On August 2, 2024, Wall Street Silver wrote a message asking how it happened that the corporate media was able to coordinate to associated the Trump-Vance ticket with the word “weird” over 160 times in one day. Elon Musk answered him by saying, “Great question”.
With the help of Grok, I believe I found out how. And I’ll walk you my findings step-by-step.
1. On July 22, 2024 at around 3:28 PM, Reporters from USA Today, Politico, and Huffington Post share a memo from the National Republican Senatorial Committee.
The NRSC provides memos with talking points that Republican Senate candidates can use in their own campaign. To the ire of these reporters, the memo includes a section that describes Harris’s negative points. Honestly, most of them are kind of silly, but I suppose the NRSC felt that they wanted to arm their candidates with some light humor. Whatever.
The section is titled “weird”.
2. The first Tweet on July 22 that describes JD Vance as “weird” is sent by an account named Leah Greenberg.
On July 22, 2024 at around 4:44 PM, an account named @Leahgreenb Tweeted this out.
According to Grok, this was the first Tweet of the day that used the word “weird” in conjunction with J.D. Vance.
She follows up that Tweet with others, including ones that call JD Vance “a creep who has a problem with women”, someone who “oozes incel energy”, “racist”, and again, “a creep”.
Who is Leah Greenberg? She’s the co-executive Director of an organization called “Indivisible.org”, which is a project of two separate organizations, a 501(c)(4) and a Hybrid Political Action Committee. We’ll talk about this organization below.
3. Hundreds of “Truth Brigade” accounts follow by Tweeting that Vance is “Weird”
After Greenberg’s first Tweet, it gets followed up by hundreds of others, all of them refer to Vance in some way as “weird”. After Greenberg’s Tweet it was followed by Jeet Heer at 12:53 PM, Patrick Fenelon at 1:57 PM, and many more that suddenty started to use the phrase “weird”.
To get an idea of how this may have happened (or at least how some of the amplification may have been organized), let’s look at little closer at Indivisible.org.
As a 501(c)(4), Indivisble.org is categorized as a “social welfare organization” that by law, cannot have political activity as its primary purpose. If you look at Greenberg’s posts as well as Indivisible.org’s main account on X, it looks like 100% of their posts are advocating for political candidates their support and attacking ones they don’t. Weird.
One of the “social welfare campaigns” that Indivisible.org promotes is something called Truth Brigade. They say that as of 2022, they had over 6,400 people in their “Truth Brigade” who posted over 60,000 messages to Twitter alone and achieved more than 550 million social media impressions. It’s two years later, so you know that number is much bigger now.
They communicate through Slack, weekly emails, and twice a month Zoom calls to coordinate on a message campaign. Guess what this month’s campaign was most likely about?
Indivisible gives its members training and coaching on how to respond to “disinformation”. That sounds great, until you remember that their definition of “disinformation” includes statements like “J.D. Vance is an honorable family man”, “Donald Trump wasn’t attacking Kamala Harris’s race, he was challenging how the media opportunistically uses her Jamaican and Indian heritages to suit their narratives”, “Joe Biden is showing signs of senility” and “Kamala Harris doesn’t have a lot of foreign policy experience”. In their mind, such statements are dangerous and must be countered with their “truth”.
Here’s their advice for their member on how to deal with this kind of “disinformation”.
What’s chilling is that you can see shades of Saul Alinsky here. “Do not engage”. “Prime people to be skeptical”. “Focus on discrediting the messenger rather than fact-checking the claim”.
Here’s an excerpt from their guide called “A Practical Guide to Defeating MAGA”.
4. The progressive media report on the “viral trend” as straight news.
This is where network effects take over. Most of the people in the “Truth Brigade” are probably only one or two degrees of separation from followers in the progressive media.
Always looking for a story (and too lazy to do any research outside of X), many reporters see hundreds of accounts posting the same message and start reporting it as a “viral trend” that is representative of the conversations on X. And so they start to write articles describing the “trend”.
They know it was astroturfed. They know it’s not representative of most Americans nor even most users on X. But none of that matters. They have their story.
July 24 – The Atlantic (why is it always the Atlantic?)
July 25 – Vox
July 27 – Rolling Stone
July 30 – Vanity Fair
5. The mainstream media picks it up
Once there are thousands of accounts on X and dozens of progressive media outlets advancing the message, the mainstream media kicks in.
They “report” on the “viral trend” they see on social media. This gets the attention of the Harris Campaign and other politicians who repeat it.
Eventually, the mainstream media doesn’t even have to amplify the original message anymore, they inject themselves as creators of the news: some of them challenge Trump and Vance with questions like “how do you respond to the groundswell of people calling you ‘weird'”. The rest report on Trump and Vance’s attempts to defend themselves and try to downplay the storm as “news”.
6. Google finishes the job
Last but not least, Google finishes the job. It indexes and displays hundreds upon hundreds of articles that reinforce what journalist Sharyl Attkisson calls “The Smear.”
Notice that there are only left-leaning and left-wing media sites here. I see Rolling Stone, The Atlantic, and even sites like Boing Boing. In one of the results, I actually saw Democrats.org as a “trusted news site”.
Notice who you don’t see. The Blaze. Daily Wire. Daily Caller. Breitbart News. Newsmax. Epoch Times. Nor any independent journalist. That’s because Google doesn’t believe they are “authoritative” enough. I covered when and how that happened in this post.
Now think about your typical American man or woman who works all day and comes home at night. He or she may have 10 minutes to turn on the computer and read the news. Where do they go? Well, 8.5 billion searches are conducted on Google every day, and you can bet that they are going to Google News for the latest political news.
If you’ve read Google News in the last few days, what are your conclusions? The assassination attempt against Trump is ancient history (even though only three weeks have passed). The undemocratic process by which they replaced Biden with Harris is ancient history. As of this writing the most important stories of the last few days—so important that hundreds and hundreds of articles were written about them—are: 1) Trump and Vance are being defensive about being called names, 2) Trump is a racist who mocked Harris’s black race, 3) Trump probably stole money from Egypt.
7. “Weird” is now in the public consciousness
As of this writing, Trump and Vance are still addressing comments about “weird” because the mainstream media will not let it out of the news cycle, even though the public has stopped caring about it days ago.
What’s the biggest damage that this attack is doing? It’s not letting Trump even talk about policies. Wouldn’t it be great to hear both candidates talking about how they would address the situation in the Middle East, or confront China, or end inflation, or get more unemployed people working, or end the war in Ukraine?
We’re not talking about that, because for days the media cycle has been fixated on “is vance weird” and “is trump racist”.
This is absolutely malpractice on the part of the media.
And how is Leah Greenberg reacting? She’s gloating that all of her attacks against Vance are making it into Google Auto-Suggest—and notice that this is happening the same time that searches like “Trump assassination attempt” have disappeared.
Conclusion
Is the kind of astroturfing that Leah Greenberg and Indivisible illegal? Probably not. Is it deceitful, manipulative, and an affront to the very concept of free speech and classical liberalism? Hell yes.
So how do those of us who want to see liberty preserved in this country fight back? Only by using our free speech to stand up for what’s right. We didn’t have this in 2020 and we still don’t have it anywhere except on X, thanks to Elon Musk. Use your free speech. Because the mainstream media and Google have not given up their quest to silence you, Elon Musk or no Elon Musk.
