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Propaganda

John Durham And The Burying Of American History

There are certain things I do not quite get since Special Counsel John Durham’s report on the epically corrupt conduct of Donald Trump’s enemies during the 2016 election campaigns went to Congress last week. Many things, actually. For all the ground Durham covers in his 306–page report, I don’t get why he left a lot of things undone and unexamined, a lot of names unnamed and a lot of conclusions unconcluded after a four-year investigation into the very unfunny fiasco known as Russiagate. And then there are a few things I do get. Chief among these is that, with the already-evident burying of the Durham Report, we now witness the obliteration of a highly significant passage in our national history.

The Censorship-Industrial Complex: Top 50 Organizations To Know

On January 17, 1960, outgoing President and former Supreme Allied Commander Dwight D. Eisenhower gave one of the most consequential speeches in American history. Eisenhower for eight years had been a popular president, whose appeal drew upon a reputation as a person of great personal fortitude, who’d guided the United States to victory in an existential fight for survival in World War II. Nonetheless, as he prepared to vacate the Oval Office for handsome young John F. Kennedy, he warned the country it was now at the mercy of a power eve he could not overcome. Until World War II, America had no permanent arms manufacturing industry.

Chinese ‘Police Stations’ And War Propaganda

“Right now there are changes – the likes of which we haven’t seen for 100 years – and we are the ones driving these changes together.” Xi Jinping to Vladimir Putin , March 22, 2023 President Lula da Silva of Brazil recently visited China’s President Xi Jinping. French President Emmanuel Macron, Belarus President Aleksandr Lukashenko, Iran’s President Ebrahim Raisi and Spain’s prime minister Pedro Sanchez have all made the journey in recent months. Even Germany’s amateurish Foreign Minister Annalena Baerbock went, but her goal was to make sure that double talking Macron didn’t stray far from the EU’s pro-U.S. orthodoxy. The frequency of high level meetings is interesting when one considers Joe Biden's bizarre rant in his State of the Union Speech.

Why China’s Winning And The US Is Panicking

One of the most important topics going on right now in our world is, as the U.S. government likes to call it, the “great power conflict” between China and the U.S. To explore this topic, Lee Camp brings on a political science professor from Shanghai to break the issue down. Dr. Joseph Gregory Mahoney of the East China Normal University joins us for an hour-long discussion on the reality of life in China, the decline of U.S. hegemonic power, Chinese foreign policy and economic development, the return of Cold War propaganda narratives, philosophy, and much more. Mahoney is a Ph.D. and professor of politics and international relations who grew up in Alabama during the Cold War.

The New York Times Is Now Telling Bigger Lies Than Iraq WMDs

The New York Times routinely tells bigger lies than the clumsy nonsense it published about weapons in Iraq. Here’s an example. This package of lies is called “Liberals Have a Blind Spot on Defense” but mentions nothing related to defense. It simply pretends that militarism is defensive by applying that word and by lying that “we face simultaneous and growing military threats from Russia and China.” Seriously? Where? The U.S. military budget is more than those of most nations of the world combined. Only 29 nations, out of some 200 on Earth, spend even 1 percent what the U.S. does. Of those 29, a full 26 are U.S. weapons customers. Many of those receive free U.S. weapons and/or training and/or have U.S. bases in their countries.

US Media Denounce Twitter’s ‘State Media’ Label When It Affects NPR

As part of an ongoing, impulsive and reactionary legacy news outlets, Elon Musk’s added to its list of “state-affiliated media”—a label from which all US media had, until recently, been exempt (FAIR.org, 1/6/23). NPR (4/5/23) rebuked the label, and major media rushed to the public broadcaster’s defense. “Twitter Slaps NPR With a Dubious New Tag: ‘State-Affiliated Media,’” read a Washington Post headline (4/5/23). Vanity Fair (4/5/23) lambasted the “false equivalence between NPR and state propaganda agencies.” CBS News (4/5/23), AP (4/5/23) and CNN (4/5/23) emphatically quoted NPR’s self-description as a purveyor of “independent, fact-based journalism.” The New York Times (4/5/23) offered an oblique criticism of Twitter’s labeling schemes under Musk as “unevenly enforced.”

Media’s Lab Leak Theorists See Spies, Not Scientists, As Arbiters Of Science

The Wall Street Journal (2/26/23) broke the news that classified documents show the US Energy Department believes Covid emerged from a lab leak in China, which sent shockwaves through the rest of the media. Such a statement by the Energy Department  “would be significant despite the fact that, as the report said, the agency made its updated judgment with ‘low confidence,’” according to the Guardian (2/26/23). “Low confidence” is a term intelligence agencies use to signify that “information’s credibility and/or plausibility is questionable, or that the information is too fragmented or poorly corroborated to make solid analytic inferences, or that we have significant concerns or problems with the sources.”

The United Nations Is Being Used In US Propaganda War Against Nicaragua

While the United States pays little regard to the human rights of many of its own citizens, it manifests intense interest in those of countries that it regards as its enemies. Nicaragua, designated by both Trump and Biden as a “strategic threat,” is seen as one of those enemies. Of the countries selected for their own annual human rights assessment by the U.S. State Department, Nicaragua merited special attention in 2022, with a 43-page report compared with, for example, only a 36-page analysis of neighboring El Salvador, where 66,000 people have been subjected to mass arrests in the past year. This is part of a highly selective approach in which human rights violations by U.S. allies are downplayed or ignored.

The So Far Non-Existent Vulkan Leaks

The Guardian,  The Washington Post and Der Spiegel have today published “bombshell” revelations about Russian cyber warfare based on leaked documents, but have produced only one single, rather innocuous leaked document between them (in The Washington Post), with zero links to any. Where are these documents and what do they actually say? Der Spiegel tells us: “This is all chronicled in 1,000 secret documents that include 5,299 pages full of project plans, instructions and internal emails from Vulkan from the years 2016 to 2021. Despite being all in Russian and extremely technical in nature, they provide unique insight into the depths of Russian cyberwarfare plans.” Ok, So where are they?

Challenging Anti-Iran Propaganda In The Middle East

The Middle East is drowning in anti-Iran propaganda emanating from Western, Gulf and oligarch-funded outlets that seek to turn the populations in the region against Iran and other institutions deemed to be “backed by Iran.” In Lebanon this plays out in a sectarian narrative that portrays Hezbollah as an Iranian proxy and depicts Shias as agents of an Iranian occupation of the country. This pattern has also been replicated in neighboring countries in an attempt to turn people against the regional forces that challenge U.S. imperialism. To understand the phenomenon, Rania Khalek was joined by Denijal Jegic, a professor of communication at Lebanese American University.

The Context Of The New Anti-China Campaign

The reactions to yesterday's Moon of Alabama post have demonstrated how easy it is for government propagandists to yank the leash of their subjects. More than half of comments are about barely informed Covid conspiracies theories. Only few recognized the propaganda item for what it was. The starting point of a new China hate campaign that will divert the public from mass casualties in Ukraine and other issues. After the Wall Street Journal launched its Sunday leak the New York Times and the Washington Post also jumped onto the train. The Times thankfully does better than the WSJ given the 'low confidence' expressed about the 'intelligence' a prominent position instead of hiding it deep down in its piece.

The Trump-Russia Saga And The Death Spiral Of American Journalism

Reporters make mistakes. It is the nature of the trade. There are always a few stories we wish were reported more carefully. Writing on deadline with often only a few hours before publication is an imperfect art. But when mistakes occur, they must be acknowledged and publicized. To cover them up, to pretend they did not happen, destroys our credibility. Once this credibility is gone, the press becomes nothing more than an echo chamber for a selected demographic. This, unfortunately, is the model that now defines the commerical media. The failure to report accurately on the Trump-Russia saga for the four years of the Trump presidency is bad enough.

Electric Utilities Created One Of The ‘Largest’ Propaganda Campaigns In US

Science historians Naomi Oreskes and Erik M. Conway, authors of the classic 2010 book Merchants of Doubt: How a Handful of Scientists Obscured the Truth on Issues from Tobacco Smoke to Global Warming, have released a new book placing that doubt machine into a longer arc of U.S. business and political history. The Big Myth: How American Business Taught Us to Loathe Government and Love the Free Market explores an even more ambitious history dating from the dawn of the 20th century to the present day. The book documents how today’s prevailing anti-regulatory and anti-government postures that deride Big Government and cheer for Big Business did not arise simply from grassroots demands.

Munich As Propaganda Fest

I love Wang Yi’s response when The New York Times’s Michael Crowley caught him in a hallway at the Munich Security Conference Saturday and asked the Chinese foreign minister if he planned to meet Secretary of State Antony Blinken on the sidelines. “He simply chuckled,” Crowley wrote of Wang at the conclusion of his report. Chuckled. I am reminded of that moment last year when Blinken, after formal talks in Moscow, pulled Sergei Lavrov into a private room at the Kremlin and asked Russia’s foreign minister if it was true Moscow’s plan was to reconstruct the Russian Empire. Lavrov stared, turned, and left the room—no reply, no handshake, no farewell, just an abrupt exit, a leaving behind.

Sy Hersh And The Way We Live Now

It is a clear indicator of the disappearance of freedom from our so-called Western democracies that Sy Hersh, arguably the greatest living journalist, cannot get this monumental revelation on the front of The Washington Post or The New York Times, but has to self-publish on the net. Hersh tells the story of the U.S. destruction of the Nordstream pipelines in forensic detail, giving dates, times, method and military units involved. He also outlines the importance of the Norwegian armed forces working alongside the U.S. Navy in the operation. One point Sy does not much stress, but it is worth saying more about, is that Norway and the U.S. are of course the two countries that have benefitted financially, to an enormous degree, from blowing up the pipeline. Not only have both gained huge export surpluses from the jump in gas prices, Norway has directly replaced Russian gas to the tune of some $40 billion per year.
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