“The concept of truth is intimately linked to the biases of forms of expression.”
– Neil Postman
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July 19, 2024 – All at once we have “choose-your-own-adventure” social media and a bewildering decay in mainstream media attempts to convey facts.
Below, James Hickman from Schiff Sovereign gives a litany of examples where formerly credible media sources have gotten the facts wrong about just about every major political or social development in the past decade.
We forecast the attempt on Trump’s life on October 11, 2023. We weren’t reading the tea lives or revealing prophecy.
We were simply analyzing the disconnect between mainstream media and events on the ground in financial markets, the economy, social movements… and the economic and political anxiety they were causing across all strata of society.
You may recall our video report entitled Shell Game:
In Shell Game, nearly a year ago, we forecast three major trends in 2024 that would culminate in an attempt on Trump’s life.
Our first broadcast of Shell Game was on October 11, 2023. We updated two versions of the mini-documentary before the video mysteriously disappeared… including from our own internal servers. Global network outages aside, we’re eagerly trying to find it now.
The first forecast of Shell Game was that inflation would prove difficult to contain. But the Fed would follow public clamoring for a return to rate cuts.
We’re just about there.
Inflation is not under control. But with the stock market beginning its seasonal summer decline this week, the preponderance of financial media outlets, opinion writers, market analysts and mainstream economists are pressuring the Fed to cut during their next meeting in September.
And yet, economic anxiety is still compounded by price inflation. Consumer debt balances and payments on interest alone have skyrocketed past a trillion dollars annually. At the same time, savings rates have plummeted.
The divide between consumer debt and personal savings has never been this wide.
That fact alone is enough to drive the average citizen into crisis.
Banks, too, are straining. The number of banks on the on the critical list for FDIC increased form 52 in the fourth quarter, at the time we published Shell Game, to 63 in the 4th quarter of 2024. “In a crisis, banks go first…” was our premise then.
The Banking Crisis of ‘23 has yet to be resolved.
Economic anxiety often results in uncivilized behavior, random singular violence, increased homelessness and drug addiction. Economic anxiety drives real, and potentially irreparable, social decay.
The trade war with China, initiated by Trump while he was president, and perpetuated by the Biden administration – with or without the pandemic – has ushered in an era where American addiction to cheap stuff is being threatened.
These are complex political issues also at play in the election cycle, but are only exacerbated by populist stump speeches by both parties.
Social movements like Black Lives Matter, Defund The Police and “River to the Sea,” are simply organized expressions of the same thinly veiled anxiety.
The actual Trump assassination attempt and Biden’s cognitive issues dominating the news cycle don’t help us understand what trends are at play in the real economy.
For now, our Shell Game thesis remains intact.
Economic anxiety leads to increased violence in civil society and within the political sphere. As the campaign fumbles along, we can expect more of it. Public policy is unashamedly designed to benefit politicians and special interests, not the voting public.
These, of course, are generalities and analyses of trends. Our work behind the paywall examines specifics. We gain insights and design investment strategies, often with the help of our tight inner circle of Grey Swan contributors.
We’re updating the Grey San model portfolio, post-assisination. Revisiting Shell Game and its forecasts and we’ll be publishing those insights all next week.
Come Monday, you’ll be receiving this daily missive with the new Grey Swan Investment Fraternity branding. Watch for it in your inbox! Exciting times…
We’ve also rebooted the Wiggin Sessions podcast interviews.
We’ve recorded two new episodes with Grey Swan contributors Zoltan Istvan and John Robb.
Keep an eye out for the Zoltan interview first. The conversation with John Robb will follow shortly behind. Exciting times to be investigating some major historical trends coming to a head in an epic election year… stay tuned!
Below, Schiff Sovereign’s James Hickman, a longtime friend and a kindred thinker, takes a look at specific examples from the last decade where the mainstream media have provided zero help in understanding what’s really happening in politics, the economy or the financial markets. Enjoy – Addison
CONTINUED BELOW…
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CONTINUED…
Once and For All, The Media Has Lost Its Credibility
By James Hickman, Schiff Sovereign
Obviously the attempted assassination of Donald Trump represents a grim milestone on America’s path of decline.
But the legacy media’s response to it may also go down as a major turning point: the moment they finally lost all credibility.
Now, clearly for a long time the media has been full of Inspired Idiots who don’t care about reporting the truth. Instead, they push a narrative they want people to believe about the world and the events which shape it.
For example, CNN famously described 2020 Black Lives Matters riots as “fiery, but mostly peaceful.”
In 2021, when the governor of South Dakota banned biological men from participating in female sports, CNN promptly reported that, “there is no consensus criteria for assigning sex at birth.”
NBC News was caught in 2021 colluding with the Biden administration to downplay the criminal past deeds of Tracy Stone-Manning, who the President had nominated to lead the Bureau of Land Management.
Stone-Manning was an eco-terrorist in her youth who was involved in tree-spiking activities that kill or maim loggers. But NBC News promised to take it easy on her to help push her appointment through.
Also in 2021, however, NBC News (along with just about every other mainstream ‘news’ outlet) hyped unproven allegations against Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh that went back 30 years.
And when #MeToo protestors stormed the United States Capitol and accosted Senators in an attempt to disrupt and overturn the Kavanaugh confirmation hearings, the media did not label these protestors ‘domestic terrorists’, as they did with January 6 protesters.
The media circulated outright lies about the Russia voter manipulation hoax. And the New York Times was even awarded the ‘esteemed’ Pulitzer Prize for its reporting of this thoroughly discredited story.
It’s also notable that, even after the Russia collusion story was proven to be false, the Pulitzer committee REFUSED to rescind the award it had bestowed to the Times. Their logic, apparently, is that quality reporting about blatant lies is still worthy of journalism’s highest honor.
Then, of course, in the weeks before the 2020 election, nearly every legacy news outlet outright refused to report on the laptop of Hunter Biden. The younger Biden’s laptop not only showed deep character flaws, but evidence of significant corruption and foreign influence connected to his father.
And don’t even get me started on how the legacy media reported on COVID, lock-downs, and vaccines.
But now they’ve elevated their lies and propaganda to a whole new level with the way they have portrayed last week’s assassination attempt on Donald Trump.
These “journalists” witnessed in real time an attempted— and very nearly successful— assassination of a former President, upon which they reported:
“Trump Escorted Away After Loud noises at rally” –The Washington Post
“Secret Service rushes Trump offstage after he falls at rally” –CNN
“Trump says he was shot in the ear at rally” –NPR
OK, let’s be extremely polite and give them the benefit of the doubt; immediately following the assassination attempt there were plenty of unknowns.
But even after the fog of war had been lifted— after it was clearly an attempted assassination— the Washington Post updated its headline to: “Trump safe after being rushed off stage following shooting at rally.”
In another article it said the assassin “shot at Trump,” not “shot Trump.”
Technically, that passes a fact check. But it’s sort of like describing Mount Everest as an elevated piece of land.
And the spin continued the next day.
Reuters ran an article titled, “Republicans, in wake of Trump shooting, seek to pin political violence trend on Democrats.”
This obviously ‘unbiased’ and ‘trustworthy’ news agency couldn’t simply report on the known facts of the attempted assassination. No, instead, their priority was to tell readers that it is the RIGHT, not the LEFT, that is full of violent extremists.
“A Reuters analysis of more than 200 incidents of politically motivated violence between 2021 and 2023, however, presented a different picture: In those years, fatal political violence more often emanated from the American right than from the left.”
Reuters didn’t actually cite a single example of this Right wing violence.
In fact, the only example of violence they did mention was the shooting of Steve Scalise, a Republican member of Congress who was gunned down (but survived) in 2017… by a Left wing extremist.
So… in an attempt to prove its assertion that its readers should fear Right wing violence, Reuters’ only example was an instance of a Left wing extremist shooting a Right wing politician.
Genius!
And these Inspired Idiots in the media still can’t understand why nobody trusts them.
Days after the attempted assassination, the Associated Press noted that the Left and Right now have dueling conspiracy theories about the assassination attempt— that Trump staged it for clout, or that the Secret Service was in on it.
AP lamented, “Americans are increasingly choosing their own reality, at the expense of a shared understanding of the facts.”
Gee, whose fault is that? (Remember, AP published the headline: “Donald Trump has been escorted off the stage by Secret Service during a rally after loud noises ring out in the crowd.”)
The attempted assassination of Trump was a rare event, in that it was broadcast in real time, and everyone could see exactly what happened with their own eyes from multiple angles.
And still the media tried as hard as possible to sell a completely bullshit narrative of the event.
What do you think they do with events that are not so clear, or are not caught on camera from every angle? How trustworthy are those “anonymous sources” they love to cite?
This is why the legacy media is becoming less trusted by the day.
It’s also why, despite Inspired Idiots owning the vast majority of broadcast media, they still haven’t been able to tip the scales decisively in favor of their own little cultural revolution.
Confronted with an event they knew would make their nemesis look strong and unbeatable, they resorted to cartoonish propaganda.
And I hope that proves to be the decisive moment for people to see them for what they are: liars.
~~ James Hickman, Schiff-Sovereign
So it goes,
Addison Wiggin
Founder, The Wiggin Sessions
P.S. How did we get here? An alternative view of the financial, economic, and political history of the United States from Demise of the Dollar through Financial Reckoning Day and on to Empire of Debt — all three books are available in their third post-pandemic editions.
(Or… simply pre-order Empire of Debt: We Came, We Saw, We Borrowed, now available at Amazon and Barnes & Noble or if you prefer one of these sites:Bookshop.org; Books-A-Million; or Target.)
Please send your comments, reactions, opprobrium, vitriol and praise to: addison@greyswanfraternity.com
