"Everything is as it should be."

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November 2023 Propaganda Report: 60 Minutes Strikes Again...and Again...and Again!

Now that I’ve begun to dip my toes back into the cesspool of propaganda, I’m once again coming to the grim realization that I don’t have to walk far to find those putrid waters.

A few weeks ago, I wrote about how I stumbled upon an episode of the CBS dinosaur 60 Minutes and was shocked/amused at how shamelessly it peddled propaganda against Russia, China and Iran, no doubt in the hopes of convincing gullible Americans into believing some Manichean ideal about us being the good guys, and them being the bad guys, and how we must righteously annihilate them in a world war.

In the weeks that followed, 60 Minutes has kept up its relentless propaganda pace with astounding consistency. In fact, since 60 Minutes started its 56th season on September 17, 2023, over the course of eleven episodes the show has run an astonishing twelve segments either directly or tangentially accusing Russia, China and/or Iran of various evils and nefariousness. This relentless cavalcade of propaganda pieces has been entirely devoid of nuance or journalistic integrity, filled with false assumptions, decidedly one-sided, egregiously vacuous and transparently contrived.

The 60 Minutes episode from November 12th is a perfect example of the type of vapid-to-the-point-of-inane propaganda now common place in American media. The topic on this episode was…shock of shocks…the evil of those nefarious Iranians and Russians!! How original.

The first segment was about an alleged Iranian government program to kill or kidnap American officials, citizens and Iranian dissidents on U.S. soil, which is a nmcie companion piece to the 60 Minutes segment I previously wrote about which dealt with an Iranian-American arrested for espionage in Iran, who was eventually part of a recent prisoner swap.

Leslie Stahl, sporting her trademark physics-defying hairstyle that is best described as Andy Warhol run through a nuclear Cuisinart and a turbo wind tunnel, started off the festivities by reading a list of U.S. officials allegedly targeted. The list included such world-class asshats as Mike Esper, Mike Pompeo and to top it all off, John fucking Bolton.

Bolton and Stahl sat down for one of the more contrived sequences in 60 Minutes history, which is quite an accomplishment, and Bolton, as is his wont, talked tough while looking like a constipated Seussian character. Bolton is one of the more blood-thirsty and maniacal hawks in recent U.S. history, again…quite an accomplishment, and he is completely devoid of any credibility on issues revolving around Iran, Russia, China, the Middle East, Europe, Asia or anywhere else in the world, but Stahl, of course, lapped up his braggadocio bullshit and never once pushed back against his false bravado or his claims…nor did she…you know…show any actual evidence to back up the FBI’s claims of an Iranian kidnap/assassination program.

Stahl then interviewed Masi Alinejad, an Iranian dissident woman living in Brooklyn whom the FBI claims was targeted by this Iranian kidnapping/assassination plot.

Alinejad came to the U.S. fourteen years ago and has been an outspoken advocate for women in Iran, and routinely confers with women in Iran and posts videos online of them not wearing a headscarf in defiance of Iranian religious law.

To be kind, Alinejad comes across as absolutely batshit crazy. She is hyper emotional and seems like the type of person you’d see wandering the streets of Brooklyn talking to neighborhood squirrels while wearing an ornate Kentucky Derby hat and a vintage wedding dress.

Alinejad shared her story of how Iran hired an Azerbaijani man in New York to buy a gun and track down Alinejad, then kidnap her and take her to Iran for trial.

Stahl’s reaction to this story is as revealing as it is pretty funny, as she says it “sounds implausible”. No shit Leslie…maybe it “sounds implausible” because it is, in fact, implausible.

Apparently, the kidnap plot against Alinejad crumbles and so the Iranians pivoted and told this criminal from Azerbaijan to skip the kidnapping and just kill her. The criminal allegedly stalks her, then goes up to her front door and “tries to get in” her house.

What’s weird about this claim of this guy trying to break in to Alinejad’s house is that 60 Minutes shows door cam footage of him on her porch meant to prove the claim, but the video doesn’t show him actually trying to get in to her house at all…in fact he never touches the door. He wanders back on forth on the porch looking at his phone, like a delivery man wondering if he has the wrong address. If there was footage of him actually trying to break in, which would be pretty damning…60 Minutes would’ve shown it. But apparently, they don’t because they didn’t.

According to the story, the alleged assassin then leaves…apparently because he couldn’t get in the house – no doubt held back by the fact that he never touched the door, and then is pulled over by cops for “running a stop sign”, and the police find a rifle in the trunk of his car.

Let’s unpack this shall we…the guy has a weapon, which the FBI alleges he was going to use to kill Alinejad at the behest of Iran, but for some inexplicable reason he decides not to take the weapon with him when he goes to kill her and ends up just standing around like a dope on her porch. What was he going to do, meet her, introduce himself and then tell her to hold on while he runs to his car and gets his rifle?

Also, never believe coincidences in cases like this. This guy wasn’t pulled over by the cops by happenstance…he was marked and everyone knew what he was doing. A strong indicator of this is that if you or I run a stop sign, the police are not going to search the trunk of our car. They will give you a ticket and that will be that. This is why I assume that this alleged assassin from Azerbaijan was actually either an intelligence agency asset or an informant of some kind, and that the entire plot was manufactured by the feds.

Now why would I assert such a crazy thing? Well because this 60 Minutes story also reveals that the man who allegedly wanted to kidnap or kill John Bolton hired a hitman online (yeah…ok) and that hitman wasn’t really a hitman…he was…you guessed it…an FBI informant.

The FBI has lots of informants and they get up to lots of nefarious stuff for their fed paymasters. For example, that 2020 kidnap plot against Michigan governor Whitmer…the vast majority of people involved were actually working for the FBI. If you look at many big-name cases, particularly in the wake of 9-11, the same is true. Hell, at the very least two of the 9-11 hijackers were living with an FBI informant in San Diego right before the attacks.

So, take all of this nonsense from the FBI and 60 Minutes about a vast Iranian assassination/kidnap plot with a gigantic grain of salt.

That said, governments and their intelligence agencies do kidnap and kill citizens of other countries. You know how I know that? Because 60 Minutes unironically shows a video in this segment where an Iranian citizen confesses to assisting the Iranian Revolutionary Guard with their kidnapping and assassination program. The Iranian man, a smuggler who was allegedly given carte blanch in his illegal business if he cooperated with the Revolutionary Guard, confesses in a video MADE BY ISRAELI INTELLIGENCE AGENTS IN THE BACK OF A CAR AFTER THESE SAME ISRAELI INTELLIGENCE AGENTS KIDNAPPED AND FORCEFULLY INTERROGATED THE GUY. Ms. Stahl fails to recognize the irony of using a confession video obtained through an Israeli kidnapping plot to prove the villainy of Iranians for their kidnapping plots.

Speaking of other governments kidnapping people…that sounds sort of like…I don’t know… the U.S. government rendition program under the Bush regime.

And speaking of assassinations of other country’s government officials…that sounds a lot like the U.S. assassination of Iranian General Qasem Soleimani in 2020. Not to mention the cavalcade of scientists assassinated in Iran by Israeli intelligence in the last decade.

Stahl does bring up the Soleimani assassination but fails to see any similarities as the Iranian General was a “terrorism mastermind”. As always, terrorism is in the eye of the beholder, as U.S. foreign policy over the last 75 years has killed and terrorized infinitely more people, especially Iranian people, than the “terrorist” Soleimani could ever dream of matching. Bolton, Pompeo and the entirety of the George W. Bush administration are at a minimum, equals to Soleimani on the terrorism chart.

Speaking of dead Iranians…does anybody remember the 290 Iranian murdered by the U.S. in 1988 when the U.S.S. Vincennes shot down Iranian Air flight 655 over Iranian airspace? Well…I’m sure Iranians do, and they probably think of it as a terror attack. The George H.W. Bush was president at the time and he refused to apologize to Iran because America never apologizes….typical terrorists behavior.

Stahl goes on to recount the FBI allegations against Iran saying that in order to keep a legal distance, Iran uses “proxies” from the criminal world to do their dirty work.

This sounds quite similar to how the U.S. intelligence community uses criminals to run guns and drugs into the U.S. from Central and South America in order to fund their black budget projects…like, ironically enough, Iran-Contra.

It is also similar to how prior to the war in Afghanistan, poppy production in that country under Taliban rule had fallen to nearly zero…but after we went on the hunt for Bin Laden by starting a war there, poppy production skyrocketed, followed by a flood of heroin into the U.S. and Europe. The same thing happened during Vietnam, when the CIA would run heroin from Thailand through Vietnam and into the U.S. Not surprisingly, Leslie Stahl didn’t bring any of this uncomfortableness up.

Also not surprisingly, when Stahl spoke of Iran using proxies like Hamas and Hezbollah to fight their wars and foment dissent in other countries, she failed to mention how the U.S. has famously used such stand-up good guys as Al Qaeda and ISIS as proxies in the Middle East against various enemies, such as the old Soviet Union and modern-day Syria.

60 Minutes’ allergy to the truth and addiction to establishment propaganda didn’t stop with the inane Iranian kidnapping story. Up next on the same episode was even more WWIII drum banging in the form of a story about Russia’s “cultural genocide” in Ukraine.

In a previous episode, 60 Minutes did a segment about Russia’s “quiet invasion” in Georgia and now they’re doing a segment on Russia’s “cultural genocide”…how sneaky of those Russians to do “quiet” invasions and “cultural” genocides, instead of those noisy invasions and actual genocides like Israel is doing in Gaza.

The main thrust of this segment was that Russia is targeting Ukrainian churches, libraries and museums in order to wipe out Ukrainian culture and identity.

The specifics of the charges against Russia in this case are…well…almost irrelevant considering the dubious sources with incentive to manufacture any story they want with no journalistic resistance to it. That said, I don't doubt in the least that churches, libraries and museums have been destroyed in Ukraine.

What I find fascinating though is that as this story aired another war is raging…this time in Gaza, and lots of churches, including the third oldest Christian church in the world, St. Porphyrius, and hospitals too, have been deliberately targeted, as have civilians.

You can bet your ass that 60 Minutes will not run a story on the cultural genocide of Christians by Israel…and that’s because when Israel commits cultural genocide, or any other kind of genocide, it’s good, but when Russia does it, it’s bad.

To be fair, it isn’t just Israel that gets a free pass…we give a free pass to ourselves as well. Remember when the Iraqi museum under U.S. military control was looted during the Iraq War, and Donald Rumsfeld’s response was to scoff at the charges and then to declare that “stuff happens”?

I certainly do not condone Russia’s military destroying Ukrainian churches, museums and libraries, nor do I condone their alleged looting. But I must say that these charges would be more impactful if western media outlets hadn’t already run with vacuous accusations of Russian rape camps and massacres, both of which have been shown to be scurrilous charges and empty propaganda talking points.

What I find so deplorable about establishment media’s modern war coverage is, whether it be in Ukraine, Syria, or Israel, the manufacturing and hyping of false atrocity stories.

War is bad enough as it is that you don’t need to gin up phony furor over fake rape camps or beheaded babies and the like. War is an atrocity all its own, it doesn’t need any help. And frankly, these stories only further to coarsen and dehumanize the public…which is already pretty coarse and inhumane.

The following Sunday, November 19th, 60 Minutes kept the propaganda train rolling with a segment titled “The Disappeared”, which was a shameless appeal to emotion that was so devoid of journalistic integrity as to be egregious.

The segment told the story of how Russia is “abducting” Ukrainian children from Ukraine and taking them into Russia. 60 Minutes reports that according to the Ukrainian government, the “official” number of children “abducted” by Russia is 19,000 but that they think the “real” number is 300,000…that’s quite a range…one might even say it is “highly improbable”. Just so everyone knows, 60 Minutes makes abundantly clear throughout the segment that all of this “abducting” is a “war crime”.

The story follows a “brave” Ukrainian grandmother, named Paulina, as she “rescues” her nine-year-old grandson Nikita who was “abducted” by the Russians. This story is…ummm…complicated to say the least.

So, Paulina’s grandson Nikita has special needs and was attending a boarding school for disabled students in Ukraine. His parents are completely out of the picture, but why that is, is never revealed in the story, we only learn that the grandmother is “in the process of filing for guardianship of her grandson”. Curious considering that Nikita was “abducted” nearly 8 months ago…which indicates he had no family member as his guardian prior to the “abduction”.  

Also curious is that Paulina lives far away (in Poland) from Nikita, as she works and has to pay for the boarding school….or so 60 Minutes tells us. The reality is that Paulina hasn’t seen Nikita in a long time and it has nothing to do with the Russians. In fact, she is in such close contact with Nikita that she only finds out he has been “abducted” by the Russians, when his picture is posted on social media by a Ukrainian activist group.

The host of the segment, Cecilia Vega, then informs us that over the seven months Nikita was “held captive”, the Russians played a “cruel game of hide and seek”, moving the child three times in eight months.

In an attempt to expose the villainy of the Russians, a digital map is used to show the long journey Nikita was taken on “post-abduction”. First, he is taken out of Ukraine to Crimea, then to Russia proper – but still close to the border, and then…astonishingly…he is taken back to Ukraine not all that far from where he was originally “abducted”. Cecilia Vega’s voice-over sums up this journey by simply declaring that the child was taken “deep into Russian-held territory”.

Paulina then works with an activist group in Ukraine dedicated to “rescuing” the children “abducted” by Russia, and they hatch a plot to get Paulina to Nikita.

We are told by a former Ukrainian politician who now runs the non-profit activist organization that “rescues” these children, that each child who returns to Ukraine is :a witness to a war crime”…which is a strange thing to say since it will just signal to Russia not to release any more children…right? Ms. Vega never asks that question because it would complicate the shallow sound-bite she is so eager to get and the Manichean narrative she has pledged to uphold and propagate.

Then we hear about Vlad, a 16-year-old Ukrainian boy, who recounts his tale of being taken from his home in Ukraine by Russian soldiers and put in a “camp”, which sounds an awful lot like a school. Among the tortures he endures are that he has to say the Russian national anthem every morning (the horror!!).

Vlad also tells us that speaking Ukrainian was forbidden in the “camp”, which means he got to experience exactly what every ethnic Russian Ukrainian citizen experienced after the U.S.-led coup in 2014 in Ukraine. The post-coup government banned the Russian language, Russian media outlets, opposition political parties and even Russian Orthodox Churches…and some Ukrainian ones too.

Vlad, being a teenager, lashes out at these ridiculous restrictions and tears down a Russian flag in anger. He is then put in the detention facility part of the “camp” and is held in “isolation”. 60 Minutes acts like this is the most barbaric thing to have ever occurred, and I concur, that children, even 16-year-olds, should not be put in isolation. Unfortunately, in the U.S. 35% of all prisoners held in youth detention facility are held in isolation at one point during their incarceration. Celia Vega never mentions that fact.

Vega did mention that the Russians were “indoctrinating” children in these “camps” by telling them “repeated lies” like “Ukraine lost the war”. By all observable metrics, Ukraine has lost the war though, and the indoctrination charge is pretty rich coming from 60 Minutes – which does nothing more than indoctrinate its viewers with the most pernicious of propaganda.

As for Vlad, his story is a sad one, but he did get back home, so Russia’s “abduction” campaign seems very, very ineffective. Considering that the Ukrainian military routinely “abducts” teens and old men off the street and uses them as forced conscripts, which they then throw into the meat grinder at the front line to be slaughtered, it’s safe to say that Vlad was lucky to be in a Russian school instead.

And that is really the point of all this. The notion that Russia is moving children out of a war zone for the safety of the children is only absurd and ridiculous if you have a cartoonish and comic book understanding of Russia and Russians. You don’t have to think Russians are the good guys to believe that they don’t want to massacre children.

And considering the fact that Israel has slaughtered more civilians and children in just over a month of war in Gaza, than Russia has in two years in Ukraine, speaks to this reality.

Another piece of evidence backing this notion is that Paulina makes it to the school where Nikita is living under Russian control. Despite the fact that she has no legal guardianship of Nikita, Russian officials, including Maria Mlova-Balova – the woman who is “accused of war crimes” by Ukraine (and 60 Minutes) for her work running Russia’s Child Services, Paulina is allowed to leave with Nikita.

Mlova-Belova, or as 60 Minutes identifies her “the accused war criminal”, tears up with joy at the reunion of Paulina and Nikita. Mlova-Belova – “the accused war criminal”, then gives gifts to Nikita and says to Paulina, “would like you like to stay in the Russian Federation with us maybe? We can give you some money, maybe a car?”

Paulina declines, as Mlova-Belova calls the reunion a “joy” and wishes Paulina and Nikita a “happy life”. Paulina and Nikita then leave for the long journey back to Poland.

Just think about this for a moment…Mlova-Belova –“the accused war criminal”, greets a Ukrainian grandmother with gifts and an offer of citizenship and financial aid, and then allows her to come take her grandson and leave, despite the fact that the Ukrainian government official running the rescue operation says every returned child is a witness to a war crime, and this “war criminal” woman puts the entire interaction on video and shares it with the world.

Does this sound like some nefarious, child-stealing enterprise being run by a “war criminal”? Does Maria Mlova-Belova sound like a monster who wants to harm Ukrainian children? In addition to that, is a nine-year-old boy with special needs some great prized possession or piece of war booty the Russians covet? Or is the more likely scenario that Mlova-Belova is a Russian bureaucrat doing her best to find a safe place or safe home for children in great peril in a very complex and difficult situation? We know what 60 Minutes wants you to think, but the facts of this scenario speak to a much more nuanced and complicated situation.

(This is not to even mention the fact that as this story ran, Israel is waging war in Gaza and making no effort to avoid killing many, many children – according to some reports, over 5,500. It would seem Russia is doing a much more humane thing by removing children from an active war zone. I’ll let you decide.)

On Sunday, November 26th, 60 Minutes ran yet another propaganda segment titled “Rise”, which was about a former American Marine Corps officer who runs a program which brings Ukrainian war widows and their children to the Swiss Alps for a week in order to climb mountains and confront their psychological trauma of having lost a husband/father.

The segment was hosted by a weepy, teary-eyed Scott Pelley, who introduced us to Nathan Schmidt, the former Marine who served three brutal tours in Iraq and has the psychological scars to prove it.

Pelley repeats the terms “Putin’s invasion” and “Putin’s unprovoked invasion” like mindless mantras throughout the segment, just so everyone knows that subtlety and nuance are not welcome on 60 Minutes, despite those declarative condemnations being, at best, disputed. To state aloud that Russia’s invasion of Ukraine was “unprovoked” is to prove yourself uninformed to the point of illiteracy in the recent history of Ukraine and America’s involvement.

There is a certain irony in the fact that Schmidt, who is so obviously torn up about what he witnessed and experienced in Iraq, helping Ukrainians heal from the psychological wounds of war, when the Iraqis, whose country he invaded, are apparently left to fend for themselves when it comes to dealing with the immense trauma, he and his nation inflicted upon them.

When hearing the very sad stories of the Ukrainian war widows and their children, I couldn’t help but wonder…where are the ethnic Russian Ukrainians who lived in the Donbas who were left widowed and orphaned by the Ukrainian government’s bombardment of thei towns and villages post the 2014 coup – a coup which was instigated and sponsored by the U.S.? Ukraine killed 14,000 ethnic Russians in the Donbas…so there are lots of war widows and orphans to choose from for a healing mountain climb. Why weren’t they invited?

And where is the healing mountain climbing for the relatives of the 48 ethnic Russian Ukrainian citizens who were burned alive in the union house in Odessa in 2014 by Ukrainians and backed by the U.S. installed Ukrainian government? I’m sure they’d like to climb a mountain and forget their troubles too.

This 60 Minutes segment is the heartstrings portion of the propaganda program, similar to the previous segment on the “disappeared” children. It is meant to overwhelm you with raw emotion, which will short circuit your brain and your critical thinking ability. Facts? We don‘t need facts! We need feelings!!

The thing that bothers me the most about this wave of 60 Minutes propaganda pieces is not the shamelessness, but the obvious venality, vacuity and malignant intent of it all.

This 60 Minutes anti-Russian/China/Iran propaganda isn’t meant to inform, it is meant to inflame. Its goal is to misinform, disinform and blind the populace to reality and dull their ability to think critically while aggravating their emotions, all in the hopes of ginning up support for a massive war against the new Axis of Evil.

War is undoubtedly a racket, and 60 Minutes is a critical part of that racket’s infrastructure. The dupes and dopes who buy into the bullshit that 60 Minutes and the neo-con American government are peddling, will ride the wave of their incuriosity and righteousness, and flag-wave us into a world war and our own annihilation.

I know Quixotically waving my red warning flags will make no difference in the long run and will do nothing to stop the inevitable, but at least it gives me something to do while the dogs of war howl louder and louder and 60 Minutes keeps the beat by incessantly banging their war drums.

 Follow me on Twitter: @MPMActingCo

©2023

Judas and the Black Messiah: A Review and Commentary

****THIS IS A SPOILER FREE REVIEW!! THIS REVIEW CONTAINS ZERO SPOILERS!!****

My Rating: 4 out of 5 stars

My Recommendation: SEE IT. A flawed but fantastic film that vibrates with a formidable vitality that also features two Oscar-worthy performances by Daniel Kaluuya and LaKieth Stanfield.

Judas and the Black Messiah, which opened in theatres and on the streaming service HBO Max on February 12th, recounts the true story of the betrayal of Fred Hampton, the charismatic chairman of the Illinois chapter of the Black Panthers, by Bill O’Neal, an FBI informant.

The flawed but fantastic film, written and directed by Shaka King, features a fascinating story and scintillating performances from Daniel Kaluuya as Hampton and LaKeith Stanfield as O’Neal, which makes it among the very best movies of this thus far cinematically calamitous year.

I have never been much impressed by Daniel Kaluuya as an actor. I thought Get Out was ridiculously overrated and thought his performance in it was too. But as Fred Hampton, Kaluuya utterly disappears into the role and creates as charismatic and compelling a character as has graced screens all year. Kaluuya’s Hampton vibrates with a natural magnetism and intensity that is glorious to behold.

As great as Kaluuya is, and he is great, LaKieth Stanfield actually has the harder job and does equally outstanding work. O’Neal is a tortured and tormented soul, and Stanfield masterfully shows us all his shades. Stanfield’s subtle, complex and detailed work is most definitely Oscar-worthy, and is a testament to his impressive skill and craftsmanship.

Other performances don’t fare quite as well as Kaluuhya and Stanfield though. Jesse Plemons, an excellent actor, does the best he can with a terribly under written role as an FBI agent, and Martin Sheen, also an excellent actor, is so dreadful as J. Edgar Hoover it is like he’s acting in a different, and much worse, movie.

The biggest issue with the film is that its secondary narratives, one which involves Hoover and the other involves Hampton’s girlfriend Deborah Johnson, lack a dramatic cohesion and power, and they distract from the main story and scuttle much needed momentum. The Hoover angle is distractingly cartoonish and the love story between Hampton and Johnson is uncomfortably lifeless, as Dominique Fishback is, to put it mildly, underwhelming in the role of Johnson.

Other issues with the film are that Shaka King’s direction was not quite as deft as I would have preferred. The script and the editing also could have been a bit tighter, but with that said, the film definitely has an undeniable energy to it and pulsates with a power that is impressive.

One final issue was the sound mixing. I watched the movie on HBO Max and the sound mix was utterly abysmal. Much of the dialogue, Daniel Kaluuya’s most of all, got lost under the music in the mix. This could be a function of HBO Max, which unfortunately is a horrible technical streaming service, or it could be I am going deaf, or it could be the sound mixing was atrocious…who knows…but it was irritating.

Predictably, most critics are using the film to connect the more recent Black Lives Matter movement with the revolutionary Black Panther movement of the 1960’s spotlighted in the film.

This is an intellectually egregious and mind-numbingly vacuous interpretation of the movie and its narrative.

The film isn’t about our current manufactured myopia regarding race, it’s about power and the great lengths those with it will go to subjugate those without it and maintain the status quo.

Infamous FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover, embarrassingly portrayed in the movie by Martin Sheen in an obscenely amateurish prosthetic nose, deemed the Black Panthers “the greatest threat to the internal security of the country” for among other reasons because their free breakfast program for kids wasn’t just for black kids but for all kids.

In response Hoover unleashed COINTELPRO (Counter Intelligence Program) and its dirty tactics on the Black Panthers just as he had done previously to Malcolm X and Martin Luther King and other leftists.

As highlighted in the film, the Black Panthers/Hampton were seen as direct threats to the power structure of the U.S. because they worked to bring all poor and working class people together, be they black, Native American, Latino and even Confederate flag-waving whites, against a common enemy, the ruling class, which subjugated and abused them.

Hampton, MLK and Malcolm X weren’t targeted by COINTELPRO’s massive surveillance and infiltration operation and ultimately assassinated under extremely suspicious circumstances because they were standing up just for black people, but because they were working to bring all peoples together to fight against the corrupt and criminal political power exploiting poor and working class in America and across the globe.

In comparison to the towering revolutionaries of Hampton, King and Malcolm X, Black Lives Matter are shameless courtesans to the establishment.

The FBI obviously don’t see BLM as a threat, hell it is such a collection of useful idiots the feds probably started it in the first place. The power structure’s greatest fear is that poor and working class black and white people will stop directing their anger at each other and start directing it at Washington, Silicon Valley and Wall Street. BLM is a critical tool to thwart that impulse and keep the proletariat separated by race…conveniently divided and conquered.

This is how something as innocuous as “All Lives Matter” is transformed into a racial slur instead of a rousing rallying cry. BLM gives away its establishment protection game by so aggressively making enemies out of potential allies, proving they’d rather separate people than bring them together for a clear common cause – stopping police brutality.

There are other signs that BLM is the establishment’s controlled opposition.

For example, when a protest by QAnon clowns at the capitol building turned riot it was immediately labeled an “insurrection” and false stories about it were propagated throughout the mainstream media and the feds hunted down the perpetrators, but these same feds and media supported the BLM “mostly peaceful protests” that attacked police stations and government buildings and took over portions of major cities like Portland and Seattle and turned other cities into looted, chaotic, burning madhouses for months.

Another example is highlighted in the film when Hampton belittles the idea of a school name change as some kind of substantial victory. BLM specializes in this sort of self-righteous symbolism, empty sloganeering (Defund the Police!) and toothless grandstanding that intentionally doesn’t address the actual conditions under which poor people suffer. It is all style over substance, as BLM would rather bring down statues than hunger, homelessness or homicide rates.

What makes Judas and the Black Messiah so poignantly tragic is that it shows that the FBI, which the left now adores, have always been the frontline workers for American fascism and their victory over genuine dissent has been spectacular.

This is why we now have vapid, race-hustling racial grievance grifters like Al Sharpton instead of intellectual giants like Malcolm X and MLK. And why we got the “hope and change” charlatanry of Barack Obama, a maintenance man for the status quo who dutifully bails out Wall Street while Main Street crumbles, instead of the revolutionary Fred Hampton. And why we are fed the lap dog of Black Lives Matter play-acting at defiance while being whole-heartedly embraced by the corporate and political power structure, instead of the bulldog of the Black Panthers putting genuine fear into the establishment.

The Black Lives Matter contingent think they’re Fred Hampton, but they’re frauds, phonies, shills and sellouts, just like Bill O’Neal. And that’s why I recommend Judas and the Black Messiah…not just for the film’s cinematic dynamism or the standout performances of Kaluuya and Stanfield but because it rightfully exposes those bourgeois BLM bullshitters.

 A version of this article was originally published at RT.

©2021

MLK/FBI: A Review and Commentary

My Rating: 2 out of 5 stars

My Recommendation: SKIP IT. Regurgitated, establishment friendly pablum that studiously avoids the bigger questions.

I’ve heard it said that Americans are the most propagandized people on the planet. I think that statement is quite accurate.

What makes the propaganda fed to Americans so insidious is that it’s so subtle that audiences, even the supposedly intellectual ones, are blissfully unaware of their indoctrination and conditioning.

A perfect example of this is MLK/FBI, the new documentary directed by Sam Pollard that premiered in theaters and video-on-demand on January 15th, that chronicles the FBI’s wiretapping and harassment of civil rights icon Martin Luther King Jr.

A documentary dealing with intelligence community nefariousness and MLK, the greatest American strategist and tactician of the 20th century, has my attention.

Unfortunately, after watching MLK/FBI, I was left frustrated and infuriated because it was so obviously a docile and deferential piece of establishment friendly propaganda meant to distract and deceive viewers.

This movie is 104 minutes of flaccid history and impotent insights disguised as setting the record straight with revolutionary revelations. But there is no new information presented in the film and no new perspectives on the information already known.

The most interesting statement in the movie comes in the final ten minutes and is from MLK aide Andrew Young, who would go on to become a congressman, the U.S. Ambassador to the U.N. and the Mayor of Atlanta.

Young says in regards to James Earl Ray, the man convicted of the assassination of MLK, “I don’t think James Earl Ray had anything to do with that, Dr. King’s assassination, so I can’t really comment on that.”

This should be where the movie starts, not where it ends.

What makes the FBI’s harassment of MLK noteworthy is that they were gathering salacious information on his private life in an attempt to assassinate his character and thus derail his morally authoritative movement.

The FBI actively tried to get members of the press to publish stories of King’s infidelity but none took the bait, and so the FBI was left with lots of ammunition but no one willing to fire it.

It was when King expanded his civil rights work and in 1968 began the Poor People’s Campaign, which set out to bring poor people of all colors together to fight for economic justice and against American militarism, that the FBI ratcheted up its anti-King work, and this is where the infamous “rape participation” allegation first is documented by the FBI.

The claim, that King watched and laughed as another pastor raped a woman, is dubious and is not thoroughly fleshed out in the film, but it reveals the FBI understood the greater threat King now posed to the ruling order with the Poor People’s Campaign, and that it was willing to push the envelop to stop him.

Other civil right’s groups and leaders faced similar escalation when they dared to cross color lines and work on behalf of all people instead of just black people.

It wasn’t until Malcolm X left the Nation of Islam and evolved into a more racially inclusive yet no less revolutionary figure, that he got assassinated under shadowy circumstances.

The Black Panther’s free breakfast program, open to children of all races, was deemed by FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover to be “the greatest internal threat to the United States”. The Black Panthers were quickly infiltrated and some, including Fred Hampton, were assassinated.

And so it was with King’s Poor People’s Campaign, which triggered the FBI to “up its game”. Coincidentally, just a few weeks later he was assassinated in Memphis.

MLK/FBI is much too “respectable” to investigate or challenge Andrew Young’s claim regarding Ray’s innocence in the assassination of King, even though Ray himself claimed he was innocent, the King family believes he is innocent and a civil court ruled he was innocent. It’s this desperation for respectability at the expense of truth that makes the film establishment propaganda.

The other tell-tale sign it’s propaganda is that the film acts like FBI and intel community deviousness and depravity are some remote experience from a dark, distant past instead of a pressing issue of our time.

This allows liberals, especially ones like Bill Maher and John Oliver who pose as anti-establishmentarians, to continue to fawn over and fellate the “heroes” of the intel community under the guise that malicious misdeeds only occurred in the past.

The FBI’s invasive surveillance of King pales in comparison to what the intel community is capable of now. What the FBI did to King the intel community is now able to do to everyone since we all carry cell phones, mini eavesdropping devices that track our every movement, contact and conversation.

The film’s flaccidity also allows liberals to continue to giddily cheer the intel community’s crackdown on nationalists, militias and Julian Assange just as conservatives once cheered Hoover’s targeting King, civil rights and anti-war groups and communists.

It also surreptitiously endorses the Black Lives Matter and allows woke advocates to deceive themselves into thinking they’re morally equivalent to Dr. King.

BLM is no Poor People’s Campaign meant to threaten the establishment order. It’s a contrived and manipulative movement meant to uphold the status quo, not disrupt it, which is why its been swiftly embraced by Washington, the media and corporate America.

In conclusion, by being a documentary that talks an awful lot but never really has anything useful to say, MLK/FBI is a deceptive piece of establishment propaganda not worthy of your time.

A version of this article was originally published at RT.

©2021

No Lives Matter

Estimated Reading Time: 8 minutes 46 seconds

As the not-so-civil war turns from cold to hot and the world around us burns, I find myself in the unenviable position of despising both sides in the battle.

BLUE LIVES DON’T MATTER

On one side is law enforcement, a community which I deem to be at best egregiously incompetent and at worst brutally malevolent and maliciously fascistic.

I have only ever had negative experiences with law enforcement. Every on-duty cop I’ve ever interacted with has been either lazy, entitled or a brutish and violent tyrant…and sometimes all three at once.

It is obvious to me that police in America are a government sanctioned gang, the largest organized crime apparatus in the nation.

One of the first things I ever wrote on this blog was about Ethan Saylor, a 26 year-old man with Down’s Syndrome who had three off-duty Maryland cops working as mall security kneel on his back in 2011 while trying to subdue him for breaking the rule of not promptly leaving a movie theatre after his screening of Zero Dark Thirty had ended.

Just like George Floyd seven years later, Ethan Saylor called out to his mom right before he died under the knee of those cops. While Floyd’s killer has been charged with murder, the cops who killed Ethan Saylor were never charged with any crime.

The killing of George Floyd also reminded me of the death of Kelly Thomas in Fullerton, California on 2011.

Thomas was a homeless, mentally-ill 36 year-old man who was beaten to death by six Fullerton, Ca. cops as, just like George Floyd would nine years later, he said he “couldn’t breath” while also crying out to his father, “dad, help me!”.

Thomas’s beating has been described as “one of the worst police beatings in US history”. He had brain injuries as well as rib and facial fractures so severe he choked on his own blood. Thomas’s breathing became permanently constricted because the six officers knelt on his chest as they beat him about his face and head.

All of the officers charged with beating and killing Kelly Thomas were acquitted.

While there are similarities in the Floyd and Saylor and Thomas cases, there are also differences. The biggest difference being that Floyd was black and Saylor and Thomas were white.

This difference in race translated into the media never really caring much when Ethan Saylor and Kelly Thomas were killed, and also no mobs rioting or looting in their honor either. Maybe this is why if you ask a hundred random people you run into on the street who Ethan Saylor or Kelly Thomas were, you’d get back 100 blank stares.

Which brings me to the other side of the shitshow…

BLACK LIVES DON’T MATTER

On the other side is Black Lives Matter and their ilk, who I find to be at best useful idiots to the establishment and at worst insidiously deceptive and intentionally divisive tools of COINTELPRO used to provoke a race war and squelch a class war.

As the events of recent months have unfolded, I have come to believe that America is currently in the grip of a manufactured racial moral panic that is meant to trigger emotion, distort perception and destroy critical thinking capacity. This racial moral panic is a vicious cancer spreading across every sector of this country…and it is terminal.

An example of this racial moral panic is found in both the media and the public’s reaction to the police shooting of Jacob Blake in Kenosha, Wisconsin.

When I watched the video of Officer Derek Chauvin kneeling on George Floyd’s neck in Minneapolis, I thought, “what the fuck is that cop doing?”

When I watched the video of the police incident in Kenosha with Jacob Blake I thought to myself, “what the fuck is Jacob Blake doing?”

When the cops arrived on the scene at the Blake incident, Blake scuffled with them - leading to cops twice attempting to tase him. Blake then defiantly walked away from officers, all of whom had their guns drawn, and tried to enter and/or reach into his vehicle with one of the cops literally pulling on his shirt to stop him. The cop pulling Blake’s shirt then shot him seven times in the back as he reached into his minivan.

The obvious point in watching the incident is that if Blake had complied with the cops demands than he wouldn’t have been shot. The counter argument heard over and over again from BLM people is that “not complying doesn’t mean you deserve to be shot!”. I wholeheartedly agree…but to quote Clint Eastwood in the film Unforgiven, “deserves got nothin to do with it.”

No one deserves to be shot and no one deserves to be killed. But…if you fight with cops, resist arrest, defy their commands and most importantly ignore their drawn guns and then reach into your vehicle thinking you are immune from consequences…you don’t deserve to be shot but you can sure as hell EXPECT to be shot, regardless of your race or ethnicity.

This recognition of reality is often refuted by BLM types with ridiculous comments about how cops should shoot people in the legs in these situations or some other Hollywood nonsense. Look, if a cop (or soldier) draws a gun they will aim for the chest or head in order to stop the target…which translates into shooting to kill. That is how people, law enforcement included, are trained to use guns, and to believe otherwise is willful ignorance.

This dovetails into another emotional trigger for BLM supporters and that is that Blake was shot seven times. I have heard over and over that this was excessive. If you watch the video of Blake being shot you notice something rather remarkable…during the shooting he continues to struggle. The cop kept shooting him because Blake didn’t immediately fall to the ground. Blake was shot seven times because the cop was shooting to drop him and he didn’t drop…that is what cops and soldiers are trained to do.

The other thing that BLM supporters like to do is emphasize that Blake was “shot in the back” in order to imply something nefarious. This is technically accurate, Blake was shot in the back…but he was also actively resisting a cop trying to stop him from reaching into or getting into a vehicle. There could be, and according to reports there was, a weapon (a knife) in the car, and of course the cop has no idea if Blake is reaching for a gun or not. Blake having his back turned is EXACTLY why he was a threat as the cop couldn’t see for what he was reaching.

Another important point is that even the car itself is considered a deadly weapon in this situation because if Blake got in that car he is then in control of a large movable weapon he can use to harm others, and there are three young children in the car…meaning shooting at Blake once he is inside the vehicle puts those children’s lives at much greater risk. Not to mention that at that time none of the cops knew if Blake was trying to enter the vehicle in order to hurt those children.

BLM supporters highlighting Blake being shot in the back without giving proper context are being extremely deceptive and disingenuous. This same tactic was used when Rayshard Brooks was shot in the back while fleeing cops in Atlanta in the wake of the Floyd killing in Minneapolis. The important piece of information in the Brooks case though is that as he ran he turned and fired a taser at the cop chasing him and was shot less than a second later. This taser was taken off of the officer by Brooks when they fought right before Brooks’ escape attempt. What the BLM crowd ignore is the fact that a taser is a deadly weapon when used against a cop because if a cop is rendered unconscious or immobile, then his gun is unsecure and that constitutes a grave danger to the officer and/or general public.

The Rayshard Brooks case was another one where BLMers were saying “the cops should’ve given him a ride home” instead of trying to arrest him because Brooks was literally so drunk he passed out at a drive thru. No doubt these same hypocritical fools would’ve been on the Mothers Against Drunk Driving bandwagon back in the day when drunk driving was turned from a mere nuisance into a public menace. Of course, cops aren’t going to give a drunk driver a ride home because then they would become liable for his behavior from that point forward. If Brooks hurts himself or someone else after cops drove him home then the police department would be sued beyond recognition…and rightfully so.

NBA DON’T MATTER

In the wake of the Jacob Blake shooting, L.A. Clippers coach Doc Rivers made an emotionally charged statement where he talked about how he, as a black man, has to give a “special talk” to his black children about how to interact with police. This is a common refrain heard from black people in regards to teaching their children how to interact properly with cops in order to avoid being shot. In watching both the Jacob Blake and Rayshard Brooks videos I thought to myself, well…either no one gave these guys “the talk”, or they weren’t paying attention when it was given.

And another point is, who doesn’t talk to their kids about how to safely interact with law enforcement? This is not just some special burden placed on black parents, it is a reality for all parents…all decent parents anyway.

Sadly, Doc Rivers speech was just another example of the racial moral panic in action. In his speech the weeping Rivers spoke of how black people are the ones “being hung” and “being shot” and that black people love this country but this country doesn’t love them.

What was remarkable to me about Rivers’ rant was that the media adored it so unquestionably, especially the nauseating ESPN, even though it is so absurdly inaccurate as to be laughable.

First off…no black people are being hung. None. A few have died by hanging this year but they committed suicide…they weren’t lynched no matter how badly the media wanted it to be true. There is not a plague of black people being hung in America and there hasn’t been since well before Doc Rivers was ever born. No one Doc Rivers knows or has ever known has ever been hung.

As for America not loving black people...that is so demonstrably untrue as to be absurd. Black people are so adored in American public life it is utterly astonishing. Everywhere you turn in American culture, be it music, movies, tv, sport or anywhere else, black people are vastly over-represented in relation to their population percentage.

Doc Rivers’ business, the NBA, is a perfect example. I could argue that Michael Jordan is the biggest star, sport or otherwise, to have dominated American culture in my lifetime. If it isn’t Michael Jordan, it may very well be Oprah Winfrey. At various times other black people have been the biggest stars in the country…Michael Jackson, Beyonce, Jay-Z, Bill Cosby, Denzel Washington, Will Smith, Muhammed Ali and on and on and on.

And of course, the most obvious rebuttal to Rivers’ refrain about American’s hatred of black people is that Barack Obama not only won two presidential elections in the last 12 years, but won them resoundingly. To put that into historical context…there have been as many black presidents in the 243 year history of the United States as there have been presidents who share my identity…Irish Catholic. In fact there has only ever been one Catholic president - Irish or otherwise, JFK…and if you’ll recall the Irish Catholic only served 2 years and 10 months in office while Obama served 8 years because it was the Irish Catholic president who was the victim of violence in office, not the black one.

The point being to all of this is that if America hates black people they sure as hell have a funny way of showing it.

NBA players were so shaken by the shooting of Jacob Blake they actually went on strike in protest. This protest strike was an emotionally driven piece of performative nonsense. The players weren’t so much protesting as having a tantrum. For players to be moved to such a drastic action over the Blake incident doesn’t make that incident egregious, it only makes their blind emotionalism readily apparent.

That said, I also have no time for people outraged by the NBA strike and respond to it by saying, “I’ll never watch a game again!” I obviously disagree with the NBA players regarding Jacob Blake and Black Lives Matter, but I also think that if you are going to protest then this is the way to do it. It would have been nice if the players had actually thought out their strike and the goals they actually wanted to achieve - and the fact that they don’t really have any achievable goals speaks to the vacuity of their cause. It also would have been beneficial if the players stood up for human rights in China earlier in the year - thus giving them some moral authority…but they didn’t and so they lack it. Regardless of all that…if you think players striking is an egregious form of protest there is no hope for you.

I always thought the same of Colin Kaepernick and his kneeling. I loathe the whole notion of flag fetishism and its accompanying militarism and think the anthem should not be played before any games, so I have never understood why Kaepernick’s kneeling was such a problem - it is simply a non-violent protest.

The WNBA also protested the Jacob Blake shooting by not playing their games, but no one noticed because no one gives a shit about that joke of a league and its dreadful product. What struck me about the WNBA protest was that all the players came out onto the court wearing a white t-shirt with seven painted on bloody bullet holes on the back in honor of Jacob Blake.

Think about that…WNBA players weren’t calling out police violence, they were actually honoring Jacob Blake, a guy who had an active warrant out for him for sexual assault against the woman whose call to police led to the shooting incident. So the WNBA think an alleged sexual assaulter is now a hero…good to know.

See this is the kind of thing that highlights the emotionalism, irrationality and utter madness of the entire Black Lives Matter movement and the racial moral panic gripping the nation.

Here is another example…Stephen A. Smith had a rant last week on ESPN where he called out the recent hiring of white Hall of Fame point guard Steve Nash, a two-time MVP, as the new head coach of the Brooklyn Nets as being a function of “white privilege”. Smith was incensed that Nash, who has no head coaching experience, would get hired over black coaches like Ty Lue who do have experience. Smith said that this (the hiring of an head coach with no experience) never happens for black people.

The uninformed may have been moved by Smith’s vacuous and emotionalist rant because it tells them what they want to hear, but what was most striking to me about the segment was that it was entirely factually incorrect.

I long ago stopped following the NBA very closely, and yet the second I heard Smith say that a black man has never been extended the opportunity that Nash had received, I immediately recalled that a black man HAD gotten that same opportunity FOR THAT SAME EXACT TEAM.

In 2014 the Brooklyn Nets hired Jason Kidd right after he retired from playing - in other words…Kidd had no coaching experience at all. While Kidd may “pass” for white as he is very light skinned, but just like Barrack Obama, he is black as his father was black. Let me add that it is horrifying to me that we as a society are now back in the truly ugly place of measuring a persons “blackness” to see if they qualify.

In addition, in 2014 Derek Fisher, a black man with no coaching experience who just retired from playing in the NBA, was hired by…the New York Knicks!

The fact that Stephen A. Smith, who considers himself a basketball expert and the ultimate New Yorker, either forgot or chose to forget, black players Jason Kidd and Derek Fisher having no coaching experience but getting hired as coaches in Brooklyn and New York, a fact that directly refutes his thesis of Nash’s white privilege, speaks volumes about the lack of integrity and dearth of emotionalism rampant in the media, especially around issues of race.

Which brings us back to Doc Rivers’ final point in his weepy post-game speech, which was about how “we are the ones being shot”. This sentiment fits nicely into something that LeBron James said recently in regard to the police. James said, “I know people get tired of hearing me say it, but we are scared as black people in America…black men, black women, black kids, we are terrified.”

LeBron should be scared, he should be absolutely terrified, but not of the police but of people who look like him, because Doc Rivers is right, black people are the ones being shot in America…but they are also the ones doing the shooting.

According to the CDC, homicide is the leading cause of death for black males aged 1 to 44. But of the 2,925 black people murdered in 2018, 2,600 of them, or 88%, were killed by other black people and 8% were killed by whites. Of the 3,499 whites murdered in 2018, 15.2% of them were killed by black people and 81% were killed by other whites.

In that same year, 228 black people were killed by cops…compared to 456 white people killed by cops. Cops kill more whites than blacks in raw numbers - whites are 72% of the population so that is not surprising, but when broken down not by population percentage but by percentage of police interaction, whites are still killed at a slightly higher rate than blacks.

The reason that there are so many police interactions with black people is revealed in the FBI crime statistics from 2018. The FBI stats show something else that is very disconcerting, and that is that black people commit an extraordinary amount of crimes, violent crimes in particular, especially considering that they make up a rather small percentage of the overall population.

For example, according to these 2018 FBI stats black people make up roughly 13% of the American population yet are arrested for 53.3% of homicides/non-negligent manslaughter, 28.6% of rapes, 54.2% of robberies, 33.7% of aggravated assaults, 29.4% of burglaries, 30% of larcenies, 37.4% of violent arsons and 32% of other assaults.

These statistics are extremely uncomfortable to discuss, in fact, these statistics are so uncomfortable both the Anti-Defamation League and the Southern Poverty Law Center have deemed referencing them to be “racist”. So, according to the ADL and SPLC, statistical reality is now racist.

When you look at the CDC and FBI statistics regarding black homicide rates and crime rates, the only logical conclusion to draw is that it would seem ‘black lives matter’ only on the rare occasion when white people or the police take them.

IDENTITY POLITICS DON’T MATTER

And this is why I abhor identity politics with a passion and believe it is killing this country. People are not representatives of some group, they are not their identities…they are individuals, each unique in their own right.

Identity politics believes that Dr. King’s dream of judging people by the content of their character and not the color of their skin, is, in fact, racist. Seeing people as individuals and not as identities is anathema to our current moment, and that is both tragic and frightening because all it does is dehumanize and elevates the worst among us, and diminish the best.

For instance, the black people I know are not represented on those FBI crime statistics. The black people I know are are not murderous criminals living the thug life, they are thoughtful, sensitive, kind and compassionate human beings. (It should also be mentioned that the two cops I know (one of whom is black) are not skull cracking, trigger happy, authoritarian douchebags either, they are just normal guys living normal lives.)

But if you are going to demand that people be identified solely by their race or ethnicity, then that identification comes with the burden of that race or ethnicity’s shadow. In the case of black people, that means the FBI crime statistics showing an alarming amount of criminality in the black community.

Race hustlers peddling the vapid Critical Race Theory like Barbara DiAngelo (White Fragility) and Ibram X. Kendi (How to be Anti-Racist) are having great success doing the same thing to whites, teaching everyone that not only are all whites inherently racist, but that every institution in America is as well.

Of course, this hyper-racialization dehumanizes the individual and imposes a needless barrier between whites and blacks while removing all agency from blacks and cynically exploiting white guilt for profit.

This approach does not diminish “racism” at all but instead accentuates divisions and heightens hatred.

There’s a reason that corporate America has been so quick to jump on the BLM bandwagon, and it isn’t because they are excited for monumental change in America. Corporate America embracing BLM is a dead give away that the movement is a mirage. Corporate America is using Black Lives Matter as a form of cheap grace…where it can signal its empty virtue and then merrily go on about its dirty business.

What Black Lives Matter does is take the focus off of police brutality or economic issues and put the focus on race. Once something becomes about race it stops being about anything else. BLM makes enemies out of potential allies by making everything about race instead of focusing on commonalities that cross racial and ethnic boundaries and have more to do with class.

If BLM were serious, their protests would have a very clear objective. Right now, BLM protestors say “defund the police” but then say that isn’t what they really mean. Or they hold up signs saying “no hate” or “racism sucks” or some other vacuous bumper sticker slogan.

An actual serious proposal to address police brutality would be to demand an increase in funding to police rather than a demand to defund. Police need more money to hire more officers and to do more training, as former Navy SEAL Jocko Willink recently stated, police need to spend at least 25% of their time training.

Police need to have it drilled into them how to deescalate situations and also how to be much more effective and efficient with their hands, thus reducing the need to use a weapon. It would be a very good idea for all cops to be serious martial artists heavily schooled in Judo or Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu.

Cops should also be better paid, better trained and more thoroughly vetted in order to weed out those with a nefarious personal agenda or psychological dysfunction.

If BLM proposed those things, then maybe that would be an indication that they were serious about actually addressing the issue of police brutality, but they don’t and they aren’t.

“Black Lives Matter”, just like its animating philosophy Critical Race Theory, is meant to be not only frustratingly amorphous but intentionally divisive, and that is why corporate America, the media and the establishment love it. As long as Black Lives Matter is front and center, the corruption of business as usual can continue unabated and the vast majority of Americans, who are working class and poor and who are a glorious melting pot of black, white, Latino, Asian, gay, straight and on and on and on, will continue to suffer at the hands of both the police and the corporate class.

What needs to happen for poor and working class people is to drop the Black Lives Matter nonsense and instead focus on things that could actually improve all of their lives…like universal health care. Universal health care would benefit poor and working class people of all races, and protests in favor of it would not be infused with the divisive and frantic emotion of the race based BLM movement, and thus be less likely to lead to rioting and looting, both of which are extraordinarily self-defeating.

The reality is that Black Lives Matter with its emotionalist, irrational hyper-racialization isn’t addressing the suffering of black Americans or any other type of Americans, it is guaranteeing it.

Until we start seriously addressing both the economic issues of poor and working class people and the inadequacies of law enforcement, then nothing of any substance will ever change.

NO LIVES MATTER

This is why I say, No Lives Matter.

No Lives Matter because the truth of our existence is that we are all completely disposable yet entirely irreplaceable. We are all flawed and fragile creatures stumbling through the dark hurtling toward our own demise.

Regardless of our race, gender, ethnicity or any other secondary characteristic, to quote JFK, “we all must inhabit this small planet, we all cherish our children’s future and we are all mortal”. The bottom line is that we all bleed when we are cut, and we all grieve when heartbroken, and we all want a better world for our children than the one we have had to endure. This is what we share…this is what brings us together…the fleetingness of the human experience and the enormous existential humility that imposes upon us.

If we can embrace that humility and recognize that all of us come from dust, and to the dust we will all inevitably return, then maybe we can stop with the incessant dehumanization in our culture that labels us black beings or white beings instead of human beings, each illuminated by the light of God or truth or love or peace that dwells deep within us all.

Until we recognize and celebrate the oceans of our commonalities as opposed to the raindrops of our differences, then no lives will ever matter…not black lives, not blue lives, not a single life.

©2020

A Hidden Life is the Story of a Farmer Who Resisted Hitler - NOT a Metaphor for Anti-Trump #Resistance

Estimated Reading Time: 3 minutes 47 seconds

A Hidden Life by iconic filmmaker Terence Malick celebrates an Austrian farmer’s Christian principled opposition to Hitler, and any attempts to draw a parallel between the movie and anti-Trump resistance are myopic at best.

The new film is the true story of Franz Jagerstatter, a Catholic farmer in Austria who is conscripted into the German army during World War II and must choose between his conscience and pledging allegiance to Hitler and the Third Reich.

Jagerstatter’s conscientious objections to Nazism come with dire legal consequences that put his life in peril and leave his mother, wife, and three young daughters pariahs in their small village community.

The movie, which stars a who’s who of European actors, including August Diehl, Bruno Ganz, Michael Nyqvist, Franz Rogowski and Mathias Shoenaerts, may be difficult for non-cinephiles to absorb as Malick, who has made such classics as Badlands, The Thin Red Line and The Tree of Life, has a storytelling style that is more meditative and impressionistic than general audiences may be conditioned to accept. That said, the film is as dramatically profound and insightful as anything I have seen all year.

Although A Hidden Life was in development before Trump ever became president, some out here in Hollywood have interpreted the film as a metaphor for the moral imperative to resist Trump. I think that interpretation is myopic at best, and believe that the movie is unintentionally a scathing indictment of the moral vacuity and hypocrisy at the heart of the anti-Trump resistance.

The main point that I took away from the film is that moral authority is essential if opposition to evil is to endure. Franz Jagerstatter had an abundance of moral authority because his loyalty was not to country, village, leader, party, policy or even church, but to Truth.

The opposition to Trump, which calls itself the #Resistance, loathes Trump because he is a boor and a bully, its opposition to him is based solely on personality and political party rather than on the moral principle to which Jagerstatter adhered. This lack of a commitment to Truth and principle is what exposes the #Resistance as being completely vapid and devoid of moral standing.

For instance, the #Resistance are rightfully furious over Trump’s immigration policies, and like to wail about “babies in cages” to prove their point, but that outrage rings entirely hollow since they never spoke up in opposition when Obama put “babies in cages” and deported so many immigrants that he was known as the “Deporter-in-Chief”.

Equally disingenuous is the #Resistance outrage over Trump’s supposed war on the free press. Obama prosecuted more whistleblowers during his two terms than every other president combined and yet none of these resistors said a word in opposition back then.

Even more damning is the #Resistance deification of morally and ethically dubious intelligence agency apparatchiks. John Brennan, Michael Hayden and James Clapper are all criminals and moral abominations for being integral parts of America’s heinous torture, rendition, surveillance and drone war programs, and yet the #Resistance now hail them as patriots and heroes.

The FBI has long infiltrated civil rights, anti-war and environmental groups in order to destroy them, but that hasn’t stopped the #Resistance from celebrating the FBI’s “professionalism” and genuflecting before loathsome establishment creatures like FBI alums Robert Mueller and James Comey, out of pure anti-Trump animus.

Political darlings of the #Resistance, such as Democrats Nancy Pelosi, Adam Schiff and Eric Swalwell, call Trump a traitor but then pass expansive military and intelligence bills that further empower the executive branch and the Washington war machine.

The #Resistance has further proven their hypocrisy by embracing the establishment talking points to a shocking degree. These allegedly liberal anti-Trumpers are shameless anti-progressive shills for empire who cheer the prosecution and persecution of truth-tellers such as Julian Assange, Edward Snowden and Chelsea Manning and decry the failure of Trump to go to war in Syria and Iran and to be more belligerent towards Russia.

Franz Jagerstatter lived a quiet, seemingly inconsequential, “hidden life”, until he was forced by his conscience to oppose the Nazis and carry the cross of Truth from his Eden in the Austrian Alps to his Golgotha in Berlin. Pope Benedict XVI beatified Franz Jagerstater in 2007 for his unwavering commitment to Christian moral principles in the face of a formidable evil that was aided in by a complicit Catholic Church. In contrast, the fraudulent #Resistance in America only play at opposition to evil, as is proven by their craven sychophancy toward the depraved neo-liberal, imperial establishment and its military-intelligence industrial complex.

The neo-liberal, imperial establishment in America is a malignant, brutish and bloodthirsty beast that has killed and exploited millions of innocent people from Asia to the Middle East to Latin America and everywhere in between over the last 70 years and the self-righteous and self-aggrandizing anti-Trump #Resistance poseurs will never have the moral authority of a great man like Franz Jagerstatter until they recognize that simple fact. For the #Resistance to squabble over which mask the slouching imperial beast will wear, be it the folksy mask of George W. Bush, or the good ol’ boy mask of Bill Clinton, or the hope and change mask of Barrack Obama, or the brash and brazen mask of Donald Trump, is a fool’s errand and the devil’s handiwork.

A Hidden Life is a deeply moving and worthwhile cinematic venture because it shows the poignant struggles of a man who, unlike the current crop of “resistors”, was willing to sacrifice everything in the service of Truth. The #Resistance must learn the crucial lesson of Franz Jagerstatter, that loyalty to Truth must be the priority, if it ever hopes to attain any moral authority. The first, most basic and most important truth that the #Resistance needs to understand is this…that Donald Trump is not the cause of the evil of neo-liberalism and American empire…he is a consequence of it.

A version of this article was originally published at RT.

©2019

In a Fit of Anti-Trump Pique, Liberals Shamelessly Embrace 'Deep State' Criminals

Estimated Reading Time: 4 minutes 11 seconds

In their blind hatred for Trump, liberals have sunk to an all-time low by unabashedly cheering a war criminal.

On Friday August 24th, HBO’s Real Time with Bill Maher had former CIA director John Brennan on as an interview guest. Brennan has been in the news lately because he accused Trump of treason, or more precisely, "nothing short of treason", due to the President's weak-kneed, post summit news conference with Vladimir Putin.

In retaliation for Brennan's remarks Trump revoked his security clearance which has caused an uproar from establishment intelligence toadies and in a case of strange bedfellows, the allegedly liberal anti-Trump movement which has dubbed itself the #Resistance.

On the episode of Real Time, the usually acerbic Maher, or as I am fond of calling him due to his petulant demeanor and intellectual dwarfism, Little Bill, immodestly degraded himself by nearly fellating John Brennan before the former CIA chief ever got on stage by gushing that he was a “true American patriot”.

The nadir for the #Resistance occurred shortly thereafter as Brennan rumbled on stage and was greeted by the eruption of a raucous standing ovation by the liberal audience, with Little Bill calling it a "well-deserved standing ovation". Only in the bizarre universe where a silver-spooned, multi-bankrupted, reality television star is president does a former CIA director who has committed crimes and war crimes such as implementing and covering up Bush's rendition and torture regime, spying on the U.S. Senate and masterminding Obama's deadly drone program, get a delirious ovation from those on the left.

As Little Bill sat across from Brennan his sycophancy swelled further when, like a pimply faced teenage boy on his first date, he rapturously declared, "I don't say this very often, but it is an honor to meet you and have you here." If this interview were taking place in the back seat of Little Bill’s parent’s station wagon the windows would've have been completely fogged by this point.

The interview was one rambling study in conformation bias, as Brennan bemoaned not having a security clearance for the first time in 38 years, and Maher stomped his feet and wailed "everyone with a brain is on your side!" Neither man was self-aware enough to realize the brazen level of entitlement that oozes from their belief that a security clearance for a former government official is a right, not a privilege.

Brennan then blamed Kentucky Senator Rand Paul for starting the whole mess and Maher breathlessly screeched, "Rand Paul is dead to me!" In the throes of his Brennan crush, Little Bill all but promised to fight Rand in the parking lot after school to defend the former CIA director's honor.

Brennan then waxed poetic about how "national security is one of the most sacred and solemn professions in this government". I wonder which part of his national security work Brennan finds so sacred...was it the torture? The extraordinary rendition? The kill lists? The murdering by drone strike of innocent people, American citizen's included? The spying on the Senate in order to scuttle any impartial investigation into the torture program? The teaming with fascists in Ukraine to overthrow a democratically elected government? Or teaming with terrorists in an attempt to overthrow Assad in Syria?

Little Bill, no doubt hoping to get lucky on his dream date, did not ask any of those questions or raise any of these topics, he just pursed his lips and shook his head as he proclaimed his horror that Trump dared to call Brennan, the man who "defended our country after 9-11", a "low life".

Maher's on screen love affair with Brennan is in keeping with his erotic profile, as his history shows he is most certainly aroused by high-ranking intelligence agency criminals. Maher has had similarly fawning, to the point of bootlicking, interviews with former head of the NSA and CIA, General Michael Hayden. Little Bill's modus operandi is to never speak ill of such mendacious intelligence officials as Hayden, Brennan and former Director of National Intelligence James Clapper, all of whom have lied to the American public and committed numerous crimes and moral atrocities such as their culpability in the rendition, torture and surveillance programs, but he instead chooses to speak only in the most overly reverential tones about their bravery and patriotic work keeping America safe.

I find it very curious that both Little Bill and his fellow liberal HBO comedy comrade John Oliver of Last Week Tonight, are so enamored with the intelligence agencies. Oliver too is an unrepentant establishment shill and brownnoser who has routinely ignored intelligence agency misbehavior and parroted the pro-intel line at every opportunity, a perfect example being his softball interview of former NSA chief General Keith Alexander and his aggressive take down of NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden.

What is even more disheartening than two insipid cable television comedians being so obviously in the pocket of the intelligence agencies, is the total lack of intellectual and moral integrity on the part of the liberals in their audience.

The buffoons in Maher's studio audience who gave Brennan a Pavlovian standing ovation on Real Time are probably the same fools who have donated money to the GoFundMe campaigns for fired FBI officials Andrew McCabe and Peter Strzok to the tune of more than a million dollars between them. Do these liberals not know who the FBI is and what they do? The FBI are the ones who wiretapped Martin Luther King Jr. and tried to blackmail him into killing himself. The FBI also infiltrated environmental, anti-war and civil rights movements in a concerted attempt to destroy them. According to Human Rights Watch, the FBI has gone above and beyond in subverting civil rights and due process in post-9/11 America by being "directly involved" in high profile terror plots in the U.S. where Muslims were entrapped and imprisoned for phony plots proposed or led by FBI agents or informants.

The liberal adoration of FBI flunkies and intelligence big wigs like Brennan, Clapper, Hayden and even the media anointed saint, former Director of the FBI and current Special Counsel Robert Mueller, who rounded up Muslims in the wake of 9/11, botched the anthrax investigation and lied about WMD’s in Iraq to the American public, is repugnant and will ultimately be counter productive if not downright self-defeating to any progressive movement.

I understand the liberal anger with the demagogue Trump, what I do not understand is why the left is so intent on embracing the most deplorable of war criminals and police state apparatchiks who have routinely flouted the constitution and flaunted their power, in order to try and bring down Trump, who progressives claim has flouted the constitution and flaunted his power.

Towards the end of the interview Brennan received a cacophony of cheers when he described Trump to Little Bill as a man who is "dishonest, unethical, doesn't have principles...or integrity", but Brennan's description of Trump is a case of the former CIA official doth protest too much, methinks. When seen in the light of Brennan's own dishonesty regarding torture, his unethical spying on the Senate and his overall lack of principles and integrity throughout his career, this statement reeks of shameless hypocrisy. Brennan's condemnation of Trump would equally fit Brennan or any of his other media darling intelligence agency cohorts, along with the liberal lemmings who send them money, give them standing ovations and take their word for gospel.

In closing Brennan postulated that things will "get worse before they get better" and reminded viewers that this country "fought hard for the freedoms and liberties we have right now". I wholeheartedly agree with that assessment, which is why the #Resistance must jettison from their ranks all criminals like Brennan, Clapper and Hayden who have dedicated their careers to usurping the "hard fought freedoms and liberties we have right now".

The pied pipers in the media, including court jesters like Little Bill Maher and John Oliver, are leading liberals down a road to perdition by holding insidious intelligence officials and agencies up as paragons of nobility and truth. Brennan, Clapper, Hayden and their ilk are professional liars whose main priority is not to uphold and defend the constitution but rather to uphold and defend the corrupt establishment and the military industrial complex. 

In 2016 liberals lost the election, but since that time, as evidenced by their deification of Brennan and his intel cohorts, they have proceeded to lose not only their minds, but their souls as well. In the face of the Trump demon, liberals have conjoined themselves to truly despicable people who have perpetrated great evil at home and across the globe. In the long run, the #Resistance is going to learn the hard way that with friends like Brennan, Clapper and Hayden, who needs enemies?

A VERSION OF THIS ARTICLE WAS ORIGINALLY PUBLISHED AT RT.COM

©2018

A Week of Holes: A$$holes, Sh*tholes and Rabbit Holes

Estimated Reading Time: 4 minutes 48 seconds

 

A ROSE BY ANY OTHER NAME

Last week the media, the internet and the #Resistence®, went batshit crazy because President Trump called Haiti a "shithole". Upon hearing the news I turned on MSNBC and was treated to their wall to wall coverage of Shithole-gate which included going so far as to have the word "shithole" uncensored on their scroll and spoken on their airwaves. While I found the entire spectacle adolescently entertaining, it was also informative, although one had to dig deeper than the salty headlines to get to the heart of the matter.

The establishment talking points on Shithole-gate were obvious from the beginning, Trump's uncouth utterance was proof of his unadulterated racism and a clear sign of the end of America if not the world. Cable host after cable host and guest after guest all suffered from the vapors in an epidemic that bordered on a frenzied hysteria.

Upon closer inspection I found the entire episode to be…well…manufactured. Here are some basic truths. First, Trump is a world class asshole, of this there can be no doubt. He was an asshole before he became president, he is an asshole as president and he will no doubt be an asshole after he leaves office. Second, Haiti is a shithole. These two things can both be true at the same time. Acknowledging these facts does not make you a bad person, it makes you an intellectually forthright one. 

Now, should the President of the United States call any country a "shithole"? No, of course not. But that doesn't mean that there aren't shitholes in the world…and Haiti is certainly one of them. Does Haiti being a shithole mean that Haitians are somehow less than any other group of people? Does this make them intellectually inferior or something? No…it just means that Haiti is a shithole. And look, when it comes to shitholes I know of which I speak...my ancestors came to America from a shithole (Ireland) and I currently reside in a shithole (Los Angeles).

The real question that no one in the media wanted to ask during the Shithole-gate fury was why is Haiti, or "Africa" or El Salvador - the other places Trump called shitholes, a shithole? The answer to that is certainly complicated, but you cannot answer that question without first pointing the finger directly at European and U.S. colonialism and/or slavery over the centuries. Another key part of the answer is also U.S. expansionist empire and militarism, even over the last forty years, most notably during the Reagan and Clinton administrations, being directly responsible for the instability and devastating poverty in Haiti, El Salvador and many parts of Africa today.

The reason no one in the media wants to admit that Haiti/El Salvador/parts of Africa is a shithole, or asked why Haiti/El Salvador/parts of Africa is a shithole is because they only push historical revisionism in regards to American empire. Admitting to historical reality would mess with the current establishment narrative which can be loosely summed up this way…"America was totally perfect and absolutely awesome until Trump became President". President Trump is certainly a boorish beast, but America has behaved like a boorish beast for a long time, well before we had one in the oval office, just ask anyone on the wrong end of America's big stick in the last fifty years, from Salvadorans who lived through Reagan's war in Latin America all the way back to the Vietnamese, Koreans and Filipinos, if you have any doubt about that.

DOWN THE RABBIT HOLE

Another thing that stood out to me about Shithole-gate is that it made for an extremely convenient distraction while another much more vital story was happening that the establishment would rather we not pay attention to. That story was the renewal of a Patriot Act-era bill that allows the NSA and FBI to do warrantless surveillance on American citizens.

The Surveillance bill is a controversial one, and there were many libertarian-minded Republicans who were against it, most notably Justin Amash from Michigan who attached an amendment to the bill that would force the FBI to get a warrant before searching the NSA collected surveillance. 

Even though he was going against his own party, Amash had gotten the commitment of dozens of Republicans to support his amendment and simply needed the support of a majority of House Democrats in order for it to pass. He got some Democrats to go along with him, but the Democratic party leadership, most notably including Nancy Pelosi (Ca.), Steny Hoyer (Md), Adam Schiff(Ca) and Eric Swalwell(Ca) voted against the Amash amendment and thus it was defeated.

What is so interesting to me is that Pelosi, Schiff and Swalwell are all leading figures in the charge of Russia-gate assault against Trump. Schiff and Swalwell in particular, routinely get in front of any camera they can find and pronounce with a Tourette's Syndrome level of persistence, that Trump is a dangerous, authoritarian, traitorous, treasonous, Hitler-esque, Russian-Manchurian president. These Democrats speak of Trump and Russia-gate as the single greatest threat to American democracy in the history of the republic. And yet…they just voted to give the man they claim to be an authoritarian monster, Trump, vast, unchecked surveillance power over all Americans. Something here does not make sense.

The only logical conclusion that you can draw from Pelosi, Schiff and Swalwell, all from safe Democratic districts in California (as an aside - Sen. Dianne Feinstein, former Sen. Barbara Boxer and former Congresswoman Jane Harmen are all from allegedly liberal California and all are/were vociferous defenders of the intelligence community and allowing them unfettered surveillance of all Americans...hmmm...curious...very curious) , voting to give Trump such vast unchecked surveillance powers is that they do not actually believe most of what they say about the man. They cannot possibly believe he is evil, authoritarian, nefarious or a traitor, for if they did they would try and curb his powers instead of expand them. 

With their vote the other day, and with the accompanying silence over it from the media and the #Resistance®, one can only conclude that all of these entities are simply playing roles in a kabuki theatre production titled "Russia-gate". If Trump was "installed" by Putin through Russian hacking to be President of the United States as so many in the #Resistance® seem to claim and so many in the media seem to imply, then it would be inconceivable if not down right insane to grant him expanded surveillance powers over Americans.

#RESISTANCE IS FUTILE...AND FEUDAL

With the Democratic pro-spying vote, and the subsequent media silence over it, the #Resistance®, in all its manifestations, has proven itself to be little more than a pose. For over a year now I've heard liberals and the media shrieking about Trump's attacks on the journalists and the institution of the free press, but this charge rings entirely hollow when the Democrats vote to give Trump unchecked spying powers over all Americans including journalists, and the alarmist media does not sound the alarm bell over Trump's spying power or the Democrats complicity in giving it to him. (Not to mention the #Resistance® and the mainstream media's glee at RT America being forced to register as an agent of a foreign power...but that is a story for another day).

The media silence on the warrantless surveillance bill is even more hypocritical when seen through the lens of their moral outrage toward Trump's "shithole" comment. The media has uniformly called Trump racist over his "shithole" comment, and they have made a big stink (pun intended) about this racial angle of the story, in particular because it is civil rights leader Martin Luther King's birthday on Monday. To see the consternation on the faces of every blowhard cable news personality over this perceived racial slight is the height of comedy, especially when you consider their silence on unchecked government surveillance. The reason I find it so funny is because MLK was the victim of government surveillance, in fact he was the target of a vicious FBI surveillance campaign, the same kind of surveillance that the Democrats just allowed the incorrigible racist Trump to do, and which the media has been silent over. The acquiescence of the Democrats on warrantless surveillance, and the deafening silence over it from the media and the #Resistance® is proof that the whole Russia-gate and anti-Trump hysteria is manufactured nonsense.

Pelosi, Schiff and Swalwell's vote for Trump's warrantless spying of American citizens in particular is actual, tangible proof that Russia-gate is a hoax created out of political opportunism, wrapped in faux-patriotism and for the sole purpose of distracting the masses. Thus far there has been exactly ZERO evidence provided to the public showing Russia "hacked" the election, the DNC or Podesta's emails. None. But with Pelosi, Schiff and Swalwell voting to expand Trump's surveillance powers and eliminate even remedial oversight on government spying, there now is evidence that Russia-Gate is utter bullshit because if it were true Pelosi, Schiff and Swalwell would NEVER vote to authorize Trump to spy on Americans without any oversight. NEVER.

And in the wake of this betrayal where is the #Resistance®? Where is the pussy hat brigade that defiantly paraded through Washington last January? Where is Rachel Maddow and the media with their vociferous attacks on Trump and the damage he can do? The answer is they are all off having an anti-Trump circle jerk while the Democrats empower Trump to spy on Americans without a warrant.

IT'S A BIG CLUB...AND YOU AIN'T IN IT

As a fun little exercise, watch the media in the coming months and every time Pelosi, Schiff and Swalwell go on various networks and decry Trump's awfulness, which will be often as they are thirsty-to-the-extreme, see if any cable news host actually calls them out on their Trump-surveillance hypocrisy. See if Rachel Maddow, Chris Matthews, Anderson Cooper or any of the other empty heads at MSNBC or CNN will ask the glaringly obvious question to Pelosi, Schiff and Swalwell, which is why, if Trump is so uniquely threatening to American democracy, did you vote to expand his powers and allow him to spy on American citizens without any oversight?

Maddow, Mathews, Cooper and the rest won't ever do that because, just like Pelosi, Schiff and Swalwell, they are just dealers in the establishment casino and the table is tilted, the game is rigged, the fix is in and the house always wins. To quote the immortal George Carlin (unlike Bill Maher or John Oliver and their ilk, Carlin really did speak truth to power), "it's a big club…and you ain't in it!". (Please watch Carlin in this short clip. He astutely lays out the reality of America for all to see.)

The big take away from Shithole-gate is this, the manufactured fainting spells of the #Resistance® over Trump saying out loud what the rest of us know to be the truth, that Haiti is a shithole, is meant to distract us from their complicity in the continued assault by the U.S. government and its intelligence community on the civil liberties of all Americans.

In conclusion, Haiti is a shithole. You know what else is a shithole? Nancy Pelosi is a shithole. Adam Schiff is a shithole. Steny Hoyer is a shithole. Eric Swalwell is a shithole. The Democratic party is a shithole. The media is a shithole. The #Resistance® is a shithole. Poseurs, phonies and fakers all. It has now been proven beyond a shadow of a doubt that the true objective of the #Resistance® and their media cohorts is only to further empower the establishment and to maintain the status quo at all costs. As it is with all bullshit artists, from Donald Trump to the #Resistance®, do not listen to what they say, but watch what they do, and then you will know their true intentions. 

 

©2017

Through the Looking Glass : Truth and Lies in Week One of 2017

Estimated Reading Time : 8 Minutes 44 Seconds

Week one of 2017 is in the books and boy oh boy was it a doozy. This most bizarre week no doubt portends the strangeness of the year to come. We are only one week into this new year and we are already through the looking glass where up is down, left is right, lie is truth, good is bad and nothing seems to make any sense whatsoever. What am I talking about…well…let's recount the week and discover the ways our world has gone topsy turvy. 

The big news of the week was the "Russia Hacking" story. Director of National Intelligence James Clapper testified before congress and assured everyone that the Russian government in general, and Putin in particular, were indeed behind the hacking of the election against Hillary Clinton. DNI Clapper followed that up by releasing a "report" by the CIA, FBI and NSA that was meant to prove his case for Russian hacking. None of that is very weird, but what was weird was how many republicans were skeptical of the intelligence community claims and how many democrats unquestioningly embraced the intelligence community claims. 

I have read the intelligence report, have you? Did you notice anything funny about the CIA report on Russian hacking into the election? Maybe I am crazy, but there is absolutely zero evidence in that report of Russian hacking or tampering in the election at all. Nothing. It is like the book reports I used to turn in in high school when I didn't read the book…which was always, because reading is for nerds. What would happen is that I wouldn't read the book and then I'd get the Cliff Notes, but I wouldn't even read those, just give them a half-assed skimming over the night before the report was due. Then I would just scratch a bunch of bullshit together in homeroom and hope to sneak by without anyone noticing I had no idea what I was talking about….sort of like what the Intelligence community just did with their hacking report. DNI Clapper turned in one hell of a whopper of a book report the other day and boy is he hoping no one actually reads it with a critical eye. What the Intelligence community did was make a bunch of assumptions, toss in some innuendo, and then played it off as some shocking new information of official Russian guilt and then let the media, and democrats, run with it. The media, of course, excitedly exclaimed that not only is this report proof that Russia hacked the election for Trump, but that Putin himself was the one who ran the whole operation…Dr. Evil style!! This entire episode is utter madness. Anyone who believes that evidence-free report needs to have their head examined. The intelligence community has been deceiving, propagandizing and fooling the populace for decades and yet the democrats cling to their every word because it means they didn't really lose the election!! 

Democrats jumped at the chance to take Clapper at his word without any evidence because it means they aren't as huge a train-wreck of a party as they fear they may be. See it wasn't their shitty candidate, or their shitty campaign, or their vacuous ideas, or their myopic political vision, no it was Putin and the mustache-twirling Russians fault that they lost. I warned democrats against embracing this Russia hacking story because it was too good to be true, and I stand by that. And if democrats would actually read the declassified report, they might not be so enamored with the intelligence community and their conclusions as to who is an enemy of the state. Let's go through the report quickly to see what I am talking about. 

First off, as I already stated, there is zero evidence presented. This report is simply a piece of paper that is meant to make "official" the leaks, which are nothing more than innuendo, that have been published across the media for weeks. The media are treating it like it is manna from heaven, but it is really regurgitated nonsense that contains nothing new. In addition to presenting zero evidence, the "sources" the document provides for their background information are embarrassingly absurd. The report uses an open source document from the internet to make their case that Russia had intent to hack the election. I am not kidding, go look at it.  The "Annex A" section (starting on Page 6, ironically enough) spends the majority of its time attacking the television channel RT (Russia Today) and blaming it for being such an effective propaganda tool for Putin to destroy American democracy. The majority of the report, in fact, is analysis of RT, which takes up 7 of the 25 pages of the report, in contrast to the actual meat of the report which takes up 5 pages.

RT is a lightning rod for the establishment as they often report on things the mainstream media would just as soon ignore. Anytime the mainstream media mention RT, they always describe it as "Kremlin controlled RT" or "Kremlin financed RT" or "Kremlin backed RT", which is pretty funny. I wonder why they don't describe the BBC as "Westminster financed or backed or controlled", or the US networks as "Washington financed, backed or controlled" or the cable channels as "Wall Street financed, backed or controlled"? Any time you hear a talking head describe RT as "Kremlin backed" immediately dismiss them as they are shoveling propaganda. Another sure fire sign of a propagandist is if they describe Putin as "former head of the KGB Putin". Yes, Putin was formerly the head of the KGB, but George HW Bush was formerly the head of the CIA, and yet no one describes him as "former head of the CIA George HW Bush", and they do not describe his son as "son of the former head of the CIA George HW Bush".  It is a simple propaganda ploy to trigger fear and distrust in the viewer and taint the story.

Getting back to the report…if democrats or liberals who are supporting it haven't read it yet,  they really should. The report gives a variety of examples of how RT attacked and undermined America's beloved democracy, the funny thing is though that many of those examples are from 2012, not 2016. Here are some of the more entertaining ones. The report states that in the lead up to the 2012 election RT introduced a new show, "Breaking the Set", hosted by Abby Martin, which "overwhelmingly focused on criticism of US and western governments". See you cannot criticize the US or western governments, that is an attack on America and democracy. Another way to look at it is that Abby Martin committed the crime of journalism. Shame on her! The hysterical part of this whole "Breaking the Set" thing being put in a report about Russian interference in the 2016 election is that "Breaking the Set" stopped airing two years before the 2016 election. Someone please buy James Clapper a calendar…and a TV Guide.

The next section of "Annex A" tells us that RT, in the lead up to the 2012 election, not the 2016 election, had the temerity to report on "alleged US election fraud and voting machine vulnerabilities". Can you believe the gall of a news agency reporting on the possibility of election fraud and voting machine vulnerabilities in the lead up to an election? RT is out of control!! You know who else reported on voting machine vulnerabilities, except unlike RT it wasn't in relation to the 2012 election, but the 2016 election? CBS and PBS just to name two. I wonder if they are Russian spies too? Probably…commie bastards!!

In the next part of Annex A, the report tells us that RT, in an effort to "highlight a lack of democracy in the United States" had "broadcast, hosted and advertised third party candidate debates". What monsters!! The lesson here is that when you are through the looking glass, more candidates, more debate and more democracy actually is an attack on democracy. According to the intel community, war is peace, slavery is freedom and ignorance is strength!!

Another section of Annex A will come as quite a shock to liberals and democrats…but in the lead up to the 2012, again, to be clear, this is not the 2016 election but the 2012 election, RT aired a documentary on Occupy Wall Street that the report described like this…"RT framed the movement (Occupy Wall Street) as a fight against the ruling class and described the current US political system as corrupt and dominated by corporations". Is there any rational and un-compromised human being on the planet who would describe the US political system any other way?

Some other parts of the Annex A section of the report say that RT "alleges widespread infringements of civil liberties, police brutality and drone use" in America. Another part says that RT is attacking the US by criticizing "alleged Wall street greed." Let that one sink in for a minute. I hope liberals and democrats are starting to understand how this report, and the intelligence community that prepared it, are not your friends, not by a long shot. Neither are they friends of Truth. 

And finally, the report claims that RT is attacking US democracy by "running anti-fracking programming, highlighting environmental issues and the impacts of public health." That is just outrageous!! How many liberals or democrats have seen Josh Fox's excellent documentary "Gasland"? Probably a lot of them. Well, they should realize that the intelligence community that they are so enamored with right now, thinks JOSH FOX IS JOSEF STALIN!! In essence, the intel community thinks Josh Fox will kill you and eat your children!! HBO is a tool of Putin!!

So, according to this report on election interference by the Russians in the 2016 election, the intelligence community writes a report that cites a russian news channel's reporting FROM 2012, that is basically in line with liberal or left leaning political positions. And democrats and the media are falling all over themselves to praise this report for its thoroughness and seriousness and attack anyone, even Glenn Greenwald, who questions in it the least. Rachel Maddow was nearly orgasmic when the report was released this week, and interestingly enough she said you should go read it, but she curiously told her viewers to only read the meat of it, which is 5 pages, and skip the "sources and methods" section, because that is longer and boring and confusing. Annex A is the sources and methods section where they only talk about RT. In other words, there are no sources, and there are no methods, there is only old speculation and assumptions. The Intel community, just like me in high school, didn't read the book or even skim the Cliff Notes, and yet the media are determined to make you not notice that. Do democrats and liberals not know this stuff? Have they not read the report? Maybe they should read it before embracing it. Dear liberals, please go read the report. Know what you are signing on to when you endorse this report. What you are signing onto to is the criminalization of your own beliefs and your own eventual demise.

It isn't only Rachel Maddow's coverage of the report and Clapper's testimony that has been both breathless and despicable.  On MSNBC the consistently deplorable Joy Ried, who is such a vacuous dimwit that she has quickly shot up that hapless network's ladder in record time, asked some bumpkin republican congressman from Nowheresville, USA whether he believed the Director of National Intelligence James Clapper or Julian Assange in regard to the Russian hacking allegations. It was an obvious "gotcha" type of moment that cable tv lives for…and watching this dope squirm was what was intended. There is just one problem with Ms. Reid's question and premise…and that is that any rational, sane human being would believe Julian Assange over DNI Clapper in a heartbeat, you know why? Because Julian Assange has never lied to them. Never. You may dislike what he has done, but he has never lied. Clapper? Clapper can't open his mouth without a swarm of lies flying out. Clapper lied to congress, which is a felony, just a few years ago in relation to the Snowden material. Has everyone lost their minds and memory all at once? Apparently the answer is yes. Assange has, at great personal expense, exposed US war crimes, Clapper, at great personal reward, has covered up his own and other war crimes. And I know it is in style at the moment to dismiss and demean Assange due to personal distaste for him, but those sex crimes charges against him reek of Intelligence community handy work.  If you think the US intel community wouldn't try and frame someone  by any means necessary, that they see as a mortal threat, you are incredibly naive.

And then there is the highest ranking democrat in the country, the loathsome Senator from New York, Chuck Schumer. Schumer went on Rachel Maddow's show last week and said that Trump better be careful because the intelligence community has "six ways to sunday to get back at you if you cross them." Think about that statement for a second. Democrats are holding up the intelligence community as the bastion of professionalism and patriotism and in the same breath are claiming the Intel community will circumvent the constitution and extra-judicially "get back" at their political enemies. If I said that same statement people would call me a conspiracy theorist and dismiss me out of hand. The ranking democrat in the country, Chuck Schumer, just said that the intelligence community will exact revenge on President Trump if he challenges them and no one bats an eye. Want to know two presidents who got on the wrong side of the intelligence community? Kennedy and Nixon. Remember how their presidency's ended? Kennedy's brains were splattered all over Jackie's nice pink suit in Dealey Plaza, and tricky Dick ignominiously gave us the "v" for victory sign and then flew off into historical oblivion after resigning. Both Kennedy's assassination and Nixon's impeachment had intelligence agency fingerprints all over them, and even some of the same intelligence operative fingerprints (I'm looking at you E. Howard Hunt). But of course thinking that, never mind saying it out loud, gets you labelled a "conspiracy theorist" and taken off the "serious person" list. But now we have the ranking Democrat directly saying it out loud on national television as a threat to the president-elect of the United States. I do not know how exactly this will play out, but I guarantee you that it will not end well. 

Speaking of repugnant Senators, John McCain and his common-law wife,  Senator Lindsay Graham aka The Southern Dandy, of course are banging the war drums claiming Russia's alleged hacking is an act of war. McCain and Graham are hawks who have never meet a war they didn't love. Democrats and liberals are empowering the war party by embracing this evidence-free report. You want a war with Russia, keep on taking the intel community at their word and I promise you will get one. It is what they want and they have convinced you that is what you want too.

Fake news has also been a major talking point of the media and even the intel community in the last week. As with the Russian hacking story, the fake news story is most bizarre. The mainstream media has claimed that fake news is what lead to Trump beating Clinton, as voters were misinformed as to the real facts and stories. The media have used a plethora of polls that say that Trump voters were terribly misinformed about the election, for instance overwhelming numbers of Trump voters believe he won the popular vote. As we know, this is not true, and so the media have used this point to say that fake news tainted the well so to speak. Of course, the media fail to mention their own part in misinforming the populace and how that is reflected in the media. For instance, there are polls that show how Clinton voters now believe that Russia actually hacked voting machines and changed votes in Trump's favor. This is untrue, even by the flimsy intel report standards, but the media would never blame themselves for this mis-information. 

In addition, the main generator of fake news, is the mainstream media. Just in the last few weeks the Washington Post has published the fakey-ist of fake news stories which much fanfare, but only after time and attention has passed have they sent out little noticed retractions. The WaPo stories were about the alleged fake news generated by Russian propaganda sources about the US election. The  PropOrNot Russian propaganda website lists made by an unnamed and unchecked source, which the Post published without questioning, is total nonsense. The other story was about Russian hacking as well, this time about how the Rooskies hacked into the Vermont power grid!! The story was absurd on its face but that didn't stop everyone from re-tweeting it and spreading it and shouting form the mountain tops about it. Of course, when the story turned out to be untrue, the Post didn't hype that fact, they sheepishly put a small disclaimer on top of it. The damage was done already…which is how fake news works. It is all about manufacturing consensus, consent and content…which is exactly why the Russia hacking the election story is fake news as well. The lack of evidence and proof don't matter to people because the story tells them what they want to hear, and the damage is done. Truth has no meaning in an empire of lies, and we are the ruling empire at the moment.

Speaking of truth, there has also been a great deal of talk about how with Donald Trump as president we now live in a post-truth world, where Truth or facts don't matter.  That may be true, but it isn't entirely Trump's doing…as the Washington Post keeps proving over and over again. Even the aforementioned Joy Reid, a vociferous attack dog against fake news and post-truth Trump, is guilty of spreading fake news and not correcting to fact. Ms. Reid, and the ludicrous "Russia" expert, the sleepy-eyed, charlatan Malcolm Nance, spread the lie pre-election that the DNC emails were proven to have been tampered with and altered. This is factually untrue, but Ms. Reid and Mr. Nance have never retracted those statements. Just like Trump, they have little regard for Truth.

The bottom line is this regarding the intel report, fake news and our post-truth world, if you take anything at face value you are a fool. Only a dupe or a dope, or both, would believe a word the intel community tells them. A brief look at recent and not-so recent history shows us that the American intelligence community are professional liars who will do anything and everything to obscure and destroy the Truth. Remember Clapper lying about surveillance? Remember the Iraq War? Remember the torture report and all the dirty tricks surrounding it? Remember the Gulf War? Remember Iran-Contra? Remember Nicaragua? El Salvador? Venezuela? Brazil? Argentina? Cuba? Iran and the Shah? Vietnam? Laos? Cambodia? I mean, c'mon, how dumb do you have to be to fall for the intel community bullshit again?

And in terms of Russia and Putin, it is most certainly possible that they hacked the election. I have no illusions about Putin being some saint, but regardless of that, what I demand in relation to any news or charges is evidence. I have yet to see compelling evidence that Russia shot down MH-17, or invaded Ukraine or committed war crimes in Syria or hacked the US election. That doesn't mean they definitely didn't do those things, only that I have not seen compelling evidence that they did. And until I see evidence I will not believe those claims, and neither should you. 

This past week is a wonderful launching pad for the chaos, disorder and madness to be unleashed in 2017. The media is abysmal, do not trust a word they say. The intel community are professional liars…never believe them…ever. Trump is incapable of telling any truth, ignore everything he utters. Trust nothing and no one. If someone makes a claim demand to actually SEE the evidence, not some report that is meant to appease people who will never read it and is void of any proof. Demand to see actual, tangible evidence, or consider it a lie.

And finally, if you are dismayed about the post-truth world we now inhabit, make it a practice to be loyal to the Truth above all else. Be loyal to the Truth above ideology, political party and even country. The Truth shall set you free, so stop being a slave to the lies and disinformation coming from "official sources". We are through the looking glass here people, we need to cast off wishful thinking and anchor ourselves to Truth or all will be lost. The road ahead is going to be very disorienting, I mean just last week Sarah Palin wrote an apology to Julian Assange and told people to go see Oliver Stone's Snowden… we are most definitely through the looking glass. Maybe if we can hold onto the Truth for dear life, we might just be able to make it through all of this madness.

©2017