Video Transcript:
This commenter said on my substack that the rise of Donald Trump through the media started way before 2015.
That's definitely true.
They go on to say back in the late 20th century, the media would go to him and ask him his opinion about all kinds of stuff.
He was a nobody, but it gave him status and credibility.
And they go on to say other things.
One thing I just want to say about this comment and I hope I'm able to articulate this in a way that makes sense to people is that Donald Trump actually deserves credit for having trained the media to go to him.
Donald Trump is a con artist.
That's what he does for a living.
People do not accept this to this day.
Donald Trump is a conductor of the news media.
He is an orchestra leader.
He's a commander of an army of press.
This is what he has done his entire career and he is very successful at it.
Donald Trump is not a successful business person.
He never has been that.
He is a successful media personality, and it's not because the media went to him.
It's because he called the news media as his own publicist.
Untransparently, Donald Trump created an alternate personality who he named John Barron.
Yes, just like his son, Barron Trump.
Donald Trump invented somebody named John Barron and he would sit in Donald Trump's offices and call journalists and tell those journalists that his name was John
Barron and he had the inside scoop on Donald Trump.
And we now know and we've known for many years that it wasn't only John Barron, it was also John Miller and David Dennison.
This is not a secret.
What you're looking at is an article from Wikipedia about Donald Trump's alter ego publicist for himself.
In the 1970s, 1980s, 1990s, and beyond, he would get on the phone, he would call journalists personally, he would use a fake name, and he would tell journalists how amazing Donald Trump is.
And they knew they were speaking to Donald Trump.
But he would give them insider information, all of it positive, of course.
He was propagandizing for himself.
Two journalists, legitimate journalists, at the New York Times, at the Washington Post, at CNN, of course, at Fox News.
And they played the game with him.
They would accept his calls.
They would not tell him that they knew he was Donald Trump.
They would take his alleged insider tips about how amazing Donald Trump is and they would run with it.
(And they participated in this big public con to make Donald Trump a celebrity and to co-create a myth that Donald Trump was this great business genius.
This is all so insane.
This is propaganda.
Journalists knew that they were speaking to Donald Trump when this man, John Barron or David Dennison, was just singing the praises of Donald Trump.
But journalists, they wanted a story.
So they would follow those leads and they would give Donald Trump the media attention that Donald Trump wanted.
And together,
they created this living legend of Donald Trump.
This myth.
As the New York Times itself called him, just before the election last year, the New York Times said Donald Trump achieved mythical status.
And the New York Times and other news organizations co-wrote that myth,
that living legend, story of Donald Trump through publishing pictures like this and telling the story that John Barron told them to tell.
This is really important to understand.
And the reason is not only because everybody has been conned by Donald Trump, by his storytelling, but some people have been smart enough to emulate John Barron, to use the media to empower themselves by manipulating journalists, by putting stuff out into the public that they knew was bait for those journalists and knowing that those journalists would take the bait and give them exactly what they want.
During the 2000s, it became pretty commonly known that celebrities often call paparazzi themselves or their publicist call the paparazzi and say, hey, this famous person is going to be standing at this street corner in New York City at this time tomorrow.
It sure would be interesting if photographers happen to be there.
And then they publish the photos.
They work together.
It is a codependent, symbiotic relationship between celebrities and the media.
We know now that the UK royal family does this, that this is like the bread and butter of the persisting existence of the royal family in the United Kingdom.
But what people won't wrap their brains around or open their eyes to or listen up and hear is that this also happens in American politics, in American business, and the press play along with it.
They dutifully show up when they're called.
And if John Barron calls them and gives them a false story to promote himself, hey, if it's a fun story, they will report it.
If they think it's going to get clicks and advertisement and buy them goodwill with John Barron, who they know is actually Donald Trump, they'll publish the story.
Well, hey, Elon Musk is on to it.
He has allegedly multiple John Barron accounts.
One of his is Adrian Dittman.
He allegedly uses false identities on his own media platform to promote himself, to promote his ideas, which oftentimes are racist ideas, hate-based ideas, or promotion of his companies to make himself richer.
He promotes those and then the press dutifully repeats those stories.
This is a common cycle.
The only people who are not commonly aware of this is the public who are influenced by it.
So, let's talk about the potential impact of these sorts of things.
It is a journalistic standard to double source information.
Meaning, if one person tells you a story, you're not supposed to take them at their word necessarily.
You're supposed to always get at least one other person to tell you the same story.
And you should know who these people are, not just take anonymous calls from some random dude named John Barron or David Dennison or John Miller.
But here's a question.
Why wouldn't Donald Trump, being successful with the alter ego John Barron, why wouldn't he just stick with John Barron?
Why would he develop David Dennison?
Maybe David Dennison was that second source to verify the story told to a reporter by John Barron.
Maybe the two sources are both false sources, and maybe they're the same person.
When the sources are anonymous, we will never know.
And that brings us to this current event of Jake Tapper from CNN writing a book of gossip about Joe Biden, full of sneering, cruel allegations of wrongdoing, whose sources are entirely anonymous. New York Times bestseller, pushed on CNN by every single CNN on-air employee.
And this man and his co-author, Alex Thompson from Axios, they were interviewed by pretty much every existing news media outlet about this book that is, to be clear, a book of gossip based entirely on anonymously sourced gossip stories.
And that is no different than Donald Trump anonymously serving as a source for his own propaganda that was reported by every major news outlet through throughout the 1980s and 1990s until he became a celebrity by his own design.
Elon Musk does the same thing and he's presently on a campaign to promote himself to salvage his image and his companies and his fortune and the press are all playing along.
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