Manipulation! Four Ways The Mainstream Media Lied To Us In 2022
Journalists are supposed to inform the public. That is the job of what has been referred to as the Fourth Estate. They are supposed to expose the crimes of the state against the people. But something is very wrong with our mainstream media. Journalists and their institutions have upended their traditional roles and decided to side with the political power against the people. We are just beginning to see the ugly truth with the release of the Twitter Files, but more importantly in the mainstream media reaction to what should be the biggest story of the century: silence.
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Hello, everybody, and thank you for tuning in to a special audio episode of the Liberty Report.
I'm here with my colleague Chris Rossini doing a show today, and we're going to discuss for a few minutes some of the biggest items of the year, some of the biggest stories of the year that we believe have either not been covered adequately, have been miscovered, or haven't been covered at all.
Chris, thanks for joining me today.
Great to be with you, Daniel.
Chris, the first one I wanted to talk about, and I find it astonishing, are the Twitter files.
And I can't claim to have an encyclopedic knowledge of everything that's going on.
And what I believe was probably nine rounds of the Twitter files being released.
But I do remember breathlessly hitting refresh when Matt Taibbi did the very first one.
And I just couldn't believe what I was seeing with my own eyes.
It was astonishing.
It felt like a bomb had dropped.
And I expected, probably foolishly, a lot of things to happen because these weren't just the impressions or the ideas of people.
These were the actual memos that were being released.
We were seeing raw intelligence, as the CIA might say, raw intelligence of what was happening in real time.
And I think the reason I picked this for our show today is because it just dropped in the middle of a desert, and nothing happened.
I know, what were your impressions?
Yeah, I mean, it tells you everything you need to know about the media, the fact that they're not covering this.
I mean, that's a dead giveaway of, you know, what their agenda is, because this is such a huge story.
And it's such a huge, I'm sure, shock to people because this wasn't supposed to happen.
This cost $44 billion, you know, for this to happen.
All of this exposure, they all thought that it would always remain hidden from everyone.
And here comes Elon Musk out of left field and exposes stuff that just people just don't expose.
This is what journalists are supposed to do.
And they obviously don't do it.
And it just shows you that, you know, as hard as the authoritarians work to steamroll everything, it just shows that they can't do it because there's always something that they can't think of, you know?
And the Soviets had the same problem.
They had people were communicating with cassette tapes.
There was the side dot.
And, you know, when something like this happens, it changes everything, even though at first it doesn't seem like it because everyone wants to keep quiet.
But if you take the example of Florida during COVID, when something, when the truth comes out and when the truth is embraced, people gravitate towards it.
People started flocking to Florida.
And I believe that that's what's going to happen with Twitter if Twitter remains the one place where you can go find the truth if Elon sticks to his word.
People will gravitate there.
Ultimately, people don't want to be lied to.
So it's a great news story.
The media obviously is not reporting it.
And that's why we're talking about it today.
And I think it's great what's happening.
At the same time, there is a sense of frustration when you feel like you finally won the argument and the other person gets up from the table and says, well, I didn't care anyway about it.
And that's what we're seeing.
And it reminds me a little bit of the feeling I had back in 2012 and 2013 when Julian Assange released some incredibly, incredibly damning information.
And we had the releases from Chelsea Manning, we had from Ed Snowden, and that's when we realized that all of the powers that were given to the intelligence component of our country to spy on the bad guys were used to spy on us.
And that's, of course, when I thought, well, something will happen.
Something will change now because it's right there in front of us.
And in fact, nothing changed.
It almost seems like that was the beginning of an era where it was like, oh, yeah, well, who cares?
You know, I mean, nothing happened.
The most that happened is that they wrote some reform legislation that basically made legal what was illegal at the time.
And that's a sense that we're feeling now.
But there are some people that have noticed this.
And I like to talk about this because I'm fascinated by the media and what's happened to the media and depressed about what's happened to the media.
But here are a couple of things.
There was an article written by Jack Hunter, who I've known for a few years in a publication called Based Politics.
And he kind of puts it on the left-right paradigm, which I don't necessarily care for.
But he says, why liberals don't care about the Twitter files?
Excuse me.
And that is to a degree true.
But he quotes Glenn Greenwald, who I would consider an honest progressive libertarian.
And Glenn says, if you think about it, it's really amazing.
Corporate journalists united from the start to pronounce the revelations of the Twitter files worthless and trivial, and the journalists reporting them illegitimate and trained millions to ignore everything they show.
And then Jack goes on to talk about just on CNN how it was mentioned, how the Twitter fires were mentioned.
Oliver Darcy says, Elon Musk claims FBI played Twitter to censor info from the public.
Here's what the Twitter files actually show.
And of course, that's nonsense because we saw the memo.
We saw where the FBI compensated Twitter to the tune of, I think, $3.5 million for its employees' time.
What were those employees engaged in?
Those employees were engaged in responding to requests by the FBI to censor or to nuke people.
I mean, it was all there in the open.
And it seems, I mean, maybe we should have a sense of triumph that they're furiously trying to backpedal and say, oh, nothing to see here, nothing to see here.
But nevertheless, I do still find it astonishing.
Yeah, it is.
And we shouldn't be surprised.
This is typical.
You know, from all your years covering the warfare state, that, you know, they just want to move on.
They don't want to look at their failures, whether it be Iraq, Syria, Afghanistan.
I mean, we could, the list is so long, we could take a whole show.
And you're just supposed to move on.
Now we're on Ukraine now and forget everything that happened before.
You know, obviously that works for a while, but ultimately, I believe there will be a spark, obviously, because all of these sparks, whether it be Assange, Snowden, what Musk is doing, all of these matter in the end, I think.
You know, they just, at one time, you know, at the time, it seems like we're still just going nowhere and the bad guys are just going to just move on.
But ultimately, and maybe it's impossible to predict, you know, it's going to catch on where people have had enough of this.
Perhaps it'll be when there's a financial crisis and the government is reeling financially because they're going to be in trouble.
And then the people will have confidence to then because, you know, they're broke.
What are they going to do to you?
You know, I'm just spitballing here.
But I think all of this matters, even though each time it seems like, you know, but nothing is changing.
So, you know, I remain optimistic that ultimately this huge empire of lies will reach its last lie.
You know, hopefully we're alive to see it.
Yeah.
I mean, I should be more optimistic because just the fact that these files have been released is a major, is a major victory, I think, for our side.
And that side being the side of freedom and free expression and liberty.
But Jack also brings up in his article something that Jonathan Turley, who we know very well and has spoken at many RPI conferences and is, in my view, a terrific, terrific academic and intellectual.
But he wrote a great piece and he talked about, he contrasted what happened after Watergate in the 70s when it became obvious how deeply involved in domestic politics was the FBI and the intelligence agencies.
And there was a severe backlash, of course, and those were the church committee hearings.
And that's when we found out about all the dirty tricks the CIA was engaging in overseas and at home.
And that caused some reform to happen at the time.
And we're not seeing any calls for that now.
There are a few people on Capitol Hill, very few, who are calling for a new church committee, but they're easily discounted as far right or extreme.
You know, people like Marjorie Taylor Greene, who I think has actually done quite a good job, more than I expected.
But there are others who are talking about a new church committee.
I don't know how it can happen.
It seems like the FBI and the CIA, which we know for sure now, again, through raw intelligence, have been involved in manipulating public opinion in the United States is in opposition to their charter.
It is blatantly illegal.
They shouldn't be allowed to do it, but they've done it anyway.
Whether there will be some move to rein in the CIA, or will it be like, like the senator from New York said, they have eight ways from Sunday to getting back at you if you go at them.
And that's, of course, Senator Chuck Schumer.
It's hard to know, but and I don't know what it would look like.
You would have to have a very, very strong figure to stand up and demand this with a lot of public opinion behind him or her.
Is it possible?
Yes.
And I hope it does happen soon.
I do too, Daniel.
Yeah, we are, we're dealing with a lawless government.
They really, laws don't scare them at all.
They just find ways around them.
And if you're Ready, I'll move on to the next.
Uh, yeah, I was just going to say one final thing, Chris, if you don't mind.
Yeah, and that is, um, I originally intended to talk more about the COVID Twitter files because I think in some ways those are the most poignant.
Because the other, of course, was terrible, and there's plenty to look through.
But the COVID ones, I think, are particularly egregious because I believe there's no question that because of the suppression of ideas from leading leading medical experts, Martin Kulsdorf and so many others, top universities, top minds in the field, the Great Barrington Declaration, all of these things being suppressed, I believe, certainly caused thousands,
if not tens of thousands of deaths.
And that's, I think, what we found through the active participation of our own government in suppressing established, brilliant medical professionals, preventing them from getting their views heard about COVID has directly led to deaths.
And I think that is something I don't know whether the courts will sort out.
I don't know how you could.
I mean, the crime is so egregious, it's so huge that it's hard to imagine it being prosecuted.
But if I can, before we move on, Chris, just one more thing, because I think, and our friend Jeff Tucker at the Brownstone Institute quotes Matt Taibbi, who I think really captures it.
And it just really hits home for me.
And maybe for you, if you can indulge me just a couple of sentences from Matt's reporting.
He said, sometime in the last decade, many people, I was one, began to feel robbed of their sense of normalcy by something we couldn't define.
Increasingly glued to our phones, we saw that the version of the world that was spat out at us from them seemed distorted.
The public's reactions to various news events seemed off-kilter, being either way too intense, not intense enough, or simply unbelievable.
You'd read that seemingly everyone in the world was in agreement with a certain thing was true, except it seemed ridiculous to you, which put you in an awkward place with friends, family, and others.
Should you say something?
Are you the crazy one?
Then he goes on to say, I can't have been the only person to have struggled psychologically during this time.
That is why these Twitter files have been such a balm.
And he goes on to say more about it.
He says, This is the reality they stole from us.
And I had that feeling.
I don't know if you probably did, Chris, as well, throughout the entire COVID era and perhaps beyond.
And now we know why, because they were forcibly alter, literally altering reality, deciding what exists and what doesn't exist.
Both human and computer artificial intelligence were determining our reality for us.
And it really feels like something out of a science fiction film, Chris.
And now that we're, I mean, if you know, the Matrix, you could say that has been overdone, but it does feel like that.
And you finally open your eyes and realize that they have been manipulating our reality after getting us all addicted to these social media programs, using them against us.
And that is a powerful balm, as Matt, as Matt points out.
Yes, you're right.
And, you know, this kind of segues into the next topic we were talking about, which was COVID itself and how that, you know, the way the media just moved on from that.
Worldwide Catastrophe Revealed00:04:26
I mean, we probably lived through the greatest human catastrophe, man-made catastrophe ever because it was so Worldwide and literally worldwide, not just a couple continents, worldwide.
And, you know, you want some accountability, but this was, like you said, this was so huge and so many people were involved, governments, governors, doctors, hospitals, the media, all of them were so wrong and doing crimes.
These were crimes, lockdowns, masks telling us what to put on our face, telling us how far to stand apart from each other, and then enforcing it with force on top of it.
These were all criminal acts.
And, you know, I think the world itself has lost the definition of what government is.
Government, in theory, is supposed to protect us and then punish the criminals.
But the way the world we live in now is government is the chief criminal.
And there are so many octopus arms attached to it, corporations, and people that are just doing their job that they created the biggest crime in human history.
And how, there will be, I guess, some accountability, but human nature being what it is, there were Nuremberg trials, and look, this still happened.
Human nature being what it is, people will still pull this stuff to the extent that they can.
This time, however, this was the big one.
And, you know, as time goes on, the failure will be impossible to ignore.
And, you know, and that's what everybody waits for.
They're not going to say anything until it's impossible to ignore.
And then at that point, I guess we'll see some token accountability.
You know, but it's just a shame that we had to go through this at all.
It shows you, excuse me, it shows you the ugly underside of the kind of will to political power.
You know, these things that you sort of suspend disbelief and believe that we live in a semi, at least a semi-organized liberal society in the sense of the word that people have certain freedoms that can't be infringed upon.
And then something like this happens and you see the real totalitarian beast that lurks just under the surface.
You look at places like Canada and Australia and many parts of the United States, the viciousness of people when they have a touch of power against other people who don't have that power.
And it is very depressing, you know, and it hits home very closely to all of us.
And the fear is that they can do this again and they will try to do this again without some kind of cleansing.
I mean, it just in so many millions of little ways.
You know, I remember being in an Hispanic food store in Southern California, visiting my mother just after my father died and buying some food.
I was going to make some Mexican food and I didn't have a mask on, of course.
And over the intercom, they were barking out some codes.
You know, we have a red alert, literally.
And they all ran to me.
I was the only one in the store without a mask on, and they all ran to me as if I had was carrying a lighted stick of dynamite, you know, and screamed that I had to leave and had to leave.
You know, these are our friends and neighbors and colleagues and shopkeepers, the people who in the normal course of our lives we interact with, we see them as neighbors.
And of course, it's easy to make the analogy with the rise of fascism in Germany, but I think it really does help us explain, as Hannah Aaron said, the banality of evil.
Your local friendly shopkeeper with just a little bit of switching of circumstance can become your jailer.
And it is a very frightening prospect, Chris.
Rising Threats and Financial Vulnerabilities00:11:09
Yeah.
And, you know, a problem that we face with this because of the sheer size of it and because of the sheer size of the number that are that people that were wrong.
For, you know, it's part of our nature, I guess, to resist, you know, I was wrong.
You were right.
So then put that on the scale that we're dealing with now.
And you can see why everybody's just trying to sweep this under the rug.
You know, they don't want to admit they're wrong, you know, about trivial things.
You know, these are life and death issues, and they're going to fight, you know, admitting that they're wrong.
You know, so we have that challenge going against us too.
But, you know, that's we got to deal with it as it is, Daniel.
So it's true.
And they have all the media on their side.
That goes back to the church committee.
When we found out what they were doing back then, the media, of course, covered it.
There were actual journalists covering it.
And there are now, but they don't have the microphone like they did.
And let's hope that changes.
But I wanted to move on to the third topic, if you're ready, Chris.
And I would just mention the third thing that was undercovered or not covered properly over this past year as we move from 2022 to 2023, I think, was, of course, and you suggested it early on, the Ukraine war.
And this is the media once again in lockstep, ignoring all of the antecedents, ignoring all of the mitigating factors, ignoring the history.
And this is not ancient history.
This is not going back to grievances of two centuries ago.
These are actual things that led to the war, absolutely covering it up, covering up the U.S. participation in the Orange Revolution in 2004 and 2005.
And this is, you know, partly the beginning of what we're seeing now today in what is essentially a civil war.
And I think David Stockman, I'm sure you saw his more recent piece about this.
He does a great job talking about the fact that this is a civil war.
And he uses the voting register transposed over a map to show just how different the East and West part of the country are and how they don't want to live together and how there is a precedent, of course, in Czechoslovakia where they split up peaceably and now have a very peaceful relationship.
They didn't have to have a civil war.
But of course, I know, I worked at the State Department at the time, how desperate the U.S. government was to prevent the breakup of Czechoslovakia.
They didn't want that to happen.
And this is the same situation here, I think, with Ukraine.
So the media has gone into none of this.
They've done no explaining whatsoever.
All you see are endless headlines about Russia is running out of missiles and the usual fluff.
And of course, you don't hear anything about last December when Russian President Putin offered once again to get together and solve these problems in a way that would prevent war rather than lead to war.
He basically said, guys, I'm serious.
He's been saying this since 2007.
I'm serious.
We're not going to let this happen.
We feel this is an existential threat to have NATO bombs on our borders, and we will act.
And nobody believed them.
Nobody in the U.S. government believed them.
Or if they believed him, they thought he was bluffing, what have you.
But none of the media, none of the mainstream media.
It's left to fringe media, like the people who are telling the truth, to go into the background and try to explain how, once again, all the State Department types, all the CIA types, many, if not most of the Pentagon types did it in Iraq all over again.
They screwed the whole thing up, just like Afghanistan.
But the scale here, of course, is bigger.
So I'm sorry to go on and on, Chris, about this, but this is something that is potentially life-ending on earth.
And the media is simply uninterested in covering it properly.
Right.
And, you know, when I look at Ukraine, it reminds me of the extreme times that we're living in, whether it be the money printing, the COVID measures, the censorship, all of this extreme.
We are now on the border of Russia.
You know, that is insane to anybody that knows anything about anything.
Russia is not like any other country that the U.S. has rolled over.
This is not a poor country.
This is not an unarmed country.
This is a major, serious threat nuclear country that would be a threat to us here at home.
You know, we as Americans are not used to war.
We don't, you know, outside of the Civil War back in the 1860s, you know, none of us have lived through actual war.
And, you know, we're so used to just turning on the TV on what's going on over in Iraq.
What's going on?
If even if you do that, you know, what's going on in Ukraine?
It would not be like that if there is ever a war with Russia.
Our physical lives here at home would be in danger.
These people can hurt us if they decide to.
And that is, you know, to think that we're even talking about something like this because it's totally unnecessary.
You know, we have no here and no, what do we care about Russia here?
Americans, we live our lives here.
This is, but the people in power, the ones that did the COVID thing, if they were willing to do what they did with COVID, they're obviously crazy enough to try to start a war with Russia.
And if the American people sit back and just let it happen, then that would be a huge tragedy, you know, and like you said, a tragedy that could end up with our own physical harm.
Yeah, exactly.
You know, and I mean, I live here not far from the bulk of the refining capacity of the United States.
And if this isn't on the list, then it should be.
And certainly you, where you live, is very close to ground zero.
But you hit it on the head, though, Chris, early on when you said we know the costs, the cost of potentially a nuclear war.
What are the benefits?
There might be a time when it would be worth risking a nuclear war if there was an existential threat to us.
And we realize that we have to use this deterrent.
We have to do it for our own survival.
But what are the stakes in this game?
For us, nothing.
Well, we learned that BlackRock, I think, is partnering with the Ukrainian government.
So there's a lot of stakes there for Mr. Fink, right?
But not a lot of stakes for us.
So there's no upside.
It doesn't matter who rules Ukraine.
It doesn't matter who runs Russia.
It's totally irrelevant.
You know, there's been no indication that they have a desire to rucify the United States, right?
Despite what some people say.
So the highest, highest risk for the lowest, lowest stakes, it's just hard to imagine anything more stupid than what's happening.
I agree.
And, you know, this is one of those times where you hope cooler heads somehow prevail.
It doesn't look good, but, you know, there are crazy people on both sides.
I'm sure Russians have their own neocon type people.
So, you know, whoever makes the ultimate decisions, we got to hope that they keep all of humanity in mind because that's really what's at stake.
It's really crazy.
You know, it wouldn't surprise me if there are people in our government and be like, yeah, well, we could sacrifice this and we could sacrifice as if we're pawns that could be taken off the table.
Some people would say DC would be a good sacrifice.
I didn't say that.
You know, they think this way, just like with the COVID.
It's just, we're just numbers, you know, just numbers.
And in reality, we're not, but in their minds, we are.
And they're making decisions that affect our lives.
So, you know, we just got to hope and pray that, you know, somehow this gets diffused.
You know, again, like we talk about with Twitter and stuff getting revealed that was never supposed to be revealed.
Things happen that are unanticipated.
You know, we really need something unanticipated to help diffuse what's happening over there.
Yeah.
I think that segues into our final topic, which is the entity that makes most of the war machine possible.
So go ahead with that one, Chris.
Yeah, obviously, Dr. Paul and I, we talk about the Fed every week.
They are still tightening interest rates.
And ultimately, some type of correction or crash will occur because of that.
And it's only because they blew up a bubble to begin with, you know, which they should not have done.
But when you have a bubble, it ultimately has to crash.
And once they increase rates, that's what happens.
This is, and it's not the first time.
We've been through this several times just in my lifetime.
It's just the crashes get bigger and bigger.
The fact that the Fed is raising rates, though, tells me that they are not interested in destroying the dollar.
There are interests in our own government, in our Congress.
There are interests outside of governments themselves, the WEF, that want to see our dollar crash and burn and so they could introduce their own digital currency.
The Fed could help make that happen by printing by the trillions, but they are tightening.
They are actually putting a noose on that plan.
Now, what happens in the future is anybody's guess.
But if they keep raising rates, they're indicating that they're not on board with killing the dollar.
And it would make sense to me because the dollar is their monopoly.
Monopolists are not fond of losing their monopoly.
But, you know, the interests that are against this are constantly trying to spend Green New Deals, $8 trillion, keep giving hundreds of, you know, $100 billion to Ukraine.
They're just trying any angle they can to get our government to spend more money that it doesn't have that the Fed has to print.
And the Fed, at least right now, nobody knows the future, is resisting this by saying, no, we're increasing rates.
We're at least for the time being, you know, putting a noose on this.
Ron Paul's Truth-Telling Mission00:03:51
So that's a good thing.
It's going to be painful because we have lived in a bubble and we now are going to have to live through a crash.
But, you know, that's at least the way that I see it right now.
Once again, Chris, we have to go to independent news sources to get any real reporting about what's happening, right?
That's right.
Yeah.
I mean, you're not.
No, it's this is the typical.
I mean, you're not going to go to CNBC and find out any of this kind of stuff.
You know, the television is not your friend.
Hopefully, I think more and more people, especially after Trump, have figured that out because he, if there's one thing that he did for four years, he told the people that these are your enemy.
And in that respect, I got to give the guy credit because he was right.
And he opened a lot of people's eyes.
Now, Daniel, myself, anybody who has followed Ron Paul knew this way back in 2008 and 2012, but it didn't reach the masses.
You know, Trump told the masses that the media is not your friend.
And I just see it from the, you know, the normal people that I deal with that they have a much different picture of the media today, rather, back, you know, as opposed to back in 2008 and 2012.
So, you know, good things are happening despite all this bad stuff.
And I think that's reflected in many, many public opinion polls over the past year, at least.
The average American's faith in the mainstream media has plummeted to the depths, the deep depths.
And I think that is true.
And we're seeing lots of layoffs, of course, in places like CNN and elsewhere.
And that's also a good sign.
So, anyway, Chris, I think we can probably close out now and certainly wish our listeners and viewers a very happy new year in 2023.
And before I turn it over to you to finish it up, I would just remind our viewers that the Ron Paul Liberty Report is a project of the Ron Paul Institute, which is a 501c3 educational charity.
Our mission is to educate on Ron Paul's chief issues, which are a non-interventionist foreign policy, respect for civil liberties at home, and how a runaway Fed enables war and the totalitarian state at home.
You have a few days left to make a tax-deductible contribution to the Ron Paul Institute.
I'll include a link in the description how you can help us keep going, keep telling the truth, help Ron Paul keep telling the truth in 2023.
I know that you feel the same way, Chris.
We need Ron Paul now more than ever to keep telling the truth.
So over to you to close it out.
Thank you, Daniel.
And thank you to everyone who has listened to us this year.
Dr. Paul and his organization, his show, I'm proud to say that our listenership and viewership has always been on an uptrend since the day we started.
And it's actually escalating.
We have the people that are listening to us audio only as our podcast, we have had exponential growth.
So there are people out there that listen to our show that hopefully share these ideas.
What we are doing is worthwhile.
It's working.
You know, ultimately, these things will end up out in the general.
And you never know where the good ideas started, where they came from.
And that's not to say that we're the only ones with these ideas.
We're just one piece.
But Dr. Paul is a very big piece.
And, you know, Daniel and I are very proud to work with him, do our best job for him.