Bernie Sanders wordt door communistenjagers gesaboteerd in zijn campagne

Op CounterPunch een artikel geschreven door Dave Lindorff over Bernie Sanders en wat je gerust een haat-campagne door de VS massamedia tegen hem kan noemen, een campagne die moet voorkomen dat Sanders in het Witte Huis belandt.... Bloomberg, één van de Democratische kandidaten, doet alleen mee om te voorkomen dat Sanders inderdaad in het genoemde huis kan plaatsnemen als president van de VS..... (van 2001 tot 2018 was Bloomberg zelfs Republikein en men stelt terecht dat hij terugkeerde in de Democratische Partij om te voorkomen dat Sanders de verkiezingen zou winnen....*)

De voorverkiezing in Iowa is volgens Lindorff een fiasco geworden door machinaties in de Democratische partij van figuren die Sanders niet lusten...... Iowa waar in feite is nog steeds niet bekend is wie echt heeft gewonnen, ook al weet men dat Sanders de meeste stemmen wist te verzamelen..... 

Lindorff betoogt terecht dat socialisme niet haaks staat op democratie, maar in feite 2 kanten van dezelfde munt zijn. Socialisme is niet hetzelfde als communisme 'zoals we hebben gezien in de Sovjet-Unie en China, zo concludeert Lindorff, waar ik aan toe zou willen voegen dat de situatie in de Sovjet-Unie niets met communisme van doen had, zoals de Chinese maatschappij niets met communisme te maken had en heeft. Beide landen werden (en wat China betreft wordt) geregeerd als een politiestaat ofwel dictatuur.......

De VS kan je in feite geen democratie meer noemen, de verschillende administraties die elkaar opvolgen bedienen vooral de super welgestelden en eventueel hun grote bedrijven...... Waar de reguliere (massa-) media in de VS Sanders afmaken als een communist die eenmaal aan de macht tegenstanders zal laten executeren, ofwel deze media maken van Sanders een 'communistisch monster' en dat middels leugens, verdraaiingen, fake news (nepnieuws), propaganda en vooral door haat en angst te zaaien (tegen/voor deze politicus).....

Lees het (soms ook humoristische) artikel van Lindorff en verbaas je, zoals ik, over de smerige machinaties in de VS, een 'land' dat zegt overal democratie te willen brengen (door landen plat te bombarderen) en zelf in feite al lang geen democratie meer is, niet alleen daar het grote geld uitmaakt wie de verkiezingen wint, maar ook door alle belemmeringen die arme en/of gekleurde burgers moet beletten te gaan stemmen........

Sanders wordt niet alleen in de VS pers onderuitgehaald, maar ook in de rest van het westen laten mediaorganen weten dat ze hem niet lusten, vanmorgen nog 'een mooi voorbeeld' in het megasuffe MAX Nieuwsweekend, waar leeghoofden Willem Post ('Amerika deskundige') en presentator de Bie hem wegzetten als een gevaarlijke halve zool; later wellicht meer over dit meer dan belachelijke gesprek op Radio1)

De wereld snakt naar rust en stabiliteit, zaken die je niet krijgt als Trump een tweede termijn mag dienen, hetzelfde is het geval met figuren als de Democraten Buttigieg en Bloomberg aan de macht....... Laten we hopen dat Sanders de voorverkiezingen en uiteindelijk het presidentschap van de VS wint, echter ik vrees dat dit niet zal gebeuren en het is zeker dat wanneer dit mislukt, de media, de grote bedrijven en de plutocraten (of oligarchen, wat je wilt) daar verantwoordelijk voor zijn......

February 13, 2020

The Red-Baiting of Bernie Sanders Has Begun and is Already Becoming Laughable

by Dave Lindorff

With Bernie Sanders now having won New Hampshire (and probably Iowa, where he won the popular vote) and confirmed his position as the frontrunner for president in the Democratic Party primaries (the New York Times’ poll guru Nate Silver is giving him a better than 40% chance of gaining enough delegates by the end of the primary season to win the nomination on the all-important first ballot at the National Convention in July), it’s becoming open season on socialism and its more anodyne relative democratic socialism.

A few days ago, right-wing columnist Marc Thiessen, writing in my local paper, the Philadelphia Inquirer, mocked the catastrophic mess of the Iowa Democratic Caucus, where there is still, six days after the voting, no clear decision on who won, Sanders or Pete Buttigieg, blaming the fiasco on “the same brilliant minds who came up with Medicare-for-All and the ‘Green New Deal.’”  His conclusion, “The Democrats’ failure in Iowa stemmed from the same fundamental flaw that has caused socialism to fail (sic) wherever it is tried — the hubris of a tiny cadre whose grand visions and lack of humility far exceed their ability to deliver.”

Thiessen’s thesis fails on a number of factual grounds, of course. First of all, the failure of the Iowa Caucus was not the work of socialists at all or of the Sanders campaign. In fact the self-described social democrat in that race, Bernie Sanders, was the victim of the foul-up (if that is what it was and not sabotage). It was the work of neoliberal veterans of the 2016 Clinton campaign and the earlier Obama years who had teamed up to found a tech company, Shadow Inc., which got contracted by the neoliberal Democratic National Committee in secret to create a totally unneeded smartphone-based app for counting and tracking the votes in state caucuses and primaries. The app was so poorly designed, so untested, and was presented so late and with no training to Iowa caucus workers that it failed stunningly, even awarding delegates to the wrong candidates. This has led experts to conclude that it may be impossible to find out who really won the Iowa delegate count.  

What is clear and unarguable is that Sanders won the popular vote, both on the first round of voting, and on the second when supporters of losing candidates were allowed to shift their vote to their second-favorite top-tier candidate.

What Thiessen should have said was “The same brilliant minds in the Hillary Clinton campaign and the Democratic National Committee (DNC) who stole the primary from Bernie Sanders in 2016 are trying to do it again.”

But he couldn’t say that because he was so eager to tar “socialism” with the blame. He even linked the alleged “socialist” fiasco to Soviet Russia, citing a Soviet-era joke about it taking 10 years to get delivery of a car after purchase.. Of course that would have ruined his plan to use the cock-up as an opening to besmirch “socialism.”

Thiessen’s not alone, though, in his willful ignorance about socialism — or in his willingness to lie about its reality in countries where its virtues have been practiced for over half a century.

For another example of how luridly ignorant and dishonest the media and the political opponents of socialist ideas are in this intellectual backwater of reaction we rather ironically call the United States, take the MSNBC talking-head host, Chris Matthews. Speaking on an MSNBC panel after last Thursday evening’s New Hampshire Democratic candidates’ debate, Matthews opined that if Sanders were to win the presidency, he would end up establishing a dictatorship and start having his opponents shot.

Even his co-panelists were aghast it the absurdity of this claim, but Matthews doubled down saying, “I believe if Castro and the reds had won the Cold War there would have been executions in Central Park and I might have been one of the ones getting executed,” adding, ”I don’t know who Bernie Sanders supports over these years, I don’t know what he means by socialism.”

Fellow MSNBC host Chris Hayes noted that Sanders frequently cites the decidedly peaceful democratic nation of Denmark, which boasts such socialist-inspired policies as government-run health insurance, free college, government-owned public transit and expansive paid maternity/paternity leave. To that Matthews replied combatively, “How do you know that? Has he said that?”

Well, yes, countless numbers of times, Chris, but maybe it doesn’t get reported on your network.

This is, I’m afraid, only the start. So propagandized has the US been by almost a century of lurid anti-Communist and anti-socialist red-baiting in our schools, our media and in the rhetoric of our political duopoly of pro-capitalist parties that all too many Americans unthinkingly accept and parrot this kind of ignorant nonsense. People don’t even realize that our own excellently run Veterans Health Care system is a purely socialist example of a UK-style National Health System (NHS), government-owned with doctors on salary, or that our Medicare program is a socialist-style, single-payer government-run health insurance program like Canada’s. You just have to be old or disabled to qualify for it.

Look at Trump’s vow in his State of the Union rant, to “never allow socialism” to “take over” the United States. Think I’m paranoid?  Look at how MSNBC commentator Jake Johnson (supposedly a political scientist professor!) freaked out when Bernie Sanders spokeswoman Nina Turner referred to Democratic Primary late buy-in candidate Mike Bloomberg, $60-billion former mayor of NY City and world’s 12th-richest person, an “oligarch.”  Johnson called her word choice “unfair and inaccurate” and added that the word had “implications in this country that I think are unfair and unreasonable.”

In other words, to people like Johnson, it’s countries like Russia, Ukraine, Byelorus and maybe China that have “oligarchs,”  but not the US, where we instead have “billionaires” whom we often refer to euphemistically as “philanthropists” because they donate a small portion of their year’s profits to charities of one kind or another.

Turner argues there is little or no difference. “Buying his way into the primaries” which Bloomburg, who is bypassing all the early contests while spending so far over $350 million on advertising and on hiring paid ‘influencers’ to promote his brand, is doing, she argued, makes him an “oligarch.”

This is the problem in a nutshell: The harsh reality is that the US today has among the most extreme wealth and income gaps in the world — indeed in the history of mankind. Our government — and this has been documented — is today almost totally responsive only to the needs and wishes of the wealthy and their corporations, whose lobbyists, it turns out, actually write most of the legislation that gets passed into law by Congress. The rich, who are for the most part beyond the law, pay little or nothing in taxes, shift their profits and wealth abroad to off-shore banking shelters with impunity, and legally bribe the members of Congress and the candidates for the presidency as well as their cabinet officers with what are called “campaign contributions,” free trips on corporate jets to exotic resorts, and promises of lucrative do-nothing positions on corporate boards after they leave their political jobs as errand-boys and girls for the rich and powerful.

So let’s take a look for the uneducated, ignorant and propagandized at what socialism and democratic socialism actually mean in the real world.

Socialism is for starters fundamentally democratic (democratic socialism is really a tautology). It advocates and celebrates the idea of people controlling their government by the electing of representatives who run the government, but also envisions extending that democratic control to the workplace, particularly in areas of economic activity where there is a paucity of competition (as in the energy industry, the arms industry, the power sector, utilities, health care the media and mass transit}. Sometimes that control comes in the form of government takeover of an industry, as for example of healthcare in the UK,  the railways in Germany or France, or the Post Office in the US. Sometimes it can come in the form of giving workers and even local communities — so-called stakeholders in the proper running of a company where they work or live — seats on the boards of enterprises. This is a requirement for large industrial firms in Germany and some other countries.

The US, since at least 1917 and the success of the Russian Revolution, has deliberately conflated socialism with Soviet Communism and later with Chinese Communism. (I should add that the US has also, all the way back to 1917, actively worked through economic strangulation and military action, to crush any attempts around the world to actually create a socialist society, from the Russian Revolution through election manipulation in France, Italy and Australia, to embargo and subversion in Cuba, coups in Chile, Brazil, Uruguay, Argentina and elsewhere in Latin America, and elsewhere, and wars in Korea, Vietnam, Laos, Congo and other countries. This sordid history makes the common argument spouted in the US that socialism “doesn’t work,” spurious in the extreme.)

Actually though, even Lenin himself readily admitted that Russia had not succeeded (and could not expect to succeed) in achieving the “socialism” described above, because of its primitive level of industrial and class development, and so it was limited to a kind of “state capitalism.”  He was correct, but the thought leaders in the US ruling class backed by the lickspittle “independent media” in this country have ignored that point and stick with the false claim that the Soviet Union and Maoist China, with all the horrors of dictatorship they imposed on their peoples, provide examples of the “evils of socialism.”  (Never mind that before the Russian and Chinese revolutions peasants were virtual or even legal slaves of the land-owners, the countries were a ruled by a Czar or a bunch of brutal warlords, respectively, and freedom didn’t exist for the vast majority of the people.)

Back in the early 1960s, as first President Kennedy and then Lyndon Johnson worked to establish what eventually became the Medicare program for the elderly and disabled, an actor named Ronald Reagan was hired by the American Medical Association to attack the idea in a series of paid public advertisements on radio and TV. As Reagan warned darkly, if “socialized medicine,” which is what he called government insurance for the elderly and disabled, were established by Congress, “behind it will come other federal programs that will invade every area of freedom as we have known it in this country until, one day as Norman Thomas said, we will awake to find that we have socialism… and one of these days you and I are going to spend our sunset years telling our children and our children’s children what it was like in America when men were free.”

Of course, by 1981 when Reagan was elected president, Medicare and Medicaid had been operating for 16 years. By that point, Americans loved both programs, which were significantly improving the health and longevity of the nation’s people even if they didn’t always realize they were benefitting from a program that is socialist in form and inspiration. 
Freedom in any event hadn’t declined at all. Indeed freedom from poverty was far greater because far fewer of the elderly were going bust paying for medical care, and far fewer younger adults were being bankrupted trying to care for their aging parents, grandparents and disabled family members.

Medicare, Medicaid, free public college, subsidized transit and the like are not, in themselves, socialism, but they are socialist ideas, as are electric power cooperatives and municipally owned water systems. Bernie Sanders’ idea of expanding and improving Medicare into a program of Medicare for All so that nobody (and nobody’s employer) needs to pay thousands of dollars annually for individual medical insurance or tens of thousands of dollars for family medical insurance and related health care costs. Sanders favors free public college because a nation’s young people are all of our responsibility. If they succeed, we all succeed as a nation. And they cannot succeed if they graduate with a degree and $50-100,000 in student loans, some bearing interest as high as 9%.

Socialism has nothing to do with freedom and democracy or a lack of it and everything to do with building a caring society that seeks to raise everyone and give everyone the opportunity to work and succeed in that society. Socialism is not scary, it’s not Communism and it’s not dictatorship, whatever the wack-jobs like Jake Johnson, Chris Matthews of MSNBC or Sanders’ latest red-baiting attacker, Joe Biden, may say.

Bernie got it right when he told Pete Buttigieg, who has the financial backing of 40 billionaires, “You cannot take support to billionaires and then say you’re going to be for the people.”

For me, the simple way to look at it is this:  socialism is the idea that democracy should be expanded beyond the political sphere to include the economic sphere. It takes the freedom which today exists largely only in the home and on one’s front yard but that gets chipped away elsewhere and doesn’t even exist inside the workplace, and extends it to the workplace and beyond. Socialism’s premise is that government and society at large have a responsibility for the welfare of a country’s most vulnerable, and that the aggregation of vast wealth and the existence of grinding poverty are antithetical to a good society.  Capitalism’s premise, in contrast, is that the pursuit of wealth in itself is a positive thing, and that the achieving of wealth is prima face evidence of the virtue of the person who has it, while poverty is the deserved result of a person’s presumed lack of industry.

More articles by:Dave Lindorff

Dave Lindorff is a founding member of ThisCantBeHappening!, an online newspaper collective, and is a contributor to Hopeless: Barack Obama and the Politics of Illusion (AK Press).
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* Het is voor velen in de VS wel duidelijk dat wanneer hare kwaadaardigheid Hillary Clinton niet misdadig vals had gespeeld tijdens de democratische voorverkiezingen, ze deze had verloren en de kans groot was geweest dat Sanders tot president was verkozen.......

Zie ook:
'Robert Epstein: Google en Facebook corrumperen de politiek en manipuleren de presidentsverkiezingen' 

'Joe Biden met dubbel verlies: hij dreigde met een rechtszaak om zo de resultaten van de voorverkiezingen in Iowa tegen te houden van publicatie'

'Democratische voorverkiezingen presidentschap Iowa: de soap is begonnen, nu is het nog wachten op de beschuldiging van 'Russische inmenging''

'Facebook staat valse informatie toe tijdens de (voor-) verkiezingen van het presidentschap in de VS'

'Max Boot, promotor van de illegale oorlog tegen Irak is pissig dat Bernie Sanders kritiek levert op die oorlog' 

'VS burgers zijn gewaarschuwd: Rusland kan hun hersenen hacken en laten geloven dat Joe Biden niet geschikt is als president'

'Hillary Clinton: Bernie Sanders is a 'Russian Asset''

'Nieuwe Russische hack samenzweringstheorie t.a.v. Joe Biden 'schokt' VS Democraten'

'VS presidentschap wordt gekocht met 100 dollar per uitgebrachte stem'

'Hillary Clinton manipuleert democratische voorverkiezingen'

'Michael Bloombergs deelname aan de verkiezingen laten nog eens zien hoe ondemocratisch de VS presidentsverkiezingen zijn'

'Media en politiek bepalen waar wel en niet over gesproken wordt >> over manipulatie en desinformatie gesproken'

'Niet Rusland maar Trump beïnvloedt nu al de verkiezingen in Groot-Brittannië'

'Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez grilt Zuckerberg over misleidende advertenties op Facebook: liegen in verkiezingstijd is toegestaan'

'Tulsi Gabbard (Democratische presidentskandidaat) en de gestoken verkiezingen'

'Ollongren (D66 minister) manipuleerde bevolking met beschuldiging Russische manipulatie door desinformatie en nepnieuws' (zie ook de links in dat bericht naar meer berichten over Ollongren en haar leugens)

Media wakker geschrokken en ontwaken in Assange nachtmerrie

Het is bijna niet te geloven, de reguliere (massa-) media die zich meer dan 2 jaar richtten op Russiagate en die Julian Assange keer op keer hebben besmeurd, zijn ontwaakt in de Assange nachtmerrie..... Eindelijk begrijpt men in die media wat de arrestatie van en de beschuldigingen tegen Assange betekenen en zelfs de schoothondjes van de plutocraten, degenen die talk shows doen, zijn bijzonder verontwaardigd.... (de wonderen zijn toch de wereld nog niet uit!)

De beschuldigingen tegen Assange, waaraan nu zelfs spionage is toegevoegd, zijn een nieuwe stap van de VS naar een volledige politiestaat..... De vrijheid van nieuwsgaring wordt met de nieuwe beschuldigingen tegen Assange zwaar geweld aangedaan..... Reken maar dat de EU zelfde stappen zal nemen, mocht de VS doorgaan op dit heilloze pad, immers alles wat de VS doet wordt hier gezien als manna uit de hemel.......

Lees het volgende artikel van Caitlin Johnstone, door mij overgenomen van Anti-Media en laten we hopen dat de reguliere media het werk weer gaan doen waarvoor ze ooit ontstaan zijn: onafhankelijke berichtgeving brengen in dienst van het volk en niet van de grote ondernemingen en een spuugrijke elite....... Jammer genoeg zijn die media in handen van dezelfde plutocraten dan wel van investeringsgroepen, waar beide groepen zoveel mogelijk winst willen maken en geen kritiek dulden op het alom tegenwoordige ijskoude en inhumane neoliberalisme, of op het ophitsen van de VS en haar oorlogshond NAVO tot (illegale) oorlogsvoering, op zo groot mogelijke schaal, immers ook dat is goed voor de winsten.......

Professional Assange Smearers Finally Realize His Fate Is Tied To Theirs

The Media is Finally Realizing What the Prosecution of Assange Means for Journalism

May 24, 2019 at 8:39 am

Written by Caitlin Johnstone

(CJ Opinion) — Rachel Maddow has aired a segment condemning the new indictment against Julian Assange for 17 alleged violations of the Espionage Act.

Yes, that Rachel Maddow.

MSNBC’s top host began the segment after it was introduced by Chris Hayes, agreeing with her colleague that it’s surprising that more news outlets aren’t giving this story more “wall to wall” coverage, given its immense significance. She recapped Assange’s various legal struggles up until this point, then accurately described Assange’s new Espionage Act charges for publishing secret documents.

“And these new charges are not about stealing classified information or outsmarting computer systems in order to illegally obtain classified information,” Maddow said. “It’s not about that.

These new charges are trying to prosecute Assange for publishing that stolen, secret material which was obtained by somebody else. And that is a whole different kettle of fish then what he was initially charged with.”

“By charging Assange for publishing that stuff that was taken by Manning, by issuing these charges today, the Justice Department has just done something you might have otherwise thought was impossible,” Maddow added after explaining the unprecedented nature of this case.

“The Justice Department today, the Trump administration today, just put every journalistic institution in this country on Julian Assange’s side of the ledger. On his side of the fight. Which, I know, is unimaginable. But that is because the government is now trying to assert this brand new right to criminally prosecute people for publishing secret stuff, and newspapers and magazines and investigative journalists and all sorts of different entities publish secret stuff all the time. That is the bread and butter of what we do.”

Maddow carefully explained to her audience that these new charges have nothing at all to do with the 2016 election or any of the Russiagate nonsense the MSNBC pundit has been devoting her life to, correctly calling what the Trump administration is doing with Assange “a novel legal effort to punch a huge hole in the First Amendment.” She tied this in with Trump’s common references to the mass media as the “enemy of the people”, finally taking mainstream liberalism into a direct confrontation with Trump’s actual war on the press instead of nonsense about his tweeting mean things about Jim Acosta. She rightly highlighted the dangers of allowing a president with a thick authoritarian streak the ability to prosecute journalists he doesn’t like, and discussed the possibility that the UK may not comply with this new agenda in extradition proceedings.

“I think these 17 espionage charges against the WikiLeaks guy are a huge deal, and a very dark development,” Maddow concluded. “Chris Hayes this evening called it a ‘four alarm development’, and I absolutely share that.”

“And, you know, I know you,” Maddow continued, pointing to the camera. “Given everything else that we know about the WikiLeaks guy, I can feel through the television right now your mixed feelings about what I am saying. I can feel what may be, perhaps, a certain lack of concern about Julian Assange’s ultimate fate, given his own gleeful and extensive personal role in trying to help a hostile foreign government interfere in our election in order to install their chosen president with WikiLeaks’ help. Okay? I know. Okay, I feel ya. I got it. But, it is a recurring theme in history, heck, it is a recurring theme in the Bible, that they always pick the least sympathetic figures to try this stuff on first. Despite anyone’s feelings about this spectacularly unsympathetic character at the center of this international drama, you are going to see every journalistic institution in this country, every First Amendment supporter in this country, left, right and center, swallow their feelings about this particular human and denounce what the Trump administration is trying to do here. Because it would fundamentally change the United States of America.”

Wow. Make no mistake, this is a hugely significant development. This isn’t just some columnist for the New York Times or the Guardian, this is Rachel effing Maddow, the Queen Mother of all tinfoil pussyhat-wearing Russiagate insanity. This same pundit was just a couple of months ago not just smearing but outright lying about Assange, deceitfully telling her audience that the new legal rings closing around Assange were about his 2016 publications then instructing viewers not to Google anything about it because they’ll get computer viruses. Now that she’s recognized that this could actually hurt her and her network directly, she’s finally feeding her audience a different narrative out of sheer enlightened self-interest.

The fact that such a hugely influential figure in mainstream liberal media is now pushing back against Assange’s prosecution, and doing so in a way that her mainstream liberal anti-Trump audience can relate to, cannot be over-appreciated. Maddow’s credulous audience would eat live kittens if she told them to, so the way she’s pushing back against a dangerous legal precedent in language they can understand will make a difference in the way American liberals think about Assange’s predicament. It won’t make them like him, it won’t make them value the things he’s done, but it will get them to finally begin resisting something that badly needs to be resisted. And that’s huge.

The danger has always been that this fatal blow to journalism would be meted out with total compliance and support from a population hammered into docility by the ongoing narrative war which has been waged on Assange’s and WikiLeaks’ reputations with the help of the mass media.

There was a very real danger that thought leaders like Maddow were going to choose their feelings over reasoning when the foot finally fell and the charges that criminalize journalism as “espionage” were finally put into play. I don’t think anyone would have been surprised if she’d applied that giant intellect of hers into making it possible to ignore it without upsetting her audience and try and figure it out later when it was too late and the legal precedent was set. It would have been so easy to keep feeding into the dominant “Assange is bad so everything bad that happens to him is good” sentiment, but she didn’t. She directly contradicted it.

She actually chose to do the right thing. I’m gobsmacked, and it’s not an exaggeration to say that my hope for humanity sparked up a little today.

If the resting smugfaced apex of liberal psychosis is getting this one right, then many more will surely follow. And indeed, many already are. In addition to Hayes’ coverage of the story, MSNBC’s Ari Melber also did a segment harshly criticizing the implications of Trump administration’s new charges. We’re seeing multiple segments from CNN about the grave dangers of the legal precedent that is being set with the superseding indictment, as well as urgent warnings about the new charges from major publications like the New York Times, the Washington Post, and the Guardian.

Chris Hayes

✔@chrislhayes

The Espionage indictment of Assange for publishing is an extremely dangerous, frontal attack on the free press. Bad, bad, bad.

11.3K

10:36 PM - May 23, 2019

Twitter Ads info and privacy

The outlets which have been smearing Assange relentlessly are now finding themselves forced to defend him.

A typical comment under Maddow’s YouTube share of this segment reads “This is very strange. Very alarming! There we go again. The GOP is preparing the country for a Dictatorship.” And okay, that’s not exactly what is happening (this has been a bipartisan push and it’s not just preparations, we’re in full swing), but whatever, now this viewer can actually see the monster’s outlines. Finally the Maddow crowd which has been fruitlessly expending all their energy so far on punching at Russian shadows will actually be attacking a real thing.

And I’m quietly excited about that. I’m eager to see what happens to the #Resistance if it actually starts #Resisting something. It doesn’t matter that this is only happening because mainstream liberal media outlets realized that they might be next on the chopping block; it matters that it’s happening, period.

For years mainstream liberals have been fixating on the fake Russiagate psyop and rending their garments about Trump’s rude tweets while commentators like me desperately implored them to pay attention to the actual dangerous agendas that this administration is actually advancing. They’ve been in a holding pattern of adamantly refusing to do that, and now, because it’s threatening them personally, we’re suddenly seeing a sharp deviation from that holding pattern.

As Bill Murray said at the end of Groundhog Day, something is different. Anything different is good.

Edward Snowden

✔@Snowden

The Department of Justice just declared war––€”not on Wikileaks, but on journalism itself. This is no longer about Julian Assange: This case will decide the future of media. https://www.nytimes.com/2019/05/23/us/politics/assange-indicted-espionage-act-first-amendment.html …

18.3K

10:27 PM - May 23, 2019

Assange Indicted Under Espionage Act, Raising First Amendment Issues

The WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange faces 17 new counts in a superseding indictment over his role in publishing classified documents in 2010.

nytimes.com

Support Caitlin’s work on Patreon or Paypal.

Opinion by Caitlin Johnstone / Republished with permission / Medium / Report a typo

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Zie ook:
'Belangrijk account voor de verdediging Julian Assange geblokkeerd door Twitter'

'Britse regering weigert RT en Sputnik voor conferentie over persvrijheid..... ha! ha! ha! ha! ha! ha! ha!'

'CNN met nog smeriger lastercampagne tegen Julian Assange'

'Julian Assange: Speciaal VN rapporteur martelen heeft grote twijfels bij onafhankelijkheid rechter'

'Het westen vervolgt journalist Assange, Rusland laat journalist vrij na onrust over diens gevangenschap' (en nog hadden de reguliere media een grote bek over Rusland, media die niet anders hebben gedaan dan collega Assange besmeuren.....)

'VN rapport: Assange is gedemoniseerd en psychisch gemarteld'

'Julian Assange weer vervolgd wegens 'verkrachting', waarvoor het Zweedse OM eerder geen bewijs kon vinden......'

'Dag van Persvrijheid: Assange wordt zoveel mogelijk uitermate hypocriet gemeden door de pers'

'Julian Assange (brekend nieuws) veroordeeld tot 50 weken gevangenisstraf......'

'Julian Assanges vervolging is de genadeklap voor klokkenluiders en (echte) journalisten'

'Brekend nieuws: EU neemt internet censuurwet aan......'

'Jan Kuitenbrouwer ('journalist'): Assange is een charlatan en WikiLeaks heeft beelden van de moord op 2 journalisten gemanipuleerd'

'Chelsea Manning blijft voor onbepaalde tijd in de gevangenis'

'VN heeft eerder de 'detentie' van Assange al als onwettig verklaard'

'Brekend nieuws: EU neemt internet censuurwet aan......'

'VS Navy SEALs werden gewaarschuwd geen oorlogsmisdaden te melden' (zo valt er niets te lekken naar WikiLeaks, of de reguliere media....)

''Journalisten' tegen openheid' ('journalisten' waaronder Jan Kuitenbrouwer en de intussen overleden Max van Weezel, al wordt de laatste niet in dat bericht genoemd. Van Weezel zei een paar jaar geleden letterlijk dat hij 'zich voor kan stellen' berichten voor het publiek achter te houden, m.a.w.: dat heeft hij daadwerkelijk gedaan, waarom zou je dit anders melden als 'journalist..?')

En gerelateerd:
'Robert Mueller lijdt aan dementie en maakt van Russiagate een nog belachelijker verhaal'

'Russiagate: VS en buitenlandse geheime diensten hebben de VS presidentsverkiezingen in 2016 gemanipuleerd'

'Russiagate: nog overtuigd van bestaan daarvan? Lees dit!' (zie ook de links in dat bericht)

'Russiagate gelovigen krijgen nieuwe klap: WikiLeaks kreeg de DNC mails van een klokkenluider, niet van Rusland.....' 

'Russiagate: VS en buitenlandse geheime diensten hebben de VS presidentsverkiezingen in 2016 gemanipuleerd'