The Guardian plumbs new depths: its resident ‘Russiagate’ fanatics claim that Putin got Trump elected
By Paul Robinson | RT | July 16, 2021
From 2016 to 2020, a single story with two elements dominated the American headlines: Russiagate. The first part of the narrative was the claim that the Russian government had used a range of tools, including disinformation, to ensure Trump clinched his country’s highest office. The second was that Trump had knowingly colluded with Moscow to achieve this goal.
After endless repetition, these claims became something close to sacred ‘truths’ for some people. And yet, as we now know, the whole thing began with a falsehood, or more accurately a single document containing a whole series of falsehoods.
This was the infamous ‘Steele dossier’, assembled by former British intelligence office Christopher Steele, as part of a strategy by the Democratic Party to dig up dirt to blacken Trump’s reputation.
The dossier contained a number of inflammatory stories about Trump’s relationship with Russia. It also claimed its information came from sources close to the upper echelons of the Kremlin. This was untrue. As we now know, the information was hearsay, collected second- or third-hand by someone who didn’t even live in Russia. In short, it was a near total fabrication.
Unfortunately, Russiagate induced many journalists to abandon any effort at critical thinking and to treat all anti-Russian allegations with a distinct credulity. Particularly prominent among them was Luke Harding of The Guardian, who even published a book entitled ‘Collusion’, laying out the case against the Russians and Trump. Its logic was often rather bizarre. For instance, Harding’s “evidence” that an associate of an associate of Trump was a Russian spy was that he used emojis in an email.
I kid you not. You use emojis, you’re a Russian spy. It gives one a sense of the quality of Harding’s argument.
Indeed, Harding has what the British call ‘form.’ In another instance, he claimed Trump’s one-time campaign manager, Paul Manafort, along with unnamed “Russians”, had met WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange in the Ecuadorian embassy in London. Unfortunately, the story turned out to be untrue. It was never retracted.
In short, there are reasons why some might want to treat what Harding says with a generous pinch of salt.
All of which is necessary background for his latest article in The Guardian, which details confidential documents he claims to have seen, allegedly showing “that Vladimir Putin personally authorized a secret spy operation to support a ‘mentally unstable’ Donald Trump in the 2016 US presidential election.” The piece is co-authored by two other reliably anti-Russian Guardian hacks, Dan Sabbagh and Julian Borger.
The documents in question are supposedly records of a meeting of Russia’s National Security Council, which is said to have concluded that Trump’s election was desirable, as it would “lead to the destabilization of the US’s sociopolitical system.” To this end, the meeting purportedly resolved to “use all possible force to facilitate his election,” including introducing “‘media viruses’ into American public life, which would … alter mass consciousness.”
Unfortunately, Harding fails to provide full copies of the documents in question, limiting himself to a single extract. Nor does he say where he got the papers. The only corroborating evidence is that “The Guardian has shown the documents to independent experts who say that they appear to be genuine.” Of course, many “independent experts” also believed in the Steele dossier, the Hitler diaries, the Zinoviev letter, and many other dubious or entirely fabricated documents. An appeal to anonymous “experts” isn’t particularly useful.
Indeed, there are some reasons to treat the story with a degree of scepticism.
First, the documents are like the perfect, solid-gold-plated proof that Russiagate storytellers have been seeking for years. The story is a little bit too good to be true.
Second, if these papers are indeed real, either somebody in the Kremlin has decided to leak the most top secret of top-secret documents, or British intelligence has a spy there and has then fed the information to Harding, risking exposing him or herself.
Both options are out of keeping with the past. Leaks from Putin’s team are very rare, to the point of being almost non-existent, and, as far as we know, neither the British, nor indeed any Western intelligence agency, has ever had a spy in the heart of the Kremlin. One can’t rule it out, but one has to have one’s doubts.
Third, the alleged motivation for backing Trump outlined in the documents smacks of what people in the West now retroactively think happened, rather than what would have likely been in the mind of Russian officials at the time.
In 2016, the primary reason why the Kremlin might have wanted Trump elected was a perception that he was not as hostile to Russia as his rival Hillary Clinton. Indeed, he had stated in speeches that he favored better relations with Moscow. But this isn’t mentioned in Harding’s documents. Instead, the focus is on “destabilizing” the United States by stirring up trouble through the election of a mentally unstable president.
These are not ideas that anybody in authority in the Kremlin has ever publicly expressed. Instead, they are ideas that gradually became dogma among conspiracy theorists between 2016 and 2020. In other words, the documents read like what Western Russiagate theorists imagine is what the Russians think, rather than what they really do think.
And fourth, it turns out that the short excerpt published with Harding’s article has a number of linguistic and grammatical errors, giving rise to speculation that it was written by a non-native speaker of Russian and then translated. Of course, this is far from firm proof of forgery – it could be that Kremlin notetakers just don’t write very well. But it’s food for thought.
One common method of rating intelligence is an alpha-numerical system in which the letters measure the reliability of the source (from A, ‘Reliable’, to E, ‘Unreliable’, and F, ‘Reliability Unknown’), and the numbers measure the reliability of the information (from 1, ‘Confirmed from other sources’, to 5, ‘Improbable’, and 6, ‘Validity of the information cannot be determined’). In this case, one would probably have to rank Harding’s story as D6. The reliability of the source – Harding – is open to doubt, and the validity of the information cannot be confirmed.
This doesn’t mean the documents are fakes. D6 doesn’t mean false. But, at the same time, it’s not exactly A1 either – you need to treat the information in question with extreme caution.
Maybe the Russian National Security Council did indeed plot to put Trump in the White House. Or maybe not. We’re not in a position to tell. Either way, but you shouldn’t take The Guardian’s word for it.
Paul Robinson, a professor at the University of Ottawa. He writes about Russian and Soviet history, military history, and military ethics, and is author of the Irrussianality blog http://t.me/irrussian
Bill Gates’s stranglehold on the MSM: Part 2 – Britain
By Karen Harradine | The Conservative Woman | July 16, 2021
WITH an estimated fortune of $128.9billion, Bill Gates is the fourth richest man in the world, after Amazon’s Jeff Bezos, Bernard Arnault and Elon Musk, according to Forbes.
He’s stepped back from the day-to-day running of Microsoft, the company he founded in 1975, and focuses on his so-called philanthropy through the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation (GF), and is best known for his worldwide vaccination and anti-malaria programmes.
Less widely known is that he has spent hundreds of millions bankrolling news outlets, in the process turning the GF into one of journalism’s main gatekeepers. According to Tim Schwab of Columbia Journalism Review, by last June more than $250million had gone to news operations including the BBC, NBC, Al Jazeera, ProPublica, National Journal, the Guardian, the Financial Times, Univision, Medium, the Atlantic, the Texas Tribune, Gannett, Washington Monthly, Le Monde, and the Center for Investigative Reporting; and to charitable organisations affiliated with news outlets, like the BBC’s Media Action and the New York Times’s Neediest Cases Fund.
As I reported in Part One of this investigation, most of this funding comes under the fine sounding GF heading of Global Policy and Advocacy, of which the BBC is a major beneficiary. Little wonder that there is little that is dispassionate about its reporting on Covid-19 vaccination or climate change.
It’s not just the BBC that the GF manipulates through these means. Between 2016 and 2020, the Financial Times received $2.3million from the GF, including $1.3million to fund ‘global health awareness’. The Guardian is another recipient of Mr Gates’s largesse. Like the BBC, it sports a ‘Global Development’ site, the common root being GF funding. Its claimed editorial independence is contradicted by its stated sole campaigning purpose to provide special focus on the Millennium Development Goals, eight targets set in 2000 by the United Nations Millennium Declaration. The Guardian has bought into this to the extent that it operates mainly as a deferential PR channel for both the UN and the GF.
The collaboration with the GF to ‘help focus the world’s attention on global development’ goes back 11 years. This is a sophisticated propaganda exercise to convince the public of the beneficial nature of Gates’s investments in a multitude of global development projects including vaccines and solutions for climate change. It helps ensure that any alternative narrative or critique is unlikely to see the light of day in any of the outlets to which he extends his munificence.
Since August 2011, the GF has given the Guardian $12.2million towards this, the latest grant being almost $2million last September. The Guardian has not only busily promoted the Millennium Development Goals, but also its spawn, the UN 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development, yet another dishonest scheme to take guilt money from Western taxpayers and give it to the world’s despots and dictators, all in the name of climate change.
Yet, as I have previously set out: ‘Very little information is available on exactly how the money is invested and who benefits from it. No information is offered to indicate if it has been cost-effective and beneficial to the economies and welfare of the 193 countries signed up to it.’
The British public have been drip-fed this propaganda for years through various GF-funded MSM mouthpieces such as the BBC. Yet it’s the economically fragile West which pays for the 2030 Agenda and its climate change ‘remedies’, draining it of even more of its resources while authoritarian regimes like China benefit financially and increase their dominance over the UN. The MSM barely protests.
The worry is that the GF has not only captured the Left-wing media in Britain: it has also made inroads into the so-called Centre and Right. The Telegraph accepted $3.4million from the GF in November 2017 to ‘raise awareness’ of global health issues. The London Evening Standard was awarded money in the same year too, receiving $20,000 to spread the GF propaganda on the ‘global health crisis’.
The growing financial dependence of the MSM on a combination of Government advertising and GF largesse has already put its impartiality in jeopardy. This is threatened further by the GF’s funding of a global network of young ‘journalists’. This project, called the International Centre of Journalists, has been given $20.4million to promote ‘public awareness’ around global health. Based in the US, the organisation finances activists to promote ‘better governments’ and make ‘communities safer and healthier’, amongst other woke ideals. Their 2020 annual review predictably emphasises the need to highlight racial injustice and climate change, and combat ‘disinformation’ about Covid-19.
As Robert Kennedy Junior says, Gates’s press bribes have paid off. ‘During the pandemic, bought and brain-dead news outlets have treated Bill Gates as a public health expert despite his lack of medical training or regulatory experience.’
Gates also funds an army of independent fact checkers including the Poynter Institute and Gannett which, Kennedy points out, use their platforms to silence detractors and to debunk as ‘false conspiracy theories’ and ‘misinformation’ charges that Gates has championed and invested in sinister endeavours like biometric chips, vaccine passports and satellite systems.
Yet all the evidence is available at a click of a mouse button. Last March, Gates began his vaccine passport campaign. The GF-funded Guardian and the BBC have unquestionably cheered on this digital slavery. In 2018, Gates gave a satellite start-up $1billion to build a system which broadcasts real-time videos globally. What better way to ensure that the little people are behaving themselves than by funding a satellite system to monitor us all? Despite the vehement denials of the GF funded ‘fact checkers’, Gates has built his Covid-19 vaccine factories, and seemingly now seeks a return on his investments.
Many lament the decline of journalistic standards in our New Dark Age. Of those responsible for turning a once-brilliant British media into an uncritical disseminator of propaganda, the GF must be placed centre stage. Now the MSM, like the Government, are often nothing more than useful idiots for the GF and its destructive policies, mindlessly chanting the GF narrative on development, climate change and Covid-19; and whose ‘solutions’ to these are destroying the free and prosperous West.
Don’t expect our MSM journalists to protest: they have long since been bought, paid for and brainwashed.
Tennessee vaccinations turn political: Dems denounce state halting programs that Republicans say bypassed parents
RT | July 14, 2021
After Republican lawmakers voiced concerns that Tennessee health authorities were directly targeting schoolchildren for Covid-19 vaccinations, the state halted the program – and came under fire from outraged Democrats.
The state Department of Health (TDH) is halting “adolescent outreach” for all vaccines, not just Covid-19, the Tennessean daily newspaper reported on Tuesday, citing “internal report and agency emails” they obtained. This includes Covid-19 vaccination drives on school property and reminders for teens to get their second dose of the jab.
Postcards and reminder emails will be sent to parents, so that they won’t be “potentially interpreted as solicitation to minors,” according to a TDH report cited by the Nashville-based daily.
The decision was reportedly made by Health Commissioner Dr. Lisa Piercey personally, and comes after the Monday firing of Dr. Michelle Fiscus, which the paper described as “Tennessee’s former top vaccine official.”
Fiscus claimed the decision was due to pressure from Republican state lawmakers who had embraced “misinformation” about Covid-19 vaccines. She also complained to CNN about a “toxic” environment at work.
At a legislative hearing in June, some GOP lawmakers accused TDH of circumventing parents and pressuring minors to get the vaccine using the school environment. Some conservatives said Fiscus was pushing to vaccinate teens without parental knowledge or approval, using what is known as the Mature Minor Doctrine, which typically says children 15 or older can consent to medical treatment.
According to the Tennessean, TDH Chief Medical Officer Dr. Tim Jones told staff they should conduct “no proactive outreach regarding routine vaccines” and “no outreach whatsoever regarding the HPV [Human papillomavirus] vaccine.” All school vaccination information should come from the Department of Education instead.
The paper’s report caused widespread outrage among Democrats. Former first daughter turned public health advocate Chelsea Clinton called the policy change “horrifying” with potentially “tragic consequences,” and insisted there was “no reasonable or moral defense” of it.
“Trumpism and right-wing anti-science extremism is harming and killing Americans,” declared Mother Jones writer David Corn, while Howard Fineman of the Yale School of Medicine called Republicans “pro-death & anti-science.”
“Does Tennessee really want kids not to be vaccinated against measles, mumps or meningitis,” Congressman Ted Lieu (D-California) wondered on Twitter.
“We’ve governed by nut-jobs with the intellectual skill sets of five year olds on sugar highs,” lamented Obama administration staffer and Democrat candidate for Congress Christopher Hale, who pointed out the halting of outreach applies to polio vaccines as well.
“They’re now, like, pro-polio?” tweeted MSNBC host Rachel Maddow.
However, the CDC recommends polio vaccinations starting at two months, with subsequent doses through age six. Measles-Mumps-Rubella (MMR) vaccines are typically given starting at 12 months, while the CDC recommends meningitis shots starting at age 11. None of these would apply to school outreach to teens.
The Tenneseean report did include a statement by TDH spokesperson Sarah Tanksley, who said the agency was responding to “an intense national conversation that is affecting how many families evaluate vaccinations in general.”
“Tennessee is on solid footing when it comes to childhood immunizations and will continue to keep information and programming in place for parents,” Tanksley said. “We are simply mindful of how certain tactics could hurt that progress.”
Covid-19 vaccinations at schools are being discontinued in part because of low demand, she added, but also “out of an abundance of caution” because they were “perceived by some to give the wrong impression regarding parental consent.”
“While the location may change, the effort to vaccinate individuals who choose to receive it continues,” Tanksley said.
Western media use images of PRO-government rally, protest in Miami to illustrate Cuban unrest as Havana warns of ‘soft coup’
The Guardian and a number of other Western news agencies used erroneously captioned photos of a pro-government protest in Havana, Cuba, presenting it as an opposition rally instead.
© TheGuardian.com / screenshot
RT | July 14, 2021
Several Western news outlets have used an erroneously captioned photo showing a pro-government rally in Cuba, deeming it an opposition protest, while CNN opted for an image of a Miami demonstration instead, raising eyebrows.
Captured by Associated Press photographer Eliana Aponte during a demonstration in support of the government in the Cuban capital on Sunday, the photo has made the rounds in the Western corporate press as unrest grips the Caribbean nation. However, multiple outlets have incorrectly described the image as an “anti-government protest,” including the Guardian, Fox News, the Financial Times, the New York Times, the Washington Times and Voice of America. The latter outlet, the US-government funded VOA, committed the error on two separate occasions.
GrayZone journalist Ben Norton and Alan MacLeod of MintPress News were among the first to note the error, sharing screenshots of several examples. MacLeod suggested the outlets may have simply “copied and pasted” the AP’s original photo caption, replicating the error across multiple agencies.
Both journalists pointed out the red-and-black flags hoisted by demonstrators in the photo, which read “26 Julio,” a reference to Fidel Castro’s 26th of July movement. The organization played a major role in the Cuban Revolution and later formed into a political party, with the two-colored flag becoming a common symbol of support for Cuba’s communist government.
Of the six news outlets cited above, only the Guardian had issued a correction at the time of writing, stating that it amended its story because the “original agency caption on the image… incorrectly described them as anti-government protesters. They were actually supporters of the government.”
The AP image is not the only photo to be misrepresented in Western media coverage. On its Instagram page, CNN also strongly implied that another photo showed Cuban protesters, with its caption reading, in part, “Thousands of Cubans protested a lack of food and medicine.” The image in question was taken by an AFP photographer, and a search through the agency’s photo gallery shows the rally was actually held in Miami, Florida. CNN appears to have omitted the first portion of the AFP caption, which made clear the protest was based in the US.
The photo mix-ups in corporate media have been compounded by a wave of false and misleading posts by observers online, with many users sharing photos of gatherings in Egypt, Spain and Argentina while claiming they depict unrest in Cuba – some racking up thousands of shares.
The anti-state protests kicked off in earnest on Sunday, seeing large crowds of demonstrators take to the streets in Havana and elsewhere to demand urgent action on food, medicine and power shortages. The government, however, claims the rallies are fueled by hostile foreign powers, namely Washington, and involve only a small number of ‘counter-revolutionaries’. President Miguel Diaz-Canal said US sanctions were to blame, arguing that Washington’s “policy of economic suffocation” aimed to “provoke social unrest” in Cuba.
Diaz-Canal also alleged that a “campaign against the Cuban revolution” had kicked off on social media platforms, saying they are “drawing on the problems and shortages we are living.” According to internet monitoring firm NetBlocks, Cuba’s state-run web provider ETECSA has moved to restrict access to certain sites and apps since the bout of unrest erupted on Sunday.
The head of the Cuban Communist Party’s ideological department, Rogelio Polanco Fuentes, also claimed that the country is experiencing an attempt at a “color revolution” or a “soft coup,” drawing a comparison to a failed US-backed uprising in Venezuela back in 2019.
Washington, for its part, has offered rhetorical backing to the protesters, with State Department spokesman Ned Price telling reporters on Tuesday that the government is looking at ways to “support the Cuban people,” though he did not elaborate.
Havana has so far offered few details on the number of arrests made or injuries sustained during the protests, though the Cuban Interior Ministry confirmed that the first death occurred during an anti-government action on Monday. Opposition groups, meanwhile, have alleged that a spate of arrests has targeted protesters, journalists and other activists.
Video producer Matt Orfalea censored again for calling out YouTube censorship
By Tom Parker | Reclaim the Net | July 13, 2021
After he published a video discussing YouTube’s censorship last month, video producer Matt Orfalea was censored and had his channel demonetized. Now, YouTube has targeted Orfalea once again and removed another video where he and his guest, independent journalist Alison Morrow, called out the tech giant’s censorship.
In the video, which is titled “YouTube BANS Reporter Exposing YouTube HYPOCRISY,” Orfalea and Morrow recapped the escalating YouTube censorship they have both faced.
This censorship began in June when Orfalea’s YouTube channel was suspended for uploading what he described as “unpublished rough cuts” of a video highlighting YouTube’s censorship of ivermectin.
Orfalea was then demonetized in July after YouTube flagged a seven year old, 13 second parody video for allegedly violating its “violent criminal organizations” policy. After facing backlash, YouTube admitted “error” but did not re-monetize his videos.
A few days after Orfalea was demonetized, he was a guest on Morrow’s channel in a video where she highlighted how mainstream media outlets are allowed to violate YouTube’s “medical misinformation” policy without facing sanctions. This video was censored and then reinstated after YouTube faced pushback for taking it down.
In the “YouTube BANS Reporter Exposing YouTube HYPOCRISY” video, Morrow suggested that her video may have been removed because of Orfalea’s guest appearance and speculated that YouTube’s artificial intelligence (AI) could be flagging people that have previously been sanctioned by YouTube and then censoring videos from other creators that associate with those that have been flagged.
“This is just a perfect example of what’s happening now,” Orfalea added. “Where we have this caste system, this blatant double standard… so clearly, as you’ve described, this is not about protecting viewers from misinformation, this is about allowing, you know, some privileged class of journalists… corporate media and allow them to say things without being challenged.”
Shortly after Orfalea posted this video where he and Morrow criticized YouTube for its censorship, YouTube took it down for allegedly violating the platform’s “medical misinformation” rules.
Orfalea appealed but YouTube rejected the appeal and told him: “We reviewed your content carefully, and have confirmed that it violates our medical misinformation policy.”
“I’ve been dealing with this insanity for almost a full month now,” Orfalea said after YouTube rejected his appeal. “YT reinstated Alison’s video. So they should reinstate my video, referencing hers, too!”
YouTube’s consistent targeting of Orfalea is reflective of the double standard on YouTube between independent creators and mainstream media outlets that he called out in this now-censored video.
Independent creators are 20x less likely to top coronavirus search results, 14x less likely to be recommended on election related content, and 10x less likely to top search results for some other newsworthy events.
YouTube’s CEO Susan Wojcicki has also admitted that the platform’s recommendation algorithm was changed in response to the media’s radicalization theory and said the platform won’t recommend YouTubers for breaking news.
Related: 🛡 Big Tech’s double standard on “conspiracy theories” when they come from mainstream media
Gemma Peters- did I hear you right?
By Roger Watson | Unity News Network | July 12, 2021
Unfortunately, I did. I caught snippets on 9 July of an interview on the BBC Radio 4 Today programme with Gemma Peters, Chief Executive of the charity Blood Cancer UK. Ms Peters has already declared and tweeted that ‘19 July won’t be freedom day for everyone’ so she is going to keep wearing her mask. Fair enough, I don’t care if she wears a paper bag over her head. But why tell us about it? And then I heard something so absurd that I had to go to BBC Sounds to re-run that section of the Today programme to verify it. And I had heard right.
According to Gemma Peters, many people with blood cancer and who may thus be immune system compromised either do not know they are compromised (something to do with ‘saving the NHS’ apparently) and others who do and who may or may not have been vaccinated may still be vulnerable to COVID-19. The answer? You probably worked it out. We should all be wearing masks all the time and socially distanced indefinitely to protect this group of people. We never know when we might be sitting next to someone who is vulnerable due to being immune compromised. I could, perhaps, appreciate this advice: 1. if face masks were effective; 2. if immune compromised people were coming down our streets in droves. But we all know masks are ineffective and the risk that Gemma Peters was pointing to applies, in the UK, to half a million people; 0.7% of the population.
So, Ms Peters, the immune compromised tail must wag the immune competent dog. Of course, that will be interpreted by my detractors as insensitivity to people with blood cancer. But what have these poor people, for whom I have every sympathy, done during influenza, norovirus and common cold epidemics? In fact, is this what they want? Do they really want to impose an ineffective and damaging restriction on the rest of the population? To tweak the heartstrings, the slot on Today opened with an interview with a man suffering from blood cancer who said how difficult it would be for him to get to work using public transport if people were unmasked. Hardly a representative sample but, of course, it gives meddling do-gooders like Gemma Peters the excuse to lecture the rest of us on how we should behave.
It strikes me that Gemma Peters and her executive team may not have enough to do. After all they have changed the name of their charity twice in four years. This undoubtedly involved a consultancy company and a fat fee. Now they have decided it is their job to try to control the lives of the rest of the population. I can imagine a host of other charities jumping on this bandwagon. How long before The Stroke Association, The Alzheimer’s Society and the British Heart Foundation weigh in? If they do, we must resist this ‘tyranny of niceness’.
‘Scientists’ Want Climate Change Deaths Reported Daily Like Covid
By Richie Allen | July 13, 2021
The Covid-19 pandemic is a hoax. The public are convinced that their lives are in danger, largely due to the media’s relentless reporting of cases and deaths every hour of every day.
Climate change is also a hoax. There is no evidence that CO2 is warming the planet and is responsible for extreme weather events. No really, there is not a jot of evidence to support the claim. Most people are indifferent to it. They’re not scared enough. What to do?
Climate evangelicals calling themselves scientists, want deaths caused by climate change, to be reported every day, just like covid. They also want climate change to be declared a global emergency.
According to SKY News today:
Climate change should be treated with the same urgency as the covid-19 pandemic, according to a study. The study, which was led by Glasgow Caledonian University Centre For Climate Justice, reported concerns that resources used for the pandemic response, would detract from those allocated to climate action.
It said that the recovery from covid-19 should be integrated with tackling climate change and that the public should be able to see climate data as easily as they were able to see data on coronavirus.
This would include real-time reporting of deaths and damage caused by adverse weather.
SKY News is there already. Since March, it has presented a climate change show called “The Daily Climate Show.” It’s usually hosted by Anna Jones. The programme features reports on adverse weather events from all over the world and how they ruin livelihoods, render people homeless and in some cases kill.
The show never offers any evidence that links Co2 to the bad weather. Along with the BBC, SKY has declared the science on climate change to be settled.
As I’ve reported on The Richie Allen Show, there are plans to introduce climate lockdowns in the future to reduce carbon emissions. Flights will be grounded, driving restricted, events shut down, certain foods banned and all in the name of protecting the planet.
It might be an easier sell, if people are shown a daily climate death count on the 24 hour news channels. It certainly worked with covid-19.
Despite the fact that bodies were not piled high in the streets, despite the fact that most people hadn’t been unwell or even known someone who had been seriously unwell or died, they believed that they were in imminent danger.
They believed it because it was repeated ten times a day, seven days a week. I believe that absent that level of propaganda, most people would have ignored covid-19 and we’d have been all the better for it.
Most people are indifferent to climate change. On some level they know that it is nonsense. Will their heads be turned by the reporting of daily death totals by the mainstream media? Time will tell.
Covid and the death of independent thought
By Elephant City | The Conservative Woman | July 10, 2021
The most depressing thing about the last 17 months is not what our governments have done. I have always expected governments to be corrupt and inept. They are merely acting in character. No, the truly depressing thing about the last 17 months is how people have acted, in particular, my family and friends.
My parents are practising Christians who marched against the Vietnam War and got arrested for protesting at nuclear submarine bases. They raised me to believe that the elites controlled the world and acted through intelligence agencies such as the CIA. They considered it self-evident that such ‘deep state’ actors killed John F Kennedy, Robert Kennedy and Martin Luther King. My siblings and I all absorbed the idea that the highest calling in life was to fight the tyranny of the wealthy over the common people.
I took this worldview with me. I sought out friends who appeared to share these values and whose intellects I respected. We spent countless late nights, over great quantities of beer, trying to peer behind the curtain to figure out exactly who ran the show. We went to New York City to participate in a No Nukes demonstration. I remember looking at my friends on the train back home: I thought, ‘We are the people.’ I felt lucky to have such good allies in this world. I was sure that they would stand beside me in the trenches should our country ever be threatened by tyranny.
All that said, I was neither naïve nor overly idealistic. On the contrary, as an adult, I was deeply cynical, at least about worldly institutions. But I had faith in the inherent goodness of people, the durability of common sense, and the wisdom of my friends and family, and my people in general.
In the last year and a half, this faith in humanity has been completely shattered, and that has shaken me to the core.
My parents have drunk deeply at the well of government propaganda. Despite the fact that their son’s business (mine) has been destroyed and their grandchildren’s education and social lives ruined, they cannot bring themselves to utter a peep of protest. They’ve accepted the closing of churches with perfect equanimity, apparently unaware that had the early Christians been so cowardly in their faith, Christianity would never have survived long enough for them to become Christian in the first place. They’ve acquiesced to the sacrifice (‘vaccination’) of children to ‘protect’ the elderly.
When presented with facts and data that contradict the mainstream narrative, my parents and siblings react with real anger. They refuse to discuss any of it. Years ago, even if we disagreed about a topic, we could discuss it without it threatening our relationship. Not any more. They don’t want to hear anything that goes against the media narrative.
As for my group of 20 or so close friends, most of them either ardently support the mainstream narrative or simply can’t be bothered to oppose it. They’ve not only accepted the theft of their most basic freedoms, they defend that theft.
These same guys who used to treat the mainstream media with healthy suspicion now parrot their talking points without a hint of irony. They seem completely unaware that the mainstream media have undergone a drastic transformation in the last five years, changing from sources of information to strident propaganda organs broadcasting a steady narrative of divisive woke talking points designed to split the masses into warring groups, while a tiny elite solidifies their control of the world’s wealth. They’ve gone from deriding the mainstream media as consent-manufacturing organs of the Machine to having a childlike faith in the latest pronouncements of Big Brother.
People I knew to be filled with curiosity and hungry for knowledge now display a kind of allergic reaction to any new information. Faced with something from outside the mainstream narrative, their reaction ranges from annoyance to outrage.
Only three of my close friends have resisted the Covid narrative. We’ve engaged in a running battle with our group about the latest abomination committed in the name of fighting Covid-19, but we’ve made no headway. We’ve finally come to the conclusion that no argument, however clever, and no data set, however telling, would change their minds. They are beyond reach.
We keep falling back on the metaphor of Invasion of the Body Snatchers, a 1956 sci-fi film remade in 1978 in which the human race is taken over by an interstellar virus: the people around us look the same as they did, but something is different. They aren’t there any more; the lights have gone out. Where common sense and reason once prevailed, there is now nothing but mindless repetition of talking points from the mainstream media. What happened to these people?
The most depressing thing is the utter shabbiness of the deception that has fooled my friends, family and countrymen. Satan is often portrayed as attractive, urbane and intelligent. It would be natural that people would be taken in by such a beguiling personality. We could forgive people for falling for his blandishments. But to see them fooled by a gang of such third-rate charlatans really boggles the mind. I mean, look at them: that creepy waxy cadaver, Joe Biden; the evil homunculus, Anthony Fauci; that crooked schoolboy, Matt Hancock; and that carefully calculated rumpled act of Boris Johnson. The merest glimpse of any of them sets my bullsh*t alarms ringing.
And the story they’ve swallowed! A few low-budget clips from China of people collapsing in the streets and endlessly recycled shots of lines of ambulances and crowded ICUs. People have completely ignored their own experience. Does this look like a pandemic? Where are the field hospitals crowded with dead and dying? Where are the mass graves? Where are the trucks calling for us to ‘bring out the dead’? Without the internet and mass media, not a soul on earth would think anything out of the ordinary was happening.
I’ve always attributed to humanity a certain animal intelligence and strength of character. But faced with a third-rate propaganda production delivered by a shoddy cast of charlatans, our most ‘educated’ people have shown all the discernment and mental acuity of the gormless rubes at a professional wrestling match. They’ve given up their most important freedoms and allowed their own children to be tortured, injured and killed without raising a finger in their defence.
The most telling realisation of the last 17 months is this: the mass of people are incredibly easy to propagandise and brainwash. Indeed, they seem to hunger for it, even at the expense of their own lives and those of their children.
I honestly thought we were better people. I thought that common sense, fair play and humanity were our default settings. I didn’t think that sheep-like obedience and cowardice were our deepest traits. But, the last 17 months have disabused me of this belief. And I don’t think I’ll ever recover from that loss.
Now, faced with ever more immersive media and more addictive and manipulative technology, all of it controlled and owned by sociopathic billionaires, I truly despair for our future. I keep thinking of the refrain from Ohio by Neil Young: ‘We are finally on our own.’
Nicaragua – Varieties of Neocolonial Solidarity
Nicaraguan student leaders lobbying for US intervention with Ileana Ros-Lehtinen and Marco Rubio
teleSUR | July 7, 2021
Just as in 2018, Nicaragua is once again the subject of the kind of mass international bad faith news coverage and perception management more usually associated recently with US and allied government offensives against Bolivia, Cuba, Iran, Syria and Venezuela. In Nicaragua’s case the current offensive is aimed at influencing the country’s elections scheduled for next November 7th. Currently, all the opinion polls show that, should President Daniel Ortega stand again for election, he and his FSLN party will win easily with over 60% support against around 20% for the the country’s right wing opposition.
The campaign against Nicaragua’s Sandinista government is clearly intended to encourage punitive coercive economic measures from the US and European Union governments aimed at influencing voter opinion in those November elections against President Ortega and the FSLN. Right now, the main false accusation is that “Ortega” has unjustly imprisoned over twenty opposition leaders, among them several presidential candidates. All US attempts to overthrow governments resisting US and allied government dictates depend on this kind of big lie. The standard big lie is that target governments are unpopular, repressive dictatorships. Invariably, the truth is very different if not the complete opposite.
For example, in 2009, the big lie in preparation for the coup against then Honduran President Manuel Zelaya was that the proposed Fourth Ballot referendum aimed to secure him re-election so as to impose a dictatorship. In Nicaragua’s case, the current big lie is that “Ortega” is arresting opposition leaders to prevent them defeating him in next November’s elections. These big lies only flourish in an essentially fascist culture of corporate dominated government in which truthful information is systematically suppressed and substituted by false beliefs.
Typical Western false beliefs or presuppositions are, for example, that the US and its allies are a force for good in the world, that Western culture is morally superior to others and that capitalism promotes optimal economic and social outcomes. These ridiculous false beliefs are fundamental tenets of Western intellectual life and public discourse. They make possible the kind of psychological warfare repeatedly unleashed against governments that obstruct the wishes of Western corporate elites and the governments they own.
An important component of Western psychological warfare shaping the moral dimension of any given disinformation assault is the essentially class based solidarity with the target country’s imperialist proxies. This neocolonial solidarity operates in reactionary and progressive varieties, both claiming a Western monopoly on freedom, democracy and defence of human rights. Both essentially agree that governments resisting Western demands deserve to be attacked one way or another.
The reactionary variety, prevalent mostly among the business and financial classes and related professionals, insists on abandoning international law in favour of intervention based on Western dictated rules. The progressive variety, prevalent mostly among non profit organizations, academics and other socially oriented professionals, agrees but is more diffident about the means of intervention deployed, demanding alibis to satisfy susceptibilities over humanitarian and human rights concerns. The right wing variety generally favors aggressive, overt or covert military-based solidarity with armed opposition rebellion, while the progressive variety favors smart-power coercive measures prioritizing solidarity with some version of opposition civil society or popular movements.
Nicaragua experienced the first right wing version of neocolonial solidarity during the Contra war of the 1980s when president Reagan declared, with more truth than he realized, that the CIA-run narco-terror campaign was “the moral equivalent of the founding fathers”. Subsequently, ever since the Sandinista FSLN party returned to government in 2007, Nicaragua has experienced principally the progressive version of smart power neocolonial solidarity developed under president Obama. That policy, supporting Nicaragua’s anti-Sandinista opposition, intensified under president Trump and continues unchanged now under “Biden”.
Self-evidently, these varieties of neocolonial solidarity thrive on their respective class loyalties and ideological susceptibilities. In 2018, a massive disinformation campaign covered up the Nicaraguan opposition’s extreme violence and their deliberate campaign of destruction. As Harold Pinter remarked in relation to the 1980s Contra War, even as the opposition violence of 2018 was happening, the murders, the extortion, the arson, the torture, it was made to seem that nothing happened. Now, when the Nicaraguan authorities have acted to preempt a repeat of that failed 2018 coup attempt, a furious psychological warfare assault is taking place to conceal the coup mongering opposition’s treasonous collusion with the US and EU country governments.
As regards progressive and left wing opinion in general, militant foreign supporters of Nicaragua’s ex-sandinista opposition have long been important protagonists covering up the ex.sandinistas’ anti-democratic collaboration with Western imperialist intervention. Even before the 2006 elections, the US authorities had coopted ex sandinistas as collaborators. But when Daniel Ortega and FSLN won those elections, successfully managed the crisis of 2008-2009 and then triumphed in the 2011 elections, US government support for the opposition switched to promoting efforts at outright regime change. Inside Nicaragua, the ex sandinistas, devoid of popular support, abused their non profit networks to camouflage their political opposition to the government and the accumulation of resources necessary to mount the 2018 coup attempt.
That systematic abusive subterfuge has been eliminated and its protagonists held to account. So now foreign supporters of the ex sandinista opposition again cloak their militant, aggressive, politically driven advocacy under phony human rights concerns. In 2018, they did so to cover up the violent role of the ex sandinistas in the failed coup attempt. Now, they falsely allege human rights abuses to cover up ex sandinista US collaborators’ treasonous criminality. The false human rights propaganda motif makes it possible for proponents of the progressive variety of neocolonial solidarity in North America, Europe and elsewhere, to work in parallel with their right wing counterparts. Even many supposedly left wing figures have written articles or signed declarations in support of the ex-Sandinista US collaborators and those people’s right wing allies in Nicaragua. They do so for three main reasons.
Firstly, many supposedly left-wing figures attacking the Nicaraguan authorities for defending Nicaragua’s independence and sovereignty have some degree of friendship with the ex-sandinistas now under investigation, so they defend them for essentially personal reasons. Secondly, it is likely that many supposed left wingers supporting the ex Sandinista US collaborators have been duped by the massive psychological warfare assault on Nicaragua without bothering to question it. A third main reason for that kind of neocolonial solidairty from people who should know better, is that they fear alienating their support networks and are simply signaling how virtuous they are so as to avoid criticism.
In any case, the current situation, just like the 2018 coup attempt, categorically defines where everyone’s loyalties lie. People genuinely committed to the principles of sovereign independence and self-determination recognize the Nicaraguan authorities are applying the country’s laws and criminal code to defend the country against US intervention aimed at overthrowing the elected government. People who believe the bogus human rights accusations and claims that the current criminal investigations are driven by electoral considerations are engaging in the kind of neocolonial solidarity regularly deployed to justify yet another operation of imperialist regime change. For anyone foolish enough to credit the ex sandinista leaders denials of complicity with the US government, this series of photographs should help disabuse them of that false belief.
‘They Make Unsubstantiated Accusations’: Venezuela Calls UN Report Fallacious
Orinoco Tribune | July 6, 2021
In a communiqué, the Bolivarian Republic of Venezuela rejected the fallacious content and highlighted the biased nature of a report published about the country’s situation by the Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights, Michelle Bachelet, on July 1, 2021.
This report is the result of a Resolution promoted by a small group of governments with serious domestic human rights violations, that conspired to satisfy the policy of “regime”-change promoted by the US against Venezuela.
Despite the attacks, Venezuela is distinguished by its harmonious constitutional system that guarantees and defends human rights. The state provides a protective shield for its people against the barbarous criminal blockade imposed and directed from Washington and the European Union, that constitutes a serious crime against humanity.
It is especially worrying that this report is based on information provided by individuals with unknown motivations, and has not been duly verified with the authorities of Venezuela, despite the extensive facilities that the Venezuelan Government has provided for the performance of the OHCHR functions within the country.
On this occasion, based on a handful of alleged complaints of human rights violations, unverified accusations are made against the Venezuelan institutions, further manipulating the false narrative constructed to artificially supplement the file currently before the International Criminal Court, with the political objective of destabilizing the democratic institutions of Venezuela.
In addition to this, the report omits mention of the 26 visits made to detention centers and headquarters of intelligence agencies during which the Office of the High Commissioner has been able to interview hundreds of prisoners, according to its own guidelines of operation. In the Office’s conclusions, delivered to the State, the people interviewed confirmed that their personal integrity was respected during their incarceration.
Venezuela has asked the Office of the High Commissioner to share information with the national authorities on the alleged cases referred to in the report, in order to carry out rigorous investigations and determine their veracity and, if applicable, the corresponding responsibilities, in full consistency with its policy of absolute respect for human rights. Similarly, the Office of the High Commissioner has been invited to accompany the investigation processes developed by local authorities.
The Bolivarian Republic of Venezuela, in order to continue intensifying due cooperation with this office, ratifies its willingness to maintain channels of communication and dialogue with the Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights, on the basis of strict adherence to the principles of objectivity, impartiality, non-politicization, respect for sovereignty, commitment to constructive dialogue, and—as required by international law—free from geopolitical agendas at the service of hegemonic powers.
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From the Archives
The Dirty Little Secret behind the “Global Terrorism Index”
The Omission of Israeli Terrorism in the Occupied Palestinian Territories
By Karin Brothers | Global Research | December 6, 2014
… The Israeli settlements — all of which are illegal – have been identified as a major impediment to peace. The refusal of a major “global” terrorism report to name the Israeli settlers as one of the groups most responsible for terrorism not only misrepresents a major source of regional violence but exposes the Global Terrorism Index as a propaganda tool that supports a U.S. agenda.
In recent years, governments have been attempting to thwart terrorism by blocking supportive fund-raising. When it comes to Israeli settlements, however, the US and Canada actually encourage fund-raising by giving organizations (such as Christian Friends of Israeli Communities (CFOIC) and the Jewish National Fund) financial support in the form of donor tax-deductions.
Charities which provide funds for the Israeli settlements should be regarded as terror-financing organizations. They should not only lose their tax-deductible status, but they should be banned because they support the violation of international humanitarian law. The terror-financing laws that are being strictly enforced for Muslim charities should be applied to Christian and Jewish charities as well. … Read full article
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