Tag: media

‘Fact-Checkers’ Are Technocracy’s Digital Brownshirts

We are under siege. A nihilistic fanaticism is running free among us thanks to the emergence of a journalistic “ethos” that establishes an almost complete equivalence between the “truth” and those utterances that support the strategic goals of the great economic and digital powers of our time.

A few months ago Facebook censored an article in the British Medical Journal that highlighted serious irregularities in Pfizer’s clinical vaccine trials. Then two weeks ago, fact-checkers from the Spanish websites Newtral and Maldita burst into the public square to accuse professor of Pharmacology, renowned expert in drug safety, and ex-WHO adviser, Joan Ramón Laporte of foisting lies and disinformation onto the Spanish populace. This, in reaction to Laporte’s testimony before a Spanish parliamentary commission investigating the country’s vaccination effort.

Despite his towering credentials, his intervention was quickly tarred as problematic by the media and subsequently banned by YouTube. The crime of this new Galileo Galilei? Alerting the assembled parliamentarians to the existence of grave procedural irregularities in the trials for the vaccines, and questioning the wisdom of a health strategy that aims to inject every Spanish child over the age of six with a new, poorly tested, and largely ineffective medication.

This incident reveals that the fact-checkers will attack anyone who does not accept the truth as dictated by the great economic and government centers of the world. This is not the usual official media obfuscation to which we’ve become accustomed over the years, but rather a brazen McCarthyist intimidation device, designed to frighten citizens into submission by appealing to their lowest and most ignoble instincts, an approach lain bare in Maldita’s smug and Manichaean slogan: “Join and support us in our battle against lies.”

Under this harsh binary logic, an internationally famous scientist like Laporte is not even given the opportunity to be judged wrong or misguided in good faith. Rather, he is immediately accused of being a willful and dangerous liar who must be immediately banished from public view.

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‘Ukraine on Fire’: What’s not getting reported

if you’re watching developments with Ukraine and Russia, you may be thinking that a lot of what’s being reported doesn’t make sense or lacks context. We’re often getting one side of a story portrayed in black and white terms.

And it’s difficult to know what “news” is coming from which sources.

A good example is the early report about the “brave Ukrainian soldiers” on a place called Snake Island that told Russian military intruders to “Go F*ck Yourselves,” and died in a blaze of glory.

Many in the media accepted and reported the information as if they’d confirmed it happened, and without question. They said that Ukraine’s President Zelenskyy had honored the men posthumously for their bravery.

It turns out pieces of that story may not have happened, as reported. In fact, multiple reports now say all of the Ukrainian soldiers are still alive. If so, it would mean they didn’t receive posthumous recognition, as had been reported. It’s also hard to know if those reports are accurate.

What to believe?

A documentary called “Ukraine on Fire,” made long before the Russia invasion, provides a lot of context that’s not being discussed. Filmmaker Oliver Stone interviews Ukrainian figures involved in decades of civil war, infighting, and controversies. The documentary also explores the US role in Ukraine’s political upheavals over the years. And it discusses manipulation of media messaging.

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CNN, ABC and CBS News to stop broadcasting in Russia after Putin’s threat to lock up journalists for 12 years: Bloomberg, BBC and Canada’s CBC ‘temporarily suspend’ operations

CNN International, the global arm of CNN, ABC and CBS News will stop broadcasting in Russia, after the Kremlin introduced a new law in the country that could jail anyone intentionally spreading ‘fake’ news.

Bloomberg News, the BBC and Canada’s CBC also said they were temporarily suspending the work of their journalists inside Russia. 

Russian officials have said that false information has been spread by enemies such as the United States and its Western European allies in an attempt to sow discord among the Russian people.

Lawmakers in Moscow passed amendments to the criminal code making the spread of ‘fake’ information an offense punishable with fines or jail terms. They also imposed fines for anyone calling for sanctions against Russia following the invasion of Ukraine.

The new legislation was passed by parliament and will become law when Vladimir Putin signs it, as he is widely expected to do. It was not clear when Putin would sign the measure.

It appeared to give the Russian state much stronger powers to crack down, by making it a criminal offense to spread fake information, with a jail term of up 15 years for posting about ‘fake news.’

‘CNN will stop broadcasting in Russia while we continue to evaluate the situation and our next steps moving forward,’ a spokesperson said Friday. 

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The Overton Window Is Being Shoved Toward Warmongering Extremism

A substitute teacher at an Arlington, Virginia middle school has been suspended for teaching an insufficiently one-sided perspective on the Russian invasion of Ukraine. Apparently one of the students recorded the lesson and showed it to their parents who complained to the school.

This happens as RT America shuts its doors following an astonishingly aggressive censorship campaign against Russia-backed media outlets throughout the western world.

The virulent post-9/11-like hysteria about Russia that has been promoted by one-sided mass media reporting on the war, and by the five years of fact-free conspiracy mongering which preceded it, has created an environment where you’ll get shouted down on social media for voicing any opinion about this conflict apart from saying Putin invaded because he is evil and hates freedom. Voices calling for diplomacy, de-escalation and detente are being systematically drowned out.

Meanwhile you’ve got massively influential pundits like Sean Hannity calling for a direct NATO airstrike on a Russian military convoy in Ukraine, without the slightest risk of losing his immense platform for advocating a move that would probably lead to a very fast, very radioactive third world war.

“You know, if we can see on satellite imagery where the convoy is, I don’t know, maybe some smart country, maybe NATO might take some of their fighter jets, or maybe they can use some drone strikes and take out the whole damn convoy,” Hannity said on Premiere Radio Networks’ The Sean Hannity Show on Wednesday. “And then nobody takes credit for it, so then Putin won’t know who to hit back.”

Hannity hastily adds that he’s “not talking about nuclear war,” but then adds a “but” which completely contradicts him.

“But at what point is this gonna end?” Hannity asks. “Cuz nobody did anything after Georgia was taken in ’08, nobody cared about Crimea being annexed in 2014.”

Hannity has also made repeated calls for Putin’s assassination, saying that “if you invade an innocent sovereign country, and you kill innocent men, women and children, you don’t deserve to live.” An interesting position for one of the most aggressive defenders of Bush’s Iraq invasion.

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Mystal: U.S. Constitution Is ‘Trash’ Written by Slave-Owning ‘White People’

The Nation’s justice correspondent Elie Mystal said Friday on ABC’s “The View” that the United States Constitution is “trash” written by slave-owning white people.

Discussing his new book “Allow Me to Retort: A Black Guy’s Guide to the Constitution,” Mystal said, “Republicans are obviously trying to manipulate those laws, particularly the rights of minorities, women, and the LGBTQ communities, and I explain it in ways we can understand so we can fight them.”

Co-host Ana Navarro said, “I live in Florida, so I’m, like, on ground zero of where all of this is happening. I’m out of my mind about the bills banning conversations about race and ethnicity and LGBTQ, just even mentioning gender identity in primary schools…Are you arguing for throwing out the Constitution? Should the Constitution be thrown out? What do we do? Is it a living document, or is it a sacred document?”

Mystal said, “It’s certainly not sacred. Let’s start there. The Constitution is kind of trash. Again, let’s just talk as adults for a second.”

Co-host Joy Behar said, “What did you say?”

Mystal said, “It’s kind of trash. It was written by slavers and colonists and white people willing to make deals with slavers and colonists. They didn’t ask anybody who looked like me what they thought about the Constitution.”

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Not Letting a ‘Good Tragedy Go to Waste,’ Big Tech Using Ukraine to Censor Independent Media

Apparently, in this new day and age, “defending freedom and democracy,” means you must eliminate freedom and democracy in regard to the sharing of information. In order to create and foster a freer and more peaceful world, we must silence anyone who questions our tactics and motives for obtaining that ostensible goal. Peace, we are now told, will come from McCarthyism in 2022.

In 1950, Senator Joseph McCarthy began a massive campaign to silence anyone who would dare question the establishment’s move involving the Soviet Union. These attacks on information would eventually become known as McCarthyism.

Using anti-communism as a means of stoking fear, the McCarthyist cult went after countless individuals who were silenced, lost their jobs, were put on blacklists, and even imprisoned. Years after the campaign began, people finally realized that they had been persecuting entirely innocent people — using extra-judicial procedures — whose only crime was questioning the status quo.

During the years of 1950 to 1954, McCarthy and his cohort within the House Un-American Activities Committee waged a destructive war on information and laid waste to the lives of innocent people, all the while enjoying the support of most Americans. The oblivious populace was so blinded by the “red scare,” they were willing to watch innocent people be silenced and hauled off to jail for a false promise of security.

Despite carrying out egregious acts of evil, most everyone involved in silencing and persecuting these “thought crimes” believed their actions were entirely noble. Though McCarthy faded into the background in 1955, later dying in 1958, every time a new threat presented itself to the American people, McCarthyism was revived — though it would never be referred to by that name again.

In just the last two decades, McCarthyism has reared its ugly head several times. After 9/11, thousands of innocent people were detained through administrative measures largely because of their ethnic identity. “Anti-terrorist” organizations began popping up on college campuses seeking to silence antiwar voices.

Lynne Cheney’s American Association of Trustees and Alumni, in its November 2001 report, Defending Civilization: How Our Universities are Failing America and
What Can be Done About It, listed 117 instances of “unpatriotic speech” by identified university professors and called American faculty “the weak link in America’s response” to September 11.

The examples of rampant McCarthyism after 9/11 are numerous too numerous to list but were not enough to stop people from engaging in it again.

McCarthyism would again rear its head in more recent years with the intellectually intolerant mob of woke cancelists. Anyone who dared stand up to the cancel culture in the mainstream was then forced out of their jobs and blacklisted — just ask New York Times editor Bari Weiss and New York Magazine journalist Andrew Sullivan.

While the woke McCarthyists are certainly troublesome, it is nothing compared to the wave of censors who began their rise to power during the early Trump years on the backs of the woke. Donald Trump ignited a fire under the new McCarthysists who would stop at nothing to silence any speech they deemed unfit for consumption — because Orange man bad. Couple this hatred for Trump with his alleged ties to Putin and we had a recipe for disaster.

No longer did the woke cults have to travel to campuses to shut down their political rivals — Big Tech took that over for them and effectively silenced anyone who’d dare commit one of the many new “thought crimes.”

In early 2018, Facebook and Google, tested the waters with this new era of McCarthyism. But instead of an entire group of people, they went after one man, Alex Jones. Jones was the perfect candidate as he’s long espoused conspiracy theories and in his latter years he went from standing up for the rights of Muslims, to pushing anti-Muslim rhetoric, giving his censors plenty of fodder.

Facebook, Apple, Spotify, and YouTube all permanently deleted the Infowars and Alex Jones Channels, Podcasts, and pages. Outside of their own domain, Infowars was entirely purged from the internet, with their last hold out being Alex Jones’ twitter profile.

“Yes, Infowars has frequent nonsense, but also a state power critique. Which publisher in the world with millions of subscribers is next to be wiped out for cultural transgression?” WikiLeaks tweeted at the time.

That tweet was met with hundreds of comments from folks praising the censorship and people subsequently attacking Julian Assange for standing against it. Infowars’ ban was not only supported by every mainstream outlet, but they demanded it go even further by removing Jones’ personal Twitter page, which happened shortly after. The masses were once again engaged in McCarthyism and once again, they didn’t even realize it.

Before and after Alex Jones was “unpersoned” by Big Tech, the Free Thought Project tried alerting everyone to the dangers of such a move. If they could take out Jones for his political rhetoric, they could take us all out — and several months later, they did.

October 11, 2018 is remembered in history as the day the tech giants attempted to wipe out independent, liberty-minded, antiwar media from the airwaves. In a coordinated effort, hundreds of pages devoted to peace and liberty were memory holed by social media giants.

The purge happened around 12:30 p.m. CST with mainstream news reports launching at the same time — implying that they were working in concert and given the heads up about the move.

In a statement co-authored by Facebook Head of Cybersecurity Nathaniel Gleicher — who also happens to be the former White House National Security Council Director of Cybersecurity Policy — the massive social media platform explained that it has removed “559 Pages and 251 accounts that have consistently broken our rules against spam and coordinated inauthentic behavior.”

Twitter followed shortly after by wiping out hundreds of accounts, including the Free Thought Project, on their platform as well.

Just like they did with Alex Jones, the unaware McCarthyists praised the move — until it came for them. 

Once again, we find ourselves on the cusp of a massive wave of censorship and it has gone full circle — back to the “red scare” of 1950. The Russians are once again the enemy and anyone who doesn’t want to engage in nuclear war against them, a “Kremlin agent.”

After Russia invaded the Ukraine, the neo-McCarthyists came out of the woodwork and demanded anyone who spreads “misinformation” be unceremoniously silenced. but misinformation is entirely subjective.

Nevertheless, Facebook, Twitter, Google, Netflix and Tiktok have all blocked Russian News broadcasts and content, seemingly at the behest of the EU which announced it will ban the networks from broadcasting on television.

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