So, you think the news is not censored in America? Think again https://t.co/JWGk0Wgkea
— Komrade Deplorable (@astroloupicus) May 27, 2023
Mainstream media
Michael’s Third Letter from Vienna and the Massive Manipulation of the Population
***
I wanted to share the third thoughtful letter that I received from Michael Buergermeister in Vienna.
I appreciate his effort to identify the process by which oligarchic families have meddled in education and altered the nature of science.
In the case of the Rockefellers, I remember back in 1988 a friend of mine, and extremely talented scientist, was admitted to Rockefeller University for the MA program—before she went on to MIT. At the time I was deeply impressed by the environment, but later on I came to understand what the Rockefellers actually did to medicine and the manner in which they created a whole new class of experts dependent on certain forms of medicine, and an approach to healing that was heavy on the use of plastics and petroleum.
I have had the chance to watch Adam Curtis’s book “The Century of the Self” and I write about, and think about the manner in which we are constantly manipulated. Our concepts of family, love, honor, success and meaningful are forced on us from the cradle on by multinational corporations.
I this respect, I would like to refer to my article entitled:
“The Treason of the Intellectuals”
The opportunity that I had to study at Yale College as an undergraduate and later at Harvard University for my Ph.D., the chance I had to wander among the gothic buildings, to imbibe confidence and purpose, and to learn to think, learn how things work, from distinguished scholars, was a point of stubborn pride for me when I started my career as a professor, but that legacy had devolved into a nightmare, into a travesty.
I watched up close how the thoughtful and insightful men and women who were my classmates at Yale and Harvard, who were my colleagues as a professor, responded to the horrific institutional decay of the United States over the past two decades. Sadly, although I remember fondly the moments of deep insight and kind exchanges of those good old days, I observed how they, as intellectuals, as lawyers, doctors, engineers, executives, professors and government officials, how they betrayed their fellow citizens and buried the wisdom they had obtained at those temples of learning deep in the excrement of fraud and hypocrisy.
You see, they forgot that the entire point of that elite education they had received. It was not supposed to be something you boasted about, or that you possessed like a yacht or a racehorse, a special key that got you into the club. No! That sort of thinking is the outgrowth of deep moral decay.
That education was a privilege alright, but one that brought with it an absolute obligation to serve society, to stand up bravely for the interests of the nation, and above all for the interests of those who have not had the opportunity to learn how the system works, to study about science and technology, about foreign lands and ancient things.
That is right, you were given special tools that few had access to. They were given to you so that you could use them, use them to help society, especially in times of need, in times of crisis.
And yes, that moment of crisis inevitably came. The 2000 election came, a moment when the entire federal government was taken over by multinational corporations and a handful of the wealthy. I looked around and my colleagues and friends acted as if nothing had happened. They took the fictions of the New York Times as their gospel and clung ever tighter to their privileges.
Then came the collapse of the twin towers, the last card in the Tarot deck, a modern miracle that belongs the Book of Revelations. In other words, a massive fraud that any high school student who has taken a semester of physics could see through.
And yet again, my colleagues from Yale and Harvard were silent; in many cases, they appeared at think tank seminars, on television, to promote this blatant fiction, and to use it as a justification for endless foreign wars, for the transfer of wealth to the billionaires.
It was, sadly, nothing other than the treason of the intellectuals.
I know that the billionaires were ultimately behind this, using their pawns and pets, but if the intellectuals, the upstanding members of society who have the specialized knowledge, the ability to write effectively, and the confidence to use those skills, if they had not sided with the establishment, if they had asked the most basic questions, the drive for war into Afghanistan, into Iraq, into Syria, and into another dozen nations, ending at the doorsteps of Russia and China, that downwards spiral could never have started.
And then there I was again, in January of 2020, right there in Washington DC, watching in amazement as the utterly contrived and unconvincing COVID-19 pandemic was rolled out for mass consumption. I knew that my colleagues were smart enough to see through that circus from the start, but almost without exception, they bought into the farce with enthusiasm, with pride and glee.
Some of them with medical expertise lent their credentials to this sinister operation.
I am an extremely limited man and I cannot claim any remarkable achievements, but I can say that it was obvious to me that the 2000 election, the 9.11 attacks, and the drive for war with Afghanistan and Iraq were a fraud and I spoke openly, and unambiguously, about these crimes at that moment.
I felt that it was my obligation as an educated American. It was, in a sense, the entire purpose of the education I had received.
My efforts, my dismissal from my job, and how I was forced out of the country, remain taboo topics for my colleagues from Yale and Harvard. Mentioning what was done to me, and to others like me, for opposing the COVID-19 fraud is also a no-no in the best of circles.
Let me say, dear colleagues, that I was also at fault. I did not do enough, especially to engage working people, and I overestimated my own capacity to effect change. I was limited by the subtle arrogance of the Ivy League I had imbibed and it took me two decades to relearn.
That is my confession, my apology, and my pledge to do better.
Now, dear colleagues, it is your turn. Admit to yourself, and to those around you, that you were wrong, that you betrayed the trust placed in you by society, by those around you who did not receive such illustrious educations, when you played stupid in the face of the 2000 elections, the 9.11 incident, the drive for world war starting in Afghanistan, and finally the operation COVID-19 pandemic.
We can be forgiving of your mistakes, but only if you are ready to ask for forgiveness.
We are waiting now, for your answers, for your pledges, and for your actions. We hope you will make proper use of the educations that you have received at this moment of national crisis.
*
No doubt Michael will notice the reference to Julien Benda’s classic “The Treason of the Intellectuals” of 1927. I do not entirely agree with that book, or even the translation of “cleric” as “intellectual.” Nevertheless, like Émile Zola’s “J’Accuse” which he published in the newspaper L’Aurore on 13 January 1898 condemning President Félix Faure for his role in the Dreyfus affair, Benda also shows a certain French flair.
I find the “J’Accuse” approach rather appealing.
It is fascinating, even amusing, that Michael continues to rub my face in the “climate change” controversy.
He states,
“That you still haven’t found time to research the “climate change” issue with any degree of thoroughness, for example, annoys me intensely!”
But Michael is not alone in this approach.
Any number of the conspiracy realm have expressed great irritation that although I call out COVID 19 fraud, I still believe there are viruses and that the concept is helpful, although I think the landing on the moon was a PR stunt, I do not believe the Earth is flat and although I openly call the 9.11 operation as a false flag attack, I do not believe the Heartland Institute propaganda fed to us about climate change. The fact that Al Gore and Greta tell us things that are false, and that multinational corporations want to use global warming as an excuse for global fascistic rule, does not make it false. I have read through various “scientists” making claims that climate truth is a fraud. They do not hold up to serious evaluation.
“Psychiatric treatment and psychiatric drugs are the common denominators of the growing number of shootings and other acts of violence, which are soaring right along with the soaring prescribing of psych drugs.”
If we want to stop the mass shootings, we need to strictly regulate the psychiatric medications that are causing them.
https://www.globalresearch.ca/drugged-up-ready-kill/5819075
By Mike Whitney
Global Research, May 12, 2023
***
“Psychiatric treatment and psychiatric drugs are the common denominators of the growing number of shootings and other acts of violence, which are soaring right along with the soaring prescribing of psych drugs.” Killers on Psych Drugs
Here’s a question that every American should be able to answer: What percentage of the killers—that have carried out mass shootings across the United States—were on powerful psychiatric medications?
- a—1%
- b—25%
- c—50%
- d—75% or more
Why don’t we know the answer to this question? Doesn’t the United States have more mass shootings than any country in the world?
- Yes, it does.
And aren’t these shootings the source of great suffering and anxiety?
- Yes, they are.
And don’t most people genuinely want to know why these lone gunmen feel compelled to kill innocent people?
- Yes, they do.
Then, why don’t we know? Why—after more than two decades of these bloody incidents—do we still not have a definitive, thoroughly-researched answer to this one simple question: How many of these mentally-disturbed killers were on dangerous psychiatric medications?
Instead, the media pursues a line of inquiry that fails to reveal anything even remotely conclusive about the gunman’s actions. If “white supremacy” or “Nazi ideology” impacted the killer’s decision to go on a deadly shooting spree in Texas, then why didn’t he target a black community center or a Jewish synagogue? Wouldn’t that have been more consistent with his alleged ideology?
Yes, it would have been, which suggests that his alleged ideology is a symptom of his fragile mental condition not the primary factor driving his behavior. The reason these people go on crazed killing sprees is because they are ‘damaged goods’ not because they are ideologues. There’s a big difference.
So, why does the media keep harping on this silly the idea that the killer’s behavior was effected by his feelings about “white supremacy” or “Nazi ideology”? It’s ridiculous, after all, the killer was not white himself nor were his victims racially targeted. They were merely random passersby strolling through a shopping mall. In other words, there is no evidence to support the case that is being made by the media. But—here’s the thing—the media doesn’t care about evidence because their real goal is to advance a political agenda aimed at linking violent fanatical behavior to race-based uber-nationalism. What they are trying to do, is make a subliminal connection between the erratic behavior of a ruthless killer and the sincerely-felt patriotism of many Trump supporters. The media has been hammering away at this same theme for over six years culminating in the January 6 fraud. This is just the latest iteration of the same tedious political psy-ops.
If the journalists were serious about investigating this latest bloody incident, they’d try to find out whether the killer had been on the FBI’s radar before the onslaught took place. (as so many mass killers have been in the past.) Was he? Was Mauricio Garcia on the list of potential “domestic terrorists” compiled by the FBI?
We’ll probably never know, because that would expose the inner workings of the nation’s premier law enforcement agency which would undoubtedly cause considerable embarassment. So, the FBI is going to circle the wagons and make sure that never happens, which means that a good portion of the truth about this event will probably remain concealed forever. Even worse, we can expect that the media will continue to push their wacky theory that Garcia was a “non-white white supremacist” regardless of the fact that the claim makes no sense at all. Here’s how analyst Michael Tracey sarcastically summed it up:
If a non-white person is a “white supremacist,” does that mean he believes in his own innate racial inferiority? @mtracey
Leave it to Tracey to expose the imbecility of a meme that defies reason but to which the media clings like the Holy Grail. It’s actually shocking that anyone can take this type of verbal hucksterism seriously when, in fact, the whole “non-white white supremacist” thing is one of the most absurd concoctions of all time. It’s pure gibberish.
So, where should we look for answers? Where can we find rational explanations for these sporadic acts of violence?
There’s only one place we can look; at the mental state of the person who committed the crime. That’s where we have to start. If we want to understand what drives a man to kill random people in a school or shopping mall, we need to know something about the psychology of the perpetrator. Fortunately, volumes have been written on this subject by respected professionals who have researched the topic, studied the data, and drawn their own informed conclusions. Take a look:
Close to 17% of Americans are taking psychiatric drugs with side effects such as acting aggressively, being angry, or violent and acting on dangerous impulses...
Psychotropic drugs are hardly helping when their side-effects include worsening depression, new or worsening anxiety, agitation or restlessness, panic attacks, new or worsening irritability, acting aggressively, being angry, or violent, acting on dangerous impulses, an extreme increase in activity and talking (mania), and other unusual changes in behavior or mood.
“Rather than helping the individual, psychotropics alienate, and push them into more and more potentially dangerous behavior,” states the president of the Florida chapter of CCHR, Diane Stein.
This situation was so egregious that in 2004, the Federal Drug Administration issued a “black-box” label warning indicating that the use of certain antidepressants to treat major depressive disorder in adolescents may increase the risk of suicide, homicide, and other acts of violence.
A study entitled Prescription Drugs Associated with Reports of Violence Towards Others… declared … In the 69-month reporting period we identified 484 evaluable drugs that accounted for 780,169 serious adverse event reports of all kinds…. The violence cases included 387 reports of homicide, 404 physical assaults, 27 cases indicating physical abuse, 896 homicidal ideation reports, and 223 cases described as violence-related symptoms.” “Psychiatric Drugs and Side Effects – The Unseen Hand Behind Violence in America“, Citizens Commission on Human Rights
These are the victims of the Texas Mall Shooting
Guns and Drugs Don’t Mix: Psychiatric Medications and Violent Behavior
It all sounds very serious, doesn’t it? It sounds like something that policymakers should be aware of so they can tighten regulations on these potentially-lethal medications. It also sounds like something that pharmaceutical industry would try to keep out of the newspapers so people don’t see the connection between these drugs and the mayhem they produce. Simply put, the truth is being hidden for power and profits. What else is new? Here’s more background from another article:
A growing number of school shootings and other shooting rampages were committed by individuals under the influence of, or in withdrawal from, psychiatric drugs known to cause mania, psychosis, violence and even homicide. Consider this list of 13 massacres over the past decade or so, resulting in 54 dead and 105 wounded – and these are just the ones where the psychiatric drugs are known. In other cases, medical records were sealed or autopsy reports not made public or, in some cases, toxicology tests were either not done to test for psychiatric drugs or not disclosed to the public….
Given the growing list of shooters who were on psychiatric drugs, given the fact that 22 international drug regulatory agencies warn these drugs can cause violence, mania, psychosis, suicide and even homicide, and given the fact that a major study was just released confirming these drugs put people at greater risk of becoming violent, CCHR International asserts: “Any recommendation for more mental health ‘treatment,’ which [inevitably] means putting more people and more kids on these [psychiatric] drugs, is not only negligent but considering the possible repercussions, criminal.” (“The Real Lesson of Columbine: Psychiatric Drugs Induce Violence”
So, why aren’t we addressing the elephant in the room? Is there any doubt that the gunman at the Dallas-area shopping mall was mentally-unstable, probably had some history of counselling and treatment, and may have been on powerful psychiatric drugs? If you were a professional journalist, isn’t that where you would start your investigation rather than trying to cobble together some far-fetched theory based on photos of Nazi memorabilia on an isolated social media post?
We are told repeatedly by the media and the pundits on cable news that ‘guns are the problem’, but isn’t the case against powerful psychiatric meds equally compelling? It’s worth noting, that guns don’t fire themselves and that, typically, guns are not fired into crowds unless they are wielded by unstable, deranged people who—more often than not—have some traceable mental history in which they were diagnosed, counselled and treated. All we want to know is which medications they were prescribed so we can better monitor their use in order to protect the public. Unfortunately, the media is unwilling to provide this information due to a fundamental conflict of interest. They are paid by the drug companies. Here’s more from an article at the American Psychiatric Association:
A link between several types of psychotropic medications and violent behavior toward others has been documented in a recent study…
In a study published in the December 15, 2010… They found that during the study period, 780,169 serious adverse events of one kind or another had been reported for 484 drugs and that of those serious adverse events, 1,937 had been acts of violence. They defined a violent event as any case report containing one or more of the following items: homicide, physical assault, physical abuse, homicidal ideation, or violence-related symptom….
“In addition, antidepressant drugs showed consistently elevated risk, even when compared with antipsychotics and mood stabilizers. . . .”
Paul Fink, M.D., an expert in the study of violent behavior and a past APA president, commented. “I can tell you that as a psychiatrist who has practiced for a long time, I was unaware that [varenicline and antidepressants] had been linked with violence toward others. . . . Psychiatrists and mental health professionals need to be aware of this association.” The study had no outside funding.” Several Medications Linked to Violent Acts
Keep in mind, normal, well-adjusted men who are happily married and gainfully employed, do not commit random acts of homicidal violence. These are people who have serious psychological problems, who may have sought professional help, and who have (oftentimes) been prescribed various psychiatric medications.
These medications—while beneficial to many—can result in excessive violence in a small percentage of users. The public needs to know about these drugs so they can balance their benefits against the risks to public safety. So far, there has been no admission that these risks even exist. Instead, all the blame has been placed on guns which has merely fueled greater distrust of both the media and the political establisment. In fact, most gun owners now believe that the politicians are not interested in public safety at all but merely use it as platform for promoting their own narrow interests. Ostensibly, those interests now include the repeal the second amendment followed by the disarming of the American people. That’s the goal and most gun owners know that’s the goal. Here’s one last clip from a letter to the editor titled Psychiatric Drugs are Behind the Violence by Doug Dale:
As Congress, surrounded by armed guards, metal detectors, chain link fence and paramilitary forces, debates infringing on the constitutional right to bear arms by private citizens, isn’t it time they actually address the root cause of these mass killings?
These events were unheard of until the FDA began approving more psychiatric drugs several decades ago. From 2004 to 2009, researchers accessing the FDA’s Adverse Event Reporting System revealed that 1,537 cases of violence were linked to 31 different types of psychiatric drugs.
Other professional studies concluded that patients didn’t have homicidal ideation until after taking these drugs. From 1992 thru 2017, 37 school shootings have been linked to these medications. In a report submitted to the Senate in 2014, it was estimated that 90% of school shooters were using antidepressants. Obviously, it’s not a person’s mental health, but the drugs that cause this violence.
The pharmaceutical lobby contributes hundreds of millions of dollars to congressional members that craft federal laws. Who will deny that these drugs are the root cause of the mass killings? Will it be uneducated political groupies drinking the gun-control elixir, politicians taking campaign contributions from the pharmaceutical lobby, the pharmaceutical industry and/or the doctors peddling this poison to the public, and if so, why?…
In 2001, a drug manufacturer removed a cholesterol drug from the market because it was linked to 31 deaths. We are way past that number in mass killings.
Congress needs to ban gun ownership from anyone being prescribed these drugs, then, at the least, make it a federal crime to write new prescriptions going forward. To do otherwise, one can only conclude that Congress could care less about how much collateral damage they cause.
If we want to stop the mass shootings, we need to strictly regulate the psychiatric medications that are causing them.
*
This article was originally published on The Unz Review.
Michael Whitney is a renowned geopolitical and social analyst based in Washington State. He initiated his career as an independent citizen-journalist in 2002 with a commitment to honest journalism, social justice and World peace.
He is a Research Associate of the Centre for Research on Globalization (CRG).
All images in this article are from TUR
The original source of this article is Global Research
Copyright © Mike Whitney, Global Research, 2023
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.
“There’s now literally no reason to watch Fox News.”
In Kennedy’s view, Carlson “crossed a red line” in his April 19 monologue, during which he “broke TV’s two biggest rules.”
“Tucker told the truth about how greedy Pharma advertisers controlled TV news content, and he lambasted obsequious newscasters for promoting jabs they knew to be lethal and worthless,” Kennedy wrote in a tweet.
“Fox just demonstrated the terrifying power of Big Pharma,” he added.
During the said monologue, Carlson openly chastised the pharmaceutical industry and the media, including his own network, for taking in hundreds of millions of dollars from Big Pharma companies in exchange for “shill[ing] for their sketchy products on the air.”
“And as they did that,” Carlson went on to state, “they maligned anyone who was skeptical of those products. At the very least, this was a moral crime. It was disgusting, but it was universal. It happened across the American news media. They all did it.”
by: Ethan Huff
Friday, April 28, 2023
Weighing in on Tucker Carlson’s recent firing from Fox News, 2024 presidential hopeful Robert F. Kennedy Jr. blamed “pharma advertisers” for pushing “deadly and ineffective” vaccines that Carlson refused to promote and even blasted as dangerous and unnecessary.
In Kennedy’s view, Carlson “crossed a red line” in his April 19 monologue, during which he “broke TV’s two biggest rules.”
“Tucker told the truth about how greedy Pharma advertisers controlled TV news content, and he lambasted obsequious newscasters for promoting jabs they knew to be lethal and worthless,” Kennedy wrote in a tweet.
“Fox just demonstrated the terrifying power of Big Pharma,” he added.
During the said monologue, Carlson openly chastised the pharmaceutical industry and the media, including his own network, for taking in hundreds of millions of dollars from Big Pharma companies in exchange for “shill[ing] for their sketchy products on the air.”
“And as they did that,” Carlson went on to state, “they maligned anyone who was skeptical of those products. At the very least, this was a moral crime. It was disgusting, but it was universal. It happened across the American news media. They all did it.”
(Related: Check out what Kennedy had to say about his uncle’s assassination.)
Natural News was censored and blacklisted for the same reasons: we call out Big Pharma and its puppets
With guns blazing, Carlson continued to point out that the vast majority of everything “in public life is corrupt,” stating that there are “too many to count.”
“The question is: who is telling the truth?” Carlson further said. “There are not many of those.”
“One of them is Robert F. Kennedy Jr. Robert Kennedy knew early that the covid vaccines were both ineffective and potentially dangerous, and he said so in public to the extent he was allowed. Science has since proven Robert F. Kennedy Jr. right. Unequivocally right.”
Instead of being rewarded for his honesty, Kennedy was vilified and censored, just like Carlson now has been at the hands of Fox, ironically enough. Kennedy, and now Carlson himself, have both been censored for daring to criticize media advertisers, which are largely dominated by pharmaceutical industry interests.
“He was censored because he dared to criticize their advertisers, the news media called Bobby Kennedy a Nazi, and then they attacked his family, but he kept doing it,” Carlson revealed in his last segment before getting axed by Fox.
“He was not intimidated and we were glad he wasn’t. This is one of those moments when it’s nice to have a truth teller around. It’s helpful because suddenly the stakes are very high.”
Carlson’s full segment is available for viewing at Infowars.com.
Keep in mind that Natural News, Brighteon, and other affiliated platforms have been blacklisted and censored for years for doing the same things Carlson and Kennedy have: telling the truth.
Check out the following video from Carlson announcing Kennedy’s run for president in 2024:
“Tucker makes news with his monologues,” tweeted conservative commentator Matt Walsh in response to Carlson’s firing from Fox. “People talk about them.”
“Nobody talks about Sean Hannity monologues. Fox is insane for letting that kind of cultural relevance go.”
Paul Joseph Watson of Summit News tweeted much more simply that “There’s now literally no reason to watch Fox News.”
“Well, there’s still the Pfizer commercials,” responded someone else jokingly about how Fox News is little more than Big Pharma news – which, by the way, we have been warning you about for years.
The latest news about Big Pharma’s control over the media through advertising can be found at Fascism.news.
Sources for this article include:
Narrowing permitted ideas on both left and right, one unsuitable voice at a time
People like AOC can couch these moves in terms of prevention of violence all they want, but it’s just too conspicuous that what’s left of major commercial media also happens to be much engaged in the trumpeting of government messaging, to the point where the people reading the news are government officials. It was once considered healthy for the press to play to mass audiences and position itself as a skeptical thorn in the side of officialdom. There is no institution like that left in American life. What we have instead is an increasingly pissed-off population that needs to look about eighty results down in every Google search to find its point of view represented. Who thinks that situation is going to hold?
https://www.racket.news/p/america-the-single-opinion-cult
APR 27, 2023
That interview says it all, doesn’t it?
Not long ago I was writing in defense of Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. When she first entered Congress as an inner-city twenty-something who’d knocked off longtime insider Joe Crowley with a Sandersian policy profile, her own party’s establishment ridiculed her as a lefty Trump. Nancy Pelosi scoffed that her win just meant voters “made a choice in one district,” so “let’s not get carried away.” Ben Ritz, director of the Progressive Policy Institute, an offshoot of the old Democratic Leadership Council, groused, “Oh, please, she just promised everyone a bunch of free stuff.”
This was before AOC decided to be the next Pelosi, instead of the next Sanders. The above sit-down on MSNBC shows the transformation. Having shed the mantle of an outsider who shook the old guard with online savvy, she appeared in soft light for a softball “interview,” by a literal Biden official (Inside With Jen Psaki is as close as you can get to a formal dissolution of the line between White House and media). In it, she seemed to argue for the outlaw of Fox News. “We have very real issues with what is permissible on air,” she said, adding people like Tucker Carlson are “very clearly” guilty of “incitement to violence,” a problem in light of “federal regulation in terms of what’s allowed on air and what isn’t.”
I was attracted to liberalism as a young person precisely because it didn’t want to ban things. Every liberal morality play in the seventies, eighties and nineties featured a finger-wagging moralist who couldn’t stomach an obscene joke (Jerry Falwell, over a Hustler parody), “obscene” art (Cincinnati’s Contemporary Arts Center, over Robert Mapplethorpe’s photos), “objectionable” music (Tipper Gore, in the now-seems-tame record-labeling furor), or unpredictable humor (NBC, in its attempts to put Richard Pryor on tape delay for Saturday Night Live). Pryor’s favored writer Paul Mooney objected so much to all the hoops they had to jump through to be allowed on air, he ended up writing a parody “job interview” skit that sent SNL’s ratings soaring, though ironically it would probably never air today:
Hollywood made self-congratulating feature films about nearly every one of those speech clashes, from The People vs. Larry Flynt to Dirty Pictures (starring James Woods, about the Cincinnati episode!) to Parental Advisory. The movie Field of Dreams features Ray Kinsella’s wife Annie telling off “IRATE MOTHER” in a school library debate about banning writer Terrence Mann, with Annie saying after: “Fascist. I’d like to ease her pain!” (The actual book Shoeless Joe featured J.D. Salinger, one of America’s most-censored authors). From To Kill a Mockingbird to Dead Man Walking liberalism celebrated the belief that truth, tolerance, and forgiveness are the way to reach closed minds. I mentioned this before, but Rob Reiner’s The American President — a naked hagiography of Clintonian politics — came to a climax with “President Andrew Shepherd” defending his flag-burning girlfriend’s honor, saying:
You want free speech? Let’s see you acknowledge a man whose words make your blood boil, who’s standing center stage and advocating, at the top of his lungs, that which you would spend a lifetime opposing…
That scene, which sounds like it should apply to any Democrat thinking about someone like Carlson, would become ironic later. Back to AOC and Fox: like so many other things in America, the marketplace of ideas is no longer a market. Voices with organic appeal are artificially restricted. Watching “approved” news these days is like watching scab baseball: you know most of the players the crowds really want to see aren’t even in the dugout. By no means is this phenomenon confined to the right.
As far back as the spring of 2017, when Google introduced “Project Owl,” a new tool designed to “surface more authoritative content,” outlets like the World Socialist Web Site, Alternet, Truthdig, Democracy Now!, and Consortium News reported dramatic drops in audience. Wikileaks traffic plummeted (that site’s content is extremely difficult to access for a variety of reasons now). Years later, the Wall Street Journal reported that Google employed “maintainers” to tend to an “‘anti-misinformation’ blacklist” to prevent sites from “appearing in Google News and other products.”
The next big event was the removal of Alex Jones from Apple, Facebook, Twitter, and Spotify. No fan of Jones, I was struck by how quickly critics moved to looking around for the next targets. Rob Reiner, the “acknowledge a man whose words make your blood boil” auteur, said on MSNBC, “You have Fox, Breitbart, Sinclair, and Alex Jones, which has now been taken off of Facebook, thank God…” Senator Chris Murphy said Jones was just the “tip of a giant iceberg” and “companies must do more than take down one website”:
Apple CEO Tim Cook insisted the Jones episode was not coordinated with the other firms, saying, “I’ve had no conversation. And to my knowledge, no one at Apple has.” Later stories like the Apple-Amazon squeeze of Parler ended the ruse that the major distribution platforms were not working together to create private agreements on speech, and the #TwitterFiles showed countless episodes of supposedly independent companies engaging in seeming anticompetitive behavior, coordinating on everything from election “misinformation” to pandemic messaging and holding regular “industry meetings” with government to discuss moderation issues.
The attendees of the call below include Microsoft, Facebook, Google, Twitter, Reddit, Pinterest, Wikimedia, even Medium, gathering to hear the “USG” list “watch-outs” and other threats:
In the six years since “Project Owl,” think about how many voices have been fully or partially removed from public view. True-blue “progressives” won’t mourn many, from Jones to Donald Trump to Carlson to RT and Sputnik to former weapons inspector Scott Ritter and Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. Add the deamplification or algorithmic blacklisting of sites like Truthdig, Wikileaks and third-party candidates like Jill Stein, the removal under government pressure of content from people like Joe Rogan, and the seemingly endless advertiser boycotts of various other classes of badthinker, and the field of view has been drastically narrowed.
The one undeniable fact about Carlson’s show is that it was materially different from other Fox content. The product was not the same as what you heard in the Hannity slot. As was the case with Donald Trump, you don’t need to cheer the message, or believe it’s sincere, to recognize that this differentiation exists. For instance, the Washington Post this week cited “people familiar with” Rupert Murdoch’s thinking in saying Carlson’s ongoing eye-rolling about the war in Ukraine, and use of terms like “pimp” to describe Volodymyr Zelensky, had “drawn furious blowback from powerful Republicans who see U.S. support for Ukraine as a bulwark in a fight for freedom and democracy — some of whom had Murdoch’s ear.”
Removing Carlson from Fox makes the rest of conservative media more homogeneous. The constant policing of content in blue media accomplishes the same. When the American Prospect ran a feature about Carlson that merely had a sarcastic headline (“The Smuggest Man On Air”) and was only critical roughly every second or third paragraph, filling in the rest of the space with detached analysis of what made Carlson’s show successful (e.g. a willingness to “mock ruling elites”), the magazine was hit with the usual grab-bag of Scanners-style head-exploding from a handful of reporters. This immediately caused two Prospect editors to roll over, throw their writers overboard, and replace the mildly different piece with the usual wire-to-wire bloodcurdling diatribe against Carlson as a “neofascist” “threat to democracy.”
I like and respect editor David Dayen, but a sequence like this sends a message to every writer that you’d better come at topics in a certain way if you want to be bylined. Liberals in the Bush years used to mock the metronome predictability of Fox, but the same kind of thing has been going on what used to be my side of the aisle for so long, most mainstream media products are basically identical. Everyone with a noticeably different point of view gets moved out, even if they’re obvious audience assets, with Glenn Greenwald (pushed out of the Intercept for wanting to publish what turned out to be the correct angle on the Hunter Biden laptop story) and Lee Fang being notable examples.
It doesn’t take a genius to see where this is going. To paraphrase Mencken, you don’t have to think Carlson’s motivations were noble to see that his rhetoric on Ukraine stood out in the current TV environment like a wart on a bald head. The rest of the corporate press, be it left or right, will now be a parade of generals and security experts whose argument won’t be about whether or not the U.S. should be involved in Ukraine, but which party is most committed and whose strategy will lead to Putin’s defeat faster. We are moving back toward an era of two homogeneous messaging landscapes that will intersect on national security issues, with the beaten antiwar left a fading memory and the isolationist right fired, under indictment, or banned.
People like AOC can couch these moves in terms of prevention of violence all they want, but it’s just too conspicuous that what’s left of major commercial media also happens to be much engaged in the trumpeting of government messaging, to the point where the people reading the news are government officials. It was once considered healthy for the press to play to mass audiences and position itself as a skeptical thorn in the side of officialdom.
There is no institution like that left in American life. What we have instead is an increasingly pissed-off population that needs to look about eighty results down in every Google search to find its point of view represented. Who thinks that situation is going to hold?
A former US Army psychological warfare officer says that Tucker Carlson was fired by Fox News because of the regime’s agenda to maintain an “uninformed semi lobotomized quasi retarded population.”
BY TYLER DURDEN
FRIDAY, APR 28, 2023
Authored by Paul Joseph Watson via Summit News,
The remarks were made by US counter-terror expert Scott Bennett.
Carlson and Fox News “parted ways” on Monday with speculation still raging as to the specific reason why the network canned its highest-rated and most popular host.
According to Bennett, Carlson posed too much of a threat to institutional power because he turned Americans into proper “researchers and thinkers”.
Carlson offered an “intellectualism, truthfulness, and an analytical depth that no other news personality has ever done in the history of the United States as far back as I can remember,” said Bennett.
Tucker needed to be “silenced” because he represented too big a threat to the “powers and principalities, institutions and agendas that seek an unenlightened uninformed semi lobotomized quasi retarded population that do not question, do not research, do not analyze but simply digest and follow instructions,” according to Bennett.
“Tucker Carlson also exposed the fraud and money laundering racketeering crimes of FTX and the Democrat Party in Ukraine involving the United States government. He exposed the US biochemical labs in Ukraine and their connection to the Democrat Party, President Barack Obama, Vice President Biden, Hillary Clinton, George Soros, Bill Gates, and other US government agencies and pharmaceutical companies,” Bennett told Sputnik.
The ex-host’s anti-regime rhetoric “could no longer be tolerated by the corrupt American media and political establishment,” said Bennett, adding that his exit signals “the death of American media”.
The former US army psyops officer suggested that Senator Chuck Schumer had threatened to utilize the CIA and the FBI to deploy secret government operations against Tucker to get him off air unless he was fired.
Schumer previously called for Carlson to be taken off air after he broadcast footage showing the January 6 ‘riot’ leaders were actually allowed into the Capitol and chaperoned around by authorities.
As we highlighted earlier, one of the reasons behind Tucker’s dismissal is a lawsuit fired by former show producer Abby Grossberg, who claims she was bullied and subjected to sexist and anti-semitic harassment.
However, Grossberg’s own lawyer revealed that she has never even met Carlson.
* * *
“Tucker Carlson also exposed the fraud and money laundering racketeering crimes of FTX and the Democrat Party in Ukraine involving the United States government. He exposed the US biochemical labs in Ukraine and their connection to the Democrat Party, President Barak Obama, Vice President Biden, Hillary Clinton, George Soros, Bill Gates, and other US government agencies and pharmaceutical companies.”
April 26, 2023
CC BY-SA 2.0 / Gage Skidmore / Tucker Carlson
Svetlana Ekimenko
All materialsWrite to the author
Tucker Carlson posed a “threat” to those powers and institutions in the US that didn’t want Americans to be transformed into “researchers and thinkers” by his broadcasts, according to US counter-terror expert Scott Bennett.
Tucker Carlson’s ouster spells “the death of American media,” Scott Bennett, a former US Army psychological warfare officer told Sputnik.
With his raw honesty, Carlson has been a leading conservative voice for Americans, bringing to cable news an “intellectualism, truthfulness, and an analytical depth that no other news personality has ever done in the history of the United States as far back as I can remember,” Bennett stated.
As such, the seasoned journalist had become a tremendous threat to the “powers and principalities, institutions and agendas that seek an unenlightened uninformed semi lobotomized quasi retarded population that do not question, do not research, do not analyze but simply digest and follow instructions,” and, accordingly, needed to be “silenced.”
Tucker Carlson’s departure from Fox News has generated a huge splash in the headlines, both, in the US, and beyond. While the 53-year-old news anchor himself has yet to comment on his exit from the network, the decision to part ways was reportedly made on Friday evening by Fox Corporation chief executive Lachlan Murdoch.
Prime-time host Tucker Carlson, who joined the network as a contributor in 2009, and had hosted his talk show “Tonight with Tucker Carlson” since 2016, had been a strong opposing figure, and built up a wall against the 1984 George Orwell-type idiocy that the US elite and corporations have been trying to degenerate Americans into, believes Bennett. He added:
“And it is for that reason the wall had to be detonated it had to be secretly exploded and this secret explosion was engineered by the Dominion Voting Machines – Fox News false lawsuit which sought to cover up the election fraud against Donald Trump… “
Indeed, Carlson’s ouster comes less than a week after Fox News agreed to pay $787 million in settlement money to Dominion Voting Systems as part of a defamation suit brought by the company in connection with former US President Donald Trump’s claims about the “rigged” 2020 election and the system’s software.
What’s Behind Tucker Carlson’s Ouster From Fox News?
“Tucker Carlson also exposed the fraud and money laundering racketeering crimes of FTX and the Democrat Party in Ukraine involving the United States government. He exposed the US biochemical labs in Ukraine and their connection to the Democrat Party, President Barak Obama, Vice President Biden, Hillary Clinton, George Soros, Bill Gates, and other US government agencies and pharmaceutical companies.”
Scott Bennett is convinced that for all of these reasons Tucker Carlson “could no longer be tolerated by the corrupt American media and political establishment.” Speculating that senator Chuck Schumer had threatened and, no doubt, initiated secret government operations against Fox News involving CIA, FBI, IRS, and other agencies if they would not fire Tucker Carlson, Bennett said that all this affirms that “voices of truth are hated and opposed by the voices of lies and deception.”
Tucker Carlson’s Fox News Ouster Reportedly Done at Direction of Rupert Murdoch
25 April, 02:17 GMT
Establishment outlets were perfectly fine with the social media scarlet letter when it was handed to their “undesirable” counterparts
https://www.rt.com/news/575027-western-media-hates-twitter/
Photos of the CBC building at 250 Front St West in Toronto to illustrate the release of the Rubin report today. © Colin McConnell/Toronto Star via Getty Images
Recently, some media outlets have quit Twitter over what they see as unjust labelling, which leads to the question – where was their outrage when the same rules were being applied to their competition?
Where was the Western fury when the social media platform was slapping labels of state affiliation or funding on media linked to Russia and China, like RT? Nowhere to be found. How about when the platform was extending that same labelling to individual journalists contributing to those platforms? Again, silent. It’s only now that they can’t object strongly enough. So what changed?
The platform’s ‘newish’ owner, Elon Musk, woke up one morning recently and decided to level the playing field by slapping Western media recipients of state funding with the “government-funded” label. Britain’s BBC has protested its tagging, America’s National Public Radio rage-quit the platform over its new designation, and Canada’s CBC (Canadian Broadcasting Corporation) suspended posting. “Twitter can be a powerful tool for our journalists to communicate with Canadians, but it undermines the accuracy and professionalism of the work they do to allow our independence to be falsely described in this way,” CBC spokesman Leon Mar said.
Western media outlets object to these tags being applied to them because they’ve long accepted the negative connotation that such tags carry when they are exclusively applied to media or journalists linked to Russia or China. They didn’t care that the integrity of those journalistic competitors was smeared by a scarlet letter. They didn’t appreciate or support the coverage offered by those labelled platforms that offer alternative information and analysis to the mainstream Western establishment agenda and related narratives.
India’s amended IT rules raise self-censorship fear for media outlets
It apparently never occurred to the Western press – even to the CBC, which received $1.24 billion in 2021-2022 from the Canadian federal government – that they could be next in line for this kind of labelling. At least not enough for them to stand up against such labels. Why? A likely explanation is that they felt that social media platforms like Twitter would always fall in line with the Western establishment agenda and narrative. Also, that it was just an extension of the ongoing efforts to marginalize geopolitical competitors and alternative sources of information that might challenge them. Labelling of Western media makes no sense in that context, so they likely presumed that they were safe.
However, Musk came along and opened Pandora’s Box, with Western media now haggling with him over precisely how much funding they ought to be able to get from the state without being slapped with a “state-affiliated” moniker. “Canadian Broadcasting Corp said they’re ‘less than 70% government-funded,’ so we corrected the label,” Musk tweeted, stating that he had amended CBC’s label to “69% Government-funded media.”
Musk has also managed to make Western politicians denounce the tags, which they previously supported when it was used against press sources that they didn’t like. Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau hysterically played the class warfare card in defense of the CBC, accusing Conservative Party opposition leader Pierre Poilievre of cozying up to US billionaires (an obvious reference to Musk). Poilievre had written a letter to Twitter drawing attention to the fact that the CBC shouldn’t be left out of the labelling spree.
“We must protect Canadians against disinformation and manipulation by state media. That is why I’m asking @Twitter @elonmusk to accurately label CBC as ‘government-funded media’,” tweeted Poilievre.
Canadian conservatives routinely accuse the public broadcaster of kowtowing to a left-leaning establishment agenda, and marking it as associated with the current Trudeau-led government would effectively assist in its marginalization.
Twitter unveils ‘hate speech’ shadow ban policy
“CBC officially exposed as ‘government-funded media’,” Poilievre tweeted after the labelling was applied. “Now people know that it is Trudeau propaganda, not news.” Sounds exactly like the kind of rhetoric that Trudeau and the entire Western establishment have used against foreign news competitors. And now it’s being used against those they like.
But hey, Musk paid $44 billion for Twitter, so he can do what he wants with his own private company, right? At least that was the argument made by those who supported banning dissenters and activists of all kinds under Twitter’s previous establishment-friendly leadership.
Who’s to say that the tagging will end here? If anyone at Twitter digs deeper, they’ll learn, for example, that the Canadian media – even privately held – is largely government-funded and subsidized to a far larger extent than meets the eye. And what about the corporate US news media that’s largely concentrated in the hands of a few billionaires – 15 of them, according to Forbes – and whose interests may or may not be entwined with special interests that drive Washington’s agenda?
This entire labelling rabbit hole could have been entirely avoided. If Western media outlets, politicians, and journalists had stood up for press freedom and free speech when the targets were their competition. Maybe they wouldn’t now find themselves in exactly the same firing line.
Ukrainian soldiers look for and collect unexploded shells after a fight with a Russian raiding group in the Ukrainian capital of Kyiv on the morning of February 26, 2022, according to Ukrainian service personnel at the scene.
(Photo by Sergei Supinksy/AFP via Getty Images)
https://www.commondreams.org/opinion/ukraine-war-leaks-propaganda
These leaks and investigative reports are not the first, nor will they be the last, to shine a light through the veil of propaganda that permits these wars to destroy young people’s lives in faraway places.
These leaks and investigative reports are not the first, nor will they be the last, to shine a light through the veil of propaganda that permits these wars to destroy young people’s lives in faraway places, so that oligarchs in Russia, Ukraine and the United States can amass wealth and power.
The U.S. corporate media’s first response to the leaking of secret documents about the war in Ukraine was to throw some mud in the water, declare “nothing to see here,” and cover it as a depoliticized crime story about a 21-year-old Air National Guardsman who published secret documents to impress his friends. President Biden dismissed the leaks as revealing nothing of “great consequence.”
What these documents reveal, however, is that the war is going worse for Ukraine than our political leaders have admitted to us, while going badly for Russia too, so that neither side is likely to break the stalemate this year, and this will lead to “a protracted war beyond 2023,” as one of the documents says.
The publication of these assessments should lead to renewed calls for our government to level with the public about what it realistically hopes to achieve by prolonging the bloodshed, and why it continues to reject the resumption of the promising peace negotiations it blocked in April 2022.
We believe that blocking those talks was a dreadful mistake, in which the Biden administration capitulated to the warmongering, since-disgraced U.K. Prime Minister Boris Johnson, and that current U.S. policy is compounding that mistake at the cost of tens of thousands more Ukrainian lives and the destruction of even more of their country.
The publication of these assessments should lead to renewed calls for our government to level with the public about what it realistically hopes to achieve by prolonging the bloodshed
In most wars, while the warring parties strenuously suppress the reporting of civilian casualties for which they are responsible, professional militaries generally treat accurate reporting of their own military casualties as a basic responsibility. But in the virulent propaganda surrounding the war in Ukraine, all sides have treated military casualty figures as fair game, systematically exaggerating enemy casualties and understating their own.
Publicly available U.S. estimates have supported the idea that many more Russians are being killed than Ukrainians, deliberately skewing public perceptions to support the notion that Ukraine can somehow win the war, as long as we just keep sending more weapons.
The leaked documents provide internal U.S. military intelligence assessments of casualties on both sides. But different documents, and different copies of the documents circulating online, show conflicting numbers, so the propaganda war rages on despite the leak.
The most detailed assessment of attrition rates of troops says explicitly that U.S. military intelligence has “low confidence” in the attrition rates it cites. It attributes that partly to “potential bias” in Ukraine’s information sharing, and notes that casualty assessments “fluctuate according to the source.”
So, despite denials by the Pentagon, a document that shows a higher death toll on the Ukrainian side may be correct, since it has been widely reported that Russia has been firing several times the number of artillery shells as Ukraine, in a bloody war of attrition in which artillery appears to be the main instrument of death. Altogether, some of the documents estimate a total death toll on both sides approaching 100,000 and total casualties, killed and wounded, of up to 350,000.
Another document reveals that, after using up the stocks sent by NATO countries, Ukraine is running out of missiles for the S-300 and BUK systems that make up 89% of its air defenses. By May or June, Ukraine will therefore be vulnerable, for the first time, to the full strength of the Russian air force, which has until now been limited mainly to long-range missile strikes and drone attacks.
Recent Western arms shipments have been justified to the public by predictions that Ukraine will soon be able to launch new counter-offensives to take back territory from Russia. Twelve brigades, or up to 60,000 troops, were assembled to train on newly delivered Western tanks for this “spring offensive,” with three brigades in Ukraine and nine more in Poland, Romania and Slovenia.
But a leaked document from the end of February reveals that the nine brigades being equipped and trained abroad had less than half their equipment and, on average, were only 15% trained. Meanwhile, Ukraine faced a stark choice to either send reinforcements to Bakhmut or withdraw from the town entirely, and it chose to sacrifice some of its “spring offensive” forces to prevent the imminent fall of Bakhmut.
Ever since the U.S. and NATO started training Ukrainian forces to fight in Donbas in 2015, and while it has been training them in other countries since the Russian invasion, NATO has provided six-month training courses to bring Ukraine’s forces up to basic NATO standards. On this basis, it appears that many of the forces being assembled for the “spring offensive” would not be fully trained and equipped before July or August.
But another document says the offensive will begin around April 30th, meaning that many troops may be thrown into combat less than fully trained, by NATO standards, even as they have to contend with more severe shortages of ammunition and a whole new scale of Russian airstrikes. The incredibly bloody fighting that has already decimated Ukrainian forces will surely be even more brutal than before.
The leaked documents conclude that “enduring Ukrainian deficiencies in training and munitions supplies probably will strain progress and exacerbate casualties during the offensive,” and that the most likely outcome remains only modest territorial gains.
The documents also reveal serious deficiencies on the Russian side, deficiencies revealed by the failure of their winter offensive to take much ground. The fighting in Bakhmut has raged on for months, leaving thousands of fallen soldiers on both sides and a burned-out city still not 100% controlled by Russia.
The inability of either side to decisively defeat the other in the ruins of Bakhmut and other front-line towns in Donbas is why one of the most important documents predicted that the war was locked in a “grinding campaign of attrition” and was “likely heading toward a stalemate.” Adding to the concerns about where this conflict is headed is the revelation in the leaked documents about the presence of 97 special forces from NATO countries, including from the U.K. and the U.S. This is in addition to previous reports about the presence of CIA personnel, trainers and Pentagon contractors, and the unexplained deployment of 20,000 troops from the 82nd and 101st Airborne Brigades near the border between Poland and Ukraine.
Worried about the ever-increasing direct U.S. military involvement, Republican Congressman Matt Gaetz has introduced a Privileged Resolution of Inquiry to force President Biden to notify the House of the exact number of U.S. military personnel inside Ukraine and precise U.S. plans to assist Ukraine militarily.
We can’t help wondering what President Biden’s plan could be, or if he even has one. But it turns out that we’re not alone. In what amounts to a second leak that the corporate media have studiously ignored, U.S. intelligence sources have told veteran investigative reporter Seymour Hersh that they are asking the same questions, and they describe a “total breakdown” between the White House and the U.S. intelligence community. Hersh’s sources describe a pattern that echoes the use of fabricated and unvetted intelligence to justify U.S. aggression against Iraq in 2003, in which Secretary of State Antony Blinken and National Security Advisor Sullivan are by-passing regular intelligence analysis and procedures and running the Ukraine War as their own private fiefdom. They reportedly smear all criticism of President Zelenskyy as “pro-Putin,” and leave U.S. intelligence agencies out in the cold trying to understand a policy that makes no sense to them.
What U.S. intelligence officials know, but the White House is doggedly ignoring, is that, as in Afghanistan and Iraq, top Ukrainian officials running this endemically corrupt country are making fortunes skimming money from the over $100 billion in aid and weapons that America has sent them.
According to Hersh’s report, the CIA assesses that Ukrainian officials, including President Zelenskyy, have embezzled $400 million from money the United States sent Ukraine to buy diesel fuel for its war effort, in a scheme that involves buying cheap, discounted fuel from Russia. Meanwhile, Hersh says, Ukrainian government ministries literally compete with each other to sell weapons paid for by U.S. taxpayers to private arms dealers in Poland, the Czech Republic and around the world.
Hersh writes that, in January 2023, after the CIA heard from Ukrainian generals that they were angry with Zelenskyy for taking a larger share of the rake-off from these schemes than his generals, CIA Director William Burns went to Kyiv to meet with him. Burns allegedly told Zelenskyy he was taking too much of the “skim money,” and handed him a list of 35 generals and senior officials the CIA knew were involved in this corrupt scheme.
Zelenskyy fired about ten of those officials but failed to alter his own behavior. Hersh’s sources tell him that the White House’s lack of interest in doing anything about these goings-on is a major factor in the breakdown of trust between the White House and the intelligence community.
First-hand reporting from inside Ukraine by New Cold War has described the same systematic pyramid of corruption as Hersh. A member of parliament, formerly in Zelenskyy’s party, told New Cold War that Zelenskyy and other officials skimmed 170 million euros from money that was supposed to pay for Bulgarian artillery shells.
The corruption reportedly extends to bribes to avoid conscription. The Open Ukraine Telegram channel was told by a military recruitment office that it could get the son of one of its writers released from the front line in Bakhmut and sent out of the country for $32,000. As has happened in Vietnam, Iraq, Afghanistan and all the wars the United States has been involved in for many decades, the longer the war goes on, the more the web of corruption, lies and distortions unravels.
The torpedoing of peace talks, the Nord Streamsabotage, the hiding of corruption, the politicization of casualty figures, and the suppressed history of broken promises and prescient warnings about the danger of NATO expansion are all examples of how our leaders have distorted the truth to shore up U.S. public support for perpetuating an unwinnable war that is killing a generation of young Ukrainians.
These leaks and investigative reports are not the first, nor will they be the last, to shine a light through the veil of propaganda that permits these wars to destroy young people’s lives in faraway places, so that oligarchs in Russia, Ukraine and the United States can amass wealth and power.
The only way this will stop is if more and more people get active in opposing those companies and individuals that profit from war–who Pope Francis calls the Merchants of Death–and boot out the politicians who do their bidding, before they make an even more fatal misstep and start a nuclear war.
Our work is licensed under Creative Commons (CC BY-NC-ND 3.0). Feel free to republish and share widely.
Medea Benjamin is co-founder of Global Exchange and CODEPINK: Women for Peace. She is the co-author, with Nicolas J.S. Davies, of War in Ukraine: Making Sense of a Senseless Conflict, available from OR Books in November 2022. Other books include, “Inside Iran: The Real History and Politics of the Islamic Republic of Iran” (2018); “Kingdom of the Unjust: Behind the U.S.-Saudi Connection” (2016); “Drone Warfare: Killing by Remote Control” (2013); “Don’t Be Afraid Gringo: A Honduran Woman Speaks from the Heart” (1989), and (with Jodie Evans) “Stop the Next War Now” (2005).
Nicolas J. S. Davies is an independent journalist and a researcher with CODEPINK. He is the co-author, with Medea Benjamin, of War in Ukraine: Making Sense of a Senseless Conflict, available from OR Books in November 2022, and the author of Blood On Our Hands: the American Invasion and Destruction of Iraq.
Which side are the editorial boards on? It’s very plain to see.
https://www.commondreams.org/opinion/us-corporate-media-celebrate-france-s-attack-on-pensions
Apr 09, 2023
“The Party Is Ending for French Retirees.” That’s the headline the Wall Street Journal (3/14/23) went with just days before French President Emmanuel Macron invoked a special article of the constitution to bypass the National Assembly and enshrine an increase in the retirement age in national law. The Journal proclaimed:
The golden age of French pensions is coming to an end, one way or another, in an extreme example of the demographic stress afflicting the retirement systems of advanced economies throughout the world.
The possibility that this “golden age” could be extended is not even entertained. Due to previous “reforms” (CounterSpin, 9/17/10), the pension of the average French person is already facing cuts over the coming decades. So preserving the current level of benefits would require strengthening the system. For the Journal, this is out of the question. Stingier pensions, on the other hand, are portrayed as the inevitable result of “demographic stress,” not policy choices.
The French people, by contrast, recognize that a less generous pension system is far from an inevitability. Protesters quickly took to the streets this January after the government unveiled plans to raise the retirement age from 62 to 64; one poll from that month found 80% of the country opposed to such a change. And as the government pushed the reform through in March, protests grew especially rowdy, with monuments of refuse lining the city’s streets and fires illuminating the Parisian landscape.
But that’s just how the French are, you know? They’re a peculiar people, much different from us Americans.
The French are built different
As the New York Times’ Paris bureau chief Roger Cohen put it in a recent episode of the Daily (3/16/23), protesters have been “talking about how life begins when work ends, which is a deeply held French conviction, very different from the American view that life is enriched and enhanced by work.”
Left unmentioned is the fact that, for decades, Americans have consistently opposed increases to the Social Security retirement age, usually by a large margin (CounterSpin, 10/26/18). Moreover, two-thirds of the American public support a four-day workweek, and half say Americans work too much. How French of them.
US media (Extra!, 3–4/96) have taken to covering the uprising against pension “reform” in the same way the narrator of a nature documentary might describe the wilderness:
Now, we come to a Frenchman in his natural habitat. His behavior may give the impression of idleness, but don’t let that fool you. If prodded enough with the prospect of labor, he will not hesitate before lighting the local pastry shop ablaze.
The New York Times (2/24/23), for instance, ran an article in the midst of the protests headlined “The French Like Protesting, but This Frenchman May Like It the Most,” about a man who has “become a personal embodiment of France’s enduring passion for demonstration.” It followed that up with a piece (3/7/23) presenting French opposition to an increase in the retirement age as some exotic reflection of the French’s French-ness. A source attested to the country’s uniqueness: “In France, we believe that there is a time for work and then a time for personal development.”
Meanwhile, while the Washington Post has mostly been content to outsource coverage of the protests to Associated Press wires, it did run a piece (3/15/23) by one of its own reporters titled: “City of … Garbage? Paris, Amid Strikes, Is Drowning in Trash.”
The burden of old people
This fairly unserious reporting on the protests contrasts sharply with the grave rhetoric deployed by the editorial boards of major newspapers in opposing the protesters’ demands. The Wall Street Journal (3/16/23), which has implored the French to face “the cold reality” of spending cuts, is not alone in its crusade against French workers. The boards of the Washington Post, Bloomberg and the Financial Times have all run similarly dour editorials promoting pension reform over the past few months.
Among these, only the Financial Times (3/19/23) opposed the French government’s remarkably anti-democratic decision to raise the retirement age without a vote in the National Assembly, opining that Macron’s tactics have both “weakened” him and left “France with a democratic deficit.”
The Washington Post (3/17/23), by contrast, suggested democratic means would have been preferable, but gave no indication of opposition to Macron’s move. (As FAIR has pointed out—3/9/23—the Post’s supposed concern for democracy doesn’t extend far beyond its slogan.) And the Wall Street Journal (3/16/23) actually saluted the move, remarking, “Give Mr. Macron credit for persistence—and political brass.”
The editorial boards’ case for pension reform is based on a simple conviction—French pensions are unsustainable—for which there are three main pieces of evidence.
First, the ratio of workers to retirees. The Wall Street Journal (3/14/23) included a graphic projecting the worker-to-retiree ratio through 2070:
As the graphic shows, this ratio has declined substantially since 2002, and is set to decline even more over the next several decades. This trend is referenced more or less directly in editorials by the Journal (3/16/23, 1/31/23, 1/13/23), the Washington Post (3/17/23) and the Financial Times (3/19/23).
The declining worker-to-retiree ratio is meant to inspire fear, but in and of itself, it’s not necessarily a problem. After all, the increased costs associated with a rising number of retirees could very well be offset by other factors. It is therefore much more useful to look directly at how much of a nation’s wealth is used to support retirees.
Which brings us to the second commonly cited piece of evidence: pensions as a percentage of GDP. This is mentioned in editorials by the Journal (3/16/23, 1/31/23, 1/13/23), Post (3/17/23) and Bloomberg (1/16/23).
As it turns out, there’s no problem to be found here. In its 2021 Aging Report, the European Commission estimates that, even without a rise in the minimum retirement age to 64, public pension spending in France would actually decline over the next several decades, dropping to 12.6% of GDP in 2070, down from 14.8% in 2019. Cost-saving factors, primarily the deterioration in benefit levels, would more than cancel out the increase in the number of retirees. In other words, there is no affordability crisis. It doesn’t exist.
Which side are you on?
The only actual evidence for the unsustainability of France’s pension system is the system’s deficit, which is projected to reach around €14 billion by 2030. This piece of evidence is cited in editorials by the Journal (1/31/23, 1/13/23) and the Financial Times (3/19/23, 1/10/23).
One solution to the deficit is raising the retirement age. Another is raising taxes. Oddly enough, the editorials cited above almost universally fail to mention the second option.
The only editorial board to bring up the possibility of raising taxes is the Financial Times’ (1/10/23), which comments, “Macron has rightly ruled out raising taxes or rescinding tax breaks since France’s tax share of GDP is already 45%, the second-highest in the OECD after Denmark.”
This statement says much more about the Times than it does about the reasonableness of raising taxes. Oxfam France (1/18/23) has estimated that a mere 2% tax on the wealth of French billionaires could eliminate the projected pension deficit. Rescinding three tax cuts that Macron’s government passed and that largely benefit the wealthy could free up €16 billion each year. That would plug the pension system’s projected deficit with money left over.
Which option you pick—increasing taxes on the wealthy or raising the retirement age—depends entirely on who you want to bear the costs of shoring up the pension system. Do you want the wealthy to sacrifice a little? Or do you want to ratchet up the suffering of lower-income folks a bit? Are you on the side of the rich, or the poor and working class? The editorial boards of these major newspapers have made their allegiance clear.
© 2023 Fairness and Accuracy In Reporting (FAIR)
Conor Smyth is a recent graduate of Washington University in St. Louis, where he studied history and political science.
The Twitter CEO revoked the newspaper’s ‘verified’ badge after it refused to pay for the privilege
“The real tragedy of @NYTimes is that their propaganda isn’t even interesting,” the billionaire declared. “Also, their feed is the Twitter equivalent of diarrhea. It’s unreadable.”
https://www.rt.com/news/574040-elon-musk-new-york-times/
April 2, 2023
Elon Musk leaves the Phillip Burton Federal Building and United States Court House in San Francisco, California, January 24, 2023 © AP / Benjamin Fanjoy
Twitter CEO Elon Musk has branded the New York Times “unreadable propaganda” after the newspaper refused to pay for verification. Earlier, Twitter began removing its iconic blue checkmarks from accounts that had received the badge before Musk’s subscription system was introduced.
Twitter announced last month that, as of Saturday, it would begin removing “legacy verified checkmarks” from accounts that were verified before Musk announced his subscription system last year. The New York Times declared on Thursday that it would not pay the $1,000 per month required of businesses, or reimburse its employees for signing up for Twitter’s $8 per month personal plan.
The New York Times’ @nytimes account lost its checkmark on Saturday, meaning its tweets will no longer show up in the ‘for you’ tab, the default timeline where Twitter users see content from accounts they follow.
Tweeting on Saturday, Musk suggested that the vanishing of Tweets from the Times would be no great loss for most users.
Musk reveals part of Twitter’s algorithm
“The real tragedy of @NYTimes is that their propaganda isn’t even interesting,” the billionaire declared. “Also, their feed is the Twitter equivalent of diarrhea. It’s unreadable.”
“They would have far more real followers if they only posted their top articles,” Musk continued, adding that the “same applies to all publications.”
The New York Times is one of a number of US newspapers and news outlets boycotting the paid verification system. The White House is also refusing to pay for blue checkmarks for its staffers, according to a report by Axios on Friday.
Musk purchased Twitter for $44 billion last October, promising a host of reforms that would roll back the platform’s censorship policies and make it a “digital town square” for free and open debate. While he has restored hundreds of previously banned accounts – including that of former US President Donald Trump – and relaxed Twitter’s content moderation rules, he has simultaneously struggled to boost the platform’s declining revenue.
READ MORE: Musk demands AI pause
Despite Musk rolling out paid subscriptions and firing around three quarters of Twitter’s staff, the company is currently worth half of what Musk paid for it last year, according to the Wall Street Journal.
Musk has previously clashed with the New York Times and suspended reporter for the paper, Ryan Mac, in December for sharing information about the billionaire’s whereabouts.
“Criticizing me all day long is totally fine, but doxxing my real-time location and endangering my family is not,” Musk tweeted at the time.
Tales from the Conspiratum 
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