Tag: propaganda

Nord Stream bombing suspect arrested while working on film about attack

A Ukrainian man arrested in the Nord Stream bombing was detained while working on a Hollywood movie about the gas pipeline attack starring Adrien Brody and Sean Penn, a report said Thursday.

Police in Pula, Croatia on Wednesday arrested Volodymyr Zhuravlyov under a European arrest warrant put out by Germany, which is seeking his extradition.

German prosecutors say Zhuravlyov is a trained diver and accuse him of helping plant explosives on the Baltic Sea energy link between Russia and Germany that destroyed three of the four pipelines in 2022.

Germany’s Legal Tribune Online reported he was arrested while working on the set for the movie “Snake Island” by US director Doug Liman (“Bourne Identity”), with Brody and three-time Oscar winner Penn.

Zhuravlyov worked as an advisor for the film, according to media reports AFP was unable to immediately verify with German or Croatian authorities.

The Ukrainian suspect had previously been held in Poland for his alleged role in destroying the pipelines.

But authorities there refused to extradite him and let him go, judging that any such Ukrainian attack would have been a legitimate act of war rather than a crime.

The Baltic Sea sabotage attack came months after Moscow’s February 2022 full-scale invasion of Ukraine.

German investigators believe the attack was ordered by a Ukrainian state agency with the aim of depriving Russia of future energy revenues to finance its war in Ukraine.

Prosecutors charge Zhuravlyov worked closely with Sergiy Kuznetsov, another Ukrainian man who was arrested in Italy last year before being extradited to Germany.

The case is politically awkward for Germany and Ukraine, as Berlin has strongly backed Kyiv in its fight against Russia.

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‘Cheap Piece of Imperialist Propaganda’: US Video Hails ‘American Dominance’ of Western Hemisphere

A congresswoman whose parents immigrated to the United States during US-backed genocidal dictatorships in Guatemala on Tuesday excoriated a State Department video hailing the Monroe Doctrine, an imperialist policy used by Washington to declare the Western Hemisphere its exclusive sphere of influence while masking aggression as protection from outside powers.

The roughly five-minute State Department video presents the Monroe Doctrine as a continuous thread in US foreign policy from 1823 to today, culminating in January’s abduction of Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro. It starts with President James Monroe’s warning that the Americas were no longer open to European colonization, then moves through the Spanish-American War – launched by President William McKinley on false pretenses – the Roosevelt Corollary, the Cold War and Cuban Missile Crisis, and finally to the Trump administration.

“American dominance in the Western Hemisphere will never be questioned again,” the State Department said in a social media post promoting the video.

Responding to the clip, Congresswoman Delia Ramirez (D-Ill.) said: “What a cheap piece of imperialist propaganda. The Monroe Doctrine’s legacy is political instability, deep poverty, extreme migration, and colonialism throughout Latin America and the Caribbean.”

Declared in December 1823 by Monroe as Spanish colonies in the Americas won their independence, the doctrine states that European powers should not establish new colonies or interfere politically in the independent states of the Western Hemisphere. While it was partly a response to European attempts to restore colonial rule in Latin America, the Monroe Doctrine also asserted US hegemony over the Americas.

Over time, the Monroe Doctrine was transformed from a warning against European imperialism into a rationale for US imperial interventions and conquest, beginning with waging war on Mexico – again, under false pretenses, this time challenged by opponents including a young congressman named Abraham Lincoln – that resulted in the seizure of more than half of Mexican territory.

The US attempted to use the Monroe Doctrine to justify acquisition of a 10-mile zone around the Panama Canal via “gunboat diplomacy” and, after the 1904 Roosevelt Corollary, the right to intervene in Latin American and Caribbean countries when it judged their governments unstable, indebted, hostile, or vulnerable to foreign influence. Invasions and occupations of Cuba, Haiti, the Dominican Republic, and Nicaragua followed.

During the Cold War, successive US administrations used the largely imagined communist “threat” as pretext for CIA overthrows of democratically elected governments in Guatemala, Chile, Brazil, and other countries outside the Americas, including Iran and Congo – none of which were actually run by communists. The US also backed the ill-fated Bay of Pigs invasion, attempts to assassinate Cuban leader Fidel Castro, and terrorism targeting his regime and the Cuban people. Right-wing, pro-US military dictatorships were installed and lavished with financial, armed, and security aid, including torture training by operatives from the CIA, USAID, and other agencies.

The State Department video was not well received throughout Latin America. One Brazilian news site resented its “threatening tone,” while Cuban media underscored the socialist island’s sovereignty amid fears of a takeover repeatedly teased by US President Donald Trump.

In addition to illegal airstrikes on alleged drug-smuggling boats in the Caribbean Sea and Pacific Ocean and bombing and invasion of Venezuela to kidnap Maduro and his wife, the US under Trump has deployed troops to Ecuador as part of a joint campaign against alleged drug gangs dubbed Operation Total Extermination. Trump has also ordered the military to plan an invasion to seize the Panama Canal, attack Mexico and Colombia, invade and annex Greenland, and somehow make Canada the “51st state.”

Critics and supporters alike have called Trump’s aggressive policies in the Americas the “Donroe Doctrine.”

All told, Trump has bombed seven countries around the world since returning to the White House and 10 nations over the course of his two terms – including Iran, where he launched an illegal war with Israel.

Respondents to international public opinion surveys have repeatedly named the United States as the biggest threat to world peace. The late former US President Jimmy Carter even called his own country the “most warlike nation in the history of the world.”

The US has attacked, invaded, or bombed dozens of countries and supported most right-wing dictatorships in the world since the end of World War II. It has overthrown or attempted to overthrow numerous foreign governments and has actively sought to crush many people’s liberation movements over that same period. It has also meddled in elections in countries that are allies and adversaries alike.

“Despite what warmongers want you to believe, the Monroe Doctrine undermines the partnerships needed to confront our complex challenges,” Ramirez said on Tuesday. “We must change course. We must pass the New Good Neighbor Act.”

Named after the short-lived period when the Franklin D. Roosevelt administration pursued policies of nonintervention and improved diplomatic relations with Latin America in the 1930s, the New Good Neighbor Act – a resolution introduced in February by Ramirez and Rep. Nydia Velazquez (D-NY) – calls on the US to adopt a new approach to the region based on cooperation, not confrontation.

“For more than 200 years, the United States has used the Monroe Doctrine to justify a paternalistic, damaging approach to relations with Latin America and the Caribbean,” Ramirez said at the time. “As a result, the legacy of our nation’s foreign policy in those regions is political instability, deep poverty, extreme migration, and colonialism. It is well past time we change our approach.”

“We must recognize our interconnectedness and admit that the Monroe Doctrine undermines the partnership needed to confront the complex challenges of this century,” she added. “We must become better neighbors.”

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America vs. the MAGA-Industrial Complex

Have you seen the ruling classes’ latest ploy for holding onto power rather than allow the public to hold them accountable through straightforward and honest elections? It’s clear as day to anyone with eyes to see. And the fact that the powerful now operate as much within the “MAGA” brand as in the Democratic establishment shouldn’t blind us. If we let it, then even some of the best of us will soon be taken in – becoming useful idiots for the same ruling classes that the MAGA movement was founded to oppose.

I’m referring to the new game of stirring up hatred against our neighbors of Middle-Eastern and Eastern heritage and labeling all dissenters against U.S.- and Israeli-led wars and war crimes as “radicals” and “communists.”

We see this new establishment ploy playing out in the latest anti-establishment electoral victory in Michigan, especially when it comes to the rhetoric surrounding Democratic Senate candidate Abdul El-Sayed – an outspoken critic of Israeli-U.S. foreign policy and of the military-industrial-complex Trumpism originally presented itself as being against.

GOP Senator Ted Cruz and maniacal pro-war Trump advisor Laura Loomer say El-Sayed’s primary victory represents the beginning of a “communist takeover of the Democratic Party” and (at the same time!) an “Islamic takeover of America” at large.

GOP Rep. Nancy Mace flatly says El-Sayed is a “terrorist.” Conservative CNN commentator Scott Jennings: “This man wants Israelis, Arabs, Americans & anyone else who steps foot in Israel to die.” Mike Pompeo: El-Sayed is a “Hamas supporter” (in fact the candidate has condemned Hamas). Neocon John Podhoretz came up with a particularly telling conflation of Democratic Socialists of America and Muslims, calling El-Sayed a “DSA jihadist.”

Meanwhile, President Donald Trump says El-Sayed is both a communist and a candidate who “hates Jews” and “hates Israel.” Trump also continually draws attention to the candidate’s name – clearly making the point that a person with such an un-American name (as if there were such a thing) has no business in office.

Trump is perhaps one of the more inadvertently honest of the public figures now serving as slavish lackeys of the ruling classes. At least he names Israel as the thing on behalf of which he opposes El-Sayed – though he also engages in the old false conflation of all Jews with Prime Minister Netanyahu’s corrupt and unpopular government.

Because yes, all of this fomenting of hatred is about one thing: U.S.-Israeli violence and crimes – especially against Palestinians in Gaza and the West Bank.

But here’s where those of us with eyes to see can find the whole point and the whole nature of this new ploy: Since that violence has proved to be morally indefensible (every poll shows the public’s moral outrage against Israel’s U.S.-funded genocide in Gaza and ethnic cleansing operation in the West Bank), the ruling classes have directed their servants – in the media, among advocacy groups, in Congress, and even in the White House – to instead simply stir up public hate and fear against Muslims as Jihadists and against political resistance as communist and inherently un-American.

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CIA-edited Wikipedia has become propaganda tool – co-founder

Wikipedia has become a compromised propaganda tool, the online encyclopedia’s co-founder-turned-critic Larry Sanger has said, warning that its content is now increasingly informing AI.

In an interview with the German newspaper Berliner Zeitung published on Friday, Sanger argued that Wikipedia’s lack of an adequate governance structure allowed “specific ideological viewpoints” to shape its content, turning the online encyclopedia into a “globalist, academic, secular and progressive” consensus.

“Wikipedia was recognized early on as an important propaganda organ,” Sanger told the outlet. He argued that while the platform’s anonymity policy makes it difficult to determine who edits its content, “what we know as fact, based on all sorts of evidence, is that the CIA has already edited Wikipedia.”

Evidence of CIA and FBI edits first emerged in 2007 after programmer Virgil Griffith created WikiScanner, a tool linking anonymous Wikipedia edits to organizations’ IP addresses. The tool attributed edits to the CIA, FBI, corporations, and government agencies, including changes to Iraq War casualty figures.

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The Trojan Horse Inside Your Head: How Government Propaganda Is Quietly Dismantling Free Thought

If the Trojan War were being fought today, the Greeks would not need to hide inside of a big, wooden horse and hope to be dragged inside Troy’s city gates.  They’d simply disseminate all kinds of lies on social media and wait for the Trojan people to fight each other.  Such is the power of corrosive ideas: They can destroy a civilization before its defenders understand that they are under attack.

Information warfare is the name of the game today.  It exists all around us.  Soundbites attack us from every phone, computer, tablet, and television screen.  Succinct messages ripple through social media platforms until people from opposite sides of the world repeat the same words without knowing why.

The most powerful bits of information are the ones that sound unquestionably true.  “Believe all women.”  “Black lives matter.”  “Build back better.”  Their simplicity assists their deception.  We certainly shouldn’t distrust women, right?  Who wants to argue that black lives mean nothing?  Surely nobody wishes to build something worse than it was before.  People hear the soundbites, nod their heads, and repeat those words to their friends and neighbors.  Some place signs in their yards with those three-word messages, as if they were brilliant expositions of fundamental truths.

Successful information warfare propagates ideas without triggering in those who receive the message any need for reflection.  Like the Greeks’ wooden horse, the communication is hollow.  It is intended to be just attractive enough that listeners drag the soundbite into their heads but sufficiently harmless in appearance to avoid real scrutiny.  Great propaganda does not conquer by force.  It seduces.  It knocks on the door, smiles, and charms its way into unsuspecting minds.  Then it waits — patiently — until the day arrives when it can do the most damage.

Effective propaganda, however, is inherently fragile.  Should anyone take the time to reflect on those three-word messages above, their magic spells are broken.  Once someone asks, “Don’t some women lie?” people remember that accusations matter less than evidentiary proof.  Once a person is shouted down for saying, “All lives matter,” it becomes clear that “diversity” and “equity” have nothing to do with equality and justice.  When anyone stops to ask, “What are we building, and why are we building it?” the World Economic Forum’s plans for a “new world order” stand naked and exposed.

In other words, thinking is the enemy of information warfare.  Those who engage in its dark arts see independent thinkers as missile shields that must be eliminated.  Reason and rational debate remain the most effective defenses against propaganda.  People who ask questions build forts for society with their minds.  The entrances to those forts are adorned with this sign: Come let us reason together.

Reasoned debate is not scary; on the contrary, it is the path upon which we walk toward enlightenment.  It is why people who demand complianceshould never be trusted.  Anyone who says, “The science is settled,” or, “Trust the experts,” seeks to deprive the listener not only of his capacity to reason but also of his prospect for salvation.  When we forsake the mental gifts that God has given us, we hobble our potential for spiritual growth.  Nobody has ever been redeemed for “just following orders.”  A good life comes from good choices, and good choices come from faithful contemplation.  In this way, attacks on free speech are attacks on our very souls.

When propagandists attack our souls from all directions, it is difficult to know who is waging war against us and why.  But there are telltale signs.  When groups and governments attempt to “cancel” individuals for their personal beliefs, they are waging war against individual conscience.

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How Lockheed Martin, Raytheon & Bae Systems Are Propagandizing Children To Support War Through Stem

Raytheon sponsors the Girl Scouts of America. BAE Systems is reading your toddlers their favorite fairytale stories. And Lockheed Martin funds children’s math and STEM festivals. This is done with great fanfare, supposedly to empower and inspire children to pursue their passion for science. In reality, though, these companies are attempting to launder their images and enlist the next generation to become cogs in the military-industrial complex.

All the while, these organizations’ products are being used across the world by the United States and Israel to commit war crimes – in Iran, Yemen, Palestine, and beyond – to target children.

MintPress explores the murky world of the arms companies training kids to bomb kids.

Normalizing War to Kids

When many Americans think of Raytheon (now officially rebranded as RTX Corporation), they don’t envisage rockets and cruise missiles; they think of math. For decades, the second-largest arms manufacturer on the planet has bankrolled a wide range of organizations aimed at getting children excited about STEM subjects.

Since 2009, Raytheon has been the title sponsor of MATHCOUNTS, a non-profit organization that provides engaging math programs for middle school students in every U.S. state, as well as organizing math competitions to find the brightest children in America.

In 2005, Raytheon launched its MathMovesU program, aimed, in its own words, “to inspire middle school students to get excited about math and science.” In addition to the materials provided, it has also spent millions on scholarships, grants, and study awards to thousands of students, teachers, and volunteers.

And its MathAlive! traveling exhibit promises, in rather outdated branding, to take math “2theXtreme”. MathAlive! Has also traveled to several countries in West Asia, including Qatar, Kuwait, the United Arab Emirates, and Saudi Arabia – all of them among the biggest purchasers of Raytheon weapons technology.

The company also enjoys a longtime partnership with the Girl Scouts of the United States of America (GSUSA). In 2017, for example, it launched the GSUSA’s first national computer science program and cyber challenge for middle and high school girls.“

The progress to diversify the STEM workforce needs to be accelerated… At a time when technology is transforming the way we live and work, we can – and should – show young women a clear path to taking an active role in this transformation,” said Thomas A. Kennedy, then-Raytheon CEO; “Working together, Raytheon and Girl Scouts will help girls build confidence to see themselves as the robotics engineers, data scientists and cybersecurity professionals who will create a better tomorrow.”

Raytheon also spearheaded the GSUSA’s “Think Like a Programmer” project, which encourages girls to explore the world of artificial intelligence and cybersecurity, and developed many of the programming badges available to the scouts.

GSUSA appears proud of this relationship. Its website profiles one former scout who now works at Raytheon as a success story and a model to follow. The article includes a step-by-step guide and a list of tips for those wishing to follow in her footsteps.

Unsurprisingly, Raytheon also works closely with the U.S. military on these matters, establishing four new STEM “centers of innovation” with the Boys & Girls Clubs of America in Michigan, Oklahoma, Colorado, and Washington, D.C., all near military bases.

While some might be surprised by the closeness of the relationship between a children’s organization and an arms manufacturer, it is worth remembering that the scouting movement was originally established by Lieutenant-General Robert Baden-Powell, as a stepping stone towards boys joining the military. Baden-Powell was deeply concerned that English boys would not be physically fit enough to fight for their country in any upcoming wars, and designed an organization that would train them both physically and mentally to do so.

Kirsten Bayes from the Campaign Against the Arms Trade was unimpressed by Raytheon’s attempts to improve their image and to train the next generation of weapons manufacturers. “Our view is that arms companies have no place in schools or colleges, and should certainly not be working with children’s educational charities,” she told MintPress, adding:

“Schools and other places of education should be places where children learn, grow and develop their full potential. They should not be a recruiting ground where arms companies whitewash their activities.”

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REPORT: Harvard Tops List of American Universities Taking Money From Foreign Countries – Including China

When it comes to accepting cash from foreign countries, including China, Harvard tops the list of American universities.

This is a major concern. Some might even call it a national security issue. China steals millions in intellectual property from the United States every year and higher education gives them direct access.

At the end of Trump’s first term, Senate Republicans began to focus heavily on this issue. Now they are looking at it again and Senator Tom Cotton is leading the charge.

FOX News reports:

Harvard tops nation in foreign cash haul as Cotton demands probe into China funding

One Ivy League institution has taken in more money from foreign countries, including China, than any other university in the country.

The U.S. Department of Education has, for years, compiled a list of federally funded universities that have taken in funding from abroad. The Trump administration sought to revamp the agency’s online reporting portal, and, in doing so, it has shown that one institution, Harvard University, has scored more foreign funding than any other college in the country.

Harvard is in the crosshairs of Sen. Tom Cotton, R-Ark., for its ties to China and other foreign nations because of the reams of outside cash the university has taken in. And the Senate Republican, who chairs the Senate Intelligence Committee, wants Education Secretary Linda McMahon to open an investigation into China’s cash flow into higher education.

“I remain concerned that millions in additional transactions with sanctioned Chinese entities may not have been reported,” Cotton wrote. “Therefore, I encourage additional scrutiny of financial ties between American universities and Communist China.”…

Cotton noted that since the portal was relaunched in January, reporting data has shown that federally funded universities accepted more than $6.8 billion from “Communist China — including more than $300 million from sanctioned entities.”

Cotton is right to go after them for this.

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The AI Race With China Is a Lie Told by Big Tech to Justify the Data Center Invasion

As Big Tech races to build water-guzzling, energy-hungry data centers for its artificial intelligence, talk of an “AI race” between the United States and China has permeated public discourse. Pundits, politicians, and the media have all joined tech corporations in selling this narrative. And it’s giving license to Big Tech and their political handmaidens to ruin our communities, exploit our every action (both online and via AI-powered surveillance), and steal the wealth of human knowledge for private gain.

But the idea of an AI race between China and the US isn’t grounded in reality. The researchers, companies, and governments behind Chinese and US AI development are pursuing completely different goals.

The discourse in the US assumes that achieving artificial general intelligence (AGI)—computers that mimic human consciousness—would be so momentous and earth-shattering that clearly this must be the goal of anyone pursuing AI development. But that’s not the main goal of Chinese AI development. And a competition in which the competitors are running toward different finish lines isn’t a race.

If we allow the myth of an AI race with China to give Big Tech free rein, we face a more polluted, less equal world.

A Race Doesn’t Have Two Different Finish Lines

While the US is focused on artificial general intelligence (AGI) powered by Large Language Models (LLMs), Chinese developers are focused on AI embedded in products. It’s ChatGPT versus robots.

Yes, China is developing LLMs, although largely in an open-source way as opposed to the for-profit competition in the US. Recent news stories report that China is “catching” the US in LLM development. Indeed, the latest Chinese model outperforms leading US models. But this isn’t evidence of an LLM-AGI race. Instead, it shows that without making AGI its main focus, China is capable of developing its own models almost as quickly as US companies.

More to the point, LLM development in China is incidental to the country’s real goal for AI. Its focus remains on products embedded with AI and robots. Or, as AI policy researcher Liang Zheng says, in China, “The first priority is to use it to benefit ordinary people” (debatable, but indicates the kind of AI they are pursuing).

In the US, the first priority is to exploit people so that the tech oligarchs can profit. It’s chatbots all the way down.

This isn’t to argue that China is doing it “right” and the US is doing it “wrong.” Either approach will lead to a future in which citizens become increasingly disempowered. In which work becomes more scarce and less lucrative for most people. And in which a handful of billionaires grow wealthier and more powerful.

But the arguments being hauled out to support the destructive growth of hyperscale data centers are based on a fallacy. There is no need to “beat China.” China and the US are racing on separate tracks, in different races, with different finish lines.

These two separate approaches also explain the mind-boggling scale of the data center invasion we currently face. The massive hyperscale data centers—recent proposals would demand up to 5 gigawatts, enough electricity to power roughly 3.75 million US households—are only “required” because the US is racing toward AGI. Meanwhile, the embodied AI dominating in China does not require the same amount of computational power.

The truth is, we don’t need hyperscale data centers to “beat China.” We aren’t racing China. We’re killing ourselves so Silicon Valley can race itself.

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Trump and Rubio Are Reviving the Old Cold War Racket Against Cuba

President Trump and Secretary of State Marco Rubio are making me feel like I’m smack dab back in the middle of the old Cold War racket — the racket that succeeded in making the U.S. national-security state and its ever-growing army of “defense” contractors a permanent feature of American life.

The State Department just issued a report that is straight out of the old Cold War playbook. It states that Cuba’s communist regime is behind the democratic socialist movements and radical leftist groups here in America . Reinforcing the report, Rubio delivered a talk last week at a big event hosted by the State Department in which he stated that Cuba’s “sprawling intelligence and ideological network helped to build the far left in our country and in our hemisphere.”

In other words, the Reds are coming to get us … again! Everyone needs to start looking under his bed for a Red … again! And Cuba, which is located only 90 miles away from American shores, is clearly the spearhead of the international communist conspiracy that is determined to take over America … again! Too bad Senator Joseph McCarthy is no longer here when we need him.

First question for Rubio: Is the international communist conspiracy still centered in Moscow or has it moved to Beijing?

Second question for Rubio: Is socialist-communist Cuba also responsible for Rubio’s fervent belief in Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, public (i.e., government) schooling, and other socialist programs here in the United States?

The Cold War racket was the best thing that ever happened to the Pentagon, the CIA, and the NSA, the three principal components of the U.S. national-security state. By striking deep fear of the Reds within the American people after World War II, warfare statists succeeded in converting the federal government from our founding system of a limited-government republic to a national-security state, which is a totalitarian-like governmental structure — and they did it without even the semblance of a constitutional amendment.

That’s how Americans ended up living under omnipotent government — that is, government that wields the power to assassinate, torture, and incarcerate them for life without due process of law and trial by jury.

It’s also how Americans have come to live under forever war and never-ending crises.

It’s also how Americans live like little serfs under a massive, all-powerful, and very expensive military-intelligence establishment and its ever-growing army of voracious “defense” contractors.

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Superstar filmmaker spurns prestigious writer’s award for retreat at super-secret Bohemian Grove

Famed documentary filmmaker Ken Burns reportedly sparked highbrow drama this week after skipping out of an in-person appearance to accept an award at a prestigious writer’s conference.

Where did he go instead? An elite mens-only camp in Sonoma County.

The 2026 Sun Valley Conference — held in Idaho — had announced that the legendary filmmaker would be honored with the Sun Valley Writers’ Conference “Writer in the World” Prize.

It comes not only with accolades but a $20,000 prize. Past winners of the prestigious award include Salman Rushdie, Margaret Atwood, and Abraham Verghese.

“For almost half a century, he has told us the story of America through some of the most acclaimed historical documentaries ever made, including The Civil War, Baseball, Jazz, The Roosevelts: An Intimate History, The Vietnam War, Country Music, and The American Buffalo,” the announcement read about his honor.

The release said Burns would “talk about his passion for the documentary form and, in conversation with Pulitzer Prize-winning military historian Rick Atkinson, tell us about his latest project on the Revolution,” our 250th Anniversary and more. 

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