Tricks of the Trade: How the White House and Legacy Media Concoct Pro-Democrat Narratives
By Ekaterina Blinova – Sputnik – 01.11.2024
Donald Trump recently announced his intention to sue CBS News for $10 billion, claiming that the network’s editing of Kamala Harris’s interview on 60 Minutes constituted “election interference.”
In a parallel move, House Republicans are contemplating an investigation into how the White House edited President Joe Biden’s controversial “garbage” comment. They argue this might violate the Presidential Records Act of 1978.
The GOP contends that both the White House and the media are engaged in efforts to portray Biden and Harris more favorably as Election Day approaches. This appears to be part of a larger trend of collaboration between the press and White House staff that has been ongoing for some time.
In mid-August, The National Interest lambasted the US mainstream media for what it referred to as Kamala Harris’s “rebranding.” The publication pointed out that Harris received “glamorous cover profiles” and positive coverage, despite her historically low approval ratings as vice president and her inability to address the border crisis after being appointed by Biden as “border czar.”
In mid-October, Fox News anchor Bret Baier confronted Harris with a series of challenging questions regarding migration, her economic agenda, and her vice-presidential record. This line of questioning led Harris’s aides to cut the interview short after less than 30 minutes.
Earlier, the White House repeatedly downplayed and sugar-coated Joe Biden’s “gaffes”, including the one concerning US “military defense” of Taiwan.
In July, Civic Media, a radio station in Milwaukee, acknowledged that it had made two edits to a July 3 recording of an interview with Biden that aired later, following a request from his campaign. This interview came on the heels of Biden’s poor performance in his June 27 debate against Trump.
- The first edit concerned Biden’s claim that his administration included more Black officials than “all other presidents combined.”
- The second edit removed his comments about Trump’s call for the death penalty for the Central Park Five teens, who were later exonerated. “I don’t know if they even called for their hanging or not, but he–but they said […] convicted of murder,” Biden asserted.
In early July, Andrea Lawful-Sanders, a host on Philadelphia’s WURD radio, conducted a separate interview with Biden and later admitted that she had asked four out of the eight questions that had been drafted for her by Biden’s aides. Michael LaRosa, a former press secretary for First Lady Jill Biden, commented to Axios that the practice of “pre-submitting questions” for interviewees has long been a strategy of the Biden team.
In February 2024, the White House pressured Fox News to revise its coverage of corruption allegations against President Biden, arguing that the claims were based on misleading data provided by FBI informant Alexander Smirnov, who allegedly fabricated the accusations against the president. Fox News declined the request, citing broader corruption allegations put forth by House investigators concerning the Biden family.
Dumpster fire: White House Press Office faced internal criticism over the rewriting of Biden’s garbage comments
By Jonathan Turley | November 1, 2024
Since the “Let’s Go, Brandon” incident, the media has been repeatedly accused of reframing news or rewriting words to benefit the President or the Biden-Harris Administration. This week, the White House Press Office and various media outlets like Politico and MSNBC have been ridiculed for denying that President Joe Biden called Trump supporters “garbage.” It has created a weird dissonance as Democratic politicians denounced what the White House and many in the press denied was said. Now, the White House Press office is being criticized from a new quarter for the clean up on aisle three: the Director of White House Stenography, Amy Sands. The White House stenographers objected to the rewriting of the transcript by the Biden White House staff to suggest that the President was condemning Trump’s rhetoric, not his supporters.
The President’s attack on Trump supporters was nothing new. Leaders like Hillary Clinton called them “deplorables,” and Biden himself has described their views as a return of the confederacy and the rise of fascism. Democrats have called the movement a modern form of Nazism and an effort to destroy democracy, round up homosexuals, and create internment camps.
The problem was the timing. As Harris was denouncing Trump for name-calling and insisting that Democrats are bringing the country together (while condemning Trump as a modern version of Hitler), Biden was literally behind her in the White House, calling tens of millions of Trump supporters “garbage.”
Fox News reportedly obtained an email in which the supervisor sounded the alarm on the White House press office’s “breach of protocol and spoilation of transcript integrity between the Stenography and Press Offices.” Sands went on to say that
“if there is a difference in interpretation, the Press Office may choose to withhold the transcript but cannot edit it independently. Our Stenography Office transcript — released to our distro, which includes the National Archives — is now different than the version edited and released to the public by Press Office staff… After last night’s process, our team would like to reiterate that rush drafts/excerpts the Stenography Office sends to assist the Press Office are not intended for public distribution or as the final version of the transcript. Please avoid sharing rush drafts/excerpts, which are subject to review and might create confusion among staff, media, and the public while our Stenography Office completes a thorough review process.”
The White House was criticized for adding an apostrophe to the President’s comments to change the meaning of the key line.
After the statement, there was an immediate clean-up effort by Politico White House bureau chief and MSNBC host Jonathan Lemire, who was accused of changing the language by saying that “Biden, in a Zoom call with the organization Voto Latino, said ‘the only garbage’ was the ‘hatred’ of Trump supporters who said such things about American citizens.”
Lemire was widely ridiculed. For many, it sounded like another “Let’s Go Brandon” moment. He later turned to the apostrophe spin: “The full Biden quote from the Zoom tonight, which is being taken out of context.” Accompanying the text is a screenshot of a transcript that has Biden saying: “The only garbage I see floating out there is his supporter’s — his — his demonization of Latinos is unconscionable, and it’s un-American.”
The spin would have been more convincing if many of these pundits were not at the same time insisting that a line from a comedian delivered at a Trump event should be attributed to Trump (despite his later condemnation of any such view). It would also be more credible if Biden had not spent much of the last four years portraying the Trump movement as a new confederacy (before it was reframed as the new Third Reich).
When asked about the internal objections, White House spokesperson Andrew Bates only repeated the prior statement: “The President confirmed in his tweet on Tuesday evening that he was addressing the hateful rhetoric from the comedian at Trump’s Madison Square Garden rally. That was reflected in the transcript.”
However, Fox noted that it remains “unclear … whether the transcript the White House cites is the one that was altered and released to the press or the final transcript that was sent to the National Archives.”
Other reporters now admit that Biden said what he said but describe it, as did CBS News anchor Norah O’Donnell, as “a gaffe by President Biden where he, in his explanation, inadvertently called Trump supporters garbage.” The “inadvertent gaffe” ignores years of portraying Trump supporters as seeking to return the United States to the Jim Crowe period or pursuing a neo-Nazi future.
While various Democratic politicians have denounced Biden’s statements and Harris has said that she strongly disagrees with them, diehards like MSNBC’s Lawrence O’Donnell mocked those who were critical as “some of the worst” or just ungrammatical journalists:
“To do so, they had to refuse to listen to the actual sentence Joe Biden spoke. They had to refuse to look at the written words of that sentence. They had to refuse to understand English grammar. They had to refuse to understand what a singular possessive is. They had to refuse to understand what apostrophe ‘s’ means. They had to refuse to remember what they learned in elementary school about the English language.”
It appears that the non-partisan, career stenographers who recorded the interview contemporaneously are also on that “worst” list of ungrammatical morons.
The mainstream media is now dismissing the entire matter as just the placement of an apostrophe. Yet, many of these same voices were supporting a full-fledged investigation into the transcript of the Ukraine call during the Trump Administration over “the use of ellipses.”
I was critical of that call and supported calls for an accurate transcript, particularly on such a weighty issue. However, back then, the accuracy of such transcripts was accepted as of paramount importance. Whether it is a matter of foreign or domestic policy (or an apostrophe or ellipses), the public should be confident on the accuracy of White House transcripts, as stressed by Sands in her internal objections to the White House Press Office.
One of those objecting to the use of the ellipses was Lawrence O’Donnell.
It appears that one person’s punctuation is another person’s punch line.
Jonathan Turley is the Shapiro professor of public interest law at George Washington University and the author of “The Indispensable Right: Free Speech in an Age of Rage.”
Media Changes Narrative as the Ukrainian Proxy War is Coming to an End
By Professor Glenn Diesen | October 30, 2024
The Economist reports that “Russia is slicing through Ukrainian defences” and Ukraine is subsequently “struggling to survive”.[1] Across the Western media, the public is prepared for defeat and painful concessions in future negotiations. The media is changing the narrative as reality can no longer be ignored. Russia’s coming victory has been obvious since at least the summer of 2023, yet this was ignored to keep the proxy war going.
We are witnessing an impressive demonstration of narrative control: For more than two years, the political-media elites have been chanting “Ukraine is winning” and denounced any dissent to their narrative as “Kremlin talking points” that aim to reduce support for the war. What was “Russian propaganda” yesterday is now suddenly the consensus of the collective media. Critical self-reflection is as absent as it was after the Russiagate reporting.
Similar narrative control was displayed when the media reassured the public for two decades that NATO was winning [in Afghanistan], before fleeing in a great rush with dramatic images of people falling off an airplane.
The media deceived the public by presenting the stagnant frontlines as evidence that Russia was not winning. However, in a war of attrition, the direction of the war is measured by attrition rates – the losses on each side. Territorial control comes after the adversary has been exhausted as territorial expansion is very costly in such high-intensity warfare with powerful defensive lines. The attrition rates have throughout the war been extremely unfavourable to Ukraine, and they continuously get worse. The current collapse of the Ukrainian frontlines was very predictable as the manpower and weaponry have been exhausted.
Why has the former narrative expired? The public could be misled by fake attrition rates, yet it is not possible to cover up territorial changes after the eventual breaking point. Furthermore, the proxy war was beneficial to NATO when the Russians and Ukrainians were bleeding each other without any significant territorial changes. Once the Ukrainians are exhausted and begin to lose strategic territory, it is no longer in the interest of NATO to continue the war.
Narrative Control: Weaponising Empathy
The political-media elites weaponised empathy to get public support for war and disdain for diplomacy. The Western public was convinced to support the proxy war against Russia by appealing to their empathy for the suffering of Ukrainians and the injustice of their loss of sovereignty. Yet, all appeals to empathy are always translated into support for continued warfare and dismissing diplomatic solutions.
Those who disagreed with the NATO’s mantra that “weapons are the way to peace” and instead suggested negotiations, were quickly dismissed as puppets of the Kremlin who did not care about Ukrainians. Support for continued fighting in a war that cannot be won has been the only acceptable expression of empathy.
For the postmodernists seeking to socially construct their own reality, great power rivalry is largely a battle of narratives. The weaponisation of empathy enabled the war narrative to become impervious to criticism. War is virtuous and diplomacy is treasonous as Ukraine was allegedly fighting Russia’s unprovoked war with the objective to subjugate the entire country. A strong moral framing convinced people to deceive and self-censor in support of the noble cause.
Even criticism of how Ukrainian civilians were dragged into cars by their government and sent to their deaths on the frontlines was portrayed as supporting “Kremlin talking points” as it undermined the NATO war narrative.
Reporting on high Ukrainian casualty rates threatened to undermine support for the war. Reporting on the failure of sanctions threatened to reduce public support for the sanctions. Reporting on the likely US destruction of Nord Stream threatened to create divisions within the miliary bloc. Reporting on the US and UK sabotage of the Minsk agreement and the Istanbul negotiations threatens the narrative of NATO merely attempting to “help” Ukraine. The public is offered the binary option of adhering either to the pro-Ukraine/NATO narrative or the pro-Russia narrative. Anyone challenging the narrative with inconvenient facts could thus be accused of supporting Moscow’s narrative. Reporting that Russia was winning was uncritically interpreted as taking Russia’s side.
There are ample facts and statements that demonstrate NATO has been fighting to the last Ukrainian to weaken a strategic rival. Yet, the strict narrative control entails that such evidence have not been permitted to be discussed.
The Objectives of a Proxy War: Bleeding the Adversary
The strict demand for loyalty to the narrative conceals unreported facts that US foreign policy is about restoring global primacy and not an altruistic commitment to liberal democratic values. The US considers Ukraine to be an important instrument to weaken Russia as a strategic rival.
RAND Corporation, a think tank funded by the US government and renowned for its close ties with the intelligence community, published a report in 2019 on how the US could bleed Russia by pulling it further into Ukraine. RAND recognised that the US could send more military equipment to Ukraine and threaten NATO expansion to provoke Russia to increase its involvement in Ukraine:
“Providing more U.S. military equipment and advice could lead Russia to increase its direct involvement in the conflict and the price it pays for it… While NATO’s requirement for unanimity makes it unlikely that Ukraine could gain membership in the foreseeable future, Washington pushing this possibility could boost Ukrainian resolve while leading Russia to redouble its efforts to forestall such a development”.[2]
However, the same RAND report recognised that the strategy of bleeding Russia had to be carefully “calibrated” as a full-scale war could result in Russia acquiring strategic territories, which is not in the interest of the US. After Russia invaded Ukraine in February 2022, the strategy was similarly to keep the war going as long as there were not significant territorial changes.
In March 2022, Leon Panetta (former White House Chief of Staff, US Secretary of Defence, and CIA Director) acknowledged: “We are engaged in a conflict here, it’s a proxy war with Russia, whether we say so or not… The way you get leverage is by, frankly, going in and killing Russians”.[3] Even Zelensky recognised in March 2022 that some Western states wanted to use Ukraine as a proxy against Russia: “There are those in the West who don’t mind a long war because it would mean exhausting Russia, even if this means the demise of Ukraine and comes at the cost of Ukrainian lives”.[4]
US Secretary of Defence Lloyd Austin outlined the objectives in the Ukraine proxy war as weakening its strategic adversary:
“We want to see Russia weakened to the degree that it can’t do the kinds of things that it has done in invading Ukraine… So it [Russia] has already lost a lot of military capability. And a lot of its troops, quite frankly. And we want to see them not have the capability to very quickly reproduce that capability”.[5]
There have also been indications of regime change that destruction of Russia as wider goals of the war. Sources in the US and UK governments confirmed in March 2022 that the objective was for “the conflict to be extended and thereby bleed Putin” as “the only end game now is the end of Putin regime”.[6] President Biden suggested that regime change was necessary in Russia: “For God’s sake, this man cannot remain in power”. However, the White House later walked back Biden’s dangerous remarks.
The spokesperson of Prime Minister Boris Johnson, also made an explicit reference to regime change by arguing “the measures we’re introducing, that large parts of the world are introducing, are to bring down the Putin regime”. James Heappey, the UK Minister for the Armed Forces, similarly wrote in the Daily Telegraph :
“His failure must be complete; Ukrainian sovereignty must be restored, and the Russian people empowered to see how little he cares for them. In showing them that, Putin’s days as President will surely be numbered and so too will those of the kleptocratic elite that surround him. He’ll lose power and he won’t get to choose his successor”.[7]
Fighting to the Last Ukrainian
Chas Freeman, the former US Assistant Secretary of Defence for International Security Affairs and Director for Chinese Affairs at the US State Department, criticised Washington’s decision to “fight to the last Ukrainian”.[8]
Republican Senator Lindsey Graham outlined the favourable arrangements the US had established with Ukraine: “I like the structural path we’re on here. As long as we help Ukraine with the weapons they need and the economic support, they will fight to the last person”.[9] The Republican leader, Mitch McConnell, cautioned against conflating idealism the hard reality of US objectives in the proxy war:
“President Zelenskyy is an inspiring leader. But the most basic reasons for continuing to help Ukraine degrade and defeat the Russian invaders are cold, hard, practical American interests. Helping equip our friends in Eastern Europe to win this war is also a direct investment in reducing Vladimir Putin’s future capabilities to menace America, threaten our allies, and contest our core interests… Finally, we all know that Ukraine’s fight to retake its territory is neither the beginning nor end of the West’s broader strategic competition with Putin’s Russia”.[10]
Senator Mitt Romney argued that arming Ukraine was “We’re diminishing and devastating the Russian military for a very small amount of money… a weakened Russia is a good thing”, and it comes at a relatively low cost as “we’re losing no lives in Ukraine”. Senator Richard Blumenthal similarly asserted: “we’re getting our money’s worth on our Ukraine investment” because “for less than 3 percent of our nation’s military budget, we’ve enabled Ukraine to degrade Russia’s military strength by half… All without a single American service woman or man injured or lost”.[11] Congressman Dan Crenshaw agrees that “investing in the destruction of our adversary’s military, without losing a single American troop, strikes me as a good idea”.[12]
Retired US General Keith Kellogg similarly argued in March 2023 that “if you can defeat a strategic adversary not using any US troops, you are at the acme of professionalism”. Kellogg further explained that using Ukrainians to fight Russia “takes a strategic adversary off the table” and thus enables the US to focus on its “primary adversary which is China”. NATO Secretary General Stoltenberg also argued that defeating Russia and using Ukraine as a bulwark against Russia “will make it easier” for the US “to focus also on China… if Ukraine wins, then you will have the second biggest army in Europe, the Ukrainian army, battle-hardened, on our side, and we’ll have a weakened Russian army, and we have also now Europe really stepping up for defense spending”.[13]
In Search of a New Narrative
A new victory narrative is required as a NATO-backed Ukraine cannot realistically defeat Russia on the battlefield. The strongest narrative is obviously to claim that Russia has failed in its objective to annex all of Ukraine to recreate the Soviet Empire and thereafter conquer Europe. This narrative enables NATO to claim victory. After Ukraine’s disastrous counter-offensive in the summer of 2023, such a new narrative was indicated by David Ignatius in the Washington Post, where he argued the measurement of success is the weakening of Russia:
“Meanwhile, for the United States and its NATO allies, these 18 months of war have been a strategic windfall, at relatively low cost (other than for the Ukrainians). The West’s most reckless antagonist has been rocked. NATO has grown much stronger with the additions of Sweden and Finland. Germany has weaned itself from dependence on Russian energy and, in many ways, rediscovered its sense of values. NATO squabbles make headlines, but overall, this has been a triumphal summer for the alliance”.[14]
Sean Bell, a former Royal Air Force Air Vice-Marshal and Ministry of Defence staffer, argued in September 2023 that the war had significantly degraded the Russian military to the point it ‘no longer poses a credible threat to Europe’. Bell therefore concluded that “the Western objective of this conflict has been achieved” and “The harsh reality is that Ukraine’s objectives are no longer aligned with their backers”.[15]
The Ukrainian proxy has been exhausted, which ends the proxy war unless NATO is prepared to go to war against Russia. As NATO is preparing to cut its losses, a new narrative is required. As the narrative changes, it will soon be permitted to call for negotiations as a display of empathy for the Ukrainians.
This article includes some excerpts from my book: “The Ukraine War and the Eurasian World Order”
[1] The Economist, ‘Ukraine is now struggling to survive, not to win’, The Economist, 29 October 2024.
[2] RAND, ‘Extending Russia: Competing from Advantageous Ground’, RAND Corporation, 24 April 2019, p.99.
[3] L. Panetta, ‘U.S. Is in a Proxy War With Russia: Panetta’, Bloomberg, 17 March 2022.
[4] The Economist. ‘Volodymyr Zelensky on why Ukraine must defeat Putin’ The Economist, 27 March 2022.
[5] G. Carbonaro, ‘U.S. Wants Russia ‘Weakened’ So It Can Never Invade Again’, Newsweek, 25 April 2022.
[6] N. Ferguson, ‘Putin Misunderstands History. So, Unfortunately, Does the U.S.’, Bloomberg, 22 March 2022.
[7] J. Heappey, ‘Ukrainians are fighting for their freedom, and Britain is doing everything to help them’, The Telegraph, 26 February 2022.
[8] A. Maté, ‘US fighting Russia ‘to the last Ukrainian’: veteran US diplomat’, The Grayzone, 24 March 2022.
[9] A. Maté, ‘US, UK sabotaged peace deal because they ‘don’t care about Ukraine’: fmr. NATO adviser’, The Grayzone, 27 September 2022.
[10] M. McConnell, ‘McConnell on Zelenskyy Visit: Helping Ukraine Directly Serves Core American Interests’, Mitch McConnell official website, 21 December 2022.
[11] R. Blumenthal, ‘Zelenskyy doesn’t want or need our troops. But he deeply and desperately needs the tools to win’, CT Post, 29 August 2023.
[12] L. Lonas, ‘Crenshaw, Greene clash on Twitter: ‘Still going after that slot on Russia Today’’, The Hill, 11 May 2022.
[13] T. O’Conner, ‘So, if the United States is concerned about China and wants to pivot towards Asia, then you have to ensure that Putin doesn’t win in in Ukraine’, Newsweek, 21 September 2023.
[14] D. Ignatius, ‘The West feels gloomy about Ukraine. Here’s why it shouldn’t’, The Washington Post, 18 July 2023.
[15] S. Bell, ‘The West remains committed to Ukraine’s counteroffensive – but there’s scepticism over Zelenskyy’s ultimate objectives’, Sky News, 9 September 2023.
Trump derangement syndrome out of control as Deep State tries defamation
By Drago Bosnic | October 28, 2024
From prosecution (although persecution is a more fitting term) by the Department of “Justice” (DoJ) and bans on running for presidency to several assassination attempts, Donald Trump has seen it all. The Deep State and the corrupt federal institutions are determined to prevent him from winning. Does this mean that Trump descended from Heaven to save us all? Certainly not. Many have argued, myself included, that it’s highly unlikely that he’ll change America’s disastrous foreign policy. Despite promises to do so, it will be exceedingly difficult (if possible at all) for Trump to significantly alter the way the United States works. However, what’s quite obvious is that he thinks thermonuclear war is an extremely bad idea (to put it mildly). And while this should be common sense, very little of it is left in Washington DC, so Trump indeed seems like the light at the end of the tunnel in comparison to the war criminals currently running the show.
That being said, it’s not his only redeeming quality, but it’s by far the most important one. However, the lunatics in power aren’t going to give up that easily. Namely, after all else failed, they’re now desperately launching defamation attacks on Trump in hopes of turning the tables at the polls. In the two latest cases of the Trump derangement syndrome (TDS), we have yet another alleged “sexual assault”, as well as an attempt to destroy the growing support Trump enjoys among Latinos and African Americans. The Guardian just published a story about Stacey Williams, a former model who claims that (for now) former president “touched her in an unwanted sexual way in 1993, after Epstein introduced them”. Williams didn’t say why she “suddenly” decided to publicly speak about the supposed “incident” only now after over 30 years of silence, although it’s quite clear who would benefit from such a story.
However, as the “sexual scandal” strategy was already tried several times, with little success, the mainstream propaganda machine wanted to make sure to simultaneously run several narratives aimed against Trump. This one isn’t new either, but it comes in a “new package”. Namely, the Atlantic, infamous neoliberal mouthpiece, is claiming that he supposedly tried to “walk back on a promise” to support the family of US soldier Vanessa Guillén who was killed in 2020. According to the report, Trump was allegedly “outraged when he learned that Guillén’s funeral, which included heightened security and closed streets, cost $60,000”. Quoting “anonymous sources”, the Atlantic reports that Trump said that “it doesn’t cost 60,000 bucks to bury a fucking Mexican” and then “ordered then-White House Chief of Staff Mark Meadows to deny payment”. There’s just one “tiny” problem with these claims – none of it is true.
“I don’t appreciate how you are exploiting my sister’s death for politics – hurtful & disrespectful to the important changes she made for service members,” Guillén’s sister Mayra posted on X, condemning the Atlantic’s highly politicized reporting and adding: “President Donald Trump did nothing but show respect to my family & Vanessa. In fact, I voted for President Trump today.”
Meadows himself also denied the claims made by the infamous warmongering mouthpiece, insisting that “any suggestion that President Trump disparaged Ms. Guillén or refused to pay for her funeral expenses is absolutely false” and that “he was nothing but kind, gracious and wanted to make sure that the military and the US government did right by Vanessa Guillén and her family”. Meadows instructed his spokesperson Ben Williamson to demand the Atlantic remove the deliberate disinformation. However, the magazine only added that Meadows “didn’t hear Trump say it”. This was the second time that the Atlantic published misleading and/or outright false information on Trump. Back in September 2020, it claimed that he “refused to visit a veteran cemetery” because he allegedly “called fallen soldiers ‘suckers’ and ‘losers'”. This blatantly fake story was never retracted.
It should be noted that this is only the tip of the iceberg when it comes to the mainstream propaganda machine and its anti-Trump witch-hunt. Namely, it’s long been a routine to compare him to the likes of Adolf Hitler and Benito Mussolini, even in American academia. CNN has been doing it for years, while war criminals such as the Clinton family never miss out on calling Trump a “threat to democracy”. Funnily enough, the mainstream propaganda machine now even claims that he will “use lawfare” against political opponents, “conveniently forgetting” that’s exactly what the corrupt federal institutions have been doing to him all these years. Hillary Clinton even called for more censorship to prevent people from accessing any objective information on what’s actually going on. There are other examples of TDS-induced panic, including claims that Trump will “use Navy SEALs to round up political opponents”.
Kamala Harris and her running mate Tim Walz made similar allegations, claiming that he would “use the US military against those who didn’t vote for him”, while CNN facilitated even more disturbing acts of defamation, such as that Trump is planning to “exterminate people through eugenics”. This deeply irrational hatred was also extended to the electorate, with cases of teachers organizing mock voting, where those who voted for Harris were rewarded with pizza parties, unlike those who voted for Trump. Meanwhile, some of the DNC supporters are attacking Trump voters even in their homes, coming to their front doors and insulting them. The McDonald’s restaurant where Trump recently made a campaign ad is being review-bombed, but that’s the lesser issue, as it’s now forced to up security due to threats. And yet, this is only the tip of the iceberg of intimidation attempts both he and his supporters are subjected to.
African Americans who want to vote for Trump are now suddenly “fascists”, while whites are told they’ll be “held accountable” if they don’t vote for Kamala Harris. In previous months, Amazon allowed the sale of merchandise with the slogan “The Only Good Trump Is A Dead One”, while the mainstream propaganda machine tried suppressing information on several people who directly threatened to kill Trump. It should be noted that blatant death threats to him, his family and supporters never stopped even after several assassination attempts. Despite all this, prominent Democrats, including university professors, were openly saying things like “we hope the shooting will inspire others” or “Trump supporters should be lined up and shot”. In the meantime, corrupt federal institutions ignored repeated warnings about more plans to kill Trump, even after new “security incidents”, as they called the attempts on his life.
On the whole, it’s clear that the warmongering oligarchy in Washington DC is determined to either eliminate Trump (physically, politically, judicially or in any other way) or to sabotage his coming presidency by setting up a war with a global or at least a major regional power. Short of war, defamation is the Deep State’s last-ditch effort to (ab)use TDS, although it seems extremely unlikely this will work. Regardless of the outcome of the upcoming election, next week will surely be the most fateful in recent memory, as the warmongers, war criminals and plutocrats are desperate. This is why Trump and his team will have to be wary of warhawks who tried to sabotage his first presidency by starting new perpetual wars. It seems some measures are already being taken against these warmongers, but it’s yet to be seen to what extent will Trump remain resilient to their malignant influence.
Drago Bosnic is an independent geopolitical and military analyst.
Western media headlines manufacturing consent for Israeli aggression against Iran
By Ivan Kesic | Press TV | October 27, 2024
In a twisted interpretation and in line with the preestablished propaganda narrative, the Western media unanimously declared Israel’s aggression against Iran as “retaliation.”
From CNN to Fox News to Axios to the New York Times to the Washington Post – all major Western media outlets rallied behind the Tel Aviv regime as it added fuel to the already raging flames.
In the early hours of Saturday, the regime jets carried out a fresh act of aggression against the Islamic Republic of Iran, attacking several sites in Tehran, Khuzestan and Ilam provinces with missiles.
Although most of the missiles were intercepted and the military damage was minor, the regime’s move represented a serious escalation as four servicemen on Iranian soil were martyred in the attacks.
The motive for the attack was face-saving after a barrage of Iranian ballistic attacks pounded Israeli military and intelligence sites earlier this month that again laid bare the inefficacy of much-hyped Israeli air defense systems such as Iron Dome, David’s Sling and Arrow.
Iran’s ‘Operation True Promise II’ was carried out as a response to the cowardly assassinations of Hezbollah leader Sayyed Hassan Nasrallah, Hamas leader Ismail Haniyeh and Iranian military commander Abbas Nilforoushan by the Israeli regime.
Iran’s military action was in full accordance with its inherent right to self-defense under Article 51 of the UN Charter, and a direct response to the regime’s repeated acts of aggression, including the violation of Iran’s sovereignty and territorial integrity.
Manipulative headlines used by major US television networks and newspapers
The same applied to ‘Operation True Promise I’ in April when Iran retaliated after the Israeli attack on the Iranian consulate building in the Syrian capital of Damascus.
These facts, however, were deliberately disregarded by most of the Western media outlets while reporting on Saturday’s aggression against Iran, offering the audience a decontextualized interpretation of the Israeli regime as a victim “retaliating” against the Iranian attack.
Manipulative headlines
A cursory look at Western media, of which a sample of about 20 are selected here, it is noticeable that they all shaped the headline in the same suggestive way, using the same terminology.
The term “retaliation” has been used by all these outlets for the Israeli act of aggression against Iran, while also employing other terms such as “reprisal”, “response” and “payback,” while ignoring the full sequence of events that have shaped this region in the past year.
The list of media outlets that employed such terminology includes major US networks CNN, ABC, CBS, NBC and Fox News, together covering over three-quarters of the American audience.
It also includes six of America’s most circulated newspapers, The Wall Street Journal, The New York Times, USA Today, The Washington Post, Los Angeles Times and New York Post.
Among them, Fox News went the farthest in its pro-Zionist bias, stating in its headline that Israeli “retaliatory” strikes against Iran followed a “missile barrage targeting Israelis,” although only military targets were precisely targeted and there were no settler casualties.
The Washington Post stated that the Israeli attacks add to the “cycle of tit-for-tat strikes” between the two sides, without specifying who started that cycle by provocatively targeting the other side.
Most other media outlets in the story summary and the text itself treated the Iranian retaliatory ballistic attack as the “cause” and did not mention what preceded it.
In this way, media analysts say, the deception of the majority of the American public has been completely achieved and there has been no progress since the times when by similar propaganda methods they turned the majority of the population for military aggressions in the West Asia region.
Other US media that resorted to the same distortions by describing Israeli aggression as “retaliatory” are the news agency Associated Press (AP), National Public Radio (NPR), the state propaganda broadcaster Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty (RFE/RL), news websites Al-Monitor and Axios, etc.
Among the international media, the same terminology in the headlines was also used by the French pan-European television network EuroNews, the newspaper Le Monde, the British television news channel Sky News, the Saudi television network Al Arabiya, Emirati news website The National, and of course, the Israeli media.
Congruently, the headline of the five mentioned major American television networks for the Iranian retaliatory attack from the beginning of the month was again almost uniform, “Iran launches missile attack on Israel,” without mentioning that it was retaliatory in nature.
Headlines in Western media seek to manufacture consent for Israeli terrorism
These identical headlines with unanimous manipulation of the context are by no means a coincidence, according to media analysts, but a reflection of centralized propaganda emanating from the top of the American regime and projected further onto the media and client states.
Such statements and the aforementioned media headlines are the result of unquestioningly following the official American narrative that the Israeli regime is a “victim” and that their aggressions on all surrounding countries are “the right of self-defense.”
Social media users took to X to call out the hypocrisy of Western media outlets.
“This is ridiculous pro-Israel propaganda in the media. Israel’s attack on Iran was not “retaliatory”; Iran’s response to Israel was retaliatory,” wrote journalist Ben Norton.
“Israel started this by first bombing Iran’s consulate in Syria, then launching an attack inside Tehran, then killing an IRGC general.”
Peter Daou, a political analyst, said these distortions are how the propaganda works.
“You’ll notice mainstream US media outlets using the word “retaliatory” in describing Israel’s attack on Iran. That’s how state propaganda works,” he wrote.
Israel and Ukraine Gaslighting To Cover Up Failures
By Larry C. Johnson | SONAR 21 | October 26, 2024
If bullshit was fungible, both Israel and Ukraine would be rolling in dough and not need another dime of foreign aid. The nonsense spilling out of Tel Aviv and Kiev is legendary and much of the Western public is slurping it up like a ravenous dog eating a bowl of rabbit stew.
Let’s start with Israel. The Zionists used more than 100 aircraft to send an estimated 200 air-launched ballistic missiles into Iran. Israeli aircraft did not dare to fly inside Iran. And what happened? Iran, with Russian help, shot down the majority of the Israeli missiles. Iran showed no signs of panic or anger in the aftermath of the attack — not what one would expect if Israel’s assault had been a smashing success.
Compare for yourself. The first video show’s Iran’s October 1 attack on Israel. The second video shows what happened in the skies over Tehran.
It is true that some of the Israeli missiles got through and killed four Iranian soldiers. Yet, check out this headline in today’s Jerusalem Post:
‘Backbone of Iran’s missile industry’ destroyed by IAF strikes on Islamic Republic
The Zionist spin patrol is working overtime to paint lipstick on their pig operation. The Zionists convinced themselves that Iran’s strike on October 1 was meaningless, notwithstanding clear video — and later satellite imagery — of damage from Iran’s missile barrage. Now, when confronted with evidence of Iranian air defense knocking Israeli missiles from the sky, they simply pretend it did not happen.
Here is a typical response from an ardent Zionist upon reports that Israel’s attack was underway:
The Israeli attack has begun and apparently they had no problem getting past the Iran air defenses. Early reports are about attacks hitting around Tehran which suggests they are going after command and control and possibly military leadership. Too early to know what is happening but by morning the real war will be underway. So far they have not hit the oil which is a surprise as that would finally sink Kamala which Netanyahu wants to do. The oil markets may think this is all OK and oil prices will remain around where they are but this is just chapter one. Before this is over the nukes and oil will get destroyed by Israel. The nukes will be next up as there is no time to lose for Israel to stop any chance of Iran fining some way to use a nuke against Israel.
So, what was Mr. Big Predictor’s reaction as dawn broke in Tehran?
It seems this was a staged attack with the intent to send a message and not to do grave damage. Arab nations were told ahead of time and passed that along to Tehran. We will need to wait a few hours to see what really happened, but it now seems clear this was not the all out attack Israel is capable of and it is instead a tit-for-tat strike to keep the US onside for now until Trump takes over. Israel needs Thaad and supplies of arms for now, so it may be that Netanyahu decided to play ball with DC to get what it needs and not use weapons it currently needs in Lebanon. The oil market will get this wrong and not realize what is yet to happen next time.
What sane folks need to understand is that no amount of evidence will shake the Zionists from their delusional fantasies. It is akin to those Americans who still insist that we could have won in Vietnam. We just didn’t try hard enough.
While Israel is doing its victory dance over its totally awesome, amazing, incredible air strike in Iran, Hezbollah, which was supposedly decapitated and rendered impotent, is stepping up its missile and rocket attacks in Israel. Here is a list of Hezbollah’s operations in the last 24-hours.
1- On the afternoon of Friday, October 25, 2024, a gathering of zionist forces in the “Shoumera” settlement was targeted (https://t.me/PalestineResist/65037) with a guided missile, resulting in confirmed casualties.
2- At 12:15, (https://t.me/PalestineResist/64826) a rocket barrage targeted the “Kiryat Shmona” settlement.
3- At 06:00, (https://t.me/PalestineResist/64867) a rocket barrage targeted a gathering of zionist forces around the town of Aita al-Shaab.
4- At 11:30, (https://t.me/PalestineResist/64868) as part of the Khaybar series of operations and in response to the attacks and massacres committed by the zionist enemy, and with the call “At your service, Nasrallah,” Islamic Resistance fighters launched an aerial attack with a squadron of attack drones on the “Tel Nof” airbase south of “Tel Aviv,” hitting their targets accurately.
5- At 12:15, (https://t.me/PalestineResist/64876) a rocket barrage targeted the “Mishar” base (the main intelligence headquarters for the northern region in Safad).
6- At 12:45, (https://t.me/PalestineResist/64875) a rocket barrage targeted the “Krayot” north of Haifa.
7- At 13:00, (https://t.me/PalestineResist/64954) as part of the Khaybar series of operations and in response to the zionist enemy’s attacks and massacres, and with the call “At your service, Nasrallah,” Islamic Resistance fighters launched a qualitative rocket barrage at zionist forces gathered at the “Ayelet” base.
8- At 13:23, (https://t.me/PalestineResist/64877) a rocket barrage targeted a gathering of zionist forces in the Al-Musharifa area in Ras Al-Naqoura.
9- At 13:30, (https://t.me/PalestineResist/64925) a rocket barrage targeted a gathering of zionist soldiers in the “Shlomi” settlement.
10- At 13:35, (https://t.me/PalestineResist/64926) a rocket barrage targeted the “Metzuba” settlement.
11- At 13:40, (https://t.me/PalestineResist/64927) a rocket barrage targeted the “Jaatoun” settlement.
12- At 14:15, (https://t.me/PalestineResist/64928) a large rocket barrage targeted the “Yesod HaMa’ala” settlement.
13- At 14:25, (https://t.me/PalestineResist/64929) a rocket barrage targeted the Jal al-Alam site.
14- At 16:05, (https://t.me/PalestineResist/64932) a rocket barrage targeted the “Habushit” site.
15- At 16:10, (https://t.me/PalestineResist/64933) a rocket barrage targeted the “Ma’ale Golani” barracks.
16- At 16:15, (https://t.me/PalestineResist/64934) a rocket barrage targeted the “Snir” barracks.
17- At 16:15, (https://t.me/PalestineResist/64936) a rocket barrage targeted the “Shear Yeshuv” settlement.
18- At 16:15, (https://t.me/PalestineResist/64953) a rocket barrage targeted a gathering of zionist forces east of the town of Markaba.
19- At 17:20, (https://t.me/PalestineResist/64955) a large rocket barrage targeted the “Shraga” base.
20- At 18:00, (https://t.me/PalestineResist/64985) as part of the Khaybar series of operations and in response to the zionist enemy’s attacks and massacres, and with the call “At your service, Nasrallah,” Islamic Resistance fighters launched an aerial attack with a squadron of attack drones on the “Naoura” base east of Afula, hitting their targets accurately.
21- At 19:30, (https://t.me/PalestineResist/65020) a rocket barrage targeted a gathering of zionist forces in the “Hatzor” settlement.
22- At 23:30, (https://t.me/PalestineResist/65021) as part of the warning (https://t.me/PalestineResist/64999) issued by the Islamic Resistance to various northern settlements, Islamic Resistance fighters launched a rocket barrage on the “Kiryat Shmona” settlement.
Yep. Hezbollah is barely hanging on.
Speaking of barely hanging on, Ukrainian forces are retreating all along the 900-mile front.
Information is coming from the field that our troops, after a big breakthrough, were able to firmly establish themselves in Shakhtyorskoye and continue to push the enemy out of the village.
The prospects for a Shakhtar breakthrough are impressive.
As far as we understand, the goal is to reach Razliv and take up positions on the Volchya River with access to the rear of the enemy garrison in Kurakhovo.
Plus pressure from two flanking directions: on the AFU group in Bogoyavlenka, thus enabling their expedient removal, and on Velikaya Novosyolka – leveling the main “joy” of the counter oink last year.
By the way, the direction of the conscious flight of the Ukrainian Armed Forces to the Dnipropetrovsk region is also a so-so idea – the enemy has no sensible fortifications between Pavlograd and Pokrovsk. So the AFU will not be able to pull off the trick of drawing us to the prepared lines and then splitting up between Pavlograd and Konstantinovka.
Then there is the Ukrainian/CIA story claiming that North Korean troops are fighting on the front because Russia has lost so many men, it had to import new cannon fodder. I believe this story was ginned up by an increasingly desperate CIA in order to create a cover story for bringing South Korean pilots to Romania to fly F-16s. The “news” about the North Korean troops first appeared in the New York Times under David Sanger’s byline on October 8. Sanger has a long history of being a willing conduit for CIA “leaks.”
Marat Khairullin, a Russian war correspondent, explained what was really going on behind the scenes:
Now it has become clear why the North Korea issue is being actively stirred up during the SMO. South Korea is sending its soldiers and officers to fight in Ukraine. Let me remind you that South Korea is a passionate, evil six of the USA (slang for “lackey”- in Russia, 6 is the lowest numbered card in a deck of cards). They are not as smart as Japan, but not as dumb as the Ukraine. Most importantly, they are high-tech. . . .
Last week, the first 16 pilots from South Korea’s 19th Air Wing arrived at NATO’s Romanian air base near Mihail Kogalniceanu. Apparently, South Korea sent the first squadron of the air wing, the most prepared and combat-ready, to the war in full force. This means they are planning to throw them into battle immediately.
Currently, the F-16 fighters allocated to Ukraine are also in Romania – at the Fetești air base on the border with Moldova. As soon as the South Korean pilots go there, this will be an indicator of the imminent use of these aircraft in Ukraine. In addition to the F-16 pilots, pilots of South Korean T-50 combat training aircraft, which are used in the southern army as light attack aircraft, have arrived at the air base in the commune of Mikhail Kogalniceanu. It is assumed that these aircraft may be useful as hunters for “Geraniums” in the protection of the Odessa port.
Remains to be seen if the South Koreans will actually enter the fight. If they do, they will learn that Russia ain’t playing games and many of those pilots will likely die. I discussed this issue with Judge Napolitano. I am also posting a live podcast that Andrei Martyanov and I did with Nima as Israel’s attack was wrapping up Friday night my time.
Dark Money, Darker Motives: Why is Bill Gates Backing Kamala Harris Using Shady Super PAC?
By Ilya Tsukanov – Sputnik – 23.10.2024
Tech billionaire, philanthropist and WEF cheerleader Bill Gates has given Kamala Harris’s campaign a $50 mln boost using dark money super PAC Future Forward. The donation was intended to remain secret, but was uncovered by NYT this week.
What’s Future Forward?
Set up in 2018 by former Obama campaign staffers and coming out of left field in the final weeks of the 2020 race to fund a massive pro-Biden media blitz, Future Forward is a super political action committee funded mostly by Big Tech and venture capital firms, including Meta, Google, disgraced crypto financier Sam Bankman-Fried, Bain Capital and Bridgewater Associates.
The super PAC has raised a whopping $700 mln for the 2024 election cycle, rolling out $75 mln in pro-Harris ads last week.
What’s Behind Gates’ Electoral ‘Generosity’?
2024 is at least the second election cycle where Gates has used a dark money vehicle to support the Democratic Party’s candidate. In 2020, the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation contributed nearly $70 mln to the New Venture Fund, a nonprofit belonging to DC consultancy Arabella Advisors, which bankrolls the Sixteen Thirty Fund, a goliath of undisclosed donations for Democratic politicians and liberal causes which raised nearly $390 mln four years ago. Publicly, Gates and his now former wife also gave $500,000 to Biden’s inaugural committee.
Mr. Gates has been an active supporter of Democratic candidates since at least 2008, contributing financially to and praising the campaigns of Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton.
Gates’ ties to the Clintons are deeply rooted, with the billionaire becoming a top donor to the Clinton Foundation, and forging partnerships with the organization for global projects since at least 2013.
In a telling interview in 2016 in which he explained his preference for Clinton, Gates said “there have been questions about vaccines in general where some of the candidates have shown that they’re not as up to date about vaccines in general, and that’s got to be a concern.”
“Science in general, whether it’s GMOs or vaccines, there’s a lot of people out there who don’t give science the benefit of the doubt. In terms of experience, Hillary Clinton and Bill Clinton have more experience in global health,” Gates said at the time.
How has Gates profited off the Dems’ agenda?
With Harris’ presidential bid expected to broadly continue the Biden/Clinton line on foreign and domestic policy, it makes sense for Gates to throw his influence behind the VP, given the perceived threat of the Trump brand of red-pill MAGA Republicans and their anti-vax, anti-tech, and anti-interventionist leanings.
“This election is different, with unprecedented significance for Americans and the most vulnerable people around the world,” Gates said this week after info about his $50 mln donation leaked out.
“I think it’s great to have somebody who’s younger, who can think about things like AI and how we shape that in the right way, and I certainly offer up my opinions to the politicians who are interested,” Gates said this summer after Biden dropped out and named Harris his successor.
The Gates Foundation’s fortunes got a big boost under Biden, with its endowment growing from $69 bln in 2020 to $75.2 bln in 2023.
Gates enjoyed a profits bonanza off mRNA coronavirus vaccines mandated by the Biden administration. In 2022, he sold off shares of BioNTech stocks he bought in 2019 as sales slowed. His foundation has also owned shares in Pfizer, CureVac and Vir Biotech going back to well before the pandemic.
The billionaire’s foundation supports the Global Virome Project – an ambitious initiative created in 2018 to predict pathogens that could trigger lethal pandemics, but accused of weaponizing viruses from a network of 150 biolabs worldwide.
Gates has also backed a broad array of World Economic Forum-affiliated initiatives, including projects to reduce emissions and create synthetic meat and dairy. In 2022, The Seattle Times revealed Gates’ secret lobbying to save Biden’s signature $2+ trln Build Back Better social and climate spending package.
Gates has also been a top backer of the Biden administration’s battle against media and online ‘misinformation’, with an explosive MintPress investigation from 2021 revealing that his foundation had bankrolled some $319 mln in media, including CNN, the BBC, Le Monde, the Financial Times, Der Spiegel and others to ensure favorable coverage of his agenda and that of his allies.
US Government Behind Campaign Violating North Korean Airspace
By Brian Berletic – New Eastern Outlook – October 23, 2024
North Korea has recently warned against the use of drones over its sovereign airspace to spread subversive propaganda.
CNN in its October 11, 2024 article, “North Korea accuses South of flying drones over Pyongyang,” reported, “North Korea accused South Korea of flying propaganda-filled drones over Pyongyang and threatened “retaliation,” state media reported.”
The same article admits that “South Korean activists and North Korean defectors have sent balloons to the North, loaded with propaganda material criticizing leader Kim Jong Un, along with USB sticks filled with K-pop songs and South Korean television shows.”
What the article omitted is that this campaign is not an organic activity carried out by independent activists, but a campaign of subversion organized and funded by the US government.
A US State Department Provocation…
As early as 2014, the Western media promoted what was called, “Thumb Drives for Democracy,” a campaign organized by the New York-based Human Rights Foundation (HRF).
The Atlantic published an article in early 2014 titled, “We Hacked North Korea With Balloons and USB Drives,” by HRF founder Thor Halvorssen, which admits its balloons carry “subversive information” meant to undermine the North Korean government. It also admits that before HRF began its campaign, “the U.S. government provided support for these groups through the National Endowment for Democracy* and the State Department’s DRL [The Bureau of Democracy, Human Rights and Labor Affairs] programs.”
The balloons were just one part of a much wider campaign of subversion and ultimately regime change.
HRF also organizes the annual “Oslo Freedom Forum” (OFF) funded in part by the Freedom Fund, which includes the US State Department as a “key investor.” The OFF is a continuation of US State Department-funded training programs gathering agitators from around the globe, training, funding, and equipping them to then return to their respective nations and attempt to overthrow them.
The New York Times in its 2011 article, “U.S. Groups Helped Nurture Arab Uprisings,” admits the US government prepared years ahead of the so-called “Arab Spring,” backing the core organizations that ultimately carried it out across the Middle East and North Africa. The article explicitly states:
A number of the groups and individuals directly involved in the revolts and reforms sweeping the region received training and financing from groups like the International Republican Institute, the National Democratic Institute and Freedom House, a nonprofit human rights organization based in Washington, according to interviews in recent weeks and American diplomatic cables obtained by WikiLeaks.
Clearly, HRF serves as an intermediary continuing US government-funded sedition around the globe in a way more difficult to trace directly back to the US government itself. Its objectives nonetheless remain to undermine, divide, destabilize, and overthrow nations targeted by the US State Department for regime change, including North Korea.
More Than Just Balloons…
Considering the aftermath of the admittedly US-engineered “Arab Spring” which included the full-scale destruction of Libya, a deeply divided Egypt, and a nearly destroyed Syria, North Korea’s concerns regarding similar US government-sponsored activities being aimed at it falls far short of an overreaction.
The CNN article reporting on North Korea’s recent warning notes that previous South Korean governments prohibited the use of balloons to spread subversive information across North Korea, recognizing the role it plays in damaging relations and raising tensions. This decision has since been reversed by a client regime more obedient to Washington.
This years-long campaign of subversion aimed at North Korea eventually prompted North Korea itself to respond with its own balloons laden with garbage. The collective Western media depicted this action out of context, omitting the US government-sponsored program targeting North Korea for over a decade, or that the ultimate goal of the campaign is “Arab Spring-style” regime change.
In 2023, when a Chinese weather balloon flew off course across the continental United States, headlines were undulated with hysteria and hostility toward China. The US Department of Defense, without providing evidence, identified it as a “high-altitude surveillance balloon,” implying it was spying on American territory. F-22 fighter jets were eventually deployed, launching air-to-air missiles at the balloon, destroying it off the eastern US coast.
Clearly, the US government itself desires other nations to respect its airspace, considering the unauthorized flight of any object, including balloons, as a potential danger to both national security and public safety. Yet, it is funding a program admittedly designed to subvert the government of a sovereign nation by flying balloons and now most likely drones into its airspace, obviously endangering both national security and public safety.
South Koreans may be convinced that the greatest obstacle to peace on the Korean Peninsula lies across the northern border, but the US has repeatedly demonstrated that it itself obstructs peace for the Korean people, and deliberately so. Continued tensions allows the US to perpetually justify the presence of its military on the Peninsula – not to defend South Korea from North Korea – but to encircle and threaten South Korea’s largest trade partner – China.
While Washington has appointed itself underwriter of stability on the Korean Peninsula, peace cannot be achieved as long as this deliberate obstruction to it remains stubbornly entrenched upon it.
The Blob are losing control of the message
Record numbers are not buying the narrative: Nearly 70% of Americans don’t trust The Media
By Jo Nova | October 16, 2024
Even Gallup admits the US is suffering from a crisis in confidence in their institutions, and the least trusted of all is “the media”.
For some reason, telling readers that they are selfish, small minded people who are screwing up the world isn’t resonating with the Rednecks. In 2020 40% of US Citizens thought the media was trustworthy, but now only 31% do, an all time record low. This is the same media that told us elections were secure, vaccines were safe and effective and Joe Biden was sharp as a tack right up until the day everyone discovered he had dementia.
The Pullitzer-prize-guys fell for every bureaucratic lie they could — Hunter Bidens laptop was Russian disinfo, ivermectin was horse-dewormer, and an unarmed mob with a horned hat and flags staged an insurrection against the largest military power in the world.
There’s a price to pay for lying and the media have barely begun to pay it.
Obviously they need to censor blogs and social media
The big question is why do 31% still trust the media?
Axios: Media trust hits another historic low
Possibly their paypacket depends on believing the program. And welfare is so much easier to take with a dose of Media entitlement-sauce.
It’s a long term decline
The full graph shows just how different things used to be. Once upon a time, 70% of the people believed the media.
Imagine a tool so effective, with such a brand, that 70% of voters believed it. Such a tool would be a magnet for the rich and powerful to control for other purposes, and so it has come to pass…
The media are impartial professionals, of course, but for some reason the audience are biased:
Over half of Democrats like what they hear, but only 1 in 8 Republicans do.
Trump’s Fake News meme in 2016 hit a nerve with Republicans and it stuck. The hate campaign against him only proves his point to Republican voters.
Since the media are supposed to be the watchdogs, the graph is almost a proxy for the decline of The West.
CBS could be in trouble over Kamala interview – regulator
RT | October 18, 2024
The US Federal Communications Commission (FCC) has grounds to hear a complaint against CBS for deceptively editing an interview with Democratic presidential candidate Kamala Harris, a Republican-appointed commissioner has said.
Earlier this month, the broadcaster aired two different answers by Harris to the same question, one in a preview and the other in the actual ‘60 Minutes’ show, prompting accusations of misleading editing to make the sitting vice-president sound more coherent than she actually was.
The Center for American Rights (CAR) filed a complaint to the FCC on Wednesday, accusing the network of “deliberate news distortion,” which would be an actionable offense under the regulator’s rules.
“What this claim is alleging is that an act of distortion took place,” Commissioner Nathan Simington told Fox News Digital on Friday. The FCC has “certainly contemplated the possibility of distortionary reporting taking place via splicing,” he explained, noting that in a previous proceeding the commissioners “gave the example of substituting a yes answer to one question or a no answer to an entirely different question.”
Simington reminded the audience that the FCC can’t regulate what can be said or written, given that the US has the First Amendment to the Constitution that protects freedom of speech and the press. However, CBS could still find itself in trouble for “abuse of public trust,” he said.
“I think everyone agrees that deliberately misleading the public is a bad idea,” the commissioner said, adding that if CBS did so, Americans should be upset, “because people go to the news in order to learn about things that they would never be able to learn about themselves. In other words, going to the news is an act of extending trust. Now, the thing about trust is that once it’s lost, it’s very difficult to regain.”
Simington is one of the two Republicans on the five-member FCC. He was appointed by President Donald Trump in 2020. Trump will face Harris in the November 5 election for the White House, after the Democrats pressured President Joe Biden to drop out of the race in July.
Trump accused ‘60 Minutes’ of perpetrating “the greatest fraud in broadcast history” by swapping Harris’ responses. FCC chair Jessica Rosenworcel, a Democrat, responded by accusing the former president of attacking free speech and democracy itself.
“The FCC does not and will not revoke licenses for broadcast stations simply because a political candidate disagrees with or dislikes content or coverage,” she said last week.
The CAR complaint specifically names WCBS-TV in New York, which is owned and operated by CBS Corporation, rather than an affiliate who could assert plausible deniability. While Simington would not speculate about a possible probe, he said the FCC might levy a fine or place conditions on the network’s license renewal, if CBS is found to have deliberately distorted the Harris interview.
A day before the CAR complaint was filed, House Speaker Mike Johnson accused CBS of selectively and deceptively editing his own interview. The Louisiana Republican offered proof by posting raw footage recorded by his office, alongside what actually aired, on X.
Will A Potemkin Election Follow Biden’s Potemkin Presidency?
By James Bovard | Real Clear Policy | October 18, 2024
President Biden has been derided for being a Potemkin president, a figurehead in a vast charade portraying him actually running the government. Biden was forced to withdraw from the presidential race after his disastrous debate performance against Donald Trump in June. But is a Potemkin presidency being followed by a Potemkin election?
Biden’s expulsion from the presidential race did not herald the arrival of truth. Most of the media still tolerates pervasive secrecy on prime issues of the 2024 campaign.
In bygone times, elections were about self-government. Nowadays, voters merely have a cameo role to sanctify the nearly boundless power of officialdom. Every year, the federal government slaps a “secret” label on trillions of pages of information – enough to fill 20 million filing cabinets. And since the government is automatically benevolent (if a Democrat is president), there is no need to trouble citizens with the grisly details of how they are being served.
At the same time Special Counsel Jack Smith is racing to fling all possible dirt at Trump before Election Day, each week we learn of new cover-ups designed to deceive Americans about how badly they have been misgoverned:
- Biden administration has mostly succeeded in covering up the crime wave by illegal aliens ushered into the nation since 2021. Former Border Patrol Sector Chief Aaron Heitke testified to Congress last month that the Biden administration hid the adverse impact from deluging U.S. cities with illegal aliens, including those with terror ties.
- The National Archives announced on Wednesday that it would delay until after the election the release of potentially damning records on Vice President Joe Biden’s dealings with his son and foreign wheelers-dealers – records that have been sought for more than a year by conservative lawyers and activists.
- Biden’s Justice Department sought to bury all the tax charges against Hunter Biden but were thwarted thanks to courageous IRS whistleblowers. Hunter’s guilty plea last month to the tax charges confirms that the Justice Department’s offer a wrist-slap plea bargain to Hunter last year was a shameless obstruction of justice.
- Biden’s FBI last year created “a new category of extremists that it seeks to track and counter: Donald Trump’s army of MAGA followers,” Newsweek reported. FBI whistleblowers have exposed the politicization of an agency that even secretly targeted traditional Catholics who prefer to hear mass in Latin. But the vast majority of FBI surveillance and entrapment abuses remain shrouded.
- Team Biden is covering up both Trump assassination attempts. Biden appointees have stonewalled bipartisan congressional investigations into the abysmal Secret Service failures at Butler, Pennsylvania. The Justice Department has indefinitely delayed hearings for Ryan Routh, the 58-year-old guy caught waiting to shoot Trump on his Florida golf course. Delaying proceedings against Routh assures that Americans will not learn before the election whether the would-be assassin had ties to the CIA, Pentagon, State Department or other agencies that assisted Routh with his massively-publicized campaign to recruit foreign soldiers to fight for Ukraine.
- The Biden administration continues covering up almost everything regarding its support for Ukraine’s fight against Russia. The best info Americans have received was thanks to a young military computer technician who leaked revelations that the Ukrainian military was in far worse shape than Team Biden claimed. Americans have been forced to pay hundreds of billions of dollars but are left in the dark regarding Biden administration machinations that risk pulling this nation into World War Three.
- The House Oversight Committee this week subpoenaed DHS for its records on Tim Walz’s possible ties to the CCP after being contacted by a whistleblower. There is zero chance that the Biden administration will release any of those records before Election Day.
- Political convenience is practically the sole determinant of what Americans are permitted to learn nowadays. After Biden dropped his re-election bid, the administration disclosed records showing that his son Hunter sought U.S. government handouts for Burisma when Joe Biden was Vice President. That scandal was buried until Joe Biden was no longer politically relevant.
Is censorship the biggest X factor for this election? Four years ago, the presidential election may have been swung by the coverup of the damning revelations in Hunter Biden’s laptop. The FBI and the CIA hustled to censor and defuse that story with false rebuttals in October 2020. According to multiple federal court rulings, federal agencies tampered with the 2020 election by censoring millions of comments by Americans who raised doubts about the trustworthiness of mail-in ballots and other election procedures. Federal judge Terry Doughty noted that “virtually all of the free speech suppressed was ‘conservative’ free speech.” A federal appeals court issued an injunction prohibiting federal officials from acting “to coerce or significantly encourage social-media companies to remove, delete, suppress, or reduce . . . posted social-media content containing protected free speech.”
But the Supreme Court refused to recognize that the censorship victims had any legal standing and canceled the injunction. Americans will likely have no idea how many muzzles and blindfolds were secretly attached by federal agencies and federal contractors before Election Day.
Don’t expect journalists to suddenly get hot to thwart those Biden cover-ups. When the media shrouded Biden’s mental debility, it directly endorsed de facto secret rule. How much effort has the New York Times or Washington Post or National Public Radio exerted to reveal who is actually exercising the supreme power nowadays? Exposing that issue could derail Kamala Harris’s presidential campaign so it is ignored. But Biden is as oblivious as ever. When asked by a reporter on Thursday about the situation in the Hurricane Helene storm zone, Biden replied that those states “are getting everything they need. They are very happy across the board.”
Earth to Uncle Joe?!?
But as long as Donald Trump is not elected next month, most of the Washington media doesn’t care who is in control. If the Wizard of Oz was a contemporary political campaign story, the media would overwhelmingly side with the guy behind the curtain. As long as the Wizard recited “Orange Man Bad,” the media would cover up all his abuses.
But “informed consent” is a mirage if the feds blindfold voters. As long as Team Biden keeps a lid on its worst outrages until Election Day, Democrats can snare four more year to abuse the Constitution, the law, and the American people. Unfortunately, self-government is not retroactive.
James Bovard is a contributing editor for The American Conservative. He is the author of ten books, including Public Policy Hooligan, Attention Deficit Democracy, The Bush Betrayal, and Lost Rights: The Destruction of American Liberty. His latest is Last Rights: The Death of American Liberty.
Revealed: The Israeli Spies Writing America’s News
By Alan MacLeod | MintPress News | October 16, 2024
One year after Oct. 7 attacks, Netanyahu is on a winning streak.” So reads the title of a recent Axios article describing the Israeli prime minister riding on an unbeatable wave of triumphs. These stunning military “successes,” its author Barak Ravid notes, include the bombing of Yemen, the assassinations of Hamas chief Ismail Haniyeh and Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah, and the pager attack against Lebanon.
The same author recently went viral for an article that claimed that Israeli attacks against Hezbollah are “not intended to lead to war but are an attempt to reach ‘de-escalation through escalation.’” Users on social media mocked Ravid for this bizarre, Orwellian reasoning. But what almost everybody missed is that Barak Ravid is an Israeli spy – or at least he was until recently. Ravid is a former analyst with Israeli spying agency Unit 8200, and as recently as last year, was still a reservist with the Israeli Defense Forces group.
Unit 8200 is Israel’s largest and perhaps most controversial spying organization. It has been responsible for many high-profile espionage and terror operations, including the recent pager attack that injured thousands of Lebanese civilians. As this investigation will reveal, Ravid is far from the only Israeli ex-spook working at top U.S. media outlets, working hard to manufacture Western support for his country’s actions.
White House Insider
Ravid has quickly become one of the most influential individuals in the Capitol Hill press corps. In April, he won the prestigious White House Press Correspondents’ Award “for overall excellence in White House coverage”—one of the highest awards in American journalism. Judges were impressed by what they described as his “deep, almost intimate levels of sourcing in the U.S. and abroad” and picked out six articles as exemplary pieces of journalism.
Most of these stories consisted of simply printing anonymous White House or Israeli government sources, making them look good, and distancing President Biden from the horrors of the Israeli attack on Palestine. As such, there was functionally no difference between these and White House press releases. For example, one story the judges picked out was titled “Scoop: Biden tells Bibi 3-day fighting pause could help secure release of some hostages,” and presented the 46th President of the United States as a dedicated humanitarian hellbent on reducing suffering. Another described how “frustrated” Biden was becoming with Netanyahu and the Israeli government.
Protestors had called on reporters to snub the event in solidarity with their fallen counterparts in Gaza (which, at the time of writing, comes to at least 128 journalists). Not only was there no boycott of the event, but organizers gave their highest award to an Israeli intelligence official-turned-reporter who has earned a reputation as perhaps the most dutiful stenographer of power in Washington.
Ravid was personally presented with the award by President Biden, who embraced him like a brother. That a known (former) Israeli spy could hug Biden in such a manner speaks volumes about not only the intimate relationship between the United States and Israel but about the extent to which establishment media holds power to account.
Ravid has made a name for himself by uncritically printing flattering information given to him by either the U.S. or Israeli government and passing it off as a scoop. In April, he wrote that “President Biden laid out an ultimatum to Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu in their call on Thursday: If Israel doesn’t change course in Gaza, ‘we won’t be able to support you,’” and that he was “making his strongest push for an end to the fighting in Gaza in six months of war, and warning for the first time that U.S. policy on the war will depend on Israel’s adherence to his demands,” which included “an immediate ceasefire.” In July, he repeated anonymous sources that told him that Netanyahu and Israel are striving for “a diplomatic solution” – another highly dubious claim.
Other articles by Ravid following the same pattern include:
- Scoop: Biden tells Bibi he’s not in it for a year of war in Gaza
- Scoop: White House cancels meeting, scolds Netanyahu in protest over video
- Biden “running out” of patience with Bibi as Gaza war hits 100 days
- Biden-Bibi clash escalates as U.S. accused of undermining Israeli government
- Biden and Bibi “red lines” for Rafah put them on a collision course
- Biden on hot mic: Told Bibi we needed “come to Jesus” meeting on Gaza
- Scoop: White House loses trust in Israeli government as Middle East spirals
- Israeli minister lambasted at White House about Gaza and war strategy
- Scoop: Biden told Bibi U.S. won’t support an Israeli counterattack on Iran
This relentless whitewashing of the Biden administration has drawn widespread mockery online.
“AXIOS EXCLUSIVE: After selling Netanyahu millions of dollars worth of weapons, Biden played —loudly — Taylor Swift’s ‘Bad Blood.’ ‘Everyone could hear it,’ a source close to Biden says,” tweeted X user David Grossman. “Continuing to hand over big piles of cash and weapons, but shaking my head so everyone knows i sort of disagree with it,” quipped comedian Hussein Kesvani, in response to Ravid’s latest article suggesting that Biden has become “increasingly distrustful” of the Israeli government.
Throughout this supposed split between the U.S. and Israel, the Biden administration has continued to voice enthusiastic support for Israeli offensives, block ceasefire resolutions and Palestinian statehood at the U.N., and has sent $18 billion worth of weapons to Israel in the past 12 months. Thus, no matter how questionable these Axios reports are, they serve a vital role for Washington, allowing the Biden administration to distance itself from what international bodies have labeled a genocide. Ravid’s function has been to manufacture consent for the government among elite liberal audiences who read Axios, allowing them to continue to believe that the U.S. is an honest broker for peace in West Asia rather than a key enabler of Israel.
Ravid does not hide his open disdain for Palestinians. In September, he retweeted a post that stated:
That’s the PaliNazi way… they pocket concessions without giving anything in return and then use those concessions as the baseline for the next round of negotiations. PaliNazis don’t know how to tell the truth.”
Less than one week later, he promoted Israeli Defense Minister Yoav Gallant’s highly dubious claim that Israeli Defense Forces had found a picture of the children al-Qassam Brigades leader Mohammed Sinwar celebrating in front of a huge picture of planes hitting the World Trade Center. Gallant stated that they had found this picture – clearly trying to falsely associate Palestinians with 9/11 – in a tunnel “where the Sinwar brothers were hiding like rats.”
An Infamous Spy Agency
Founded in 1952, Unit 8200 is the Israeli military’s largest and most controversial division.
Responsible for covert operations, spying, surveillance and cyberwarfare, since October 7, 2023, the group has been at the forefront of the world’s attention. It is widely identified as the organization behind the infamous pager attack on Lebanon, which left at least nine dead and around 3,000 people injured. While many in Israel (and Ravid himself) hailed the operation as a success, it was condemned worldwide as an egregious act of terrorism, including by ex-CIA director Leon Panetta.
Unit 8200 has also constructed an artificial intelligence-powered kill list for Gaza, suggesting tens of thousands of individuals (including women and children) for assassination. This software was the primary targeting mechanism the IDF used in the early months of its attack on the densely populated strip.
Described as Israel’s Harvard, Unit 8200 is one of the most prestigious institutions in the country. The selection process is highly competitive; parents spend fortunes on science and math classes for their children, hoping they will be picked for service there, unlocking a lucrative career in Israel’s burgeoning hi-tech sector.
It also serves as the centerpiece of Israel’s futuristic repressive state apparatus. Using gigantic amounts of data compiled on Palestinians by tracking their every move through face recognition cameras monitoring their calls, messages, emails and personal data, Unit 8200 has created a dystopian dragnet that it uses to surveil, harass and suppress Palestinians.
Unit 8200 compiles dossiers on every Palestinian, including their medical history, sex lives and search histories, so that this information can be used for extortion or blackmail later. If, for example, an individual is cheating on their spouse, desperately needs a medical operation, or is secretly homosexual, this can be used as leverage to turn civilians into informants and spies for Israel. One former Unit 8200 operative said that as part of his training, he was assigned to memorize different Arabic words for “gay” so that he could listen out for them in conversations.
Unit 8200 operatives have gone on to create some of the world’s most downloaded apps and many of the most infamous spying programs, including Pegasus. Pegasus was used to surveil dozens of political leaders around the world, including France’s Emmanuel Macron, South Africa’s Cyril Ramaphosa, and Pakistan’s Imran Khan.
The Israeli government authorized the sale of Pegasus to the Central Intelligence Agency, as well as some of the most authoritarian governments on the planet. This included Saudi Arabia, who used the software to surveil Washington Post journalist Jamal Khashoggi before he was assassinated by Saudi agents in Türkiye.
A recent MintPress News investigation found that a large proportion of the worldwide VPN market is owned and operated by an Israeli company headed and co-founded by a Unit 8200 alumnus.
In 2014, 43 Unit 8200 reservists penned a joint statement declaring that they were no longer willing to serve in the unit on account of its unethical practices, which included making no distinction between ordinary Palestinian citizens and terrorists. The letter also noted that their intelligence was passed on to powerful local politicians, who used it as they saw fit.
This public statement left Ravid bristling with anger at his co-workers. In the wake of the scandal, Ravid went on Israeli Army radio to attack the whistleblowers. Ravid said that to oppose the occupation of Palestine was to oppose Israel itself, as the occupation is a fundamental “part” of Israel. “If the problem is really the occupation,” he said, “then your taxes are also a problem — they fund the soldier at the checkpoint, the education system… and 8200 is a great spin.”
Leaving aside Ravid’s comments, the question arises: is it really acceptable that members from a group designed to infiltrate, surveil and target foreign populations, that has produced many of the planet’s most dangerous and invasive spying technology, and is widely to be behind sophisticated international terror attacks, are writing Americans’ news about Israel and Palestine? What would the reaction be if senior figures in U.S. media were outed as intelligence officers for Hezbollah, Hamas, or Russia’s F.S.B.?
News About Israel, Brought to You by Israel
Ravid is far from the only influential journalist in America with deep ties to the Israeli state, however. Shachar Peled spent three years as an officer in Unit 8200, leading a team of analysts in surveillance, intelligence and cyberwarfare. She also served as a technology analyst for the Israeli intelligence service, Shin Bet. In 2017, she was hired as a producer and writer by CNN and spent three years putting together segments for Fareed Zakaria and Christiane Amanpour’s shows. Google later hired her to become their Senior Media Specialist.
Another Unit 8200 agent who went on to work for CNN is Tal Heinrich. Heinrich spent three years as a Unit 8200 agent. Between 2014 and 2017, she was the field and news desk producer for CNN’s notoriously pro-Israel Jerusalem Bureau, where she was one of the principal journalists shaping America’s understanding of Operation Protective Edge, Israel’s bombardment of Gaza that killed more than 2,000 people and left hundreds of thousands displaced. Heinrich later left CNN and is now the official spokesperson of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.
CNN’s penchant for hiring Israeli state figures continues to this day. Tamar Michaelis, for example, currently works for the network, producing much of its Israel/Palestine content. This is despite having previously served as an official IDF spokesperson in the Israeli Defense Forces.
The New York Times, meanwhile, hired Anat Schwartz, an ex-Israeli Air Force Intelligence officer with zero journalistic experience. Schwartz co-wrote the infamous and now discredited “Screams Without Words” expose, which claimed that Hamas fighters systematically sexually violated Israelis on October 7. Times staff themselves revolted over the lack of evidence and fact-checking in the piece.
Multiple New York Times employees, including star columnist David Brooks, have had children serving in the IDF; even as they report or offer opinions on the region, the Times never disclosed these glaring conflicts of interest to its readers. Nor has it disclosed that it purchased a Jerusalem house for its bureau chief that was stolen from the family of Palestinian intellectual Ghada Karmi in 1948.
MintPress News interviewed Karmi last year about her latest book and Israeli attempts to silence her. Former New York Times Magazine writer and current editor-in-chief of The Atlantic Jeffrey Goldberg (an American) dropped out of the University of Pennsylvania to volunteer as an IDF prison guard during the first Palestinian Intifada (uprising). In his memoirs, Goldberg revealed that, while serving in the IDF., he helped cover up the abuse of Palestinian prisoners.
Social media companies, too, are filled with former Unit 8200 agents. A 2022 MintPress study found no fewer than 99 former Unit 8200 operatives working for Google.
Facebook also employs dozens of ex-spooks from the controversial unit. This includes Emi Palmor, who sits on Meta’s oversight board. This 21-person panel ultimately decides the direction of Facebook, Instagram and Meta’s other offerings, adjudicating on what content to allow, promote, and what to suppress. Meta has been formally condemned for its systematic suppression of Palestinian voices across its platforms by Human Rights Watch, which documented over 1,000 instances of overt anti-Palestinian censorship in October and November 2023 alone. A measure of this bias is highlighted by the fact that, at one point, Instagram automatically inserted the word “terrorist” into the profiles of users who called themselves Palestinian.
Despite the widespread claims by U.S. politicians that it is a hotbed of anti-Israel and anti-Semitic racism, TikTok also employs many former Unit 8200 agents in key positions in its organization. For example, in 2021, it hired Asaf Hochman as its global head of product strategy and operations. Before joining TikTok, Hochman spent over five years as an Israeli spook. He now works for Meta.
Top Down Pro-Israel Censorship
When it comes to the Israeli attack on its neighbors, corporate media has consistently displayed a pro-Israel bias. The New York Times, for example, regularly refrains from identifying the perpetrator of violence when that perpetrator is the Israeli military and described the 1948 genocide of around 750,000 Palestinians as a mere “migration.” A study of the paper’s coverage found that words like “slaughter,” “massacre,” and “horrific” appear 22 times more frequently when discussing Israeli deaths than Palestinian ones, despite the gigantic disparity in the number of people killed on both sides.
Meanwhile, in a story about how Israeli soldiers shot 335 bullets at a car containing a Palestinian child and then shot the rescue workers who came to save her, CNN printed the headline “Five-year-old Palestinian girl found dead after being trapped in car with dead relatives” – a title that could be interpreted that her death was a tragic accident.
This sort of reporting does not happen by accident. In fact, it comes straight from the top. A leaked New York Times memo from November revealed that company management explicitly instructed its reporters not to use words such as “genocide,” “slaughter,” and “ethnic cleansing” when discussing Israel’s actions. Times’ staff must refrain from using words like “refugee camp,” “occupied territory,” or even “Palestine” in their reporting, making it almost impossible to convey some of the most basic facts to their audience.
CNN staff are under similar pressure. Last October, new C.E.O. Mark Thompson sent out a memo to all staff instructing them to make sure that Hamas (and not Israel) is presented as responsible for the violence, that they must always use the moniker “Hamas-controlled” when discussing the Gaza Health Ministry and their civilian death figures, and barring them from any reporting of Hamas’ viewpoint, which its senior director of news standards and practices told staff was “not newsworthy” and amounted to “inflammatory rhetoric and propaganda.”
Both the Times and CNN have fired multiple journalists over their opposition to Israeli actions or support for Palestinian liberation. In November, the Times’ Jazmine Hughes was forced out after she signed an open letter opposing genocide in Palestine. The newspaper terminated Hosam Salem’s contract the previous year after a pressure campaign from pro-Israel group Honest Reporting. And CNN anchor Marc Lamont Hill was abruptly fired in 2018 for calling for Palestinian liberation in a speech at the United Nations.
Large organizations like Axios, CNN and the New York Times obviously know who they are hiring. These are some of the most sought-after jobs in journalism, and hundreds of applicants are likely applying for each position. The fact that these organizations choose to select Israeli spies above everybody else raises serious questions about their journalistic credibility and their purpose.
Hiring agents from Unit 8200 to produce American news should be as unthinkable as employing Hamas or Hezbollah fighters as reporters. Yet former Israeli spooks are entrusted with informing the American public about their country’s ongoing offensives against Palestine, Lebanon, Yemen, Iran and Syria. What does this say about the credibility and biases of our media?
Since Israel could not continue to prosecute this war without American aid, the battle for the American mind is as important as actions on the ground. And as the propaganda war wages, the lines between journalist and fighter blur. The fact that many of the top journalists supplying us with news about Israel/Palestine are literally former Israeli intelligence agents only underlines this.
Featured Video
or go to
Aletho News Archives – Video-Images
From the Archives
Three Reasons Macron is a Hypocrite when it Comes to Venezuela
By Jim Carey | Geopolitics Alert | January 29, 2019
Paris – French President Emmanuel Macron recently voiced support for protesters in Venezuela as his own country has been ground to a halt by protests every weekend.
There is an overused saying that “people in glass houses shouldn’t throw stones.” While these few words may be cliche there is definitely one man that they can be applied to after this weekend: Emmanuel Macron.
Even though the French President is into the third month of protests against his government, he has decided to weigh in on the legitimacy of another country’s government and his latest outrageous statements just highlight the hypocrisy of Macron and Western leaders in general. … continue
Blog Roll
Recent Comments
Bill Francis on Australia Passes New Hate Spee… seversonebcfb985d9 on Australia Passes New Hate Spee… Bill Francis on Britain’s AI Policing Plan Tur… loongtip on Miami Beach Resident Questione… loongtip on Israeli agricultural export co… loongtip on The War On Free Speech In Aust… seversonebcfb985d9 on Scott Ritter Hiding the Domina… Richard Ong on Europe Economic Panic Kate on Bird Flu Outbreak 40 Miles Fro… loongtip on US announces Gaza ‘Board of Pe… Richard Jones on Peaceful Finland? Think Twice:… Richard Jones on Bird Flu Outbreak 40 Miles Fro…
Aletho News- When Greenland divides the North Atlantic allies, the world is astonished!
- The CIA’s Blatant Lies About Ukraine and Russia… Intentional or Just Trolling Sy Hersh?
- EU free trade pact on hold as farmers revolt
- Russian gold gains offset frozen asset value – Bloomberg
- Australia Passes New Hate Speech Law, Raising Free Speech Fears
- Miami Beach Resident Questioned by Police After Facebook Post Criticizing Mayor Steven Meiner
- Britain’s AI Policing Plan Turns Toward Predictive Surveillance and a Pre-Crime Future
- Gaza’s ‘Phase Two’: The illusion of transition and the reality of control
- UNRWA under attack: Ben-Gvir directs demolition in al-Quds
- Israeli agricultural export collapse amid Gaza genocide boycott
- If Americans Knew
- Another baby dies of cold in Gaza, as Rafah crossing remains locked down – Not a ceasefire Day 103
- Brutal Beatings, Arson, and Impunity: A Palestinian Plant Nursery Becomes a Target for Settler Pogroms
- On Iran’s protests, Israeli hypocrisy knows no limits
- A Cease-fire for Israelis and a War for Palestinians
- ‘When will Baba come back?’ Gaza’s widows and orphans struggle to survive
- Genocide research institute levels accusations against Germany for denying Israel’s genocide against Palestinians
- Over 1,200 Israeli truce violations in Gaza – Not a ceasefire Day 102
- Trump has created a monster: Gaza Board of Peace – Not a ceasefire Day 101
- As world leaders squabble over controlling Gaza, another baby freezes to death – Not a ceasefire Day 100
- Trump “Board of Peace” for Gaza is stacked with Israel supporters – Not a ceasefire Day 99
- No Tricks Zone
- New Study: Brazil’s Relative Sea Level Was 2+ Meters Higher And SSTs 3-4°C Warmer 6000 Years Ago
- Philosopher Schopenhauer: Climate Science Certainty Stems From Stupidity, Ignorance
- New Study: Species Extinction Rates Declining Since 1980 – ‘Climate Change Is Not An Important Threat’
- Denmark Places Climate Protection Above Animal Welfare, Poisoning And Culling Cows
- New Study: Greenland Was 3-7°C Warmer And Far Less Glaciated Than Today 6000-8000 Years Ago
- German Media Report That Current Frigid Weather Can Be Explained By Arctic Warming!
- Berlin Blackout Shows Germany’s $5 Trillion Green Scheme Is “Left-Green Ideological Pipe Dream”
- Modeling Error In Estimating How Clouds Affect Climate Is 8700% Larger Than Alleged CO2 Forcing
- Berlin’s Terror-Blackout Enters 4th Day As Tens Of Thousands Suffer In Cold Without Heat!
- Expect Soon Another PIK Paper Claiming Warming Leads To Cold Snaps Over Europe
Aletho News 