This is absolutely how mainstream US outlets think: exactly what is said there by Rid (one of those centrist Professor outlets use to elevate their unhinged conspiracy theories with a facade of expertise):
*We have no idea if this conspiracy is true, but we will say it anyway.*
There is no question -- none -- that mainstream US news outlets disseminate more unhinged, unproven conspiracy theories -- and do far more damage with them -- than QAnon, or whichever fringe group they want you to focus on, can achieve in 1,000 years.
See for yourself:
US media outlets outside of right-wing sites were desperate not to report the Hunter emails and to block their reporters from doing so. So they just started printing that it was "Russian disinformation," knowing there was no basis for that, until they could figure out what to do.
One of the US's best reporters, @mtaibbi, just published an great and well-researched article documenting how many lies US media outlets are telling to protect Biden.
It's on Substack. I doubt any liberal-left outlet would publish it. That's why Taibbi is more popular than ever.
Independent journalists like Taibbi, and platforms and outlets that won't censor, are more rare than ever, especially now when most national journalists are in full-on Elect Biden mode at the expense of everything else. Support them:
The only silver lining in all of this is that media outlets are so desperate to help Biden win that they're not even pretending anymore. No pretense. There's great clarity in that. To the NPR Public Editor Note, the CNN panel and that Rid quote, add this stunning @camanpour clip:
No purported news outlet has worth if it constrains or censors writers and reporters and forces them to advance the partisan preferences of editors or to flatter the ideological presuppositions of their audience. Support independent journalism: only those outlets that are free.
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Yale's "Fascism expert" Jason Stanely -- Yale's "Jacob Urowsky Professor of Philosophy" (does anyone now who that is?) -- explains why he's fleeing the US in fear withYale's Timothy Snyder and his wife Marci Shore -- to Canada, which he calls "the Ukraine of of North America."
He says Canada is Ukraine beacaue it's a bastion of freedom and nobility threatened an by authoritarian neighbor.
The absolute narcissism and melodrama of these people: there are those whose civil liberties are threatened. Celebrated, rich Yale professors are not among them.
Extra gross that Snyder is very wealthy by heralding himself the world's leading warrior against fascism. His book implores others not to "anticipatorily obey" Trump.
2 months into Trump's term, he flees the US as if he's an underground #Resistance leader in occupied France.
If Joe Biden had announced that any private universities that allow criticism of him or Dems shall immediately lose all federal funding -- while keeping the funding if they allow criticisms of Trump -- would that have been constitutional since no school has the right to funding?
How about if Biden cut off all federal funding to universities that deny the validity of the trans identity or the existence of multiple genders -- on the ground that such teaching incites violence against trans people and is hate speech?
Would that have been constitutional?
The only tactic needed to induce support for censorship is train people to believe the views they hate are violence.
Anti-trans activists are inciting violence and calling for genocide, etc.
Opponents of Israel's war on Gaza are calling for genocide and must be censored, etc. etc.
During the Dem primary campaign, one of RFK Jr.'s core issues was free speech and opposing censorship. Then he became known for wanting to combat chronic disease.
So what does he use his first month for? Threatening universities which allow protests against Israel on campus:
Note: you're free to protest the US on campus. You can protest any country or group: just not Israel.
And of course this censorship - like all censorship - is justified the name of stopping hate speech and keeping one group "safe": as if they're being relentlessly attacked.
Every government in the world -- including the most repressive and tyrannical -- "protects free speech" for the views they like.
It's the views they most hate that are targeted. And the most sacred issue for many in the Trump Admin is Israel: that is what's therefore shielded.
There's nothing stopping Germany or the EU from funding war in Ukraine until the end of eternity if they wish, or sending their citizens to Ukraine to fight Russia.
But the German Greens -- the worst of the worst -- are emblematic of European liberals: all posturing, no action.
British pundits prance around as if they're Churchill, and Macron walks around like he's a tough guy, and German Greens and other vague Berlin liberals posture as if they're the paragon of compassion: all while they rely on the US to finance wars, fight and protect them.
Zelensky begged and begged Westerners to get off line and stop tweeting with their blue-yellow emojis and instead go to Ukraine to help them fight the Russian Army, knowing he couldn't win without non-Ukrainians volunteering to fight. Very, very few did.
For a long-time, harsh critiques of US foreign policy and interventionism were found on the populist right. Listen to Pat Buchanan (who worked for Nixon and Reagan) as well as Ron Paul on US policy toward Israel. Very, very few Dems now speak this way:
In February 2021 -- more than a year before Russian troops entered Ukraine en masse -- the inspiring democrat, President Zelensky, banned 3 popular opposition TV networks by accusing them of spreading Russian disinformation.
It'd be as if Biden banned Fox or Trump banned CNN:🇺🇦
In 2014 -- after Victoria Nuland, @ChrisMurphyCT, John McCain etc. used NED to fund protests in Kiev to remove the democratically elected leader and replace him with an unelected pro-US puppet -- Kiev began bombing ethnic Russian civilians in Donbas:
@ChrisMurphyCT It's bizarre to watch history re-written in real time to serve war propaganda: how Azov Battalion was described as neo-Nazi by western elites, only to be turned into heroic warriors the minute we armed them.