Tag: propaganda

SOUTHCOM Commander Urges Cubans To Seize The Moment Alongside CIA Recruitment Pitch

The commander of Southern Command, Marine Corps Gen. Francis L. Donovan, posted on the command’s official X account on October 24. He urged Cubans to push for political change. “Cuba’s future belongs to those who act. Seize the moment and build the change you want to see,” he wrote. He claimed Cubans should be fed up with the broken promises, the huge corruption, and the small elite that lives in luxury while ignoring the majority of the population. Donovan’s message amplified a Spanish-language message from the CIA inviting Cubans to open up a confidential contact with the agency.

This is highly unusual for a combatant command. A senior operational commander does not normally post a message to help an intelligence agency recruit citizens of another country to be an agent.

This unusual proposition was posted on SOUTHCOM’s social media account on October 24, as the third of a series of messages from senior US officials to Cubans seeking to engineer positive change to engage in a “discrete partnership” with the CIA. The CIA messages — a brief Spanish-language solicitation and a video explaining how Cubans could contact them — included tips on how to use Virtual Private Networks (VPNs), to use private browsing and throwaway email addresses to contact them.

At a South Florida rally, President Trump said that warships returning from operations related to Iran would pass Cuba and stop about 50 yards off the coast. Rubio would then be sent in to finish the deal, the President said. In late September Trump said an agreement with Havana could be reached without military intervention. Rubio said September 29 that Cuba had already fallen.

Measures to pressure Cuba in 2026 include an oil blockade, additional economic restrictions, and interdiction of fuel shipments to the island by the Coast Guard which have contributed to fuel shortages and electricity blackouts. Furthermore, a dedicated task force on Cuba has been established by the CIA, and military options for dealing with Havana under review. All of this, according to ClashReport, has increased in recent months in light of the January operation to capture Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro and a rare meeting earlier this year with senior Cuban military officials held by Donovan at Naval Station Guantanamo Bay.

Havana dismissed the campaign as desperation, as Deputy Foreign Minister Carlos Fernández de Cossío characterized the CIA’s attempt to publicly reach out to Cubans for contact. He compared it to the marketing of toothpaste, according to ClashReport.

Keep reading

Germany plans to force social media platforms to fill 20% of algorithmic recommendations with ‘state-approved’ content

Germany’s federal states are proposing that social media platforms reserve at least 20 percent of algorithmic recommendations for content from a pool of approved media outlets deemed important for opinion diversity, according to a draft under public consultation. The proposed measure is already being slammed as a state-mandated propaganda effort that would force German citizens to view content friendly to the ruling establishment parties.

The measure is part of the second stage of a planned Digital Media State Treaty developed by the Broadcasting Commission of the Federal States. Under the draft, public broadcasters such as ARD, ZDF and Deutschland Radio would automatically qualify for certain offerings.

Meanwhile, private outlets would generally need to apply and demonstrate that they meet criteria including news and political reporting, information and educational content, documentaries, local or regional coverage, original journalistic production, editorial staffing and accessibility standards. Approvals would be decided by the 14 state media authorities.

In other words, the state wants to control what people are seeing in their feeds.

As the Berliner Zeitung reports, the media law involves “media quotas with an advantage for ARD and ZDF,” which are two state broadcasters that already have a massive advantage over private competitors. Both outlets, which are notoriously in favor of mass migration and known for their anti-AfD bias, and which employ virtually all left-wing journalists, are already known for not playing on a level playing field.

Austrian remigration activist Martin Sellner, along with other right-leaning accounts, already are warning about the new plans.

Keep reading

Truth Social Stock Hits All-Time Low as Userbase Craters on Trump’s Twitter Clone

Donald Trump’s Twitter clone, Truth Social, is in serious trouble.

The company has weathered bad news before, hitting all-time low stock prices on multiple occasions over the past year. But those days now look balmy in comparison, with the social network’s shares sliding more than 7.5 percent on Monday alone and setting a new rock bottom of just $6.40. Zooming out doesn’t paint a prettier picture, either: over the past month, the company’s stock has fallen a stomach-churning 29 percent.

It’s easy to empathize with any investors looking to ditch the company. It never had much of a raison d’être beyond “funnel some money to Trump,” and the president’s declining political fortunes — not to mention looming midterms that are likely to undermine his remaining power — have weakened even that grift-era pitch.

As the Daily Beast reported last week, not even its users are sticking around, with analytics data suggesting that its daily traffic has cratered by more than 30 percent over the past year. For a company that was already posting huge losses every quarter, that’s grim news — and it sounds like the company’s remaining investors may now be seeing the writing on the wall.

As its fortunes have soured, Truth Social has tried a series of eyebrow-raising pivots into gambling and crypto that failed to gain traction. It also moved to merge with a nuclear fusion company and started selling early access to Trump’s messages on the platform, in a move that was widely derided as an attempt to profit off his position as president.

So far, none of those moves have showed any signs of turning around the company’s fortunes. Add it all up, and it’s hard not to wonder whether Truth Social will survive as long as Trump’s second administration.

Keep reading

Hegseth travels to University of Tenn. for ‘Send Me Tour,’ touts ‘peace through strength’

As part of his nationwide “Send Me Tour,” United States Secretary of War Pete Hegseth traveled to Knoxville, Tennessee, where he addressed Reserve Officers’ Training Corps (ROTC) cadets and administered the oath of enlistment to new recruits ahead of the Tennessee-Alabama football game.

The “Send Me Tour” is a national military outreach and enlistment initiative launched by U.S. defense officials to engage with prospective enlistees, speak to military cadets and administer oaths of enlistment to new service members, according to the U.S. Department of War.

Addressing audience members at the University of Tennessee in Knoxville on Saturday, Hegseth spoke to both new enlistees and cadets from ROTC before a football game between the Tennessee Volunteers and the Alabama Crimson Tide.

The war secretary also administered the oath of enlistment to young men and women joining all military service branches and the Tennessee National Guard.

“For 251 years, Americans raised their right hand and said, ‘send me;’ send me to fight the redcoats, send me to fight the Nazis, send me to fight the communists, send me to fight the Islamists,” he said. “And now, you’ve said, ‘send me’ to defend [your] nation, to fight against whatever threatens our shores, our interests and our people.”

Hegseth said those stepping up to serve are true peacemakers who preserve “peace through strength” and ensure the safety of the American homeland.

“If there’s one entity that should win the Nobel Peace Prize every single year, it actually should be the United States military,” he said. “Peace through strength: the reason our people live free, the reason we get to play football games like this one today, are because we are stronger than any other nation in the world.”

Keep reading

Reconciliation propaganda in high school exposed by BC teen

A 16-year-old B.C. high school student says he is being denied the opportunity to return to class unless he removes his YouTube video called “Lies and Reconciliation,” which exposed some of the propaganda that was pushed on students during his school’s Truth and Reconciliation Day programming.

Isaac Simpson, a Grade 11 student enrolled in a Lower Mainland school’s film and television program, decided to put his filmmaking skills to use after growing frustrated with what he was being taught about Canada’s history, often unbeknownst to parents.

From a masked Black Lives Matter advocate telling students about truth, to another virtual speaker telling the youth to embrace discussions of “land back,” to a disturbing exaggerated illustration depicting Catholic nuns and an RCMP officer forcibly tearing Indigenous children from their mothers, Simpson’s video gives parents a rare look inside the classroom.

“I got really sick of all the indoctrination being pushed down students’ throats,” Simpson told me. “They were just telling you what to think, not how to think.”

But his decision to expose the material came at a cost.

After initially being suspended for what the school described as a period of “pause and reflection,” Simpson and his parents attended a meeting with school officials that the teen likened to an interrogation.

Simpson documented that experience in a second video posted to his YouTube channel, Isaac Simpson’s Flying Circus. Both videos have since been gaining attention online.

Now, Simpson says he has been told he cannot return to school unless the videos come down. He refuses to comply.

“I’m not taking it down because, you know, I stand by what I said,” Simpson explained.

I caught up with the young filmmaker to find out why it was important for him to expose what’s happening in his public school despite the risk.

For Simpson, the issue is bigger than his suspension. Currently, “parents have no way of figuring out what is being taught in schools,” he said.

I also spoke with his mother, former Global News director and current B.C. political commentator Anita Krishna, about the school’s response and what comes next.

Keep reading

Influencers Got Payouts to Post Pro-Talarico Content

A new report from the New York Times has revealed that a group called Frontier Media was distributing payouts to creators who would post pro-James Talarico content on social media.

The Times claims to have found “dozens” of TikTok accounts that received payments of $4 per 1,000 views to upload positive videos of the Democrat Senate candidate. According to the Times, the Talarico campaign denies any involvement in the scheme to boost his favorability. Despite the denials, the origin of the funds is completely unknown as Frontier Media has no FEC filings.

The newest scheme to help aid Talarico through the election comes nearly a month after an employee for a pro-Talarico PAC had been caught on video explaining that the group was “paying people for their votes” through a “paid relational program.”

Keep reading

Biden Judge Orders Immediate Halt to Trump Ads After Trump Says He’ll Pay for Them Himself

A Biden-appointed judge has ruled that the Trump Administration must cease the production and airing of government-funded advertisements ahead of the midterms. 

In other words, Trump can no longer promote the United States of America or his administration in government-funded ads.

The Department of Homeland Security told the court last night that there were “no plans” to air additional ads, while asking the judge to reject the request by progressive groups for an emergency order to block the ads.

Still, U.S. District Judge Jennifer Rochon ordered the Trump Administration to stop using DHS funds to create or disseminate the ads and to cancel any upcoming ad slots for a two-week duration as court proceedings continue.

The ads, which came under fire last week, feature Trump’s statements about draining the swamp, ridding the government of Communists, and liberating America “from these villains once and for all.” The White House has described the campaign as “educational and unapologetically patriotic” public service announcements, aimed at “reminding Americans to love their country and understand what makes it worth defending, at home, at our borders, and abroad.”

“This is the final battle. With you at my side. We will demolish the deep state. We will expel the war mongers from our government. We will drive out the globalists, we will cast out the Communists, Marxists, and Fascists. We will throw off the sick political class that hates our country. We will rout the fake news media, and we will liberate America from these villains once and for all,” Trump says in one of the ads.

At the end of the ad, a disclaimer reads: “Paid for by the U.S. Government.”

Keep reading

Donald J. Trump: The DSA President

The administration is running a television advertisement in which President Trump says, “Together we will defeat communism, socialism, and Marxism in America.” Government-financed propaganda promoting an unpopular head of state is something one might associate with a communist country. The irony doesn’t end there. The ad’s target is the Democratic Party and its leftward shift, as evidenced by its “democratic socialism” problem. Yet it is Trump himself who has unlocked the door the left has long sought to open: the normalization of government ownership of private companies.

While the government has occasionally taken stakes in private companies, it has generally done so—rightly or wrongly—as a temporary measure to address a perceived emergency. However, never in U.S. history has the executive branch taken ownership stakes in private companies simply because the president wanted his own federal investment portfolio. And this administration has done so without clear legal authority.

As of this writing, the administration has announced deals giving the federal government equity stakes in 34 private companies and counting. Thus, after Trump has spent much of his second term acquiring the means of production, his pitch ahead of the November elections is that he will stop Democrats from … acquiring the means of production?

To be sure, there are anti-market Democrats who have long desired to make government ownership of companies a permanent federal policy tool. Indeed, how they have responded to the administration’s equity deals offers clues about how they may deploy this tool when Republican dominance in Washington ends.

Keep reading

The Lancet Jumps the Shark

The Lancet’s latest review of mRNA vaccines, by Blakney and colleagues, presents itself as an authoritative synthesis of the evidence.

Titled “Safety and efficacy of mRNA vaccines: a mechanistic and public health perspective,” it promises to examine the mRNA platform from mechanistic, preclinical, clinical, and public health perspectives.

Instead, it delivers a remarkably confident account that gives little attention to many of the scientific and regulatory questions that have shaped debate over the past five years.

What makes the review effective as messaging is not that it ignores controversy, but that it appears to engage with it.

It names difficult issues — residual DNA, biodistribution, frameshifting, and IgG4 class switching — only to swiftly minimise them with reassuring language.

The effect is to create the appearance of critical scrutiny while reassuring readers that these concerns are either resolved or insignificant.

The review describes mRNA vaccines as a “transformative advance” characterised by “rapid clearance,” “lack of genomic integration,” and a “favourable safety profile.” It concludes that the accumulated evidence “affirms” the platform as safe, effective, and adaptable.

Ironically, the review sits behind a paywall. Most journalists will never read it, many doctors will see only the abstract, and policymakers are likely to rely on its conclusions without examining the evidence in detail.

Having spent more than five years examining regulatory decisions, FOI documents, advisory committee meetings, and independent laboratory findings on mRNA vaccines, I expected the review to grapple with the questions that repeatedly emerged during those investigations. But it didn’t.

The authors note that after injection, mRNA lipid nanoparticles “remain largely localised to the injection site” with “limited distribution” to secondary organs. The review also notes that vaccine mRNA has been detected in human plasma for up to 14 days in some recipients, and that mRNA and spike antigen have been found in draining lymph nodes for up to 60 days.

But these findings are quickly reframed as evidence of “rapid clearance” and “short-lived antigen expression” — a conclusion presented with far greater confidence than the underlying evidence appears to warrant.

Only last year, members of the CDC’s vaccine advisory committee questioned the manufacturers after discovering that biodistribution studies had never been conducted using the commercial vaccine administered to millions of people.

When asked directly whether those studies had been performed, company representatives struggled to answer, exposing important gaps in the evidence base. Yet those gaps receive little attention in the review.

Residual DNA is treated similarly.

Keep reading

DNC Sues Trump Administration Alleging Illegal Propaganda Campaign

The Democratic National Committee sued the Trump administration on Wednesday, accusing it of using taxpayer funding to craft political advertisements ahead of November’s midterm elections.

The DNC filed the lawsuit in the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia, alleging that millions of dollars were spent on what amounts to government propaganda, according to the Associated Press.

The DNC complaint also claimed that Trump personally directed the ads and wants the court to declare them illegal.

This comes despite Trump saying on Monday that he would pay for future ads using his super PAC, adding that they are a “positive promotion for our Great U.S.A.”

The ads began airing in September and are estimated to have cost $12 million so far.

DNC Chair Ken Martin said this is Trump’s “last-ditch attempt to save Republicans in November.”

“Americans deserve better than to have their hard-earned tax dollars used for Trump’s illegal schemes,” he declared.

Keep reading