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Category: Disinformation

  • A Yank and a Dutchman Exploring on their BettBeat Channel The World

    They’ve had skin in the game — the Podcast and Substack game — for four years.

    Amazing guests, and unfortunately for us, but fortunately for us, too, they have been covering the genocide in the Jewish State of Raping and Murdering and Starving and Maiming and Poisoning Palestine: Going on TWO goddamned years.

    One of their favorite guests, and mine too: Assal Rad, Peter and Karim examine the ongoing genocide in Gaza and the failure of international institutions to respond effectively. The conversation explores how Israeli propaganda has become increasingly ineffective as images of starvation make their justifications harder to sell, yet Western governments continue providing unwavering support despite shifting public opinion.

    An outright assault on all Palestinian Life Anywhere.

    Listen to BettBeat Media’s Karim and Peter here, on my show, Finding Fringe, KYAQ FM:

    Now, both are floundering, as they start a new semester in Hong Kong. Floundering because the world and their own adopted country, China, isn’t doing anything to stop the genocide. Here, a telling interview with a Portuguese fellow, also in China, talking about the lack of soft power from China toward the West, and the odd bullshit in China’s textbooks describing Palestine as a terrorist place:

    But, let’s not forget, that the Jewish Illegal State of Israel has a lot of cadres in their camp that have committed settler colonial genocide and mass murder.

    Man, oh, man, the Jews of Israel have solid genocidal ground to stand on: Let us put this in a historical perspective: the commemoration of the War to End All Wars acknowledges that 15 million lives were lost in the course of World War I (1914-18).

    The loss of life in the Second World War (1939-1945) was on a much larger scale, when compared to World War I: 60 million lives, both military and civilian, were lost during World War II. (Four times those killed during World War I).

    The largest WWII casualties were suffered by China and the Soviet Union:

    • 26 million in the Soviet Union,
    • China estimates its losses at approximately 20 million deaths.

    Ironically, these two countries (allies of the US during WWII) —  which lost a large share of their population during WWII — were under the Biden-Harris administration as categorized  as “enemies of America”, which are threatening the Western World. Under Trump? Same continuation of the hatred.

    Germany and Austria lost approximately 8 million people during WWII, Japan lost more than 2.5 million people. The US and Britain respectively lost more than 400,000 lives.

    Here’s a carefully researched article by James A. Lucas documenting the more than 20 million lives lost resulting from US led wars, military coups and intelligence ops carried out in the wake of WWII, in what is euphemistically called the “post-war era” (1945- ).

    The extensive loss of life in Lebanon, Syria, Yemen, Ukraine and Libya, Palestine is not included in this study.

    Nor are the millions of deaths resulting from extreme poverty — largely induced by economic sanctions and Western interference in nations’ ability to democratically elect who they want. Selling weapons to both sides of a revolution or war, well, that has its multiplier effect.

    The causes of wars are complex. In some instances nations other than the U.S. may have been responsible for more deaths, but if the involvement of our nation appeared to have been a necessary cause of a war or conflict it was considered responsible for the deaths in it. In other words they probably would not have taken place if the U.S. had not used the heavy hand of its power. The military and economic power of the United States was crucial.

    This study reveals that U.S. military forces were directly responsible for about 10 to 15 million deaths during the Korean and Vietnam Wars and the two Iraq Wars. The Korean War also includes Chinese deaths while the Vietnam War also includes fatalities in Cambodia and Laos.

    The American public probably is not aware of these numbers and knows even less about the proxy wars for which the United States is also responsible. In the latter wars there were between nine and 14 million deaths in Afghanistan, Angola, Democratic Republic of the Congo, East Timor, Guatemala, Indonesia, Pakistan and Sudan.

    But the victims are not just from big nations or one part of the world. The remaining deaths were in smaller ones which constitute over half the total number of nations. Virtually all parts of the world have been the target of U.S. intervention.

    The overall conclusion reached is that the United States most likely has been responsible since WWII for the deaths of between 20 and 30 million people in wars and conflicts scattered over the world.

    To the families and friends of these victims it makes little difference whether the causes were U.S. military action, proxy military forces, the provision of U.S. military supplies or advisors, or other ways, such as economic pressures applied by our nation. They had to make decisions about other things such as finding lost loved ones, whether to become refugees, and how to survive.

    And the pain and anger is spread even further. Some authorities estimate that there are as many as 10 wounded for each person who dies in wars. Their visible, continued suffering is a continuing reminder to their fellow countrymen.

    It is essential that Americans learn more about this topic so that they can begin to understand the pain that others feel. Someone once observed that the Germans during WWII “chose not to know.” We cannot allow history to say this about our country. The question posed above was “How many September 11ths has the United States caused in other nations since WWII?” The answer is: possibly 10,000. — James A. Lucas

    Here, a bio on Karim:

    I am interested in how the asymmetrical cultural flow from the West into societies across the world, reinforced by corporate hegemony in a neoliberal global political economy (e.g., dominance in the spheres of social media, the movie industry and fashion), influences the individual psychology of the global population. In particular, the effects of racism/white supremacy, capitalism and colonialism hold my strong attention. My research revolves around questions such as: Why do racism and colorism follow highly similar patterns across the globe; How do (Western) social media platforms perpetuate racial hierarchies in cultures across the globe; What are the psychological ramifications of colonialism; What is the relationship between neoliberal political economies and our understanding of human nature?

    Peter’s a serious scholar: Publications

    Work in Progress

    “When Left is Right and Right is Left: The psychological correlates of political ideology in China” (Under Review). [Link]

    “Knowing what the electorate knows: Issue-specific knowledge and candidate choice in the 2020 elections” (Under Review). [Link]

    *****

    We intended to get into geopolitical or political economy, but we ran out of time: Here, a primer with Peter Phillips, former director of Project Censored and professor of Political Sociology at Sonoma State University. His new book Giants: The Global Power Elite details the 17 transnational investment firms which control over $50 trillion in wealth—and how they are kept in power by their activists, facilitators and protectors.

    Ahh, we did get briefly into the Fertile Crescent, when agriculture highjacked humanity:

    Picture

    Ahh, Peter Beattie said things have been messed up for 10,000 years: Think about this evolution of the brain and psyche for two million years, or more, and now what, the Fertile Crescent fucked us up big TIME.

    • 2 million years ago: The earliest evidence of a hunter-gatherer culture emerges with the appearance of the genus Homo.
    • 1.9 million years ago: The lifestyle became more developed and accelerated with Homo erectus, a species with a larger brain and physique suited for long-distance walking to acquire meat.
    • 700,000 to 40,000 years ago: Hunting and gathering was the way of life for later hominins, including Homo heidelbergensis and Neanderthals, who used increasingly sophisticated tools.
    • 200,000 years ago to ~12,000 years ago: The hunter-gatherer lifestyle continued through most of the existence of our own species, Homo sapiens. This period ended with the Neolithic Revolution, which led to the development of agriculture.

    I’m adding this here in the DV piece:

    Locking up the food and fencing in the hunter/ gatherer and nomadic and pastoral lands caused:

    • Social stratification
    • Specialization and gender roles
    • Warfare

    While in 1995 there appeared to have been at least a 1,500-year gap between plant and animal domestication, it now seems that both occurred at roughly the same time, with initial management of morphologically wild future plant and animal domesticates reaching back to at least 11,500 cal BP, if not earlier. A focus on the southern Levant as the core area for crop domestication and diffusion has been replaced by a more pluralistic view that sees domestication of various crops and livestock occurring, sometimes multiple times in the same species, across the entire region. Morphological change can no longer be held to be a leading-edge indicator of domestication. Instead, it appears that a long period of increasingly intensive human management preceded the manifestation of archaeologically detectable morphological change in managed crops and livestock. Agriculture in the Near East arose in the context of broad-based systematic human efforts at modifying local environments and biotic communities to encourage plant and animal resources of economic interest. This process took place across the entire Fertile Crescent during a period of dramatic post-Pleistocene climate and environmental change with considerable regional variation in the scope and intensity of these activities as well as in the range of resources being manipulated.

    Against the Grain: How Agriculture Has Hijacked Civilization

    Check out my interview with Manning here:

    Scroll Down and find the old show illustrated above HERE.

    *****

    Peter has a big essay —  “The Pull of Humanitarian Interventionism: Examining the Effects of Media Frames and Political Values,” (with Jovan Milojevich) International Journal of Communication 12: 831–855 (2018). [Link]

    (Oh, winning those hearts and minds with intervention of the Western Humanitarian (sic) kind!)

    The Candy Man Soldiers of Good Will?

    Propaganda:

    Edward Bernays anyone?

    “If we understand the mechanism and motives of the group mind, it is now possible to control and regiment the masses according to our will without them knowing it.” — Edward Bernays, from Propaganda

    Soft power into murderous coups:

    We talked about soft (not mashed banana) power: Edward Bernays’ promotional stunts were only a smokescreen for a not-so-innocent deep-state strategy. With sly public relations tactics, he began to influence American media toward discrediting the new Guatemalan President and ultimately incite action against the duly-elected leader. In 1954, a CIA-backed coup d’état turned the government of Guatemala over to what was ostensibly a leader hand-picked by the U.S. government and indirectly by a U.S. corporation — the United Fruit Company.

    I’ll have them both on again, soon: Peter Beattie

    The media create frames to transmit information to the public, and the frames can have varying effects on public opinion depending on how they combine with people’s values and deep-seated cultural narratives. This study examines the effects of media frames and values on people’s choice of resolution of conflict. The results show that neither values nor exposure to frames are associated with outcome. Participants overwhelmingly chose the humanitarian intervention option regardless of frame exposure and even in contrast to their own political values, demonstrating the influence of the mainstream media’s dominant, humanitarian interventionist frame on public opinion.

    In early 2013, the Syrian crisis was growing worse by the day, and violence was escalating at a rapid pace. Then–U.S. president Barack Obama was weighing the option of a full-scale military intervention, based on humanitarian grounds, in the troubled state. Islamic State was wreaking havoc throughout the country; however, it was Syrian president Bashar al-Assad who was primarily making the headlines in the United States for alleged atrocities and violations of the Geneva Accords and human rights. The seemingly perpetual beat of war drums in the United States did not take long to sound off, and they grew louder each day President Obama did not declare war on Assad. The media played along, and, generally, so did the political elite. Even former U.S. president Bill Clinton contributed by stating that if Obama chose not to go to war because Congress voted against it, he would risk “looking like a total wuss” (Voorhees, 2013)—a feeble and desperate attempt to demean the president into taking the United States to war. Former secretary of state Hillary Clinton and Senator John McCain, never ones to shy away from a military confrontation (Johnstone, 2015; Landler, 2016), echoed Bill Clinton’s sentiment as they were both displeased with Obama’s foreign policy decision making on Syria (Landler, 2016; Voorhees, 2013). Highly emotive phrases—popular in interventionist frames—such as, “History will judge us,” “We don’t want to be on the wrong side of history,” “We cannot look the other way,” “The world is watching us,” and “What will and “What will the world think,” dominated the headlines and news reports. Then–secretary of state John Kerry touched on almost all of these in his speech at a State Department briefing in August 2013, at a time when President Obama was deliberating possible recourses in response to an alleged chemical attack by Assad’s forces.

    Kerry stated,

    As previous storms in history have gathered, when unspeakable crimes were within our power to stop them, we have been warned against the temptations of looking the other way. . . . What we choose to do or not do matters in real ways to our own security. Some cite the risk of doing things. But we need to ask, “What is the risk of doing nothing?” . . . So our concern is not just about some far-off land oceans away. That’s not what this is about. Our concern with the cause of the defenseless people of Syria is about choices that will directly affect our role in the world and our interests in the world. It is also profoundly about who we are. We are the United States of America. We are the country that has tried, not always successfully, but always tried to honor a set of universal values around which we have organized our lives and our aspirations. . . . My friends, it matters here if nothing is done. It matters if the world speaks out in condemnation and then nothing happens. History would judge us all extraordinarily harshly if we turned a blind eye to a dictator’s wanton use of weapons of mass destruction.

    …

    Continued, Beattie:

    One of the main cultural themes in the United States is the nationalism theme, with the global responsibility nationalism theme—which emerged after World War II—being the most dominant. As Gamson (1992) articulates, “With the advent of World War II and the cold war, public discourse fully embraced the global responsibility theme” (p. 142), and the American public threw its support behind the United Nations and the idea of collective security. Democrats and Republicans alike “embraced a dominant U.S. role in the creation of political-military alliances, not only in Europe but in other regions as well” (Gamson, 1992, p. 142). The global responsibility theme was the dominant theme during the Cold War and the framing of the U.S. doctrine of containment, and it continues to be the dominant theme today in the framing of the humanitarian interventionist doctrine.

    Prior to World War II, the “America first” nationalist theme was the most dominant; however, the global responsibility (then) countertheme was still quite prevalent. When the America first theme was dominant, the kind of isolationism that it supported “was never incompatible with expansionism in what was regarded as U.S. turf” (Gamson, 1992, p. 141); therefore, the global responsibility (at that time) countertheme actually supported the America first theme rather than countering it. The Monroe Doctrine is evidence of this compatibility, because it reinforced American isolationism—by telling European powers to stay out of the Americas—yet supported U.S. expansionism. The global responsibility countertheme was “reflected in the idea of America’s international mission as a light unto nations” (Gamson, 1992, pp. 141–142), with the belief that the “expansion of American influence in the world would bring enlightenment to backward peoples and confer upon them the bounties of Christianity and American political genius” (p. 142). The global responsibility (then) countertheme clearly embodied the notion of American exceptionalism, just as it does today as the dominant nationalism theme. Nevertheless, we would like to make it clear that we are not claiming that deep-seated cultural narratives in the United States are necessarily pro–humanitarian interventionist. What we are claiming, and will substantiate throughout this section, is that the U.S. media and political elites have tapped into a deep-seated cultural narrative to gain support for pro–humanitarian intervention policy options.

    Many Americans believe, just as Kerry and other political elites publicly pronounce, that their country does try to honor a set of universal values around which they have organized their lives and aspirations and that these values include the notion that the United States is the leading “defender of democracy and human rights” around the world and that it is “exceptional.” Regardless of whether political elites actually believe this or whether it is simply rhetoric on their part, the mere invocation of this notion to justify war (much of the time conducted illegally—without United Nations or congressional approval) is troubling on its own. For instance, American exceptionalism “originally meant that the U.S. had a God given duty to impose its government and ‘way of life’ on lands not already under its control” (Pestana, 2016, para. 3), and it was, therefore, used to justify American imperialism. In more recent times, however, American exceptionalism has morphed into a more idealistic notion, being viewed as a

    belief that the American political system is unique in its form, and that the American people have an exceptional commitment to liberty and democracy. By virtue of this, American exceptionalists assert that America has a providential mission to spread its values around the world. American power is viewed as naturally good, leading to the proliferation of freedom and democracy. (Britton, 2006, p. 128)

    *****

    In the end, really, what is a new semester and a new bunch of students in this time of genocide? The following should lend pause to anyone who is comfortably numb.

    Future Lawyers Don’t Understand Murder

    When it happens to Palestinians…

    Ahmad Ibsais

    The classroom feels smaller than I remembered, like the walls have moved closer while I was gone. Professor X assigns readings on constitutional interpretation, and I watch twenty-three students highlight passages about due process while Palestinians are denied the most basic right of all: the right to exist. The girl next to me underlines “equal protection under law” in yellow marker, and I wonder if she knows that phrase is meaningless when some lives are worth more than others.

    “The framers intended,” someone says, and I stop listening. The framers intended many things, but they could not have intended for us to sit in air-conditioned rooms debating legal theory while children suffocate under rubble. They could not have intended for us to parse the meaning of justice while justice dies in real time, broadcast live, ignored by everyone in this room.

    During breaks, I sit on the steps and watch them. They cluster in their familiar groups, talking about internships and weekend plans and whether Professor Y is a hard grader. Their voices float past me, a steady stream of nothing that matters.

    “I’m so stressed about the bar exam.” “Are you going to the Football game this weekend?” “My parents want me to come home for Labor Day, but like, I have so much reading.”

    I listen for something else, anything else. I wait for one of them to mention that children are being murdered while we debate constitutional amendments. I wait for someone to say the word Palestinian, or genocide, or even just acknowledge that the world exists beyond their study guides and social calendars. I wait for an hour, and then another, and I hear nothing.

    In another class, we discuss mens rea and actus reus, the guilty mind and the guilty act. Professor Z explains how intent matters, how knowledge of wrongdoing affects culpability. I think about my classmates’ guilty minds, their knowledge of genocide coupled with their deliberate choice to say nothing. I think about their guilty acts of scrolling past videos of dying children to double-tap vacation photos. But this kind of guilt will never be prosecuted. This kind of crime never sees the inside of a courtroom.

    “Can someone give me an example of willful blindness?” Z asks.

    I could give twenty-three examples right here in this room, but I stay quiet.

    This is my new reality. Sitting in rooms with people who revealed themselves to be the kind of people who would have looked away during any other genocide. Listening to them complain about reading assignments while Palestinians are denied the right to read anything ever again. Watching them stress about internships while Palestinian children will never have the chance to worry about their futures.

    The loneliness is not in being alone. The loneliness is in being surrounded by people who chose to be strangers to their own moral obligations. It is in sharing space with those who had the chance to speak and chose silence, who had the opportunity to care and chose comfort, who had the moment to act and chose nothing.

    At the coffee shop, I overhear a conversation about whether the new professor is mean. At the library, someone complains that their laptop is slow. In the dining hall, a group debates which Netflix show to binge next. Normal life continues, mundane concerns persist, and the world beyond their bubble might as well not exist.

    The hardest part is not their cruelty. It is their comfort with it. It is how easily they moved on, how quickly they forgot, how completely they have convinced themselves that their silence was not a choice. They live their lives as if Palestinian children were not buried alive while they read for evidence.

    I am back now, walking through classrooms where professors teach about human rights while ignoring the most basic human right being violated in real time. I am surrounded by people who think my people’s elimination is too complicated to have an opinion about, whose cowardice proved stronger than their morality.

    And I still carry shame that I must even share the same air.

    Comfortably LOBOTOMIZED!

    The post A Yank and a Dutchman Exploring on their BettBeat Channel The World first appeared on Dissident Voice.

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • Trump’s Federal Guidelines for AI May Turbocharge Climate Denial and Racist Bias

    Picture this: You ask an AI to show you images of judges, and it depicts only 3 percent as women — even though 34 percent of federal judges are women. Or imagine an AI that’s more likely to recommend harsh criminal sentences for people who use expressions rooted in Black vernacular cultures. Now imagine that same AI instructed to ignore climate impacts or treating Russian propaganda as credible…

    Source

    This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.

  • From Manufactured Scandals to AI Misinformation

    FAKE NEWS
    This section chronicles some of the most pressing examples of disinformation and fake news from the previous two weeks. I define fake news as information that appears to be real news but is baseless, inaccurate, misleading, or false.

    Fake news isn’t just a headline problem — it’s a cultural crisis. A tattooed Justin Bieber lookalike crashed a DJ set in Las Vegas and convinced Gryffin, the headliner, to bring him onstage. Minutes later, security exposed the imposter and banned him from the hotel. In a city that celebrates illusion, the stunt might seem like harmless fun.

    But not all impersonations are created equal. This prank highlights a darker truth: once someone can convincingly pose as another person, the line between joke and danger blurs. If one man can fool a Vegas DJ, what happens when bad actors impersonate school shooters? That’s where the hoaxes turn deadly serious.

    From school shooting hoaxes that terrify families, to Trump’s manufactured outrage campaigns, to AI bots creating deadly illusions, disinformation has become a defining feature of public life. This section unpacks some of the biggest examples from the past two weeks, showing how fake news is weaponized to scare, outrage, and mislead — and why the consequences are anything but harmless.

    School Shooting Hoaxes: Generation Lockdown’s New Nightmare

    The new school year began with panic. Students across the country received texts from their schools: “run, hide, fight.” Active shooter alerts poured in from Arkansas, Arizona, Iowa State, Kansas State, Colorado University, and the University of New Hampshire — all in one day. In the days that followed, calls hit campuses in Georgia, Kentucky, West Virginia, Florida, and California.

    There was just one problem: none of the shootings happened. They were pranks or hoaxes. Fake news that caused a real panic.

    This isn’t a one-off—it’s been happening for years. A Reddit forum last year overflowed with stories of false shooter threats that triggered lockdowns. Back in 2022, California news outlets were sounding the alarm over a surge in false school shooting reports. In 2023, Homeland security expert Juliette Kayyem called these hoaxes a “second curse” of the school shooting era. The trauma is real: kids grow up wondering if each alarm is life-or-death. They’re Generation Lockdown, raised in fear.

    These hoaxes drain police resources, fuel paranoia, and deepen the mental health crisis in schools. Worse, they normalize chaos, making it harder to distinguish a prank from a real emergency. And that’s exactly the blurred reality fake news thrives in.

    Fake Flags: How Trump Manufactures Outrage

    On August 25, Trump signed an executive order to prosecute flag burning, despite a 1989 Supreme Court ruling protecting it. The order came at a strange time, with no signs of a flag-burning epidemic. Ironically, it sparked one: a military veteran burned a flag outside the White House in response. But facts don’t matter here. The goal wasn’t protecting flags—it was stoking conservative outrage.

    “This tactic isn’t new. Conservatives have long whipped up anger over trivialities: Cracker Barrel logos, LGBTQIA+ issues, critical race theory content in schools, or the fear of communism. Fox News host Jesse Watters admitted the game openly, saying networks keep viewers hooked with culture-war gimmicks: “You just have to keep your audience happy with what they’re used to… that’s why people will be watching Fox until they die.”

    The recycling of fake outrages goes back decades. Today, Trump leans on the same playbook, using a favorite topic for conservative fear-mongering: crime.” Trump claims that crime in Washington, D.C., is ‘getting worse.’ In reality, it isn’t. Violent crime has actually dropped to a 30 year low. When fact-checked, Trump accused officials of fabricating the statistics and even ordered Department of Justice investigations into whether the numbers were ‘manipulated.’ Yet when those same officials showed that crime had fallen after Trump sent the National Guard to D.C., he embraced the new numbers—produced by the very same offices he had previously accused of lying. Orwell couldn’t have written this.

    But he didn’t stop there. Trump falsely claimed that the National Guard’s presence had given D.C. its first 11-day streak without a murder in ‘many years’—even though that streak actually occurred in February 2025. He also insisted there was ‘no crime’ despite hundreds of offenses being reported. Trump also falsely claimed that D.C. was at an “all-time high” in crime at the end of President Biden’s administration, even though crime was far higher in the 1990s.

    To make Trump’s lies more convincing, many people in D.C. have been rounded up and hit with inflated charges, creating the illusion that he is bringing justice and order to a city supposedly overrun by dangerous criminals. One attorney called these charges “horseshit.” Indeed, many of these cases are likely to fail in court—and some already have. For example, a man accused of felony assault for throwing a sandwich at a federal agent was freed by a grand jury. Yet the narrative had already taken hold: D.C. was a war zone, and Trump was the general.

    It’s classic Orwellian disinformation—create a fake crisis, deploy force, then claim victory. And yet, fake news doesn’t just come from politics; technology is making it even more dangerous.

    AI Illusions: From Chatbots to Suicide Coaches

    AI isn’t just clumsy; it’s lethal. Bots are now creating fake musicians, fake backstories, and fake histories that fool people into believing they’re real. Take “Rhoda Hardcok,” an AI country singer with vulgar songs on YouTube, social media accounts, and an invented tale about being censored in the 1970s. People online actually believe she exists.

    But sometimes the consequences are far deadlier. California’s Attorney General found chatbots flirting with children, exposing them to sexualized content. One 76-year-old man, convinced he was in a romance with a chatbot named “Big Sis Billie,” tried to meet her in New York — only to die in a tragic fall while chasing a woman who never existed.

    AI isn’t just luring the lonely; it’s enabling suicide. Before taking her life, Sophie, a 29-year-old, left a note that her mother said “didn’t sound like her.” It was later revealed that Sophie had asked a chatbot named Henry to edit the note so it would minimize her parents’ pain.

    People aren’t just turning to AI for advice on writing suicide notes—they’re consulting it on whether to end their lives and, if so, how. Take Adam Raine, whose parents discovered after his suicide that ChatGPT had coached the sixteen-year-old to conceal his plans and even ‘practice’ methods. Even as Adam tried to reach out for help—showing his parents the scars from practicing hanging—the bot told him not to alert them, insisting that they would try to prevent the suicide.

    And yet, Big Tech keeps selling AI as the future, claiming it’s stealing jobs and revolutionizing work. Political economist Mark Blyth disagrees, arguing that AI companies are overhyping both their current and future impact on the job market. Still, AI is here, and traditionally education has been relied on to help the public develop the skills and perspectives needed to understand and utilize new inventions. But rather than focusing on AI’s shortcomings, falsehoods, or dangers, schools have been struggling to keep up—focusing their attention on how to get students career-ready for AI or debating whether to ban AI in classrooms. Meanwhile, real dangers—such as how easily people mistake these systems for intelligence—go unaddressed.

    At the same time, despite the biases and shortcomings in AI systems, they are increasingly making decisions critical to human lives. Economist Gary Smith has repeatedly shown that AI fails basic reasoning tests, and numerous studies have demonstrated that AI is largely unintelligent by human standards—some might even call it dumb. Others such as Meredith Broussard, a data journalism professor at the Arthur L. Carter Journalism Institute at New York University, note that AI follows human directions in how it processes information, meaning it reflects the biases of those instructions and the data used to train it.

    Yet the Trump administration has proposed using these biased and largely unintelligent tools to determine Medicare eligibility. Imagine denying healthcare based on a system that can’t distinguish fact from fiction. Similarly, anti-ICE activists have started using AI to “out” undercover agents. While exposing abusive officers might feel righteous, what happens when the AI gets it wrong and the wrong person gets doxxed?

    Fake News: The Glue Holding It All Together

    From fake school shootings to flag-burning panics to AI hallucinations, fake news thrives because it preys on fear, anger, and confusion. A prank in Las Vegas is funny until it isn’t. A flag-burning “epidemic” doesn’t need to exist for it to mobilize millions. A chatbot doesn’t need to be smart to destroy a life.

    Fake news isn’t just noise. It shapes how we think, vote, and grieve. It creates the crises politicians exploit, the distractions media profit from, and the illusions technology companies monetize. And unless we learn to see through it, fake news will keep writing the script of our reality.

    The post From Manufactured Scandals to AI Misinformation first appeared on Dissident Voice.

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • Antony Lowenstein: Israel’s murderous killing spree against Palestinian journalists

    By Antony Loewenstein in Sydney

    The grim facts should speak for themselves. Since 7 October 2023, Israel has deliberately killed an unprecedented number of Palestinian journalists in Gaza.

    Those brave individuals are smeared as Hamas operatives and terrorists by Israel and its supporters.

    But the real story behind this, beyond just Western racism and dehumanisation towards Arab reporters who don’t work for the corporate media in London or New York, is an Israeli military strategy to deliberately (and falsely) link Gazan journalists to Hamas.

    The outlet +972 Magazine explains the plan:

    “The Israeli military has operated a special unit called the ‘Legitimization Cell,’ tasked with gathering intelligence from Gaza that can bolster Israel’s image in the international media, according to three intelligence sources who spoke to +972 Magazine and Local Call and confirmed the unit’s existence.

    “Established after October 7, the unit sought information on Hamas’ use of schools and hospitals for military purposes, and on failed rocket launches by armed Palestinian groups that harmed civilians in the enclave.

    “It has also been assigned to identify Gaza-based journalists it could portray as undercover Hamas operatives, in an effort to blunt growing global outrage over Israel’s killing of reporters — the latest of whom was Al Jazeera journalist Anas Al-Sharif, killed in an Israeli airstrike this past week [august 10].

    According to the sources, the Legitimisation Cell’s motivation was not security, but public relations. Driven by anger that Gaza-based reporters were “smearing [Israel’s] name in front of the world,” its members were eager to find a journalist they could link to Hamas and mark as a target, one source said.

    As a journalist who’s visited and reported in Gaza since 2009, here’s a short film I made after my first trip, Palestinian journalists are some of the most heroic individuals on the planet. They have to navigate both Israeli attacks and threats and Western contempt for their craft.

    I stand in solidarity with them. And so should you.

    After the Israeli murder of Al Jazeera journalist Anas Al-Sharif on August 10, I spoke to Al Jazeera English about him and Israel’s deadly campaign:


    Antony Loewenstein speaking on Al Jazeera English on 11 August 2025.   Video: AJ


    Antony Loewenstein interviewed by Al Jazeera on 11 August 2025.  Video: AJ

    News graveyards - how dangers to journalists endanger the world
    News graveyards – how dangers to journalists endanger the world. Image: Antony Loewenstein Substack

    Republished from the Substack of Antony Lowenstein, author of The Palestine Laboratory,  with permission.

    This post was originally published on Asia Pacific Report.

  • MSM Lies

    The post MSM Lies first appeared on Dissident Voice.

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • How the Taliban’s propaganda empire consumed Afghan media

    New York, 13 August 13, 2025—In four years, the Taliban have annihilated Afghanistan’s independent media sector and supplanted it with their own propaganda empire and sophisticated digital bots that flood social media with pro-Taliban content.

    CPJ interviewed 10 Afghan journalists, inside and outside the country, who said that  independent media, which used to reach millions of people, have largely been banned, suspended, or shuttered while key outlets have been taken over by the Taliban. None would publish their names, citing fear of reprisals.

    The Taliban now run about 15 major television and radio stations, newspapers, and digital platforms, including on YouTube, X, and Telegram — tightly aligned with their radical Islamist ideology.

    “The ruling authority enforces a monolithic media policy, rejecting any news, narrative, or voice that deviates from what they deem the truth. Even personal opinions expressed on platforms like Facebook are treated as propaganda and punished accordingly,” Ahmad Quraishi, director of the exiled Afghanistan Journalists Center, told CPJ.

    Exiled journalists offer one of the last remaining sources of independent information broadcast into Afghanistan. But even they face safety concerns and hardships, as well as job losses and potential forced return due to the U.S. funding cuts to the Congress-funded Voice of America and Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty (RFE/RL) outlets.

    Turning fearful journalists into spies

    In September 2020, a year before the Taliban took control of Afghanistan, a radio presenter reads the news during a broadcast at the Merman radio station in Kandahar.
    In September 2020, a year before the Taliban took control of Afghanistan, a radio presenter reads the news during a broadcast at the Merman radio station in Kandahar. Women journalists have been largely sidelined by the Taliban. (Photo: AFP/ Wakil Kohsar)

    As Afghanistan marks the fourth anniversary of the Taliban’s August 15, 2021, takeover, most journalists who spoke with CPJ said they were fearful, and either jobless or heavily censored. Several described the relentless surveillance, control, and intimidation as living under a “media police state.”

    “Taliban intelligence agents have launched a policing system where every journalist is expected to spy on others,” a media executive who led a TV station in eastern Afghanistan told CPJ.

    “They demand complete personal information on all staff: names, fathers’ names, addresses, phone numbers, emails, WhatsApp numbers … We must report everything.”

    Intelligence agents monitor and detain reporters over their social media content, while the morality police arrest those who violate their stringent interpretation of Sharia law, which includes a ban on music, soap operas, and programs co-hosted by male and female presenters.

    Two media owners from northern and eastern Afghanistan told CPJ that they had been subjected to invasive revenue audits and administrative delays because they were perceived as insufficiently compliant.

    “Taliban agents reach out to journalists privately, pressuring them to spy on their colleagues or push specific narratives,” one of the owners said. “If someone refuses, they call the media manager and demand the journalist be fired. We comply, or we face licensing issues from the Ministry of Information and Culture or financial penalties from the Ministry of Finance.”

    In May, a spokesperson for the Ministry for the Propagation of Virtue and Prevention of Vice said it had held over 1,000 meetings with the media over the last year to “coordinate in promoting Islamic Sharia values” — a term understood locally to mean morality police enforcement meetings.

    Two female journalists from western Afghanistan said they were each summoned over 10 times in the past two years.

     “Once they interrogated me for three hours in the office of the Directorate of Virtue and Vice, asking why I worked instead of staying home,” one woman told CPJ, referring to the ministry’s provincial office.

    “They said that if I were found working with exiled media, it would be wajib al-qatl [permissible to kill me]. One official said, ‘We forgive you this time, you thank God for this. But under Sharia, we could bring any calamity upon you.’ Another time, they said they could detain me for a week just to extract a confession, and no one would even know.”

    Inside the Taliban’s media empire

    The Taliban flag flutters over a provincial branch building of National Radio Television of Takhar (RTA) in Taloqan, in northeastern Takhar province in 2024. (Photo: AFP)

    Three active, independent Kabul-based journalists explained the Taliban’s new media landscape to CPJ:

    With over 500 staff nationwide and a budget of about 600 million Afghanis (US$8.8 million), RTA reports often promote Taliban achievements, such as supporting refugees and diplomacy.

    • Bakhtar News Agency, founded in 1939, employs around 60 staff in Kabul and four reporters in each of Afghanistan’s 34 provinces. Run by the information ministry, it is the Taliban’s official news source and publishes in eight languages, including Mandarin and Turkish.
    • The information ministry also runs several daily newspapers, including Dari-language Anis, Pashto-language Hewad, and English-language The Kabul Times in print and online. These newspapers were founded several decades ago.

    The three journalists said security agencies operate three radio stations:

    Reporting focuses on regional rivalries and Taliban military successes, particularly against the Afghan-based Islamic State-Khorasan, which continues to kill civilians and Taliban leaders.

    Hurriyat Radio was launched in 2022 by the General Directorate of Intelligence (GDI) — the Taliban’s notorious intelligence agency behind a series of media crackdowns — and is managed by the agency’s directorate of media and publications.

    • Radio Omid, started in 2023 by the defense ministry, employs 45 staff in Kabul and provincial reporters, and reports on the ministry’s achievements. The radio station is managed by the office of spokesperson of the defense ministry.
    • Radio Police, relaunched in 2021 by the interior ministry, broadcasts news about police activities across key provinces like Kabul and southern Kandahar.

    The Taliban has four news sites, at least three of which are run by the intelligence agency:

    It is funded and operated by the GDI’s directorate of media and publications and its senior managers are linked to the interior minister Sirajuddin Haqqani.

    • YouTube-based Maihan discredits the Taliban’s opponents, with 12 staff, led by Jawad Sargar, former deputy director of the GDI’s directorate of media and publication.

    When contacted via messaging app, Sargar asked CPJ to stop contacting him, adding, “These matters are not related to you.”

    • The multi-lingual Alemarah news site, active before 2021, is the Taliban’s official outlet, run by Taliban spokesperson Zabihullah Mujahid.

    Disinformation campaign

    Intelligence officials have four offices from which they direct disinformation campaigns. Dozens of creators are paid 6,000 to 10,000 Afghanis (US$88 to 146) a month to run fake social media accounts that troll critics, smear activists, and simulate grassroots support, two Afghan journalists told CPJ.

    The project is led by senior GDI figures like deputy director of media and publication, Jabir Nomani, former GDI spokespeople Jawad Amin and Sargar – who runs Maihan – and Kabul-based political analyst Fazlur Rahman Orya, the journalists said.

    Orya, who is also director of the Sahar Discourse Center, which advises the Taliban on policy, denied that he was involved in disinformation, telling CPJ via messaging app, “You make a big mistake about me.”

    Nomani did not respond to CPJ’s requests for comment via messaging app.

    Qais Alamdar, exiled founder of the open source investigative platform IntelFocus, has documented the activities of these bots, which often post near-identical tweets within minutes of each other to bolster the government’s legitimacy or prevent internet users finding other news, such as an attack on the Taliban.

    “Only someone with consistent access to electricity, internet, and time could maintain that kind of operation in Afghanistan,” he told CPJ.

    Traffic accidents are only news allowed

    A destroyed bus is lifted after it plunged off a road north of Kabul in 2010.
    A destroyed bus is lifted after it plunged off a road north of Kabul in 2010. (Photo: Reuters/stringer)

    As a result of these repressive measures, many media outlets have shut down or have been banned entirely.

    In the northeastern Panjshir Valley, once the heart of resistance to the Taliban, no media outlets remain active, Ahmad Hanayesh, who used to own two radio stations in the province, told CPJ from exile.

    Four journalists from Herat, Nangarhar, Faryab, and Bamiyan told CPJ that aside from education and health stories, the only serious news they were permitted to cover was traffic accidents. Even crime reporting was banned.

    GDI’s media and publications director Khalil Hamraz and Taliban spokesperson Mujahid did not respond to CPJ’s requests for comment via messaging app.


    This content originally appeared on Committee to Protect Journalists and was authored by Waliullah Rahmani.

    This post was originally published on Radio Free.

  • UK’s Starmer and Lammy Prepare Ground for Dubious “Peace Plan”

    Public opinion and party pressure have forced Sir Keir Starmer and David Lammy to speak warm words about Palestinian statehood. But these guys are a Zionist double-act and will do the Palestinians no favours if they can help it.

    UK Foreign Secretary David Lammy, addressing the UN Conference on The Peaceful Settlement of the Question of Palestine and the Implementation of the Two-State Solution, said it was “660 days since the Israeli hostages were first cruelly taken by Hamas terrorists. There is no possible justification for this suffering.” Lammy had spent most of that time deliberately misinterpreting the Genocide Convention and insisting that no genocide was being committed.

    “Our support for Israel, its right to exist and the security of its people is steadfast,” he said. Considering Israel’s massacres and other crimes against humanity since the first day of its statehood in 1948 this frequently repeated statement has never convinced anyone.

    “However, the Balfour declaration came with the solemn promise ‘that nothing shall be done, nothing which may prejudice the civil and religious rights’ of the Palestinian people’…. This has not been upheld and it is a historical injustice which continues to unfold.” True, but he misquotes Balfour even here. That part of the declaration actually reads: “… it being clearly understood that nothing shall be done which may prejudice the civil and religious rights of existing non-Jewish communities in Palestine….”

    The Balfour declaration also came with dire warnings. Lord Edwin Montagu, the only Jew in the Cabinet at the time, called Zionism “a mischievous political creed, untenable by any patriotic citizen of the United Kingdom”. Lord Sydenham remarked: “What we have done, by concessions not to the Jewish people but to a Zionist extreme section, is to start a running sore in the East, and no-one can tell how far that sore will extend.”

    Well, we know now. And it will stain Britain’s reputation forever.

    Lammy continued: “Hamas must never be rewarded for its monstrous attack on October 7.” Of course, he said nothing about Israel having been continuously rewarded for its monstrous attacks on Palestinians over the last 77 years and will likely be rewarded again for its genocide.

    “It [Hamas] must immediately release the hostages, agree to an immediate ceasefire, accept it will have no role in governing Gaza and commit to disarmament.” Coincidentally Qatar, Saudi Arabia and Egypt have also called on Hamas to disband. Along with a number of other countries they’ve just signed a statement saying, “Hamas must end its rule in Gaza and hand over its weapons to the Palestinian Authority, with international engagement and support, in line with the objective of a sovereign and independent Palestinian State.” Quite how this squares with international law isn’t clear, and no-one explains. It is for the Palestinian people to decide who governs their sovereign state.

    Lammy: “His Majesty’s Government therefore intends to recognise the State of Palestine when the UN General Assembly gathers in September…. unless the Israeli government acts to end the appalling situation in Gaza, ends its military campaign and commits to a long-term sustainable peace based on a two-state solution. Our demands on Hamas also remain absolute and unwavering.” So what happens if Israel actually complies, or appears to comply? Does HMG then see no reason to recognise statehood? That would suit Israel very well. Note that there’s no requirement in all this for Israel to immediately end its illegal occupation of Palestinian territories, which is central to the whole problem. So the Starmer-Lammy proposal purposely misses the point.

    Lammy maintains “there is no better vision for the future of the region than two states. Israelis living within secure borders, recognised and at peace with their neighbours, free from the threat of terrorism. And Palestinians living in their own state, in dignity and security, free of occupation.” Just a minute: how about Palestinians, whose land this is, “living within secure borders, free from the threat of Israeli terrorism and occupation”, the terrorists being (as if he didn’t know) the Israelis and their backers the US? Furthermore, UK leaders have banged the drum about a two-state solution for decades without ever describing what it would look like – especially now that Israel has been allowed to establish irreversible ‘facts on the ground’ that make a proper, workable Palestinian state almost impossible.

    “The decades-long conflict between Israelis and Palestinians cannot be managed or contained,” he says. True, and that’s been obvious for decades.

    “It must now be resolved.” True, and that too has been obvious for decades.

    That same day, 29 July, Prime Minister Starmer was delivering “words on Gaza” from Downing Street.

    “On the 7th of October 2023 Hamas perpetrated the worst massacre in Israel’s history. Every day since then, the horror has continued.” He makes it sound like the 660 days of horror have been Hamas’s doing.

    “Ceasefire must be sustainable and it must lead to a wider peace plan, which we are developing with our international partners. This plan will deliver security and proper governance in Gaza and pave the way for negotiations on a Two State Solution”. Yes, but under international law Palestinians should not have to ‘negotiate’ their freedom and independence, it’s theirs by right regardless of what other nations think or say.

    “Our goal remains a safe and secure Israel, alongside a viable and sovereign Palestinian state.” Oh dear, the same old lopsided spiel. Parity isn’t on the West’s agenda.

    “Now, in Gaza because of a catastrophic failure of aid, we see starving babies, children too weak to stand: Images that will stay with us for a lifetime.” The horror is not due to “a catastrophic failure of aid” but failure over the years to end Israel’s illegal occupation and, in particular, its cruel 18-year siege and blockade of Gaza and the sickening practice of ‘mowing the grass’. The UK especially has been complicit in enabling Israel to maintain its stranglehold.

    Starmer: “I’ve always said we will recognise a Palestinian state as a contribution to a proper peace process, at the moment of maximum impact for the Two State Solution.” UK governments have been saying that for years. Britain was supposed to grant Palestinians provisional statehood under its Mandate responsibilities back in 1923 and failed to do so. We’ve been ducking the issue ever since while eagerly recognising Israeli statehood with their terrorist militia and Ben-Gurion’s plan to take over the entire Holy Land by force.

    “This is the moment to act,” Starmer continued. “So today – as part of this process towards peace I can confirm the UK will recognise the state of Palestine by the United Nations General Assembly in September unless the Israeli government takes substantive steps to end the appalling situation in Gaza, agree to a ceasefire and commit to a long-term, sustainable peace, reviving the prospect of a Two State Solution. And this includes allowing the UN to restart the supply of aid, and making clear there will be no annexations in the West Bank.” This is unbelievable vague and gives Israel endless wriggle-room. Much of the West Bank, of course, is already annexed. To give peace any kind of chance conditions must include Israel withdrawing its squatters, quitting all annexed lands and ending its illegal military occupation forthwith.

    Starmer ends with the familiar mantra: “Our message to the terrorists of Hamas is unchanged and unequivocal. They must immediately release all the hostages, sign up to a ceasefire, disarm and accept that they will play no part in the government of Gaza.” No mention of the Israeli terrorists disarming and no ban on Likud (Netanyahu’s demented party) from any future government of Israel.

    Starmer and Lammy never use the terms ‘international law’ or ‘justice’. Don’t they understand that there can be no peace without justice? Perhaps they do but won’t admit it because their friends and allies Israel and the US, for selfish strategic reasons, don’t want peace and never have.

    Starmer and Lammy compromised and untrustworthy

    Starmer told The Times of Israel, “I support Zionism without qualification”. Lammy has made similar declarations. The Ministerial Code and Principles of Public Life state very clearly (seer ‘Integrity’): “Holders of public office should not place themselves under any financial or other obligation to outside individuals or organisations that might seek to influence them in the performance of their official duties.” How do they get away with it?

    So it’s hardly surprising that Lammy and Starmer show no concern for the 7,200 Palestinian hostages, including 88 women and 250 children, held in Israeli jails on 7 October under appalling conditions. Over 1,200 were under ‘administrative detention’ without charge or trial and denied ‘due process’. Or the fact that in the 23 years up to October 7 Israel had been slaughtering Palestinians at the rate of 8:1 and children at the rate of 16:1. Actual figures: Palestinians killed by Israelis 10,651 including 2,270 children and 6,656 women. Israelis killed by Palestinians 1,330 including 145 children and 261 women (source: Israel’s B’Tselem). Were they and their friends in Israel expecting Palestinians to take all that lying down?

    Our dynamic duo were not so appalled by the sight of “starving babies and children too weak to stand” that they provided protection for the British-flagged aid vessel Madleen and the Handala bringing much-needed supplies to Gaza. They allowed these vessels to be hijacked in international waters, their cargo stolen and crews abducted by Israel’s thugs, just as the Mavi Marmara, the Al-Awda and other mercy ships had been similarly assaulted. Israeli piracy is the new normal in the eastern Mediterranean and Western nations don’t give a damn. The British government are more than happy, though, to instruct the RAF to fly surveillance missions over Gaza in support of Israel’s genocide programme and to continue sharing intelligence with the apartheid regime.

    And if their concerns about the suffering and devastation were ever genuine, why didn’t they proposed forming a UN multi-nation intervention force to take over the Gaza crossings to ensure aid gets through as it should? They have now been shamed and their ‘no genocide’ stance utterly discredited by two of Israel’s own human rights organisations – B’Tselem and Physicians for Human Rights – who declare that Israel is indeed committing genocide in Gaza and its Western allies have a legal and moral duty to put a stop to it. B’Tselem’s summing-up of the situation is worth sharing:

    Since October 2023, Israel has shifted its policy toward the Palestinians. Its military onslaught on Gaza, underway for more than 21 months, has included mass killing, both directly and through creating unlivable conditions, serious bodily or mental harm to an entire population, decimation of basic infrastructure throughout the Strip, and forcible displacement on a huge scale, with ethnic cleansing added to the list of official war objectives.

    This is compounded by mass arrests and abuse of Palestinians in Israeli prisons, which have effectively become torture camps, and tearing apart the social fabric of Gaza, including the destruction of Palestinian educational and cultural institutions. The campaign is also an assault on Palestinian identity itself, through the deliberate destruction of refugee camps and attempts to undermine the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees (UNRWA).

    An examination of Israel’s policy in the Gaza Strip and its horrific outcomes, together with statements by senior Israeli politicians and military commanders about the goals of the attack, leads to the unequivocal conclusion that Israel is taking coordinated, deliberate action to destroy Palestinian society in the Gaza Strip. In other words: Israel is committing genocide against the Palestinians in the Gaza Strip.

    The term genocide refers to a socio-historical and political phenomenon involving acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnic, racial or religious group. Both morally and legally, genocide cannot be justified under any circumstance, including as an act of self-defense.

    Genocide always occurs within a context: there are conditions that enable it, triggering events, and a guiding ideology. The current onslaught on the Palestinian people, including in the Gaza Strip, must be understood in the context of more than seventy years in which Israel has imposed a violent and discriminatory regime on the Palestinians, taking its most extreme form against those living in the Gaza Strip. Since the State of Israel was established, the apartheid and occupation regime has institutionalized and systematically employed mechanisms of violent control, demographic engineering, discrimination, and fragmentation of the Palestinian collective. These foundations laid by the regime are what made it possible to launch a genocidal attack on the Palestinians immediately after the Hamas-led attack on 7 October 2023.

    The assault on Palestinians in Gaza cannot be separated from the escalating violence being inflicted, at varying levels and in different forms, on Palestinians living under Israeli rule in the West Bank and within Israel. The violence and destruction in these areas is intensifying over time, with no effective domestic or international mechanism acting to halt them. We warn of the clear and present danger that the genocide will not remain confined to the Gaza Strip, and that the actions and underlying mindset driving it may be extended to other areas as well.

    The recognition that the Israeli regime is committing genocide in the Gaza Strip, and the deep concern that it may expand to other areas where Palestinians live under Israeli rule, demand urgent and unequivocal action from both Israeli society and the international community, and use of every means available under international law to stop Israel’s genocide against the Palestinian people.

    The post UK’s Starmer and Lammy Prepare Ground for Dubious “Peace Plan” first appeared on Dissident Voice.

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • The Militarization and Weaponization of Media Literacy: NATO Invades the Classroom

    During President Donald Trump’s second term, education has remained a central battleground in American politics. Republicans claim that classrooms have become hotbeds of “woke” indoctrination, accusing educators of promoting progressive agendas and tolerating antisemitism. In contrast, Democrats argue that conservatives are systematically defunding and dismantling public and higher education precisely because it teaches values like diversity, equity, and inclusion. While these partisan skirmishes dominate headlines, they obscure a much deeper and more enduring issue that encompasses all of these issues and more: the influence of corporate and military power on public education.

    For decades, scholars have warned that corporations have steadily infiltrated the classroom—not to promote critical thinking or democratic values, but to cultivate ideologies that reinforce capitalism, nationalism, and militarism. Critical media literacy educators, in particular, have drawn attention to the convergence of tech firms and military entities in education, offering so-called “free” digital tools that often serve as Trojan horses for data collection and ideological control.

    One striking example is the rise of programs like NewsGuard, which uses public fears over fake news to justify increased surveillance of students’ online activity. Relatedly, in 2018, the Atlantic Council partnered with Meta to perform “fact-checking” on platforms such as Facebook. In 2022, the US Marine Corps discussed developing media literacy training. It remains to be seen what training, if any, they will develop. However, what is known is that a large global player has entered the media literacy arena: the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO). While NATO presents its initiatives as supportive of media literacy and democratic education, these efforts appear to be oriented more toward reinforcing alignment with its strategic and political priorities than to fostering critical civic engagement.

    NATO was created in 1949, during the Cold War, as a military alliance to contain communism. Although the war officially ended in 1991, NATO has expanded both its mission and membership. Today, it encompasses more than thirty member nations and continues to frame itself as a global force for peace, democracy, and security. But this self-image masks real conflicts of interest.

    NATO is deeply intertwined with powerful nation-states and corporate actors. It routinely partners with defense contractors, tech firms, think tanks, and Western governments—all of which have a vested interest in maintaining specific political and economic systems. These relationships raise concerns when NATO extends its reach into education. Can a military alliance—closely linked to the defense industry and state propaganda—credibly serve as a neutral force in media education?

    In 2022, NATO associates collaborated with the US-based Center for Media Literacy (CML) to launch a media literacy initiative framed as a strategic defense against misinformation. The initiative included a report titled Building Resiliency: Media Literacy as a Strategic Defense Strategy for the Transatlantic, authored by CML’s Tessa Jolls. It was accompanied by a series of webinars featuring military personnel, policy experts, and academics.

    On the surface, the initiative appeared to promote digital literacy and civic engagement. But a closer look reveals a clear ideological agenda. Funded and organized by NATO, the initiative positioned media literacy not as a means of empowering students to think critically about how power shapes media, but as a defense strategy to protect NATO member states from so-called “hostile actors.” The curriculum emphasized surveillance, resilience, and behavior modification over reflection, analysis, and democratic dialogue.

    Throughout their webinars, NATO representatives described the media environment as a battlefield, frequently using other war metaphors such as “hostile information activities” and “cognitive warfare.” Panelists argued that citizens in NATO countries were targets of foreign disinformation campaigns—and that media literacy could serve as a tool to inoculate them against ideological threats.

    A critical review of NATO’s media literacy initiative reveals several troubling themes. First, it frames media literacy as a protectionist project rather than an educational one. Students are portrayed less as thinkers to be empowered and more as civilians to be monitored, molded, and managed. In this model, education becomes a form of top-down, preemptive defense, relying on expert guidance and military oversight rather than democratic participation.

    Second, the initiative advances a distinctly neoliberal worldview. It emphasizes individual responsibility over structural analysis. In other words, misinformation is treated as a user error, rather than the result of flawed systems, corporate algorithms, or media consolidation. This framing conveniently absolves powerful actors, including NATO and Big Tech, of their role in producing or amplifying disinformation.

    Third, the initiative promotes a contradictory definition of empowerment. While the report and webinars often use the language of “citizen empowerment,” they ultimately advocate for surveillance, censorship, and ideological conformity. Panelists call for NATO to “dominate” the information space, and some even propose systems to monitor students’ attitudes and online behaviors. Rather than encouraging students to question power—including NATO itself—this approach rewards obedience and penalizes dissent.

    Finally, the initiative erases the influence of corporate power. Although it criticizes authoritarian regimes and “hostile actors,” it fails to examine the role that Western corporations, particularly tech companies, play in shaping media environments. This oversight is especially problematic given that many of these corporations are NATO’s partners. By ignoring the political economy of media, the initiative offers an incomplete and ideologically skewed version of media literacy.

    NATO’s foray into media literacy education represents a new frontier in militarized pedagogy. While claiming to promote democracy and resilience, its initiative advances a narrow, protectionist, and neoliberal approach that prioritizes NATO’s geopolitical goals over student empowerment.

    This should raise red flags for educators, policymakers, and advocates. Media literacy is not a neutral practice. The organizations that design and fund media literacy programs inevitably shape the goals and methods of those programs. When a military alliance like NATO promotes media education, it brings with it a strategic interest in ideological control.

    Educators must ask: What kind of media literacy are we teaching—and whose interests does it serve? If the goal is to produce informed, critically thinking citizens capable of questioning power in all its forms, then NATO’s approach falls short. Instead of inviting students to explore complex media systems, it simplifies them into a binary struggle between “us” and “them,” encouraging loyalty over literacy.

    True media literacy must begin with transparency about who and what is behind the curriculum. It must empower students to question all forms of influence—governmental, corporate, and military alike. And it must resist the creeping presence of militarism in our classrooms. As educators, we must defend the right to question, not just the messages we see, but the institutions that shape them.

    This essay was originally published here:

    The Militarization and Weaponization of Media Literacy

     

    The post The Militarization and Weaponization of Media Literacy: NATO Invades the Classroom first appeared on Dissident Voice.

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • Is AI Pushing Us Closer to Nuclear Disaster?

    Earlier this year, Daniel Holz from the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists announced that its experts were moving the hands of the Doomsday Clock to 89 seconds before midnight. The hands have been moved only 25 times since the clock’s creation in 1947, and they’re now the closest they’ve pointed to imminent global destruction. On this week’s More To The Story, Holz sits down with host Al Letson to talk about the history of the Doomsday Clock, why we’re closer to destruction than ever before, and what we can do to stop it. 

    Producer: Josh Sanburn | Editor: Kara McGuirk-Allison | Theme music: Fernando Arruda and Jim Briggs | Digital producer: Nikki Frick | Interim executive producers: Brett Myers and Taki Telonidis | Executive editor: James West | Host: Al Letson 

    Listen: Weapons With Minds of Their Own (Reveal)
    Learn more: NUKEMAP
    Read: Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists
    Read: Why Iran’s Nuclear Program Is So Essential to Its Identity (The Guardian)

    Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

    This post was originally published on Reveal.

  • We Will Never Forget that the BBC Has Helped to Enable a genocide

    A damning report has now confirmed what many of us already knew: that the BBC’s reporting of Israel’s war on Gaza is far from impartial.

    The Centre for Media Monitoring (CfMM) analysed the BBC’s coverage of the 12 months following Hamas’ one-day attack on 7 October 2023. Their huge report reveals a clear dynamic: “the marginalisation of Palestinian suffering and the amplification of Israeli narratives.”

    The report showed that, despite the killing of 34 times more Palestinians, the BBC gave Israeli deaths 33 times more coverage, interviewed more than twice as many Israelis as Palestinians (1,085 v 2,350), and shared the Israeli perspective 11 times more frequently than the Palestinian one (2,340 v 217).

    Complicit in genocide

    The report, which examined over 35,000 pieces of content produced by “the world’s most trusted broadcaster,” is full of similarly shocking evidence. But perhaps the most deplorable is the BBC’s failure to report confessions of genocidal intent by Israel’s leaders. Not a single BBC article reported Israel’s prime minister Netanyahu’s biblical “Amalek” reference – a people the Jews were commanded by God to annihilate – or president Herzog’s claim of Palestinian collective responsibility. Just 12 out of 3,873 articles bothered to mention former defence minister Gallant’s statement in which he referred to Palestinians as “human animals”, ordered “a complete siege on the Gaza strip”, and promised “we will eliminate everything”. Genocidal intent is notoriously difficult to prove when classifying an act as genocide, yet here are Israel’s own leaders, readily admitting their intention to wipe out an entire people.

    Peter Oborne, one of several journalists to question the BBC about the findings in the report during a parliamentary meeting, said: “You never educated your audience about the genocidal remarks, and according to this report, on one hundred occasions, one hundred occasions, you’ve closed down the references to genocide by your guests. This makes you complicit.”

    Lack of crucial context

    Oborne’s brilliant tirade, which can be viewed here, also flagged the BBC’s failure to report on two Israeli military doctrines – the Hannibal directive and the Dayiha doctrine – which provide essential context to understanding Israel’s response to the 7 October attacks.

    The Hannibal directive allows the Israeli military to use any force necessary to prevent its soldiers from being captured and taken into enemy territory – even if that means opening fire on those captives. A major investigation by Israeli newspaper Haaretz revealed that the procedure was activated during the 7 October attacks, and a UN report concluded that at least 14 Israeli civilians were deliberately killed by their own army on that day as a result of the directive. But as Israel refused to cooperate with the UN investigation – and barred medical professionals and others from doing so – we do not know the true figure. A year-long investigation by Electronic Intifada, however, found it to be in the hundreds.

    The BBC has also never mentioned Israel’s Dahiya doctrine. Named after a Beirut suburb that was decimated by Israel in 2006, the Dahiya doctrine is the use of disproportionate force to destroy civilians and everything that supports them so that they will never again contemplate resistance. It is a form of collective punishment – and unquestionably a war crime – that has been applied to Gaza over the past 20 months. The BBC’s decision not to ever mention this doctrine is, as Oborne calls it, “a grotesque omission”, for it provides fundamental context to Israel’s devastating assault on Gaza following 7 October.

    No desire to change

    You only have to look at the representative the BBC chose to respond to the accusations in the report and defend its Gaza coverage to see how little it cares – and how unlikely it is to change. Richard Burgess, executive news editor at the BBC, admitted he’s “not a Middle East expert” and doesn’t claim to understand the doctrines. A rightly exasperated Oborne responded, “Then send someone along who does!” When a senior news editor is asked to justify their organisation’s coverage of what is widely considered a genocide, ignorance of the full facts is truly an appalling defense.

    Soon after the report was released – as if to demonstrate its complete unwillingness to modify its pattern of bias – the BBC announced that its long-awaited documentary, Gaza: Doctors Under Attack, would not be aired. The film explores the systematic destruction of Gaza’s health service by Israeli forces as well as the abuse suffered by Palestinian medics. The BBC claimed that broadcasting the film could create “a perception of partiality”. But as former BBC journalist and news presenter Karishma Patel tweeted: “How? This film shows the reality of Israel’s actions. You can’t fling the accusation of bias at realities you simply don’t want on air.” Just as the harrowing documentary on life in Gaza seen through the eyes of Palestinian children was pulled by the BBC months previously, the BBC’s silencing of Palestinian voices appears to be institutional. It’s simply what it does.

    Israel apologists

    And just when you think it couldn’t get any worse, it does. On 27 June, the Israeli newspaper Haaretz published a horrific article about the Gaza Health Foundation (GHF) – the controversial Israeli-controlled aid distribution centres. The IDF soldiers Haaretz interviewed confirmed what Palestinians have been claiming for weeks: that soldiers are being ordered to massacre desperate, starving civilians queuing up for food. “It’s a killing field,” one soldier said. “Where I was stationed, between one and five people were killed every day. They’re treated like a hostile force – no crowd-control measures, no tear gas – just live fire with everything imaginable: heavy machine guns, grenade launchers, mortars.” Another added, “Sometimes we just charge at them from close range. But there’s no danger to the forces…I’m not aware of a single instance of return fire.”

    Did the BBC pick up on this story? Of course it didn’t. It did however publish an ‘explainer’ about the shootings at GHF sites via its Verify service. BBC Verify calls itself a “specialist team of journalists” who “fact-check information, verify video, counter disinformation, and analyse data to separate fact from fake.” But rather than using actual testimony from IDF soldiers to corroborate reports of shootings, their specialist journalists looked at some video footage and concluded that they paint a murky picture: “While the videos show an overall picture of danger and chaos, they do not definitively show who is responsible for firing.”

    The rest of the article reads like a PR piece for the government of Israel: Israeli government spokesman David Mencer is quoted saying that the reports of hundreds of civilians being killed is “another untruth”; Hamas are of course likely responsible; while a GHF spokesperson is “pleased” with its first month of operations. We know the BBC Verify journalists will have read the Haaretz article. That they chose to completely ignore it and concoct this pile of Israel apologia is frankly appalling.

    The truth is coming out

    The BBC obviously has no intention of reforming and will continue to provide cover for Israel’s crimes for as long as it possibly can. But despite their best efforts, the truth about Israel is finding its way out. The documentary that the BBC refused to air has now found a home on Channel 4 in the UK and on Zeteo News worldwide. And the BBC’s attempt to control their Glastonbury coverage by barring pro-Palestinian band Kneecap from their live broadcast, failed spectacularly when punk duo Bob Vylan chose to use their set to condemn Israel’s war crimes, live on air. Lead singer Bobby called out the UK and US for being “complicit in war crimes” and led chants of “free Palestine” and “death to the IDF”, which the crowd enthusiastically shouted back. The crowd’s response, and the fact that a huge number of other artists also spoke out in support of Palestine, suggests the tide is shifting.

    True to form, the BBC swiftly removed Bob Vylan’s performance from iPlayer and released a grovelling statement expressing regret that it hadn’t pulled the live stream and describing Vylan’s words as “deeply offensive” and “utterly unacceptable.” That our state broadcaster is so quick to condemn words but ignores a massacre of unarmed civilians tells you everything you need to know about the BBC – and you can’t help but sense that it is losing control of the narrative. Anyone with any conscience simply cannot agree that calling out a genocide is worse than committing one.

    History will not be kind to the genocide enablers. And thanks to reports like CfMM’s, we will always remember on whose side the BBC stood.

    The post We Will Never Forget that the BBC Has Helped to Enable a genocide first appeared on Dissident Voice.

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  • Seven Things Tom Cotton Needs to Learn About China

    US Senator Tom Cotton recently published a book titled Seven Things You Can’t Say About China. I decided to put myself through the aggravated torture of reading it, just to see what he had to say, and now mourn hours of life that I’ll never get back.

    Simply put, the book’s existence is a crime against quality academic literature.

    I had no expectations of strong, intellectual debate, because Cotton isn’t known for backing any of his claims with evidence (it only took me one page in to find that admittance: “I used simple common sense, not scientific knowledge or classified intelligence”), so I wasn’t disappointed by his complete lack of depth and historical accuracy.

    More than anything, I was impressed that such an absurd, conspiratorial text could reach a publisher’s desk and be checked off on. It’s really not a book at all—it’s a manifesto of paranoia. The kind you expect to find written in messy, hand-scrawled letters and hidden beneath the desk of a serial killer whose crimes you are trying to piece together.

    Well, Cotton’s crimes are many. This book is just one more venture in his career, full of asking, I wonder how much I can get away with?

    While Tom Cotton has always been one of war’s #1 fans, his favorite of all is one still yet to happen—the one he’s trying to justify in his book. His “brave truth-telling” is nothing less than imperialist propaganda feverishly trying to manufacture an enemy and send us headlong into that war.

    He starts by trying to convince us that China is the manifestation of all evil and wrongdoing, the harbinger of doom, and the pioneer of global villainy:

    “China is waging economic world war.”

    “Communist China is the focus of evil in the modern world.”

    “China is coming for our children.”

    As bewildering as these statements are, what stood out to me the most is that Tom Cotton has clearly never studied China in any real capacity. I can’t forgive him for his ignorance, because it’s undoubtedly followed closely by deep, soul-crushing racism, but I can teach him a few things he never learned in military boot camp.

    Tom Cotton, here are seven things you need to learn about China.

    1. China’s rise has nothing to do with the US.

    Tom Cotton situates everything China has done over the past century as a calculated maneuver to outwit and conquer the United States. It’s a classic case of main-characterism, in which a subject assumes everyone’s actions revolve entirely around them.

    The truth is, China’s rise has nothing to do with the US. Really, it’s none of our business. China developed because the modern era called for it. China sought economic prosperity because it had 1.4 billion citizens to provide for. China became powerful because that’s a side effect of having one of the largest economies in the world.

    China’s success is its own achievement. The fact that the US considers another country’s growing prosperity to be a direct threat against it says far more about the US. Instead of buying into the existential threat narratives, we need to ask why they exist.

    Why is China’s economic prosperity so terrifying to the Washington elite? Well, Tom Cotton says it loud and clear:

    “Most of us take American global dominance for granted, without thinking much about it; since at least World War I, that’s just the way it’s been. World trade is conducted in dollars. English is the unofficial global language of business and politics. (…) For more than a century, Americans have reaped enormous economic and security benefits from this state of affairs.”

    How dare another country become prosperous despite decades of foreign occupation, intervention, and coercion meant to reaffirm global inequality and protect US dominance?

    2. China is 5,000 years old.

    In 1949, when the PRC was established under the Communist Party, the US proclaimed that it had “lost China.”

    Let’s get this straight: a 175-year-old country was proclaiming to have “lost” a 5,000-year-old civilization state. Isn’t that absurd? China was never ours to have or to lose, or to do anything with at all.

    At the time, the US government even considered preemptively striking China to ensure it never obtained nuclear weapons. Those considerations never disappeared entirely.

    We really have to consider the differences between the two states with vastly opposing backgrounds, because you can’t understand China through a Western lens. The US is a relatively young nation born out of settler colonization and genocide of the native people. Our wealth was amassed through resource extraction, exploitation, and slavery. What precedent does that set? In comparison, China has undergone thousands of years of dynastic empires rising and falling. It has a strong cultural continuity and shared historical experience that informs how it conducts itself in the global theater. Its wealth was amassed internally, not through imperialist behavior or the exploitation of another. It’s an ancient civilization with deep roots, and a unique vision of the world informed by a long philosophical tradition and an anti-capitalist, anti-imperialist framework.

    Additionally, China was one of the world’s largest economies for over 2,000 years, accounting for around 25-30% of global GDP. It wasn’t until the colonial period of the 1800s that colonial violence and occupation by Japan and the British Empire drove China into poverty. In the 1970s, it was one of the world’s poorest nations. The fact that China was able to return to its former prosperity despite decades of foreign intervention is nothing less than a miracle.

    Tom Cotton has no understanding of these complexities. He sees China through the narrow, ultra-patriotic, super-imperialist, America-is-the-center-of-the-world-and-nobody-else-matters mindset. It doesn’t work, and it comes off incredibly cliche and small-minded.

    3. You have to travel to China to understand China.

    Which Cotton can’t do because he’s sanctioned from visiting. I really can’t blame China at all for that. I wouldn’t want Tom Cotton in my country either.

    Regardless, I know this to be true: you have to see China for yourself to develop any real understanding of it. The fact that Tom Cotton has never been to China and will never go only proves that he has absolutely no authority, and never will, over writing a book about China’s actions and intentions.

    It should be a prerequisite for any individual with any degree of political power to spend time in the country they claim to know so much about. They should be required to visit cities and towns, to learn the country’s version of its history, and to talk with local people about their unique perspectives.

    Tom Cotton has not, will not, and therefore, his opinion should not be accepted or respected.

    4. China does NOT want his kids.

    In Chapter 6, Tom Cotton says, “China is coming for our kids.” It’s a bold statement, and he doesn’t give us much follow-up to reinforce such extremism. You’d expect something a bit more villainous, like a government-backed kidnapping ring or 5G mind control. But alas, what Cotton refers to is the growing prevalence of the social media app TikTok.

    TikTok, he says, is a Chinese plot to take over the minds of the American youth.

    You may recall Cotton’s viral moment when he repeatedly asked Singaporean TikTok CEO Shou Zi Chew if he was Chinese. The conversation went like this:

    “Of what nation are you a citizen?”

    “Singapore, sir.”

    “Are you a citizen of any other nation?”

    “No senator.”

    “Have you ever applied for Chinese citizenship?”

    “Senator, I served my nation in Singapore. No, I did not.”

    “Do you have a Singaporean passport?

    “Yes, and I served my military for two and a half years in Singapore.”

    “Do you have any other passports from any other nations?”

    “No senator.”

    “Have you ever been a member of the Chinese Communist Party?”

    “Senator, I’m Singaporean. No.”

    “Have you ever been associated or affiliated with the Chinese Communist Party?”

    “No, Senator. Again, I’m Singaporean!”

    It goes without saying that the TikTok ban was dead in the water until pro-Palestinian content began proliferating. According to Congressman Mike Gallagher, “The bill was still dead until October 7th. And people started to see a bunch of antisemitic content on the platform, and our bill had legs again.”

    In truth, the TikTok ban was never about China, but about shielding young minds from learning about Israel’s atrocities against the Palestinian people and the ongoing complicity of the United States. The ban now walks hand in hand with the new education reforms that seek to dispose of “anti-patriotic” fields of study like critical race theory and threatens open discussion about the genocide in Gaza by automatically deeming it antisemitic. Yes, we are watching radical censorship in action.

    Anyway, Tom Cotton, China is not coming for your kids or anyone else’s, and making that claim without evidence is lazy and hysterical. This type of rhetoric serves one purpose only: to fuel fear and drive war.

    5. China didn’t ruin our economy—we did.

    It’s a real irony that those with all the power and money never take responsibility for their failings, but blame everyone else. And a lot of the time, people don’t see it. For instance, the elites who have crippled the US economy continue to point their fingers at those with no power at all—the impoverished, the starving, the homeless, the immigrants—and scream, it’s their fault! They did it! And the general populace turns on them with all the blame and rage of their wearisome existence. But who are the ones making all the decisions? Hoarding all the wealth? Throwing out tax breaks to billionaire friends and cutting the few life-saving programs that help regular folks get off the ground?

    It’s the elites. The politicians. The CEOs.

    We can’t blame China for developing. That’s its responsibility to its people. They didn’t steal our jobs. The thievery happened at home, on US soil, right under our noses. The corporate elite decided to take advantage of global inequality and save a few extra bucks by exporting industries abroad, where they could take advantage of cheap labor and exploit the resources of poorer nations.

    Tom Cotton spends quite a lot of time talking about China’s “economic world war.” First of all, using war language to describe economic competition sets a dangerous precedent. Competition is natural within our economic systems, and shouting “war! “ when the US isn’t constantly on top is militant imperialist behavior (Sidenote: we must rid ourselves of the notion that there are limited resources and limited wealth. There’s plenty for everyone—the problem is the majority of wealth is hoarded by 1% of the global population.)

    And secondly, I can’t help but wonder at the flips and tricks the human mind must do to accuse another nation of such an action, when the US has forever used sanctions, tariffs, and economic coercion as weapons to hurt and topple other nations, to corner them into loans and structural adjustments, and to strangulate, pressure, and punish. It makes Cotton’s particularly brief section on “economic imperialism” sound even more ridiculous.

    6. China is more logical than Cotton will ever be.

    My favorite section of Tom Cotton’s book began with the title, “Green is the new red.” I know it’s meant to be scary, but it reads more like one of those comedy-horrors that make you cringe, but you just can’t look away. I was particularly impressed with the impossible flexibility it takes to convince people a country is evil because it’s invested so much in… renewable energy!

    Terrifying!

    The mental gymnastics of this section might just be Cotton’s greatest feat ever.

    One thing is for certain. There’s no logic to be found here. But there’s also no logic to be found in much of the US policy on climate change. If I had to put a symbol to it, I’d choose an ostrich sticking its head in the ground—if you don’t look, it’s not there!

    Tom Cotton laments that as a result of heavy investment in solar panels, “China has devastated yet another American industry.” Those poor corporations. Those poor CEOs. How will they fare without their megayachts while the world burns?

    It is an unfortunate side effect of capitalism that our system prioritizes wealth over protecting the planet. It’s a fortunate side effect of China’s socialist characteristics that they don’t. As Brazilian activist Chico Mendes said, “Environmentalism without class struggle is just gardening.”

    7. China doesn’t want to go to war.

    We can’t define China by what-ifs. What if China wants to conquer the Pacific? What if China invades Poland? What if China hacks into my coffee pot and deciphers my favorite brew? What if what if what if? It’s nonsensical. We can only define China by what it’s said and what it’s done.

    If there’s one thing Tom Cotton needs to learn, it’s that China has no desire for war. Literally none. China has not been involved in any overseas conflict for fifty years. Compare that to the 251 foreign military interventions the US has conducted since just 1991. Really, just think about that. Don’t you think that if China had hegemonic ambitions, it would build a foreign military base in every country… or multiple? Or maybe over 900+ like the US? But no, China has just one in Djibouti. Tom Cotton thinks that the Djibouti base is suspicious and signals China’s malign ambitions. In reality, many nations have a military presence there to prevent piracy and smuggling in one of the world’s most crucial shipping lanes, the US included. Clearly, Tom Cotton lives in a different reality of his own paranoid design.

    Additionally, Chinese officials have repeated—over and over and over—that they have no desire for war. I think we can take them at their word, considering their lack of war historically, and their foundational policy of “peaceful coexistence.” In Cotton’s entire book, he never once refers to China’s foreign policy principles that guide every decision made. Chinese officials have never talked about a world in which China “dominates” other countries. They have only ever talked about visions of a world built on mutual respect, sovereignty, non-aggression, non-interference, cooperation, and peaceful coexistence.

    Tom Cotton needs to do some more reading on Chinese political theory, but it seems like he spends most of his learning hours thinking about war: “As a senator, I regularly review war games between China and the United States—exercises where military experts play out what would happen in a war between the two nations. I’ve never seen happy results.”

    You don’t need a war game to tell you that the results of war would be unhappy. Anyone could tell you that. I’m sure if Tom Cotton thought hard enough, he could even come up with that prediction all on his own.

    And war between the US and China wouldn’t just be unhappy, it would be devastating. Which is why our Congress members should be doing everything they can to prevent it, not ramping up the possibility by writing tedious, hysterical conspiracies about the evilness of other nations and the inevitability of conflict.

    Tom Cotton has a lot to learn about China, a lot more to learn about being a good politician, and the absolute most to learn about being a good person. But he can start with learning about China and switching his political tools to fostering dialogue, cooperation, and understanding, rather than the war-driving dribble he regularly spews.

    Unfortunately, the book was published. So if you see it at your local bookstore, do us all a favor and move it to the fantasy section, where it belongs. Or, if you’re feeling extra whimsical, you can add some Tom Cotton war criminal bookmarks to surprise the next person who picks it up. Meanwhile, we’ll be putting publisher HarperCollins on notice that it needs a much better fact-checking department.

    The post Seven Things Tom Cotton Needs to Learn About China first appeared on Dissident Voice.

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • The Right-Wing Disinformation Machine After a Murder #politics #trump


    This content originally appeared on The Intercept and was authored by The Intercept.

    This post was originally published on Radio Free.

  • Bombs Away

    “Iran, the bully of the Middle East, must now make peace. If they do not, future attacks will be far greater and a lot easier,” said President Trump as he addressed the American people shortly after announcing he was bombing Iran. I was too young to watch my political leaders spiral themselves into the war in Iraq – I was only old enough to be able to comprehend the final toll: one million Iraqis died because my country couldn’t help itself from another power grab in the Middle East. I can’t help but feel that the same thing is happening all over again.

    Myself, and countless other Americans, are ashamed at how many people have been killed in our name or with our tax dollars. The comfy politicians in Washington condescend to us — that our concern for human life actually goes against our own interests — as if Palestinians and Iranians do more to hurt Americans than the politicians and billionaires who gutted out industry, automated our jobs, privatized education, and cut social services. In our daily life, the people who actually hate us only become more obvious.

    Last week before it was absolutely clear that the US would formally enter the war, public opinion polls came out that a vast majority of Americans did not want the US to go to war. This was not the case in the lead up to the war in Iraq. Times and opinions have changed amongst the masses, but that didn’t seem to matter to anyone in the White House yesterday.

    In the aftermath of 9/11, our leaders were awfully good at convincing Americans that they needed revenge for what happened. Even if it wasn’t logical, even if it didn’t make sense — we invaded two countries that had nothing to do with 9/11. Revenge is often carried out in a blind rage, and I would say that characterized US actions in Iraq, given the barbaric nature of how the war was carried out, how many civilians died, and with a fallout that’s done very little for “strategic security interests”. I would say that it was a “blind rage” if its violence wasn’t so calculated — specifically to enrich a handful of Americans. It did succeed in that endeavor, and American families had their sons and daughters sent home in body bags so Haliburton’s stock could skyrocket. The Iraqi people, with unsolicited promises to be “liberated” from Saddam, got nothing but grief and trauma that continues twenty years later. It was perhaps hard to justify all of that to the public; American public opinion has changed a lot, and so has US-led warfare as a result of that shift.

    So, Donald Trump has made it obvious (in case it wasn’t before) that the consent of the governed doesn’t hold any weight in the United States of America. However, it’s still an interesting thing to examine in our current context. Despite a barrage of lies about nuclear weapons (like Saddam’s WMDs) and images of scary, oppressive mullahs (like the ‘dictator Saddam’) Americans still opposed a US war on Iran. If Americans were to leverage this public opinion against war in a meaningful way, by taking some sort of step past having a stance in their heads, what would it challenge? What would it look like? Will Americans oppose – at a large enough scale, US warfare that looks slightly different than it did in 2003?

    US warmaking is more subtle to the American public, but not less deadly to the countries we impose it on. Trump insisted in his address to the nation that he has no plans to keep attacking Iran as long as they “negotiate”. This is after Israel killed Iranian negotiators with US approval, and after Iran had made clear their terms of negotiating that the US just couldn’t accept. There’s no definition about what Iranian compliance would look like, setting the stage for further bombing campaigns whenever Trump decides. There might not be troops on the ground or a US military occupation, but a war they refuse to call one is still functionally a war. It still kills people. It still destabilizes countries.

    The US fights wars with money, private contractors, and “offensive support”. Only pouring into the streets to oppose sending troops to fight on behalf of Israel against Iran might not be the demand that becomes most pressing in the coming days and weeks. For example, will Americans oppose a war with Iran if it’s primarily conducted from the air?

    There’s also a large sector of the American public that still morally supports Israel’s military in one way or another, whether it be overtly or with silence on the subject. Some of them might also make up the large portion of society that opposes the US going to war. For the last two years, as Israel has carried out its genocide campaign against Palestinians in Gaza, the US has been building up Israel’s military, sending off billions of our tax dollars to make sure Israel was perfectly poised for the moment it decided to kill Iranians. Whether the public who opposes war with Iran likes it or not, their support for Israel as a military ally will directly contradict their opinion opposing war with Iran. You can’t have your cake and eat it too, if we want to put it simply.

    On the other side, Israel’s war crimes in Gaza also might have something to do with why opposition to the war on Iran is so prevalent. Because the back-up justification for attacking Iran, made by the ruling class, in case the nuke lies didn’t work, was portraying Iran’s leaders as scary, irrational, and evil boogeymen. The ruling class, decrying an evil Hitler-esque foreign leader in Iran, is now the boy crying wolf. We were told the same things about the leaders in Libya and Iraq to justify our country bombing of theirs. The result was Libyan, Iraqi, and to a lesser extent, American blood pooling in the streets. On top of that collective memory, we’ve seen our government entrench itself with Netanyahu — a commander of a military that’s killed countless Palestinians and a handful of Americans without any condemnation from our government. If there are murderous and unjust dictators in the Middle East, one of them is named Benjamin Netanyahu, and we are told he’s our greatest ally, and acting on behalf of Israel is acting in the best interest of Americans. Now, even if the US wanted the war on Iran all along, it appears to the world that Israel pulled us into the war – people do not like that, rightfully so.

    If Americans who are against the war can reject these new forms of hybrid warfare as much as they reject the traditional forms of warfare, and the sectors of the public still sympathetic to Israel see the blatant contradictions in front of their eyes — then perhaps this public opinion could mean something real. Furthermore, it’s been made clear that the American ruling class will not change course solely because the people they “serve” oppose what they are doing. They’ve also demonstrated that they are willing to jail and deport people who disagree with them and their foreign policy escapades. The genocide in Gaza has made it clear that Americans standing against the actions of their government do so at great personal risk. Do Americans disagree with US involvement in the war enough? Do they disagree to the point where they are willing to experience threats, jail time, repression, physical harm, or other forms of violence? In the case of a war that could turn nuclear with an untethered Israel and Trump Administration at the helm, I sincerely hope so. 

    The post Bombs Away first appeared on Dissident Voice.

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  • Why the All the Promotions for COVID Spokespeople?

    The post Why the All the Promotions for COVID Spokespeople? first appeared on Dissident Voice.

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • A Silence that is Defining Our Age and Which is Deafening

    Note: Another long opinion piece in the local rag, Lincoln County Leader, June 18, 2025.


    First, though, let me explain. The idea is to not just rattle my fellow citizens’ cages, those self-imposed prisons of the mind. It’s my own journalistic and controlled demolition of the grand narratives this country has foisted on a public that has not only become unsuspecting, but absolutely habituated into brands, and consumer dialogue, talks about trips to Costco or Costa Rica, it’s all the same fucking 24 pack of paper towels to throw at hurricane victims in Puerto Rico.

    This is the spawn of Nazis, the good Germans, the guy who is now a Jew, who was trained by Jew York Jews like Roy Cohen, and alas, his grandkiddos are Jewish, and that daughter is Jewish, and the mafia in his Minyan is composed of Jews and even freak Zionists like RFK, Jr.

    It is a sickness that isn’t just one chapter in the DSM-V: Victoria Nuland and cookies, man.

    What is the DSM-5?

    The Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, often known as the “DSM,” is a reference book on mental health and brain-related conditions and disorders. The American Psychiatric Association (APA) is responsible for the writing, editing, reviewing and publishing of this book.

    The number “5” attached to the name of the DSM refers to the fifth — and most recent — edition of this book. The DSM-5®’s original release date was in May 2013. The APA released a revised version of the fifth edition in March 2022. That version is known as the DSM-5-TR™, with TR meaning “text revision.”

    IMPORTANT: The DSM-5 and DSM-5-TR are medical reference books intended for experts and professionals. The content in these books is very technical, though people who aren’t medical professionals may still find it interesting or educational. However, you shouldn’t use either of these books as a substitute for seeing a trained, qualified mental health or medical provider.

    Additionally, the APA also publishes books that supplement the content in the DSM-5-TR. Examples of these supplement publications include the DSM-5 Handbook of Differential Diagnosis and DSM-5 Clinical Cases.

    What is the purpose of the DSM-5?

    The first step in treating any health condition — physical or mental — is accurately diagnosing the condition. That’s where the DSM-5 comes in. It provides clear, highly detailed definitions of mental health and brain-related conditions. It also provides details and examples of the signs and symptoms of those conditions.

    In addition to defining and explaining conditions, the DSM-5 organizes those conditions into groups. That makes it easier for healthcare providers to accurately diagnose conditions and tell them apart from conditions with similar signs and symptoms.]

    [Photo: While Ronald Reagan demonized the welfare system as a whole in familiar terms, his ire was largely directed toward single mothers, and his racially coded language was sufficient to make clear his overarching intentions.]

    All these things, these economic things, they are on people’s minds. The chaos of Trump and Company, as he plays out his dictator role, all of that is on everyone’s minds.

    The cost of being poor is rising. And it’s worse for poor families of color. Great headline.

    But the point of my short op-ed was to discuss how the silence of this genocide is deafening, in fact, defeating. This has a deep deep psychological effect on those who might have cared to speak up and who are distressed by the murder incorporated on a mass murder scale that the Jews in Israel are undertaking.

    But the empire of chaos is about that chaos, and the chaotic nature of our news cycle with the demented POTUS and his even more demented cabinet members and his MAGA mutt followers, that this imploding diesel belching engine has thrown so many people into discombobulation syndrome.

    Chaos of thought and passion, all confused;
    Still by himself abused or disabused;
    Created half to rise, and half to fall;
    Great lord of all things, yet a prey to all;
    Sole judge of truth, in endless error hurled,
    The glory, jest, and riddle of the world.

    — Alexander Pope, An Essay on Man

    The poor and forgotten nations of the world can blame their downward spiral on an emerging world order that Samir Amin in this brilliant essay calls the “empire of chaos.” Comprised of the United States, Japan, and Germany, and backed by a weakened USSR and the comprador classes of the third world, this is an empire that will stop at nothing in its campaign to protect and expand its capitalist markets.

    The interview with Professor Samir Amin was conducted on 6 May 2018 in Beijing, by Professor Lau Kin Chi and Professor Sit Tsui Jade. Professor Amin criticized monopoly capitalism and the collective imperialism of the Triad (USA, Europe, and Japan). He analyzed the current major challenges to China. He strongly suggested that China should not join financial globalization, but on the contrary, keep capital account and exchange rate under control, as well as maintain collective ownership of land and the small peasantry. These were great weapons against financial globalization. He also discussed the possibilities of building people’s internationalism.

    *****
    “Israel’s culture of genocide is spreading globally. We must build an alternative” by Abed Abou Shhadeh

    Even as Israeli violence becomes more visible, politicians like Ben Gvir are welcomed as honoured guests in the US

    ‘The crimes [in Gaza] are so egregious that are being carried out… The attempt to cover them up and whitewash them is failing’ Since 7 October, western media coverage of Israel’s war on Gaza has come under intense scrutiny, particularly for the language and terminology used by many outlets. As a result, the coverage has been accused of bias against Palestinians effectively providing cover for Israel’s war on Gaza. To delve into this, we’re speaking to Assal Rad, an Iranian-American scholar of the modern Middle East and fellow at DAWN, who’s also made it her mission to call out and ‘fix’ misleading headlines. Her widely shared posts earned her the title of ‘headline fixer’, turning this into a trend of its own online.

    This is just a watered-down version of what I really would love to write every day, and in a sense have the public square to discuss this silence, this mute echo of silence has pushed a collective insanity and amnesia into the populous.

    The Silence is Deafening

    The silence is deafening, here on the coast, and throughout most of the land. Forget about large universities and valiant young people and some faculty protesting the genocide which by many expert accounts — not cited in so-called legacy media – are 100,000 murdered civilians.

    Targeted assassinations of journalists and of medical workers? And the AMA is silent. The American Medical Association represents hundreds of thousands of doctors.

    “We’re seeing hospitals being bombed, ambulances being bombed, doctors and other medical workers being targeted and shot. The AMA is the sixth-largest lobbying organization in the United States, it’s bigger than Boeing. It’s bigger than Lockheed Martin, it’s bigger than the National Rifle Association. They have a tremendous amount of domestic and international influence, and because they carry such weight within the realm of health care, we felt it would be appropriate for them to use their voice in this way.”

    Emily Hacker, a member of Healthcare Workers for Palestine, outlined that an important reason healthcare workers want the “AMA and all other healthcare institutions to be involved in ending the Israeli occupation of Palestine”  is that “the US can spend billions and billions of dollars on bombs and bullets, but there are 26 million Americans with no health insurance and 150 million Americans rely on Medicare or Medicaid.”

    “People can’t afford their insulin, but there’s always money for bombs,” Hackerarticulated.

    Cognitive dissonance is more than just interesting as a theory to study. In our daily lives we for the most part are silent. Hands down. No discussion of Israel’s genocide and the United States’ and Britain’s complicity because most Americans are dangerously poorly educated.

    Miseducated. Brainwashed.

    This is what many call “deep” or “master narratives” – that somehow the settler colonial apartheid state of Israel is the most democratic state in the Middle East. I witnessed genocide silence at the Yachats Commons June 1, where we listened to Oregon Black Pioneers presenter Zachary Stocks discuss the origin of black exclusion laws in our state as well as the pro-slavery mentality that dominated many of the state’s politicians and newspaper editors.

    Good stuff he presented to a largely greying and older population. We did get some land acknowledgment from Joanne Kittel, known for her work around the Amanda Trail.

    “For those of you who travel through Yachats, I ask you to pay respect to and honor the Alsea, Siuslaw, Lower Umpqua and Coos people who lost their lives as a result of their forced incarceration and mistreatment in Yachats, Waldport and Florence areas. The Amanda Trail that connects Yachats to Cape Perpetua is a spiritual and solemn path that remembers in perpetuity.” Joanne Kittel wrote this as a blurb for a book, Seeking Recognition: The Termination and Restoration of the Coos, Lower Umpqua, and Siuslaw Indians, 1855-1984 by David R.M. Beck.

    No moment of silence for Gaza? It would have been appropriate.

    Deep, grand, meta or master narratives are dominant or commonly-shared stories within a society or culture. They are tools for shaping a collective idea or consciousness about who we are as a society, culture or people. Master narratives also limit our understanding of context and historical causes and effects, and they’re deployed to perpetuate stereotypes or dominant ideologies.

    Erasing knowledge and context is the coin of the realm now especially with a shallow and sallow-minded president. This POTUS isn’t the be-all and end-all, but for the past five months people have been scrambling to anticipate his administration’s brand of proto- or neo-fascism. Erasing Black Medal of Honor winners or Jackie Robinson’s portrait from various locations and websites is just the tip of the iceberg of flipping around of history.

    “A good Indian is a Dead Indian.” Or, from the other POTUS, Teddy Roosevelt: “I don’t go so far as to think that the only good Indians are the dead Indians, but I believe nine out of every 10 are,” Roosevelt said during a January 1886 speech in New York. “And I shouldn’t like to inquire too closely into the case of the tenth.”

    And now why is it the genocide of our times is never discussed in public or around dinner tables? Imagine that during World War Two not a word about Nazism or fascism in Italy and Spain. Silence? The price of bacon?

    A Jewish Canadian journalist, many reading this might not know, Aaron Mate, says it bluntly about that Grand Narrative of Israel and Judaism: “Everything I Was Taught… Was a Lie” He says the indoctrination of how Israel is this grand democracy and mothership for all Jews starts early.

    “This Jewish state commits genocide in our name. It’s a moral obligation to resist this,” Mate states.

    It is more than bizarre and Orwellian, this current rampant ideology of “silence is transparency and lies are truth.”

    Doctors, nurses, and medics are murdered and hospitals bombed. And no one in mixed company discusses Gaza, the genocide, the dehumanization of Palestinians, which is a dehumanization for us all.

    Doctors? I have MDs in my family and I was a pre-med student for a while. Here is an anonymous statement I agree with, from a doctor condemning the American Medical Association’s complicity:

    “As a doctor, I am saying loud and clear I am against all war and especially GENOCIDE. AMA and all our medical institutions that have remained silent and practiced unethical silencing, doxxing, firing of peace supporters or those speaking up for Palestine cast a long shadow of shame on our great profession.”

    Silence, and the grand narrative just crumbles.

    The post A Silence that is Defining Our Age and Which is Deafening first appeared on Dissident Voice.

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • Ahh, Little Red Barns Don’t Exist Anymore, Israel Was Never a Democracy, and Neither US the Shining City on the Hill

    I’ll be interviewing Will this Tuesday, for my radio show, Finding Fringe: Voices from the Edge, and it will air in July.

    Here’s a blub — a promotional positive statement about the book:

    “We are in a fight for our lives against a rising authoritarian tide, and this clear-eyed, compelling, clarion call of a book has a message everyone needs to hear. We will not save ourselves if we do not also fight for the lives of others–including non-human animals. No one is better positioned than Will Potter to connect the dots between fascism and factory farming, and he does so with energy, conviction, and incredible insight.”

    — Astra Taylor, author of Democracy May Not Exist, but We’ll Miss It When It’s Gone

    I’m digging the book he sent me. Stay TUNED.

    Yes indeed, things have gotten really really worse, and the book thus far is about ag-gag, the history of those laws, and we go back farther than Upton Sinclair’s The Jungle, way back to “Old McDonald Had a Farm.” Even farther back to Matthew in that book about bearing witness, or Islam and the concept of being a martyr, witness, whistleblower.

    Oh, I recall this bullshit interview/debate on Democracy Now with Will Potter and the schill goofy woman working for the lobby, man, and the manufactured balance, the false balance, the broken equivalency.

    Thirteen Years ago: States Crack Down On Animal Rights Activists And Their Undercover Videos

    My most recent radio interview about to hit the airways June 18, KYAQ.org, but DV and Paulokirk readers get the preview here: The right to community. And that is what the politicians and their thug dictators, the corporations, the polluters and the destroyers, want DESTROYED forever. The-Right-to/for/because of Community

    CELDF - Community Rights Pioneers - Protecting Nature and ...

    So, moving on before I get back to reading Will’s new book, the infamy of AmeriKKKa and the world, as we slaughter not just the billions of birds and bovine and swine, but our fellow human beings.

    Bearing witness? Goddamn!

    Child Gunned Down by the IDF, His Crime? Being Born Palestinian: Israel is annihilating Palestinian children. Amer Rabee was one of them

    Amer had a name. He had a smile. He was loved. He was real. And now, he is gone. We owe him more than silence. We owe Gaza’s starving children more than silence.

    *****

    I talk about this EVERYDAY — how do we go on without YELLING at the top of our lungs everywhere all the goddamn time?

    Progress

    [Palestine Will Be Free]

    Oh, what great progress! We have come so far

    What glorious days I wake up to!
    What mirth and joy the mornings conjure.
    After starting my day with coffee and Wagyu steak,
    I tap-dance to work and present my deck.

    All fun and games with the friends at work,
    As we discuss last night’s game we streamed.
    “Oh, how he shot — and the one he missed —
    They should build him a statue in the city’s midst.”

    At noon, I got the letter with the bonus check —
    My hard work is really stacking the deck!
    That called for a celebration, so we went
    To this exquisite bar a colleague had picked.

    We did good business this year, my boss said,
    As our machines were deployed across the East and the West.
    We’re ramping up production — the demand is high.
    I already smell the next check — oh, how I fly!

    We wrapped up another busy day at work,
    As we built more machines to send across the pond.
    On the way home, I called my spouse,
    And we went to her favourite: Roundhouse.

    As we got home, on the TV they showed
    One of our products being dropped by the shore.
    Our President announced, “No holds will be barred,
    In support of our friends who always want more.”

    Smacking my lips, I looked up the scrip,
    Giddy as a kid, I slept like a pig.
    More work tomorrow, as we must ship more
    Of our fearsome products to our friends by the shore.

    Oh, what great progress! We have come so far.
    With my MIT degree, I have become a star.
    My machines hum low as they cross the sea,
    Carving silence where children used to be.

    *****

    More of the monsters, the criminals, the continuing criminal enterprises of finance and predatory and disaster and penury and polluting capitalism:

    JPMorgan’s Jamie Dimon calls on US to stockpile bullets, rare earth instead of bitcoin!

    Crime boss in a 5,000 dollar suit:

    “We should be stockpiling bullets,” he continued.

    “Like, you know, the military guys tell you that, you know, if there’s a war in the South China Sea, we have missiles for seven days. Okay, come on. I mean, we can’t say that with a straight face and think that’s okay. So we know what to do. We just got to now go about doing it. Get the people together, roll up our sleeves, you know, have the debates.”

    And so the clown show is so on track to take the USA down the path of intellectual-spiritual-agency starvation. No one in the NBC piece is railing against the military and the fool Trump, no-sir-ee.

    Army says Trump’s military parade could cause $16 million in damage to Washington streets

    The repair costs are part of the estimated $45 million price tag for the upcoming parade.

    Bone spurs Trump, man, what a complete Chief Fraud.

    “We have the greatest missiles in the world. We have the greatest submarines in the world. We have the greatest army tanks in the world. We have the greatest weapons in the world. And we’re going to celebrate it,” Trump added.

    The parade will be part of a massive celebration in downtown Washington that includes a number of events, historical displays and a demonstration by the Army’s famous parachute team, the Golden Knights.

    The parade itself will include about 130 vehicles, including 28 M1A1 tanks, 28 Bradley Fighting Vehicles, 28 Stryker armored fighting vehicles and a number of vehicles towing artillery launchers. More than 50 helicopters will also participate in an “extensive flyover” in the nation’s capital.

    The event will also bring more than 9,000 soldiers from around the country to Washington, about 7,000 of whom will march in the parade itself. The event will also include at least eight Army bands, and some troops will ride on the nearly three dozen horses and two mules expected to march as part of a historical section of the parade.

    [Photo: Poison Ivy League school Harvard!]

    And you thought colleges were places of sanity and caring? Forget about it.

    As colleges halt affinity graduations, students of color plan their own cultural celebrations. Affinity graduations recognize the range “of challenges and obstacles” that students from minority backgrounds face as they work toward their degrees, said one professor.

    Death spiral in almost 100 percent of American life:

    The Harvard joins many other institutions across the country that have canceled affinity graduations after the federal cracked down on funding for colleges. Notre Dame canceled its Lavender Graduation for 50 LGBTQ students, with members of the university’s Alumni Rainbow Community and the Notre Dame Club of Greater Louisville stepping in to host an independent ceremony this month.

    Wichita State University, the University of Louisville and the University of Kentucky also canceled some or all of their affinity ceremonies. The Hispanic Educators Association of Nevada said it canceled its event for Latino students because of a lack of financial support.

    This is what education once again means to the perversions called US Secretary of Ed.

    U.S. Secretary of Education Linda McMahon said her department will give the state ten days to sign an agreement rescinding its Native American mascot ban and apologizing to Native Americans for having discriminated against them and attempted to “erase” their history.

    JP O’Hare, a spokesperson for the New York education department, dismissed McMahon’s visit as “political theater” and said the school district was doing a “grave disservice” to its students by refusing to consult with local tribes about their concerns.

    “These representatives will tell them, as they have told us, that certain Native American names and images perpetuate negative stereotypes and are demonstrably harmful to children,” he said in a statement.

    You feeling the dictator’s blues yet? President Trump has long called for escalating the U.S. drug war against Mexican cartels and wants tougher penalties for dealers selling fentanyl and other street drugs in American communities. “I am ready for it, the death penalty, if you deal drugs,” Trump said during a meeting with state governors in February, where he said dealers are too often treated with a “slap on the wrist.”

    But despite his tough rhetoric, Trump has sparked controversy by pardoning a growing number of convicted drug dealers, including this week’s move to grant clemency to Larry Hoover, 74, who was serving multiple life sentences in federal prison for crimes linked to his role leading the Chicago-based Gangster Disciples.

    “Larry Hoover was the head of perhaps the most pernicious, efficient drug operation in the United States,” Safer said. “They sold over $100 million of drugs a year in the city of Chicago alone. They were responsible for countless murders. They supported their drug territories with ruthless violence.”

    *****

    A LITTLE pushback?

    What? Everything about Trump, man, is the most perverse, weird and dystopian and of course, Snake Oil Salesmanship and Three Card Monty and Chapter 11-13 full bore.

    Not digging the Catholic Church, but can you imagine making rabbis tell the truth, the Fortune 300 or 5,000 go before a board of truth and reconciliation? Imagine if the Jewish State of Murdering Raping Maiming Polluting Poisoning Starving Occupied Palestine had to disclose that client-extortionist privilege? Patient-Doctor confidentiality? Doesn’t exist, and DOGE is coming after the food stampers and the disability pittance recipients while the millionaires, billionaires and trillionaires get to keep their dirty felonious secrets, well, secrets.

    The sickness throughout the land, as Flag Day and Rapist in CHief’s B-Day and the Military Uniformed Mercenary Hired Guns Army have their anniversary, and we continue writing at Dissident Voice and elsewhere the crimes, man, the inhumanity, the absolute Orwellian and Phillip K. Dick nature of this dystopia.

    *****

    Some of us are tired of surviving

    For many in Gaza, death isn’t always the worst outcome.

    MOHAMMED R MHAWISH's avatar

    Mohammed R Mhawish

    May 31, 2025

    What kind of world forces people to beg for death to feel peace?

    I’ve survived so many times now I’ve lost count. I was pulled from the rubble with my son after our home was flattened, walked for hours carrying a bag of bread and the bones of what once was a life, fled neighborhoods, towns, and streets we once called home, only to find no home waiting on the other side, and every time I survived, something else died. Sometimes, it was a friend. Sometimes a cousin and sometimes a colleague. Some other times it was the sound of my son’s laughter and my own belief that living means something.

    Survival is not a blessing.

    I’ve come to learn that survival is just another word for staying inside the pain. People wake up every day in a different place than where they were yesterday and find it more crowded and more tired and more broken. Stepping over children sleeping on cardboard under trees is now a normal thing, and the days are all the same. So are the struggles of hunger and water and the bitter metallic taste. The same questions about where we should go next, what we will eat today, and who else we’ve lost.

    A reporter captured the moment at midnight, as the sky lit up like day from illumination flares.

    Watch the post on Instagram

    anasjamal44

    A post shared by @anasjamal44

    The caption reads: “We are dying. The Israeli bombing is relentless. Women and children are the victims. No safe places left. No food, no water. Famine is spreading rapidly.”

    I’ve sat with people who don’t run anymore when leaflets fall from the sky, I remember talking to a woman in Khan Younis who told me she stayed in her home after the first warnings. Her name was Sameera and she was sixty-two. Her husband was too sick to walk and she couldn’t carry him. “If we leave, we die on the road. If we stay, we die here,” she said. “At least here I know the ground. I know which walls will fall on me.”

    She didn’t say it with fear. There was simply no fear left.

    Another man in Deir Al Balah was standing in the middle of a bombed street and sweeping glass and dirt into a pile. He’d lost two of his daughters, and when I asked him why he didn’t leave earlier, he said, “I didn’t want to spend the last moments of my life running.”

    It’s neither courage nor resistance, only exhaustion, the kind that comes with an understanding that in Gaza there is no such thing as a safe place. We just run until our legs and souls give out. And even if we make it out alive, we still carry the weight of every person who didn’t.

    In one video, a child sits on top of the rubble sobbing. His father is still trapped beneath the debris.]

    Watch the video on X

    People always say survival is the goal and we’re lucky to have made it. But there’s no such thing as luck about people dissolving slowly and dying in slow motion.

    During my months reporting from there, I saw children who don’t speak anymore. I once saw a boy in Jabalia who used to love cartoons but now just sits and stares at the wall. When I tried to ask for his name, he covered his ears. His mother said he hasn’t spoken since the missile hit their home and took his sister.

    When someone cries out of an injury, we know they’re still holding on. But when they just stare at the ceiling as they bleed, we know they’ve already left, even if their body hasn’t.

    There is nothing noble about this kind of survival. There is no aftercare or healing.

    A young Palestinian student, Shayma, describes what it’s like to be forcibly displaced amid the devastation and having nowhere to go. The camera pans across the flattened neighborhood where she is sheltering. aljazeeraenglish

    We don’t want to die. But when some of us fantasize about death, it’s because we’re full of everything that hurts. Our moms whisper that they envy those who died peacefully and quickly. I myself used to shower in cold water at night just to feel something cold. My neighbor lost her baby to dehydration around the time my son and I were diagnosed with malnutrition in March 2024. She still carries his blanket in her bag.

    And here my friends tell me to stay strong and safe. But I don’t want strength anymore. I don’t want to be the one who survived everything. I don’t want my son to grow up believing that pain is something you get used to or that losing everything and still breathing means you’re lucky.

    We all have our tricks for trying to suffer a little less. Some stop talking about the people they lost because even saying a name is unbearable. Some lie to themselves and pretend their loved ones are still displaced just somewhere they can’t reach. Some stop eating because food feels like a betrayal when the person you used to share it with is gone.

    I once believed that writing would help me make sense of it and that putting these stories down would somehow soften them. But even that doesn’t work anymore. I can’t keep writing about mass graves and call it documenting and narrating pain while still living inside it.

    There is nothing poetic about this grief. It is ugly and it is heavy and it is repetitive. Sometimes I walk for hours just not to think and keep my body moving while my mind shuts down, or just to delay the next memory from arriving.

    I still wake up sometimes believing we’re back home and feel like I’ll hear my mother’s voice and make coffee in our old kitchen.

    The truth is, survival, when it’s endless and hollow and filled with nothing but hunger and mourning and fear… it begins to feel like a punishment.

    We are alive in ways no one in this world would envy.

    So when the people in Gaza no longer pray for safety, it’s because we’ve seen too much and lost too many.

    The post Ahh, Little Red Barns Don’t Exist Anymore, Israel Was Never a Democracy, and Neither US the Shining City on the Hill first appeared on Dissident Voice.

  • RFK Jr.’s Answer to US Health Crisis Is Citations Made Up by AI

    The White House’s keystone health report outlining its agenda for Americans’ health is riddled with artificial intelligence “hallucinations,” with fabricated citations and broken links reflective of the administration’s embrace of non-scientific approaches to public health. An analysis by The Washington Post uncovered numerous citations in the “Make America Healthy Again” report with the…

    Source

    This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.

  • Ethiopian journalist Ahmed Awga sentenced to 2 years in prison

    Nairobi, May 30, 2025—The Committee to Protect Journalists is dismayed by an Ethiopian regional court’s decision to sentence Jigjiga Television Network founder Ahmed Awga to two years in jail on charges of disseminating hateful information via a Facebook post he did not author.

    On May 22, the Fafen Zone High Court in Jigjiga, the capital of Ethiopia’s eastern Somali Region, sentenced Ahmed, whose legal name is Ahmed Abdi Omar, to two years in prison. He had been detained since his April 23 arrest on incitement charges related to an interview he conducted with a man whose son died following an alleged police beating, as well as for commentary on Ahmed’s Facebook page. The charge was later changed to “propagation of disinformation and public incitement,” under the 2020 anti-hate speech law, according to the charge sheet, which was reviewed by CPJ.

    “Ahmed Awga’s conviction and two-year prison sentence, based on a Facebook post he didn’t write, is outrageous and a stark illustration of Ethiopia’s escalating assault on press freedom,” said Angela Quintal, CPJ’s Africa regional director, from Durban. “Ethiopian authorities must cease using the legal system to silence critical voices.”

    The charge sheet alleges that on April 17, Ahmed posted statements on his Facebook page, describing a regional election as a “so-called election,” accusing regional government officials of holding the population hostage, and claiming specific districts were seized by certain individuals. He was also accused of inciting residents by allegedly stating, “we have no justice — only killing and death.”

    A CPJ review of the prosecution’s evidence, corroborated by an analysis by VOSS TV, an online media outlet, shows his conviction was primarily based on a post he didn’t write. His account was merely tagged in an April 20 post, which clearly originated from another Facebook page, not Ahmed’s. None of Ahmed’s April 17 posts appeared to reference the allegations in the charge sheet, according to CPJ’s review.

    Ahmed’s conviction is part of a broader crackdown on media in Ethiopia. At least six other journalists were arrested in the month of April alone, as the government tightened its control over the media regulator, the Ethiopian Media Authority (EMA).

    In a May 27 interview with BBC’s Somali service, Somali Region President Mustafa Mohammed Omar rejected suggestions that people were being jailed simply for what they posted online. The four people currently in custody — “a journalist, a former official, and two activists” — face charges of “harming the reputation of security agencies, spreading false information about jail conditions, and exploiting the death of an inmate to incite the public,” he said, adding that the regional judiciary is independent.


    This content originally appeared on Committee to Protect Journalists and was authored by CPJ Staff.

    This post was originally published on Radio Free.

  • Ballots and Bias: How the Press Framed Venezuela’s Regional and Legislative Elections

    The pro-government alliance achieved a sweeping victory in Venezuela’s May 25 elections, while a fractured opposition suffered losses. Western media distorted the results – spinning low turnout claims, ignoring the role of illegal US sanctions, and offering selective sympathy to elite opposition figures.

    Opposition fractures, pro-government consolidates

    At stake for the 54 contesting Venezuelan political parties were seats for 285 National Assembly deputies, 24 state governors, and 260 regional legislators.

    The pro-government coalition won all but one of the governorships, taking three of the four states previously held by the opposition. The loss of the state of Barinas was particularly symbolic, for this was the birthplace of former President Hugo Chávez, and especially so, because the winner was Adán Chávez, the late president’s older brother.

    Likewise, the Chavista alliance swept the National Assembly, securing 253 out of 285 seats. Notable exceptions were the election of opposition leaders Henrique Capriles and Henri Falcón, both of whom are former presidential candidates.

    The New York Times reported the same outcomes but spun it as the “results [rather than the vote]…stripped the opposition of some of the last few positions it held,” inferring fraud.

    However, this election outcome was not unexpected, as the opposition was not only divided but also had a significant portion opting to boycott the vote. The pro-government forces enjoyed a unified effort, an efficient electoral machine, and grassroots support, especially from the communal movement.

    “After 32 elections, amidst blockades, criminal sanctions, fascism and violence,” Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro affirmed, “today we showed that the Bolivarian Revolution is stronger than ever.”

    Opposition self-implodes

    The headline from Le Monde spun the voting thus: “Venezuela holds divisive new elections.” Contrary to what the headline suggests, the divisiveness was not the government’s doing, but due to the opposition’s perennial internecine warfare.

    While the pro-government Great Patriotic Pole alliance around the ruling Socialist Party (PSUV) “works in unison,” according to opposition leader Henrique Capriles, the electoral opposition is divided into three warring camps. They, in turn, were surrounded by a circular firing squad of the far-right abstentionists, calling for a vote boycott.

    The abstentionists were assembled around Maria Corina Machado. She had been pardoned for her involvement in the short-lived 2002 US-backed coup but was subsequently disqualified from running for office for constitutional offenses. Following Washington’s lead, which has not recognized a Venezuelan presidential election as legitimate since 2012, the far-right opposition rejected electoral means for achieving regime change and has even pleaded in effect for US military intervention.

    Machado’s faction, which claimed that Edmund González Urrutia won the 2024 presidential election, does not recognize their country’s constitutional authority. Consequently, when summoned by the Venezuelan Supreme Court, they refused to present evidence of their victory, thereby removing any legal basis for their claimed victory to be accepted. Machado maintained that voting only “legitimizes” the government, bitterly calling those participating in the democratic process “scorpions.”

    Machado spent the election in self-imposed hiding. She further dug herself into a hole, after urging even harsher punishing US sanctions on her own people, by appearing to support Trump’s sending of Venezuelan migrants to the CECOT torture prison in El Salvador.

    El Pais sympathized with her as “driven by the strength of the pain of being a mother who has been separated from her three children.” The WaPo described the middle-aged divorcé from one of the wealthiest families in Venezuela as a “courageous leader” whose “three children are exiled abroad.” In fact, her adult children live comfortably in the US and Colombia.

    To this manufactured sympathy for the privileged, Venezuelan-Canadian sociologist Maria Paez Victor asks, “Where are the defenders of the human rights of Venezuelans?” She excoriates the collective West for its selective concern for human rights, emphasizing the neglect of Venezuelans’ rights amid external pressures and US sanctions.

    The disputed Essequibo

    The headline for The New York Times’s report spun the elections with: “Venezuela is holding an election for another country’s land.” This refers to the elections for governor and legislators in Essequibo (Guayana Esequiba in Spanish), which is, in fact, a disputed land.

    For nearly two centuries, Venezuelans have considered that region part of their country, having wrested it from Spanish colonialists in 1835. In the questionable Paris Arbitral Award, with the US representing Venezuela, the Essequibo was handed over to the UK in 1899 (then colonial British Guiana and now the independent nation of Guyana). Ever since, it has been contested territory.

    In 1962, Venezuela formally revived its claim at the UN, asserting that the 1899 award was null and void. Not surprisingly, the Times sides with Guyana, or more precisely with what they report as “Exxon Mobil’s multibillion-dollar investments” plus “military ties with the US.”

    This first-time vote for political representation in the Essequibo is seen by Venezuelans across their political spectrum as an important step to assert their claim. It follows a referendum in 2023, which affirmed popular support for the Essequibo as part of their national territory. The actual voting was held in the neighboring Bolivar state.

    On cue, the western-aligned press criticized the vote on the Essequibo as a “cynical ploy” by the Maduro administration to divert attention from other pressing problems. Meanwhile, they obscure the increasing US military penetration in neighboring Guyana and in the wider region.

    Yet even the NYT had to admit: “Claims to the Essequibo region are deeply ingrained among many Venezuelans… [and even] María Corina Machado, the most prominent opposition leader, visited the area by canoe in 2013 to advance Venezuela’s claim.” Venezuelan journalist Jésus Rodríguez Espinoza (pers. comm.) described the vote as “an exercise in national sovereignty.”

    Illegal sanctions – the elephant in the room

    A WaPo opinion piece claims, “that the actual root cause of poverty has been a lack of democracy and freedom,” as if the US and its allies have not imposed sanctions deliberately designed to cripple the Venezuelan economy. These “unilateral coercive measures,” condemned by the UN, are illegal under international law because they constitute collective punishment.

    But the fact that Venezuelans had to vote while being subjected to illegal coercion is completely ignored by the corporate press. That is, the existence of sanctions is recognized, but instead of exposing their illegal and coercive essence, the press normalizes them. The story untold by the press is the courage of the Venezuelan people who continue to support their government under such adverse conditions.

    Disparaging the election

    Washington and its aligned press cannot question the popular sweep for the Socialist Party’s alliance in Venezuela, because it is so obvious. Nonetheless, they disparage the mandate. The chorus of criticism alleges the fraudulent nature of previous elections, although it is a geopolitical reality that Washington considers any popular vote against its designated candidates illegitimate.

    For this particular election, these State Department stenographers focused on the supposedly low turnout. In fact, the turnout was typical for a non-presidential election contest and fell within the same percentage range as US midterm elections.

    Moreover, the pro-government slate actually garnered more votes than it had in the previous regional elections. The Chavista core of older, working class women remains solid.

    When Elvis Amoroso, president of Venezuela’s authority (CNE), qualified the turnout percentages to apply to “active voters,” he meant those in-country. Due to the large number of recent out-migrations, a significant number are registered but cannot vote because they are abroad.

    What was notably low was the voting for the highly divided opposition, with major factions calling for a boycott. Further, the opposition had been discredited by revelations that some had received and misused hundreds of millions of dollars from USAID. More than ever, the inept opposition has exposed itself in a negative light to the broad electorate. 

    The overwhelming sentiment on the street in Venezuela is for an end to partisan conflict and for continuing the slow economic recovery. Challenges ahead include inflationary winds, a rising unofficial dollar exchange rate, and, above all, the animus of the Trump administration, which is currently in internal debate over whether to try to deal the Bolivarian Revolution a quick or a slow death. Either way, destabilization efforts continue.

    To which Socialist Party leader and Interior Minister Diosdado Cabello said: “No one can stop our people. Not sanctions, nor blockades, nor persecution – because when a people decide to be free, no one can stop them.”

    The post Ballots and Bias: How the Press Framed Venezuela’s Regional and Legislative Elections first appeared on Dissident Voice.

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  • Israel’s Claim that “Hamas is stealing aid” is Patently a Lie

    Western journalists – having promoted Israel’s lies for more than a year and half – have grown entirely insensible to their active collusion in genocide.

    Israel’s claim that Hamas is “stealing aid” is so preposterous no serious journalist or politician ought to give it any kind of airing – yet there it is continuously cropping up in the coverage of Gaza.

    How do I know Israel’s claim is utterly worthless? For this simple reason:

    Israel has a fleet of surveillance drones constantly hovering over the tiny strip of land that is Gaza, monitoring every inch of the territory. The incessant whine you hear every time you watch someone there being interviewed is from one of those drones. They are Israel’s eyes on the enclave. If you are outside in Gaza, you might as well be living in the Truman Show.

    Were Hamas stealing aid in Gaza, Israel would easily be able to document it. It would have the video footage from its drones. The fact that it has not provided any footage showing Hamas’ theft of aid – its ransacking of aid trucks, or its fighters smuggling themselves into aid warehouses – is confirmation enough that Israel has simply invented this claim to rationalise its plans to starve the people of Gaza to death through months of an aid blockade or force them to flee into neighbouring Sinai, whichever comes first.

    Without its disinformation campaign about “Hamas stealing aid”, Israel knows popular revulsion at its starvation campaign would grow quickly, and western governments would further struggle to keep opposition in check.

    There are lots of others reasons, of course, to reject Israel’s lies about “Hamas stealing aid”. Not least, because every single charity and aid agency dealing with Gaza says that aid is not being stolen by Hamas.

    But also because, were Hamas fighters doing so, they would be stealing from their own families: from their children and grandparents, who are much more vulnerable to Israel’s starvation campaign than they are. The idea that Hamas is stealing aid makes sense only to a racist, European colonial mindset in which Hamas fighters are viewed as bogeymen figures indifferent to the deaths of their own children, wives and parents.

    What undoubtedly is happening is that Israel is allowing the strongest extended families in Gaza – often crime families with significant private arsenals – to loot the aid. That has become a serious problem since Israel killed off Gaza’s civilian police force (in violation of international law), leaving no one to enforce public order.

    When everyone’s starving, the most powerful families mobilise their strength to grab an unfair share of the aid. That was an entirely predictable outcome of Israel’s policy to smash all of Gaza’s institutions, including its hospitals, government offices, and police stations, on the bogus pretext that they were “Hamas”.

    Note too that Israel has long cultivated close ties to Palestinian crime families, because they provide a potential alternative, and more co-optable, power base to the Palestinian national movements and are a good source of collaborators.

    The evidence suggests Israel is encouraging these crime families to loot the aid precisely to justify its dismantling of an existing aid system that works remarkably well, given the catastrophic circumstances in Gaza, and replace it with its own militarised, completely inadequate “aid distribution” system, which is designed only to herd Palestinians into the southern-most tip of Gaza, ready to be expelled into Sinai.

    No journalist ought to be repeating Israel’s transparent disinformation. To do so is to collude in the promotion of lies to justify genocide. But the western media class have been doing that now for more than a year and half. They have grown entirely insensible to their own active collusion in the genocide.

    The post Israel’s Claim that “Hamas is stealing aid” is Patently a Lie first appeared on Dissident Voice.

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  • US Reinstates Funding to Propaganda Outlet

    The brief freeze and rapid partial reinstatement of National Endowment for Democracy (NED) funding in early 2025 helped expose it as a US regime-change tool. Created to rebrand CIA covert operations as “democracy promotion,” the NED channels government funds to opposition groups in Venezuela, Nicaragua and Cuba, meddling in their internal affairs.

    Regime change on the US agenda

     In 2018, Kenneth Wollack bragged to the US Congress that the NED had given political training to 8,000 young Nicaraguans, many of whom were engaged in a failed attempt to overthrow Nicaragua’s Sandinista government. Wollack was praising the “democracy-promotion” work carried out by NED, of which he is now vice-chair. Carl Gershman, then president of the NED and giving evidence, was asked about Nicaragua’s Daniel Ortega, who had been re-elected with an increased majority two years prior. He responded: “Time for him to go.”

    Seven years later, Trump took office and it looked as if the NED’s future was endangered. On February 12, the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) under Elon Musk froze disbursement of its congressionally approved funds. Its activities stopped and its website went blank. On February 24, Richard Grenell, special envoy to Venezuela, declared that “Donald Trump is someone who does not want to make regime changes.”

    Washington’s global regime-change operations were immediately impacted and over 2,000 paid US collaborating organizations temporarily defunded. A Biden-appointed judge warned of “potentially catastrophic harm” to (not in her words) US efforts to overturn foreign governments. The howl from the corporate press was deafening. The Associated Press cried: “‘Beacon of freedom’ dims as US initiatives that promote democracy abroad wither.”

    However, the pause lasted barely a month. On March 10, funding was largely reinstated.  The NED, which “deeply appreciated” the State Department’s volte face, then made public its current program which, in Latin America and the Caribbean alone, includes over 260 projects costing more than $40 million.

    US “soft power”

    Created in 1983 under President Ronald Reagan following scandals involving the CIA’s covert funding of foreign interventions, the NED was to shift such operations into a more publicly palatable form under the guise of “democracy promotion.” As Allen Weinstein, NED’s first acting president, infamously admitted in 1991: “A lot of what we do today was done covertly 25 years ago by the CIA.” In short, NED functions as a “soft power arm” of US foreign policy.

    The NED disingenuously operates as a 501(c)(3) private nonprofit foundation. However, it is nearly 100% funded by annual appropriations from the US Congress and governed mainly by Washington officials or ex-officials. In reality, it is an instrument of the US state—and, arguably, of the so-called deep state. But its quasi-private status shields it from many of the disclosure requirements that typically apply to taxpayer-funded agencies.

    Hence we encounter verbal gymnastics such as those in its “Duty of Care and Public Disclosure Policies.” That document loftily proclaims: “NED holds itself to high standards of transparency and accountability.” Under a discussion of its “legacy” (with no mention of its CIA pedigree), the NGO boasts: “Transparency has always been central to NED’s identity.”

    But it continues, “…transparency for oversight differs significantly from transparency for public consumption.” In other words, it is transparent to the State Department but not to the public. The latter are only offered what it euphemistically calls a “curated public listing of grants” – highly redacted and lacking in specific details.

    NED enjoys a number of advantages by operating in the nether region between an accountable US government agency and a private foundation. It offers plausible deniability: the US government can use it to support groups doing its bidding abroad without direct attribution, giving Washington a defense from accusations of interference in the internal affairs of other countries. It is also more palatable for foreign institutions to partner with what is ostensibly an NGO, rather than with the US government itself.

    The NED can also respond quickly if regime-change initiatives are needed in countries on Washington’s enemy list, circumventing the usual governmental budgeting procedures. And, as illustrated during that congressional presentation in 2018 on Nicaragua, NED’s activities are framed as supporting democracy, human rights, and civil society. It cynically invokes universal liberal values while promoting narrow Yankee geopolitical interests. Thus its programs are sold as altruistic rather than imperial, and earn positive media headlines like the one from the AP cited above.

    But a look at NED’s work in Venezuela, Nicaragua and Cuba suggests very much the opposite.

    Venezuela

     Venezuela had passed an NGO Oversight Law in 2024. Like the US’s Foreign Agents Registration Act, but somewhat less restrictive, the law requires certification of NGOs. As even the Washington Office on Latin America (WOLA) – an inside-the-beltway promoter of US imperialism with a liberal gloss –  admits: “Many Venezuelan organizations receiving US support have not been public about being funding recipients.”

    The pace of Washington’s efforts in Venezuela temporarily slowed with the funding pause, as US-funded proxies had to focus on their own survival. Venezuelan government officials, cheering the pause, viewed the NED’s interference in their internal affairs as a violation of Venezuelan sovereignty. In contrast, the US-funded leader of the far-right opposition, Maria Corina Machado, begged for international support to make up for the shortfall from Washington.

    WOLA bemoaned that the funding freeze allowed the “Maduro government to further delegitimize NGOs” paid by the US. Hundreds of US-funded organizations, they lamented, “now face the grim choice of going underground, relocating abroad, or shutting down operations altogether.”

    With the partial reinstatement of funding, now bankrolling at least 39 projects costing $3.4 million, former US senator and present NED board member Mel Martinez praised the NED for its “tremendous presence in Venezuela… supporting the anti-Maduro movement.”

    Nicaragua

     Leading up to the 2018 coup attempt, the NED had funded 54 projects worth over $4 million. Much of this went to support supposedly “independent” media, in practice little more than propaganda outlets for Nicaragua’s opposition groups. Afterward, the NED-funded online magazine Global Americans revealed that the NED had “laid “the groundwork for insurrection” in Nicaragua.

    One of the main beneficiaries, Confidencial, is owned by the Chamorro family, two of whose members later announced intentions to stand in Nicaragua’s 2021 elections. The family received well over $5 million in US government funding, either from the NED or directly from USAID (now absorbed into the State Department). In 2022, Cristiana Chamorro, who handled much of this funding, was found guilty of money laundering. Her eight-year sentence was commuted to house arrest; after a few months she was given asylum in the US.

    Of the 22 Nicaragua-related projects which NED has resumed funding, one third sponsor “independent” media. While the recipients’ names are undisclosed, it is almost certain that this funding is either for outlets like Confidencial (now based in Costa Rica), or else is going direct to leading opponents of the Sandinista government to pay for advertisements currently appearing in Twitter and other social media.

    Cuba

     In Latin America, Cuba is targeted with the highest level of NED spending – $6.6 million covering 46 projects. One stated objective is to create “a more well-informed, critically minded citizenry,” which appears laughable to anyone who has been to Cuba and talked to ordinary people there – generally much better informed about world affairs than a typical US citizen.

    Cuba’s Foreign Minister Bruno Rodríguez criticized the NED’s destabilizing activities, such as financing 54 anti-Cuba organizations since 2017. He advised the US administration to review “how many in that country [the US] have enriched themselves organizing destabilization and terrorism against Cuba with support from that organization.”

    Washington not only restored NED funding for attacks on Cuba but, on May 15, added Cuba to the list of countries that “do not fully cooperate with its anti-terrorist efforts.”

     The NED: Covert influence in the name of democracy

     Anyone with a basic familiarity with the Washington’s workings is likely to be aware of the NED’s covert role. Yet the corporate media – behaving as State Department stenographers and showing no apparent embarrassment – have degenerated to the point where they regularly portray the secretly funded NED outlets as “independent” media serving the targeted countries.

    Case in point: Washington Post columnist Max Boot finds it “sickening” that Trump is “trying [to] end US government support for democracy abroad.” He is concerned because astroturf “democracy promotion groups” cannot exist without the flow of US government dollars. He fears the “immense tragedy” of Trump’s executive order to cut off funding (now partially reinstated) for the US Agency for Global Media, the parent agency of the Voice of America, Radio Marti, and other propaganda outlets.

    Behind the moralistic appeals to democracy promotion and free press is a defense of the US imperial project to impose itself on countries such as Venezuela, Nicaragua and Cuba. Those sanctioned countries, targeted for regime change, need free access to food, fuel, medicines and funding for development. They don’t need to hear US propaganda beamed to them or generated locally by phonily “independent” media.

    The post US Reinstates Funding to Propaganda Outlet first appeared on Dissident Voice.

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  • Danish Politiken Smears China Based on CIA, US, EU and NATO Funded Sources

    In Danish here for Danish readers.

    The development – or decline – of the Danish daily newspaper Politiken as a quality newspaper in the field of foreign policy pains me. Allow me a personal, somewhat nostalgic introduction. I wrote frequently for Politiken from 1971 to 1994. As a 20-year-old sociology student, I was naturally proud to be published in what was then a prestigious, liberal media outlet, which was initially shaped by Hørup’s anti-militarism and cultural radicalism.

    In Denmark, there was a – albeit quite traditional but serious and multifaceted – discussion about the state of the world. There was actually quite a lot of room for different opinions, and it was natural that many opinions were expressed and met in the Danish media – creating the social debate that is essential for security, peace and democracy. There were debates on security policy around the country – in folk high schools, assembly halls, upper secondary schools and trade unions.

    How I miss that Denmark, which is dead and gone today.

    Back then, no one would dream of excluding/cancelling discussions about peace – nor did anyone suggest that Denmark should contribute to the militarisation of the world or participate in wars abroad – no, Denmark should first and foremost be able to defend itself against an attack or if, God forbid, Article 5 of the NATO Treaty should come into force. Denmark was called a ‘footnote nation;’ the principles were upheld that NATO membership was compatible with the country never accepting nuclear weapons, foreign bases, pre-positioning of equipment, weapons and ammunition on its soil, and that Denmark should not participate in NATO’s nuclear planning group.

    Those were the days. There were politicians who could both read books and write books – readable ones at that.

    And back then, long ago, Politiken was, in my view, the leading newspaper (along with Information, which, however, had less general influence) for common sense, diversity, broad social debate and room for both pro- and anti-military perspectives.

    And peace – and futurology, including global perspectives, Club of Rome reports, which I reviewed, etc.

    OK, things change over 50 years, of course. But Politiken’s current position on foreign and security policy is not a law of nature. Over time, the owners and editorial managers of the daily newspaper could have chosen to preserve at least some of the soul of what Politiken used to be.

    But where does Politiken – which still confidently calls itself ‘the organ of the highest enlightenment since 1884’ – stand today?

    For me, with the above background to compare (there are advantages to getting older…), it stands as one of the highest organs of propaganda about other countries and their – Western-determined – role as threats to the fine, pure, innocent Western world. Whether intentional or not, Politiken legitimises and promotes militarism infinitely more strongly than anti-militarism and peace.

    Today, it can rightly be called PolitPravda.

    My younger readers should know that Pravda was the organ of the Soviet Communist Party; Pravda means ‘the truth’ – and that wasn’t exactly what Pravda contained.

    In the areas of foreign and security policy, today’s Politiken runs on what I call FOSI – Fake+Omission+Source Ignorance. The newspaper’s management clearly sees its role as blindly loyal support for the militarism of the American empire – NATO, interventions, bombings, regime change, hatred of Russia – although not necessarily for Trump’s policies or the grabbing of Greenland.

    FOSI has been and continues to be practised in the coverage of Syria, Israel, Russia, Ukraine… Palestine. And China, which I discuss further down.

    *****

    I have just listened to the fifth episode of Politiken’s populist podcast series: Putin – The World’s Most Dangerous Man? The episode is alternately titled The Grand Plan and How He Is Creating a Generation of Ardent Nationalists. Listen here.

    It is incomprehensibly trivialising, intellectually lazy and unprofessional, with a few facts and guesswork about, for example, Putin’s daily routines, spiced with the journalist’s personal opinions and ‘assessments,’ interrupted now and then by exclusively US-Western media Russophobic expert quotes, which are concocted into breakneck interpretations of the banal central thesis that Putin is power-mad with his Grand Plan for the re-establishment of the old Soviet empire.

    No, dear reader, this is not political satire on Politiken’s humour page, ATS, or elsewhere. These are grown adults conveying this message without any form of analysis or arguments for or against the thesis, based solely on Western mainstream sources. It is blatant Russophobia, entirely in line with the relentless opinion-shaping efforts of the government, the military’ intelligence’ agency, FET, and other media outlets. It is opinion journalism of the worst kind and of no use whatsoever to anyone seeking qualified knowledge.

    There are no theories or concepts, and therefore no rigour. It is tabloid drivel at the lowest level of information and limited in its understanding, in that Russia and Putin are not seen as part of the international system or as a partner in a very complex conflict with the cultural West, which all Soviet/Russian leaders since Gorbaechev, also Putin, has stated clearly that they feel their country belongs to. In this presentation, Russia is an isolated entity – only action and never reaction. It is about a Russia that is only itself and in no way navigates the challenges posed by, for example, NATO. At Politiken, Russia is a pariah that can be talked about – and disparaged – however one pleases.

    This is the result of 110% groupthink, and there is only one possible attitude towards ourselves and towards Russia (and China). From my own experience, I know that it is impossible to get a response from today’s journalists if you point out that their portrayals are, for example, factually incorrect, biased and lacking in basic knowledge and fairness. Or if the top management has chosen a very specific systematic approach to reporting.

    How many times have you seen that this or that country is engaging in dis/misinformation – and that we must protect ourselves against this sedition? We are to understand that it is only the others who do this; we in the West do not engage in such mis/dis behaviour. It is only Russia that threatens us – we cannot in any way be perceived as threatening in the eyes of Russia or China. We have good intentions, but they do not.

    Coincidentally, this awful story about the CIA’s activities in China came out at the same time as Politiken’s series. You will not find that story in Politiken.

    Thus, nothing is too low, simple or stupidly propagandistic. It would be demeaning to children to describe it as ‘sandbox level.’

    This fifth podcast about the world’s most dangerous man is completely uninteresting if you want to know anything about Russia, Putin and international politics – including the invasion/war in Ukraine, which, in NATO agitprop style, is of course and quite foolishly called ‘full-scale,’ which is about the only thing (along with ‘unprovoked’) it cannot be described as. It is simply factual nonsense and should not have made it through quality control. When it does, it is because it is NATO speak, and therefore, there is no professional or ethical problem.

    I wonder how far they can go – and how long it will take – before loyal readers of the highest organ of propaganda realise that they are being deceived? When will the Pravda Moment hit Politiken’s readers?

    And if it is not deliberate deception, then it is simple ignorance and professional incompetence. A third – entirely hypothetical, of course – possibility is that senior editors at Politiken a little too often have lunch with people from the American embassy and say ‘No, thank you’ if they receive invitations from embassies that do not represent NATO and the EU.

    *****

    In keeping with the West’s incredible, rapid intellectual decline and impending fall, coupled with its support for armament and militarism, Politiken has also descended into pure propaganda when it comes to China. In an ‘analysis’ a few days ago, it claimed that China is hunting down critics all over the world. Read it here.

    In another, the theme is that China has infiltrated the UN and distorts and lies about everything related to human rights. Read it here. These are pure smear articles by journalist John Hansen and the newspaper’s Asia correspondent Sebastian Stryhn Kjeldtoft – who is based in Taipei, Taiwan, and not in mainland China.

    China has infiltrated the UN with an army of fake NGOs. Meet the gongos↗

    This is yet another example of how the media sees it as its primary task to write only negatively about China. You hardly ever see anything positive about China and its impressive development over the past 40 years. The classic themes are Tibet, Hong Kong, the ‘genocide’ and ‘concentration camps’ in Xinjiang, Xi Jinping is a dictator – and the system is a dictatorship because it is not a democracy in the Western sense – Chinese researchers, students and agents have stolen everything in the West, China’s military build-up is a threat to the Western world – and then, of course, Taiwan, which, according to Western media, is an independent state (or should be), but is constantly threatened by an invasion launched by Beijing.

    On the other hand, you never hear about what the US and the rest of the West are doing vis-à-vis China – and it is not small stuff and is not done on small budgets. TFF and my staff have mapped out this entire media-based Cold War initiated by the West. Read the full report with extensive, concrete documentation here.

    Both articles are based on material from an organisation that Politiken neither describes nor provides its readers with a link to, namely ‘the journalistic network ICIJ’ – as if readers already knew what ICIJ stands for, much like NATO or the EU. ICIJ’s website can be found here.

    I visited this website on 6 May 2025 and found that of the 13 top articles, 11 are about China – and only about how terrible China is. Several focus on the well-worn story of how China persecutes all Uyghurs. In Politiken, the issue of the Uyghurs in Xinjiang is presented by quoting Zumretay Arkin, vice-president of the World Uyghur Congress, ‘who is fighting for democracy and independence for the Uyghurs, an ethnic minority in the Xinjiang region of western China.’ (My italics).

    However, the whole thing is a little more complicated. A very small minority of Uyghurs want an independent East Turkestan and have been trying to achieve this goal for a couple of decades by carrying out around 1,200 terrorist attacks in and outside Xinjiang. The United States and US-backed terrorist movements support them, and the East Turkestan government-in-exile has been based in Washington for 20 years!

    Many have been arrested and sentenced to prison or re-education camps in China – and it is certainly no fun to be there. But it is also no fun for China that the United States supports violent separatist movements in its largest province – and that some of these Uighur terrorists have been trained by al-Nusra and have been fighting in Syria for years with the aim of returning to Xinjiang and ‘liberating’ it – a province considerably larger than France and with extensive natural resources, through which China’s new Silk Road project, BRI, involving 140 countries runs.

    But in Western media and political propaganda, the terrorist element of this is never mentioned; it is simply that China persecutes Muslims in general and Uighurs in particular. Because remember: this was said by Trump’s then-Secretary of State Mike Pompeo – a habitual liar and former CIA chief who has himself said that he is proud to have trained CIA agents to ‘lie, cheat and steal.’ On his last day at work, he left a ‘statement’ saying that what was happening in Xinjiang was genocide. Full stop. To date, the State Department has never backed this up with any form of documentation. But TFF has documented how this outright lie has come about, how it is part of the US media’s Cold War against China, and here you can read a report from Xinjiang, which I co-authored.

    People who have no idea what social analysis or journalism is – but have a political agenda – have since promoted the lie, the fake and omission. Whether they know what they are doing or are simply ignorant, I will leave unsaid – but neither is particularly honourable. And the very same media and politicians are simultaneously concealing the actual Israeli/Zionist genocide and ensuring that it is not stopped. The US and its media allies are – once again – at the centre of moral decay.

    Back to the ICIJ website. The ICIJ’s ‘Our team’ consists of 42 journalists; no less than 25 of them are listed as ‘United States,’ and it is indeed in Washington that the organisation has its headquarters. The chairwoman of the board, Rhona Murphy, has worked with a number of leading conservative American media outlets.

    And who finances the ICIJ – which Politiken’s source-uncritical China smear campaign chooses not to reveal to its readers in the two articles? Well, as I thought – yes, I have a nasty mind: A long list of government organisations, foundations and funds in NATO countries, in the West in general – none outside. See the list here.

    Three stand out: the EU, the US State Department and the usual suspect, NED – The National Endowment for Democracy, which is indisputably well known as a front organisation for the CIA. There is hardly a US regime change where NED has not pumped money into NGOs to carry out colour revolutions, etc. The organisation was created by Ronald Reagan, and a former NED director has stated that most people would not want to accept money directly from the CIA and that NED appears less controversial as an NGO.

    As I write this article, Politiken publishes another smear article on 6 May and an editorial by Marcus Rubin – a law graduate, former US correspondent for Politiken and now feature editor and member of the editorial board – with the cultured, journalistically objective headline: “China’s oppression is both lawless and boundless. It makes for frightening reading about an extremely powerful dictatorial regime.”

    A taste:

    It makes for frightening reading about an extremely powerful dictatorial regime whose power is spreading both in Asia and throughout the rest of the world, and which will stop at nothing. The goal of the campaign of repression is to stifle any criticism of the regime in Beijing by persecuting, subjugating and destroying its critics – wherever they may be. The Danish Security and Intelligence Service (PET) acknowledges the problems and assesses that China is also ‘attempting to exercise control over Chinese people in Denmark to a large extent.

    Not a single fact, not a single example, not a single piece of evidence. No documentation. It is as if Rubin asked an AI machine to ‘Write some shit about China.’

    The third article in the “highest level of information” about China appeared on 28 April with this sober headline: “Eric compares his former workplace to the Gestapo.” And the introduction reads:

    Chinese people who criticise the Communist Party are hunted down all over the world. Now one of the regime’s former manhunters, the spy “Eric”, tells his story in Politiken. For 15 years, he helped spy on and plan the kidnappings of dissidents, even though he secretly hated the Communists. Now Eric himself has become a victim.

    Like the other articles, the story is accompanied by a tasteful illustration of this type and begins:

    We meet “Eric” at dusk in an anonymous car in a secret location in Australia. He fumbles with the video camera, nervous that some detail in the background might reveal his location. He knows better than most what China’s hackers are capable of. Eric is convinced that his life is in danger. That is why Politiken does not publish his real name…

    So we are simply expected to believe Politiken: that this is objective journalism and not Sinophobic propaganda in the service of the US/the West. China’s intelligence service is like the Gestapo, and so you know that President Xi Jinping is like Hitler. And – surprise, surprise! – it is emphasised that the Chinese embassy has not responded to Politiken’s smear campaign.

    What Politiken naturally never covers is the positive development in China, for the people in general. That, according to the World Bank, 700 million people have been lifted out of poverty in record time. That the country has developed from a poor and dirty underdeveloped country 40 years ago to being the world’s most successful welfare state today, with a super-modern infrastructure, where people have access to education, health, employment, culture – and where incredible resources have been invested in research and development. Unique in the history of humankind.

    Would Politiken kindly publish the figures from the American Edelman Trust Barometer, which show that, year after year, China is the country in the world where the largest proportion of the population has trust in its government. The figure is around 90%; the corresponding figure is 30, some higher and some lower for many in the ‘democratic’ West.

    Would you kindly explain in an editorial how on earth it can be that over 120 million Chinese leave China every year to travel to the rest of the world and 99.999999% return and would not dream of settling permanently anywhere in the Western world. Oh yes, Marcus Rubin, they have all simply been completely brainwashed, haven’t they?

    I wonder if Politiken can find a single Westerner who has travelled around China as a tourist on their own for just 14 days and returned home with the same attitude towards China, the Communist Party and the population as Western racist US/NATO agitprop media continue to have in the current Yellow Peril hysteria, which Politiken also shamelessly and ignorantly promotes with its smear campaigns?

    I am not saying that various media outlets should write hallelujah articles about China. Journalism should never be about conveying a solely positive or solely negative image. It should be about being curious, being fair and conveying facts that are useful for the highest level of public information.

    Politiken simply does not do this. Or it prefers its agitprop role.

    *****

    Politiken’s writers make a big deal out of the fact that China has so-called ‘gongos’ – governmental non-governmental organisations, i.e. government-controlled/influenced NGOs. That is absolutely correct. But it does not occur to them that the ICIJ – and tons of Western NGOs – are wholly or partly funded by their governments and therefore, in practice, also have a restricted mandate and become near-governmental. It does not occur to them – because they have hardly investigated it, as they are uncritical of their sources as long as the message is anti-China (sinophobic) – that they are promoting claims without documentation from the ICIJ, which is partly funded by the US government, including the NED…CIA.

    Even less – one would hope – does it occur to them that they are helping to legitimise armament and increase the risk of actual war between the US/NATO and Russia and/or China. All false threat scenarios have that consequence.

    If Politiken is the organ of the highest information, the lights have gone out on the Danish mass media scene. The articles I have reviewed here are so journalistically poor and so propagandistic that it is far more accurate and relevant to compare Politiken with the old Pravda. (I am only talking about foreign and security policy areas – not about Politiken as a whole).

    Which reminds me that one of the most unique bridge builders between Russia, Ukraine and the United States, Edward Lozensky (1941-2025), has just passed away. Read about him here. Among many other things, he is known for this spot-on description of reality – that of the Western world – which only causes me pain in my heart:

    “The Americans are busy
    turning their country into the Soviet Union.
    And they don’t even realise they’re doing it.”

    This does not only apply to the United States. It applies to the entire Western world. It applies to Denmark. And to PolitPravda.

    The post Danish Politiken Smears China Based on CIA, US, EU and NATO Funded Sources first appeared on Dissident Voice.

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  • Russia, the Defeat of Nazism, and the Collaborationist West

    On May 9 Russia welcomed twenty-seven heads of state from around the world to commemorate the 80th anniversary of the conclusion of the Great Patriotic War, which ended in victory over the Nazis, one of the greatest achievements in Russian history, and one that would make any nation justly proud.

    The United States likes to portray the defeat of Nazism as a glorious U.S. achievement, with a nod to British, Canadian, Australian, French and a few others for their supporting roles. This ignores the central fact that the Wehrmacht had been ground nearly to pulp by the time the U.S. invaded Normandy on June 6, 1944, an event that 80 years of Hollywood fantasies have attempted to transform into the key battle of the war. In reality, however, this much-delayed opening of a second front in the European war occurred when Hitler’s troops had been reduced to mostly children and old men, the military-aged soldiers having perished in gargantuan numbers on the Eastern front. Tens of millions of Soviet soldiers and civilians were also killed there, a large majority deliberately starved by Hitler, who looked to eliminate Slavic peoples and re-populate their territories with a civilized master race of “Aryans.”

    U.S. mind-managers have dispatched this immense Russian agony to Orwell’s memory hole, along with the suffering of the Chinese, who lost about half as much as the USSR on the battlefield (which was still an enormous total) in horrendous camps, and in “scientific” laboratories that treated them like experimental rats. British, French, and American losses, especially civilian deaths, were but a tiny fraction of these.

    The ferocity of the battles fought in Leningrad, Moscow, Stalingrad, and Kursk defies description and is well beyond the West’s impoverished moral capacity to even begin to apprehend. Three million Nazi soldiers invaded the USSR with the launching of Operation Barbarossa on June 22, 1941.  This represented eighty percent of the German Army, almost all of whom were either killed, captured, or wounded over the subsequent three years. Meanwhile, the USSR not only fought the invading Germans, but also ardent Nazi-supporters in Poland, Ukraine, Hungary, Romania, and Bulgaria, along with other European countries that facilitated German military operations and replaced fallen German soldiers in battle.

    Both Churchill and FDR accepted that it was the USSR that defeated the Nazis. Western supplies helped, but it was the heart and determination of the Red Army that brought the Nazi beast down.

    After the war, the Western powers obscured this story with a fanciful tale of being the most heroic human rights champions in history. But it was actually the Red Army that shot anti-Semites while Western myth-makers re-invented the Jew-haters as anti-Communist freedom fighters worthy of admiration.

    Renewing the Cold War it had initiated in 1917 in reaction to the Bolshevik Revolution, Washington imposed a “cordon-sanitaire” in order to eradicate Communism in Western Europe, a broadly-defined demon class that included major elements of the wartime anti-fascist resistance and trade union movements while those who had accommodated Nazism or gone into hiding faced no such exclusion.

    Today’s inheritors of collaborationist Europe have redoubled their attacks on Russia with economic sanctions and anti-Russian “human rights” tribunals, all in the name of a “never again” anti-genocide crusade that lacks even the slightest pretense of concern for Israel’s ongoing extermination of the Palestinian people.

    Our problems go far beyond Donald Trump.

    Source:

    “Victory Day: Rescuing the Truth,” La Jornada, May 10, 2025 (Spanish)

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  • Starvation in Gaza is so bad even the BBC is covering it – and reporting it all wrong

    The BBC’s role is not to keep viewers informed. It’s to persuade them a clear crime against humanity by Israel is, in fact, highly complicated geopolitics they cannot hope to understand

    You can tell how bad levels of starvation now are in Gaza, as the population there begins the third month of a complete aid blockade by Israel, because last night the BBC finally dedicated a serious chunk of its main news programme, the News at Ten, to the issue.

    But while upsetting footage of a skin-and-bones, five-month-old baby was shown, most of the segment was, of course, dedicated to confusing audiences by two-sidesing Israel’s genocidal programme of starving 2 million-plus Palestinian civilians.

    Particularly shocking was the BBC’s failure in this extended report to mention even once the fact that Israel’s prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, has been a fugitive for months from the International Criminal Court, which wants him on trial for crimes against humanity. Why? For using starvation as a weapon of war against the civilian population.

    I have yet to see the BBC, or any other major British media outlet, append the status “wanted war crimes suspect” when mentioning Netanyahu in stories. That is all the more unconscionable on this occasion, in a story directly related to the very issue – starving a civilian population – he is charged over.

    Was mention of the arrest warrant against him avoided because it might signal a little too clearly that the highest legal authorities in the world attribute starvation in Gaza directly to Israel and its government, and do not see it – as the British establishment media apparently do – as some continuing, unfortunate “humanitarian” consequence of “war”.

    Predictably misleading, too, was BBC Verify’s input. It provided a timeline of Israel’s intensified blockade that managed to pin the blame not on Israel, even though it is the one blocking all aid, but implicitly on Hamas.

    Verify’s reporter asserted that in early March, Israel “blocked humanitarian aid, demanding that Hamas extend a ceasefire and release the remaining hostages”. He then jumped to 18 March, stating: “Israel resumes military operations.”

    Viewers were left, presumably intentionally, with the impression that Hamas had rejected a continuation of the ceasefire and had refused to release the last of the hostages.

    None of that is true. In fact, Israel never honoured the ceasefire, continuing to attack Gaza and kill civilians throughout. But worse, Israel’s supposed “extension” was actually its unilateral violation of the ceasefire by insisting on radical changes to the terms that had already been agreed, and which included Hamas releasing the hostages.

    Israel broke the ceasefire precisely so it had the pretext it needed to return to starving Gaza’s civilians – and the hostages whose safety it proclaims to care about – as part of its efforts to make them so desperate they are prepared to risk their lives by forcing open the short border with neighbouring Sinai sealed by Egypt.

    Yesterday, an Israeli government minister once again made clear what the game plan has been from the very start. “Gaza will be entirely destroyed,” Bezalel Smotrich, the finance minister, said. Gaza’s population, he added, would be forced to “leave in great numbers to third countries”. In other words, Israel intends to carry out what the rest of us would call the ethnic cleansing of Palestinians, as it has been doing continuously for eight decades.

    Simply astonishing. We’ve had 19 months of Israeli government ministers and military commanders telling us they are destroying Gaza. They’ve destroyed Gaza. And yet, Western politicians and media still refuse to call it a genocide.

    What is the point of the BBC’s Verify service—supposedly there to fact-check and ensure viewers get only the unvarnished truth—when its team is itself peddling gross distortions of the truth?

    The BBC and its Verify service are not keeping viewers informed. They are propagandising them into believing a clear crime against humanity by Israel is, in fact, highly complicated geopolitics that audiences cannot hope to understand.

    The establishment media’s aim is to so confuse audiences that they will throw up their hands and say: “To hell with Israel and the Palestinians! They are as bad as each other. Leave it to the politicians and diplomats to sort out.”

    In any other circumstance, it would strike you as obvious that starving children en masse is morally abhorrent, and that anyone who does it, or excuses it, is a monster. The role of the BBC is to persuade you that what should be obvious to you is, in fact, more complicated than you can appreciate.

    There may be skin-and-bones babies, but there are also hostages. There may be tens of thousands of children being slaughtered, but there is also a risk of antisemitism. Israeli officials may be calling for the eradication of the Palestinian people, but the Jewish state they run needs to be preserved at all costs.

    If we could spend five minutes in Gaza without the constant, babbling distractions of these so-called journalists, the truth would be clear. It’s a genocide. It was always a genocide.

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    This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Jonathan Cook.

    This post was originally published on Radio Free.

  • Now is the Time for All Anti-Imperialists and All Justice-Loving People to Stand Unequivocally in Defense of Burkina Faso

    It is no surprise to the Black Alliance for Peace’s (BAP) Africa Team and U.S. Out of Africa Network (USOAN) that aggression is stepping up against the countries in the anti-imperialist Alliance of Sahel States. This was reflected in the flagrantly baseless accusations against Burkina Faso’s leader Ibrahim Traoré. On April 3, 2025, U.S. AFRICOM Commander Michael Langley testified to the Senate Armed Services Committee and claimed without evidence that interim President Traoré is misusing the country’s gold mineral wealth in exchange for protection. Langley provided no details on how these supposed exchanges are carried out or from what Traoré needs protection.

    The imperialist modus operandi is at play here and starts with demonizing and criminalizing the leader of a country as the war propaganda pretext for more direct intervention. We have seen this script before. Commander-In-Chief of Economic Fighters League of Ghana and Steering Committee member of the USOAN,  Ernesto Yeboah refutes the liberal framing meant to arrest dissent against what is at stake:

    This is not about military vs. civilian rule. This is about imperialism vs. liberation. This is about Africans standing up — finally — and saying: Hands off Africa.

    The BAP Africa Team and USOAN are heeding the call emanating across Africa to unite in defense of Burkina Faso. And we further call on all anti-imperialist forces around the world, especially Black forces, to sound the alarm and publicly denounce these designs before this all too familiar strategy takes root. In 2011, Black anti-imperialist forces were unable to effectively counter the heinous plan of the U.S.-EU-NATO Axis of Domination to destroy the revolutionary Pan-Africanist nation of Libya. BAP’s USOAN refuses to allow this fatal mistake to be repeated.

    This time the complicity of silence by ECOWAS, the African Union, the Congressional Black Caucus, and the African (Black) comprador class around the world must be exposed.

    This is a pivotal time for the struggle against imperialism in Africa. The emergence of the Alliance of Sahel States (AES) and the revolutionary example of self-determination being set by the people of Burkina Faso represents a historic breakthrough for Pan-Africanism that the U.S. and NATO have been eager to eliminate. The U.S.-EU-NATO axis is desperate to re-colonize Burkina Faso and to halt any further influence across Africa set by the example of the Alliance of Sahel States. What the U.S is angling to undermine is a popular process of decolonization.

    Under President Traoré’s leadership, Burkina Faso has advanced toward food sovereignty, established a national gold refinery, and taken critical steps to reclaim its resources for the benefit of its people. The vague and opportunistic accusations issued by AFRICOM are designed to undermine these gains and set the stage for imperialist subversion. When U.S. officials speak of “strategic interests,” they mean the unfettered right to plunder Africa’s mineral wealth, dominate markets, and exploit African labor, all without the consent of African peoples. We must not allow the absurdity of the U.S. and NATO, currently complicit in the genocide of Palestinians, to pose as moral arbiters in Africa.

    BAP and USOAN call on all anti-imperialist forces to join in active defense of Burkina Faso, demand the expulsion of AFRICOM from the continent, and ensure that no African nation suffers the fate that befell Libya in 2011.

    The time to act is now!

    The post Now is the Time for All Anti-Imperialists and All Justice-Loving People to Stand Unequivocally in Defense of Burkina Faso first appeared on Dissident Voice.

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  • Why I Wrote an Expert Report against the UK Classing Hamas as a Terror Group

    Predictably, the British establishment is vilifying lawyers trying to end the proscription of Hamas’ political as well as armed wing. The lawyers have good arguments. So why is no one listening?

    This is the first time I have had to begin an opinion column with both a journalistic disclosure and a legal disclaimer. But hey ho, these are dystopian times we live in.

    The disclosure: I was one of 20 people who contributed expert reports for a recent legal submission to the British home secretary, Yvette Cooper, calling on her to end the proscription of Hamas as a terrorist organisation.

    You can read my submission – on the significant damage done to journalism by Hamas’ proscription – here.

    If, as widely expected, Cooper does not approve the application, prepared by the London-based Riverway Law firm on behalf of Hamas, within the 90-day time limit, her decision will be referred to an appeal tribunal for judicial review.

    The disclaimer: Nothing that follows is intended in any way to encourage you to take a more favourable view of Hamas. It is not intended in any way to encourage you to support Hamas. It does not endorse opinions or beliefs that are supportive of Hamas, as set out in the submissions calling for the de-proscription of Hamas.

    The danger is this: under Section 12 of Britain’s draconian Terrorism Act of 2000, if anything I write, however inadvertently, encourages you to think more favourably of a proscribed organisation like Hamas, I face up to 14 years in jail.

    The purpose of this article is to show how the law and the establishment operate together to stifle legitimate criticism of the Israeli occupation.

    The law is so loosely worded that the British government, supported by a counter-terrorism police seemingly only too eager to please, can potentially arrest anyone praising the work of Gaza’s public hospitals in saving lives because Hamas is in charge of the enclave’s government, or prosecute anyone, including media outlets, giving a platform to Hamas politicians trying to advance a ceasefire.

    If all this sounds crazy, given both that stating facts should not be illegal and that I cannot possibly know how anyone might receive and feel about any information regarding Hamas, then you are starting to understand why the application to the home secretary is so urgent and important.

    Secret meetings

    The UK may have declared Hamas’ armed wing a terrorist organisation a quarter of a century ago, but its political and administrative wings were added to the proscribed list much more recently – in 2021.

    Which is why Cooper, the current home secretary, was misleading in the way she dismissively responded to the de-proscription application submitted to her office. She told LBC: “Hamas has long been a terrorist organisation. We maintain our view about the barbaric nature of this organisation.”

    It was Priti Patel who, as home secretary, added Hamas in its entirety, including its political and administrative wings, to the proscription list shortly after she was rehabilitated and readmitted to Boris Johnson’s government in 2019.

    Two years earlier, she had been forced to resign from her post as international development secretary in disgrace.

    Why? Because she was found to have held 12 secret meetings with senior Israeli officials, including Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, without disclosing those meetings to her colleagues and while she was supposedly on a family holiday.

    It later emerged she had also secretly met other Israeli officials in New York and Westminster.

    Patel’s political career, to put it politely, has been distinguished by an evident attentiveness to Israeli concerns.

    Undoubtedly her decision to proscribe Hamas’ political and administrative wings, treating them as identical to the armed section of the organisation, was high on Israel’s wish list.

    It instantly degraded Britain’s political discourse so that it became all but impossible to discuss Hamas’ rule in Gaza or Israel’s blockade of the enclave in a balanced or realistic way. It resulted in a simplistic black-and-white picture of life in the enclave in which everything Hamas was bad – and therefore, by contrast, everything Israeli was good.

    That would spectacularly serve Israeli interests two years later, when, following the Hamas-led attacks on 7 October 2023, Israel fed the western media entirely fabricated stories of Hamas “beheading babies” and carrying out “mass rapes”.

    For months afterwards, as Israel set about murdering Palestinians in Gaza en masse and levelling their homes, the only question media interviewers directed at anyone criticising Israel’s actions was this: “Do you condemn Hamas?”

    Even the ever-swelling death toll figures recorded by Gaza’s health ministry – proven to be so reliable in previous Israeli attacks that international bodies and the Israeli military itself relied on them – were suddenly treated as suspect and inflated. Independent research continues to suggest otherwise.

    Western media outlets appended “Hamas-run” to the health ministry, and its casualty figures – almost certainly a massive undercount given Israel’s systematic destruction of the health sector – were now reported only as a “claim”.

    In turn, these deceptions were implicitly used to justify Israel’s own, far greater atrocities in killing and maiming hundreds of thousands of Palestinians, most of them women and children, destroying the enclave’s hospitals and supporting infrastructure, while at the same time starving the entire population.

    Eighteen months on, “evil Hamas” is still the story, not Israel’s all-too-obvious genocide.

    Bullied into silence

    Concerns about Hamas being proscribed in its entirety – not just its armed wing – are far from hypothetical, given the expansive wording of the UK’s Terrorism Act since 2019, when it was amended.

    In particular, a revision to Section 12 means that anyone who “expresses an opinion or belief that is supportive of a proscribed organisation”, and one that might “encourage support” for that organisation, is liable to arrest by terrorism police, prosecution, and up to 14 years in jail.

    For expressing an opinion.

    The wording is so vague that, for example, simply criticising Israel for committing greater and more numerous atrocities than Hamas could theoretically have the counter-terrorism police banging on your door.

    To avoid prosecution, Riverway Law’s website dedicated to its application to the home secretary carries a legal disclaimer: “By entering this website you acknowledge that none of the contents can be understood as supporting, or expressing support for, proscribed terrorist organisations under the Terrorism Act 2000.”

    Several independent British journalists and commentators – those whose careers are not dictated, and protected, by billionaires or the UK state broadcaster – have had their homes raided at dawn by counter-terrorism police or been arrested at the border as they return home.

    One political commentator, Tony Greenstein – who also happens to be Jewish and a trained lawyer – is currently being prosecuted under Section 12 of the Terrorism Act. Others are under prolonged investigation. They have the threat of prosecution hanging over their heads like a sword.

    The rest of us are meant to take note, feeling the chilling effect. Do we want the police breaking down the door of our homes at dawn? Do we want to be arrested on return from holiday, our partners and children looking on in horror?

    The National Union of Journalists has called the police actions against journalists “abuse and mis-use of counter-terror legislation” and warned that they risk “threatening the safety of journalists”, as well as their sources.

    Understandably, you may be barely aware of these repressive police tactics, which have been accelerating since Keir Starmer came to power. He, let us recall, personally approved, as opposition leader, Israel’s crime against humanity of blocking food, water and power to Gaza.

    The BBC and the rest of the media have failed to meaningfully report these incidents – which are characteristic elsewhere of police states.

    Is that because these media outlets are themselves cowed into submission by the Terrorism Act?

    Or is it because they are simply mouthpieces of the same British establishment that made it illegal to express support for objectives which are the same as those sought by Hamas’ political, as opposed to military, objectives?

    Let us remember – and it’s easy to forget, given how rarely such things are mentioned by the British media – that the same UK state that proscribed Hamas continues to arm Israel directly, helps ship weapons from other countries to Israel, supplies Israel with intelligence from British spy planes over Gaza, and provides Israel with diplomatic cover – all while Israel carries out what the International Court of Justice (ICJ) calls a “plausible genocide”, and while its sister International Criminal Court (ICC) seeks the arrest of Netanyahu for crimes against humanity.

    The British government is not a neutral party in the levelling of Gaza, the decimation of its people by bombs, the ethnic cleansing of swaths of the enclave, or the starvation of the population. It is actively assisting Israel in its genocidal campaign.

    The UK establishment is also, through its proscription of Hamas and the wording of the Terrorism Act, bullying journalists, academics, politicians, lawyers – in fact, anyone – into silence about the context of its complicity, into an unwillingness to scrutinise its rationalisations for collusion in genocide.

    ‘No civilians’

    There are two main objectives behind Riverway Law’s submission to the home secretary against Hamas’ proscription as a violation of the European Convention on Human Rights.

    The first concerns the proscription of the entire organisation by the British government. This is the part of the legal submission that has attracted most attention – and which has been used to vilify the lawyers involved

    As barrister Franck Magennis has explained, Riverway’s hands were tied because Patel – now the shadow foreign secretary – added Hamas to the list as a single entity in 2021, making no distinction between its different wings. That meant the lawyers had no choice but to petition for the entire group to be deproscribed.

    The government set the terms of the legal debate, not Hamas or its legal representatives.

    Hamas’ lawyers accept that its military wing meets the definition of a terrorist organisation under the terms of the UK’s Terrorism Act. They argue this law casts the net so wide that any organisation using violence to achieve political ends is covered, including the Israeli, Ukrainian and British militaries.

    The establishment media have tried to smear Riverway and its barristers as Hamas “stooges” and supporters of terrorism – amply illustrating why the case is so necessary.

    An openly hostile interviewer for LBC appeared to think he had caught out Magennis in some kind of ethical or professional lapse because he chose to represent Hamas without payment – as he must do under UK law because Hamas is a proscribed organisation.

    The implication was that Magennis was so enthusiastically supportive of terrorism that he was willing to take on time-consuming and career-damaging work for free – rather than that he is doing so because there are vitally important legal and ethical principles at stake.

    Not least, the proscription of Hamas’ political wing, including its governmental and administrative institutions, treats them as extensions of the armed struggle.

    It breathes life into Israel’s patently ridiculous claims that all of Gaza’s 36 hospitals are really “Hamas command and control centres”, that Gaza’s doctors can be killed or arrested and taken to torture camps because they are “Hamas operatives” in disguise, and that Gaza’s paramedics can be executed because their rescue missions supposedly aid Hamas.

    And worse, ultimately proscription supports Israeli leaders’ genocidal statements that there are “no civilians in Gaza”, a place where half the population are children.

    Bargaining chips

    The proscription of Hamas in its entirety ignores the fact that the group has political goals – ones Gaza’s population voted for 19 years ago to liberate themselves from decades of Israel’s brutal and illegal military occupation. Those goals are distinct from Hamas, yet expressing support for the objectives gives rise to the risk of being investigated by the police and prosecuted by the Crown Prosecution Service (CPS).

    Gaza’s people – the less than half who were old enough to vote two decades ago – were driven down the path of supporting armed resistance in the pursuit of national liberation for an all-too-obvious reason. Because Israel had refused to make any concessions to Hamas’ political rivals, headed by Mahmoud Abbas in the West Bank.

    Abbas, head of the Palestinian Authority, has been using strictly diplomatic means – which Israel also opposes – to achieve statehood.

    The proscription of Hamas sweeps out of view the fact that a people under occupation have a right enshrined in international law to use armed struggle against their military oppressors. It makes it perilously dangerous to show support for the armed struggle of Gaza’s Palestinians lest you are accused of breaching Section 12 of the Terrorism Act 2000.

    Proscription sanctions the failure by western politicians and media to distinguish between Hamas actions on 7 October 2023 that accord with international law, such as its attacks on Israeli military bases, and illegitimate actions targeting Israeli civilians.

    It reverses reality, treating all those Israelis held in Gaza as hostages who have been kidnapped, even those who are soldiers, while approving of Israel’s kidnapping of Palestinians in Gaza, from medical staff to children.

    The latter are supposedly “arrested”. They are referred to by the western media as “prisoners”, even though most have not been charged or put on trial, and the main purpose of their detention seems to be as bargaining chips in an exchange for Israelis captive in Gaza.

    And finally, since 2021, Britain’s proscription of Hamas’ political wing has effectively meant the UK has given its backing both to Israel’s refusal to talk to Gaza’s government, and to Israel’s near two-decade-old siege of Gaza that turned it into little more than a concentration camp holding 2.3 million Palestinians, further radicalising the population.

    British politicians should understand quite how self-defeating such an approach is. After all, it was only through talking to Sinn Fein, the political wing of the “terrorist” IRA group, that Britain was able to negotiate a peace deal, the Good Friday Agreement, in Northern Ireland in 1998.

    Hamas stated in its revised 2017 charter that it is ready to make territorial concessions with Israel – based on the traditional two-state solution.

    And it does so again in its application to the home secretary, calling the two-state solution the “national consensus” among Palestinians.

    The submission notes that Israel has repeatedly assassinated Hamas leaders, including Ahmed Jabari and Ismail Haniyeh, when they were close to concluding ceasefire agreements, in what looks suspiciously like attempts by Israel to undermine more moderate voices within the organisation.

    Through proscription, Britain has handed Israel a permanent licence to refuse to test Hamas’ willingness to compromise.

    Attack on lawyers

    Robert Jenrick, Britain’s shadow justice secretary, has called for Riverway Law and its barristers to be investigated and struck off for representing Hamas – apparently forgetting the foundational principle in law that everyone, even serial killers, have a right to legal representation if the law is not to become a hollow charade.

    The Terrorism Act includes provision for an appeal by proscribed organisations against their inclusion on the list. How are they to go through the legal procedure to appeal their listing apart from through lawyers?

    Disgracefully, Starmer’s officials have once again kept their silence as Hamas’ legal representatives in the UK have been turned into targets for establishment abuse. The government is as complicit in the assault at home on basic democratic rights, such as free speech and the rule of law, as it has been complicit abroad in Israel’s genocide in Gaza.

    How would the Starmer government have reacted had the two British barristers who defended Israel against South Africa’s case against genocide at the ICJ last year been publicly maligned for doing so? Would it have been okay to tar those lawyers with the crimes against humanity committed by their client?

    Fahad Ansari, director of Riverway Law, has written to the government, urging it to speak up in defence of this team’s right to challenge Hamas’ proscription, and warning that Jenrick’s “comments are not only reckless and libellous but amount to incitement against our staff members”.

    He has reminded the justice secretary, Shabana Mahmood, of the previous murder of lawyers for taking on cases that challenged the British establishment, including Pat Finucane, who was killed by Ulster loyalists in collusion with the British security services, after he won several human rights cases against the British government.

    Hamas’ submission makes the case that Patel provided several false grounds to justify the proscription of Hamas in its entirety.

    Hamas disputes Patel’s characterisation of it as a terrorist organisation. It notes that international law allows people illegally occupied and oppressed to resist through military means.

    Hamas’ former political bureau chief Mousa Abu Marzouk notes in his witness statement on behalf of Hamas that Hamas’ operation on 7 October 2023 was intended only to strike military targets, and that atrocities carried out by its fighters that day against civilians had not been authorised by the leadership and are not condoned.

    It is impossible to know whether that claim is true.

    It is also incredibly hard to draw attention to factors which could be said to support Abu Marzouk’s argument without also being alleged to have invited support for Hamas or as expressing an opinion or belief that is supportive of Hamas – which would risk being accused of a criminal offence under Section 12.

    In addition to the false stories spread by Israel, such as that Hamas “beheaded babies” and carried out “mass rape”, it is known that other, presumably less disciplined, groups broke out of Gaza that day as well as Hamas. Apparently no effort has been made to determine which groups carried out which atrocities.

    And then there is the fact that an unknown number of the atrocities blamed on Hamas were actually caused by Israel’s green-lighting of its Hannibal directive, which authorised the Israeli military to kill its own soldiers and citizens to prevent them being seized. That included firing missiles into kibbutz homes and on vehicles heading towards Gaza, leaving only charred remains of the occupants.

    The proscription of Hamas makes it legally dangerous to draw attention to the sickening acts of the Israeli government.

    Also worth noting is that Hamas makes clear in its submission that, unlike Israel, it is ready to have its actions that day investigated by international bodies and any of its fighters who committed atrocities put on trial.

    “We remain, as always, prepared to cooperate with any international investigations and inquiries into the operation, even if ‘Israel’ refuses to do so,” Abu Marzouk writes.

    He calls on “the ICC Prosecutor and his team to immediately and urgently come to occupied Palestine to look into the crimes and violations committed there, rather than merely observing the situation remotely or being subject to the Israeli restrictions.”

    Public demonised

    Abu Marzouk points out that Britain is not a dispassionate observer of Israel’s genocide unfolding in Gaza. As the colonial power in Palestine for much of the first half of the last century, it permitted European Jews to colonise the Palestinian people’s homeland, effectively leaving the latter stateless.

    “Unsurprisingly,” Abu Marzouk writes, “the British state continues to side with the genocidal Zionist coloniser, while proscribing organisations like ours that strive to assert Palestinian dignity.”

    Which alludes to the second main purpose of Hamas’ application.

    The British state has a legal obligation to prevent Israel’s current crimes against humanity and genocide in Gaza. And those in a position to shed light on Israel’s atrocities – and thereby add to the pressure on the British government and international bodies to fulfil their legal obligations – have a duty to do so too.

    That means lawyers, journalists, human rights groups, academics and researchers should be as free as possible to contribute information and analyses that hold both Israel to account for its continuing crimes and the British state for any collusion in those crimes.

    But as noted earlier, what Hamas’ proscription has done is precisely stifle expert discourse about what is happening in Gaza. Those who try to speak up, from independent journalists to lawyers, have found themselves vilified, bullied or threatened with prosecution by the British state.

    Increasingly, this crackdown is being extended to the wider public.

    Proscription has paved the way for the arrest and jailing of peace activist groups like Palestine Action trying to stop the UK-based arms manufacturer Elbit producing the quadcopters Israel is using to finish off civilians, including children, injured in air strikes on Gaza.

    Proscription has paved the way for demonising mass public marches and student campus demonstrations against Israel’s genocide as pro-Hamas and “hate protests”.

    Proscription has paved the way for the police to place ever-tighter restrictions on such demonstrations, to arrest the organisers, and to investigate prominent figures like Jeremy Corbyn and John McDonnell who take part in them.

    “Rather than allow freedom of speech, police have embarked on a campaign of political intimidation and persecution of journalists, academics, peace activists and students over their perceived support for Hamas,” the application argues.

    But while those opposed to genocide find themselves maligned as supporters of terrorism, those actually committing crimes against humanity – whether Israeli leaders or British nationals taking part as soldiers in the genocide in Gaza – are still being welcomed in Britain with open arms.

    UK Foreign Secretary David Lammy met his Israeli counterpart, Gideon Saar, in London last month for a so-called “private meeting”. The British government apparently agreed to Saar’s visit, even though it must have known it would trigger requests from legal groups for his arrest for war crimes.

    British officials have also hosted senior Israeli military figures.

    Meanwhile, a legal dossier handed to the Metropolitan Police last month against 10 Britons accused of committing war crimes in Gaza, such as killing civilians and aid workers, has made barely any ripples.

    Where is the outrage meted out by the media and politicians for Britons who have chosen to travel to Gaza to fight with an army that has killed and maimed many tens of thousands of Palestinian children there?

    There is more to say, but saying more risks arrest by the UK’s counter-terrorism police and jail time. Which is why ending Hamas’ proscription needs to happen as soon as possible.

    And why the British establishment, from politicians to the media, are so determined to close ranks and foil the application.

  • First published in Middle East Eye on 1 May 2025.
    • The post Why I Wrote an Expert Report against the UK Classing Hamas as a Terror Group first appeared on Dissident Voice.

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • The Drip-drip of Slanted Gaza Reporting Erodes Our Sense of Right and Wrong

    It is quite possible to take apart virtually any report in the Guardian on Gaza – as I have done with a story in today’s paper – and identify the same kinds of journalistic malpractice.

    Further, I could have taken any paragraph in the article and parsed it in much the same way as I do below. But for the sake of brevity, I have selected four paragraphs (each in bold) that illustrate the abysmal state of reporting about Gaza by Britain’s supposedly most serious, liberal newspaper.

    Note that these misrepresentations are included in a story that is ostensibly critical of Israel. A new report by the United Nations accuses Israel of physically abusing and torturing its staff, including teachers, doctors, and social workers, and of using others as human shields.

    The language and framing used by the Guardian below serve to dilute the impact of the UN report, and thereby give Israel’s behaviour far more legitimacy than it deserves.

    “The Palestine Red Crescent Society said on Tuesday that Israel had released a medic held since a deadly and hugely controversial attack by Israeli troops on ambulances in southern Gaza on 23 March.”

    “Hugely controversial” is the Guardian’s cowardly way of referring to an indisputable atrocity. Israel murdered 15 paramedics and fire crew members in a three-and-a-half-minute hail of bullets on clearly marked emergency vehicles. Israel then crushed the vehicles, and buried them and the crews’ bodies to hide the evidence.

    In what world is that only “controversial”?

     

    “Controversy” implies two sides to an issue. It suggests room for doubt. There is no debate or doubt about what happened, apart from one perpetuated by the Western media. Had Russia done the same to Ukrainian medics, the Guardian would be calling it what it is: a war crime.

    War crimes aren’t “controversial”. They are war crimes.

    “Israel banned all cooperation with UNRWA’s activities in Gaza and the occupied West Bank earlier this year, and claims the [United Nations] agency has been infiltrated by Hamas, an allegation that has been fiercely contested.”

    Again, “fiercely contested” is the Guardian’s weaselly way of giving credence to an obvious Israeli lie. Israel has had many, many months to produce even a sliver of evidence to support its claim that Hamas infiltrated the UN refugee agency, UNRWA – and they have signally failed to do so.

    To call the smear an “allegation” and claim it is “contested” is to suggest that someone apart from Israel takes the smear seriously. They don’t. That is why it is a smear.

    “Rights groups accuse Israel of using a ‘starvation tactic’ that endangers the whole population, potentially making it a war crime.”

    It is not just “rights groups”, and it’s not just an “accusation”. The International Criminal Court has an arrest warrant out for Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu for crimes against humanity, and one of those crimes is for starving Gaza’s population. Israel’s starvation policy has actually intensified since Israel broke the ceasefire agreement last month. Israeli leaders even proudly admit they are starving the population. So, how is that just an “accusation”?

    And starving the population isn’t just “potentially” a war crime. It is a war crime. It is a prime example in international law of “collective punishment” – collectively punishing civilians for the actions of their leaders. And in this case, “punishment” is starving them to death – the gravest kind of collective punishment and the gravest kind of war crime.

    “Israel’s prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, has vowed to continue the offensive until all the hostages are returned and Hamas is either destroyed or agrees to disarm and leave the territory.”

    Journalists usually use the word “vow” to indicate a positive view of a proposed action. A more neutral word here would be “threatened”. Even the conservative International Court of Justice suspects Israel is committing genocide in Gaza. How does “Netanyahu vowed to continue the genocide until all the hostages are returned” sound? Strange? Outrageous? Then, you understand the point.

    Further, why is the Guardian parroting only the most self-serving of Netanyahu’s claims about the aims of Israel’s war crimes (while giving Israel the benefit of the doubt about whether they are war crimes)? There are a whole host of other, far more plausible reasons for Israel destroying all of Gaza’s infrastructure, including its hospitals, and killing and maiming 100,000s of Palestinians, than “getting the hostages back” or “disarming Hamas”.

    They include an aim stated by Netanyahu and other Israeli leaders that they wish to “encourage” Palestinians to leave their homeland. The wanton death and destruction spread by Israel seem to be what they all mean by “encouragement”.

    The constant drip-drip of skewed language, slanted reporting, and prejudicial framing by the Western media has a purpose. It is intended to erode the reader’s sense of right and wrong, fact and fiction, victim and oppressor.

    It is there to disorientate us, leaving us more open to disbelieving what we can see with our own eyes: that there is a genocide going on, and our own leaders are actively assisting it.

    The post The Drip-drip of Slanted Gaza Reporting Erodes Our Sense of Right and Wrong first appeared on Dissident Voice.

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • Trump Meets Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni

    Donald Trump’s mental quirks recall a character in the novel, Aunt Julia and the Scriptwriter by Peruvian writer, Mario Vargas Llosa ─ an eccentric scriptwriter, Pedro Camacho writes serials that become more bizarre and parallel his descent into madness. From early press conferences until today, the U.S. president has exhibited increased megalomania, increased recitation of falsehoods, and more snarling revenge at anyone who contradicts him. His appearances are reality television, imaginative narrations that only he believes are real.

    The press conference after his meeting with Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni revealed the extent of his descent into a chaotic state ─ he hardly knew she was there.

    Usually, the press conference that occurs after a meeting between two “heads of state” concentrates on the results of the discussion between the two executives. The U.S. president may field most of the questions, but a healthy, alert, and empathetic executive makes certain that the foreign minster is also addressed and is given equal time to reply to questions. Not with Trump; he continually answered questions, while Giorgia Meloni sat quietly aside until an Italian correspondent asked a question of the Italian Prime Minister. Trump unashamedly lied and insulted people in Ms. Meloni’s presence; displaying characteristics that shock foreign dignitaries and embarrass the American people.

    A question on price rises from a CNN reporter stirred Trump into his act. After berating the reporter with an abusive remark, “if you were truthful, which you are not,” Mr. Veracity casually stated, “I learned that gasoline hit $1.98 in some states.” Knowing that the lowest charge in my area is about $3.30/gallon, I hastened to ask Gemini to tell me the state with the lowest gas price. Answer: Mississippi at $2.53/gallon and national average at $3.34/gallon. Mr. Veracity continued with his audacious remarks, careless statements, and mathematical ignorance.

    “When I came into office they hit me with the price of eggs. Fake news like you, you’re fake. Eggs had gone up 87 percent and we did an unbelievable job and eggs are now down 92 percent.” Medium sized eggs had a price tag of $5-$6/dozen, which by Trump’s figures would now be about 40 cents to 55 cents for a dozen, a price from 50 years ago.

    “Tariffs are making us rich, losing trillions and now we are making money, taking in billions of dollars. I took in more than 700 billions of dollars from China.” The economic whiz still does not know that the importer pays the tariff and always increases the price and passes the duty charge on to the consumer. (Note: In rare cases, over a long time, tariffs may increase the value of the currency and indirectly lower the price the importer pays for the merchandise. In this case the importer might not raise the price. This rarity has not happened.) Nobody asked how he (personally) “took in more than 700 billions of dollars from China,” when the total income from tariffs was only $80B in 2019 and not all were duties on goods from China.

    Trump’s obsession with Joe Biden grows and grows. “We’re getting criminals out of this country who Biden allowed to enter. Hundreds of thousands of criminals and murders, drug dealers. Opened jails all over the world and they came here. Biden did that.” The disturbing fixation on Biden continued.

    “When Biden came in, oil went through the roof. That is what caused the problem. If Biden were in power, oil would be 7 or 8 dollars/gallon.“ Not only does former U.S. President, Joe Biden, have the keys to the jails in Latin America, he controls OPEC and determines the price of oil. Seems Trump’s mental gymnastics confused the price of oil with the price of gasoline.

    All Biden’s administration was good at was “stealing elections.” No need to be concerned, now, “We have a real president who understands what it is all about. I had the strongest economy by far.”

    In Donald Trump’s world, the meager GDP growth during his term in office represented the best U.S. economy of all time. COVID-19 in the year 2020 reduced the average GDP, but the other years did not show spectacular growth.

    Bill Clinton 1993–2001 4.0%
    George W. Bush 2001–2009 2.4%
    Barack Obama 2009–2017 2.3%
    Donald Trump 2017–2021 2.3% (2.46% in 2017, 2.97% in 2018 2.47% in 2019)
    Joe Biden 2021–2025 3.2%

    Driven by animosity and never by charity, the “liar-in-chief” ridiculed federal laws, created an unnecessary upheaval in the financial community, undermined an agency that gains credibility by having a neutral appearance, and insulted an independent agency’s leader who was not there to defend himself.

    In response to a question regarding Federal Reserve actions, Trump replied:

    I don’t think he (Federal Reserve Chairperson Jerome Hayden “Jay” Powell) is doing the job, too late, always too late…. If I ask Powell to leave, he’ll be out of there, real fast….Only things gone up are interest rates because they are playing politics; Federal Reserve are not smart people.

    “Didn’t you nominate him,” asked a press member. “I can’t complain because we had the greatest economy,” the wise man answered.

    Trump later retracted his remark of having the capability of firing Powell, who, by a previous Supreme Court decision ─ the 1935 Humphrey’s Executor decision from the Supreme Court, finding the president cannot fire leaders of independent federal agencies over policy disagreements ─ challenged Trump’s statement. He could not retract the obvious attempt to force an independent agency to behave as if dependent upon him and to have the public lose faith in the agency that regulates the money supply and has its name on all currency.

    After disposing of the people that most annoy him, Trump turned to the nation that most annoys him ─ Iran ─ with his biggest whopper, deciphered by anyone who can read. “I terminated the Iran deal and you can see they haven’t been able to do anything.” Yes, it is true, Iran has not been able to do “anything”; they have been able to do “everything.”

    Trump withdrew the United States from the Iran nuclear deal in 2018, claiming “it failed to curtail Iran’s missile program and regional influence.” Formally known as the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA), the 2015 agreement reached between Iran and the major world powers prevented the Islamic State from developing the centrifuges to enrich uranium for nuclear weapons. Imposing restrictions on its nuclear activities and allowing international inspections of the nuclear facilities froze Iran’s nuclear activities for ten years

    The treaty would have expired in 2025 and been either renegotiated or Iran could re-start its nuclear activities. After JCPOA was scrapped, Iran developed a massive number of ballistic missiles, increased its regional influence, allied with Russia and China, and enriched trace amounts of uranium to nearly weapons-grade levels. Iran has done everything that Trump claimed he would prevent. In the year 2025, they were not starting from scratch but, due to Donald Trump, were nearly finished having atomic weapons. Added benefits ─ Iran is able to negotiate with increased leverage and does not have to give up anything ─ let the powers bomb the facilities and suffer a little destruction in the process.

    The serial mendacities, self-aggrandizements, character assassinations, and petty resentments, where Trump elevates himself by judging and demeaning others, type him as slightly deranged. His relation to the eccentric scriptwriter in Mario Vargas Llosa’s novel made its complete appearance, with Pedro Camacho Trump showing he had gone berserk by vilifying an admired and deceased president. The real life Pedro Camacho Trump recited the most sickening, psychopathic, and unhinged statement ever uttered in normal society: “Carter died a happy man, know why, because he was not the worst president, Joe Biden was.”

    The men in white would have done the nation a favor by hauling the soon-to-be ex-president away to his preferred rest home ─ Mar-a-Lago. Hm, Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni wore white for the occasion.

    The post Trump Meets Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni first appeared on Dissident Voice.

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • How to fight Trump’s cyber dystopia with community, self-determination, care, and truth

    COMMENTARY: By Mandy Henk

    When the US Embassy knocked on my door in late 2024, I was both pleased and more than a little suspicious.

    I’d worked with them before, but the organisation where I did that work, Tohatoha, had closed its doors. My new project, Dark Times Academy, was specifically an attempt to pull myself out of the grant cycle, to explore ways of funding the work of counter-disinformation education without dependence on unreliable governments and philanthropic funders more concerned with their own objectives than the work I believed then — and still believe — is crucial to the future of human freedom.

    But despite my efforts to turn them away, they kept knocking, and Dark Times Academy certainly needed the money. I’m warning you all now: There is a sense in which everything I have to say about counter-disinformation comes down to conversations about how to fund the work.

    DARK TIMES ACADEMY

    There is nothing I would like more than to talk about literally anything other than funding this work. I don’t love money, but I do like eating, having a home, and being able to give my kids cash.

    I have also repeatedly found myself in roles where other people look to me for their livelihoods; a responsibility that I carry heavily and with more than a little clumsiness and reluctance.

    But if we are to talk about President Donald Trump and disinformation, we have to talk about money. As it is said, the love of money is the root of all evil. And the lack of it is the manifestation of that evil.

    Trump and his attack on all of us — on truth, on peace, on human freedom and dignity — is, at its core, an attack that uses money as a weapon. It is an attack rooted in greed and in avarice.

    In his world, money is power
    But in that greed lies his weakness. In his world, money is power. He and those who serve him and his fascist agenda cannot see beyond the world that money built. Their power comes in the form of control over that world and the people forced to live in it.

    Of course, money is just paper. It is digital bits in a database sitting on a server in a data centre relying on electricity and water taken from our earth. The ephemeral nature of their money speaks volumes about their lack of strength and their vulnerability to more powerful forces.

    They know this. Trump and all men like him know their weaknesses — and that’s why they use their money to gather power and control. When you have more money than you and your whānau can spend in several generations, you suddenly have a different kind of  relationship to money.

    It’s one where money itself — and the structures that allow money to be used for control of people and the material world — becomes your biggest vulnerability. If your power and identity are built entirely on the power of money, your commitment to preserving the power of money in the world becomes an all-consuming drive.

    Capitalism rests on many “logics” — commodification, individualism, eternal growth, the alienation of labour. Marx and others have tried this ground well already.

    In a sense, we are past the time when more analysis is useful to us. Rather, we have reached a point where action is becoming a practical necessity. After all, Trump isn’t going to stop with the media or with counter-disinformation organisations. He is ultimately coming for us all.

    What form that action must take is a complicated matter. But, first we must think about money and about how money works, because only through lessening the power of money can we hope to lessen the power of those who wield it as their primary weapon.

    Beliefs about poor people
    If you have been so unfortunate to be subject to engagement with anti-poverty programmes during the neoliberal era either as a client or a worker, you will know that one of the motivations used for denying direct cash aid to those in need of money is a belief on the part of government and policy experts that poor people will use their money in unwise ways, be it drugs or alcohol, or status purchases like sneakers or manicures.

    But over and over again, there’s another concern raised: cash benefits will be spent on others in the community, but outside of those targeted with the cash aid.

    You see this less now that ideas like a universal basic income (UBI) and direct cash transfers have taken hold of the policy and donor classes, but it is one of those rightwing concerns that turned out to be empirically accurate.

    Poor people are more generous with their money and all of their other resources as well. The stereotype of the stingy Scrooge is one based on a pretty solid mountain of evidence.

    The poor turn out to understand far better than the rich how to defeat the power that money gives those who hoard it — and that is community. The logic of money and capital can most effectively be defeated through the creation and strengthening of our community ties.

    Donald Trump and those who follow him revel in creating a world of atomised individuals focused on themselves; the kind of world where, rather than relying on each other, people depend on the market and the dollar to meet their material needs — dollars. of course, being the source of control and power for their class.

    Our ability to fund our work, feed our families, and keep a roof over our heads has not always been subject to the whims of capitalists and those with money to pay us. Around the world, the grand multicentury project known as colonialism has impoverished us all and created our dependency.

    Colonial projects and ‘enclosures’
    I cannot speak as a direct victim of the colonial project. Those are not my stories to tell. There are so many of you in this room who can speak to that with far more eloquence and direct experience than I. But the colonial project wasn’t only an overseas project for my ancestors.

    In England, the project was called “enclosure”.

    Enclosure is one of the core colonial logics. Enclosure takes resources (land in particular) that were held in common and managed collectively using traditional customs and hands them over to private control to be used for private rather than communal benefit. This process, repeated over and over around the globe, created the world we live in today — the world built on money.

    As we lose control over our access to what we need to live as the land that holds our communities together, that binds us to one another, is co-opted or stolen from us, we lose our power of self-determination. Self-governance, freedom, liberty — these are what colonisation and enclosure take from us when they steal our livelihoods.

    As part of my work, I keep a close eye on the approaches to counter-disinformation that those whose relationship to power is smoother than my own take. Also, in this the year of our Lord 2025, it is mandatory to devote at least some portion of each public talk to AI.

    I am also profoundly sorry to have to report that as far as I can tell, the only work on counter-disinformation still getting funding is work that claims to be able to use AI to detect and counter disinformation. It will not surprise you that I am extremely dubious about these claims.

    AI has been created through what has been called “data colonialism”, in that it relies on stolen data, just as traditional forms of colonialism rely on stolen land.

    Risks and dangers of AI
    AI itself — and I am speaking here specifically of generative AI — is being used as a tool of oppression. Other forms of AI have their own risks and dangers, but in this context, generative AI is quite simply a tool of power consolidation, of hollowing out of human skill and care, and of profanity, in the sense of being the opposite of sacred.

    Words, art, conversation, companionship — these are fiercely human things. For a machine to mimic these things is to transgress against all of our communities — all the more so when the machine is being wielded by people who speak openly of genocide and white supremacy.

    However, just as capitalism can be fought through community, colonialism can and has been fought through our own commitment to living our lives in freedom. It is fought by refusing their demands and denying their power, whether through the traditional tools of street protest and nonviolent resistance, or through simply walking away from the structures of violence and control that they have implemented.

    In the current moment, that particularly includes the technological tools that are being used to destroy our communities and create the data being used to enact their oppression. Each of us is free to deny them access to our lives, our hopes, and dreams.

    This version of colonisation has a unique weakness, in that the cyber dystopia they have created can be unplugged and turned off. And yet, we can still retain the parts of it that serve us well by building our own technological infrastructure and helping people use that instead of the kind owned and controlled by oligarchs.

    By living our lives with the freedom we all possess as human beings, we can deny these systems the symbolic power they rely on to continue.

    That said, this has limitations. This process of theft that underlies both traditional colonialism and contemporary data colonialism, rather than that of land or data, destroys our material base of support — ie. places to grow food, the education of our children, control over our intellectual property.

    Power consolidated upwards
    The outcome is to create ever more dependence on systems outside of our control that serve to consolidate power upwards and create classes of disposable people through the logic of dehumanisation.

    Disposable people have been a feature across many human societies. We see it in slaves, in cultures that use banishment and exile, and in places where imprisonment is used to enforce laws.

    Right now we see it in the United States being directed at scale towards those from Central and Latin America and around the world. The men being sent to the El Salvadorian gulag, the toddlers sent to immigration court without a lawyer, the federal workers tossed from their jobs — these are disposable people to Trump.

    The logic of colonialism relies on the process of dehumanisation; of denying the moral relevance of people’s identity and position within their communities and families. When they take a father from his family, they are dehumanising him and his family. They are denying the moral relevance of his role as a father and of his children and wife.

    When they require a child to appear alone before an immigration judge, they are dehumanising her by denying her the right to be recognised as a child with moral claims on the adults around her. When they say they want to transition federal workers from unproductive government jobs to the private sector, they are denying those workers their life’s work and identity as labourers whose work supports the common good.

    There was a time when I would point out that we all know where this leads, but we are there now. It has led there, although given the US incarceration rate for Black men, it isn’t unreasonable to argue that in fact for some people, the US has always been there. Fascism is not an aberration, it is a continuation. But the quickening is here. The expansion of dehumanisation and hate have escalated under Trump.

    Dehumanisaton always starts with words and  language. And Trump is genuinely — and terribly — gifted with language. His speeches are compelling, glittering, and persuasive to his audiences. With his words and gestures, he creates an alternate reality. When Trump says, “They’re eating the cats! They’re eating the dogs!”, he is using language to dehumanise Haitian immigrants.

    An alternate reality for migrants
    When he calls immigrants “aliens” he is creating an alternate reality where migrants are no longer human, no longer part of our communities, but rather outside of them, not fully human.

    When he tells lies and spews bullshit into our shared information system, those lies are virtually always aimed at creating a permission structure to deny some group of people their full humanity. Outrageous lie after outrageous lie told over and over again crumbles society in ways that we have seen over and over again throughout history.

    In Europe, the claims that women were consorting with the devil led to the witch trials and the burning of thousands of women across central and northern Europe. In Myanmar, claims that Rohinga Muslims were commiting rape, led to mass slaughter.

    Just as we fight the logics of capitalism with community and colonialism with a fierce commitment to our freedom, the power to resist dehumanisation is also ours. Through empathy and care — which is simply the material manifestation of empathy — we can defeat attempts to dehumanise.

    Empathy and care are inherent to all functioning societies — and they are tools we all have available to us. By refusing to be drawn into their hateful premises, by putting morality and compassion first, we can draw attention to the ridiculousness of their ideas and help support those targeted.

    Disinformation is the tool used to dehumanise. It always has been. During the COVID-19 pandemic when disinformation as a concept gained popularity over the rather older concept of propaganda, there was a real moment where there was a drive to focus on misinformation, or people who were genuinely wrong about usually public health facts. This is a way to talk about misinformation that elides the truth about it.

    There is an empirical reality underlying the tsunami of COVID disinformation and it is that the information was spread intentionally by bad actors with the goal of destroying the social bonds that hold us all together. State actors, including the United States under the first Trump administration, spread lies about COVID intentionally for their own benefit and at the cost of thousands if not millions of lives.

    Lies and disinformation at scale
    This tactic was not new then. Those seeking political power or to destroy communities for their own financial gain have always used lies and disinformation. But what is different this time, what has created unique risks, is the scale.

    Networked disinformation — the power to spread bullshit and lies across the globe within seconds and within a context where traditional media and sources of both moral and factual authority have been systematically weakened over decades of neoliberal attack — has created a situation where disinformation has more power and those who wield it can do so with precision.

    But just as we have the means to fight capitalism, colonialism, and dehumanisation, so too do we — you and I — have the tools to fight disinformation: truth, and accurate and timely reporting from trustworthy sources of information shared with the communities impacted in their own language and from their own people.

    If words and images are the chosen tools of dehumanisation and disinformation, then we are lucky because they are fighting with swords that we forged and that we know how to wield. You, the media, are the front lines right now. Trump will take all of our money and all of our resources, but our work must continue.

    Times like this call for fearlessness and courage. But more than that, they call on us to use all of the tools in our toolboxes — community, self-determination, care, and truth. Fighting disinformation isn’t something we can do in a vacuum. It isn’t something that we can depersonalise and mechanise. It requires us to work together to build a very human movement.

    I can’t deny that Trump’s attacks have exhausted me and left me depressed. I’m a librarian by training. I love sharing stories with people, not telling them myself. I love building communities of learning and of sharing, not taking to the streets in protest.

    More than anything else, I just want a nice cup of tea and a novel. But we are here in what I’ve seen others call “a coyote moment”. Like Wile E. Coyote, we are over the cliff with our legs spinning in the air.

    We can use this time to focus on what really matters and figure out how we will keep going and keep working. We can look at the blue sky above us and revel in what beauty and joy we can.

    Building community, exercising our self-determination, caring for each other, and telling the truth fearlessly and as though our very lives depend on it will leave us all the stronger and ready to fight Trump and his tidal wave of disinformation.

    Mandy Henk, co-founder of Dark Times Academy, has been teaching and learning on the margins of the academy for her whole career. As an academic librarian, she has worked closely with academics, students, and university administrations for decades. She taught her own courses, led her own research work, and fought for a vision of the liberal arts that supports learning and teaching as the things that actually matter. This article was originally presented as an invited address at the annual general meeting of the Asia Pacific Media Network on 24 April 2025.

    This post was originally published on Asia Pacific Report.

  • How to fight Trump’s cyber dystopia with community, self-determination, care, and truth

    COMMENTARY: By Mandy Henk

    When the US Embassy knocked on my door in late 2024, I was both pleased and more than a little suspicious.

    I’d worked with them before, but the organisation where I did that work, Tohatoha, had closed its doors. My new project, Dark Times Academy, was specifically an attempt to pull myself out of the grant cycle, to explore ways of funding the work of counter-disinformation education without dependence on unreliable governments and philanthropic funders more concerned with their own objectives than the work I believed then — and still believe — is crucial to the future of human freedom.

    But despite my efforts to turn them away, they kept knocking, and Dark Times Academy certainly needed the money. I’m warning you all now: There is a sense in which everything I have to say about counter-disinformation comes down to conversations about how to fund the work.

    DARK TIMES ACADEMY

    There is nothing I would like more than to talk about literally anything other than funding this work. I don’t love money, but I do like eating, having a home, and being able to give my kids cash.

    I have also repeatedly found myself in roles where other people look to me for their livelihoods; a responsibility that I carry heavily and with more than a little clumsiness and reluctance.

    But if we are to talk about President Donald Trump and disinformation, we have to talk about money. As it is said, the love of money is the root of all evil. And the lack of it is the manifestation of that evil.

    Trump and his attack on all of us — on truth, on peace, on human freedom and dignity — is, at its core, an attack that uses money as a weapon. It is an attack rooted in greed and in avarice.

    In his world, money is power
    But in that greed lies his weakness. In his world, money is power. He and those who serve him and his fascist agenda cannot see beyond the world that money built. Their power comes in the form of control over that world and the people forced to live in it.

    Of course, money is just paper. It is digital bits in a database sitting on a server in a data centre relying on electricity and water taken from our earth. The ephemeral nature of their money speaks volumes about their lack of strength and their vulnerability to more powerful forces.

    They know this. Trump and all men like him know their weaknesses — and that’s why they use their money to gather power and control. When you have more money than you and your whānau can spend in several generations, you suddenly have a different kind of  relationship to money.

    It’s one where money itself — and the structures that allow money to be used for control of people and the material world — becomes your biggest vulnerability. If your power and identity are built entirely on the power of money, your commitment to preserving the power of money in the world becomes an all-consuming drive.

    Capitalism rests on many “logics” — commodification, individualism, eternal growth, the alienation of labour. Marx and others have tried this ground well already.

    In a sense, we are past the time when more analysis is useful to us. Rather, we have reached a point where action is becoming a practical necessity. After all, Trump isn’t going to stop with the media or with counter-disinformation organisations. He is ultimately coming for us all.

    What form that action must take is a complicated matter. But, first we must think about money and about how money works, because only through lessening the power of money can we hope to lessen the power of those who wield it as their primary weapon.

    Beliefs about poor people
    If you have been so unfortunate to be subject to engagement with anti-poverty programmes during the neoliberal era either as a client or a worker, you will know that one of the motivations used for denying direct cash aid to those in need of money is a belief on the part of government and policy experts that poor people will use their money in unwise ways, be it drugs or alcohol, or status purchases like sneakers or manicures.

    But over and over again, there’s another concern raised: cash benefits will be spent on others in the community, but outside of those targeted with the cash aid.

    You see this less now that ideas like a universal basic income (UBI) and direct cash transfers have taken hold of the policy and donor classes, but it is one of those rightwing concerns that turned out to be empirically accurate.

    Poor people are more generous with their money and all of their other resources as well. The stereotype of the stingy Scrooge is one based on a pretty solid mountain of evidence.

    The poor turn out to understand far better than the rich how to defeat the power that money gives those who hoard it — and that is community. The logic of money and capital can most effectively be defeated through the creation and strengthening of our community ties.

    Donald Trump and those who follow him revel in creating a world of atomised individuals focused on themselves; the kind of world where, rather than relying on each other, people depend on the market and the dollar to meet their material needs — dollars. of course, being the source of control and power for their class.

    Our ability to fund our work, feed our families, and keep a roof over our heads has not always been subject to the whims of capitalists and those with money to pay us. Around the world, the grand multicentury project known as colonialism has impoverished us all and created our dependency.

    Colonial projects and ‘enclosures’
    I cannot speak as a direct victim of the colonial project. Those are not my stories to tell. There are so many of you in this room who can speak to that with far more eloquence and direct experience than I. But the colonial project wasn’t only an overseas project for my ancestors.

    In England, the project was called “enclosure”.

    Enclosure is one of the core colonial logics. Enclosure takes resources (land in particular) that were held in common and managed collectively using traditional customs and hands them over to private control to be used for private rather than communal benefit. This process, repeated over and over around the globe, created the world we live in today — the world built on money.

    As we lose control over our access to what we need to live as the land that holds our communities together, that binds us to one another, is co-opted or stolen from us, we lose our power of self-determination. Self-governance, freedom, liberty — these are what colonisation and enclosure take from us when they steal our livelihoods.

    As part of my work, I keep a close eye on the approaches to counter-disinformation that those whose relationship to power is smoother than my own take. Also, in this the year of our Lord 2025, it is mandatory to devote at least some portion of each public talk to AI.

    I am also profoundly sorry to have to report that as far as I can tell, the only work on counter-disinformation still getting funding is work that claims to be able to use AI to detect and counter disinformation. It will not surprise you that I am extremely dubious about these claims.

    AI has been created through what has been called “data colonialism”, in that it relies on stolen data, just as traditional forms of colonialism rely on stolen land.

    Risks and dangers of AI
    AI itself — and I am speaking here specifically of generative AI — is being used as a tool of oppression. Other forms of AI have their own risks and dangers, but in this context, generative AI is quite simply a tool of power consolidation, of hollowing out of human skill and care, and of profanity, in the sense of being the opposite of sacred.

    Words, art, conversation, companionship — these are fiercely human things. For a machine to mimic these things is to transgress against all of our communities — all the more so when the machine is being wielded by people who speak openly of genocide and white supremacy.

    However, just as capitalism can be fought through community, colonialism can and has been fought through our own commitment to living our lives in freedom. It is fought by refusing their demands and denying their power, whether through the traditional tools of street protest and nonviolent resistance, or through simply walking away from the structures of violence and control that they have implemented.

    In the current moment, that particularly includes the technological tools that are being used to destroy our communities and create the data being used to enact their oppression. Each of us is free to deny them access to our lives, our hopes, and dreams.

    This version of colonisation has a unique weakness, in that the cyber dystopia they have created can be unplugged and turned off. And yet, we can still retain the parts of it that serve us well by building our own technological infrastructure and helping people use that instead of the kind owned and controlled by oligarchs.

    By living our lives with the freedom we all possess as human beings, we can deny these systems the symbolic power they rely on to continue.

    That said, this has limitations. This process of theft that underlies both traditional colonialism and contemporary data colonialism, rather than that of land or data, destroys our material base of support — ie. places to grow food, the education of our children, control over our intellectual property.

    Power consolidated upwards
    The outcome is to create ever more dependence on systems outside of our control that serve to consolidate power upwards and create classes of disposable people through the logic of dehumanisation.

    Disposable people have been a feature across many human societies. We see it in slaves, in cultures that use banishment and exile, and in places where imprisonment is used to enforce laws.

    Right now we see it in the United States being directed at scale towards those from Central and Latin America and around the world. The men being sent to the El Salvadorian gulag, the toddlers sent to immigration court without a lawyer, the federal workers tossed from their jobs — these are disposable people to Trump.

    The logic of colonialism relies on the process of dehumanisation; of denying the moral relevance of people’s identity and position within their communities and families. When they take a father from his family, they are dehumanising him and his family. They are denying the moral relevance of his role as a father and of his children and wife.

    When they require a child to appear alone before an immigration judge, they are dehumanising her by denying her the right to be recognised as a child with moral claims on the adults around her. When they say they want to transition federal workers from unproductive government jobs to the private sector, they are denying those workers their life’s work and identity as labourers whose work supports the common good.

    There was a time when I would point out that we all know where this leads, but we are there now. It has led there, although given the US incarceration rate for Black men, it isn’t unreasonable to argue that in fact for some people, the US has always been there. Fascism is not an aberration, it is a continuation. But the quickening is here. The expansion of dehumanisation and hate have escalated under Trump.

    Dehumanisaton always starts with words and  language. And Trump is genuinely — and terribly — gifted with language. His speeches are compelling, glittering, and persuasive to his audiences. With his words and gestures, he creates an alternate reality. When Trump says, “They’re eating the cats! They’re eating the dogs!”, he is using language to dehumanise Haitian immigrants.

    An alternate reality for migrants
    When he calls immigrants “aliens” he is creating an alternate reality where migrants are no longer human, no longer part of our communities, but rather outside of them, not fully human.

    When he tells lies and spews bullshit into our shared information system, those lies are virtually always aimed at creating a permission structure to deny some group of people their full humanity. Outrageous lie after outrageous lie told over and over again crumbles society in ways that we have seen over and over again throughout history.

    In Europe, the claims that women were consorting with the devil led to the witch trials and the burning of thousands of women across central and northern Europe. In Myanmar, claims that Rohinga Muslims were commiting rape, led to mass slaughter.

    Just as we fight the logics of capitalism with community and colonialism with a fierce commitment to our freedom, the power to resist dehumanisation is also ours. Through empathy and care — which is simply the material manifestation of empathy — we can defeat attempts to dehumanise.

    Empathy and care are inherent to all functioning societies — and they are tools we all have available to us. By refusing to be drawn into their hateful premises, by putting morality and compassion first, we can draw attention to the ridiculousness of their ideas and help support those targeted.

    Disinformation is the tool used to dehumanise. It always has been. During the COVID-19 pandemic when disinformation as a concept gained popularity over the rather older concept of propaganda, there was a real moment where there was a drive to focus on misinformation, or people who were genuinely wrong about usually public health facts. This is a way to talk about misinformation that elides the truth about it.

    There is an empirical reality underlying the tsunami of COVID disinformation and it is that the information was spread intentionally by bad actors with the goal of destroying the social bonds that hold us all together. State actors, including the United States under the first Trump administration, spread lies about COVID intentionally for their own benefit and at the cost of thousands if not millions of lives.

    Lies and disinformation at scale
    This tactic was not new then. Those seeking political power or to destroy communities for their own financial gain have always used lies and disinformation. But what is different this time, what has created unique risks, is the scale.

    Networked disinformation — the power to spread bullshit and lies across the globe within seconds and within a context where traditional media and sources of both moral and factual authority have been systematically weakened over decades of neoliberal attack — has created a situation where disinformation has more power and those who wield it can do so with precision.

    But just as we have the means to fight capitalism, colonialism, and dehumanisation, so too do we — you and I — have the tools to fight disinformation: truth, and accurate and timely reporting from trustworthy sources of information shared with the communities impacted in their own language and from their own people.

    If words and images are the chosen tools of dehumanisation and disinformation, then we are lucky because they are fighting with swords that we forged and that we know how to wield. You, the media, are the front lines right now. Trump will take all of our money and all of our resources, but our work must continue.

    Times like this call for fearlessness and courage. But more than that, they call on us to use all of the tools in our toolboxes — community, self-determination, care, and truth. Fighting disinformation isn’t something we can do in a vacuum. It isn’t something that we can depersonalise and mechanise. It requires us to work together to build a very human movement.

    I can’t deny that Trump’s attacks have exhausted me and left me depressed. I’m a librarian by training. I love sharing stories with people, not telling them myself. I love building communities of learning and of sharing, not taking to the streets in protest.

    More than anything else, I just want a nice cup of tea and a novel. But we are here in what I’ve seen others call “a coyote moment”. Like Wile E. Coyote, we are over the cliff with our legs spinning in the air.

    We can use this time to focus on what really matters and figure out how we will keep going and keep working. We can look at the blue sky above us and revel in what beauty and joy we can.

    Building community, exercising our self-determination, caring for each other, and telling the truth fearlessly and as though our very lives depend on it will leave us all the stronger and ready to fight Trump and his tidal wave of disinformation.

    Mandy Henk, co-founder of Dark Times Academy, has been teaching and learning on the margins of the academy for her whole career. As an academic librarian, she has worked closely with academics, students, and university administrations for decades. She taught her own courses, led her own research work, and fought for a vision of the liberal arts that supports learning and teaching as the things that actually matter. This article was originally presented as an invited address at the annual general meeting of the Asia Pacific Media Network on 24 April 2025.

    This post was originally published on Asia Pacific Report.