Posted originally on the CTH on June 3, 2023 | Sundance 

People often ask me why I seem to highlight datapoints and background events that do not trend to the media-driven narrative priority of the moment.  The answer is simple; everything is connected to the next thing that happens. If you do not outline the originating point, the accurate reference is missed when needed.

This approach is why I have focused significant research on Elon Musk’s financial situation with Twitter {GO DEEP}.

The issue of Twitter’s financial status speaks to the motives of Musk that later surface – like his relationship with Fox News billionaire Rupert Murdoch.  Once you see the connections, suddenly everything makes sense.  Musk and Murdoch have intersecting interests.

Elon Musk is in desperate need of revenue for his social media platform Twitter.  By his own admissions, Twitter is currently in the red on an annual basis between $1.5 to $4.0 billion; that may go as high as $5 billion, depending on what happens over the next six months.  Currently losing $100 million/mo, Musk is limited on how much he can pull from his other companies to support Twitter, and with $1.5 billion in debt service alone on the $12.5 billion borrowed for the Twitter purchase, Musk needs an income stream quickly.

Advertising revenue has dropped 50%. This is the motive for Musk to hire Linda Jaccarino, the former head of NBC Universal advertising, to bring urgently needed revenue to a platform currently considered too extreme for the DEI-minded corporate advertising executives.  Musk is also captive to contracts with Bezos’ Amazon (AWS) and Google cloud services for platform data processing support.  Those very expensive contracts – $1 billion and $2 billion respectively – do not expire until 2025.

In short, Musk needs revenue. For Twitter, this reality drives his decision-making.  Enter, Rupert Murdoch.

Billionaire media mogul Rupert Murdoch owns Fox News, The Wall Street Journal, The New York Post and Harper Collins book publishing.

Murdoch wants to control the outcome of the 2024 election and strongly supports Ron DeSantis on behalf of his Wall Street allies.

Murdoch financed DeSantis through the Harper Collins book deal, and Murdoch has turned his media outlets into advanced PR for the DeSantis campaign.

The Murdoch media approach includes lengthy and friendly broadcast Fox News appearances, interviews and pundit advocacy, while the print side spins favorable stories.  The Wall Street Journal and New York Post are doing the same.  It is a full-court press to support DeSantis on behalf of the interests of Murdoch et al.  Keep in mind, the RNC has given Fox News control over the kickoff GOP debate.

♦The Alliance of Interests – Elon Musk needs money; this is not in question.  Rupert Murdoch, supporting Ron DeSantis, wants control of the 2024 election outcome; also, this is not in question.  These two facets form the baseline of a common interest.

Elon Musk launches the DeSantis campaign via Twitter Spaces – not accidental.  Musk then uses his platform control mechanisms to amplify DeSantis and counteract the strong and visible platform support for Donald Trump.   What outlet pushes the narrative that flows from the operation?  Rupert Murdoch.

NEW YORK POST – Donald Trump’s 2024 election campaign’s claims are already being hit with Twitter’s new “community notes,” which fact-check or offer context to dubious posts.  In May alone, Team Trump and their surrogates were slapped with community notes on at least seven occasions — and were often cited for posting flat-out lies.  (read more)

Christina Pushaw is a registered foreign agent working for the DeSantis campaign.

Ms. Pushaw went from working in Ukraine, for Volodymyr Zelenskyy, directly to working in Florida as Ron DeSantis’ press secretary.

Pushaw was the person who gathered the “influence operation” over the past two years on behalf of the DeSantis 2024 operation.  That operation was visible in 2022, denied in 2022, then finally admitted two weeks ago.

Now working for the DeSantis campaign, Christina Pushaw – a fellow traveler from the George Soros network and schooling – has organized the same type of influence campaign used in Ukraine to support Zelenskyy, only this time she is exploiting social media and specifically Twitter.  This is why she spent so much time recruiting ‘influencers’ in 2021 and 2022, and even tried to deny she was doing it.

Put it all together, and what you see is Rupert Murdoch as the financial lifeline (with a common interest) for Elon Musk who desperately needs money that does not and cannot come from his other businesses (Tesla, SpaceX etc.).

Murdoch, supporting DeSantis, also had a problem he was willing to remove on his Fox News network.   Musk needs content providers as he needs a way to increase his viewership and money.  Murdoch axes Tucker Carlson.  Where does Carlson surface?  Twitter!  [NOTE: Except now I think Carlson has caught on to the play.]

The Twitter platform has now evolved to become the influence operation for Team DeSantis- with groundwork seeded by Pushaw.  The throttling of pro-MAGA, and boosting of pro-Meatball, is now becoming increasingly obvious.

The Twitter ‘Community Notes’ issue is simply a very visible reflection of what people have been talking about for several weeks.  This is why it was loaded into the media cannon on Rupert’s platform, The New York Post.   Everything is connected to everything else, and once you see the strings on these marionettes you can never return to that moment in the performance when you did not see them.

Musk needs revenue; this is not in question.  The question is now, how urgently?

The alliance between Rupert Murdoch and Elon Musk isn’t a conspiracy or wild imagining, it is simply the logical outcome to a common interest.  Elon needs money, Rupert wants DeSantis and control of the 2024 election.  Everything else is a matter of mutually aligned support.

♦Last point – My long-standing suspicion is, the people who organized Ron DeSantis appear to have convinced the governor to run in 2024 by telling him that Lawfare was going to take down Donald Trump.  That’s why his handlers pushed the Florida governor into a bunker after the August 2022 FBI raid on Mar-a-Lago, and then relaunched the national campaign immediately thereafter. {Go Deep}

Ron DeSantis appears to have enrolled in their agenda under the assumption that he would NOT have to actually run against Donald Trump, but would instead be able to just pick up the MAGA base after Trump was removed from the 2024 campaign by Lawfare operations.  Pushed to accept this prediction by a wife desperate for her own sense of power, DeSantis appears to have believed the DC connected team that made these assurances.  Now both Ron, and to a lesser extent, Jill, are stuck hoping they are not wrong.

Rolling the dice on a bet against Donald Trump is never a good career strategy.  Factually, that approach has been proven bad-bad, ju-ju for anyone who tried.

Keep in mind, all the never-Trumpers and gleeful influencers who saw the dollar signs and joined on to DeSantis bandwagon, are hitched to the same outcome.

They are in a mutually assured destruction (MAD) situation.  If the Deep State and Lawfare doesn’t take out Donald Trump, their DeSantis operation goes over the edge into the bottomless pit of irrelevancy.

Thus, the DeSantis campaign, and everyone attached to the support thereof, will become increasingly desperate as Lawfare starts failing.

Posted originally on the CTH on June 1, 2023 | Sundance | 304 Comments

A few people like us predicted that once people realized the 2022 reelection bid of Ron DeSantis was a con, there was a strong probability he would lose support. According to polling taken after his launch, that’s exactly what happened.

There are two different YouGov polls. One that shows opinion of the DeSantis launch [Economist – SEE HERE] and one that shows the results of the head-to-head Trump -v- DeSantis matchup [Yahoo – SEE HERE]. The bottom line is that DeSantis has lost ground with voters AFTER his launch.

WASHINGTON – Ron DeSantis was surely hoping for a bump from his presidential campaign launch last week. But a new Yahoo News/YouGov poll shows no sign of improvement.

In fact, the survey of 1,520 U.S. adults, which was conducted from May 25-30, suggests that the Florida governor may have actually lost ground against frontrunner and former President Donald Trump since officially entering the race for the 2024 GOP nomination during a glitchy Twitter Spaces event with the platform’s billionaire owner Elon Musk.

Among potential Republican primary voters — registered voters who identify as Republicans or GOP-leaning independents — Trump now leads the full field of seven declared candidates with 53%. That’s up from 48% in early May, before DeSantis threw his hat in the ring. And DeSantis now lags further behind than he did just a few weeks ago; his 25% is down from 28% in early May. (read more)

When asked how the DeSantis launch went, 48% said badly, 24% said well.  31% were not sure.

[Economist – YouGov pdf LINK]

FLORIDA – The Florida Governor’s glitch-filled kickoff on Twitter Spaces with Elon Musk left a bad impression with 1,500 U.S. adult citizens surveyed by The Economist and You Gov between May 27 and May 31.  Just 7% of those surveyed said the opening went “very well,” with another 17% venturing that it went “somewhat well.”

Meanwhile, 24% said it went “somewhat badly,” with an additional 21% saying it went “very badly,” putting the whole event 21 points underwater. Another 31% of respondents were “not sure” how it went for the Governor. (read more) 

The situation is actually worse than described by the media. Candidate Ron DeSantis cannot hold a public event in the state of Florida, because most of the people who support him are the isolated group immediately around him, and the Selfie-My-Lunch crowd who are disconnected from the average life of a Floridian.

Have you ever heard of a presidential candidate launching a campaign and NOT holding a public event in his/her home state to do it?   Most people are overlooking the obvious.  His handlers cannot run the risk of a public event for their principal.  What does that tell you about the candidate?

Everything, and I do mean everything, about the Ron DeSantis 2024 campaign is manufactured, fake and phony – especially the claimed support that you see pushed by national media and the right-wing alt-media that are placing their bets to be paid by the massive financial mechanism behind the DeSantis management team.  Floridians can see through it, and the handlers were hoping the sunlight did not spread to Iowa, New Hampshire and South Carolina.

In the state of Florida, support for Ron DeSantis 2024 is maybe in the 15 to 20% range (I’m being generous).  Beyond that, he is not liked at all.  I travel the state talking to blue collar ordinary people all the time; there is no grassroots support for the fraud that DeSantis has perpetrated on the state.  This announcement has left him naked to the realization of his character as a raw political opportunist.

We are now seeing the same negative results spread nationally.

One of the optimistic aspects to U.S. politics, especially in this era of institutional deceit, is the ability of the average person to detect fraud and a lack of authenticity.  It’s one of the reasons why I will never count out the ability of the American people to overcome severe institutional gaslighting.

At an intrinsic DNA level, the average American can sense when something is not right, something is amiss, something is sketchy.  Always trust your instincts, especially when dealing with the manufactured nonsense that flows from the constructs of the Sea Island billionaire class.

On another optimistic note, think about how much time, effort and money was put into this operation by the billionaire donors.   Many of them will now be asking, ‘what’s next’?

Posted originally on May 30, 2023 | Sundance 

One of the key aspects to noticing a controlled candidate is the speech, cadence and distinct linguistics used during prepared remarks.

When a candidate is authentic in delivery of advocacy points, their speech is a natural flow of thoughts and ideas they create in verbal delivery.  However, when a politician is delivering a speech constructed for them, using the thoughts of others, you will notice a cadence constructed around a series of soundbites that are strung together.

Ron DeSantis kicked-off his official Iowa campaign today literally reading prepared remarks that did not come from his own thought processes.  When delivering a speech from the thoughts of others, there is an emphasis on the reading of it; in the example we highlight today with DeSantis the reading is extreme.  You can see below.

This is not to say that speech writers are not useful, they are. Almost all politicians use speech writers to assist them in putting their thoughts into words to assist communication.  The key is to use the candidates’ thoughts. However, when the thoughts themselves are not from the candidate, there is a very different outcome in delivery.

This is what becomes very visible with Ron DeSantis.

As candidates, Dr. Ben Carson and Newt Gingrich wrote most of their speech scripts and delivered their own thoughts on points of policy and advocacy.  President Trump also communicates his own thoughts through speeches written from them.  When the thoughts are from the candidate, you will notice a tone of authenticity in the delivery. Speeches delivered by people like Tucker Carlson and Jordan Peterson also communicate with authenticity because the thoughts conveyed are their own.

Conversely, in traditional politics there are candidates who do not convey their own thoughts and end up reading speeches that are disjointed with emphasis misplaced, syllables in wrong context, and carrying an odd syntax and cadence.  The more disconnected from the thoughts of the reader, the odder the delivery.

The worst examples of reading other people’s thoughts to assist their own communication, come from Joe Biden, Kamala Harris and Pete Buttigieg.  Governor Nikki Haley also struggles with this, and to a lesser extent so does Mike Pence and other well-known republicans.

Three of the more noticeable political figures, somewhere in the middle of the extremes was Hillary Clinton, Jeb Bush and George ‘Dubya’ Bush.  The best orator to transfer the thoughts of others into his own linguistic delivery was probably Barack Obama. One of the reasons for Obama’s success was due to his team all having the same ideological outlooks.  Obama delivered convincing words because his thoughts and the thoughts of his speech writers were in synergy.

The bottom line is that when a political operation is poll-testing, highly managed and heavily scripted, there is a noticeable lack of authenticity in the speeches of the candidate.  The reason is quite simple; the speeches are assembled from disconnected ‘talking points’ or ‘soundbites’ and then an effort is put toward sequencing them for candidate communication.

Once you notice the issue of reading the ‘thoughts of others‘ it is almost impossible not to see it when you watch the speech being delivered.  This issue is very clear today in the remarks from Ron DeSantis in Iowa.  Unbeknownst to most casual political observers, DeSantis has always been heavily influenced and managed by others throughout his career.  However, now it is starting to become more noticeable.

The venue is a mega-church in Des Moines.  Iowa Governor Kim Reynolds introduces Ron DeSantis to the church audience, and immediately the Florida governor starts reading the script.  Watch how much time he spends literally reading the words. WATCH for a minute and you will see:

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