JOHNSTONE

It's not healthy to seek control over what people say and think. Free speech is important not because it makes people sad when they don't get to say what they want, but because the free exchange of ideas and information is how we collectively bring awareness to problems, change minds, stir the zeitgeist, and, if necessary, organize mass resistance.

And that's exactly why the powerful work to prevent the free exchange of ideas and information. If people are permitted to stand at the center of a digital public square and send an unauthorized idea or piece of information viral if it resonates with others, that is a direct threat to status quo power structures. It's not about saving Ukrainians, ending Covid misinformation, preventing violence, or any of the other excuses they've been rolling out since 2016. It's about censoring the internet.

Reading by Tim Foley.

We're about to see a judge sign off on Julian Assange's extradition to the United States for exposing the empire's war crimes while that same empire blasts us all in the face with an unprecedented war propaganda campaign about rescuing Ukraine's freedom and democracy.

"Russia must be held accountable for its war crimes," said the empire while imprisoning a journalist for trying to hold it accountable for war crimes.

Just the fact that the US and UK are imprisoning a journalist for exposing the war crimes of a war criminal president—just that one fact by itself—completely invalidates all criticisms of Russia from Washington and its allies.

Fun little factoid: if you subtract all the narratives being used to justify it, the Assange case looks exactly the same as the world's most powerful government imprisoning a journalist for telling the truth.

Reading by Tim Foley.

The New York Times is naming and shaming Ukrainian men who've fled the country rather than stay and kill Russians for Washington, because it was illegal for men of military age to leave, and because their countrymen are angry at them, and because it's the New York Times.

Reading by Tim Foley.

No, the US State Department does not care about human rights abuses. Blinken's remarks are just the latest in a series of shots across the bow that the US empire has been firing at New Delhi to warn it against moving into alignment with Moscow. 

Reading by Tim Foley.

If you've got a gut feeling that your rulers are working to control your perception of the war in Ukraine, it is safe to trust that feeling.

Reading by Tim Foley.

Can't believe we've been watching people lose their social media accounts for posting "misinformation" this whole time only for US officials to come right out and admit that they've been running an active disinformation campaign where they knowingly circulate lies about Russia.

Reading by Tim Foley.

Regardless of whether you agree with Galloway's argument or not, this all overlooks the innate absurdity of a government-tied social media corporation like Twitter labeling other people "state-affiliated media". Twitter is state-affiliated media. It has been working in steadily increasing intimacy with the United States government since the US empire began pressuring Silicon Valley platforms to regulate content in support of establishment power structures following the 2016 election.

In 2020 Twitter was one of the many Silicon Valley corporations who coordinated directly with US government agencies to determine what content should be censored in order to "secure" the presidential election. In 2021 Twitter announced that it was orchestrating mass purges of foreign accounts on the advice of the Australian Strategic Policy Institute (ASPI), which receives funding from many government institutions including the US State Department.

Reading by Tim Foley.

NBC News has a new report out citing multiple anonymous US officials, humorously titled "In a break with the past, U.S. is using intel to fight an info war with Russia, even when the intel isn't rock solid". 

The officials say the Biden administration has been rapidly pushing out "intelligence" about Russia's plans in Ukraine that is "low-confidence" or "based more on analysis than hard evidence", or even just plain false, in order to fight an information war against Putin.

The report says that toward this end the US government has deliberately circulated false or poorly evidenced claims about impending chemical weapons attacks, about Russian plans to orchestrate a false flag attack in the Donbass to justify an invasion, about Putin's advisors misinforming him, and about Russia seeking arms supplies from China.

Reading by Tim Foley.

People lost their minds when President Biden uttered the phrase "new world order" last month and were quickly informed by mainstream "fact checkers" that this does not validate longstanding conspiracy theories about an elite agenda to create a one-world government. In reality, though, the real agenda to create a one-world government is not some hidden conspiracy involving secret societies and shadowy figures with Jewish surnames. The US empire is openly working to unite the planet under a single power structure which effectively functions as one government in many ways.

Reading by Tim Foley.

US military interventionism always makes things worse and never accomplishes what its proponents claim it will accomplish. It's stupid to have to keep saying this year after year. There's nothing wrong in Ukraine that direct US military intervention couldn't make much, much worse.

Reading by Tim Foley.