Richard Nixon’s directive to Helm’s 50 years ago set in motion a series one of the more infamous acts in the annals of U.S. foreign policy. To instigate a coup CIA soon focused on providing guns, funds, and even life insurance policies for Chilean military operatives to remove the commander-in-chief of the Chilean armed forces, General Rene Schneider, who opposed a golpe. On October 22, 1970, Schneider was intercepted and shot on his way to work; he died the next day. His CIA-supported murder became one of the most legendary cases of U.S. involvement in the assassination of foreign leaders.

MoA—Every few days U.S. ‘intelligence’ and ‘officials’ produce fake claims about this or that ‘hostile’ country. U.S. media continue to reproduce those claims even if they lack any logic, substance, and do not make any sense. On June 27 the New York Times and the Washington Post published fake news about alleged Russian payments to the Taliban for killing U.S. troops. The stories ran on the outlets’ front pages. Two weeks later the story was shown to have no basis:

CAITLIN JOHNSTONE—Several millions. Not detained. Not involuntarily subjected to re-education programs. Killed. Five to seven million lives snuffed out, in the name of fighting “terrorism”. That’s just people who were killed. It says nothing of the tens of millions of people. America’s so-called “war on terror” who were forced to flee their homes in desperation. It says nothing of the mass-scale chaos, suffering and trauma that America’s response to acts of terrorism have inflicted upon people which will affect them for the rest of their lives. This is plainly worse than even the very worst things the US is accusing China of doing.

CALEB MAUPIN—In this chat Caleb covers as usual a wide range of topics, including: A major and powerful analysis of the political origins of 9/11 (the attack on the Towers).  Caleb explores the rise of Wahabism, a fanatical branch of Islam supported by Saudi Arabia and the US, and used criminally and cynically by the latter to fight genuine anti-imperialist forces and nations. Caleb reminds us that the 9/11 attacks were NOT carried out by anti-imperialist forces or nations, and that such nations —Cuba, Iran, Syria, Russia, China, etc., well acquainted with the consequences of Wahabism—were in fact clearly opposed to such an act of indiscriminate terror against the American people.  The conceptual failure of the left to point out that the attack on the twin towers was not the work of anti-imperialists, but of a Washington proxy and ally, was a huge tactical failure for the American left, including its most famous voices.

MAX BLUMENTHAL—t is hard to think of an American film that provoked a greater backlash in 2020 than “Planet of the Humans.” Focused on the theme of planetary extinction and fanciful proposals to ward it off, the documentary was released for free on YouTube on April 21. The date was significant not only because it was the eve of the 50th anniversary of Earth Day, but because a global pandemic was tearing through America’s social fabric and exposing the human toll of the country’s globalized, growth-obsessed economic model.“The Michael Moore-produced ‘Planet of the Humans’ faced a coordinated suppression campaign led by professional climate activists backed by the same ‘green’ billionaires, Wall Street investors, industry insiders and family foundations skewered in the film.”

JOE LAURIA—Graphika seemed alarmed that on PeaceData’s Arabic-language site “some articles also attacked France in general and President Emmanuel Macron in particular, and accused them of an ‘imperialist’ approach toward Africa.” This is in line with the Times quoting Ben Nimmo, director of investigations at Graphika and an Atlantic Council fellow, as saying, “In terms of posting, they were clearly significantly left of the Biden-Harris campaign,” as if this were a threat to “national security” as the FBI contends. PeaceData had a mix of original and republished articles, Graphika tells us, from publications such as The Grayzone, which Graphika smears as a “pro-Kremlin site.”

FINIAN CUNNINGHAM—The basic problem is that the United States has devolved into a hyper militarized oligarchic state. The vast, growing social inequality in the nation, and its grotesque waste of economic resources on militarism are but two manifestations of this state. That is the outcome of decades of US corporate capitalism. All Western states tend to share similar deformities, but the American version of the disease is at its most virulent and moribund.

DAVID W. PEAR—Everyone should also know about the U.S. 2014 illegal coup in Ukraine. The U.S. was behind a European Union bait and switch offer to Ukraine for eventual membership in the EU. Ukraine was suffering under economic hardships, and the U.S. and EU put stars in the eyes of the Ukrainian people. The psy-op had the Ukrainian people dreaming of a future prosperity, being Europeanized and eventually becoming NATO members. The terms that the EU ended up offering to Ukraine were so deceitful that no Ukrainian president, no matter how corrupt, could accept them. The result was the U.S.-choreographed, the “f*ck the E.U.”, Euromaidan color revolution. U.S. meddling has resulted in thousands of deaths, chaos, and the lives of ordinary Ukrainians has been for the worse for it. The corruption has just changed hands to U.S. profiteers.

Censorship, deplatforming, and de-ranking counterhegemonic content and alternative news, while simultaneously promoting more “authoritative” (i.e., corporate news) content, has so far proven insufficient for the tech and social media giants. They wish to financially and ideologically reestablish the corporate press’s dominance as the manufacturers of public opinion and consent, and as the gatekeepers of information to which the public has access, in addition to recapturing advertising profits by limiting audience access to alternative media sources.

BRYAN DYNE —Yet for all his rhetoric, Newsom has helped expand the fossil fuel industry in California along similar lines to Trump’s policies nationally. During his first 10 months in office, Newsom approved 33 percent more new oil and gas drilling permits than his predecessor, Jerry Brown. He also dropped a proposal from earlier this year to further regulate the industry after his administration received a letter from the California Independent Petroleum Association, an oil and gas lobbying group, urging him to do so. The flagship for such hypocrisy is the “Biden Plan for a Clean Energy Revolution and Environmental Justice” put out by Joe Biden’s presidential campaign. It asserts that a “Green New Deal is a crucial framework for meeting the climate challenges we face,” and claims that Biden will “[e]nsure the US achieves a 100 percent clean energy economy and reaches net-zero emissions no later than 2050.” Readers should recall the legacy of the Obama-Biden administration on environmental policy before expecting Biden to carry out any of this platform. During their second year in office they spearheaded the efforts to conceal the full extent of the Deepwater Horizon disaster, the largest oil spill to date in the Gulf of Mexico, which caused hundreds of billions of dollars in damages to the entire region.

ERIC ZUESSE—It’s not just that Biden is so incompetent as to have chosen the unpopular Harris; it is because he and his Party are owned by their billionaires just as much as Trump and his Party are owned by their billionaires — and this is the type of Government that results from that.

VANESSA BEELEY—Iran has come to the aid of the Syrian air-force helicopters from Hama airport that were transporting water from Sourani Dam in Tartous to limit the expansion of the fires burning in the inaccessible mountain ranges, impossible to reach with fire brigade vehicles. The risk for Iran to assist Syria in this campaign is huge. The terrorist groups are equipped with the US-manufactured ground to air missile launchers which have been used in the past to bring down Syrian aircraft. Fire-fighting planes must necessarily fly low and slow to be most effective which makes them a relatively easy target for the Al Qaeda-linked armed groups armed by the US Coalition members.