We had an excellent discussion yesterday about the intersection of the latest developments in Trump’s indictment for January 6 and some of the material we have covered in class.
Here are some of the articles/books/tweets we referenced:
A memo written by Kenneth Cheseboro on December 6, 2020 which is referenced in the indictment and outlines the perception management strategy to enable the self-coup to succeed (we debated whether it is pronounced CHEESE-boro or CHEZ-boro and I went with cheese)
My Substack post from last November on information asymmetry, and how Trump takes advantage of the Justice Department’s norms to only “speak” through its indictments, leaving him with an information vacuum he can fill with his preferred narrative (I elaborated on this in this MSNBC piece in the aftermath of Trump’s indictment in Manhattan many moons ago)
My Substack post from January on the indictment against Charles McGonigal, the former head of the FBI’s New York counterintelligence division, which is a good refresher in light of the latest news that he is in talks to plead guilty for the work he did for a Russian oligarch
Bowling Alone: The Collapse and Revival of American Community by Robert Putnam — I’ll be referring to this book a lot later in the course but it came up in connection with a question about the weaponization of social disconnection; Putnam’s book chronicles the demise of social capital from World War II to the turn of the 21st century
Related to the theme of social capital, this Atlantic article by Amanda Mull from January 2021 on how the pandemic erased many of our “weak ties,” which are essential for a feeling of social connection and community
And finally, this tweet from James Fallows, analyzing the framing of a New York Times article, which we discussed helps contribute to the amplification of Trump’s narratives in the information space
Thanks to everyone who joined yesterday, and I hope to see those of you who couldn’t make it next time!
As always, well said. Appreciate these resources. I may integrate some of the social capital readings into a Trust sequence in next year’s Strategy for the Networked Economy class. 🙏
The question is, did you go full parody mode and pronounce it CHEESE-BRO.