Trump’s anti-ISIS envoy admits he MISLED president about US troop numbers in Syria to keep them there
RT | November 13, 2020
When President Donald Trump ordered all but a few hundred US troops withdrawn from Syria, his own diplomats hid the true number of American forces from the president, envoy Jim Jeffrey has revealed in a new interview.
“We were always playing shell games to not make clear to our leadership how many troops we had there,” Jeffrey, envoy to the global coalition against Islamic State (IS, formerly ISIS) told Defense One on Thursday. Jeffrey added that the actual number of troops in northeastern Syria is “a lot more” than the 200-400 that Trump agreed to leave behind last year.
Trump’s withdrawal appeared to make good on his campaign-trail promise to extricate the US from its “forever wars” in the Middle East. Trump, who referred to Syria in 2018 as “sand and death,” angered a host of Pentagon chiefs and diplomats when he announced the near-total pullout from the country last October. Defense Secretary Jim Mattis resigned in protest when Trump first announced withdrawal plans in 2018, and Jeffrey said on Thursday that the decision was “the most controversial thing in my fifty years in government.”
Jeffrey’s predecessor, Brett McGurk, also handed in his notice when Trump revealed the pullout. Taking over from McGurk, Jeffrey and his team routinely misled the president to ensure that “there was never a Syria withdrawal.”
Even before he signed up to work for the Trump administration, Jeffrey’s opposition to the president was well known. Shortly after Trump was named as the Republican candidate in 2016, Jeffrey signed a letter declaring that the businessman and TV host “would be the most reckless president in American history.” The letter’s other signatories included a host of Bush administration security officials, who helped shape the policies that destabilized the Middle East and gave rise to Islamic State.
Despite his open and secret opposition to Trump’s policies, Jeffrey told Defense One that the president’s “modest” approach to the Middle East has yielded better results than George Bush’s military interventionism or Barack Obama’s apologetic overtures to Muslim leaders while arming extremist militias in Syria.
Trump, by contrast, has managed to put together a political alliance between Israel and a number of Gulf states, while maintaining relations with Iraq and focusing pressure on Iran. Conflict in the region is frozen in a “stalemate,” Jeffrey noted.
“Nobody really wants to see President Trump go, among all our allies,” he said. “The truth is President Trump and his policies are quite popular among all of our popular states in the region. Name me one that’s not happy.”
Trump’s withdrawal plans throughout the region have earned him the scorn of policy hawks in Washington. When the New York Times published an anonymously sourced report in June accusing Russia of paying Taliban fighters to kill American troops in Afghanistan, the Democrat-controlled House Armed Services Committee voted to deny Trump the funding for a withdrawal from the war-torn country. Before the Times’ report was published, Trump signed a deal with the Taliban to end the 19-year conflict, and White House plans for a withdrawal by fall were leaked. The report was later debunked by the Pentagon itself.
Trump has since moved to withdraw from Afghanistan again, tweeting last month that “we should have the small remaining number of our BRAVE Men and Women serving in Afghanistan home by Christmas!”
A number of rapid-fire personnel changes at the Pentagon seem to confirm that Trump intends to withdraw further from the Middle East. Retired Army Col. Douglas Macgregor – a long-time proponent of ending the war in Afghanistan – was appointed on Wednesday to serve under new Acting Defense Secretary Christopher Miller. CNN reported that departing Defense Secretary Mark Esper had been pushing back against Trump’s withdrawal plans, calling them “premature.”
However, the results of this month’s election are still unclear, and Trump’s tenure in the White House may be coming to an end. Should Joe Biden eventually be declared president, Jeffrey advised the Democrat to stick to the Trump doctrine in the Middle East. “I think the stalemate we’ve put together is a step forward and I would advocate it,” Jeffrey said.
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
NY Times Disparages the Scientific Method While Attacking NOAA Scientists
By H. Sterling Burnett – ClimateRealism – October 29, 2020
The New York Times (NYT) published an October 27 article accusing President Trump of fighting “against climate science,” while the NYT itself misrepresents climate science.
In the article titled, “As Election Nears, Trump Makes a Final Push Against Climate Science,” the NYT implies the Trump administration is fighting against climate science by appointing research meteorologist Ryan Maue, Ph.D., as chief scientist at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), and appointing David Legates, Ph.D., former state climatologist for Delaware, as deputy assistant secretary of commerce for observation and prediction at NOAA. Maue’s appointment is problematic according to the NYT because he “has criticized climate scientists for what he has called unnecessarily dire predictions.”
A google scholar search of Maue’s publications shows he is well qualified for the position of NOAA chief scientist. Maue has authored or co-authored more than 30 peer-reviewed articles discussing climate change. Simultaneously, Maue served as a meteorologist at WeatherBELL Analytics, a widely used weather forecasting service. Much of Maue’s research presents real-world data to demonstrate that human-induced climate change is not causing more powerful and more frequent hurricanes.
A Google Scholar search of Legates’ name shows he has authored or co-authored 140 peer-reviewed climate-change-related articles. The topics of Legates’ papers range from the earth’s climate sensitivity as shown by actual measurements, the validity of climate models, drought and flood patterns across the United States, and the impact of warming on polar bear populations. Once again, the objective record shows Legates is well qualified to direct and inform government research on climate related matters.
The NYT is not the first mainstream media outlet to criticize the Maue and Legates appointments. For example, Climate Realism refuted the ad-hominem charges leveled against Legates by National Public Radio shortly after his appointment to NOAA. The author of that Climate Realism article wrote, “The very definition of science, in its most-basic sense from The Enlightenment to 2020, is ‘questioning the basic tenets’ of current assumptions. [Legates has] examined the data for many, many years and has not seen persuasive evidence that humans are the chief drivers of climate change.”
NOAA is charged with assembling the National Climate Assessment every four years. The report includes input from 13 federal agencies and outside scientists, supposedly to present objective knowledge concerning the causes and consequences of climate change. Rather than being objective, NOAA’s 2018 report referenced the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s (IPCC) worst-case scenario to claim climate change poses an imminent and dire threat to the United States. The IPCC itself has disavowed its worst-case scenario, admitting it has only a three-percent chance of becoming a reality.
NOAA’s Climate Assessment ignored hundreds of unalarming peer-reviewed articles and books published by dozens of prominent researchers including, for example, physicists Will Happer, Ph.D., Richard Lindzen, Ph.D., Willie Soon, Ph.D., and atmospheric scientists, John Christy, Ph.D., Pat Michaels, Ph.D., and Roy Spencer, Ph.D. These scientists, and many others, have published research showing that the human impact on global temperatures is and will be, at most, minimal. According to these scholars, natural factors, such as, cloud formation, solar activity, and large-scale ocean circulation patterns are the dominant drivers of climate shifts. Other studies have concluded, based on measurable data, that the modest climate change the Earth has so far experienced has been beneficial. Research also indicates a continued modest increase in temperatures is highly unlikely to result in extreme weather changes.
NOAA has also previously ignored findings of the 14 peer-reviewed volumes produced by the Nongovernmental International Panel on Climate Change. In particular, NIPCC’s Climate Change Reconsidered series presents a comprehensive literature review of the peer-reviewed evidence indicating human influence on climate is minimal and that present climate change is not catastrophic. NIPCC’s reports are written and/or reviewed by hundreds of researchers, yet the past political leadership of NOAA has ignored them and the thousands of peer-reviewed papers they reference.
The appointments of Maue and Legates to NOAA present an opportunity to reinforce the proper use of the scientific method in government research. The Scientific Method demands that researchers question self-proclaimed consensus science. In the field of climate research, this means carefully considering the broad range of evidence concerning the causes and consequences of climate change when federal reports are developed. This would represent a shift from NOAA’s previous practice, in which it referenced a narrow body of research to support the politically predetermined conclusion that dangerous human-caused climate change is happening.
It is not surprising that the NYT dismisses the Trump administration’s attempts to defend the Scientific Method from doctrinaire views of climate change. Trump’s previous efforts to bring transparency to scientific research and to prevent corruption in the funding process for scientific research have been similarly critiqued by climate alarmists. Left-leaning mainstream media outlets, academics who’ve learned to manipulate the current closed system, and political partisans who use the cloak of “following the science” to promote their personal political agendas reject transparency and support self-dealing.
As the peer-reviewed research by Legates, Maue and hundreds of other scientists makes clear, there is an active scientific debate concerning the causes, extent, and consequences of climate change. Trump’s appointments of Legates and Maue may bring justified and necessary balance to federal reports on the state of climate science.
Anti-Trump mole Miles Taylor unveils President’s ‘shocking sins’… mostly farcical outbursts & PUBLIC promises to voters
By Tony Cox | RT | October 31, 2020
The ex-Trump staffer who revealed himself as the author of an anonymous New York Times piece has tried to frame publicly stated policies, such as removing troops from Syria, as scandalous revelations and crimes against America.
Miles Taylor, a former Department of Homeland Security (DHS) employee, tweeted a list Saturday of what he called “foolish, unethical, un-American and/or illegal” directives that he witnessed from President Donald Trump during his tenure in the administration. But rather than condemning the president, the list appears to show the commander-in-chief taking steps that reflect the policies he promised to voters when he campaigned successfully for the job in 2016.
For instance, Taylor cited Trump as saying “Let’s get the hell out of Afghanistan” and “Let’s get the hell out of Syria” on his list of alleged wrongdoing. Several of his other allegations had to do with deterring illegal immigration and altering policy to make immigration more advantageous to the country. For example, Taylor listed well known Trump statements on bringing more immigrants from prosperous nations and cutting off aid to Central American countries to force them to cooperate with the administration on migration policy.
Trump told us: Let’s ditch these NATO countries (despite it being the backbone of the U.S. global defense alliance). (13 of 25)
— Miles Taylor (@MilesTaylorUSA) October 31, 2020
Taylor also rehashed claims from a book that alleged absurd demands on border security, such as building a moat, using an electrified fence with spikes on top and shooting illegal immigrants in the legs to slow them down. Trump has denied those accusations. Taylor also faulted Trump for calling to “gas migrants at the border.” The president has openly defended use of tear gas to deter hundreds of migrants who rushed the border simultaneously to try to overwhelm enforcement agents.
Trump talked tough on border enforcement during the 2016 election, much to the delight of his supporters. He has made every effort to deliver on his immigration promises, which has been made more difficult by a lack of support from people in his own party and administration. Ironically, Taylor, now a CNN contributor, thought he was impugning Trump Friday when he said, “I think I can count on two hands the number of people around this president that I really think are true loyalists.”
The former DHS employee also cited an alleged request by Trump to “spy on the personal phones of White House staff to catch leakers” as one of Trump’s grave sins against America.
Taylor’s list is perhaps less revealing about Trump – offering no surprises – than the Deep State bureaucrats who have worked against the president’s agenda for the past four years. Missing is any notion that the elected president has a right to have his stated policy agenda – his mandate from voters – carried out faithfully by executive branch employees.
For example, Taylor thought it was a gotcha stab at Trump to allege that he told staffers to “stop talking about Russian election interference, and I’m going to fire those people that do. (Russian President Vladimir) Putin is our friend.”
Trump campaigned on a desire to build a more friendly relationship with Russia – a position that Washington’s unelected bureaucracy refused to accept. He also called Democrat allegations of collusion with Moscow in the 2016 election a “hoax,” and it might have been reasonable for him to expect the people in his own administration to refrain from joining what he saw as a conspiracy to oust him from office.
Taylor took issue with those policies when he wrote an anonymous New York Times op-ed in September 2018, saying that he and “like-minded colleagues” were working to “thwart” the president’s agenda. The Times said it was taking a “rare step” of publishing the op-ed without identifying the writer, whom it described falsely as a “senior official” in the Trump administration. CNN allowed Taylor to keep his job at the network despite the fact that he lied on air to host Anderson Cooper about not being the anonymous Trump critic.
“Miles Taylor was always a neocon,” Will Chamberlain, editor of Human Events, said in reaction to the supposedly damning Trump list. “He had no business being in the Trump administration.”
Many other observers reacted similarly, including one who tweeted, “So getting out of wars was considered illegal by this guy.” Another said, “You mean he’s against law and order?” Author Mike Cernovich summed up the reaction of Trump supporters to Taylor’s list in one word: “And?”
Anti-Trump camp took the opposite view, thanking Taylor for coming forward, though some faulted him for not doing it sooner and others asked for corroborating evidence. Another Twitter commenter said the allegations were “exactly in line with everything we’ve heard out of his mouth for years.”
So from either side’s point of view, Trump was essentially doing what he said he was going to do when he got elected in a constitutional republic that was supposedly designed to reflect the will of the people.
By Tony Cox, a US journalist who has written or edited for Bloomberg and several major daily newspapers.
Weapons of Mass Distraction
By Eric Striker • National Justice • October 22, 2020
The most remarkable thing about the Iraq war debacle isn’t the trillions of dollars wasted or hundreds of thousands of innocent people and US servicemen killed, but the fact that all of the journalists who promoted the lie to the American people were never held to account.
During the 2000s, a bipartisan cabal of overwhelmingly Jewish media personalities coordinated with American intelligence services to concoct the lie that Saddam Hussein was developing weapons of mass destruction to use against the United States.
The role of neoconservatives in this endeavor, primarily as Bush administration officials coordinating the war, is well known. What has been forgotten is the integral role “liberal” publications like the New York Times, Washington Post and others played in selling the WMD hoax.
The Times’ Judith Miller is credited with being one of the first to plant unsubstantiated WMD tales in popular consciousness, but other Jews — many of them also seen as unambiguously “liberal” — also played an active role in lying to drum up support for Bush’s war for Israel: Ezra Klein (currently of Vox ), Jeffrey Goldberg (now editor of The Atlantic), and Jonathan Chait (star columnist at the New Yorker). That’s just a shortlist.
Amazingly, every one of these individuals has only grown in prestige and influence in the press in the aftermath. Even Iraq war sin chicken Judith Miller remained unapologetic in her 2015 rehabilitation tours. She has since 2016 been hired by conservative outlets like Fox News and City Journal, now dedicating her columns to promoting foreign election meddling claims.
The gravest problem now with our Jewish controlled media is that all of the Iraq war disinformation agents, not just Miller, are now amongst the loudest amplifiers of the US intelligence community’s latest baseless hysterics alleging that every act of low-level trolling, dissenting political opinion, or news report (including initially the Hunter Biden story) that they find inconvenient is an inorganic product of Russian, Chinese or Iranian “election meddling” or “disinformation.”
To what ends? To lower public confidence in liberal institutions? To cause division and polarization? To make people afraid to vote and even more afraid of the outcome? The intelligence community’s Chicken Littles are doing this on a much wider scale than any supposed foreign agent.
Earlier today, the Director of National Intelligence John Ratcliffe held an “important” national security conference besides American NKVD leader Christopher Wray claiming that crudely written emails sent by someone impersonating the pro-Trump group, Proud Boys, telling registered Democrats in Florida not to vote was in fact an act of “election interference” by Iran. Intelligence operatives at the announcement also mentioned that Russia was conspiring with them by harvesting US political registrations for ill-intended reasons. No evidence was provided for either allegation.
The claim is ridiculous because, first of all, Florida political registrations are publicly available and easily found online. Anyone can obtain them without engaging in cyber crime or hacking.
Secondly, unflinching hostility towards Iran and over the top loyalty to Israel first is an issue Joe Biden and Donald Trump both enthusiastically agree on.
Trump and Biden are equally bad for Iran in distinct ways. Biden supports escalating Washington’s military presence in Syria and placing pressure on Iraq to cut ties with Iran.
Trump on the other hand has for the last few years attempted to starve the Iranian people into submission with “maximum pressure” sanctions, but this has been paired with military retreats in geostrategic zones of the Middle East that Israel believes are important to maintain a foothold in.
The Iranians and Russians don’t have a dog in America’s 2020 election fight between Oreo and Hydrox. Seeing how only 67% of Democrats are excited to vote for Joe Biden, it looks like Biden’s uninspired and mailed-in candidacy is the foremost act of interference in his campaign.
Meanwhile, Iran has responded with fury typical of a falsely accused man. The nation’s diplomats have lodged an official complaint at the United Nations demanding the FBI and DNI stop making frivolous accusations of trying to intimidate voters in America. President Hassan Rouhani’s counter is that both candidates — who are just spokesmen for Washington’s permanent bureaucracy — are enemies of the Iranian nation.
Today’s press conference by Wray and Ratcliffe was more akin to the despots in 1984 switching back and forth between blaming Eurasia (Russia) and Eastasia (China and Iran) during Hate Week. It’s a moronic distraction from their moronic failures, corruption and the artificially induced climate of fear they have created in our homeland.
It’s an attempt to shoehorn into tonight’s debate the non-issues of “election interference” and “disinformation” that most of the American public, which is suffering from problems like hunger and unemployment, has tuned out.
From weapons of mass destruction to weapons of mass distraction, both personify the Jewish post-truth order.
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.
Claims of dramatic loss of Great Barrier Reef corals are false
Corals expert hits out at media reports
GWPF | October 15, 2020
Claims that Australia’s Great Barrier Reef has lost half of its coral cover between 1995 and 2017 have received global media coverage.
The stories were based on a new paper co-authored by controversial Australian researcher, Professor Terry Hughes of James Cook University.
But according to Professor Peter Ridd, a leading authority on the Great Barrier Reef, these claims are false.
According to Professor Ridd, the best data on coral cover is taken by the Australian Institute of Marine Science (AIMS), who have been measuring over 100 reefs every year since 1986:
“AIMS data shows that coral cover fluctuates dramatically with time but there is roughly the same amount of coral today as in 1995. There was a huge reduction in coral cover in 2011 which was caused by two major cyclones that halved coral cover. Cyclones have always been the major cause of temporary coral loss on the Reef.”
Coral cover of the Great Barrier Reef 1986-2019; AIMS/Peter Ridd 2020
This is not the first time that Professor Hughes has made such claims about coral loss. His previous study was strongly criticised by the AIMS scientists responsible for collecting and publishing the coral data.
Moreover, Professor Hughes has refused to make public the raw data upon which he made this claim, despite repeated requests.
“This latest work by Prof Hughes needs a thorough quality-audit to test its veracity”, says Ridd. “Prime-facie, there are excellent grounds to treat it with great scepticism.”
Contact
Professor Peter Ridd
e: peterridd@yahoo.com.au
Colonel Alexander Vindman’s Revenge
Another “expert” with an agenda surfaces
By Philip Giraldi • Unz Review • October 13, 2020
During last year’s impeachment process directed against President Donald Trump, Congress obtained testimony from a parade of witnesses to or participants in what was inevitably being referred to as UkraineGate. It centered around an investigation into whether Trump inappropriately sought a political quid pro quo from Ukrainian leaders in exchange for a military assistance package.
The prepared opening statement by Lieutenant Colonel Alexander Vindman, described as the top Ukraine expert on the National Security Council (NSC), provided some insights into how decision making at the NSC actually works. Vindman was born to a Jewish family in Ukraine but emigrated to the United States at age three. He was commissioned as an army infantry officer in 1998 and served in some capacity in Iraq from 2004-5, where he was wounded by a roadside bomb and received a purple heart. Vindman, who speaks both Ukrainian and Russian fluently, has filled a number of diplomatic and military positions in government dealing with Eastern Europe, to include a key role in Pentagon planning on how to deal with Russia.
Vindman, Ukrainian both by birth and culturally, clearly was a major player in articulating and managing U.S. policy towards that country, but at that time it was sometimes noted that he did not really understand what his role on the NSC should have been. As more than likely the U.S. government’s sole genuine Ukrainian expert, he should have become a good source for consideration of viable options that the United States might exercise vis-à-vis its relationship with Ukraine, and, by extension, regarding Moscow’s involvement with Kiev. But that is not how his statement before congress, which advocated for a specific policy, read. Rather than providing expert advice, Vindman was concerned chiefly because arming Ukraine was not proceeding quickly enough to suit him, an extremely risky policy which had already created serious problems with a much more important Russia.
Part of Vindman’s written statement (my emphasis) is revealing: ”When I joined the NSC in July 2018, I began implementing the administration’s policy on Ukraine. In the Spring of 2019, I became aware of outside influencers promoting a false narrative of Ukraine inconsistent with the consensus views of the interagency. This narrative was harmful to U.S. government policy. While my interagency colleagues and I were becoming increasingly optimistic on Ukraine’s prospects, this alternative narrative undermined U.S. government efforts to expand cooperation with Ukraine.”
Vindman was also interested in promoting a policy that would limit any damage to the Democratic Party. Note the following additional excerpt from Vindman’s prepared statement to Congress: “…. I was worried about the implications for the US government’s support of Ukraine…. I realized that if Ukraine pursued an investigation into the Bidens and Burisma, it would likely be interpreted as a partisan play which would undoubtedly result in Ukraine losing the bipartisan support it has thus far maintained.”
So Alexander Vindman clearly was pushing a risky alternative policy that had not been endorsed by either the president of the United States or the secretary of state, who were and still are the responsible authorities for making decisions relating to foreign and national security issues. It is therefore tempting to conclude that Vindman was an integral part of the Washington inside-the-beltway Deep State, which believed the solution to the Ukraine problem was to send arms to Kiev to enable an attack on Russia that would in turn weaken President Vladimir Putin. Along the way, Vindman attempted to make the absurd claim that the political situation in Kiev was somehow important to U.S. national security, asserting that “Ukraine is a frontline state and a bulwark against Russian aggression.” He did not care to ask the inevitable next question, “Aggression against whom?” The combined visions of Russia as an aggressive, expansionistic power coupled with the brave Ukrainians serving as a bastion of freedom is so absurd that it is hardly worth countering.
It is perhaps not surprising to learn that Colonel Vindman is at it again, joining the chorus of former government officials who are seeking to bring about the defeat of Donald Trump in November. And this time around he has the useful bully pulpit provided by the New York Times and The Atlantic, which have featured a Times op-ed co-authored by him followed by a recorded and transcribed interview as well as another article based on yet another interview with The Atlantic. The Times op-ed revealed that Vindman has not learned anything about how the government works since he made the statement to Congress last year. In a piece entitled “Trump Has Sold Off America’s Credibility for His Personal Gain: From China to Ukraine, this president has acted at odds with American foreign policy. Imagine what he could do with four more years” it cites Vindman’s perspective that “… the president and his associates asked officials in Kyiv to deliver on Mr. Trump’s political interests in exchange for American military aid needed to defend Ukraine… This was not a unique instance of Mr. Trump’s personal priorities corrupting American foreign policy. As the 2020 election grew closer, the president increasingly ignored the policies developed by his own government and instead pursued transactions guided by self-interest and instinct.”
Colonel Vindman is wrong in not realizing that when it comes to foreign policy “his own government” is the president whose decisions are binding, whether one likes it or not. And he also fails to understand that bilateral international agreements and understandings are a process of horse trading, with favors being done by both sides. Trump was certainly within his rights to want to know about possible illegal activity carried out by the son of a former Vice President.
The Atlantic piece, written by editor in chief Jeffrey Goldberg, former Israeli prison guard and now leading anti-Trump malcontent, quotes Vindman and editorializes as follows: “’President Trump should be considered to be a useful idiot and a fellow traveler, which makes him an unwitting agent of Putin,’” he says. Useful idiot is a term commonly used to describe dupes of authoritarian regimes; fellow traveler, in Vindman’s description, is a person who shares Putin’s loathing for democratic norms. But do you think Russia is blackmailing Trump? “’They may or may not have dirt on him, but they don’t have to use it,’” he says. “’They have more effective and less risky ways to employ him. He has aspirations to be the kind of leader that Putin is, and so he admires him. He likes authoritarian strongmen who act with impunity, without checks and balances. So he’ll try to please Putin.’” Vindman continues, “’In the Army we call this ‘free chicken,’ something you don’t have to work for—it just comes to you. This is what the Russians have in Trump: free chicken.’”
It is very easy to despise what passes for foreign policy in the Trump White House, but the alternative of rule by agenda-driven bureaucrats like Colonel Alexander Vindman is even more unpalatable from a constitutional point of view. His original testimony before Congress, wrapped in an air of sanctimoniousness and a uniform, should be regarded as little more than the conventional thinking that has produced foreign policy failure after failure in the past twenty years. Russia the perpetual enemy requiring “friends” like Ukraine with little regard for the actual threat level or the potential consequences. The fact that Vindman is how exploiting a bully pulpit on the largely discredited New York Times while also getting into bed with the scoundrel Jeffrey Goldberg should tell one all that is necessary to know. Trump is right about ending America’s love affair with foreign wars, even though it is a subject that neither he nor Joe Biden will be discussing. Vindman is little more than an apologist for why those useless wars are promoted and are continuing.
Philip M. Giraldi, Ph.D., is Executive Director of the Council for the National Interest, a 501(c)3 tax deductible educational foundation (Federal ID Number #52-1739023) that seeks a more interests-based U.S. foreign policy in the Middle East. Website is https://councilforthenationalinterest.org, address is P.O. Box 2157, Purcellville VA 20134 and its email is inform@cnionline.org.
WSJ ‘investigation’ of aggregator that dared include RT scares other members into ditching the network
By Helen Buyniski | RT | October 8, 2020
After social media censorship failed to zero out RT’s web traffic, an establishment US media outlet has revealed it reached out to sites in the same link-exchange network as RT, spooking them into backing out.
The Wall Street Journal has launched an investigation into a link aggregator that includes RT.com, publishing the names of participants and the network itself in an effort to shame them into kicking the site off, in a hit piece on Wednesday. If this thinly-veiled intimidation is the behavior of a democratic country’s media, one shudders to imagine what an authoritarian nation might have done.
RealClearPolitics – a mostly-nonpartisan site that reports poll results and political news – is held up as an example, guilty of wrongthink through its association with Mixi.Media, a web-ring that links to headlines from news sites of various political persuasions (including RT) at the bottom of partners’ webpages. Mixi doesn’t show the source of the headlines right away, no matter where they come from, which –in the eyes of the Journal– proves it’s up to something nefarious.
The pearl-clutching pseudo-exposé made it clear that even unwitting association with RT is beyond the pale in this paranoid day and age. “If [readers] see RT, they are going to freak out,” Mixi founder Alex Baron is quoted as saying. Asked whether he agrees with RT’s “politics,” he answers in the negative, of course. However, the implication is made that he’s a Kremlin agent at heart through his past association with a Russian private equity firm – never mind that he’s suing that firm after being fired in 2018. Merely working for a company owned by a Russian executive initiates an irrevocable cootie-transfer.
The Journal doesn’t illustrate exactly how they approached the web-ring participants for the piece, but at least five sites were sufficiently intimidated –including The Blaze, Newser, and AccuWeather– that they fled Mixi’s network after being asked about the Russian intruder in their midst. Presumably the dialogue went something like “Gee, that’s a nice news outlet you’ve got there, sure would be a shame if it got shut down for Russian collusion.”
If that sounds like an exaggeration, one need only refer to the New York Times’ warning that merely reporting a story RT has covered is actually “sowing discord” and “creating division.” As far back as 2016, the Washington Post was accusing US-based, US-run alt-media websites of being Russian “useful idiots” merely for disdaining to go along with Washington’s neoliberal warmongering agenda, laundering its smears through the anonymous Ukrainian front “PropOrNot.”
The WSJ’s “don’t click that link – there might be Russians in it” scare story is just the latest in a long string of efforts to pressure friendly networks into giving RT the cold shoulder. The same outlet bemoaned RT’s seeming invincibility to TV censorship back in January 2017 as part of a multi-pronged media blitz ginned up by the US intelligence community’s attempt to implicate RT in “meddling” in the 2016 election – an allegation that has never been remotely substantiated yet has become part of the narrative wallpaper for the American establishment, assumed to be true even in the absence of evidence.
The dubious allegations of hacking the Democratic National Committee were followed by a lengthy screed against programs RT no longer even aired – but that was enough for the New York Times and other “papers of record” to pile on a competitor they didn’t know they had, treating the uninspired smear like a smoking gun. Breaking precedent set by other state-owned foreign media, the Justice Department forced RT to register as a “foreign agent.” The designation was subsequently held up, bizarrely, as “proof” it was foreign propaganda, as officials insisted it was voluntary, even though the network was threatened with criminal charges if it refused.
And the UK Sunday Times pulled a similar stunt to the WSJ’s back in 2017, phoning up RT’s British advertisers – many of whom were spooked by the probing questions into pulling their ads – and misrepresenting their vanishing act as motivated by the channel’s “propaganda and fake news.”
Efforts to sideline RT have only increased since then, with first YouTube and more recently Facebook and Twitter labeling it as state-run foreign media and burying its content. WSJ’s report glossed over the obvious follow-on effect from such a move, crowing gleefully that social media traffic to the site dropped 22 percent from 2018 to July and web traffic in general dropped 14 percent.
But until it drops to zero, the US’ propaganda mill will never be satisfied. Having coasted for decades with a virtual monopoly on viewers’ eyeballs, its quality declined accordingly, and the rise of the internet saw Americans hungrily lapping up any alternative source of information. When they’re presented with the sight of rioters burning businesses, bibles, or people and told these are peaceful democratic protesters who must be supported, they recoil not because they are propagandized by RT or some other outlet, but because they’re aware they’re being lied to.
With the 2020 election looming on the horizon, social media platforms and news outlets alike are renewing their fatwa against all things Russian. That reliable “enemy” ensures they will never have to answer for the many holes in their own one-sided coverage, the flagrant falsehoods regularly passed off as gospel, and the unrelenting fear porn that keeps too many Americans glued to their TV set. Heaven forbid they change the channel – they might trip over the truth.
Helen Buyniski is an American journalist and political commentator at RT. Follow her on Twitter @velocirapture23
How NYT’s Trump Tax “Bombshell” Turned Out to be Yet Another Big Nothing Burger
By Ekaterina Blinova – Sputnik – 06.10.2020
The New York Times’ report on Trump’s tax returns has missed a number of its apparent targets failing to implicate the president or find his alleged ties to Russia, says Wall Street analyst Charles Ortel, adding that those who leaked Trump’s financial data may face criminal charges and civil damages.
The leaker or leakers who handed Donald Trump’s tax returns to The New York Times may have committed a felony, writes Just the News, a US national news agency founded by American investigative journalist John Solomon.
The NYT disclosure came amid the Democratic lawmakers’ longstanding effort to obtain Donald Trump’s tax returns which is seen by the president’s proponents as a “fishing expedition” aimed at disrupting his presidency and the 2020 campaign, along with the “Russia collusion” story and an attempt to impeach him.
‘The Leaking is a Crime’
In a note to the NYT’s “bombshell” article in question, the newspaper’s executive editor Dean Baquet insisted that the president’s tax information “was legally obtained by reporters”, adding however, that they are not making the records themselves public because they “do not want to jeopardise our sources, who have taken enormous personal risks to help inform the public”.
“Under federal and state laws, income tax returns are confidential”, stresses Wall Street analyst and investigative journalist Charles Ortel. “The rationale is they normally contain extensive amounts of information that filers would not want shared either with the general public or especially with competitors and political rivals”.
Citing Joseph diGenova, a former US Attorney for the District of Columbia, Just the News noted last Friday that if the documents were obtained by an IRS employee, a lawyer or an accountant, the leaking “definitely” constitutes a crime that could result in both criminal and civil legal actions.
In particular, Internal Revenue Code, Section 6103, protects an individual’s tax return information from disclosure to other parties by the IRS. In addition, 26 US Code § 7213 says that it’s a felony if any officer or employee of the United States discloses unauthorised information, including tax returns.
“It is unlikely that Trump or any family member leaked income tax information to the New York Times“, Ortel suggests. “However, it’s possible that disgruntled staff at a law firm or accounting firm may have done so. If true such actions would likely carry criminal penalties, and civil damages.”
Another possibility, more likely, is that federal or state government officials may have leaked this sensitive information to the paper, according to the investigative journalist.
“If true, this would be deeply concerning not simply to Trump and his supporters but to most sensible Americans”, he warns.
Kevin Brady (R-TX), the top Republican on the House Ways and Means Committee, shares similar concerns. On 28 September, he issued a statement regarding the NYT’s story on Trump’s tax return raising the alarm over “the prospect that a felony crime was committed by releasing the private tax return information of an individual” and calling for an investigation into the matter.
‘10,000 Empty Words on Trump’s Taxes’
One might ask as to whether taking these “enormous personal risks” and leaking the president’s tax returns was worth the pain. In other words, did the NYT disclose something really “damning” about the president? According to Ortel, nothing of that kind was reported by the newspaper.
While the media’s story is largely focused on Trump’s alleged tax avoidance, it is not a crime to offset losses incurred against income, the Wall Street analyst underscores.
“Moreover it is common to use options available in relevant jurisdictions to make one claim about the value of a given asset and a different one in a loan application”, he says. “In every case, Trump and his organisation certainly will have worked closely with professionals to make sure that all claims were reasonable and defensible”.
Apart from this, Ortel doubts that a team of New York Times reporters have conducted a thorough and accurate analysis of the president’s documents.
“For a filer like Donald Trump, engaged in so many activities inside the US, tax returns are certainly lengthy and so complicated that professional firms likely are involved in submitting them, including accountants and lawyers”, the Wall Street analyst underscores.
As for left-leaning mainstream media’s claims that “Trump’s tax avoidance is a tax on the rest of us”, they have apparently overlooked the fact that “generations of Trumps employed thousands of New Yorkers directly and indirectly producing incomes and spending that filled tax coffers at federal, state, city and county level”, as Ortel noted in his 29 September opinion piece for The American Thinker.
“So, a fair accounting of all tax revenues created by the Trump Organisation likely will show enormous positive impact overall“, the analyst believes.
What Did NYT Reporters Fail to Find?
Still, it’s more important what the NYT “did not find”, i.e. any proof of Trump’s alleged “collusion” with Moscow which the Dems are continuing to speculate about even though Special Counsel Robert Mueller dug up no evidence to back these assumptions, the analyst notes.
In response to Trump’s unwillingness to release his tax returns after assuming the Oval Office, MSM observers suggested that the documents may show income from Russian sources or debt owed to Russians which potentially could make the president vulnerable to Moscow’s “influence”.
On 10 July 2020, Elaine Kamarck of the Brookings Institution insisted that “once in office, Trump proceeded to do things that raised suspicions about his relationship with Russia”. She claimed that there is no other way to answer whether the president “has been propped up by Russian money” than making his tax returns public.
However, the NYT’s review of the president’s financial documents has apparently hammered the final nail into the Dems’ “Trump-Russia collusion” story, according to Ortel: “Mueller and the New York York Times have failed to produce any evidence of Russian support, state or otherwise, to the Trump political campaign or enterprises”, he stresses.
“The decision to target Trump for theoretical illegal links to Russia clearly seems to be ‘gaslighting’ – bleating these scurrilous charges to distract from actual corruption involving a host of foreign powers going all the way back to Bill Clinton’s days as Arkansas governor forward to the present”, Ortel says referring to the “pay-to-play” scheme allegedly established by the Clinton Foundation.
NYT ‘Disclosure’ Won’t Make Trump Release His Returns
Trump’s tax returns leak bears some resemblance to what happened to Richard Nixon in 1973: nearly two years ago Politico referred to a scenario in which the president could be forced to release his tax returns.
“Disclosing confidential tax information is a felony”, the magazine wrote on 23 December 2018. “If Democrats can’t release Trump’s returns publicly, then they can’t discuss anything they see in them without putting themselves in legal jeopardy”.
The media outlet recollected that in 1973 The Washington Post and The New York Times launched a series of reports raising the question of whether President Nixon “grossly underpaid” what he owed the government.
In October 1973, the Providence Journal-Bulletin obtained Nixon’s tax returns, and released a “blockbuster report” indicating that the president paid just $792.81 in federal income taxes in 1970 and $878.03 in 1971. Nixon submitted to media pressure and agreed to make his tax returns public to restore “the confidence of the American people in the integrity of the president”. However, it did not help Nixon much amid a series of scandals which prompted him to resign on 9 August 1974 in the middle of his second term.
So, will the NYT article about Trump’s tax records affect the president in the same way and force him to publish his returns to clear the air before the election? If this was the trick it did not work, according to Ortel.
“I suspect he will not release any tax return information until, at the earliest, after the election”, the Wall Street analyst presumes. “This decision will further enrage Never Trumpers, but not lessen the enthusiasm that his base has to win re-election for Donald J. Trump”.
History as Warfare: The ‘1619 Project’ and the Plot to Destroy the Republic
By Matthew Ehret | Strategic Culture Foundation | October 4, 2020
“Repression is the only lasting philosophy. The dark deference of fear and slavery, my friend, will keep the dogs obedient to the whip, as long as this roof shuts out the sky.”
– Marquis St. Evrémonde (from Dickens’ Tale of Two Cities)
A major cultural fight has broken out between Donald Trump’s recently announced 1776 Commission and the NY Times’ 1619 Project.
While Trump’s commission designed to “promote patriotic history” naively paints over some glaring hypocrisies of American history by placing figures like Hamilton, Jackson, Jefferson and Lincoln in the same boat (thus keeping a bit too much bathwater along with the baby), it does represent an important major cultural battle over the soul of America which is now sitting precariously upon a new civil war, military coup threat and total disintegration.
In his recent Sept. 17 speech attacking the 1619 Project and announcing his 1776 Commission, Trump said quite rightfully:
“Whether it is the mob on the street, or the “cancel culture” in the boardroom, the goal is the same: to silence dissent, to scare you out of speaking the truth, and to bully Americans into abandoning their values, their heritage, and their way of life.
“We are here today to declare that we will never submit to tyranny. We will reclaim our history and our country for citizens of every race, color, religion, and creed.
“The radicals burning American flags want to burn down the principles in our founding documents, including the bedrock principle of equal justice under law. In order to radically transform America, they must first cause Americans to lose confidence in who we are, where we come from, and what we believe…. The left-wing cultural revolution is designed to overthrow the American Revolution.”
Attacking the underpinnings of Critical Race theory which attempts to assert that belief in rational thought, hard work and the nuclear family were the result of “whiteness”, Trump invoked Martin Luther King saying:
“where children are not judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character. Critical Race Theory, the 1619 project, and the crusade against American history, are toxic propaganda, ideological poison that, if not removed, will dissolve the civic bonds that tie us together. It will destroy our country.”
What is the 1619 Project?
The New York Times’ 1619 Project, which was unveiled in June 2019 by Nikole Hannah-Jones, attempts to smear the entirety of American history as simply a slave-promoting fraud from the moment the first slave arrived in Jonestown in 1619.
During its short existence, this “project” has quickly won over thousands of academics, and in spite of its proven fallacies (which it had to secretly cover up in Orwellian fashion), Jones was still awarded the Pulitzer Prize legitimizing the fraud in the minds of countless school administrators, policy-makers and academics.
If one truly accepts the claims of the 1619 Project which have become turned into a Pulitzer curriculum and already embedded in 4500 U.S. schools, then America’s dissolution would be no great loss to the world. In fact, one would have to conclude that since the republic was always built upon the defense of slavery (going so far as to paint the British Empire as an anti-slavery bastion which the founding fathers broke away from only due to their fear of having their slaves removed), then America was always… evil.
The First Paradox
If it were true that the creation of the American republic was just driven by a desire to protect the institution of slavery from the abolition-loving British then it should be asked: why did every American state shut down the African slave trade by 1793??”
Don’t believe me? Let the facts speak for themselves.
By 1784, six states in the new nation had voted to totally abolish slavery (Rhode Island in 1774, Vermont in 1777, Pennsylvania in 1780, Massachusetts in 1781, New Hampshire in 1783 and Connecticut in 1784), while the importation of all new slaves was banned by every other state by 1793. The important Northwest Ordinances passed in the 1787 Continental Congress ensured that no slavery would be permitted in the immense North West Territories (giving rise to the later addition of Ohio, Indiana, Illinois, Michigan and Wisconsin as free states). This agreement was established during the 1774 Continental Congress where a non-importation act was signed by all colonies stating: “That we will neither import, nor purchase any slave imported, after the first day of December next; after which time, we will wholly discontinue the slave trade, and will neither be concerned in it ourselves, nor will we hire our vessels, nor sell our commodities or manufactures to those who are concerned in it.”
Another Paradox
If Britain was threatening to end the slave trade as the 1619 Project authors teach, then why did the Empire override dozens of petitions from the colonies between 1650-1765 demanding an end to slavery? Rather than oppose slavery, the British Royal Africa Company, under the direction of the Privy Council, and Board of Trade enforced the mass important of 8 million African slaves into the Americas during the 18th century alone! These same organizations constantly strove to destroy all efforts to establish manufacturing within the colonies from 1630-1765 which everyone knew was the only effective pathway to liberating a society from reliance on slave labor.
Additionally, IF it were true that the 1776 revolution were driven by the intent to protect the slave economy from the freedom-loving British Empire, then why did England only ban slavery in 1807 and why did they wait until 1833 to begin extending this ban across their colonies?? Did the founding fathers have a crystal ball and act on events that would occur only 65 years in the future? If the British truly hated slavery so much, then why did the empire maintain a global system of subjugation, famine and exploitation across Asia, Ireland and beyond for so many generations?
So what happened? Was the British Empire seriously pushing an anti-slavery agenda? Why did America’s anti-slave trajectory fall apart so soon after the revolution and why did the rot spread to the point of necessitating a Civil War by 1861?
How to proceed with a serious investigation?
The Matter of Money
Since one of the most effective keys to understanding history starts with the question of “who controls the money”, economics is a good place to start.
Approaching the matter this way will cause the inquiring mind to confront the battle between two opposing paradigms of statecraft which defined the world in which the American revolution arose as part of an international phenomenon involving leaders from Russia, France, Germany, Ireland, Spain, India and Morocco.
The battle over what sort of system of economics would govern America after political independence was achieved in 1783 will here become a very valuable question.
Where certain players of that age believed that “value” should be locked into rules of money-worship and profit (which all people desired since money bought pleasure and helped us avoid pain), others disagreed and believed value should be looked for elsewhere. These others believed that value transcended matters of pleasure/pain and touched upon something less transient and more universal… but what?
Introducing Ben Franklin
During the 18th century, these latter forces centered themselves around the figure of America’s “father of founding fathers” Benjamin Franklin who drafted some of the most important policies that led to the sovereign control over currency from his 1729 On the Necessity for a Paper Currency, onwards. Franklin used his powerful printing presses to spread both sovereign banking and anti-slavery pamphlets, books and treatises for decades before the revolution itself was declared in 1775. One of the most powerful anti-slavery books printed by Franklin was the influential 1737 ‘All Slave Keepers Who Keep the Innocent in Bondage’ by Benjamin Lay which argued that any Christian keeping slaves was an offense against God.
Lay wrote: “No greater sin Hell can invent than to prophane and blaspheme the pure and Holy Truth, which is God all in all, and remove God’s creatures made after his own image, from all the comforts of life and their country… and bring them into all the miseries that dragons, serpents, devils and hypocrites can procure and think of”.
In the mind of Franklin and his co-thinkers these issues (economics and slavery) represented two sides of the same fight.
Franklin argued in his many writings that “value” originated in what you create that satisfies the needs of humanity, and not what “things” you possess or wish to consume. Since a society of creators/producers requires sovereign manufacturing to generate real wealth and constant internal improvements of infrastructure to coordinate the development of all parts of a nation under a unified intention, Franklin recognized clearly that the production generated by “slave labor” is a chimera and actually represented a form of “anti-value”. Like heroine consumption today, anti-value simply means any form of “momentary profits” that might even be measurable as GDP and generate money flows, but actually represents a destruction of that society’s ability to sustain its own existence over time. (1)
The reason for this is simple.
Slavery destroys the creative powers of mentation in both the laboring slave who is valued only for their animal labor, and also the decadent slave master who’s potential for creativity becomes narrowly defined by ways to keep the slave under control.
It is thus no coincidence that Franklin also created the anti-slavery alliance in the 1760s and later founded the 1785 Society for Promoting the Manumission of Slaves” alongside several of his devoted proteges. These proteges included the figures of Alexander Hamilton, John Jay, and Gouvernor Morris who all happened to become the creators and leaders of the “American System of political economy” premised on the use of a national bank, productive credit, protective tariffs, and large scale manufacturing to promote the economic sovereignty of the new nation. I introduced some of this in my recent essay How to Save a Dying Republic: Hamilton’s Genius.
When Jefferson took control of the Presidency from 1801-1809, a major victory was won for the pro-slavery oligarchs of America who saw immense profits to be gained by spreading their peculiar form of society under a perverse form of Manifest Destiny.
Admittedly, these oligarchs would have been much happier with the victory of Aaron Burr to the presidency in 1801 since an immediate dissolution of the union would have occurred between slave and free states as early as 1804 (to be discussed in a future essay). Unlike Burr, Jefferson was at least against breaking up the Union into northern and southern confederacies (with the free states merging with Canada and the slave states becoming their own nation), and that is why Hamilton (Jefferson’s political nemesis) ironically organized aggressively for his victory winning the fatal ire of Burr.
Sadly, Jefferson’s devout belief in agrarianism, hate for manufacturing, love of slavery, and British enlightenment thinking still made him an instrument for the slave power’s cancerous growth during his terms in office.
The British Empire’s Global Game
By destroying Indian textiles and subduing the “Chinese dragon” with a program of mass opium consumption that would stain the 19th century, the City of London quickly took control of world textile manufactures which created a primary export market for southern slave plantation cotton and a new set of addictions began: the addiction to the easy money derived from cheap slave labor. This proto globalization established a global closed system of controls onto all nations through cash cropping, free trade, speculation and drugs.
By 1840 over 20% of the British population was employed in textiles under such anti-human conditions that Charles Dickens described in his Tale of Two Cities and other writings.
The Best of Times and Worst of Times
With the 1804 murder of Hamilton, and undermining of America’s national credit system between 1804-1836, British free trade grew as protective tariffs were taken down, and credit towards infrastructure projects like the Erie Canal, roads, rail, etc shriveled up. Speculation ran rampant whenever this monetarist system was unleashed driven by booms and busts and the rise of “state-rights” programs that superseded all national initiatives. This process was taken directly from classic divide to conquer tactics which I outlined in my last essay Lincoln and the Greenbacks.
An astute Whig economist looking upon this bipolar process in America (while comparing it to the depressingly stagnant Canadian economic situation of 1791-1850) stated in 1853:
“Though the ratio of the increase of the population has been greater in Canada than in the United States, yet their increase of wealth has barely kept pace with the population, and they are as poor as they were half a century since. They have enjoyed the blessings of Free Trade with England all the time, we have only a part of the time. Whenever we have attempted to supply ourselves by our own industry, with the comforts and necessaries of life, we have improved our condition as a people; and during the intervals of Free Trade and large importations of foreign goods, we have relapsed again into a condition bordering on bankruptcy; while the Canadians have been constantly exhausted, and kept so poor by Free Trade, as to be unable to get sufficient credit to have even the ups and downs of prosperity and bankruptcy in succession.” (2)
The Slave Power Spreads
By 1836, the 2nd National Bank was officially killed after a mass propaganda campaign convinced a duped mob that it was an instrument of tyranny in America, and over the coming 6 decades, the only five presidents who would make any serious effort towards reviving America’s nationalist system would end up dead while in office (Harrison in 1841, Taylor in 1850, Lincoln in 1865, Garfield in 1880, and McKinley in 1901). The man who is today celebrated for having “killed the bank” and “paying Americas debts” was in reality a force of pure destruction. Jackson “paid the debt” by cutting all infrastructure projects and unleashing mass speculation which resulted in a devastating 1837 bank panic that drove the nation into discord and depression. An unrepentant racist, Jackson also gave enormous assistance to the slavocracy by emptying the southern lands of Cherokee in the genocidal “Trail of Tears” and giving the land over to cotton planting oligarchs loyal only to their profits, “way of life” and the British Empire.
This story is told in all of its ugly detail in historian Michael Kirsch’s groundbreaking 2012 study “How Andrew Jackson Destroyed the United States”.
Between 1801 to 1840, southern cotton exports exploded from 100,000 bales/year to 1 million bales/year with 80% of the exports going to Britain. The City of London-Wall Street-New Orleans triangle dominated the world system with New Orleans representing over 12% of all U.S. banking capital. The southern slave states grew to represent the world’s fourth biggest economy through the support of the British Empire both financially and also in the logistical support needed to import mass slavery into the Americas. This degeneration proceeded slowly until the presidencies of Jackson and his handler Martin van Buren, but after this, cotton exports increased to 4 million bales/year by 1860 and the slave power grew immensely under the Kansas-Nebraska Act of 1854 that ensured the spread of slavery west of Mississippi.
While many radical abolitionists in the USA and British Canada then advocated the dissolution of the union as an alternative to civil war, stronger souls like Frederick Douglass recognized the higher historic fight at hand. As a lesson to modern anarchists who believe in the 1619 Project and feel no sorrow at the burning of America under a new civil war today, Douglass took the time to research history, and broke with William Lloyd Garrison (the leader of the abolitionist movement) defending the Constitution in 1852:
“I differ from those who charge this baseness on the framers of the Constitution of the United States. It is a slander upon their memory… In that instrument [the U.S. Constitution] I hold there is neither warrant, license, nor sanction of the hateful thing; but interpreted, as it ought to be interpreted, the Constitution is a Glorious Liberty Document. Read its preamble, consider its purposes. Is slavery among them? Is it at the gateway? or is it in the temple? It is neither. While I do not intend to argue this question on the present occasion, let me ask, if it be not somewhat singular that, if the Constitution were intended to be, by its framers and adopters, a slaveholding instrument, why neither slavery, slaveholding, nor slave can anywhere be found in it”.
This higher understanding of history and the principles of the Constitution caused Douglass to ally himself with Lincoln where he worked with all his might to recruit 200,000 black soldiers to the cause. Later in life, Douglass attacked British free trade and “cheap labor” in defense of the Nationalist system writing in 1871:
“Cheap Labor, is a phrase that has no cheering music for the masses. Those who demand it, and seek to acquire it, have but little sympathy with common humanity. It is the cry of the few against the many. When we inquire who are the men that are continually vociferating for cheap labor, we find not the poor, the simple, and the lowly; not the class who dig and toil for their daily bread; not the landless, feeble, and defenseless portion of society, but the rich and powerful, the crafty and scheming, those who live by the sweat of other men’s faces.”
The British Hand Behind the Civil War
During the entirety of the Civil War, the British Empire’s guiding hand could always be felt, from supplying the south with battle ships, weapons and finances to providing logistic and diplomatic support internationally. Even British Canada was given over to the Confederacy’s intelligence headquarters which deployed spying, money laundering, and terrorist operations against the Union during the entire war.
Speaking to the British Parliament, Lord Robert Cecil (Marquis of Salisbury) expressed Britain’s logic succinctly when he said in 1861:
“The Northern States of America never can be our sure friends because we are rivals, rivals politically, rivals commercially…. With the Southern States, the case is entirely reversed. The population are an agricultural people. They furnish the raw material of our industry, and they consume the products which we manufacture from it. With them, every interest must lead us to cultivate friendly relations, and when the war began they at once recurred to England as their natural ally.”
A future installment will tackle the role of British operations in Canada that organized the murder of Lincoln, sabotaged the industrial reconstruction of the South, and undid the internationalization of Lincoln’s system around the world during the 19-20th centuries. This sabotage of potential created the foundations for the creature embedded within America now organizing a new Civil War and dissolution of the republic once and for all.
The author can be reached at matt.ehret@tutamail.com
(1) In the minds of those dirigistes like Franklin (including the Colbertist school of France, and its international leaders like Jonathon Swift, Daniel Dafoe, and Cotton Mathers in America who all wrote pamphlets supporting manufacturing over slave labor), a machine produced by the creative mind of man can accomplish the work of 100 laborers- thus liberating those laborers from the demands of the material forces of nature and freeing them to develop their powers of mind.
(2) Ezra Champion Seaman, Essays on the Progress of Nations (1853), p. 599
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