MSM Pundits Push Idea That Criticizing US Policy On Russia Makes You A Russian Agent

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Caitlin Johnstone
ROGUE JOURNALIST


THIS IS AN ANNOTATED VERSION OF THIS ARTICLE
ALL ANNOTATIONS BY THE EDITORS, NOT THE AUTHOR

The scummy Democrats, specialists in hypocrisy, poisoned innuendo, and sanctimony, soon to be followed by the equally repugnant Republicans, are systematically killing the First Amendment. It's a duopoly project. Wake the hell up people, but for real!


Listen to a reading of this article:

One thing I've been meaning to write about these last few days has been the way mass media pundits have been insinuating or outright asserting that Fox News host Tucker Carlson is literally an agent of the Russian government.

Carlson has been accused of promoting Russian propaganda by mainstream narrative managers for frequently criticizing the Biden administration's hawkish posture toward Russia regarding the entirely unsubstantiated claim that Moscow is preparing to launch an unprovoked military invasion of Ukraine. We've been seeing things like Anderson Cooper innocently musing that "It is striking how neatly Kremlin propaganda seems to dovetail with Carlson's talking points" and this CNN segment from December with Reliable Sources host Brian Stelter and tinfoil hat Russiagater Julia Ioffe wondering aloud about why Russian state media seem to be so fond of Carlson. By mid-January, Democratic Party operatives were openly demanding that Carlson be investigated for violations of the Foreign Agents Registration Act.

Editor's Note: Here's the whole CNN segment on Tucker Carlson. Everything they state as fact is a lie, or simply outright insidious innuendo. They can't refute, in good faith, Tucker's points, so they smear him. 

"This isn’t journalism, it’s an ongoing FARA violation. Tucker Carlson needs to be prosecuted as an unregistered agent of the Russian Federation and treason under Article 3, Sec. 3, Clause 1 of the U.S. Constitution for aiding an enemy in hybrid warfare against the United States," tweeted former DNC official Alexandra Chalupa, best known for colluding with the Ukrainian government in 2016 on opposition research against Donald Trump.

The accusations and insinuations increased, eventually leading to Carlson outright denying being a Russian agent in a recent interview with The New York Times saying, "I’ve never been to Russia, I don’t speak Russian. Of course I’m not an agent of Russia.”

As you would expect, this denial was then spun by the same demented mainstream pundits who've spent the last five years being wrong about Russia as evidence that Carlson is a Russian agent.

"Tucker Carlson told The New York Times he’s not a Russian agent amid controversy over his pro-Kremlin stance," blares a headline by Business Insider.

"What would a Russian agent say if asked if they were a Russian agent?" tweeted former FBI special agent Clint Watts in response to Carlson's denial.

"Tucker Carlson Denies Being Russian Agent After Taking Kremlin's Side," says a viral tweet by former FBI Assistant Director Frank Figliuzzi.

"Narrator: After he helped destroy American Democracy, it turned out he was, indeed, a Russian agent … though a rather silly one," added MSNBC's cartoonish "intelligence" expert Malcolm Nance.

"Tucker Carlson is walking proof that you don't need to be an agent to be a useful idiot," former FBI agent Peter Strzok told MSNBC's Nicole Wallace, apparently less willing to commit to the bit than his FBI peers.

"Why hasn't Tucker Carlson registered as a foreign agent?" reads a viral tweet from the notorious Lincoln Project.

I've never gotten used to the insane McCarthyite accusations which US liberals will hurl without a second thought at anyone who disagrees with them. Every time it happens it startles and alarms me, and this latest trend of claiming that opposition to US military posture toward a nuclear superpower constitutes evidence of being a treasonous foreign intelligence operative is a marked uptick in the madness.

TEXT BY CAITY JOHNSTONE CONTINUES AFTER THE EDITORS' SIDEBAR

Who is this DNC operative "Alexandra Chalupa"?
By the editors' council

S I D E B A R
For starters, if you logically thought she's of Hispanic descent, you'd be woefully wrong. The woman is of rabid anti-Soviet/anti-Communist Ukrainian stock, daughter of Ukie emigres who, naturally, like many of their reactionary ilk, landed in North America (Canada is also crawling with them).  These people support the 2014 criminal Maidan coup in Ukraine, engineered by the US, an event that, among other things, by putting unrepentant Neonazis in power, has pushed the world to the real possibility of a major war between superpowers.  Chalupa, of course, is a card-carrying Russiagater. The Wikipedia offers some facts, albeit carefully massaged to expunge some of the unpleasantness about Chalupa's origins:

[2]

Chalupa is a pro-Ukrainian activist. Prominent supporters of President Donald Trump have, without evidence, promoted the theory that Chalupa's past activities were part of a conspiracy between the DNC and the Ukrainian government to undermine Trump's campaign and, later, to frame the Russian government for the hacking of the DNC during the 2016 US presidential campaign.[3] 

Chalupa was born in Davis, California, to Tanya Keis and Leo M. Chalupa, both Ukrainian immigrants.[4][1][5][6] Tanya was born in a United Nations refugee camp in Heidenheim, Germany after World War II.[5] Tanya's and Leo's parents brought them to the United States as children seeking asylum from the Soviet Union, and they grew up in the Bronx, New York.[5] As a couple, they moved to California, where Leo earned a PhD in neuroscience from UCLA and became a professor at UC Davis.[5]

Many rightwing/pro-Trump & assorted conservative sites, along with several independent sites not aligned with the Democrats, regard Chalupa as a shady operative: Alexandra “Ali” Chalupa is a Democratic National Committee operative linked to Hillary Clinton, Joe Biden and fake “whistleblower” / CIA analyst Eric Ciaramella. (Gateway Pundit, 2019). That the Chalupa Wiki page was massaged by Deep State actors to exculpate her from the slightest suspicion she might have been operating with the Ukranians to frame Donald Trump, or carry out other nefarious pro-Deep State work against the US Constitution, is apparent in the closing paragraph (see below): 

Impeachment Inquiry

During the US Congress' 2019 Impeachment Inquiry hearings, House Intelligence Committee ranking member Devin Nunes several times cited Alexandra Chalupa as a fact witness that committee chairman Adam Schiff refused to bring before the committee. Chalupa responded that she would welcome the opportunity to testify and push back against the Republican narrative about her involvement with Ukrainian officials.[2]

There is no evidence that Ukrainian embassy officials helped Chalupa in any significant way or that the DNC used any information obtained by Chalupa to aid Hillary Clinton's presidential campaign against Trump.[3]
(SOURCE: Alexandra Chalupa, Wikipedia

Text by Caity Johnstone continues below.

I'm highlighting this deranged behavior not to defend the odious Carlson, but to point out that it works very much in the US empire's favor to have a bunch of influential narrative managers aggressively manufacturing the consensus that anyone who criticizes America's posture toward Russia is suspicious and untrustworthy.

The mass media, whose primary job is to propagandize the masses and who have an extensive history of lying to the public to manufacture consent for war, are not pushing the belief that Tucker Carlson is suspicious and sinister for questioning the official narrative about Russia. They are pushing the belief that anyone is suspicious and sinister for questioning the official narrative about Russia. That's the message that people are receiving from this line that's being pushed by narrative managers and ex-federal agents. Anyone who is successfully indoctrinated with this belief will become inoculated against wrongthink about that nation because they will reflexively distrust the motives of anyone who says anything that differs from the officially authorized line.

That's the real value of this framing for the imperial propagandists. They don't care about Tucker Carlson, who serves their agendas more often than not. They care about making sure that current and future establishment narratives about Russia will be swallowed hook, line and sinker by the mainstream public without the slightest twinge of gag reflex. You don't even need to silence dissent if you can simply render it impotent.

Editor's Note: Here's the whole CNN segment on Tucker Carlson. Everything they state as fact is a lie, or simply outright insidious innuendo. They can't refute, in good faith, Tucker's points, so they smear him. 

It's worth considering the possibility that all the artificially manufactured Russia hysteria we've seen over the last five years has been geared toward building public support for the exact escalations we are seeing today. After all, it says a lot that Russiagate beganwith unevidenced claims by US intelligence agencies who have an extensive track record of lying, resulted in the reignition of a new cold war against a nation long targeted for destruction by the US intelligence cartel, and now there are tons of weapons being flown in to Ukraine and US troops are being moved to Eastern Europe in response to a threat we've still seen no evidence is actually real.

Whoever controls the narrative controls the world. If you can control what people believe about a certain thing, then you can control what they will do and what they will allow in response to that thing. Controlling people's beliefs about reality is controlling their reality. If you can convince people that anyone who disputes what you're saying about a government you don't like is suspicious and not to be trusted, then you can keep them believing everything you say about that government.

It's clear that it is very, very important to the narrative managers that we believe what we are told about Russia. Now we're just waiting to find out toward what specific end that agenda is being driven. 

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This is a dispatch from our ongoing series by Caitlin Johnstone


Caitlin Johnstone is a brave journalist, political junkie, relentless feminist, champion of the 99 percent. And a powerful counter-propaganda tactician. 
 

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 NOTE : ALL CAPTIONS AND PULL QUOTES BY THE EDITORS, NOT THE AUTHORS.