Censorship, fake news, perception management

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Children in classroom, unidentified school, King County, Washington, 1909 (via Wikimedia).

Curriculum of Control: Capital’s Grip on U.S. History Education
By Joe Coleman (Posted Jun 02, 2025)

The Classroom Is a Battleground
Teaching U.S. history in a public high school today is a subversive act. In the face of mounting attacks on education, educators like me are caught between the curriculum we are allowed to teach and the truth students desperately need to understand. It is no exaggeration to say that the classroom has become a political frontline. And like all frontlines, it is shaped by conflict, strategy, and power.

History, at its core, is memory. It is the collective memory of a people—of what happened, why, and who benefited. That’s precisely why those in power have worked so hard to control it. The current wave of censorship efforts in schools is not merely a reaction to culture wars—it is part of a longstanding project to whitewash struggle, depoliticize the classroom, and silence the historical roots of resistance.

This moment is not exceptional. It is a continuation of the American state’s obsession with erasing collective memory in the service of capital, racial hierarchy, and imperial mythmaking.

Manufacturing Consensus
The American education system was never designed to produce critical thinkers. It was built to create compliant workers. From its earliest iterations, schooling was a tool of social reproduction, not social transformation. By the mid-20th century—especially after World War II—the U.S. government and corporate foundations made a concerted effort to reshape curricula to align with the ideological demands of Cold War capitalism.

Curricula were rewritten, and textbooks reprinted, to emphasize patriotic themes, American exceptionalism, and the naturalness of the free market.¹ Leftist and labor histories were either omitted entirely or presented as dangerous deviations. Historian Ellen Schrecker notes that during this period, even university professors came under intense scrutiny for espousing views that questioned U.S. policy or praised the achievements of socialist movements.²

This was not merely academic gatekeeping—it was ideological warfare. Teaching students that history is shaped by material struggle and systemic oppression posed a threat to the political and economic status quo. So the state responded as it always has: with repression disguised as reform.

From McCarthyism to Moms for Liberty
The current explosion of laws banning the teaching of Critical Race Theory is not an isolated phenomenon. It belongs to a long lineage of efforts to police what students can learn and what teachers can say.

During the McCarthy era, educators were among the first casualties. Thousands were investigated, fired, or forced to sign loyalty oaths swearing allegiance to the U.S. government and denouncing communism.³ The 1958 National Defense Education Act linked federal funds to political conformity, further entrenching a culture of surveillance in American schools.⁴

Fast forward to today, and we see a parallel dynamic—only now, the language has changed. In 2022, Florida Governor Ron DeSantis signed the Stop WOKE Act, legislation that prohibits teaching students anything that might cause them to feel “guilt, anguish, or discomfort” about historical systems of racism or privilege.⁵ The law does not define these terms clearly, which is precisely the point: its vagueness creates a chilling effect, where teachers self-censor to avoid retaliation.

Simultaneously, DeSantis and other Republican officials have weaponized parent groups like Moms for Liberty to flood school board meetings with demands to ban books on race, gender, and sexuality. In the 2022–23 school year alone, over 3,300 books were removed from school libraries across the U.S., including classics like Beloved and The Bluest Eye by Toni Morrison, which centers Black girlhood and systemic violence.⁶

This assault has intensified with Florida’s “Don’t Say Gay” law, which bans classroom instruction on sexual orientation and gender identity in all grades.⁷ LGBTQ+ history—already underrepresented in most curricula—has now been legislated into invisibility.

Florida’s Curriculum as State Propaganda
Few states have embraced this reactionary model more fully than Florida. The “Stop WOKE Act” and “Don’t Say Gay” law are only the surface. In July 2023, the Florida Department of Education approved new African American history standards that included a line stating: “Instruction includes how slaves developed skills which, in some instances, could be applied for their personal benefit.”⁸ This appears in the middle school social studies curriculum, introducing preteens to the idea that slavery may have functioned as a form of job training.

This revision is not an anomaly—it is a test balloon. And it reflects a grotesque continuity with the “happy slave” myth used by pro-slavery advocates to justify human bondage. It is the ideological equivalent of saying a prisoner learned useful carpentry while behind bars—without mentioning the chains, the whip, or the fact that they were never free to leave.
Florida’s standards also mandate instruction on “acts of violence perpetrated by African Americans” during Reconstruction, while omitting white violence entirely, including the thousands of lynchings and anti-Black massacres that defined the post-emancipation South.⁹

What makes Florida’s model especially dangerous is its scale and ambition. The DeSantis administration has actively exported its policies, encouraging other Republican-controlled states to adopt similar curriculum bans and surveillance regimes. Florida now functions as an ideological laboratory for a new form of educational authoritarianism—one that punishes teachers, erases marginalized identities, and trains students in historical amnesia.

Textbook Censorship
One of the most overlooked but powerful battlegrounds in the fight over historical memory is the textbook industry. In theory, textbooks are supposed to reflect the academic consensus of trained historians. In practice, they are written and edited by committees beholden not to truth, but to the market.

Major publishers like Pearson and McGraw-Hill do not produce a single, national version of their U.S. history texts. Instead, they publish state-specific versions—one for California, one for Texas, one for Florida—each carefully edited to satisfy the ideological and political demands of state boards.¹⁰ In Texas, the state board of education has demanded that the transatlantic slave trade be described as the “Atlantic triangular trade,” and that capitalism be praised as the world’s greatest wealth-generating system.¹¹ California textbooks may include more about Cesar Chavez, but they still sanitize class struggle and rarely mention contemporary labor resistance. In Florida, publishers are now required to omit the terms “systemic racism,” “white privilege,” and “gender identity” entirely from state-approved materials.¹²

The reason for this fragmentation isn’t pedagogy—it’s profit. With millions of dollars in textbook contracts on the line, publishers are incentivized to appease the most conservative, politically repressive states. What results is not an education system rooted in inquiry and evidence but a marketplace of sanitized history, where the content students receive is determined not by scholarly rigor but by what offends the fewest school boards.

This is capitalism in action. The commodification of curriculum means that historical memory is filtered through a profit motive. Instead of producing texts that challenge students to think critically about inequality, empire, and resistance, publishers churn out ideology dressed as information. Textbooks become products. Truth becomes a liability.

And because states like Texas and Florida purchase textbooks in such high volume, their choices often shape national standards. Smaller states frequently adopt the content from these larger buyers to avoid the cost of customization. In effect, the most reactionary politics of a few states become the de facto curriculum for the entire country.

This is not merely educational censorship—it is the privatization of knowledge.

Teaching While Watched
Today’s teachers operate in a state of soft surveillance. Administrators monitor lesson plans. Parents film classroom discussions. Conservative organizations mine social media posts for “evidence” of ideological bias. Teachers have been fired for displaying Black Lives Matter flags, for using the word “oppression,” or for acknowledging the existence of trans students.¹³

Standardized testing and scripted curriculum have also served to narrow the space for pedagogical freedom. A 2021 report by the Rand Corporation found that 60% of teachers report feeling pressure to avoid “controversial topics,” even when those topics are in their state’s official standards.¹⁴

This is repression not through outright censorship, but through the constant threat of discipline—professional, legal, or financial.

Memory Is a Threat to Power
Why does the state fear historical truth? Because it knows that understanding history is the first step to changing the future. To teach that slavery was not an aberration but a cornerstone of American capitalism, to show how labor unions were built through blood and sabotage, to connect the lynching tree to the modern prison system—these lessons do not leave students unchanged. They leave them armed with clarity.

That’s what today’s repression is really about: making sure the next generation doesn’t connect the dots.

Resistance in the Classroom: A Living Tradition
Despite these conditions, educators are resisting. Across the country, teachers have organized “banned book clubs,” underground curriculum exchanges, and mutual aid networks to support one another. Some have transformed their classrooms into micro-sites of liberation—teaching A People’s History of the United States, screening 13th, or drawing direct lines between the Dust Bowl and today’s climate refugees.

They draw on a long history of resistance. During Reconstruction, freed people established schools under the threat of death. During Jim Crow, Black teachers developed “hidden curricula” that taught students about their true history under the radar of white school boards.¹⁵

What We Teach Is What We Fight For
The classroom is not neutral. It never has been. It is either a tool of domination or a space of possibility. As a teacher, I know I cannot fully liberate my students inside a system designed to contain them—but I can give them the language to name what’s happening, and the courage to imagine something better.

To teach honestly is to fight. And that fight continues every day in classrooms across the country—under surveillance, under threat, but never in silence.

Notes
1. Michael Parenti, Democracy for the Few, 9th ed. (Boston: Wadsworth, 2010), 145–149.

2. Ellen Schrecker, No Ivory Tower: McCarthyism and the Universities (New York: Oxford University Press, 1986), 33–56.

3. Ibid., 97–102.

4. James W. Loewen, Lies My Teacher Told Me: Everything Your American History Textbook Got Wrong (New York: New Press, 1995), 45.

5. Florida Senate Bill 148, “Stop WOKE Act,” 2022, https://www.flsenate.gov/Session/Bill/2022/148.

6. PEN America, “Banned in the USA: The Growing Movement to Censor Books in Schools,” September 2023, https://pen.org/report/book-bans-2023/.

7. Florida House Bill 1557, “Parental Rights in Education” (a.k.a. “Don’t Say Gay”), 2022, https://www.flsenate.gov/Session/Bill/2022/1557.

8. Florida Department of Education, “2023 State Academic Standards for Social Studies,” https://www.fldoe.org/core/fileparse.ph ... ndards.pdf.

9. Equal Justice Initiative, “Lynching in America: Confronting the Legacy of Racial Terror,” 3rd ed. (EJI, 2017), https://lynchinginamerica.eji.org/report/.

10. Dana Goldstein, “Texas Conservatives Rewrite Textbooks to Fit Their View of History,” New York Times, July 3, 2015, https://www.nytimes.com/2015/07/04/us/t ... story.html.

11. Stephanie Saul, “Publishers Are Catering to the Textbook Demands of Texas and Florida. That Should Worry Us All,” ProPublica, October 12, 2023, https://www.propublica.org/article/text ... as-florida.

12. Florida Department of Education, “Social Studies Instructional Materials Review,” 2023, https://www.fldoe.org.

13. NBC News, “Teachers Who Back LGBTQ Rights Face Harassment and Termination,” August 2023.

14. RAND Corporation, “Teachers’ Views on Critical Race Theory and Censorship,” 2021, https://www.rand.org/pubs/research_repo ... 108-1.html.

15. Heather Andrea Williams, Self-Taught: African American Education in Slavery and Freedom (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2005).

https://mronline.org/2025/06/02/curricu ... education/

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Zen And The Art Of New York Times Headline Writing

It’s amazing how creative these freaks get when they need to publicly exonerate Israel and its western allies of their crimes.

Caitlin Johnstone
June 5, 2025


The New York Times has just published one of the most insane headlines I have ever seen it publish, which is really saying something.

“Gaza’s Deadly Aid Deliveries,” the title blares.

If you were among the majority of people who only skim the headline without reading the rest of the article, you would have no idea that Israel has spent the last few days massacring starving civilians at aid sites and lying about it. You would also have no idea that it is Israel who’s been starving them in the first place.


The headline is written in such a passive, amorphous way that it sounds like the aid deliveries themselves are deadly. Like the bags of flour are picking up assault rifles and firing on desperate Palestinians queuing for food or something.

The sub-headline is no better: “Israel’s troops have repeatedly shot near food distribution sites.”

Oh? They’ve shot “near” food distribution sites, have they? Could their discharging their weapons in close proximity to the aid sites possibly have something to do with the aforementioned deadliness of the aid deliveries? Are we the readers supposed to connect these two pieces of information for ourselves, or are we meant to view them as two separate data points which may or may not have anything to with one another?

The article itself makes it clear that Israel has admitted that IDF troops fired their weapons “near” people waiting for aid after they failed to respond to “warning shots”, so you don’t have to be Sherlock Holmes to figure out what happened here. But in mainstream publications the headlines are written by editors, not by the journalists who write the articles, so they get to frame the story in whatever way suits their propaganda agenda for the majority who never read past the headline.


We saw another amazingly manipulative New York Times headline last month, “Israeli Soldiers Fire in Air to Disperse Western Diplomats in West Bank,” about the IDF firing “warning shots” at a delegation of foreign officials attempting to visit Jenin.

This was a story which provoked outcry and condemnation throughout the western world, but look at the lengths the New York Times editor went to in order to frame the IDF’s actions in the most innocent way possible. They were firing into the air. They were firing “to disperse western diplomats”—like that’s a thing. Like diplomats are crows on a cornfield or something. Oh yeah, ya know ya get too many diplomats flockin’ around and ya gotta fire a few rounds to disperse ’em. Just normal stuff.

It’s amazing how creative these freaks get when they need to publicly exonerate Israel and its western allies of their crimes. The IDF commits a war crime and suddenly these stuffy mass media editors who’ve never created any art in their lives transform into poets, bending and twisting the English language to come up with lines that read more like Zen koans than reporting on an important news event.

It’s impossible to have too much disdain for these people.

https://caitlinjohnstone.com.au/2025/06 ... e-writing/

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Western media complicit in Kiev regime’s terrorism

June 6, 2025

Western media silence and distortion are not merely disgraceful false propaganda. It is complicity in war crimes by giving cover and license for more.

Western news media have given up the pretense of being independent and impartial sources of information. American and European mainstream outlets are nothing but propaganda services for the NATO proxy war against Russia.

That observation is hardly new. Since the NATO-backed coup in Kiev in 2014, the Western media have systematically and relentlessly whitewashed the NeoNazi regime and its strategic purpose as a cat’s paw to embroil Russia in conflict. Russia’s inevitable military response to the decade-long proxy war has been distorted as “unprovoked aggression” against “democratic” Ukraine.

The Western “news media” have now outed themselves for the propaganda functionaries that they are. The veil is shredded.

Last weekend, the NATO-backed Kiev regime deliberately attacked a civilian passenger train in Russia’s Bryansk region. Seven people were killed and over 100 were injured after a bridge was blown up, crashing down on a train passing underneath. The death toll could have been much higher, given the hundreds on board.

Within hours of that heinous act, a second train was derailed when a bridge it was traveling over in Kursk was blown up. Mercifully, there were no deaths in the second attack despite several injuries.

Three more explosions have been reported on Russia’s railways this week: another in Bryansk and two in the Voronezh and Belgorod regions.

These calculated acts to cause maximum civilian casualties by the Ukrainian regime and its NATO enablers are nothing short of state terrorism. They are war crimes of the first magnitude.

Yet the Western media, like the Western governments, have maintained a shameful and damning silence on these crimes. One can imagine the outpouring of condemnation if Russia were to carry out such attacks, deliberately targeting civilians in Ukraine.

Instead, the Western “news” outlets gave prominent coverage of the drone attacks on Russia’s airfields. Certainly, the targeting of five airbases where Russian nuclear-capable bomber aircraft are stationed was big news.

However, Western media reports let their colors show by being ecstatic in tone about an “audacious” operation, amplifying unverified Ukrainian claims that 40 aircraft were destroyed. Britain’s Daily Telegraph and other Western outlets shared video of one plane exploding, headlining with glee that “Putin’s bombers” were knocked out.

For its part, the Russian military said that most of the drones were intercepted and only a few aircraft were damaged.

None of the Western outlets reported on the obvious role that NATO intelligence must have played in such a recklessly provocative attack on Russia’s strategic defenses. As such, the Western media is covering up for what could be deemed an act of war on Russia.

The gloating propagandist reporting on the airfield raids was in stark contrast to the relative silence over the terrorist attack on the passenger train.

U.S.-based ABC headlined with “Ukraine targets Russian airfields in major drone attack” and relayed dramatic details of the operation. It was only much further down in the report that ABC mentioned the deadly train explosion, as if it were a minor incident.

It reported: “Elsewhere, at least seven people were killed and 66 injured when a railway bridge collapsed and a train derailed in Russia’s western Bryansk region overnight.”

Note how ABC makes out that a bridge collapsed as if by gravity without explosive sabotage. It goes on to distort the terror attack by quoting a Ukrainian regime propagandist who insinuates that the wreckage was somehow carried out by Russia. The warped logic dignified by ABC was that the Russians carried out a fiendish false-flag ploy to scuttle negotiations that were due to take place the following day in Istanbul between Russian and Ukrainian delegates.

The British BBC deployed the same reprehensible disinformation. Its headline was: “At least seven dead after two Russian bridges collapse.”

Again, according to the BBC, bridges just collapse on passenger trains. Like ABC, the BBC buries important Russian information implicating Ukrainian responsibility for detonating explosives in the mass murder of civilians.

Significantly, the BBC also quotes the same Ukrainian regime propaganda source, Andriy Kovalenko, aired by ABC, who is described as “head of Ukraine’s National Security and Defence Council’s Centre for Countering Disinformation.” He is also permitted by the British outlet to accuse Russia of self-inflicted terrorism, allegedly “laying the groundwork to derail the negotiations” in Istanbul.

With blatant distortion, Western media are minimizing what are outrageous acts of terrorism by the NATO-weaponized regime. Sickeningly, deliberate acts of murdering civilians by the NATO-backed regime are twisted upside down as Russian dirty tricks.

Of course, Western media are obliged to tell lies to cover up crimes by their governments and their proxies. In that case, they have lost their pious and pretentious claims of being “independent media”. They are abject propaganda tools, dressed up with self-ordained virtue. And still they have the arrogance to accuse other nations’ media of being state-run propaganda. This charade by Western media has been running for a long time, decades and indeed centuries. It has always been a charade. It’s now flagrantly obvious. No wonder so many Western citizens have contempt for their mainstream media.

The peace talks in Istanbul – the second round was held earlier this week – to try to find an end to the proxy war in Ukraine have largely come about because of Moscow’s initiative. American President Donald Trump’s declared wish to end the conflict has brought the Kiev regime to the table. It is not clear if the talks will succeed.

In the meantime, it is abundantly clear that the NATO axis on both sides of the Atlantic wants the proxy war to continue.

Carrying out provocations and terrorist crimes against civilians is aimed at sabotaging any diplomatic effort.

Russia responded in recent days to the terror assaults last weekend with massive bombardments on Ukraine’s military sites.

Russian President Vladimir Putin warned Trump in a phone call mid-week that retaliation was imminent.

Western media reported Russia’s air strikes by giving prominence to the deaths of five civilians, according to Ukrainian officials. Russia claims it is not deliberately targeting civilian centers. That is an important distinction compared with the NATO-backed regime.

As usual, the latest Russian strikes were reported without a single mention of the terrorist murders of civilians in Russia. It is an all-too-familiar and deplorable pattern of bias. Russian lives are worthless, evidently from the Western perspective.

The one-sided Western media dereliction of journalism is seen over and over again throughout the proxy war in Ukraine. In another notorious distortion this week, the nuclear power plant in Zaporozhye – the biggest in Europe – came under drone attack from the Kiev regime. There were no reports in the Western media of this nuclear terrorism to contaminate Europe. When Western media reported on previous attacks on the ZNPP (by the Kiev forces), it absurdly claimed that Russia is doing the sabotage on a power plant under its control. Just like supposedly blowing up its own trains and citizens.

Western media silence and distortion are not merely disgraceful false propaganda. It is complicity in war crimes by giving cover and license for more.

https://strategic-culture.su/news/2025/ ... terrorism/

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Your Smartphone Is a Parasite, According To Evolution
Posted on June 8, 2025 by Conor Gallagher

Conor here: As Lenin wrote, “the rentier state is a state of parasitic, decaying capitalism, and this circumstance cannot fail to influence all the socio-political conditions of the countries concerned…” Maybe nothing has influenced it more than the most successful parasite of the modern age.

By Rachael L. Brown. She is the Director of the Centre for Philosophy of the Sciences and an Associate Professor at the School of Philosophy in the Research School of Social Sciences at the Australian National University. She also has podcast on the philosophy of science. Also by Rob Brooks, an evolutionary biologist who thinks and writes about how evolved minds and cultures interact with the 21st-century world. Originally published at The Conversation.

Head lice, fleas and tapeworms have been humanity’s companions throughout our evolutionary history. Yet, the greatest parasite of the modern age is no blood-sucking invertebrate. It is sleek, glass-fronted and addictive by design. Its host? Every human on Earth with a wifi signal.

Far from being benign tools, smartphones parasitise our time, our attention and our personal information, all in the interests of technology companies and their advertisers.

In a new article in the Australasian Journal of Philosophy, we argue smartphones pose unique societal risks, which come into sharp focus when viewed through the lens of parasitism.

What, Exactly, Is a Parasite?

Evolutionary biologists define a parasite as a species that benefits from a close relationship with another species – its host – while the host bears a cost.

The head louse, for example, is entirely dependent on our own species for its survival. They only eat human blood, and if they become dislodged from their host, they survive only briefly unless they are fortunate enough to fall onto another human scalp. In return for our blood, head lice give us nothing but a nasty itch; that’s the cost.

Smartphones have radically changed our lives. From navigating cities to managing chronic health diseases such as diabetes, these pocket-sized bits of tech make our lives easier. So much so that most of us are rarely without them.

Yet, despite their benefits, many of us are hostage to our phones and slaves to the endless scroll, unable to fully disconnect. Phone users are paying the price with a lack of sleep, weaker offline relationships and mood disorders.

From Mutualism to Parasitism

Not all close species relationships are parasitic. Many organisms that live on or inside us are beneficial.

Consider the bacteria in the digestive tracts of animals. They can only survive and reproduce in the gut of their host species, feeding on nutrients passing through. But they provide benefits to the host, including improved immunity and better digestion. These win-win associations are called mutualisms.

The human-smartphone association began as a mutualism. The technology proved useful to humans for staying in touch, navigating via maps and finding useful information.

Philosophers have spoken of this not in terms of mutualism, but rather as phones being an extension of the human mind, like notebooks, maps and other tools.

From these benign origins, however, we argue the relationship has become parasitic. Such a change is not uncommon in nature; a mutualist can evolve to become a parasite, or vice versa.

Smartphones as Parasites

As smartphones have become near-indispensible, some of the most popular apps they offer have come to serve the interests of the app-making companies and their advertisers more faithfully than those of their human users.

These apps are designed to nudge our behaviour to keep us scrolling, clicking on advertising and simmering in perpetual outrage.

The data on our scrolling behaviour is used to further that exploitation. Your phone only cares about your personal fitness goals or desire to spend more quality time with your kids to the extent that it uses this information to tailor itself to better capture your attention.

So, it can be useful to think of users and their phones as akin to hosts and their parasites – at least some of the time.

While this realisation is interesting in and of itself, the benefit of viewing smartphones through the evolutionary lens of parasitism comes into its own when considering where the relationship might head next – and how we could thwart these high-tech parasites.

Where Policing Comes In

On the Great Barrier Reef, bluestreak cleaner wrasse establish “cleaning stations” where larger fish allow the wrasse to feed on dead skin, loose scales and invertebrate parasites living in their gills. This relationship is a classic mutualism – the larger fish lose costly parasites and the cleaner wrasse get fed.


A bluestreak cleaner wrasse at work cleaning the mouth of a goatfish. Wayne and Pam Osborn/iNaturalist, CC BY-NC

Sometimes the cleaner wrasse “cheat” and nip their hosts, tipping the scale from mutualism to parasitism. The fish being cleaned may punish offenders by chasing them away or withholding further visits. In this, the reef fish exhibit something evolutionary biologists see as important to keeping mutualisms in balance: policing.

Could we adequately police our exploitation by smartphones and restore a net-beneficial relationship?

Evolution shows that two things are key: an ability to detect exploitation when it occurs, and the capacity to respond (typically by withdrawing service to the parasite).

A Difficult Battle

In the case of the smartphone, we can’t easily detect the exploitation. Tech companies that design the various features and algorithms to keep you picking up your phone aren’t advertising this behaviour.

But even if you’re aware of the exploitative nature of smartphone apps, responding is also more difficult than simply putting the phone down.

Many of us have become reliant on smartphones for everyday tasks. Rather than remembering facts, we offload the task to digital devices – for some people, this can change their cognition and memory.

We depend on having a camera for capturing life events or even just recording where we parked the car. This both enhances and limits our memory of events.

Governments and companies have only further cemented our dependence on our phones, by moving their service delivery online via mobile apps. Once we pick up the phone to access our bank accounts or access government services, we’ve lost the battle.

How then can users redress the imbalanced relationship with their phones, turning the parasitic relationship back to a mutualistic one?

Our analysis suggests individual choice can’t reliably get users there. We are individually outgunned by the massive information advantage tech companies hold in the host-parasite arms race.

The Australian government’s under-age social media ban is an example of the kind of collective action required to limit what these parasites can legally do. To win the battle, we will also need restrictions on app features known to be addictive, and on the collection and sale of our personal data.



https://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2025/06 ... ution.html

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Israel Is Bombing Iran. Here Are Some Future New York Times Headlines.

Israel has launched an extensive series of airstrikes on Iran. The western media are of course unquestioningly regurgitating the Israeli government’s evidence-free claim that these strikes were “preemptive”. The Trump regime is attempting to spin this as a completely unilateral Israeli attack which had…

Caitlin Johnstone
June 13, 2025

Israel has launched an extensive series of airstrikes on Iran.

The western media are of course unquestioningly regurgitating the Israeli government’s evidence-free claim that these strikes were “preemptive”.

The Trump regime is attempting to spin this as a completely unilateral Israeli attack which had nothing to do with the United States — a claim you could be forgiven for believing if you were born yesterday.

Here’s a list of future headlines we can expect from The New York Times:

– Iranian strikes rock Israel in unprovoked attack.

– Israeli families take shelter amid antisemitic terror bombing.

– Israeli defense minister: U.S. campus protesters somehow knew about Iranian strikes in advance, indicating Tehran coordination.

– Trump privately voices frustration with Netanyahu over Iran conflict the U.S. is just passively, innocently witnessing.

– American Jews feeling anxious, unsupported amid spiraling wars in the Middle East.

– Opinion: I feared for my life during airstrikes on Tel Aviv. Nobody in the world can possibly understand what this is like.

– Opinion: Is the U.S. at risk of being drawn into another Middle Eastern war?

– Opinion: Is the U.S. stumbling into another Middle Eastern war?

– Opinion: Is the U.S. accidentally oopsie poopsie bungling into another Middle Eastern war?

– Opinion: Is the U.S. being dragged kicking and screaming into a war in the Middle East, something it historically tries to avoid at all cost?

– US launches strikes on Iran in preemptive attack.

– Opinion: Is the U.S. being sucked into a third world war?

– Opinion: Is the U.S. tumbling headlong into a nuclear exchange with Russia and China?

– Opinion: The sky is darkening as nuclear radiation creeps across our land, so we must all come together and condemn Hamas.

– Opinion: The earth is a barren wasteland. Nothing remains. Check on your Jewish friends.

https://caitlinjohnstone.com.au/2025/06 ... headlines/

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Rockers of the Empire: How the US Pays to Sing Against the Revolution
June 12, 2025


Late Venezuelan President Hugo Chávez holding an electric guitar during a political rally. Photo: File photo.

By Víctor Lara – Jun 11, 2025

“The Venezuelan opposition’s primary election campaigns were paid for by USAID, they lied about the mechanism they were using,” stated Diasdado Cabello, first vice president of the United Socialist Party of Venezuela (PSUV), at a press conference on February 3. “We’re going to show you, we’re going to show you who they financed: Súmate, Provea, and even rock bands.”

Rock bands? But what is Diosdado Cabello talking about when he talks about rock bands? Here’s the story.

The Venezuelan government has already reported on several occasions that, through various NGOs funded by front organizations for the US entity and European governments, they have managed to produce events and attract personalities from the world of culture, in which this musical genre is no exception.

Two branches of the US Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) are said to be the most active in promoting these destabilizing plans: the National Endowment for Democracy (NED), and the US Agency for International Development (USAID).

Cultural Cold War
Let’s see how this practice is nothing new. Since its creation in 1947, the CIA began conducting psychological operations using culture, and many of its influencers, especially in Europe, to instill anti-communist thinking and facilitate the pursuit of US colonial foreign policy interests abroad.

In the midst of the Cold War (post-World War II), when the Soviet bloc was strengthening its presence in Europe, the battlefield shifted from the trenches to the mind, with the aim of imposing a dominant ideology that arose from the struggle between the two blocs that were vying for the new global geopolitics.

At the time, Washington was promoting the Truman Doctrine and the well-known “Marshall Plan,” which would serve as a means of “reconstruction” for Europe after the devastation left by the war. However, the actions undertaken by Washington were not based on their altruistic pretensions.

“These countries were also secretly expected to assume other responsibilities ‘in support of the Cold War,’ and to this end, Marshall Plan funds were soon allocated to promote cultural struggle in the West,” reads Frances Stonor Saunders’ book, The CIA and the Cultural Cold War.

The tactic was simple: to use “covert actions,” which were defined, as the book quotes, as any “clandestine activity intended to influence foreign governments, events, organizations, or persons in support of US foreign policy, carried out in such a way as to conceal US involvement.”

The CIA, through the Office of Policy Coordination (OPC), created multiple front agencies to fund the spearheads of the “Cultural Cold War.”

From there was born the so-called Congress for Cultural Freedom, an event promoting other major events in Europe, such as the Festival of Masterpieces of the 20th Century, held in Paris, France, in 1952. “During the next thirty days, the Congress for Cultural Freedom filled Paris with hundreds of symphonies, concerts, operas and ballets by seventy composers of the 20th century,” states the aforementioned text.

But that event produced what would ultimately prove to be the trial run for what NGOs do today. The Farfield Foundation, a CIA front, positioned itself as “an apparently credible congressional backer,” with the help of billionaire Julius Junkie Fleischmann, the Foundation’s first president, who raised large sums of money for the aforementioned purposes.

“His personal fortune and various artistic patronages made him a perfect and credible front for the CIA in the Congress for Cultural Freedom,” the book says, also citing an interview with former CIA agent Tom Branden in which he states, “We used the names of the foundations for many purposes, but the foundation only existed on paper.”

Since then, these practices have continued unabated, and several changes in government around the world have been carried out through this strategy. This is why the US empire’s government and its European allies have also encouraged such actions since the arrival of the Bolivarian Revolution in 1999.

First attempts in Venezuela
The US empire’s actions in this regard have been seen since the beginning of what has been called the Fifth Republic in Venezuela, using its diplomatic personnel in order to do so.

In March 2008, then-ambassador of the US empire to Venezuela, Patrick Duddy, had requested funding from USAID and the US Department of Defense to hold “rock concerts and music festivals.”

A year later, in September, the Venezuelan-American Center of Zulia would serve as the epicenter for the Cevaz Rock & Pop Festival at the Sambil Mall facilities in Maracaibo.

The event’s purpose is to “raise funds to support the scholarship programs offered by the binational cultural center,” according to a CEVAZ review.

Duddy, accused of being part of the conspiracy against the government of Evo Morales in Bolivia in 2008, was expelled by Commander Hugo Chávez with the legendary phrase, “Go to hell, you fucking Yankees!” in the same year.

However, when Barack Obama arrived at the White House in 2009, Venezuela lifted the ban on Duddy, and he was again sent as ambassador to Venezuela until July 16, 2010.

Color Revolution
In 2011, a new event would take place, reflecting the US imperial government’s efforts to overthrow President Hugo Chávez, using cultural events and rock bands as a cover.

This plot was revealed on May 27, 2020, by Tim Gill, a sociology professor at the University of North Carolina, within the US entity, after obtaining declassified documents through the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA).

The professor, through a message on his X account, evidences the links between the NED and the financing of Venezuelan rock groups for these purposes.

“In 2011, the US, through the National Endowment for Democracy, funded rock groups in Venezuela to write songs about freedom of expression,” reads the social media post. “They hired a producer, recorded the songs, and distributed them.”

Gill explained in an article that, under the terms of the agreement, Venezuelan bands would compete against each other in a national competition, and the winners would perform a final concert in Caracas.

In this particular agreement, the researcher adds, the NED subtly notes the project’s objectives as “promoting greater reflection among young Venezuelans on freedom of expression, its connection to democracy, and the state of democracy in the country.”

The project would be funded with $22,970, funds that were to be used for song production and concerts with emerging bands. A quick internet search reveals that several urban music festivals, including rock, were held in various parts of the country in 2011.

Among the best known are WTFest (Anzoategui state and Caracas), Ni Tan Nuevas Bandas (whose last edition was July 9, 2011, involving nine local rock bands), 100% Venezuelan Rock Festival (Carabobo state), Música Sin Mordaza (several states in the country), and Unión Rock Show (Miranda state).

No gag on the attack
In his article, Gill reveals that the NED would use the NGO A World Without Gags for these destabilizing purposes. The NGO was founded in 2009 and, according to its website, “throughout its ten years of operation, the organization has grown beyond its borders, with volunteers throughout the country and the world, to coordinate campaigns using music, art, cultural events, new technologies, and online activism to promote human rights and democratic values in Venezuela.”

The organization is led by Rodrigo Diamanti, who has been behind various destabilizing campaigns against the Bolivarian Revolution. He graduated from the Andrés Bello Catholic University (UCAB), and was part of the “White Hands,” a tropicalization of the “Color Revolution” movement known as Otpor, which overthrew governments in Eastern Europe. He was also part of the self-proclaimed “Student Movement,” formed by the US colony’s government in Venezuela.


Diamanti, second from left, in 2011 as part of the “White Hands” Movement that promoted the Guarimbas in the country. Photo: File photo.

“Since 2005, Washington has been redirecting resources through the NED and USAID toward the student sector in Venezuela. Of the $15 million invested and channeled by these US agencies in Venezuela, more than 32% is directed toward young people,” recalls an article published on the Rebelion website, entitled “Washington organizes student network against Venezuela, Cuba, and Iran.”

This work would be carried out under the guise of Freedom House, an anti-communist think tank founded in 1941 that specializes in psychological warfare. It arrived in Venezuela in 2005 with funding from USAID “to advise and finance various groups, emerging NGOs and opposition projects.”

Diamanti, who at the time represented the organization Futuro Presente (created by far-right Yon Goicochea, dedicated to “the training of young political leaders”), participated in a 2010 meeting called “Activists for Freedom and Human Rights” in Dallas, Texas, hosted by Freedom House and the George W. Bush Institute.

In 2015, the year Obama was about to formalize his decree labeling Venezuela as “an unusual and extraordinary threat to the security of the United States,” Un Mundo Sin Mordaza (A World Without a Gag) and Rodrigo Gonsalves, singer of the Venezuelan rock band Viniloversus, launched a joint project “that links art with human rights.”


The NGO Sin Mordaza has endorsed Rodrigo Gonsalves (middle), vocalist of the band Viniloversus. Photo: File photo.

Diamanti explained that the concert’s purpose was for Venezuelans to “feel supported by music in these difficult times,” while the artist himself justified the collaboration by making spurious claims such as that the “government violates the human rights” of the population.


Organizing the 2012 Sin Mordaza Awards to encourage opposition voting ahead of the presidential elections. Photo: File photo.

Four years later, Diamanti, as the president of the right-wing NGO, was also one of the producers of the “Live Aid” concert in Cúcuta, Colombia, promoted by British magnate Richard Branson.

“When we needed help most, Richard Branson rose to the occasion,” the president of A World Without Gags said in a post on Instagram on February 23, 2019.

It should be remembered that this event served as cover for the invasion supported by Juan Guaidó and other far-right leaders from Venezuela and Latin America, under the guise of bringing “humanitarian aid” financed by USAID.


Diamanti alongside British tycoon Richard Branson before promoting the invasion in 2019. Photo: File photo.

The two had already met in 2014 at the World Economic Forum in Davos. There, Diamanti posted on Instagram that Branson was “one of his favorite people in the world.”

Anti-Chavista rock
The US empire’s strategy was no coincidence, a tactic to respond to events like GillmanFest, a landmark of revolutionary rock that drew large audiences across six Venezuelan states in 2011.

“We’re talking about events that drew 15,000 or 20,000 people, mostly young people,” Ennio Di Marcantonio, a Venezuelan rock and metal journalist and researcher, told Últimas Noticias.


GillmanFest became a critical hub for Washington’s interests in the country. Photo: File photo.

The specialist noted that rock music originated from enslaved Africans working on 19th-century US colonial plantations, evolving from blues into its modern form.

“It seems the US was truly outraged that Venezuelan rock—made in Venezuela—attracted more people to support the Bolivarian Revolution than any opposition effort,” the journalist emphasized. “The idea of creating anti-Chavista rock failed because there were no bands for that.”

This explains why Di Marcantonio questioned how large events, like those organized by the Unión Rock Show Foundation, took place. While free to attend, their sponsorship remained unclear, suggesting possible foreign funding.

KAS also enters the game
One such institution, Di Marcantonio noted, is Germany’s Goethe Institute, which promoted supposed cultural exchanges between Venezuelan and European rock bands.

The researcher explained the institute is part of the Konrad Adenauer Stiftung (KAS), denounced by Venezuelan authorities for funding subversive groups.

“They financed Venezuela’s riots alongside organizations like George Soros’ Open Society Institute, one of the world’s greatest destabilizers of democracies,” he added. “These groups work to overthrow progressive governments opposing US interests.”

KAS has been linked to extremist political party Justice First (PJ), according to the article “The Third Sector as ‘Soft’ Imperialism: Interference of the Konrad Adenauer Stiftung (KAS) in Latin America and the Caribbean.”

It also funds the Institute for Political and Social Studies, Training, and Action (FORMA), which hosted far-right Vente Venezuela politicians María Corina Machado and Edmundo González ahead of the 2024 presidential elections.

Provea and New Bands Festival
Another active Venezuelan NGO funding rock events is Provea, which claims to defend human rights but faces criticism for destabilizing actions.

“It’s not Provea, it’s ProCIA, they’ve worked for the CIA since the 1990s,” President Nicolás Maduro said in 2024 during a Miranda state rally, condemning the NGO.

While Provea’s general coordinator Rafael Uzcátegui denies receiving US imperial State Department funding “due to the high political cost,” he admits resources come from “the German government and the US-based Open Society Institute.”

Provea has backed numerous pop rock events, particularly through the New Bands Foundation that has promoted emerging groups since the early 1990s.

The foundation is led by Felix Allueva, who, in numerous interviews, has called Venezuela’s government “authoritarian and populist,” claiming it only supports leftist groups.

In 2018, Provea released the album “Rock Against the Dictatorship,” featuring 16 bands. It was distributed for free at the Lima Summit of the Americas.


Provea appears as the main sponsor in several editions of the New Bands Festival. Photo: File photo.

The Goethe Institute also partnered with the Nuevas Bandas Foundation, which, in 2020, promoted an event condemned by the Corazón Rokero Foundation for allegedly coercing bands into creating anti-government music under the guise of a “rock-for-medicine compilation.”

In 2019, the foundations collaborated on events from April 25-28 commemorating the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989.


Poster for the event “Music Before and After the Wall,” in which the Nuevas Bandas Foundation participated. Photo: File photo.

Notably, bands like Caramelos de Cianuro, who participated in Nuevas Bandas 1992, performed at lockdown protests in Miranda state municipalities Chacao, Baruta, and El Hatillo, reportedly during COVID-19 social distancing restrictions.


In May 2020, Caramelos de Cianuro performed in Chacao during lockdown. Photo: File photo.
Venezuela has become one of the countries where the strategy of financing musical groups has been implemented, just as was done in Cuba with hip hop, according to the US empire-based Associated Press. However, in both cases, these actions have failed to achieve their ultimate goal: to help destabilize the country and bring about “regime change.”

https://orinocotribune.com/rockers-of-t ... evolution/

[blindpig]

Fox News Just Helped Netanyahu Spread The Lie That Iran Tried To Assassinate Trump

The lies about Iran are just getting started. There will be more. Don’t buy into any part of this scam.

Caitlin Johnstone
June 16, 2025

Benjamin Netanyahu was given a platform to spout lies and war propaganda on Fox News in an interview with a groveling Bret Baier, who not only allowed the Israeli prime minister’s lies to cruise by unchecked but actually invited him to expand upon them.

Netanyahu promoted countless incendiary falsehoods and unsubstantiated claims throughout the interview, including the assertion that Iran was working on producing nuclear weapons and intended to give them to Yemen’s Houthis to facilitate global terrorism, and that Iran was working on intercontinental ballistic missiles to nuke the east coast of the United States as well.

Perhaps the most ridiculous and brazenly propagandistic claim advanced by Netanyahu was that Iran had twice attempted to assassinate the president of the United States.

“These are people who chant ‘Death to America.’ They’ve tried to assassinate President Trump twice,” said the prime minister.


Rather than push back on this claim or point out that there’s been no reported evidence that any such thing has occurred, Baier instead offered Netanyahu the opportunity to drive the narrative home further with claims of secret intelligence about these alleged assassination plots.

“You just said Iran tried to assassinate President Trump twice,” Baier said. “Do you have intel that the assassination attempts on President Trump were directly from Iran?”

“Through proxies, yes, through their intel, yes, they want to kill him,” Netanyahu asserted.

Netanyahu had previously made this claim on his own platform in a statement on Friday wishing President Trump a happy birthday, and now he’s carrying it into the mainstream news media of the United States.

Netanyahu’s claim has already been repeated in outlets like The New York Post, Washington Examiner, Breitbart, and The Independent. So it’s in the blood stream now. The information ecosystem of US politics has already been infected with the virus.



It says so much about how comfortable Israel is with lying and how eager the western media are to help promote those lies that Netanyahu could go on Fox News and just casually assert that Iran “tried to assassinate President Trump twice,” only to have the Murdoch muppet host invite him to expound upon this assertion rather than challenging the Israeli prime minister’s evidence-free claim.

Netanyahu was fully aware that he was lying, and Baier was fully aware that Netanyahu was lying. They collaborated to push this lie before Fox News’ aging audience without the faintest whisper of journalistic ethics anywhere to be heard, knowing that this one baseless assertion would help turn their Trump-sympathizing viewers toward supporting a US attack on Iran.

If you weren’t around for the lead-up to the invasion of Iraq, this is what it was like. Brazen lies with a fully complicit media, with the most frenetic war propaganda circulated by the Murdoch press.

Rupert Murdoch is intimately intertwined with Israel’s political elite and has a financial stake in Israeli energy which depends on Israel’s ongoing military occupation of the Golan Heights. Murdoch largely has the assistance of the US government to thank for his mass media empire. He personally funded the political career of Benjamin Netanyahu, who in 2002 told the US Congress that “There is no question whatsoever that Saddam [Hussein] is seeking, is working, is advancing towards to the development of nuclear weapons,” and that “If you take out Saddam, Saddam’s regime, I guarantee you that it will have enormous positive reverberations on the region.”

The US does not have a free press, and neither do any of its allies in the western world. Under the western power alliance the mass media operate as the propaganda services of the US-centralized empire, and the public is fed whatever narratives serve the information interests of that empire.

The lies about Iran are just getting started. There will be more. Don’t buy into any part of this scam.

https://caitlinjohnstone.com.au/2025/06 ... ate-trump/

[blindpig]

American Committee on Foreign Relations Miseducates Public and Censors Truth-Telling Analysts
By Jeremy Kuzmarov - June 16, 2025 3


[Source: acfr.org]

Gatekeepers who run groups have links to U.S. intelligence and only allow certain kinds of viewpoints—all while claiming to be promoting education and open debate about U.S. foreign policy

On March 17, 2025, the Tulsa Committee on Foreign Relations (TCFR) featured two National Endowment for Democracy (NED) staffers who were there to defend the reputation of the NED in the face of the Trump administration’s threatened budgetary cuts.

The TCFR is a branch of the American Committee on Foreign Relations (ACFR), an offshoot of the Council on Foreign Relations (CFR), a dominant think tank that helps guide U.S. foreign policy.

A 1979 book on the CFR that noted its heavy Wall Street funding was tellingly titled “Imperial Brain Trust.”[1]


[Source: amazon.com]

The ACFR promotes a speaker series in cities across the southern and midwestern U.S. with the official purpose of “fostering non-partisan public dialog and education on foreign policy issues.”

Really, however, the speakers support a pro-imperialistic foreign policy.

One of the TCFR speakers on March 17, 2025, Tom Garrett, was vice president of the Republican Party’s arm of the NED, which supports political parties in foreign countries that adopt a similar platform to the U.S. Republican Party.


Tom Garrett [Source: louisvillecommittee.org]

The second speaker that day, Patrick Merloe, has worked for the National Democratic Institute (NDI), the Democratic Party’s arm of the NED.

CovertAction Magazine has published numerous articles exposing the NED as a CIA offshoot/front specializing in the promotion of political propaganda that provides grants to civil society groups in countries targeted by the U.S. for regime change, or which the U.S. seeks to maintain in its geopolitical orbit.

In addition to these NED staffers, the TCFR has recently brought a CIA agent to speak, Meredith Woodruff, who regaled the crowd with tales of the duplicitous actions that she engaged in around the world.

Woodruff admitted in her talk that her job involved trying to get people to betray their countries and that putting them in contact with her meant that their lives were placed in jeopardy.[2]

In April, the TCFR’s speaker was Vitalii Tarasiuk, the Ukrainian Consul-General in Houston.[3] No one was ever invited to the group to offer the Russian perspective on the war so audiences could hear both sides—what proper educators try and do.


Meredith Woodruff [Source: tulsacfr.org]


Vitali Tarasiuk [Source: rotaryhouston.org]

Previously, the TCFR hosted Fareed Zakaria, a protégé of neo-conservative Samuel Huntington who serves as a mouthpiece for the globalist/pro-
imperialist elite that, according to historian Anatol Lievan, “can only feel safe and comfortable in a world that is some combination of that of 1950, when an economically utterly dominant U.S. confronted an alliance of totalitarian enemies, and of 1995, when a geopolitically utterly dominant U.S. lacked any serious competitor.”

Routinely, the TCFR invites State Department and other government officials and an assortment of inside-the-Beltway think-tank analysts who mostly parrot the official positions of the U.S. executive branch on Ukraine-Russia and a host of other conflicts.

One of these analysts, Ali Wyne, was typical in expressing his belief that the U.S. was a beacon for humanity and that U.S. military actions were responsive to Russian and Chinese aggression and a rising tide of authoritarianism (as if the U.S. has never supported authoritarian regimes).[4]

Another TCFR speaker, CFR fellow Steven Cook, appeared on a podcast with CIA operative and Iran-Contra felon Elliott Abrams after October 7, 2023, to underplay the impact of Israeli settlements and occupation in shaping the conflict in Gaza and to blame Iran for October 7.[5]


[Source: buzzworthy.blob.core.windows.net]


Ali Wyne [Source: tulsacfr.org]


Steven Cook [Source: youtube.com]

Accusing Iran, rather than the U.S. and Israel, of “creating chaos across the Middle East,” Cook agreed with arch neo-con Abrams on the need for a hawkish policy toward Iran and stated that the U.S. “should not leave the Middle East.” Regarding Syria, Cook wrote an article about the December 2024 “revolution” that omitted the CIA’s role in overthrowing the Assad government and inhuman U.S. sanctions policy that was designed to starve Syria’s population into submission.[6]

The TCFR touts itself as a non-profit organization dedicated to “sponsoring rigorous and informed foreign relations discussions, between the heartland and the beltway, and across the USA.”

I found the latter statement to be a blatant lie when I joined the TCFR in 2022 (I had previously been a member some years earlier) and was given a form to request speakers and make suggestions to the committee chairman for improving the committee’s programs.

On that form, I requested that the committee invite someone associated with the Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity (VIPS)[7] group (Ray McGovern and Colonel Ann Wright headed my list), or national security whistleblowers such as Scott Ritter and/or John Kiriakou.

Additionally, I suggested that the program committee include voices from the Global South.

After I made these suggestions, I attended a brief planning meeting for the coming year before the first speaker event. After that meeting, I spoke to the head of the TCFR, Robert Donaldson, the former president of the University of Tulsa whose son had been a student in my class at that university.

When I mentioned the speakers I had suggested, he responded: “Those are left-wing people and we present centrist and reasonable points of view.” Or something to that effect.

I responded by stating that the people I had highlighted were among the most knowledgeable insiders and truth-tellers who had been proven right about Russia Gate, CIA torture and many other things. He just smiled and walked away.

Previously, I had sent Donaldson notice of the publication of my book on Bill Clinton and invited him to a book talk that I gave at a local library.

Of course, I knew he would never come or invite me to speak as he never invited me before despite publishing numerous books and academic journal articles on topics relevant to his group that had passed rigorous academic peer review standards.

But Donaldson and his friends don’t care about these standards or good scholarship if it contradicts the world view of the corporate masters whom they serve.

Now a professor emeritus in the University of Tulsa’s Political Science Department, Donaldson has a past teaching at the U.S. Army War College and has worked as a State Department consultant. Holding a Ph.D. from Harvard in Sovietology, his bio on the University of Tulsa website lists him as a consultant to the U.S. intelligence community.[8]

A former assistant of his, the former chairman of the University of Tulsa political science department who also attends the TCFR events, once called me to accost me for challenging the official narrative of the Kennedy assassination after I was interviewed by The Tulsa World on this topic. He said a board member of the university had been part of the Warren Commission, which he claimed got the investigation into the assassination right. (Polls show that most Americans do not believe this and massive evidence shows his view to be wrong—see investigation here).

Donaldson is a friendly man who co-authored a detailed study of Russian foreign policy history that I purchased from him and use periodically as a resource. His party affiliation appears to be Democratic and he once told me that, in the 1990s, he tried to lobby some of Oklahoma’s elected representatives against eastward NATO expansion.

While these latter efforts were noble, Donaldson functions as a gatekeeper who wants to keep any dissent within certain limits and censors anybody he considers to be to his left.

He projects himself as an anti-Trump liberal but promotes speakers who advance disinformation in support of empire and war while censoring and ridiculing those who display empathy for the people living on the wrong end of the guns.


Robert Donaldson [Source: tulsacfr.org]

David W. Conde, in the suppressed 1970 book CIA—Core of the Cancer called academic gatekeepers like Donaldson, those who received foundation money or worked directly for CIA-linked organizations, as being part of a system of “intellectual incest and rape.”

The “rapists” (i.e., CIA-linked gatekeepers like Donaldson who advance in the ranks of academia) define the parameters of discourse and censor real intellectuals who genuinely “speak truth to power.”

In 1967, Noam Chomsky wrote poignantly about the “responsibility of intellectuals” for the Vietnam War by virtue of the fact that they helped to advance the misconceived view that U.S. foreign policy was idealistic and well-intentioned, even if some believed it misguided.


David W. Conde [Source: covertactionmagazine.com]


Noam Chomsky [Source: libcom.org]


McGeorge Bundy, the CIA’s man in the White House and a key architect of the Vietnam War. He sought to define the parameters of debate about Vietnam and other U.S. wars and encouraged blacklisting of genune dissenters against a murderous foreign policy. [Source; karsh.org]

Political-economic critiques that placed the Vietnam War in the larger pattern of U.S. imperialism were said to be adopted only by people whom National Security Adviser McGeorge Bundy labeled “wild men in the wings” who faced blacklisting from academia.[9]

In the past, the TCFR has brought in some critical speakers—like Andrew Bacevich[10] and Rajiv Chandrasekaran[11]—however, they confine their critiques within certain parameters and do not look at how corporate/Wall Street interests often drive U.S. foreign policy or adopt viewpoints of people from the Global South.

Nor do they address the adoption of false-flag operations by governing elites to hoodwink the public into support for illegal wars, or the pernicious nature of CIA operations.

The latter topics are out of bounds for the CFR/ACFR and anyone who addresses them are quickly subjected to Stalin-style purges or blacklisting—as with academia writ large.[12]

A long-time member of the TCFR with whom I am friendly, a former DynCorp pilot who is critical of U.S. foreign policy and anguished by the Israeli genocide in Gaza, suggested to Donaldson inviting Alison Weir who wrote a book critical of U.S. support for the creation of the State of Israel.

This latter suggestion was shot down and my friend told me that whenever he gets up to ask questions at committee events, people hiss at him—which is why he stopped going.


Andrew Bacevich [Source: youtube.com]


Alison Weir—she is blacklisted and persona non grata at any AFCR event because of her criticism of U.S. support for Israel. [Source: kingdomtruther.com]

Imperial Brain Trust
I did not fully understand the forces behind the ACFR until I reread Laurence Shoup and William Minter’s 1977 book Imperial Brain Trust: The Council on Foreign Relations & United States Foreign Policy.

This book provides a detailed history of the CFR and discusses how it founded regional committees starting in 1938 with the goal of engendering support for a globalist U.S. foreign policy.

The CFR was founded in the late 1910s by an elite circle of Wall Street financiers, bankers and government officials who supported U.S. intervention in World War I and saw the U.S. as the rightful heir of the British Empire.[13]

The CFR’s first honorary chairman, Elihu Root, was a corporate lawyer who served as Secretary of War during the Spanish-American-Philippines War and was an early leader in overseas American expansion.

The CFR’s first president, John W. Davis, was the Democratic Party candidate for president in 1924 and senior partner in the law firm that represented the J.P. Morgan group.[14] Morgan was one of the wealthiest men on Wall Street who floated loans to Britain and France that drew the U.S. into World War I.


Elihu Root [Source: fineartamerica.com]


John W. Davis [Source: britannica.com]


Allen Dulles [Source: historyheist.com]

CIA Director Allen Dulles, whose exploits are well known to CovertAction Magazine readers, was another CFR director and a key part of the organization for more than 40 years.

Much of the early funding for the CFR came from some of the richest men in the U.S., including Morgan and his associate Thomas W. Lamont (who originally helped set up the CFR), John D. III and David Rockefeller, Herbert Lehman and Howard Heinz, among others.


Thomas W. Lamont [Source: condenaststore.com]


Howard Heinz [Source: findagrave.com]


John D. Rockefeller III [Source: howold.co]

CFR members were key architects of multiple U.S. foreign policy disasters, including the Korean and Vietnam Wars and the dropping of the atomic bomb.

When George Kennan published his blueprint for U.S. strategy in the Cold War, it was in the CFR’s house journal, Foreign Affairs.

In the 1930s Charles Beard wrote a critique of the CFR-backed Open Door Policy[15] emphasizing how surplus U.S. production could be consumed at home in a rationally planned economy, making overseas expansion and colonialism unnecessary for domestic prosperity.[16]


George F. Kennan speaks before the Council on Foreign Relations. [Source: cfr.org]


Charles Beard [Source: historynewsnetwork.org]

This viewpoint was rejected by CFR members who succeeded in getting Franklin D. Roosevelt to focus on trade expansion as a means of combatting the Great Depression rather than domestic reform under the New Deal.

Shoup and Minter suggest that the CFR laid the seeds for the post-World War II imperial strategy and Cold War, which was predicated on the belief that domestic prosperity was contingent on the opening of foreign markets by the U.S. military and establishment of a global system of free trade.

The CFR continues today to advance the same vision, which is why many of its members are offput by Trump’s revitalization of U.S. tariffs as part of what Trump calls an “America First” agenda.

The CFR had originally opposed the America First Committee, which favored U.S. isolationism and avoidance of conflict in Europe and Southeast Asia during the 1930s.


[Source: allthatsinteresting.com]

In 2003, the CFR published a book length study by CFR member Kenneth Pollack making the case for invading Iraq. It continues to promote writings that, as Laurence Shoup put it, “magnify threats and increase fears in order to build support among attentive publics and capitalist ruling class leaders for a possible war”—now either with Russia, Iran and/or China.


[Source: youtube.com]

Plus Ça Change
While CFR members are entitled to their perspective, the U.S. Constitution guarantees the right to free speech. Genuinely open debate and education are among the life bloods of democracy that the CFR and its offshoots, along with the CIA, have helped to stifle.

Like with their parent organization, the ACFR’s website shows that many of the organization’s board members worked for Fortune 500 companies or organizations connected to the CIA.


Duff Weddle [Source: tulsacfr.org]

For example, the TCFR treasurer Duff Weddle was corporate counsel of the Arabian-American Oil Company (ARAMCO), whose operations in Saudi Arabia were enabled by pioneering OSS and CIA covert operations.

Board members of the ACFR’s Dallas branch include ex-CIA operatives, U.S. intelligence contractors and heads of private intelligence firms, an ex-adviser to the U.S. Army Joint Chief of Staff, the former head of Bank of America Dallas, venture capitalists, oil and gas company executives, and a woman who sat on the board of the Sixth Floor Museum, which whitewashes the role of the CIA in the Kennedy assassination and makes it seem like Lee Harvey Oswald was the lone assassin.

With these kinds of people, there is no way that the ACFR would promote any real dialogue or education among the public.

The latter can only occur when there is a willingness to hear out uncomfortable truths and a willingness to look at ongoing conflicts around the world from multi-faceted perspectives while critically scrutinizing U.S. governmental claims.


[Source: dallascfr.org]

Progressives and anti-war activists should learn from the CFR’s strategy and try to develop alternative committees that do what the ACFR does not: educate people about the truth surrounding U.S. foreign policy and promote dialogue and debate, including about alternative policy visions to the currently dominant ones.

A smart approach would be to reach out to diverse sectors of the population. The ACFR events are largely attended by wealthy white people who are over age 60. Hosting speaker series that combine with live music or other events would be a way to draw in young people and a more diverse crowd.

One of the successes of the early 20th century Anti-Imperialist League was the ability to educate people about the horrors of the U.S. war in the Philippines (for which Elihu Root served as a key architect) by publishing political pamphlets and hosting town hall speaker events.

The latter should be replicated by a new Anti-Imperialist League, whose establishment is urgently needed.



1.Laurence H. Shoup and William Minter, Imperial Brain Trust: The Council on Foreign Relations & United States Foreign Policy (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1977). ↑



2.Sadly, after Woodruff’s talk, a number of students who attended the talk expressed interest in joining the CIA as a career. Fluent in German, hebrew and it appears Russian, Woodruff is a graduate of Oklahoma State University (OSU) who served with the CIA in classified missions in Central Eurasia, the Near East, Africa and Europe. Her husband Freddie also served with the CIA and died while on an undisclosed operation in Georgia, where he was CIA Station Chief, in 1993 (Freddie was shot in the head in the company of the chief of security of Georgian President Eduard Shevardnadze who had been installed in a CIA backed coup that unseated Zviad Gamsakhurdia, a democrat who himself died under suspicious circumstances). Meredith is recipient of the Donovan Award for Operational Excellence and the Distinguished Career Intelligence Medal. She now sits on OSU’s Global Ambassador’s Board and is a partner in a media company, Spycraft Entertainment, that shapes representations of the CIA in Hollywood so as to cover up the CIA’s misdeeds and to present the CIA heroically. ↑



3.Tarasiuk was invited by TCFR board member, Dr. Randy Kluver, a dean of international studies at Oklahoma State University who is a zealous Ukraine war hawk who incidentally works closely with Meredith Woodruff. The Tampa Committee on Foreign Relations this year hosted as a speaker Douglas Wise, a former member of the CIA’s senior intelligence service who, according to his official bio, “led a major CIA covert action.” ↑



4.The June TCFR speaker, Lieutenant General Harry D. Raduege Jr., is a former Director of the Defense Information Systems Agency who has a background in the Air Force and in intelligence work. He worked for The Cohen Group, headed by former Defense Secretary William Cohen. ↑



5.Cook and Abrams not surprisingly advanced the myth of a “surprise attack” on October 7 similar to Pearl Harbor, when strong evidence indicates that the attack was known in advance by the Israelis and could have easily been prevented. See my article on this topic here. ↑



6.For an antidote, see Jeremy Kuzmarov, “U.S. Media Ignored How CIA’s Operation Timber Sycamore Paved the Way For the Syrian ‘Revolution,’” CovertAction Magazine, December 23, 2024, among other articles I have written on Syria for CAM.
↑



7.The VIPS consists of intelligence professionals concerned about the politicization of intelligence. It was founded after the 2003 war on Iraq when false intelligence regarding WMDs was used to sell the war in Iraq. VIPS also published numerous memos debunking the official narrative about Russia Gate. It carried out a study, which determined that Democratic Party emails that made 2016 Democratic Party presidential candidate Hillary Clinton look bad that were sent to WikiLeaks could not have been leaked by the Russians. This was based on the speed of the modem which showed that the emails had been leaked from within the U.S. ↑



8.Donaldson is listed as a member of the Council on Foreign Relations. ↑



9.Those adopting this analysis were called communists during the height of the McCarthy era and beyond. ↑



10.Bacevich has published a number of excellent books with antiwar themes and I found him to be a very nice, well informed person with sensible views on many topics. However, he is not a leftist but a conservative, which seems to make him more palatable to the CFR/ACFR and mainstream academia, along with the fact that there are certain gray areas in his analysis. He does not, for example, address false flags or do a good job of analyzing the corporate influence on U.S. foreign policy that Covert Action Information Bulletin founder Philip Agee addressed in his writings. ↑



11.A onetime Washington Post reporter, he wrote a book Imperial Life in the Emerald City: Inside Iraq’s Green Zone (New York: Vintage, 2007) that exposed the insularity of U.S. government officials living in Iraq’s Green Zone. However, neither the book nor talk addressed the deeper imperialistic underpinnings of the U.S. intervention in Iraq or how it fit a wider pattern of U.S. foreign policy. ↑



12.More consciousness is developing about the latter due to the recent publicized firing of pro-Palestinian academics and those critical of Israeli policies in Gaza. ↑



13.Jim Macgregor and Jim O’Dowd, Two World Wars and Hitler: Who Was Responsible? Anglo-American Money, Foreign Agents and Geopolitics (Walterville, OR: Trine Day Press, 2025), 26, suggest that the CFR was a creation of the Milner pro-imperialist group in England, an elite body that included Cecil Rhodes which drove support for the British empire and Anglo-American world supremacy. Chatham House was its counterpart in Great Britain. ↑



14.The law firm was Davis, Polk, Wardwell, Gardiner and Reed. Davis, interestingly, became a member of the right-wing Liberty League backed by wealthy financiers who mounted a coup against Roosevelt because of their opposition to the New Deal. ↑



15.Officially articulated by Secretary of State John Hay in the late 1890s, the Open Door Policy advocated for a strong U.S. military to open up business and trade opportunities around the world. ↑



16.Beard it should be noted was fired from Columbia University for his views and opposition to World War I. ↑

https://covertactionmagazine.com/2025/0 ... -analysts/

[blindpig]

Fake media under the microscope
The BBC has been covering up the genocide in Gaza since its first headline.
June 23, 2025 , 12:02 pm .



A long-term 12-month review, from October 7, 2023, to October 6, 2024, reveals how the BBC has reported on the genocide in Gaza. The Centre for Media Monitoring analyzed 3,873 digital news stories and 32,092 television and radio segments, all produced without direct access to the Strip. Since the start of the offensive, the Israeli army and the news agency Cogat have closed the Erez border crossing and any independent entry by foreign correspondents, a restriction upheld by the Supreme Court in January 2024.

In this information vacuum, Palestinian reporters have taken over—in more than one case, paying with their lives —to document a conflict in which the disproportionate number of victims reaches 42,010 Palestinians compared to 1,246 Israelis.

The study detects an unequivocal pattern: the British network prioritizes official Israeli discourse and minimizes the Palestinian perspective. Neither the magnitude of the deadly breach nor the international investigations into genocide alter a framework that presents the offensive as a defensive action, removes the context from the civil devastation, and relegates Palestinian suffering to a background figure.

Who dies, who matters
The disproportionate number of victims—a ratio of 34 to 1—should be the focus of any serious news narrative, but the BBC distorts this reality from the very headline. For every 21 Israeli victims killed, the network publishes a headline, while to dissect the same Palestinian statistic, it requires 353 deaths before dedicating a headline to it.

This numerical gap extends to the text. In the first five lines of each article, where reader retention is at stake, allusions to Israeli deaths are 30 times more frequent than to Palestinian ones; in the entire body of articles, each Israeli death garners an average of 33 mentions, compared to 0.03 for each victim in Gaza. And if we talk about audiovisual media, radio and television clips other than interviews show a 19-to-1 gap in favor of the Israelis.


The BBC and the failure to acknowledge Israeli responsibility for the death of a blogger in Gaza (Photo: CFMM)

By "putting a face" to the conflict, the BBC displays a supposed balance that turns out to be deceptive: 279 portraits of Palestinian victims were published compared to 201 of Israeli victims, almost equal numbers, but which in practice hide the mortality abyss of the former case. Emotional or personal content, those pieces designed to generate empathy, resulted in only twice as many stories about Palestinian tragedies as about Israeli ones, despite the fact that Gaza has endured massive days of massacres since the offensive began.

Adding to this quantitative disproportion is a biased editorial treatment: the BBC inserted the tagline "Hamas-controlled Health Ministry" in 1,155 articles, almost as many times as it mentioned the total number of deaths in Gaza (1,342), while the same source without this critical charge appeared only 119 times, thus sowing constant doubt about the veracity of the Palestinian figures.


The BBC repeatedly uses the phrase "Hamas-controlled Health Ministry" in its headlines (Photo: CFMM)

The historical and structural context that explains the true scale of the siege is virtually absent. Although 40% of the articles mention October 7th as the trigger, less than 1% allude to the previous occupation, and terms as essential as "blockade" and "settlements" appear in 0.08% and 0.03% of the articles, respectively.

Grammar of bias
The CFMM report reveals how the BBC's vocabulary choices reinforce a hierarchical moral universe. The recurrent use of the word "massacre" to describe events in Israel—almost 18 times more frequently than when reporting on attacks in Gaza—and the preference for emotionally charged adjectives such as "atrocity," "brutal," "barbaric," or "lethal"—four times more frequently used when reporting these events—contribute to tipping the balance in favor of Israel. For example, after Hamas invaded the border kibbutz of Kfar Aza, the BBC declared a "massacre" when describing the Israeli victims.


Use of emotive terms by BBC presenters and journalists (Photo: CFMM)

However, when it comes to Al Shifa Hospital, the narrative changes completely. In November 2023, the Israeli army, with implicit support from Washington, mounted a propaganda campaign to promote the idea of ​​a Hamas "command node" beneath the complex and thus justify repeated bombings that killed civilians sheltering in its corridors. The BBC was one of the media outlets invited by Israel to verify this version, and after the raid, its coverage was limited to describing the " takeover ," without ever indicating the true extent of the damage.

Months later, in April 2024 , the Gaza Ministry of Health documented more than 400 Palestinians killed in and around the hospital, while the Israeli army allegedly kidnapped between 500 and 700 civilians. Organizations reported that Israeli troops used Palestinian civilians as human shields to protect themselves from friendly fire, an aspect not seen in the network's reports.

In June 2024, the BBC published an article about the mass graves found after the siege, including witness accounts of bodies piled up in makeshift graves. Despite the evidence, the article openly contradicted Israeli explanations that characterized the operation as a "legitimate operation against terrorist tunnels."

The CFMM report notes that expressions like "massacred" are reserved exclusively for Israeli victims, while the term "murdered" is used more frequently—220 times—compared to just one when referring to Palestinians. The use of the passive voice obscures the aggressor and dilutes responsibility, and the systematic omission of actors seeks to prevent the reader from associating the damage with the Israeli army. When the BBC reported on the attack on Al Shifa Hospital, it spoke of "corridors filled with hundreds of bodies" without once mentioning those responsible.

The asymmetry extends to sources and testimonies. The BBC interviewed 2,350 Israeli spokespersons compared to just 1,085 Palestinians, broadcast narratives of "Israeli self-defense" on 2,340 occasions compared to 217 references to Palestinian defense, and pressured 38 guests to condemn Hamas without ever asking about the actions of the Israeli army.

Thus, by focusing coverage on what happened in Gaza, attention is diverted from the genocide that this state is committing against Palestine. This narrative shift relativizes the magnitude of the Israeli operation. Differential dehumanization reduces the relevance of the Palestinian victims, and the imbalance of voices consolidates a single narrative that obscures the true dynamics of the aggression.

From the Gaza script to the Iranian libretto
Now that Israel has shifted its offensive to Iran, the Western media is employing a similar narrative under the guise of a nuclear threat, overlooking the fact that many of the targets are civilian facilities and critical nodes of the country's economy.

In a BBC article titled "Israel attacks key nuclear sites," the target, without specifying that the targets include gas and oil plants unrelated to uranium, are direct blows to Iran's energy and economic center.

Health Ministry spokesman Hosein Kermanpur said on June 16 that the attacks had so far left 224 dead and more than 1,400 injured, more than 90 percent of whom were civilians, including 20 children crushed in a 14-story residential building in northern Tehran, the target of Israeli bombardment.

Israeli fire also hit areas near religious sites, with explosions near Mashhad airport, a short distance from the Imam Reza shrine , and hitting Farabi Hospital in the border city of Kermanshah, causing severe damage to medical equipment and injuring several patients in the affected areas.

The BBC, however, accompanies this devastation with reports suggesting that Iranian society is not united in the face of the aggression. The report omits the fact that the missiles hit neighborhoods, hospitals, and energy depots, and suggests that if the population supposedly did not support Tehran, the bombings would be more acceptable.

Thus, just as has been happening in Gaza, the reporting framework once again legitimizes a campaign that destroys vital infrastructure and claims civilian lives; the victims and devastation are relegated to marginal notes, shrouded in euphemisms that whitewash the true nature of the offensive.

https://misionverdad.com/globalistan/la ... er-titular

Google Translator

[blindpig]

How Confirmation Bias and Group Think Have Been Manipulated to Sustain the Cycle of War
June 23, 2025
By Sylvia Demarest, Substack, 6/8/25

Sylvia Demarest is a retired trial lawyer.

First a brief discussion of 4 issues: 1) clarification of the term military Keynesianism; 2) why pushing for WW3 is societal suicide; 3) comments on Operation Spiderweb; and 4) the aborted exchange of bodies between Ukraine and Russia.

1–Military Keynesianism— Military Keynesianism refers to the use of war and military spending to stimulate the economy. The US is economically dependent on military spending. Keynesianism refers to John Maynard Keynes a British mathematician and economist who was very influential during the Great Depression, spearheading a revolution in economic thinking, and providing the theoretical basis for Keynesian economics. Keynes opposed setting German reparations payments so high during the Versailles peace conference that followed WW1, and was also involved in the negotiations that established the Bretton Woods system after World War 2. President Richard Nixon withdrew the US from Bretton Woods in 1971 initiating the era of neoliberalism. These issues were discussed in previous Substack’s.

2–World War 3–In the last Substack two reasons were given why the US and NATO could not fight and win WW3 against a peer enemy such as Russia or China: 1) the US and the NATO nations do not have the industrial capacity to produce the weapons needed to fight and win an industrial war, or to even provide the needed logistical support; and 2) since modern weapons were so powerful, a global war would destroy civilization. The basis for this opinion is the reality that in such a war, the US and NATO would probably face defeat, and, rather than accept defeat, would use nuclear (or biological) weapons). Should nuclear weapons be used against either Russia or China, both the USA and the EU would be destroyed in retaliation. Russia and China are very large countries so their capacity to retaliate is unlikely to be destroyed, even by a first strike. A nuclear war of this size would destroy civilization. Avoiding WW3 is the only reasonable option

3–Operation Spiderweb–On June 1st Ukraine launched a drone attack against Russian strategic bombers parked on several bases. The attack is said to have taken 18 months to arrange. It involved hiding drones in wooden houses in trucking containers. An electronic signal opened the roofs of the containers, releasing drones. The container then self-destructed.

Several bases were attacked but not all were hit. Western media has been very congratulatory of Ukraine’s “daring do.” David Ingnatius even exalted “Ukraine’s Dirty War Is Just Getting Started”. The extent of the damage is uncertain. Ukraine claims to have destroyed 40 planes, the US claims 20 hit and 9 destroyed, the alternative media claims only 5 planes destroyed and damaged meaning some will be repaired. Given the ability to fake video and photos it is impossible to know the true facts unless Russia decides to tell us and offers proof. The USSR made hundreds of the planes that were hit (although some had been upgraded) and bone yards contain extra parts, so any loss may not be permanent. Moreover, these types of bombers have been superseded by other means of weapon’s delivery. Russia’s true loss may, or may not, be that significant. The loss of trust, security, and national pride are another matter.

The USA claims not to have been involved in this strike, but as Dmitry Kornev argued in an analysis published in RT, the drone strikes “blended high-tech sabotage, covert infiltration, and satellite-guided timing with the kind of precision that only the world’s most advanced intelligence networks can deliver.” If the USA was not directly involved, a questionable proposition, some western country with access to US data and systems, probably was involved.

The Russian strategic bombers, like similar US bombers, are parked outside, so they could be monitored by satellite, as required by a treaty between the US and the Soviet Union (today Russia) –the Intermediate Range Nuclear Forces Treaty (INF). Russia constantly moves these bombers –so Ukraine needed access to up to date satellite information for targeting purposes. The US is the most likely source of this data.

There have been several articles discussing the fact that the US and NATO run, arm, and fund this proxy war against Russia. For example, the CIA has operated throughout Ukraine for years before the SMO started in February 2022. It has also been acknowledged that the war is overseen by NATO and the US out of a military base in Germany, see “The Partnership: The Secret History of the War in Ukraine”. The US and NATO are Ukraine’s eyes and ears assisting with imaging and SIGNIT intelligence for use in monitoring and targeting. It defies logic to claim that none of the countries in US/NATO alliance participated in this attack–in fact the best description is that this was a limited US first strike on Russia, by proxy.

Unfortunately, there is now ZERO potential for weapon limitation treaties with Russia, or for that matter, with China. The betrayal, and the distrust, is too great. This probably signals the end of any real effort to end the Ukraine war–after all, this attack came one day before another scheduled peace conference. The US and NATO have proven to be unreliable and untrustworthy partners. This is markedly different from the Cold War when trust and reliability levels were much higher.

Every effort is being made to goad Russia into striking outside Ukraine, such a strike could force the US to join the war and turn the Ukraine war into WW3. Russia is very wise not to take the bait. If we survive this era, we should all thank the rational, careful and levelheaded President of Russia, Vladimir Vladimirovich Putin, not the so called “western leadership.”

The lack of concern for the risk of a global nuclear war is very dangerous, it means there is no public pushback against either the Ukraine War or the talk of a wider war. Even the Washington Post is beginning to sound the alarm–see “Why We Should Worry About Nuclear Weapons Again.”

4 –The exchange of bodies between Russia and Ukraine During the last peace negotiation, Russia and Ukraine agreed to an exchange of bodies of deceased soldiers. Russia began publishing lists of names and showed up on the Minsk border with refrigerated trailers for the exchange. Ukraine refused to accept the bodies. Was this refusal because acknowledging 6,000 dead soldiers would contradict Ukraine’s casualty claims, and would require Ukraine to pay their families billions? To prevent this the Ukraine Rada passed a law requiring families to prove the death in court, giving the government two years to pay.

What are human biases, like confirmation bias and group think?

There are so many human biases entire books have been written about them, for example, The Biased Brain lists almost 200 biases, and an entire Cognitive Biases Codex has been set up.

Human biases are closely studied, not only to manipulate people and promote war, but by marketers and politicians. Human biases are poorly understood by most people–but we all have them. Cognitive Biases cause us to make irrational decisions and judgments on the information we process. A Cognitive Bias can be thought of as a programmed error in our brains. These biases can be manipulated, especially when combined with fear, greed, ideology, and the lust for power. Censorship and the manipulation of information through propaganda and fear is a feature of our media, which is often aligned with big business and the national security state.

Cognitive Biases can be divided into 4 parts:

1. Information: filtering information.

2. Meaning: connecting dots and filling in the gaps with what we think we know.

3. Speed: making decisions based on new information.

4. Memory: we can’t remember everything, so we have to use it efficiently.

For those who want to delve into cognitive biases more deeply a good place to start is Gust de Baker’ article Cognitive Biases (2025): A Complete list of 151 Biases.

For today’s essay I want to focus on two; confirmation bias and a combination of several biases that expresses itself in what is known as group think.

Confirmation bias “refers to the tendency of individuals to seek, interpret, and remember information in a way that confirms their pre-existing beliefs or values. This bias leads people to focus on evidence that supports their views while dismissing or undervaluing information that contradicts them. As a result, confirmation bias can create a distorted understanding of reality, reinforce stereotypes and hinder effective communication in diverse settings.”

Group Think “..refers to a mode of thinking in which individual members of small cohesive groups tend to accept a viewpoint or conclusion that represents a perceived group consensus, whether or not the group members believe it to be valid, correct, or optimal. Groupthink reduces the efficiency of collective problem solving within such groups.”

From Britanica: “The eight symptoms of groupthink include an illusion of invulnerability or of the inability to be wrong, the collective rationalization of the group’s decisions, an unquestioned belief in the morality of the group and its choices, stereotyping of the relevant opponents or out-group members, and the presence of “mind guards” who act as barriers to alternative or negative information, as well as self-censorship and an illusion of unanimity. Decision making affected by groupthink neglects possible alternatives and focuses on a narrow number of goals, ignoring the risks involved in a particular decision. It fails to seek out alternative information and is biased in its consideration of that which is available. Once rejected, alternatives are forgotten, and little attention is paid to contingency plans in case the preferred solution fails.

How confirmation bias is used to manipulate people

We are all products of the information environment in which we live. Often it is this very information environment provides the propaganda that creates confirmation bias. Most people get their news from the corporate media. In corporate media, the news is often managed, information is censored, a narrative is created, dissenting points of view are excluded, and the approved narrative is constantly repeated. In the alternative media, all points of view can be found, but some are completely unreliable. The security agencies are also involved in media. The best option is to consult a variety of sources, supplemented by a constant study of history. Unfortunately, history has also been censored and manipulated. The best evidence usually comes from historians who rely on and cite original sources. Unfortunately, historians who contradict the approved narrative may not be able to publish their work. Those who get published may find their careers destroyed. Noam Chomsky has spent a career studying these issues. Ron Unz has conducted a historical re-evaluation in his American Pravda series and discusses many of these issues.

One significant feature of the information environment for the last 20 plus years has been the demonization and outright defamation of Russia and her president, Vladimir Putin.

–One historian, Dr. Vladimir Brovkin believes that this demonization began in 2003 when France and Germany combined with Russia to oppose the Iraq war. It is understood that one of the purposes of NATO was to “keep the Soviet Union out, the Americans in, and the Germans down”. The friendship and cooperation between Russia, Germany and France may have been seen as a threat to US influence.

—Vladimir Posner gave a lecture at Yale University in September, 2018 titled “How the United States Created Vladimir Putin” discussing the facts behind the extensive campaign to create a negative image of Putin and Russia. Posner also said he had hired people to examine the archives of the New York Times to locate positive stories from 2015, 2016, and 2017 about Russia or Putin. There were none. This level of negative reporting should be seen as evidence of a successful propaganda campaign intended to build support of a war against Russia.

–On September 25, 2015 John Mearsheimer gave a lecture titled “Why Is Ukraine the West’s Fault”. The lecture did not attract a great deal of attention at the time, but after February of 2022 has over 30 million views. In this lecture Prof Mearsheimer sets out how to resolve the civil war in Ukraine–abandon NATO expansion–guarantee minority rights in Ukraine especially language rights–and provide some autonomy to Eastern Ukraine. These were the basic principles Russia always supported, and were also behind Misk 1 and 2, which were never implemented–in fact Angela Merkel of Germany admitted the agreements were used to buy time to allow Ukraine to re-arm.

To think there was nothing positive to say about Russia or the accomplishments of President Putin is absurd. Julian Assange pointed to the objective of such coverage when he said that every war the US has fought for the last 50 years has been based on lies. This is also the case with the proxy war in Ukraine.

Constant repetition of negative coverage is likely to trigger confirmation bias. Confirmation bias often makes it impossible for people to change their minds about issues and events no matter how much contrary information they are shown. Lies once embedded often cannot be dislodged. Perhaps this is why Mark Twain is claimed to have said, “it’s easier to fool people than to convince them they have been fooled.”

If we consider the entire array of societal rewards and punishments, it becomes obvious that the ability to control information, along with the power to bury or punish those who try to reveal prohibited information, can create false narratives and control our understanding of both current events and history. This information control, when combined with fear, can embed biases that can be manipulated to steer society in desired directions. Wars would never be fought if they weren’t profitable and served to enhance the power of favored groups. This has been the course of history throughout the ages.

How are group think is used to support militarism and war

In 1972, Irving.L. Janis did a study titled Victims of groupthink: A psychological study of foreign-policy decisions and fiascoes. In this study Janis defined “groupthink” as a psychological drive for consensus at any cost that suppresses dissent and appraisal of alternatives in cohesive decision-making groups. Janis used a group dynamics approach to explain aspects of American foreign policy decision making.

Janis found that the results of this small-group phenomenon often spelled disaster and paved the way for some of the major U.S. fiascoes: the Korean War stalemate, the escalation of the Vietnam War, the failure to be prepared for the attack on Pearl Harbor, and the Bay of Pigs blunder. Yet there are cases, such as the handling of the Cuban Missile Crisis and the formulation of the Marshall Plan, where group think was avoided. It is through documented portrayal of these cases of the invasion and avoidance of group think that Irving Janis demonstrated his hypothesis and was able to offer suggestions for counteracting group think.

Janis’s work showed how group think was a major issue and made suggestions for avoiding the problems of group think in the future. To date, his suggestions have been ignored. One major issue in the effort to avoid group think is that those who adhere to the group’s narratives are encouraged and promoted, those who do not are excluded and lose influence.

If the past is any indication, U.S. foreign policy makers will learn nothing from another debacle like Ukraine. In the past, decision makers have been able to walk away from the ruins of their poor decisions without any political repercussions. If this is repeated with the Ukraine proxy war, it will reinforce the belief that such a proxy war represents a repeatable formula for sustaining a bloated military, for selling weapons, and for starting wars of convenience. This pattern of U.S. foreign policy failures stretches from North Korea to the present day, with a corresponding trail of death and destruction. The question: how can this destructive pattern be ended before it destroys us all?



From Armed Madhouse: Ukraine War Report

Conclusion

Today the cycle of war is in full flower–military Keynesianism rules the day. The US is in a proxy war against Russia, has bombed Yemen, and threatens war against Iraq and China. The US military budget is set to increase the power of confirmation bias and group think is undaunted.

Today is also the anniversary of the Israeli attack on the USS Liberty on June 8, 1967, an attack that was apparently designed to allow the US to enter the 1967 war on behalf of Israel,threatening a nuclear confrontation with the Soviet Union. I raise these issues because we again face the risk of nuclear war. Also, the US alliance with Israel is implicated in every war the US has fought since 911, including the current campaign to force the US to go to war with Iran, again, for the security of Israel. Given the financial and political power of the Zionist lobby in the USA concern about war with Iran must be taken seriously.

The risk of that war with Russia, with Iran, or with China could lead to a civilization destroying nuclear war. Together, all these issues again highlight the need for people to put aside their differences, their biases, and come together in a citizen’s movement for reform.

https://natyliesbaldwin.com/2025/06/how ... le-of-war/