he
Cloward-Priven
strategy is a way of causing radical political change by deliberately
expanding bad economic policies to overload a system to the point where
it collapses. Its original goal was to bring about Communism by wrecking
the welfare system. But it can work for almost anything, as anyone who
ever put a heat gun, drill press, and electric heater on a single
circuit can testify.
How does a president deal with the fact that our news media are constitutionally unable to tell the truth? It seems clear that for President Trump, who is a genius at creating misdirection and chaos, the answer is to use the Cloward-Priven strategy to force the mainstream media to collapse into gibbering lunacy (which some might argue needs only a feather-light push as it is).
Aside from the commentariat, who are so dull they take everything literally, and the politically activist class, who pounce on anything that might benefit their ideology, most people have figured out that the supposed Trump-Musk feud is really just a parting gift to Musk to get him back in favor with the Left, or at least get them to stop committing terrorist acts against Tesla dealerships. It's so obvious I almost didn't bother posting this.
If somebody offered me 152 billion dollars, which is one estimate of what Tesla's stock lost, I'd probably consider walking around with an ‘Impeach Trump’ sign myself.
Front page of an issue of People's Daily, the most boring newspaper in recorded history, from the Renmin Ribao archive
The fact that it worked suggests that Trump's view of his opponents being easily manipulated may be accurate. We're now at the same stage as the citizens of the USSR with their famous saying about their two newspapers, Pravda (which means ‘proven’ or ‘truth’) and Izvestia (which means ‘news’): “V Pravde nyet izvestiy, v Izvestiyakh nyet pravdy”: there is no news in Pravda and no truth in Izvestia.
If they reported that World War III broke out tomorrow, we'd have no way of knowing for sure until we saw mushroom clouds. Virtually every story the media publish today is either a politically driven conspiracy theory or an outright lie. Young people know this intuitively, which is why most of them get their news from social media—and it's why the conventional media keep trying to shut it down.
Trump certainly knows this as well, as evidenced by his comment at the end of Zelensky's self-annihilation at that infamous press conference that the on-screen smackdown between Zelenskyy, Trump, and Vance was “good television.” Translation: the media will misrepresent everything, so the solution is to trick them with so much outrageous nonsense that they go in circles.
Even Putin knows it's fake, having offered Elon Musk “political asylum.”
But is using that fact to fake out the Democrats really such a good idea? What if they catch on? I guess there's not much chance of that: lots of my Democrat friends still think biology has proved that sex is a continuum and Trump will “destroy democracy” and nothing I say can convince them otherwise.
Years ago, there was a store in northwest Washington, DC that sold international newspapers, including Renmin Ribao (People's Daily), an official paper of red China. They were constitutionally immune to the C-P strategy. The news they reported consisted mainly of listings of the number of cubic meters of dirt needed for some provincial dam the government was building . . . how many hectares the lake would cover . . . how many metric tons of rock . . . how many truckloads of dirt. It was so boring that few ever doubted its accuracy.
That is the risk Trump is taking. Could America survive that? It might be tough, but I think we might just pull through.
jun 08 2025, 7:26 am
