The “gentrification of the left”, its takeover by onetime mildly reformist and social democrat parties in most of the West, representing the comfortable upper middle class, a project in which the CIA and its allies has been wildly successful, has killed its radical and revolutionary message, notes Diana Johnstone, in this interview with Chris Hedges, and we certainly agree. Identity politics has always been something of an obvious fraud, a con game foisted on the unsuspecting masses to kill class struggle consciousness when it is most desperately needed.
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GLENN GREENWALD—The most prolific activism demanding more Silicon Valley censorship is found in the nation’s largest news outlets: the media reporters of CNN, the “disinformation” unit of NBC News, and especially the tech reporters of The New York Times. That is where the most aggressive and sustained pro-internet-censorship campaigns are waged.
Due in part to a self-interested desire to re-establish their monopoly on discourse by crushing any independent or dissenting voices, and in part by a censorious and arrogant mindset which convinces them that only those of their worldview and pedigree have a right to be heard, they largely devote themselves to complaining that Facebook, Google and Twitter are not suppressing enough speech.
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MAX PARRY—Maupin emphasizes that the intelligentsia of the New Left were actively supported by the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) through its clandestine Congress for Cultural Freedom (CCF) program during the Cold War, which sought to subvert the sympathies of liberals and the non-communist left with the Soviet Union through the covert funding of prominent literary magazines, journals, international conferences, modern art exhibitions, and other cultural activities. The objective was to promote an intellectual consensus on the Western left that the Soviet Union was to be opposed as much as capitalism and it was indisputably successful.
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CAITLIN JOHNSTONE—Claiming that an evidence-free conspiratorial McCarthyite smear is true because the target of that smear did not prostrate themselves sufficiently to deny it is disgusting and shameful in and of itself. The burden of proof is always on the party making the claim, and extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence. If an extraordinary claim is made with no evidence at all, the party making that claim should be promptly shamed and dismissed.
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JOHN R HALL—From their corporate cages all domesticated sentient beings await their turns to become martyrs to capitalism. Cows, pigs, sheep, turkeys, and chickens moo, oink, bleat, gobble, and cackle their way to the meat grinders. Credit card zombified humanoids, distracted beyond all hope by shiny objects and virgins fondling credit cards, spend like drunken sailors, then toil like slaves, under the threatening whip of bankruptcy, hunger, and homelessness, calloused hands digging their own early earthly graves.
