Suppression/Propaganda in Media

[Belligerent Savant]

Just in case some don't get the joke...

The Babylon Bee is a conservative Christian news satire website that publishes satirical articles on topics including religion, politics, current events, and public figures. It has been referred to in the media as a Christian, evangelical, or conservative version of The Onion. Wikipedia

Interesting wikipedia entry. Haven't had an inclination to look up Babylon Bee's 'origins' as they're not a news org. I generally find their satire amusing, and in instances like the above, on-point.

One needn't be 'christian', 'conservative', or 'evangelical' to appreciate it, of course.

Elvis must have tipped off Twitter... [/sarcasm]

Seth Dillon
@SethDillon

They didn't take our account down. They locked it — meaning we can't post any new tweets — until we delete our "violative tweet." We haven't deleted anything, and they haven't, either. The tweet they want us to delete is still up.

11:24 AM · Mar 21, 2022

https://twitter.com/SethDillon/status/1 ... dcplQiv1Lg

[JackRiddler]

https://www.theonion.com/in-defense-of- ... 1848673776

In Defense Of Mass Censorship
Friday 2:12PM

When The Onion’s editorial board convened to discuss the tumultuous events of the previous month, one conclusion became evident: The world stands at a crossroads. Two visions of our collective future stand before us: On one side is a free and enlightened society, dedicated to the principles of openness, tolerance, and debate; the other is built upon ignorance, fear, and the suppression of dissent. Today, the path forward could not be clearer.

Simply put, we need mass censorship now.

Our country was founded upon the admirable principles of a moneyed elite spoon-feeding its beliefs to the ignorant and unwashed masses, and yet today that legacy stands in tatters. For too long, our nation has tolerated the mewling and rambling of the confused public. For too long, we have watched the God-given right to suppress free speech slip away. That’s why The Onion now stands united in calling on all governments, domestic and foreign, to immediately muzzle protesters, dissidents, and citizens of all stripes who take part in the blighted pestilence on human affairs known as freedom of expression.

Time and again, history has shown us that the opinions of the masses are not only noisome, they are dangerous. The free transmission of ideas through newspapers, pamphlets, and protest has too often threatened trusted figures of strength and stability such as Joseph Stalin, Kim Il-Sung, and Idi Amin. Have we learned nothing from their example about the importance of suppressing dissent from the moronic and childlike public?

Related
‘The Onion’ Promises Russian Oil Will Remain Available In ‘The Onion’ Store

Today, the dangers of free speech could not be clearer. Indeed, a recent Onion/Zweibel poll found that 93% of Americans have “little or no idea” what they’re talking about at any one time. Yet, what actions have been taken to stem the tide of inanities and idle chatter arising from their lips? Where is Mr. Biden, with his supposed focus on American greatness, if not deploying his troops to break in doors and earn his dimwitted populace’s respect through fear and coercion? Does the commander in chief not understand that every day his own citizens openly diminish his government on social media and in internet comment sections with zero fear of consequences?

Over the coming months, the Zweibel Institute for Mass Censorship will use its considerable leverage and multi-billion-dollar budget to lobby politicians worldwide to crack down upon any and all individuals who attempts to express their beliefs in public or private. Effective immediately, we will begin advocating in the U.S. Congress for the abolishment of the First Amendment and creation of a nationwide firewall to stifle dissent. In addition, we will examine the valiant efforts to stem the flow of information seen in the regimes of President Putin and Chairman Xi, who have demonstrated how worthwhile such nationwide censorship campaigns can be in terms of taming an unruly citizenry.

Critics may question where the globe’s citizens will find the information they need if not through traditional news sources. Of course, The Onion stands at the ready to act as a mouthpiece of the world’s elite, using its distinguished reportage to parrot whatever the party line happens to be. Genocide, eugenics, incest—no topic is too taboo to find support in our paper so long as it has been approved by a trustworthy establishment. What, indeed, is the purpose of the Fourth Estate if not to shepherd the simple-minded throng into blindly following a single unquestionable narrative? To this ideal, we remain dedicated.

[Belligerent Savant]

.

Good to see satire remains strong at The Onion.

This exposition is impressive -

https://theethicalskeptic.com/2022/03/1 ... /#comments

Disinformation vs Misinformation – Neither Can Be Defined by ‘Intent’ (Part I of II)

Posted on March 10, 2022 by The Ethical Skeptic

The social definitions of misinformation and disinformation suffer Wittgenstein Contextual Error. They are disinformation themselves. One should notice that, despite an expansion of such terminology and knowledge, nonetheless people grow more ignorant and gullible each decade. This is exactly how disinformation works.

The 10% lie is much more effective than the 100% one. While misinformation deals in lies, disinformation deals in facts. ‘Fact-checking’ therefore, is a favorite pretense of the disinformant.

There exist six states of wrong. Each state is defined below, along with its Wittgenstein identifier in parenthesis. But before we outline these definition delineations to a Wittgenstein level however, let’s briefly examine a principle I learned in my intelligence days.

Once detected, a 10% lie (disinformation) is much more informative than a 100% lie (misinformation) – as the latter is merely incorrect. The former often identifies the focus of the propaganda and the latter most often does not. This ‘added focus’ is not intent per se, but rather additional intelligence embedded inside the information itself. It is a status of the information therefore, and not of the person carrying it.

This is critical to comprehend. This ‘added intelligence’ (or agency) is sometimes misinterpreted as ‘intent’ (apparent intent) – hence the obvious confusion. Intent is the status of a person, not of the information. Being ‘partly correct’ (more accurately, the four forms of Disinformation below) is a status of information, not person.

All information stems from and carries intent. That is why it became information and was delivered to you in the first place. Therefore declaring that one knows in advance, what intent is bad (disinformation) and what intent is innocent (misinformation), constitutes a useless God proclamation. The ethical skeptic does not operate under such a luxury of inerrancy, as the ethical skeptic is not a god or anything near that. He or she cannot pretend to know intent a priori. He or she can only judge the soundness, completeness, and logical rigor of the syllogism and inference being passed.

The Conditions of Flawed Information

Misinformation

Misinformation deals in lies, purposed to a state of one ‘being ill-informed’ – as it gives wrong information.

When intentional, its intent is to injure or make the recipient appear as if irrational or error prone to others. Often it is fabricated so as to be detected at some point in the future when it will serve to discredit and harm the most. It is a form of poison information.

Misinformation (Latin ‘Mis’ – bad/wrong) – a state of holding information which is bad/wrong (this can be the result of both intent or non-intent and its contrived stickiness can be both permanent or temporary).1

• Wrong (sinnlos) – Factually incorrect (principally or ~100% wrong)
• Incoherent/Not even wrong (bedeutungslos) – Babble. Not a syllogism or statement of inference in reality

Disinformation

Disinformation deals in ‘facts’, purposed to a state of one ‘being un-informed’ – as it gives no actual salient or critical information at all – it can be most easily distinguished by what it ignores or is silent about.

Disinformation is chewing gum, which the consumer thinks is actual food. The disinformant of course does not want to be caught lying, and misinformation can be detected as a lie. Fact-checking therefore, is a favorite pretense of the disinformant – along with misdirection, appeal to ignorance or authority (debunking), or tag-line memorization. Its intent is to make the recipient appear artificially rational or correct before others, as long as they accede to it – so that the notion being passed, can spread more easily. It is fabricated so as to be harder to detect than mere lying. It is fabricated so as to displace the existence of usable information and create an intellectual vacuum (the absence or ‘without’).

Disinformation (Latin ‘Dis’ – without) – a state of being without information – a vacuum created by a spun ‘fact’ – which is superficially, irrelevantly, or partly correct – and distracts the recipient into not being aware that they hold no actual salient information at all (this is almost always intentional and almost always planned to be permanent in terms of its stickiness).2

• Contrived Correctness (sinnlos) – Factually correct, logically flawed or unsound inference
• Contrived Ignorance (sinnlos) – Mostly correct, Nelsonian knowledge or inference (10% wrong)
• Correct but Moot (unsinnig) – Inferentially moot, ignoratio elenchi, red herring, ingens vanitatum
• Apothegm/Tag-Line (unsinnig) – A social idiom, appeal to apothegm, or catch phrase

Propaganda and Malinformation

Malinformation, or malicious information, is information which is purposely released and which serves by its content (not per se intent), to harm a targeted individual or organization. It can come in the form of truth, disinformation, or misinformation. Doxxing someone’s children for instance, exposing a crime for which they were convicted as a teenager, or releasing nude photos of someone, all can be 100% true information. As well, it can be fabricated or partially correct. Therefore, malinformation is for the most part a species of propaganda, because propaganda employs both disinformation (true to partly true) and misinformation (lie), as does malinformation.

With that in mind, let us therefore define propaganda (as intent), below.

Propaganda (The Art of the Professional Lie)

The skilled exploitation of caustic or surreptitious misinformation, anonymously sourced malinformation, along with smoothed (both simple and authoritative) disinformation, passed selectively from fiat authority to those targeted and under its influence – which is used to harm opposition voices, and to make allied voices appear more credible.

Propaganda exploits the human proclivity towards fear-uncertainty-doubt (FUD), identifying the bad guy in advance (judging intent), and finally the desire for easy and simple answers.

To the intelligence professional, there is little utility in completely sincere ‘mistaken’ information. Moreover, ‘being mistaken’ most often stems from Nelsonian intent or fear to begin with. Therefore, everyone bears an intent in transmuting the information they pass to one degree or another.

The job of the intelligence professional is to detect agency, not simply human nature.

Please note as well that there exist both mis/disinformation and counter-mis/disinformation. One should not allow the complexity of ‘proposition versus counter-proposition’ to confuse the principle outlined above. A fact-checker for instance will often counter a claim made in public, and cite that it is ‘wrong’, when in fact only a minor, headlining, or trivial aspect of the material is wrong. Such would be a case of counter-propositional disinformation.

The counter-intelligence professional is trained to be a skilled observer of a special blend of misinformation and disinformation, called propaganda. Once they attempt to adjudicate these by intent alone, everything becomes a distinction without a difference. Everyone becomes a suspect.

As one can see, neither definition can hinge solely upon intent, as both can bear either its presence or absence. Gaslighting (an intent) for instance, can utilize both misinformation and disinformation at the same time. All six of these conditions of information, can stem from personal maliciousness, sincerity, or intent to deceive – which are conditions of the person, not conditions of information. This logical distinction is critical. Misinformation or Disinformation is a status of the information, and not of the myriad intents of potential people (or no people at all) who carry, promote, or alter it.

All of these conditions of information, are passed simultaneously and serially among layers of organization, intelligence and syndicate compartment, and series of individuals or authorities – all of whom are both sincere and insincere in their intent at the same time. All of whom also add their own spin.

The Problem of Intent:

Verschlimmbesserung – (German) to make something worse while trying to make it better. The fallacy of judging disasters by the measure that, those who bore the ‘good intentions’ should bear no fault, or place themselves as disconnected from the disaster.

A Lopsided Intent-Based Delineation is Disinformation Itself



Exhibit 1 – Intent vs Logic Based Delineation – most people do not perceive that they are being played from both ends of the disinformation and misinformation spectrum, not just one of them. Through declaring one end bad through intent and the other ‘good’, one has lost both the battle and the war.

This black arrow on the lower left hand side of Exhibit 1, is what one might call the ‘make it simple for me’ propaganda channel. The absolute hallmark of disinformation is, that it is most always crafted to be simple – which along with other treatments (see The Tree of Knowledge Obfuscation) are collectively termed as ‘smoothed’ in this chart.

Therefore, as one may observe in the above chart, intent is not a workable basis of delineation between misinformation and disinformation. Intent is an extra layer of discernment and complicatedness (Ockham’s Razor) one brings to the party before knowing anything at all. The problems of establishing an intent-based lopsided Wittgenstein footprint delineation include:

1. Since all Misinformation is only innocent in context, propaganda (the Intelligence definition) can never exist. Only conspiracy theory can exist.
2. A mutual exclusivity becomes a fortiori between Authority-Governance-Media (who only make mistakes, but bear only objective to good intent) and Malinformation. An exclusivity which forces all Disinformation (and therefore Conspiracy Theory) to reside outside the footprint of Authority-Governance-Media.
3. Authority-Governance-Media can disinform all they please, as there is no term which exists to describe malicious activity on their part – just as long as they never say anything provably ‘100% wrong’ (Wittgenstein Context Error).
4. This serves to establish the false dilemma, that if one questions The Narrative in the slightest, one is therefore a Conspiracy Theorist.
5. Finally, this bifurcation falsely reassures Narrative Ninnies, that they are indeed correct.

Through an ‘intent’ bifurcation, one essentially establishes the standard,
that as long as one employs the terms ‘fact’ and ‘conspiracy theory’ –
they therefore have earned a license to lie.

Moreover, as a result:

- A lie would change constantly back and forth from misinformation to disinformation and back as it was passed through a chain of command or syndicate, crony network – until becoming inevitably altered through a series of individuals, various levels of awareness and intent, and into the market of information.

- Information can be stripped of intent when it enters the marketplace of ideas to begin with. What does it become then? No longer disinformation? Baloney. This is exactly what fact-checkers thrive upon – assumed lack of agency.

- Discerning of ‘intent’ adds another unnecessary layer of uncertainty and complicatedness into the already shaky discourse around a science. This is an unwise activity from a philosophical standpoint, and should be avoided whenever possible.

- Through this type of value chain, if the definition were based upon solely intent, all disinformation would eventually devolve into misinformation in the market/field as it encountered more gullibility (less intent to deceive). Propaganda could never therefore exist at a level of accountability. It would perpetually wear the costume of innocent ‘misinformation’.

- A person can claim exculpatory status from maliciousness and propaganda simply by claiming ‘I was mistaken’ – when no such thing was true (and because there is no such status as ‘distaken’) and where indeed they purposely surrendered their diligence to an authority they knew to be disinformative.

The ethical skeptic knows that it is not actually their job (although it is human nature to do so) to psychically discern the intent of the person they are deliberating with across the table. We are not playing poker when deliberating science, philosophy, and truth. We are not trying to win a kitty or ego-stoking argument. This is how tribes and polarization foment, as everyone begins to distrust everyone on the opposing side, from expertly reading their ‘intent’ – rather than focusing upon the logical calculus at hand.

Of course we have seen the results of that working basis of definition. It is therefore high time for a new and Wittgenstein accurate one.

[conniption]

Glenn Greenwald

The NYT Now Admits the Biden Laptop -- Falsely Called "Russian Disinformation" -- is Authentic
(embedded links)

The media outlets which spread this lie from ex-CIA officials never retracted their pre-election falsehoods, ones used by Big Tech to censor reporting on the front-runner.

Glenn Greenwald
Mar 17, 2022

One of the most successful disinformation campaigns in modern American electoral history occurred in the weeks prior to the 2020 presidential election. On October 14, 2020 — less than three weeks before Americans were set to vote — the nation's oldest newspaper, The New York Post, began publishing a series of reports about the business dealings of the Democratic frontrunner Joe Biden and his son, Hunter, in countries in which Biden, as Vice President, wielded considerable influence (including Ukraine and China) and would again if elected president.

The backlash against this reporting was immediate and intense, leading to suppression of the story by U.S. corporate media outlets and censorship of the story by leading Silicon Valley monopolies. The disinformation campaign against this reporting was led by the CIA's all-but-official spokesperson Natasha Bertrand (then of Politico, now with CNN), whose article on October 19 appeared under this headline: “Hunter Biden story is Russian disinfo, dozens of former intel officials say.”




These "former intel officials" did not actually say that the “Hunter Biden story is Russian disinfo." Indeed, they stressed in their letter the opposite: namely, that they had no evidence to suggest the emails were falsified or that Russia had anything to do them, but, instead, they had merely intuited this "suspicion" based on their experience:

We want to emphasize that we do not know if the emails, provided to the New York Post by President Trump’s personal attorney Rudy Giuliani, are genuine or not and that we do not have evidence of Russian involvement -- just that our experience makes us deeply suspicious that the Russian government played a significant role in this case.

But a media that was overwhelmingly desperate to ensure Trump's defeat had no time for facts or annoying details such as what these former officials actually said or whether it was in fact true. They had an election to manipulate. As a result, that these emails were "Russian disinformation” — meaning that they were fake and that Russia manufactured them — became an article of faith among the U.S.'s justifiably despised class of media employees.

Very few even included the crucial caveat that the intelligence officials themselves stressed: namely, that they had no evidence at all to corroborate this claim. Instead, as I noted last September, “virtually every media outlet — CNN, NBC News, PBS, Huffington Post, The Intercept, and too many others to count — began completely ignoring the substance of the reporting and instead spread the lie over and over that these documents were the by-product of Russian disinformation.” The Huffington Post even published a must-be-seen-to-be-believed campaign ad for Joe Biden, masquerading as “reporting,” that spread this lie that the emails were "Russian disinformation.”

Huffington Post's false Biden campaign ad masquerading as a "report"

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3GCkBYx117c

This disinformation campaign about the Biden emails was then used by Big Tech to justify brute censorship of any reporting on or discussion of this story: easily the most severe case of pre-election censorship in modern American political history. Twitter locked The New York Post's Twitter account for close to two weeks due to its refusal to obey Twitter's orders to delete any reference to its reporting. The social media site also blocked any and all references to the reporting by all users; Twitter users were barred even from linking to the story in private chats with one another. Facebook, through its spokesman, the life-long DNC operative Andy Stone, announced that they would algorithmically suppress discussion of the reporting to ensure it did not spread, pending a “fact check[] by Facebook's third-party fact checking partners” which, needless to say, never came — precisely because the archive was indisputably authentic.

The archive's authenticity, as I documented in a video report from September, was clear from the start. Indeed, as I described in that report, I staked my career on its authenticity when I demanded that The Intercept publish my analysis of these revelations, and then resigned when its vehemently anti-Trump editors censored any discussion of those emails precisely because it was indisputable that the archive was authentic (The Intercept's former New York Times reporter James Risen was given the green light by these same editors to spread and endorse the CIA's lie, as he insisted that laptop should be ignored because “a group of former intelligence officials issued a letter saying that the Giuliani laptop story has the classic trademarks of Russian disinformation.") I knew the archive was real because all the relevant journalistic metrics that one evaluates to verify large archives of this type — including the Snowden archive and the Brazil archive which I used to report a series of investigative exposés — left no doubt that it was genuine (that includes documented verification from third parties who were included in the email chains and who showed that the emails they had in their possession matched the ones in the archive word-for-word).

Any residual doubts that the Biden archive was genuine — and there should have been none — were shattered when a reporter from Politico, Ben Schreckinger, published a book last September, entitled "The Bidens: Inside the First Family’s Fifty-Year Rise to Power," in which his new reporting proved that the key emails on which The New York Post relied were entirely authentic. Among other things, Schreckinger interviewed several people included in the email chains who provided confirmation that the emails in their possession matched the ones in the Post's archive word for word. He also obtained documents from the Swedish government that were identical to key documents in the archive. His own outlet, Politico, was one of the few to even acknowledge his book. While ignoring the fact that they were the first to spread the lie that the emails were "Russian disinformation,” Politico editors — under the headline “Double Trouble for Biden”— admitted that the book “finds evidence that some of the purported Hunter Biden laptop material is genuine, including two emails at the center of last October’s controversy.”

The vital revelations in Schreckinger's book were almost completely ignored by the very same corporate media outlets that published the CIA's now-debunked lies. They just pretended it never happened. Grappling with it would have forced them to acknowledge a fact quite devastating to whatever remaining credibility they have: namely, that they all ratified and spread a coordinated disinformation campaign in order to elect Joe Biden and defeat Donald Trump. With strength in numbers, and knowing that they speak only to and for liberals who are happy if they lie to help Democrats, they all joined hands in an implicit vow of silence and simply ignored the new proof in Schreckinger's book that, in the days leading up to the 2020 election, they all endorsed a disinformation campaign.

It will now be much harder to avoid confronting the reality of what they did, though it is highly likely that they will continue to do so. This morning, The New York Times published an article about the broad, ongoing FBI criminal investigation into Hunter Biden's international business and tax activities. Prior to the election, the Times, to their credit, was one of the few to apply skepticism to the CIA's pre-election lie, noting on October 22 that “no concrete evidence has emerged that the laptop contains Russian disinformation.” Because the activities of Hunter Biden now under FBI investigation directly pertain to the emails first revealed by The Post, the reporters needed to rely upon the laptop's archive to amplify and inform their reporting. That, in turn, required The New York Times to verify the authenticity of this laptop and its origins — exactly what, according to their reporters, they successfully did:

People familiar with the investigation said prosecutors had examined emails between Mr. Biden, Mr. Archer and others about Burisma and other foreign business activity. Those emails were obtained by The New York Times from a cache of files that appears to have come from a laptop abandoned by Mr. Biden in a Delaware repair shop. The email and others in the cache were authenticated by people familiar with them and with the investigation.

That this cache of emails was authentic was clear from the start. Any doubts were obliterated by publication of Schreckinger's book six months ago. Now the Paper of Record itself explicitly states not only that the emails “were authenticated” but also that the original story from The Post about how they obtained these materials — they “come from a laptop abandoned by Mr. Biden in a Delaware repair shop” — “appears” to be true.

What this means is that, in the crucial days leading up to the 2020 presidential election, most of the corporate media spread an absolute lie about The New York Post's reporting in order to mislead and manipulate the American electorate. It means that Big Tech monopolies, along with Twitter, censored this story based on a lie from “the intelligence community.” It means that Facebook's promise from its DNC operative that it would suppress discussion of the reporting in order to conduct a "fact-check” of these documents was a fraud because if an honest one had been conducted, it would have proven that Facebook’s censorship decree was based on a lie. It means that millions of Americans were denied the ability to hear about reporting on the candidate leading all polls to become the next president, and instead were subjected to a barrage of lies about the provenance (Russia did it) and authenticity (disinformation!) of these documents.

The objections to noting all of this today are drearily predictable. Reporting on Hunter Biden is irrelevant since he was not himself a candidate (what made the reporting relevant was what it revealed about the involvement of Joe Biden in these deals). Given the war in Ukraine, now is not the time to discuss all of this (despite the fact that they are usually ignored, there are always horrific wars being waged even if the victims are not as sympathetic as European Ukrainians and the perpetrators are the film's Good Guys and not the Bad Guys). The real reason most liberals and their media allies do not want to hear about any of this is because they believe that the means they used (deliberately lying to the public with CIA disinformation) are justified by their noble ends (defeating Trump).

Whatever else is true, both the CIA/media disinformation campaign in the weeks before the 2020 election and the resulting regime of brute censorship imposed by Big Tech are of historic significance. Democrats and their new allies in the establishment wing of the Republican Party may be more excited by war in Ukraine than the subversion of their own election by the unholy trinity of the intelligence community, the corporate press, and Big Tech. But today's admission by The New York Times that this archive and the emails in it were real all along proves that a gigantic fraud was perpetrated by the country's most powerful institutions. What matters far more than the interest level of various partisan factions is the core truths about U.S. democracy revealed by this tawdry spectacle.

https://greenwald.substack.com/p/the-ny ... laptop?s=w

[MacCruiskeen]

In search of nicer oil, Germany's Vice-Chancellor Robert Habeck (Green) went and grovelled to the Saudis last week. Their meeting was photographed.

Germany's main public-service news programme Die Tagesschau literally twisted the photo to the right until he matched the height of the strapping sheik he's bowing to. (Observe the slanting/vertical pillar.)

a) Tall Bob:

https://pbs.twimg.com/media/FOhhJS0WUBE ... name=large

b) Small Bob:

https://pbs.twimg.com/media/FOhhJS1WQAw ... me=360x360

[Belligerent Savant]

.

Mark Changizi, et al. v. Department of Health and Human Services, et al.

CASE SUMMARY

Mark Changizi, Daniel Kotzin, and Michael Senger each had or have Twitter accounts with tens of thousands of followers or more. Their Twitter platforms provided them with a social network, and an outlet to express their views, to hear the views of others, and to engage with detractors and fans alike. Outrageously, the U.S. Surgeon General and the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) have directed social media platforms including Twitter to censor alleged “misinformation” about Covid-19. The speech ban has included information the Government later conceded was true but that conflicted with the Government’s messaging on Covid-19 at the time. On March 3, the Surgeon General demanded that the tech companies turn over information about individuals who spread such “misinformation,” a clear intimidation tactic that HHS has labeled a “Request for Information” (RFI). In response to Government pressure, Twitter has permanently banned Mr. Senger, and temporarily suspended Mr. Changizi and Mr. Kotzin.

The lawsuit alleges that Surgeon General Vivek Murthy and HHS Secretary Xavier Becerra, whom NCLA has sued in their official capacities, do not have the statutory authority to issue this RFI.

In May 2021, the White House began a coordinated and escalating public campaign to stop the flow of purported “health misinformation” related to Covid-19. In a May 5, 2021 press briefing, White House Press Secretary Jen Psaki stated that the President believed social media platforms have a responsibility to censor health “misinformation” related to Covid-19 vaccinations, that by not doing so they were responsible for American deaths, and that the President believed “anti-trust” programs were in order to effectuate this end. In other words, if tech companies refused to censor, they would face antitrust investigations—or worse. By July, the Surgeon General and HHS ratcheted up the pressure by issuing an advisory on the subject, commanding technology platforms to collect data on the “spread and impact of misinformation” and “prioritize early detection of misinformation ‘super-spreaders’ and repeat offenders” by “impos[ing] clear consequences for accounts that repeatedly violate platform policies.”

Following this initiative, Twitter began to suspend more and more accounts, some permanently. Between May and December 2021, all three Plaintiffs were suspended from Twitter due to their tweets about Covid-19. This sort of censorship strikes at the heart of what the First Amendment to the U.S. Constitution was designed to protect—free speech, especially political speech, much of which has later been vindicated as accurate. Adding insult to injury, on March 3, the Surgeon General issued his RFI, demanding that technology platforms turn over “information about sources of Covid-19 misinformation” to the Government by May 2, 2022.

The Surgeon General does not have the authority to issue this demand. The statute only gives him the authority to implement measures to stem spread of communicable disease. The statute cannot reasonably be interpreted to allow him to order tech companies to censor individuals with whom he disagrees on Covid policy, or to demand that Twitter hand over information about such account holders without a warrant based on probable cause. Demanding social media platforms, including Twitter, to turn over information about users that the Government deems problematic constitutes a warrantless search in violation of the Fourth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution.

NCLA does not condone every position taken on Covid-19 by those whose Twitter accounts have been suspended or banned. But by instrumentalizing tech companies, including Twitter—through pressure, coercion, and threats—to censor viewpoints that the federal executive has deemed “misinformation,” the Surgeon General has turned Twitter’s censorship into state action. The Government’s policy of pressuring Twitter and other tech companies to censor the Plaintiffs should be halted immediately, and this RFI must be set aside.

https://nclalegal.org/mark-changizi-et- ... ces-et-al/

[MacCruiskeen]

@OffGuardian0 1 hr ago

Interestingly, #Pfizer [and BionTech] were the sponsor of the #Oscars, and have a new #Alopecia drug #ritlecitinib likely coming to market later this year. #WillAndChris

@cnni
Jada Pinkett Smith found her struggle with hair loss at the center of an unexpected controversy at the Oscars, after her husband Will Smith appeared to strike comedian Chris Rock in response to a joke he made about her shaved head.
https://twitter.com/cnni/status/1508447856683888650

https://twitter.com/OffGuardian0/status ... 3471726594

("appeared to", right, just like he appeared to punch an alien in Independence Day.)

I thought Smith's "angry words" were bleeped out later by the highly moral US corporate media because he had used "profanities". But having heard that "outburst" in full on a Japanese broadcast, I think they silenced him because it sounded hollow and fake as fuck. Can't they find any decent actors for these ads?

ON EDIT: The BBC reports: "Viewers at home didn't hear the swearing. Broadcast network ABC had cut the live feed to avoid offending viewers at home." Prescient, if not clairvoyant. Or else the "live feed" was not in fact live.

[Belligerent Savant]

https://twitter.com/ggreenwald/status/1 ... 7o32H0dzAA

[Belligerent Savant]

.

https://scheerpost.com/2022/03/28/hedge ... sappeared/

Hedges: On Being Disappeared

March 28, 2022

The entire archive of six years of my show On Contact has been removed by YouTube.

The entire archive of On Contact, the Emmy-nominated show I hosted for six years for RT America and RT International, has been disappeared from YouTube. Gone is the interview with Nathaniel Philbrick on his book about George Washington. Gone is the discussion with Kai Bird on his biography of J. Robert Oppenheimer. Gone is my exploration with Professor Sam Slote from Trinity College Dublin of James Joyce’s “Ulysses.” Gone is the show with Benjamin Moser on his biography of Susan Sontag. Gone is the show with Stephen Kinzer on his book on John Foster Dulles and Allen Dulles. Gone are the interviews with the social critics Cornel West, Tariq Ali, Noam Chomsky, Gerald Horne, Wendy Brown, Paul Street, Gabriel Rockwell, Naomi Wolff and Slavoj Zizek. Gone are the interviews with the novelists Russell Banks and Salar Abdoh. Gone is the interview with Kevin Sharp, a former federal judge, on the case of Leonard Peltier. Gone are the interviews with economists David Harvey and Richard Wolff. Gone are the interviews with the combat veterans and West Point graduates Danny Sjursen and Eric Edstrom about our wars in the Middle East. Gone are the discussions with the journalists Glenn Greenwald and Matt Taibbi. Gone are the voices of those who are being persecuted and marginalized, including the human rights attorney Steven Donziger and the political prisoner Mumia Abu Jamal. None of the shows I did on mass incarceration, where I interviewed those released from our prisons, are any longer on YouTube. Gone are the shows with the cartoonists Joe Sacco and Dwayne Booth. Melted into thin air, leaving not a rack behind.

I received no inquiry or notice from YouTube. I vanished. In totalitarian systems you exist, then you don’t. I suppose this was done in the name of censoring Russian propaganda, although I have a hard time seeing how a detailed discussion of “Ulysses” or the biographies of Susan Sontag and J. Robert Oppenheimer had any connection in the eyes of the most obtuse censors in Silicon Valley with Vladimir Putin. Indeed, there is not one show that dealt with Russia. I was on RT because, as a vocal critic of US imperialism, militarism, the corporate control of the two ruling parties, and especially because I support the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions movement against Israel, I was blacklisted. I was on RT for the same reason the dissident Vaclav Havel, who I knew, was on Voice of America during the communist regime in Czechoslovakia. It was that or not be heard. Havel had no more love for the policies of Washington than I have for those of Moscow.

Are we a more informed and better society because of this wholesale censorship? Is this a world we want to inhabit where those who know everything about us and about whom we know nothing can instantly erase us? If this happens to me, it can happen to you, to any critic anywhere who challenges the dominant narrative. And that is where we are headed as the ruling elites refuse to respond to the disenfranchisement and suffering of the working class, opting not for social and political change or the curbing of the rapacious power and obscene wealth of our oligarchic rulers, but instead imposing iron control over information, as if that will solve the mounting social unrest and vast political and social divides.

The most vocal cheerleaders for this censorship are the liberal class. Terrified of the enraged crowds of QAnon conspiracy theorists, Christian fascists, gun-toting militias, and cult-like Trump supporters that grew out of the distortions of neoliberalism, austerity, deindustrialization, and the collapse of social programs, they plead with the digital monopolies to make it all go away. They blame anyone but themselves. Democrats in Congress have held hearings with the CEOs of social media companies pressuring them to do more to censor content. Banish the troglodytes. Then we will have social cohesion. Then life will go back to normal. Fake news. Harm reduction model. Information pollution. Information disorder. They have all sorts of Orwellian phrases to justify censorship. Meanwhile, they peddle their own fantasy that Russia was responsible for the election of Donald Trump. It is a stunning inability to be remotely self-reflective or self-critical, and it is ominous as we move deeper and deeper into a state of political and social dysfunction.

More at link.

[MacCruiskeen]

BBC front page, one hour ago: "This video has been removed for editorial reasons. This video has been removed after doubts were raised over the accuracy of the source material."

I read this and thought: "WTF? That's a first. What was the video about? " So I googled the quote and it returned this excellent short dissection:

David Jamieson @David_Jamieson7

It's a shame that this video has been removed by the BBC - because it demonstrates perfectly how institutions help to generate and sustain state ideology. Wee thread 1/

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/av/business-53597663/coronavirus-can-rishi-sunak-save-the-economy-from-covid-19
Can Rishi Sunak save the economy from Covid-19?

This video has been removed for editorial reasons.
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/av/business- ... m-covid-19

The video depicted Rishi Sunak as superman. "Restaurants, pubs, theatres even bookshops, the Chancellor Rishi Sunak is on a mission to save the British economy"; the interesting thing here is not the tone, rather the bit most journalists think is uncontentious 2/

That is, that Sunak is trying to do 'his best' for a unitary economic community. There is only one 'best' for all, and all politicians are trying to achieve it. Political disagreements are really technical or theoretical in character 3/

About 80-90% of employed journalists in the UK would agree with that statement. They would agree with it so much they would never have thought about, probably never put it into words. Not true ofc. It is perfectly possible to mash the economy in a way beneficial to the rich 4/

Austerity showed that. [b]Next sentence: "But will his superpowers be enough to nurse us back to health after the crippling blow of coronavirus?" Again, forget that we are being spoken to like children (this is hard). Think about how many wild assumptions are loaded in to that 5/

Next sentence: "This is what he is trying to avoid: turning back the clock to the long dole cues of the 1980s" - a potently ideological statement here. Sunak is trying to avoid increased unemployment. That is his guiding objective. There is no evidence for this assertion 6/

Again, the team who made the vid have come in for a lot of flack, but really this is how almost all journalists think (and most members of powerful institutions): Everyone's priority is optimal human happiness, we disagree about how to achieve it [/b]7/

I think it's worth remembering that mindset every time we see powerful institutions in operation (regulators, the NHS, schools, HMRC, EHRC, the courts): all of them are staffed by people who accept this key item of ruling ideology. 8/

There's more to it of course, nobody is entirely one to this or that worldview. Everyone is subject to contradictory material and ideological pressures, the system often creates disaffection among its own ideological workers 9/

The BBC is a model of ideological reproduction. We should really be in awe. Think how much more advanced and powerful this is than RT, The People's Daily, or Fox News. A near seamless operation, because so many of its staff are 'deep believers' rather than 'true believers' 10/10

https://twtext.com/article/1290314694314594311

You can follow @David_Jamieson7.
Tip: mention @twtextapp on a Twitter thread with the keyword “unroll” to get a link to it.

[conniption]

We need more threads on Propaganda in the Media. It's all we get.

Off-Guardian
(embedded links)

Hunter’s laptop & Nuland’s bio-lab…a propaganda trap?

Catte
Mar 29, 2022

A few days ago the Daily Mail busted out an “exclusive” story, claiming that Russian “disinformation” on NATO-funded biolabs in Ukraine might be accurate after all:

Hunter Biden DID help secure millions in funding for US contractor in Ukraine specializing in deadly pathogen research, laptop emails reveal, raising more questions about the disgraced son of then vice president

The same story was picked up by the New York Post, who broke the original “Hunter’s laptop” story back in 2020.

This is one of those validating headlines we in alt media tend to rush in and grab without pausing to think about context. We KNEW we were right, and look – the Daily Mail is admitting it so it must be true.

But, let’s not do that. Let’s be smart and take stock before we snatch up this morsel, and consider what we have here.

One major point to note: This is the DAILY MAIL. The fat, corrupt heart of the MSM.

They don’t feel obliged to publish leaked stuff just because it’s undeniably true. They deny the undeniable every single day at the same time they tell massive indefensible lies.

No. If a ‘leak’ appears here it is with the express approval or requirement of at least some part of the UK/US establishment.

So, right there, we know we are reading this story from this source at this time because someone in the Establishment wants us to.

Which begs the question – why does the UK/US establishment want us to read a ton of files in the DM that SUPPORT the Russian claims of US-run biological warfare research in Ukraine?

It’s curious, isn’t it?

Almost as curious as Victoria Nuland “admitting” the labs were there in the first place:


https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ydSf57SRtcQ

Please do not try to earnestly counter this by saying there’s independent evidence the labs exist. Yes, there is. But why do you think that’s a factor for Nuland?

Nuland cares about evidence even less than the Daily Mail does. To her veridical truth is a minor inconvenience she encounters now and again and instantly brushes aside. She ‘admits’ what she admits for one reason. It suits her agenda to do so.

Another point to consider: Hunter Biden’s laptop used to be censored on social media

“Hunter Biden’s laptop” has been a leaky treasure trove of variously planted narratives for some time. We KNOW it’s a handy tool being wielded by – again – at least some actors in the UK/UK nexus. You want a story of sleaze or villainy out there – good place to source it is somewhere on Hunter Biden’s HDD. Because he is, unquestionably, a gross little crown prince of sleaze.

And interestingly, when the sleaze being uncovered is not politically convenient, it is subject to immediate and sweeping removal on social media. When the laptop story was first broken in the run-up to the 2020 election, both Twitter and Facebook banned all mention of the story from their platforms. Twitter even went so far as to suspend the account of the official White House Spokesperson for tweeting about it.

Nothing like that is happening on this round of laptop stories.

In fact articles in both Vox and the New York Times have quasi-admitted the laptop is genuine after labelling it misinformation for the last 18 months. Curious.

Essentially, there are three points to remember here:

1. The Daily Mail is not honor-bound to print “leaks” just because they’re true. They lie and repress the truth all the time.

2. Victoria Nuland had no reason at all to admit those labs exist, she lies all the time and could have lied about that if she wanted.

3. Previous “Hunter’s laptop” stories were blocked on social media for being “misinformation”, this one was not.

Whether the laptop story is true, partly true or totally false, the fact we are seeing it is clearly an establishment contrivance.

Yet another strong indicator that those “bio labs” are a narrative that it very much suits both the West and Russia to promote.

As to possible reasons why – well it’s quite obvious how this story can be made to tie into the currently semi-dormant, but not dead, “pandemic” narrative. Particularly when we note that Russia was at pains to make it clear at least one of these labs was allegedly working on – of course – coronaviruses.

Let’s remember that from the outset the most essential thrust of the pandemic fear story was to force us to accept a) the virus was NEW and UNIQUE and b) PEOPLE NEEDED TO BE PROTECTED FROM IT.

The agenda-managers clearly did not mind about details as long as this central myth was accepted. They did not mind whether people thought it was a natural mutation or something bio-engineered. Just as long as people were afraid of it and believed ‘something must be done’ the agenda was being served.

And the pandemic narrative began to collapse when enough people saw the lie of it and refused to be afraid.

So, reinventing or reissuing the story as being about a pathogen from a terrifying Ukrainian bio-lab might be a good way to scythe through that growing awakening, no?

Another possible reason, of course, is future horror stories of mutant pathogens being released ‘by accident’ or ‘by the Russians/Ukrainians’ (you will be able to pick a side in that delicious binary and debate it forever in the ensuing lockdown/cull, which will, of course, be global and require a ton of even tighter legislation).

Such stories can also be a great ‘justification’ for widening a war or reviving a flagging war narrative, for dropping peace negotiations, cranking up sanctions or any other chaos-inducing stuff you want to introduce.

So, given the source and the huge potential this story has for promoting the ‘forever pandemic’, ‘bio-warfare’ and probably other agendas too, let’s approach with caution so we don’t end up doing the propagandists’ work for them.

Caveat emptor is the order of the day.
_______

one of many comments:

Annie
Mar 29, 2022 8:58 PM

What I’ve learnt from all of this is it all exists in the media,When I’m sitting in the garden it doe’s not exist,When I go to the beach to forage mussels it does not exist.It only exists on a Tv or a little phone or a computer?Outside of all those it does not exist.

https://off-guardian.org/2022/03/29/hun ... anda-trap/

[JackRiddler]

.

Following RT, DISH TV has now apparently removed the China global news network CGTN from broadcast.

If so, we will be dropping DISH.

Will post again when details are confirmed.

Can't find reliable news on this but apparently CGTN was supposed to start broadcasting disclaimers in U.S. that it is registered under the foreign agents act (according to some post on a board). I expect the move was by DISH, and that would be very cowardly and preemptively obedient to possible future state dictates if so.

I think, in fact, they dropped Al Jazeera full channel a year ago. (I may not have noticed because Al Jazeera hours also appear on other channels like FSTV or Link.)

I always dreamed of a TV service that delivered news shows from all forms of main foreign channels, preferably including whatever they actually broadcast at home. Or a program that did a round-up of the news as broadcast on channels around the world.

This is really sick shit in the Age of Sick Shit.

.

[Marionumber1]

Just as an aside, and not in any way downplaying how abhorrent it is to see Chris Hedges get deplatformed by Big Tech in an instant, am I the only one to think this statement by him is naive at best?

I was on RT for the same reason the dissident Vaclav Havel, who I knew, was on Voice of America during the communist regime in Czechoslovakia. It was that or not be heard. Havel had no more love for the policies of Washington than I have for those of Moscow.

Per his Wikipedia page, Havel was a pivotal force in "the transition of NATO from being an anti-Warsaw Pact alliance to its present form", meaning "the inclusion of former-Warsaw Pact members, like the Czech Republic, into the Western alliance". In other words, the same imperialistic bullshit that got us to the point of the Russia/Ukraine war in the first place. He was also a supporter of NATO's 1999 bombing campaign in Yugoslavia, but I guess he's in good company because so was Hedges.

[Belligerent Savant]

.
Valid considerations. As you point out, Hedges' deplatforming is abhorrent regardless of his apparent/occasional inconsistency.

That said, I'm afraid Hedges is a strong candidate for a limited hangout, though this is merely my opinion. I touched on this back on page 4 of this thread:

,

Unfortunately, I lean towards the opposite.

[Arguably, the points raised in the below may not be due to Hedges as a 'compromised agent', but rather, he may be willfully -- or perhaps unwittingly -- raising blinds to certain unpleasant truths... but is Hedges the type that would succumb to the latter?]

...

A recent article, Our Invisible Government, by the well-known journalist, Chris Hedges, is a typical case in point. As is his habit, he sheds light on much that is avoided by the mainstream press. Very important matters. In this piece, he writes in his passionate style that

"The most powerful and important organs in the invisible government are the nation’s bloated and unaccountable intelligence agencies. They are the vanguard of the invisible government. They oversee a vast “black world,” tasked with maintaining the invisible government’s lock on power."

This, of course, is true. He then goes on to catalogue ways these intelligence agencies, led by the CIA, have overthrown foreign governments and assassinated their leaders, persecuted and besmirched the names of those – Edward Snowden, Julian Assange, et al. – who have opposed government policies, and used propaganda to conceal the real reasons for their evil deeds, such as the wars against Vietnam, Syria, Afghanistan, Iraq, and Libya. He condemns such actions.

He spends much of his article referencing Stephen Kinzer’s new book, Poisoner in Chief: Sydney Gottlieb and the CIA Search for Mind Control and Gottlieb’s heinous exploits during his long CIA career. Known as “Dr. Death,” this Bronx born son of Jewish immigrants, ran the CIA’s mind control programs and its depraved medical experiments on unknowing victims, known as MK-ULTRA and Artichoke. He oversaw the development of various poisons and bizarre methods to kill foreign leaders such as Fidel Castro and Patrice Lumumba. He worked closely with Nazi scientists who had been brought to the United Statesby Allen Dulles in an operation called Operation Paperclip. Gottlieb was responsible for so many deaths and so much human anguish and suffering that it is hard to believe, but believe it we must because it is true. His work on torture and mind control led to Abu Ghraib, CIA black sites, and assorted U.S.atrocities of recent history.

Hedges tells us all this and rightly condemns it as “the moral squalor” and “criminality” that it is.Only a sick or evil person could disagree with his account of Gottlieb via Kinzer’s book. I suspect many good people who have or will read his piece will agree with his denunciations of this evil CIA history. Additionally, he correctly adds:

"It would be naive to relegate the behavior of Gottlieb and the CIA to the past, especially since the invisible government has once again shrouded the activities of intelligence agencies from congressional oversight or public scrutiny and installed a proponent of torture, Gina Haspel, as the head of the agency."

This also is very true. All these truths can make you forget what’s not true and what’s missing in his article.

But something is missing, and some wording is quite odd and factually false. It is easy to miss this as one’s indignation rises as one reads Hedges’ cataloguing of Gottlieb’s and the CIA’s obscenities.

He omits mentioning the Clinton administration’s dismantling wars against Yugoslavia, including 78 days of non-stop bombing of Serbia in 1999 that killed thousands of innocent people in the name of “humanitarian intervention,” wars he covered for the New York Times, the paper he has come to castigate and the paper that has a long history of doing the CIA’s bidding.

He claims that Gottlieb and the CIA’s scientists failed in their “vain quest” for mind control drugs or electronic implants that might, among other things, get victims to act against their wills, such as acting as a Manchurian candidate, and as a result, “abandoned” their efforts. That they failed is not true, and that they abandoned their efforts is unknowable, unless you wish to take the CIA at its word, which is a hilarious thought. How could Hedges possibly know they abandoned such work? A logical person would assume they would say that and continue their work more secretly. On one hand, Hedges says, “It would be naive to relegate the behavior of Gottlieb and the CIA to the past,” but then he does just that. Which is it, Chris? By definition, the “invisible” government, the CIA, never reveals their operations, and lying is their modus operandi, especially with their brazen in-your-face biblical motto: “And ye shall know the truth and the truth shall make you free.”

He says the invisible deep state “failed to foresee…the 9/11 attacks or the absence of Iraqi weapons of mass destruction.” This is factually wrong and quite absurd, as is well documented. They simply lied about these matters ex post facto. He suggests such failures were due to “ineptitude,” a coy word used by numerous other writers who find reasons to deny intentionality to the “deep state.”

He therefore is implying that the attacks of September 11, 2001, a subject that he has consistently failed to address over the years even while he has written in detail about so much else, did not involve America’s “invisible government forces.” The ineptitude explanation fails elementary logical analysis.Does he think it was intelligence ineptitude that allowed operatives to wire the highly-secure Twin Towers and Building 7 for controlled demolition that brought those buildings down, as the testimony of one’s eyes and that of hundreds of NYC firefighters who reported explosions throughout the buildings affirm? Ineptitude is another word for avoidance of evidence, gathered over the years by careful scholars and researchers. Ineptitude is another word for the belief “in miracles,” as David Ray Griffin has phrased it.

What does he think Colin Powell was doing at the United Nations on February 5, 2003 with CIA Director George Tenet sitting behind him when he lied repeatedly and fabricated evidence for Iraq having weapons of mass destruction to promote and justify the U.S. war against Iraq? Ineptitude? A failure of intelligence?

Chris Hedges is a very intelligent man, so why does he write such things?

Most importantly, why, when he writes about the past evil deeds of the intelligence operatives –Gottlieb and the CIA’s overseas coups and assassination of foreign leaders, etc. – does he fail to say one word about the CIA’s assassination of domestic leaders, including President John Kennedy in 1963, the foundational event in the invisible government’s takeover of the United States. Can an act be more evil and in need of moral condemnation? And how about the assassinations of Martin Luther King and Robert Kennedy in 1968, or Malcolm X in 1965? Why does Hedges elide these assassinations as if they are not worthy of attention, but Gottlieb’s sick work for the CIA is? Like the attacks of September 11, 2001, he has avoided these assassinations throughout the years.

I don’t know why. Only he can say. He is a very well-read man, who is constantly quoting from scholars about various important issues. His books are chock full of such quotations and references. But you will look in vain for references to the brilliant, scholarly work of such writers on these assassinations, the attacks of September 11, 2001, and the CIA’s criminal and morally repugnant activities as James Douglass, David Talbot, David Ray Griffin, William Pepper, Graeme MacQueen, Lisa Pease, and so many others. Is it possible that he has never read their books when he has read so much else? If so, why?

As I said before, Chris Hedges, who has a passionate but mild-mannered style, is not alone in his disregard of these key matters. Other celebrity names on the left have been especially guilty of the same approach: Noam Chomsky, Howard Zinn, and Alexander Cockburn, to name just a few (Zinn and Cockburn are dead).They have avoided these issues as if they were toxic. Nor would they logically explain why. The few times they did respond to those who criticized them for this, it was usually through a dismissive wave of the hand or name calling, a tactic such as the CIA developed with the term “conspiracy theory.” Cockburn was particularly nasty in this regard, priding himself on dismissing others with words such as kooks, lunatics, and idiots, even when his logic was deplorable. He liked to use ineptitude’s synonym, “incompetence,” to explain away what he considered intelligence agency failures. “Why,” he wrote in one piece attacking September 11 critics while upholding the government’s version, “does the obvious have to be proved?”

The CIA’s mind control operations need to be exposed, as Hedges does to a degree in this latest article. But revealing while concealing is unworthy of one who condemns “creeps who revel in human degradation, dirty tricks, and murder.” It itself is a form of mind control.

Perhaps he will see fit to publicly explain why he has done this.

https://countercurrents.org/2019/09/why ... -his-bets/

[Marionumber1]

A cursory look at Hedges' background makes me concerned that it could be more sinister than merely turning a blind eye to certain issues (political assassinations, 9/11, etc.). He gets his start as a foreign war correspondent for establishment press organs like the Dallas Morning News (known to harbor at least one prominent CIA asset within the media: Hugh Aynesworth) and the New York Times. Most likely during this time, he is friends with a "dissident" who appeared on US government propaganda and goes on to become the pro-NATO president of the Czech Republic. He also backs NATO's bombing campaign in Yugoslavia, and is even the first reporter able to travel with the Kosovo Liberation Army (KLA), itself a widely-noted CIA front. In the lead-up to the Iraq War, he publishes articles for the New York Times spreading dubious stories by Iraqi defectors about how Iraq has been training Islamsts to hijack planes and developing biological weapons; later, he tries to disavow all responsibility by saying his fellow journalists duped him.

Then suddenly Hedges comes out in 2003 and speaks out publicly against the Iraq War, burnishing his leftist credentials while also destroying his career at the NYT. Luckily, it all worked out well for him; as he stated in 2008, "every year since I left the Times, I’ve made at least twice the salary I made at the paper". Who knew that being a left-wing dissident writer was actually a more lucrative career path than being a reporter for one of the top media outlets in the world?