Andy NGO Discusses ANTIFA, Including Media Coverage

Earlier this month, independent journalist Andy Ngo gave a talks at Hillsdale College. I saw images and videos I hadn't before seen, including massive disruption and violence in downtown Portland, Oregon. Until I saw this, I only had a vague notion of the goals and history of ANTIFA. Ngo's account is the only detailed account I have heard, so I won't pretend that anyone should stop their research after watching this one presentation.

That said, Ngo's account of ANTIFA provided considerable detailed information I had not heard before, even though I had often heard the term ANTIFA. Mostly, I had heard the term ANTIFA as part of a dispute of whether the group even exists. Ngo showed the audience these headlines:

My reason for sharing this video is twofold. Andy Ngo presents detailed information about an ideology (Ngo explains it is not one cohesive group) about which I hadn't before heard detailed information.

Much more interesting and concerning to me is the legacy media's almost total shutdown of selected events. I invite you to visit NPR/NYT/WP and word search for the terms "ANTIFA," "Portland" or "riot" and compare the threadbare on-the-ground news coverage of what happened on the streets with the vast and intense news coverage you will see for "Capitol Riot." I was disturbed by both of these incidents. I see them both as attacks on my government. These were both attempts to invoke a feeling of chaos and loss of confidence in the social order. In Portland, I see a federal courthouse under attack, night after night, forcing police into a defensive shell, hopelessly waiting it out. As I watch these videos and photos it repeatedly occurs to me that Courthouse are where our Civil Rights Laws are often enforced, where people abused by government action find a remedy. Yet the images show repeated attempts to damage or destroy it. The attacks on Portland (and Seattle) lasted for weeks, and they included substantial violence and destruction of property, far more than the damage down the our DC Capitol. The violence in Minneapolis amounted to a half-billion in uninsured property losses, substantial amount of this falling on fledgling businesses and immigrant shopkeepers.

I can think of no better evidence proving that the left-leaning media consciously embraces its chosen narrative every bit as much as FOX does on the political right. This is important to see, at a time when numerous left-leaning people I know insist that there is no such thing bias on the left. I personally know dozens of people who deny media bias on the left, people who hunker down only with NPR/NYT/WP and assume that they are getting the full story.

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Greenwald: Trump’s Confrontational Russia Foreign Policy Was the Opposite of Obama’s Accommodationist Foreign Policy

From most legacy media reports, you would think that Donald Trump was a pawn of the Russian government. You'd never know that this narrative was wildly spun fiction concocted to get Trump out of the White House (Note: I am glad he's out of the White House).

The fable that Trump's foreign policy accommodated Russia lingers, however. As Matt Taibbi showed with numerous exhibits, we were showered with (literally) fake news suggesting that Trump was over-friendly to Russia. Now, Glenn Greenwald has written an article comparing Trump's often confrontational foreign policy toward Russia to the Obama's (and now Biden's) accommodationist policy toward Russia. By writing this, I'm not pretending to know how to approach foreign policy toward Russia. I suspect that I don't know many of the relevant facts (because I'm ignorant of them or because they are secret). Rather, I'm linking to Greenwald's article because the information he presents is shockingly counter to the prevailing narrative of the majority of legacy news outlets: "Biden, Reversing Trump, Permits a Key Putin Goal: a New Russian Natural Gas Pipeline to Germany: That Trump was controlled by Putin and served his agenda was the opposite of reality. First Obama, and now Biden, have accommodated Moscow far more." Here are a few excerpts:

When it came to actual vital Russian interests — as opposed to the symbolic gestures hyped by the liberal cable and op-ed page circus — Trump and his administration were confronting and undermining the Kremlin in ways Trump’s predecessor, Barack Obama, had, to his credit, steadfastly refused to do.

Indeed, the foreign policy trait relentlessly attributed to Trump in support of the media’s Cold War conspiracy theory — namely, an aversion to confronting Putin — was, in reality, an overarching and explicit belief of President Obama’s foreign policy, not President Trump. During the 2012 presidential election, Obama and the Democratic Party famously and repeatedly mocked GOP nominee Mitt Romney’s warnings about the threat posed by Russia as a “relic of the Cold War.”

.    .   .

Consistent with that view, Obama rejected bipartisan demands to send lethal weapons to Ukraine throughout 2015 and into 2016. Even when Russia reasserted control over Crimea in 2014 after citizens overwhelmingly approved it in a referendum, Obama did little more than impose some toothless sanctions (though he did preside over, if not engineer, regime change efforts in Ukraine that swept out the pro-Moscow leader and replaced him with a pro-U.S. lackey). Obama worked directly with Putin to forge an agreement with Russia’s allies in Tehran to lift sanctions against Iran and bring them back into the international community, and then publicly praised the Russian leader for the constructive role he played in orchestrating that agreement.

And, enraging the bipartisan U.S. foreign policy community, Obama even refused to follow through on his own declared “red line” to attack Russia’s key ally in Syria, President Bashar al-Assad. Indeed, even after Russia asserted governance over Crimea, and even after Russia is said by intelligence agencies to have hacked the DNC and John Podesta’s computers, Obama, in 2016, sought to form a partnership with Russia in Syria to jointly bomb targets regarded by the two governments as “terrorists.”

Meanwhile, Trump — even as media figures gorged themselves on the conspiracy theory that he was a Kremlin agent — reversed virtually all of those Obama-era accommodations to Putin. Again and again, Trump acted contrary to the Kremlin’s core interests. After publicly threatening Russia over Syria, Trump twice bombed Putin’s key Middle Eastern ally — something Obama refused to do . . . Trump also reversed Obama’s Ukraine policy, sending the exact lethal arms to anti-Russian elements that Obama warned would be directly threatening to the Kremlin and thus excessively provocative. Trump filled his administration with long-time anti-Russia hawks who would never have been welcomed in the Obama administration (including CIA Director and Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, National Security Advisor John Bolton, NATO Ambassador Richard Grenell, and U.N. Ambassador Nikki Haley).

These excerpts are part of Greenwald's much longer, factually supported article.

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Glenn Greenwald Puts Spotlight on CNN’s Natasha Bertrand to Illustrate the DNC – Spy State Alliance

It wasn't that long ago that Democrats were suspicious (if not hostile) to the CIA and America's other spy agencies. There was good reason for that, given the long history of propaganda, lies and manipulation by the CIA, FBI and NSA. Perhaps the peak of this DNC anti-spy state feeling occurred during Edward Snowden's revelations.

But then something happened. The Spy State became useful to the DNC, driven by their mutual hostility to Donald Trump. This was brought on by Trump himself by his ridicule of the spies. This makes for terrible political strategy, as highlighted in this short interview from 2017, Rachel Maddow interviewing Chuck Schumer: "When you take on the intelligence community, they have six ways from Sunday of getting back at you." The CIA and NSA have immense resources for getting back at you by fueling campaigns of disinformation:

We know remarkably little about the nature of the nation’s intelligence spending, other than its supposed total, released in a report every year. By now, it’s more than $80 billion.
During the good old days of 2013, some Democrats took seriously the revelations disclosed by Edward Snowden, even though they were hesitant to applaud his efforts publicly.  This headline tells you what the DNC thinks about Snowden's heroic actions: "Almost No Democrats Are Calling On Trump To Pardon Edward Snowden: Many progressive lawmakers have pushed reforms based on Snowden’s leaks, which makes their silence about a potential pardon that much more curious." This is a complex multi-variate issue, of course, but I suspect that Snowden has been abandoned to twist in the wind because he is not useful to the DNC and because Snowden is not a friend of the DNC's newish friend, the U.S. spy state.

This brings us to Glenn Greenwald's most recent article about the bubbly friendship involving the spy state, the DNC and the DND-allied "news" media. Corruption doesn't happen in the abstract. Rather, it is furthered by the conduct of real-life human beings, often by people who willingly betray the principles that should be guiding them in exchange for money and career advancement.  CNN's Natasha Bertrand is one for those people.  Greenwald's article is titled: "CNN's New "Reporter," Natasha Bertrand, is a Deranged Conspiracy Theorist and Scandal-Plagued CIA Propagandist: In the U.S. corporate media, the surest way to advance is to loyally spread lies and deceit from the U.S. security state. Bertrand is just the latest example."

Glenn Greenwald continues to be a lightning rod for abuse from many political directions.  These ad hominem attacks stem from his reporting because he has a problem: he follows facts where they lead, regardless of who this pisses off. His resulting and undeservedly untarnished reputation makes many people (including many of my FB "Friends") viscerally hostile to Greenwald and hesitant to read or believe what he has written. Here is the solution to that (unwarranted) hostility: Greenwald's article contains numerous links allowing you to read the underlying evidence and weep. Here is an excerpt, but I urge you to read the full article, to follow Glenn Greenwald at his Substack account and, further, to financially support his courageous journalism.

Natasha Bertrand has spent the last five years working as a spokesperson for the alliance composed of the CIA and the Democratic Party, spreading every unvetted and unproven conspiracy theory about Russiagate that they fed her. The more loyally she performed that propagandistic function, the more rapidly she was promoted and rewarded. Now she arrives at her latest destination: CNN, not only Russiagate Central along with MSNBC but also the home to countless ex-operatives of the security state agencies on whose behalf Bertrand speaks.

Once again we see the two key truths of modern corporate journalism in the U.S. First, we have the Jeffrey Goldberg Principle: you can never go wrong, but only right, by disseminating lies and propaganda from the CIA. Second, the organs that spread the most disinformation and crave disinformation agents as their employees are the very same ones who demand censorship of the internet in the name of stopping disinformation.

I've long said that if you want to understand how to thrive in this part of the media world, you should study the career advancement of Jeffrey Goldberg, propelled by one reckless act after the next. But now the sequel to the Goldberg Rise is the thriving career of this new CNN reporter whose value as a CIA propagandist Goldberg, notably, was the first to spot and reward.

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The High Cost of Breaking a Story that Changes the World

Matt Taibbi describes enormous price Glenn Greenwald is willing to pay to get the big story out. Taibbi's article is titled: "Why "Securing Democracy" Will Be Taught in Journalism Schools." Here is an excerpt:

Lastly: for all the quasi-psychiatric analyses of Greenwald in places like The New Yorker or New York magazine, none of them seem to grasp that being willing to be the object of intense public loathing is now a pre-condition of most serious investigative reporting.

The costs of publishing something really damaging were always high — think of the way the business turned on Sy Hersh after he published the “Family Jewels” story about the CIA in 1975 — but in the digital age, full-scale character assassination is usually just a beginning. The Car Wash story prompted the spreading of a wild forgery purporting to show a secret bitcoin payment by Greenwald to a Russian hacker for the archive. This turned into Bolsonaro’s son Flavio publicly insisting that “Glenn Greenwald may have paid a Russian hacker to invade the cell phones of Brazilian authorities,” followed by accusations of pedophilic predation, followed by Bolsonaro himself speculating that Glenn might need to “spend some time in the slammer here in Brazil.”

America’s social media smear artists can be proud that they share many thematic ideas with the Brazilian fascist. Bolsonaro is too dense to know the word “grooming,” but he insinuated that Greenwald and Miranda were “tricksters” who “adopted boys” to abuse them. Greenwald and Miranda’s lesson: “It is impossible to anticipate all the threats that you will face when confronting powerful governments.”

Even after all this, Greenwald could regularly be seen arguing the story’s merits with every after-midnight three-follower egg on Twitter, which drives some people crazy but is probably a big part of why the hacker-source picked him in the first place. Most whistleblowers are in jams, thrust into impossible situations that have cost them jobs, friends, even their families sometimes. They need someone willing to join them on the hated list, and in the Internet age, the number of such people is small.

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