Matt Taibbi’s Challenge to You

Matt Taibbi gave an extraordinary speech in DC this weekend. I invite everyone to watch his speech or read the transcript.

One of Matt's many quotable lines: "[The use of propaganda is] always someone trying to make you feel bad for their weakness, their mistakes. Don’t be ground down by it. Stand up straight and give it back."

I agree with every word of Tabbi's challenge. We need to speak up often and this includes repeatedly saying "no" to government overreach. When something big monied organizations tell us doesn't make sense, we need to stand up and say so, even when people (including friends and family) tell us we are bad for refusing to belief. Recently, Elites, including John Kerry and Bill Gates have disparaged our founding documents, the ones we purportedly celebrate on Fourth of July. They are now saying out loud that the First Amendment is a problem, rather than a brilliant proven solution to government overreach.

This tyranny and censorship we are facing are invisible to those who lap up their "news" from corporate media. "X" (Twitter) is where you need to go to get better information and alternate perspectives. It's far from perfect because X is a huge tent filled with many types of people, many of them severely wacky. X is also one of the few places where you can find thoughtful people freely conversing with each other, freely challenging the narrative that your government is spending untold millions of $ trying to force-feed you every day. Your own government thinks you aren't smart enough to think for yourself. It's minions talk down to you. They want to be your nanny. They want you get get in line and stop asking questions. They want you to shut the fuck up, even though they got almost EVERYTHING wrong about COVID. You'd think that they would instill some humility, but these are high paid elites who treasure their job security as much as they their conviction that they are so much god-damned smarter than the rest of us. They are close to having the power to intellectually blind and gag us on a scale that would have been unimaginable pre-internet. Truly, we need to stand up every day and say no to this.

Here's a longer excerpt from Taibbi's speech:

Let me pause to say something about America’s current intellectual class, from which the “anti-disinformation” complex comes. By the way: there are no working-class censors, poor censors, hungry censors. The dirty secret of “content moderation” everywhere is that it’s a tiny sliver of the educated rich correcting everyone else. It’s telling people what fork to use, but you can get a degree in it.

America has the most useless aristocrats in history. Even the French dandies marched to the razor by the Jacobins were towering specimens of humanity compared to the Michael Haydens, John Brennans, James Clappers, Mike McFauls and Rick Stengels who make up America’s self-appointed behavior police.

In prerevolutionary France even the most drunken, depraved, debauched libertine had to be prepared to back up an insolent act with a sword duel to the death. Our aristocrats pee themselves at the sight of mean tweets. They have no honor, no belief, no poetry, art, or humor, no patriotism, no loyalty, no dreams, and no accomplishments. They’re simultaneously illiterate and pretentious, which is very hard to pull off.

They have one idea, not even an idea but a sensation: fear. Rightly so, because they snitch each other out at the drop of a hat; they’re afraid of each other, but they’re also terrified of everyone outside their social set and live in near-constant fear of being caught having an original opinion. They believe in the manner of herd animals, who also live whole lives without knowing an anxiety-free minute: they believe things with blinding zeal until 51% change their minds, and then like deer the rest bolt in that direction. We saw that with the Biden is sharp as a tack/No, Biden must step aside for the Politics of Joy switch.

I grew up a liberal Democrat and can’t remember having even most of the same beliefs as my friends. Now, millions of alleged intellectuals claim identical beliefs about vast ranges of issues and this ludicrous mass delusion is the precondition for “disinformation studies,” really the highly unscientific science of punishing deviation from the uniform belief set — what another excommunicated liberal, my friend Thomas Frank, calls the “Utopia of Scolding.”

“Freedom of speech” is a beautiful phrase, strong, optimistic. It has a ring to it. But it’s being replaced in the discourse by “disinformation” and “misinformation,” words that aren’t beautiful but full of the small, pettifogging, bureaucratic anxiety of a familiar American villain: the busybody, the prohibitionist, the Nosey Parker, the snoop.

H.L. Mencken defined Puritanism as the “haunting fear that someone, somewhere is happy.” That streak of our early European settlers unfortunately survives in us and keeps surfacing through moral panics. Four hundred years ago it was witches, then it was Catholic immigrants, then “the devil’s music,” comic books, booze, communists, and now, information.

Because “freedom of speech” is now frequently described as a stalking horse for hate and discrimination — the UN High Commissioner Volker Türk scolded Elon Musk that “free speech is not a free pass” — it’s becoming one of those soon-to-be-extinct terms. Speech is mentioned in “reputable” media only as a possible vector for the informational disease known as misinformation. Soon all that will remain of the issue for most people is a flutter of the nerves, reminding them to avoid thinking about it.

The end game is not controlling speech. They’re already doing that. The endgame is getting us to forget we ever had anything to say . . .

Continue ReadingMatt Taibbi’s Challenge to You

Minimal Media Coverage of Attempted Assassinations and The Dog the Didn’t Bark

If they were real journalists, the U.S. corporate media would be vigorously examining the many claims raised in this video (and many similar videos and posts on X (Twitter). It would be nonstop, 24/7. Similarly, if someone tried to shoot Kamala Harris, the "news" media would stop at NOTHING to find out exactly and precisely what happened, how it happened and why.

Too many things simply don't add up regarding the two recent attempts on Donald Trump's life, but revealing the facts might not be convenient for the big media corporations. Vigorously investigating how these two allegedly unfunded and unconnected "renegades" came so close to killing Donald Trump might even impugn the operations and intentions of the U.S. security state. It is stunning to watch "journalists" doing the bare minimum, repeatedly taking the attitude: Just move on . . . nothing to see here. They are working hard to normalize the fact that people sometimes try to kill a major candidate for president. This lack of interest, the failure or journalists to care about major stories, is as disturbing as the blatant censorship and government funded propaganda we've seen over the past five years.

For those who think all of the questions and suspicions of this young woman on TikTok are far-fetched, that the U.S. security state would never do the terrible things that it does to other countries to our own country, consider that the ubiquitous censorship, government propaganda (including the claim of Russian collusion), the abject disinterest of our corporate media and perhaps much much more might be the most recent manifestations of a 60+ year work in progress.

If you think that the constant state of war promoted by the U.S. is the only option, your brain has been broken by sophisticated U.S. government psy-ops. You can't simply make these serious concerns magically disappear by uttering "conspiracy theory" as though this phrase were one of Harry Potter's incantations.

Continue ReadingMinimal Media Coverage of Attempted Assassinations and The Dog the Didn’t Bark

The Desperate Situation in London

London is unrecognizable. This is the desperate situation in the UK. According to Konstantin Kisin, the widespread riots are merely a symptom of much bigger challenges in the UK. The government's main tactic to "address this situation" is mass censorship and attempts to shut down Twitter ("X").

Continue ReadingThe Desperate Situation in London

The United States Empire as a Configuration of Dots

As Jimmy Dore points out, each dot is a United States Military base, part of our Department of DEFENSE.

This is called Empire. This is imperialism. These are all the military bases the United States has around the world. You know, no other country has this just the United States as this. Nobody else does this. China, Russia. They don't have bases all over the world. Who does? We do, because that's how capitalism ends up.

You have to use a gun to keep it going. And you have to become fascists, which is what Joe Biden did to the railroad workers when he crushed her railroad strike. That's called fascism. The stuff that they that you hear all the time and on TV as fascism isn't. That was actual fascism. And this is why our country is going down the shitter and we're ending like all great empires. And we're overextending militarily while we won't take care of our own people at home.

We just said $15 billion, which could take care of everybody here in the United States. We just send it to Ukraine with no debate, no talking about it. And we're we just built another military base in Syria. We built three more in the Philippines just in the last couple of months. That's where your money's going. Because your government is 100% corrupt. Not regular corrupt. It's 100%. corrupt. This is called corruption. You see this? Do you know what this is called? This is called a trillion dollars a year in corruption because that's all this is. These military bases are there to make sure American corporations can extract natural resources from these places. Look at all the bases we have outside of China. Look at this. Here comes South America, Central America. Look at that! Imagine if China had these many bases in South and Central America or anywhere? Imagine if China had all these bases in the Middle East Imagine.

Continue ReadingThe United States Empire as a Configuration of Dots

What is a Neocon?

One of today's bravest, most principled journalists, arguably the person best able to consistently and clearly analyze complex issues is Glenn Greenwald. I've followed his work for twenty years and I am repeatedly impressed with his ability to see the forest as well as the highly detailed trees. Glenn was a practicing civil rights attorney early in his career, which helps to explain his ability to discuss the intersection of current events within the existing legal framework. But he also has an outstanding understanding of history, which is a stark contrast with most journalists, who seem to thing that the only thing that matters is what happens today. If you haven't yet seen Glenn's show, System Update, I highly recommend that you give it a try.

I find myself writing recognition of Greenwald's talents and accomplishments today because I am about to rely on his work once again. Today, I found myself frustrated with nonstop U.S. warmongering, muttering to myself about the "neocons." I then stopped to ask myself "What, precisely is a neocon?" I'm going to quote Glenn Greenwald extensively here. He traces the history of neocons from their earlier peak of power, embedded as Republicans, plunging us into the tragic invasion of Iraq in 2003. They seemed to disappear after that abject failure, but somehow they are back in control in Joe Biden's Cabinet. Two prominent Iraq War architects, Victoria Nuland and Anthony Blinken, are now wearing Democrat costumes. They are in the process of plunging the U.S. into two (or more) new major wars of discretion? Why? Because they are neocons. Here's Glenn Greenwald, explaining the term:

One of the most extraordinary, alarming and baffling developments to witness in American politics is the complete rehabilitation of neoconservatives. Most Americans who know this term first learned of it in 2002 during the run-up to the American and British invasion of Iraq. The neocons were the most vocal and vehement advocates, not just of the invasion of Iraq, but more importantly, of the warmongering framework undergirding that attack, namely that the world is better off when the United States rules it, and especially the Middle East, through the application of superior military force, in essence, ordering all countries to do the bidding of the United States, always under the threat that failure to obey will result in attacks, invasions, bombings, regime change, coups and much more. This imperialistic and militaristic mindset was not exactly new.

This imperialistic and militaristic mindset was not exactly new. The U.S. fought wars, imposed tyrannies, and engineered coups all over the world, on every continent, during the Cold War and after but what distinguished neocons from standard warmongers and militarists were two qualities:

First, they have no other politics beyond their quest for endless war. Many neocons in fact began as liberals or even leftists and were willing to morph into anything they needed to be as long as doing so served the only issue they really cared about: placing the US in a state of endless war, almost always fought by other people's families and children rather than their own. Starting with the war in Iraq, a war they were craving and loudly demanding long before the 9/11 attacks – that attack became the pretext for the war in Iraq – they have supported every new and proposed American war since then. "Neocons" is a polite euphemism for "bloodthirsty, sociopathic warmongers."

Second, neocons, by definition, barely even pretend to care about the truth, whether they know it or not. The smarter ones do, the dumber ones don't. They are often followers of the German-American political philosopher Leo Strauss, and his belief in the “noble lie”, falsehoods propagated by those who are superior in society to deceive and mislead the peasants into acting contrary to their own belief system, for their own good as elites to find that concept for them. It was no accident that the war in Iraq, along with every U.S. war that followed, began – and then was sustained – with propaganda so intense and deceitful that calling them lies is a woeful understatement. Neocons do believe in lies. They believe in lies – and appear to derive arousal from them – almost as much as they believe in and find purpose and excitement in wars.

Neocons were said to have reached the peak of their power during the Bush-Cheney administration when the trauma of the 9/11 attack and the fear and anger it inspired finally gave them the fuel to usher their demented agenda of endless permanent war. The utter failure of the Iraq War and the realization that it was based on lies told to the public through the corporate media, often led by neocons themselves, supposedly resulted in neocons finally being expelled from power and influence in Washington. They were discredited, we were told, finally unmasked as the deceitful sociopaths that they are.

Continue ReadingWhat is a Neocon?