
13-year-old Mary Phagan, the girl raped and murdered by Leo Frank, the founding hero of the ADL
In our modern era, there are surely few organizations that so terrify powerful Americans as the Anti-Defamation League (ADL) of B’nai B’rith, a central organ of the organized Jewish community.
Mel Gibson had long been one of the most popular stars in Hollywood and his 2004 film The Passion of the Christ became among the most profitable in world history, yet the ADL and its allies destroyed his career, and he eventually donated millions of dollars to Jewish groups in desperate hopes of regaining some of his public standing. When the ADL criticized a cartoon that had appeared in one of his newspapers, media titan Rupert Murdoch provided his personal apology to that organization, and the editors of The Economist quickly retracted a different cartoon once it came under ADL fire. Billionaire Tom Perkins, a famed Silicon Valley venture capitalist, was forced to issue a heartfelt apology after coming under ADL criticism for his choice of words in a Wall Street Journal column. These were all proud, powerful individuals, and they must have deeply resented being forced to seek such abject public forgiveness, but they did so nonetheless. The total list of ADL supplicants over the years is a very long one.
Given the fearsome reputation of the ADL and its notorious hair-trigger activists, there was a widespread belief that my small webzine would be completely annihilated when I first launched my recent series of controversial articles in early June by praising the works of historian David Irving, long demonized by the ADL. Yet absolutely nothing happened.
During the next three months my subsequent articles directly challenged nearly every hot-button issue normally so fiercely defended by the ADL and its lackies, so much so that a friendly journalist soon described me as the “Kamikaze from California.” Yet despite my 90,000 words of text and the 13,000 comments I had attracted, the continuing silence of the ADL was absolutely deafening. Meanwhile, my articles were read more than half a million times, with the following being a list of the most provocative pieces:
- The Remarkable Historiography of David Irving
June 4, 2018 • 1,700 Words • 570 Comments
- American Pravda: The JFK Assassination, Part II – Who Did It?
June 25, 2018 • 8,000 Words • 985 Comments
- American Pravda: Oddities of the Jewish Religion
July 16, 2018 • 7,800 Words • 1,637 Comments
- American Pravda: The Bolshevik Revolution and Its Aftermath
July 23, 2018 • 6,900 Words • 913 Comments
- American Pravda: The Nature of Anti-Semitism
July 30, 2018 • 5,500 Words • 666 Comments
- American Pravda: Jews and Nazis
August 6, 2018 • 6,800 Words • 554 Comments
- American Pravda: Holocaust Denial
August 27, 2018 • 17,600 Words • 2,323 Comments
- American Pravda: 9/11 Conspiracy Theories
September 10, 2018 • 11,000 Words • 2,355 Comments
When divine wrath fails to smite the heretic and terrifying enforcers of official dogma seem to have suddenly lost their taste for battle, others gradually begin to take notice and may grow emboldened. Eventually leading pro-Russian and Libertarian websites such as Russia Insider and LewRockwell began republishing some of my most controversial American Pravda articles, thus bringing my factual claims to the attention of broader audiences. After the conclusion of the my series, I began directly ridiculing my strangely timorous ADL opponents, publishing a short column entitled “Has the ADL Gone Into Hiding?” which led the redoubtable Paul Craig Roberts to describe me as “the bravest man I know.”
Apparently the combination of all these factors at long last grew too worrisome for the ADL, and stirring from their secret hiding place, its activists have now finally released a short and rather milquetoast response to my material, one which hardly much impresses me. A few days ago, they Tweeted out their column, together with a photo of their new nemesis.
The ADL may boast an annual budget of $60 million and have many hundreds of full-time employees, but its research skills seem sorely lacking. I discovered that they opened their rebuke by denouncing me as a notorious “anti-immigrant activist.” This seems an extremely odd claim given that I have published perhaps a quarter-million words on that contentious topic over the last twenty-five years, nearly all of it online and fully searchable, and my views have never been characterized in that fashion. To cite just one example, my article “California and the End of White America” appeared as a 1999 cover-story in Commentary, the flagship publication of The American Jewish Committee, and surely anyone reading it would be greatly puzzled by the ADL’s description. Indeed, just a few years earlier, I had been a top featured speaker at the October 1994 pro-immigrant protest in downtown Los Angeles, a 70,000 strong political rally that was the largest such gathering in American history to that date.

Over the years, my political activities have been the subject of many thousands of articles in the mainstream media, including a half-dozen front-page stories in the New York Times, and these would provide a similar picture, as did the New Republic cover story chronicling my California successes. Moreover, my views on immigrants haven’t changed all that much over the years as demonstrated by my more recent articles such as “The Myth of Hispanic Crime,” “Immigration, Republicans, and the End of White America” and “A Grand Bargain on Immigration?” Perhaps the intrepid ADL investigators should acquaint themselves with a powerful new technological tool called “Google.”

I was equally unimpressed that they so hotly denounced me for substantially relying upon the writings of Israel Shahak, whom they characterized as viciously “anti-Semitic.” As I had repeatedly emphasized, my own total lack of Aramaic and Hebrew necessarily forces me to rely upon the research of others, and the late Prof. Shahak, an award-winning Israeli academic, certainly seems a fine source to use. After all, famed linguist Noam Chomsky had lauded Shahak’s works for their “outstanding scholarship,” and numerous of our other most prominent public intellectuals such as Christopher Hitchens, Edward Said, and Gore Vidal had been similarly lavish in their praise. Furthermore, one of Shahak’s co-authors was Norton Mezvinsky, a prominent American academic specializing in Middle Eastern history, himself hardly an obscure figure given that both his brother and sister-in-law served in Congress and his nephew later married Chelsea Clinton. And as far as I’m aware almost none of Shahak’s explicit claims about the Talmud or traditional Judaism have ever been directly challenged, while the online availability of his first book allows those so interested to conveniently read it and decide for themselves.

The ADL similarly denounced me for taking seriously the theories of Ariel Toeff, another Israeli academic. But Prof. Toeff, son of the Chief Rabbi of Rome, certainly ranks as one of the world’s leading scholarly authorities on Medieval Jewry, and working together with his graduate students and other colleagues, he had devoted many years of effort to the research study in question, drawing upon extensive primary and secondary sources produced in eight different languages. I found his 500 page book quite persuasive, as did Israeli journalist Israel Shamir, and I have seen no credible rebuttals.
Now the work of all these prominent academics and intellectuals may not necessarily be correct, and perhaps I am mistaken in accepting their factual claims. But I would need to see something far more weighty than a casual dismissal in a few paragraphs contained within an anonymous ADL column, whose author for all I know might have been some ignorant young intern.
Those glaring flaws aside, most of the ADL’s remaining catalogue of my numerous heretical positions seemed reasonably accurate, though obviously presented in a somewhat hostile and derogatory fashion and sorely lacking any links to my original pieces. But even this desultory listing of my mortal transgressions was woefully incomplete, with the ADL strangely failing to include mention of some of my most controversial claims.

For example, the authors excluded all reference to my discussion of the thoroughly documented Nazi-Zionist economic partnership of the 1930s, which played such a crucial role in laying the basis for the State of Israel. And the ADL similarly avoided mentioning the nearly 20,000 words I had allocated to discussing the very considerable evidence that the Israeli Mossad had played a central role in both the JFK Assassination and the 9/11 Attacks. Surely this must be one of the few times that the ADL has deliberately avoided leveling the charge of “conspiracy theorist” against an opponent whom they might have so easily slurred in that fashion. Perhaps they felt the evidence I provided was too strong for them to effectively challenge.
The worrisome incompetence of ADL researchers becomes particularly alarming when we consider that over the last couple of years that organization has been elevated into a content gatekeeping role at America’s largest Internet companies, helping to determine what may or may not be said on the most important Social Media platforms such as Facebook, YouTube, and Twitter.

Brittan Heller, director of technology and society for the Anti-Defamation League, photographed in Palo Alto, Calif., on August 27, 2018. (Nhat V. Meyer/Bay Area News Group)
My local paper is the San Jose Mercury News and a couple of weeks ago it published a major profile interview with Brittan Heller, the ADL Director tasked with policing “hate speech” across the America-dominated portions of the Internet. She seemed like a perfectly pleasant young woman in her mid-thirties, a Stanford English major and a graduate of Yale Law, now living in Silicon Valley with her husband and her two cats, Luna and Stella. She emphasizes her own experience as a victim of cyber-harassment from a fellow college student whose romantic overtures she rejected and the later expertise she had gained as a Nazi-hunter for the U.S. government. But does that resume really provide her with the god-like knowledge suitable for overriding our traditional First Amendment rights and determining which views and which individuals should be allowed access to some two billion readers worldwide?
There is also a far more serious aspect to the situation. The choice of the ADL as the primary ideological overseer of America’s Internet may seem natural and appropriate to politically-ignorant Americans, a category that unfortunately includes the technology executives leading the companies involved. But this reflects the remarkable cowardice and dishonesty of the American media from which all these individuals derive their knowledge of our world. The true recent history of the ADL is a remarkably sordid and disreputable tale.
In January 1993, the San Francisco Police Department reported that it had recently raided the Northern California headquarters of the ADL based upon information provided by the FBI. The SFPD discovered that the organization had been keeping intelligence files on more than 600 civic organizations and 10,000 individuals, overwhelmingly of a liberal orientation, with the SFPD inspector estimating that 75% of the material had been illegally obtained, much of it by secret payments to police officials. This was merely the tip of the iceberg in what clearly amounted to the largest domestic spying operation by any private organization in American history, and according to some sources, ADL agents across the country had targeted over 1,000 political, religious, labor, and civil rights organizations, with the New York headquarters of the ADL maintaining active dossiers on more than a million Americans.
Not long afterward, an ACLU official who had previously held a high-ranking position with the ADL revealed in an interview that his organization had been the actual source of the highly controversial 1960s surveillance on Martin Luther King, Jr., which it had then provided to FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover. For many years Hoover had been furiously denounced in the national media headlines for his use of tapes and other secret information on King’s activities, but when a local San Francisco newspaper revealed that an ADL spying operation had actually been the source of all that sordid material, the bombshell revelation was totally ignored in the national media and only reported by fringe organizations, so that today almost no Americans are aware of that fact.
I am not aware of any other private organization in American history that has been involved in even a sliver of such illegal domestic espionage activity, which appears to have been directed against almost all groups and prominent individuals—Left, Right, and Center—suspected of being insufficiently aligned with Jewish and Israeli interests. Some of the illegal material found in ADL possession even raised dark suspicions that it had played a role in domestic terrorist attacks and political assassinations directed against foreign leaders. I am no legal expert, but given the massive scale of such illegal ADL activities, I wonder whether a plausible case might have been made to prosecute the entire organization under RICO statutes and sentence all of its leaders to long prison terms.
Instead, the resulting government charges were quickly settled with merely a trivial fine and a legal slap on the wrist, demonstrating the near-total impunity provided by massive Jewish political power in modern American society.
In effect, the ADL seems to have long operated as our country’s privatized secret political police, monitoring and enforcing its ideological doctrines on behalf of Jewish groups much as the Stasi did for the Communist rulers of East Germany. Given such a long history of criminal activity, allowing the ADL to extend its oversight to our largest Social Media platforms amounts to appointing the Mafia to supervise the FBI and the NSA, or taking a very large step towards implementing George Orwell’s Ministry of Truth on behalf of Jewish interests.
In his 1981 memoirs, the far right Classics scholar Revilo P. Oliver characterized the ADL as “the formidable organization of Jewish cowboys who ride herd on their American cattle” and this seems a reasonably apt description to me.
Although I had long recognized the power and influence of the ADL, a leading Jewish-activist organization whose leaders were so regularly quoted in my newspapers, until rather recently I had only the vaguest notions of its origins. I’m sure I’d heard the story mentioned at some points, but the account had never stuck in my mind.
Then perhaps a year or two ago, I happened to come across some discussion of the ADL’s 2013 centenary celebration, in which the leadership reaffirmed the principles of its 1913 founding. The initial impetus had been the vain national effort to save the life of Leo Frank, a young Jew unjustly accused of murder and eventually lynched. Not long before, Frank’s name and story would have been equally vague in my mind, with the man half-remembered from my introductory history textbooks as a notorious early KKK victim in the fiercely anti-Semitic Deep South of the early twentieth century. However, not long before seeing that piece on the ADL I’d read Albert Lindemann’s highly-regarded study The Jew Accused, and his short chapter on the notorious Frank case had completely exploded all my preconceptions.

First, Lindemann demonstrated that there was no evidence of any anti-Semitism behind Frank’s arrest and conviction, with Jews constituting a highly-valued element of the affluent Atlanta society of the day, and no references to Frank’s Jewish background, negative or otherwise, appearing in the media prior to the trial. Indeed, five of the Grand Jurors who voted to indict Frank for murder were themselves Jewish, and none of them ever voiced regret over their decision. In general, support for Frank seems to have been strongest among Jews from New York and other distant parts of the country and weakest among the Atlanta Jews with best knowledge of the local situation.
Furthermore, although Lindemann followed the secondary sources he relied upon in declaring that Frank was clearly innocent of the charges of rape and murder, the facts he recounted led me to the opposite conclusion, seeming to suggest strong evidence of Frank’s guilt. When I much more recently read Lindemann’s longer and more comprehensive historical study of anti-Semitism, Esau’s Tears, I noticed that his abbreviated treatment of the Frank case no longer made any claim of innocence, perhaps indicating that the author himself might have also had second thoughts about the weight of the evidence.
Based on this material, I voiced that opinion in my recent article on historical anti-Semitism, but my conclusions were necessarily quite tentative since they relied upon Lindermann’s summary of the information provided in the secondary sources he had used, and I had the impression that virtually all those who had closely investigated the Frank case had concluded that Frank was innocent. But after my piece appeared, someone pointed me to a 2016 book from an unexpected source arguing for Frank’s guilt. Now that I have ordered and read that volume, my understanding of the Frank case and its historical significance has been entirely transformed.
Mainstream publishers may often reject books that too sharply conflict with reigning dogma and sales of such works are unlikely to justify the extensive research required to produce the manuscript. Furthermore, both authors and publishers may face widespread vilification from a hostile media for taking such positions. For these reasons, those who publish such controversial material will often be acting from deep ideological motives rather than merely seeking professional advancement or monetary gain. As an example, it took a zealous Trotskyite leftist such as Lenni Brunner to brave the risk of widespread vilification and invest the time and effort to produce his remarkable study of the crucial Nazi-Zionist partnership of the 1930s. And for similar reasons, we should not be totally surprised that the leading book arguing for the guilt of Leo Frank appeared as a volume in the series on the pernicious aspects of Jewish-Black historical relations produced by Louis Farrakhan’s Nation of Islam (NOI), nor that the text lacked any identified author.

Anonymous works published by heavily-demonized religious-political movements naturally engender considerable caution, but once I began reading the 500 pages of The Leo Frank Case: The Lynching of a Guilty Man I was greatly impressed by the quality of the historical analysis. I think I have only very rarely encountered a research monograph on a controversial historical event that provided such an enormous wealth of carefully-argued analysis backed by such copious evidence. The authors seemed to display complete command of the major secondary literature of the last one hundred years while drawing very heavily upon the primary sources, including court records, personal correspondence, and contemporaneous publications, with the overwhelming majority of the 1200 footnotes referencing newspaper and magazine articles of that era. The case made for Frank’s guilt seemed absolutely overwhelming.
The basic outline of events is not disputed. In 1913 Georgia, a 13-year-old pencil company worker named Mary Phagan was last seen alive visiting the office of factory manager Leo Frank on a Saturday morning to collect her weekly paycheck, while her raped and murdered body was found in the basement early the next morning and Frank eventually arrested for the crime. As the wealthy young president of the Atlanta chapter of B’nai B’rith, Frank ranked as one of the most prominent Jewish men in the South, and great resources were deployed in his legal defense, but after the longest and most expensive trial in state history, he was quickly convicted and sentenced to death.
The facts of the case against Frank eventually became a remarkable tangle of complex and often conflicting evidence and eyewitness testimony, with sworn statements regularly being retracted and then counter-retracted. But the crucial point that the NOI authors emphasize for properly deciphering this confusing situation is the enormous scale of the financial resources that were deployed on Frank’s behalf, both prior to the trial and afterward, with virtually all of the funds coming from Jewish sources. Currency conversions are hardly precise, but relative to the American family incomes of the time, the total expenditures by Frank supporters may have been as high as $25 million in present-day dollars, quite possibly more than any other homicide defense in American history before or after, and an almost unimaginable sum for the impoverished Deep South of that period. Years later, a leading donor privately admitted that much of this money was spent on perjury and similar falsifications, something which is very readily apparent to anyone who closely studies the case. When we consider this vast ocean of pro-Frank funding and the sordid means for which it was often deployed, the details of the case become far less mysterious. There exists a mountain of demonstrably fabricated evidence and false testimony in favor of Frank, and no sign of anything similar on the other side.
The police initially suspected the black night watchman who found the girl’s body, and he was quickly arrested and harshly interrogated. Soon afterward, a bloody shirt was found at his home, and Frank made several statements that seemed to implicate his employee in the crime. At one point, this black suspect may have come close to being summarily lynched by a mob, which would have closed the case. But he stuck to his story of innocence with remarkable composure, in sharp contrast to Frank’s extremely nervous and suspicious behavior, and the police soon shifted their scrutiny toward the latter, culminating in his arrest. All researchers now recognize that the night watchman was entirely innocent, and the material against him planted.
The evidence against Frank steadily mounted. He was the last man known to have seen the young victim and he repeatedly changed important aspects of his story. Numerous former female employees reported his long history of sexually aggressive behavior toward them, especially directed towards the murdered girl herself. At the time of the murder, Frank claimed to have been working alone in his office, but a witness who went there reported he had been nowhere to be found. A vast amount of circumstantial evidence implicated Frank.
A black Frank family servant soon came forward with sworn testimony that Frank had confessed the murder to his wife on the morning after the killing, and this claim seemed supported by the latter’s strange refusal to visit her husband in jail for the first two weeks after the day of his arrest.
Two separate firms of experienced private detectives were hired by Frank’s lavishly-funded partisans, and the agents of both eventually came to the reluctant conclusion that Frank was guilty as charged.
As the investigation moved forward, a major break occurred as a certain Jim Conley, Frank’s black janitor, came forward and confessed to having been Frank’s accomplice in concealing the crime. At the trial he testified that Frank had regularly enlisted him as a lookout during his numerous sexual liaisons with his female employees, and after murdering Phagan, had then offered him a huge sum of money to help remove and hide the body in the basement so that the crime could be pinned upon someone else. But with the legal noose tightening around Frank, Conley had begun to fear that he might be made the new scapegoat, and went to the authorities in order to save his own neck. Despite Conley’s damning accusations, Frank repeatedly refused to confront him in the presence of the police, which was widely seen as further proof of Frank’s guilt.
By the time of the trial itself, all sides were agreed that the murderer was either Frank, the wealthy Jewish businessman, or Conley, the semi-literate black janitor with a first-grade education and a long history of public drunkenness and petty crime. Frank’s lawyers exploited this comparison to the fullest, emphasizing Frank’s Jewish background as evidence for his innocence and indulging in the crudest sort of racial invective against his black accuser, whom they claimed was obviously the true rapist and murderer due to his bestial nature.
Those attorneys were the best that money could buy and the lead counsel was known as the one of the most skilled courtroom interrogators in the South. But although he subjected Conley to a grueling sixteen hours of intense cross-examination over three days, the latter never wavered in the major details of his extremely vivid story, which deeply impressed the local media and the jury. Meanwhile, Frank refused to take the stand at his own trial, thereby avoiding any public cross-examination of his often changing account.
Two notes written in crude black English had been discovered alongside Phagan’s body, and everyone soon agreed that these were written by the murderer in hopes of misdirecting suspicion. So they were either written by a semi-literate black such as Conley or by an educated white attempting to imitate that style, and to my mind, the spelling and choice of words strongly suggests the latter, thereby implicating Frank.
Taking a broader overview, the theory advanced by Frank’s legion of posthumous advocates seems to defy rationality. These journalists and scholars uniformly argue that Conley, a semi-literate black menial, had brutally raped and murdered a young white girl, and the legal authorities soon became aware of this fact, but conspired to set him free by supporting a complex and risky scheme to instead frame an innocent white businessman. Can we really believe that the police officials and prosecutors of a city in the Old South would have violated their oath of office in order to knowingly protect a black rapist and killer from legal punishment and thereby turn him loose upon their city streets, presumably to prey on future young white girls? This implausible reconstruction is particularly bizarre in that nearly all its advocates across the decades have been the staunchest of Jewish liberals, who endlessly condemned the horrific racism of the Southern authorities of that era, but then unaccountably chose to make a special exception in this one particular case.
In many respects, the more important part of the Frank case began after his conviction and death sentence when many of America’s wealthiest and most influential Jewish leaders began mobilizing to save him from the hangman. They soon established the ADL as a new vehicle for that purpose and succeeded in making the Frank murder case one of the most famous in American history to that date.
Although his role was largely concealed at the time, the most important new backer whom Frank attracted was Albert Lasker of Chicago, the unchallenged monarch of American consumer advertising, which constituted the life’s blood of all of our mainstream newspapers and magazines. Not only did he ultimately provide the lion’s share of the funds for Frank’s defense, but he focused his energies upon shaping the media coverage surrounding the case. Given his dominant business influence in that sector, we should not be surprised that a huge wave of unremitting pro-Frank propaganda soon began appearing across the country in both local and national publications, extending to most of America’s most popular and highly-regarded media outlets, with scarcely a single word told on the other side of the story. This even included all of Atlanta’s own leading newspapers, which suddenly reversed their previous positions and became convinced of Frank’s innocence.
Lasker also enlisted other powerful Jewish figures in the Frank cause, including New York Times owner Adolph Ochs, American Jewish Committee president Louis Marshall, and leading Wall Street financier Jacob Schiff. The Times, in particular, began devoting enormous coverage to this previously-obscure Georgia murder case, and many of its articles were widely republished elsewhere. The NOI authors highlight this extraordinary national media attention: “The Black janitor whose testimony became central to Leo Frank’s conviction became the most quoted Black person in American history up to that time. More of his words appeared in print in the New York Times than those of W.E.B. Du Bois, Marcus Garvey, and Booker T. Washington—combined.”
Back a century ago just as today, our media creates our reality, and with Frank’s innocence being proclaimed nationwide in near-unanimous fashion, a long list of prominent public figures were soon persuaded to demand a new trial for the convicted murderer, including Thomas Edison, Henry Ford, and Jane Addams.
Ironically enough, Lasker himself plunged himself into this crusade despite apparently having very mixed personal feelings about man whose cause he was championing. His later biography reveals that upon his first personal meeting with Frank, he perceived him as “a pervert” and a “disgusting” individual, so much so that he even hoped that after he managed to free Frank, the latter would quickly perish in some accident. Furthermore, in his private correspondence he freely admitted that a large fraction of the massive funding that he and numerous other wealthy Jews from across the country were providing had been spent on perjured testimony and there are also strong hints that he explored bribing various judges. Given these facts, Lasker and Frank’s other major backers were clearly guilty of serious felonies, and could have received lengthy prison terms for their illegal conduct.
With the New York Times and the rest of the liberal Northern media now providing such massive coverage of the case, Frank’s defense team was forced to abandon the racially-inflammatory rhetoric aimed at his black accuser which had previously been the centerpiece of their trial strategy. Instead, they began concocting a tale of rampant local anti-Semitism, previously unnoticed by all observers, and adopted it as a major grounds for their appeal of the verdict.
The unprincipled legal methods pursued by Frank’s backers is illustrated by a single example. Georgia law normally required that a defendant be present in court to hear the reading of the verdict, but given the popular emotions in the case, the judge suggested that this provision be waived, and the prosecution assented only if the defense lawyers promised not to use this small irregularity as grounds for appeal. But after Frank was convicted, AJC President Marshall and his other backers orchestrated numerous unsuccessful state and federal appeals on exactly this minor technicality, merely hiring other lawyers to file the motion.
For almost two years, the nearly limitless funds deployed by Frank’s supporters covered the costs of thirteen separate appeals on the state and federal levels, including to the U.S. Supreme Court, while the national media was used to endlessly vilify Georgia’s system of justice in the harshest possible terms. Naturally, this soon generated a local reaction, and during this period outraged Georgians began denouncing the wealthy Jews who were spending such enormous sums to subvert their local criminal justice system.
One of the very few journalists willing to oppose Frank’s position was Georgia publisher Tom Watson, a populist firebrand, and in one of his editorials he reasonably declared “We cannot have… one law for the Jew, and another for the Gentile” while he also lamented that “It is a bad state of affairs when the idea gets abroad that the law is too weak to punish a man who has plenty of money.” A former Georgia governor indignantly inquired “Are we to understand that anybody except a Jew can be punished for a crime.” The clear facts indicate that there was indeed a massive miscarriage of justice in Frank’s case, but virtually all of it occurred in Frank’s favor.
All appeals were ultimately rejected and Frank’s execution date for the rape and murder of the young girl finally drew near. But just days before he was scheduled to leave office, Georgia’s outgoing governor commuted Frank’s sentence, provoking an enormous storm of popular protest, especially since he was the legal partner of Frank’s chief defense lawyer, an obvious conflict of interest. Given the enormous funds that Frank’s national supporters had been deploying on his behalf and the widespread past admissions of bribery in the case, there are obviously dark suspicions about what had prompted such a remarkably unpopular decision, which soon forced the former governor to exile himself from the state. A few weeks later, a group of Georgia citizens stormed Frank’s prison farm, abducting and hanging him, with Frank becoming the first and only Jew lynched in American history.
Naturally, Frank’s killing was roundly denounced in the national media that had long promoted his cause. But even in those quarters, there may have been a significant difference between public and private sentiments. No newspaper in country had more strongly championed Frank’s innocence than the New York Times of Adolph Ochs. Yet according to the personal diary of one of the Times editors, Ochs privately despised Frank, and perhaps even greeted his lynching with a sense of relief. No effort was ever made by any of Frank’s wealthy supporters to bring any of the lynching party to justice.
Although I have now come to regard the NOI volume as the most persuasive and definitive text on the Frank case, I naturally considered conflicting works before coming to this conclusion.

For nearly a half-century, the leading scholarly account of the incident had probably been Leonard Dinnerstein’s book The Leo Frank Case, first published in 1966, and Dinnerstein, a University of Arizona professor specializing in Jewish history, entirely supported Frank’s innocence. But although the work won a national award, carries glowing blurbs from several prestigious publications, and has surely graced the reading lists of endless college courses, I was not at all impressed. Among other things, the book appears to be the original source of some of the most lurid examples of alleged anti-Semitic public outbursts that apparently have no basis in reality and seem to have been simply fabricated by the author given his lack of any citations; the NOI authors note these stories have been quietly abandoned by all recent researchers. Even leaving aside such likely falsifications, which were widely cited by later writers and heavily contaminated the historical record, I found the short Dinnerstein work rather paltry and even pitiful when compared to that of its NOI counterpart.
A far longer and more substantial recent work was Steve Oney’s 2003 And the Dead Shall Rise, which runs nearly 750 pages and won the National Jewish Book Award, the Southern Book Critics Circle Prize, and the American Bar Association’s Silver Gavel, probably establishing itself as today’s canonical text on the historical incident. Oney had been a longtime Atlanta journalist and I was favorably impressed by his narrative skill, along with the numerous fascinating vignettes he provided to illustrate the Southern history of that general era. He also seemed a cautious researcher, drawing heavily upon the primary sources and avoiding much of the falsified history of the last century, while not entirely suppressing the massive evidence of bribery and perjury employed by the Frank forces.
But although Oney does mention much of this information, he strangely fails to connect the dots. For example, although he occasionally mentions some of the funds spent on Frank’s behalf, he never attempts to convert them into present-day equivalents, leaving a naive reader to assume that such trivial amounts could not possibly have been used to pervert the course of justice. Furthermore, his entire book is written in chronological narrative form, with no footnotes provided in the text, and a large portion of the content being entirely extraneous to any attempt to determine Frank’s guilt or innocence, contrasting very sharply with the more scholarly style of the NOI authors.

To my mind, a central element of the Frank case was the massive financial temptations being offered by Frank’s Jewish backers, and the huge number of Atlanta citizens, both high and low, who apparently shifted their positions on Frank’s guilt in eager hopes of capturing some of that largess. But although this obvious theme was heavily emphasized in the NOI book, Oney seems to mostly avoid this obvious factor, perhaps even for personal reasons. Print publications have suffered massive cutbacks in recent years and I noticed on the book flap that although Oney is described as a longtime Atlanta journalist, he had subsequently relocated to Los Angeles. Once I checked, I immediately discovered that Oney’s book had became the basis for an independent film entitled The People v. Leo Frank, and I wonder whether his hopes of capturing a sliver of Hollywood’s vast lucre may not have encouraged him to so strongly suggest Frank’s innocence. Would an account of Leo Frank as rapist and murderer ever be likely to reach the silver screen? The quiet influence of financial considerations today is no different today than they were a century ago, and this factor must be taken into account when evaluating historical events.
The NOI authors devote nearly all of their lengthy book to a careful analysis of the Frank case provided in suitably dispassionate form, but a sense of their justifiable outrage does occasionally poke through. In the years prior to Frank’s killing, many thousands of black men throughout the South had been lynched, often based on a slender thread of suspicion, with few of these incidents receiving more than a few sentences of coverage in a local newspaper, and large numbers of whites had also perished in similar circumstances. Meanwhile, Frank had received benefit of the longest trial in modern Southern history, backed by the finest trial lawyers that money could buy, and based on overwhelming evidence had been sentenced to death for the rape and murder of a young girl. But when Frank’s legal verdict was carried out by extra-judicial means, he immediately became the most famous lynching victim in American history, perhaps even attracting more media attention than all those thousands of other cases combined. Jewish money and Jewish media established him as a Jewish martyr who thereby effectively usurped the victimhood of the enormous number of innocent blacks who were killed both before and after him, none of whom were ever even recognized as individuals.
As Prof. Shahak has effectively demonstrated, traditional Talmudic Judaism regarded all non-Jews as being sub-human, with their lives possessing no value. Given that Frank’s backers were all followers of Reform Judaism, it seems quite unlikely that they followed this doctrine or were even aware of its existence. But religious traditions of a thousand years standing can easily become embedded within a culture, and such unrecognized cultural sentiments may have easily shaped their reaction to Frank’s legal predicament.
Influential historical accounts of the Frank case and its aftermath have contained lurid tales of the rampant public anti-Semitism visited upon Atlanta’s Jewish community in the wake of the trial, even claiming that a substantial portion of the population was forced to flee as a consequence. However, a careful examination of the primary source evidence, including the contemporaneous newspaper coverage, provides absolutely no evidence of this, and it appears to be entirely fictional.
The NOI authors note that prior to Frank’s trial American history had been virtually devoid of any evidence of significant anti-Semitism, with the previous most notable incident being the case of an extremely wealthy Jewish financier who was refused service at a fancy resort hotel. But by totally distorting the Frank case and focusing such massive national media coverage on the case, Jewish leaders around the country succeeded in fabricating a powerful ideological narrative despite its lack of reality, perhaps intending it to serve as a bonding experience to foster Jewish community cohesion.
As a further example of the widely promoted but apparently fraudulent history, the Jewish writers who have overwhelmingly dominated accounts of the Frank case have frequently claimed that it sparked the revival of the Ku Klux Klan soon afterward, with the group of citizens responsible for Frank’s 1915 lynching supposedly serving as the inspiration for William Simmons’ reestablishment of that organization a couple of years later. But there seems no evidence for this. Indeed, Simmons strongly emphasized the philo-Semitic nature of his new organization, which attracted considerable Jewish membership.
The primary factor behind the rebirth of the KKK was almost certainly D.W. Griffith’s overwhelmingly popular landmark 1917 film Birth of a Nation, which glorified the Klan of the Reconstruction Era. Given that the American film industry was so overwhelmingly Jewish at the time and the film’s financial backers and leading Southern distributors came from that same background, it could be plausibly argued that the Jewish contribution to the creation of the 1920s Klan was a very crucial one, while the revenue from the film’s distribution throughout the South actually financed Sam Goldwyn’s creation of MGM, Hollywood’s leading studio.
In their introduction, the NOI authors make the fascinating point that the larger historical meaning of the Frank case in American racial history has been entirely lost. Prior to that trial, it was unprecedented for Southern courts to allow black testimony against a white man, let alone against a wealthy man being tried on serious charges; but the horrific nature of the crime and Conley’s role as the sole witness required a break from that longstanding tradition. Thus, the authors argue not unreasonably, that the Frank case may have been as important to the history of black progress in America as such landmark legal verdicts as Plessy vs. Ferguson or Brown vs. Board. But since almost the entire historical narrative has been produced by fervent Jewish advocates, these facts have been completely obscured and the case entirely misrepresented as an example of anti-Semitic persecution and public murder.
Let us now summarize what seems to be the solidly established factual history of the Frank case, quite different than the traditional narrative. There is not the slightest evidence that Frank’s Jewish background was a factor behind his arrest and conviction, nor the death sentence he received. The case set a remarkable precedent in Southern courtroom history with the testimony of a black man playing a central role in a white man’s conviction. From the earliest stages of the murder investigation, Frank and his allies continually attempted to implicate a series of different innocent blacks by planting false evidence and using bribes to solicit perjured testimony, while the exceptionally harsh racial rhetoric that Frank and his attorneys directed towards those blacks was presumably intended to provoke their public lynching. Yet despite all these attempts by the Frank forces to play upon the notorious racial sentiments of the white Southerners of that era, the latter saw through these schemes and Frank was the one sentenced to hang for his rape and murder of that young girl.
Now suppose that all the facts of this famous case were exactly unchanged except that Frank had been a white Gentile. Surely the trial would be ranked as one of the greatest racial turning points in American history, perhaps even overshadowing Brown v. Board because of the extent of popular sentiment, and it would have been given a central place in all our modern textbooks. Meanwhile, Frank, his lawyers, and his heavy financial backers would probably be cast as among the vilest racial villains in all of American history for their repeated attempts to foment the lynching of various innocent blacks so that a wealthy white rapist and murderer could walk free. But because Frank was Jewish rather than Christian, this remarkable history has been completely inverted for over one hundred years by our Jewish-dominated media and historiography.
These are the important consequences that derive from control of the narrative and the flow of information, which allows murderers to be transmuted into martyrs and villains into heroes. The ADL was founded just over a century ago with the central goal of preventing a Jewish rapist and killer from being held legally accountable for his crimes, and over the decades, it eventually metastasized into a secret political police force not entirely dissimilar to the widely despised East German Stasi, but with its central goal seeming to be the maintenance of overwhelming Jewish control in a society that is 98% non-Jewish.
We should ask ourselves whether it is appropriate for an organization with such origins and such recent history to be granted enormous influence over the distribution of information across our Internet.
October 15, 2018
Posted by aletho |
Deception, Fake News, Full Spectrum Dominance, Mainstream Media, Warmongering, Supremacism, Social Darwinism, Timeless or most popular | ADL, Facebook, FBI, New York Times, SFPD, Steve Oney, Twitter, United States, YouTube, Zionism |
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Media outlets removed by Facebook on Thursday, in a massive purge of 800 accounts and pages, had previously been targeted in a blacklist of oppositional sites promoted by the Washington Post in November 2016.
The organizations censored by Facebook include The Anti-Media, with 2.1 million followers, The Free Thought Project, with 3.1 million followers, and Counter Current News, with 500,000 followers. All three of these groups had been on the blacklist.
In November 2016, the Washington Post published a puff-piece on a shadowy and up to then largely unknown organization called PropOrNot, which had compiled a list of organizations it claimed were part of a “sophisticated Russian propaganda campaign.”
The Post said the report “identifies more than 200 websites as routine peddlers of Russian propaganda during the election season, with combined audiences of at least 15 million Americans.”
The publication of the blacklist drew widespread media condemnation, including from journalists Matt Taibbi and Glenn Greenwald, forcing the Post to publish a partial retraction. The newspaper declared that it “does not itself vouch for the validity of PropOrNot’s findings regarding any individual media outlet.”
While the individuals behind PropOrNot have not identified themselves, the Washington Post said the group was a “collection of researchers with foreign policy, military and technology backgrounds.”
PropOrNot, which remains active on Twitter, publicly gloated about Facebook’s removal of the pages on Thursday. “Russian propaganda is VERY VERY MAD about their various front outlets & fellow travellers getting suspended by @Facebook &/or @Twitter,” it wrote. The tweet tagged The Anti Media and The Free Thought Project, and included a Russian flag emoji next to an emoji depicting feces.

PropOrNot did not attempt to reconcile its own narrative that the targeted organizations were front groups for the Kremlin with Facebook’s official claim that they operated independently of any government but sought to “stir up political debate” for financial motives. This is because both accusations are hollow pretexts for political censorship.
In a separate post, PropOrNot added: “Well, look at that… @Facebook removed some of the most important gray/black Russian propaganda outlets from their platform! Bravo @Facebook – better late than never, so a BIG thank you for this.”

It added, ominously: “All of these [organizations] are cross platform & have websites, but one thing at a time.”
These comments by PropOrNot make clear where the censorship measures supervised by the US government and implemented by the internet companies are going. While these organizations still “have websites,” the authorities are handling “one thing at a time.”
The clear implication is that censorship will not end with Google’s manipulation of its search platform or the removal of accounts by Facebook and Twitter. The ultimate aim is the total banning of oppositional news web sites.
The publication of the PropOrNot blacklist and its promotion by the Washington Post helped trigger a wave of censorship measures against oppositional news sites by the major technology companies, working at the instigation of the US intelligence agencies and leading politicians.
Last year, the World Socialist Web Site reported that it an other sites, including Global Research, Counterpunch, Consortium News, WikiLeaks and Truthout, saw their search traffic plunge after search giant Google implemented a change to its search ranking algorithm.
In the subsequent period, search traffic to these sites has fallen even further. Search traffic to Counterpunch has fallen by 39 percent, and Consortium News has fallen by 51 percent.
These developments confirm the analysis made by the World Socialist Web Site in its open letter to Google alleging that it was censoring left-wing, anti-war and socialist websites.
“Censorship on this scale is political blacklisting,” the letter declared. “The obvious intent of Google’s censorship algorithm is to block news that your company does not want reported and to suppress opinions with which you do not agree. Political blacklisting is not a legitimate exercise of whatever may be Google’s prerogatives as a commercial enterprise. It is a gross abuse of monopolistic power. What you are doing is an attack on freedom of speech.”
On Tuesday, Google admitted in an internal document that it and other technology companies had “gradually shifted away from unmediated free speech and towards censorship and moderation.” The document stated that an aim of the censorship was to “increase revenues” under conditions of growing government and commercial pressure.
The document acknowledged that such actions constitute a break with the “American tradition that prioritizes free speech for democracy.”
October 14, 2018
Posted by aletho |
Civil Liberties, Full Spectrum Dominance | Facebook, Human rights, Propornot, Twitter, United States, Washington Post |
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Some 800 anti-establishment accounts and pages have been yanked from Facebook in a sweeping crackdown the social media giant framed as a fight against spammers. RT talked to those who were targeted in the cleansing.
Among the hundreds of pages and accounts Facebook and Twitter took down were those both on the political left and right, ranging from conspiracy theorists and police brutality watchers, to news outlets with non-mainstream angles, While their content could be at times described as controversial, the bulk of the banished pages boasted large followings and outreach.
RT spoke to some of the voices silenced by the Facebook move. Here is what they had to say.
Jason Bassler, The Free Thought Project, 3.1mn followers
The Free Thought Project bills itself as a “hub for free thinking conversations.” Both its Facebook and Twitter accounts were shut down in the pre-midterms purge. Jason Bassler, who co-founded the project in 2013, told RT that what Facebook did is an act of political censorship and has nothing to do with its stated goal to clean up its platform from spam.
“If that was just spam, if that was just irrelevant garbage they wouldn’t be so threatening, they would not ban us, they would not care, we would not have been on their radar.”
By spinning the story as a fight against unworthy news trash, Facebook itself is misleading users with its own version of fake news, he said: “This is nothing more than political censorship and trying to eradicate certain political ideologies.”
Nicholas Bernabe, founder of The Anti-Media, 2.1mn followers
Nicholas Bernabe, blogger and entrepreneur behind the independent news aggregator The Anti-Media, believes that “the most troubling” thing in Facebook’s treatment of media pages is that tech giants are now trying to police cultural dialogue by posing as politically neutral.
“That could actually be perceived as Facebook itself meddling in elections, because we are only a few weeks away from the midterms and they go and target 800 politically-oriented media pages for deletion.”
He added that the majority of the banned pages held “very anti-establishment, very anti-authoritarian views,” that appealed to those whose take on election is very different from what mainstream media has to offer.
Matt Savoy, The Free Thought Project, 3.1mn followers
It is hard to overestimate the implications for those that were swept up in the purge, Matt Savoy of The Free Thought Project said. Many of the affected websites will be out of business and “thousands of people will be out of work.”
“This is like a death blow. Facebook was a source of how we were able to get our links out and drive traffic to the website, and we no longer have it. The few remaining employees that we have, they are going to be gone.”
Journalists did not have any time to prepare for the looming crackdown, Savoy said, and at first the staff thought it was a mere glitch.
Matt Bergman, Punk Rock Libertarians, 190,000 followers
Matt Bergman, who founded the Punk Rock Libertarians in 2010, told RT that his ‘The Daily Liberator’ podcast was taken down from Facebook without any explanation. Bergman’s own account was also briefly suspended, as well as those of other page admins.
The purge is the result of the pressure Congress put on Mark Zuckerberg, and its first targets were independent outlets “right of the dial,” since it’s easier to get away with banning relatively small outlets than major channels like RT, he argued.
“Their terms of service agreement is probably a million words long. Nobody has ever read it all the way through and I would think that if they wanted to they can ban CNN, they can ban you guys, if they wanted to, they can ban anybody.”
Bergman said he is filing an appeal in a bid to restore the account.
Dan Dicks, Investigative Journalist, 350,000 followers
Vancouver-based investigative journalist Dan Dicks, who writes for The Press for Truth, said the Facebook crackdown was “clearly political” as it saw tech companies assuming the role of “the gatekeepers of political thought.”
“What we are dealing with here today is the silencing of anybody who goes against the status quo right now, does not matter right or left side of the political spectrum.”
Conspiracy theorist Alex Jones, expunged from Facebook and Twitter, might have been “the first domino to fall,” but now the crackdown has widened to affect smaller outlets that vie for minds of the people on par with mainstream media, he said.
The crackdown on anti-establishment voices will come back to bite Facebook, UK Labour Party activist and political theorist Dr. Richard Barbrook argued.
Facebook and other tech companies who feel compelled to impose more “traditional media censorship” are likely to see a mass exodus from their platforms, he believes.
“The problem is if they are doing it too much, people would be gone somewhere else, where they don’t have network effects working against them,” Barbrook told RT.
October 13, 2018
Posted by aletho |
Civil Liberties, Full Spectrum Dominance | Facebook, Human rights, Twitter, United States |
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Twitter has suspended the official account of the Venezuelan government’s press team, reportedly without giving any explanation. The suspension is the latest in a series of social media strikes against Venezuelan media outlets.
“They blocked our Twitter account of the Presidential Press, they flagrantly violate our right to inform, we demand immediate reinstatement,” Minister for Communication Jorge Rodriguez tweeted on Tuesday.
The Presidential Press profile has more than one million followers. Monday’s suspension is not the first such event: in October 2017, President Maduro denounced an apparent campaign to limit the reach of his posts on platforms such as Twitter and Instagram, TeleSUR reported.
While it is unclear if the events are connected, the suspension comes amid a wider clampdown by social media companies on anti-Western and alternative media. In August, Facebook abruptly removed the page of TeleSUR English, a Latin-American news network part-funded by the Venezuelan government. The removal was accompanied by the vague explanation that TeleSUR had breached Facebook’s terms of use.
The apparent censorship of TeleSUR came less than a week after the social media giant deleted the page of Venezuelanalysis, an outlet that offered leftist commentary on Latin American affairs. Though Facebook reinstated the page, Venezuelanalysis received no apology or explanation for its removal.
While accusations of bias and censorship by Silicon Valley tech companies have mostly come from conservatives in the US, a growing number of left-wing sites have felt the squeeze too. Journalist Abby Martin, who hosted ‘The Empire Files’ on TeleSUR told RT that big tech’s censorship efforts are “literally curating our reality and trying to paint anything that challenges this establishment narrative as conspiracy theories, as disinformation, as Russian trolls.”
September 26, 2018
Posted by aletho |
Full Spectrum Dominance | Twitter, Venezuela |
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“Who needs direct repression,” asked philosopher Slavoj Zizek, “when one can convince the chicken to walk freely into the slaughterhouse?”
In an Orwellian age where war equals peace, surveillance equals safety, and tolerance equals intolerance of uncomfortable truths and politically incorrect ideas, “we the people” have gotten very good at walking freely into the slaughterhouse, all the while convincing ourselves that the prison walls enclosing us within the American police state are there for our protection.
After all, the alternative—taking a stand, raising a ruckus, demanding change, refusing to cooperate, engaging in civil disobedience—is not only a lot of work but can be downright dangerous.
What we fail to realize, however, is that by tacitly allowing these violations to continue, we not only empower the tyrant but we feed the monster.
In this way, what starts off as small, occasional encroachments on our rights, justified in the name of greater safety, becomes routine, wide-ranging abuses so entrenched as to make reform all but impossible: the government lures us in with a scheme to make our lives better, our families safer, and our communities more secure, and then once we buy into it, they slam the trap closed.
It doesn’t matter whether you’re talking about red light cameras, DNA databases, surveillance cameras, or zero tolerance policies: they all result in “we the people” being turned into Enemy Number One.
In this way, the government campaign to spy on our phone calls, letters and emails was sold to the American people as a necessary tool in the war on terror.
Instead of targeting terrorists, however, the government has turned us into potential terrorists, so that if we dare say the wrong thing in a phone call, letter, email or on the internet, especially social media, we end up investigated, charged and possibly jailed.
If you happen to be one of the 1.31 billion individuals who use Facebook or one of the 255 million who tweet their personal and political views on Twitter, you might want to pay close attention.
This criminalization of free speech, which is exactly what the government’s prosecution of those who say the “wrong” thing using an electronic medium amounts to, was at the heart of Elonis v. United States, a Supreme Court case that wrestled with where the government can draw the line when it comes to expressive speech that is protected and permissible versus speech that could be interpreted as connoting a criminal intent. The Court ruled in favor of Elonis.
The common thread running through Elonis’ case and others like it is the use of social media to voice frustration, grievances, and anger, sometimes using language that is overtly violent.
Despite the Court’s ruling in Elonis, Corporate America has now taken the lead in policing expressive activity online, with social media giants such as Facebook, Twitter and YouTube using their formidable dominance in the field to censor, penalize and regulate speech and behavior online by suspending and/or banning users whose content violated the companies’ so-called community standards for obscenity, violence, hate speech, discrimination, etc.
Make no mistake: this is fascism with a smile.
The subtle appeal of this particular brand of fascism is its self-righteous claim to fighting the evils of our day (intolerance, hatred, violence) using the weapons of Corporate America.
Be warned, however: it is only a matter of time before these weapons are used more broadly, taking aim at anything that stands in its quest for greater profit, control and power.
This is what fascism looks like in a modern context, with corporations flexing their muscles to censor and silence expressive activity under the pretext that it is taking place within a private environment subject to corporate rules as opposed to activity that takes place within a public or government forum that might be subject to the First Amendment’s protection of “controversial” and/or politically incorrect speech.
Alex Jones was just the beginning.
Jones, the majordomo of conspiracy theorists who spawned an empire built on alternative news, was banned from Facebook for posting content that violates the social media site’s “Community Standards,” which prohibit posts that can be construed as bullying or hateful.
According to The Washington Post, Twitter suspended over 70 million accounts over the course of two months to “reduce the flow of misinformation on the platform.”
Curiously enough, you know who has yet to be suspended? President Trump.
Twitter’s rationale for not suspending world leaders such as Trump is because “Blocking a world leader from Twitter or removing their controversial Tweets, would hide important information people should be able to see and debate.”
Frankly, all individuals, whether or not they are world leaders, should be entitled to have their thoughts and ideas aired openly, pitted against those who might disagree with them, and debated widely, especially in a forum like the internet.
Why does this matter?
The internet and social media have taken the place of the historic public square, which has slowly been crowded out by shopping malls and parking lots.
As such, these cyber “public squares” may be the only forum left for citizens to freely speak their minds and exercise their First Amendment rights, especially in the wake of legislation that limits access to our elected representatives.
Unfortunately, the internet has become a tool for the government—and its corporate partners—to monitor, control and punish the populace for behavior and speech that may be controversial but far from criminal.
Yet we would do well to tread cautiously in how much authority we give the Corporate Police State to criminalize free speech activities and chill a vital free speech forum.
Not only are social media and the Internet critical forums for individuals to freely share information and express ideas, but they also serve as release valves to those who may be angry, seething, alienated or otherwise discontented.
Without an outlet for their pent-up anger and frustration, thoughts and emotions fester in secret, which is where most violent acts are born.
In the same way, free speech in the public square—whether it’s the internet, the plaza in front of the U.S. Supreme Court or a college campus—brings people together to express their grievances and challenge oppressive government regimes.
Without it, democracy becomes stagnant and atrophied.
Likewise, as I make clear in my book Battlefield America: The War on the American People, if free speech is not vigilantly protected, democracy is more likely to drift toward fear, repression, and violence. In such a scenario, we will find ourselves threatened with an even more pernicious injury than violence itself: the loss of liberty.
Constitutional attorney and author John W. Whitehead is founder and president of The Rutherford Institute. His new book Battlefield America: The War on the American People (SelectBooks, 2015) is available online at http://www.amazon.com. Whitehead can be contacted at johnw@rutherford.org.
September 25, 2018
Posted by aletho |
Civil Liberties, Full Spectrum Dominance, Timeless or most popular | Facebook, Human rights, Twitter, United States, YouTube |
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During the past several years, there has been increased pressure coming from some in the federal government aided and abetted by powerful advocacy groups in the private sector to police social and alternative media. It is a multi-pronged attack on the First Amendment which has already limited the types of information that Americans have access to, thereby narrowing policy options to suit those in power
The process has been ostensibly driven by concerns over alleged Russian interference in the 2016 election, but it is really about who controls and limits the public’s right to know what is going on out of sight in Washington and New York City, where politics and money come together. If one is interested in the free flow of information and viewpoints that comes with the alternative media, it certainly does not look that way. Robert Parry described it as a deliberate process of “demonizing and silencing dissent that questions mainstream narratives.”
Last October top executives from Facebook, Google and Twitter were summoned to Capitol Hill for a discussion of their role in what is alleged to be Russia’s influence on the presidential campaign and went back home contrite and promising to improve. They have indeed improved by punishing members whose views have been found to be unacceptable, blocking them and suspending their access to the sites. Meanwhile, the federal government for its part has attempted to silence independent non-U.S. based voices by declaring Russian media outlets RT America and Sputnik to be “foreign agents,” requiring them to register under the Foreign Agents Registration Act of 1938 (FARA). It is an unprecedented action against a news agency and invites quid-pro-quo for U.S. media operating overseas, leaving the American public more ignorant of world affairs than it already is.
Qatar based Al-Jazeera, which has been particularly targeted by Jonathan Greenblatt of the Anti-Defamation League (ADL) as “a major exporter of hate against the Jewish people,” will also be required to register with FARA to comply with the new National Defense Authorization Act. Al-Jazeera, it should be noted, has employed undercover investigative journalism to expose the corruption of Britain’s government by Israeli supported Jewish groups. It’s similar series on the activity of Zionist lobbyists in America is on hold due to threats from Jewish organizations to severely punish the network if the documentary should ever be aired.
More recently Facebook has been active in removing accounts and advertising, much of it pro-Palestinian or otherwise critical of Israel, but also to include highly respectable Telesur’s “The Empire Files,” which looked at the consequences of U.S. sanctions on Venezuela. Anything that criticizes the corporate worldview is fair game for censorship. American Herald Tribune, which is critical of U.S. foreign policy in many areas, has recently had its Gmail shut down while Google also stopped servicing ads on its website. Its Facebook page was also closed, all done without any warning or explanation.
One of the organizations most interested in limiting conversations about what is going on in the world is the ADL which claims that it is “the world’s leading organization combating anti-Semitism and hate of all kinds,” though it clearly excludes incitement or even physical harm directed against Palestinian Arabs resentful of the Israeli occupation of their country. Its definition of “hatred” is really quite selective and is focused on anyone criticizing Israel or Jewish related issues. Its goal is to have any such speech or writing categorized as anti-Semitism and, eventually, to have “hate crime” legislation that criminalizes such expressions.
It is particularly ironic that Israel, which has now declared that it is in no way subject to international law, has itself proposed across the board censorship of the most prominent social media platforms on a global scale by creating an “international coalition that would make limiting criticism of Israel its primary objective.” It would operate through a “loose coalition… [that] would keep an eye on content and where it is being posted, and members of the coalition would work to demand that the platforms remove the content… in any of their countries at the request of members.”
More recently, Israel has been exposed by Wikileaks as hosting a conference describing how it now has a Command Center that uses Artificial Intelligence (AI) to scan the internet worldwide looking for “anti-Semitic” content. For Israel, anti-Semitic content means any criticism of its government or its behavior towards the Arabs. It reportedly pulls 200,000 posts a day and then reviews them using AI for content considered to be unacceptable. The roughly 10,000 posts determined to be anti-Semitic are then passed on to “intelligence and law enforcement agencies” in countries that have hate speech legislation for further action. The Israeli government also complains directly to the social media source to have the material taken down and works through Jewish organizations in cities and countries where there is considerable “anti-Semitic” activity to pressure governments to act even if there is no legal basis.
As most genuine independent journalism is currently limited to the alternative media, and that media lives on the internet, the ADL and those who are acting in collusion with the Israeli government are focusing on “cyberhate” as the problem and are working with major internet providers to voluntarily censor their product. On October 10th, 2017 the ADL issued a press release out of its New York City offices to explain just how far the censorship process has gone. The organization boasted of the fact that it was working with Facebook, Google, Microsoft and Twitter “to engineer new solutions to stop cyberhate.” Apple is not identified by name in the press release but one should presume that it is also involved, as well as YouTube, which is owned by Google. When you consider that the associates in this venture with ADL are vast corporations that control huge slices of the communications industry, the consequences of some kind of corporate decision on what constitutes “hate” become clear. Combatting “cyberhate” will inevitably become across-the-board censorship for viewpoints that are considered to be unacceptable, including any criticism of Israel.
ADL will be the “convener” for the group, providing “insight on how hate and extremist content manifests – and constantly evolves-online.” Which means it will define the problem, which it calls the “spew[ing] of hateful ideologies” so the corporate world can take steps to block such material. And “the initiative will be managed by ADL’s Center for Technology and Society in Silicon Valley.”
Facebook already employs thousands of censors and there is literally no limit to how far those who want to restrict material that they consider offensive will go. To be sure, most groups who want to limit the flow of information do not have the clout or resources of ADL with its $64 million annual operating budget so its “cyberhate” campaign will no doubt serve as a model that others will then follow. For ADL, reducing criticism of Israel is a much-sought-after goal. For the rest of us, it is a trip into darkness.
September 25, 2018
Posted by aletho |
Civil Liberties, Full Spectrum Dominance | ADL, Facebook, Google, Human rights, Jonathan Greenblatt, Twitter, United States, YouTube |
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Controversies surrounding online fake news, having alarmed political activists in Britain and the US, are prompting social media companies to be more active in combating the alleged threat. For many people in opposition to the policies of US President Donald Trump and Britain’s exit from the EU, the internet is to blame for the situation because it illicitly influenced voters. As a result, increased policing of social networks to root out foreign spies and domestic dissidents seems necessary to them. One of the latest examples is Twitter’s permanent suspension of American conspiracy theorist entertainer Alex Jones.
The responsibility to police the social networks seems to have largely been placed, by pushy and concerned politicians, on the management of tech companies themselves. British MPs and US senators did this by summoning them to hearings and campaigning openly against the internet’s permissiveness on political content, making demands they should shut down dissident and foreign outlets because they have gone too far.
Although the most vocal of them are not actually in the incumbent government and therefore not responsible for national security responses, they are still lawmakers representing constituents and can threaten legislation to compel social media companies to change. Preferring instead to make the policing of social media posts look voluntary, they seem to have capably persuaded the management of the tech companies to enforce their views on national security.
Therefore, now, we are at an awkward point where transnational social networks must care about so-called national security – specifically the US’s national security, based on that country’s strange and self-obsessed drivel about being exceptional and better than others. What next?
Recently, we have seen police-like enforcement action against dissident users and outlets present on a variety of social media platforms and applications used by a probable majority of people in the UK and the US. This removal of controversial figures from online platforms is presented as not being censorship, but rather the enforcement of decent community guidelines by companies that have every right to withhold services. However, this argument is not very convincing. The political pressure has been immense. The results have not been targeted at bad social media behavior like spam and harassment, but against alternate political views on both the left and the right. If we look at the actions of the tech companies, they are not only encouraged by elements of the state but have made themselves into state-like actors by describing themselves as stopping foreign threats and extremism.
Brexit was the mistake of a misled public, perhaps. We are told so by influential media personalities – almost all of them – and the same narrative is presented when it comes to the election of Trump. We are encouraged to lean towards the same common solution to both of these mishaps, and it consists of mostly a crackdown online – especially on Twitter. We will be shutting down online accounts and channels belonging to the supporters of such causes as Trump and Brexit, after quickly and conveniently finding them guilty of being bots or possibly foreign. No attention is given to bad behavior as a whole.
For example, no enforcement action is used against pro-EU accounts or anti-Trump accounts, many of which self-identify as foreign or completely automated. Some even blatantly violate Twitter’s rules on inflated hashtag campaigns, doing things like using the hashtag #FBPE to get followers and retweets from pro-EU bots. Their own determination to trick users and violate the community guidelines is openly celebrated by them, so oblivious are these kinds of activists to their own hypocrisy.
So, in fact, what seems at first a principled argument against bad behavior is really a cliché so we can pretend there was some civilized reason for thuggishly silencing other points of view.
Much of the commentary by the Democratic Party, as with opponents of Brexit in the UK, focuses on national security and the need to silence or eliminate bad people and Russians. It is presented as war, using the language of military propaganda. Being in opposition, these democracy-loving people in the Democratic Party and other groups now presume it is the job of civil society – news networks like CNN and tech companies like Apple mainly – to not only take charge of national security themselves but also engage directly in censorship.
But censorship, the shutting down of opposing views and channels on grounds that they are treasonous, is not an exertion of soft power but hard power. It is a state-like activity, and the sole responsibility of states in all previous cases. By taking part in censorship without being part of the elected leadership of the state and the command structure it possesses to deal with national security threats, unelected elements in civil society are allowed to commit what would be a crime if they had been elected to do it. They engage in a coup-like activity, since, not being part of an elected government, they are nonetheless engaged in state-like activity and are trying to invasively police matters that only a heavily expanded state or dictatorship is ever expected to police.
What is presented above makes it justifiable to consider whether traditional models of state censorship would be more consistent with the rule of law and the importance of a democratic mandate than the current capricious enforcement by private companies. A party whose candidate failed to win power over the whole state, such as the Democrats, is not able to implement a program of state censorship at the moment they most want to. The reason this is the case is because of their very loss in the 2016 US election, which makes them not responsible for matters of national security and not tasked with securing the information space against threats, and yet they try. For them to seek routes around this failure, going to non-elected entities such as the tech companies in an attempt to dictate terms of censorship and actual national security policies via them, can be compared with a coup or a form of separatism. This is the creation of a second state, the seizure of infrastructure to interdict citizens. It is completely outside the bounds of normal political processes, which focus solely on democratic and valid elections as the only means of changing power.
Each point made in relation to the US Democrats here is equally true of influencers and leaders who seek to invalidate the results of the UK’s Brexit referendum, in large part because these are the same kind of civil society actors. In their attempts to portray the activity of the national government itself as treasonous and wrest control of the management of national security from the British government, entities with no democratic mandate are hopelessly creating a second state – one without elections – to take control over national security.
It is not political opposition but a second state because, for the first time ever, it wants not just persuasive soft power but hard power in the capability to suppress targets or eliminate their influence on command. Not only would this realization make these parties and their tech industry collaborators a state-like entity, but it could make such actors as the Democratic Party traitors at war with the electorate.
While this article doesn’t make such a claim, it is one Trump and his supporters have come close to making when the President accused unrelenting elements of the press of being “enemies of the people”, and could eventually create a national security crisis. The reason it would be a crisis is because both Trump and his critics will have a point. It is the role of activists and media to be adversarial, but if they are too aggressive and specifically driven to remove an elected head of state from power, their actions may be seen as the de facto overthrow of the republic to install themselves as political arbiters and impose a moral aristocracy.
Many leaders and followers in the political opposition in the US and UK are supportive of censorship, slithering around constitutional safeguards against state censorship. Whether in public hearings or behind closed doors, they have been going directly to tech companies and other parts of civil society to physically disrupt or silence speech they dislike. If they are such supporters of national security and censorship, and are really so concerned about traitors, they should not conspire. Rather, these people should approach the elected government with their concerns, to avoid being deemed traitors themselves.
They can achieve censorship by working to convince the elected government to change the law in relation to such practices and introduce programs of lawful censorship, as well as bodies to reliably and authoritatively identify traitors. This means national security can be pursued in a way at least consistent with electoral democracy, even if it erodes human rights further. Otherwise, we will continue to see electorally defeated parties and elements of civil society acting like terrorist hijackers determined to take power. They will be gaining state-like powers, harassing citizens who did not vote for them, carrying out targeted censorship, and enforcing their values over the corpse of the democratic state.
It should be concluded that none of the above is a desirable conversation to take part in and it is regrettable that it would need to be published. Ideally, neither state censorship nor corporate censorship should be tolerated. The internet should continue to be home to an anarchic culture at all costs, not a state-like one. However, as rhetoric becomes more warlike and paranoid and positions become irreconcilable, all spaces could become politically aligned and everyone’s freedom to communicate could catastrophically reduce. With constant political censorship, critical thinking will rewind a hundred years and the internet will talk like propaganda from 1914 when you try to search for the truth.
Harry Bentham is an independent author. His writing has been featured at Beliefnet, Press TV, the Center for a Stateless Society, h+ Magazine and the Institute for Ethics and Emerging Technologies. Having authored several titles available on Amazon, Harry wrote and independently published the technology and politics book Catalyst: A Techno-Liberation Thesis in 2013 and is a listed member of think tanks including the futurist Lifeboat Foundation. Keep track of Harry’s ideas via Twitter @hjbentham and @catalystthesis
September 16, 2018
Posted by aletho |
Civil Liberties, Full Spectrum Dominance | Democratic Party, European Union, Human rights, Twitter, UK, United States |
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If at first you don’t succeed, try, try again. The American Empire doesn’t handle failure well, and their repeated failures to oust Syrian president Bashar al-Assad have driven them into a frenzy where good judgment and logic are a thing of the past. Russian military intelligence predicts a false-flag chemical attack in Idlib which will be pinned on the Assad regime and used to justify “retaliation” orders of magnitude greater than April’s Tomahawk tantrum. This time, if the words of the Wicked Witch of the UN are any indication, Iran and Russia will also be blamed. While the US has mostly abandoned hope for regime change in Syria, it will not look a gift horse in the mouth, and is gathering aircraft carriers and bombers to the region while pumping out tear-jerking propaganda about Idlib residents fearing for their lives. If the false flag fails, they can always send those bombers to Iran…
Such an attack is very much on the table, with the groundwork being laid in the pro-war press. John Bolton promised the MEK, a “corrupt, criminal cult” of Iranian exiles which bribed its way off the State Department’s list of terrorist organizations in 2012, regime change by 2019, and the clock is ticking. Attempts to foment a color revolution have failed repeatedly, because Iranians aren’t stupid and remember what happened the last time the US overthrew their government. But Benjamin Netanyahu has been baying for Iranian blood for almost three decades, and Bolton cares little for more clear-headed military personnel’s warnings that invading Iran would be a costly, unwinnable nightmare – Real Men Go To Tehran, as they used to say in the halcyon days of the Axis of Evil.

Prelude to War: Iranian Bots
The ruling class understands Americans are wary of another Middle Eastern war and must be convinced they’re under attack. Hence the new bogeyman, just in time for Election 2018: Iranian Meddling. Twitter, Facebook, and Google took time out from deplatforming anti-establishment commentators to delete over a thousand accounts between them after cyber-security firm FireEye released a report detailing a far-reaching “Suspected Iranian Influence Operation.” With only “moderate confidence,” FireEye pointed to “coordinated inauthentic behavior” geared toward “shaping a message favorable to Iran’s national interests” as the smoking gun. Washed-up former intelligence operatives Ron Hosko and Larry Pfeiffer (ex-FBI and ex-CIA, respectively) smugly added that if we hadn’t let Russia get away with their (still unproven) interference in the 2016 election, Iran would never have been so emboldened as to pour $12,000 of cold, hard cash into this social media offensive in order to portray itself favorably to western audiences.
Facebook, eager to behave, took down 652 offending accounts before the government could even react to the news. FireEye’s report points accusingly to the accounts’ promotion of “anti-Saudi, anti-Israeli, and pro-Palestinian themes, as well as support for specific US policies favorable to Iran,” implying Facebook users should be suspicious of anyone else espousing these views (and warning Iranian and Palestinian sympathizers and other pro-peace activists to shut up, or they’re next). An important step in laying the groundwork for an unpopular war is to “other” and ultimately demonize the enemy, and FireEye’s suggestion that those with pro-Iranian views aren’t even real humans is classic wartime propaganda for the digital age. In addition to three groups of Iranian accounts, FireEye claims it caught some Russians “attempt[ing] to influence politics in Syria and the Ukraine.” This group “was linked to sources that Facebook said the US had linked to Russian military intelligence.” How many hops of truth distortion are too many for even the terminally credulous establishment media?
Perhaps anticipating users’ bewilderment – the offending accounts had broken no laws, were promoting no political candidates, and in many cases had not even bought ads – Zuckerberg explained around a mouth full of jackboot that “These were accounts that were misleading people about who they were and what they were doing. We ban this kind of behavior because authenticity matters. People need to be able to trust the connections they make on Facebook.” Lest users make the mistake of trusting Facebook, however, he added that the company would be “working more closely with law enforcement, security experts and other companies,” turning over more user data than ever in its quest to make privacy obsolete. When law enforcement calls on Facebook to create a backdoor in its Messenger program – thus defeating the purpose of “encrypted chat” – does anyone really expect Zuckerberg to stand fast for privacy rights?

Not to be outdone, Twitter deleted 770 accounts based on the FireEye report, noting that only 100 of these ostensibly Iranian accounts had misrepresented their location and not even all of these had shared “divisive social commentary,” while a single account had purchased $30 in ads. This means over 600 Twitter accounts were deleted for the crime of geography alone (collateral damage?). But Twitter has always gone above and beyond the call of duty, announcing in May that to promote “healthy” conversations it would begin de-ranking users for engaging in “suspicious behavior.” Users who tweeted at many accounts, had multiple complaints against them, or retweeted material tweeted by banned accounts were shadowbanned indefinitely as persona non grata. Since November, Twitter and Facebook have both been turning over information on users who post “divisive” content of the sort promoted by “Russia-linked accounts” to congressional investigators even though a creator of “Russian bot tracker” Hamilton68 admits the accounts his tool tracks are not necessarily bots, or even Russian – “some are legitimately passionate people,” as if passion is an un-American trait.
Last year, the FBI launched a Foreign Intelligence Task Force to work with US tech firms to combat “foreign influence actors.” With bots and their ilk operating all over the world, the decision to single out Russia and Iran has obvious foreign policy motivation (Bolton also claims that China and North Korea are up to no good on social media). All of this avoids naming the elephant in the room. Even though Israel meddles loudly and proudly in US elections, Facebook openly collaborates with Netanyahu’s government. Beyond removing posts and banning accounts, Facebook even turns over user information to Israeli authorities to facilitate prosecution of Palestinian activists for “incitement,” sometimes over nothing more than a “like” or a “share.” Adding insult to injury, Israel’s Ministry of Strategic Affairs has weaponized the diaspora’s ennui – often caused in no small part by young Jews’ discomfort with the crimes their government commits in their name – with the social media equivalent of a Predator drone. Act.IL is an app that allows the user to participate in the “brigading” (mass-reporting for spurious violations) of hapless strangers for “incitement” – supporting the BDS movement, say, or implying that Palestinians are human rather than a “lawn” to be “mowed.” In a rare case of instant karma, the app was found to be leaking users’ email addresses. A nation where the government and citizen “enforcers” are working together to silence dissent sounds like an authoritarian nightmare, but this is our “democratic” Middle Eastern ally.

Origins of Totalitarianism
Israel is the missing link that explains how “sowing discord” – an offense few Americans had ever heard of until 2016 – entered our national vocabulary. The modern “fake news” panic has its roots in the totalitarian tradition. Words like “inciting,” “fomenting,” and “sowing” “discord” and “subversion” are very versatile weapons in the hands of authoritarian regimes. This language was previously uncommon in the US, but its emergence became inevitable when the “new Pearl Harbor” of 9/11 opened the door to the creation of the modern American police state. Social media are now just extra bars on the cage – the tools we once believed could liberate us, during the promising early months of Occupy Wall Street and the Arab Spring, are now used to silence us. The US, following a blueprint for legal censorship set by post-WW2 Europe, is taking on the totalitarian trappings of China, of Burma, of the central Asian “stans” and of Saudi Arabia. Kazakhstan calls it “inciting national discord,” with the variations “ethnic discord” and “religious discord” applicable as needed to whatever activist, journalist, or trade unionist the regime needs to put on ice for a few years. It’s called “inciting religious hatred” or “ethnic hatred” in Azerbaijan, which also permanently bans 5 major media outlets for reasons of “national security.” Uzbekistan arrests journalists for “extremism.” China targets activists of all stripes for “inciting subversion.” Burma, which is cracking down hard on the press as it seeks to keep its Rohingya ethnic cleansing quiet, criminalizes “speech that is likely to cause fear or harm and incites classes or groups to commit offenses against each other.” Egypt detains lawyers, journalists and activists under charges of “propagating false news.” Saudi Arabia recently put a Shi’a religious leader to death for “sowing discord” and “undermining national unity.” American dissenters, this is your future.
I have already explained how the Great Deplatforming represents the triumph of the repressive concept of Hate Speech over Free Speech, and how this – not Trump blustering about that wall he’ll get around to building someday – is what fascism looks like. The US government uses friendly corporations as workarounds for the constitutional limits on its power. This technique was deployed against the Second Amendment in Citibank and Bank of America’s post-Parkland refusal to process financial transactions from firearm manufacturers, and is being deployed against the First Amendment here. Such corporate-state fascism is very effective, and the ruling class has seen fit to share it with the other “Five Eyes” intelligence partners, all of whom share information gathered by their Panopticon surveillance agencies. This week, ministers from the US, UK, Canada, Australia and New Zealand met in Australia to condemn hostile nations who “sow discord, manipulate public discourse, bias the development of policy, or disrupt markets” through their manipulation of social media platforms; they also implored Big Tech to allow law enforcement “targeted” access to users’ encrypted data. Flexing the thuggish muscles of the world’s greatest carceral state, the group acknowledged “individual rights must be protected” (and presumably snickered before adding) “privacy is not absolute” and warning that encryption was being exploited by criminals.
The Iranian Meddling affair is a perfect distraction from the real malfeasance at Facebook, where Zuckerberg is bringing back Stasi-style crowdsourced secret policing. The company is assigning “trust ratings” to users based in part on their willingness to report their friends for posting “fake news,” fostering a climate of distrust and fear meant to instill reflexive self-censorship. As in East Germany, the central authorities can’t possibly police everyone all of the time, and it is much more advantageous for them to outsource surveillance to the people, since one who cannot trust his neighbor will not unite with him to overthrow the state. Accordingly, Facebook admits that “some users” abuse Facebook’s reporting system, dubbing stories or users they don’t like “fake news” – but don’t worry about those miscreants, because Facebook compensates for their actions with thousands (!) of other measures that go into calculating the trust rating. No user can see his or her own report – that would be telling – so we’re encouraged to tread carefully to avoid running afoul of the ever-shifting Rules. Jordan Peterson, conservatism’s favorite intellectual, delivers his marching orders in a video he posted last week – “nothing is ever simple,” he pleads as he tells his fans that he’s reached an understanding with Zuckerberg, a “very straightforward person” who really just wants to keep his users safe from bad guys like ISIS recruiters. And Iran. Because they’re terrorists, you know?
The police state is no longer necessary when you have internalized the police. “Media censorship is a shift in the flow of information, while self-censorship is a shift in consciousness.” When the government has convinced citizens to do its job – reporting friends and neighbors for “hate speech,” “sowing discord,” and “incitement” on social media, for example – a free society is impossible.
September 12, 2018
Posted by aletho |
Civil Liberties, Full Spectrum Dominance | Facebook, FireEye, Human rights, Iran, Israel, Middle East, Palestine, Syria, Twitter, United States, Zionism |
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Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey has vigorously defended his platform as a place for free speech and political pluralism, but there’s one easy way to determine how much he really cares about all of that: Look at who Twitter gives money to.
In testimony to the US Senate Intelligence Committee on Wednesday, Dorsey proudly reminded senators that Twitter had last year banned advertising from RT and Sputnik. Then, presumably as some kind of gesture of apology, he said Twitter donated $1.9 million generated from RT and Sputnik advertising to “research” and “civil society” platforms working to counter Russian influence online.
When Twitter first announced that decision in October 2017, it said it was part of its “ongoing commitment to help protect the integrity of the user experience” and admitted that it had made the decision in light of a US intelligence community report that concluded that Russia “attempted to interfere” with the 2016 presidential election. That report was widely panned as being extremely light on evidence, even by journalists who are generally highly critical of Moscow.
To put it simply, Dorsey admitted banning RT from advertising on its platform and then handing the money generated from previous advertising over to US government-funded think tanks. This kind of capitulation suggests that Dorsey believes free speech and pluralism is limited to how he treats Americans of different political persuasions on his platform, but not how he treats everyone else.
When Dorsey talks about giving everyone a fair shake on Twitter and ensuring that political bias does not get in the way of how Twitter functions, he seems to only ever be talking about the “health” of the debate and conversation when it comes to American political discourse — but not everyone using Twitter is an American politic worried about being “shadowbanned”.
In other words, he’s implying that while all American individuals should indeed be treated fairly, more broadly speaking, it’s totally fine to be openly and proudly biased in favor of American foreign policy, despite the fact that Twitter is supposed to be a global platform. Twitter is a tool of the US government in much the same way Facebook is. So let’s look at those organizations Dorsey has given money to:
The Atlantic Council
To see that Twitter has offered money to none other than the Atlantic Council to help “research” flimsy claims of election interference by Russia should immediately set off alarm bells.
The Atlantic Council has become widely regarded outside of Washington political and media circles as a vehicle for Western foreign policy promotion and propaganda. The Washington DC-based think tank is funded by a slew of American weapons manufacturers, including Lockheed Martin, Raytheon, Boeing and Northrop Grumman. The Atlantic Council is also funded by both the US government and a number of other NATO countries through various government agencies. Facebook is also a donor.
Unsurprisingly, given its donors list, the AC has lobbied consistently in favor of US military interventions around the world and has taken an almost exclusively negative view of Russia in international affairs. Is this think tank, funded by NATO governments and weapons makers really the kind of organization that can be trusted to fairly assess claims of Russian interference in American elections?
EU Disinfolab
Similar to the Atlantic Council, the Brussels-based EU Disinfolab has focused a huge amount of its attention on countering Russia online in recent years. Its stated mission is to “fight disinformation with innovative methodology” — but it certainly does not focus its attention evenly when it comes to fighting disinformation.
Disinfolab has drawn much criticism last month when it attempted to brand French Twitter users posting about a national scandal involving President Emmanuel Macron’s former bodyguard as “Russophiles” who were part of the “Russian disinformation system”. More of Twitter’s “research” money well spent?
Disinfo lab is also partnered with the Brussels-based European Values think tank which made headlines last year when it published a list of 2,327 people who had appeared as guests on RT, branding them all “useful idiots” for their appearances on the channel. Included on the list were the likes of journalist Bob Woodward, former US Vice President Dick Cheney, actors Denzel Washington and Pierce Brosnan and the late Secretary-General of the United Nations, Kofi Annan.
Partners in fight against US ‘adversaries’, rather than ‘neutral arbiters’?
If any more evidence was needed that Twitter happily acts as a vehicle for US government propaganda, the Senate hearing on Wednesday provided it in abundance. When Senator Tom Cotton (R-Arizona) asked Dorsey and Sheryl Sandberg, who was also present to give testimony on behalf of Facebook, if they would ever take any kind of action that would favor or “privilege” a “hostile foreign power” over the United States or its military, both Dorsey and Sandberg said no, they would not. It was only when Cotton asked “Do you prefer to see America remain the world’s dominant global superpower?” that Dorsey declined to answer directly, offering: “I prefer that we continue to help everywhere we serve.”
Cotton later suggested to Dorsey and Sandberg that Facebook and Twitter should be actively working on behalf of the US government and not acting as “even handed or neutral arbiters”.
The subdued responses from Sandberg and Dorsey to Cotton’s questions, clearly both afraid to say anything that would suggest their platforms are not there to serve US government interests, seemed to suggest that they have little interest in challenging the assumption that their job is to work on behalf of the White House against “bad actors” around the world.
During the hearing Senator Mark Warner (D-Virginia) told Sandberg and Dorsey that while they had come a “long way” in recognizing the threat posed by Russia’s “malicious activities” on their platforms, there was still “a lot of work to do”. Warner said it was unlikely that Facebook and Twitter could combat Russia alone without some action from Congress itself, declaring that the “era of the wild west in social media is coming to an end”.
It looks like when it comes to censorship and US government influence over social media platforms, this is just the beginning.
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September 7, 2018
Posted by aletho |
Full Spectrum Dominance, Mainstream Media, Warmongering, Russophobia | Atlantic Council, EU DisinfoLab, Twitter, United States |
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If you had any lingering doubt that Facebook has become little more than a vehicle for US government censorship and Western propaganda, a recent Washington Post op-ed by Mark Zuckerberg should remove any ambiguity.
In his short and snappy op-ed, Mark Zuckerberg admits that “protecting democracy” is an “arms race” and reaffirms Facebook’s commitment to winning. Put another way, Zuckerberg is telling us that social media is a weapon — and that he has picked a side.
Because, let’s not labor under the false illusion that Facebook cares about democracy everywhere. In Zuckerberg’s world, there are bad guys and good guys — and he’s relying on the good guys to tell him what’s what.
The problem is that, coincidentally, the good guys always seem to be tied to Western or Western-aligned governments — and the bad guys always just happen to be the ones those governments don’t seem to like very much. A conundrum which I’m sure was totally unintentional and which Facebook is no doubt working very hard on figuring out. As he says in the Post, Facebook is working very hard to “improve its defenses” against any kind of unfair or nefarious influence and it has been doing its very best to remove “fake accounts and bad content” in recent months.
The military comparisons (“arms race” and “improving our defenses”) are perhaps more apt than Zuckerberg even intended, given that for some of this work, he has chosen to partner up with the Atlantic Council, which operates essentially as a soft-power lobbying wing for NATO, campaigning vociferously on behalf of the US-led military organization and championing its wars and “interventions” across the world.
In a roundabout sort of way, Zuckerberg’s op-ed is unintentionally honest, because a huge amount more can be inferred from what he doesn’t say than what he does say.
Funnily enough, despite offering a list of actions Facebook has taken against what Zuckerberg calls “bad actors” online, the psyops and social media manipulation orchestrated by Western governments — chiefly, the US, UK and Israeli governments — don’t get so much as a passing mention in his op-ed. This is odd, given his sincere and deep commitment to combating fake news and misinformation. Clearly, the little democracy fairies that whisper orders in his ear every day must have forgotten to mention them. I mean, let’s give the guy a break. It’s a big responsibility to have the fate of democracy resting on your shoulders.
But let’s say someone did slip a note onto Zuckerberg’s desk about some really nefarious stuff that’s been going on under his nose for years. What might it say?
Well, it might mention a 2011 report in the Guardian newspaper which exposed that the US government was at that time developing a ‘sock puppet’ software program, designed by the US military, to “fake online identities” for the purpose of influencing online conversations and spreading pro-American propaganda. What’s worse, this wasn’t even really a secret.
To build its influence campaign, United States Central Command (Centcom) awarded a contract to a California-based company to develop an “online persona management service” allowing one serviceperson to control up to ten different fake identities, which the contract stated must have convincing and believable background stories. But don’t worry, CENTCOM said it was all about combating terrorism, that they were not targeting Facebook or Twitter and they were only trying to fool foreigners who speak languages like “Arabic, Farsi, Urdu and Pashto” — so, no problem then. I mean, if they say it, it must be true.
The note to Zuckerberg might also mention that in 2015, the British Army proudly announced it was developing a new brigade to specialize in psychological warfare on social media. The ‘77th Brigade’ employs social media “warriors” (the Russians have “trolls” and “bots” — but the UK has “warriors”) who use “non-lethal engagement and legitimate non-military levers as a means to adapt behaviours” online — a fairly long-winded way to say: “We do propaganda.”
It is also known that the British GCHQ and the NSA in the US operate entire programs dedicated to discrediting adversaries online through sophisticated disinformation campaigns involving fake emails and blog posts.
At the beginning of this year, the Israeli Army set up its “Center for Consciousness Operations” which was described by Haaretz as “a new ‘soft power’ psychological warfare unit”. Of course, this was not Israel’s first attempt at manipulating opinion online. The Israeli Army has previously invested in similar programs, with the government announcing in 2013 that it was willing to pay Israeli students to circulate pro-Israeli information online. The IDF is known to be active on 30 platforms including Facebook, Twitter, YouTube and Instagram and operating in six languages. But the centre of “consciousness operations” was part of a new push to “influence the enemy and Western opinion over Israel’s military moves” through social media and other online platforms.
Zuckerberg’s mind will be blown when he hears about all this. No doubt he would march straight back to Capitol Hill and demand an immediate explanation.
Facebook has steadfastly ignored any evidence that these governments are engaged in massive online influence campaigns because they’re the ‘good’ guys so what they do online doesn’t matter. In fact, it’s worse than that. Facebook not only does not care what these governments do, it actively helps them do it.
One recent example was the temporary removal of the Telesur English page on Facebook without explanation. It just so happens that Telesur is one of the only English-language sources of news on Venezuela that offers a perspective which differs from Washington’s view. A coincidence, surely.
Then there’s the fact that Facebook has been deleting the accounts of Palestinian activists at the behest of the Israeli government, as the Intercept reported last year. Over one four-month period, Facebook removed 95 percent of the accounts that Tel Aviv demanded to be taken down. It’s important to note that “demanded” is the correct word here, given that Israel threatened Facebook with new laws which would have forced them to comply with deletion orders if they did not do so voluntarily.
In his op-ed, Zuckerberg claims (correctly) that social media platforms like Facebook are targeted by “sophisticated, well-funded adversaries” who are getting smarter about covering their tracks. But he simply can’t be taken seriously while ignoring the clear evidence that the very governments and ‘fact checkers’ he is so keen to work with to ‘combat’ disinformation are knee-deep in this exact activity.
In reality, we can’t expect Zuckerberg to start caring about any of this. During a Senate Intelligence Committee hearing on Wednesday, Facebook’s Chief Operating Officer Sheryl Sandberg all but confirmed that Facebook willingly acts on behalf of the US government when she assured senators that the platform would never take action to favor a “hostile foreign power” over the US or its military.
But Facebook executives are one thing and the media is another. While Western journalists have sought to wrangle as many headlines as possible out of stories about “Russian meddling” online, they have shown curiously little interest in online propaganda campaigns run by their own governments.
Danielle Ryan is an Irish freelance writer based in Dublin. Her work has appeared in Salon, The Nation, Rethinking Russia, teleSUR, RBTH, The Calvert Journal and others. Follow her on Twitter @DanielleRyanJ
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September 6, 2018
Posted by aletho |
Deception, Full Spectrum Dominance, Timeless or most popular | Facebook, Israel, Mark Zuckerberg, Twitter, YouTube, Zionism |
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On Monday, US President Donald Trump criticized tech giant Google for allegedly spreading misinformation about him and accused the company of hiding stories with positive content about his presidency.
“Google search results for ‘Trump News’ shows only the viewing/reporting of Fake News Media. In other words, they have it RIGGED, for me & others, so that almost all stories & news is BAD… 96% of results on ‘Trump News’ are from National Left-Wing Media, very dangerous. Google & others are suppressing voices of Conservatives and hiding information and news that is good. They are controlling what we can & cannot see. This is a very serious situation-will be addressed!” Trump said Tuesday on Twitter.
Dr. Robert Epstein, the senior research psychologist at the American Institute for Behavioral Research and Technology, told Radio Sputnik’s Loud & Clear that while Trump’s outrage was directed at Google’s reported suppression of right-wing outlets, beneath the surface are huge implications about Google’s power and ability to surveil virtually every part of people’s lives.
“The censorship phenomenon, I’ve been writing about that for quite awhile,” Epstein told hosts John Kiriakou and Brian Becker.
“I did an investigative piece for US News and World Report called ‘The News Censorship,’ and because of Trump’s tweets on the issue, I would urge people to take a look at that article again. There are legitimate issues here, whether Trump is right or wrong, and whether conservative stories are being suppressed.”
“That, in my opinion, is irrelevant to the larger issues here, which is that Google has the power, so does Facebook and Twitter, to suppress all kinds of material. It acknowledges suppressing all kinds of material, and who on Earth gave it that kind of power to determine what 2.5 billion people around the world see or don’t see? That’s the big issue here,” Epstein added.
On Tuesday, Google said that its search results didn’t favor a particular political ideology.
“Search is not used to set a political agenda, and we don’t bias our results toward any political ideology,” a Google spokesperson said.
On Tuesday, Director of the National Economic Council Larry Kudlow told reporters that the US administration is considering the possibility of tightening regulations on Google.
When asked whether the Trump administration was looking into possible regulation for Google, Kudlow said, “We’ll let you know. We’re taking a look at it,” Sputnik reported Tuesday.
“The Trump administration might be going ahead, somewhat aggressively, looking into the regulation of Google,” Epstein told Radio Sputnik.
“Google and Facebook have nothing to sell except us. So, it’s a completely different business model [than Microsoft]. Microsoft sells a few things, but mainly they sell software. Google sells us,” Epstein continued.
“It’s a business model, the surveillance business model, which I believe should be illegal, in part because it is inherently deceptive, but also because it’s a tremendously dangerous because of the information they are collecting about us and the ways they are discovering to use that information, not just to determine what we buy and who we vote for, but ultimately to build models of us that allow companies to predict our behavior and ultimately to exercise more and more control over our thinking and behavior. It’s a dangerous and deceptive business model which should be illegal. Period,” Epstein argued.
“The fact is that major news organizations and major universities very mindlessly and naively share all of their emails, outgoing and ingoing, and very important documents with Google, naively thinking that Google doesn’t share, store or analyze such information. The fact is, we are talking about organizations like the New York Times, The Guardian, the Financial Times. We are talking about the Daily Caller, The Hill. All of these organizations and many more and major universities share all of their email with Google. It’s absolutely absurd,” Epstein added.
“Google is the biggest data miner in the history of humankind. Google in fact collects the data and stores this sensitive data. This gives Google the ability to monitor ongoing investigations. This gives Google the ability to assess companies that they might want to buy, to make interesting stock decisions. This gives Google access to a world of information that they should have no access to whatsoever,” Epstein continued.
On Tuesday, The US president also told reporters at the White House that Google is taking advantage of a lot of people and characterized the charge against the tech giants as very serious. Trump said “thousands and thousands of complaints” were coming in about the tech companies.
August 29, 2018
Posted by aletho |
Deception, Economics, Timeless or most popular | Facebook, Google, Twitter, United States |
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Facebook removed 652 pages, groups and accounts on Tuesday for “coordinated inauthentic behavior” after it was tipped off to the accounts by FireEye, a cybersecurity firm bankrolled by the Central Intelligence Agency.
The company has attributed the operators of the newly removed accounts to the usual scapegoats: Russia and Iran.
“These were distinct campaigns, and we have not identified any links or coordination between them,” the company said.
Twitter quickly followed suit. “Working with our industry peers today, we have suspended 284 accounts from Twitter for engaging in coordinated manipulation,” Twitter said in a Tuesday statement. “Based on our existing analysis, it appears many of these accounts originated from Iran.”
“The thing that strikes me the most is that it’s so convenient, that all of these pages that Facebook has been taking down and that Twitter has been limiting, are all somehow related — or they say they’re related — to governments or movements or news sources that aren’t very friendly to the United States or that the United States government wants to overthrow,” web developer and technologist Chris Garaffa told Radio Sputnik’s By Any Means Necessary.
“Russia. Iran. TeleSur. Venezuela Analysis. There was a Haitian liberation page that was taken down last week on Facebook as well.”
“You don’t see any German pages, you don’t see any British pages coming down, even if they are doing some sort of sketchy activity,” Garaffa added.
According to Facebook’s head of Cybersecurity Policy, Nathaniel Gleicher, the social media giant got a tip from FireEye, a cybersecurity firm that has received venture capital funding by the CIA since 2009. In a statement, the CIA’s investment arm said it will maintain a “strategic partnership” with FireEye, calling it a “critical addition to our strategic investment portfolio for security technologies.”
The CIA’s venture capital arm is known as In-Q-Tel, which describes itself as a “not-for-profit strategic investor” on its website.
The company was one of the few cyber firms to forensically analyze the alleged hack of the Democratic National Committee. A spokesman for the firm told Defense One that the hackers “wanted experts and policymakers to know that Russia is behind it.”
In March 2017, FireEye CEO Kevin Mandia, a former Air Force cyber crimes investigator, told the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence that the company was able to attribute the blame to Russia based off of “deduction” and “process of elimination.”
One part of the network FireEye identified to Facebook was a page called Quest 4 Truth. According to Gleicher, it “claims to be an independent Iranian media organization, but is in fact linked to Press TV, an English-language news network affiliated with Iranian state media.”

“We’re still investigating, and we have shared what we know with the US and UK governments,” Gleicher wrote. “Since there are US sanctions involving Iran, we’ve also briefed the US Treasury and State Departments.”
“The social media companies are by and large American companies, and they want to be in favor with the US government,” Garaffa told By Any Means Necessary hosts Eugene Puryear and Sean Blackmon. “They will do the bidding of the US government when it comes to data collection [and] when it comes to taking down pages that are not acceptable.”
“It’s a huge PR weapon that the American government has that almost no one else does,” he added.
The investigation came in three parts, according to Facebook. The first netted 74 Facebook pages, 70 accounts, three groups and 76 accounts on Instagram, which is owned by Facebook. Some $6,000 was spent on ads on the platforms, and three events were created.
The second stage included 12 Facebook pages, 66 Facebook accounts and nine Instagram accounts. No money was spent on advertising, and none of the pages had associated events.
The third part of the investigation found 168 Facebook pages, 140 Facebook accounts and 31 Instagram accounts; 25 events were created, and more than $6,000 was spent on ads.
According to Facebook, many of the pages masqueraded as news organizations. Some real news organizations have reported that the accounts were seeking to influence the US midterm elections, but in reality, Facebook just said one of the account groups was discovered as the company stepped up investigation efforts ahead of the midterms.
“Finally, we’ve removed pages, groups and accounts that can be linked to sources the US government has previously identified as Russian military intelligence services,” the company said. “This more recent activity focused on politics in Syria and Ukraine. For example, they are associated with Inside Syria Media Center, which the Atlantic Council and other organizations have identified for covertly spreading pro-Russian and pro-Assad content.”
Facebook has partnered with the Digital Forensics Research Lab to combat so-called fake news. It’s worth noting DFL is an arm of the neoconservative Atlantic Council think tank, which is primarily funded by NATO, Gulf monarchies and the US defense industry.
“The shuttering of progressive media amidst the ‘fake news’ and Russiagate hysteria is what activists been warning all along — tech companies, working in concert with think tanks stacked with CIA officials and defense contractors, shouldn’t have the power to curate our reality to make those already rendered invisible even more obsolete,” Abby Martin, host of “The Empire Files” on TeleSur English, told Sputnik News after Facebook temporarily unpublished the TeleSur English page. “The Empire Files” announced on Wednesday that they were forced to shut down because of US sanctions.
“The Atlantic Council is like a who’s who of the extremely wealthy and NATO countries and allies,” Garaffa said. Since the “content moderation” partnership, there’s been a “massive uptick in removing of any content that goes against the mass media, US propaganda line.”
“So they have this unprecedented control over the narrative and the information that we can see, and these are private companies, but ultimately because of their relationship with the state, they are serving the interests of the state, and the state is actually serving to protect these companies’ interests as well.”
Facebook’s last round of bans came on July 31. That time, the company made no attempt to publicly identify who was behind the “bad actors” on their platform, but said that activity displayed by them was consistent with previously identified activity from the allegedly Kremlin-run troll farm the Internet Research Agency.
That ban included 32 pages and accounts and the main counter-protest to the Unite the Right 2.0 rally held in Washington, DC on August 12 — the one-year anniversary to the deadly Charlottesville, Virginia, protest. One of the six administrators on the account supposedly displayed inauthentic activity. The other five were totally legitimate, the company admitted.
The bans on Tuesday follow a long line of similar ones issued by the company since the 2016 election. The company banned 470 supposedly fake Russian accounts in September 2017; then, on April 3, Facebook banned 70 Facebook accounts, 65 Instagram accounts and 138 Facebook pages allegedly controlled by the Internet Research Agency.
Garaffa underscored the power social media giants wield, as they’re relied on “much more now than most people did on television or newspaper news, because the stream is always on. You’re not picking up the morning edition of the paper, you’re looking at what happened in the last five minutes.”
August 22, 2018
Posted by aletho |
Civil Liberties, Deception, Full Spectrum Dominance | CIA, Facebook, FireEye, Human rights, In-Q-Tel, Iran, Twitter, United States |
2 Comments