LIBERAL BETRAYALS

CBS newsmagazine show 60 Minutes recently profiled Eliot Higgins, founder of the “journalism” outlet Bellingcat. Bellingcat performs a specific kind of investigative journalism – the kind that always alleges wrongdoing by official enemies of the United States and the U.K., which also happen to be the governments that fund Bellingcat. Jimmy and The Grayzone’s Aaron Maté (https://mate.substack.com) feign surprise that 60 Minutes’ reporter Scott Pelley neglects to mention Bellingcat’s many ties to western governments.

ERIC ZUESSE—One thing that I find quite striking is that in none of the web-pages that come up when web-searching “UNDERSTANDING THE RUSSIA-UKRAINE CONFLICT” have I found any of them that use the word “coup” to refer to what incontestably was the coup that in February 2014 grabbed Ukraine for the U.S. (As those links show, that’s an empirical statement, a historical fact, no mere hypothesis.) Instead, all of them start with the false implicit assumption that it was instead a ‘revolution’ there, and that Russia was the aggressor against Ukraine during 2014 and seized Crimea from Ukraine, and that the Donbass (far eastern) part of “the Russia-Ukraine conflict” was (and was ONLY) a Russian invasion of that part of Ukraine, and that those two alleged ‘grabs’ by Russia had started this war between Ukraine and Russia.

EDWARD CURTIN—While ostensibly about European anti-war and anti-NATO activists caught on the horns of a dilemma, the piece goes on to assert that although US/NATO was guilty of wrongful expansion over many years, Russia has been an aggressor in Ukraine and Georgia and is guilty of terrible war crimes, etc.

There is not a word about the U.S. engineered coup in 2014, the CIA and Pentagon backed mercenaries in Ukraine, or its support for the neo-Nazi Azov Battalion and Ukraine’s years of attacks on the Donbass where many thousands have been killed. It is assumed these actions are not criminal or provocations.

At least for the moment, the bipartisan project to muzzle the US population is hitting a bump on the road and causing even a bit of a ruling class fracas due to the Biden admin’s oafish move to create a DHS department dedicated to “combat online disinformation”, seen by many as a transparent attempt to really police free speech, which is totally unconstitutional.

This is being done because the empire is actually losing the battle of communications at a critical moment in its troubled history. Global capitalism simply cannot cope with the very issues it continually trigers:  economic immiseration for the masses and grotesque inequality; endless wars; an unstoppable ecocide, and, perhaps, the most politically flammable issue, incurable unemployment.

On the heels of the Biden administration’s announcement of a “Ministry of Truth”-esque “Disinformation Governance Board” in the Homeland Security Department, Florida’s GOP Governor Ron Desantis responded by insisting that he will do everything in his power to protect liberty and not let the federal government stifle free speech under the guise of exposing propaganda and misinformation by foreign governments. Jimmy and The Grayzone’s Max Blumenthal discuss how the Democrats are becoming authoritarian and ceding the freedom-defending zone to right-wingers like Ron Desantis.