Your government dollars at work. Stella Assange is the wife of Julian Assange. This bizarre directive from Neocon Anthony Blinken (one of the architects of the Iraq War) brings to mind US efforts to blow-up an early opportunity to settle the Ukraine-Russia dispute.
From Charles Cook of National Review:
Bluntly put, I’m going to ask you for money. But, before I do, I have a pressing question: Do you know how fire alarms work?
I do. And I’d wager that most of the press did, too, until Representative Jamaal Bowman pulled one this week in a possible attempt to shut down the work of Congress, and, in a transparent attempt to ignore the problem with his having done so, the operation of fire alarms immediately became one of those great Talmudic mysteries that prompt furrowed brows and the perplexed shrugging of shoulders. If you want to see a journalist lose faith in epistemological truth, have a Democrat do something corrupt or stupid. Within seconds, you’ll be transported to a pot-filled sophomore philosophy seminar. “When you think about it, what can we really know, dude?”
I mention The Strange Case of the Exquisitely Complicated Fire Alarm because it strikes me as a perfect example-in-miniature of how the media have elected to treat the growing evidence of serious wrongdoing by President Biden and his family. Back in 2017, when the subject of rumors was Donald Trump and his supposed “collusion” with Russia, the press treated every claim that was made as if it were self-evidently true . . . Questions were begged without relief. If it was alleged at 5 p.m. that Trump had once tried a vodka martini, by 6 the walls would be closing in. . .
With Biden, the media have taken precisely the opposite approach. I would like to say that this reversal represents a salutary overcorrection, but, of course, we all know that it is no such thing. It represents corruption. . . The press wanted Trump to be guilty, it wants Biden to be innocent, and it has proceeded accordingly in both cases. With Trump, fluff was treated as evidence; with Biden, evidence is treated as fluff.
This excellent article is the reason I created a category on this website called "Narratives in Media." It's probably my fasted growing category, with more than two hundred examples, most of these from the past three years. I created this category relatively recently; my of my older posts could have been categorized similarly. I sometimes refer to the post in this category to remind myself that we are constantly being gaslight by corporate media. When I wonder whether my positions are reasonable on COVID, immigration, Biden, Hunter Biden, politization of the U.S. security state, censorship, etc., I refer to these articles. It's simply not possible that left-leaning versus right-leaning (FOX) corporate news repeatedly come down on the opposite side of all these issues.
My main question is whether all of these so-called "reporters" and "editors" are intentionally misleading us, paltering, or whether they have drunk so much of the Kool-aid that they are oblivious to their own need to preach to us (through commission and omission) rather than simply telling us what is happening out in the world.
I do want to put in a good word for National Review, a conservative-leaning publication that is also self-critical. A conservative publication that was consistently and critically opposed to Trump. As Cook accurately says in his article on Jamal Bowman and media polarization,
I am proud to say that National Review did not behave in this manner in either case. The phrase that I have heard most frequently uttered by my colleagues during the discussion of both of these stories is “don’t get out over your skis.” Instead: Be skeptical, be open-minded, be patient, look for evidence, and follow it where it goes.
This is abhorrent. A national embarrassment. Having news media that is not adversarial to the ruling political elite is like having plumbers who prefer leaky pipes. There is nothing more fundamental for a news reporter than to be skeptical and curious. The best reporters in years past were relentlessly driven forward by the idea that powerful people constantly lie for their own personal gain.
If only those who cheer on new U.S. imperialist wars would consider our deplorable track record. Consider the following excerpt from a recent article by Chris Hedges. The title of his article: "Humanitarian Imperialism Created the Libyan NightmareNATO’s military intervention in Libya in 2011, which overthrew the regime of Muammar Gaddafi, resulted in a chaotic and murderous failed state. Libyans pay a horrific price for this catastrophe."
“We came, we saw, he died,” Hillary Clinton famously quipped when Muammar Gaddafi, after seven months of U.S. and NATO bombing, was overthrown in 2011 and killed by a mob who sodomized him with a bayonet. But Gaddafi would not be the only one to die. . . .
The chaos that followed Western intervention saw weapons from the country’s arsenals flood the black market, with many snatched up by groups such as the Islamic State. Civil society ceased to function. Journalists captured images of migrants from Nigeria, Senegal and Eritrea being beaten and sold as slaves to work in fields or on construction sites. Libya’s infrastructure, including its electrical grids, aquifers, oil fields and dams, fell into disrepair....
Western regime-change, carried out in the name of human rights under the doctrine of R2P (Responsibility to Protect), destroyed Libya - as it did Iraq - as a unified and stable nation. The flood victims are part of the tens of thousands of Libyan dead resulting from our “humanitarian intervention,” which rendered disaster relief non-existent. We bear responsibility for Libya’s prolonged suffering. But once we wreak havoc on a country in the name of saving its persecuted — regardless of whether they are being persecuted or not — we forget they exist.
Karl Popper in “The Open Society and Its Enemies” warned against utopian engineering, massive social transformations, almost always implanted by force, and led by those who believe they are endowed with a revealed truth. These utopian engineers carry out the wholesale destruction of systems, institutions and social and cultural structures in a vain effort to achieve their vision. In the process, they dismantle the self-correcting mechanisms of incremental and piecemeal reform that are impediments to that grand vision. History is replete with murderous utopian social engineering — the Jacobins, the communists, the fascists and now, in our own age, the globalists, or neoliberal imperialists.
Libya, like Iraq and Afghanistan, fell victim to the self-delusions peddled by humanitarian interventionists — Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton, Ben Rhodes, Samantha Power and Susan Rice. The Obama administration armed and backed an insurgent force that they believed would do the bidding of the U.S. Obama in a recent post urged people to support aid agencies to alleviate the suffering of the people of Libya, a plea that ignited an understandable backlash on social media."
I posted on this topic about a week ago but I'm posting again because the behavior of the Biden White House is despicable. Robert F. Kennedy, Jr.'s father and uncle were assassinated. RFK, Jr. was almost murdered last week. Presidents have always granted Secret service protection to opposing candidate, who requested it, until now. I'm to the point where there is no innocent explanation for the behavior of the White House. Please watch this short video. Don't skip over the beginning where Gavin de Becker describes his noteworthy credentials.
