Tag: mainstream media

French Newspaper Le Monde FINALLY Discovers That the Ukrainian Army Is Rife With Neo-Nazis – Hundreds of Soldiers From 3rd Assault Brigade Openly Display 3rd Reich Symbols

It’s like they say: better late than never.

The western media has been willingly blind to one of the worst-kept geopolitical secrets of our times: that the heroic ‘defenders of democracy’ in Ukraine are, in many cases, a bunch of Neo-Nazis running around unchecked.

The French premier newspaper Le Monde has just released the result of a 10-day investigation on the 3rd assault brigade of the Armed Forces of Ukraine, and to their ‘surprise’ and dismay found out that the militants go around openly and proudly wearing neo-Nazi symbols.

Of course, no one needed the Le Monde deep dive, since the information is readily available about the Nazi Azov Brigades and their heirs of the 3rd assault brigade.

And, what’s more, no one is hiding the fact that the Nazi collaborator and war criminal Stephan Bandera has been turned into a Ukrainian national hero.

Just between us: they don’t make much of an effort to hide their extremist ideologies.

Slavyangrad reported:

“According to Le Monde, hundreds of servicemen of the 3rd Assault Brigade — the direct heirs of the Azov Regiment — continue to openly use Nazi symbols. The photo shows swastikas, greeting gestures, and SS emblems.

Despite the ‘reform’ and the formal inclusion of the brigade in the Ukrainian Armed Forces, radical symbols have not disappeared. Journalists note: this is not a matter of chance, but of a conscious choice – either based on ideological convictions or as a tool of intimidation.

On June 14, in Kiev, on the day of the ‘March of Equality’ [Gay Pride], radicals from the ‘Carpathian Sich’ held an alternative ‘March of Tradition’. Participants were captured on camera demonstrating a Nazi salute.”

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Watergate’s Continuing Legacy: Dishonest Media and Clueless Republicans

June 17, 2025, the recent 53rd anniversary of the Watergate break-in, should remind us of the scandal’s scurrilous aftermath. What was promised to be a new millennium of aggressive, yet punctilious, journalism turned out to be a continuation of the Washington Post‘s reckless, essentially untruthful, Watergate reporting, clearly biased in favor of Democrats.

While Republicans in the wake of Watergate vowed to be beyond reproach, like Caesar’s wife, they were indeed generally rectitudinous but yet continued the same stupidity that ruined the Nixon administration. Because neither side addressed these failures, they persist today.

We have written extensively about the Post‘s fraud during Watergate, but not enough about the Nixon Administration’s idiocy in dealing with what should have been nothing more than an embarrassing dustup.

While the FBI was diligently investigating the Watergate burglary and the Post was sleuthing (however conspiratorially with the DNC), the White House reacted by rigorously keeping itself in the dark. The occupants of the Oval Office assumed that someone within their associated group had done something wrong, but were afraid to pinpoint exactly what it was and who did it.

The White House inner circle could not have been more wrong-footed in its own deliberately restrained inquiry. For instance, it immediately assumed it should go into cover-up mode without knowing what it was covering up. It unwisely chose White House counsel John Dean to be its hub, even though Dean had no relevant experience, and any modest inquiry would have cast a suspicious eye toward him. To be fair, the entire group assumed from the outset that all involved must keep quiet, including among themselves.

One avenue of knowledge the White House, through Dean, shut off was G. Gordon Liddy, the burglary supervisor who, seemingly heroically, refused to talk for six years. But more harmful was the CRP lawyers’ decision not to provide legal representation for wiretap monitor Alfred Baldwin, III. In so doing, the reputedly savvy Republicans lost the opportunity to determine what he was listening to and what burglary team leader James McCord had said and done in Baldwin’s presence. So two key witnesses, who could have provided exculpatory information absolving higher officials, were lost to the Oval Office.

The Nixon Administration would have learned what Democrats later suppressed: that the project was aimed at listening to out-of-town Democrats talking to young ladies about their upcoming tawdry assignations. They would have gained clues that this may well have been a CIA operation run by infiltrating agents, the “retired” CIA agent James McCord working as his cover for the campaign (“CRP”), and White House consultant and “retired” CIA agent Howard Hunt.

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Now We Know Why the Minnesota Assassin Story Disappeared Overnight

Have you wondered why the story of the Minnesota assassin Vance Boelter has suddenly vanished from the news? Now we have a pretty good idea why.

Boelter, who murdered State Rep. Melissa Hortman and her husband while also shooting State Sen. John Hoffman and his wife, unleashed terror that sparked a massive manhunt before his capture late Sunday. Initial media coverage was rife with speculation, with left-leaning outlets eager to cast Boelter as a MAGA Republican, hastily blaming the GOP and even President Donald Trump for inciting his shooting spree. 

Yet the letter found in Boelter’s abandoned vehicle tells a radically different story, one that not only exposes the media’s rush to judgment and political opportunism but sudden drop in coverage.

According to Minnesota’s largest newspaper, the Star-Tribune, Boelter believed he was acting under the supposed orders of Democrat Gov. Tim Walz. Boelter’s incoherent letter, about a page and a half long, bizarrely claimed that killing Sen. Amy Klobuchar was necessary to clear the way for Walz to run for the U.S. Senate. 

The letter is the clearest evidence yet of Boelter’s mindset after the targeted violence against Minnesota politicians last week. It is incoherent, one and a half pages long, confusing and hard to read, according to two people familiar with the letter’s contents. It includes Boelter alleging he had been trained by the U.S. military off the books, and that Walz, who is not running for Senate, had asked him to kill Klobuchar and others.

Asked to comment about the letter, Hennepin County Attorney spokesperson Daniel Borgertpoepping said the office cannot comment on an open investigation but “due to the seriousness of the allegations it contains, we will state only that we have seen no evidence that the allegations regarding Governor Walz are based in fact.”

What’s more, as we previously reported, Walz appointed Boelter to a government workforce board, a fact that seemingly fueled his delusion of a personal relationship with the governor. But this imagined relationship was the extent of any link, as the letter’s ramblings make clear. There is no evidence that support for Trump or any conservative cause motivated Boelter’s actions. Instead, his violent spree was rooted in a deranged fixation on Walz, a far cry from the media’s initial narrative that sought to weaponize the tragedy against the pro-Trump right.

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The Censorship-Industrial Complex Has Now Become Self-Perpetuating

I’ve covered a lot of speech crime indictments here at the plague chronicle.

Before Covid, these things hardly ever happened.

Occasionally you’d find the odd article about a dumb tourist who was cited for throwing a Nazi salute in public or something, but that was it. The whole area just didn’t matter.

The German state acquired a kind of political Long Covid from the pandemic.

Its agents learned from their virus repressions that they could get away with a lot more than they ever thought, and they also learned to view ordinary people as their adversaries.

A third thing happened too, in that lockdowns moved a lot of discourse to the internet, and the German elite discovered for the first time that they and their policies suffer a popularity deficit there. To explain this, our baffled and offended if powerful social media naifs borrowed the malevolent concept of “disinformation” from the Anglosphere. They began whining and crying and beating their breasts and clutching their pearls about disinformation. None of them did this so hard and so insistently as the Greens, because the Greens represent the views of the German political elite, and as an elite they feel entitled to scold, control discourse, and tell other people what to do.

That’s my potted history of how we got to this world, with pensioners being sent to jail for typing the wrong three-word phrase on the internet and YouTubers being fined thousands of Euros because some computer programme hallucinated into their banal complaints about poor internet reception a contextually incoherent Nazism. If you’re unlucky enough, you can get nailed for literally anything, and we only hear about a tiny minority of these cases. For a lot of people, the summary judgements they receive from the court are embarrassing, baffling and not worth the trouble. Those who can will just quietly eat the fine and try to get on with their lives.

In past pieces, I’ve drawn comparisons to the DDR, and I’ve also tried to characterise political repression as something that all states get up to when their ruling classes become threatened. I stand by all of that, but I’ve neglected to explain why our present situation is unique.

Europe and particularly Germany have entered a totally new era when it comes to government interference with personal expression. We’ve never seen anything like this before, it is going to get a lot worse, and nobody anywhere has the slightest interest in dialling this back. The prosecutions are escalating and they will only become more pervasive and ridiculous.

What is happening resembles classic “totalitarian” political tactics only superficially. The DDR employed literal bureaucrats and secret policemen whose job it was to censor speech according to defined standards and to punish or intimidate those who said inconvenient things. An analogy would be the farmer who decides there are too many rabbits eating his cabbages, and so he goes out and shoots them.

Modern Germany just can’t go out and shoot rabbits, and the reason has nothing to do with liberal democratic freedoms. We can’t even build bridges. Over a century ago, the Kingdom of Saxony required only two or three years to build the first Carola Bridge over the Elbe in Dresden. The SS destroyed that monument in 1945 to slow the Soviet advance, but the DDR needed only four years to build a replacement – the one that finally collapsed in September of last year. Today, in the best Germany of all time, we will require at least ten years and almost certainly more to build our third Carola Bridge. That is a very rough scale of how much ability the state has lost in the space of just a few generations.

The sclerotic, hyper-managerialised state that cannot build an uncomplicated 500-metre bridge across a river also finds censorship really, really hard. And so it has signed over this project to a whole world of NGOs, many of which now devote incredible resources to policing the internet all day.

We once had a farmer shooting rabbits, and that was bad enough if you happened to be a rabbit. Now we have an obese, bed-ridden, day-drinking farmer who can no longer fit through his front door. To solve his rabbit problem he has deputised a lot of autonomous agents, like the myxoma virus, to get rid of the hated rabbits instead.

This means he’s no longer in control of the process at all. The censorship happens all on its own, and for reasons of its own too.

It’s just something that a growing number of state-adjacent organisations do now, because there are institutional interests (jobs, funding) behind it.

How this happened is insidious.

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Loss of Narrative Control: How State Power Struggles Against Free Speech

The state is losing control over the dominant narratives in the competition of prevailing stories. Its apparatus of power responds predictably invasively and reveals its hostility toward dissenting opinions.

The German Bundestag’s Vice President Bodo Ramelow calls for stricter control of social media. “The platforms must be regulated,” Ramelow warns, demanding that operators “be held liable for what happens on their platforms.” In view of the “coarsening of language and writing” in the digital space, he advocates clear identity verification of users.

Of course, the former Prime Minister of Thuringia and self-confessed fanboy of cultivated socialism is as far removed from protecting free speech as he is from a fair exchange of arguments among different interest groups on an equal footing, where the state takes on the role of a passive guardian. No, Ramelow is a representative of the autonomously reproducing caste of statists, whose clearly articulated goal is to develop the state from a referee role into the dominant actor in the societal power field.

Socialism as a Viral Disease

A state that abandons its neutral role inevitably degenerates into an overbearing actor — socialism as a power construct is the consequence. One can also understand socialism in its revolving character as a kind of intellectual viral disease. Resentment, inferiority complexes, and failure translate in unstable personalities prone to one-dimensionality in societal disputes into vulgar fantasies of expropriation. Economic and cultural crises cause the rapid spread of this civilizationally deforming ideology — a mental pandemic gaining energy, whose discharge dissolves the pillars of civilization: private property, autonomy of action, family, religion, and cultural life.

It is of fundamental importance to understand at what point in the cyclical course of our society we have arrived. Ramelow’s talk can of course be dismissed as infantile utterances of a provincial politician and salon communist, who, like so many of his comrades, has carved a path through bureaucratic positions, public service, and NGO activism to eke out a life at maximum distance from normal reality. Yet in my opinion, this would be a superficial judgment. Ramelow’s unrestrained demands for control of the supposed sovereign are an expression of the final phase of the societal cycle. We stand at a turning point where representatives of the state feel the overstretching of their power, shaped in growing public debt, collapsing economies, and an as yet unspecific unrest among the people.

State Activates Last Resources

The left-wing power machine’s fight against dissenting opinions and political movements has long been institutionalized. In laws such as the Digital Services Act and the Digital Markets Act, the EU undertakes as a kind of “Ministry of Truth” the obscene attempt to bring social media platforms under state control to counteract its loss of power. Soft, emotionally charged, the enforcers of control cite transparency and youth protection to justify their overreach. The obligation to moderate content and disclose algorithms opens the door wide to political influence.

The citizen’s digital sovereignty as a counter-public, as a new regulatory mechanism against state media dominance, has become the newest battlefield of a society that passively watched the rise of initially gentle socialism and must now experience how from climate moralism and diversity hype emerges a passive-aggressive classic control socialism, which spares no effort to deploy state organs like the judiciary apparatus against the growing dissident movement. In this way, the state forges ever new weapons in the war of memes, a war long lost but seemingly continued as a rearguard action until the bitter end. Consider the flood of lawsuits with which failed representatives of societal transformation like Robert Habeck defend their criticism-immune safe zones.

The judiciary’s assault on U.S. President Donald Trump during last year’s election campaign, intended to sideline the Republican, will go down as a unique case in American judicial history. These cases accumulate into a fundamental problem, drawing the battle line between the state apparatus and the civic sphere so sharply that one can already fairly confidently predict the failure of this pathological control fetish. That the U.S. government has actually managed in recent geopolitical turmoil to initiate the first budget cuts to the propaganda vehicle USAID can be seen as a milestone victory in the open culture war against civic freedom.

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Whoopi Goldberg Suggests That Black People Living in the U.S. Are as Oppressed as the People of Iran

The ABC News show ‘The View’ is an abomination to American television.

During the broadcast today, co-host Whoopi Goldberg suggested that black people living in the United States are as oppressed as people living in Iran, where women have to submit to dress codes, and being gay is punishable by death.

Her comments came during a loud and incredibly stupid discussion about American foreign policy with regards to what’s currently unfolding in Iran.

It’s really amazing that this show is still on the air.

Transcript via NewsBusters:

FARAH GRIFFIN: It’s not even the same! I couldn’t step foot wearing this outfit in Iran right now.

GOLDBERG: Oh, no! That’s not what you mean to say. It is the same.

FARAH GRIFFIN: No, it’s not. The year 2025 in the United States is nothing like — if I stepped foot wearing this outfit in Tehran right now.

[Crosstalk, Haines trying to bring up Mahsa Amini]

FARAH GRIFFIN: I can’t have my hair showing. I can’t wear a skirt. I can’t have my arms out.

[Crosstalk]

HOSTIN: And it’s for us to judge?

FARAH GRIFFIN: I literally said it’s up to the Iranian people.

HAINES: Yes, it is up to them.

GOLDBERG: And that’s why I’m saying it is the same! Murdering someone for their difference is not good whoever does it! It’s not good!

[Applause]

So, that’s why I said you weren’t saying what you — what I heard was not what you meant.

FARAH GRIFFIN: Okay. I think it’s very different to live in the United States in 2025 than it is in Iran.

GOLDBERG: Not if you’re black!

HOSTIN: Not for everybody!

GOLDBERG: Not if you’re black!

FARAH GRIFFIN: Guys, don’t compare us to Tehran. No one at this table should go to Tehran.

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IAEA Chief Says There’s ‘No Proof’ Iran Working Toward a Nuclear Bomb

Rafael Grossi, the head of the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), reaffirmed on Tuesday that his organization had “no proof” that Iran decided to build a nuclear bomb ahead of Israel’s attacks on the country.

Grossi made the comments in an interview with CNN host Christiane Amanpour, who brought up the fact that US intelligence had also assessed there was no evidence Iran was working toward a nuclear weapon.

“What we informed and what we reported was that we did not have — as in coincidence with some of the sources you mentioned there, that we did not have any proof of a systematic effort to move into a nuclear weapon,” Grossi said.

He added that the IAEA couldn’t say whether or not there was “clandestine” activity that it wasn’t aware of, but based on available evidence, there was no indication that Iran was attempting to weaponize its nuclear program.

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu launched his war with Iran based on the claim that Iran was advancing toward nuclear weapons. According to a report from The Wall Street Journal, the US was not convinced by Israel’s intelligence that Iran had made the decision to build a nuclear bomb, and other reports say the US still assessed Tehran wasn’t seeking one ahead of Israel’s attacks.

Grossi brought up the fact that Iran has a stockpile of uranium enriched at the 60% level, but it has not attempted to enrich at the 90% level needed for weapons-grade, and Iranian officials had made clear they were willing to reduce enrichment levels and get rid of the stockpile of highly enriched uranium in exchange for sanctions relief as part of a deal with the US.

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Working Hard to Justify Israel’s Unprovoked Attack on Iran

Imagine for a moment that Country A launched an illegal and unprovoked attack on Country B. In any sort of objective world, you might expect media coverage of the episode to go something along the lines of: “Country A Launches Illegal and Unprovoked Attack on Country B.”

Not so in the case of Israel, whose special relationship with the United States means it gets special coverage in the US corporate media. When Israel attacked Iran early last Friday, killing numerous civilians along with military officials and scientists, the press was standing by to present the assault as fundamentally justified—no surprise coming from the outlets that have for more than 20 months refused to describe Israel’s genocide of Palestinians in the Gaza Strip as genocide.

From the get-go, the corporate media narrative was that Israel had targeted Iranian military and nuclear facilities in a “preemptive strike” (ABC, 6/13/25), with civilian casualties presented either as an afterthought or not at all (e.g., AP, 6/18/25). (As the Israeli attack on Iran has continued unabated for the past week in tandem with retaliatory Iranian strikes on Israel, the Iranian civilian death toll has become harder to ignore—as, for example, in the Washington Post’s recent profile of 23-year-old poet Parnia Abbasi, killed along with her family as they slept in their Tehran apartment building.)

On Monday, June 16, the fourth day of the assault, the Associated Press reported that Israeli strikes had “killed at least 224 people since Friday.” This figure appeared in the eighth paragraph of the 34-paragraph article; the first reference to Iranian civilians appeared in paragraph 33, which informed readers that “rights groups” had suggested that the number was a “significant undercount,” and that 197 civilians were thus far among the upwards of 400 dead.

Back in paragraph 8, meanwhile, came the typical implicit validation of Israeli actions:

Israel says its sweeping assault on Iran’s top military leaders, uranium enrichment sites and nuclear scientists, is necessary to prevent its longtime adversary from getting any closer to building an atomic weapon.

That Israel’s “preventive” efforts happened to occur smack in the middle of a US push for a diplomatic resolution to the Iranian nuclear issue has not proved to be a detail that is overly of interest to the US media; nor have corporate outlets found it necessary to dwell too deeply on the matter of the personal convenience of war on Iran for Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu—both as a distraction from the genocide in Gaza, and from his domestic embroilment in assorted corruption charges.

In its own coverage, NBC News (6/14/25) highlighted that Netanyahu had “said the operation targeted Iran’s nuclear program and ‘will continue for as many days as it takes to remove this threat.’” Somehow, it is never deemed worth mentioning in such reports that it is not in fact up to Israel—the only state in the region with an (undeclared) nuclear arsenal, and a non-signatory to the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty—to be policing any perceived nuclear “threat.” Instead, Israeli officials are given ample space, time and again, to present their supposed cause as entirely legitimate, while getting away with murder—not to mention genocide.

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The $96 Billion Lie: How Liberal Economists Manipulate Immigration Statistics to Hide the Truth About America’s Job Crisis

An economic analysis reveals how selective statistics are used to portray illegal immigration as beneficial while obscuring its true impact on American workers.

For years, liberal advocacy groups and complicit media outlets have pushed a narrative that sounds almost too good to be true: illegal immigrants are contributing $96 billion annually in taxes while maintaining higher employment rates than native-born Americans. Like most things that sound too good to be true, this claim crumbles under basic economic scrutiny.

The recent surge in claims about immigrant “tax contributions” and “employment rates” represents a sophisticated misinformation campaign. The cornerstone of pro-illegal immigration propaganda is the claim that undocumented immigrants pay $96 billion in taxes annually. This figure, popularized by the Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy (ITEP) and parroted by countless media outlets, is a masterpiece of statistical deception.

The $96 billion figure lumps together sales taxes paid by everyone, excise taxes on gasoline and utilities, property taxes supposedly “indirectly paid through rent”, which is an economic fallacy, and a small fraction of actual income taxes.

Advocates then present this mix as if undocumented immigrants are dutifully filing tax returns and contributing to Social Security like law-abiding citizens.

They are not.

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Watch Rachel Maddow LIE to Her Audience About the Florida Sheriff Who Warned Would-Be Rioters Ahead of ‘No Kings’ Protests

Ahead of the ‘No Kings’ protests by the left last weekend, a sheriff in Brevard County in Florida issued a stern warning to potential rioters that if they threw explosives at a law enforcement officer or pointed a gun at one of them, that they would be killed.

It was a harsh, but very fair and direct warning, and it worked. There were no riots in Florida during the protests.

On MSNBC, Rachel Maddow flat-out LIED to her audience this week, while talking about the sheriff. She said that he would kill people for protesting and then acted like she and the left were rubbing it in his face by protesting anyway.

It was a complete misrepresentation of the sheriff’s warning and Rachel knows this.

Transcript via NewsBusters:

RACHEL MADDOW: You might have seen headlines last week about the Brevard County, Florida, sheriff last week who called a press conference to threaten that he would sic dogs on people and his officers would not just put people in jail, they would put people in the hospital.

He literally got up at a press conference and said, “We will kill you”, talking about violence he expected at any anti-Trump protests in Brevard county, Florida. After that bizarre show of intimidation from that sheriff in Brevard County, Florida, turns out people in Brevard County, Florida were not at all intimidated by what he said.

As you can see from local headlines like this one, quote: “‘ No Kings’ anti-Trump protests draw thousands”, in Brevard County and Cocoa and Palm Bay. I mean, the sheriff gets out there and says, we will kill you and Brevard County, Florida is like, “You know what? We’ve got a right to protest. We have a right to make protest signs of any kind, including ones that show Donald Trump in a big wig made up like Marie Antoinette, saying, let them eat cake and you are not going to stop us from doing it. We are Americans, we have the right to do this, we will protest.”

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