Interview 1625 – New World Next Week with James Evan Pilato
Corbett • 03/18/2021
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Welcome to New World Next Week – the video series from Corbett Report and Media Monarchy that covers some of the most important developments in open source intelligence news. This week:
Watch on Archive / BitChute / LBRY / Minds / YouTube or Download the mp4
Story #1: March 20 “World Wide Rally For Freedom”
https://www.startpage.com/do/search?q=March+20+World+Wide+Rally+Freedom
QAnon Groups on Telegram Seethe with Covid Denialism and Vaccine Misinformation
https://archive.is/cpznz
Global March 20 Anti-Vaccine Protests Promoted by QAnon-Linked Groups
https://archive.is/I3DX6
Far-Right Trump Supporters Hope to Use RFK Jr.-Backed Protests to Stage Comeback
https://archive.ph/FVEV1
No to the new normal which takes away the future of Japan and children’s smiles.
https://twitter.com/jimakudaio/status/1371045888001474561
Nagoya, Tokyo, Osaka, Okinawa, Kyushu, Shikoku, Tohoku and Hokkaido
https://www.facebook.com/events/188525632676626
World Wide Rally – Walk For Freedom – Calgary, Alberta
https://thelibertyclub.ca/event/world-wide-rally-walk-for-freedom-calgary-alberta/
No Lockdown, Yes Freedom: New Mexico Statewide Rally
https://cdn.discordapp.com/attachments/821800098953691178/821800379691433994/image0.jpg
Daily Kos: CIA-Engineered Controlled Opposition? (Aug. 9, 2007)
https://web.archive.org/web/20071011031548/http://kurtnimmo.com/?p=950
Story #2: Moderna Begins Study of COVID-19 Vaccine In Kids
https://archive.is/dnL9E
Toronto Lockdown Czar’s Husband Has ‘Financial Ties’ to Pfizer
https://www.lifesitenews.com/news/toronto-lockdown-czars-husband-has-financial-ties-to-pfizer-astrazeneca
“Doctor” Fauci sat down for an interview with Mexican “comedian”
https://twitter.com/wakeupfromcovid/status/1370188597366784003
Fauci gets grilled by Mexican Comedian
https://odysee.com/@TruthPills:5/derbez:3
‘Vaccine Secrets’: What Parents Should Know Before They Vaccinate Their Kids
https://childrenshealthdefense.org/defender/vaccine-secrets-parents-should-know-before-vaccinate/
Story #3: Spotify Censors Art for “Misinformation,” Pulls Ian Brown’s Anti-Lockdown Track
https://reclaimthenet.org/spotify-censors-ian-browns-anti-lockdown-track/
NSFW: Media Monarchy Cancels His Spotify Premium, Asks Questions About Other Pop Songs
https://twitter.com/mediamonarchy/status/1372018888674713600
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Is the new covid variant deadlier?
By Sebastian Rushworth, M.D. | March 18, 2021
An article was recently published in the British Medical Journal that reported on a matched cohort study which compared the risk of dying for those infected with the new British variant (a.k.a. B.1.1.7) and those infected with the older covid variants.
A matched cohort study is a type of observational study where you take a group of people with some condition and then try to find a similar group without the condition to match against. Then you follow the two cohorts over time and see if they differ in some meaningful outcome (like death). Since it is an observational study, it can only show correlation. It can’t prove the existence of a cause and effect relationship, but that doesn’t stop many people acting like it does.
The article has resulted in fear-mongering headlines in news media around the world. Just to take the first example I could find, Al-Jazeera published an article with the headline: “UK variant up to 100% deadlier more deadly, study finds”.
Those darn studies, they’re always finding things. It’s like a never-ending game of whack-a-mole. You knock one down here, and another one pops up over there. Anyway, let’s look into the study some detail, and see if the claim is true.
There were two criteria that had to be fulfilled for a person to be included in the study. They had to have a PCR-test positive for covid at some point between the beginning of October 2020 and the end of January 2021. And they had to be over 30 years old. The authors don’t provide any reason for the second criterion. The only reason I can see for removing people under the age of 30 is that they pretty much never die when they get covid, and including them would therefore have resulted in less impressive mortality numbers, which would have made it a little bit harder to use the results as part of public fear mongering campaigns.
In the UK, the PCR test currently in use is based on three reading frames. In other words, three separate pieces of viral RNA are sought. The B.1.1.7 variant has some variations in its genetic code that cause one of these reading frames to turn up a negative result. This is useful, because a problem with doing a big study like this and comparing mortality rates for different viral variants is that most people don’t actually get their infections gene-sequenced. So all you have to work with in most cases is a PCR test. But the fact that the B.1.1.7 variant has this oddity, that one of the three reading frames turns up a negative result, means that it can be identified through PCR with pretty good accuracy. No gene sequencing necessary.
So, what the researchers did was to put everyone with a covid diagnosis in which the other two reading frames were positive, but this specific reading frame was negative, into one cohort, the “B.1.1.7 variant” cohort. Those who had all three reading frames turn up positive were put in the other, “old variants”, cohort.
Now, as mentioned, a cohort study is a type of observational study, and observational studies are rife with confounding factors that mess up the results. In order to minimize this problem as much as possible, the researchers went through and matched each person in the new variant cohort to a similar person in the old variant cohort. The cohorts were matched on date of testing, in order to deal with potential biases caused by one person for example getting tested during the covid peak, when hospitals were overstretched, while the matched person in the other cohort got tested at a time point when nurses actually had time to fluff their pillows. The cohorts were also matched on geographical location, age, gender, and ethnicity.
The endpoint that the researchers chose to look at was death within 28 days. This is a very problematic end point, that will tend to overestimate mortality due to covid. Basically, anyone who had a positive covid test and who then died with the next 28 days was counted as a covid death. Even if they got hit by a bus. Apart from overestimating the covid death rate, this could also muddy the results of the study, making it harder to see a real difference in mortality between the new variant and the older variants, if such a difference does exist. Why they chose to do this rather than actually looking at death certificates, to see whether covid was listed as the cause of death or not, I really don’t understand.
Anyway, let’s get to the results.
54,906 people with the new covid variant were identified, and these were matched with 54,906 people with the older variants. Among those with the new variant, 227 patients died (0,41%). Among those with the old variants, 141 people died (0,26%).
So, the new variant does appear to be a little bit deadlier than the older variants, 0,15% deadlier to be precise. To put this in perspective, for every 700 people who develop covid due to the new variant, you can expect one extra death, as compared with getting covid due to the older variants.
You could of course, like the mass media do, focus on relative risk, and say that the new variant is 61% deadlier, or “up to 100% deadlier” as Al-Jazeera state in their headline (based on looking at the upper end of the confidence interval), but in this instance, looking at the absolute risk gives a much clearer understanding of how deadly the new variant actually is, don’t you think?
One should of course always remember that this is an observational study, and although the researchers have done their best to get rid of confounding factors, it is still possible that the increased mortality rate seen here is due to some unknown confounder, and not due to the new variant itself.
The thing that strikes me most about the results of this study is not the fact that the new variant seems to be a bit more deadly than the old variants, but how un-deadly this study clearly shows that covid is. We have to remember that this study only included people who actually took a PCR test. According to the eminent Dr. Anthony Fauci, 40-45% of covid infections are asymptomatic. Obviously, people who are asymptomatic are for the most part not going to get a PCR test (unless they get caught through contact tracing, but this likely only catches a small proportion of asymptomatic infections). And equally obviously, people with asymptomatic infections aren’t going to die of covid. So, although this study found a fatality rate of 0,41% for the new variant, and 0,26% for the old variants, the real fatality rate is likely considerably lower.
That is especially true if we also factor in that this study excluded people under the age of 30, and counted every death within 28 days of a positive covid test as a covid death. Both of those factors would push the fatality rate down further if factored in. So this study, funnily enough, adds to the existing evidence that the infection fatality rate for covid has been grossly overstated.
To be fair, the proportion of participants over the age of 80 in the study is low, only 0,5%, compared with 3% in the UK population as a whole, which will push the fatality rate in the opposite direction. Whether excluding everyone under the age of 30 (constituting 25% of the UK population) or only having 0,5% of participants be over the age of 80 (when they constitute 3% of the UK population) has the bigger impact on the overall fatality rate in the study, is hard to say. But it raises another interesting point. The mortality rate in the 80+ group in the study is 100-fold higher than it is among the people aged 30-59 (12%, or one in nine people, as compared to 0,12%, or one in 900 people). This is in line with earlier studies that have shown that the risk of dying rises steeply as people reach an advanced age.
As always, the devil is in the details. So, what can we conclude from this study?
The B.1.1.7 variant does appear to be a little deadlier than the older variants, increasing the risk of dying for the average person who gets a symptomatic infection by a marginal amount (0,15% to be precise).
However, the main take-away from this study is that the infection fatality rate, even with the new variant, is very low for most people. I think a more reasonable title for Al-Jazeera’s article about this study would have been “Covid much less deadly than everyone thinks, study finds”.
The Intellectually Superior Perpetual Victim Again on Display
By Philip Giraldi | Unz Review | March 16, 2021
Those who have followed developments in the Middle East would likely agree that Israel covers up its war crimes and other human rights violations by regularly invoking its own victimhood. Whether the subject is U.S. aid to the Jewish state or media coverage of the illegal expansion of Israel into the West Bank, one will always find references to the so-called holocaust or claims of anti-Semitism to discredit any criticism. And the results of this assiduous effort to assign guilt are clearly seen as the mainstream media in both the United States and Europe exhibits considerable reluctance to report honestly on what is being done to the Palestinians while politicians in the west sometimes appear to count themselves more as “friends of Israel” than as representatives advancing the interests of their own constituents.
As defenders of all things Israeli go, there is no one more assiduous than Bret Stephens of the New York Times. He is, of course, Jewish, and was the editor of the right-wing Jerusalem Post between 2002 and 2004. The Times employs him as one of its resident conservatives, though he would be better described as a neoconservative. Stephens’ recent piece entitled “California Ethnic Studies Follies” takes aim at California’s controversial diversity program that is being imposed on the state’s public school system.
Stephens’ article is sub-headed “A proposed curriculum magnifies differences, encourages tribal loyalties and advances ideological group think.” While it is clear that “Ethnic Studies,” a precursor to the current Critical Race Theory and similar to programs in a number of other states, does all that and more, Stephens inevitably turns the whole argument around to the alleged victimization of his own highly privileged caste, i.e. American Jews.
Stephens gets into it immediately, beginning his piece with:
“The first time California’s Department of Education published a draft of an ethnic studies ‘model curriculum’ for high school students, in 2019, it managed the neat trick of omitting anti-Semitism while committing it. More than a million Jews live in California. They are also among the state’s leading victims of hate crimes.
“Yet in a lengthy draft otherwise rich with references to various forms of bigotry, there was no mention of bigotry toward Jews. There was, however, an endorsement of the Boycott, Divest and Sanction [BDS] movement, which essentially calls for the elimination of the Jewish state. There was also an approving mention of a Palestinian singer rapping that Israelis ‘use the press so they can manufacture’ — the old refrain that lying Jews control the media.
“The draft outraged many Jews. And they were joined by Armenian, Assyrian, Hellenic, Hindu and Korean civic groups in a statement urging the California Department of Education to ‘completely redraft the curriculum.’ In its original form, they said, the document was ‘replete with mischaracterizations and omissions of major California ethnoreligious groups.’
“Last September, Gov. Gavin Newsom vetoed a bill that would mandate ethnic studies as a graduation requirement in California’s high schools, pending further review of the model curriculum. While some maintained that a critical ethnic studies curriculum was a mistake, and not just for Jews, others took the view that, when it came to those revisions, it was better to be at the table than on it. Progressive Jews helped redraft a curriculum that included two sample lessons on the Jewish-American experience, along with testimonials about Jewishness from the likes of Ruth Bader Ginsburg and Dianne Feinstein. A victory? One can still quarrel with the curriculum’s tendentiously racialized view of the American-Jewish experience. But at least the anti-Semitic and anti-Zionist dog whistles have been taken out and the history of anti-Semitism has been put in.”
To be sure, Stephens makes some good points about how the California program, which is again going to be voted on by the Board of Education later this month, is indoctrination and not education. But Stephens is also blind to the reality of what constitutes political power in the United States. He observes that the Irish, Poles and Italians apparently do not need to be supported by inclusion in an Ethnic Studies program while he simultaneously accepts that if there is such a thing Jews have to be carefully protected by it. And based on some of his other articles, his view of his own ethnicity seems to go well beyond that and is flattering to him and those who agree with his apparent view that that Ashkenazi Jews are intellectually and genetically superior to other groups.
One can only imagine what the reaction would have been if Stephens had written instead that whites are superior to blacks. And the points that Stephens raises in support of revising the California document to highlight both Jewish suffering and achievements are, of course, extremely self-serving. They are also deliberately deceptive. Yes, Jews have been “victims” of so-called “hate crimes” but the crimes themselves are very rarely violent. It has been demonstrated that many recent so-called anti-Semitic attacks on Jews involve easily recognizable Hasidic Jews and are actually based on community tensions as established neighborhoods are experiencing dramatic changes with the newcomers using pressure tactics to force out existing residents. And after the Hasidim take over a town or neighborhood, they defund local schools to support their own private academies and frequently engage in large scale welfare and other social services fraud to permit them to spend all their days studying the Talmud, which, inter alia teaches that gentiles are no better than beasts fit only to serve Jews.
Much more often “hate crimes” against Jews consist of graffiti or reaction to criticism of Israel for its brutal suppression of the Palestinians. Indeed, there are now organizations at universities like Canary Mission funded by Jewish oligarchs which encourage Jewish students to claim damages from critics while also “exposing them” on campus on behalf of Israel. A Jewish student walking on a college campus who passes by protesters objecting to Israel’s behavior can claim to feel threatened and the incident is recorded as anti-Semitism, for example, and slurs written on the sides of buildings or grave stones, not necessarily the work of Jew-haters, are similarly categorized. In one case in Israel in 2017, the two street swastika artists were Jews.
One is surprised that Stephens does not raise the issue of the “libel” of “Jews and money,” as if the Republicans actually loved a repulsive toad like Sheldon Adelson, who was dedicated to promoting Israeli interests, and bought the GOP foreign policy for $100 million. And Stephens is way over the top when it comes to characterizing BDS as a hate group that seeks to the “eliminate the Jewish state.” The group is explicitly non-violent and does in fact have significant liberal Jewish membership. It seeks to use economic pressure to compel Israel to behave better towards the Palestinians, similar to what produced change in apartheid South Africa.
But the most interesting aspect of the Stephens piece is the demand that Jews be universally recognized for their unique suffering. He considers it a libel when one maintains that Jews control the media… has he looked around the newsrooms at his own paper, the Washington Post, CNN, CBS and MSNBC lately? And as for bigotry and discrimination, how about consideration of the fact that Jews run Hollywood and the entertainment industry, are the wealthiest and best educated demographic in the country, are grossly disproportionate in high status and high pay jobs, and hold many of the top positions in the Biden Administration. Authorities like Professor Alan Dershowitz are quite outspoken in their praise of Jewish power in the United States. And Jewish organizations already receive more than 90% of the discretionary funding from the Department of Homeland Security to “protect themselves.” American Jews hardly seem to constitute a minority that needs more consideration and breaks because it is under siege, so when will Stephens stop whining?
And as for the claim of widespread anti-Semitism, one recalls the comment by former Israeli Education Minister Shulamit Aloni, speaking about calling critics anti-Semites. She said “Well, it’s a trick, we always use it. When from Europe somebody is criticizing Israel, then we bring up the Holocaust. When in this country people are criticizing Israel, then they are anti-Semitic. And the organization is strong, and has a lot of money, and the ties between Israel and the American Jewish establishment are very strong and they are strong in this country, as you know. And they have power, which is okay. They are talented people and they have power and money, and the media and other things, and their attitude is ‘Israel, my country right or wrong,’ identification. And they are not ready to hear criticism. And it’s very easy to blame people who criticize certain acts of the Israeli government as anti-Semitic, and to bring up the Holocaust, and the suffering of the Jewish people, and that is to justify everything we do to the Palestinians.”
Shulamit Aloni has described Bret Stephens and the political culture that he comes out of. Criticizing Israel or the sometimes predatory behavior of American Jews is one of the few remaining total taboos in America. One marvels at the recent account of a basketball player who apparently blurted out the word “kike” while engaged in a video game. Even though he apparently did not know that the word referred in derogatory fashion to Jews, he was suspended by his team and fined $50,000 by Adam Silver the NBA commissioner. Does anyone seriously believe that if he had said “Wop,” “Mick,” “Spick” or “Polack” he would have been punished at all? He was also required to publicly express contrition and forced to go through a counseling session with a representative from the Anti-Defamation League (ADL), which is, if I might be so bold as to suggest, the U.S. based enforcement arm of the powerful Israel Lobby.
Philip M. Giraldi, Ph.D., is Executive Director of the Council for the National Interest, a 501(c)3 tax deductible educational foundation (Federal ID Number #52-1739023) that seeks a more interests-based U.S. foreign policy in the Middle East. Website is https://councilforthenationalinterest.org address is P.O. Box 2157, Purcellville VA 20134 and its email is inform@cnionline.org
How Do Big Media Outlets So Often “Independently Confirm” Each Other’s Falsehoods?
NBC News’ national security reporter and long-time de facto CIA spokesman Ken Dilanian purporting to “independently confirm” a false CNN story, Dec. 8, 2017
By Glenn Greenwald | March 16, 2021
There were so many false reports circulated by the dominant corporate wing of the U.S. media as part of the five-year-long Russiagate hysteria that in January, 2019, I compiled what I called “The 10 Worst, Most Embarrassing U.S. Media Failures on the Trump-Russia Story.” The only difficult part of that article was choosing which among the many dozens of retractions, corrections and still-uncorrected factual falsehoods merited inclusion in the worst-ten list. So stiff was the competition that I was forced to omit many huge media Russiagate humiliations, and thus, to be fair to those who missed the cut, had to append a large “Dishonorable Mention” category at the end (note: the Intercept’s site seems to be down for the moment, rendering that first link inoperable).
That the entire Russiagate storyline itself was a fraud and a farce is conclusively demonstrated by one decisive fact that can never be memory-holed: namely, the impetus for the scandal and subsequent investigation was the conspiracy theory that the Trump campaign had secretly and criminally conspired with the Russian government to interfere in the 2016 election, primarily hacking into the email inboxes of the DNC and Clinton campaign chief John Podesta. And a grand total of zero Americans were accused (let alone convicted) of participating in that animating conspiracy.
The New York Times’ May, 2017 announcement of Robert Mueller as special counsel stated explicitly that his task was “to oversee the investigation into ties between President Trump’s campaign and Russian officials” and specifically “investigate ‘any links and/or coordination between the Russian government and individuals associated with the campaign of President Donald Trump.’”
The related secondary media-created conspiracy theory was that the Kremlin clandestinely controlled U.S. political institutions by virtue of sexual and financial blackmail held over President Trump, which they used to compel him to obediently obey their dictates. “I don’t know what the Russians have on the president, politically, personally, or financially” was the dark innuendo which House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and her media allies most loved to spout. “Prestige news” outlets created their own Q-Anon-level series of art designed to implant in Americans’ minds a slew of McCarthyite imagery showing the Kremlin (or an iconic Moscow cathedral they mistook for the Kremlin) having fully infiltrated Washington’s key institutions.
Cover story of The New Yorker, Feb. 24, 2017
But that all came crashing down on their heads in April, 2019, when Mueller announced that he was closing his investigation without charging even a single American with the criminal conspiracy that launched the entire spectacle: criminally conspiring with the Russian government to interfere in the election. Again: while Mueller — like so many Washington special counsels before him — ended up snaring some operatives in alleged process crimes committed after the investigation commenced (lying to the FBI and obstruction of justice) or unrelated crimes (Manafort’s financial sleaze), the 18-month aggressive, sprawling investigation resulted in exactly zero criminal charges on the core claim that Trump officials had criminally conspired with Russia.
If that were not sufficient to make every person who drowned the country in this crazed conspiracy theory feel enormous shame (and it should have been), the former FBI Director’s final Report explicitly stated that “the investigation did not establish that members of the Trump campaign conspired or coordinated with the Russian government in its election.” In many cases, the Report went even further than this “did not establish” formulation to state that there was no evidence of any kind found for many of the key media conspiracies (“The investigation did not identify evidence that any U.S. persons knowingly or intentionally coordinated with the IRA’s interference operation”; the “evidence does not establish that one campaign official’s efforts to dilute a portion of the Republican platform was undertaken at the behest of candidate Trump or Russia”; “the investigation did not establish that [Carter] Page coordinated with the Russian government in its efforts to interfere in the 2016 presidential election”). The Report also barely even dignified let alone confirmed the long-standing, utterly deranged Democratic/media conspiracy theory that the Kremlin had taken over U.S. policy through blackmail.
The Advocate, Mar. 10, 2017
For a few weeks following the issuance of the Mueller report, Democrats and media figures gamely attempted to deny that it obliterated the conspiracy theories to which they had relentlessly subjected the country for the prior four years. How could they do otherwise? They staked their entire reputations and the trust of their audience on having this be true. To avoid their day of reckoning, they would hype ancillary events such as Paul Manafort’s conviction on unrelated financial crimes or Michael Flynn’s guilty plea for a minor and dubious charge (for which even Mueller recommended no prison time) or Roger Stone’s various process charges to insist that there was still a grain of truth to their multifaceted geopolitical fairy tale seemingly lifted straight from a Tom Clancy Cold War thriller about the world’s two largest nuclear powers.
But even they knew this was just a temporary survival strategy and that it was unsustainable for the long term. That the crux of the scandal all along was that key Trump allies if not the President himself would be indicted and imprisoned for having conspired with the Russians was too glaring to make people forget about it.
That was why former CIA Director John Brennan assured the MSNBC audience in March — just weeks before Mueller closed his investigation with no conspiracy crimes alleged — that it was impossible that the investigation could close without first indicting Trump’s children and other key White House aides on what Brennan correctly said was the whole point of the scandal from the start: “criminal conspiracy involving the Russians . . . . whether or not U.S. persons were actively collaborating, colluding, cooperating, involved in a conspiracy with them or not.” Brennan strongly insinuated that among those likely to be indicted for criminally conspiring with the Russians were those “from the Trump family.”
As we all know, literally none of that happened. Not only were Trump family members not indicted by Mueller on charges of “criminal conspiracy involving the Russians,” no Americans were. Brennan believed there was no way that the Mueller investigation could end without that happening because that was the whole point of the scandal from the start. To explain why it had not happened up to that point after eighteen months of investigation by Mueller’s subpoena-armed and very zealous team of prosecutors, Brennan invented a theory that they were waiting to do that as the final act because they knew they would be fired by Trump once it happened. But it never happened because Mueller found no evidence to prove that it did.
In other words, the conspiracy theory that the media pushed on Americans since before Trump’s inauguration — to the point where it drowned out most of U.S. politics and policy for years — proved to have no evidentiary foundation. And that is one reason I say that the sectors of the media pretending to be most distraught at the spread of “disinformation” by anonymous citizens on Facebook and 4Chan are, in fact, the most aggressive, prolific and destructive disseminators of that disinformation by far (nor was it uncredentialed YouTube hosts, Patreon podcasters or Substack writers who convinced Americans to believe that Saddam Hussein possessed nuclear weapons and was in an alliance with Al Qaeda but rather the editor-heavy prestige outlets such as The New York Times, The New Yorker, NBC News and The Atlantic).
With the crux of the Russiagate conspiracy theory collapsed, U.S. media outlets began acknowledging — because they had to — that none of it was vindicated by Mueller’s report. To do so, they abruptly nullified a rule that had been in place since Mueller’s appointment: one may not speak ill of the former FBI Director because he is a patriotic man of the highest integrity and to malign him is to undermine the Brave Men and Women of the FBI Who Keep Us Safe. The only self-preservation tactic they could find to salvage their credibility was to turn on Mueller, quite viciously. Overnight, the storyline emerged: the conspiracy theory we pushed on you was correct all along, but Mueller was a coward and failed in his patriotic duty to say so.
While the hypocrisy of watching a media that for months demanded reverence for Mueller turn on a dime to accuse him of being a borderline-senile, unpatriotic coward was quite amazing, it was at least some progress toward acknowledging the undeniable reality that the media had collectively failed. Their dark conspiracies and predictions of doom were pipe dreams. They flooded the country with disinformation for years about all of this. And while they characteristically engaged in exactly zero self-reflection or self-critique — preferring to heap all the blame on Mueller instead for failing to find the evidence that is still out there of their cognitive derangements — it at least consecrated the fact that this scandal ended in humiliation for them.
When I created my top ten list of media Russiagate debacles, choosing the top ten was difficult but choosing the top spot was not. It is worth briefly revisiting that particular journalistic humiliation because of what it reveals about ongoing media behavior.
On the morning of December 8, 2017, CNN went on the air with one of the most cataclysmic and breathless scoops of the entire Russiagate saga. The network hauled out all of its most melodramatic graphics, music and host voice-tones to signify that this was it : the smoking gun, the ultimate bombshell, the final nail in the coffin, inescapable proof for their conspiracy theory. The big huge scoop notably came from its Congressional reporter Manu Raju (one of the favorite dumping grounds for false leaks by leading House Democrat Russiagate fanatics such as Rep. Adam Schiff and Eric Swalwell (D-CA)).
According to this historic CNN revelation, a stunning and incriminating email had been obtained by “congressional investigators,” and “multiple sources” conveyed its contents to CNN. This email proved, said CNN, that Donald Trump Jr. was given advanced access to the archive of DNC and Podesta emails ultimately published by WikiLeaks on September 14, 2016. This earth-shattering email to Trump, Jr. was dated September 4 — ten days before WikiLeaks began publishing — and this, in the minds of CNN, proved somehow that the Trump campaign was in on the plot from the start.
Now, even if Trump had been shown the archive in advance by WikiLeaks or someone else, it would not have remotely proven that the Trump campaign was a participant in the plot, but let us not get detained on that hypothetical. The CNN story was treated by the entire liberal sector of the press as the most devastating and incriminating evidence yet produced to prove the truth of the Russiagate conspiracy theory, with one particularly loyal Democratic partisan-writer using an image of a nuclear explosion to convey its significance:
Talking Points Memo editor Josh Marshall, Dec. 8, 2017
As it turns out, there was one small problem with the CNN story: it was completely and utterly false. The email to Trump, Jr. on which the entire bombshell was based was sent after WikiLeaks began publishing the archive, not before. And it was sent not by some super-secret inside source with the Kremlin or WikiLeaks, but by a random member of the public who, having read about the WikiLeaks publications in the newspaper, emailed Trump, Jr. to encourage him to take a look.
How “multiple sources” all got the date on the email wrong — mis-reading it as September 4 rather than the real date of the email: September 14 — was never explained by CNN. That is because corporate media outlets believe they owe the public no explanation or accountability for the massive errors they commit.
But what was most notable about this episode is that it was not just CNN which reported this fraudulent story. An hour or so after the network shook the political world with its graphics-and-music-shaped bombshell, other news networks — including MSNBC and CBS News — claimed that they had obtained what they called “independent confirmation” that the story was true.
All of these media outlets, reading Orwell as if it is an instruction manual, have now scrubbed most of the humiliating videos where they did this from the internet. But one can still watch here as NBC News’ national security reporter and long-time de facto CIA spokesman Ken Dilanian breathlessly tells an MSNBC host, who herself can barely maintain her composure, that he has spoken with “sources” who have provided independent confirmation of the CNN story, thus adding NBC News’ imprimatur to it. Shortly thereafter, CBS News did the same.
All of this prompted the obvious question: how could MSNBC and CBS News have both purported to “independently confirm” a CNN bombshell that was completely false? The reason this matters is because the term “independently confirm” significantly bolsters the credibility of the initial report because it makes it appear that other credible-to-some news organizations have conducted their own investigation and found more evidence that proves it is true. That is the purpose of the exercise: to bolster the credibility of the story in the minds of the public.
But what actually happens is as deceitful as it is obvious. When a news outlet such as NBC News claims to have “independently corroborated” a report from another corporate outlet, they often do not mean that they searched for and acquired corroborating evidence for it. What they mean is much more tawdry: they called, or were called by, the same anonymous sources that fed CNN the false story in the first place, and were fed the same false story. And just as CNN did — repeated what they were told (almost certainly by Democratic Congressional members and/or their staff) without independently investigating it, because they knew any anti-Trump story would please their partisan audience — NBC News pretended they had obtained “independent confirmation” when all they had done was speak to the same sources that fed CNN.
This episode is so worth recalling not only because it is one of the most stunning and pathetic media humiliations of the Trump era — though it is that — but also because the shoddy tactic that drove it is still in full use by the same media outlets. We just saw proof of that again with a major Washington Post “correction” — which should be called a retraction — of one of the most-discussed news stories of the last six months: the Post’s claims about what Trump said when he called a Georgia election official while he was still contesting the 2020 election results.
On January 9, The Washington Post published a story reporting that an anonymous source claimed that on December 23, Trump spoke by phone with Frances Watson, the chief investigator of the Georgia Secretary of State’s office, and directed her that she must “find the fraud” and promised her she would be “a national hero” if she did so. The paper insisted that those were actual quotes of what Trump said. This time, it was CNN purporting to independently confirm the Post’s reporting, affirming that Trump said these words “according to a source with knowledge of the call.”
But late last week, The Wall Street Journal obtained a recording of that call, and those quotes attributed to Trump do not appear. As a result, The Washington Post — two months after its original story that predictably spread like wildfire throughout the entire media ecosystem — has appended a correction at the top of its original story. Politico’s Alex Thompson correctly pronounced these errors “real bad” because of how widely they spread and were endorsed by other major media outlets.
This is a different species of journalistic malpractice than mere journalistic falsehoods. As I detailed in February and again two weeks ago, the U.S. public was inundated for weeks with an utterly false yet horrifying story — that a barbaric pro-Trump mob had savagely murdered Capitol Police Officer Brian Sicknick by bashing his skull in with a fire extinguisher. That false tale about the only person said to have been killed at the January 6 riot other than pro-Trump supporters emanated from a New York Times report based on the claims of “two anonymous law enforcement officials.”
As it turns out, Sicknick’s autopsy revealed that he suffered no blunt trauma, and two men arrested this week were charged not with murder but assault and conspiracy to injure an officer: for using an unidentified gas. In reporting those arrests, even The New York Times acknowledged that “prosecutors stopped short of linking the attack to Officer Sicknick’s death the next day” because “both officers and rioters deployed spray, mace and other irritants during the attack” and “it remains unclear whether Officer Sicknick died because of his exposure to the spray.”
Many liberals defenders of these corporate media outlets insist that these major factual errors do not matter because the basic narrative — Trump and his supporters at the Capitol are bad people who did bad things — is still true. But these errors are enormous. That Trump, Jr. received that email from a random member of the public after WikiLeaks began publicly publishing documents transforms the story from smoking gun to irrelevant. That Trump did not utter the extremely incriminating quotes attributed to him in that call at least permits debate about whether he did anything wrong there and what his intent was (encouraging the official to find the fraud he genuinely believed was there or pressuring her to manufacture claims with threats and promises of reward). And there is, manifestly, a fundamental difference in both intent and morality between deliberately murdering someone by repeatedly bashing their skull in with a fire extinguisher and using a non-lethal crowd-control spray frequently used at protests even if it is ultimately proven that the spray is what caused Officer Sicknick’s death (which is why those two acts would carry vastly different punishments under the law).
But all of this highlights the real crisis in journalism, the reason public faith and trust in media institutions is in free fall. With liberal media outlets deliberately embracing a profit model of speaking overwhelmingly to partisan Democrats who use them as their primary source of news, there is zero cost to publishing false claims about people and groups hated by that liberal audience.
That audience does not care if these media outlets publish false stories as long as it is done for the Greater Good of harming their political enemies, and this ethos has contaminated newsrooms as well. Given human fallibility, reporting errors are normal and inevitable, but when they are all geared toward advancing one political agenda or faction and undermining the other, they cease to be errors and become a deliberate strategy or, at best, systemic recklessness.
But whatever else is true, it is vital to understand what news outlets mean when they claim they have “independently verified” the uncorroborated reports of other similar outlets. It means nothing of consequence. In many if not most cases — enough to make this formulation totally unreliable — it signifies nothing more than their willingness to serve as stenographers for the same anonymous political operatives who fed their competitors similar propaganda.
Journalist Proclaims She Would “Love to Die” From the AstraZeneca Vaccine if it Helps Others
By Paul Joseph Watson | Summit News | March 16, 2021
A Norwegian journalist bizarrely claimed she would “love to die from the AstraZeneca vaccine” if it meant other people in Europe were not discouraged from taking it.
The statement was made in the headline of Linn Wiik’s article, which literally translates as “I would love to die from the AstraZeneca vaccine.”
The AstraZeneca COVID-19 vaccine has been temporarily pulled by numerous countries across Europe, including Spain, France, Portugal, Cyprus, Austria, Denmark, Slovenia and Norway, due to reports of blood clotting and several deaths of people who took the jab.
In response to the news, Wiik defiantly suggested that she would be prepared to die from taking the vaccine if it meant others were not discouraged from taking it.
“Some must be sacrificed in the war against the corona,” she wrote. “That’s the way it is in all wars. This time it may well be me.”
Wiik went on to downplay deaths and illnesses linked to the vaccine, asserting, “People get blood clots and die of cerebral hemorrhage every year.”
“But even if it turns out that it is the AstraZeneca vaccine that has caused blood clots or cerebral haemorrhage, I have no doubt: If I get the offer, I will take it anyway,” she continued.
“Because, sorry to say it so bluntly: Someone has to sacrifice in order for the rest to be safe.”
Judging by her picture, Wiik is not over the age of 69, meaning she has a better than 99.5% of surviving COVID-19 if she catches it.
One wonders if given the choice between those odds and risking serious illness from taking a vaccine from a contaminated batch that she would still choose the latter.
“Have we hit peak journo-ism yet?” asked Chris Menahan.
When it comes to vaccines, suddenly “from vs with” matters again
By Kit Knightly | OffGuardian | March 15, 2021
In the last few weeks the media has demonstrated one of the clearest, most concise displays of true-life doublethink I’ve ever seen. It truly is the perfect exemplar.
The dichotomy is in “covid deaths” vs “vaccine related injuries”.
As we all know by now, countries all around the world define “Covid deaths” as “people who die, of any cause, within 30 days of a positive test result” (the number of days changes by country, it’s usually between 28 and 60). This trend was started in Italy last spring, and spread all around the world.
Globally, with a few notable exceptions, a “covid death” is a death “from any cause” following a positive test.
And when they say “any cause”, they mean it. Up to, and including, shooting yourself in the head.
In one blackly hilarious case, a man “died of coronavirus” after being shot by the police, with his 7 gunshot wounds being listed as “complications”.
That’s how loosely defined “covid death” has become, it is more or less meaningless. However, Covid “vaccines”, and possible related injuries or deaths, are a very different matter.
The establishment is going out of its way to make sure everyone understands that anybody who gets ill, or dies, after being vaccinated, is absolutely NOT a “vaccine death”.
What’s hilarious is those same journalists and “experts” preaching against “Covid denial”, are now literally employing our own arguments against us in the name of defending the vaccines.
Check out this article from ABC a few weeks ago, quoting one doctor:
We have to be very careful about causality. There are going to be spurious relationships, especially as the vaccine is targeting elderly or those with chronic conditions. Just because these events happen in proximity to the vaccine does not mean the vaccine caused these events. Nursing home centers and hospices are of particular concern, because they are homes to incredibly frail populations, and you have to look at the background rate of these events within those populations.”
You see, it’s important not take deaths out of context. After all, many of the people who die after being vaccinated are old and frail and already seriously ill. We need to be “careful about causation”, just because event B happened after event A, does not mean A caused B to happen.
In other words: There is a difference between with and from.
Hmmm. Does that argument sound familiar to anyone else?
The article continues:
In fact, an average of 8,000 people die each day in the United States. Some of them may have just received a coronavirus vaccine.
Fascinating. Apparently 8000 people die each and every day in the United States – translating to roughly 3 million people per year – and falsely attributing natural human mortality to a potentially totally unconnected event might cause panic.
I really feel like I might have read a similar sentiment somewhere else, too. Don’t you?
The Reuters “fact check” on vaccine injury says exactly the same thing:
Reports of death following vaccination do not necessarily mean the vaccine caused the death,”
The sheer desperation of the PR in the press is apparent in all the headlines. Such as:
Pfizer Covid vaccine probably didn’t kill woman, 78, who died shortly after having it
Or:
Woman dies from brain haemorrhage in Japan days after vaccine, but link uncertain
Or:
Macomb County man, 90, dies after COVID-19 vaccine — but doctors say shots are safe
Essentially, if you die within two months of testing positive for Sars-Cov-2, you’re a “Covid death”, and if you die within two minutes of getting the vaccine, you’re a coincidence.
Now, that’s not to say the vaccine definitely did kill those unfortunate people, I don’t know the details of the cases. The point is the equivocation. The soft use of language which is totally at odds with the apocalyptic prose discussing “Covid deaths”.
Nowhere is this contradiction more apparent than in the UK right now, following the AstraZeneca situation.
A quick recap, for those who haven’t heard: Recently, the Norwegian government suspended use of the Oxford/AstraZeneca vaccine, following it being linked to increased risk of blood clots. Several other countries soon followed suit.
This has prompted a UK-wide defence of the AstraZeneca jab. Including this piece from David Spiegelhalter, in the Guardian just today, in which he uses the same exact argument as the ABC article, almost word for word:
It’s human nature to spot patterns in data. But we should be careful about finding causal links where none may exist
After 12 months of ignoring the conversation on “with” vs “from”, suddenly all the vaccine pushers have rediscovered the difference. None of them seem in any way aware of their self-contradiction.
But this ludicrous double standard doesn’t just apply to death, but also the concept of acceptable risk.
Appearing on Good Morning Britain today, UK Dr Nighat Arif encouraged the continued use of the AstraZeneca shot, by explaining that technically there’s always a small chance you’ll get a blood clot, but you can’t let that stop you doing what needs to be done:
As a GP I see clots a lot, unfortunately our background risk of getting a clot is about 1/1000 people. If you’re on a flight, your risk of clot increases. If women are on the contraceptive pill, their risk of clot increases. People going to hospital for surgery. However, we don’t stop doing any of those things.
The doctor is actually arguing that refusing to live your life based on a 0.1% risk of death is foolish, and that nobody should be expected to do that.
It is, literally, word for word a “Covid sceptic” argument, reproduced in the mainstream, without even the tiniest hint of irony or self-awareness. The very attitude they are taking towards “vaccine injury” is the same one they have condemned in “covid deniers” for over a year. By their hypocrisy they prove their own mendacity.
If they want to define a “Covid death” as dying within 60 days of a positive test, fine. But then anyone who dies within two months of getting vaccinated is a “vaccine death”. And they should have those two big red numbers counting up, right next to each other, on the front page of every news website in the world.
And if they don’t do that – which they obviously won’t – then you have a deliberately employed double standard, and that is a tacit admission of intentional deception.
It really is just that simple.
10 years since the war in Syria began, Western media & pundits still eager to keep it going
By Eva Bartlett | RT | March 15, 2021
After many wars built on lies over the decades, people might have developed a good BS radar. Instead, in March 2011, when media and human rights groups pushed propaganda about Syria, the public once again fell for it.
Front page, round-the-clock headlines were pumped out, and transparently hollow Western pundits tut-tutted Syria’s president and claimed the Syrian government was cracking down on “peaceful protesters.”
But this is March 2021, and while Western lies and fake concern have dominated news on Syria, Syrians deserve to have the reality – their suffering under some of the most heinous terrorism the world has known – highlighted instead.
In reality, March 2011 in Syria saw well-armed thugs attacking not only government buildings, but killing soldiers and civilians too.
In the months and years that followed, some of those who had been dubbed as “peaceful protesters” committed massacre after massacre of Syrian civilians and security forces.
Independent observers like Homs-based Dutch priest Father Frans van der Lugt witnessed “armed demonstrators who began to shoot at the police first.”
Flemish priest Father Daniel Maes, based in Damascus’ countryside, said:
“I have seen with my own eyes how agitators from outside Syria organized protests against the government and recruited young people. Murders were committed by foreign terrorists, against the Sunni and Christian communities, in an effort to sow religious and ethnic discord among the Syrian people.”
From my own fourteen visits from April 2014 and over the next seven years, what I’ve heard and experienced in Syria only confirmed my early suspicions that what Al Jazeera and Western media were purporting were lies.
– While people did aspire to political change (and the government made changes), from the start there was violence from well-armed “protesters.”
– Contrary to what the media would have us believe, there wasn’t wide support for what was dubbed a “revolution,” and it wasn’t actually a revolution. Predominantly Sunni Aleppo rejected the non-revolution.
– The core message of the protesters who continued beyond the first few protests was not about democracy but about driving out Christians to Beirut and killing Alawites. A sectarianism promoted by the West and its Gulf allies.
Although mass media attempted to paint events in Syria as a “civil war,” both Israel and Western nations have long been supporting terrorists in Syria, including Al-Qaeda in Syria (reportedly providing them medical treatment), and even Islamic State (IS, formerly ISIS).
And as I detailed, the West has long been working to change the government of Syria, even decades prior during Hafez Assad’s time.
How I saw Syria vs. what it looks like through Al-Qaeda-tinted glasses
In April 2014, I met an American living in Latakia who recalled reading a LA Times blog post alleging a protest which had turned violent in her city three years prior, but which never happened. According to her, she had been to the places mentioned in the report that day, and there was no unrest.
Years later in Damascus, I met and interviewed a Syrian doctor who had been based in Dara’a province in March 2011. He described how his hospital operated at normal capacity at the time. At the same time, he says he saw a repeated report on another mainstream outlet that said the facility was overwhelmed, not enough doctors were available, and moreover, the hospital was denying treatment to civilians, when in fact the hospital directives were to treat civilians before soldiers.
Since a core message in regime-change reporting on Syria has been that the people want the president gone, it’s worth noting that President Bashar Assad is actually quite popular among Syrians. In fact, I was surprised to come across a January 2012 admission of this, one of the worst purveyors of lies and war propaganda on Syria.
Assad’s popularity has only steadily grown. From the early months of 2011 to late 2011, 2012, and beyond, Syrians held mass demonstrations in support of their president.
In Lebanon in 2014, I witnessed a mass show of support during the presidential election. These were people determined to vote, and the people I spoke with proudly declared their support for Assad.
From 2014 to my last visit in 2020, Syrians have maintained to me that while there are a host of changes they do want for the country, seeing Assad step down is not one of them.
The Syrian government issues visas to journalists from the worst propaganda outlets (including the BBC, Channel 4, the New York Times and CBC), yet they have reported a vastly different Syria than that which I or my colleagues know.
In their Syria, the suffering of civilians in government-controlled areas doesn’t exist. If mentioned, they are dubbed “regime supporters,” thus somehow deserving of the shelling and other abuse perpetrated by terrorist factions.
The outlets don’t take into account the millions of internally displaced Syrians who have fled terrorism or fighting elsewhere in Syria and taken shelter in government-controlled areas, frequently coming under attacks of terrorists.
When greater Aleppo, with around 1.5 million people, was for years being attacked with gas canister bombs, mortars, grad missiles and sniping by terrorists occupying areas of the city (by November 2016 resulting in the deaths of nearly 11,000 civilians), media downplayed this, or simply didn’t mention it at all.
Even when mixed Christian and Muslim areas of Old Damascus were shelled by terrorists occupying eastern Ghouta – and they were shelled for years, until Ghouta’s liberation – this terrorism, and the many maimed and killed, was underreported, if reported at all.
In one instance, after an elementary school was mortared (killing one child and injuring over 60 more) the BBC’s reporter later disingenuously wrote, “the government is also accused of launching [mortar shells] into neighborhoods under its control.”
In summer of 2016, I travelled around Syria, meeting Syrians who had started their lives anew, displaced by terrorists, and meeting Syrians who had survived terrorist attacks only to be living within a few hundred metres proximity to them and at daily risk of sniping and shelling.
And all the while, the same war propagandizing, script-reading media glossed over the horrific realities of life under terrorist rule, which included imprisonment, torture, starvation, rape of women and public executions of civilians by sword or point-blank assassination.
‘Fallen’ cities, ‘chemical attacks’ and other lies
I’ve gone to many key cities and towns post-liberation from terrorist factions. Western media inevitably said these areas had “fallen,” bizarrely trying to claim that life under the government would be worse than life under the extremists who easily and routinely murdered civilians in the street.
Civilians under terrorist rule were starving – not by the Syrian government, but by the terrorists – and were often imprisoned in ghastly often underground prisons.
From the old city of Homs, to the ancient Aramaic-speaking village of Maaloula, to eastern Aleppo, to Madaya and al-Waer, to eastern Ghouta and even areas of Idlib province, civilians I met spoke of the hell they had lived under terrorist rule, and of their relief at being liberated.
When mass media said those areas “fell,” they were lying. Those areas returned to peace and stability.
UN representatives may feign concern and neutrality in matters Syria, but the UN has been complicit in ignoring terrorists’ shelling of Damascus and in silencing the voices of suffering civilians and Syrian representatives at the UN.
Then there is the issue of the alleged and never proven “chemical attacks” by the Syrian army.
I’ve written about the chemical weapons accusations, noting even a lead member of the UNHRC Commission of Inquiry, blamed the “rebels.”
Many journalists, including myself, have gone to Douma, the location of the latest alleged chemical attack, and interviewed medical staff and civilians, concluding that a chemical attack did not take place.
Douma witnesses spoke at The Hague, including a boy featured in Western media’s claims. Instead of considering these Syrian sources, pundits and media sneered at the “obscene masquerade” regarding the testimonies.
Yes, the same media which uncritically endorsed the Twitter account of a seven-year-old English-illiterate Aleppo girl as gospel in the lead up to the liberation of Aleppo refused to consider the testimonies of seventeen civilians from Douma.
The same media refused the revelations of the Organisation for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons (OPCW) whistleblowers who spoke out, damning the final OPCW report for its glaring omissions – omissions that completely changed the narrative around Douma.
In October 2020, the UN Security Council itself refused to allow Jose Bustani, former general director of the OPCW, to speak. I urge people to read Bustani’s words on the cover up of OPCW expert findings around the Douma allegations.
Still lying after all these years
Even now, five years after his image was plastered across global media as the “face of suffering in Syria,” allegedly hurt in a Russian or Syrian airstrike, the UK’s Independent has a photo of Aleppo boy Omran Daqneesh as its Twitter cover photo.
But this was a narrative debunked in mid-2017, when I met a healthy Omran and his father. The father specifically said there was no airstrike.
Still other lies that were debunked years ago are being recycled anew, in the West’s ceaseless attempt to criminalize Assad and legitimize the US coalition’s illegal presence in Syria.
But none of the media or pundits who claim to care about Syrians’ well-being address the actual causes (including terrorists) of their suffering, chief among which is the brutal Western sanctions against Syria, which directly impact on Syrian civilians’ ability to live and procure medicine, much less rebuild.
Also impacting on Syrians’ economy and sufficiency, the US’ theft of Syrian oil and cotton, and burning of wheat. And this, along with other US illegal policies in Syria, will only get worse under the Biden administration.
And if you peruse recent headlines, you’ll see the same old Western insistence that things won’t change until Assad is gone. They’ve blatantly said sanctions will continue until then.
And now they’re going after the first lady, a woman who is well-liked on the ground in Syria for dedicating her work to helping the country’s poorest through development and microfinance projects.
The West would have us believe she has “incited and encouraged terrorist acts,” a claim, emanating from the UK (which most definitely incited and encouraged terrorism), that would be laughable were it not so revolting.
Russia has called this “psychological pressure on the eve of the presidential election.”
A look at the legal entity behind the absurd allegations reveals this isn’t the first time they’ve attempted a legal attack against the Syrian government.
To adequately write about the past ten years of war on Syria would take volumes. For the sake of brevity: it need never have happened, nor the deaths and destruction accompanying it.
This was a premeditated and cruel war on the people of Syria, spurned forth by the media who truly do not care about the lives of Syrians.
To quote Father Daniel: “The media can either contribute to the massacre of the Syrian people or help the Syrian people, with their media coverage. Unfortunately, there are too many followers and cowards among journalists.”
Eva Bartlett is a Canadian independent journalist and activist. She has spent years on the ground covering conflict zones in the Middle East, especially in Syria and Palestine (where she lived for nearly four years).
Congressional Testimony: The Leading Activists for Online Censorship Are Corporate Journalists
By Glenn Greenwald | March 14, 2021
There are not many Congressional committees regularly engaged in substantive and serious work — most are performative — but the House Judiciary’s Subcommittee on Antitrust, Commercial, and Administrative Law is an exception. Chaired by Rep. David Cicilline (D-RI) and Rep. Ken Buck (R-CO), it is, with a few exceptions, composed of lawmakers whose knowledge of tech monopolies and anti-trust law is impressive.
In October, the Committee, after a sixteen-month investigation, produced one of those most comprehensive and informative reports by any government body anywhere in the world about the multi-pronged threats to democracy raised by four Silicon Valley monopolies: Facebook, Google, Amazon and Apple. The 450-page report also proposed sweeping solutions, including ways to break up these companies and/or constrain them from controlling our political discourse and political life. That report merits much greater attention and consideration than it has thus far received.
The Subcommittee held a hearing on Friday and I was invited to testify along with Microsoft President Brad Smith; President of the News Guild-Communications Workers of America Jonathan Schleuss, the Outkick’s Clay Travis, CEO of the Graham Media Group Emily Barr, and CEO of the News Media Alliance David Chavern. The ostensible purpose the hearing was a narrow one: to consider a bill that would vest media outlets with an exemption from anti-trust laws to collectively bargain with tech companies such as Facebook and Google so that they can obtain a greater share of the ad revenue. The representatives of the news industry and Microsoft who testified were naturally in favor because this bill (they have been heavily lobbying for it) because it would benefit them commercially in numerous way (the Microsoft President maintained the conceit that the Bill-Gates-founded company was engaging in self-sacrifice for the good of Democracy by supporting the bill but the reality is the Bing search engine owners are in favor of anything that weakens Google).
While I share the ostensible motive behind the bill — to stem the serious crisis of bankruptcies and closings of local news outlets — I do not believe that this bill will end up doing that, particularly because it empowers the largest media outlets such as The New York Times and MSNBC to dominate the process and because it does not even acknowledge, let alone address, the broader problems plaguing the news industry, including collapsing trust by the public (a bill that limited this anti-trust exemption to small local news outlets so as to allow them to bargain collectively with tech companies in their own interest would seem to me to serve the claimed purpose much better than one which empowers media giants to form a negotiating cartel).
But the broader context for the bill is the one most interesting and the one on which I focused in my opening statement and testimony: namely, the relationship between social media and tech giants on the one hand, and the news media industry on the other. Contrary to the popular narrative propagated by news outlets — in which they are cast as the victims of the supremely powerful Silicon Valley giants — that narrative is sometimes (not always, but sometimes) the opposite of reality: much if not most Silicon Valley censorship of political speech emanates from pressure campaigns led by corporate media outlets and their journalists, demanding that more and more of their competitors and ideological adversaries be silenced. Big media, in other words, is coopting the power of Big Tech for their own purposes.
My written opening testimony, which is on the Committee’s site, is also printed below. The video of the full hearing can be seen here. Here is the video of my opening five-minute statement:
Opening Statement of Glenn Greenwald
March 12, 2021
Before the House Subcommittee on Antitrust, Commercial and Administrative Law
Mr. Chairman and members of the Committee:
Thank you for the opportunity to testify.
I am a constitutional lawyer, a journalist, and the author of six books on civil liberties, media and politics. After graduating New York University School of Law in 1994, I worked as a constitutional and media law litigator for more than a decade, first at the firm of Wachtell, Lipton, Rosen & Katz, and then at a firm I co-founded in 1997. During my work as a lawyer, I represented numerous clients in First Amendment free speech and press freedom cases, including individuals with highly controversial views who were targeted for punishment by state and non-state actors alike, as well as media outlets subjected to repressive state limitations on their rights of expression and reporting.
Since 2005, I have worked primarily as a journalist and author, reporting extensively on civil liberties debates, assaults on free speech and a free press, the value of a free and open internet, the implications of growing Silicon Valley monopolistic power, and the complex relationship between corporate media outlets and social media companies. That reporting has received the 2014 Pulitzer Prize for Public Service and the George Polk Award for National Security Reporting. In 2013, I co-founded the online news outlet The Intercept, and in 2016 co-founded its Brazilian branch, The Intercept Brazil.
Over the last several years, my journalistic interest in and concern about the dangers of Silicon Valley’s monopoly power has greatly intensified — particularly as wielded by Facebook, Google, Amazon and Apple. The dangers posed by their growing power manifest in multiple ways. But I am principally alarmed by the repressive effect on free discourse, a free press, and a free internet, all culminating in increasingly intrusive effects on the flow of information and ideas and an increasingly intolerable strain on a healthy democracy.
Three specific incidents over the last four months represent a serious escalation in the willingness of tech monopolies to intrude into and exert control over our domestic politics through censorship and other forms of information manipulation:
- In the weeks leading up to the 2020 presidential election, The New York Post, the nation’s oldest newspaper, broke a major story based on documents and emails obtained from the laptop of Hunter Biden, son of the front-running presidential candidate Joe Biden. Those documents shed substantial light not only on the efforts of Hunter and other family members of President Biden to trade on his name and their influence on him for lucrative business deals around the world, but also raised serious questions about the extent to which President Biden himself was aware of and involved in those efforts.But Americans were barred from discussing that reporting on Twitter, and were actively impeded from reading about it by Facebook.That is because Twitter imposed a full ban on its users’ ability to link to the story: not just on their public Twitter pages but even in private Twitter chats. Twitter even locked the account of The New York Post, preventing the newspaper from using that platform for almost two weeks unless they agreed to voluntarily delete any references to their reporting about the Hunter Biden materials (the paper, rightfully, refused).
Facebook’s censorship of this reporting was more subtle and therefore more insidious: a life-long Democratic Party operative who is now a Facebook official, Andy Stone, announced (on Twitter) that Facebook would be “reducing [the article’s] distribution on our platform” pending a review “by Facebook’s third-party fact checking partners.” In other words, Facebook tinkered with its algorithms to prevent the dissemination of this reporting about a long-time politician who was leading the political party for which this Facebook official spent years working (See The Intercept, “Facebook and Twitter Cross a Far More Dangerous Line Than What They Censor,” Oct. 15, 2020).
This “fact-check” promised by Facebook never came. That is likely because it was not the New York Post’s reporting which turned out to be false but rather the claims made by these two social media giants to justify its suppression. The censorship justification was that the documents on which the reporting was based constituted either “hacked materials” and/or “Russian disinformation.”
Neither of those claims is true. Even the FBI has acknowledged that there is no evidence whatsoever of any involvement by the Russian government in the procurement of that laptop, and not even the Biden family, to this very day, has claimed that a single word contained in the published documents is fabricated or otherwise inauthentic. Ample evidence — including the testimony of others involved in the original creation and circulation of those documents — demonstrates that they were fully genuine.
This means that two of the largest and most powerful Silicon Valley giants suppressed crucial information about a leading presidential candidate — the one which employees at their companies overwhelmingly supported — shortly before voting commenced. While Twitter’s CEO Jack Dorsey apologized for this banning and acknowledged that it may have been wrong, Facebook has never done so.
While we will never know whether this censorship altered the outcome of the election, it is clear that this was one of the most direct acts of information repression about an American presidential election in decades. That was possible only because of the vast power wielded by these platforms over our political discourse and our political lives.
- In the wake of the January 6 riot at the Capitol, Facebook, Google, Twitter and numerous other Silicon Valley giants united to remove the democratically elected sitting President of the United States from their platforms. While many defenders of this corporate censorship tried to minimize it by claiming the President could still be heard by giving speeches and holding press conferences, several leading news outlets followed suit by announcing that they would not carry his speeches live and would only allow to be heard the excerpts they deemed to be safe and responsible.In response, numerous world leaders — including several who had clashed in the past with President Trump — expressed grave concerns about the dangers posed to democracy by the ability of tech monopolies to effectively remove even democratically elected leaders from the internet.
German Chancellor Angela Merkel argued through her spokesperson that “it is problematic that the president’s accounts have been permanently suspended,” adding that “the right to freedom of opinion is of fundamental importance.” Attempts to regulate speech, the Chancellor said, “can be interfered with, but by law and within the framework defined by the legislature — not according to a corporate decision.”
The European Union’s Commissioner for Internal Markets Thierry Breton warned: “The fact that a CEO can pull the plug on POTUS’s loudspeaker without any checks and balances is perplexing.” Commissioner Breton noted that this collective Silicon Valley ban “is not only confirmation of the power of these platforms, but it also displays deep weaknesses in the way our society is organized in the digital space.” (CNBC, “Germany’s Merkel hits out at Twitter over ‘problematic’ Trump ban,” Jan. 21, 2021).
The Health Secretary for the United Kingdom, Matt Hanckock, sounded similar alarms. Speaking to the BBC, he said “‘tech giants are ‘taking editorial decisions’ that raise a ‘very big question’ about how social media is regulated,” adding: “That’s clear because they’re choosing who should and shouldn’t have a voice on their platform” (CNBC, “Trump’s social media bans are raising new questions on tech regulation,” Jan. 11, 2021).
Objections to Silicon Valley’s removal of President Trump from their platforms were even more severe from officials with the government of French President Emmanuel Macron. The French Minister for European Union Affairs Clement Beaune pronounced himself “shocked” by the news of President Trump’s banning, arguing: “This should be decided by citizens, not by a CEO.” And France’s Finance Minister Bruno Le Maire said: “There needs to be public regulation of big online platforms,” calling big tech “one of the threats” to democracy (Bloomberg News, “Germany and France Oppose Trump’s Twitter Exile,” Jan. 11, 2021).
Perhaps the most fervent and eloquent warnings about the dangers posed by this episode came from Mexican President Andrés Manuel López Obrador. In a press conference held the day after the announcement, he said:
It’s a bad omen that private companies decide to silence, to censor. That is an attack on freedom. Let’s not be creating a world government with the power to control social networks, a world media power. And also a censorship court, like the Holy Inquisition, but in order to shape public opinion. This is really serious.
The Associated Press further quoted President López Obrador as asking: “How can a company act as if it was all powerful, omnipotent, as a sort of Spanish Inquisition on what is expressed?.” And AP confirmed that “ Mexico’s president vowed to lead an international effort to combat what he considers censorship by social media companies that have blocked or suspended the accounts of U.S. President Donald Trump,” and is “reaching out to other governments to form a common front on the issue” (Associated Press, “Mexican President Mounts Campaign Against Social Media Bans,” Jan. 14, 2021).
These world leaders are expressing the same grave concern: that Silicon Valley giants wield power that is, in many instances, greater than that of any sovereign nation-state. But unlike the governments which govern those countries, tech monopolies apply these powers arbitrarily, without checks and without transparency. When doing so, they threaten not only American democracy but democracies around the world.
- Critics of Silicon Valley power over political discourse for years have heard the same refrain: if you don’t like how they are moderating content and policing discourse, you can go start your own social media platform that is more permissive. Leaving aside the centuries-old recognition that it is impossible, by definition, to effectively compete with monopolies, we now have an incident vividly proving how inadequate that alternative is. Several individuals who primarily identify as libertarians heard this argument from Silicon Valley’s defenders and took it seriously. They set out to create a social media competitor to Twitter and Facebook — one which would provide far broader free expression rights for users and, more importantly, would offer greater privacy protections than other Silicon Valley giants by refusing to track those users and commoditize them for advertisers. They called it Parler, and in early January, 2021, it was the single most-downloaded app in the Apple Play Store. This success story seemed to be a vindication for the claim that it was possible to create competitors to existing social media monopolies.But now, a mere two months after it ascended to the top of the charts, Parler barely exists. That is because several members of Congress with the largest and most influential social media platforms demanded that Apple and Google remove Parler from their stores and ban any further downloading of the app, and further demanded that Amazon, the dominant provider of web hosting services, cease hosting the site. Within forty-eight hours, those three Silicon Valley monopolies complied with those demands, rendering Parler inoperable and effectively removing it from the internet (See “How Silicon Valley, in a Show of Monopolistic Force, Destroyed Parler,” Glenn Greenwald, Jan. 12, 2021).
The justification of this collective banning was that Parler had hosted numerous advocates of and participants in the January 6 Capitol riot. But even if that were a justification for removing an entire platform from the internet, subsequent reporting demonstrated that far more planning and advocacy of that riot was done on other platforms, including Facebook, Google-owned YouTube, Instagram and Twitter (See The Washington Post, “Facebook’s Sandberg deflected blame for Capitol riot, but new evidence shows how platform played role,“ Jan. 13, 2021; Forbes, “Sheryl Sandberg Downplayed Facebook’s Role In The Capitol Hill Siege—Justice Department Files Tell A Very Different Story,” Feb. 7, 2021).
Whatever else one might want to say about the destruction of Parler, it was a stark illustration of how these Silicon Valley giants could obliterate even a highly successful competitor overnight, with little effort, by uniting to do so. And it laid bare how inadequate is the claim that Silicon Valley’s monopolies can be challenged through competition.
How Congress sets out to address Silicon Valley’s immense and undemocratic power is a complicated question, posing complex challenges. The proposal to vest media companies with an antitrust exemption in order to allow them to negotiate as a consortium or cartel seeks to rectify a real and serious problem — the vacuuming up of advertising revenue by Google and Facebook at the expense of the journalistic outlets which create the news content being monetized — but empowering large media companies could easily end up creating more problems than it solves.
That is particularly so given that it is often media companies that are the cause of Silicon Valley censorship of and interference in political speech of the kind outlined above. When these social media companies were first created and in the years after, they wanted to avoid being in the business of content moderation and political censorship. This was an obligation foisted upon them, often by the most powerful media outlets using their large platforms to shame these companies and their executives for failing to censor robustly enough.
Sometimes this pressure was politically motivated — demanding the banning of people whose ideologies sharply differs from those who own and control these media outlets — but more often it was motivated by competitive objectives: a desire to prevent others from creating independent platforms and thus diluting the monopolistic stranglehold that corporate media outlets exert over our political discourse. Further empowering this already-powerful media industry — which has demonstrated it will use its force to silence competitors under the guise of “quality control” — runs the real risk of transferring the abusive monopoly power from Silicon Valley to corporate media companies or, even worse, encouraging some sort of de facto merger in which these two industries pool their power to the mutual benefit of each.
This Subcommittee produced one of the most impressive and comprehensive reports last October detailing the dangers of the classic monopoly power wielded by Google, Facebook, Amazon and Apple. That report set forth numerous legislative and regulatory solutions to comply with the law and a consensus of economic and political science experts about the need to break up monopolies wherever they arise.
Until that is done, none of these problems can be addressed in ways other than the most superficial, piecemeal and marginal. Virtually every concern that Americans across the political spectrum express about the dangers of Silicon Valley power emanates from the fact that they have been permitted to flout antitrust laws and acquire monopoly power. None of those problems — including their ability to police and control our political discourse and the flow of information — can be addressed until that core problem is resolved.
What is most striking is that while Silicon Valley censorship of online speech and interference in political discourse is recognized as a grave menace to a healthy democracy around the democratic world, it is often dismissed in the U.S. — especially by journalists — as some sort of trivial “culture war” question when they are not actively cheering and even demanding more of it. Even more bizarre is that opposition to oligarchical censorship and monopoly power is often depicted by the liberal-left as a right-wing cause, largely because they perceive (inaccurately) that such oligarchical discourse policing will operate in their favor.
Whatever labels one wants to apply to it, it should not require much work to recognize that vesting this magnitude of power in the hands of unaccountable billionaires, who operate outside the democratic process yet are highly influenced by public media-led pressure campaigns, is unsustainable.
Bernays and Propaganda – Propaganda Continues Unabated – Part 5
By Larry Romanoff for the Saker Blog | March 11, 2021
In most nations, when a particular criminal conduct reaches epidemic proportion, the government finally acts decisively to eradicate it. Not in America; they solve the problem by legalising it. They did this with influence-peddling (lobbying) and drugs, the same now occurring with domestic propaganda which has been against the law for a very long time to protect citizens from psychological manipulation and control by their own government. The law has always been ignored, but Congress is now dispensing with the pretense in repealing two major laws, the 1948 Smith-Mundt Act (1) (2) (3) (4) and the 1987 Foreign Relations Authorization Act, so as to permit the authorities to disperse false and misleading propaganda and campaigns of misinformation against its own people. Of course, the government has always done this surreptitiously, sometimes to an overwhelming extent as in the case of war marketing, but it has always been illegal. After this, it won’t be. One Pentagon official claimed this new provision will have “No checks and balances. No one will know if the information is accurate, partially accurate, or entirely false”. In an article in USA Today, it was quoted that the US military (Pentagon) already spends about $4 billion per year on propaganda to sway public opinion, much of that directed domestically. (5) (6) (7)
We now have the sock puppets, (8) (9) the fake social media personas on the Internet, used by the US military and intelligence agencies to affect and lead public opinion in many countries, usually with the intent of inciting civil unrest and revolution. It has been obvious for some time that these tactics have been used domestically as well, the new legislation simply legalising the process. Many US government agencies have obtained this software that permits them to flood the social media with fake people making fake posts in support of government positions and discrediting those who hold contrary views or are critical of the government. The software is extremely detailed, providing extensive backgrounds for these fictitious people, permitting a single human to assume the identities of as many as 1,000 fake people, and make them appear to actually be in a certain physical place or even attending an actual event. They control the IP address, making it impossible to detect that a single person in one location is orchestrating all that activity. The program manual states, “There is a variety of social media tricks we can use to add a level of realness to all fictitious personas”. The contract requires “virtual private servers” located in and outside the US, to give false locational information, and also requires what it calls “traffic mixing”, blending the persona controllers’ internet usage with the usage of people outside Centcom in a manner that offers “excellent cover and powerful deniability”.
This “Persona management software” is now being used to manipulate public opinion on key issues, with unlimited numbers of virtual people regularly flooding US social media with pro-government propaganda in attempts to manage public perception and kill political activism. This is called “counter-messaging” and the Pentagon has made no secret of its activities in promulgating “black propaganda” – which means knowingly spreading lies to mislead and misinform the public for the purpose of stifling political dissent. In its increasing fear of political activism, the US government has labeled the Internet as a “breeding ground for domestic terrorists”, and appears to include in this category anyone who questions the government’s version of events. This is all part of a massive program to intimidate, manipulate, and crush all public dissent, and to control not only domestic discussion but also to actively manipulate worldwide opinion. Their activity is becoming common in China where, on the occurrence of an event containing useful propaganda fuel, we often see a flood of commentary on Weibo supporting the American position, these ostensibly being posted by native Chinese but almost inevitably originating in Fort Langley, Virginia.
The government has used these in smear campaigns (10) (11) (12) against reporters and other high-profile individuals who criticise US government policy, to the extent of creating fake Facebook and Twitter accounts in their names, containing fake posts meant to be personally damaging, and have even created fake websites and Wikipedia pages purporting to belong to an individual, all for the purpose of discrediting “dissidents”. When a Taiwanese scientist aired his research identifying the 5 haplotypes of COVID-19 and proving America had to be the original source since these types existed only in the USA, the VOA harassed the man so badly online that he closed all his social media accounts and went dark.
The US government performs surveillance and infiltration in attempts to control the public dialogue in many nations, creating Twitter-like social media platforms in other countries, ostensibly local but all monitored and controlled by US agencies. Most are the work of USAID. The Americans innocently proclaim the purpose as “encouraging open political discussion” (in every nation but the US), but it’s a ‘discussion’ they mean to control entirely and skew to satisfy their agenda of inciting unrest and revolution. One such platform in Cuba was widely ridiculed when knowledge of it became public in early 2014, and was killed. (13) (14) (15) Even the Associated Press reported that it “was set up to encourage political dissent”, but White House officials claimed they wanted only “to provide Cubans with a platform to share ideas and exchange information”, claiming it was used to “share cricket scores” and by farmers to “share market prices”. Maybe, but it was used primarily for political destabilisation. The State Department and USAID actively pushed for these platforms after their successes in causing the uprisings in Egypt, Tunisia and Iran. The State Department also provided several million dollars to a team of American hackers to develop a system known as a mesh network to enable US-sponsored dissidents in Cuba to communicate more freely and securely, with USAID committing yet another several million to the same cause. This is precisely what the US has been doing in Hong Kong for many years now.
The real owners and controllers of Google are reading from the same script. Google is not actively propagandising, but functions as an information gateway with all searches heavily censored and prioritised so that we see only what the secret government wants us to see and receive only the information they want or permit us to have. (16) Facebook and Twitter are not better. (17) Wikipedia is different, being one of the most criminally-dishonest active propagandists in the world. (18) There is surprisingly little in Wikipedia that is not either censored or outright false. If you want to know the number of protons in a Cesium atom, you will find the correct answer, but in any area related to history, politics, wars, government, the Jews, Israel, Arabs, ‘Axis of evil’ members, crimes of governments and corporations, the truths of the European bankers and their ravaging of the world, Wikipedia is 95% sanitised misinformation. And this propaganda is intense; Wiki has tens of thousands of ‘volunteers’ constantly scouring all the page entries to find items requiring editing or deleting. Many people have reported correcting an obviously false entry only to discover moments later that their corrections had been deleted and the page locked. Perhaps the biggest laugh is Wiki’s claim that “Content Requires Verifiable Data”. Maybe, but only from you.
The final pillar of this social engineering is the Jewish-owned and/or controlled media and entertainment industries which have long since abandoned the dissemination of truth and information and wholeheartedly adopted the primary task of propagandising the public mind. Today, the topics are different than the war marketing of Bernays, but – and this is very important to understand – the intensity remains the same. Just as Bernays once flooded every possible media channel with war-mongering hatred, today those same channels are directed to nations other than Germany (China, Russia, Iran, Iraq, Libya Cuba, Syria, Venezuela), to the instillation of fear (the war on terrorism) which is easily manipulated to achieve astonishing measures of social control, and to detail-less information to maintain public ignorance and confusion on all important issues. Paul Craig Roberts wrote that “The American media does not serve the truth. It serves the government and the interest groups that empower the government. The function of the “mainstream media” is to sell products and to brainwash the audience for the government and interest groups.” (19) That is precisely correct.
The book publishers are also onside in this vast propaganda campaign. The content of educational texts especially is heavily controlled by the disparate elements of the propaganda machine, with countless topics and theories proscribed. Howard Zinn was a notable exception in having some of his “radical” (i.e. accurate) history books published, but today, only shortly after his death, all his books are being removed from school libraries and destroyed. During the past two or three generations it has become increasingly difficult, and now almost impossible, to publish books on topics that would pose a threat to the activities of the secret government, and more than a few individuals have been killed for trying. The concentration of media and publishing power is not an accident, but part of a plan to eliminate information contradictory to the best interests of Bernays’ invisible people. Today, many publishers and authors will testify that Amazon actively suppresses many books while pretending to sell them.
Neal Gabler, author of An Empire of Their Own: How the Jews invented Hollywood, (20) (21) wrote “What is amazing is the extent to which they succeeded in promulgating this fiction throughout the world. By making a ‘shadow’ America, one which idealized every old glorifying bromide about the country, the Hollywood Jews created a powerful cluster of images and ideas so powerful that, in a sense, they colonized the American imagination. Ultimately, American values came to be defined largely by the movies the Jews made.”
The US movie industry is the worst of all media for fictionalising history and reality and replacing them with fabricated mythology. A recent example is Steven Spielberg’s unforgivably distorted portrayal of Lincoln and slavery and the American civil war. It was the Rothschild’s Barings Bank that financed the slave trade, and a great many if not most of the slave traders were Jewish. Furthermore, we have adequate documentation that it was European Jewish bankers who stimulated the slavery-related rift in American society to instigate the civil war. In this context, Spielberg’s movie is an especially offensive false and mythical portrayal of the true facts. As one columnist noted, Spielberg’s movie “had too many negroes and too few Jews”. The upshot is that tens of millions of gullible Americans will take with them to their graves a totally and absolutely false understanding of a critical period in their nation’s history.
That is the real issue, and that brings us back to Bernays who wrote: “The American motion picture is the greatest unconscious carrier of propaganda in the world to-day. It is a great distributor for ideas and opinions. The motion picture can standardize the ideas and habits of a nation.” It also begins very early to indoctrinate little minds.
“The American Jews have always used their films as an active propaganda channel to transmit not only their own political agenda but the fiction of US culture, values and way of thinking to people in other nations, these films containing an outpouring of individualism or struggles in pursuit of freedom or the realisation of the American Dream. They have always portrayed an idealised society intended to evoke in others a kind of yearning for America and the things it appears to be. All is cleverly arranged, with meticulous attention paid to the smallest details of setting, with the American flag so often prominent and Americans always portrayed as leaders of the world. All of this is a large and persistent attempt at a kind of cultural colonisation of the world, the Jews excelling at the presentation of a superficial layer of intense audio and visual effects that are “so image rich and content poor that they manipulate our emotions and short-circuit our reason”.”
The great objection to all this is that the presentation is totally false, the US being nothing like the mythical movie presentations, and the values promulgated and unconsciously accepted are not actually held by Americans, and certainly not by the nation’s leaders. Like everything similar emanating from the US, American movies are stimulating, high-quality lies, which is why many nations restrict American content.
All of the above, radio, television, newspapers, magazines, the advertising industry, Hollywood movies and TV programs, book publishing and book selling, Wikipedia, and the social media, are controlled by Jews. Their control over information is almost complete, giving them the power to directly influence people’s thoughts and behavior and to alter the course of events. All of these follow the same inescapable propaganda script. (22) (23) (24) They are not apologetic about this control; Philip Weiss wrote an article in Mondoweiss titled, “Do Jews Dominate in American Media? And So What If We Do?”. (25) I can think of several objections.
Control over the mass media and of the movie industry have always been central to the dissemination of propaganda in the US, with the media presenting the narrative to be adopted and the movies glorifying the propaganda myths disguised as entertainment. The US is the one nation most thoroughly saturated by the media, Americans being bombarded daily with thousands of images on what is essentially political ideology, guiding popular opinion in a predefined direction. The media themselves and many branches of the government spend hundreds of millions of dollars annually in the art of public propaganda directed at the bewildered herd, this mass media bombardment daily shaping the American view of reality. American author Gore Vidal wrote:
“You cannot get through the density of the propaganda with which the American people, through the dreaded media, have been filled and the horrible public educational system we have for the average person. It’s just grotesque. The corporate grip on opinion in the United States is one of the wonders of the Western world. No First World country has ever managed to eliminate so entirely from its media all objectivity, much less dissent.” (26)
All of the so-called values that Americans hold so dear and appear so determined to inflict on all other nations, have their origin in the propaganda disseminated by Bernays’ invisible government through this tightly-held media cartel. Dr. Nancy Snow, an assistant professor of political science, wrote “Propaganda is most effective when it is least noticeable. What the American people don’t know is that American propaganda is hidden, and its characteristics, integrated into communications and entertainment, convince people that they are not being manipulated. Propaganda is not supposed to be part of an ‘open society’. Much of our media now are so image rich and content poor that they just serve to capture the eye, manipulate our emotions, and short-circuit our reason. The propaganda and advertising industries therefore function increasingly like adult obedience industries. They instruct their audiences in how to feel and what to think, and increasing numbers of people follow and accept the cues without question.”
Snow described one of her previous jobs as being a “propagandist” for the US Information Agency. She said, “In the US, we don’t think of ourselves as a country that propagandises, even though to the rest of the world we are seen as really the most propagandistic nation”. According to her, the US has more PR professionals than news reporters, and the global reach of what Bernays called Public Relations is just a euphemism for propaganda that involves the entire US media. One example of this was the appointment of an advertising professional as Undersecretary of State for public diplomacy and public affairs. In an article in the LA Times, Naomi Klein wrote that “[Charlotte Beers] had no previous State Department experience, but she had held the top job at both the J. Walter Thompson and Ogilvy & Mather ad agencies, and she’s built brands for everything from dog food to power drills, and that her task now was to work her magic on the greatest branding challenge of all – to sell the United States and its war on terrorism to an increasingly hostile world”. (27) (28) (29) Secretary of State Colin Powell actively defended this: “There is nothing wrong with getting somebody who knows how to sell something. We are selling a product. We need someone who can re-brand American foreign policy, re-brand diplomacy.” (30)
I wrote elsewhere of the fake stories the US military produced for its invasions of Iraq and Libya, with fabricated video of locals apparently cheering the American invaders as liberating heroes. You may have wondered why ‘protestors for freedom’ in many foreign nations (Iraq, Libya, Yugoslavia, Iran, Ukraine) inexplicably seem to create all their protest signs in English; they are all fake, meant for an American audience. Here is some background for you, from a speech given at the US Air Force Academy by John Rendon, a PR consultant employed by the US military. Rendon said, “I am not a national security strategist or a military tactician. I am a politician, an information warrior and a perception manager”, at which point he reminded his audience that when US troops entered Kuwait City during the first Persian Gulf war, they received a wildly enthusiastic greeting from hundreds of Kuwaitis waving US flags. He then asked, “Did you ever stop to wonder how the people of Kuwait City were able to get American flags? Well, you now know the answer. That was one of my jobs then”. (31) (32) It is interesting that Americans boast so openly about their perverted manipulation of the world’s peoples. This was Pompeo boasting, “We lied, we cheated, we stole.” And the American people cheered.
American propaganda foolishness knows no bounds. Some years ago, prior to President Bush’s helicopter landing in a public downtown park on his visit to Italy, I watched dozens of Secret Service agents with cans of paint, spray-painting all the grass a lovely shade of green so Bush would look prettier on TV. When a US President or State Secretary speaks to an empty hall at the United Nations, the media obligingly cut and paste an audience from another speaker’s talk to make Americans proud that their leader was enthusiastically applauded by a full house.
Today, every part of America is all about marketing the brand, selling the sizzle instead of the steak. The operating philosophy is termed “perception management”, the attempt to substitute a utopian fictionalised version of events for reality. Great efforts are made to determine which actions or attitudes or sentiments to portray to the American public and the world, which items of information should be denied to the public, and which “indicators” are necessary to convey to audiences to influence their emotions and dull their objective reasoning. This perception management combines some facts, some unrelated truths, a great deal of deception, all wrapped in layers of what is termed “psychological operations”, and used to sell patriotism, wars, capitalism, fear and fascism. This is the legacy of Lippman and Bernays: an entire nation has degraded to the point where product substance is irrelevant and brand perception is everything.
The picture in Americans minds of their own country consists of a vast array of misinformation, falsehoods and myths, covering every facet of the human experience and which they fervently, and even belligerently, believe to be true. The reason I have dwelt on the topic of propaganda to the extent I have done, is to demonstrate the equal truth that the picture foreigners hold in their minds of the US also consists of the same vast array of lies, misinformation, falsehoods and myths, their understanding of the US equally as flawed as that of the Americans themselves. Almost everything we read, see and learn about the US is mythical propaganda far removed from reality. We are buying the sizzle without the steak, paying for the brand without understanding or even receiving the product.
Bernays’ secret government has been taking control of the ideological foundations of all of America, the propaganda onslaught including the political, corporate, banking, foreign policy, military, media, and academic sectors of the nation, attempting to force all into a single cohesive mental state. It isn’t simply information or misinformation. By controlling the sources and so deciding what you can and cannot see or learn, they plan to decide how you feel and what you think, and ultimately who has or does not have a voice. This is what led CIA Director William Casey to state, “We’ll know our disinformation program is complete when everything the American public believes is false.” (33)
The world finally appears to be awakening to the fictional foolishness that is America today. The Pew Research Center has done several recent studies which document a growing distrust of everything American in most countries (34), including China and Western Europe. At the same time, it notes that American citizens are receiving an increasingly narrow view of important world issues, exacerbating their already fabled ignorance. Pew also note that while the American people receive limited information reduced to child-like sound bytes lacking breadth, depth and context, this deliberately fabricated ignorance also increases the ease of propagandists to make false claims that appear real and are difficult to question.
One recent example was the political coup in the Ukraine, the second time the US has overthrown an elected government in that nation. The Americans first instigated a mini-revolution and installed Julia Tymoshenko as their puppet president, this queen’s reign terminated prematurely when she was imprisoned for massive fraud, embezzlement and murder. The Americans then invested – by their own admission – more than $5 billion to destabilise the country with an impressive amount of violence in a second attempt to take control. This disintegrated when most of Eastern Ukraine, especially the Crimea, objected to the US effort and voted to separate from the Ukraine and rejoin Russia. For background, the Crimea had always been part of Russia but was only recently ‘given’ to the Ukraine as a peace measure; its citizens are virtually all ethnic Russians and wanted to return home.
However, the US media carried only the news and video of riots, omitting the fact that they were all US-inspired and financed and that the CIA had a huge contingent resident in Kiev that was masterminding the events from the US Embassy. They specifically omitted video of the “democratic protestors” returning to the US Embassy compound afterward to collect their pay. The riots were attributed to Russia’s “meddling” and presented as cries for freedom by the Ukrainian people, and the secession vote by the Crimean residents which was entirely self-initiated, was described in the US media as a “Russian invasion” of the Crimea. It is in this context that the US climbs on its hypocritical moral white horse and pretends to “warn” Russia about “interfering in Ukraine’s elections”, filling American hearts with pride in their nation’s fight for truth and freedom. With this heavily-propagandised false picture flooding the US media, most Americans believe they clearly understand the situation in the Ukraine and that Russia is indeed “the evil empire”. In fact, they understand nothing clearly and what little they know is wrong, but when a nation’s government so thoroughly controls the media and the narrative, and is a pathological liar, what hope is there for the people?
This ‘perception management’ marketing of the US brand is not limited to US soil; even more time and money are spent on managing perceptions in other nations, one of these being China. The US spends more than $300 million in China each year on marketing their productless brand. It isn’t only obvious outlets like the Voice of America; the Americans make Herculean efforts to plant pro-American messages in newspapers, magazines, social media Weibo and WeChat, in the topic outline of speeches, placing visiting professors in schools and universities in China, and in thousands of other sources that reach the public. This is entirely a psychological warfare operation and is described by the Americans in these terms. The aim of this huge effort is simply to employ all manner of lies and misinformation to make China’s government look bad in the eyes of its people (and the world).
As one example, the U.S. Consul-General in Guangzhou, Jim Levy, filled the internet with outright false or badly-twisted information about sudden racial discrimination against blacks in China. For background, all visas expired during the COVID-19 epidemic, requiring foreign nationals to return home and wait for approval of new visas. Many Africans, in China to purchase low-cost goods to ship home, and reluctant to lose their income source, failed to comply, essentially hiding underground. As health officers were making the rounds to test foreigners and obtain health codes, there were many stories of Africans jumping out of windows (hopefully first-floor windows) to escape the medical authorities and avoid the necessary quarantines. Finally, the police had to instruct apartments and hotels to not provide accommodation to anyone lacking a valid visa, but the US Consulate filled Chinese social media and foreign airwaves with stories titled, “African nations, US decry racism against blacks in China”. (35) (36) My opinion of Levy is not high, especially since he was using his American diplomatic post to further the political aims of his Jewish masters. In a similar manner, Alan Dershowitz, another American Jew, this one from Harvard, not long ago gave a speech to AIPAC, the Godzilla of Jewish influence in the US, where he asked all Jews to create as much pressure as possible on China’s imaginary human rights violations in Tibet, to take the world’s attention off the Jewish atrocities in Palestine. International politics supported by propaganda, i.e. “perception management”, is a dirty business.
Hong Kong today is saturated with CIA and other US-based media control, their long-term propaganda campaign being the entire source of the Western-oriented political agitation and the persistently negative views of China that originate there. George Soros, another American Jew, finances the seditious “China Media Project” at Hong Kong University, creating a massive anti-China campaign and responsible for much of the violence there. The violence and chaos in Tibet and Xinjiang all have the same source. Philip Agee, a former CIA agent (37), wrote that the US has been conducting this illegal interference in Tibet since prior to the 1950s and 1960s, claiming that his duties in the CIA involved attempting to penetrate and manipulate the institutions of power, infiltrating and manipulating political parties, trade unions, youth and student movements, intellectual, professional and cultural societies, religious groups, women’s groups and especially the media. He details how he paid journalists to publish American propaganda as if it were the journalists’ own information, and how the CIA spent huge sums of money intervening in foreign elections to promote and elect an American puppet candidate. The NYT had very little nice to say about Agee in their obituary. (38)
Jonathan Power told us of one highly-placed British diplomat who stated, “One reads about the world’s desire for American leadership only in the United States. Everywhere else one reads about American arrogance and unilateralism”. (39) (40) Power wrote further that “America Is Sadly In The Grip Of ‘Exhausted Ideas’”. (41) And as Naomi Klein noted, nations don’t generally object to America’s so-called ‘values’, but to the fact that the US never adheres to them. Critics see only US unilateralism, defiance of all international laws, great wealth disparity, and increasing unjustified crackdowns and violations of civil rights. She wrote that America’s problem “was not with the brand but with the product”, and that the great and increasing international anger – and it is anger – arises “not only from the facts but also from a clear perception of false advertising”. In other words, American hypocrisy, the Utopia Syndrome I wrote of earlier. However, Americans seem oblivious to these realities and are redoubling their efforts to propagandise not only all Americans but the world.
Introduction – If America Dissolves… https://thesaker.is/if-america-dissolves/
Bernays and Propaganda – Part 1 of 5 — https://thesaker.is/bernays-and-propaganda/
Bernays and Propaganda – Part 2 of 5 — The Marketing of War — https://thesaker.is/bernays-and-propaganda-the-marketing-of-war/
Bernays and Propaganda – Part 3 of 5 –– Democracy Control – http://thesaker.is/bernays-and-propaganda-democracy-control/
Bernays and Propaganda – Part 4 of 5 –The Transition to Education and Commerce – http://thesaker.is/bernays-and-propaganda-the-transition-to-education-and-commerce-part-4/
Bernays and Propaganda – Part 5 of 5 — Propaganda Continues Unabated — You are now here.
Mr. Romanoff’s writing has been translated into 30 languages and his articles posted on more than 150 foreign-language news and politics websites in more than 30 countries, as well as more than 100 English language platforms. Larry Romanoff is a retired management consultant and businessman. He has held senior executive positions in international consulting firms, and owned an international import-export business. He has been a visiting professor at Shanghai’s Fudan University, presenting case studies in international affairs to senior EMBA classes. Mr. Romanoff lives in Shanghai and is currently writing a series of ten books generally related to China and the West. He is one of the contributing authors to Cynthia McKinney’s new anthology ‘When China Sneezes’.
His full archive can be seen at https://www.moonofshanghai.com/
and http://www.bluemoonofshanghai.com/
He can be contacted at: 2186604556@qq.com
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Notes
(1) https://www.congress.gov/bill/112th-congress/house-bill/5736
(2) https://www.congress.gov/bill/112th-congress/house-bill/5736/text
(3) https://newswithviews.com/smith-mundt-act-of-1948-and-the-coup/
(4) https://www.rt.com/usa/smith-mundt-domestic-propaganda-121/
(7) https://www.usatoday.com/story/nation/2013/07/08/pentagon-propaganda-post-somali/2498339/
(8) https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2011/mar/17/us-spy-operation-social-networks
(9) https://ronaldthomaswest.com/2014/04/18/military-sock-puppets-nsa-trolls-cia-shills/
(11) https://caitlinjohnstone.com/2019/03/03/how-and-how-not-to-beat-a-smear-campaign/
(12) https://thegrayzone.com/2020/08/18/us-government-funded-coda-story/
(13) https://www.pbs.org/newshour/show/u-s-created-cuba-twitter-sow-unrest-reports-ap
(14) https://apnews.com/article/904a9a6a1bcd46cebfc14bea2ee30fdf
(15) https://www.theguardian.com/world/2014/apr/03/us-cuban-twitter-zunzuneo-stir-unrest
(17) https://nypost.com/2021/01/04/ted-cruz-twitter-most-brazen-and-google-most-dangerous/
(18) https://www.serendipity.li/cda/censorship_at_wikipedia.htm
(19) https://www.paulcraigroberts.org/2021/01/24/the-media-destroyed-america/
(20) https://www.amazon.com/Empire-Their-Own-Invented-Hollywood/dp/0385265573
(21) https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/118657.An_Empire_of_Their_Own
(22) https://researchlist.blogspot.com/2011/06/jewish-ownership-of-big-media.html
(23) http://tapnewswire.com/2015/10/six-jewish-companies-control-96-of-the-worlds-media/
(24) https://www.simpletoremember.com/articles/a/jews-in-the-media-hollywood/
(25) https://mondoweiss.net/2008/02/do-jews-dominat/
(26) https://www.latimes.com/la-bk-gore-vidal-1989-08-04-story.html
(27) Naomi Klein | The Spectacular Failure of Brand USA; https://naomiklein.org/spectacular-failure-brand-usa/
(28) http://www.pbs.org/pov/borders/2006/de_sellingamerica.html
(29) https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-2003-mar-04-fg-beers03-story.html
(30) https://www.alternet.org/2002/03/brand_usa/
(31) https://nexus23.com/warfare2/the-rendon-group-reloaded/
(32) http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php?title=The_Pentagon%27s_Information_Warrior
(33) https://www.counterpunch.org/2020/01/03/the-dangers-of-privatized-intelligence/
(34) https://www.pewresearch.org/politics/2019/07/22/how-americans-see-problems-of-trust/
(37) http://www.philipagee.com/
(38) https://www.nytimes.com/2008/01/10/obituaries/10agee.html
(39) https://ecfsapi.fcc.gov/file/7021898632.pdf
(40) https://www.globalissues.org/article/163/media-in-the-united-states
(41) https://www.eurasiareview.com/22042020-america-is-sadly-in-the-grip-of-exhausted-ideas-oped/
SHOCK REVELATION: PUTIN WANTS STABILITY IN THE USA
By Paul Robinson | IRRUSIANALITY | March 12, 2021
Remember the claims that Vladimir Putin and the Russian government had a role in inciting the mob that broke into the Capitol building in Washington DC back in January? I wrote about this in an article a few weeks ago. No sooner had the dust settled than social media was abuzz with statements that Putin either arranged the whole thing or at the very least was celebrating what had happened. As former Deputy National Security Advisor Ben Rhodes put it, “This is the day that Vladimir Putin has waited for since he had to leave East Germany as a young KGB officer at the end of the Cold War.”
The idea that Putin and the Russian state want nothing more than to see Western democracies collapse into chaos is now so widespread as to be pretty much an uncontestable truth. Everybody knows that it is so. Russian “disinformation”, election “meddling”, and all of the rest of it, are put down to Putin’s enormous fear of democracy and of the West, and his concomitant desire to undermine both.
If you have any doubts, just Google “Putin, undermine democracy.” I did, and this is what I got:
As you can see, at the top of the list comes an article in The Atlantic from last year with the title “Putin’s Goal Is to Bring Down American Democracy,” after which we have a Science Direct article “Russia’s Attempt to Undermine Democracy in the West,” something from the Foreign Policy Research Institute entitled “Is Russia Undermining Democracy in the West? Conference” (I looked up the conference – the answer to the question was overwhelming “Yes), and then a Foreign Affairs article “How Russia and China Undermine Democracy” (note that there’s no question here that they do – the issue is just how). And on and on it goes.
You get the point. Putin wants to destroy Western democracy, and revels in destabilizing it at every opportunity. If you have any doubts about that, anti-disinformation campaigners point to the work of alleged Russian internet trolls and bots who, they say, latch on to divisions in Western societies and then exploit and accentuate them, in order to destabilize us from within.
I decided to put this to the Google test as well, searching for “Russia, exploit divisions America’. I got the following results:
The Atlantic again tops the rankings with an article entitled “Russia Is Still Exploiting America’s Divisions.” After that, we have the same Atlantic piece that appeared in the first search, then others with titles like “Russia exploits our divisions,” “How Russia used social media to divide Americans,” and “Russia seeks to exploit divisions in the West.”
So there we have it. Russia is out to get us. It wants domestic chaos in the West, and is doing all it can to create it.
But is this true?
Here’s the problem. No senior Russian official has ever said anything of the sort. Really. I challenge you to prove the opposite. Just find one quotation from Putin, foreign minister Lavrov, or anybody else at the top of the Kremlin pile, saying that this is what they want. I’m betting you won’t find it.
To the contrary, what you find when you study what Russians say is that the one thing they value above all else is stability. In fact, the word “stability” appears over 20 times in the 2016 Foreign Concept of the Russian Federation. And stability in foreign affairs, it is felt, depends on domestic stability. A country that is in internal turmoil is going to be incapable of pursuing a constructive foreign policy, and will likely try to deflect from its internal problems by assertiveness abroad. It’s better that other countries, even ones that are relatively hostile, are stable than that they are falling apart.
And so it is that in a meeting with businessmen on Wednesday, Vladimir Putin had the following to say:
We see what is happening, for example, overseas: of all those who walked into the US Congress building, 150 people were arrested and face anywhere from 15 to 25 years in prison. We have no way of knowing whether the internal contradictions will stop there. We really want them to stop, and I will tell you why. We are interested in steady relations with all our key partners, and internal squabbles, for internal political reasons, are in the way of achieving this kind of stability in the relations between our states.
What??
How does this square with the gospel truth we have been told to believe that Putin rejoices at every sign of turmoil in our midst, and is doing all he can to provoke chaos amongst us?
It doesn’t square at all. Something must be wrong.
Indeed something is – everything we’re being told by The Atlantic and all the rest of them is total, complete, utter nonsense. It not only isn’t supported by the evidence, but is in fact rejected by it.
Will anybody notice? Sadly, I doubt it. The same old lies will keep on being repeated. They’ve been said so often by now that nobody can imagine that they’re not true. But at least you, dear readers, will know that they’re not. And perhaps if we can spread that truth a little bit further, then drip by drip we might have some effect. I’m not optimistic, but at least we can try.
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From the Archives
US murdering 1 million Iraqis is democracy, Iran giving yogurt to Iraq is “domination”
By Ali Salaam | American Herald Tribune | July 31, 2017
The New York Times, owned by the Zionist Jewish supremacist Ochs-Sulzberger family, has no problem with Iraqi suffering as long as Iran is not the one behind it.
The Iraq War was a genocide of the Iraqi people by Zionist supremacists in the Bush administration. Over 1 million innocent people were killed based on a lie. American soldiers died in an Israeli war and now an average of 22 soldiers commit suicide every day because their consciences cannot cope with the fact they committed crimes in an illegal war that served no purpose other than to benefit Israel, not America.
Benjamin Netanyahu, Prime Minister of the Zionist regime, once said “We are benefiting from one thing, and that is the attack on the Twin Towers and Pentagon, and the American struggle in Iraq.”
Paul Wolfowitz had his sights on Iraq since his time in the first Bush administration. Former Israeli official and Bush administration official Richard Perle had his eyes on Iraq since at least his authorship of the Clean Break white paper. The Zionist regime had their eyes on Iraq since the 1980s when strategist Oded Yinon wrote his white paper in support of dividing the Arab-Muslim world along ethnic and sectarian lines. The global Zionist lobby has had their eyes on Iraq since Theodor Herzl stated that Eretz Israel’s true borders go from the Nile River in Egypt to the Euphrates River in Iraq. … continue
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