GLENN GREENWALD—This is the regime of censorship whose tentacles grow each month and whose power expands inexorably. Like all censors, the consortium that controls and funds this regime recognizes that whoever controls the flow of information will wield unchallenged power, and that few powers are more potent and tyrannical than the ability to relegate one’s critics to the most distant fringes or to silence them altogether.
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MONA ISSA—The popular support for the law was reiterated in a 2014 national poll which collected data from all provinces across the country, holding the question of whether they agree that the mandatory hijab should be implemented on Iranian women even if they do not agree with it. Around 19% of the population completely agreed, 35% simply agreed, and 25% were neutral. In 2021, Iranian deputy speaker of the parliament Ali Motahhari suggested another referendum on the veil be conducted when protests again were on the rise, exhibiting the democratic values which the state holds, as opposed to what the West paints the country to be – a clerical wasteland dictatorship.
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A KENT MACDOUGALL—Right-wing media monitors gleefully seized upon my two-part memoir, “Boring From Within the Bourgeois Press,” to try to breathe new life into the discredited thesis that the Establishment press is contaminated with leftism. Dow Jones & Company, publisher of The Wall Street Journal, for which I reported ten years, denounced me as an ideologue and questioned my fitness to teach journalism at a respected university. But my old editor at the Journal, now the president of NBC News, vouched for my reporting and stood up for ideological diversity in the newsroom. Meanwhile, my students and my dean vouched for my teaching, attesting that I keep ideology out of the classroom.
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DEBORAH ARMSTRONG—“We went to one yard,” Masha recalls, remembering an apartment building they had visited. “And there was a children’s playground, and graves right on this playground. Right there. It was the first biggest shock that I had. When I looked at it live. When it’s not a photo or, I don’t know, some video you watch on TV. When you see it live. The playground. And those graves. Right there.”
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The FBI was thus born primarily as a national security agency, charged with the domestic front. Over the ensuing decades, the agency accumulated a voluminous record of underhanded and controversial interventions, many clearly unconstitutional. It was precisely to deflect public attention from this unpopular political police role that the establishment began to provide the masses with a different image of the FBI, one concerned with leading “public enemies”, notorious gangsters and racqueteers. The “crime busters” image was reinforced by carefully managed p.r. campaigns and compliant media programs, such as the eponymous TV series The FBI, which made the agency a welcome fixture of Americana in most US households.
