Republicans Rethink the Benefits of Censorship

Congressional Democrats are still the all-star censorship team, but Matt Taibbi points out that two-faced Republicans are working hard to try to play catch-up. The title to his article is "More Republicans Betray Causes They Supported Ten Minutes AgoThe Great Bipartisan Constitution-shredding project of 2024 continues at breakneck speed."

Whispers about familiar villains preparing new versions of the election censorship programs that animated the Twitter Files grew louder last week, when Virginia Senator Mark Warner let slip at a conference that the FBI and DHS have renewed “voluntary” communications with Internet platforms.

Republicans who objected to the last programs on First Amendment grounds are now rushing to out-censor the censors. Between renewal of FISA surveillance, the depressingly bipartisan Antisemitism Awareness Act, and now a proposed No Fly List for campus protesters, most all of congress apart from a few libertarian holdouts is signed up for the project of turning War on Terror machinery inward. Not exactly the surprise of the century, but still, sheesh.

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More Undeniable Evidence of a Media Narrative

Nellie Bowles discusses the BLM riots of 2020 with Bari Weiss of Honestly:

"More than explicit lies about what happened in 2020, howw the mainstream media contralled the narrative was by not covering it. That was the most important thing. It was to ignore it."

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Dave Smith Offers and A/B Illustration of How Corporate Media-Concocted Narratives Masquerade as Facts

A protest is a protest, right? No, not when an election is looming. Corporate media (including NPR) specializes in telling us just enough of the right kind of facts to get the right person elected. Dave Smith offers this excellent illustration comparing the George Floyd protests to the current protests regarding the war involving Israel and Gaza.

The text of Dave's tweet:

Four years ago, after George Floyd’s death, a massive protest movement started across the country. The protests quickly turned violent. Almost nightly, in cities across the country, riots broke out. Many people were murdered, thousands were assaulted and billions of dollars in property damage was committed.

In the face of this, the corporate media sided with the rioters. They stood in front of fires calling the riots “mostly peaceful”

Our cartoonishly militarized police, seeming to finally have a purpose for existing, stood down and allowed the mob to terrorize American citizens.

Objectively, the current “free Palestine” protests are nothing like this. They actually have been “mostly peaceful.” There have been isolated instances of violence and a few made up hoaxes.

Watching the media coverage and police response has been sickening, particularly when you remember 2020.

The bottom line is that they thought those protests hurt Trump and these ones hurt Biden.

There are a lot of things I don’t like about these protests but the major issues come down to the words they’re hollering or blocking college kids from a building. It’s important to remember the real story here isn’t some left wing 20 yr olds. It’s what Israel is doing to Gaza and our criminal government funding and arming it.

Continue ReadingDave Smith Offers and A/B Illustration of How Corporate Media-Concocted Narratives Masquerade as Facts

The United States Empire as a Configuration of Dots

As Jimmy Dore points out, each dot is a United States Military base, part of our Department of DEFENSE.

This is called Empire. This is imperialism. These are all the military bases the United States has around the world. You know, no other country has this just the United States as this. Nobody else does this. China, Russia. They don't have bases all over the world. Who does? We do, because that's how capitalism ends up.

You have to use a gun to keep it going. And you have to become fascists, which is what Joe Biden did to the railroad workers when he crushed her railroad strike. That's called fascism. The stuff that they that you hear all the time and on TV as fascism isn't. That was actual fascism. And this is why our country is going down the shitter and we're ending like all great empires. And we're overextending militarily while we won't take care of our own people at home.

We just said $15 billion, which could take care of everybody here in the United States. We just send it to Ukraine with no debate, no talking about it. And we're we just built another military base in Syria. We built three more in the Philippines just in the last couple of months. That's where your money's going. Because your government is 100% corrupt. Not regular corrupt. It's 100%. corrupt. This is called corruption. You see this? Do you know what this is called? This is called a trillion dollars a year in corruption because that's all this is. These military bases are there to make sure American corporations can extract natural resources from these places. Look at all the bases we have outside of China. Look at this. Here comes South America, Central America. Look at that! Imagine if China had these many bases in South and Central America or anywhere? Imagine if China had all these bases in the Middle East Imagine.

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