Tag: propaganda

The ADL Wasn’t Founded to Fight Antisemitism. But To Do PR.

Over a hundred years ago a lawyer stopped by a Chicago vaudeville theater to see a show. The ethnic comedy on display offended him so much that he helped create the ADL.

Both the ADL and antisemites like Candace Owens like to link the organization to the Leo Frank case in which a Jewish man in the South who was lynched after being falsely accused of the murder of a young girl, to make the ADL seem more important.

But the ADL actually had its origins in the B’nai Brith’s ‘National Caricature Committee’ and preceding organizations such as the ‘Chicago Anti Stage-Jew Ridicule Committee’ whose mission was to fight ‘ethnic comedy’ featuring Jews.

Often being performed by Jews.

The ADL was not founded as a civil rights organization, let alone an anti-lynching group, but, as an anti-defamation group. Hence the name the ‘Anti-Defamation League’. Its founding charter began by complaining that “a tendency has manifested itself in American life toward the caricaturing and defaming of Jews on the stage” and declared that the “immediate object of the League is to stop…the defamation.”

In the 1900s and 1910s, vaudeville was booming, and successful ‘comedians’ could record their own phonograph records, cartoons were also taking off and silent movies added another form of entertainment. And about the easiest way to get laughs was with ethnic comedy: Germans, the Irish, blacks, Swedes, Italians and Jews were among the many stereotypes to appear on stage.

While we tend to take free speech, including offensive speech, for granted, this was an era where multiple censorship boards, local ones like those in major cities, and ‘voluntary’ national ones, along with local and federal law enforcement, not to mention church groups, could decide whether movies would be released and whether theaters would be allowed to put on a show.

Catholics, the Irish, Germans and Jews deployed pressure groups to get the theaters to stop demeaning them. The NAACP had been at it well before the B’nai Brith launched the ‘National Caricature Committee’ at the initiative of Sigmund Livingston, a member of the German Jewish lodge, who saw an offensive show in Chicago, and Adolf Kraus, a B’nai Brith leader trying to take the local Chicago efforts of the ‘Chicago Anti Stage-Jew Ridicule Committee’ nationwide.

The ‘Chicago Anti Stage-Jew Ridicule Committee’ was not even the most awkwardly worded ethnic comedy pressure group name, that honor likely went to the elongated ‘Society for the Prevention of Ridiculous and Pervasive Misrepresentation of the Irish Character’. The ‘National Caricature Committee’ streamlined the name and the ‘Anti-Defamation League’ streamlined it further. Today the ADL and the NAACP prefer their initials over their awkward full names.

But the much more awkward thing about the ADL was how much of its focus was spent on ‘shande’ politics, policing the wrong kind of Jewish people who were seen as causing antisemitism. Much of the material that the ADL and allied groups objected to was coming from Jewish comedians, theater owners and movie studios. While most of the targets are entirely (and probably deservedly) forgotten, they included future mainstream stars like Fanny Brice who was accused of contributing to “the recrudescence and continuance of the spirit of Anti-Semitism in America”.

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Federal DC prosecutor accuses Wikipedia of spreading propaganda and disinformation to Americans

Interim United States attorney for Washington, D.C., Ed Martin, on Thursday sent a letter to the parent company of Wikipedia, accusing it of possibly violating its nonprofit obligations by allowing editors to publish disinformation aimed at the American people. 

Martin, an ally of President Donald Trump, accused Wikimedia of engaging in activities that negatively impact the neutrality of the online project. 

The Wikipedia website was founded in 2000 to “create and distribute a free encyclopedia of the highest possible quality to every single person on the planet in their own language,” according to one of the company’s co-founders. 

“Masking propaganda that influences public opinion under the guise of providing informational material is antithetical to Wikimedia’s ‘educational’ mission,” Martin wrote in a four-page letter. He also accused it of “allowing foreign actors to manipulate information and spread propaganda to the American public.”

The letter did not specify what foreign actors were manipulating information on Wikipedia, and did not give examples of alleged propaganda, but Martin claimed Wikimedia is directed by a board “that is composed primarily of foreign nationals,” according to the Free Press. 

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Do You Think You’ll Ever Know, Now That You Have Handed Your Mind to the Machine?

We live in a 24/7 media society of the spectacle where brainwashing is cunning and relentless, and the consuming public is consumed with thoughts and perceptions filtered through electronic media according to the needs and lies of corporate state power.

This propaganda comes in two forms: covert and overt. The latter, and most effective form, comes with a large dose of truth offered rapid-fire by celebrated, authoritative voices via prominent media. The truth is sprinkled with subtle messages that render it sterile.

This has long been the case, but it is even more so in the age of images on screens and digital media where words and images flow away like water in a rapidly moving stream. The late sociologist, Zygmunt Bauman, updating Marx’s famous quote “all that is solid melts into thin air,” called this “liquid modernity.”

Welcome to Operation Pandemonium

See, these experts purport to say: What we tell you is true, but it is impossible to draw definitive conclusions. You must drink the waters of uncertainty forever lest you become a conspiracy nut. But if you don’t want to be so labelled, accept the simplest explanation for matters that disturb you – Occam’s razor, that the truest answer is the simplest – which is always the official explanation.  If this sounds contradictory, that is because it is. It is meant to be. We induce schizophrenia.

And it is, these experts suggest, because we live in a world where all knowledge is relative, and you, the individual, like Kafka’s country bumpkin, who in his parable “Before the Law,” tries to get past the doorkeeper to enter the inner sanctum of the Law but is never allowed to pass; you, the individual, must accept the futility of your efforts and accede to this dictum that declares that all knowledge is relative, which is ironically an absolute dictum. It is the Law. The Law of contradictions declared from on high.

Many writers, journalists, and filmmakers, while allegedly revealing truths about the U.S. and its allies’ criminal operations at home and abroad, have for decades slyly conveyed the message that in the end “we will never know the truth,” the real facts – that convincing evidence is lacking.

This refusal to come to conclusions is a sly tactic that keeps many careers safe while besmirching, intentionally or not, the names of serious researchers who reach conclusions based on overwhelming circumstantial evidence (the basis for most murder convictions) and detailed, sourced facts, often using the words of the guilty parties themselves, but are dismissed with the CIA weaponized term “conspiracy theorists.”

This often escapes the average person who does not read footnotes and sources, if they even read books. They read screens and the mainstream media, which should now be understood to include much of the “alternative” media. And they watch all sorts of films.

But this “we will never know” meme, this false mystery, is shrewdly and often implicitly joined to another: That we do know because the official explanation of events is true and only nut cases would believe otherwise. Propaganda by paradox.  Operation chaos.

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The Media Playbook for Measles Looks a Lot Like Its COVID Playbook — This Time, Kids Are the Pawns

There are moments in the history of a movement that test its resolve. For the medical freedom movement, this is one of those moments.

We are in the midst of another full-on attack by the pharmaceutical-industrial complex, aided and abetted by a beholden mainstream media united around its allegiance to a $69 billion vaccine industry.

Five years ago, we fought back as our government, Big Media and Big Pharma orchestrated and executed a COVID-19 fear campaign — a campaign built on lies, deception and censorship — and then parlayed the public’s fear into dangerous and deadly medical mandates and hospital protocols that continue to cause profound harm.

The upside to COVID-19 global disaster?

It opened the eyes of millions more people to the dangers of shoddily tested vaccines, regulatory agency hubris and one-size-fits-all “medicine.”

As our movement has grown exponentially, so has our threat to Big Pharma.

In response, we’re seeing the same tactics rolled out again. This time, it’s measles. This time, children are the pawns in pharma’s playbook.

Children’s Health Defense (CHD) stood strong and stayed true to our mission during COVID. We’re standing just as strong now. We remain just as committed now to the truth, informed consent and medical freedom as we were during the pandemic.

As pharma ramps up its measles playbook, our No. 1 job is to dismantle the vaccine industry’s lies — broadcast far and wide through the industry’s most reliable and faithful megaphone: mainstream media.

The media would have you believe that measles is a “deadly” disease. But any suggestion that MMR (measles-mumps-rubella) vaccines are safer than measles infection isn’t supported by facts.

In fact, between 2000 and 2024, nine measles-related deaths were reported to the CDC. During the same period, 141 deaths following MMR or MMRV vaccination were reported in the U.S. to the Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System (VAERS) — suggesting the MMR vaccine can be deadlier than measles.

The media echo the same familiar refrain: The MMR vaccine is “overwhelmingly safe.”

In fact, the MMR vaccine is associated with serious health risks. The package insert for Merck’s MMRII says, “M-M-R II vaccine has not been evaluated for carcinogenic or mutagenic potential or impairment of fertility.”

Research also shows the MMR vaccine causes febrile seizures, anaphylaxis, meningitis, encephalitis, thrombocytopenia, arthralgia and vasculitis. In 2004, researchers at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention found that boys vaccinated with their first MMR vaccine on time were 67% more likely to be diagnosed with autism compared to boys who got their first vaccine after their 3rd birthday.

The media insist there’s no viable treatment for measles — hence prevention, with the MMR vaccine, is the sole solution.

In fact, as CHD reported, doctors in West Texas are successfully treating measles with budesonide and vitamin A. Even the World Health Organization recommends vitamin A.

Yet some hospitals and doctors are refusing to treat measles patients with budesonide. Texas health officials rejected pleas by a treating physician to endorse the treatment and get the word out to hospitals about its effectiveness.

Sound familiar?

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How Taxpayer-Funded Censorship Tools Could Manipulate What Americans See About Vaccines, Raw Milk, And More

The U.S. government funded various online censorship tools, some of which went missing after President Donald Trump took office. Others, however, are still operating today — potentially limiting what Americans see online, especially regarding health issues.

The National Science Foundation incubated a host of programs through its Convergence Accelerator to fight online speech deemed “misinformation,” many of which recently dropped off the map, as The Federalist previously reported. But some of these projects continue today — adopted by left-leaning institutions and dedicated to controlling online speech.

The censorship projects still operating include Chime In, hosted by the University of Wisconsin-Madison; the Analysis and Response Toolkit for Trust, housed in leftist nonprofit Discourse Labs; and Expert Voices Together, adopted by the left-wing group Right To Be. 

Chime In

The tool Chime In was previously called “Course Correct.” UW-Madison developed Course Correct as an anti-“misinformation” dashboard for journalists, as The Federalist previously reported. The NSF awarded the project $5 million starting in 2022. According to the grant description, it hoped to “scale Course Correct into local, national, and international newsrooms…” 

The program was renamed to Chime In “more than a year ago,” university spokesman John Lucas previously told The Federalist. Chime In is housed in UW-Madison’s Center for Communication and Civic Renewal, and aims to “counter vaccine hesitancy.”

As The College Fix reported in 2023, the program conducted “pilot testing… on issues including: raw milk, genetically modified foods, vaccine safety, fluoride in water, Covid-19, and sunscreen safety.” The project could also collude with media to manipulate the public narrative.

“Once journalists evaluate the size and reach of these misinformation networks detected by the dashboard, they work with Course Correct staff to develop and rapidly test messages that will reduce the flow of misinformation,” reads the project’s NSF description. “Course Correct will seed the affected misinformation network with sponsored social media posts…”

The Federalist obtained a screen recording of the Chime In software. The program helps users create messaging “experiments,” creating their own target groups, such as “vaccine skeptics.” Users can push their narratives on different platforms such as X, Facebook, Instagram, and YouTube, then request funding for these campaigns. Finally, the tool enables users to draft specific posts to be promoted across social media.

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Revealed: Pro-Kamala Social-Media Millions That Couldn’t Sync ‘Brat’ With ‘Democrat’

The abrupt withdrawal last year of President Joe Biden as the Democratic presidential nominee, followed rapidly by his replacement with Vice President Kamala Harris, irked many voters left out by the process. Yet social media seemed to ooze with enthusiasm and Gen Z-friendly hipster appeal.

Influencers flooded the web with neon-matcha green pro-Harris videos synced to beats from singer Charli XCX’s album “Brat” released last year. The poppy rave videos, gushed journalists, showed that Harris embodied the confidently independent “brat” vibe conveyed by the music. Social media pages bubbled with memes celebrating Harris as the voice of queer and black youth, in contrast with the Republican agenda of white supremacy. Digital creator Amelia Montooth, in one viral TikTok video, kissed a woman and tried searching for pornography, actions her sketch suggested would be banned if Harris lost the election.

Harris, a career politician favored by the Democratic Party’s establishment, never quite fit the bill as an icon of activist movements. But the sudden influencer buzz seemed to transform the stodgy former prosecutor into an icon of the cultural zeitgeist. 

As it turns out, the tidal wave of enthusiasm was not entirely genuine. Much of the content, including Montooth’s videos, was quietly funded by an elusive group of Democratic billionaires and major donors in an arrangement designed to conceal the payments from voters. 

RealClearInvestigations obtained internal documents and WhatsApp messages from Democratic strategists behind the influencer campaign. Way to Win, one of the major donor groups behind the effort, spent more than $9.1 million on social media influencers during the 2024 presidential election – payments revealed here for the first time. The amount was touted in a document circulated after the election detailing the organization’s accomplishments. 

The effort supported over 550 content creators who published 6,644 posts across platforms, TikTok, Instagram, YouTube, Twitch, and X. Way to Win coached creators on phrases, issue areas, and key themes to “disseminate pro-Kamala content throughout the cycle,” a post-election memo from the group noted.

The look behind the curtain reveals that at least some of the image-making around the Harris candidacy was carefully orchestrated by the same types of covert social media marketing often used by corporate brands and special interest groups. Such campaigns provide the illusion of organic support through the authentic appeal of trusted social media voices.

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Charity Involved With Adolescence Suggested Boys Engaging in “Locker Room Banter” Can Lead to “Genocide”

The charity which met with Prime Minister Keir Starmer over a plan to screen the Netflix show Adolescence in UK schools previously published material suggesting that boys engaging in “locker room banter,” advocating for “strict gender roles” and “bragging” can ultimately lead to genocide.

Yes, really.

Adolescence is a 4 part drama based around a 13-year-old white boy who murders a girl after being radicalized by incel culture and ‘Manosphere’ social media influencers like Andrew Tate.

Despite the fact that the show is a complete work of fiction, it has somehow become a rallying cry for new policies and laws which will ultimately lead to more online censorship.

The child character in the show is a white boy from a married home, despite producers admitting the plot was primarily based on the murder of a 15-year-old black girl by a black Ugandan immigrant.

Tender has been instrumental in working with the producers of the show to bring it to a wider audience, leading to a plan to broadcast the series in all UK schools which has been backed by the government.

Representatives from Tender in addition to Adolescence co-creator Jack Thorne and producers Emma Feller and Jo Johnson met with the UK Prime Minister on Monday.

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Germany’s Stern magazine calls for conscription of young people to take up arms ‘to defend diversity’ in pro-war propaganda piece

Stern Magazine is calling for mass conscription of German youths to join the army, including to ensure the defense of “freedom and diversity.” The reaction to the article has been harsh to say the least, with hundreds of negative comments directed at Stern.

The article, entitled “Others no longer defend us? Then we must do it ourselves!” claims that “the USA no longer wants to protect Germany. This brings a bitter realization: Our unbearable complacency must end.”

The solution? Start drafting German youth to fight the future wars. The author, Tilman Gerwien, a German male noticeable well past the age of someone who might typically be drafted, says that the days of a “dollhouse-like Bullerbü” are over and “we have to grow up.” He details the left’s traditional stance against conscription, which saw German youths demanding American troops leave Germany, was “not only a matter of conscience, but also a lifestyle.” He noted that at demonstrations against NATO, “people hopped around in peace-loving spirits, chanting ‘Out of NATO, into fun!’” All of this has to end, according to Gerwien, who does not seem particularly like the type of person to rush into battle himself.

There is no way to know if Gerwien was ever a part of these previous protests or ever shared those sentiments at one time, but it is notable that he is now old enough to not have to face the draft himself. Lucky him.

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German Socialists Want to Use Citizen’s Own Money to Propagandize Them

The German socialists (SPD) are desperately seeking new ways to improve their standing after the electorate roundly rejected their political agenda—especially relating to mass migration—in the February elections.

An outright ban on the Alternative für Deutschland (AfD) opposition is, of course, one option. Another is funnelling taxpayer cash into the coffers of media organisations that can be trusted to put a positive spin on the SPD’s flaws.

Such considerations appear now to have made their way into ongoing coalition talks, in which Friedrich Merz’s CDU has already proved happy to ‘cede ground’ further to the left.

Die Stimme Berlins reports that the SPD is calling for a new “media innovation fund” which would provide state support to what the paper described as “reliable” and “trustworthy” publications. That is, reliable and trustworthy according to the state.

AfD Bundestag member Götz Frömming said this, in effect, would mean papers that are “loyal to the [governing] party line,” while journalist Henning Rosenbusch added that ‘reliable’ translated in this case to “preemptively obedient government propaganda.”

Reports also note that the fund would be intended to support these selected media companies while they improve their digital arms—which, of course, is where influencing can today take place most effectively—as well as to combat ‘disinformation.’

This closely follows a slew of criticism surrounding accusations that the main U.S. aid agency’s (USAID) funds were used to deliver particular political outcomes in Europe, as well as calls by leftist Brussels officials for taxpayers to fund, effectively, pro-European Union propaganda.

Apollo News claims that the SPD demand is currently being met with “displeasure” from CDU negotiators. But with Merz, the chancellor-in-waiting, hoping to forge a coalition by April 20th, it is not at all difficult to imagine the ‘conservatives’ backing down.

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Turn Off That (Government) Radio!

On March 14, US president Donald Trump signed an executive order reducing “statutory functions of unnecessary governmental entities to what is required by law.”

Among other institutions, the order targets the United States Agency for Global Media and the broadcast media it operates and funds: Voice of America, Radio and Television Martí, Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty, Radio Free Asia, and the Middle East Broadcasting Networks.

At less than one 6,750th of last year’s $6.75 trillion federal spending, USAGM may seem like small potatoes, but as the late US Senator Everett Dirksen (R-IL) reportedly said, “a billion here, a billion there, pretty soon you’re talking about real money.” And good reasons for wadding up the agency and tossing it in the dustbin of history go far beyond the financial.

What are the agency and its outlets, really? In a word, propaganda.

Their entire purpose is and always has been to regale the world –especially that portion of its population ruled by non-US-approved governments –with the US government’s take on every event and every issue.

While that approach never seemed very much like what America advertises itself as, it may have made at least a little sense during the Cold War when Radio Moscow and China Radio International likewise spread their regimes’ messages via the airwaves.

Now, though, in addition to not reflecting supposed American values (you know, free speech and free press instead of government propaganda), those state-operated broadcast media are beyond redundant.

These days, US “mainstream private sector” media – print, radio, television, and Internet –go toe-to-toe with competitors (state-operated and “private sector” alike) worldwide, reaching far more people than their USAGM predecessors.

And, for the most part and in most respects,  those “private sector” platforms have long since brought their editorial lines into compliance with the US regime’s every whim.

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