Tag Archives: corporate media

Democracy vs. The Putin-Nazis

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By CJ Hopkins

Source: Consent Factory

Back in January 2018, I wrote this piece about The War on Dissent, which, in case you haven’t noticed, is going gangbusters. As predicted, the global capitalist ruling classes have been using every weapon in their arsenal to marginalize, stigmatize, delegitimize, and otherwise eliminate any and all forms of dissent from neoliberal ideology, and in particular from their new official narrative … “Democracy versus The Putin-Nazis.”

For over two years, the corporate media have been pounding out an endless series of variations on this major theme, namely, that “democracy is under attack” by a conspiracy of Russians and neo-Nazis that magically materialized out of the ether during the Summer of 2016. The intelligence agencies, political elites, academia, celebrities, social media personalities, and other organs of the culture industry have been systematically reifying this official narrative through constant repetition. The Western masses have been inundated with innumerable articles, editorials, television news and talk show segments, books, social media posts, and various other forms of messaging whipping up hysteria over “Russians” and “fascists.” At this point, it is no longer just propaganda. It has become the new “truth.” It has become “reality.”

Becoming “reality” is, of course, the ultimate goal of every ideology. An ideology is just a system of ideas, and is thus fair game for critique and dissent. “Reality” is not fair game for dissent. It is not up for debate or challenge, not by “serious,” “legitimate” people. “Reality” is simply “the way it is.” It is axiomatic. It is apothegmatic. It’s not a belief or an interpretation. It is not subject to change or revision. It is the immortal, immutable Word of God … or whatever deity or deity-like concept the ruling classes and the masses they rule accept as the Final Arbiter of Truth. In our case, this would be Science, or Reason, rather than some supernatural being, but in terms of ideology there isn’t much difference. Every system of belief, regardless of its nature, ultimately depends on political power and power relations to enforce its beliefs, which is to say, to make them “real.”

OK, whenever I write about “reality” and “truth,” I get a few rather angry responses from folks who appear to think I’m denying the existence of objective reality. I’m not … for example, this chair I’m sitting on is absolutely part of objective reality, a physical object that actually exists. The screen you’re probably reading these words on is also part of objective reality. I am not saying there is no reality. What I’m saying is, “reality” is a concept, a concept invented and developed by people … a concept that serves a variety of purposes, some philosophical, some political. It’s the political purposes I’m interested in.

Think of “reality” as an ideological tool … a tool in the hands of those with the power to designate what is “real” and what isn’t. Doctors, teachers, politicians, police, scientists, priests, pundits, experts, parents — these are the enforcers of “reality.” The powerless do not get to decide what is “real.” Ask someone suffering from schizophrenia. Or … I’m sorry, is it bipolar disorder? Or oppositional defiant disorder? I can’t keep all these new disorders psychiatrists keep “discovering” straight.

Or ask a Palestinian living in Gaza. Or the mother of a Black kid the cops shot for no reason. Ask Julian Assange. Ask the families of all those “enemy combatants” Obama droned. Ask the “conspiracy theorists” on Twitter digitally screaming at anyone who will listen about what is and isn’t “the truth.” Each of them will give you their version of “reality,” and you and I may agree with some of them, and some of their beliefs may be supported with facts, but that will not make what they believe “reality.”

Power is what makes “reality” “reality.” Not facts. Not evidence. Not knowledge. Power.

Those in power, or aligned with those in power, or parroting the narratives of those in power, understand this (whether consciously or not). Those without power mostly do not, and thus we continue to “speak truth to power,” as if those in power gave a shit. They don’t. The powerful are not arguing with us. They are not attempting to win a debate about what is and isn’t “true,” or what did or didn’t “really” happen. They are declaring what did or didn’t happen. They are telling us what is and is not “reality,” and demonstrating what happens to those who disagree.

The “Democracy versus The Putin-Nazis” narrative is our new “reality,” whether we like it or not. It does not matter one iota that there is zero evidence to support this narrative, other than the claims of intelligence agencies, politicians, the corporate media, and other servants of the ruling classes. The Russians are “attacking democracy” because the ruling classes tell us they are. “Fascism is on the march again” because the ruling classes say it is. Anyone who disagrees is a “Putin-sympathizer,” a “Putin-apologist,” or “linked to Russia,” or “favored by Russia,” or an “anti-Semite,” or a “fascist apologist.”

Question the official narrative about the Gratuitously Baby Gassing Monster of Syria and you’re an Assad apologist, a Russian bot network, or a plagiarizing Red-Brown infiltrator. Criticize the corporate media for disseminating cheap McCarthyite smears, and you’re a Tulsi-stanning Hindu Nazi-apologist. God help you if you should appear on FOX, in which case you are a Nazi-legitimizer! A cursory check of the Internet today revealed that “far-right Facebook groups are spreading hate to millions in Europe” by means of some sort of hypnogenic content that just looking at it turns you into a Nazi. Our democracy-loving friends at The Atlantic Council are disappointed by Trump’s refusal to sign the “Christchurch Call,” a multilateral statement encouraging corporations to censor the Internet … and fascism is fashionable in Italy again!”

This post-Orwellian, neo-McCarthyite mass hysteria is not going to stop … not until the global capitalist ruling classes have suppressed the current “populist” insurgency and restored “normality” throughout the Western world. Until then, it’s going to be pretty much non-stop “Democracy versus the Putin-Nazis.”

So, unless you’re enjoying our new “reality,” or are willing to conform to it for some other reason, prepare to be smeared as “a Russia-loving, Putin-apologizing conspiracy theorist,” or a “fascism-enabling, Trump-loving Nazi,” or some other type of insidiously Slavic, white supremacist, mass-murder enthusiast. Things are only going to get uglier as the American election season ramps up. I mean, come on … you don’t really believe that the global capitalist ruling classes are going to let Trump serve a second term, do you?

U.S. War Criminals, Conspiracy Theorists and the Mainstream Media vs. Julian Assange

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By Timothy Alexander Guzman

Source: Silent Crow News

Julian Assange exposed U.S. war crimes, CIA spying capabilities, false flag cyber attacks and corruption within the Democratic Party and he’s the bad guy? Trump’s Justice department has decided to charge Julian Assange with “17 counts of violating the Espionage Act for his role in obtaining and publishing secret military and diplomatic documents in 2010, the Justice Department announced on Thursday, a novel case that raises profound First Amendment issues” according to The New York Times. The article ‘Assange Indicted Under Espionage Act, Raising First Amendment Issues’ does mention the fact that charging Assange under the Espionage Act sets the precedent to criminalize investigative journalism that is “related to obtaining, and in some cases publishing, state secrets to be criminal, the officials sought to minimize the implications for press freedoms.” However, The New York Times has become the judge and jury and says that Assange is a fugitive trying to avoid Sweden’s justice system for an alleged sexual assault charge and that he is a useful tool for the Russians in regards to interfering in U.S. elections:

The charges are the latest twist in a career in which Mr. Assange has morphed from a crusader for radical transparency to fugitive from a Swedish sexual assault investigation, to tool of Russia’s election interference, to criminal defendant in the United States.

Mr. Assange vaulted to global fame nearly a decade ago as a champion of openness about what governments secretly do. But with this indictment, he has become the target for a case that could open the door to criminalizing activities that are crucial to American investigative journalists who write about national security matters.

The case has nothing to do with Russia’s election interference in 2016, when Mr. Assange’s organization published Democratic emails stolen by Russia as part of its covert efforts to help elect President Trump. Instead, it focuses on Mr. Assange’s role in the leak of hundreds of thousands of State Department cables and military files by the former Army intelligence analyst Chelsea Manning

According to the head of the Justice Department’s National Security Division, John Demers, he said that “Some say that Assange is a journalist and that he should be immune from prosecution for these actions,” and that “The department takes seriously the role of journalists in our democracy and we thank you for it. It is not and has never been the department’s policy to target them for reporting.” But Mr. Assange, was “no journalist.”

Demers has accused Assange of collaborating with Chelsea Manning to steal classified information when he said that “No responsible actor, journalist or otherwise, would purposefully publish the names of individuals he or she knew to be confidential human sources in a war zone, exposing them to the gravest of dangers.”

The New York Times admits that they can be charged for doing what Wikileaks has done in the near future under the Espionage Act:

Notably, The New York Times, among many other news organizations, obtained precisely the same archives of documents from WikiLeaks, without authorization from the government — the act that most of the charges addressed. While The Times did take steps to withhold the names of informants in the subset of the files it published, it is not clear how that is legally different from publishing other classified information

Assange’s lawyer, Barry J. Pollack said that his client was charged for a crime, but according to Pollack, Assange is guilty “for encouraging sources to provide him truthful information and for publishing that information.” The New York Times also said that “the United States has asked Britain to extradite Mr. Assange, who is fighting the move, and the filing of the new charges clears the way for British courts to weigh whether it would be lawful to transfer custody of him to a place where he will face Espionage Act charges.” Britain will most likely extradite Assange to the U.S. since Britain is a close U.S. ally. The New York Times is sort of playing good cop, bad cop with the case of Julian Assange. They describe Assange as a fugitive who is avoiding Sweden’s sexual assault investigation to becoming a tool or a puppet for “Russia’s election interference” which is a joke, then they say that they can face the same charges as Wikileaks if they use the same tactics to obtain information. However, The New York Times and every other mainstream media outlet works for the U.S. government and are on the same page with the politicians as they shamefully and continuously discredit Assange. According to a report by FAIR (Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting) titled ‘Media Cheer Assange’s Arrest’ said that the media demonized Assange after his arrest:

A Washington Post editorial (4/11/19) claimed Assange was “no free-press hero” and insisted the arrest was “long overdue.” Likewise, the Wall Street Journal (4/11/19) demanded “accountability” for Assange, saying, “His targets always seem to be democratic institutions or governments.”

Other coverage was more condemnatory still. The View’s Meghan McCain (4/11/19) declared she hoped Assange “rots in hell.” Saturday Night Live’s Colin Jost (4/13/19) said it was “so satisfying to see an Internet troll get dragged out into the sunlight.” But it was perhaps the National Review (4/12/19) that expressed the most enthusiastic approval of Assange’s arrest, condemning him for his “anti-Americanism, his antisemitism and his raw personal corruption” and for harming the US with his “vile spite”

Trump and the CIA

The CIA is Trump’s wet dream, I know it sounds nasty but it was obvious from the start when Trump made his first visit as President of the United States to the CIA headquarters in Langley, Virginia and said “But I want to say that there is nobody that feels stronger about the intelligence community and the CIA than Donald Trump. There’s nobody.” Trump practically brown-nosed the CIA, and in doing so, the writing was on the wall to where the Trump-CIA relationship was going, that’s why Trump’s u-turn on Julian Assange’s arrest was not surprising and may I say, one of the most dishonest responses made by the president since the Obama and Bush years. Let’s remember during Trump’s campaign trail, it was reported that he mentioned Wikileaks more than 141 times until the day Assange was dragged out in handcuffs from the Ecuadorian embassy, and then Trump changed his tune when he was asked by the media about Assange’s arrest, and what was his response? “I know nothing about WikiLeaks.” Politicians from both sides of the aisle in Washington praised the arrest of Julian Assange especially Hillary Clinton who said Assange “has to answer for what he has done” according to The Guardian.

Trump’s entire administration wants Julian Assange and his Wikileaks organization to be permanently shut down including Trump’s advisor John Bolton who was exposed by Wikileaks when they released more than 800 files exposing his war crimes. Secretary of State and former CIA Director, Mike Pompeo is another war hawk neocon who wants Assange either dead or alive. Pompeo had called Julian Assange a “narcissist” who allegedly works hands in glove with Russia and that Assange depends on “the dirty work of others to make him famous.” During a speech at The Center for Strategic and International Studies(CSIS) back in 2017, Pompeo said that “It is time to call out WikiLeaks for what it really is: a non-state hostile intelligence service often abetted by state actors like Russia.” Pompeo said that the U.S. intelligence community (including the CIA) had already determined that Russia’s military intelligence service, the GRU used WikiLeaks to release hacked information from the DNC. But the reality is that the hacked emails came from a source who faced a serious risk according to Assange and that source was Seth Rich who was shot and killed in an affluent neighborhood in Washington, D.C. in the summer of 2016 in an apparent robbery that “failed” according to Seth Rich’s father, Joel during an interview with a local TV station KMTV. In 2016, Assange was interviewed on a Dutch television program Nieuwsuur, and said that they concerned about what happened to Seth Rich and were investigating the situation:

“We have to understand how high the stakes are in the US, and that our sources face serious risks. That’s why they come to us, so we can protect their anonymity. We are investigating what happened with Seth Rich. We think it is a concerning situation. There is not a conclusion yet; we are not willing to state a conclusion, but we are concerned about it. And more importantly, a variety of WikiLeaks sources are concerned when that kind of thing happens”

 Wikileaks offered a $20,000 reward for information leading to a conviction for the murder of Seth Rich.

Robert Mueller is a Conspiracy Theorist

The New York Times published an article based on the Mueller Report regarding the murder of Seth Rich ‘Seth Rich Was Not Source of Leaked D.N.C. Emails, Mueller Report Confirms’ claiming that Seth Rich was not the source of the Democratic National Committee’s (DNC) leaked emails proving that they were undermining the Bernie Sander’s campaign. The emails were first published by DCLeaks and then by WikiLeaks on July 22, 2016 right before the 2016 Democratic National Convention. According to The New York Times:

The special counsel’s report confirmed this week that Seth Rich, a young Democratic National Committee employee whose unsolved killing became grist for a right-wing conspiracy theory, was not the source of thousands of internal D.N.C. emails that WikiLeaks released during the 2016 presidential race, officially debunking a notion that had persisted without support for years

The report also said that “tucked amid hundreds of pages of the report’s main findings, the special counsel, Robert S. Mueller III, took aim at WikiLeaks and its founder, Julian Assange, for falsely implying that Mr. Rich was somehow involved in the dissemination of the emails, an act that aided President Trump’s campaign.” Mueller said that “WikiLeaks and Assange made several public statements apparently designed to obscure the source of the materials that WikiLeaks was releasing.” The report claims that WikiLeaks collaborated with the “true source of the leaked emails — Russian hackers — after Mr. Rich’s death.” The New York Times also said that “The theory linking Mr. Rich to the email leak took root in conservative circles and was cited by prominent conservatives like Newt Gingrich and right-wing commentators like Rush Limbaugh, Sean Hannity and Alex Jones of Infowars.” Mueller’s final statement regarding the murder of Seth Rich is just a diversion away from the truth and with Mueller’s help he can make it just go away, at least in the mainstream-media. The only people that can expose the truth regarding Seth Rich is Julian Assange and the Wikileaks organization. According to an nbcwashington.comarticle “The Mueller report says beginning in the summer of 2016 Julian Assange and WikiLeaks made statements about Rich falsely implying he leaked the stolen emails.” Last month, Vox.com published an article declaring that ‘The Seth Rich conspiracy theory needs to end now’ and falsely claimed that Assange knew that Seth Rich was not the source, because it was the Russians:

The report definitively disproved the notion that a Democratic National Committee staffer named Seth Rich was the source of leaked DNC documents later published by WikiLeaks, and that his July 2016 murder came as the result of his decision to leak those documents to WikiLeaks. This wasn’t true, although Trump associates like Jerome Corsi, Roger Stone, and countless others, have argued vehemently for years that it was. And WikiLeaks, and its founder Julian Assange, knew it

The Trump-Russia collusion hoax has been on air since Trump took office more than 2 years ago. MSNBC who was a cheerleader for the removal of Trump was humiliated after the Mueller Report revealed that Trump did not collude with Russia in the 2016 Presidential elections to defeat Hillary Clinton. Clinton lost the election because of Clinton, not Assange, the Russians or anyone else. Clinton was and still is despised by most people within the U.S. especially when she tried to undermine the other hypocrite, Bernie Sanders (who would be another puppet of the deep state if he were to win the 2020 U.S. elections)and she was exposed. Clinton and the DNC’s plan to undermine the Sander’s campaign was to secure her nomination. Wikileaks embarrassed the DNC and forced them to make an apology to Bernie Sanders and his supporters by saying “On behalf of everyone at the DNC, we want to offer a deep and sincere apology to Senator Sanders, his supporters, and the entire Democratic Party for the inexcusable remarks made over email” and that “These comments do not reflect the values of the DNC or our steadfast commitment to neutrality during the nominating process.” The Mueller report claims that the emails were allegedly stolen by hackers associated with Russian intelligence called Guccifer 2.0. In the summer of 2018, Robert Mueller indicted 12 Russian military intelligence agents called Fancy Bear who were allegedly responsible for the attack. Fancy Bear was supposedly behind Guccifer 2.0 who claimed they were responsible, but then again, it’s all a lie.

Vault 7: The CIA’s ‘Global Covert Hacking System’

One of the biggest news stories involving Wikileaks and the release of more than 8,761 documents under ‘Year Zero’, exposing the CIA and its global operations. It was the first part of a series of leaks that Wikileaks called ‘Vault 7’ a network that was inside the CIA’s Center for Cyber Intelligence based in Langley, Virginia that involves a “global covert hacking program,” including what Wikileaks describes as “weaponized exploits” used against such devices as “Apple’s iPhone, Google’s Android and Microsoft’s Windows and even Samsung TVs, which are turned into covert microphones.” The CIA bypassed encryption codes on messaging services such as WhatsApp and other phones devices. WikiLeaks said that government hackers can hack Android phones that basically collects “audio and message traffic before encryption is applied.” There are various parts of Vault 7 such as ‘Dark Matter’ that exposed the CIA’s hacking capabilities including Apple’s iPhones and Macs. Weeping Angel is another hacking tool that was developed by the CIA and the U.K.’s very own MI5 used to penetrate smart TVs to gather intelligence. Once the program is installed in smart T.V.s with a USB stick, it enabled those same televisions’ with built-in microphones and sometimes even video cameras to record while the television is turned off. Then the recorded data is either stored into the television’s memory or sent to the CIA through the internet. There are several other programs exposed under the ‘Year Zero’ global covert hacking program, but one other program stands out the most is what the CIA uses to conduct “false flag” cyber-attacks that has portrayed Russia in the past as the aggressor. Regarding the CIA’s Remote Devices Branch’s UMBRAGE group, which is a subdivision of the center’s Remote Development Branch (RDB), and according to Wikileaks’s source, the program “collects and maintains a substantial library of attack techniques” that were stolen from malware produced in other states including the Russian Federation. Wikileaks said the following:

With UMBRAGE and related projects the CIA cannot only increase its total number of attack types but also misdirect attribution by leaving behind the “fingerprints” of the groups that the attack techniques were stolen from. UMBRAGE components cover keyloggers, password collection, webcam capture, data destruction, persistence, privilege escalation, stealth, anti-virus (PSP) avoidance and survey techniques

Kim Dotcom commented on the Wikileaks revelations when he tweeted that the “CIA uses techniques to make cyber attacks look like they originated from enemy state. It turns DNC/Russia hack allegation by CIA into a JOKE.” Wired.com claimed that “Russian hacking deniers” were at an advantage in a 2017 article titled ‘WikiLeaks CIA Dump Gives Russian Hacking Deniers the Perfect Ammo’ and said that:

One nugget of particular interest to Trump supporters: a section titled “Umbrage” that details the CIA’s ability to impersonate cyber-attack techniques used by Russia and other nation states. In theory, that means the agency could have faked digital forensic fingerprints to make the Russians look guilty of hacking the Democratic National Committee

The CIA’s ability to hack smart TV’s, Smartphone’s and encrypted messaging applications and we must add to the fact that the CIA also has the capability to conduct cyber-attacks under the UMBRAGE group and make them appear it came from a foreign power is as Orwellian as one can get, it also carries very serious geopolitical implications. What is insane about the CIA’s UMBRAGE group is that according to Wikileaks, “With UMBRAGE and related projects the CIA cannot only increase its total number of attack types but also misdirect attribution by leaving behind the “fingerprints” of the groups that the attack techniques were stolen from.” In other words, the CIA could launch a malware attack that was originally developed by another country to intentionally “misdirect attribution” for the hack that would not be traced back to the CIA in any way. In 2017, CNN quoted the former CIA director James Woolsey as saying that “It’s often not foolproof to say who it is because it is possible and sometimes easy to hide your tracks,” he said. “There’s lots of tricks.” and he should know. “I think the Russians were in there, but it doesn’t mean other people weren’t, too,” Woolsey told CNN.

The CIA and the Persecution of Julian Assange 

When Julian Assange was arrested by British authorities, Wikileaks immediately released a statement on twitter mentioning the role of the CIA:

This man is a son, a father, a brother. He has won dozens of journalism awards. He’s been nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize every year since 2010. Powerful actors, including CIA, are engaged in a sophisticated effort to dehumanise, delegitimize and imprison him. #ProtectJulian

The arrest of Assange has sparked outrage and anger around the world. Assange is a hero to us all especially those in the alternative media. The mainstream-media, as we all know are based on conspiracy theories, fabrications and flat-out lies are celebrating the arrest of Assange. Perhaps, they are hoping to rebound after the ‘RussiaGate’ conspiracy theory hoax which backfired in their faces and since then, their viewership has completely collapsed.

Julian Assange will face a U.S. court if he is extradited. But rest assured, there will be those of us who will continue to speak out for Assange, and there will also be worldwide protests in coming months and years until Julian Assange is released from prison. There is hope because Assange has the truth on his side no matter what happens. If is imprisoned for life or god forbid executed at the behest of Washington and the CIA, Assange will become a Martyr. There will be many more people like Assange because the truth is like a virus to the establishment, and that’s why they want to destroy Wikileaks and the alternative media, but it’s too late, the truth is out and it will never be stopped. #ProtectJulian

Freedom Rider: No Chemical Attacks in Syria

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By Margaret Kimberly

Source: Black Agenda Report

The corporate media is concealing a leaked UN agency report that shows Syrian government innocence in an alleged chemical attack.

“Americans have been fed a steady diet of ‘Assad the butcher’ and any counter narrative is disappeared.”

The corporate media march in lock step with the United States and its allies around the world. They have a tacit agreement to exclude any information which might inconvenience pro-war, pro-interventionist narratives.

Claims of chemical weapons use by the Syrian government are but one example of this tactic. These improbable stories have been repeated with regularity ever since the United States and its allies began using jihadist proxies to overthrow the Syrian government in 2011. In 2013 we were told that president Assad waged a chemical weapons attack on the same day that United Nations weapons inspectors arrived in the country. It is an understatement to say that this scenario is unlikely to be true.

In 2018 the U.S. and its European allies repeated that they would take military action against Syria if there were any reports of chemical weapons use. Like clockwork, such an event was reported and a bombing campaign took place in April of that year.

Anyone with common sense should doubt these reports. Assad had no reason to do anything which guaranteed military attacks on his country. Furthermore, persons with credibility and expertise had already provided evidence that these claims are nothing but false flags meant to get public buy-in for aggression.

“Assad had no reason to do anything which guaranteed military attacks on his country.”

The claims and counter claims always merited serious scrutiny. But a leaked document from the Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons (OPCW) makes the case that even supposedly disinterested parties take the side of the U.S. and its allies if enough pressure is applied.

The leaked report makes clear that there were serious questions about the 2018 reports, even among OPCW staff. The New York Times and the rest of their partners in propaganda wanted to make the case for the once and future war and accused the Syrian government of dropping chlorine gas devices onto an apartment building. But the leaked document  shows that there were serious doubts expressed by the some of the expert investigators. “…there is a higher probability that both cylinders were manually placed at both locations rather than being delivered by aircraft.”

There are many dots to connect here and they point away from the “Assad is gassing his own people” tale. The OPCW was pressured into taking on the role of judge and jury and assigning blame, rather than merely reporting on its technical findings. The politicization of its work dove tailed nicely with charges of Syrian gas and Russian poisonings against former KGB operatives. As the old saying goes, there is no such thing as coincidence.

“The politicization of the OPCW’s work dove tailed nicely with charges of Syrian gas and Russian poisonings against former KGB operatives.”

The recently leaked documents ought to make for headlines around the world. Instead the story has been ignored by corporate media. Only those who are already interested in the topic or who are familiar with organizations such as the Working Group  on Syria, Propaganda and Media know anything about this news. It has been deliberately kept hidden so that the next call for an armed response will receive little or no opposition.

The U.S. Congress came very close to calling for a Syrian war in a May 20, 2019 letter signed by 70% of its members . The AIPAC inspired massive calls for president Trump to “stabilize” Syria, protect Israel and stop Russian and Iranian influence. The call was bipartisan and bicameral with 79 senators and 303 members of the house signing on to the call for imperialism. Presidential candidates Kamala Harris and Cory Booker are among those calling for the dangerous slippery slope. Congressional Black Caucus (CBC) chairwoman Karen Bass signed too as did Hakeem Jeffries, James Clyburn, and Elijah Cummings among others.

Americans have been fed a steady diet of “Assad the butcher” and any counter narrative is disappeared, just like the OPCW leak. It is a useful ploy to have around. Let us not forget that last year’s bombing resulted in praise from the so-called resistance crowd who think they are supporting a humanitarian action. When he next decides to protect the U.S. jihadist proxies the gas attack story will suddenly reappear. Revealing any doubts about its veracity will undermine the U.S. hegemonic project.

“Seventy-nine senators and 303 members of the house signing on to the call for imperialism.”

There is plenty of collusion in the United States and it isn’t between Trump and Russia. The love triangle involves the corporate media, both sides of the war party, and foreign ally puppet states. They all play nicely together in the sandbox when there is an evil deed to carry out. The public are mostly hapless dupes who give approval for destruction and carnage just like the state want them to.

We have been through this often enough to know when lies are being told. It wasn’t that long ago that Colin Powell went to the United Nations with a vial and a tall tale about WMD. The cast of characters changes but the story is the same. It is time to grow up and end useful idiocy.

 

Margaret Kimberley’s Freedom Rider column appears weekly in BAR, and is widely reprinted elsewhere. She maintains a frequently updated blog as well at http://freedomrider.blogspot.com . Ms. Kimberley lives in New York City, and can be reached via e-Mail at Margaret.Kimberley(at)BlackAgendaReport.com.

Are “Conspiracy Theories” Tearing Society Apart Or Saving Us From Destruction?

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By Brandon Smith

Source: Activist Post

The phrase “conspiracy theory” is often used by establishment agencies, the mainstream media and useful idiots as a tool to dismiss legitimate evidence or viewpoints that disagree with their predetermined version of events. This method of propaganda was not always as widespread as it is today. The phrase was not “created” by the CIA, but it was in fact weaponized by them in the 1960s after the assassination of John F. Kennedy with the express purpose of shutting down rational debate.

CIA memo 1035-960, circulated within the CIA in 1967 and exposed through a freedom of information act request by The New York Times in 1976, outlines strategies the agency would use to shut down critics of the Warren Commission Report. Specifically, they suggested the accusation of “conspiracy” with negative connotations attached, predominantly in mainstream books and articles. This was indeed done through the CIA’s many puppets in the media, and the concept of “conspiracy theory” as a pejorative was born.

Through the use of straw man arguments, red herring fallacies and sophistry, the incredible scale of evidence (exposed by investigators like New Orleans District Attorney Jim Garrison) suggesting the Warren Commission was either corrupt or ignorant in its findings was buried in a flurry of hatchet jobs and hit pieces. And this was the goal, of course; to attack the messenger and silence the truth without having to go through the ugly process of directly confronting the truth.

Until recently, this strategy was highly effective. Attacking a person as a “conspiracy theorist” was the only tool critics really needed to keep a piece of evidence or a concrete viewpoint from going viral. Conspiracy theory is equated to insanity, or stupidity, or buffoonery. Everyone knows a conspiracy theorist is not to be taken seriously, so why waste time listening to what they have to say in the first place?

It should come as no surprise that conspiracy REALITY is not something these people want entertained by the public. Conspiracies are a fact of history. Governments lie, all the time, and they have been caught doing it. The media lies, constantly, and has been caught doing it. Yet, we are supposed to ignore this and assume that anyone daring to stand contrary to government and media claims is some kind of lunatic?

In the past 5-10 years, however, things have been changing. Suddenly, anti-establishment views and investigations of corruption are bulldozing the mainstream scripted narrative, and the elites and the media are bewildered. They can see they are losing control of popular thought and they are disturbed, to say the least. A steady stream of articles and essays have been flooding the MSM recently lamenting the rise of “conspiracy culture” and warning of the “death of democracy” if this is allowed to continue.

They seem specifically angered by the idea that their “journalistic” and “professional” status no longer matters to most people. Not long ago, anyone wearing a suit, a uniform, a lab coat, a journalist’s badge or collecting a government paycheck was supposed to be immediately taken seriously as a designated “expert”. As Noam Chomsky describes them in his book Manufacturing Consent, they were the professional class, the top 10% or less of individuals with “all the answers”. These were the people the establishment sought to indoctrinate most of all, because these were the community leaders that many in the public listened to without question.

Now there is a growing movement of people who could not care less about what kind of degree someone’s parents purchased for them from an Ivy League university. They don’t care about establishment designations and fake accolades and titles and credentials. What they care about are facts and evidence. What they care about are the arguments a person puts forth, rather than how important they purport to be. This is causing some consternation among the elites.

A key figure and gatekeeper in the propaganda war against the alternative media and conspiracy reality is Cass Sunstein, former “Information Czar” in the Obama Administration. Sunstein has written numerous books and articles lamenting the growing influence of the alternative media, including his book Conspiracy Theories And Dangerous Ideas.

The main thrust of Sunstein’s position is that conspiracy theories isolate the populace into small groups of like-minded people perpetuating each other’s “misguided” views. He also suggests that these groups represent a concrete threat to the stability of government and of society by spreading wrong (or perhaps inconvenient) information and civil unrest. In other words, a few decades ago all information was centralized and filtered by the corporate media and government, and now the Internet is decentralizing information flow thereby allowing people to think differently and break from the majority narrative, which is unacceptable by Sunstein’s standards.

Sunstein sees the creation of a public hive mind as the best outcome for social order. He suggests in his book Nudge the concept of “Libertarian Paternalism” (which is neither libertarian nor paternal). He advocates for the control of society through subversive means of influence (nudging) while allowing people to continue believing that their choices are actually their own.

But how would Sunstein go about executing this influence? His solution to the threat of the alternative media was first made clear in his paper titled “Conspiracy Theories”, published in 2008. In it, he argues in favor of government interference or control of alternative media or “conspiracy theory” sources. His primary tactic was the infiltration of alternative media forums and sites by government agents or private actors paid by the government to disrupt discussion, derail activism and sow seeds of doubt or chaos. Effectively, Sunstein wanted the covert destruction of the liberty media by paid agitators.

So, the same man who accuses the alternative media of conspiracy mongering and the destruction of the Western world is actively seeking to foment a conspiracy to undermine that movement. Is this irony, or hypocrisy or both?  Doesn’t this mean that Sunstein is a part of one of the very conspiracies he criticizes people like me for being concerned about?

Sunstein and his elitist ilk want the power to erase or sabotage the alternative media. In fact, there are probably a few of their agents provocateurs attacking this article in the comments below right now. They would prefer that the government eventually take full control of the Internet and dictate the terms of media participation directly. This gives rise to one of the most important questions that the establishment does not want to answer – Who gets to decide what is and what is not “dangerous conspiracy theory”?

If pressed, the elites will ultimately suggest that they are the best qualified. Sunstein describes the general public in his books as essentially lazy, unintelligent, impulsive and not to be trusted to make good decisions. He does not seem to include himself and his globalist comrades as being prone to the same weaknesses. They are apparently wise and benevolent enough to make the best decisions for all of us. Imagine that…

This elitism bias and Sunstein’s overall methodology for biting at the ankles of the liberty media is being carried over into a new wave of propaganda in the past couple of years, primarily coming from (though not limited to) the political left.

Sunstein’s gatekeeping has spawned a cancerous growth of copycats in progressive academics. This is going on everywhere, but one particular example I found recently was on Vox, a leftist rag which shamelessly flaunts its political bias and actively slanders conservatives.  Vox‘s article “Conspiracy Theories Are Getting More Absurd And Harder To Refute” promotes a new book which regurgitates Sunstein’s propaganda model. The article takes special time to reassert the old disinformation narrative by stating that:

Democracy requires a minimum amount of mutual trust among citizens, and conspiracism destroys it.

Are you getting the sense yet that there is a repetitive message coming from these people that they want you to embrace? Is there ANYTHING true about the statement above?  The fundamental root of their argument is that conspiracy theories (viewpoints outside the mainstream) must be treated as existential threats to society. In other words, some ideas are so dangerous that they must be controlled or outlawed. The basis of this argument, though, is entirely fraudulent.

First, leftists incessantly refer to our society as a “democracy”, I think because they believe if they tell the lie enough it will become reality by default.  The US was never intended to be a “democracy”, but a Republic, and with good reason. Democracy requires blind and often misplaced faith in the system. A Republic requires constant vigilance and healthy skepticism. In a Republic, we are not supposed to simply “trust” that our leaders are going to do the right thing. We are supposed to put them under a microscope, uncover criminality and corruption, and generally make them uncomfortable at all times. It is our civic duty to become “conspiracy theorists”.

The establishment prefers a democracy because in a democracy 51% of the population can dictate the individual liberties of the other 49%, and they are rightly convinced that they can influence the thinking and decisions of the larger half. Also, in a democracy, society revolves around moral relativism and the ever arbitrary “greater good for the greater number”, instead of governing according to individual liberty, inherent moral compass and human conscience.

The Vox article goes on to make the claim that while there are some correct conspiracy theories, they have all come from the left side of the political spectrum (which they call “progressive conspiracy theories”). They then assert that there are no verifiable conspiracy theories coming from the political right. This is madness.

When Cass Sunstein describes the tribalist isolation and conspiracy delusions of certain groups, he was clearly trying to mislabel conservative activists and the alternative media, but the REAL conspiracy nutbags have actually been on the left this whole time.

A lot of young leftist millennials, professional (I say this with the utmost sarcasm) mainstream media personalities and celebrities foolishly bought into the Russiagate conspiracy theory; a theory based on ZERO concrete evidence and a garbage heap of empty conjecture. For example, how many sessions of Real Time With Bill Maher or Late Night With Stephen Colbert was the Russiagate fantasy propped up as verified fact by a screeching flock of leftist parrots, blanketed in the protective peanut-brained imbecility of the audiences in their Los Angeles and New York echo chambers?

Even today, after the long-anticipated Mueller Report led to no indictments, leftists continue to cling desperately like hemorrhoids to the anus that is Russiagate.

Leftists have to this point justified much of their schizophrenic and sometimes violent and criminal behavior on the lie that Donald Trump is a usurper put into office by Russian manipulation of US elections. Now isn’t this the epitome of a conspiracy theory that is destructive to society?

Not all conspiracy theories are started by the alternative media. Many are started by the establishment itself, and these are indeed designed to cause the destabilization of the nation.

At the same time, the fabricated Russiagate conspiracy has been very effective at leading the left away from the very real conspiracy of Trump’s saturation of his cabinet with banking elites and globalist think tank ghouls like John Bolton, Steven Mnuchin or Wilber Ross. Weren’t these the same elites that Trump was going to “drain from the swamp”? Why hasn’t the left talking about that for the past two years?

The article also makes no mention of the DNC rigging of the Democratic primaries in favor of Hillary Clinton and against Bernie Sanders. This was a conspiracy conservatives had to help expose, while the left sat idle and ignored it, hyperfocusing on their hatred of Trump while propping up Hillary Clinton, a repeat criminal offender. But, hey, conservative conspiracies are always wrong and leftist conspiracies are often correct according to Vox and friends…

And what about the verified fact of mass digital surveillance by government on the public?  This was a conspiracy that conservative groups had been warning about for years.  We were called kooks, because why would the government care about what the average person did in their day-to-day life?  Our fears were verified by the exposure of classified data by people like Edward Snowden and Julian Assange (who is now facing extradition and prosecution for nothing more than publishing truths on the Internet).  Both the political left and political right are aggressively hostile to both these men, and are seeking to bury them.

My question is, what is really more dangerous?  Conspiracy theories, or the actual conspiracies governments and elitists execute against the people?

The message here is not ambiguous at all. To summarize, the establishment wants control of Internet media, by hook or by crook, in the name of protecting people from themselves and from ideas they consider unsettling to the world order. The political left is all on board with this as long as their conspiracy theories are treated with legitimacy; and they will be, because their conspiracy theories are the establishment’s conspiracy theories.

The only theories that are being threatened with subjugation are those of conservatives and the alternative media that are contrary to centralization and government power. Not because our theories are dangerous to the fabric of society, but because our theories are dangerous to the people who want to dictate the fabric of society. Our activism and journalism represents decentralized thought which could choke the engine of the globalist agenda. We aren’t tearing down the Western world, we’re the only thing keeping it alive.

 

You can read more from Brandon Smith at his site Alt-Market. If you would like to support the work that Alt-Market does while also receiving content on advanced tactics for defeating the globalist agenda, subscribe to our exclusive newsletter The Wild Bunch Dispatch.  Learn more about it HERE.

Freedom Rider: U.S. Wages War Against the World

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By Margaret Kimberly

Source: Black Agenda Report

The U.S. “troika of tyranny,” Trump, Bolton and Pompeo, are making things up as they go along, seeking to bend the planet to their lawless will.

“The activists who chose to protect the Venezuelan embassy from Guaido and the other Venezuelan traitors are showing us the way to move forward.”

This columnist has spent many years predicting a United States war on Iran. There is now a president who may finally make good on that long expressed threat. Donald Trump is deep in the thrall of Saudi Arabia and Israel, the two nations that pose the greatest risk to Iran. He happily does their bidding and is in a position to bring the sick neocon fantasy to reality.

But the U.S. excels at nothing except creating misery for millions of people and raising the risk of an all out hot war.  Cuba recently instituted rationing after Trump returned to the bad old days of strict sanctions enacted against that nation. More than 40,000 Venezuelans have lost their lives as a result of the crushing sanctions imposed on that country. Iran suffered catastrophic flooding but not one country would provide them with needed aid because U.S. sanctions prevented them from doing so.

“More than 40,000 Venezuelans have lost their lives as a result of the crushing sanctions.”

Aside from starving civilians and depriving them of medical care, the U.S. can’t do much else that doesn’t create dangerous consequences. The latest regime change attempt failed miserably and exposed the limits of U.S. power.  The Venezuelan coup attempt was a complete farce . Hand-picked puppet Juan Guaido never had more than 25 soldiers on his side, and those few were tricked into showing up for what amounted to a photo-op.

In the interim, National Security Adviser John Bolton and Secretary of State Pompeo have proven themselves to be the worst in a long line of bad foreign policy decision making. First they accused Iran of some unspecified aggressive act and sent a fleet of ships to make their case for a war of aggression. Then Pompeo scheduled meetings with Russian foreign minister Sergei Lavrov to be followed by talks with Vladimir Putin himself. But he chose to cut short his time in Russia in order to meet with Europeans and enlist their support for action against Iran.

“Hand-picked puppet Juan Guaido never had more than 25 soldiers on his side.”

All of the bluster, meeting changes and dispatching navy vessels to the Persian gulf prove one important point. The U.S. “troika of tyranny,” Trump, Bolton and Pompeo, are making things up as they go along. They picked a trade fight with China that they could not win. They want regime change in Iran and Venezuela but they won’t get the results they want even if they carry out military attacks.

In the meantime they fall back on the old tricks of false flags, in this case blaming Iran for a mysterious and conveniently timed oil tanker explosion in the United Arab Emirates. The Saudi puppets are obviously part of the plan and right on cue claim to have been sabotaged .

The United States has willing vassals such as the NATO member states. It has the biggest military in the world. It can attack Venezuela or Iran but faces serious consequences should it do so. Iran and Venezuela have friends, namely Russia and China. Those two countries have developed a strong alliance in order to protect themselves from the crazed and unpredictable Americans.

“They fall back on the old tricks of false flags.”

The U.S. continues to up the ante with phony requests to attack Venezuela allegedly coming from the dupes who thought the United States would put them in power. It isn’t coincidental that the activists protecting the Venezuelan embassy were expelled at the same time.

The evil war mongers are very stupid but that it isn’t a cause for celebration. Unintended consequences have already lead to two world wars and millions of dead.  Unfortunately no one who ought to educate the public on this subject are doing what they should. The corporate media always support presidents at war. Even supposedly liberal outlets have spent years demonizing Russia, Venezuela and Iran. In so doing they have made the population ignorant and or blood thirsty. Democrats in congress are equally imperialist and will say nothing as the government plans a humanitarian catastrophe. At most they will mutter that Trump must ask for their approval before killing thousands of people. Instead they carry on the discredited Russiagate story but oppose none of the things that actually make the Trump administration so dangerous.

“At most Democrats will mutter that Trump must ask for their approval before killing thousands of people.”

But Russiagate and phony claims of a constitutional crisis were intentionally created for this moment. When the United States most needs détente and a lessening of tensions, the lies meant to make Russia look like an aggressor are repeated and make war more likely.

Only the people can lead the United States away from disaster. The activists who chose to protect the Venezuelan embassy from Guaido and the other Venezuelan traitors are showing us the way to move forward. Leftish Democrats won’t help us. The media will continue to lie in service to the state. The “resistance” aren’t angry about anything except a faux scandal. Those of us who want peace will have to say so and demand that our representatives work for the people and not for the cause of war and suffering. There will be no saviors for this country or for the rest of the world. We can only rely on ourselves.

Corporate Media Target Gabbard for Her Anti-Interventionism—a Word They Can Barely Pronounce

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Tulsi Gabbard being asked by CBS‘s Stephen Colbert (3/11/19) why she doesn’t see the US as a “force for good in the world.”

By Owen Marsh

Source: FAIR

Presidential hopeful Tulsi Gabbard has not garnered much press coverage since announcing her bid on February 2; she’s the 13th-most-mentioned Democratic candidate on TV news, according to FAIR’s most recent count (4/14/19).

But when corporate media do talk about the Hawaii congressmember, they tend to reveal more about themselves than about her.

A veteran of the Iraq War, Gabbard is centering her presidential campaign around anti-interventionism (2/3/19): the belief that US interference in foreign countries, especially in the form of regime-change wars, increases the suffering of the citizens in those countries.

When corporate outlets talk about this anti-interventionist position, they primarily use it to negatively characterize the candidates who espouse it. Few in establishment media seem interested in going any deeper or considering the veracity of arguments raised by anti-interventionists.

The Washington Post (1/15/19) listed Gabbard’s anti-interventionism as a factor that hurts her electability in a video titled, “Why Some See Tulsi Gabbard as a Controversial 2020 Candidate.” Part of the video’s explanation: “The congresswoman has raised concern among Democrats in the past when she criticized Obama’s strategy on Iran, ISIS and Syria.”

CBS News (2/4/19) briefly interviewed Honolulu Civil Beats reporter Nick Grube regarding Gabbard’s campaign announcement. The anchors had clearly never encountered the term anti-interventionism before, struggling to even pronounce the word, then laughing and saying it “doesn’t roll off the tongue.” When asked to define the candidate’s position, Grube equated it to President Trump’s foreign policy. But “America First” rallying cries aside, it hardly seems accurate to call Trump an anti-interventionist, given his administration’s regime change efforts in Venezuela, his unilateral reimposition of sanctions on Iran (FAIR.org, 5/2/19) and his escalation of the drone wars (Daily Beast, 11/25/18).

When Gabbard appears on talkshows, she is typically on the receiving end of baseless questions coated in assumptions of military altruism. Gabbard appeared on ABC’s The View (2/20/19) and articulated her argument that US intervention does more harm than good to the people purportedly being helped. Rather than respond to any of the points she raised, however, the hosts resorted to the kinds of shallow questions that have been supporting interventionism for decades.

Sunny Hostin asked, “So should we not get involved when we see atrocities abroad?” Fellow panelist Ana Navarro elaborated:

I’m very troubled by the tweets about Venezuela that you’ve put out…. [Maduro] is not allowing humanitarian aid, he is a thug, he is a dictator, he is corrupt. And I am very supportive of what the United States is doing right now…. Why are you so against intervention in Venezuela?

On CBS’s Late Show With Stephen Colbert (3/11/19), the host resorted to old-fashioned American exceptionalism and Cold War–style paranoia to counter the congressmember:

Nature abhors a vacuum. If we are not involved in international conflicts, or trying to quell international conflicts, certainly the Russians and the Chinese will fill that vacuum…. That might destabilize the world, because the United States, however flawed, is a force for good in the world, in my opinion.

Comments like these may seem harmless; why not, after all, fight “atrocities”? In fact, they contain the same language that media have used for decades to justify interventionism and quiet dissenters.

Colbert’s exceptionalism argument, in particular, is reminiscent of the centuries-old vision of the US as a “shining city upon a hill.” It’s also a frame historically employed by media to rationalize the country’s foreign policy. As communications scholar Andrew Rojecki wrote in his 2008 research article (Political Communication, 2/4/08) on elite commentary of George W. Bush’s military interventions in Afghanistan and Iraq, “Over the course of the two crises, American exceptionalist themes made up a constant background presence in elite commentary and opinion.”

In other words, the assurance that Colbert has that the US has been “a force for good in the world” has paved the way for some of the greatest disasters of the modern world, including the 17-year-old war in Afghanistan (or almost 40 years, if you date from the US deliberately provoking the 1979 Soviet intervention) and the half-million-plus killed in the Iraq War. Other difficult cases for proponents of intervention include Libya, where removing an authoritarian ruler devastated the nation and brought back slave markets, and Syria, where hawks evade responsibility for the hundreds of thousands killed in a US-backed effort to overthrow the government by pretending that the US has failed to intervene.

Currently, in Venezuela, where Navarro is “very supportive of what the United States is doing,” Washington has imposed sanctions that are blamed for killing 40,000 in the last two years (CEPR, 4/25/19). Meanwhile, the US offers as a publicity stunt a convoy with “humanitarian aid” valued at less than 1 percent of the assets it has blocked Venezuela from spending.

Another easy to way to discredit anti-war critics is to accuse them of siding with the enemy (FAIR.org, 4/1/06). So it’s not much of a surprise that when Gabbard gets mentioned in establishment news, a comment about her meeting with Syrian President Bashar al-Assad is usually soon to follow.

Gabbard traveled to Syria in 2017, on what her office called a “fact-finding mission.” During her trip, she met and spoke with al-Assad, prompting the media to question her loyalties ever since, equating her meeting to tacit support of his regime. (Gabbard calls Assad a “brutal dictator,” but says US efforts to overthrow his government are “illegal and counterproductive.”)

New York Times columnist Bari Weiss appeared on the popular Joe Rogan Experience podcast (1/21/19) and confidently called Gabbard an “Assad toadie.” When Rogan asked her what “toadie” meant, she couldn’t define the word, asking the show’s producer to look it up for her. (It means “sycophant”).

The New York Times (1/11/19) and Associated Press (Washington Post, 5/2/19) both identified Gabbard’s meeting with Assad as a factor that made her a controversial candidate. In an article about Gabbard’s apparent fall from grace within the Democratic party, Vox (1/17/19) characterized Gabbard’s opposition to the funding of Syrian rebels as “quasi-support for Syrian President Bashar al-Assad, the dictator responsible for the outbreak of the Syrian civil war and the conflict’s worst atrocities.”

Interviewers from MSNBC’s Morning Joe, ABC’s The View, CBS’s Late Show and CNN’s Van Jones Show all asked Gabbard to justify her meeting with Assad, or pressured her to renounce him as an enemy. None were interested in asking even the most basic question of substance, “What did you and Assad talk about during your meeting?” The implication is clear: When it comes to those designated by the state as official enemies, communication is suspect.

So perhaps the simplest explanation for corporate media’s treatment of Gabbard is that she opposes the kind of intervention that they have historically been complicit in.

FAIR (e.g, 4/91, 3/19/07, 8/11) has documented mainstream media’s consistent support for US intervention across the globe. FAIR has also been documenting corporate media’s support for intervention in Venezuela, finding recently that zero percent of elite commentators opposed regime change in that country (4/30/19) and noting corporate media’s harsh admonishment of Bernie Sanders after he tepidly questioned US intervention in Venezuela (3/5/19).

Gabbard’s campaign is just one small piece of a larger phenomenon in the mainstream media: Space for dissenting opinions on the US’s neoliberal, interventionist foreign policies must not be allowed.

Understanding the American Dictatorship

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By Eric Zuesse

Source: Washington’s Blog

The American dictatorship is by the aristocracy of the country’s 585 billionaires, and has been scientifically proven beyond any doubt, now, not only in the classic Gilens and Page study, which examined thousands of bills in Congress and their money-backers and their ultimate outcomes (passage or failure to pass), during the studied period, 1981-2002. But also another (though less rigorous) study suggests that this control of the U.S. Government by America’s billionaires is getting even worse. So, America is clearly a dictatorship, by America’s aristocracy.

This is not just one or the other of America’s two Parties — Democrats versus Republicans — representing only the super-rich. Both of the Parties do, but the Democratic Party represents liberal billionaires, while the Republican Party represents conservative billionaires. Each Party represents a different faction of the billionaires.

The conservative faction is well represented by Donald Trump, whose swash-buckling rhetoric — “I’d take the oil!” in Iraq, and in Syria, and in Venezuela, etc. — is more blatantly uncouth than Barack Obama’s more gentlemanly rhetoric, but not basically different than Obama’s even bloodier grabbing of Honduras, Ukraine, Libya, and Syria were. The prominent Obama-backer George Soros, however, was demanding that banks, backed up by taxpayers, should kick in an extra $50 billion to enable him and other billionaires to exploit that country successfully. (He said this while Ukraine was spending most of the money that it did have trying to conquer the people in the far-eastern part of the country who refused to accept Obama’s imposed ruler who replaced the democratically elected President for whom they had voted over 90%.) So, ‘liberal’ and ‘conservative’ are both neoconservative, or the old term for that was “imperialistic.” In such matters (international matters), the billionaires very much are unified, and their news-media also are. And they all do represent the billionaires — never the public.

One billionaire, the owner of the fake-progressive “The Intercept” news-site, was exposed recently for his grabbingness. The excellent and honest journalists Alexander Rubinstein and Max Blumenthal headlined at one of the few honest news-media, Mint Press, “Pierre Omidyar’s Funding of Pro-Regime-Change Networks and Partnerships with CIA Cutouts”, and reported:

A select group of national news ‘stakeholders’ gathered at an undisclosed location for what was described as a “semi-secret” workshop somewhere in Canada on January 26. The meeting had been convened to determine how and to whom a ‘news industry bailout’ of $645 million in Canadian government subsidies to private and supposedly independent media outlets would be disbursed. … 

Jesse Brown, a Canadian journalist who participated in the meeting, complained that the first thing he noticed about it “was that one major public ‘stakeholder’ wasn’t represented: the public.” Inside what amounted to a smoke filled room that was off limits to most Canadian citizens, Ben Scott — a former Obama administration official who also served in Hillary Clinton’s State Department — presided over the discussions. Today, as the director of policy and advocacy for the Omidyar Network, Scott works for one of the most quietly influential billionaires. …

Pierre Omidyar, the ebay founder [is] best known for his sponsorship of The Intercept, a flashy progressive publication that possesses the classified documents exfiltrated by NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden. Unlike rival Silicon Valley billionaires Peter Thiel, Jeff Bezos, and Eric Schmidt, Omidyar has mostly managed to keep his influential role in media below the radar. … Samantha Power, the former U.S. ambassador to the UN and liberal interventionist guru, has explicitly praised Omidyar as someone who is following in the footsteps of Soros.

While Samantha Power was Obama’s U.N. Representative, she joined with two other countries, Ukraine and Canada, to oppose a U.N. resolution condemning nazism and all forms of racism. (Only three nations opposed it at the U.N., and these were the three.) When Donald Trump became America’s President, his U.N. Representative, Nikki Haley, likewise was one of only three nations at the U.N. who opposed a similar resolution.

So, perhaps the only people in U.S. and Canada who don’t know that their Governments are among only three that march ideologically in today’s lockstep with the Axis powers that lost World War II, are those three nazi-supporting countries’ own citizens. What media will tell their citizens the truth about this? Who owns the major media, and who finances politicians’ careers there, in the three-or-so brazenly fascist and even pro-nazi countries — the three that vote shamelessly for it?

The extraordinarily fine Rubenstein-Blumenthal article continued:

While backing media outlets around the world that produce news and commentary, Omidyar supports a global cartel of self-styled fact-checking groups that determine which outlets are legitimate and which are “fake.” He has also thrown his money behind murky initiatives like the non-profit backing New Knowledge, the data firm that waged one of the most devious disinformation campaigns in any recent American election campaign; and he is a key backer of the International Consortium of Investigative Journalism (ICIJ), the outfit that holds the Panama Papers and oversees the strategic dissemination of that leaked trove of financial files to hand-picked journalists.

And this is only on the liberal side of the U.S. regime.

The present article is being submitted to all major and most of the smaller national news media throughout the U.S. and its allied countries. The sites that publish it will be the only national and international news-media worth subscribing to, because all the rest are simply censoring-out these basic truths — and are labeling as ‘fake news’ the few honest sites, such as the one you are reading now, the ones that publish such news.

The American dictatorship can’t be accurately understood by relying mainly upon the ‘news’ that the billionaires’ sites publish. That’s very sad, but it’s true. It’s bad news, but it is real news, and not (like the billionaires’ sites call it but actually they themselves are) “fake news” sites. Maybe they publish non-controversial news honestly, but that’s about all of the truth that their owners will allow.

The American dictatorship is increasingly becoming a lock-down against truth. No matter how ugly one might imagine it to be, it’s worse. No solution to this vast problem is being presented here, but the first step toward solving any problem is to understand accurately what that problem actually is, and how it actually functions. In the present case, it’s no malfunction. It’s not a mistake. It’s instead a plan. And it is very competently being imposed — by the billionaires’ agents, against the public. That’s how dictatorships normally are imposed, and that’s how they’re imposed here. Mussolini called it “corporationism.” The U.S. has become its center.

Coup Attempt in Venezuela: What You’re Not Being Told

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By Derrick Broze

Source: The Conscious Resistance

As self-proclaimed “Interim President” Juan Guaidó attempted to stage a military coup in Venezuela, the country’s U.N. ambassador declared President Nicolas Maduro victorious and called the United States a “rogue nation.”

The turbulent situation that has been unfolding in Venezuela for the last few years reached new heights on Tuesday as opposition leader and self-declared “Interim President” Juan Guaidó attempted to wrangle power away from Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro, in what many are calling an attempted coup. Early Tuesday morning, Guaidó gave a press conference declaring that he has the support of the Venezuelan people and military, and demanded that Maduro step down. Guaidó also called on Venezuelans to take to the streets and call for an end to Maduro’s reign as president.

During the day’s events, cameras caught armored vehicles, reportedly belonging to the Bolivian military, running into crowds of protesters. Human Rights Watch (HRW) tweeted that 25 peopled were detained and dozens were wounded. HRW also noted that Venezuelan authorities shut down two international television channels and censored one radio station. “The regime should know that it will be held accountable for these abuses,” tweeted José Miguel Vivanco, Executive Director of HRW’s America Division.

Meanwhile, Venezuela’s U.N. ambassador Samuel Moncada held a press conference stating that President Maduro has “defeated” opposition leader Juan Guaidó and his supporters. Moncada stated “the country is right now in a situation of perfect normality.” Moncada criticized U.N. Secretary-General Antonio Guterres for not supporting Maduro’s government against Guaidó.

Moncada also attacked the United States for what he said was another example of their interventionist policies, singling out President Trump and Vice President Mike Pence for their support of Guaidó. “This is one of the most strange and weird situations we are in now, which the superpower of the world is the main rogue state going around, without care, destroying countries, invading countries, and threatening with the use of force,” Moncada stated.

The Ambassador to the UN also noted that the United States’ use of sanctions amounts to an act of war and only hurts the Venezuelan people. “Sanctions kill, as simple as that. Sanctions are criminal sanctions, are weapons of mass destruction. You don’t see the smoke, but you see the effect, you see the deleterious effect of killing and suffering,” Moncada said. “The sanctions use banks sanction, sanctions use ships, sanctions use insurance companies, and financial blockades. They cannot just say that they are concerned about liberty or freedom or the children in Venezuela, and then exercise a ghastly, nasty policy of calculated cruelty. They are acting like torturers, it is a collective punishment.”

Indeed, the Washington D.C.-based Center for Economic Policy Research published a reportlast week which determined that U.S. sanctions against Venezuela were likely responsible for 40,000 deaths in 2017-2018.

The harsh reality is that Maduro is by no means a perfect leader and his support of censoring media, use of the military to suppress protests (whether engineered or authentic), his suppression of the opposition, and other despicable acts do need to be called out. However, Ambassador Moncada is also correct that the United States does act as an imperialist “rogue” nation, using force on any nation that does not follow the Western Imperialist agenda. Unfortunately, it seems that the Venezuelan people are caught between a leader who is unpopular in some circles and an even more unpopular self-proclaimed “Interim President” with multiple connections to the Western Empire.

Of course, if our readers are unaware of these connections, it is because the corporate media (CNN, WaPo, The Hill, and others) have been running non-stop coverage of why Guaidó should be accepted as the leader of Venezuela while ignoring any bit of evidence that the “uprising” might be less than genuine.

Despite the round the clock support of Guaidó, on April 13 the Grayzone exclusively reportedthat a who’s who of Trump advisors, right-wing Latin American officials, and Venezuelan opposition figures met to discuss “Assessing the Use of Military Force in Venezuela.” The meeting was hosted on April 10 at the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS), a Washington-based think tank. This meeting included current and former State Department, National Intelligence Council, and National Security Council officials, along with Admiral Kurt Tidd, who was until recently the commander of the US Naval Forces Southern Command, overseeing operations in Central and South America.

The truth is that the Western Empire has been attempting to use Guaidó to install a puppet government in Venezuela. There is also evidence that the U.S. government and its intelligence agencies have attempted to take advantage of electricity blackouts in order to dethrone Maduro. In addition, there are a number of corporations and special interests who stand to benefit from the overthrow of Maduro and the crowning of Guaidó.

Although the American media has failed to report any of the above conflicts, there are still some Americans who are standing against the Venezuelan coup. A group calling itself the Embassy Protection Collective was invited by Venezuela’s government to protect the Venezuelan Embassy in Washington D.C. from illegal seizure by the U.S. government or opposition supporters. The group—which includes members of CODEPINK, Popular Resistance, the Answer Coalition, MintPress News and more—has been working to raise awareness on the attempts by the Western oligarchy to install another puppet government in Venezuela.

The reality of the situation in Venezuela is much more complicated than the likes of CNNwould have the American people believe. Only by dissecting the lies from the American media, the Maduro government, and the Guaidó contingent can we hope to get to the truth and support the people who really matter: The Venezuelan People.