Thread by @caitoz

'Journalists' Who Smear Assange Are Pure Scum

"There's shit, there's the shit that would come out of shit if shit could shit, and then there's people like @jamesrbuk."
caitlinjohnstone.substack.com/p/journalists-…

I wouldn't have thought that any mass media reporters would have the temerity to continue the public smear campaign against Julian Assange after it became clear to everyone that his case threatens everyone. But if anyone was going to try it, it would be the odious James Ball.

Ball, who as @Suzi3D documented in 2016 has been working within the MSM to destroy Assange's reputation for years, has just published yet another ugly smear piece titled "Julian Assange is no hero. I should know — I lived with him and his awful gang".
contraspin.co.nz/another-day-an…

This would be the same James Ball who "admits to having taken money from the Integrity Initiative, a government and NATO funded propaganda unit designed to shape opinion in a direction hostile towards Russia and favourable towards increased militarism."

https://twitter.com/financialeyes/status/1348224699772395521

This would also be the same James Ball who, a year before Assange was dragged out of the Ecuadorian embassy in which he'd taken political asylum fearing US extradition, authored this:
theguardian.com/commentisfree/…

"There is no public criminal case against Assange or WikiLeaks in the US," Ball argues in his January 2018 article, claiming there is "no real reason to believe anything has changed with Assange’s situation in the US."

If I'd authored an article for a major publication claiming Assange stands no risk of US prosecution and is only staying in the embassy due to "pride", and then that claim proved horrifyingly wrong, I would have shut the entire fuck up about Assange for the rest of my life.

Not James Ball though. There's a certain type of personality that guarantees it will always fail upward because it possesses a remarkable combination of power-worshipping obsequiousness, a total lack of shame, and a complete lack of scruples.

I'm pretty good with words, but I've never succeeded in finding any which adequately articulate the absolute depravity of the mass media smearmeisters who've spent years getting paid to churn out deceitful hit pieces about Assange while he's silenced and unable to defend himself.

There's simply no one lower. There's shit, there's the shit that would come out of shit if shit could shit, and then there's people like James Ball.

But that was the whole idea. That's why they silenced him, long before they dragged him out of the embassy. The empire needed the public to consent to his persecution, and he was running interference on their consent manufacturing campaign.

And now they kick him while he’s down, continuing to stomp his reputation into the ground even as he’s being unjustly locked in Belmarsh after a judge already blocked his extradition.

https://twitter.com/kgosztola/status/1348459603642769409?s=20

The torture and brutalization of Assange has only been made possible by the fact that the public consents to it, and the public only consents to it because of a mass media smear campaign that took place between late 2016 and his arrest in April 2019.

People like James Ball are directly responsible for the empire's ability to make an example of what happens to a journalist who exposes US war crimes, and they must never be forgiven for it.