Can't-Miss of 2023 (3/5): Exposing Bellingcat—The Shady Mouthpiece of Elites
One of the Top 5, Can't-Miss SYSTEM UPDATE episodes of 2023! This is an excerpt from our show that originally aired in May of this year, covering what we feel is one of the most important yet overlooked stories of 2023—the stories of massive consequence that have not yet garnered the attention and conversation they deserve. We hope you enjoy, and thanks as always for your support!
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Right before the Christmas break, we did a show where we highlighted the five stories we covered this year that we thought Garnered far less attention and impact and discussion than they merited, given the significance of the stories, the news events, the analysis.
And so we decided for this week between Christmas and New Year, when our show is off, to provide excerpts of each one of those five shows.
We hope you really enjoy it.
We hope it rejuvenates interest in these stories that, again, got some attention.
Obviously, our show covered them, but nowhere near the attention we think they deserve.
Enjoy.
CONTROVERSY IS ONCE AGAIN SWIRLING AROUND THE U.S.
government-funded site called Bellingcat, which, depending on your perspective, is either celebrated for its intrepid reporting and courageous investigations, or is notorious for its relentless propaganda, always in servitude to the foreign policy agenda of the Western intelligence agencies and neoliberal global institutions which fund it.
Mystery has long surrounded how this outfit in a very short period of time skyrocketed from an obscure ragtag team of failed journalists and dweebish online neoliberals into a site that receives ample funding from the US government and EU's most potent propaganda arms and has become genuinely revered and aggressively protected by the most pro-establishment media sectors from NBC and CNN,
With whom Bellingcat is officially partnered, even though those networks rarely, if ever, disclose that fact when defending Bellingcat, to numerous Western governments and politically active billionaires who are also counted among their most rabid supporters and ample funders.
The latest controversy came when Elon Musk this week accurately described what Bellingcat does.
Quote, Bellingcat literally specializes in psychological operations, Musk said.
Immediately, the most devoted loyalists of US foreign policy and media, politics, and academia rose in indignation to Bellingcat's defense, as they always do.
All without even mentioning, let alone refuting, the rather crucial fact that a significant chunk of Bellingcat's funding comes from exactly the agencies, exactly the agencies that specialize in those kind of psy-op propaganda campaign, always in an alignment with US and EU foreign policy.
One can barely imagine a fact more revealing than the situation we have here.
The most beloved and popular news site among established media outlets and pro-establishment academics is one that just so happens to be funded by CIA-adjacent government agencies, EU foreign policy units, and the same small handful of multi-billionaires, George Soros, Bill Gates, Pierre Omidyar, over and over and over.
Whose fingerprints are always at the center of virtually every campaign of propaganda, disinformation, and censorship.
To say that Bellingcat is a shady and sketchy operation is to woefully understate the case.
We'll show you who funds them, what functions they serve, and why glorifying and protecting them has become so crucial to CIA-aligned operatives and the nation's largest media corporations.
Whenever a tiny and obscure entity is jettisoned overnight into international celebrity, it merits a great deal of critical scrutiny to find out who exactly is behind this new entity, who funds it, and what is it that they get in return for that and what is it that they get in return for that
Now, there are occasions when a Hollywood dream comes true, when a young, scrappy group of rabidly intrepid and independent investigators stumbles into or finds some incredibly consequential story or series of stories and becomes celebrated for that reason.
That does, on occasion, happen.
And then there's Bellingcat, someone, an entity that completely deviates from that script in every sense of the word.
Bellingcat is indeed rabidly celebrated by almost every key establishment sector in politics, in media, in academia.
Anyone who criticizes them or even subjects them to critical scrutiny, as we're doing here, will instantly become the target of all sorts of vitriol, all sorts of rabid anger.
Principally from employees of the largest media outlets in the West who have come to depend on Bellingcat and their reputation for independent journalism and courageous investigations for the mythology they like to propagate about what press freedom means in the United States and more importantly How their revelations prove the validity of U.S.
foreign military adventures, U.S.
and NATO wars, and all other kinds of foreign policy goals of the United States and EU, which it just so happens turns out to be among their biggest funders.
Now, Bellingcat, as I suggested at the beginning, has been the subject of controversy for a long time now, but they have found a new controversy because earlier this week, the owner of Twitter and the CEO of SpaceX and Tesla, Elon Musk, was interviewed on CNBC and was asked about Bellingcat, and Elon Musk stated what is
Clearly the truth, something that is demonstrable and dispositive if you just look at the evidence as we're about to.
He essentially said that Bellingcat exists for psychological operations, for spreading propaganda on behalf of Western centers of power.
Let's watch this interview.
But, I mean, when you link to somebody who's talking about the guy who killed children in a mall in Allen, Texas, and you say something like it might be a bad PSYOP, I'm not quite sure what you meant, but... Oh, in that particular case, there was a...
Somehow that that's not not not that the people killed but the it was I think incorrectly ascribed to be a white supremacist action and the evidence for that was some obscure Russian website that no one's ever heard of that had no followers and the The company that found this is Bellingcat.
Do you know what Bellingcat does?
Psyops.
So, that was Elon Musk's description, his accurate description of what Bellingcat does.
I'm not here to report on or analyze or comment upon the evolution of facts concerning that shooter and what ideology motivated him, simply because I have not devoted the time or attention necessary to opine with any degree of confidence on that question.
The question I'm interested in instead is the broader claim about what Bellingcat does, because they have become extremely influential in how narratives in Western discourse are formulated.
the media, the corporate media in the United States, has come to rely on them to such an extent that they will just mindlessly repeat whatever Bellingcat claims is the case.
And so interrogating what Bellingcat is and who funds them and why these state agencies and neoliberal billionaires fund Bellingcat is of vital importance, precisely because what Elon Musk said in this video, not about the specific instance of whether this shooter was not about the specific instance of whether this shooter was motivated by Nazi ideology or not, but instead the broader assertion that Bellingcat exists for PSYOPs, for psychological operation campaigns, which is a Cold War term that connotes an attempt to influence and
campaigns, which is a Cold War term that connotes an attempt to influence and manipulate public opinion by typically secretive operations with inside governments, his description is entirely correct.
When he gave this interview and said this about Bellingcat, it created a huge amount of controversy because Bellingcat has become extremely important to all kinds of centers of power in the West.
Let's pull up the documents here where we can take a look at exactly What happened?
So here on the screen, when controversy arose, you have Elon Musk essentially repeating what he said in that interview.
He said, quote, didn't this story come from Bellingcat, which literally specializes in psychological operations?
I don't want to hurt their feelings, but this is either the weirdest story ever or a very bad psyop.
Now, lots of people Responded to Elon Musk by attacking him and insisting that his accusations about Bellingcat were unjust, principally leading figures in the media.
Here is CNN's Jake Tapper who responded to the controversy provoked by Musk's comments by saying, Bellingcat is a great journalistic organization.
Conversely, Musk once linked to a deranged article about Paul Pelosi and the Santa Monica Observer, a nutjob website that claimed in 2016 that Hillary Clinton had died and had been replaced by a body double.
It's true that Elon Musk's tweet in that instance was reckless.
He deleted it.
But the question that actually matters, from which people like Jake Tapper are trying to distract, is what is Bellingcat?
It's Bellingcat, not Elon Musk, who has become a leading source of narrative influence by Western media outlets, including CNN.
And so every time there's a controversy surrounding Bellingcat, you have people inside CNN and NBC doing what Jake Tapper did here, which is rising to their defense and heaping praise on them as a, quote, great journalistic organization.
Here is the Yale history professor who has become a leading resistance advocate.
He uses his credentials as a Ivy League professor to essentially propagate democratic Party talking points, he's a huge fan of U.S.
foreign policy and the U.S.
security state, a fanatical supporter of the U.S.
proxy war in Ukraine.
He made a lot of money writing books about how Donald Trump is the new Hitler, how he's the singular threat to everything sacred in our democracy.
He's just like a resistance troll on Twitter who happens to be an Ivy League professor of history.
And here's Timothy Snyder, unsurprisingly, as an ardent defender of the U.S. security state and U.S. foreign policy, doing the same thing, quote, Bellingcat is a treasure trove of hugely important investigative journalism.
Now, one NBC personality who has an 8 o'clock show on MSNBC, Chris Hayes, decided that he wanted to refute the accusations about Bellingcat.
Chris had been using his Twitter account to defend Bellingcat, and then in order to refute the accusations about Bellingcat, who did Chris Hayes bring on in order to discuss this?
Did he bring on a critic of Bellingcat?
Did he bring on somebody who has done investigative reporting about the U.S.
government and European security state agencies that fund Bellingcat to ask the question, why would the leading propaganda arms of the U.S.
government and EU security state agencies be funding a, quote, great journalistic outlet that has intrepid investigations and independent reporting?
That's not who they go and try and fund.
They obviously try and fund outlets that promote their agenda, that promote their foreign policy.
And that's why every time Bellingcat needs defenders, the people who stand up and defend them are the people who are the most loyal devotees of the CIA, the FBI, the NSA, the Justice Department.
Homeland Security, the war in Ukraine, and European security state agencies, because that's exactly who funds Bellingcat, as we're about to show you.
So you would think if you're going to do a TV segment where you intend to or purport to refute what Elon Musk said about Bellingcat and the widespread criticisms about how they actually disseminate propaganda and don't do journalism at all, you would at least speak to a critic of Bellingcat you would at least speak to a critic of Bellingcat or acknowledge the evidence about who funds them and how they function as a way to have a full and informed debate.
But of course, that's not what people in corporate media ever do.
There is no dissent on NBC News.
You turn on NBC News or MSNBC or CNN and what you find is exactly the same thing all the time.
Two people or three or four or five all violently nodding their heads in agreement with one another to the point that you worry they're actually going to get a neck sprain.
That's what these outlets exist to do.
They are a closed system of propaganda.
And the way you know that is they never have anybody on who disagrees with the view of the news corporation.
So if I wanted to do a Bellingcat segment and I had a guest on, I would try and have that guest be someone from Bellingcat or somebody who defends Bellingcat.
That's not what they do.
So Chris Hayes, a virulent defender of Bellingcat, decided to invite on a Bellingcat operative to refute these claims.
And never once was the funding of Bellingcat mentioned, nor the criticisms of Bellingcat and the basis for those criticisms ever mentioned.
Instead, they both joined together and scoffed at Bellingcat's critics in a segment, a part of which we're about to show you.
How do you respond to the world's richest man and the owner of Twitter basically saying this is a fabricated psyop that you invented?
And no, just for, I've seen people asking the question, so just to clarify, these two are not related biologically.
The spelling cat operative is not the nephew or the son of Chris Hayes.
I understand why people have asked that question, but I want to just clarify that to my knowledge, at least they have no biological relationship despite their Yeah, well, I mean, obviously it's not.
I mean, I didn't even find this first.
So I want you to respond to the world's richest man and the owner of Twitter basically saying this is a fabricated psyop that you invented.
Yeah, well, I mean, obviously it's not.
I mean, I didn't even find this first.
The Texas police found it, and then it got leaked to New York Times.
And then I kind of put the clues together to find it.
He just didn't like that we posted it, I guess.
But, I mean, you know, Musk is just getting garbage information because he's just entirely kind of flooded in this, like, far right, you know, info space.
So, you know, people from, you know, Glenn Greenwald and all these types who are kind of putting this kind of stuff out there.
So he's just getting, you know, garbage in, garbage out, kind of, is how his thought process goes.
I don't think he actually understands this all this well.
So there was a lot of name-calling there.
There was a lot of snickering, a lot of patronizing commentary.
You know what there wasn't?
Any substantive engagement with the criticisms.
Any of the reporting that we've done.
Because they cannot confront that.
They don't want their audience to know about that.
That's why they don't have on a critic of Bellingcat or even mention the criticism themselves.
I also will never stop finding it incredibly ironic That a TV host who never criticizes the U.S.
security state except to beg them to do more on behalf of his party and an operative from a propaganda arm that is actually funded by the U.S.
security state and its propaganda arms and EU security state agencies are calling me someone who has been a career-long critic Of those security state agencies, a far right operative or a far right voice.
And of course, Chris Hayes lacks the courage.
Chris Hayes has known me for 15 years to point that out, that that is a preposterous label.
Now, I don't care about these labels, but the point is, if this is how they try and discredit people, they use these labels that they know are signifiers to their audience, that once they put that label on someone, you can just tune them out forever.
You don't have to engage with their reporting.
You don't have to engage in the substance of anything that they say.
So, it's just always bizarre to be called right-wing by people whose mission in life appears to serve the CIA, serve US and NATO wars, proxy wars, and spying by the FBI, and censorship by Homeland Security.
It's just a very odd dynamic that results in that, but this is the kind of thing you see.
What matters here is two things.
One, that NBC and CNN feel so Compelled like on a kind of morally imperative mission to defend Bellingcat as a great journalistic outlet, even though they're funded by those agencies.
Since when are great journalistic outlets funded by the US government or by EU security state agencies?
But the other part of it is they just don't even need to tell their audience what the criticism is.
So let's look at what the criticism is.
Let's actually look at the facts.
No snickering, no name-calling, no casually, recklessly tossing around political labels to discredit.
Let's just look at the facts of who exactly it is that has made Bellingcat able to function, who gives money to Bellingcat, and who obviously supports the work they do.
So, here from Bellingcat's own website is a section called How to Support Bellingcat.
So if you are inclined to transfer money out of your bank account to theirs, they provide the information for how that can be done.
And you can see here that they say approximately a third of Bellingcat's budget is currently raised from workshop held throughout the year.
And then they say, we would also like to express our gratitude to the following organizations for their support.
One of them is Civitas, the other, the European Commission, which is a unit of the EU government, Wellspring Philanthropic Fund, and quote, several organizations who graciously support our work but prefer to remain anonymous.
Shouldn't we know who the funders are of this great journalistic outlet that is constantly being used by major media corporations to shape their narrative?
To the extent we do know who funds them, though, we know that it's the European Commission, and then keep in mind Wellspring Philanthropic Fund and Symmetries, because we're going to show you who they are.
But the most important Part of Bellingcat's funding, both important in terms of how much they get from there and the portion of their budget that is accounted for, but also important in terms of revealing their true function, is that they are funded by the US and the EU governments.
What media outlet could possibly maintain any credibility as a journalistic outlet when they're being funded By major governments on whom they're constantly reporting in a way that just coincidentally, in almost every case, happens to align with the foreign policy agenda of those governments that fund them.
So here you see from their own financial report from 2021, they have a line item here, income from other nonprofit organizations.
And there you see the National Endowment for Democracy.
Which, in terms of the actual 2020 budget and the planned 2020 budget, is the largest single donor, at least listed in these sections.
We're going to show you what the National Endowment for Democracy is, but by its own description, it is funded entirely by the US government.
It answers to the Biden White House and to the Democratic Senate and now the Republican House.
So it is supervised and funded entirely by the U.S.
government.
And its mission, as we're about to show you, from the start, explicitly, was to do the work of the CIA, but to do it with transparency, publicly, because they were concerned that the CIA's reputation was getting contaminated by how secretly they operate.
And the idea was, let's create an agency that will claim is designed to spread democracy throughout the world.
We all know what that means.
Whenever the US government wants to facilitate regime change in another part of the world, remove one government, or replace it with a government they like better, they claim that they're doing so to spread democracy.
That was the justification for invading Iraq.
That was the justification for changing the government of Libya.
That was the justification for a covert CIA war in Syria, all of which Bellingcat supported.
That's the justification for the proxy war in Ukraine.
And every time the U.S.
government has facilitated regime change, even when the regime they're taking down was actually a democratically elected government, they call that spreading democracy.
For decades during the Cold War, you can go back and see coups of the United States government engineered, taking down democratically elected governments like they did in Brazil in 1964.
Like they did in Chile, like they did in so many other, in El Salvador, Nicaragua, so many other countries throughout the world.
It's always called promotion of democracy.
All US-sponsored coups are called that.
That's what this National Endowment for Democracy exists to do, is to fund opposition groups in countries that we want to change the government of.
In 2014, when Victoria Nuland led the change of government in Ukraine, the coup in Ukraine, Where the democratically elected president who the U.S.
perceived was too close to Moscow but was actually democratically elected was removed from power as a result of oppositional groups funded by the National Endowment for Democracy and other arms of the U.S.
government that was called promotion of democracy.
Even though it resulted in the democratically elected president being removed from power before his term expired and the installation of a leader That the U.S.
government picked because they knew that that would best serve their interests.
In a recording we've all heard where Victoria Nuland was speaking to the U.S.
ambassador to Ukraine and they were debating who should be the next leader and they picked the leader and that's who got installed.
That's always what promotion of democracy means, going back to the Cold War and still now, is the U.S.
does coups and calls it an advancement of democracy.
That's what the National Endowment for Democracy exists to do.
It's a U.S.
government-funded agency designed to facilitate regime change throughout the world and call it promotion of democracy.
That is Bellingcat's biggest funder, or one of their biggest funders, as demonstrated by their own financial disclosure documents.
So how can anybody possibly believe that the new National Endowment for Democracy is substantially funding some sort of independent journalistic outlet when the whole reason the National Endowment for Democracy exists is to do the CIA's work out in the open?
That's their own description of what their function is and always has been.
So if you're going to go on television and do a segment about Bellingcat and purport to refute the criticisms of them as existing to do PSYOPs, you might want to mention the rather significant fact that it is the National Endowment for Democracy, the CIA adjacent arm, that provides them with a significant amount of their funding.
You also might want to mention The equally significant fact that the EU also funds Bellingcat.
Here you see item number 17, income from governments.
And the first line item is the European Union.
And the next is the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe.
Please tell me What independent journalistic outlets are funded by the security organizations, the security state agencies of governments around the world, only for those outlets to then go and report, coincidentally, in a way that furthers the foreign policy agenda of that Of that, those governments.
Is there anything more revealing about the function of our corporate media and pro-establishment journal academics like Timothy Snyder than the fact that the journalistic outlet they herald and most revere is one funded by the U.S.
security state?
This shows you how integrated all of these centers of powerful institutions are.
That every journalist should look immediately askance and with great skepticism at Bellingcat because of this funding.
Unless you think that the CIA's mission, or the National Endowment for Democracy's mission, is to just find really good journalists who are there to follow the facts wherever they might lead, even if it undermines US foreign policy goals.
Just because the CIA cares so much, so much about making sure we have an informed citizenry.
If you believe that about the CIA and the National Endowment for Democracy and the European Union, maybe then you would actually believe that Bellingcat is actually a journalistic organization.
But unless you believe that idiotic fairy tale that even an eighth grader would instantly find laughable, it would be very difficult To herald this entity as something journalistic.
Or at the very least, when you talk about Bellingcat, in order to defend them, you should be mentioning these obviously relevant facts.
Now, let's take a look at a couple other Bellingcat documents.
Here you see again, funders and partnerships.
This too is from a Bellingcat publication right on their website.
Bellingcat currently receives grants from the following organizations.
The EU.
So, the European Union, on whom they're constantly reporting, on whose words they're constantly reporting, on whose foreign policy they constantly report, is a funder of Bellingcat.
Now, let me ask you a question.
If Bellingcat were frequently reporting facts that undermined, rather than advanced, the foreign policy interest of the EU and the CIA, do you think that these government agencies would be funding Bellingcat?
They would be funding media outlets that are adversarial to them.
To ask the question is to answer it.
In fact, to ask the question is to reveal the utter fraud at the heart of Bellingcat.
Here from the independent media outlet Declassified UK is a comprehensive report on what Bellingcat is.
And they talk about the fact that one of its leading funders is the National Endowment for Democracy, the NED, which funds Bellingcat.
The former DCIA official, they quote, said that the National Endowment of Democracy is a, quote, vehicle for US government propaganda.
The National Endowment for Democracy, which is a big Bellingcat funder, is funded entirely by the US Congress, or almost entirely, and it has repeatedly plowed millions of dollars into groups that call themselves media outlets.
The New York Times reported And we'll show you this article in 1997 that the National Endowment for Democracy was, quote, created to do in the open what the CIA has surreptitiously done for decades.
It's just the arm of the CIA that is explicitly acknowledged and always has been in Washington.
It talks about how the NED has been involved in undermining and removing governments that are too disobedient to Washington, including in Bolivia, Ecuador, and Venezuela.
It quotes former directors of the NED openly admitting that what essentially their goal is to do the same thing as the CIA does, just out in the open.
And it talks about the money that the National Endowment for Democracy gives to Bellingcat, which is something you will find just by looking at Bellingcat's own documents.
Now, back in 2010, the actually independent media outlet ProPublica published an article about the National Endowment for Democracy and noted the propagandistic role that it plays.
And the National Endowment for Democracy sent a letter to ProPublica objecting to that characterization.
And in responding to that, the ProPublica, which is a widely, highly regarded media outlet, Said, in response, that they stand behind that characterization.
And this is part of what they said about why they called the National Endowment for Democracy a state propaganda arm.
Quote, in the frequently asked questions on his site, the NED acknowledges its ongoing relationship with lawmakers, saying that its, quote, continued funding is dependent on the continued support of the White House and Congress.
Those who spearheaded creation of NED have long acknowledged it was part of an effort to move from covert to overt efforts to foster democracy.
President Reagan said in 1983 that quote, this program will not be hidden in the shadows, it will stand proudly in the spotlight and that's where it belongs.
Alan Weinstein, a former acting president of the National Endowment for Democracy and one of the authors of the study that led to its creation, told the Washington Post's David Ignatius, who I often refer to as the Washington Post's CIA spokesman, David Ignatius, in a 1991 interview that, quote, a lot of what we do was done covertly 25 years ago by the CIA.
The biggest difference is that when such activities are done overtly, the flat potential is close to zero.
Openness is its own protection.
In other words, as I said, they had a problem with the CIA, the US government did, which is because everything they were doing was in secret, much of it was contaminated, and they needed a way to prettify it, to make it appear more noble, and so they created an agency, the National Endowment for Democracy, whose only goal is to promote CIA's agenda, but to do so in a way that seems more open.
And it's that agency that exists solely to promote the agenda of the CIA by their own explanation, their own self-description, that is a major funding of Bellingcat.
Why?
Why would they be funding an independent journalistic entity?
They don't.
It's preposterous.
They fund outlets, exactly as Elon Musk said, that are designed to disseminate psyops, psychological operations and propaganda campaigns and perception management on behalf of the U.S.
security state.
Here is an article from the New York Times on the National Endowment for Democracy from 1997 and it says here, quote, this is how the New York Times always talked about this entity, quote, Congress routinely appropriates tens of millions of dollars in covert and overt money to use in influencing domestic politics abroad.
The National Endowment for Democracy, created 15 years ago to do in the open what the CIA has done surreptitiously for decades, spends $30 million a year to support things like political parties, labor unions, dissident movements, and the news media in dozens of countries, including China.
They're not doing that because they want to help other countries be more democratic.
They're doing that to influence those other countries and the domestic politics in them to make them more aligned with the US government.
It's absurd that I even have to explain this.
And yet, Bellingcat, if you point out that the National Endowment for Democracy is an arm of the CIA and an arm of the US government, have convinced its followers that this is nothing more than Russian propaganda.
Every single fact That Democrats and corporate media employees like Chris Hayes dislike is instantly labeled Russian disinformation or far-right, automatically.
So what has been true and stated openly by the NED and by the media for 20 years, 30 years, that the NED exists to promote the agenda of the CIA, if you say that now you'll be accused of spreading Russian disinformation.
It reminds me a lot of how for 10 years, the last 10 years, every major Western media outlet has warned that the Azov Battalion is the most significant fighting force in Ukraine, and unfortunately, and quite dangerously, they happen to be Nazis.
They happen to embrace an overt neo-Nazi ideology.
You can find articles in Time Magazine and The Guardian, USA Today, and every major media outlet, The New York Times, Before the war in Ukraine, saying that the Azov Battalion is a overt neo-Nazi organization.
But then, once the war in Ukraine happened, and it came time to arm and fund that group, suddenly it became Russian propaganda overnight to point out what the media had been saying for years.
In exactly the same way that in the CIA war under Obama to overthrow Bashar al-Assad in Syria, It was just simply true that the U.S.
was aligned with Al-Qaeda and even ISIS, was fighting on the same side as Al-Qaeda and even ISIS.
And yet, if you point that out, you get accused of being someone disseminating Russian disinformation, even though it is dispositively true.
And Syria, which was the number one foreign policy goal of the CIA over the last decade, That Trump's opposition to that regime change operation in Syria, which he enunciated in 2015, was one of the major reasons the CIA was so devoted to destroying the Trump campaign.
Because he was an explicit opponent of their number one foreign policy goal, which was to overthrow Bashar al-Assad.
Bellingcat first became a known entity, first came to the public spotlight as a result of their independent investigations That constantly supported the CIA's accusations against the government of Bashar al-Assad that they were using chemical weapons.
In every instance, Bellingcat was on the side of the CIA.
They've done the same thing in Ukraine.
That's what they exist to do, exactly as Elon Musk said.
That's why they're funded by these organizations.
Now, Here is a 2021 document from Bellingcat in which they show who their partners are.
And there you see one of the partners is the OCCRP.
Another one is the BBC.
We'll talk about these in a second.
I just want you to make note of these for the moment.
Here is Other partners as well.
And you can see there that two of their partners, Bellingcat's partners, are CNN.
Take a look in here.
There's CNN.
And NBC.
So these are partners of Bellingcat.
And it is, I think, quite extraordinary, just independent of everything else I've talked about.
That we just watched a CNN personality, Jake Tapper, rise in defense of Bellingcat on Twitter, herald them as a wonderful journalistic outlet.
We watched part of the segment that NBC's Chris Hayes did, where he invited on a Bellingcat operative to sit in agreement with him about how great Bellingcat is.
And to my knowledge, none of these networks ever disclosed this partnership they have with Bellingcat while defending Bellingcat.
I know for certain that in that entire segment that Chris Hayes did, never once did he say, oh, by the way, you may want to know that my corporate employer, NBC, is an official partner of Bellingcat.
There are CNN segments, I can't say that every CNN segment that talked about Bellingcat failed to disclose this, but the ones we found also have no disclosure of any kind, nor do CNN's employees defending Bellingcat over social media.
This is just all something they ignore.
A kind of relevant fact when these news outlets are defending Bellingcat.
Here is some more connections of Bellingcat.
Here are what they call Bellingcat supporters.
And there you see the flag of the EU, because it's absolutely true that the EU is a supporter of Bellingcat, as is right here, the National Endowment for Democracy, which again, according to its own description, exists to promote the agenda of the CIA.
This is who's behind Bellingcat.
This is why they skyrocketed to notoriety.
This is why so many pro-establishment operatives and propagandists are so vested in defending them.
Because this is what they exist to do.
This is whose agenda they are devoted to promoting.
Whatever they are, it is not journalistic.
Here, is one of their partners, the OCCRP.
And I think what's really important here is that when you look at who funds Bellingcat directly, by looking at their financial disclosures, as we just did, you will find that they get money directly from the National Endowment for Democracy and the EU.
And people often say, well, those aren't very big amounts.
But the reality of what happens is that so much of this money is laundered By the US government and the EU government giving money to Bellingcat sponsors which then pass on that money to Bellingcat.
So if you look at Bellingcat's financial statements you will see direct government money from the EU and the US but what you don't see is how much indirect money they get from the US and the EU.
Through their sponsors, such as the OCCRP.
So here's the OCCRP is the Organized Crime and Corruption Reporting Project.
Here you see their financial statements.
In 2020, their biggest donor by far, in fact, half or more than half of their budget came from the US government.
$5 million in 2020.
And that's a budget, a total budget of $8 million.
So it's actually around 70% of their budget came from the US government.
So they passed on money as well to Bellingcat.
That's one of Bellingcat's sponsors.
This is how this works.
It's the same web of money, the same people constantly funding these entities, the same billionaires, Bill Gates, Pierre Midiar, George Soros, and the same governments laundering this money through all of these different networks that have benign sounding names like the Organized Crime and Corruption Reporting Project.
Who could be opposed to that?
When in reality, what they exist to do is to promote the agenda of these governments by labeling government critics Russian agents, by constantly inventing propaganda to promote foreign policy agencies, and by laundering all this money around.
Now, let's look at Another document from this OCCRP, which is a sponsor of Bellingcat.
Here they have a page titled, Who Supports Our Work?
And what do we find here?
More Western governments pouring their money into a Bellingcat partner, the Slovak Agency for International Development Cooperation, the Swedish International Development Cooperation Agency, and the United Kingdom's Foreign Commonwealth and Development Office.
Do you think these entities here are funding independent organizations that are willing to be adversarial to their foreign policy agenda if the facts lead them there?
Or do you think these governments are funding exactly those entities they know exist to propagandize on behalf of their agenda?
Here is the second page of this entity's funding, and here we have, unsurprisingly, the U.S.
Department of State.
And the U.S.
Agency for International Development, as well as the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of Denmark, and again, the National Endowment for Democracy, as well as George Soros' Open Societies Foundation.
So this OCCRP is funded by the U.S.
State Department, by the U.S.
Security State, by numerous Western security agencies, as well as by George Soros.
And this too is a sponsor of Bellingcat.
It's just money laundered all over the place by the same sources for the same reasons.
Here is another list of Bellingcat sponsors.
And it's not just that George Soros is a sponsor of Bellingcat indirectly, though he is.
He's also a direct sponsor of Bellingcat.
There you see the Open Society's foundations.
Always, whenever these outfits emerge, you find the fingerprints of George Soros.
Now, one of their partners is the Wellspring Philanthropic Fund.
This is another sponsor or funder of Bellingcat.
We showed you the financial disclosure where they list the Wellspring Philanthropic Fund.
What is that?
According to Influence Watch, and we verified these facts independently, quote, the Wellspring Philanthropic Fund, formerly known as the Motten-Bedsetter Foundation, was created in 2001 as part of an elaborate and secretive network of grant-making organizations funded by three hedge fund billionaires, Andrew Schechtel, David Gelbaum, and C. Frederick Taylor.
So, there's all kinds of this kind of money floating around too that ends up in Bellingcat.
Now, one of the partners of Bellingcat is the Center for American Progress.
Or rather, let me withdraw that.
The Center for American Progress, if you look at their funding, and the Center for American Progress is, of course, the biggest Democratic Party think tank, the biggest neoliberal think tank.
In Washington, it was founded and run for years by John Podesta, the campaign manager for Hillary Clinton.
It was then run by Neera Tanden, who has now replaced Susan Rice in the Biden White House as the chief domestic policy advisor.
And if you look at who funds The Center for American Progress, you see entities like Bloomberg, the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative, which is Mark Zuckerberg and his wife, the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, and also Wellspring Philanthropic Fund.
So they're funding the largest Democratic Party think tank in Washington, as well as Bellingcat, because this money just floats around from all the same sources here.
This is a couple more Center for American Progress funders, including Microsoft Corporation, of course, the Open Society Foundation.
You have the Omidyar Network Fund, so Pierre Omidyar's money is there, as well as the Walton Family Corporation.
Again, Bill Gates, Pierre Omidyar, George Soros, always their money is appearing wherever these things are found.
If you were going to do a segment like this, inviting this little Bellingcat operative onto your show, who happens to be a doppelganger of the host, for reasons that I guess are coincidental, and you want to put on this chyron, Elon Musk fueling far-right conspiracy theories about Bellingcat, and mention me as a far-right conspiracy theorist who Elon Musk is,
Relying upon, let me just ask you to compare this segment completely bereft of any substantive information, refusing to even acknowledge, let alone confront, all the facts I just showed you to the way that we do reporting, which is to lay out all the facts for you so that you can make decisions about what you think about Bellingcat.
I don't conceal the other side of the story.
I showed you their defense.
I showed you other defenses of them, but then I showed you the facts about who's behind Bellingcat and what those sponsors and funders exist to do.
And when you actually do that, when you actually respect your audience enough to share with them both sides of the story and to walk them through the actual reporting that you've done, not using
Bizarre sources that just appeared in the last five years and that are funded by weird government agencies, but often using Bellingcat's own documents and the documents of their funders to trace where the money goes to and why these outlets exist and what they fund outlets like Bellingcat for, the facts become extremely self-evident, very manifest.
And so there is a good reason why CNN and NBC are so eager To Harold Bellingcat.
There's a reason why U.S.
security state propagandists like Professor Timothy Snyder become so indignant whenever anyone criticizes them.
There's a reason that Western centers of power are so desperate to criticize any effort to bring transparency to Bellingcat.
It's because they have become, arguably, the single most valuable and influential propaganda arm Of the CIA, the U.S.
Security State, and Western intelligence agencies on behalf of their foreign policy agenda.
And to know that, you should not listen to me and my claims, or Elon Musk and his, or these two, and theirs, this Chris Hazen, this Bellingcat person.
