Western media leads us into war in Ukraine with Russia, but don’t worry, Biden’s got the autocue working now.

“We’re heading for a war in Ukraine not because of Putin but because of western media provoking one” is not an erudite argument which many will want to embrace. But western media is in such a poor state and its journalists such low grade, that warmongering is to be expected more than ever now. Fake news has really taken over the domain as hacks scramble to outbid one another for the latest juiciest headline and in so doing, actually stir up the atmosphere so that the political establishment gets hooked on the media coverage so much that it tacitly edges itself into the war zone.

If we look for one moment of the British media’s coverage of the Ukraine crisis, we can see at an instance that few journalists are even interested in due diligence in giving the Russian side the right to reply to their jaded narrative, which is, in a nutshell that Putin will invade Ukraine based on a staged provocation. The sloppy journalism is stunning. The Sun newspaper, arguably Britain’s most popular tabloid which it could be argued is the founding father of fake news from as far back as the 80s, never lets the truth stand in the way of a good story. It declared in a thundering piece on February 15^th that Russian troops would invade the following day with 200,000 troops and a missile “blitz” – attributed of course to U.S. intelligence reports. When journalists are complicit in news which they doubt is true, they are at least obliged to put the story into context. Unless of course they are simply ignorant and are just anxious to get a sexy headline and feed the clickbait machine. Sadly, this latter scenario is what is driving most western media newsroom agendas as journalists today are no more than stenographers sitting at a machine and waiting for instructions.

The state of media now in the west is so piss poor that most journalists in British newsrooms writing about the Ukraine crisis haven’t even the faintest idea what the nuances of the story are and are just primed to write up any garbage which is handed to them, U.S. intelligence reports being perfect fodder which of course is not even checked. We saw exactly the same scenario play out for years in London with journalists covering Syria who were happy to just write factual reports about Assad’s chemical weapons attacks allegedly on his own people – based on nothing but finger-pointing by western governments and fake news generated on social media – only to be held to account years later by a scandal in the very weapons watchdog which exposed the reports to be entirely wrong and fabricated by western intel agencies who carried them out, complete with actors providing staged video footage to the BBC.

Is the same going to happen with the Ukraine war?

It’s already happening. Putin has been demonised to such a point that not one of the so-called frontline journalists camped in Ukraine wishes to go into two regions which are controlled by “Russian separatists” and do some old school investigating. Time after time British media giants like Sky wheel out anti-Russian so-called experts to unravel the reports and how they are interpreted as it always results in Russia being the enemy, because that’s manageable, bite-sized and everyone in the newsroom can work with it as it doesn’t challenge what their own government is spewing out in the world of call centre journalism which we know as ‘mainstream media’ today.

Putin can hardly believe his luck. This oversimplification and binary approach to war reporting assists him no end. Ignorance of the west to the Ukraine crisis works well in these times of crisis. Biden, who just recently announced for the second time that he was confident Putin was about to invade begins to look even more stupid and misinformed than ever before. And that’s quite an achievement.

Yet the truth is that the third-rate leaders which we elected because of a lack of confidence in the establishment are letting western voters down in their policies and are fighting for their political lives. And so, a war in Ukraine needs to be talked up and Putin needs to be provoked to actually do it, just so they can throw a huge blanket over their own egregious failures in office and work on promoting themselves as defending western values. Boris, Biden and Zelensky are all a joke. Literally. The thing that unites them is that they could use an invasion as a God-given media distraction and, they believe, save themselves from being ousted at the polls or replaced by their own parties. Similarly, the EU is in an all-time political crisis and it will almost certainly direct its servile brown-tongued journalists in Brussels to knock out blinding copy showing how the European Union is part of a humanitarian crisis and “leading” the EU armies which sent troops there. Brussels might even convince some EU member states to put on its soldiers’ arms an EU arm band to feed the fake news media machine with more lies. Of course, those journalists – like the FT one who recently wrote up a boring conference in Brussels about its relations with African countries as an award winning PR stunt for the EU itself – will not be looking for any annoying facts to get in the way of a good story. One, for example, being that it was the EU goading Ukraine to become a western ally and join NATO which is the root of the entire crisis now.

A war in Ukraine will whitewash so much bad news away in Brussels like how pathetic the eurozone is doing in growth, how Poland and other member states are emerging as Brexit-like contenders or just simply how clueless the EU is on big picture foreign policy stuff and can only really wrap itself around the leg of Uncle Sam and do a nodding dog routine, demonstrated quite well by Josep Borrell in Washington recently. Biden’s popularity also might be suspended temporarily from the current freefall if he can come across as statesman-like and actually complete whole sentences while stammering away into his autocue and using highbrow words or remembering the capital of the Ukraine. All this while the coin-operated stenographers of MSM in both the U.S. and the UK just stop wholesale in covering other galactic media events altogether – like the war in Yemen, for example – and focus on the Ukraine war story, which actually just writes itself anyway, complete with its own clichés. I wonder what the late P J O’Rourke would have made of it all.

Nearly all Americans agree that the rampant spread of misinformation is a problem.

Most also think social media companies, and the people that use them, bear a good deal of blame for the situation. But few are very concerned that they themselves might be responsible, according to a new poll from The Pearson Institute and The Associated Press-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research.

Ninety-five percent of Americans identified misinformation as a problem when they’re trying to access important information. About half put a great deal of blame on the U.S. government, and about three-quarters point to social media users and tech companies. Yet only 2 in 10 Americans say they’re very concerned that they have personally spread misinformation.

More, about 6 in 10, are at least somewhat concerned that their friends or family members have been part of the problem.

For Carmen Speller, a 33-year-old graduate student in Lexington, Kentucky, the divisions are evident when she’s discussing the coronavirus pandemic with close family members. Speller trusts COVID-19 vaccines; her family does not. She believes the misinformation her family has seen on TV or read on questionable news sites has swayed them in their decision to stay unvaccinated against COVID-19.

In fact, some of her family members think she’s crazy for trusting the government for information about COVID-19.

“I do feel like they believe I’m misinformed. I’m the one that’s blindly following what the government is saying, that’s something I hear a lot,” Speller said. “It’s come to the point where it does create a lot of tension with my family and some of my friends as well.”

Speller isn’t the only one who may be having those disagreements with her family.

The survey found that 61% of Republicans say the U.S. government has a lot of responsibility for spreading misinformation, compared with just 38% of Democrats.

There’s more bipartisan agreement, however, about the role that social media companies, including Facebook, Twitter and YouTube, play in the spread of misinformation.

According to the poll, 79% of Republicans and 73% of Democrats said social media companies have a great deal or quite a bit of responsibility for misinformation.

And that type of rare partisan agreement among Americans could spell trouble for tech giants like Facebook, the largest and most profitable of the social media platforms, which is under fire from Republican and Democrat lawmakers alike.

“The AP-NORC poll is bad news for Facebook,” said Konstantin Sonin, a professor of public policy at the University of Chicago who is affiliated with the Pearson Institute. “It makes clear that assaulting Facebook is popular by a large margin — even when Congress is split 50-50, and each side has its own reasons.”

“It has profited off spreading misinformation and disinformation and sowing hate,” Sen. Richard Blumenthal, D-Conn., said during a meeting of the Senate Commerce Subcommittee on Consumer Protection. Democrats and Republicans ended the hearing with acknowledgement that regulations must be introduced to change the way Facebook amplifies its content and targets users.

The poll also revealed that Americans are willing to blame just about everybody but themselves for spreading misinformation, with 53% of them saying they’re not concerned that they’ve spread misinformation.

“We see this a lot of times where people are very worried about misinformation but they think it’s something that happens to other people — other people get fooled by it, other people spread it,” said Lisa Fazio, a Vanderbilt University psychology professor who studies how false claims spread. “Most people don’t recognize their own role in it.”

Younger adults tend to be more concerned that they’ve shared falsehoods, with 25% of those ages 18 to 29 very or extremely worried that they have spread misinformation, compared to just 14% of adults ages 60 and older. Sixty-three percent of older adults are not concerned, compared with roughly half of other Americans.

Yet it’s older adults who should be more worried about spreading misinformation, given that research shows they’re more likely to share an article from a false news website, Fazio said.

Before she shares things with family or her friends on Facebook, Speller tries her best to make sure the information she’s passing on about important topics like COVID-19 has been peer-reviewed or comes from a credible medical institution. Still, Speller acknowledges there has to have been a time or two that she “liked” or hit “share” on a post that didn’t get all the facts quite right.

“I’m sure it has happened,” Speller said. “I tend to not share things on social media that I didn’t find on verified sites. I’m open to that if someone were to point out, ‘Hey this isn’t right,’ I would think, OK, let me check this.”

___

The AP-NORC poll of 1,071 adults was conducted Sept. 9-13 using a sample drawn from NORC’s probability-based AmeriSpeak Panel, which is designed to be representative of the U.S. population. The margin of sampling error for all respondents is plus or minus 3.9 percentage points.

apnews.com

One wonders if Britain’s MI5 chief, Ken McCallum is a real person or some banal technical creation of the boffins of the UK’s home security service. His recent comments about the Taliban giving rogue winnable terrorists around the world a moral boost after the calamity of the U.S. withdrawal in Afghanistan not only smacks of ‘stating the bleeding obvious’ but also of paternal baloney nefariously designed to distract the UK’s public attention away from the real issues.

Is McCallum actually the real boss of MI5 or the nerdy, hapless fake chief who is there merely to generate fake news in the UK press?

Writing in the God-awful woke Guardian, he harps on about preventing over thirty UK terror attacks which he admits span over four years, but spectacularly fails to make his assertions stand up. His unsubstantiated article was really just a rant which probably only served his own interests rather than the country’s; it also neatly took a pot shot at Biden without naming the U.S. president which might give us all a hint about the so-called special relationship between the UK and the U.S. being really just a farce, or a cliché used by both sides on special occasions.

But in a period where people are reflecting about Afghanistan and trying to look for lessons learnt, the article was way off the mark for a intelligence chief and raised a number of red flags.

The Americans and the British who followed them got the intel really wrong in Afghanistan as indeed was the case in Iraq. So should we really expect anything from the security services in terms of looking back – and then looking forward? And is there a dark game being played here by the spooks in Britain, using a cavernous and inept media machine to create a smoke screen to the real issues?

How could anyone with any real intellect and understanding of international politics be so stupid? The oversimplification is stunning.

In reality, some pundits might speculate that such media stunts are all about guiding a gullible public away from the difficult-to-chew truth towards the easier-to-swallow perceived truth about U.S. interventionism and the link to homegrown terrorism.

America has failed spectacularly in its military ventures for decades, going back to Nicaragua, El Salvador, Korea and Vietnam. It has a short blip in the 90s with the NATO-led air strikes against Serbia and later some success in Kosovo; but a small cabal of foreign hacks have always pointed to the faked attacks on Muslims in Sarajevo which paved the way for NATO getting the green light for the campaign pushed by the odious Madeleine Albright. And in the same period, a U.S.-led UN mission in Somalia in 1993 led to the bungling of a raid supposed to bring a recalcitrant warlord in, but led to the catastrophe of ‘Black Hawk Down’ – which singularly led to Bill Clinton failing to intervene in the Rwandan genocide a year later.

In the 90s there was a false sense of righteousness brought about largely by the Russian withdrawal of Afghanistan. And this has prevailed leading to 2001 when George W Bush sent troops to Afghanistan – by far the biggest failure of U.S. military-led foreign policy ever leading to thousands of lost lives, trillions of dollars of debt and most European leaders scratching their heads in recent weeks wondering if Europe can ever be beguiled into blindly following the U.S. into an intervention ever again, regardless of how shocking the events are which preceded it.

America just can’t help itself in using its force to resolve the illogical outcomes of its befuddled policies. Madeleine Albright once commented in 1998 when she was Secretary of State that “If we have to use force, it is because we are America: we are the indispensable nation. We stand tall and we see further than other countries into the future, and we see the danger here to all of us.”

And Britain can’t seem to help itself but to follow Washington wherever it goes. But what the UK spy chief failed, curiously, to point out in his link with the Taliban and UK terror attacks is that it is London which has supported the U.S. in its dirty wars in Syria and Libya which has overwhelmingly led to nearly all of the attacks he claims he is foiling. It was Britain after all who even assisted Libyans living there to get on planes and go to Libya to fight with Al Qaeda to overthrow Gaddafi, before returning only to be welcomed at Heathrow airport by spooks who gave them the nod and the wink. It was also Britain who stood side by side with the U.S. in its sponsoring of Al Qaeda affiliates in Syria who were hilariously called ‘moderates’ just to help British journalists who were camped in Beirut but who ventured into Northern Syria to ‘embed’ with them. There are no moderates anymore in Syria, in case you were wondering. The West has given up its obsession with Assad so the need to blur the lines is no longer necessary. Dirty wars though, which involve terrorists being paid hard cash by the U.S. and UK, will no doubt continue as long as a naïve public laps up all those terribly insightful articles in the Guardian and assumes them to be genuine. And how is it that the home security boss seems to be an expert on Afghanistan, to the point where he is almost preparing the British public for British soldiers to return there at some point?

By Aaron MATÉ

For the first time, OPCW chief Fernando Arias was asked a series of direct questions at the United Nations about the cover-up of a Syria chemical weapons probe. He answered none of them.

Russia’s UN ambassador asked Arias about several damning leaks, some revealed by The Grayzone, as well as ongoing deceptive attacks on the veteran scientists who challenged the censorship of their investigation. Arias refused to answer in public session, and gave vague, non-substantive answers in private.

Aaron Maté recaps the unanswered questions to Arias, as well as recent attacks on the OPCW whistleblowers via Western state-funded outlets Bellingcat and the BBC.

thegrayzone.com

In a previous piece, I broke down the current troubles of Moldova and the mistakes of history they are very likely to be repeated based on certain similarities this republic has to the Ukraine, Georgia and Armenia. In that article the only key difference that makes Moldova different from the others is that Sandu won the election (apparently cleanly) without a Maidan-style Color Revolution. The years following revolutionary change tend to be rather harsh so one would hope that this could be avoided but that is exactly why the winning side is building a pseudo-Maidan on the streets of Chișinău.

Image: Sandu and Zelensky: Is Ukraine a good or bad example for Moldova to follow?

The incoming President Sandu, has overtly stated that the reasons for these protests are to push for earlier elections next time with the justification that it will help the new President battle corruption. But how could earlier or later elections really affect corruption? The possible answer to this, is that there are too many pro-Russian members of the government currently in office and that she needs to strike while the iron is hot to get more pro-EU allies seated in various positions across the country.

This strategy makes a lot of sense as there is nothing more publicly disappointing then a Color Revolution 5 years in. This is the point where the naive street protestors that gave into empty promises see that nothing has changed except for a radical increase in national debt. Color Revolutions don’t age well, and poor countries that most Westerners can’t spell or find on a map tend to only get poorer and rustier under a cheap coat democratic of paint. The populous who fought for these changes wanted to remove corrupt officials from office, the problem is that they are simply replaced by different corrupt officials that wear a different lapel pin.

In the previously stated breakdown of the Moldovan situation, I made it clear that war between unhappy regions of the country and the capital is very likely since exactly the same thing has happened right after other Color Revolution events in other Former Soviet Republics. This sounded conspiratorial to some but thankfully President Sandu agrees with me saying that she “wouldn’t be surprised by a Nagorno-Karabakh situation in Transdniester”. It is always nice when world leaders publicly confirm your “conspiracy theory”. Although for the sake of the thousands that will potentially die, I hope that I will be proven completely wrong.

To be clear, the Maidan-style protests that Sandu is at the epicenter of are not for the sake of some sort of State Department checklist but to create the illusion of public support that happens from a Revolution. Politics can be very theatrical and it looks much better coming into office with hordes of angry villagers with pitchforks behind you. If you want to make big societal changes or try to send in your forces to break Transdniester then you will need a media friendly wave of popular support. We should not blame Sandu or any other politician for trying some stunt like this to drum up enthusiasm, what we can blame them for is to what ends will they use said enthusiasm.

What Sandu is doing is very intellectually interesting. Color Revolutions have always been an illusion of the people’s will. In Ukraine 40,000 organized activists decided the fate of 40 million citizens sitting at home watching passively. This was in a way a simulation of a revolution or a theatrical microcosm of one. What is happening in Moldova is essentially a “simulacrum” – a simulation of a simulation or a copy of a fake. This political term is very popular in Russian parlance, probably due to so many years of rule by the Communist Party, which adored fake attempts and fake results. When something falls into the simulacrum category it has no hope of success as it provides false solutions to false problems. This “Maidan Simulacrum” is for today a unique instance, but there is a lot of potential for politicians to try to copy this model.

Image: Despite leaving office Igor Dodon is heading to Moscow for important talks.

Leaders across the globe should take note of this move by Sandu as it was cheap, easy and could become very effective. This sort of fake revolutionary spirit has worked well for Chavez/Maduro’s Venezuela and Duterte’s Philippines in which this type of exciting spirit of change has served to maintain the state rather than overthrow it.

Perhaps one final interesting curiosity is that the soon to be former President of Moldova Igor Dodon is planning a big trip to Moscow for meetings in the halls of power. This is a very strange way to start one’s retirement. Dodon is a man of steel resolve and he may not let one electoral loss end his life mission. The results of Mr. Dodon’s trip will reveal a lot about where Moldova is heading and Russia’s ability to convince its former territory to stay somewhat close to home.

Most ‘democratic’ countries are democratic only in form but not in substance. They have a constitution, but there are infinite numbers of ways to get around it. Such ‘democracies’ have multiple candidates in ‘elections’, and have multiple Parties, but all of the Parties that succeed in becoming represented in the national legislature are funded by various billionaires, who collectively determine which candidates will be adequately funded, and which won’t. So: billionaires are the actual rulers there, because candidates who don’t serve any billionaire won’t stand any chance to become the nominee of any Party. Such candidates will be abandoned by the big money, and therefore would be merely a waste of money for any non-billionaire to donate to. Any such candidate can easily be overwhelmed by the money that’s going to his or her opponents who are backed by billionaires. No candidate who lacks the funds to get his/her message out to the voters stands any chance of winning, in such a ‘democracy’.

Winning public office thus becomes based upon propaganda: lying and censorship (so as to fool the public into thinking the candidate will serve the public instead of his/her top financial backers), which are done both by candidates’ campaigns and by the ‘news’-media that are controlled by the billionaires — the nation’s mainstream (i.e., well-funded) ‘news’-media. That propaganda is a lock-hold on accession to political power. And it is also a lock-hold on maintaining political power. And it is controlled by the billionaires, who are the ultimate political bosses in any such ‘democracy’.

Every recent national political campaign in any ‘democracy’ has been dominated by lying and censorship. Here is how that — the key to control — is enabled to function effectively:

People worldwide trust traditional — print and broadcast — news-media more than internet news-media, but only internet news-media even have the ability to enable readers to access immediately and directly, on their own, the reporter’s news-sources, in order for the reader him-or-herself to be able to verify, or else to disconfirm, on one’s own, how credible those sources — and therefore the article itself — actually are. (Any voter who relies only on billionaires-funded ‘fact-checking’ organizations to ‘verify’ ‘truth’ is no less totally controlled by the billionaires than is one who simply trusts his/her preferred ‘news’-media — that person, too, is totally controlled. Each individual’s active scientific skepticism of all news is essential, in order for the public to become enabled to take control.)

Consequently, in a rational world, the public would restrict itself only to online news-articles that take advantage of this unique new technological ability, which only the internet has — the ability to link to each source wherever there is a questionable allegation being made by the reporter. However, the vast majority of people are instead irrational, and the public therefore trust traditional print-and-broadcast ‘news’-media more than internet media — even more than the internet media which DO provide links to their sources (in other words: which empower their readers to check their sources).

The widespread distrust of information that’s obtained over the internet is the reason why polls show that the public consistently trust broadcast and printed news (billionaires-controlled news) more than news which is available only over the internet.

For example, the latest global Gallup poll, of 150,000 people in 142 countries, was recently released as the Lloyd’s Register Foundation World Risk Poll Report 2019, and on page 147, it shows that people who are using the internet worry more about receiving false information than about anything else — even about fraud — on the internet. 52% of those 150,000 people use the internet, and 57% of that 52% — or 30% of the 150,000 respondents — said that they “worry about” “receiving false information” via the internet. Only 42% of them did not worry about that. By contrast, only 45% of that 52% (users of the internet) worry about “Fraud.” And only 30% of them worry about “Bullying” on the internet. So: distrust of news that’s available only online is very high — the highest concern that users of the internet have. For example, in the United States, the 2019 Ipsos “Trust in Media Poll” found that the net level of trust in news from newspapers and magazines is +9%; from television and radio is +7%; and from online news websites is -13%. There is net distrust only of online-only news-sites.

A major reason for this sad fact is that the vast majority of users of the internet do not restrict their news to only articles that link to their sources; and, so, mere gossip and hearsay on the internet is received by them with the same credibility as serious news-reporting and analysis on the internet is. And there is plenty of gossip and hearsay on the internet, just as there is plenty of it in broadcast and printed news. But the latter — broadcast and printed news — provides the audience with no trustworthy means of verifying its sources, and is therefore intrinsically less trustworthy. (Yet, the mainstream ‘news’ is more trusted than news received only online is; so, deceiving the public is easy for billionaires to do.)

Almost all people accept or reject news mainly on the basis of their personal trust in the given ’news’-medium. If the person is conservative, then only conservative ‘news’-media are trusted; and, if liberal, then only liberal ones are. People choose ‘news’-media in order to confirm their personal prejudices. In other words: they vote, actually, on the basis of sheer faith. They think that their faith is right, and that anything which is opposed to their faith is wrong. They don’t vote on the basis of science (which would demand restricting one’s news to only online news-articles that link to their sources). In fact, billionaires’ ‘news’-media encourage voting on the basis of faith (in religion, race, ethnicity, or any other assumption-laden mythology — ‘solidarity’ with ‘one’s own’ people, ‘us’ instead of ‘them’), instead of on the basis of scientific skepticism of every claim, from everyone.

A major way that this situation is promulgated is by deceiving the public about what causes ‘fake news’ to exist. (After all: as the Lloyd’s Register report noted, that’s the biggest worry the public has about news which can be received only online.) The major ‘news’-media pretend that “fake news” is news that doesn’t come from the major ‘news’-media: they lie to convey that “fake news” is a problem only of non-mainstream media. But, actually, all of the major, or “mainstream,” news-media are owned and controlled by billionaires; and so, the only times when any of them will criticize another of them is when it’s about a partisan (Democratic versus Republican) issue, and never in order to expose a truth that BOTH of the Parties (all of the billionaires) want the public not to know.

A classic example of authentic major fake ‘news’ is that throughout 2002 and even well after the U.S. and its allies invaded Iraq on 20 March 2003, none of the mainstream ‘news’-media were reporting that U.S. President George W. Bush and his Administration were lying through their teeth and misrepresenting the evidence regarding Bush’s claims of “WMD in Iraq”; and, basically, they all were hiding the clear fact that he (and UK’s Tony Blair) were simply lying. They said, instead, that these had been ‘intelligence errors’. The fake ‘news’ came from the Government, and from the ‘news’-media that the billionaires also controlled, and it just kept on coming. America’s and UK’s mainstream ‘news’-media were all pumping lies about ‘Saddam’s WMD’ — they were the “fake news” media, who had stenographically reported those lies from the Government, as truths; and they ALSO were the mainstream — print and broadcast — ‘news’-media. So, ONLY the few members of the general public who had been searching ONLINE (and NOT at the online versions of those fake-‘news’ reports) had even a CHANCE to know that these two Governments (U.S. & UK) were lying through their teeth. Both Democratic Party ‘news’-media and Republican Party ‘news’-media (and Labour Party and Conservative Party ‘news’-media) were lying. And they kept on doing it. The fake ‘news’-media were the mainstream — the print and broadcast — media. And, yet, even today, those are the most-trusted news-media.

One way that the ‘news’-media and their nonprofits further advance the lie about what the source of fake news is, is by their mischaracterizing the issue as being “TV, NEWSPAPERS, RADIO” versus “SOCIAL MEDIA”. Ignored altogether there is the key difference: “Print and Broadcast Media” (or “Mainstream Media” or “Billionaires-controlled Media”) versus independent (Non-Billionaires-controlled) online news-articles that link to their sources (such as the present article does). Unfortunately, many independent news-media themselves mix articles of that type (which links to its sources, as this one does) along with unsourced (or non-linked) articles, and along with youtubed or other video news-reports (which have no links in them), but even some of the latter (videos) are often far superior to the mainstream ‘news’-media; and here are two such examples of that — excellent online-only news-videos, which demonstrate how high the quality of independent online-only news-reporting and analysis can be, even if it fails to provide ways to link to its sources:

https://theduran.com

I’ve personally tracked down the sources that are identified in both of those major news-reports/analyses, and found 100% truthfulness in both. Together, they demonstrate the gross inadequacy, and even the untrustworthiness, of mainstream ‘news’-media, in the U.S., and in its vassal nations (such as UK). Both of those videos report very important news that none of the mainstream media were reporting at the same time (or even now).

Obviously, social media, such as Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram, are billionaires-controlled and therefore serve the interests — including the political interests — of billionaires; and, so, they are just as motivated to censor-out what billionaires don’t want the public to know as the print and broadcast media are. So: the issue isn’t “social media versus mainstream media” (such as some billionaires-controlled organizations assert) but, instead, billionaires-controlled media versus non-billionaires-controlled news-media (such as you now are reading).

In order to understand how the dictators in ‘democracies’ stay in power, the first thing that needs to be understood is that the dictators are none of the major political Parties, but are the billionaires, because those billionaires — of all major Parties — collectively control the Government. For example, on October 28th, America’s National Public Radio (NPR), a propaganda operation that’s funded by billionaires and by the U.S. Government itself, headlined “Global Conflict Experts See Signs Of Potential Violence Around U.S. Election”, and reported as if the basic American conflict is between the Democrats versus the Republicans and is racial, instead of between the billionaires versus the public and is thus actually class-based. In order to do that, they had to censor-out the key information that is necessary to know in order to be able to understand how America’s politics actually works. That’s not really “news” which is being reported; it is instead lying, and it is done by censoring-out the key facts (such as this) that are necessary in order to be able to understand truthfully what is happening. If the public are blinded to such key facts (such as here), then the billionaires can face no effective resistance, whatsoever. Consequently, reporters whose understanding is deeper than that, won’t be hired by the nation’s mainstream ‘news’-media (or won’t be able to keep their jobs there if they are, such as in this instance, and in this instance).

This isn’t to say that post-election violence won’t happen, but that — if it does happen — the reason for it won’t be actually racial. Any such violence would be a result of suckers of Democratic Party billionaires, and/or of Republican Party billionaires. (In either case, it would be a misdirection of rage, away from the aristocracy, and onto ‘Whites’ or ‘Blacks’.) Censorship is no way to solve the problem, but is instead an essential tool for causing the problem. Censorship is basic for misdirection.

Censorship is the core of any dictatorship, even of ones that pretend to be democratic. The only way around censorship is intelligent usage of the internet. This article has explained basically how that is done. If there aren’t many people who care about getting beyond the propaganda, then how can democracy even become possible? A population that votes only its existing prejudices cannot even conceivably be the citizenry of an authentic democracy. And, so, they aren’t.

Censorship isn’t done only by (for example) destroying Julian Assange for his having made essential truths available to the public. But billionaires-controlled ‘news’-media encourage that — and other types of — censorship, so as to maintain their control over the Government. As long as that control continues, the dictatorship will continue.

Despite the rising salience of “fake news” in the U.S., propaganda, misinformation, and conspiracy theories are hardly new phenomena. In the 1950s, The historian Richard Hofstadter famously wrote in The Paranoid Style of American Politics about conspiratorial thinking in American history, including McCarthyism, ravings about water fluoridation, and wild tales about the Illuminati and Free Masons secretly dominating American politics and society.

Americans are now witnessing a new era of conspiracy mongering and fake news via the rise of the fringe “QAnon” movement, among a plethora of paranoid claims that Covid-19 is an elite-fueled hoax and that it was secretly created by powerful people working in the shadows.

Pew Research Center polling from September finds that nearly half of Americans – 47 percent – have read or heard about the QAnon conspiracy, which claims that the Democratic Party and media are secretly coordinating a cannibalistic satanic pedophilia ring, and that only Donald Trump and one of his allies embedded in the “deep state” stand in their way.

The best conspiracy theories are those that are completely unencumbered by facts or evidence. This reality holds for QAnon as well. Trump’s supposed ally in the depths of the “deep state” – Q – appears not to be government employee at all, and he does not even reside in the United States. Rather, Jim Watkins – who reportedly hosts the primary QAnon accounts on 8Chan, is a pig farmer living in Manila. And in a truly Orwellian twist, 8Chan itself reportedly serves as a venue for the dissemination of child pornography. Finally, President Trump, who is supposedly leading the effort to combat “deep state” pedophilia, has gone out of his way to identify with Ghislaine Maxwell, announcing that he “wish[ed] her well” after she was arrested and charged for participating in Jeffrey Epstein’s child sex trafficking ring.

Outside of QAnon, American political discourse on Covid-19 has also been infected with various false and conspiratorial claims. This misinformation is primarily fueled, not by mainstream media coverage, but by questionable actors operating in social media venues like Facebook, and Twitter, among other sources. I sought to drill to the core of the fake news phenomenon, to better understand precisely how this new social media ecosystem has contributed to the dumbing down of the nation on important political matters of the day.

To identify the effects of social media in disseminating misinformation, I examined two recent national polls by the Pew Research Center – from April and June 2020 – covering American media consumption, and as related to opinions of fake news, conspiratorial thinking, and the Covid-19 pandemic.

Through an original statistical regression analysis, I isolate the power of social media consumption in predicting consumption of, and beliefs about various forms of fake news. “Controlling” for other demographic factors, including respondents’ partisan identities, self-declared ideology, gender, age, education, race, and income, I am able to rule out other factors as potential influences on one’s likelihood of consuming and embracing fake news.

The concern with the noxious effects of social media began to intensify in the spring of this year when various fake news stories and conspiracies were first popularized in these venues. And there is good reason to be alarmed. My analysis of Pew’s April 2020 survey finds that consumption of social media – including Facebook, Twitter, and “online forums”/“discussion groups” – is significantly linked not only to being increasingly exposed to fake news, but with struggling to distinguish between which news stories and information are real, and which are fabricated. Individuals who reported getting and posting their information and news on Covid-19 from these venues were more likely to say they had consumed fake news stories and conspiracies on Covid-19, including the claim that Vitamin C is an effective treatment against the virus, that 5G cell towers are secretly spreading Covid, and that “at-home treatments” are “effective” for combating “various serious cases of the Coronavirus.”

The problems didn’t stop with the fake news above. Social media users were also consistently more likely to fall victim to all types of fake news related to Covid-19. They were significantly more likely:

+ To admit that much of the “news and information” they had “seen or heard about the coronavirus” “seemed completely made up.”

+ To agree that they “initially” believed that “made-up news and information” on Covid-19 “was true before realizing it was made-up.”

+ To report that they had “stopped going to a specific source” of news or information because they “thought that they were putting out made-up stories and information about the coronavirus outbreak.”

+ To report that they lacked confidence in their ability “to check the accuracy of news and information about the coronavirus.”

+ To say that they found it “difficult to determine what is true and what is not” when it comes to “get[ting] news and information about the coronavirus outbreak.”

Unsurprisingly, considering their greater exposure to fake news and their increased struggles in identifying it, social media users were also significantly more likely to agree that “made-up news and information leaves Americans confused about the basic facts of the coronavirus outbreak.”

Recognizing the PR disaster of serving as a hotbed for Covid-19 fake news and conspiracy theories, Facebook and Twitter quickly announced that they were implementing efforts to crack down on false “news” and information on their platforms. Mark Zuckerberg announced in April that Facebook was committed to “help[ing] connect people with authoritative health information and experts and at the same time to limit the spread of misinformation” by directing “more than 2 billion people” to a “Covid information center” with “high-quality content” from health experts, while promising to “take down” false health information from Facebook users if it was perceived to “put people at risk,” and by working “with independent fact checkers” to expose “more than 4,000 articles” posted by Facebook users who were “spreading misinformation” via the use of “warning labels.” Similarly, Twitter announced in late-March that it would take down misinformation-based content concerning Covid-19 that downplayed the danger of the virus, that toted false cures, and falsely promised that mass contraction would help defeat the virus by promoting “herd immunity.”

Despite promises to crack down on Covid-19 fake news, misinformation continued to be associated with social media use in the months following Facebook’s and Twitter’s spring announcements. These venues cracked down on many of the most egregious conspiracies and misinformation, but available evidence also suggests that they continued to serve as delivery mechanisms for misinformation among a subset of users – Americans (and especially Republican Americans) who heavily rely on President Trump and social media for their information about Covid-19. My statistical examination of the Pew Research Center’s June 2020 national survey finds that social media consumption was still consistently linked with embracing Covid-19-related misinformation, after controlling for other factors, including respondents’ partisanship, ideology, race, gender, education, age, and income. More specifically, my analysis examines individuals who reported: 1. Getting “political and election news or information directly from…Donald Trump or his presidential campaign” via “email, social media, or [his] campaign website”; and 2. Those who reported relying on social media, including Twitter and Facebook, as “the most common way you get political and election news.”

These two groups are significantly different in their susceptibility to Covid-19 misinformation. Reflecting Twitter’s and Facebook’s crackdown on conspiratorial information and other fake news, primary reliance on these venues (question #1 above) was no longer associated with increased likelihood of embracing fake news conspiracies. But individuals (particularly Republicans) relying heavily on political and election news from Trump’s campaign and social media (question #2 above) were significantly more likely to embrace false information and conspiratorial thinking, along multiple dimensions. They were more likely to believe the baseless claim that the official Covid-19 death count (more than 100,000 by June) had been intentionally exaggerated, to have heard that “powerful people” had secretly and “intentionally planned the coronavirus outbreak,” to agree that this conspiracy theory was true, and to have watched the “Plandemic” conspiracy “documentary” claiming that Covid-19 was created and unleashed by a secret cabal of elites. This sub-group of Americans likely includes many of Trump’s tens of millions of Twitter followers, but also right-wing Americans who participate in all types of social media groups and closed right-wing echo chamber networks that are trafficking in Covid-19 related conspiracies.

Social media venues have also been at the vanguard of disseminating the QAnon conspiracy theory. As the Pew Research Center reports from its spring 2020 national survey, social media users – specifically those consuming Reddit, Twitter, and Youtube, were among the most likely to be exposed to QAnon conspiracy information, although exposure was much less on Facebook and Instagram. Traditional media consumers – those following the New York Times, National Public Radio, and MSNBC – were also regularly exposed to the QAnon conspiracy. But the big difference between legacy media and social media in this instance is that the coverage in traditional media has been overwhelmingly negative, almost universally referring to QAnon as a fringe conspiracy theory, while social media venues have become prime culprits in disseminating pro-QAnon paranoia.

The crackdown on social media against misinformation has seemingly succeeded in limiting the volume of blatantly fraudulent content that is consumed by their patrons. But major problems persist – particularly in right-wing informational networks – when it comes to promoting and consuming conspiracy theory paranoia and fake news. Social media boosters will no doubt point to the crackdowns as evidence that these venues can be reformed and regulated to avoid the worst forms of misinformation that thrive online. But the reality remains that social media like Facebook have long enabled the proliferation of insulated echo chambers, since they amplify content that users “like,” click on, and comment on, by providing their consumers with more of that content, while allowing users to “block” or “unfriend” any individuals who challenge their preexisting views. This long-standing practice means that social media have become prime purveyors of propaganda, fake news, and conspiracy theories, even if their administrators do eventually censor the worst of this misinformation in the face of the negative PR that follows their tolerance of its dissemination.

One “solution” to dealing with the travesty of social media-induced misinformation is for Americans to gravitate in mass away from these venues as mediums for political “education” and engagement. Online echo chambers reinforce extreme political views, while providing their consumers with a sense of false confidence in their beliefs – one that is completely divorced from evidence or rational thinking in the case of the QAnon and Covid-19 conspiracies and fake news. The sooner Americans move away from relying on these venues, and toward engaging with real reporting and fact-checking venues, the better.

A digital copy of Anthony DiMaggio’s new book, Rebellion in America, can be read for free here.

counterpunch.org

Ben NORTON

The top US newspaper has been exposed for overseeing another large-scale fake news operation.

The main source for the New York Times’ award-winning podcast, Caliphate, has been arrested and charged with lying about joining ISIS. The major media outlet had relied on this man’s fabricated story as the core of its reporting, and said two US government officials had independently confirmed his identity.

So far, the Times has not issued any retractions or corrections. But the fake news spread by the American “newspaper of record” has touched off a political scandal in Canada.

Hosted by Times reporter Rukmini Callimachi, the Caliphate podcast claims to tell the story of the rise and fall of the so-called Islamic State in Syria and Iraq. The show has attracted millions of listeners, and is one of the most popular podcasts on the globe. The New York Times’ PR team actively boasts of its work on the “chart-topping show” in marketing materials.

The podcast has aggressively pushed the propaganda line of Syria’s Western government-backed opposition. While the Times was publicly praised for its “nuance” in “humanizing” Salafi-jihadist foreign fighters who joined ISIS, massacred civilians, ethnically cleansed religious minorities, and turned women into sex slaves, Caliphate simultaneously portrayed the Syrian government that defeated ISIS as the epitome of evil.

The host of the podcast, Callimachi, euphemistically described genocidal ISIS extremists as “rebels fighting Assad’s soldiers, standing up for the Muslim people,” while blaming the rise of the Islamic State on the “crimes of President Bashar al-Assad” and depicting the “Assad regime” as a collection of sadists who kill civilians for fun.

The star of Caliphate was a young man using the pseudonym Abu Huzayfah al-Kanadi (“the Canadian” in Arabic). Abu Huzayfah concocted an elaborate tale, claiming to the Times that he traveled to Syria in 2014 to join ISIS, where he claimed to have killed people in public executions. Then Huzayfah said he went to Turkey and Pakistan before returning to Canada.

Abu Huzayfah created prominent social media platforms where he spread pro-ISIS propaganda and sought to recruit new Salafi-jihadist extremists.

There was just one problem: the wildly popular podcast was based on a hoax.

Key New York Times “ISIS” source arrested in Canada under terrorism hoax laws

The real Abu Huzayfah al-Kanadi has been identified as a 25-year-old man living in Toronto named Shehroze Chaudhry. He was arrested by the Royal Canadian Mounted Police (RCMP) on September 25, and faces up to five years in prison under Canada’s terrorism hoax laws.

Chaudhry was not a mere guest of the Times’ Caliphate podcast; he was the key source that Rukmini Callimachi and her employer relied on. “Abu Huzayfah” was personally featured or mentioned in the prologue and nine of the 10 episodes.

Callimachi has earned fame by marketing herself as a journalistic expert on ISIS and violent Islamist extremism. The Guardian described her in a fawning profile as the “the podcasting terror expert getting into the minds of Isis.”

After winning the prestigious Peabody Award in 2018, Callimachi was named as a finalist for the renowned Pulitzer Prize the following year thanks to her work on the podcast. This year, she earned the vaunted assignment of lead reporter on the police killing of Breonna Taylor in Louisville, Kentucky.

When news broke that Abu Huzayfah was a fraud named Chaudry, Callimachi tried to distract from the scandal by claiming on Twitter that her podcast raised concerns about Chaudhry’s narrative in episode six. She did not mention, however, that she continued to use “Abu Huzayfah” as a source in episodes seven, eight, and 10.

1. Big news out of Canada: Abu Huzayfah has been arrested on a terrorist “hoax” charge. The narrative tension of our podcast “Caliphate” is the question of whether his account is true. In Chapter 6 we explain the conflicting strands of his story, and what we can and can’t confirm https://t.co/w0CbPGvzeA

— Rukmini Callimachi (@rcallimachi) September 25, 2020

In its own report on Chaudhry’s arrest, the New York Times said it “declined to discuss its sourcing” and downplayed the severity of the controversy.

Times correspondents geolocate non-existent ISIS member, push bogus US intelligence on his background

According to the paper, “The Times had used geolocation to place Mr. Huzayfah on the banks of the Euphrates river in Syria.” That geolocation was performed by Malachy Browne, director of New York Times visual investigations, during episode six of Caliphate.

Abu Huzayfah had provided a video of himself supposedly shooting a pistol into the Euphrates river to prove to Rukmini Callimachi that he traveled to Syria on his way back to Canada from Pakistan. Browne used Google Earth Pro to locate the video on the river, prompting Callimachi and her producer, Andy Mills, to praise his work as “brilliant” and “incredible.”

Because Callimachi probed holes in Abu Huzayfah’s story, a New York Times spokesperson has misleadingly claimed, “The uncertainty about Abu Huzayfah’s story is central to every episode of Caliphate that featured him.”

But in episode six – the one episode where the podcast hosts investigated inconsistencies in Abu Huzayfah’s narrative – Callimachi pushed back when her producer suggested that their source might be a phony:

“Look, it makes sense to me that somebody that has been in the caliphate, that if he’s trying to exaggerate a little, you know, that if he’s trying to — ‘Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah, I was there when Baghdadi, you know, announced it, oh, my God!’ Whatever. That makes sense to me. But not going there at all and making up all of those details about the Albu Nimr tribesmen, about this execution, about what it’s like to hold the gun, about what it’s like to actually whip somebody, about the fact that the blood splashes back up on you, that would — I mean, that’s a level of invention? It’s too much! I mean, it’s — he’s providing details that nobody knows, you know?”

Later in that episode, Callimachi was informed by New York Times national security correspondent Eric Schmitt that “two different officials in the U.S. government at different agencies have told me is that this individual, this Canadian, was a member of ISIS.”

Schmitt again confidently assured Callimachi, “Two different sources in the American government have confirmed that he was active in some type of ISIS activities in Syria.”

This ultimately led the Caliphate host to conclude that “something will emerge” verifying Abu Huzayfah’s narrative of his time in ISIS.

Instead, he was exposed as a fraudster. And Schmitt’s two anonymous US intelligence sources were completely wrong, as was Browne’s geolocation seeking out the hoaxer on the banks of the Euphrates.

Canadian media outlets had raised concerns about Caliphate back in 2018. A CBC correspondent asked, “Did former Canadian ISIS member lie to the New York Times or to CBC News?” But their criticisms were ignored by the Gray Lady.

The fake news scandal has reverberated through Canada’s halls of power, with reports that Chaudhry’s claims to the Times had “fueled public outrage and debate in the House of Commons.”

The House leader from the Conservative Party, MP Candice Bergen, grilled the government of Canada’s Liberal Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, declaring in a fiery speech that went viral: “This guy is apparently in Toronto. Canadians deserve more answers from this government… Why aren’t they doing something about this despicable animal that’s walking around the country? This individual is speaking freely to the media.”

The New York Times’ long history of pro-war fake news

This is far from the only time the New York Times has been exposed for spreading false stories. The “newspaper of record” has a long history of printing fake news when it serves the interest of the US national security state.

In 1945, after the United States dropped nuclear bombs on Japan, the Times published a story titled “No Radioactivity in Hiroshima Ruin.” The newspaper’s impartial source was the chief of the US War Department, Major General T. F. Farrell, who “denied categorically that [the atom bombing] produced a dangerous, lingering radioactivity.”

Next, in 1964, the Times spread lies to help justify Washington’s exterminationist war on Vietnam. “REDS DRIVEN OFF; Two Torpedo Vessels Believed Sunk in Gulf of Tonkin,” the newspaper trumpeted. It uncritically echoed the US Defense Department to falsely portray North Vietnamese boats as aggressors carrying out “deliberate attacks” on American forces.

To help sell the first US war on Iraq, the New York Times widely circulated and defended the fabricated claims of “Nayirah,” the teenage daughter of Kuwait’s US ambassador, who falsely claimed Iraqi soldiers were removing babies from incubators in Kuwaiti hospitals and leaving them on the ground to die.

As is public knowledge, the Times was instrumental in spreading the George W. Bush administration’s lies during the lead-up to the second US war on Iraq, falsely reporting that the government of Saddam Hussein had “weapons of mass destruction.” The only reporter who faced serious consequences for the scandal was Judith Miller, who later fell comfortably on her feet at Fox News. Still today, the Times boasts a collection of Iraq War boosters as top correspondents and columnists.

The Times printed transparently absurd claims to help justify NATO’s regime-change war on Libya in 2011. Among the fake news spread by the newspaper was the lie that leader Muammar Gaddafi had been giving his soldiers Viagra and encouraging them to rape women.

The fictitious story and persona behind the Caliphate podcast controversy is just one example in a string of fake stories the Times has printed in its information war on the Syrian government.

One of the most notorious Times blunders on Syria was produced by Malachy Browne, the visual investigations director who appeared in Caliphate to geolocate the non-existent Abu Huzayfah. That report relied on glorified cartoon illustrations to “prove” that the Syrian government “gassed its own people” in the Damascus suburb of Syria in April, 2018, thereby justifying the US bombing of Syria that followed.

But as demonstrated by several whistleblowers from the Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons (OPCW), including a member of the fact-finding mission that visited the site of the supposed bombing, the incident in Douma was a staged event – a hoax put on by the Syrian opposition to trigger US military action.

Since the election of US President Donald Trump, the New York Times has been crucial in fueling hysteria around supposed Russian meddling in American politics.

Volunteering its pages as a dumping site for intelligence agencies, the paper has laundered CIA disinformation in the guise of reporting on Russiagate, spreading laughably absurd claims that Moscow is paying Taliban militants in Afghanistan bounties to kill US soldiers – comically thin stories that fall apart with the slightest bit of scrutiny.

Despite its long history of spreading dubious propaganda that benefits the US national security state, or rather because of it, the Times has forged cozy relations with top government officials and powerful but faceless figures nestled in the permanent bureaucracy of the national security state. As The Grayzone reported, the New York Times has sent national security-related stories to the US government for approval before publication.

If history is any indication, the Caliphate fake news scandal will be tossed down the memory hole, and Rukmini Callimachi will be rewarded with important new assignments. And before long, new national security stories will find their way onto the pages of the Times that go uncorrected even after they are exposed as bogus plants.

thegrayzone.com

The US military has been unable to find any evidence that the Russian government paid bounties on US troops to Taliban-linked fighters in Afghanistan, confirming what was already obvious to anyone who hasn’t had their brain stem hijacked by mass media-induced Russophobia.

NBC News reports the following:

Two months after top Pentagon officials vowed to get to the bottom of whether the Russian government bribed the Taliban to kill American service members, the commander of troops in the region says a detailed review of all available intelligence has not been able to corroborate the existence of such a program.

“It just has not been proved to a level of certainty that satisfies me,” Gen. Frank McKenzie, commander of the U.S. Central Command, told NBC News. McKenzie oversees U.S. troops in Afghanistan. The U.S. continues to hunt for new information on the matter, he said.

“We continue to look for that evidence,” the general said. “I just haven’t seen it yet. But … it’s not a closed issue.”

McKenzie’s comments, reflecting a consensus view among military leaders, underscores the lack of certainty around a narrative that has been accepted as fact by Democrats and other Trump critics, including presidential nominee Joe Biden, who has cited Russian bounties in attacks on President Donald Trump.

2 months after top Pentagon officials vowed to get to the bottom of whether the Russian gov’t bribed Taliban to kill US service members, the commander in the region says a review of the intel has not been able to corroborate the existence of such a program https://t.co/RaiUV2XtHr

— NBC News (@NBCNews) September 14, 2020

Like many other critical voices, I said from the beginning that there was no reason to believe the Russian bounties narrative and that the mass publication of baseless and nonsensical claims circulated anonymously by US intelligence operatives constitutes journalistic malpractice. There is no excuse for a reporter to ever present anonymous CIA press releases under the guise of news, especially when they make no sense; the US-centralized coalition in Afghanistan is a hostile occupying force and there are an essentially limitless number of people there who require no financial incentive to attack them.

But this is exactly what happened. Once the news media had reported the unsubstantiated rumor given to them by anonymous spies, spinmeisters like Rachel Maddow began presenting it as an objective fact that had been fully authenticated, and from there the entire Democratic political/media class began months of loudly babbling about how suspicious it is that the US president hadn’t confronted Vladimir Putin and sanctioned Russia in response to this verified fact.

And it was never anything of the sort. It was fake. But now aggressions have been ramped up against Russia, Trump has been painted as a Putin puppet who hates the troops, Senate Democrats have introduced a bill mandating sanctions on any Russians involved in this imaginary conspiracy, and legislation has been passed making it harder for Trump to withdraw troops from Afghanistan.

The story did its job, and now that it’s proven false the same people who promoted it are uniformly ignoring the new evidence which clearly shows it to have been bogus.

pic.twitter.com/4v98nToJqP https://t.co/IKpj7uBblq

— Aaron Maté (@aaronjmate) September 14, 2020

This story has been so ubiquitously promoted within the establishment liberal echo chamber that it’s impossible to list all the dishonest portrayals it’s been given since June, but to pick just a few recent examples:

• Here’s a recent viral interview by Atlantic’s Anne Applebaum with former FBI agent Peter Strzok in which he falsely cites Trump’s refusal to strike back at Russia over the Taliban bounties as evidence that the president is “compromised” toward the Kremlin.
• Here’s Biden falsely attacking Trump for not confronting Putin about the bounties story.
• Here’s sitting US Senator Richard Blumenthal falsely claiming “Intelligence powerfully shows that the Kremlin offered the Taliban bounties for killing Americans in Afghanistan”.
• Here’s sitting US Senator Tammy Duckworth falsely saying “Donald Trump has gone 80 days without condemning Putin for putting reported bounties on our troops.”
• Here’s sitting US Congressman Ted Lieu falsely claiming “Putin paid money to the Taliban to kill US troops.”
• Here’s MSNBC star Joy Reid falsely asking why the president won’t “condemn Russia for putting bounties on our troops.”
• Here’s renowned Harvard professor Laurence Tribe falsely claiming that Putin “offered bounties on American troops killed in Afghanistan.”

Again, that’s just a very few very recent examples. Now that their claims have proven false, how many of these highly influential people do you think are using their massive platforms to spread awareness of this fact? Take a wild guess.

If you said zero, you are correct. In fact Democratic Party influencers are even continuing to promote the debunked Russian bounties story many hours after the report debunking it became available on mainstream platforms. Andrew Bates, Director of Rapid Response for the Biden campaign, just tweeted that “Trump is giving Russia a pass for putting bounties on the heads of American service members.”

At a time when Trump is giving Russia a pass for putting bounties on the heads of American service members.

Team Trump needs so much reminding: this is A-M-E-R-I-C-A.

“Trump ad asks people to support the troops. But it uses a picture of Russian jets” https://t.co/7CxCWBfXp7

— Andrew Bates (@AndrewBatesNC) September 15, 2020

Again, this is hours after it’s been public knowledge that this is a completely false thing to assert.

And we can absolutely expect this to continue. We can absolutely expect establishment Democrats to continue bleating about Russian bounties in Afghanistan for as long as it is politically convenient to do so. They never let the lack of evidence for their position get in the way before, and they won’t let it get in the way now. The arguments that they make for their power-serving position are not designed to reflect truth or reality, they are designed to serve power. That’s exactly what echo chambers are for.

An email published by WikiLeaks in 2016 was sent by Democratic Party insider John Podesta to billionaires George Soros, Peter Lewis, John Sperling, and Herb and Marion Sandler in 2007 with a detailed and structured overview of material the group had covered during a meeting they’d had in September (to read the email click ‘Attachments’ and then ‘2008 Combined Fundraising, Message and Mobilization Plan’). Among the thing these powerful manipulators discussed was the creation of a “robust echo chamber” to be used in the party’s interests.

On page two of the attachment:

“Control the political discourse. So much effort over the past few years has been focused on better coordinating, strengthening, and developing progressive institutions and leaders. Now that this enhanced infrastructure is in place — grassroots organizing; multi-issue advocacy groups; think tanks; youth outreach; faith communities; micro-targeting outfits; the netroots and blogosphere — we need to better utilize these networks to drive the content of politics through a strong “echo chamber” and message delivery system”.

And on page four:

“Create a robust echo chamber with progressive messaging that spans from the opposition campaigns to outside groups, academic experts, and bloggers.”

Usually when you see the names Podesta and Soros presented together it just means you stumbled into a bad corner of the internet pervaded by sloppy thinking and an irrational trust in anonymous 8chan posts, but in this WikiLeaks email we actually get a useful glimpse into the reason people can keep babbling about something that’s completely divorced from the truth without being smashed by cognitive dissonance. The fact that echo chambers are actively created by establishment manipulators enables establishment-friendly narratives to remain afloat long after evidence should have sunk them.

Read the comments from liberals on this tweet from July. They were all 100% certain there was proof that Russia had paid bounties on US troops to Taliban-linked fighters, because people like @Maddow told them so. Now the top US commander in Afghanistan says there’s no evidence. https://t.co/IJNDq1PPyK

— Caitlin Johnstone (@caitoz) September 14, 2020

Several weeks ago I tweeted “It’s clear that ‘Russia paid bounties to Taliban fighters’ is one of those narratives the propagandists decided to ram into mainstream consciousness until they force it to become consensus orthodoxy by repetition and sheer force of will, with zero interest in facts or evidence.”

This has indeed happened, and it will continue to happen. The oligarchs who rule over us have so thoroughly divorced the information ecosystem from truth that they can get people to believe just about anything. They do this because they understand that humans are storytelling animals and you control the humans by controlling the stories. We will be unable to fight lies with truth until we collectively understand this fact as well as our oppressors.

medium.com

The long-awaited Russia report was published with a call for “immediate action” by the government and intelligence services to tackle the threat from just one country – Russia. The reality was that while Russia may have been meddling at the edges of Britain’s democracy, America has been actively involved in centrally funding the breakdown of democracy, the rule of law and the British way of life. So where is the America Report?

The Russia Report cited ‘open source’ studies which pointed to “pro-Brexit or anti-EU stories on RT and Sputnik, and the use of ‘bots’ and ‘trolls’, as evidence of Russian attempts to influence the process.” Apparently, 150,000 Russian tweets bots churned out pro-Brexit propaganda. When asked to comment on Russian interference into British politics, MI5 couldn’t be bothered to answer and provided just six lines of text – and anything remotely important in that text was redacted anyway.

The government said: “We have seen no evidence of successful interference in the EU referendum“. Was anyone expecting them to say anything else?

In referring to the meddling of the biggest political and economic decision Britain has been faced with since the last World War, not a word was mentioned about any other interference. And by interference, I mean the type of interventions that would make a significant difference to the outcome of a referendum. For instance – no comment was made that one billion targeted ads delivered by American tech giants hit swing voters in the EU referendum.

Does anyone think that Brexit would have become a reality without the ubiquitous depth and reach into the fabric of our lives as a result of social media? It is not alleged – but a matter of documented fact, that in the last four weeks on the runup to the EU referendum, voters were targeted by the American company SCL Elections. and Cambridge Analytica. They had collected data, notably from another American company – Facebook. In fact, they collected an illegal dataset containing “hundreds of data points on millions of individuals,” including the gathering of “psychological insights into voters’ personalities and decision-making” and “political opinions, sociological structures and additional psychological metrics.” SCL then targeted “salient segments of the voting population according to their geographic location, views on the EU, propensity to vote and other factors.” This trio of American corporations effectively hunted down unsuspecting marginal voters relentlessly. One-third of British voters were undecided on the question of EU membership just one week before the referendum in June 2016.

At TruePublica, we have written many reports and articles about how large sums of dark money campaigns have influenced not just getting Brexit over the line but have since been pushing hard for a no-deal Brexit.

Secrecy

The biggest search engine in the world – with incredible power over entire populations have been caught secretly funding far-right shadowy groups – like the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC) who are accused of having a stranglehold on the political system in America with huge sums of ‘dark money’ funding from unknown sources. In turn, these American organisations, with connections to the Whitehouse have focused their massive firepower at ensuring Brexit Britain becomes a reality. Just this one ‘institution’ has over 400 corporate and political funding connections – the vast majority are American.

Opaque think tanks and front charities – not required by law to publish funding sources – many with close contacts with the current American administration have also been exposed. Many are funded by transnational corporations who do not want to be identified – such as the fossil fuel industry and especially the pervasive search engine and social media giants. And we’re not talking of anything less than tens of millions of dollars being invested each year in acquiring a new market for their insatiable desire for deregulation and profiteering. And make no mistake – deregulation is what this is all about.

Reports published as far back as July 2018 revealed that Britain’s most prominent free-market think tank was brokering access to senior Tory politicians for American donors seeking to influence the course of Brexit. The head of the Institute of Economic Affairs (IEA) was secretly filmed boasting about setting up meetings with Brexiteer MPs, government ministers and senior trade officials for US visitors – who had agreed to raise money for the IEA’s work pushing for a US-UK free trade deal.

Fanatics

Two years ago – The Independent wrote a report about how American religious conservatives are fuelling Europe’s far-right surge, shifting power away from individuals who have universal rights and onto powerful institutions like churches, patriarchal family structures, the police and ‘strong leaders’.

Corporate Europe Observatory – a research group that investigates corporate lobbying have found their way into the same cul-de-sac. In May 2019, they wrote – “Collectively, these parties don’t believe in genuine vibrant democracies, despite their rhetoric about ‘people power’. Rather, they present a future vision based on (ultra)nationalism; even if many of them have been through recent re-branding exercises to try to tone down their more unsavoury and extreme racist elements and broaden their appeal.”

And the money is paying off. Successfully exploiting public anxiety over migration, national identity and the failures of the establishment are the hallmarks of populists and their cheerleaders. After decades on the fringes, they’re forming governments, by themselves or in coalition.

The reality is that a picture has emerged of a powerful, well-funded global alliance of ultra-conservatives, free-market and far-right political actors, many of whom unite around an economically libertarian but socially conservative worldview. Their strategy begins by influencing elections, then onto judicial systems, education, and healthcare systems, as well as policymakers and public opinion. Its goal is to take power and then keep it.

Boris Johnson has already achieved much of this same agenda. The EU referendum was very much ‘influenced’ illegally and the Tory party is increasingly funded by ‘dark money.’ Britain’s judicial system is being attacked and leaked documents show a trade deal putting a much treasured NHS into the hands of the miserable American privatised system of profit before health. The media is being silenced, dissenters threatened with all sorts of legal and libel cases and now an American style spokesman is required to control the public narrative that was always the job of the Prime Minister.

Martin Kettle over The Guardian wrote that “a stake has been driven through the heart of the UK’s postwar self-image” and that Britain is now to become a “vassal of the US.”

Ian Dunt over at politics.co.uk points out that Britain – is a country that has been in a subservient position (to the USA) since the end of the war and who we are now to be utterly controlled by. It is a grim foreshadowing of what will come if Brexit succeeds.”

Graham Vanbergen at The European Financial Review writes – Britain now stands on the precipice of becoming a ‘client state’ of a foreign super-power. The Trojan horse is Brexit. In his book, ‘Brexit – A Corporate Coup D’Etat’ (read the full introduction and first two chapters free HERE) there are countless references to American dark money operations. It highlights a leaked ‘blueprint for a radical free-trade agreement’ that included free movement of American citizens to come and go in Britain as they please – just as EU citizens had done.

The New European headlines with – ‘UK on track to become 51st state of America under Boris Johnson.’ Numerous other reports from the London Economic, America’s CNN, MSN news and many others have concluded the same.

What they want

This political vision is explicit about seeking to shift power. In America, many of these organisations have pooled their resources. This triad of “life, family, and freedom” was enshrined in the Manhattan Declaration, a manifesto written nearly a decade ago by American activists of the religious right. Signatories including Orthodox, Evangelical, and Catholic leaders pledged to act in unison and determined that “no power on Earth, be it cultural or political, will intimidate us into silence or acquiescence.”

The voting records of Britain’s Conservative frontbenchers speaks for itself and aligns itself to these goals. Boris Johnson, Priti Patel, Dominic Raab, Michale Gove, Rishi Sunak, Matt Hancock, Alok Sharma, Gavin Williamson and many other influential Conservative MP’s have almost universally voted against equality and human rights. Many have voted against LGBTQ+ rights, same-sex marriage and other progressive social policies (source).

British nationalist Daniel Hannon, a right-wing proponent of the replacement of the NHS with a private insurance system, founding Vote Leave member, whose account of the Good Friday Agreement has been criticised as factually inaccurate and reckless – is the man recognised as being the architect of Brexit. His connections to American conservatism is never-ending. He was also the head of the ERG – itself a fanatical right-wing political militia inside the Tory party forcing as hard a Brexit as possible.

However, it was Conservative MP Steve Baker who moulded the ERG into what The Economist has described as “the closest thing Britain has produced to sans-culottes” – the radical and militant partisans of the French Revolution. A born-again Christian; baptised by full-body immersion off the coast of Cornwall, Baker has spoken of being guided by a higher power. However, he is more a committed disciple of the laissez-faire Austrian economics model – that of unrestrained capitalism, than saving the poor from the crisis of daily life it delivers.

Peter Geoghegan, the investigations editor of openDemocracy and author of ‘Democracy for Sale‘ spells out the coming dangers of Britain’s swing to the Conservative/religious/free-market right. His article in politco.eu entitled – ‘Death by dark money: The Americanization of British democracy‘ is about shadowy political and corporate American actors, distorting British politics and directing it towards a hard Brexit.

MP Stephen Kinnock, chair of a parliamentary working group on electoral reform, warns, Britain is in the process of being “Americanized. – “Dark money and dodgy data are playing an increasing role in our politics. That is a very dangerous place to be. We have been complacent about our democracy. We thought it would just look after itself.”

“A federal election in the U.S. is supposed to be decided by 150 million voters, and yet the policy preferences are being determined by literally 20 people, 20 major donors,” says Adav Noti, a U.S. election lawyer with the Campaign Legal Center, in Washington DC. Why does anyone now think it is any different in the UK.

The Russia Report does tell us one thing. It says British democracy is up for sale to the deepest pockets. The recent appointments to the House of Lords by Boris Johnson tells us that parliament is now up for sale to the highest bidders.

In short shrift, the British Conservatives, backed by foreign actors and dark money have systematically gone about dismantling Britain’s principles of democracy. They are thoroughly abusing Britain’s long-standing uncodified constitution and are now actively focused on weakening the institutions that hold them accountable. If they stay in power at the next general election, they will go on to attack other fundamental rights based around the principles of their deregulatory agenda, hidden inside the doctrine of its ‘triad of family life’ and blaming anything or anyone for the failings of its governance.

It’s not Russia we should looking towards as a threat to Britain’s way of life – it is America – by a very long way.

truepublica.org.uk