Tag: media

It Is The Mass Media’s Job To Help Suppress Anti-War Movements

In a new article titled “European antiwar protests gain strength as NATO’s Ukraine proxy war escalates,” The Grayzone’s Stavroula Pabst and Max Blumenthal document the many large demonstrations that have been occurring in France, the UK, Germany, Greece, Spain, the Czech Republic, Austria, Belgium and elsewhere opposing the western empire’s brinkmanship with Russia and proxy warfare in Ukraine.

Pabst and Blumenthal conclude their report with a denouncement of the way the western media have either been ignoring or sneering at these protests while actively cheerleading smaller demonstrations in support of arming Ukraine.

“When Western media has not ignored Europe’s antiwar protest wave altogether, its coverage has alternated between dismissive and contemptuous,” they write. “German state broadcaster Deutsche Welle sneeringly characterized the February 25 demonstration in Berlin as ‘naive’ while providing glowing coverage to smaller shows of support for the war by the Ukrainian diaspora. The New York Times, for its part, mentioned the European protests in just a single generic line buried in an article on minuscule anti-Putin protests held by Russian emigres.”

This bias is of course blatantly propagandistic, which won’t surprise anyone who understands that the mainstream western media exist first and foremost to administer propaganda on behalf of the US-centralized empire. And chief among their propaganda duties is to suppress the emergence of a genuine peace movement.

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6 Ways The Censorship Complex Silences Speech It Doesn’t Want You To Say Or Hear

Since Trump entered the political arena and proved the efficacy of sidestepping the legacy media and speaking directly to the people, a cabal of government agencies, politicians, academia, nonprofits, the corrupt press, and Big Tech have joined forces to erect a Censorship Complex. Collaboration, funding, and groupthink connect these players, and an analysis of their functioning reveals six ways they operate to censor speech in America.

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Of Course That’s How the Liberal Media Reacted to the Latest COVID Origin News

It was never a conspiracy theory. This narrative isn’t plotline fodder for the X-Files or filled with unsubstantiated material. The coronavirus leaking from a lab in Wuhan, China, had plenty of preliminary evidence. No one had to pick unlikely events or hypotheses to string this along; the blood trail went right to the facility’s door. It wasn’t wet markets or bat soup. It was crappy containment policies at a research facility in a secretive, authoritarian regime that let it get out. Even worse, the Chinese government wasn’t transparent—shocker— about this lab leak, and we might have financed some of the research that led to the pandemic. Spencer wrote about how the Energy Department came to that determination over the weekend.

Yet, those who uttered it for months were banned, silenced, and smeared as paranoid racists. We have the receipts of the liberal media once again placing feelings over facts and making themselves look like idiots. If it made Donald Trump or the Republicans look good and the Democrats wrong, then you were a racist. The best was how the media said this theory was used to gin up anti-Asian hate; COVID didn’t birth racial prejudice against Asians. It’s always been around, but it was another liberal media attempt to control the flow of information when everyone and their mother knew months ago that the Fruit Roll-Ups lab probably had better security protocols—and that place isn’t even real. Even now, some outlets are still holding out hope that this wasn’t a lab leak (via The Hill):

Republicans are seizing on a new Energy Department conclusion pointing to a “lab leak” as causing the COVID-19 outbreak to call for swift action against the Chinese government, which has refused to cooperate with global probes into the pandemic’s origin. 

The Wall Street Journal and The New York Times reported Sunday that the Energy Department had determined with “low confidence” that the virus was leaked from a lab, though it is unclear what new intelligence that was based on.

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MSNBC Talking Head Calls GOP “Front For A Terrorist Organisation”

MSNBC extremist contributor Jason Johnson declared Thursday that the Republican Party no longer exists and that it is now just a front for a terrorist organisation.

Johnson made the comments during a discussion centred on the release of previously unseen footage from the January 6th Capitol incident.

House Republican Speaker Kevin McCarthy’s provided the unreleased security camera footage to Fox News host Tucker Carlson, immediately triggering the far left.

Johnson commented on the move, stating “I’m not being incendiary when I say this, I’ve been saying this for a long time… There is no Republican Party. They’re a dime store front for a terrorist organization.”

“You took an investigation into a federal attack, an attack on our federal government, and gave it to a journalist who is a supporter of terrorism,” Johnson charged, adding “This is dangerous.”

Johnson whined that that Carlson “doesn’t have security clearance,” and declared “we don’t know if it ends with Tucker Carlson! He can hand it to anybody else. He can hand it to Jesse Waters, right? He can hand it to anybody. All sorts of incompetent people who are in favor of overthrowing this government in a violent fashion.”

Johnson went on, “there are terrorists in this world, [and] some in Congress right now, who want to overthrow our legitimately elected government. And they’ve just given this man information that he can distribute to anybody.” 

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Shakespeare flagged as ‘far right’ literature in UK – media

Several of the UK’s most respected television shows, movies and works of literature have been included in a list of works that could potentially encourage far-right sympathies, compiled by the taxpayer-funded and government-led ‘Prevent’ counter-terrorism programme, according to the Daily Mail.

Works by JRR Tolkien, Aldous Huxley, George Orwell and even William Shakespeare, as well as classic movies ‘The Bridge on the River Kwai’ and ‘The Great Escape’ were cited in a list published by the British paper on Saturday as being highlighted by the counter-terrorism watchdog, for their potential use by far-right agitators to promote troublesome viewpoints online.

“This is truly extraordinary,” historian and broadcaster Andrew Roberts said of the list to the tabloid. “This is the reading list of anyone who wants a civilized, liberal, cultural education.

“It includes some of the greatest works in the Western canon and in some cases – such as Joseph Conrad’s ‘The Secret Agent’ – powerful critiques of terrorism. [Edmund] Burke, Orwell and Tolkien were all anti-totalitarian writers.”

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What happened to the story of the two murdered NJ councilmen?

We are being told it is a coincidence, and that there don’t appear to be any political motivations behind the murders. Perhaps that is true. I have no reason one way or another to believe otherwise.

But it sure is odd that not one, but two Republican councilmen in New Jersey were murdered in a week, and both had been elected since 2020.

The first murder was of Councilwoman Eunice Dwumfour of Sayreville; the second of Milford Borough Councilman Russell Heller. The second murder may have been work-related, as his killer shared the same employer. However, nobody is saying “boo” about what happened and it isn’t even clear that the killer and the councilman knew each other.

On a whim, I searched the Googles and found a distinct dearth of stories about the killings, neither of which has an apparent motive. The police indicated that each was a targeted killing, but the reasons behind the murders are unknown.

It has been two weeks since the first murder and a week since the second. Both briefly made national news, and then the story was memory-holed. A brief update was covered locally when the 911 call for the first was released. But the initial flurry of stories died out almost immediately.

Everybody has chalked it up to coincidence and…that’s it.

Maybe. But it sure seems weird that we haven’t been given much of an explanation about what happened in either case, and the coincidence is rather striking.

One thing is certain: if these were two Democrats we would be enduring endless lectures about insurrections, political violence, violent rhetoric, and gun control.

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Can’t Afford Groceries In Biden’s America? Wall Street Journal Says Just Don’t Eat!

As many Americans struggle to put food on the table, The Wall Street Journal proposed an idea this week: Instead of Biden taking responsibility for his destructive public policy, you should just skip breakfast.

Titled “To Save Money, Maybe You Should Skip Breakfast,” the article analyzed three popular breakfast foods — eggs, juice, and cereal — and offered explanations for why they cost significantly more since last year. According to the Journal, eggs are up a whopping 70 percent, frozen orange juice is up more than 12 percent, and cereal is up 15 percent since just one year ago.

Why the crippling increases? The explanations were as plentiful as they were diverse: avian flu, bad weather, citrus disease, dead chickens, and Vladimir Putin.

Global food supply includes a myriad of liabilities and moving parts, and of course, a drop in supply will play in role in rising prices. But the Journal neglected to mention perhaps the most important contributor to Americans’ economic woes: Biden’s apparently limitless federal spending.

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The Argument That ‘America Has Gone Too Far in Legalizing Vice’ Ignores the Cost of Prohibition

In a recent Atlantic essay, physician Matthew Loftus argues that “America has gone too far in legalizing vice.” Because people do not always make rational decisions and sometimes develop self-destructive habits, Loftus argues, the government should make it harder, not easier, to engage in pleasurable activities such as gambling and cannabis consumption. “Just as highways have guardrails for the moments when a driver isn’t exercising perfect self-control,” he writes, “so we also need guardrails to help people from driving off cliffs of vice.”

To his credit, Loftus does not draw arbitrary distinctions between potentially harmful habits based on their current legal status. He argues that alcohol prohibition was successful in reducing the harm caused by excessive drinking, for example, and seems to understand that any pleasure-providing or stress-relieving activity can be the focus of an addiction—a point that psychologists such as Stanton Peele and Jeffrey Schaler have been making for many years.

But Loftus exaggerates how often that happens, obscuring the implication that the government should impose restrictions on everyone based on the mistakes of a minority. He cherry-picks data to support his argument that liberalization of marijuana policies has been harmful. And while he emphasizes human fallibility as it relates to “vice” itself, he ignores its perils in formulating laws and regulations aimed at curtailing “vice.”

The term that Loftus uses to describe things that people enjoy is telling. The “vice” label implies that even occasional or moderate gambling, drinking, or cannabis consumption is morally suspect and provides no value that is worth considering. That is convenient for the argument in favor of paternalistic policies like the ones that Loftus supports. But it ignores the reality that people who engage in such activities typically do not develop life-disrupting habits they ultimately regret. By and large, these activities are life-enhancing rather than life-disrupting.

Loftus implies otherwise. “Our hearts and minds are shaped not only by reason but also by our experiences, affections, and, most important, our habits, which are just as often inexplicably self-destructive as they are reasonable,” he writes.

That is an empirical claim, implying that roughly half of the people who gamble, drink, or use marijuana develop “self-destructive” habits. The evidence does not support that claim.

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US Officials Now Say Chinese “Spy Balloon” Flew Over The US Accidentally

The Washington Post has a weird new article out citing multiple anonymous US officials saying that the Chinese “spy balloon” we’ve been hearing about for the last two weeks was never intended for a surveillance mission over North America at all.

The article is titled “U.S. tracked China spy balloon from launch on Hainan Island along unusual path,” and throughout it alternates between the objective journalistic terms “suspected spy balloon” and “suspected Chinese surveillance balloon” and the US government’s terms “spy balloon” and “airborne surveillance device”. There is at this time no publicly available evidence that the balloon which was famously shot down on February 4th was in fact an instrument of Chinese espionage; the Chinese government has said that the balloon was a civilian meteorological airship that got blown off course, and the Pentagon’s own assessment is that a Chinese spy balloon would not “create significant value added over and above what the PRC is likely able to collect through things like satellites in Low Earth Orbit.”

What makes the article so weird is that it actually contains claims which substantiate Beijing’s assertion that this was in fact a balloon that got blown off course, yet it keeps repeating the unevidenced claim that it was a “spy balloon”.

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