Glenn Greenwald and Tucker Carlson Discuss Ukraine and Propaganda

What follows is an excerpt from a Nov 20, 2024 discussion between Glenn Greenwald and Tucker Carlson. This is a critically important discussion regarding recent developments in the Ukraine War and related U.S. Propaganda:

Glenn Greenwald [00:18:53] Tucker, there's nobody I'm certain of this in the United States, just an average, ordinary American voter who believes that their life is affected in any way by the question of who rules various provinces in the Donbass in eastern Ukraine. Nobody thinks about Ukraine, let alone the Donbass, let alone eastern Ukraine. It's an incredibly complex situation there in terms of the people's allegiances, which are far closer to Moscow than they are to Kiev. The question of what that territory should be, should it be somehow autonomous, should it be used as a buffer against the West? The whole framework, as you well know, and as other people have pointed out, when Russia agreed to the reunification of Germany, which was obviously an extraordinary thing for the Russians to agree to, given the Russian history in the 20th century with respect to Germany, when they opened, the Berlin Wall fell and they allowed the eastern and the western parts of Germany to reunite and to become part of the West and become part of the EU. The only concession they extracted in exchange for that was with reunification. NATO's now moving eastward, closer to our border in a country that has devastated our country twice in two world wars, invaded Russia twice, killed tens of millions of Russian citizens. The only thing we need as a security guarantee in exchange for allowing that is that NATO will never expand one inch eastward beyond what was East Germany and the United States agreed to that. And immediately in the 90s, an administration, the administration started talking about it and implementing NATO's expansion eastward toward Russia. Exactly what was promised to Gorbachev the United States would not do in exchange for them agreeing to reunification. And why? Why? Why did we need to expand eastward toward Russia. And now it's not just eastward in general. It's going directly up to the Russian border on the part of their border that has been invaded twice in Ukraine to destroy Russia. And both of those world wars, we also participated in the change of government. We removed the democratically elected leader of Ukraine before his constitutional term was expired in 2014 because we perceived him as being too friendly to Moscow, which is what the Ukrainians voted for and replaced him. [U.S. State Department's] Victoria Nuland constructed a government and they was replaced by a government that was more pro-U.S.. Imagine if the Russians engineered a coup in Mexico to take out the government because they were too friendly to us and put in a hard line, pro Russian, anti-American, anti-NATO president. Imagine how threatening we would regard that as. And that's exactly what we did in Ukraine. The question is, though, this has nothing to do with the national security of the American people. No American is threatened by who governs Ukraine. What they're threatened by is what the United States is doing in Ukraine, including this most recent act.

... This is not a lame duck decision and it's not like there was any emergency to it. It wasn't there was no emergency to it. They just wanted to escalate it because they thought Trump wouldn't. And so they did.

Tucker [00:27:52] It puts us in this remarkable moment where the only adult is Vladimir Putin. This person, we've been told, is Hitler and deranged, crazy, dying of nine different kinds of cancer can't be trusted like the only reason we're not. I mean, we're all relying on his restraint. That's just a fact right now. How weird is that?

Continue ReadingGlenn Greenwald and Tucker Carlson Discuss Ukraine and Propaganda

Jimmy Dore Points to the Biggest Liar – The Government.

Comedian Jimmy Dore recently commented a "news" cast where Jen Psaki argued that social media needed to be censored. Governement lies during COVID provide endless evidence that Psake could not be more wrong, but there is a lot more. First, Jen Psaki's claim that social media needs to be censored:

But even if Trump is defeated tomorrow, he is exposed during his time out, there some serious limitations within our system, and it may be time to ask ourselves things like whether social media platforms should have the freedom to operate at a lower level of accountability than local television networks.

Jimmy Dore's response:

First of all, how do you get lower accountability than zero? This is this? Is that wanting to censor social because they don't have any accountability, you don't have any fucking accountability. Is there? Is there anything they haven't lied about in my they lied about Iraq twice. They lied about Afghanistan for 20 years. Lied about Syria, they lied about Libya, they lied about Ukraine. They're currently lying about Ukraine. They lied about COVID. They lied about lockdowns. They lied about where the virus came from, mass transmissibility, contraction, herd immunity, natural immunity. There wasn't a fucking thing that side effects. There's not a goddamn thing that they haven't lied about in the last 20 years of my life, 40 years of my life. And these motherfuckers want to censor other people because they might be spreading misinformation.

The biggest liar, as we all know, is the government. Second is the corporate, owned media, and a distant third are randos on social media. That's the fucking fact, okay, and if it wasn't for social media, we wouldn't know about any of those lies about the Syrian war, the Ukraine war, or COVID, or the vaccines or masks or lockdowns, or all the shit they did to children during COVID, or all the shit they're doing to children who are confused about their gender identity before they had fucking puberty. We wouldn't know any of that shit if it wasn't for social media ...

That was a direct hit by Dore, as evidence by many of the articles I have been posting over the past 5 years (and more). But let's also hear from Max Blumenthal.

I do not believe @RobertKennedyJr would have ever gained national celebrity and been able to launch a national campaign that vaulted him to the heights of Trumpworld had The Science(TM) that informed the Covid response proven even remotely correct.

If the mRNA "vaccine" had not failed on every stated promise; had the CDC and WHO not changed the very definition of vaccine to accommodate its failure to prevent transmission or infection; had countless working class Americans not lost their jobs for refusing to take the jab, while others were forcibly injected in order to keep their livelihoods, sometimes suffering injury as a result; had mainstream news hosts and politicians including Joe Biden not proposed isolating The Unvaccinated from society, preventing them from traveling, and even from buying food in markets; had the lockdowns not set a generation of children across all social strata back years in their education, while doing nothing to stop the spread; had once-vibrant city centers not transformed to terrifying zombie scenes, shattering countless small businesses, while we were assured by Fauci that it would take just another week or two to flatten the curve; had a dystopian state censorship regime not consolidated its hold over social media platforms, disappearing dissenters from our digital commons those who protested in the streets were often beaten and arrested – had none of this occurred, RFK Jr. would be comfortably ensconced in his home in West LA, still loyal to the Democratic Party, a welcome presence in the world of affluent liberals, and nowhere near the political celebrity he is today.

But all this happened and worse. Americans were lied to and abused on a massive scale, and RFK was one of the first to tap into the public's anger. And thanks to his Children's Health Defense, he already had an established platform to promote his jeremiads (which focused heavily at the time on the erosion of constitutional rights, not always on vaccine-related issues).

Though the Covid event was hardly discussed during the 2024 presenting campaign – largely because the corporate media that got almost everything wrong wanted the issue to disappear – it loomed like a heavy cloud. RFK's presence as a Trump surrogate enabled 47 to channel the simmering anger, giving rise to the Make America Healthy Again movement, which became a magnet for alt media-oriented independent voters.

Now RFK stands to take over a gargantuan federal agency that has traditionally served as an instrument of Big Pharma and the agribusiness lobby, and which is currently led by a Democrat political operative with no medical or scientific background. The pundits who paint RFK's ascension as an unfortunate triumph of the paranoid style in American politics are whitewashing the failures and sordid deceptions of the credentialed class they represent, while denying the experiences of the millions who paid the price for them.

One more thing for Jen Psaki: How would she feel if the government started interrupting our private phone calls and telling us that we can no longer discuss certain topics or that we are forbidden from talking to certain people because they are "bad"? Censoring social media is no different from this in concept, but only in scale.

Continue ReadingJimmy Dore Points to the Biggest Liar – The Government.

Political Power and the Need for Free Speech

Greg Lukianoff of FIRE:

In a democracy, the majority doesn’t need special protection for freedom of speech because their power is protected by the majority vote. The bully and the bigot easily get their way if they have the votes.

The fact is that only those with opinions that are unpopular with the majority or the ruling elite need the special protection of freedom of speech. It is not, in fact, a coincidence that the Civil Rights Movement, the women’s rights movement, and the gay rights movement (just to name a few) only really took off when the protections of the First Amendment became strongly interpreted beginning in the 1950s. Prior to that, without a strong First Amendment, those movements were easy to shut down.

But the powerful in higher education find this narrative inconvenient. This is because, frankly, they are unsatisfied with the amount of power they have over speech and thought (which is already immense, and regularly abused). They prefer a narrative in which they are still the underdog (which they've never really been) and still the hero (which they very rarely are). At the same time, they’d like to continue to censor “bad” speakers and “bad” speech — not just with new tools, but with a continued sense of self-righteousness about their authoritarian impulses.

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Mike Benz: It’s time to take apart the Death Star of government censorship.

I've followed Mike Benz for several years. He formerly worked in the US State Department. His analyses of the US censorship industrial complex are detailed and credible.

Question:

I want to ask you about the protections that we need for social media companies. How can we stop the government from being able to bully social media companies into censoring content that it dislikes.

Benz:

With control over the executive branch, it would be surprisingly easy not to take the whole thing out, but to devastate it in effectively a single blow. All you would need is an incoming day one executive order that prohibits government grants and contracts by any government agency to any outside group involved in regulating, flagging or downranking so-called "disinformation." It does what the Supreme Court should have done and said that the funding of censorship by the government is censorship by the government. So that Executive Order will allow you to go agency by agency and kill all of those grants and contracts that comprise the censorship industry. There are hundreds of 1000s of people now around the world, and 10s of 1000s of people here in the US whose full time--their paychecks, their livelihoods, their mortgages are effectively paid for by doing full-time 24/7 censorship work. This field did not exist eight years ago. It was created after the 2016 election as a response to Trump winning to stop a night like tonight where he might win again.

Continue ReadingMike Benz: It’s time to take apart the Death Star of government censorship.