[1]
By John Helmer, Moscow
@bears_with [2]
Reading is more effective for understanding Presidents Trump, Putin and Xi than listening.
This is because reading uses more of your brain to process the incoming information, compare and fact-check it, than listening or viewing podcasts.
American brain scientists report [3] new experiments which prove this. “To mirror the transient nature of spoken sentences, visual input was presented in rapid serial visual presentation format. The results showed a common core of amodal left inferior frontal and middle temporal gyri activation, as well as modality specific brain activation associated with listening and reading comprehension. Reading comprehension was associated with more left-lateralized activation and with left inferior occipital cortex (including fusiform gyrus) activation. Listening comprehension was associated with extensive bilateral temporal cortex activation and more overall activation of the whole cortex.”
In other words, think of yourself as an Artificial Intelligence (AI) machine with less electricity for powering your chips to process a smaller data base, and that’s you listening. When reading, however, you are going full throttle with more chips processing more calculations at a faster speed with a bigger database [4].
There’s also a big difference in the power of thinking triggered by radio broadcasts compared to video podcasts.
When you read text, you control the speed. Your eyes scan shapes, link them to sounds, and allow you to pause or re-read to grasp complex ideas. With podcasts, the brain is forced to process at the speaker’s speed. Because spoken words are a continuous, fleeting stream, your working memory must work harder to retain information before it vanishes. When you listen and view a podcast, your brain processes the speaker’s vocal inflections, rhythm, and tone, which naturally adds emotional context and influences intuitive reasoning.
That’s a neuroscientific euphemism for persuasion.
In the podcast called Judging Freedom, for example — sponsored by firms selling money betting on the price of gold, silver and other commodity futures — retired army officers speak from interior decoration behind them which includes campaign citations and busts of victorious generals like Napoleon and Ulysses Grant; professors from desks and bookcases loaded with texts; and spy agency veterans with antique furnishings acquired on undercover Middle Eastern postings. This display is meant to overload the cortex with data irrelevant to the truth or falsity of the information being propagated. You are meant to think you’ve come to your conclusions and convictions because the source is credible to look at, not because the evidence is accurate in the reading (and checking). Your short-term memory loses the data and cannot double-check; it remembers that you believed the man on the screen. That’s propaganda and subversion for you.
Gorilla Radio, presented from Canada for the past twenty-five years by Chris Cook, beats these AI limitations. It uses the auditory cortex but frees the visual cortex to double-check the readable world – without the interior decoration. It’s the antidote to propaganda.
So when Trump launches missile attacks on Iranian speedboats in the Strait of Hormuz and bombs targets in the port of Bandar Abbas, at the same time as he [5], Vice President JD Vance [6], and Secretary of State Marco Rubio [7] say they are hopeful of negotiating end-of-war terms with Iran, the meaning of the contradictory and confusing data is best transmitted by this new broadcast [8].
[9]Source: https://gradio.substack.com/p/gorilla-radio-with-chris-cook-karen-65b [8] -- starting at Minute 30. For the archive [10], plus introductions to Canada’s Resistance and the history as it took shape and fought the battles that had to be fought, click here [11].
In the discussion [12], we referred to the breaking news from Trump’s Cabinet meeting on May 27 when he declared that he is going to win the midterm Congressional elections on November 3 on the strength of his voter income-boosting policies; and at the same time as he claimed “he doesn’t care” if his Iran war and Hormuz Strait blockade damage voter intentions and the midterm election results.
[13]Trump: “It's really great. People are calling up and they're buying drugs for a fraction, for literally a fraction of the price. And it should be the biggest story. And on that alone, we should win the midterms. On that alone, we should win the midterms, but the press doesn't talk about it…Maybe we have to go back and finish it, maybe we don't. Right now, I mean, you can speak to Steve Witkoff and Jared, they're doing a good job. But right now, I think it looks like they want to just make a deal. They want to -- they have -- I don't think they have a choice. They're just going back to the internet because they're getting clobbered; their economy is in freefall. They have 250 percent inflation, their money has no value, and their whole economic system is broken down. They thought they were going to outwait me; you know, we'll outwait him. He's got the midterms. I don't care about the midterms. Look what happened last night, that was the prelude to the midterms. People understand it, they know that, very simple, Iran cannot have a nuclear weapon [12].”
Trump’s use of the Cabinet meeting as a propaganda platform isn’t new for him nor for his predecessors. In the Carter Administration, Cabinet meetings were called weekly as a closed-door decision making method, and Carter held a total of 152 of them over his four-year term; but he reduced their frequency as his term came under more intense political pressure. President Obama convened 19 Cabinet sessions in his first term, 13 in his second term. In Trump’s first term, there were 25 Cabinet meetings. Under President Biden, the frequency dropped to just 11 as the president’s mental incapacities grew and his inability to stage lengthy public meetings became too visible for his political survival.
Excerpting and republishing the latest Cabinet session, the White House runs its own twitter machine called RapidResponse47 [14]. Trump’s personal twitter stream can be monitored here [15]. Here is a sample on which our Gorilla Radio discussion has been based:
[16]Source: : https://x.com/FoxNews/status/20596254776024925 [6]
[17]Source: https://x.com/RapidResponse47/status/2059643957647171644 [18]
[19]Source: https://x.com/RapidResponse47/status/2059669267100913903 [5]
[20]Source: https://x.com/RapidResponse47/status/2059673162002903064 [7]
Here’s the poll evidence on the Trump political succession for 2028:
[21]Source: https://www.realclearpolling.com/polls/president/republican-primary/2028/national [22]