Neocons think of the world as a giant game of Risk. This world view is narcissistic, simple-minded and dangerous. But here it is, exemplified by a CIA director:
Glenn Greenwald offered this detailed description of what it means to be a neocon.
The CEO of Axios is not ranting out of concern for us. He is ranting because it wants the unearned power of being a permanent gatekeeper. He wants legacy media to have power to control our thoughts and actions, whether or not the legacy media is doing excellent work. The ultimate power of the news should reside with all of us at the grassroots level. The responsibility and power for all things that affect us should be with each of us. That is the core idea of a democracy and the great gift offered to us by the Enlightenment.
I very much admire Coleman Hughes. He bravely stood up to the race-hucksters over the past five years and advocated for the type of color-blindness embraced by almost all classical liberals. But on CNN he naively stepped into an area in which he is not well informed: National Security. Almost everything he says in opposition to Tulsi Gabbard is incorrect and it wouldn't have taken much time to get informed before going live. Very disappointing, but this illustrates something ubiquitous. Everyone I know (even myself) who gets a lot right sometimes falls off the rails. The causes are many: tribalism, hubris, fatigue and failing to be self-critical. It happens to all of us, some of the time and free speech is the best approach we know to limit these missteps. So here is Glenn Greenwald speaking freely about Coleman's embarrassing moment on CNN:
Glenn Greenwald:
There was a panel discussion about why Tulsi Gabbard is this great evil, and the opposition to her was led by Coleman Hughes, who--I don't really understand when he became an expert on foreign policy. He became known speaking, I think, quite insightfully, about things like race and class and the intersection of them. I've been on his show before. He's been on mine.Suddenly, though, he's now a great expert in the Middle East, he's a vehement supporter of Israel--as much as Barry Weiss or Sam Harris or people like that are. And here he is on CNN, maligning Tulsi Gabbard, who knows 10 million times more about foreign policy in her toenail than Coleman Hughes has in his entire arsenal of knowledge. But here he is expressing why she's such a terrible choice as DNI [Director of National Intelligence].
Coleman Hughes:
It's a very confounding. Look, call me crazy, but I think the Director of National Intelligence should be a person who, A) trusts US intelligence, and B) likes US intelligence. What do we know about Tulsi Gabbard? We know that when Assad gassed civilians in 2017 and our intelligence agencies determined that and Trump decided to strike those facilities, Gabbard doubted that. She doubted the findings of our own intelligence and she went to go visit Assad. And we know that she defends Julian Assange, who released classified informations that imperiled the people we were working with in Afghanistan and the Taliban went out there and were able to kill them one by one. And so, you know, this is exactly the opposite of the person you would want leading national intelligence.
Glenn Greenwald:
He's saying that the only kinds of people you want to lead the intelligence agencies are people who A) trust what they tell you and B) like how they operate. How can any sentient human being who knows anything about the last 25 years of American history, --and even if you want to go back much further--and it's the same thing. But just going back to the last 25 years since the war in Iraq and the run up to it, going all the way through things like Syria and Libya and Russiagate and the Hunter Biden laptop, and all the different ways that these intelligence agencies have interfered in our politics, improperly and based on lies--It's not disqualifying to distrust the intelligence agencies or to dislike how they operate and want to change it. What's disqualifying is to trust the intelligence agencies. How mindless must somebody be to say, "Yeah, I really trust the CIA. I think their pronouncements are all correct."Oh, the audacity of her to question anything that the CIA was saying about the war in Syria, when the CIA was leading, one of those dirty wars that they love to fight at a billion dollars a year that Obama unleashed them to fight in order to remove Bashar Al Assad from power and replace [him with] someone else they wanted. Oh no, questioning the intelligence agencies. Tulsi Gabbard questioned what they said, doubted some of their pronouncements, and now she's somehow ineligible to lead them, because she doesn't have blind, mindless faith in them.
This is conventional wisdom in Washington. Coleman doesn't know anything about the topics of which he's opining, including what he said about WikiLeaks. And the idea that WikiLeaks is supposed to be considered some sort of nefarious group that nobody can defend when they've done more than anybody to bring transparency to our government, including the lies they told about the wars in which Tulsi Gabbard fought and the corruption of our allies, and all the lies that we've been told as the public about what our government was doing.
The idea that defending Julian Assange for bringing transparency is somehow disqualifying? I'm sure he would say the same thing about Edward Snowden, who Tulsi Gabbard also supports, is just mind-blowingly dumb. But this we showed you this because it's so reflective of how Washington thinks. Coleman Hughes--what he does when he doesn't know what he's talking about, is--he just picks up on conventional wisdom and the world in which he resides with Bari Weiss and those kind of people, he just repeats what that world thinks without an even an inch of knowledge. But it's nonetheless worth seeing, because that is the opposition to Tulsi Gabbard: "Oh, she's not a fan of the CIA. She's not a fan of the NSA. She doesn't think the intelligence agencies like Homeland Security have been doing a good job, have been honest with the American people. This is what Donald Trump ran on. He didn't run on appointing the kind of people that Coleman Hughes thinks should be appointed: people who think the intelligence communities are so trustworthy in whatever they're doing.
[Trump] ran on a campaign promise to uproot them, to fundamentally drain their swamp and to rebuild them into more ethical and trustworthy institutions, and Tulsi Gabbard represents that. The only people scared of her are the people who should be scared, the people who want to keep those institutions in place, despite all the lies they told and the corruption they've imposed, precisely because they're the ones who benefit most from it. But they don't want any one questioning, let alone changing, how Washington works.
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.
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.