DISINFORMATION

OLIVER BOYD-GARRETT—The scale of Israel’s attack on Hezbollah has been grossly exaggerated for propaganda purposes.

The most important conclusions that we should draw:

(1) we have resumed a war of attrition and calibrated escalation;

(2) that Hezbollah, Iran and the Houthis will separately deal with their own “accounts,”

(3) that Iran knows that the very last thing it should give Netanyahu is a full-scale war. This is what Netanyahu most needs so that he can:

(a) draw in the US to a conflict that Israel is too weak and divided to achieve on its own;

(b) so that he can use the fog of war to camouflage the continuing liquidation of the Palestine people in Gaza and the West Bank;

CJ HOPKINS—As my regular readers know, for the last two years, I’ve been experiencing the global crackdown on dissent “up close and personal,” and trying to report on it. A lot of my reporting has fallen on deaf ears. Which is understandable, given the nature of what we’re up against, which is (a) formidable, (b) rather challenging to really understand, and (c) virtually unassailable, currently.

People don’t tend to like stories like that. They tend to like stories with “good guys,” and “bad guys,” and identifiable enemies, and simple solutions, even if those stories are, essentially, bullshit.

One of the most prevalent bullshit stories (i.e., theories) about the global crackdown on dissent is the one about how The Big Bad Government Forced the Poor Helpless Global Corporations to Censor Everybody, or at least Conservatives. Americans are particularly fond of this story, especially conservative Americans, as it casts the Big Bad Government as the antagonist, and good, freedom-loving, military-contracting billionaires like Elon Musk as the heroic protagonists.

SCOTT RITTER—I got to know Phil in 2002, when he returned to the television talk show circuit on MSNBC as the host of Donahue.

America was, at that time, collectively beating the drums of war, with the Bush administration making the case that Iraq possessed weapons of mass destruction that posed a threat to world peace sufficient enough to justify a military invasion.

Phil, however, thought it was important to ask questions before signing on to the government case for war. He asked his producer, Jeff Cohen, to find a voice in opposition to the war. Jeff called me, and asked if I would be the guest on Phil’s premier. I accepted.

EDITOR—Glenn chats with Prof. Jonathan Turley, one of America’s foremost scholars on Constitutional Law and author of The Indispensable Right: Free Speech in an Age of Rage.  Turley warns about the enormous advances of the “censorship industry”, an underhanded offshoot of the MICIMATT, currently focusing on tightening controls on the official narrative by cynically curtailing free speech in the name of protecting Americans from “disinformation”. Ironically, it is precisely the US establishment, also called “the Deep State,” that is and remains the main originator and disseminator of global disinformation. Just about everything it says about current and past realities, from the nature of the US political system (hint: it ain’t a democracy), to the facts about Russia, Iran, Putin, China, the Ukraine War and the Israeli genocide on Palestinians—among other things—is a total lie, the world upside down. In this Orwellian framework, a powerful obstacle is the US Constitution’s First Amendment, offering all Americans the absolute right to Free Speech, as a human right, notes Prof. Turley.

DON HANK—Political and demographic trends suggest that the far right in Israel will remain electorally influential, even dominant, for the foreseeable future. [And these Judaic fundamentalists are supported wholeheartedly by American “Christian” Zionists, who in turn support Zionist lawmakers, creating a vicious circle that cannot be broken. Only the multipolar world order led by Russia and China can effectively oppose this]

But many Israelis who are not especially religious are also beginning to subscribe to this increasingly extreme ethnonationalist ideology. Since the October 7 attacks, the Israeli right wing has grown even more radical.