Post date: Feb 12, 2016 3:12:34 PM
This would-be exposé about the extraordinary drought affecting the Western United States is actually a convoluted video advertisement for the book Food for Freedom, which purports to teach people how to cheaply yet self-sufficiently grow their own food using hydroponic techniques combined with tank-grown fish. Using such easy-to-use technology, it argues that people may thereby avoid the "sinister plan by Obama" to enslave Americans during a coming emergency arising from massive food shortages and consequent social unrest precipitated by the drought.
Tellingly, the author claims to be a career journalist but uses a a pen name. The prologue is protracted, and the actual product being advertised is not revealed for several minutes. The video is filled with stock footage and scenes filmed in other countries without proper attribution or description. It also includes dubious footage of desperate citizens interacting with riot police in black gear and face-obscuring masks, carrying shields emblazoned with the word 'FEMA' in large, block letters.
The narration uses journalistically unusual words such as "sinister" and "dark" to describe the government's plans, "ficticious" to describe climate science described in the film An Inconvenient Truth, "?" and "?" to describe public statements by Barack Obama and John Kerry, and even "delicious", "luscious" and "juicy" describing the vegetables one can grow at home using the knowledge in the book offered for sale.
The claims are extraordinary, fearful, and prophetic in tone: "everything will happen very, very soon". The message self-certifies by arguing that the investigation was done by a journalist at the end of his career and that the fact that the story is not reported by main stream media demonstrates that <<the story is true>>. The long video mixes together facts such as the current epic drought in California and other western states with current and waning conspiracy theories focused on the domestic military exercise known as Jade Helm, recent supposedly suspicious Walmart store closures, standard climate change denialism (it's a natural interglacial warming peak caused by the planet's orbit, not greenhouse gas emissions), and amorphous distrust of governmental authorities.
Very interesting and even artful is the use (at ##:##) of news footage from an Obama speech on climate change and its impact on national security and the operation of the American military. The viewer is left to presume that Obama has tipped his hand about his nefarious plan to use the American military against Americans, rather than the actual message which was that the instability around the world would likely grow as a result of displacements caused by climate change and the military's bases would be affected by rising sea levels and altered storm patterns.
The purveyors seem to have even captured Google in the sense that searching for "Food for Freedom" links on the first page only to the main website, ancillary ads for the product and spurious reviews and commentary that clearly originate with the purveyors of the product. For instance, a supposedly independent review at http://binarymetabot.com/food-for-freedom-system-review/ (which, incongruously, is a website about foreign exchange investing) argues "Is Frank Tanner's Food For Freedom Review a really good for you? Check out my honest and well researched Review before you deciding to buy this Food For Freedom Book." [N.B. There are so many idiosyncrasies in the text that I have omitted use of 'sic' for the sake of readability. Interestingly, copy-paste functionality seems to be restricted at this site.] The review also portends ominously "If you really want to ensure your food security, you will have to move fast... If this FEMA, the NSA or any other government agency finds out about this program, they will take it down... So, don't miss this precious program in your life." There are many such reviews on line, all of which seem to draw from the same source.
The pen name "Frank Tanner" is a rather common name, including as the appellation of a cartoon character, so searching for it also yields unhelpful results on the first page. No other names of authorities or institutions are named. Even the publisher of the book being sold is obscure. The book is not available on Amazon, although a government pamphlet on food rationing issued during the Second World War, which has the same name, is available electronically [http://www.amazon.com/Food-Freedom-US-ebook/dp/B002KW4C1Y].