American Pravda: John McCain, Jeffrey Epstein, and Pizzagate
Our Reigning Political Puppets, Jerked by Invisible Strings
By Ron Unz • Unz Review • July 29, 2019
The death of Sen. John McCain last August revealed some important truths about the nature of our establishment media.
McCain’s family had released word of his incurable brain cancer many months earlier and his passing at age 84 was long expected, so media outlets great and small had possessed all the time necessary for producing and polishing the packages they eventually published, and that was readily apparent from the voluminous nature of the tributes that they ran. The New York Times, still our national newspaper of record, allocated more than three full pages of its printed edition to the primary obituary, and this was supplemented by a considerable number of other articles and sidebars. I cannot recall any political figure other than an American president whose passing had ever received such an enormous wealth of coverage, and perhaps even some former residents of the Oval Office might have fallen short of that standard. Although I certainly didn’t bother reading all of the tens of thousands of words in the Times or my other newspapers, the coverage of McCain’s life and career seemed exceptionally laudatory across the mainstream media, liberal and conservative alike, with scarcely a negative word appearing anywhere outside the political fringe.
On the face of it, such undiluted political love for McCain might seem a bit odd to those who have followed his activities over the last couple of decades. After all, the Times and most of the other leading lights of our media firmament are purportedly liberal and claim to have become vehement critics of our disastrous Iraq War and other military adventures, let alone the calamitous possibility of an attack upon Iran. Meanwhile, McCain was universally regarded as the leading figure in America’s “War Party,” eagerly supporting all prospective and retrospective military endeavors with gleeful fury, and even making his chant of “Bomb, Bomb, Bomb Iran” the most widely remembered detail of his unsuccessful 2008 presidential campaign. So either our major media outlets somehow overlooked such striking differences on an absolutely central issue, or perhaps their true positions on certain matters are not exactly what they seem to be, and merely constitute elements of a Kabuki-performance aimed at deceiving their more naive readers.
Even more remarkable were the discordant facts airbrushed out of McCain’s history.
As the winner of the Pulitzer Prize and two George Polk awards, the late Sydney Schanberg was widely regarded as one of the greatest American war correspondents of the twentieth century. His exploits during our ill-fated Indo-Chinese War had become the basis of the Oscar-winning film The Killing Fields, which probably established him as the most famous journalist in America after Woodward and Bernstein of Watergate fame, and he had also served as a top editor at The New York Times. A decade ago, he published his greatest expose, providing a mountain of evidence that America had deliberately left behind hundreds of POWs in Vietnam and he fingered then-presidential candidate John McCain as the central figure in the later official cover-up of that monstrous betrayal. The Arizona senator had traded on his national reputation as our best-known former POW to bury the story of those abandoned prisoners, permitting America’s political establishment to escape serious embarrassment. As a result, Sen. McCain earned the lush rewards of our generous ruling elites, much like his own father Admiral John S. McCain, Sr., who had led the cover-up of the deliberate 1967 Israeli attack on the U.S.S. Liberty, which killed or wounded over 200 American servicemen.
As publisher of The American Conservative, I ran Schanberg’s remarkable piece as a cover story, and across several websites over the years it has surely been read many hundreds of thousands of times, including a huge spike around the time of McCain’s death. I therefore find it rather difficult to believe that the many journalists investigating McCain’s background might have remained unaware of this material. Yet not a hint of these facts were provided in any of the articles appearing in any remotely prominent media outlets as can be seen by searching for web pages containing “McCain and Schanberg” dated around the time of the Senator’s passing.
Schanberg’s journalistic stature had hardly been forgotten by his former colleagues. Upon his death a couple of years ago, the Times ran a very long and glowing obituary, and a few months later I attended the memorial tribute to his life and career held at the New York Times headquarters building, which drew a couple of hundred prominent journalists mostly from his same generation, including those of the highest rank. Times Publisher Arthur Sulzberger, Jr. gave a speech describing how as a young man he had always so greatly admired Schanberg and had been mortified by the unfortunate circumstances of his departure from the family’s newspaper. Former Executive Editor Joseph Lelyveld recounted the many years he had worked closely with the man he had long considered his closest friend and colleague, someone whom he almost seemed to regard as his older brother. But during the two hours of praise and remembrance scarcely a single word was uttered in public about the gigantic story that had occupied the last two decades of Schanberg’s celebrated career.
This same blanket of media silence also enveloped the very serious accusations regarding McCain’s own Vietnam War record. A few years ago, I drew upon the Times and other fully mainstream sources to strongly suggest that McCain’s stories of his torture as a POW were probably fictional, invented to serve as a cover and an excuse for the very real record of his wartime collaboration with his Communist captors. Indeed, at the time our American media reported his activities as one of the leading propagandists of our North Vietnamese foes, but these facts were later flushed down the memory-hole. McCain’s father was then ranked as one of America’s top military officers, and it seems likely that his personal political intervention ensured that the official narrative of his son’s wartime record was transmuted from traitor to war-hero, thereby allowing the younger McCain to later embark upon his celebrated political career.
The story of the abandoned Vietnam POWs and McCain’s own Communist propaganda broadcasts hardly exhaust the catalog of the major skeletons in the late Senator’s closet. McCain was regularly described by reporters as being remarkably hot-headed and having a violent temper, but the national press left it to the alternative media to investigate the real-life implications of those rather suggestive phrases.
In a September 1, 2008 Counterpunch expose later published online, Alexander Cockburn reported that interviews with two emergency room physicians in Phoenix revealed that around the time that McCain was sucked into the political maelstrom of the Keating Five Scandal, his wife Cindy was admitted to her local hospital suffering from a black eye, facial bruises, and scratches consistent with physical violence, and this same situation occurred two additional times over the next few years. Cockburn also noted several other highly suspicious marital incidents during the years that followed, including the Senator’s wife appearing with a bandaged wrist and her arm in a sling not long after she joined her husband on the 2008 campaign trail, an injury reported by our strangely incurious political journalists as being due to “excessive hand-shaking.” It’s an odd situation when a tiny leftist newsletter can easily uncover facts that so totally eluded the vast resources of our entire national press corps. If there were credible reports that Melania Trump had been repeatedly admitted to local emergency rooms suffering from black eyes and facial bruises, would our corporate media have remained so uninterested in any further investigation?
McCain had first won his Arizona Congressional seat in 1982, not long after he moved into the state, with his campaign bankrolled by his father-in-law’s beer-distributorship fortune, and that inheritance eventually elevated the McCain household into one of the wealthiest in the Senate. But although the Senator spent the next quarter-century in public life, even nearly upsetting George W. Bush for the 2000 Republican presidential nomination, only in late 2008 did I learn from the Times that the Phoenix beer-monopoly in question, then valued at around $200 million, had accrued to a man whose lifelong business partner Kemper Marley had long been deeply linked to organized crime. Indeed, close associates of that latter individual had been convicted by a jury of the car-bomb assassination of a Phoenix investigative crime reporter just a few years before McCain’s sudden triumphal entrance into Arizona politics. Perhaps such guilt-by-association is improper, but would our national press-corps have remained silent if the personal fortune of our current president were only a step or two removed from the car-bomb assassins of a nosy journalist who died while investigating mobsters.
As I gradually became aware of these enormities casually hidden in McCain’s background, my initial reaction was disbelief that someone whose record was so deeply tarnished in so many different ways could ever have reached such a pinnacle of American political power. But as the media continued to avert its eyes from these newly revealed facts, even those disclosed in the pages of the Times itself, I gradually began to consider matters in a different light. Perhaps McCain’s elevation to great American political power was not in spite of the devastating facts littering his personal past, but because of them. As I wrote a few years ago:
Today when we consider the major countries of the world we see that in many cases the official leaders are also the leaders in actuality: Vladimir Putin calls the shots in Russia, Xi Jinping and his top Politburo colleagues do the same in China, and so forth. However, in America and in some other Western countries, this seems to be less and less the case, with top national figures merely being attractive front-men selected for their popular appeal and their political malleability, a development that may eventually have dire consequences for the nations they lead. As an extreme example, a drunken Boris Yeltsin freely allowed the looting of Russia’s entire national wealth by the handful of oligarchs who pulled his strings, and the result was the total impoverishment of the Russian people and a demographic collapse almost unprecedented in modern peacetime history.
An obvious problem with installing puppet rulers is the risk that they will attempt to cut their strings, much like Putin soon outmaneuvered and exiled his oligarch patron Boris Berezovsky. One means of minimizing such risk is to select puppets who are so deeply compromised that they can never break free, knowing that the political self-destruct charges buried deep within their pasts could easily be triggered if they sought independence. I have sometimes joked with my friends that perhaps the best career move for an ambitious young politician would be to secretly commit some monstrous crime and then make sure that the hard evidence of his guilt ended up in the hands of certain powerful people, thereby assuring his rapid political rise.
In physics, when an object deviates from its expected trajectory for inexplicable reasons, we assume that some unknown force has been at work, and tracing the record of such deviations may help to determine the characteristic properties of the latter. Over the years, I’ve increasingly become aware of such strange ideological deviations in public policy, and although some are readily explained, others suggest the existence of hidden forces far beneath the surface of our regular political world. This same situation may have occurred throughout our history, and sometimes the political decisions that so baffled contemporaries eventually came to light decades later.
In The Dark Side of Camelot, famed investigative reporter Seymour Hersh claimed that secret blackmail evidence of JFK’s extra-marital affairs probably played a crucial role in having his administration overrule the unanimous verdict of all top Pentagon advisors and award the largest military procurement contract in U.S. history to General Dynamics instead of Boeing, thereby saving the former company from likely bankruptcy and its major organized-crime shareholders from devastating financial losses. Hersh also suggests that a similar factor likely explains JFK’s last-minute reversal in the choice of his Vice President, a decision that landed Lyndon Johnson on the 1960 ticket and placed him in the White House after Kennedy’s 1963 assassination.
As I recently mentioned, in the 1950s Sen. Estes Kefauver shifted the focus of his Organized Crime Hearings after the Chicago Syndicate confronted him with the photographs of his sexual encounter with two mob-supplied women. A decade later, California Attorney-General Stanley Mosk suffered much the same fate, with the facts remaining hidden for over twenty years.
Similar rumors swirl around events much farther back in history as well, sometimes with enormous consequences. Well-placed contemporary sources have claimed that Samuel Untermyer, a wealthy Jewish lawyer, purchased the secret correspondence between Woodrow Wilson and his longtime mistress, and that the existence of that powerful leverage may have been an important factor behind Wilson’s astonishingly rapid rise from president of Princeton in 1910 to governor of New Jersey in 1911 to president of the United States in 1912. Once in office, Wilson signed the controversial legislation establishing the Federal Reserve system in 1913 and also named Louis Brandeis as the first Jewish member of the U.S. Supreme Court despite the public opposition of nearly our entire legal establishment. Wilson’s swiftly changing views on American involvement in the First World War may also have been influenced by such personal pressures rather than solely determined by his perceptions of the national interest.
Without naming any names, since 2001 it has been difficult to avoid noticing that one of the most zealous and committed supporters of the Neocon party-line on all Middle Eastern foreign policy matters has been a leading Republican senator from one of the most socially-conservative Southern states, a man whose rumored personal inclinations have long circulated on the Internet. The strikingly-sudden reversal of this individual on a major policy question certainly supports these suspicions. There have also been several other such examples involving prominent Republicans.
But consider the far different situation of Rep. Barney Frank of Massachusetts, who in 1987 became the first member of the Congress to voluntarily admit that he was gay. Not long afterward, a notorious scandal erupted when it was revealed that his own DC townhouse had been used by a former boyfriend as headquarters for a male-prostitution ring. Frank claimed to have had no knowledge of that sordid situation, and his liberal Massachusetts constituents apparently accepted that, since he was resoundingly reelected and went on to serve another 24 years in Congress. But surely if Frank had been a Republican from a socially-conservative district, anyone possessing such evidence would have totally controlled his political survival, and with Frank spending several years as Chairman of the very powerful House Financial Services Committee, the value of such a powerful hold would have been enormous.
This demonstrates the undeniable reality that what constitutes effective blackmail material may vary tremendously across different eras and regions. Today, it is widely accepted that longtime FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover lived his life as a deeply-closeted homosexual and there seem to be serious claims that he also had some black ancestry, with the secret evidence of these facts probably helping to explain why for decades he stubbornly refused to admit the existence of American organized crime or focus his G-men on efforts to uproot it. But in today’s America, he would surely have proudly declared his sexuality and racial ancestry in an New York Times Magazine cover-story, rightly believing that they would have enhanced his political invulnerability on the national stage. There are lurid rumors that the Syndicate possessed secret photos of Hoover wearing a dress and high-heels, but just a few years ago Rep. Mike Honda of San Jose desperately placed his eight-year-old transgendered grand-daughter front-and-center in his unsuccessful attempt to win reelection.
The decades have certainly softened the effectiveness of many forms of blackmail, but pedophilia still ranks as an extremely powerful taboo. There seems to be a great deal of evidence that powerful organizations and individuals have successfully managed to suppress credible accusations of that practice for very long periods of time so long as no group with substantial media influence had chosen to target the offenders for unmasking.
The most obvious example is the Catholic Church, and the failings of its American and international hierarchy in that regard have regularly made the front pages of our leading newspapers. But until the early 2000s and the breakthrough reporting of the Boston Globe as recounted in the Oscar-winning film Spotlight, the Church had routinely fended off such scandals.
Consider also the remarkable case of British television personality Sir Jimmy Savile, one of his country’s most admired celebrities, eventually knighted for his public service. Only shortly after his death at age 84 did the press begin revealing that he had probably molested many hundreds of children during his long career. Accusations by his young victims had stretched back across forty years, but his criminal activities had seemingly been protected by his wealth and celebrity, along with his numerous supporters in the media.
There is also the intriguing example of Dennis Hastert. As the longest serving Republican Speaker of the House in U.S. history, holding office during 1999-2007, Hastert was third in line to the Presidency and even ranked as our nation’s top Republican elected official during some of that period. Based upon my newspaper readings, he had always struck me as a rather bland and ordinary individual, with journalists sometimes even strongly hinting at his mediocrity, so that I occasionally wondered just how someone so unimpressive could have risen to such extremely high national office.
Then a few years ago, he was suddenly thrust back into the headlines, arrested by the FBI and charged with financial crimes relating to what apparently had been his past history of abusing young boys, at least one of whom had committed suicide, with the federal judge who sent him to prison denouncing him as “a serial child molester” at sentencing. Perhaps I’ve led an overly sheltered life, but my impression is that only a tiny sliver of Americans have had a long record of child molestation, and all things being equal, it seems rather unlikely that someone of such a background but who possesses no other great talents or skills would rise to near the absolute top of our political heap. So perhaps not all things were otherwise equal. If some powerful elements possessed the hard evidence that placed a particular elected official under their total control, working very hard to elevate him to Speaker of the House would be a very shrewd investment.
At times the unwillingness of our national media to see major stories in front of their very noses reaches ridiculous extremes. During the summer of 2007, the Internet was ablaze with claims that Sen. John Edwards, a runner-up in the 2004 Democratic presidential primaries, had just fathered a child with his mistress, and those reports were backed by seemingly-credible visual evidence, including photos showing the married senator holding his new-born baby. Yet as the days and even the weeks went by, not a whiff of this salacious scandal ever reached the pages of any of my morning newspapers or the rest of the mainstream media although it was a top conversation topic everywhere else. Eventually, the National Enquirer, a notorious gossip tabloid, scored a journalistic first, receiving a Pulitzer Prize nomination for breaking the story that no other outlet seemed willing to cover. Would our media have similarly averted its eyes from a newborn baby Trump coming from the wrong side of the bed?
Over the years, it became increasingly obvious to me that nearly all elements of our national media were often quite willing to enlist in a “conspiracy of silence” to minimize or entirely ignore stories of tremendous potential interest to their readership and major public importance. I could easily have doubled or tripled the number of such notable examples I provided above without much effort. Moreover, it is quite intriguing that so many of these cases involve the sort of criminal or sexual misbehavior that would be ideally suited for blackmailing powerful individuals who are less likely to be vulnerable to other influences. So perhaps many of the elected officials situated at the top of our democratic system merely reign as political puppets, jerked by invisible strings.
Given my awareness of this remarkable track-record of major media cover-ups, I’m ashamed to admit that I had paid almost no attention to the Jeffrey Epstein case until it exploded across our national headlines earlier this month, suddenly becoming one of the biggest news stories in our country.
For many years, reports about Epstein and his illegal sex-ring had regularly circulated on the fringes of the Internet, with agitated commenters citing the case as proof of the dark and malevolent forces that secretly controlled our corrupted political system. But I almost entirely ignored these discussions, and I’m not sure that I ever once clicked on a single link.
Probably one reason I paid so little attention to the topic was the exceptionally lurid nature of the claims being made. Epstein was supposedly an enormously wealthy Wall Street financier of rather mysterious personal background and source of funds, who owned a private island and an immense New York City mansion, both regularly stocked with harems of underage girls provided for sexual purposes. He allegedly hobnobbed on a regular basis with Bill Clinton, Prince Andrew, Harvard’s Alan Dershowitz, and numerous other figures in the international elite, as well as a gaggle of ordinary billionaires, frequently transporting those individuals on his personal jet known as “the Lolita Express” for the role it played in facilitating illegal secret orgies with young girls. When right-wing bloggers on obscure websites claimed that former President Clinton and the British Royals were being sexually serviced by the underage girls of a James Bond super-villain brought to life, I just assumed those accusations were the wildest sort of Internet exaggeration.
Moreover, these angry writers did occasionally let slip that the fiendish target of their wrath had already been charged in a Florida courtroom, eventually pleading guilty to a single sexual offense and receiving a thirteen month jail sentence, mitigated by very generous work-release provisions. This hardly seemed like the sort of judicial punishment that would lend credence to the fantastical accusations against him. If Epstein had already been investigated by law enforcement authorities and given the sort of sentence one might expect for writing a bad check, I found it quite unlikely that he was actually the Goldfinger or Dr. No that deluded Internet activists made him out to be.
Then these same wild, implausible claims previously found only on anonymous comment-threads were suddenly repeated as solid fact on the front pages of the Times and all my other morning newspapers, and the former federal prosecutor who had signed off on Epstein’s legal slap-on-the-wrist was forced to resign from the Trump Cabinet. Epstein’s safe had been found to contain a huge cache of child-pornography and other highly suspicious material, and he was quickly rearrested on charges that could send him to federal prison for decades. Prestigious media outlets described Epstein as the mastermind of a huge sex-trafficking ring, and numerous underage victims began coming forward, telling their stories of how he had molested, raped, and pimped them. The author of a long 2003 Epstein profile that had appeared in Vanity Fair explained that she had personally spoken to some of his victims and included their highly-credible accounts in her article, but that those portions had been censored and removed by her timorous editors.
As presented by these media outlets, Epstein’s personal rise also seemed rather inexplicable unless he had benefited from some powerful network or similar organization. Lacking any college degree or credentials, he had somehow gotten a job teaching at one of New York City’s most elite prep schools, then quickly jumped to working at a top investment bank, rising to become partner with astonishing speed until he was fired a few years later for illegal activity. Despite such a scanty and doubtful record, he was soon managing money for some of America’s wealthiest individuals, and keeping so much of it for himself that he was regularly described as a billionaire. According to newspaper accounts, his great specialty was “making connections for people.”
Obviously, Epstein was a ruthlessly opportunistic financial hustler. But extremely wealthy individuals must surely be surrounded by great swarms of ruthlessly opportunistic financial hustlers, and why would he have been so much more successful than all those others? Perhaps a clue comes from the offhand remark of Epstein’s now-disgraced prosecutor, saying that he had been told to go very easy on the sex-trafficker because he “belonged to intelligence.” The vague phrasing of that statement raises questions about whether the intelligence service may not have been one controlled by the U.S. government.
Philip Giraldi, a highly-regarded former CIA officer, put things very plainly when he suggested that Epstein had probably been working for the Israeli Mossad, operating “honey traps” to obtain blackmail information on all the wealthy and powerful individuals whom he regularly plied with underage girls. Indeed, longtime Canadian journalist Eric Margolis recounted his early 1990s visit to Epstein’s enormous NYC mansion, in which he had barely crossed the threshold before he was offered an “intimate massage” by one of the many young girls there, presumably in a bedroom well-stocked with hidden cameras.
Given my personal lack of interest in the Epstein case, then or now, perhaps a few of these details may be garbled, but it seems undeniable that he was exactly the sort of remarkable renegade typically faced by Agent 007 of the movies, and the true facts will presumably come out at his trial. Or perhaps not. Whether he lives to see trial is not entirely clear given the considerable number of powerful individuals who might prefer that hidden facts remain hidden, and the Friday newspapers reported that Epstein had been found injured and unconscious in his prison cell.
When one seemingly implausible pedophilia scandal has suddenly jumped from obscure corners of the Internet to the front pages of our leading newspapers, we must naturally begin to wonder whether others might not eventually do the same. And a very likely candidate comes to mind, one that seemed to me far better documented than the vague accusations being thrown about over the last few years against a wealthy financier given a thirteen-month jail sentence in Florida a decade earlier.
I don’t use Social Media myself, but near the end of the 2016 presidential campaign, I gradually began seeing more and more Trump supporters referring to something called “Pizzagate,” a burgeoning sexual scandal that they claimed would bring down Hillary Clinton and many of the top leaders of her party, with the chatter actually increasing after Trump was elected. As near as I could tell, the whole bizarre theory had grown up on the far-right fringe of the Internet, with the utterly fantastical plot having something to do with stolen secret emails, DC pizza parlors, and a ring of pedophiles situated near the top of the Democratic Party. But given all the other strange and unlikely things I’d gradually discovered about our history, it didn’t seem like something I could necessarily dismiss out of hand.
At the beginning of December, a right-wing blogger produced a lengthy exposition of the Pizzagate charges, which finally gave me some understanding of what was actually under discussion, and I soon made arrangements to republish his article. It quickly attracted a great deal of interest, and some websites pointed to it as the best single introduction to the scandal for a general audience.
A couple of weeks later, I republished an additional article by the same writer, describing a long list of previous pedophilia scandals that had occurred in elite American and European political circles. Although many of these seemed to be solidly documented, nearly all of them had received minimal coverage by our mainstream media outlets. And if such political pedophile rings had existed in the relatively recent past, was it so totally implausible that there might be another one simmering beneath the surface of today’s Washington DC?
Those interested in the details of the Pizzagate Hypothesis are advised to read these articles, especially the first one, but I might was well provide a brief summary.
John Podesta had been a longtime fixture in DC political circles, becoming chief of staff to President Bill Clinton in 1998, and afterward remaining one of the most powerful figures in the Democratic Party establishment. While serving as as chairman of Hillary Clinton’s 2016 presidential campaign, his apparent carelessness with the password security of his Gmail account allowed it to easily be hacked, and tens of thousands of his personal emails were soon published on WikiLeaks. A swarm of young anti-Clinton activists began scouring this treasure-trove of semi-confidential information, seeking evidence of mundane bribery and corruption, but instead they came across some quite odd exchanges, seemingly written in coded language.
Now use of coded language in a supposedly secure private email account raises all sorts of natural suspicions regarding what might have been under discussion, with the most likely possibilities being illegal drugs or sex. But most of the references didn’t seem to fit the former category, and in our remarkably libertine era, in which political candidates compete for the right to be Grand Marshal at an annual Gay Pride Parade, one of the few sexual activities still discussed only in whispers would seem to be pedophilia, with some of the very strange remarks possibly hinting at this.
The researchers also soon discovered that his brother Tony Podesta, one of the wealthiest and most successful lobbyists in DC, had extremely odd taste in art. Major items of his very extensive personal collection seemed to represent tortured or murdered bodies, and one of his favorite artists was best known for paintings depicting young children being held captive, lying dead, or suffering under severe distress. Such peculiar artwork obviously isn’t illegal, but it might naturally arouse some suspicions. And oddly enough, arch-Democrat Podesta had long been a close personal friend of former Republican Speaker and convicted child-molester Dennis Hastert, welcoming him back into DC society after his release from prison.
Furthermore, some of the rather suspiciously-worded Podesta emails referred to events held at a local DC pizza parlor, greatly favored by the Democratic Party elite, whose owner was the gay former boyfriend of David Brock, a leading Democratic activist. The public Instagram account of that pizza-entrepreneur apparently contained numerous images of young children, sometimes tied or bound, with those images frequently labeled by hashtags using the traditional gay slang for underage sexual targets. Some photos showed the fellow wearing a tee-shirt bearing the statement “I Love Children” in French, and by a very odd coincidence, his possibly assumed name was phonetically identical to that very same French phrase, thus proclaiming to the world that he was “a lover of children.” Closely connected Instagram accounts also included pictures of young children, sometimes shown amid piles of high-value currency, with queries about how much those particular children might be worth. None of this seemed illegal, but surely any reasonable person would regard the material as extremely suspicious.
DC is sometimes described as “Powertown,” being the seat of the individuals who make America’s laws and govern our society, with local political journalists being closely attuned to the relative status of such individuals. And oddly enough, GQ Magazine had ranked that gay pizza parlor owner with a strange focus on young children as being one of the 50 most powerful people in our national capital, placing him far ahead of many Cabinet members, Senators, Congressional Chairmen, Supreme Court justices, and top lobbyists. Was his pizza really that delicious?
These few paragraphs provide merely a sliver of the large quantity of highly-suspicious material surrounding various powerful figures at the apex of the DC political world. A vast cloud of billowing smoke is certainly no proof of any fire, but only a fool would completely ignore it without attempting further investigation.
I usually regard videos as a poor means of imparting serious information, far less effective and meaningful than the simple printed word. But the overwhelming bulk of the evidence supporting the Pizzagate Hypothesis consists of visual images and screen shots, and these are naturally suited to a video presentation.
Some of the best summaries of the Pizzagate case were produced by a young British YouTuber named Tara McCarthy, whose work was published under the name of “Reality Calls,” and her videos were viewed hundreds of thousands of times. Although her channel was eventually banned and her videos purged, copies were later reloaded to other accounts, both on YouTube and BitChute. Some of the evidence she presents seemed rather innocuous or speculative to me and other elements were probably based upon her unfamiliarity with American society and culture. But a great deal of extremely suspicious material remains, and I would suggest that people watch the videos and decide for themselves.
See also instagram video at Unz Review [disturbing]
Around the same time that I first became familiar with the details of the Pizzagate controversy, the topic also started reaching the pages of my morning newspapers, but in an rather strange manner. Political stories began giving a sentence or two to the “Pizzagate hoax,” describing it as a ridiculous right-wing “conspiracy theory” but excluding all relevant details. I had an eerie feeling that some unseen hand had suddenly flipped a switch and caused the entire mainstream media to begin displaying identical signs reading “Pizzagate Is False—Nothing To See There!” in brightly flashing neon. I couldn’t recall any previous example of such a strange media reaction to some obscure controversy on the Internet.
Articles in the Washington Post and the Los Angeles Times also suddenly appeared denouncing the entirety of the alternative media—Left, Right, and Libertarian—as “fake news” websites promoting Russian propaganda, while urging that their content be blocked by all patriotic Internet giants such as Facebook, Twitter, and Google. Prior to that moment, I’d never even heard the term “fake news” but suddenly it was ubiquitous across the media, once again almost as if some unseen hand had suddenly flipped a switch.
I naturally began to wonder whether the timing of these two strange developments was entirely coincidental. Perhaps Pizzagate was indeed true and struck so deeply at the core of our hugely corrupted political system that the media efforts to suppress it were approaching the point of hysteria.
Not long afterward, Tara McCarthy’s fine Pizzagate videos were purged from YouTube. This was among the very first instances of video content being banned despite fully conforming to all existing YouTube guidelines, another deeply suspicious development.
I also noticed that mere mention of Pizzagate had become politically lethal. Donald Trump had selected Lt. Gen. Michael Flynn, former head of the Defense Intelligence Agency, as his National Security Advisor, and Flynn’s son served as the latter’s chief of staff. The younger Flynn happened to Tweet out a couple of links to Pizzagate stories, pointing out that the accusations hadn’t yet been actually investigated let alone disproven, and very soon afterward, he was purged from the Trump transition team, foreshadowing his father’s fall a few weeks later. It seemed astonishing to me that a few simple Tweets about an Internet controversy could have such huge real-life impact near the top of our government.
The media continued its uniform drumbeat of “Pizzagate Has Been Disproven!” but we were never explained how or by whom, and I was not the only individual to notice the hollowness of such denunciations. An award-winning investigative journalist named Ben Swann at a CBS station in Atlanta broadcast a short television segment summarizing the Pizzagate controversy and noting that contrary to widespread media claims, Pizzagate had neither been investigated nor debunked. Swann was almost immediately purged by CBS but a copy of his television segment remains available for viewing on the Internet.
There is an old wartime proverb that enemy flak is always heaviest over the most important target, and the remarkably ferocious wave of attacks and censorship against anyone broaching the subject of Pizzagate seems to raise all sorts of dark suspicions. Indeed, the simultaneous waves of attacks against all alternative media outlets as “Russian propaganda outlets” laid the basis for the continuing regime of Social Media censorship that has become a central aspect of today’s world.
Pizzagate may or may not turn out to be true, but the ongoing Internet crackdown has similarly engulfed topics of a somewhat similar nature but with vastly stronger documentation. Although I don’t use Twitter myself, I encountered the obvious implications of this new censorship policy following McCain’s death last August. The senator had died on a Saturday afternoon, and readership of Sydney Schanberg’s long 2008 expose quickly exploded, with numerous individuals Tweeting out the story and a large fraction of our incoming traffic therefore coming from Twitter. This continued until the following morning, at which point the huge flood of Tweets continued to grow, but all incoming Twitter traffic suddenly and permanently vanished, presumably because “shadow banning” had rendered all such Tweets invisible. My own article on McCain’s very doubtful war record simultaneously suffered the same fate, as did numerous other articles of a controversial nature that we published later that same week.
Perhaps that censorship decision was made by some ignorant young intern at Twitter, casually choosing to ban as “hate speech” or “fake news” a massively-documented 8,400 word expose by one of America’s most distinguished journalists, a Pulitzer-prize winning former top editor at The New York Times.
Or perhaps certain political-puppeteers who had spent decades controlling that late Arizona senator sought to ensure that their political puppet-strings remained invisible even after his death.
Related Reading:
- John McCain and the POW Cover-Up by Sydney Schanberg
- John McCain: When “Tokyo Rose” Ran for President
- Pizzagate by Aedon Cassiel
- What We Know About Pizzagate So Far by Tara McCarthy
- Precedents for Pizzagate by Aedon Cassiel
“Human Right Activists” Celebrate Facebook-Twitter Censorship
By Joseph Thomas – New Eastern Outlook – July 26, 2019
All Facebook and Twitter accounts associated with Bangkok-based geopolitical analyst Tony Cartalucci have been deleted. The extent to which both American-based tech companies went to target Cartalucci could be seen in a recent Reuters article reporting on it.
Written by Thai Reuters correspondent Patpicha Tanakasempipat, the article titled, “Facebook removes fake accounts from Thailand, Russia, Ukraine, Honduras,” referred to the author claiming:
The accounts removed in Thailand used “fictitious personas” to promote narratives about Thai politics, U.S.-China relations, protests in Hong Kong, and criticism of democracy activists in Thailand, Gleicher said.
“We were able to determine conclusively that some of the activities of this network was linked to an individual based in Thailand associated with New Eastern Outlook, a Russian government-funded journal based in Moscow,” Gleicher said.
The article cited “coordinated inauthentic behavior” and hailed the move as countering “deceptive political propaganda.”
No mention was made of how writing anonymously is “inauthentic behavior” nor were any examples provided of what was deemed “deceptive political propaganda” and why.
Matthew Tostevin, a Reuters correspondent also based in Southeast Asia and whose Twitter profile unironically invokes the hashtag, “Journalism is Not a Crime” celebrated the systematic, coordinated censorship, claiming in a tweet:
“Tony Cartalucci” Facebook and Twitter accounts inaccessible after Facebook said it had erased accounts of a network linked to “an individual based in Thailand associated with New Eastern Outlook, a Russian government-funded journal”.
The term “associated with” is often used to imply impropriety without providing any actual evidence of it. Tostevin’s defence of Facebook-Twitter censorship fails to explain how getting paid to write articles is wrong, especially considering Tostevin himself makes his living doing precisely that for London-based Reuters.
Human Rights Watch’s Thai representative, Sunai Phasuk, himself a verified recipient of foreign government funds, also celebrated rather than opposed Facebook and Twitter’s coordinated censorship.
In his tweet (translated from Thai), he claimed:
The end of IO [information operation]! Facebook and Twitter suspend the accounts of Tony/Anthony Cartalucci (source of “slim” information) as well as related accounts for using a fake identity, disseminating false information, creating hatred for democratic parties and human rights activists/linked to Russian IO.
The term “slim” is a derogatory term used by supporters of Thaksin Shinawatra, an ousted billionaire politician now living abroad as a fugitive and guilty of the worst human rights violations in contemporary Thai history.
Sunai not only reveals a complete lack of impartiality as a supposed human rights advocate, but also is clearly promoting censorship of information he and his foreign sponsors deem “false.”
Regarding claims of using a “fake identity,” Cartalucci himself has repeatedly stated over several years that the name “Tony Cartalucci” is a pen name and that he writes anonymously, as many authors throughout history have, particularly those writing about sensitive political topics.
From Reuters to Human Rights Watch employees, attempts to “dox” Cartalucci and others presenting differing perspectives has become a disturbing trend.
Facebook and Twitter now deleting accounts of anonymous writers only serves to further chill the free speech “human rights advocates” like Sunai claim to defend.
Others celebrating Cartalucci’s suspension from Facebook and Twitter include BBC correspondent Jonathan Head.
West’s Losing Battle Amid the Information War
Facebook and Twitter have targeted many other alternative media sites and individuals, often using accusations of being “Russian-funded” to smear targets and justify censorship. Conversely, should governments overseas targeted by US or British-funded sites or individuals attempt to shut them down, they are depicted as “authoritarian” and guilty of indisputable “censorship.”
Such hypocrisy over free speech, media freedom and censorship stems from the much wider hypocrisy that drives Western foreign policy in general.
Other examples include decrying “Iranian aggression” while the US surrounds Iran with military bases built on nations the US illegally invaded and now occupy, or the US decrying unfounded claims of Russian interference in its domestic politics while openly funding opposition groups targeting Moscow.
The accounts of organisations and individuals across the West, including Reuters, the BBC, and HRW guilty of “disseminating false information” regarding “weapons of mass destruction” in Iraq, Russian interference in US elections, claims of sarin gas used in Syria or covering up Western interference in the domestic politics of nations worldwide not only remain unscathed by Facebook and Twitter’s “fake news” campaign, but the sole beneficiaries in an increasingly crowded information sphere where the alternative media has otherwise challenged their monopoly over information.
Facebook and Twitter are both suffering severely from attempts to control the flow of information on both platforms. A desire for alternatives is sought out not only by persecuted political activists being purged from both platforms, but from a wide and growing range of ordinary individuals who feel both social media platforms have become too invasive.
Cartalucci will likely continue writing and those who remain on Facebook and Twitter will likely continue promoting his articles. All the move to purge individuals and organisations from social media platforms will do is accelerate the search for alternatives.
Since Facebook and Twitter’s censorship fails to address the fundamental shortcomings of Western foreign policy that people like Cartalucci expose and have gained attention from Facebook and Twitter censorship for, such censorship is a bandaid at best. At worse, it is delaying the inevitable conclusion of an information war neither social media platform (nor the special interests they represent) are winning.
Joseph Thomas is chief editor of Thailand-based geopolitical journal, The New Atlas and contributor to the online magazine “New Eastern Outlook”.
Anti-War Democratic Candidate Tulsi Gabbard Sues Google For Campaign “Interference”
By Tyler Durden – Zero Hedge – 07/25/2019
Progressive Democrat presidential candidate Tulsi Gabbard, who has long been under fire from mainstream media and establishment voices in her own party for her vehemently anti-war and anti-interventionist stance, is suing Google, The New York Times reports, in what is said to be the first time in history a presidential candidate has sued a major technology firm.
It must be remembered that though considered a “long shot” by party insiders based on her outlier stances (for which she’s been called a popular Ron Paul type unorthodox figure among the Dems), from criticizing the Democrats’ ‘Russiagate’ fixation to calling for an end to “regime change wars” abroad to being willing to meet with Syria’s President Bashar al-Assad, Google searches for her named surged across the US during last month’s first round of presidential nominee debates. And now, as the Times reports, she says Google infringed on her free speech by suspending her campaign’s ability to get its message out:
Tulsi Now Inc., the campaign committee for Ms. Gabbard, said Google suspended the campaign’s advertising account for six hours on June 27 and June 28, obstructing its ability to raise money and spread her message to potential voters.
Google and other major US tech companies like Facebook have faced an avalanche of scrutiny and criticism of late for censoring and/or manipulating the visibility of those with unorthodox political views.
The new lawsuit claims Google took steps to “interfere” with Gabbard’s chances in the upcoming 2020 presidential election.
“Google’s arbitrary and capricious treatment of Gabbard’s campaign should raise concerns for policymakers everywhere about the company’s ability to use its dominance to impact political discourse, in a way that interferes with the upcoming 2020 presidential election,” the lawsuit stated.
Specifically the lawsuit suggests Google diverted Gabbard campaign emails to be sent to spam folders on Gmail at “a disproportionately high rate” compared to her Democratic rival candidates.
The lawsuit was filed Thursday an a Los Angeles federal court, the Times reports, and “seeks an injunction against Google from further meddling in the election and damages of at least $50 million.”
Previously the Hawaii congresswoman pointed out there was a “clear bias” against her as she was given the least amount of speaking time during the first 2020 Democratic primary debate.
“Look, it shows that there is a clear bias in place. I made the most of every minute that I had — wish I had the opportunity to have more time to address these important issues,” Gabbard told Tucker Carlson during a June 27th Fox interview.
Google did not initially respond to reports of the lawsuit, which comes after having long been under fire and suspicions from Republican and conservative groups for downgrading their content on the world’s most popular and visible search engine.
UK govt unveils plan to teach school kids about ‘fake news’… What could go wrong?
RT | July 15, 2019
The British government is planning a new initiative which will aim to help schoolchildren distinguish real information from ‘fake news’ — in an eyebrow-raising move which could be described as a little bit Orwellian.
British Secretary of State for Education Damian Hinds unveiled the new plan, warning that teachers need to better prepare students for the risks posed by “fake news” online, the Independent reported.
From 2020, British kids in both primary and secondary schools will learn about “confirmation bias” and “online risks” as part of a compulsory section of the curriculum. As part of the plan, teachers will help children identify techniques used for “persuasion” and be told “when to seek support.” They will also learn about the reasons why someone might wish to “bend the truth” in the first place.
A concerned Hinds warned that the internet makes it easier for both state actors and individuals to “spread falsehoods.” One area in particular which the government is looking at is “misleading content” regarding vaccinations. Without “firm action,” the proliferation of allegedly misleading information online will “get a lot worse,” he said.
Hinds recalled that propagandists have sought to “manipulate the truth” since “ancient times.” Indeed, this is something any British government official should be well aware of, since it’s well-known that the British mainstream media — including the BBC and British newspapers — have historically been infiltrated by intelligence agents from MI5 and MI6. One could probably safely assume that such inconvenient information will be left off the agenda, however, with the British program more likely to focus on the evils of propaganda emanating from Britain’s geopolitical adversaries.
Aside from the obvious question of whether governments are best placed to create a curriculum on fake vs. real news, there’s also the added dilemma of whether teachers should be responsible for imparting wisdom on media manipulation to children, when so much of the task of deciphering the news these days comes down to pure opinion. What one teacher might regard as real, another might view as fake.
Presumably, for example, Hinds would regard an institution like the BBC as a “trusted” source — and yet many others of a different political persuasion would likely disagree. The initiative raises the question of who exactly should be allowed to set the standards of ‘truth’ and ‘trusted’ when it comes to media. This is usually only the role of government in dystopian novels.
It’s not the first time Western governments or government-linked initiatives have sought to ‘educate’ the public about fake news through arguably sketchy means. The CIA-linked NewsGuard app has managed to get itself automatically installed on Microsoft’s Edge mobile browser, warning users away from “unreliable” whistleblowing and alternative news sites and directing them firmly toward mainstream sources that don’t often question establishment narratives.
A cynic might suggest such that the British government’s latest plan amounts to a form of state indoctrination of children to support the ‘correct’ narratives to serve its agenda from an early age.
Also on rt.com:
No need to install: Microsoft has controversial fake news filter NewsGuard built into mobile browser
Why The BBC acts as a Propaganda Outlet for Israel– An Insider View
By Gilad Atzmom | July 14, 2019
The BBC’s Panorama channel ‘investigation’ into Labour’s ‘anti-Semitism’ was so blatantly one sided its broadcast as ‘news’ demanded an explanation. In an attempt to grasp why the British national broadcaster fails to fulfil its core mission to report the news in as unbiased a manner as possible, I interviewed a former senior editor for the BBC. The editor, a 35 year veteran of the BBC, reveals the culture that has steered the BBC into its present position as a Zionist mouthpiece.
In acting as a whistle blower, the former editor risks severe consequences. In Britain leading journalists have been locked behind bars and under threat of extradition for reporting information whose truthfulness has not even been challenged.
Sadly, this danger is heightened under the present toxic political atmosphere in Britain, as demonstrated by its purging of a major political party and its tolerance for abuse of its judicial system to deter and punish anyone who dares to question the Zionist narrative.
Q: When did the BBC become openly biased?
A: The BBC has always been biased towards Israel, and its bias has been well documented. The reasons for this bias have long been the subject of serious academic studies, the best known of which is Greg Philo’s and Mike Berry’s More Bad News from Israel. In fact, in 2006 an independent report commissioned by the BBC’s own governing body concluded that the BBC’s coverage of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict “does not consistently constitute a full and fair account of the conflict but rather, in important respects, presents an incomplete and in that sense misleading picture.”
Q: Who and what drove this cultural and political direction within the corporation?
A: There are a number of drivers behind this biased BBC culture. The most important is the fact that a small number of hardline Zionists occupy key positions at the top and middle levels of the corporation, as well as at the shop-floor level, by which I mean the people who select what to publish or broadcast on a daily basis and who provide editorial steer to journalists. This has been widely publicised and has been in the public domain for some time — see, for example, this http://tinyurl.com/ydhjzeek, these (a) http://tinyurl.com/y7mjtkc6, (b) http://tinyurl.com/y7k39vsh, and (c) http://tinyurl.com/y3x9nktl. Also see this http://tinyurl.com/y6ne4apn and this http://tinyurl.com/y7l88zwl.
Q: What about political impartiality, supposedly a core BBC value?
A: Unfortunately, there are many examples of such pro- Israel hype, some blatant and others who slant the news by use of emphasis and/or omission. For instance, there was Sarah Montague’s interview with Israel’s defence minister, Moshe Ya’alon, in March 2015, Head of Statistics’ Anthony Reuben’s reflection on fatalities in Gaza (http://tinyurl.com/ycc9p8d4), and the utilization of Gil Hoffman, an Israeli army reservist and chief political correspondent for the Jerusalem Post to write for the BBC News website (http://tinyurl.com/yanppk93) to mention but a few.
Q: Does the broadcaster have the means or inclination to fix itself ?
A: In my opinion, the chances of the BBC fixing itself is about zero. Apart from what I have said above, it is a cowardly, spineless organisation. Not only does it always pursue the path of least resistance by selecting to broadcast what is least likely to upset the Zionist lobby, but it is also deadly afraid of what the Daily Mail might say about its output. Very often, and by that I mean almost on a daily basis, one would hear senior managers ask at the morning agenda-setting editorial meetings, “What would the Daily Mail say about that?” Invariably, they would choose what is least likely to be picked up and criticised by the Daily Mail. Please remember, this is a public broadcaster that is funded by taxpayers (yes, the License Fee is a tax) and is supposed to “Educate, Inform and Entertain”, not propagandise on behalf of Israel.
Q: Some of the so-called Labour ‘Whistleblowers’ were exposed by Al Jazeera as Israeli Lobby assets. Is it possible that the BBC was so bold as to interview these characters hoping that no one would notice or was it simply a matter of a clumsy decision making? Can the BBC match the journalistic dedication of organisations such as RT or Al Jazeera?
A: There is no chance whatsoever that the BBC would do anything approximating Al Jazeera TV’s programme on Israeli infiltration of the Labour Party (http://tinyurl.com/yad6fslm). The BBC is institutionally pro-Zionist and institutionally spineless.
Q: You worked in the corporation for 35 years, did you notice a deterioration in the quality of people hired? Was there a change in employees’ attitudes and their willingness to express themselves freely and critically?
A: I worked for the BBC’s English-language outlets as an editor and senior editor for 35 years. Since the early 1990s there has been growing intolerance of criticism of editorial management decisions, even in internal forums which internal BBC propaganda claims are meant for staff to speak freely. This applies across the board on all matters. But certainly with regard to Israel and Zionism, any questioning of BBC impartiality would attract accusations of anti-Semitism and would certainly spell the end of one’s career, no matter how privately and confidentially such criticism is conveyed.
London proudly hosts press freedom forum, defends right to spy on journos in Strasbourg the same day
RT | July 11, 2019
On Wednesday an international conference on press freedom was launched in London. Ironically on the same day Her Majesty’s government was defending its mass surveillance on communications, including those of journalists.
The Global Conference for Media Freedom, co-organized by the governments of the UK and Canada, was launched with much fanfare in the British capital, with some 1,000 representatives from around the world present. Some media professionals were barred from the grand event (namely this media, RT and another Russian outlet Sputnik to be precise), but of course it didn’t stop hosts from declaring appreciation of the role that a free press plays in a free society.
Halfway across Europe in Strasbourg on the same day lawyers representing the British government were defending its right to spy on electronic communication of people before the Grand Chamber of the European Court of Human Rights (ECHR).
The case was brought before the court by 16 organizations and individuals defending civil and journalistic liberties, including the Bureau of Investigative Journalism. They argued that mass snooping, first revealed by NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden, violated the right to privacy and the right to freedom of expression – the latter being fundamental for journalistic work.
“This may be the most important case with regard to the protection of journalistic communications and the protection of our sources to be heard in the past 20 years,” Rachel Oldroyd, managing editor of the Bureau said.
“As journalists we must be able to speak freely to our sources without fear of surveillance. The UK government’s system of mass collection and storage of all our communications is a severe threat to this cornerstone of our profession and a severe intrusion upon the freedom of the press.”
“It is ironic that on the very day the Bureau is making this case against the British government’s surveillance regime in the highest court in Europe, the same government is hosting a global summit on press freedom.”
In September 2018 the ECHR ruled that Britain didn’t have necessary safeguards in place to ensure that its mass surveillance complied with the European Convention on Human Rights after which the case was referred to the Grand Chamber. The hearing on Wednesday lasted almost three hours, but the date for delivering the judgement is yet to be announced.
Meanwhile the media freedom conference in London continued into its second day on Thursday with panels like ‘Taking a Stand: How We Defend Media Freedom’ and ‘Strengthening Media Freedom across the Commonwealth’ on the agenda. Do tell.
Judge, jury & executioner: Facebook policy permits death threats against ‘dangerous individuals’
RT | July 10, 2019
Facebook has issued an ominous new policy permitting death threats and calls for violence – so long as they’re directed against “dangerous” individuals or organizations, or someone accused (but not convicted) of a crime.
Facebook has updated its “community standards” to carve out a few exceptions to its “no death threats” policy. Calls for “high-severity violence” are now permitted, as long as they’re directed at individuals “covered in the Dangerous Individuals and Organizations policy” or individuals “described as having carried out violent crimes or sexual offenses” by media reports. After all, are people banned from Facebook really people at all?
The change was spotted on Tuesday by commentator Paul Joseph Watson, who along with his former Infowars boss Alex Jones was one of a handful of mostly-conservative personalities banned from Facebook in May under its “Dangerous Individuals” policy. Back then, even mentioning one of the banned names could get a user banned – unless the mention was derogatory.
Facebook has apparently taken that “hate the haters” tactic and run with it. While the “Dangerous Individuals” policy supposedly only covers “terrorist activity, organized hate, mass or serial murder, human trafficking, and organized violence or criminal activity,” none of the commentators banned – including Watson, Jones, conservative political performance artist Milo Yiannopoulos, and Nation of Islam leader Louis Farrakhan – were involved in any of those activities. But, Watson discovered, a person wearing an Infowars t-shirt is enough to get a photo removed from Instagram, and photos that include banned individuals – even if their faces are blurred out – have been deleted as well.
Equally ominous is Facebook’s decision to dispense with the concept of “innocent until proven guilty” that forms the core of the US legal system (Facebook is based in Menlo Park, California, and at least theoretically subject to US laws). Individuals need only be accused in the media of violent crimes and sexual offenses to become fair game for death threats – not convicted in court. For a company that claims to take the threat of “fake news” very seriously, Facebook is surprisingly cavalier about the potential for media misinformation to lead to violence.
But then, Facebook never even tried to prove Watson, Jones or any of the other banned users were “Dangerous Individuals,” either – its policy has always been that banned users are guilty until proven innocent, as any user who’s ever been forced to jump through its tech support hoops to restore a banned account can attest.
“The largest social media company in the world with over 2 billion users literally says it’s fine to incite violence against me, despite this being illegal,” Watson wrote at Summit.news, pointing out that sending death threats or threats of violence is, in fact, a crime under UK law (as it is under US law and the laws of most developed countries with substantial Facebook-using populations). “They are painting a target on my back.”
Facebook even tracks off-platform behavior to determine whether users should be blacklisted as “hate agents,” according to internal documents seen by Breitbart, meaning merely showing up at the same event as a “dangerous individual” can potentially earn a user the designation. The site’s list of “hate agents” is reportedly quite exhaustive and includes British politicians Carl Benjamin and Anne Marie Waters as well as conservative commentators like Yiannopoulos and Candace Owens. Because all this classification goes on in secret, users have no chance to appeal their un-personing, and may never even know they are being judged, until they start receiving Facebook-approved death threats of their own.
Also on rt.com:
‘No future for dissidents’ on social media: Paul Joseph Watson reflects on Facebook ban
The United States of Fascism Hysteria
By CJ Hopkins | Consent Factory | July 10, 2019
So it’s been an exciting few weeks for Antifa and the rest of the neoliberal Resistance. OK, they haven’t yet managed to overthrow the Putin-Nazi occupation government (hereinafter “POG”), but they’ve definitely got “the Fash” on the run. “Fascism” hysteria is spreading like wildfire. Liberal Twitter mobs are out for blood. At this point, it’s only a matter of time until the sleeping giant of normality awakens and purges America of the fascist filth that have Putin-Nazified this once great nation.
Antifa has been at the vanguard of the fight, smashing the Fash on both East and West Coasts. In Portland, where a gang of neo-fascist anti-masturbationists known as the “Proud Boys” had assembled for a self-promotional street fight they were billing as the “Battle of Portland 2,” Antifa militants positively identified and preventatively beat the living snot out of a journalist named Andy Ngo. To prevent him from snitching to the fascist cops (who are allegedly working hand in hand with POG), they self-defensively robbed him, sprayed him with silly string, and pelted him with vegan milkshakes.
Now, before you get all up in arms about Antifa assaulting and robbing journalists, you need to know a couple of things. First, according to Antifa spokespersons, and those bloodthirsty liberal Twitter mobs, Andy Ngo is a “fascist adjacent,” and possibly even a card carrying fascist. Antifa representative Alexander Reid Ross claims that Ngo is personally responsible for putting people’s names on a Nazi “kill-list” (or at least that Ngo’s writing has been published by Quillette, which published an article by someone else that some fascists read and copied people’s names from), so, basically, he deserves to die.
Also, assaulting and robbing Ngo was technically “preemptive self-defense” (you know, the same as when we invaded Iraq to defend ourselves from those WMDs). Despite their helmets and body armor, and the fact that Ngo is a doughy little gay guy, his presence among them on a public street was making Antifa feel “unsafe.” So, they had no choice but to beat him senseless, steal his camera, and vegan milkshake him. As Antifa expert Mark Bray explains, when you’re Antifa, “fighting back is always self-defense, even if [you] strike the first blow.” (This logic only applies to anti-fascists, of course, like Antifa and the U.S. military, and not to, you know, gangs of thugs, or the perpetrators of wars of aggression.)
Antifa’s self-defensive mugging of a journalist apparently scared the crap out of POG, because one week later, back in Washington, D.C., President Hitler called in the tanks, and the Luftwaffe, and announced that he was going to stage a reenactment of a Nuremberg Rally right in front of the Lincoln Memorial. The liberal intelligentsia went apeshit. This was really it this time! Putin had given Trump the green-light to declare martial law and pronounce himself Führer. The long-awaited Putin-Nazi Apocalypse was finally about to begin!
Unfortunately, Trump’s Fourth of July Jamboree turned out to be a rather tame affair. He even almost made it through his speech without making an ass of himself. This was extremely disappointing for liberals, who were hoping he would go full-Hitler, paint “death’s heads” on the turrets of the Bradleys and a Swastika on the tail of Air Force One, and order ICE to start rounding up the Jews.
The weekend wasn’t a total let-down, however. The Proud Boys (who are clearly gluttons for punishment), staged another self-promotional event, this one billed as “Defend Free Speech.” A few hundred people turned up to listen to speeches by a handful of alt-right clowns desperately trying to reignite their careers. They were outnumbered 2 to 1 by Antifa, Black Lives Matter, assorted drag queens, and an indigenous, two-spirited transperson of color, who reportedly “performed a spoken word” on the meaning of the term “latinx.”
The D.C. police (who are even more fascist than the Portland police who stood by and watched as Antifa beat up and robbed a journalist) fascistically prevented Antifa militants from storming into the Alt-right rally and beating the snot out of everyone in sight. So, the anti-fascists had no choice but to preemptively attack a newspaper dispenser, which was presumably making them feel “unsafe,” or disseminating POG propaganda, or something. One of them tried to burn a flag, but he couldn’t figure out how to operate his matches. Assorted other hilarious acts of revolutionary direct action followed. Apparently, Antifa’s strategy was to smash the Fash by amusing them to death.
Meanwhile, militant Resistance actions against the POG “concentration camps” continue. New York City, San Francisco, and other liberal metropolitan areas have almost completely emptied out as liberals flock to the southern border to liberate the surviving prisoners. Conditions in the camps are now beyond inhuman. According to Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, migrants are being forced to drink out of toilets, and otherwise subjected to “systematic cruelty,” (so you can understand why liberals are physically putting their bodies on the line to bring an end to this horrifying sadism, and not just sitting around on the Internet shrieking about “concentration camps” as they travel to their summer holiday rentals on Martha’s Vineyard, or the Hamptons, or wherever).
No, these Putin-Nazi “concentration camps” are nothing at all like the “detention facilities” the Obama administration operated, even though they look exactly the same. Sure, thousands of migrant children were separated from their parents, in cages, and there were tens of thousands of incidents of rape, sexual abuse, beatings, and so on, but, otherwise, these Obama “detention facilities” were more like great big 2-star hotels, or like student dorms at a state university, so there was no need for liberals to get all worked up and start comparing them to places like Dachau and Buchenwald.
Plus, here’s a picture of dead people! Look at this picture! These people are dead! So just shut up about Obama already! Enough with history, and critical thinking, and the practical aspects of immigration policy! It’s time to abolish all national borders, issue everyone a U.S. passport, and transcend the whole concept of national sovereignty … or at least to provide the capitalist ruling classes with an endless supply of cheap, undocumented, extremely compliant unskilled labor. Those Bel Air lawns aren’t going to mow themselves!
Jesus, I can’t believe I just wrote that. Concentration camps and dead people are nothing to joke about. It’s OK, however, to cynically use them to whip people up into a paroxysm of manufactured mass fascism hysteria. Not that the neoliberal ruling classes and the corporate media would ever do that. No, they would never repeatedly attempt to evoke our hatred of the actual Nazis (and their actual concentration camps … which people were dragged out of their homes, loaded onto trains, and shipped away to, and which you could not voluntarily depart) in order to short circuit our critical thinking, or otherwise emotionally manipulate us into supporting their War on Populism.
No, the Putin-Nazi occupation government is not just manufactured mass hysteria concocted by the neoliberal ruling classes. Donald Trump is really a Nazi. There’s a portrait of Hitler in the Oval Office. Putin really controls America. Putin, and his cabal of Russian Nazis. They’re everywhere. They own the banks. They control the media. They control elections. They are the “International Invisible Government.” (Is any of this sounding vaguely familiar?) They are devising the Final Solution to the Immigrant Problem right this minute. They are doing this at Mar-a-Lago, where Trump has had a big “Black Sun” etched into the marble floor.
So, if you’re serious about your anti-fascism, now’s the time to load up on silly string, ski goggles, masks, hard knuckle gloves, and whatever you make those milkshakes with. POG might be on the run at the moment, but there’s an election season coming up, so we need to be prepared for anything. The important thing is to remain hysterical, and to be ready to respond to whatever emotional stimuli the ruling classes wave in our faces. The fate of democracy hangs in the balance.
Oh, and watch out for those fascist newspaper dispensers!
Google Promising Real-Time Censorship
By Kit Knightly | OffGuardian | July 5, 2019
Google has changed their algorithm so that it actively suppresses “misinformation” when “bad events” are taking place. This is pretty big news if you’re interested in free speech or the free flow of information. Nobody in the media treated it that way.
In fact, you probably didn’t see it at all. Almost no papers covered it – and the major one that did, The Guardian, buried back in the “science and technology” section.
The idea that Google suppresses “misinformation”, and boosts “authoritative voices” is not new. We already know they do that. The new part is that they will do it in real-time, they will respond to “tragic events” by focusing more on blocking “misinformation” at “criticial times”.
Pandu Nayak, the Google representative interviewed for the article, summed it up thus:
…we have developed algorithms that recognise that a bad event is taking place and that we should increase our notions of ‘authority’, increase the weight of ‘authority’ in our ranking so that we surface high quality content rather than misinformation in this critical time here.”
He is directly referencing mass shootings in the Sandy Hook vein, but he could just as well be talking about terrorist attacks, natural disasters, election results or war.
When he says “high quality content” (sic) he means corporate media. When he says “authority”, he means government sources.
Essentially, Google – the most powerful company on Earth – is going to be tightening its control on the flow of information when important news is breaking.
This is a step backwards for the internet, and the world. And it’s a direct response to challenges to state-backed narratives in multiple theatres of information warfare.
Take the Gulf of Oman incident. Compare and contrast: The Gulf of Oman, the USS Maine and the Gulf of Tonkin. The similarities are obvious, I won’t bother explaining.
The difference? Real-time flow of facts. Social media allowed people to comment on the flaws in the narrative instantly. The internet lets people see/hear Iran’s side of the narrative quickly and easily.
That open communication is the difference between a propagandised populace baying for blood, and an informed public asking the right questions. The difference between “historical realisation” decades after the fact, and instantaneous fact-checking. The difference between war and peace.
The almost-war with Iran is just the most recent example. Going back years now “official narratives” have faced a heretofore unknown level of challenge. The sheer number of people calling BS on the Skripal affair and the Douma chemical attack prevented a stronger reaction to both those false flags.
The war in Syria didn’t happen. The war in Iraq did. People believed babies were thrown out of incubators, but never bought that Assad had gassed his own people. All because of the direct channel of communication between people who know the truth and the people who want the truth.
That’s the channel Google are trying to close. Google, and Facebook, and Twitter and everyone else.
And, of course, the press cheers them on. Demanding we have our rights taken away for the sake of freedom, and applauding when some massive corporate conglomeration places yet another restriction on the liberty of the individual.
The Guardian has always been at the forefront of that push, with their absurd “Web We Want” section (which died a swift death, fortunately).
This article uses all the usual tricks, dressing the issue up in emotionally manipulative language – citing mass shootings and holocaust denial as if free speech precludes being wrong or offensive (it doesn’t).
The specifics don’t matter. Examples don’t matter. All that matters are the precedent and the future applications.
This is about what all “safeguards” on the internet are about – controlling the narrative. The old idiom still applies:
Knowledge IS power.
Right now WE have it, and THEY want to take it back.
Kit Knightly is co-editor of OffGuardian. The Guardian banned him from commenting. Twice. He used to write for fun, but now he’s forced to out of a near-permanent sense of outrage.
Internet users beware, GCHQ is trolling you
Press TV – July 3, 2019
Britain’s primary signals intelligence organization, Government Communications Headquarters (GCHQ), is actively recruiting for what it calls “Covert Online Operators”.
GCHQ recruiters are vague about the role, describing potential applicants as people who are “passionate” about the online world and are dedicated to using it to achieve “real world” results.
The successful applicant is expected to confront what is billed as Britain’s “adversaries” in an online setting with a view to delivering “end-to-end” results. The job description mentions “scoping” as well as working with “behavioural scientists” to achieve “operational objectives”.
Despite going to great lengths to present the job as high-end and sophisticated, nonetheless there are give-aways which reveal the real nature of the work.
Foremost, successful applicants only require A-levels or a university degree in any subject and then only at 2:2 level. The relatively low-level entry threshold is in stark contrast to the stringent entry requirements for mainstream national security-related jobs which typically require high level academic achievements.
The job description has led British political analysts to speculate on whether GCHQ is looking to employ trolls or social media disruptors whose job it is to identify and harass critics and opponents of British government policy online.
One such analyst is former British diplomat and ex-ambassador to Uzbekistan turned whistleblower, Craig Murray, who has long complained of online harassment at the hands of alleged British government trolls.
According to Murray the British government employs “a very large number” of people to shape the online political narrative in a manner consistent with British government positions and interests.
GCHQ’s large-scale recruitment of online trolls runs the risk of undermining the UK’s position in three important respects. Foremost, it undermines the myth of GCHQ as a cutting edge signals intelligence and cyber warfare organisation. By recruiting trolls, GCHQ is effectively admitting to online harassment and other low-level activities.
By implicitly admitting to deploying an army of trolls, the British government undermines its claims of strong commitment to media freedom and integrity on the world stage.
As critics of the British government have pointed out, if the establishment uses industrial-level trolling to silence dissidents and critics at home, it leaves little to the imagination as what it is capable of doing overseas to shape the debate in favour of Britain’s ruling elites.
To reinforce the message of cyber victimization, the British government set up the National Cyber Security Centre in 2016 ostensibly to combat cyber-based threats.
Despite the fact the UK likes to paint itself as a victim of cyber aggression, by most credible accounts Britain is more engaged in cyber offence than defence. Back in September it was reported that the Ministry of Defence and GCHQ are setting up a £250 million joint cyber warfare centre to take the fight to Britain’s adversaries.
Britain employs thousands of skilled personnel in cyber offensive roles and the government readily admits to a £1.9 billion national cyber security strategy.
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MMR (Measles, Mumps and Rubella) – Vaccine Risk Statement
MMR Vaccine (Measles, Mumps, and Rubella) Is It Safer Than Measles, Mumps and Rubella?
Physicians for Informed Consent | December 2024
… It has not been proven that the MMR vaccine is safer than measles, mumps, and rubella. The vaccine package insert raises questions about safety testing for cancer, genetic mutations, and impaired fertility. Although VAERS tracks some adverse events, it is too inaccurate to measure against the risk of measles, mumps, and rubella. Clinical trials do not have the ability to detect less common adverse reactions, and epidemiological studies are limited by the effects of chance and possible confounders. Safety studies of the MMR vaccine are particularly lacking in statistical power. A review of more than 60 MMR vaccine studies conducted for the Cochrane Library states, “The design and reporting of safety outcomes in MMR vaccine studies, both pre- and post-marketing, are largely inadequate.”19 Because permanent sequelae (aftereffects) from measles, mumps, and rubella are so rare (especially in children with normal levels of vitamin A and infected after birth),6,15-17 the level of accuracy of the research studies available is insufficient to rule out the possibility that the MMR vaccine causes greater death or permanent disability than measles, mumps, and rubella. – Read full article
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