Category Archives: propaganda

A State of Never-Ending Crisis: The Government Is Fomenting Mass Hysteria

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By John & Nisha Whitehead

Source: The Rutherford Institute

“This country has been having a nationwide nervous breakdown since 9/11. A nation of people suddenly broke, the market economy goes to shit, and they’re threatened on every side by an unknown, sinister enemy. But I don’t think fear is a very effective way of dealing with things—of responding to reality. Fear is just another word for ignorance.”—Hunter S. Thompson, gonzo journalist

We have become guinea pigs in a ruthlessly calculated, carefully orchestrated, chillingly cold-blooded experiment in how to control a population and advance a political agenda without much opposition from the citizenry.

This is mind-control in its most sinister form.

With alarming regularity, the nation is being subjected to a spate of violence that terrorizes the public, destabilizes the country, and gives the government greater justifications to crack down, lock down, and institute even more authoritarian policies for the so-called sake of national security without many objections from the citizenry.

Take this latest shooting in Nashville, Tenn.

The 28-year-old shooter (a clearly troubled transgender individual in possession of several military-style weapons) opened fire in a Christian elementary school, killing three children and three adults.

Already, fingers are being pointed and battle lines are being drawn.

Those who want safety at all costs are clamoring for more gun control measures (if not at an outright ban on assault weapons for non-military, non-police personnel), widespread mental health screening of the general population, more threat assessments and behavioral sensing warnings, more CCTV cameras with facial recognition capabilities, more “See Something, Say Something” programs aimed at turning Americans into snitches and spies, more metal detectors and whole-body imaging devices at soft targets, more roaming squads of militarized police empowered to do random bag searches, more fusion centers to centralize and disseminate information to law enforcement agencies, and more surveillance of what Americans say and do, where they go, what they buy and how they spend their time.

This is all part of the Deep State’s master plan.

Ask yourselves: why are we being bombarded with crises, distractions, fake news and reality TV politics? We’re being conditioned like lab mice to subsist on a steady diet of bread-and-circus politics and an endless spate of crises.

Caught up in this “crisis of the now,” the average person has a hard time keeping up with and remembering all of the “events,” manufactured or otherwise, which occur like clockwork in order to keep us distracted, deluded, amused, and insulated from reality.

As investigative journalist Mike Adams points out:

“This psychological bombardment is waged primarily via the mainstream media which assaults the viewer by the hour with images of violence, war, emotions and conflict. Because the human nervous system is hard wired to focus on immediate threats accompanied by depictions of violence, mainstream media viewers have their attention and mental resources funneled into the never-ending ‘crisis of the NOW’ from which they can never have the mental breathing room to apply logic, reason or historical context.”

Professor Jacques Ellul studied this phenomenon of overwhelming news, short memories and the use of propaganda to advance hidden agendas. “One thought drives away another; old facts are chased by new ones,” wrote Ellul.

All the while, the government continues to amass more power and authority over the citizenry.

When we’re being bombarded with wall-to-wall news coverage and news cycles that change every few days, it’s difficult to stay focused on one thing—namely, holding the government accountable to abiding by the rule of law—and the powers-that-be understand this.

Yet as John Lennon reminds us, “nothing is real,” especially not in the world of politics.

In other words, it’s all fake, i.e., manufactured, i.e., manipulated to distort reality.

Much like the fabricated universe in Peter Weir’s 1998 film The Truman Show, in which a man’s life is the basis for an elaborately staged television show aimed at selling products and procuring ratings, the political scene in the United States has devolved over the years into a carefully calibrated exercise in how to manipulate, polarize, propagandize and control a population.

This is the magic of the reality TV programming that passes for politics today.

As long as we are distracted, entertained, occasionally outraged, always polarized but largely uninvolved and content to remain in the viewer’s seat, we’ll never manage to present a unified front against tyranny (or government corruption and ineptitude) in any form.

The more that is beamed at us, the more inclined we are to settle back in our comfy recliners and become passive viewers rather than active participants as unsettling, frightening events unfold.

Reality and fiction merge as everything around us becomes entertainment fodder.

We don’t even have to change the channel when the subject matter becomes too monotonous. That’s taken care of for us by the programmers (the corporate media).

“Living is easy with eyes closed,” says Lennon, and that’s exactly what reality TV that masquerades as American politics programs the citizenry to do: navigate the world with their eyes shut.

As long as we’re viewers, we’ll never be doers.

Studies suggest that the more reality TV people watch—and I would posit that it’s all reality TV, entertainment news included—the more difficult it becomes to distinguish between what is real and what is carefully crafted farce.

“We the people” are watching a lot of TV.

On average, Americans spend five hours a day watching television. By the time we reach age 65, we’re watching more than 50 hours of television a week, and that number increases as we get older. And reality TV programming consistently captures the largest percentage of TV watchers every season by an almost 2-1 ratio.

This doesn’t bode well for a citizenry able to sift through masterfully-produced propaganda in order to think critically about the issues of the day, whether it’s fake news peddled by government agencies or foreign entities.

Those who watch reality shows tend to view what they see as the “norm.” Thus, those who watch shows characterized by lying, aggression and meanness not only come to see such behavior as acceptable and entertaining but also mimic the medium.

This holds true whether the reality programming is about the antics of celebrities in the White House, in the board room, or in the bedroom.

It’s a phenomenon called “humilitainment.”

A term coined by media scholars Brad Waite and Sara Booker, “humilitainment” refers to the tendency for viewers to take pleasure in someone else’s humiliation, suffering and pain.

“Humilitainment” largely explains not only why American TV watchers are so fixated on reality TV programming but how American citizens, largely insulated from what is really happening in the world around them by layers of technology, entertainment, and other distractions, are being programmed to accept the brutality, surveillance and dehumanizing treatment of the American police state as things happening to other people.

The ramifications for the future of civic engagement, political discourse and self-government are incredibly depressing and demoralizing.

This is what happens when an entire nation—bombarded by reality TV programming, government propaganda and entertainment news—becomes systematically desensitized and acclimated to the trappings of a government that operates by fiat and speaks in a language of force.

Ultimately, the reality shows, the entertainment news, the surveillance society, the militarized police, and the political spectacles have one common objective: to keep us divided, distracted, imprisoned, and incapable of taking an active role in the business of self-government.

Look behind the political spectacles, the reality TV theatrics, the sleight-of-hand distractions and diversions, and the stomach-churning, nail-biting drama, and you will find there is a method to the madness.

How do you change the way people think? You start by changing the words they use.

In totalitarian regimes—a.k.a. police states—where conformity and compliance are enforced at the end of a loaded gun, the government dictates what words can and cannot be used.

In countries where the police state hides behind a benevolent mask and disguises itself as tolerance, the citizens censor themselves, policing their words and thoughts to conform to the dictates of the mass mind.

Even when the motives behind this rigidly calibrated reorientation of societal language appear well-intentioned—discouraging racism, condemning violence, denouncing discrimination and hatred—inevitably, the end result is the same: intolerance, indoctrination, infantilism, the chilling of free speech and the demonizing of viewpoints that run counter to the cultural elite.

Labelling something as “fake news” is a masterful way of dismissing truth that may run counter to the ruling power’s own narrative.

As George Orwell recognized, “In times of universal deceit, telling the truth is a revolutionary act.”

Orwell understood only too well the power of language to manipulate the masses. In Orwell’s 1984, Big Brother does away with all undesirable and unnecessary words and meanings, even going so far as to routinely rewrite history and punish “thoughtcrimes.”

In this dystopian vision of the future, the Thought Police serve as the eyes and ears of Big Brother, while the Ministry of Peace deals with war and defense, the Ministry of Plenty deals with economic affairs (rationing and starvation), the Ministry of Love deals with law and order (torture and brainwashing), and the Ministry of Truth deals with news, entertainment, education and art (propaganda). The mottos of Oceania: WAR IS PEACE, FREEDOM IS SLAVERY, and IGNORANCE IS STRENGTH.

Orwell’s Big Brother relied on Newspeak to eliminate undesirable words, strip such words as remained of unorthodox meanings and make independent, non-government-approved thought altogether unnecessary.

Where we stand now is at the juncture of Oldspeak (where words have meanings, and ideas can be dangerous) and Newspeak (where only that which is “safe” and “accepted” by the majority is permitted).

Truth is often lost when we fail to distinguish between opinion and fact, and that is the danger we now face as a society. Anyone who relies exclusively on television/cable news hosts and political commentators for actual knowledge of the world is making a serious mistake.

Unfortunately, since Americans have by and large become non-readers, television has become their prime source of so-called “news.” This reliance on TV news has given rise to such popular news personalities who draw in vast audiences that virtually hang on their every word.

In our media age, these are the new powers-that-be.

Yet while these personalities often dispense the news like preachers used to dispense religion, with power and certainty, they are little more than conduits for propaganda and advertisements delivered in the guise of entertainment and news.

Given the preponderance of news-as-entertainment programming, it’s no wonder that viewers have largely lost the ability to think critically and analytically and differentiate between truth and propaganda, especially when delivered by way of fake news criers and politicians.

The bottom line is simply this: Americans should beware of letting others—whether they be television news hosts, political commentators or media corporations—do their thinking for them.

A populace that cannot think for themselves is a populace with its backs to the walls: mute in the face of elected officials who refuse to represent us, helpless in the face of police brutality, powerless in the face of militarized tactics and technology that treat us like enemy combatants on a battlefield, and naked in the face of government surveillance that sees and hears all.

As I make clear in my book Battlefield America: The War on the American People and in its fictional counterpart The Erik Blair Diaries, it’s time to change the channel, tune out the reality TV show, and push back against the real menace of the police state.

If not, if we continue to sit back and lose ourselves in political programming, we will remain a captive audience to a farce that grows more absurd by the minute.

Substack: Dead Man Walking

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The crowning propaganda achievement of the next phase of authoritarian eradication of free speech is the theatrical takedown of Jack Teixeira.

By Kurt Nimmo

Source: Kurt Nimmo Substack

Substack’s days are numbered. The email newsletter platform is increasingly under attack, most recently by the ADL. The organization wrote on April 3 that Substack “continues to attract extremists and conspiracy theorists who routinely use the site to profit from spreading antisemitism, misinformation, disinformation and hate speech.”

The latest salvo by ADL against the First Amendment dovetails with a congressional push to further erode liberty with its draconian RESTRICT Act. There are a number of tweets that encapsulate the latest threat to liberty, but Substack no longer allows tweet embeds, thanks to an absurd ego-colliding tiff between Substack CEO Chris Best and Twitter boss, Elon Musk.

The RESTRICT Act is dressed up as a response to Tik Tok and China. Contrary to this propaganda, it will be used primarily to sanitize the internet and squash (and criminalize) all speech diverting from USG narratives.

“The Restrict Act Completes the Overthrow of the US Constitution,” writes Paul Craig Roberts. “The purpose is to silence all dissent from official explanations. Truth is criminalized. Propaganda and lies will reign supreme and unchallenged. The Matrix will be complete.”

Connor O’Keeffe writes for the Mises Institute,

With its vague language, the bill gives the government much leeway in defining what qualifies as illegal information. We’ve already seen government officials and their friends in media conflate antiestablishment arguments with foreign disinformation. They’ve even falsely labelled accurate news stories as foreign disinformation. It’s not hard to see these same people using the powers granted to them by the RESTRICT Act to criminalize certain dissenting views under the guise of counterintelligence.

The crowning propaganda achievement of the next phase of authoritarian control over free speech is the theatrical SWAT takedown of 21-year-old patsy Jack Teixeira, a low-level National Guard airman that, according to The Washington Post, somehow managed to get his hands on highly classified CIA and DOD documents. This is highly improbable, but then a blindsided American public is routinely fed improbable lies, exaggerations, and omissions by the USG and its corporate propaganda media.

CNN describes the event as a “carefully choreographed arrest,” and I’d agree with that assessment, although not as a result of the “Biden administration’s scramble” to contain sensitive leaks. The theatrical takedown of Mr. Teixeira is a propaganda event designed to bolster further eradication of dissent and grease the skids for the passage of RESTRICT.

The Washington Post has a documented history of working with the CIA to disseminate propaganda, so when we learn that the newspaper “wrote about the presence of problematic content on Substack, noting its use by spreaders of false information,” according to the ADL, we know for certain Substack will be brought to heel. (For more on the CIA’s takeover of the media, see The CIA and the Press: When the Washington Post Ran the CIA’s Propaganda Network, by Jeffrey St. Clair and Alexander Cockburn).

Add to this the Digital Services Act. It is “the EU’s latest incoming tech rulebook requiring them to stamp out illegal content on their platforms… including social media giants like Facebook, Instagram, TikTok and Twitter. These include quickly taking down flagged illegal content, including hate speech,” Politico reported last October. The corporate propaganda conduit conflated “hate speech” (that is, speech contrary to the narratives of the state) with “child pornography and terrorist videos.”

According to Slate, the Digital Services Act (DSA),

while written to protect EU residents, will almost certainly lead social media firms to change their moderation policies worldwide. Thus, with the DSA, the EU will effectively be doing what the First Amendment ostensibly prohibits our own government from doing: regulating the editorial judgments made by social media platforms on which Americans communicate with each other.

The jaws of the authoritarian vice are tightening. In the near future, the ability to express your opinion will be terminated if it runs counter to official government narratives. All avenues of expression are to be tightly monitored, moderated and censored at the behest of the state.

“The Biden administration is looking at expanding how it monitors social media sites and chatrooms after U.S. intelligence agencies failed to spot classified Pentagon documents circulating online for weeks,” NBC News reported on April 12. “The administration is now looking at expanding the universe of online sites that intelligence agencies and law enforcement authorities track.”

Undoubtedly, this will include Substack, one of the last remaining platforms where free speech is permissible without the heavy-handed interference of the state, and the narrowly focused and highly politicized censorship agenda of the ADL and other anti-First Amendment organizations.

Fox News Decision to settle Dominion lawsuit for more than three-quarters of a billion dollars makes no sense

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By Paul Craig Roberts

Source: PaulCraigRoberts.org

Something fishy here.  

First, corporate executives don’t give away $787 million of shareholders’ money without a test of the claim in court.  The uncontested amount is so large that one wonders if Fox News itself paid it or whether this almost $800 million was a gift funneled through an uncontested lawsuit to fund Dominion by our ruling elites. Once elections are determined by how voting machines are programmed, the people are disenfranchised.

Second, it is not defamation to report the news.  Tucker Carlson reported the claims of experts.  That is news reporting.  Dominion’s defamation lawsuit should have been filed against the experts.  It wasn’t, because the experts had the evidence.

Third, Experts supplied evidence that the Dominion voting machines could be programmed to count votes differently from how the votes were cast; experts supplied evidence that the machines could be hacked; experts supplied evidence that the voting machines were connected to the Internet.  Fox News could have called these experts as expert witnesses. By agreeing to settle, Fox News refused the evidence its day in court.  Why?

A possible explanation is that Fox News, voluntarily or involuntarily, participated in an orchestration that established the precedent that reporting news different from the narrative, or news that is unfavorable to a person, company, or government institution, is defamation.  Think about what this means.  A prosecutor who charges a person with a crime has defamed the person.  Truth becomes unreportable. Investigative reporter Seymour Hersh could be charged for defamation, and for being a Russian agent, for reporting that the US government destroyed the Nord Stream pipeline. 

When we see the few truth-tellers who are the stars of their organizations jettisoned–Tucker Carlson from Fox News, Matt Taibbi from Rolling Stone, Glenn Greenwald from The Intercept, James O’Keefe from Project Veritas, President Trump charged under a non-existent law, and Wikileaks’ Julian Assange imprisoned for a decade without due process, we must face the fact that there is an organized conspiracy to suppress truth.  We are experiencing the completion of The Matrix in which expressed doubt or even unspoken suspicion of official narratives are criminal offenses.  

Truth-tellers receive almost nonexistent support.  The inescapable conclusion is that in the Western world truth has no future.

Tyranny is upon us.

Don’t Let Them Memory-Hole This 

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By Jeffrey A. Tucker

Source: Brownstone Institute

On a video podcast the other day, I made reference to the lockdown orders of March 2020. The host turned off the recording. He said it was fine to talk about this subject but from now on please refer to “the events of March 2020” with no specifics. 

Otherwise, it will be taken down by YouTube and Facebook. He needs those platforms for reach, and reach is necessary for his business model. 

I complied, but I was spooked. Are we really now in the position that talking about what happened to us is verboten on mainstream venues? Sadly, that seems to be where we headed. In big and small ways, and throughout the culture and the whole world, we are bit by bit being trained to forget and hence not learn and thus repeat the whole thing. 

This makes no sense since nearly every public issue in play today traces to those fateful days and the fallout thereof, including censorship, the entrenchment of industry-government oligarchs, the corruption of media and tech, the educational upheaval, the abuse of courts and law, and the developing financial and banking crisis. 

And yet hardly anyone wants to speak about the topic frankly. It is too upsetting. There is too much at stake. We cannot risk being canceled, the single greatest fear of every aspirational professional in today’s world. Plus too many powerful people were in on it and don’t want to admit it. It would appear that the whole subject is being memoryholed in ways of which they all approve. 

For nearly two years, or longer, respectable intellectuals knew not to dissent from the prevailing norms and challenge the whole machinery. This was true of Washington think tanks, which went on their merry way from March 2020 either celebrating the “public health response” or just remaining quiet. The same was true of the leadership of major political parties and third parties. 

Most religious leaders stayed quiet too, even as their doors were padlocked for as long as 2 holiday seasons. Civic organizations played along. If you thought that the job of the ACLU was to defend civil liberties, you were wrong: they one day decided that lockdowns, mandatory masks, and forced shots were essential to their mission. 

So many were compromised over 3 years. These same people now just want the whole subject to go away. We find ourselves in an odd position, having experienced the biggest trauma in our lives and in many generations and yet there is precious little open talk about it. Brownstone was established to fill this void but we’ve become a target as a result. 

The search engines have been gamed for the better part of 3 years to keep the science channeled in only one direction. If web platforms step out of line, it is easy enough for search engines and social-media companies to tag them as problematic and thus throttle their reach. But for Substackers – and they are being targeted now too – it would be hard to find out anything other than what the oligarchs want you to believe. 

This silent treatment is filtering down to every aspect of our lives and becoming entrenched in the political culture too. Here is an example from this week. 

When Donald Trump returned from his theatrical and ridiculous indictment on nothing in New York, he flew immediately back to Mar-a-Lago where he told his story to people gathered in a pastiche-baroque ballroom. He told of the fake news, the attempted impeachments for Russia and Ukraine, the plots and schemes, and onward to the fake ballots and the FBI raid on his home, and now this preposterous new thing. 

It was a solid narrative overall. But his story left out a hugely important detail. He said not one word about Covid lockdowns and Operation Warp Speed that was supposed to be the great fix for the virus but flopped. This was a rather important detail to leave out since it wrecked the economy, the Bill of Rights, education, and led to a massive demographic upheaval in addition to the continuing fallout in terms of culture, economics, and everything else. 

It also caused him to lose the presidency, whether because the shock resulted in mass demoralization (this was certainly not a path to making America great again) or because of the mail-in ballots made possible by Covid restrictions, or probably both. However you look at it, it was the most disastrous decision of his presidency or possibly any presidency in history. 

How in the world are we just supposed to pretend that this did not happen? And yet he is playing along simply because he does not want to admit error. He thinks it makes him appear weak. Nor does he still slam the successor presidency for mask and shot mandates even though hundreds of millions were affected by them. He would rather not bring up the topic at all, lest doing so raises questions about his own judgment in those fateful days of March 2020. 

Meanwhile, the DNC does not want to admit that it celebrated and built on Trump’s biggest disaster while the RNC does not want to discuss that the policies they decry from the DNC actually began under the RNC. And so you have a kind of “mutually assured destruction” pact between them that needs no plot or contract. In silencing all talk about this, each party is only doing what is in its interest. 

We can fully expect that these issues will be locked out of the campaign narratives in 2024 just as they were in 2020 and 2022. Everyone seems to agree: the less said the better. And this is precisely why the announced candidacy of Robert Kennedy, Jr., has triggered the usual and expected gaslighting from the mainstream media. The plan is to flog him into marginalization. And if that doesn’t work, they will flog and flog again. 

We are seeing a real-time example of how history is really written. The narrative is more self-serving than we knew. If all the power centers in society get something tremendously wrong, an informal conspiracy of silence develops around it, with the hope of just wiping it from the history books. 

As Michael Senger has written, “Lockdowns met little resistance in part because they reinforced existing power structures. The rich got richer, the Zoom class got a vacation, workers got stimulus, while some business owners, their employees, and the most vulnerable had to sacrifice everything for this fantasy.” 

And we can add to that: government gained vastly more power. In fact, Covid became the template for the biggest expansion of government power over the population in world history, more effective than ancient myths about god-like rulers, heresy trials and witch burnings of the Middle Ages, sedition purges of the 18th and 19th centuries, red scares of the 20th centuries, the Cold War, or even the wars on terror. Fear of infectious disease was more effective than all of them for ratcheting up despotism. 

When something works this well for the most powerful people in society, why not just keep quiet about it?

The tellers of tales can write stories but they cannot invent their own realities. There will be no restoration of liberty, rights, and truth until we come to terms with what happened, why, and how to prevent it in the future. Playing along with this conspiracy of silence surrounding a policy that effectively blotted out every advance in human rights since the Magna Carta is a disastrous error that could lead to the entrenchment of a new dark age. 

The Loss Of Free Speech Was Predictable And Preventable

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By Patrick Wood

Source: Technocracy News & Trends

As technology has disrupted key elements of society, Technocrats have taken advantage of the chaos to not only implement their own agenda but also to erect barriers to competition or resistance. If this had been recognized early enough, it could have been easily blocked. Now, the mere barriers have hardened into fortresses.⁃ TN Editor

The First Amendment is at a critical juncture. Recent congressional hearings on the Twitter Files brought the matter into full public view. Freedom of speech and of the press are hanging by a precarious thread. Do we want a future in which information flows freely, or one in which an information elite controls those flows “for our own good?” The choices we make over the next few years will determine which of those futures we get.

It’s tragic that we have let the problem reach this dangerous state. What heightens the tragedy, however, is that the war against America’s most cherished freedoms was predictable and preventable. If those of us who value freedom want to win, we’re going to need a strategy grounded in a clear understanding of what’s happening and why.

The Twitter Files story is shocking. Allegations that big tech and social media manipulate information have been around for as long as we’ve had tech and social media companies. Allegations of bias among the mainstream media are even older. In recent years, however, both the allegations and the supporting evidence have ratcheted upward to unprecedented levels.

When Elon Musk acquired Twitter, he opened his company’s internal archives to scrutiny. He assembled a team of journalists with a curious pedigree: registered Democrats with a distaste for Donald Trump and his supporters, whose track records skewed considerably left of center, and whose recent work has demonstrated deep concern about the politicization of journalism.

Musk gave them unfettered access. They found a deep, broad, and disturbing pattern of collaboration between big government and big tech designed to promote “official stories” on multiple issues, throttle competing theories and arguments, and sanction those who dared to question government propaganda.

When two of those journalists – Matt Taibbi and Michael Shellenberger – testified before Congress, their Democratic inquisitors sought to belittle their credentials, question their motives, and tar them as part of some Republican-funded, far-right conspiracy. The still-left-leaning journalists are trying to absorb their shock at the depths to which the formerly civil-libertarian left has fallen.

Far from shocking, however, that fall was predictable – and predicted. In 2001, amidst the public disgust with tech companies following the collapse of the dotcom bubble, I set out to make sense of life during the transition from the late industrial age to the early information age. I analyzed what I called the first four front-page stories of the information age: the dotcom bubble, the Microsoft antitrust trial, the rise of open-source software, and the Napster-driven wars over digital music. Contrary to popular opinion of the time, I believed that these stories were far from distinct. I saw them as four manifestations of a single underlying phenomenon. My goal was to understand that phenomenon.

I found it. It appeared most clearly in the digital music arena, but it ran through all four stories – and through much that has happened since. It appears just as clearly in today’s war on free speech. It involves an entirely predictable pattern of opportunity, action, and reaction.

The starting point is digitization and quantification. The Internet changed the economics of information. Throughout human history, information was scarce, hard to acquire, and expensive to process. Skilled professionals – spies, scholars, lawyers, accountants, clerics, doctors – could command a premium for their knowledge. When the Internet went public, anything that could be digitized and quantified suddenly flowed freely. Information was there for the asking. The premium shifted to filtering – the ability to discard unwanted information and arrange what remained.

Economic shifts generate massive opportunities for creative, entrepreneurial people and bring glorious benefits to millions of consumers. The Internet was no exception in this regard, and neither was the predictable backlash against it. Anything that benefits new businesses and empowers consumers is a warning shot across the bow of powerful incumbents who’d grown accustomed to serving those consumers in a predictable, profitable, manner.

In the music industry, anything that let individual consumers share digital music files reduced the revenues, profits, power, and control of record labels. Pre-digitization, these powerful incumbents determined what music got recorded and how it was packaged, distributed, presented, and priced. It was a comfortable business model that gave us the music industry “as we knew it.” The Internet undermined it entirely.

Powerful incumbents never fade quietly into the night when challenged. They fight, using whatever weapons they can muster. In our society, the most effective ways to undermine new technological and economic opportunities tend to lie in law, regulation, and public policy. The record labels fought – largely successfully – to apply and reinterpret existing laws and to change laws in ways favorable to their interests.

There’s the pattern: Technology creates opportunities. New businesses exploit those opportunities. Consumers benefit. Powerful incumbents fear their loss of control. Threatened incumbents seek allies in government. Government changes laws and regulations to protect incumbent interests. Media campaigns “educate” the public on the merits of the new policies. The new laws ensure that the next wave of technological change runs largely through the powerful incumbents, rather than against them.

By 2003, I had distilled this pattern, showed numerous ways that it had already unfolded, predicted that it would soon hit parts of our economy and our lives far more significant than the music industry, and suggested some ways that we might prepare ourselves for the coming battles.

It took another two years to get my analysis published. It went largely unnoticed. Twelve years later, then-Senator Ben Sasse described the ways that this pattern had forever disrupted the dynamics of employment. This, too, went largely unnoticed.

Today, we see that disruptive pattern threatening the most basic of our civil liberties. Its manifestation in the arenas of speech, propaganda, and censorship is clear. Consider how each step in the process I identified above has played out here:

Technology creates opportunities. The Internet opened entirely new vistas for the creation and exchange of ideas, information, theories, opinions, propaganda, and outright lies.

New businesses exploit those opportunities. The companies founded since 1995 that created and control the world’s most important conduits for information have joined the ranks of history’s most powerful entities.

Consumers benefit. The centrality of these communication systems to our lives (for better or for worse) proves that they confer real value.

Powerful incumbents fear their loss of control. The twin political shocks of 2016 – Brexit and Donald Trump – highlighted the extent to which official channels had lost control of the narrative. With the entirety of elite media, government, big business, and the intelligentsia aligned behind Remain and Hillary, the newly empowered masses understood – for the first time – that there were viable alternatives to the official story.

Threatened incumbents seek allies in government. A coalition of elite forces assembled quickly, laser-focused on stomping out the populist threat. Masses empowered to conduct their own analyses, draw their own conclusions, and share their opinions among themselves threatened the stability of the power structure “as we know it.”

Government changes laws and regulations to protect incumbent interests. Prior to Musk’s Twitter, the entirety of Silicon Valley committed itself to “protecting” the public from “disinformation,” roughly defined as anything that threatened to undermine an official, sanctioned narrative. Allies throughout the administrative state, Congress, and the Biden White House are working to embed those “protections” in law.

Media campaigns “educate” the public on the merits of the new policies. The same mainstream media that vilified Napster, Grokster, and Peer-to-Peer (P2P) file sharing is now working to turn public opinion against the evil purveyors of alleged “disinformation.”

Will the information age be an era of informed, empowered citizens – or an era of a dominant, information-controlling elite? Stay tuned. That’s the question we need to answer.

Robert F. Kennedy, Jr.: To Heal the Great Divide

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By Edward Curtin

Source: Behind the Curtain

It has been fifty-five years since Senator Robert F. Kennedy stepped onto the presidential nominating stage to try to mend the massive breach that had opened in American society.  The country was torn asunder by the Vietnam War, racism, poverty, the assassination of President Kennedy and the soon-to-be assassination of Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr.  Chaos reigned as Lyndon Johnson lied and Richard Nixon matched him in verbal and actual treachery.  A war between Middle America and the elites running the government was breaking out across the country.  A great divide between whites and blacks, rich and poor, the working class and the upper class was opening wide.  The Tet Offensive had just ripped the face off the official lies about the course of the war in Vietnam and the emperor, Lyndon Jonson, stood naked and would soon announce that he would not run again.

On March 16, 1968, Senator Kennedy declared his candidacy with these words:

I do not run for the presidency merely to oppose any man but to propose new policies. I run because I am convinced that this country is on a perilous course and because I have such strong feelings about what must be done, and I feel that I’m obliged to do all that I can.

I run to seek new policies – policies to end the bloodshed in Vietnam and in our cities, policies to close the gaps that now exist between black and white, between rich and poor, between young and old, in this country and around the rest of the world.

By the end of 1968, a plague year if there ever were one, Richard Nixon, together with his goon squad, prepared to occupy the White House, Vietnam raged on, and everything King and Kennedy stood for seemed lost.  Ignorance, vituperation, and the divide-and-conquer technique long practiced by the power elites set into the body politic like a deadly cancer.  Something died, all hope seemed lost, and the perilous course RFK spoke of was never stopped.  Jackals with polished faces have sat in the White House ever since.

Today hope is resurrected.  Enter Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. center stage who will declare his candidacy for the Democratic nomination for president on Wednesday, April 19, in Boston, Massachusetts.

The wheel of history has turned and 2023 resembles 1968 in many ways while getting worse in others.  The divide in the country remains but has greatly widened.  The CIA and the intelligence agencies totally control the mainstream media now.  The Pentagon’s budget has increased exponentially.  The U.S. wages a savage war against Russia in Ukraine under the blatant lie of defending freedom while supporting Nazis and greatly risking nuclear war.  It provokes war with China.  Permanent war is government policy with military bases and CIA and special forces all over the world, waging semi-clandestine wars, or maybe just wars that people don’t want to know about.  The gap between the rich and the poor has widened while the elites mock working class people as moronic deplorables.  The Department of Defense controls the development, manufacturing, clinical testing, supply, production, and distribution of the mRNA vaccines, while the criminal pharmaceutical companies reap obscene profits.  Lies are piled upon lies in what amounts to an Orwellian nightmare.  And while LBJ and Nixon have been replaced by Joe Biden, the warfare state roll on.

Some things have changed, of course.  In 1968, liberals were turning against the U.S. war against Vietnam and were growing wary of the CIA.  Today they support all the Democratic-led wars and love the CIA.  They trust the obvious media lies and those of a proven liar such as Anthony Fauci.  Nowhere is this sadly truer than with the extended Kennedy family, who in their support for Biden, Fauci, the CIA, etc. have betrayed JFK and RFK.  Their smugness and support for Biden against their brother who is carrying on his uncle’s and father’s legacy is betrayal of the worst kind.

Despite a family actively opposed to his candidacy, despite all the media lies about him, and despite the odds makers giving him little chance, RFK, Jr. is entering the race.  It is an act of supreme moral courage.

Like his father in ’68, he is the only candidate who can heal this nation’s great divide.

That he is opposed by a huge array of people who will lie about him because he is a truthteller does not deter him.  Those lies immediately started up again as soon as word got out that he might run.  It’s an old story.

Trash will be thrown at him.  Every blemish of his nearly seventy years will be dredged up to paint him as a villain, a flawed man, a hypocrite – name all the negative terms you can think of and the real hypocrites, in their self-righteous rage, will use them against him.  They will bounce off him.  He is ready.

When Bobby, Jr. was young, his father handed him a book and said with urgency, “I want you to read this.”  It was Albert Camus’s The Plague.  He read it and it has informed his life ever since.  Just as in 1968, we live in plague times, and the plague is US, it runs through all our institutions and, as in Camus’s books, the rats are running wild, devouring truth and the values that can redeem us.  As he has written in his beautiful and important book, American Values: Lessons I Learned from My Family, Camus’s analysis of Sisyphus and the ancient Greeks has taught him an important lesson:

It is neither our position nor our circumstances that define us, according to the Stoics, but our response to those circumstance; when destiny crushes us, small heroic gestures of courage and service can bring us peace and fulfillment. In applying our shoulder to the stone, we give order to a chaotic universe. Of the many wonderful things my father left me, this philosophical truth was perhaps the most useful. In many ways, it has defined my life, and has allowed me to find serenity and purpose even in the most trying and tragic circumstances. (p.287)

Despite its brilliance, American Values (see this) was completely ignored by the mainstream press.  Why?  Because it revolves around “Chapter 9, Senator Robert F. Kennedy” and the long war between the Kennedys and the CIA that resulted in the deaths of JFK and RFK.  In this chapter, RFK, Jr. brilliantly shows that he fully grasps the CIA’s evil history.  All the other chapters, while very interesting personal and family history, pale in importance.   No member of the Kennedy family since JFK or RFK has dared to say what RFK, Jr. does in this book.  He indicts the CIA.  This is probably not a small part of his extended family’s animosity toward him.  Family taboos must be protected, as if they were state secrets.

But his indictment of the CIA is the fundamental reason why it and the media will at all costs try to prevent him from getting the nomination.  The character assassination will be intense.

Kennedy knows he faces an uphill battle for the presidency, but no matter what forces are aligned against him, political and familial, he will not back down.

He will surprise all the pundits, for his appeal crosses party lines.  He is tough and very smart.  He has been so hated and falsely maligned by the mainstream media for so long that he is skilled at keeping to his message, which I think will be positive and inspirational, something that this country is desperate for after so many years of lies and treachery.

Even Biden’s supporters in the Democratic party know he is a flawed candidate on his last legs, laboring to keep his words straight and his steps solid.  While he may have long served as the establishment’s war puppet, there are many nervous Democrats who want to finally cut their strings with him.  And the Republicans are a party in disarray, internally torn and tired of the Trump saga which will not end.

Two clowns don’t make for a pretty picture running the country and the world into the ground.  Biden and Trump and their predecessors are naked now and not just does one boy see it and shout it only to be ignored.  There is a growing feeling throughout the country that truth and goodness spoken clearly are desperately needed to unite the country through common values. Bob Dylan got it right back a few years:

While preachers preach of evil fates
Teachers teach that knowledge waits
Can lead to hundred-dollar plates
Goodness hides behind its gates
But even the president of the United States
Sometimes must have to stand naked

Every day Americans are bombarded with bad news: the U.S. war against Russia via Ukraine, the lies about the “threats” from Russia and China, the collapsing economy, toxic spills, gun violence, corporate gangsters ripping off the average American and funneling those monies to the politicians who pimp for them, the egregious Covid-19 and “vaccine” lies that are daily being exposed as deadly frauds, the growing threat of nuclear war, etc.

Bad bad news, and with it a growing public sense of hopelessness.  A pall of unacknowledged depression smothers the country.  People are dying for hope, as they were in 1968.  In their inner hearts there is this desperate yearning for one brave soul to stand up and tell Americans the truth about what has happened to their country.  Bobby Kennedy, Jr. is the only one who can move Americans to hope again.

For years he has been telling harsh truths that many who profit from the lies do not want to hear. That our waters are polluted and the chemical companies are criminals; that the pharmaceutical companies are criminal enterprises polluting people’s bodies; that the CIA is organized crime polluting people’s minds and assassinating its anti-war leaders; that the Pentagon is a criminal enterprise not defending but risking American’s lives and their livelihood; that the U.S. government has joined with mega-corporations to run a Mob-like fleecing of the American people; that not one of Sirhan Sirhan’s bullets killed his father, Senator Robert Kennedy, who was shot from behind at close range by a CIA hit man; that the so-called Covid vaccines are very dangerous and have never been appropriately tested and many people are dying and being injured as a result; that Anthony Fauci is a liar and fraud who fronts for Big Pharma (see this) in the Covid-19 crisis that is an intelligence-run operation controlled by spooks working with medical technocrats; and that we are close to losing our country and any semblance of its democratic ideals.

These are not liberal or conservative positions.  They are self-evident conclusions of a patriot, as they should be for everyone.

And because they have become such to more and more Americans who can think without reacting, Kennedy’s voice and his candidacy will grow in strength across the great divide.

The media attacks will be intense and simply full of lies.  They love to call him an “anti-vaxxer,” when he is not opposed to all vaccines.  But no matter how many times he has explained this, the media twist it to serve their masters.

For example, The New York Post recently published a slimy piece that could serve as a template for all the propaganda aimed at Kennedy.  Let me quote:

Robert has said Sirhan did not actually participate in the murder of Sen. Robert F. Kennedy during a Los Angeles presidential campaign stop in 1968.

This of course is a lie.  RFK, Jr. has said that Sirhan fired a pistol but none of his bullets hit the Senator.  He has said a CIA hit man shot his father at close range from behind as the official autopsy clearly showed, while Sirhan was standing in front of the Senator.

Lie number two.  The Post writes:

In it [a speech], he implied that those who oppose vaccines are being persecuted more severely than Anne Frank, the German teen who hid from the Nazis in Amsterdam before being sent to her death at Auschwitz.

He never implied that.  His point was clear: that in the coming digital surveillance state there will be nowhere to hide, not even in an attic, because the surveillance technology will track everyone everywhere, day and night.

These are but a few examples.  Look and you will find them everywhere now and in the coming days.

The hyenas with polished faces will try like hell to dismiss Robert f. Kennedy, Jr. as a flake, a fraud, and a conspiracy nut on an ego-trip.  Too many people can now see through such propaganda.  He is the real thing, our best hope to bridge the great divide that has been created by the elites to divide the American people.

He will not back down, and all people of good will who believe the U.S. can still find its way out of the morass we find ourselves in, should back him up.  He has warned us, he has given us his voice, and his moral courage should be followed by all who hope to hope.

The pundits who dismiss his chances will then be shocked.

“Facing Clear Evidence of Peril” in a Country of Lies

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By Edward Curtin

Source: Behind the Curtain

“In my seventy-plus years from 1946 to now, the chorus of fear-mongering bullshit has never ceased – only grown louder. The joke is on us. Ha Ha Ha.”

– Oliver Stone, Chasing the Light

Perhaps silence is the best response to the endless cavalcade of official lies that is United States history. The Internet and digital technology have allowed those lies to increase exponentially in number and frequency with the result that people’s minds have become like 7-Eleven stores, open 24/7 for snack-crap “news.”

But once you become conscious that it’s lies night and day, it sets your head aswirl and plunges your soul into depths of despair.  You are tempted to retreat from such knowledge and talk of trees and trivia.  But you are ashamed of your country.  It’s hard to laugh.  You feel you are drowning.  You flounder and gasp for air.  You look around and wonder why most people are able to go their merry ways believing the lies and whistling in the dark.  Junk news nation, indeed.

Yes, there are alternative voices who tell the truth, but their audiences and monetary support are very small or non-existent compared to the corporate mainstream media and those who shout and scream across the Internet as they take in a lot of money from naive followers. The recent revelations about Alex Jones’s wealth probably don’t bother his diehard fans, but they should.  Likewise, the funding sources for websites and writers of various persuasions are important to know, for they reveal possible biases in their work.  Snake oil salesmen are commonplace, and there are many naive customers lining up for their wares.

Wealth and power are the main drivers of the media chicanery that has captured so many minds. Writers, of course, should be fairly paid for their work, but in this Internet age, most are not.  As with the movies and book publishing, the income gap between the big names – the celebrity stars – and less well-known writers, even if their work is excellent, is huge.

Some sites and writers make a lot of money, but who they are is a guessing game.  No one’s talking.  Some regularly tell their readers that if they don’t receive enough contributions, they will be unable to continue to write or publish, even when the sites do not pay their contributors.  Whether this is good marketing or income-by-threat is up for grabs.  Whichever it is, it seems to work, as far as I can tell, for these writers and websites don’t disappear.

Money is the dirty secret of all news and commentary.  To paraphrase someone: It is very difficult to get truth from writers whose income is dependent on pleasing those who fund them.

You may have noticed how many former military officers, CIA agents, mainstream journalists, pharmaceutical company executives, and sundry other government and corporate bigwigs appear in the mainstream and alternative media to support or oppose government policies.  The mainstream ones doing the propaganda they always did, while the alternative ones appear as converts to the dissident faith.  No one ever explains how and by whom these people are financed or how their lucrative pensions affect their consciences.  “Former” is a funny word.  Ha Ha Ha.

Confidence “men” come in all shapes and sizes with no one talking money.

So let me fess up.  I received about $200 in support last year for edwardcurtin.com, my website.  Nothing before that and not a cent over the last 5-6 years for many hundreds of articles that have appeared very widely across the Internet.  Before the Internet, publications paid for work, mine and others.  Not now, at least for me.  How much money writers are receiving, and who is supporting their sites, is a taboo subject.

So I am thinking about selling mugs at my site with my name and mug shot on them and a line of supplements that will increase one’s testosterone and estrogen in equal measure to make sure no one takes offense in this era of delicate feelings.  Ha Ha Ha.  Yes, the joke is on us.  I identify as a man since I am one.  Don’t be offended.

Jokes aside, as Leonard Cohen sang:

“Oh, like a bird on the wire
Like a drunk in a midnight choir
I have tried in my way to be free”

If you are stubborn enough and have the good fortune to find inspiration from those brave dissidents who have gone before us and those who continue to lead us on, you realize silence is betrayal and that you must speak, even if all seems hopeless at times. Even when no one is paying you, or maybe more accurately, because no one is paying you. Even though it is hopeless, even though it isn’t.  This is another secret.  There are many.

It’s been twenty years since the U.S. brutally invaded Iraq.  When George W. Bush, at a staged pseudo-event in Cincinnati on October 7, 2002, as he set Americans up for the invasion of Iraq in March 2003, said, “Facing clear evidence of peril, we cannot wait for the final proof, the smoking gun, that could come in the form of a mushroom cloud,” no one laughed him out of the house.  His claim was simply an evil joke that was reported as truth.  It was all predictable, blatant deception.  And the media played along with such an absurdity, which is their job and what they always do.  I pointed it out at the time in a newspaper column, but who listened to a hick writer in a regional newspaper.

Iraq obviously had no nuclear weapons or the slightest capability to deliver even a firecracker on the U.S.  But the mainstream media, Senator Joe Biden, politicians galore, celebrities like Oprah Winfrey with her guest, the eventually disgraced Judith Miller of the New York Times, the despicable Tony Blair, et al., all supported Bush’s blatant lies.  Soon Colin Powell, the “hero” of George H. W. Bush’s 1991 made-for-TV Gulf War of aggression against Iraq, would do his Pinocchio act at the United Nations and the U.S. military was off to get Saddam Hussein, Osama bin Laden’s evil twin, both the latest Hitlers until Vladimir Putin replaced them.  I guess I skipped some others such as Muammar Gaddafi and Bashar Al-Assad.  New Hitlers proliferate so fast it’s hard to keep track of them.  Ha Ha Ha.  The joke is on us.

As everyone knows, or should, more than a million Iraqis died because of George W. Bush, but how many cared?  How many cared when once Bush was gone, Barack Obama, aided and abetted by the cackling Hilary Clinton, destroyed Libya and ignited the war against Syria?  You want examples?  There are too many to name here.  But let it be said these lies span all American administrations, whether it’s Bill Clinton continuously bombing Iraq and Serbia through Trump bombing Syria and Somalia, up to the present day with Biden attacking Russia via Ukraine, etc.  All these presidents are liars, but their followers treat them otherwise.  Biden says Jimmy Carter asked him to deliver his eulogy.  What does that tell you?  Shall we laugh?  Sing?

On the clear understanding
That this kind of thing can happen
Shall we laugh?
Shall we laugh?
Shall we laugh?

Shall we laugh harder if I mention the Covid-19 propaganda and all those writers who have failed to even address it, as they have failed to question 9/11 and other obvious official lies?  Is it not evident that if they did so, their money flows might dry up?  Here and no further is a widespread rule, for they must adhere to the boundaries imposed by “responsible thought” and the “no go” zones with which they tie their own hands in order to keep their wallets full.

If you are lucky, as I was, when you are young you discover how fearful of free thought and how corrupt our institutional authorities are.  You don’t spend decades feasting off the spoils of those institutions only to “wake up” once you have made your name and secured your fortune, which seems to be the way of so many wise luminaries of the Internet Age who are either trying to ease their consciences as they get ready to kick the bucket or are perhaps putting us on.

When I was twenty-four years-old, I accepted my first teaching job at a small Catholic college where I taught theology.  I had been trained in the latest and best scholarly work of the most renown international theologians.  Rather than indoctrinating my students with rote learning, I taught them to read widely and think deeply in the tradition of a liberal arts education.  To seek out the best scholarship.

But doing so became quickly apparent to the college and Church authorities who were stuck in the inquisitorial age of obedience or else and no thinking allowed.   Although my students loved my courses and felt freed up for the first time to think about their spiritual lives, I was hounded to correct my heretical teaching, which of course I refused to do.

At one point when I was at lunch in the cafeteria, a nun who was a professor, stole my brief case with my notes and left the cafeteria.  One of my students saw her do this and chased her into the ladies’ room where the nun hid in a stall.  The nun kept flushing the toilet to scare the student away, but the student wouldn’t let her out until she returned the briefcase.  Ha Ha Ha.  It sounds funny to recount but was an example of my experience at this college.  Someone vandalized my office door and ripped down anti-war posters that were on it.  I was gone from that college soon thereafter.  It taught me a lot.  Obey or else.

Heresy: The Latin word is from Greek hairesis, a taking or choosing for oneself, a choice.

At another teaching job a year or so later, I had a more chilling experience.  I was known as an anti-war activist, a conscientious objector from the Marines, etc., and one day, a late Friday afternoon when few were around, an administrator asked to meet me on a deserted stairwell where he proceeded in hushed tones to try to convince me to join him in Army Intelligence to spy on others.  He said I would be perfect for the job since I was known as an anti-war dissident.  I told him to fuck off, but I was shocked by his double life and his request.

I have since learned that this guy the spy was not an anomaly, for government confidence men are widespread.

I’ve had many other such early experiences for which I am very grateful, even though when I was fired from jobs and lost income it was traumatic at the time.  By my thirtieth year, I knew the system was corrupt to its core and subsequent experience has only ratified that conclusion.  I got the joke.

I recount these incidents not because my experiences are singular and I’m special, for others have suffered the same youthful fate.  But such good fortune can fortify you for life or break your spirit.  If the former, you don’t wait to retire to push back against all the lies or regret your past.  You find that it’s all good and life has set you on the heretic’s path of freedom and choice. You realize that what you went through is absolutely nothing compared to people around the world who have and continue to suffer at the hands of the U.S. military industrial complex.  You realize your experiences are trivial in the larger scope of things and that your government’s conduct is beyond condemnation.  It is an abomination.  You feel ashamed to live in a land where killing is a game.

The sociologist Peter Berger puts it well in his little classic, Invitation to Sociology, when he discusses experiences that lead to seeing through the play-acting nature of social life:

Experiences such as these may lead to a sudden reversal in one’s view of society – from an awe-inspiring vision of an edifice made of massive granite to the picture of a toy-house precariously put together with papier mâché. While such metamorphosis may be disturbing to people who have hitherto had great confidence in the stability and rightness of society, it can also have a very liberating effect on those more inclined to look upon the latter as a giant sitting on top of them, and not necessarily a friendly giant at that. It is reassuring to discover that the giant is afflicted with a nervous tick.

Notice the giant George W. Bush’s clicking eyes as he delivers his “facing clear evidence of peril” lies for the invasion of Iraq.  He and his presidential good friends are cardboard cartoon characters whose eyes reveal their evil intentions.  “It’s a Barnum and Bailey world/Just as phony as it can be,” but it would all fall to pieces if it weren’t for you and me failing to see through all the bad actors, not just presidents but the whole cast of characters that populate the Spectacle of news and opinion.

The Russians are coming!  Ha Ha Ha.  Yes, Oliver, the joke’s on us.

But it’s not really funny, except in the most sardonic and dark way, for we now do really face clear evidence of peril as a result of Biden and his crazy predecessors who have run U.S. foreign policy for so long. They have brought us to the edge of nuclear war with Russia by surrounding Russia with NATO bases and nuclear weapons, while doing the same to China.

Bertolt Brecht was right in his poem “To Those Born After”:

Truly I live in dark times!

Frank speech is naïve. A smooth forehead

Suggests insensitivity. The man who laughs

Has simply not yet heard

The terrible news.

What kind of times are these, when

To talk about trees is almost a crime

Because it implies silence about so many horrors?

When the man over there calmly crossing the street

Is already perhaps beyond the reach of his friends

Who are in need?

The Nord Stream-Andromeda Cover Up

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U.S. intelligence was too quick to leak information about the German investigation to The New York Times. It raises the distinct impression that the real culprit is nervous about the investigative work of Seymour Hersh. 

President Joe Biden meeting with German Chancellor Olaf Scholz in the Oval Office, March 3, 2023. (Official White House Photo by Adam Schultz)

By Scott Ritter

Source: Consortium News

Back in 2000, the television series “Andromeda”  premiered, based upon unused material from Gene Roddenberry, the creator of the Star Trek series and franchise. The plot is premised on the notion of a spaceship, “Andromeda,” frozen in time, which is given the opportunity to reverse the clock and undo history.

The series ran five years.

Fast forward to the present.

History has dealt a tough hand to the administration of U.S. President Joe Biden, who openly confessed his intent to “bring an end” to the Nord Stream pipeline system which delivered Russian natural gas to Europe through four pipelines (Nord Stream 1 and Nord Stream 2, consisting of two pipelines each).

Since then, the Biden White House was compelled to deny the president’s stated intent after an explosive report by Pulitzer-Prize winning investigative journalist Seymour Hersh detailed damning information which, if true (and there is no reason to suspect it’s not) casts the responsibility for a series of underwater explosions that took place on Sept. 26, 2022, on Biden himself.

Hersh’s report was ignored by the mainstream media in the United States, with neither The New York Times, for whom Seymour Hersh wrote on national security issues for many years, nor The Washington Post even hinting that the greatest living investigative journalist had broken a blockbuster story.

Enter the “Andromeda” — not the spaceship of the eponymous television series, but rather a Bavaria C50 15-meter (49-foot) yacht based out of the German Baltic port city of Rostock. On March 7 — nearly a month after Hersh self-published his article on Substack — a team of German reporters from the ARD capital studio, Kontraste, Südwestrundfunk (SWR) and Die Zeit collaboratively reported that they had uncovered the existence of “the boat that was allegedly used for the secret operation.”

The boat was “a yacht rented from a company based in Poland, apparently owned by two Ukrainians.” According to the story, “the secret operation at sea was carried out by a team of six people.”

The name of the yacht was “The Andromeda.”

According to the German reporting, the team — five men, consisting of a ship captain, two primary divers, two supporting divers and a female doctor — used the Andromeda to transport the team, along with the explosives used to destroy the pipelines, to the scene of the crime. The boat was returned to Rostock in “an uncleaned condition,” allowing German law enforcement officials, who carried out a search of the vessel between Jan. 8-11, to detect “traces of explosives” on a table in the ship’s cabin.

The same day the German reporting on the new Nord Stream attack narrative broke, The New York Times ran a front-page story entitled “Intelligence Suggests Pro-Ukrainian Group Sabotaged Pipelines, US Officials Say.”

[Related: As Bakhmut Falls, US May Turn From Ukraine, Starting With Pipeline Story]

For the first time, The New York Times referred to Hersh’s reporting, writing, “Last month, the investigative journalist Seymour Hersh published an article on the newsletter platform Substack concluding that the United States carried out the operation at the direction of Mr. Biden,” before closing with “U.S. officials say Mr. Biden and his top aides did not authorize a mission to destroy the Nord Stream pipelines, and they say there was no U.S. involvement.”

As if echoing the Biden White House denials, The New York Times led off with this:

“New intelligence reporting amounts to the first significant known lead about who was responsible for the attack on the Nord Stream pipelines that carried natural gas from Russia to Europe” (emphasis added.)

The New York Times, it seems, was more than happy about proceeding with its own anonymous intelligence sources, while dismissing Hersh’s.

The problem with both the German reporting and that of The New York Times (whose source was clearly referring to the same data reported by the German reporters) is that the Andromeda narrative doesn’t hold water.

Take, for instance, the Tom Clancy-like tale of derring-do that has four allegedly Ukraine-affiliated divers defy physiology by conducting dives that would require the use of a decompression chamber for them to survive an ascent of 240 feet (the depth of the Nord Stream pipelines that were destroyed). A rule of thumb is that decompression takes approximately one day per 100 feet of seawater plus a day.

This means that the team of divers would have required three days of decompression per dive. But to decompress, one needs a decompression chamber. For a dive involving two divers, the Andromeda would have to have been outfitted with either a two-person Class A decompression chamber, or two single-person Class B chambers, as well as the number of large oxygen bottles needed to operate these chambers over time. \

A simple examination of the interior cabin space of the Bavarian C50 yacht would quickly dispossess one of any notion that either option was viable.

Simply put — no decompression chamber, no dive, no story.

‘Traces’ of High Explosives 

There is another aspect of the story to probe. According to the German reporting, law enforcement officials detected “traces” of high explosives on the tables in the cabin of the Andromeda.

According to the Swedish Prosecution Authority, in a statement released on Nov. 19, 2022, Swedish investigators discovered “traces of explosives on several of the foreign objects that were found” at the site of the explosions.

These explosives, according to a Nov. 22, 2022, report issued by Nord Stream AG, the Swiss-based parent company that owned the Nord Stream 1 and 2 pipelines, produced “technogenic [i.e., “of or pertaining to a process or substance created by human technology”] craters with a depth of 3 to 5 meters” separated “by a distance of about 248 meters.”

“The section of the pipe between the craters is destroyed, the radius of pipe fragments dispersion is at least 250 meters,” the report noted.

In a report to the United Nations, both Denmark and Sweden said that the damage done to the Nord Stream pipelines was caused by blasts equivalent to the power of “several hundred kilograms of explosive.”

It should be noted that underwater pipelines like those used in Nord Stream are designed to withstand proximal explosions from devices up to several hundred kilograms in size. Indeed, in locations such as the Baltic Sea, where unexploded military ordnance from multiple world wars abounds, the threat of a drifting device striking a pipeline and detonating is quite real.

Computer modeling shows that a 600-kilogram high explosive charge detonated approximately 5 meters from a 34mm-thick steel pipeline filled with gas would not compromise the structural integrity of the pipeline.

At the location of the explosions, the Nord Stream pipelines consisted of 26.8 mm steel pipes with an addition 33.2 mm of concrete coating, for a total thickness of 60 mm. The weight of a single pipe section was over 11 tons.

In short, a standard high-explosive charge of several hundred kilograms would not be sufficient to cause the destruction that occurred on the Nord Stream pipeline.

Enter Hersh, who reported that the explosives used were “shaped charges.”

With a shaped charge, the energy of the explosion is focused in one direction, usually by creating a concave shape in the explosive that is them lined with a metal sheet, so that it usually achieves an armor- and/or concrete-penetrating effect.

Without getting too technical, the design of an underwater shaped charge that would be sufficient to penetrate concrete-lined steel pipe at a depth of 240 feet is not common knowledge. The charge would have to be prepared by qualified explosives experts and ideally tested prior to being employed operationally to validate the design and functionality of the device.

These are not tasks undertaken by a small ad hoc team of Ukrainian underwater saboteurs, but rather state-sponsored actors with access to military grade explosives and testing facilities.

Strike two for the German reporting.

But the most glaring deficiency in the German reporting deals with the detection of “trace explosive” onboard the Andromeda. This information would identify the precise explosive used. Moreover, when compared and contrasted with the “trace explosive” found by the Swedes at the location of the Nord Stream attacks, it could provide a clear linkage between the Andromeda and the attacks.

But Sweden has sealed the files of its investigation into the Nord Stream attack on national security grounds, meaning that it will not cooperate with Germany to see if the explosive traces found at the scene of the Nord Stream crime match those onboard the Andromeda.

The obvious reason behind this decision: because the two traces won’t match. One — the Swedish sample — points to the culprit. The other — the Andromeda sample — is evidence of a cover up.

Strike three, and you’re out.

The German government’s crude effort to manufacture an alternative narrative regarding who attacked the Nord Stream pipeline fails the smell test — in short, it stinks. The holes in this story are such that even the most gifted screenwriters could not turn this Andromeda tale of changing history into something remotely believable. In short, Gene Roddenberry would not be impressed.

Moreover, the fact that the U.S. intelligence community was quick to leak information about the German investigation to The New York Times appears to be de facto evidence of U.S. complicity in this cover up.

And the reason for this cover up is quite clear: the Germans and Americans both fear the reporting being done by Hersh.