People of the U.S. often fail to notice the methods their own government uses to do what amounts to brainwashing them. The book Manufacturing Consent by Edward S. Hermann and Noam Chomsky details how U.S. corporate-controlled mainstream media outlets (today that includes mainstream TV “news” networks, most mainstream magazines, newspapers, etc.) act as propagandists. Another excellent source on U. S. media propaganda is Michael Parenti’s book, Inventing Reality.
When mainstream TV, magazines, newspapers and mainstream Internet sites all repeat the same false talking points over and over, they’re often deliberately attempting to brainwash, rather than inform, the public. Their motive is usually to gain mass public support for something that brings dishonest politicians and the oligarchy money and power. For example, they often propagandize the public to support illicit war for profit.
Today’s political propagandists pretend only the right wing criticizes them, but many on the left oppose misleading propaganda as well. I’m politically progressive, don’t like Biden or Trump because they are both far too right wing in my view. However, I think the extremist push to “get Trump” and paint him as inciting the January 6 protest are obvious efforts to manipulate the public’s thinking. Trump encouraged the protesters to “fight”, but to “fight” politically has traditionally been used to simply mean to battle verbally, to argue, or to boycott or strike. He didn’t specify or urge physical violence.
This opinion piece has nothing to do with minimizing the harm done by any actual violence on January 6. Violence should never be condoned and is a separate issue from protests in general. Instead this is about being aware of ways the U.S. government is now employing methods long used to promote propaganda, to discourage even peaceful protests, and to influence the public mind. The current government manipulation is a way of manufacturing consent, or as Michael Parenti called it, inventing reality.
What is the U.S. government likely to gain by manipulating the public into dropping their critical thinking skills and becoming lost in emotional rage, and by turning the public against protest and implying that all forms of dissent are possibly “insurrection” or sedition? (1) The focus on Trump and January 6 turns the public’s attention away from the country’s many other problems, including the fact that we’re the world’s only advanced nation without an adequate healthcare system. It also distracts us from the urgent need for environmental reform. (2) If the powers that be can get most Americans to focus on only Trump, there will be no focus on the U.S. politicians responsible for turning the U.S. into an oligarchy, with much money funneled away from the middle class to the wealthiest one percent. [Source] (3) If the powerful corrupt politicians can increase penalties for even peaceful protests, they’ll frighten and shame innocent people and prevent them from needed legitimate protesting, (4) If the public can be manipulated into believing that only right-wing racists and fascists refuse to accept government propaganda and authoritarianism, the left can be intimidated through guilt by association and through fear of being identified with the right wing.
People should walk the fine line between too much skepticism and not enough. Excessive suspicion is doubt not supported by evidence. Healthy skepticism is based on reality, including the U. S. government’s characteristic way of using disinformation to control public opinion throughout history. The thing that should give people pause and keep them aiming toward a balance of skepticism is the fact that the U.S. government has a long and well documented legacy of using widely-known propaganda techniques on the U.S. public. For anyone who doubts the U.S. government routinely propagandizes the public, at least read the two books mentioned above, which provide many additional reference sources and essentially prove this is true beyond any doubt. If the U.S. population likes to be maneuvered and more or less brainwashed by their own government, they’re free to do that. However, thoughtful skepticism, independent research and honest scrutiny are preferable.
The US Election is still a burning issue almost two weeks after the people went to the polls, and though the race has been called for Biden by every mainstream media outlet in the world, the recounts are ongoing and irregularities manifest.
Trump’s legal team, and many in the alternate media, are claiming the election was rigged. With one voice the mainstream media – and the entire political establishment – denounce these claims as “baseless”, and scream there is “no evidence”.
This is incorrect. There is plenty of evidence, both circumstantial and direct, which breaks down into six basic categories:
Precedent – It has happened before.
Motive – Deep State/Military dislike of Trump’s policies is widely known.
Foreknowledge – Establishment voices predicted this exact situation.
Opportunity – The voting system is highly susceptible to fraud.
Voting Irregularities – Known software “glitches” & irregularities in the reporting of the results.
Cover-up – Dishonesty in the reporting of the situation.
1. Precedent
There is plenty of evidence that US elections have been rigged before.
Nobody is talking about it much, but US elections have been rigged before. Everyone is more than familiar with the 2000 election, which was called for Al Gore before Florida flipped to Bush and swung the election. The controversy over “hanging chads” and misplaced votes was all people talked about for weeks.
One noteworthy “error” with electronic voting machines, switched over 10000 votes from Gore to an obscure third-party candidate.
After weeks of legal battles, Gore eventually conceded. Within a year the “attacks” of 9/11 had happened, and the US was at war in Afghanistan and planning six more wars within 3 years.
More recently, it was revealed the DNC had gone out of its way to hand Hillary the presidential nomination over Sanders in 2016. Then in the 2020 primaries, despite embarrassingly losses in the first few primaries, Biden’s presidential campaign had a “miraculous turnaround”, thanks largely to irregularities in postal ballots in Ohio, Wisconsin and New Jersey.
This is evidence of precedent.
2. Motive
The US Deep State has clear and publicly known motives for wanting to remove Trump from office.
It is no secret that many members of the US’s political establishment oppose Trump and Trump’s policies. This includes neo-con warmongers and chiefs of the military and intelligence agencies.
“The Resistance”, billed as some voice of the progressive alternative, boasted former members of George Bush’s cabinet as members.
The most strident opposition to Trump was on foreign policy – most specifically in the Middle East. Trump was committed to withdrawing from Syria, in direct opposition to the “Assad Must Go” crowd at the Pentagon and State Dept.
Conversely, Biden has always been firmly in the establishment camp on Syria, and many warmongers are already predicting that Biden will want to “restore some dignity” to the Syrian people.
The US Deep State has carried out coups all around the world, many of them bloody and violent, in order to maintain Imperial ambitions and keep wars-for-profit going. They have every motive to want to remove Trump and put Biden in his place.
This is evidence of motive.
3. Foreknowledge
Establishment voices have been predicting, and planning for, this exact situation for almost a year.
In January of this year – well before anyone could have predicted the effect the “pandemic” would have on the world – legal scholars were Wargaming the outcome of a disputed Presidential election based on postal ballots in Pennsylvania.
In August a group naming themselves the Transition Integrity Project published a document predicting a “disputed” election, that the counting would take much longer than usual and that it would not be certain who was President until January.
More generally, the outcome of the election was widely “predicted”, with multiple press outlets claiming there would be a “red mirage” and a “blue shift”. Meaning it would look like Trump would win, and then suddenly Biden would win at the last minute.
This is evidence of foreknowledge.
4. Opportunity
There is plenty of evidence that the US voting system is open to potential corruption.
Voting machines, for example, are owned and distributed by private companies. Many of which have political ties. An article in the Guardian, of all places, went into great detail about this just last year, when they were suggesting that Trump may have stolen the 2016 election.
Likewise, postal ballots are known to be susceptible to fraud. William Barr, the Attorney General, summed it up in a television interview in September, and written reports in 2007 and earlier this year, have gone into great detail about historical cases of postal vote fraud and possibilities of future occurrences.
This is evidence of opportunity.
5. Voting Irregularities
There are plenty of irregularities in the results which suggest the possibility of something strange going on.
The story of the election by the numbers doesn’t really make logical sense. The turnout is said to be 72%, the highest in 120 years, and the first over 60% for over 50 years.
In the process Joe Biden, we are told, shattered Barack Obama’s popular vote record by almost 10 million votes.
Joe Biden?
This Joe Biden?
…got more votes than Barack Obama or Hillary Clinton?
Meanwhile Donald Trump increased his own popular vote by over 10 million, whilst increasing his vote share in almost every ethnic demographic, as well as with women and LGBT voters.
Making him the first incumbent president to increase his popular vote but still lose in over a century, and the only one since all 50 states were part of the union.
Even if you believe that narrative is possible, there’s more than enough evidence of voting irregularities to warrant at least questioning the result and investigating further.
This error was only spotted because of the historically republican record of the county. In a more hotly disputed seat, this error could potentially never have been picked up.
The software used in this county is used in 30 other states – including Wisconsin, Georgia, Arizona and Pennsylvania, all of which were decided by less than 1% of the vote, and any two of which could swing the election to Trump.
In fact Dominion, the company which supplied the questionable voting software, was denied a contract by the state of Texas in 2019 when judges found there were “concerns” about “whether [it] is safe from fraudulent or unauthorized manipulation”.
A subsidiary of Dominion was kicked out of the Philippines for being too easy to hack.
This video clip appears to show CNN’s coverage switching over 19,000 votes from Trump to Biden in Pennsylvania.
The graphed results of both Michigan and Wisconsin show decidedly odd jumps in Biden’s vote.
The counting itself was also deeply suspect, with several states taking almost a week to count the last few percent of the vote, whilst managing to count over 90% of the vote on the first evening. In Wisconsin the National Guard were brought in to “transcribe” damaged ballots, whilst in Pennsylvania they were allowed to count postal votes with “no clear post mark”.
To state there is “no evidence” of election rigging is a lie. There is plenty of evidence. Every news outlet, channel and website is singing from the same hymn sheet on this – even Fox News, so often Trump’s supposed favourite channel.
Even before the election, as discussed above, all the mainstream media were running articles defending mail-in ballots, and claiming that they are not historically weak to voter fraud. This is totally untrue, as anyone who cared to research the topic would tell you.
So, why are all the media telling the same lies? Why are people being denied a platform?
This is evidence of a cover-up.
*
Ask yourself:
If, in 2016, some voting software used in 30 states had flipped 5500 from Hillary to Trump, and later been revealed to be financial tied to the Republican party, would that have been “just a glitch”, or evidence of cheating?
If the Brexit referendum had swung violently to Leave after dumps of suspect postal ballots were permitted into the count by a judge who was a known Brexit supporter, would the media have kept quiet?
If, in Russia, the media denied a platform to the opposition to accuse Putin of voter fraud, would that be “responsible media practice”, or evidence of bias and censorship?
We don’t know exactly what happened, or how the election was result was controlled, but as of right now the specifics do not matter.
The point is there is plenty of evidence suggesting something happened, more than enough to warrant asking rational questions and expecting reasonable answers.
Every time the media ignores the evidence, or censors those seeking it, they only display further that there must be some fire behind all of this smoke.
The New York Times star reporter Rukmini Callimachi had beenwidelycriticized for her exaggerated reporting about the Islamic State and terrorism. But her editors kept supporting and promoting her stories. That finally ended when Canada recently indicted one Shehroze Chaudhry, also known as Abu Huzaifa, for falsely claiming to have been an ISIS member. Chaudhry had made up his blood dripping stories. He had never been with ISIS and had never been to Syria or Iraq.
But the unverified stories of Abu Huzaifa al-Kanadi had been the central element of the NYT’s ten part Caliphate podcast by Rukmini Callimachi.
The failure of her reporting finally was so evident that the NYT had to allow its media columnist Ben Smith to write about the issue. Remarkably his reporting was published in the Business section of the paper.
It is a pretty devastating report about the support Callimachi got from her editors even as an ever growing number of her collogues criticized her over-sensationalized reporting. The root cause of the problem is the way in which the Times, as well as other news media, try to change from news providers to narrative creators:
The crisis now surrounding the podcast is as much about The Times as it is about Ms. Callimachi. She is, in many ways, the new model of a New York Times reporter. She combines the old school bravado of the parachuting, big foot reporter of the past, with a more modern savvy for surfing Twitter’s narrative waves and spotting the sorts of stories that will explode on the internet. … Ms. Callimachi’s approach and her stories won her the support of some of the most powerful figures at The Times: early on, from Joe Kahn, who was foreign editor when Ms. Callimachi arrived and is now managing editor and viewed internally as the likely successor to the executive editor, Dean Baquet; and later, an assistant managing editor, Sam Dolnick, who oversees the paper’s successful audio team and is a member of the family that controls The Times. … Ms. Callimachi’s approach to storytelling aligned with a more profound shift underway at The Times. The paper is in the midst of an evolution from the stodgy paper of record into a juicy collection of great narratives, on the web and streaming services. And Ms. Callimachi’s success has been due, in part, to her ability to turn distant conflicts in Africa and the Middle East into irresistibly accessible stories.
The highlighted sentence is the essence of the piece. It was even repeated in the caption of a picture accompanying it.
The striving for ‘juicy narratives’ is the biggest mistake of current news media. Their attempt to copy the success of Hollywood dramas by creating narratives has destroyed their credibility. It has put incentives on the wrong aspect of a reporter’s work. Instead of requiring well checked facts the editors are now asking for confirmations of preconceived tales:
What is clear is that The Times should have been alert to the possibility that, in its signature audio documentary, it was listening too hard for the story it wanted to hear — “rooting for the story,” as The Post’s Erik Wemple put it on Friday.
Callimachi is far from the only one guilty of creating fake news to fulfill her editors demand of narratives. The four year long coverage of ‘Russiagate’, the fairytale collection of made up connections between Donald Trump and Russia, was full of such. The editorial push towards narratives is rooted in the desire to create clickbait and to generate a social media echo around the reporting. That may be profitable in the short term but it is also a guarantee for a long term failure.
False of hyped narratives will over time get debunked. People then lose trust in the media that provided them with the fake news. That again will cause a long term loss of readership.
A similar case of falling for ‘narratives’ happened to German magazine Der Spiegel. Its star author Claas Relotius wrote fake stories on a large scale. Whether he wrote about Trump voters in Arizona or about a little girl in Syria, Relotius invented the witnesses to the ‘news’ he provided. He made up ‘facts’ and described himself visiting places he had never been to. For years there had been warnings that many of the detail Relotius provided were wrong. But his editors promoted him because the slick ‘narratives’ he delivered were exactly what they wanted. Der Spiegel, a once universally trusted source of news, is now joked about as ‘the former news magazine’.
The media trend towards providing narratives instead of verified facts also increases the danger of falling for manipulation. Governments as well as political marketing campaigns love to provide ready made tales. It is easier and cheaper for media to pick these up and repeat them instead of digging into the facts and their logic. We thus get false tales about chemical weapon use in Syria and a Skripal poisoning ‘narrative’ that does not stand up to the slightest scrutiny.
Can we please have real news? Just the new facts, with no ‘narrative’ or moral tales attached to them? Facts that are verified and described in the context of the issue they relate to? Do they fit the logic of already known ones? Do they make sense? How may they influence further developments?
To provide the above can easily fill a reporter’s day of work. It is usually enough material to write an 800 words report. Its sufficient for the reader to create his own narrative from it.
Dear news media. Please go back to providing real news. If you do so you will eventually regain my trust. That will be, in the long run, a much more valuable asset than the social media chatter you are currently trying to generate.
The poisoning of Alexei Navalny has created intensified support by pro-U.S., and especially pro-NATO, officials in the European Union, to block the nearly completed NordStream 2 natural-gas pipeline from Russia to Germany, and to import into the EU, instead, far costlier U.S. LNG, liquefied natural gas. A very real possibility thus now exists that the poisoning of Navalny will turn out to have been worth many billions of dollars to U.S. frackers, by causing the nearly-completed NordStream 2 to be turned to waste so that fracked U.S. LNG will sell in Europe. The present article will explore the relative likelihood that the poisoning of Navalny isn’t merely coincidentally perfectly timed in order to achieve that objective for the benefit of America’s gas-industry, but that it probably was actually planned and perpetrated in order to achieve this.
The idea that the Russian Government poisoned Alexei Navalny presumes such astounding stupidity on the part of Russia’s Government as to be exceedingly dubious, at best. Navalny, though he actually is favorably viewed by only around 2% of Russians (as indicated in polls there), is widely publicized in U.S.-and-allied media as having instead the highest support by the Russian people of anyone who might challenge Vladimir Putin for Russia’s leadership. It’s a lie, and always has been. Other politicians have far higher polled support in Russia. For example, whereas in the latest poll, published on September 5th, Navalny was one of four individuals who had 2%, Zhirinovsky had 5% and Zhirinovsky was the only person who had more than 2%, other than Putin, who had 56%. In the 2018 Presidential election, Zhirinovsky polled at 13.7%, Grudinin polled at 12.0%, and Putin polled at 72.6%. The actual election-outcome was Putin 76.69%, Grudinin 11.7%, and Zhirinovsky 5.65%. The idea that Putin would need to kill anyone in order to be leading Russia is so stupid and uninformed (and mis-informed) that it is beyond belief, though it is widely publicized in The West as being instead the reality. But what is true is that Navalny has been an immense propaganda-asset to the U.S. Government, and he now is especially so.
Even America’s CNN let slip, in a news-report on September 18th, regarding Navalny, that “his list of enemies is as long as it is powerful,” but they said nothing about whom those “enemies” might be. No one questions that Navalny claims to be an anti-corruption campaigner, and that this would generate enemies regardless of whether his accusations are truthful. The article on “Alexei Navalny” at Wikipedia, which is CIA-edited and written, and which blacklists (blocks from linking to) sites that aren’t CIA-approved, indicates that Navalny has accused numerous individuals of corruption, but not that any of those individuals is corrupt — and this is at a site (Wikipedia) which can reasonably be expected to link to documentation of any damning evidence that Navalny has come up with. But the article doesn’t link to any. The article does make clear that Navalny has been hoping to use these accusations in order to rise in Russian politics. It would be a dangerous way to rise in any nation’s politics, regardless of whether those accusations are true. The idea that Putin was behind this is insane. Is Putin so stupid as to poison the U.S. regime’s most-heavily propaganda-favored Russian precisely at the time when the EU is about to grant final approval to Russia’s vast (and virtually completed) NordStream 2 pipeline?
The US has long opposed Nord Stream 2 and in December imposed sanctions against companies involved in its construction. That move prompted Swiss pipe-layer Allseas to suspend its work with just 6 per cent left to install. A group of US senators from across the political divide are pushing to extend those sanctions.
Criticism of the project has grown in Europe too, with opponents saying it will increase Europe’s dependence on Russian energy exports at a time of rising tensions with Moscow. In her State of the Union address on Wednesday, European Commission president Ursula von der Leyen said: “To those that advocate closer ties with Russia, I say that the poisoning of Alexei Navalny with an advanced chemical agent is not a one-off. This pattern is not changing — and no pipeline will change that.
The U.S. regime’s agent, von der Leyen, is doing her utmost to serve U.S. LNG marketers. Many other U.S.-regime agents also are.
On September 17th, America’s neoconservative (or pro-U.S.-empire) Newsweek bannered “Opinion: Open Letter: For the Sake of Transatlantic Security, Stop Nord Stream 2,” with 114 signatories of NATO-related U.S. and European officials, and published their argument that, “Over the past decade, the Government of the Russian Federation has engaged in a litany of malign activities aimed at upending liberal democratic norms across Europe and North America. The shocking poisoning of Russian opposition leader Alexei Navalny by a variant of the weapons-grade nerve agent Novichok shows that Moscow has not been deterred by Western actions and statements and refuses to reverse its destabilizing political adventurism at home and abroad.”
How blatant and scummy can a marketing campaign get?
The fresh orgy of anti-Russian invective in the lickspittle media (LSM) has the feel of fin de siècle. The last four reality-impaired years do seem as though they add up to a century. And no definitive fin is in sight, as long as most people don’t know what’s going on.
The LSM should be confronted: “At long last have you left no sense of decency?” But who would hear the question — much less any answer? The corporate media have a lock on what Americans are permitted or not permitted to hear. Checking the truth, once routine in journalism, is a thing of the past.
Thus the reckless abandon with which The New York Times is leading the current full-court press to improve on what it regards as Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s weak-kneed effort to blame the Russians for giving us Donald Trump. The press is on, and there are no referees to call the fouls.
The recent release of a 1,000-page, sans bombshells and already out-of-date report by the Senate Intelligence Committee has provided the occasion to “catapult the propaganda,” as President George W. Bush once put it.
As the the Times‘s Mark Mazzetti put it in his article Wednesday:
“Releasing the report less than 100 days before Election Day, Republican-majority senators hoped it would refocus attention on the interference by Russia and other hostile foreign powers in the American political process, which has continued unabated.”
Mazzetti is telling his readers, soto voce: regarding that interference four years ago, and the “continued-unabated” part, you just have to trust us and our intelligence community sources who would never lie to you. And if, nevertheless, you persist in asking for actual evidence, you are clearly in Putin’s pocket.
Incidentally, Mueller’s report apparently was insufficient, only two years in the making, and just 448 pages. The Senate committee’s magnum opus took three years, is almost 1,000 pages — and fortified. So there.
Iron Pills
Recall how disappointed the LSM and the rest of the Establishment were with Mueller’s anemic findings in spring 2019. His report claimed that the Russian government “interfered in the 2016 presidential election in sweeping and systematic fashion” via a social media campaign run by the Internet Research Agency (IRA) and by “hacking” Democratic emails. But the evidence behind those charges could not bear close scrutiny.
You would hardly know it from the LSM, but the accusation against the IRA was thrown out of court when the U.S. government admitted it could not prove that the IRA was working for the Russian government. Mueller’s ipse dixit did not suffice, as we explained a year ago in “Sic Transit Gloria Mueller.”
The Best Defense …
… is a good offense, and the Senate Intelligence Committee’s release of its study — call it “Mueller (Enhanced)” — and the propaganda fanfare — come at a key point in the Russiagate/Spygate imbroglio. It also came, curiously, as the Democratic Convention was beginning, as if the Republican-controlled Senate was sending Trump a message.
One chief worry, of course, derives from the uncertainty as to whether John Durham, the US Attorney investigating those FBI and other officials who launched the Trump-Russia investigation will let some heavy shoes drop before the election. Barr has said he expects “developments in Durham’s investigation hopefully before the end of the summer.”
FBI attorney Kevin Clinesmith already has decided to plead guilty to the felony of falsifying evidence used to support a warrant from the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court to surveillance to spy on Trump associate Carter Page. It is abundantly clear that Clinesmith was just a small cog in the deep-state machine in action against candidate and then President Trump. And those running the machine are well known. The president has named names, and Barr has made no bones about his disdain for what he calls spying on the president.
The cognoscenti and the big fish themselves may be guessing that Trump/Barr/Durham will not throw out heavier lines for former FBI Director James Comey, his deputy Andrew McCabe, CIA Director John Brennan, and Director of National Intelligence James Clapper, for example. But how can they be sure? What has become clear is that the certainty they all shared that Hillary Clinton would be the next president prompted them not only to take serious liberties with the Constitution and the law, but also to do so without taking rudimentary steps to hide their tracks.
The incriminating evidence is there. And as Trump becomes more and more vulnerable and defensive about his ineptness — particularly with regard to Covid-19 — he may summon the courage to order Barr and Durham to hook the big fish, not just minnows like Clinesmith. The neuralgic reality is that no one knows at this point how far Trump will go. To say that this kind of uncertainty is unsettling to all concerned is to say the obvious.
So, the stakes are high — for the Democrats, as well — and, not least, the LSM. In these circumstances it would seem imperative not just to circle the wagons but to mount the best offense/defense possible, despite the fact that virtually all the ammunition (as in the Senate report) is familiar and stale (“enhanced” or not).
Black eyes might well be in store for the very top former law enforcement and intelligence officials, the Democrats, and the LSM — and in the key pre-election period. So, the calculation: launch “Mueller Report (Enhanced)” and catapult the truth now with propaganda, before it is too late.
No Evidence of Hacking
The “hacking of the DNC” charge suffered a fatal blow three months ago when it became known that Shawn Henry, president of the DNC-hired cyber-security firm CrowdStrike, admitted under oath that his firm had no evidence that the DNC emails were hacked — by Russia or anyone else.
Henry gave his testimony on Dec. 5, 2017, but House Intelligence Committee chair Adam Schiff was able to keep it hidden until May 7, 2020.
Here’s a brief taste of how Henry’s testimony went: Asked by Schiff for “the date on which the Russians exfiltrated the data”, Henry replied, “We just don’t have the evidence that says it actually left.”
You did not know that? You may be forgiven — up until now — if your information diet is limited to the LSM and you believe The New York Times still publishes “all the news that’s fit to print.” I am taking bets on how much longer the NYT will be able to keep Henry’s testimony hidden; Schiff’s record of 29 months will be hard to beat.
Putting Lipstick on the Pig of Russian ‘Tampering’
Worse still for the LSM and other Russiagate diehards, Mueller’s findings last year enabled Trump to shout “No Collusion” with Russia. What seems clear at this point is that a key objective of the current catapulting of the truth is to apply lipstick to Mueller’s findings.
After all, he was supposed to find treacherous plotting between the Trump campaign and the Russians and failed miserably. Most LSM-suffused Americans remain blissfully unaware of this, and the likes of Pulitzer Prize winner Mazzetti have been commissioned to keep it that way.
In Wednesday’s article, for example, Mazzetti puts it somewhat plaintively:
“Like the special counsel … the Senate report did not conclude that the Trump campaign engaged in a coordinated conspiracy with the Russian government — a fact that the Republicans seized on to argue that there was ‘no collusion’.”
How could they!
Mazzetti is playing with words. “Collusion,” however one defines it, is not a crime; conspiracy is.
‘Breathtaking’ Contacts: Mueller (Enhanced)
Mazzetti emphasizes that the Senate report “showed extensive evidence of contacts between Trump campaign advisers and people tied to the Kremlin,” and Sen. Mark Warner (D-VA), the intelligence committee’s vice chairman, said the committee report details “a breathtaking level of contacts between Trump officials and Russian government operatives that is a very real counterintelligence threat to our elections.”
None of that takes us much beyond the Mueller report and other things generally well known — even in the LSM. Nor does the drivel about people like Paul Manafort “sharing polling data with Russians” who might be intelligence officers. That data was “mostly public” the Times itself reported, and the paper had to correcta story that the data was intended for Russian oligarchs, when it was meant for Ukrainian oligarchs instead. That Manafort was working to turn Ukraine towards the West and not Russia is rarely mentioned.
Recent revelations regarding the false data given the FISA court by an FBI lawyer to “justify” eavesdropping on Trump associate Carter Page show the Senate report to be not up to date and misguided in endorsing the FBI’s decision to investigate Page. The committee may wish to revisit that endorsement — at least.
On the Steele Dossier, the committee also missed a ruling by a British judge against Christopher Steele, labeling his dossier an attempt to help Hillary Clinton get elected. Consortium Newsexplained back in October 2017 that both CrowdStrike and Steele were paid for by the Democratic Party and Clinton campaign to push Russiagate.
Also missed by the intelligence committee was a document released by the Senate Judiciary Committee last month that revealed that Steele’s “Primary Subsource and his friends peddled warmed-over rumors and laughable gossip that Steele dressed up as formal intelligence memos.”
Smearing WikiLeaks
The Intelligence Committee report also repeats thoroughly debunked myths about WikiLeaks and, like Mueller, the committee made no effort to interview Julian Assange before launching its smears. Italian journalist Stefania Maurizi, who partnered with WikiLeaks in the publication of the Podesta emails, described the report’s treatment of WikiLeaks in this Twitter thread:
2. the description of #WikiLeaks‘ publishing activities by this #SenateIntelligenceCommittee‘s Report appears a true #EdgarHoover‘s disinformation campaign to make a legitimate media org completely radioactive
3. Clearly, to describe #WikiLeaks and its publishing activities the #SenateIntelligenceCommittee’s Report completely rely on #US intelligence community+ #MikePompeo’s characterisation of #WikiLeaks. There is not even any pretense of an independent approach
4. there are also unsubstantiated claims like:
– “[WikiLeaks’] disclosures have jeopardized the safety of individual Americans and foreign allies” (p.200)
– “WikiLeaks has passed information to U.S. adversaries” (p.201)
5. it’s completely false that “#WikiLeaks does not seem to weigh whether its disclosures add any public interest value” (p.200) and any longtime media partner like me could provide you dozens of examples on how wrong this characterisation [is].
Titillating
Mazzetti did add some spice to the version of his article that dominated the two top right columns of Wednesday’s Times with the blaring headline: “Senate Panel Ties Russian Officials to Trump’s Aides: G.O.P.-Led Committee Echoes Mueller’s Findings on Election Tampering.”
Those who make it to the end of Mazzetti’s piece will learn that the Senate committee report “did not establish” that the Russian government obtained any compromising material on Mr. Trump or that they tried to use such materials [that they didn’t have] as leverage against him.” However, Mazzetti adds,
“According to the report, Mr. Trump met a former Miss Moscow at a party during one trip in 1996. After the party, a Trump associate told others he had seen Mr. Trump with the woman on multiple occasions and that they ‘might have had a brief romantic relationship.’
“The report also raised the possibility that, during that trip, Mr. Trump spent the night with two young women who joined him the next morning at a business meeting with the mayor of Moscow.”
This is journalism?
Another Pulitzer in Store?
The Times appends a note reminding us that Mazzetti was part of a team that won a Pulitzer Prize in 2018 for reporting on Donald Trump’s advisers and their connections to Russia.
And that’s not the half of it. In September 2018, Mazzetti and his NYT colleague Scott Shane wrote a 10,000-word feature, “The Plot to Subvert an Election,” trying to convince readers that the Russian Internet Research Agency (IRA) had successfully swayed U.S. opinion during the 2016 election with 80,000 Facebook posts that they said had reached 126 million Americans.
That turned out to be a grotesquely deceptive claim. Mazzetti and Shane failed to mention the fact that those 80,000 IRA posts (from early 2015 through 2017, meaning about half came after the election), had been engulfed in a vast ocean of more than 33 trillion Facebook posts in people’s news feeds – 413 million times more than the IRA posts. Not to mention the lack of evidence that the IRA was the Russian government, as Mueller claimed.
In exposing that chicanery, prize-winning investigative reporter Gareth Porter commented:
“The descent of The New York Times into this unprecedented level of propagandizing for the narrative of Russia’s threat to U.S. democracy is dramatic evidence of a broader problem of abuses by corporate media … Greater awareness of the dishonesty at the heart of the Times’ coverage of that issue is a key to leveraging media reform and political change.”
Nothingburgers With Russian Dressing: the Backstory
“It’s too much; it’s just too much, too much”, a sedated, semi-conscious Robert Parry kept telling me from his hospital bed in late January 2018 a couple of days before he died. Bob was founder of Consortium News.
It was already clear what Bob meant; he had taken care to see to that. On Dec. 31, 2017 the reason for saying that came in what he titled “An Apology & Explanation” for “spotty production in recent days.” A stroke on Christmas Eve had left Bob with impaired vision, but he was able to summon enough strength to write an Apologia — his vision for honest journalism and his dismay at what had happened to his profession before he died on Jan. 27, 2018. The dichotomy was “just too much”.
Parry rued the role that journalism was playing in the “unrelenting ugliness that has become Official Washington. … Facts and logic no longer mattered. It was a case of using whatever you had to diminish and destroy your opponent … this loss of objective standards reached deeply into the most prestigious halls of American media.”
What bothered Bob most was the needless, dishonest tweaking of the Russian bear. “The U.S. media’s approach to Russia,” he wrote, “is now virtually 100 percent propaganda. Does any sentient human being read The New York Times’ or The Washington Post’s coverage of Russia and think that he or she is getting a neutral or unbiased treatment of the facts? … Western journalists now apparently see it as their patriotic duty to hide facts that otherwise would undermine the demonizing of Putin and Russia.”
Parry, who was no conservative, continued:
“Liberals are embracing every negative claim about Russia just because elements of the CIA, FBI and National Security Agency produced a report last Jan. 6 that blamed Russia for ‘hacking’ Democratic emails and releasing them to WikiLeaks.”
Bob noted that the ‘hand-picked’ authors “evinced no evidence and even admitted that they weren’t asserting any of this as fact.”
It was just too much.
Robert Parry’s Last Article
Bob posted his last substantive article on Dec. 13, 2017, the day after text exchanges between senior FBI officials Peter Strzok and Lisa Page were made public. (Typically, readers of The New York Times the following day would altogether miss the importance of the text-exchanges.)
Bob Parry rarely felt any need for a “sanity check.” Dec. 12, 2017 was an exception. He called me about the Strzok-Page texts; we agreed they were explosive. FBI Agent Peter Strzok was on Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s staff investigating alleged Russian interference, until Mueller removed him.
Strzok reportedly was a “hand-picked” FBI agent taking part in the Jan 2017 evidence-impoverished, rump, misnomered “intelligence community” assessment that blamed Russia for hacking and other election meddling. And he had helped lead the investigation into Hillary Clinton’s misuse of her computer servers. Page was Deputy Director Andrew McCabe’s right-hand lawyer.
His Dec. 13, 2017 piece would be his fourth related article in less than two weeks; it turned out to be his last substantive article. All three of the earlier ones are worth a re-read as examples of fearless, unbiased, perceptive journalism. Here arethelinks.
Bob began his article on the Strzok-Page bombshell:
“The disclosure of fiercely anti-Trump text messages between two romantically involved senior FBI officials who played key roles in the early Russia-gate inquiry has turned the supposed Russian-election-meddling “scandal” into its own scandal, by providing evidence that some government investigators saw it as their duty to block or destroy Donald Trump’s presidency.?
“As much as the U.S. mainstream media has mocked the idea that an American ‘deep state’ exists and that it has maneuvered to remove Trump from office, the text messages between senior FBI counterintelligence official Peter Strzok and senior FBI lawyer Lisa Page reveal how two high-ranking members of the government’s intelligence/legal bureaucracy saw their role as protecting the United States from an election that might elevate to the presidency someone as unfit as Trump.”
Not a fragment of Bob’s or other Consortium News analysis made any impact on what Bob used to call the Establishment media. As a matter of fact, eight months later during a talk in Seattle that I titled “Russia-gate: Can You Handle the Truth?”, only three out of a very progressive audience of some 150 had ever heard of Strzok and Page.
And so it goes.
Lest I am accused of being “in Putin’s pocket,” let me add the explanatory note that we Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity included in our most explosive Memorandum for President Trump, on “Russian hacking.”
Full Disclosure: Over recent decades the ethos of our intelligence profession has eroded in the public mind to the point that agenda-free analysis is deemed well nigh impossible. Thus, we add this disclaimer, which applies to everything we in VIPS say and do: We have no political agenda; our sole purpose is to spread truth around and, when necessary, hold to account our former intelligence colleagues.
We speak and write without fear or favor. Consequently, any resemblance between what we say and what presidents, politicians and pundits say is purely coincidental. The fact we find it is necessary to include that reminder speaks volumes about these highly politicized times.
Ray McGovern works with Tell the Word, a publishing arm of the ecumenical Church of the Saviour in inner-city Washington. A CIA analyst for 27 years, he served as Chief of the Soviet Foreign Policy Branch and as a downtown morning briefer of the President’s Daily Brief.
They’ve done it via the ‘news’-media — their propaganda-operations. So, this is about how billionaires do that; how they’ve done it.
Ever since at least the time of Thucydides in the 5th century BC, the wealthiest have ruled, and did it by conquest and plunder. The acquisition of exceptional wealth was by theft: it was coercion, which could be either physical against the body (violence), or mental against the mind (deception). Exceptional wealth was acquired by some form of theft. The wealthiest controlled the government, which then enforced that theft as legal “ownership.” That’s how the economy worked. The government is the ultimate authority on who owns what. None of this has changed over the millennia. However, the technologies today are different, depending less on the wielding of steely weapons, and more on the statement of stealthy words, than in the ancient past. Increasingly, control is being achieved by deceiving the public. (For example, America’s leading liberal politician, Joe Biden, was one of the U.S. Senate’s leading segregationists and back-room opponents of the NAACP, but claims to be a supporter of “civil rights”, and is thus voted for by the overwhelming majority of America’s Blacks — but America’s press hides his segregationist record, and so they don’t know about it. Those voters’ ignorance is that politician’s strength, and it all comes from America’s billionaires.) Today’s methods of deceiving (and thus controlling) the public are considerably more sophisticated and professional than in the past. The aristocracy (the billionaires) do it nowadays mainly by means of their buying and selling, and hiring and firing, of the news-media, which thus have far more importance than in ancient times, because deceit is today’s main way to control the public.
Whereas conservative media rely unashamedly upon the existing popular mythology, liberal media need to rely upon that but to pretend not to, and to be instead ‘humanitarian’ and ‘enlightened’ in a more tolerant and open-minded sense: they specialize in hypocrisy — it’s liberal aristocrats’ particular style of art-form; they’re the ‘not conservative’ type of aristocrats. They pretend to be what they aren’t (champions of democracy — which they actually despise and crave to overcome, if it exists at all).
Progressive media (to the extent they exist at all, which is only very slight, anywhere) avoid both hypocrisy and mythology: they are openly anti-aristocratic, and rejecting also any mythology — they are populist, while not affirming the popular (or any) mythology. (By contrast: conservative ‘populists’ are committed to the existing popular mythology, and can therefore be manipulated by openly conservative aristocrats — they can be “Tories,” or even “Nazis,” and they can therefore vote against their own “class interests.” It’s stupid, but conservative ‘populists’ nonetheless do it routinely.)
As a result of this (since the progressives’ appeal — rejecting both the aristocracy and the mythology — is so small), politics almost invariably pits conservatives against liberals, and therefore promotes dictatorship (rule of the nation by its aristocracy), either way.
This means that, almost invariably, it’s either the conservative aristocrats, or else the liberal aristocrats, who rule a country. (Democracy — rule by the public — is thus very rare.)
Perhaps the most famous of all liberal news-media during the Twentieth Century was Britain’s Guardian newspaper, which was anti-imperialist — and that’s a core component of progressivism, because the aristocracy derive wealth not only by exploiting their domestic public, but also (if they are internationally successful, meaning control vassal-nations) by exploiting foreign publics. These aristocrats exploit foreign publics by controlling foreign governments. That’s called “imperialism.”
The Guardian newspaper was widely considered, until recently, to be not only liberal, but even progressive. It promoted government-expenditures for the benefit of the people, instead of for international conquest (which billionaires much prefer). Consequently, the aristocracy hated it, and wanted to take it over.
Tragically, that newspaper was, in fact, taken over, culminating in 2016, by American billionaires’ ‘charities’, and promptly it became perhaps the world’s most-rabidly pro-imperialistic propaganda-sheet (even worse than America’s own Washington Post and New York Times, both of which were infamous villains, which had, for example, helped to promote George W. Bush’s lies to invade and destroy Iraq for WMD that didn’t even exist except in their own lies about the matter — and those were definitely lies, not mere errors such as the liars and their propaganda-media claimed afterward). They are constantly whipping up hatred against Russia’s Government and against any nations (like Iraq 2003, Libya 2011, Syria 2012, Ukraine 2014, and Venezuela 2015, were, and like China and Iran are now) that were friendly toward Russia — because Russia is the main country that America’s billionaires want to conquer and control that they don’t yet control. So, they constantly propagandize against Russia, where they all want “regime change” (meaning, actually, conquest).
Just as for at least the past 2,500 years, conquest is the aristocracy’s chief goal. All aristocrats support imperialism. (Any who would oppose it would no longer be accepted within the aristocracy. It would hurt them in their business-dealings with other aristocrats. Amongst their fellow aristocrats, they would be rejected.)
This journalistic transformation at the Guardian, from anti-imperialist, to becoming a champion of the Military-Industrial Complex (which is owned and controlled by the billionaires), is typical.
Understanding this transformation toward pure propaganda is helpful in order to understand the functioning of today’s most destructive Government, the U.S. Government — the country (whose Government is controlled by its billionaires — no democracy) that has perpetrated far more invasions and coups, and done far more damage in and to the world, than all other Governments in the world combined, ever since the end of World War II. It has mass-murdered tens of millions of people, not only via invasions, but by coups that were followed by U.S.-imposed brutal dictatorships (which served the U.S. aristocracy) — and all the while with the U.S. regime pretending to advance ‘democracy’ and ‘human rights’ (such as in Iraq 2003-, Libya 2011-, and Syria 2012-). (After all: it’s liberal; it is hypocritical — it pretends to be progressive but isn’t.)
Though this incredibly hypocritical global-tyrannical U.S. regime is accepted world-wide, as if it weren’t today’s equivalent of Nazi Germany (only bigger than that), it is by far the world’s most evil Government, much as Nazi Germany’s Government was, in its time. Whereas America under President FDR (who was sincerely an enemy of Nazi Germany) was largely a democracy, America is now an aristocracy of its billionaires — a dictatorship by its own super-rich (and they are vicious, comparable to what Germany’s Nazis were, though using far more-liberal rhetoric).
A typical example of today’s Guardian (which is no longer a newspaper but just an online propaganda-site funded by those billionaires’ ‘charities’, and by readers who are stupid enough to donate and pay in order to be deceived by ‘news’ they read there) is two ‘news’-reports that were published in the Guardian on the same day, and unconnected with one-another except that they were both fact-less, undocumented, and rabidly hateful against Russia’s Government — that’s to say, against the bête noire of American-and-allied (such as UK) billionaires.
The Guardian is now a typical liberal ‘news’-medium, which means that it is at least as imperialistic as the openly conservative ‘news’-media (such as Rupert Murdoch’s Times of London) are.
To show how such propaganda is created and spread, and has been used with enormous success by the millions of hired agents (including publicly elected governmental officials) of the U.S. aristocracy, a few examples will be cited here that have already been sufficiently studied and exposed to be frauds — such as those two ‘news’-stories in the July 16th Guardian have not yet been exposed, but (based on that ‘news’-medium’s record) probably also are frauds.
What’s stunning there is that, with such a horrid President as Trump, the Democrats selected this hoaxed case to bring against him, in order to force him out of office — as if there weren’t authentic crimes that he had been perpetrating during his Presidency (and even before). They refused to bring any of the authentic cases against him, because they — the Democratic Party itself, its own Senators and Representatives and the Democratic National Committee — were themselves participating in those crimes (such as this and this and this and this). So, they instead brought this “Russiagate” case (which had been manufactured by the prior, Democratic Party, President’s Administration, in conjunction with MI6; and, so, Democratic Party officials could bring it), which is entirely disprovable. All of their ‘news’-media (such as the New York Times, and the Washington Post, and even the formerly British Guardian) therefore hid the hoaxiness of the charges, so as to sucker the Democratic Party’s voters (their readers) into supporting their own Democratic-Party-billionaire-serving politicians, instead of the Republican Party ones, who instead represented Republican Party billionaires. The villain was Russia (their bête noire), instead of Hillary Clinton and their own controlling aristocracy.
That “Russiagate” case in the United States was co-created by America’s CIA and Britain’s MI6; so, not only was it a real crime by the (traitorous) U.S. Government against its own American public, but it was a fictitious crime also by a foreign Government (Russia, ‘the enemy’), against the American people. And, as I have also documented, there are many such governmental crimes. And the more that they can be blamed against countries that America’s aristocracy wants to conquer (such as “Russiagate” was), the better it is for America’s aristocrats. So, this is the routine reality now (and under Trump it has increasingly been also against Iran and China), so as to pump up the Military-Industrial Complex, which is virtually owned by the aristocracy.
I document many things that are consistently denied in America’s mainstream ‘news’-media, and therefore none of those media will publish these articles (though all of my articles are submitted to all of them); but, just today as I am writing, a webmaster at a non-mainstream site objected because I provide “too many” links. Even though he operates an online news-site, he fails to know or respect the fact that ONLY online text-articles possess even the ability to enable their readers to check out easily — just by the reader’s clicking onto a link — the evidence for any reasonably questionable allegation that is being made in the given article (such as this one). Broadcast journalism doesn’t do that. Paper-and-ink journalism also doesn’t. Therefore, all of the traditional ‘news’-media don’t empower their audiences to be intelligently skeptical, and to have easy access to the actual evidence behind any reasonably questionable assertion that is being put forth by them.
Furthermore, even when traditional ‘news’-media establish online sites, any links there are often uninformative, such as to that site’s own archive of references to a given term that is being linked in their article. They assume that you trust one Party or the other, and they provide no easy means of digging deeper — because they don’t want their audience to be able to understand. Those are all billionaire-controlled ‘news’-media. So, all of them lie routinely, in order to advance the business-interests of those owners and control their audience. It’s like they are just nonstop advertisements instead of real news-media. And, since there are no links to their ultimate sources, those audiences would have to become investigators, themselves, in order to separate out which allegations are facts and which allegations are frauds. Readers don’t have the time to do that; and listeners don’t have any way in which they can do it, even if they did have the time. In other words: those audiences will choose to believe and to disbelieve whatever they want. This is the reason for the increasing political-Party polarization. It has become so bad in America now, so that the current U.S. Presidential election is between two rabidly racist contenders: the openly conservative one, Donald Trump, who hardly even tries to hide his racism, versus the other, Joe Biden, who does try to hide the fact that he was one of the U.S. Senate’s leading segregationists and was even allied on segregation-issues with the Senate’s leading segregationist, the Republican Party’s Senator Jesse Helms. Only by means of the ‘news’-media’s hiding Biden’s White-supremacist background, can they pretend that the two Parties are offering the electorate a ‘progressive’ option, in the billionaires’ 2020 Presidential (s)‘election’. Non-racist Americans are offered, by the billionaires’ two Parties, only White-supremacist options (the overtly segregationist Trump, or else the covertly segregationist Biden) to vote for to become the next President.
The entire national public then increasingly consists of people who are prejudiced in whatever ways that they are — increasingly set in their existing false beliefs — their existing myths. To allow billionaires to place their heavy thumbs upon the scales of truth and justice that they own, by means of their control over ‘news’-media, is a sure way for any democracy to degenerate into dictatorship, so that the public are fighting more against each other than against the aristocracy. This is what billionaires want and what has happened. Some things change, but others remain the same. And rule-by-the-richest seems to be in the latter category.
So: this is how one of the very few remaining progressive news-media became switched, in just the past few years, to being whored to the liberal aristocracy. The Guardian, RIP, was almost the opposite of today’s Guardian.
On August 10th, Jonathan Cook, who used to be a Guardian journalist when it was its previous, progressive newspaper, headlined “How the Guardian betrayed not only Corbyn but the last vestiges of British democracy”, and he exposed his former employer as the opposite of what it had been and as having become perhaps even the chief tool by billionaires to destroy the post-Tony-Blair Labour Party which had been led by the progressive Jeremy Corbyn, and as having reflected the Labour Party billionaires’ preference instead to defeat Corby’s Labour Party, in order to help to install as Prime Minister the far-right Tory Boris Johnson so as to restore, as being that Conservative Party’s opposition, the pro-imperialist Labour Party that had joined itself full-force to George W. Bush’s lie-based invasion of Iraq in 2003. “Racism was endemic in the language and behaviours of Labour’s senior, rightwing officials,” whom today’s Guardian had helped to make the Labour Party’s current leaders. This new Guardian was the opposite of the old Guardian, which had given a voice “for control of the Labour party so that it might really represent the poor and vulnerable against rule by the rich.” Today’s Guardian was instead instrumental in killing–off that Labour Party, and thereby leaving UK with no progressive party at all, and without even a single Party that has any actually functioning progressive wing to it, at all.
The way that billionaires took over liberalism and destroyed it is by their having taken control over non-conservative media (most of which were liberal, but a few of which were even progressive, as the Guardian used to be) and stripped out of them any opposition that those media previously had had toward imperialism, and replaced that by championing imperialism, so long it’s of the ‘right’ kind, namely sanctions and coups and invasions by ‘our’ country, against countries that never even threatened one’s own country (but that are friendly toward Russia). By definition, attempting to conquer a country that isn’t attempting to conquer that aggressor-country is the biggest of all international war-crimes; it’s “aggressive war” — and Nazi leaders were hanged for it at Nuremberg — but it’s entirely unpunished when the world’s most powerful country (and its allies) are doing it, such as now. A popular term for it (i.e., for the supreme crime that was being prosecuted at the Nuremberg Tribunals) today is “neoconservatism,” and the only way in which it differs from the Nazi Party is that America’s aggressions are aiming at different targets to destroy.
The easiest way to end democracy is to take control over the news-media so as to make them instead ‘news’-media; and, therefore, that’s the way it has been done.
If we’d been living in a healthy society and then suddenly had this society’s sick, insane status quo thrust upon us by powerful people, we’d have all been out in the streets making life very hard for those powerful people in an instant.
We are in the same situation now. We are having a wildly insane status quo thrust upon us by the powerful and for the benefit of the powerful. Only difference is we’re not all out in the streets, and instead of thrusting this horrible situation upon us suddenly, they’ve been doing it this entire time.
Which is precisely why we’re not out in the streets. We were born into this mess, so we assume it’s normal and that things are supposed to be this way. But it isn’t, and they aren’t.
What is normal is health. Health is the normal default condition. If you wake up with a fever and stabbing pain in your abdomen you don’t say “Ah well I guess that’s normal now, you can’t expect to just not have a fever and stabbing abdominal pain,” you recognize that there’s an urgent problem and you take action to fix it.
Even if you’d been sick your entire life, you would understand that your situation is not normal. You would understand that the basic default condition is health, but some dysfunction in your specific system has deprived you of that normal state of being.
In order for us to begin pushing back on the dysfunction of our current system, we need to begin looking at it in the same way. We need to clearly come to see how spectacularly divergent it is from the basic default condition of health. How sick it is. How abnormal it is.
We need to see clearly that health is normal and sickness is abnormal, whether you’re talking about an individual or a society.
It’s not normal for a civilization to be dominated by plutocrats and secretive government agencies and to only get offered the choice between two authoritarian corporate warmongers in a pretend election to a position of leadership that is almost entirely fake.
It’s not normal for there to be enough wealth to feed and care for everyone and yet instead have people with unfathomable amounts of money while others die of lack.
It’s not normal for a globe-spanning empire to dominate our species with endless military violence and starvation sanctions for the sole purpose of maintaining and expanding the unipolar hegemony of a few sociopathic manipulators.
It’s not normal for us to be destroying our ecosystem in order to grow an economy that is ultimately an imaginary construction in our minds instead of learning to collaborate harmoniously with that ecosystem.
It’s not normal for us all to be competing against each other at the expense of the entire world instead of collaborating with each other for the good of the entire world.
We need to get crystal clear that these things are not normal, because our entire society is completely saturated with skilful manipulations telling us that they are.
I write a lot about the more egregious, incendiary lies that the mass media have notoriously promulgated like WMDs in Iraq, Russiagate, the imaginary Labour antisemitism crisis etc. But the most destructive lies the mass media tell us are not the ones that stand out the most in our collective memory. The most damaging lies they tell us are the little ones they tell us many times every single day by way of spin, omission, half-truth and distortion in order to give us the impression that this status quo is normal and inescapable.
You see it in the way they talk about politicians who stand even a tiny bit outside the warmongering oligarchic beltway consensus like they are radical extremists. You see it in the way they’ll focus on protests in Belarus or Hong Kong while ignoring them in Bolivia or France. You see it in the way they ignore Yemen when it’s the single most horrific thing happening on our planet right now. You see it in all the sitcoms and movies where debt and low wages and other symptoms of status quo dysfunction are almost never a featured concern.
You see it in innumerable other ways, day in and day out, and they add up. They add up for someone who was born into a gravely dysfunctional system and has never known anything resembling health to compare it to. They’re like someone who has always been sick, who has also never known or heard about anyone who is healthy.
You can tell me we’ve never had a healthy society since the dawn of civilization all you want. All you are telling me is that we have always been sick. Being sick all your life doesn’t mean health isn’t normal or that health shouldn’t be urgently sought; if anything it means it should be sought more urgently.
It is not human nature to be this sick, and anyone who tells you it is is lying. Anyone who tells you it’s human nature to be greedy, violent, domineering and abusive isn’t telling you about humanity’s nature, they’re telling you about their own nature. And it’s probably a bad idea to turn your back on them.
We can have health. We can have normality. But just as you won’t return to health by pretending that your fever and abdominal pains are normal, we can’t create a healthy society as long as we allow ourselves to be manipulated into the belief that our backwards, insane status quo is what normality looks like.
So abnormalize the status quo. Abnormalize it every chance you get. Abnormalize it by holding a clear idea in your mind of what a healthy society would look like, then point out all the bizarre deviations from that vision at every opportunity. Remind people that this is crazy. Assure them that it doesn’t have to be this way. That the only thing keeping it this way is the fact that the powerful keep pouring vast troves of wealth into manipulating us into thinking that we should.
Help people see what health is so that they can see what sickness is. Interrupt conversations about which flavor of sickness would be preferable this election season to point to what real health would look like. Disrupt all attempts to normalize our status quo, and use whatever reach you have to help abnormalize it.
There is no doubt that QAnon has been behind absurd conspiracy theories and verified lies circulating online – suspiciously absurd. Banning it from Twitter because of alleged fears its activity will lead to “offline harm” is even more absurd .
Despite making absurd claims that demonstrably never materialize or providing evidence that is later revealed to be clearly fabricated, nothing QAnon has done differs from what the corporate media does on a daily basis. In many ways they are one in the same – dividing and distracting the public while US special interests advance their agenda unnoticed and unopposed.
QAnon allegedly made false claims that Hillary Clinton’s arrest was imminent – she was never arrested. Conversely, the corporate media regularly claims that various world leaders in nations targeted by Western regime change have “fled,” are “dead,” or otherwise “ousted from power” – with lies spread by the Western media over the alleged “fates” of still incumbent leaders like Syrian President Bashar Al-Assad, Venezuela’s President Nicolás Maduro, and North Korean leader Kim Jong-un coming to immediate mind.
The Western corporate media also helps sell various wars of aggression.
This includes the US invasion of Afghanistan in 2001, the US invasion of Iraq in 2003, US interventions in Libya and Syria from 2011 onward and US-backed regime change in Ukraine in 2013-2014.
Collectively these conflicts have killed over a million people and driven millions more from their homes. This “offline harm” – the direct result of lies told by the Western corporate media – has not only gone completely unaddressed by Twitter – it is enabled by Twitter.
The banning of the more absurd QAnon movement will pave the way for other purges – eventually eliminating any alternative to the corporate media and its demonstrably dangerous and dishonest narratives. QAnon’s absurdity will make it easy for Twitter to justify its ban, but the momentum toward greater censorship across Western social media will eventually impact accounts and movements previously difficult to justify banning.
US-based “social media” platforms – Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, etc. – are no longer truly social media. They are clearly transforming into centralized programed media where corporate monopolies create content that is consumed, removing the public, independent organizations, and competitors’ role in creating content, contributing to discussions, offering alternative views, and interacting with one another.
It is important that this fact be fully recognized and exposed as well as the creation of alternative platforms – especially overseas where US-based “social media” has been fully weaponized and used to undermine sociopolitical and economic stability.
After the Crash 