Are we about to see a Colour Revolution in the United States?
By Kit Knightly | OffGuardian | June 2, 2020
It started with peaceful protests. It always does. Oppressed, poor or otherwise desperate people take to the streets because they don’t know what else to do. Because their neighbours are doing it. Because the world is unfair to so many people. Because attention should be paid.
The reasons don’t matter. The peacefulness does.
Nobody who is marching for justice and change really wants to burn down a bakery or steal some trainers from a Nike store.
But then it starts happening.
Windows are broken. Bricks are thrown. Civilians are sprayed with mace. Bystanders are caught up in the throng. People get hurt.
It doesn’t need to happen, but it does.
Sometimes police panic in the face of intimidating crowds. Sometimes protesters let their anger boil over. A small minority of people just enjoy violence and chaos. Others stand to benefit from it, they stoke conflict and spread blame.
Then the molotov cocktails are flying and the snipers are shooting people on both sides. There’s blood in the streets and barricades are going up and the whole thing has its own momentum.
And, through all this, the media is churning out the noise. Partisan and dehumanising. “criminals” on one side “Fascists” on the other. Both sides are called thugs. Fox News and CNN tell the same stories with reversed points of view, slashing society down the centre.
And the chaos builds. The President has to do something, so he calls in the army.
Now the press are calling him a fascist and a dictator. They say he’s violated his office and he has to resign or be removed or be arrested.
I’m not talking about the United States.
I’m talking about Ukraine in 2014. Or Egypt and Syria in 2011. Or Libya in 2010. Or Bolivia just last winter. Or Venezuela every year for decades.
If the events currently unfolding in cities across the United States were happening in any other country in the world, a lot of us would already have said that the US Deep State was behind it. All the hallmarks are there.
The constructed narratives. The handy props. The agents provocateur. The hysterical media. The stench of agenda.
Consider, for a moment, that what is happening in Minneapolis and New York and Los Angeles has been happening in Paris and a host of other French cities for nearly two years.
The Guardian never called Macron a fascist. CNN never had a live stream about that.
Compare the coverage of the Gilets Jaunes to Black Lives Matter, and then to the Maidan protests.
The rubber bullets and tear gas are the same. The headlines are not.
CNN has one host calling Trump a “thug” who’s “hiding in his bunker”, and another saying “Trump declared war on Americans”. Robert Reich, writing in the Guardian, says:
[Trump] is no longer president. The sooner we stop treating him as if he were, the better.
The Washington Post has an op-ed headlined:
Trump must be removed. So must his congressional enablers.
Slate magazine:
Remove Trump Now
The corporations are all on board. Every one of them releasing statements of solidarity and heartfelt Instagram posts and sending money to all the right places. Nike had their famous ad.
Because the same companies paying slave-wages to 10-year-old Indonesian kids in vast sweatshops just hate racism and inequality, honest.
We’ve seen this before, haven’t we? Doesn’t this look like a play for an exchange of power? A colour revolution in the offing?
I suppose we should ask “why now?” Trump is up for re-election in just five months after all. Biden doesn’t really stand a chance, but they could have him suffer “ill health” and pull out, replace him with a Harris or a Warren or Michelle Obama. Hell, they could just rig it. They’ve done it before.
But then maybe it’s not about Trump per se, maybe it’s about the process of elections and the office of President in general. Maybe it’s about getting martial law in place well before the Covid19 backlash kicks in. Maybe there’s something else coming down the pipe that will make it clearer.
Supposing the plan is to get rid of Trump, what happens next?
Well, maybe one of a few things.
Firstly, it’s possible it all just dies down. But if 2020 has taught us anything it’s that the Deep State doesn’t fold a bad hand, they just up the ante and hope to bluff it out.
Second, there’s the possibility Trump introduces full-on martial law and becomes a quasi-dictator. While I’m sure he has no moral compunctions about that, it’s hard to see he would have the (vital) support of the Pentagon and the intelligence agencies in that endeavour. They’ve shown their colours throughout the last four years. However useful Trump has been, he is not an insider and he is entirely disposable.
Third, and final, Trump goes. Whether there’s an impeachment or a trial or an early election or a civil war… I don’t know. But it’s hard to see Trump weathering this storm.
If I had to guess, I’d say the protests and pressures mount until Trump does something stupid. If he makes any Yanukovych-style attempts at appeasement (he probably won’t), they will be ignored or minimised or the goalposts will be moved (we already saw that, when the arrest of Derek Chauvin went almost totally unnoticed).
If soldiers fire on civilians – whether Trump orders it or not, or whether mercenaries frame the army (like in Ukraine) – that will be it. The military will resign en masse, turn on Trump and he will be ousted.
From there could emerge an appointed “temporary” President, a middle-of-the-road type with support from both parties, whose job is to “unify the country” and “heal the divides”.
The emergence of a totally unelected President will, of course, be called something like “a triumph of the democratic spirit” in The Guardian.
The riots will be blamed for a constructed “second wave” of Covid19. Just in time for one of the new POTUS’ first announcements to be that “America will start taking Covid19 seriously”. Stronger lockdown rules, mandatory track-and-trace… the full Monty.
This will naturally earn him/her good-boy points all across the mainstream media, with the (totally accidental) bonus that anyone who dares protest the coup will be breaking the law, being selfish and risking lives (and probably a racist).
This is all just my supposition. I could be wrong, I hope I’m wrong. But I can see it heading in that direction. And the idea should worry everyone. Not out of any latent concern for Donald Trump, obviously. Just for the stability of the world. Coups or impeachments or other non-democratic power-changes are not good. They don’t end well.
They don’t end well for the leaders being removed, who almost universally end up exiled or hanged or poisoned or shot. Sometimes worse.
More importantly, they don’t end well for the ordinary people, who always suffer when the Deep State turns society on its head.
And, in this instance, it may not end well for the world, which suddenly has a nuclear-armed superpower in a severe state of flux to worry about.
We should all be concerned.
There’s an old joke:
Q: Why has there never been a military coup in the United States?
A: Because there’s no American Embassy there.
It looks like maybe that no longer applies.
Trump’s Anti-China Hysteria Goes Nuclear
Strategic Culture Foundation | May 29, 2020
The Trump administration’s scapegoating of China over its own disastrous mishandling of the coronavirus pandemic has relied on baseless conspiracy theory, unscientific claims and hyperbole. This week the president’s National Security Advisor went further by comparing the virus outbreak to the Chernobyl nuclear disaster.
In a U.S. media interview, Robert O’Brien repeated baseless claims that China was guilty of a “cover up” in responding to the disease. And he likened it to the 1986 nuclear disaster at Chernobyl in the former Soviet Union where the authorities were also accused of concealing the initial severity of the accident.
O’Brien added: “They unleashed a virus on the world that’s destroyed trillions of dollars in American economic wealth that we’re having to spend to keep our economy alive, to keep Americans afloat during this virus.”
It is a transparent attempt to make China liable for reparations.
The politicization of the coronavirus global pandemic by the Trump administration is unprecedented. It’s not just a feckless, demagogic administration engaging in delusion, denial and China-bashing. A growing bipartisan consensus in Washington is blaming China for having responsibility for spreading a communicable disease. This is in spite of the public record on the timeline of the pandemic and the early response from China and the World Health Organization to alert the rest of the world to potential consequences.
But Trump and his Secretary of State Mike Pompeo have taken the anti-China rhetoric to reckless extreme by leveling unsubstantiated claims that the Chinese government weaponized a virus to inflict damage on the U.S.
This unhinged logic is a dangerous slippery slope towards conflict. By comparing the coronavirus pandemic to Chernobyl, the Trump administration is gas-lighting the American public into viewing China as the source of their woes and all the terrible fallout from the disease. With over 100,000 dead Americans in four months – the world’s leader in this grim toll – and with 40 million American’s unemployed, the Trump administration is cynically seeking to turn public anger against China as a deflection from its own criminal incompetence.
The image of Chernobyl is a handy, if specious, mechanism by which to incite American anger even more against China.
Ironically, this gross distortion of events is willfully propagated by an American president who has made a signature cause against “fake news media”. Trump this week signed an executive order clamping down on social media platforms which he accuses, with some validity, of censoring certain viewpoints such as his claims about voter fraud using mail-in ballots.
Yet these U.S.-owned social media platforms do not “fact check” when it comes to Trump’s much more dubious and incendiary allegations against China. The president and his men have been freely vilifying China for allegedly unleashing the virus, weaponizing the pandemic and wreaking havoc and suffering across the U.S. – without any “checks” by his favored Twitter platform flagging such slanderous nonsense.
It should be disturbing too that Trump’s top National Security Advisor is so bereft of judgement and facts that he makes such an absurd comparison between the biological pandemic and an industrial accident. If this so-called security expert can be so imprudent with facts then it is appalling to consider how other important global issues, such as nuclear arms controls, will be likewise distorted and politicized for self-serving purpose.
Since Robert O’Brien took over the National Security Council from John Bolton at the end of last year it has taken on a noticeably more hawkish stance towards China in what seems to be a career-furthering choice of direction. His Neo-imperialist and “American exceptionalism” views set out in his over-rated book, While America Slept, show O’Brien to be an empty vessel intellectually and having a thoroughly propagandized mind.
Going nuclear over the pandemic is a sure sign that the Trump administration is desperate to replace rational argument with reckless rhetoric. Because it does not have a rational argument.
AFRICOM’s gambit: Why a US military command is waging a ‘media war’ on Americans
By Nebojsa Malic | RT | May 28, 2020
A regional US military command tasked with hunting down terrorists across Africa seems to be far more interested in waging psychological operations targeting the American public, the Pentagon and the White House. How curious.
Most countries in the world divide their own territory in military areas of responsibility. Not so the US, whose combatant commands span the entire globe – and beyond. One of these, the Africa Command (AFRICOM) is responsible for the entire African continent – with the exception of Egypt, which somehow ended up in the realm of the neighboring Central Command (CENTCOM).

AFRICOM is one of the US combatant commands that span the entire planet, as well as space now © Wikipedia
Tasked with going after terrorist groups like Boko Haram, Al-Shabaab and Islamic State (IS, formerly ISIS), AFRICOM has recently focused its efforts on using friendly journalists, media leak and bombastic social media statements to bypass its military and civilian superiors and lobby in Washington for more power, influence and money.
“Once is happenstance. Twice is coincidence. Three times is enemy action,” goes a quote attributed to James Bond author Ian Fleming. So it was definitely noticeable when AFRICOM made a third bid to attract attention in under a month.
On Wednesday, the left-progressive magazine Nation published an exclusive story based on an AFRICOM document showing that the command was worried about President Donald Trump freezing US funding for the World Health Organization and how China might exploit that for expanding its influence in Africa. Journalist Ken Klippenstein says the document, dated April 23, was leaked to him.
The leak came only a day after AFRICOM posted a series of tweets accusing Russia of sending fighter jets to Libya. One of them quoted its commander, General Charles Townsend, saying that they “watched as Russia flew fourth generation jet fighters to Libya – every step of the way.”
Except no proof of this was actually offered, and AFRICOM’s statement qualified the claim with weasel-words such as “assessed” and “likely.” Russian officials have dismissed the claim as ridiculous, especially the part about supposedly camouflaging the fighters’ origins by giving them a fresh paint job in Syria.
AFRICOM has been very sore about Moscow’s alleged military presence in Libya – where its own troops withdrew from in March 2019, per Trump’s orders – claiming that Russia is “destabilizing” Libya and making worse the “migration crisis affecting Europe.” In Tuesday’s statement, it accused Russia of not being “interested in what is best for the Libyan people” but “working to achieve their own strategic goals instead.”
That’s a bit rich, considering that it was the US and its NATO allies that carried out the 2011 regime-change intervention, turning Libya from the most prosperous country in Africa into a hellhole infested with warlords, terrorists and slavers ever since.
While leaking to The Nation appealed to the American left, AFRICOM has previously reached out to the right as well. Back in April, the command used a friendly reporter at the conservative Washington Examiner to claim that the (alleged) Russian presence in Libya is “more dangerous than ISIS,” which actually operated in Libya at one point in time.
“We believe that there will be a need in the future, an opportunity for us to get back into Libya again,” the unnamed official was actually quoted as saying at one point, giving away the endgame.
Between bombastic tweets, anonymous insinuations to friendly conservative reporters and leaks to liberal ones, the picture that emerges is of AFRICOM waging a psychological operation (psyop), a propaganda war on the US public bypassing the Joint Chiefs, the Pentagon and even the commander in chief himself to lobby for a bigger piece of the military pie.
This may seem far-fetched, but it isn’t strictly speaking without precedent. Some might remember General Phillip ‘Bwana’ Breedlove, who headed the European Command until May 2016. Emails from his personal account – published in July 2016, following his retirement from the US military – revealed months of effort to lobby the Pentagon and the White House to give EUCOM more attention, including spinning tall tales about a “Russian invasion” of Ukraine. The emails also revealed how Washington-based lobbyists identified the right way of approaching certain officials and the best channels for influencing the Obama administration when it came to Ukraine – notably, Vice President Joe Biden.
At one point, Breedlove even accused Moscow of “weaponizing migration in an attempt to overwhelm European structures and break European resolve” – just as AFRICOM is doing now.
All of which raises the question: when did combatant commands – an organization system invented during WWII to streamline command, control and communication between various branches of the military – morph into de facto feudal fiefdoms, with their commanders as barons more focused on currying favor in Washington than doing their actual job in the field?
In AFRICOM’s case, that job literally involves hunting down terrorists – or helping locals do so themselves, since the command is headquartered in Germany and has only a few actual bases in Africa. Not that any of that is going well at all. So AFRICOM shifted its focus on the home front instead.
One possible explanation may be money. Back in February, a rumor began spreading around Washington that the Trump administration was considering “zeroing out” AFRICOM’s budget. Both the rumor itself and the reported reactions to it have been hotly denied, but that might just help shed some light on Townsend’s gambit. As with any bureaucracy, survival is the highest priority.
Nebojsa Malic is a Serbian-American journalist, blogger and translator, who wrote a regular column for Antiwar.com from 2000 to 2015, and is now senior writer at RT. Follow him on Twitter @NebojsaMalic
Secret Nuclear Sites of DPRK? Or is Everything Visible from Above?
By Konstantin Asmolov – New Eastern Outlook – 28.05.2020
Since 2018, North Korea has continued to adhere to its moratorium on nuclear, and medium- and long-range missile tests. This has created an impression that DPRK’s missile and nuclear weapons program has been put on hold. Still, analysts have been asking whether this is actually the case and the answer tends to depend on their political bias. Naturally, those who have come to perceive Pyongyang as an Evil Empire believe that North Korea has not stopped working on such projects and is continuing to develop weapons of mass destruction. Within US expert circles, aside from holding such opinions, analysts linked with the Democratic party typically seek ways to show how politically incompetent Donald Trump is. In fact, any of their statements about successes made on the North Korean front actually imply that Donald Trump is being deceived but does not realize this.
Such ideological blinders further restrict the limited capabilities of these “Pyongyang experts”. Analyzing satellite images is essentially the only means they use to learn what is happening in the DPRK. But it is impossible to see everything from up above. Therefore, analysts end up basing their assumptions on a politicized interpretation of information, i.e. if a building can theoretically house a missile, it must be meant for that very purpose.
This, in turn, generates sensational stories about yet another secret site linked to the DPRK’s nuclear weapons program being located. Such reports are often published by Beyond Parallel, an analytic vehicle funded by the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS) or 38 North, currently a project of the Henry L. Stimson Center (formerly a program of the US-Korea Institute at Johns Hopkins University’s Paul H. Nitze School of Advanced International Studies).
On August 28, 2019, Beyond Parallel wrote that their latest satellite images provided “circumstantial evidence of the construction of a new ballistic missile submarine and preliminary evidence of possible preparations for a test” in the DPRK. Photographs of Sinpo South Shipyard showed “support vessels and a crane” suggesting “possible preparations, based on past practice, to tow the missile test stand barge out to sea for an SLBM (submarine-launched ballistic missile) test flight”. And although the authors of the article stated that there was “no conclusive evidence” that the preparation was nearing completion, media outlets reported that as an evidential fact.
On September 5, 2019, experts of the UN Security Council Sanctions Committee on North Korea submitted a report stating that the Uranium enrichment facility and the Experimental Light Water Reactor (ELWR) continued their operations at North Korea’s Yongbyon Nuclear Scientific Research Center.
On September 18, 2019, the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) said that a nuclear reactor at Yongbyon was shut down for a sufficient period of time to be “de-fueled and subsequently re-fueled” in its report. The document also stated that there had been “signs of use at the centrifuge enrichment facility” there although “no indications of reprocessing activities” had been detected at the radiochemical lab in the plant.
In December 2019, the 38 North website reported that Stanford University’s Center for International Security and Cooperation (CISAC) had “observed activity at the Experimental Light Water Reactor (ELWR)” in Yongbyon indicating that it might be operational. According to the article, the “construction of the ELWR began in late 2010”, and although it appeared to be externally complete in early 2013, the North Korean government “has not spoken publicly about the reactor or its status” since November 2011.
Commercial satellite images made early in 2019 showed “a narrow but steady liquid effluent likely trailing from a pipeline stemming from the Turbine-Generator Building of the ELWR”. The report said that since 2017, photographs have shown “frequent movement of vehicles, cranes and equipment around the reactor’s entrance, the emplacement of a transmission tower and electrical transmission lines in 2017”. And in early 2018, the construction of a dam and spillway were observed. The authors of the article concluded that such activity indicated that the reactor was being prepared “for start-up operation”, and this “could have significant implications for North Korea’s nuclear weapons program and would complicate any denuclearization process”. According to the report, “the stated purpose for the ELWR is electricity generation”, but “the reactor could be operated to produce weapons-grade plutonium or tritium for boosted fission or hydrogen bombs”.
On January 30, 2019, South Korea’s leading conservative newspaper the Chosun Ilbo wrote that the DPRK had supposedly “built a large tunnel in Ryanggang Province near the border with China” that appeared “to be an underground missile base”. The conclusion was based on observations of the facility and imagery showing that the tunnel had only one entrance with “two cylindrical objects measuring around 10 m in length” near it, which appeared “to be missile-launching tubes”.
In March 2020, 38 North wrote about “a previously publicly unidentified underground facility (UGF) beneath a hill in Bungang” near the Yongbyon Nuclear Scientific Research Center. The article provided a lot of details, based on satellite imagery, about its construction that had started in 2004. And, most importantly, the author made the following conclusion: “Underground structures in residential areas are not unusual and may be used for storage, civil defense or other innocuous purposes. While there is no evidence that it is related to the North Korean nuclear program, the site’s proximity may raise suspicions. Moreover, there is reason to believe there may be other underground sites in the area that may also provoke the same concerns. Therefore, any future denuclearization agreements covering the Yongbyon nuclear facility may need to take this site and any others discovered nearby into consideration when formulating verification provisions.” The report also mentioned that “no electrical lines feeding into” the UGF were observed, and “no external ventilation systems” were visible.
On March 27, 2020, the 38 North website issued a warning that “a new North Korean version of the Army Tactical Missile System (ATACMS), test-fired” in March, could be capable of carrying nuclear warheads.
On April 8, citing 38 North, South Korea’s Yonhap News Agency reported that the DPRK had “recently conducted a dummy missile ejection test at its Sinpo shipyard”. According to the article, satellite imagery from April 5 showed that “the service tower on the ejection test pad pulled back from its static position”. In addition, the photographs also depicted a “glimpse of the bow of the SINPO-class experimental ballistic missile submarine”, however, “it was mostly obscured by the environmental awning”.
Another report published by Beyond Parallel on May 5, 2020 caused quite a stir. It said that a new facility was nearing completion in the village of Sil-li (not far from Pyongyang International Airport), and that it was “almost certainly related to North Korea’s expanding ballistic missile program”. According to the article, it “could be complete and ready for operations sometime during late-2020 or early-2021”.
The author of the story, Joseph Bermudez, based his conclusions on the following information:
- “A high-bay building within the facility is large enough to accommodate an elevated Hwasong-15 intercontinental ballistic missile and, therefore, the entirety of North Korea’s known ballistic missile variants.” The building bay doors up to 8 m in height also indicate this.
- The facility has been constructed next to a UGL “whose likely size is also large enough to easily accommodate all known North Korean ballistic missiles and their associated launchers and support vehicles”.
- An “unusually large covered rail terminal” and a “new rail spur line” are probably meant “to support ballistic missile operations” at the facility. All the structures there are connected by “a 9- to 10-meter-wide surfaced road network with wide radius turns suitable for the movement of large trucks and ballistic missile launchers”.
- The facility is “relatively close to ballistic missile component manufacturing plants in the Pyongyang area” (for example, Tae-sung Machine Factory, Mangyongdae Light Electric Factory) and can, therefore, be used for “the assembly of ballistic missiles from components delivered by rail”
- “There are at least 17 air defense artillery bases and numerous military and paramilitary barracks within a 5-kilometer radius of the facility”.
Citing Joseph Bermudez’s article, ROK’s Yonhap News Agency elaborated that the Sil-li Ballistic Missile Support Facility, nearing completion, could be used to test-fire intercontinental ballistic missiles. And on May 9, it was reported that “multiple intercontinental ballistic missiles (ICBMs)” were “newly manufactured in Sain-ri, Pyongsong in North Korea”.
However, a Principal Researcher at Korea Atomic Energy Research Institute (KAERI) and the former Director General of Korea Institute of Nuclear Nonproliferation and Control (KINAC), Hwang Yong-soo was very critical of Joseph Bermudez’s conclusions comparing them to baseless rumors about the North Korean leader’s health.
Hwang Yong-soo pointed out that Bermudez leapt from “hypothesis to inferred conclusion” in his Beyond Parallel report, which was based solely on “interpreted open source satellite imagery”. He was also skeptical that “North Korea’s leaders would construct their most critical missile facility adjacent to Sunan Airport” (DPRK’s national airport). In addition, “transport of large missiles and components to and from Sil-li would be apparent via national technical means to the United States and its allies”. Hwang Yong-soo also suggested that alternative explanations for large buildings being constructed “next to an airport seem entirely logical as the purpose attributed to these buildings by CSIS”.
It is no secret that North Korea often builds underground facilities to prepare for a possible military conflict during which Pyongyang’s enemies would dominate in the skies. Hence, many of DPRK’s manufacturing and strategic complexes are located underground, but this does not mean that all of them are linked to the missile and nuclear weapons program.
Still, North Korea has surprised the rest of the world on occasion, thus western analysts tend to err on the side of caution when it comes to the DPRK. After all, underestimating one’s enemies is far more dangerous than overestimating them. Nonetheless, it is worth treating reasonable concerns in a different manner to attempts to produce cheaply sensational reports based on biased interpretations or data that is low on quality and quantity.
Konstantin Asmolov, PhD in History is a Leading Research Fellow at the Center for Korean Studies of the Institute of Far Eastern Studies of the Russian Academy of Sciences.
Race war or bust? MSM smothers racial unity over police killing of Minneapolis man by reminding blacks & whites to hate each other
By Helen Buyniski | RT | May 27, 2020
The brutal police murder of an unarmed black man in Minneapolis united all races and political stripes in shocked outrage. So why is MSM invoking every racially-divisive incident they can to set society at each other’s throats?
Liberals and conservatives alike were horrified on Monday by a widely-circulated Facebook video showing a white police officer choking an unarmed, handcuffed black man to death by kneeling on his neck for upwards of seven minutes, ignoring his increasingly feeble cries for help until he went limp. Regardless of their race, viewers demanded the officer – Minneapolis Police Department’s Derek Chauvin – be charged with murder and cheered at the news he and three colleagues present during the Memorial Day incident had been suspended from the force.
Given the country’s oft-lamented polarization, it’s rare to see such broad agreement on something as controversial as a police killing. But the sight of George Floyd struggling to wheeze out “I can’t breathe” while Chauvin mocked the anguished cries of onlookers convinced many to put aside their ideological feuds and get outraged. Seeing the life slowly choked out of the 46-year-old for nothing more than allegedly “resisting arrest” over supposedly forging a check at a supermarket was beyond the pale.
Mainstream media’s narrative managers were determined to shatter that unity, however.
Thousands of protesters marched on Minneapolis’ third police precinct headquarters on Tuesday, carrying banners demanding justice for Floyd and his family. While a small group broke windows and sprayed graffiti en route, the riot-gear-clad cops met the entire racially-heterogeneous group as if it were an invading army, hurling stun grenades and firing rubber bullets and tear gas into the crowd. At least one woman was shot in the head.
Journalists and politicians on social media reacted to this appalling show of excessive force not by unilaterally condemning police violence – that would risk cementing the dreaded “unity” – but by contrasting the crackdown with last month’s docile police response to a “Liberate Minnesota” protest against the state’s Covid-19 lockdown. Hundreds of mostly-white protesters, many strapped with guns, had surrounded the Governor’s Residence of Democrat Tim Walz, demanding an end to the pandemic-inspired stay-at-home order.
The anti-lockdown protesters were largely left alone by the cops, liberals complained, implying police refusal to meet the flag-waving “extremists” with a hail of rubber (or real!) bullets was due to racism rather than the firepower the anti-lockdown protesters were packing.
That the divisive narrative was fundamentally flawed – the Minneapolis crowd protesting Floyd’s murder was as white as it was black – didn’t matter. Nor was it deemed necessary to point out that the unarmed Minneapolis protesters were not a threat to the riot-gear-clad cops, who’d have had to be suicidal to fire rubber bullets into a crowd of AR-15-packing wannabe-militiamen the previous month. It was too late – the spell of unity had been broken, and the conversation had degenerated into bickering over the morality of property damage and whether molotov cocktails were justified in the face of murder.
American police’s legendary itchy trigger fingers may seem incompatible with the American people’s love of firearms. However, the cops’ choice of prey is instructive: police-involved shootings are much more common in cities with strict gun-control laws: New York, Chicago, Los Angeles. The majority of US police departments – including members of the Minneapolis force – train in Israel, learning to shoot first and ask questions later while testing out their new skills on real live occupied Palestinians. This training follows them home, where too often poor black populations become the favored target. But the core psychology is that of a bully, unwilling to pick on someone their own size, armed with their own weapons.
The MSM narrative-managers poured it on thick in their effort to muddy the waters, dragging in months’ worth of racial controversies. Anything was fair game, as long as it could be used to guide conservatives and liberals, blacks and whites back to their proper positions at each other’s throats.
From the “Central Park Karen” who called the cops on a black man for asking her to put her dog on a leash, to Ahmaud Arbery, the young black man shot by a father-and-son team while jogging in Georgia, supposedly because they suspected him of a burglary, nothing was too off-topic.
The last thing the media establishment needs is for Americans to realize their country doesn’t have a race problem, so much as a class problem – and the media is on one side of the divide, encouraging those on the other side to fight among themselves for its amusement.
Helen Buyniski is an American journalist and political commentator at RT. Follow her on Twitter @velocirapture23
Twitter & media know this isn’t about mail-in ballots or fraud, but about who gets to define truth; Trump does too
By Nebojsa Malic | RT | May 27, 2020
Twitter opened a new battlefront in the 2020 US election by ‘fact-checking’ posts by President Donald Trump to say he was wrong about voter fraud. That would normally be the end of the story – except nothing about this is normal.
On Tuesday, Twitter took the unprecedented step of posting a link under the two tweets – made by the president on his personal account – listing a bunch of mainstream media articles to assert that “fact-checkers say there is no evidence that mail-in ballots are linked to voter fraud,” and therefore Trump’s opinion about the matter is factually wrong.
The move followed a campaign by mainstream media and Democrats to censor Trump over other tweets, insinuating that the intern for former congressman and current MSNBC host Joe Scarborough may not have died accidentally, which culminated in a demand for Twitter to “cleanse the Trump stain” in a New York Times op-ed earlier on Tuesday.
Try as they might, Twitter couldn’t find any violation of their ever-shifting rules to pin on Trump, so they did the next best thing and “fact-checked” him. No doubt, whoever came up with this figured it was a really clever way to appease the outrage mob. Sure, the Trump 2020 campaign would protest the bias – and reveal in the process that they pulled advertisements from Twitter months ago – but they can be brushed off, unlike the chorus of his critics.
Then the White House Press Secretary fired off a thread filled with recent stories about mail-in ballot problems – forms being mailed to the dead or people who’d long since moved away, a Philadelphia judge just convicted for stuffing the ballot box, etc. – clearly showing the Twitter “fact checkers” had some explaining to do.
That should not come as a surprise to anyone. After all, these are the same outlets that have peddled the Russiagate conspiracy theory with impunity for the past four years, and even racked up prestigious awards for the blatantly fraudulent coverage. Mainstream media archives are littered with “bombshells” designed to first prevent Trump’s election, then inauguration, then get him impeached or otherwise removed from office. Every single one turned out to be a dud.
“But Trump lies! Constantly!” scream in unison the people used to being not just gatekeepers of “respectable discourse” but the tone police of Washington, the arbiters of the acceptable, the people who believe their pen shapes the very fabric of reality. People who headline their stories with “what you should know” and “how you should think.”
When challenged, they form ranks and scream they are being unjustly attacked and “delegitimized” – but only if it’s one of their mainstream colleagues called out for their excesses. Anyone else, from Julian Assange to alternative outlets, can rot because the precious First Amendment doesn’t apply to them, supposedly.
CNN had to settle a lawsuit after defaming a teenager from Covington, Kentucky. To avoid a similar fate, MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow argued that when she says “literally” that’s not news but humorous hyperbole, essentially dismissing her entire show as fake news.
It’s telling that this very phrase – fake news – has become synonymous with Trump’s criticism of the media, even though it was originally used by Hillary Clinton as an excuse for losing the 2016 election. You know, the election the mainstream media gave her 98 percent chances of winning almost to the very end, and openly endorsed her at the same rate?
If you thought Clinton took that loss hard, though, you clearly haven’t been paying attention to the media. Trump’s victory was an existential crisis for them, the moment their power to dictate the shape of reality itself was exposed as a mirage.
This is why they’ve spent the past four years lobbing Russiagate and other ‘bombshells’ at him. This is why they have led the outrage mobs, not just against Trump or the millions of “deplorables” that voted for him, but also against the social media platforms he used to bypass them in 2016, so he wouldn’t be able to do that again this November. Don’t think for a second any of this is about mail-in ballots, which – much like immigration and other issues – Democrats themselves once used to be against.
When they wrote freedom of speech into the Constitution, America’s founders may not have imagined that a president would be an unlikely champion of it, while the “free press” would be clamoring for censorship to preserve its power. Yet here we are.
Nebojsa Malic is a Serbian-American journalist, blogger and translator, who wrote a regular column for Antiwar.com from 2000 to 2015, and is now senior writer at RT. Follow him on Twitter @NebojsaMalic
Court rejects OAN suit over MSNBC host Rachel Maddow’s claim about ‘Russian propaganda’
‘Rhetorical hyperbole’ and NOT FACT

© Global Look /ZUMA Press /Michael Brochstein
RT | May 23, 2020
A US judge dismissed a defamation lawsuit by One America News Network against MSNBC over Rachel Maddow’s claims that OAN was “literally” Russian propaganda, ruling that her segment was merely “an opinion” and “exaggeration.”
OAN sued the liberal talk show host and MSNBC for defamation, demanding over $10 million in damages, back in September 2019. The lawsuit was based on the July 22 episode of The Rachel Maddow Show, where Maddow launched a scathing broadside against the conservative television network, labeling it “the most obsequiously pro-Trump right wing news outlet in America” and “really literally paid Russian propaganda.”
In the segment, Maddow cited a story by The Daily Beast’s Kevin Poulsen about OAN’s Kristian Rouz, who has previously contributed to Sputnik as a freelance author. Toeing the general US mainstream line on the Russian media, be it Sputnik or RT, Poulsen branded the Russian news agency “the Kremlin’s official propaganda outlet” and said Rouz was once on its “payroll.”
Shortly after MSNBC’s star talent peddled the claim, OAN rejected the allegations as “utterly and completely false.” The outlet, which is owned by the Herring Networks, a small California-based family company, said that it “has never been paid or received a penny from Russia or the Russian government,” with its only funding coming from the Herring family.
In their bid to win the case, Maddow herself, MSNBC, Comcast Corporation and NBCUniversal Media did not address the accusation itself – namely, that her claim about OAN was false – but opted to invoke the First Amendment, insisting that the rant should be protected as free speech.
Siding with Maddow, the California district court defined Maddow’s show as a mix of “news and opinions,” concluding that the manner in which the progressive host blurted out the accusations “makes it more likely that a reasonable viewer would not conclude that the contested statement implies an assertion of objective fact.”
“The statement constitutes opinion and rhetorical hyperbole protected under the First Amendment.”
The court said that while Maddow “truthfully” related the story by the Daily Beast, the statement about OAN being funded by the Kremlin was her “opinion” and “exaggeration” of the said article.
While the legal trick helped Maddow to get off the hook without ever trying to defend her initial statement, conservative commentators on social media wasted no time in pointing out that dodging a payout to OAN literally meant admitting that Maddow was not, in fact, news.
The Case of General Michael Flynn: The Use of Law as a Political Weapon

By Paul Craig Roberts | Institute for Political Economy | May 20, 2020
The audacious corruption of the FBI and the US Department of Justice (sic) is demonstrated by their frame-up of the three-star general, former Director of the Defense Intelligence Agency, and National Security Adviser to President Donald Trump.
US Department of Justice (DOJ) documents that the department was forced to turn over to General Michael Flynn’s attorney reveal that the FBI found no wrongdoing by Flynn in its investigation of him and recommended the investigation be closed. Corrupt FBI official Peter Strzok, a leader of the anti-Trump cabal in the FBI, intervened. Strzok convinced the official managing the investigation not to close the case as it was the wishes of the “7th floor” (top FBI officials) to keep the case open. In the absence of evidence against Flynn, released FBI documents prove that the FBI leadership decided to frame General Flynn. The documents reveal that the FBI’s plan is “to get him (Flynn) to lie so we can prosecute him or get him fired. . . . we should try to frame them in a way we want.” General Flynn was forced to incriminate himself with a guilty plea. Otherwise, the corrupt DOJ prosecutors threatened to indict Flynn’s son.
When this proof of egregious government misconduct came to light, the DOJ had no choice but to drop the case against General Flynn. Otherwise it would be clear that law in the US is a weapon in the hands of government. This would mean that control of government would be a life and death matter for the two political parties as it is in Ecuador and Bolivia where incoming presidents arrest or attempt to arrest outgoing presidents.
But we didn’t hear a word about the frame-up of General Flynn from the corrupt presstitutes. On May 7 the editorial board of the New York Times published the largest and most egregious collection of lies in the entire history of the disreputable organization. The editorial— “Don’t Forget, Michael Flynn Pleaded Guillty. Twice.” —claimed the lies coerced from Flynn proved Flynn’s guilt, and that Attorney General William Barr is a “personal fixer for the president” and used the Department of Justice to protect friends and to go after political enemies.
The New York Times has it backwards. Going after political enemies is precisely what the Obama Regime’s concocted case against General Flynn (and Trump) was all about. Remember, it was General Flynn who said on television that it was a “willful decision” of the Obama Regime to send the mercenary jihadists to attack Syria, a decision Obama made in the face of contrary advice by General Flynn, Director of the Defense Intelligence Agency. When Flynn revealed this, it blew up the fake news story spread by the Obama Regime and the presstitutes that the Obama-supported invasion of Syria by CIA mercenaries was an uprising by Syrian moderates fighting for democracy. Flynn’s blood is blood that the corrupt Obama Regime wanted very badly.
Obama’s role in the frame-up of Flynn and the orchestration of the Russiagate hoax is now coming to light, making the former president nervous. On May 10 the Wall Street Journal editorial board asked if Obama’s nerves are getting in the way of his judgment:
“Barack Obama is a lawyer, so it was stunning to read that he ventured into the Michael Flynn case in a way that misstated the supposed crime and ignored the history of his own Administration in targeting Mr. Flynn. Since the former President chose to offer his legal views when he didn’t need to, we wonder what he’s really worried about.”
The Democrats’ frame-up of General Flynn and their two attempted frame-ups of President Trump show an extraordinary audacity and a corruptly compliant FBI and DOJ. They thought that they could get away with it, and, of course, they had all the help possible from the New York Times, Washington Post, CNN, MSNBC, and the rest of the presstitute scum for whom lies are the currency of their fake news realm. The presstitutes have made clear that the US media is devoid of integrity.
After high officials such as James Clapper, Susan Rice, Samatha Power, and others repeatedly claimed evidence of Trump and Flynn’s guilt, when under oath their story changed 180 degrees. Here is Director of National Intelligence James Clapper:
“I never saw any direct empirical evidence that the Trump campaign or someone in it was plotting/conspiring with the Russians to meddle with the election.”
Susan Rice, Obama’s incompetent National Security Adviser, and Samatha Power, Obama’s Russia-baiting ambassador to the UN, along with the rest of the disreputable Obama cabal, have admitted that they saw no specific evidence of any collusion between Trump and Russia. The entire thing was an orchestrated hoax that proves beyond all doubt that the Democrat Party and the US media are corrupt beyond redemption.
When the case against Flynn was dropped as a result of the damning evidence of egregious government misconduct in framing a senior official of the US government, the corrupt prosecutors who had prosecuted the innocent Flynn all resigned in a huff, pretending that it was Barr, not them, who used the Department of Justice for self-interested political purpose.
Two Georgetown University law professors, Kean K. Katyal and Joshua A. Geltzer, totally discredited themselves and the Obama contingent in the DOJ, by alleging in the New York Times that the dropped charge against Flynn has resulted in the “utter demoralization” of “the law enforcement community.” In other words, for these law professors and “the law enforcement community” for which they claim to speak, dropping a case consisting entirely of an orchestrated frame-up, a contrived perjury trap, and threats against family members is demoralizing. The professors are so thoroughly dishonest that they use the lies coerced from Flynn—the price of his “cooperation with the investigation” in order that his son would not also be framed-up—as “evidence” of Flynn’s guilt and proof of the political use of the Justice Department by Trump and Barr in dropping the contrived case.
The frame-up of Flynn is not acknowledged by the law professors as political use of the Justice Department.
Instead the law professors describe the vindication of an innocent man on the basis of undeniable evidence as political use of the Justice Department.
If this is the kind of law Georgetown University teaches, the law school should be promptly shut down.
The question that demands an answer is how do people as corrupt and devoid of integrity as Comey, Mueller, and Strzok get into top FBI positions?
Washington’s tall tale of Iranian-Al Qaeda alliance based on questionably sourced book ‘The Exile’
A disinformation campaign aimed to justify the assassination of Qassem Soleimani by painting him and Iran as willing enablers of al-Qaeda. The propaganda operation relied heavily on a shoddily sourced book, “The Exile.”
By Gareth Porter | The Grayzone | May 19, 2020
The U.S. assassination of Qassem Soleimani in January touched off a new wave of disinformation about the top Iranian major general, with Trump administration allies branding him a global terrorist while painting Iran as the world’s worst state sponsor of terrorism. Much of the propaganda about Soleimani related to his alleged responsibility for the killing of American troops in Iraq, along with Iran’s role in Syria, Lebanon, and Yemen.
But a second theme in the disinformation campaign, which has been picked up by mainstream outlets like the Wall Street Journal and National Public Radio, was the claim that Soleimani deliberately unleashed al-Qaeda terrorist Abu Musab al-Zarqawi’s campaign to kill Shiites in Iraq. That element of the propaganda offensive was the result of the 2017 publication of “The Exile,” a book by British journalists Adrian Levy and Cathy Scott-Clark, which spun a new version of the familiar U.S. propaganda line of a supposed Iranian terror alliance with al-Qaeda.
Levy and Scott-Clark introduced the theme of secret collusion between the two open adversaries with an article in the The Sunday Times in early 2018, dramatically entitled “Tehran in devil’s pact to rebuild al‑Qaeda.” Soleimani, they claimed, “first offered sanctuary to bin Laden’s family and al-Qaeda military leaders,” then proceeded to “build them a residential compound at the heart of a military training center in Tehran.”
But those two sentences represented a grotesque distortion of Iran’s policy toward the al-Qaeda personnel fleeing from Afghanistan into Iran. Virtually every piece of concrete evidence, including an internal al-Qaeda document written in 2007, showed that Iran agreed to take in a group of al-Qaeda refugees with legal passports that included members of bin Laden’s family and some fighters and middle- and lower-ranking military cadres – but not Zarqawi and other al-Qaeda military leaders — and only temporarily and under strict rules forbidding political activity.
The crucial fact that Levy and Scott-Clark conveniently failed to mention, moreover, was that Iranian officials were well aware that al-Qaeda’s leadership figures, including military commanders and with their troops, were also slipping into Iran from Afghanistan, but Iranian security forces had not yet located them.
Keeping the legal arrivals under closer surveillance and watching for any contacts with those illegally in the country, therefore, was a prudent policy for Iranian security under the circumstances.
In addition, having bin Laden’s family and other al-Qaeda cadres under their surveillance gave Iran potential bargaining chips it could use to counter hostile actions by both al-Qaeda and the United States.
Al-Qaeda documents undermine narrative of cooperation with Iran
Careful study of the enormous cache of internal al-Qaeda documents released by the U.S. government in 2017 further discredited the tall tale of Iranian facilitation of al-Qaeda terrorism.
Nelly Lahoud, a senior fellow at the New American Foundation and former senior research associate at the West Point Combating Terrorism Center, translated and analyzed 303 of the newly available documents and found nothing indicating Iranian cooperation with, or even knowledge about the whereabouts of Zarqawi or other al-Qaeda military leaders prior to their detentions of April 2003.
Lahoud explained in a September 2018 lecture that all actions by al-Qaeda operatives in Iran had been “conducted in a clandestine manner.” She even discovered from one of the documents that al-Qaeda had considered the clandestine presence of those officials and fighters so dangerous that they had been instructed on how to commit suicide if they were caught by the Iranians.
Adrian Levy and Cathy Scott-Clark were well aware that those al-Qaeda operatives living in Tehran’s military training center were under severe constraints, akin to a prison. Meanwhile, senior figures like Zarqawi and Saif al-Adel, the head of the al-Qaeda shura council, were far away from Tehran, planning new operations in the region amid friendly Sunni contacts. These plans included Zarqawi’s campaign Iraq, which he began organizing in early 2002.
Nevertheless the authors declared, “From [the Iranian training center], al-Qaeda organized, trained and established funding networks with the help of Iran, co-ordinated multiple terrorist atrocities and supported the bloodbath against Shi’ites by al-Qaeda in Iraq….”
Anti-Iran think tanker Sadjadpour jumps on the conspiracy bandwagon
Karim Sadjadpour of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, a reliable fount of anti-Iran spin, responded within days of the Soleimani assassination with an article in the Wall Street Journal’s right-wing editorial section that reinforced the budding disinformation campaign.
Entitled “The Sinister Genius of Qassem Soleimani,” Sadjadpour’s op-ed argued that in March 2003, before the U.S. invasion of Iraq, “Soleimani’s Quds Force freed many Sunni jihadists that Iran had been holding captive, unleashing them against the U.S.” He cited “The Exile” as his source.
Levy and Scott-Clark did indeed spin a tale in the book of Zarqawi’s troops — and Zarqawi himself — being rounded up and locked to the same prison as those al-Qaeda members who entered with passports in March 2003. The authors claimed they were released within days. But the only sources they cite to support their claims were two people they interviewed in Amman, Jordan in 2016.
So who were these insider sources? The only identifying characteristics Levy and Scott-Clark offer is that they were “in Zarqawi’s group at the time.” Furthermore, neither of these sources is quoted to substantiate the claim that Zarqawi was arrested and then released from prison, and they are mentioned only in a footnote on the number of Zarqawi’s troops that had been sent to the prison.
Sadjadpour offered his own explanation — without the slightest suggestion of any evidence to support it — of why Soleimani would support an anti-Shiite jihadist to kill his own Iraqi Shiite allies. “By targeting Shiite shrines and civilians, killing thousands of Iran’s fellow Shiites,” he wrote, “Zarqawi helped to radicalize Iraq’s Shiite majority and pushed them closer to Iran—and to Soleimani, who could offer them protection.”
In late January, on National Public Radio’s weekly program “Throughline,” Sadjadpour pushed his dubiously sourced argument, opining that Soleimani had figured out how to “use the al Qaeda jihadists of Zarqawi … to simply unleash them into Iraq with the understanding that you guys do what you do.”
The BBC promotes “The Exile” as the book’s narrative crumbles
In a BBC radio documentary broadcasted in late April, titled “Iran’s Long Game” (an allusion to Iran’s alleged long-term plan for domination of the entire Middle East), Cathy Scott-Clark told a story intended to clinch the case that Iran had helped Zarqawi: Other prisoners “heard conversations in the corridors” in which Iranian authorities allegedly assured Zarqawi, “You can do whatever you want to do … in Iraq.”
That story does not appear in her book, however. Instead, Adrian Levy and Scott-Clark related a comment by Abu Hafs al-Mauritani, a spiritual adviser to bin Laden, on hearing about the arrest and subsequent release of Zarqawi from another prisoner who eavesdropped by tapping the pipes leading into his room.
That narrative had already been definitively contradicted long before, however, in an account provided by Saif al-Adl, the most senior member of the al-Qaeda top leadership in Iran. Al-Adl had fled with Zarqawi from Afghanistan across the border into Iran illegally in late 2001 or early 2002 and was apprehended in April 2003 — weeks after the alleged events portrayed in al-Mauritani’s story.
In a memoir smuggled out of Iran to Jordanian journalist Fouad Hussein, which Husayn published in 2005 in an Arabic-language book (but available online in an English-language translation), Saif al-Adl described an Iranian crackdown in March 2003 that captured 80 percent of Zarqawi’s fighters and “confused us and aborted 75 percent of our plan”.
Because of that round-up, al-Adl wrote, “[T]here was a need for the departure of Abu-Mus’ab and the brothers who remained free.” Al-Adl described his final meeting with Zarqawi before his departure, confirming that Zarqawi had not been caught prior to his own apprehension on April 23, 2003.
Levy and Scott-Clark cited Saif al-Adl’s memoir on other matters in “The Exile,” but when this writer queried Scott-Clark about al-Adl’s testimony – which contradicted the narrative that underpinned her book – Scott-Clark responded, “I know Fuad Hussein well. Most of his information is third hand and not well sourced.”
She did not address the substance of al-Adl’s recollections about Zarqawi, however. When asked in a follow-up email whether she challenged the authenticity of Saif al-Adl’s testimony, Scott-Clark did not respond.
Gareth Porter is an independent investigative journalist who has covered national security policy since 2005 and was the recipient of Gellhorn Prize for Journalism in 2012. His most recent book is The CIA Insider’s Guide to the Iran Crisis co-authored with John Kiriakou, just published in February.
The Covid Lockdown and CO2

By Kip Hansen | Watts Up With That? | May 18, 2020
There has been a lot of talk in the press and from talking heads claiming that the Covid lockdown has “reduced emissions” (power plants cutting back on power generations, factories closed, populations ordered to stay home, most airplanes grounded) and talk encouraging that government Covid recovery packages, should support only companies and projects “which decouple economic growth from GHG emissions”. The “Build Back Better” movement.
It is true that emissions from human sources – automobiles, factories, power plants, etc. – have been reduced by the multitude of nations that have sacrificed their economies in the [misguided] belief that doing so “saves lives”.
But the idea that the Worldwide Covid Lockdown has had any effect on atmospheric CO2 concentrations is simply not true.
Here is the data, from the world’s most trusted monitor of atmospheric CO2:

Despite the dreams of the anti-human element of the Climate Cabal, which seems to have been hoping that the Covid Lockdown would destroy enough of to human society to allow the Radical Greens to dictate the “post-apocalypse recovery plan” — there has been no apocalypse (there has been an economic downturn… by definition, they turned down the economy), the lockdown hasn’t even made a dent, not even a tiny slowdown, in the growth atmospheric CO2 concentrations.
That is, this year, through May, looks precisely like each of the previous four years. You might be asking: “How can that be?” — factories closed, cars off the road, power plants just ticking over…..
[ If you don’t like this chart, try the Daily and Weekly Chart — it shows the same thing. ]
Maybe, just maybe, anthropogenic emissions just don’t make that big of a contribution to the increase…. Maybe abandoning fossil fuels and all the advantages of modern society isn’t a solution to rising CO2.
Don’t ask me to explain it, I don’t know. But it sure is interesting – even I thought the lockdowns would show up at Mauna Loa.
