Click here for the full interview with Oliver Stone: https://usefulidiots.locals.com/post/4126347/free-preview-oliver-stone-goes-nuclear

For $5 a month, become a Useful Idiot! Get extended interviews, Thursday Throwdowns, and chat live with Katie and Aaron in the Absurd Arena at http://usefulidiots.locals.com

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Watch this week's Thursday Throwdown: FBI Helps Ukraine Censor Aaron Maté – Twitter Files https://open.substack.com/pub/usefulidiots/p/fbi-helps-ukraine-censor-aaron-mate?r=je5va&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=web

Oliver Stone grew up in a world that hates nuclear energy: we heard horror stories of catastrophic “disasters” like in Chernobyl and Fukushima, subconsciously linked it to the nuclear bomb, even died under the trampling feet of its nuclear spawn in Godzilla and Them!

So what, after decades of mistrust against the nuclear boogeyman, made Oliver change his mind? “Fear. Fear and confusion.”

His new documentary Nuclear Now debunks years of propaganda, misinformation, and sensationalism, urging us to see that “nuclear energy is the only viable way to get out of this mess.”

It turns out, the documentary shows, deaths from nuclear energy are minuscule compared to any other form of energy: “The HBO series Chernobyl is a fear document,” he says. “It’s sensationalism. The World Health Organization and the UN did extensive studies and they came out with 4,000 people who possibly died from cancer. A lot of people say millions died, but it’s not coming out in any scientific evidence.”

And the “disaster” at Fukushima caused one (disputed) death. And there are no other cases. So why are we told nuclear energy is so dangerous?

Well first, “keep in mind that the fossil fuel industry has benefitted from renewables.” When you have oil and gas and coal lobbies fighting against you, we’ve seen too many times how easy it is to get lost in the propaganda.

But while renewables like wind and solar energy are good things, Oliver explains that they “won’t make the gap. It will not make the continental volume to get where we need to be to really have clean energy.”

“An Inconvenient Truth popularized renewables, but here we are twenty fucking years later and we still have the same amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. It’s not working.”

Subscribe for the full interview with Oliver Stone for his take on the Ukraine proxy war and its effect on climate change, his scathing review of the Green Party and their neocon friends, and why he believes “America is divorcing itself from reality.”

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Click here for the full interview with Nick Turse: https://usefulidiots.locals.com/post/4092319/extended-episode-henry-kissinger-kill-anything-that-moves

Read Nick's article Blood on his Hands: Survivors of Kissinger’s Secret War in Cambodia Reveal Unreported Mass Killings https://theintercept.com/2023/05/23/henry-kissinger-cambodia-bombing-survivors/

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Watch this week's Thursday Throwdown: "The Russians are dying...It's the best money we've ever spent." https://usefulidiots.locals.com/post/4084907/the-russians-are-dying-its-the-best-money-weve-ever-spent

Since CBS is celebrating Henry Kissinger’s 100th birthday, we figured it’s time to look into the “elder statesman’s” past with journalist Nick Turse, author of books including Next Time They'll Come to Count the Dead and a recent investigation “Blood on his Hands,” an extensive examination of the unreported mass killings of Kissinger’s secret war in Cambodia.

“It’s long been known that Henry Kissinger has a lot of blood on his hands for Cambodia,” Turse begins. “But this investigation, using an archive of US military documents and never-before-published interviews, shows that Kissinger was responsible for far more civilian deaths than we knew about, and that the violence was far more intimate.”

Turse, who visited Cambodia to hear the stories of survivors, shares in-depth accounts of the horrors unleashed by Kissinger. And he was asked over and over again by the people of Cambodia: “Why? Why were we bombed?” Nick, in an ambush interview with Kissinger himself, asked the statesman those very questions.

“Why were they bombed?”

“We didn’t bomb Cambodians,” Kissinger lied back. “We bombed North Vietnamese in Cambodia.”

“Then how were 50,000 Cambodians murdered by your bombs?”

And the answer Kissinger gave, as strange as it is chilling, Nick still doesn’t understand: “He told me to ‘Play with it and have a good time.’ And then he stomped his cane on the floor and stalked off.”

Hear the full interview with Nick Turse in which he recounts finding the secret tape recordings from Kissinger’s office, widely unreported, that detail the extent of Henry Kissinger’s hands-on control in the murders of tens of thousands of people.

As Aaron puts it: “Well that was bone-chilling.” Subscribe to watch the full interview below.

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Click here for the full interview: https://usefulidiots.locals.com/post/4059339/full-interview-syrians-find-hope-under-crushing-us-sanctions

Read Hekmat’s article: Immiserated, humiliated, yet resilient: how Syrians survive America’s economic siege https://thegrayzone.com/2023/05/16/syrians-survive-americas-economic-siege/

For $5 a month, become a Useful Idiot! Get extended interviews, Thursday Throwdowns, and chat live with Katie and Aaron in the Absurd Arena at http://usefulidiots.locals.com

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Watch this week's Thursday Throwdown: "Donald Trump loves communist Russia," announces Democrat https://usefulidiots.locals.com/post/4051134/donald-trump-loves-communist-russia-announces-democrat

From Iraq to Syria to everywhere else the US government attempts regime change, when corporate media tells us what the “voices of the people” are saying, it’s not often that we actually hear voices that deviate from the US agenda.

That’s why we invited Syrian analyst Kevork Almassian and journalist Hekmat Aboukhater. And even under accounts of dangerous war zones, terrorist groups, and crushing US sanctions, they both noted that there is hope in Syria.

And the truth they found in Syria only underscores how much western corporate journalists lie to us to help keep the oppressive sanctions going:

“The western journalists who are the so-called experts on Syria,” Kevork, who founded Syriana Analysis, says. “They also have blood on their hands. They’re like a parallel intelligence apparatus giving justifications and information so that these criminal psychopaths in Washington would continue in their policy. Their entire goal is to give justification for US regime change and sanctions.”

Hekmat, cofounder of Project Onwards, shares the story of a Syrian student unable to access most websites and learning materials under US sanctions: “At every single turn as a youth trying to better himself, he’s blocked by a country oceans away that seems to have its knee on his neck as he’s just trying to exist as an internet student.”

But the US government and media pretend that sanctions are targeted only at President Assad, not destroying the lives of citizens. It’s a world of propaganda that’s become increasingly difficult to see through, but the first step to finding out what’s really going on is hearing the voices of real Syrians.

Subscribe to hear the full interview with Kevork and Hekmat where they share stories of US weapons used against the Syrian people, the CIA-backed army that kidnapped and threatened to behead Kevork’s brother, and the glimmer of hope they found back home.

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Click here for the full interview with Ben Smith: https://open.substack.com/pub/usefulidiots/p/former-buzzfeed-chief-on-the-end?r=je5va&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=web

For $5 a month, become a Useful Idiot! Get extended interviews, Thursday Throwdowns, and chat live with Katie and Aaron in the Absurd Arena at http://usefulidiots.substack.com

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Watch this week's Thursday Throwdown: BlueAnon Cracks under Russiagate Report https://open.substack.com/pub/usefulidiots/p/blueanon-cracks-under-russiagate?r=je5va&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=web

The era of corporate media is dying. The future is independent.

Ben Smith, former Buzzfeed chief and New York Times media columnist, is the founder of Semafor, a news site which, unlike corporate rags who pretend otherwise, doesn’t hide the author’s opinion. Check it out here.

Ben joins Useful Idiots to explain the beginnings of the internet age of media that led to Obama’s election, the rise and demise of outlets like Buzzfeed News and Vice, and describes what he sees as the next era. And yes, it includes Useful Idiots.

Watch the full episode where Ben debates Aaron on the Durham Report, which this week showed that the six-year story of collusion between Trump and Russia was a hoax led by corporate media. Buzzfeed, with Ben in charge, was the first outlet to publish the Steele Dossier in 2017. When Aaron challenges him on this, things get heated.

Then, as an ex-Times writer, Ben exposes the biggest clusterf*ck from his years at the paper, a notorious example of choosing traffic over truth. Hear his report in the full interview.

And speaking of Traffic, check out Ben Smith’s new book on media genius, rivalry, and delusion in the billion-dollar race to go viral.

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Click here for the full interview with former CIA agent Ray McGovern: https://open.substack.com/pub/usefulidiots/p/ex-cia-agent-reveals-the-truth-about?r=je5va&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=web

For $5 a month, become a Useful Idiot! Get extended interviews, Thursday Throwdowns, and chat live with Katie and Aaron in the Absurd Arena at http://usefulidiots.substack.com

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Watch this week's Thursday Throwdown: If you're voting for Joe Biden, you ain't 18-29 https://open.substack.com/pub/usefulidiots/p/if-youre-voting-for-joe-biden-you?r=je5va&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=web

A 23-year-old Ray McGovern, fresh in the CIA, a believer in John F. Kennedy, sat for a lecture from a senior operations officer at the agency. And was shocked by the rant he heard: “This president is a coward! He failed to back us up on the Bay of Pigs! He’s so cowardly, this is an awful, awful thing!” That was the summer of 1963. Three months later John Kennedy was assassinated.

McGovern, who worked in the CIA for 27 years and has spent an equal number of years critiquing it, lays out step by step the factors that led to what he suspects is the agency’s role in the assassination of a president.

First, he explains, was that “Kennedy threatened to splinter the CIA into a thousand pieces and throw it to the four winds. Now, what President Kennedy didn’t realize is you don’t say those kinds of things. You don’t threaten to do those kinds of things.”

Already in dangerous territory, Kennedy also went rogue on the CIA’s war: “Not only had John Kennedy already made two executive orders to pull our troops out of Vietnam, but in June 1963 he gave an incredible speech saying ‘Why can’t we just get along with the Russians?’”

The result? “He was killed. Very simply. He was assassinated and it was a warning to all other presidents who might want to threaten the CIA.”

McGovern, who since leaving the CIA founded the anti-war group Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity, is calling for the CIA to be disbanded. “It should be splintered. It serves no useful purpose. Somebody should set up an apolitical, agenda-free institute to do substantial, substantive, and untainted intelligence.” He adds, slyly: “And then if you want to do operations like blowing up pipelines, you put that in the Pentagon.”

Watch the full interview to hear Ray McGovern dissect the CIA’s proxy war in Ukraine, the Biden administration’s hoax of Russian disinformation, and the shocking private Trump quote that made him ask: “Who the hell is running this country?”

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Click here for the full interview with Branko Marcetic: https://open.substack.com/pub/usefulidiots/p/kremlin-droned-tucker-carlson-debate?r=je5va&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=web

For $5 a month, become a Useful Idiot! Get extended interviews, Thursday Throwdowns, and chat live with Katie and Aaron in the Absurd Arena at http://usefulidiots.substack.com

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Watch this week's Thursday Throwdown: Biden Toasts Media for Ignoring Julian Assange https://open.substack.com/pub/usefulidiots/p/biden-toasts-media-for-ignoring-julian?r=je5va&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=web

“Humanity escaped by the skin of its teeth.”

But you wouldn’t know it without journalists like Branko Marcetic, a returning Useful Idiot revealing the contents of the Pentagon leaks that the media has tried so hard to bury. And after this week’s attempted drone strike on the Kremlin, these leaks of US aggression become even more important.

“One of the topline revelations,” he tells us. “Was that despite the fact that Joe Biden said early in the war we’re not going to send US troops, it turns out that there are boots on the ground.” What they’re doing there, we don’t know yet. What it means for the war, Branko explains.

Another major revelation, he explains, is that “last year there was a run-in between a Russian and British plane. It turns out, we know from these documents, that a Russian plane fired at a British spy plane because the pilot misunderstood the instructions he was getting from the ground.” The only reason the plane wasn’t shot down, potentially leading to World War III: “The plane malfunctioned. And humanity escaped by the skin of its teeth.”

But our heads of military in both the Pentagon and the media can’t let Americans know how dangerous this increasingly escalating war is for fear of losing support for the billions of cash we spend on it. And that’s where Branko gives the third revelation from the Pentagon leaks:

“US officials lied about Ukraine winning the war. Privately, they believe Ukraine can make modest land gains at best. But if Americans believe that Ukraine is winning, they’re more likely to support sending further military aide.”

The Pentagon leaks are being censored to keep a deadly proxy war alive, to keep support for sucking Ukraine dry until we fight to the last Ukrainian. Branko Marcetic is uncovering it.

Watch the full interview to hear the scary extent of the Pentagon leaks, the depressing reelection campaign of “yesterday’s man” Joe Biden, and a heated debate:

Is Tucker Carlson actually anti-war?

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Click here for the full interview with Matt Taibbi: https://open.substack.com/pub/usefulidiots/p/matt-taibbi-reacts-to-dems-prison?r=je5va&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=web

For $5 a month, become a Useful Idiot! Get extended interviews, Thursday Throwdowns, and chat live with Katie and Aaron in the Absurd Arena at http://usefulidiots.substack.com

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Watch this week's Thursday Throwdown: "Arm Taiwan to the teeth (for peace)" https://open.substack.com/pub/usefulidiots/p/arm-taiwan-to-the-teeth-for-peace?r=je5va&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=web

If you thought beef with Elon Musk and threats of imprisonment from Congress would stop Matt Taibbi from breaking more of “the biggest story” of his career, you underestimate the power of a Useful Idiot: Matt returned to the show this week to drop an explosive new Twitter Files.

What he and journalists Matt Orfalea and Andrew Lowenthal uncovered was Project Osprey, Twitter’s secretive method of categorizing threats to the establishment as Russian agents. Twitter had two different algorithmic lists of Russians: “A Priori Russians” and “Inferred Russians,” the latter including presidential candidate Jill Stein and Wikileaks founder Julian Assange.

“It’s another example,” Matt explains, “of how there’s lots of stuff in the Twitter Files that if the quote unquote “left” cared, there’s stuff pertaining to them.” The reports consistently show collaboration between media companies, private corporations, and the US government to control a narrative of information and censor whatever doesn’t fit into it.

As Collusion author (and “Buzzsaw” victim) Luke Harding wrote in his Orwellian view of the future of journalism: “Rivalry between media titles is a thing of the past. The future is collaboration, the hunt for evidence a shared endeavor.”

Matt translates: “What these people are really talking about when they’re making decisions about content, it’s not just a First Amendment violation, it’s not just an antitrust violation, it’s a complete demolition of the whole model of how democracy is supposed to work.”

And this, not Hunter Biden’s penis, is the underlying theme of all the Twitter Files: “It’s this collaboration between a tightly-knit group of insiders who have decided that they’re gonna do this thing together without the input of the public.”

For all the unprecedented revelations of government censorship and control, Matt can’t understand why no one in the mainstream media seems to care about the story: “In American history there’s never been a story like this.”

Watch the full interview with Matt Taibbi where he responds to the infamous Mehdi Hasan interview, spills some Elon gossip, and reports on a story you won’t hear in corporate media: the indictment of four U.S. citizens accused of being Russian agents for speaking out against the US government. It makes us wonder who’s next.

Plus, watch this week’s Thursday Throwdown: "Arm Taiwan to the teeth (for peace)"

And join the Absurd Arena live discussion board with Katie and Aaron every Tuesday at 12pm est in the Substack app.

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Click here for the full interview with Lee Fang: https://open.substack.com/pub/usefulidiots/p/lee-fang-on-pentagon-leaks-twitter?r=je5va&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=web

*We recorded this episode before it was revealed that Congresswoman Stacey Plaskett had written Matt Taibbi a letter threatening him with prison time over his Twitter Files testimony. This makes our discussion with Lee even more crucial.*

For $5 a month, become a Useful Idiot! Get extended interviews, Thursday Throwdowns, and chat live with Katie and Aaron in the Absurd Arena at http://usefulidiots.substack.com

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Watch this week's Thursday Throwdown: Build Back Better in Ukraine https://open.substack.com/pub/usefulidiots/p/build-back-better-in-ukraine?r=je5va&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=web

Lee Fang, an independent and highly accomplished investigative journalist, is needed this week more than ever. His in-depth research and reporting, increasingly foreign to “intellectually lazy” corporate pundits like Mehdi Hasan, is a superpower for independent journalism in the fight against a mainstream media which has become little more than a traffic cop for the US government.

Lee explains the contents of the leaked national security documents (something people know very little about thanks to the NYT & co) and corporate media’s response, sharing the importance of one specific unearthed secret he found in the leak: Biden and national security officials, while publicly parading Ukraine’s advantage in the war, privately claim that Ukraine is losing rapidly to Russia. But instead of allowing Ukraine to negotiate peace, they continue the lie to “weaken” Russia and bleed Ukraine dry of any money they can suck out of it.

And then we get to the Twitter Files. Lee, who had exclusive access to Twitter documents, explains what he unearthed about a sweeping Pentagon propaganda campaign.

But the more the Twitter Files reveal about the government, the harder corporate media tries to bury them. After Mehdi Hasan’s embarrassing attack on Matt Taibbi (with enough name-calling and avoidance to make Trump proud), Rep. Stacey Plaskett sent a letter to Taibbi threatening him with jail time for committing perjury in his Congressional testimony. Lee’s response: “That is bullshit. What Matt Taibbi said in his testimony is 100 percent accurate.” He proves it point by point.

One bright side, however, is that Mehdi, whose flashy punditry needs no actual research, clearly chose the wrong people to go after when he attacked real investigative journalists. Lee’s entire career is highlighted by his willingness to go in the weeds with mountains of documents and sift through years of archives. So he decided to comb through Mehdi’s entire career. And what he found: multiple instances of plagiarism.

Watch the full interview with Lee Fang where we read Mehdi’s articles side-by-side with the originals he lifted and decide for yourself if Mehdi Hasan can be considered a journalist.

Plus, watch this week’s Thursday Throwdown: Build Back Better in Ukraine.

And join the Absurd Arena live discussion board with Katie and Aaron every Tuesday at 12pm est in the Substack app.

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Click here for the full interview with Jacob Siegel: https://open.substack.com/pub/usefulidiots/p/the-disinformation-hoax-of-the-century?r=je5va&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=web

For $5 a month, become a Useful Idiot! Get extended interviews, Thursday Throwdowns, and chat live with Katie and Aaron in the Absurd Arena at http://usefulidiots.substack.com

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Join the Absurd Arena live chat with Katie and Aaron every Tuesday at 12pm est at https://usefulidiots.substack.com/chat

Watch this week's Thursday Throwdown: Matt Taibbi vs Mehdi Hasan https://open.substack.com/pub/usefulidiots/p/matt-taibbi-vs-medhi-hasan?r=je5va&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=web

Read A Guide to Understanding the Hoax of the Century: https://www.tabletmag.com/sections/news/articles/guide-understanding-hoax-century-thirteen-ways-looking-disinformation

“Something monstrous is taking shape in America,” warns journalist Jacob Siegel in an article at Tablet:

Formally, it exhibits the synergy of state and corporate power in service of a tribal zeal that is the hallmark of fascism… A state organized on the principle that it exists to protect the sovereign rights of individuals is being replaced by a digital leviathan that wields power through opaque algorithms and the manipulation of digital swarms.America is ruled by a regime of censorship whose aim “is not to censor or to oppress, but to rule. That’s why the authorities can never be labeled as guilty of disinformation.” What is disinformation? It’s “whatever they say it is.” But, Siegel argues, “if the underlying philosophy of the war against disinformation can be expressed in a single claim, it is this: You cannot be trusted with your own mind.”

Since 2016, the US has pumped out Orwellian programs like the Countering Foreign Propaganda and Disinformation Act and Nina Jankowicz’s (Scary Poppins) Disinformation Governance Board, claiming that protecting citizens from state spying was jeopardizing national security. The US was losing “influence warfare.”

Make sure to watch the full Substack-only interview, in which Siegel weighs in on the Twitter Files, discusses the significance of Hunter Biden’s laptop story, and pushes back against the claim that they didn’t reveal any censorship.

Plus, watch this week’s Thursday Throwdown: Matt Taibbi vs Mehdi Hasan.

And join the Absurd Arena live discussion board with Katie and Aaron every Tuesday at 12pm est in the Substack app.

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Click here for the full interview with Congressman Ro Khanna: https://open.substack.com/pub/usefulidiots/p/congressman-ro-khanna-vs-useful-idiots?r=je5va&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=web

For $5 a month, become a Useful Idiot! Get extended interviews, Thursday Throwdowns, and chat live with Katie and Aaron in the Absurd Arena at http://usefulidiots.substack.com

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Join the Absurd Arena live chat with Katie and Aaron every Tuesday at 12pm est at https://usefulidiots.substack.com/chat

Watch this week's Thursday Throwdown: Even Trump-Crazed Media can't get it up for Indictment https://open.substack.com/pub/usefulidiots/p/even-trump-crazed-media-cant-get?r=je5va&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=web

Congressman Ro Khanna joins Useful Idiots to answer the question once and for all: can we still call him, or any member of Congress for that matter, a progressive?

Aaron and Katie come ready with hard-hitting questions on the Ukraine proxy war, the strangling sanctions on Syria, Biden’s drilling hypocrisy, and more, challenging the corporate establishment’s propaganda, constantly shoved down the throats of progressive members of Congress.

But did the establishment get to Ro?

Watch the full episode as the interview turns to debate, with Aaron confronting the congressman’s version of history in both Ukraine and Syria; the idea that the US wants peace, even after multiple top officials have denounced a ceasefire as unacceptable; and the blind trust in a president who hasn’t fulfilled a single progressive promise.

Katie and Aaron don’t pull punches, citing facts and history when given the White House narrative, calling out the president’s lies.

In a time when sitting for an opposition interview is almost unheard of for US politicians, it’s a big deal to have Ro Khanna, the last willing member, on the show. Hopefully, other politicians will follow his lead and allow their policy to be challenged. We’re looking at you next, Adam Schiff…

Plus, watch this week’s Thursday Throwdown: even Trump-crazed media can’t get it up for the indictment.

And join the Absurd Arena live discussion board with Katie and Aaron every Tuesday at 12pm est in the Substack app.

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