From TheAgeofTransitions.com Pearse Redmond returns to the show to help us all take a look around at the strange place we find ourselves in now. QAnon has come a long way since the days that Pearse and Robbie Martin would talk about it on a weekly basis. American foreign policy has taken a political backseat […]
Under FBI orders, Facebook and Google removed American Herald Tribune, an alternative site that publishes US and European writers critical…
The post FBI launches open attack on ‘foreign’ alternative media outlets challenging US foreign policy appeared first on The Grayzone.
Max Blumenthal, the editor of independent media outlet The Grayzone, was secretly arrested on October 25 in a “SWAT-style” morning raid on his Washington D.C. home. He was held in D.C. Central Detention Facility for two days incommunicado, without the ability to communicate to the outside world, having been refused a phone call.
Caitlin JOHNSTONE
Alternative media circles have been buzzing for the last two days ever since news broke about the arrest of Grayzone journalist Max Blumenthal, who was reportedly jailed for two days after a SWAT-style police team showed up threatening to break his door down last Friday.
Do you trust the media? Most people don’t. A 2017 study of nine Western countries found that in not one did a majority of people think traditional news or social media sorted fact from fiction well.
“Fake news” is a rather ubiquitous term that has come to be used in US and international media. This term is mainly attributed to President Donald Trump, in reaction to false media narratives about him and his campaign, and after his election to the Presidency, fake news became the modus operandi by which the media establishments sought to destroy the Trump Presidency by inundating the American populace with information that would serve to discourage them from supporting him.
Over the weekend, members and owners of multiple independent media outlets gathered in Houston, Texas to discuss the heavy hand of corporate and government censorship and how to stop it. The meeting was a success with the common theme of peaceful voices refusing to be silenced.
I didn’t realize you were still doing your show!” “Why can’t I see your posts anymore?” “I’ve had to re-follow you several times on Facebook.” These are but a few of the various comments and complaints about my Facebook page that I’ve fielded the past two years. With growing regularity and intensity, the cheery blue “F” has fucked over radical journalists like me, emboldened by the Russiagate and fake news narratives that brand any dissident or alternative media as our generation’s folk devils.
Grayzone Project — This October, Facebook and Twitter deleted the accounts of hundreds of users, including many alternative media outlets maintained by American users. Among those wiped out in the coordinated purge were popular sites that scrutinized police brutality and U.S. interventionism, like The Free Thought Project, Anti-Media, and Cop Block, along with the pages of journalists like Rachel Blevins.
In a sense, blowback is simply another way of saying that a nation reaps what it sows. Although people usually know what they have sown, our national experience of blowback is seldom imagined in such terms because so much of what the managers of the American empire have sown has been kept secret.
It is time to realize, however, that the real dangers to America today come not from the newly rich people of East Asia but from our own ideological rigidity, our deep-seated belief in our own propaganda.
