By a vote of 92-7, with one not voting, the United States Senate on December 8 passed the annual -- and notoriously anti-freedom -- National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA), which contained one of the most stunning attacks on free speech ever written into US law. The bill that the NDAA assimilated is called the “Portman-Murphy Counter-Propaganda Bill,” and would shell out over $160 million in two years to stifle free speech, see US politicians and "dinosaur media" team up on propaganda of their own, allow federal bailouts of the dinosaur press (the very thing Barack Obama called for in September and October) and establish a “truthiness” test for websites and videos (which Mr. Obama also thought was a brilliant idea).
To come to grips with just how immediately important this is, let’s do two things over the course of two reports:
1.Unravel how the dinosaur media and their favorite politicians work with each other to promote legislation, and how this recently was done to blacklist alternative news sites, delegitimize Donald Trump's election, and further an anti-Russian narrative…
2.Understand the fabricated origins of so-called “Fake News” (also known as factual news that leftist reporters don’t like), and look at the real fakers peddling the term.
First, let’s check the historical pattern, or modus operandi, of the dinosaur media when laying the rhetorical red carpet for legislation, an age-old strategy that was employed as long ago as the Roman Empire…
A few weeks of watching mainstream news sites or broadcasts reveals the pattern. Without honestly reporting that a bill is in the works or has been introduced, the pop media typically hum about some “crisis” or emotionally titanic problem that “needs fixing,” and, a few days or weeks later -- lo-and-behold! – an heroic senator, congressman, or some glorious combination of more than one, has that magical bill in hand to address the “crisis.” It is the perfect example of Roman Emperor Diocletian’s “problem-reaction-solution” process fulfilled, but, shoot, we can rest easy knowing our government overlords have done battle for us once more.
The contemporary version of the strategy has been employed for decades, from virtually endless media coverage of First Lady Hillary Clinton grousing about the “silent crisis” of “unaffordable” daycare in 1997 as a strategy to prep for federal handouts to do just that, to the false narrative about Kuwaiti children in neonatal wards being killed by Iraqis, a fiction employed to generate public support for George H. W. Bush’s unconstitutional “Desert Shield” and “Desert Storm.”
The latest round, in which the old media shivered about "Fake News" and "The Russians," has led to this Orwellian “Anti-Propaganda” bill, which is not simply a reaffirmation, echo, or academic exercise in skullduggery. It is immediate, immensely important, and part of an ongoing effort to crush news competition and demonize both Russia and the next Presidential Administration.
Many in the old guard US press began crying "Fake News" and "Russian Hacking" as a way to defend themselves against the unstoppable rise of “alternative media,” which is mainly comprised of independent, often amateur, reporters uncovering information and posting it online. This explosion of independent news gatherers -- who don’t need the federally-controlled broadcast spectrum or expensive newspaper staff, who cater to people who have thousands of online choices for news, not just a handful of government-regulated networks and papers -- has nearly wiped out the stale news paradigm.
And not only does this not sit well with the reporters and editors at the original networks and leftist papers for economic reasons, it gets under their proverbial skin for another reason: they and their political pals are losing ideological supremacy in the growing information war.
One of the earliest examples of the tumbling house of cards came in the late summer/early autumn of 2013, with the failed attempt by the Obama Administration to push a false narrative facilitating an undeclared war on the government of Syria. When President Obama and Secretary of State John Kerry tried to push the fiction that a sarin gas attack inside Syria was conducted by Bashar al Assad, fewer Americans listened to the pop news nets’ complicit reports. Instead, many watched reporters such as David Knight and Paul Joseph Watson, of InfoWars, whistleblower Sibel Edmunds, Canadian sensation Stefan Molyneaux, Ben Swann, StormCloudsGathering, Russia Today, and LibertyConspiracy. Instead of the fictional drivel ladled out by the leftist media, these Americans discovered that a team of MIT scientists studied the Administration claims about Assad and found that the design and trajectory of the rocket could not possibly have come from Assad-controlled Syria, and that another team of scientists studied the gas cannisters and found that they were not Assad's, but likely used by the very "rebels" Mr. Obama and Mr. Kerry had been courting.
The resulting wave of public skepticism forced the Obama hawks to back down.
The next phase of trouble for the establishment came when the pop media assiduously avoided hundreds of independent reports that Hillary Clinton was in poor health during the summer of 2016. Despite dozens of videos showing her coughing so much she was incapable of speaking, despite reports of her canceling campaign appearances, of her taking huge swaths of time off and disappearing, the pop media not only did not report the incidents, they engaged in criticism of those who did.
I should know, because I was one of the targets of this opprobrium.
At roughly the same time, apparatchiks in the Democratic National Convention (DNC) were scrambling to draw attention away from the fact that DNC e-mails leaked in June showed an unethical, possibly illegal, relationship between leftist reporters at websites like Politico, and at networks such as CNN, CNBC, MSNBC, NBC, and ABC News, one one side, and the DNC, members of the Clinton Presidential campaign, or the Clinton Global Initiative on the other. Instead of addressing the problem – which gave Clinton an edge in debates against Vermont Senator Bernie “Buckaroo Banzai” Sanders – the DNC tried to divert attention from the e-mail content, and made up useless and fantastical narratives that the evil “Russians” were responsible for the hack. Despite the crazy desperation of the move, their dinosaur media pals dutifully repeated the canard.
The fact that Guccifer2 claimed responsibility for the DNC hack, and for handing the information to non-partisan Wikileaks to vet and release, and the fact that Julian Assange, the founder of Wikileaks, flatly stated that the Russians did not do the electronic infiltration, did not matter (in fact, one day ago, Assange repeated this to Sean Hannity on Fox). The DNC and their leftist press pals chose their bogeyman, the ubiquitous “Crazy Russian Hacker,” and stuck with it.
But why blame the Russian government, specifically?
This is where the dinosaur media's yammering about "fake news" and "Russian meddling" serves a second purpose, beyond distraction from the e-mail content. It serves to help the Obama Administration's attempt to isolate Russia geopolitically and economically.
The antipathy of the Obama Administration has been long-standing and economically based. Four years after the Russian and Chinese governments (to name a few) began dropping US debt instruments, they uncoupled from the US “petrodollar” in 2014. They did this because the Federal Reserve has been locked on an insane, decades-long inflationary expansion of the US money supply, decreasing the long-term buying power of the dollar. Since the Russian nation possesses vast petroleum and gas reserves, its government could split from the dollar, shore up its gold reserves, and trade using Rubles instead. This is something the US government, Qatar’s government, and Saudi royals don’t like, and led to the US trying to block Russian energy exports.
How did the US try to do block Russian energy exports?
First, by engaging in what appears to have been a NATO-CIA-State-Department-Backed coup of the elected government of Ukraine thus blocking Russian access to the sea via Crimea, and, second, by trying to topple the regime in Syria, thus stopping the growth of a pipeline from Russia to eastern Europe.
In fact, if people wonder whether the US State Department was involved in the deplorable act of overthrowing Ukraine, all they need do is listen to the recording of foul-mouthed Assistant Secretary of State Victoria Nuland talking to gummy bear US Ambassador to Ukraine, Geoffrey Pyatt, as they discuss which puppet leader to put into office. Ms. Nuland, by the way, is the same person who let slip that the US spent $5 billion to overthrow the Ukrainian government (through direct payments to agents provocateur and Non-Governmental Organizations aka NGOs). If that isn't enough evidence to indicate that the Russians were not the bad guys there, perhaps the fact that Joe Biden's son was almost immediately placed on the board of Ukraine's biggest energy company might convince a few more doubting Thomases.
So the choice of Russia as the Darth Vader behind DNC hacks served to not only distract from the illicit and downright slimy details of the DNC activities revealed in the e-mails, it served to bolster the Obama Administration’s portrayal of the Russian government as an existential evil that needed to be contained in Crimea and Syria. Americans must accept the narrative. Did you hear something different from those pesky Scooby Gang reporters in the “alternative media?” Did they tell you that the US has given military and financial support to members of al Nusra in Syria, and those supposedly “moderate” rebels whom John McCain, Lindsey Graham, and Barack Obama adored ended up expanding ISIS and invading Iraq? Nooooo, noooo. Listen to the dinosaurs and the administration! It’s Russia’s fault! After all, "Russia invaded Crimea."
In fact, despite its not-so-bright track record regarding human rights, the Russians have been trying to defend Crimea, and trying to defend Syria (though Mr. Assad is also no angel) against the radicals whom the US, Qatar, Turkey, and the Saudis helped arm, train, and fund both directly and through secondary “Rat Line” channels in Qatar, Libya and Turkey. This is something the politically-connected old-guard US media tried to avoid reporting, especially as Hillary Clinton’s presidential race began to founder.
Shoot, if one is ideologically aligned with the Obama agenda, why not add to the deflection away from the DNC e-mails and the Clinton e-mails that Wikileaks released, and try to use the leaks as ways to demonize a geopolitical thorn in the proverbial US rump? Why not blame the Russians?
In Part Two of this story, we will look into just how these old mainstream media liars have attempted to blacklist alternative, independent news sites and helped push the passage of the odious “Portman-Murphy” bill. Thank you for reading.