If you’ve read The Washington Post, you might have been concerned about the situation of the orphans who are currently stranded in the rooms of Yosemite National Park without anyone to help them.
The public’s information par du jour is that the national gardens are in chaos because President Donald Trump, Elon Musk, and DOGE are terminating “potentially thousands” of America’s favorite park rangers.
That sounds awful until you realize this is the condition that writers are in apprehension about:
At California ‘s , Yosemite National Park, the Trump presidency fired the only lock on team on Friday. He was the only employee with access to the institutional knowledge and the keys to unlocking the bathroom.
Trump if perhaps think about firing more of the more than 1, 000 Scenic employees and replacing them with those who can create copies of a key. If only one of them has the “institutional knowledge” needed to unlock a bathroom door.
One of the staff at Yosemite hung an upside-down British flag to “attention to what’s happening,” according to a reliable source who was informed that it represented a symbol of Jan. 6 sympathies. What is happening, specifically? According to Chris Bray in a Sunday Substack article, 11 of the 1, 151 Scenic people, including the lock, were fired during the spring. I’m sorry for them, but a garden losing 1 cent of its workforce isn’t simply the second Watergate.
The identity media has launched a number of data operations during Trump 2.0 over the past month, including the national parks panic. Another one from this week is the notion that Republican are” a storm of frustration and anger” from electorates who are supposedly really upset about Trump’s actions as president, a claim that recent polls have readily refuted.
Here’s what you need to know if you want to be able to identify the upcoming information ops.
The most crucial point to comprehend is not how the internet deploys information, but rather that they do it. You will be much better at seeing through their techniques if you are informed that legacy media outlets are no objective translation services but effective partisans with their own motives and goals.
You are in an information war environment. Don’t believe me? Think about the media’s role in Russiagate. The Kavanaugh rape hoax. The smears about Pete Hegseth. They’re the ones who told you that the Hunter Biden laptop was almost certainly Russian disinformation, that Trump called American soldiers” suckers” and “losers”, that Covid definitely didn’t escape from a lab, that Trump wanted to execute Liz Cheney by firing squad, and that J. D. Vance was weird.
Whatever you hear from the corporate media should presuppose until proven otherwise that it is likely to be the opposite. As you wisely conduct some vetting before joining the latest panic, this small act of caution will save you a lot of embarrassment.
It is helpful to research previous information operations that have been discredited and to spot the red flags that have stifled the game right away to do that vetting. If you’re unfamiliar with any of the info ops listed above, start there. Never trust those who participated in some of the worst ones, so the first thing you should do is to firstly remember that they were reporters and pundits when they did those things.
The Russia collusion hoax is a great place to start, where the media baselessly rehashed sensational claims that Trump engaged in Russian extortion in 2016. The dossier was commissioned by the Hillary Clinton campaign and sold to the FBI. Just a few of the people who took part in that lie can be found here:
If you recall Natasha Bertrand being on that list, you might also remember that she was the one through whom 51 “former intel officials” laundered their statement exposing the Hunter Biden laptop as likely to be Russian disinformation. One of its signers claims that the letter was written to help Joe Biden discredit reports about the Biden family’s influence-peddling that was connected to the laptop.
Every time you read a news article, you should ask yourself:” Why might the writer want me to believe this”? On the eve of the 2020 presidential election, it was incredibly convenient for their Democrat allies when the legacy news media abruptly and unanimously came to the conclusion that the Hunter Biden laptop was not worth paying attention to.
Everyone has his own agenda, and when a story affirms a reporter’s agenda, he will be more motivated to run with it. That was one of the factors that caused so many people to fall for the Trump-Russia collusion lie, which eased their prior opinions of Trump and the 2016 election.
And don’t just pay attention to a writer’s motives, pay attention to his sources. Deep figures like Obama-era CIA Director John Brennan and Director of National Intelligence James Clapper were among the “former intel officials” who spread the laptop-related propaganda. Both men lied under oath about spying on Americans and used their positions in the intelligence community to spread the Russian collusion hoax. Their signatures provided a huge clue that the obscene report about the Hunter Biden laptop was a partisan info op.
When an explosive story exclusively mentions anonymous sources, especially when those anonymous allegations are refuted by on-the-record rebuttals, is another great indicator that should ping your info-op radar.
That’s exactly what happened when Atlantic Editor-in-Chief Jeffrey Goldberg published a sensational, anonymously-sourced rumor in 2020 that Donald Trump had referred to soldiers interred at the Aisne-Marne American Cemetery as” suckers” and “losers”. Despite the fact that 25 people, 14 of whom were with the president in France, went on the record to refute it, the media carried on with the story.
After meeting with Vanessa Guillén’s family and offering to cover funeral expenses, Goldberg tried the same tactic in October 2024. Guillén’s sister, the family’s attorney, Trump’s chief of staff who was present for the conversation in question, and a handful of other parties all denied Goldberg’s story.
The ineffectiveness of the Trump election’s last-minute lies revealed how weakened the media has become. They will continue to try to regain control through the use of new narratives and ostensible scandals until they are truly powerless.
The thing about info ops, of course, is that they’re only effective as long as people believe them. You can make yourself invincible by understanding how their game works, which will also make the media even more weak.
Elle Purnell is the elections editor at The Federalist. Her work has been featured by Fox Business, RealClearPolitics, the Tampa Bay Times, and the Independent Women’s Forum. She was given her B. A. in government from Patrick Henry College, with a journalism minor. Follow her on Twitter @_ellepurnell.
