American political leaders display a widening disconnect from reality intended to mask their complicity in the seizure of power by global corporations and billionaires.
Original illustration by Mr. Fish. (Scheerpost)
By Chris Hedges
ScheerPost.com
Joe Biden’s victory instantly obliterated the Democratic Party’s longstanding charge that Russia was hijacking and compromising U.S. elections. The Biden victory, the Democratic Party leaders and their courtiers in the media now insist, is evidence that the democratic process is strong and untainted, that the system works. The elections ratified the will of the people.
But imagine if Donald Trump had been reelected. Would the Democrats and pundits at The New York Times, CNN and MSNBC pay homage to a fair electoral process? Or, having spent four years trying to impugn the integrity of the 2016 presidential race, would they once again haul out the blunt instrument of Russian interference to paint Trump as Vladimir Putin’s Manchurian candidate?
Trump and his attorney Rudy Giuliani are vulgar and buffoonish, but they play the same slimy game as their Democratic opponents. The Republicans scapegoat the deep state, communists and now, bizarrely, Venezuela; the Democrats scapegoat Russia. The widening disconnect from reality by the ruling elite is intended to mask their complicity in the seizure of power by predatory global corporations and billionaires.
Former Mayor Rudy Giuliani in 2019. (Gage Skidmore, Flickr, CC BY-SA 2.0)
“This is a disgraceful thing that was done in this country,” Giuliani said at his recent bad-hair-day press conference. “Probably not much more disgraceful than the things these people did in office, which you didn’t and don’t bother to cover and you conceal from the American people, but we let this happen, we use largely a Venezuelan voting machine in essence to count our vote. We let this happen. We’re going to become Venezuela. We cannot let this happen to us. We cannot allow these crooks, because that’s what they are, to steal an election from the American people. They elected Donald Trump. They didn’t elect Joe Biden. Joe Biden is in the lead because of the fraudulent ballots, the illegal ballots, that were produced and that were allowed to be used, after the election was over.”
Giuliani’s rant was topped by those of Sidney Powell, until yesterday another of Trump’s lawyers, who blamed software designed for Hugo Chavez, who died in 2013, for Trump’s loss, as well as “the massive influence of Communist money.” The software “was created so Hugo Chavez would never lose another election, and he did not after that software was created,” Powell said. “He won every single election and then they exported it to Argentina and other countries in South America, and then they brought it here.”
Hillary Clinton campaigning for president in Des Moines, Iowa, in 2016. (Gage Skidmore, CC BY-SA 2.0, Wikimedia Commons)
Compare this to how Hillary Clinton, during the recent primary campaign, warned that the Russians were “grooming” a female candidate, widely assumed to be Rep. Tulsi Gabbard, to run as a third-party candidate to serve Russian interests. Previously, Clinton called the 2016 Green Party candidate Jill Stein a “Russian asset.” She insisted, although Special Counsel Robert Mueller and his prosecutors found no evidence to support her charge, that the Trump campaign worked closely in 2016 with Moscow and WikiLeaks — which she insists is a Russian front — to defeat her. Hillary’s staff put together a “hit list” in the final days of her 2008 campaign, according to the book, Shattered: Inside Hillary Clinton’s Doomed Campaign by Jonathan Allen and Amie Parnes, listing those who were loyal to the Clintons those who were not. They used a scale of 1 to 7.
“Step back and think about it,” Clinton wrote in her book, What Happened, about the 2016 election.
“The Russians hacked our election systems. They got inside. They tried to delete or alter voter information. This should send a shiver down the spine of every American.”
Never mind that both ruling parties are silent about the massive interference in our elections by Israel, which uses its lobbying groups to lavishly fund political candidates in both parties and flies members of Congress and their families to Israel for junkets at seaside resorts. Israel’s intrusion in our political process, including when Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu addressed Congress in 2015, without informing then President Barack Obama, to attack the president’s Iran nuclear deal, dwarfs that of any other country, including Russia.
Fictional & Dangerous Narratives
Sidney Powell in January 2019. (Screenshot)
The two warring factions within the ruling elite, which fight primarily over the spoils of power while abjectly serving corporate interests, peddle alternative realities. If the deep state and Venezuelan socialists or Russia intelligence operatives are pulling the strings no one in power is accountable for the rage and alienation caused by the social inequality, the unassailability of corporate power, the legalized bribery that defines our political process, the endless wars, austerity and de-industrialization. The social breakdown is, instead, the fault of shadowy phantom enemies manipulating groups such as Black Lives Matters or the Green Party.
“The people who run this country have run out of workable myths with which to distract the public, and in a moment of extreme crisis have chosen to stoke civil war and defame the rest of us – black and white – rather than admit to a generation of corruption, betrayal, and mismanagement,” Matt Taibbi writes.
These fictional narratives are dangerous. They erode the credibility of democratic institutions and electoral politics. They posit that news and facts are no longer true or false. Information is accepted or discarded based on whether it hurts or promotes one faction over another. While outlets such as Fox News have always existed as an arm of the Republican Party, this partisanship has now infected nearly all news organizations, including publications such as The New York Times and The Washington Post, along with the major tech platforms that disseminate information and news. A fragmented public with no common narrative believes whatever it wants to believe.
I first assumed this job posting from The New York Times for a Moscow correspondent was a parody posted by The Onion. It wasn’t. It speaks volumes about the self-immolation of The New York Times and the press.
JOB DESCRIPTION: Vladimir Putin’s Russia remains one of the biggest stories in the world. It sends out hit squads armed with nerve agents against its enemies, most recently the opposition leader Aleksei Navalny. It has its cyber agents sow chaos and disharmony in the West to tarnish its democratic systems, while promoting its faux version of democracy. It has deployed private military contractors around the globe to secretly spread its influence. At home, its hospitals are filling up fast with Covid patients as its president hides out in his villa. If that sounds like a place you want to cover, then we have good news: We will have an opening for a new correspondent as Andy Higgins takes over as our next Eastern Europe Bureau Chief early next year.
Of course, every charge leveled here against Russia regarding foreign interference can be leveled in spades against the United States, both in the present and past, and even the implied criticism of its pandemic response seems like a textbook case of projection. More to the point, why should the Times even send someone to Moscow to report on what Russians think, feel and how they view themselves and the world if they have already decided they are a cartoon villain? Why have a Moscow bureau at all?
A parody response circulating on the internet imagined a parallel posting by Pravda for a U.S. correspondent:
JOB DESCRIPTION: Donald Trump’s America remains one of the biggest stories in the world. It sends out its armies, its drones, and its agents around the world to kill its enemies. It has its cyber agents sow chaos and disharmony, undermining and overthrowing regimes, while promoting its faux version of democracy. It has deployed private military contractors around the globe to secretly spread its influence. At home, its hospitals are filling up fast with Covid patients as its president hides out on the golf course. If that sounds like a place you want to cover, then we have good news. We will have an opening for a new correspondent.
I was a foreign correspondent for 20 years, 15 of them with The New York Times. My job was to become bicultural, which requires hundreds of hours of language classes, to see the world from the perspective of those I covered and reflect it back to an American audience. But this type of reporting is now anachronistic. The paper might as well rehire the con artist Jayson Blair to sit in his apartment and snort coke while filing fictional variants on the preordained narrative the paper demands. Or maybe computer algorithms can do the job.
I guess I should not be surprised. After all, it was the Times that produced a 10-part podcast by its reporter Rukmini Callimachi based on interviews with a Muslim identified as Abu Huzayfah al-Kanadi who claimed to have been a member of ISIS in the Middle East. He provided lurid accounts of murders and crucifixions he supposedly carried out.
His stories, catering to the rampant Islamophobia that poisons American society, were the audio version of snuff films. They were also a lie. The Canadian “Abu Huzayfah,” whose real name was Shehroze Chaudhry, was arrested in September 2020 by Royal Canadian Mounted Police (RCMP) and charged under Canadian hoax laws for fabricating his story.
Rise of Authoritarian State
George Floyd Protest in Madison, Wisconsin, May 31, 2020. (Ken Fager, Flickr)
The flagrant partisanship and discrediting of truth across the political spectrum are swiftly fueling the rise of an authoritarian state. The credibility of democratic institutions and electoral politics, already deeply corrupted by PACs, the electoral college, lobbyists, the disenfranchisement of third-party candidates, gerrymandering and voter suppression, is being eviscerated.
Silicon Valley billionaires, including Facebook cofounder Dustin Moskovitz and ex-Google CEO Eric Schmidt, donated more than $100 million to a Democratic super PAC that created a torrent of anti-Trump TV ads in the final weeks of the campaign to elect Biden. The heavy infusion of corporate money to support Biden wasn’t done to protect democracy. It was done because these corporations and billionaires know a Biden administration will serve their interests.
The press, meanwhile, has largely given up on journalism. It has retreated into competing echo chambers that only speak to true believers. This catering exclusively to one demographic, which it sets against another demographic, is commercially profitable. But it also guarantees the balkanization of the United States and edges us closer and closer to fratricide.
When Trump leaves the White House millions of his enraged supports, hermetically sealed inside hyperventilating media platforms that feed back to them their rage and hate, will see the vote as fraudulent, the political system as rigged, and the establishment press as propaganda. They will target, I fear, through violence, the Democratic Party politicians, mainstream media outlets and those they demonize as conspiratorial members of the deep state, such as Dr. Anthony Fauci. The Democratic Party is as much to blame for this disintegration as Trump and the Republican Party.
More Targeting & Censorship Ahead
The election of Biden is also very bad news for journalists such as Matt Taibbi, Glen Ford, Margaret Kimberley, Glenn Greenwald, Jeffrey St. Clair or Robert Scheer who refuse to be courtiers to the ruling elites. Journalists who do not spew the approved narrative of the right-wing, or, alternatively, the approved narrative of the Democratic Party, have a credibility the ruling elite fears.
The worse things get – and they will get worse as the pandemic leaves hundreds of thousands dead and thrusts millions of Americans into severe economic distress – the more those who seek to hold the ruling elites, and in particular the Democratic Party, accountable will be targeted and censored in ways familiar to WikiLeaks and Julian Assange, now in a London prison and facing possible extradition to the United States and life imprisonment.
President Barack Obama, July 5, 2016. (White House Flickr, Lawrence Jackson)
Barack Obama’s assault on civil liberties, which included the repeated misuse of the Espionage Act to prosecute whistleblowers, the passage of Section 1021 of the National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA) to permit the military to act as a domestic police force and the ordering of the assassination of U.S. citizens deemed to be terrorists in Yemen, was far worse than those of George W. Bush. Biden’s assault on civil liberties, I suspect, will surpass those of the Obama administration.
The censorship was heavy handed during the campaign. Digital media platforms, including Google, Twitter, YouTube and Facebook, along with the establishment press worked shamelessly as propaganda arms for the Biden campaign. They were determined not to make the “mistake” they made in 2016 when they reported on the damaging emails, released by WikiLeaks, from Hillary Clinton’s campaign chairman John Podesta.
Although the emails were genuine, papers such as The New York Times routinely refer to the Podesta emails as “disinformation.” This, no doubt, pleases its readership, 91 percent of whom identify as Democrats according to the Pew Research Center. But it is another example of journalistic malfeasance.
Following the election of Trump, the media outlets that cater to a Democratic Party readership made amends. The New York Times was one of the principal platforms that amplified Russiagate conspiracies, most of which turned out to be false. At the same time, the paper largely ignored the plight of the disposed working class that supported Trump.
When the Russiagate story collapsed, the paper pivoted to focus on race, embodied in the 1619 Project. The root cause of social disintegration — the neoliberal order, austerity and deindustrialization — was ignored since naming it would alienate the paper’s corporate advertisers and the elites on whom the paper depends for access.
Once the 2020 election started, The New York Times and other mainstream outlets censored and discredited information that could hurt Biden, including a tape of Joe Biden speaking with former Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko, which appears to be authentic. They gave credibility to any rumor, however spurious, which was unfavorable to Trump.
Twitter and Facebook blocked access to a New York Post story about the emails allegedly found on Hunter Biden’s discarded laptop. Twitter locked The New York Post out of its own account for over a week. Glenn Greenwald, whose article on Hunter Biden was censored by his editors at The Intercept, which he helped found, resigned.
He released the email exchanges with his editors over his article. Ignoring the textual evidence of censorship, editors and writers at The Intercept engaged in a public campaign of character assassination against Greenwald. This sordid behavior by self-identified progressive journalists is a page out of the Trump playbook and a sad commentary on the collapse of journalistic integrity.
The Attack on WikiLeaks
Protester in San Francisco, 2011. (Max Braun, CC BY-SA 2.0, Wikimedia Commons)
The censorship and manipulation of information was honed and perfected against WikiLeaks. When WikiLeaks tries to release information, it is hit with botnets or distributed denial of service attacks. Malware attacks WikiLeaks’ domain and website. The WikiLeaks site is routinely shut down or unable to serve its content to its readers.
Attempts by WikiLeaks to hold press conferences see the audio distorted and the visual images corrupted. Links to WikiLeaks events are delayed or cut. Algorithms block the dissemination of WikiLeaks content. Hosting services, including Amazon, removed WikiLeaks from its servers. Julian Assange, after releasing the Iraqi war logs, saw his bank accounts and credit cards frozen. WikiLeaks’ PayPal accounts were disabled to cut off donations.
The Freedom of the Press Foundation in December 2017 closed down the anonymous funding channel to WikiLeaks which was set up to protect the anonymity of donors. A well-orchestrated smear campaign against Assange was amplified and given credibility by the mass media and filmmakers such as Alex Gibney. Assange and WikiLeaks were first. We are next.
Democratic Sen. Chris Murphy told CNN during this campaign that Russian disinformation efforts are “more problematic” than in 2016. He warned that “this time around, the Russians have decided to cultivate U.S. citizens as assets. They are attempting to try to spread their propaganda in the mainstream media.”
This will be the official mantra of the Democratic Party, a vicious red-baiting campaign without actual reds, especially as the country spirals out of control. The reason I have a show on Russia-funded RT America is the same reason Vaclav Havel could only be heard on the U.S.-funded Voice of America during the communist control of Czechoslovakia.
I did not choose to leave the mainstream media. I was pushed out. And once anyone is pushed out, the ruling elite is relentless about discrediting the few platforms left willing to give them, and the issues they raise, a hearing.
“If the problem is ‘American citizens’ being cultivated as ‘assets’ trying to put ‘interference’ in the mainstream media, the logical next step is to start asking Internet platforms to shut down accounts belonging to any American journalist with the temerity to report material leaked by foreigners (the wrong foreigners, of course – it will continue to be okay to report things like the ‘black ledger’),” writes Taibbi, who has done some of the best reporting on the emerging censorship.
“From Fox or the Daily Caller on the right, to left-leaning outlets like Consortium [News] or the World Socialist Web Site, to writers like me even – we’re all now clearly in range of new speech restrictions, even if we stick to long-ago-established factual standards.”
Taibbi argues that the precedent for overt censorship took place when the major digital platforms — Facebook, Twitter, Google, Spotify, YouTube — in a coordinated move blacklisted the right-wing talk show host Alex Jones.
“Liberal America cheered,” Taibbi told me when I interviewed him for my show, “On Contact”:
“They said ‘Well this is a noxious figure. This is a great thing. Finally, someone’s taking action.’ What they didn’t realize is that we were trading an old system of speech regulation for a new one without any public discussion. You and I were raised in a system where you got punished for speech if you committed libel or slander or if there was imminent incitement to lawless action, right? That was the standard that the Supreme Court set, but that was done through litigation. There was an open process where you had a chance to rebut charges. That is all gone now.
Now, basically there’s a handful of these tech distribution platforms that control how people get their media. They’ve been pressured by the Senate, which has called all of their CEOs in, and basically ordered them, ‘We need you to come up with a plan to prevent the sowing of discord and spreading of misinformation.’ This has finally come into fruition. You see a major reputable news organization like the New York Post — with a 200-year history — locked out of its own Twitter account. The story [Hunter Biden’s emails] has not been disproven.
It’s not disinformation or misinformation. It’s been suppressed as it would be suppressed in a Third World country. It’s a remarkable historic moment. The danger is that we end up with a one-party informational system. There’s going to be approved dialogue and unapproved dialogue that you can only get through certain fringe avenues. That’s the problem. We let these companies get this monopolistic share of the distribution system. Now they’re exercising that power.”
In the Soviet Union the truth was passed, often hand to hand, in underground samizdat documents, clandestine copies of news and literature banned by the state. The truth will endure. It will be heard by those who seek it out. It will expose the mendacity of the powerful, however hard it will be to obtain. Despotisms fear the truth. They know it is a mortal threat. If we remain determined to live in truth, no matter the cost, we have a chance.
Chris Hedges is a Pulitzer Prize–winning journalist who was a foreign correspondent for 15 years for The New York Times, where he served as the Middle East bureau chief and Balkan bureau chief for the paper. He previously worked overseas for The Dallas Morning News, The Christian Science Monitor and NPR. He is the host of the Emmy Award-nominated RT America show “On Contact.”
This column is from Scheerpost, for which Chris Hedges writes a regular column twice a month. Click here to sign up for email alerts.
The views expressed are solely those of the author and may or may not reflect those of Consortium News.
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OK, so the dream of democracy is over. They seem to have covered and neutralized every form of expression, the press, the streets, the ballot, and the courts, …?
Some time ago there was a discussion on the net about whom you would consdier a hero among polticians.
I said I had none except for Rosa Luxemburg in the past. Then I added that if anyone deserved to considered a hero, it was Chris Hedges.
Chris Hedges is a bright light of truth in the land of professional prevaricators earning pay checks for monopoly capitalists media owners with a need for smart propagandists darkening truth and integrity as sheep dogs shepherds leading herd to repeated shearing.
A couple of observations.
1. Russian intelligence warned US intelligence that Three Names would pull out a Russian interference card in the 2016 election long before she did.
2. Barack Obama is neither a Democrat nor a liberal. He is a moderate Republican and an incompetent leader. He is also a war criminal.
3. People who break the law should be made to pay a price. I’m not talking about the likes of Chelsea Manning or Julian Assange. Exposure of governmental crimes should be a positive defense against the charge of espionage.
4. Back in the 30’s there were strict limitations on the ownership of news media. Those limitations need to be brought back. There are those who will doubtless argue that the likes of facebook, google, etc aren’t news media. Except they are. They have news feeds and in the case of google and facebook they even select what news you will see.
5. The diversity of the fairness doctrine needs to be brought back.
And all that’s just for openers. We have to reclaim our country because it’s lost now.
And Zoom. Killing meetings with Palestinians or about Palestinians. As much as Jews across the world are certainly NOT monoliths, and as much as there are some orgs devoted to real human rights for all, including Palestinians (Jewish Voice for Peace, etc), as a whole, most Jews are not loudly opposing the claims from Israel and Zionists in particular that all Jews are together in opposing the murderously savage (quote, unquote) Palestinians. Almost as if Jews are working as hard as possible to re-create the old, ugly unforgivable forgery, the “Protocols of Zion” and make it real.
I used to get arguments that there never were any Palestinians, they are made up. I haven’t seen that one in a while. Nonetheless, Israel’s existence was the result of a long-term Zionist project to immigrate to Palestine and build a population that would take over and remove (actual stated aims, early on) the Palestinian people who lived there. The holocaust gave them leave to use that horrid genocide to justify their own genocide against Palestinians. Really, an obscene use of Jewish victims and the phrase “never more.”
correction “never again”
Good ideas, Dao Gen. Fairness & Accuracy in Reporting is established and might be strengthened and expanded: hXXps://fair.org/
Dear Chris Hedges:
The “Original illustration by Mr. Fish” is going to cost your article circulation. I will try to find your article elsewhere to post it.
Thank you,
Bruce Considine
Are you kidding? I think it’s frickin’ *hilarious*!
One of the best political cartoons I’ve seen!
Yes, I agree with dave, it’s freakin’ hilarious–as is the fact that I didn’t even notice it until Bruce pointed it out!
Where does the propaganda of the day emmanate from? – is there a base operation somewhere that generates the attacks on “reliable sources” who would expose the corrupt predatory system that skims off the labor of disenfranchised working people and loots the treasury to feed the for profit war machine, etc?
How does the #MICIMATT get their act together?
It seems that hiding the truth from the general population must mean that we are considered the enemy to keep at bay lest we succeed in leveling the economic playing field.
So, for example, when Hillary Clinton kept her speeches at Goldman Sachs secret was she consciously aware that by inference she must have considered the voters dangerous to her political and financial prospects or did she hide that even from herself….?
Here is a fascinating article by Glenn Greenwald related to Chris Hedges’s excllent piece.
It deals with Wiki-leaked CIA documents that explained the agency’s cynical use of Obama in supporting their wars.
hXXps://greenwald.substack.com/p/a-long-forgotten-cia-document-from
In addition to being a mean country that bit about America being the land of the free, home of the brave is bullshit.
The fact that so many millions would disagree with this simply proves the power of propaganda.
Excellent piece. Beautiful opening thought.
The words of Giuliani. Powell, and Clinton are all just shameful.
But America simply has no shame anymore. How could it when no one really objected to the filthy attacks on China about the coronavirus by Trump and Pompeo? Open insults to the disease’s first victim.
You might think many prominent American people and politicians of both parties would object to such gutter-language in international affairs, such immorality, but you’d be wrong.
Giuliani has just said he “may have exaggerated a bit.” Powell has pretty well been shown to be a mental case with her “Kraken” and other delusions.
But the most influential of them, Clinton, who has made a career of lying, libeling, and killing (as Secretary of State in Libya and Syria), carries right on and will be influential with Biden.
Remember, this charmer made a joke and laughed when Gadhafi, a good leader for his people, was murdered by being bayonetted in his rectum as he lay on the ground. She also famously said of Julian Assange, “Can’t we just drone him or something?”
The New York Times is a perfect example too. It has been caught lying and distorting many times and even with CIA on its staff, but it just carries right on with its role which someone aptly described as “the house organ for America’s power establishment”
Chris Hedges diagnoses the problem correctly, but I see no answer for it. Soviet-style official dishonesty and corruption are also side effects of the terrible distribution of wealth in America which creats the most fundamental and destructive division in the country.
It’s almost as serious in its effects as the old division of slave and free.
And the good old USSR clanked right on for seventy years.
All so true John C….and if the life span of the USSR was 70 years, what can we hope for the end of western, Usian global empire…please???
“But America simply has no shame anymore. How could it when no one really objected to the filthy attacks on China about the coronavirus by Trump and Pompeo? Open insults to the disease’s first victim.” — a large part of US population is focusing on making ends meet and bearing the day-to-day misery the capitalist system inflicts on them. The charade of politicians and what they do is most likely at the bottom of their list of concerns.
May the gods bless Consortium and Chris Hedges. I am saving up and will contribute 50 euros to Consortium before the new year.
A largely European-based feed will report on independent science and the work that is being done to re-establish freedom of speech and bodily integrity. US-based persons must participate virtually. While some of the principals cannot go to English-speaking places, some were able to get to a Scandinavian location for an in-person meeting which has been posted. Searching Heiko Shoning may bring up a link for those who are interested.
Even fb has not yet removed access to the work of Reiner Fuellmich and Sara Cunial, so some information is still available on fb. I post exceptionally beautiful bird photos to distract from my coded postings about things important to ecosystems of human beings.
It is a jungle among humans right now, with prisons for humans with a few wild creatures wanting to liberate the prisoners. The persons inside the prisons look to outsiders as if they have a sad Stockholm syndrome going on. The prisoners appear determined to stay in a bizarre fearful shaming mode, asserting a right to impose solitary confinement on other humans for some imagined collective good.
The principals who oppose freedom are aging from all appearances. Their consequences for harmful behaviors could be seizure of the assets they have accumulated power over. They could then be restrained from doing further harm. They could then have to put up with attempts by librarians to figure out and document how these thieves came to behave the way they have, in an extraordinary syndrome of hoarding and lording.
Those who oppose the extraordinary harm from government-enforced monopolistic corporations must brainstorm what to do with those who have clearly violated standards of humane behaviors.
Thank you for this eloquent call to action. We seem to be entering a dangerous period of consolidation of the duopoly into a single two-headed monster and of severe economic, physical, and mental suffering by ordinary Americans, as the gap between rich and poor widens to unacceptable dimensions. Biden is obviously the candidate backed by the US power elite and by Wall Street, the MIC, and the security state, and his Howdy-Doody-like speaking style actually gives us an honest view of the kind of puppet he really is. Ditto for Harris. At the same time, the brief period of unipolar US empire has begun to wane, causing the 1% to panic and call for greater militarization of the 99% and for a series of “color revolutions,” i.e., coups, inside the US. As you suggest, the American ruling class believes that massive doses of faux reality such as Russiagate and increasing amounts of censorship will be necessary to keep ordinary Americans in line and too fearful to think clearly or push back.
Mr. Hedges, I hope you and others like you will create some sort of Freedom of Speech Center which will issue bulletins like the old Consumer Reports categorizing and systematically listing and analyzing all the major fake news and acts of censorship each week or month. If we have one central clearing house for analyses and info about all the biggest virtual reality psyops and acts of suppression of free political speech coming from Biden, the MSM, the DNC and RNC, the MIC, and from corporate America, then it will be easier to resist and satirize. Colorful charts and graphs linking the various separate outrages against truth could then be issued in easy-to-view form like a parody of a weekly stock market report. And a cumulative electronic index could be kept for cross-reference. Even Richard Stengel, Biden’s apparent Domestic Propaganda and Censorship Czar, would have a harder time trying to rewrite the First Amendment, and the Atlantic Council would have a harder time censoring FaceBook, even though several Big Tech people will be advising Biden. I would suggest having both progressives and conservative populists at this Center, since in the age of high duopoly, with Joe and Mitch laughing together as they exchange ideas for imposing austerity and with all the insane demands for censorship coming from allegedly liberal and even self-styled progressive Dems, the old left-right schema is no longer very helpful — populist vs. power elitist would be a more accurate way to map the American political terrain. Some populist conservatives like Saagar Enjetti have good ideas on specific issues, so there could be a certain amount of populist consensus that progressives and conservative populists could both affirm. Fighting censorship would certainly be one area of possible mutual agreement. Progressives simply cannot rely on the Dem Party any more in any major way. The Dem Party is knock, knock, knockin’ on the deep state’s gate.
“Information is accepted or discarded based on whether it hurts or promotes one faction over another.”
We are getting what we demand from our media. That is the problem. They are not force feeding it on us, so much as we are behaving like addicts.