Censorship, fake news, perception management

[blindpig]

The Corporate News Media at Work
July 13, 2024

Large numbers of Palestinians and Ukrainians were killed in missile strikes days apart, writes Jonathan Cook. The differing coverage of these comparable events is the clue to the media’s true function.


The New York Times building, 2012. (Ermell, CC BY-SA 4.0, Wikimedia Commons)

By Jonathan Cook
Jonathan-Cook.net

When all we have to rely on in understanding our relationship to the news media is the media’s self-proclaimed assessment of its own role, maybe it is no surprise that most of us assume the West’s “free press” is a force for good: the bedrock of democracy, the touchstone of a superior western civilisation.

The more idealistic among us think of the news media as something akin to a public service. The more cynical of us think of it as a competitive marketplace in information and commentary, one in which ugly agendas are often in evidence but truth ultimately prevails.

Both views are fanciful. The reality is far, far darker – and I speak as someone who worked for many years in The Guardian and Observer newsrooms, widely seen as the West’s most progressive newspapers.

As readers, we don’t, as we imagine, “consume” news. Rather, the news consumes us. Or put another way, the media uses the news to groom us, its audience. Properly understood, the relationship is one of abuser and abused.

Sounds like a paranoid conspiracy theory?

In fact, just such an argument was set out many years ago — in more academic fashion — in Noam Chomsky and Ed Herman’s book Manufacturing Consent.

If you have never heard of the book, there may be a reason. The media don’t want you reading it.

When I worked at The Guardian, there was no figure more reviled in the newsroom by senior editors than Noam Chomsky. As young journalists, we were warned off reading him. How might we react were we to start thinking more deeply about the role of the media, or begin testing the limits of what we were allowed to report and say?

Chomsky and Herman’s Propaganda Model explains in detail how Western publics are “brainwashed under freedom” by a media driven by hidden corporate and state interests. Those interests can be concealed only because the media decides what counts as news and frames how we understand events.

Its chief tools are misdirection and omission — and, in extremis, outright deception.

Tribal Camps


Election Day: The Newseum’s Campaign 2016 exhibit in Washington, D.C. (Lorie Shaull, Flickr, CC BY 2.0)

The Propaganda Model acknowledges that competition is permitted in the news media. But only of a narrow, superficial kind, meant to divide us more usefully into tribal, ideological camps – defined as the left and the right.

Those camps are there to keep us imagining that we enjoy a plurality of ideas, that we are in charge of our response to events, that we elect governments — just as we enjoy a choice between watching the BBC and Fox News.

But our herding into oppositional camps isn’t really about choice. The camps are there to keep us divided, so we can be more easily manipulated and ruled. They are there to obscure from us the deeper reality that the state-corporate media is the public relations arm of an establishment that needs us weak.

To survive, the Western power establishment has to engineer two related kinds of popular endorsement.

First, we must consent to the idea that the West has an inalienable right to control the Earth’s resources, even at the cost of committing terrible crimes both against the rest of humanity, such as the current genocide in Gaza, and against other species, as we wreck the natural world in our pursuit of impossible, endless economic growth on a finite planet.

And second, we must consent to the idea that the richest and most powerful elites in the West have an inalienable right to cream off most of the profits from this industrialised rape of our only home.

The media rarely identifies this wasteful, greed system, so normalised has it become. But when given a name, it is called capitalism. It emerges from the shadows only when the media need to confront and ridicule a bogeyman caricature of its main ideological rival, socialism.

Immersed in Propaganda


Guardian’s office in London, 2010. (Michael Brunton-Spall, Flickr, CC BY 2.0)

The news media have been fantastically successful at making a system of suicidal resource extraction designed to enrich a tiny number of billionaires seem entirely normal to their audiences.

Which is why those same billionaires are as keen to own the news media as they are to own politicians. In fact, gain ownership of the media, and you own the political class too. It is the ultimate two-for-one offer.

No politician can afford to take on key state-corporate interests, or the media that veils those interests — as Jeremy Corbyn soon found out in the U.K. a few years back.

I have spent the past 15 years or more trying to highlight to readers the true nature of our relationship to the media — the groomer and groomed — using the media’s coverage of major news events as a practical peg on which to hang my analysis.

Talking about the abusive relationship purely in the abstract is likely to persuade few, given how deeply we are immersed in propaganda.

Understanding how the media carries out its day-to-day switch and baits, its omissions, deceptions and misdirections, is the key to beginning the process of freeing our minds.

If you look to the state-corporate media for guidance, you are already in its clutches. You are already a victim — a victim of your own suffocating ignorance, of your own self-sabotage, of your own death wish.

I have expended many hundreds of thousands of words on this topic, as have others such as Media Lens. You can read a few recent examples from me here, here and here. Or you can watch this talk I gave on how I freed myself professionally from the clutches of the corporate media and gained my freedom as an independent journalist:



Different Narratives

But rarely do we have examples of propaganda so flagrant from our “free press” that it is hard for readers not to notice them. The state-corporate media just made my job a little easier.

Earlier this month, it reported on two closely comparable events that it framed in entirely different ways. Ways that all too clearly serve state-corporate interests.

The first such event was an Israeli air strike on July 6 on a school in Gaza, where Palestinian civilians, including children, had been sheltering from months of a rampaging Israeli military that has slaughtered many tens of thousands of Palestinians and destroyed most of the enclave’s homes and infrastructure.

The massive scale of death and destruction in Gaza has forced the World Court to put Israel on trial for genocide — not that you would know that from the media coverage. The genocide case against Israel has been largely disappeared down the memory hole.

The second event, on July 8, was a Russian air strike on a hospital in Kyiv. It was part of a wave of attacks on Ukrainian targets that day that killed 36 Ukrainians.

Let us note that on a typical day in Gaza, at least 150 Palestinians are killed by Israel. That has been happening day-after-day for nine months. And the death toll is almost certainly a massive under-estimate. In decimated Gaza, unlike Ukraine, officials long ago lost the ability to count their dead.

Let us note too that, despite huge numbers of Palestinian women and children being killed each day by Israeli missiles, the news media largely stopped covering the carnage in Gaza months ago. The BBC’s main evening news barely reports it.

The fact alone that the killing of 36 Ukrainian civilians attracted so much attention and concern from the Western media, in a war that’s more than two years old, when there is a far larger daily death toll of Palestinian civilians in Gaza, which our governments have been directly aiding, and the slaughter is of more recent origin, is telling in and of itself.

So how did our most trusted and progressive media outlets report these comparable events, in Gaza and Ukraine?

The headlines tell much of the story.

In an all-too-familiar pattern, the BBC shouted from the rooftops: “At least 20 dead after ‘massive’ Russian missile attack on Ukraine cities”. It named Russia as responsible for killing Ukrainians, and did so even when there was still some debate about whether Russian missiles or Ukrainian air-defence missiles had caused the destruction.



Meanwhile, the BBC carefully avoided identifying Israel as the party that killed those in Gaza sheltering from its bombs, even though Israel long ago stopped pretending that feeble Palestinian rockets could cause damage on such a scale. The headline read: “Air strike on Gaza school kills at least 15 people.”



The Guardian’s headlines were even more revealing.

The paper did, at least, identify Israel as responsible for the killing: “Israeli strike on Gaza school kills 16, say Palestinian officials.”

However, the dry, matter-of-fact language about those Palestinian deaths, the suggestion that the deaths were only a claim, and the attribution of that claim to “Palestinian officials” (with the now widely accepted implication that those officials can’t be trusted) was intended to steer the emotional response of readers. They would be left cold and indifferent.

The framing was clear: this was just another, routine day in Gaza. No need to be overly invested in Palestinian suffering.



Contrast that with the entirely different tone The Guardian struck in its headlines on the cover story (below) of the attack on Ukraine: “‘No words for this’: horror over Russian bombing of Kyiv children’s hospital.”

The subhead reads: “Witnesses express shock and revulsion after deadly missile strike on Ukraine’s largest paediatric clinic.” [Human Rights Watch said only child died and 10 were injured compared to the much larger casualties in the Gaza attack.]

The emphasis is on “horror”, “shock”, “revulsion”. “No words”, we are told, can convey the savagery of this atrocity. The headline’s emphasis is on the targeting of “children” with a “deadly missile”.



All of which, of course, could be equally said about the horror of Israel’s targeting of Palestinian children day-in, day-out. But, of course, isn’t.

Swaying Readers

If this isn’t convincing enough, take another example of The Guardian’s treatment (below) of comparable events in Gaza and Ukraine.

Here is how the paper reported Israel destroying Gaza’s largest hospital back in November, when such actions had not yet become routine, as they are now, and when it had killed far larger numbers of civilians at the hospital in Gaza than Russia did in Ukraine.

The headline reads clinically: “IDF says it has entered Gaza’s al-Shifa hospital in ‘targeted’ operation against Hamas.”

The Guardian readily repeats the Israeli military’s terminology, conferring legitimacy on the carnage at al-Shifa hospital as a “targeted operation.”

The fact that patients and medical personnel were the main victims is obscured by The Guardian’s repeating of Israel’s claim that it was simply “targeting Hamas” – just as Israel’s wanton destruction of Gaza has supposedly been about “eliminating Hamas”, even as Hamas grows stronger.

Apparently there is no “horror, “shock” or “revulsion” at The Guardian over the destruction and killing spree at Gaza’s largest hospital. Such sentiments are reserved for Ukraine.



The same differences are illustrated in the U.S. “liberal” media, as Alan MacLeod noted on X.

A day after Russia’s strike on Ukraine, Israel was attacking another school shelter in Gaza. The New York Times made it clear how differently readers were supposed to feel about these similar events.



Headline: “At Least 25 Reported Killed in Strike on School Building in Southern Gaza.”

Note the passive, uncertain treatment – this was, after all, only a report. Note too that the perpetrator, Israel, remains unidentified.



Headline: “Russia Strikes Children’s Hospital in Deadly Barrage Across Ukraine.”

In stark contrast, Russia is clearly identified as the perpetrator, the active voice is used to describe its crime, and once again emotional descriptors — “deadly” — can be readily deployed to sway readers into an emotional response.

Headlines and photos are the part of a story that almost every reader sees. Which is why their role in framing our understanding of events is so important. They are the print media’s main means of propagandising us.

Skewed Priorities

Broadcast media like the BBC work slightly differently in manipulating our responses.

Running orders — the channel’s way to signal its news priorities — are important, as are the emotional reactions of anchors and reporters. Just think of the way Steve Rosenberg, the BBC’s Moscow correspondent, half-stifles a sneer every time he mentions Vladimir Putin by name, or how he struggles to suppress a scoff at any of the Russian president’s statements.

Then try to imagine any BBC reporter being allowed to do the same with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, let alone British leader Sir Keir Starmer.

Another way to make us invested in some events but not others is by concentrating on what are called “human-interest” stories, taking ordinary individuals and making their troubles and suffering the focus of a piece rather than the usual talking heads.

The BBC evening news, for example, has largely stopped reporting on Gaza’s suffering. When it does, reports occur briefly and late in the running order and they usually cover little more than the dry facts. Human-interest stories have been rare.

The BBC broke with that trend twice on Tuesday’s News at Ten – in the midst of Israel twice targeting schools that were supposed to be offering shelter to Palestinians driven from their homes by Israeli bombs.

Did the BBC tell the stories of the victims of those air strikes? No, those attacks received the most minimal coverage.

The first human-interest story concerned a Ukrainian mother, shown desperately searching for her child in the aftermath of the attack on the Kyiv hospital the previous day, as well as their later reunion.

The second human-interest story, this one from Gaza, didn’t concern any of the many victims of the Israeli attacks on school-shelters. It focused instead — and at great length — on a Palestinian man beaten in Gaza for opposing Hamas rule.

In other words, not only did the BBC consider the day-old deaths of Ukrainians far more important news than Israel’s killing that day of 29 Palestinian civilians, but it also considered the beating of a man by Hamas as a bigger news priority too.

When we are encouraged to care about Palestinians, it is only when the odd one is being brutalised by other Palestinians, not when millions of them are being brutalised by their occupier, Israel, in their ghetto-prisons.

The pattern to this skewing of news priorities, the constant distorted framing of events is the clue to how we should decipher what the media is trying to achieve, what it is there to do.

BBC news coverage all too often looks like it is exploiting any opportunity to highlight violence by Russia, in strict accordance with British foreign policy objectives. Equally, it all too often looks like the BBC is engineering pretexts to ignore or downplay violence by Israel, again in strict accordance with British foreign policy objectives.

Ukraine is a key battleground for the West in its battle for global “full-spectrum dominance”, Washington’s central foreign policy strategy in which it positions itself so that no other great power, such as Russia and China, can challenge its control over the planet’s resources. The U.S. and its Western allies are ready to risk an entirely unnecessary nuclear war, it seems, to win that battle.

Israel, meanwhile, a colonial fortress-state implanted by the West into the oil-rich Middle East, is a critically important ally in realising Washington’s dominance in its region. The Palestinians are the fly in the ointment — and like a fly, they can be swatted away with utter indifference and impunity.

With this as our framework, we can understand why the BBC and other media fail so systematically to fulfill their self-professed remits to reporting objectively and disinterestedly, and fail to scrutinise and hold power to account — unless it is the power of an Official Enemy.

The truth is the BBC, The Guardian and the rest are nothing more than conduits of state-corporate propaganda, masquerading as news outlets.

Until we grasp that, they will continue grooming us.

Jonathan Cook is an award-winning British journalist. He was based in Nazareth, Israel, for 20 years. He returned to the U.K. in 2021. He is the author of three books on the Israel-Palestine conflict: Blood and Religion: The Unmasking of the Jewish State (2006), Israel and the Clash of Civilisations: Iraq, Iran and the Plan to Remake the Middle East (2008) and Disappearing Palestine: Israel’s Experiments in Human Despair (2008). If you appreciate his articles, please consider offering your financial support.

This article is from the author’s blog, Jonathan Cook.net.

The views expressed are solely those of the author and may or may not reflect those of Consortium News.

https://consortiumnews.com/2024/07/13/t ... a-at-work/

*****



The Mainstream Worldview Is A Mass-Produced Artificial Psychosis

People who still believe that the news media tell them the truth and that their nation and their world work pretty much the way they were taught in school are just as brainwashed and deluded as any QAnon cultist.

Caitlin Johnstone
July 13, 2024

People who still believe that the news media tell them the truth and that their nation and their world work pretty much the way they were taught in school are just as brainwashed and deluded as any QAnon cultist. The only difference is that their delusions are much more widely shared, and that the mechanisms used to brainwash them are much more high-budget and sophisticated. The mainstream worldview is really just a mass-produced artificial psychosis.

It’s actually difficult to wrap your mind around the scale and pervasiveness of the mountain of lies upon which this dystopian civilization is built. You think you’re starting to get a read on things, then you gain more knowledge and insight and realize it goes so much further than you thought. You start pulling on one thread, maybe some obvious lie about Iraq or Palestine or whatever, and the whole thing just keeps unraveling and unraveling and unraveling. Before you know it you’re staring at a society that is not just riddled with untruth, but actually woven entirely from the fabric of untruth.

Everything. How your nation really works. How the world really works. How capitalism really works. What politics really are. What the media are really used for. What laws are really used for. What wars and militarism are really used for. What ideology is really used for. What religion is really used for. What culture is really used for. What rules and etiquette are really used for. It’s all made-up narrative all the way down, and all of those narratives are made up by the powerful, in the service of the powerful.

You can tell someone’s still playing in the shallow end of the pool of political insight based on how much time they spend freaking out about a dark dystopian future, because it shows the extent to which they fail to perceive how profoundly unfree we are right here and now. Right wingers, ideologically prohibited from considering the possibility that what they’re experiencing under capitalism isn’t real freedom, spend their time freaking out about a neo-Marxist future where everyone’s trapped in 15-minute cities and forced to take poisonous vaccines and eat bugs. Western liberals, ideologically prohibited from considering the possibility they live under the world’s most tyrannical power structure and that everything they were taught is a lie, spend their time freaking out about a future under a horrible Trumpian dictatorship.

If you’ve really got your eyes open, you understand that as a whole we could not actually be more effectively enslaved to the will of the powerful than we are right now, even if we were all wearing chains around our necks and had mind control computer chips in our brains. As a collective we’re always thinking, speaking, laboring, spending, living, acting and voting exactly as the wealthiest and most powerful people in our society want us to, our entire lives completely dedicated to the service of their continued power and profit while our information systems keep pummeling us with the message that we are free.

We are indoctrinated into believing we live in a free country unlike those poor suckers in Iran or North Korea, and we are indoctrinated into believing everything else our tyrannical rulers want us to believe as well. We sing of our freedom while marching in unison to the beat of the imperial drum, our minds so fully subjugated that we don’t even realize that we are marching.

“We are free!” we cry. “Free to sell our labor at extortionate rates to the capitalist class. Free to pay rent to professional land-hoarders or mortgage payments to banks for the privilege of having shelter on the planet we were born on. Free to choose between ten thousand different kinds of toothpaste and two warmongering capitalist political parties. Free to vote in fake elections for fake candidates who will never change anything. Free to think however we were trained to think and say anything we’ve been trained to say. Free to live exactly how we’ve been programmed to live by our owners.”

And sure there are a few of us who manage get our minds unplugged from the propaganda matrix, but our numbers are kept so few as to be inconsequential. Everyone else is told we are paranoid conspiracy theorists and victims of Russian propaganda and disinformation in order to inoculate the mainstream herd against infection from our wrongthink, while the volume on the imperial indoctrination machine is simply cranked up a notch.

The good news is that there’s no way this is sustainable. There’s only so much depravity you can sweep under the carpet with the broom of deception before people start noticing the lumps on the floor. There’s only so far you can stretch and twist the human mind before it snaps. The empire is a house of cards resting on a closed pair of eyelids, and at some point those eyelids are going to flutter open. At some point everyone’s going to start noticing the loose threads in the fabric of all this, and keep pulling and pulling until they see through the entire scam.

https://caitlinjohnstone.com.au/2024/07 ... psychosis/

[blindpig]

Sen. Joseph McCarthy (center) during a House Un-American Activities Committee questioning. (Photo: Wikimedia Commons)

American inquisition part 1: The origins of the Cold War and McCarthyism
Originally published: Liberation News on July 5, 2024 by Eugene Puryear (more by Liberation News) | (Posted Jul 22, 2024)

The ghost of “Tail-Gunner Joe” McCarthy is haunting the U.S. Congress. Republicans, in particular, during their various TikTok hearings, have resurrected some of his hallmarks in their questioning of various officials and CEOs over social media and Israel. Sometimes this even involves variations on the famous question “Are you now, or have you ever been a member of…” this or that demonized group. Democrats have also joined in with their often evidence-free accusations of “misinformation and disinformation” spread by “revisionist” nations.

The repeat performances are no real surprise, since, now, like then, they are tied to a broad based effort to prepare the country for nuclear conflict, creating a boogeyman to make it easier to mobilize resources and people for a range of unnecessary less-than-nuclear conflicts. The post-World War II order shaped by the first Cold War is now collapsing. U.S. hegemony is being challenged by rising powers who want more influence in global affairs. Like the 1950s, domestic opponents of Corporate America’s worldview represent an impediment to the ruling class.

The real history of this “American inquisition” is crucially important to grasp for anyone seeking to build a better world. McCarthyism took its principal aim at the organizations dedicated to that purpose. The most militant civil rights organizations–the unions who fought the bosses the hardest and opposed racism the most; the cooperative organizations helping workers achieve a higher living standard; the newspapers, think tanks and record labels building an educational and cultural world that encompassed these struggles–all were sent six feet deep by the Red Scare.

Even worse, the victims of this very American “purge” have been slandered for a second time in the wake of the fall of the Soviet Union. Dubious “scholarship” produced mainly by anti-communist partisans has “justified” McCarthyism in a large part of the popular discourse through multiple books that have purportedly “proved” that the Soviet Union operated a massive spy ring that was a major threat to the United States.

Similarly today, the attempt to enforce conformity with the Cold War against Russia and China and the genocide being perpetrated in Gaza are aiming their weapons in the same direction. They see what we see: the Sanders electoral insurgency, the 2020 uprisings, the mass protests for Gaza, the strike waves, the growing popularity of unions and socialism. And this makes the ruling elites very worried.

If we want to avoid a similar fate, understanding the real history of the purges of the late 1940s and 1950s deserves revisiting.

The world after the war
By 1943, debates over what the world would look like after the war started to come into sharper focus. The allied coalition had created a unique relationship of forces, disparate interests drawn together solely by their belief that fascism was the greatest danger. British imperialists, Soviet communists and American industrialists were all in one boat. Even more, in order to prosecute the war, various concessions had been made to anti-colonial and anti-racist forces that, while ad-hoc, murky and inadequate, portended the possible end to the status quo on these issues.

One broad camp in the U.S. felt that, in general, the wartime alliance was a good outline for relations between nations, and that the New Deal was a good framework for how relations between classes and class strata could work domestically. This was the general framework that won the 1944 presidential elections for FDR.

The other camp was seeing dollar signs. Understanding that “Old Europe” was going to be crippled and exhausted, they saw an opportunity for the U.S. to make the rest of the 20th century the “American Century.” They saw their opportunity to displace France, England and Germany as the world’s leading power and, in the words of news magnate Henry Luce,

exert upon the world the full impact of our influence, for such purposes as we see fit.1

For both sides, this created thorny issues, but particularly for those in the second camp. Hopes had been raised that the end to the war would mean a transition away from colonialism, Jim Crow and Great Power conflict. This would not do, for the business class looking to “exert … the full impact” of their influence. Internationally, the wealth of the Global North was dependent on a continuation of colonial exploitation. So while promoting formal independence was beneficial to U.S. capital because it had the effect of breaking up the exclusive economic zones of the old imperial system, too much independence was dangerous because it might result in too many anti-exploitative, and thus profit-reducing, practices.

As Leo Welch, treasurer of Standard Oil, put it: “Our foreign policy will be more concerned with the safety and stability of our foreign investments than ever before,” adding that “proper respect” for U.S. “capital abroad” was a crucial goal, adding further that the U.S. must take on the role of “the majority stockholder in this corporation known as the world … nor is this for a given term of office. This is a permanent obligation.”2

Domestically, the issue was similar. Unions were far too strong. The year 1946, in particular, had seen a huge wave of strikes demanding better wages and working conditions. That same year, the National Association of Manufacturers–one of the top lobbyists for big business–released a book, “The American Individual Enterprise System,” which, among other things, laid out a blueprint for a new labor law to kneecap unions that would later be adopted.3 At one secret meeting of top capitalists a few years later that included Charles E. Wilson, head of General Electric, attendees found “unanimous agreement” on the need to “offset the growing power of labor.”4

Even more, Black workers were particularly restless. The war had created leverage that had been used against Jim Crow. The Supreme Court had struck down the white primary, and some Southern states were modifying the poll tax, creating the first real political openings for Blacks in the South since Reconstruction. The civil rights-labor coalition had grown powerful in states like New York during the Depression and the war, and an increasing number of Congressmen from those states were becoming more vocal on fighting discrimination. In a sign of the times, Mississippi’s fascist senator Theodore Bilbo was essentially ejected from Congress for his extreme racism and corruption, avoiding official censure only because he died of cancer.

Taken as a whole, this created serious issues for big business. If labor could aggressively challenge efforts to prevent workers getting wages and benefits and if it insisted on addressing racial inequalities in the labor market–and, on top of all that, also challenge the central pillar of capital: the fascist Jim Crow political machines–then the “American Century” would not be all that its advocates hoped for.

Best laid plans
The ruling elites, however, had a plan that still echoes today: promote mass hysteria about potential war with Russia. Whether at home or abroad, the principle challengers to American capitalism’s attempts to deepen the exploitation of workers, peasants and oppressed nationalities were communists. Move them out of the picture, and busting unions, lowering wages, protecting segregation and continuing old empires under new ownership would be dramatically easier.

They also knew that this provided a push for a permanent war economy that could be tremendously profitable. During World War II, profits had exploded as business and the government fused, jumping to two-times the pre-war average, and four-and-a-half times by the end of the Korean War.5 Even more, government funds were underwriting a number of innovations just handed over to corporations and helping big business to shift their production more into non-union areas. This “military-industrial complex” not only offered big profits, but it could also help generate enough economic activity to convince enough of the working class that the system was working.

As the business paper the Journal of Commerce put it at the time,

The assurance of continued high level of defense expenditures under present conditions cannot be underestimated because the whole economy pivots around it.6

The relationship between all these issues is easily comprehended when one looks at the overall situation 1947. In that year, the U.S. government established the Defense Department, created the CIA and established the National Security Council to coordinate the relationship between military, diplomatic and domestic affairs. Further, President Harry Truman had announced the Truman Doctrine, which pledged the U.S. would support any movement or government it deemed to be anti-communist with essentially unlimited funds and weapons. Also in 1947, Congress passed the Taft-Hartley Act, which kneecapped trade unions and had been written by corporate lobbyists. Finally, President Truman also initiated the “loyalty program” designed to persecute anyone in government service who may disagree with Cold War policies. Notably, such a loyalty program had been high on the agenda of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce.

Was there a Soviet threat?
U.S. historiography–conservative and liberal, then and now–has maintained that whatever excesses existed, the Cold War was inevitable and that there was a “Soviet threat.” The problem was, there wasn’t one. The Soviets had lost 27 million people in World War II. They weren’t too far removed from losing millions during the first World War and millions more fighting Tsarist remnants in a civil war. Not to mention, the USSR has paid a heavy price between the wars in the march towards becoming the second-place industrial powerhouse in the world.

In 1946, Secretary of Defense James Forrestal noted in his diary that the Soviets “would not move” towards war “at any time.”7 Writing about a month later, Secretary Forrestal noted the U.S. military governor of Germany told him that “the Russians did not want war.” A month after that, General Eisenhower told the Secretary that “the Russians would not take steps leading to immediate war.” Even a couple years later, in 1948, when the Cold War was already heating up, one of America’s top generals told Forrestal that he “is confident that they do not want a war.”8

In 1950 George Kennan, the intellectual architect of much Cold War policy and then-Ambassador to Moscow, was quoted in the very anti-communist Readers Digest as saying that it was “hardly likely” that the Soviets were “charting a course for an early military onslaught on the Western World.” In 1952, when the Red Scare was in full-swing, General Alfred Gruenther, Eisenhower’s chief-of-staff, made his view clear in the press that “in my mind, there isn’t going to be any war.” Herbert Hoover, who was militantly anti-Soviet as president, angrily told the New York Times that the militarism emanating out of Washington was nothing more than a “war psychosis.”9

What was really happening?
The real issue between the two powers was not war, but the balance of power. U.S. global supremacy depended on Washington being able to manage the changes in Europe. Germany was at the center of this process. For the Soviets, the memory was strong regarding the way England and France–and to some degree the U.S.–had colluded with the Nazis to try to prompt them to invade the USSR and dethrone Bolshevism. The Soviet government wanted Germany to be totally demilitarized with limits on its economic production. For the U.S. ruling class, this was ultimately an obstacle.

A unified, demilitarized Germany would almost certainly be politically “pluralist,” that is containing communists, capitalists and everything in between. It would be likely to lean on natural economic ties to form a close alliance with the USSR. Politically and economically this threatened to reorient Europe, especially Western Europe, away from a U.S.-dominated “Atlantic alliance.”

Politically, France and Italy were already trending in a “pluralist” direction. In Yugoslavia and Greece, the Nazis had been defeated by communist guerrillas who were taking power in both places. Seeking security from invasion, the Soviets had installed anti-fascist, often communist, governments in Poland, Czechoslovakia, Hungary and Romania. Economically, control of German coal was key to the revival of Western European economies.

On both counts, then, a unified Germany would make it more difficult to profit from European reconstruction, and potentially create a Eurasian alliance that could challenge the U.S. desire to “exert upon the world the full impact of our influence, for such purposes as we see fit.” As one key U.S. policy-maker said in 1947:

the difficulty under which we labor is that in spite of our announced position we really do not intend to accept German reunification.10

At the same time, in Asia, the ground was also rapidly shifting. Chiang Kai-Shek’s bankrupt Chinese government was being steamrolled by the communist forces who had the sympathy of the majority of Chinese. The Chinese people saw their program–that promised to put an end to the ruinous feudalism of the countryside, pursue worker-led industrialization in the cities, and banish imperial concessions forever–with great hope. Chiang’s forces, on the other hand, represented the brutal landlord class and the gangster-connected corporate bosses that had presided over famine and poverty in league with their Western “friends” for over a century.

In Korea too, the anti-fascist, communist-led forces were the most popular, having been the tip of the spear of the most recent manifestation of resistance to many decades of Japanese colonialism. In Vietnam, the same was true, not to mention the communists had been the primary opponents of the French colonial forces that came before the war and wished to return now that it was over.

From India to Malaysia, Indonesia and the Philippines, left-leaning forces that had been leading national liberation movements were also in the lead position politically. This would ultimately prompt the U.S. to draw “North Korea” into a conflict to, at the very least, bleed China and Russia and weaken the anti-colonial tide in Asia, if not outright invade China and overthrow the communists. This is despite the fact that in all these places the new leading parties were hoping to establish a working relationship with the U.S. that, in many cases, was like what was happening in Europe, building on the existing wartime alliances against fascism.

Enter the Red Scare
The lack of any real war threat made the need for a mass panic even more critical. Further, it couldn’t seem too remote, but a present danger. Unable to really conjure the image of an aggressive USSR, the stenographers for capital had to make peace overtures from communists worldwide seem sinister, just smokescreens to hide war preparations. To make U.S. citizens believe this, they had to “expose” that the communists were “all around us,” from the smallest community group to the highest councils of government. Since this was all a “hidden plot,” one could not simply look for the self-declared “card-carrying communists,” but also any camouflaged Reds and any “sympathizers” that might aid them. This meant identifying anyone who had ever shown any sympathy to “communist front organizations.”

This made sense for the redbaiters because it gave them millions of Americans who they could pick and choose to scapegoat. From the Depression on through the war, millions of people had signed petitions against racism and lynching and demanding freedom for victims of the legal lynch mob. Many had also actively engaged in opposing the fascist invasion of Ethiopia and the fascist insurgency in Spain. They had joined and advocated for unions, electrified by the fight back against brutal capitalist policies represented by the CIO. Some of them were Hollywood stars who sought to use their fame to build support for these causes. Some of them had joined the New Deal, hoping to use their skills to help farmers in the dust bowl or putting people back to work at the WPA.

And, yes, a relatively small percentage of these millions, never more than 100,000, were official members of the Communist Party. Of course, none of this was illegal, and most of it, in fact, was quite positive. To solve that problem, the vast majority of those who had signed a petition, joined a demonstration, joined a union and even taken out Communist Party membership were classed as “dupes,” supposedly providing a respectable cover for the evil purposes of the various “Soviet agents” that were “using” these movements to sow division and recruit spies within the government.

To figure out who was who, it was crucial to force as many people as possible to “name names” of those who were a part of the communist conspiracy. In addition to the “Loyalty Program” which expelled anyone who wouldn’t take an anti-communist oath from the government, the Taft-Hartley Act established an “anti-communist oath” for all union officials as well. Private businesses followed suit, but there was also public opprobrium.

The FBI and others quickly assembled a coterie of former communists with an ax to grind and were willing to spin lurid and ludicrous tales. Elizabeth Bentley, for instance, publicly stated a Soviet spy would sit behind a black curtain during Central Committee meetings to hide his identity while he dispensed guidance from Stalin. Often the information they were peddling was clearly false. Manning Johnson, a frequent anti-communist witness at government hearings, when confronted with his own multiple perjured statements, told a federal panel he would “lie 1,000 times if the interests of my government are at stake.” Paul Crouch, star witness for the witch hunters who was deployed against Robert Oppenheimer, Charlie Chaplin and dozens of others high and low, was by 1955 exposed as a fabulist and his various testimonies widely discredited.

Nonetheless, inconsistencies and obvious falsehoods were brushed aside by hearings, trials and most media accounts and the idea of a great communist conspiracy was widely embraced in the popular consciousness. The “memoirs” of the star witnesses became bestsellers, with movie and TV adaptations. The end result was the destruction of the most forward-looking elements of the country–and the rise of a much more conservative outlook that energized Jim Crow and kneecapped militant unionism, lowering the horizons for everyone who wasn’t ultra-wealthy and/or white in accessing the potential promise of the post-war world.

Notes:
1.↩ https://thehill.com/opinion/national-se ... n-century/
2.↩ Carl Marzani, We Can Be Friends (1952) p. 107
3.↩ Jennifer Delton, The Industrialists: How the National Association of Manufacturers Shaped American Capitalism (Princeton UP, 2020). P.140
4.↩ Marzani. p.72
5.↩ Marzani, p.68
6.↩ Marzani, p. 64
7.↩ Marzani, p. 23
8.↩ Ibid. p. 23
9.↩ Ibid. pp. 20-27
10.↩ Christopher Layne, The Peace of Illusions : American Grand Strategy from 1940 to the Present(Cornell, 2006) p.67

https://mronline.org/2024/07/22/america ... carthyism/


Paul Robeson at a Civil Rights Congress protest in front of the White House in Aug. 1948. (Photo: Flickr/Washington Area Spark)

American inquisition (Part 2): What McCarthyism really destroyed
Originally published: Liberation News on July 10, 2024 by Eugene Puryear (more by Liberation News) | (Posted Jul 23, 2024)

Taking down the “Soviet Menace” in America, was, as we saw in part 1 1, not a response to any real “national security threat,” but a very real threat to corporate profits and neocolonial domination by the U.S. ruling class. It was a shield to hide its real, and much less popular, mission to take down those bold enough to challenge racism, advocate aggressively for workers, for peace, rather than world war, or cold war, and a post-war world that would also be free of colonialism.

Even decades later this was so successful most of those who were extirpated from public life remain forgotten. The heaviest blows, without a doubt, fell on the labor and Black liberation movements—in particular their intersection. Whatever its faults, the Communist Party was the nexus between forward-looking elements in both arenas. The unions—and union locals—with the strongest communist influence were the most outspoken opponents of racism, not as a matter of charity but strategy. Making clear that the principle result of white supremacy had been to hold back working-class prosperity.

Relatedly Black communists, understanding the vast majority of Blacks were workers, linked Black freedom to shifting power relations away from capital and toward labor. In both cases, the militants in question recognized that working and oppressed people could never defeat the ruling class isolated purely within national borders, but had to bring their struggles together with similar forces worldwide.

For a brief period in the post-World War II era, this constellation of forces, both communists and non-communist progressives, presented a very different vision of the world. They were the true victims of McCarthyism, and understanding of what they were up to, offers an important lesson about the role of panics, inquisitions and witchunts organized by the U.S. ruling class in the name of “national security.”

A crushing blow
In North Carolina, Local 22 of the Food, Tobacco, Agricultural, and Allied Works of America (FTA) had taken on the biggest tobacco makers in the country, and won union representation. The nearly 10,000 members were mainly Black women. Working together they won not only higher wages, but longer breaks, overtime and vacation days for the first time in living memory.2

They were responsible for electing the first Black city council member in Winston-Salem history and expanding the right to vote in North Carolina in ways that hadn’t been possible since the 1890s. The union even forced RJ Reynolds Tobacco to give workers time off without loss of pay to vote—the first time any employer had done so in the history of North Carolina. The NAACP in Winston-Salem went from 11 members in 1941 to nearly 2,000 just a few months after Local 22 members stepped in to revitalize the civil rights organization.3

The union also stepped in against the lynch mob mentality of the South, campaigning to defend William Wellman, a Black man, from a death sentence stemming from a false rape charge.4 Local 22, was also a leftwing stronghold, with the majority of the 150 members of the Winston-Salem Communist Party in 1946 being tobacco workers, including a significant number of Local 22 shop stewards. Party activity was synergistic with the unions, in particular on fighting Klan terror and promoting more progressive policies in the state like the first ever minimum wage and higher salaries for teachers and expanded public education.5

In the post-war atmosphere, this put Local 22, and the FTA more broadly, in the crosshairs of the witch hunters. FTA, along with others in the labor movement initially refused to sign the anti-communist affidavits linked to Taft-Hartley, which meant they lost the ability to represent workers in union elections. Anti-communist labor leaders in the CIO and the AFL started competing organizing drives to undermine Local 22, using redbaiting and racism to try to turn workers against the union.

Many of their community supporters in the Black middle class also turned on them. Racist politicians and corporate officials feigned belief in some progress for Blacks to break some of the more mainstream leaders away from the union on anti-communist grounds. Local 22 also faced heavy attack for having a close relationship to Paul Robeson and spearheading the North Carolina presidential campaign for former Vice President Henry Wallace in 1948, the only candidate running on an anti-segregation platform. These factors combined crushed the union by the early 1950s, sending tobacco workers back into the unorganized, Jim Crow world that they had done so much to start tearing down.

Civil rights, the first wave
On the one hand, the war had raised the hopes of Black America about what may come next. It had also raised the fighting spirit of Black people who not only advocated aggressively, but sought to exploit their status as “swing voters,” especially when combined with the political forces of labor in Northern and Midwestern states to exert political pressure on both parties to embrace non-discriminatory policy planks. Nonetheless, the forces of white supremacy were not easily dislodged and the menace of defacto and de jure lynch law were just as evident as the war ended.

Indicatively, on June 6, 1945, just three days before the Nazi surrender, Denice Harris, a war veteran, was shot to death, without reason, by a joint police-civilian mob in Atlanta, Georgia. The case was ultimately ruled a “justifiable homicide.” On Dec. 23 of the same year in Fontana, California the Short family, including two young children, were burned to death in their home for daring to move into a “white” neighborhood. No one was ever held responsible.6

In that atmosphere, it’s unsurprising that there was a desire to fight back. In 1946, the Civil Rights Congress, a vehicle for militant fightback, was formed. The organization was led by William Patterson, a communist and one of the principal leaders of the fight to free the Scottsboro Boys and other civil rights campaigns of the 1930s and 1940s, including the integration of Major League Baseball. It also included top leaders from the UAW and the United Electrical Workers, the former governor of Minnesota, stalwart African American newspaperwoman Charlotta Bass —later the first Black woman to run for vice president—and a number of others with serious credentials fighting racial discrimination.7

The CRC approached the issue of fighting racism with a Scottsboro-like mentality. Focusing on mass campaigning to shine a spotlight on racial injustice, exploiting the official U.S. rhetoric of “democracy” to bring pressure on authorities and sidetrack clear frame-up cases. As such, a major focus was on developing a mass membership of those opposed to white supremacy. Its membership was rooted in the Black community, and leftwing sectors of the working class. For instance, in Pennsylvania one chapter leader reported its members were “influential in Negro Baptist church life.” In Spokane, Washington the members were mainly “railway workers and carpenters.” In Wilkes-Barre, the members were “in large part” miners. Chicago, even at the height of McCarthyism in 1952, had 4,000 members.8

The CRC was a hive of activity on all the major fronts. Nationally they waged a fierce campaign to pressure the government to prosecute the Ku Klux Klan (which they never did) and collected over 500,000 signatures in a campaign to oust arch-racist Theodore Bilbo from Congress. They registered voters in the Jim Crow terror stronghold of St. Bernard Parish, Louisiana and fought against segregation in South Carolina schools.9 In Philadelphia the local CRC picketed Woolworths until they hired their first Black employees and in California forced the state employment agency to cease screening job applicants by race.10

The Civil Rights Congress was perhaps best known for its willingness to take on Scottsboro-like cases where Black’s were framed on bogus charges, mainly the Martinsville Seven, Willie McGee and Rosa Lee Ingram. Ingram’s case was particular indicative because it directly challenged the centuries old status quo in the South that Black women could be raped at will. Ingram and her sons were arrested and sentenced to death after the three acted in self-defense and killed a white man who had repeatedly committed sexual violence against Rosa Lee. The CRC represented her in court and, along with the Black left-led organization Sojourners for Truth and Justice, conducted a mass defense campaign of protests and petitions that got the sentenced commuted to life. All three would finally be released in 1959.

The Civil Rights Congress also presented a landmark publication “We Charge Genocide!” to the United Nations in 1951, that, in detailed fashion, listed the extreme violence and discrimination faced by Blacks in the United States that made a significant impact internationally and seriously harmed its image in Europe and in the Global South.

For all this, the CRC was heavily targeted by the government. As early as 1948, it was listed as “subversive” by Attorney General Tom Clark. They endured incessant police harassment, wiretapping and physical disruptions of meetings by thugs sent in by the police and right wing. Affiliation with the CRC was one of the principle markers of being a subversive communist agent and dozens were hauled before Congress on that basis. The government waged a multi-faceted campaign to target the finances of the CRC, essentially bankrupting the organization by forcing it into numerous legal cases and demanding it turn over its donor lists which, of course, hobbled ongoing fundraising. Not to mention several IRS probes. Ultimately the organization was forced to dissolve in 1956.11

Meaning of McCarthy
These are just two examples of dozens. The International Workers Order, for instance, was a mutual aid society with hundreds of thousands of members that provided low-cost health and life insurance, as well as medical and dental clinics for workers. It was the only insurance organization that didn’t discriminate against Blacks. It also underwrote numerous cultural activities to benefit working-class families. Nonetheless, despite being totally solvent, it was forced to dissolve itself in the mid-1950s by New York State officials.

The McCarthyite witch hunt fits perfectly into a frequent occurrence through history of “national security”-type panics launched by elites. In 1741, for instance, colonial authorities in New York tortured several Irish women for being accomplices in a slave uprising. From their “confessions” half the male slave population was imprisoned in a mass hysteria. British colonial authorities presented the whole thing as a Catholic plot conducted by Spain and the Pope.

Not that long after, in 1798, the new United States passed the Alien and Sedition Act, which blatantly contradicted the Constitution, essentially making it a crime to criticize the government, with fear of the French Revolutionary spirit hanging in the background. After Nat Turner’s rebellion, a wave of repression followed across the South as slave owners feared slave revolts. This repression included beheading the uninvolved and placing their heads on pikes. The Virginia legislature followed up by passing increased restrictions on free Blacks as well as slaves.

In each case, these panics are created by elites to clip the wings of those potentially challenging their power. With “foreign interference”often used as the pretext. Clearly this is where we are today. Opposition to anything contrary to the status quo is being framed as “disinformation” or “misinformation” or as being “manipulated” by Russia, China, Iran, Hamas, Cuba or all of the above.

The question is, will we learn from history? Will we let the genocidaires to silence the voice of those opposing genocide? Allow those who strangle countries with blockades and sanctions to strangle those who struggle for a more just world order? Let the elites who hope to keep workers poor and impoverished crush the voices arguing to end hunger and provide the masses with a dignified standard of living? The real meaning of McCarthyism is that it, along with its attendant panics and inquisitions, are just weapons of the rich against the exploited and oppressed. If we want a new world, we can’t ever forget that.

Part 1

Notes:
1.↩ https://www.liberationnews.org/american ... carthyism/
2.↩ https://www.ueunion.org/ue-news-feature ... s-unionism
3.↩ https://jacobin.com/2018/05/civil-right ... 22-korstad
4.↩ Ibid.
5.↩ Ibid.
6.↩ We Charge Genocide, 1951, pp.60-61 https://www.crmvet.org/info/genocide5_evidence-a.pdf
7.↩ Gerald Horne, Communist Front? Civil Rights Congress, pp. 32-33.
8.↩ Ibid. pp. 40-41
9.↩ Ibid. p. 58
10.↩ Ibid. pp.58-62
11.↩ Ibid. ch.

https://mronline.org/2024/07/23/america ... on-part-2/

[blindpig]

“Censorship to Defend Democracy”
Posted on July 30, 2024 by Yves Smith

Yves here. I am posting this piece despite the authors’ abject failure to consider the deep internal contradiction treating censorship as any way justified, worst of all in depicting it as a bulwark of democracy. This stance again illustrates how fearful ruling factions in the West have become and how they over-rely on messaging, as opposed to getting legitimacy from delivering concrete material benefits to citizens and operating bureaucracies competently, as fairly as possible given often conflicting demand, and in an efficient manner.

Admittedly, the authors are Swiss and Europe generally does not have free speech as central (at least historically) to the exercise of democratic rights. But it seems noteworthy that this orientation suggests that the US, perhaps by design, did not promote this key component of US democracy through its “democracy” promoting organs like the National Endowment for Democracy and Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty.

I trust readers will have some fun picking this article apart.


By Marcel Caesmann,PhD candidate in Economics University Of Zurich, Janis Goldzycher, PhD candidate University Of Zurich, Matteo Grigoletto, PhD candidate University Of Bern; PhD candidate Wyss Academy For Nature, and Lorenz Gschwent, PhD student University of Duisburg-Essen. Originally published at VoxEU

The spread of propaganda, misinformation, and biased narratives, especially on social media, is a growing concern in many democracies. This column explores the EU ban on Russian state-led news outlets after the 2022 Russian invasion of Ukraine to find out whether censorship curbs the spread of slanted narratives. While the ban did reduce pro-Russian slant on social media, its effects were short-lived. Increased activity by other suppliers of slanted content that was not banned might play a role in mitigating the ban’s effectiveness. Regulation in the context of social media where many players can create and spread content poses new challenges for democracies.

Misinformation, propaganda, and biased narratives are increasingly recognised as a major concern and a source of risk in the 21st century (World Economic Forum 2024). The Russian interference in the 2016 US presidential election marked a pivotal moment, raising awareness of foreign influence in democratic processes. From Russia’s ‘asymmetric warfare’ in Ukraine to Chinese influence over TikTok, autocracies are weaponising information, shifting their effort from outright repression to controlling narratives (Treisman and Guriev 2015, Guriev and Treisman 2022).

Recent work (Guriev et al. 2023a, 2023b) highlights two major policy alternatives democracies could adopt to counter this threat. One strategy relies on top-down regulatory measures to control foreign media influence and the spread of misinformation. The other addresses the issue at the individual level with media literacy campaigns, fact-checking tools, behavioural interventions, and similar measures. The first approach is particularly challenging to implement in a democratic context due to the inherent trade-off between implementing effective measures to curb misinformation and upholding free speech as a core principle of a democratic order.

Recent actions, such as the Protecting Americans from Foreign Adversary Controlled Applications Act passed by the US Congress in 2024, the EU’s Digital Services Act (European Union 2023), the German NetzDG (Müller et al. 2022, Jiménez Durán et al. 2024) or Israel’s ban of Al Jazeera’s broadcasting activity, demonstrate that democratic governments see large-scale policy interventions as a necessary and viable tool to counteract the spread of misinformation. At the same time, the rising importance of social media as a news source adds a new layer of complexity to effective regulation. In contrast to traditional forms of media such as newspapers, radio, or TV, which have a limited number of senders, social media is characterised by a large number of users that act as producers, spreaders, and consumers of information – changing their roles fluidly and thereby making it harder to control the flow of information (Campante et al. 2023).

To shed light on the effects of censorship in democracies, our recent work (Caesmann et al. 2024) examines the EU ban on two Russian state-backed outlets, Russia Today and Sputnik. The EU implemented the ban on 2 March 2022 to counteract the spread of Russian narratives in the context of the 2022 Russian invasion of Ukraine. The unprecedented decision to ban all activities of Russia Today and Sputnik was implemented virtually overnight, affecting all their channels, including online platforms.

We investigate the effectiveness of the ban in shifting the conversation away from narratives with a pro-Russian government bias and misinformation on Twitter (now X) among users from Europe. To do this, we leverage the fact that the ban on Russia Today and Sputnik was implemented in the EU while no comparable measure was taken in non-EU European countries such as Switzerland and the UK.

Media Slant Regarding the War

We build on recent advancements in natural language processing (Gentzkow and Shapiro 2011, Gennaro and Ash 2023) and measure each user’s opinion on the war by assessing their proximity towards two narrative poles: pro-Russia and pro-Ukraine. We create these poles by analysing more than 15,000 tweets from accounts related to the Ukrainian and Russian governments. Using advanced natural language processing, we transform these tweets into vectors representing the average stance of pro-Russian and pro-Ukrainian government tweets. We use these as two poles of slant in the Twitter conversation on the war.

Figure 1 illustrates the content differences in government tweets, with keyword frequencies in Russian government tweets in purple (on the left) and in Ukrainian government tweets in orange (on the right). Keywords like “aggression” and “invasion” are used predominantly by Ukrainian accounts to frame the conflict as an invasion, while the Russian narrative describes it as a “military operation”. Other keywords like “occupy”, “defence”, “NATO”, “West”, “nazi”, and “Donbas” further highlight the distinct narratives of each side. These terms underline the slant in government content, making them effective benchmarks for our measurement.

Figure 1 Word frequency in the sample of government tweets


Note: Russian government tweets in purple (on the left) and Ukrainian government tweets in orange (on the right).
Next, we collect more than 750,000 tweets on the conflict in the four weeks around the implementation of the ban. We compute a slant measure for each tweet by calculating its proximity to the Russian pole relative to the Ukrainian one, centring it at zero. This measure takes negative values when the tweet leans towards the Ukrainian pole and positive ones for the Russian pole.

Censorship to Defend Democracy

Figure 2 plots the time series of raw averages of average slant by users in the countries affected by the ban in blue and those not affected by the ban in orange. Our measure of media slant captures the dynamics of the online discussion. Until the invasion, the conversation was increasingly moving towards the pro-Ukrainian pole. The beginning of the invasion also coincides with mounting pro-Russian activity, most likely capturing the intense online campaign that flooded Europe and pushed the EU to a swift reaction. Overall, the raw data already suggests an effect of the ban on the spread of pro-Russian government content; we observe a growing divergence in the average slant between EU and non-EU countries after the ban is implemented.

Figure 2 Time series of our slant measure: Daily averages


To estimate the causal effect of the ban more systematically, we compare users located in the EU (Austria, France, Germany, Ireland, and Italy) that were affected by the ban to users located in non-EU countries (Switzerland and UK) that were not affected by a ban in the time of our study, using a difference-in-difference strategy.

First, we focus on users who previously directly interacted (followed, retweeted, or replied) with the two banned outlets. Figure 3 shows the results of this analysis and indicates an immediate and sizeable effect of the ban, leading to a reduction in pro-Russian slant among users affected by the policy. Our estimates suggest that the ban reduced the average slant of these interaction users by 63.1% compared to the pre-ban mean with no clear existing pre-trends before the ban. In the paper, we show that this effect is most pronounced among users who were most extreme before the ban.

Figure 3 Daily event study on our slant measure: Interaction users


Censorship – a Viable Policy Tool?

A closer investigation into the temporal effect of the ban suggests that the effect is fading over time. While there is an immediate effect after the ban, even within the short time horizon of our study, the difference in average slant, between users affected by the ban and those not, closes a few days after the implementation.

We further study the indirect effects of the ban on users who did not directly interact with the banned outlets. We do find that the ban also reduced the pro-Russian slant among the non-interaction users. However, this happens to a lower degree, resulting in a decrease of approximately 17.3% from pre-ban slant levels, in contrast to the 63.1% observed among interaction users. Notably, we find a reduction in the share of pro-Russian retweets driving this effect. This finding suggests that the ban deprives non-interaction users of slanted content that they are able and willing to share.

Our results show that the ban had some immediate impact, particularly on those users who interacted with the banned outlets before the ban implementation. However, this effect fades quickly and is muted in its reach to indirectly affected users.

In the final step of our analysis, we investigate the mechanisms that might have compensated for the ban’s effect, effectively re-balancing the supply of pro-Russia slanted content. This part of our study particularly examines users identified as suppliers of slanted content. We provide suggestive evidence that the most active suppliers have increased the production of new pro-Russian content in response to the ban and thereby helped to counteract the overall effectiveness of the ban.

Our analysis complements insights from studies investigating small-scale policy interventions targeting the individual user (Guriev, Marquis et al. 2023, Guriev, Henry et al. 2023), by studying the effects of a large-scale policy alternative: governmental censorship of media outlets. Specifically, we provide evidence that censorship in a democratic context can affect content circulated on social media. However, there seem to be limits to the effectiveness of such measures, reflected in the short-lived effect of the ban and its more limited impact on users who are only indirectly affected by the policy.

Our study points to the crucial role of other suppliers who are filling the void created by censoring core outlets. This reflects the changed nature of media regulation in the context of social media, where many users can create and spread information at low costs. The ability and willingness of other users to take action seem to limit the effectiveness of large-scale regulatory measures targeting big outlets. Successful policy interventions need to account for these limits of large-scale regulatory measures in the context of social media.

See original post for references

https://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2024/07 ... cracy.html

[blindpig]

(Meanwhile, from the Dept of Pots & Kettles...)

How Sinclair Sneaks Right-Wing Spin Into Millions of Households
Pete Tucker


A video collage of dozens of Sinclair anchors reading a script warning that


Election Focus 2024With the presidential contest in full swing, the Sinclair Broadcast Group appears to be ramping up its right-wing propaganda again.

While millions of Americans are subjected to the TV network’s electioneering, few know it. That’s because, like a chameleon, Sinclair blends into the woodwork.

Turn on your local news and you may well be watching a Sinclair station, even though it appears on your screen under the imprimatur of a major network like CBS, NBC or Fox.

Here in the DC area, I occasionally tune into the local ABC affiliate, WJLA. Its newscasters are personable, and I like the weather forecasts. But then I remember that WJLA is owned by Sinclair.

I know this only because I’m a weirdo who follows Sinclair, not because there’s any obvious on-air sign the network owns WJLA—there isn’t. That’s why Sinclair’s propaganda is so hard to detect.

Hijacking trust


A video collage of dozens of Sinclair anchors reading a script warning that “some members of the media use their platforms to push their own personal bias and agenda.”

While trust in the media has cratered in recent years, there’s a notable exception. “Seventy-six percent of Americans say that they still trust their local news stations—more than the percentage professing to trust their family or friends,” the New Yorker (10/15/18) reported.

Smartly, Sinclair leaves its affiliates alone long enough for them to develop a rapport with their audience. “In a way, the fact that it looks normal most of the time is part of the problem,” said Margaret Sullivan (CJR, 4/11/18), former public editor of the New York Times. “What Sinclair is cynically doing is trading on the trust that develops among local news people and their local audience.”

By hijacking this trusting relationship, Sinclair is able to sneak its propaganda into millions of American homes, including in presidential swing states where Sinclair owns more stations than any other network.

Sinclair does this by requiring its affiliates to air the right-wing stories it sends them. Because these segments are introduced or delivered by trusted local hosts, they gain credibility.

Mostly Sinclair’s sleight of hand goes undetected. But in 2018, the network pushed its luck by requiring anchors at stations across the country to read from the same Trump-like anti-media script. A video compilation of dozens if not hundreds of Sinclair anchors voicing the same “Orwellian” commentary went viral.

Despite the occasional brush up, Sinclair carries on largely under-the-radar, quietly gobbling up stations, mainly in cheaper markets. “We’re forever expanding—like the universe,” said longtime leader David Smith, who’s turned Sinclair into the country’s second-largest TV network. (See FAIR.org, 5/13/24.)

An anchor jumps ship

Popular Information (7/23/24) reported that Sinclair anchor Eugene Ramirez quit in part over a requirement that he air at least three stories from the network’s “Rapid Response Team” nightly. “The RRT has produced 147 stories this year that portray Democrats in a negative light,” Popular Information found, “and just seven stories that portray Democrats positively.”

Of the 294 TV stations that Sinclair owns or operates, at least 70 of them air Sinclair’s in-house national evening news broadcast. For a year and a half, this broadcast was anchored by Eugene Ramirez, but he resigned in January, and it’s not hard to see why.

Each night Ramirez was given a list of four stories produced out of Sinclair’s Maryland’s headquarters. From these, Ramirez had to select at least three to air. Often these stories were little more than writeups of press releases from right-wing politicians and groups, as Judd Legum and Rebecca Crosby report at Popular Information (7/23/24). One recent headline read, “Trump PAC Launches New Ad Hitting Democrats on Border: ‘Joe Biden Does Nothing.’”

Sinclair frequently booked far-right guests to appear on Ramirez’s broadcast, and he was “instructed not to interrupt them,” according to Popular Information. “Many of Sinclair‘s affiliates were not in big cities,” Ramirez was told, “and the content of the broadcast had to reflect the sensitivities of those viewers.” Progressive guests rarely if ever appeared.

Legum and Crosby also found that Sinclair requires around 200 of its affiliates to air its “Question of the Day,” which has included gems like, “Do you think former House Speaker Pelosi deserves some of the blame for January 6 riot?” But other questions are less obviously biased.

It’s one thing when a blowhard on Fox News asks, “Are you concerned violent criminals are crossing the border?” But it’s quite another when the same question is asked by a familiar and trusted local anchor.

The power of Sinclair is that questions like these are being posed not just by one trusted anchor, but by a small army of them in communities across the country every day. Elections are won and lost on less.

https://fair.org/home/how-sinclair-snea ... ouseholds/

Dastardly! Meanwhile, the mainstream news outlets, less Fox, push liberal pov non-stop as though it's the only game in town. Unless you're a Trump fascist, of course. What's that sticking out of your eye, Bubba?

Conservative capitalist parties and Liberal capitalist parties demonize each other disguising the fact that neither does squat to help the working class when in power. These scum are all self-aggrandizing as Trump but more circumspect in their pillage, usually.

Why people trust any of the well-coiffed mouthpieces is beyond me but there's no doubt that many do. The 'magical' effect of video on our monkey brains, the power of repetition, the cumulative effect of propaganda absorbed since grade school all are in play.

In this instance these TV news anchors are no different than the Hollywood celebrities who mostly are as liberal as it gets, attractive faces on a screen telling people what to think. Were I a liberal I'd be embarrassed by this whiny article.

[blindpig]

CN Condemns FBI Raid on CN Columnist’s Home
August 9, 2024

Consortium News strongly condemns the raid on the home of its columnist Scott Ritter by the F.B.l. on Thursday as a serious threat to press freedom.


Scott Ritter speaking with the media outside his home after the F.B.I. left with boxes of documents and electronics. (CBS 6 Albany/YouTube screenshot)

By Consortium News

Consortium News condemns in the strongest terms the F.B.I. raid on the home of CN columnist Scott Ritter.

Federal agents removed Ritter’s electronic equipment and numerous boxes of paper files from his Albany, N.Y. area home Thursday on suspicion that the former U.N. weapons inspector is violating the U.S. Foreign Agents Registration Act.

In a video posted to his Substack page, Ritter said that normally in alleged FARA violation cases the authorities send a letter to the subject of the inquiry informing them of the investigation. They do not send numerous F.B.I. agents to the door with a warrant to search and remove potential evidence.

The warrant, a copy of which Ritter posted, only called for electronic devices to be removed, but the agents, whom Ritter said acted professionally, also removed boxes of paper United Nations files from his days as a U.N. weapons inspector in Iraq in the 1990s. As Ritter says in the video, U.N. documents are never classified and could have nothing to do with the alleged FARA case against him.

“So the idea that, this is normal procedure is absurd in the extreme. I’m not a foreign agent. What I am is a journalist. And this is how we need to couch this entire thing. What the F.B.I. did yesterday, what the United States government did yesterday, was a frontal assault not only on free speech, but a free press,” Ritter said in the video.

Ritter says he’s being targeted because of his freelance work for Russian media. In the wake of Russiagate, the U.S. Department of Justice in 2017 forced Russian-government financed media companies to register as foreign agents. But only the principal executives of RT and Sputnik need to register, not employees or freelancers such as Ritter.

“They are seeking to intimidate a journalist with a long record of journalism, to intimidate this journalist, me, from engaging in activities such as the research and publication of articles and materials critical of U.S. policy in Ukraine, supportive of Russian objectives,” he said.

“Just a quick reminder. The U.S. courts have determined that under FARA, coincidence of ideas between an individual such as myself and a foreign government, Russia, does not weigh in on FARA,” Ritter said.

“So the fact that the Russian government and I happen to have coinciding viewpoints on critical issues of the day might reflect that we’re both on the right side of history as opposed to me being an agent of the Russian government. In fact, it does reflect that we’re both on the right side of history,” he said.

Because of his views, Ritter has been placed on a “kill list” by the Ukrainian government. The local CBS News affiliate in Albany, N.Y., apparently tipped off by the F.B.I., filmed agents removing boxes from Ritter’s home. In the process they revealed his home address and license plate numbers.

Ritter said in the video (published on CN) that a police SWAT team was also sent to his home Thursday evening and left without incident.

Ritter said:

“I’m a journalist. I have a constitutional right of free speech associated with a free press to do what I’m doing. And to shut up means I’ve allowed the United States government to intimidate a journalist into silence. That simply isn’t going to happen.

Why would the F.B.I. do this? I think we can’t ask that question without bringing up the obvious. What I’m saying and doing strikes fear in the hearts of some people in Washington, D.C., whether it be the State Department, the C.I.A, the White House, Department of Justice; it strikes fear in the hearts of the Ukrainian government.”

Consortium News calls on the Justice Department to immediately cease its intimidation of one of our columnists as it constitutes state interference in the operation of the media and a threat to press freedom.

https://consortiumnews.com/2024/08/09/c ... ists-home/

[blindpig]

Scott Ritter: The FBI’s Raid on Peace
August 16, 2024

Maybe the F.B.I. thought I would be intimidated by the raid, and opt to remain silent out of fear of generating unwanted attention. But all it really accomplished that day was to execute a raid on peace, the author says.


F.B.I. headquarters in Washington. (Aude, Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 3.0)

By Scott Ritter
Scott Ritter Extra

On Wednesday, Aug. 7, the F.B.I. executed a search warrant at my residence. The F.B.I. claimed they were investigating whether I was functioning as an unregistered agent of a foreign government. But what was really taking place was a frontal assault on peace.

Shortly before 2 p.m. on Aug. 5, attorneys from the Northern District of New York, accompanied by agents from the National Security Division of the Federal Bureau of Investigation (F.B.I.), gathered in the chambers of Christian F. Hummel, a United States magistrate judge for the Northern District of New York. Hummel was appointed to this position in September 2012.

Prior to his appointment, Hummel, a graduate of Albany Law School, had a career in civil litigation as a trial lawyer, before being elected as the town justice for the town of East Greenbush. Hummel moved on to be a Rensselaer County Family Court judge and, later, the Rensselaer County surrogate, the position he held at the time of his appointment as a U.S. magistrate judge.

The U.S. attorneys presented Hummel with a series of affidavits from the F.B.I. and possibly other U.S. government agencies which they maintained established probable cause for the federal law enforcement to conduct a search of my residence for “any computers, computer equipment, cellular telephones, and/or any other electronic media or storage devices.”

According to the affidavits (which were not included as part of the search warrant presented to me by the F.B.I. agents), these electronic devices contained information they believed would advance their case that I was operating as an unregistered agent of a foreign government in violation of the Foreign Agent and Registration Act.

[Scott Ritter will discuss this article and answer audience questions on Ep. 185 of Ask the Inspector on Thursday, August 15 at 8 PM ET.]

Based upon the questions asked of me by the F.B.I. during the conduct of this search, the foreign government in question was the Russian Federation.

The search warrant required that the search be conducted in the daytime between 6 a.m. and 10 p.m., which meant that the U.S. attorneys and the F.B.I. either did not seek to establish cause for a nighttime raid or were unable to convince Judge Hummel that such cause existed. Likewise, the U.S. attorneys and the F.B.I. did not make a case to delay notification of their execution of the search warrant.

In short, this search warrant was as non-confrontational a process as one can have when 20-plus armed U.S. government agents invade your home and rifle through your life’s possessions, and those of your family.

The F.B.I. agents involved in both the search and the questioning were professional and courteous throughout the five-plus hour event.

A couple of takeaways from a cursory analysis of this search warrant. First, the F.B.I. was most likely not looking for anything related to the active commission of a crime — I was not handcuffed, and the interview process was completely voluntary on my part — they did not read me my rights, nor was I asked to waive my rights.

This suggests that neither the U.S. attorneys nor the F.B.I. were operating based on any federal indictment — if such an indictment existed and had been used as the foundation of this search, the tenor of the proceedings would have been far different. Indeed, at no time did the F.B.I. suggest that I had committed a crime — they simply said there was concern within the U.S. government that I was engaged in activities that fell under the FARA statute.

Second, it appeared to me that the F.B.I. was on a fishing expedition. The two special agents who questioned me each held thick folders filled with documents that they would refer to during the interview. On one occasion, after they completed a particular line of questioning, the two agents stared at each other, as if they were struggling with how to proceed.

“You guys clearly have something on your mind,” I said. “Just say what it is. I’m being completely cooperative here. Ask your question, and I’ll answer it to the best of my ability.”

At that point, one of the agents reached into her folder and pulled out copies of an email exchange I had back in February 2023 with Igor Shaktar-ool, a senior counselor with the Russian embassy.

‘Unmasked’


The author with Russian diplomats inside the Russian embassy, Feb. 21, 2023. Igor Shakra-ool is on the far right. (Russian Embassy)

The production of this email demonstrated that the F.B.I. had most likely obtained a FISA warrant which enabled them, directly or indirectly, to monitor my communications.

This did not necessarily mean that they had received permission to monitor me directly — as a U.S. citizen, I have constitutionally-derived rights of privacy which preclude such monitoring void of very specific justification and authorization, none of which could possibly have been met given the facts of the case. (Moreover, if there had been a FISA warrant issued, and this product was the result, then I doubt the F.B.I. agent would have shared it with me in such a non-confrontational manner.)

The F.B.I. is, however, allowed to monitor the emails of foreign diplomats, of whom Igor Shaktar-ool is one. As an American citizen caught up in any intercepted communication, my identity would normally be “masked,” meaning that anyone who encountered the intercepted email would only know me as a faceless, nameless “U.S. citizen.”

At some point in time, however, my actions regarding Russia must have reached a level of concern where my identity was “unmasked” so that the data contained in the emails could be more thoroughly evaluated.

And this “unmasking” undoubtedly led to the F.B.I. seeking a court order to gain access to the emails in question outside the FISA procedures, freeing up the information contained within to be used by a wider audience.

This appears to be the case.

Back on June 3, I had received an email from Google informing me that they had “received and responded to a legal process issued by the F.B.I. compelling the release of information related to Google accounts that are linked to or associated with a specific identifier.” Google’s response, the email noted, “included information about your account.”

Google had been prohibited from disclosing this information to me by a “court order.” This order had either expired or had been rescinded, and Google was now permitted to disclose their receipt of the F.B.I. request.

I’m not a big believer in coincidences. June 3 was also the date the Customs and Border Protection agents seized my passport as I was preparing to board a flight at JFK airport that was to take me to Russia, where I was scheduled to participate in the Saint Petersburg International Economic Forum before embarking on a 40-plus day tour of Russia.

As was the case with the search warrant, if I was under suspicion of having committed a crime, I would have been arrested and detained once they seized my passport.

The fact that the Customs and Border Protection agents allowed me to leave unhindered pointed to the existence of an ongoing federal law enforcement investigation which feared the unmonitored connectivity I would have with Russians, including Russian government officials, while travelling in Russia.

Igor Shaktar-ool and most of the Russian embassy staff use Gmail as their email provider.

To legally seize my passport in the manner they did, the U.S. government would be revealing that they had an ongoing federal investigation against me. This would require the unsealing of the court order related to that investigation. Which would free up Google to send me the email about the F.B.I. investigation.

Life is stranger than fiction.

Now to the email chain in question.

I had visited the Russian embassy, at my request, on Feb. 20, 2023, to inform the Russian government of my intent to travel to Russia later in the spring as part of a book tour to promote the publication of my recently released memoir — Disarmament in the Time of Perestroika: Arms control and the end of the Soviet Union — of my time as an inspector implementing the Intermediate Nuclear Forces (INF) treaty in the Soviet Union back in 1988-1990.

The U.S. had withdrawn from the INF treaty back in August 2019, an action that I believed accelerated the risk of nuclear war. At the time, I was promoting the idea of a major anti-nuclear war rally here in the United States, and I was thinking about trying to organize similar rallies in Russia.

As I explained to the Russians, my background as a former Marine Corps intelligence officer who had worked in the Soviet Union in that capacity would undoubtedly raise alarms in the Kremlin. My purpose in visiting the Russian embassy — which was done on my request and my initiative — was to answer any questions the Russians might have about my upcoming trip so that there were no misperceptions or concerns about motive.

The last thing I wanted, I told the Russian diplomats I met with, was to be viewed as a threat by the Russian government.

My mission in travelling to Russia was to promote better relations by reminding a Russian audience that once upon a time our two nations actively worked together in the furtherance of the cause of peace by eliminating the very weapons — nuclear-armed missiles — that threatened our mutual existence.

The story of my experience as a weapons inspector in the Soviet Union, in my opinion, served as an example of not only what was, but what could — and, in my opinion, should — be again. I wanted to go to Russia, engage in a conversation with the Russian people about furthering nuclear arms control and bettering relations, and then return to the United States and educate the American people about the Russian reality as I saw it.

Rage Against War


Among the many speakers at the Washington rally was Chris Hedges, but not the author. (Joe Lauria)

The Russian embassy officials were familiar with this article (apparently, they subscribe to my Substack — it’s a free subscription! The F.B.I. should do so as well, if they already have not.) In addition to discussing my plans regarding bringing the message of peace and hope contained in my book Disarmament in the Time of Perestroika to Russia, our conversation turned to the issue of Russophobia in the United States.

I viewed Russophobia as the greatest impediment to the cause of bringing about good relations between Russia and the United States — so long as the American people were taught to be afraid of Russia, they would never be able to responsibly engage on the issue of improving relations with Russia.

It was at this juncture that Igor Shaktar-ool mentioned that the Russian ambassador, Anatoly Antonov, had recently written an article on the problem of Russophobia. I was shown a draft of the article.

Igor noted that in the past the ambassador would have sought to publish the article as an Op Ed in either The New York Times or The Washington Post, both of which had in the past published essays written by Russian diplomats. Igor noted that in the present climate, neither publication was sympathetic to the views of a Russian diplomat.

I asked if Igor could provide me with a copy of the article so I could read it over. Igor promised to email me a copy.

The next day Igor sent me an email:

“It was [a] pleasure to meet you in the Embassy yesterday. I a.m. grateful to you for the very interesting discussion on Russia-U.S. relations in the context of Ukraine crisis.

As we agreed I a.m. sending to you our article on Russophobia.

We would appreciate [it] if you could assist us in publishing it in the U.S. media, for instance, in the Nation or Consortium News. It was pleasure to meet you in the Embassy yesterday. I am grateful to you for the very interesting discussion on Russia-U.S. relations in the context of Ukraine crisis.

I reached out to both The Nation and Consortium News about Ambassador Antonov’s essay. I never heard back from The Nation, and Joe Lauria, the editor at Consortium News, was gun-shy about running something sourced straight from the Russian embassy. Given the reality of the current climate, I couldn’t blame him.

I sent an email to Igor on Feb. 23, informing him as much. I also told him that I had taken the initiative to write my own article, using Antonov’s essay as the core point of departure.

You Are Being Directed by the Russian


The author with Russian Ambassador Anatoly Antonov at the Russian ambassador’s residence, December 2022. (Russian Embassy)

Instead of trying to place the essay in an American publication, I proposed that I publish my article on my own Substack. “I would then publish it on Twitter (100,000-plus followers), Telegram (80,000-plus followers) and Facebook (I have no idea how many followers). There is a good chance it would be picked up by other outlets,” I noted, adding (optimistically) “It could easily get a million views.”

“I used every word in your essay as written. I did move a paragraph to the front to help me set the stage properly.

Let me know what you think. I could publish this as soon as I got your approval.

Or if you have concerns, we can talk it through.

And, at the end of the day, [if] you would prefer to have your essay published as is, we can keep trying.”

The F.B.I. agent who showed me the email exchange between Igor and myself underscored the sentence in bold, above.

“You asked for his approval,” she said. “It suggests that you were taking instructions from the Russian Embassy.”

I laughed. “It shows no such thing,” I replied. I pointed out that I had shifted paragraphs around, breaking up the flow of Ambassador Antonov’s essay as it had originally been written. It was only proper that I make sure the source was okay with this.

“I’m a journalist,” I said. “I’m using material written by someone else. I have a duty to make sure that I use this material in a manner which meets with the approval of the source. It’s standard practice.”

Igor replied to me the next day. He thanked me for my interest in Antonov’s Russophobia article, and for my “creative approach with substantial comments on the problem we raise.”

Igor asked that I give the embassy some time to discuss my draft. “I will let you know about our decision,” he wrote.

Igor was as good as his word, writing to me on Feb. 25. He told me that the embassy had decided to publish Antonov’s article on the Embassy Facebook page. “This doesn’t negate our great interest in your article,” he wrote, “which we find very strong, thoughtful, detailed and well-written.”

Igor proposed that I publish my article as a separate piece. He did request that I change the opening passage of the article “for objective reasons.”

“And you made those changes,” the F.B.I. agent said. “It shows that you are being directed by the Russians, and that you are complying with their directions.”

The opening passage of the draft article that I had sent to Igor reads as follows:

“Recently, I had the opportunity to speak with a Russian diplomat assigned to the Russian Embassy in the United States. He shared with me an essay prepared by the Embassy which was intended for publication in an American media outlet. In years past, this was common practice—as part of a time-honored practice derived from the principles of free speech which encourage debate, dialogue, and discussion of topical issues, foreign diplomats would have essays published, often as Op-Ed articles, in the pages of prestigious American newspapers.

But the Russian Embassy, when it came to the essay in question, had been met with a wall of silence. There was no interest, it seemed, in providing a platform for any Russian opinion.

It is not as if the essay that had been prepared by the Russian Embassy addressed a controversial issue, such as the ongoing conflict in Ukraine. Rather, it addressed the elephant in the room when it came to explaining the very psychology which motivated the decision to ban the Russian essay from the pages of American newspapers designed to promote, and provoke, thought—Russophobia.”

It was my understanding that the Russians objected to identifying them as the source of the essay. So, I rewrote the passage.

“Recently, I ran across an essay that had been published by the Ambassador of Russia to the United States, Anatoly Antonov, in the Russian newspaper, Rossiyaskaya Gazeta, and subsequently posted on the Russian Embassy Facebook page. The title of the essay, “Russophobia as a malignant tumor in the United States”, is, admittedly, provocative—as all good, thought-provoking titles should be. After reading it, it became apparent to me that, in the interest of combating Russophobia, I should help bring the Ambassador’s essay to the attention of as many people as possible.”

Once again, the F.B.I. agent expressed her concern. “You clearly took instruction from the Russian Embassy and complied.”

And once again, I objected. “I’m a journalist. I was respecting my source’s wishes regarding how to describe the source of the material. Nothing I wrote was inaccurate. All journalists do this.”

As I responded, I couldn’t help but recall the case of Evan Gershkovich, The Wall Street Journal journalist who had been arrested and charged with espionage by the Russian government for receiving classified information from an employee of a sensitive military industrial facility near the city of Ekaterinburg.

In recordings released by RT of Gershkovich’s rendezvous with his source, the source is heard telling Gershkovich to be “very careful,” adding that the information he was providing is “secret.”

Gershkovich replied that in his article he would not mention seeing the documents in question, and that he would cite “anonymous sources” in what he wrote. In this way, Gershkovich would shield from discovery the fact that secret information had been collected, and that there was a source leaking this classified information.

According to Gershkovich’s editor at The Wall Street Journal, Gershkovich’s deception regarding the source of the information he was collecting was consistent with the actions taken by a journalist to protect the identity of his source.

Gershkovich was clearly practicing deception, and yet his technique is considered standard journalistic practice.

In many ways, my rewritten passage was more accurate in describing the source of information used in my article than the original draft.

The F.B.I. agent clearly was not happy with my answer. “You were acting as a foreign agent,” she said.

The Foreign Agents Registration Act (FARA) (22 U.S.C. § 611 et seq.), defines the term “agent of a foreign principal” as:

“any person who acts as an agent, representative, employee, or servant, or any person who acts in any other capacity at the order, request, or under the direction or control, of a foreign principal or of a person any of whose activities are directly or indirectly supervised, directed, controlled, financed, or subsidized in whole or in major part by a foreign principal [who] engages within the United States in political activities for or in the interests of such foreign principal [or] acts within the United States as a public relations counsel, publicity agent, information-service employee or political consultant for or in the interests of such foreign principal.”

The FARA statute also notes that “the term ‘agent of a foreign principal’ does not include any news or press service.”

I once again reminded the F.B.I. agent that I was acting as a journalist when I both met and exchanged emails with Igor Shaktar-ool, that it was I who had requested the meeting with the Russians, not them, and that it was me who raised the topic of Russophobia.

I was the one who decided to write the article in question. That I had a source of information with whom I worked to make sure that the information provided was used in a manner agreeable to the source is basic journalism — nothing more, nothing less. Any “requests” made by the Russians in this regard were simply in the context of the interaction between a journalist and his source.

In short, my actions did not fit the definition of an “agent of a foreign principle,” but rather that of a working journalist.

FARA defines “political activities” to mean:

“… any activity that the person engaging in believes will, or that the person intends to, in any way influence any agency or official of the Government of the United States or any section of the public within the United States with reference to formulating, adopting, or changing the domestic or foreign policies of the United States or with reference to the political or public interests, policies, or relations of a government of a foreign country or a foreign political party.”

There is no doubt that much of my work falls under the category of “political activity.”

As I wrote in my Substack article of Feb. 10, my goal was to defeat the disease of Russophobia so that the American people would be empowered by fact-based knowledge and information to make decisions that could lead to the betterment of relations between Russia and the United States.

I am therefore guilty of trying to influence the American public when it comes to U.S. attitudes toward Russia and, in doing so, seek to generate public pressure on U.S. policy makers to formulate more responsible policies that don’t lend themselves to a nuclear arms race with Russia.

This is the moral duty and responsibility of every American citizen — to hold his or her elected representatives accountable for what is done in their name.

It is the bedrock principle of representational democracy.

And now the F.B.I. is seeking to criminalize it.

I am a practitioner of what is known as “advocacy journalism,” a genre of journalism which openly pursues a social or political purpose. I am an advocate for the betterment of relations between the U.S. and Russia, not because I seek to further Russian interests on behalf of Russia, but because I firmly believe, as an American, it is in the best interests of my country to facilitate the peaceful coexistence between the U.S. and Russia predicated on a mutual desire to avoid nuclear war and, as such, embrace arms control.

In pursuing this advocacy, I have been assiduous in ensuring that what I report on is derived from fact-based truth, something that separates me from the bias that has corrupted the more conventional “balanced” reporting of mainstream media.

There is no doubt that there are those in the United States, including many in the U.S. government (and, very likely, many in the Department of Justice and the F.B.I.) who take extreme umbrage over what I say and write when it comes to Russia.

Compare and contrast my approach to journalism with admissions by the U.S. intelligence community that it deliberately declassifies and releases for public consumption intelligence information it knew to be unverified or even wrong about Russia for the sole purpose of shaping public opinion amongst the American people so that they would unquestioningly support U.S. policy objectives vis-à-vis Russia that not only have put the United States on the cusp of a direct conflict with Russia in Ukraine, but run the real risk of inciting a larger conflict that could, and probably would, lead to a nuclear conflagration that would not just hazard American lives, but humanity as a whole.

Free to Censure the Government


Justice Hugo Black in 1937. (Libray of Congress/Wikimedia Commons)

In his concurring opinion to the Supreme Court’s 6-3 decision in New York Times Co. v. United States, Justice Hugo Black wrote:

“The press was to serve the governed, not the governors. The Government’s power to censor the press was abolished so that the press would remain forever free to censure the Government. The press was protected so that it could bare the secrets of the government and inform the people. Only a free and unrestrained press can effectively expose deception in government. And paramount among the responsibilities of a free press is the duty to prevent any part of the government from deceiving the people and sending them off to distant lands to die of foreign fevers and foreign shot and shell.”

That is my mission as a journalist — to prevent my government from deceiving my fellow citizens and, in doing so, preventing the men and women who honor us with their service in the U.S. military from being sent off to fight and die in a distant land in furtherance of a cause that was built on the foundation of lies, half-truths, and misinformation, most if not all of which is being disseminated to the American people on behalf of the U.S. government by a compliant and controlled mainstream media.

I don’t work for the U.S. government.

I don’t advocate on its behalf.

I work for myself.

And I advocate on behalf of the American people.

Because I am an American.

A citizen true to the demands of citizenship, which mandates that I oppose the governors when they are acting in a manner which I believe is to the detriment of the governed.

And now the F.B.I. and the Department of Justice want to criminalize my work.

If the Department of Justice wants to have a legal wrestling match over the definition of journalism and a working journalist in the United States, and the rights accrued to me as an American citizen under the First Amendment of the U.S. Constitution (“Congress shall make no law…prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press…”), that is a fight I am ready to engage in.

FARA is literally a law made by the U.S. Congress.

And, according to the F.B.I., it can now be used to define what is and isn’t journalism in the United States.

The F.B.I.’s reasoning, and that of the Department of Justice, in this matter represents nothing less than a frontal assault on both free speech and a free press, one which, should the F.B.I. decide to proceed, cannot and will not go unchallenged.

The FARA statute was promulgated ostensibly to serve the national security interests of the United States by denying foreign governments the ability to interfere in the internal political affairs of the American people by hiding their actions through American citizens acting on their behalf. On the surface, this is a good thing to try and prevent.

However, by seeking to extend the jurisdiction of FARA so that it covers the practice of journalism by American citizens, it is a frontal assault on that most precious American right — free speech and a free press, all in the name of “national security.”

Justice Black addressed this issue in his New York Times Co. v. United States concurring opinion:

“[W]e are asked to hold that…the Executive Branch, the Congress, and the Judiciary can make laws … abridging the freedom of the press in the name of ‘national security’.”

To permit this, Justice Black argued,

“would wipe out the First Amendment and destroy the fundamental liberty and security of the very people the Government hopes to make ‘secure’…[t]he word ‘security’ is a broad, vague generality whose contours should not be invoked to abrogate the fundamental law embodied in the First Amendment.”

There is no legitimate national security interest in interfering in the work of a journalist whose ideas the U.S. government finds objectionable. Justice Black agreed. “The Framers of the First Amendment,” he wrote,

“fully aware of both the need to defend a new nation and the abuses of the English and Colonial governments, sought to give this new society strength and security by providing that freedom of speech, press, religion, and assembly should not be abridged.”

In its efforts to label me a foreign agent because of my journalistic activity, the F.B.I. and the Department of Justice are seeking to do just that — abridge freedom of speech and a free press.

Having arrived at this juncture, however, I was still concerned about the tactics being employed by the Department of Justice in addressing the one alleged “violation” of FARA alluded to by the F.B.I. agents who interviewed me.

If this was the basis of their concern, it could have — and indeed, should have — been addressed by having the FARA Unit send me a “letter of inquiry” advising me of my potential obligations under FARA, and seeking additional information from me that hopefully answered their concerns.

Instead, they executed a search warrant.

Why?

This is a question only those who swore out the affidavits that were presented to Magistrate Judge Hummel can answer.

Hopefully, someday they will.

The F.B.I. had, by their own admission, been monitoring my communications for well over 18 months.

All they had to show for it was a meeting between myself and Russian diplomats that resulted in me publishing an article talking about the danger of Russophobia.

An article which detailed the sourcing of the information used to write it.

By their own actions the F.B.I. demonstrated that this, in and of itself, did not constitute a violation of the FARA statute, let alone a crime.

If it was a clear-cut violation of FARA, the Justice Department’s FARA Unit would have issued a letter of inquiry.

Instead, the F.B.I. executed a search warrant based upon affidavits possessing information sufficient to satisfy a federal magistrate judge that there was probable cause for a search of my personal electronics which the F.B.I. claimed would show…what?

The commission of a crime?

No.

If that was the case, the entire tenor of the search would have been different.

I would have more than likely been detained.

One is left, therefore, with the F.B.I. looking for additional information to sustain their theory that I am operating as an unregistered agent of the Russian government.

The F.B.I. was clearly concerned about the time I spent in Russia, outside their span of control.

Maybe they thought that my computer and cell phone would contain evidence of a covert relationship between myself and the Russian government.

They will be disappointed.

Detained at the US Border

Upon my return from my first trip to Russia, I was detained by the Customs and Border Protection agents for several hours. During that time, I was questioned in depth by an agent who specialized in Russia about my trip. He had many questions, and I had many honest answers.

He inspected my luggage, including the gifts I had received from Alexander Zyrianov, my host, which I had declared on my customs declaration. The agent then exercised his option to waive charging me a duty assessment on the gifts.

The F.B.I. acknowledged they were aware of this.

On my return from my second trip, I was detained by the Customs and Border Protection agents for an hour. I was prepared with a fully filled-out customs declaration form.

I was ready to answer all their questions.

Instead, the CBP agents released me after an hour with no interview and no inspection of my luggage.

Just a simple cursory “welcome home” from the CBP agent as he returned my passport.

This was after a trip which took me to Chechnya, where I met with Ramzan Khadirov and spoke before 25,000 Chechen soldiers.


The author, accompanied by Alexander Zyrianov, at lunch with Ramzan Khadirov, January 2024. (Chechen Minister of Information)

Where I visited Crimea.
Where I visited the four “new territories” of Kherson, Zaporizhia, Donetsk and Lugansk.

If there ever was a visit to Russia that demanded attention from CBP, this was it.

And yet they let me go, no questions, no inspection.

In retrospect, I believe this was the moment that the F.B.I. decided they were going to begin manufacturing their case against me, creating the foundation of probable cause based upon demonstrated behavior patterns that could sustain an argument before a magistrate judge that I was involved in activities which would require me to register as a foreign agent under the FARA statute.

This case would have been undermined if the CBP agents had questioned me, and I answered the questions as completely and honestly as I had done back in 2023.

This case would have been undermined if the CBP agents had inspected my luggage, eliminating the element of uncertainty the F.B.I. was later able to create about the contents of my bags.

It also explains why my passport was seized by the CBP back on June 3.

The F.B.I. was making a case that I was an unregistered Russian agent.

That I was working under the control and direction of the Russian government.

And yet the trip I was scheduled to begin on June 3 would prove the exact opposite — that I was a journalist whose interest in Russia was to learn more about the Russian people — the Russian “soul” — so that I might empower an American audience to rethink their attitudes toward all things Russian, attitudes shaped in large part by systemic Russophobia.

Because the F.B.I. had been monitoring my communications, they were aware of the agenda, goals, and objectives of this planned trip, which included taking my podcast, Ask the Inspector, to some 16 Russian cities over the course of 40 days.

The F.B.I. was aware that myself and my co-host, Jeff Norman, had been raising money in support of this trip, and that we were in the final phases of discussions with a donor who was going to provide the money needed to make this ambitious trip a reality.

The F.B.I. was aware of the detailed line-item budget we had prepared, and the fact that we intended to pay for every single expense associated with this trip.

The F.B.I. knew that if I went on this trip, they could never successfully manufacture a case built on the premise that I was operating under the direction of the Russian government.

So, the F.B.I. killed the trip.

And when I adjusted to this new reality by refocusing my efforts on a massive peace rally hosted by Gerald Celente in Kingston, New York, which is scheduled for Sept. 28, the F.B.I. had no choice but to act.

Perhaps they thought the Kingston rally is being directed and/or funded by the Russians.

There is no doubt that the Kingston rally is going to be a political event — as part of the event, I am organizing Operation DAWN, an event designed to help prevent nuclear war between the U.S. and Russia by asking the following questions of American voters:

“What would you do to save Democracy, save America, save the World, by empowering your vote in November?”

All the F.B.I. had to do was ask me a question outlining their concern; as I demonstrated during their multi-hour interview conducted while my home was being searched, I am fully cooperative and transparent when it comes to my work.

But simply asking me questions wouldn’t achieve what I believe to be the larger objective — to bring harm to the rally itself.

To stop Operation DAWN in its tracks.

Perhaps the F.B.I. honestly believes that I am a Russian agent, and as such Operation DAWN is prohibited political action conducted on behalf of the Russian government.

Maybe they think there will be some form of communication between myself and my imaginary Russian controllers that detail this perceived collaboration.

They will be disappointed.

Or maybe someone in the F.B.I. and/or the Department of Justice, on their own volition or following orders from above, simply decided to try and discredit Operation DAWN and the Kingston rally by doing the only thing they were capable of doing at this juncture — execute a daytime search warrant of my residence in a manner which generated the maximum amount of publicity, and then remain silent about why they had done this, knowing all too well that the compliant mainstream media would pick up the ball and run with it, publishing scandalous stories based upon a rehashing of past events and full of irresponsible speculation drawn from the imaginations of so-called “experts” who know nothing whatsoever about the facts of the case (yes, Albany Times Union, I’m speaking about you.)

Maybe the F.B.I. thought I would be intimidated by the raid, and opt to remain silent out of fear of generating unwanted attention.

But all the F.B.I. really accomplished that day was to execute a raid on peace.

Because that is what Operation DAWN and the Sept. 28 rally in Kingston are all about — promoting the cause of peace based upon good relations between nations, of preventing nuclear war through meaningful arms control.

I don’t know yet how this story ends.

I know how it should end — with the F.B.I. returning my electronics and issuing a statement that nothing had been found of interest.

Maybe even issue a statement that I was no longer a subject of interest.

Maybe even return my passport.

But in this day and age of politicized justice, such an outcome, even if warranted, is not assured.

But I do know a few things.

One, I am not an agent of the Russian government.

Two, I am an American patriot who loves my country with all my being.

Three, I believe the threat of nuclear war represents the greatest existential threat to my country today.

Four, one of the last remaining opportunities for the American people to help prevent a nuclear war is to empower their vote in November’s presidential election by making the candidates for that office earn it by articulating policies that promote peace, the prevention of nuclear war, and the promotion of arms control.

And, finally, five — that God willing, I will be in Kingston, New York, on Sept. 28, side by side with Gerald Celente and a host of friends and colleagues, including those physically present and those participating remotely, to promote the cause of peace that constitute the core objectives of Operation DAWN.

I hope many of you who read this can join us on that day.

Let’s shut down the thruway, just like they did back during the Woodstock Festival in August 1969.

Let us make happen what the F.B.I. and Department of Justice appear hellbent on stopping.

Let’s make peace, not war, a national priority.

I’ll see you in Kingston.

https://consortiumnews.com/2024/08/16/s ... -on-peace/

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Meta permanently bans The Cradle in latest attack on free speech

The social media giant has singled out an independent West Asian media outlet, as it intensifies its crackdown on Palestinian and regional voices, both on its platforms and among its employees

News Desk

AUG 19, 2024


(Photo Credit: Esteban Carrillo)

On 16 August, Facebook and Instagram parent company Meta permanently banned The Cradle from its social media platforms for allegedly violating community guidelines by “praising terrorist organizations” and engaging in “incitement to violence.”

“No one can see or find your account, and you can't use it. All your information will be permanently deleted,” reads the message accompanying the ban on Instagram, where The Cradle had surpassed 107,000 followers and amassed millions of views.

“You cannot request another review of this decision,” the message ends, despite the fact the ban came with little warning or any chance for review.



The Cradle is an independent, journalist-owned news website that covers the geopolitics of West Asia from a West Asian perspective. Since 2021, the publication has made a name for itself by covering regional developments with the kind of breadth and depth – and nuance – that often go missing in mainstream corporate media.

Meta's accusations of “praising terrorist organizations” and engaging in “incitement to violence” largely stem from posts and videos that relay information or quotes from West Asian resistance movements like Hamas, Hezbollah, and Ansarallah – who are an essential part of the news stories unfolding in a region on the precipice of a major war.

It is also essential to recognize that these are major West Asian political organizations that have deep institutional and civic roots within Lebanon, Palestine, and Yemen and are part of the very fabric of these societies. They are represented in governance, run schools, hospitals, and utilities, and disperse salaries to millions of civilian workers.

Ironically, many of The Cradle's Meta-flagged quotes on these organizations also come from Israeli and western officials:

“The intelligence information that Hezbollah has collected is accurate at the level of an advanced western intelligence organization, with observation capabilities, accurate intelligence gathering, and real-time documentation … There is almost no target in the north that Hezbollah cannot hit with over 50 percent success.” – Meta claims this two-month old post violated its guidelines, despite the quotes coming from Israeli journalists and officials.

Other posts that Meta claimed violated its rules included a reel on protesters breaking into an Elbit factory in the UK; a news headline image that reads “Israeli army approves plans for offensive on Lebanon”; and a quote from a Hamas official in Lebanon on how the “[Gaza] support fronts … achieved their goal.”

Although The Cradle had occasionally run afoul of Meta's frustratingly unspecific community guidelines – which the publication always addressed immediately – matters appeared to come to a head following the 31 July assassination of Hamas Politburo Chief Ismail Haniyeh, when the company owned by US billionaire Mark Zuckerberg significantly tightened its grip on free speech.


In the days after Haniyeh's assassination, Meta took down 10 posts from The Cradle's Instagram account over 48 hours. These ranged from quotes by Hamas officials and Hezbollah Secretary-General Hassan Nasrallah condemning massacres in Gaza and the Israeli strikes in Tehran and Beirut, videos released by local resistance factions clashing with the Israeli army in Gaza, and even news headlines about Haniyeh.

One of the posts removed for violations was a headline that read, “Hamas calls for ‘day of rage’ following assassination of Haniyeh." Another was a carousel of image quotes by Hezbollah Secretary-General Hassan Nasrallah, addressingthe assassinations in Beirut and Tehran, and a likely response.


Instagram posts by Middle East Eye and Al Jazeera include images, quotes, and videos of Hamas and Hezbollah officials, as well as Hamas's military operations against Israel in Gaza. The Cradle, in contrast, does not publish photos of Resistance Axis leaders on any Meta platforms, except for highly obscured visuals.

Since the events of 7 October 2023 and Israel's military assault on Gaza, independent news outlets such as The Cradle have seen a marked surge in audience as news consumers seek out representative coverage from the ground that counters misinformation.

This change in the global information status quo has triggered growing censorship by social media giants.

“Meta’s policies and practices have been silencing voices in support of Palestine and Palestinian human rights on Instagram and Facebook in a wave of heightened censorship of social media,” Human Rights Watch (HRW) detailed in a December 2023 report.

“Human Rights Watch found that the censorship of content related to Palestine on Instagram and Facebook is systemic and global. Meta’s inconsistent enforcement of its own policies led to the erroneous removal of content about Palestine … Meta, the parent company of Facebook and Instagram, has a well-documented record of overbroad crackdowns on content related to Palestine,” the HRW report adds.

Digital civil rights organizations and human rights groups have urged Meta over recent months to end its systemic censorship of pro-Palestinian content and uphold its human rights commitments.

Meta’s devolving censorship policies may be attributable to its questionable senior hires. One example is Chief Information Security Officer since 2022, Guy Rosen, a veteran of the Israeli army’s Unit 8200 – its clandestine Intelligence Corps Unit – and co-founder of Facebook-owned Israeli tech company Onavo.

Meta continues to escalate its attack on speech, even considering censorship of the word “Zionist,” as revealed by Intercept journalist Sam Biddle in February 2024.


Quotes by Secretary General Hassan Nasrallah following the assassinations of Ismail Haniyeh and Fuad Shukr in Beirut and Tehran. The finger of Nasrallah can be seen in this photo. (Removed by Meta for violations.)

In 2022, Palestinian journalists in the Gaza Strip and occupied East Jerusalem accused Meta of “purging” their WhatsApp and Facebook accounts for reporting on Israeli war crimes.

At the time, Meta accused the journalists of “breaching their publishing standards [for posting pictures] detailing the civilians killed by Israeli forces in the Gaza Strip.”

The tech giant has also been accused of “exorbitant internal censorship” by its own staff.

In June, Meta’s diversity chief, Maxine Williams, effectively barred staff from discussing the war in Gaza, informing them that the company had “decided to limit discussions around topics that have historically led to disruptions in the workplace, regardless of the importance of those topics – this includes content related to war and statehood.”

The same month, a Palestinian-American engineer, Ferras Hamas, sued the company for discrimination and wrongful termination, claiming Meta fired him for trying to help fix bugs causing the suppression of Palestinian Instagram posts.

Hamad also accused Meta of bias against Palestinians, saying the company deleted internal employee communications that mentioned the deaths of their relatives in Gaza and conducted investigations into their use of the Palestinian flag emoji.


On 15 August, one day before Meta permanently banned The Cradle from its platforms, The Guardian reported on the company's “internal struggles” moderating content related to the war in Gaza and its double standards when determining “the accuracy of moderation of Hebrew content and Arabic content.”

Whistleblowers also expressed fears of reprisal from the company, saying its priorities are “not about actually making sure content is safe for the community.”

“If I raised this directly, I feel my job would be on the line – it is very obvious where the company stands on this issue,” the unnamed Meta staffer said.

As journalistic freedoms rapidly decline in all spaces, we urge our readers and audiences to help counter those efforts by kindly supporting us with donations via our thecradle.co website and Patreon. Make sure to follow us on X, Telegram, TikTok, and The Cradle’s RSS feed for daily and hourly news updates, subscribe to our weekly newsletter, and join us on YouTube and Rumble for weekly podcasts that break down the news for you.

https://thecradle.co/articles/meta-perm ... ree-speech

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Scandal surrounding the American National Endowment for Democracy (NED)
August 21, 2024
Rybar

Recently, the American National Endowment for Democracy (NED) was rocked by a scandal: employees of The Grayzone project got their hands on letters that clearly demonstrate NED’s involvement in meddling in the politics of various countries, including Nicaragua, Venezuela, Haiti and the so-called Ukraine.

Over the decades, NED has steadily built up a reputation as a CIA branch: where intelligence agents operated in the dark, the Foundation developed its initiatives and distributed grants to anyone who wanted to work for the benefit of democracy .

However, if earlier, despite the obviousness of what was happening, there was no direct evidence of the organization’s destructive activity, now it has appeared – in the form of chaos and panic that key NED employees created after the leak of correspondence.

At the center of the events were Carl Gershman (former NED president), Michael Allen (NDI official with direct ties to influence operations in foreign countries) and Leslie Aune (former NED communications director who, according to the article, worked actively to create a positive image of the organization’s programs and hide their real purposes). All of these individuals have now been suspended from their positions after speaking with representatives of The Grayzone.

Obviously, as a result of what happened, one should not expect that the activities of American figures to plant democracy around the world will now suddenly cease. Most likely, NED will focus its efforts on other areas for some time, so as not to advertise its current activities and not to aggravate reputational losses.

Moreover, the octopus of organizations operating abroad consists not only of American organizations such as NED, USAID and others, but also of companies controlled by them in other countries – for example, the German Aspen Institute Germany.

It seems that the worst consequence of this chain of tragic coincidences will be a possible reduction in funding for NED in favor of other similar actors. And, most likely, it was the competitors who made sure that the leak of correspondence happened at the right time and went into the right hands. The fact that the organization could not get out of this crisis gracefully is a clear indication of the incompetence of its employees, who are not even capable of convincingly voicing the legend of their type of activity.

https://rybar.ru/skandal-vokrug-amerika ... ratii-ned/

Google Translator

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Elon Musk Doesn’t Protect Speech, He Monetizes It
August 26, 2024

The “saviour of free speech” is cracking down on criticism of Israel’s genocide, writes Jonathan Cook.


Elon Musk, CEO of X, center, with attendees at a U.K. AI conference at Bletchley Park in 2023. (Rory Arnold / No 10 Downing Street, Flickr, CC BY-NC-ND 2.0)

By Jonathan Cook
Jonathan-Cook.net

Many users of X, formerly Twitter, seem deeply misguided. They imagine that Elon Musk is the saviour of free speech. He’s not. He is simply the latest pioneer in monetising speech. Which isn’t the same thing at all.

All the blue ticks on X — mine included — are buying access to an audience. Which is why Musk has made it so easy to get a blue tick — and why there are now so many of them on the platform. If you don’t pay Musk, the algorithms make sure you get minimal reach. You are denied your five seconds of fame.

That has particularly infuriated corporate journalists. On what used to be called Twitter, they got access to large audiences as a natural right, along with politicians and celebrities. They never paid a penny. They felt entitled to those big audiences because they already enjoyed similarly big audiences in the “legacy media.” They did not see why they should start competing with the rest of us to be heard.

The new media system was rigged, as the old media system has been for centuries, to ensure that it was their voices that counted. Or rather it was the voices of the ultra-wealthy paying their salaries who counted.

Independent journalists, including myself, have been some of the chief beneficiaries of Musk’s X. But I don’t for a minute make the mistake of thinking Musk is really in favour of my free speech — or anyone else’s — compared to his own.

A reminder that free speech in America is special and we need to do everything possible to preserve it https://t.co/yAvX1TpuRp

— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) August 19, 2024

Being able to buy yourself an audience isn’t what most people understand as free speech.

Musk’s X is simply the latest innovation on the traditional “free speech” model from the bad old days. Then, only a handful of very rich men could afford to buy themselves lots of hired hands, known as journalists; own a printing press; and be in a position to attract advertisers.

Billionaires paid a small fortune to buy the privilege of “free speech.” As a result, they managed to secure for themselves a very big voice in a highly exclusive market. You and I can now pay a hundred bucks a year and buy ourselves a very, very small voice in a massively overcrowded, cacophonous marketplace of voices.

The point is this: Speech on X is still a privilege — it’s just one that you can now pay for. And like all privileges, it is on licence from the owner. Musk can withdraw that privilege — and withdraw it selectively — whenever he thinks someone or something is harming his interests, whether directly or indirectly.

Musk is already disappearing opinions, either ones he doesn’t like or ones he cannot afford to be seen supporting — most visibly, anything too critical of Israel.

As I said earlier this week, “decolonization”, “from the river to the sea” and similar euphemisms necessarily imply genocide.

Clear calls for extreme violence are against our terms of service and will result in suspension. https://t.co/1fCFo5Lezb

— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) November 17, 2023

He has threatened users with suspension for repeating slogans such as “From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free” — in other words, for calling for an end to what the judges of the World Court recently decreed to be Israel’s apartheid rule over Palestinians. He is also against hosting on X the term “decolonisation” in reference to Israel, claiming perversely that “it implies a Jewish genocide” — itself an implicit admission that Israelis (not Jews) have long been colonising Palestine and ethnically cleansing Palestinians.

The Israel lobby is also pushing hard for a ban on the words “Zionism” and “Zionist.” It won’t be long before X, like Meta, cracks down on these terms too.

Note that banning these words makes it all but impossible to discuss the specific historical forces that led to Israel’s creation at the expense of the Palestinian people, or analyse the ideology that today underpins Israel’s efforts to disappear the Palestinian people, or explain how the West has been complicit in Israel’s illegal occupation of the Palestinian territories for decades and is currently aiding the genocide of Palestinians in Gaza.

The loss of “Zionist” and “Zionism” from our lexicon would be a serious handicap for anyone trying to explain some of the major events unfolding in the Middle East at the moment. Which is precisely why the establishment, and Musk, are so keen to see such words discredited.

Expect to see Musk’s X getting a lot more censorious over the next months and years, especially against what he is terming the “faaaaaar left” — that is, disparate groups of people he has lumped together who hold opinions either he doesn’t like personally or that can damage his business interests.

From the standpoint of the faaaaaar left, this platform is far right, but it’s actually just centrist https://t.co/PUNAvdTKQS

— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) August 20, 2024

Billionaires aren’t there to protect free speech. They got to be billionaires by being very good at making money — by seizing markets, by inflating our appetite for consumption, and by buying politicians to rig the system to protect their empires from competitors.

Musk understands that the only people against a world based on rapacious profit and material greed are the “faaaaaar left”. Which is why the “faaaaaar left” are in the crosshairs of anyone with power in our rigged system, from the centrists to the right wing, from “liberals” to conservatives, from Blue to Red, from Democrats to Republicans.

The right and the centrists disagree only on how best to maintain that rapacious, consumption-driven, environmentally destructive status quo, and on how to normalise it to different segments of the public. They are competing wings of a system designed by a single ruling cabal.

[Related: Vijay Prashad: The Far Right of a Special Type]

I am willing to serve pic.twitter.com/BJhGbcA2e0

— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) August 20, 2024

Musk used to see himself as a liberal and now leans towards the Trumpian right. Trump used to see himself as a Clintonian Democrat but now sees himself as… well, fill in the blank, according to taste.

The point is that centrists and the right are, in essence, interchangeable — as should be only too clear from the rapid shift of free-speech liberals towards authoritarian censorship, and the rapid (pretend) reinvention of conservatives from moralising guardians of family values to the embattled defenders of free speech.

Neither’s posturing should be taken at face value. Both are equally authoritarian, when their interests are threatened by “an excess of democracy.” Their apparent differences are simply the competition for dominance within a system that’s been gerrymandered to their mutual benefit. We are their dupes, buying into their games.

JUST IN: ?? ?? Emmanuel Macron's Liberal MEP threatens to shut down X in Europe .

"If Elon Musk does not comply with the European rules on digital services, the EU Commission will ask the continental operators to block X or, in the most extreme case, force them to completely… pic.twitter.com/8rbt4pjSPp

— BRICS News (@BRICSinfo) August 20, 2024

The two tribes are there to offer the pretence of a battle of ideas, of competition, of choice at election time, of freedom. They look hostile to each other, but when push comes to shove they are united in their support for oligarchy, and opposition to genuine free speech, to real democracy, to meaningful pluralism, to an open society.

The “faaaaaar left” are the true enemy of both the centrists and the right. Why? Because they are the only group struggling for a society in which money doesn’t buy privilege, where speech isn’t something someone can own.

That’s why, when Musk intensifies his crackdown, it will be the “faaaaar left” that’s erased so completely you won’t notice it’s gone. You won’t remember it was ever there.

https://consortiumnews.com/2024/08/26/e ... etizes-it/

"Same as it ever was"...I was banned from twitter 5 years ago for calling out a Bernie influencer for his phony socialism and a couple attempts at appeal were brushed off. Just as well, I'm a saner person for it.

[blindpig]

From Fight the Power To Work for It: Chuck D, Public Enemy and How the CIA Neutralized Rap
August 24, 2024


A younger (Left) and older (Right) Chuck D. Photo: MintPress News.

By Alan MacLeod – Aug 22, 2024

Surprising many, legendary rapper and activist Chuck D appeared at the White House earlier this summer, announcing that he was joining forces with YouTube and Antony Blinken’s State Department to become one of Washington’s “global music ambassadors” – a role directly modeled on Washington’s Cold War-era efforts to use the arts to inspire US-backed regime change in Eastern Europe, and to use musical tours as covers that the CIA could use to assassinate foreign leaders.

Among a crowd of artists that included Herbie Hancock, Armani White, BRELAND, Denyce Graves, Grace Bowers, Jelly Roll, Justin Tranter, Kane Brown, Lainey Wilson, and Teddy Swims, the Public Enemy frontman was centerstage, standing directly on Blinken’s right-hand side, and was the first artist in the room mentioned by the Secretary of State, earning a round of applause from the journalists and dignitaries assembled. “I would like to thank everybody in the US State Department and also YouTube for having me being invited to being a United States global music ambassador,” he said.

All this is a far cry from Chuck D.’s beginnings and outward image. The rapper and writer of such songs as “Fight the Power” and “Rebel Without a Cause” used both the aesthetics and message of the Black Panther Party in his performances and was seen as Malcolm X with a microphone. He lists the Panthers and Malcolm X as influences during his formative years. “I was in the Black Panther lunch program,” he told the Historic.ly podcast. Thus, for an artist to go from unapologetically demanding black power to now enthusiastically supporting state power is a bitter pill to swallow for his millions of fans.


The Cultural Cold War
Although the State Department was careful to frame its new venture as one designed to support peace, the program’s history and the United States’ foreign policy moves strongly undermine that claim.

Throughout the press conference announcing the project’s inauguration, both Blinken and YouTube’s global music head, Lyor Cohen, constantly mentioned the CIA’s secret Cold War program to use music and the arts as weapons for regime change. Referencing sending Louis Armstrong to play behind the Iron Curtain, Blinken stated, “America’s secret weapon is a blue note and a minor chord. Music is such a powerful diplomatic force because, I think, it taps into something fundamental, universal.” “In Berlin, just before the wall came down, Bruce Springsteen played to the adoration of countless fans,” he added.

Cohen explained that YouTube was teaming up with the US State Department to help them “leverage global events.” “We will utilize major international gatherings to inspire action,” he said. What kind of “actions” the State Department is interested in fomenting was not stated but is not difficult to ascertain.

Throughout the Cold War, the United States flooded enemy nations with propaganda. But it often found that a more subtle approach was far more effective. To that end, it spent vast sums sending famous artists such as Nina Simone, Louis Armstrong, Dizzy Gillespie and Ella Fitzgerald overseas, to the point where jazz became synonymous with individualism and democracy. US media networks like Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty bombarded Eastern Europe with music which Soviet authorities banned. It was thus transformed into a subversive, countercultural weapon. Voice of America—another US-funded network targeted at Communist countries—called its jazz radio show the “Hour of Freedom.”

The CIA deliberately chose to front the campaign with black musicians, helping to soften America’s image and promote a (false) message of racial harmony to counter well-founded Russian criticism of the United States as a structurally racist society.

In the wake of World War II, the Soviet Union engendered massive worldwide goodwill. Primarily responsible for defeating European fascism, millions around the world saw Communism as the way out of poverty and considered it far more supportive of high culture and the arts than capitalism.

Knowing they had to do something quickly to win the war for the planet’s future, the CIA almost immediately established the Congress for Cultural Freedom—a worldwide group of intellectuals and artists dedicated to opposing Communism, some of whom were completely unaware that this was not an organic, grassroots movement.

The goal was clear: destroy Communism and initiate regime change worldwide, installing pro-US puppets wherever possible. “Give me a hundred million dollars and a thousand dedicated people, and I will guarantee to generate such a wave of democratic unrest among the masses, yes, even among the soldiers of Stalin’s own empire, that all his problems for a long period of time, to come will be internal. I can find the people,” anti-communist philosopher Sidney Hook begged the CIA.

Hook got what he wanted, and the CIA became a principal driver of both high and low culture across the globe. Operating through its front organization, the Congress for Cultural Freedom, the CIA funded and promoted artists, writers, musicians and intellectuals who advanced US government interests in dozens of countries worldwide. It received help for these activities from organizations such as the Museum of Modern Art (MOMA), whose former executive director, Thomas Braden, was a CIA employee. Institutions like MOMA acted as front groups for CIA schemes, ensuring a veneer of plausibility and respectability to events.

At the height of its influence, the CIA published highly influential magazines, built up a book-publishing empire promoting anti-Communist literature, raised money for the production of hit movies, started academic journals, and sponsored conferences the world over.


Chuck D, second from right, Lyor Cohen, center, and Antony Blinken, second from center. Photo | US State Department

The CIA promoted the work of George Orwell, pushing his books, and even funded the 1954 film adaptation of Animal Farm. Thus, the author, who is most closely synonymous with propaganda and government control over society, in an ironic twist, owed his massive popularity in no small part to a giant decades-long CIA propaganda campaign.

Dissident Russian authors like Boris Pasternak also owed their notoriety to the Congress on Cultural Freedom’s work. Pasternak’s epic anti-communist book, Dr. Zhivago was translated and circulated widely, both inside and outside the Communist bloc, by the CIA front group. Thus, much of what we in the West consider the classic and fundamental tomes of modern society are, in fact, partly a product of CIA activities.

The Congress on Cultural Freedom made pains to appear as if it was actually a leftist organization, preferring not to support overtly conservative or reactionary art or content. It was careful to woo more radical-sounding intellectuals to its cause as long as they were willing to attack the Soviet Union, China, Cuba, or other US foes, thereby helping with American efforts at regime change. This included Hook himself, who was a former Communist. The congress set up a wide range of faux-radical groups which were designed to defame the worldwide Communist movement, promote the idea that the US and Western Europe tolerated leftist dissent, and tie up and confuse would-be radicals at home into pointless organizations that would do nothing to truly challenge power.

It was not only high culture, however, that the US attempted to hijack. The CIA also published astrology magazines and gossip rags, all with subtle (and often not-so-subtle) anti-Communist undertones to them.

The project continued until the successful overthrow of Communism in Eastern Europe—events in which the US government played a significant role. There have long been extremely strong rumors that the CIA wrote and promoted the Scorpions’ hit song “Winds of Change” as regime change propaganda. Meanwhile, David Hasselhoff – the American singer who has long been inexplicably popular in Germany – has strongly insinuated that he worked with the agency to bring down the Berlin Wall. His song, “Looking for Freedom,” became the unofficial anthem of the wall’s destruction, and he played it to a huge Berlin crowd in 1989.

By his own admission, Chuck D and Public Enemy were also involved in the destruction of the Berlin Wall. The group traveled to the German city and played concerts there. Seeing their counterparts in West Berlin enjoying hip-hop gigs, the rapper explained, contributed to their sense of frustration with the system they lived under. “The Eastern [Berlin] fans can’t get there, and the closer they get to the wall, they ain’t thinking about hip hop at that wall,” he said.

Selling a Fantasy
The message of freedom the US projected was a total fabrication. In reality, the black stars it sent around the world to promote the idea that the US was the home of liberty and tolerance were not even allowed to enter many music halls in their home states, let alone play in them. Genuine leftists were being ruthlessly purged from public life in the anti-communist McCarthyist witch hunts.

This included many of America’s finest talents. Singer Paul Robeson and actor Charlie Chaplain had their lives destroyed for supporting socialism, the latter spending the last 25 years of his life unable to return to the United States under fear of arrest for his political views. Scientist Albert Einstein was mistrusted by authorities and blocked from influential positions because of his socialist organizing. Playwright Arthur Miller and his actress wife Marilyn Monroe were constantly hounded by their political leanings.

But their treatment was nothing compared to how US authorities attacked black leaders such as Malcolm X and the Black Panthers—groups that served as inspiration for Chuck D’s career. In 1969, police carried out the murder of Black Panther leader Fred Hampton in Chicago, while in 1985, Philadelphia police carried out an airstrike against black liberation organization MOVE, destroying an entire residential neighborhood block and killing 11 people.

Perhaps even more notable, however, is how the CIA used these “goodwill” tours of black artists as cover to get close to African leaders in order to carry out assassinations. A case in point is Louis Armstrong’s 1960 tour of the [Democratic Republic of the] Congo. The newly independent country had just elected Patrice Lumumba as president. Young and charismatic, Lumumba was a radical who believed that his nation’s immense resources should be used to build a democratic, egalitarian society. This, for CIA director Allen Dulles, who described him as an “African [Fidel] Castro,” signed his death warrant.

The CIA attached itself to the jazz legend’s tour, accompanying him around the country and gathering crucial information on Lumumba’s whereabouts and security to carry out an assassination. Lumumba was killed a few months later. The killer’s identity remains debated, but what is clear is that, after his death, Congo went into a 60-year tailspin of dictatorships and civil war, from which it has not recovered. Throughout the violence, Western corporations continue to control the nation’s vast mineral resources.

In 1962, the CIA passed information to the apartheid government in South Africa that led to the arrest and imprisonment of Nelson Mandela for 27 years, while an investigation by Seymour Hersh for the New York Times found that the agency was involved in the overthrow of Ghana’s first president Kwame Nkrumah, widely considered one of the finest leaders the continent has ever produced.

Nonsensical Responses
Chuck D is aware of the history of the CIA using this program to overthrow countries and assassinate foreign leaders, referencing it in his interview with Historic.ly. Nevertheless, he insisted that, “I ain’t got nothing to do with fucking government. Their language is blood, bombs and bullets.”

He offered a unique justification for working with the power he claimed to be fighting, arguing that the modern world has transcended governments to the point where the nation-state is no longer relevant. Hence, it was acceptable to work with any and all governments to push agendas. As he said:

I was accused of being with the State Department of the United States, I am basically telling people: get them symbols and them titles out your fucking head. That shit is no longer applicable. There are really no such thing as fucking countries and nations. It is technology that has become that. My only thing, and my only ulterior motive is hip hop music, rap, art culture, that’s it! That’s my fucking religion and fucking nation at this point. I trust no governments. They are all the same.”

When asked whether it hurt his credibility to be associated with a regime-change operation, he insisted that times have changed. “It was 75 years ago! The jazz ambassadorships, when they talk about Louis Armstrong and Ella Fitzgerald, that’s 1952 in the Cold War. What the fuck has that got to do with 2025?!” he retorted. He also noted that he is not receiving any financial compensation for the partnership.

The Tall Israeli Running Rap
Standing next to Chuck D at the White House was Lyor Cohen, a man he has long described as his “mentor.” Cohen has long been one of the most powerful men in the rap business, but with his 2016 appointment as global head of music at YouTube, he became arguably the most important person in the music industry.

Cohen was born in New York City to Israeli parents with deep ties to the Zionist paramilitary group the Haganah. His father, Elisha, was a member of the infamous Harel Brigade during the 1948 Nakba. The Harel Brigade played a pivotal role in the killings of thousands of Palestinians and the expulsion of hundreds of thousands more. This included carrying out biological warfare against the indigenous population. After the 1948 war, he became an officer in the Israeli Defense Forces.

Lyor’s formative years included living in Kfar Haim in Israel, at a settlement named after Haim Arlosoroff, a Zionist negotiator who worked with Nazi Germany in the 1930s, transferring German Jews and their assets to historic Palestine.

He got his start in hip hop in the 1980s at Russell Simmons’ Rush Management, working with the likes of Run-DMC and the Beastie Boys before becoming president of Def Jam Records, an iconic label associated with many of the industry’s biggest names.


Lyor Cohen, center right, is pictured at a funeral for slain rapper Jam Master Jay in Queens New York. Ed Bailey | AP

He began working with Public Enemy in the 1980s and immediately began attempting to clean up its image. Cohen successfully lobbied Chuck D to fire Professor Griff from Public Enemy after the latter made antisemitic comments. While at Warner Music, he reportedly obstructed the promotion and release of an album by Lupe Fiasco, an artist known for his radical politics and committed support for Palestinian liberation. More recently, in November of last year, at the height of interest in Israel’s attack on Gaza, some have connected him with YouTube’s decision to remove the song “Terrorist” by MintPress’ Lowkey from the platform, after almost 14 years and 5.5 million views.

While Cohen’s power is legendary, he prefers to stay out of the limelight. “The Rape Over,” a song by Yasinn Bey (formerly known as Mos Def) about how corporate forces have taken over hip hop, described Cohen as the “tall Israeli [who] is running this rap shit.” The song, and more specifically, this particular lyric, was condemned as antisemitic and was removed from the rapper’s back catalog, the track having been essentially banned.

The incident is a microcosm of how a once politically conscious, revolutionary, and entirely non-politically correct art form has been defanged and reshaped by corporate forces to make it more palatable to those at the top of society. Chuck D is far from the first old rap legend accused of selling out. Ice-T found fame by releasing tracks like “Cop Killer” to eventually playing one on Law and Order: Special Victims Unit. Ice Cube, meanwhile, went from “Fuck the Police” and “Arrest the President” to allying himself with Donald Trump.

(Counter)Revolutionary Rhythm
Despite the official end of the Cold War, the United States has never stopped using music and musicians to foment unrest and spark regime change. In 2021, it sponsored, promoted and attempted a counter-revolution in Cuba led by hip-hop artists that it had been funding and promoting for years.

Chief amongst those artists is Yotuel, whose song “Patria y Vida” became the anthem of the failed movement. The song was publicly promoted by all manner of US officials, up to and including President Biden himself. The song and the anti-government hip-hop movement were given glowing write-ups in establishment media such as NPR and The New York Times.

But what all failed to inform the public was that Cuban rappers like Yotuel were recruited and nurtured by the US government to sow discontent and spark regime change on the island.

The 2021 grants publication database of the National Endowment for Democracy (NED)—an organization established by the Reagan administration as a front group for the CIA—lists several such projects.

For instance, one project, entitled “Empowering Cuban Hip-Hop Artists as Leaders in Society,” states that its goal is to “promote citizen participation and social change” and to “raise awareness about the role hip-hop artists have in strengthening democracy in the region.” Another, called “Promoting Freedom of Expression in Cuba through the Arts,” claims it is helping local artists on projects related to “democracy, human rights, and historical memory” and to help “increase awareness about the Cuban reality.

Meanwhile, during the Cuban protests, the NED’s sister organization, USAID, offered $2 million worth of funding to groups that use culture to bring about social change in Cuba. The announcement itself references Yotuel’s song, suggesting to applicants that they want more content in this vein.” Artists and musicians have taken to the streets to protest government repression, producing anthems such as “Patria y Vida,” which has not only brought greater global awareness to the plight of the Cuban people but also served as a rallying cry for change on the island,” it notes.

In Venezuela, the NED [US National Endowment for Democracy] funded and supported rock bands producing music aimed at destabilizing and overthrowing the socialist government. In 2011, for example, the NED was involved in approximately two dozen agreements for funding the performance and distribution of such music. It helped fund a national music contest, with the winners playing in Caracas. The documents, obtained under the Freedom of Information Act, note that the project aimed to “promote greater reflection among Venezuelan youth about freedom of expression, their connection with democracy, and the state of democracy in the country.”

Such is the reactionary nature of the anti-government opposition in Venezuela, however, that the contest’s local organizers chose the song “Primates” as the national winner – a track that compared the (primarily black and mixed race) government and its supporters as subhuman monkeys and gorillas—perhaps a little too on-the-nose for the likes of Antony Blinken and the State Department to support as it did with “Patria y Vida.”

Blinken himself has personally used music to advance a political agenda. In May of this year, he played a cover of Neil Young’s “Rockin’ in the Free World” in front of a host of TV cameras in a Kyiv bar. The message he was trying to project was that the US stands with Ukraine and for freedom against the authoritarian dictatorship in the Kremlin. What Blinken either forgot or did not care about, however, is that “Rockin’ in the Free World” is a satirical protest song, mocking how politicians sing odes to “freedom” in the US while its people go hungry and sleep on the streets.

Big Tech and Big Brother
The partnership between YouTube and the State Department will see the platform push pro-US music and messaging across the world, supposedly to promote “peace.” However, the United States has been at war for 229 of its 248-year history. Its military spending rivals that of all other countries combined, and it operates a network of around 1,000 military bases around the globe, including nearly 400 encircling China. It has, by its own estimation, launched 251 foreign military interventions between 1991 and 2022 alone and is currently supporting a genocide in Gaza. Thus, the idea that it will use this new initiative to push peace is at least as dubious as its previous claims of sponsoring “freedom” during the Cold War.

However, this is far from YouTube’s only connection to the US national security state. Its parent company, Google, is essentially a creation of the CIA. Both the CIA and the NSA bankrolled the Ph.D. research of Google founder Sergey Brin, and senior CIA officials oversaw the evolution of Google during its pre-launch phase. As late as 2005, the CIA was still a major shareholder in Google. These shares resulted from Google’s acquisition of Keyhole, Inc., a CIA-backed surveillance firm whose software eventually became Google Earth—the civilian offshoot of a spying software the US government uses to surveil and target its friends and enemies. Since then, Google has become a major CIA contractor, securing a cloud services contract worth tens of billions of dollars.

Perhaps most alarmingly, a MintPress News investigation found a network of dozens of former CIA agents and officials now working in senior positions at Google and YouTube. Among them include Jacqueline Lopour, Google’s senior intelligence collection and trust and safety manager, who spent more than ten years as a CIA analyst; Ryan Fugit, who left the CIA in 2019 to become a senior global trust and safety manager for Google; and Bryan Weisbard, a former CIA intelligence officer and State Department official, who, in 2021, became director of YouTube Trust and Safety.
Other MintPress News investigations have found similar networks of ex-CIA agents working in top jobs at Facebook, TikTok and other platforms.

These individuals were not being appointed to politically neutral areas, such as sales or customer service, but were instead parachuted into positions where they affected what billions of people see, read and hear every day in their newsfeeds, usually with little to no relevant expertise in that field except their longtime careers as spies and spooks.

That individuals like this are in charge of defining real from fake news is deeply problematic, given the CIA’s long history of being the source of false information. John Stockwell, former head of a CIA task force, explained on camera how his organization infiltrated media departments the world over, created fake newspapers and news agencies, and planted false news about Washington’s enemies. “I had propagandists all over the world,” he said, adding,

We pumped dozens of stories about Cuban atrocities, Cuban rapists [to the media]… We ran [faked] photographs that made almost every newspaper in the country… We didn’t know of one single atrocity committed by the Cubans. It was pure, raw, false propaganda to create an illusion of communists eating babies for breakfast.”

The US national security state is also intimately involved in producing pop culture. The military has produced or co-produced thousands of TV shows and Hollywood movies, including many of the biggest blockbuster franchises, such as Iron Man, The Avengers, Jurassic Park, and Top Gun.

The CIA, meanwhile, was deeply involved in the production of films as diverse as Mission: Impossible, Borat, and Salt. And video game mega-franchises like Call of Duty are produced by ex-CIA chiefs. Brian Bulatao, the chief administration officer for Call of Duty producer Activision Blizzard, was formerly chief operating officer for the CIA, placing him third in command of the agency.

A MintPress investigation into the connections between Call of Duty and the national security state found that Air Force leaders were also deeply involved in game production, flying Activision Blizzard staff out to military bases to “showcase” their hardware to them and to make the industry more “credible advocates” for the US war machine.

Cold War 2.0
It is little secret that the United States is embarking on a new Cold War against both Russia and China. China’s economic rise poses a threat to American dominance of the globe. In addition to the hundreds of military bases encircling the two nations, this new war is being fought economically, digitally and culturally. War planners are already describing how the United States is trying to “kick China under the table,” such as commissioning “Taiwanese Tom Clancy” novels intended to demonize China and demoralize its citizens. Chinese-linked apps such as TikTok are under threat of possible deletion. YouTube stars collaborate with the military to promote the military-industrial complex to their tens of millions of impressionable, young fans. And President Biden briefs influencers on how best to explain the Ukraine War to their followers.

It is in this vein that we should see the State Department’s recent announcement to partner with musicians to push pro-US propaganda throughout the world. That they are doing this should be no surprise. What is remarkable, however, is how a musician with such widespread respect as a radical, anti-establishment figure would decide to join forces with the very institution he has railed against for decades.

At the White House press conference, Blinken unironically celebrated Chuck D, introducing him as “a legendary rapper from Flushing, Queens, who inspired us to fight the power.” Does Blinken not realize that he is the very power Public Enemy was rapping about? By choosing to team up with Blinken and join a project openly being pitched as a psychological operation aimed at regime change, Chuck D has, lamentably, gone from fighting the power to working for the power.

(MintPress News)

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