In the last few years, Facebook has become Public Enemy No. 1 in the media’s imagination, and Mark Zuckerberg is suddenly the creepy James Bond villain. Celebrated PBS filmmaker Ken Burns even ranted on a podcast that Zuckerberg was an “enemy of the state” who should be in jail.

After Facebook went down for six hours on Oct. 4, CBS late-night “comedian” Stephen Colbert joked, “Facebook did not say what might be causing the outage. Now, I’m no computer expert, but my theory is: A just God?”

It does not matter one iota that Facebook employees donated 90% of their political money to the Democrats in the last election cycle. Or that Zuckerberg donated $400 million to a “civic integrity” group that funded election monitors and health measures at the polls in 2020. It doesn’t matter how many Facebook posts they censored to please the left before the election; the outcomes weren’t favorable enough to the Democrats.

Liberal journalists compared the harm of Facebook to smoking, and Zuckerberg to a tobacco CEO. The team at “Morning Joe” used the CEO analogy after touting a poll that Zuckerberg now is less popular than Donald Trump and Donald Trump Jr.

Both sides are angry. Conservatives don’t like how much they are censored on Facebook. Liberals don’t like how conservatives are never censored enough for their tastes.

Colbert joked they’re objecting to quack medical advice; it’s where your “second cousin thinks the vaccine gives your pancreas Wi-Fi.” But they’re really upset that conservatives have used Facebook to go around the media filter. The media wants that filter imposed on Facebook. They need to “curate” information as fiercely as the “mainstream media” does.

CNN has gone so fiercely after Facebook in recent days you might think Facebook was somehow like Fox News multiplied by 100. They went live to a hearing on Oct. 5 where Facebook whistleblower Frances Haugen ripped her ex-employer as “one of the most urgent threats” to the American people, and claimed that they drive children to suicide, “stoke division” and “weaken our democracy.”

The Democrats want a dramatic content crackdown. On MSNBC’s “MTP Daily,” Rep. David Cicilline trashed Facebook, saying it is “a monopoly, it has monopoly power, it’s too big and too powerful to care.” That sounds like a decent description of our federal government, which is much bigger than Facebook. But Cicilline warned Facebook is a business, so “it in fact puts profits before everything else.”

He insisted not only must the government force more competition into the digital marketplace, “We have to in fact pass legislation that will make Facebook accountable for amplifying toxic and dangerous content.”

So what is “toxic and dangerous”? Let’s start with what “fact-checkers” are flagging as false. If you look up the category of “Facebook Posts” on PolitiFact, you quickly find that out of 1,456 posts, 88% are “Mostly False” (182 posts), “False” (765 posts) or “Pants on Fire” (357 posts). Only 65 are “True” or “Mostly True.” If PolitiFact throws the “False” flag, Facebook suppresses the content.

The most recent posts demonstrate that PolitiFact is especially upset at vaccination misinformation, claims about the 2020 election being stolen and anyone disparaging President Joe Biden and liberals. For example, they provided a “False” rating for a Facebook post stating, “The White House ‘created a fake set for (President Joe) Biden to get his booster shot.'” (It was a set inside an auditorium.) Then, there’s “Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau and wife Sophie faked their COVID-19 vaccinations on live television.”

The watchdogs of “toxic and dangerous” Facebook content have a tilt to the left… precisely like the “mainstream media” has a perpetual slant.

creators.com

By Glenn GREENWALD

The axis of liberal media outlets and their allied activist groups — CNN, NBC News, The Washington Post, Media Matters — are in an angry uproar over a recent report questioning the foreknowledge and involvement of the FBI in the January 6 Capitol riot. As soon as that new report was published on Monday, a consensus instantly emerged in these liberal media precincts that this is an unhinged, ignorant and insane conspiracy theory that deserves no consideration.

The original report, published by Revolver News and then amplified by Fox News’ Tucker Carlson, documented ample evidence of FBI infiltration of the three key groups at the center of the 1/6 investigation — the Oath Keepers, the Proud Boys, and the Three Percenters — and noted how many alleged riot leaders from these groups have not yet been indicted. While low-level protesters have been aggressively charged with major felonies and held without bail, many of the alleged plot leaders have thus far been shielded from charges.

The implications of these facts are obvious. It seems extremely likely that the FBI had numerous ways to know of any organized plots regarding the January 6 riot (just as the U.S. intelligence community, by its own admission, had ample advanced clues of the 9/11 attack but, according to their excuse, tragically failed to “connect the dots”). There is no doubt that the FBI has infiltrated at least some if not all of these groups — which it has been warning for years pose a grave national security threat — with informants and/or undercover spies. It is known that Proud Boys leader Enrique Tarrio has served as an FBI informant in the past, and the disrupted 2020 plot by Three Percenters members to kidnap Gov. Gretchen Whitmer (D-MI) was shaped and driven by what The Wall Street Journal reported were the FBI’s “undercover agents and confidential informants.

Wall Street Journal, Oct. 18, 2020

What would be shocking and strange is not if the FBI had embedded informants and other infiltrators in the groups planning the January 6 Capitol riot. What would be shocking and strange — bizarre and inexplicable — is if the FBI did not have those groups under tight control. And yet the suggestion that FBI informants may have played some role in the planning of the January 6 riot was instantly depicted as something akin to, say, 9/11 truth theories or questions about the CIA’s role in JFK’s assassination or, until a few weeks ago, the COVID lab-leak theory: as something that, from the perspective of Respectable Serious Circles, only a barely-sane, tin-foil-hat-wearing lunatic would even entertain.

This reaction is particularly confounding given how often the FBI did exactly this during the first War on Terror, and how commonplace discussions of this tactic were in mainstream liberal circles. Over the last decade, I reported on countless cases for The Guardian and The Intercept where the FBI targeted some young American Muslims they viewed as easily manipulated — due to financial distress, emotional problems, or both — and then deployed informants and undercover agents to dupe them into agreeing to join terrorist plots that had been created, designed and funded by the FBI itself, only to then congratulate themselves for breaking up the plot which they themselves initiated. As I asked in one headline about a particularly egregious entrapment case: “Why Does the FBI Have to Manufacture its Own Plots if Terrorism and ISIS Are Such Grave Threats?”

In 2011, Mother Jones published an outstanding, lengthy investigation by reporter Trevor Aaronson, entitled “The Informations,” which asked: “The FBI has built a massive network of spies to prevent another domestic attack. But are they busting terrorist plots—or leading them?” Aaronson covered numerous similar cases for The Intercept where the FBI designed, directed and even funded the terror plots and other criminal rings they then boasted of disrupting. A widely praised TEDTalk by Aaronson, which, in the words of organizers, “reveals a disturbing FBI practice that breeds terrorist plots by exploiting Muslim-Americans with mental health problems,” featured this central claim: “There’s an organization responsible for more terrorism plots in the United States than al-Qaeda, al-Shabaab and ISIS combined: The FBI.”

The Guardian, Nov. 16, 2011

So far from being some warped conspiracy theory, that the FBI purposely targets vulnerable people and infiltrates groups in order to create attacks and direct targets to engage in them is indisputably true, well established, and a commonly reported fact in mainstream liberal media. Exactly that has been happening for decades.

As it usually does, The Washington Post — which told Americans that Russians had invaded the U.S. electricity grid and that a huge army of Kremlin-loyal American writers was shaping our discourse — echoed the instant CNN/liberal consensus by mocking it as “Tucker Carlson’s wild, baseless theory,” claiming that “it’s the kind of suggestion journalists in other organizations would quite possibly be fired for if they sought to push it nearly as hard.” The standard liberal blob of HuffPost/ DailyBeast/ BusinessInsider all recited from the herd script. “A laughable conspiracy theory,” chortled The Huffington Post, who has done more to help the FBI find citizens allegedly at the Capitol riot than any local law enforcement agency.

The Huffington Post, June 18, 2021

What accounts for this furious liberal #Resistance to questioning the FBI’s role in the January 6 riot and asking whether there are vital facts that are being concealed? There was one minor analytical flaw in both the Revolver News article and Carlson segment that they seized on by pretending that it was central to the question rather than what it was: a completely ancillary distraction. It is true that it is highly unlikely, probably close to impossible, that the FBI would refer to someone they were directing or collaborating with as an “unindicted co-conspirator” because, by definition, someone working at the behest of the FBI would not be a “conspirator” in a plot since they would lack the necessary intent to forward that plot (their intent, instead, is to tell the FBI what is being plotted). CNN hauled out some career federal prosecutor and current corporate lawyer, their “Senior Legal Analyst” Elie Honig, to spend five minutes pretending that this single-handedly destroys the case.

But rather than some devastating theory-destroying point, this is ultimately irrelevant to the evidence marshaled by Revolver News. While it is true that “unindicted co-conspirator” almost certainly does not refer to FBI informants or operatives, the numerous references to Person-1, Person-2, etc. very well could [indeed, in the case of the FBI-directed plot to kidnap Gov. Whitmer, CHS-1, CHS-2, etc. (confidential human source) is how the FBI informants driving that plot were referenced]. These are common tactics that the FBI uses to reference the acts of their own unindicted informants without revealing their identity. And while some of the unnamed-but-referenced people in the charging documents are known (one is the spouse one of those charged), several are not.

The questions raised by the Revolver News reporting, which none of these smug FBI defenders and guardians of the liberal consensus can answer, remain:

• How is it remotely credible that the FBI did not have informants in these three groups that they have been identifying as major threats for years, especially given the reporting that the leader of the Proud Boys — conveniently arrested the day before January 6 — was an FBI informant in the past, along with the confirmed reporting that the FBI had multiple informants in the Michigan Three Percenters case?
• Why are low-level protesters being charged with major crimes while the alleged organizers of this riot and the leaders of these groups have not been?
• Why are enormous amounts of video surveillance footage from January 6 still being concealed?
• What happened to the alleged planting of pipe bombs near the Capitol?
• Why did the FBI not take more aggressive action given the once-denied but now-confirmed fact that the social media platform Parler sent the FBI advanced warnings of specific plots to use violence at the Capitol.

If the FBI had advanced knowledge of what was being plotted yet did nothing to stop the attack, it raises numerous possibilities about why that is. It could be that they just had yet another “intelligence failure” of the kind that they claimed caused them to miss the 9/11 attack and therefore need massive new surveillance authorities, budget increases, and new Patriot-Act-type laws to fix it. It could be that they allowed the riot to happen because they did not take it seriously enough or because some of them supported the cause behind it, or because they realized that there would be benefits to the security state if it happened. Or it could be that they were using those operatives under their control to plot with, direct, and drive the attack – as they have done so many times in the past — and allowed it to happen out of either negligence or intent.

Nobody is claiming to know the answers to those questions, including Revolver News, Carlson, or anyone else. Instead, they are doing the work of actual journalists — pointing out the gaping holes in the public record about what we do and do not know about an event that is being exploited to launch a new domestic War on Terror, prompt massive new police and security state spending, and empower and justify new domestic surveillance and censorship authorities. Anyone not asking these questions or, worse, trying to delegitmize them, is a propagandist and has no business calling themselves a journalist.

Pew Research, July 24, 2018

But the primary reason is that their newsrooms are filled with former FBI operatives, CIA agents, and other former employees of the security state. CNN has more FBI agents and federal prosecutors working for it than anyone outside of the J. Edgar Hoover FBI headquarters in Washington. When they go to analyze any matters involving the FBI, they rely on career FBI agents and officials to tell them what to think. And you’ll never guess what these FBI operatives tell them: trust the FBI; only malicious conspiracists wonder if the FBI is lying and has been engaged in treachery; those who malign the FBI are liars. Here is just one of CNN’s countless FBI operatives doing her job:

In virtually every segment that they have done since the Revolver News article was published, CNN, in order to angrily mock questions about the FBI, brings on FBI officials like former FBI Deputy Director Andrew McCabe — who got caught lying to the FBI and barely escaped prosecution for it — to insist that the honorable agency would never do any such thing:

CHRIS CUOMO: Let’s talk about what is true, and not true, in this scenario. Former FBI Director Andrew McCabe.

“Person one, person two, unindicted co-conspirator, those are you guys. Those are – those are Feds, undercover.” What’s the reality?

ANDREW MCCABE, CNN SENIOR LAW ENFORCEMENT ANALYST, FORMER DEPUTY DIRECTOR, FBI: The reality, Chris, is that we’re going to – we’re going to go into, very briefly, a little law lesson here, because I am convinced that your viewers are smarter than Tucker Carlson.

Just think about a purported news outlet saying this: Let’s talk about what is true, and not true, in this scenario. Former FBI Director Andrew McCabe.

While MSNBC prefers ex-CIA officials like John Brennan, CNN is practically overrun with former FBI officials, agents and operatives. But NBC News is also the home to FBI caricatures like this:

Look at these FBI cartoons these media corporations employ. Then they haul them out to tell everyone that only malignant conspiracists and insane losers would ponder the possibility that the FBI was engaged in deceit or other forms of manipulation regarding an event that has taken on central importance in their quest for more power and money. And their liberal viewers and the liberal journalists who watch these networks nod in agreement because they think they are hearing from the real, honest experts: the security state agents they have been trained to revere.

But all the mockery in the world does not make these questions disappear. Of course the FBI was infiltrating the groups they claim were behind these attacks. There may be good reasons why that did not enable the FBI to stop this riot or why they have not yet indicted these ringleaders. But those answers are not yet known. And gullible conspiracists are not the ones who want answers to these questions but, instead, are the ones doing everything possible to protect the FBI from having to provide them.

greenwald.substack.com

There was a time in American history when the media seemed a lot more subtle in its filtering of ideas. Certainly the blunt advertising of the 1950’s is primitive by today’s standards of subtle product placement and “native” advertising that surround our subconscious on all fronts. But the news media has gone in the opposite direction, becoming so bluntly biased that it is like watching those Disney/Warner Bros. animated propaganda reels from the 1940’s. Today’s “case in point” is CNN’s in-your-face interpretation of the conviction of the police officer that snuffed out the life of George Floyd while he was already handcuffed.

We should not forget that no matter what sort of person Floyd was he could only be rightfully executed after being convicted by an impartial jury during a fair trial with legal representation. The American system was designed specifically not to allow “Judge Dredd” style police work. So Floyd “the man” is not relevant to this discussion, but what is, is CNN’s exploitation of his corpse. The first two sentences of their article are as follows…

“The conviction of Derek Chauvin showed George Floyd’s life really did matter to a justice system on trial.

Now, millions of Americans wait to see whether a moment of rare hope will spur political leaders to deliver similar justice by reforming policing and eradicating systemic racism.”

Firstly, although perhaps taking into account the value of life would be a benefit to court hearings, this verdict only proves that there was enough evidence to convict the police officer in question of murdering a helpless suspect in custody. It proves that he is “guilty beyond a reasonable doubt”. The author of this piece either purposely or by instinct has framed the idea of this trial for the reader so that the results are a reflection of the emotions of the state towards the death of Floyd and not a reflection of evidence and

due process. This interpretation makes it look like court decisions come as a gesture of grace from the Emperor rather than the result of pieces of proof convincing a jury one way or another.

The second bit about having “a rare moment of hope” for “eradicating systemic racism” is just as manipulative. It is true that for some mysterious reason political change always requires a catalyst. Politicians simply cannot put up a new street light on a dangerous intersection until someone gets splattered by an SUV. So perhaps the convection could be a catalyst, but it is a weak one. If the court system is capable of imprisoning police who grossly violate their code of conduct then that sort of proves that the system would seem to be working. Furthermore, the fiery Black Lives Matter protests are a much more volatile and effective as a catalyst than punishing someone that most of the country has already forgotten about. Moments of hope are indeed rare but usually follow a major political victory or a supreme court decision, not so much throwing one bad cop (of the many out there) in jail.

But the real icing on the absurdity cake is the idea, hinted at by CNN, is that now thanks to passing some new beefy legislation, that few have fully read, filled with minor nuances and tweaks by people who have mostly never worked in law enforcement, can and and somehow shall end “systemic racism”.

In a country that guarantees equality for all under the law in its Constitution as well as provided all sorts of benefits to minorities, diversity quotas, scholarships for the under-represented and the like, it seems that if there is systemic racism at the core of today’s American government, then it is doing a garbage job of realizing Hitler’s vision for the Aryan future, especially those two electoral victories under Obama’s belt.
Again, according to CNN the amazing Democrat solution of the day that needs to be trumpeted looks something like this.

“The method for making the most fundamental set of changes to policing in a generation, the George Floyd Justice in Policing Act, is already sitting in the Senate. Democrats say it would end racial and religious profiling, ban chokeholds on suspects, eliminate no-knock warrants on drugs cases, make it easier to prosecute offending police officers and would overhaul police training to build trust with the communities in which officers serve. Yet its path is challenging given the opposition of many Republicans to the concept of Washington establishing federal standards for police.”

This again goes back to the classic logic followed by far too many people the world over, that if you “ban X via law, then X will go away forever”. For the average global peasantry this makes sense, most of us are afraid of the police and will do what the lords in fancy suits tell us to do. So if we order Joe Average that X, Y and Z are now illegal statistically he is likely to just accept it and not engage in those acts even if he thinks the ban is wrong. The problem is that it certainly doesn’t make X, Y and Z go away forerver as some people simply do not care about risks and others may be motivated to engage in them anyways or they are part of human nature which cannot be banned. No matter how many times we make murder illegal it still seems to happen, but there are certainly ways to reduce its number of occurances per year. Things like “racial profiling” fall into this category of things that are frowned upon but will never be eradicated by legislation.

Trying to ban racial profiling essentially means that via bureaucracy we want to punish people for an unfair decision making process that they make in their subconscious minds. Very few policemen are going to go out thinking consciously “I’m going to be racist today” but they certainly work and make many decisions based on their instincts which have a whole array of built up biases, some of which are fair and reasonable, some of which are not.

You cannot ban a form of “intuition” that does not suit your bizarre My Little Pony political worldview. This bureaucratic step means that logically any subject, arrested by an officer of a different race could argue that due to a procedural error of racial profiling they should be let off the hook. People get off the hook based on technicalities all the time, which is again an inherent part of the American system. If the police screw up – you go free, even if you are probably guilty. Now every action of the police that gently scrapes racial lines could become a “technicality”.

Although it may be a matter of personal intuition, this crackdown on profiling seems like an extension of the “Defund the Police” logic. However this is more of a “Scare the Police into Inaction” technique, which makes for an effective strategy but a bad bumper sticker.

Now, of this proposed legislation, the concrete tactical aspects of it do seem like a positive step. A choke-hold is a concrete hand-to-hand combat tactic, no-knock warrants are also a tactic, these can in theory be “banned”, but bans only work if the police are being constantly videotaped and those recording have the ability to use the video as evidence. We could certainly go down a “Whataboutism” rabbit hole asking why the police now cannot choke someone, yet they have been starting to use all sorts of APC like vehicles and brutal crowd control methods in recent years that seem obviously heavy-handed, but we can leave that discussion for another day.

The key issue is that if bureaucracy could solve the animosity between the Police and Black America then these issues would have been over by the end of the 60’s. The fundamental problems are of an economic and ideological nature. Biden and friends can throw as much long-winded legislation at the wall as they want, but they can’t and haven’t made it stick. No amount of CNN spin can cause this horrible approach to government to become effective. If this is the culmination of the massive protests after the death of George Floyd then they were completely in vain. Washington has put another cheap patch on the leaking dam.

MSNBC host Joe Scarborough’s belittling comments against fair and balanced Russia related journalism relate to an April 12-13 CNN airing on recent matters concerning Russia and Ukraine. The segment at issue begins with CNN reporter Matthew Chance joining Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky at the frontline of the demarcation area between the forces of the Ukrainian government and Donbass rebels. Thereafter, CNN news anchor John Vause follows up with longtime US academic/mass media journalist Jill Dougherty.

The false spin is given that Russia increased tension by amassing troops along its border with Ukraine. In actuality, the Kiev regime’s dramatic military buildup near the Donbass rebels occurred beforehand. This oversight is in line with the aforementioned CNN segment misidentifying Ukrainian forces as being Russian.

The CNN bit gives an inaccurate psychoanalysis of what’s motivating the recent Russian military activity. Omitted, is some otherwise valid insight of what could very well be influencing Zelensky and the Russian response to him. Zelensky’s low poll numbers are in part due to the miserable socioeconomic conditions in Ukraine and some faulty decision-making on the part of his government. Unable to get a prompt delivery of Western Covid-19 vaccinations, the Ukrainian government shot down the possibility of acquiring the Russian Sputnik vaccine. That stance can be reasonably seen as a shortsighted nationalist stance. It’s not as if Russia and Ukraine don’t commercially interact. Despite the differences between their governments, Russia remains a key trading partner of Ukraine.

Zelensky won the last Ukrainian presidential election on a platform that wasn’t as confrontational towards Russia as his opponent Petro Poroshenko. The former has since done an about face with brazen comments towards Russia and the Donbass rebels. The same can be said of his statement about Ukraine taking back Crimea (something that the majority of Crimean residents don’t support) and presiding over the closure of some Ukrainian (not Russian) media venues which aren’t so critical of Russia when compared to the Kiev regime’s preferred imagery. (Instead of condemning that move as a violation of press freedom, the Biden administration and some others have hailed that undertaking as a positive act against “Russian disinformation”.)

The Ukrainian government hasn’t made much, if any effort to interact with the Donbass rebels as stated in the Minsk Protocol of 2014. This aspect was casually downplayed by Dougherty in the Q & A with Vause.

In 1982, an unpopular Argentine junta attempted to militarily takeover the Falkland Islands from the United Kingdom. Initially, that move won (albeit temporarily) the Argentine regime large scale political support across the left-right political spectrum in Argentina and much of Latin America. The Kiev regime’s increased military move towards the Donbass rebels, serves as both a diversion to Ukraine’s socioeconomic problems and a testing of key particulars.

Perhaps the Argentine military were hoping that Britain’s resolve wouldn’t be so great, in conjunction with the junta getting a break from its opposition. In comparison, the overall Ukrainian enthusiasm for forcefully taking over the rebel held Donbass territory isn’t as great as the 1982 Argentine support for its government move on the Falklands.

Some Ukrainian nationalists see the Donbass area as a pro-Russian burden to the effort of a Ukraine opposed to Russia. Others see the humanitarian dilemma involved with military action relative to the civilian population in Donbass.

This last point is a concern for Russia as well. Many of the Donbass residents have Russian citizenship and/or familial links to Russia. The Russian government is well aware of a hypothetical Croatian Operation Storm scenario, which will be problematical for Russia, in terms of taking in a considerable number of Donbass residents and having nationalist anti-Russian elements in a stronger position.

In response to the increased Ukrainian government military presence near the rebels, Russia’s armed buildup along a portion of Ukraine’s northeastern border and stern statements, have sent a clear message that Moscow will not stand idly by in the event of a Croatian Operation Storm like move. The Ukrainian government could very well lose additional territory in a military confrontation with Russia.

Russia’s response seems to have paved the way for a possible de-escalation of tension – something that the CNN segment didn’t bring up. Confrontation with Russia is in line with a sensationalist media, influenced by neocons, neolibs and flat-out Russia-haters.

Never before has the fourth estate been in such poor health after four years of abuse by a president. Biden now has a chance to put his money where his mouth is on transparency and tie aid and arms sales to journalists’ protection, in particular in the Middle East.

One of the most extraordinary elements of the Trump era of pseudo-governance was how his own relationship with the fourth estate and how they reacted to him, exposed the press – in particular the U.S. giants – as never being more servile and weak than ever before. Trump literally showed the world how pathetic U.S. mainstream media is in its compliance with his own tawdry agenda to manipulate it. It was literally like watching journalists begging for more and more material from him while they say “we know this is BS, but please don’t stop”.

This is partly for two reasons. Much of it is about money for most of media and how Trump’s legendary litigation against journalists and anybody who would not agree with him ended up creating a name to be feared in the newsroom. But it’s also how Trump became a household name and that it became too difficult for journalists to continue working on deeper subjects when the U.S. president just tweeted something incoherent or plain stupid – and writing about it provided the immediate traffic that mainstream media editors demand of their journalists.

In fact, there’s a third more salient reason which might appear vitriolic and churlish on my part, after being a journalist with over thirty years behind me: quality. With the advent of social media and the cash crisis which this inflicted on many of the big titles, proprietors went out to seek a new generation of journalists and editors, who, to be honest, were simply a different class to the old school staffers. This new generation were expected to deliver many more pieces per day and this meant replicating a lot of material which was buried on the deep web. These journalists consider the internet to be their source base anyway, so writing about Trump’s latest tantrum would be considered news for them in any case.

In these realities Trump was an absolute genius. According to veteran journalist David Cay Johnston, Trump has spent most of his entire career cheating and fooling journalists and so to stay in the media spotlight, it was entirely obvious that his chief strategy from the beginning was to just keep talking and tweeting stupidity. This would stop most journalists working on real issues like healthcare, environment, the economy or even investigating Trump himself. Even before becoming President, Trump would telephone journalists and editors for years pretending to be a PR consultant with valuable information which usually served him immediate purposes. He even used to send material in the mail to journalists’ houses, unsigned of course.

Indeed, the four years which have passed have been an all-time low for the press in America which have proved time and time again they can be called to press conferences, even if they are not allowed to ask the kind of questions the president wanted. They can be insulted, humiliated, banned from key events and generally treated like servants of the president and the office he holds, in exactly the way you would imagine a fragile state in Africa to be. In short, U.S. media failed spectacularly to hold Donald Trump to account which has set a terrible precedent for others who look up to him. Worse was how journalists refused to adhere to any kind of collective standard and stand up to Trump. No one walked out on Trump. No one said “no sir, that is not acceptable to talk to my colleague like that”. No one campaigned to improve Trump’s behaviour. And so he continued.

Hey Joe, where ya going…?

Joe Biden, it is claimed, wants to restore confidence in the press. And for this, he will have to be a top gun and make enemies. He will also have to lead by example and not just set a standard for others and not himself to adhere to.

“President-elect Biden believes that the media is a critical piece of our democracy; that transparency is incredibly important,” Biden’s campaign press secretary TJ Ducklo said. “You’ll remember we opened all of our fundraisers this campaign, opened to press so that folks could see what was going on and what was being said”, according to CNN.

Ducklo said Biden also believes “that the media’s job is to hold him accountable. He is there to do the people’s work. And, you know, he welcomes that relationship. He welcomes their role, the media’s role in our democracy. And I think it will be, frankly, the polar opposite what we have seen the last four years.” A reset is about to begin, according to Brian Stelter.

A ‘reset’ indeed. But it shouldn’t only begin and end with allowing access to fundraisers. Journalists should have unfettered access to all Washington institutions, including the White House, shouldn’t be turned down for interviews by the President and other top officials (a trend Trump started) and should over all be taken more seriously. Why is it that not more journalists are investigating Trump’s alleged tax fraud, sexual assault and business misconduct which are just starting to get attention by fringe media outlets?

It’s really all about what kind of a society you want for your children and future generations. Under Trump it was hard to see America, at times, as even a modern democracy when you looked at how he treated the press. He claimed to hate the press and we should have seen the warning signs when he declared that the press is the “enemy of the people” when in reality is the servant of the people. In reality, he didn’t hate them. He absolutely loved them, as they made him what he is.

But if Biden is serious about leaving his term in office with a legacy which unites America, he would do well to reform and protect the fourth estate. We need to see the institution and everything it stands for upheld. Transparency is key. And if Biden is really serious about restoring the sanctity of media and their institutions then he needs to target the giants from day one. This is harder to imagine though given that CNN was literally frothing at the mouth (or at one point weeping) in its repugnant support for him during the election debacle. The quality of CNN’s reporting around the world – or lack of it – all contributes to the over all standard of human rights deteriorating and journalist’s work becoming remedial at best, and outright disinformation at worse.

But I would like to see more honesty about where content comes from. I would like Biden to force CNN and others to have on screen icons for content which is produced along the lines of ethical journalism and the rest which is invariably sponsored content and these days masquerading more are more as legitimate. Watch CNN for any real length of time and you will see short little films which flash up, sometimes for as little as 30 seconds, which in most cases are paid for ads – but they are not presented as such. This is disgraceful for the No 1 broadcast news outlet in America and sets a really bad example to others. Also, the number of Republican commentators on the network contributing to the co-called debates is shocking.

Tying aid and arms sales to journalists’ protection

Internationally too, American can set the benchmark under Biden. In the Middle East, we have seen since 2011, when the Arab Spring swept across the MENA region a crackdown on anything whiffing of democracy which threatened the elites. Opposition groups quashed, their leaders arrested, beaten and sometimes even tortured whilst detained illegally – and all this because of an almost blind side by local journalists in these countries who are too afraid to report on these matters at all. Countries which Biden is keen to wield the rod at like Egypt, Saudi Arabia and Turkey – which have extraordinary levels of self-censorship as well as astonishingly high levels of journalists locked up – should be targeted for their treatment of the press. If the U.S. is going to take the lead on human rights it mustn’t forget to make the link between aid packages or arms deals with the protection of local journalists to write and investigate freely. In 2011, many Arab countries’ hard core leaders in the region thought they dodged a bullet by succeeding in crushing journalists’ zeal and pulling off a revolution in itself to silence the press entirely. If Biden is serious about the MENA region and building a better relationship based on human rights, then he needs to include a new role for journalists in these countries. If this had been the case, perhaps the Yemen war would have been called off years ago; the Khashoggi murder might not have even happened and Arabian princesses from the Gulf making the headlines in the UK press might not be almost the weekly news event that it has become.

Recently, mainstream media made a song and dance about an attractive blonde CNN staffer called Michelle Kosinski who is accused of both having an illicit affair with Britain’s most important ambassador in the world and extracting information out of him about Trump and key decisions the administration was about to make – leading to a number of ‘scoops’.

Kim Darroch is a particularly controversial ambassador, previously based in Washington DC and at the heart of the swamp. Darroch quit his prestigious Washington post in July last year after leaked cables revealed he had branded Trump ‘incompetent’ which made him immediately hated by the U.S. president.

Darroch also claimed the president ‘radiates insecurity’, telling British officials they need to ‘start praising him for something he’s done’ when they meet him.

Kosinski meanwhile left her post at CNN just five months later, according to her LinkedIn profile although it’s unclear whether CNN fired her, or she resigned.

Both Kosinski and Darroch were recently investigated by Department of Justice officials who, in the event, couldn’t prove the pillow talk allegations which started at the beginning of 2018.

Darroch really should be investigated though by the British government as the alleged love affair should have rung alarm bells in the Foreign Office in London, presenting a security threat not entirely dissimilar to the Profumo Affair in the 60s involving Christine Keeler, a call girl who slept with both the war minister and a senior Russian diplomat.

It’s alleged with the Kosinski-Darroch affair that a number of highly sensitive decisions taken by the U.S. and NATO about Russia were leaked to the CNN staffer who naturally denies the sex-for-scoops allegations.

In many ways though we shouldn’t be surprised by the scandal as British diplomats behaving badly is almost becoming so common that it might as well be a soap opera. In my personal experience, I have found the Foreign Office to be a rotten institution which protects its own and lies, cheats and feeds disinformation to UK newspaper editors to protect its own. Consequently, a new generation of ambassadors is starting to make the headlines for incompetence, buffoonery and serving their own interests and needs.

Did the UK government know about the affair? Almost certainly. Was it a security breach which could have led to British soldiers in hotspots around the world being compromised? Probably.

Keeping the British end up

But the story is really nothing new. CNN journalists offering sexual favours to important figures is certainly nothing out of the ordinary. In fact it is positively encouraged and worn by some reporters as a badge of honour.

Kosinski rants in her tweets that she was “doing her job” but this needs some context. As a former contracted freelance journalist working for CNN, I have seen the extraordinary lengths failing journalists will go to in the cutthroat world of Atlanta, just to stay relevant. In 2011, I worked with one such struggling producer who came to Morocco with clear intent to make up a story about the King here “clinging on to power”. When I refused to go along with the ruse, I was threatened. Eventually I was fired for being “difficult to work with” – which is coded CNN management jargon for “you’re a good journalist, so we can’t work with you and your annoying fact checking”.

Not only did “Lisa” (we shall call her) want to make up a story here in Morocco which was entirely false, but her protestation when I objected was quite revealing about the CNN ethos. She explained to me that it was entirely normal practice for the big names in Atlanta to make up “all their foreign reports” when they worked abroad, naming Anderson Cooper and CNN VP Parisa Khosravi as well as the khaki legend Christina Ammanpour.

Yet perhaps even more shocking was how the loud New Yorker proudly told me that she was sleeping with a UAE diplomat in Rabat, who was helping her no end with her Morocco report, while providing embassy car and other perks like food and perhaps even cash.

Indeed, providing sexual services to diplomats, it was explained to me, was really not a big deal. And it came with a number of benefits to help wannabe journalists like her. In Morocco she virtually had no expenses at all, which was both a benefit to her and Atlanta who finally ran her story which was littered with errors.

Weeks later she was actually promoted to become a fully fledged foreign correspondent on the strength of her ‘showreel’ report from Morocco.

Lisa was investigated, to my knowledge three times by CNN bosses for ‘unethical journalism’ until she was finally fired in December. She has been despatched to the lonesome world of DC obscurity of speaking events and the occasional interview on TV.

Bang Bang Club of CNN

Kosinski’s disgrace also probably led to her departure from CNN. According to her Linkedin profile, she is currently presenting a web TV show.

When she writes she was “doing her job” in getting scoops one has to wonder what she meant. Was she referring to this old practice of CNN staffers who can’t make the grade of joining the bang-bang club and doing the rounds on the diplomatic circuit? Just as Lisa was stung by a number of clumsy, unethical journalist stunts (like offering to help Hillary Clinton with a ruse) which finally caught up with her, Kosinski is never going to get over a 2005 one which showed her doing a live report in a canoe reporting on a flooding in New Jersey – which featured two individuals walking across her camera line in just a few centimetres of water as she sits in the boat. Oops.

Apparently, the stunt which massively backfired, only propelled her into the dizzy orbit of CNN, which, presumably, was impressed with her zeal to fake stories. Dirty diplomats and slutty female journalists ready to use their bodies as a dump zone for men twenty years their senior is the new norm.

Kosinski left CNN to present a web TV show called The Perfect Scam with Frank Abagnale, who was the real-life inspiration for the film ‘Catch Me If You Can’ played by the handsome Hollywood heartthrob Leonardo DiCapprio.

Has Britain’s own top Ambassador been caught by a Democratic Party ‘honey trap’?

The core of her gripes with her work experience at MSNBC can be summed up by this paragraph from her blog…

“It’s possible that I’m more sensitive to the editorial process due to my background in public radio, where no decision I ever witnessed was predicated on how a topic or guest would ‘rate.’ The longer I was at MSNBC, the more I saw such choices — it’s practically baked in to the editorial process – and those decisions affect news content every day,” Pekary said. “Likewise, it’s taboo to discuss how the ratings scheme distorts content, or it’s simply taken for granted, because everyone in the commercial broadcast news industry is doing the exact same thing. But behind closed doors, industry leaders will admit the damage that’s being done.”

The above describes one major inherent flaw in news media – the drive for ratings, hits, clicks, views, etc. Be it government or privately funded, someone is paying for producers, hosts, writers, reporters, cameramen, and so on, to go out there and find, i.e. create the news. This means that every single major news organization regardless of where it gets its funding from is beholden to the financier. Someone wants to get their money’s worth.

With seemingly no exceptions, this financier is some massive bureaucratic corporation, massive bureaucratic government, or an extremely wealthy individual with an ideological bone to pick, all three of which want to evaluate the results of their investment based on statistics. If one news site gets 1,000,000 visitors per day and another gets 10,000 then from the standpoint of paperwork and stamps it is obvious who deserves to have their contracts extended for another year.

The thing is that a million views does not mean that a million hearts were touched or a million minds were swayed. Bureaucrats love the idea of quantifying something as abstract as “influence” into hard statistics but the effects of news are hard to quantify. Despite having dismal ratings and results the Mainstream Media in the United States still ultimately drives the news narrative inside of America and for most of the world. Meaning that even with terrible results the big objective is still being achieved. On the other hand getting large amounts of hits/views for garbage material about celebrities, diet and other nonsense doesn’t quantify some level of influence.

In many ways news is the original form of clickbait that was happening even before computer mice became a common household item. Shocking events of horror and murder got people to “tune in at 11” to find out. This need to get shock for ratings is the reason why Charles Manson, Ted Bundy and (post football) O.J. Simpson became their own brand of celebrity. If TV channels back then tried to compete against shock with “hard hitting journalism” that is full of nuances in terms of loopholes in the tax code, then they may as well have kissed the advertisers (and thus their stations) goodbye. “Sex sells” as they say and so does shock/violence. And because of this for decades material that attracts attention has gotten priority over information that may be in the public’s interest. This is not a conspiracy but a natural state of being – news needs views.

Screenshot: Fox may be pleased to publish the words of an MSNBC dissident but their site prominently features non-journalism created solely for clicks.

So Ms. Pekary really shouldn’t be too mad at MSNBC for doing what they need to do to survive, because it is impossible to imagine, especially in the private sector, that some news station could work with no concern for ratings/hits/views. Would you invest millions of dollars into advertising on a media source that has zero guarantees of results? If you were a powerful member of government, would you publicly fund news that may actually serve as a means for revolutionaries to rise up against you via propaganda? No, you wouldn’t and this is why things are the way they are. But Ms. Pekary still seems full of optimism.

“Now maybe we can’t really change the inherently broken structure of broadcast news, but I know for certain that it won’t change unless we actually face it, in public, and at least try to change it.”

The only way to really fix this problem would be to somehow finance massive media budgets without the news organizations having any statistical accountability, or perhaps the success metrics of news need to change and be evaluated in some other way. Perhaps if independent polling were to see to what extent the common masses parroted the narratives thrown out by the MSM, this would be a better means of evaluation, because the real mission is to control the narrative. Obviously this is very abstract, and expensive, but it would be a better metric. Then again CNN’s and MSNBC’s narratives are often identical so it would be tough to prove which one took the intellectual territory. Since most of our beliefs on events are in our subconscious it is very hard to measure.

We also cannot forget that most journalists don’t join the profession to write about Madonna’s most recent botched plastic surgery and would prefer to write about something more serious. There will always be a desire within the staff to do something of value because it is really the managers are those who put them in position who care about statistics.

When it comes to governmental and ideological financiers, even if they are not so much concerned with hard data, then they are very concerned with what ideas are being pushed, so the idea that somehow government financed media would free us from the burden of celebrity gossip news, is only partially true. The government wants results also, maybe just slightly different ones that don’t involve advertising.

It also cannot be understated how any organization can have its own culture and Overton Window of what can and cannot be said. Thus a Liberal audience of MSNBC will not be happy to see more balance by dusting off and inviting Bill O’Reilly to come on to denounce the latest Left Wing crusade. Twenty-first century news has a lot of competition which means that playing to a more niche hardcore audience guarantees better results than being fair and balanced winning over no one to your site. People used to go to church to hear confirmation that their views were right, they didn’t go to synagogues, mosques and temples for a second opinion. People are comfortable in their ideological space which is naturally bad for pushing more open-minded narratives in the media.

Screenshot: Putting Rachel Maddow as your lead personality automatically turns of a Conservative audience and Conservatives from applying to work there. This creates a Liberal echo chamber effect at the station.

The sad reality is that former MSNBC producer Ariana Pekary will never find a media organization that is not compromised for hits/ratings/views or to appease the financier directly. This is just not the way the media works, the problem is that the Mainstream Media is presented to the public as if it were the exact opposite. Perhaps the problem isn’t in the MSM but in the public’s perspective. If the average man on the street saw the media as various propaganda sources trying to woo him to their side, rather than preaching “objective truths”, we would live in a more reasonable world.

What she should do is understand that there are forces within media that naturally push it to do things she does not like and try her best to work within the system to make it better rather than giving up. Producers have a lot of ability to get the guests and talking points they want onto the air. She could gently try to nudge MSNBC closer to what she believes is being “objective” or at least get someone on the air who does not consider Donald Trump to be the spawn of Satan.

And this is another problem with the MSM, good people in it get frustrated and give up when it is their tough battle against policy, economic interest and bureaucracy to try to change organizations from within. It would have been wiser for her to say, keep her salary and fight for incremental change rather than writing a blog stating what should be obvious to the intellectually adept readers of the Strategic Culture Foundation.

In short, the ways to solve the problem described by Ms. Pekary would be to…

• See it as a non-problem and an inherent part of working in news media that will never change. (i.e. live with it)
• Try to convince the financing part to give the media organization the freedom it needs to do good work, without relying on tradition view based evaluation. This will be a tough sell for sure.
• Try to provide metrics of success that are not based purely on hits/clicks.
• Have good people remain inside a bad system and push the network in a more moral direction incrementally.

If it’s an election year, there must be a Russiagate story. The Clintons and their neoliberal progeny, including the current standard bearer for corporate liberalism, have turned the Democratic Party into a branch office of the Deep State Inc., whose propaganda drones, the New York Times, Washington Post, CNN, and MSNBC act like hired guns for the Office of War Information.

There’s nothing new about the mainstream media (MSM) being teammates with the State Department and the CIA. Carl Bernstein published a major investigative report back in 1977 that revealed that the Times and their fellow travelers had been functioning as the overseas eyes and ears of the Agency, what was called “Operation Mockingbird,” since 1948. The MSM were practically owned by the CIA.

The Times still goes to “The Company”  before reporting events abroad. Given that the largest section of Americans still depends on television for news, and TV in turn relies heavily on the New York Times for the international news agenda, the CIA is able to feed its propaganda to the public through establishment media, even though this violates its charter. The CIA also influences public opinion through its entertainment industry liaison program, established in the mid-1990s, that in effect co-directs many American film and television productions.

The warmongers in the liberal media are more gung-ho than even the president. Interviewing Mike Pence last year after Trump threatened to obliterate Iran, CNN’s Jake Tapper expressed the concern that “Iran would get the wrong message from the president’s restraint.” The cowboy pundit asked Pence,“Is he willing to pull the trigger,” salivating at the prospect of war.

The Wall Street Journal, employing the media’s “highly likely” style of negative analysis reserved for enemy states like Iran, Syria, Venezuela, and Russia, ran the headline: “U.S. says Iran likely behind ship attacks.” NBC News joined the party with an online story: “U.S. officials: ‘Highly likely’ Iran carried out tanker attacks,” as did CBS News: “US officials: Iran likely behind new tanker attacks.” Other news media just accused Iran outright, based on nothing but anonymous sources.

The hysteria over Russia continues unabated, particularly by prominent Democrats such as Adam Schiff and Jerrold Nadler in the House and Nancy Pelosi, Charles Schumer, and Richard Blumenthal in the Senate. The latest claim about Russia, that it sponsored a Taliban assassination program in Afghanistan, has been carried by all the troll farm mainstream media despite the absence of any confirmed evidence. On its face, the story is absurd, as Russia has been extremely hostile to the Taliban – among other reasons for the fundamentalist Islamic group’s active support of the Chechnyan uprising inside Russia.

The US needs a scapegoat for its disastrous defeat in Afghanistan, and for professional liars-of-record that role falls on Russia. However, as the Washington Post revealed a year ago, despite deploying more than 775,000 troops to Afghanistan between 2001 and 2019, and suffering 2,300 dead and 20,585 wounded in action soldiers, and more than 100,000 killed or wounded Afghan civilians, at a financial cost of nearly $1 trillion during that time, the Democratic leadership and their right-wing allies in the other party refuse to quit without imposing conditions that the Taliban will never accept. If they have to quit, the Russians are available for US face-saving.

As the US military’s own secret study on the Afghanistan invasion has revealed, successive US governments have lied to the American people about the situation year after year since 2001. This reminds one of Chomsky’s comment that if the Nuremberg laws had been universally enforced, every post-war US president would have been hanged for crimes against humanity.

How can anyone accept the CIA as a legitimate source of information on the Russiagate saga, especially given its notorious history of transmitting disinformation? In a frank admission of the deep state’s clandestine policy of lying to the American public, former CIA director Mike Pompeo told an audience at Texas A&M University: “I was a CIA director, [and] we lied, we cheated we stole… like, we had entire training courses [on it]. It reminds you of the glory of the American experiment.” And Donald Trump conceded in an interview with Fox last May: “And don’t kid yourself. You do have a military-industrial complex. They do like war.”

Is Russia the enemy in Afghanistan? Russia scholar Stephen Cohen noted in 2011: “Putin’s Kremlin did more than any NATO government to assist the U.S. war effort against the Taliban regime in Afghanistan, and to save American lives, by giving it valuable intelligence, a Moscow-trained Afghan combat force, and unhindered access to crucial air bases in former Soviet Central Asia.” Cohen has since been marginalized in the media and academia by the cancel culture.

That kind of censorship does not apply to former acting CIA director Michael Morell, who went on TV in 2016 to call for the covert murder of Russians and Iranians in Syria, i.e., an assassination program. Speaking to Charlie Rose, he called for outright terror tactics to “send a message” to Russia. The message apparently had a “return to sender” stamp. Morell was an active supporter of Hillary (Syria no fly zone) Clinton for president in 2016.

Moreover, the MSM and the establishment Democrats have short memories about Jimmy Carter’s extensive military support to the Afghan mujahedin (which morphed into the Taliban) during the Soviet intervention in that country in the 1970s and ‘80s. And further to the matter of foreign interference, they might also be a bit more self-conscious about the fact that it was Bill Clinton and the Harvard “shock therapy” specialists who gave extensive regime support to the corrupt autocrat Boris Yeltsin and the oligarchs he appointed to take over former state-run industries.

The US shipped over campaign spin doctors to run a rigged Yeltsin election in 1996, which sent the country into a massive depression: “the military was in shambles, the economy had collapsed, crime was rampant, massive poverty pervaded the country, and Russians were experiencing the worst mortality crisis since World War II. Russia was on the verge of being a failed state.” It was Yeltsin’s successor, Vladimir Putin, who pulled the country out of economic and social disaster.

Most of the American political class in their broadest imagination paint Putin as a ruthless dictator, forgetting that the US supported a corrupt autocrat in Boris Yeltsin, whom Bill Clinton called “Russia’s Abraham Lincoln” for his brutal suppression of the Chechnyan rebellion. They also have amnesia about the voluminous list of dictators US governments have supported for over a century. But as FDR is alleged to have said of Trujillo in the 1930s, pointedly capturing the US duplicitous imperial attitude, “he may be a son-of-a-bitch, but he’s our son-of-a-bitch!”

There is no question that Putin is no liberal democrat, and Russia is ranked low in press freedom, but it’s easy to forget that Russia has never been a liberal democracy. From that vantage point, with multiple functioning opposition parties, media, and street protests under Putin, he is almost without doubt (this is hard for gut-level Russia haters to swallow) at least in relative terms the most liberal political leader in Russian history. And despite his general stupidity about most matters, Trump seems to understand that it’s in the interest of the United States to work with Putin, a position seen by others as threatening to the national security state and the war machine.

It is also worth remembering that despite the outrage over Russia’s alleged interference in the 2016 US election, the premier interventionist in “rigging polls, supporting military coups, channeling funds and spreading political propaganda in other countries” is Uncle Sam. As George Bush Sr. and every president succeeding him, violating an oral agreement with Gorbachev to the contrary, placed aggressive NATO forces in the countries along nearly the entire Russian perimeter, is it reasonable to expect Russia to look the other way? Hence the preemptive annexation, with the strong endorsement of the local populace, of the next intended NATO peg, Crimea (and the Sevastopol naval facility), an old Russian territory, following the Maidan coup in 2014.

The Deep State-Democrat-MSM axis is blinded by their Russiagate narrative. And the Trump-Putin conspiracy thesis is not a winner for the Democrats in 2020, as they will be measured by their lack of policy making during the last 4 years and their failure to take down the president. Indeed, in poll after poll by Gallup and others, the Russiagate tale doesn’t even register as even a minor concern with the American people.

However, when the question is posed by Gallup in 2020 as to whether Russia’s military is a “critical threat” to the US, more than half (52%) of those polled said it was, compared to just 18% in 2004. On the other hand, given the daily barrage of fearmongering news the past 3 years about the so-called Russia threat, it is remarkable that almost half of Americans don’t take the threat seriously.

Putin’s latest opinion poll, which has been dropping over the last three years, currently in the midst of a major coronavirus epidemic in that country, still registers at 59% approval, according to the independent polling agency Levada. Of the last four US presidents, the average approval numbers are well below that figure. Obama averaged 47.9%; GW Bush 49.4%; Trump 40%, and Clinton, the highest, 55.1%.

As the Canadian-born journalist Aaron Maté points out, in all their flailing about Trump’s supposed bromance with Putin, the Democrats put up little criticism of the Trump tax cuts, but complained instead about Trump’s firing of the racist Jeff Sessions. Meanwhile, their MSM voice boxes, such as Rachel Maddow on MSNBC, continue to beat the drum against Russia in hopes of tearing down Trump, who, to his credit, has been unwilling to militarily confront Russia.

Second, it doesn’t hurt that Maddow’s network-approved rants pay her a salary of $7 million. Being anti-Russia in the American media has no downsides. Any sort of unadorned propaganda on the subject passes the litmus test of “news.”

“The hawkish mindset that liberals have embraced,” Maté writes, “threatens not just their own political fortunes but also global peace.” Instead of cutting back on defense spending, the Democrats demanded an increase higher that what Trump requested; instead of working for peace, the Democrats align themselves with super hawk John Bolton, a Dr. Strangelove if there ever was one. This is an ally who said on a national TV program in 2010: “Now I want to make the case for secrecy in government when it comes to the conduct of national security affairs, and possibly for deception where that’s appropriate.”

The failed impeachment effort was a gift to Trump of higher approval ratings. At least 50% of the public said in February 2020 that he deserved four more years. Then came the tides of March. If there’s one thing that could defeat him in November, it’s the unforeseen deus ex machina of Covid-19 and Trump’s utter failure to take it seriously.

US foreign policy is stuck in time back to the era of the Cold War. The Soviet Union not only challenged the US ideologically, socialism versus capitalism, but, perhaps more importantly, it resisted the idea of a single power center ruling the world. Jodi Dean has written that “the practices imbricated in institutions and technologies relieve us of our duty to believe. They do it for us.” The Cold War, like racism, is institutionalized in the fabric of the modern American capitalist project, its technological infrastructure, and the media stenographers.

Whoever wins the 2020 election, one thing is almost certain. As long as there is a military-industrial-deep state-media complex, the sun will never set on the Cold War.

counterpunch.org