EU and The Washington Post Escalate Their Censorship Campaign with a New Fraudulent “Disinformation Study” About Twitter and Russia. Plus: The John McCain Institute Used to Promote Neocon Dogma on War | SYSTEM UPDATE #143
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Welcome to a new episode of System Update, our live nightly show that airs every Monday through Friday at 7 p.m.
Eastern, exclusively here on Rumble, the free speech alternative to YouTube.
Tonight, the rapid and well-funded emergence of the fraudulent industry of self-anointed disinformation experts.
Is one of the most consequential weapons developed after the 2016 election of Donald Trump, and therefore is a significant focus of this show.
As we have repeatedly documented, these groups that demand the right to decree what, quote, disinformation is, are almost always funded by the same small set of neoliberal billionaires led by George Soros and Pierre Midiar, Western security agencies and the arms industry.
And have a goal that is as obvious as it is nefarious, not just to denounce disinformation, but to demand the silencing and censoring of those who they accuse of producing it.
The way this typically works is that groups claim to employ disinformation experts, a brand new and fake expertise they created overnight, and then produce studies that purport to document who is either circulating harmful disinformation or who is permitting it to be heard.
This latter accusation, permitting dangerous disinformation to be heard, always means that one social media company or another is failing to censor in accordance with the demands of the group and its funders.
They then get corporate media outlets who crave censorship to melodramatically trumpet their accusatory studies using flamboyant headlines that claim a disobedient technology platform has the ball out of their hands.
Knowing that it will spread virally with very few people actually reading the study to determine if the accusations have any validity.
This entire industry and this specific practice is a thinly disguised tactic to elevate brute political censorship into something more noble, something more objective and academic.
Not something despotically intended to silence political dissent, perish the thought.
No, this is something that uses the high and noble fields of science and data to justify the silencing of people who are spreading demonstrably and objectively false claims.
Last week the Washington Post, one of the media leaders in agitating for online censorship by touting these fraudulent disinformation studies, published one of the worst attempts yet to disguise censorship demands as science and data from experts.
In a predictably mega-viral tweet, there you see it, was retweeted by at least 10,000 people, liked by tens of thousands of others, the paper announced, quote, Twitter under Elon Musk's ownership has played a major role in allowing Russian propaganda about Ukraine to reach more people than before the war began, according to a year-long study released this week by the European Commission.
The article itself made its barely hidden pro-censorship agenda manifest almost right away with this sub-headline, quote, X's failure to slow the spread of disinformation on the internet would have violated EU social media law had it been in effect.
Its central claim was described this way by the Washington Post, quote, over the course of 2022, the audience and reach of Kremlin-aligned social media accounts increased substantially all over Europe.
The questions that emerge from this accusation in this article are obvious.
What constitutes Russian propaganda about Ukraine?
Does Russian propaganda about Ukraine mean anything other than those who dissent from the U.S.
and NATO narrative about the war?
How are these determinations made?
Can we see any examples of this, quote, Russian propaganda?
What is a Kremlin-aligned account or a pro-Kremlin account and how is that determined?
Does it mean anything other than opposing U.S.
and NATO financing of the war in Ukraine and other than forcing Elon Musk to censor more In accordance with the war agenda of the EU and the Washington Post, what is Musk supposed to do about this supposed spread of propaganda on his platform?
Obviously, the answer is to censor.
Now, unsurprisingly, one can read the entire Post article.
Or the accompanying EU study in vain for any answers to these questions.
At least in the post article, there are no examples of Russian propaganda provided in this article, nor any indications of how this accusatory category was determined.
In the study itself, they purport to show examples, but none that actually illuminate what these terms mean.
The Post, knowing that most liberals despise Elon Musk for refusing to succumb to the censorship demands of the liberal establishment, and knowing that American liberals continue to drown in paranoia about Russian disinformation spreading everywhere, simply threw the vague and unproven accusation out there, knowing it would be mindlessly spread by millions.
And that's exactly what happened.
Because this EU study and the post-promotion of it constitutes one of the most vivid examples yet of how deceitful and fraudulent these, quote, disinformation studies are, and because it was conducted by a peer Omidyar-funded group commissioned by the EU, which from the start of the war has aggressively used censorship to shield this propaganda from dissent, we think it is really worth examining what they did here in this specific case.
Doing so reveals the core tactics That now shaped this joint state, media, and corporate campaign to seize the power to decree what is and is not disinformation all as a means of controlling the spread of disinformation or information in debate on the internet.
Then, Washington is filled with institutes and think tanks that have benign or even inspiring names, yet which wield great policy influence, often in the shadows.
Such is the case for the John McCain Institute, named after the former prisoner of war in Vietnam, the GOP presidential candidate, and the longtime beloved-by-the-media senator from Arizona.
The Institute devotes itself to advocating the same neocon commitment to endless war that John McCain championed his whole life.
It's run by a former senior Obama Pentagon official and is lavishly funded by exactly the funding sources you would expect.
We'll examine this institution to show you the role these entities play in the D.C.
ecosystem of war, bipartisan consensus, and propaganda.
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For now, welcome to a new episode of System Update, starting right now.
Ever since the 2022 Russian invasion, there has been a large consensus among Western populations supporting their governments financing and sending there has been a large consensus among Western populations supporting their governments financing and sending arms to the government of Ukraine in order It was very predictable that this would happen.
We examined the very emotionally effective propaganda that emerged very early on that you could see in real time was really grabbing people and playing on their best interest in order to get them to believe that the intention of this Western war, or the West's involvement in this war, was to spread democracy and protect the Ukrainian people from aggression.
And even though it was obvious that the exact opposite is true, that the goal was to sacrifice Ukraine and the Ukrainian people in order to promote the West's own geopolitical interest of weakening Russia, it had nothing to do with defending Ukraine.
It was going to destroy Ukraine and they were going to fight to the last Ukrainian.
The propaganda was quite effective.
There was an attempt to censor any dissent from it, a very effective and aggressive one, especially by the EU.
And anyone offering any kind of opposition at all was immediately stigmatized as a Putin apologist or a Kremlin agent.
And as a result, from the beginning of the war, including the United States, a large majority supported it.
But it was also predictable.
And as we predicted from the start, once the realities of this war became manifest, once it became clear that none of the goals that were presented were the real goals of the war, That this is just yet another endless war that the United States found six months after it finally ended the war in Afghanistan.
The public would start to question why it is that we're sending billions of dollars of their taxpayer funds to this conflict on the other side of the world where very little is at stake other than who will govern various provinces in eastern Ukraine.
And they will begin asking the obvious question, which is, given how much economic deprivation we suffer here at home, why are we sending our resources to fuel this endless war that has nothing to do with our lives except that it severely escalates the risk, the real risk of a nuclear war?
Even Joe Biden, the champion of this policy from the start, acknowledged that the U.S.
or the world has not faced the risk of nuclear annihilation The way it does now from this war in Ukraine since the Cuban Missile Crisis in 1962 where the world really became a half an hour or so away from nuclear apocalypse.
And that's exactly what is happening.
We've shown you the polling data that is really scaring Democrats ahead of into the 2024 election that majorities of Americans Now opposed sending any further funds to the war in Ukraine.
Even though Secretary of State Antony Blinken made a surprise visit to Kyiv today and announced another billion dollars.
In funding, and even though the Biden administration's most recent demand for another $25 billion to fuel the war further on top of the $120 billion it's already authorized, can't even get a House vote and faces a very difficult struggle in Congress.
They ignored all that.
And they just said to Kiev, here's another billion dollars.
And they flew to Ukraine.
Secretary of State Blinken did to do it.
But what they're really worried about is that they see the same polling data as we've reported on and they know that if the Republican Party has a nominee who can credibly claim to be opposed to this war, Americans will have a choice.
Do you want to continue to fund billions and billions of dollars of American money to the point where we're depleting our own stockpiles?
A war that has no end in sight and that doesn't really affect your life?
Or, the Republican Party nominee will argue, it's time to end this war.
This war has no benefits to the American people and is draining them of their resources.
That's one of the reasons, as we documented when we got back from the GOP debate in Milwaukee, there's such a desperate attempt to ensure that the Republican nominee isn't somebody like Donald Trump, or Vivek Ramaswamy, or even Ron DeSantis, who has been kind of tepid, but a little bit more in the direction of opposing Biden, but instead is somebody like Nikki Haley, or Mike Pence, or Asa Hutchinson, or Chris Christie, or Tim Scott, people who are fully supportive of the Biden administration's war policy so that you go to the polls next year and you have no choice.
You can vote Democrat or you can vote Republican, and the war in Ukraine will continue exactly as is because both political parties fully support it.
That's what they love, is to turn wars in particular into bipartisan consensus.
It isn't just in the United States where polling data is starting to become of great concern, but also in Western Europe and even Eastern Europe.
The New York Times today has an article about the fact that in Slovakia, which was part of Czechoslovakia before the two countries split up, part of the Iron Curtain in Eastern Europe, more or less Central Europe, a country that has been steadfastly more or less Central Europe, a country that has been steadfastly pro-Ukraine and anti-Russian,
Very aggressively offering support to Ukraine in the war, that the frontrunner for its election next month is a right-wing candidate who is now very vocal about his opposition to having Slovakia continue to support Ukraine in the war.
Instead he wants to turn Slovakia into a neutral country and he's using very much that similar discourse I just referenced.
But why are we in Slovakia involving ourselves in this war?
Why are we sending all our money and weapons to the war in Ukraine?
It's not helping anything.
It's protracting this war.
It's killing Ukrainians.
And it's risking the spread of war into our countries as well.
And Western policymakers are now petrified that this will be an example showing that politicians who run against the war in Ukraine Are able to command a majority because that's where the sentiment of the even people in Central Europe are now headed.
There you see one of the headlines from today, quote, it's one of Ukraine's fiercest allies, but an election could change that.
Quote, the vote in Slovakia this month will be a test of European unity on Ukraine and of Russia's efforts to undermine it.
Note there the implication, which is about to get more explicit.
That if this candidate wins, it's going to be because Russia interfered in the election.
The United States is interfering in almost every one of their elections.
Tucker Carlson recently interviewed Viktor Orban, who talked about the huge amounts of money the United States spent to defeat him in the last Hungarian election.
George Soros' son, Alex, issued what was more or less his foreign policy manifesto now that he's taking over his dad's multi-billion dollar foundation, where they involved themselves in every foreign country.
And he essentially mocked the Hungarian government, made clear his animosity toward them, and affirmed their intention to continue to interfere.
Obviously, always aligned with U.S.
government in the internal affairs of virtually every country in Central and Eastern Europe.
Europe, including heavily in support of the Ukrainian government and the war in Ukraine.
So of course, it can't be that the people of this country legitimately decide that they're going to make a decision on their own that contravenes the Western agenda.
It can only be that they were manipulated by Russia into doing so.
Here is the article, quote, the mayor of a remote Slovak village, as the ambassador announced last September, had bulldozed Russian graves from World War I.
So he was clearly anti-Russian.
Ambassador Igor Brachkov demanded that the Slovak government, a robust supporter of Ukraine, take action to punish the blasphemous act.
The Slovak police responded swiftly, dismissing the ambassador's claims as a hoax, but his fabrication took flight, amplified by vociferous pro-Russian groups in Slovakia and news outlets notorious for recycling Russian propaganda.
A month later, the mayor of the village, Vladislav Cooper, lost an election to a rival candidate from a populist party opposed to helping Ukraine.
Today, the same forces that helped unseat Mr. Cooper have mobilized for a general election in Slovakia on September 30th with much bigger stakes.
The vote will not only decide who governs a small Central European nation with fewer than 6 million people, but will also indicate whether opposition to helping Ukraine, a position now mostly confined to the political fringes across Europe, could take hold in the mainstream.
I don't really think that opposition to supporting Ukraine in the war is relegated to the fringes across Europe.
In Germany, for example...
We interviewed the leader of the longtime leftist party, Sarah Wagenknecht, I think back in March or April, about her steadfast opposition to German involvement in that war.
She talked about how reckless it was for Germany, of all countries, to be sending their tanks, German tanks, back to the Russian border through Ukraine.
By furnishing all kinds of weaponry to Ukraine to be used against Russia.
Remember, Russia lost tens of millions of Russians in two world wars that involved Germany attacking it through Ukraine.
That's one of the reasons why that part of the Russian border is so sensitive to the Russians.
And she described how traumatic it is for Russians to now see German tanks and German weaponry again being deployed to Ukraine and used against it.
But we showed you polling data from Germany about how she's become very, very popular, including among a lot of right-wing populists, for her opposition to the German role in the war in Ukraine.
So the New York Times is correct that up until now, as we said at the start, majorities in most countries have supported the same policy and posture the Biden administration has adopted, but increasingly, support is eroding.
Quote, the frontrunner, according to opinion polls, is a party headed by Robert Fico, a pugnacious former Prime Minister who has vowed to halt slowback arms deliveries to Ukraine, denounced sanctions against Russia, and railed against NATO.
Despite his country's membership in the alliance, a strong showing in the election by Mr. Fico and far-right parties hostile to the government of Kiev would likely turn one of Ukraine's most stalwart backers, Slovakia was the first country to send in air defense missiles and fighter jets, into a neutral bystander more sympathetic to Moscow.
It would also end the isolation of Prime Minister Viktor Orban of Hungary as the only leader in the EU and NATO speaking out strongly against helping Ukraine.
Thanks to widespread public discontent with the infighting between pro-Western Slovak politicians who came to power in 2020 and deep pools of genuine pro-Russian sentiment dating back to the 19th century, Russia has been pushing on an open door.
A survey of public opinion across Eastern and Central Europe in March by GlobeSec A Bratislava-based research group found that only 40% of Slovaks blame Russia for the war in Ukraine, while 51% believe that either Ukraine or the West is, quote, primarily responsible.
That is the critical context here.
The EU, the US, NATO know that public opinion is eroding.
That's why they're getting more aggressive in both their propaganda but also in their censorship push to ensure that no opposition, no dissent to their war policies in Ukraine be permitted to spread on the internet.
They're really Trying to coerce big tech using legal means and media attacks to try and force Twitter and Facebook and Google to do even more censorship to ensure that anyone who's a dissident on NATO and US policy in Ukraine be stifled, be deplatformed, be silenced and censored.
Now, regardless of what your views are, and we've been saying this from the start, About the war in Ukraine, about whether the U.S.
government should be funding and arming Ukraine and fueling this war.
It is in nobody's interest, no citizen's interest, to have debate about the most consequential thing a country can do, involve itself in a war, using the citizen's resources, to be so censored that no dissent can be heard.
This is something that has always led to the worst outcomes.
The Espionage Act of 1917, one of the most tyrannical laws in the United States that is now used to prosecute whistleblowers like Edward Snowden and Julian Assange.
It's also now being used to prosecute Donald Trump.
For that preposterous case of accusing him of being reckless with classified documents that he had the unilateral power to declassify had he wanted, is also based on the Espionage Act of 1917.
That law was intended solely by Woodrow Wilson to allow him to prosecute opponents to his policy of involving the U.S.
in the European war, what became World War I.
And a lot of anti-war activists, including the socialist Eugene Debs, were in prison under that law.
You never want governments with the power to censor opposition and dissent to their war policies, and yet that is what the EU has been doing from the beginning.
And the US, given the First Amendment, has been doing as well, albeit with non-legal means.
Now, this concern is starting to lead to a real escalation and attacks on big tech and demanding that they censor dissent on the war.
So here you see an article from the Washington Post in September 1st of 2023.
And as we showed you, the tweet where they promoted and unveiled the article went super viral.
Just liberals sitting there all day clicking retweet, not, of course, having even read the article, let alone the study.
Where they would have seen that the whole claim is completely dubious and even flagrantly fraudulent, as we're about to show you.
But here was a central claim.
Elon Musk's new Twitter policies helped spread Russian propaganda, the EU says.
What were those new Twitter policies?
The ones that reduced the amount of censorship on the platform.
The ones that said, we're going to stop censoring dissent To Western narratives and Western policy on the most consequential policy debates like COVID, like election integrity, like the war in Ukraine.
This is what they're targeting.
This is what they're angry about.
They're claiming that free speech policies on the internet are dangerous.
Because it leads to the spread of Russian propaganda about the war in Ukraine.
Here's the sub-headline, just making the threat against Twitter even more explicit.
"X's failure to slow the spread of disinformation on the internet would have violated EU social media law had it been in effect." So they're referring to a new social media law in Europe that requires platforms to proactively censor what the EU regards as disinformation or hate speech and to be guilty of crimes or face major fines if it fails to preemptively censor.
So they're essentially threatening X, formerly Twitter, that if you don't start censoring more dissent on the war in Ukraine, Not only are we going to start pinning that to your forehead, the claim that you're a Russian propagandist, but you're going to start to face legal jeopardy by allowing free speech on your platform.
It's really worth understanding what this article did and what the underlying study did.
So let's take a look.
Quote, Elon Musk's ex, formerly Twitter, has played a major role in allowing Russian propaganda about Ukraine to reach more people than before the war began, according to a study released this week by the European Commission, the governing body of the EU.
Now, obviously, it goes without saying that the EU is steadfastly in support of the war in Ukraine.
And support for it, and although the Washington Post article nor the underlying study really say what constitutes pro-Russian propaganda, you can certainly assume, based on what we did find, that anything that opposes US and NATO support for the war, meaning any war dissent, is classifiable as pro-Russian propaganda.
Our show, for sure, would be classified as pro-Russian propaganda, even though we have never once uttered a word of praise for Vladimir Putin, simply by virtue of questioning whether or not the U.S.
should be fueling this war and opposing the policy by Joe Biden that it should.
That would absolutely count as pro-Russian propaganda that this study and the EU is demanding, along with the Washington Post, Twitter censor.
Quote, the research found that despite voluntary commitments to take action against Russian propaganda by the largest social media companies, including Meta, Russian disinformation against Ukraine thrived.
Now, you'll notice this article over and over throws these terms around, Russian disinformation about Ukraine, Russian propaganda, pro-Russian accounts, and never once do they define what that means or how that's determined.
Even though it's central to the entire accusation.
Quote, allowing the disinformation and hate speech.
They just threw hate speech in there now.
So it's not just disinformation, it's also hate speech.
Allowing the disinformation and hate speech to spread without limits would have violated the Digital Services Act, the EU social media law, had it been enforced last year, the year-long Commission study concluded.
Quote, over the course of 2022, the audience and reach of Kremlin-aligned social media accounts Increased substantially all over Europe, the study found.
Preliminary analysis suggests that the reach and influence of Kremlin-backed accounts has grown further in the first half of 2022, driven in particular by the dismantling of Twitter's safety standards.
You know what safety standards are, of course.
Those are censorship structures that were implemented and overseen by people like Yoel Roth and the former FBI General Counsel James Baker, who became the Twitter Deputy General Counsel.
They want those censorship structures back in place.
They want to control them and commandeer them in order to prevent dissent from their policies.
That's how tyrannical this really is.
Quote, the EU has taken a far more aggressive regulatory approach to government-backed disinformation than the United States has.
The Digital Services Act, which went into effect for the biggest social media companies on August 25th, requires them to assess the risk of false information, stop the worst disinformation from being boosted by algorithms, and subject their performance to auditing.
Obviously, who determines what disinformation is, is the EU government.
So social media companies, under this law that the Washington Post obviously admires, requires these social media platforms to ban people who are posting views that undermine or deviate from formal EU policy or EU perspective.
There's really nothing more dangerous than that.
I know we're all trained to think of the EU as these nice, soft Democrats with a small D.
But in the name of prosecuting this war, in the name of their powers on COVID, and just in general, they are really aggressively seeking to prevent dissent on the internet.
And exactly the kind of authoritarian and totalitarian way we were, we are always trained to believe is done by our enemies.
Separately, European sanctions on Russian state media have prompted YouTube and other platforms to ban the likes of RT, the Russian news outlet formerly known as Russia Today that was once one of the most followed channels.
That's considered a success that if you're an adult in the EU or in the United States now and you want to hear what the Russian government is saying, even if you hate the Russian government, you just want to hear what they're saying so that you can understand their perspective on the war, you are now banned because the EU made it illegal to platform RT and other Russian state media.
That's the reason Rumble is not available in France because Rumble refused to obey France's order to remove RT and other Russian state media like Sputnik from its platform.
You can still listen to it on Rumble but you can't if you're in France because the French government threatened that they would cut Rumble off at the IP level in France unless Rumble complied with its censorship demands.
This is the state of affairs we're already in and that we're headed to more and more where You will be unable to access information that your government or some other government decides they don't want you to hear upon pain of cutting those platforms off at the IP level.
Quote, the study is the starkest indication yet that the legal and voluntary measures are not getting the job done, following June warnings from EU Commissioner Thierry Breton that X had work to do to avoid potentially massive fines under the DSA.
You may recall that the EU official referenced there went onto Twitter and said directly to Elon Musk, When he talked about how the bird was going to be free, he said, well, the bird has to obey our laws.
And if you allow disinformation and hate speech to spread, you're going to suffer the consequences under our law.
Sounded like Kim Jong-un.
The research, this study that BU commissioned, was conducted by non-profit analysis group RESET.
Which advocates for greater oversight of digital platforms.
That's their job, Reset.
To seize control of what opinions are and are not permitted on the internet.
Now, obviously, The Washington Post doesn't tell you who funds Reset, so we will.
It's Pierre Omidyar, one of the largest funders, as we'll show you later.
As always, it's either Pierre Omidyar, George Soros, in alignment with the U.S.
Security State or Western intelligence agencies, who are behind all these projects.
To exploit the concept of disinformation and hate speech to justify internet censorship.
Quote, Musk's ex was not alone in having to fail to stop the spread of Russian propaganda, the study found.
Instagram, Telegram, and Facebook, owned by Meta, also drew criticism.
Quote, in absolute numbers, pro-Kremlin accounts, obviously not defined, pro-Kremlin accounts continue to reach the largest audiences on Meta's platforms.
Meanwhile, the audience size for Kremlin-backed accounts more than tripled on Telegram since Russia's February 2022 invasion, the group wrote.
We found that no platform consistently applied its terms of service in repeated tests of user notification systems in several Central and Eastern European languages.
Reset senior advisor Felix Carte told the Washington Post that the myriad propaganda campaigns used hate speech, boosted extremists, and threatened national security, potentially influencing European elections next year. - Sure.
That is what they're really worried about.
They're worried about free speech resulting in democratic outcomes they dislike, as I've repeatedly argued.
What really prompted the censorship regime to accelerate was when they got two results in 2016 they did not like from their populations.
The decision by British subjects of the Crown to leave the EU when they approved Brexit, followed months later by the defeat of Hillary Clinton in the election of Donald Trump.
That is what led all these people, these neoliberals, these neoliberal billionaires, the Western intelligence agencies, to conclude they could no longer permit free speech on the internet because free speech meant that voters may decide Outcomes of elections different than what these elites want them to do.
That is really what's going on here.
These people constantly march under the banner of saving democracy and pro-democracy and saving the West from authoritarianism when in reality their central project is to eliminate free speech in the digital age.
Because of fears of what free speech will enable the populations to do, meaning people will think freely outside of their control and might therefore vote in ways different than they want them to.
As is happening in Slovakia.
Where Slovaks are deciding on their own that they don't want their money going anymore to the war in Ukraine.
They don't want to be alienating and antagonizing Russia by being involved in a war that isn't theirs.
And therefore, the frontrunner to win the governorship of that country is somebody who wants to make Slovak neutral in the war.
They can't have that.
They blame free debate over the internet, free speech over the internet.
This is what they're trying to eliminate through bullshit studies like these.
That make allegations about disinformation without defining what that means, without anyone having to justify the label, when all it really means, like Russian propaganda, is views that diverge from theirs.
The article goes on, quote, Though the main period of study was 2022, quote, the reach of pro-Kremlin accountants increased between January and May of 2023, with average engagement rising by 22% across online platforms, Reset found.
However, this increased reach was largely driven by Twitter, where engagement grew by 36% after CEO Elon Musk decided to lift mitigation measures on Kremlin-backed accounts, arguing that, quote, all news is to some degree propaganda.
Which, of course, is utterly true.
Propaganda, that word, is like terrorism.
It means whatever the wielders of the term want it to mean.
Same with hate speech.
Same with disinformation.
These terms are not real terms.
They're terms of propaganda.
Quote, Musk withdrew his social media platform from the Voluntary Code of Conduct for Combating Disinformation that was widely propagated in June 2022 when he has eased content rules and cut enforcement staff.
Now, one reason why there's more, quote, pro-Russian content circulating on these platforms Is probably the fact that more and more people are turning against this war, as polling data demonstrates.
And, of course, it is true that if you stop censoring in accordance with the demands of neoliberal Western institutions of power, as Twitter has largely, though not entirely, done, you're going to have more dissent.
Because now dissent is permitted, rather than banned.
But you see the subtext of this article is very clear.
Oftentimes it's not even subtext, it's explicit.
The crime of Elon Musk is that he decided not to censor as much.
The crime of Meta and Facebook and Instagram is the same.
And YouTube.
Which is, although they don't refuse to censor as much as Elon Musk is, they're still not censoring enough.
That is always the accusation.
That is always the crime being alleged.
And they have all these terms like disinformation and propaganda and hate speech to dine to justify or disguise what is nothing more than just pure despotic political censorship.
The banning of dissent from their policies and views.
Now, it is worth looking at the EU study that the Washington Post wrote about because there is some more insight that one gets from looking at it.
As I said, imagine all the people just mindlessly tweeting, retweeting, spreading That Washington Post headline, there's a bunch more Russian propaganda or disinformation on Elon Musk's Twitter than before, without having the slightest clue whether it's true.
They obviously didn't look at the article.
They would have found that none of these terms is defined.
There's no validity or confirmation or substantiation provided for any of it.
There's not even a definition of what Russian propaganda is.
Does it mean anything more than opposing U.S.
support for or NATO support for the war in Ukraine?
There's no indication of that at all, and they just mindlessly spread it because they like the accusation.
And because left liberals favor a censorship regime, polling data makes that abundantly clear.
And so anything that seems like it's towards censorship, including, as we devoted our show last night to analyzing, the Anti-Defamation League, a longtime enemy of the political left in the United States.
Now that the ADL is also central to the censorship regime, they suddenly find themselves aligned with the ADL and defending the ADL and sounding like the ADL, accusing everybody who disagrees with them of being a Nazi or an anti-Semite because they want those people banned from speaking.
It's all this coalition of people with the common aim, which is censorship of dissent from establishment, authority, orthodoxies.
There's really nobody more dangerous than people who want to do that.
Now, here's the study.
Remember, this is commissioned by the EU, but it was farmed out to this disinformation expertise group, RESET, as they call themselves, funded by Pierre Omidyar.
And the title of it is Application of the Risk Management Framework to Russian Disinformation Campaigns 2023.
Now, They purport to provide a little bit more detail about what these terms mean, so let's look at that.
Here is the paragraph entitled, Data and Sources, and they say, quote, for this study, we analyzed content posted by more than 2,200 accounts on Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, YouTube, TikTok, and Telegram.
This list was created almost over two years of intensive monitoring research.
The criteria for inclusion on this manually curated list of sources were as follows.
So this is how you get on the list of being a pro-Russian account or a Russian propagandist account.
This is how you get on there.
One way is proximity to the Russian state.
So if you have proximity to the Russian state, you are counted as a pro-Russian account or someone spreading Russian propaganda.
Quote, accounts in this category are not directly connected with the Russian state, but the individual behind the account has been associated with a Russian government institution or state media outlet, be it through current or former employment.
The proximity parameter is used to designate accounts of individuals that may retain some level of independence from the Kremlin.
But whose posting activity is aligned with the more explicit Kremlin disinformation campaigns.
So, you can be totally independent of the Kremlin, not work for the Kremlin, have nothing to do with the Kremlin, but you will nonetheless be counted as an offending page or account if your posting activity is, quote, aligned with the more explicit Kremlin disinformation campaigns.
What does that mean?
What are these explicit Kremlin disinformation campaigns?
They, of course, do not say.
They provide a couple of very extreme examples, but there's no definitional criteria.
So, if, for example, you go online and you say, the counteroffensive launched by the Ukrainians is failing, huge numbers of Ukrainians are being killed, even though there's no likely way that the Ukrainians can expel Russia, This war was not entirely the fault of Vladimir Putin, but instead was deliberately provoked by NATO and the United States?
Of course that aligns with the view of Russia, because Russia wants NATO no longer to be waging this war on the other side of its battle.
Does it make you pro-Kremlin any more than you are pro-Saddam?
If you opposed the invasion of Iraq, or you were pro-Saddam if you advocated the withdrawal of U.S.
troops from Iraqi soil, even though if you opposed the invasion of Iraq, your views aligned with the Saddam Hussein government, or if you opposed the NATO regime change war in Libya, it didn't mean you were pro-Gaddafi.
You weren't arguing that Muammar Gaddafi was a good leader who should stay in power.
You were arguing that the United States shouldn't go there and change the regime.
So, of course, your views aligned with Gaddafi.
He didn't want NATO to come and kill him.
War opposition doesn't mean that you're in favor of the government the United States is proposing to fight a war against that you oppose.
But that's obviously what gets you counted.
Now, if this weren't obvious enough, They go on.
Depending on the level of direct connection with the Kremlin, accounts are either defined Kremlin-backed or Kremlin-aligned.
Now, here's the next category.
This is another way to get counted as a pro-Russian or Kremlin propaganda account.
Ideological alignment with the Russian state.
So, here you don't even have to have ever worked for the Kremlin, gotten near the Kremlin.
You're automatically included if You have ideological alignment with the Russian state.
Now, we've seen in American discourse how this functions.
Tulsi Gabbard, who is still a member of the United States Army Reserve, who went and volunteered to fight for her country in Iraq, was accused by scumbags like Mitt Romney and Mitch McConnell and members of the Democratic Party of being a Kremlin propagandist simply because she said before the war began, "We should do everything in our power more to try and find a diplomatic way out of this war.
We shouldn't be sending our money to the war.
We shouldn't be trying to end the war." And she got called, as Hillary Clinton called her repeatedly as well, for questioning Russiagate, aligned with the Russian state or being a Russian propagandist.
You know that's all it takes to get counted as someone aligned with the Russian government is simply opposing the U.S.
role in Ukraine.
Even if you don't care the slightest about Vladimir Putin and the Kremlin.
Even if you have no favorable sentiments to the Russian government at all, even if you hate the Russian government and oppose the Russian government, simply by opposing the U.S.
war in Ukraine or questioning the false claims of the United States and its media about the war, you will be counted as a pro-Russian propagandist who should be censored from the internet under EU law because you have, quote, ideological alignment with the Russian state.
In every war the United States has fought over at least the last century, every opponent of the war gets accused of being treasonous, of being on the other side.
That is how every war is conducted.
That is the standard neocon tactic.
You can't just say, I want my country to be neutral, I don't want it to be involved in this war.
Doing so means you're automatically pro-Moscow.
That is insanity, but that's what the study formalizes.
Which shouldn't be a surprise, Pierre Omidyar, the funder of this study, funds Bill Kristol and neocon media outlets and activist groups that are fanatical about supporting the war in Ukraine.
So it's unsurprising that they want to call everybody who questions that policy a pro-Russian actor who should be banned from the internet.
I wouldn't even care if all they were doing was accusing people of having Kremlin sympathies Maybe I would care a little bit because it's still wrong to unjustly destroy somebody's reputation, but it would be far, there'd be far less at stake if this weren't about, remember the whole point here is demanding and coercing through threat of legal action that Facebook, Twitter, Google, and the rest censor these people, remove them from the internet.
That's the claim against Elon Musk is he's allowing people whose ideological alignment with the Russian state to speak on his platform, even though it doesn't mean anything more than questioning the war in that country you're saying Ukraine is losing.
Quote, accounts in this category post content that is often similar or identical to the content posted by accounts affiliated with or in close proximity to Russian institutions or media.
If, for example, before the war in Iraq in 2002, you argued that you don't believe Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction or no convincing evidence had been presented, obviously your statements would align with the formal position of the Iraqi government.
That wouldn't have made you pro-Saddam.
But under this framework, you would have counted as that.
Quote, in many cases, those accounts directly share links to affiliated accounts.
Other accounts parent the Kremlin's narratives.
Through originally produced content, or by spreading Kremlin-aligned narratives to different target audiences and languages, the accounts are defined as, quote, Kremlin-aligned accounts.
So there you have it.
Now, what this also would mean, by the way, conversely, is that newspapers like the Washington Post, Or groups like the John McCain Institute, which we're about to report on, who favor U.S.
government policy or who support the NATO view of Ukraine, like the Washington Post, by definition they must be CIA-aligned accounts, or pro-Washington propagandists, or NATO disinformation agents, because they're expressing views that align with the interests of the CIA.
And NATO in Western European capitals, which is dredging up support for this war.
So if opposition to this war means you're a pro-Kremlin propagandist, by definition, support for it must mean that you're a CIA-aligned propagandist.
And of course they have no interest in having those people censored because those people are spreading views that promote the Western agenda.
Do you see how that works?
Now, what's really ironic here is that here they try to justify their censorship campaign by saying the following, quote, negative impact on the exercise of fundamental rights.
The Kremlin's disinformation campaign poses significant risk to the exercise of fundamental rights.
This is the EU that has banned The platforming of Russian media, even if you want to.
This is the EU that is desperately trying to get anyone who criticizes their policies from being censored and banned from the internet.
I can't stress enough that this is the explicit point of this whole project.
And then they have the audacity to turn around and claim that it's Russian disinformation that threatens the exercise of fundamental rights.
Nobody could exercise the fundamental rights more than a government or set of governments and power centers devoted to the censoring of dissent online.
And that's exactly what they're doing.
Now, let's look at this next argument about why the censorship is so necessary.
It's amazing to watch how these new neoliberal institutions conduct themselves and the themes they constantly go back to and exploit.
So here's the other argument about why it's so necessary to ban Russian propaganda.
It's because it's misogynistic.
It is targeted, they say, disproportionately at female Western leaders who support the war.
For example, an underreported aspect of pro-Kremlin disinformation campaigns focused on gender-based attacks.
Analysts at the Ukrainian research organization Detector Media performed a dedicated study of pro-Kremlin social media posts across platforms in Ukraine between February and August 2022.
They found the denigration of Ukrainian women as a widespread theme.
It took many forms, but in particular, the pro-Kremlin narrative alleged female Ukrainian refugees were prostituting themselves to Europe.
Women leaders prominent in the opposition to the Russian war of aggression were particular targets, including the First Lady of Ukraine, Elena Zelenska, the President of Moldova, Maya Sandu, and the former Prime Minister of Moldova, Natalia Gavrila.
We found numerous instances of direct attacks against women on the channels in our sample.
Remember, that's what they did to shield Hillary Clinton from criticism.
If you attack Hillary Clinton, you're misogynistic.
The British Labour Party is experts at this.
They're filled with a lot of women.
And if you criticize the Labour Party or these female MPs or ministers in particular, it means that you're engaging in misogynistic abuse.
They weaponize these identity politics themes constantly to shield powerful people.
You're talking about world leaders here.
And if you attack them or criticize them for their support for the war in Ukraine, it means that you're engaging in misogyny and misogynistic abuse, and that is why it's so urgent, says the EU, to ban people who are their critics.
I mean, it's unbelievable to watch that happen.
To put female leaders who support the war off limits from critiques because criticizing them is misogynistic.
And then finally they say, lastly, doxing.
Doxing is a behavior that Kremlin-lined accounts frequently apply on online platforms to suppress opposing viewpoints, therefore undermining the ability of their targets to exercise the right to data protection.
So apparently now doxing, like blackmail and whataboutism, is also something that is a uniquely Russian weapon.
Do you see how weak the case is for censorship?
But every censor throughout history has always used the same argument.
Always.
The speech they want to ban is simply too dangerous to permit.
But the real danger of speech that questions the war in Ukraine It's not that it spreads misogyny or causes doxxing or threatens the exercise of fundamental rights.
The real threat is that the European leaders are petrified that allowing people to speak freely will continue to feed and expand opposition to the war in Ukraine.
It will cause citizens to vote against leaders who want to continue that war and vote for the leaders who want to stop it.
It's just that simple.
They want to protect their own power and nothing threatens their power more than people who criticize them.
It's like the despotic tendency of every single person who gains political power is to silence their critics.
That's why the First Amendment exists.
But it doesn't exist in most of Europe.
And they're taking advantage of that by enacting laws designed to punish social media companies who don't obey their orders to censor.
Remember, in the United States, the official position of the Democratic Party stated over and over is that social media companies that don't censor in accordance with their demands will face legal and regulatory reprisals.
To the point that a federal district court judge earlier this year ruled But the United States government, the Biden administration, is systematically violating the First Amendment by constantly forcing or pressuring or threatening social media companies to censor in accordance with their orders.
And they ban these agencies in the Biden White House from continuing to communicate with these social media companies to prevent further violations.
That is what this censorship framework is about, and the main way that it's accomplished It's through this fraudulent industry that Pierre Ametiar and George Soros and the CIA and MI6 funded to create overnight a fake expertise of disinformation experts who go around pretending to be able to objectively identify what disinformation is or hate speech is and therefore justify its censorship.
Now, again, just to remind you of how Sensorious end.
What a threat to fundamental rights the EU has become.
Here's The Guardian on February 27th, so just less than a week into the war.
This is how quickly they acted, quote, EU to ban Russian state-backed channels RT and Sputnik.
Ursula von der Leyen says stations will, quote, no longer be able to spread their lies to justify Putin's war.
The EU has announced it will ban the Russian state-backed channels RT and Sputnik in an unprecedented move against the Kremlin media machine.
The European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen said, quote, Russia today and Sputnik, as well as their subsidiaries, will no longer be able to spread their lies to justify Putin's war and to sow division in our union.
So we are developing tools to ban their toxic and hateful or harmful disinformation in Europe.
I don't know, I have to say, hearing a German leader talk about how urgent it is to ban dissent in order to preserve unity over a war against Russia, Does that not strike you as alarming?
I don't think people have an understanding of history any longer.
It was like when the Hillary Clinton campaign unveiled its attack on Donald Trump, its principal attack, that he was some sort of secret Kremlin agent.
They played that Sinister music and asked, what does Donald Trump have in common with the Russian government?
It immediately reminded me, obviously, of the McCarthy era and the worst abuses of that era.
Hearing Germans
And German politicians talk about the need for unity and achieving that through suppression of dissent because the need to win glorious war over Russia by attacking it through Ukraine has such obvious historical relationships to these kind of very traumatic themes that I'm amazed that more people don't see those and react that way.
Just to remind you of what this EU Digital Services Act is, the one that The Washington Post is now threatening Elon Musk with for not censoring more, Reuters on August 24 reported, quote, big tech braces for EU Digital Services Act regulations.
Quote, more than a dozen of the world's biggest tech companies face unprecedented legal scrutiny as the European Union's sweeping Digital Services Act, DSA, imposed new rules on content moderation, user privacy, and transparency.
From Friday, a host of internet giants, including Metas, Facebook, and Instagram platforms, Apple's online app stores, and a handful of Google services, will face new obligations in the EU, including preventing harmful content from spreading, banning or limiting certain user-targeting practices, and sharing some internal data with regulators and associated researchers.
Over the past few months, the European Commission said it has offered to conduct DSA stress tests with the 19 platforms.
Such tests assessed whether these platforms could, quote, detect, address, and mitigate systemic risks such as disinformation, a commissioner spokesperson said.
At least five platforms have participated in such tests, Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, TikTok, and Snapchat.
In each case, the commission said more work was needed to prepare for the DSA.
Now, just as the rules come into effect, research published on Thursday by nonprofit Echo shows Facebook was still approving online ads containing harmful content.
And again, those sound like nice terms that you want to get rid of.
Harmful content, disinformation, hate speech.
But it's defined and determined solely by the governments of Western Europe and Eastern Europe and Central Europe and soon North America.
And if you trust governments to define for us what disinformation is, what toxic and harmful information is, what hate speech is, and expect them to do anything other than include views that are threatening to their policies, I don't know what to tell you.
Here is the little information about RESET, the organization commissioned by the EU that published that study that the Washington Post trumpeted.
Quote, RESET, and this is from their website, is a non-profit philanthropic organization that both provides grants and contracts and works programmatically alongside partners with shared policy, technology, and advocacy goals.
Luminate and the Sandler Foundation are our founding funders.
Luminate is a global foundation working to ensure that everyone, especially those who are unrepresented, has the information rights and power to influence the decisions that shape society.
That is literally the opposite of what they're doing.
Their whole goal is to apply the disinformation label or the hate speech label to those who they want to be banned from speaking.
Quote, the foundation is focused on enabling people to fully participate in civic and political life, to safely challenge power, and to access accurate, trustworthy information.
It was established by the philanthropists Pierre and Pam Omidyar.
I just, I'm amazed at how Orwellian that is.
To pretend that they're trying to facilitate the participation in civic life, When in reality, they're trying to exclude people from participating in political debate in civic life who deviate from Pierre Omidyar's worldview.
And he's a fanatical opponent of Russia, a huge supporter of the war in Ukraine, a fanatical Russiagate supporter.
And he has been under, on a crusade, like George Soros has, and like the US government has, to remove anyone from the internet who questions his core pieties about war, about Foreign policy about COVID by spending his billions and billions of dollars to accuse anyone who disagrees with fear of being guilty of spreading hate speech and disinformation.
The only reason that works is because he is in full alignment with the US security state.
He has funded organizations in other countries, including Ukraine.
But the United States government was funding as a way of facilitating regime change against governments that didn't take its orders.
He is a loyal partner of the CIA, the FBI, the US government, as is George Soros.
And this is what they do.
They go around funding these groups to put labels on dissidents.
That make it seem like they have been judged scientifically as being unworthy of being allowed to be heard on the internet.
And they are pressuring big tech companies to censor even more of their political enemies.
Now using the force of law, threats of prosecution, or fines, and reputational destruction in order to do it.
I don't really care what their policy aims are.
There is really not much worth thinking about until this is defeated because if we are going to live in a country or in a culture where the internet is now a closed system of information where essentially nothing can be heard on it, if it deviates at all from the policy views of the US and Western governments and neoliberal billionaires, Then none of these other political rights really matter.
If you're being manipulated and propagandized and controlled because only one side of a debate is being permitted to be conveyed to you, then you're just going to vote like an automaton.
Your vote in these elections don't really matter.
And they're being clear that their biggest fear is that free speech will render elections too free.
And that allowing a free internet will allow people to think for themselves in ways they regard as dangerous.
All you have to do is look a little bit deeply past the headlines into what they're actually doing and saying and those goals become very manifest as do the very grave and I would even say incomparable dangers that arise from them.
One of the ways that propaganda functions and one of the ways that the bipartisan consensus in Washington is protected is through the creation of all kinds of think tanks and institutes that are often named in a way to seem very benign.
Some of them have very vague titles that don't give any clue about what they're really about.
Many of these disinformation groups often have names like Unit to Combat Extremism or the Agency to Guard Against Disinformation.
You hear these names and you think, well, they sound really neutral.
They sound like scientific.
Nobody would be opposed to them.
One of the ways to do it, though, is to name it after somebody who you think is kind of obtained political saint status, who basically is like a secular state who's very popular among the powerful And therefore, whatever that institute advocates automatically seems benevolent by virtue of its association with this person.
And they created now the John McCain Institute.
Which is really unsurprising in this agenda.
John McCain was mostly noted for his vigorous and passionate and unyielding defense of every single war the United States has fought.
And his demands that many wars be fought that never ended up getting fighting.
Never ended up being fought.
He was a warmonger, John McCain.
A neocon.
He was.
His alliances were people like Lindsey Graham and Joe Lieberman.
And while McCain had other sorts of aspects to his politics, including occasionally voting in a very flamboyant way that deviated from Republican Party orthodoxy on things like domestic politics, and even though he pretended to be this very noble politician, even though he was caught up in one of the worst scandals of the 1980s, late 1980s and 1990s, which is when he was accused, along with four other members of Congress,
Being on the take from a very wealthy political operative, he used lobbyists and the like to basically buy votes.
What he was mostly known for was his foreign policy and in particular his contempt for anti-war or what he called interventionist or isolationist ideologies, whether on the left or the right.
And they now have a McCain Institute that is run by an Obama Pentagon official, a former Obama Pentagon official, that's designed to sanctify neoconservative endless war policy as the policy of bipartisan decency.
So let's just take a quick look at what this is so that when you hear it you know what it is.
Here is a Washington Post article from just a few days ago.
Which is obviously very adoring because nobody was more beloved by the media than the Washington John McCain.
And the headline reads, McCain's political heirs carry on his fight against Trumpian isolationism.
Quote, the late senator's institute has taken the lead among outside groups trying to keep his worldview relevant, especially in Ukraine's fight against Russia.
Yeah, it's worth remembering that in 2014, when Ukrainians, some of them, were becoming violent and were demanding the ouster of their pro-Moscow, anti-EU, democratically elected leader, who was elected in 2010 and had his term extend to 2015 under the Constitution, and they removed him a year early.
It was John McCain and Democratic Senator Chris Murphy who went to Made in square in Kiev along with people like Victoria Nuland to declare openly their support for the regime change protesters.
And we've shown you the C-SPAN video of Chris Murphy afterwards, still a very inexperienced young senator who didn't know how to lie well enough, admitting explicitly that the U.S.
was a key actor in that change of regime in Ukraine because, according to Chris Murphy, it lost its legitimacy.
And he went with John McCain to do that.
Quote, "As he hit the crescendo of his presidential nomination speech, Senator John McCain returned to the roots of the unexpected revival of his campaign." Quote, "Stand up to defend our country from its enemies.
Stand up for each other, for a beautiful, blessed, bountiful America." McCain, a Republican from Arizona, declared September 4, 2008, closing the Republican National Convention.
Quote, "Stand up, stand up, stand up and fight." Nothing is inevitable here.
We're Americans and we never give up.
We never quit.
Left for politically dead in the summer of 2007, McCain turned around his presidential campaign by stumping for a more aggressive approach to the Iraq war.
He regularly joked about when he looked into the eyes of Russian President Vladimir Putin, he saw three letters, KGB.
That was mocking George Bush for saying that he had looked into President Putin's eyes and saw an honorable and trustworthy leader.
Quote, those days are long gone, Rick Davis, McCain's 2008 campaign manager, lamented in a recent interview.
Davis serves on the board of the McCain Institute, founded in D.C.
a few years before the senator's death on August 25, 2018.
It promotes his views of, quote, defending democracy and human rights around the world.
I guess that's what we call the invasion of Iraq, the regime change wars in Syria and Libya, the occupation of Afghanistan, the regime change in Ukraine, all these other regime changes and wars that John McCain wanted.
This is called, quote, defending democracy and human rights around the world.
Doesn't that sound wonderful?
Who could be opposed to that?
Quote, one of the Institute's central roles now is building outside coalitions to shore up political support for defending Ukraine against the Russian invasion.
Now, five years after his death turned into a call to arms for Democrats and Republicans who believed in U.S.
engagement abroad, Mr. McCain's traditional Republican views of national security face their most difficult fight against the isolationist views of former President Donald Trump.
I don't really know what they mean by isolation.
If you use the form of President Donald Trump, it is true, as he vowed to do in the 2016 campaign.
He was the first American president in decades not to involve the United States in a new war.
But he was hardly pacifistic or isolationist.
He escalated bombing campaigns in Syria and Iraq that he inherited from President Obama, as he also vowed to do in the campaign.
Remember when he said he would bomb the shit out of terrorists?
And destroy ISIS and Al Qaeda, that's what those bombing campaigns ostensibly were meant to do.
He flooded Ukraine with lethal arms, even though President Obama refused to.
But any attempt at all to limit the wars in which the United States fights get cast as isolationism when on the right or pacifism when it comes from the left.
You need these terms to stigmatize anti-war sentiment while glorifying warmongering as a defense of democracy and human rights.
So that's how the Washington Post Frames it all.
Quote, Congress returns this month to debate whether to authorize the more than $20 billion that President Biden has requested to boost Ukraine's war against Russia and to back Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky.
That proposal has overwhelming support except among some House Republicans, some of whom are Trump's most vocal supporters, while many others fear his wrath should they oppose him.
Note that they don't mention public opinion because that doesn't count.
The fact that the majority of Americans also oppose this war.
They're like, the people who count.
Namely, the people with power in Washington.
They're all in favor of the war, which is basically true.
Except for a group, a populist on the right, who are largely believers in Trump's foreign policy of America First, who oppose the war.
They're the ones, the group of 70 senators and house members, every last one of whom is Republican, who voted against the original $40 billion authorization.
Quote, Trump, the leading GOP presidential candidate for 2024, and his supporters do not view Ukraine as part of U.S.
national security interests.
Quote, my red line in the sand has always been I will not vote to fund a war in Ukraine, Congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Greene, Republican of Georgia, a far-right ally to Trump and House Speaker Kevin McCarthy, said Thursday at a town hall.
Her remarks drew cheers from her conservative constituents.
No one quite knows how this legislative fight will end, but McCain's allies know he would have approached this battle.
Quote, John McCain would be in Ukraine.
Evelyn Farkas, the Executive Director of the Institute, said in a recent interview, reciting the Senator's quote, show-off approach to using congressional delegation trips to demonstrate support.
He would be manning the barricades.
Exactly.
He was elected to be a Senator for the United States by the people of Arizona, and I have no doubt, she's right, he would be in Ukraine.
Focusing on their interests instead.
That's why so many people despise the bipartisan Washington establishment, because they never care about the interests and opinions of the American people, which the Washington Post doesn't even bother to mention.
Quote, to that end, Farkas plans to lead a group of business leaders to Kiev in the fall, part of the McCain Institute's Ukraine Business Alliance.
Lawmakers might be invited to join the trips and they see that even prominent members of the private sector including Microsoft and other tech companies support the defense of Ukraine.
You know who really supports it?
BlackRock and JPMorgan who are waiting on the sidelines for all kinds of propeteering efforts in what will be the rebuilding of Ukraine that was destroyed by this war that is going to produce billions if not trillions of dollars for them.
Quote, Farkas first came into McCain's orbit as a Democratic staffer two years ago for the late Senator's longtime friend, Senator Carl Levin, Democrat of Michigan, when he was on the Senate Armed Services Committee.
She served in the Obama administration as Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense for Russia, Ukraine, and other parts of that region, making her a frequent media guest to discuss Putin's barbarism.
Trump and McCain had the equivalent of an existential battle beginning a few weeks after the reality TV star launched his presidential campaign in 2015 by attacking McCain's prisoner of war tenure in Vietnam.
McCain withdrew his endorsement of the GOP nominee just before the 2016 election after the Post reported Trump's comments about sexual assault.
In 2017, McCain cast a deciding vote against Trump's attempt to repeal the Affordable Care Act.
But Trump's soft views toward Putin... Do you see how every one of these lines is written in the most tendentious way possible?
To show the Washington Post's views, even though this is a news article.
But Trump's soft views toward Putin... How were his views toward Putin soft?
Because he didn't want war with Putin?
He sent lethal arms to Ukraine.
He also agitated for years for the destruction of Nord Stream 2, the most important economic project for the Kremlin.
But he was soft because he wanted cooperation with Moscow instead of a new war with it.
And the Washington Post plays along with that ideological perspective in how it reports its news.
But Mr. Trump's soft views toward Putin also sparked the sharpest clashes.
Davis, who also worked on GOP presidential campaigns for George H.W.
Bush and Robert J. Dole, said the Republican Party's retreat from its strong national security views would shock McCain.
Trump's 2016 surprise victory gave him vast control over the conservative media echo chamber, allowing him to regularly mock McCain, even after his death, and others who held similarly hawkish views, including Senator Mitch McConnell, Republican of Kentucky.
Over the last 18 months, the most conservative media personalities, particularly former Fox host Tucker Carlson, have parroted Trump's anti-Zelensky themes.
Quote, if you tell people enough times that Ukrainians are the problem, sooner or later they're going to start aping that back to you, Davis said.
Increasingly, with the elections of 2018, 2020, and 2022, the new crop of Republicans veer toward Trump's worldview.
Some of those far-right conservatives threaten to oust McCarthy as Speaker if they're upset with how he handles the coming negotiations over government funding, which will include the Ukraine request.
Quote, the international order has kept us out of World War III, Farkas said, explaining how she tries to educate lawmakers about the domino effect of Putin wins in Ukraine.
Quote, there's a lot at stake here for every human.
Last month, Republican debate provided some relief when a majority of candidates raised their hand in support of Ukraine, including former President, Vice President Mike Pence and former UN Ambassador Nikki Haley.
Yet three leading candidates, Trump, Florida Governor Ron DeSantis and entrepreneur Vivek Ramaswamy, opposed funds for Ukraine.
It's a remarkable shift from 15 years ago when McCain anchored his entire presidential bid around foreign policy and projecting American leadership abroad.
By the way, does anyone remember?
Does the Post think it's worth noting that McCain got crushed in that election?
He didn't actually win.
For all this talk about how he inspired Democrats and Republicans to the pro-war cause, McCain lost the election to a total newcomer who had been in the Senate for all of two years when he announced his candidacy, Barack Obama, who ran on the opposite campaign of vowing to uproot the Bush-Cheney war on terror.
Now, he didn't do that.
Of course, he did the opposite, but that was the campaign on which Obama ran that actually won.
Quote, while he went on to lose the general election by a wide margin, alright, they did acknowledge that, McCain retained his place as a critical Republican voice on national security and chaired the Senate Armed Services Committee.
Foreign leaders treated McCain as the equivalent of a Secretary of State or Defense when one of his congressional delegations landed, Davis recalled.
Quote, the man carried the weight of America around the world with him.
Now these views are growing out of fashion, even with the newest Republicans in the Senate.
McCain liked to share political fights, even those he lost, frequently deploying the quote, a fight not joined was a fight not enjoyed line.
I think he would be angry, Davis said, of the current state of global affairs.
He would have rolled up his sleeves, hit the floor of the Senate.
All right.
So that was John McCain.
That's how they marketed him all the time, and that was his reality.
But do you see how bipartisan it is?
Here is the person who runs the John McCain Institute.
It's not some Republican.
It's Dr. Evelyn Farkas.
There you see her in all her gory.
She's the Executive Director, and she served from 2012 to 2015 as Deputy Assistant of Defense for Russia, Ukraine, and Eurasia for President Obama, also covering the Balkans and conventional arms control.
From 2010 to 2012, she was the Senior Advisor to the Supreme Allied Commander in Europe.
All right.
That's her.
From 2001 to 2008, she served as a professional staff member of the Senate Armed Services Committee.
Now, no one mentions this because I guess it's impolite, but she ran for Congress in New York in 2020 and lost by a gigantic Margin to Mondaire Jones and her consolation prize when she got to run the McCain Institute, but it shows you how this pro-war ideology is completely bipartisan in Washington, which is why the establishment wings of the Democratic and Republican Party are equally supportive of Biden's war policy in Ukraine, even as public opinion turns against it.
Now, who funds this John McCain Institute, you might wonder?
Oh, well, we have the donors for you.
They're right on the site.
Northrop Grumman Corporation, whose business is selling arms, so they probably like John McCain and the war in Ukraine quite a bit and understand why they're funding the John McCain Institute.
You know what else?
Raytheon Corporation.
That was the arms dealer that Lloyd Austin was on the board of before being named defense secretary.
Oh, and there you have the Open Society Foundation.
That's George Soros' group.
Also, the Royal Embassy of Saudi Arabia.
They also fund the John McCain Institute.
And then George Soros himself, the chairman of the Soros Fund Management.
It's really amazing.
These are two separate stories.
The story on the Washington Post crusading for censorship of opponents of the Ukraine war based on this disinformation fraud funded by Pierre Omidyar and the EU.
And the John McCain Institute, which is designed to preserve bipartisan consensus about pro-war propaganda that was embodied by John McCain.
And in here you see the utter myth of the idea that the Democrats and Republicans are so radically disparate, they can't agree on anything, they're constantly at each other's throats.
The reality is they agree, certainly on foreign policy, on virtually everything.
And that's one of the reasons Donald Trump is considered such a threat, such an outlier.
But we just got done hearing about Russian propaganda and Russian disinformation, and now you see that this group that the Washington Post loves, on whom they rely to disseminate pro-war agitprop, is funded by Raytheon and Northrop Grumman and the George Soros Foundation and The Royal Embassy of Saudi Arabia.
So, there may be a lot of Russian propaganda, but there's a lot of pro-war propaganda emanating from Washington.
It's almost always entirely funded by the same tiny group of people who are not your friends.
And they are increasingly relying, not even on persuasion about their propaganda any longer, but increasingly censorship of dissent from their views because they know, as this article suggested, that these views are falling out of favor.
And their only recourse is to do what all people in power do when they start feeling power slipping away.
Banning free speech, controlling which propaganda can and can't be heard, and squeezing The most fundamental rights until they're suffocated and dead because they feel so threatened by them and this is the network, the framework that is being used to facilitate that.
So that concludes our show for this evening.
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