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People Overestimate The US War Machine And Underestimate The US Propaganda Machine
The European Endowment for Democracy is a spinoff of the US government-funded “NGO” National Endowment for Democracy, which according to its own co-founder was set up to do overtly what the CIA used to do covertly, namely orchestrate coups and manage narratives to advance US interests. A page on an NED website says that “All EU member states are members of EED’s Board of Governors, together with members of the European Parliament and civil society experts.”
So this is a media outlet funded by a government-run “NGO” being forcefully pushed in front of millions of western eyeballs by a major Silicon Valley corporation that people have come to rely on for getting information about the world. In the same way Silicon Valley facilitates government censorship by proxy, it also facilitates government propaganda by proxy.
The Globe and Mail reports that the Canadian government also put $200,000 toward Kyiv Independent’s funding. The outlet is being so loudly amplified by Twitter that not only has its Twitter account secured nearly two million followers since its creation in November, but one of its reporters (who calls the neo-Nazi Azov Battalion his “brothers in arms“) has gained a million followers since the start of the Russian invasion.
Do you see how sophisticated just that one tiny component of the US-centralized empire‘s propaganda campaign is? How many seemingly disparate and unrelated elements it has? Multiple countries, NGOs, an ostensibly independent social media platform, an ostensibly independent news outlet. It’s very difficult to see how any of it connects at all if you don’t know where to look. And almost nobody knows where to look.
This highly advanced perception management operation is happening all around the world about any issue the empire has a vested interest in. As anti-imperialist author and podcaster Justin Podur recently put it, “The US Empire is based on the mastery of storytelling. Making reality through propaganda.”
Rod Serling on prejudice…
Sovereign ‘Democracy’ Ukraine: Zelenskyy Suspends 11 Opposition Parties Becoming Head Of A One-Party State
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy, with the backing of Ukraine’s National Security and Defence Council, declared that all opposition parties would be suspended indefinitely until martial law is declared over.
In a statement issued yesterday evening, President Zelenskyy announced the following decree: political parties who his party, “Servants of the People,” has identified as being pro-Russian would be suspended until the nation-wide martial law is lifted. The list essentially includes every opposition party.
With millions of their constituents now stripped of any political infrastructure, it’s safe to say that this is not the sort of action taken by a ‘democracy.’
Which way?
This Is the End of Free Speech Online
The internet has changed radically in the past decade or so. Where social-media giants once boasted about being ‘the free speech wing of the free speech party’, in recent years, Facebook, Twitter, YouTube and other platforms have become increasingly censorious, cracking down on dissenting views and offensive speech. Big Tech has relished this role as the unofficial arbiter of acceptable thought. But while the likes of Facebook may have severely wounded free speech online, it could be the UK government that deals the killer blow.
This week the long-awaited Online Safety Bill was published, which aims to make the UK the ‘safest place to be online in the world’ – in other words, the country with the most strictly regulated and censored internet of any liberal democracy. This mammoth piece of legislation was five years in the making, and those five years show. The bill is vast in scope, and terrifying in its implications for free speech.
Most significant is the ‘duty of care’ the bill imposes on social-media firms. Tech platforms will be legally required to prevent users from seeing both illegal content and ‘legal but harmful content’.
What actually constitutes ‘harmful content’ has yet to be revealed. If the Online Harms White Paper (published in 2020) is any guide, then this is likely to include content which might cause psychological harm, disinformation and trolling or harassment. Of course, all of these ‘harms’ are subjective. ‘Trolling’ can extend from playful banter to persistent harassment. Which views tech firms consider to be ‘disinformation’ has less to do with lies and truth than political expediency.
Once this list of harms is approved by parliament, the culture secretary will have the power to add more categories of harm, and firms will be required to report new ‘emerging harms’ to Ofcom, the UK’s communications regulator. So we should expect the bill’s censorious remit to expand over time.
Firms which fail to comply with the new duty-of-care requirements, or are obstructive or provide false information to Ofcom, can be fined up to 10 per cent of their annual worldwide revenue, and platform executives can be sentenced to up to two years in jail. These severe penalties have allowed UK culture secretary Nadine Dorries to claim that she is taking on Big Tech, and that she is holding Silicon Valley firms ‘accountable’. But it is not Big Tech firms that suffer when free speech is curtailed online. Indeed, they have already demonstrated their indifference to free speech.
After all, it is not Facebook, Twitter or Google that produce the ‘harmful’ content the government wants to eliminate. It is us, the users of social media, the deplorable, unruly citizens, who are saying things that our political masters would rather we did not say. It is our ability to express ourselves that will be curtailed by this legislation, not theirs. And this is why this bill is so troubling.
Police Officer Kills Dog for Walking Toward Him With Tail Wagging
For Bradley Brock, his 3-year-old dog, a mastiff named Moose, was his family and his support after a serious motorcycle accident. In a span of seconds on a November night last year, a police officer in Inkster, Michigan, took all of that from Brock when the officer shot Moose multiple times as the dog approached him.
Brock says, and video appears to show, the dog wagging its tail as it trots toward the officer. Brock has now filed a federal civil rights lawsuit arguing that the shooting was an unreasonable seizure under the Fourth Amendment.
The shooting is another alleged instance of an officer misreading dog behavior and slaying a pet—a sadly common occurrence that continues to devastate families, generate public outrage, lead to officers being fired, and cost police departments hundreds of thousands of dollars in lawsuit settlements.
Brock says he called 911 on November 15 of last year after a man at a gas station pulled a gun on him. Video of the incident shows an Inkster police officer talking to Brock while Moose sits on the sidewalk a short distance away, off leash. Moose then trots over to Brock, wagging his tail and stopping to sniff a passing pedestrian, before turning and moving toward the officer.
“He was very friendly, but if anybody was around me, he wanted to check ’em out and make sure they’re okay,” Brock says. “That’s all, like any dog.”
However, the officer begins quickly backpedaling, draws his gun, and within seconds shoots the dog multiple times.
UC Berkeley Professor Told Students Abolishing Whiteness Means Wiping out White People
When you were growing up, the term “abolition” likely referred to slavery.
But much history has since been made, and we’re in the midst of a racial revolution.
These days, a world of wokeness wants to “abolish whiteness.”
How might that be done?
According to University of California, Berkeley Professor Zeus Leonardo, we must eradicate white people.
A bit of background via his faculty page:
Some of his essays include: “Critical Social Theory and Transformative Knowledge,” “The Souls of White Folk,” “The Color of Supremacy,” “Contracting Race,” and “Dis-orienting Western Knowledge.”
The author’s most recent books:
- Race, Whiteness, and Education
- Race Frameworks
- Education and Racism
Per The Post Millennial, in a video of the instructor’s lecture “Teaching Whiteness in a Multicultural Context and Colorblind Era,” Zeus asks, “Is it worth it to be white anymore?”
A host of current headlines beg the same.
White folks, he waxes, “depend” upon whiteness:
“[I’m] trying to distinguish between whiteness and ideology, white people and identities and white bodies, which is some kind of literal understanding there that then we graft the meaning of white people onto, right? But if you undercut whiteness as an ideology, one that a lot of abolitionists suggest is parasitic, right? And it’s an ideology that white people really depend on.”
Should they be let off the hook?
“If we give white people an option out of that, and it’s not just sort of words, right? It’s sort of structural transformations, then what I’m suggesting is that it also signals the withering away of white people.”
The professor gets downright biblical. To quote John Lennon, “imagine”:
“If you can, imagine we didn’t have white people…let’s say, 600 years ago. So the suggestion by abolitionists is, we made white people, so one is not born white. By virtue of having a white Bible, one has to be taught to be white. … [W]hites are taught as young children to be white.”
Usually, he asserts, “That means in opposition to the non-white, usually black.”
The instructor can’t fathom that colorblindness is real. “Colorblindness isn’t necessarily such a literal process of being blind to color,” he insists. “It’s about feigning being blind to color, because in a completely racialized globe, how do you not see race?”
White people know what they are:
“[W]e…know just from personal experience, that if a white person took a non-white person home as a date, everything changes. Right? … To bring home a friend who’s not white, everything changes.”
Why in the world wouldn’t whites want whites to be abolished? He theorizes it may be their awareness of whiteness:
“So in some, at least, lived way, whites already know that they’re white. And that may explain why there’s sort of this defensive reaction towards abolishing whiteness and abolishing white people, because there is an investment here, okay?”
And abolition, as he understands it, is exactly what must occur. White bodies, however, will get a pass:
“[M]y recent understanding is that to abolish whiteness is to abolish white people. Okay, now that’s…different from white bodies, right? White bodies will still exist, but we will no longer consider them white people.”
Twitter blocked links to Daily Mail article that questioned Covid death stats
Twitter has put a warning on an article from the UK’s Daily Mail, one of the biggest news outlets in the country, that describes the article as potentially being “unsafe.”
The article is written by the newspaper’s deputy health editor, Eve Simmons, and discusses how official government figures vastly overstated the COVID-19 death rate due to bad reporting.
“Warning: this link may be unsafe,” Twitter displays when users go to click the link to the article.
“The link you are trying to access has been identified by Twitter or our partners as being potentially spammy or unsafe, in accordance with Twitter’s URL Policy,” it says at the time of writing.
It’s unclear who these “partners” are that have called for the censorship of the article.
“Health chiefs admitted, embarrassingly, that the numbers they’d been feeding the Government were only an approximation – provoking fury from Ministers,” the article reads.
“More recently it was revealed that a quarter of Omicron deaths included in the daily figures did not, in fact, list Covid as a primary cause.
“More than two years since Covid-19 emerged, many feel they want a simple answer: how many were killed by this virus?
From Iraq to Ukraine, the American Press Loves a War
On this day in 2003, the United States launched its air invasion of Iraq, with the ground component beginning one day later. It was the first stage of a war that would ultimately drag on for over eight years, killing thousands of American soldiers and hundreds of thousands of Iraqi civilians as the U.S. and its allies sought to overthrow Saddam Hussein’s government.
Nineteen years on, Americans watch as a conflict embroils Eastern Europe. Russian President Vladimir Putin’s large-scale invasion of Ukraine beginning last month has brought frequent reports of deaths of innocents and strikes on civilian spaces.
Horrific scenes from the conflict in Ukraine have fetched headlines much like those published during the Iraq War. But there is a difference between journalistic reporting on a conflict and coverage that trends more toward activism. Reporters operating under the guise of objectivity repeatedly trended toward the latter approach during the Iraq War. Now, as establishment journalists not-so-subtly agitate for a more interventionist U.S. policy in Ukraine, it’s worth keeping an eye on these tried-and-trued hawkish tendencies.
In a press conference on March 15, reporters pelted White House Press Secretary Jen Psaki with questions regarding the Biden administration’s opposition to certain military support for Ukraine. There were over one dozen questions mentioning military assistance—including five distinct mentions of a no-fly zone—and only one question about the potential American role in facilitating negotiations between Russia and Ukraine.
Neither were the numerous questions about military assistance purely fact-based. “Zelenskyy and other Ukrainian officials have made so clear that what they believe they need the most is more warplanes and fighter jets. So why is the U.S. assessing something different?” asked a reporter. “Why does the U.S. believe they know better what Ukraine needs than what Ukrainian officials are saying they need the most?”
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