Category Archives: censorship

The GATHERING Storm in Ukraine Spells Doom for the West

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Photo by by Adam Brummett

By Col. Douglas MacGregor

Source: Information Clearing House

The crisis of American national power has begun. America’s economy is tipping over, and Western financial markets are quietly panicking. Imperiled by rising interest rates, mortgage-backed securities and U.S. Treasuries are losing their value. The market’s proverbial “vibes”—feelings, emotions, beliefs, and psychological penchants—suggest a dark turn is underway inside the American economy.

American national power is measured as much by American military capability as by economic potential and performance. The growing realization that American and European military-industrial capacity cannot keep up with Ukrainian demands for ammunition and equipment is an ominous signal to send during a proxy war that Washington insists its Ukrainian surrogate is winning.

Russian economy-of-force operations in southern Ukraine appear to have successfully ground down attacking Ukrainian forces with the minimal expenditure of Russian lives and resources. While Russia’s implementation of attrition warfare worked brilliantly, Russia mobilized its reserves of men and equipment to field a force that is several magnitudes larger and significantly more lethal than it was a year ago.

Russia’s massive arsenal of artillery systems including rockets, missiles, and drones linked to overhead surveillance platforms converted Ukrainian soldiers fighting to retain the northern edge of the Donbas into pop-up targets. How many Ukrainian soldiers have died is unknown, but one recent estimate wagers between 150,000-200,000 Ukrainians have been killed in action since the war began, while another estimates about 250,000.

Given the glaring weakness of NATO members’ ground, air, and air defense forces, an unwanted war with Russia could easily bring hundreds of thousands of Russian Troops to the Polish border, NATO’s Eastern Frontier. This is not an outcome Washington promised its European allies, but it’s now a real possibility.

In contrast to the Soviet Union’s hamfisted and ideologically driven foreign policymaking and execution, contemporary Russia has skillfully cultivated support for its cause in Latin America, Africa, the Middle East, and South Asia. The fact that the West’s economic sanctions damaged the U.S. and European economies while turning the Russian ruble into one of the international system’s strongest currencies has hardly enhanced Washington’s global standing.

Biden’s policy of forcibly pushing NATO to Russia’s borders forged a strong commonality of security and trade interests between Moscow and Beijing that is attracting strategic partners in South Asia like India, and partners like Brazil in Latin America. The global economic implications for the emerging Russo-Chinese axis and their planned industrial revolution for some 3.9 billion people in the Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO) are profound.

In sum, Washington’s military strategy to weaken, isolate, or even destroy Russia is a colossal failure and the failure puts Washington’s proxy war with Russia on a truly dangerous path. To press on, undeterred in the face of Ukraine’s descent into oblivion, ignores three metastasizing threats: 1. Persistently high inflation and rising interest rates that signal economic weakness. (The first American bank failure since 2020 is a reminder of U.S. financial fragility.) 2. The threat to stability and prosperity inside European societies already reeling from several waves of unwanted refugees/migrants. 3. The threat of a wider European war.

Inside presidential administrations, there are always competing factions urging the president to adopt a particular course of action. Observers on the outside seldom know with certainty which faction exerts the most influence, but there are figures in the Biden administration seeking an off-ramp from involvement in Ukraine. Even Secretary of State Antony Blinken, a rabid supporter of the proxy war with Moscow, recognizes that Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky’s demand that the West help him recapture Crimea is a red line for Putin that might lead to a dramatic escalation from Moscow.

Backing down from the Biden administration’s malignant and asinine demands for a humiliating Russian withdrawal from eastern Ukraine before peace talks can convene is a step Washington refuses to take. Yet it must be taken. The higher interest rates rise, and the more Washington spends at home and abroad to prosecute the war in Ukraine, the closer American society moves toward internal political and social turmoil. These are dangerous conditions for any republic.

From all the wreckage and confusion of the last two years, there emerges one undeniable truth. Most Americans are right to be distrustful of and dissatisfied with their government. President Biden comes across as a cardboard cut-out, a stand-in for ideological fanatics in his administration, people that see executive power as the means to silence political opposition and retain permanent control of the federal government.

Americans are not fools. They know that members of Congress flagrantly trade stocks based on inside information, creating conflicts of interest that would land most citizens in jail. They also know that since 1965 Washington led them into a series of failed military interventions that severely weakened American political, economic, and military power.

Far too many Americans believe they have had no real national leadership since January 21, 2021. It is high time the Biden administration found an off-ramp designed to extricate Washington, D.C., from its proxy Ukrainian war against Russia. It will not be easy. Liberal internationalism or, in its modern guise, “moralizing globalism,” makes prudent diplomacy arduous, but now is the time. In Eastern Europe, the spring rains present both Russian and Ukrainian ground forces with a sea of mud that severely impedes movement. But the Russian High Command is preparing to ensure that when the ground dries and Russian ground forces attack, the operations will achieve an unambiguous decision, making it clear that Washington and its supporters have no chance to rescue the dying regime in Kiev. From then on, negotiations will be extremely difficult, if not impossible.

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Journalistic Malpractice on Trial: What the Dominion Voting System Tells Us About How the Media Sacrificed their Credibility to Partisan Falsehoods

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By Nolan Higdon

Source: Project Censored

“This is direct evidence of knowing falsity” exclaimed RonNell Anderson Jones, Professor of Law at the University of Utah, in a February 2023 interview with Jon Stewart. Jones noted that in most defamation cases “the likelihood that you will find evidence of them [news outlets] saying, ‘We know this is a lie and we would like to move forward with it anyway is deeply unlikely.’” However, in the case of Dominion Voting Systems v. Fox News, “the filing contains just this trove of evidence of emails and text messages and internal memos that are ‘rare’ both in terms of the ‘volume of the evidence and as to the directness of the evidence.’” This sentiment was echoed by Harvard law professor Laurence Tribe who noted, “I have never seen a defamation case with such overwhelming proof that the defendant admitted in writing that it was making up fake information in order to increase its viewership and its revenues.”

In the $1.6 billion defamation lawsuit, Dominion Voting Systems accuses Fox News Channel of falsely reporting that Dominion’s voting machines fraudulently delivered victory to Joe Biden in the 2020 U.S. Presidential Election. Court documents attained by other media outlets reveal that hosts and other high-ranking Fox News Channel officials – including the Chairman and CEO of Fox’s parent company News Corporation, Rupert Murdoch – knew these reports were false, but aired them because they were more concerned with confirming their audience’s belief that Donald Trump won the election.

The evidence presented in the court documents speaks to the journalistic malpractice that plagues the cable news industry. Journalistic malpractice refers to professional journalists who privilege ideological bias and profits over truth in their reporting. Fox News Channel is patient zero for the plague of journalistic malpractice. It was created in 1996 by Rupert Murdoch and the late Roger Ailes, a media consultant for several Republican presidents, as a political project to sell conservative culture and policy to the American public with pro-conservative propaganda disguised as journalism. For example, Fox News Channel has

  • falsely claimed that other media outlets did not cover the conservative Tea Party rallies;
  • utilized videos out of context to inflate the perceived size of conservative protests;
  • labeled former President Barack Obama a racist;
  • declared Osama bin Laden as a John Kerry supporter;
  • perpetuated discredited reports on the existence of Weapons of Mass Destruction in Iraq;
  • introduced digitally altered photos to fabricate Black Lives Matter violence and make New York Timesreporters appear to be revolting.   

Liberals were right to assert that such chicanery was propaganda, not journalism. But before liberal readers scold Fox News viewers, they should remind themselves that the plague of journalistic malpractice has also infected the liberal leaning cable networks such as CNN and MSNBC. Researchers and scholars have noted that the advent of cable and then the internet saw news media outlets shift from attaining the largest audience possible to focusing on a more specific or narrow demographic of the audience. While Fox News Channel sought to cater to Republican Party voting viewers, CNN and MSNBC did the same for Democratic Party voters. This gave the Democratic Party influence over programming that was tantamount to what the Republican Party long enjoyed at Fox.

When Senator U.S. Bernie Sanders’ 2016 Presidential bid posed a threat to their desired candidate Hillary Clinton in 2016, leaders from the Democratic Party admitted they worked to undermine his campaign. Pro-Democratic party outlets like MSNBC and CNN aided in this effort by

  • creating an unfavorable debate schedule;
  • giving Clinton twice as much and more favorable coverage;
  • publishing 16 negative articles about Sanders in Washington Post (owned by major Democratic Party funder Jeff Bezos) in 16 hours;
  • ghost editing previous news articles to diminish Sanders’ quarter century of accomplishments;
  • inviting his opponent’s surrogates to attack his character under the auspices of being objective journalists.

Their smear of Sanders continued in 2020 when

  • the Democratic Party-leaning news outlets misled the public about Sanders’ polling numbers;
  • CNN’s Abby Phillips drew gasps for ignoring Sanders’ claim that he never said a “woman could not be president;”
  • James Carville on MSNBC made the baseless claim that Russia was supporting Sanders;
  • MSNBC’s Chris Matthews compared Sander’s primary victories to the Nazi’s defeat of the French, an unfortunate comparison as Sanders’ family was murdered in the holocaust.

Journalistic malpractice also plagued Covid-19 coverage. Starting in 2020, CNN’s Chris Cuomo utilized his platform – with the approval of CNN leadership – to host his brother, then New York Governor Andrew Cuomo. The jovial segments seemed like campaign advertisements as Chris treated Andrew as the anti-thesis to then President Trump: a competent executive who took decisive action to address the Covid-19 pandemic. Although, the Democratic versus Republican framing attracted partisan audiences, in reality, Andrew Cuomo and Trump were all too similar: both concealed the actual number of Covid-19 deaths in their jurisdiction, both put patients at risk with kickbacks to industry partners, and both utilized media contacts to stifle press reports about their alleged sexual crimes.

The partisan falsehoods in cable news includes the production of powerful, long- running false stories designed to convince their audiences that the other party is wrong and crazy. For years now, conservatives and Fox News Channel perpetuated the baseless Qanon conspiracy, which alleges that a cabal of Satan-worshiping pedophiles – mainly in the Democratic Party – runs global affairs but Trump will break up the conspiracy. The absurdity of this conspiracy is tantamount to liberal leaning news media’s reporting on Russiagate, which sought to discredit Republicans. Since 2016, Russiagate – the story that Russia meddled in and influenced the outcome of the U.S. election in 2016, had direct connections to Donald Trump and his associates, and worked to help defeat Hillary Clinton for the presidency – was perpetuated by a series of false stories from Democratic Party-friendly media including

  • Russia hacking a Vermont power plant;
  • putting a bounty on U.S. soldiers in Afghanistan;
  • shifting election outcomes around the world;
  • turning Trump into an asset since 1987;
  • labeling the Hunter Biden laptop story as fake news.

Conservatives rightly see this reporting and believe liberals are insane.

Both factions need to look in a mirror. While audiences can clearly see the insanity in other networks’ viewers, they rarely seem to see it in themselves. Indeed, in the same week that CNN and others were having a schadenfreude moment over the Dominion v. Fox case, they hosted a commentator on the train derailment in East Palestine, Ohio without disclosing that he had lobbied for the train company Norfolk Southern. This example of hypocrisy and journalistic malpractice is not only costly to CNN’s credibility, but our democracy as well.   

Without a robust media system that privileges truth over preaching to the choir, the public will have endless debates devoid of facts on key issues such as critical race theory, vaccine efficacy, the origins of the COVID-19 virus, climate change, transgender issues, Ukraine, mysterious balloons, and more. Democratic discourse will be reduced to seeing Republicans as MAGA-hat wearing, blue lives matter-flag waving, gun nuts, and Democrats as medical mask wearing, “this house cares about everything” front-lawn sign adorning, professional victims and virtue signalers. These caricatures have never really been accurate, but as long as the nation is infected with the plague of journalist malpractice they will surely be perpetuated.

While the courts are unlikely to deliver solace from political party propaganda disguised as journalism, they have provided some wisdom. Both Rachel Maddow and Tucker Carlson of MSNBC and Fox News Channel respectively, have been brought to court for spreading false information and were exonerated because the judges concluded that no reasonable person would believe either of them were telling the truth. That is good advice, and viewers would be wise to remember it every time they consider watching cable news.

A Fed-Issued Digital Currency: The Mark of the Beast

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A Fed-issued digital currency would be no more in our interests than the current dollar system.

By Jeremy R. Hammond

Source: Jeremy R. Hammond Blog

China’s ‘Social Credit’ System

“And he causeth all, both small and great, rich and poor, free and bond, to receive a mark in their right hand, or in their foreheads: And that no man might buy or sell, save he that had the mark, or the name of the beast, or the number of his name.” — Revelation 13:16-17

In China, as you have likely heard, the government has been experimenting with a “social credit” system aimed at giving politicians even greater control over people’s behavior. China was, of course, also the country whose authoritarian “lockdown” response to the outbreak of SARS‑CoV‑2—the coronavirus that causes COVID‑19 and was likely engineered in a Chinese lab with US government funding—was pointed to as a model for the rest of the world to follow by the World Health Organization (WHO).

The WHO has since been aiming to acquire even more centralized global authority to issue diktats in the event of another pandemic, such as implementation of “lockdown” measures that might include travel restrictions, prevention of employment, and vaccine mandates or passport systems.

As of December 2020, around the time of the initial outbreak of the virus in Wuhan, China, social credit laws and regulations had been implemented in an estimated 80 percent of the country.

Naturally, the system is characterized by its proponents as a benevolent means to reward socially responsible people while denying privileges to unsavory and untrustworthy characters and businesses. But you and I both recognize the grave threat posed by politicians wielding this type of power and control over the population. It is an obvious threat to privacy and liberty.

The people of China regrettably but unsurprisingly appear to have welcomed this system, although the perception of public approval might be largely an artifact of people being afraid to publicly criticize the system lest their names be placed on one of the government’s “blacklists”.

As with any law or government policy, we should view it through the lens of how such power could be used as opposed to how politicians say they intend to use it.

A glimpse of how it could be used is the city of Rongcheng’s prohibition on “spreading harmful information”, violations of which could result in subtraction of points off residents’ social credit scores.

Such prohibitions must be seen in light of how governments are in the habit of interpreting “harmful information” as any information that does not align with the adopted political agenda. In the US during the COVID‑19 pandemic, there has been no greater purveyor of misinformation than the US government itself.

According to MIT Technology Review, the central government actually pressed the city to scale back the threat to individual liberty posed by its social credit system, such as enabling residents to opt-out. “The Chinese government did emphasize that all social-credit-related punishment has to adhere to existing laws,” the Review states, “but laws themselves can be unjust in the first place.”

The takeaway from that article is that “the social credit system does not (yet) exemplify abuse of advanced technologies like artificial intelligence”. But that’s no reason for the citizenry to consent to the implementation of systems that are conducive to extreme governmental abuses of authority.

A July 2019 article in Wired magazine related the example of Liu Hu, a journalist who was arrested, fined, and blacklisted, reportedly for writing about censorship and government corruption. He found himself on a “List of Dishonest Persons Subject to Enforcement by the Supreme People’s Court as ‘not qualified’ to buy a plane ticket, and banned from travelling some train lines, buying property, or taking out a loan.”

A more recent Newsweek article appropriately describes the system this way:

On an individual level, the government seeks to instill in the public an increased sense of morality to discourage everything from fraud and plagiarism to counterfeit goods and petty crime. But a system to make individual actions more transparent would necessitate the creation of tools to monitor all aspects of life. Social control, if not the original aim, could be an inevitable consequence, researchers say.

. . . While China’s vision of the system has yet to emerge as a dystopian tool for control driven by big data, there are real concerns about the way personal information is to be collected and processed to create social credit profiles, which could have lasting implications for individuals.

An untrustworthy government has no place dictating to its citizens what types of behaviors should be regarded as creating or breaking trust.

Human Rights Watch provides the example of lawyer Li Xioaolin, who was denied a plane ticket home while away on a work trip inside China because his name was on a blacklist of “untrustworthy” people in relation to a years-old court-related issue that he thought he had resolved.

According to Human Rights Watch, journalist Liu Hu was punished not for criticizing the government and exposing corruption but for having offered an apology that the government deemed “insincere” after losing a defamation case for publishing an article alleging that someone was an extortionist. Still, the organization notes, in both cases, “penalties were exacted in wildly arbitrary and unaccountable manners.” Additionally, “the courts failed to notify them, leaving them no chance to contest their treatment.”

According to the human rights organization, between 2013 and 2017, the Chinese government imposed more than seven million punishments to people for failing to carry out local court orders, which punishments have included publicly naming and shaming individuals and barring them from flights and trains.

After experiencing the totalitarianism of the disastrously harmful lockdown regimes and the accompanying efforts to coerce the population into accepting COVID‑19 vaccines and to censor truths countering the government’s incessant lies (I was permanently banned from LinkedIn, for example, for accurately reporting that the CDC’s claim that COVID‑19 vaccines provide greater protection against SARS‑CoV‑2 infection than natural immunity was a bald-faced lie), it should not be too difficult to imagine such a system being dangerously used to silence critics and punish dissenters so that whatever ruling regime can continue its crimes against humanity unobstructed.

The idea of a “social credit” score, of course, is inherently tied to the idea of central banking. In the US, the central bank is the Federal Reserve, a government-legislated private monopoly over the supply of currency. Increasingly, there is talk of a central bank digital currency, heightening concerns about the government having the means to exercise power over us and control our behavior.

“Project Hamilton”

As an example of how the Fed is exploring the idea of adopting a digital currency, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) has teamed up with the Federal Reserve Bank of Boston under the appropriately named “Project Hamilton”.

Alexander Hamilton, of course, was instrumental in the adoption of central banking by the US government, famously at odds with Thomas Jefferson, who rightly opposed the idea and warned about the dangers inherent in such an institution. Jefferson appeared to hold the view that the means of exchange and interest rates ought to be determined by the market as opposed to being determined by fiat by a roomful of central planners.

Jefferson accurately foresaw how the government would use the central bank to pay for its spending as an alternative to raising taxes directly, and how the debt that would consequently be incurred by this uncontrolled spending would ultimately be borne by future generations.

In a letter to John Wayles Eppes in 1813, for example, Jefferson wrote:

I have said that the taxes should be continued by annual or biennial re-enactments; because a constant hold, by the nation, of the strings of the public purse, is a salutary restraint, from which an honest government ought not to wish, nor a corrupt one to be permitted, to be free. No tax should ever be yielded for longer than that of the Congress granting it, except when pledged for the reimbursement of a loan.

. . . Bank-paper must be suppressed, and the circulating medium must be restored to the nation to whom it belongs. . . . Treasury bills, bottomed on taxes, bearing, or not bearing interest, as may be found necessary, thrown into circulation, will take the place of so much gold & silver, which last, when crouded, will find an efflux into other countries, and thus keep the quantum of medium at its salutary level.

In a letter to John Taylor in 1816, Jefferson described central banking as rightly “reprobated” and as “a blot left in all our constitutions, which, if not covered, will end in their destruction”. He wrote, “And I sincerely believe with you, that banking establishments are more dangerous than standing armies; & that the principle of spending money to be paid by posterity, under the name of funding, is but swindling futurity on a large scale”.

Jefferson viewed the federal government as having no authority to institute a central banking system. As he wrote in 1791, “The incorporation of a bank, and the powers assumed by this bill, have not, in my opinion, been delegated to the United States, by the Constitution.”

The stated aim of Project Hamilton “is to investigate the technical feasibility of a general purpose central bank digital currency (CBDC) that could be used by an economy the size of the United States and to gain a hands-on understanding of a CBDC’s technical challenges, opportunities, risks, and tradeoffs.”

The project is part of MIT’s “Digital Currency Initiative”, which is aimed at bringing minds together “to conduct the research necessary to support the development of digital currency and blockchain technology.”

The aim of the collaboration with the Federal Reserve Bank of Boston has been “to develop a hypothetical CBDC.” MIT describes the possibility of a “central-bank-issued digital currency” as “a unique opportunity to address challenges in our existing payments system and design an economy that is more resilient, participatory, and open.”

We can reasonably assume that Thomas Jefferson, were he alive today, would disagree and view the idea as anathema to both a sound economy and a free society.

Noting that it was Alexander Hamilton “who laid the foundation for a U.S. central bank”, a project white paper published in February 2022 concluded that it is “critical” for research to continue for “achieving goals for a CBDC.” That is, it is not a question of whether the Fed should adopt a digital currency but how and when.

Biden’s Executive Order and Project Lithium

In January 2022, the Federal Reserve Board of Governors similarly published a paper titled “Money and Payments: The U.S. Dollar in the Age of Digital Transformation”, the aim of which was “to foster a broad and transparent public dialogue about CBDCs in general, and about the potential benefits and risks of a U.S. CBDC.”

Then in March 2022 President Joe Biden signed an “Executive Order on Ensuring Responsible Development of Digital Assets”, which declares the supposed need for the US government to “regulate” digital assets, including for the purpose of preventing circumvention of its sanctions regimes—in which context we might remember the US government’s criminal sanctions regime against Iraq in the 1990s and how Secretary of State Madeleine Albright insisted that the “price” of half-a-million dead Iraqi children was “worth it”.

The executive order, number 14067, describes how the government has an interest in maintaining the US dollar’s “central role” in “the global financial system”, which refers to the use of the dollar as a reserve currency. To that end, the order states, the Biden administration “places the highest urgency on research and development efforts into the potential design and deployment options of a United States CBDC.”

The White House is intent on determining what actions would be required to launch such a currency “if doing so is deemed to be in the national interest”. Of course, as the example of half a million excess childhood deaths in Iraq due to sanctions once again illustrates, determining just what is in the “national interest” is not a task that government policymakers seem particularly good at.

The lockdown measures, which utterly failed to project those at highest risk from COVID-19 while causing devastating harms globally, are another useful example of the ineptitude of policymakers when it comes to making decision that are in our best interests.

Following Biden’s executive order, in April 2022, the Depository Trust & Clearing Corporation (DTCC) announced “the development of the first prototype to explore how a CBDC might operate”. This endeavor was given the name “Project Lithium”, on which the DTCC is collaborating with The Digital Dollar Project (DDP), an organization that advocates US leadership “in advancing a CBDC” and encourages the executive branch of government “to support appropriate legislation” to authorize further research and development of such a currency.

The DDP published a white paper in May 2020 concluding that the US government “should, and must, take a leadership role in this new wave of digital innovation” and preserve the dollar’s role as “the world’s primary reserve currency” by working toward “the launch of a tokenized digital dollar”.

End the Fed!

Naturally, advocates of a central bank digital currency describe the aims of such a development as benign, just as the Federal Reserve system was originally established on the pretext that having a more centrally controlled economy would benefit all.

In truth, the Federal Reserve system serves the interests of the financially and political elite at the expense of the rest of us. Central banking itself, whatever the form of currency issued, is harmful to the economy because central banks essentially exist to effect a transfer of wealth upward. Schools of economic thought like Keynesianism and Modern Monetary Theory (MMT), which I like to refer to as “Keynesianism 2.0”, exist to justify the existence of central banks.

The Fed, a government-legislated private monopoly over the currency supply, enables the government to spend on whatever, including endless wars (euphemistically called “defense” spending), but the means of paying for it all, the creation of “money” out of thin air, results in upward wealth transfer. The elite classes who receive the newly created dollars first are able to spend it for purchasing assets prior to the resulting devaluation that manifests in the form of higher prices for goods and services.

Monetary inflation robs us of our purchasing power and so serves as a hidden tax. It also causes widespread malinvestment and major economic distortions like the housing bubble that burst in 2007 and precipitated the 2008 financial crisis, not to mention the current housing bubble and general asset inflation. (For more on that, see my book Ron Paul vs. Paul Krugman: Austrian vs. Keynesian Economics in the Financial Crisis.)

We are meant to believe we need centralized control over the currency supply for economic growth, but central banks instead serve to impede real economic growth in favor of enabling the government’s endlessly wasteful and harmful spending.

The chief appeal of a cryptocurrency like Bitcoin is that it is a decentralized medium of exchange that serves to compete with central-bank-issued currency and potentially enables people to opt-out of the exploitative dollar system. The idea of a “legal tender” digital currency in the hands of the bankers and politicians is anathema to the whole concept of a peer-to-peer electronic cash system.

One might argue that the replacement of print dollars with a centrally controlled cryptocurrency is just a natural evolution from the current system, in which exchange of actual cash is becoming less frequent and most transactions occur digitally anyway. We should keep up with the times and adapt to advancements in technology, the argument goes.

However, this overlooks the more fundamental issue that we should not have central banks in the first place. The way I see it, the movement towards replacing the US dollar with a Fed-issued cryptocurrency is far from benign. We have seen in the past few years just how far government policymakers are willing to go to exercise authoritarian control over us.

To illustrate, remember how businesses deemed “non-essential” were shut down by clueless bureaucrats under threat of punishment, and how coercive measures including mandates and travel restrictions were used to get people to accept COVID‑19 vaccinations?

With the World Economic Forum (WEF) having announced its “Great Reset” agenda, which ties directly into the global mass vaccination agenda, the advocates of greater centralized control over society do not deserve the benefit of our doubt about their intentions. It would be naïve to think that if the authoritarians in government had even greater means to penalize citizens for disobedience to the regime that they would not attempt to use it. It is safer to assume that if they can utilize a digital currency to control our behavior, they will.

It seems therefore imperative to oppose a centralized digital currency, but we also need to go further than that and oppose the existence of the Federal Reserve altogether. Whatever the form of currency, centralized economic planning is an abomination and anathema to the principle of a free market.

“And I heard another voice from heaven, saying, Come out of her, my people, that ye be not partakers of her sins, and that ye receive not of her plagues.” — Revelation 18:4

The U.S. empire is collapsing.

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Credit: JOEL PETT

By Eric Zuesse

Source: The Duran

The U.S. empire was initiated, on 25 July 1945, by U.S. President Harry Truman, upon the advice of his hero Dwight Eisenhower, but the U.S. empire — the only empire that remained after WW II — has been successfully hidden from its publics, never self-acknowledged, despite now having 900 foreign U.S. military bases in its colonies (‘allies’) around the world, and despite having become, by now, by far and overwhelmingly, the largest empire that has ever existed, in all of world history. (And those 900 foreign military bases are in addition to America’s 749 domestic U.S. military bases.)

But, now, this largest-ever empire in world history is finally in the process of collapsing. This collapse will be documented here, first of all by documenting how extreme the lies by the empire’s rulers (“The Emperor has no clothes” that are true — that actually exist) have become, and the desperateness of those persons’ fabrications of ‘news’, and consequently of ‘history’, because it is by means of their lies that we can truthfully understand whom and what they actually are.

On 9 December 2016, the great independent war journalist, Eva Bartlett, addressed the U.N., representing only herself as an independent journalist who had been to Syria many times, not representing any of the war’s combatants. And here was her 19-minute presentation, which is stunning to watch, and which is 100% true (as I know it to be, on the basis of my own independent sources):

“Western media lies about Syria exposed (Canadian journalist Eva Bartlett)”

VIDEO, 19 mins., Eva Bartlett, 10 December 2016, U.N., NYC

That’s an archived youtube, not the original youtube, because youtube had forced its uploader/owner to remove it from each one of its postings at youtube:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g1VNQGsiP8M  FORCED OFF BY YOUTUBE

https://web.archive.org/web/20170428135437/https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g1VNQGsiP8M  Saved in archive.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?app=desktop&v=g1VNQGsiP8M  FORCED OFF BY YOUTUBE

https://web.archive.org/web/20211225000619/https://www.youtube.com/watch?app=desktop&v=g1VNQGsiP8M Saved in archive.

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=g1VNQGsiP8M  FORCED OFF BY YOUTUBE

https://web.archive.org/web/20221030031919/https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=g1VNQGsiP8M  Saved in archive.

The site’s owner explained, on 1 February 2023, that he had been forced by youtube to cancel his videos: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5JYWDjmnMxM; so, I several times archived his explanation, in case youtube will force that video (his explanation) to become removed, too: https://web.archive.org/web/20230304172339/https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5JYWDjmnMxM.

(I have previously explained some of the techniques that the U.S. Government and its allies have employed in order to reduce the size of my own audience.)

There’s lots more about the U.N.’s knowledge that the U.S. Government has been hiring proxy-forces to destroy Syria unless the U.S. Government will succeed in placing the Saud family into control over Syria. And even when the U.N. was presented conclusive evidence that the U.S. had suborned perjury to declare Syria’s Government a violator of chemical-weapons bans, that evidence was simply ignored by U.N. officials.

And the war in Ukraine is at least as much lied-about by the U.S. Government and its colonies (colonies other than the post-2013 U.S.-coup-controlled Ukraine itself, which the U.S. Government is using as the main battleground for its war since 1945 to conquer Russia). And, of course, the U.S. Government is calling “fiction” American investigative journalist Seymour Hersh’s report on how the U.S. President Joe Biden ordered and (in coordination with Norway’s Government) blew up and destroyed the Nord Stream pipelines of Russian gas into Germany.

And, also, America’s entirely lie-based war against Iraq in 2003 was another example of the U.S. Government and its ‘news’-media constantly lying to and treating with unlimited contempt its own population.

There are so many other similar examples, such as the U.S. Government’s having signed to agreements with China’s Government that Taiwan is a part of China, versus the same U.S. Government sending weapons and troops to Taiwan in order to encourage that Chinese province’s local government to declare itself NOT to be a part of China.

There is apparently no limit to the absurdity and profusion of U.S. Government (and its ‘news’-media’s) lies, which are its war against the global public. This is how desperate they now are. Are they desperate enough to launch a nuclear war against Russia and/or China on the basis of their lies? That is the question.

The MSM Never Was Objective—and It Never Questioned Power, Either

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By Iain Davis

Source: The Disillusioned Blogger

In his excellent exposé of the recent decision by the Knight-Cronkite News Lab (KCNL) to advocate journalism that goes beyond objectivity, and in light of the report from the Columbia Journalism Review (CJR) confirming that RussiaGate was fabricated nonsense, genuinely independent researcher, writer and filmmaker James Corbett made a number of very salient points.

As Corbett points out:

As a moment’s sober reflection will immediately reveal, the mouthpiece mockingbirds of the controlled establishment media have never been objective and they have no credibility to damage.

But there is far more to this particular psyop than merely covering up the inconvenient history of media. The new narrative, sold to us in this instance by both KCNL and the CJR, is laying the foundations for a transformation of the media landscape.

The establishment wants us to believe that our “trust” in journalism is a vital component of our democracy—and, moreover, that the state can determine which news media organisation is deserving of our “trust.”

In truth, if democratic principles really matter to us, it is essential that we never trust any “news reports” from any journalist or news provider. Democracy places a duty upon us to be fierce critical thinkers. We should never unquestioningly accept anything we are told.

Journalism Is Story Telling

Every mainstream media (MSM) and “alternative media” outlet presents narratives. They are in the business of telling stories, not simply presenting “objective” facts.

Good journalism expresses an opinion and then cites the evidence that informs it. Well written journalism does this within the engaging and intriguing narratives it weaves. But no journalism is free from the journalist’s own conformation bias, and the tenor of the story is often directed by the editorial policy and allegiances of the publisher.

Pulitzer Prize winner Seymour Hersh’s recent investigation, in which he exposes the likelihood that the US government was behind the destruction of the Nord Stream II pipeline, is only available via independent outlets and on his own Substack. Despite this apparently being a story of enormous magnitude, the MSM seems extremely reluctant to bring it to wider attention. You can read about it only in the so-called “alternative media.”

While some MSM outlets report the official denial of Hersh’s piece, none have lent it much credibility, and many have been quick to cast aspersions on Hersh himself. Yes, the old game of attacking the messenger while avoiding the content of the message.

It is fair to say, based on the Hersh article alone, that no one can really verify his revelations in specific regard to Nord Stream II. He presents no evidence other than anecdotal accounts from unnamed sources. But nowhere in the MSM does there appear to be any interest in pursuing the needed investigation that Hersh’s piece demands.

Thus, it remains a piece of fantastic journalism, most notably because the very specific references it makes to orders given and operations undertaken during the BALTOPS22 exercise can be investigated. Detailed questions can be asked of officials. The blanket denials of Hersh’s story and his precise allegations are nowhere near enough to discredit it.

Given all the circumstantial evidence that also points towards US and NATO aligned culpability, his journalism—a great story—adds real fuel to the fire. This is real investigative journalism. That the story he presents in part reflects his own perspective is irrelevant.

The MSM Was Never Objective

One of the MSM’s main criticisms of the so-called “alternative media” is that it can often be described as activist journalism. This allegation implies that the perspective of the alternative news journalist biases their reporting. But such a criticism is itself a deception, because all journalism reports from a perspective.

There are basic commercial reasons why objectivity doesn’t suit journalism. Consumers of “news” don’t want to simply know what the facts are. They also want a steer on the broader implications of those facts. If that reaffirms their existing world view, all the better for sales. We all want to believe we are right and not be constantly reminded that we are probably wrong.

This is why very few Guardian readers also read the Daily Telegraph or Sun readers the Mirror, even when the presented “facts” are essentially the same. We pay for the perspective we agree with, not simply an objective reporting of the facts.

It is science, not journalism, that strives to achieve absolute objectivity in its pursuit of empirical facts. But the problem with scientific objectivity, beyond its corruption, is that it tends to introduce immense complexity and can be extremely boring to read. It doesn’t lend itself well to stirring up emotions or selling media content.

Other than a few obsessive researchers and the scientists themselves, few of us actually want to read highly technical and sterile scientific papers. We rely upon the journals and the MSM to tell us what the science says, wrongly assuming that their reporting of it is “objective.”

Our faith in the MSM places us in a vulnerable position, especially when it comes to the reporting of hard facts, such as those supposedly revealed by science. If those same alleged “facts” then become the basis for justifying government policy and/or our own decisions, then we had better be damn sure that our belief in the veracity of the story is well-placed.

The evidence that the MSM doesn’t even report the facts accurately is overwhelming. The CJR has exposed RussiaGate as the politically motivated nonsense it was. But this rubbish was relentlessly spewed out on both sides of the Atlantic for more than a year—alongside the equally baseless Skripal yarn—by a majority of MSM outlets. The obvious propaganda was designed to illegitimately demonise the Russian government.

https://odysee.com/$/download/Skripal-Salisbury-Chemical-Weapons-Attack-2018/890ead50a0e7139bbcca98425260c767e938590e

The CJR report demonstrates that today’s Western MSM is a mass purveyor of mis- and disinformation. We are presently regaled with highly spurious Ukraine war propaganda. This is the culmination of the Russophobic Western MSM agenda that has been building for many years.

The scene has seemingly been set, and we have all been psychologically prepared for the current conflict. This makes it easier for us to imagine that the Russians are our enemy.

State propaganda partnerships with the MSM are nothing new. Three examples quickly come to mind:

— British military intelligence were feeding senior broadsheet correspondents “stories” for decades, long before the MSM made up tales about WMD in Iraq to convince the public to accept a fake casus belli for the Iraq War.

— The Church Committee formally exposed the “Operation Mockingbird” network in the US in 1975. The CIA had been manipulating the reporting of the US MSM for many years, feeding selected operative journalists intel that they then reported as “objective journalism.”

— The Mockingbird Operation PBSuccess employed public relations guru Edward Bernays to use the media to overthrow the Guatemalan government on behalf of the United Fruit Company in 1954.

While proven MSM disinformation operations and campaigns, such as these, have purportedly been assigned to the annals of history, disinfo activity is manifestly ongoing. If anything, state control of the MSM narrative for propaganda purposes has reached heights that even Bernays couldn’t have imagined.

State propaganda has been privatised. Governments channel taxpayers’ money to their global corporate partners, which in turn pay the MSM to produce the desired disinformation. During the pseudopandemic we saw whole teams of behavioural scientists at the World Health Organisation global governance level and in various nations states “use” the MSM to unethically deploy applied psychology and disinformation to tackle what the establishment and its MSM hypocritically called “the infodemic.”

When Spi-B—the team of behavioural change experts within the UK’s Scientific Advisory Group for Emergencies (SAGE)—recommended that the UK government should “use the media” to increase “the perceived level of personal threat” to convince British people that they were living through a pandemic, contrary to the evidence of their own eyes, the MSM dutifully obliged. They launched numerous corporate backed terror campaigns upon an unsuspecting public.

We are constantly told by the political class that “press freedom” is an essential part of our democracy. If the MSM really were a pluralistic and free media, it wouldn’t be possible to “use” it for propaganda. There would be too many dissenting articles by investigative MSM journalists to maintain a single, uniform narrative across all outlets simultaneously. But it isn’t a pluralistic and free media and never was, so it is entirely possible for the MSM to be co-opted. What does this say about our alleged democracy?

The so-called “infodemic,” identified by the World Health Organisation as being “just as dangerous” as an alleged global pandemic, included any and all information that questioned the diktats of our “democratic” policymakers. The MSM attacked all dissent—literally without question—on the behalf of governments and intergovernmental authorities and their corporate partners.

The infodemic, according to the establishment, was prompted by the public’s questions about government policy, about “science” as reported by the MSM, and about data that revealed statistical manipulation. The infodemic was also prompted by the MSM looking askance at sceptical scientific papers shared by people who dared question the reported “science” as well as at the millions of people who raised their voices in mass protests. These protests were either ignored by the MSM or the protestors views were distorted and their peaceful demonstrations labelled “extremist.”

There was nothing remotely “objective” about any of this mainstream “news coverage.” Rather, in total obedience to the state, the Western MSM attacked informed opinion, ridiculed all questions and demonised individuals who did not comply. Not because there was any justification for doing so, but because that is the role of the MSM. Objectivity is nowhere in sight, nor has it ever been.

The MSM Has Never Questioned Power

The Knight-Cronkite News Lab (KCNL) goal is to create a “set of standards for trustworthy news.” Indeed, maintaining the public’s “trust” is the overwhelming fixation of the MSM and its government partners. We are urged to place our faith in those who evidently lie to us and suppress facts all the time.

At one point the KCNL noted:

As early as the turbulent 1960s, some younger journalists, especially investigative reporters, began to question what objectivity really meant if it did not challenge power, privilege and inequality.

Similarly, the CJR report on RussiaGate states that “primary missions” of journalism include “informing the public and holding powerful interests accountable.”

We are told that “holding power to account,” or watchdog journalism, is the core principle of journalism. Yet nowhere in the International Federation of Journalists Charter of Ethics or in the UK National Union of Journalists Code of Conduct is there any mention of this alleged principle.

The American Press Association’s (APA) Principles of Journalism does say that journalism must serve as an independent monitor of power. But this “principle” speaks more about defending journalists’ alleged legal “rights” than it does about exposing any wrongdoing:

Journalism has an unusual capacity to serve as watchdog over those whose power and position most affect citizens. The Founders recognized this to be a rampart against despotism when they ensured an independent press; courts have affirmed it; citizens rely on it. As journalists, we have an obligation to protect this watchdog freedom by not demeaning it in frivolous use or exploiting it for commercial gain.

The APA’s watchdog principle is supposedly protected by the government and its courts. It is not a “right,” but rather a permit bestowed upon American journalists by the establishment. This permit can be rescinded. The extent to which journalists in the US can question “power” is based solely on the protection that legacy journalism receives from the institutions it allegedly questions.

Demeaning something as frivolous is precisely what the MSM does when it labels people as conspiracy theorists, as science deniers or as COVID deniers. These attacks are rarely, if ever, based upon any exploration of the evidence. In fact, the labelling system itself is used to omit, obscure or “deny” the evidence.

All the APA’s principles mean is that certain subjects and certain kinds of evidence, characterised as “frivolous,” must not be reported by its members. What is or is not considered “frivolous” is entirely subjective. Given journalism’s legislative “protections,” it seems pretty clear what will be considered “frivolous.” A high degree of subjectivity, not objectivity, is the full extent of the APA members’ ethical commitment to “watchdog” journalism.

We only need look at the history we’ve discussed to understand that the news media barely and rarely holds power to account. Instead, the MSM is more frequently an extension of state and corporate power and is used to control the people through disinformation, omission and misdirection rather than to inform them and question power of their behalf.

This is not to say that good MSM journalism doesn’t exist. But, on those few occasions when MSM journalists do expose state crimes, they pay a terrible price for doing so. Julian Assange is among the small band of journalists who have dared to question power. He currently languishes in a British high-security prison precisely because he did so.

The MSM doesn’t question power when it deceives the public about chemical weapon attacks on behalf of the state. It isn’t holding power to account with its refusal to investigate, or even report, evidence of malfeasance in office. Its ignoring of state crimes can in no way be considered “watchdog freedom.” And it certainly does not act as any kind of watchdog when it simply reports whatever it is ordered to report by a centrally controlled global propaganda network.

We Are the Problem and the Solution

Social media has been lambasted for corralling its users into self-affirming information silos. While this is somewhat concerning, it isn’t anything new. The technological capability of social media to control opinion is an added dimension, to be sure, but the MSM has been doing exactly the same thing for more than a century.

Unfortunately, the MSM is able to propagandise us with relative ease. It does this partly by exploiting our own misconceptions. While we all seem to agree that the Russian and Chinese MSM are state propaganda, we Westerners, for some unknown reason, apparently imagine that our own mainstream media isn’t.

There is, however, a caveat with regard to this apparent gullibility. Research statistics show that there is a remarkable lack of trust in the MSM in the West. Notably, in the US “trust” in the news is as low as 26%. The UK fares little better, at just 34%. “Trust” in the news is higher in Scandinavian countries.

We only need have brief conversations with friends and family to realise that the propaganda does, in fact, work. But what explains this disconnect between our lack of trust in the MSM with our continuing willingness to believe what it tells us?

The answer lies in the greatest achievement of the Western MSM and the parasite class it serves: They have convinced us that our media is free and is pluralistic—this despite it never being true.

Consequently, it seems that while we are wary of spin and propaganda, we refuse to contemplate the likelihood that the MSM is out-and-out lying to us. Perhaps that is because we perceive the MSM as basically serving the public interest—even if we admit to ourselves that it bends the truth a little. Our scepticism does not extend as far as disbelief.

We therefore remain unable to reconcile our credulous acceptance of MSM claims about itself with the reality that we are being misled en masse by that same institution. Cognitive dissonance—the uncomfortable psychological sensation we experience when we hold two or more contradictory thoughts at the same time—may account for our irreconcilable beliefs.

In other words, we are caught between not “trusting” the MSM, on the one hand, and, on the other, our inability to accept the fact that virtually nothing the MSM tells us is true. The implications of this dichotomy are beyond anything we want to contemplate. As a result, we still believe that “the news” is our window on the world.

If you think about it, the idea that all the important global events of the day can be condensed into a single “newspaper” or a 30-minute “evening news” broadcast is quite ridiculous. Even if it were composed of honest, unbiased reports, which it seldom is, “the news” cannot provide us with anything approaching a reasonable understanding of what is actually going on.

Therefore, if we genuinely want to know what’s happening, we have to actively seek information and critically evaluate it ourselves. As James Corbett wrote:

Granted, the realization that all media is constructed for us by someone with an interest in making us believe something is not a happy one for most people. Instead, it is a deeply unpopular realization, because it means we can’t just switch on the evening news, switch off our brain, and expect some totally neutral journalistic saviour to come along and hand us “the news” from on high.

Like it or not, it is our responsibility to think critically about all information, no matter who relays it. This responsibility applies equally to the stories we are fed by the “alternative media.” This article should be read critically! It is, after all, just information that’s being passed along to you.

The Knight-Cronkite News Lab suggests that journalists should give their “readers, viewers, listeners and users valuable information that helps them make better decisions and lead better lives.”

Here, the new breed of MSM journalists, no more nor less objective than their predecessors, has been given the task of reporting “the news” from a value-driven perspective. The aim is to change us by making us “better” people. So what are the values the new breed of journalists are being taught to advocate?

KCNL tell us:

There is broad consensus today about the reality of climate change and the threats that it poses. That may well inform how many resources a newsroom devotes to reporting on the issue as well as any point of view its stories reflect. The same might go for opposition to systemic racism, say, or support for LGBTQ rights. [. . .] One value we believe is worth stating out loud is support for democratic institutions, which are under attack on multiple fronts. Trustworthy news is essential to sustaining a healthy democracy.

Herein lies the problem. Every one of these “values” serves global political agendas and dovetails neatly with government policy and, perhaps most notably, with global governance policy. That is to say, the MSM’s new values are exactly the same as their old values. Their “new” objective, just like the old objective, is to advocate for power, not question it.

Contrary to the KCNL’s claims, democracy is not founded upon our acceptance of whatever we are told by government “institutions.” Rather, it is predicated upon our ability not just to question the state but to limit it. Thus, KCNL’s contention that a “healthy democracy” is one where “democratic institutions” assert sovereignty over us is entirely false.

To point out that these institutions have no authority over us whatsoever is not to attack “democracy.” On the contrary, doing so defends “democracy.” But you will never hear that from the MSM. The MSM’s continuing mission is to maintain the lies that ensure we never realise this “truth.”

It is ironic that the MSM attacks their alternative counterparts for advocacy journalism and yet the MSM’s own apparent solution to the trust issue that preoccupies it is to itself emulate advocacy journalism. The difference? The alternative media is far more likely to advocate the questioning of power, while the MSM looks set to continue advocating for power.

Seeing as how the concept of “news” is, in and of itself, absurd, the suggestion that news should be “trusted” simply adds another layer of misdirection to this new MSM advocacy journalism. So, if our “faith” in the stories we are told is part of the problem, a solution is self-evident. We should abandon any notion of “trust.” We should invest our efforts in being “better” critical thinkers.

The “alternative” media outlet UK Column sums up this point nicely. It asks:

Why should I trust the UK Column? Put simply, you shouldn’t. The question of whether or not to trust a news organisation is a false choice. Making such a choice is promoted by government, the old media, and two new organisation types: the fact checker and the trust provider.

It disenfranchises readers, viewers and listeners. It is based on the principle that if you trust the media organisation you are visiting, there is no need for you to check the information they present. So we ask you not to trust us. Instead, view everything published here with a critical eye. Where possible, primary source material is made available for everything we publish: check it; make up your own mind.

In his previously referenced article, James Corbett provides a list of questions we should all ask ourselves whenever we encounter information offered by any source. We don’t need government or any other “democratic institution” to control information for us, nor we do need to be told what to think about it. We just need to think critically and answer these simple questions to our own satisfaction:

  • Why is this media outlet showing us this report?
  • What interest do they have in making us think a particular way about the issue presented?
  • Can the information in the report be independently confirmed or triangulated from other sources?
  • Whose viewpoint is being shown, and how is that viewpoint portrayed? Whose viewpoint is being excluded? Why?
  • What language is being used to frame the issue?
  • What does the report make us believe about the world?
  • Are we in agreement with the report? Why or why not?

Ultimately, as ever, the choice is yours. You can gather information from any source you wish. If you want to know what the state wants you to believe and what behaviour it expects of you, then go to the MSM. If you want to explore broader criticism of government and its policies, then the more independent “alternative media” provides richer pickings.

Treat those two impostors just the same. There is honest, high-quality journalism in both. There is also propaganda to be found in both. Fortunately, if you answer James Corbett’s suggested questions, you’ll be able to spot the difference more often than not.

The Hunter Biden / Ihor Kolomoïsky affair

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By Thierry Meyssan

Source: VoltaireNet.org

The Biden Administration is finally reacting to the scandals that have arisen from the computer of the president’s son, Hunter Biden. This loser, whose only known activities are those of a junkie and a pimp, managed to become the director of a large gas company; a job he knows nothing about. A man of straw, he signed all sorts of big contracts, in different countries, where he travelled -without right- in official US planes. His father is now launching an operation to cover up his affairs, which has led him to clean up the Ukrainian government.

As time goes on, American voters are turning away from President Joe Biden. Many of those who say they voted for him tell pollsters they regret it. Some say that if they had known about the Hunter Biden affair beforehand, they would never have trusted his father as president.

During the presidential election campaign, the Republican Party filed a lawsuit with the Federal Election Commission because the social networks Twitter and Facebook censored thousands of accounts that relayed the New York Post’s revelations about Hunter Biden’s computer [1]. The seizure was dismissed, but the Twitter Files, revealed by Elon Musk, attest in detail that the FBI and an intelligence agency (probably the CIA) had intervened with Twitter and Facebook to censor this information.

I was astonished that in the United States, the son of a vice-president, then president, could travel in official planes to the four corners of the world, giving the impression of being an official personality when he was only a junkie [2]. This abuse was, in my opinion, a sign of the decadence of the US Empire.

However, the new Republican majority in the House of Representatives intends to carry out various investigations, notably on Joe Biden’s involvement in his son’s dirty dealings. If these investigations were to succeed, they could call into question the independence of the President of the United States and therefore lead to his impeachment.

It should be remembered that when Joe Biden was Barack Obama’s vice-president, 7 million dollars in bribes were paid to the Attorney General of Ukraine to keep his nose out of Burisma’s affairs. Later, this same prosecutor, who had become too greedy, was ousted by the Verkhovna Rada (Parliament) under pressure from the United States, the European Union, the IMF and the World Bank, which wanted to save the owner of Burisma and former Prime Minister Yulia Tymoshenko at a lower price.

In a puritanical country like the United States, public opinion first focused on Hunter Biden’s frequent use of prostitutes and his drug use before it became clear that his financial affairs were much more important.

Now the Hunter Biden affair, which had been covered up by very senior members of the intelligence community, for whom the whole saga was “Russian disinformation” [3], is likely to turn the tables. It is no longer appropriate to deny the facts, so much so that Harvard University has just announced that it is closing its Technology and Social Change Project, a structure that had been constantly assimilating the existence of Hunter Biden’s laptop to Fake news [4].

Until now, the citizens who cared about this affair were only “conspiracy theorists”, “extreme right-wing” followers of President Trump and readers of the gutter press. On the contrary, almost the entire ruling class had “discerned” that it was just a popular rumor, Fake News. On the one hand, there were the readers of the New York Post, which had revealed the affair [5], on the other hand, those of the New York Times, which kept on denying it.

Among the many financial affairs of the president’s son, two stand out. The first concerns a Chinese spy. It could reveal influence peddling in the service of a foreign power. While the second concerns his activities in Ukraine and particularly his appointment and that of his friend Devon Archer (former roommate of Christopher Heinz, John Kerry’s son-in-law, during their university period) to the board of directors of the oil company Burisma. This is the group that President Vladimir Putin denounced as “a bunch of drug addicts and neo-Nazis” [6] when he called on his armies to end the civil war in Ukraine under UN Security Council Resolution 2202.

This week two seemingly unrelated events have shaken things up. They were probably imagined by or with David Brock, the undisputed agitprop specialist on whom President Biden relied in 2016 against President Trump. Ill, he had disappeared, he is now back [7]

Hunter Biden has hired one of the most famous American lawyers, Abbe Lowell. He has requested a criminal investigation and sent letters to all the people who played a role in the disclosure of the contents of his client’s laptop, including former New York City Mayor Rudy Giuliani and former Donald Trump advisor Steve Bannon. He accused them of violating the privacy of his client, urged them to retract the conclusions they drew from the contents of the computer, and thus bury the case. At the same time, a delegation from the Departments of Defense and State, as well as USAID, went to Ukraine to advise the Zelensky government to clean up some of the mess [8]. Officially, it was only to ensure that the money offered at the expense of the US taxpayers was not misappropriated by corrupt officials. Unofficially, it was only a matter of eliminating the annoying pawns without touching the others. In two days, fourteen personalities resigned in a chain. Five regional governors (Valentin Reznichenko (Dnipropetrovsk), Oleksander Starukh (Zaporizhia), Dmytro Zhivytsky Surya), Yaroslav Yanshayevich (Kherson) and Oleksiy Kulba (Kiev)), four deputy ministers (including Viacheslav Shapovalov (Defense) and Vasyl Lozynsky (Infrastructure)) and two heads of a government agency left their posts, in addition to the deputy head of the presidential administration (Kyrylo Tymoshenko) and the deputy prosecutor general (Oleksiy Symonenko).

The Western media reported faithfully on this major sweep. But the most important thing happened on the 3rd day and very few people talked about it. SBU troops searched the home of oligarch Ihor Kolomoysky, sponsor of both President Volodymyr Zelensky and the “integral nationalists”, but above all owner of… Burisma Holding, which he had bought from Mykola Zlochevskyi, in 2011, i.e. before Hunter Biden entered it. Of course the Anticorruption Action Center’s article on this change of ownership has long since been removed from its site [9].

Technically, Ihor Kolomoysky is not being prosecuted for the assassinations he ordered, but for rigging a gas lot auction involving two deputy energy ministers for nearly a million dollars.

Arresting mafia boss Ihor Kolomoysky removes the traces of many problems. He is the key witness to link President Volodymyr Zelensky with the “integral nationalists”, i.e. between a defender of democracy and anti-democrats, and between a Jewish personality and mass murderers of Jews. For the “President’s Men”, Kolomoysky is the main Ukrainian personality who can be held accountable for the corruption of Hunter Biden and, eventually, Joe Biden.

It will be remembered that in 2019 the US Secretary of Energy Rick Perry reportedly informed Rudy Giuliani about President Zelensky’s confidences during his inauguration ceremony about Hunter Biden [10]. President Donald Trump then asked the Ukrainians for information about their investigations. But the affair was leaked, President Trump was accused of acting out of revenge, and a new impeachment procedure was launched against him.

The Hunter Biden affair has many facets. One thing is to erase his role in Burisma, another is to erase his role in the activities of US military laboratories in Ukraine. These activities were carried out through Rosemont Seneca Technology Partners (RSTP), one of his companies that he created with Christopher Heinz, son-in-law of the special presidential envoy for the climate John Kerry, who joined him on the board of Burisma [11].

[1] «Republican National Committe Letter to the Federal Election Commission», Octobrer 16, 2020.

[2] « La décadence de l’Empire états-unien », par Thierry Meyssan, Réseau Voltaire, 6 septembre 2022.

[3] “Public Statement on the Hunter Biden Emails”, Voltaire Network, 19 October 2020.

[4] «Harvard pulls the plug on disinformation research project led by Hunter Biden laptop skeptic», Yael Halon, Fox News, February 3, 2023. «Harvard shuts down ’misinformation’ research program and cuts ties with director who was skeptical of Hunter Biden laptop story (but claims it was for ’bureaucratic reasons’)», Will Potter, Daily Mail, February 3, 2023.

[5] “Smoking-gun email reveals how Hunter Biden introduced Ukrainian businessman to VP dad”, Emma-Jo Morris & Gabrielle Fonrouge ; “WH press secretary locked out of Twitter for sharing Post’s Hunter Biden story” , Steven Nelson, New York Post, October 14, 2020.

[6] “A gang of drug addicts and neo-nazis”, by Thierry Meyssan, Voltaire Network, 5 March 2022.

[7] “David Brock, Clintons agitprop man, zeroes in to rescue the Bidens”, Voltaire Network, 2 December 2022.

[8] «Defense, State, and USAID Inspectors General Visit Kyiv», Department of Defense Office of Inspector Genral, January 31, 2023.

[9] « Kings of Ukrainian Gas », Anticorruption Action Center, 26 août 2012.

[10] “WSJ News Exclusive“, Timothy Puko & Rebecca Ballhaus, October 16, 2019, Wall Street Journal.

[11] «Hunter Biden Bio Firm Partnered With Ukrainian Researchers ‘Isolating Deadly Pathogens’ Using Funds From Obama’s Defense Department», Natalie Winters & Raheem J. Kassam, The National Pulse, March 24, 2022.

Sy Hersh and The Way We Live Now

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By Craig Murray

Source: Craig Murray Blog

It is a clear indicator of the disappearance of freedom from our so-called western democracies, that Sy Hersh, arguably the greatest living journalist, cannot get this monumental revelation on the front of the Washington Post or New York Times, but has to self-publish on the net.

Hersh tells the story of the US destruction of the Nordstream pipelines in forensic detail, giving dates, times, method and military units involved. He also outlines the importance of the Norwegian armed forces working alongside the US Navy in the operation.

One point Sy does not much stress, but it is worth saying more about, is that Norway and the USA are of course the two countries who have benefitted financially, to an enormous degree, from blowing up the pipeline.

Both not only have gained huge export surpluses from the jump in gas prices, but Norway has directly replaced Russian gas to the tune of some $40 billion per year. From 2023 the United States will appear in that list in second place behind Norway, following the opening in the last two months of two new Liquefied Natural Gas terminals in Germany, built to replace Russian gas with US and Qatari supplies.

So Russia lost out massively financially from the destruction of Nordstream and who benefited? The USA and Norway, the two countries who blew up the pipeline.

But of course, this war is nothing to do with money or hydrocarbons and is all about freedom and democracy…

To return to Hersh’s account, particularly interesting are the series of decisions taken to avoid classification of the operation in various ways which would require it to be reported to Congress. In terms of United States history, this ought to be a big deal.

For the Executive to commit what is an act of war without the approval of the Legislature is fundamentally unconstitutional. But that is one of those quaint remnants of democracy that the neo-liberal elite consensus can quietly sidestep nowadays.

Hersh sets out the well known background in compelling detail,  including the fact that, from Biden down, the Americans effectively announced what they were going to do, openly.

But what most worries me about the entire story is the unanimous complicity of the mainstream media in ignoring the completely obvious.

The media line, parroted here relentlessly by the BBC and corporate media, was  that the Russians had probably themselves blown up the pipeline on which they had expended such great resources and three decades of intense diplomatic activity, and which was to be the key to Russia’s single most valuable source of income for the next 40 years.

This was always quite literally incredible. You would have to be deranged to believe it.

It actually taught me not just that we truly are in the realm of totalitarianism and the Big Lie, but I learnt something very important about how the Big Lie works.

The secret is not that people genuinely believe an outrageous claim. The secret is that people do genuinely believe that they are in a battle of good against evil, and it is necessary to accept the narrative being promoted, in the interests of fighting evil.

Don’t question, just follow. If you do question, you are promoting evil.

I am sure that is how it works.

State and corporate stenographer journalists are actually intelligent individuals. If they thought about it, they would realise that the narrative that Russia blew up its own pipeline is obvious nonsense.

But they are convinced it is morally wrong to think about it.

Which is why none of them challenged the equally mad claims that Russia was repeatedly shelling its own forces occupying the Zaporizhzhia nuclear power station, and indeed is why none of them challenged the utterly risible official version of the Skripal story.

I previously told the anecdote from when I worked in the Foreign and Commonwealth Office and asked a good friend if he really believed the misinformatioin on Iraqi WMD with which he was involved.

He replied by referring to the video game Championship Manager (now renamed Football Manager), which we used to play together. He said when he was in the game, it was immersive, he was manager of Liverpool, and it fully absorbed him.

Similarly, when he walked through the FCO gates, the world of the intelligence reports was immersive and Iraq did have these WMDs inside that world. He worked in the “reality” of the FCO. Once he left in the evening, he lived in a different reality, the world of us in the pub.

I do know of one or two journalists bright enough to detach their professional output from what they really think, in a similar way. (I once had a conversation along these lines with Jeremy Bowen in Tashkent.)

Most however don’t think like this. They simply think that all right thinking people support the historic struggle against the evil Russians, so it must be right to read out the propaganda without thinking too much about it.

Those of us critical of the aggressive promotion of war in Europe, are not only barred from all mainstream media and confined to corners of the internet, and even then heavily suppressed on social media (which is why Sy Hersh’s article does not have the scores of millions of readers it merits).

We can’t even obtain freedom of assembly.

Two established left wing venues have cancelled the No 2 Nato meeting I am addressing in London on 25 February. Conway Hall’s reasons for cancellation included threats to funding and fears for the safety of staff.

We are now reduced to a guerrilla meeting, the Central London venue for which will not be announced until the evening before.

Is this really a democracy, where it is not possible for dissidents to hold a public meeting without secrecy, subterfuge and hiding from supporters of the state?

I do urge you to come along on the day, whatever your views on the subject, to support the right to freedom of speech.

I have a different view from perhaps all of the other speakers, on the legitimacy of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, which I oppose.

But I also oppose NATO expansion which is an underlying cause of the war, and indeed oppose the existence of NATO itself.

NATO is a war machine which sucks resources from working people to benefit the military industrial complex, and unleashes devastating destruction on developing states which do not make their natural resources available to western billionaire elites.

It is also a fundamental node of the propaganda apparatus which manipulates and controls our society, particularly as counter narrative and dissident thought is now rigorously and systematically excluded.

There is no longer an Overton window of permitted debate. It has narrowed and should be renamed the Overton letterbox.

One of those small difficult ones right down at the bottom of the door.  With a very fierce spring, and snarling dogs guarding it.

Did the US Blow Up Nord Stream If There is No Media to Report It?

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“The Norwegian navy was quick to find the right spot, in the shallow water a few miles off Denmark’s Bornholm Island” (Image: Seymour Hersh Substack)

By Margaret Kimberley

Source: Black Agenda Report

A respected investigative journalist explains how the U.S. sabotaged the Nord Stream pipelines. But corporate media working in service to the state ignore the story and endanger the world.

“If a tree falls in the forest and no one is around to hear it, does it make a sound?” The idea behind this old thought experiment should not be relegated to the realm of philosophy. Present day reality can be used in place of hypothetical falling trees. If the United States blows up the Nord Stream pipelines but the media ignores it, did the attack ever happen?

Seymour Hersh has all of the credentials that usually give one gravitas in the world of journalism. As a freelance reporter he exposed the U.S. army’s 1969 massacre of Vietnamese civilians at My Lai and won a Pulitzer Prize for his efforts. He later worked at the New York Times and reported on high profile stories such as the Watergate revelations, and the CIA coup against the government of Chile. In 2004 Hersh exposed torture of Iraqis at Abu Ghraib prison for The New Yorker.

None of these accomplishments helped Hersh when he recently provided evidence of what had long been obvious, that the Biden administration blew up the Nord Stream pipelines on September 26, 2022. In a 5,200 word article published on his Substack entitled How America Took Out the Nord Stream Pipeline , Hersh utilized highly placed sources who presented as one might say the “receipts” of how the deed was done.

Joe Biden and his foreign policy team at the State Department, National Security Agency, and the Central Intelligence Agency first discussed the operation one year before carrying it out, and months before Russia’s special military operation in Ukraine began. The fear of deepening integration between Russia and Germany was the cause of alarm. They wanted to end Europe’s resource and financial connections to Russia, and decided that exploding the means of transporting natural gas was a good idea. According to Hersh’s source(s) the plot was carried out with help from Norway, a NATO member nation that made itself the sole source of natural gas in the region by helping in the attack. The current Secretary General of NATO, Jens Stoltenberg, was formerly a prime minister of Norway.

The U.S. had the motive, means, and opportunity and spent many months confessing to the plot and then to the crime after it took place. In February 2022 Biden pledged to stop the Nord Stream 2 project and added for good measure, “I promise you we’ll be able to do it.” After the explosion Secretary of State Antony Blinken said , “It’s a tremendous opportunity to once and for all end the dependence on Russian energy.” Under Secretary of State Victoria Nuland smugly said at a Senate hearing, “Senator Cruz, like you I am and I think the administration is very gratified to know that Nord Stream 2 is now as you like to say, a hunk of metal at the bottom of the sea.”

Hersh’s article was a sensation online when it was published on February 8, 2023 but it has been ignored by major corporate media ever since. One has to ask if it really happened when the New York Times, Washington Post and television networks ignore what ought to be a huge news story.

It isn’t hard to understand why the same individuals and institutions who act as state mouthpieces would want to sweep Hersh’s reporting under the rug. For months they have acted as scribes instead of as journalists. The days when they would compete to break a scoop that a president wanted covered up are long gone. They now go along with establishment narratives, and promote imperialism as much as the people they are tasked with covering and confronting. Not one person asked about Hersh’s revelations at the daily white house press briefing the day after it was published.

Not only have the media ignored what Hersh reported but Republicans who claim to oppose Biden and the Democrats have also been silent. There are impeachable offenses committed in Hersh’s account but the people who should be asking questions have demurred. Republicans were as eager as Democrats to end Nord Stream’s existence. The word collusion which was bandied about so much in recent years is apropos here and that means the Hersh story is now at the bottom of the sea politically.

Biden is the fox in charge of the hen house, preparing to ask congress for the biggest defense budget in history, in large part to replenish the weapons used in Ukraine. The people who are asked to accept austerity for themselves are largely ignorant of how the conflict started and why their money is used for every purpose except for those that benefit them.

The Nord Stream sabotage is not the only news story which has been deep sized. The decision to sabotage Nord Stream was very reckless, and a sign that Biden and his team are willing to risk a wider war in order to do what they cannot, weaken Russia or get Vladimir Putin out of office, or destroy Russia economically. At the very moment that people in this country need to know the hard truth, it is being kept from them.

So complete is the indoctrination that Biden’s obvious instability is never discussed, even when the public see it for themselves unfiltered. At the State of the Union address he made this odd remark , “Name me a world leader who’d change places with Xi Jinping! Name me one! Name me one!” The strange outburst was never given the attention that it deserved.

The media are behaving in a manner that violates their own ethics and that may in fact be criminal. Lest anyone forget, the post-World War II Nuremberg trials charged the German press with committing “propaganda as an instrument of war.” Now in the nuclear age the media in what is known as the “collective west” are acting in a similar fashion, covering up crimes and repeating lies as truth in the name of making and continuing war.

The Biden administration did sabotage Nord Stream whether the media say so or not. Their lack of attention doesn’t change facts, but it does disappear them and that is incredibly dangerous to the entire world.