IMPERIAL WHORES

Red Lines host Anya Parampil speaks with The Grayzone’s Ben Norton about his recent piece “U.S. govt-linked PR firm ran fake news networks for right-wing Latin American regimes.” They discuss Facebook’s recent announcement that it deleted dozens of accounts run by a Washington D.C. based PR firm called CLS Strategies. The accounts sought to undermine the democratically elected governments of Nicolás Maduro in Venezuela and Andrés Manuel López Obrador in Mexico, as well as boost support for the Bolivian coup regime. They also address CLS Strategies’ close ties to the Democratic Party and a potential Biden Administration.

CAITLIN JOHNSTONE—These are just a few examples. These sentiments are everywhere throughout the Democratic establishment and its allied media. Do these seem like the sentiments of a media class who believes Donald Trump poses an urgent existential threat and must be defeated at all cost? Or do they sound like a media class who promoted Russiagate and Trump hysteria for ratings?

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.”

CAITLIN JOHNSTONE—Like many other forms of bigotry, this one has been engineered and promulgated by powerful people who benefit from it. If the mainstream news media were what it purports to be, namely an institution dedicated to creating an informed populace about what’s truthfully going on in the world, we would see the bombings in foreign nations given the same type of coverage that a bombing in Paris or London receives.

This would immediately bring consciousness to the unconscious bigotry that those in the US-centralized empire hold against people in low and middle income countries, which is exactly why the plutocrat-owned media do not report on it in this way. The US-centralized empire is held together by endless violence, and the plutocrats who run it have built their kingdoms upon the status quo of that empire.

MATT EHRET—As investigative journalist Paul Sperry rigorously lays out in his report, a major piece of the Russiagate puzzle was revealed when it became known that the primary source used by Christopher Steele in shaping his dodgy dossier was not the high level Kremlin insider which the world was told, but rather a former Brookings Institute employee named Igor Danchenko.