For me, one of the most disturbing stories over the past five years is how cheerleading news outlets have gotten things so wrong so often. Here is Matt Orfalea's latest mashup, featuring the Trump "Alpha Bank" scandal. This is not a scandal about Trump (a despicable human in my opinion), but a scandal concerning the Clinton campaign and our "news" industry.
https://rumble.com/embed/v13pa8u/?pub=4
Name-calling. That's apparently what a political party does when it has largely abandoned the working class in order to feast on large corporate contributions. What else could we have done with $40 billion? This downpayment on this illegal war has cost each American taxpayer almost $300. What if we had given $1 Billion dollars to each of the 40 American cities that are most crime-ridden and/or lacking in education funds? There wasn't even a God-damned debate about this largess to America's biggest defense contractors. Most of us who have challenged this profligate spending for this extremely dangerous war have been called "Russian assets." As if the apparent U.S. strategy of regime-change against Putin, a purported madman with thousands of nuclear missiles, doesn't deserve sober debate. As though we have already forgotten how devastating it is to our own country to fight another undeclared war without any meaningful end game. That is the state of democracy in the modern day U.S. This is what passes for meaningful conversation. Name-calling.
We should not underestimate the capacity of well-run propaganda systems to drive people to irrational, murderous, and suicidal behavior. Take an example … World War I … on both sides, the soldiers marched off to mutual slaughter with enormous exuberance, fortified by the cheers of the intellectual classes and those who they helped mobilize across the political spectrum, from left to right including the most powerful left political force in the world, in Germany. Exceptions are so few that we can practically list them, and some of the most prominent among them ended up in jail for questioning the nobility of the enterprise: among them Rosa Luxemburg, Bertrand Russell, and Eugene Debs. With the help of Wilson’s propaganda agencies and the enthusiastic support of liberal intellectuals, a pacifist country was turned in a few months into raving anti-German hysterics, ready to take revenge on those who had perpetrated savage crimes, many of them invented by the British Ministry of Information. But that’s by no means inevitable, and we should not underestimate the civilizing effects of the popular struggles of recent years. We need not stride resolutely towards catastrophe merely because those are the marching orders.
NBC's Nicolle Wallace keeps proudly getting the facts wrong, over and over. She still has a job at NBC.
Glenn Greenwald comments at his new article: "The Typhoid Mary of Disinformation": Nicolle Wallace. Nobody Spreads it More Relentlessly.From her days as Bush/Cheney propagandist, to her stint on The View, to her role as beloved-by-Democrats MSNBC host, Wallace has perfected the art of sociopathic lying.":
She has an unsurpassed ability to broadcast to audiences outright lies whispered to her by Deep State operatives — one after the next — without flinching or betraying the slightest sense of a conscience or moral compass. She lies like only a sociopath can: exuding charm and warmth yet utterly vacant on the inside, except for a soul festering in rot. Over the last twenty years — from her perches at the White House, on The View, and now at MSNBC — nobody has made liberals eat up Pentagon and neocon war propaganda more eagerly and uncritically than Nicolle Wallace. There is literally not a single liberal/CIA disinformation campaign over the last six years that she did not fully and uncritically embrace.
Here's the military-industrial-news-media complex hard at work today, focused on the western flank. I'm smelling the stink of military manufacturers frightening and corrupting politicians in order to procure more orders for weapons. And why not float the idea of a two-front war with two nuclear armed adversaries, one of whom manufactures much of America's high tech goods? Trump is mostly out of the news these days than to drum up more warmongering? This will allow NBC to sell more commercials and thus enjoy some largess too.
Caitlin Johnson comments at her website:
NBC's Meet the Press just aired an absolutely freakish segment in which the influential narrative management firm Center for a New American Security (CNAS) ran war games simulating a direct US hot war with China. . . .
As we've discussed previously, citing war machine-funded think tanks as expert analysis without even disclosing their financial conflict of interest is plainly journalistic malpractice. But it happens all the time in the mass media anyway, because the mass media exist to circulate propaganda, not journalism.
This is getting so, so crazy. That the mass media are now openly teaming up with war machine think tanks to begin seeding the normalization of a hot war with China into the minds of the public indicates that the propaganda campaign to manufacture consent for the US-centralized empire's final Hail Mary grab at unipolar domination is escalating even further. The mass-scale psychological manipulation is getting more and more overt and more and more shameless.