Poems

Big News Brigade

A Poem

Scientists creating a newspaper in a laboratory (AI-generated)

Text within this block will maintain its original spacing when publishedExtra! Extra!
Fabricated prints,
the smoothest texture.
High-quality inks
for the words of shrinks
to tell everyone
what they ought to think.

Extra! Extra!
From Big News Brigade,
the ones who decide
what's not to be said.
The editor's mark
is 6-6-6 times
seventy-seven.

Extra! Extra!
Only, really, there's
no "extra" fixtures.
We're a green business,
recycling news
and doing our bit
to push narratives.

Big News Brigade ~ A Poem by Tom Shaw

I’ve touched upon media manipulation in pieces before, but this is the first piece I’ve done to directly address this. It began as a piece purely to say something on the nature that all news has to be “big” and in-your-face in order to push certain ideas or narratives to keep people hooked. And when the name “Big News Brigade” came to mind, it seemed like the perfect opportunity for me to give mention to the 77th Brigade.

For those who are not aware, the 77th Brigade is a division of the British Army whose mission is to expressly conduct psychological operations through influencing online discourse. They often employ the use of fake profiles on social media to post comments to specifically push conversations and amplify specific ideas that are currently circling within the news - and away from others, discrediting voices that post information contrary to a government narrative, whether true or not.

They have admitted themselves that they have played a pivotal role through 2020 in countering what they see as mis- and disinformation surrounding Covid-19.

Substack has some excellent articles which have looked at the role of the 77th Brigade, and I’ll link a few below which I found interesting, including from Iain Davis andMaajid Nawaz.

So what is the media talking about now that there would be interest in engineering people’s perceptions on?

In the UK, and perhaps the US too, my bet would be on the elections.

The current discourse seems to be using basic aspects of the recognition of undue technocratic influences on society to keep alive a false left-right paradigm that encourages us to “other” people in an anti-human fashion. Is it part of some divide-and-conquer strategy?

I’m increasingly of the opinion that, at least with our current governance structures, change cannot come through the political systems, and that democracy itself may even be a contributing factor. Thus, any promotion of any party of politician, to me, seems like an attempt to uphold the faith that our democratic system is genuinely able to bring change through electing politicians who claim they can restore order. Yet, it’s essentially a meme at this point that parties never fulfil their manifesto promises. This, and that the decisions they make for their country must be in-keeping with what a globalist cabal is satisfied with for particular parts of the narrative wants.

It’s all well and good for someone like Farage to openly say that, if in power, he would end the UK’s membership of the WEF. While I think that specific policy would be a good thing, something like that is only the tip of the iceberg, and on other more foundational issues, Farage seems to be promoting ideas perfectly in-line with global agendas, in particular a blind support for Israel (note that since the election rolled around, he has been almost completely silent on this issue - I wonder why?). Could he simply end up being another Javier Milei?

Ultimately, all of this is in support of the notion that we should hand over sovereignty of what happens in our lives to an ultimately-unaccountable apparatus motivated towards total control and finding ways to twist truth to manipulate those affected in the destruction of their old narratives to support new ones. And “the news” is just one arm of this.

With all this in mind, I’ll leave you with this very humorous take from Alistair Williams from a few months back on the state that the “news” is currently in. Enjoy: