Every House Democrat Votes Against Defunding A Cutout Of The CIA
The Dissident | January 18, 2026
Recently, U.S. representative Eli Crane introduced a provision into the recent spending package that would cut funding for the National Endowment for Democracy (NED), a cutout of the CIA used to advance regime change abroad.
In response to his “amendment to defund NED” every House Democrat, including progressives like Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Ro Khanna, and Ilhan Omar, voted against it, along with 81 Republicans, slapping down the amendment 291 to 127.
But what is the NED, the CIA cutout that the Washington uniparty rejected ending funding for?
The NED, which was officially created by Ronald Regan in 1984, was described in 1995 by CIA whistleblower Philip Agee as the CIA’s “sidekick” which functioned as “a mega conduit” for “the millions or the tens of millions that are set aside for the meddling in the internal affairs of other countries”.
Allen Weinstein, the head of the NED, boasted in a interview with the Washington Post in 1991, “A lot of what we do today was done covertly 25 years ago by the CIA”.
Indeed, the NED has been used for America’s “meddling in the internal affairs of other countries”, playing a role in U.S. coups and coup attempts in Venezuela (2002-2025), Haiti (2004), Ukraine (2014), Nicaragua (2018), Bolivia (2019), Belarus (2020), and Romania (2024).
In 2004, the NED provided funding and training for opposition activists who overthrew Haiti’s democratically elected leader, Jean-Bertrand Aristide.
Mother Jones reported at the time when the coup took place, “several of the people who had attended IRI (International Republican Institute, a subsidiary of the NED) trainings were influential in the toppling of Aristide”.
Mother Jones noted, “In 2002 and 2003, IRI used funding from the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) to organize numerous political training sessions in the Dominican Republic and Miami for some 600 Haitian leaders. Though IRI’s work is supposed to be nonpartisan — it is official U.S. policy not to interfere in foreign elections — a former U.S. diplomat says organizers of the workshops selected only opponents of Aristide and attempted to mold them into a political force”.
Similarly, in 2002, the NED, through the IRI, helped support a U.S. backed military coup against Venezuela’s elected president, Hugo Chavez, with Mother Jones noting, “In April 2002, a group of military officers launched a coup against Chavez, and leaders of several parties trained by IRI joined the junta.”
In 2015, the NED gave $300,000 to another one of its subsidiaries the National Democratic Institute (NDI) to meddle in Venezuela’s National Assembly elections of 2015 and swing them to the U.S.-backed opposition through “mobilizing a voter database that identified and targeted swing voters through social media”.
As Jacobin Magazine noted , “indeed, in December 2015, the opposition won a majority in the Venezuelan National Assembly for the first time since Chávez came to power in 1999” adding, “the NDI claims credit for the opposition’s success, writing that this strategy ‘ultimately played an important role in their resounding victory in the 2015 election’ and that a ‘determining factor in the success of the coalition in the parliamentary elections of 2015 was a two-year effort prior to the election”.
Along with this, the NED funded opposition politicians such as Maria Corina Machado, who helped certify the 2002 coup, drove a failed referendum against Chavez in 2004, and “was also one of the political architects of La Salida, the 2014 opposition campaign that called for escalated protests, including guarimba tactics”, which- as journalist Michelle Ellner noted, “weren’t ‘peaceful protests’ as the foreign press claimed; they were organized barricades meant to paralyze the country and force the government’s fall. Streets were blocked with burning trash and barbed wire, buses carrying workers were torched, and people suspected of being Chavista were beaten or killed. Even ambulances and doctors were attacked. Some Cuban medical brigades were nearly burned alive. Public buildings, food trucks, and schools were destroyed. Entire neighborhoods were held hostage by fear while opposition leaders like Machado cheered from the sidelines and called it ‘resistance.’”
Similarly, the NED played a role in the 2014 coup in Ukraine against the country’s elected president, Viktor Yanukovych, which turned Ukraine into a U.S. proxy state.
As journalist Branko Marcetic reported, “Just two months before they (protests in Ukraine) broke out, the NED’s then president, pointing to Yanukovych’s European outreach, wrote that ‘the opportunities are considerable, and there are important ways Washington could help.’ In practice, this meant funding groups like New Citizen, which the Financial Times reported ‘played a big role in getting the protest up and running,’ led by a pro-EU opposition figure. Journalist Mark Ames discovered the organization had received hundreds of thousands of dollars from US democracy promotion initiatives.”
The protests were eventually taken over by far-right paramilitary groups, who fired sniper shots at protestors in the Maidan square, a massacre that was falsely blamed on Yanukovych’s forces by the U.S. and used to justify supporting his removal and installing a puppet government.
The real motive behind the coup, as Ukrainian political scientist Konstantin Bondarenko put it was because “The West, however, did not want a Ukrainian president who pursued a multi-vector foreign policy; the West needed Ukraine to be anti-Russia, with clear opposition between Kyiv and Moscow. Yanukovych was open to broad cooperation with the West, but he was not willing to confront Russia and China. The West could not accept this ambivalence. The West needed a Ukraine charged for confrontation and even war against Russia, a Ukraine it could use as a tool in the fight against Russia” adding, “this was why Western politicians, diplomats, and civil society representatives actively supported the Euromaidan as a mechanism for overthrowing Yanukovych, even going as far as providing financial support for the ‘revolutionary’ process”
The NED tried and failed to foment another “Maidan” in Nicaragua from 2014-2018, in an attempt to remove the country’s leader, Daniel Ortega, the head of the Sandinista party, which fought the CIA-backed contras in the 1980s.
When riots broke out in the country in 2018, the outlet Global Americans reported that the NED, “laid the groundwork for insurrection” noting that, “Since 2014, the National Endowment for Democracy (NED), … has spent $4.1 million on projects in Nicaragua” adding, “it’s becoming more and more clear that the U.S. support has helped play a role in nurturing the current uprisings.”
The uprising was not peaceful protests but a violent NED backed coup attempt. Journalist John Perry, who reported on the coup attempt from the ground noted , “Public buildings and the houses of government supporters were burnt down by protesters; shops were ransacked; most businesses and all banks and schools were closed. The main secondary school for 3,700 pupils was burnt out twice. The police station was under siege for 45 days, so no police were on patrol. No cars or taxis could use the streets; passing the barricades on foot involved being checked by youths with weapons and on occasion threatened. Dissent was met with violence (before the barricades went up, I took part in a ‘peace’ march which was pelted with stones). At first protesters had homemade mortars, but later many acquired more serious weapons such as AK-47s; paid troublemakers manned the barricades at night-time. A police official captured nearby was tortured and then killed, his body burnt at a barricade.”
Similarly, the NED played a role in the U.S. backed military coup against Bolivia’s elected leader, Evo Morales, in 2019.
The U.S. backed coup was sparked when the Organization of American States (OSA) falsely claimed that Evo Morales stole the 2019 election, which was used to justify a military coup and the installation of a military dictatorship led by U.S. puppet, Jeanine Añez.
As journalist Yanis Iqbal, reported the lie that Evo Morales stole the elected was heavily pushed by the NED writing that, “In 2019, NED ran programmes such as Countering Disinformation in the Political Process, Informing Citizens Via Digital Platforms, Monitoring the National Electoral Process, Promoting an Informed Electorate, Providing Independent Analysis and Information, Providing Independent Political News and Election Information and Stimulating an Informed National Debate” which pushed the lie used to justify the coup, adding, “These NED tactics conclusively point towards a scheme of carefully choreographed propaganda and electoral interventionism which contributed to the 2019 Bolivia coup.”
Similar to the Maidan coup in Ukraine, the NED continued to undermine governments in Eastern Europe, which were seen as too close to Russia.
When protests broke out against Belarus’ Russia-aligned president, Aleksandr Lukashenko in 2020, journalist Alan Macleod reported, “on a Zoom meeting infiltrated by activists and released to the public, the NED’s senior Europe Program officer, Nina Ognianova, boasted that the groups leading the nationwide demonstrations against Lukashenko … were trained by her organization. ‘We don’t think that this movement that is so impressive and so inspiring came out of nowhere — that it just happened overnight,’ she said, noting that the NED had made a ‘modest but significant contribution’ to the protests.”
He added, “On the same call, NED President Carl Gershman added that ‘we support many, many groups and we have a very, very active program throughout the country, and many of the groups obviously have their partners in exile.’ Gershman also boasted that the Belarusian government was powerless to intervene and stop them: ‘We’re not like Freedom House or NDI [the National Democratic Institute] and the IRI [International Republican Institute]; we don’t have offices. So if we’re not there, they can’t kick us out.’”
Similarly, the NED intervened in the 2024 election in Romania to back a judicial coup against the candidate Calin Georgescu, because he was opposed to funding the proxy war in Ukraine (which was in large part sparked by the NED backed coup in 2014).
Romania’s intelligence agencies released an evidence-free report which falsely claimed that a TikTok campaign backed by Russia was supporting his campaign.
As the New York Times noted, “The intelligence documents released publicly by Romania provided no evidence of a Russian role, only the observation that ‘Russia has a history of interfering in the electoral processes of other states’ and vague claims that what happened in Romania was ‘similar’ to well-documented Russian election interference in neighboring Moldova”.
Furthermore, the investigative outlet Snoop reported that the TikTok campaign cited in the intelligence report was actually paid for by the Romanian National Liberal Party, the party opposing Calin Georgescu.
Based on this fabricated report, Calin Georgescu was barred from running in the election, despite winning the first round of the vote.
His opponent, Elena Lascon, said at the time, “Today is the moment when the Romanian state trampled over democracy. God, the Romanian people, the truth and the law will prevail and will punish those who are guilty of destroying our democracy”.
This lawfare campaign was backed by the NED. Journalist Lee Fang uncovered that, “think tanks and civil society NGOs funded by the U.S. – via USAID foreign aid programs, the National Endowment for Democracy (NED), and the State Department – have served as the most vocal voices championing the judicial coup”.
The fact that every House Democrat and many House Republicans voted against defunding the ostensible NGO that has been used by the CIA to back coups around the world – including against democratically elected leaders – that do not bow down to Washington’s demands shows that both parties will continue to keep the deep state’s infrastructure running.
Donald Trump, A Responsibility to Protect President
By Adam Dick | Ron Paul Institute | January 16, 2026
Publicly denouncing war and liberals was a regular part of Donald Trump’s communication in his 2024 presidential campaign. Yet, as president, Trump has been relying on the responsibility to protect idea associated with liberals he would normally ridicule as a basis for the US engaging in wars abroad.
In October of 2016, the month before Donald Trump won the race to succeed Barack Obama as president, David Stockman wrote about an example of the terrible damage the US following a responsibility to protect standard in foreign policy can yield. In particular, Stockman wrote about Syria being “a lawless, bombed-out, economically decimated failed state today owing to Washington’s heavy-handed intervention at the behest of the War Party’s bloody twin sisters.” Those “twin sisters,” continued Stockman, are “the neocons — led by the contemptible Kagan clan — and the R2P liberal interventionist claque around Hillary Clinton, including UN Ambassador Samantha Powers and National Security Council head Susan Rice.”
Stockman here used the term “R2P” to reference responsibility to protect.
For some more details on what responsibility to protect entails, consider this excerpt from “Humanitarian Intervention: Destroying Nations to Save Them” by Ibrahim Kazerooni and Rob Prince from 2013:
What distinguishes the more recent forms of humanitarian intervention is that thanks to the writings of the likes of Samantha Powers and Susan Rice, humanitarian intervention now has a more comprehensive theoretical justification, i.e., the pretexts for military intervention have become more refined, coated with phony concern for “the people.” It was used to justify the military intervention in Libya, and until less than a month ago was the emotional cutting edge for greater military intervention in Syria.
As an elaborate excuse is needed to justify unprovoked aggression – all in the name of the public good – humanitarian intervention serves the purpose well. But at its heart, strike it down to its basics and it [is] little more than liberal racism – i.e., “we” = one neo-colonial power or another = magnanimously no less – are invading a country for its own good because those poor dumb folks don’t have the wherewithal to protect themselves and need our kind assistance to prevent disasters.
As suggested by Stockman, responsibility to protect, or R2P, is a reason for United States government intervention that is commonly associated with liberals or Democrats. But, Trump as president has recently appeared to embrace it publicly as a sufficient basis for the US to attack other countries. Consider, for example, Trump’s comments in the last few months regarding his reasoning for supporting US military attacks in Nigeria and Iran.
In November, Trump indicated in a post at Truth Social that he was directing that the US military plan to go into Nigeria with “’guns-a-blazing,’ to completely wipe out the Islamic Terrorists” Trump wrote were killing Christians. There was no mention of any threat to America, to Americans, or even to the often broadly and squishily defined US “national interests.” Instead, the message was people are being harmed so the US should attack to help address the problem.
When I wrote in November regarding Trump’s post, I noted that Trump’s post was followed by comment by Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth that “killing of innocent Christians in Nigeria — and anywhere — must end immediately” and comment by US Ambassador to the United Nations Mike Waltz that US government should be concerned with persecution of Christians spanning “78 countries, 330 million Christians being persecuted around the world.” This one sort of alleged harm thus could open the door to a vast US military intervention across the world.
Come Christmas, the US military attacked in Nigeria, with Trump stating the attack came in response to harm done to Christians in Nigeria. Stated Trump in a December 25 Truth Social post: “I have previously warned these Terrorists that if they did not stop the slaughtering of Christians, there would be hell to pay, and tonight, there was.”
This week, Trump has been promoting the US going to war in another country based entirely upon responsibility to protect reasoning. Trump, in a Truth Social post on Tuesday, stated his encouragement of protesters in Iran to take revolutionary actions and promised that “HELP IS ON THE WAY” for the protesters. He even told them to “[s]ave the names of the killers and abusers” who he wrote “will pay a big price” — apparently due to US action. Here is what Trump wrote:
Iranian Patriots, KEEP PROTESTING – TAKE OVER YOUR INSTITUTIONS!!! Save the names of the killers and abusers. They will pay a big price. I have cancelled all meetings with Iranian Officials until the senseless killing of protesters STOPS. HELP IS ON ITS WAY. MIGA!!! PRESIDENT DONALD J. TRUMP
“MIGA” here is likely a reference to Make Iran Great Again, a phrase used by uber-warmonger Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-SC) in a Truth Social post that Trump reposted three days earlier. Graham, in his bellicose post, in addition to declaring “Make Iran Great Again,” praised a comment by US Secretary of State Marco Rubio that the US “supports the brave people of Iran.” “To the regime leadership: your brutality against the great people of Iran will not go unchallenged,” also threatened Graham in his post.
Earlier, on January 2, Trump had already asserted he was ready to send the US military to attack Iran based just on the conclusion that protesters in Iran were killed. Then, Trump wrote in a Truth Social post:
If Iran shots [sic] and violently kills peaceful protesters, which is their custom, the United States of America will come to their rescue. We are locked and loaded and ready to go. Thank you for your attention to this matter! President DONALD J.TRUMP
Attacking Iran is not a new idea for Trump. The US military did just that in June, upon Trump’s order. That time a primary argument Trump asserted was that he wanted to prevent Iran from acquiring nuclear weapons. That bombing also came to the aid of Israel that had gotten in over its head by attacking Iran over a week earlier and whose Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu had long been urging Trump to take military action against Iran.
The responsibility to protect argument Trump keeps trotting out for a US attack on Iran joins other arguments that he has proffered over time. For example, on December 29, with Netanyahu by his side, Trump threatened to “knock the hell out of” Iran if it tries to “build up again” from damage inflicted earlier in the year by Israel and the US.
Trump likes to ridicule liberals for their ideas that he depicts as kooky, absurd, or dangerous. At the same time, Trump is out touting his adherence to one of the most kooky, absurd, and dangerous ideas associated with liberals — trying to justify the US going to war based on the responsibility to protect argument that it is appropriate for the US to use military force for the sole purpose of stopping or punishing the infliction of harm on people oversees. It is a formula for foreign intervention without restraint. It is also incompatible with the peace candidate status Trump sought to establish for himself in the 2024 presidential race.
Adam Dick worked from 2003 through 2013 as a legislative aide for Rep. Ron Paul. Previously, he was a member of the Wisconsin State Board of Elections, a co-manager of Ed Thompson’s 2002 Wisconsin governor campaign, and a lawyer in New York and Connecticut.
Here’s who really weaponizes children in the Russia-Ukraine conflict
By Eva Bartlett | RT | January 9, 2026
For the last three years, Ukraine and concerted legacy media campaigns have been screaming that Russia has abducted, or forcibly displaced, thousands of Ukrainian children – even up to 1.5 million!
The accusations resurged in December, with a UN General Assembly vote on a draft resolution on the return of Ukrainian children.
During the meeting, Ukraine’s Deputy Foreign Minister Mariana Betsa once again pushed claims that “at least 20,000 Ukrainian children have been deported to Russia,” in spite of the fact that months prior, during the June Istanbul talks, the Ukrainian side finally provided a list of the children it accuses Russia of abducting: 339 children, surprisingly far fewer than the number alleged for years.
The absence of over 19,500 on the list indeed leads to many questions, mainly: is Ukraine lying again? Recall that in 2022, the accusations by the (now former) Ukrainian ombudswoman, Lyudmila Denisova, about “sexual atrocities” allegedly committed by Russian soldiers, were revealed to be lies and propaganda. So much so that Denisova was sacked. But before her dismissal, legacy media and the UN all backed the lies.
Some recent accusations are that children were being sent to labor camps in Russia – “165 re-education camps where Ukrainian children are militarized and Russified” – or even of being sent to North Korea, as Katerina Rashevskaya of the Ukrainian Regional Center for Human Rights told the US Subcommittee on State, Foreign Operations, and Related Programs on December 3.
The footnotes of the claims made by Rashevskaya, instead of a source for the information, say “The Regional Human Rights Center can provide information upon request.” In other words, her sources are “trust me, bro.”
Regarding the North Korean camp in question, if two Russian teens were sent there, they’d potentially be made to enjoy water slides, basketball and volleyball courts, an arcade room, a rock climbing wall, art and performance halls, an archery range, a private beach, and hikes in the mountains.
Regarding the list of 339 children Ukraine says were abducted by Russia, Russian Foreign Ministry Spokeswoman Maria Zakharova remarked, “30 percent of the names on the list could not be verified, as most of those children were never in Russia, are now adults, or have already returned to their families. As for the Ukrainian children who are actually in our country, they are under state care in appropriate institutions. They are safe now; in many cases, their evacuation from combat zones saved their lives. Local children’s rights commissioners are now working to reunite them with their relatives.”
Just as legacy media has whitewashed the eight years of Ukraine’s war against Donbass civilians prior to Russia commencing its military operation in 2022, including the Ukrainian shelling which killed 250 children starting in 2014, media likewise ignore the children Russia says are missing.
During the talks in Istanbul, Zakharova noted, “the Russian side presented Ukraine with a list of 20 Russian children who are either currently in Ukraine or relocated from Ukraine to Western Europe, including to countries that endorsed this very statement. Now, the burden falls on these states to provide Russia with a substantive response regarding our ‘list of 20.’”
Over 500 Ukrainian orphans abused in Türkiye
Recently, Donbass-based journalist Christelle Néant wrote about a report published on a pro-Ukrainian website which broke the story of 510 Ukrainian children who had been evacuated by a Ukrainian oligarch in 2022 from Dnepropetrovsk to Türkiye, where the benevolent foundation which brought them there allegedly allowed its staff to beat the children, sexually assault them, and deny them food if they refused to perform on camera to raise funds for their lodging. These are just some of the reported violations of the orphans’ rights.
The details of the report show that the children suffered physically and psychologically. Additionally, two underage teens were impregnated by staff at the hotel they stayed in, with educators allegedly aware of the interactions.
According to Néant, the orphanage director’s response to the fact of one of the teens in her care becoming pregnant was to blame the girl: “This young girl comes from an asocial family. Well, this way of life is already inscribed in every cell, in the blood of these children.”
“In almost 10 years of work in Donbass,” Néant wrote, “I have conducted or filmed many humanitarian missions to orphanages in the region. And never ever have I heard a director make such vile remarks about one of the children in her care. Even the most difficult and recalcitrant were cared for with pedagogy, love, and patience.”
Ukraine hunting down children
In April 2023, Christelle Néant and I interviewed Artyomovsk civilians who had recently been rescued by Russian soldiers. In addition to being deliberately shelled by Ukrainian forces who knew they were sheltering in the basement of a residential building, the civilians we spoke to told us about Ukrainian military police hunting for children.
The evacuees told us some of these police went by the name ‘White Angels’, and were taking children away without their consent or that of their parents.
Around that time, more reports came out about these abductions or attempted abductions, including an 11-year-old girl who spoke of how White Angels, who introduced themselves as military police, came to the basement she was sheltering in with a photo of her, looking for her, and saying they needed to take her away, because “Russia killed her mother.” According to the girl, her mother was alive and with her.
Reports of these abductions also emerged in Avdeyevka, Kupyansk, Slavyansk, Chasov Yar and Konstantinovka, as well as in Ukrainsk and Zhelannoye.
Néant wrote of a July 2023 conference on Ukraine’s crimes against the Donbass children, in which Liliya and her daughter Kira from Schastye, in the Lugansk People’s Republic, spoke.
They gave evidence of how, “at the start of the special military operation (when Ukraine controlled Schastye), around ten children were taken from a school in Schastye to western Ukraine by the headmistress of the school, on orders from Kiev, without informing their parents.”
The children were even forbidden to call their parents, Néant wrote, “But Kira knew her mother’s telephone number by heart and managed to call her to let her know that they were in Lviv and then Khoust. Thanks to Liliya’s determination to find her daughter, we discovered how Kiev ‘exports’ the children it abducts.” Ukraine had forged a new “original” birth certificate for Kira. The girl said she and the other children were to be sent to Poland.
Former SBU officer Vasily Prozorov spoke at the same conference, where he explained, according to Néant, “that one of his investigations had revealed that some of the children abducted by Ukraine are sent to pedophile networks in Great Britain, via a whole network of Ukrainian and British officials or former officials who work together. On the British side, members of MI6 and the Foreign Office are involved.”
Prozorov, she wrote, spoke of “another of his investigations on organizations registered in EU countries involved in ‘exporting’ children from Ukraine under the pretext of providing them with shelter. These organizations take unaccompanied Ukrainian children out of Ukraine. What happens to them afterwards is unknown.”
Evacuees from Kherson reject ‘abduction’ claims
In November 2022, in the southern Russian seaside city Anapa, I met numerous people displaced from Kherson who were being lodged in hotels and apartments in the city.
The first site I visited was a few minutes by taxi outside of the city, one of many hotels along the coast. The hotel director showing me around said they don’t call them refugees, “we call them guests of the building,” and spoke affectionately of them, how grateful they were to be there, far from any shelling. Just under 500 refugees had been living there since October, she told me.
No guards monitored the entrance/exit; the refugees walked around tidy grounds. But in any case, I asked about their freedom of movement, or lack thereof.
“They move freely, of course. We don’t prohibit them from going out. Many aren’t here now because they’re in town, looking for jobs, getting documents. Children are at school.”
With my hired translator, I spoke with two Kherson women, a young mother and her own mother, to hear their stories.
“We were living with explosions at night, it was very scary, not only for myself, but for my children and for my grandchildren,” the older woman said. “When you go to bed, you don’t know if you will get out of bed in the morning. We were forced to leave.”
I asked who was shelling them. “Word of mouth transmits very clearly, and people around us spoke about it. We were bombed by the Armed Forces of Ukraine. Russian soldiers protected us.”
The younger woman said she used to speak with the Russian soldiers there. “They are friendly. We wanted to hug them, because we felt protected. They helped us, gave us humanitarian aid, brought it to the house.”
Some minutes’ taxi ride away, I visited an apartment complex that could have served tourists in summer. There, fifty buildings housed around 1,500 refugees who had also arrived in October, mostly from Kherson Region.
My translator and I walked around, passing playgrounds, a pharmacy, a library, a swimming pool, a gym, a small petting zoo with peacocks, and a kindergarten. Near a playground, I spoke with a mother sitting on a bench with two of her four children.
“In the early days, there was bombing. We spent two and a half weeks in the basement. It was unbearable, the children were very afraid.” One of her daughters became ill. “She had acute inflammation of the lower jaw, we think due to hypothermia. We took her to Simferopol and she had surgery.”
In Anapa, she said, her children had full medical examinations. “We were helped by the mayor of the city of Anapa. We are grateful for everything.”
I mentioned that according to Western media, she and her family were kidnapped by Russia. She replied that her husband’s parents had demanded to see the children, having been told that children were being separated from their parents in Russia.
“His mother called three days in a row, saying, ‘Where are the children?’ We answered, ‘They went to the cinema. They’re playing, etc.’ She said, ‘Show me the children, they say that they took your children from you.’”
Details matter
Whereas legacy media continue to push the “Evil Russia child kidnapper” narrative, there is ample evidence that Ukraine is guilty of doing precisely what it accuses Russia of. There is also a significant absence of evidence regarding the ‘20,000 kidnapped children’ claims still being pushed.
Will media investigate the reports of abuse of Ukrainian children in Türkiye? Surely not. It wouldn’t suit their scripted anti-Russia bias.
Eva Bartlett is a Canadian independent journalist. She has spent years on the ground covering conflict zones in the Middle East, especially in Syria and Palestine (where she lived for nearly four years).
2016: The Year American Democracy Became “Post-Truth”
By James Bovard | January 9, 2026
Was the 2016 election a turning point for American democracy? Did political shenanigans and the election destroy so much credibility and legitimacy that the system will never fully recover?
In 2016, ignorant voters were reviled like never before. However, the entire political-media system floundered badly. Never before had American voters been obliged to choose between two such widely despised candidates. A few months before the election, an Associated Press poll “found that 86 percent of Americans were angry or dissatisfied with the state of politics in the nation.” Routine deceit by both candidates helped make “post-truth” the Oxford English Dictionary’s word of the year for 2016.
Many Americans were riled early on because one party preempted voters from selecting their preferred candidate. The Democratic Party leadership decided in 2015 or earlier to award its presidential nomination to former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton; a large block of “super delegates” chosen by party elites instead of voters helped ensure that result. In , WikiLeaks released the hacked emails of the Democratic National Committee, exposing how the Democratic Party “fixed” its primaries and procedures to ensure that Clinton would be the nominee — even though she was under FBI criminal investigation at the time. After the emails were released, DNC chairwoman Debbie Wasserman Schulz resigned and was promptly appointed honorary chair of the Clinton campaign.
Republican nominee Donald Trump also produced plenty of scandals and outrages, including a leaked audio tape from 2005 boasting of pussy grabbing, inflammatory comments on illegal Mexican immigrants and a Mexican-American judge, and unsavory squabbling with a Venezuelan beauty queen who gained 60 pounds. Trump was also tarnished by allegations of improprieties or crimes by Trump University, the Trump Foundation, and some branches of his corporate empire.
Trump’s rise provoked denunciations from poohbahs who considered themselves the public policy equivalent of Mt. Olympus. James Traub, an heir to the Bloomingdale fortune and a member of the Council for Foreign Relations, lashed out in an oped entitled, “It’s Time for the Elites to Rise Up Against the Ignorant Masses.” Traub declared that “the political schism of our time” is “not about the left vs. the right; it’s about the sane vs. the mindlessly angry.” His solution: “It is necessary to say that people are deluded and that the task of leadership is to un-delude them.” Traub asked: “Is that ‘elitist?’ Maybe it is; maybe we have become so inclined to celebrate the authenticity of all personal conviction that it is now elitist to believe in reason, expertise, and the lessons of history.” And anyone who disagreed with Traub was automatically unfit to judge history.
Clinton’s email scandal
The most politically damaging scandal of the 2016 race involved Clinton’s emails as secretary of state. Federal law requires the government to preserve the emails of top officials, but Clinton evaded that mandate by setting up a private server in her own house. She violated federal law and regulations by handling top-secret information on an unsecure communications system. When a congressional committee subpoenaed her emails as part of an official investigation, she and her staffers deleted more than 30,000 messages. When she was asked if she had wiped clean her email server before turning information over to the FBI, she laughed, “What? Like with a cloth or something? I don’t know how it works digitally at all.” In reality, Clinton operatives used powerful software to shred the hard drives beyond recognition while other aides used hammers to smash her cell phones to block investigators from reviving her records.
Clinton was the first major-party female presidential candidate in American history and her supporters were encouraged to view any criticism as an attack on all women. Robin Lakoff, a linguistics professor at the University of California, Berkeley, raged in Time magazine: “Emailgate is a bitch hunt, but the target is not Hillary Clinton. It’s us. It’s not about emails; it’s about public communication by a woman in general. Clinton is guilty of SWF (Speaking While Female).” Washington Post media critic columnist Margaret Sullivan bewailed the media’s “ridiculous emphasis put on every development about Hillary Clinton’s email practices.”
Media bias and hypocrisy
Some pro-Clinton journalists went to the ramparts to glorify government secrecy. Vox.com’s Matt Yglesias attacked the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA), declaring that it is “fundamentally not in the public interest to routinely know” the content of emails of high-ranking government officials. He proposed amending FOIA to exempt email almost across the board because “effective government beats transparent government.” Mother Jones editor Kevin Drum followed up with a piece calling for “less transparency” and stressing that “Hillary Clinton is a real object lesson in how FOIA can go wrong when it’s weaponized.” Actually, if the Obama administration had obeyed FOIA and disclosed Clinton’s emails as secretary of state, the Democratic Party might have nominated a different candidate and won the 2016 election.
Other journalists asserted that truth itself can be a liability for democracy. After she resigned as secretary of state, Clinton gave dozens of speeches to Wall Street banks and other interest groups, for which she received $21 million. Clinton refused to disclose the speech texts, but Wikileaks leaked them in early October. In one speech for which she was paid $240,000, Clinton defended political weaseling: “You need both a public and private position on certain issues.” In a New York Times oped, author Jonathan Rauch praised Hillary for her “disarming candor — including candor about lack of candor…. Hypocrisy and two-facedness … are a public good and a political necessity…. In our hearts, we know she’s right.”
Clinton defended political weaseling.
A month before the election, WikiLeaks began daily releases of more than 50,000 hacked emails from Clinton campaign chief John Podesta. Highlights included a 10-page analysis of the conflicts of interest behind “Bill Clinton Inc.” by a top Clinton aide, an unsavory $1 million gift to Bill Clinton from the government of Qatar (who Hillary Clinton derided for financing ISIS in another email), ample “pay to play” kickbacks from aspiring political appointees, machinations on evading government investigations of Hillary’s emails, and advance disclosures of questions for Hillary in upcoming debates from a CNN bigwig.
The media had no qualms about heavily publicizing the tax returns of Donald Trump, which had been illegally provided to the New York Times. (Trump had reneged on promises to disclose the returns.) But as Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting, a liberal media watchdog, noted, “nothing to see here” was the verdict issued by many pundits on WikiLeaks. Zeynep Tufekci, a University of North Carolina professor and a New York Times contributing opinion writer, denounced WikiLeaks and claimed its “true target is the health of our democracy.” Tufekci asserted that “obsessively reporting” about the Podesta disclosures was “not responsible journalism.” CNN host Chris Cuomo even implied that citizens risked prison time if they downloaded the leaked emails. He told viewers that “it’s illegal to possess these stolen documents. It’s different for the media, so everything you’re learning about this, you’re learning from us.” Some Republicans joined the suppression campaign. Sen. Marco Rubio (R-Fla.) declared, “I will not discuss any issue that has become public solely on the basis of WikiLeaks…. I want to warn my fellow Republicans who may want to capitalize politically on these leaks: it is the Democrats. it could be us.” WikiLeaks endangered the bipartisan right to govern in secret. Instead, anyone who revealed internal political documents was presumably engaging in a conspiracy against American democracy. (In 2019, the Trump’s Justice Department charged WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange with violating the Espionage Act — though his actual offense was Lese Majeste.)
Journalists were told they had a sacred duty to slant the news. A Washington Post editorial warned that “Donald Trump is a unique threat to American democracy… The Republican Party has moved the lunatic fringe onto center stage.” Vox editor Emmett Rensin urged readers to take to the streets: “If Trump comes to your town, start a riot. Let’s be clear: It’s never a shame to storm the barricades set up around a fascist.” In October, Washington Post columnist Dana Milbank denounced the “lapdogs of the media.” But the lapdogs were not those journalists and pundits who cheered the Clinton campaign. Instead, the “lap dogs” were any journalist who failed to attack Trump as vehemently as Milbank thought he deserved. Milbank declared that “it is absolutely appropriate to ‘take sides’ in a contest between democracy and its alternative.” Wikileaks revealed that Milbank had earlier contacted the Democratic National Committee for assistance on a Passover-themed piece on the “Ten Plagues of Trump.” Most of the quotes Milbank used to attack Trump were provided by the DNC. Wikileaks disclosed many other messages from journalists kowtowing to the Clinton campaign.
Disdain of voters
Voters were sometimes openly disdained. At a reception, Clinton declared that “half of Trump’s supporters” were part of “the basket of deplorables … racist, sexist, homophobic, xenophobic, Islamophobic,” and mostly “irredeemable.” Clinton assured attendees at the $1,200-a-person fundraiser that they were part of the “other basket” in America. Clinton did not suffer a fatal media backlash, because many pundits shared her opinion. A few days before the election, David Brooks, one of the nation’s most respected commentators, declared on the PBS Newshour, “Basically, less educated or high school-educated whites are going to Trump. It doesn’t matter what the guy does… People are just going with their gene pool and whatever it is. And that is one of the more depressing aspects of this race for me.” CBS News’s Will Rahn observed that the media diagnosed Trump supporters “as racists in the way Dark Age clerics confused medical problems with demonic possession.”
After the election, public-radio icon Garrison Keillor vented in the Washington Post that “raw ego and proud illiteracy have won out… Resentment is no excuse for baldfaced stupidity.” New York Times columnist Roxane Gay wailed, “I thought there were more Americans who believe in progress and equality than there were Americans who were racist, xenophobic, misogynistic and homophobic.” Georgetown University professor Jason Brennan scoffed: “Donald Trump always enjoyed massive support from uneducated, low-information white people… we saw something historic: the dance of the dunces. Never before have the lesser-educated so uniformly supported a candidate.” Washington Post media columnist Margaret Sullivan absolved her profession for any bias or mistakes: “We wanted to believe in a country where decency and civility still mattered, and where someone so crude, spiteful and intemperate could never be elected — because America was better than that.”
Actually, a New Republic analysis shortly after the election pointed out that Clinton lost because she failed to garner a majority of white college-educated voters. Many commentators could not concede that citizens had ample reasons to despise and vote against both major-party candidates.
Post-election laments
After the 2016 election, protestors demanded that Trump be denied the presidency because he failed the newly discovered “progressive rhetoric legitimacy test” that annulled 60 million ballots. In Richmond, Virginia, one protestor painted “Your vote was a hate crime” on a prominent statue. In Portland, Oregon, protestors rioted, looting and smashing storefronts and cars. Activists disclosed the home addresses of Electoral College electors, who were bombarded with death threats warning them to vote for Clinton instead of Trump. More than four million people signed an online petition demanding that the Electoral College effectively overturn the election because Trump was “unfit to serve.”
Almost all the antics that occurred after the 2016 election vanished into a memory hole after the , 2021, Capitol building ruckus after the 2020 election.
Ironically, while the media and many politicians were busy sneering at voters, the FBI and the Clinton campaign carried out one of the most brazen illegal schemes in American political history. In 2023, Special Counsel John Durham released a 316-page report detailing how Clinton and the FBI connived to rig the 2016 election. But that topic will need to wait for a later issue.
James Bovard is a policy advisor to The Future of Freedom Foundation and is the author of the ebook Freedom Frauds: Hard Lessons in American Liberty, published by FFF, his new book, Last Rights: The Death of American Liberty, and nine other books.
Targeting Putin and New Year celebrations… Western war psychosis in desperation mode
Strategic Culture Foundation | January 2, 2026
Earlier this week, in the early hours of December 29, Russia claimed that the NATO proxy regime had launched a large-scale drone attack aiming to assassinate President Vladimir Putin. Western political leaders and news media immediately vilified Russia for “lying” and “fabricating” the allegations as a pretext to derail diplomatic efforts for a peaceful end to the conflict.
A few days later, however, the proof was in to show who the real cynics and psychopaths are.
On New Year’s Eve, as the world was welcoming a New Year, the NATO armed and intelligence-equipped regime deliberately attacked families gathered in the Black Sea coastal village of Khorly in Kherson to hear the midnight chimes. Three drones murdered 24 civilians and injured more than 50 people after a hotel and cafe were hit with incendiary explosives. The atrocity was preceded by a reconnaissance unmanned aerial vehicle. There can be no doubt that this was a deliberate act of mass murder.
Hours later, on New Year’s Day, also in the Kherson region, a family car was hit by a drone, killing a five-year-old boy and seriously wounding his mother and grandparents.
There were no condemnations from Western political leaders. The Western news media hardly reported the atrocities, and the few media outlets that did report used whitewashing headlines such as “Russia says Ukrainian drone strike kills 24 in occupied Ukraine as tensions grow amid peace talks.”
The NeoNazi regime has been deliberately murdering Russian civilians for four years with American and European weapons, intelligence, and complicity. Before the conflict erupted in February 2022, the CIA-installed regime was killing ethnic Russian people in the Donbass.
Ukrainian civilians have also been killed by the Russian military during the conflict. The cardinal difference is that Russian forces do not target civilians.
The mass murder on New Year’s Eve was not random. It is a repeated vile war crime that has been witnessed against multiple Russian communities in Belgorod, Bryansk, Crimea, Donetsk, Lugansk, and elsewhere.
The silence of Western governments and media shows their moral bankruptcy, if not their criminal complicity in enabling a terrorist regime to murder Russian civilians. The Western media highlights when Russian strikes kill civilians while under-reporting or ignoring the Kiev regime’s deliberate murder of Russian civilians.
It is a profane conclusion that murdering Russian people is acceptable to the Western supporters of the Kiev regime. No expense or weaponry is spared in arming the regime. Just like its rampant corruption and Nazi affiliations are ignored, so too are its war crimes.
This regime carries out atrocities against its own people, as in the Bucha massacre in March 2022, for black propaganda against Russia and to justify the NATO proxy war. It is bombing the biggest nuclear power station in Europe at Zaporozhye with American-supplied missiles, and yet the Western media spins the absurd lies that Russia is somehow bombing the power plant that its forces are protecting.
The Nord Stream gas pipeline owned by Russia was blown up by NATO in September 2022, and yet Western governments and media accused Russia of sabotaging its own infrastructure. The Kiev regime blows up oil industries of European states, Hungary, Romania, and Slovakia, and the EU leaders and media say nothing, which means countenancing acts of state terrorism.
The sick, malevolent logic of the U.S.-led NATO war machine is evident. It wanted this war with Russia for decades. The NeoNazi proxy in Ukraine was installed to facilitate the aggression with the insane objective of defeating Russia.
Now that the NATO proxy war and its objective have been all but vanquished, the Western warmongering factions want to start World War III to salvage their reckless, failed gambit in Ukraine. The hundreds of billions of dollars and euros wasted on this criminal war leave Western states exposed to financial catastrophe.
Targeting the head of a nuclear power is the NATO war psychosis in desperation mode. Murdering families celebrating the New Year is depraved beyond words. But it shows how desperate the warmongers have become.
American and European politicians have Russian blood on their hands. Russia should not trust any proffered negotiations as genuine. It is not feasible to talk or reason with Russophobic psychopaths.
U.S. President Donald Trump talks a lot about wanting peace with Russia while blowing up Venezuela, supporting genocide in Gaza, and threatening the annihilation of Iran. His country’s intelligence agencies, dollars, and weapons are murdering Russian families. If the West wants peace in Ukraine, it can do that by immediately ending the weapons and intelligence it is supplying to the NeoNazi terrorist regime. Until then, Russia reserves the right to destroy the NATO war machine.
It is customary to wish readers a Happy New Year. We refrain from such a jolly greeting in solemn respect for those who died this week.
Whistleblowers accuse CPJ of ‘shielding’ Israel to appease donors
The Cradle | December 20, 2025
Current and former staff at the Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ) have accused the organization of deliberately downplaying Israel’s war crimes in Gaza to placate pro-Israel donors, according to a report by Electronic Intifada published on 18 December.
The whistleblowers claim CPJ CEO Jodie Ginsberg personally controls all Gaza-related research, blocking work that would reveal that the Israeli army deliberately targets journalists.
One research piece backed by military experts reportedly concluded Israel knowingly kills journalists, but Ginsberg shelved it.
An employee was reportedly fired after disputing Ginsberg’s refusal to classify journalist killings as targeted murders—a war crime under international law.
Despite an internal memo stating CPJ should call Israel’s actions “genocide,” whistleblowers say this is misleading.
The memo instructs staff to use qualified language like “what human rights groups deem a genocide” to talk about the mass murder of tens of thousands of Palestinians.
A website review found that in only two of 15 Gaza-related items does CPJ use “genocide” without attribution, with the first appearing in October 2025, two years into Israel’s genocidal war.
The CPJ denied the allegations, saying staff were never told to avoid “genocide” and could use any language on personal social media, citing examples of Ginsberg publicly using the term and accusing Israel of war crimes.
The annual CPJ fundraising dinner draws major media donors, including five Rupert Murdoch-owned outlets, which contributed $250,000 total.
Rupert Murdoch is a longtime supporter of Israel who has routinely advanced pro-Israel positions via his platforms.
He previously described Israel as a front-line defender of “western democratic civilization” at the peak of Israel’s ethnic cleansing campaign.
This year’s awards honored journalists from China, Ecuador, Kyrgyzstan, and Tunisia, with no Palestinian nominees.
Ginsberg explained CPJ doesn’t award journalists from the same country consecutively, noting last year’s recipient was Palestinian journalist Shrouq Al Aila.
Whistleblowers called Al Aila a “safe choice” whose background was extensively vetted, and said proposals to honor slain Al Jazeera journalist Anas Al-Sharif were ignored.
Since the genocide began over two years ago, nearly 300 journalists have been killed by Israeli forces.
Reporters Without Borders (RSF) has declared Israel the world’s leading cause of death of journalists for three years in a row. Forty-three percent of the 67 journalists killed globally between December 2024 and December 2025 were killed by Israeli forces in Gaza.
The organization condemned the murders and designated them as targeted killings by state militaries.
Israeli journalist Yuval Abraham recently revealed that military intelligence created a “Legitimization Cell” to justify killing Palestinian journalists by falsely portraying them as Hamas operatives.
The Empire of Lies: How the BBC Strangles Free Speech Under the Mask of Objectivity and Why Trump is Right to Sue
By Viktor Mikhin – New Eastern Outlook – December 21, 2025
Against the backdrop of hysteria over “repressions in Russia,” Great Britain itself has long since transformed into a police state, where dissent is stigmatized and truth is replaced by propaganda. Putin’s response has exposed the double standards of Western media.
The Smokescreen of the “Free Press”
On December 19, 2025, Vladimir Putin gave comprehensive and calm answers in a live broadcast to provocative questions from BBC journalist Stephen Rosenberg. Instead of honestly analyzing his arguments about foreign agents, security, and sovereignty, Western media, and the BBC itself first and foremost, prepared another portion of distortions under headlines like “Putin Denies the Obvious.” This moment is the perfect prism through which to discern the essence of the phenomenon. While the missionaries from Northgold Street teach the whole world about “democracy” and “free journalism,” the British Isles themselves are rapidly sinking into the quagmire of ideological conformity and censorship. The BBC Corporation, once a symbol of respectability, has become the epitome of systemic bias and an industry for manufacturing narratives. It is no coincidence that Donald Trump, whom this media machine has vilified for years, has filed a lawsuit against it—this is a logical act of self-defense against organized lies.
Hypocrisy as Editorial Policy. “Repressions” There and Censorship Here
Putin’s answer on the issue of “foreign agents” was crystal clear: the law is a copy of the American FARA, requiring only transparency of foreign funding, not criminal prosecution for opinion. This thesis reveals a monstrous contrast with the realities of Great Britain itself, where freedom of speech has become a fiction, covered by bureaucratic and ideological terror.
Thought Police in Action: From Tweets to Kitchen Conversations. In Russia, it’s registration for NGOs; in Britain, it’s a criminal charge for an ordinary citizen. The Online Safety Bill is nothing other than an architecture of preemptive censorship. UK police regularly detain people for “offensive” or “alarming” posts on social media. There are known cases of a man being interrogated for a sarcastic tweet about transgender people, and a pensioner for a “racist” comment about migration on Facebook. These are not isolated excesses; this is the system. Where is the freedom of speech that the BBC so fiercely defends in its reports about Russia?
De Facto “Foreign Agents”: Stigmatization Instead of Discussion. The BBC has appropriated for itself the right to define the boundaries of permissible discourse. Any criticism that goes beyond these boundaries, be it doubts about the radical environmental agenda, questions about transhumanism, or analysis of the problems of mass migration, is instantly branded by the corporation as “marginal,” “extremist,” or “propagandistic.” Independent analysts, scientists, and journalists who disagree with the general line are systematically pushed out of the airwaves and public sphere under the convenient pretext of “fighting disinformation.” That is, the BBC itself creates “disinformation,” defines it, and fights it, eliminating competitors. This is a classic monopoly on truth.
Trump’s Lawsuit is an Anatomy of the BBC’s Lies. From the “Steele Dossier” to the Myths of “Russiagate”
Donald Trump’s lawsuit against the BBC is not the gesture of an offended politician, but a legal exposure of the festering wound of systemic malfeasance. Trump accuses the corporation of “deliberate and malicious defamation,” and history provides him with ample evidence.
The “Steele Dossier” — A Fake as a Journalistic Standard. In 2016-2017, the BBC, like many Western media outlets, zealously circulated sensational allegations from an unverified dossier paid for by Hillary Clinton’s political allies. Citing “high-ranking sources,” the BBC built a narrative for months about “Trump’s ties to Moscow,” presenting unconfirmed gossip as facts. Subsequent FBI and US Department of Justice investigations proved the dossier was fabricated, its key “evidence” unsubstantiated. No apologies or serious editorial conclusions ever came from the BBC. The corporation simply moved on to the next topic, leaving a poisoned residue of lies in the minds of millions of viewers.
Salisbury — Verdict Instead of Investigation. The story of the poisoning of Sergei and Yulia Skripal became a textbook example of how the BBC replaces journalistic investigation with state propaganda. From the first minutes, the corporation abandoned the basic principle—presumption of innocence. The airwaves carried not questions of “who and why?” but assertions: “Russia committed an act of war on British soil.” Alternative versions, inconsistencies in the official story (for example, the complete absence of traces of the “Novichok” poison in the places the Skripals allegedly were), expert opinions questioning the British version—all of this was either hushed up or ridiculed in specially designated “disinformation” segments. The BBC brazenly turned an unverified accusation into an indisputable dogma, denying viewers the right to information.
The Myth of Trump’s “Russian Links,” Which Lasted for Years. Throughout Trump’s presidency, the BBC peremptorily supported the obsessive narrative of his “secret collusion” with the Kremlin. This “link” was the central theme of thousands of reports, analytical programs, and articles. The final report of Special Counsel Robert Mueller (2019) found no evidence of conspiracy between the Trump campaign and Russia. For an objective media outlet, this would have been a reason for a deep review of its own editorial policy. For the BBC—merely a reason to change rhetoric: if not “collusion,” then “interference” that Trump “didn’t condemn enough.” The goal was not to inform but to shape the desired, pre-set perception of Trump as illegitimate and hostile.
Censorship in the Name of Security: British Total Control vs. Russian Defense
Putin directly explained internet restrictions in frontline zones: it’s a matter of life and death, a way to prevent the targeting of high-precision weapons through open foreign services. This is a military necessity in conditions of real conflict.
Double Standard as a Principle. And what does peaceful, democratic Great Britain do? Under the same pretext of “national security,” one of the world’s most total surveillance mechanisms over its own citizens has been created here. The Investigatory Powers Act (or “Snoopers’ Charter”) allows intelligence agencies to mass-collect the browsing history, calls, and message metadata of every resident without any court warrant. In partnership with the government, major IT companies and social networks engage in preemptive content censorship, removing viewpoints inconvenient to the authorities under vague labels like “hate propaganda” or “disinformation.” The difference is fundamental: Russia is protecting its physical borders from real military threats in the context of the Special Military Operation. The British state, with the tacit approval and participation of the BBC, actively and undemocratically protects the ideological boundaries of the ruling establishment from dissent, passing it off as “concern for security” and “protection of democracy.”
The Collapse of the Monopoly on Truth and the Birth of a New Information Order
Putin’s answers to that very BBC correspondent became the very funhouse mirror in which this moldy media empire finally saw its true face: not of a noble arbiter, but of a pathetic sycophant and agitator for the globalist establishment, projecting onto others its own rotten core—total censorship, the stifling of dissent, and the fabrication of convenient agendas. Trump’s lawsuit is not the beginning, but a logical final act. It is a shameful verdict for an organization that, with hypocritical, sanctimonious zeal, searched for “tyranny” in far-off lands, blinded by its own arrogance, until it itself turned into the main strangler of free thought at home, on those very blessed islands ruled by arrogant mandarins from Whitehall, detached from reality, and their lackeys at the BBC.
Readers and viewers around the world have long been sick of this hypocritical sham. They are fleeing these dreary, pompous preachers of the “only correct” truth to vibrant alternatives, live streams, and independent voices, bypassing these filtered sewer channels of the old, thoroughly rotten guard.
The world no longer believes in the sacred cow of the “public broadcaster” BBC, whose editorial policy has long been groveling low and basely before the powers that be. All the world’s vileness is committed not by the powers that be, but by the most cowardly dregs, in this case, “the dregs of journalism.” They cannot win in an open fight, and therefore always act with rat-like methods, basely and brazenly distorting obvious facts. Cowards from journalism always rely on baseness and prefer to strike from behind, like rats. This word is the best characterization of the BBC’s current state.
The era when a bunch of pompous dandies from the Thames could arrogantly tell the world what to think has irrevocably sunk into oblivion. And in this lies the best slap in the face to their ossified arrogance and a real breath of freedom for the word in the 21st century.
Victor Mikhin, Writer, Corresponding Member of the Russian Academy of Natural Sciences, Expert on Middle Eastern Countries
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The lobby is milking the Bondi Beach attack to silence critics of Israel’s genocide
By Jonathan Cook | December 15, 2025
I, for one, am struggling to stomach the spew of hypocrisy from pro-Israel groups like the Community Security Trust and its policy director, Dave Rich, in the wake of Sunday’s Bondi Beach attack.
Establishment media, on the other hand, appear to have a bottomless appetite for efforts by Israel apologists to exploit the genuine fear and grief of the Jewish community to advance a political agenda – one designed to silence criticism of Israel over its two-year slaughter and maiming of Palestinian children in Gaza.
Predictably, the supposedly liberal Guardian once again gave Rich a prominent slot in its comment pages, this time to spin the attack in Sydney into a demand for silencing opposition to Israel’s genocide.
Here are extracts from Rich’s piece in italics, followed by my observations. His all-too-obvious double standards and his glaring misdirection ploys should have disqualified this piece from publication. But the British media simply can’t get enough of this kind of bilge.
Rich: “The mobile phone footage of two gunmen calmly taking aim at families enjoying a Hanukah party is utterly chilling. It takes a special kind of dehumanisation, an ideology of pure hatred and self-righteous conviction, to do that.”
If Rich is so troubled by issues of dehumanisation, why has he remained so steadfastly mute about the long and utterly chilling dehumanisation of Palestinians by Israel and by its lobby groups, including his own organisation? Remember, Israeli leaders called the Palestinians “human animals”. It is decades of that kind of dehumanisation that laid the ground for Israel’s genocide. It is precisely because of such dehumanisation that the live-streamed horrors of the past two years made barely any impact on the Israeli public or on opinion among Israel’s supporters.
The truth is it is Rich and his fellow pro-Israel lobbyists who are the ones in the grip of an “ideology of pure hatred” – one that chooses to excuse the mass murder of children when they are Palestinian, blown to pieces and starved for months on end by the very state he identifies with.
Rich: “The whole basis of western liberal democracy, the belief in shared values within a diverse society, is endangered by these attacks.”
No, it’s not the Bondi Beach attack that has endangered “western liberal democracy”. That was irreversibly hollowed out when western leaders chose to actively collude in Israel’s genocide and defy the rulings of the world’s most respected legal institutions, the International Court of Justice and the International Criminal Court. Western liberal democracy was hollowed out when these leaders chose to side with Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu and prioritise his exterminationist agenda over the rule of law.
Rich: “Some people react as if this terrorism is akin to a natural disaster or unforeseen tragedy: blind hatred with no cause or purpose, and therefore no deeper explanation needed. But terrorism does not emerge from a vacuum. It is merely the most violent, lethal expression of a set of attitudes and beliefs that are much more widely held than just by those who wield the gun or the knife.”
How true! Terrorism does not occur in a vacuum. Rather, it is the weapon of the weak, and it feeds off a festering hatred that derives from having one’s community abused and a parallel, suffocating feeling of powerlessness to stop it. That doesn’t justify the Bondi Beach attack, but it does provide us with the “deeper explanation” Rich claims to be searching for.
But even before we read on, we know where he wants to take this.
Rich: “When it comes to antisemitic terror, the ideas that some take as justification for murder are popularised and normalised through the language of much of the anti-Israel movement that has marched up and down our city streets and through our university campuses these past two years.”
And sure enough, there it is. The “antisemites”, according to Rich and the rest of the pro-Israel lobby, are British families marching though their towns and cities to protest a genocide in which the British govermment is actively colluding. They are the criminals, not Israel’s genocide machine.
The “antisemites”, Rich wants you to believe, are those incensed by witnessing Israel slaughter children day after day for more than two years; those incensed at seeing Israel bomb the hospitals needed to treat those children; those incensed at hearing Israel and its supporters deny what we have all seen happening with our own eyes; and those incensed that our governments have not only failed to stop this horror show but have actively demonised their own populations for highlighting their complicity in these crimes.
Rich: “After rapper Bobby Vylan, one half of the group Bob Vylan, chanted “Death, death to the IDF” during a set at the Glastonbury festival in June, it became the rallying cry of anti-Israel protesters everywhere. It got Bob Vylan invited to the Irish parliament and Bobby Vylan on to Louis Theroux’s podcast. Far from a call for death putting the rapper beyond the pale, it made him a celebrity.”
It takes extraordinary chutzpah to exploit the blood spilled in Sydney by special pleading for an Israeli army that is recognised by all major human rights groups, the United Nations, the International Association of Genocide Scholars, and the International Criminal Court to have been routinely committing crimes against humanity in Gaza over the past two years.
If Dave Rich and the Community Security Trust are really so concerned about the dangers faced by Jews because of the many documented, and unpunished, crimes committed by the Israeli army, then maybe he should dedicate a little space to distancing himself and his organisation from that military rather than denying its criminality at every opportunity.
Rich: “Is there a connection between this embrace of a call for death in the name of Palestinian rights, and people inflicting actual death apparently in the name of the same cause? As soon as you ask the question, the answer seems obvious.”
Both sides can play this game. Is there a connection between the embrace of calls for genocide in the name of Jewish supremacy, and Israeli soldiers inflicting actual death in the name of that cause? Remember Israel’s head of the military said he would deny the people of Gaza food, water and fuel, supposedly in “self-defence”, and that’s exactly what Israel did. Remember Netanyahu himself described the people of Gaza as “Amalek”, a people condemned to genocide by God, and genocide is exactly what Israel did.
Indeed, as soon as you ask the question, the answer seems obvious. But in the case of Gaza, the death toll is many thousands of times greater than anything inflicted by two twisted gunmen in Sydney.
Rich: “The devastation in Gaza is real and lots of people involved in pro-Palestinian activism do not support antisemitic violence against Jews, whether in Britain or Australia. But like it or not, it seems this movement has generated and sustained a political culture in which violence is both conceivable and enacted.”
Even were this true, it cannot compare to the political culture generated by Rich and his pro-Israel lobbyists. That political culture has not only made violence against Palestinians conceivable but a daily reality for them decade after decade. It is years of dedicated work by the Israel lobby that has ensured the mass murder of Palestinians is viewed by governments, the media and parts of the Jewish community as entirely legitimate.
Rich: “This is now a global emergency of antisemitism, and it is the consequence of two years of turning a blind eye, taking the easy path and ignoring the warnings. Make no mistake: alongside the grief and the defiance, Jews are angry. And they have every right to be.”
No, that is not the global emergency. The real emergency is a rampant anti-Palestinian racism that has utterly normalised genocide and been given institutional support across the West. It is anti-Palestinian racism, not “antisemitism”, that is the consequence of “two years of turning a blind eye, taking the easy path and ignoring the warnings”. Make no mistake: alongside the grief and the defiance, people with a conscience are angry at the two-year genocide endorsed by our governments. And they have every right to be.
Iran Army says Australia’s designation of IRGC serves US-Israeli interests
Press TV – November 30, 2025
The General Staff of Iran’s Armed Forces has strongly condemned Australia’s “unwise decision” to label the Islamic Revolution Guards Corps (IRGC) as a “state sponsor of terrorism.”
In a statement on Sunday, the Armed Forces said the unwise decision by the “dependent” Australian government against the IRGC is in line with the sinister goals of the arrogant system, led by the terrorist United States.
It added that the move aims to serve the terrorist Israeli regime’s interests in the continuation of oppression and crimes and has no meaning other than “baseless and spiteful” claims under the pressure of the US and Israel.
According to the statement, the move demonstrates a lack of proper understanding of international and global realities.
The Army, however, emphasized that such moves will strengthen the will of the heroic Iranian nation to boost its defense prowess and will result in nothing but greater support of Iranians and the free nations across the world for the Armed Forces, especially the powerful and anti-terrorism IRGC.
The Australian government listed the IRGC as a “state sponsor of terrorism” on Thursday over baseless accusations that the elite force had orchestrated attacks against Australia’s Jewish community.
In a statement released on Thursday, the Iranian Foreign Ministry strongly condemned the decision.
“The political move by the Australian government is a dangerous and criminal precedent, designed under the influence of the Zionist regime to divert public attention from the genocide in Gaza,” the ministry said.
4 Shocking Ties Between Rubio, Lobbyists, and Hernández Narcotics Indictment
teleSUR | November 29, 2025
WASHINGTON — The recent announcement by former U.S. President Donald Trump that he will grant a “full and complete pardon” to Juan Orlando Hernández, the former Honduran president currently serving a U.S. federal sentence for drug trafficking, has reignited scrutiny over a long-documented web of political and financial connections linking Hernández, Republican lobbying powerhouse BGR Group, and U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio.
Far from an isolated act of clemency, Trump’s pledge appears deeply entangled with a system of influence-peddling that has shaped U.S. policy toward Central America for years. At the center stands Rubio—a figure who, as a Florida senator, once publicly praised Hernández for “taking on drug traffickers,” even as evidence mounted that the Honduran leader was personally profiting from the very cartels he claimed to fight.
Now, with Rubio overseeing U.S. diplomacy from the State Department, critics warn that the Rubio Hernández lobbying scandal reveals how foreign actors can exploit the U.S. lobbying system to buy legitimacy, evade justice, and ultimately secure political favors—including presidential pardons.
The BGR Group Connection: How Hernández Bought Influence in Washington
In early 2020, as his legal situation began to collapse—following the life sentence of his brother, Tony Hernández, for trafficking tons of cocaine into the U.S.—Juan Orlando Hernández signed a $660,000 contract with BGR Group, a Washington-based lobbying firm founded by former Republican Governor Haley Barbour.
The goal was clear: rehabilitate Hernández’s image in the U.S. capital as a “trusted ally” and “anti-narcotics partner,” despite mounting evidence that he had accepted millions in bribes from cartels to fund his presidential campaigns.
According to a detailed investigation by VICE News, BGR Group went to work immediately:
- It contacted 11 congressional staffers, three of whom had previously worked directly for Marco Rubio.
- It distributed press releases portraying Hernández as a bulwark against organized crime.
- It arranged meetings with U.S. officials to reinforce the narrative of Honduras as a cooperative security partner.
All this occurred while U.S. prosecutors were building their case against Hernández himself—culminating in his 2024 conviction for conspiring to import over 500 tons of cocaine into the United States.
Critically, BGR Group was not just any firm—it was a major Republican donor network with deep ties to Rubio’s political career. Records show the firm hosted fundraising events for Rubio’s 2010 and 2016 Senate campaigns, as well as his short-lived 2016 presidential bid.
This means that the same lobbying apparatus paid by a convicted narco-president helped finance the rise of the man now shaping U.S. policy toward Latin America.
Explore FEC records on BGR’s political contributions to Rubio (Federal Election Commission)
Trump’s Pardon as Political Payback—Not Justice
Trump’s announcement—made via Truth Social on Friday—comes amid his open support for Nasry “Tito” Asfura, Hernández’s political protégé and the National Party’s 2025 presidential candidate in Honduras. Trump has explicitly tied future U.S. aid to Asfura’s victory, signaling that Washington’s backing is conditional on political alignment.
In this context, the pardon of Hernández appears less like mercy and more like a strategic signal: loyalty to U.S. Republican interests—even when demonstrated through illicit means—will be rewarded.
Hernández, after all, was once Washington’s favorite Central American strongman. He allowed the U.S. to maintain military bases in Honduras, cracked down on migrant caravans, and supported U.S. regional agendas—all while allegedly running a state-sponsored drug enterprise.
Now, with Rubio at the State Department and Trump eyeing a 2028 comeback, the Rubio Hernández lobbying scandal underscores a troubling reality: foreign leaders can launder their reputations through U.S. lobbying firms, gain access to top policymakers, and ultimately escape accountability—even after federal conviction.
As one Latin American diplomat put it: “This isn’t diplomacy. It’s transactional impunity.”
Geopolitical Context: Undermining Rule of Law in the Americas
The fallout from the Rubio Hernández lobbying scandal extends far beyond bilateral relations. It strikes at the credibility of the entire U.S. “war on drugs” and its claims of promoting democracy and rule of law in Latin America.
If a president convicted of trafficking cocaine can secure a presidential pardon through backroom lobbying and partisan loyalty, what message does that send to reformers in Guatemala, El Salvador, or Colombia?
Moreover, it deepens regional distrust of U.S. intentions. For years, progressive governments in the region have argued that Washington prioritizes compliance over justice—backing authoritarian but cooperative leaders while condemning leftist governments for lesser offenses. The Hernández case validates that critique.
Cuba, Nicaragua, and Venezuela have long denounced this “selective morality” in U.S. foreign policy. Now, even centrist allies are questioning whether the U.S. system can be gamed by those with enough money and the right lobbyists.
In a hemisphere increasingly seeking multipolar partnerships, such scandals fuel the narrative that U.S. democracy is for sale—and that sovereignty is secondary to political convenience.
The biggest fish caught in China’s “debt trap”
The US is the “victim” as the largest recipient of Chinese official credits and loans
By Hua Bin | November 27, 2025
An Indian by the name of Brahma Chellaney, employed by Center of Policy Research based in New Delhi and funded by US State Department, coined the term “debt trap” to demonize Chinese loans for the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) across developing countries.
It’s clear, just by the origin of the term, that it was a smear job by a dimwit sour grape. His argument has since been roundly debunked by researchers and analysts from John Hopkins, Harvard, and the Chatham House. None of them can be described as trolls for China.
For example, research by the New York-based Rhodium Group and John Hopkins University has shown no instance of China seizing strategic assets due to debt defaults, a core claim by Chellaney and the “debt trap” advocates.
Studies done by London-based Chatham House (The Royal Institute of International Affairs), a very anti-China outfit by its track record, contrast China’s debt management with that of Western bondholders and institutions.
Their analyses demonstrate China has shown far greater willingness to provide debt rescheduling and relief, while Western lenders such as the World Bank and IMF are quick to resort to legal measures.
Western loans also often come with conditionalities that negatively affect a country’s economic productivity – such as deregulation and privatization.
Ironically, while India sounds the alarm on “debt trap”, the country itself is the largest recipient of loans from the Asia Infrastructure Investment Bank (AIIB), a financial institution funded primarily by China.
Of course, the Indians are presumably so “smart” that they are immune to any “debt trap”. Their lenders and creditors are the ones who need to worry about being “trapped”.
Very predictably, such a discredited lie is not too low for most Western governments to adopt as the holy script since it fits their geopolitical narrative.
And the term has become a regular in the official lexicon of western governments and media.
A recent study on Chinese official lending done by the College of William and Mary (W&M) in Virginia, the second oldest university in the US, is very telling and goes to show the disparity of Western claims and empirical evidence on the ground.
The AidData research lab at W&M found that China is the largest creditor nation in the world and its global lending since the turn of the century has been “vastly” larger than previously understood, with loans and grants increasingly going to developed countries.
The US is by far the largest recipient – nearly US$202 billion of the US$2.2 trillion disbursed by China’s “official sector” between 2000 and 2023 went to projects in the US.
Note the data excludes China’s purchase of US Treasury bonds.
“Our data demonstrate that the US – a high-income country – is the single largest recipient of official sector credit from China. This finding is both unexpected and counterintuitive,” wrote researchers of the study released earlier this month.
“This is an extraordinary discovery, given that the US has spent the better part of the last decade warning other countries of the dangers of accumulating significant debt exposure to China, and accusing China of practicing “debt trap” diplomacy,” said Brad Parks, AidData’s executive director.
The study, compiled over 36 months using more than 246,000 sources, covered a wide range of Chinese official lenders, including state policy banks, state-owned commercial banks, state-owned companies, state-owned funds, and the central bank.
Some of the Chinese lending in the US involved the construction of “critical infrastructure”, helping to bankroll the construction of major liquefied natural gas pipelines in Rio Grande, Port Arthur and Freeport, the Dakota Access oil pipeline, an electric power transmission line feeding New York City, data centres in Virginia, and airport terminals in New York and California, among other projects.
Official Chinese lenders also financed the merger and acquisition of hi-tech companies in the US and provided liquidity support – via working capital and revolving credit facilities – to a wide array of Fortune 500 companies.
The research lab described most Chinese loans to the US “are guided by the pursuit of profit rather than the pursuit of geopolitical or geoeconomic advantage”.
While China is well known for lending to Global South countries via BRI, the report found that 10 of the 20 largest destinations between 2000 and 2023 were high-income countries, including the UK, Singapore, Germany and Switzerland.
Russia was the second largest recipient after the US, with a cumulative US$171.78 billion in loans and grants over the period, followed by Australia with a total of US$130 billion.
According to AidData, China’s total overseas lending portfolio is two to four times larger than previously published estimates, making China the world’s biggest official creditor by a large margin.
Its lending portfolio has evolved significantly over time – in 2000, 88% of China’s lending went to low-income countries; by 2023, financing going to developed countries rose to 76%.
China had approved loans and grants for more than 30,000 “projects and activities” worldwide between 2000 and 2023. A total of 9,764 of those projects and activities were in high-income countries.
The AidData report claims China offers debt, equity and grants in “flexible, innovative and complementary ways to advance its geostrategic and commercial interests”.
China is increasingly seen as an “international creditor of first – and last – resort”, according to the report summary.
The disconnect between the Western propaganda and the reality on the ground is revealing – the hypocrisy of calling Chinese lending “debt trap” while engaging in a feeding frenzy in a trough of Chinese money.
Western governments and media’s twisted narratives about China live on a hotbed of cynicism and stupidity.
For such narratives to be believed, one of two things must be true – either the readers are so cynical they are willing to swallow patently false narratives to feed their bigotry, or the readers are so dumb that they don’t possess basic faculty for critical thinking.
This reminds one of other similarly ludicrous talking points. For example, Western pundits regularly claim China’s domestic economy precarious because of persistent “deflation”.
While it’s true that prices have been stable or falling slightly in the last 2 – 3 years, how is it a bad thing for consumers?
Why should consumers welcome “rising prices” – as the wide-spread inflation in much of the West?
Shouldn’t prices of goods fall when manufacturing scale and efficiency improve and companies compete for consumers in an open marketplace?
Why are high corporate profit margins as a result of higher prices a good thing for consumers?
In China, average real household income growth in 2024 was 5.4%, 0.2% higher than the nominal growth rate 5.2% due to lower prices. Isn’t this better than negative real income growth in most Western countries?
In China, the effective interest rate for 30-year mortgage is 3.1% on average, and 2.65% for first time buyers. Isn’t this better than paying 6 to 9% as in other countries?
You have to be a real retard or cynically shut down any critical thinking to believe in the garbage from the lying media.
And it’s more than the media. A prime source of such garbage comes from “elected leaders”.
Ted Cruz, the 3-time US Senator from Texas, wrote in a recent op-ed that Chinese AI dominance would mean “state-run surveillance and coercion”, while an American win would guarantee a technology anchored by “liberty, human dignity, and the rule of law”.
If this self-serving propaganda comes from someone with a modicum of credibility, it might carry some weight. But coming from Ted Cruz, one of the most despised men in his home country the US, the irony is overwhelming.
This is Ted Cruz talking. The same Ted Cruz, christened “lyin’ Ted” by the Donald, who became Trump’s most loyal lapdog three months after Trump insulted his wife’s looks (whom Cruz claimed as “the love of my life”) and hinted his father helped kill JFK.
This is the same Ted Cruz who was voted as “the most unlikeable person” by former classmates (including his college roommate) and fellow Republican colleagues.
The same Ted Cruz who fled to a Ritz in Cancun when his voters were frozen to death during the Texas freeze in ’21.
John McCain, late warmonger par excellence and Cruz’s fellow senator, was quoted saying: “if you killed Ted Cruz on the floor of the senate, and the trial is in the senate, nobody would convict you”.
Even Lindsey Graham, who is a worthy contestant as the most despicable human with Cruz, said “if you shot Ted Cruz, it would be a hung jury”.
For this Ted Cruz, who failed to defend the honor of his own wife and father, to take the moral highroad and defend “human dignity” is the equivalent of a two-peso prostitute to lecture on chastity and virtue.
So, the question is – are those vile creatures like Cruz and Graham going to save the US from China’s “debt trap”?
The Beat of the War Drums
By Craig Murray | November 20, 2025
In fascist lockstep, the entire British media, broadcast and print, corporate and state, is leading with a Ministry of Defence press release about a “Russian spy ship” inside “British waters”.
No British media appears to have been able to speak to anybody who knows the first thing about the Law of the Sea.
Here are the facts:
The Exclusive Economic Zone extends 200 miles from the coastal baselines. The Continental Shelf can extend still further, as a fact of geology, not an imposed maximum.
On the Continental Shelf the coastal state is entitled to the mineral resources. In the Exclusive Economic Zone the coastal state is entitled to the fisheries and mineral resources.
For purposes of navigation, both the Continental Shelf and Exclusive Economic Zone are part of the High Seas. There is freedom of navigation on the High Seas. Foreign ships, including foreign military ships, may come and go as they please. Nor is there any ban on “spying” – exactly as there is no restriction on spying from satellites.
The Territorial Waters of a state extend out to just twelve miles. These are subject to the internal legislation of the coastal state. There is freedom for foreign vessels, including military vessels, to pass through them but only subject to the rule of “innocent passage” – which specifically rules out spying and reconnaissance. In the territorial sea, vessels have to be genuinely just passing through on their way somewhere, otherwise they may need coastal state permission for their activity.
The Exclusive Economic Zone is subject to the rules of the coastal state only in relation to the reserved economic activities to which the state is entitled. Scientific research is specifically free for all states within the Exclusive Economic Zone.
The Russian ship Yantar has been just outside the UK territorial waters. It is therefore under “freedom of navigation” and not under “innocent passage”. It is free to do scientific research.
I don’t doubt it is really gathering intelligence on military, energy and communications facilities. That is what states do. The UK does it to Russia all the time, on the Black Sea, the Barents Sea, the Baltic, and elsewhere. Not to mention 24/7 satellite surveillance.
It is perfectly legal for the Yantar to do this. Personally I wish the entire world would stop such activity, but to blame the Russians given the massive levels of surveillance and encirclement they suffer from NATO assets is simply ludicrous.
Not to mention the ultimate hypocrisy that the UK has been flying intelligence missions over Gaza every single day and feeding targeting information to aid the Gaza genocide.
The UK’s allies blew up Russia’s Nord Stream pipeline. The UK is now accusing the Yantar precisely of scouting this same kind of attack – which we endorsed when the pipeline was Russian.
For example HMS Sutherland, accompanied by Royal Fleet Auxiliary Tidespring, and two other NATO warships penetrated 160 miles into Russia’s Exclusive Economic Zone and lingered 40 miles from Russia’s Severomorsk naval base. There was no pretence they were doing anything other than gathering intelligence and sounding out defences.
In armed forces media the UK boasted it was an assertion of freedom of navigation. Yet we harass the Russian vessel equally on the High Seas for exercising its freedom of navigation.
That was also perfectly legal. The idea that the same activity is worthy when we do it, but a pretext for war if the Russians do it, is so childish as to be beyond ridicule. But there is not one single mainstream journalist willing to call it out.
As this photo of HMS Somerset illegally threatening the Yantar on the High Seas shows, forcing it into dangerous moves, the aggression is not from the Russians. That British jets illegally buzzing the Yantar have been met with lasers designed to disrupt attacks. That is not the Russian aggression John Healy claims. The nonsense about dazzling pilots’ eyes is sheer invention.
Unless the plane is extremely, extremely low or a very long way away it is a physical impossibility to shine a laser into a pilot’s eyes in a modern warplane, from below in a ship. The pilot won’t be looking at the ship out of the window, but will be looking at his screens and the image from the cameras under the plane. These might be disrupted by the lasers – and a perfectly valid and sensible defensive measure that is too.
This is the Eurofighter Typhoon.
Imagine it in the skies way above you and look at its body, particularly the front end – how would you get line of sight on the pilot? You couldn’t. Lasers only go in straight lines.
Most sinister of all is the universal state control of media that gets every single mainstream outlet booming out the propaganda narrative, all entirely without question.
This war talk is of course the normal refuge of extremely unpopular governments. But it is part of a wider tightening of the grip of the military-industrial complex on the state. Starmer is committed to increasing military expenditure by tens of billions of pounds a year, while imposing austerity on the rest of the economy. In Scotland, we are told that the closure of major industrial sites like Grangemouth and Mossmorran will be compensated by opening new weapons factories.
Beating ploughshares into swords.
The rise of domestic racism and authoritarianism is accompanied by the increase in militarism and the desire to portray Russia and China as enemy states with whom we are already in a state of proto-war. The state has a mainstream media which is showing itself willing to pump out even the most thin propaganda to this end with no interrogation whatsoever.
Western democracy has already died. Not everybody has yet noticed.
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How the Strategy of Fighting to the Last Ukrainian Was Sold to the Public as Morally Righteous
By Professor Glenn Diesen | November 26, 2024
For almost three years, NATO countries have boycotted diplomatic contacts with Russia, even as hundreds of thousands of men have died on the battlefield. The decision by diplomats to reject diplomacy is morally repugnant as diplomacy could have reduced the excess of violence, prevented escalation, and even resulted in a path to peace. However, the political-media elites skilfully sold the rejection of diplomacy to the public as evidence of their moral righteousness.
This article will first outline how NATO planned for a long war to exhaust Russia and knock it out from the ranks of great powers. Second, this article will demonstrate how the political-media elites communicated that diplomacy is treasonous and war is virtuous. … continue
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