Vice President Harris says US backs Kiev ‘in defense of NATO alliance’
RT | March 13, 2022
US Vice President Kamala Harris has said that, by fighting Russia, Ukraine is defending the US-led NATO alliance in an apparent gaffe.
In a speech to the Democratic National Committee’s (DNC) winter meeting in Washington, DC on Saturday, Harris argued that Russia’s offensive in Ukraine “threatens not just Ukraine’s democracy” but “democracy and security across Europe,” as well as overseas.
“The ocean that separates us will not leave us untouched by this aggression,” Harris claimed, before seemingly suggesting that Ukraine is doing NATO’s bidding.
“So I will say what I know we all say, and I will say over and over again: The United States stands firmly with the Ukrainian people in defense of the NATO alliance,” she said.
However, the transcript of the speech released by the White House suggested that Harris misspoke with “and” being added before “in defense of the NATO alliance.”
“The United States stands firmly with the Ukrainian people and in defense of the NATO Alliance,” the transcript reads.
That did not stop the VP’s critics on social media from accusing her of a foreign policy blunder. Some Republicans questioned whether Harris mistakenly believed Ukraine was a member of the alliance.
While Kiev was initially passionate about joining NATO, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky indicated this week that he had become less interested in the idea, accusing the US-led military bloc of not doing enough to support Ukraine. NATO has previously rejected Zelensky’s appeal for the establishment of a no-fly zone over the country, arguing it would drag the whole alliance into the conflict with Russia.
“I’ve become less passionate about this issue after we understood that NATO isn’t ready to accept Ukraine,” said Zelensky on Monday, accusing NATO of being “afraid of controversial things and a confrontation with Russia.”
“I’ve never wanted Ukraine to be a country that is on its knees, begging for something. And we’re not going to be that country,” he added.
Imagine If MSM Consistently Applied The Evidentiary Standards It’s Applying To Hunter Biden’s Emails
By Caitlin Johnstone | October 14, 2020
Mainstream media and social media platforms are actively blacking out an October surprise published by The New York Post which purports to show “smoking gun” emails from the laptop of Hunter Biden, son of Democratic nominee Joe Biden.
Both Twitter and Facebook have censored the story on their platforms, the first time we’ve seen the powerful social media giants deplatform a mainstream news media article, both citing concerns about the origins of the emails and an uncertainty about the veracity of the claims.
“Facebook was limiting distribution of the story while its outside fact-checkers reviewed the story’s claims, spokesman Andy Stone said,” reports NPR, adding that “Twitter said it decided to block the story because it couldn’t be sure about the origins of the emails.”
Twitter claims it found the emails to be in violation of its policies banning content which contained private information and its rules against “hacked materials”, both of which would have forbidden all articles sharing the contents of the 2016 WikiLeaks drops if those rules had existed back then. As I warned could happen back in August, these rules have set the stage for the cross-platform censorship of a 2020 October surprise.
There’s a good thread going around Twitter compiling posts that mainstream media reporters have been making in objection to the circulation of Hunter Biden’s emails alongside posts made by those same reporters promoting far more ridiculous and insubstantial allegations, like MSNBC’s virulent Russia conspiracy theorist Kyle Griffin saying nobody should link to the New York Post report because if they do they’ll be “amplifying disinformation”.
A new Reason article discusses how the mass media are not just avoiding the story but actively discouraging it:
On Wednesday, The New York Post published an attention-catching original report: “Smoking-gun email reveals how Hunter Biden introduced Ukrainian businessman to VP dad.” In the previously unreleased email, which was allegedly sent on April 17, 2015, an executive with Burisma, the Ukrainian natural gas company, thanks Hunter Biden for “giving an opportunity” to meet Joe Biden, according to The NY Post.
It’s a story that merits the attention of other journalists, political operatives, national security experts, and also the public at large — not least of all because there are serious questions about its accuracy, reliability, and sourcing. And yet many in the media are choosing not just to ignore the story, but to actively encourage others to suppress any discussion of it.
Indeed, two mainstream reporters who acknowledged (and criticized) the Post’s scoop — The New York Times’ Maggie Haberman and Politico’s Jake Sherman — faced thunderous denunciation on Twitter from Democratic partisans simply for discussing the story. Center for American Progress President Neera Tanden accused Haberman of promoting disinformation, and New York Times columnist Michelle Goldberg told Sherman that he was helping nefarious conservative activists “launder this bullshit into the news cycle.” Historian Kevin Kruse asked why they were “amplifying” the story.
Indeed a scroll through today’s mainstream news reporting does appear to show some consensus among most news media that the topic of the emails should be avoided, with most MSM articles on the matter covering the after-effects of the New York Post release or explaining why readers should be dubious about its contents. A new Washington Post article titled “Hunter Biden’s alleged laptop: an explainer” takes great pains to outline how important it is to be very, very certain that this story is everything it purports to be before investing any credulity in it.
“How do we know the email is authentic? We do not,” WaPo tells us. “The New York Post posted PDF print-outs of several emails allegedly from the laptop, but for the ‘smoking gun’ email, it shows only a photo made the day before the story was posted, according to Thomas Rid, author of Active Measures, a book on disinformation. ‘There is no header information, no metadata.’ The Washington Post has been unable to independently verify or authenticate these emails, as requests to make the laptop hard drive available for inspection have not been granted.”
This would be the same Washington Post that has been circulating disinformation about Russia for years due to its disinterest in verifying information before reporting, and has alongside the rest of the mass media been promoting the narrative that Russia interfered in the 2016 US election based solely on unproven assertions promoted by government agencies despite many gaping plot holes in that narrative. Where was the journalistic concern for seeing the data and inspecting the hard drives then?
In and of itself there is no problem at all with mainstream news media applying high evidentiary standards to its reporting and making sure readers are aware when political manipulators could be pulling the wool over their eyes. In and of itself this would be a good thing. The problem is that all this emphasis on verification and truth only comes up when it is politically convenient for these plutocratic media outlets, because only favoring truth when it’s convenient is the same as lying constantly.
Where were these high evidentiary standards when The Guardian reported without evidence and against all common sense that WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange had been having secret meetings with Trump lackey Paul Manafort? That evidence never came out, because the story was ridiculous bullshit from the beginning, yet mass media outlets everywhere parroted it to their audiences like it was a fact. You can still post that bogus Guardian story on Twitter and Facebook to this very day without so much as a warning.
Where were these high evidentiary standards when Politico published the idiotic, nonsensical story that Iran was plotting to assassinate the American ambassador to South Africa? The report sparked many news reports and Twitter threats from the president, but when it was dismissed by the South African government itself there was barely a whisper about it. You are still free to share this bogus Politico article anywhere online you like.
Where were these high evidentiary standards when leaks by anonymous spooks dominated headlines for days with their evidence-free allegation that the Russian government had been paying Taliban-linked fighters bounties on western occupying forces? We now know that story was completely baseless and would have been dismissed by news reporters who were actually doing their due diligence, yet it’s still being cited as fact on Twitter by sitting US senators and in a recent vice presidential debate by Kamala Harris. If news reporters had spent anywhere near as much energy cautioning their audiences to be skeptical about this story and educating them about its plot holes as they’re spending on Hunter Biden’s emails, this would not be happening.
The problem is not that there are high evidentiary standards for Hunter Biden’s emails, the problem is that there are virtually no evidentiary standards when the plutocratic media want to sell the world on a narrative which benefits the establishment upon which the media-owning class has built its kingdom. News reports will be waved through on a vague assertion by some anonymous government operative if they are damaging to Russia, Iran, China, North Korea, Syria or any other US-targeted nation, and they are on a pretty much daily basis to greater or lesser degrees.
If a news report facilitates the national security state, all journalistic protocol goes out the window and nobody knows the meaning of the word evidence. As soon as a report becomes inconvenient for a friend of the national security state like Joe Biden, suddenly strict evidentiary standards and warnings against potential disinformation are of paramount importance. This is the same as lying all the time.
They lie because the mass media within the US-centralized empire are the propaganda engine for that empire. The drivers of empire understand that whoever controls the narrative controls the world, so they ensure that all points of narrative influence are tightly controlled by them.
A world where all news stories are held to the same evidentiary standards as Hunter Biden’s emails are currently being held would be a world without empire. People would never consent to the insanity of imperialism and endless war if their consent wasn’t manufactured, and depriving them of the information that is inconvenient for that empire is essential in that manufacturing.
Pro-Israel Kamala Harris pledges not to condition US aid to Israel on human rights
MEMO | August 27, 2020
Senator Kamala Harris, the Democratic nominee for vice president, has eased the concerns of pro-Israel Jewish donors to her party, by pledging not to condition aid to Israel on its human rights record if Joe Biden is elected President.
“Joe has made it clear he will not tie security assistance to any political decisions that Israel makes, and I couldn’t agree more,” Harris is reported saying in a virtual event held with Jewish donors by the Jerusalem Post.
“As vice president, Joe Biden helped ensure unwavering support for Israel’s security,” she continued. “During the Obama-Biden administration, he was a key advocate in securing support for life-saving technologies, which I have seen.”
Vowing to put Israel first, Harris added: “I pledge to you the Biden-Harris administration will sustain our unbreakable commitment to Israel’s security, including the unprecedented military and intelligence cooperation pioneered during the Obama-Biden administration and the guarantee that Israel will always maintain its qualitative military edge.”
The threat of conditioning aid to Israel was suggested by a number of Democrat lawmakers. In July the likes of Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Bernie Sanders signed a letter calling for the $3.8 billion annual aid given to Israel to be made conditional on the Zionist state ending its violation of Palestinian human rights.
Narrative control tightens as panicked anti-Trump aristocrats crank up media gaslight machines
By Mitchell Feierstein | RT | August 17, 2020
Orange Man Bad. It’s a narrative that is being made harder to question every day, even as Democrat-controlled cities descend into chaos and Americans are being fed the same old status quo from the Obama and Clinton era.
The middle and lower classes have been eviscerated, and America’s big cities have been decimated and destroyed by the mob. And who is the mob? They are Antifa, BLM, ideologues (aka Democratic elites) and their multi-million-dollar-a-year media propaganda mouthpieces. The mob and its supporters are creating extreme tribalism that is ripping America apart.
Disgracefully, Democratic Party members of the US Congress are actively calling for “unrest in the streets” and the Democratic Party’s presidential dream team of Joe Biden and Kamala Harris condone this anarchy, chaos and violence by their silence, as they dance to the mob’s tune saying and doing anything to grab power through instilling more fear, terror and uncertainty amongst the voters. Democrats have not denounced the surge in murders, looting, and violence infecting America’s biggest cities, but many are instead actively working to defund the police during a massive crime wave. People have to “shoplift some bread,” as New York City’s member of Congress Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez explains.
The Democratic cabal headed by Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi from California and New York Congressman Jerry Nadler, the chairman of the Congressional Judiciary Committee, have actively denied the murders, arson, looting, and violent crime as buildings burn and jobs disappear (here). It’s all because of America’s systemic racism and white privilege – but don’t believe me, just ask the intelligentsia.
To throw petrol on the arsonists’ blaze, the media have whipped up more unnecessary fear and panic by disproportionately sensationalizing everything as being part of Covid even if their ‘fake facts’ directly contradict the science. This falls perfectly in line with the psyops alleged in the scandalous Millie Weaver documentary ‘Shadowgate’, and before that in Patrick Bergy’s book ‘Victim of the Swamp’ – a fear-based narrative control operation called Interactive Internet Activities, or IIA. It’s your call to what extent you want to believe them, but the expedience with which Shadowgate was censored online (for ‘hate speech’ of all things) and Weaver reportedly got arrested certainly is telling.
Last week, project fear version 2.0 for election 2020 was kicked off by Joe Biden and Kamala Harris demanding that all “patriotic” Americans wear masks for the next three months, claiming it will save 40,000 lives. Biden and Harris refused to cite even a scintilla of scientific evidence or answer any questions. Their policy? Just shut up and obey.
I have discussed at length and how Amazon, Facebook, Google, Twitter, Apple, Netflix and YouTube could manipulate the outcome of the 2020 presidential election. The US two-party system looks content to sit silently and allow the Wall Street-financed Silicon Valley oligarchs to rig the 2020 election and implement a cancel culture with fear and obedience as its main features. Freedom of speech, democracy and liberty will be vaporized. Congratulations, Wall Street – Biden/Harris are ready to do whatever you command.
The rule of law has already been cast aside, along with statues and history, as a ‘racist relic’ created by old white men. In the minds of the mob, the United States is being transformed into a virtue-signaling utopia, which, in reality, has become a lawless banana republic run by a small shrieking violent minority of coastal elites funded by plutocrats with IIA to solidify their rule. Welcome to Wokeistan and its cult-like indoctrination run by omnipotent ‘diversity trainers’.
New York’s ‘Gray Lady’ the New York Times is a prime example, having now morphed into a liberal left echo chamber that tells its readers what to think. It has dropped all journalistic neutrality and has ‘evolved’ into a biased editorial paper that displaces critical analysis, reason, logic and facts. The Times now claims a monopoly on ‘progressive thought’ that is veering sharply from any journalistic integrity and heading down a dark path of ‘woke ideologies’ that distort the truth and include insane platforms such as censorship-based ‘cancel culture’ and ‘abolishing the police’. In conjunction with Hollywood billionaire Oprah Winfrey’s production company Lionsgate, the ‘Narrative Lady’ seeks to put a dishonest spin on history and cancel anyone who dares resist. Why is America’s broken judicial system allowing a dialogue that will enable ANYONE to criticize, discriminate or attack people for the way they were born? Discrimination law is clear – it is illegal to treat people differently based upon their immutable characteristics of skin color, sex, age, ethnicity, nationality, religion, or political inclination.
The overthrow began 30 years ago when the Clintons came into power and academics became more interested in indoctrination than in education. Education has been overrun by cultural Marxism. As George Orwell warned: “War is Peace, Freedom is Slavery and Ignorance is Strength.” Today’s mantra is ‘Diversity is our strength’. If you dispute this, you are racist, sexist, homophobic and a despicable person who the mob will ensure is censored, fired, humiliated, shunned from society and permanently canceled for not subscribing to the dictates.
The left demanded that Joe Biden’s VP pick be a woman of color – not the most qualified person for the job, but a woman of color because of Biden’s Senate record and history on race. In advance of Biden’s capitulation, left-leaning groups crafted and sent all major news outlets 32 pages of guidelines with veiled threats of cancelation if anyone dared question the narrative. If you step over the line, you will be considered racist, sexist and a slew of ‘ists’ too many to name.
Following Harris’s nomination, there was even more magical thinking from coastal academic elites and purveyors of fake news. The New York Times was widely mocked for its rebirth of Kamala Harris and for its revisionist history when it called Kamala Harris a pragmatic moderate. GovTrack rated Harris as the fourth most liberal US senator in the 115th Congress. Harris’ track record as a California prosecutor shows her to be anything but a progressive prosecutor. Harris did not protect victims of sexual predators. Harris failed to prosecute alleged pedophile priests. However, Harris did accept a $50,950 campaign contribution from “board members of San Francisco Catholic archdiocese-related organizations and their family members,” as well as lucrative pay-to-play board appointments. Nothing to see here, look away.
Senator Kamala Harris will do or say anything in her quest for power. Before determining any factual basis for Jussie Smollett’s fake ‘hate crime’, Harris had no problem posting the divisive, inflammatory race-baiting tweet below.
When overwhelming evidence revealed how Jussie Smollett faked this ‘hate crime’, Harris refused to retract her statements and remove this incendiary tweet. Is that leadership? Where is the condemnation? Is Harris someone we want a heartbeat away from the presidency?
This presidential election will be the most consequential for the survival of the republic.
The US is no longer a democracy; it is an oligarchy. Wall Street, Silicon Valley, the media propagandists and the coastal elites demand regime and societal change as well as a cultural shift. Let the book burning begin! Is this what the majority of America wants? Does either political party care about the people they represent?
‘Orange man bad’ is the totality of the Biden/Harris ticket. No questions allowed and any debates are unlikely. Forget the facts that Democrat-controlled cities are currently infested with crime and are borderline uninhabitable, that the wealth inequality gap has never been wider, that tens of thousands of Americans die yearly from opioid addiction, that about 40 million Americans are unemployed and that the Federal Reserve keeps bailing out bankers with a debt tsunami while the bread and circuses of the empire in decline hits a fever pitch. These are minor details because: ORANGE MAN BAD! Rinse, repeat ORANGE MAN BAD!
A Biden/Harris ticket ensures the oligarchy’s agenda will be accelerated, the rich will get richer and everyone else will get screwed – again.
Mitchell Feierstein is the CEO of Glacier Environmental Fund and author of ‘Planet Ponzi: How the World Got into This Mess, What Happens Next, and How to Protect Yourself.’ He spends his time between London and Manhattan. Join Mitch on Twitter, Instagram, and Facebook – @Planetponzi
Kamala Harris Dons Progressive Mantle in Public, Strips it Off in Private as She Courts Israel Lobby
By Whitney Webb | Mint Press News | January 21, 2019
Confirming long-held speculation, Senator Kamala Harris (D-CA) has announced that she will be running for president in 2020, pitting her against other Democratic senators such as Kirsten Gillibrand (D-NY) and Elizabeth Warren (D-MA) as well as Rep. Tulsi Gabbard (D-HI). Harris’ announcement has generated some buzz but surprised few, as she has been considered a likely 2020 contender for the Democratic nomination since early 2017. Harris first tweeted on Monday morning out her plans to run for president along with the Clinton-esque slogan “Let’s do this together.”
She then repeated her announcement on ABC’s Good Morning America, stating that “I am running for president of the United States. I’m very excited about it.” Harris, who decided to launch her campaign on the federal holiday celebrating Martin Luther King Jr., later added, “I love my country. And this is a moment in time that I feel a sense of responsibility to stand up and fight for the best of who we are.”
However, despite the long-promoted “inevitability” of Harris’ campaign, she has failed to garner much enthusiasm from progressive voters, owing to her history of supporting neoliberal policies as well as her pro-Zionist leanings, which she has attempted to keep from public view.
Though hardly “progressive,” Harris – much like another 2020 hopeful, Elizabeth Warren – has sought to cast herself as such in recent years in an effort to unite a fractured Democratic party by publicly catering to progressives while also privately catering to special interests, including the Israel lobby.
In this two-part series, MintPress News will examine how Harris is set to emulate much of Hillary Clinton’s failed 2016 campaign — particularly the distinction between her “private” and “public” positions — while using identity politics to her advantage. This has already begun, with Harris having courted past Hillary campaign staffers and millionaire donors alike. In addition, top establishment liberals like Joy Ann Reid of MSNBC and Clinton advisor Neera Tanden are claiming that legitimate criticism of, and a lack of enthusiasm for, a Harris presidential run on the part of progressives stem from “racism” and “sexism” among left-leaning Americans — reviving the Clinton campaign’s “Bernie bros” narrative that characterizes Bernie Sanders-supporting progressive voters as “all-white” and “all-male.”
One of the clearest examples of Harris’ practice of courting special interests in private while painting a different picture in public is her position on the Israel/Palestine conflict. While Harris once, in 2012 while serving as California’s attorney general, stood up to Israeli government pressure to persecute activists working with the pro-Palestinian rights movement Boycott, Divest, Sanctions (BDS), she made a concerted effort to court pro-Israel interests as she began to pursue her higher political ambitions, namely when she kicked off her 2016 campaign for the Senate.
Since then, Harris has sought to keep a public persona of neutrality on the divisive issue by evasively responding to questions on the issue or avoiding them altogether. At the same time, Harris has been privately pandering to Israel lobby groups in “off-the-record” speeches and during trips to Israel that she and her staff chose not to publicize. This clearly reflects the image that Harris seeks to build of herself as a “progressive centrist” candidate, meaning one who cultivates a public persona of progressivism while also supporting many of the hallmark policies of establishment “centrist” Democrats and courting the mega-donors of the Democratic Party.
A quiet courtship
Once her 2016 Senate campaign was underway, Harris made it clear that she was willing to “look the other way” when it comes to the human-rights abuses regularly inflicted on Palestinians by the state of Israel. That year, in a questionnaire from Jewish News of Northern California, Harris asserted that “Lasting peace [between Israel and Palestine] can only be found through bilateral negotiations that protect Israel’s identity, ensure security for all people and include the recognition of Israel’s right to exist as a Jewish state” — i.e., a Jewish ethnostate that gives other ethnoreligious backgrounds an “inferior” status.
In that same questionnaire, Harris also praised Israel’s Supreme Court, which has helped to enshrine apartheid and also legalized the targeted assassinations of hundreds of Palestinians during intifadas (uprisings), as “a beautiful home to democracy and justice in a region where radicalism and authoritarianism all too often shape government.”
Harris went on to resoundingly reject the non-violent BDS movement, stating:
The BDS movement seeks to weaken Israel but it will only isolate the nation and steer Israelis against prerequisite compromises for peace. At a time when anti-Semitism is on the rise – especially in Europe – and the Middle East is growing increasingly unstable, I believe we should not isolate Israel, the only democracy in the region.”
In 2017, a few months after winning her Senate seat, Harris gave her first public address to the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC), in which she stated:
I believe Israel should never be a partisan issue, and as long as I’m a United States senator, I will do everything in my power to ensure broad and bipartisan support for Israel’s security and right to self-defense.”
Several months later, Harris quietly visited Israel, a trip that she did not post on her website or social media accounts but that was instead announced by Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and another Israeli politician, Yair Lapid, via social media. During the trip, Harris also briefly visited 10 female students at Al-Quds University in the occupied West Bank, where she asked the students whether Israel’s massive separation wall posed “a real barrier” to their movement.
Though her trip to Israel and photo-op with Netanyahu raised some concern, Harris’ decision to court pro-Israel interests has since grown substantially. Much as with her Israel trip though, the California senator has sought to court these interests just out of public view. For instance, in March of last year, Harris spoke to the Israel lobby organization AIPAC at an event called “A Conversation with Senator Kamala Harris.” The event was not listed on the AIPAC conference’s program or website, nor was it promoted by Harris herself. AIPAC Director of Communications Beth Robbins later confirmed to the Intercept that Senator Harris’ remarks were part of “an off-the-record session.”
Though the transcript of her remarks was never made public, one anecdote shared by a participant in the session recounted how Harris had, as a child, helped fundraise for the Jewish National Fund (JNF) “to plant trees in Israel” as opposed to selling Girl Scout cookies or something similar. However, it’s unlikely that Harris mentioned at this gathering that JNF pine plantations are largely used to cover and effectively erase the bulldozed remnants of Palestinian villages that were destroyed by the state of Israel soon after its founding.
In addition to her AIPAC conferences and speeches, Harris’ national security adviser up until May 2018 was Halie Soifer, a long-time advocate for Israel who was also the Obama campaign’s Jewish outreach liaison in Florida in 2008 and a former advisor to former U.N. Ambassador Samantha Power on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Soifer was also previously a speechwriter for the Israeli ambassador to the United States and was a “Next Generation National Security Fellow” with the Center for a New American Security (CNAS), which is headed by Victoria Nuland, of the neo-conservative “Kagan clan,” and Richard Fontaine, former foreign policy advisor to John McCain.
Soifer is now the executive director of the Jewish Democratic Council of America, an Israel lobby organization that “actively promotes foreign and domestic policies consistent with socially progressive, pro-Israel, Jewish community values.”
Having it both ways
While being a pro-Israel senator is hardly uncommon in American politics, what stands out about Kamala Harris is that she has sought to obfuscate her courting of Israel lobby organizations and Israeli politicians. This shows that Harris is not only seeking to make inroads with the powerful pro-Israel lobby and win its support but is also seeking to construct a public persona that courts progressive voters.
However, if Clinton’s 2016 campaign is any indication, separating one’s “public” and “private” positions in order to win votes, while privately courting special interests, is a recipe for disaster — one that assumes progressive voters are easily duped and can be silenced by identity politics.
As the second part of this series will show, Harris’ Clintonesque construction of both a “private” and “public” platform is hardly a coincidence, since she has surrounded herself for much of her young Senate career with numerous Clinton campaign staffers and Obama administration officials and has been zealously courting Hillary Clinton’s former political patrons.
Whitney Webb is a staff writer for MintPress News and a contributor to Ben Swann’s Truth in Media. Her work has appeared on Global Research, the Ron Paul Institute and 21st Century Wire, among others. She has also made radio and TV appearances on RT and Sputnik. She currently lives with her family in southern Chile.