US Citizens Backing Russia – Zelensky
Russian influence has penetrated the US political system and warped the information field around the world, Ukrainian President Vladimir Zelensky claimed in an interview with Politico on Tuesday.
Zelensky was asked to comment on recent statements made by two Republican lawmakers: Mike Turner of Ohio and Mike McCaul of Texas. They claimed that “pro-Russian” propaganda has filtered into the minds of some of the members of Congress, which has failed to greenlight the $60 billion aid package for Kiev.
The Ukrainian leader stated that Russia has succeeded in distorting “the information field of the world.”
“They have their lobbies everywhere: in the United States, in the EU countries, in Britain, in Latin America, in Africa,”he said. “When we talk about the Congress — do you notice how they work with society in the United States?” he noted, adding that the scale of Russian influence in the US has been underestimated.
He claimed that US citizens were helping Russia by spreading its ideas in the American media.
“They pump their narratives through the media,” Zelensky said. “These are not Russian citizens or natives of Russia, no. They are representatives of certain media groups, citizens of the United States.”
According to Zelensky, these people work in the US media and deliver the appropriate messages, which are sometimes “very pro-Russian.” He hasn’t mentioned any names though.
READ MORE: EU media should learn from RT – Borrell
Following the start of Russia’s military operation in Ukraine in 2022, Western governments launched a large censorship campaign against Russian media they deem to be ‘state-controlled’. Multiple Russian TV stations and media outlets, including RT, have been either blocked or prevented from operating in the US and some other Western countries.
RT, having been the first international news channel to reach one billion views on YouTube, was banned from the platform and those owned by the US-based tech giant Meta, including Facebook and Instagram, in the spring of 2022.
According to the Foreign Ministry in Moscow, Russian journalists working in the US have been facing difficulties, including over visa renewals; they’ve had their bank accounts blocked and in some cases been hounded by US intelligence agencies.
Last year, James Rubin, the special envoy and coordinator of the US State Department’s Center for Global Engagement admitted that Washington wanted to shut down Russian media around the world.
Commenting on his remarks, Russian Deputy Foreign Minister Sergey Ryabkov said that by taking such steps, Washington, which positions itself as a stronghold of human rights, demonstrated a deep disregard for media freedom.
Alex Jones Details How Feds Targeted Him And Other Patriots
Former Reporter Alleges ‘Journalistic Rape’ by CBS News Following Termination, File Seizure
The CBS network was accused of “journalistic rape” by a former reporter after it fired her then seized her documents while she was working to “expose government corruption.”
Award-winning reporter Catherine Herridge, whose work included exposing Biden administration scandals, testified to a House Judiciary Committee Thursday that her First Amendment had been violated by the news organization.
“When my records were seized I felt it was a journalistic rape,” Herridge told Rep. Jim Jordan (R-Ohio), who’d asked if she’d wrote reporting critical of the Biden administration, to which she agreed.
Catherine Herridge says CBS’ seizure of her files and records was “journalistic rape” @DailyCaller pic.twitter.com/gBTQmIx8oX
— Nicole Silverio (@NicoleMSilverio) April 11, 2024
“When the network of Walter Cronkite seizes your reporting files, including confidential source information, that is an attack on investigative journalism,” she added.
Elsewhere in her statements, Herridge explained how she was fired by CBS shortly after being held in contempt by a refusing to reveal her sources on a national security story.
“CBS News’ decision to seize my reporting records crossed a red line that I believe should never be crossed by any media organization,” the Emmy award winning reporter stated.
“Multiple sources said they were concerned that by working with me to expose government corruption and misconduct they would be identified and exposed.”
“CBS News locked me out of the building and seized hundreds of pages of my reporting files, including confidential source information.”
Herridge continued:
My current situation arises from a Privacy Act lawsuit. I am only a witness in the case. It is not common for these cases to reach the stage of holding a reporter in contempt, but when such cases happen, they have profound consequences, impacting every journalist in the United States. Forcing a reporter to disclose confidential sources would have a crippling effect on investigative journalism, because without reliable assurances of confidentiality, sources will not come forward. The First Amendment provides protections for the press because an informed electorate is at the foundation of our democracy. If confidential sources are not protected, I fear investigative journalism is dead.
Former CBS News reporter Sharyl Attkisson also appeared at the press freedom hearing to discuss her own experiences with the network after she wrote stories critical of the Obama administration.
STATE-RUN MEDIA: Journalist Sharyl Attkisson says in her experience at CBS the government intervened in news coverage everyday.
— Te?asLindsay™ (@TexasLindsay_) April 11, 2024
She says CBS was constantly pressured by members of Congress, the White House & the intel agencies on what stories CBS should or should not cover. pic.twitter.com/kIWIki7dps
Watch the full “Fighting for a Free Press: Protecting Journalists and their Sources” House Judiciary Committee hearing:
Did Lockdowns Set a Global Revolt in Motion?
My first article on the coming backlash – admittedly wildly optimistic – went to print April 24, 2020. After 6 weeks of lockdown, I confidently predicted a political revolt, a movement against masks, a population-wide revulsion against the elites, a demand to reject “social distancing” and streaming-only life, plus widespread disgust at everything and everyone involved.
I was off by four years. I wrongly assumed back then that society was still functioning and that our elites would be responsive to the obvious flop of the whole lockdown scheme. I assumed that people were smarter than they proved to be. I also did not anticipate just how devastating the effects of lockdown would be: in terms of learning loss, economic chaos, cultural shock, and the population-wide demoralization and loss of trust.
The forces that set in motion those grim days were far more deep than I knew at the time. They involved a willing complicity from tech, media, pharma, and the administrative state at all levels of society.
There is every evidence that it was planned to be exactly what it became; not just a foolish deployment of public health powers but a “great reset” of our lives. The newfound powers of the ruling class were not given up so easily, and it took far longer for people to shake off the trauma than I had anticipated.
Is that backlash finally here? If so, it’s about time.
New literature is emerging to document it all.
The new book White Rural Rage: The Threat to American Democracy is a viciously partisan, histrionic, and gravely inaccurate account that gets nearly everything wrong but one: vast swaths of the public are fed up, not with democracy but its opposite of ruling class hegemony. The revolt is not racial and not geographically determined. It’s not even about left and right, categories that are mostly a distraction. it’s class-based in large part but more precisely about the rulers vs. the ruled.
With more precision, new voices are emerging among people who detect a “vibe change” in the population. One is Elizabeth Nickson’s article “Strongholds Falling; Populists Seize the Culture.” She argues, quoting Bret Weinstein, that “The lessons of [C]ovid are profound. The most important lesson of Covid is that without knowing the game, we outfoxed them and their narrative collapsed…The revolution is happening all over the socials, especially in videos. And the disgust is palpable.”
A second article is “Vibe Shift” by Santiago Pliego:
The Vibe Shift I’m talking about is the speaking of previously unspeakable truths, the noticing of previously suppressed facts. I’m talking about the give you feel when the walls of Propaganda and Bureaucracy start to move as you push; the very visible dust kicked up in the air as Experts and Fact Checkers scramble to hold on to decaying institutions; the cautious but electric rush of energy when dictatorial edifices designed to stifle innovation, enterprise, and thought are exposed or toppled. Fundamentally, the Vibe Shift is a return to—a championing of—Reality, a rejection of the bureaucratic, the cowardly, the guilt-driven; a return to greatness, courage, and joyous ambition.
We truly want to believe this is true. And this much is certainly correct: the battle lines are incredibly clear these days. The media that uncritically echo the deep-state line are known: Slate, Wired, Rolling Stone, Mother Jones, New Republic, New Yorker, and so on, to say nothing of the New York Times. What used to be politically partisan venues with certain predictable biases are now more readily described as ruling-class mouthpieces, forever instructing you precisely how to think while demonizing disagreement.
After all, all of these venues, in addition to the obvious case of the science journals, are still defending the lockdowns and everything that followed. Rather than express regret for their bad models and immoral means of control, they have continued to insist that they did the right thing, regardless of the civilization-wide carnage everywhere in evidence, while ignoring the relationship between the policies they championed and the terrible results.
Instead of allowing their mistakes to change their own outlook, they have adapted their own worldview to allow for snap lockdowns anytime they deem them necessary. In holding this view, they have forged a view of politics that it is embarrassingly acquiescent to the powerful.
The liberalism that once questioned authority and demanded free speech seems extinct. This transmogrified and captured liberalism now demands compliance with authority and calls for further restrictions on free speech. Now anyone who makes a basic demand for normal freedom – to speak or choose one’s own medical treatment or to decline to wear a mask – can reliably anticipate being denounced as “right-wing” even when it makes absolutely no sense.
The smears, cancellations, and denunciations are out of control, and so unbearably predictable.
It’s enough to make one’s head spin. As for the pandemic protocols themselves, there have been no apologies but only more insistence that they were imposed with the best of intentions and mostly correct. The World Health Organization wants more power, and so does the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Even though the evidence of the failure of pharma pours in daily, major media venues pretend that all is well, and thereby out themselves as mouthpieces for the ruling regime.
The issue is that major and unbearably obvious failures have never been admitted. Institutions and individuals who only double down on preposterous lies that everyone knows are lies only end up discrediting themselves.
That’s a pretty good summary of where we are today, with vast swaths of elite culture facing an unprecedented loss of trust. Elites have chosen the lie over truth and cover-up over transparency.
This is becoming operationalized in declining traffic for legacy media, which is shedding costly staff as fast as possible. The social media venues that cooperated closely with government during the lockdowns are losing cultural sway while uncensored ones like Elon Musk’s X are gaining attention. Disney is reeling from its partisanship, while states are passing new laws against WHO policies and interventions.
Sometimes this whole revolt can be quite entertaining. When the CDC or WHO posts an update on X, when they allow comments, it is followed by thousands of reader comments of denunciation and poking fun, with flurries of comments to the effect of “I will not comply.”
DEI is being systematically defunded by major corporations while financial institutions are turning on it. Indeed, the culture in general has come to regard DEI as a sure indication of incompetence. Meanwhile, the outer reaches of the “great reset” such as the hope that EVs would replace internal combustion have come to naught as the EV market has collapsed, along with consumer demand for fake meat to say nothing of bug eating.
As for politics, yes, it does seem like the backlash has empowered populist movements all over the world. We see them in the farmers’ revolt in Europe, the street protests in Brazil against a sketchy election, the widespread discontent in Canada over government policies, and even in migration trends out of US blue states toward red ones. Already, the administrative state in D.C. is working to secure itself against a possible unfriendly president in the form of Trump or RFK, Jr.
So, yes, there are many signs of revolt. These are all very encouraging.
What does all this mean in practice? How does this end? How precisely does a revolt take shape in an industrialized democracy? What is the mostly likely pathway for long-term social change? These are legitimate questions.
For hundreds of years, our best political philosophers have opined that no system can function in a sustainable way in which a huge majority is coercively governed by a tiny elite with a class interest in serving themselves at public expense.
That seems correct. In the days of the Occupy Wall Street movement of 15 years ago, the street protesters spoke of the 1 percent vs. the 99 percent. They were speaking of those with the money inside the traders’ buildings as opposed to the people on the streets and everywhere else.
Even if that movement misidentified the full nature of the problem, the intuition into which it tapped spoke to a truth. Such a disproportionate distribution of power and wealth is dangerously unsustainable. Revolution of some sort threatens. The mystery right now is what form this takes. It’s unknown because we’ve never been here before.
There is no real historical record of a highly developed society ostensibly living under a civilized code of law that experiences an upheaval of the type that would be required to unseat the rulers of all the commanding heights. We’ve seen political reform movements that take place from the top down but not really anything that approximates a genuine bottom-up revolution of the sort that is shaping up right now.
We know, or think we know, how it all transpires in a tinpot dictatorship or a socialist society of the old Soviet bloc. The government loses all legitimacy, the military flips loyalties, there is a popular revolt that boils over, and the leaders of the government flee. Or they simply lose their jobs and take up new positions in civilian life. These revolutions can be violent or peaceful but the end result is the same. One regime replaces another.
It’s hard to know how this translates to a society that is heavily modernized and seen as non-totalitarian and even existing under the rule of law, more or less. How does revolution occur in this case? How does the regime come around to adapting itself to a public revolt against governance as we know it in the US, UK, and Europe?
Yes, there is the vote, if we can trust that. But even here, there are the candidates, which are that for a reason. They specialize in politics, which does not necessarily mean doing the right thing or reflecting the aspirations of the voters behind them. They are responsive to their donors first, as we have long discovered. Public opinion can matter but there is no mechanism that guarantees a smoothly responsive pathway from popular attitudes to political outcomes.
There is also the pathway of industrial change, a migration of resources out of legacy venues to new ones. Indeed, in the marketplace of ideas, the amplifiers of regime propaganda are failing but we also observe the response: widened censorship. What’s happening in Brazil with the full criminalization of free speech can easily happen in the US.
In social media, were it not for Elon’s takeover of Twitter, it’s hard to know where we would be. We have no large platform in which to influence the culture more broadly. And yet the attacks on that platform and other enterprises owned by Musk are growing. This is emblematic of a much more robust upheaval taking place, one that suggests change is on the way.
But how long does such a paradigm shift take? Thomas Kuhn’s The Structure of Scientific Revolutions is a bracing account of how one orthodoxy migrates to another not by the ebb and flow of proof and evidence but through dramatic paradigm shifts. An abundance of anomalies can wholly discredit a current praxis but that doesn’t make it go away. Ego and institutional inertia perpetuate the problem until its most prominent exponents retire and die and a new elite replaces them with different ideas.
In this model, we can expect that a failed innovation in science, politics, or technology could last as long as 70 years before finally being displaced, which is roughly how long the Soviet experiment lasted. That’s a depressing thought. If this is true, we still have another 60 plus years of rule by the management professionals who enacted lockdowns, closures, shot mandates, population propaganda, and censorship.
And yet, people say that history is moving faster now than in the past. If a future of freedom is ours just lying in wait, we need that future here sooner rather than later, before it is too late to do anything about it.
The slogan became popular about ten years ago: the revolution will be decentralized with the creation of robust parallel institutions. There is no other path. The intellectual parlor game is over. This is a real-life struggle for freedom itself. It’s resist and rebuild or doom.
Alex Jones Responds To Revelation That FBI/CIA Attempted To Silence Him And Shut Down Infowars
SHOCK VIDEO: Hundreds of Illegal Aliens Flood Penn Station In NYC
Penn Station was slammed by hundreds of illegal aliens arriving in New York City this week.
Also:
The Population Explosion Disaster that Never Happened
I do not hear much talk about world population these days, the way I did growing up in the 1960s and ’70s. People were supposedly starving, dying, with tens of millions more sure to die. The problem back then was that there were just too many, well, people.
Population numbers coming out of China and India were unthinkable, and projections indicated many more people were going to be born into this dire situation. There were over twenty thousand people in my hometown and as far as everyone was concerned, that was enough already!
People were dying! We were told to eat our broccoli and clean our plate because there were starving children in China. Everyone knew that was a stretch of the imagination because we all knew that Chinese people only ate rice.
The book The Population Bomb was published in 1968 by Stanford University’s Paul and Anne Ehrlich. They wrote that hundreds of millions of people would soon die because of hunger in the next decade and there was nothing we could do about it. There were just too many people.
The first Earth Day was held in April 1970 in honor of the earth.
We were told we were ruining the earth. We were overpopulated. And we were going to die. Back then they told us that we were causing a new ice age.
Of course, all of the inflammatory predictions of the Ehrlichs’ bestselling book did not come to pass. Just like “peak oil” never came to pass. Just like all the current predictions are not panning out and must regularly be changed to keep people fixated on the issue.
The problem with the people who make such predictions is that they worship the earth and want to keep it for themselves and don’t want to share it with others. They really want to reduce or eliminate people. They do not care about people or science. Most concerned people have been fooled into these peoples’ agenda.
The current crop of depopulationists hide under the cloak of “climate change.” Such people as Bill Gates, Senator John Kerry, Greta Thunberg, and Klaus Schwab tell us to be terrified of “climate change.”
They want to substitute “sustainability” policies, or we will all face the manmade consequences that include rising sea levels, scorched lands, and all manner of apocalyptic conditions in which we will all surely die.
They want to sustain the earth for the earth’s sake.
A similar but very different policy is “conservationism.” This is a set of individual actions that has the aim of conserving the earth and the resources it contains for the MOST valuable uses of humans, present and future generations. Conservation is the normal condition that humans live in without respect to government policy. It is driven by how all of us value everything.
So, that might mean keeping a valley in pristine natural conditions just for the sake of its view or future use. Or it might mean turning the whole thing into a giant subdivision to house a multitude of families who want to live there. It’s the owner’s choice. When it’s the government’s choice, things always go awry.
California is a good case in point. That state imposes some of the most far-reaching and draconian land use policies in the world. As a result, only a tiny fraction of land is used for human habitation. It now has some of the worst housing conditions in the country, despite all its wealth and supposedly super smart legislature. Its working class is impoverished not by wages or jobs, but by housing costs and commute times.
Now, back to the environmentalists and the global climate-change community. They ask us to accept their demands and that we engage in sustainability by using alternative energy sources and by consuming alternative foods.
What is left unsaid is that these alternatives are poor substitutes for the real things. Alternative energy is both more expensive and less efficient in terms of using up the earth’s resources. Alternative foods are also more expensive and less efficient.
Cows pooping and farting in the fields produce a better taste and more nutrition than you will get from factory-made artificial chicken strips.
Using alternatives, or ersatz production of artificial things, means higher prices and less production of the two things that modern humans need to live: food and energy. Less food and fuel means fewer humans, plain and simple, and they don’t want to talk about that, especially in the less developed countries.
When the Ehrlichs published their book more than half a century ago, there were fewer than four billion people. Now there are more than eight billion people, and thanks to the adoption of free-market policies in India and China, more than two billion people have lifted themselves out of poverty! We did not do that! People today make good livings doing jobs like “social influencer” and “data analyst,” which were unthinkable back in the day, but in a world of eight billion people things like that are possible.
What might be possible in a world of one hundred billion people? Or what problems might be faced in the future with the depopulation-demographic problems in places like Japan and some European countries?
Also, a half century later, none of the alarmist climate predictions have materialized. The world has not frozen over. It has not been turned into a scorching desert. The seas have not risen in a great flood. Climate change has been a total bomb despite all the TV weathermen in the world’s best efforts to tell us otherwise.
Alex Jones Responds To Revelation That FBI/CIA Attempted To Silence Him And Shut Down Infowars
BREAKING: Republican Congressmen Call for Official Investigation into FBI/CIA Setup of Alex Jones
Alex Jones should definitely pursue legal action against the FBI and CIA after an undercover exposé featured an agent admitting the controversial radio host was unjustly targeted, GOP lawmakers are urging.
On Wednesday, Rep. Troy Nehls (R-Texas) told Benny Johnson that Jones should politically fight back against being targeted by the DOJ’s weaponization of the justice system, as admitted by a CIA contractor in a recent undercover exposé.
?BREAKING: Rep. Troy Nehls calls for subpoenas and a Congressional investigation into the CIA contractor ADMITTING the agency targeted Alex Jones and Tucker Carlson
— Benny Johnson (@bennyjohnson) April 10, 2024
He also encourages Alex and Tucker to go after the Federal Government if the allegations are true. pic.twitter.com/OjGCcvqb2y
“Alex Jones if you’re listening, Alex Jones, you have a right to be a little bit flustered, right?” Nehls said. “Your feather should be flustered right now with what that agent, that former CIA guy, or that CIA guy, said about you — and same with Tucker. I’ll tell you go after them, go after them.”
“This weaponization that the Republicans have said has happened with the DOJ, it’s true America,” he continued. “They’re coming after Donald Trump. They’re coming after anybody that’s a MAGA movement individual. We got to push back.”
Asked if he believed Jones should pursue a congressional subpoena against the CIA contracting officer in the video, Gavin O’Blennis, Nehls responded, “Hell yes!”
“Listen, everybody says a lot of stuff up here, Benny, you say this, you say that – this guy kind of, I looked at the guy, he looked a little like he’s a little different – but what I would do is I would try to confirm, verify what he said and if it’s true, if it’s true, and if it’s accurate, I think Alex Jones should go after — they should go after the federal government, without question. And I think Tucker and everybody else should do it.”
“These are abuses that the American people will not tolerate we will not tolerate these abuses by the DOJ. The weaponization has been taking place. They’ve gone after Donald Trump for years. It’s all going to stop. Trump 2024, baby, he’s coming back,” Rep. Nehls added.
Nehls’ appearance with Johnson comes on the heels of another interview with Rep. Paulina Luna (R-Fla.), who confirmed members of Congress are also being spied on by US intelligence agencies under orders to treat conservatives as “domestic terrorists.”
? BREAKING ?
— Benny Johnson (@bennyjohnson) April 11, 2024
Rep. Luna CONFIRMS members of Congress are SPIED on by American intelligence agencies through FISA loopholes, labeling conservatives as “domestic terrorists”
Q: Is Congress spied on?
A: “Yes. 100%. I am quite confident in some capacity that I am on a list…” pic.twitter.com/57hqd9rw0e
The legislators’ warnings follow similar alerts by other GOP lawmakers, including Sen. Mike Lee (Utah) and Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (Ga.), who warned a reauthorization of the FISA Act could imperil US citizens’ privacy rights.
“This isn’t national security. This isn’t law enforcement. This is fascism,” Lee said.
“We can put anyone in jail if you know what to do.”
— Mike Lee (@BasedMikeLee) April 10, 2024
This isn’t national security.
This isn’t law enforcement.
This is fascism.
Yet another reason why we’d be crazy to reauthorize FISA 702 without a warrant requirement. https://t.co/OQKUiWs8eO
“Yet another reason why we’d be crazy to reauthorize FISA 702 without a warrant requirement,” he added, referring to Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act that Congress is currently debating whether to reauthorize.
Likewise, Rep. Greene wrote, “Alex Jones and many others have been the target of the deep state for many years. Congress can not pass FISA authorization without STRONG warrant requirements. We have to end this.”
Alex Jones and many others have been the target of the deep state for many years.
— Marjorie Taylor Greene ?? (@mtgreenee) April 10, 2024
Congress can not pass FISA authorization without STRONG warrant requirements.
We have to end this. https://t.co/2KJXeQTMn6