Tag Archives: Mainstream Media

They Live, We Sleep: Beware the Growing Evil in Our Midst

Posted on by
5

By John W. Whitehead

Source: The Rutherford Institute

“You see them on the street. You watch them on TV. You might even vote for one this fall. You think they’re people just like you. You’re wrong. Dead wrong.” — They Live

We’re living in two worlds, you and I.

There’s the world we see (or are made to see) and then there’s the one we sense (and occasionally catch a glimpse of), the latter of which is a far cry from the propaganda-driven reality manufactured by the government and its corporate sponsors, including the media.

Indeed, what most Americans perceive as life in America—privileged, progressive and free—is a far cry from reality, where economic inequality is growing, real agendas and real power are buried beneath layers of Orwellian doublespeak and corporate obfuscation, and “freedom,” such that it is, is meted out in small, legalistic doses by militarized police armed to the teeth.

All is not as it seems.

This is the premise of John Carpenter’s film They Live, which was released more than 30 years ago, and remains unnervingly, chillingly appropriate for our modern age.

Best known for his horror film Halloween, which assumes that there is a form of evil so dark that it can’t be killed, Carpenter’s larger body of work is infused with a strong anti-authoritarian, anti-establishment, laconic bent that speaks to the filmmaker’s concerns about the unraveling of our society, particularly our government.

Time and again, Carpenter portrays the government working against its own citizens, a populace out of touch with reality, technology run amok, and a future more horrific than any horror film.

In Escape from New York, Carpenter presents fascism as the future of America.

In The Thing, a remake of the 1951 sci-fi classic of the same name, Carpenter presupposes that increasingly we are all becoming dehumanized.

In Christine, the film adaptation of Stephen King’s novel about a demon-possessed car, technology exhibits a will and consciousness of its own and goes on a murderous rampage.

In In the Mouth of Madness, Carpenter notes that evil grows when people lose “the ability to know the difference between reality and fantasy.”

And then there is Carpenter’s They Live, in which two migrant workers discover that the world is not as it seems. In fact, the population is actually being controlled and exploited by aliens working in partnership with an oligarchic elite. All the while, the populace—blissfully unaware of the real agenda at work in their lives—has been lulled into complacency, indoctrinated into compliance, bombarded with media distractions, and hypnotized by subliminal messages beamed out of television and various electronic devices, billboards and the like.

It is only when homeless drifter John Nada (played to the hilt by the late Roddy Piper) discovers a pair of doctored sunglasses—Hoffman lenses—that Nada sees what lies beneath the elite’s fabricated reality: control and bondage.

When viewed through the lens of truth, the elite, who appear human until stripped of their disguises, are shown to be monsters who have enslaved the citizenry in order to prey on them.

Likewise, billboards blare out hidden, authoritative messages: a bikini-clad woman in one ad is actually ordering viewers to “MARRY AND REPRODUCE.” Magazine racks scream “CONSUME” and “OBEY.” A wad of dollar bills in a vendor’s hand proclaims, “THIS IS YOUR GOD.”

When viewed through Nada’s Hoffman lenses, some of the other hidden messages being drummed into the people’s subconscious include: NO INDEPENDENT THOUGHT, CONFORM, SUBMIT, STAY ASLEEP, BUY, WATCH TV, NO IMAGINATION, and DO NOT QUESTION AUTHORITY.

This indoctrination campaign engineered by the elite in They Live is painfully familiar to anyone who has studied the decline of American culture.

A citizenry that does not think for themselves, obeys without question, is submissive, does not challenge authority, does not think outside the box, and is content to sit back and be entertained is a citizenry that can be easily controlled.

In this way, the subtle message of They Live provides an apt analogy of our own distorted vision of life in the American police state, what philosopher Slavoj Žižek refers to as dictatorship in democracy, “the invisible order which sustains your apparent freedom.”

We’re being fed a series of carefully contrived fictions that bear no resemblance to reality.

The powers-that-be want us to feel threatened by forces beyond our control (terrorists, shooters, bombers).

They want us afraid and dependent on the government and its militarized armies for our safety and well-being.

They want us distrustful of each other, divided by our prejudices, and at each other’s throats.

Most of all, they want us to continue to march in lockstep with their dictates.

Tune out the government’s attempts to distract, divert and befuddle us and tune into what’s really going on in this country, and you’ll run headlong into an unmistakable, unpalatable truth: the moneyed elite who rule us view us as expendable resources to be used, abused and discarded.

In fact, a study conducted by Princeton and Northwestern University concluded that the U.S. government does not represent the majority of American citizens. Instead, the study found that the government is ruled by the rich and powerful, or the so-called “economic elite.” Moreover, the researchers concluded that policies enacted by this governmental elite nearly always favor special interests and lobbying groups.

In other words, we are being ruled by an oligarchy disguised as a democracy, and arguably on our way towards fascism—a form of government where private corporate interests rule, money calls the shots, and the people are seen as mere subjects to be controlled.

Not only do you have to be rich—or beholden to the rich—to get elected these days, but getting elected is also a surefire way to get rich. As CBS News reports, “Once in office, members of Congress enjoy access to connections and information they can use to increase their wealth, in ways that are unparalleled in the private sector. And once politicians leave office, their connections allow them to profit even further.”

In denouncing this blatant corruption of America’s political system, former president Jimmy Carter blasted the process of getting elected—to the White House, governor’s mansion, Congress or state legislatures—as “unlimited political bribery… a subversion of our political system as a payoff to major contributors, who want and expect, and sometimes get, favors for themselves after the election is over.”

Rest assured that when and if fascism finally takes hold in America, the basic forms of government will remain: Fascism will appear to be friendly. The legislators will be in session. There will be elections, and the news media will continue to cover the entertainment and political trivia. Consent of the governed, however, will no longer apply. Actual control will have finally passed to the oligarchic elite controlling the government behind the scenes.

Sound familiar?

Clearly, we are now ruled by an oligarchic elite of governmental and corporate interests.

We have moved into “corporatism” (favored by Benito Mussolini), which is a halfway point on the road to full-blown fascism.

Corporatism is where the few moneyed interests—not elected by the citizenry—rule over the many. In this way, it is not a democracy or a republican form of government, which is what the American government was established to be. It is a top-down form of government and one which has a terrifying history typified by the developments that occurred in totalitarian regimes of the past: police states where everyone is watched and spied on, rounded up for minor infractions by government agents, placed under police control, and placed in detention (a.k.a. concentration) camps.

For the final hammer of fascism to fall, it will require the most crucial ingredient: the majority of the people will have to agree that it’s not only expedient but necessary.

But why would a people agree to such an oppressive regime?

The answer is the same in every age: fear.

Fear makes people stupid.

Fear is the method most often used by politicians to increase the power of government. And, as most social commentators recognize, an atmosphere of fear permeates modern America: fear of terrorism, fear of the police, fear of our neighbors and so on.

The propaganda of fear has been used quite effectively by those who want to gain control, and it is working on the American populace.

Despite the fact that we are 17,600 times more likely to die from heart disease than from a terrorist attack; 11,000 times more likely to die from an airplane accident than from a terrorist plot involving an airplane; 1,048 times more likely to die from a car accident than a terrorist attack, and 8 times more likely to be killed by a police officer than by a terrorist , we have handed over control of our lives to government officials who treat us as a means to an end—the source of money and power.

As the Bearded Man in They Live warns, “They are dismantling the sleeping middle class. More and more people are becoming poor. We are their cattle. We are being bred for slavery.”

In this regard, we’re not so different from the oppressed citizens in They Live.

From the moment we are born until we die, we are indoctrinated into believing that those who rule us do it for our own good. The truth is far different.

Despite the truth staring us in the face, we have allowed ourselves to become fearful, controlled, pacified zombies.

We live in a perpetual state of denial, insulated from the painful reality of the American police state by wall-to-wall entertainment news and screen devices.

Most everyone keeps their heads down these days while staring zombie-like into an electronic screen, even when they’re crossing the street. Families sit in restaurants with their heads down, separated by their screen devices and unaware of what’s going on around them. Young people especially seem dominated by the devices they hold in their hands, oblivious to the fact that they can simply push a button, turn the thing off and walk away.

Indeed, there is no larger group activity than that connected with those who watch screens—that is, television, lap tops, personal computers, cell phones and so on. In fact, a Nielsen study reports that American screen viewing is at an all-time high. For example, the average American watches approximately 151 hours of television per month.

The question, of course, is what effect does such screen consumption have on one’s mind?

Psychologically it is similar to drug addiction. Researchers found that “almost immediately after turning on the TV, subjects reported feeling more relaxed, and because this occurs so quickly and the tension returns so rapidly after the TV is turned off, people are conditioned to associate TV viewing with a lack of tension.” Research also shows that regardless of the programming, viewers’ brain waves slow down, thus transforming them into a more passive, nonresistant state.

Historically, television has been used by those in authority to quiet discontent and pacify disruptive people. “Faced with severe overcrowding and limited budgets for rehabilitation and counseling, more and more prison officials are using TV to keep inmates quiet,” according to Newsweek.

Given that the majority of what Americans watch on television is provided through channels controlled by six mega corporations, what we watch is now controlled by a corporate elite and, if that elite needs to foster a particular viewpoint or pacify its viewers, it can do so on a large scale.

If we’re watching, we’re not doing.

The powers-that-be understand this. As television journalist Edward R. Murrow warned in a 1958 speech:

We are currently wealthy, fat, comfortable and complacent. We have currently a built-in allergy to unpleasant or disturbing information. Our mass media reflect this. But unless we get up off our fat surpluses and recognize that television in the main is being used to distract, delude, amuse, and insulate us, then television and those who finance it, those who look at it, and those who work at it, may see a totally different picture too late.

This brings me back to They Live, in which the real zombies are not the aliens calling the shots but the populace who are content to remain controlled.

When all is said and done, the world of They Live is not so different from our own. As one of the characters points out, “The poor and the underclass are growing. Racial justice and human rights are nonexistent. They have created a repressive society and we are their unwitting accomplices. Their intention to rule rests with the annihilation of consciousness. We have been lulled into a trance. They have made us indifferent to ourselves, to others. We are focused only on our own gain.”

We, too, are focused only on our own pleasures, prejudices and gains. Our poor and underclasses are also growing. Racial injustice is growing. Human rights is nearly nonexistent. We too have been lulled into a trance, indifferent to others.

Oblivious to what lies ahead, we’ve been manipulated into believing that if we continue to consume, obey, and have faith, things will work out. But that’s never been true of emerging regimes. And by the time we feel the hammer coming down upon us, it will be too late.

So where does that leave us?

The characters who populate Carpenter’s films provide some insight.

Underneath their machismo, they still believe in the ideals of liberty and equal opportunity. Their beliefs place them in constant opposition with the law and the establishment, but they are nonetheless freedom fighters.

When, for example, John Nada destroys the alien hyno-transmitter in They Live, he restores hope by delivering America a wake-up call for freedom.

That’s the key right there: we need to wake up.

Stop allowing yourselves to be easily distracted by pointless political spectacles and pay attention to what’s really going on in the country.

The real battle for control of this nation is not being waged between Republicans and Democrats in the ballot box.

As I make clear in my book Battlefield America: The War on the American People, the real battle for control of this nation is taking place on roadsides, in police cars, on witness stands, over phone lines, in government offices, in corporate offices, in public school hallways and classrooms, in parks and city council meetings, and in towns and cities across this country.

The real battle between freedom and tyranny is taking place right in front of our eyes, if we would only open them.

All the trappings of the American police state are now in plain sight.

Wake up, America.

If they live (the tyrants, the oppressors, the invaders, the overlords), it is only because “we the people” sleep.

Bolivia’s New Puppet Regime Wastes No Time Aligning With US Foreign Policy

Posted on by
Reply

By Caitlin Johnstone

Source: CaitlinJohnstone.com

The Washington-recognized interim government which just ascended to power via US-backed military coup in Bolivia is already shifting the nation’s foreign policy into alignment with the US-centralized empire, severing important ties with two governments which have resisted absorption into the imperial blob.

“Bolivia’s caretaker government isn’t wasting any time overhauling its foreign policy, announcing Friday that it will expel hundreds of Cuban officials and break ties with longtime ally Venezuela,” The Miami Herald reports. “In a series of statements, Bolivia’s new foreign minister, Karen Longaric, told local media that about 725 Cubans — including doctors and medical staff — would begin leaving Bolivia on Friday.”

“In that same interview she also said she’d be recalling Bolivia’s diplomatic staff from Venezuela,” Miami Herald adds. “Later, asked if she would maintain ties with Venezuelan leader Nicolás Maduro, she said, ‘Of course we’ll break diplomatic relations with the Maduro government.’”

Of course they will.

This news comes as no surprise to anyone who’s been paying attention. US foreign policy is essentially an endless war on disobedience, in which governments that refuse to bow to US interests are toppled by any means necessary and replaced by governments who will.

International affairs are much easier to understand once you stop thinking in terms of separate, sovereign nations and start thinking in terms of alliances and empire. What we are witnessing can best be described as a slow-motion third world war between what amounts to an unofficial globe-spanning empire centralized around the United States and its military on one side, and all the nations which have refused to be absorbed into this empire on the other. Nations which allow themselves to be absorbed are rewarded with the carrot of military and economic alliance with the empire, and nations which refuse are punished with the stick of invasions, sanctions, trade wars, and coups, with the ultimate goal being total unipolar global domination. The bigger the imperial blob grows, the stronger and more effective it becomes in undermining the interests of unabsorbed nations like Venezuela and Cuba.

Nothing takes precedence over this agenda of unipolar hegemony. As long as a nation remains loyal to the empire, it can fund terrorists, butcher Washington Post columnists, and create the worst humanitarian crisis in the world without fear of any retribution of any kind from the US-centralized empire. As a leaked State Department memo explained in 2017, so far as the empire is concerned human rights violations are nothing more than a strategic narrative control weapon with which to attack unabsorbed nations, and to be ignored when they are perpetrated by absorbed nations.

It should therefore also surprise no one that this same Washington-recognized government installed via US-backed military coup is now murdering demonstrators who object to it.

As of this writing there have been five protesters confirmed to have been killed by gunfire in Cochabamba, where security forces are cracking down on demonstrations with extreme aggression against majority-Indigenous demonstrations in support of the ousted president Evo Morales.

The narrative managers at The New York Times are reporting on the events in Cochabamba with the obnoxious insinuation that it may actually be Morales and Bolivia’s Indigenous population who are to blame for current tensions. Here are a couple of excerpts from NYT’s latest contribution to the narrative matrix titled “Ethnic Rifts in Bolivia Burst Into View With Fall of Evo Morales” (emphases mine):

Mr. Morales’s nearly 14 years in power represented a breakthrough for the three-quarters of Bolivians who are either of Indigenous descent or identify as members of Indigenous groups. But he also reinforced his base of support with explicit appeals to racial identity that many Bolivians found threatening and polarizing.

…

“Racism exists in Bolivia; it existed before Evo, and it will never disappear,” said Michelle Kieffer, an insurance broker, as she sipped a cappuccino in an upper-middle-class neighborhood of the country’s administrative capital, La Paz.

“While Evo started an important discussion,” she added, “he also manipulated the race issue, and that has caused disunity. And now people of different races look at each other with suspicion.”

Right. Gotcha. Maybe it’s the impoverished brown-skinned people who are in fact the real fascists, and not the literal Christian fascist coupmongers whose US-backed government takeover they are protesting. Thanks, NYT.

Morales won re-election by over ten percentage points last month, and his previously-elected term wasn’t scheduled to end until January. He was commanded to resign during a current term by the military despite fully acquiescing to demands for a new internationally supervised election. Now it’s being reported that the popular leftist party to which he belonged, MAS, may be banned by the Jeanine Añez-led interim government from participating in the next elections.

Despite all this the western mass media are continuing their cartoonishly ridiculous pattern of resisting the use of the word ‘coup’ when reporting on Bolivia, except to admonish people for using that word as in the case of recent narrative management pieces by The Washington Post, The Washington Examiner, and The Economist.

“Supporters of the coup in Bolivia can’t call it a coup,” US politician Lee Carter recently noted. “The US has a law preventing us from sending foreign aid to a new government if it was installed by a coup. So they come up with absurd claims that the military forcing Evo out somehow isn’t a coup.”

And the western mass media are falling right in line with the government forces in refusing to use this word, despite the ousting of a government by the military being exactly the thing that a coup is. This is because in a plutocracy, plutocrat-owned media is functionally the same as state media. Reporters for plutocratic media know what they are and are not permitted to say without being told, so they advance narratives which favor the status quo upon which their plutocrat employers have built their respective kingdoms. This is the status quo of the US-centralized empire, which just absorbed Bolivia and pivoted its foreign policy against the unabsorbed governments of Venezuela and Cuba.

Algorithmic Feudalism

Posted on by
Reply

By Michael Krieger

Source: Liberty Blitzkrieg

Stiegler insists, however, that authentic thinking and calculative thinking are not mutually exclusive; indeed, mathematical rationality is one of our major prosthetic extensions. But the catastrophe of the digital age is that the global economy, powered by computational “reason” and driven by profit, is foreclosing the horizon of independent reflection for the majority of our species, in so far as we remain unaware that our thinking is so often being constricted by lines of code intended to anticipate, and actively shape, consciousness itself. 

– Via TruthDig: Fighting the Unprecedented ‘Proletarianization’ of the Human Mind

As the share price of Google parent company Alphabet soared to new highs in the U.S. equity market last week, several articles were published detailing just how out of control and dangerous this tech behemoth has become.

First, we learned Google is in the process of secretly sucking up the personalized healthcare data of up to 50 million Americans without the permission of patients or doctors. This was followed by a detailed report in the Wall Street Journal outlining how the search giant is meddling with its algorithms far more aggressively than executives lead people to believe. Despite these revelations, or more likely because of them, the stock price jumped to record levels. This is the world we live in.

We should’ve known right away that a tech company with the motto “don’t be evil,” would quickly and without any hesitation embrace as much evil as possible. Although pushback against America’s most dangerous tech giants (Google, Facebook and Amazon) has been growing, it hasn’t amounted to anything serious, and investors don’t expect much if the share price is any indication. Perhaps after seeing zero bank executives jailed after last decade’s financial crime spree, coupled with Boeing executives likewise facing no real repercussions despite killing hundreds out of profit-obsessed negligence, we’ve come to embrace our sociopathic, depraved overlords. Give me liberty, or give me new highs in the S&P500.

It’s important to note that while much of the recent focus on tech giants revolves around market dominance and anti-competitiveness, the real danger posed is far more extensive. Particularly since the post-election “panic of 2016,” these companies have begun to more earnestly morph into digital information gatekeepers in the name of empire and the national security state.

Day by day, tweaked algorithm by tweaked algorithm, and with each new thought criminal banished from major digital platforms, we’ve seen not only dissident views marginalized, but we’ve also lost a capacity to access information we’re looking for should tech company CEOs or their national security state partners deem it inappropriate. The powers that be have determined the internet permitted too much freedom of thought and opinion, so the tech giants stand ready to bluntly throw the hammer down in order to reverse that trend and regain narrative control. The algorithm will be used to get you in line, and if you don’t comply, the algorithm will destroy you.

More from TruthDig:

Stiegler believes that digital technology, in the hands of technocrats whom he calls “the new barbarians,” now threatens to dominate our tertiary memory, leading to a historically unprecedented “proletarianization” of the human mind. For Stiegler, the stakes today are much higher than they were for Marx, from whom this term is derived: proletarianization is no longer a threat posed to physical labor but to the human spirit itself…

Stiegler firmly believes that a distinction must always be upheld between “authentic thinking” and “computational cognitivism” and that today’s crisis lies in confusing the latter for the former: we have entrusted our rationality to computational technologies that now dominate everyday life, which is increasingly dependent on glowing screens driven by algorithmic anticipations of their users’ preferences and even writing habits (e.g., the repugnantly named “predictive text” feature that awaits typed-in characters to regurgitate stock phrases)… As Stiegler’s translator, the philosopher and filmmaker Daniel Ross, puts it, our so-called post-truth age is one “where calculation becomes so hegemonic as to threaten the possibility of thinking itself.” 

This is the true crux of what we’re dealing with, and so we find ourselves at a terrifying transition point in the entire historical human experience should we fail to correct it. As a consequence of their dominant market shares in core areas of our modern digital world like e-commerce (Amazon), human-to-human communication (Facebook) and information access (Google), tech giants now have the capacity to replace human curiosity and thought with opaque and ever-changing algorithms.

Here’s some of what the WSJ revealed in its investigation published last week:

More than 100 interviews and the Journal’s own testing of Google’s search results reveal:

• Google made algorithmic changes to its search results that favor big businesses over smaller ones, and in at least one case made changes on behalf of a major advertiser, eBay Inc., contrary to its public position that it never takes that type of action. The company also boosts some major websites, such as Amazon.com Inc.and Facebook Inc., according to people familiar with the matter. 

• Google engineers regularly make behind-the-scenes adjustments to other information the company is increasingly layering on top of its basic search results. These features include auto-complete suggestions, boxes called “knowledge panels” and “featured snippets,” and news results, which aren’t subject to the same company policies limiting what engineers can remove or change.

• Despite publicly denying doing so, Google keeps blacklists to remove certain sites or prevent others from surfacing in certain types of results. These moves are separate from those that block sites as required by U.S. or foreign law, such as those featuring child abuse or with copyright infringement, and from changes designed to demote spam sites, which attempt to game the system to appear higher in results.

• In auto-complete, the feature that predicts search terms as the user types a query, Google’s engineers have created algorithms and blacklists to weed out more-incendiary suggestions for controversial subjects, such as abortion or immigration, in effect filtering out inflammatory results on high-profile topics. 

• Google employees and executives, including co-founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin, have disagreed on how much to intervene on search results and to what extent. Employees can push for revisions in specific search results, including on topics such as vaccinations and autism. 

• To evaluate its search results, Google employs thousands of low-paid contractors whose purpose the company says is to assess the quality of the algorithms’ rankings. Even so, contractors said Google gave feedback to these workers to convey what it considered to be the correct ranking of results, and they revised their assessments accordingly, according to contractors interviewed by the Journal. The contractors’ collective evaluations are then used to adjust algorithms.

This comes down to power and control, and the tech giants are now maturing into their predictable role as algorithmic gatekeepers of a new digital feudalism. Google has the power to shape your mind by limiting what you have access to, while at the same time wielding the power to destroy your livelihood with a tweak of an algorithm. Although a lot of the most nefarious stuff is still being conducted at the margins so the masses don’t realize what’s happening, stealth censorship will continue to be rolled out until the internet most people use becomes for all practical purposes an information gulag where nothing but shameless propaganda is pumped onto screens by hidden algorithms tweaked (for your own good) by billionaires.

A perfect example of this can be seen in how YouTube hides ones of the most popular videos ever made regarding the attacks of September 11, 2001. The short clip made by James Corbett, is titled 9/11: A Conspiracy Theory, and has over 3.2 million views. Nevertheless, here’s what YouTube spits out if you search by the exact title of the video.

Keep scrolling and you still won’t find it. This isn’t YouTube helping users find the information they want, it’s YouTube hiding content from its users. Moreover, the only reason I’m aware of the censoring of this particular item is because I’m familiar with the video from years ago. You can be certain this sort of thing is more common than you realize and will only get worse.

The internet was supposed to free information while connecting people and ideas across borders. This promise is being lost with each passing day, and rectifying the situation is one of the most significant challenges we face. Should we fail, we can look forward to a future where humanity consists of little more than digitally lobotomized automatons responding like lab rats to algorithms created by tech CEOs and their national security state partners.

 

The Twilight of Liberty: the State Destroys Alternative Media

Posted on by
Reply

By Kurt Nimmo

Source: Another Day in the Empire

It should be obvious by now what the plan is for Julian Assange—psychological torture resulting in either a total breakdown or an untimely death, the latter supported by the psychopaths who claim they are our leaders. This psychological torture was noted, with standard corporate media disinterest, by Nils Melzer, an internationally recognized expert on torture treatment.

“Unless the UK urgently changes course and alleviates his inhumane situation, Mr. Assange’s continued exposure to arbitrariness and abuse may soon end up costing his life,” Melzer, UN special rapporteur on torture and other cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment, said in a statement last week.

Melzer demanded “that London immediately take measures to protect Assange’s health and dignity… However, what we have seen from the UK Government is outright contempt for Mr. Assange’s rights and integrity… Despite the medical urgency of my appeal, and the seriousness of the alleged violations, the UK has not undertaken any measures of investigation, prevention and redress required under international law.”

In America, the UK, and much of Europe, the financial elite and its political class consider truth-telling a cardinal sin, a crime punishable by death—not by lethal injection, but slowly and sadistically under a torture system tweaked by the CIA and put into action in rendition dungeons scattered around the world.

An article at Strategic Culture Foundation summarizes:

Assange has provided vital information to the international public which demonstrates systematic corruption by Washington and its allies. For telling the truth, he is now being persecuted, just as his whistleblowing colleagues, Chelsea Manning and Edward Snowden are. Manning has been repeatedly imprisoned in the US, while Snowden has had to seek asylum in Russia for fear of being summarily incarcerated as a “traitor” if he returns to the US.

In fact, all of us, those who look beyond the headlines and ferret out the truth, are half a dozen steps away from suffering Julian Assange’s fate.

The national security state and its political class plan to kill Assange, keep Chelsea Manning in prison and find a way to return Snowden to the US for a show trial and life behind bars (or execution).

It must, however, first salt the earth where truth is harvested. Thousands of blogs, similar to this one, and websites contradicting and disassembling approved narratives, will be targeted for extinction.

The Mueller investigation did not result in dethroning Donald Trump. The Clinton-DNC attack on a duly elected president, however, resulted in millions of easily duped Americans believing Russia somehow meddled in the 2016 election and will do it again in 2020.

According to corporate entities in “partnership” with the state (the true nature of fascism), Russia is not alone in its supposed hatred of democracy and the self-proclaimed exceptional nation-state.

“There is an undeclared war that Russia and China are waging against the United States and the West,” Jim Sciutto,  CNN’s chief national security correspondent and co-anchor of CNN Newsroom, told the Poynter Fellowship in Journalism Speaker Series in October. “China and Russia, over the last 10 years, have done a remarkably good job at this.”

This alleged manipulation of American voters, according to the state and its corporate propaganda media, is assisted by Russian agents and a countless number of mindless dupes unaware of Vladimir Putin’s desire to destroy America.

In 2016, Max Blumenthal wrote:

A shady website that claims “Russia is Manipulating US Opinion Through Online Propaganda” has compiled a blacklist of websites its anonymous authors accuse of pushing fake news and Russian propaganda. The blacklist includes over 200 outlets, from the right-wing Drudge Report and Russian government-funded Russia Today, to Wikileaks and an array of marginal conspiracy and far-right sites. The blacklist also includes some of the flagship publications of the progressive left, including Truthdig, Counterpunch, Truthout, Naked Capitalism, and the Black Agenda Report, a leftist African-American opinion hub that is critical of the liberal black political establishment.

“You can see in the current atmosphere, where anti-Russia hysteria has spread like typhoid, how readily-accepted such a notion would be by many. The reds are under our beds and the Russkies have taken over our airwaves,” wrote Daniel McAdams of The Ron Paul Institute for Peace & Prosperity wrote in 2017.

The Washington Post, owned by billionaire Jeff Bezos, rolled out the red carpet for the shadowy group, PropOrNot, and its baseless fact-devoid accusations of alternative media treason and complicity with Russia.

Bezos is working closely with the CIA on a $600 million internet-cloud deal to get the NSA, DoD, the National Reconnaissance Office, the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency, and other government snoop-and-subvert operations interconnected.

The Alliance for Securing Democracy’s Hamilton 68 effort to destroy alternative media also has roots in the 2016 election loss of Hillary Clinton. Hamilton 68 is a project supported by the US State Department, the German Marshall Fund, and NATO. Neocon William Kristol and DNC operative John Podesta sit on its advisory board. The organization leans heavily on the Russian collusion fairy tale, thus lending to the conclusion alternative media is a Trojan horse that will help the “New Hitler” Putin destroy democracy.

I certainly don’t have a crystal ball to gaze into and read the future. However, it seems rather obvious what the outcome of all this feverish work to demonize truth-tellers and install gatekeepers on the internet will be.

First, high visibility “fake news” websites will feel the heat. This is already well underway with the persecution of Alex Jones for the crime of questioning Sandy Hook and promoting the Pizzagate conspiracy theory. Lawsuits aimed at Jones are intended to drive his operation into bankruptcy and hold him criminally responsible for questioning official narratives.

The takeaway here—questioning official narratives and positing counter-narratives is a risky business and you are advised not to engage in treasonous behavior with Russian agents if you value your freedom, ability to earn a living, and want to stay off a government terror list.

Second, the concerted effort to sanitize social media of heretical political expression is moving along at a fairly robust clip. Numerous activists and alternative websites and individuals—including the above mentioned McAdams—have been scrubbed since Hillary Clinton declared war on freedom of political expression, which she fallaciously and absurdly chalked up to malfeasance by Russia and the misbehavior of Deplorables.

Third, there will be “meddling by Russia” in the 2020 election regardless of the winner of the presidential teleprompter reader sweepstakes. This will be considered a national emergency and the floodgates will fly open to suffuse the population with scary stories of democracy lost to the autocrat Putin. Radical measures to stem the tide of subversion will be put forward and turned into law by the political class.

I have no idea what the outcome of this will be except to say many of us will be prevented from posting counter-narratives and unearthing hidden truths—historical, political, and economic. Earlier this year the FBI designated alternative media commentary as domestic terrorism.

“The FBI assesses these conspiracy theories very likely will emerge, spread, and evolve in the modern information marketplace, occasionally driving both groups and individual extremists to carry out criminal or violent acts,” the document states. It also goes on to say the FBI believes conspiracy theory-driven extremists are likely to increase during the 2020 presidential election cycle.

The FBI’s not talking about flat-earthers and UFOologists. It is targeting alternative media. The historical record—ignored by the propaganda media—of the FBI’s COINTELPRO operation to destroy political movements in the 1960s and 70s should be revisited. It is paradigmatic of the state and its subversion of opposition. For the FBI, terror is truth unshackled.

Again, I have no idea what will happen, but considering the emphasis placed on the destruction of the First Amendment—along with the Second and Fifth—and the manufactured hysteria of insidious Russian (and Chinese) subversion, and the credulity (or indifference) of the American people, it now appears the alternative media is in danger of extinction, at least on the internet.

MSM Adamantly Avoids The Word “Coup” In Bolivia Reporting

Posted on by
Reply

By Caitlin Johnstone

Source: CaitlinJohnstone.com

There has been a military coup in Bolivia backed by violent right-wing rioters and the US government, but you’d hardly know this from any of the mainstream media headlines.

“Bolivian President Evo Morales steps down following accusations of election fraud” proclaims CNN.

“Bolivia’s Morales resigns amid scathing election report, rising protests” reports The Washington Post.

“Bolivian Leader Evo Morales Steps Down” says The New York Times.

“Bolivian President Evo Morales resigns amid fraud poll protests” declares the BBC.

“President of Bolivia steps down amid allegations of election rigging” we are informed by Telegraph.

“Bolivia’s President Morales resigns after backlash to disputed election” says the Sydney Morning Herald.

So there you have it. The indigenous leader of a socialist South American government which has successfully lifted masses of people out of crushing poverty, which happens to control the world’s largest reserves of lithium (which may one day replace oil as a crucial energy resource due to its use in powering smartphones, laptops, hybrid and electric cars), which has an extensive and well-documented history of being targeted for regime change by the US government, simply stepped down due to some sort of scandal involving a “disputed election”. Nothing to do with the fact that right-wing mobs had been terrorizing this leader’s family, or the fact that the nation’s military literally commanded him to step down and are now currently searching for him to arrest him, leading to ousted government officials being rounded up and held captive by soldiers wearing masks.

All perfectly normal and not suspicious at all.

As is usual, mass media’s reporting on this story is in full alignment with the US State Department, with Secretary of State Mike Pompeo also advancing the “disputed election” line in a tweet shortly before the forced resignation of Morales. Pompeo cited the evidence-free and discredited allegation of suspicious vote tallies during Morales’ re-election last month from the Washington-based Organization of American States (OAS). As Mark Weisbrot of the Center for Economic & Policy Research explains in a recent article for The Nation, the OAS receives 60 percent of its funding from Washington, which gives the US tremendous leverage over the supposedly neutral and international body. This ties in interestingly with what we discussed the other day about Washington’s known history of using its disproportionate financial support for the Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons as leverage to force that supposedly neutral and international body to comply with US agendas.

The field of narrative management keeps making more and more advances.

The US-centralized empire just keeps throwing coup attempts at unabsorbed governments until they stick. The coup in Venezuela failed in 2002 and again in 2019, but they’ll just keep attempting them until one takes hold. A kickboxer throws strikes in combinations with the understanding that most attacks will miss or do minimal damage against a trained opponent, but eventually one will get through and score the knockout blow. Imperialist regime change agendas employ the same punches-in-bunches philosophy: just keep attacking and undermining at every possible turn, and eventually something will stick.

And the empire can afford to do this. When you have all the power and resources, you can bide your time, knowing that if the current attempt at toppling the government in a sovereign nation fails, there’s always tomorrow.

At a United Nations Security Council meeting last year, President Morales summed up the true nature of America’s role in the world very accurately, and, it turns out, very presciently.

“I would like to say to you, frankly and openly here, that in no way is the United States interested in upholding democracy,” Morales said. “If such were the case it would not have financed coups d’etat and supported dictators. It would not have threatened with military intervention democratically elected governments as it has done with Venezuela. The United States could not care less about human rights or justice. If this were the case, it would have signed the international conventions and treaties that have protected human rights. It would not have threatened the investigation mechanism of the International Criminal Court, nor would it promote the use of torture, nor would it have walked away from the Human Rights Council. And nor would it have separated migrant children from their families, nor put them in cages.”

“The United States is not interested in multilateralism,” Morales continued. “If it were interested in multilateralism it would not have withdrawn from the Paris Agreement or given the cold shoulder to the global compact on migration, it would not have launched unilateral attacks, nor have taken decisions such as illegally declaring Jerusalem to be the capital of Israel. This contempt for multilateralism is motivated by the thirst of the United States for political control and for the seizing of natural resources.”

“Each time that the United States invades nations, launches missiles, or finances regime change, it does so behind a propaganda campaign which incessantly repeats the message that it is acting in the course of justice, freedom and democracy, in the cause of human rights or for humanitarian reasons,” Morales also said.

“The responsibility of our generation is to hand over a fairer and more secure world to the following generation,” Morales concluded. “We will only achieve this dream if we work together to consolidate a multipolar world, a world with common rules that are respected by and defended from all the threats ranged against the United Nations.”

Indeed, the only reason the US is able to wage its endless campaign of regime change agendas against unabsorbed governments is because the unipolar world order it rules has allowed it the power, resources and leisure to do so. A multipolar world would enable the citizenry of this planet to have a say in what happens to them in a way that is not dictated by a few sociopaths in and around Washington, DC. A multipolar world is to democracy as a unipolar world is to monarchy. The citizens of the world should oppose this unipolarity.

 

Facebook and YouTube remove posts naming CIA impeachment whistleblower

Posted on by
1

By Kevin Reed

Source: WSWS.org

Multiple media sources reported on Friday that the social media platforms Facebook and YouTube were removing posts that identified by name the CIA whistleblower behind the Congressional impeachment inquiry of President Donald Trump.

In an email statement, Facebook said, “Any mention of the potential whistleblower’s name violates our coordinating harm policy, which prohibits content ‘outing of witness, informant or activist’,” adding, “We are removing any and all mentions of the potential whistleblower’s name and will revisit this decision should their name be widely published in the media or used by public figures in debate.”

CNN also reported that YouTube issued a statement saying that it was using a combination of artificial intelligence software and human monitors to find and delete videos with the name of the “Ukrainegate” whistleblower. “The removals, the spokesperson added, would affect the titles and descriptions of videos as well as the video’s actual content,” the CNN report said.

The World Socialist Web Site has independently confirmed that Facebook is deleting posts containing the name of alleged CIA whistleblower Eric Ciaramella.

Facebook’s claim that any content posted on its platform naming Ciaramella constitutes “outing” the whistleblower is absurd. The alleged identity of the career CIA analyst who filed a complaint regarding the July 25 phone call between President Trump and Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky has been known since October 30 when the pro-Republican Real Clear Politics website published his name.

When his name was published by Real Clear Politics, the whistleblower’s attorneys—in typical CIA fashion—said they could “neither confirm nor deny” that Ciaramella was their client.

Ciaramella is a plausible candidate for being whistleblower, given his background as a registered Democrat and CIA analyst with expertise in Ukraine and Russia. He worked under both Obama National Security Advisor Susan Rice and Trump National Security Advisor H.R. McMaster. In mid-2017 he was sent back to the CIA amid accusations that he was leaking anti-Trump information to the media.

While Ciaramella’s name has been widely circulated by Republican political figures, right-wing news sites and former CIA analyst and Trump aide Fred Fleitz said, “everyone knows who he is,” the Democrats and their allies in the media at the New York Times, Washington Post and major television networks have not made his name public.

Even an article in the New York Times on Friday that reported on Facebook’s censoring of posts by the right-wing website Breitbart did not include Ciaramella’s name. By taking the step of scrubbing posts mentioning allegations that are widely shared and reported, Facebook and YouTube are now joining with these corporate media organizations and blocking the public from having access to important information.

The latest heavy-handed social media censorship—so obviously being carried out in the service of the Democratic Party impeachment inquiry and the CIA—actually helps the Trump administration, the Republican Party and the extreme right-wing political forces defending the White House, allowing them to adopt the false posture of advocating free flow of information, even as Trump continues to demonize the media as the “enemies of the people.”

The mass scrubbing of all social media content by Facebook and YouTube that mentions the name Eric Ciaramella is part of the broader censorship efforts by the technology monopolies, in collaboration with the intelligence state, and sets the stage for even more draconian attacks on freedom of expression.

This must be seen within the context of the drive by a substantial section of the ruling establishment for the social media platforms to “step up to the plate” and, as Hillary Clinton said last week, take down “false, deceptive or deliberately misleading content” or “pay a price.” Leading figures within the Democratic Party, including presidential candidate Elizabeth Warren, Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Congresswoman Rashida Tlaib, have been campaigning for social media censorship that will block what they call “untruthful statements.”

As explained on the World Socialist Web Site, the increasing calls for censorship on social media are part of a protracted campaign by the US intelligence apparatus, under conditions of a growing movement of the working class and young people and increasing interest and support for socialism, to suppress left-wing, antiwar and progressive political viewpoints.

Furthermore, the WSWS has pointed out that what is determined as “fake” or “real” is not to be decided by the government or giant tech monopolies: “All the dishonesty of the campaign for internet censorship is contained in the failure to answer, much less consider, one central question: Who is to determine what is true and what is false?”

The publication of the name of the CIA analyst who submitted his complaint memo to the heads of the House and Senate Intelligence Committees in August is not a crime. In fact, his identity is of substantial consequence, given that his complaint became the starting point of an effort to remove a sitting president through impeachment.

Alt Media was Exposing Epstein Corruption as ABC was Covering it Up—Who’s the Real Fake News?

Posted on by
1

Prince Andrew with Jeffrey Epstein

By Matt Agorist

Source: Free Thought Project

One of the largest stories in the news this week was the ABC anchor who was recorded on a hot microphone ranting about how the network suppressed her story on Jeffrey Epstein and his ties to the elite — three years ago. While this admission was certainly noteworthy, it should come as no surprise. Over the past few years, the mainstream media, in general, has refused to report on any of Epstein’s ties to current and past government officials, Hollywood insiders, and even royalty. Now, as the “Epstein didn’t kill himself” memes storm the internet, it has all of the sudden become “cool” to finally talk about this insidious group of power elite predators. However, those of us in the alternative media have been talking about this stuff for years — before it was cool — and we were called conspiracy theorists for doing so.

In 2016, the Pizzagate conspiracy took the internet by storm and created a slew of unprovable theories that never materialized. While the mainstream media was shouting down the Pizzagate crowd, TFTP and others were reporting on the real child sex trafficking conspiracy involving Epstein and his friends like the Clintons. As we reported in 2016, flight logs showed that Bill Clinton allegedly took numerous flights on the “Lolita Express” (Epstein’s private jet) to “orgy island” (Epstein’s private island in the Caribbean) to engage in sex with underage girls.

Epstein is also tied to the current president Donald Trump. Indeed, prior to taking the White House, billionaire Donald Trump dished out praise for Epstein back in 2002, telling New York Magazine for an article, in hindsight, peculiarly titled, “Jeffrey Epstein: International Moneyman of Mystery,”

“I’ve known Jeff for 15 years. Terrific guy. He’s a lot of fun to be with. It is even said that he likes beautiful women as much as I do, and many of them are on the younger side. No doubt about it — Jeffrey enjoys his social life.”

When we were reporting on these provable facts years ago, the mainstream media was suppressing them. Even Prince Andrew was tied to this convicted pedophile. In fact, one piece of evidence submitted during a lawsuit against Epstein last year was a photo of Prince Andrew with his arm around the underage victim, Virginia Roberts who claims that was she was both forced to have sex with Epstein and that she was “loaned out” to perform sex acts on his friends.

The photo resurfaced last year during the trials, yet it was entirely ignored by the mainstream. Coincidentally, any ties to the Royal Family have been ignored by the mainstream despite the evidence.

Why is that?

“The Palace found out that we had her whole allegations about Prince Andrew and threatened us a million different ways,” Amy Robach, ‘Good Morning America’ Co-Host and Breaking News Anchor at ABC was recorded saying on a hot mic in the now viral video.

As ABC was taking marching orders from the Royal family to cover for a convicted pedophile, those of us in the trenches of alternative media were putting out reports left and right. The Miami Herald is arguably one of the largest purveyors and investigators in the Epstein corruption case, putting out bombshell after bombshell over the last few years. Sadly, however, most of it was ignored.

As TFTP has reported, Epstein is a convicted child molester and sexually abused no less than 40 underage girls. Despite this fact, Alexander Acosta protected him while serving as a U.S. Attorney in Florida.

Instead of going to prison for life, as he should’ve considering the evidence against him, Epstein only got 13 months and was allowed to stay in the Palm Beach County Jail in his own private cell where he was allowed to leave the prison six days a week for “work release.”

Instead of being investigated for letting this convicted pedophile off with a wrist slap, Acosta was appointed by Trump to Secretary of Labor. During his appointment hearing in 2017, Acosta defended the way he handled the Epstein case.

“At the end of the day, based on the evidence, professionals within a prosecutor’s office decide that a plea — that guarantees that someone goes to jail, that guarantees that someone register generally and that guarantees other outcomes — is a good thing,” he said.

As the Alternative Media was screaming from the rooftops — literally, we did a podcast on this last year —  that this man let a pedophile off with a wrist slap and was then appointed a high position in the government, the mainstream media ignored it once again. Only after Epstein was arrested did Acosta’s role become something the mainstream media would talk about. The coverage almost immediately led to this pedophile helper’s resignation.

When the Hollywood #metoo movement blew up, the mainstream media focused solely on a few people while ignoring Epstein’s ties to any of it. However, pining away with pertinent information were the folks at the Antimedia, showing the connections. 

When Epstein was being sued in Federal Court last year, the mainstream was again silent. But TFTP contributor, founder of the Conscience Resistance, and Houston mayoral candidate Derrick Broze was in Florida — standing in front of Epstein’s mansion — trying to get this information out to the public.

Yet again, the algorithms, the “fact checkers” and thought controllers acted almost in unison to silence these platforms. A month after TFTP published Broze’s extensive investigative work, our entire social media network across Facebook and Twitter, consisting of nearly 7 million followers, was surreptitiously wiped off the face of the internet. 

None of the information we have put out in regard to Epstein over the past few years has been wrong. Alternative media has had their finger on the pulse of the Epstein corruption for years, yet we have been shoved into the fringes by the mainstream. Coincidence?

Sadly, however, although it appears that they are finally reporting on the Epstein corruption, the mainstream media is still pussyfooting all over it. They are more concerned with Epstein’s death in jail than the actual connections to these elite child traffickers, many of whom are still free.

Whitney Webb with Mint Press News has been following the Epstein case down into the deepest crawls of the establishment and has been asking hard questions, like how the hell is Ghislaine Maxwell — who is alleged to have helped Epstein traffic these children — still walking around a free person? If you want a true glimpse into how deep the rabbit hole goes, you can take a look at their in depth coverage, here. 

The sleight of hand tactics employed by the mainstream are becoming more and more apparent as we progress through time. It is no surprise that they have earned the nickname “dinosaur media.” Let’s hope that those who help to protect society’s worst, who victimize and prey on innocent children, will one day find their platforms used for this protection, extinct, just like the dinosaurs.

How Far Will They Go?

Posted on by
1

By James Howard Kunstler

Source: Kunstler.com

CBS-News carried another bucket of muddy water for the coup team Sunday night with a lead 60 Minutes agit-prop story on Maria Butina, an ambitious Russian cutie who worked the American NRA circuit in the most public manner imaginable to make herself into a sex-bomb celebrity at the exact moment in history when the US Deep State wished to reinforce the fantasy, as Lesley Stahl put it, that “Russia was interfering in our electoral process.”

Of course, Ms. Stahl and her shifty producers left out half the story: how Maria Butina was manipulated by her FBI-handler and sometime-boyfriend, Patrick Byrne, the former Overstock.com CEO who had been employed by the Bureau over the years on other undercover assignments. They didn’t mention him or seek to understand his role in the operation. But they gave plenty of air-time to the DOJ lawyer, John C Demers, who prosecuted Ms. Butina, and never bothered to ask Demers why Butina was not charged with espionage — perhaps because nothing remotely like that occurred.

How media giants like Ms. Stahl can keep mouthing this malarkey designed to stoke a new cold war is one of the great mysteries of our national psychology these days. You’d think they’d learned something from the train wreck of the Mueller Investigation, the Brett Kavanaugh fiasco, and the current debacle of Adam Schiff’s imploding Ukraine whistleblower caper — namely, that spouting lies will eventually get you found-out and disgraced.

But the coup team is now dangerously stuck tripling and quadrupling down on its fairy tale narrative as the reckoning of its dark deeds approaches and its star players await their turns on the witness stand. Half the country has been waiting patiently for authorities-of-standing to put an end to this Hitchcockian campaign of seditious fog that has driven us close to the brink of a second civil war. That half of the country has actually been reading the evidence of this treason and sedition — underwritten by Hillary Clinton and her allies — on the back-channels of the Internet. None of that evidence has been posted through the main media outlets wholly owned by the coup team, gospel to the other half of America, and soon millions of credulous bystanders who got high on three years of CIA-issued RussiaGate Kool-Aid will get the surprise of their lives when they discover how deeply they were played.

The CIA and the FBI are in a fight for their lives now. The evidence shows pretty clearly that these rogue agencies conducted all the election “meddling” of 2016 and that the RussiaGate hysteria was an engineered smokescreen to hide their tracks and cover their asses when the certainty of a Hillary election triumph nauseatingly resolved unfavorably in the cold, gray dawn of 11/8/16. Despite the chatter about an “insurance policy,” they were quite unprepared for the exposure that loomed.

They also badly underestimated the resources of what is now a very sturdy alt.media which has managed to weave the real story of what happened over the past three years into a shocking tapestry of massive subversion and treachery. A big part of the true story is how amazingly incompetent the RussiaGate coupsters were. Did they really believe they could conceal the ties between their agencies and Glenn Simpson’s Fusion GPS operation, and its feckless front man, British ex-spy Christopher Steele, and the whole outfit’s connection to Hillary Clinton and the Democratic National Committee? Did they suppose they could pass off Stephan Halper and Joseph Mifsud as Russian agents when the two have consorted with US and allied intelligence for decades? The US Department of Defense even holds Mr. Halper’s million-dollar pay stubs and Mr. Mifsud appears in photographs of every Western cloak-and-dagger cocktail get-together of spook officialdom for the last twenty years.

The latest, and most desperate gambit is the UkraineGate whistleblower, a CIA employee blatantly playing errand-boy for his mentor John Brennan and deeply tied to 2016 election shenanigans emanating from Ukraine, featuring his former employer, ex-Vice-President Joe Biden. This shadowy figure, pegged as Eric Ciaramella, 33, may shortly find himself in a grand jury chamber answering for his role in this charade. Ciaramella has just been hung out to dry by his sponsor, Rep. Adam Schiff in a desperate attempt to dissociate himself from the huggermugger within his House Intel Committee that preceded the falsely blown whistle.

It’s not an overstatement to say that many of the figures behind this gigantic web of lies and deceit ought to answer charges up to and including treason. The question is whether Messers Barr & Durham have the cojones to cater the banquet of consequences that this huge cast of characters should be made to feast from. Another question is whether these desperate characters and the agencies they represent will go all the way now and attempt to enlist the military brass in an outright overthrow of the executive. There are already intimations of this. It would be answered by the kind of civil violence that has broken out in other parts of world where other Deep States have worn out their welcome — and their legitimacy.