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Paul Craig Roberts
Institute for Political Economy
Revealed: Mass Media Complicity in “Russian Disinformation” Fraud,
Revealed: Mass Media Complicity in “Russian Disinformation” Fraud, w/ Matt Taibbi | SYSTEM UPDATE #30
Glenn Greenwald and Matt Taibbi Explain How Democrats, FBI, CIA, Homeland Security, and whore media Created the Disinformation Industry in order to Suppress Truth
“I honestly don’t think we have even come close to confronting what an incredible systemic failure there was on the part of the media throughout this entire Russiagate hysteria, too, from publishing everything the CIA and the FBI and Homeland Security told them to say, anonymously, to swallowing every single scam and fraud that appeared and building their entire news narrative around it. And now they’re so angry and confused about why nobody trusts them.” — Glenn Greenwald
An excerpt:
In this episode, we will examine the most important and fascinating – or one of them – new installments from the Twitter Files. Just hours ago, the independent journalist Matt Taibbi published a series of revelations about something called “Hamilton 68” which was launched in 2017, and it was immediately obvious that it was an attempt to smear all critics of the Democratic Party as Russian agents by pretending to use complex data analysis and new expertise called ‘disinformation expertise’ to prove which voices and viewpoints are being promoted by the Kremlin.
But there were two very red flags from the start. The first was who was behind it, namely the now familiar mix of Democratic Party operatives, their old neocon allies, led by Bill Kristol and numerous operatives of the U.S. Security State, CIA, FBI, Homeland Security, the dominant union in the Trump era politics, that era giving itself the right to label what was and was not disinformation. Secondly, they refused to disclose any of the underlying data that they claim compose their sophisticated analysis, so it was impossible to know who they even decided to brand as Russian-friendly outlets. Impossible, that is, until now. Taibbi, using his access to the Twitter Files, has exposed not only the total fraud at the heart of this project but also Twitter’s knowledge that, even as they and leading news corporations in America touted this Hamilton 68 dashboard as the authoritative source for knowing who was and was not a Russian asset, everyone in Twitter knew it was fraudulent but never told the country.
We examine both the key revelations and the vital context to understand them and then speak to Taibbi himself about the reporting he just did, reporting which, needless to say, is being ignored by almost every major media outlet, including the ones that so heavily touted that fraudulent framework.
After their humiliating defeat in 2016 to Donald Trump, along with their allies in the corporate media, Democrats decided to blame everyone except themselves. The list of villains is virtually endless: WikiLeaks and Julian Assange, who ended up imprisoned as a result; James Comey, for daring to investigate Hillary Clinton’s private email server at her home, even though he ended up deciding not to prosecute her for it; Jill Stein for the crime of running against Hillary Clinton rather than falling obediently into line behind the Democrats – an art of submission, which the Squad ended up perfecting just a year later. Democrats even blame the New York Times because they believed, I swear, that the Paper of Record was too hard on Hillary and not hard enough on Trump. They blamed Russia, of course, and never stopped blaming them. They basically blamed everyone for their loss except Chris Hayes, Amy Klobuchar, Hillary Clinton, and the people Hillary paid a lot of money to, in order to win the election, namely the people whose responsibility it was to win that election.
But above all else, what they really blamed was freedom: freedom of speech, a free press, and, especially, a free Internet. They decided that the real reason they lost was because citizens were too free to spread their views, their ideas, and their information over the Internet. So, they united with the U.S. Security State, which is always concerned about Americans having too much freedom, and they set about trying to rectify this problem by demanding that their Big Tech allies institute a new regime of censorship under threat of being punished for failure to obey. In order to justify this new censorship regime, they needed a way to pretend that they weren’t really engaged in political censorship, in part because the First Amendment still makes that unconstitutional and because most Americans, by instinct, still recoil when they hear that people are being censored for their political views – that is still something that Americans by nature believe only happens in those bad countries, in tyrannies.
So, Democrats, after their 2016 loss, faced a real problem: they knew they could no longer allow free speech and free Internet in the United States but they also knew they needed a branding campaign or a branding strategy to call their political censorship something else. What they decided to do was to invent a brand new and completely fake expertise. They called these censors, these fake experts, “disinformation experts.” That’s the title they bestowed on that laughable resistance fanatic Nina Yanukovich, who they actually tried to install as the Disinformation Czar inside the Department of Homeland Security. But having such a preposterous woman as her, and the entire idea of having DHS have a ministry of truth within it, was simply a bridge too far, even for a censorship-happy political culture. So, while they were forced to withdraw that embarrassing attempt, the structure of which it was to be a part of not only endured, but continues to strengthen.
As a result, we now have a sprawling, extremely well-funded industry called “disinformation experts.” The idea is that these people reside above politics and ideology. They don’t root for one side or the other. Perish the thought. They’re just scholars. They’re scholars who study disinformation much the way that cardiologists study the heart, or aeronautical engineers study physics and rockets, or mathematicians study numbers and calculations. They just declare what is true and what is false. That’s all. They’re the owners of the truth. They decreed truth and falsity because somehow they earned the credentials to do so.
It is this scam industry that gave Democrats and their allies in the media and the U.S. Security State the excuse and the euphemism to censor what these disinformation experts in place – and they seemed to appear overnight and they all had benign-sounding names like the Institute to Combat Extremism – these people aren’t trying to censor dissent or ideological disputes. No. They just want to censor lies and falsehoods and disinformation. Who could possibly be opposed to that?
When Rumble first announced that I, along with others, such as former Congresswoman Tulsi Gabbard, were moving to the Rumble platform to produce videos exclusively, back in 2021, The Washington Post quoted something, as part of their hit piece on our move called the “Institute for Strategic Dialogue,” and they used someone who works at the Institute for Strategic Dialogue – such a nice and benign and unthreatening name – to trash Rumble as a sewer of disinformation and right-wing conspiracy theories. In other words, it wasn’t The Washington Post saying that Rumble was filled with lies and disinformation. It was these experts, these disinformation experts at this Institute. Now, as it turns out, and The Washington Post, of course, didn’t tell you this, that institute is funded by and partners with Google, Facebook and the United States Security Services and by other Western intelligence services and by NATO. In other words, it’s a completely politicized organization devoted to political censorship against anyone who dissents from their agenda masquerading under the guise of apolitical expertise. That is what this whole fraudulent disinformation industry is.
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