Dec. 10, 2016 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
45:11
3527 The Truth About Fake News | Russia Hacked U.S. Election For Donald Trump?
The Washington Post and New York Times drove the news cycle publishing claims based on “high level” sources with access to a recent intelligence security briefing involving the allegations of Russian involvement in attempting to influence the United States election. Stefan Molyneux looks at the facts behind the latest mainstream media assertions, the logical holes in the argument presented from sources privy to the high level CIA briefings, claims that the Republican National Committee (RNC) was also hacked, the weaponized IRS targeting conservative groups, Portman-Murphy Counter-Propaganda Bill, the National Defense Authorization Act, Hillary Clinton takes donations in congestion with approving Russia's accusation of Uranium One, Amazon Founder and CEO Jeff Bezos undisclosed $600 million contract with the Central Intelligence Agency, Operation Mockingbird and much much more!Sources: http://www.fdrurl.com/truth-about-fake-newsFreedomain Radio is 100% funded by viewers like you. Please support the show by signing up for a monthly subscription or making a one time donation at: http://www.freedomainradio.com/donate
So you may have heard just a little bit about fake news, fake, scary, manufactured, made-up, private-style propaganda news that has been talked about by, ironically of all entities, the mainstream media are these days really, really going out there.
After basically confessing that they tried to pull the election in general for Hillary Clinton, they're now concerned...
After the election is lost, after the recount, it seems to be going nowhere.
But prior to the vote by the Electoral College, they seem to be very, very concerned about fake news.
You know, the way they were concerned about fake news when it came to starting the war in Iraq or covering up some of the State Department's horrific actions overseas, destabilizing foreign governments, arming terrorist groups and so on.
Really, really concerned about fake news now that their attempt to influence the election has failed.
And they are facing, of course, a Trump presidency.
So let's have a dig into what is going on.
Some of it fairly sinister in response to this crisis, I guess you could say.
So President Barack Obama, I'm trying not to put that in quotes, President Barack Obama recently ordered a review of cyber attacks that supposedly targeted political organizations and operatives throughout the election cycle.
White House spokesman Eric Schultz said, He's requested this report be completed and submitted to him before the end of his term.
As you all know, in 2008 there were intrusions into both the Obama and McCain campaigns.
There haven't been any noted episodes in 2012, but the president asked to go back with what we know now to make sure that we're using every tool possible as a means of due diligence.
And then, of course, in 2016, our intelligence community determined that there was malicious cyber activity intended to interfere with our elections.
See, that's completely unfair.
It's the job of the mainstream media to interfere with the U.S. elections through relentless partisanship.
It's not, perhaps, the job of hackers outside the borders of the United States.
He went on to say, as we've made clear, we are committed to ensuring the integrity of our elections.
Sorry.
And this report will dig into this pattern of malicious cyber activity timed to our elections, take stock of our defensive capabilities and capture lessons learned to make sure that we brief members of Congress and stakeholders as appropriate.
so the latest report requested by obama has nothing to do with vote or election fraud but simply the procurement and release of embarrassing information by wikileaks and others concerning hillary clinton and the democratic party um it can't be allowed to happen again because what happened was actual information got out to the alternative media which is not beholden to special interest groups It can't be allowed to happen again because what happened was actual information got out to the alternative media, which is not beholden to special interest groups.
The alternative media isn't sitting there like a lapdog begging for access to political operatives.
They're not dependent upon government handouts or government contracts, as we'll see with the case of Amazon's relationship to the CIA soon.
But facts actually got out to the general public and this cannot be allowed.
See, when the general public has facts, they tend to make informed decisions, and informed decisions apparently in this case was Donald J. Trump.
They recognize, and I think it's a fair statement to say, that it was the alternative media that secured the victory of Donald Trump's electoral aspirations, and therefore...
The enemy is not the American people.
Of course, the enemy is not facts, because that's too obvious.
The enemy, of course, has to be fake news!
Which, again, glass houses, stones, guys?
Really?
The White House, November 25th, 2016, said, We stand behind our election results, which accurately reflect the will of the American people.
The federal government did not observe any increased level of malicious cyber activity aimed at disrupting our electoral process on Election Day.
Believe our elections were free and fair from a cybersecurity perspective.
See, now that's before the recount seems to have failed.
So that's where they were, November 25th.
On December 9, 2016, the Washington Post and New York Times—oh, we'll be getting to those people in just a moment—drove the news cycle, publishing claims based on, quote, high-level sources with access to a recent intelligence security briefing involving the allegations of Russian involvement in attempting to influence— The U.S. election.
The New York Times said, Russia hacked Republican committee but kept data, U.S. concludes.
Ah, see?
We've gone from an allegation to a conclusion.
They really, really want to present this as a fact.
See, the American public couldn't have just chosen Donald Trump because they like his policies.
It must have been malicious foreign interference that caused it.
The Washington Post said, Secret CIA assessment says Russia was trying to help Trump win White House.
The New York Times said, American intelligence agencies have concluded with high confidence that Russia acted covertly in the latter stages of the presidential campaign to harm Hillary Clinton's chances and promote Donald J. Trump, according to senior administration officials.
Boy, can you imagine that some supposedly neutral agency might have worked to harm one presidential candidate's aspirations and promote the others?
Can you imagine such a thing happening?
It's great, you see, when the mainstream media in America does it, it's terrible.
When a foreign government is accused of doing it, it's just terrible.
According to the New York Times, again, they based that conclusion in part on another finding, which they say was also reached with high confidence, that Russians hacked the Republican National Committee's computer systems in addition to their attacks on Democratic organizations, but did not release whatever information they gleaned from the Republican networks, right?
So this is what they're hanging their hat on, right?
That foreign hackers with loose ties potential to a government, that they hacked...
The DNC had released all that information, but they also hacked the RNC and didn't release any of that information, so clearly they were favoring the RNC. Chief Strategist and Communications Director Sean Spencer said, The RNC was not hacked.
The New York Times was told and chose to ignore.
This is all from tweets.
Exhibit number one in the fake news.
David Sanger is clearly about clicks versus fax.
Don't miss tomorrow's David Sanger exclusive interview with Elvis riding his unicorn on a rainbow with Santa.
Actually, that still would be more realistic than their election coverage.
The confusing New York Times piece continued by refuting the Republican hacking claim, even rebutting their own headline.
One senior government official who had been briefed on an FBI investigation into the matter said that while there were attempts to penetrate the Republican committee's systems, they were not successful.
So again, the whole narrative is that, well, they tried to hack both, but they only released the DNC stuff.
Even in their own article, they say, no, they didn't hack the RNC anyway.
It was previously uncovered that several individual Republican accounts were hacked with their mundane emails being released online by DC leaks.
It's kind of like a WikiLeaks during the presidential election campaign.
The most noteworthy Republican email leak was from Colin Powell, specifically his correspondence related to Hillary Clinton's use of a private email server and his private thoughts about Bill Clinton creating the strangest named Lord of the Rings character with the phrase bimbo dicking.
Bimbo, bimbo, digging the bravest hobbit of them all.
So, what specific evidence is there that Russia was connected to the DNC or Podesta email?
Leak, hack, phish.
See, they call the Podesta, John Podesta's email, that it was hacked.
I'm not an expert on the terminology, but to me, hacked...
Is when you're an innocent victim, you don't do anything, and they somehow gain access to your computer systems.
If you click on a phishing link, like if you click on a link that's supposed to be, oh, reset your password, and then they gain access.
I don't think that's really a hack.
John Podesta was told by his IT staff, don't click on that link to reset your password.
Yes, reset your password.
Here's the link you should click on.
Don't click on that link.
And he went and clicked on the original link, entered his password, and so on, gave up everything to the world as a whole.
Is that a high-level government hack, a phishing scam?
Really, this is the best that Russia can do?
I think they're technically quite competent, but anyway, that's perhaps a matter of semantics.
The New York Times said, and I'm going to add emphasis throughout here, a group of hackers believed to be linked.
To the GRU, Russia's military intelligence agency, stole the emails of senior officials of the Democratic National Committee.
Believed to be linked.
That's two levels of not proof.
A group of hackers believed to be linked.
Believed to be and linked, right?
Now, if they were linked, okay, then it's a little...
But anyway, it's nonsense.
In my opinion.
The Washington Post said, the CIA presentation to senators about Russia's intentions fell short of a formal U.S. assessment produced by all 17 intelligence agencies.
A senior U.S. official said there were minor disagreements among intelligence officials about the agency's assessment, in part because some questions remain unanswered.
Okay, a big picture here, folks.
A big picture here.
It's kind of important.
17 intelligence agencies, and they still can't prevent hacking?
What are you people doing?
What are you doing?
17 intelligence agencies.
Ah, we got hacked.
The Washington Post went on to say, For example, intelligence agencies do not have specific intelligence showing officials in the Kremlin directing the identified individuals to pass the Democratic emails to WikiLeaks, a second senior U.S. official said.
See?
Don't have specific intelligence.
What does that mean?
Do you have general intelligence?
I don't have specific intelligence that this person strangled a hobo.
Well, wait, do you have any facts at all?
It's not specific intelligence.
That implies that there's some other non-specific intelligence that you have, in which case, why not present that?
Unless you don't really have it in any compelling way.
Then just use the weasel word specific.
This is attack of the weasel gremlins, right?
I mean, it's all a bunch of innuendo and all that kind of stuff.
So they went on to say...
Those actors, according to the official, were one step removed from the Russian government rather than government employees.
Moscow has in the past used middlemen to participate in sensitive intelligence operations so it has plausible deniability.
Plausible deniability, the new official slogan of the Democrat Party.
And this is funny, too, because, of course, the American government hacked foreign emails and foreign cell phones of foreign leaders and so on.
I mean, it's brutal.
One of the reasons why they lost control of the Internet recently was because foreign governments were so appalled at how the U.S. government was hacking everything in sight.
So the idea that, oh, my goodness, governments are hacking other people's emails.
It's the worst thing ever.
Well, why doesn't America stop doing it itself then?
and ah, because doublethink.
The intelligence officials with full access to the information gained from the investigation disagree on the findings, but the sources which leaked this information, who are almost undoubtedly Democrats, have coined the term consensus, which is now being reported by the mainstream media.
There's a consensus among these seven Right?
So...
Just the amount that you've ever played, sort of, the game of whisper, where you whisper something and it goes around.
Like, the amount of separation from that.
So, there's some hackers believed to be potentially having some link to the GRU, to Russia's military intelligence agency.
This has gone through a whole bunch of intelligence agencies.
It's been presented to Congress.
It's being reported on by senior, mostly Democrat, I assume, officials, which then goes through the mainstream media, which then gets to you.
Huh.
I gotta think the chain of custody, just a little bit foggy on this one.
The New York Times article limped along even admitting that the original Russia helped Trump narrative was outright speculation.
I love how they just use the word speculation.
I believe there's another shorter syllable for that.
Rhymes with tie.
It'll come to me soon.
So you guys remember, there was, oh, Russia helped Trump and Trump has all these ties with Russia.
Right?
All nonsense.
In September, the CIA had different conclusions.
Quote, It is also far from clear that Russia's original intent was to support Mr.
Trump, and many intelligence officials and former officials in Mrs.
Clinton's campaign believed that the primary motive of the Russians was to simply disrupt the campaign and undercut confidence in the integrity of the vote.
And it's just kind of funny, right?
And it's completely predictable, right?
The fact that Hillary Clinton deleted emails under subpoena and said that she never sent or received any classified information and blah-de-blah-de-blah, this, of course, is never any kind of proof of wrongdoing.
It's a very high standard when it comes to Hillary Clinton and proof of wrongdoing.
But some vague, tenuous potential ties between hackers and the GRU reported through 17 different channels.
Oh, that's for certain.
Conclusive!
Concludes the U.S. The Trump transition team statement went as follows.
These are the same people that said Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction.
The election ended a long time ago in one of the biggest electoral college victories in history.
It's now time to move on and make America great again.
And please, can we stop about the popular vote?
There is no such thing in America as winning by the popular vote.
It's not even a contest.
There's a reason why there's an electoral college.
And you can tune into Bill Mitchell's program to find out more about this.
But there's no such thing.
She might as well say, well, I won the alien lizard baton twirling contest.
It's like there's no such contest.
You can't win that way.
It's not how things work.
If you're the slowest in a race, you don't get to say, I won the slowest in the race contest.
There's no such thing as winning the popular vote.
It means nothing whatsoever.
So anyway, people will keep saying it.
So, Donald Trump in Time Magazine said, I don't believe Russia interfered.
Anytime I do something, they say, oh, Russia interfered.
It could be Russia, and it could be China, and it could be some guy in his home in New Jersey.
And this is why Trump won.
House Intelligence Committee Chairman and Trump Transition Team Member Devin Nunes said, I'll be the first one to come out and point at Russia, if there's clear evidence, but there is no clear evidence, even now.
There's a lot of innuendo, lots of circumstantial evidence.
That's it.
It should also be noted that the FBI investigated the possibility of Donald Trump having ties to Russia and found zero evidence to support such claims.
The New York Times, October 31, 2016.
Quote, Law enforcement officials say that none of the investigations so far have found any conclusive or direct link between Mr.
Trump and the Russian government.
But that's okay, you see, because the smear has achieved its job.
No clear ties, no conclusive ties.
But maybe there are still ties.
I don't know.
His ties.
Made in China, not to the Russian government.
Now, Julian Assange, of course, feared and required proof of life victim and whistleblower.
Julian Assange, founder of WikiLeaks, has said, The Clinton camp has been able to project a neo-McCarthyist hysteria that Russia is responsible for everything.
Hillary Clinton has stated multiple times falsely that 17 U.S. intelligence agencies had assessed that Russia was the source of our publications.
That's false.
We can say that the Russian government is not the source.
Now that's Julian Assange.
He's the head of WikiLeaks, who published the information.
I gotta think he knows something about what he's talking about.
After a noteworthy interview, Assange's subtle nodding, which was played in slow motion and seems to be quite indicative to a lot of people, has led to widespread speculation that the DNC emails were compromised through a leak by recently murdered DNC staffer Seth Rich.
Not a hack by...
Pimply teenagers in their mother's basement with possible ties to GRU, or, I don't know, maybe they just watched that Minions movie and that grew.
So, yeah, it was not a hack.
And this guy, it's pretty suspicious stuff.
He was supposed to be killed as sort of a mugging or whatever, but his wallet, his phone weren't taken, nothing like that.
So, could have been a hit.
Julian Assange went on to say...
We're very interested in anything that might be a threat to WikiLeaks sources.
We're not saying that Seth Rich is necessarily connected to our publications.
I'm suggesting that our sources take risks and they become concerned to see things occurring like that.
Assange and WikiLeaks have offered a $20,000 reward in exchange for information related to the shooting death of Seth Rich.
So in which case, this was not a hack by a foreign government, but somebody within the DNC who copied or took these emails and released them and may have paid.
Again, there's no proof of any of this, but the speculation is, and hints by Julian Assange seem to indicate that this guy could have been the source of the leaks of the DNC, in which case, I think that would pretty much clear Russia.
I'm no lawyer, but that would be my instinct.
Now, all this Russian speculation rests on the claim, as we mentioned earlier, that in addition to the DNC, the RNC was also successfully hacked, but the hackers did not release the information showing bias to Donald Trump.
We got the dirt on both parties, but we're only releasing the DNC dirt, not the RNC dirt, therefore blah, blah, blah, and you get that argument.
The RNC, of course, denies that they were successfully hacked, so we're left with the individual Republican accounts, which were compromised, but their information was published online, not withheld.
We're back to Bimbo Dickens.
Given the massive opposition to Trump from within the Republican establishment, it's unlikely that leaked RNC emails would have even been negative to the president-elect's campaign.
And this is a bit subtle, but I sort of want to get this idea across.
It's pretty important.
So a lot of people who voted for Trump really disliked the existing RNC. They really disliked what they called the RINOs, Republicans in name only.
So they really disliked the RINOs, and there was a lot of suspicion that the existing Republicans who really disliked, a lot of whom really disliked Donald Trump, remember the never-Trumpers and so on, That they were conspiring against him.
So if the Republican establishment emails had been leaked, and if those emails had shown conspiracies against Donald Trump, that actually would have helped Donald Trump's campaign.
And of course, Russia's intelligent enough to understand all of that.
Russians are intelligent enough to figure that sort of stuff out.
When it comes to political maneuvering, you can't really do much to beat the Russians.
So yeah, if they really wanted to help, they would have hacked and leaked the RNC emails.
If they showed plotting against Donald Trump, that would have helped Donald Trump's campaign.
So it's really quite quaint that the Democrats and the mainstream media are now suddenly upset that somebody may have influenced the election.
The media relentlessly anti-Donald Trump and pro-Hillary Clinton, which had a massive impact on the election.
There are sort of studies out there that say, you know, 10-15% or more of the electoral vote was swayed by the mainstream media in the past and maybe even in the present, and that's pretty significant.
So...
What about the silence concerning the IRS's targeting of Tea Party groups?
Right?
So the Tea Party groups wanted to get charitable status, right?
And the IRS would not give it to them.
And there's some particular and significant suspicion that the IRS was targeting these groups and also demanded things like a list of their donors and so on, which made people kind of leery about donating to these groups and so on.
So there's pretty good estimates out there that the IRS targeting of Tea Party groups and refusing to grant them charitable status and demanding lists of donors and so on may have cost Mitt Romney and the Republicans a 2012 presidential election.
See, I mean, the hacks or whatever you are, the phishing or whatever you want to call it, well, that put out information that they're all facts and so on.
But this targeting of groups by an agency as powerful as the IRS, that seems a little bit.
of course, that helps the lefties win, and the lefties in the media didn't really have much of a problem with that.
So if you're concerned about foreign entities possibly influencing American elections, what about a politicized and weaponized domestic agency?
I gotta think that's a little bit more powerful.
In January 2014, the FBI claimed investigation had found no evidence so far warranting the filing of federal criminal charges in connection with the IRS scandal, as it had not found any evidence of enemy hunting.
The investigation then continued.
On October 23rd, 2015, the Obama Justice Department Declared that no criminal charges would be filed.
Ah, what a shocker.
If there was a problem with the IRS that helped Obama win the election in 2012, it turns out that his Justice Department didn't find any problems with it.
So what is really going on with these latest claims of foreign involvement and fake news and so on?
Well, it all comes down to this, and this is some pretty chilling stuff.
We really need to pay attention here.
On December 8, 2016, the U.S. Senate passed the Portman-Murphy counterpropaganda bill as part of National Defense Authorization Act, or the NDAA. Counterpropaganda bill!
Well, of course, in the new speak of INGSOC, or I guess U.S. SOC, the sort of modern...
Growingly totalitarian system of media.
Counter-propaganda bill.
You just take the first two syllables off and you've got what it is, I'm pretty sure.
So according to this fancy press release, the Portman-Murphy bill, quote, Promotes coordination strategy to defend America, allies, against propaganda and disinformation from Russia, China, and others.
Propaganda and disinformation, just terrible stuff.
So in plain English, what does this bill mean?
The bill requires the establishment of a Center for Information Analysis and Response, which to anyone who actually reads the bill sounds like the coming of a 1984-style truth ministry, MinTruth, actually Minimum Truth, which decides which information is valid and which is propaganda worthy of censorship or response.
The Center would, quote, lead and coordinate the collection and analysis of information on foreign government information warfare efforts.
This would include information provided through a new $20 million grant or contract fund which would be given to civil society groups, journalists, non-governmental organizations, federally funded research and development centers, private companies or academic institutions.
I don't know.
Seems to me kind of like a multi-million dollar slush fund designed to help pay people to promote the kind of information that you think is good and to deprecate or denigrate the information that you think is bad.
Well, at least they're being upfront with it and kind of honest.
And this is bad for alternative media, and it's also great for alternative media.
It's bad because it's going to be targeting alternative media outlets.
On the other hand, it's going to completely discredit the mainstream media and academic institutions and everyone.
Are you going to be required to reveal that you've taken these grants?
Well, I assume not.
Because the House can lower your credibility, in which case everyone's going to be tainted with the potential of having taken this money and doing what the government wants.
In other words, the Truth Ministry provides a $20 million subsidy for individuals and groups which offered RightThink while working to censor and control WrongThink.
Now, there is this push, right, which has come out since Trump won the election, to classify alternative media outlets like Breitbart and Infowars and so on as fake news.
Now, this is not unrelated to this new approach.
This is very, very important to understand.
See, if the alternative media can be branded as foreign disinformation propaganda, it will be blocked via social media and through large internet companies and search engines and so on, right?
So when the left can't respond to your arguments, what they do is they go after, they smear you and they go after your source of income, right?
I mean, hoping to undercut you financially because they can't respond.
So, by blocking these sites as foreign disinformation propaganda, well, they're going to go after the advertising revenue and try and shut them down that way.
So how exactly does this bill shake out in a country with a First Amendment right that grants free speech?
Let's just say that remains to be seen.
But this is the latest step in advancing censorship and allowing the unbridled propagandization of the American population.
See, having the children for 12 years straight to propagandize them in government public schools, not quite enough.
Now we need to go after anyone who's out there telling the truth.
This is the same thing that happened when the printing press emerged and information began getting to the public through the printing press, which was the summer start of the late Middle Ages.
Information began getting to the public that wasn't controlled by the church, wasn't controlled by the aristocracy, and they had to start licensing and shutting down the printing press.
That's the same.
The totalitarians never sleep.
The bill will now head to the desk of the President of the United States to either be signed into law or vetoed.
And people wonder why I seem to throw some weight behind Donald Trump.
Given that it is essentially the 27 budget appropriation for the entire Department of Defense, it is expected to be signed before President-elect Donald Trump takes office.
Dangerous, dangerous stuff, but at least they're being upfront about it.
At least it's public, not private in the way it's been before.
Okay, since we're talking about bias and propaganda, let's take a moment to discuss some information that you've likely never heard before related to Russian influence, the actions of the CIA, and the interests of the Washington Post and the New York Times, respectively.
I see fake news and conflict of interest and all that propaganda, foreign control of things, really, really bad.
In January 2013, Pravda, Russian news agency, published an article entitled Russian Nuclear Energy Conquers the World, detailing how the Russian Atomic Energy Agency, Rosatom, had taken over Canadian company Uranium One, which made the Russian agency one of the world's largest uranium producers.
According to the New York Times in 2015, since uranium is considered a strategic asset with implications for national security, the deal had to be approved by a committee composed of representatives from a number of United States government agencies.
Among the agencies that eventually signed off was the State Department, then headed by Mr.
Clinton's wife, Hillary Rodham Clinton.
As the Russians gradually assumed control of Uranium One, in three separate transactions from 2009 to 2013, Canadian records show a flow of cash made its way to the Clinton Foundation.
Uranium One's chairman used his family foundation to make four donations totaling $2.35 million.
Those contributions were not publicly disclosed by the Clintons, despite an agreement Mrs.
Clinton had struck with the Obama White House to publicly identify all donors.
Other people with ties to the company made donations as well.
And shortly after the Russians announced their intention to acquire a majority stake in Uranium One, Mr.
Clinton received $500,000 for a Moscow speech from a Russian investment bank with links to the Kremlin that was promoting Uranium One stock.
So, this seems quite important.
The Russian Atomic Agency had taken over significant portions of uranium production, and this was, of course, a strategic and security asset.
So, foreign influence over American policy.
I guess this remains to be seen.
Now, the New York Times.
This is important.
The Newspaper of Record, the Grey Lady.
The single largest stakeholder in the New York Times is Mexican billionaire Carla Slim, who owns 17% of the company.
In 2008, Slim also gave the Times a $250 million loan at an interest rate of 14%, and previously had donated between a quarter of a million and a half a million dollars to the Clinton Foundation.
Slim owns more than 200 companies in Mexico, and it has been commented that it's difficult to make through a single day in Mexico without paying him in some form due to his extensive financial interest south of the border.
I've got a question for you.
Do you think that Carla Slim's acquisition of massive amounts of companies and significant portions of the Mexican economy was achieved through the complete mechanism of the free market?
Or do you think there might have been just a little bit of government-sanctioned crony capitalism or crapitalism or corporatism or whatever you want to call it?
I will leave it for you to do the research on that, but I think you know the answer.
So this financial empire has made Carla Slim one of the richest men in the world.
Thank you.
So why would he be interested in the New York Times?
Well, in 2015, remittances sent back to Mexico from outside countries totaled $24.8 billion, overtaking even Mexican oil revenue as a source of foreign income in the country.
See, when Mexicans go overseas, and by that it generally means the United States, they got a lot of welfare, they take jobs and so on, and they take their money and they funnel it to relatives in Mexico who then use it to buy things sold by Carla Slim.
Huh!
It's quite a business model.
And you see, the Mexican government loves it when Mexicans go to America because they get lots of money coming back in the form of remittances without having to go to the pesky trouble of actually providing services to their citizens, right?
So normally you provide services and then you get taxes from your citizens.
If they go overseas and send money back, you get all of this income, but you don't actually have to provide these services, right?
People get the income and pay taxes on it.
So, given that the United States immigration policy will dramatically impact the Mexican economy and Slim's 200 plus companies, it's easy to understand why the Mexican billionaire purchased a large interest in the New York Times.
So, very, very briefly, if Donald Trump achieves his goal, builds a wall and deports people just as Eisenhower did in the 50s, well, what's going to happen is lots of people are going to go from America back down to Mexico.
Now, they're going to get jobs in Mexico, and so they're going to drive down wages in Mexico, which reduces the amount of money that people have to buy on Carlos Slim stuff, reduces the amount of money available to the Mexican government because lower incomes means less taxation and so on.
So you can drive down the wages.
Wages in America are going to go up because reduced supply with continual demand increases a result in price.
So you're going to get higher wages in America, you're going to get lower wages in Mexico.
And so, of course, having people come to America is very beneficial to Carla Slim and very beneficial to the Mexican government as a whole.
And so, if you want to promote amnesty, if you want to promote illegal immigration and so on, buying or being the major stakeholder in the New York Times and giving them a quarter of a billion dollar loan, well, that seems like quite a good business move.
So...
It's important to, and does the New York Times say any of this when it's talking about immigration, does it have a disclaimer in saying, well, we may have a potential conflict of interest, but one of the richest men in the world is benefiting from the immigration policy we are now espousing, and so on.
Donald Trump said, I know why I get bad treatment in the New York Times, because it's owned by Mexico.
I don't know if you know, a rich guy in Mexico actually has power at the New York Times.
I wonder why they don't like us, you know?
I just wonder.
And see, for the left, you don't know any of this stuff, right?
So the people on the right know all of this stuff, and Ann Coulter talked about this in her great book on immigration into America called Adios, America.
And so people on the right know this stuff, people on the left don't, and they just look at the New York Times as some objective source of information.
New York Times publisher Arthur Sulzberger, Jr., quote, Slim's spokesman and son-in-law Arturo Elias on Slim's attempt to influence the U.S. election.
Quote, This is totally false.
Of course we aren't interfering in the U.S. election.
We aren't even active in Mexican politics.
So this is what they say.
What about Amazon?
In 2013, Amazon founder and CEO Jeff Bezos secured a $600 million contract with the Central Intelligence Agency offering advanced high-tech cloud storage infrastructure.
Amazon November 2013 said, We look forward to a successful relationship with the CIA. Didn't the Shah of Iran say something similar?
I can't recall.
Now, this raised, of course, significant red flags.
Jeff Bezos purchased the Washington Post.
And, of course, this made possible conflict of interest, which was not being properly disclosed.
To put things in context, right, Bezos purchased the Washington Post for $250 million, making the Amazon contract with the CIA more than two times as valuable as the entire sticker price of the Washington Post.
According to Arutz Action, quote, the Washington Post's coverage of the CIA should include full disclosure that the sole owner of the Post is also the main owner of Amazon, and Amazon is now gaining huge profits directly from the CIA. And see, this is, you know, conflict of interest is supposed to be disclosed.
Like, if you are a financial analyst and you're recommending a stock, you're supposed to say if you own any of that stock, because you could be trying to drive up demand for that stock, thus raising your own profit.
So, conflict of interest is very, very important, I guess, unless you're A psychiatrist.
But anyway, do they talk about this?
Well, the Institute for Public Accountability statement goes as follows, quote, When the main shareholder in one of the very largest corporations in the world benefits from a massive contract with the CIA, on the one hand, and that same billionaire owns the Washington Post, on the other hand, there are serious problems.
Citizens need to know about this conflict of interest in the columns of the Post itself.
I think I want to say, if some official enemy of the United States had a comparable situation, say the owner of the dominant newspaper in Caracas was getting $600 million in secretive contracts from the Maduro government, the post itself would lead the howling chorus impaling that newspaper and that government for making a mockery of a free press.
It is time for the post to take a dose of its own medicine.
And why?
I mean, Jeff Bezos is obviously a very, very competent businessman.
Why would you buy a newspaper these days, looking at the revenue decline?
Because there's some other benefit for you, other than, well, boy, I'm sure that newspapers have a real future in the profitability matrix.
Journalism scholar Robert W. The Post is undoubtedly the political paper of record in the United States, and how it covers governance sets the agenda for the balance of the news media.
Citizens need to know about the conflict of interest in the columns of the Post itself.
Former Washington Post reporter John Hanrahan said, It's all so basic.
Readers of the Washington Post, which reports frequently on the CIA, are entitled to know and to be reminded on a regular basis in stories and editorials in the newspaper and online that the Post's new owner, Jeff Bezos, stands to benefit substantially from Amazon's $600 million contract with the CIA. Even with such disclosure,
the public should not feel assured they are getting tough-minded reporting on the CIA. And this sends a clear message to even the hardest-nosed journalists that making the CIA look bad might not be a good career move.
And see, this is the thing.
You don't need to get a memo.
People respond to incentives.
Well, I never directly told anyone that they shouldn't be hard on the CIA. I never did that at all.
It's like, yeah, okay.
Well, let's say I put an ad out there saying I'm selling a Lamborghini for $10.
Well, I never directly told anyone to buy this Lamborghini.
People respond to incentives.
Everybody knows that.
Come on.
We've got a choice of a million articles, right?
Let's say you've got a major advertiser and you've discovered something unpleasant about that major advertiser.
Well, you know that if you go after that major advertiser, you're going to end up probably losing the account.
Do people not think that other people respond to incentives?
I mean, it's crazy.
Of course people respond to incentives.
This is one of the reasons I don't take ads.
I want to be accountable to you and to facts, to reason, evidence, not to who pays the bills.
Former CIA official Ray McGovern said, What emerges now is what, in intelligence parlance, is called an agent of influence owning the post, with a huge financial interest in playing nice with the CIA. In other words, two main players nourishing the national security state in undisguised collaboration.
Amazon also has a controversial path related to WikiLeaks.
Fairness and Accountability in Reporting themselves reported, quote, After the publication of the State Department cables, WikiLeaks was booted from Amazon's web hosting service AWS. This is from The Guardian 12.1.10.
So at the height of public interest in what WikiLeaks was publishing, readers were unable to access the WikiLeaks website.
In a 1988 speech at CIA headquarters, former Washington Post publisher Catherine Graham said, We live in a dirty and dangerous world.
There are some things that the general public does not need to know and shouldn't.
I believe democracy flourishes when the government can take legitimate steps to keep its secrets and when the press can decide whether to print what it knows.
Yeah, I remember them saying all of that in the 1970s with Watergate.
You tough-minded reporters.
Prestitutes.
Look, it is not exactly unheard of for the United States CIA to be involved with media propaganda campaigns designed to influence the domestic American population.
Starting in the 1950s, and you can do a search on this, Operation Mockingbird was designed to do specifically that, funding journalists and political campaigns to promote the interests and desired viewpoints of the CIA. Fourth Generation Warfare 101.
Control the minds, you control the wallets, you control the votes, you control the power of the state.
So, Congress report in 1976, quote, The CIA currently maintains a network of several hundred foreign individuals around the world who provide intelligence for the CIA and at times attempt to influence opinion through the use of covert propaganda.
These individuals provide the CIA with direct access to a large number of newspapers and periodicals, scores of press services and news agencies, radio and television stations, commercial book publishers, and other foreign media outlets.
In other words, it's all suspect.
It's all suspect.
Newly appointed director of the CIA, George Herbert Walker Bush, February 1976.
Effective immediately, the CIA will not enter into any paid or contract relationship with any full-time or part-time news correspondent accredited by any U.S. news service, newspaper, periodical, radio or television network or station.
Despite the claims by Bush, many relationships between the CIA and U.S. journalists continued, with the CIA announcing, ending Project Mockingbird, even declaring that the agency would continue to, quote, welcome the voluntary, unpaid cooperation of journalists.
So, there is, of course, a war against what's called the alternative media.
This is the unmuzzled media.
This is the uncontrolled media.
And there is, of course, the electoral college vote coming up.
Now, they tried to control the election through being, the mainstream media tried to control the election by being wildly pro-Hillary and viciously anti-Trump, promoting every smear against Trump and covering up for every often legitimate complaint against Hillary.
So, they tried to do it that way.
And they tried this recount thing.
Jill Stein took a lot of money to pursue a recount.
I think there's some money left over.
I wonder what's going to happen to that.
Anyway, and now there's this electoral college vote.
So, now they're trying this sort of foreign influence thing, right?
I mean, they, and this, of course, is after they accused Donald Trump of undermining democracy by not accepting the legitimate results of a vote, blah, blah, blah, right?
So the mainstream media is hobbled in many ways.
So they need access to government officials, right?
They would rather get government officials to tell them stuff which they can then report.
It's a lot easier to do your reporting by sitting there doing Google and doing other searches and handouts.
It's a lot of work, it's a lot of expense, and it exposes you to legal repercussions if you make any kind of mistake, or maybe even if you don't.
So the mainstream media needs access to government officials.
And this means that government officials have massive amounts of control over the media.
Are you going to grant them access or not?
Mainstream media is dependent upon big corporations, right?
And we just saw with Kellogg pulling its ads from the Breitbart site, people are coming out with a lot of stuff that these corporations have a lot of left-leaning social justice warriors embedded in their midst.
They're donating a lot to leftist groups.
They have very leftist agendas.
And so, are you going to promote a leftist agenda?
If not, promoting it might get big advertising revenue pulled because these leftist companies want to spend money to promote their agendas, which, it's fine.
It's a free country, or at least it's supposed to be.
So, there's lots of restrictions, and of course, ownership of media companies has really been concentrated in the hands of very few megacorporations these days who are, there's just not that much competition anymore.
Plus, they're speaking to an audience that's been programmed by terrible government schools to not be able to think and reason, to respond emotionally, to To respond to narrative, to respond to sort of depth of the brain spine evoking language rather than reason and evidence.
So it's a big, giant mess.
And the reason why outlets like Free Domain Radio and Breitbart and Mike Cernovich and Got News and all of the other people who do great work in the alternative media, the reason why we are achieving such success is that we are not beholden to, to.
We are not owned by, we are not lapdogs of the state or of advertisers in particular, and we can actually speak the truth.
So, you know, there's still a market for the truth, which I'm very happy about.
Of course, recognizing that there's a market for the truth, the government and the mainstream media, it seems to me, a kind of acting to try and shut that down by saying, oh, there's fake news out there, and we've got to control this fake news, because fake news is really, really dangerous, and fake news is really, really bad.
Fake news might be able to get people hurt.
Well, the fake news leading up to the invasion of Iraq.
Saddam was tied to al-Qaeda.
Saddam was behind 9-11 style attacks.
Saddam had weapons of mass destruction.
He tried to buy yellow cake from Nigeria.
I mean, this got close to a million people killed in Iraq, destabilized the region, caused a domino effect in other regions with the help of the State Department under Hillary, and is helping to bring this migrant wave of people seeking welfare benefits to Europe, which is destabilizing Europe.
But apparently, fake news is dangerous.
But see, the mainstream media has nothing to do with fake news, even though they constantly have to post corrections on everything they say.
Nothing to do with fake news.
So this is a battle for your mind.
This is a battle for what goes into your eyeballs and listening holes.
This is very, very important stuff.
The government is not going to try and stop, the existing government is not going to try and stop shutting down Independent outlets for information that go contrary to the agenda the government wants to promote.
That's inevitable.
That's natural.
I'm not saying it's good.
I'm not saying it's moral.
But this kind of control is very important.
And this is a savage battle for the future of the minds of the West.
This is a savage battle between propaganda and information.
Between programming and reason.
Between manipulation and evidence.
And it's really important that you're very aware of the battle that's going on.
And don't just be an observer.
Get in and talk about this with people.
Help to expose the manipulations and the corruptions occurring in certain media outlets.
Help to get people to recognize how essential it is that we get this lifeline, this air tube, this allowing us to breathe and to flourish and to think and to reason.
and help people to understand how essential it is that we still have a flourishing, unowned, uncontrolled media, that we have the capacity to bring facts, reason, and evidence to the general population, because they want to control your thinking so that they can control you, so that they can control the future.
And when you start manipulating people, when you start passing laws designed to promote a particular narrative and oppose another narrative, you know what it tells everyone with half a brain?
You don't have any arguments.
And people who want their way, who can't reason their way into getting other people to accept their perspective, what do they do?
Sooner or later, they reach for the bribe, they reach for the gun.
We need to push back.
This is Stefan Molyneux for Freedom Aid Radio.
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