INDECENT SLIMEBALLS

CAITLIN JOHNSTONE—You can always count on the less reality-anchored pundits to say out loud what the rest are thinking in private. Support for internet censorship is now a mainstream position among the so-called “moderates” of the warmongering corporatist Democratic Party, not just for people to their right but for people to their left as well. If it were up to these freaks the entire internet would just be a bunch of Wall Street liberals agreeing with each other that Trump is bad and Jen Psaki is a strong yet sensual warrior princess.

The Emma Vigeland tweet that Dore was riffing on in the clip was more hand-wringing about a “red-brown alliance” that all grown adults should realize by now was never anything other than a narrative management campaign to keep leftists from moving too far from the establishment-authorized Overton window of acceptable opinion.

DUBAI: This week, The New York Times ran a full page ad that condemned part-Palestinian models Gigi and Bella Hadid and British-Albanian popstar Dua Lipa for showing solidarity with the people of Palestine. “Bella, Gigi and Dua, Hamas calls for a second holocaust. Condemn them now (sic),” read the headline of the advertisement, which took the form of a letter to the three prominent stars. The advert was organized, produced and paid for by Rabbi Shmuley Boteach, the head of the World Values Network.

The ad, which ran on Saturday in the main section of the newspaper, named Lipa and the Hadid sisters as “mega-influencers” who have “accused Israel of ethnic cleansing” and “vilified the Jewish State.” 

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.

CAITLIN JOHNSTONE—And how sick is that? Obviously Trump has advanced a lot of toxic agendas which need to be ferociously opposed, but how warped does your mind have to be to make a religion out of that opposition which is so all-consuming that it eclipses even the natural impulse to avoid inflicting death and destruction upon your fellow man? How viciously has the psyche of American liberals been brutalized with mass media psyops to drive them into this psychotic, twisted reality tunnel?

P. GREANVILLE—Since Trump came to power, Maddow has led the choir in seeking his toppling, using, as do all Democrats, the spurious Russiagate scandal as the battering ram. Maddow is obviously capable of shedding tears for Latin babies caught in the insane anti-migrant policies of the US government (which Trump has exacerbated but not created, Obama deported a huge number on his watch) but pays little regard to children in Gaza, or Libya or Syria, where US criminal interventions rage on with no sign of letup.  Not to mention that a nuclear war between the superpowers would cause a helluva lot more suffering than she’s already supposedly decrying