Words

At some point last weekend, America decided its First Amendment was outdated - that Free Speech was no longer as important as protecting the vulnerable from the menace of Hate Speech. This decision came down from on high amidst a whirlwind of banning, deplatforming, and terminology-redefining, the product of years of collaboration between Big Tech and Big Government on how to break down the resistance to censorship that was so stubbornly encoded in this country's DNA. Infowars was merely the test case - a toe dipped in the public stream of consciousness to gauge the effectiveness of the propaganda we’re being fed. Outside the conservative media sphere, the response to Alex Jones’ un-personing - removed from YouTube, Facebook, Google, Apple, Spotify, Stitchr, MailChimp, LinkedIn, Vimeo, and finally Twitter in the course of a few days, a heavy blow the companies claim was not coordinated among themselves at all (wink, wink) - was tepid, with only a few brave commentators willing to bridge the partisan divide to defend his right to free speech on principle. Some reprehensible shills even cried that the censorship hadn’t gone far enough. Big Tech took the Left’s cowardice as a green light and turned their censorship ray on the other end of the political spectrum. Telesur, the Caracas-based network home to Abby Martin, was booted from Facebook yesterday, an act the media greeted with a deafening silence far more terrifying than all the anti-speech “liberals” baying for Jones’ blood.

 

Telesur and Martin were logical choices to launch Big Tech’s un-personing on the Left. Facebook’s “partner” in silencing dissent - er, fake news - is the Atlantic Council, whose board of directors reads like a who’s-who of western imperialism, with Henry Kissinger, Michael Chertoff, and Michael Hayden rubbing shoulders with CrowdStrike founder Dmitri Alperovitch, the man behind the Russiagate conspiracy theory. Martin figured prominently in the Russiagate intelligence community assessment, which devoted several pages to wringing its hands about her old RT show “Breaking the Set,” even though it had been off the air for years before the 2016 election; a woman-on-the-street piece she recorded last year that revealed the shocking bigotry of average Israeli citizens was banned in 28 countries on YouTube. Venezuela, of course, sits on the largest oil reserves in the western hemisphere and has long been on the war machine’s “to do” list (Venezuelanalysis.com was also dropped from Facebook, but later reinstated). Together, they represent everything that keeps the NATO-backed Atlantic Council awake at night.

 

For all the hundreds of articles weighing in on the Passion of Alex Jones, hardly anyone mentioned Telesur's disappearance - or the deletion of State Department whistleblower Peter van Buren, who was banned from Twitter for a relatively mild argument while all eyes were on Infowars; or the double vanishing act of Scott Horton and Daniel McAdams, two anti-war journalists whose Twitter accounts were yanked and then restored for defending van Buren. The narrative we are being fed is that Jones was out of line for his behavior - that questioning the facts of the Sandy Hook shooting is morally equivalent to yelling “fire” in a crowded theatre - so Big Tech made a Big Decision and silenced Infowars, in a precedent-setting move that won’t ever have sinister repercussions for anyone elsewhere on the political spectrum. Anyone capable of mustering a few scraps of historical context or even basic critical thinking understood that Jones was just the red-faced canary in the totalitarian coal mine, and that every alternative media content creator is now in peril. But the establishment media is telling us to move on - after all, Trump is attacking the press, and we have to stand with them! 

 

Big Tech’s Big Crackdown was driven not by social media platforms themselves, but by establishment media and their backers, who see the writing on the wall as the lion’s share of Americans now get their news from Facebook and Google. When Jack Dorsey dragged his feet on censoring Infowars, dozens of articles from the Verge and Vox shrieked about Twitter’s “amorality,” but it was CNN that actually deployed a reporter to dig through Jones’ old tweets in search of something that violated the platform’s terms of service. Facebook, instructed by the Atlantic Council, has begun removing “misinformation that contributes to violence” - fake stories it "believes" (after consultation with local “threat intelligence agencies”) are “created or shared with the intent of causing violence or physical harm” - but even this Orwellian overstep would not disqualify Infowars. The tech platforms and their ruling class manipulators are belatedly realizing their control grid is still full of holes, and the establishment media - another tentacle on the same octopus - is offering up some almost-clever solutions in a bid to regain its masters' favor. Facebook could take a page from YouTube’s book and link to Wikipedia pages on the disputed topic (because Wikipedia is such an authoritative source)! They could draft a constitution (since they clearly respect the existing one so much)! Anything but positioning themselves as a neutral content platform like Twitter, enmeshed in “amoral, as well as regressive, terrible decision-making.”  

 

The not-so-secret weapon in the new-media censorship wars is Hate Speech - a nebulous term whose meaning is constantly shifting to suit the whims of whoever is using it. Since the 2016 election, Hate has been the domestic bogeyman of choice, the enemy within while Russia plays the role of enemy without. The Southern Poverty Law Center, the Anti-Defamation League and other fearmongering groups tell us Hate is on the rise, that Hate Crimes have skyrocketed since Trump’s election, that Haters are being radicalized online at a breakneck pace - and that only drastic, even unconstitutional measures will stop the insanity. The establishment media have rushed to cover anything that looks remotely like a white supremacist gathering, often outnumbering the actual participants with their camerapeople and reporters. Only by exposing the Haters, they say, will America free itself of the scourge of white supremacy - clearly the #1 problem in a country where the national debt is 940% of GDP and most of us live paycheck to paycheck, falling asleep to the lullaby that we live in the richest nation in the world.

 

Hate speech is the ideal weapon for the deplatforming aggressive precisely because the term has no universally agreed-upon definition even as it provokes an emotional reaction. Nearly all of the platforms that banned Infowars cited “hate speech” as their rationale without claiming a specific example, though Facebook claimed Jones’ account was full of anti-Muslim and anti-trans bigotry. YouTube was the first to block Jones, making it impossible for those unfamiliar with his material to ascertain the truth of these claims. A political performance-artist who took a hard ideological swerve right with Trump’s candidacy, Jones has replaced much of the anti-police-state rhetoric that endeared him to his early audience with more typical conservative talking points, including a reprehensible knee-jerk Zionism that sets him in opposition to Islam. Still, a rational mind would be hard-pressed to classify his words as “hate” unless one radically redefined “hate.” Which is precisely the idea. Liberals, unaware of Infowars content, take Big Tech’s word that it is hateful and repugnant - he questioned Sandy Hook! - but don’t bother evaluating it for themselves because of their visceral aversion to anything deemed “hate speech,” and his relatively anodyne comments retroactively come to embody hate speech, since no one is sure what the term means anyway. Definition creep sets in, and overnight half the conservative media finds itself on the wrong end of Big Tech’s terms of service.

 

Twitter clone Gab, the favored platform of the alt-right ever since it welcomed victims of the 2016 “Twitter purges,” was threatened by Microsoft with the cancellation of its web domain last week because of two anti-Semitic posts made a month ago by Republican Senate candidate Patrick Little. Why Microsoft would take down the entire platform because of two objectionable tweets was never properly explained - certainly, the platform is home to plenty of other objectionable messages by less-well-known users. The threat may have been an effort to force Gab to betray the principles that originally attracted users like Little who’ve been expelled from other platforms - “free speech, individual liberty and the free flow of information online” - principles sure to attract more users as Twitter begins purging anew. Little removed the offending tweets, and Gab survived to offend another day. Meanwhile, PayPal has been quietly dropping users linked to the Southern Poverty Law Center's infamously inaccurate "hatewatch" list since last year.

 

Banning the “haters” is only the first step in Big Tech’s Big Crackdown. Google’s shadowy Jigsaw arm recently developed a tool called Perspective which aims to root out “hate speech” before it spreads. Built in collaboration with the New York Times and Wikipedia, Perspective uses “machine learning” to “spot abuse and harassment online,” analyzing the flow of online conversations in the hope of predicting (and preemptively redirecting) their trajectory. The tool could presumably be deployed against content creation on Big Tech platforms in real time, though the PR materials limit their discussion to its potential in moderating comments sections. A similar initiative is in development at the ADL, which is working with UC-Berkeley to develop an “online hate index” to “better understand the growing amount of hate on social media,” uncovering and identifying trends in “hate speech” across different platforms. The goal is a “community-based” definition of hate speech - but they never say whose community gets to do the defining. Given the ADL’s rabid demonization of anything with a whiff of criticizing Israel as "anti-Semitism," such a tool in their hands should worry political analysts and anyone who comments on world events.

 

Jigsaw is already looking beyond "hate speech" to influence real-world behavior. Its Redirect Method began as a beefed-up AdWords aimed at convincing potential ISIS recruits to think twice about joining the US/Israeli-backed terror group; the program is now being positioned as the perfect tool for countering the uniquely American specter of White Hate. Instead of merely pointing the hapless would-be terrorist to YouTube videos debunking ISIS propaganda, Redirect’s successor Moonshot follows up the ideological rebuttals with messages from “undercover social workers” embedded in extremist forums. The infiltrators “discreetly message potential recruits to dissuade them,” an act that takes on sinister implications considering the vast wealth of personally identifying information Google hoards on its users. Given that the program has no way of distinguishing between an individual looking to be radicalized and someone doing research for a film or journalistic piece, the privacy ramifications are - as with everything Google - disturbing. It is one thing to be concern-trolled by an online do-gooder; another entirely when the concern-troll is armed with your home address, your phone number, and your bank account information. A Wired article on the program also suggests that Google readily supplies the incriminating search data to authorities, dispelling any illusion of the tech giant’s concern for the well-being of wannabe extremists.

 

Lest you believe the Great Deplatforming is really about “hate,” recall that Facebook also removed 32 pages it suspected of “inauthentic behavior” last weekend, pages devoted to the counter-protest against the Unite the Right 2 rally, pages populated mostly by anti-racist groups planning a big show of opposition to the white nationalist gathering that was supposed to be the very embodiment of “hate.” Why? They were suspected of having been created by Russian trolls. This is the Atlantic Council, after all - if you aren't losing sleep over the possibility of Russian "meddling" in the midterm elections, they're not doing their job. Israel’s Knesset just passed the first draft of a bill that would empower courts to order the removal of social media posts for “safety” reasons - not merely hide the posts from Israeli users, but remove them globally. This is a country that regularly arrests people based on their social media content, having criminalized such violations as “glorifying Palestinian martyrs” or “disclosing Israeli crimes.” Don’t think the deplatforming will stop with the perpetrators of “hate.” 

 

Led by the Boston Globe, 300 newspapers have colluded in Sinclair-media-esque fashion to publish editorials in defense of a free press, as if Trump’s disparaging remarks about “fake news” represent the most significant threat to their ossified business model. The Globe published a poll indicating 48% of Republicans believe “the news media is the enemy of the American people” - but this is a situation for which the establishment media has only itself to blame. Decades of biased pro-corporate warmongering have taken their toll, and the average American has had their fill of lies. The best journalism has long since migrated online and away from the big legacy names, and social media platforms have assumed the role once held by the television. Meanwhile, Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg has threatened the entire old-media establishment with economic death if they do not work with his platform to “revitalize journalism.” It is difficult to tell whether establishment media or Big Tech poses a greater threat to press freedom - both are chillingly effective tools of control wielded by the ruling class against the people, and Zuckerberg’s idea of a “revitalized” journalism is the stuff of nightmares - but as the online platforms increasingly come to resemble establishment media with their unhealthy appetites for gatekeeping and censorship, it is clear that neither see themselves as friends to independent journalists.

 

Some have naively called for the government to step in and regulate Big Tech, reasoning that their platforms operate as monopolies and should be treated as such under the law. While it’s tempting to call in Big Brother to clip the wings of Twitter & co., such an act would trigger a slide down yet another slippery slope. Corporations are already the willing partner of the US government in enacting almost-laws that violate our pesky constitution - Facebook, Twitter, YouTube and the other tech platforms have been discussing the banning of Infowars in meetings with congresspeople for months. The Deep State knows it can't openly strip citizens of their First Amendment rights just yet, so Big Tech is deployed to do their dirty work. Once the government legally has its hands on social media, there is nothing stopping them from exerting even more control over these platforms, bringing full circle the process that began when the Pentagon’s Orwellian “LifeLog” project was scrapped and reanimated in the corporate sector as “the Facebook.” Fascism is characterized by an alliance at the highest level between corporations and the government, and further defined by heavy-handed censorship. This creeping fascism - not a mere figurehead like Trump - is the greatest threat to press freedom today.

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Sources close to the Ecuadorean embassy have been predicting Julian Assange’s expulsion from his safe-haven-turned-prison-cell for a few weeks now. Ecuadorean President Lenin Moreno seems to be fumbling to find a way to rescind the citizenship his predecessor granted the fugitive journalist without looking like a spineless tool of the American empire, declaring yesterday that Assange must "stop intervening in politics and self-determination of the country" else "measures will be taken." Trapped for more than six years in the embassy, where his plea for asylum has mutated into an open-ended prison sentence, Assange has been blocked from communicating with the outside world for the past 135 days, rendering Moreno's threats absurd. Held in indefinite seclusion and faced with imminent extradition to a country where he could face the death penalty, Assange has been all but forgotten by the media WikiLeaks empowered, many of whom have allowed establishment propaganda or petty interpersonal squabbles to confuse their moral responsibility toward a fellow truth-teller ensnared in an Orwellian nightmare. As Moreno tries to make nice with the US, Assange is poised to lose his political asylum, a development which would throw him to the wolves of Washington, ready to tear him to pieces for the unspeakable crime of publishing the truth. 

Assange’s plight is indicative of a disturbing global shift away from freedom of the press, towards an oppressive climate marked by McCarthyite attacks on alternative media as enemy propaganda in a new Cold War, Left-cover censorship that uses the language of political correctness to bolster authoritarian ideologies, and controlled-opposition provocateurs infiltrating alternative media to falsely delineate the bounds of acceptable discourse. The campaign against dissident media voices has been operating at fever pitch since the 2016 US election revealed the control matrix of the ruling class was less than total, and social media censorship is rapidly engulfing anti-establishment voices on both sides of the political spectrum as the mainstream media clings desperately to relevance.   

 

In February, UK courts upheld the bail-jumping charge that permits authorities to arrest Assange should he exit the embassy - jumping bail for rape charges that Swedish courts dropped over a year ago, charges based on accusations that were coerced and then recanted, as the basis for a case that was never prosecuted against a defendant who was never questioned. “Kafkaesque” was coined to describe circumstances like these. Despite the establishment’s record of using sex-crimes charges to discredit dissidents and the flimsy non-case against Assange, some enemies still opt to smear him with the “rapist” epithet. Others cling to the threadbare Russiagate narrative, which casts him as a Russian dupe or willing Russian agent for publishing leaked documents revealing the corruption at the center of the Democratic Party. Still others, grasping at straws, point to what they call his support for Trump - despite his characterization of the 2016 election as a choice between cholera and gonorrhea - as proof he has gone full fascist, an ironic accusation to make against the victim of a fascist police state. What unites Assange’s enemies is their reliance on shooting the messenger, a propaganda technique that is the establishment’s last best defense against a message too powerful to suppress. 

 

Wikileaks is much more than its founder - its power comes from the leakers, not from Assange's own writing, or from some special knack he has for getting the story. If the US and UK governments do silence him - whether through extradition and imprisonment or an indefinite extension of the absurd legal limbo in which he is allowed internet access only if he does not "speak about politics" - WikiLeaks will continue to publish the world’s secrets. By setting up a decentralized, ultra-resilient platform for whistleblowers to share their secrets anonymously, he caused a seismic shift in the relationship between the oppressed and their oppressors, and that shift cannot be reversed. The threat inherent in Assange as a free man lies not in what has been published, but in what can be, and how. As Facebook and Twitter tighten the screws of censorship - anti-war journalists Peter Van Buren and Janice Kortkamp have been booted off Twitter, and even 9/11 Truth proponent turned Trump lapdog Alex Jones has been barred from most popular platforms - visionary anti-establishment techno-savants like Assange will be central figures in the mass movement toward secure social media platforms when those platforms emerge, fueled by an understanding that strong ideals and technical expertise are both essential if techno-dissidents are to shift the paradigm away from Deep State control of the internet.

 

Government persecution of Assange is to be expected - WikiLeaks keeps the ruling class up at night worrying their misdeeds might be smeared across the morning's headlines - but his lack of support among fellow journalists is reprehensible. Whatever flaws Assange the person may possess are far outweighed by the good WikiLeaks has done for the world. In the media sphere, there is no downside to more information being available, especially free of charge. The patchwork of baseless smears and personal insults that has enveloped Assange since his internet connection was severed is pathetic and speaks volumes more about his detractors, kicking a man when he's down, than about him. Reports from visitors to the embassy suggest his physical and mental condition is deteriorating rapidly, reports met with derision from a vocal cadre of establishment lackeys calling themselves journalists on Twitter. But below even these sadistic pigs are the spineless appeasers who maintain their silence as Assange is smeared and deprived of his rights, cowards who sigh with relief every time the dogs of war sink their teeth into someone else. The radio silence that followed then-CIA chief Mike Pompeo's condemnation of WikiLeaks as a "hostile non-state intelligence service" - an ominous term he invented to lay the groundwork for whatever clandestine indictments US courts are cooking up after WikiLeaks embarrassed the CIA by releasing Vault 7 - reflected appalling cowardice on the part of the establishment wing of the Fourth Estate, which must have quivered with pleasure as the chubby Rapture-botherer compared WikiLeaks unfavorably to so-called "legitimate news organizations like the New York Times and the Washington Post." Any journalist who falls for such naked divide-and-conquer rhetoric should hang up their laptop. 

 

The Russia Excuse

 

Because of the outsize role it played in the 2016 US election, WikiLeaks found itself at the center of Russiagate, the only conspiracy theory considered acceptable in mainstream American society. A month after the election, anonymous Ukrainian website PropOrNot declared - on the front page of the Washington Post, no less - that over 200 popular anti-establishment media outlets on both Left and Right were actually mouthpieces for Russian propaganda. PropOrNot begged the US government to investigate WikiLeaks and 200 of its fellows as traitors, accusations WaPo was forced to wrap in a disclaimer after several of those outlets threatened libel lawsuits. The witch hunt was on - anti-war, anti-capitalist, anti-Big Government, anti-police state views were all nefarious heads on the same Russian hydra. If you were on that list and you didn’t work for the Russians, you were a useful idiot, being fed information by Russian operatives so smooth you had no idea they worked for the Kremlin. It became fashionable to smear one's opponent as a Russian bot when losing internet arguments, and Sky News infamously dragged a British retiree and a Syrian-Australian scientist onto an interview program to essentially take a live Turing test. The narrative was ludicrous, but found fertile ground in the imagination of traumatized Clinton voters, who’d been assured at every turn their victory was certain. Even two years on, in the absence of any concrete proof of Russian collusion, a devoted core of believers keep the Russiagate faith, fanning the flames with a cultic fervor as the rest of Democratic voters despair of ever again winning an election.

 

The Russiagaters aren’t done with WikiLeaks. The Democratic National Committee, watching progressive voters jump ship in droves after leaked documents proved its primaries were rigged against Bernie Sanders, fell back on its shoot-the-messenger playbook, naming the Trump campaign, Russia, and WikiLeaks in a lawsuit that would be adorably delusional if not for its chilling implications for a free press. The suit claims that by publishing the stolen documents, Wikileaks stole the DNC’s trade secrets - the same defense, incidentally, used by Scientology when it filed its own suit against WikiLeaks in the organization's early days. Were the argument to stand, it would silence journalists who seek to publish leaked documents even when the journalists did not steal those documents themselves - dealing a major blow to investigative reporting. Pulitzer-winning exposés like the Pentagon papers or the more recent Panama papers would be impossible to write without the leaked or stolen documents provided by whistleblowers, who commit the minor crime of theft to expose the monstrous crimes of governments and corporations. The lawsuit also implicates WikiLeaks in illegal “wiretapping” - since the “trade secrets” were transmitted over the internet, and WikiLeaks must have known they’d been obtained illegally - and ties itself in knots creatively interpreting RICO statutes. If all journalists publishing whistleblower reports could be hit with RICO suits, such reporting would take on a whole new level of peril. The icing on the cake is the copyright violation charge - the DNC’s documents, after all, were copyrighted material, which WikiLeaks was not licensed to publish! The lawsuit is absurd, but its content was never meant to be taken seriously as an indictment of the elusive Trump-Russia collusion. It was meant to shut WikiLeaks up - and to silence any investigative journalists who would follow in Assange's footsteps.

 

The UN Working Group on Arbitrary Detention called for Assange’s release in 2016 in a report that criticized excesses by both the Swedish and UK governments and refuted the notion that he is in the Ecuadorian embassy of his own free will, facing no threat of extradition to the United States. The group recommended both countries “ensure the right of free movement of Mr. Assange and accord him an enforceable right to compensation” as they are in violation of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights. Sweden, which had never before been found to detain a person arbitrarily by the UN WGAD, dropped its seven-year “preliminary investigation” into the rape allegations last May - an investigation the UK government had bullied them into prolonging for four of those years, reminding Swedish authorities it was “not just another extradition.” Assange has served over three times the maximum jail sentence for bail-jumping in the UK, but Judge Emma Arbuthnot upheld the warrant for his arrest in February, dismissing his concerns about extradition and the increasingly dire state of his health. Former Ecuadorian President Rafael Correa denounced his successor's indefinite blocking of Assange's visitors and internet access as "torture" and called Moreno a "wolf in sheep's clothing" for jettisoning his leftist campaign platform to serve the interests of US empire over those of his own country. 

US Guts First Amendment

 

Right now, the most urgent danger Assange faces is US extradition. The Trump regime, having pulled an about-face from Candidate Trump’s “love” of WikiLeaks, has made it a “priority” to arrest Assange, and a UK arrest would soon see him on a plane headed to face the same DC judge who locked up Chelsea Manning for life - a sentence that was only commuted, incidentally, because Assange told Barack Obama he’d turn himself in in exchange for a pardon for Manning. Obama couldn’t quite bring himself to pardon Manning, and the commutation “compromise” gave Assange a loophole to avoid facing the hanging judges in the capital. John Pilger and the Courage Foundation are campaigning for Assange’s safe release to Australia with a guarantee that he will not be extradited by the United States, even though the word of the US under Trump means less than ever (the regime's reneging on the Iran nuclear deal having nibbled away at what few shreds remained after the deadly bait-and-switches that disarmed and then disemboweled Saddam Hussein and Muammar Gaddafi). The idea of US extradition should be ludicrous, given that Assange has neither entered the US nor committed any crimes against it, but merely publishing stolen documents has increasingly been codified as a crime in the post-9/11 US. 

 

The Obama administration prosecuted more whistleblowers under the Espionage Act than all previous presidents combined, part of a comprehensive attack on press freedom that saw legal protections for journalists and their sources eviscerated. Not to be outdone, Trump AG Jeff Sessions announced last year that his Justice Department was pursuing three times as many leak investigations as Obama’s and that they would be reviewing the department’s press policies to make it easier to prosecute such leaks. When the Intercept and Freedom of the Press Foundation published Justice Department documents detailing the department's press policies, they glossed over the real story - that press protections don’t apply to a journalist who is “believed to be a spy or…part of a news organization associated with a foreign intelligence service or otherwise acting on behalf of a foreign power.” Another reason for casting WikiLeaks and other alternative media as Russian stooges becomes abundantly clear. Obama’s Justice Department used the Espionage Act, a WWI-era law meant to prosecute spies, as a weapon in its war on whistleblowers; Trump’s goons are just taking this strategy to its logical conclusion.

 

Controlled Opposition

 

One should expect obfuscation and misleading coverage from the Intercept, whose star journalist Glenn Greenwald has not yet released 95% of the Snowden files he was entrusted to curate in 2013. eBay billionaire Pierre Omidyar's platform, which rose to prominence because of its monopoly on the Snowden material, has always acted in Omidyar's interest first and journalism's last. During Obama's presidency, Omidyar visited the White House more often than the CEOs of Google, Facebook, or Amazon, rendering invalid the notion of the Intercept as anti-establishment. In launching parent company First Look Media, Omidyar essentially paid $250 million to acquire control of Greenwald and Laura Poitras, the two journalists in possession of the Snowden documents, and now owns those documents, which allegedly include the juicy details of PayPal's business relationship with the NSA and its function within the agency's unconstitutional spying programs. Omidyar has made no secret of his antipathy towards leakers, and he clearly does not intend to release any more of the Snowden material if it can be avoided.

 

With the anti-leaker bias at the core of the Intercept exposed, it should shock no one that the outlet was responsible for last year’s arrest of leaker Reality Winner. What appeared to be sloppy opsec may have been deliberate betrayal - the journalists who bungled Winner’s leak were also involved in outing CIA whistleblower John Kiriakou, who exposed the agency’s torture program. When the Intercept publishes factually inaccurate polemics against WikiLeaks, it is not an anomalous act by an otherwise pro-transparency media platform, but a blow against the authentic competitor it wants to replace with its own controlled opposition. Micah Lee, who has called the WikiLeaks founder a "rapist, liar, & ally to fascists" as well as a "Putin fanboy," is a Russiagate true believer who convinced the Freedom of the Press Foundation to cut off Wikileaks’ funding before penning the least fact-based smear yet to emerge from the Intercept. The irony is rich, considering that the FPF was formed to circumvent the banking blockade on donations to WikiLeaks in the fallout from the Cablegate leaks. But Omidyar now funds the FPF, whose ranks have swelled to 15 members, many of whom are affiliated with the Intercept. There, they take turns hammering at Assange with baseless smears and innuendos (most recently Xeni Jardin's attempts to link Assange to Cambridge Analytica, as well as her deliberate mischaracterization of his Twitter DMs as death threats) in between shilling for terrorist movie stars the White Helmets and fanning the dying embers of Russiagate. Greenwald has much to answer for beyond merely dragging his feet in releasing Snowden’s material, though he recently ventured a lukewarm defense of Assange as press-freedom poster-boy. 

 

The Ukrainian Connection

 

Omidyar joined USAID and other CIA-backed NGOs in funding the 2014 Euromaidan revolution, which replaced democratically-elected Ukrainian president Victor Yanukovych with a coalition of far-right neo-Nazi goons backed by the US State Department and led by Arseniy Yatsenyuk (later Petro Poroshenko). The Ukrainian government is known for targeting dissident journalists both inside and outside its borders, outsourcing such thought-policing to amateur “security researchers” via open-source surveillance tools to devastating effect. Within the government, it created the Orwellian-sounding Ministry of Information Policy in 2015, ostensibly to combat Russian propaganda by manufacturing its own, and designated all journalists who opposed the regime as “collaborators” - fair game for retaliation, be it harassment, arrest, or murder. Anonymous website Mirotvorets doxxed thousands of “terrorists” operating in the eastern separatist regions of Donetsk and Donbas - a list that grew to include over a thousand journalists whose only crime was receiving credentials from the contested regions - and encouraged patriotic Ukrainians to snitch on pro-Russian elements in their midst while threatening pro-Russian elements with death if they did not rat out their friends. Many journalists received death threats; some were attacked in the streets; some, like Pavel Sheremet, were killed. The attackers were not government goon squads, but propagandized Ukrainian civilians who believed they were doing their patriotic duty by attacking “traitors.” 

 

As the US becomes more hostile to journalists, it’s impossible to ignore the Ukrainian blueprint for the future. Demonizing/scapegoating of Russia? check. Spinning of contested events? check. Anonymous blacklist(s) of dissident journalists (PropOrNot, Mirotvorets)? check. PropOrNot did not inspire ordinary American citizens to physically attack dissident journalists, but by smearing them as traitors, it established a subconscious association that can be drawn upon or amplified in the future. European Values followed up on the slanders last year with an exhaustive list of 2000+ names of politicians and media figures who had appeared on RT, dismissing them all categorically as Kremlin operatives - names running the gamut from UKIP’s Nigel Farage to the Libertarian Party’s Gary Johnson to John Sununu, a relatively obscure figure from the first Bush administration. George Eliason described years ago how Ukrainian intelligence has outsourced the persecution of dissident journalists to civilians in a series of terrifying articles that read like a dystopian nightmare - vigilante citizens armed with NSA surveillance technology acting out their personal vendettas on law-abiding citizens who have no idea they’re being targeted - and he has documented extensively the role these shadowy figures played in the 2016 election. They did such a good job, in fact, that they’ve been rewarded with the highest prize a propagandist could ask for - the ability to determine truth and falsehood on the world’s largest social media platform. The Atlantic Council, a pro-NATO think tank funded by Ukrainian billionaires, multinational banks, weapons contractors, and other supra-governmental entities, has joined Facebook's fight against “fake news.” The truth has left the building.

 

Global Crackdown

 

The persecution of Assange is just one piece of a coordinated effort at press suppression that reaches around the globe. The Department of Homeland Security is currently compiling a master list of “journalists and media influencers” - people who have committed no crime other than publishing. The agency plans to track over 290,000 news sources globally, in over 100 languages that will be instantly translated to English. Browsable by “location, beat, and type of influencer,” the database will also have profiles of each “influencer” including their contact information, previous writings, and “sentiment.” Applications closed four months ago, so it’s presumably in development now. They really don’t want another WikiLeaks, or a proper alternative to Facebook/Twitter, or - worse - a Deep-State-free Google. 

 

The DHS database facilitates the rise of a Mirotvorets for every country - a police state’s wet dream - as well as a valuable information trove to be sold to foreign governments frustrated with their own unruly press. There is no understating the potential abuses, especially at a time when (according to the latest RSF report) hostility toward journalists is on the rise worldwide. Egypt and Turkey are accusing journalists of terrorism and even imprisoning those who don’t display loyalty toward their governments; Philippines president Rodrigo Duterte has told reporters they “are not exempted from assassination;” Czech president Milos Zeman has called for journalists to be “liquidated” and recently brandished a prop AK47 labeled “journalists.” Serbian PM Aleksandar Vucic followed the examples of the US, UK and Ukraine, using state media to intimidate independent journalists and accusing them of “treachery” and being foreign spies. Countless regimes were called out by the RSF report for publicly insulting the press. Germany has used the specter of “fake news” to pass one of the most restrictive anti-free-speech laws in the EU, fining social networks if they don’t remove “hate speech” quickly enough after it’s reported. Given that country’s notoriously broad definition of “hate speech” - octogenarian “Nazi grandma” Ursula Haverbeck is serving a 14-month sentence for “holocaust denial” for calling Auschwitz a labor camp - German journalists are especially screwed.

The #Unity4J campaign is a nexus of activists from all corners of the ideological arena working together to uphold the cause of press freedom around the world. This is not just about Julian Assange, but about one of the fundamental rights of humankind. Freedom of the press is crucial to maintaining government transparency - if there is one thing WikiLeaks has taught us, it is that governments are prone to the most evil acts when they believe no one is capable of holding them accountable. Actions are being planned around the world in the event that Assange is expelled from the embassy and extradited. If you can’t support his release, don’t expect anyone to show up when they come for you, because they will not stop with imprisoning him, or Kiriakou, Manning, Winner, and the endless list of whistleblowers punished for the crimes they exposed. It doesn’t matter if you think that Assange is a cad, or that he said something mean on Twitter, or that he went off the deep end during the 2016 election (you’d go off the deep end too if you had spent the last five years in legal limbo in a foreign embassy with only the occasional glimpse of sunlight to remind you what planet you're on, and one can hardly accuse him of supporting a candidate he likened to an STD). Assange committed no crime, yet he rots in solitary confinement. Such inhumane treatment of an individual who has done so much for the cause of transparency and truth is unconscionable. Safe passage must be arranged to a country where he will be safe from US extradition. Publishing the truth - forcing the powerful to answer for their crimes - should not be a capital offense.

 

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It’s been nearly a week since Trump sold America’s birthright to Comrade Putin, making the once-great United States a Russian colony as payment for a dozen Russian hackers’ efforts in winning him the presidency. Six days we have had nothing to eat but borscht and sadness, while our former president, clad in nothing but a spiked collar and chaps, is paraded around on a leash from press conference to press conference, barking like a dog.

 

 

 

That was the story in the establishment media, at least, which offered the American people five days of unprecedented hysteria, flinging around terms like “treason” as they frantically tortured their thesauruses to the brink of death trying to impress upon the people the urgency of the situation. After flogging the “treason” narrative to within an inch of its life, with nothing to show for it but strained vocal cords and declining ratings, they abruptly switched gears, returning to the well-worn territory of what Hillary Clinton used to call “bimbo eruptions” - a recording from Trump’s lawyer involving payments to a Playboy Playmate to keep quiet about her past assignations with the commander-in-chief.

 

 

The Helsinki hysteria shone a spotlight on the utter impotence of the establishment media and their Deep State controllers to make their delusions reality. Never before has there been such a gaping chasm visible between the media’s “truth” and the facts on the ground. Pundits compared the summit to Pearl Harbor and 9/11, with some even reaching for the brass ring of the Holocaust by likening it to Kristallnacht, while polls revealed the American people really didn’t care. 

 

 

Worse, it laid bare the collusion between the media and their Deep State handlers - the central dissemination point for the headlines, down to the same phrases, that led to every outlet claiming Trump had “thrown the Intelligence Community under the bus” by refusing to embrace the Russia-hacked-our-democracy narrative during his press conference with Putin. Leaving aside the sudden ubiquity of “Intelligence Community” in our national discourse - as if this network of spies and murderous thugs is Mr. Rogers’ Neighborhood - no one seriously believes every pundit came up with “throws under the bus” as the proper way of describing that press conference.

 

 

The same central control was apparent in the unanimous condemnations of Putin - that he murders journalists, breaks international agreements, uses banned chemical weapons, kills women and children in Syria, and, of course, meddles in elections. For every single establishment pundit to exhibit such a breathtaking lack of insight into their own government’s misdeeds is highly unlikely. Many of these same talking heads remarked in horror on Sinclair Broadcasting's Orwellian "prepared statement" issuing forth from the mouths of hundreds of stations' anchors at once. Et tu, Anderson Cooper?

 

 

The media frenzy was geared toward sparking a popular revolt, with tensions already running high from the previous media frenzy about family separation at the border (though only one MSNBC segment seemed to recall that they should still care about that, and belatedly included some footage of kids behind a fence wrapped in Mylar blankets). Rachel Maddow, armed with the crocodile tears that served her so well during the family-separation fracas, exhorted her faithful cultists to do something. Meanwhile, national-security neanderthal John Brennan all but called for a coup, condemning the president for the unspeakable “high crimes and misdemeanors” of seeking to improve relations with the world’s second-largest nuclear power. He called on Pompeo and Bolton, the two biggest warmongers in a Trump administration bristling with warmongers, to resign in protest. This would have been a grand slam for world peace, but alas, it was not to be. Even those two realize what a has-been Brennan is. 

 

 

Congress wasted no time jumping on the Treason bandwagon, led by Chuck Schumer conjuring the spectre of the KGB, Marco Rubio as neocon point-man (one imagines Barbara Bush rolling in her grave at his usurpation of Jeb's rightful role) proposing locked-and-loaded sanctions in case of future "meddling," and John McCain, still desperate to take the rest of the world with him before he finally kicks a long-overdue bucket, condemning the “disgraceful” display of two heads of state trying to come to an agreement about matters of mutual interest. The Pentagon has invested a lot of time and money in positioning Russia as Public Enemy #1, and for Trump to put his foot in it by making nice with Putin might diminish the size of their weapons contracts - or the willingness of the American people to tolerate more than half of every tax dollar disappearing down an unaccountable hole. Peace? Eh, who needs it. Cash, motherfucker.

 

 

 

Trump’s grip on his long-elusive spine was only temporary, and he held another press conference upon returning home to reiterate his trust in the intelligence agencies that have made no secret of their utter loathing for him since day one. When the lights went out at the climactic moment, it became clear for anyone who still hadn’t gotten the message who was running the show here (and Trump, to his credit, actually joked about it). The Intelligence Community believes it is God, and it hath smote Trump good. Smelling blood in the water, the media redoubled their shrieking for several days, and…crickets. On to the Playmates

 

 

Sacha Baron Cohen’s latest series, “Who is America,” targeted Ted Koppel for one segment. Koppel cut the interview short after smelling a rat and expressed his high-minded concern that Cohen’s antics would hurt Americans’ trust in reporters. But after a week of the entire media establishment screaming that the sky is falling while the heavens remain firmly in place, Cohen is clearly the least of their problems. At least he’s funny. 

 

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On the eve of Trump’s historic meeting with Vladimir Putin - with Russia-US relations at their worst since the fall of the USSR - Grand Inquisitor Robert Mueller handed down 12 indictments of Russian military intelligence operatives accused of participating in the 2016 hacks of the DNC, DCC and Clinton presidential campaign. This is it, we’re supposed to think. The proof we’ve all been waiting for - that Russia hacked the election. It's not quite the holy grail of Collusion, but it's red meat to the starving faithful. It is now the skeptics’ turn to wipe the egg off our faces.

 

No?

 

 

US courts will indict a ham sandwich, goes the proverb. Mueller indicted 13 Russians linked to the “troll farm” Internet Research Agency in February, hoping that they wouldn’t bother to appear in court, not being bound by US law or having anything to gain by participating in his show trial. But a few sent their lawyers and demanded discovery, which would have forced Mueller to reveal the evidence he had against them. Finding his own indictments riddled with errors - one of the companies named didn’t even exist at the time of the election - Mueller quietly backpedaled. Score one for the Russians.

 

But this time he has evidence, right? Surely he wouldn’t make that mistake again. And this time it’s Russian military operatives, not some two-bit troll-farmers! The indictment accuses them of spear-phishing Democratic staffers and using those login credentials to access the party’s servers, stealing the famous documents and leaking them to the public through Wikileaks and DCLeaks (though they seem unsure whether DCLeaks is a person or a website). Isn’t this what we’ve all been waiting for?

 

Perhaps it would be, if the FBI had actually encountered the servers firsthand. Government investigators (from both the FBI and the DHS, which also wanted in on the action) never even laid eyes on the “hacked” servers belonging to the DNC and DCCC, instead relying on the assessment of a computer security firm headed by a Russian expat with an ax to grind against his former government. Dmitri Alperovitch’s CrowdStrike specializes in attributing malware attacks to state actors - a no-no in the computer security industry, and something he was discouraged from doing by former employer McAfee (whose founder has personally commented on the lack of evidence implicating Russia in the DNC hack). Alperovitch launched CrowdStrike to offer his attribution services to clients like the US government which might care more about blaming a hack on a government than finding out how to protect against such hacks in the first place. 

 

The DNC hired CrowdStrike to find evidence that Russia was behind the hack on its servers. CrowdStrike dutifully found (produced, embellished) that evidence. When the FBI came knocking, the Democrats had no interest in getting a second opinion about who’d been rooting around in their digital underwear drawer, and Alperovitch certainly didn’t want some upstart security expert revealing his business model was hideously flawed. Fortunately, James Comey’s FBI was sympathetic to the Democrats’ concerns and took CrowdStrike’s assessment as valid legal proof as if its own agents had poked through those servers themselves.

 

If this dubious information, sourced from an unaccountable third party never placed under oath with numerous reasons to lie or at least mislead, was used as evidential basis for any indictment, that indictment cannot stand up in court. The foundations of Mueller’s case collapse on even the most cursory scrutiny (that article refers to the original 13 indictments, but unless a clean chain of evidence was used to generate the latest 12, its conclusions remain applicable). CrowdStrike delivers geopolitically-actionable conclusions swaddled in just enough technical jargon to dissuade observers from looking too closely. It’s a perfect dance partner for the Deep State hawks who want war with Russia, whether it’s another 50 years of cold war or (and this is what they jerk off to at night) a hot, sexy, nuclear war, a proper World War 3, something they could tell the kids about (if they hadn’t nuked humanity off the planet). 

 

(A footnote to the whole affair is that whoever "hacked" the DNC and DCCC merely leaked secure information and internal communications that revealed the extent of Democratic Party corruption, and the notion of "hacking the election" is something of a misnomer as no voting machines were tampered with; sure, it would have been nice to get a bipartisan view, with the Republican Party's dirty laundry hung out for all to see, but exposing the crimes of others is not the same as committing them oneself. Indeed, one viable alternate explanation of the DNC hacks is that a disgruntled Party worker leaked the documents himself, frustrated with the unfair treatment Bernie Sanders was receiving at the hands of Clinton's minions within the Party.)

 

Congress is in the process of handing Trump authorization to deploy “usable nukes” in a theatre of war that is rapidly expanding to cover the entire globe (and now space, because when you’re printing money with no basis in reality, the sky is literally the limit). There’s no reason to use nukes in Afghanistan, the poorest country in Asia, nor even in Iran, since it’s too close to Israel to risk decades of fallout and radiation sickness for the guys pushing the whole regional conflict. The nukes are for Russia, for when the next false flag “chemical attack” in Syria (that Russian intelligence is already warning us about, if we would actually listen to them this time instead of continuing to fund the terrorists responsible for the last one) inevitably touches off a hot war with Russia.

 

Trump’s meeting with Putin has the potential to put the WW3 genie back in the bottle, to remove fingers from triggers on both sides. Russia has been developing new weapons at a pace unseen since the Soviet years, now that the US has been poking a stick in their geopolitical eye for 4 years over Ukraine, but the US cannot afford a prolonged arms race - we are already throwing more than half of every tax dollar at the Pentagon just to maintain the aging arms infrastructure we have. Most of that money is going toward waging the insanely destructive, strategically self-defeating don’t-call-them-wars in Afghanistan, Syria, Iraq, Yemen, Libya - and paying the contractors the military must hire as they run out of indigent youth willing to risk their lives to pay for college, and equipping the monstrously wasteful aircraft carriers that have become little more than sitting ducks in the wake of Russian and Chinese advances in missile technology. Trump’s meeting with Putin could set the two countries back on a peaceful path. This is unacceptable for the war machine.

 

 

Americans are sick of Russiagate, but desperate times call for desperate measures. There’s nothing new in the information that led to these indictments - Mueller long ago despaired of coming up with actual proof that Russians “hacked” the 2016 election, hence his more recent diversions into Trump and Cohen’s personal finances, Stormy Daniels’ panties, and the byzantine financial dealings of Trump Inc. But only by hysterically hammering away at the Russia-Hacked-Our-Democracy narrative can the establishment hope to raise popular opposition to the Trump-Putin summit. Democrats, taking a break from shedding crocodile tears for separated migrant families, have demanded Trump call off the meeting until Putin says he’s Very Very Sorry and Won’t Do It Again. Panic reigns as peace threatens to break out.

 

Trump’s meeting with Putin could set the two countries back on the path to peace and sanity, or irrevocably on the road to the war the military-industrial-intelligence complex is salivating for. The media establishment has long known Trump’s primary vulnerability was his outsize ego, and used accusations of Russian puppetry to manipulate him into antagonizing the country he’d campaigned on easing relations with. One hopes that by now, after two years of superhuman restraint from Russia as the US’s disgusting and illegal military adventures in Syria racked up Russian casualties - and no such restraint from certain unelected factions of the US government - Trump might be more willing to take up a dialogue with the Russian president. Certainly, they should be able to bond over their demonization in the American press.

 

 

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Crying Migrant Child has ascended to the photojournalism hall of fame alongside the iconic Vietnamese Napalm Girl and Tiananmen Square Man. Unwittingly conscripted to the front lines of the Resistance, she was chosen to represent the morally unconscionable (this week) separation of undocumented children from their parents. As the establishment appeals to cheap sentimentality to distract from its own much more horrific treatment of children around the globe and pin another catastrophe on its favorite presidential scapegoat, it does not matter that Crying Migrant Child is still with her mother, who with one illegal entry already on her record has only escaped felony charges through the miracle of a government that bit off more than it could chew with a zero-tolerance border policy enacted more for theatrics than law enforcement. It is immaterial that Mom paid $6000 to smuggle the two of them into the country when more than half of Americans can't even scrape together a tenth of that amount for an emergency expense. Americans have not evolved beyond knee-jerk emotional reactions to the perceived suffering of children and small animals, which - properly deployed - can distract from any number of more distant atrocities. Crying Migrant Child is not mere fake news - in all her innocent duplicity, pressed into the service of a propaganda narrative, she is the perfect poster child for this made-to-order controversy. 

It is no surprise to see the thousands of doe-eyed migrant Children detained in recent months deployed as a weapon by the Resistance, used to bludgeon the Trump administration into relaxing its border policy. Democrats who've knighted themselves Protectors of the Child hold a stubbornly ahistorical view of Trump’s immigration policy, choosing to ignore its roots in the legislation of his predecessors, and maintain a convenient amnesia regarding the words of their own leaders - Pelosi, Schumer, Feinstein, both Clintons, even Barack Obama have all voiced the same ideas the Resistance now finds so repulsive in the mouth of Trump. Why is Rachel Maddow only now rustling up crocodile tears from the depths of her freeze-dried soul for the migrant children locked in detention facilities? Surely she felt some pangs of conscience when some kids detained under the Obama administration were mistakenly released into the custody of human traffickers? Surely her viewers have seen human beings cry before and recognize Maddow's sick pantomime of human sadness for the crass emotional manipulation it is? The Trump immigration controversy is not about the plight of the Children, or the morality of separating families, or the utility of borders in a globalized world. The Resistance's concern for Central American migrants has clear limits. One cannot discuss the political context of this refugee crisis, the fact that the US is to blame for turning nations like Honduras and El Salvador into violent exporters of desperate humanity, or the strident Defenders of the Children lose interest. They’re here to virtue-signal, not to learn history. Blame Trump or GTFO.

 

Cause and Effect

Honduras held the dubious distinction of murder capital of the world for four years following the 2009 coup that ousted President Manuel Zelaya, a reformer who presided over a 10% decline in poverty nationwide but ran afoul of powerful corporate interests when he tried to raise the country’s minimum wage and called for a vote to reform the constitution. The UN and OAS condemned the coup while Hillary Clinton’s State Department called for immediate elections to legitimize its plotters, who’d learned their trade at the notorious School for the Americas. The new regime unleashed a torrent of repression, tanked the economy with the standard SoA neoliberal Friedmanism, and scared the murder rate up to 169 per 100000 people, sparking a wave of refugees which has been crashing on our borders ever since. The country has continued to deteriorate since the coup, though it is no longer the murder capital of the world, thanks to another US-backed conflict - this one in Syria.

Nicaragua, too, was recently plunged into violent upheaval, with the National Endowment for Democracy up to its old tricks coopting opposition movements, arming death squads, and sowing chaos to unseat the popular leader who presided over a drop in crime and rise in economic fortunes over the last decade. Until two months ago, Nicaragua’s good fortunes presented a stark contrast to neighbor El Salvador, whose MS-13 woes were largely created by the US when we deported thousands of gang members in 1989 to a country ravaged by more than a decade of civil war. The corrupt and violent right-wing government which emerged from that war sicced the military on the gangs in a policy called mano dura which accomplished little beyond strengthening the gangs and pushing up the death toll. El Salvador has mostly doubled down on these failed enforcement policies since then, with the brief respite of a two-year gang truce followed by a rehash of mano dura. El Salvador's homicide rate is 60 per 100000, while Nicaragua's is just 6 per 100000, but the US is working to change that - one look at the coverage of Nicaragua by the western media establishment, united against President Daniel Ortega, reveals who now controls the “opposition” movement, however genuine its origins may have been. Americans can expect a wave of Nicaraguan refugees to join their Salvadoran cousins at our borders soon.

Guatemala, whose own civil war lasted 36 years following the US overthrow of democratically-elected president Jacopo Arbenz in 1954, is also experiencing a resurgence of violence and consequent spike in migration, with a 71% increase in deportations to that country from the US this year. It is home to the highest percentage of chronically malnourished children in the region - 44% as of 2009. Even Costa Rica - dubbed “the Switzerland of Central America” for its stability - has experienced a rise in homicides due to drug-related violence, which the newly-elected president has promised to combat with a police crackdown and stronger asset-forfeiture laws (because those work so well), ensuring the cycle of violence and corruption will continue as it has elsewhere in Central America, producing a reliable stream of refugees.

The nasty truth at the heart of the current controversy is that Trump is damned if he does, damned if he doesn’t with regard to separating migrant kids from their parents. This is not about the children - they are merely weapons in the war against Trump. If he houses them separately, he’s a monster for splitting up families. If he houses them together, he’s allowing contact between children and unrelated adults who may have criminal histories, creating the potential for abuse. Trump's executive order halting the family-separation policy almost immediately came under fire for leaving kids vulnerable to abuse by other detainees and has also been criticized for failing to provide for the reunion of already-separated families. No matter what Trump does here, he can’t win, unless he points out the hypocrisy of his enemies for their extremely narrow selection of which children they care about, and their refusal to consider the historical context of the refugee crisis - which he won’t, because with neocon dinosaurs like Bolton and Pompeo at his side, he’s gone all-in with the US war machine and its attendant crimes against humanity. Democrats and Republicans are locked in battle for who can occupy a more repugnant position, both using migrant kids as a political football to advance their preferred version of immigration reform and both failing miserably. Americans love immigrants, except when they’re moving to their neighborhoods

 

Out of Sight, Out of Mind

Those on the Left who actually care about the fate of children, or human beings in general, have been watching in horror as the US arms and directs the Saudi Arabian genocide of the Houthis in Yemen. Already the poorest country in the Middle East before its government fell during the Arab Spring, Yemen’s population is now facing the largest cholera epidemic in history and a famine that threatens 18 million lives, both artificially created by the Saudi assault. The US has intervened - on the side of the Saudis, who couldn’t wage this war without American support. By selling them hundreds of billions of dollars in weapons and guidance systems, training their troops, and even filling out their ranks on the ground, the Trump administration has facilitated the worst humanitarian crisis of the 21st century. No White Helmets have materialized in Yemen to package propaganda narratives for American viewers, even as the Red Cross and other aid groups are forced to evacuate the areas where they are most needed. Last week, Saudi coalition forces began their assault on Hodeidah, the port that supplies 90% of the vital food aid to Houthi-controlled areas, despite international humanitarian outcry. The destruction of Hodeidah would place 10 million people on the brink of starvation, in addition to the 8 million already at critical risk, according to the UN

The Houthi genocide has gone largely uncovered by US media, since the Saudis are supposed to be our allies and their penchant for bombing wedding parties and cholera hospitals and using chemical weapons on civilians is unspinnable. When they do cover the conflict, it’s to wring their hands about how “complicated” the issue is, or take a page from Netanyahu’s bloodstained playbook and blame Iran. Horrifying images of starved Yemeni infants do occasionally surface on establishment media - babies so malnourished they don’t even look human, dead before their first birthday because military contractors want a return on their investment. The number of children suffering moderate malnutrition doubled just a year after the start of the war, reaching 1.3 million in 2016, according to the World Food Program. UNICEF says 320000 children face “severe acute malnutrition”. Imagine how many Yemeni kids could be fed with the $6000 that smuggled Crying Migrant Child and her mother across the US border, or - better yet - the $15 million raised by RAICES after ProPublica released an audio file of crying children purporting to originate from a youth detention center. Children are dying every 10 minutes in Yemen, but Rachel Maddow reserves her cloying pantomime of human sadness for the comparatively privileged border-crossers of the Americas. Out of sight, out of mind - American exceptionalism is alive and well and dictating our foreign policy. 

It isn’t just Yemen, of course - children are suffering and dying all over the Middle East because of US foreign policy, which is less a policy than a direct pipeline from taxpayers’ wallets into the pockets of arms manufacturers. Neither Right nor Left seem to care anymore about the undeclared wars that are bankrupting the country financially and morally - gone are the days when thousands of people took to the streets to protest Bush’s invasion of Iraq, even though the Trump regime is dropping an insane 121 bombs per day while amateur-hour Bush could only manage 24. “Collateral damage” has mushroomed as more attacks are conducted remotely, with less than 10% of these bombs hitting their targets, ensuring a plentiful supply of America-hating survivors among the family members of the dead in years to come. Our soldiers may as well be playing video games for all they care.

Pentagon policy is increasingly to tag all dead adults as “combatants” after the fact, a dirty trick we learned from Israel, another "ally" with a blank check to mow down children who were born in the wrong place at the wrong time. If a drone bomb wipes out an Arab village and no one is around to hear their screams, was a war crime committed? US media says no, and Democrats are just as guilty as Republicans of enabling these atrocities. Just 7 of the 47 Democratic senators voted against the latest $82 billion increase in the “defense” budget, belying the sincerity of their anti-Trump rhetoric, since who would hand him $716 billion to blow up defenseless civilians halfway around the world if they really thought he was the Tangerine Antichrist unless they were a bunch of cynical, bloodthirsty sociopaths?

Just as the Resistance categorically refuses to connect US policy in Central America with the refugee crisis at our southern border, so do they fail to connect US policy in the Middle East with the refugee crisis in Europe. Seven US representatives drafted a letter to Defense Secretary Mattis imploring him to stop the Saudi assault on Hodeidah, perhaps emboldened by the toothless resolution they passed last year that condemned Saudi targeting of Yemeni civilians but accomplished little else (a Senate resolution that would have ended US military support for the Saudi offensive was shot down in a 55-44 vote in March). Perhaps Congress was merely caught off guard when reminded of their duty to authorize such foreign military adventures - Trump never asked permission for the illegal missile strike he launched on Syria before the latest "gas attack" could be investigated. Nor did he seek congressional permission to strike Syria last year after photographs ostensibly depicting gassed children convinced him to discard his plan to abandon regime change in the country. Yemen and Syria, of course, are both on Trump's list of countries from which emigration and most travel are banned, as are Libya and Somalia, also decimated by US bombs. Photographs of dead children can only inspire so much compassion, apparently. 

 

Meet the New Boss, Same as the Old Boss

There has been no meaningful anti-war movement since Bush left the White House. Obama and Clinton put a kinder, gentler face on the suffering they inflicted on the Middle East and Afghanistan, couching their destruction in humanitarian rhetoric to set it apart from Bush's belligerent us-vs.-them imperialism. Like the war in Yemen, Trump’s immigration policies are rooted in the actions of his predecessor; for this reason, establishment critiques of Trump are deliberately devoid of context. Those who would beatify Obama while condemning Trump as Orange Hitler forget that immigrants’ rights groups mocked Obama as the “deporter in chief” with good reason - in 2013, deportations reached a record high of 434015, numbers unmatched even by Trump’s 2017 high of 105736. In 2012, funding for immigration enforcement was $18 billion, 24% higher than funding for the FBI, DEA, Secret Service, US Marshals, and BATF combined. While the Trump administration has overseen an increase in apprehensions of aliens qua aliens (as opposed to aliens arrested for another crime), Obama’s first term was marked by similar policies, including the imposition of quotas, incentivizing agents to hunt down illegal immigrants Blade Runner-style in the country’s interior, violating the rights of citizens and non-citizens alike. His administration deported a record 2.4 million people, 40% of whom were guilty of nothing beyond their illegal presence in the US. His bestselling 2006 propaganda tract Audacity of Hope even mentions the "flush of patriotic resentment" he supposedly felt upon seeing Mexican flags waving at immigrant demonstrations. No wonder the establishment Resistance is so vehemently ahistorical.

 

Under Trump, Democrats have discovered a visceral loathing for ICE, even though the agency assumed its current form under Obama. This time, they've found a worthy target. ICE was created by the Homeland Security Act of 2002 as part of Bush’s sinister post-9/11 police state buildup. The agency raids homes and workplaces, terrorizing the undocumented who are committing no crime beyond their presence in the country, and sets up roadblocks where agents demand proof of citizenship in “show us your papers” routines straight out of the Third Reich. While ICE’s stated mission is enforcing immigration law within US borders, the agency now employs 20000 agents in 48 countries, and detains over 100000 people per year - more than all other federal law enforcement agencies combined. This is mission creep on a grand scale. More recently, ICE has decided its job is “protecting our nation’s children from sexual predators around the globe,” a nauseating nugget of hypocrisy from an agency that only investigated 3% of the 1224 reports of child sexual abuse its Inspector General received during the Obama years. The agency continues to place migrant children in facilities with horrific track records; one of these, Shiloh Treatment Center, is being sued for forcibly drugging its child detainees, while others have renamed themselves after kids turned up dead on their watch. While scaling back bureaucracy is never easy, ICE is a branch that should be pruned, ideally as a prelude to dissolving the entire Department of Homeland Security police-state apparatus and returning the component agencies to independent functioning. Returning Border Patrol agents to the task of patrolling the border (instead of an absurd 100-miles-from-the-border grey area that encompasses two-thirds of the country’s populated areas and facilitates abuses like roadblock papers checks) and streamlining the legal immigration process would make much of the police state obsolete by eliminating the official rationale for policies that are frequently turned against legal American citizens. 

It was not Bush and his merry band of neocons but Bill Clinton who passed the law that lay the groundwork for the DHS and its militarization of immigration policy. Passed in 1996, the IIRIRA was just one piece of Clinton’s ideological bodyslam of the Overton Window to the Right, along with the welfare “reform” that made it much more difficult to climb out of poverty, the criminal justice “reform” that has consigned hundreds of thousands of low-level drug offenders to lengthy prison sentences (and also made it difficult if not impossible for them to climb out of poverty), and neoliberal wet-dream NAFTA that devastated the US economy. Clinton’s “tough on crime” and “tough on immigration” stances helped distance the Democratic Party from the progressive Left; it has inched Rightward ever since, to the point that the most notorious Republican neocons defected to the Clinton campaign in 2016 rather than vote Trump. The anti-Trump “Resistance”’s violent allergy to historical context is largely due to Democratic responsibility for Trump's immigration policy. The Right has delighted in flooding social media with clips of Democratic establishment luminaries espousing the same policies they now decry in Trump, but even they don’t transcend the surface hypocrisy, since they’re just as guilty of using illegal immigrants as a political football - in their case as a scapegoat for the economic tribulations of working-class Americans. Indeed, Trump’s 2016 campaign initially focused on illegal immigration as its signature issue when preliminary polling revealed it was the #1 issue among likely Republican voters.

Alarm bells should ring the second an elected official in the country with the world’s largest per-capita prison population starts acting concerned about detention facilities separating children from their parents. It goes without saying that this is the result when a nation imprisons non-violent drug offenders for years at a time, as the US does under the policies which have turned a generation of mostly black men into fodder for the prison-industrial complex. Yet not one of the newly-sentimental lawmakers calling on the Trump administration to #reunitethe2300 migrant kids separated from their parents has said a word about the 2.7 million kids barred from seeing their parents outside brief, heavily-restricted visiting hours because those parents got caught with a few joints. Why are Facebook users only now donating $15 million to RAICES to pay bail for non-citizens when so many of their fellow Americans have languished behind bars, sometimes for years, for want of a couple hundred dollars? The recent marijuana referendums in such unlikely states as Oklahoma are proof that Americans don’t actually want to see their fellows jailed for nonviolent drug offenses.

The migrant controversy should serve as an entry point into a larger discussion about the morality of separating families in the name of a war on drugs that has proven so alarmingly ineffective that more Americans now die of opiate overdoses than any other cause. The kiss of death for any American policy is to declare it a “war on” something - whether it’s Drugs, Poverty, or Terror, our opponent always gains the upper hand - but with Central America also suffering the fallout from this particular “war,” there’s no time like the present to end it. ICE's mission-creep, too, has been largely under the aegis of drug interdiction, as if any more proof was needed that the war on drugs is merely a Trojan horse deployed to usurp national sovereignty and expand the US police state outside its nominal borders.

 

There's No Virtue Like No Virtue

The gold medal for hypocrisy goes to Laura Bush, waxing lachrymose about how children who’ve been “interned” are twice as likely to suffer cardiovascular disease than their non-interned peers. One wonders where her concern for detainees was during her husband’s presidency, when his CIA ran a shadowy network of “black site” prisons where sadistic creeps like Gina Haspel learned to express themselves creatively through torture away from the prying eyes of international human rights law. At least the children in US detention centers are alive, and thus better off than the hundreds of thousands of dead Iraqi and Afghan kids weighing on the Bushes' consciences. Yet liberals blinded by Trump Derangement Syndrome have forgiven and forgotten that family for their crimes against humanity, obediently following the establishment media’s two-minutes-hate directive against the current occupant of the White House. 

"Never Forget" that Bush signed the law blamed for much of the migrant crisis - a bill supposedly aimed at curtailing human trafficking that ended the rapid deportation of unaccompanied minors arriving from Honduras, Guatemala and El Salvador. Obama’s DACA virtue-signaling merely exacerbated the problem he had tried to keep under wraps as unaccompanied minors piled up at the border, their numbers doubling in 2012 and again in 2013. His administration first denied the existence of the new detention centers they built in response to the migrant flood, then forbid photography of them; finally, it compounded its mess by instituting what has become known as “catch and release 2.0” which discouraged the detention of illegal aliens not otherwise engaged in criminal activity. Like Trump’s decision to drop the charges against the parents separated from their children under the new zero-tolerance policy, this decision had less to do with morality than a lack of resources - Obama asked for $3.7 billion from Congress to deal with the migrant wave and instead got stern moralizing lectures about bailouts from the Republican-controlled congress that had suddenly developed a sense of fiscal responsibility. Ironically, given the Bush law’s original intention to counter human trafficking, an unknown number of children ended up in the hands of “sponsors” who turned out to be traffickers. Trump has also prohibited photography in detention centers, citing the privacy concerns of detainees, though given the American government's utter lack of respect for its own citizens' privacy, this excuse does not stand up to scrutiny.

 

Trump hasn’t helped his case by blaming “Democrats” for the laws he’s supposedly following - his immigration policy is built on solid bipartisan precedent and he would be wise to emphasize its adherence to the status quo. However, his executive order halting family separations seemingly negated the much-vaunted zero-tolerance policy, as a West Texas jurisdiction dropped most illegal immigration charges against parents separated from their children pending the emergence of a coherent new policy, while cabinet members have appeared in the media pushing at least three separate lines: the separation policy is a deterrent (John Kelly) / there is no deliberate separation policy (Nielsen) / the separation policy predates Trump (Trump). Many children crossing the border arrive alone, and it’s uncertain how many other kids are traveling with unrelated adults hoping to avoid arrest by using them as human (legal) shields, but the lack of coherent leadership from Trump's administration ensures the latter practice will continue. The legislative “solutions” drawn up by Feinstein et.al - so sloppily written that they exonerate anyone committing a federal crime, so long as they're accompanied by a child - expose the shoddiness of our entire legislative structure, which relies on rushed 11th-hour lawmaking to pass unpopular and unconstitutional legislation by rolling it into massive, unwieldy bills pertaining to essential governmental functions.

TL;DR? Our government runs on hypocrisy, corruption, and violence barely concealed beneath a crumbling facade of moral superiority. Someone should tell the refugees fleeing the corporate-authoritarian kleptocracies and incipient narco-states of Central America that they’re running out of the frying pan and into the fire. 

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Tuesday marks the sixth anniversary of Julian Assange’s arrival at London's Ecuadorian embassy, where he received the political asylum that has since mutated into an open-ended prison sentence. His plight illustrates a disturbing global shift away from press freedom, an oppressive climate marked by McCarthyite attacks on alternative media as enemy propaganda in a new Cold War, Left-cover censorship that uses the language of political correctness to bolster authoritarian ideologies, and controlled-opposition outlets infiltrating alternative media to falsely delineate the bounds of "acceptable" discourse. The campaign against dissident media voices has been operating at fever pitch since the 2016 US election revealed the control matrix of the ruling class was less than total. Banned from even communicating with the outside world for the past 80 days, Assange has been all but forgotten by the media WikiLeaks empowered, many of whom have allowed establishment propaganda or petty interpersonal squabbles to confuse their moral responsibility toward a fellow truth-teller ensnared in an Orwellian nightmare. As newly-elected Ecuadorian president Lenin Moreno tries to make nice with the US, Assange is in danger of losing his asylum status, a development which would throw him to the wolves of Washington, already salivating to tear him to pieces for the unspeakable crime of publishing the truth. 

 

In February, UK courts upheld the bail-jumping charge that permits authorities to arrest Assange should he exit the embassy - jumping bail for rape charges that Swedish courts dropped over a year ago, charges based on accusations that were coerced and then recanted, as the basis for a case that was never prosecuted against a defendant who was never questioned. “Kafkaesque” was coined to describe circumstances like these. Despite the establishment’s record of using sex-crimes charges to discredit dissidents and the flimsy non-case against Assange, some enemies opt to smear him with the “rapist” epithet. Others cling to the threadbare Russiagate narrative, which posits WikiLeaks is a Russian dupe or willing Russian agent using the magic of evidence-free conspiracy-mongering. Still others, grasping at straws, point to what they call his support for Trump - despite his characterization of the election as a choice between cholera and gonorrhea - as proof he had gone full fascist, an ironic accusation to make against the victim of a fascist police state. What unites Assange’s enemies is their reliance on shooting the messenger, a propaganda technique that is the establishment’s last best defense against a message too powerful to suppress. 

 

Wikileaks is much more than its founder - its power comes from the leakers, not from Assange's own writing, or from some special knack he has for getting the story. If the US and UK governments do silence him - whether through extradition and imprisonment or an indefinite extension of the absurd legal limbo in which he is allowed internet access only if he does not "speak about politics" - WikiLeaks will continue to publish the world’s secrets. By setting up a decentralized, ultra-resilient platform for whistleblowers to share their secrets anonymously, he caused a seismic shift in the relationship between the oppressed and their oppressors, and that shift cannot be reversed. The threat inherent in Assange as a free man lies not in what has been published, but in what can be, and how. As Facebook and Twitter tighten the screws of censorship - #Unity4J is just one of many trending hashtags to be struck down in its prime by the Tweet Police - visionary anti-establishment techno-savants like Assange will be central figures in the mass movement toward secure social media platforms when those platforms emerge, unleashed by Kim Dotcom or whoever is first across the finish line. Dotcom has already asked Assange, Snowden and a European hacker collective for their input on a decentralized platform he is developing, understanding that strong ideals and technical expertise are both essential if techno-dissidents are to shift the paradigm away from Deep State control of the internet.

 

Government persecution of Assange is to be expected - WikiLeaks keeps the ruling class up at night worrying their misdeeds might be smeared across the morning's headlines - but his lack of support among fellow journalists is reprehensible. Whatever flaws Assange the person may possess are far outweighed by the good WikiLeaks has done for the world. In the media sphere, there is no downside to more information being available, especially free of charge. The patchwork of baseless smears and personal insults that has enveloped Assange since his internet connection was severed is pathetic and speaks volumes more about his detractors, kicking a man when he's down, than about him. Reports from visitors to the embassy suggest his physical and mental condition is deteriorating rapidly, reports met with derision from a vocal cadre of establishment lackeys calling themselves journalists on social media. But below even these sadistic pigs are the spineless appeasers who maintain their silence as Assange is smeared and deprived of his rights, cowards who sigh with relief every time the dogs of war sink their teeth into someone else. The radio silence that followed then-CIA chief Mike Pompeo's condemnation of WikiLeaks as a "hostile non-state intelligence service" - an ominous term he invented for the occasion - reflected appalling cowardice on the part of the establishment wing of the Fourth Estate, which must have quivered with pleasure as the chubby Rapture-botherer compared WikiLeaks unfavorably to so-called "legitimate news organizations like the New York Times and the Washington Post." Any journalist who falls for such naked divide-and-conquer rhetoric should hang up their laptop. 

 

The Russia Excuse

 

Because of the outsize role it played in the 2016 US election, WikiLeaks found itself at the center of Russiagate, the only conspiracy theory considered socially acceptable in mainstream American society. A month after the election, anonymous Ukrainian website PropOrNot declared - on the front page of the Washington Post, no less - that over 200 popular anti-establishment media outlets on both Left and Right were actually mouthpieces for Russian propaganda. PropOrNot begged the US government to investigate WikiLeaks and 200 of its fellows as traitors, accusations WaPo was forced to wrap in a disclaimer after several of those outlets threatened libel lawsuits. The witch hunt was on - anti-war, anti-capitalist, anti-Big Government, anti-police state views were all nefarious heads on the same Russian hydra. If you were on that list and you didn’t work for the Russians, you were a useful idiot, being fed information by Russian operatives so smooth you had no idea they worked for the Kremlin. It became fashionable to smear one's opponent as a Russian bot when losing internet arguments, and Sky News infamously dragged a British retiree and a Syrian-Australian scientist onto an interview program to essentially take a live Turing test. The narrative was ludicrous, but found fertile ground in the imagination of traumatized Clinton voters, who’d been assured at every turn their victory was certain. Even two years on, in the absence of any concrete proof of Russian collusion, a devoted core of believers keep the Russiagate faith, fanning the flames with a cultic fervor as the rest of Democratic voters despair of ever again winning an election.

 

The Russiagaters weren’t done with WikiLeaks, however. The Democratic National Committee, watching progressive voters jump ship in droves after leaked documents proved its primaries were rigged against Bernie Sanders, fell back on their shoot-the-messenger playbook, naming the Trump campaign, Russia, and WikiLeaks in a lawsuit that would be adorably delusional if not for its chilling implications for a free press. The suit claims that by publishing the stolen documents, Wikileaks stole the DNC’s trade secrets - the same defense, incidentally, used by Scientology when it filed its own suit against WikiLeaks in the organization's early days. Were the argument to stand, it would silence journalists who seek to publish leaked documents even when the journalists did not steal those documents themselves - dealing a major blow to investigative reporting. Pulitzer-winning exposés like the Pentagon papers or the more recent Panama papers would be impossible to write without the leaked or stolen documents provided by whistleblowers, who commit the minor crime of theft to expose the monstrous crimes of governments and corporations. The lawsuit also implicates WikiLeaks in illegal “wiretapping” - since the “trade secrets” were transmitted over the internet, and WikiLeaks must have known they’d been obtained illegally - and ties itself in knots creatively interpreting RICO statutes. If all journalists publishing whistleblower reports could be hit with RICO suits, such reporting would take on a whole new level of peril. The icing on the cake is the copyright violation charge - the DNC’s documents, after all, were copyrighted material, which WikiLeaks was not licensed to publish! The lawsuit is absurd, but its content was never meant to be taken seriously as an indictment of the elusive Trump-Russia collusion. It was meant to shut WikiLeaks up - and to silence any investigative journalists who would follow in Assange's footsteps.

 

The UN Working Group on Arbitrary Detention called for Assange’s release in 2016 in a report that criticized excesses by both the Swedish and UK governments and refuted the notion that he is in the Ecuadorian embassy of his own free will, facing no threat of extradition to the United States. The group recommended both countries “ensure the right of free movement of Mr. Assange and accord him an enforceable right to compensation” as they are in violation of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights. Sweden, which had never before been found to detain a person arbitrarily by the UN WGAD, dropped its seven-year “preliminary investigation” into the rape allegations last May - an investigation the UK government had bullied them into prolonging for four of those years, reminding Swedish authorities it was “not just another extradition.” Assange has served over three times the maximum jail sentence for bail-jumping in the UK, but Judge Emma Arbuthnot upheld the warrant for his arrest in February, dismissing his concerns about extradition and the increasingly dire state of his health. 

 

US Guts First Amendment

 

Right now, the most urgent danger Assange faces is US extradition. The Trump regime, having pulled an about-face from Candidate Trump’s “love” of WikiLeaks, has made it a “priority” to arrest Assange, and a UK arrest would soon see him on a plane headed to face the same DC judge who locked up Chelsea Manning for life - a sentence that was only commuted, incidentally, because Assange told Barack Obama he’d turn himself in in exchange for a pardon for Manning. Obama, whose administration prosecuted more journalists under the Espionage Act than all its predecessors combined, couldn’t quite bring himself to pardon Manning, and the commutation “compromise” gave Assange a loophole to avoid facing the hanging judges in the capital. John Pilger and the Courage Foundation are campaigning for Assange’s safe release to Australia with a guarantee that he will not be extradited by the United States, even though the word of the US under Trump means less than ever (the regime's reneging on the Iran nuclear deal having nibbled away at what few shreds remained after the deadly bait-and-switches that disarmed and then disemboweled Saddam Hussein and Muammar Gaddafi). The idea of US extradition should be ludicrous, given that Assange has neither entered the US nor committed any crimes against it, but merely publishing stolen documents has increasingly been codified as a crime in the post-9/11 US. 

 

The Obama administration prosecuted more whistleblowers under the Espionage Act than all previous presidents combined, part of a comprehensive attack on press freedom that saw legal protections for journalists and their sources eviscerated. Not to be outdone, Trump AG Jeff Sessions announced last year that his Justice Department was pursuing three times as many leak investigations as Obama’s and that they would be reviewing the department’s press policies to make it easier to prosecute such leaks. Earlier this month, agents seized the phone and email records of New York Times reporter Ali Watkins during an investigation into leaks by former Senate Intelligence Committee security director James Wolfe. Wolfe was indicted for lying to investigators about contact with reporters but not charged with leaking classified information; his indictment mentions but does not name three other reporters with whom he had contact, whose information was presumably left alone. Watkins’ information - a year’s worth of phone and email data - was seized via national security letter without her knowledge (again, without even an indictment alleging she had received classified information from Wolfe). Justice Department guidelines adopted in 2015 require the Department to exhaust all other options before subpoenaing a journalist’s information and provide advance notice to the journalist so that they might challenge the subpoena in court, but national security letters have increasingly been (ab)used to secretly obtain data on journalists and their sources. The guidelines permit secretly obtaining journalists’ data only if there’s a threat of “grave harm to national security” or “imminent risk of death or serious bodily harm” involved - hardly the case with regard to Watkins, then working for Buzzfeed, and her senate aide boyfriend Wolfe discussing Russiagate - but such rules are conveniently non-binding. 

 

The Intercept’s James Risen, recasting himself as a profile in journalistic courage despite sitting on the NSA’s “Stellar Wind” surveillance program for two years at the behest of his New York Times editors, recognized the Wolfe investigation as a flashpoint in the war on press freedom but drew the wrong conclusions, framing the episode as proof that there was a core of truth within the disintegrating Russiagate edifice, urging reporters to keep at the collusion non-story and cheering on the establishment media for “keeping the story alive when public and governmental interest has waned.” When the Intercept and Freedom of the Press Foundation published Justice Department documents detailing the department's press policies, they glossed over the real story - that press protections don’t apply to a journalist who is “believed to be a spy or…part of a news organization associated with a foreign intelligence service or otherwise acting on behalf of a foreign power.” Another reason for casting WikiLeaks and other alternative media as Russian stooges becomes abundantly clear. Obama’s Justice Department used the Espionage Act, a WWI-era law meant to prosecute spies, as a weapon in its war on whistleblowers. Trump’s goons are just taking this strategy to its logical conclusion.

 

Controlled Opposition

 

One should expect obfuscation and misleading coverage from the Intercept, whose star journalist Glenn Greenwald has not yet released 95% of the Snowden files he was entrusted to curate in 2013, including one that could have prevented some of the bloodshed in Syria if it had been released years ago. The document, which exposes the “moderate rebels” fighting the Assad regime as foreign proxies funded by the US and Saudi Arabia, would have interfered with the Intercept's anti-Assad line - even the too-little-too-late article accompanying the document falsely depicts the war in Syria as the outgrowth of an "organic, peaceful" protest movement - so the outlet sat on it until even the US State Department had admitted the anti-Assad "rebels" were deploying the chemical weapons they'd accused Assad of using. eBay billionaire Pierre Omidyar's platform, which rose to prominence because of its monopoly on the Snowden material, has always acted in Omidyar's interest first and journalism's last. During Obama's presidency, Omidyar visited the White House more often than the CEOs of Google, Facebook, or Amazon, rendering invalid the notion of the Intercept as anti-establishment. In launching parent company First Look Media, Omidyar essentially paid $250 million to acquire control of Greenwald and Laura Poitras, the two journalists in possession of the Snowden documents, and now owns those documents, which allegedly include the juicy details of PayPal's business relationship with the NSA and its function within the agency's unconstitutional spying programs. Omidyar has made no secret of his antipathy towards leakers, and he clearly does not intend to release any more of the Snowden material if it can be avoided.

 

With the lies at the core of the Intercept exposed, it should shock no one that the outlet was responsible for last year’s arrest of leaker Reality Winner. What appeared to be sloppy opsec may have been deliberate betrayal - the journalists who bungled Winner’s leak were also involved in outing CIA whistleblower John Kiriakou, who exposed the agency’s torture program. When the Intercept publishes factually inaccurate polemics against WikiLeaks, it is not an anomalous act by an otherwise pro-transparency media platform, but a blow against the authentic competitor it wants to replace with its own controlled opposition. Micah Lee, who has called the WikiLeaks founder a "rapist, liar, & ally to fascists" as well as a "Putin fanboy" is a Russiagate true believer who convinced the Freedom of the Press Foundation to cut off Wikileaks’ funding before penning the least fact-based smear yet to emerge from the Intercept. The irony is rich, considering that the FPF was formed to circumvent the banking blockade on donations to WikiLeaks in the fallout from the Cablegate leaks. But Omidyar now funds the FPF, whose ranks have swelled to 15 members, many of whom are affiliated with the Intercept. There, they take turns hammering at Assange with baseless smears and innuendos (most recently Xeni Jardin's attempts to link Assange to Cambridge Analytica, as well as her deliberate mischaracterization of his Twitter DMs as death threats) in between shilling for terrorist movie stars the White Helmets and fanning the dying embers of Russiagate. Greenwald has much to answer for beyond merely dragging his feet in releasing Snowden’s material. The Intercept and other controlled-opposition outlets are far more damaging to independent journalists than the media establishment.

 

The Ukrainian Connection

 

Omidyar, along with the Right’s favorite bogeyman George Soros, joined USAID and other CIA-backed NGOs in funding the 2014 Euromaidan revolution, which replaced democratically-elected Ukrainian president Victor Yanukovych with a coalition of far-right neo-Nazi goons backed by the US State Department and led by Arseniy Yatsenyuk (later Petro Poroshenko). The Ukrainian government is known for targeting dissident journalists both inside and outside its borders, outsourcing such thought-policing to amateur “security researchers” via open-source surveillance tools to devastating effect. Within the government, it created the Orwellian-sounding Ministry of Information Policy in 2015, ostensibly to combat Russian propaganda by manufacturing its own, and designated all journalists who opposed the regime as “collaborators” - fair game for retaliation, be it harassment, arrest, or murder. Anonymous website Mirotvorets doxxed thousands of “terrorists” operating in the eastern separatist regions of Donetsk and Donbas - a list that grew to include over a thousand journalists whose only crime was receiving credentials from the contested regions - and encouraged patriotic Ukrainians to snitch on pro-Russian elements in their midst while threatening pro-Russian elements with death if they did not rat out their friends. Many journalists received death threats; some were attacked in the streets; some, like Pavel Sheremet, were killed. The attackers were not government goon squads, but propagandized Ukrainian civilians who believed they were doing their patriotic duty by attacking “traitors.” 

 

As the US becomes more hostile to journalists, it’s impossible to ignore the Ukrainian blueprint for the future. Demonizing/scapegoating of Russia? check. Spinning of contested events? check. Anonymous blacklist(s) of dissident journalists (PropOrNot, Mirotvorets)? check. PropOrNot did not inspire ordinary American citizens to physically attack dissident journalists, but by smearing them as traitors, it established a subconscious association that can be drawn upon or amplified in the future. European Values followed up on the slanders last year with an exhaustive list of 2000+ names of politicians and media figures who had appeared on RT, dismissing them all categorically as Kremlin operatives - names running the gamut from UKIP’s Nigel Farage to the Libertarian Party’s Gary Johnson to John Sununu, a relatively obscure figure from the first Bush administration. George Eliason described years ago how Ukrainian intelligence has outsourced the persecution of dissident journalists to civilians in a series of terrifying articles that read like a dystopian nightmare - vigilante citizens armed with NSA surveillance technology acting out their personal vendettas on law-abiding citizens who have no idea they’re being targeted - and he has documented extensively the role these shadowy figures played in the 2016 election. They did such a good job, in fact, that they’ve been rewarded with the highest prize a propagandist could ask for - the ability to determine truth and falsehood on the world’s largest social media platform. The Atlantic Council, a pro-NATO think tank funded by Ukrainian billionaires, multinational banks, weapons contractors, and other supra-governmental entities, is joining Facebook's fight against “fake news.” The truth has left the building.

 

Russian revenant-journalist Arkady Babchenko messed with the program by coming back to life after he was supposed to have fallen victim to the evil press-massacring Russians. Ukrainian media, already suffering from low levels of trust among the population, scrambled to plug the holes in the story, devising a slap-dash tale of a ruse meant to draw out Russian hitmen and emphasizing that the reason everyone fell for the original story is that it was so likely Babchenko would be murdered for criticizing Putin. The stories that had already appeared implicating Russia in Babchenko’s death, information that had been furnished by Ukrainian security services, were memory-holed, but not before they made fools of such well-known fools as the UK’s Boris Johnson. Such sloppiness made the Keystone-Kops Skirpal affair look positively credible. Journalists in Ukraine and Russia alike, though universally relieved that Babchenko was alive, expressed concern that his reanimation would further undermine the tenuous credibility of their nations’ presses. Russia is home to few independent media outlets, and press freedom in Ukraine has all but dried up since the Euromaidan revolution. The Atlantic admits that “it is still not clear how authorities, in staging Babchenko’s death, were allegedly able to confirm Russia’s involvement in the murder plot.” Yet the US media continues to take the word of Ukraine’s security services and media as gospel, republishing the claim that Babchenko’s ruse led to the discovery of a hit-list with 47 names targeted for assassination by the Russian government (up from 30 a few days previously). Fool me once, shame on you…

 

Global Crackdown

 

The persecution of Assange is just one piece of a coordinated effort at press suppression that reaches around the globe. The Department of Homeland Security is currently compiling a master list of “journalists and media influencers” - people who have committed no crime other than publishing. The agency plans to track over 290,000 news sources globally, in over 100 languages that will be instantly translated to English. Browsable by “location, beat, and type of influencer,” the database will also have profiles of each “influencer” including their contact information, previous writings, and “sentiment.” Applications closed two months ago, so it’s presumably in development now. They really don’t want another WikiLeaks, or a proper alternative to Facebook/Twitter, or - worse - a Deep-State-free Google. 

 

The DHS database facilitates the rise of a Mirotvorets for every country - a police state’s wet dream - as well as a valuable information trove to be sold to foreign governments frustrated with their own unruly press. There is no understating the potential abuses, especially at a time when (according to the latest RSF report) hostility toward journalists is on the rise worldwide. Egypt and Turkey are accusing journalists of terrorism and even imprisoning those who don’t display loyalty toward their governments; Philippines president Rodrigo Duterte has told reporters they “are not exempted from assassination;” Czech president Milos Zeman has called for journalists to be “liquidated” and recently brandished a prop AK47 labeled “journalists.” Serbian PM Aleksandar Vucic followed the examples of the US, UK and Ukraine, using state media to intimidate independent journalists and accusing them of “treachery” and being foreign spies. Countless regimes were called out by the RSF report for publicly insulting the press. Germany has used the specter of “fake news” to pass one of the most restrictive anti-free-speech laws in the EU, fining social networks if they don’t remove “hate speech” quickly enough after it’s reported. Given that country’s notoriously broad definition of “hate speech” - octogenarian “Nazi grandma” Ursula Haverbeck is serving a 14-month sentence for “holocaust denial” for calling Auschwitz a labor camp - German journalists are especially screwed.

 

Criminalizing Journalism

 

Assange's imprisonment is only the tip of the UK's police-state iceberg. The country, which after all birthed Orwell and still hosts more CCTV cameras per square inch than any other nation (one for every 11 citizens), has embraced the notion of secret police, imprisoning controversial citizen journalist Tommy Robinson for reporting on the “grooming” trial of a group of Pakistani men. Robinson, formerly of the far-right English Defense League, has been smeared in the media as an Islamophobe, but whatever his prejudices, he remains a British citizen who was exercising his legal rights. He was convicted and imprisoned within five hours and a media gag order was quickly issued; articles about Robinson’s arrest suddenly disappeared into the D-notice memory hole. Robinson got his start exposing a massive child-sex ring operating with full knowledge of town officials in his home village of Rotherham and has since become a vocal critic of Islamic extremism, blaming religious doctrine and unfettered immigration for the actions of the grooming gangs. He has clashed with UK authorities before for reporting outside grooming trials, but a lawyer seeking to debunk the idea of Robinson as a victim of a police state run amok actually disproves his own thesis when he unpacks the contempt charge. When he was arrested, Robinson had been filming the defendants as they filed into the building, naming them and their charges - conspicuously adding “allegedly” in order to avoid running afoul of contempt criteria. Defendants’ names were already public, and the verdict was being delivered during that session, meaning the jury could not have been influenced by his reporting unless they were watching Robinson’s livestream from the courtroom. The use of a D-notice - a publication ban applied only where cases of national security are concerned - to squelch coverage of Robinson's arrest reeks of Stalinism. The “breach of the peace” charge used to justify the arrest itself is entirely spurious. Robinson may be prejudiced or just a victim of media demonization but he was not committing a crime. His arrest - and subsequent removal to a heavily Muslim prison where he fears for his life and where he has already been threatened - sent a message to other citizen journalists to sit down and shut up.

 

Journalists who dare to speak truth to power are frequently arrested on trumped-up or invented charges - for Robinson it was “disturbing the peace,” a patently absurd accusation for a man filming a courthouse with a cellphone. Assange’s “rape” charges involved consensual sex, and his accuser recanted soon after she was coerced into making her statement. Every activist knows someone who has been arrested for “resisting arrest,” a nonexistent crime that can carry a death sentence in the trigger-happy US, especially if the “offender” is black. Stalin’s regime infamously locked up dissidents in insane asylums - since one would have to be crazy to oppose Stalinism - and this paradigm is still operational today, though deinstitutionalization means dissidents are more commonly imprisoned with "chemical straitjackets" such as antipsychotic drugs that render them harmlessly unable to think without the expense of housing their husks. Germany still locks up history scholars for “holocaust denial,” a catch-all term encompassing everything from revisionist scholarship to neo-Nazi propaganda. In the US, concerned “friends” of Chelsea Manning called the police to her home for a “wellness check” in response to a series of depressed-sounding tweets, triggering a heavily-armed response that likely would have killed her had she been home. 

 

Israeli snipers gunned down several journalists covering the Palestinian March of Return last month despite their clearly-marked “Press” vests, equating coverage of “terrorists” with “terrorism” in a similar manner to Ukrainian propaganda. Indeed, US ambassador to Israel David Friedman issued an edict to the journalists condemning Israeli violence in Gaza -  don’t. Claiming that 9 of 10 articles are “critical of Israel,” as if that wouldn’t be logical given that it isn’t the Palestinians slaughtering unarmed protesters, journalists and medics, he lamented the lack of “hard, factual analysis” (which would presumably uncover how a baby can be a terrorist). FAIR (and anyone who’s been paying attention) note that the opposite is true - 9 of 10 articles take Israel’s side, victim-blaming on a grand scale. Friedman implies that the journalists shot by Israeli snipers must also take the blame for their own murder - after all, “hard, factual analysis” would have told them they’d be less likely to be shot covering the protests from the Israeli side. The Israeli Knesset is currently weighing legislation that would criminalize the filming of IDF soldiers. Censorship is the last refuge of scoundrels.

 

A law recently passed in South Carolina conflates criticism of Israel with anti-Semitism and criminalizes both. Israel realizes its escalating abuses of Palestinian human rights do not go unnoticed even in its accomplice and enabler the US, and that American Jews - especially younger, more liberal Jews - are distancing themselves from the reactionary Likud government en masse. The only way to deal with such political toxicity is to outlaw acknowledging its existence. The pall that has hung over open discussion of Israel in Europe is moving across the pond. The ACLU has offered only token resistance to this law, and other organizations are giving it a wide berth, fearing the powerful cudgel of antisemitism accusations as wielded by the ADL and its cohorts. As Israeli snipers fire on journalists attempting to document the situation in Gaza, Friedman’s directive adds to the bulldozer full of bullshit American media has already dumped on the Palestinian victims of Israeli crimes. Babies? Shouldn’t have been there. Kids? Human shields. Medics? “Doctors and nurses can be terrorists too.” Since 9/11, Israeli security forces have trained American cops to bring their brutal and repressive tactics back to the homeland. When home-grown uniformed death squads start gunning down journalists, we can thank Zionism.

 

...but back to WikiLeaks

 

Anyone who cares about freedom of the press can join a protest this Tuesday in the metropolis of your choice. June 19 is the 6th anniversary of his entry into the embassy. If you can’t show up for this, don’t expect anyone to show up when they come for you, because they will not stop with imprisoning Assange, or Robinson, or Kiriakou, Manning, Winner, and the endless list of whistleblowers punished for the crimes they exposed. It doesn’t matter if you think Assange is a cad, or that he went off the deep end during the 2016 election (you’d go off the deep end too if you had spent the last five years in legal limbo in a foreign embassy with only the occasional glimpse of sunlight to remind you what planet you're on, and one can hardly accuse him of supporting a candidate he likened to an STD). Assange committed no crime, yet he rots in solitary confinement. Such treatment of an individual who has done so much for the cause of transparency and truth is unconscionable. He must not be forgotten. Safe passage must be arranged to a country with no US extradition treaty. Exposing the truth should not be a capital crime.

 

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[continued from Part I]

 

The Deep State and DNC officials are colluding to pull off a heist on the Democratic Party that will maximize the power of the military-intelligence network within electoral politics, allowing the US military-intelligence apparatus to rewrite the laws that govern it at a time when the government's war powers are undeniably expanding. To distract from this broad daylight heist, the establishment media, wearing its opposition to the president as a badge of honor, spins an elaborate fiction in which those intelligence agencies are comrades in the anti-Trump Resistance, defenders of truth, justice and the American Way. The media, too, are indispensable allies in the fight against Trump, fearless standard-bearers of impartial journalism, incorruptible merchants of facts.

 

Caveat Resistor.

 

You may believe you have signed up for a political movement, but you are getting a religion, and it does not tolerate heretics. The Resistance, once a broad-based grassroots coalition fighting for progressive change against the system that produced President Trump, has been weaponized and turned against its own members in an effort to silence dissent.

 

WE COULD BE HEROES (BUT WHY BOTHER)

In Resistance cosmology, Special Counsel Robert Mueller is the St. George to Trump’s dragon - a righteous crusader destined to take down the monster holding the people in thrall. His ascension as the Voice of Resistance was accompanied by a rollout of merchandise selling solidarity: “It’s Mueller Time!” But Mueller, who presided over the transformation of the FBI from a law-enforcement agency to a Minority Report-esque pre-crime organization during his tenure as Bush’s FBI Director, is no friend to the Left. His FBI massively expanded its surveillance of Americans and enabled the Bush administration’s evisceration of civil liberties. Now, as the “grand inquisitor” of Russiagate, he has a blank check to lay siege to the Trump presidency for as long as he desires. As the investigation drags on into its second year, Mueller has trampled attorney-client privilege, the rules of special prosecutions, the fourth amendment, and other inconvenient laws in his quest to bag the great orange whale, yet failed to uncover the holy grail - proof of collusion with the Russian government. Trump’s hands are tied, with every muscle of the Resistance tensed and ready to rip out his throat should he fire the Special Counsel, and Mueller is just biding his time until someone in the president’s inner circle screws up. Meanwhile, the Resistance hangs on his every word.

 

Ex-FBI Director James Comey is the top martyr in the Resistance pantheon, a Christ-like figure unjustly brought low by the spray-tanned tyrant. Establishment court jester Jimmy Kimmel was already selling “Comey Is My Homey” t-shirts for $29.99 hours after Trump fired the FBI Director, whom noted war criminal John McCain called “arguably the most respected person in America” without a trace of irony. Acting as Attorney General under Bush, Comey signed off on the arrest and imprisonment of US citizens on US soil without due process; authorized the torture program; OK’d the NSA’s domestic surveillance operations; tried to outlaw end-to-end encryption; and used National Security Letters to collect email and browsing records on American citizens without a warrant. His saintly, slightly constipated visage conceals a vindictive bumbler.  

 

Beyond specific agents, though, the FBI’s history is one of all-out war with the Left. Recasting the agency as the shock troops of the Resistance requires a complete break with history. There is a reason COINTELPRO remains a household word in activist circles - the program decimated leftist groups in the 1960s. Agents infiltrated, surveilled, sowed dissent, provoked, entrapped, smeared, and otherwise terrorized law-abiding citizens the Bureau saw as threats. COINTELPRO began at the height of the Red Scare and officially concluded in 1971 after its exposure resulted in public outcry, though its techniques remain in use, emboldened by unprecedented expansion of agency powers under the Patriot Act, targeting Muslims, Occupy protesters, and Black Lives Matter activists. Then as now, agents saw Russian influence behind every protest; then as now, the media was a willing partner in their operations, taking agents’ claims as gospel and reprinting them uncritically. Then, however, no one was dumb enough to think the FBI was on the side of the activists.

 

Like the FBI, the CIA is a lifelong enemy of the Left. While legally prohibited from operating on American soil, the agency always ignored such restrictions, launching Operation CHAOS in 1959 to spy on Cuban exiles arriving in Florida in order to recruit anti-Castro operatives. This domestic surveillance program expanded to college campuses during the Vietnam War, using many of the same techniques as the FBI’s COINTELPRO agents to infiltrate and sabotage anti-war groups. FBI and CIA competed for the favor of President Johnson with their reports on campus activism. CHAOS was discontinued in 1973, but the CIA has periodically gotten the band back together to surveil dissidents during Reagan’s regime-change wars in Central America and the first Gulf War, always denying it vigorously when caught. Former CIA and NSA Director Michael Hayden epitomizes the CIA’s antagonistic relationship with the truth - Hayden had the dubious distinction of lying under oath more than anyone else in the Bush administration when he testified about the agency’s torture program. Yet we are supposed to trust their “high confidence” that the Russian government “aspired to help President-elect Trump’s election chances.” These are the same intelligence agencies that Schumer warned had “six ways from Sunday” of getting back at Trump - but they aren’t vindictive, just impartial lawmen keeping the world safe for democracy (ex-CIA Director John Brennan to Trump: “America will triumph over you").

 

The CIA has rehabilitated its image since the days of the Church Committee with the help of Hollywood, establishing the Entertainment Liaison Office to encourage positive film portrayals of the agency in return for access and advice, and the mainstream news media, which it has effectively controlled since the days of Operation Mockingbird. While Mockingbird, in which the agency paid journalists to plant or promote some stories and suppress others, was exposed in 1975, it was never discontinued - if anything, the program has expanded now that it’s out in the open. New guidelines adopted by Comey’s FBI enshrined the Mockingbird model in law in 2014, permitting agents to impersonate journalists. Given all this, it’s unsurprising that only 32% of Americans report trust in the mass media. Democrats, who’ve uncritically embraced the media establishment as partners in the anti-Trump Resistance since the election, report higher levels of trust than Republicans (51% to 14%).

 

With establishment media outlets consolidated into just a few monolithic corporations able to unilaterally dictate the limits of acceptable discourse, the CIA no longer needs to buy friendly journalists. Former CIA directors Leon Panetta and John Brennan are regular contributors to NBC, MSNBC and CBS. Despite self-identifying as members of the Resistance - the intelligence community has been at war with Trump since the beginning - they endorsed the president’s nomination of “Bloody” Gina Haspel for their old job just as they’ve endorsed the other hawks with whom he’s stacked his cabinet. Haspel ran a black site prison in Thailand and destroyed evidence of torture against presidential orders, but she’s OK with the Resistance. And Henry Kissinger. And John Negroponte. Not a peep of Resistance against too-unhinged-for-CNN John Bolton or Rapture-awaiter Mike Pompeo from these old spies, either. Those intelligence vets who do stand up for human rights, like Ray McGovern, are quickly silenced. Their Resistance never makes it onto the news.

 

 

James Clapper, Director of National Intelligence under Obama, leaked the discredited Steele dossier to CNN, lied about it to Congress, and was rewarded with a position at CNN. Clapper is no stranger to lying under oath, most famously denying the NSA’s domestic spying program to Congress. He embodies the unhealthy relationship between the government and the supposedly independent media who cover it. Anderson Cooper, the dashing Vanderbilt scion, interned with the CIA for two years. Though his homosexuality gives him liberal cover, he’s as hawkish as his ex-CIA colleagues. Wolf Blitzer worked for AIPAC before joining CNN and one could be forgiven for believing he still collects a paycheck from the Israeli lobby; he raised the specter of the Holocaust while condemning Trump’s response to the Charlottesville riots, called out former Trump press secretary Sean Spicer for comparing the false flag Syrian gas attack to the Holocaust, and in general works the Trump/Hitler angle tirelessly. Blitzer was scouted by the CIA while writing for the Jerusalem Post in Tel Aviv. No CNN commentator has ever spoken out against an American war, and the reason is clear from the commercials that run between programs - ads for Boeing, Lockheed-Martin, Raytheon - as if the average CNN viewer was in the market for a cruise missile.

 

VILLAINS

 

The rise of independent media loosened the stranglehold of the Mockingbird establishment, a fact that was unavoidable during the 2016 election. Mainstream media refused to cover the Sanders campaign, relegating DNC debates to time slots opposite major football games, yet his rallies drew tens of thousands of supporters, he won several primaries while raking in record small-dollar donations, and if not for his party’s electoral machinations, he probably would have secured the nomination. On the Right, the rise of Alex Jones unsettled the Clinton campaign enough that she called him out by name in a speech. The media clearly had an emergency on its hands, and the “fake news” psy-op was born. Media complicity in Deep State propaganda reached a new low when the Washington Post uncritically promoted the anonymous blacklist PropOrNot, which smeared hundreds of alternative-media websites as Russian propaganda geared toward sowing discord and influencing the election - and warned that the end goal was “Russian-orchestrated political violence in the US,” calling on the FBI and Justice Department to investigate the blacklistees for espionage. WaPo, which declined to name the individuals behind PropOrNot or share any information aside from their Ukrainian national origin, was forced to rescind the allegations when several of the libeled sites threatened to sue, but accusations of Russian disinformation have been a staple of online arguments ever since.

 

A closer look at PropOrNot reveals ties to CrowdStrike, the security firm credited with finding the not-quite-smoking-gun evidence that Russia "hacked the election." CrowdStrike was paid by the DNC to uncover evidence of Russian hacking; unable to do so conclusively, they fudged it, gave it to US intelligence, and enlisted Twitter influencer Andrea Chalupa to post thousands of unhinged tweets calling for an audit of the election in the hope that no one with the proper technical knowledge would take a closer look at CrowdStrike's mess. Irene Chalupa, Andrea’s sister, is a news anchor on Stopfake.org, the "Ukrainian Snopes" established during the 2014 Russian annexation of Crimea to combat Russian propaganda; a third sister, Alexandra Chalupa, works as a strategist with the DNC. Coincidence, surely.

 

PropOrNot’s Ukrainian connections suggest something more ominous in store for dissident journalists than baseless smear campaigns. In late 2014, the far-Right government of Petro Poroshenko established a Ministry of Information Policy to combat - you guessed it - Russian propaganda. Tasked with developing and implementing a “state information strategy,” protecting citizens from “partial, ill-judged and unreliable information” (fake news), and “registering media outlets and defining professional standards," the Orwellian bureau recruited private citizens to join its “i-army” in the fight against Russian disinformation. A website called Mirotvorets that kept a database of "enemies of Ukraine" doxxed more than 5000 journalists operating in the separatist region of Donetsk. Labeled “terrorist collaborators,” they were deluged with death threats; some were violently attacked. Self-styled "patriotic journalists" dismissed them as "traitors" who had it coming. The US government doesn’t do this - yet - but PropOrNot is just Mirotvorets recreated for the American stage; the blacklist has already led to many alternative media journalists being smeared as Russian agents or "useful idiots," and rancor directed at journalists who question the establishment line on Russiagate and related stories has only grown since last year.

 

 

Government response to the alleged Russian infiltration of US media is shaping up to resemble the three-pronged strategy of the Ukrainian MIP, which is unsurprising given that the US stage-managed the Euromaidan uprising that installed Poroshenko's government. The House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence Report on Russian Active Measures, released in March, recommended "educating" and "inoculating" populations against Russian influence campaigns (NATO-allied influence campaigns are OK, apparently), as well as freeing the executive branch to respond to “foreign threats” with military force if deemed necessary - an especially terrifying measure given the concurrent blank-check AUMF being debated in Congress. The Senate Foreign Relations Committee, which likens Russian election interference to 9/11 (!), came to similar conclusions in its not-alarmist-at-all report Putin's Asymmetric Assault on Democracy, in some cases using the exact same phrases ("inoculating the population against fake news"). Though neither report found evidence of collusion between the Trump campaign and Russia, the House had some helpful ideas for stepping up penalties on whistleblowers, while the Senate suggested criminalizing the sharing of "fake news." This tradition goes all the way back to the Warren Commission, which failed to reach any conclusions regarding the JFK assassination but nevertheless recommended increased surveillance of activist groups. Like 9/11, "Russian hacking" is just a means to tighten control of the people by a government diametrically opposed to authentic Resistance in any way, shape, or form.

 

 

TV AS SKINNER BOX

 

Resistance media, while keeping up a jaw-dropping 91% negative coverage of Trump's administration, always seems to miss the most egregious crimes of his presidency: Saudi Arabia using US weapons to commit war crimes on the people of Yemen; more civilian deaths by drone in the first nine months of Trump’s presidency than in two years of Obama; Jared Kushner’s collusion with the Israeli government to squash a UN Security Council resolution condemning illegal Israeli settlements; a threefold increase in NSA data collection last year. Instead, the media chorus is a maelstrom of sound and fury, signifying nothing - Stormy Daniels, the White House press dinner, and ominous palace gossip that Trump is going to fire Mueller any day now. The president’s obsession with his media image is his Achilles’ heel, and establishment outlets have become adept at increasing and decreasing pressure to produce desired behavior.

 

The Resistance’s silence on Trump’s overseas military adventures lays bare the moral bankruptcy of the media. CNN’s Fareed Zakaria, who gushed that Trump had finally become president after bombing Syria last year, busted out his cheerleader outfit again after last month’s strikes, qualifying his approval by expressing concern that Trump wasn't bombing enough. Seven of the top 10 US newspapers supported last month’s missile strikes in Syria, putting aside that they were illegal under both US and international law. Only the NY Times, NY Daily News, and San Jose Mercury News abstained from the military-industrial lovefest, stopping short of condemning the strikes. The Wall Street Journal actually proposed expanding the war into Iran and Russia. Not one of the top 100 papers condemned the strikes on legal or moral grounds, though like their counterparts in Congress, many bemoaned the lack of a “greater Syria strategy” - more bombings. Beneath the surface of the elusive "liberal media" is the “cruise missile left,” deftly framing US imperialist aggression as humanitarian, a fantasy helped along by propaganda organizations like the Oscar-winning White Helmets in Syria. Instead of strong anti-war voices, the Left gets “Pentagon liberals” like Rachel Maddow who mouth progressive buzzwords while shilling for the military-industrial complex. Maddow actually teared up while covering Trump’s latest strike on Damascus, clearly experiencing some sort of transcendent wargasm as the missiles descended on the ancient city. An early and enthusiastic Russiagate acolyte, she has devoted most of her airtime since the election to the elusive “scandal,” ignoring matters of substance on which she could have scored points against Trump. The president could rescue a kitten from a burning building and the Resistance establishment would claim he set the fire, but when he bombs a sovereign nation without provocation, they fall to their knees. This is not Resistance. This is enabling.

 

BRINGING THE REVOLUTION HOME

The idea of a broad-based Resistance arose from the post-election war-room meetings of a massive network of Obama administration alumni. Still “obsessed” with the man one ex-staffer called “our Jesus Christ,” the shell-shocked Obama acolytes flew into action days after the election to protect their leader’s legacy, though they had a hard time listing any of the touchstones of that legacy aside from Obamacare, DACA, and “his climate regulation." Perhaps Politico found it impolitic to remind the reader of the "people power" revolutions engineered by the Obama/Clinton State Department - the secular Arab republics that fell in the Arab Spring to become terror-ridden hellholes, or their last great achievement knocking out the pro-Russian Yanukovych government in Ukraine, leading to Russia's annexation of Crimea and separatist clashes in the east that continue to this day. But these starry-eyed Obama cultists, still motivated by their guru's “stirring message of hope and change" despite having encountered neither in the preceding eight years, saw only possibilities. Hope springs eternal! They became the architects of the Resistance, determined to take Trump down and restore the rightful political order by bringing home the color revolution model that had worked so well abroad. Now all they needed were some warm bodies to fill the streets.

 

With more than 4.2 million participants across over 600 cities, the Women's March was the largest single day of mass political action in American history, hailed unequivocally as a triumph of the Resistance. Organizer Carmen Perez specifically warned against focusing too much on Trump, while lead strategist Mrinalini Chakraborty clarified that it was less an anti-Trump rally than a “solidarity march that highlights global issues.” Participants included environmental, civil rights, labor, women’s, and immigrants’ groups - a genuinely broad grassroots coalition with much bigger fish to fry than Trump - and the March’s “unity principles” support an admirable array of social-justice causes from anti-war to workers’ rights. Unsurprisingly, COINTELPRO began nibbling at the Women’s March before the event even began. Mic called out the ubiquitous pink “pussyhats” at the March as “trans-exclusionary” for implying a link between women and vaginas; the story was picked up by at least 15 "mock the snowflakes"-type conservative blogs. A Facebook squabble over privilege was clearly intended to drive a wedge between experienced activists and their less "woke" peers, the latter of whom showed up at the march in unprecedented numbers anyway. The three non-white organizers - Perez, Tamika Mallory, and Linda Sarsour - were denounced as anti-Semites for refusing to disavow the Nation of Islam’s Louis Farrakhan; Sarsour, a Palestinian who supports the BDS movement, was called a terrorist and worse for finding Zionism "creepy," and the organizers' refusal to let the accusations distract from their activism only made their detractors more strident. Ironically, that left only Bob Bland, the one white leader, who had initially brought the three seasoned activists on board because of the glaring lack of diversity in protest leadership as well as her own lack of protest experience. To Bland’s credit, she stuck by her co-organizers, marking International Women's Day with "a Day Without a Woman," a sort of performative general strike in which participants abstained from all economic participation while wearing red, but the damage was done - the fickle Resistance media was almost snarky in its coverage, panning the event as well as the March group itself and suggesting would-be activists check out Indivisible instead. It was clear who had gotten the contract for the Resistance.

 

While the Women’s March was inspiring constructive protests by thousands of newly-minted activists, the Indivisible Guide was inspiring obstructionism. Indivisible modeled itself on the Tea Party, which had effectively blocked the Obama administration from accomplishing much of its planned legislative agenda. Leah Greenberg and Ezra Levin refashioned the Tea Party’s modus operandi for progressives, emphasizing the need to organize locally, present a united front, delegitimize the opposition, and obstruct, obstruct, obstruct. This is the model the Resistance establishment has chosen to champion, and it’s not difficult to see why, as it perfectly mirrors the official policy platform (or lack thereof) of the DNC and DCCC. Indivisible is the bible of the Party of No. The guide advises readers to find and influence extant activist groups where possible rather than “reinvent the wheel” by starting their own - to infiltrate and coopt, COINTELPRO-style, activist groups and transform them into obstructionist (inactivist) groups. Rather than form an intersectional opposition network - a more geographically diffuse take on the Occupy model, and an organizational nightmare if you're trying to create an easily-controlled color revolution - the Resistance was encouraged to be reactionary, avoid "policy solutions," and stall for time like their lives depended on it - just as Republicans did in their opposition to Obama. The potential for a new Occupy was thus averted. The FBI had outsourced COINTELPRO without having to lift a finger. 

 

Politico champions Greenberg and Levin for their success in stonewalling Trump, but they forget the ending of the Tea Party story. Just as Obama eventually resigned himself to governing by executive order, unable to secure Congressional approval to so much as blow his nose, so will Trump. He has already unilaterally bombed Syria twice, pulled out of the JCPOA and Paris Climate Treaty despite global pearl-clutching, and now - with Congress poised to hand him unprecedented warmaking powers - could light up the globe if another world leader made fun of his hair. Just as instructive is what he has not done - Trump has not met with Putin at all, nor attempted to engage Russia politically, as he promised on the campaign trail. The posturing with missile strikes in Syria is simply an elaborate and expensive form of interpretive dance - this is the only way the US is allowed to communicate with the evil empire from which we have isolated ourselves, since to get closer, to understand the “enemy,” would be to collude. It’s yet another self-handicapping gunshot wound to the foot, hand-delivered by a Resistance that could have at least backed Trump into a more geostrategically advantageous corner. 

 

Between Russiagate and his cabinet of rabid hawks and neocon revenants, Trump has ensured he will be incapable of governing effectively. The energy of the Resistance has been transformed - the rushing water has become the dam - and the would-be color revolution sits on the shelf, an insurance policy against Trump becoming the populist, swamp-draining crusader he fooled his working-class supporters into believing he was. But this assumes Trump was ever an anti-establishment candidate. He may not be of the Washington political elite that produced Clinton, but he moves through those circles as a real estate billionaire with his fingers in so many dubiously legal pies he needs multiple lawyers to keep track of them all. After his inauguration, Trump wasted no time cuddling up to Netanyahu and the Saudi royal family, the two worst violators of human rights and the US’s closest allies. As he revealed he was willing to play ball with the ruling class, that human life meant as little to him as it did to them, they breathed a sigh of relief, but have kept the Resistance on a tight leash, ready to let it loose should he evince a glimmer of geostrategic rebellion.

 

STRANGE BEDFELLOWS

 

During the election, Trump was simply too unpredictable, too un-beholden to powerful interest groups, to satisfy the Deep State or the neocons. It’s hard to remember now, as he drops record numbers of bombs, but he ran on an unusually noninterventionist platform for the Republican party. Clinton, voted Most Likely to Start World War 3 in the DNC yearbook, was the consummate Deep State Democrat. Faced with a candidate who might cut off their war supply, the self-styled Never-Trumpers donned the mantle of the Resistance and wasted no time trumpeting their ideological common ground with the Democratic Party. Bill Kristol and Robert Kagan, who had already rebranded their notorious Project for a New American Century as the Foreign Policy Initiative to escape the stink of the Bush doctrine, were well-versed in liberal vocabulary, having weaponized LGBT rights against Putin’s Russia. Imperialist Pollyanna Max Boot tried out some liberal buzzwords of his own, baring his newly enlightened soul in a meditation on white male privilege. The neocons were Russia hawks before it was cool - they joined the Republican party in the 1980s because of Democrats’ waning enthusiasm for Cold War militarism. Democrats, having already choked down Clinton’s neocon foreign policy, found the PNAC boys’ belligerence easy to swallow afterwards and readily adopted their imperialist rationale to give ideological heft to their own newborn Russophobia (again, it’s hard to remember now that Putin is blamed for all the country’s evils from mass shootings to institutionalized racism, but Obama actually mocked Romney during the 2012 election for his Russophobia: “the 1980s are calling to ask for their foreign policy back”). The bipartisan lovefest gave neocons a chance to rebrand with the added bonus of delegitimizing the few remaining anti-war voices of the Resistance; they were the real progressives now. 

 

The worst tendencies of the new Resistance-Plus emerged in the Alliance for Securing Democracy, a bipartisan initiative whose stated mission is defending “democracy” against Russian interference, “applying the lessons” of 2016’s still-unproven election meddling and documenting “Vladimir Putin’s ongoing efforts to subvert democracy in the United States and Europe.” The ASD created the Hamilton 68 Dashboard, which purports to track Russian twitterbot influence despite utterly unscientific methodology - the tool was enthusiastically adopted by the establishment media, which uses it to smear dissident journalists. ASD is run by Clinton campaign foreign policy advisor Laura Rosenberger and rabid neocon Jamie Fly, who spent the Obama years lustfully advocating for preemptive war on Iran; he openly mocked the idea of diplomacy as a foreign policy option and essentially called the president a slacker for only dropping 72 bombs a day. Yet the ASD is fully in alignment with the new Democratic Party line epitomized by Clinton, in which the party that once protested the Vietnam War now out-hawks the GOP. 

 

Kagan threw a public tantrum after Trump’s nomination, calling himself a “former Republican” and announcing that “the party cannot be saved, but the country still can be.” For a minute, it looked like the GOP might take him up on his implied offer, embracing non-interventionism in the person of the mercurial Trump, but the president-elect soon disappointed everyone by cleaving to the traditional party line. Still, 2016 could be considered a referendum on neoconservatism - in the crowded GOP primary, the neocon candidates were quick to flame out despite heavy funding. Bush, whose very name is synonymous with his older brother’s eponymous Doctrine, couldn’t crack 1% of the electorate despite his bottomless campaign war chest. Rubio, whose lack of experience and foreign policy knowledge made him an ideal empty vessel for the ideas of advisers like Jamie Fly, had a brief moment in the sun as the Not-Trump candidate, but even the most skilled puppeteer couldn’t make a statesman out of him. Cruz was never a proper neocon, but the PNAC relics were desperate for a candidate at that point, and the sniveling Senator from Texas was at least a politician. At a time when the world had finally awoken to the utter moral irredeemability of the imperialist sociopaths, it was liberals who were tricked into offering them shelter under the auspices of the Resistance. We fucked up. Like vampires, neocons cannot enter one's home uninvited; like vampires, they are unlikely to leave without draining the host of blood. The neocon faction was quick to take over the GOP last time they switched parties, and they are almost certainly involved in the unprecedented numbers of former CIA and military intelligence running for office on the Democratic ticket, many of whom cut their teeth in covert ops fighting the neocons' wars. While the DNC squabbles about impeachment and delusional lawsuits, the neocons are consolidating control; Kagan, clearly in for the long haul, is already calling himself a "liberal interventionist." 

 

When progressives fell in line behind Clinton as the Democratic nominee, they were forced to reconcile her overcompensatory militarism with their own anti-war sentiments. Excusing the crimes of one neocon excuses them all - Clinton robbed the party of the moral legitimacy it has always clung to in the country’s darkest hours. Under Obama, Democratic voters could at least claim they’d been hoodwinked - they’d voted for hope, change, and anyone-but-Bush, and he’d given them drones, whistleblower prosecutions, and Bush-in-a-black-man-suit. But Clinton never misled anyone about her positions. Sure, she swaddled her warmongering in a lot of humanitarian bubble-wrap, making sure everyone had heard the stories of Gaddafi’s viagra-fueled rape brigades before laying waste to the most advanced country in Africa, but under her leadership, the State Department was essentially transformed into an arm of the military, giving diplomatic cover to military action and expanding the US military presence into over 100 countries. Like Kristol, Boot, and the other PNAC war-junkies who have been wrong about everything from Iraq to Trump himself, she adamantly refuses to learn from her mistakes, or even admit they were mistakes - a misplaced confidence that her followers mistake for a leadership quality. And it is progressives who suffer, who are ignored, ridiculed, antagonized, and smeared unless they adopt the new orthodoxy. Even Jill Stein, whose quixotic fundraising efforts for a recount the Clinton campaign didn't even want should have endeared her to the election-deniers, got the full Ralph Nader treatment as those supporters flailed around for anyone to blame besides the person in the mirror.

 

The portion of the media now devoted to covering the Gospel of Russiagate means Trump is literally getting away with murder, somewhere in Yemen or Somalia, with the collusion of a Congress about to be packed full of intelligence operatives. Journalists are all but burned at the stake for the heresy of questioning western-friendly geopolitical narratives, tarred as bots, trolls, and useful idiots, their accounts blocked or censored in a chilling presentiment of the Ukrainian Ministry of Information Policy's state-sponsored violence. A free and adversarial press is integral to a free society. Religious doctrine and palace intrigue masquerading as news is not. The Resistance must recover its moral center and start acting instead of reacting. If the US starts World War 3, it will not matter if Trump fires Mueller, because we will all be dead. 

 

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The validity of the US political system hinges on the perceived legitimacy of its voting process. Even in 2018's hyper-partisan climate, faith in the possibility of change through voting stops Americans from burning Washington down and tearing out the throats of the political class. Yet each election cycle brings more proof that these contests are neither free nor fair, despite our vaunted self-image as the pinnacle of democratic perfection. Bush v. Gore, Sanders v. Clinton, and all the little anomalies in between have cast a shadow over the American democratic process. Public trust in the political and media establishment is at an all-time low, yet neither group has grasped the need to evolve or perish. Instead, it is the military-intelligence axis, cloaked in Resistance camouflage, plotting an unprecedented power grab while the old guard is at its weakest. What's left of American democracy is on the chopping block and the Deep State is poised to infiltrate the elected state.

 

Trump’s election win shocked Democratic and progressive voters out of their Obama-era complacency, alerting them to their own party’s duplicity even as they began to realize how far right that party had drifted over the preceding eight years. Support for the Democratic Party among millennials has actually declined 9% since the 2016 election, and it’s not because the Republicans’ message is so compelling. While the percentage of millennials who support the Democrats declined from 53% to 46%, support for Republicans remained constant at 28%. Many of those 9% said they would rather stay home on election day. How are Democrats failing so thoroughly to connect with voters when all predictions point to a "blue wave" of midterm victories?

 

The 2016 election taught a generation of activists that the Democratic party did not care about their vote. Bernie Sanders supporters saw their candidate systematically silenced, sidelined, suppressed, mocked - and finally, when he seemed poised to win the nomination against all odds, cheated. It is no surprise that many were unable to heed the tepid calls for Party unity that followed, even when those calls came from Sanders himself. Responding to a lawsuit filed by DNC donors and Sanders supporters, lawyers for the Party claimed it had no contractual obligation to consider voters’ input in choosing a candidate - that Party leadership could choose the winner in the proverbial smoke-filled back room if they wanted - and that the DNC charter, which mandates the Chairperson “exercise impartiality and even handedness as between the Presidential candidate and campaigns,” was just a “political promise” and therefore nonbinding. 

 

In the intervening two years, the DNC could have made an effort to mend fences. Even if party leadership couldn’t agree to do away with the undemocratic superdelegate structure, a sincere apology campaign would have gone a long way - disillusioned liberals, after all, have nowhere to go, absent a viable third party. But the DNC continues to shun progressive candidates, throwing its weight behind lukewarm “centrists” indistinguishable from their Republican opponents in the race to take back control of Congress despite poll after poll suggesting voters are moving to the left.

 

Self-Handicapping Gunshot Wound to the Foot as Strategy

In Texas’ 7th district, the DCCC published opposition research to smear Laura Moser, a progressive writer in a three-way primary contest against a Goldman Sachs banker and a corporate lawyer. In Colorado, Democratic Whip Steny Hoyer was caught on tape pressuring Levi Tillemann to drop out of the 6th District primary, explaining that while “staying out of primaries sounds small-D democratic, very intellectual, and very interesting,” the DCCC had already chosen to support corporate lawyer and Iraq veteran Jason Crow. House Majority Leader Nancy Pelosi defended the mafiaesque intimidation, chastising Tillemann for recording the phone call without Hoyer's permission. 

 

Hoyer is a fitting mouthpiece for big-money Democrats, having begun his House career as a protégé of then-DCCC chair Tony Coelho, whose signature accomplishment was transforming the DCCC from a common people’s party into a corporate lobbyist's paradise. Coelho instituted the fundraising practice of selling access to Democratic leaders at a Party “Speaker’s Club,” where donors who pledged $5000 and up could bend the ear of committee chairmen, Party leaders, and other club members. The Speaker’s Club seems quaint in the post-Citizens United era, but in 1983 the campaign finance arms race had only just begun. Hoyer has also pioneered the exploitation of fundraising loopholes like bundling and leadership PACs to become the top donor to fellow House Democrats. 

 

After Juanita Perez Williams tanked in her 2017 bid for mayor of Syracuse, losing even her own neighborhood to an independent candidate in the heavily Democratic city, the DCCC flew her to Washington to discuss running for New York’s 24th Congressional district against the Republican incumbent. She initially declined, even donating to Dana Balter, whom four local Democratic committees were backing for the seat, then jumped into the race at the last minute, claiming a “political mentor” had changed her mind. Perez Williams criticized Balter for failing to attract support from national Democratic leaders and donors, pointing to her Republican opponent’s comparatively massive war chest as proof she would not be able to compete in the general election, and secured an added chunk of campaign dollars with her inclusion in the DCCC’s Red to Blue swing-seat program. Syracuse Democrats seethed as their grassroots organizing was ignored.

 

The DCCC increased its primary involvement in 2006, promoting corporate moderates over progressive candidates with the rationale that centrists were more likely to beat Republicans in the general election. Instead, many of the Party’s anointed candidates lost the general, while some progressives won without DCCC support. 2016, too, saw big losses by moderates at the polls, handing tripartite control of the government to the Republican Party. Democrats have lost over 1000 state legislature seats since Obama’s election in 2008, a downward spiral that continued in 2016 despite record fundraising numbers. Last year saw the DNC defiantly packing its leadership ranks with lobbyists and deep-pocketed donors, ensuring another crop of superdelegates out of touch with rank-and-file voters. But they seem determined not to learn from their mistakes, doubling down on a failed strategy. That is, if these are mistakes at all, and not deliberate Party suicide.

 

Viewing Democrats’ electoral losses as failure assumes winning elections is their goal, but the primary process seems geared more toward enriching the party’s network of approved political consultants. Prospective candidates are given the “rolodex test,” challenged to raise $250,000 from the contacts on their phone before the DCCC will even consider backing them. They are told to spend four hours a day fundraising and then turn over 75% of that money to the DCCC’s chosen campaign consultants (a Memorandum of Understanding ironically refers to these as “professional staff and consultants who can help execute a winning campaign in the 2018 General Election”). Primary campaigns must focus on “highlighting our shared values as Democrats and holding Republicans accountable.” Running within this uninspired paradigm turns the Democrats into the Party of No - they actually field-tested the slogan “I mean, have you seen the other guys?” for the midterms. 

 

Bullying voters to the polls by portraying Trump as Hitler 2.0 didn’t work in 2016 and will not work in 2018, but the party refuses to take a clear stand for anything. The official 2018 platform, “A Better Deal,” is a Clintonesque hodgepodge of compromises sure to inspire strong feelings in no one. Too populist for Wall Street and too moderate for progressives, it includes a new regulatory agency to curb skyrocketing prescription drug prices, a new federal office devoted to policing monopolistic corporate behavior, and 10 million jobs created through tax-credit alchemy. Worse, candidates are admonished not to take strong stances on hot-button issues like gun control and Like rats fleeing the Titanic, individual Democratic candidates have recognized the necessity of distancing themselves from their party’s reactionary message and many are running on platforms of their own design. While the DNC heeds the stay-the-course advice of hedge funder Steve Rattner, who considers Medicare-for-all a fringe notion despite polls indicating that two-thirds of Democrats support it, progressives are running on everything from free public college tuition to a new 9/11 investigation. 

 

Abandon Your Principles, All Ye Who Enter Here

 

Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer pledged to lead the anti-Trump crusade after 2016, but he joined ninety-two percent of Democratic senators in failing to condemn the president’s illegal missile strike in Syria last month. A few piped up with weak legalistic objections, reprimanding the president for neglecting to get congressional authorization for the strikes, but the total lack of moral condemnation suggested they would have gladly granted such authorization. Only Edward Markey (D-MA), Christopher Murphy (D-CT), and Kristen Gillibrand (D-NY) (along with Bernie Sanders, once more an Independent) stood with US and international law against the bombing. Elizabeth Warren and Kamala Harris, two supposed stalwarts of the Resistance, revealed themselves as utter political invertebrates with their refusal to stand up to the president.

 

The lack of resistance from the Resistance is even more troubling in the context of the new Authorization for Use of Military Force (AUMF) bill proposed by Senators Bob Corker (R-TN) and Tim Kaine (D-VA). The previous AUMF, signed in the wake of 9/11, has been extended year after year via increasingly tortuous links between the locations and entities initially authorized for military engagement and our current “enemies.” Current military engagements bear little resemblance to those authorized in the 2001 and 2002 AUMFs but Congress had been reluctant to attempt a rewrite until now, lest they deprive the president of his beloved war powers.

 

The new AUMF allows the president to unilaterally declare war anywhere in the world, against any non-nation-state group, without Congressional approval. It is an unprecedented and unconstitutional expansion of executive power. Under Article I of the Constitution, a Congressional majority and presidential approval are required to legally go to war. Past presidents got around that problem by calling their war a “police action” (Korean War) or using a false flag attack to justify a temporary use of military force that was then extended both temporally and geographically (Vietnam/Cambodia/Laos, Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, Somalia, Yemen) or just shooting first and asking questions later (Syria). Trump will no longer have to even pretend to seek Congressional approval, since blocking a presidential declaration of war would require a veto-proof two-thirds majority in a Congress that can barely agree on bills to fund itself. 

 

One would expect the Resistance to be up in arms about the idea of giving unprecedented war powers to a president they so vehemently oppose, but the silence so far has spoken volumes. Barbara Lee and Jeff Merkley are the only Senate Democrats to publicly oppose the bill, joined by Rand Paul on the Republican side. After seventeen years of constant war, have the other Senators forgotten what it’s like to say no to blowing something up? If this is Resistance, I’d hate to see Acquiescence.

 

The Israeli Knesset recently passed a similar resolution allowing Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to declare war “in extreme circumstances” with the approval of his Defense Minister. Netanyahu celebrated the vote by fearmongering about Iran’s “secret nuclear program,” a figment of his imagination, in a thinly-veiled order to Trump to pull out of the Iranian nuclear deal (JCPOA). Given the close relationship between the two countries - Senators Corker and Kaine, like everyone else in Congress, had to sign what amounts to a loyalty oath to Israel in order to access campaign funds - it is not a coincidence that both nations are giving their leaders unprecedented war-making powers at this time. The clouds of war are gathering over Iran as Trump nixes the JCPOA and Netanyahu plays target practice on Syrian air bases. 

 

It was not Obama, King of the Drones, who taught the Democrats to stop worrying and love the bomb. Clinton’s “humanitarian bombing” of Yugoslavia sent that country back to the stone age under the guise of saving the poor Albanians from genocidal maniac Slobodan Milosevic. Only Milosevic wasn’t the monster the media claimed, the Kosovo Liberation Army had been designated a terrorist group until the CIA opted to start funding them, and Milosevic was eventually exonerated of war crimes charges. Clinton’s war crimes are often overlooked in the shadow of Bush’s, but those looking to the Democratic Resistance to stand up to the military-industrial complex would do well to remember that not since Carter has a Democratic president made it through his tenure without starting a war - and Carter only lasted one term.

 

Death Squad Caucus

 

The 2018 campaign introduced a more virulent strain of political operator into the Democratic machine, one with no ideological connection to the Party but which nevertheless has the full backing of its leadership. Fifty-seven intelligence agency veterans - more than in any election in US history - are running for Democratic Congressional seats, hoping to capitalize on the anticipated "blue wave" of Democratic voters turning out to register their dissatisfaction with Trump. The DCCC specifically sought out candidates with Deep State backgrounds for its "Red to Blue" program, running military-intelligence candidates in 10 of the 22 House seats that comprise the program. The Deep State Democrats make no effort to conceal their pasts, now that decades of positive media portrayals and war-on-terror propaganda have convinced voters they are the good guys. Indeed, the CIA's reputational transformation from reviled rogue agency and illegal infiltrator of left-wing groups to patriotic feeder group for the nominally Left Democratic Party is surely the public relations coup of the century. 

 

Elissa Slotkin, CIA vet and former top aide to John “Death Squad” Negroponte, the war criminal responsible for thousands of civilian deaths during Reagan’s Central American regime-change wars of the 1980s, is running for Michigan’s 8th Congressional District, challenging the Republican incumbent. Slotkin moved to Michigan last May, two months before launching her candidacy. Her candidate page checks all the boxes - union endorsements, middle-of-the-road platitudes, an endorsement from Joe Biden (!), with the obligatory line about how “the game feels rigged by politicians in Washington, who seem to care more about the interests of big donors and corporations, [sic] than the very people they represent.” As Senior Assistant to Negroponte when he was Director of National Intelligence under Bush, Slotkin would have been present when Negroponte was forming and training anti-insurgent death squads in Iraq. Surely this experience gives her extensive insight on how to fight for affordable healthcare for the people of Michigan.

 

Slotkin is just one of many candidates linked to Iraq war crimes. Jeff Beals, running for New York’s 19th District Congressional seat, has tried to obfuscate his ties not only to Iraqi death squads, but also to the Clinton political machine. Beals’ campaign manager is Bennett Ratliff, a “longtime friend and ally of Hillary Clinton,” who worked with the then-Secretary of State in her attempt to legitimize the 2009 coup against democratically-elected Honduran president Manuel Zelaya. Beals has downplayed Ratliff’s role in his campaign, calling himself a “Bernie democrat” and shunning traditional big-money fundraising in order to paint himself as a grassroots candidate. Beals was involved in the initial effort to set up a US-friendly puppet regime in Iraq in 2005 under Nour al-Maliki, who presided over an explosion in sectarian insurgency and the rise of ISIS. When he first arrived in Iraq, Beals came under the wing of Deputy Ambassador to Iraq Robert Ford, helping recruit Iraqi death squads under the direction of Ambassador…John Negroponte. 2018 might as well be called the Year of the Death Squad Democrats. Yet to hear Beals tell it, he was part of an effort to “help [the US] find a way out” of Iraq. In 2005. Must have gotten turned around somewhere in Najaf.

 

If Death Squad Beals doesn’t float your aircraft carrier, there’s another spook running in New York’s 19th. Patrick Ryan served two tours as an Army intelligence officer in Iraq, coordinating counterterrorism and counterinsurgency in Mosul, which soon became Iraq’s first ISIS stronghold when Iraqi security forces inexplicably fled the advancing militants in June 2014, leaving their weapons (and $500 million in cash) behind. Back in civilian life, Ryan worked with Berico Technologies on a plan for a “real-time surveillance operation of left-wing groups and labor unions” in collaboration with HBGary Federal and Palantir Technologies. HBGary famously collapsed after hacker group LulzSec released company emails detailing the extent of that surveillance operation, which had been commissioned by the US Chamber of Commerce. Ryan later worked for data analytics firm Dataminr, which received funding from InQTel, the CIA’s venture capital firm, and provided law enforcement with real-time social media updates from activists via proprietary access to Twitter’s “firehose”. While Ryan isn’t insulting voters’ intelligence by running as a progressive, the fact that he and Beals have the two wings of the Democratic party staked out is disturbing. 

 

WSWS has compiled a complete and detailed list of all the CIA candidates. If Democrats win the 24 seats necessary to reclaim the House, spook-slate candidates will hold the balance of power among freshman representatives. No platform plank is too bizarre for an intel plant’s platform - State Department operative Tom Malinowski would “work to keep American a force for good in the world, aligned with countries that share our belief in human rights, not with the dictators Trump prefers” - presumably the Jersey House hopeful knows that the US government provides military assistance to over three-quarters of the world’s dictatorships, and will just pick and choose his preferred repressive regimes to avoid “aligning” (what does that mean, exactly?) with countries favored by Trump.

 

Resistance groups are pushing voters to flip the House at all costs - to vote the Party, not the candidate - but early intervention in these primaries is essential lest the general election force yet another matching pair of red and blue evils down our throats. Congress is supposed to provide the checks and balances on Deep State power - when it becomes another tentacle of the intelligence services, there is no turning back. Power grabbed by these agencies is not voluntarily relinquished.

 

Alienating Their Audience; Spending Their Money

Last month, DNC Chair Tom Perez filed a lawsuit against the Trump campaign, WikiLeaks, and the country of Russia, alleging they colluded to influence the 2016 election. This pointless temper tantrum of a suit reflects Democratic establishment anger that the Mueller investigation has come up all but empty, yielding 13 indictments against Russian nationals for penny-ante crimes like identity theft and wire fraud but tacitly admitting there is no evidence of the promised collusion. The House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence concurred in its report, finding no evidence the campaign “colluded, coordinated or conspired” with the Russian government. Case closed? Not for Perez. Confronted with the writing on the wall, he has merely painted over it. 

 

The text of the suit is overtly melodramatic ("No one is above the law!"), indulging in legally indefensible leaps of logic in its tortured attempt at proving the DNC’s case. Though there is still no proof the Russian government was responsible for the DNC email leak, Perez holds them (and WikiLeaks, and the Trump campaign) responsible for the results anyway, claiming the leak was part of a campaign to “undermine public faith in the US democratic process, denigrate secretary Clinton, and harm her electability and potential presidency.” Certainly the emails helped undermine faith in elections and hurt Clinton’s electability, but only because they presented voters with indisputable evidence that the DNC primary had been rigged in Clinton’s favor. The leaks undermined “the party’s ability to achieve unity” and “rally members around their shared values” because they demonstrated that the Party did not share voters’ values! 

 

Adding insult to injury, the suit describes the content of the hacked emails as “trade secrets” and claims that because their publication harmed the DNC’s “business,” compensation is in order. Leaking is now “economic espionage.” They even tack on copyright law violations. The whole package spits in the face of the First Amendment, once more demonstrating that the DNC does not share the values of the rank and file voters, who value freedom of the press - and who are embarrassed by the DNC’s need to relitigate the lost election. The lawyer who filed the DNC suit is a partner in the Securities Litigation and Investor Protection practice at Cohen Milstein, where he focuses on recovering money for investors in mortgage-backed securities. How this joke suit stacks up to bad mortgage investments is unclear, but perhaps he is a sort of legalistic St. Christopher, patron solicitor of lost causes.

 

CNN’s Gloria Borger was the first to accuse Perez of pulling a fundraising stunt, which he denies, and indeed the legal costs inherent in such a sprawling and bizarre lawsuit would cancel out any sympathy donations. Instead, the purpose of the filing seems to be to keep the specter of collusion in the headlines a little longer. Never mind that it’s splintering the party unity the DNC supposedly values so highly, with Sen. Claire McCaskill (D-MO) and Rep. Jackie Speier (D-CA) publicly expressing misgivings, or that voters are sick of Russiagate - a Harvard-Harris poll conducted last June revealed 73% of voters were concerned that Mueller’s probe was distracting Congress from more important issues. Another poll released earlier this month shows the promised “blue wave” of Democratic turnout losing momentum, with voters left cold by candidates’ apparent disinterest in the economic issues that actually affect their lives.  

 

Since 2016, the RNC has out-fundraised the DNC by more than 2:1. While individual Democratic campaigns and party committees have seen their fundraising numbers soar, the DNC’s refusal to conduct an “autopsy” of the 2016 debacle or offer a clear plan for winning in the midterms has turned off longtime donors. Broke and desperate, the Party is asking members to contribute or raise $1000 each, a request it never made in the past. The resulting vicious cycle sees the DNC hemorrhaging money, manpower, and voter support. To burden the cash-strapped organization with a massive lawsuit is nothing short of suicidal.

 

The DNC declined to examine the reasons for its 2016 loss, preferring instead to blame Russian meddling with a soupçon of misogyny. California Progressive Caucus Chair Karen Bernal and DNC delegate Norman Solomon conducted their own autopsy and found that the Party had prioritized wooing Republicans and independents over connecting with its base, especially youth, people of color, and the working class; the absence of a strong economic justice message, as well as Clinton’s hawkishness, also turned voters off, as did the Party’s failure to address its own undemocratic procedures as revealed in the leaked emails. The autopsy concluded the Party must do away with the superdelegate process; distance itself from Wall Street, corporate interests, and the military-industrial complex; and focus on programs addressing economic and social justice. All signs would indicate that Perez and the DNC have not actually read the autopsy. The Party is poised to repeat the blunders that cost it so much in 2016. No political organization could be so stupid - meaning this is a deliberate strategy.

 

The DNC’s seemingly inept response to the 2016 debacle appears to be the first step in a corporate raid on the Party by Deep State interests. "Order out of chaos" is the modus operandi of US intelligence, and DNC leadership couldn’t have done a better job of tanking the Party’s value, driving away donors, voters and even candidates with its focus on bland corporate-friendly messaging amid an activist political climate. The CIA then plays the corporate raider (or parasitic wasp, depending on your tastes), taking over the empty shell of the Party and filling it with its own operatives. Once in control, the Deep State can evict the remnants of the DNC's stubborn progressive contingent and wrench the Overton Window irreversibly to the right. Many progressives already criticize the Democratic party for being nearly indistinguishable from the GOP. With its anti-war faction all but wiped out already under Obama and Clinton, the two parties have never been closer to complete overlap. The rise of the Deep State Democrats will lead to a total eclipse of democracy. This coup must be blocked at all costs.

 

 
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The dogs of Empire are howling for Iranian blood. Iran has dropped the petrodollar - banned the dollar from its markets entirely! - and it must be punished, lest other countries follow its example and start thinking they control their own economies. The US, Israel, and Saudi Arabia, frustrated by their failure to take out Syrian President Bashar al-Assad, another petrodollar apostate, have shifted their sights to the next country on their checklist for remaking the Middle East in the image of Greater Israel.

 

As President Donald Trump prepares to scuttle the Iran nuclear deal (JCPOA) despite Iran’s compliance, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu gave a theatrical press conference last night, outlining Iran’s “secret nuclear program” and beating the drums for war against the Islamic Republic. Netanyahu’s report, based on 100,000 files stolen from Tehran by the Israeli Mossad, contains no new information, nor does it offer proof Iran is currently violating the nuclear agreement; instead, it fixates on Project Amad, a “secret program” already known to the IAEA which Netanyahu admits was shelved in 2003 but which he claims was merely placed on hold to be resurrected when the West least expects it. “Why would a terrorist regime hide and meticulously catalog its secret nuclear files if not to use them at a later date?” he asks, perhaps unaware that by pushing the US to scrap the deal, he is opening the door to Iran resuming development of nuclear weapons, at which point those “secret nuclear files” will come in handy. The performance served a clear propaganda purpose for Trump, who cited it as proof that he was correct in seeking to withdraw from the deal over the protests of other JCPOA signatories, including France, UK, Russia, China, and Germany. 

 

Israeli Defense Minister Avigdor Lieberman, who has said there are no innocent people in Gaza, is fully on board with ramping up Iranian hostilities, explaining that Israel has three problems: “Iran, Iran and Iran.” UN Secretary Nikki Haley, who never met a country she didn’t want to bomb, admitted last month that the US would maintain a military presence in Syria against Assad’s wishes in order to “watch” Iran “because Iran is a national threat to American interests." John Bolton, Trump’s new national security advisor, is so bloodthirsty he gives even CNN pause. His enthusiasm for preemptively bombing Iran makes Haley look timid. He is affiliated with Mujahedin E Khalq, an Iranian terrorist cult that Mossad has used to leak fake documents intended to frame the regime as a nuclear threat. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, parroting the treasured neocon lie that Iran is the world’s top sponsor of terrorism, cozied up to Saudi Arabia (the actual top sponsor of terrorism) during his first official state visit, chiding Iran for “destabilizing the region” - an accusation that would be hilarious if he didn’t wield so much power. Pompeo was known during his time as CIA head for discussing the Rapture with co-workers. Trump couldn't ask for a more Strangelovian crew.

 

In March, Iran banned the use of the dollar in foreign trade, effectively signing its own death warrant, if history is any guide. Libya didn’t survive this move; neither did Iraq. Syria hangs on by the skin of its teeth after dropping the dollar in 2006 but seems to have scored a temporary reprieve from the fate of its neighbors now that Russia has stepped in. Putin's interference has caused no end of anguish to the neocons, who see Assad's continued existence as a finger in the eye of their economic hegemony, but so far they are unwilling to risk a direct confrontation with Russian forces.

 

Iran has been distancing itself from the petrodollar for years in the face of ongoing US hostility. In May 2017, the country signed an agreement with Russia to barter oil for goods, circumventing US sanctions on both countries. When Trump banned Iranian immigrants from entering the US last January, the country dropped the dollar as the official currency used in financial and foreign exchange reports. Following that move, Congress introduced a bill authorizing the use of military force in Iran. While it has not yet passed, the resolution “authorizes the President to use the US Armed Forces as necessary in order to prevent Iran from obtaining nuclear weapons.” What a coincidence, then, that Netanyahu’s PowerPoint posits just that eventuality.

 

In 2008, Iran launched its International Oil Bourse, an exchange for trading oil, gas and petroleum products in non-dollar currencies, sparking another round of US sanctions. Far from impeding trade, however, the sanctions encouraged Iran's trade partners to work around the petrodollar, accelerating a global drift away from the imperial currency. In 2016, Iran switched to rupees in conducting oil trades with India. Earlier this year, China launched the petroyuan, an oil-futures contract denominated in the Chinese currency and a potentially serious threat to dollar hegemony now that China is the world’s largest oil importer. Russia, like Iran a victim of harsh US sanctions, has been quick to jump on board with the petroyuan, signing on to a payment system that allows the two countries to trade directly in their own currencies without dollar intermediaries. The imposition of further sanctions on Iran under Trump may accelerate the decline in relevance of the petrodollar as Iran, the third-largest oil producer, is pushed into China’s arms.

 

The official narratives employed to sell petrodollar wars to the American people vary, but their core remains constant. Any nation with the hubris to believe it controls its own economy - that it can sell its own oil in whatever currency it pleases, to whomever it pleases - must be punished, lest others follow its example and the petrodollar collapse like the house of cards it is. Offending nations are always disarmed first, because there’s nothing the Empire hates more than a fair fight. Saddam Hussein destroyed his weapons stockpiles after the first Gulf War, yet the ghosts of these weapons were used as casus belli for a second Iraq invasion. Muammar Gaddafi liquidated his arsenal as part of diplomatic rapprochement with the US and UK in the years before he himself was brutally liquidated. NATO forces didn’t even try to come up with a good reason for the disaster in Libya, citing concerns about the regime attacking civilians only to slaughter hundreds more civilians itself. Syria destroyed its chemical weapons four years ago; it has only recently been pulled back from the brink of oblivion through Russian intervention after nearly a decade fighting rebels backed by the US, Israel and Saudi Arabia. Like Hussein, Assad continues to be accused of harboring more weapons. On the brink of defeat, Syrian rebels staged a chemical attack last month and blamed the regime, provoking hasty response strikes from Israel, US, UK, and France before OPCW inspectors could arrive on the scene and confirm that no chemical attack had in fact taken place.

 

Israel killed 26 soldiers, mostly Iranians, with a missile strike on the Brigade 47 base in Syria yesterday; the base, located in Hama, is one of the largest Iranian-linked sites in the country. The unprovoked strike suggests the Netanyahu regime has tired of complaining to the US and Russia about the Iranian presence in Syria and decided to take matters into its own hands. Bibi’s blustering press conference also distracts from Israeli Defense Forces’ flagrantly illegal slaughter of unarmed protesters and journalists in Gaza during the Palestinian March of Return. Even in a nation that routinely flouts international law, the scale of the violence that has left dozens dead and over a thousand wounded during the last few weeks has broken through the usual media blackout on Israeli war crimes and horrified the global community. Haley continues to veto UN resolutions against the IDF violence, but even prominent Jewish American celebrities like Natalie Portman are beginning to publicly distance themselves from Netanyahu's government.

Netanyahu has been crying wolf about Iranian nukes for over 25 years. In 1995, he claimed Iran was three to five years away from developing a nuclear bomb, an alarm he continues to sound every few years. Though most apocalyptic preachers who repeatedly predict the end of the world only to watch the dates pass without incident are laughed out of town, Netanyahu has escaped this fate, perhaps because he sits on his own uncatalogued stockpile of hundreds of nukes and bathes in US taxpayer dollars to the tune of $10.1 million in military aid every day. He has previously helped lie the US into war, warning the Bush regime in 2002 that there was “no question whatsoever” that Saddam Hussein was developing nuclear weapons. It doesn't take much critical insight to recognize the Israeli Prime Minister is a pathological liar.

 

Iran has complied with the JCPOA since its inception in 2015, meaning Trump has no legitimate cause to withdraw the US from the treaty. Netanyahu's theatrics provide the flimsy rhetorical cover Trump will need should he decide, as he almost certainly will, to back out of the deal against the wishes of the other parties. Pompeo promised the US would "stand with Israel against Iran" - even though Iranian Supreme National Security Council Secretary Ali Shamkhani threatened to restart the country's nuclear program only if Trump canned the deal. Cause and effect work differently in the realms of Empire, apparently, but just like last month's standoff following the Douma "attack," this conflict has the potential to ignite World War 3. The US, Israel, and Saudi Arabia were all but defeated in Syria, and Saudi Arabia is also losing its proxy war in Yemen. Far from cautious even in the best of times, the allies may behave even more recklessly, and with Russian forces still on the ground in Syria, things could escalate quickly.

 

Iran has found itself in US crosshairs before. Last year, a wave of economic protests were hailed as the latest and greatest color revolution in the Arab Spring, but try as they might, US operatives were unable to convince the protesters the solution to their problems lay in overthrowing the Rouhani regime. A similar plan unfolded during the 2009 election, when opposition candidate Mousavi emerged as the figurehead of the so-called Green Revolution yet failed to unseat President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. Iran was famously part of Bush’s iconic/moronic Axis of Evil with Iraq and North Korea, though Bush had already overextended the military in Afghanistan and Iraq by the time he could have launched an Iranian invasion, much to Bolton's chagrin. Netanyahu’s involvement, however, suggests that this round of Iranian sabre-rattling is more serious. Bibi doesn’t put on a performance like last night's conference - which memorably featured a slide reading in huge letters "IRAN LIED" - for nothing. The Empire is spoiling for a fight after losing in Syria, and Iran is about to feel the wrath of a nuclear-armed lunatic helming a government whose stated policy in the face of certain defeat is nuclear holocaust.

 

“I’m sure he’ll do the right thing. The right thing for the US, the right thing for Israel, and the right thing for the peace of the world," Netanyahu said in a pointed hint to Trump and his pack of rabid dogs. Too bad those three "right things" are mutually exclusive.

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