Censorship, fake news, perception management

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Re: Censorship, fake news, perception management

Post by blindpig » Sun Jan 29, 2023 3:11 pm

The Mass Media Used To Publish Perspectives On Ukraine That They Would Never Publish Today

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The other day I stumbled across a 2014 opinion piece in The Guardian titled “It’s not Russia that’s pushed Ukraine to the brink of war” by Seumas Milne, who the following year would go on to become the Labour Party’s Executive Director of Strategy and Communications under Jeremy Corbyn.

I bring this up because the perspectives you’ll find in that article are jarring in how severely they deviate from anything you’ll see published in the mainstream press about Ukraine in 2023. It places the brunt of the blame for the violence and tensions in that nation at that time squarely at Washington’s feet, opening with a warning that the “threat of war in Ukraine is growing” and saying there’s an “unelected government in Kiev,” and it only gets naughtier from there.

I strongly recommend reading the article in full if you want some perspective in just how dramatically the mass media has clamped down on dissenting ideas about Ukraine and Russia, beginning with the frenzied stoking of Russia hysteria in 2016 and exploding exponentially with the Russian invasion last year. I doubt there’s a single paragraph which could get published in any mainstream outlet in the media environment of today.

Milne writes about how “the Ukrainian president was replaced by a US-selected administration, in an entirely unconstitutional takeover,” and about “the role of the fascistic right on the streets and in the new Ukrainian regime.” He says that “Crimeans voted overwhelmingly to join Russia,” and that “you don’t hear much about the Ukrainian government’s veneration of wartime Nazi collaborators and pogromists, or the arson attacks on the homes and offices of elected communist leaders, or the integration of the extreme Right Sector into the national guard, while the anti-semitism and white supremacism of the government’s ultra-nationalists is assiduously played down.” He says that “after two decades of eastward Nato expansion, this crisis was triggered by the west’s attempt to pull Ukraine decisively into its orbit and defence structure.”


Milne says “Putin’s absorption of Crimea and support for the rebellion in eastern Ukraine is clearly defensive,” and says the US and its allies have been “encouraging the military crackdown on protesters after visits from Joe Biden and the CIA director, John Brennan.” He correctly predicts that “one outcome of the crisis is likely to be a closer alliance between China and Russia, as the US continues its anti-Chinese ‘pivot’ to Asia,” and presciently warns of “the threat of a return of big-power conflict” as Ukraine moves toward war.

To be clear, Milne was not some fringe voice who happened to get picked up for one Guardian op-ed by a strange editorial fluke; he published hundreds of articles with The Guardian over the course of many years, and kept on publishing for a year and a half after this Ukraine piece came out, right up until he went to work for Corbyn. He was on the left end of the mainstream media, but he was very much part of the mainstream media.

This article would of course have drawn controversy and criticism at the time; there were many people who were on the opposite side of the debate in 2014, though they would’ve had a fraction of the numbers of the shrieking conformity enforcers we see on all matters related to Ukraine today. Milne himself says that “the bulk of the western media abandoned any hint of even-handed coverage” after the Crimea annexation, so his article would have been an outlier to be sure. But the fact remains that it was published in The Guardian, and that it would never be published there today.

Seriously, try to imagine an article like that about what happened in Ukraine in 2014 appearing in a mainstream publication like The Guardian in 2023. Can you imagine the hysterics? The histrionic garment-rending from the establishment narrative managers? The social media swarming of Zelenskyite trolls? This is after all the same media environment that pressured CBS to retract its story about how arms shipments to Ukraine weren’t getting where they were supposed to, and pressured Amnesty International to apologize for saying anything about Ukrainian war crimes.


Or how about this Guardian article by John Pilger titled “In Ukraine, the US is dragging us towards war with Russia,” subtitled “Washington’s role in Ukraine, and its backing for the regime’s neo-Nazis, has huge implications for the rest of the world,” published two weeks after Milne’s?

Pilger’s article is somehow even more heretical than Milne’s, saying Washington “masterminded the coup in February against the democratically elected government in Kiev” and that “Ukraine has been turned into a CIA theme park – run personally by CIA director John Brennan in Kiev, with dozens of ‘special units’ from the CIA and FBI setting up a ‘security structure’ that oversees savage attacks on those who opposed the February coup.”

As with Milne, Pilger criticizes the media environment at the time, saying “propaganda” about what’s happening in Ukraine is happening in an “Orwellian style”. But again, his article was published in The Guardian, whereas today it never would be.

Pilger has actually provided some background for this shift in mass media reporting, saying that there was a “purge” of dissident voices from The Guardian’s ranks around 2014-2015.

“My written journalism is no longer welcome in The Guardian which, three years ago, got rid of people like me in pretty much a purge of those who really were saying what The Guardian no longer says any more,” Pilger reported in a January 2018 radio interview.

Interestingly, a 2019 Declassified UK report found that British intelligence services began aggressively targeting The Guardian after its 2013 publication of the Edward Snowden documents, and found their in when the outlet’s editor-in-chief Alan Rusbridger was replaced by Katharine Viner in March 2015. After that point The Guardian began moving away from critical investigative reporting and began publishing softball “interviews” with MI5 and MI6 chiefs and willingly participating in the west’s information war against Russia.

Once the western world plunged in unison into blinkered Russia hysteria after Hillary Clinton lost the US presidential election in 2016, we began seeing things like that time a BBC reporter admonished a guest for voicing unauthorized opinions about Syria because “we’re in an information war with Russia.”


Whether or not you agree with the perspectives authored by Milne and Pilger is irrelevant to the very important fact that they could say things in the mainstream media in 2014 that they could never say in the mainstream media in 2023. The dramatic shift from a media environment where criticism of establishment Russia narratives is permitted to one where it is not permitted is worth noting, because it means there was a conscious shift toward converting the mass media into full-fledged cold war propaganda outlets.

A lot of things have happened since 2014, but nothing about what happened in 2014 has changed since 2014. It’s still the same year it always was, because that’s how time works; nothing has changed about 2014 other than the thoughts you’re permitted to voice about it in mainstream outlets like The Guardian.

This bizarre historical revisionism has been occurring not just in The Guardian but throughout the mainstream media. Last year Moon of Alabama published a piece titled “Media Are Now Whitewashing Nazis They Had Previously Condemned” which compiles many, many instances in which the mass media have reported on Ukraine’s neo-Nazi problem over the years, and contrasts this with the way the mass media now whitewashes those paramilitaries and pretends they’re just fine upstanding patriots. In the years prior to the Russian invasion there were neo-Nazis in Ukraine; now there are no neo-Nazis in Ukraine and there never have been and you’re a treasonous Putin puppet if you say otherwise. Nothing actually changed about Ukraine’s neo-Nazi problem; all that changed is the narrative.


Everyone should be aware that the mass media have drastically changed the perspectives they’re willing to publish on Ukraine, because it proves that these outlets are not working to help create a well-informed populace and facilitate important conversations, but are in fact knowingly operating as war propaganda firms. They’re not trying to inform people about what’s going on in the world, they’re trying to manipulate the way people think about the world. These two goals could not possibly be more different.

Power is controlling what happens; true power is controlling what people think about what happens. They’re re-writing history to influence control over what people think about the present. As old Orwell put it, “Who controls the past controls the future. Who controls the present controls the past.”

https://caitlinjohnstone.com/2023/01/27 ... ish-today/
"There is great chaos under heaven; the situation is excellent."

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Re: Censorship, fake news, perception management

Post by blindpig » Mon Jan 30, 2023 2:46 pm

Celebrities Protect The Interests Of The Empire: Notes From The Edge Of The Narrative Matrix

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If you say you oppose Russia because you’re an anti-imperialist but you don’t oppose the US empire for its role in starting and perpetuating this war, then you’re a liar. You don’t oppose Russia because you’re an anti-imperialist, you oppose Russia because you’re an imperialist.

The only people who say “Putin can end this war at any time by withdrawing” are those who deny the US empire’s aggressions which led to this conflict, which is just a nonsense garbage position based on lies. They don’t actually want peace, they just want victory for the empire. The real unbiased position which supports peace is wanting both Russia and the western empire to begin engaging in diplomacy, de-escalation and detente to end this war. But empire simps will call you treasonously biased if you support anything other than total Russian defeat.

This dopey propaganda-addled notion that the west did nothing wrong and Putin attacked Ukraine solely because he is evil and hates freedom actually prevents peace from happening. If one side only acknowledges the reality of the aggressions of the other side, peace is impossible. If you don’t understand how a war was started and perpetuated, then you can’t understand how peace can be started and perpetuated. The empire deliberately works to prevent the public from obtaining this understanding, because the empire wants war.

It’s not okay for grown adults to act like Putin is just running around invading countries willy nilly because he’s a crazed madman. You’ve got a whole internet of information at your fingertips. Use it.



It’s impossible to overstate how much our society is shaped by the fact that those who are given the most influence and the largest platforms will experience our status quo systems as working very nicely and have a vested interest in preserving those systems which benefit them. The media-owning, culture-manufacturing class of the super-wealthy elevates people to wealth and celebrity who look like they will be good protectors of their class interests. Those people will necessarily speak fondly of the status quo political systems which let them be rich.


These are the people who put on all the shows, movies and music almost everyone consumes, thereby engineering mainstream culture to the benefit of the super wealthy. It shapes the way the people think, speak, act and vote. What they feel entitled to. What they think is possible.

A rich celebrity who makes millions of dollars a year in a fun, easy and egoically gratifying job is not going to be spotlighting all the lives who are being destroyed by the status quo systems which elevated them. They’re not going to favor the revolutionary changes that are needed. They’re not going to be calling for a massive, sweeping overhaul of the systems which are crushing ordinary people to death and creating widespread misery; at most they’re going to be telling you to vote Democrat or Republican and quibbling about minor disagreements on tax rates. But these are the people with the loudest voices in our society — not just the loudest, but many orders of magnitude more amplified and influential than the voices of the ordinary people who are suffering under existing systems. These loudly-amplified rich celebrities shape and direct mainstream culture.

This dynamic plays such a massive role in hiding from mainstream attention the ways our status quo systems are exploiting, oppressing and abusing people while killing our biosphere and pushing us toward nuclear annihilation, that it’s hard to wrap your mind around how far it goes. The way everyone’s thinking about the world is so pervasively informed by perspectives that are favorable to the status quo prevents them from even noticing how bad things are for everyone else. It’s widely assumed that if you’re struggling in this mess, it’s because of your own failures. If any media you turn on depicts people who are doing basically fine and are content with the way things are while you’re barely able to keep your head above water, the take-home message is that the problem is with you, not with our systems. That you are what needs to change.

The failings of the status quo are hidden in mainstream culture, and people aren’t permitted to consider the possibility that there might be a better way for things to be. People don’t know, and they don’t know that they don’t know. They’re kept in the dark about what’s possible.





People are like, “Oh yeah right Caitlin, it’s ALWAYS America’s fault. You’re always blaming the US for every conflict, just because it runs a globe-spanning empire which dominates the planet with violence and coercion and works continuously to keep all the other countries subjugated to it.”

They’re like, “Right, right, blame EVERYTHING on the violent unipolar planetary hegemon.”

It’s a lot like saying, “Okay sure we’re trapped in a room with a tiger, and sure we keep getting eaten, and yes your leg is missing and you’ve got a large bite out of your torso, but you can’t blame ALL of that on the tiger. It’s not fair. Some of it might be Steve’s fault. Steve’s kind of a jerk.”



People whose opinions are grounded in facts and logic don’t need to resort to accusing those who disagree with them of being secret agents working for foreign governments.






Most people on this planet couldn’t give a shit who governs Crimea, but one small group insists we risk every life in existence on earth — every bee, every frog, every tree, every child — for their current t-shirt-of-the-week issue. It’s so arrogant.

It’s one thing to draw a line and say “The world must never let anyone cross this point, even if it means risking nuclear armageddon.” It’s quite another to make that line something as trivial as the question of who governs Crimea. It’s not legitimate to risk all life over that. This is especially true because the US empire provoked this war and because even the Crimeans themselves prefer to be Russian. But even if none of that was the case, it still wouldn’t be legitimate for the US empire to risk the lives of people in Africa or South America by backing an offensive on Crimea.

The correct response to anyone who supports this is “Who the fuck do you think you are? Who the fuck are you to risk the life of every human and non-human life on this planet over an issue only a tiny fraction of the world cares one whit about?”

All these armchair warriors saying “We need to be brave and take a stand!” are willing to gamble billions of lives who do not consent to being gambled over a war they’re not even fighting in. All while refusing to deeply contemplate what nuclear war would entail. They’re the worst kind of cowards.



I just want the rapidly rising threat of nuclear war to be treated, reported on, and discussed like the supremely important issue that it is. It’s the single most important matter in the world and it just gets casually mentioned here and there like it’s just another issue.

It’s actually a huge problem that nobody wants to talk about the single most important issue in the world and everyone acts like you’re a crazy hysterical idiot for pointing out the very real ways we’re moving closer to that very real possibility. I’ve been writing about the growing risk of nuclear war for years and people have been calling me a delusional lunatic and a Putin puppet the entire time, meanwhile we’ve demonstrably and indisputably been seeing massive steps toward that outcome and it’s still being dismissed.

Even if you believe that all this nuclear brinkmanship is justified and good, you still need to fully acknowledge the reality of the risk and the unfathomable horrors that it would unleash upon our world. And you need to do it with all the respect and solemnity the subject deserves.

https://caitlinjohnstone.com/2023/01/30 ... ve-matrix/

Well, it could be argued that Zelensky deserves an Oscar for his performance....and for the shambles he has led the Ukrainian people into he deserves a trip to the nearest wall or lamppost too.
"There is great chaos under heaven; the situation is excellent."

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Re: Censorship, fake news, perception management

Post by blindpig » Thu Feb 02, 2023 11:40 pm

On The Media Of 'Russiagate' And Related Fake Stories

Last week Matt Taibbi, with access to Twitter's internal papers, debunked the fake Hamilton 68 propaganda dashboard that was used to create many stories about alleged Russian disinformation. I had done similar five years earlier but had no access to the original data. There were enough secondary indications to conclude that the dashboard was a sham. Still, have the case made with primary data is a valuable addition.

There has been no Russian influence or disinformation campaign.

Two days later the Columbia Journalism Review (CJR) published a five part longread from an 18 month long investigation into the 'Russigate' drama and on how the media had cooked it up.

CJR's editor wrote the intro:

No narrative did more to shape Trump’s relations with the press than Russiagate. The story, which included the Steele dossier and the Mueller report among other totemic moments, resulted in Pulitzer Prizes as well as embarrassing retractions and damaged careers. For Trump, the press’s pursuit of the Russia story convinced him that any sort of normal relationship with the press was impossible.
For the past year and a half, CJR has been examining the American media’s coverage of Trump and Russia in granular detail, and what it means as the country enters a new political cycle. Investigative reporter Jeff Gerth interviewed dozens of people at the center of the story—editors and reporters, Trump himself, and others in his orbit.


The result is an encyclopedic look at one of the most consequential moments in American media history.

Gerth's, who is 78, is a longtime mainstream investigative reporter who has written for major media outlets. The result of his investigation is indeed encyclopedic, detailed and very damaging.

The four parts are in chronological order and I recommend to read them all to grasp the real extend of the media's failures.

INTRODUCTION: ‘I realized early on I had two jobs’
Chapter 2: The origins of fake news
Chapter 3: A contested Pulitzer
Chapter 4: Helsinki and the $3,000 Russian disinformation campaign
For those who do not have time to read the four lengthy pieces there is a Foxnews piece with a decent summary of their content.

Gerth ends his review with a personal afterword:

I’ve avoided opining in my more than fifty years as a reporter. This time, however, I felt obligated to weigh in. Why? Because I am worried about journalism’s declining credibility and society’s increasing polarization. The two trends, I believe, are intertwined.
My main conclusion is that journalism’s primary missions, informing the public and holding powerful interests accountable, have been undermined by the erosion of journalistic norms and the media’s own lack of transparency about its work. This combination adds to people’s distrust about the media and exacerbates frayed political and social differences.
...
My final concern, and frustration, was the lack of transparency by media organizations in responding to my questions. I reached out to more than sixty journalists; only about half responded. Of those who did, more than a dozen agreed to be interviewed on the record. However, not a single major news organization made available a newsroom leader to talk about their coverage.
...
Most Americans (60 percent) say they want unbiased news sources. Yet 86 percent think the media is biased. The consequences of this mismatch are all too obvious: 83 percent of the audience for Fox News leans Republican while 91 percent of the readers of the New York Times lean Democratic.
...
Walter Lippmann wrote about these dangers in his 1920 book Liberty and the News. Lippmann worried then that when journalists “arrogate to themselves the right to determine by their own consciences what shall be reported and for what purpose, democracy is unworkable.”


I have the same concern that Gerth and Lippmann expressed.

The three main culprits of the Russiagate sham, the News Times, the Washington Post and CNN, have yet to report on the CFR story. The probably fear to admit that their reporting on Russiagate, which in itself created large parts of the story, was full of mistakes and omissions because of their partisan view.

I have written dozens of pieces of media criticism and on the media's failure. My concerns about systematic bias of, and 'official' influence on, media has steadily increased. False stories are a major ingredient for cooking up wars. The Hamilton dashboard, the Steele dossier and other Russiagate elements were likely invented for that larger purpose.

Objectivity in the media has been damaged. It is now threatened to become even worse. Leonard Downie Jr., a former executive editor of The Washington Post, has published an opinion piece that argues for even less objectivity.

Opinion Newsrooms that move beyond ‘objectivity’ can build trust

Amid all the profound challenges and changes roiling the American news media today, newsrooms are debating whether traditional objectivity should still be the standard for news reporting. “Objectivity” is defined by most dictionaries as expressing or using facts without distortion by personal beliefs, bias, feelings or prejudice. Journalistic objectivity has been generally understood to mean much the same thing.
But increasingly, reporters, editors and media critics argue that the concept of journalistic objectivity is a distortion of reality. They point out that the standard was dictated over decades by male editors in predominantly White newsrooms and reinforced their own view of the world. They believe that pursuing objectivity can lead to false balance or misleading “bothsidesism” in covering stories about race, the treatment of women, LGBTQ+ rights, income inequality, climate change and many other subjects. And, in today’s diversifying newsrooms, they feel it negates many of their own identities, life experiences and cultural contexts, keeping them from pursuing truth in their work.


Having the news reported through the tinted glasses of an ever increasing number of 'identities' will not make today's generally bad media quality ny better.

It will only increase the problem of partisanship and bias that leads to a ever more disunited public.

Thinking about it: Who has an interest in that?

Posted by b on February 2, 2023 at 17:36 UTC | Permalink

https://www.moonofalabama.org/2023/02/o ... .html#more

The attraction of a 'twofer'linking Trump and Russia in a feedback relationship was gold for the imperial management. Never for a moment think this 'Deep State' is in any way 'rouge' , it is the tool of a majority portion of the ruling class and has been having it's own way for a long time now because 'important people' are making obscene amounts of money. Trump's lack of enthusiasm for continued and expanding overseas action(he wasn't on that gravy train), nothing more than paleo-conservative tight-fistedness, was the breaking point for him and a majority of his peers, he was costing them money. They might tolerate a swine and and racist demagogue but not a costly one.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, but remember:

“All over the world, wherever there are capitalists, freedom of the press means freedom to buy up newspapers, to buy writers, to bribe, buy and fake “public opinion” for the benefit of the bourgeoisie.”

— Vladimir Lenin
"There is great chaos under heaven; the situation is excellent."

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Re: Censorship, fake news, perception management

Post by blindpig » Mon Feb 06, 2023 3:09 pm

They’re Not Worried About “Russian Influence”, They’re Worried About Dissent

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Being labeled a Russian propagandist all day every day for criticizing US foreign policy is really weird, but one advantage it comes with is a useful perspective on what people have really been talking about all these years when they warn of the dangers of “Russian propaganda”.

I know I’m not a Russian propagandist. I’m not paid by Russia, I have no connections to Russia, and until I started this political commentary gig in 2016 I thought very little about Russia. My opinions about the western empire sometimes turn up on Russian media because I let anyone use my work who wants to, but that was always something they did on their own without my submitting it to them and without any payment or solicitation of any kind. I’m literally just some random westerner sharing political opinions on the internet; those opinions just happen to disagree with the US empire and its stories about itself and its behavior.

Yet for years I’ve watched people pointing at me as an example of what “Russian propaganda” looks like. This has helped inform my understanding of all the panic about “Russian influence” that’s been circulating these last six years, and given me some insight into how seriously it should be taken.


That’s one reason why I wasn’t surprised by Matt Taibbi’s reporting on the Twitter Files revelations about Hamilton 68, an information op run by DC swamp monsters and backed by imperialist think tanks which generated hundreds if not thousands of completely bogus mainstream news reports about online Russian influence over the years.

Hamilton 68 purported to track Russian attempts to influence western thought on social media, but Twitter eventually figured out that the “Russians” the operation has been tracking were actually mostly real, mostly American accounts who just happened to say things that didn’t perfectly align with the official Beltway consensus. These accounts were often right-leaning, but also included people like Consortium News editor Joe Lauria, who’s about as far from a rightist as you can get.

They played a massive role in fanning the flames of public hysteria about online Russian influence, but while they did this by pretending to track the behavior of Russian influence ops, in reality they were tracking dissent.

One of the craziest things happening in the world today is the way westerners are being brainwashed by western propaganda into panicking about Russian propaganda, something that has no meaningful existence in the west. Before RT was shut down it was drawing a whopping 0.04 percent of the UK’s total TV audience. The much-touted Russian election interference campaign on Facebook was mostly unrelated to the election and affected “approximately 1 out of 23,000 pieces of content” according o Facebook. Research by New York University into Russian trolling behavior on Twitter in the lead-up to the 2016 election has found “no evidence of a meaningful relationship between exposure to the Russian foreign influence campaign and changes in attitudes, polarization, or voting behavior.” A study by the University of Adelaide found that despite all the warnings of Russian bots and trolls following Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, the overwhelming majority of inauthentic behavior on Twitter during that time was anti-Russian in nature.

Russia exerts essentially zero influence over what westerners think, yet we’re all meant to freak out about “Russian propaganda” while western oligarchs and government agencies continually hammer our minds with propaganda designed to manufacture our consent for the status quo which benefits them.


All this and we’re still seeing calls for more narrative management from the western empire, like the recent American Purpose article “The Long War of Ideas” being promoted by people like Bill Kristol which calls for a resurrection of CIA culture war tactics like those used during the last cold war. Every day there’s some new liberal politician sermonizing about the need to do more to fight Russian influence and protect American minds from “disinformation”, even as we are shown over and over again that what they really want is to shut down dissident voices.

That’s what we’re seeing in the continual efforts to increase online censorship, in the bogus new “fact-checking” industry, in calls to increase the output of formal US government propaganda operations like Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty and Radio Free Asia, in the way all dissent about Russia has been forcefully purged from the western media in recent years, in the way empire-amplified trolling operations have been shouting down and drowning out critics of US foreign policy online, in the way censorship via algorithm has emerged as one of the major methods of restricting dissident speech.

They claim there needs to be a massive escalation in propaganda, censorship and online psyops in order to fight “Russian influence”, while the only influence operations we’re being subjected to in any meaningful way are only ever of the western variety. They just want to do more of that.

Our rulers aren’t actually worried about “Russian influence”, they’re worried about dissent. They’re worried the public won’t consent to the “great power competition” they plan to subject us to for the foreseeable future unless they can exert massive influence over our minds, because they know that otherwise we will recognize that our interests are directly harmed by the economic warfare, exploding military spending and nuclear brinkmanship which necessarily accompanies that campaign to reign in Russia and stop the rise of China.

They’re propagandizing us about the threat of foreign propaganda in order to justify propagandizing us more. We’re being manipulated into consenting to agendas that no healthy person would ever consent to without copious amounts of manipulation.

https://caitlinjohnstone.com/2023/02/05 ... t-dissent/

****************

Interview with Alan MacLeod: Elon Musk’s Cozy Ties With the Military Industrial Complex
FEBRUARY 5, 2023

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Lowkey’s podcast logo (left), Elon Musk (center) over a “National Security State” and CIA logos as well as Alan Macleod (right). Photo: MintPress News.

The MintPress podcast, “The Watchdog,” hosted by British-Iraqi hip hop artist Lowkey, closely examines organizations about which it is in the public interest to know – including intelligence, lobby and special interest groups influencing policies that infringe on free speech and target dissent. The Watchdog goes against the grain by casting a light on stories largely ignored by the mainstream, corporate media.


Via the Twitter Files, new Twitter owner Elon Musk has helped to reveal several hair-raising stories about the extent of U.S. national security state operations on social media. However, as today’s guest explains, Musk himself is a key cog in the military-industrial and surveillance states being built by Washington.

Joining Lowkey today is return guest Alan MacLeod, a Senior Staff Writer for MintPress News. After completing his PhD in 2017, Alan published two books: “Bad News From Venezuela: Twenty Years of Fake News and Misreporting” and “Propaganda in the Information Age: Still Manufacturing Consent,” as well as a number of academic articles.


The podcast begins with Alan discussing Elon Musk’s company, SpaceX, a space firm and military contractor with close links to the CIA. He describes how SpaceX’s Starlink communications devices are being used by both the Ukrainian military and by anti-government activists in Iran to further Washington’s goals in those two countries.

As Alan explains, Starlink is “an internet service which allows anyone with a terminal to directly connect to one of many thousands of satellites that are orbiting the earth.”

Such channels of communication can prove to be of use towards the CIA and other intelligence services in the region, such as Mossad, which retains an illustrious reputation of purporting misinformation to support the overthrow of democratically elected governments in the Middle East. Stalinks also allow ways for U.S.-backed groups inside the country to remain online and in communication with one another without the knowledge of the government.

Since the Islamic Revolution of 1979, Iran has been one of the U.S.’ prime targets for regime change.

Suspicion towards Musk continued to rocket, as we delved further into his relationship with both NASA and more generally the National Security State. Alan describes how, from the very outset, Musk’s company was nurtured by the CIA in with the explicit expectation that it would work closely with Washington and become a key asset once established. SpaceX was also bankrolled by the U.S. government to the tune of billions of dollars.

The dialogue then shifts to the revelations discovered from the Twitter Files, the direct involvement of American intelligence personnel in the production of the video game series “Call of Duty,” and later the role played by U.S., Israeli and even German intelligence agencies in carrying out the assassination of Iranian general and statesman, Qassem Soleimani. The pair also discuss the disastrous effects of U.S. militarism, noting that at least 6 million people have died in America’s post-9/11 wars, a crusade that has only resulted in destroying the region.

Watch the whole interview here, exclusively at MintPress News. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qTf8QIgNWvs

Lowkey is a British-Iraqi hip-hop artist, academic and political campaigner. As a musician, he has collaborated with the Arctic Monkeys, Wretch 32, Immortal Technique and Akala. He is a patron of Stop The War Coalition, Palestine Solidarity Campaign, the Racial Justice Network and The Peace and Justice Project, founded by Jeremy Corbyn. He has spoken and performed on platforms from the Oxford Union to the Royal Albert Hall and Glastonbury. His latest album, Soundtrack To The Struggle 2, featured Noam Chomsky and Frankie Boyle and has been streamed millions of times.

https://orinocotribune.com/interview-wi ... l-complex/
"There is great chaos under heaven; the situation is excellent."

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Re: Censorship, fake news, perception management

Post by blindpig » Wed Feb 08, 2023 2:39 pm

Is a Crash Course Enough to Call Oneself a Reporter? Notes on the State of Journalism
FEBRUARY 5, 2023

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A man runs through a flurry of newspapers. File photo.

Editorial note: In Venezuela, the exercise of journalism as a profession, and the privilege of being referred to as a “journalist,” is limited to those who have graduated from institutes of higher education with a journalism degree. Those who do not possess the educational qualifications are not identified as journalists. This is the context in which Clodovaldo Hernández writes the piece below.

By Clodovaldo Hernández – Feb 4, 2023

This week we are again faced with one of those typical situations in which it’s hard to tell if the storm is really coming or if the neighbor is just shaken up [si la tormenta se avecina o la vecina se atormenta], as was once said in El Chavo del Ocho. What happened was that the National Institute for Socialist Training and Education (INCES) recently announced that there would be short courses to train to be a reporter. All hell broke loose.

Many people came out, both from the opposition and revolutionary side, to question this academic self-confidence that insults those who, such as social communications graduates, were hunkered down for five years or more in a university.

Several colleagues and friends approached me, some to ask me for my opinion in good faith, and others to challenge me with statements such as the following: “Aha, and what do you think of that, ah, ah, ah? Say, dare them! ” Well, here is what I think. Forgive me for my ramblings.

Reflection on a crisis
The fact that someone in an institution dedicated to technical training believes that a few months are enough to become a reporter is a reflection of the deep existential crisis that is shaking journalism. And I am not only referring to us, the Venezuelans, but to this profession on global scale.

This crisis is like several simultaneous earthquakes, with various epicenters and intensities, and many similar cases. On the one hand, the Internet and social media have shattered the conventional business model of the press, in which news was printed on paper or broadcast in the form of news via radio and television. Everything is obsolete now, thrown into the metaphorical garbage dump. But if that happened to the business, what can be expected to happen to the entrepreneurs and workers of this branch in a world stamped by capitalism?

Communication activities after this mutation have become the absolute and direct property of the great corporations which drive the world economy with their weapons, energy, food, medicines, or online commerce, never mind the extralegal sectors of the economy. They are not interested in journalism, but the voracious profitability of their businesses. These companies handle what remains of the conventional media industry and have also taken over the platforms that hegemonize the new communication platforms. For these operations, the work of many people is required. But let’s be sincere. They don’t need the type of training required during the second half of the20th century and the first years of the 21st. What these corporations require are IT specialists, algorithm manipulators, social networks influencers, Youtubers, Instagrammers and Tiktokers, trades that do not require university degrees in social communications, for example, since these are skills that young people today carry as congenital brain programming. While some, not so young individuals, seem to have acquired them through practice or almost by osmosis.

Our own fault
Another reason why the university profession of journalism has been degraded ostensibly must be attributed to journalists. Professors of journalism have continuously waged a war on the trade. We should be kicking ourselves over it then.

Both in the large centers of media power in the United States and Europe, and in Venezuela and the rest of Latin America, many journalists—including the stars of the profession—have trampled ethical norms and even common sense itself. Flagrant lies, half truths, misrepresentations, manipulations, ideology and selective silences have been the daily routine of a field once characterized by a good level of prestige and rigor. Then, the audiences of these outlets and people who have not studied journalism (which are the overwhelming majority of society) have begun to make the following reflection without thinking twice: if the expert university graduates of this career spew out these barbarities, do we even need them? And they start asking: why not have lay people do this work? It is not unreasonable to wonder if anyone could do at least an equally poor job.

Let’s try to understand the situation: it is as if the doctors of a town stopped working their magic, their patients die or become sicker, and the people stop trusting them. Then some bold types start proscribing cures without having the faintest idea of anatomy or biochemistry. What is the most serious thing that could happen? Well, the patients would continue to die, or get worse. More of the same, nothing that wasn’t happening already in the first place.

Lets be honest with ourselves, first of all: with what moral authority can university journalists claim exclusivity over the management of mass information, if a good part of the better known figures of the trade have become mercenaries of the news, or mere propagandists? How can we sustain the idea that to be a journalist, a long theoretical and deontological training is required, if they themselves have acted without scruples, outside of theory and ethics? It would be very difficult indeed.

Controlling the message
Here, we can even take stock of the basic element of journalistic work: language. We need not look far: in the case of the average university journalist, can it be said that the graduates of this career are examples to be followed by their readers, listeners or viewers in terms of quality writing and orating? To me—this is a thing of the past, I admit it—it seems that it was so in another era, but not anymore, no offence.

In my experience, while at several newspapers and magazines I always ran into colleagues who presented various levels of disability with regards to putting subject, verb, and predicate in a more or less comprehensible order. Infrequently, some were reputed to be excellent journalists (and they were convinced that they were). The bosses, editors, writing secretaries, and style correctors even used to make salty jokes about how these people had gotten their university degrees, and the most common joke was that they had come out of an Ace box, because for a while, powder detergent companies tried to ramp up their sales by offering surprises in the packaging.

Then, to make matters worse, if a person without journalistic training reads a string of attacks against the grammar of a graduate in that field, what must they think?

Journalist factories
And here I will take the opportunity to move on to another controversial point about the training of journalists in recent years, especially in the ’90s and the first decade of the 2000s, when the career “became fashionable” and schools opened in several private universities, where they produced graduates like churros—the saying is spot on.

In those years, I met several colleagues, who were professors at some of those schools, who, at the outset, expressed some remorse, not because they had recently graduated (that is not the point), but because not everyone there had the necessary qualifications to practice journalism and, therefore, much less so to pretend to teach others how it was done. Some were good prospects, even if they were still in training, yet they had notable deficiencies. They were still lacking in the bread-and-butter issues of the profession (even with regards to spelling, especially in certain cases), yet they undertook the task of training others. What could go wrong?

But apart from that, these professors said they had classes of more than 100 students! And they gave class to two or three of those groups. They were asked what kind of individual care they could give as teachers to each student if they were in charge of 200 or 300. The question, of course, was rhetorical, because it was more than clear that in such conditions it is almost impossible to cater to individual students in any way. Especially since professors in media studies (particularly in journalism, one of the axes of the career) must be coaches above all else; someone who reviews the work of each student in detail, corrects them, and offers specific suggestions.

It was in response to these training centers for the soldiers of the media war, i.e., the social communication schools of private universities, that the revolution proposed to train its own through the social communication training programs of the Bolivarian University of Venezuela and The Sucre mission.

For 10 years I participated in this effort, chasing the utopia (still very much alive) of a media studies program that has all the attributes and demands of the university level, but is at the same time alternative and popular in its philosophical and political approach. After a decade, I abandoned the classrooms for personal reasons, but now that they have been overcome, I have not been able to return because an of an existential crisis: I fear that the journalism that I would be able to teach almost no longer exists, and, above all, it is not applicable to the new media landscape; therefore, insisting on it would be like cheating students. I have not yet been able to overcome this problem.

The usual hypocrites
With regards to the coming storm and the neighbors who are tormented there were a few typical hypocrites which were captured by the acute and well-trained senses of my favorite political scientist, Prodigio Pérez.

These are the complaints of some journalists and managers of the “free press” (proclaimed independent, but financed by foreign agents) regarding the offer of the INCES to train reporters.

It turns out that several of these media outlets, associated with the infallible NGOs that defend freedom of expression (and are also subsidized by foreign governments), have been offering their own courses, for a long time, for what they have been calling “citizen reporters.”

There is no real difference between those citizen reporters and those that the INCES had in mind when they launched their ill-fated course (which, apparently, has already been removed from the didactic offer, incidentally).

Prodigio says that the true objective of the citizen reporters courses of the “free press” is to train people to work for free for the aforementioned media outlets, in an occupation halfway between journalism, the collection of gossip, intelligence operations and the infiltration of popular areas.

These people are fine with training their own “reporters”, but now that INCES has decided to do the same, well in that case they are undermining the university status of the profession of journalism. Contradictory, right?

Another hypocritical aspect that came to light is that highlighted by Luigino Bracci Roa, who, by the way, is a university graduate in computer science, but does more journalism than most media studies graduates put together. In a tweet, Luigino pointed out that when private or public media or the press department of a corporation or institution receives an intern or a rookie journalist, the bosses order him to become a one-man show: record sounds for the radio and podcasts; take photos for the portal or blog; make videos for television, YouTube and Tiktok; write notes for web pages and threads for Twitter; live stream on Instagram and even create memes for internal communications, that is, executing the work that several people should be doing (cameramen, operators, broadcasters, webmaster, just to list a few). This means that the intensive exploitative system that is being applied to journalists has led them to usurp the work of other professionals, that is, more or less the same thing that the reporters trained by INCES were going to do. They are curiosities of the metaverse.

The earthquake in the trade
For those who do not know or have forgotten, limiting the formation of communicators to the acquisition of basic technical skills was the great dream of media moguls throughout the 20th century.

The most offensive approaches of that ultra-reactionary artifact called the Inter-American Press Society (SIP) and its local branch, the Venezuelan Press Block, were those aimed at destroying the guild of journalists and allowing any professional from another branch or anyone without any specific studies to exercise functions in newspapers and other media companies. Back then, these people had agreed with the INCES plan to train reporters, because they presumed that they would be cheaper than the university students and perhaps more docile to manipulation.

For years, the generations of media studies graduates which founded the National College of Journalists, and its first heirs, fought without support against their employer’s plan to dismantle the trade of journalism.

Then, the territory of the journalistic guilds was also ravaged by several earthquakes. After the political changes of 1999, the leaders of the CNP (and the National Union of Press Workers) have dedicated themselves to catering to the owners of the mainstream media, under the pretext of fighting the governments of Hugo Chávez and Nicolás Maduro, whom both consider dictatorial and contrary to freedom of expression.

This coincidence has led to truly absurd situations, such as that, some years ago, when the CNP-Caracas managers agreed to endorse, in a public act (and with pompous mannerisms, as if it were a great achievement), the declaration of Chapultepec, the most anti-union document that the SIP has issued in its long history of struggles against the organization of university journalists.

Some of these figures came out in uncertain numbers last week to complain to the heavens about the INCES trainings. It is hard to tell if it was out of ignorance or impudence.

Epilogue
To close this long incursion of mine into the neighboring storm, I will point out that, apart from the express reporters trained by the INCES, by the “free press,” or by any other entity with edifying or destructive purposes (which will always depend on who judges it), the exercise of journalism by university graduates faces another threat that, clearly, seems more serious and global: ChatGPT.

We are talking about a chatbot type app, based on artificial intelligence, capable of writing academic documents, reports, and even stories, novels and poems, following the very general instructions provided by any user, and in record time.

The resource has already worried educators at all levels because Chatgpt can do the work and tasks of students without being accused of plagiarism, since in a strict sense, it produces original materials, that is, it doesn’t copy and paste, but investigates, “thinks,” and writes.

This fear of educators has also taken root in the field of journalism because the dream of so many entrepreneurs of the sector (and their counterparts, government officials) is of doing without annoying employees, pesky employees with too many questions, or women on maternity leave.

For years they have tried to robotize jobs in the media sector, to produce their notes, reports, interviews, and chronicles according to the precise instructions of the bosses, without caring if the cat has five legs. But now, with this kind of virtual reporter at their disposal, they can completely dispense with the almost always dirty minds of journalists.

As my friend, the former communist, said, things are never so bad that they can’t get worse. Or, to return to the phrase of El Chavo del Ocho: this is the coming storm and, at the same time, it is a good reason for the whole journalistic neighborhood to be shaken up.

https://orinocotribune.com/is-a-crash-c ... ournalism/

Ya know what I think? I think that in times of (class) war there are only propagandists.

Which side are you on?
"There is great chaos under heaven; the situation is excellent."

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Re: Censorship, fake news, perception management

Post by blindpig » Sat Feb 11, 2023 3:34 pm

Twitter Censorship And The Crapification Path Of Social Media
On January 6 I wrote about the Twitter files:

Twitter Files Show How The Deep State Conquered Social Media

Part of the quoted reporting by Matt Taibbi, Bari Weiss and others was about Twitter censorship:

Twitter Files Part 2, by @BariWeiss, December 8, 2022

TWITTER’S SECRET BLACKLISTS

Bari Weiss gives a long-awaited answer to the question, “Was Twitter shadow-banning people?” It did, only the company calls it “visibility filtering.” Twitter also had a separate, higher council called SIP-PES that decided cases for high-visibility, controversial accounts.

Key revelations: Twitter had a huge toolbox for controlling the visibility of any user, including a “Search Blacklist” (for Dan Bongino), a “Trends Blacklist” for Stanford’s Dr. Jay Bhattacharya, and a “Do Not Amplify” setting for conservative activist Charlie Kirk. Weiss quotes a Twitter employee: “Think about visibility filtering as being a way for us to suppress what people see to different levels. It’s a very powerful tool.” With help from @abigailshrier, @shellenbergermd, @nelliebowles, and @isaacgrafstein.


This was of special interest to me as my account, @MoonofA, was throttled:

Until late 2021 my Twitter account @MoonofA, which I mostly use to promote my writings here, was not allowed to grow beyond 19,500 followers. There were also signs that tweets by me were not shown to users who were following me. After my account was released from the growth prison it rapidly grew to 47,500 followers in the fall of 2022. It then again went into growth prison for no discernible reason and without me getting any notice of it. Now anytime my follower count increases by 100 or so it will automatically be slashed back to 47,450 followers. There are also again signs that tweets from my account are again 'shadowbanned'.

Someone at Twitter must have read the above. One or two days after I published the piece my account was again allowed to grow. It has since gained more than 2,500 new followers for a total of more than 50,000.

Image

I do not know though to what degree I am still shadow banned or not.

The original idea of Twitter was that you will see the tweets and retweets by those people you follow (and preferable only those) in your timeline. Over time that has been perverted again and again. Tweets from some accounts were suppressed by 'visibility filtering', i.e not show in their followers timelines. Tweets of people one did not follow were inserted into one's stream. (Using https://tweetdeck.twitter.com in a browser seems to largely avoid the later issue.)

Both of those issues are typical for social media. Services like Facebook and Twitter get first build so that they are easy to use. To grow they must have features that people like and find useful. The first phase of optimization of a service is done for that purpose.

When the social media service has acquired a sufficient number of regular users, and 'eyeballs' that can be monetized, the optimization aim changes. Most things done after that are no longer user orientated but to maximize the income of the service via advertisements or sales. When money is in the game fraud via automated accounts and other manipulations will inevitably follow.

Any social media service will also have some power over its users by being able to push some content and withhold other. Power attracts governments and politicians who will want to manipulate it for their purposes. The introduction of censorship follows. Thus the FBI gets to decide which accounts get throttled or shadow banned.

Everything that follows after the first phase of optimizing the user experience will inevitably crappify a service. Soon this will impede growth. Then follows the decline of user numbers. AOL, MySpace and Facebook are primary examples for this process.

Twitter was well on its way to the point of decline. If Elon Musk wants to make it profitable he will have to think hard on how to achieve that.

My advice would be to optimize for user experience only and to concentrate on the core features. This must be done in carefully thought out tiny steps. Put a hard limit on the influence of advertisement sales and government influence. (Think of sales as an (necessary?) add-on, not as a core service.) Neither should be allowed to influence the users' experience.

Posted by b on February 10, 2023 at 16:28 UTC | Permalink

https://www.moonofalabama.org/2023/02/t ... .html#more

If Musky discredits or sinks Twitter how can that not be a good thing? Cause ya know that no good can come from it, that will not be allowed.
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Re: Censorship, fake news, perception management

Post by blindpig » Thu Feb 16, 2023 3:33 pm

Image.
Seymour Hersh (Photo: Illustration by MintPress News)

Media ignore Seymour Hersh bombshell report of U.S. destroying Nord Stream II
By Alan MacLeod (Posted Feb 16, 2023)

Originally published: MintPress News on February 15, 2023 (more by MintPress News) |

It has now been one week since Seymour Hersh published an in-depth report claiming that the Biden administration deliberately blew up the Nord Stream II gas pipeline without Germany’s consent or even knowledge—an operation which began planning long before the Russian invasion of Ukraine.

Based on interviews with national security insiders, Hersh—the journalist who broke the stories of the My Lai Massacre, the CIA spying program and the Abu Ghraib torture scandal—claims that in June, U.S. Navy divers traveled to the Baltic Sea and attached C4 explosive charges to the pipeline. By September, President Biden himself ordered its destruction. According to Hersh, all understood the stakes and the gravity of what they were doing, acknowledging that, if caught, it would be seen as a flagrant “act of war” against their allies.

Despite this, corporate media have overwhelmingly ignored the Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter’s bombshell. A MintPress News study analyzed the 20 most influential publications in the United States, according to analytics company Similar Web, and found only four mentions of the report between them.

The entirety of the corporate media’s attention given to the story consisted of:

A 166-word mini report in Bloomberg;
One five-minute segment on “Tucker Carlson Tonight” (Fox News);
One 600-word round up in The New York Post;
A shrill Business Insider attack article, whose headline labels Hersh a “discredited journalist” that has given a “gift to Putin”.
The 20 outlets studied are, in alphabetical order:

ABC News; Bloomberg News; Business Insider; BuzzFeed; CBS News; CNBC; CNN; Forbes; Fox News; The Huffington Post; MSNBC; NBC News; The New York Post; The New York Times; NPR; People Magazine; Politico; USA Today, The Wall Street Journal and The Washington Post.

Searches for “Seymour Hersh” and “Nord Stream” were carried out on the websites of each outlet, and were then checked against precise Google searches and results from the Dow Jones Factiva news database.

This lack of interest cannot be explained due to the report’s irrelevance. If the Biden administration really did work closely with the Norwegian government to blow up Nord Stream II, causing billions of dollars worth of immediate damage and plunging an entire region of the world into a freezing winter without sufficient energy, it ranks as one of the worst terrorist attacks in history; a flagrant act of aggression against a supposed ally.

Therefore, if Biden did indeed order this attack, it is barely possible to think of a more consequential piece of news. Indeed, according to Hersh, all those involved—from Biden, Under Secretary of State for Political Affairs Victoria Nuland, Secretary of State Anthony Blinken to National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan—understood that what they were doing was “an act of war.”

The Nord Stream attack was also one of the world’s worst ecological disasters, constituting the largest single leak of methane in history—a gas 80 times worse for the planet than carbon dioxide at accelerating climate change.

“The media system has, predictably, tried to marginalize the report,” Bryce Greene, a writer and media critic who has closely followed the press’ lack of interest in scrutinizing the Nord Stream story, told MintPress, adding,

They don’t want to deal with the repercussions. It also reflects poorly on the profession…Even Jeffery Sachs in his Bloomberg interview said that journalists he knew personally understood that evidence, but also understood that the media system they worked in wouldn’t respond kindly to any suggestion of U.S. complicity, so they kept quiet.

Greene explained that bothersome facts about the war have consistently been swept under the rug, noting that,

This is indicative of the entire Ukraine War coverage. From hiding the history of NATO expansion, to calling Ukrainian Nazis Russian propaganda, to CBS even retracting a story about Ukrainian corruption. The fact that U.S. media figures want to be seen as ‘on the good team’ or ‘on the right side of history’ means that they’re unwilling to confront reality as it exists.

RADIO SILENCE

This complete radio silence from most of the country’s most influential news organizations is all the more remarkable, considering Hersh’s revelations have been all over newswire services. Reuters, for example, has published 14 separate reports on the topic since Thursday. Every large media outlet in America (and many medium-sized and even small ones) subscribes to Reuters, republishing content from their newswires.

One of the main tasks of a newsroom editor is to follow the newswire and follow up on Reuters’ content. This means that editors around the country have been bombarded with this story every day since it broke, and virtually every single one of them has passed on it—14 consecutive times. Thus, even when repeatedly presented with free content to monetize, almost every newsroom in the U.S. decided against it. Independent, reader-supported media, however, have covered the story much more closely.

This is not to say that Reuters has been supportive of Hersh’s assertions. Its first article on the subject, for example, was entitled “White House says blog post on Nord Stream explosion ‘is utterly false’”, thereby allowing the Biden administration to set the agenda and downplay Hersh’s investigation as a mere blog post—something those in alternative media were quick to highlight. Hersh self-published his report on online platform Substack—a fact that either undermines his findings or the credibility of the corporate media apparatus, depending on one’s perspective.

“The most incredible thing about the backlash against Hersh’s article on the U.S. blowing up the Nord Stream pipelines is the fact that it’s clear no establishment media outlet has any intention of carrying out the basic journalism needed to confirm or refute what he’s reported,” wrote journalist and MintPress contributor Jonathan Cook.

Other journalists, particularly those connected to the Western intelligence services, were scathing of the report. “The only people Hersh impresses any more [sic] are the sort of people who carry water for Putin and Assad, or the terminally dumb,” quipped Bellingcat’s Eliot Higgins. Christo Grozev, another Bellingcat writer, labeled Hersh “senile”, “corrupt” and an “obsessive liar” whose “irresponsible single-anonymous-source reporting by a name with legacy authority is among the worst damage to journalism anyone ever caused.”

Fact-checking website Snopes also sprung into action, calling Hersh’s claim a “conspiracy” that rested on a single “omnipotent anonymous source.”

In an interview with the Radio War Nerd podcast, Hersh fired back, claiming

The New York Times and the Washington Post have just ignored me. What they think I should do is use [the source’s] name, get him put in jail, stuff like that, which would end my career. I’ve been doing this for 50 years. My Lai started in 1969, and I will tell you something…I will protect people.

He also noted that he actually cultivated multiple corroborative sources for the story.


A STORY LIKE NO OTHER

According to Hersh’s source, last June, under the cover of an international NATO exercise happening in the area, U.S. Navy divers based in Panama City, Florida, planted remotely-triggered C4 explosives on a section of the pipeline. Three months later, the order was given to blow it up. Navy divers were assisted by the Norwegian military, who found the perfect location; calm and shallow water just off the coast of Bornholm Island, Denmark.

An earlier Nord Stream pipeline was already supplying Germany and Western Europe with Russian gas, providing a cheap and readily available source of fuel to heat and power the continent. With the introduction of the second pipeline, Europe would have become effectively energy independent of the United States. This raised the possibility that the continent might move in a neutral or independent political direction too, creating a powerful regional bloc of its own, rather than the current Atlanticist (i.e. U.S.-dominated) model that prevails. The 760-mile pipeline travels along the Baltic Sea floor, from western Russia to northeastern Germany, transporting liquified natural gas into homes and businesses throughout Europe. As such, it represents a vastly more cost-efficient form of energy than purchasing American liquified national gas or fracked oil—something Washington had been leaning hard on Europe to switch to.

Successive White House administrations had long made their opposition to the new, multi-billion dollar project publicly known. But Hersh alleges that the Biden administration began planning the sabotage in 2021, many months before the Russian invasion of Ukraine.

The choice to use Navy divers, rather than members of America’s Special Operations Command, was reportedly down to secrecy. Unlike Special Ops, by law, Congress, the Senate and House leadership do not need to be briefed about Navy operations. “The Biden Administration was doing everything possible to avoid leaks,” Hersh wrote.

Nevertheless, many in the know had cold feet. “Some working guys in the CIA and the State Department were saying, ‘Don’t do this. It’s stupid and will be a political nightmare if it comes out,’” Hersh’s source said.

In the end, Biden himself gave the mission the green light, and three months after it was completed, Washington pressed the button, destroying the pipeline.

Image
Tubes are stored in Sassnitz, Germany, during construction of the natural gas pipeline Nord Stream 2, Dec. 6, 2016. Jens Buettner | DPA via AP

In the immediate aftermath of the destruction, Western corporate media were coy about the culprit, even suggesting that Vladimir Putin himself was by far the number one suspect in the case. They also actively suppressed any other opinions on the matter, sometimes to a near-comical degree. Columbia University professor Jeffrey Sachs, for example, was abruptly taken off the air by Bloomberg as he ran through circumstantial evidence suggesting Western forces could be behind the attack.

CAN WE BELIEVE THIS?

Hersh’s account adds weight to Sachs’ assertions. But is it credible? On the one hand, Hersh is a veteran investigative journalist who has built a stellar reputation over decades, working closely with government sources to break important news stories. On the other, his bombshell relies almost entirely on unnamed sources. It is standard journalistic practice to name and check sources. The Society of Professional Journalists’ code of ethics state that “reporters should use every possible avenue to confirm and attribute information before relying on unnamed sources,” and that they must “always question sources’ motives before promising anonymity,” because too many “provide information only when it benefits them.”

Without a name to go with a claim, there are no consequences for sources (or journalists, for that matter) simply lying to further their agenda. Hersh, therefore, is implicitly asking readers to trust his credibility and his judgement. Moreover, Hersh’s sources are government and intelligence insiders. Part of their role is placing false or inaccurate information into the public domain to further the state’s agenda. Journalistically speaking, then, anonymous government or intelligence officials are about the least credible sources imaginable.

Nevertheless, it seems clear that, given Washington’s war on whistleblowers, no source would ever publicly disclose this sort of information, unless they were ready to risk decades in prison. Therefore, they could reasonably qualify for anonymity.

Greene took a nuanced position on the story’s credibility, stating,

Is everything Hersh alleged correct? While it would surprise me if there were evidence of any other power being behind the pipeline explosion—which would mean Hersh’s report is a complete fabrication—it would not be surprising if a few of Hersh’s details don’t line up, but that is common in journalism, and not always the result of bad faith or incompetence.

“The thing to remember is Hersh’s sources are in the world of military and intelligence. They will lie, exaggerate, obfuscate—and of course get things wrong by mistake,” Greene added,

But The compartmentalized nature of any bureaucracy—and the intelligence world especially—means that the full picture is sometimes murky, even to those considered to be ‘in the know’. The fact that Hersh’s source knows so much detail is remarkable, but certainly not implausible given the history of high-level leakers.


WHO BENEFITS?
If the United States did indeed sabotage Nord Stream II, it was one of the least well-hidden and most signposted attacks in history. The U.S. and NATO had, for years, publicly made clear that they were exploring options to stop the project.

A few weeks before the Russian invasion last February, Biden summoned German Chancellor Olaf Scholz to the White House, where the president made him participate in a bizarre press conference in which Biden stated,

If Russia invades–that means tanks or troops crossing the border of Ukraine–then there will be no longer a Nord Stream II. We will bring an end to it.

The event had the air of an adult chastising a misbehaving child, yet Biden was, in effect, telling Scholz to his face that his country’s infrastructure might face a U.S. attack.

To be fair to the president, he was merely repeating what many in his administration had been publicly saying for months. Both Victoria Nuland and State Department Spokesperson Ned Price had independently stated that,

one way or another, Nord Stream II will not move forward.

Image
Police accompany a protest against sanctions on Russia while a banner with the inscription “Open Nordstream 2 immediately” is held, September 05, 2022. Sebastian Willnow | DPA via AP

Likewise, after the attack, the U.S. barely tried to hide its satisfaction. “This is a tremendous opportunity” Anthony Blinken beamed. The Secretary of State continued,

It’s a tremendous opportunity to once and for all remove the dependence on Russian energy, and thus to take away from Vladimir Putin the weaponization of energy as a means of advancing his imperial designs. That’s very significant and that offers tremendous strategic opportunity.

Other major officials thought U.S. culpability for the blast was so obvious that they assumed that they would take credit for it, rather than claim Russia carried out a false flag attack. Member of the European Parliament and former Foreign Minister of Poland, Radek Sikorski, for example, tweeted out a picture of the blast with the words “Thank you, USA”. Sikorski, married to U.S. national security state insider Anne Applebaum, later deleted his post.

For Greene, the United States is near the top of the list of potential culprits. As he explained,

The charge of U.S. complicity is supported by a good deal of circumstantial evidence: The clearest answer to the ‘cui bono’ [who benefits?] question is obviously the U.S. Even before Hersh’s reporting, German officials reportedly said they were open to the idea of Western complicity. So in that sense, Hersh’s reporting is in line with what we already know (and what the mainstream media refuses to seriously discuss).

Certainly, Washington has benefited greatly from the explosion. Its major competitor (Russia) has been seriously economically weakened, and European purchases of expensive American liquified natural gas have more than doubled since last year. Norway, too, has gained from the blast, and is now Germany’s principal supplier of gas, allowing it to make billions in profits.


A REPORTER LIKE NO OTHER

Born in 1937 into a working-class Jewish immigrant family, Hersh cut his teeth as a crime reporter in early 1960s Chicago. He first came to national attention in 1969, however, when he exposed the massacre of hundreds of Vietnamese civilians by U.S. troops at My Lai—a scoop that won him the Pulitzer Prize. His revelations were far from welcomed in establishment media, though, and he had to fight to get even a small startup newswire to take a chance on his story.

In 1974, Hersh again caused a national scandal after exposing a massive Nixon-era CIA spying operation targeting hundreds of thousands of left-wing activists, anti-war dissidents and other anti-establishment figures. Again, far from being heralded, the majority of the corporate press attempted to defend the national security state and discredit him and his reporting.

Thirty years later, he dropped yet another bombshell on the American public, exposing the U.S.’ widespread torture of Iraqi prisoners at Abu Ghraib prison.

Whether it was reporting on the U.S.’ role in the 1973 coup in Chile or undermining the Obama administration’s claims on chemical weapons attacks in Syria, Hersh has courted controversy and attracted flak throughout his career. Yet his fearlessness has won him respect the world over. As journalist Glenn Greenwald stated,

Seymour Hersh is beyond any reasonable dispute one of the two or three most accomplished, important and courageous journalists of his generation. Very few journalists on the planet—and virtually none who still work inside the nation’s largest media corporations—can even get close to him when it comes to having broken more major, history-changing stories.

SEVERE CONSEQUENCES

It is for this reason that Hersh’s reporting is so important—and why corporate media’s steadfast refusal to cover it is so noteworthy. If Hersh is correct, the United States and Norway essentially attacked their supposed NATO allies, something that could have gigantic geopolitical implications. Article 5 of NATO’s treaty states that if a NATO member is attacked, then all other NATO members must defend said country. Several NATO members, including the United Kingdom and France, possess nuclear weapons.

Of course, NATO will not declare war on the United States, precisely because it is, since its very inception, an unequal alliance. As Lord Ismay, the organization’s first secretary general, explained, “NATO’s role is to keep the Russians out, the Germans down and the Americans in”. In other words, it is a U.S.-dominated confederation meant to stifle the pan-European project that sought to reorient the continent away from serving the U.S. and towards becoming an independent regional bloc.

While the culprit of the attacks still remains in doubt, many of the consequences are not.

Germans—like much of Europe—have had to endure freezing winters amid enormous fuel price spikes. The dearth of energy has helped spark double-digit inflation in Germany that has eroded the savings of tens of millions of people. Energy costs are causing vast numbers of businesses to permanently close and presents a crisis of competitiveness for European industry, which is struggling to compete with American and Asian manufacturers enjoying cheap fuel.

Moreover, huge numbers of European businesses are closing or reducing their domestic workforce in favor of moving production to the U.S., where, alongside cheaper energy costs, the Biden administration is offering them financial incentives to do so. The European Union has accused Washington of breaching World Trade Organization rules.

Thus, it could be said that the invasion of Ukraine has marked a turning point in geopolitical history, whereby the United States is not only carrying out a proxy war against Russia, but engaged in an economic war against the entirety of Europe. If Hersh’s Nord Stream story is true, it could send a shockwave throughout Europe and should cause long held beliefs about the nature of Europe’s relationship with the United States to be challenged. Therefore, given the massive negative consequences of all this for Washington, perhaps it is no surprise that the revelation will not be televised.

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Re: Censorship, fake news, perception management

Post by blindpig » Fri Feb 17, 2023 3:55 pm

You Have To Be Trusted By The People That You Lie To: Notes From The Edge Of The Narrative Matrix

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The widespread refusal to accept that the US government bombed the Nord Stream pipelines is based solely on the faith-based belief that the US government would never do something so evil, despite its having done many things that are far more evil than this right out in the open.

“Okay sure they’ve been spending the last few years helping Saudi Arabia create mountains of child corpses in Yemen, but blowing up a pipeline? That would be a step too far!”

So much government nefariousness hides behind the completely unevidenced assumption “Oh, our leaders would never do anything THAT bad!” It’s a belief that is based on literally nothing. It’s believed because it is comfortable.

You only get one shot at preventing nuclear war. There will be no do-overs. There will be no course-correction. There will be no learning from mistakes that were made. This is it. Our one and only chance. We’re living it.

Is it good enough? Are we using our one shot responsibly?

If the mushroom clouds turn up, will anyone honestly be able to tell themselves that our leaders did everything they could to prevent this from happening, and that we the rank-and-file citizenry did everything we could to pressure them into navigating wisely around this threat?

I personally don’t think so. I think if we meet our end that way it will be the result of a bunch of humans playing with armageddon weapons in an extremely reckless and irresponsible way with virtually no resistance from the public, because we didn’t like thinking about it much.



The worst thing about Australia is America. All of the most destructive and dangerous things our country has done in recent decades, and all the most destructive and dangerous things it continues to do, have been the result of our role in the US-centralized empire.



Hey I’ve got a smart idea, let’s make laws that require corporations to act like sociopaths, pursuing profit without any consideration for morality or human wellbeing, then let’s allow our entire civilization to be ruled by corporations.

Oh cool we already did that, good thinking.

The fact that Biden has explicitly said the US will go to war to defend Taiwan, and that it won’t go to war to defend the far less geostrategically crucial Ukraine, should show you that the US does not go to war to defend human interests but to defend its own interests.

The biggest problem with the western anti-war movement is that there is no western anti-war movement. All the other problems you think you’re seeing in your “anti-war movement” are at best a very, very distant second to the fundamental problem that your movement has no movement. There’s no good reason to spend your energy worrying if the peace movement is doing it wrong or including the wrong people or not organizing correctly if there is no meaningful peace movement. Focus on fixing that problem first — on creating movement rather than creating inertia and sectarian squabbling.



There’s this Pink Floyd line that’s been rattling around in my head, “You have to be trusted by the people that you lie to.” Because it’s so true; you can’t deceive people who don’t trust you. Propaganda only works if people don’t know it’s happening — if they don’t think of its source as untrustworthy.

That’s why it gives me hope that trust in the mass media is plunging to historic lows: if people sufficiently distrust those who lie to them, then those lies won’t take root in their minds anymore. Without trust, the propaganda machine can’t function.

All our world’s troubles are ultimately due to propaganda; people only consent to status quo systems which hurt their interests because their consent is manufactured via propaganda. And that propaganda only works because of public trust in the messengers.

We can fight this by working to exacerbate public distrust in the institutions that manufacture our consent, spreading public awareness of the fact that everything we’ve been taught to believe about our nation, our government and our world is a lie. All positive changes in human behavior — whether individual or collective — are always preceded by an expansion of consciousness. Make people more aware that they are being deceived, and the liars will no longer be trusted by the people they lie to.

Trust in the mass media has never been lower, meanwhile our ability to amplify our own voices and share ideas and information has never been higher. We can use this opportunity to free the collective mind from the chains of propaganda, so that we can finally get real change.

https://caitlinjohnstone.com/2023/02/17 ... ve-matrix/

******

Did the US Blow Up Nord Stream If There is No Media to Report It?
Margaret Kimberley, BAR Executive Editor and Senior Columnist 15 Feb 2023

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“The Norwegian navy was quick to find the right spot, in the shallow water a few miles off Denmark’s Bornholm Island” (Image: Seymour Hersh Substack)

A respected investigative journalist explains how the U.S. sabotaged the Nord Stream pipelines. But corporate media working in service to the state ignore the story and endanger the world.

“If a tree falls in the forest and no one is around to hear it, does it make a sound?” The idea behind this old thought experiment should not be relegated to the realm of philosophy. Present day reality can be used in place of hypothetical falling trees. If the United States blows up the Nord Stream pipelines but the media ignores it, did the attack ever happen?

Seymour Hersh has all of the credentials that usually give one gravitas in the world of journalism. As a freelance reporter he exposed the U.S. army’s 1969 massacre of Vietnamese civilians at My Lai and won a Pulitzer Prize for his efforts. He later worked at the New York Times and reported on high profile stories such as the Watergate revelations, and the CIA coup against the government of Chile. In 2004 Hersh exposed torture of Iraqis at Abu Ghraib prison for The New Yorker.

None of these accomplishments helped Hersh when he recently provided evidence of what had long been obvious, that the Biden administration blew up the Nord Stream pipelines on September 26, 2022. In a 5,200 word article published on his Substack entitled How America Took Out the Nord Stream Pipeline , Hersh utilized highly placed sources who presented as one might say the “receipts” of how the deed was done.

Joe Biden and his foreign policy team at the State Department, National Security Agency, and the Central Intelligence Agency first discussed the operation one year before carrying it out, and months before Russia’s special military operation in Ukraine began. The fear of deepening integration between Russia and Germany was the cause of alarm. They wanted to end Europe’s resource and financial connections to Russia, and decided that exploding the means of transporting natural gas was a good idea. According to Hersh’s source(s) the plot was carried out with help from Norway, a NATO member nation that made itself the sole source of natural gas in the region by helping in the attack. The current Secretary General of NATO, Jens Stoltenberg, was formerly a prime minister of Norway.

The U.S. had the motive, means, and opportunity and spent many months confessing to the plot and then to the crime after it took place. In February 2022 Biden pledged to stop the Nord Stream 2 project and added for good measure, “I promise you we’ll be able to do it.” After the explosion Secretary of State Antony Blinken said , “It’s a tremendous opportunity to once and for all end the dependence on Russian energy.” Under Secretary of State Victoria Nuland smugly said at a Senate hearing, “Senator Cruz, like you I am and I think the administration is very gratified to know that Nord Stream 2 is now as you like to say, a hunk of metal at the bottom of the sea.”

Hersh’s article was a sensation online when it was published on February 8, 2023 but it has been ignored by major corporate media ever since. One has to ask if it really happened when the New York Times, Washington Post and television networks ignore what ought to be a huge news story.

It isn’t hard to understand why the same individuals and institutions who act as state mouthpieces would want to sweep Hersh’s reporting under the rug. For months they have acted as scribes instead of as journalists. The days when they would compete to break a scoop that a president wanted covered up are long gone. They now go along with establishment narratives, and promote imperialism as much as the people they are tasked with covering and confronting. Not one person asked about Hersh’s revelations at the daily white house press briefing the day after it was published.

Not only have the media ignored what Hersh reported but Republicans who claim to oppose Biden and the Democrats have also been silent. There are impeachable offenses committed in Hersh’s account but the people who should be asking questions have demurred. Republicans were as eager as Democrats to end Nord Stream’s existence. The word collusion which was bandied about so much in recent years is apropos here and that means the Hersh story is now at the bottom of the sea politically.

Biden is the fox in charge of the hen house, preparing to ask congress for the biggest defense budget in history, in large part to replenish the weapons used in Ukraine. The people who are asked to accept austerity for themselves are largely ignorant of how the conflict started and why their money is used for every purpose except for those that benefit them.

The Nord Stream sabotage is not the only news story which has been deep sized. The decision to sabotage Nord Stream was very reckless, and a sign that Biden and his team are willing to risk a wider war in order to do what they cannot, weaken Russia or get Vladimir Putin out of office, or destroy Russia economically. At the very moment that people in this country need to know the hard truth, it is being kept from them.

So complete is the indoctrination that Biden’s obvious instability is never discussed, even when the public see it for themselves unfiltered. At the State of the Union address he made this odd remark , “Name me a world leader who'd change places with Xi Jinping! Name me one! Name me one!" The strange outburst was never given the attention that it deserved.

The media are behaving in a manner that violates their own ethics and that may in fact be criminal. Lest anyone forget, the post-World War II Nuremberg trials charged the German press with committing “propaganda as an instrument of war.” Now in the nuclear age the media in what is known as the “collective west” are acting in a similar fashion, covering up crimes and repeating lies as truth in the name of making and continuing war.

The Biden administration did sabotage Nord Stream whether the media say so or not. Their lack of attention doesn’t change facts, but it does disappear them and that is incredibly dangerous to the entire world.

https://www.blackagendareport.com/did-u ... -report-it
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Re: Censorship, fake news, perception management

Post by blindpig » Sat Feb 18, 2023 2:56 pm

Murdoch Propaganda Pushes Australia To Double Its Military Budget For War With China

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In the latest escalation in Australia’s increasingly forceful campaign to manufacture consent for war with China, the Murdoch-owned Sky News Australia has aired a jaw-droppingly propagandistic hour-long special which advocates a dramatic increase in the nation’s military spending.

Australians are uniquely vulnerable to propaganda because our nation has the most concentrated media ownership in the western world, the lion’s share of it by Rupert Murdoch, who has well-documented ties to US government agencies going back decades. The propaganda campaign against China has gotten so aggressive here in recent years that I’ve repeatedly had complete strangers start babbling at me about the Chinese threat in casual conversation, completely out of the blue, within minutes of our first meeting each other.

The Sky News special is one of the most brazenly propagandistic things I have ever witnessed in any news media, with its opening minutes featuring footage of bayonet-wielding Chinese troops marching while ominous cinematic Bad Guy music plays loudly over the sound of the marching. In its promotional clip for the special, Sky News Australia tinged all footage pertaining to China in red to show how dangerous and communist they are. These are not decisions that are made with the intention of informing the public, these are decisions that are made with the intention of administering war propaganda.


The first expert Sky News brings on to tell viewers about the Chinese menace is Mick Ryan, an Adjunct Fellow at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, which is funded by military-industrial complex entities like Raytheon, Boeing, Lockheed Martin and Northrop Grumman, and is also directly funded by the US government and its client states, including Australia and Taiwan. Sky News of course makes no mention of this immense conflict of interest while manufacturing consent for increased military spending, calling Ryan simply a “former major general.” This is on the same level of journalistic malpractice as running an article by Colonel Sanders on the health benefits of fried chicken but calling him “Harland David Sanders, former fry cook.”

The next expert Sky News presents us with is Australian former major general Jim “The Butcher of Fallujah” Molan, who oh-so-sadly passed away last month. I’ve written about Molan previously specifically because the Australian media love citing him in their propaganda campaign against China, last time when he was pushing the ridiculous claim that China is poised to launch an invasion of Australia.

The other experts Sky News brings in are former CIA Director and US Secretary of Defense Leon Panetta, Taiwan’s Foreign Minister Joseph Wu, Taiwan’s Director of Chinese Affairs Dr Lai Chung, Japan’s ambassador to Australia Yamagami Shingo, Australian Shadow Defense Minister Andrew Hastie, and John Coyne of the Australian Strategic Policy Institute, a virulent propaganda firm which is once again funded by US-aligned governments and military-industrial complex war profiteers.

So it’s about as balanced and impartial a punditry lineup as you’d expect.



At the 8:15 mark of the special, Sky News repeats the unevidenced propaganda claim that former Chinese president Hu Jintao was politically purged during the 20th Communist Party Congress last year.

At 19:15 Jim Molan talks about the need to fight and die with our allies the Americans while patriotic cello music plays in the background.

At 21:30 we are shown images of Australia being bombed alongside the Chinese flag (very subtle, guys).

At 24:25 Sky News accidentally does a version of the “look how close they put their country to our military bases” meme with a graphic display of all the US war machinery that surrounds China. The US would never tolerate being encircled by the Chinese military like that and would immediately wage war if China tried; it’s clear that the US is the aggressor in this conflict and China is reacting defensively.

“The United States plays a major strategic role in the Indo-Pacific,” says Sky News anchor Peter Stefanovic as the screen lights up with graphics showing the military presence surrounding China. “With 375,000 personnel, there’s a vast network of operations that extend from Hawaii all the way to India.”

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At 26:30 we are shown a digital representation of China’s satellite systems in space, with the Chinese satellites colored red to help us all appreciate how evil and communist they are.

At 27:45 we are shown illustrations of how much smaller Australia’s military is than China’s or America’s to help us understand how important it is to increase the size of our nation’s war machine, ignoring the fact that Australia’s total population is a tiny fraction of either of those countries.

At 32:45 we are told that the AUKUS pact will “beef up America’s military presence in the north of Australia,” and that “America has long used Australia as a key strategic outpost,” showing images of Pine Gap and other parts of the US war machine which dot this continent. “Now, there’s more to come,” says Stefanovic, with US Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin describing the surge in US military presence we’re to expect in Australia.

At 34:10 the Australian Strategic Policy Institute guy explains why the US is so keen to use Australia in its planned confrontation with China, saying the continent’s geography puts it in “the Goldilocks location” of being close enough to China to be meaningful but far enough away that its war machinery can’t be easily struck.

At 35:15 Stefanovic warns that “our nation could quite literally be brought to its knees” if a war to the north sees shipping lanes cut off since Australia is so heavily dependent of imports. You would think this is an argument about the importance of maintaining a peaceful relationship with China, but instead it’s used to foment fear of China and argue for the need to be able to defeat it in a war.


And at 45:50 we finally get to the real purpose of this Sky News special: the need to “dramatically increase” the Australian military budget, and the need to manufacture consent for that increase. Australia currently has a military budget of $48.7 billion, a little less than two percent of the nation’s GDP. The late Butcher of Fallujah tells Sky News that “we need to at least double our defense expenditure” to four percent, and the special’s pundits openly discuss the need for Australians to be persuaded to accept this using narrative management.

“The Australian government needs to talk to the Australian people about the kinds of threats it faces,” says Mick Ryan. “It needs a more compelling narrative to convince the Australian people that they need to spend more on defense.”

“I think it is important that we are having a conversation with the Australian people which makes it clear that we live in a world which is more fragile than we have for a very long period of time,” Australian Defense Minister Richard Marles tells Sky News. “And what that is going to require is a defense posture and a defense force which is in truth gonna cost more than it has in the past. We’re gonna need to increase our defense spending.”

To be clear, this is not just a call to increase military spending, this is a call to propagandize Australians into consenting to more military spending. It’s not very often that the propaganda comes right out and explains to you why it is propagandizing you.


I always get people complaining that I focus too much on the US war machine when I live in Australia, but anyone who’s paying attention knows the behavior of the US war machine is as relevant to Australians as it is to Americans. They are beating the drums for a future war of unfathomable horror all to please a dark god known as unipolarism, and it threatens to destroy us all.

The time to start resisting is now.

https://caitlinjohnstone.com/2023/02/16 ... ith-china/
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Re: Censorship, fake news, perception management

Post by blindpig » Thu Feb 23, 2023 4:21 pm

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How social networks became a ‘subsidiary’ of the FBI and CIA
By Jonathan Cook (Posted Feb 23, 2023)

Originally published: Jonathan Cook Blog on February 20, 2023 (more by Jonathan Cook Blog)

The U.S. Congress last tried to grapple with what the country’s ballooning security services were up to nearly half a century ago.

In 1975, the Church Committee managed to take a fleeting, if far from complete, snapshot of the netherworld in which agencies such as the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), Federal Bureau of Investigations (FBI) and National Security Agency (NSA) operate.

In the aftermath of the Watergate scandal, the congressional committee and other related investigations found that the country’s intelligence services had sweeping surveillance powers and were involved in a raft of illegal or unconstitutional acts.

They were covertly subverting and assassinating foreign leaders. They had coopted hundreds of journalists and many media outlets around the world to promote false narratives. They spied on and infiltrated political and civil rights groups. And they manipulated the public discourse to protect and expand their powers.

Senator Frank Church himself warned that the might of the intelligence community could at any moment “be turned around on the American people, and no American would have any privacy left, such is the capability to monitor everything… There would be no place to hide.”

Since then, the technological possibilities to invade privacy have dramatically increased, and the reach of the intelligence agencies, especially after 9/11, has moved on in ways Church could never have foreseen.

This is why establishing a new Church Committee is long overdue. And finally, in the most controversial of circumstances and for the most partisan of reasons, some sort of revival may finally be about to happen.

A protracted battle last month within the Republican Party to elect Kevin McCarthy as the new speaker of the House of Representatives forced him to cave to the demands of his party’s right wing. Not least, he agreed to set up a committee on what is being called the “weaponisation” of the federal government.

It held its first meeting last week. The panel said its task would be to look at “the politicization of the FBI and DOJ and attacks on American civil liberties”.

Earlier, in a speech to the House on the new committee, Republican Representative Dan Bishop said it was time to cut out the “rot” in the federal government: “We’re putting the deep state on notice. We’re coming for you.”

Democrats are already decrying the committee as a tool that will be wielded in the interests of Donald Trump and his supporters, saying the Republican right wants to discredit the security services and suggest malfeasance in the treatment of the former president.

Snowballing powers
But while the committee will almost certainly end up being used to settle political scores, it may still manage to shed light on some of the terrifying new powers the security services have accrued since the Church Committee’s report.

The degree to which those powers have snowballed should be obvious to all. Documents leaked by whistleblower Edward Snowden a decade ago showed illegal mass surveillance at home and abroad by the NSA. And Julian Assange’s transparency organisation Wikileaks published dossiers not only revealing U.S. war crimes in Iraq and Afghanistan, but a huge global hacking programme by the CIA.

Notably, in what may be a sign of the power of the security agencies to inflict retribution on those challenging their might, both Assange and Snowden have suffered dire consequences.

Snowden has been forced into exile in Russia, one of the few jurisdictions where he cannot be extradited to the U.S. and locked away. Assange has been jailed as U.S. authorities seek his extradition, so he can be disappeared into a maximum-security prison for the rest of his life.

Now, in an unlikely turn of events, a billionaire has opened another window on covert manipulations by the security services—on this occasion in relation to social media platforms and the U.S. electoral process. The key players this time are the FBI and the Department of Homeland Security (DHS), set up by former President George W Bush’s administration in the wake of the 9/11 attacks.

After he bought the social network Twitter last year, Elon Musk gave a handful of independent journalists access to its corporate archives. In a continuing series of investigations named the Twitter Files, published as long threads on the platform, these journalists have been making sense of what was going on under Twitter’s previous owners.

The bottom line is that, after Trump’s election, U.S. security agencies—aided by political pressure, especially from the Democratic Party—aggressively wormed their way into Twitter’s decision-making processes. Other major social media platforms appear to have made similar arrangements.

A ‘nothingburger’?
The Twitter Files suggest a rapidly emerging but hidden partnership between state intelligence services, Silicon Valley, and traditional media, to manipulate the national conversation in the U.S.—as well as much of the rest of the world.

The parties in this alliance justify to each other their meddling in U.S. politics—concealed from public view—as a necessary response to the rapid rise of a new populism. Trump and his supporters had come to dominate the Republican Party, and a populist left headed by Senator Bernie Sanders had made limited inroads into the Democratic Party.

Social media attracted particular concern from the security services because it was seen as the vehicle that had unleashed this wave of popular discontent. According to a report in the Intercept, one FBI official remarked last year that “subversive information on social media could undermine support for the U.S. government”.

The national security state, it seems, viewed an alliance with the Big Tech private sector as an opportunity to protect the old guard of politics, particularly in the Democratic Party. Figures such as President Joe Biden and former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi were seen as a safe pair of hands, positioned to preserve the legitimacy of a turbo-charged, neoliberal capitalism, and the forever wars that have been the lifeblood of the intelligence community.

This partnership has served all sides well. Silicon Valley has been the career of choice for many liberals who believe that progress is best pursued through technological means that depend on social stability and political consensus. Populism and the polarisation it engenders naturally discomfort them.

And both the security services and more centrist politicians in the Republican and Democratic parties understand that they are in the firing line in populist politics for decades-long failures: a growing polarisation of wealth between rich and poor, a creaking US economy, depleted or non-existent welfare services, the ability of the rich to buy political influence, the constant loss of treasure and life in seemingly pointless wars fought in far-off lands, and a media that rarely addresses the concerns of ordinary people.

Rather than focusing on the real causes of growing anger and anti-establishment sentiment, the security services offered politicians and Silicon Valley a more comforting and convenient narrative. The populists—on the right and left—were not articulating a frustration with a failing U.S. political and economic system. They were working to sow social discontent to advance the interests of Russia.

Or as the minutes of a DHS meeting last March recorded, the new focus was on curbing “subversive data utilized to drive a wedge between the populace and the government”.

This strategy reached its zenith with “Russiagate”, years of evidence-free hysteria promoted by the intelligence community and the Democratic Party. The central claim was that Trump was only able to defeat his Democratic rival Hillary Clinton in the 2016 presidential election because of collusion with Moscow, and Russian influence operations through social media.

As in a game of whack-a-mole, any signs of misconduct or criminality by the security services, or systemic failures by the U.S. political class, were now knocked down as “Russian disinformation”.

Snowden’s exile to Russia—the only choice left to him—was used to discredit his whistleblowing on the NSA. And the disclosures by Assange and Wikileaks of war crimes and lawbreaking by the intelligence community were effectively negated by a supposed collusion with “Russian hackers” in revealing corruption in the Democratic Party during the 2016 election.

In practice, claims of “Russian disinformation” simply served to further polarise U.S. politics.

The key issues raised by the Twitter Files—of deep-state collusion with the tech and media industries, election meddling, and narrative manipulation and deflection—have been subsumed within, and obscured by, political partisanship.

Interest in the Twitter Files has been largely confined to the right. In knee-jerk fashion, Democrats have mostly dismissed the revelations as a “nothingburger”.

Climate of fear
Perhaps coincidentally, Musk has found himself transformed since his takeover of Twitter from a darling of liberals—for his Tesla electric cars—into a near-pariah. In October, the Biden administration denied reports that it was considering a national security review of his businesses in the face of Musk’s “increasingly Russia-friendly stance”. His status as the world’s richest man has rapidly collapsed alongside his reputation.

The irony is that the same security agencies that whipped up the “Russiagate” hysteria are now exposed in the Twitter Files as perpetrating the very interference of which they accused Moscow.

During the 2016 presidential election, Russia was said to have colluded with Trump and assisted him by weaponising social media to sow discord and manipulate the U.S. electorate. A subsequent official inquiry by Robert Mueller failed to stand up those allegations.


Instead, the Twitter Files indicate that it was not Russia but the FBI, DHS and CIA—the very agencies arguing that Russia threatened political order in the U.S.—that were aggressively and clandestinely seeking to influence American public opinion.

The Twitter Files suggest that it is the U.S. security state, much more than Russia, that poses the real menace to U.S. democracy. The climate of fear these agencies fuelled over supposed “Russian disinformation” not only swayed public opinion, but gave the intelligence community even greater leverage over social media networks and further licence to accumulate greater powers.

State actors are increasingly in charge of deciding who is allowed to be heard on social media—even Trump was banned while president—and what can be said. Those decisions are often taken not to prevent a crime or enforce laws, or even for the public good, but to tightly control political discourse to marginalise serious criticism of the establishment.

The fact that the collusion between social media platforms and these agencies has taken place in secret is itself an indication of the nefarious nature of what’s been going on.

Hidden pressure
The Twitter Files open a window on a phenomenon that appears to have been playing out across all social networks.

Traditionally, liberals have defended social media’s use of censorship on the grounds that these platforms are private companies that can do as they please. Their behaviour supposedly does not constitute a violation of First Amendment protections of free speech.

The reality exposed by the Twitter Files, however, is that the networks have often been responding to hidden pressure, either directly from the federal government or via its intelligence agencies, in restricting what can be said. As the Files have repeatedly noted, Twitter, like other social media, has come to function less as a private company and more as “a kind of subsidiary of the FBI”.

In 2017, at the height of the Russiagate panic, the FBI set up a Foreign Influence Task Force whose numbers soon swelled to 80 agents. Its ostensible job was to liaise with the various networks to stop alleged foreign interference in elections.

Twitter executives were soon meeting and communicating with senior FBI officials on a regular basis, while receiving an endless stream of demands for content takedowns to prevent “Russian disinformation”. The CIA appears to have attended meetings too, under the moniker of OGA or “other government agency”. Although the task force’s remit was foreign influence, it reportedly became a “conduit for mountains of domestic moderation requests, from state governments, even local police”.

Under growing pressure behind the scenes from the intelligence services, and in public from politicians, the social networks started to draw up secret blacklists, aided by information from the security services, to limit the reach of accounts or stop topics trending. The effects were often hard to miss, with Trump declaring he would investigate the practice in 2018.

In response, Twitter executives publicly denied that they practised “shadow banning”—a term for when posts or accounts are made difficult or impossible to find. In fact, Twitter had simply invented a different phrase for the exact same regime of speech suppression. They called it “visibility filtering”.

Such censorship was used not only against suspected bot accounts, or those peddling obvious misinformation. Even eminent public figures who had authority to speak on a topic were secretly targeted if they challenged key establishment narratives.

Stanford epidemiologist Jay Bhattacharya, for example, suffered from “visibility filtering” during the Covid-19 pandemic after he criticised lockdowns for inflicting harm on children. He was put on a “trends blacklist”.

Amid recent mass layoffs at Twitter, Middle East Eye was unable to contact the company for comment on these and other allegations made in the Twitter Files. The CIA had not replied by publication time, while the FBI sent a response stating:

The correspondence between the FBI and Twitter show nothing more than examples of our traditional, longstanding and ongoing federal government and private sector engagements … As evidenced in the correspondence, the FBI provides critical information to the private sector in an effort to allow them to protect themselves and their customers.

Other leading doctors who questioned government orthodoxy have also been sidelined by Twitter, the Files found, often under direct pressure from the White House or vaccine company lobbyists.

But the highest-profile casualty of the Twitter censorship regime was Trump himself. He was banned on 8 January 2021, even though staff reportedly agreed behind the scenes that they could not base such a decision on any direct violation of their rules.

Russian ‘influence’
The fallout from Russiagate drew Twitter more deeply into the embrace of the security services. In early 2018, a Republican representative, Devin Nunes, submitted a classified memo to the House Intelligence Committee detailing alleged abuses by the FBI in surveilling a figure connected to Trump.

The FBI relied on the so-called Steele dossier, which had been partly financed by Clinton and the Democratic Party but was initially presented by the media as an independent, intelligence-led inquiry verifying collusion between Trump’s team and Moscow.

News of the memo provoked a storm on social media among Trump supporters, fuelling a viral hashtag: #ReleaseTheMemo. Nunes’s allegations were verified nearly two years later by a Department of Justice inquiry. Nonetheless, at the time, Democratic politicians and the media rushed to ridicule the memo, characterising any demand for its publication as a “Russian influence operation”.

The heat was dialled up on Big Tech. Twitter’s own investigations could not pinpoint any Russian involvement, suggesting that the hashtag was trending organically, driven by VITs—Very Important Tweeters.


But Twitter executives were in no mood for a fight. Rather than take on the Democratic Party—and most likely behind it the FBI, concerned by the memo’s revelations—Twitter followed “a slavish pattern of not challenging Russia claims on the record”, noted Matt Taibbi, one of the journalists who worked on the Twitter Files.

Soon, Russia was being blamed by major media outlets for any embarrassing hashtag that went viral, such as #SchumerShutdown, #ParklandShooting and #GunControlNow. As the campaign of Russiagate claims intensified, Twitter came under ever-greater pressure for action. In 2017, it manually examined some 2,700 accounts flagged as potentially suspicious. The vast majority were cleared. Twitter suspended 22 as possible Russian accounts, while a further 179 were found to have “possible links” to those accounts.

Democratic politicians were incensed, apparently relying on intelligence sources to support their claim that social media was overrun with Russian bots. Twitter responded by setting up a “Russia task force” to investigate further, but again found no evidence of a Russian influence campaign. All it identified were a few lone-wolf posters spending limited money on ads.

Nonetheless, Twitter was plunged into a PR crisis, with politicians and establishment media accusing it of inertia. Congress threatened draconian legislation that would starve Twitter of advertising revenue. Twitter’s inability to find Russian influence accounts led to an indictment from Politico: “Twitter deleted data potentially crucial to Russia probes.” Twitter’s original investigation of the 2,700 accounts fuelled outlandish claims in the media that a “new network” of Russian bots had been discovered.

In the midst of this firestorm, Twitter suddenly changed tack, publicly stating that it would remove content “at our sole discretion”—but in truth, it was far worse than that. As Taibbi reported in one of the Twitter Files, the company decided privately to “off-board” anything “identified by the U.S. intelligence community as a state-sponsored entity conducting cyber operations”.

Twitter increasingly found itself besieged. A Twitter File released last month argues that a prominent online lobby called Hamilton 68—with ties to the intelligence community—perpetrated “a scam” about Russian disinformation.

The site elicited endless headlines in the U.S. media after indicating it had uncovered a Russian influence campaign on social media, involving hundreds of users. Media outlets published these claims as proof that the social networks were overrun with Russian bots. Hamilton 68’s staff were even invited to testify before senior congressional politicians.

Despite this furore, however, Hamilton 68 never made public the list of bots it said it had unearthed. Internal Twitter investigations revealed that almost all of those on the list were ordinary users.

The Alliance for Securing Democracy (ASD), which hosted Hamilton 68 and its successor Hamilton 2.0, issued a “fact sheet” in response to the Twitter Files denying the allegations, and suggesting that its data had been “consistently misunderstood or misrepresented” by the media and lawmakers, despite “extensive efforts to correct misconceptions at the time”. The ASD noted that it never suggested all the bots were Russian, but it was monitoring some that might have been.

Notably, Hamilton 68 was headed by a former senior FBI official. Twitter executives did not publicly stand up to the media pile-on, and found themselves given the brush-off when they tried to raise their concerns privately with reporters.

FBI ‘belly button’
In a sign of how close the relationship between the FBI and Twitter had grown, Twitter recruited as legal counsel James Baker, the FBI’s former top lawyer. Baker had been one of the central figures in the efforts to paint a picture—again now discredited—of collusion between Trump and Moscow.

Plenty of others who left the FBI headed straight to Twitter. They included Dawn Burton, the former deputy chief of staff to FBI head James Comey, who initiated the Russiagate investigation. She became Twitter’s director of strategy in 2019.

Similar ties existed with the British security services. Twitter recruited Gordon MacMillan as its top editorial adviser on the Middle East. It was a part-time post, as he was serving at the same time in the British military’s psychological warfare unit, the 77th Brigade.

By 2020, as the pandemic unfolded, other government agencies saw their chance to wage a parallel campaign against Twitter focused on China’s supposed efforts to spread Covid-19 disinformation. An intelligence arm of the State Department, the Global Engagement Center, using federal government data, alleged that 250,000 Twitter accounts were amplifying “Chinese propaganda”, once again to sow disorder. Those accounts included the Canadian military and CNN.

Emails between Twitter executives show that they had their own views about what the campaign hoped to achieve. State Department officials wanted to “insert themselves” into the consortium of agencies, such as the FBI and DHS, that were allowed to take down Twitter content.

It is telling that Twitter argued against State Department inclusion—and in terms that contrasted strongly with their approach to the FBI and DHS. State was viewed by executives as more “political” and “Trumpy”.

In the end, it was suggested that the FBI would serve as the “belly button” through which Silicon Valley would keep other government agencies informed. The result, according to the Files, was that Twitter “was taking requests from every conceivable government body”, and often in bulk. The platform almost never said no to requests to delete accounts accused of being Russian bots.

As Twitter grew more supine, even senior U.S. politicians tried to get in on the act. Adam Schiff, then head of the House Intelligence Committee, asked for a journalist he did not like to be deplatformed. Though Twitter was reluctant to accede to such requests, it “deamplified” some accounts.

As the 2020 election drew near, the flow of security-service demands became a deluge that threatened to overwhelm Twitter. Many were unrelated to foreign influence—the FBI task force’s ostensible purpose. Instead, the submissions often appear to have concerned domestic accounts. They rarely detailed law-breaking or terror threats, presumably the FBI’s main area of interest, but focused instead on much less-well-defined violations of Twitter’s “terms of service”.

Often, accounts faced “digital execution” not because what was said was verifiably disinformation, but because tweets crossed political red lines: by noting a neo-Nazi problem in Ukraine, or being too sympathetic to Venezuelan leader Nicholas Maduro or Russian President Vladimir Putin.

Laptop revelations
Once embedded in Big Tech, the security services reportedly used their powers to covertly shape the national conversation around the 2020 presidential election.

Perhaps the biggest single disclosure so far—confirming suspicions on the right—is that social media and state security agencies played a role in suppressing the so-called Hunter Biden laptop story weeks before the 2020 election.

In the run-up to the vote, the FBI task force prepared the ground by claiming to Silicon Valley executives that Russia would try to “dump” hacked information to damage Joe Biden, the Democratic candidate for president. This would supposedly be a rerun of the 2016 election, when publication of internal emails from the Democratic Party harmed the then-candidate, Hillary Clinton.

After Trump’s election, much of the Russiagate narrative grew out of evidence-free claims by the security services that those embarrassing emails, indicating political corruption among the Democratic Party leadership, were hacked by Russia.


Evidence suggesting a different explanation—that the emails were leaked by a disgruntled insider—was widely ignored. The furore provoked by the story obscured the fact that the emails, and their damning revelations about the Democratic Party, were all too real.

Based on the warnings from the intelligence community, social media platforms hurriedly blocked the Hunter Biden laptop story, which alleged problematic ties between the Biden family and foreign officials in Ukraine. Joe Biden’s officials denied any wrongdoing by the then-presidential candidate, while Hunter himself was evasive about whether the laptop belonged to him. The story, which was broken by the right-wing New York Post, was immediately declared a Russian influence operation by dozens of former intelligence officials.

But in truth, the FBI knew nearly a year before the story became public that the laptop belonged to Hunter Biden and that the information it contained was not likely forged or hacked. A Delaware computer store owner asked by Hunter Biden to repair his laptop had reported his concerns to the FBI. The agency had even subpoenaed the device.

This chain of events raises questions over whether the FBI decided to pre-empt the impacts of the laptop story, which threatened Joe Biden’s electoral chances in 2020, before the right-wing press could publish. It appears that they manipulated the media, including social networks, into assuming that any story harming Biden before the election was Russian disinformation.

Big Tech had other reasons at the time to believe the story was likely true. The New York Post had carried out the usual verification checks. Other reporters soon confirmed that the information had come from Hunter Biden’s laptop.

Nonetheless, Twitter hurriedly accepted the claim that the story violated its policy against publishing hacked material, echoing the FBI’s claim that it was Russian disinformation. Others, such as Mark Zuckerberg at Facebook, accepted the FBI’s claims on trust too, as he later admitted.

The social networks took the unprecedented step of blocking attempts to share the story on their platforms, which might have impacted the outcome of the 2020 election—something viewed by much of the Republican right as a crime against democracy, and by many Democratic Party supporters as an unfortunate necessity to defend the democratic order.

Psychological warfare
The collusion between social media platforms and the U.S. security state over Russiagate was no aberration. According to the Files, Twitter gave the Pentagon special dispensation, in violation of its own policies, to set up accounts to carry out “online psychological influence ops”.

Twitter assisted the military in “whitelisting” 52 fake Arabic-language accounts to “amplify certain messages”. These accounts promoted U.S. military objectives in the Middle East, including messages attacking Iran, supporting the Saudi-led war in Yemen, and claiming that U.S. drone strikes hit only terrorists.

By May 2020, Twitter had detected dozens more accounts the Pentagon had not disclosed that tweeted in Russian and Arabic on topics such as Syria and the Islamic State. According to Lee Fang, one of the journalists who worked on the Twitter Files:

Many emails from throughout 2020 show that high-level Twitter executives were well aware of [the Department of Defense’s] vast network of fake accounts & covert propaganda and did not suspend the accounts.

Other research has exposed an extensive Pentagon propaganda network on other social media apps, such as Facebook and Telegram.

Twitter’s indulgence of these covert Pentagon accounts contrasts strongly with its handling of media and individuals accused of being affiliated with countries considered by the U.S. government as enemy states. They are prominently labelled as such, including western dissident journalists and academics alleged to have worked with Russian, Chinese, Iranian or Venezuelan outlets.

According to research by the media watchdog group FAIR, Twitter continues to conceal the state affiliations of accounts funded by the U.S. government, including those advancing its propaganda aims in Ukraine and elsewhere. FAIR could find no examples of accounts identified as “United States state-affiliated media”, nor any labelled as such in Britain or Canada.

The group concluded:

Twitter enables U.S. propaganda outlets to maintain the pretense of independence on the platform, a tacit endorsement of U.S. soft power and influence operations … Twitter is serving as an active participant in an ongoing information war.

Thick pall of secrecy
After the Twitter Files began dropping in December, the FBI responded not by addressing the veracity of the documents, but by playing the same game as before. It accused the journalists involved of spreading “conspiracy theories” and “misinformation” intended to “discredit the agency”.

Hillary Clinton, the doyenne of the Democratic Party establishment, continues to blame Russian disinformation for her country’s woes.

The truth is that both the security services and the political establishment have far too much invested in their current, secret arrangements with the social networks to agree to change.

And the pressure to do so is not likely to increase while the U.S. continues to lurch from crisis to crisis: from the “war on terror”, to the Trump presidency, to the Covid-19 pandemic, to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. All of these crises—in their different ways, it should be noted—are the legacy of policy decisions taken by the very same actors now rebuffing scrutiny and oversight.

These crises provide the pretext not only for inaction but for ever-closer, tighter policing of the digital public square by the state—and not transparently, but under a thick pall of secrecy.

As Church warned nearly half a century ago, the biggest threat the U.S. faces is the possibility that its security agencies will turn their enormous powers inwards, against the American public. And that process is exactly what the Twitter Files document.

They show that the intelligence community has come to redefine its primary role—protecting the American public from foreign threats—to include the American public itself as part of that threat.

In 2021, one of the Biden administration’s first priorities was to unveil a National Strategy for Countering Domestic Terrorism. It described the loss of faith in government and extreme polarisation as “fueled by a crisis of disinformation and misinformation often channeled through social media platforms”.

The rise in dissatisfaction among the U.S. citizenry is not the fault of a failed political leadership or an overweening deep state, it seems. Instead, that same failed establishment views the popular backlash—and electoral discontent—in self-serving terms only, as proof of foreign meddling.

In the Twitter Files, Musk has thrown open a small window to show a little of what has been going on behind closed doors. But even that window will shut again soon enough. And then the dark will return—unless the public demands its right to know more.

https://mronline.org/2023/02/23/how-soc ... i-and-cia/
"There is great chaos under heaven; the situation is excellent."

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