Another real journalist (not one of the corporate media stenographers) drops more truth bombs about #Ukraine. This is one interview that warmongering liberals and their Tory bedfellows need to watch. pic.twitter.com/yN0vaMw4Tg
— Chris Williamson (@DerbyChrisW) June 1, 2023
Journalism
You cannot be a journalist in the West anymore. Look at what they do to those who question the state propaganda.
“The Cradle contributor was questioned for five hours by counter-terrorism police over his journalistic work and political opinions
UK counter-terrorism police detained journalist Kit Klarenberg upon his arrival in his home country from Belgrade, Serbia, on 17 May, subjecting him to an extended interrogation over his “political views” and his reporting.
Klarenberg has written extensively for The Cradle, exposing London’s many covert operations in West Asia.
According to The Grayzone, six plainclothes police were waiting for him outside his plane, promptly moving him to a back room and informing him of his detention under Schedule Three, Section Four of the 2019 Counter-Terrorism and Border Act.
Klarenberg was questioned for over five hours about his journalistic work, including “his personal opinion on everything from the current British political leadership to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.”
The counter-terrorism police seized his electronic devices and SD cards, took DNA swabs, fingerprinted him, and photographed him multiple times. He was threatened with arrest if he failed to comply.
Klarenberg’s most recent investigation for The Cradle exposed how UK government-affiliated contractors have been training Palestinian Authority (PA) security forces using US funding.
He made waves in recent months by exposing London’s use of Yemeni NGOs to covertly undermine the Ansarallah-led government in Sanaa as well as Jordan’s use of UK intel techniques known as “digital media exploitation … used to monitor, manipulate, and disrupt dissent in the kingdom.”
Klarenberg has also ruffled feathers in London with his reporting for The Grayzone, exposing “major British and US intelligence intrigues,” including a report on how at least two of the hijackers who carried out the 11 September attacks in New York had been recruited into a joint CIA-Saudi intelligence operation.
Another of his major exposés was a report revealing that journalist Paul Mason worked as a UK security state collaborator tasked with discrediting alternative media outlets, academics, and peace activists critical of NATO’s role in the Ukraine war…”
The Western mainstream media have never been so blatant in their propaganda for the U.S. empire
The war in Ukraine is becoming more evident as a war-racket and imperialist proxy war against Russia. That war is in desperate danger of spiralling into an all-out world war that could unleash a nuclear catastrophe.
All Western media outlets have ignored credible investigative reporting by Seymour Hersh (and others) who have very plausibly implicated the sabotage of Nord Stream by the U.S., carried out under the instructions of American President Joe Biden.
The Western mainstream media have never been so blatant in their propaganda for the U.S. empire.
The pretensions are threadbare. As the warmongering U.S. government/regime and its Western/NATO imperialist lackeys are becoming more exposed and desperate to maintain credibility, so too are their media tools. The likes of the New York Times, BBC, CNN – and many more – are a contemptible joke on the public. They are an insult to common intelligence.
Fake news has been around for centuries, but it’s now becoming glaringly obvious and self-destructive. In the same way that the U.S. warmongering empire is becoming glaringly obvious and self-destructive.
The disconnect with reality and degradation of supposed independent journalism is reflected in record levels of distrust among the Western public toward the mainstream, corporate-controlled news media.
In this interview, U.S.-based writers Bruce Gagnon and Daniel Lazare demolish the pretensions of Western media.
The systematic cover-up of the Nord Stream sabotage by the United States and its NATO allies – an act of war and state terrorism – demonstrates the servile function of Western media outlets that claim to be pillars of independent news and freedom of information.
Media outlets like the New York Times, Washington Post, and the British state-owned BBC, among many others, have been exposed as pathetic propaganda tools for the United States and other NATO imperialist regimes.
All Western media outlets have ignored credible investigative reporting by Seymour Hersh (and others) who have very plausibly implicated the sabotage of Nord Stream by the U.S., carried out under the instructions of American President Joe Biden.
Another touchstone subject is the vile persecution of Julian Assange. Western media have again covered up what are a shocking violation of Assange’s rights and principled publishing through the whistleblower organization Wikileaks. Julian Assange’s only “crime” is that he revealed the war crimes committed by the U.S. and its imperialist lackeys.
Assange’s appalling mistreatment, indeed torture – four years in British solitary confinement awaiting extradition to the U.S. over spurious “spying charges” – is a vicious attack on journalism and the public’s right to know. Yet supposed self-declared Western media defenders of “truth” and “fact-based” objective information – have conspired to be silent and permit Assange’s persecution. Western media are shown to be complicit in destroying the very principles of journalism that they claim to uphold.
As Bruce Gagnon and Daniel Lazare point out, it is a crime to tell the truth and Western media stand exposed in their odious dereliction of duty to report independently. They are seen more than ever as out-and-out tools of empire.
A proper understanding of the Nord Stream sabotage and the case of Julian Assange would give the Western public a critical insight into the imperialist nature of their governments – regimes that serve warmongering capitalist interests. Critical mass must be thwarted at all costs by the Empire’s media foot-servants.
From the point of view of U.S.-led Western imperialist power, it is imperative and absolutely vital to cover up the scandals of the Nord Stream attack and Julian Assange, among others. If the public were to become more widely cognizant then the whole edifice of Western governments implodes. This is why the Western media are more blatant than ever to cover up. But the truth will win out.
The war in Ukraine is becoming more evident as a war-racket and imperialist proxy war against Russia. That war is in desperate danger of spiralling into an all-out world war that could unleash a nuclear catastrophe.
The same Western media cover-up is at work with regard to the U.S.-led NATO aggression toward China. Again, the Western media are spinning imperialist propaganda of alleged Chinese menace in order to justify what is an insane warmongering agenda to confront China and prop up American hegemonic ambitions.
A tantalizing positive prospect is that critical, independent media are gradually and relentlessly breaking the monopoly of Western propaganda media. The internet and global communications are seeing to that – albeit against sinister censorship by Western regimes.
Nevertheless, the establishment of Western media are increasingly held in distrust and contempt by the Western public and globally.
We are living in an exemplary time of the fabled Emperor With No Clothes. The false image of dominant Western regimes and their lying corporate media has never been so degraded but also never so fragile. The Western lie machine’s days are numbered. It only has itself to blame because of its abject disservice to the public interest.
Western state-complicit media claim to be “free”. Laughably, they are “free” to be slaves of lies and propaganda.
A crash is long overdue.
The use of the phrase “journalism is not a crime” is an interesting choice since the most common individual case you’ll hear it used in reference to is surely that of Julian Assange, who has been locked in a maximum security prison for four years while the US government works to extradite him for the crime of good journalism.
Apr 7
After a certain point criticizing the hypocrisy and contradictions of the US-centralized empire starts to feel too easy, like shooting fish in a barrel. But hell let’s do it anyway; the barrel’s right here, and I really hate these particular fish.
Russian security services have formally filed espionage charges against Wall Street Journal reporter Evan Gershkovich, who has been detained in Russia since his arrest last month. Gershkovich reportedly denies the spying allegations and says he was engaged in journalistic activity in Russia.
This news came out at the same time as a joint statement was published by Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer and Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell condemning Gershkovich’s detention as a violation of press freedoms.
“Let there be no mistake: journalism is not a crime,” the senators write. “We demand the baseless, fabricated charges against Mr. Gershkovich be dropped and he be immediately released and reiterate our condemnation of the Russian government’s continued attempts to intimidate, repress, and punish independent journalists and civil society voices.”
The use of the phrase “journalism is not a crime” is an interesting choice since the most common individual case you’ll hear it used in reference to is surely that of Julian Assange, who has been locked in a maximum security prison for four years while the US government works to extradite him for the crime of good journalism. Every pro-Assange demonstration I’ve ever been to has featured signs with some variation of the phrase “journalism is not a crime,” and any Assange supporter will be intimately familiar with that refrain.
So as an Assange supporter it sounds a bit odd to hear that slogan rolled out by two DC swamp monsters who have both enthusiastically supported the persecution of the world’s most famous journalist.
“He has done enormous damage to our country and I think he needs to be prosecuted to the fullest extent of the law. And if that becomes a problem, we need to change the law,” McConnell said of Assange after WikiLeaks published thousands of diplomatic cables in 2010.
“Neither WikiLeaks, nor its original source for these materials, should be spared in any way from the fullest prosecution possible under the law,” Schumer said in 2010.
“Now that Julian Assange has been arrested, I hope he will soon be held to account for his meddling in our elections on behalf of Putin and the Russian government,” Schumer tweeted when Assange was dragged from the Ecuadorian embassy in London almost exactly four years ago. (Assange has not been charged with anything related to Russia or the 2016 election, and allegations of collusion with Russia remain completely unsubstantiated to this day.)
These are two of the most powerful elected officials in the world, puffing and posing as brave defenders of press freedoms after having actively facilitated their government’s attempts to destroy those very press freedoms. Their government is working to extradite and imprison Assange under the Espionage Act for engaging in what experts say is standard journalistic activity, which will allow them to set a legal precedent in which any journalist anywhere in the world can be extradited and prosecuted for exposing US war crimes like Assange did.
There is no greater threat posed to world press freedoms than the one the US is presenting with its persecution of Julian Assange, a persecution which has been fervently endorsed by Schumer and McConnell and all the other Washington swamp creatures who are melodramatically rending their garments about Evan Gershkovich today.
Which is of course ridiculous. You don’t get to say “journalism is not a crime” while literally working to criminalize journalism. Those positions are mutually exclusive. Pick one.
It’s worthwhile to point out the hypocrisy of US empire managers, not because hypocrisy in and of itself is some uniquely grave evil but because it shows that these people do not stand for what they pretend to stand for. The US empire does not care about press freedoms, it cares about power and domination, and the noises it makes in support of journalism are only ever made as a cynical ploy with which to bludgeon disobedient foreign governments on the world stage.
Assange exposed many inconvenient facts about the US empire in his work with WikiLeaks, but none have been so inconvenient as what he’s exposed by forcing them to come after him and reveal their true face in their brazen persecution of the world’s greatest journalist.
Research conducted by New York University’s Center for Social Media and Politics into Russian trolling behavior on Twitter in the lead-up to the 2016 US presidential election has found “no evidence of a meaningful relationship between exposure to the Russian foreign influence campaign and changes in attitudes, polarization, or voting behavior.”
Which is to say that all the years of hysterical shrieking about Russian trolls interfering in US democracy and corrupting the fragile little minds of Americans — a narrative that has been used to drum up support for internet censorship and ever-increasing US government involvement in the regulation of online speech — was false.
The most important reporting a journalist can do in the western world today is to help expose the lies, propaganda and malpractice of other western journalists and news outlets. But that is also the last thing a western journalist is ever likely to do because western journalists seek praise and approval not from the public, but from other western journalists…
You can see this in the way they post on Twitter, with their little in-jokes and insider references, how they’re always cliquing up and beckoning and signalling to each other. Twitter is a great window through which to observe western journalists because they really lay it all out there. Watch their bootlicking facilitation of status quo power, their ingratiating tail-wagging with each other, the way they gang up on dissenters like zealots burning a heretic. To see what I’m talking about you have to pay attention not to their viral tweets that go off but to all the rest that receive little attention because the ones that take off are the ones the public is interested in. If you watch them carefully it becomes clear that for most of them the intended audience of the majority of their posts is not the rank-and-file public, but their fellow members of the media class.
Notorious globalist billionaire George Soros has gone on the record declaring himself a God and promising an audience at the World Economic Forum that the New World Order are making the necessary preparations to completely and utterly obliterate the conservative agenda in the US.
Soros is playing his part in this destructive agenda the only way he knows how — by throwing his dirty money around, sponsoring hate groups, paid protestors, and NGOs, attempting to subvert the course of democracy and eradicate the silent majority.
Soros has also been paying dozens of “journalists” and other corporate media figures large sums of cash to promote his radical agenda — and now we know their names.
In return for their souls, Soros is paying these so-called “journalists” anywhere from $63,000 to $85,000 to promote his agenda to the masses and publish glowing reports on his radical leftist activities.
Much of the propaganda effort has sought to advance Soros’ progressive criminal justice reform.
Via his non-profit the Open Society Foundations (OSF), Soros is pumping cash to the media in the form of fellowships, or “Soros Justice Fellowships.”
To receive big payouts, fellows must produce projects that align with Soros’ goals to restructure the U.S. justice system with soft-on-crime policies that favor criminals.
Among the goals is reducing incarceration rates and introducing radical sentencing guidelines.
However, the eligibility for these fellowships is not just limited to journalists. OSF offers three distinct categories of fellowship funding — advocacy, media, and youth activism.
According to scholarship data provided to universities, OSF may pay up to six figures for fellowships. These categories qualify a wide variety of professions such as lawyers, advocates, grassroots organizers, artists, and filmmakers.
Soros Justice Fellowship alums have been at the center of several controversies in recent years due to their activism.
Susan Burton, founder of the criminal justice reform activist group A New Way of Life (ANWOL), and Mark-Anthony Johnson, a longtime ally of Black Lives Matter co-founder Patrisse Cullors, have both made headlines for the radical activism after taking Soros’ cash.
The fellowship program isn’t new, however, and Soros has offered this funding for over 25 years. A total of 469 individuals have received Soros-funded fellowships since the program’s inception.
Most of the earliest fellows involved in journalism went on to become acclaimed reporters across a variety of corporate media outlets.
Below is a full list of Big Media operatives who have received funding from George Soros to promote his radical agenda.
The following are current fellows involved in mainstream media, out of 18 total fellows for 2022:
- Yasmine Arrington, of Washington, D.C., will produce a podcast featuring only “Black and brown youth voices” discussing the criminal justice system, including juvenile probation, reentry, and recidivism. Arrington has written for TeenVogue, Essence, Black Enterprise, Forbes Magazine, Washington Post, and Baltimore Times.
- Zachary Siegel, of Chicago, Illinois, will write and narrate news coverage concerning current approaches to overdose deaths. Siegel has written for Harper’s Magazine, New York Times Magazine, The Atlantic, The Nation, New Republic, WIRED, Politico, and Scientific American.
- Irene Franco Rubio, a Phoenix, Arizona, native attending the University of Southern California, will produce a podcast on juvenile minority incarceration and their criminalization in public school systems. Franco Rubio has written for Forbes, USA Today, Teen Vogue, and NPR, as well as worked for Michelle Obama’s nonprofit. Franco Rubio was recognized as a scholar by a number of prominent groups: Facebook Journalism Project, Marguerite Casey Foundation’s Equal Voice News, International Center for Journalists, and ProPublica Diversity.
Several current fellowships went to budding journalist-activists:
- Tiera Howleit, a student reporter at Indiana University’s collegiate paper. Howleit’s fellowship profile says that she will use the funds to “elevate the voices of people of color […] impacted by the criminal justice system.” Howleit founded “Black Collegians” in 2020, a social justice advocacy group.
- Katherine Owojori, a pre-law student at USC, will work with Franco Rubio to produce the above-mentioned podcast. Owojori is an active member of Black Lives Matter: Los Angeles.
Past fellows involved in mainstream media, in the order in which their fellowship was awarded:
- Cloee Cooper – PBS, The John Oliver Show, Huffington Post, The Guardian, Politico, Nevada Public Radio, Spectrum TV
- Contessa Gayles – CNN, VICE, PBS Frontline, CBS, Wired, Al Jazeera, Vox
- Lam Thuy Vo – Buzzfeed News, The Wall Street Journal, Al Jazeera, NPR, ProPublica, The Guardian, The New York Times, ESPN
- May Jeong – Vanity Fair, The New York Times, Harper’s, The Intercept
- Shanita Hubbard – The New York Times, HuffPost, Essence Magazine, Fusion, The Root
- Cynthia Greenlee – The Washington Post, The Atlantic, The New York Times, Vox, Self, Harper’s Bazaar, The Counter, American Prospect, Dissent, Ebony, Elle, Longreads, Salon, Smithsonian
- Donovan Ramsey – The New York Times, The Atlantic, Buzzfeed, Ebony, GQ, New Republic, Los Angeles Times, The Wall Street Journal, Essence
- Jenni Monet – The Guardian, Yes! Magazine, Los Angeles Times, PBS, Al Jazeera, Indian Country Today, Columbia Journalism Review
- Julieta Martinelli – Futuro Media, Nashville Public Radio, CBS, Real Atlanta Magazine, Gwinnett Daily Post
- James Kilgore – Medium, WIRED Magazine, Al Jazeera, Salon
- Katie Rose Quandt – The Atlantic, Rolling Stone, The Appeal, The Nation, Vice, Slate, Mother Jones, Brooklyn Magazine, America Magazine
- Ebony Underwood – Huffington Post, Vibe, USA Today, The Appeal, Vibe, Mic
- Isaac Bailey – The New York Times, The Washington Post, Politico, Time, Esquire, CNN, Nieman Reports
- Nick August-Perna – National Geographic, PBS, HBO, Vox, Vice
- Judith Levine – Harper’s Bazaar, The New York Times, Vogue, Mother Jones, The Nation, Boston Review, Salon
- Maia Szalavitz – The New York Times, Time, The Washington Post, Elle, New York Magazine, New Scientist, Newsweek, CNN, MSNBC, NPR
- Alisa Roth – NPR, CBS, PRI’s The World, Marketplace, The New York Times, Business Week, Nation
- Mark Obbie – The Atlantic, The Trace, Politico, The New York Times, The American Lawyer, Texas Lawyer, Houston Post, Pacific Standard, Inc. Magazine, Slate
- Osagie Obasogie – The New York Times, Slate, Scientific American, Los Angeles Times, Boston Globe, New Scientist
- Seth Freed Wessler – Associated Press, The New York Times, Los Angeles Times, ABC News, NPR, NBC, This American Life, Elle, PRI’s The World
- Luis Trelles – NPR
- James Ridgeway – Mother Jones, The Economist, Parade, Harper’s, The Nation, The New York Times, The Guardian, Al Jazeera
- Jean Casella – Mother Jones, The Guardian, Solitary Watch, The Appeal, Al Jazeera, The Nation
- Joel Medina – Huffington Post, Univision
- Erin Siegal – The New York Times, Time, Rolling Stone, The New Yorker
- Jonah Engle – The New York Times, BBC, NPR, Radio Netherlands International, Deutsche Welle, Atlanta Journal Constitution, Nation Magazine, Columbia Journalism Review, Denver Post, Haitian Times
- Lisa Riordan Seville – NBC News, The Crime Report, The Nation, MSNBC, The Daily Beast, Salon
- Hannah Rappleye – The Wall Street Journal, Mail & Guardian, The Nation, City Limits, The Crime Report, Salon.com, MSNBC
- Chandra Thomas Whitfield – People, Essence, Ebony, The American Prospect, The Guardian, HuffPost, NBC News, NPR, U.S. News & World Report, Christian Science Monitor, MIT Technology Review, Time, Newsweek, The Root
- Petra Bartosiewicz – Harper’s, Mother Jones, The Nation, New York Magazine, Texas Observer, This American Life
- Amanda Crawford – Boston Globe, Businessweek, National Geographic, Chronicle of Higher Education, Ms. Magazine, Huffington Post, Arizona Republic, Baltimore Sun
- Jesse Wegman – The New York Times, Reuters, Daily Beast, Newsweek, New York Observer
- Renee Feltz – Democracy Now!, The Intercept, The New York Times, Texas Observer, PBS
- Stokely Baksh – New Republic, Forbes, Mother Jones, The Wall Street Journal, Dow Jones, Marketwatch, PBS, The Nation, Al Jazeera
- Jessica Pupovac – PBS, NPR, WBEZ Chicago, The Chicago Journal
- Nancy Mullane – NPR, American Public Media
- Patrice Gaines – The Washington Post, NPR, Washington Informer, Yahoo News, NBC News, Yes! Magazine, New York Times, Essence
- Jennifer Thompson-Cannino – The New York Times, Durham-Herald Sun, Tallahassee Democrat
- Erin Torneo – Cosmopolitan, Variety, Independent, indieWIRE
- JoAnn Mar – NPR, Voice of America, Pacifica Radio, CBS Radio, KALW-FM
- Jonathan Mahler – The New York Times, The New Republic, Slate, New York Magazine, Bloomberg, HuffPost, MSN, CNBC, Yahoo
- Laura Mansnerus – The New York Times, Detroit Free Press, Philadelphia Inquirer, MSN, The Boston Globe, Business Standard, Tampa Bay Times, Pittsburgh Post-Gazette
- Paul Butler – MSNBC, NBC News, Nature, The Washington Post, USA Today, Los Angeles Times, The Atlantic, Yahoo, People
- Susan Koch – ABC, NBC, HBO, PBS, MTV, Discovery Channel, National Geographic
- David Dent – The Daily Beast, PBS, HuffPost
- Emily Bazelon – New York Times Magazine, Business Insider, HuffPost, MSN, The Independent, The Washington Post, ABC News, The Atlantic, Yahoo, Miami Herald, Vogue, RealClear Politics, Slate
- Mary Beth Pfeiffer – Forbes, HuffPost, Scientific American, The Globe and Mail, The Hill, Newsday, RealClear Politics, Pittsburgh Post-Gazette
- Steve Liss – Time, PBS
- Amy Bach – New York Magazine, The New York Times, The Nation, Slate
- Elizabeth Amon – Bloomberg News, The American Lawyer, The National Law Journal, The New York Times, Harper’s, The Imprint
- Nathan Blakeslee – Texas Monthly, The Guardian, The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, The Nation, Houston Chronicle, The Texas Observer
- Robin Mejia – The Washington Post, Science, Mother Jones, LA Times, CNN
- Slawomir Grunberg – PBS, HBO, ABC, NBC
- Tyrone Turner – National Geographic, NPR, DCist
- Brenda Kenneally – New York Times Magazine, Rolling Stone, Ms. Magazine
- Jan Goodwin – New York Times Magazine, The Nation, Harper’s Bazaar, Marie-Claire, Real Simple, Reader’s Digest, Good Housekeeping, Ladies’ Home Journal
- Sara Cantania – Los Angeles Times, Reuters
- Adrian LeBlanc – Seventeen Magazine, New York Times Magazine, The New Yorker, Esquire
- Alden Loury – Chicago Sun-Times, WBEZ-FM, The Chicago Reporter, WVIK-FM
- John Biewen – NPR, American RadioWorks
- Sasha Abramsky – The Nation, American Prospect, The Daily Beast, Columbia Journalism Review, The Atlantic, HuffPost, San Francisco Weekly, The Guardian, Mother Jones, New York Magazine
- Andrew Lichtenstein – Yahoo, Business Insider, MSN, The Atlantic, The New Yorker, Al Jazeera, The New Republic
- Dan Collison – Newsweek, NPR, Thomson Reuters Foundation
- Eric Whitney – NPR, CNN, The Washington Post, WebMD, The Atlantic, The Atlanta Journal-Constitution, New Jersey Public Radio
- Nell Bernstein – The New York Times, The Washington Post, USA Today, Buzzfeed, Cosmopolitan, Glamour, The Crime Report, The San Francisco Standard
- Jennifer Gonnerman – The New Yorker, New York Magazine, Village Voice
Soros’ influence extends far beyond the media, however.
Soros has been the Democratic Party’s top donor for several years, buying himself massive sway in the federal government.
It was also recently revealed that a Soros-funded propaganda group was involved in the Big Tech coverup of the Hunter Biden laptop scandal in the run-up to the 2020 election.
In his explosive new book, “The Man Behind the Curtain: Inside the Secret Network of George Soros,” Matt Palumbo exposes how the radical billionaire uses his global groups to peddle influence around the world.
Palumbo details how Soros uses his wealth to fund a power grab that finds its way right into the upper echelons of Democrat President Joe Biden’s White House.
Earlier this year, the hugely popular exposé was snubbed from the New York Times “Best Seller” list.
Unsurprisingly, Soros owns millions of dollars worth of stock in the newspaper.
The Fox News star gives voice to the concerns of millions – the part of America that some would prefer not to hear
“Ukraine’s leaders aren’t really hiding it anymore, they have total contempt for us,” Carlson said. “They just want our money. They don’t care about the United States even a little bit. This is not democracies uniting in solidarity. This is a scam.”
https://www.rt.com/news/568524-tucker-carlson-media-hate/
Dec 19, 2022
Tucker Carlson © Janos Kummer / Getty Images
The jungle of the US media kingdom appears to be divided between two powerful entities – the pro-establishment behemoth often referred to as the mainstream media, and Tucker Carlson. And against all odds, Carlson appears to be winning.
It would be difficult to name a single person, aside from the rabble-rouser Donald J. Trump, who is more disgusting and/or terrifying (depending on who you ask) for the establishment media than Fox News host Tucker Carlson. This one man is considered such a threat that the New York Times in May spent a boatload of ink to assassinate his character in a 20,000-word hit piece. Ironically, the article backfired as it laid bare the reasons Americans no longer trust the ‘legacy media’.
Straight from the Grey Lady’s mouth: “‘Tucker Carlson Tonight’ has presented a dominant narrative, recasting American racism to present white Americans as an oppressed caste. The ruling class uses fentanyl and other opioids to addict and kill legacy Americans, anti-white racism to cast them as bigots, feminism to degrade their self-esteem, immigration to erode their political power. Republican elites, however improbably, help to import the voters Democrats require at the ballot box. The United States, Mr. Carlson tells his viewers, is ‘ruled by mercenaries who feel no long-term obligation to the people they rule.’”
Those sentiments, which the piece dismisses out of hand as some wild conspiracy theories, are shared by tens of millions of average Americans whose trust in journalists and politicians is now at an all-time low.
Media sees clue Tucker Carlson will run for US president
Tucker Carlson Tonight is the second-most-watched show on cable news. In September, the 8pm opinion news-talk show averaged 3.09 million viewers. The concerns he raises, night after night, resonate with a lot of Americans, and if you attack and dismiss his work, you are attacking the millions of Americans who can relate. It’s as if the establishment media wants those concerns to disappear – and the public is on to it.
In a recent Gallup poll, it was found that just 34% of Americans trust the media to report the news “fully, accurately and fairly.” When you break down that shocking number, however, it becomes clearer why Tucker Carlson enrages the establishment so much: 70% of Democrats, 14% of Republicans, and 27% of independents say they trust the fourth estate. Naturally, those 70% of Democrats do not enjoy having their cherished belief systems exposed and ridiculed every evening by Mr. Carlson, nor do their loyal media outlets want to be exposed as a politically charged propaganda machine working on behalf of the Democratic Party.
Consider, for example, the recent Black Lives Matter movement. Following the death of George Floyd at the hands of a white cop, the entire country lost its collective mind in a bout of liberal insanity. In the coast-to-coast riots that broke out, not only were the American people expected to take a knee to this violent movement (which has since been exposed as a fraud that arguably never helped a single black person, apart from those who founded the organization to buy mansions), they were expected to endorse the defunding of the police. Carlson wasn’t buying any of it.
“This may be a lot of things, this moment we’re living through, but it is definitely not about black lives,” Carlson said. “Remember that when they come for you, and at this rate, they will.”
“Anyone who has ever been subjected to the rage of the mob knows the feeling,” he continued. “It’s like being swarmed by hornets. You cannot think clearly. And the temptation is to panic. But you can’t panic. You’ve got to keep your head and tell the truth… If you show weakness of any kind, they will crush you.” He was speaking from experience, too – back in 2018, Antifa protesters besieged his home, threatening his family and vandalizing his property.
Carlson’s lonely voice in the media wilderness sparked a massive backlash, with corporations, also heavily invested in the BLM movement to the tune of billions of dollars, pulling their advertising from his show, while establishment media shock troops quickly portrayed the Fox News host as a cold-blooded racist. Fortunately, Carlson has enough of a conservative base who agreed with his message and he survived the onslaught.
More recently, Carlson has come under liberal fire for his ‘support of Vladimir Putin’, who is now embroiled in a bitter conflict against Ukraine. Here, the Fox News host has shown incredible courage, for no other person in the world of politics since Genghis Khan has been more vilified than the Russian president. Carlson asked a simple thing of his audience: To consider what Putin has done to them personally that makes him such an object of visceral hate.
“It might be worth asking yourself, since it is getting pretty serious, what is this really about? Why do I hate Putin so much? Has Putin ever called me a racist? Has he threatened to get me fired for disagreeing with him? Has he shipped every middle-class job in my town to Russia? Did he manufacture a worldwide pandemic that wrecked my business and kept me indoors for two years? Is he teaching my children to embrace racial discrimination? Is he making fentanyl? Is he trying to snuff out Christianity? Does he eat dogs? Vladimir Putin didn’t do any of that.”
Not only did Carlson ask his listeners to think twice about Vladimir Putin being propped up as the premier global villain, he suggested that the real enemy of the American people is none other than Ukrainian President Vladimir Zelensky, who has otherwise won fawning admiration from across the media spectrum.
Tucker Carlson slams Zelensky for ‘demanding’ money
At a time when the US-Mexico border is wide open, and inflation is spiralling out of control, only Carlson had the audacity to ask the simple question that millions of other Americans are also wondering: “Why are we still funding this?” Since the beginning of Russia’s special military operation in Ukraine, the US and its EU allies have forked over to Kiev around $126 billion worth of aid, a number almost equal to Ukraine’s entire 2020 GDP. And it seems that with every passing day, the Ukrainian leader demands more. And while it has been reported that much of the funds being sent to Ukraine never make it to the soldiers, it is the American people who must deal with the inflationary pressures from the limitless spending. How did Zelensky react to that news? Carlson quoted the Ukrainian leader as saying: “Inflation is nothing. Who is thinking about inflation? These things are secondary.” Secondary to what, you ask? Maybe like funnelling the wealth out of the country to Cote d’Azur?
“Ukraine’s leaders aren’t really hiding it anymore, they have total contempt for us,” Carlson said. “They just want our money. They don’t care about the United States even a little bit. This is not democracies uniting in solidarity. This is a scam.”
Incidentally, is it any wonder, then, that Russian television has demonstrated admiration for Carlson’s work, which is unique in that it is not tainted by raw anti-Russian propaganda? Just this week, the New York Times published an article alleging that Carlson and other US conservative voices had become “fixtures of internal news roundups, scripts and broadcasts” on various Russian news broadcasts. Apparently, this was supposed to demonstrate, once again, the nefarious relationship that exists between the Kremlin and the Republicans. In reality, it just shows how desperate the liberals have become to target Carlson and the Kremlin to help the Democrats advance on the political battlefield.
The establishment media would undoubtedly boost their ratings out of the basement if they started talking like that too, but because they have never in the past 20 years reported on an American war they didn’t like, it certainly will never criticize a US proxy war where the only thing the country loses, at least so far, is billions of dollars in taxpayer money. After all, as many of these warmongers want to believe, Ukraine could be Russia’s ‘Afghanistan War’ that is said to have brought down the Soviet Union, or just maybe the equivalent of the humiliating defeat America suffered in the Vietnam War. Either way, it doesn’t matter because the defense industry stands to gain enormous profits, which is what this is all about.
Whether they like it or not, Tucker Carlson remains a rare voice of candidness and honesty representing the genuine concerns of millions of Americans, which the establishment media would prefer to memory-hole.
“The crimes of the United States have been systematic, constant, vicious, remorseless, but very few people have actually talked about them. You have to hand it to America. It has exercised a quite clinical manipulation of power worldwide while masquerading as a force for universal good. It’s a brilliant, even witty, highly successful act of hypnosis.” Harold Pinter
Today, the most profitable wars have their own brand. They are called “forever wars” — Afghanistan, Palestine, Iraq, Libya, Yemen, and now Ukraine. All are based on a pack of lies.
https://www.zerohedge.com/geopolitical/pilger-silencing-lambs-how-propaganda-works
BY TYLER DURDEN
SUNDAY, SEP 11, 2022
Authored by John Pilger via ConsortiumNews.com,
When will real journalists stand up? An inspirational samizdat already exists on the internet: Consortium News, founded by the great reporter Robert Parry, Max Blumenthal’s The Grayzone, Mint Press News, Media Lens, DeclassifiedUK, Alborada, Electronic Intifada, WSWS, ZNet, ICH, CounterPunch, Independent Australia, the work of Chris Hedges, Patrick Lawrence, Jonathan Cook, Diana Johnstone, Caitlin Johnstone and others who will forgive me for not mentioning them here.
In the 1970s, I met one of Hitler’s leading propagandists, Leni Riefenstahl, whose epic films glorified the Nazis. We happened to be staying at the same lodge in Kenya, where she was on a photography assignment, having escaped the fate of other friends of the Fuhrer.
She told me that the “patriotic messages” of her films were dependent not on “orders from above” but on what she called the “submissive void” of the German public.
Did that include the liberal, educated bourgeoisie? I asked. “Yes, especially them,” she said.
I think of this as I look around at the propaganda now consuming Western societies.
Of course, we are very different from Germany in the 1930s. We live in information societies. We are globalists. We have never been more aware, more in touch, and better connected.
Leni Riefenstahl, center, filming with two assistants, 1936. (Bundesarchiv, CC-BY-SA 3.0, Wikimedia Commons)
Or do we in the West live in a Media Society where brainwashing is insidious and relentless, and perception is filtered according to the needs and lies of state and corporate power?
The United States dominates the Western world’s media. All but one of the top 10 media companies are based in North America. The internet and social media – Google, Twitter, Facebook – are mostly American-owned and controlled.
In my lifetime, the United States has overthrown or attempted to overthrow more than 50 governments, mostly democracies. It has interfered in democratic elections in 30 countries. It has dropped bombs on the people of 30 countries, most of them poor and defenseless. It has attempted to murder the leaders of 50 countries. It has fought to suppress liberation movements in 20 countries.
The extent and scale of this carnage is largely unreported, unrecognised, and those responsible continue to dominate Anglo-American political life.
Harold Pinter Broke the Silence
In the years before he died in 2008, the playwright Harold Pinter made two extraordinary speeches, which broke the silence.
“U.S. foreign policy,” he said, is
“best defined as follows: kiss my arse or I’ll kick your head in. It is as simple and as crude as that. What is interesting about it is that it’s so incredibly successful. It possesses the structures of disinformation, use of rhetoric, distortion of language, which are very persuasive, but are actually a pack of lies. It is very successful propaganda. They have the money, they have the technology, they have all the means to get away with it, and they do.”
In accepting the Nobel Prize for Literature, Pinter said this:
“The crimes of the United States have been systematic, constant, vicious, remorseless, but very few people have actually talked about them. You have to hand it to America. It has exercised a quite clinical manipulation of power worldwide while masquerading as a force for universal good. It’s a brilliant, even witty, highly successful act of hypnosis.”
Pinter was a friend of mine and possibly the last great political sage – that is, before dissenting politics were gentrified. I asked him if the “hypnosis” he referred to was the “submissive void” described by Leni Riefenstahl.
“It’s the same,” he replied. “It means the brainwashing is so thorough we are programmed to swallow a pack of lies. If we don’t recognise propaganda, we may accept it as normal and believe it. That’s the submissive void.”
Leni Riefenstahl and a camera crew stand in front of Hitler’s car during 1934 rally in Nuremberg. (Bundesarchiv, CC-BY-SA 3.0, Wikimedia Commons)
In our systems of corporate democracy, war is an economic necessity, the perfect marriage of public subsidy and private profit: socialism for the rich, capitalism for the poor. The day after 9/11 the stock prices of the war industry soared. More bloodshed was coming, which is great for business.
Today, the most profitable wars have their own brand. They are called “forever wars” — Afghanistan, Palestine, Iraq, Libya, Yemen, and now Ukraine. All are based on a pack of lies.
Iraq is the most infamous, with its weapons of mass destruction that didn’t exist. NATO’s destruction of Libya in 2011 was justified by a massacre in Benghazi that didn’t happen. Afghanistan was a convenient revenge war for 9/11, which had nothing to do with the people of Afghanistan.
Today, the news from Afghanistan is how evil the Taliban are —not that U.S. President Joe Biden’s theft of $7 billion of the country’s bank reserves is causing widespread suffering. Recently, National Public Radio in Washington devoted two hours to Afghanistan — and 30 seconds to its starving people.
At its summit in Madrid in June, NATO, which is controlled by the United States, adopted a strategy document that militarises the European continent, and escalates the prospect of war with Russia and China. It proposes “multi domain warfighting against nuclear-armed peer-competitor.” In other words, nuclear war.
NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg, left, and Spain’s Prime Minster Pedro Sánchez on June 28 in Madrid. (NATO)
It says: “NATO’s enlargement has been a historic success.”
I read that in disbelief.
The news from the war in Ukraine is mostly not news, but a one-sided litany of jingoism, distortion, omission. I have reported a number of wars and have never known such blanket propaganda.
In February, Russia invaded Ukraine as a response to almost eight years of killing and criminal destruction in the Russian-speaking region of Donbass on their border.
In 2014, the United States sponsored a coup in Kiev that got rid of Ukraine’s democratically elected, Russian-friendly president and installed a successor whom the Americans made clear was their man.
Dec. 7, 2015: U.S. Vice President Joe Biden meets with Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko in Kiev. (U.S. Embassy Kyiv, Flickr)
In recent years, American “defender” missiles have been installed in eastern Europe, Poland, Slovenia, the Czech Republic, almost certainly aimed at Russia, accompanied by false assurances all the way back to James Baker’s “promise” to Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev in February 1990 that NATO would never expand beyond Germany.
NATO on Hitler’s Borderline
Ukraine is the frontline. NATO has effectively reached the very borderland through which Hitler’s army stormed in 1941, leaving more than 23 million dead in the Soviet Union.
Last December, Russia proposed a far-reaching security plan for Europe. This was dismissed, derided or suppressed in the Western media. Who read its step-by-step proposals? On Feb. 24, President Volodymyr Zelensky threatened to develop nuclear weapons unless America armed and protected Ukraine.
On the same day, Russia invaded — an unprovoked act of congenital infamy, according to the Western media. The history, the lies, the peace proposals, the solemn agreements on Donbass at Minsk counted for nothing.
On April 25, U.S. Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin flew into Kiev and confirmed that America’s aim was to destroy the Russian Federation — the word he used was “weaken.” America had got the war it wanted, waged by an American bankrolled and armed proxy and expendable pawn.
Almost none of this was explained to Western audiences.
Russia’s invasion of Ukraine is wanton and inexcusable. It is a crime to invade a sovereign country. There are no “buts” — except one.
When did the present war in Ukraine begin and who started it? According to the United Nations, between 2014 and this year, some 14,000 people have been killed in the Kiev regime’s civil war on the Donbass. Many of the attacks were carried out by neo-Nazis.
Watch an ITV news report from May 2014, by the veteran reporter James Mates, who is shelled, along with civilians in the city of Mariupol, by Ukraine’s Azov (neo-Nazi) battalion.
In the same month, dozens of Russian-speaking people were burned alive or suffocated in a trade union building in Odessa besieged by fascist thugs, the followers of the Nazi collaborator and anti-Semitic fanatic Stepan Bandera. The New York Times called the thugs “nationalists.”
“The historic mission of our nation in this critical moment,” said Andreiy Biletsky, founder of the Azov Battalion, “is to lead the White Races of the world in a final crusade for their survival, a crusade against the Semite-led Untermenschen.”
Since February, a campaign of self-appointed “news monitors” (mostly funded by the Americans and British with links to governments) have sought to maintain the absurdity that Ukraine’s neo-Nazis don’t exist.
Airbrushing, once associated with Stalin’s purges, has become a tool of mainstream journalism.
In less than a decade, a “good” China has been airbrushed and a “bad” China has replaced it: from the world’s workshop to a budding new Satan.
Much of this propaganda originates in the U.S., and is transmitted through proxies and “think-tanks,” such as the notorious Australian Strategic Policy Institute, the voice of the arms industry, and by journalists such as Peter Hartcher of The Sydney Morning Herald, who has labeled those spreading Chinese influence as “rats, flies, mosquitoes and sparrows” and suggested these “pests” be “eradicated.”
Andriy Beletsky, commanding officer of the special Ukrainian neo-Nazi police regiment Azov, with volunteers in 2014. (My News24, CC BY 3.0, Wikimedia Commons)
News about China in the West is almost entirely about the threat from Beijing. Airbrushed are the 400 American military bases that surround most of China, an armed necklace that reaches from Australia to the Pacific and Southeast Asia, Japan, and Korea. The Japanese island of Okinawa and the Korean island of Jeju are like loaded guns aimed point blank at the industrial heart of China. A Pentagon official described this as a “noose.”
Palestine has been misreported for as long as I can remember. To the BBC, there is the “conflict” of “two narratives.” The longest, most brutal, lawless military occupation in modern times is unmentionable.
The stricken people of Yemen barely exist. They are media unpeople. While the Saudis rain down their American cluster bombs with British advisers working alongside the Saudi targeting officers, more than half a million children face starvation.
This brainwashing by omission is not new. The slaughter of the First World War was suppressed by reporters who were given knighthoods for their compliance. In 1917, the editor of The Manchester Guardian, C.P. Scott, confided to Prime Minister Lloyd George: “If people really knew [the truth], the war would be stopped tomorrow, but they don’t know and can’t know.”
The refusal to see people and events as those in other countries see them is a media virus in the West, as debilitating as Covid. It is as if we see the world through a one-way mirror, in which “we” are moral and benign and “they” are not. It is a profoundly imperial view.
The history that is a living presence in China and Russia is rarely explained and rarely understood. Vladimir Putin is Adolf Hitler. Xi Jinping is Fu Man Chu. Epic achievements, such as the eradication of abject poverty in China, are barely known. How perverse and squalid this is.
When will we allow ourselves to understand? Training journalists factory style is not the answer. Neither is the wondrous digital tool, which is a means, not an end, like the one-finger typewriter and the linotype machine.
In recent years, some of the best journalists have been eased out of the mainstream. “Defenestrated” is the word used. The spaces once open to mavericks, to journalists who went against the grain, truth-tellers, have closed.
Julian Assange in 2014. (David G Silvers, Wikimedia Commons)
The case of Julian Assange is the most shocking. When Julian and WikiLeaks could win readers and prizes for The Guardian, The New York Times, and other self-important “papers of record,” he was celebrated.
When the dark state objected and demanded the destruction of hard drives and the assassination of Julian’s character, he was made a public enemy. Vice President Joe Biden compared him to a “hi-tech terrorist.” Hillary Clinton asked, “Can’t we just drone this guy?”
The ensuing campaign of abuse and vilification against Julian Assange — the U.N. rapporteur on torture called it “mobbing” — brought the liberal press to its lowest ebb. We know who they are. I think of them as collaborators: as Vichy journalists.
When will real journalists stand up? An inspirational samizdat already exists on the internet: Consortium News, founded by the great reporter Robert Parry, Max Blumenthal’s The Grayzone, Mint Press News, Media Lens, DeclassifiedUK, Alborada, Electronic Intifada, WSWS, ZNet, ICH, CounterPunch, Independent Australia, the work of Chris Hedges, Patrick Lawrence, Jonathan Cook, Diana Johnstone, Caitlin Johnstone and others who will forgive me for not mentioning them here.
And when will writers stand up, as they did against the rise of fascism in the 1930s? When will filmmakers stand up, as they did against the Cold War in the 1940s? When will satirists stand up, as they did a generation ago?
Having soaked for 82 years in a deep bath of righteousness that is the official version of the last world war, isn’t it time those who are meant to keep the record straight declared their independence and decoded the propaganda? The urgency is greater than ever.
* * *
John Pilger has twice won Britain’s highest award for journalism and has been International Reporter of the Year, News Reporter of the Year and Descriptive Writer of the Year. He has made 61 documentary films and has won an Emmy, a BAFTA and the Royal Television Society prize. His ‘Cambodia Year Zero’ is named as one of the ten most important films of the 20th century. He can be contacted at www.johnpilger.com
The views expressed are solely those of the author and may or may not reflect those of ZeroHedge or Consortium News.
Cancel culture is inbuilt in the techno-feudalist project: conform to the hegemonic narrative, or else. Journalism that does not conform must be taken down.
By Pepe Escobar
Special to Consortium News
This month, several of us – Scott Ritter, myself, ASB Military News, among others – were canceled from Twitter. The – unstated – reason: we were debunking the officially approved narrative of the Russia/NATO/Ukraine war.
As with all things Big Tech, that was predictable. I lasted only seven months on Twitter. And that was long enough. Contacts in California had told me I was on their radar because the account grew too fast, and had enormous reach, especially after the start of Operation Z.
I celebrated the cancelation by experiencing an aesthetic illumination in front of the Aegean Sea, at the home of Herodotus, the Father of History. Additionally, it was heart-warming to be recognized by the great George Galloway in his moving tribute to targets of the new McCarthyism.
In parallel, comic relief of the “Mars Attacks” variety was provided by expectations of free speech on Twitter being saved by the benign intervention of Elon Musk.
Techno-feudalism is one of the overarching themes of my latest book, Raging Twenties – published in early 2021 and reviewed here in a very thoughtful and meticulous manner.
Cancel culture is inbuilt in the techno-feudalist project: conform to the hegemonic narrative, or else. In my own case regarding Twitter and Facebook – two of the guardians of the internet, alongside Google — I knew a day of reckoning was inevitable, because like other countless users I had previously been dispatched to those notorious “jails”.
On one Facebook occasion, I sent a sharp message highlighting that I was a columnist/analyst for an established Hong Kong-based media company. Some human, not an algorithm, must have read it, because the account was restored in less than 24 hours.
But then the account was simply disabled – with no warning. I requested the proverbial “review”. The response was a demand for proof of ID. Less than 24 hours later, came the verdict: “Your account has been disabled” because it had not followed those notoriously hazy “community standards.” The decision was “reviewed” and “it can’t be reversed”.
I celebrated with a Buddhist mini-requiem on Instagram.
My hit-by-a-Hellfire missile Facebook page clearly identified for the general public who I was, at the time: “Geopolitical analyst at Asia Times”. The fact of the matter is Facebook algorithms canceled a top columnist from Asia Times – with a proven record and a global profile. The algos would never have had the – digital – guts to do the same with a top columnist from The New York Times or the Financial Times.
Asia Times lawyers in Hong Kong sent a letter to Facebook management. Predictably, there was no response.
Of course becoming a target of cancel culture – twice – does not even remotely compare to the fate of Julian Assange, imprisoned for over three years in Belmarsh under the most appalling circumstances, and about to be dispatched for “judgment” in the American gulag for the crime of committing journalism. Yet the same “logic” applies: journalism that does not conform to the hegemonic narrative must be taken down.
Conform, or Else
At the time, I discussed the matter with several Western analysts. As one of them succinctly put it, “You were ridiculing the U.S. president while pointing out the positives of Russia, China and Iran. That’s a deadly combination”.
Others were simply stunned: “I wonder why you were restricted as you work for a reputable publication.” Or made the obvious connections: “Facebook is a censorship machine. I did not know that they do not give reasons for what they do but then they are part of the Deep State.”
A banking source that usually places my columns on the desks of selected Masters of the Universe put it New York-style: “You severely p****d the Atlantic Council”. No question: the specimen who oversaw the canceling of my account was a former Atlantic Council hack.
Ron Unz in California had the account of his extremely popular website Unz Review purged by Facebook on April 2020. Subsequently, readers who tried to post their articles met with an “error” message describing the content as “abusive”.
When Unz mentioned my case to renowned economist James Galbraith, “he really was quite shocked, and thought it might signal a very negative censorship trend on the Internet.”
The “censorship trend” is a fact – for quite a while now. Take this U.S. State Department 2020 report identifying “pillars of Russia’s disinformation and propaganda ecosystem.”
State Dept. Directive
The late Pompeo-era report demonizes “fringe or conspiracy-minded” websites who happen to be extremely critical of U.S. foreign policy. They include Moscow-based Strategic Culture Foundation – where I’m a columnist – and Canada-based Global Research, which republishes most of my columns (but so does Consortium News, ZeroHedge and many other U.S. websites). I’m cited in the report by name, along with quite a few top columnists.
The report’s “research” states that Strategic Culture – which is blocked by Facebook and Twitter – is directed by the SVR, Russian foreign intel. This is ridiculous. I met the previous editors in Moscow – young, energetic, with enquiring minds. They had to quit their jobs because after the report they started to be severely threatened online.
So the directive comes straight from the State Department – and that has not changed under Biden-Harris: any analysis of U.S. foreign policy that deviates from the norm is a “conspiracy theory” – a terminology that was invented and perfected by the C.I.A.
Couple it with the partnership between Facebook and the Atlantic Council – which is a de facto NATO think tank – and now we have a real powerful ecosystem.
It’s a Wonderful Life
Every silicon fragment in the valley connects Facebook as a direct extension of the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA)’s LifeLog project, a Pentagon attempt to “build a database tracking a person’s entire existence.” Facebook launched its website exactly on the same day – Feb. 4, 2004 – that DARPA and the Pentagon shuttered LifeLog.
No explanation by DARPA was ever provided. The MIT’s David Karger, at the time, remarked, “I am sure that such research will continue to be funded under some other title. I can’t imagine DARPA ‘dropping out’ of such a key research area.”
Of course a smokin’ gun directly connecting Facebook to DARPA will never be allowed to surface. But occasionally some key players speak out, such as Douglas Gage, none other than LifeLog’s conceptualizer: “Facebook is the real face of pseudo-LifeLog at this point (…) We have ended up providing the same kind of detailed personal information to advertisers and data brokers and without arousing the kind of opposition that LifeLog provoked.”
So Facebook has absolutely nothing to do with journalism. Not to mention pontificating over a journalist’s work, or assuming it’s entitled to cancel him or her. Facebook is an “ecosystem” built to sell private data at a huge profit, offering a public service as a private enterprise, but most of all sharing the accumulated data of its billions of users with the U.S. national security state.
The resulting algorithmic stupidity, also shared by Twitter – incapable of recognizing nuance, metaphor, irony, critical thinking – is perfectly integrated into what former C.I.A. analyst Ray McGovern brilliantly coined as the MICIMATT (military-industrial-congressional-intelligence-media-academia-think tank complex).
In the U.S., at least the odd expert on monopoly power identified this neo-Orwellian push as accelerating “the collapse of journalism and democracy.”
Facebook “fact-checking professional journalists” does not even qualify as pathetic. Otherwise Facebook – and not analysts like McGovern – would have debunked Russiagate. It would not routinely cancel Palestinian journalists and analysts. It would not disable the account of University of Tehran professor Mohammad Marandi – who was actually born in the U.S.
I received quite a few messages stating that being canceled by Facebook – and now by Twitter – is a badge of honor. Well, everything is impermanent (Buddhism) and everything flows (Daoism). So being deleted – twice – by an algorithm qualifies at best as a cosmic joke.
Pepe Escobar’s latest book is Raging Twenties. He remains un-cancelled on VK, Telegram and Instagram.
The views expressed are solely those of the author and may or may not reflect those of Consortium News.
He also denounced these outlets for being “cheerleaders” for the government instead of upholding the tenets of journalism.
04/06/2022
A former executive on British television confirmed that mainstream media (MSM) outlets are prevented from questioning the official government narrative. He also denounced these outlets for being “cheerleaders” for the government instead of upholding the tenets of journalism.
Mark Sharman, former Sky News executive and ITV producer, made these revelations during an interview on “The HighWire.” Citing an example from his homeland, Sharman told program host Del Bigtree that the British Office of Communications (Ofcom) is responsible for keeping television stations in line with what the government wants to hear.
Bigtree played a short clip of the TV executive during his March 20 interview with talk show host Dan Wootton.
“[Ofcom issued] a warning – actually, it’s like a little bulletin – that basically says ‘Do not question the official government line.’ To be fair, [it] said you can have opposition voices on, but … you must intervene if there’s any danger of harmful misinformation,” Sharman said at the time.
“I think that warning affected all broadcasters. Most of the major [ones] followed; only one or two smaller [broadcasters] got caught. One community radio was censored for putting something out. I think it’s created an environment which will lead to the biggest assault on freedom of speech and democracy I’ve known in my lifetime.”
Sharman concluded his interview with Wootton by saying: “I’ve never seen a warning from Ofcom like that, [and] I’ve never seen broadcasters toe the line. Rather than question the government, they became cheerleaders for the government.”
“As I said on the other clip, I’ve never seen an instruction that warns broadcasters not to question government policy. But what’s emerging is not really government policy, it’s worldwide policy,” the erstwhile TV executive told Bigtree. “It’s not a coincidence that every country in the Western world reacted in exactly the same way. Anybody that questions the official line is taken down.” (Related: The fall of the mainstream media and the biggest lies they told in 2021.)
Bigtree: We lose democracy if we lose free news
Bigtree said: “We are under attack, [and] we have lost the free press. The news was considered the fourth branch of government and if we lose a free news system, then we will lose democracy. The news must always be free [and] unaffected by the government, so it can always challenge the government with whatever challenge it wants [and] never beckons to bias or agenda.”
Sharman agreed with “The HighWire” host with regard to the free press being lost.
“It feels to me like free speech and democracy [is going down] with it. We’re in a room – [but] the walls are coming in, the ceiling’s coming down and the floor’s coming up. You’ve got Big Tech on one side and [the] MSM on the other closing us out. Somebody at the world level decides what the answer is, and we’re all prevented from that point on from asking any questions,” Sharman said.
“It’s a very, very dangerous precedent. Who are these people that are deciding what’s information and what’s misinformation? Who are they to dismiss eminent scientists and doctors who question the official narrative and say it’s misinformation? Since when did science stop? We’re losing the ability to debate.”
Sharman pointed to the BBC‘s Trusted News Initiative (TNI) as an example of how the “free” press is no longer free as people know it. According to the TNI website, it seeks to bring together “organizations across media and technology to tackle harmful disinformation in real-time.”
“Bear in mind [that] we have the BBC, which retains a reputation for truth around the world. I’m sorry to say it’s not deserved at the moment. They employ their own disinformation reporter … and they also have the TNI. When you look at that, that’s in partnership with Microsoft and Facebook – all the same people. They wouldn’t have called it the Zuckerberg TNI, would they?”
Visit NewsCartels.com to read more stories about MSM outlets following the government narrative.
Watch the interview between Del Bigtree and Mark Sharman about mainstream media outlets following the official government narrative below.
https://www.brighteon.com/embed/8f531dfb-47a3-4ba7-a65c-407519ace664
This video is from The HighWire with Del Bigtree channel on Brighteon.com.
More related stories:
Is the mainstream media beginning to turn against failed covid vaccines?
Media watchdog calls to investigate mainstream media election meddling.
The lying mainstream media are prestitutes on the front lines of America’s police state.
Sources include:
https://www.newstarget.com/2022-02-11-government-sees-investigative-journalism-as-threat.html
02/11/2022 / By Arsenio Toledo
In Nov. 2021, the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) raided the home of James O’Keefe, the founder of the investigative journalism organization Project Veritas. O’Keefe believes that raid proves the government sees his organization as a threat to the status quo.
The FBI raid on O’Keefe’s home in Mamaroneck, New York, on the early morning of Nov. 6 was a court-ordered search that was the latest in the bureau’s attacks against the organization. Just two days earlier, the homes of two of O’Keefe’s associates were also raided.
“Most people don’t want to do what I do, and [the government is] starting to deter people from doing what I do by doing things like this,” said O’Keefe, talking about the raid on his home to One America News journalist John Hines. (Related: DOJ documents confirm Pfizer and FBI are communicating about Project Veritas.)
The FBI raided O’Keefe’s and his associates’ homes in search of the diary of Ashley Biden, the daughter of President Joe Biden. According to O’Keefe, this diary was given to him by an anonymous source. But O’Keefe refused to publish anything written in the diary because he could not properly authenticate whether the diary is real. And so, as a journalist, he could not bring himself to publicize its contents.
“And even if I could [authenticate the diary], which I couldn’t with one hundred percent certainty, I couldn’t authenticate if what she wrote about actually occurred,” said O’Keefe. “I didn’t want to take that chance. So, we did the most ethical thing journalists should do, which is then, we said, ‘Okay we shouldn’t publish this, but maybe let’s reach out to the Biden campaign for comment on the one percent chance, or whatever, that they corroborate it, which they didn’t.”
Raid on O’Keefe a threat to journalists everywhere
The Biden administration’s raid on O’Keefe became a cause for concern for journalists all over America, as many rightfully saw it as an attack on First Amendment rights.
“This is just beyond belief,” said Jane Kirtley, a law professor at the University of Minnesota and a former executive director of the Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press. “I’m not a big fan of Project Veritas, but this is just over the top. I hope they get a serious reprimand from the court because I think this is just wrong.”
“Journalism isn’t a shield against lawbreaking, and if Mr. O’Keefe committed a crime in obtaining the diary, he is subject to prosecution. We don’t agree with or practice all of Mr. O’Keefe’s methods, but what he does is reporting that qualifies as journalism,” wrote the editorial board of the Wall Street Journal. They also noted that it is not a crime to publish information obtained unlawfully, and that it is clear the FBI’s raid was a punitive action since the organization was already in the process of complying with a subpoena.
“This raid has shown the world how much of a threat Project Veritas is,” said O’Keefe. “Our whistleblowers come to us, and what they say is, ‘James, there’s nowhere else for us to go.’ It’s important for us to stand our ground.”
More related stories:
FBI tactics against Project Veritas cause concerns about freedom of the press.
Watch this clip from One America News introducing James O’Keefe as a modern-day muckraker.
https://www.brighteon.com/embed/329fa412-7074-46a7-bfea-91316a37c38f
This video is from the Excellent Podcasts & Real News channel on Brighteon.com.
Learn more about journalists like James O’Keefe and all the people in Project Veritas who hold governments accountable by reading the latest articles at Journalism.news.
Sources include:
When Zen teacher Issan Dorsey was asked to describe the essence of Zen art, he answered, “Nothing extra.”
“Nothing extra” is also of course the essence of Zen living itself: perceiving life as it actually is, as opposed to perceiving it through a bunch of believed narrative filters about yourself, about others, about reality, and so on. These narrative filters are an extra pile of layers that are added on top of the actual experience of life, and they give a distorted view which causes a lot of confusion and suffering. Relinquishing belief in them brings clarity and peace.
This is also the essence of clearly understanding what’s really going on in the world. Like so much else, the approach to the large is the same as the approach to the small, which is to say the approach to seeing clearly in the big picture is the same as the approach to seeing clearly as an individual: you need to learn to look at it without the extra narrative overlay.
Because the news media are controlled by plutocrats who have a vested interest in protecting the status quo upon which their kingdoms are built, almost everything in the news is useless narrative fluff. It doesn’t tell you what’s really going on, it rather tries to influence what’s going on by manipulating the perceptions of the audience. It does this by either (A) distracting from what really matters by focusing on what doesn’t matter, or (B) actively working to manipulate how the audience thinks about a given issue.
When you strip away all the empty fluff and manipulative spin, there are basically only four often-overlapping pieces of information that really matter in the big picture: (1) where the money is going, (2) where the resources are going, (3) where the weapons are going, and (4) where the people are going. When it comes to understanding world dynamics, accurate information about these four things is the only real news you’ll ever encounter. Everything else is empty narrative spin meant to justify, distort, or distract from information about these things.
If you ignore everything else and only focus on finding the most accurate information possible about these four items, you will have an infinitely clearer understanding of what’s really going on in the world than someone who trusts news reporters to walk them through it.
Watch where the money is going because you can trust the raw numbers of financial transactions a lot more than you can trust the stories people are telling. A massive percentage of daily news coverage goes toward analyzing the latest foam-brained gibberish that came out of Donald Trump’s mouth even though we all know he’s going to contradict himself two days later, but the fact that he’s been heavily funded by an oligarch who happens to have been a longtime proponent of the Iran policies this administration has been advancing is much more solid.
Zoom out and watch where the money is going in the big picture and you’ll see that a grossly disproportionate amount of it is moving away from the general public and toward a very small group of people, which we just saw illustrated in the historically unprecedented multitrillion-dollar wealth transfer in the US corporate bailout. If you watch this small group and pay attention to the projects, candidates, think tanks and media outlets they pour their wealth into, you will notice that they exert an incredible amount of influence on all four crucial factors: where the money goes, where the resources go, where the weapons go, and where the people go.
Watching where the resources are going gives you an even clearer image of what’s going on because resources, unlike money, are completely independent of narrative. There is no such thing as “money” without the thoughts that humans agree to collectively think about it, but oil would still be oil even if all humans were wiped off the face of the earth. When you see the US ramping up escalations against Venezuela, ignore the narratives about “drug trafficking” and what a bad, bad man Nicolás Maduro is, and look at what resources lie beneath the ground in that nation to find out what this is really about. Mentally “mute” the soundtracks the political/media class spout about who’s doing what to whom and just watch where the resources are going, and who’s controlling them. That way you’ll be able to discern the powerful from the disempowered and the takers from their victims.
Watch where the weapons are going because those are another non-narrative factor which exerts a huge influence on the world; a bullet will stop a beating heart regardless of what the mind thinks about it. Ignore the irrelevant narrative fluff about where the coronavirus originated and whether or not it’s racist to say “Wuhan virus”, and look at the ring of US military bases encircling China and the way the Marine Corps is shifting its attention onto that nation. Ignore Trump’s gibberish about ending wars and note that he’s been expanding them and increasing foreign troop presence. Ignore the Democratic Party’s nonsense about Trump having loyalties to Russia and watch his administration’s many dangerous nuclear escalations against that nation. Ignore international finger-wagging at humanitarian abuses by Israel and Saudi Arabia and look at who’s still selling them weapons and supporting them militarily.
Watch where the people are going for another important piece of real information that isn’t dependent on narrative. Where are the prisoners? Where are the refugees, where are they going, and what are they fleeing? Where are people moving to, and what do they want?
With each of these four items you can simply watch raw data and ignore all the stories the establishment spinmeisters tell about that data. As long as you make sure you’re getting the most accurate data possible, it’s like you’re looking at a globe and watching lines in four different colors moving around in it from place to place and person to person. And without anyone’s stories tainting your view.
You will notice that there’s a heavy degree of overlap between these four items. You see the weapons moving toward China and you notice that’s the nation with the US hegemony-threatening Belt and Road Initiative (where the resources are moving) and the key player in the US dollar-threatening Shanghai Cooperation Organization (where the money is moving). You see Julian Assange locked in prison (where the people are going) for exposing US war crimes (where the weapons are going). You see US troops illegally occupying Syrian oil fields (where the weapons and resources are going) to prevent the Syrian government from using it to rebuild the nation (where the money is going). And so on.
Nearly everything that makes it to the top of the daily news churn is either propaganda distortion or distracting drivel, and either way you can safely ignore it. Just watch where the money is going, where the resources are going, where the weapons are going and where the people are going, and ignore all the narrative chatter.
Nothing extra.
______________________________
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Well, we all know by now who is really ruling the USA, don’t we? If I hear anymore from the US about freedom of speech I am going to puke.
“Twenty-eight states have already mandated loyalty pledges to Israel as a means to outlaw dissent. But in December, President Trump passed legislation effectively criminalizing the Boycott Divestments and Sanctions (BDS) movement that aims to put pressure on the Jewish state through economic action, along the lines of the anti-Apartheid struggle in South Africa. The law mandates that any public institution would be subject to losing all funding if the government deems that they are not doing enough to stamp out anti-Semitism, which, it explicitly states, includes any criticism of the Israeli government. In December, MintPress reported that the British government under Boris Johnson is planning to introduce similar legislation.”
“This censorship of my talk based on forced compliance to anti-BDS laws in Georgia is just one level of a nationwide campaign to protect Israel from grassroots pressure.” — Abby Martin
Journalist Abby Martin Sues State of Georgia Over Law Requiring Pledge of Allegiance to Israel
Mint Press News
Martin was dismayed by the university’s decision: “This censorship of my talk based on forced compliance to anti-BDS laws in Georgia is just one level of a nationwide campaign to protect Israel from grassroots pressure. We must stand firmly opposed to these efforts and not cower in fear to these blatant violations of free speech,” she said.
Abby Martin
✔@AbbyMartinAfter I was scheduled to give keynote speech at an upcoming @GeorgiaSouthern conference, organizers said I must comply w/ Georgia’s anti-BDS law & sign a contractual pledge to not boycott Israel. I refused & my talk was canceled. The event fell apart after colleagues supported me
3,116 people are talking about this
Twenty-eight states have already mandated loyalty pledges to Israel as a means to outlaw dissent. But in December, President Trump passed legislation effectively criminalizing the Boycott Divestments and Sanctions (BDS) movement that aims to put pressure on the Jewish state through economic action, along the lines of the anti-Apartheid struggle in South Africa. The law mandates that any public institution would be subject to losing all funding if the government deems that they are not doing enough to stamp out anti-Semitism, which, it explicitly states, includes any criticism of the Israeli government. In December, MintPress reported that the British government under Boris Johnson is planning to introduce similar legislation.
“The hyperbolic notion that conservatives are the ones being persecuted on college campuses has made blatant censorship campaigns against people for criticism of Israel, or other progressive protests, go completely ignored,” Martin wrote.
CAIR’s Legal Defense Fund Senior Litigation Attorney Gadeir Abbas said,
There is no place where free speech is more important than on campus. And this attempt to suppress Abby’s views – denying students, academics, and others from hearing her lecture – is as brazen as it is illegal. In adopting this anti-BDS law, Georgia has prioritized the policy preferences of a foreign country over the free speech rights of Americans, like Abby, who speak on this state’s college campuses.”
The PCJF likened the BDS movement to the boycotts of the civil rights movement in the mid-twentieth century, its Executive Director Mara Verheyden-Hilliard described the laws as “extraordinary, outrageous, illegal and unconstitutional.” In 1956 Martin Luther King and his movement were criminalized for carrying out boycotts, as Southern states passed legislation to penalize their behavior, only for it to be later struck down by the Supreme Court. This is what Martin and the alliance of non-governmental organizations is hoping will happen here too. Why should I have to “contractually pledge loyalty to a foreign country?” she asked at her press conference today.
In 2016, Georgia Governor Nathan Deal signed a law requiring any person or organization entering into a contract with the state worth at least $1,000 sign an oath promising that they would not oppose the Israeli government in any fashion. CAIR has reason to believe they could overturn the law its Georgia Executive Director, Edward Ahmed Mitchell, called “blatantly and hilariously unconstitutional.”
In 2018, Bahia Amawi, a Houston-based children’s speech pathologist who worked with autistic, speech-impaired and other developmentally disabled children, lost her job after she refused to sign a similar document. Amawi had been at her job for nine years previously without a problem. CAIR took up Amawi’s case and managed to overturn every Texas boycott law on the grounds of their unconstitutionality and she is now free to return to work. They appear confident of a similar victory in Georgia.
Martin began as a citizen journalist covering the Occupy movement in her native California. From 2012 to 2015 she hosted the show Breaking the Set on RT. In the famous D.N.I. report into alleged Russian interference into the 2016 election, the U.S. government accused her of “promoting radical discontent” in America, something she appears to wear as a badge of honor. Her current documentary series, Empire Files, is broadcast on TeleSUR English. However, due to sanctions against the Venezuelan government, Gaza Fights for Freedom was crowdfunded. She is also the host of Media Roots Radio.
Correction | An earlier version of this article incorrectly stated that the state of Georgia shut down a screening of Abby Martin’s documentary film “Gaza Fights for Freedom.”
Alan MacLeod is a Staff Writer for MintPress News. After completing his PhD in 2017 he published two books: Bad News From Venezuela: Twenty Years of Fake News and Misreporting and Propaganda in the Information Age: Still Manufacturing Consent. He has also contributed to Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting, The Guardian, Salon, The Grayzone, Jacobin Magazine, Common Dreams the American Herald Tribune and The Canary.
Evil, even in the darkest moments, is impotent before the miracle of human kindness. This miracle defies prejudices and hatreds. It crosses cultures and religions. It lies at the core of faith. Take a brief journey through the eyes of American, Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Chris Hedges to Jerusalem, Gaza, and Iraq, and discover the sacred bonds that make us human.
Police State 2019:
“It’s really scary that someone could be hauled out of his house by a team of cops, listed falsely as ‘armed and dangerous,’ and then jailed for two days and possibly put on trial because someone who doesn’t like their political views decides to level a false allegation against him,” he said. “There has to be some deterrence against this happening again.” Max Blumenthal
9 Dec, 2019
Journalist Max Blumenthal says assault charges against him have been dropped by the US government partially because the case would have turned into a great embarrassment for the Secret Service.
Blumenthal was subjected to an early morning arrest in October on a five-month-old warrant, which stemmed from an accusation against him and fellow activist Ben Rubinstein. A Venezuelan opposition activist said they attacked her when they were delivering food to people who took cover in the Venezuelan Embassy in Washington DC trying to prevent supporters of US-backed self-proclaimed president Juan Guaido from taking over the place.
The journalist says the charge was bogus from the start, but his defense took a surprising turn when Blumenthal’s lawyer requested exculpatory evidence in the form of logs from the US Secret Service, whose agents were present at the scene. If agents failed to call an ambulance after a violent incident resulting in an injury, a lack of such call would indicate that the allegations were false, he reasoned.
However, the logs for the day were completely missing. Blumenthal believes the Secret Service obstructed the request because the logs would confirm that they were acting hand-in-glove with the crowd trying to take over the diplomatic mission, he told RT.
“What I think could be the case here is that they are concerned that their collusion with this right-wing band of hooligans, who were used to do what the Secret Service was legally forbidden from doing, which is prevent food and medicine from getting into the embassy,” would have been exposed, he said.
[Releasing the logs] would have exposed that collusion and embarrass the Secret Service.
The Grayzone journalist said he was obviously targeted with a false accusation because he personally and his colleagues were vocal opponents of Guaido and his Washington-backed attempts to overthrow the Venezuelan government. The opposition activists simply used the friendly US government to harass their critics, and there needs to be a push-back against such malpractice, he believes.
“It’s really scary that someone could be hauled out of his house by a team of cops, listed falsely as ‘armed and dangerous,’ and then jailed for two days and possibly put on trial because someone who doesn’t like their political views decides to level a false allegation against him,” he said. “There has to be some deterrence against this happening again.”
The confrontation at the embassy happened between April and May, and resulted in the pro-Guaido crowd taking over the building. Two Grayzone journalists were covering the tense standoff from inside the embassy.
themindunleashed.com
(TRI Opinion) — All of us are in danger.
In an age of prosecutions for thought crimes, pre-crime deterrence programs, and government agencies that operate like organized crime syndicates, there is a new kind of tyranny being imposed on those who dare to expose the crimes of the Deep State, whose reach has gone global.
The Deep State has embarked on a ruthless, take-no-prisoners, all-out assault on truth-tellers.
Activists, journalists and whistleblowers alike are being terrorized, traumatized, tortured and subjected to the fear-inducing, mind-altering, soul-destroying, smash-your-face-in tactics employed by the superpowers-that-be.
Take Julian Assange, for example.
Assange, the founder of WikiLeaks—a website that published secret information, news leaks, and classified media from anonymous sources—was arrested on April 11, 2019, on charges of helping U.S. Army intelligence analyst Chelsea Manning access and leak more than 700,000 classified military documents that portray the U.S. government and its military as reckless, irresponsible and responsible for thousands of civilian deaths.
Included among the leaked Manning material were the Collateral Murder video (April 2010), the Afghanistan war logs (July 2010), the Iraq war logs (October 2010), a quarter of a million diplomatic cables (November 2010), and the Guantánamo files (April 2011).
The Collateral Murder leak included gunsight video footage from two U.S. AH-64 Apache helicopters engaged in a series of air-to-ground attacks while air crew laughed at some of the casualties. Among the casualties were two Reuters correspondents who were gunned down after their cameras were mistaken for weapons and a driver who stopped to help one of the journalists. The driver’s two children, who happened to be in the van at the time it was fired upon by U.S. forces, suffered serious injuries.
This is morally wrong.
“What happens to Julian Assange and to Chelsea Manning is meant to intimidate us, to frighten us into silence. By defending Julian Assange, we defend our most sacred rights. Speak up now or wake up one morning to the silence of a new kind of tyranny. The choice is ours.”—John Pilger, investigative journalist
It shouldn’t matter which nation is responsible for these atrocities: there is no defense for such evil perpetrated in the name of profit margins and war profiteering.
In true Orwellian fashion, however, the government would have us believe that it is Assange and Manning who are the real criminals for daring to expose the war machine’s seedy underbelly.
Since his April 2019 arrest, Assange has been locked up in a maximum-security British prison—in solitary confinement for up to 23 hours a day—pending extradition to the U.S., where if convicted, he could be sentenced to 175 years in prison.
Whatever is being done to Assange behind those prison walls—psychological torture, forced drugging, prolonged isolation, intimidation, surveillance—it’s wearing him down.
In court appearances, the 48-year-old Assange appears disoriented, haggard and zombie-like.
“In 20 years of work with victims of war, violence and political persecution I have never seen a group of democratic States ganging up to deliberately isolate, demonise and abuse a single individual for such a long time and with so little regard for human dignity and the rule of law,” declared Nils Melzer, the UN special rapporteur on torture.
It’s not just Assange who is being made to suffer, however.
Manning, who was jailed for seven years from 2010 to 2017 for leaking classified documents to Wikileaks, was arrested in March 2019 for refusing to testify before a grand jury about Assange, placed in solitary confinement for almost a month, and then sentenced to remain in jail either until she agrees to testify or until the grand jury’s 18-month term expires.
Federal judge Anthony J. Trenga of the Eastern District of Virginia also fined Manning $500 for every day she remained in custody after 30 days, and $1,000 for every day she remains in custody after 60 days, a chilling—and financially crippling—example of the government’s heavy-handed efforts to weaponize fines and jail terms as a means of forcing dissidents to fall in line.
This is how the police state deals with those who challenge its chokehold on power.
Make no mistake: the government is waging war on journalists and whistleblowers for disclosing information relating to government misconduct that is within the public’s right to know.
Yet while this targeted campaign—aided, abetted and advanced by the Deep State’s international alliances—is unfolding during President Trump’s watch, it began with the Obama Administration’s decision to revive the antiquated, hundred-year-old Espionage Act, which was intended to punish government spies, and instead use it to prosecute government whistleblowers.
Unfortunately, the Trump Administration has not merely continued the Obama Administration’s attack on whistleblowers. It has injected this war on truth-tellers and truth-seekers with steroids and let it loose on the First Amendment.
In May 2019, Trump’s Justice Department issued a sweeping new “superseding” secret indictment of Assange—hinged on the Espionage Act—that empowers the government to determine what counts as legitimate journalism and criminalize the rest, not to mention giving “the government license to criminally punish journalists it does not like, based on antipathy, vague standards, and subjective judgments.”
Noting that the indictment signaled grave dangers for freedom of the press in general, media lawyer Theodore J. Boutrous, Jr., warned, “The indictment would criminalize the encouragement of leaks of newsworthy classified information, criminalize the acceptance of such information, and criminalize publication of it.”
Boutrous continues:
[I]t doesn’t matter whether you think Assange is a journalist, or whether WikiLeaks is a news organization. The theory that animates the indictment targets the very essence of journalistic activity: the gathering and dissemination of information that the government wants to keep secret. You don’t have to like Assange or endorse what he and WikiLeaks have done over the years to recognize that this indictment sets an ominous precedent and threatens basic First Amendment values…. With only modest tweaking, the very same theory could be invoked to prosecute journalists for the very same crimes being alleged against Assange, simply for doing their jobs of scrutinizing the government and reporting the news to the American people.
We desperately need greater scrutiny and transparency, not less.
Indeed, transparency is one of those things the shadow government fears the most. Why? Because it might arouse the distracted American populace to actually exercise their rights and resist the tyranny that is inexorably asphyxiating their freedoms.
This need to shed light on government actions—to make the obscure, least transparent reaches of government accessible and accountable—was a common theme for Supreme Court Justice Louis Brandeis, who famously coined the phrase, “Sunlight is the best disinfectant.”
Writing in January 1884, Brandeis explained:
Light is the only thing that can sweeten our political atmosphere—light thrown upon every detail of administration in the departments; light diffused through every policy; light blazed full upon every feature of legislation; light that can penetrate every recess or corner in which any intrigue might hide; light that will open up to view the innermost chambers of government, drive away all darkness from the treasury vaults; illuminate foreign correspondence; explore national dockyards; search out the obscurities of Indian affairs; display the workings of justice; exhibit the management of the army; play upon the sails of the navy; and follow the distribution of the mails.
Of course, transparency is futile without a populace that is informed, engaged and prepared to hold the government accountable to abiding by the rule of law.
For this reason, it is vital that citizens have the right to criticize the government without fear.
After all, we’re citizens, not subjects. For those who don’t fully understand the distinction between the two and why transparency is so vital to a healthy constitutional government, Manning explains it well:
When freedom of information and transparency are stifled, then bad decisions are often made and heartbreaking tragedies occur – too often on a breathtaking scale that can leave societies wondering: how did this happen? … I believe that when the public lacks even the most fundamental access to what its governments and militaries are doing in their names, then they cease to be involved in the act of citizenship. There is a bright distinction between citizens, who have rights and privileges protected by the state, and subjects, who are under the complete control and authority of the state.
Manning goes on to suggest that the U.S. “needs legislation to protect the public’s right to free speech and a free press, to protect it from the actions of the executive branch and to promote the integrity and transparency of the US government.”
Technically, we’ve already got such legislation on the books: the First Amendment.
The First Amendment gives the citizenry the right to speak freely, protest peacefully, expose government wrongdoing, and criticize the government without fear of arrest, isolation or any of the other punishments that have been meted out to whistleblowers such as Edwards Snowden, Assange and Manning.
The challenge is holding the government accountable to obeying the law.
Almost 50 years ago, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled 6-3 in United States v. Washington Post Co. to block the Nixon Administration’s attempts to use claims of national security to prevent The Washington Post and The New York Times from publishing secret Pentagon papers on how America went to war in Vietnam.
As Justice William O. Douglas remarked on the ruling, “The press was protected so that it could bare the secrets of government and inform the people. Only a free and unrestrained press can effectively expose deception in government. And paramount among the responsibilities of a free press is the duty to prevent any part of the government from deceiving the people and sending them off to distant lands to die of foreign fevers and foreign shot and shell.”
Almost 50 years later, with Assange being cast as the poster boy for treason, we’re witnessing yet another showdown, which pits the people’s right to know about government misconduct against the might of the military-industrial complex.
Yet this isn’t merely about whether whistleblowers and journalists are part of a protected class under the Constitution. It’s a debate over how long “we the people” will remain a protected class under the Constitution.
Following the current downward trajectory, it won’t be long before anyone who believes in holding the government accountable is labeled an “extremist,” is relegated to an underclass that doesn’t fit in, must be watched all the time, and is rounded up when the government deems it necessary.
Eventually, we will all be potential suspects, terrorists and lawbreakers in the eyes of the government
Partisan politics have no place in this debate: Americans of all stripes would do well to remember that those who question the motives of government provide a necessary counterpoint to those who would blindly follow where politicians choose to lead.
We don’t have to agree with every criticism of the government, but we must defend the rights of all individuals to speak freely without fear of punishment or threat of banishment.
Never forget: what the architects of the police state want are submissive, compliant, cooperative, obedient, meek citizens who don’t talk back, don’t challenge government authority, don’t speak out against government misconduct, and don’t step out of line.
What the First Amendment protects—and a healthy constitutional republic requires—are citizens who routinely exercise their right to speak truth to power.
As I make clear in my book Battlefield America: The War on the American People, the right to speak out against government wrongdoing is the quintessential freedom.
Be warned: this quintessential freedom won’t be much good to anyone if the government makes good on its promise to make an example of Assange as a warning to other journalists intent on helping whistleblowers disclose government corruption.
Once again, we find ourselves reliving George Orwell’s 1984, which portrayed in chilling detail how totalitarian governments employ the power of language to manipulate the masses.
In Orwell’s dystopian vision of the future, Big Brother does away with all undesirable and unnecessary words and meanings, even going so far as to routinely rewrite history and punish “thoughtcrimes.”
Much like today’s social media censors and pre-crime police departments, Orwell’s Thought Police serve as the eyes and ears of Big Brother, while the other government agencies peddle in economic affairs (rationing and starvation), law and order (torture and brainwashing), and news, entertainment, education and art (propaganda).
Orwell’s Big Brother relies on Newspeak to eliminate undesirable words, strip such words as remained of unorthodox meanings and make independent, non-government-approved thought altogether unnecessary.
Where we stand now is at the juncture of OldSpeak (where words have meanings, and ideas can be dangerous) and Newspeak (where only that which is “safe” and “accepted” by the majority is permitted). The power elite has made their intentions clear: they will pursue and prosecute any and all words, thoughts and expressions that challenge their authority.
This is the final link in the police state chain.
Having been reduced to a cowering citizenry—mute in the face of elected officials who refuse to represent us, helpless in the face of police brutality, powerless in the face of militarized tactics and technology that treat us like enemy combatants on a battlefield, and naked in the face of government surveillance that sees and hears all—our backs are to the walls.
From this point on, we have only two options: go down fighting, or capitulate and betray our loved ones, our friends and ourselves by insisting that, as a brainwashed Winston Smith does at the end of Orwell’s 1984, yes, 2+2 does equal 5.
As George Orwell recognized, “In a time of deceit telling the truth is a revolutionary act.”
By John W. Whitehead | Ruthford.org | Republished with permission
The views in this article may not reflect editorial policy of The Mind Unleashed.
Tales from the Conspiratum 
