What's Your Green Social Credit Score?

A former Goldman Sachs official now working for the Chinese giant Alibaba revealed at Davos recently that a new global tracking system of "where you go, what you eat, etc" will soon be in operation to monitor and report on how "green" individuals are behaving. What was once derided as conspiracy theory has become conspiracy fact. Also today: California deep dives into medical tyranny and MSM continues to walk back its (mis)-reporting on Ukraine. Watch the Liberty Report:



from What's Your Green Social Credit Score?

Stopping School Shootings

The tragic murder of innocent school children and teachers in Uvalde Texas is once again being used by the radical left to attack our second amendment rights. During a hastily called press conference poor old doddering Joe Biden angrily decried what he called semi-automatic rifles “weapons of war” and implied anyone who owned such a weapon did so with the intent to murder other human beings.

Just for a moment, let’s do a little thought experiment. Suppose Joe managed to eliminate all types of guns in the hands of citizens overnight. No more handguns, no more rifles, no more shotguns, nothing. Guns are kaput!

Would it be possible for a mentally impaired maniac like the shooter in Uvalde to use something other than a gun to murder innocent school children? What if he ran in the school with a couple of quart mason jars full of gasoline and splattered them in the class room and then lit it off? What if he stole a big bulldozer and used it to smash through the wall and crush anyone in the way?

What I’m driving at is guns are NOT the problem, it’s the troubled souls who use them to murder. That said we will never stop school shootings by restricting access to firearms. But what we can do is make any potential maniac think twice before entering any school and shooting children and teachers.

How do we accomplish this? One option would be to train and arm teachers willing to protect their students. But school teaching seems to attract an overabundance of lefties who hate the second amendment and insist their school should be a “Gun Free Zone”. And since everybody knows schools are “Gun Free Zones” there is no fear of armed resistance for the nut jobs that barge in shooting the place up.

According to research.com there are 97,568 public schools in the United States as of 2020. What would it cost to put two armed guards in every school across the country? Well let’s put this in perspective. As you know Congress has allotted over $53 BILLION to Ukraine over the past few months to save our democracy!

Are the lives of our school children worth protecting as much as a totally corrupt, Nazi infested regime in Ukraine?

Well if you do the math you’ll discover that for about $125,000 annually per public school we could hire two armed guards to protect the kids. That works out to $12 Billion $200 Million dollars or about 22 percent of what’s been earmarked for Ukraine. And with all the out-of-work police who saw their departments defunded by the woke crowd there should be no shortage of qualified applicants to protect the kids.

Then the main stream media could trumpet the fact that every school in America would have multiple armed guards on campus. Schools would be able to adequately protect their students and teachers with armed, trained guards on site. No, we’ll never be able to completely stop some nut from killing innocent school children regardless of their weapon of choice. But we can let them know they will be met with a hail of bullets if they show up with a weapon.

Are our kids worth 22 percent of what’s going to Ukraine to keep them safe from nut jobs like the Uvalde shooter? We’ll see soon enough.

from Stopping School Shootings

Mass Shooting Deception at the Washington Post

What? There were at least 11 mass shootings in America over Memorial Day weekend? That is what Annabelle Timsit wrote in a Washington Post article. That is news to me, and probably to you as well. Why had we not heard of all these mass shootings? One simple reason: They did not happen. Timsit’s article is greatly inflating the number of mass shootings by including things that do not fit in the category. This is nothing new for the Washington Post. I addressed such deception from the...

Read the full report by clicking the title, below...

from Peace and Prosperity http://www.ronpaulinstitute.org/archives/peace-and-prosperity/2022/may/31/mass-shooting-deception-at-the-washington-post/

Mainstream Media Grudgingly Admits Truth: Ukraine War Is A Disaster

One by one, the US mainstream media outlets are lining up to (finally) let a bit of truth leak out after three months of incessant propaganda: Ukraine is being destroyed in the war. How many have unnecessarily died because the likes of Boris Johnson and Biden have prohibited a negotiated settlement? Also today, US/EU sanctions on Russia have backfired. Like always. Bonus: What was Ron Paul doing this weekend? Today on the Liberty Report:



from Mainstream Media Grudgingly Admits Truth: Ukraine War Is A Disaster

Media Lies Fuel Phony Ukraine Narrative

The idea that Ukraine and Zelensky are going to "win the war" is an absolute fantasy. It’s delusional in the extreme. And yet, so many in the West have been conditioned to really believe it.

If you are getting your narrative and information from mainstream media in a NATO nation, then my heart goes out to you. Understand that your externalized reality on this war nothing more than a testament to the power of western propaganda. We have a state-of-the-art consensus reality machine which would make Goebbels’ head spin, and makes Stalin’s Pravda look like Nickelodeon.

Much closer to the truth is this: Ukraine is not just losing, but they are setting themselves up for a historical downthrow. If Russian Ministry of  Defense dailies are even partly true (most of these are backed up by visual evidence as well), then at the current clip of 200-300 per day Ukraine Armed Forces lost in combat may, very soon, approach the level of US soldier losses in Vietnam. In just 6 months. Mind you, it took the US ten years to lose 56K troops in a fruitless war of attrition.

It is becoming clearer every day that the Ukraine Armed Forces seem to have a policy of either not counting their dead, or counting them as AWOL, so as to avoid a collapse in military morale (and more actual deserters), and the inevitable international and domestic fallout from having to announce they have 20K or 30K dead soldiers, many of whom were untrained, under equipped frontline fodder - forced into conscription by a desperate Zelensky regime eager to please his new funding sources in Washington and Brussels. If their true numbers were announced publicly each week, what do you think would happen to US, UK and EU support for Zelensky & his Nazi brigades? And how long would Ukrainians support NATO’s "arm’s length" proxy meat grinder war? Not long at all. It would be over yesterday.

Like the actor Zelensky, our governments are also selling a packaged fantasy to the public. Support for a losing war would end in a heartbeat should the true state of affairs become the consensus reality in the West.

When the fighting eventually stops, perhaps the smartest men in the room will then be the estimated 5K+ Ukrainian soldiers who have already surrendered to Russian and DPR forces. Fortunate will be those who walked away from their western puppet’s ego-driven suicidal debacle.

The likely numbers we are looking at here across the board are simply unprecedented in recent modern conflict, and each and every data point confounds each and every fanciful, postmodernist projection coming out of our corrupt, self-referential western mainstream media and parroting politicians who are quite clearly feeding off their own propaganda entrails now. It’s beyond disgusting. Sorry to be blunt here, but this is fast becoming the biggest propaganda bubble in the history of western military adventurism.

And that’s saying something.

And don’t expect a mea culpa from the gaggle of charlatans we have running foreign and "defense" policy in the US, UK, mutton Europe, and the rest of the supine NATO backwater nations. They will simply double-down and continue attack any dissenters to their fanatical party line, believing that crushing free speech and debate will somehow help keep their propaganda bubble from deflating faster than it already is.

Sure, it’s an exercise in futility, but one we’ve sadly come to expect from the legion of incompetent globalist bureaucrats and technocrats with a track record of repeated failures and whose only real accomplishment has been to blow trillions in public money on systematically wrecking other countries, always under some contrived moral imperative. By the way, besides being the most corrupt society and government in the western orbit, as it stands now Ukraine is much, much further from being an independent, sovereign and free "democracy" than Russia is.

The longer the geniuses at NATO and our media continue fueling their proxy war of attrition, the more territory Kiev is going to lose. And whatever they lose, they will never get back. That’s for the simple reason that the people in those regions do not want to live in a wildly corrupt, western controlled, Nazi-ridden sectarian basketcase of a failed state, aka Ukraine.

So the next time to hear someone trumpeting, “I Stand with Ukraine!”, just stop and ask them:

"Where would you draw that line on how many dead Ukrainian soldiers until we call it quits? How much territory will Kiev have to lose before we say that’s enough?"

And don’t let them go until they give you a coherent answer.

from Media Lies Fuel Phony Ukraine Narrative

Friends with Benefits: Sussmann Trial is an Indictment of the FBI and the Washington Establishment

Below is a slightly expanded version of my column in the Hill on Sussmann trial and what it revealed about the role of the Federal Bureau of Investigation in the combined Russian collusion investigations. It also looks down the road at whether Special Counsel John Durham will be allowed to write the same type of public report that concluded the Mueller investigation.

Here is the column:

With the jury out in the trial of former 2016 Clinton campaign counsel Michael Sussmann, the usual odds-takers appeared on cable news, rating the chances of a conviction. Despite the seemingly overwhelming evidence against Sussmann, the jury’s makeup seems strikingly favorable for the defense.

One verdict, however, appears to need little deliberation. It concerns the Department of Justice, and particularly the FBI. The trial confirmed what many have long alleged about how top officials eagerly accepted any Russia collusion claim involving Donald Trump’s 2016 campaign. Special counsel John Durham’s investigation, which led to Sussmann’s trial, is an indictment of a department and a bureau which, once again, appeared willfully blind as they were played by Hillary Clinton’s campaign.

Despite the trial judge’s rulings imposing strict limits on the scope of the trial evidence, Durham’s case still revealed new information on how the Russia collusion theory was pushed into the FBI and the media by the Clinton campaign. Perhaps the most ironic moment came when Sussmann’s defense team outed Clinton as personally approving the campaign’s effort to spread a baseless claim that the Trump organization maintained a secret channel to the Kremlin through Russia’s Alfa Bank.

That claim was a real tinfoil-hat conspiracy theory without support. Durham previously disclosed how researchers tasked with supporting the claim were afraid it was so unsupported that they would be mocked. They argued, according to Sussmann’s indictment, that anyone familiar with analyzing internet traffic “would poke several holes” in the theory. One researcher warned: “Let’s assume again that they are not smart enough to refute our ‘best case scenario.’ You do realize that we will have to expose every trick we have in our bag to even make a very weak association.”

Yet, the Clinton campaign did not seem remotely concerned about even minimal inquiries that might expose the lack of proof. The researchers were told to just worry about creating a “very useful narrative.”

During the trial, Clinton campaign general counsel Marc Elias and campaign manager Robby Mook both said the campaign trusted the media to push the story. They were right: Slate quickly ran it, and then Clinton and one of her aides, Jake Sullivan (now President Biden’s national security adviser), released statements expressing alarm about the claim as if it were news to them.

The Clinton campaign similarly pushed the infamous Steele dossier into the news, too, after secretly helping to fund it. And both the Steele dossier and the Alfa Bank claim was pushed to friends in the FBI.

Regardless of what the jury decides regarding Sussmann, the combined record of the Steele dossier and the Alfa Bank claim makes the FBI look like an unindicted co-conspirator.

On the witness stand in Sussmann’s trial, for example, FBI general counsel James Baker was asked why it took him so long to turn over the most damaging evidence — a text message to him in which Sussmann said he was not representing any client in pushing the Alfa Bank claim to FBI officials. Baker explained that Sussmann was his friend and told prosecutors that “this is not my investigation. This is your investigation.”

In other words, there was no reason for the Justice Department to expect that Baker, a former top Justice lawyer, would help to make the case against Sussmann. It did not help the optics when Baker left the Justice Department and joined Brookings Institution, liberal think tank linked to key figures who framed the early Russian collusion claims. For some, it seemed like not just friends but “friends with benefits.”

Later, the supervisory agent for the FBI’s Trump-Russia probe, Joe Pientka, sent a note to FBI special agent Curtis Heide, stating: “People on the 7th floor to include Director are fired up about this server.” Pientka then messaged Heide: “Did you guys open a case? Reach out and put tools on?”

That description of the apparent eagerness of then-FBI Director James Comey and others only magnifies concern over the bureau’s alleged bias or predisposition on the Trump investigation. It was the same eagerness that led the FBI to pursue the Russian investigation for years despite being warned early by American intelligence that the Steele dossier contained not just unsupported allegations but possible Russian disinformation.

When FBI investigators were given Sussmann’s allegation, they were told by supervisors that it came from the Justice Department, not Sussmann. Even with that framing, however, investigators found what the Clinton campaign researchers feared — in Baker’s words, that there was “nothing there.”

The FBI, however, went on to pursue the other Russia collusion claims. That effort would result in a conviction of FBI attorney Kevin Clinesmith for making false statements by altering key evidence to obtain secret surveillance orders against Trump associate Carter Page. Another trial witness, the FBI’s Heide, admitted he is under investigation for allegedly withholding exculpatory information contradicting the premise of the Russia investigation.

Previously, of course, another special counsel, Robert Mueller, never found any basis for criminal charges related to Russia collusion. But what is now even more striking is how so much of this information about “fired up” FBI officials and the role of the Clinton campaign mysteriously escaped Mueller and his team.

The question now is whether Durham will be given the same opportunity as Mueller to write a report on his findings. All of these disclosures were made despite limitations placed on Durham by the court. Clearly, Durham is sitting on more information about how the collusion claims were packaged and pushed to eager friends in the media and the FBI.


Before Mueller declined to press criminal charges on any Russia collusion allegations, Democrats in Congress insisted that he should not just issue a report but that the report should be released unredacted, including ordinarily secret grand jury material.

There is no such hue and cry for a similarly unredacted report by Durham.

If Durham does not issue such a report, much of the true story behind the Russia collusion scandal could be buried. Indeed, even if control of Congress were to flip to Republicans in November, the Justice Department could refuse to turn over investigatory material and information. That is precisely what many in Washington undoubtedly would like to happen.

Yet, after the glimpses offered in Sussmann prosecution of still undisclosed evidence, the public deserves to have a full Durham report on how these scandals were conceived and crafted among “friends.”

Reprinted with permission from JonathanTurley.org.

from Friends with Benefits: Sussmann Trial is an Indictment of the FBI and the Washington Establishment

Don’t Trade Real Liberty for Phony Security

Authoritarian politicians wasted no time using the recent shootings in Buffalo, New York, and Uvalde, Texas, to justify new infringements on liberty. Just days after the Buffalo shooting, the US House of Representatives passed a law creating new domestic terrorism offices in the FBI, the Justice Department, and the Department of Homeland Security.

This is a step toward achieving the longstanding goal of many progressives of focusing the national security state on “domestic terrorists” and “right-wing extremists.” Supporters of these efforts have used the Buffalo shooter’s mention of “replacement theory” in his “manifesto” to attack prominent conservative commentators, most notably Tucker Carlson. Carlson and others are accused of spreading the replacement conspiracy theory because they have pointed out that the Left has for years celebrated the coming “replacement” of the white majority population. The goal is to stigmatize, intimidate, and even criminalize those expressing views or facts that contradict the cultural Marxists or the Democrat party establishment.

Painting the Buffalo shooter as a conservative requires ignoring his self-description as an environmental-fascist and his disdain for “Fox News conservatism.” The mainstream media also ignores the shooter’s use of the same neo-Nazi symbol used by the Ukrainian Azov brigade. This may be because they do not want the American people to realize their tax dollars are supporting actual Nazis in Ukraine.

The push to use the police state against “right-wing extremists” is supported by many progressives who (correctly) oppose the national security state’s civil liberties abuses of Muslim and other minorities. Conversely, many conservatives who have defended all infringements on liberty done in the name of the “global war on terror,” (correctly) oppose federal crackdown on “right wing extremists.”

Both sides fail to realize that a violation of any individual’s liberty is a threat to everyone’s liberty.

The massacre of 19 school children and two teachers in Uvalde Texas was followed by calls for expanded gun controls from President Biden and other prominent politicians. Among the proposals floated are a renewed push for federal Red Flag laws. Red Flag laws allow law enforcement to take someone’s guns without due process based on a mere allegation that an individual poses a risk of violent behavior. Despite being unconstitutional, easily abused, and ineffective at stopping violent crime, Red Flag laws enjoy broad bipartisan support. For example, former President Donald Trump endorsed a policy of “take the gun first, worry about due process later.”

If Congress was serious about protecting liberty and security, they would pass Kentucky Representative Thomas Massie’s legislation repealing the “Gun-Free School Zones Act of 1990.” This poorly worded law leaves children defenseless against mass shooters who are not dissuaded from their evil intentions by “Gun-Free Zone” signs. Video showing the Uvalde police not only standing around outside the school, but tasering parents who were trying to protect their children reinforces the importance of allowing school personnel to protect themselves and their students by carrying firearms.

Expanding the police state to “monitor” right-wing extremism and giving the government new powers to deny law-abiding individuals access to firearms make us less safe and less free. Instead of allowing politicians to use mass shootings as an excuse to further expand their powers, we must insist they repeal all federal laws that trade real liberty for phony security starting with the USA FREEDOM Acts (previously known as the USA PATRIOT Act) and the so-called Safe and Gun Free Schools Act.

from Don’t Trade Real Liberty for Phony Security

Russia-Ukraine War: George Bush’s Admission of His Crimes in Iraq Was No ‘Gaffe’

It was apparently a “gaffe” of the kind we had forgotten since George W Bush stepped down from the US presidency in early 2009. During a speech in Dallas last week, he momentarily confused Russian President Vladimir Putin’s current war of aggression against Ukraine and his own war of aggression against Iraq in 2003.

Bush observed that a lack of checks and balances in Russia had allowed “one man to launch a wholly unjustified and brutal invasion of Iraq… I mean, Ukraine. Iraq too. Anyway… I’m 75.”

It sounded like another “Bushism” – a verbal slip-up – for which the 43rd president was famous. Just like the time he boasted that people “misunderestimated” him, or when he warned that America’s enemies “never stop thinking about new ways to harm our country and our people – and neither do we”.

Maybe that explains why his audience laughed. Or maybe not, given how uncomfortable the laughter sounded.

Bush certainly wanted his mistake to be seen as yet another slip-up, which is why he hurriedly blamed it on his age. The senility defense doubtless sounds a lot more plausible at a time when the incumbent president, Joe Biden, regularly loses track of what he is saying and even where he is.

The western media, in so far as it has bothered to report Bush’s speech, has laughed along nervously too. It has milked the incident largely for comic effect: “Look, we can laugh at ourselves – unlike that narcissist Russian monster, Putin.”

The BBC accorded Bush’s comment status as a down-page brief news item. Those that gave it more attention preferred to term it a “gaffe” or an amusing “Freudian slip”.

‘Putin apologists’

But the focus on the humor of the moment is actually part of the media’s continuing war on our understanding of recent history. It is intended to deflect us, the audience, from thinking about the real significance of Bush’s “gaffe”.

The only reason the media is now so belatedly connecting – if very indirectly – “a wholly unjustified and brutal invasion” of Ukraine and what happened in Iraq is because of Bush’s mistake.

Had it not happened, the establishment media would have continued to ignore any such comparison. And those trying to raise it would continue to be dismissed as conspiracy theorists or as apologists for Putin.

The implication of what Bush said – even for those mockingly characterizing it in Freudian terms – is that he and his co-conspirator, British Prime Minister Tony Blair, are war criminals and that they should be on trial at the Hague for invading and occupying Iraq.

Everything the current US administration is saying against Putin, and every punishment meted out on Russia and ordinary Russians, can be turned around and directed at the United States and Britain.

Should the US not be under severe economic sanctions from the “civilized world” for what it did to Iraq? Should its sportspeople not be banned from international events? Should its billionaires not be hunted down and stripped of their assets? And should the works of its long-dead writers, artists and composers not be shunned by polite society?

And yet, the western establishment media are proposing none of the above. They are not calling for Blair and Bush to be tried for war crimes. Meanwhile, they echo western leaders in labeling what Russia is doing in Ukraine as genocide and labeling Putin as an evil madman.

The western media are as uncomfortable taking Bush’s speech at face value as his audience was. And for good reason.

That is because the media are equally implicated in US and UK crimes in Iraq. They never seriously questioned the ludicrous “weapons of mass destruction” justification for the invasion. They never debated whether the “Shock and Awe” bombing campaign of Baghdad was genocidal.

And, of course, they never described either Bush or Blair as madmen and megalomaniacs and never accused them of waging a war of imperialism – or one for oil – in invading Iraq. In fact, both continue to be treated by the media as respected elder statesmen.

During Trump’s presidency, leading journalists waxed nostalgic for the days of Bush, apparently unconcerned that he had used his own presidency to launch a war of aggression – the “supreme international crime”.

And Blair continues to be sought out by the British and US media for his opinions on domestic and world affairs. He is even listened to deferentially when he opines on Ukraine.

Pre-emption excuse

But this is not simply about a failure to acknowledge the recent historical record. Bush’s invasion of Iraq is deeply tied to Putin’s invasion of Ukraine. And for that reason, if no other, the western media ought to have been driving home from the outset the parallels between the two – as Bush has now done in error.

That would have provided the geopolitical context for understanding – without necessarily justifying – Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and the West’s role in provoking it. Which is precisely why the media have worked so hard to ignore those parallels.

In invading Iraq, Bush and Blair created a precedent that powerful states could redefine their attack on another state as “pre-emptive” – as defensive rather than aggressive – and thereby justify the military invasion in violation of the laws of war.

Bush and Blair falsely claimed both that Iraq threatened the West with weapons of mass destruction and that its secular leader, Saddam Hussein, had cultivated ties with the extreme Islamists of al-Qaeda that carried out the 9/11 attacks on the US. These pretexts ranged from the entirely unsubstantiated to the downright preposterous.

Putin has argued – more plausibly – that Russia had to take preemptive action against covert efforts by a US-led Nato to expand its military sphere of influence right up to Russia’s borders. Russia feared that, left unchecked, the US and NATO were preparing to absorb Ukraine by stealth.

But how does that qualify Russia’s invasion as defensive? The Kremlin’s fears were chiefly twofold.

First, it could have paved the way for NATO stationing missiles minutes away from Moscow, eroding any principle of mutual deterrence.

And second, NATO’s incorporation of Ukraine would have drawn the western military alliance directly into Ukraine’s civil war in the eastern Donbas region. That is where Ukrainian forces, including neo-Nazi elements like the Azov Brigade, have been pitted in a bloody fight against ethnic Russian communities.

In this view, absent a Russian invasion, NATO could have become an active participant in propping up Ukrainian ultra-nationalists killing ethnic Russians – as the West is now effectively doing through its arming of Ukraine to the tune of more than $40 billion.

Even if one discounts Russia’s concerns, Moscow clearly has a greater strategic interest invested in what its neighbor Ukraine is doing on their shared border than Washington ever had in Iraq, many thousands of miles away.

Proxy wars

Even more relevant, given the West’s failure to acknowledge, let alone address, Bush and Blair’s crimes committed in Iraq, is Russia’s suspicion that US foreign policy is unchanged two decades on. On what basis would Moscow believe that Washington is any less aggressive or power-hungry than it was when it launched its invasion of Iraq?

The western media continue to refer to the US attack on Iraq, and the subsequent bloody years of occupation, as variously a “mistake”, a “misadventure” and a “blunder”. But surely it does not look that way to Moscow, all the more so given that Washington followed its invasion of Iraq with a series of proxy wars against other Middle Eastern and North African states such as Libya, Syria and Yemen.

To Russia, the attack on Iraq looks more like a stepping stone in a continuum of wars the US has waged over decades for “full-spectrum dominance” and to eradicate competitors for control of the planet’s resources.

With that as the context, Moscow might have reasonably imagined that the US and its NATO allies were eager for yet another proxy war, this time using Ukraine as the battlefield. Recent comments from Biden administration officials, such as Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin, noting that Washington’s tens of billions of dollars in military aid to Kyiv is intended to “weaken Russia”, can only accentuate such fears.

Back in March, Leon Panetta, a former US secretary of defense and the CIA director under Barack Obama, who is in a position to speak more freely than serving officials, observed that Washington was waging “a proxy war with Russia, whether we say so or not”.

He predicted where US policy would head next, noting that the aim would be “to provide as much military aid as necessary”. Diplomacy has been a glaringly low priority for Washington.

Barely concealed from public view is a desire in the US and its allies for another regime change operation – this time in Russia – rather than end the war and the suffering of Ukrainians.

Butcher versus blunderer

Last week, the New York Times very belatedly turned down the war rhetoric a notch and called on the Biden administration to advance negotiations. Even so, its assessment of where the blame lay for Ukraine’s destruction was unambiguous: “Mr. Putin will go down in history as a butcher.”

But have Bush or Blair gone down in history as butchers? They most certainly haven’t. And the reason is that the western media have been complicit in rehabilitating their images, presenting them as statesmen who “blundered” – with the implication that good people blunder when they fail to take account of how entrenched the evil of everyone else in the world is.

A butcher versus a pair of blunderers.

This false distinction means western leaders and western publics continue to evade responsibility for western crimes in Iraq and elsewhere.

That was why in late February – in reference to Ukraine – a TV journalist could suggest to Condoleezza Rice, who was one of the architects of the illegal war of aggression on Iraq as Bush’s national security adviser: “When you invade a sovereign nation, that is a war crime.” The journalist apparently did not consider for a moment that it was not just Putin who was a war criminal but the very woman she was sitting opposite.

It was also why Rice could nod solemnly and agree with a straight face that Putin’s invasion of Ukraine was “against every principle of international law and international order – and that’s why throwing the book at them [Russia] now in terms of economic sanctions and punishments is a part of it”.

But a West that has refused to come to terms with its role in committing the “supreme international crime” of invading Iraq, and has been supporting systematic crimes against the sovereignty of other states such as Yemen, Libya and Syria, cannot sit in judgment on Russia. And further, it should not be trying to take the high ground by meddling in the war in Ukraine.

If we took the implications of Bush’s comment seriously, rather than treating it as a “gaffe” and viewing the Iraq invasion as a “blunder”, we might be in a position to speak with moral authority instead of flaunting – once again – our hypocrisy.

Reprinted with permission from Antiwar.com.

from Russia-Ukraine War: George Bush’s Admission of His Crimes in Iraq Was No ‘Gaffe’

In Stunning Shift, WaPo Admits Catastrophic-Conditions, Collapsing-Morale Of Ukraine Front-Line Forces

With Russia's war in Ukraine now in its fourth month, mainstream media consumers have been treated to seemingly endless headlines and analysis of Russia's extensive military losses. At the same time Ukrainian forces have tended to be lionized and their battlefield prowess romanticized, with essentially zero public information so far being given which details up-to-date Ukrainian force casualties, set-backs, and equipment losses.

But for the first time The Washington Post is out with a surprisingly dire and negative assessment of how US-backed and equipped Ukrainian forces are actually fairing. Gone is the rosy idealizing lens through which each and every encounter with the Russians is typically portrayed. WaPo correspondent and author of the new report Sudarsan Raghavan underscores of the true situation that "Ukrainian leaders project an image of military invulnerability against Russia. But commanders offer a more realistic portrait of the war, where outgunned volunteers describe being abandoned by their military brass and facing certain death at the front."

As many careful and less idealistic observers suspected the whole time, a steady stream of both wartime propaganda and one-sided social media feeds where it seems the only tanks being blown up are Russian ones has served to present a very skewed portrayal of the battlefield to the Western public. While it's perhaps easier to get sucked into this pro-Ukraine bias based on the innumerable so-called open source intelligence self-anointed 'experts' on Twitter, this is less so if one wades into Telegram, where a flood of uncensored videos from both sides gives a truer picture, as the fresh report seems to also suggest.

The Washington Post report belatedly admits the avalanche of propaganda based in a pro-Kiev, pro-West narrative from the outset: "Videos of assaults on Russian tanks or positions are posted daily on social media. Artists are creating patriotic posters, billboards and T-shirts. The postal service even released stamps commemorating the sinking of a Russian warship in the Black Sea."

The report then pivots to the reality of an undertrained, poorly commanded and equipped, rag-tag force of mostly volunteers in the East who find themselves increasingly surrounded by the numerically superior Russian military which has penetrated almost the entire Donbas region. "Ukraine, like Russia, has provided scant information about deaths, injuries or losses of military equipment. But after three months of war, this company of 120 men is down to 54 because of deaths, injuries and desertions," the report reads as it follows one particular battalion.

The report's sources speak out despite threat of being court-martialed amid a heavily controlled information flow:

“War breaks people down,” said Serhiy Haidai, head of the regional war administration in Luhansk province, acknowledging many volunteers were not properly trained because Ukrainian authorities did not expect Russia to invade. But he maintained that all soldiers are taken care of: “They have enough medical supplies and food. The only thing is there are people that aren’t ready to fight.”

First major US media I've seen to report catastrophic condition of Ukrainian forces, collapsing Ukrainian morale on the front. Seems obvious we should know the truth about a war our government is so deeply invested in.https://t.co/sYYwdm1p62

— Mark Ames (@MarkAmesExiled) May 26, 2022

The report references a video widely circulating online this week wherein a group the size of a platoon declares they simply can't fight for lack of weaponry, ammunition, food and proper command support:

“We are being sent to certain death,” said a volunteer, reading from a prepared script, adding that a similar video was filmed by members of the 115th Brigade 1st Battalion. “We are not alone like this, we are many.”

Ukraine’s military rebutted the volunteers’ claims in their own video posted online, saying the “deserters” had everything they needed to fight: “They thought they came for a vacation,” one service member said. “That’s why they left their positions.”

In the wake of the video, the Ukrainian troops featured are being accused of 'desertion':

And in recent weeks, he said, the situation has gotten much worse. When their supply chains were cut off for two days by the bombardment, the men were forced to make do with a potato a day.

They spend most days and nights in trenches dug into the forest on the edges of Toshkivka or inside the basements of abandoned houses. “They have no water, nothing there,” Lapko said. “Only water that I bring them every other day.”

Meanwhile the very noticeable shifting rhetoric issued from prominent officials and pundits of late has strongly suggested not all is well for Ukraine's military...

Notice the rhetoric shift

Now both the NY Times Editorial Board and Henry Kissinger at the WEF are both calling for a negotiated peace for Ukraine even it it means ceding territory to Russia

— Davos Detainee Poso (@JackPosobiec) May 24, 2022

The WaPo further includes the following devastating testimony and assessment:

“Many got shell shock. I don’t know how to count them,” Lapko said.

The casualties here are largely kept secret to protect morale among troops and the general public.

“On Ukrainian TV we see that there are no losses,” Lapko said. “There’s no truth.”

Many of the casualties suffered by the above referenced volunteer unit were due to lack of logistics available to transport the wounded to hospitals behind the front lines. The report emphasizes that the entirety of the catastrophic conditions of frontline forces has led to officers and enlisted increasingly refusing to follow orders from higher command.

With this fresh and unexpected Washington Post report, the mainstream seems to now belatedly be admitting what only weeks ago could get a person banned from Twitter...

Now they are methodically advancing their mobile infantry into the shattered remnants under an umbrella of low-level close air support and drone-corrected precision artillery strikes.

Consequently, the demoralized Ukrainian soldiers are surrendering en masse.

2/

— Will Schryver (@imetatronink) May 23, 2022

"Lapko and his men have grown increasingly frustrated and disillusioned with their superiors. His request for the awards has not been approved," the report finds. "His battalion commander demanded that he send 20 of his soldiers to another front line, which meant that he couldn’t rotate his men out from Toshkivka. He refused the order."

Reprinted with permission from ZeroHedge.

from In Stunning Shift, WaPo Admits Catastrophic-Conditions, Collapsing-Morale Of Ukraine Front-Line Forces

Uh Oh - New AP Poll Shows Americans Souring On Ukraine Aid

A new AP poll released this week shows for the first time that Americans are souring on "Putin's price hike" as a cost of propping up Ukraine in its war with Russia. Six and seven dollar a gallon gas plus raging inflation have brought the cost of an interventionist foreign policy home to the US and Americans are not happy. Also today, Zelensky's top aide has some colorful words for Ukraine's western sponsors. And...are you ready for Monkeypox? It's the "latest thing." Don't miss today's Liberty Report:



from Uh Oh - New AP Poll Shows Americans Souring On Ukraine Aid

Americans are Increasingly Wary of US Efforts to Harm Russia Causing Economic Damage in America

On March 8, President Joe Biden declared, in a speech announcing a ban on imports of Russian oil and gas, that these and other actions taken by the United States government “to inflict further pain on [Russia President Vladimir Putin]” would “cost us as well, in the United States.” ­ Since then, the US government’s economic sanctions on Russia — as well as spending, military training, intelligence sharing, and weapons transfers to attack the Russian military — have increased as the economic...

Read the full report by clicking the title, below...

from Peace and Prosperity http://www.ronpaulinstitute.org/archives/peace-and-prosperity/2022/may/26/americans-are-increasingly-wary-of-us-efforts-to-harm-russia-causing-economic-damage-in-america/

30 Years With No Strategy Brought Us the War in Ukraine

Washington DC has not excelled in grand strategy; the art and science of cost-effectively employing the diplomatic, economic, and informational powers of the United States in combination with its armed forces to secure its national goals and interests. Most of the strategic decisions to use American military power that were made over the last 30 years resulted in one of two strategic outcomes: abject failure (Somalia, Haiti, Afghanistan, and Iraq) or a new regional status quo that is untenable without a permanent US military presence far from America’s borders (the Balkans).

The reasons for the discouraging outcomes of the last 30 years can be traced to Washington’s failure to clearly define realistic, attainable goals for US military power. That requires an acknowledgement that American resources and the electorate’s patience are not limitless, and a thorough understanding of the opponent’s interests and capabilities. It seems that regardless of party affiliation Washington approaches national strategy the way the British approach sex, “romantically remote from the distressing biological crudities.”

This inability to recognize that conditions once conducive to Washington’s control of world events are weakening is why the war in Ukraine will end at Russia’s convenience, not ours.

Washington prolonged the war in Ukraine far past the point where it could and should have stopped. Instead of acknowledging Russia’s vital strategic interests in its near abroad and implementing the Minsk Agreements, the Biden administration made conflict unavoidable, then, stonewalled any serious negotiations with Moscow as either surrender or treason. The White House now finds it impossible to retreat from a policy position of implacable hostility to Moscow that from its inception made no strategic sense.

When Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin urged Moscow to arrange an immediate ceasefire, Ukraine’s internal crisis—the use of untrained manpower unfit for service to replace the many thousands of patriotic Ukrainian killed and wounded—was already perilous. In the words of an informed observer with strong ties to the region, conditions in Ukraine are grave:

The average Ukrainian brigade that began the war in late February with at least 100% of its strength is now down by 60% or 70% percent. Some brigades like the 81st and 36th Marine brigades have ceased to exist. There are already reports of recent mobilized civilians contacting Russian commanders and arranging to desert in platoon strength. At what point will [that] go up to companies and battalions; Especially as the dedicated professionals and patriots who volunteered at the start of the war are already dead?

Washington’s provision of ninety M777 Howitzers to Ukraine will certainly stiffen Ukrainian resolve, but the Russians have destroyed so many artillery systems that those new guns will likely be demolished be in few weeks. In addition, Russia is the world’s largest exporter of titanium, a critical component of the M777 gun system. Roughly one-third to half of the US military’s stockpile of Javelin and Stinger missiles have already been shipped to Ukraine. Is the US industrial base really prepared to sustain this effort?

The Biden administration can certainly argue that if there are still Ukrainian soldiers willing to fight, then US military assistance can plausibly keep the war with Russia going. But at what cost? Eastern Ukraine is wrecked. Is the plan to wreck Western Ukraine too?

Turning Western Ukraine, a critical part of the world’s breadbasket into “Ukrainistan” purely to satisfy Washington’s determination to bleed Russia white must be an ominous prospect for Ukrainians and many European leaders. As always, it’s the bravest of the brave in Washington DC who are most eager to consign the people of Ukraine to years of this hell. The advocates for conflict with Russia certainly do not include the vast majority of American voters.

Only Warsaw rivals Washington in its hatred of Russia. In recent remarks, Poland’s Prime Minister insisted that Russia’s monstrous ideology—in his mind the equivalent of 20th-century communism and Nazism—must be destroyed. How the Polish PM can reconcile these claims with the indisputable Nazi presence in Ukraine’s forces is incomprehensible, but so is Washington’s unrelenting hatred of Moscow.

The question now is whether Europe’s leaders in Berlin, Paris, Rome, and the continental capitals are willing to put their governments and societies at risk of internal political upheaval to maintain Washington’s endless war in Ukraine against Russia. According to the German government, Russia is preventing Ukraine from exporting twenty million tons of grain, mainly to North Africa and Asia. Meanwhile, Berlin declines to support calls for a German or European embargo or tariff on Russian oil and gas (their reasons are not without merit).

Americans and Europeans are not experiencing a market correction. Our problems are not cyclical. They are structural and systemic. A food/energy crisis is here. Supply chain problems are a symptom—the underlying problem is misallocation of capital, insufficient or mismanaged infrastructure, and a broken political system. Why? The Federal Reserve has lost control. The bull market is finished.

From this point onward, stocks will experience a rolling, downward correction. Whatever Chairman Jerome Powell and his colleagues do now, their actions are unlikely to make much difference. If the Fed hikes interest rates, markets will collapse. If the Fed suppresses interest rates as they have to date, inflation will exacerbate leading to demand destruction. Inflation is not the only or even the core problem. The far more dangerous outcome is deflation; a collapse of asset prices that are artificially inflated in value. Today, the two most important assets propping up the global economy are mortgage bonds and treasuries; both are in danger as yields rise.

Either way, the end result is the same: serious economic crisis at home and abroad in Europe. The crisis will affect all assets and all markets. It will also widen the gap between Washington’s wish list for conflict overseas and the needs of American citizens at home.

Whether the internal crises confronting Washington will force a sober-minded reappraisal of our national security interests along with a decent respect for the culture and interests of other states is unknown. But in the words of the late Angelo Codevilla, “It should be possible, even for Americans who hate one another, to agree that the consequences of foreign wars, especially of wars unsupported by the American public, are not good for anyone.”

Reprinted with permission from The Libertarian Institute.

from 30 Years With No Strategy Brought Us the War in Ukraine

Biden Administration’s Ministry of Truth Stumbles

Finally some good news – maybe! The Department of Homeland Security’s recently launched Disinformation Governance Board has gone into what has been described as the “pause” mode and its controversial Director Nina Jankowicz has resigned, citing “vile personal attacks and physical threats.” Its status will reportedly be reviewed over the next 75 days and it will likely be rolled out more quietly next time around and under a different name.

The Board was developed to counter what was held to be unfair criticism of policies being promoted by the government. Ironically, however, it has recently become clear that the White House itself has been doing much of the lying. It uses the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) and other government agencies to spread false information, referred to as disinformation, to dupe the public into believing that there is something good and noble about America becoming heavily involved in the war in Ukraine, with all that entails. And, of course, since the evildoers must be excoriated as that drama is playing out, good old Russia fits in admirably, particularly as the Democrats still like to pretend that it was Moscow’s interference that defeated Hillary in 2016.

A lie is a lie, but it is the ultimate irony when a government that is caught lying on a regular basis sets up an inquisition that seeks to identify and take action against ordinary citizens who are accused of spreading “disinformation.” Of course, critics on the right immediately discerned that the disinformation will consist of anything that challenges the official government line on various issues, up to including pandemics, white supremacist domestic terrorism, aborting unwanted babies, and even the march to war. Although the inept President Joe Biden Administration can rightly be accused of elevating deceit to a steady diet of malapropisms, one can trace the rise of egregious lying by heads of state to the Gulf of Tonkin incident and, more recently, to the criminal deceptions carried out by the George W. Bush Administration. Those lies led to the invasion of Iraq, which cost trillions of dollars, killed hundreds of thousands of Iraqis and thousands of Americans, and which is still producing unrest in the region.

So now we were to be confronted by the Disinformation Governance Board, so designated under the august authority of the Department of Homeland Security to root out disinformation and those who are seeking to disseminate falsehoods about what our noble elected officials are doing to us in Washington. Followers of George Orwell inevitably, and almost immediately, dubbed the new creation the Ministry of Truth.

The official launch documents in late April claimed that the DGB would be “protecting free speech, privacy, civil rights, & civil liberties” against the “threat of disinformation.” Its focus would be on “homeland security, focused specifically on irregular migration and Russia,” meaning that it would be discrediting any source that complains about the flood of aliens crossing the US southern border or casting doubts on the necessity of supporting America’s Ukraine “allies.” In a follow-up briefing DHS elaborated that it would monitor threat “disinformation spread by foreign states such as Russia, China and Iran, or other adversaries such as transnational criminal organizations and human smuggling organizations.”

And the board was to be headed by one Nina Jankowicz, a weird, highly politicized concoction who sang about her mission in a tweet entitled “You can just call me the Mary Poppins of disinformation” while confirming that she would be the first executive director of the DGB. She has also written a book entitled “How To Be A Woman Online.” She has worked for the National Democratic Institute, the Democratic Party affiliate of the National Endowment for Democracy that promotes democracy worldwide. She has also been a fellow at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars in Washington.

In an NPR interview responding to a question concerning Elon Musk’s purchase of Twitter, Jankowicz ridiculously opined that “I shudder to think about, if free speech absolutists were taking over more platforms, what that would be like for the marginalized communities around the world…” Glenn Greenwald further describedthe new Disinformation Czar as having “herself ratified and helped spread virtually every disinformation campaign concocted by the union of the Democratic Party and corporate media over the last five years. Indeed, the only valid basis for calling her a ‘disinformation expert’ is that she has spread disinformation with such gusto. The most notorious of those was the pre-election lie that the authentic Hunter Biden laptop was ‘disinformation.’ She also decreed falsely that the origins of COVID were definitively proven to be zoonotic and could not have come from a lab leak, was a frequent and vocal advocate of the fraudulent Steele Dossier, and repeatedly pronounced as true all sorts of Trump/Russia collusion conspiracy theories which Robert Mueller, after conducting an intense 18-month investigation, rejected as lacking evidence to establish their truth.”

Jankowicz’s boss Department of Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas nevertheless claimed that she was “eminently qualified,” a “renowned expert,” and politically “neutral.” But to put that in context, her rather thin actual work history, heavy on being a Democratic Party apparatchik tied to the Clintons, oddly includes a stint as a Fulbright-Clinton fellow in 2017 serving as an adviser on disinformation to the Ukrainian Foreign Ministry. She sports the US and Ukrainian flags next to her picture on her twitter page.

Attempts by governments to shape their message by discrediting alternative viewpoints are not exactly new. Here in the US, suppressing contrary views is nearly as old as the republic. The Alien and Sedition Acts of 1798 gave the president power to deport potentially “dangerous” foreigners and made it a crime to print “any false, scandalous, and malicious writing” about the government. President John Adams supported these laws because he wanted to prevent a war with France, quite the reverse of what the Biden regime is seeking to do as it mobilizes against Russia. Vice President Thomas Jefferson was openly disgusted by the unconstitutional acts, which probably contributed to his election as president in 1800.

The Acts were subsequently allowed to expire and were never reviewed by the Supreme Court, but there is also the later example of the Committee for Public Information which was used by the government to support the war party line in World War One. There followed the Espionage Act of 1918, which is still in effect, that was used liberally by President Woodrow Wilson to silence critics of American entry into the war. The definition of what constitutes “espionage” was deliberately made infinitely elastic and the Act is still in use against whistleblowers and presumably also Julian Assange.

Given the language connected with the launch of the Disinformation Government Board, it might reasonably be assumed that it would have surely sought to suppress “malicious writing” and speech relating to the Biden sponsored wave of illegal immigration along the country’s southern border that has driven America’s foreign-born population to a record 46.6 million people. And, in addition to an increase in arriving Afghans, which was actually written into the bill proposing $33 billion more for Ukraine, there will surely be more Ukrainian migrants. Jewish organizations in the US, Europe and Israel are already actively bringing in co-religionists. Given political realities, displaced Ukrainian Jews will likely be quietly given refugee status granting them full benefits to include housing and welfare payments.

Not surprisingly, the surging wave of immigration is highly unpopular among working people who are already established, even among many Democrats, and the Biden response will be to compel the bad vibes go away, literally, by openly labeling critics as liars peddling disinformation. Whether there will be actual criminal or civil penalties attached to the process remains to be seen when the board is most likely resurrected under another name.

And, of course, the likes of Senator Rand Paul, Congressman Tom Massie, journalist Tucker Carlson and former Congresswoman Tulsi Gabbard would have their views on the developing catastrophe in Ukraine challenged and denigrated, to include possibly arranging for their banning from social media sites, which is already being done to some critics. The fact is that we do not know at this point exactly what the new Board will eventually be empowered to do, but one can count on the results being bad, destructive both of the First Amendment and of honest journalism in the United States.

The ability of the government to collude with corporate America to diminish personal liberty of the citizenry cannot be understated. We have already seen corporations that operate on the internet proactively terminating accounts that it considers politically unacceptable. Consortium News, a perfectly respectable site of long standing that has a splendid record of investigative journalism, was recently delisted by PayPal, which took the further step of confiscating its nearly $10,000 of funds with the threat that the money might be retained by PayPal as an additional punishment.

The reality is that the government can unleash its thousands of lawyers to make a case against nearly every citizen who is politically active. Which is why the Biden Administration has already been criminalizing and/or sanctioning any foreign organization that has “interfered in or undermined public confidence in United States elections,” as if the two major parties are not already doing that quite effectively all by themselves. If that is truly a crime why aren’t Nancy Pelosi and Mitch McConnell being sanctioned?

In my own experience, I have dealt with threatened punishment regarding my contributing to and participating in the activities of an Iranian NGO and a Russian information site. Neither organization can plausibly regarded as a threat to the United States, though they both were highly critical of US government policies, as am I. In one case, American participants in a conference overseas organized by the Iranians were warned that they would be arrested upon return, which currently appears to be “due process” in the US. In the case of the Russian site, the Treasury Department’s Office of Foreign Assets Control (OFAC) advised that any American writing for the site could be fined as much as $311,562!

The unfortunate reality is that the real damage is being done through the employment of government driven restrictions punishing ordinary citizens who are exercising their right of free speech and free association. It is easy to claim that a foreign news service or NGO is “undermining confidence in US elections” as it is a charge that one need not have to prove. Indeed, it is unprovable and it is a weapon that can be used to manage dissent and to narrow the bounds of acceptable discourse. The question becomes whether and to what extent the successor to the now paused Disinformation Governance Board will attempt to apply similar standards to Americans. One might suggest that the barring of dissident US journalists and political figures from social media sites and from funding mechanisms like PayPal is the first shot to be fired in a long struggle over what is “truth” that will play out over the next two years.

Reprinted with permission from Unz Review.

from Biden Administration’s Ministry of Truth Stumbles

Western Media Run Blatant Atrocity Propaganda For The Ukrainian Government

The Ukrainian government is quickly learning that it can say anything, literally anything at all, about what's happening on the ground there and get it uncritically reported as an actual news story by the mainstream western press.

The latest story making the rounds is a completely unevidenced claim made by a Ukrainian government official that Russians are going around raping Ukrainian babies to death. Business Insider, The Daily Beast, The Daily Mailand Yahoo News have all run this story despite no actual evidence existing for it beyond the empty assertions of a government who would have every incentive to lie.

"A one-year-old boy died after being raped by two Russian soldiers, the Ukrainian Parliament's Commissioner for Human Rights said on Thursday," reads a report by Business Insider which was subsequently picked up by Yahoo News. "The accusation is one of the most horrific from Russia's invasion of Ukraine, but is not unique."

At the end of the fourth paragraph we get to the disclaimer that every critical thinker should look for when reading such stories in the mainstream press:

"Insider could find no independent evidence for the claim."

A growing number of accusations that Russian soldiers are raping the youngest and most vulnerable war victims is the latest disturbing twist in a modern war defined by archaic brutalityhttps://t.co/fFFkGLmg7M

— The Daily Beast (@thedailybeast) May 20, 2022

In its trademark style, The Daily Beast ran the same story in a much more flamboyant and click-friendly fashion.

"The dead boy is among dozens of alleged child rape victims which include two 10-year-old boys, triplets aged 9, a 2-year-old girl raped by two Russian soldiers, and a 9-month-old baby who was penetrated with a candlestick in front of its mother, according to Ukraine’s Commissioner for Human Rights," The Daily Beast writes.

The one and only source for this latest spate of "the Russians are raping babies to death" stories is a statement on a Ukrainian government website by Ukraine's Human Rights Commissioner Lyudmyla Denisova. The brief statement contains no evidence of any kind, and its English translation concludes as follows:

I appeal to the UN Commission for Investigation Human Rights Violations during the Russian military invasion of Ukraine to take into account these facts of genocide of the Ukrainian people.

I call on our partners around the world to increase sanctions pressure on russia, to provide Ukraine with offensive weapons, to join the investigation of rashist crimes in our country!

The enemy must be stopped and all those involved in the atrocities in Ukraine must be brought to justice!

This is what passes for journalism in the western world today. Reporting completely unfounded allegations against US enemies based solely on assertions by a government official demanding more weapons and sanctions against those enemies and making claims that sound like they came from an It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia bit.

The Ukrainian government is quickly learning that it can say anything, literally anything about Russia, without any evidence at all, and the western mainstream press will report it as an actual news story. pic.twitter.com/BYESIPwe1x

— Caitlin Johnstone ⏳ (@caitoz) May 21, 2022

We cannot say definitively that these rapes never happened. We also cannot say definitively that the Australian government isn't warehousing extraterrestrial aircraft in an underground bunker in Canberra, but we don't treat that like it's an established fact and publish mainstream news reports about it just because we can't prove it's false. That's not how the burden of proof works.

Obviously the rape of children is a very real and very serious matter, and obviously rape is one of the many horrors which can be inflicted upon people in the lawless environment of war. But to turn strategically convenient government assertions about such matters into a news story based on no evidence whatsoever is not just journalistic malpractice but actual atrocity propaganda.

As we discussed previously, the US and its proxies have an established history of using atrocity propaganda, as in the infamous "taking babies from incubators" narrative that was circulated in the infamous 1990 Nayirah testimony which helped manufacture consent for the Gulf War.

Atrocity propaganda has been in use for a very long time due to how effective it can be at getting populations mobilized against targeted enemies, from the Middle Ages when Jews were accused of kidnapping Christian children to kill them and drink their blood, to 17th century claims that the Irish were killing English children and throwing them into the sea, to World War I claims that Germans were mutilating and eating Belgian babies.

Atrocity propaganda frequently involves children, because children cannot be construed as combatants or non-innocents, and generally involves the most horrific allegations the propagandists can possibly get away with at that point in history. It creates a useful appeal to emotion which bypasses people's logical faculties and gets them accepting the propaganda based not on facts and evidence but on how it makes them feel.

Before writing this, the members of the @nytimes Editorial Board should have asked themselves who among them wanted to have their children, including babies and infants, raped by Russian soldiers, because that is what's happening in Ukraine: https://t.co/upsYpUmuyI https://t.co/UeCbCDTLfr

— Andrea Chalupa 🇺🇲 (@AndreaChalupa) May 20, 2022

And the atrocity propaganda is functioning exactly as it's meant to. Do a search on social media for this bogus story that's been forcibly injected into public discourse and you'll find countless individuals expressing their outrage at the evil baby-raping Russians. Democratic Party operative Andrea Chalupa, known for her controversial collusion with the Ukrainian government to undermine the 2016 Trump campaign, can be seen citing the aforementioned Daily Beast article on Twitter to angrily admonish the New York Times editorial board for expressing a rare word of caution about US involvement in the war.

"Before writing this, the members of the New York Times Editorial Board should have asked themselves who among them wanted to have their children, including babies and infants, raped by Russian soldiers, because that is what's happening in Ukraine," Chalupa tweeted.

See that? How a completely unevidenced government assertion was turned into an official-looking news story, and how that official-looking news story was then cited as though it's an objective fact that Russian soldiers are running around raping babies to death in Ukraine? And how it's done to help manufacture consent for a geostrategically crucial proxy war, and to bludgeon those who express any amount of caution about these world-threatening escalations? 

That's atrocity propaganda doing exactly what it is meant to do.

Now on top of all the other reasons we're being given why the US and its allies need to send Ukraine more and more war machinery of higher and higher destructive capability, they also need to do so because the Russians are just raping babies to death willy nilly over there. Which just so happens to work out nicely for the US-centralized empire's goals of unipolar domination, for the Ukrainian regime, and for the military-industrial complex.

"Newsweek has not independently verified the claim." https://t.co/LdnZ8rLdRz

— Scott Horton (@scotthortonshow) May 21, 2022

And that wasn't even the extent of obscene mass media atrocity propaganda conducted on behalf of Ukrainian officials for the day. Newsweek has a new article out titled "Russians Targeting Kids' Beds, Rooms With Explosives: Ukrainian Bomb Team," which informs us that "The leader of a Ukrainian bomb squad has said that Russian forces are targeting children by placing explosive devices inside their rooms and under their beds."

Then at the end of the second paragraph we again find that magical phrase:

"Newsweek has not independently verified the claim."

The Newsweek report is based on part of an embarrassing ABC News Australia puff piece about a Ukrainian team which is allegedly responsible for removing landmines in areas that were previously occupied by Russian forces. The puff piece refers to the team as a "unit of brave de-miners" while calling Russian forces "barbaric".

ABC uncritically reports all the nefarious ways the evil Russians have been planting explosives with the goal of killing Ukrainian civilians, including setting mines in children's beds and teddy bears and placing them under fallen Ukrainian soldiers. Way down toward the bottom of the article we see the magical phrase again:

"The ABC has not been able to independently verify these reports, but they back up allegations made by Ukraine's President."

Ahh, so what you're being told by Ukrainian forces "backs up" what you've been told by the president of Ukraine. Doesn't get any more rock solid than that, does it? Great journalism there, fellas.

The Ukrainian government stands everything to gain and nothing to lose by just saying whatever it needs to say in order to obtain more weapons, more funding and increasingly direct assistance from western powers, so if it knows the western media will uncritically report every claim it makes, why not lie? Why not tell whatever lie you need to tell in order to advance your own interests and agendas? It would be pretty silly of them not to take advantage of the opening they're being given.

This is something the western press know is happening. They know full well that Ukraine is waging a very sophisticated propaganda campaign against Russia and seeding disinformation to facilitate that infowar. It's not a secret. They are participating in that campaign knowingly.

The CIA Post is going full Babies on Bayonets already. Putin is going to round up and torture all the gays! https://t.co/OJspZdz37P pic.twitter.com/qPyhpHD1gp

— Scott Horton (@scotthortonshow) February 21, 2022

The mass media have been cranking out atrocity propaganda about what's happening in Ukraine since before the invasion even started, like when they reported in February that Russia has a list of dissidents, journalists and “vulnerable populations such as religious and ethnic minorities and LGBTQI+ persons” who it plans on rounding up and torturing when it invades. Funny how we just completely stopped hearing about that one.

And this is all happening at the same time the western political/media class continues to shriek about the dangers of "disinformation" and the urgent need to strictly regulate its circulation on the internet, even after US officials came right out and admitted that they've been circulating disinformation about Russia and Ukraine. I guarantee you none of these completely evidence-free claims will be subject to censorship by the "fact checkers" of social media platforms.

The fact that both Silicon Valley and the mainstream news media have accepted it as a given that it is their job to manipulate public thought about this war tells you everything you need to know about how free and truth-based the so-called liberal democracies of the western world really are. We are being deceived and confused into consenting to agendas that could very easily lead to nuclear armageddon, and if we ever raise our voices in objection to this we are branded Putin propagandists and disinformation agents.

It's getting very, very bad. Turn around, people. Wrong way.

Reprinted with permission from Caitlin's Blog.
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from Western Media Run Blatant Atrocity Propaganda For The Ukrainian Government

Klaus Schwab: Yes, the World Economic Forum Annual Meeting is about Elites Advancing a Conspiracy

That select group of elites from around the world who come together at the World Economic Forum (WEF) annual meeting in Davos, Switzerland really are conspiring to control the direction of society and politics worldwide. It is a conspiracy in practice, not just a conspiracy theory. That is the admission of WEF Founder and Executive Chairman Klaus Schwab in his Monday welcoming remarks for this year’s WEF annual meeting. Here is the conspiracy admission from Schwab’s speech: Let’s also be...

Read the full report by clicking the title, below...

from Peace and Prosperity http://www.ronpaulinstitute.org/archives/peace-and-prosperity/2022/may/24/klaus-schwab-yes-the-world-economic-forum-annual-meeting-is-about-elites-advancing-a-conspiracy/

General Milley Predicts Grim Future of Deadly Great Power Wars Fought in Cities

America’s highest-ranking military officer painted a picture of a dark future with great power wars fought in urban environments. Speaking to graduating cadets at the United States Military Academy, General Mark Milley forewarned of death tolls for US soldiers in the tens of thousands.

Milley identified Russia and China as the growing powers America will face in the next generation. "We are facing right now two global powers, China and Russia," he said. "As we are entering a world that is becoming more unstable. The world you are being commissioned into has the potential for significant international conflict between great powers, and that potential is increasing, not decreasing."

During the commencement speech, he noted the importance of America confronting Russia in Ukraine. "Yet again in Ukraine, we are learning the lesson that aggression left unanswered only emboldens the aggressor," the general said.

After recalling the massive American casualties in World War I and World War II, the general explained future great power conflicts would likely cause tens of thousands of deaths for US soldiers. "26,000 soldiers and marines were killed in only six weeks from October to November 1918…26,000 US troops were killed In the eight weeks in the summer of 1940… In the summer of 1944, 58,000 Americans were killed in action in the air, at sea and on land in five theaters of war and only eight weeks. That’s the human cost of great power war."

Milley laid out how he believed warfare would evolve over the next quarter-century. The general said new technologies will shape the battlefield, including robotic tanks, ships, and airplanes. He referred to artificial intelligence as "the mother of all technologies" and said, "machines are actually developing the capacity to learn and to reason these rapidly converging developments in time and space or resulting in that profound change."

The Chairman of the Joint Chiefs assesses future conflicts will be fought in cities. "The battlefield will be highly complex and almost certainly decisive in urban areas," he said. If Milley is correct, the coming wars will exact high tolls on civilian populations.

Reprinted with permission from Antiwar.com.

from General Milley Predicts Grim Future of Deadly Great Power Wars Fought in Cities