Tag: media

MSNBC’s ‘Fitness=Fascism’ Article Resurfaces As Rogan And Musk Tweet It Out

An MSNBC article from last year that seriously argued being fit and healthy its a ‘gateway drug’ to becoming a ‘Neo-Nazi’ has resurfaced after both Joe Rogan and Elon Musk tweeted about how insane it is.

MSNBC ‘columnist‘ Cynthia Miller-Idriss created the ludicrous piece in March of 2022, claiming “the far right has taken advantage of pandemic at-home fitness trends to expand its decade-plus radicalization of physical mixed martial arts.”

The writer also pointed to a separate report that claimed “a network of online ‘fascist fitness’ chat groups on the encrypted platform Telegram are recruiting and radicalizing young men with neo-Nazi and white supremacist extremist ideologies.”

“Initially lured with health tips and strategies for positive physical changes, new recruits are later invited to closed chat groups where far-right content is shared,” the article continued.

MSNBC Piece Claims ‘Health & Fitness’ is New Gateway Drug to the Far-Right

https://summit.news/2022/03/25/msnbc-claims-health-fitness-is-new-gateway-drug-to-the-far-right/embed/#?secret=jcKqHcMlp3

Podcast king Rogan tweeted out a link to the piece Monday.

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The FBI raided a notable journalist’s home. Rolling Stone didn’t tell readers why

Last Oct. 18, Rolling Stone served up a foreboding scoop: The FBI had raided the home of a renowned journalist at the top of his game months earlier, and he had disappeared from public view.

It should have been a coup. Instead, acrimony inside the newsroom over how that scoop was edited led to accusations that the magazine’s brash leader pulled punches in overseeing coverage of someone he knew. The reporter who wrote the story, enraged, accepted a position at a sister publication two months later. And her complaints prompted a senior attorney for the magazine’s parent company to review what happened.

FBI raids on journalists are rare. News organizations often respond with formal protests and legal challenges. Under a 2021 Justice Department policy, raids, subpoenas and other compulsory means of obtaining materials from reporters are banned for any investigation of matters related to their journalism. The policy became the basis for a significant shift in the stance of the Justice Department toward the press.

The Rolling Stone story created a stir. Reporter Tatiana Siegel stated that the April 22 raid was “quite possibly, the first” carried out by the Biden administration on a journalist.

In this case, the journalist was ABC News national security producer James Gordon Meek. A former investigator for the U.S. House Homeland Security Committee, Meek had been with ABC News since 2013. He also was a producer of 3212 Un-Redacted, an investigative documentary that streamed on Hulu.

As published, the Rolling Stone article’s first two paragraphs lionized Meek’s record and swashbuckling style.

“Meek appears to be on the wrong side of the national-security apparatus,” it stated.

As the story noted, Siegel’s sources told her “federal agents allegedly found classified information on Meek’s laptop during their raid.” Siegel reported that Meek left his job at ABC after the raid; a publishing contract with Simon & Schuster evaporated.

As edited by Rolling Stone Editor-in-Chief Noah Shachtman, however, the article omitted a key fact that Siegel initially intended to include: Siegel had learned from her sources that Meek had been raided as part of a federal investigation into images of child sex abuse, something not publicly revealed until last month.

Why did Rolling Stone suggest Meek was targeted for his coverage of national security, rather than something unrelated to his journalism?

Neither Siegel nor Shachtman would comment for this story. This article is based on a review of some contemporaneous communications and also interviews with 10 people with knowledge of incidents described here, including several individuals at Rolling Stone, as well as people at ABC and federal law enforcement agencies.

Each asked not to be named because they were not authorized to disclose these matters publicly.

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BBC Engulfed In Another Child Sex Abuse Allegation Against One Of Its Hosts

The BBC has taken pride in being the world’s first national television outlet since it first took to the air in November 1936, tracing its history back even further to its founding as a radio station in 1922. Though it has earned a distinguished reputation over the years, it has done its best to throw that away in recent vintage. What once was a beacon of broadcast media has become a mouthpiece of Britain’s propaganda ministry. The distorted narratives it pushes have become so undeniably visible that the hubris of its punditry and production alike teem with a lack of self awareness that has come to boil over in embarrassing interviews showcasing the BBC’s fall from grace with regularity. From Elon Musk to Andrew Tate, the BBC has been made to look utterly foolish, leaving a reputation that was once exemplary tarnished and torn beyond repair.

Yet, those public faux pas are merely the tip of the iceberg concerning the rampant corruption coming from the BBC. While the hypocrisy of the broadcaster has been exposed in recently televised high publicity exchanges, a deeper pervasive issue that the organization has done its best to keep out of the public’s purview reared its ugly head once more. Once again, an on-air personality at the the BBC has been exposed for child sex abuse. This latest controversy has led to the network taking one of its high profile presenters off air while it investigations allegations that they paid a teenager more than £35,000 for pornographic images since 2020 when they were just 17 years old.

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Return of a Disgraced Neocon

CNN reports that President Joe Biden has nominated criminal neocon Elliott Abrams for a position on the U.S. Advisory Commission on Public Diplomacy, which according to the U.S. State Department is responsible for “appraising activities intended to understand, inform, and influence foreign publics” and pays “acute attention” to the U.S. government’s official foreign propaganda arm, the U.S. Agency for Global Media.

Usually when you hear someone called a “neocon” it’s not a strictly accurate description from a technical point of view and is frequently used to just mean “warmonger.”

But Abrams is actually a proper Project for a New American Century neoconservative ideologue with deep ties to the old-school neocons of the 1970s, and has helped promote violent U.S. imperialism in Latin America and the Middle East for decades.

In addition to serving as the Trump administration’s special representative for both Iran and Venezuela (two of the nations where former President Donald Trump’s foreign policy was at its most murderous), Abrams is probably best known for confessing to his role in the criminal coverup of Iran-Contra during the Reagan administration.

CNN — notoriously reluctant to criticize either U.S. foreign policy or Democratic presidential administrations — was surprisingly critical on this point in its report on Biden’s nomination of Abrams to the position.

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RFK Jr Blasts Media’s “Organized Conspiracy” To Suppress COVID Information And Stick To “Government Orthodoxy”

During a podcast appearance with Lex Fridman, Presidential candidate Robert F. Kennedy Jr. outlined how during the pandemic the media engaged in an “organised conspiracy” by acting as “propaganda organs for the government agencies,” and acting to censor “anybody who dissented.”

Kennedy again spoke at length of the “insurmountable and mountainous and overwhelming” evidence that the CIA was involved in the murder of his uncle and his father, prompting Fridman to ask “What is the mechanism by which the CIA influences the narrative?”

“Through the press,” Kennedy responded, adding “Directly through key members — there are certain press organs that have been linked to the agency, the people who run those organs, things like the Daily Beast and Rolling Stone… have deep relationships with the intelligence community. Salon, Daily Kos.”

He continued, “I actually think the entire field of journalism has really shamed itself in recent years. It has become, the principal newspapers in this country, and the television stations, and the legacy media, have abandoned their tradition… they believed that the function of journalists was to maintain this posture of fierce skepticism toward any aggregation of power, including government authority… their job was to speak truth to power and be guardians of the first amendment right to free expression.”

“But if you look at what happened during the pandemic, it was the inverse of that kind of journalism,” RFK Jr. further urged, adding “the major press organs in this country… were broadcasting propaganda, they became propaganda organs for the government agencies. They were actually censoring the speech of anybody who dissented, of the powerless.”

“In fact, it was an organized conspiracy. The name of it was the Trusted News Initiative,” Kennedy noted, adding “Some of the major press organizations in our country signed onto it. They agreed not to print stories or facts that departed from government orthodoxy.”

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How To Create a Fake News Cycle

Despite the best efforts of the mainstream media to pillory him as an anti-vaccine conspiracy theorist, Robert F. Kennedy Jr. is having a moment. A recent poll from CNN of all places showed him earning 20% of Democratic primary voters – and that was before his Joe Rogan interview and shirtless push-up video went viral. Kennedy’s support only confirms the titanic loss of trust between voters and mainstream media.

Except for those in the business, few people understand the inner workings of the media world. As a doctor and lifelong Democratic voter who pulled the lever for Biden in 2020, I had no clue. Prior to COVID-19, I trusted that what I was reading represented the truth. My experience running the Front Line COVID-19 Critical Care Alliance (FLCCC) quickly disabused me of that idea.

The first wave hit in December 2020, when I testified in the Senate that corticosteroids were saving my COVID patients’ lives. My recommendations weren’t just ignored – they were attacked, and I was personally ridiculed as a fraud and Trump puppet. My life and career were upended. I felt forced to resign my faculty position. It was cold comfort when a few months later, a large study confirmed my testimony and government agencies added steroids to the standard of care for COVID patients.

I struggled to make sense of it through much of 2021. The Biden administration and the mainstream media single-mindedly pushed untested vaccines even as the FLCCC accumulated more and more evidence that cheap, generic medicines could stop COVID. As I detailed in my new book, “The War on Ivermectin,” simply presenting evidence that doctors were using the medicine to treat and prevent COVID around the world was a dog whistle for the mob.

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Story of Cocaine at the White House Takes a Sudden Turn, Left-Wingers Float Insane Theory in Response

As RedState reported, a baggie of cocaine was found at the White House on Sunday, leading to an evacuation of the grounds for fear it was something more dangerous.

Even while streets were still shut down, the spin began posthaste. Most media outlets initially took the line that the baggie was found “near” the White House. Multiple reporters also described the substance as “cocaine hydrochloride,” suggesting it was the equivalent of a local anesthetic nasal spray used by (very few) dentists.

The messaging strategy was obvious. The administration and its compliant press allies wanted everything to think this substance was medical-grade and that did not originate from anyone inside the White House. Of course, “cocaine hydrochloride” does not exist in powdered form as an anesthetic, and no medical version of the drug comes in a bag. In other words, what was actually found here is just run-of-the-mill cocaine.

Now, we know where it was found. According to The Washington Post and others, the baggie was located in the White House Library.

One of the first reactions I saw to that news was that the White House Library is part of the public tours that take place multiple days a week. Surely, that means some random tourist left their baggie of cocaine laying around after somehow getting it past Secret Service. A quick look at the tour website, though, shows that theory doesn’t really wash.

For starters, the last tour happened at 12:30 PM on Saturday. The cocaine was found Sunday afternoon. Are we to believe it just sat there on a table or similar, unnoticed by the cleaning crews and security sweeps for over 24 hours? That seems highly unlikely. Further, the current White House tour does not actually include entering the library. Rather, you look at the library through a hallway door before going up the stairs to the left of the room. Am I to believe a tourist high-heated a baggie of cocaine into a secret hiding spot in the library somehow while not actually entering it? Again, that seems highly unlikely.

There is one logical explanation, though. Joe Biden’s son, Hunter Biden, is a notorious drug addict who was made infamous for filming himself doing crack and coke. So let’s do the math. The Secret Service found a baggie of cocaine hidden inside the White House in a place normal people can’t go. Hunter Biden lives at the White House and reportedly uses the library often.

It’s a mystery that may never be solved.

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Report Shows How Military Industrial Complex Sets Media Narrative on Ukraine

Wealthy donors have long funded think tanks with official-sounding names that produce research that reflects the interests of those funders (Extra!, 7/13). The weapons industry is a major contributor to these idea factories; a recent report from the Quincy Institute (6/1/23) demonstrates just how much influence war profiteers have on the national discourse.

The Quincy Institute—whose own start-up funding came mainly from George Soros and Charles Koch—looked at 11 months of Ukraine War coverage in the New York Times, Washington Post and Wall Street Journal, from March 1, 2022, through January 31, 2023, and counted each time one of 33 leading think tanks was mentioned. Of the 15 think tanks most often mentioned in the coverage, only one—Human Rights Watch—does not take funding from Pentagon contractors. Quincy’s analysis found that the media were seven times more likely to cite think tanks with war industry ties than they were to cite think tanks without war industry ties.

With 157 mentions each, the top two think tanks were the Atlantic Council and the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS). Both of these think tanks receive millions from the war industry. The Atlantic Council has long been the brain trust of NATO, the military organization whose expansion towards Russia’s borders was a critical factor in Russia’s decision to invade Ukraine. (See FAIR.org, 3/4/22.) Both think tanks receive hundreds of thousands of dollars from Raytheon and Lockheed Martin, companies which have already been awarded billions of dollars in Pentagon contracts as a result of the war in Ukraine.

CSIS was revealed in a New York Times expose (8/7/16) to produce content that reflected the weapons industry priorities of its funders.  It also “initiated meetings with Defense Department officials and congressional staff to push for the recommendations” of military funders.

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9/11: Whodunnit? and Why It Matters to the Peace Movement

“I have chosen this time and this place to discuss a topic on which ignorance too often abounds and the truth is too rarely perceived — yet it is the most important topic on earth: world peace . . .”— PRESIDENT JOHN F. KENNEDY, AMERICAN UNIVERSITY, JUNE 10, 1963

Sixty years later it behooves us more than ever to penetrate the tenacious ignorance of which Kennedy spoke. To honor my friend and colleague, TRANSCEND member Prof. Graeme MacQueen, who passed away in April, this editorial addresses topics he was passionate about, namely peace, justice and truth, in particular 9/11 truth.

If we’re not willing to open our minds to the abundant evidence refuting the narrative, fed to us mere minutes after the heinous crimes of 9/11 unfolded before our eyes, that a band of foreign militants from the Middle East was solely responsible for those crimes, then we risk continuing to fall prey to propaganda leading to unending wars and suffering.

Johan Galtung introduced me to Graeme at a 2011 TRANSCEND symposium in North Carolina. 9/11 was not on the formal agenda, but came up in side conversations as the 10-year anniversary approached. Galtung has always promoted open dialog on challenging topics, bucking the penchant of academic institutions and major media platforms to ignore dissenting views on 9/11 and dismiss them as crazy conspiracy theories. He thus proposed adding a session on 9/11 to the symposium and opening it to the general public. Three of us presented our views, followed by Q and A.

Galtung accepted the official narrative that 9/11 was perpetrated by foreign Muslim extremists, viewing it as blow-back from the many injustices the US had inflicted on the Middle East. He called it a public execution of 3 buildings (World Trade Center 1 and 2, and the Pentagon) that symbolized the US military-financial complex. 

Graeme and I enumerated unexplained anomalies pointing to complicity of key agents within the US Government and cast doubt on the culpability of Al-Qaeda operatives. Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, alleged mastermind of 9/11, confessed involvement only after being subjected to prolonged torture via waterboarding, while videos of Osama bin Laden claiming credit for the attacks look suspiciously fake.

We all agreed, however, along with most peace activists, that the US response to the events of 9/11 was reprehensible: declaring the unending war on terror, fomenting widespread Islamophobia, curtailing civil liberties, decades-long military incursions in Afghanistan and Iraq that ruined both countries and cost countless lives. The US leadership justified its violent response by the fear, outrage and desire for revenge that swept across much of the nation, horrified at the shock and awe it had witnessed that fateful day. How could that have been prevented?

Imagine what our world might look like if the propaganda machine set in motion the morning of 9/11 had failed. What if most journalists, commentators, engineers, pilots, firefighters, police, and politicians on mainstream media had pressed for answers to valid questions, like:

How could damage and fires on the upper floors have caused both twin towers to explode and disappear into their footprints? How could World Trade Center 7, a third skyscraper not hit by a plane, have imploded symmetrically at free fall speed? How could an alleged hijacker who flunked flight school on small planes have executed a harrowing maneuver to ram a passenger jet into the Pentagon going 500 mph at ground level? How did the US, with its hundreds of billions in defense spending, fail to defend the nerve center of its military headquarters in the nation’s capital? 

Once it was announced hijacked planes were crashing into buildings, why did Secret Service agents allow President Bush to remain in a Florida classroom with children, leaving them vulnerable to attack? Who made money on a significant increase in stock market betting right before 9/11 that prices of American and United Airline stocks would drop? 

What if honest eye-witness journalists, who in the morning had reported explosions both before and during the destruction of the towers, had continued to develop that thread and ask deeper questions throughout the day and following days, rather than being diverted by select experts and pundits who silenced the “explosion” theme, supplanting it with unproven assertions that Osama bin Laden did it.

Had these questions — many raised also by 9/11 victims’ family members — been relentlessly pursued, the flimsy tale of Muslim extremists from remote parts of the world with no ties to any government being the lone perpetrators of this apocalyptic theatrical display would have soon disintegrated.

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