Censorship, fake news, perception management

[blindpig]

How To Make Your Mind Harder For The Propagandists To Manipulate

The domestic propaganda that westerners are fed by the powerful does not typically consist of whole-cloth fabrications, but rather of distortions, half-truths, manipulated emphasis, and lies by omission.

Caitlin Johnstone
May 13, 2025

The worst mistake you can make when reading the news is to assume there’s a good reason why the mass media report on something in the way that they do. That there’s a good reason why Israel-Palestine gets framed as a complex and morally ambiguous issue with no clear path forward, even though it all looks pretty self-evident to you. That there must be a valid and legitimate reason why one story gets more coverage than a seemingly far more important story, like how the release of one Israeli-American hostage is currently getting far more news media coverage than the deliberate starvation of an entire enclave full of civilians.

In reality there is no valid and legitimate reason why such things are covered the way they are. The coverage happens in the way that it happens because it serves the information interests of Israel and the western empire, and for no other reason.

So much western ignorance is facilitated by the manipulative way the imperial media report on what’s going on in the world. People assume that because they’re not hearing about a given issue all the time or in a particularly urgent tone of reporting, it must not be an especially important matter that needs their attention. They assume that if one side of a conflict isn’t framed as being clearly in the wrong, then it must not be.

Westerners assume that if the world were experiencing another Holocaust, another Transatlantic Slave Trade, another Cuban Missile Crisis, they would hear about it in the news at an appropriate level of urgency. But that simply isn’t how it works. The only reason the western public is ever told about anything bad that happens at a high level of frequency and urgency is when it is convenient for the western empire, like when Russia invaded Ukraine. When that happened it was the main story in every western outlet for ages, and Russia was clearly framed as the evil aggressor, with all the NATO aggressions which provoked the invasion going completely unmentioned.

When people hear the word “propaganda” they tend to think it means the same thing as “lies”, but that’s not accurate. The domestic propaganda that westerners are fed by the powerful does not typically consist of whole-cloth fabrications, but rather of distortions, half-truths, manipulated emphasis, and lies by omission.

Most of the worst things the US and its allies are doing in the world are reported accurately by the western press at certain times and in certain publications, but they simply are not given any emphasis and amplification after those brief mentions. If you look at the hyperlinks I cite in my articles to describe the criminality of the empire it’s usually either straight out of the mainstream press or some other independent author who’s citing mainstream news reporting. The difference is that I regularly spotlight those admissions, while the imperial media will mention them once halfway down an article somewhere and then let the daily news churn carry it away down the memory hole.

Western propaganda doesn’t consist so much of manipulating what gets reported but how it gets reported. How often something gets mentioned. How often the perpetrator of an abuse is explicitly named. The type of language used to describe a given offense. These adjustments might sound insignificant when they are described, but when put into practice across the board they are extremely effective at shaping public perception of world affairs.

The only way to get around this is to maintain an acute awareness of what’s being reported while ignoring distorting factors like frequency, emphasis and tone. You have to just focus on the raw data of what’s being reported about what the empire is up to from day to day without allowing your perception to be colored by the way in which that data is reported. If you come across a key piece of information about the empire’s criminality you’ve got to hold onto it and remember its significance for yourself, because the imperial press sure aren’t going to remind you. They’re going to be acting like it never happened by next week.

It’s bizarre once you start noticing how much of a disconnect there is between reality and the mass media’s reporting on world events. They’ll occasionally mention actual important things, but there’s no accurate sense of proportionality to any of it. It’s like if you were at a restaurant with a friend and a waiter’s uniform caught fire, and your friend just casually mentioned “Oh that guy’s on fire” before going back to talking about the meal for the rest of the conversation while the guy burned to death at the other end of the room. It is utterly surreal.

So one of the most important things you need to do to maintain a truth-based worldview is to take complete control over your own understanding of the importance of the pieces of information which come across your field of vision. You can’t rely on others to tell you how important they are, because all the most amplified and influential voices in our society are working to manipulate your understanding of their importance, and most ordinary people you’ll interact with are being manipulated by those voices to some extent. Public political discourse is overwhelmingly dominated by these distortions.

You’ve got to interpret the urgency and importance of information for yourself. By standing on your own two feet and looking at the raw data with fresh eyes before it gets jumbled around by the imperial spin machine, you make your mind much harder to bend to the will of the empire.

https://caitlinjohnstone.com.au/2025/05 ... anipulate/

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Jonathan Cook: BBC Mystifies Starvation in Gaza
May 12, 2025

The public-service broadcaster presents Israel’s clear crime against humanity as a highly complicated geopolitical matter its audience cannot hope to understand.


An entrance to the BBC broadcasting house in London. (Edwardx, Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 3.0)

By Jonathan Cook
Jonathan-Cook.net

You can tell how bad levels of starvation now are in Gaza — as the population there begins the third month of a complete aid blockade by Israel — because last week the BBC finally dedicated a serious chunk of its main news programme, the News at Ten, to the issue.

But while upsetting footage of a skin-and-bones, 5-month-old baby was shown, most of the segment was, of course, dedicated to confusing audiences — by two-sidesing Israel’s genocidal programme of starving 2 million-plus Palestinian civilians.

Particularly shocking was the BBC’s failure in this extended report to mention even once the fact that Israel’s prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, has been a fugitive for months from the International Criminal Court, which wants him on trial for crimes against humanity. Why? For using starvation as a weapon of war against the civilian population.

I have yet to see the BBC, or any other major British media outlet, append the status “wanted war crimes suspect” when mentioning Netanyahu in stories. That is all the more unconscionable on this occasion, in a story directly related to the very issue — starving a civilian population — he is charged over.

Was mention of the arrest warrant against him avoided because it might signal a little too clearly that the highest legal authorities in the world attribute starvation in Gaza directly to Israel and its government, and do not see it — as the British establishment media apparently do — as some continuing, unfortunate “humanitarian” consequence of “war”?

Predictably misleading too was BBC Verify’s input. It provided a timeline of Israel’s intensified blockade that managed to pin the blame not on Israel, even though it is the one blocking all aid, but implicitly on Hamas.

Verify’s reporter asserted that in early March Israel “blocked humanitarian aid, demanding that Hamas extend a ceasefire and release the remaining hostages.” He then jumped to March 18, stating: “Israel resumed military operations.”


(Screenshot)

Viewers were left — presumably intentionally — with the impression that Hamas had rejected a continuation of the ceasefire and had refused to release the last of the hostages.

None of that is true. In fact, Israel never honoured the ceasefire. It continued to attack Gaza and kill civilians throughout. But worse, Israel’s supposed “extension” was actually its unilateral violation of the ceasefire by insisting on radical changes to the terms that had already been agreed, and which included Hamas releasing the hostages.

Israel broke the ceasefire precisely so it had the pretext it needed to return to starving Gaza’s civilians — and the hostages whose safety it proclaims to care about — as part of its efforts to make them so desperate they are prepared to risk their lives by forcing open the short border with neighboring Sinai sealed by Egypt.

Last week, an Israeli government minister once again made clear what the game plan has been from the very start. “Gaza will be entirely destroyed,” Bezalel Smotrich, the finance minister, said. Gaza’s population, he added, would be forced to “leave in great numbers to third countries” — in other words, Israel intends to carry out what the rest of us would call the ethnic cleansing of Palestinians, as it has been doing continuously for eight decades.

What is the point of the BBC having a Verify service — supposedly there to fact-check and ensure viewers get only the unvarnished truth — when its team are themselves peddling gross distortions of the truth?

The BBC and its Verify service are not keeping viewers informed. They are propagandising them into believing a clear crime against humanity by Israel is, in fact, highly complicated geopolitics that audiences cannot hope to understand.

The establishment media’s aim is to so confuse audiences that they will throw up their hands and say: “To hell with Israel and the Palestinians! They are as bad as each other. Leave it to the politicians and diplomats to sort out.”

In any other circumstance, it would strike you as obvious that starving children en masse is morally abhorrent, and that anyone who does it, or excuses it, is a monster. The role of the BBC is to persuade you that what should be obvious to you is, in fact, more complicated than you can appreciate.

There may be skin-and-bones babies, but there are also hostages. There may be tens of thousands of children being slaughtered, but there is also a risk of anti-Semitism. Israeli officials may be calling for the eradication of the Palestinian people, but the Jewish state they run needs to be preserved at all costs.

If we could spend five minutes in Gaza without the constant, babbling distractions of these so-called journalists, the truth would be clear. It’s a genocide. It was always a genocide.

https://consortiumnews.com/2025/05/12/j ... n-in-gaza/

[blindpig]

One Side Routinely Uses Human Shields in Gaza—But Not the Side That’s Usually Blamed
Gregory Shupak

Since the earliest days of the post–October 7 US/Israeli genocide in Gaza, corporate media outlets have claimed that Hamas uses Palestinian civilians as human shields. Protocol 1 of the Geneva Convention characterizes the practice thusly:

The presence or movements of the civilian population or individual civilians shall not be used to render certain points or areas immune from military operations, in particular in attempts to shield military objectives from attacks or to shield, favour or impede military operations.

In other words, when civilians are used to shield military targets, attacking those targets can be legal under international law, but the attacker, as Al Jazeera (11/13/23) noted, still has to adhere to

the principles of distinction and proportionality: An army has the duty to target only the enemy, even if this means facing greater risks to minimize civilian casualties; and to weigh the military value of each attack against the civilian casualties that are likely to result from it.

Stunning assertion

Jewish Currents (7/17/24): “By casting all the protected sites and people it has bombed as “shields,” Israel thus seeks to shift the responsibility for its mass killings of civilians and sweeping destruction of civilian infrastructure onto Hamas—absolving itself of blame and legal accountability.”

Israel and its backers, however, have completely distorted this concept, in an apparent attempt to give their massacres in Gaza a veneer of legality. The scholars Nicola Perugini and Neve Gordon (Jewish Currents, 7/17/24) explained how human shielding discourse has been misapplied to Gaza:

Parties alleging the use of human shields have typically restricted the charge to limited territorial areas; in contrast, Israel has cited Hamas’s underground tunnel system to cast every square inch of Gaza as a human shield. This apparently endless multiplication of the human shielding accusation has functioned to erase the possibility of Palestinian civilianness altogether.

This corruption of the meaning of “human shields” has distorted much of the corporate media coverage of the Gaza genocide. At the outset of the October 2023 escalation in Palestine, a Boston Globe article (10/8/23) asserted that Hamas “uses its own civilians as human shields against attacks. Israel warns civilians before it launches attacks and urges that they leave conflict zones.” This was a stunning assertion, given Israel’s prolific record of deliberately killing Palestinian noncombatants, which long predates October 7, 2023 (FAIR.org, 10/13/23).

The New York Times’ editorial board (10/16/23) flatly stated that “Hamas is using the people of Gaza as human shields against Israel’s bombing campaign,” without pointing to any source documenting a single instance of this practice.

The same was true of a piece that appeared a day later in the Wall Street Journal (10/17/23), which said that “Hamas uses the inhabitants of Gaza as human shields.” It described the group as employing a “human-shield strategy.”

Evidence on one side
Such claims have two major problems. One is the lack of evidence for them, and the other is the extensive evidence of Israel using Palestinian civilians as human shields.

Consider, for example, the UN Human Rights Council (UNHRC) report on Operation Cast Lead, Israel’s US-backed 2008–09 assault on Gaza. The UN’s fact-finding mission

found no evidence to suggest that Palestinian armed groups either directed civilians to areas where attacks were being launched or forced civilians to remain within the vicinity of the attacks.

The mission did, however, find credible allegations that “Israeli troops used Palestinian men as human shields whilst conducting house searches.”

The UNHRC’s report on Israel’s 2014 offensive in Gaza, Operation Protective Edge, fell short of saying that Hamas used Palestinians as human shields. The commission said it was “disturbed by” a “report” that a Hamas spokesperson said people in Gaza should go on their roofs as a way of “shielding their homes from attack.”

The document said that “although the call is directed to residents of Gaza, it can be seen and understood as an encouragement to Palestinian armed groups to use human shields.” That’s quite different from saying that Palestinian fighters actually did compel Palestinian civilians to act as human shields.

But the report said that that’s what Israel did:

The manner in which the Israeli soldiers forced Palestinian civilians to stand in windows, enter houses/underground areas and/or perform dangerous tasks of a military nature, constitutes a violation of the prohibition against the use of human shields.

An Amnesty International report (3/26/15) on Operation Protective Edge noted that

Israeli authorities have claimed that in a few incidents, the Hamas authorities or Palestinian fighters directed or physically coerced individual civilians in specific locations to shield combatants or military objectives. Amnesty International has not been able to corroborate the facts in any of these cases.

Another important context for the human shields issue comes from the Israeli human rights group B’Tselem (11/11/17). The organization says that, since Israel occupied the West Bank and Gaza in 1967,

Israeli security forces Israeli security forces have repeatedly used Palestinians in the West Bank and in the Gaza Strip as human shields, ordering them to perform military tasks that risked their lives. As part of this policy, soldiers have ordered Palestinian civilians to remove suspicious objects from roads, to tell people to come out of their homes so the military can arrest them, to stand in front of soldiers while the latter shoot from behind them, and more. The Palestinian civilians were chosen at random for these tasks, and could not refuse the demand placed on them by armed soldiers.

This use of civilians is not an independent initiative by soldiers in the field, but the result of a decision made by senior military authorities.

‘Hamas command bunker’

By describing a raid on a hospital as an effort to “root out Hamas,” the Wall Street Journal (11/10/23) gave credence to unsubstantiated Israeli claims.

Over the course of the genocide in Gaza, corporate media have frequently ignored this body of evidence. The human shields propaganda arguably reached its apotheosis in the run-up to Israel’s November 2023 attack on Al-Shifa hospital, Gaza’s largest medical complex at the time, and during and after the assault.

A Wall Street Journal article (11/10/23) on the matter carried the headline “Israeli Forces Race to Root Out Hamas,” with the subhead “Israeli forces face one of their toughest challenges as they converge on strip’s largest hospital.” Taken together, these phrases imply that Al-Shifa has a Hamas presence that ought to be “rooted out.” The piece said that Israeli

troops have converged in the past day on the sprawling facility, which Israel contends holds a major Hamas command bunker underneath the complex, a claim Hamas has denied.

At no point did the authors mention that Israel had presented no credible evidence in support of these allegations (FAIR.org, 12/1/23).

A New York Times report (11/15/23) said that

Israel maintains that Hamas built a military command center at the hospital, using its patients and staff as human shields.

The seizure of Al-Shifa, along with whatever evidence the Israelis produce of Hamas’s military presence there, could affect international sentiment about the invasion, as well as the continuing negotiations to free the hostages captured by Hamas last month.

This passage suggests that the question is what type of evidence Israel will provide of Hamas’s supposed operations at Al-Shifa, rather than whether it has any convincing evidence at all. The piece opted to present the supposed command center as a “he said, she said” narrative, but Hamas reportedly said that they were “prepared for an international delegation to conduct a search of the hospitals and their grounds for evidence of such alleged underground tunnels and command centers” (Mondoweiss, 11/13/23).

‘A deadly lie’

Human Rights Watch (11/14/23) found that “no evidence put forward would justify depriving hospitals and ambulances of their protected status under international humanitarian law.”

Meanwhile, medical staff at the hospital denied that there was a Hamas command center under the facility (Guardian, 11/14/23). Human Rights Watch (11/14/23), for its part, said:

The Israeli military on October 27 claimed that “Hamas uses hospitals as terror infrastructures,” publishing footage alleging that Hamas was operating from Gaza’s largest hospital, Al-Shifa. Israel also alleged that Hamas was using the Indonesian Hospital to hide an underground command and control center and that they had deployed a rocket launchpad 75 meters from the hospital.

These claims are contested. Human Rights Watch has not been able to corroborate them, nor seen any information that would justify attacks on Gaza hospitals.

Nevertheless, a subsequent CNN (11/17/23) report took the “shrug and say, ‘gee, golly, we just don’t know’” approach:

Israel points to the hospital as an example of Hamas’ use of civilians as human shields.

Since launching an operation at Al-Shifa this week, the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) claimed it found a tunnel shaft and military equipment, but it has not yet shown proof of a large-scale command and control center. Hamas denies the allegations. CNN has not verified the claims of either Israel or Hamas.

CNN may not have been unable to verify either party’s claims, but they do their audience no favors by leaving out Human Right Watch’s remarks, or the following from Katrina Penney (Otago Daily Times, 11/16/23), a representative of MSF, which had personnel working at Al-Shifa:

We have seen no evidence that the hospital buildings or the compounds are being used by Hamas as a military base. In fact to the contrary; the hospital facilities have been trying to treat patients and trying to shelter civilians and their families at levels far beyond their capacity.

Excluding such testimonials gave Israel’s “command center” and “human shields” arguments unwarranted credibility. In contrast to CNN, Maureen Clare Murphy (Electronic Intifada, 11/15/23) offered a much sharper assessment of the available evidence, writing that

Israel’s own propaganda published in the aftermath of the raid shows that Netanyahu and the military’s longstanding accusation that Hamas uses Al-Shifa to shield its command center is a deadly lie.

But such honesty and precision is generally too much to ask of corporate media.

‘A sub-army of slaves’

To establish the “truth” that Hamas uses human shields, Washington Post columnist James Willick (11/14/23) quotes a Post editorial (11/5/23) criticizing Hamas for “provoking Israel militarily—while protecting its own leaders and fighters in tunnels.” By this logic, any non-suicidal military operation against Israel would involve “human shields.”

This dismal coverage of the human shields question was not limited to the reporting on Al-Shifa. Throughout the genocide, corporate media have often treated the idea that Hamas routinely uses Palestinian civilians as human shields as an established fact, while pretending that Israel doesn’t do exactly that.

Nor have media offered any proof of Hamas engaging in this practice in the post–October 7 US/Israeli rampage, as in an in-house Washington Post column (11/14/23) by Jason Willick, headlined “We Can’t Ignore the Truth That Hamas Uses Human Shields.” Hamas, he said, was “trying to increase” the number of dead Palestinian civilians.

A Newsweek op-ed (5/23/24) from Fordham University philosophy professor John Davenport referred to what he called “the stark fact” that Hamas uses “ordinary Palestinians as ‘human shields.’” While voluminous evidence of US/Israeli crimes throughout the genocide was readily available (Middle East Eye, 10/20/23, 5/16/24), Willick and Davenport failed to marshal a single report from the UN or an NGO that substantiated their claim that Hamas uses Palestinians as human shields.

Meanwhile, the Euro-Med Human Rights Monitor (7/1/24) said that, in the months since October 7, “the Israeli army’s use of Palestinian civilians as human shields has been documented on a large scale.” Haaretz (8/13/24) reported that “random Palestinians have been used by Israeli army units in the Gaza Strip for one purpose: to serve as human shields for soldiers during operations.”

Still, US media commentators like Bret Stephens (New York Times, 9/3/24) and the Journal’s editorial board (10/7/24) were more interested in making uncorroborated claims that Hamas uses Palestinians as human shields than in discussing Israel’s widespread, confirmed use of the practice.

More recently, Haaretz (3/30/25) ran an article by an anonymous senior officer in the Israeli military detailing how “in Gaza, human shields are used by Israeli soldiers at least six times a day.” The officer explains how no infantry force in the Israeli military goes into a house in Gaza before a human shield clears it, which means “there are four [human shields] in a company, 12 in a battalion and at least 36 in a brigade. We operate a sub-army of slaves.”

Blaming Palestinians for their own deaths

Reuters (4/6/25) allowed a National Security Council spokesperson to claim without contradiction that aid workers killed by Israel were “human shields for terrorism.”

Even after Haaretz published this account, the New York Times ran an op-ed (4/6/25) asserting that Hamas uses Palestinian civilians as “human shields,” as if it were Hamas that kept a slave army of Palestinians for this purpose.

Similarly, a Reuters report (4/6/25) on Israel’s March 23 massacre of 15 paramedics quoted US National Security Council spokesperson Brian Hughes, “Hamas uses ambulances and more broadly human shields for terrorism.” The piece didn’t bother pointing to the lack of proof for Hughes’ claim, nor did it inform readers that Israel uses Palestinians as human shields on a daily basis.

In the same vein, an NBC News piece (4/7/25) on the paramedics atrocity included the sentence, “The White House on Sunday said Trump held Hamas responsible for the incident because Hamas uses ambulances and ‘human shields.’” Nothing in the article cast doubt on this unsubstantiated assertion, or noted that a senior Israeli military officer had just acknowledged (Haaretz, 3/30/25) that

the highest-ranking personnel on the ground have known about the [Israeli military’s] use of [Palestinians as] human shields for more than a year, and no one has tried to stop it.

To suggest that a meaningful portion of the Palestinians killed in Gaza can be attributed to Hamas using them as human shields—lack of evidence be damned—is to blame Palestinians for their own deaths, while reducing US/Israeli responsibility for the slaughter.

The canard also demonizes Hamas, painting its leaders as brutal savages with no regard for any human life. That in turn rationalizes the US/Israeli assault on Gaza; the narrative suggests that Hamas are so brutal toward their own people that one should cheer for Israel to eradicate them, not only for Israel’s benefit, but ultimately for the Palestinians’—even at the cost of leveling Gaza and exterminating its people.

https://fair.org/home/one-side-routinel ... ly-blamed/

[blindpig]

"Adolescence": Highly Effective Propaganda
Roger Boyd
May 16, 2025

Propaganda fulfils a number of roles for the dominant ruling class, one of them being redirection “look over here, not over there” that serves to stop the populace looking too closely at underlying issues whose examination may be detrimental to the legitimacy of that ruling class. The Netflix series “Adolescence” provides a masterclass in such propaganda.

The series was created by Jack Thorne (47) and Stephen Graham (52), and it was directed by Philip Barantini (45). Thorne graduated from Cambridge and became a successful playwright and television and film writer, with many of his projects covering childhood and adolescent topics. He is a very experienced and successful script writer. He is himself physically disabled and autistic, and an activist for the disabled (and neurodivergent) within the arts and media, and has a son. Stephen Graham is a successful actor and producer who graduated from Rose Burford College of Theatre & Performance, who was awarded an OBE in the 2023 New Years Honours. He is dyslexic and has struggled with depression, and has a son and daughter. Philip Barantini is a successful actor and producer, known for his one-shot style works, working with Stephen Graham. An exceptional team, with a significant personal understanding of psychological and disability struggles, that produced an extremely professional and immersive television series.

The series is said to have been conceived by Stephen Graham in response to teenage knife crimes, including the murders of Ava White and Elianne Andam. Ava White was a 12 year old British girl that was murdered by a 14 year old boy in 2021 after an argument over a Snapchat video. The judge stated that the boy had been exposed to violence in his environment from a young age (his father beat his mother, and he was being exploited by known criminals), and that the stabbing was a result of a physical altercation with both the victim and killer (who were equally matched) being aggressive. The boy also suffered from ADHD and was being investigated for autism, attending a special school; with little help coming from social services. Nowhere did the judge mention the “Manosphere”. The judges sentencing remarks were extensive. Elianne Andam was a 15 year old girl that was stabbed to death by a 17 year old after a row over a teddy bear. The killer had a history of attacking others and brandishing a knife, was exposed to violence at a young age (had been violently abused), self-harmed, threatened suicide, spent some time in foster care (after maternal neglect) and suffers from mild autism and ADHD and exhibits traits of anti social personality disorder. The “Manosphere” was never mentioned during the trial. The judges sentencing remarks were extensive. Both killings did not show extensive pre-planning if any. Another recent case did show pre-planning, the murder of 15 year-old Holly Newton by her 16 year-old ex-boyfriend. The killer, Logan MacPhail, is autistic, has a low IQ with both speech and reading difficulties, and had been physically abused as a child. The couple had been in a relationship for 18 months and he had displayed obsessive and controlling behaviours.

Why do we need to understand these cases in detail? Because they are the supposed cases that drove the development of the series, and also reflect the reality of such extremely rare cases of teenage boys murdering teenage girls. They are quite classic cases of psychologically troubled children that experienced violence early in their real-world lives and had exhibited worrying behaviours prior to the stabbings. None had anything to do with the on-line “Manosphere”.



More recently, there have been two shocking cases of teenage girls attacking others with knives. In 2024 a 13 year-year-old girl was found guilty of attempted murder in the stabbing of two teachers and another pupil. She had stated earlier in the day that she might “do something stupid that could get me expelled” and her bedroom contained drawings that referenced one of the teachers and the pupil that was attacked, with a note saying “cut their mouths and eyes”. She had regularly carried knives to school for self-harm and had been subject to bullying. In early 2025, a 13-year-old girl was charged with the murder of a 43-year old woman.

The writers supposedly wanted to “look in the eye of modern male rage” and examine the influence of the likes of the so-called “redpiller” Andrew Tate. Without the support of extensive social science research it is extremely dangerous to link actions in the real world with interactions in an imaginary or on-line one. Such research for example, has utterly debunked any relationship between violent video games and violent real-world behaviour. So we have to be very careful when making assumptions that the consumption of “Manosphere” material creates violent misogyny. Thorne and Graham took no such care in their screen writing for Adolescence.

Warp Films (a UK independent television and film production company, set up by the founding partners of Warp Records), Matriarch Productions (Graham and his wife’s production company) and Plan B Entertainment (founded by Brad Pitt, Jennifer Aniston, Brad Grey and Kristin Hahn) produced the series for Netflix. An ensemble of highly bourgeois progressive and “edgy” media companies, which may very well have been positively pre-disposed to the focus on the “Manosphere” and “toxic masculinity”. Together with the creators and producer, they represent the bourgeois progressive “left” that will serve up many, many reasons for societal ills that tend to be divisive, ignore real grievances that some groups may have, and utterly ignore political-economic realities. “Othering” groups such as “toxic men”, “incels”, “trans-exclusionary radical feminists - TERFs” etc. The mirror image of the Othering tactics of the bourgeois conservatives. Such Othering of young men is covered well below, an Othering that both negatively affects young men and leads women to be unfoundedly fearful of all men.



In Adolescence there is no evidence of physical violence within the Miller family, no evidence of of any autism or ADHD in Jamie, no evidence of learning difficulties. No evidence of Jamie carrying out self-harm, having suicidal thoughts, having depressive episodes nor of any previous violent attacks or association with gangs. Given the details of the previous cases above, and the real life experiences of the two creators, this is extremely telling.

The middle class white killer Jamie, is shown to have made some sexually explicit comments about female models on Instagram; comments that the murdered girl Katie responded to by accusing Jamie of being an incel (cyberbullying). Katie had sent a topless photo of herself to another boy she was attracted to, who sent it to other classmates. Afterwards Jamie had asked Katie out and had been rejected by her. On this slim basis of motive, together with “online radicalization” by the “Manosphere” with Andrew Tate begin specifically mentioned, Jamie stabs Katie to death. As Nicholas Clairmont states, this whole sequence of events is “simply not psychologically plausible”. As he states the obvious that Adolescence ignores:

harming another human being in some premeditated, bloody way, like repeatedly stabbing her with a kitchen knife, is something a person has to be deeply disordered to do. Human beings just have something in us that stops us from doing things like that, which is why in boot camp soldiers have to be basically broken down and brainwashed … Jamie, while he is depicted in the show as a troubled child with an anger problem, isn’t crazy or a monster.

As he notes, Adolescence perfectly lets off the powerful and supports their policies:

Adolescence gives the country’s rulers the perfect case study without all the messiness of real life: a black police officer who does a procedurally perfect job during the arrest, a white perpetrator and victim with no problematic racial dynamics between them, and a motive that can be “addressed” by doing something that was their favourite thing to do anyway, namely censor the internet.

I do not often agree with The Spectator but here I think they accurately reflect on the misrepresentation of reality by the series and its use by interested parties to push for more censorship.



And the whole bourgeois UK establishment heartily and enthusiastically leapt to applaud the establishment-friendly moral panic driven by the show, from the bourgeois progressive critics to the media to even the Prime Minister. As Clairmont notes:

If we are going to have a moral panic - and I would suggest we do not - it should be about real life rather than a fictional show written by someone who wants to create one. Because while Adolescence is moving, incredibly well made, and full of tremendous performances from its cast, it is also propaganda.



If Adolescence had faced up to the real underlying societal issues that lead to adolescent knife crime with some of the honesty and earnestness that Alan Bleasdale did with works such as Boys From The Blackstuff, they would have had to cover such things as the immiseration of so many British families through fifty years of neoliberalism, and the evisceration of local council support services for children with psychological issues and/or subject to mistreatment. Perhaps also the social impacts of decades of mass immigration and the vast array of online porn that has been shown to affect adolescent sexual and mental health. Perhaps also abusive policing that may serve to radicalize youth, and perhaps even some of the real issues that young men face that the “Manosphere” feeds on. And perhaps even the narcissism, anti-social behaviours, and psychologically-damaging internalizations that are encouraged and rewarded by neoliberal capitalism.

In Boys From The Blackstuff, the character of Yosser Hughes is written and performed as a highly complex individual that is driven to the edge of sanity and violence by the loss of his job, his wife, the state’s attempts to take his children from him, the deprivations of poverty, and his loss of his sense of “being a man”. There is no such complexity in the character of Jamie, who is all surface behaviour not supported by any real underlying causes.



The Boys From The Blackstuff and Adolescence seem to come from different artistic realities, one when real social commentary could be produced and another where real social commentary is erased and replaced with trite bourgeois progressive moralizing. The writers of Adolescence are not Alan Bleasdale, they come out of this as simply ignorant self-serving pop psychology politically correct grifters. Superb artistic technocrats, but lousy tellers of the truth. That’s what makes Adolescence so dangerous, as with so much other superbly written, acted and directed propaganda, it so easily sucks you in to a world based on lies and misrepresentations. And many of its purveyors sincerely believe in the rubbish that they are purveying. As Chomsky put it so well to an interviewer, those in power only select those people and those projects that align with belief systems that serve their interests.

[blindpig]

How NYT Reports on Weaponized Famine So You Don’t Have to Give a Damn[
Janine Jackson

The World Health Organization (5/12/25) “calls for the protection of health care and for an immediate end to the aid blockade, which is starving people, obstructing their right to health, and robbing them of dignity and hope.”

More than two months ago, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu announced a complete blockade of aid—including food, water and medical supplies—from entering the besieged Gaza strip. It’s a severe escalation of Israel’s now 19-month genocide against Palestinians in Gaza—and what the World Health Organization (5/12/25) has described as “one of the world’s worst hunger crises, unfolding in real time.”

With no replenishing stock, aid groups have begun running out of supplies to distribute to families in need.

The UN Relief and Works Agency (5/16/25) reports that their “flour and food parcels have run out,” and that “one third of essential medical supplies are already out of stock.” More than a week ago, World Central Kitchen reported that they no longer have supplies to cook hot meals and bake bread for starving families—they’ve since repurposed their pots to distribute filtered water.

With Gaza’s entire population experiencing crisis-level food insecurity, and with three-quarters facing “emergency” or “catastrophic” levels of deprivation, the famine has been recognized by Human Rights Watch interim executive director Federico Borello as “a tool of extermination.”

‘To pressure Hamas’

The New York Times‘ online headline (4/28/25) reduces the prospect of mass starvation to the innocuous phrase “Gaza aid.”

At first glance, the April 29 New York Times offered what many would call an objective account with the headline: “UN Faults Israel Over Blockade of Aid for Gaza” (web version here: 4/28/25).

A closer look at the piece however, reveals the Times’ usual spinelessness in its Gaza coverage, unquestioningly accepting Israeli framing in its supposed right to carry out its ongoing genocide.

Reporter Aaron Boxerman writes up top:

For more than a month and a half, Israel has blocked food, medicine and other relief from entering the devastated Gaza Strip in an attempt to pressure Hamas to free the dozens of remaining Israeli hostages there. It argues that its blockade is lawful and that Gaza has enough provisions despite the restrictions.

That frame looks like a simple sentence, but note that it tacitly requires you to accept that Israel determines whether people in the Gaza Strip can receive the basics for human life—asking why Israel is in charge of Palestinians’ food and medicine is beyond this conversation’s walls.

Then, without even a comma, we are told that the denial of life to all Gazans is “an attempt to pressure Hamas”—Boxerman makes a silent skip over the acceptability of collective punishment there, and a frictionless transmission of Israel’s rationale for its actions. That Israel has itself deprioritized the release of the hostages vis-à-vis the reoccupation of Gaza is off the page. But that Israel “argues” the blockade is lawful and that Gaza has what we’re told to accept as “enough provisions”? Those are statements that the Times suggests can stand alone.

Who you choose to believe

The New York Times (4/28/25) describes the relationship between Israel, which has announced a policy of starving millions of people, and the UN, which is trying to force Israel to allow food aid into Gaza, as “fraught with mutual recrimination.”

But aha, you say, here comes another view—though it’s already set up by being in the responsive, “others differ” position:

The United Nations and aid groups say the blockade has further harmed Palestinians already reeling from more than a year and a half of war in Gaza, which has killed tens of thousands of people, displaced well over a million and leveled large swaths of the enclave’s cities.

While true, and ostensibly sympathetic, what with the reeling and the leveling, notice how this is not a direct response to the claims in the lead: that the blockade is lawful, and that Gaza has all it needs. It’s just a statement that the people of Gaza have suffered tremendously. And that even that is just a thing the UN and aid groups “say.”

You could tighten this all to the NBC News headline (4/17/25) Belén Fernández clocked in her piece on coverage of Israel’s starvation of Gaza (FAIR.org, 4/25/25): “Aid Groups Describe Dire Conditions in Gaza as Israel Says There Is No Shortage of Aid.”

All of this depends on who you choose to believe, seems to be elite media’s message—with a few winky-wink tips on who to believe.

Boxerman goes on to report:

Ordinary Gazans have lamented the rising price of basic commodities under the pressure of the blockade. In some cases, the restrictions have turned the quest for getting enough nutritious food into a daily struggle.

It’s like an unfunny game of “find the qualifier”: What’s an “ordinary” Gazan, and who are the extraordinary ones who deserve to starve? What defines the “some cases”? Is un-nutritious food freely available? When does a “quest” become a “struggle”?

It’s a perverse way to describe a situation where widespread starvation is not looming or imminent, but well underway. But it’s an excellent way to tell people they don’t necessarily, if you look at it a certain way, need to give a damn.

https://fair.org/home/how-nyt-reports-o ... ve-a-damn/

[blindpig]

Propaganda From The Horses Mouth
Roger Boyd
May 19, 2025

A couple of years ago I wrote about my experiences at a Canadian academic conference on “disinformation” and how a Disinformation Industrial Complex (DIC) was being constructed to trash, restrict and even get banned anyone who dares stray from the establishment narrative provided by the mainstream media. A response to the internet serving to democratize information with the inevitable collapse in the legitimacy and reach of the mainstream media. I have also recently written about the extensive Western disinformation campaigns to sell the establishment narrative that supports the hegemonic culture used to help control the population, including the use of both fake “left” and fake “right” front groups, influencers, journalists, academics and content creators.

Recently I attended a presentation and panel on disinformation/misinformation which showed how this state and oligarch-driven project has become integrated at an international level, and has become much more formalized. The main speaker was Siim Kumpas, a Russia-hating Estonian who is the Leader of the Policy, Strategy & Partnerships Team at the Information Integrity & Countering Foreign Information Manipulation & Interference (FIMI) Division, which is part of the European External Action Service headed by the Russia-hating Estonian Kaja Kallas. Why not just call it the “EU Ministry of Truth”. He has an MA in Communications from the University of Tartu, Estonia (2013) and previously worked within the Estonian government when Kallas was Estonian PM. He gave a very bland presentation on what represented an EU-level effort to tell European citizens what to believe and what not to believe.

He referenced the DISARM Foundation, whose stated goal is to “identify and respond to malign information influence operations” which can help coordinate “whole society responses to malign influence operators”. It is funded by the Alfred Landecker Foundation and Craig Newmark Philanthropies. The former states its main aims as remembering the holocaust, fighting “anti-semitism” and “strengthening” democracy; i.e. countering anyone who criticizes the Zionist regime. The latter was founded by the US centi-millionaire founder of Craigslist and supports cybersecurity and promoting the “truth”. He is from a Jewish family and has supported the Zionist disinformation operation the Anti Defamation League that equates any criticism of Israel as anti-semitism. So perhaps the DISARM Foundation’s real goal is to identify and respond to the wrong people’s “malign” information influence operations; e.g. not the EU and Western state governments, not the Israeli and Ukrainian governments, and their security services, and not the oligarch and state controlled Western mainstream media.

He also mentioned EUvsDISINFO produced by the East Stratcom Task Force which is part of the EU diplomatic service headed up by Kaja Kallas; specifically set up to counter “Russian Disinformation”, i.e. anything that countered Ukrainian and Western lies. One of the lead articles on their website is about Georgia and its struggle to regain its sovereignty, which is of course presented as a pro-Russia activity and makes absolutely no mention of the massive Western colour-revolution attempt to overthrow the elected government of that country as it voted on legislation to limit Western disinformation and political manipulation within Georgia.

He also earnestly told the audience that the EU Digital Services Act is in no way an attack on free speech, but is in fact meant to protect it together with our democracy. This reminded me of the focus of 1984 on the debasement of language, where a statement could mean its complete opposite; war is peace and censorship is protecting free speech. In the same way that banning the leading candidate for president in Romania was “protecting democracy”.

The whole event had been organized by the Ukrainian Halyna Padalko, who has received scholarships from the Ukrainian government and is also doing a fellowship at the NATO Centre for Strategic Communications and has completed an internship at the European Parliament. The panel members included Aengus Bridgman, 2024 PhD from McGill University, who is the Director of the Media Ecosystem Observatory (MEO) of McGill & Toronto universities and is “one of Canada’s leading experts on misinformation, digital activism, and the politics of digital media”. MEO is also the coordinating body of the Canadian Digital Media Research Network (CDMRN) which is “committed to fortifying and fostering resilience within Canada’s unique information ecosystem. The CDMRN was founded with a C$5.5. million grant from the Canadian government as part of its initiative to fight “foreign disinformation”; but not the widespread disinformation spread by the Canadian government itself and the state media. Nor foreign-owned media such as the National Post, or the Canadian oligarch-owned Globe and Mail and Toronto Star.

Another panel member was Estonian Marcus Kolga, another Russia hater, and the founder and director of DisinfoWatch, together with being a Fellow at the McDonald-Laurier Institute, the Conference on Defence Associations (CDA) Institute whose mission is to “advance informed debate on national security issues”, and the Raoul Wallenberg Centre for Human Rights. The McDonald-Laurier Institute institute is a right-wing neoliberal think tank and receives funding from Canadian oil and gas interests, the US Koch Foundation, and from the US Atlas Network; i.e. a foreign funded influence organization in Canada. It funds DisinfoWatch. The CDA Institute is basically a pressure group for the Canadian security services, and the Raoul Wallenberg Centre for Human Rights is a “unique international consortium of parliamentarians, scholars, jurists, human rights defenders, NGOs, and students”; i.e. a foreign influence network. It regularly spreads and supports Israeli and Zionist propaganda.

And another panel member was Jennifer Irish, Director of the Information Integrity Lab (another 1984 style title) at the University of Ottawa. She had a 35-year career in the Canadian foreign service and federal government and was part of Canada’s Security and Intelligence Community. A lifelong Canadian state security operative put in charge of an organization supposedly tasked with keeping the integrity of the information within society; you could not make this stuff up.

The panel referred to Vatnik Soup as a good source on people and organizations spreading “disinformation”. This source claims that The Heritage Foundation, Jill Stein, Victor Orban, Aaron Mate, Max Blumenthal, TikTok, Julian Assange, Rand Paul, John Mearsheimer, Sahra Wagenknecht, Pope Francis, the AfD, Dimitri Lascaris, Roger Waters, Caitlin Johnstone, Jeffrey Sachs, Tucker Carlson, Glenn Diesen, Vanessa Beeley, Robert Fico, Jimmy Dore, Clare Daley, and even Noam Chomsky are all Russian apologists and propagandists! The author of of Vatnik Soup is Pekka Kallioniemi, a non-resident research fellow at International Centre for Defence and Security (ICDS) in guess where - Estonia! For Mr. Kallioniemi you must be a propagandist if you do not share his obvious extreme anti-Russian and pro-Ukrainian views.

Marcus Kolga truly let the cat out of the bag when he was asked what could be done to combat foreign “disinformation” and stated that perhaps the regular perusal of the Economist and Globe and Mail, two bastions of Western establishment propaganda, would help to show the “truth” from “trusted” journalists. That’s the whole point, they want the citizenry to go back to just reading and viewing establishment propaganda and not have access to, or be brainwashed into not trusting, other sources that provide a critique of the establishment view. Truly a collective Ministry of Truth for our modern times, built by national security states, establishment-funded think tanks, and complicit careerist and Russia-hating (and also China-hating) academics, journalists and researchers; with help from the Zionist regime and its supporters.

Below Aaron Mate covers the US state funded entities tasked with delegitimizing anything, from either ends of the political spectrum, that counters the establishment narrative or points out the flaws or lies that form part of that narrative - such as Newsguard and the UK-based Global Disinformation Index . Heavily managed through the Biden-era US State Department project called the Global Engagement Centre lead by Nina Jankowicz. She is of Polish ethnicity, graduated from a women’s liberal arts college with a double-major in Russian and political science in 2011, and spent a year working with the Ukrainian foreign ministry in 2017 as a Fulbright Scholar. Joining the large group of Eastern European background, Russia-hating liberal scholars in this area.



This is the soft end of the collective Ministry of Truth. The harder end includes the harassing of independent journalists and researchers, their jailing and even murder.



He who controls the narrative controls society. And Western governments and their oligarch backers are determined to control the narrative, whatever it takes.

https://rogerboyd.substack.com/p/propag ... rses-mouth

[blindpig]

The Western Media Brought Gaza To This Point

Netanyahu is here saying that the ethnic cleansing of Gaza is Israel’s ultimate military objective.

Caitlin Johnstone
May 22, 2025

Benjamin Netanyahu is now explicitly saying that the complete ethnic cleansing of Gaza is a precondition to ending the slaughter in the besieged Palestinian territory.

The Times of Israel reports:

“Responding to those who are pushing for an end to war in Gaza, Netanyahu says he ‘is ready to end the war, under clear conditions that will ensure the safety of Israel — all the hostages come home, Hamas lays down its arms, steps down from power, its leadership is exiled from the Strip… Gaza is totally disarmed, and we carry out the Trump plan. A plan that is so correct and so revolutionary.’

“This represents the first time the US president’s plan for moving Gaza civilians out of the Strip has been presented as an Israeli demand for ending the war.”

Trump’s stated plan for Gaza is to remove “all” Palestinians from the enclave and never allow them to return. Netanyahu is here saying that the ethnic cleansing of Gaza is Israel’s ultimate military objective.


Which has been obvious from the very beginning. On the 20th of October 2023, a mere 13 days after October 7, I myself posted the following:

“Israel’s being so obvious about wanting to do another land grab. The solution to every problem is to move Gazans off the land they’re on to somewhere else. It’s like a guy at a nightclub pushing you and pushing you to drink a drink he handed you; at a certain point you realize he’s probably not really interested in making sure you have enough to drink.”

It’s been so transparently obvious this entire time that Israel’s entire objective is to remove Palestinians from a Palestinian territory so their land can be used for Israel’s own purposes — but you’d never have known it from looking at the western press.

For the last year and a half the western media have been brazenly lying to the public by framing this as a “war with Hamas” instead of the naked ethnic cleansing operation it clearly is. They’ve been manufacturing consent for this murderous land grab by babbling about hostages, terrorism and October 7 when Israel’s mass atrocity in Gaza has never, ever been about any of those things. It has only ever been about taking Palestinian land away from Palestinians.


If the western press had been doing actual journalism, Israel would never have been able to bring Gaza to this point. Because the western press have instead been administering propaganda this entire time, Gaza is now an uninhabitable pile of rubble full of desperate, starving people, allowing Israel and the Trump administration to argue that the humanitarian thing to do is to evacuate them all immediately.

The western media’s refusal to acknowledge this — combined with a year and a half of wildly biased headlines, indisputably slanted coverage, and extensively documented top-down pressure in mass media institutions to cover Israel’s onslaught in a positive light — stifled much of the public opposition to this genocidal land grab that we would likely have seen otherwise. This journalistic malpractice allowed Israel’s western backers to support this mass atrocity with impunity, which in turn allowed Israel to act with impunity.

None of this would be possible if the west had an actual free press whose job is to create an informed populace. But we do not have an actual free press whose job is to create an informed populace — we have imperial propaganda services disguised as news.

Now that Israel has pulled back the curtain and acknowledged what we are looking at here, some in the western press have begun pivoting to wag their fingers at Netanyahu in order to preserve their image. And fine, whatever, we need as much help as we can get. But never forget what these monsters did to help create this nightmare in Gaza.

https://caitlinjohnstone.com.au/2025/05 ... his-point/

[blindpig]

Trump DOJ Adopts Policy Permitting Journalist Arrests
May 22, 2025
By Kevin Gosztola, The Dissenter, 4/26/25

The following article was made possible by paid subscribers of The Dissenter. Become a subscriber with this discount offer and support journalism that stands up to attacks on freedom of the press.

United States Attorney General Pam Bondi ended a Justice Department (DOJ) policy that explicitly discouraged federal prosecutors from forcing journalists to reveal their sources and other sensitive information, including information obtained from potential leaks.

With new guidelines, members of the news media who refuse to cooperate with prosecutors could be arrested for contempt. If accused of contempt, they could be fined or jailed.

The move by Bondi comes as Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard has “referred” three alleged “intelligence leakers” to the DOJ for criminal prosecution.

According to Gabbard, one of those individuals allegedly leaked to the Washington Post. The policy change effectively gives the green light to prosecutors to subpoena Post reporters and other staff.

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In October 2022, Attorney General Merrick Garland adopted changes to “news media guidelines” that were celebrated by journalist associations and press freedom groups. As the Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press (RCFP) described, for the first time, guidelines prohibited prosecutors “from using subpoenas or other investigative tools against journalists who possess and publish classified information obtained in newsgathering, with only narrow exceptions.”

On April 25, 2025, Bondi issued a memo [PDF] that voided those changes. The memo informs all DOJ employees that members of the news media “must answer subpoenas,” and it also applied to court orders and search warrants intended to “compel the production of information and testimony.” Bondi will approve all “efforts to question or arrest members of the news media.”

The memo further suggests that Bondi will only approve subpoenas, court orders, or search warrants when the information sought is “essential to a successful prosecution” and prosecutors have “made all reasonable attempts to obtain the information from alternative sources.” Yet the DOJ has wide discretion to conduct investigations however it chooses, and the guidelines hardly mean that Bondi and the DOJ will not trample over the rights of journalists.

Bondi cast this development as a necessary part of winning an information war against President Donald Trump’s political opponents within and outside of the government. Specifically, she accused President Joe Biden’s administration of abusing “Garland’s overly broad procedural protections for media allies by engaging in selective leaks in support of failed lawfare campaigns.”

“The leaks have not abated since President Trump’s second inauguration, including leaks of classified information,” Bondi added. “This Justice Department will not tolerate unauthorized disclosures that undermine President Trump’s policies, victimize government agencies, and cause harm to the American people.”

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Quoting a stunning executive order from Trump that singled out a former official as an “egregious leaker,” Bondi echoed the assertion that disclosures of information related to foreign policy, national security, or “government effectiveness” could be characterized as “treasonous and as possibly violating the Espionage Act.”

Bondi stated, “The perpetrators of these leaks aid our foreign adversaries by spilling sensitive and sometimes classified information on to the Internet. The damage is significant and irreversible. Accountability, including criminal prosecutions, is necessary to set a new course.”

Garland’s protections for reporters stemmed from a backlash to news reports, which revealed that Trump’s first administration had secretly subpoenaed the communications records of reporters at the Post, CNN, and the New York Times.

In fact, after Biden assumed office in 2021, the DOJ did not immediately stop Trump’s retaliation against the press. DOJ officials even imposed an “unprecedented” gag order against Times executives.

DOJ officials eventually met with media representatives to tamp down outrage and agreed to limits on national security leak investigations. The overture was similar to Attorney General Eric Holder’s response to widespread media disapproval in 2013, when it became known that President Barack Obama’s administration had seized records from “more than 20 separate telephone lines assigned to [the Associated Press] and its journalists.”


President Joe Biden (Photo from the White House and in the public domain.)

Throughout the Biden administration, a coalition of groups recognized that the protections for press were subject to change under future administrations. They urged the U.S. House of Representatives and U.S. Senate to codify the changes into law by passing the PRESS Act, which would have established a federal reporter’s shield law.

The House passed the PRESS Act in January 2024, however, despite bipartisan support, the shield law languished in the Senate for months as Democrats did nothing to move the bill for a vote.

In April 2024, when White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre was asked if Biden supported the PRESS Act, she uttered a platitude: “[J]ournalism is not a crime. We’ve been very clear about that.” But the White House refused to back legislation that would protect reporters from the type of attacks on their newsgathering that Bondi just authorized.

After Vice President Kamala Harris lost the presidential election to Trump, Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer and other Democrats, like Senate Judiciary Committee Chair Dick Durbin, suddenly recognized the need to pass the PRESS Act. It was too late. Trump came out against the shield law, instructing Republicans to “kill” the bill. Republican Senator Tom Cotton obeyed Trump and blocked the bill, as he had done during a previous session of Congress.

“Every Democrat who put the PRESS Act on the back burner when they had the opportunity to pass a bipartisan bill codifying journalist-source confidentiality should be ashamed,” Freedom of the Press Foundation advocacy director Seth Stern said, after Bondi revoked press protections. “Everyone predicted this would happen in a second Trump administration, yet politicians in a position to prevent it prioritized empty rhetoric over putting up a meaningful fight.”

“Because of them, a president who threatens journalists with prison rape for protecting their sources and says reporting critically on his administration should be illegal can and almost certainly will abuse the legal system to investigate and prosecute his critics and the journalists they talk to,” Stern added.

Trump’s second term already presents more danger to freedom of the press than his first term, particularly because there is nothing constraining his administration. They are hellbent on weaponizing government and engaging in the kind of lawfare that they fervently believe the Biden administration waged against them.

As The Dissenter thoroughly recounted when Biden’s term ended, his administration laid the foundation for further attacks on the press by Trump. The Biden administration continued the unprecedented Espionage Act prosecution against WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange, and in Florida, FBI agents raided the home newsroom of Timothy Burke in 2023. The following year, the DOJ charged Burke as an economic cybercriminal. (A jury trial is scheduled for September 8, 2025.)

Those guilty of journalism could have had the ability to go to court and fight back against Trump’s war on the press. But now, as Trump officials spread propaganda to demonize reporters and whip up public support for violating their First Amendment rights, there is little that the news media can do to stop petty and vindictive officials eager to target them and their sources.

https://natyliesbaldwin.com/2025/05/tru ... t-arrests/

[blindpig]

Secretary Marco Rubio departs Instanbul, Türkiye May 16, 2025. (Official State Department photo by Freddie Everett)

Under Trump, NED to continue weaponizing “democracy” in Venezuela, Nicaragua and Cuba
By Roger Harris (Posted May 21, 2025)

Originally published: Kawsachun News on May 16, 2025 (more by Kawsachun News) |

The brief freeze and rapid partial reinstatement of National Endowment for Democracy (NED) funding in early 2025 helped expose it as a U.S. regime-change tool. Created to rebrand CIA covert operations as “democracy promotion,” the NED channels government funds to opposition groups in Venezuela, Nicaragua and Cuba, meddling in their internal affairs.

Regime change on the U.S. agenda
In 2018, Kenneth Wollack bragged to the U.S. Congress that the NED had given political training to 8,000 young Nicaraguans, many of whom were engaged in a failed attempt to overthrow Nicaragua’s Sandinista government. Wollack was praising the “democracy-promotion” work carried out by NED, of which he is now vice-chair. Carl Gershman, then president of the NED and giving evidence, was asked about Nicaragua’s Daniel Ortega, who had been re-elected with an increased majority two years prior. He responded:

Time for him to go.

Seven years later, Trump took office and it looked as if the NED’s future was endangered. On February 12, the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) under Elon Musk froze disbursement of its congressionally approved funds. Its activities stopped and its website went blank. On February 24, Richard Grenell, special envoy to Venezuela, declared that “Donald Trump is someone who does not want to make regime changes.”

Washington’s global regime-change operations were immediately impacted and over 2,000 paid U.S. collaborating organizations temporarily defunded. A Biden-appointed judge warned of “potentially catastrophic harm” to (not in her words) U.S. efforts to overturn foreign governments. The howl from the corporate press was deafening. The Associated Press cried:

‘Beacon of freedom’ dims as U.S. initiatives that promote democracy abroad wither.

However, the pause lasted barely a month. On March 10, funding was largely reinstated. The NED, which “deeply appreciated” the State Department’s volte face, then made public its current program which, in Latin America and the Caribbean alone, includes over 260 projects costing more than $40 million.

US “soft power”
Created in 1983 under President Ronald Reagan following scandals involving the CIA’s covert funding of foreign interventions, the NED was to shift such operations into a more publicly palatable form under the guise of “democracy promotion.” As Allen Weinstein, NED’s first acting president, infamously admitted in 1991: “A lot of what we do today was done covertly 25 years ago by the CIA.” In short, NED functions as a “soft power arm” of U.S. foreign policy.

The NED disingenuously operates as a 501(c)(3) private nonprofit foundation. However, it is nearly 100% funded by annual appropriations from the U.S. Congress and governed mainly by Washington officials or ex-officials. In reality, it is an instrument of the U.S. state—and, arguably, of the so-called deep state. But its quasi-private status shields it from many of the disclosure requirements that typically apply to taxpayer-funded agencies.

Hence we encounter verbal gymnastics such as those in its “Duty of Care and Public Disclosure Policies.” That document loftily proclaims: “NED holds itself to high standards of transparency and accountability.” Under a discussion of its “legacy” (with no mention of its CIA pedigree), the NGO boasts:

Transparency has always been central to NED’s identity.

But it continues, “…transparency for oversight differs significantly from transparency for public consumption.” In other words, it is transparent to the State Department but not to the public. The latter are only offered what it euphemistically calls a “curated public listing of grants”—highly redacted and lacking in specific details.

NED enjoys a number of advantages by operating in the nether region between an accountable U.S. government agency and a private foundation. It offers plausible deniability: the U.S. government can use it to support groups doing its bidding abroad without direct attribution, giving Washington a defense from accusations of interference in the internal affairs of other countries. It is also more palatable for foreign institutions to partner with what is ostensibly an NGO, rather than with the U.S. government itself.

The NED can also respond quickly if regime-change initiatives are needed in countries on Washington’s enemy list, circumventing the usual governmental budgeting procedures. And, as illustrated during that congressional presentation in 2018 on Nicaragua, NED’s activities are framed as supporting democracy, human rights, and civil society. It cynically invokes universal liberal values while promoting narrow Yankee geopolitical interests. Thus its programs are sold as altruistic rather than imperial, and earn positive media headlines like the one from the AP cited above.

But a look at NED’s work in Venezuela, Nicaragua and Cuba suggests very much the opposite.

Venezuela
Venezuela had passed an NGO Oversight Law in 2024. Like the US’s Foreign Agents Registration Act, but somewhat less restrictive, the law requires certification of NGOs. As even the Washington Office on Latin America (WOLA)—an inside-the-beltway promoter of U.S. imperialism with a liberal gloss— admits:

Many Venezuelan organizations receiving U.S. support have not been public about being funding recipients.

The pace of Washington’s efforts in Venezuela temporarily slowed with the funding pause, as U.S.-funded proxies had to focus on their own survival. Venezuelan government officials, cheering the pause, viewed the NED’s interference in their internal affairs as a violation of Venezuelan sovereignty. In contrast, the U.S.-funded leader of the far-right opposition, Maria Corina Machado, begged for international support to make up for the shortfall from Washington.

WOLA bemoaned that the funding freeze allowed the “Maduro government to further delegitimize NGOs” paid by the U.S. Hundreds of U.S.-funded organizations, they lamented,

now face the grim choice of going underground, relocating abroad, or shutting down operations altogether.

With the partial reinstatement of funding, now bankrolling at least 39 projects costing $3.4 million, former U.S. senator and present NED board member Mel Martinez praised the NED for its “tremendous presence in Venezuela… supporting the anti-Maduro movement.”

Nicaragua
Leading up to the 2018 coup attempt, the NED had funded 54 projects worth over $4 million. Much of this went to support supposedly “independent” media, in practice little more than propaganda outlets for Nicaragua’s opposition groups. Afterward, the NED-funded online magazine Global Americans revealed that the NED had “laid “the groundwork for insurrection” in Nicaragua.

One of the main beneficiaries, Confidencial, is owned by the Chamorro family, two of whose members later announced intentions to stand in Nicaragua’s 2021 elections. The family received well over $5 million in U.S. government funding, either from the NED or directly from USAID (now absorbed into the State Department). In 2022, Cristiana Chamorro, who handled much of this funding, was found guilty of money laundering. Her eight-year sentence was commuted to house arrest; after a few months she was given asylum in the U.S.

Of the 22 Nicaragua-related projects which NED has resumed funding, one third sponsor “independent” media. While the recipients’ names are undisclosed, it is almost certain that this funding is either for outlets like Confidencial (now based in Costa Rica), or else is going direct to leading opponents of the Sandinista government to pay for advertisements currently appearing in Twitter and other social media.

Cuba
In Latin America, Cuba is targeted with the highest level of NED spending—$6.6 million covering 46 projects. One stated objective is to create “a more well-informed, critically minded citizenry,” which appears laughable to anyone who has been to Cuba and talked to ordinary people there—generally much better informed about world affairs than a typical U.S. citizen.

Cuba’s Foreign Minister Bruno Rodríguez criticized the NED’s destabilizing activities, such as financing 54 anti-Cuba organizations since 2017. He advised the U.S. administration to review “how many in that country [the US] have enriched themselves organizing destabilization and terrorism against Cuba with support from that organization.”

Washington not only restored NED funding for attacks on Cuba but, on May 15, added Cuba to the list of countries that “do not fully cooperate with its anti-terrorist efforts.”

The NED: Covert influence in the name of democracy
Anyone with a basic familiarity with the Washington’s workings is likely to be aware of the NED’s covert role. Yet the corporate media—behaving as State Department stenographers and showing no apparent embarrassment—have degenerated to the point where they regularly portray the secretly funded NED outlets as “independent” media serving the targeted countries.

Case in point: Washington Post columnist Max Boot finds it “sickening” that Trump is “trying [to] end U.S. government support for democracy abroad.” He is concerned because astroturf “democracy promotion groups” cannot exist without the flow of U.S. government dollars. He fears the “immense tragedy” of Trump’s executive order to cut off funding (now partially reinstated) for the U.S. Agency for Global Media, the parent agency of the Voice of America, Radio Marti, and other propaganda outlets.

Behind the moralistic appeals to democracy promotion and free press is a defense of the U.S. imperial project to impose itself on countries such as Venezuela, Nicaragua and Cuba. Those sanctioned countries, targeted for regime change, need free access to food, fuel, medicines and funding for development. They don’t need to hear U.S. propaganda beamed to them or generated locally by phonily “independent” media.

https://mronline.org/2025/05/21/under-t ... -and-cuba/

[blindpig]

This Dystopia Would Never Be Accepted Without Extensive Indoctrination

It takes a lot of education to make us this stupid.

Caitlin Johnstone
May 27, 2025


I am not a politically complicated person. I think genocide is bad. I think peace is good. I don’t think anyone should be struggling to survive in a civilization that is capable of providing for all. I think we should try to preserve the biosphere we all depend on for survival.

To me these are just obvious, common sense positions, no more remarkable or profound than believing I should refrain from slamming my nipple in a car door. I do not think these views should put me on the political fringe. I don’t think they should cause me to be seen as some kind of radical. It’s not outlandish that I hold these views, it’s outlandish that everyone else does not.

But that’s the kind of society we find ourselves in today. The obvious is framed as freakish while the freakish is presented as obvious. Health is framed as sickness while sickness is presented as health. The moderate is framed as extremism while extremism is presented as moderate.

We live in a twisted, backwards dystopia where everything is the opposite of the way it should be, and we’re conditioned to think it’s normal and acceptable. It’s not until some degree of insight dawns in you that you look around and realize you are living in the nightmare of a madman. Until then you spend your time here thinking, speaking, voting and behaving as though the demented status quo we are living under is the moderate and expected reality.

All our lives we are trained to believe this hellscape is the healthy and expected circumstance for our species. Our parents and teachers tell us that it’s normal for things to be this way. Our pundits and politicians assure us that there’s no other way things could be and that we are living under the best possible system.

A big part of it is just growing up in a society that’s been diseased since long before you were born, being raised and taught by people who also grew up in a society that’s been diseased since long before they were born. We show up here, we don’t know anything, and then the big people teach us about war and money and jobs and politics, and assure us that our initial horrified reaction to the things we are learning is just immature naivety to something fine and normal.

If you’ve ever had the misfortune of having to explain war to a child, then you know how insane this civilization looks when perceived by a pair of fresh eyes. I’ve never had to explain the genocide in Gaza to a young child, but I am sure it would be met with even more shock and grief. Kids have a natural, healthy revulsion toward such things, and it is only by sustained indoctrination that we are able to twist their minds into seeing them as normal.

It takes a lot of education to make us this stupid. Our minds require a whole lot of training to accept this horrific dystopia as the baseline norm. That’s why the empire we live under has the most sophisticated domestic propaganda machine that has ever existed.

In order to have clarity, we need to learn to look with fresh eyes. Uninitiated eyes. Eyes that have not been educated out of their initial healthy impulse to weep at what we are doing and how we are living here. We need to get in touch with that intuition within us which rejects the sickness of our society as though it was meeting it for the very first time.

Learning to meet life afresh in each instant is good practice anyway; it makes living a lot more enjoyable and beautiful, and it helps us move in a much wiser way since we’re not constantly reacting to old patterns and expectations in an ever-changing world. But as an added bonus it also peels away the tolerance we have built up for the backwards lunacy of this empire we are living under.

The less healthy this civilization feels to you, the healthier you are getting. Everything about this nightmare looks appalling through clear eyes.

https://caitlinjohnstone.com.au/2025/05 ... trination/

True enough, but instead of this individualist self-help advice how about we organize our class for revolution?

[blindpig]

What have the residents of Spalding got against the people of Gaza?

The media plays a vital role in desensitising British people to the sufferings of their fellow workers.
Proletarian writers

Tuesday 27 May 2025


The BBC’s entirely fictitious and criminally complicit framing of the zionists’ war crimes in Gaza as ‘nice white people v awful brown terrorists’ must not be allowed to prevail.

On Saturday 10 May, while merrymakers, quite reasonably, headed off to the Spalding Flower Parade for an afternoon of fun in the sun; our party members joined Spalding Palestine Solidarity Campaign (PSC) in holding a silent vigil to remind their fellow townspeople of the ongoing suffering of the people of Palestine.

Sadly, we were not made welcome. Most people actively ignored us or were downright hostile. A handful of motorists beeped or wave in support, which gave us a smattering of hope.

The majority of drivers held onto their steering wheels with grim determination, eyes straight ahead, stiffly and actively ignoring the vigil.

A few drivers, filled with animosity, shouted expletives and hammered their car horns to draw our attention to their vulgar hand gestures.

A minority beeped to show their support. While there was little foot traffic, the majority were amiable.

One rushed past, head down desperate to avoid eye contact. Notably, a family of mum, kids, dad and gran. Granny demanded we take our flags down and go home. Her anger was palpable.

We talked about Palestinian children being starved before our very eyes, to which the response was: “My kids aren’t starving,” as they gathered speed and practically ran past us.

No one could call the people of Lincolnshire radical. This is very much the middle-English heartland of such traditional British values as racism, imperial supremacy and conservatism.

It is notable that while support for Palestine is at an all-time high in Britain, where the solidarity movement is low, the BBC narrative still holds sway. Amongst this section of the population, the default assumptions are still that ‘we Brits’ identify with the Israeli genocide and see its victims as ‘terrorists’.

But just because workers have been spoon-fed throughout their lives on a thin gruel of imperial ‘culture’ that makes them self-identify as temporarily embarrassed billionaires, there is no reason to doubt that their real economic conditions are steadily transforming them into opponents of this system – and will continue to do so.

The local paper’s coverage of this small PSC solidarity action highlighted once again the essential role played by establishment media in keeping workers distracted, divided and demobilised. One had only to look at the linked ‘most read’ articles to see what our rulers would prefer us to be thinking about (football, money, local ‘characters’). (Pro-Palestine protest held in Spalding with police saying it passed off peacefully by Andrew Brookes, LincsOnline, 10 May 2025)

The headline on the above-mentioned report said it all: the police report was taken as the sole basis for the article’s standpoint and reporting. It was clear that the author had not attended the demonstration or attempted to find out anything about it other than reporting on ‘rumours’ that it may have been connected to a delay in the beginning of the flower show.

Having mentioned this rumour, the author went on to say that it was baseless, but it is clear that the point of the story was rather to reinforce the connection in readers’ minds. In fact, the sole point of the article was to underline the potential for ‘trouble’ and (horror of horrors) minor inconvenience that might arise from any protest action. Surely better to stay at home when your government is systematically massacring innocents abroad than to cause a 20-minute traffic disruption that could temporarily inconvenience a few hundred Brits?

This approach perfectly mirrored reporting of the national demonstrations against the Gaza genocide over the last year and a half. Many national newspapers dedicated live feeds to these events, but reading them would not give anyone a sense of what was actually happening there. Huge emphasis was put on what the police said, who they scuffled with (usually a handful of fringe right-wing thugs who seem to have turned up for no other purpose than to assist in this narrative manipulation) and what charges they made when arresting people (as opposed to what those arrested and charged were doing at the time – which usually turned out to have been absolutely nothing!)

The overall impression conveyed was not of hundreds of thousands of deeply concerned and righteously angered British workers regularly coming together from all over the country to demand an end to the British state’s horrific facilitation of the genocide in Palestine, but of a hotbed of radical islamists, race-baiting bigots and terrorist plotters.

All the same, our comrades will keep going back to Spalding with the PSC, because it’s these angry, hostile and indifferent workers we need to reach out to. We need to do everything in our power to help them learn to direct their anger towards our mutual enemy, the ruling class; to help them understand that they have much more in common with Palestinians under British and American bombs than with their ‘mate’ Nigel Farage.

Time can teach. But we must help working people draw the right conclusions.[/i]

https://thecommunists.org/2025/05/27/ne ... inst-gaza/