FINIAN CUNNINGHAM—The NATO alliance is busily erasing the truth about the origins and conduct of the Second World War, with Washington, Berlin, London, Warsaw and their satellites shamelessly claiming the Soviets share the blame for the catastrophe.

PATRICK HENNINGSEN—If ISIS does reemerge, then there’s a risk that residents of the region may also remember Donald Trump’s double assassination of Iran’s General Qassem Soleimani and the Iraqi military’s PMU commander, Abu Mahdi al Mouhendis – for what it truly was, a gift to global terrorism.

DANIEL LAZARE—The trouble with Sanders is that he thinks he can win by playing by the rules. But he can’t because the rules are stacked against him. He’d know that if his outlook was more radical. His problem is not that he’s too much of a socialist. Rather, it’s that he’s not enough.

ANDRE VLTCHEK—This is a discussion which is clearly encouraged, even invented by the Western regime: a safe discussion which is aimed at diverting dialogue from topics such as the fact that even in the West, a great number of people are living in fear and misery, and that the majority of neo-colonies of North America and Europe are once again being totally, shamelessly exploited.

JAMES COGAN—On January 2, however, Morrison was brought face-to-face with the mass popular anger that is burgeoning over the inaction and indifference of his government and the entire political establishment towards the bushfire catastrophe. Working class residents in the fire-devastated town of Cobargo refused to shake his hand, shouted abuse and demanded that he leave. The encounter in Cobargo revealed the state of class relations in Australia. The fire crisis is triggering the type of shift in popular consciousness that has led to mass struggles and protests in country after country—from France and North Africa to Chile and India—demanding the removal of governments and an end to the relentless attacks on the social position of the working class. Trust in the official establishment is collapsing.

“We’re all focused on 2020,” Lauren Crawford Shaver, a partner at Forbes-Tate who is helping to manage the Partnership campaign, recently told the National Association of Health Underwriters in a podcast produced by the group. Shaver, a former top staffer for the Hillary Clinton presidential campaign, explained to the group that she is working to peel support away from the “Medicare for All” bill sponsored by Sen. Bernie Sanders, I-Vt. The Sanders bill is currently sponsored by several rumored 2020 Democratic presidential candidates, including Sens. Elizabeth Warren, D-Mass.; Kamala Harris, D-Calif.; and Kirsten Gillibrand, D-N.Y.

As Truthdig columnist Chris Hedges argues in a new interview with “Rising’s” Krystal Ball and Saagar Enjeti, the Democratic Party has been “selective” in its assessment of what rises to a constitutional violation, willfully ignoring a litany of crimes committed by the Bush and Obama administrations.

CAITLIN JOHNSTONE—The smear campaign that has been conducted against Assange by the political/media class has distorted public perception of his plight so severely that there are far more people seeing his case through a distorted understanding than there are people who actually understand what’s happening to him. We saw this illustrated very clearly when the aforementioned UN Special Rapporteur on Torture, Nils Melzer, admitted frankly that before going to investigate Assange’s case for himself he’d been propagandized by this same smear campaign as well.

MoA—When AP sent the misleading tweet the commander of the Iraqi Federal Police Forces Jaffar al-Batat had already announced that the number of demonstrators exceeds one million. That number may well be correct. Reports said that the column of protesters was already eight kilometers long even while many were still arriving.

ALISON WEIR—The EJC considers anti-Zionism to be a form of anti-Semitism and employs a newly created definition of antisemitism in which certain types of statements about Israel are supposedly “antisemitic.” As a result, EJC’s opposition to “antisemitism” often consists of censoring information that exposes Israeli violations of Palestinian human rights.