Progressive Hypocrite « Aletho News

‘Bidenism’ domestically: no free press, no lawyer, one-party state?

By Ramin Mazaheri | Press TV | November 15, 2020

For months the United States’ corporate-dominated media has terrified everyone with promises of right-wing militias taking to the streets, but here’s the thing: the pressures currently being put on 70 million Trump supporters is exponentially raising the possibility of that actually occurring, not reducing it.

It is ghastly illuminating to see just how quickly – and with such disregard for modern human rights – both the elite and the highly partisan citizens of the United States are attacking those who refuse to fall at the feet of Joe Biden, and even before all the votes are counted in a very narrow and highly-disputed election.

It is not an exaggeration, as I will list them below, but the tactics being used to push Biden into office are akin to wartime, yet the US is most emphatically not at war – all this derangement is over merely trying to vote as equals. I am not reporting from 1917 USSR, or 1949 China, or 1959 Cuba, or 1979 Iran – there are no foreign armed forces meddling in a revolution/civil war.

“Bidenism” is most emphatically not a revolutionary force. It is openly and proudly the exact opposite: a return to the “normalcy” embodied in the 2015 status quo. Nor is the US at civil war, but it seems some never-trumpets are actually hell-bent on starting one rather than do what every nation does: rely on a calm judicial review when there is a contested and very narrow vote. There is simply no other way out for the US than to follow normal democratic procedures, even if their electoral process is routinely called the worst among the Western core democracies by Harvard think-tanks.

(The US goes one step too far, as usual – other nations at least wait until the votes are actually mostly counted until a candidate declares victory, unlike Donald Trump and Joe Biden.)

If this does turn out to be the “Biden presidential(-elect) era” the world can easily grasp what a terrible, very Trumpian start it is. Americans, I think, cannot.

It’s just very unclear what Americans in 2020 truly believe in anymore?

We know that many American elite don’t truly believe in free press or free speech:

Part 1 of this article, “CNN’s Jake Tapper: The foreman/overseer keeping all journalists in line” discussed how one of the nation’s top news anchors threatened lesser-privileged journalists with blacklisting if they don’t side with Biden immediately. His intimidation went uncommented upon/tacitly condoned by his top colleagues, when his pathetic careerism amid social instability should cost him at least some of his privileges.

Censorship is one way to prevent dissenting journalism, but informal censorship is another: The US doesn’t need formal government censors when their own journalists enforce such obvious suppression informally.

The goal of censorship is conformity. The US media which is corporate dominated – from the (fake) left New York Times to right-wing Fox News – is producing coverage which seemingly exclusively conforms to the false idea that it’s good journalism to exclude the massive number of Americans who feel the vote was not “fair and free”.

Since this troubled election began that number includes a stunning 70% of Republicans, per recent polls, but also independents and leftists. Since the election I interviewed both the Party for Socialism & Liberation and the Socialist Alternative Party (you have never heard of them because of the duopoly which strangles American elections) and both of them said the same thing: this is a terribly antiquated system in America, but in any democracy you count all the votes and litigate any contentious problems.

We know that many Americans don’t believe in the right to an attorney:

The anti-Trump and totally mainstream PAC/think tank The Republican Project has been lauded from the (fake) left to the far-right Washington Post for successfully harassing Trump’s Pennsylvania election lawyers into abandoning their client. The tactics used were not rhetorical and moral but mere intimidation, harassment and doxxing (releasing private information about people into public).

Trump is appalling, but does he not even deserve a lawyer?

Do people who associate with Trump, such as his lawyers, deserve such treatment? How far does this go – that’s the question those engaged in a witch-hunt are too fanatical to ask themselves.

Trump’s legal grievance is obviously supported by too large a democratic minority to ignore without causing lasting damage to the integrity of the American system.

By denying the right to an attorney these rabid anti-Trumpers do not technically betray the letter of their 1776 Revolution, that anti-imperialist event, but they certainly do seem to betray the spirit. It seems to violate the spirit if not the letter of the 6th amendment (ratified in 1791), which guarantees a lawyer in all criminal prosecutions, as well as the Due Process and Equal Protection clauses of the 14th amendment (ratified in 1868).

Congratulations to rabid anti-Trumpers for being so very progressive that they have made it to just past the slavery era?

1868 is a good place mark for the mentality of US Democrats, who remain obsessed with race and totally untouched by any of the anti-imperialist and class-based analyses which began to prevail worldwide since 1917.

We know that some American lawmakers don’t believe in open elections:

Earlier this month I reported on the blacklist of Iranian media by the Bernie Sanders-affiliated Democratic Socialists of America, so we shouldn’t have expected much from this fake-leftist faction openly committed to working within the Democratic Party.

But many Americans were shocked that DSA’s most powerful member, Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, actually doubled down when a tweet of hers suggested that lists should be compiled of pro-Trumpers who have committed no crime other than supporting not her party.

When top elected officials vaguely threaten citizens with “the idea of being responsible for their behavior over last four years” and their behaviour is just working for a democratically-elected candidate, what else is this but massively undemocratic intimidation? That would make free elections in the future impossible.

AOC is seemingly advocating for a one-party state, without knowing it, perhaps, but incompetence is no excuse. It’s certainly another sign of the widespread hysteria of rabid anti-Trumpers.

Directly after AOC’s call sprang up the “Trump Accountability Project”, headed by former Democratic National Committee press secretary Hari Sevugan, which is seemingly looking to blacklist all those that worked for the (possibly) outgoing administration. Would Mr. Sevugan approve of a “Biden Accountability Project” in 2024 for Biden’s staff? Or is that a superfluous question because Democrats are preordained to rule in an unbroken, 1,000-year dynasty?

Why would anybody of merit want to go into public service anymore if they are just going to get blacklisted for doing so?

All the above: This is all wartime-era stuff.

And Chicago, where I am currently based, has been boarded up like it was wartime since the election. (And in August/September. And in May/June.)

It’s as if America can’t help but inexorably draw itself to conflict, because this is all totally self-imposed. This is not the 1960s – there is no peace movement here anymore.

America is acting like what it is: half-full of rabid imperialists

Of course, “neo-imperialism” means colonising your own nation for an international 1%, as the European Union – that supremely US-guided project; that project which is more American than even America – proves.

Of course America is in a state of xenophobia (hostility or fear towards different cultures or strangers) and witch-hunting: this is exactly what the Democratic Party has normalised via their failed Russophobia campaign since 2016.

Did they think they could just turn that off?

Many current Biden supporters failed to stand up against this phony campaign designed to deflect from the Democrats 2016 election failures (2020 saw an even bigger “Blue Wave” failure, but isn’t this anti-Trump supporter hysteria deflecting attention from that for now?), and the most vociferous of them are now aiming their pitchforks at the people who dared to vote differently. The problem is that there are so very many of such persons.

We should add that for four years on US social media this hate mongering has to be multiplied by millions, maybe even billions of time-wasting, venomous posts and spiteful “likes” about veritable political nonsense. It’s practically a justification for state-sponsored censorship, because what kind of society can be healthy towards their neighbors, much less foreigners, when there have these been daily witch-hunts in the phony online world?!

So these lists can go on and on, but our tolerance of such intimidation should not.

(And, yes, before Russophobia there was Islamophobia, and before that it was socialism-phobia, Blackphobia, Indianphobia, etc.)

What’s going on in America is that the most Trump-hating Democrats are acting exactly like what they are: not fascists, as is so often alleged of the other side in Western discourse, but imperialists, which is so rarely discussed in Western discourse.

Like Jake Tapper, they are not just careerists who aspire to outdo everyone in extremism in order to rule from atop the pyramid, they also want to believe they also have the moral high ground despite that. It is arrogance combined with a lust for power and a hysterical, unreasoning rage which comes from we know not where?

Half of the US is so hysterical about being doubted that they can’t recognise themselves in the mirror, but many of those they have colonised, blockaded, sanctioned, brutalised and impoverished sure can.

It’s absolutely appalling and the solution is not simply, “Say that Biden is the president.”

Any nation which has a culture willing to go to such lengths to get others to accept their view – rather than relying on reasoned, secure reflection and some sort of litigation or vetting process – is deeply messed up.

But, as the US proved with their murderous meddling in Iran’s 2009 election: many in the US don’t just not care about anyone’s else’s rules, judges or systems of conflict resolution – the 2020 election proves that many Americans don’t even care about their own.

They are the law-giver and the life-taker and the president-maker, because they say so. Better side with “they”, or else.

November 15, 2020 Posted by aletho | Civil Liberties, Militarism, Progressive Hypocrite, Russophobia | European Union, Human rights, United States | 1 Comment

The Dystopic Great Reset and the Fight Back: Population Reduction and Hope for the Children of Men

By Joaquin Flores | Strategic Culture Foundation | November 11, 2020

The Great Reset, the 4^th Industrial Revolution, the 4^th Turning, the Great Awakening, and Artificial Intelligence. These are the real themes that are shaping the socio-political, cultural, and ideological landscape of our lives in 2020.

The push for lockdown and quarantine towards a Great Reset is increasingly understood by critics as program of mass enslavement and collective punishment, population reduction, presented within the trappings progressive talking points. In our last piece on the Great Reset, ‘Whose Great Reset? The Fight for Our Future – Technocracy vs. the Republic’, we confronted the Orwellian nature of the term itself, showing that the ostensibly technocratic new proposal was being made in a way that appears to short-cut the decision making processes of sovereign states as well as democratic processes within republics.

In the eternal words of the Irish author, Oscar Wilde, ‘Life imitates art far more than art imitates life’.

“That we live in a time where the plans of the elite are more openly and more brazenly spelled out, in fiction, in public mythology, in culture, and are manufactured in a way entirely out of the hands of the vast majority of people whose lives will be forever changed, likely for the worse, is hands-down the real catastrophe of our time.”

There is a strange, if little known fact about the lived lives of prisoners. Now that humanity faces the real daunting probability of a lockdown regime on the flimsy pretext of a virus with a 99.9% survival rate, we need to understand something about prisoners and the Great Awakening. The Great Awakening is the product of how actually imprisoned people respond to imprisonment. Just as a person deprived of vision develops an outstanding sense of smell and hearing, a person deprived of physical freedom develops a profound and reified spiritual or supernatural freedom, which is the awakening. In a strange twist of fate, the more that people are locked down, the more they awaken.

We are caught between two seeming contradictions which in fact reconcile each other. On the one hand we understand that everything happens for a reason and that justice always prevails in the end, and on the other hand we know that the possible destiny that we can have only comes at the cost of tremendous struggle, self-discipline, moral fortitude, and sacrifice. This much is the mindset of the awakened, of the political soldier, in the course of the fight against the Great Awakening and within the age of the 4^th Turning.

Censoring Facts, Reifying Fiction

Last month, the father of UK PM Boris Johnson, Stanley Johnson, was caught at a second time in public, not wearing a mask. Was he unaware that there is a highly contagious pandemic, one which affects his age group in particular? Does he not know what is going on in the UK and around the world?

Or does he know something that the rest of us do not? The folly that it may be, it came to be learned that it was Stanley Johnson who wrote the dystopian fiction novel, The Virus, one that describes much of what we are living through today. He is also the author of World Population and the United Nations: Challenge and Response, a non-fiction primer on the subject described in its title. In The Virus,

In both the narrative arc of the novel, and in his own introduction, Stanley Johnson lays out the necessity of a virus in the eyes of an insidious elite to curb population growth. This coincidence with the actual Agenda 21/2030 of the UN on population control, and the commitment of vaccine advocate and WHO beneficiary Bill Gates to decrease world population, is absolutely disconcerting and raises questions about further coincidences that have since arisen. This of course includes the very position that Boris Johnson holds today in managing the real-life version of the virus in Britain today.

But is this a mere matter of coincidence, or not? That question has become the subject of a vigorous debate, with one side of the debate arguing that it is not a coincidence being tremendously censored by social media and effectively barred from giving their side, and the other side being the only voice one hears and sees across social and legacy media.

The fact of this censorship over this question alone appears to lend credence to those being censored, as is often the unintended consequence of censorship, and perhaps the last hope of man.

This is an astonishing example of life imitating art, and now with an increasing public awareness on the relationship between vaccines and infertility, we arrive at the predicate to the film ‘Children of Men’.

Children of Men depicts a world in global chaos, war, strife, open street battles between members of quasi-governmental forces and various radical and religious cults, a jihadist military push through the streets of Paris, a paramilitary junta, the effects of mass migration, open air prisons, and worse. This has taken hold of most of Europe and presumably the world. This breakdown seems to have been the product of a global pandemic of infertility of an unknown origin. A film from 2008, anyone seeing the film today would instantly recognize the scenes as approximating real-life footage seen on the news in the world of 2020.

The global infertility crisis creates a pervasive sense of insecurity, the impossibility of a stock market, and a conscious sense of impending doom and nihilist response on the part of elites.

Taken together with Johnson’s ‘The Virus’, we can make a rather educated guess how such an outcome would manifest in a reality where life is imitating art: the virus or the vaccine created to cure the virus, in fact lends towards infertility.

It isn’t difficult to make such a guess, for the reason that, day by day, we see this dystopia becoming our everyday reality. It has become a matter of fact much more than of fiction.

This compels us to approach, soberly, a reassessment of the concept of progress and where it leads

The themes of a virus used as a predicate for both population control and a total social transformation, as we wrote about in ‘Whose Great Reset’, is one which mirrors the effects of war: both in terms of a mass casualty event and the need to ‘build back better’ after an apparent socio-economic collapse induced either by the calamity or by the government’s heavy-handed response.

The Ideological State Apparatus of Technocratic Late Modernity

For any number of years, social critics and public philosophers have raised concerns about the never-ending rise of the technocratic and futurist cult of late modernity. In many ways, this is caught up with the entire ideological project of our epoch, as a left-façade over a technocratic thought-police-state has been weaponized as what Louis Althusser had called the Ideological State Apparatus (ISA) in his landmark text of the same name, “Idéologie et appareils idéologiques d’État (Notes pour une recherche)“.

That we live in a time where the plans of the elite are more openly and more brazenly spelled out, in fiction, in public mythology, in culture, and are manufactured in a way entirely out of the hands of the vast majority of people whose lives will be forever changed, likely for the worse, is hands-down the real catastrophe of our time.

For generations, citizens were bombarded with futurist and technocratic motifs, where people were encouraged to naively project their own goodness onto the aims of political and corporate leaders, and scientists, even while this goodness had not been proven or established. The white lab-coat had become synonymous not only with trust, but with good intentions, and in that sense replaced the priest’s frock and black robe. This has cultivated a fertile soil for the likes of the Dr. Anthony Fauci and his ilk. This has culminated in the now open implementation of a so-called ‘4^th Industrial Revolution’, a progressivist framework wrapped within the sociology of Marx but absent its humanism and emancipatory components – a ‘technocratic Marxism of elites’.

The church of the progress myth has characterized much of the socio-political discourse of the last century. It has been one which has prepared several generations to accept the ‘challenges of change’ as a foregone necessity, towards the forging of a ‘brave new world’. It has served as the underlying assumption of the three most impactful ideologies of the 20^th century: liberalism, fascism, and communism. So many apple-carts have been overturned along the way towards some combination of those ends, that today there are hundreds of millions of people who have never seen an apple cart with their own eyes.

The Ideological State Apparatus has proscribed that criticisms of real-existing policies, plans, and commitments at the level of the UN, such as Agenda 21 and Agenda 2030, are censored across social media. The censorship itself gives credence to the ‘no coincidence’ side of the present debate, because the aim of global population reduction is not only explicit, but central. The established ideological apparatus proscribes that questioning the agenda is ‘science denial’, and ‘far-right conspiracy’, which are the double-plus ungood thought-crimes of our day. Central to the ideological apparatus were the cultural and political tropes which thematically dovetailed with cultural and supply-line globalization within the framework of first-world service-based economies, itself founded on the premise of planned-obsolescence.

Population reduction however is an open goal of elites and their global governance institutions, and all that is contentious is the idea that the same governments that lied about the pretexts for the wars in Iraq and Vietnam, which then went on to murder millions of innocent people, may be lying again today about the methods they may use towards that end.

And yet the past methods of population control such as warfare of the total war type, are unacceptable for elites today because of the specter of a nuclear holocaust that would also contaminate life for the elites themselves. Johnson is not only aware of this, but is explicit in his introduction to ‘The Virus’. We can also include that war will result in one side or the other being blamed at a time of great collusion between world powers, but yet a global pandemic seems to be an act of god – when in fact perhaps it is the outcome of man playing at god.

The Ideological State Apparatus began to mutate in the late 1970’s, absorbing, deforming and then projecting back onto a society a mutated form of the very same protest radicalism which previously challenged the older Ideological State Apparatus. This new ISA was characterized by a new social morality, which delivered the now pervasive cult of political correctness. This ideological authoritarianism is one where slavery and self-harm are virtue signals, and this cultural shift towards public flagellation made possible the idea that lockdown, quarantine, and mask wearing was a sign of virtue more so than health. Without this change in the ISA over the past few decades, there could have never been a new normal.

Conclusion

As we have laid out the surface of the problem and begun to hint at the necessary course of solutions, in Part II we will dig deeper into the problem and flesh out what a just order would look like. In Part II, we will look at the origins of the social contract and the problem of free men versus the growing bureaucratic form, in history. This will set us up to look at why at the philosophical level our present elites have landed on misanthropy and genocide as a human population reduction program, as the best possible solution. Finally we will explain that while a 4^th industrial revolution will come either way, that population reduction and slavery is not a necessary component of it. Rather, that it is up to free men to determine what that will look like and we will sketch out its actual functions.

November 12, 2020 Posted by aletho | Deception, Progressive Hypocrite, Supremacism, Social Darwinism, Timeless or most popular | Human rights | Leave a comment

Democrats are giving McCarthyism a major comeback by blacklisting Trump supporters, and we should all be worried

By Zachary Leeman | RT | November 12, 2020

Blacklisting anyone perceived as supportive of President Donald Trump has become a shockingly mainstream idea for liberals, who are proving day after day that they embrace the very authoritarian beliefs they claim to be against.

It may be difficult to believe, but McCarthyism seems to be making a comeback.

The late Wisconsin senator’s public hearings in the ‘50s where he investigated individuals for any and all connections to communism (which ultimately led to many losing their livelihoods) represent a dark time for the US, but Democrats appear to be taking notes on this unfortunate chapter in history for future use.

The warm embrace of a likely Biden presidency has not softened the left’s hatred for Trump supporters in any way, but rather only emboldened them to promote more and more extreme ideas.

Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-New York) recently promoted “archiving” Trump “sycophants” so they cannot “downplay or deny their complicity in the future.”

One quick question for AOC: in what scenario besides a McCarthy-style hearing would someone need to “deny” their relationship to the Trump administration?

The congresswoman should be happy because Democrats have been promoting the Trump Accountability Project, which promises to hold anyone who worked for or with the Trump administration accountable for “what they did.”

“The world should never forget those who, when faced with a decision, chose to put their money, their time, and their reputations behind separating children from their families, encouraging racism and anti-Semitism, and negligently causing the unnecessary loss of life and economic devastation from our country’s failed response to the COVID-19 pandemic,” the group’s site reads.

Their list of who they want to keep from getting future jobs is pretty extensive as it includes anyone who donated to the president’s campaigns, worked with his campaigns or for any groups “affiliated” with them, as well as anyone who was part of his staff.

The group has even been promoted by Democrat operatives, including former Pete Buttigieg aide Emily Abrams and former Barack Obama campaign staffer Michael Simon.

Public figures like ‘The View’ co-host Sunny Hostin and CNN’s Jake Tapper have also been accused of promoting blackballing pro-Trumpers.

“I don’t think we should look the other way,” Hostin recently said of Trump “associates.”“I think we need to remember because if you don’t remember things then past becomes prologue. I do think people need to be held accountable for their actions and um I don’t think it’s reminiscent of McCarthyism at all.”

Tapper meanwhile warned Trump supporters backing accusations of voter fraud from the president about what future employers would think of their “character.” To be fair, when confronted with the Trump Accountability Project, blacklisting seemed to become too real for the anchor and he did a complete about-face on the issue.

The idea of blacklisting someone through public shaming or (gulp) Senate hearings may sound ludicrous, but there is sadly precedent for it in this country. McCarthy capitalized on the red scare in the ‘50s and played into people’s fears and ignorance by making communists and anyone associated with communists sound like deranged spies looking to infiltrate industries and government agencies to destroy American values.

Compare that extremism to how many on the left speak of anyone they deem a Trump supporter today. They constantly slam the opposition as white supremacists, misogynists, fascists, etc. Even someone like rapper Ice Cube simply admitting to working with the administration on legislation to help black communities was enough to get him called a racist and labeled a Trump supporter.

McCarthy is sadly not the only precedent here. We only need to look to Hollywood to see how organized and powerful liberals can blacklist conservatives.

Ironically an industry many theorize is very left-leaning due to McCarthy keeping Hollywood titans out of work once they were labeled communists, Hollywood has long been accused of blackballing anyone they deem right-leaning.

Many of Hollywood’s most outspoken conservatives like James Woods and Robert Davi have detailed in the past how their politics have kept them out of certain jobs. The president himself accused the industry of blacklisting conservatives after ‘Will & Grace’ stars Debra Messing and Eric McCormack demanded knowing who was attending a Hollywood fundraiser for the president.

While accusations of Hollywood blacklisting does not amount to actual full-blown McCarthyism, the strategy of shaming and punishing conservatives and non-liberals has evolved. Instead of being behind the scenes and only kept in discussion through accusations, it is now an idea being embraced and promoted by actual politicians and media talking heads.

Right or left, every American should resist and fear a world where one side controls the other through wild accusations, public shaming, and blacklisting. Joseph McCarthy is dead. Let McCarthyism die with him.

Zachary Leeman is the author of the novel Nigh and journalist who covers art and culture. He has previously written for outlets such as Breitbart, LifeZette, and BizPac Review among others. Follow him on Twitter @WritingLeeman

November 12, 2020 Posted by aletho | Civil Liberties, Progressive Hypocrite | United States | 2 Comments

‘Coup’ preparation, or move to stop endless wars? What’s behind Trump’s Pentagon purge

By Nebojsa Malic | RT | November 11, 2020

Democrats and their allies are alarmed that President Donald Trump’s firing of top Pentagon officials could be preparation for a military coup. What looks more likely is that US troops might finally pull out from Afghanistan.

In addition to Defense Secretary Mark Esper, whom Trump “terminated” on Monday, Esper’s chief of staff Jennifer Stewart, acting policy chief James Anderson, and intelligence undersecretary Joseph Kernan have also been shown the door. They were replaced by National Security Council counter-terrorist chief Christopher Miller, former NSC aide Kash Patel, General Anthony Tata, and another former NSC aide Ezra Cohen-Watnick, respectively.

The purge and the appointment of the officials widely described in mainstream media as “Trump loyalists” has led to Democrats and neoconservatives warning that a “coup” might be in the works against Joe Biden, who has claimed victory in the November 3 election.

4. Who knows whether intentions are mostly petty, or domestic election interference, or unimpeded decisions in foreign policy (latter could range from military force to military withdrawals, and from pro-Putin to pro-MBS). But, I’m told, both Esper and Milley are truly worried.

— Bill Kristol (@BillKristol) November 11, 2020

Allowing for the possibility that Trump could just be acting out of spite against people who were disloyal to him, The Nation’s Michael Klare noted that Miller had been involved in covert operations in urban settings of Iraq and Afghanistan with US Special Forces.

Democrats should look for any evidence that the Pentagon purge “signals a covert White House plan to use the US military in support of an illegal drive to subvert democracy and install Trump as dictator,” Klare warned.

Wednesday’s appointment of retired Army Colonel Douglas Macgregor as Miller’s senior adviser, however, points in an entirely different direction. First reported by Axios, it was confirmed by the Pentagon later in the day, with a statement noting that Macgregor’s “decades of military experience will be used to assist in the continued implementation of the President’s national security priorities.”

While that sounds like properly vague Pentagonese, Macgregor is well known for his advocacy of a speedy US withdrawal from Afghanistan – something Trump said last month he wished to see by Christmas this year, ahead of the 2021 timeline envisioned in the peace agreement the US have struck with the Taliban.

The Intercept’s Lee Fang quoted an anonymous Pentagon official who basically confirmed that the Pentagon purge is aimed at overcoming resistance by career bureaucrats and the military-industrial complex to Trump’s policies.

Trump official claims the rapid personnel changes are designed to end the “forever wars” in Afghanistan, withdraw troops by Christmas, which many Pentagon leaders opposed. Others argue moves are designed only to award loyalty and punish dissent.

— Lee Fang (@lhfang) November 11, 2020

“The president is taking back control of DOD. It’s a rebirth of foreign policy. This is Trump foreign policy,” said the official.

“This is happening because the president feels that neoconservatism has failed the American people,” he added.

Trump campaigned in 2016 on ending the ‘endless wars’ in the Middle East. Within a few months, however, he allowed himself to be persuaded by the Pentagon to ramp them up instead, bombing Afghanistan and launching missiles at Syria. Once all the territory held by Islamic State (IS, formerly ISIS) terrorists was liberated, however, he pushed hard for withdrawal from Syria, Afghanistan and Iraq – running into resistance from the Pentagon.

His first Defense Secretary Jim Mattis resigned over Syria at the end of 2018. Most US troops there were withdrawn by October 2019. Some troops were also pulled out of Iraq this year, citing concerns over the coronavirus, though many still remain. A peace treaty with the Taliban was signed in February this year, after nearly 20 years of war that perfectly defined “mission creep.”

There is no denying that the present political situation in Washington, with Biden claiming he won the election and Trump disputing that citing irregularities in key states, is fraught with peril. Whatever the outcome, unless everything is handled above board and with transparency, half the country is going to feel cheated and disenfranchised.

There are two things to keep in mind, however. Whatever one thinks of him, Trump has kept his word, implementing his electoral promises – by working through the system – despite the obstacles thrown before him by the administrative apparatus, legislators and the courts. So far, the current flurry of activity at the Pentagon seems to point towards a withdrawal from the Middle East, rather than a coup at home.

Secondly, it was actually the Democrats – Joe Biden himself – who first brought up the notion of using the US military to forcibly remove Trump from the White House, should he lose but refuse to concede. That was in June, long before the election and its controversies. What did Biden know at the time to make him say that, nobody knows – because nobody in the mainstream US media has bothered to ask, preferring to entertain partisan fantasies based on conjecture instead.

November 12, 2020 Posted by aletho | Illegal Occupation, Militarism, Progressive Hypocrite | Afghanistan, ISIS, United States | Leave a comment

WAKE UP, LIBERALS! American Voters Are Smarter Than You Are

By Michael Lesher | OffGuardian | November 10, 2020

Ever since Election Day, the self-righteous hate parade has been marching its way across liberal media.

Too much support for Donald Trump!

Even amid general declarations of a Biden victory, liberal angst – and snobbish posturing – darken nearly every op-ed, “news analysis,” social media post and Twitter storm in which the Right Thinkers pontificate about the election returns.

And their message is always pretty much the same: too many Americans just don’t get it. Even after months of patient lectures from Right Thinkers, assuring us all that Donald Trump is personally responsible for every American evil from slavery to the latest respiratory virus, tens of millions of the dumb clucks actually voted for him! Whatever is the world coming to?

Well, trust the liberals to have an answer ready. If substantial majorities in dozens of states across the nation still prefer The Donald to Jolly Joe, it can only mean one thing: Americans are no good.

“[T]he outsize support Trump has continued to receive exposes America’s ‘soul’ for what it is,” lamented Andre M. Perry for the Brookings Institution the morning after the election. Brittney Cooper, a professor at Rutgers University, intoned on the same day – before many of the ballots had even been counted! – that “Donald Trump is the fault of white people. His rise is a direct result of white people’s collective rejection of the progress that the Obama era signaled.” In an equally vindictive temper, the Boston Globe cited “Black voters” who found widespread support for Trump to be proof of “the country’s failure to decisively reject racist policy,” a phenomenon they found “disappointing but not surprising.”

And so it went.

Now, if you yourself are one of those liberals who celebrated the Biden campaign as a “battle for the nation’s soul” (to borrow the old plagiarist’s own saccharine phrase), and if you’ve stumbled onto this column on your way to the more flattering and insular world of the New York Times editorial page, please allow me just a few words before you go.

No, I did not vote for Donald Trump. But I did expect him to poll even more successfully than he actually did this time around. And my reasons had precious little to do with liberal virtue-signaling.

Because the real secret of Trump’s popularity isn’t any of the things liberals are moaning about from their agenda-setting cenacles. What drives the Trump phenomenon is the hypocritical refusal of those same liberals to recognize, let alone to confess, the extent of their betrayal of American working people – and their inability to hear the public’s fury even when it’s shouted at them by millions of voices at a time.

Shall I prove it?

Do you claim to revile Trump’s racism, Mr. Liberal? Then why did you insist on nominating, as the antidote to him, a man whose first great political project was to fight racial desegregation, who went out of his way to praise Strom Thurmond – Mr. “Massive Resistance” himself – for sending lots of black people to prison, and who consistently supported a program of mass incarceration aimed primarily at minorities?

Did you find Trump “divisive”? Then why did you cheer from the sidelines as your counterparts in Great Britain smeared and demonized the most stubbornly non-discriminatory politician in recent history (Jeremy Corbyn), and nod approvingly when liberal pundits applied the “racist” label to supporters of Bernie Sanders here in the U.S., simply because he happens to be a white male?

You say you hate Trump for attacking the “free press”? Well, where has the vaunted liberal establishment been throughout the persecution of Julian Assange – the worst attack on press freedom in decades? Where was that establishment’s respect for honest journalism while, for three years, it screamed its support for Russiagate, probably the silliest conspiracy theory in recent Washington history, and vilified skeptics as everything from agents of the Kremlin to closet Trumpists?

Yes, you say there are questions of “character” at stake. And you claim to be horrified at the allegations of sexual harassment Trump has collected over the years. But do you remember what happened when Tara Reade publicized similar accusations against Joe Biden? The liberal media had a field day excoriating her, questioning her motives, impugning her character; and Biden walked away unscathed, even nabbing the “proud and excited” endorsement of the feckless National Organization for Women. So much for “character.”

Trump, you add, is “authoritarian”? Maybe so. But what do you call the police state tactics unleashed by more than forty state governors – and celebrated by the Democratic Party leadership – that have included suspending legislatures, quashing civil liberties, ruling by “emergency” decrees and confining huge numbers of people in what amounts to house arrest? What have liberals done to oppose this massive attack on democracy? They’ve done nothing.

Yes, they did speak up when protesters objected to the theft of their rights: they called them right-wing lunatics and enemies of science. Why wasn’t such contempt for political dissent an example of “authoritarianism”? Could it be because Trump didn’t say it?

And wasn’t it those same liberals who proved their attachment to democracy by sabotaging the Bernie Sanders campaign – once it began to look as though he might actually emerge from the primaries as the front-runner? Did any liberals protest when Democratic Party leaders bullied each of the contenders to drop out of the race to ensure that the notably unpopular Biden would be the only available alternative to Trump? Isn’t it an “authoritarian” political structure that dictates to the voters what their choices are, instead of letting the public decide for itself?

Ah, but Trump professed too close a relationship to Russia to be fully trusted – is that it? Yet Joe Biden has boasted of his fealty to Israel – a state whose meddling in American politics makes other countries look like amateurs by comparison. And not a single establishment liberal or mainstream media outlet that I can think of accused him of disloyalty for taking such a stand.

I know, I know. In good liberal circles, one doesn’t mention such things. Joe Biden is the Democratic Party establishment’s chosen messiah to save the world from the Orange-Haired Menace. So we mustn’t even notice his incorrigible lying, his rotten political history, his obvious disdain for political dissent, his equally obvious mental decline – not even his choice of an unprincipled civil rights buster and police-violence enabler as a “progressive” running mate.

But while liberals may manage not to see the obvious, they haven’t succeeded in blinding the entire American electorate. And so, unsurprisingly, the voters are behaving more sensibly than the pundits who sanctimoniously chastise them. They have looked at the real Joe Biden, and they have had the inevitable, natural reaction.

You liberals would have done the same – if you’d been half as honest.

“Our age is indeed the age of the intellectual organization of political hatreds,” wrote Julien Benda in The Treason of the Intellectuals barely a century ago. Just as Republicans have used the 2020 campaign to smear all opponents as dangerous subversives, the Democrats have made a Trumpless White House an end that justifies any means – including media censorship, economic blackmail, and a full-throttle assault on civil liberties under the pretext of protecting the nation’s “health” – while simultaneously rejecting their own voters’ demands for Medicare for All.

And all this has been spiced with hypocrisy rank enough to have embarrassed Tartuffe himself – as the Democrats pose as the enemies of “hate” while execrating every voter who can’t swallow their bilge as either a racist, an idiot, a Nazi sympathizer or a potential mass murderer.

“I feel like leaving this country,” wrote one liberal I know on Facebook, deploring an America in which so many people could still cast ballots for The Donald.

And I want to tell him: you are mistaken, my friend. You and your fellow liberals aren’t just on the brink of leaving the country. You turned your back on its people a long time ago.

And if you don’t know that, they do.

Better awaken – and soon. Otherwise, by the time you finally start caring about the people you never bothered to think of as your equals, they may not be in any mood to listen to you.

November 9, 2020 Posted by aletho | Progressive Hypocrite | United States | Leave a comment

Why it is right to question the orthodox Covid-19 narrative

The authors of ‘Welcome to Covidworld’ defend their stance

By Matthew Ratcliffe and Ian James Kidd | The Critic | November 6, 2020

In a reply to our piece “Welcome to Covidworld”, Ben Bramble engages in precisely the sort of thinking that we raised concerns about. He suggests that we are mistaken in comparing harms done by lockdowns and other measures to harms caused by the virus. Instead, we ought to have weighed up the costs of lockdowns against what would have happened without them.

Bramble’s case hinges on a counterfactual claim: in the absence of lockdowns, the virus would have inflicted much more harm than it has done. The cost of not locking down would, he says, have been “mind-bogglingly great”.

What could be wrong with Bramble’s claim? First of all, his use of the term “lockdown” is insufficiently discerning. Lockdown is not a simple, straightforward policy measure that took the same form in every country. There are, for instance, important differences between early and late lockdowns. Australia and New Zealand both locked down early and suppressed the virus.

Setting aside the issue of whether or not the actions taken by these countries are morally justifiable, it remains to be seen whether or not this is a success story. If a highly effective vaccine is not forthcoming, both countries will face the painful options of cutting themselves off from the rest of the world indefinitely, having strict lockdowns whenever the virus reappears, or eventually succumbing to the virus, none of which amount to success.

However, the current UK situation is very different. Given where we are now, nobody is claiming that this second lockdown or any future UK lockdowns will be able to suppress the virus here. It is too well established for that. Rather, the stated aims have been to buy us some time until a vaccine arrives and, most recently, to ensure that the NHS is not overwhelmed. In evaluating the effectiveness and appropriateness of such policy measures, it will not do to make sweeping claims about the effectiveness of lockdowns in general. When considering interventions so extreme and destructive, we need to proceed more carefully.

Bramble simply accepts that lockdowns in general work. He does not specify exactly what it would be for a late lockdown to work, when the goal is no longer complete suppression. Presumably, the relevant criteria will include reducing hospitalizations and deaths due to Covid-19, during the lockdown and in the longer term as well. But where is the evidence that lockdowns generally have this effect? Bramble doesn’t provide any. Maybe he thinks it’s just obvious that they achieve this, but it really isn’t.

A strict lockdown in Peru is associated with one of the highest Covid-19 death tolls in the world (currently recorded as 1,047 people per 1 million of the population). Other countries that have resorted to exceptionally long and strict lockdowns, such as Argentina, have also fared badly. One could, of course, run Bramble’s counterfactual here: it would have been even worse for these countries had they not locked down. But where is the evidence for that? Indeed, what would even count as evidence?

It would be intellectually and morally unacceptable to make the pro-lockdown position unfalsifiable by always insisting on the following: (1) where cases drop after a lockdown was introduced, it must be the lockdown that achieved this; (2) where cases rise after a lockdown was introduced, it would certainly have been even worse without the lockdown; (3) if other countries, such as Sweden, adopt less extreme approaches than us and fare better or at least no worse, this must be due to other differences between the two countries – the Swedish strategy would never have worked here.

So, how do we go about evaluating the effectiveness of lockdowns? Where is the evidence that the virus ultimately causes far more deaths in the absence of extreme social restrictions? Where are those countries that followed a different course from countries like the UK (which locked down, but did not suppress the virus) and now have higher death tolls than us? By simply assuming that his counterfactual claim is true, Bramble illustrates our worry that lockdowns risk becoming an unfalsifiable article of faith. In fact, he even asserts that “the science on this is beyond question”. Is it really? If so, all the disease modelers who have made dire predictions concerning the current UK situation will be delighted to hear that their work will be forever immune from critique, even if it turns out that their models have little bearing on reality. And, in any case, none of them would endorse Bramble’s exaggerated claim that, without a lockdown, there would have been “many millions of deaths” in countries such as the UK.

In fact, much about the behaviour of this virus remains unclear, including how the infection rate is influenced by growing immunity within a population. There is no single, homogeneous entity called “the science”. Rather, there are many different and often conflicting perspectives, theories, and claims. Furthermore, this is a complicated, fast-changing situation that impacts on all aspects of human society. Relevant expertise thus encompasses a wide range of academic disciplines and areas of practice. Philosophers should not simply defer to “the experts”; they also have plenty of relevant expertise themselves.

What we do know is that lockdowns are immensely damaging in so many ways. This second UK lockdown will further disrupt the social and emotional development of our children, cause a substantial rise in severe mental health problems, force many elderly people to live out the final weeks and perhaps months of their lives in loneliness and misery, exacerbate and prolong the pain of bereavement by depriving people of interpersonal and social interactions that shape and regulate grief, destroy livelihoods and risk mass unemployment, increase regional social and economic inequalities, reduce the life-opportunities of young people while saddling them with an ever-growing mountain of debt to pay off, suspend much of what gives our lives meaning, deprive people of countless precious, irreplaceable life-moments, and cause deaths due to the numerous resulting impacts on people’s health.

However, the true extent of certain harms, such as the long-term effects of sustained lockdown measures on children’s development, may not become fully clear for some time.

Others have similarly warned that policy makers are paying insufficient attention to these growing costs. For instance, an open letter by psychologists, which appeared on 1 November, spells out the widespread and damaging psychological effects of continuing restrictions, including the harms done to children. Similarly, an article published in the British Medical Journal on 2 November raises the concern that the “collateral damage” caused by public health interventions has “yet to be considered systematically”. Others have drawn attention to the global costs of national lockdowns. For instance, the charity Oxfam has stated that, by the end of this year, over 12,000 people could be starving to death every day due the global impact of national-level responses to Covid-19.

Bramble observes that the orthodox view has in fact been subjected to critical scrutiny. But the problem is that – in the UK, at least – alternative perspectives have had little influence on the processes of recommending, making, and implementing policy decisions. And we worry that this may be partly because of blinkered and inflexible attitudes that are widely held. People are often very quick to dismiss or express moral disapproval of dissenting voices. However, those who confidently endorse lockdowns with an air of moral authority also need to acknowledge the full extent of the harms these measures have caused, are causing, and are likely to cause. Furthermore, explicit and sufficiently specific criteria should be supplied for determining the effectiveness of any proposed lockdown, accompanied by convincing evidence to show that it is very likely to achieve its intended effects.

Instead of pursuing such a path, Bramble speculates that our own concerns originate in cognitive impairments caused by our distressing experiences of lockdown. This is the kind of response that motivated our earlier account of “Covidworld”, a simplified, virus-centric reality where various norms of reason, scientific enquiry, and moral conduct have ceased to apply.

November 8, 2020 Posted by aletho | Civil Liberties, Deception, Economics, Progressive Hypocrite, Science and Pseudo-Science, Supremacism, Social Darwinism | Covid-19, Human rights, UK | Leave a comment

Disbelief in human rationality; The Trump Factor

By Ghassan Kadi for the Saker Blog | November 8, 2020

Disbelief is probably the best word to describe today’s world. Disbelief that in the short span of my own lifetime thus far, I have lived to witness black whitewashed to become white, and when it doesn’t turn white, brains are brainwashed to see it white.

I am in disbelief that the political Left that I have grown to choose to either like or dislike is now owned and controlled by Western billionaires and oligarchs who have turned developing countries into slave labour camps.

I am in disbelief that the former promise of liberalism has been turned by the new-Left to become a mass movement that is devoid of free-thinking, one that literally coerces one to unconditionally accept it and follow its agenda without any questions or else face persecution, humiliation and slander.

Love or hate Castro and Guevara, I am in total disbelief that their political heirs, as it were, are Greta Thunberg, Hillary Clinton, Joe Biden, the main benefactor of whom is George Soros; just to name a few.

I am in disbelief that decent people have condoned violent protests and looting and considered them as rightful civil rights activities.

I am in total disbelief that rudeness, thought-policing, political correctness, hypocrisy and double standards have become the new norms.

And now that Biden has illegally declared himself a winner, I am in disbelief that many of his supporters do not seem to care as to whether he has indeed committed electoral fraud or not despite allegations that indicate that ballots might have been fiddled with and which at least warrants an investigation. They seem happy to get rid of Trump even if this meant that fraud was actually committed.

I am in disbelief that world leaders are breaking the standards of political protocol and congratulating Biden before he is formally declared a winner.

I am in disbelief that social media giants like Facebook and Twitter are allowed to censor personal opinion and make their own rules on what constitutes freedom of expression and what doesn’t. Even more, I am in disbelief that those giants are free to decide to ban publishing reports about allegations of corruption in the Biden family camp because they have not been legally and formally substantiated, but at the same time promote and publish unsubstantiated accusations about Trump and his supporters.

I am in disbelief that it became illegal to prescribe and sell hydroxychloroquine even though there are indications [completed trials] that it can treat COVID-19.

I am in disbelief that intelligent, well-meaning people, including many personal friends have believed the myriad of unsubstantiated stories that have been fabricated about Trump ever since he was elected. I am in disbelief that they believed in the Russiagate fiasco and that upon reflection did not feel any remorse when they were proved to be a lie. I am in disbelief that those who fabricated the story were not prosecuted.

I am in disbelief that the BLM movement appears to blame Trump for centuries of racial injustice in America. I am in disbelief that those same people do not look at Obama’s track record on race issues.

I am in disbelief that many mature and intelligent men and women believe that Greta is an expert on climate all the while ignoring what many eminent scientists are saying to the contrary. I am in disbelief that Trump is blamed for that so-called ‘Climate Change’ and that Biden truly believes that he is able to reach zero CO2 emission.

When I was growing up, reform and justice meant iconic issues such as freedom of worship, free speech, free education and medication. I am in disbelief to see that the new definition has morphed into the ‘rights’ of late term abortion and school children having gender change surgeries.

I am in disbelief that the same West that once mocked the use of the term ‘democratic’ in the rhetoric of the USSR and the names of entities like the German Democratic Republic finds itself at ease kicking democracy in the guts and have the so-called American Democratic Party ruled by a new ‘species’ of dictators and thugs.

I am in disbelief that the new definition of being progressive does not include decency and respect and that parents no longer teach their children simple rules like giving up their bus seats to the elderly.

I am in disbelief that the impact of COVID-19 and alleged loss of life was blamed on Trump. I say ‘alleged’ loss of life not because I believe that the virus does not exist; it does, but because I have seen enough evidence to substantiate that the figures we have been presented with were highly exaggerated and that many people died of causes other than COVD-19 but were counted as COVID-19 victims; just to make Trump look bad. To this effect, if Trump does initiate a court challenge to the election results and loses, then all that Biden has to do is to start publishing the real figures of deaths caused by COVID-19, and that alone will make him look like a hero who managed to turn around the figures.

I must say that as a Syrian-Lebanese, Trump has been horrible for Syria. He did not manage to contain Erdogan. He sanctioned the theft of Syrian oil. He allowed for Syrian crops to be burnt. He intensified sanctions against Syria with his Caesar Act. For the above and other reasons, Syrians should be rejoicing to see him leave even though Biden and his team of Democrats have been beating the drums of war, but if they draw first blood, it will be a war they cannot win. In more ways than one, a military escalation in Syria now, one that does not expand to become an all-out war between America and Russia, may break the stalemate and create the foreground for moving forward in a new direction. In other words, as far as Syria is concerned, Biden can inadvertently be a better president than Trump. Time will tell.

I therefore have real, concrete and thought-out reasons to dislike Trump and even loath him. But I find myself in total disbelief when I ask many people the reason, the real reason, for which they hate Trump; they are unable to provide a single one. Some revert to his looks and/or his vocabulary, but come on, is this enough for them to hate him with the passion they do? I am in disbelief that they echo like parrots the words of the media, knowing from previous experiences that the only thing that the media is good at is lying. I am in disbelief that seemingly rational people are increasingly finding it easy and plausible for them to adopt very strong views, make loud and uncouth comments, without taking the effort of fact-finding.

I am in disbelief that the moment one speaks of fact-finding-based rationality, he/she is either ‘accused’ of being a Trumpie or a denialist. You are either 100% with them or against them. I am in disbelief that they do not see the grey lines in any given argument.

The perception of Trump by the world reminds me of that of President Assad in the Arab World a bit; not that a real comparison can be drawn between the two men. Many Arabs who hate Assad cannot provide one single legitimate reason for hating him, but when squeezed in a corner, they admit that they dislike him because he is an Alawite.

The planners of the anti-Trump campaign have worked very hard in order to demonize him and create a multi-faceted global anti-Trump hysteria. They planned to put together a coalition of haters of different persuasions united only by their hatred to Trump; again in a manner akin to how the ‘War on Syria’ started.

The public both within America and abroad has been bombarded with stories about Trump, portraying him as the public enemy number one at different levels and on many issues.

The Chinese have a great interest to see Trump go because Trump is a tough trade deal negotiator.

The EU nations, and NATO members to be specific, also have a great interest to see Trump go because he forced them to make larger contributions to the NATO budget.

And even though Trump canceled the Iran nuclear deal, endorsed Jerusalem as the capital of Israel and facilitated peace settlements with three Arab states, the Israelis have no qualms about seeing Trump go because they know for a fact that Biden will not waver in his support to Israel. To Israel and the Israel lobby, the identity of the resident of the White House is totally immaterial.

Erdogan will be happy to see Trump go because he knows that Biden will be a much softer putty to mould. Biden is more likely to give him a free hand dealing with the Kurds than Trump ever did.

The huge American industrialists and globalists will be happy to see Trump go because they do not wish to repatriate their factories and create American jobs. They do not want to pay higher salaries and higher taxes. They are totally indifferent as to how far and wide the rust belt expands; for as long as their companies are making profit having factories overseas.

Big Pharma is keen to see Trump go because it is tipped to make hundreds of billions of dollars selling vaccines.

Last but not least, the Deep State wishes for Trump to go. No prior American President has ever dared to even mention the term ‘Deep State’ let alone take charge against it. I find myself in a state of disbelief because the alleged foot soldiers who are meant to stand up against the ‘Deep State’, ie the Left, are the ones taking charge against Trump. Work this one out.

Even the old guards at the GOP, the Republican Party are against Trump; because they are part-and-parcel of the Deep State, they have their fingers in the pie, and Trump does not represent them. In reality, in both of his election and re-election bids, Trump ran more like an independent than a GOP candidate. History will possibly mark him as the American President who was closest to being an independent candidate.

With all of the above said, I can fully understand why some have good reasons to dislike Trump and even hate him, and as mentioned above, I can have my own reasons. I can equally understand why some can be shortsighted enough to wish to see him go without giving much thought to who is to replace him. But for anyone to believe that Joe Biden is the man to restore America’s position in the world and make the world a better place, then unsubstantiated wishful thinking is the most polite manner to describe such aspirations.

Notwithstanding all of the above, the world is undergoing an inevitable polar shift and this is now unstoppable. The West is losing its technical edge and financial prowess as both are moving East. And even if Trump wins his touted court battle and is declared a winner, changes the constitution and gets re-elected for ten more terms, he will not be able to reverse this torrent even if the Democrats worked wholeheartedly with him.

If Biden ends up in the White House, he may and probably will attempt to gain initial support by publishing real COVID-19 death related figures as mentioned above. But what will he be able to conjure up in order to be able to save face when it comes to public debt, unemployment and other huge problems that America and the rest of the world face?

The cracks within America are sadly widening and the underlying foundations are crumbling, and if Biden is foolish enough to take the war gamble as a way out of the financial dilemma that he will have to deal with if he becomes president and squanders a few more trillion on a new war somewhere in the world, he will hasten the financial collapse. If he warms up to China and escalates his anti-Russian rhetoric to the extent of creating war with Russia, then God help us all. I suppose Greta and her minions will blame Russia for the nuclear fallout, provided that any of them and us will still be around to talk about it.

Whether Trump stays or goes, he has definitely and inadvertently accelerated the events in the age of disbelief. The word disbelief was once associated with heresy, but now, at least in my dictionary, it refers to the disbelief in the current state of human rationality.

I can go on and on but enough is said. With all the above reasons to have disbelief, I wonder if there is still any benefit in writing articles like this one and trying to talk people into having some common sense.

The world is quickly and steadfastly approaching a rather frightening stage of mass hysteria of Biblical proportions. Rational people now feel that they are surrounded by lunatics, and yet some say we ‘ain’t seen nothing yet’.

May God have mercy on humanity, because humanity did not have mercy on itself.

November 8, 2020 Posted by aletho | Progressive Hypocrite | Middle East, United States | 1 Comment

The media’s anti-Trump bias on both sides of the pond is so blatant is it any wonder the Donald is crying foul?

By Neil Clark | RT | November 7, 2020

Donald Trump always claimed the media was against him and this week’s events prove he was right, whatever one’s opinion of the US president.

It’s probably the understatement of the year to say that Donald Trump is a polarising figure. Rather like Marmite, people tend to love him or loathe him. But even those in the latter category, if they’re being honest, would have to admit that the mainstream media coverage of the 2020 presidential election results has been heavily – and quite outrageously – slanted against the US president.

Let’s put it another way.

Suppose someone who had spent the last four years at a space station on Planet Zog, and who had no background knowledge of US politics, zoomed down to Earth on Tuesday night and decided to tune into the US election coverage. They would work out pretty quickly that most of the media and most ‘commentators’ wanted the man they called ‘Trump’ to lose and the man they called ‘Biden’ to win. Orange Man = Bad, Other Man in Mask = Good.

You’d have to be deaf, dumb and blind not to notice the bias. As the author Candace Owens tweeted “At no point would they call states with a clear Trump lead on election night if it put Trump above Biden. I have never seen anything like it. The media is in full cooperation and collusion with the Democrat Party.”

Quite a claim isn’t it? But it certainly does seem that way to any neutral observer.

Trump’s defeat was something the major channels and most ‘talking heads’ had looked forward to for years. The prospect of him actually winning – against the odds and against the polls – was not something they were willing to countenance. Even when the president had a clear lead in several states. Instead we kept hearing how Joe could still take this or that state. The Democratic candidate was merely ‘biden’ his time, don‘t you know.

We all know the media plays a key role in influencing how people vote, but in the US, because of the peculiarities of the system, they also play a very important role in shaping perceptions of who is actually winning. Forget the fat lady singing, the US election shows it ain’t over until the media says it is, the New York Times even explicitly said this in a hastily deleted tweet. And the media wasn’t going to call it over with the man they utterly despised in the lead. You don’t have to be a member of the Donald Trump fan club to acknowledge this.

On Tuesday, at 11pm in the UK Biden was odds-on and Trump 2-1 against. But in the morning Trump was odds-on. Then came the time-out. It was the German football manager Franz Beckenbauer who said that if your team is losing, you have to do everything you can to disrupt your opponent’s momentum. The media – and Trump’s opponents – certainly did that.

Of course Trump is angry about what happened. Wouldn’t you be? But look at how his reaction to what happened has been portrayed. The BBC website, declared ‘US goes to wire as Trump falsely claims fraud’. Why the ‘falsely’? Does the BBC know for sure that Trump’s claims are false? They may be but they may not be. Who knows? In the good old days when the BBC reported the news rather than editorialised it, the headline would have been ‘US vote goes to wire as Trump claims fraud’, and viewers would be left to decide for themselves whether they thought the claims had any merit.

ITV News was just as subjective. ’Donald Trump repeats baseless election fraud claim as Joe Biden urges calm’, they tweeted. Got that? Bad Man makes baseless claims, Good Man says ‘Stay calm, folks’.

Isn’t it revealing that Trump’s claims are routinely and summarily dismissed as ‘false’ and ‘baseless’ whereas Democrat claims that he was a de facto Russian agent received no such dismissal. No, they and the associated claims of ’major Russian collusion’ in the 2016 election were reported as credible, even though no evidence was produced. Which begs the question: How can the US electoral system be so fraud-proof in 2020, yet so open to ’Russian fraud’ in 2016? The double standards are off the scale.

Trump has been told to be a ‘good loser’ and ‘do a John McCain’ by those who did everything they could to delegitimise his victory four years ago. Is it any surprise that he isn’t prepared to concede and instead threatens litigation? To add insult to injury several news networks cut off from the president’s Thursday press conference regarding the election. Newsweek, helpfully, tells us Trump’s statement “was laced with false claims regarding the election.”

The BBC, even more helpfully, ‘fact-checked’ Trump‘s speech for us. What a service! What a pity all this ‘fact-checking‘ wasn‘t around when George W. Bush (and Tony Blair) were making claims about Iraq having WMDs. They were baseless claims, for sure. But no one reported them as such. Shame that, because lots of people died. But only Donald Trump tells lies. Donald Trump was the man who invented ‘Fake News’. There was none of it before he was around.

Repeat After Me: “Orange Man Bad. Biden Man Good. Once Bad Orange Man goes US will be a great, internationally-respected country again like when it invaded Iraq and Afghanistan, bombed Yugoslavia and destroyed Libya under the ‘honourable’ Presidents Clinton, Bush and Obama, who never made any ‘false’ claims at all. Got it, children?”

Now go to sleep. Uncle Joe will (hopefully) soon be in the White House and the world will be a MUCH BETTER PLACE.

Neil Clark is a journalist, writer, broadcaster and blogger. His award winning blog can be found at http://www.neilclark66.blogspot.com. He tweets on politics and world affairs @NeilClark66

November 7, 2020 Posted by aletho | Fake News, Mainstream Media, Warmongering, Progressive Hypocrite | BBC, New York Times, United States | 1 Comment

So we’re racist because Biden didn’t get a landslide victory? That just shows how much the elite and the media hate Americans

By Tony Cox | RT | November 6, 2020

MSNBC host Joy Reid wants Americans to be ashamed for failing to deliver on the media’s false promises that Joe Biden would win the election easily, giving President Donald Trump the beating she thinks he deserves.

After five years of watching Trump’s alleged sins play out in the mainstream media, “it felt like a repudiation was coming,” MSNBC host Joy Reid said late Wednesday. When that failed to happen on election night, with swing-state races too close to call and the outcome heading for a legal battle, Trump’s strong showing only confirmed to her that America has “a great amount of racism, anti-blackness, anti-wokeness.”

“We know what this country is, but still part of you, I think part of your heart says, you know what, maybe the country’s going to pay off all of this pain, the children that were stolen, with a repudiation,” Reid said. “And as the night wore on and I realized and it sunk in, OK, that’s not happening, we are still who we thought, unfortunately.”

Van Jones, the CNN host and commentator, said essentially the same thing on election night, saying the results didn’t provide the “moral victory” that Democrats wanted after seeing children being taken away from their mothers at the border and black children being called “the n-word” at school under Trump’s leadership. “They want a moral victory tonight,” he said. “We wanted to see a repudiation of this direction for the country. And the fact that it’s this close, I think, it hurts, it just hurts.”

Reid and Jones are both black, and in their view, anything short of a dominating one-party rule by their preferred party can only mean that America is too racist to vote correctly. It can’t be that the pollsters and the mainstream media were incompetent and/or dishonest when they vastly underestimated voter support for Trump, just as they did in 2016.

Their words are condemning, especially in the case of Reid’s: “we are still who we thought, unfortunately.” We, as in America, are still as racist and reprehensible as we thought because we don’t vote Democrat in sufficient proportion. We don’t hate Trump sufficiently for sticking his thumb in the eye of the ruling class and obnoxiously leading the nation as a populist. This is the same Bad Orange Man who won’t start fake wars, won’t kiss the ring of the CIA-Pentagon intelligence-military complex, won’t play by the rules of corrupt establishment politicians, won’t cower when the press calls him a racist and won’t support globalist trade and environmental deals.

Reid and Jones didn’t get the landslide they were looking for because voters were too busy again repudiating the ruling class and its media mouthpieces to repudiate Trump. They were too busy rejecting the people who brought us NAFTA, spied on us, transferred our manufacturing jobs to China, depressed our wages with illegal immigration, and squandered our blood and treasure in Iraq, Syria, Afghanistan, etc.

And they especially repudiated the liars who roll out the dreaded R words – ‘racism’ or ‘Russia’ – whenever someone needs to be silenced.

Contrary to leftist doctrine, most support for Trump isn’t about cultish followers who can’t be brought out of their trance long enough to come to grips with reality. A large portion of Trump supporters understand that he is a deeply flawed individual. He’s not righteous, his personality can be maddening, and he’s too easily baited into nonsensical arguments that distract from his agenda. But unlike the Joy Reids of the world – and their directors – he apparently loves America and its people.

It’s not only white people who notice the difference. CNN exit polls showed that support for Trump among Hispanic voters increased by 15-19 percentage points from 2016’s level in Florida, Georgia and Ohio. And Biden won just 80 percent of the black male vote, down from Hillary Clinton’s 82 percent in 2016 and Barack Obama’s 87-95 percent in 2008 and 2012. Trump also won 35 percent of the Muslim vote, compared with 15 percent support in that segment in 2016.

Those voters obviously didn’t believe the media mantra that Trump is a raging white supremacist. Or did they? The race hustlers have explanations for that, too, as it turns out. MSNBC contributor Eddie Glaude argued that black and Hispanic men are guilty of “sexism and patriarchy,” just like white men.

Young Turks commentator Aida Rodriguez took the psychoanalysis to another level. “Many people showed up to support Trump because let’s keep it real, a lot of people of color hate themselves,” she said. “They want to identify with upward mobility, and to them, that means white is right.”

But Glaude quickly brought the indictment discussion back to the real culprits: White people. “This is a story about how whiteness still animates the core of this country, along with selfishness, because we know who this man is. This race shouldn’t be this tight,” he said.

Reid made similar comments on election night, saying the results raised “real questions about what America is at the end of the day and whether what Trump is, is more like the American character than people ever, ever wanted to admit.”

These attacks on the character of voters were more of the same from ruling-class ‘elites’ who show only contempt for Americans and Americanism. Americans voted for Barack Obama, twice, and yet they’re reminded daily of how racist they are – ironically, by bigots and liars.

Reid was outed in April 2018 for anti-gay, anti-Muslim posts that she had made years earlier on her blog. She responded by alleging that someone had hacked her former blog and planted the offensive material years ago without her noticing. Her lawyer said the FBI was investigating, and MSNBC stood by her. Months later, she apologized for the posts without mentioning the hacking allegations or the FBI probe.

So these are our moral superiors, we’re told. It doesn’t matter how many times they’re wrong, how many times they’re false or how many times they appear to behave like enemies of the American people. Any failure to agree with their politics can only be explained by the rest of us being morally disgusting, or as Hillary Clinton would say, “deplorable.”

Is it any wonder that the feeling is mutual?

Tony Cox is a US journalist who has written or edited for Bloomberg and several major daily newspapers.

November 6, 2020 Posted by aletho | Progressive Hypocrite | Joy Reid, MSNBC, United States | 1 Comment

Biden’s Electric Car Delusion

By Dr. Jay Lehr & Tom Harris | America Out Loud | November 3, 2020

Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden’s election promise to vastly increase electric cars in America makes no sense. It would leave people with unreliable vehicles, huge transportation costs and do nothing to protect the environment.

Beside aiming to ensure “100% of new sales for light- and medium-duty vehicles will be electrified,” The Biden Plan for a Clean Energy Revolution and Environmental Justice makes the following commitments:

- Biden will work with our nation’s governors and mayors to support the deployment of more than 500,000 new public charging outlets by the end of 2030.
- Biden will restore the full electric vehicle tax credit to incentivize the purchase of these vehicles.
- Biden will work to develop a new fuel economy standard that goes beyond what the Obama-Biden Administration put in place.

A Canadian engineer recently ran the numbers involved in the switchover to electric vehicles (EVs) and concluded that, in order to match the 2,000 cars that a typical filling station can service in a busy 12 hours, the filling station would require six hundred, 50-kilowatt chargers at an estimated cost of $24 million. The station would require a supply of 30 megawatts of power from the grid which would be enough to power 20,000 homes. Unlike home recharging stations, these would be operating at peak usage hours where the rates are the highest.

Where would all that power come from? As quoted on The Heartland Institute’s Web site, Dr. David Wojick, director of the Climate Change Debate Education Project said,

“There is almost no excess generating, distribution, or transmission capacity in the United States, or globally for that matter, so a lot of new, expensive power plants and power lines will be needed if EVs are ever to become popular. The EV grid simply does not exist.”

This means that, without the construction of vast new multi-billion-dollar electrical grids, Biden’s plan is simply a recipe for nationwide brownouts and blackouts and a lot of stranded motorists. No wonder one of the main worries car owners have with respect to EVs is ‘range anxiety.’ You need to plan any EV trip very carefully or you will be calling your friends who still own gasoline-powered cars to pick you up in the middle of nowhere.

Biden also seems to be ignoring the fact that it can take between 30 minutes and 8 hours to recharge a vehicle, depending on it being empty or just topping off. Charging stations will need lounge areas, holding areas for vehicles completed but waiting for owners to return from shopping or dining and so on. The scope of the plan is staggering.

As time goes by more owners will also come to understand the problems in charging and recharging EVs in very cold weather. All batteries use electrolytes which are liquids such as acids, bases and salts that conduct electricity by the movement of ions. Hence, battery performance worsens as it gets colder. A typical electrolyte conducts a fourth as much at minus 5 degrees C as it does at 55 C. Little by little EVs, in normal to cold climates, will experience this problem.

California plans to have over 25 million such vehicles in the not too distant future. In fact, Gov. Gavin Newsom’s plans to ban sales of new, gas-powered passenger cars and trucks in California by 2035.

The utility companies have thus far had little to say about the alarming cost projections or the certain increased rates they will be required to charge their customers. It is not just the total amount of electricity required but the transmission lines and fast charging capacity that must be built at existing filling stations. Neither wind nor solar can support any of it, of course. Biden’s idea that they can is just another of his politically-correct illusions.

Also ignored is the direct cost to the consumer of buying EVs. A new study by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) Energy Initiative concluded that it will probably be more than a decade before EVs will be price-competitive with fossil fuel-powered cars.

The main reason for this is the lithium-ion batteries used in EVs, which account for about one-third of the cost of the vehicle, according to the MIT study. Just do the math: lithium-ion battery packs used in EVs cost anywhere from $175 to $300 per kilowatt-hour (KWh). A midrange EV typically has a 60 KWh battery pack. So, taking, say, a battery at the average cost per KWh ($237.5 per KWh), that would cost $14,250 just for the car’s batteries.

The hope is to get the battery price down to $100 per KWh by 2025. But the MIT study explains that even meeting that price target by 2030 would require material costs to remain constant for the next 10 years while global demand for these batteries is expected to skyrocket. How likely is that, Joe?

And talk about heavy! Although the modern lithium-ion battery is four times better than the old lead-acid battery, gasoline holds 80 times the energy density. The lithium-ion battery in your cell phones weighs less than an ounce while the Tesla battery weighs 1,000 pounds.

Biden is apparently also unconcerned that China controls most of the lithium and cobalt needed to produce batteries and they are often produced with child labor and near-slave labor, and with practically no health, safety or environmental safeguards. But then, the Biden family has been heavily invested in China, so perhaps they have a financial stake in this too.

Joe tells us that he will work to develop a new fuel economy standard that goes beyond what the Obama/Biden administration put in place. But the fuel economy standards brought on by Obama led to lighter weight and less safe vehicles. As we explained in our April 7^th America Out Loud article, “Trump Administration Overturns Unsafe Obama Automobile Standards:”

“The Obama administration was effectively in partnership with overzealous environmental groups who never cared about public safety or economics. The long-term goal was simply to eliminate the use of fossil fuels at all costs.”

And Biden says he will go beyond the dangerous Obama-Biden standard.

And finally, Joe is either naïve or ignorant when it comes to electric vehicle tax credits. As we explained in our America Out Loud January 1, 2020 article, “A Rough Road Ahead For Electric Cars,”

“Up until now, the EV tax credit was granted on an honor system with no required affidavits to prove the credit was actually earned. The Treasury Inspector General for Tax Administration (TIGTA) recently reported that of 239,422 EV tax credits claimed between 2014 and 2018, it identified 16,510 as potentially erroneous. Some are outright frauds; others are to second owners who do not qualify or those leasing vehicles who also do not qualify. Worse yet a Congressional Research Service study showed that 80% of all EV tax credits go to households with incomes exceeding $100,000. Truly a wealth redistribution in the wrong direction that liberals should not like.”

Note: Dr. Lehr, the senior author of this article, discussed how Joe Biden’s energy and climate plan is “sheer insanity” on the Lars Larsen Show on October 23, 2020. You can listen to the 7-minute interview here.

November 5, 2020 Posted by aletho | Deception, Progressive Hypocrite | Joe Biden, United States | Leave a comment

Angelina Jolie’s MI6 Interview Shows Just How Connected Hollywood Is To the Deep State

By Alan Macleod | MintPress News | November 4, 2020

With election fever still gripping the U.S., talk of rigging or interference in the democratic process is reaching new levels, high enough that even Hollywood legend Angelina Jolie is talking about it. In an extraordinary interview in Time magazine, the star of “Wanted, Maleficent, and Lara Croft: Tomb Raider,” sat down with the former head of the UK’s MI6 spy network, Sir Alex Younger, to ask how worrying the threat from Russia or China really is.

“Russia feels threatened by the quality of our alliances and, even in the current environment, the quality of our democratic institutions. It sets out to denigrate them, and it uses intelligence services to that end. It is a serious problem, and we should organize to prevent it,” the British spook told the actress.

Younger also went on to discuss the rise of China, and how the West must act to challenge the supposed threat Beijing poses. “We are going to have two sharply different value systems in operation on the same planet for the foreseeable future. We mustn’t be naïve. We need to retain the capacity to defend ourselves,” he told Jolie.

Never challenging him, Jolie even asked the head of perhaps the world’s most notorious spying agency how we can protect ourselves from fake information.

To some, the pairing of a Hollywood star and a veteran spymaster might seem strange. But, in reality, the silver screen and the national security state have always been intimately intertwined. And as much as Jolie presents herself as a leading humanitarian, even being appointed as a Special Envoy for the UN Commission for Refugees, she has spent an inordinate amount of her free time rubbing shoulders with some of the world’s worst human rights abusers.

At World Refugee Day in 2005, Jolie shared a stage with then-U.S. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice. Rice was a key player in the Bush administration, responsible for the Afghanistan and Iraq invasions, two of the world’s worst humanitarian and refugee crises that continue to plague the planet to this day.

Jolie herself has slowly become a leading member of the U.S. national security apparatus, joining the influential and well-endowed Council on Foreign Relations think tank in 2007, and penning a joint op-ed in The New York Times with John McCain two years ago calling for U.S. intervention in Syria and Myanmar. “Around the world, there is profound concern that America is giving up the mantle of global leadership,” they questionably asserted, decrying America’s “steady retreat over the past decade” that has, “dangerously eroded the rule of law,” and condemned the Trump administration’s inaction in Syria that could have “deterred mass atrocities,” and reduced the refugee crisis.

Salt

Jolie’s collaboration with high-level government officials is not limited to her personal life, however. The 45-year-old Californian has also worked closely, and openly, with CIA officials as part of her movies. A case in point is the 2010 blockbuster Salt, where Jolie plays a CIA agent accused of being a Russian spy. The movie was released at the same time as the real-life Anna Chapman scandal, where the Russian national was caught spying for her country inside the U.S., and marked the beginning of hardening American relations with Moscow, ending up at the point where some have declared the beginning of a new Cold War.

“Salt was the first big cultural product reflecting this geopolitical change, for most of the 2000s Hollywood had no interest in evil Russians,” Tom Secker, an investigative journalist with SpyCulture.com told MintPress. “If you watch the film the Russian politicians are clearly based on Vladimir Putin and Dmitry Medvedev.”

Jolie, playing an evil Russian spy in Salt, chokes out an NYPD officer

“We talked to a lot of the women in the CIA,” said Jolie of her experiences preparing for her role. She appeared to have nothing but admiration for the organization; “One after the other, they are just these lovely, sweet women that you can’t imagine being put in a dangerous situation, but they really are,” she added. Salt even hired a former CIA officer to be an on-set technical advisor.

A CIA document Secker shared with MintPress highlights the extent of CIA involvement in Hollywood and their reasons for doing so. “In an effort to ensure an accurate portrayal of the men and women of the CIA,” it reads. “For years the Agency has worked with creative artists from across the entertainment industry. [The CIA Office of Public Affairs] interacts with directors, producers, screenwriters, authors, documentarians, actors and others to help debunk myths and provide authenticity, and of course to protect Agency equities,” it adds. But perhaps the most important reason stated is, “to help prevent inappropriate negative depictions of the Agency,” in mass media.

Propaganda on an enormous scale

The level of state involvement in Salt is far from abnormal. In fact, Alford and Secker’s book “National Security Cinema” details how, since 2005, documents they obtained showed that the Department of Defense alone had closely collaborated in the production of over 1,000 movies or TV shows. This includes many of the largest film franchises, such as “Iron Man,” “Transformers,” “James Bond,” and “Mission: Impossible,” and hit TV shows like “The Biggest Loser,” “Grey’s Anatomy,” “Master Chef” and “The Price is Right.”

In general, the military or the CIA will offer free services to productions, such as the use of prohibitively expensive military equipment, or technical direction, in exchange for editorial control over scripts. This allows the agencies to make sure the power, prestige, and integrity of these organizations are not challenged. Sometimes entire movies are radically rewritten.

“The Department of Defense actually apologized in their covering letter to the producers of “Hulk” (2003), since the changes they required were so extensive,” Dr. Matthew Alford of the University of Bath told MintPress.

“But really the disturbing thing here is the pattern and the scale… What I suggest is that we focus on the deliberate, major, secretive pressures that rewrite scripts — and we find they’re all on the side of the national security state. Systematically scrubbed from the screen is an unsavoury century of military history including war crimes, illegal arms sales, racism and sexual assault, torture, coups, assassinations, and weapons of mass destruction. It amounts to the airbrushing of an entire mediated culture.”

Thus, the large majority of big-budget productions featuring military or intelligence services have been greenlighted by the national security state, who have negotiated for control over the message in order to better propagandize both Americans and the global public. However, serious antiwar content rarely makes it to network TV or Hollywood drawing boards, so wholescale interference is usually unnecessary.

In 2014, former Deputy Counsel or Acting General Counsel of the CIA, John Rizzo, wrote that his organization “has long had a special relationship with the entertainment industry, devoting considerable attention to fostering relationships with Hollywood movers and shakers—studio executives, producers, directors, big-name actors.” Many of America’s most familiar faces have visited the organization’s headquarters in Langley, VA, including Will Smith, Robert De Niro, Mike Myers, Bryan Cranston, and Tom Cruise.

In recent years, collaboration has become even more overt. The Department of Defense even tweeted out during the Oscars how proud it is to work so closely with Hollywood to further its own image.

Meanwhile, the latest series of the hit spy show “Jack Ryan,” for instance, has the eponymous CIA hero travel to Venezuela to help overthrow tyrannical dictator Nicolas Reyes (a clear allusion to current president Nicolas Maduro). John Krasinski, who plays Ryan, said that he worked closely with the Agency in order to make the show more realistic. Krasinski also described the CIA as amazingly “apolitical.” “They’re always trying to do the right thing,” he said of them, claiming they “care about the country in a bigger, more idealistic way.”

Last month, a real CIA agent, Matthew John Heath, was arrested outside Venezuela’s largest oil refinery carrying explosives, a grenade launcher, a submachine gun, and stacks of U.S. dollars.

“Probably Hollywood is full of CIA agents and we just don’t know it. And I wouldn’t be surprised at all to discover that this was extremely common,” said “Batman” star Ben Affleck in 2012, before going to describe himself, perhaps jokingly, as a CIA agent himself.

Propaganda works

The effect of years of propaganda has been to improve the standing of the deep state and make the American public more conducive to supporting the tactics of the CIA and the military. One academic study found that showing torture scenes from the hit spy series “24” to liberal college students made them far more likely to support the use of it against anyone deemed an enemy of the state.

Democrat-aligned voters’ opinion of the FBI has been steadily rising over the last decade, to the point that 77% hold a favorable view of the institution (and almost two-thirds of the country supports the CIA).

Thus, while the entertainment industry might be liberal in that it largely opposes Trump and donates to the Democratic Party, it works closely to support and uphold the national security state, promotes ultra-patriotism and American aggression throughout the world. While Jolie might present herself as a champion of human rights, working with the very institutions responsible for destroying those rights around the globe undermines this assertion.

Alan MacLeod is a Staff Writer for MintPress News. After completing his PhD in 2017 he published two books: Bad News From Venezuela: Twenty Years of Fake News and Misreporting and Propaganda in the Information Age: Still Manufacturing Consent.

November 4, 2020 Posted by aletho | Mainstream Media, Warmongering, Militarism, Progressive Hypocrite | CIA, Human rights, UK, United States | 8 Comments

Bernie’s DSA blacklists Iran media: No change with Biden win?

By Ramin Mazaheri – Press TV – November 1, 2020

PressTV’s motto is to give “voice to the voiceless” and so we have given priority to non-mainstream political groups during our coverage of the US presidential election. We have spoken with socialists, Greens, Libertarians and more, but the Democratic Socialists of America – perhaps best exemplified by failed presidential candidate Bernie Sanders – has openly blacklisted Iranian media.

After repeated requests, the Chicago chapter of DSA wrote to Press TV that, “The officers of our organization have decided that it would not serve our interests to do an interview.”

This caused PressTV management to contact DSA’s headquarters in New York City to confirm if this allegedly-leftist political group was really enforcing a blacklist on the entire media of an internationally-recognized nation. As expected, no response was given, so – crucially – no denial either.

It is a disheartening policy for a group which openly promises that – if elected in greater numbers – their members will push the Democratic Party and thus the entire nation to an unprecedentedly progressive left.

Take, for example, their most prominent member, Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. She said as recently as September, “I think, overall, we can likely push Vice-President Biden in a more progressive direction across policy issues. I think foreign policy is an enormous area where we can improve; immigration is another one.”

That begs obvious questions: How can DSA officials from the national down to the local level make US foreign policy more progressive if they refuse to talk to foreigners and their representatives? Should DSA members get elected or be appointed to public office, their members are willfully ignorant of foreign viewpoints.

Just as worrying regarding the quality of the public service they will provide, DSA cadres are being trained to use a unilateral approach when dealing with non-Americans. Lastly, how authentic and patriotic is DSA if they are not reflecting the values which the average American seems to champion, such as the freedom of the press?

While Americans are days away from voting in their election, Iran’s next presidential election is in June.

It appears critical for Iranian voters to consider that if DSA – the allegedly-leftist wing of the Democratic Party – refuses to engage in normal cooperation with friendly Iranian media, then what is the likelihood that such people are going to truly push Washington’s Iran policy in a more open and progressive direction?

So even if Democrats win next week, DSA’s blacklist raises the question: How could a Joe Biden presidency drastically alleviate the US-led sanction war on Iran?

The Democratic Socialists of America should immediately reform their wrongly-guided decision to blacklist Iranian media. Refusal to do so would be an extremely belligerent policy which only helps to lay the groundwork for ignorance, murderous sanctions, war and anti-internationalism, and by a group which claims to be “Democratic” and “Socialist.”

November 1, 2020 Posted by aletho | Progressive Hypocrite | Democratic Party, Sanctions against Iran, United States | 1 Comment

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Guaido’s true colors: “President” to fix Venezuelan relations with Israel

By Jim Carey | Geopolitics Alert | February 13, 2019

Caracas – In an interview over the weekend, “interim President” of Venezuela Juan Guaido promised he would work on restoring relations with Israel.

Despite not actually having a government or being in any type of official position of power within Venezuela Juan Guaido is still somehow making big promises. Last week it was the promise to sell oil he doesn’t control to the US and this week he is setting foreign policy for a state, a military, and a diplomatic core that he doesn’t have.

Regardless of Juan Guaido’s material position, Israel has been more than willing to indulge in the US fantasy in Venezuela and was one of the early states to recognize the fraud as “interim President.” Now it seems Guaido is more than willing to repay the favor should he ever actually hold office.

Guaido made this promise in a recent interview with the Israel Hayom newspaper where he told the interviewer that he was “very happy to announce that the process of stabilizing relations with Israel is in full swing.” While what exactly that means when you’re a President with no power is rather ambiguous, for some reason Guaido has said restoring relations “is very important for us.”

Regardless of all these factors, there are still several reasons the new President has made this a high priority. Even without any actual diplomatic staff recognized by the state, Guaidó has still been in contact with Israel and has even discussed opening a new Venezuelan embassy in Israel, saying it “is one of the subjects we are talking about.”

Another reason Guaidó claims he wants to restore relations with the Zionists is due to the fact that there “are many Venezuelans in Israel and many Jews in Venezuela.”

According to Guaidó, this Venezuelan Jewish community “is very active and prosperous”… continue

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Jolie, playing an evil Russian spy in Salt, chokes out an NYPD officer

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