CITIZENS COUNTER-PROPAGANDA

As might be expected from a shockumentary artist like Michael Moore, his latest outing,  Planet of the Humans, packs a great deal of provocative, at times haunting, and vital information along with debatable truths. Watch Moore’s film, and this video selection featuring critics and defenders in the most important debate of our time or any time.

MATT EHRET—When it became evident that the story of the laboratory origins of COVID-19 wasn’t going to disappear on its own, a new counter-narrative was spun which involved embracing the evidence of the laboratory origins while shifting the blame from the hands of Anglo-American intelligence to… China.

LORENZO—Noam Chomsky is, as anyone reading this knows, a linguist, MIT professor, and the English-speaking world’s foremost radical dissident intellectual. Chomsky’s work in this latter capacity is so well-documented that it’s not necessary to recapitulate too much—however, a few choice high notes include decades of criticism of US foreign policy, some decent commentary on then-President-elect Barack Obama at a time nearly all of the Western commentariat had turned into a deranged Borg-like collective, and producing the second comprehensive study of corporate constraints on the media along with Edward Herman. As co-author of Manufacturing Consent, Chomsky provided a model illuminating the “political economy of the mass media,” and from this research came a great deal of very useful and incisive media criticism on issues like how concision and sound-bites help the status quo and why a journalist can be both genuine and compromised. Herman and Chomsky’s propaganda model purports to show how five corporate filters enable the mass media’s owners to ensure that their interests are expressed. In this way, according to the two, democracies manufacture consent through seamlessly delivered propaganda, the way totalitarian societies do so by coercion and force.

TIM WISE—The truth was there, but invisible to most whites when we told pollsters in the mid-1960s — within mere months of the time that formal apartheid had been lifted with the Civil Rights Act of 1964 — that the present situation of black Americans was mostly their own fault. Only one in four thought white racism, past or present, or some combination of the two, might be the culprit.

ALEX LO—In one masterstroke, Beijing is set to resolve long-standing challenges to its legitimate interests, power and prestige in Hong Kong. Forget all the noises coming out of Britain, Canada and Australia, or the usual meaningless threats from Washington. Hong Kong IS China’s. It is simply a rightful assertion of Chinese sovereignty after being challenged and undermined by pro-independence elements – who dare not speak their name – within the protest movement and opposition.