It always feels like an uphill battle trying to counter the talking points and narratives of an empire in decline. However, each day, the veil falls away just a little bit more. Those who suspected become more suspicious. Those in denial double down. Those who have known for a while become just a little braver, a little more vocal.
As the lies become more flagrant, harder to deny, more desperate, ghoulish, frantic and appallingly transparent, the more corporate media loses its grip on an audience already tired and dubious. With corrupt and thoroughly heartless players like Biden, Netanyahu and Trump alongside their increasingly despised and reviled public mouthpieces like Miller, Blinken, Levy, Pompeo and others, independent news sources are finding audiences increasingly desperate for something – anything – that resembles truth and reality. Yes, some will turn to demagogues like Trump or aggressively bolster the McCarthy-esque tactics of violent career-liars like Hillary Clinton, but others will start to listen to those they were taught to block out or ignore. Those they were duly informed were “Putin puppets,” or “working for China” or “anti-semites” or even “aiding Trump.”
The more extreme, dire and explicit the events around us get, the more they betray the depths of corporate power and deception and those who have built careers on their unfaltering and unethical devotion to those powers, the more arduous it becomes to swallow the lies and manipulation. The presidential debate last night showed us what we all knew already: that Biden has been in serious cognitive decline. But instead of acknowledging that and acting with both integrity and truthfulness or allowing a democratic election primary debate, the powers-that-be from ex-presidents like Barack Obama to media hosts like Joe Scarborough either dismissed or attacked anyone who would dare suggest that Biden was anything but at his peak. These are not only dishonest players, they are corrupt, morally vapid and place us all – and by “all” I mean the entirety of the human race – in the greatest existential peril.
Here’s what Barack Obama just said about Joe Biden, a president currently in serious cognitive decline who is the architect of the most aggressively racist incarceration laws in this country, helped destroy unions and workers, and is today directly engaged in genocide and antagonistically instigating a third world war:
“Someone who has fought for ordinary folks his entire life… someone who tells the truth; who knows right from wrong and will give it to the American people straight.” What kind of blatant and immoral hucksterism is this? At what point do we begin to recognize that we do not live in a democracy and that our beloved leaders are people who pride themselves on the lies they can get away with. Their job is to maintain power at any cost by keeping us invested in this ruinous and immoral corporate duopoly. Absent from the debate stage – once again – were the other on-the-ballot candidates like the Green Party’s Jill Stein, who is a real-world alternative to both Trump and Biden. But oligarchy and authoritarianism do not allow for democratic or fair elections. And if you are someone who still believes that third-party-candidates are “spoilers,” then I suggest you have been sold a bill of goods that directly and purposefully undermines both democracy and choice. And I recommend you question exactly what it is they are spoiling.
As Briahna Joy Gray proposed, “I cannot imagine a better moment to break free.”
Here’s MSNBC host Joe Scarborough just 3 months ago on Biden:
“I’ve said it for years now, he’s cogent, but I undersold him when I said he was cogent. He’s far beyond cogent. In fact, I think he’s better than he’s ever been intellectually, analytically, because he’s been around for 50 years… Start your tape right now because I’m about to tell you the truth. And fuck you if you can’t handle the truth: This version of Biden intellectually, analytically, is the best Biden ever. Not a close second. And I have known him for years. The Brzezinskis have known him for 50 years. If it weren’t the truth, I wouldn’t say it.”
The level of cognitive dissonance it takes to excuse, justify or deny the overt manipulation and lies that people like this enact with seemingly no remorse or shame, is staggering. It is also a massive betrayal of trust. These are not mistakes or misquotes. These are deliberate and calculated fabrications enacted with purpose. To try and convince ourselves otherwise is a manipulation of desire over reality. And it is deadly.
The horror show that is the unthinkably cruel and barbarous genocide of Palestinians – who are ironically being framed by Israel and the U.S. as Nazis and terrorists – continues in force alongside the rampant negative and factually false narratives about Julian Assange which continue to be thrown around on corporate media – a media which prefers to openly parade former high-ranking members of the FBI as their “informed guests” to further discredit Assange. They do this instead of bringing on human rights leaders or actual lawyers involved with the case or anyone who will call out the grave miscarriage of justice and sham court proceedings that kept Assange a tortured prisoner for 15 years as a warning to other journalists around the world. Slowly, more and more people are starting to wake up to Malcom X’s oft-quoted words of caution:
“The media is the most powerful entity on earth. Because they control the minds of the masses, they have the power to make the innocent guilty and to make the guilty innocent, and that’s power… If you’re not careful, the newspapers will have you hating the people who are being oppressed, and loving the people who are doing the oppressing.”
Let’s not forget that it was these same power structures that publicly demonized such outspoken (and now revered) voices as Malcolm X and Martin Luther King, Jr. in the years before their assassinations. These were the voices we were told to ignore, the voices we were told were dangerous, traitorous and working for foreign governments.
It is essential to point out, I believe, that the more people who are able to move beyond their once-blind allegiance to propagandistic nationalism and institutionally constructed mythologies of righteousness, exceptionalism and virtue, the more people will seek out the alternative journalistic voices they have been told to vigorously ignore, demonise, despise and attempt to silence. Once-trusted media institutions like the New York Times and the Washington Post – both struggling for readership, but still the default go-to for many who grew up with faith in and admiration for those institutions – are slowly being revealed to be nothing more than mouthpieces for Pentagon talking points. Any semblance of “journalism” has been stripped from these media institutions, cannibalised by the mass firing of outspoken journalistic voices alongside the transition of ownership to governmental and financial conglomerates and billionaires.
As I have done for years, I will continue sharing just a small – but I believe increasingly significant – corner of those voices that have gained my trust and admiration over many years of reporting, uncovering, revealing and placing themselves in harm’s way to try and alter the course of world events away from greed and destruction and toward something more closely resembling an educated and informed civilisation. A lofty goal, I know.
The mythologies of Israel, the United States, the West are collapsing in real time. As the northern parts of the world begin to close themselves off even more from the Southern regions and peoples and create climate fortresses equipped with battle-tested crowd-control and state-of-the-art industrialised weaponry, the more demonstrations, protests and even militaristic pushback will appear. Gaza may have been the tipping point, but the scenario we are seeing there will be repeated across the globe in the coming years and decades. Assuming we last that long.
I recommend looking more deeply at all of these voices, visiting their sites, podcasts, shows, interviews and writings. Read their bios, do your research, your due diligence. Support actual journalism and journalists who openly challenge power structures, the very mission of journalism itself.
There are so many others, but this list is a great start for anyone wanting alternative journalism as opposed to the corporatised version of State Media that passes for journalism and a “free press” in mainstream circles (see Sheldon Wolen’s Inverted Totalitarianism).
“One cannot point to any national institution[s] that can accurately be described as democratic, surely not in the highly managed, money-saturated elections, the lobby-infested Congress, the imperial presidency, the class-biased judicial and penal system, or, least of all, the media.” – Sheldon Wolen
“The corporate grip on opinion in the United States is one of the wonders of the Western world. No First World country has ever managed to eliminate so entirely from its media all objectivity – much less dissent.” – Gore Vidal
“Any dictator would admire the uniformity and obedience of the US media.”– Noam Chomsky
I share this for anyone who wants access to more information, not just the information that is cherry-picked by those who profit directly from manufacturing our consent for criminal acts, atrocities and the mass-undoing of civil rights and protections. We are at a historical tipping point. We are witnessing another empire in collapse – like the Roman Empire, the Athenian Empire, the Ottoman Empire, the British Empire and so many others. The difference today is we have not only the power to distinguish all life on the planet, but we are increasingly cornering ourselves into that inevitability. The human race has never been closer to total annihilation than it is today. That is a fact supported by scientists across the globe. The United States is owned and run by individuals whose power lies in maintaining total and complete global hegemony. The multipolar world that is emerging is their greatest threat, their greatest fear, and in their desperation and insanity, they are willing to burn it all down if they can’t maintain the global dominance they believe is their god-given right.
Please. Be informed. Listen to the many journalistic and activist voices you were told to ignore, attack, silence and discredit. THEN make your decisions.
Here are some recent articles and videos from some of the above-mentioned journalists and activists.
TOPICS:
UKRAINE
ISRAEL/GAZA
WAR & EMPIRE
JULIAN ASSANGE
UKRAINE:
ISRAEL/GAZA:
WAR & EMPIRE:
JULIAN ASSANGE:
*Image at top by mr. fish.
THE HAL BLOG 
Leave a comment