Tag Archives: Psyops

Did Bellingcat get Ukrainian forces killed?

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By Kit Klarenberg

Source: The Grayzone

Christo Grozev of Bellingcat gained a front row seat to a bungled Ukrainian intelligence operation that left a friendly airfield destroyed and soldiers dead. His narrative about his role in the plot is filled with holes.

Criminal charges of treason and abuse of power have been leveled against an unspecified number of Ukrainian servicemen by the Security Service of Ukraine (SBU). In a bizarre plot to seize Russian aircraft and transfer the planes to Ukraine, the accused soldiers disclosed sensitive information that allowed Moscow to strike an important Ukrainian airfield with a Kalibr missile. A commander was killed, 17 airmen were wounded, two fighter jets destroyed, and “significant damage” was inflicted to the airstrip and several nearby buildings.

Will Ukrainian authorities now level criminal charges against members of Bellingcat, the Western government-funded open source investigations collective, for its role in the connivance? Christo Grozev, the organization’s “lead Russia investigator,” was inexplicably granted a front row seat to the chicanery by the individuals who attempted to carry it out. 

Once the plot unravelled spectacularly, Grozev attempted to spin it as an embarrassment for Russia, while denying the SBU or Ukraine’s Defense Intelligence Directorate (GUR) played any role in its execution. Instead, he claimed, it was the work of “maverick ex-operatives.” The criminal cases pursued by the SBU validate this narrative:

“These actions of individual servicemen [emphasis added], which led to serious consequences, death and injury of Ukraine’s defenders and harmed the country’s defence capabilities, require an appropriate legal assessment.”

As we will see, Grozev was far from a passive spectator in the scheme. Indeed, his framing of the event gives every appearance of a damage control exercise, shielding Bellingcat and the GUR and SBU from blame. Coincidentally, his Bellingcat website profile notes his interest in “the weaponization of information.”

Read Alex Rubinstein’s report on Christo Grozev’s defense of a terror attack on a St. Petersburg, Russia cafe, and his call for more of such actions.

Bulgarian journalist and Bellingcat’s “lead Russia investigator” Christo Grozev

Bellingcat’s proxy war blunders pile up

Since the war in Ukraine began, Christo Grozev and Bellingcat have played a lead role in disseminating and “verifying” dubious, if not outright fraudulent, material and claims related to the conflict. 

Just over a week after Russia’s February 24, 2022 invasion, Grozev confidently declared that Moscow’s war-fighting resources would be spent by March 6th, at which time Russian forces would “collapse.” Over a year later, the gears of the Russian war machine are still churning away.

By the end of March 2022, Bellingcat had fed the Wall Street Journal an entirely bogus tale, asserting that oligarch Roman Abramovich and two Ukrainian negotiators who had been trying to broker peace between their two countries were poisoned.

The finding was the result of an investigation reportedly organized by Grozev, who claimed to have seen the images of the effects of the attack. He further alleged that “too much time had passed for the suspected poison to be detected by the time a German forensic team was able to perform an examination,” accounting for why his assertions could not be verified by authorities.

“It was not intended to kill, it was just a warning,” Grozev falsely declared.

Though Ukrainian and US officials quickly dismissed the story as fantasy, Grozev was not deterred. In late April 2022, while appearing on a charity telethon for Kiev, he claimed to have “personally checked,” and found that Russia had already lost “90%” of the “highest quality, important and essential part of its army, without which it is impossible to conquer key infrastructure facilities.” 

For the families of those killed at Kanatove airfield, and the countless conscripts who have lost their lives under Russian artillery fire in Bakhmut, such comments must seem like a sick joke.

Bellingcat’s Grozev spins a cinematic yarn

On July 25th 2022, Moscow’s state-owned news agency TASS reported that Russia’s FSB security agency had thwarted a Ukrainian operation to steal Russian aircraft, “supervised by NATO.” 

Intelligence officers acting on behalf of Kiev’s political leadership reportedly approached Russian military pilots in secret, offering them millions of dollars and citizenship of an EU country of their choosing in return for deliveries of aircraft such as Su-24s and Su-34s. 

Several pilots appeared to take the bait. And it turned out that Bellingcat’s Christo Grozev had been helping to cultivate the turncoats through a series of exchanges on encrypted messaging apps. 

However, the FSB had apparently infiltrated the plot from the outset, and were using discussions over defection to glean sensitive information from the Ukrainians. This yield then helped the Russian air force to “inflict fire damage on a number of Ukrainian military facilities.”

The Russian strike on Ukraine’s Kanatove airfield, and the SBU’s criminal investigation of the incident, tends to confirm that version of events. However, in the wake of the TASS report, Grozev offered a radically different tale: a “crazier-than-fiction story of triple-agents, fake passports and faux girlfriends.” 

The Bellingcat staffer claimed that after Kiev passed a law in April offering financial incentives to Russians to surrender and hand over weapons and vehicles, “a team of Ukrainian operatives decided to approach Russian pilots with an offer based on this law.” Bellingcat miraculously “found out about the initiative” and secured a “front seat” to make a documentary about a “brazen operation.”

Grozev and company then watched as Russian pilots were successfully lured into providing “proof-of-access” videos from inside their planes, some of which were “quite detailed and enlightening,” as they prepared to defect. It was only then that the FSB became involved, as the Ukrainians learned later on. At this point, the plot morphed into a “double ‘operational game’ in which both sides were trying to extract maximum information from the other, while feeding them maximum disinfo.”

The Ukrainians peddled the FSB “fake maps of their anti-aircraft deployments, as well as disinfo on the operational airstrips.” They even convinced the security service to send one of the pilot’s wives, “along with a whole FSB tailing team,” to Minsk, Belarus for an in-person meeting. When nobody showed up, the Russians realized they had been “burned,” the Ukrainians realized they were not “getting a real pilot,” and the “mutual-deceit game came to an end.”

“While Russia is presenting today this as a coup for its counter intelligence, in fact the operation was a serious blunder for the FSB, disclosing unintentionally identities of dozens of counter intel officers, their methods of operation, and their undercover assets,” Grozev boldly declared.

After pushback, Grozev changes his story

The narrative Grozev spun out was marred by several obvious problems. How did Bellingcat learn of a secret Ukrainian operation? Why were outsiders – particularly ostensibly independent journalists – encouraged by the plotters to film a documentary on the operation as it was being conducted? Why did Grozev wait for the FSB to get the first word, if the plot was such a stunning success for the Ukrainians? 

Perhaps most pertinently of all, if Bellingcat played no active part in the connivance and were simply observers, how did the Russians learn of their presence, to be able to falsely accuse Grozev of involvement?

Even if Grozev’s version of events were true, it provides numerous indications that Bellingcat assisted the so-called “Ukrainian operatives.”

For example, one of the pilots sent the Ukrainians a photo of his “lover,” whom he wished to take with him when he defected. Grozev boasted that it took him “about five minutes” to discover that the woman was in reality “an FSB girlfriend-for-hire.” Did he keep this information siloed from the “operatives”? Would Grozev really not share this revelation with the supposed subjects of his “documentary”?

While many took Grozev’s unbelievable fable at face value, several of Bellingcat’s normally deferential mainstream boosters began asking if the organization’s involvement with “Ukrainian operatives” placed it in direct quarters with the SBU and GUR. At this point, Grozev felt compelled to issue a clarification. He claimed neither agency was involved, and if either had been, “there’d be no way we would – or want to – get access to it.”

Instead, Grozev contended the Ukrainians in contact with Bellingcat had been “maverick ex-operatives” who he met during a previous investigation, and that they were acting independently of the government and security services. As such, he claimed the FSB’s counterintelligence wing was “fighting tooth and nail against a bunch of, essentially, volunteers.”

Grozev’s clunky narrative raised far more suspicion than it allayed. It is inconceivable that such a sensitive attempt to secure defections during wartime would be conducted without state authorization or knowledge. This is particularly the case if defections are sought under the terms of a dedicated government program providing financial incentives for switching sides and handing over military hardware.

Offers of money and EU citizenship for the pilots and their “lovers” would have necessarily needed to be approved by Kiev. Even if the Ukrainian “ex-operatives” ultimately intended to betray the defectors and not provide what they promised, the Ukrainian military would have by definition needed to agree to the pilots’ arrival, and their planned flightpaths, in advance. Otherwise, their jets would be shot down before they landed.

In any event, not providing the pilots with what was offered would inevitably deter any further defections from the Russian side, therefore sabotaging the government’s high-profile incentive scheme outright.

Bonfire of security officials suggests state involvement

In a curious twist, just hours after Grozev deployed a blizzard of excuses, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky fired the First Deputy Secretary of the National Security and Defense Council, Ruslan Demchenko, and Special Operations Forces (SSO) commander Hryhoriy Halahan. Both positions are directly related to clandestine operations, such as attempts to facilitate Russian military defections.

The firings followed the surprise canning of Zelensky’s childhood friend and close confidante, Ivan Bakanov, as SBU chief on July 17th 2022. Bakanov was officially dismissed under Article 47 of the Disciplinary Statute of the Armed Forces of Ukraine: “non-performance (improper performance) of official duties, which caused human casualties or other serious consequences or created a threat of such consequences.” The grounds for his termination echo the charges faced by the unnamed Ukrainian servicemen.

It is not hard to imagine the righteous fury that would have erupted in Mariinskyi Palace if Zelensky were told the FSB had stitched up a plot to recruit Russian pilots and their cutting-edge fighter jets. Public confirmation on July 25 that the conspiracy had been a setup all along would have provided ample grounds for the firing of Demchenko and Halahan.

This March, Yahoo News published a lengthy investigation supporting Grozev’s claims that the Ukrainians involved were mere “volunteers,” and that Russian pilots had indeed been planning to defect, only for the FSB to catch them and step in. However, the report also revealed that substantial amounts of money had been sent to the pilots to convince them to defect. The sums were so high, it is almost inconceivable Kiev did not pay them, reinforcing the interpretation that the mission was state-approved.

While basing its story exclusively on testimony and material supplied by an unnamed “volunteer,” Yahoo News nonetheless acknowledged at least one of the pilots may have been working for the FSB all along. Moreover, it claimed some of the pilots could still be active in the Ukraine war, which obviously would not be the case if they had ever seriously intended to defect.

Did careless disclosures from the “volunteer” to Yahoo News play any role in triggering the SBU’s sudden move to prosecute the individuals involved? It would by definition silence them, killing off any and all suggestions the cataclysm was Kiev’s own doing. Alternatively, with Western military aid running out and the Pentagon and mainstream media alike acknowledging Russia’s air force will soon fly effectively unopposed in Ukrainian airspace, it may be necessary to find people to blame.

Grozev has remained eerily silent about the SBU’s criminal investigation. It would be reasonable to expect a “documentarian” with such a candid, insider view of what went down to be a suspect, or at least a witness, in such a probe. Should he and his fellow laptop jockeys not be charged with assisting reckless actions of “individual servicemen” that cost lives, it would strongly suggest Bellingcat enjoys some degree of protection from Ukrainian security and intelligence services.

While Bellingcat and Christo Grozev seek to downplay their role in a high-level Ukrainian intelligence operation, their website continues to refer to their organization as “an independent investigative collective.”

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

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By John & Nisha Whitehead

Source: The Rutherford Institute

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

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

This is mind-control in its most sinister form.

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

Take this latest shooting in Nashville, Tenn.

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

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

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

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

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

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

As investigative journalist Mike Adams points out:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

It’s a phenomenon called “humilitainment.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Substack: Dead Man Walking

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

By Kurt Nimmo

Source: Kurt Nimmo Substack

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

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

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

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

Connor O’Keeffe writes for the Mises Institute,

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Don’t Let Them Memory-Hole This 

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By Jeffrey A. Tucker

Source: Brownstone Institute

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Don’t Believe Anything – But Recognize the Verge of a New Dark Age

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By Phil Butler

Source: New Eastern Outlook

A decade ago, discovering every significant media outlet in the western world as tabloid news would have been inconceivable. Well, the unbelievable is all around us pounding pure lies into our brains on behalf of people eviler than Emperor Caligula. Just Google Putin, Russia, or even China, and with some effort, you’ll see what I mean.

In the mainstream, your average American gets, President Joe Biden is some kind of Dwight Eisenhower or Harry Truman figure. A man who cannot find his way off a stage or navigate the White House lawn is somehow a fit chess competitor for Vladimir Putin. The latest snafu is about his visit with Ukraine’s Zelensky a day before Putin spoke about a new phase of Russian policy. The CNN headline read “Biden’s Ukraine visit upstages Putin and leaves Moscow’s military pundits raging.” As an American who served his country in the military and other capacities, it’s sickening. Get this.

These media outlets and the Neocons have Americans believing a Chinese weather balloon that blew off course was gathering vital US nuclear missile silo intel. And Joe Biden waited until it flew all the way across the country before launching a multi-million-dollar F-22 strike to kill the spy machine. Days later, US fighter pilots shot down UFOs over Alaska. The only positive note after that was the Internet memes poking fun at the senile President and our goofball policies. Oh, but there’s more, oh so much more.

The New York Times and the rest are providing pushback on the Biden-authorized Nord Stream sabotage reported by one of the world’s most respected investigative journalists, Seymour Hersh. The guy who uncovered the My Lai massacre and its cover-up during the Vietnam War, key facts on Watergate, CIA domestic spy, and a lot more busted the Biden administration for using Navy Seals to detonate undersea charges dooming a Russia to Germany gas pipeline. The Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist’s revelations should have caused a media frenzy, a UN summit, and a NATO emergency meeting. But the people in charge can’t have that. The story of the decade so far is being slid under the rug. The reason why is explained in something Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov said recently:

“In many cases, ruling elites in unfriendly countries do not act of their free will, but only because they must show solidarity within their block. NATO and the EU enforce heavy-handed discipline on their members at the initiative of an aggressive minority.”

“How America Took Out The Nord Stream Pipeline” should be a reason for Biden’s impeachment hearings to be planned. The Germans should be banning US military personnel from their borders. And the Russians should probably go ahead and declare war when it all pans out true. We have this from Hersh’s sources and research:

“Last June, the Navy divers, operating under cover of the highly publicized NATO exercise known as BALTOPS 22, planted the remotely triggered explosives that, three months later, destroyed three of the four Nord Stream pipelines, according to a source with knowledge of the operational planning.”

The pipelines, which supplied Germany and much of Europe with cheap gas to run industry and fueled the lives of millions, were sabotaged without so much as a mention of the plan to America’s lawmakers. Hersh went on to describe how Biden, Jake Sullivan, Victoria Nuland, and Anthony Blinken were key conspirators in the illegal plan to undermine a NATO ally just to get to Putin and Russia. Biden had announced months before, after a meeting with Germany’s Scholz, that if Russia invaded Ukraine, “there would be no pipeline.”

Of course, Biden and his scandalous minions knew Russia had to act to prevent further NATO shenanigans in Ukraine, as we learned from the revelations of former German Chancellor Angela Merkel about the Minsk accords being a ruse. Talk about world-class liars and thugs. America’s leadership makes the worst Israeli mafioso seem harmless as Mickey Mouse. These people will get our world blown up.

Now Biden, Zelensky, all the EU criminals, and even exiled Putin enemy and Russian mafioso Mikhail Borisovich Khodorkovsky have been seen at the Munich Security Council predicting Putin’s demise—some more. Once we’d have thought US presidents, New York Times publishers, and killer thugs kicked from Russia like bullying kids from the schoolyard would be strange bedfellows. But this Biden administration has to be the most corrupt bunch since the days of Al Capone and Lucky Luciano.

Get this, one of the men involved in the Hunter Biden laptop affair, Prof. Gal Luft, is now in leg irons in a Cyprus jail awaiting extradition to the US for, you won’t believe it, being an arms dealer. Luft had helped the FBI and other agencies with highly incriminating facts about Hunter Biden, and now he’s on a path like Jeffrey Epstein or Julian Assange. Hanged by the neck, or something like that. Oh, and congressional investigators are asking who paid millions of dollars for Hunter Biden’s art? The lunacy goes on, and on, and on.

I’ll leave off with the European Parliament bosses blocking public scrutiny of Ursula von der Leyen over a Pfizer contract she clearly benefitted from. And Pfizer gate is not the EU President’s only worry. She’s now pledged another €1 billion for Ukraine’s fast recovery. That is, if there is a Ukraine to rebuild once western weapons and mercenaries force the Russians to obliterate the country just to keep NATO and bio-weapons labs out. For me, it now seems obvious why the liberal world order has gone all in with this proxy war against Russia. If the citizens of our countries ever find out what their leaders have really done, there will be public hangings Mussolini style across the NATO cabal.

So, forget the tabloids except to use reverse psychology for understanding the news. If the White House says we did not blow up Nord Stream, you can bet your last dollar we did. Think about our track record, America’s I mean. Our leaders operate like very drunken Roman senators, and our military operates as if Hannibal were commanding the armed forces of every third-world country. We even have officials swearing that Putin does not have any nuclear weapons. No really. This is where we are with detente in the 21st century, on the verge of a new Dark Ages.

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

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By Nolan Higdon

Source: Project Censored

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Their smear of Sanders continued in 2020 when

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

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

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

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

Conservatives rightly see this reporting and believe liberals are insane.

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

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

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

The U.S. empire is collapsing.

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Credit: JOEL PETT

By Eric Zuesse

Source: The Duran

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

It Is The Mass Media’s Job To Help Suppress Anti-War Movements

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By Caitlin Johnstone

Source: CaitlinJohnstone.com

In a new article titled “European antiwar protests gain strength as NATO’s Ukraine proxy war escalates,” The Grayzone’s Stavroula Pabst and Max Blumenthal document the many large demonstrations that have been occurring in France, the UK, Germany, Greece, Spain, the Czech Republic, Austria, Belgium and elsewhere opposing the western empire’s brinkmanship with Russia and proxy warfare in Ukraine.

Pabst and Blumenthal conclude their report with a denouncement of the way the western media have either been ignoring or sneering at these protests while actively cheerleading smaller demonstrations in support of arming Ukraine.

“When Western media has not ignored Europe’s antiwar protest wave altogether, its coverage has alternated between dismissive and contemptuous,” they write. “German state broadcaster Deutsche Welle sneeringly characterized the February 25 demonstration in Berlin as ‘naive’ while providing glowing coverage to smaller shows of support for the war by the Ukrainian diaspora. The New York Times, for its part, mentioned the European protests in just a single generic line buried in an article on minuscule anti-Putin protests held by Russian emigres.”

This bias is of course blatantly propagandistic, which won’t surprise anyone who understands that the mainstream western media exist first and foremost to administer propaganda on behalf of the US-centralized empire. And chief among their propaganda duties is to suppress the emergence of a genuine peace movement.

As we’ve discussed previously, it has never in human history been more urgent to have a massive, forceful protest movement in opposition to the empire’s rapidly accelerating trajectory toward a global conflict against Russia and China. Other peace movements have arisen in the past in response to horrific wars which would go on to claim millions of lives, but a world war in the Atomic Age could easily wind up killing billions, and must never be allowed to happen.

And yet the public is not treating this unparalleled threat with the urgency it deserves. A few protests here and there is great, but it’s not nearly enough. And the reason the people have not answered the call is because the mass media have been successfully propagandizing them into accepting the continuous escalations toward world war that we’ve been seeing.

People aren’t going to protest what their government is doing if they believe that what their government is doing is appropriate, and the only reason so many people believe what their government is doing with regard to Russia and China is appropriate is because they have been propagandized into thinking so.

The mass media are not telling the public about the many well documented western provocations which led to the war in Ukraine and sabotaged peace at every turn; they’re just telling everyone that Putin invaded because he’s an evil Hitler sequel who loves killing and hates freedom. The mass media are not telling the public about the way the US empire has been encircling China with war machinery in ways it would never permit itself to be encircled while deliberately staging incendiary provocations in Taiwan; they’re just telling everyone that China is run by evil warmongering tyrants. The mass media are not reminding the public that after the fall of the Soviet Union the US empire espoused a doctrine asserting that the rise of any foreign superpower must be prevented at all cost; they’re letting that agenda fade into the memory hole.

Because people believe Russia and China are the sole aggressors and the US and its allies are only responding defensively to those unprovoked aggressions, they don’t see the need for a mass protest movement against their own governments. If you tell the average coastal American liberal that you’re holding a protest about the war in Ukraine, they’re going to assume you mean you’re protesting against Putin, and they’ll look at you strangely if you tell them you’re actually protesting your own government’s aggressions.

The narrative that Russia and China are acting with unprovoked aggression actually prevents peace, because if your government isn’t doing anything to make things worse, then there’s nothing it can change about its own behavior to make things better. But of course there is a massive, massive amount that the western power alliance can change about its own behavior with regard to Russia and China that would greatly improve matters. Instead of working to subordinate the entire planet to the will of Washington and its drivers, they can work toward de-escalation, diplomacy and detente.

We’re not going to get de-escalation, diplomacy and detente unless the people use the power of their numbers to demand those things, and the people are not going to use the power of their numbers to demand those things as long as they are successfully propagandized not to. This means propaganda is the ultimate problem that needs to be addressed. Ordinary people can only address it by waking the public up to the fact that the political/media class are lying to them about what’s happening with Russia and China, using whatever means we have access to.

So that’s what we need to do. We need to fight the imperial disinformation campaign using information. Tell people the truth using every medium available to us to sow distrust in the imperial propaganda machine, because propaganda only works if you don’t know it’s happening to you.

Our rulers are always babbling about how they’re fighting an “information war” against enemy nations, but in reality they’re fighting an information war against normal westerners like us. So we must fight back. We need to cripple public trust in the propaganda machine and begin awakening one another from our propaganda-induced sleep, so that we can begin organizing against the horrific end they are driving us toward.