ACTIVISTS & HEROES

NORMAN SOLOMON—After many years of carefully refusing to launch a single campaign in support of brave whistleblowers who faced vicious prosecution during the Obama administration — including Army whistleblower Chelsea Manning, NSA whistleblowers Thomas Drake and Edward Snowden, and CIA whistleblowers John Kiriakou and Jeffrey Sterling — MoveOn.org has just cherrypicked a whistleblowing hero it can support. [Well you guessed it, they picked a whistleblower who is no whistleblower, but a CIA agent helping to launch a coup against Trump.—Ed)

All of the people who visited the cyberactivist during his stay at the diplomatic building were obliged to hand over their bags, computers, electronic devices and cellphones at a security checkpoint. What the assortment of attorneys, journalists, politicians, doctors and friends of Assange who visited the embassy were unaware of is that some of them had been designated by Morales as “priority targets.”

CAITLIN JOHNSTONE—Establishment loyalists write smear pieces about me because they can’t get me fired since I’m crowd-funded and can’t get me deplatformed since I don’t have any platform beyond blogging and social media. Their only shot, then, is to circulate material making the general public suspicious of me so that nobody will read what I write. That doesn’t really work either, though; the most prominent lefty outlet in America spent all of last July throwing smear pieces at me and it didn’t even slow me down. My leftist haters are out of ammo, and my centrist and right-wing haters only help me.

MEDIA LENS—As Oborne noted, Assange is ‘responsible for breaking more stories than all the rest of us put together’, ‘each and every one in the public interest’, ‘which any self-respecting reporter would sell his or her grandmother to obtain’. One could hardly think of a more powerful example of someone not ‘pissing around at the margins of the problem’. [Meanwhile] Monbiot is hardly alone in ‘focusing on other issues’, year after year, while Assange rots.

For over a decade, the nation branding campaign Brand Israel has sought to “wash” the crimes of occupation, apartheid and ethnic cleansing by carefully crafting the image of Israel as a progressive, forward-thinking oasis of modernism in the Middle East. The campaign has appropriated elements of both the LGBT and environmental movements to advance these goals. Such “pinkwashing” and “greenwashing” are unique in the world of state-sponsored propaganda campaigns.