MEDIA SCUM

CALEB MAUPIN—In the case of civic activism and political struggle, Navalny has always been in favor of a setup in which authorities, including, judges, can be dispensed with quickly, and then shot. While talk about the danger of social media rhetoric inciting violence is very prevalent across the United States these days, in 2020 Navalny announced publicly that he calls for the immediate forcible overthrow the government of Russia: “Such a government must be overthrown right now, quite possibly even by force.”

CAITLIN JOHNSTONE—Our job is to wake up the mainstream public. This is very feasible, as trust in the imperial media is at an all-time low while our ability to network and share information is at an all-time high. It does mean we need to stop thinking of ourselves as radicals (we’re not radical, we’re just sane) and push inward from the fringes to the heart of the mainstream public as hard as we can.

GLENN GREENWALD—In a January Wall Street Journal op-ed, tech entrepreneur Vivek Ramaswamy and Yale Law School’s constitutional scholar Jed Rubenfeld warned that Congress is rapidly approaching this constitutional boundary if it has not already transgressed it. “Using a combination of statutory inducements and regulatory threats,” the duo wrote, “Congress has co-opted Silicon Valley to do through the back door what government cannot directly accomplish under the Constitution.” Added: Deleted: That article compiled just a small sample of case law making clear that efforts to coerce private actors to censor speech implicate core First Amendment free speech guarantees.

JAMES TRACY—Since the end of World War Two the Central Intelligence Agency has been a major force in US and foreign news media, exerting considerable influence over what the public sees, hears and reads on a regular basis. CIA publicists and journalists alike will assert they have few, if any, relationships, yet the seldom acknowledged history of their intimate collaboration indicates a far different story–indeed, one that media historians are reluctant to examine.

When seriously practiced, the journalistic profession involves gathering information concerning individuals, locales, events, and issues. In theory such information informs people about their world, thereby strengthening “democracy.” This is exactly the reason why news organizations and individual journalists are tapped as assets by intelligence agencies and, as the experiences of German journalist Udo Ulfkotte (entry 47 below) suggest, this practice is at least as widespread today as it was at the height of the Cold War.

In this Grayzone special, Max Blumenthal attends a Capitol Hill gathering of the National Endowment for Democracy (NED) and explores the group’s destabilizing global campaign to meddle in other countries’ affairs. The report covers the NED’s interference in foreign elections in Russia and Mongolia, its participation in coup attempts from Haiti to Venezuela to Nicaragua, and its escalating public relations efforts against China and North Korea. Help us create more videos like this by donating to Grayzone: https://www.patreon.com/Grayzone​