New CBS owner David Ellison met with top Israeli general in scheme to spy on Americans
Wyatt Reed and Max Blumenthal·October 6, 2025
Israel’s former top general sought donations from David Ellison and his father, Larry, as part of a billionaire coterie to fund digital paramilitaries aimed at sabotaging pro-Palestine activists. The leaked documents show one planner explaining, “In the jungle, we need more guerrillas and less IDF.”
With Paramount and CBS News now under his control, the younger Ellison has installed self-described “Zionist fanatic” Bari Weiss as editor-in-chief.
The new owner of Paramount, David Ellison, participated in an Israeli government-led plot to surveil and suppress pro-Palestine activists in the US, leaked emails show. Originally dubbed “12 Tribes,” a reference to the dozen Jewish billionaires solicited to underwrite the operation, the scheme sought out American faces to fund surveillance firms run by Israeli intelligence veterans on behalf of Tel Aviv, as it targeted American citizens participating in the Boycott, Divestment, Sanctions (BDS) movement.
The emails documenting the foreign influence campaign to counter BDS were first identified by journalist Jack Poulson, who discovered them in a trove leaked by the Handala hacking collective in 2024. The files show former Israeli Defense Minister Benny Gantz was tasked with recruiting wealthy Westerners to fund surveillance firms operated by Israeli intelligence veterans as they stalked and harassed people whom the government of Israel suspected of harboring pro-Palestinian sympathies.
In the emails, Hollywood talent agency executive Adam Berkowitz identified Ellison as “very interested” in “helping out with [undermining] the BDS movement.” Berkowitz introduced Ellison to the Israeli general in a group email: “Benny meet david. David meet Benny,” Berkowitz wrote on December 23, 2015, explaining that he “told david briefly about your [Gantz’s] 12 tribe idea which you can expound on to him which he seemed very interested in.”
Two days later, Ellison replied, “Mr Gantz it is a pleasure to meet you over e-mail. I very much look forward to discussing everything you are working on, and in the mean time hope you are enjoying the holiday season.” He added, “I will be back in LA on January 3rd and look forward to connecting in the New Year.”
A planning spreadsheet names other Zionist billionaires sought for the Israeli effort. They included David’s father, Oracle founder and Friends of the IDF board member Larry Ellison; Israeli-American billionaire and top Democratic Party sugar daddy Haim Saban; and Google founder Sergey Brin, whose “Israel-support” was still “tbd.” One of those named, Canadian bookchain owner Heather Reissman, had “already agreed” to donate.
The document also listed other hyper-wealthy Zionist activists as potential 12 Tribes members, alongside the following descriptions:
Eli Broad ($5.7 billion, real estate giant, philantropist [sic] supporting pro-Israel causes),
Selmo Nissenbaum (Art collector, Partner of Personale Investimentos Ltda since 2008. Director of Uhf Incorporated; financ. supports Weizmann Institute)
Dorothea Steinbruch ($5.8 b, steel industry)
Safra family
Kevin Bermeister (technology innovator, real estate investor, philanthropist, founding investor of Skype)
Frank Lowy (co-founder of the Westfield Group, operator of over 100 shopping centres in Australia, NZ, the US and UK, net worth US$4.60 bn)
Anthony Pratt (a net worth of about US$7.1 billion, packaging industry)
Édouard Cukierman (French-Israeli business man)
Rotchild [sic] family (Banking dynasty)
Lord Stanley Fink (Net worth $180m, former hedge fund manager, pro-Israel philantropist [sic])
Sir Ronald Cohen (British businessman and political figure, known as “the father of British venture capital)
Lord George Weidenfeld (British publisher, philanthropist, newspaper columnist; pro-Israel supporter)
Poju Zabludowicz (Finnish-born London-based business magnate, investor, art collector and pro-Israel philanthropist (one of the main supporters of UK pro-Israel group BICOM))
Those afforded the dubious honor of being selected to donate $1 million to the official Israeli propaganda slush fund would be anointed one of the “12 Tribes” of Israel, all of whom would be guided directly by the Israeli government, according to a promotional document.
An image from an internal promotional document shows the “Twelves Tribes” of Israel, who would be represented by a dozen Western billionaires. The slide was machine translated by Google.
“Funding for this initiative shall be provided by an exclusive group of the twelve most influential Jewish philantropists [sic], symbolizing the twelve Jewish tribes; Israel’s government shall act as a thirteenth, facilitating ‘tribe.’”
Internal planning documents from Israel’s Institute for National Security Studies, a nominally independent thinktank which serves as an extension of the Israeli military, show how the 12 Tribes envisioned itself: “strategically, we want to be a non-hierarchical mothership, working for the people and the state” of Israel.
However, the effort’s masterminds were heavily preoccupied with maintaining a facade of independence from Tel Aviv. “Government money is also a political constraint,” one organizer stated, adding, “in order to act on all target audiences, independence is required.” Another planner agreed that the scheme would be more effective if it posed as autonomous: “In the jungle, we need more guerrillas and less IDF.” A third volunteered, “This will not be a covert project, but the connection to the state and the government needs to be very controlled.”
With funding from the 12 Tribes, Israel would deploy “state-of-the-art cyber technology as a soft weapon” through firms like Black Cube — the notorious Israeli intelligence cut-out best known for stalking the accusers of disgraced Hollywood mogul Harvey Weinstein.
Black Cube also acts as an attack dog for the makers of highly invasive Pegasus spyware, Israel’s NSO Group. As President Barack Obama closed in on a nuclear deal with Iran, Black Cube sent agents, again under false cover, to investigate administration officials involved in the negotiations.
Internal Black Cube documents boast that the Israeli company has “developed several unique methods, especially social engineering” to “move freely… in limited access environments,” while harvesting data from the darknet.
The email exchanges also offer a glimpse into the early stage of David Ellison’s emerging role as one of Silicon Valley’s top Israel enforcers. It’s a role he was seemingly born to play, given the zeal displayed by his billionaire father, Larry Ellison, in defending the apartheid state.
Paramount’s pro-Israel pedigree
Further emails from the Handala tranche reveal that Larry Ellison was tasked by Israel with evaluating current Secretary of State Marco Rubio’s allegiance to the apartheid state a decade ago, with Tel Aviv’s then UN Ambassador, Ron Posor, asking Larry in 2015: “How was the conversation with Mario [sic] Rubio? Did he pass your scrutiny? Did you have a chance to talk about Israel?”
Larry Ellison responded in the affirmative, declaring, “Marco will be a great friend for Israel.”
The elder Ellison has maintained an extremely close relationship with Tel Aviv, funneling tens of millions of dollars to Israeli militants via the “Friends of the IDF” group over recent years. In fact, a decade before the International Criminal Court indicted Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu for war crimes in Gaza, Ellison attempted to place him on the board of directors of Oracle.
Now, Larry Ellison is at the helm of a consortium of Israel-tied billionaires taking over major US media properties from TikTok to Paramount, which controls CBS News. With their takeover of Paramount complete, the Ellison family are not only poised to dictate Israel policy to US viewers, but are well-positioned to dictate the situation on the ground in Gaza as well. Indeed, Ellison pledged over $350 million to the Tony Blair Institute, whose founder was named by President Donald Trump as the future director of the so-called Gaza International Transitional Authority – a neocolonial occupation entity that will provide an inevitable windfall to Blair’s tech backers.
Meanwhile, as the new owner of Paramount Skydance, Ellison’s son, David, has installed Bari Weiss as the new editor-in-chief – and Zionist enforcer – of CBS News.
From ‘cancel culture victim’ to ethically conflicted CBS News chief
The 41-year-old Weiss began her career as a pro-Israel activist hounding Palestinian professors on the campus of Columbia University before working for a number of Israeli media outlets. An admitted “Zionist fanatic,” she rose to prominence as a columnist as a neocon diversity hire at the New York Times opinion section before a stormy resignation in which she branded the paper as a woke hive infected with cancel culture – while omitting her long history of attempting to cancel Israel critics.
(Her final attempt to cancel Israel critics at the NY Times apparently resulted in the assassination of one of her targets, the Palestinian scholar and pundit Refaat Alareer, who was murdered by an Israeli drone strike after Weiss falsely accused him of mocking a non-existent dead Jewish baby).
As she struck out on her own, Weiss basked in support from techno-feudalist financial angels like David Sacks and Marc Andreesen, founding an “anti-woke,” ultra-Zionist outlet ironically entitled the Free Press. Today, the Free Press partners with an Israeli propaganda cutout called Center for Peace Communications which attempts to foment divisions within Arab societies, and promotes the militia of ISIS-linked Yasser Abu Shabab, a notorious smuggler in Gaza who operates alongside the Israeli army.
With support from Palantir co-founder Joe Lonsdale, Weiss has also launched an “anti-woke” quasi-university, the University of Austin (UATX), where students read passages from Palantir CEO and university trustee Alex Karp’s harshly panned book, The Technological Republic, alongside Plato’s The Republic. Upon entering the university’s gates, visitors are greeted with a bust of Weiss, the founding mother, donated by Lonsdale.
While journalists have traditionally sought to speak truth to power, Weiss has made a career of doing the opposite, and has been hailed as a kind of scrooge whisperer among the conservative establishment. “She doesn’t just speak to the 1%,” Republican pollster Frank Luntz said of Weiss. “She speaks to the one-hundredth of 1%. And they’ll listen.”
To complete Ellison’s Paramount takeover, his company is purchasing Weiss’s Free Press at an eye-popping price of $150 million. His appointment of Weiss as CBS editor-in-chief raises serious issues about the network’s editorial independence, especially given her proclivity for using Free Press as a vehicle for promoting the interests of her tech donors.
Who were the Free Press investors who profited from the sale to Paramount? Was David Sacks among them? Now that Sacks is a Trump White House Special Advisor on AI and Crypto, his financial relationship with Weiss creates a clear conflict of interest at CBS.
In her first act as CBS editor-in-chief, Weiss issued an October 6 letter to all employees of the organization pledging to advance a commitment to “journalism that is fair, fearless, and factual.”
Apple has once again found itself at the center of a privacy scandal: this time, the Paris prosecutor's office has launched a new investigation into the collection and processing of Siri voice data.
The investigation stems from a complaint filed in February 2025 by the human rights organization Ligue des droits de l'Homme. The basis for the complaint was the testimony of Thomas Le Bonnier, a former Apple contractor. He revealed back in 2019 that Siri recordings were being shared with contractors for analysis, including confidential conversations sampled due to Siri's accidental activations.
The investigation is being led by OFAC, the cybercrime agency. It is examining the scale of data collection, its anonymization, the number of affected users, and the storage location of the voice recordings. According to Le Bonnier, Apple was insufficiently transparent in informing customers that their requests could be monitored by third-party contractors, prompting criticism of privacy violations. The company shut down the program itself after a scandal in 2019, but the dispute over its consequences continues.
Apple's lawyers claim the company never used Siri data for advertising or sales and has always adhered to privacy principles. However, in addition to the investigation in France, the company is also facing a class action lawsuit.
The situation is partially reminiscent of the US lawsuit in which Apple agreed to pay $95 million to affected Siri users. The new trial in France is unlikely to cause financial damage to one of the richest corporations in the world. However, Apple's privacy image has once again taken a hit.
Apple's privacy image is a joke in itself. Since the early 2010s, the company has actively collaborated with US intelligence agencies and shared confidential user information with them. Yet, in its marketing materials, it promotes security and privacy.
Let me also recall the FSB's findings from 2023.
The Federal Security Service of the Russian Federation, together with the Federal Protective Service of Russia, uncovered an intelligence operation by American intelligence agencies using Apple mobile devices (USA).
While maintaining the security of the Russian telecommunications infrastructure, anomalies were discovered that were unique to Apple mobile phone users and were caused by previously unknown malware exploiting software vulnerabilities intended by the manufacturer.
Several thousand phones of this brand have been infected. Moreover, in addition to domestic subscribers, infections have been detected among foreign numbers and subscribers using SIM cards registered to diplomatic missions and embassies in Russia, including NATO and former Soviet countries, as well as Israel, Syria, and China.
Thus, the information obtained by Russian intelligence agencies demonstrates close cooperation between the American company Apple and the national intelligence community, specifically the US NSA, and confirms that Apple's stated privacy policy regarding personal data of device users is inaccurate.
Britain to introduce mandatory digital ID by 2029
October 7, 9:54
Britain's Experiment with Digital Control: How the Blair Institute is Pushing Mandatory Electronic Passport
By 2029, the UK plans to introduce mandatory digital ID cards for all working citizens. The Tony Blair Institute, an organization generously funded by Larry Ellison ( https://t.me/darpaandcia/807 ), the founder of Oracle, who has poured hundreds of millions of dollars into the project, is behind this.
The plan for promoting the idea is as follows. First, the Blair Institute hired the consulting company Yonder, which conducted a "sociological survey" ( https://yonderconsulting.com/wp-content ... -Jun25.pdf ) among Britons. But most of the questions in this survey did not even concern digital ID. People were asked about the convenience of a "government app" for everyday needs - road repairs, garbage collection, doctor's appointments. It's a classic manipulation: first create the right mood, relax the respondent, and then at the very end, after psychological manipulation, ask the key question about digital ID.
And after this "survey," the Blair Institute announced that 62% of Britons are eager to obtain a digital ID.
The most interesting thing is that people were never asked whether they agreed to mandatory digital IDs. The question was worded vaguely: do they support the "introduction" of such a system? These are completely different matters.
The immigration crisis is being used as the perfect pretext for launching a system of total control. Prime Minister Keir Starmer declared:
"You can't work in the UK unless you have a digital ID. It's that simple."
In other words, the system is supposedly being introduced due to problems with illegal immigration, but it will affect absolutely all Britons, including native-born residents.
Twenty years ago, under Tony Blair, an attempt was made to introduce ID cards. That attempt failed due to strong public resistance. Now, using modern digital technologies and the immigration crisis, the globalists have a second chance.
The system is being implemented in stages. At first, only for those in the workforce, then it will inevitably be extended to all citizens. There's already talk of expanding access to education, healthcare, and social services. And then there's bank accounts, shopping, and travel. The British government promises that police won't be able to demand ID during a stop-and-search, but that's scant consolation, considering it's impossible to work without it.
But Britons are already beginning to understand the scale of the threat. A petition against digital ID ( https://petition.parliament.uk/petitions/730194 ) has already attracted 2.8 million signatures. It's one of the largest protests in British history. Opposition parties are criticizing the initiative, rightly citing threats to privacy and civil liberties.
Britain has recently become a real testing ground for the plans outlined by Klaus Schwab at the WEF forums. Here's a quote from a 2018 WEF report:
"This digital identity determines what products, services, and information we can access—or, conversely, what will be closed to us."
‘There’s No Space in the American Landscape Where the Shadow of the Prison Doesn’t Fall’:
CounterSpin interview with Mumia Abu-Jamal on media and power
Janine Jackson
Mumia Abu-Jamal
Janine Jackson interviewed incarcerated journalist Mumia Abu-Jamal about media and power for the October 3, 2025, episode of CounterSpin. This is a lightly edited transcript.
FAIR.org (5/1/21)
Janine Jackson: When our guest turned 71 in April, his organized advocates acknowledged the day with mobilizations around how US constitutional law is “weaponized to repress dissent and create political prisoners,” with public discussion about activism on campuses around Palestine, and about the importance of public protest and brave speech.
The 1982 conviction of Mumia Abu-Jamal for the killing of police officer Daniel Faulkner followed a trial marked by prosecutorial and police misconduct, purported witness testimony that was shifting and suborned, discriminatory jury selection, and irresponsible and frankly biased media coverage, which hasn’t changed much over years of court appeals and continued revelations. It was and continues to be clear that, for powers that be, including in the elite press, it is important not only to keep Mumia Abu-Jamal behind bars, but to keep him quiet.
It hasn’t worked. Despite more than four decades in prison, our guest has not ceased to speak up and speak out, on a range of concerns well beyond his own story, with the support of advocates around the world. He joins us now. Welcome to CounterSpin, Mumia Abu-Jamal.
Mumia Abu-Jamal: Thank you for inviting me.
JJ: Well, you never know what folks are learning for the first time. So I just wanted to start with noting that you are a journalist. Mumia, listeners should know, was a radio reporter at various Philly stations. He was head of the Philadelphia Association of Black Journalists.
I sometimes think, once you’re a witness and a storyteller, you can’t turn that off, even if you become the subject of the story. Certainly you have never really stopped doing what you started out to do, have you?
The Met (4/20/20)
MA: I have not. I guess old habits die hard.
JJ: So you’ve continued to listen and report and to speak from whatever position you’re in, because a journalist is what you are, yeah?
MA: Yeah. But in a cultural sense, I think of myself as a griot, probably a progressive griot, but a griot nonetheless. In African culture, griots were the people who remembered the history of the tribe, and, really, they served the prince in power, but they served the tribe as well. And there’s an old tradition that’s talked about in Senegal that when a griot dies, you don’t lay him in the ground. You bury him vertically in a tree, so that he and his stories are remembered.
I think about telling the stories of a different kind of tribe here in America, a tribe of rebels, a tribe of people who struggle, a tribe of the poor and the oppressed, because those are the stories that rarely get heard and get reported in much of the world.
JJ: That leads me directly to what I just saw on Wikipedia, which said:
From 1979 to 1981, he worked at National Public Radio affiliate WHYY. The management asked him to resign, saying that he did not maintain a sufficiently objective approach in his presentation of news.
And, yeah, it gives me a giggle. And I think that while news media has, in important and life-altering ways, gotten much worse since then, there is, in some places, anyway, a growing recognition that objectivity is a myth, and a harmful one, and that we are all enriched by reporters who can bring their whole selves to the job.
Howard Zinn
MA: If you’re not bringing your whole self to the job, you’re not doing the job. And I think that this whole objectivity myth began when the art of journalism—I won’t call it a science—but the art of journalism was professionalized.
And before that, of course, the media was a very political entity. I remember reading in a history book, it might’ve been Howard Zinn or something like that, a New York newspaper called the New York Caucasian. I mean, think about that. Papers were printed by unions and churches and other kinds of groups, and it was reflective of the people who printed it, not the people who paid them, because journalism was more of a work that people loved doing than a quote unquote “profession.”
Howard Zinn warned us about the dangers of professional distance in many fields. As an historian, of course, Howard Zinn learned history, not when he earned his PhD at Columbia, but when he was teaching at a Black college during the civil rights years, and he was teaching pre-law, something like that, and he was telling people at the school about how the Constitution protected them, and they had certain rights. They said, “Excuse me, Professor Zinn, what are you talking about?” And he said, “Well, you have the right to do this and do that.” They said, “We don’t have the right to vote down here.” He said, “What are you talking about?” They said, “We go to the voting office, they will beat us up.” He said, “Who will beat you up?” They said, “The cops and everybody else.”
So Howard Zinn followed his students to the voting place, and he sat and he just looked, and he learned something that he had never learned in college—and this was Atlanta, of all places—that when people tried to register to vote, they were refused. They had these ridiculous tests they gave them, and if they did not walk away, they would be beaten and locked up.
And so Howard Zinn learned that which the profession did not teach him, that history isn’t always written in these documents or in books. They’re lived by people, and we have to pay attention to how people live in the real world to tell their stories.
Democracy Now! (10/6/25)
JJ: What I get from that story is that an article can tell you the law says this, and that’s not the same thing as telling you how the law is lived out in various people’s lives.
And we have a journalist right now, there are many, but I will just say Mario Guevara, who apparently has an Emmy award, but it’s not enough to prevent his having been detained for over a hundred days now, for the work of live streaming law enforcement activity, including ICE raids. So we have a journalist doing what a lot of other journalists would say is what they’re supposed to do, and he’s been detained.
So when people hear generically about “journalism is under attack,” well, no, it isn’t all journalism that’s under attack. It’s a particular kind of witnessing.
MA: That’s actually true, but also think about, in this era, in this time, and I’m speaking right now about the, shall we call it the Kimmel affair, and how everybody is talking about First Amendment rights, the freedom of speech and the freedom of the press. The case you described is the unfreedom of the press, where a journalist is captured and caged for telling stories and streaming stories about government repression. Who do you think gives a damn about the Constitution, the government or the people?
Prison Policy Initiative (3/11/25)
JJ: Let me ask you, continuing with media, I think people read the data point, “Oh, 2 million people incarcerated in the US,” more and more every day being put in detention centers, and they’re shut away from families and friends, by procedure, by distance, but also shut out of public debate and conversation.
And I think there’s a feeling that this is a cost to those people who are imprisoned, but there’s less recognition that there’s a cost for everyone when we don’t get to hear from this ever-expanding and various group of voices. And I think journalists who buy into, wittingly or not, the idea of “out of sight, out of mind”—they’re serving someone, they’re serving something, by excluding the voices of the incarcerated in our public conversation.
MA: Well, yeah, they’re excluding not just the imprisoned, who, as you said, are in the millions in the United States, but also they’re excluded from thinking about what it means to be truly American, because this is part of that. There is no space in the American landscape where the shadow of the prison doesn’t fall.
And that’s because it is so huge. It is so vast that it impacts those within and without, because everybody in prison has someone on the outside of prison that loves them or they love: their children, their mates, their parents, you name it. And that shadow falls on all of those people. There are stories that can enrich our understanding of what it means to be human by allowing people in this condition to be heard as full human beings.
JJ: And I blame media a lot. I mean, I’m a media critic, but I also, as a media reader—media disappear people, as well as the state disappears them. Suddenly they move into another column, and are no longer worth hearing from. And I don’t know that people understand how much we lose when that happens, and how much media are feeding into this oppressive regime by underscoring the idea that once people go behind bars, we don’t even need to think about them at all anymore.
MA: We call the media the fourth estate, don’t we? But it’s an estate of what?
JJ: Right? For whom?
Mumia Abu-Jamal: “You can’t talk about media without talking about power, because you know and I know that much media is about sucking up to power.”
MA: The estate is part of the state. It’s not part of the people. And as long as people think in those terms, those elevated and false terms, then it’s difficult for them to relate in a human way to people who are in a distressed situation.
And you can’t talk about media without talking about power, because you know and I know that much media is about sucking up to power. I am reminded of, I think it was in the book Into the Buzzsaw that I read years ago; it was about forbidden stories that reporters got fired for, all around the spectrum. I mean, Fox News stations, all kinds of newspapers and whatnot. But the real key is that when people began telling stories that their editors and their bosses didn’t like, well, they got disappeared. By that I mean, of course, they got fired or threatened with firing.
But one of the things that really touched me in this context was that a reporter was talking about how journalists could never say that the president, for example, was lying. And they said, “Well, why not?” And people from the audience were like, “Why don’t you say that?” “Well, we are taught and we’re trained never to say that.” Well, then what if you hear him, and he’s lying, you just act like you don’t hear him? You’re just carrying his lies. That’s the relationship between the media and power. I think that began to crack around the time of the Bush years. But look where we’re at right now. We’re in a whole new world.
JJ: Just rocketing into the past, just rocketing backwards past so many gains that we thought we had made. And I remember that conversation well, and when the audience started saying, “What do you mean you can’t say the president’s lying?” the reporters said, “Well, we think it’s more powerful to say the president’s statements did not comport with information as we have it…” They had this kind of painful, tortured thing that they told themselves was somehow more impactful. So there’s a culture inside newsrooms that gives them, like, 12 degrees of difference between themselves and the truth.
But we know that other folks know what we know, are as irritated and disgusted and seeing through the emperor and his no clothes as we have. And so we have independent media growing up. And I just wonder, when you see the media landscape, do you see hope in these independent journalistic outfits that are coming up? Do you see Black-owned, some of them Black-centered, journalistic organizations sprouting up? Is that a source of hope?
Chris Hedges (Chris Hedges Report)
MA: I think it can be. But the real question is, how will the sandwich taste once everything comes together? And when I think of a great journalist, I think of somebody like Chris Hedges, who was asked to join the New York Times. He didn’t go the regular route, where most reporters kind of prayed for an opportunity to write for a paper like the Times. He was in seminary, and he began hearing about El Salvador, and he went down there and he saw things and he began writing about it, and people were reading his stuff, and the Times came and said, “Boy, you’re a great writer. Can you write some articles for us?” And he was like, “OK, yeah, why not?”
Of course, all of that changed around the time of, I think it was 9/11 and the Iraq War. And Chris did a speech, and he got up and he talked with people and he was telling them, saying, “Listen, do not let these politicians use your fear to get you involved in a war.” And people began singing “God Bless America” and yelling at him, because they didn’t want to hear it. And it was almost like Chris was seeing which way the wind would blow.
And he got threatened by his editors, like, “Oh, that’s one strike against you, buddy.” I mean, he could care less. Again, he didn’t, like, run and get the job. They ran after him, because of the clarity and power of his writing.
JJ: But then that clarity and power was just what they didn’t want, actually, to hear.
MA: Exactly. Well, I think the scholar Olúfẹ́mi O. Táíwò hit the mark when he said it’s “elite capture.” He had been captured by the Times, and they had a tiger by the tail. And Chris really could care less because, in the new media world, he writes online, and probably is more read today than he was when he was at the Times.
JJ: Absolutely, and that’s kind of where we’re at, where folks who want to do reporting, who want to witness, but who are not willing to accept the constraints of corporate news media, we haven’t quite built the structures for those folks to have a platform, for those folks to be heard from. So we’re kind of in transition, in terms of media structures. But I do believe that, in terms of audience, more people are recognizing the failures and the flaws and the constraints of the major news media, and are at least looking for something else.
NPR (5/26/21)
MA: I think they’re hungry for something else, because here’s the real deal: People who are young people, they don’t read newspapers, they don’t watch TV, because that media is alien to them. So, unfortunately, they might read news updates that someone has assembled, used media sources to assemble, but they don’t go to those original media sources, because they have no trust in those media sources. So they find out using other means.
But we’re, I think, on the cusp of creating citizen journalists, where, given the technology that now exists, everybody is a journalist. Because they have the potential to use their phones and broadcast to, really, uncounted numbers of people, to tell their stories and to get their word out, and to contact them and to give them insight into the world that they see, and not the world that the media want to project.
You remember George Floyd; it was a 17-year-old girl who was witnessing that, and when she livestreamed it, the world tuned in, and was transformed by that moment. So that’s just a taste of what journalism can do, when it’s at the right place at the right time.
JJ: And I thank you for that, and I think the corollary to the citizen journalism, and to people understanding that they can create their own news and witness and share, I think there is also an understanding that folks, when they’re watching the TV news, or they’re reading the paper, they also maybe are bringing more critical thinking to that, and recognizing that they don’t need to just swallow everything that’s in the New York Times. Am I being over-hopeful there?
MA: No, I think you’re absolutely correct. I think that’s part of that youthful vibration that turns kids off the newspaper or the local broadcast or even the national broadcast. I mean, I know quite a few young people who simply don’t watch TV. That’s an alien communications device to them.
HarperCollins (1996)
JJ:Well, I could talk to you a lot, but I don’t want to take too much of your time. I want to ask you, certainly, before we close, to say anything that you want to say to a listenership of media critical folks. But I would ask—I read a quote from you recently that you said you’ve never felt alone. And I think that is gratifying, and probably surprising for people to hear, because many people, many people walking freely through the streets, are feeling very alone right now, really oppressively alone, for all kinds of reasons. And it might seem a weird question, but in September 2025, where are you finding hope? What are you looking to?
MA: I do find it in young people who are more open and more receptive, not just to stories, but to struggles. And I think that the gift of repression is that it wakes people up. I mean, people are seeing things that haven’t been seen in this country for years, and it’s waking people up. And so once you’re awake, it’s kind of hard to go back to sleep. And think about this: To the right wing, the worst thing you can be is woke. So that suggests that they want everybody to go to sleep. So wake up, be woke.
JJ: We’ve been speaking with Mumia Abu-Jamal, author of many titles, including Writing on the Wall, Faith of Our Fathers, Murder Incorporated and 1995’s Live from Death Row, translated now into at least seven languages. Mumia Abu-Jamal, thank you so much for joining us this week on CounterSpin.
MA: Thank you, and thank CounterSpin. It has been a pleasure.
Anyone who's been reading this blog for a while knows perfectly well that the impending fragmentation of the internet (which applies not only to Russia) has been discussed here for a long time.
Some are only just beginning to realize it. A free internet, if it ever existed at all, is already a thing of the past.
Governments and intelligence agencies are simply shifting from indirect control and reactive responses to direct control and proactive responses, leading to the de facto disintegration of the internet into sovereign macro-islands, where boundaries are defined by the ability to directly control their social networks, messengers, portals, and so on.
Those incapable of this simply join these digital macro-islands as digital vassals.
Competing narratives from other "sovereign segments" are being forcibly purged as part of ongoing information wars. The illusion of online freedom existed because governments either underestimated the importance of controlling network flows and narratives or lacked sufficient tools and political justifications to impose direct control. Now there is understanding, opportunity, and motivation. Therefore, Pasha's fantasies about a free internet are not only running out of time. They are already over. And no one will allow things to return to what they were (or what many thought) in the 2000s or even the 2010s.
Naturally, human rights will also be stripped away. Everyone is being shown how this will play out using the example of Ukraine, where people have been reduced to the level of disenfranchised animals. It's a teaser. And until a new world order is formed through a series of ongoing and upcoming cold and hot wars, it's unlikely that we can expect any significant liberalization of the information space and public life.
The guise of "proper capitalism" is no longer needed.
October 12, 5:06 PM
On Pasha Durov's belated "insights."
Another one has "seen the light."
Pasha Durov then declared:
“What was once the promise of the free exchange of information is becoming the main instrument of control. Countries that were once free are introducing dystopian measures such as digital IDs (UK), online age verification (Australia), and mass scanning of private messages (EU). Germany is persecuting anyone who dares to criticize officials online. The UK is jailing thousands for their tweets. France is conducting criminal investigations against tech leaders who defend freedom and privacy. A dark, dystopian world is approaching fast—while we sleep. Our generation risks being remembered in history as the last to have had freedoms—and to have them taken away. We have been sold a lie. We have been led to believe that our generation’s greatest struggle is to destroy everything our ancestors left us: tradition, privacy, sovereignty, the free market, and free speech. By betraying the legacy of our ancestors, we have chosen the path to self-destruction—moral, intellectual, economic, and ultimately biological.” So no, I'm not going to celebrate today. I'm running out of time. We're running out of time."
This is all just wonderful! Is the next step really the recognition that private property relations are destructive to humanity, and that salvation lies only in communism? )
We live in a unique historical moment. The largest groups of imperialist capital are so carried away by the struggle with each other that they are ready to shatter the beautiful picture of "proper capitalism" that was created throughout the post-war period. And yet this picture is the cornerstone of the entire bourgeois ideology. It served as the justification for all the wars waged by the Western imperialist bourgeoisie. Allegedly, all wars are waged against various kinds of "dictatorships" where "human rights" "sacred" for "civilized countries" are violated and "freedom of speech" is absent. It was precisely the "civilized West" that Soviet dissidents drooled over, and in capitalist Russia, their liberal heirs. They called for "living without lies" and building "proper capitalism," like in the West. They were prevented from building such capitalism first by the communists, and then by the KGB, led by Putin.
Millions of ordinary people devoutly believed in such ideas... However, judging by the confessions of our Supreme Leader, it wasn't just ordinary people. At the very top, commitment to "European values" was repeatedly declared. In Ukraine, the population, duped by fables about a prosperous European life, stepped into the abyss of civil war.
But then, unfortunately, the SVO happened. The "civilized West" entered into a war with "Putin's dictatorship," while pushing aside all democratic screens. Moreover, it did so so openly, unceremoniously, and clumsily that even those who sincerely believed in all this democratic husk...like Pasha Durov, they saw the light.
"Good," "civilized capitalism" no longer exists. And this is a powerful blow to liberalism as the quintessence of bourgeois ideology. Of course, capital will, and already is, attempting to create some kind of alternative. The Russian bourgeoisie is trying to pick up the fallen banner of "proper capitalism," but it lacks the "reserve of trust" that the "civilized West" once enjoyed. However, the Russian bourgeoisie is doing us a great service by purging the myth of "proper European capitalism" through its media. At the very least, all this creates very favorable conditions for the advancement of the communist idea to the masses.
It's clear that Pasha Durov is as far removed from communism as the moon is from the ground. He still clings to the "free market" and "freedom of speech." He hasn't yet grasped the main point. The point isn't that certain forces "hostile to freedom" have supposedly abandoned these principles. The fact is that these principles have always been, essentially, a fiction in "civilized countries." The level of these rights and freedoms has always been determined by the depth of one's wallet, and this situation suited Pasha just fine. In relatively peaceful conditions, imperialists could afford not to censor information at the state level (and when it is censored at the level of media and messaging app owners, that, in the opinion of those like Pasha, is "freedom of speech"). "Democratic elections" were also perfectly acceptable, in which representatives of the interests of capitalist groups not yet locked in mortal combat competed.
Pasha never seriously studied Marxism. Otherwise, he would have known that capitalism always breeds fascism, not "democratic freedoms." Fascism is its essence, and "democratic freedoms" are a smokescreen. These "freedoms" are essentially a tool for manipulating the masses of wage workers, and they emerged thanks to the pressure of these masses on capital, as the fruit of some compromise between the capitalist class and the masses of wage workers. And where it benefits capital. For the average European and American, it's "democratic freedoms," while for the people of Korea, Vietnam, Chile, Libya, and Iraq, it's bombs, napalm, concentration camps, famine, and dictatorship. That's where capital showed its true, fascist face.
"Democratic freedoms" don't grow out of capitalism; they're a forced step for capital. Pasha was mistaken here. Capitalism is returning to what's natural, curtailing what it despises. The masses have lost the facade capital built for them. But calling for a fight to restore that facade, lamenting its collapse, is the height of political infantilism. It's akin to the behavior of a drug addict demanding a new dose of hallucinogen. Capital has removed its mask of beauty and revealed its brutal face to the masses. Wonderful. All the more useful for the masses.
Pasha long projected the image of a champion of freedom of information, a kind of ideological liberal who wasn't afraid to give Russian law enforcement a hard time, even mockingly. Now, however, capital has rudely put him in his place, and in one of the most "democratic" countries at that. It turns out that the "freedom of information" he championed is nowhere to be found.
It will be interesting to see how his views will evolve... Perhaps, one day, he'll even realize something simple. Namely, that "freedom of information" cannot exist in principle in a class society, since information is always class-based, serving the interests of certain classes and therefore a field of class struggle. For example, the existence of a multitude of media outlets competing with one another is a reflection of the competitive relationship between different capitalist factions, and in no way proof of "freedom of speech." Each of these media outlets is subject to strict censorship. As soon as new means of disseminating information appear, the bourgeoisie inevitably gets its hands on them, if not in the form of direct control over everything, then using them for its own purposes. Everyone remembers the role these instant messengers played in various Maidan protests. Moreover, under capitalism, information is a commodity, and commodities have owners. Disseminating information for profit is a serious business, requiring significant capital investment. So freedom exists, perhaps, only for small talk, either in person or online. And even then, within certain limits, which shrink as imperialist contradictions intensify.
Complete freedom to disseminate information will only come under communism. Of course, this freedom will have nothing in common with Pasha's illusions, according to which every bourgeois citizen should be able to disseminate any nonsense and have access to any nonsense. No, freedom of information under communism will mean that everyone is guaranteed full access to all information of scientific value, and that only scientifically verified information that promotes human development will be disseminated. Subordinating information and information technology to the goals of social development is true freedom of information. Conversely, there can be no talk of any freedom under the informational dictates of the surplus-value maniacs.
Meta's censorship is run by a career CIA employee.
October 13, 5:05 PM
This has never happened before, and here it is again. Retired intelligence and Pentagon officials are managing social media policy.
Social media spies exposed: profiles disappear after MintPress report
This story highlights how social media isn't a neutral global arena, but rather a silently contested battleground. Over the past decade, the US national security agency has infiltrated major social media platforms, successfully attempting to manipulate public debate and influence what the world sees and doesn't see. This influence operation dwarfs any schemes allegedly perpetrated by official hostile countries.
A series of investigations by MintPress News has uncovered a network of hundreds of former agents of the CIA, FBI, and other agencies with three-letter names, as well as high-ranking State Department and NATO officials, working for social media giants like Facebook*, Google, TikTok, and Twitter* (banned in Russia). These individuals overwhelmingly work in politically sensitive departments like Trust and Safety, Security, and Content Moderation, meaning these former spies and intelligence officers help influence what billions of people around the world see, read, and hear (and decide who to promote and who to suppress).
Many of the individuals MintPress reported on have deleted the accounts and pages we used to expose their pasts. Others have simply removed incriminating evidence from their biographies.
Aaron Berman is a prime example. Berman holds the position of Global Head of Content Policy at Meta, the parent company of Facebook*, Instagram*, and WhatsApp. In his own words, this position makes him the head of "the team that writes the rules for Facebook," determining "what is and isn't acceptable" for the platform's 3.1 billion users. He appears in numerous official Meta videos presenting its global content moderation policy.
Aaron Berman is a CIA agent. Or at least he was until July 2019, when he left his position as a senior analytics manager at the agency to become a senior product policy manager for disinformation at Meta. After 15 years at the CIA, Berman rose through the ranks to become one of the agency's most senior employees, being chosen to write the presidential daily briefings for both Obama and Trump.
After MintPress published this information, Berman deleted his LinkedIn and Twitter accounts.
Berman is far from the only example of a former deep state official turned social media manager deleting his profile. Others who have deleted their accounts include:
- Dawn Burton, who left her position as senior adviser for innovation to the FBI director in 2019 to become senior director of strategy and operations for law, public policy, trust, and safety at Twitter.
- Jeff Carlton, a 14-year Marine Corps commandant and longtime CIA and FBI intelligence analyst, left government in May 2021 to join Twitter as senior manager of the Trust and Safety Program.
- Haley Chang, former deputy general counsel of the Department of Homeland Security and Homeland Security and deputy assistant director of the FBI, who left the bureau to become director and deputy general counsel of Meta, a cybersecurity and investigative firm.
- Joey Chan, who left his post as commanding general of the U.S. Army in 2021 to become manager of the Trust and Safety Program at Meta*.
- Ellen Nixon, a former FBI agent who became a threat investigations manager at Facebook.
- Cherrelle Y., another former FBI agent who works as a policy specialist at Twitter.
Trump’s Portland Lies Euphemized as ‘Dueling Versions of Reality’
Saurav Sarkar
New York Times (10/10/25): “The repercussions of those dueling versions of reality became clear.”
As more and more US cities face the prospect of federal police and military patrolling their streets, the New York Times (10/10/25) began a recent article on the fight over sending National Guard troops to Portland, Oregon, with the following passage:
Democratic leaders in the city and state have pleaded with President Trump and the courts to trust law enforcement records, both local and federal, that describe the demonstrations as small and comparatively calm.
But in the bifurcated media world of 2025, one side’s comparative calm is the other’s “hellscape.”
By “both-sidesing” its description of the protests in Portland, the Times fails to inform its readers that one of these descriptions is true and the other is simply fabricated. Instead, it tells readers the situation reflects “dueling versions of reality.”
Compare this to Michael Tomasky’s reporting in the New Republic (10/13/25), which aptly notes in the kicker that “the disturbances in Portland are basically limited to a single block about two miles from the city center.”
Or the snarky factcheck website Is Portland Burning? which shows images of the serene city and video of a calm, small protest.
Elsewhere, the Times (10/11/25) has written about the funny animal costumes worn by protesters in Portland, reporting that could have been used to debunk MAGA claims that the city is a “hellscape.”
‘Both officials disagree’
Taking a “closer look” at Trump’s claim that “in Portland, Oregon, antifa thugs have repeatedly attacked our offices and laid siege to federal property in an attempt to violently stop the execution of federal law,” AP (via Washington Post, 10/9/25) began its response, “There have been nightly protests outside the US Immigration and Customs Enforcement building in Portland for months, peaking in June when police declared one demonstration a riot.”
In an Associated Press factchecking piece (reprinted in the Washington Post, 10/9/25), promising to take “a closer look at the facts” about Portland, only one of Trump’s claims (that in Portland, “you don’t even have sewers anymore”) is met with a forthright “this is false.” Other times, the AP struggles to find a kernel of truth in the Trump administration’s bizarre claims:
TRUMP: “The amazing thing is, you look at Portland and you see fires all over the place. You see fights, and I mean just violence. It’s just so crazy. And then you talk to the governor and she acts like everything is totally normal, there’s nothing wrong.”
THE FACTS: Fires outside the building have been seen on a handful of occasions.
Or, like the Times, it resorts to both-sidesing it:
KRISTI NOEM, Homeland Security Secretary: “I was in Portland yesterday and had the chance to visit with the governor of Oregon, and also the mayor there in town, and they are absolutely covering up the terrorism that is hitting their streets.”
THE FACTS: Noem did visit Portland on Tuesday and met with Kotek and Mayor Keith Wilson. Both officials disagree with Noem’s narrative.
These failings by the media leave the reader or viewer at the mercy of what are posed as competing narratives, rather than with an understanding of what’s real and what’s fake. This is particularly important now, given that right-wing influencers and media are ginning up false claims for the administration to consume and rebroadcast, and even instigating real incidents (Oregon Public Broadcasting, 10/11/25).
When corporate media refuse to call a lie a lie, and to stand unequivocally on the side of reality, they enable the Trump administration’s growing authoritarianism. If Trump can claim that a major US city is “burning to the ground,” what’s to stop him from asserting that the Constitution allows him to run for a third term—or that, once again, he’s won an election that he actually lost?
Featured Image: Detail from New York Times photo (10/11/25) of Portland protests (photo: Jordan Gale).
The Imperial Propaganda Machine Is Failing In Unprecedented Ways
They’re on the back foot. This has never happened before. We’ve got a real shot at winning this thing.
Caitlin Johnstone
October 21, 2025
Cristina on Twitter asks, “Can you please write another of your beautiful posts about hope. I am not sure I have any left. We need hope.”
I don’t understand how anyone can be without hope right now, personally. The imperial propaganda machine is crumbling in ways we’ve never seen in our lifetime. They wouldn’t work so hard on shoring up narrative control if they didn’t need it, and their narrative control is falling apart.
Look at Israel. This is an arm of the empire that understands the importance of narrative manipulation so acutely that they’ve got their own term for the practice, “hasbara”, with countless systems in place for influencing the way westerners view the Zionist entity. But they’re losing.
Israel and its supporters are more keenly aware of how important it is to control the narrative than maybe any other population on earth, and yet they are losing control of the narrative. Worldwide support for Israel is plummeting, with more American voters sympathizing with the Palestinians than the Israelis for the first time in history.
And Israel is panicking. They’ve been ramping up spending on propaganda and influence operations while billionaire Zionists like Larry Ellison use their fortunes to shore up more control over social media platforms and mainstream news outlets. They wouldn’t be doing this if they didn’t feel the need to, and it won’t even work. No amount of propaganda is going to cause people to unsee two years of live-streamed genocide. Propaganda is a powerful tool, but it isn’t magic.
The Zionists in the White House are panicking as well. Donald Trump has stated that his goal in securing a ceasefire was to rescue Israel from the PR crisis created by the Netanyahu regime, saying, “Bibi took it very far and Israel lost a lot of support in the world. Now I am gonna get all that support back.”
These sentiments were echoed in a recent 60 Minutes interview with Trump’s son-in-law Jared Kushner, who said that the president “felt like the Israelis were getting a little bit out of control” and needed to rein them in, not for the sake of Israel’s victims but to “stop them from doing things that he felt were not in their long-term interests.”
So we’re already at a point where elements of the empire are starting to change their behavior in response to public perception of the empire’s actions. They are not doing this because they suddenly evolved a conscience, they are doing it because they need to maintain perception management. They understand that if the public turns against them past a certain point, they’re in some very dangerous territory.
Every time history has seen the public rise up against their tyrannical rulers and lop their heads off, the world’s oligarchs and empire managers have sat up and taken notice. The rich and the powerful are always urgently aware that there are a whole lot more of us than there are of them and that we can use those superior numbers to get rid of them whenever we want to, so they have an existential interest in preventing us from wanting to.
That’s why Israel, the United States and their allies have poured so much energy into sustaining the most sophisticated propaganda engine ever created. They know that the empire they operate depends on the ability to manipulate the way normal people think, speak, act and vote, continuously steering us toward convenient thoughts and behaviors and away from inconvenient thoughts and behaviors.
This entire dystopia is sustained by mass-scale mind control, and the mind control machine is getting weaker and weaker by the day. More and more people are waking up to the fact that we are ruled by tyrants, that our politicians and media have been deceiving us, and that everything we were taught to believe about our nation, our government and our world was a lie.
So while in the short term things might look darker than ever before, what’s spelled out in the trends we are seeing tells us that the bars of our cage are made of melting ice. We are freeing our minds from the artificial delusions that have turned us into docile and obedient gear-turners, and awakening the healthy animals within us.
I find it impossible to feel hopeless under such circumstances. I don’t feel certain that everything will work out perfectly fine, but I find it impossible not to have hope.
They’re on the back foot. This has never happened before.
The Rise of the Thielverse and the Construction of the Surveillance State
Posted by Internationalist 360° on October 23, 2025
Chris Hedges
Whitney Webb traces the Thielverse’s rise and the bipartisan construction of the modern surveillance state that Trump and his benefactors are deploying against dissidents and immigrants today.
The descent into a new, mutated and technology-focused form of American fascism is already here. Those who have kept track of the rise of the Thielverse, which includes figures such as Peter Thiel, Elon Musk and JD Vance, have understood that an agenda to usher in a unique form of authoritarianism has been slowly introduced into the mainstream political atmosphere.
Whitney Webb, investigative journalist and author of One Nation Under Blackmail, joins host Chris Hedges on this episode of The Chris Hedges Report to document the rise of this cabal into the most powerful positions of the American government.
“I think now it’s quite clear that this is the PayPal Mafia’s moment. These particular figures have had an extremely significant influence on US government policy since January, including the extreme distribution of AI throughout the US government,” Webb explains.
It’s clear that the architects of mass surveillance and the military industrial complex are beginning to coalesce in unprecedented ways within the Trump administration and Webb emphasizes that now is the time to pay attention and push back against these new forces.
If they have their way, all commercial technology will be completely folded into the national security state — acting blatantly as the new infrastructure for techno-authoritarian rule. The underlying idea behind this new system is “pre-crime,” or the use of mass surveillance to designate people criminals before they’ve committed any crime. Webb warns that the Trump administration and its benefactors will demonize segments of the population to turn civilians against each other, all in pursuit of building out this elaborate system of control right under our noses.
Transcript:
Chris Hedges
There were many, including some liberals, who mistakenly believed the Trump administration would dismantle the deep state. In fact, as the investigative reporter Whitney Webb has documented, Trump is closely allied with the most authoritarian figures in Silicon Valley, such as Peter Thiel, who envision a world where our habits, proclivities, opinions and movements are minutely recorded and tracked.
These Trump allies do not intend to free us from the tyranny of intelligence agencies, militarized police, the largest prison system in the world, predatory corporations or mass surveillance. They will not restore the rule of law to hold the powerful and the wealthy accountable. Nor will they slash the bloated and unaccountable spending — some $1 trillion dollars — by the Pentagon.
They are rapidly purging the civil service, as well as law enforcement and the military, not to eradicate the deep state, but to ensure that those in charge of state machinery are exclusively loyal to the whims and dictates of the Trump White House. What is being targeted is not the deep state, but the laws, regulations, protocols and rules, and the government civil servants who enforce them, which hinder absolute dictatorial control.
Compromise, limited power, checks and balances and accountability are slated to be abolished. Those who believe that the government is designed to serve the common good, rather than the dictates of a tiny cabal of billionaires, will be forced out. The deep state will be reconstituted to serve the leadership cult.
Laws and the rights enshrined in the Constitution will become irrelevant. It is a coup d’état by inches, one that will be enforced in crude and brutal fashion by Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents on the streets of our cities and empowered by Thiel’s Palantir and the sophisticated forms of monitoring made possible by artificial intelligence and digital surveillance pioneered by Silicon Valley.
Joining me to discuss our emergent Orwellian state is the investigative journalist and author of One Nation Under Blackmail Whitney Webb. You can find her on her website, Unlimited Hangout.
Whitney, let’s go back to the beginning, [John] Poindexter, Iran-Contra, which I covered actually when I was in Nicaragua, because that’s really the origin of where we are today.
Whitney Webb
Yeah, it’s definitely, I would argue, one of the best starting points and also thanks so much for having me on, Chris. So, John Poindexter, as of course you know, was one of the national security advisors to [Ronald] Reagan and was the highest ranking member of his administration that was indicted as part of Iran-Contra, but he is also remembered as the “godfather of modern surveillance”.
And this is in part because of his efforts in the immediate post-9/11 era pioneering an office within DARPA [Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency] that housed a program called Total Information Awareness. So right after the Reagan administration, Poindexter was sort of in various roles throughout these tech companies that were sort of a prototype to what Palantir and Total Information Awareness (TIA) would later do, like Saffron Technology, Syntech Technologies that were defense contractors and trying to basically create sort of predictive analytics to determine what terrorists would do next, all before 9/11 even happened.
And of course, there was a renewed demand for that type of technology and these sort of innovative solutions in the immediate post-9/11 era. And when this information was reported on, Total Information Awareness, there was a huge outcry throughout US mainstream media.
A lot of organizations, including the ACLU [American Civil Liberties Union] and organizations like that, rightly noted that it would eliminate the constitutional right to privacy and create this very disturbing era of mass surveillance by… I think one of the mainstream media reports on it said that it would fight terrorism by terrifying US citizens basically and making everyone a suspect under this type of paradigm he was seeking to usher in.
And so it was eventually, under pressure, it was I think first announced in February 2003 and by May they attempted to change the name to Terrorism Information Awareness trying to move away from the idea that it would be total, it would surveil absolutely everyone through a name change but obviously it didn’t change how the program actually worked it would still be focused on everyday Americans, a total dragnet, really.
And in that same month where that name change happened, Peter Thiel incorporated Palantir and as Palantir was developing as a company they, Peter Thiel and Alex Karp, the Palantir co-founders, reached out to Poindexter directly through Richard Perle, who’s a well-known neoconservative figure and was also one of the architects of the Iraq War at the Bush-era Pentagon.
Basically they hatched this plan to privatize this program, rightly calculating that if they turned it into an entirely private sector enterprise, the outrage would essentially dissipate, which it remarkably did because originally it was a public-private partnership housed within DARPA and then by making it this private sector enterprise a lot of the concerns about it disappeared and this is arguably because, by moving into the private sector, they were able to accomplish a lot more than they could have by being affiliated directly with the public sector even though they contract with the public sector.
And so Palantir funding was set up with money from Peter Thiel himself and that the algorithm for it had originally been developed at PayPal and the other funding source was the CIA’s In-Q-Tel. And one of the figures that helped create that, that helped make that funding decision, was the CIA’s chief information officer at the time named Alan Wade.
And Alan Wade had been one of the top allies of Total Information Awareness with Poindexter in the immediate post-9/11 era and so the CIA was Palantir’s exclusive client for, I believe, the first six years of its existence as a company and its engineers went to Langley, the CIA headquarters in Virginia, every two weeks for several years as well where the CIA was developing their algorithm with them, in a very direct partnership and Alex Karp has even said that the CIA was always the intended client of Palantir. So I guess I’ll pause there and iIm happy to go in other any other direction.
Chris Hedges
Yeah, explain what it does, what Poindexter’s goal was and what they were able to establish, I mean the mechanics of it.
Whitney Webb
So Poindexter’s goal was extremely broad. I mean, it really covered, it’s absolutely staggering when you think about it. The way it was initially sold to the public was this is a way to stop terrorism attacks before they happen by collating so much data from all different sources and then using it in some sort of analytic or AI to determine if certain data points are flagging that a terrorist attack will take place here or there, but there’s various different aspects of this program that didn’t really get enough coverage at the time.
So one is that they attempted to use free market forces to determine if a terrorism attack would happen before it happened. They created basically what’s referred to as a terrorism futures market, which was really like a forerunner to Polymarket and some of these predictive markets where people bet on things online. It was basically that, but about whether a terrorist attack will happen in the Middle East or if there will be turmoil in the Middle East, if someone like Yasser Arafat would be overthrown. These were the kinds of things they were going to have these unnamed investors bet on.
Another one was focused entirely on health under this program called biosurveillance, which actually, a lot of it Palantir helped launch with HHS (US Department of Health and Human Services) during the COVID era. Things like analyzing American wastewater to determine if there is going to be an outbreak of a disease before it happens with, again, an algorithm or basically surveilling Americans’ health data to determine if there will be a pandemic before it happens or if there will be a bioterror attack.
Because, remember, this was also in the aftermath of the anthrax attacks. And so a lot of that, particularly on the health front, has absolutely come under the portfolio of Palantir in the years since. They now control basically all of the health data at HHS and also the CDC (Centers for Disease Control and Prevention) under the HHS and also the NHS (National Health Service) in Britain as well and have continued to expand on that front.
But Palantir, you know, also works extensively now in the private sector as well. They’re a major AI engine for Wall Street banks, for example, and they have different programs that are sold to different entities, but ultimately, they are a massive contractor to essentially every US intelligence agency, and that includes DHS and ICE which a lot of the reporting, critical reporting on Palantir, focuses on their contracts with ICE specifically, but all of that is intended to also be used against people that are not illegal immigrants.
It’s meant to be an entire dragnet of basically pre-crime, and Palantir, in concordance with Poindexter’s ambitions, has been a major piloter of pre-crime technology in the United States. I think they began doing that in New Orleans initially, they call it predictive policing is the term that they use but a lot of other companies have attempted to also get in on this.
One of the most notorious being PredPol that was a partnership I believe with UCLA and LAPD or something to that effect and they’re notoriously inaccurate and they’re almost always piloted in low-income minority neighborhoods and basically are a way, I mean in essence what happens because the accuracy rate is so low is that you’re creating this pipeline of people basically being sent to prison or being caught up in crimes that are very petty but you’re just sending police to all these areas in a relatively discriminatory way.
I mean the PredPol is really outrageous because it’s accuracy was found to be like insanely low and they didn’t phase it out despite the extreme inaccuracy. It was worse than a coin toss, essentially, and departments around the country continued to use it. And then in some of these areas where Palantir ended up leaving, another Peter Thiel-backed entity called Carbyne also has a predictive policing component, but has been sort of taking over 911 emergency call systems throughout the United States, which is generally at the county level.
But this is a company that wasn’t just funded by Peter Thiel, it was funded by Jeffrey Epstein and was led for a significant amount of time by Ehud Barak, the former Israeli prime minister, as well and has sort of expanded outwards. So, yeah, a lot of Poindexter’s ambitions unfortunately have been becoming true at a really rapid pace. And part of this was done under the guise of combating the COVID-19 situation with data, that we needed data to solve those problems.
Chris Hedges
And are you in essence just creating profiles? I mean, these are just creating profiles for every American citizen?
Whitney Webb
Well, ultimately, I mean, that’s been acknowledged now. I think there was a report on that a few months ago. The Trump administration was explicitly using Palantir to make databases on every American. But that has been done in a way that has been more covert through something called the Main Core database. That was, again, something that goes back to Iran-Contra and persists until the present.
But this is sort of a way to make it a more overt program that can be used openly by law enforcement, arguably. And I would say if you look back to how the Trump administration behaved around the end of 2019, there were a spate of mass shootings and basically their response to those was to create the legal infrastructure for pre-crime.
So after the El Paso Walmart shooting and some of these shootings that happened during that time, William Barr, then Attorney General, created this program at the DOJ called DEEP that basically created the legal infrastructure for pre-crime. And you had Trump come out and say that the way to combat these shootings was to have social media develop algorithms that flag posts to predict shooters before they can act, target some of these anonymous online message boards.
And he was also considering this program that he was being pitched creating a DARPA for health, HARPA, which was actually created under Biden under the name ARPA-H. They just moved the H to the back. And the pilot program for that that was being pitched during the Trump era was called SAFE HOME. It’s an acronym.
And basically that was about using AI to scan American social media posts in mass to determine what they called early warning signs of neuropsychiatric violence and that people that were flagged by that algorithm could then be sent to a court-ordered physician or put under house arrest or all sorts of possibilities were fielded.
And it ultimately wasn’t adopted by Trump, but these are the types of things that they were considering. And so now, you know, given the current climate, how extremely entangled Palantir has become with the current administration expanding even into the IRS and Treasury and mortgages in addition to just the national security components and health components.
It is rather unsettling but, as I mentioned earlier, a lot of this profiling of Americans has been going on for a long time under the guise of what was developed by the Iran-Contra crowd covertly. The continuity of government protocols in this effort by parts of the “deep state” or the national security state to basically profile people they deemed unfriendly for whatever reason, people that could be, you know, potentially incarcerated in a time of political upheaval, they said.
But the Reagan administration’s examples of political upheaval in these cases were… one example given was widespread mass protests that were nonviolent against US military intervention in Latin America, like in Nicaragua, for example, was something that could have them use these profiles they had developed on Americans then back in the 1980s and incarcerate them at a time deemed convenient or necessary by the Reagan administration.
And they claimed then, in the 1980s, to be able to locate these so-called dissidents almost immediately based on the data they had compiled on them at that point. So imagine what it’s become over the past 25 years when we’ve seen a lot of these extreme surveillance capabilities and also the development of the associated technology just take off in the aftermath of 9-11-2001.
Chris Hedges
Let me ask about what you call the “PayPal Mafia”. Palmer Luckey, he was a Thiel fellow, founded [Oculus] in 2012 before it was purchased by Meta, [Mark] Zuckerberg. [CEO of OpenAI] Sam Altman, [Vice President] JD Vance, Elon Musk. Talk about that little cabal.
Whitney Webb
Yeah, well they are quite the cabal. First of all, PayPal Mafia, it’s important to point out what PayPal is. So PayPal is most widely known, right, to have been a project of Peter Thiel and Elon Musk, but it was originally a combination of Peter Thiel’s Confinity and Elon Musk’s X.com.
And when Peter Thiel was setting up this proto-PayPal, he and his co-founders openly, they’ve admitted this, consulted with every three letter agency in the US government that would talk to them about developing their product before they launched it.
And then they teamed up with Elon Musk and X and created this, I mean, it basically dollarized the internet. It made the dollar the de facto currency of the internet and had very huge reverberations for the early FinTech space. But of course, as I just said, they did this hand in hand with the US government.
And then, it’s really no surprise that you see, when it’s sold, when they sell PayPal to Pierre Omidyar of eBay, Peter Thiel moves into this effort to privatize Total Information Awareness, the algorithm for Palantir having started as PayPal’s anti-fraud algorithm initially and then being developed to become what it is today.
And so since then you have a whole network of people that have either been protege’s of these figures or worked at one point for PayPal. For example the current AI and crypto czar at the White House David Sacks, a former top executive at PayPal with Thiel and all of these other people.
And of course JD Vance, the current vice president, is intimately connected to Peter Thiel. His whole career in VC (venture capital), Peter Thiel’s entirely responsible for that. And also, Thiel was the main donor to a lot of his political campaigns and he would not be the vice president if it wasn’t for Peter Thiel. He wouldn’t even be a politician, probably.
So Thiel’s influence is incredibly significant. It was also arguably significant during the first Trump administration, but I think now it’s quite clear that this is the PayPal Mafia’s moment. These particular figures have an extremely significant influence on US government policy since January, including the extreme distribution of AI throughout the US government.
And this includes not just well-known figures of the PayPal Mafia, but people, a lot of former employees for Palantir have been placed throughout the US government that you don’t think a lot about or most people don’t think a lot about, chief information officers of various departments and things like that.
You know, there’s a considerable, very considerable, amount of influence and what I find particularly troubling about this is that a lot of these PayPal Mafia figures Thiel, Musk and Vance, among others, are extremely close to or acolytes really of the philosophy advocated by a fellow named Curtis Yarvin, whose political philosophy is essentially that the way to solve the problems of our current system and current bureaucracy is to basically completely privatize the state and install a CEO in place of the president, who would rule essentially as a dictator, which is completely bonkers and it’s amazing that people have allowed people like Peter Thiel or even Yarvin himself to masquerade as so-called libertarians when they’re very in favor of the authoritarian abilities of the state.
They just want to sufficiently privatize it before allowing that authoritarianism to continue and expand. And you can also see how a lot of these people are also war profiteers, Palantir, of course, not only is this tool of mass surveillance, it’s a tool of mass murder used by the US Army and also by the IDF [Israel Defense Forces] to decide who lives and who dies in Gaza.
And a lot of these other people that have been Thiel protégés, for example, like Palmer Luckey and Anduril, which Luckey co-founded with Trae Stephens, who’s also affiliated with the aforementioned Epstein-funded Carbyne 911.
Anduril is ushering in this era of autonomous warfare, and bankrolled, of course, by Peter Thiel. And they’re also developing the so-called smart wall on the US-Mexico border. And really, you know, these people are developing very Orwellian disturbing systems with not just domestic implications but also very significant implications to how the US military and other militaries operate abroad.
And it’s extremely disturbing to say the very least. And a lot of their branding is, you know, we’re America first and so we should replace the old defense contractor giants like Lockheed Martin, for example, or General Dynamics and these entities and framing that as a good thing, this is how we’re going to defeat the deep state, right?
We’re going to remove these, it’s correct that they’re corrupt and terrible companies that have enabled terrible things, but it’s not like Anduril won’t enable the same sort of thing, it’ll just enable it more efficiently and at greater scale and with less humans involved. And is that necessarily better?
I don’t really think so. And when you consider, too, that you have the current Secretary of War, since it’s been recently renamed, in Pete Hegseth coming out and basically saying, the massacre of Wounded Knee, the soldiers that did that should have their medals restored and all of this, it’s basically trying to be anti-woke by conflating American culture with war crimes at the same time that we’re developing all of this autonomous technology that would allow these people to conduct more war crimes than ever before.
So under the guise of “we’re making the government more efficient”, what aspects of the government are these people in the PayPal Mafia actually making more efficient? Well, one of them is mass murder.
Unfortunately, you don’t hear enough about this and presumably a lot of people that wanted the destruction of the so-called deep state under Trump didn’t want these things to expand and continue, but they absolutely are.
Chris Hedges
Let’s talk a little bit about, you mentioned privatizations, let’s talk about SpaceX, cryptocurrency, and Musk’s early involvement with DOGE [Department of Government Efficiency] in the administration. What they were doing, what they’re doing. And explain for people who don’t understand the smart wall, what the smart wall is.
Whitney Webb
So I’ll start with that because you asked a couple different things there. So basically the goal of the smart wall, it’s not a physical wall, it’s meant to be basically an invisible wall that uses a combination of surveillance and drone technology to basically intercept anyone crossing the border in a non-authorized way.
So that presumably includes both people crossing from Mexico into the US and people crossing from the US to Mexico. And again, it’s free in terms of efficiency and all of that. You don’t have to have necessarily border agents there. You can have drones that are currently not lethal but could be made lethal at any point.
And that is basically what they envision as the future of the wall and obviously a lot of Trump supporters, I think, originally had envisioned a physical wall and not this combo of non-lethal-potentially-in-the-future-lethal drone technology and mass surveillance but also as you may be aware, the US government defines the border as going much more inland than a lot of people would imagine.
And I forget exactly how long it is but a significant amount of the country actually lives in what is considered a border zone that have sometimes in the past been referred to as Constitution-free zones where they’re allowed to basically extend this type of technology deep into the U.S. domestically as well as presumably into Mexico to some extent as well, especially now that the military and intelligence agencies say they have to go be more active in Mexico to presumably fight Mexican drug cartels and things of that nature.
So they’ll certainly be taking liberties there as well. I’m not sure exactly what you’d like to talk about as it relates to SpaceX, but it is worth pointing out that they’re a massive military contractor specifically for Space Force created under the first Trump administration. They really are the main contractor for Space Force.
And also, you know, they are directly affiliated with Starlink, the satellite internet company that also arguably has some kind of covert uses with Elon Musk, for example, saying he is going to help sneak Starlinks into Iran, for example, I wonder who that would benefit. And also, it’s used by Ukraine and the Ukrainian military and then them coming back saying, we didn’t know they would use it for offensive purposes.
I think that was them sort of trying to cover their tracks afterwards because it’s obviously affiliated with a major U.S. military contractor. I mean, it can’t be that surprising. And also what’s important in that context as well is that he’s a major military contractor that wants the US government to go in a particular direction, particularly a highly automated future.
And through the Department of Government Deficiency, a government efficiency DOGE, a lot was made to facilitate that by laying off a lot of government workers in their place putting, basically replacing them with, AI algorithms.
And those algorithms are, of course, patented and controlled by Silicon Valley companies. And the vast majority of major Silicon Valley companies double as either intelligence or military contractors or both, or have for a very long time. And a lot of the biggest companies in Silicon Valley arguably started because of national security involvement.
One that’s often overlooked a lot is Oracle, Larry Ellison’s Oracle. And Larry Ellison, before creating Oracle, worked on Project Oracle at the CIA, and then created Oracle, the company, which then took on the CIA as one of its earliest main clients, similar in a way to what happened with Palantir, as I noted a moment ago.
And now, Larry Ellison is becoming, basically taking over a large swath of American media now. So you’re seeing a lot of these Silicon billionaires that contract for the military are also becoming major owners of mass media. So you see that with Ellison, for example, and it’s also true with Elon Musk after his purchase of Twitter.
And his ambition to basically turn what is now X, formerly Twitter, into the “everything app” with a major financial component. So as I noted earlier, there have been these efforts going around previously considered by the Trump administration to have AI algorithms go over social media posts and flag people, but they also are pushing to have you tie your finances to those same apps.
And presumably X will also be using some form of cryptocurrency, most likely a stablecoin, which has been the major focus of the Trump administration being a major pro-crypto administration. A lot of people thought they would be more pro-Bitcoin than anything else.
That’s how they sort of touted themselves on the campaign trail, but they’ve been overtly, most overtly, supportive of stablecoins and stablecoin issuers of course buy lots of treasuries and serve to help service the US debt so it’s a way for them to continue to spend more than they are bringing in and to basically service that debt so they can obviously, I would say, increase the Pentagon budget which is the budget that, in the national security budget, in general DHS and these things that continue to grow and grow and grow and grow at the expense of other departments that actually benefit the American people significantly more.
Chris Hedges
Can you talk about Oracle’s relationship with AI?
Whitney Webb
So I’m not an expert on what Oracle does specifically. As far as I’m aware, they mostly focus on database management. But I do know that they’ve had a significant influence over the Trump administration previously as well. So Safra Catz is a major top executive at Oracle in addition to Larry Ellison.
And she, along with Sheldon Adelson, coordinated the firing of H.R. McMaster, who was previously a Trump national security advisor and had, I believe, John Bolton put in his place. So Oracle has been sort of very influential, particularly on the Trump administration behind the scenes before this administration, but now we’re sort of seeing Larry Ellison come out more into himself.
But my understanding is that they contract widely throughout the national security community and beyond, and that a lot of it is data management and digital infrastructure. Not sure on the specifics there, sorry about that.
Chris Hedges
I want to ask you about Israel because there are many tentacles I guess running each way between the military, the [Unit] 8200, and Silicon Valley. It’s an incestuous relationship which you’ve written about.
Whitney Webb
Yeah, so there’s a couple different things here. So I would say that a major pillar, not just of [Benjamin] Netanyahu, but really going back to the early 90s in Israel has been to empower their venture capital ecosystem. And it began with state backing really significantly in the early 90s. But Netanyahu, throughout his lengthy time as prime minister, has made that a major priority.
And back in 2012, it actually became Israeli policy to have basically some of these startups that are incubated by veterans of Unit 8200 and some of these other Israeli intelligence agencies that involve technology to a significant degree, to have them conduct operations that were previously done in-house by Mossad or Unit 8200. So basically, to use them as fronts is essentially what the policy, admitted policy, began.
And in the Israeli media report that documents this, they note that a firm like Black Cube, for example, which has been called a privatized Mossad, was one of the companies that was developed under this policy. But presumably, there’s a lot of other companies that also operate this way.
It’s important to note that in the same period of time, you had a neoconservative and Zionist mega donor to the GOP, Paul Singer, team up with people from Netanyahu’s office to develop something called Startup Nation Central, which was framed as a way to prevent the United States from ever meaningfully adopting the Boycott Divest Sanctions Movement, or BDS, by basically marketing Israeli startups, particularly in technology to American companies and also to the US government.
And of course, the US government contracts with significant Unit 8200 companies. For example, the NSA in the mid 2000s had an Israeli Unit 8200-linked company develop its back doors and the popular software programs. I mean, Carbyne 911 that I brought up earlier, also Unit 8200 created and now controlling a litany of 911 emergency call centers throughout the US.
There’s a lot of companies that have popped up to do so and also you’ve seen a lot of these Silicon Valley giants — Google, Microsoft, Intel — recruit heavily from Unit 8200 and also open offices in Israel. Of course some of those, in the case of Microsoft significantly, precede this 2012 point.
But basically the goal was to prevent the US from ever allowing boycotts of Israel at any meaningful level by integrating companies at the same time that Netanyahu made it a deliberate policy to use a lot of these companies as fronts for either the Israeli military or for Israeli intelligence.
So, unfortunately, in addition to that, we also have a significant overlap of some of these Silicon Valley billionaires and the IDF rather overtly. So Larry Ellison, who I brought up a moment ago, is, I believe, if not the leading donor, one of the most major private donors to the IDF, and is also, as we noted a moment ago, a major contractor to the US national security state and is building a quite a massive US domestic media empire and I believe he’s going to be one of the figures involved in the takeover of TikTok that was just signed off on by Trump not that long ago.
Chris Hedges
And he’s just taken CBS.
Whitney Webb
Yeah, and I think Paramount and I think a few others are, I think CNN is about to be acquired by them as well, so we’ll see. But it’s definitely a rapid consolidation.
Chris Hedges
I want you to speculate what this world is going to look like, it is the fusion of corporate and governmental power. In some ways, of course, these corporations will have even more power than government institutions. We just had the presidential memo that came out a couple days ago, which essentially criminalizes… It’s quite an amazing memo that criminalizes people who criticize capitalism, support gender equality.
Whitney Webb
Or really anyone who is antifascist in any capacity.
Chris Hedges
Yeah. And of course, all of these tools will be employed against these people who are being targeted, what kind of a world will it create? Will it kind of look like China’s totalitarian capitalism or will it be different?
Whitney Webb
You know, I think it’s really hard to know because of course the future is unwritten and a lot of it depends on us and there’s an unprecedented effort, of course, to propagandize the American people to have us willingly walk in and support and consent to these systems being installed because a lot of people forget but the ban on propaganda being used domestically against Americans was lifted under the Obama administration.
And now with all of this extreme media consolidation by the specific cabal of billionaires and oligarchs, the propaganda is already bad, I would argue, but is going to get even worse to get people to consent to these systems specifically.
And I think a lot of what we’re going to see is going to be sort of a repeated trope of what we saw in the War on Terror. We have to give up all of our, all of these new freedoms and things like that, because we have to go after al-Qaeda and get them at all costs.
But now, you know, 20 plus years later, you have the head of al-Qaeda in Syria being given a diplomat, I don’t even know what to call it, it’s so ridiculous, like a red carpet welcome to shake hands with David Petraeus and all of this.
So we lost all of our freedoms, but now al-Qaeda is just let’s shake hands and let them come to the UN while we don’t let anyone from Palestine come. I mean, it’s totally insane. So I think it’s quite possible that given that we’re seeing this effort to gin up a war on domestic terrorism, yet again, we’re going to be given another invisible enemy and told that we need to give up all of these remaining freedoms and civil liberties to go after the domestic terrorists and that it’s going to be, unfortunately, a lot of the depravity that we witnessed during the War on Terror, but directed domestically, hence the name domestic terrorism.
And I think you can argue that was always the plan post 9/11. A lot of the stuff was focused domestically. Before 9/11, there were efforts to pass DHS as the National Homeland Security Agency. It stalled in Congress. Of course, after 9/11, no longer stalled. And so DHS was created in a lot of these security agencies and the expansion of the national security state in general has also had a lot of tentacles domestically.
And I think Americans have been naive that a lot of the evil that that national security state has done abroad would never be used against them. And I think that we need to be very aware of what is going on here and that the deep state, whatever you want to call it, is expanding and it’s expanding in the hands of private oligarchs that have a very dangerous political vision that is rarely talked about.
And a lot of people on the right, for example, during the COVID era were up in arms about the World Economic Forum and the public-private partnership stakeholder capitalist model. And some of the ideas promoted by its former chairman Klaus Schwab and the Fourth Industrial Revolution and transhumanism, but somehow are lining up behind these figures like Peter Thiel and Elon Musk, who are also overtly transhumanist and have backed someone like Curtis Yarvin, who has a very similar political vision in many ways to Klaus Schwab.
And somehow it’s bad when one group does it, but not bad when the other group backs it. And it’s just change a couple terms around and try and make it edgy, but ultimately at the same day, it’s essentially fascism.
And people, but I mean they obviously want to market it under different names to get people to consent to it, which I think efforts are being done to do that now under the guise of fighting the corruption in the national security state. But unfortunately this has always been a cancer on American society that has been distinctly bipartisan. And I think a lot of what’s going to be done here is going to be, if we allow it, political opposition could be labeled “terrorism”.
And to think that this wouldn’t come back on people on the right as well, I think is naive. You know, the definition of domestic terrorist under the Biden administration concluded people that were outraged by perceived government overreach, for example, which could easily include people on the right as well. I mean, a lot of the things in the definitions of these things are incredibly vague and just meant to sort of be a catchall for people who don’t agree with the government for whatever reason and who won’t just put their head down and be obedient when prodded to do so.
So I think there’s a potentially dark future but there’s still time for awareness about these agendas and for people to develop parallel systems to escape this. And I think it’s very important too that people start really seriously considering how to wean themselves off of these Silicon Valley giants that are building these systems and contracting with these military and intelligence agencies. You know, getting off of Microsoft or Google products.
I mean, there’s still time to do all of that. You can look up online different guides to use different operating systems, whether it’s on your computer or your phone, or use alternatives to Google or any of these other things. Because, I mean, ultimately, they may try and move to make it illegal to boycott Israel, but we can boycott the other enablers of the system that are based in the United States.
Maybe it’s inconvenient at the time to change these things, but I think it’s much more inconvenient to just walk into this world that they’re trying to usher us into without offering any sort of meaningful pushback. And if they’re going to try and censor speech or criminalize speech, there’s other things we can do to stop this from happening.
Chris Hedges
Great. Thank you, Whitney. I want to thank Diego [Ramos], Victor [Padilla], Sofia [Menemenlis], Thomas [Hedges], and Max [Jones], who produced the show. You can find me at ChrisHedges.Substack.com.
It's 'authoritarian' but it ain't fascism. See Dimitrov. And "China's authoritarian capitalism"...whadda load of crap, Hedges is a liberal(or a Trot)) and refuses to comprehend socialist democracy.
"There is great chaos under heaven; the situation is excellent."
Pentagon Creates New Legion of PR Toadies
Ari Paul
New Republic depiction of Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth
The professional organization Military Reporters & Editors (CNN, 10/15/25) called the new press restrictions “an unprecedented attack on the First Amendment and on the American people, who deserve accurate reporting on how the world’s largest military is funded and managed with their tax dollars.”
When the Pentagon announced that reporters would only be credentialed if they pledged not to report on documents not expressly released by official press handlers, free press advocates, including FAIR (9/23/25), denounced the directive as an assault on the First Amendment.
The impact of this rule cannot be understated—any reporter agreeing to such terms is essentially a deputized public relations lackey.
Many journalists, thankfully, displayed solidarity with each other and the idea of a free press when they resisted the state’s new censorship efforts. “Dozens of reporters turned in access badges and exited the Pentagon…rather than agree to government-imposed restrictions on their work,” reported the AP (10/15/25).
CNN’s Brian Stelter (10/15/25) reported:
A flyer with the words “journalism is not a crime” appeared Tuesday on the wall outside the “Correspondents’ Corridor” where journalists operate at the Pentagon. It was a silent protest of Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth’s new policy that severely restricts press access.
Donald Trump (Reuters, 10/15/25) explained the new Pentagon press policy by saying Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth “finds the press to be very disruptive in terms of world peace and maybe security for our nation.”
The policy criminalizes routine reporting, according to media lawyers and advocates, so news outlets are refusing to abide by it. Instead, they are giving up their access to the building, while vowing to continue thoroughly covering Hegseth and the military from outside the Pentagon’s five walls.
Reuters (10/15/25) noted that it and at least 30 other outlets refused to sign the pledge, citing the others:
Associated Press, Bloomberg News, the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, the Washington Post, CNN, Fox News, CBS, NBC, ABC, NPR, Axios, Politico, the Guardian, the Atlantic, The Hill, Newsmax, Breaking Defense and Task & Purpose.
Good on these outlets for showing some spine against an administration for whom anti-media bellicosity has been a central feature of its authoritarian impulse. It’s a sign that perhaps at least some of them can toughen up against the administration’s threats against democratic and constitutional order. Even some outlets on the right–Murdoch properties Fox News and Wall Street Journal, and Christopher Ruddy’s Newsmax–declined to be part of Hegseth’s captive news corps.
‘The new Pentagon press corps’
Malcolm Ferguson (New Republic, 10/22/25): “It should alarm every American that the defense secretary is making an effort to fill the press corps with people who will never hold him accountable.”
However, the Pentagon is touting the success of its draconian order. “Today, the Department of War is announcing the next generation of the Pentagon press corps,” Pentagon spokesperson Sean Parnell announced on X (10/22/25):
Over 60 journalists, representing a broad spectrum of new media outlets and independent journalists, have signed the Pentagon’s media access policy and will be joining the new Pentagon press corps….
New media outlets and independent journalists have created the formula to circumvent the lies of the mainstream media and get real news directly to the American people. Their reach and impact collectively are far more effective and balanced than the self-righteous media who chose to self-deport from the Pentagon. Americans have largely abandoned digesting their news through the lens of activists who masquerade as journalists in the mainstream media. We look forward to beginning a fresh relationship with members of the new Pentagon press corps.
In fact, this “broad spectrum” of outlets represents the fringes of the right, including One America Network, Epoch Times, Gateway Pundit, Human Events, LindellTV, Frontlines and the National Pulse (New York Times, 10/22/25).
These outlets are old and new. Human Events shaped its worldview in early Cold War nationalism. Frontlines is a project of the late Charlie Kirk’s Turning Point USA. LindellTV is the brainchild of MyPillow CEO and 2020 election denialist Mike Lindell (Guardian, 5/4/25; BBC, 6/19/25).
The Times quoted LindellTV bragging about its elevation into the halls of power in twisted, Orwellian speak: “We are officially part of the new Pentagon press corps, this is a major win for free speech and real journalism.”
The Gateway Pundit blog has been around since 2004, long enough to have pushed birther conspiracy theories before it promoted 2020 stolen election theories. National Pulse (slogan: “radically independent”) is more recent, founded and edited by a former chief advisor to British far-right leader Nigel Farage.
One America Network, which FAIR founder Jeff Cohen observed “makes Fox News sound like Democracy Now!,” was founded in 2013 so that AT&T could add a second right-wing network to its DirecTV platform (FAIR.org, 10/15/21). Epoch Times is affiliated with China’s Falun Gong movement, and comes to its Trumpy politics through Chinese anti-Communism.
Conspiracy outlet InfoWars—famous for losing a $1.4 billion defamation judgement for falsely stating the Sandy Hook Elementary School shooting was faked (Reuters, 10/14/25), as well as something about chemicals turning frogs gay (InfoWars, 8/28/24)—is also reportedly in the revamped press pool. “Breanna Morello is responsible for covering the Pentagon on behalf of Infowars and will do so from outside of DC,” the Hill (10/23/25) reported.
‘Maximum lethality’
The Trump administration is throwing real reporters out of the Pentagon even as Trump is using the military in unprecedented ways (Bloomberg, 10/6/25).
This new directive didn’t come about in a vacuum; the Pentagon is closing its doors to the press, and by extension the rest of the public, at a time of ramping up violence off the coasts of South America (AP, 10/22/25) and elsewhere. Hegseth couldn’t have been clearer in his recent speech to the military’s top officers when he said the Pentagon’s only mission was “warfighting, preparing for war and preparing to win, unrelenting and uncompromising in that pursuit,” highlighting a focus on “common sense, maximum lethality and authority for warfighters.”
President Donald Trump, despite his claims of ending wars (CNN, 10/17/25), is certainly acting like he wants more war in the future, a crucial development for the public. “Trump Beats the Drums of War for Direct Action in Venezuela,” rang a headline in the Washington Post (10/22/25), with the subhead:
The administration has surged warships, planes and troops to the Caribbean for drug interdiction. Some see the ultimate goal as toppling Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro.
The Trump administration has already carried out attacks on Iran (Axios, 6/22/25) and Yemen (BBC, 4/18/25). And the administration “continues to expand troop deployments to US cities, escalating a campaign to assert military power at home with little precedent in US history” (Bloomberg, 10/6/25).
The Economist (10/23/25) warned that the Trump administration, which has invoked cartel violence to justify the president’s lethal hostility toward Venezuela (Center for Strategic and International Studies, 10/3/25), was turning the War on Drugs into a full-scale, international military campaign with little restraint. The magazine said:
Past presidents have also stretched their powers to wage wars and even to start them. Indeed, Mr. Trump is gesturing at precedents they set. But “this administration is going further, and going further with less public, detailed defense of what they’re doing,” says Peter Feaver, a political scientist at Duke University. “I think the biggest difference is that Congress is not holding this administration to account in the way that they did even to Trump 1.0, let alone to Biden and to Bush.”
Just because Mr. Trump has labeled some migrants and even leftist opponents as “terrorists” does not mean he will use the armed forces against them. But right now, it’s not clear what, besides his own inclinations, might prevent him.
This new loyalty pledge has now chipped away at another restraint: the press. It is true, as many FAIR readers know, that the Pentagon has sold wars to the public through the establishment media without these draconian credentialing pledges (Extra!, 1–2/90, 11–12/90, 7–8/99; FAIR.org, 3/19/07). However, what we are likely to see now is an army of meme-obsessed, MAGA sycophants posing as independent journalists obediently copy-and-pasting Pentagon press releases into articles, selling an imperialist agenda to the president’s right-wing, nationalist base. That’s chilling news for those of us living here, and for any country that might sit in the crosshairs of the Trump administration’s imperial ambitions.
There is some hope that military reporters will continue to do their jobs and receive information from the inside via channels that exist outside the actual walls of the Pentagon. Atlantic correspondent Nancy Youseff (10/15/25), one of the recently departed from the official pool, said “mid-level troops have been reaching out to me, unsolicited, and promising that they would keep providing journalists with information” in order to “uphold the values embedded in the Constitution.”
If legacy publications are truly horrified by these developments, they will get more creative in their methods of reporting when it comes to the Pentagon’s advances. That can result in more critical and less obedient coverage of the war machine, which would be a good thing, for once.
It is not as though the stenographers were doing real journalism to start with but this is a step up the ladder, a partisan layer of bullshit on top of the steaming pile of imperialist lies and omissions. Trump will not be gainsaid by his peers.
"There is great chaos under heaven; the situation is excellent."
You Believe The Mainstream Narrative? Of Course You Do, You’re Twelve
You think Trump is trying to get rid of Maduro because Maduro is an evil dictator who wants to poison Americans with fentanyl? Hell yeah homie, you’re twelve.
Caitlin Johnstone
October 28, 2025
❖
The ultimate expression of “everyone is twelve now” theory is in the mainstream worldview promoted by western pundits and politicians which holds that the world is full of evil villains doing evil things simply because they are evil, and that these Bad Guys are opposed by the virtuous Good Guys of the US-led world order.
You think Hamas killed Israelis because they’re a bunch of monsters who hate Jews? Of course you do, you’re twelve.
You think Trump is trying to get rid of Maduro because Maduro is an evil dictator who wants to poison Americans with fentanyl? Hell yeah homie, you’re twelve.
You think Putin invaded Ukraine because he hates freedom and democracy and wants to conquer the world? Bless your heart my twelve year-old buddy.
You think the US and Israel have been attacking and eliminating rivals in Iran, Lebanon, Syria, Yemen and Palestine in order to fight terrorism, stop tyranny, and protect the world from nuclear weapons? Yeah, that checks out, you’re twelve.
The mainstream western worldview is like a children’s cartoon, with the Bad Guys doing Bad Things simply because they are Bad, and the Good Guys striving heroically to stop them. It sounds like a shitty PG-13 summer blockbuster starring The Rock, but it’s the consensus worldview of serious professional pundits and analysts who share this perspective on mainstream platforms with serious expressions on their faces, and anyone who calls any part of it into question is dismissed as an extremist or a deranged crackpot.
Because everyone is twelve now.
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I said the above on Twitter and I got a reply from a guy saying “Western countries like Denmark, Holland and the UK, US and Israel too are objectively nicer and happier places than the third world ones you mentioned. You can see by walking around, looking at people and things. So we’re doing something right that they’re doing wrong.”
It always fascinates me when people think this is some kind of checkmate argument. Yes obviously it’s nicer to be in the countries doing the bombing, sanctioning, extracting and stealing than the countries being bombed, sanctioned, exploited and robbed. It’s nicer to be a mugger than the person being mugged, too. It’s always more pleasant to be the hammer than the nail.
It’s such a self-evidently stupid argument, but you see it all the time. Whenever I talk about the abusiveness of the western empire I always get empire simps in my replies all “hoho, but have you considered that it is nicer to live here than to live there?” Of course it is, dickflop. It’s always going to be easier being the abuser than the abused.
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Israeli National Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir reportedly advocated shooting children who get too close to the “Yellow Line” dividing Israel-controlled parts of Gaza from the parts under Hamas control. After a while you start understanding why so many people refer to the Israeli regime as “demonic” and “satanic” even if you’re not religious. At a certain point you just run out of strong enough adjectives.
It’s so weird how the western political/media class regards Ben-Gvir as a fringe kook whose comments should be ignored despite the fact that he (A) is Israel’s national security minister and (B) consistently ends up getting what he wants.
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Zohran Mamdani is outside my area of political interest and it’s none of my business who New Yorkers elect as their mayor, but the Islamophobic shrieking I’ve been seeing online in response to his campaign has been absolutely jaw-dropping. No one with mainstream political or media aspirations could ever get away with talking about the religion of a Jewish politician the way Zionists have been openly talking about Mamdani and his faith.
From what I can tell Mamdani is a just a regular guy and a fairly ordinary progressive Democrat with an extraordinarily high level of campaign talent, but these freaks are claiming he’s going to impose sharia law and start throwing gays off the Chrysler Building. It’s a degree of mass hysteria about Islam unlike anything I’ve seen since the immediate aftermath of 9/11, which any normal person will agree led to some extremely bad thinking and terrible decisions.
Some of it is arising from organic American racism and the knee-jerk rightist impulse to throw anyone to the left of Bill Clinton out of a flying helicopter, but a lot of it has nothing to do with Mamdani at all. As we’ve discussed previously, Zionists have been seizing on every opportunity to promote hatred of Muslims because it’s a lot easier than convincing people to like Israel.
To be clear, I am not speculating when I say this. Drop Site News published a report last month based on leaked documents which showed that the Israeli government had commissioned an American polling company to help it with the PR crisis caused by its genocidal atrocities, and the report found that the most effective strategy would be to foment fear of “Radical Islam” and “Jihadism”.
So this agenda is already in the waters of Zionist consciousness. The election of a Muslim to the most high-profile mayoral position in the United States provides Israel supporters with ample opportunity to stir up panic about Muslims in America on the assumption that Israel will benefit from such sentiments, since Israel is always killing Muslims. There is no argument to be made that Israel is a good nation that is inherently deserving of support, so they’re banking on circulating the belief that it’s good to drop bombs on Muslims instead.
Western politics is getting more and more diseased, and US politics is leading the way. It’s making people dumber, crazier, and more hateful, and is preventing them from seeing that the real minority that’s been causing everyone’s problems are the rich and powerful oligarchs and empire managers who rule the western power alliance. Keep ordinary members of the public hating each other and fighting each other, and they won’t start hating and fighting their actual oppressors.
President Maduro: “Generation Z is an invention of Western psychological warfare”
“They implement it through social networks to control the minds and expectations of young people while they continue in their plan to impose themselves as a new empire,” said the president
President Nicolás Maduro said that Venezuelan youth are “a generation for humanity, not for slavery or new colonialism.” Photo: Presidential Press
October 30, 2025 Hour: 8:40 pm
The President of Venezuela, Nicolás Maduro, pointed out this Thursday, October 30, that generation Z is an invention of Western psychological warfare laboratories and they implement it through social networks.
During the First International Space Congress, held at the Teresa Carreño Theater in Caracas and addressing young Venezuelan scientists, the head of state stressed that “generation Z is a creation of the Western media that dominate Instagram, Tik Tok, Facebook. They want to shape a generation.”
“They shoot the same content at that girl and model it in generation Z. Who invented that? It was invented by Western psychological warfare laboratories and implemented through social networks to control the minds and expectations of young people while they continue in their plan to impose themselves as a new empire,” he said.
Insisting that they not allow themselves to be manipulated, the president acknowledged that the young people who were gathered are the brilliant generation. “Great in politics, life, sports, science, music,” the president remarked.
On the value of this generation, he also said that it is “a generation for humanity, not for slavery or the new colonialism. We are making the integral independence of the homeland, of the body, the mind, of a nation.”
“Venezuela has the atomic bomb: the scientific seedbed. It is the weapon for the development of the future: 500,000 children and young scientists,” said the president addressing the boys and girls gathered there, ages 14, 15, 16 years old.
During the congress organized by the Ministry of People’s Power for Science and Technology, within the framework of the celebration of the 18th Anniversary of the Bolivarian Agency for Space Activities (ABAE), President Nicolás Maduro announced the acceleration, activation and launch, together with the People’s Republic of China, of the new communications satellite Gran Cacique Guaicaipuro.
On the other hand, the president recognized the work of more than 65,000 scientists, who are active throughout the country to provide scientific solutions to chronic, serious or difficult-to-treat diseases, among other skills. In the same way, he opted to “share that independence with all the brothers and sisters of our continent.”
During his speech, the head of state referred to the economic war suffered by Venezuela and how it affected the scientific sector: “in the times that the economic missiles of sanctions, blockades, which closed and completely blockaded Venezuela, we lost 99 percent of the income and thousands of the best scientific minds of a country, with a very high tradition in the development of science, technology and innovation, which has had true phenomena of world scientific knowledge”.
On the other hand, the president pointed out that science is not “to invent wars that destroy the orbit of our planet and increase an escalation of destruction.”
Finally, he asserted that “we are going to defend our right to peace,” while reflecting that science is “for peace, for life and for humanity.”
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