LIES & PROPAGANDA

YASHA LEVINE—I’ve been trying to write about the liberal xenophobia that undergirds so much of today’s elite panic about “Russia” and “the Russians.” Since Trump’s election, the usual stereotypes and tropes about Russians have morphed into an all-encompassing racist conspiracy. It’s become totally fine — and even respectable — in American liberal media circles to bombard viewers and readers with all sorts of plots that feature shadowy Russians infecting “our” society and lurking behind everything that’s going wrong in America and around the world.

CAITLIN JOHNSTONE—Any think tank with the words “foreign policy” in its title is nothing other than a group of intellectuals who are paid by plutocrats to come up with the best possible arguments for why it would be very good and smart to do things that are very evil and stupid, and Naveed Jamali sits comfortably there.

MIKE HEAD—Last Friday, under the guise of partially restoring Assange’s right to access the internet and receive visitors, Moreno’s government sought to impose a new “special protocol” that provides a pretext for terminating the asylum that the previous Ecuadorian government of Rafael Correa granted him in 2012. Anyone seeking to visit Assange would have to give the Ecuadorian embassy three days’ notice and wait for written authorisation by the head of the embassy, which could be arbitrarily refused or cancelled without any reason being given. Visitors would have to provide the Ecuadorian authorities with full ID details and either hand over or clear all mobile phones and other communications devices.

P. GREANVILLE—Stephen Colbert and the recently dethroned Les Moonves typify the hypocrisy of hardcore centrist liberals. These are the folks that talk incessantly of morality, doing the right thing, are wedded to identity politics and racialism, but when push comes to shove, money and power always talk louder. Colbert made his reputation as a smirking, insolent subsidiary of Jon Stewart, cultivating the image of a rebel, speaking truth to power, yada yada. Later, as inheritor to the uber profitable Late Night Show franchise once presided by Johnny Carson, the man instantly became an apologetic CIA-asskissing, Democrat Russiagater and fervent neoliberal.