Watch a Narrative Evolve in Real Time

By now you've likely heard of the shooting in San Bernadino, California. If you didn't pay close attention to the media narrative as events unfolded, I don't blame you; while the media establishment fumbled about trying to get and vet the facts (and by did they fumble), the narrative was also in flux.

If you needed any further convincing that there is a massive, institutional Narrative Warfare campaign going on then all you need to do is go back through the Twitter feeds of several prominent people during yesterday's events. Immediately the Social Justice Warriors and their political allies went to the Evil White Male Christian Patriarchy narrative due to the location and the apparent signs of workplace violence.

Mike Cernovich aptly put my take on the whiplash when it turned out that the shooters were Arab Muslims enacting a pre-meditated attack upon a soft target:

What changed @speechboy71? pic.twitter.com/FHrLeAk8W9

— Mike Cernovich (@Cernovich) December 3, 2015

As for that media establishment incompetence, here you are- a failure to vet alleged sources of a grossly stupid nature:

Outlets failing to vet sources vindicate #GamerGate's campaign for ethical journalism: https://t.co/QDONyq3hvS pic.twitter.com/U54Vb7v9n4

— Gareth Hart (@tgheretford) December 4, 2015

Today the scramble is real. There is no acknowledgement that preliminary claims were wrong, no confession of being wrong, just throwing all of that down the Memory Hole ("The Past is Irrelevant!" screams the Crazy Cat Lady, "Take me as I am!") and shifting their narrative as if it always was that way. They're worse than cats like that.

Instead, the narrative is about the guns- with only minimal acknowledgement of race or religion at this point. (Expect that to shift soon.) Fools great and small parrot talking points as if they got memos emailed to them this morning. (Likely a literal thing for the politically-connected.) I hear the emphasis being on "legally acquired", and I know someone (a) doesn't know Federal or California regulations and (b) doesn't care to look them up.

• It is illegal to buy a firearms of any kind if you are not the final recipient. This is a "Straw Purchase", and it's a Felony offense. Until the provenence of the sales are vetted and confirmed, it is irresponsible to comment on the legality of the sale. That they do so anyway is meant to be poison-pill talk to propagandize the listener to anti-gun views.
  
• The rifles, as reported so far, operated in a manner contrary to what is allowed under California's regulations (the most anti-gun in the US) regarding semi-automatic rifles. This makes the possession illegal; the reason is that Federal regulation disallows the cross-state in-person sale of semi-automatic rifles without the intervention of a Federal Firearms Licensee to perform the mandated paperwork for transfer at sale as well as one in the buyer's home state to receive the rifle (the buyer can't take it home himself), and out-of-state sellers must conform to the regulations of the buyer's state. (This is why a lot of online retailers do not sell to California buyers.)
  
• Looking these facts up are as simple as going to the FAQ page of the ATF's website, something every journalist can do while guzzling coffee and donuts on their break time.
  

So, what we see here is yet another act of virtual human sacrifice: the exploitation of the lives of innocents to give power to a ritual working of one's will in order to bend reality to conform to one's desires. (In this case, political changes meant to screw the same innocents in favor of those conducting the ritual.) I find this abhorrent, as I would expect others still possessed of sound moral fiber, but that is what Narrative Warfare does. Now that we know what it is, and how it works, I would hope that we have both the will and skill to wreck it.