Tag: media

Australian War Propaganda Keeps Getting Crazier

60 Minutes Australia has churned out yet another fearmongering war propaganda piece on China, this one so ham-fisted in its call to beef up military spending that it goes so far as to run a brazen advertisement for an actual Australian weapons manufacturer disguised as news reporting.

This round of psychological conformity-making features Australian former major general Jim “The Butcher of Fallujah” Molan saying that in three to ten years a war will be fought against China over Taiwan and that Australians are going to have to fight in that war to prevent a future Chinese invasion of the land down under. He argues Australia will need to greatly increase its military spending in order to accomplish this, because it can’t be certain the United States will protect it from Chinese aggression.

“Australia is monstrously vulnerable at the moment; we have this naive faith that American military power is infinite, and it’s not,” says Molan, who is a contributor to government/arms industry-funded think tanks Lowy Institute and Australian Strategic Policy Institute.

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Glenn Greenwald torches ‘amoral sociopath’ Adam Schiff for remaining defiant after hyping Steele dossier

Greenwald, who has long been skeptical of the Russian collusion narrative and outspoken of the media’s uncritical coverage, torched the top Democratic lawmaker for his defiant stance. 

“Look at what an amoral sociopath Adam Schiff is,” Greenwald reacted. “He spent years promoting the Steele Dossier. He read it into the Congressional Record. He lied about the ‘smoking gun’ evidence he saw (that Mueller never found). Watch how he worms his way around to avoid even an iota of mea culpa.”

He added, “Notable that Adam Schiff — who appears on every CNN, MSNBC and Sunday morning network news program as often as possible — just had his first truly adversarial questioning about his pathological Russiagate lies not on any of those networks but from Morgan Ortagus on the View.”

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As America Braces For The Rittenhouse-Verdict Unrest, Profits Soar

The Mayhem Watch is on. Closing arguments in the trial of “Kenosha Shooter” Kyle Rittenhouse are expected Monday, and after weeks of hype, the country is primed to explode again. Wisconsin governor Tony Evers announced 500 National Guard troops will be on hand for potential post-verdict “unrest,” which seems almost guaranteed, no matter the result.

As with all major news stories lately, the Rittenhouse case saw idiosyncrasies wash away as coverage accumulated, with pundits pounding the trial into yet another generalized referendum on American culture war. Prestige media made Rittenhouse a stand-in for the Proud Boys, January 6th, school board protests, anti-mask protests, QAnon, Blue Lives Matter, Trump, “Domestic Terrorism,” fascism, school shooters, and every other naughty thing, with everyone from then-candidate Joe Biden to The Intercept blithely declaring him a white supremacist. The efforts to cast Rittenhouse as a symbol of racism and white rage have been awesome in quantity and transparently, intentionally provoking, with even leading papers like the New York Times standardizing a practice of underscoring Rittenhouse’s race (“white teenager”) while leaving the identities of those shot out of coverage. Glenn Greenwald pointed out that his old outlet, The Intercept, noted Rittenhouse’s race 20 times in one piece while keeping schtum about the color of those shot. This has gone on for so long, we’ve seen a foreign newspaper misreport that the two people killed in the case were black. In the public consciousness, they might as well have been.

Because Rittenhouse from the day of the shooting was made a symbol of Fox-watching, Trump-loving conservatives, he was also quickly adopted in red media as a hero, which “he surely wasn’t,” as Andrew Sullivan put it. This turbo-charged the freakout even more, as Rittenhouse’s defenders turned his case into a referendum on everything from media coverage of last summer’s protests of Black Lives Matter to the performance (or non-performance, as it were) of police during the George Floyd/Jacob Blake demonstrations, to a dozen other things that made public passions rise in the last year.

Rittenhouse in other words became a symbol of so many things to so many people that the specifics of his legal case have ceased to be relevant. There seems to be no such thing as an editorialist who has negative feelings about, say, Rittenhouse posing with Proud Boys, yet also believes that incident can’t be evidence since it happened after the shooting. Everyone picks a side and stays there. Pundits are telling us that any opinion on how the jury should rule can only be understood as a reflection of racial attitudes. “If you’re defending Kyle Rittenhouse, you might be a white supremacist. Just sayin,” is how Tweeter-with-beard and sometimes-journalist David Leavitt puts it.

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Joe Biden’s ‘Negro’ Quote Earns Hilarious Label From Twitter as ‘Fact Checkers’ Spin Like Tops

We previously reported on how some in the media rushed into damage control mode Thursday in the latest round of “Protect Joe” after President Biden called the late Major League Baseball legend/icon Satchel Paige a “negro.”

For those who missed it, Biden was giving a speech on Veterans Day at Arlington National Cemetary when he made the comments, which I’m providing below just so I don’t get accused of taking the current White House occupant out of context:

I want to welcome all the Cabinet members and honored guests joining us today, including the father of our Secretary of State, who served in the Army Air Corps during World War Two, Ambassador Donald Blinken, whose birthday is today. Happy Birthday. (Applause.) Thank you for your service to our country.

And I just want to tell you, I know you’re a little younger than I am, but, you know, I’ve adopted the attitude of the great Negro — at the time, pitcher in the Negro Leagues — went on to become a great pitcher in the pros — in the Major League Baseball after Jackie Robinson. His name was Satchel Paige.

Naturally, when members of the media hit the Code Red button to alert each other that it’s once again time to Protect the Precious, their colleagues on the “fact-checking” side often also jump in to “confirm” the media’s spin, which Snopes, Politifact, and Reuters have already done in a matter of 24 hours by laughably suggesting discussion/reporting on the comments “lacked context,” while Politifact also brought up the fact that Biden sometimes has a stuttering problem to try and explain what happened.

Compounding the hilarity of the collective Defend Biden effort, Twitter also jumped into the debate in their “events” section to amplify the claims from “fact-checkers” as though a single person in this country should trust anything fact-checkers say at a time when their liberal bias could not be more obvious.

“Edited clips of Joe Biden’s remarks about Black baseball player Satchel Paige lack some context, fact-checkers say,” the promo on the right-side Twitter column read.

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Don’t Let Leftists Gaslight You on Critical Race Theory

Chauncey Devega, a race essentialist and staff writer for Salon, insists that Critical Race Theory is a fairytale.  In his recent article, “‘Critical race theory’ is a fairytale — but America’s monsters are real,” Devega insists that CRT is a lie, a damn lie, and suggests everyday white folks are “doing the work of racism and white supremacy” by “[s]upporting Republican fascists who tell evil fairytales about ‘Critical Race Theory.'”

Devega makes his case by bloviating for ten full paragraphs about an old Southern boogieman called the “Goat Man,” a legendary monster that terrorized black communities in North Carolina by gobbling up black American men and boys.  He’d heard this tale as a child from his grandmother, which turned out to be a metaphor for Jim Crow and white supremacy.

Devega wants the reader to know that the Goat Man is not real, but that “real evil takes the form of flesh-and-blood human beings, not ghosts or demons or spectral fiends.”  Trump and his supporters are the real monsters, Devega insists, along with “Republican fascists who tell evil fairytales about ‘critical race theory.'”

He writes: 

Their goal is to reclaim uncontested white power and white privilege over every significant aspect of American society. Their evil fairytales about “critical race theory” or “parental control” are but a means to that end. 

At no point does Devega dare to take a real look at the issues at the heart of the pushback against CRT — at what is happening in school board meetings across the United States.  He couldn’t care less about the growing concerns of parents, teachers, and administrators in K–12 schools or the rest of American society at large.  CRT is a “fairytale” because arrogant race essentialists like Devega say it is.  (For the record, Vox is parroting this same nonsense, as are NBC, ABC, CBS, CNN, MSNBC, and NPR.)

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Pfizer-Sponsored NBC News Caught Lying About COVID and Kids

On a recent episode of “The Jimmy Dore Show,” comedian and political commentator Jimmy Dore accused Dr. John Torres, medical correspondent for NBC News, for overplaying COVID’s risk to children and reporting incorrect statistics.

“This is a story about how money influences corporate news,” Dore said, before playing a compilation video of Pfizer sponsoring newscasts on CNN, NBC, CBS, Good Morning America, ABC News, MSNBC and 60 Minutes.

“So what’s the result of all that Pfizer money going to newsrooms?” Dore asked. “Here’s how they’re going to report on the Pfizer vaccine being authorized for children who are at almost zero risk, according to the science.”

Dore played a clip of Torres on NBC’s Today show explaining why parents should vaccinate their children with Pfizer’s vaccine.

Torres recited statistics — including the statement that “there have been 146,000 COVID deaths [among children]” — that aren’t corroborated by any government health agency.

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