I don't generally like the term "white supremacist" as it has come to be used as a reference to any injustice in our current system of governance. "Capitalist" is better, but still too broad. So here's a stab at a better title:
The NY Times is a Propaganda Outlet for the Chauvinistic U.S. Empire
Chauvinism is a form of extreme patriotism and nationalism, a fervent faith in national excellence and glory. It is an irrational belief in the superiority or dominance of one's own group or people, who are seen as strong and virtuous, while others are considered weak or unworthy.
That's better, in my view.
Here's an example that recently caught my eye:
RUSSIAGATE: NYT, FB & FBI Say Anti-Trump Site, Now Shutdown, Was Russian Effort to Help Trump Win – Consortiumnews
Misgivings about who ran this site, however, can co-exist with legitimate alarm about the combined attacks by the FBI, the Times and other corporate media on the political nature — and not the accuracy — of the published content. That presents the spectacle of a leading news outlet and two social media companies joining a state security agency in an effort to trample press freedom...
PeaceData was accused of being funded by the St. Petersburg-based Internet Research Agency, which the Times says “was very active in the 2016 presidential election, and a recent bipartisan Senate Intelligence Committee report detailed Russian interference in support of Mr. Trump’s election.” In fact, half of IRA’s Facebook ads were purchased after the 2016 election and half of those before the election supported Hillary Clinton, and the other half, Trump. The IRA spent about $100,000 on the ads, compared to the $6.5 billion spent by the Clinton and Trump campaigns.
“Now Facebook and Twitter are offering evidence of this meddling,” the fourth paragraph of the Times story begins, although nowhere in the rest of the article is any evidence presented. The Times says Facebook made its decision based on a report — which the Times does not link to — written by a company called Graphika.
While spotlighting PeaceData’s purported links to the Russian government, the Times fails to provide readers the same service when it comes to Graphika’s own official connections, in this case to the U.S. government.
This pattern of lockstep chauvinism on the part of the U.S. establishment, including many mainstream Republicans as well as Democrats, is why I consider Democrats the bigger threat to the downtrodden of the world than I do Trump and his supporters. The world is a big place, and there is tremendous institutional and legal support for the rights of black Americans. This is great. But the militarized chauvinism of Republicans and Democrats which destroyed the Middle East is on the loose, with the NY Times leading the charge.
Putin was right about Iraq WMDs; Mueller and the New York Times were wrong. The pattern has continued and intensified in recent years, in my opinion. I could be wrong, as only the secretive intelligence agencies know the truth of such matters. But my best guess is that our intelligence agencies have been on the wrong side of critical stories related to war in the Middle East, domestic U.S. politics, and relations with Russia.
Accuracy matters. And that's why I've used the term propaganda in the title of this post.
Propaganda is communication that is used primarily to influence an audience and further an agenda, which may not be objective and may be presenting facts selectively to encourage a particular synthesis
I believe in the enlightenment ideals upon which the U.S. was founded, and which have been improved upon through the abolition of slavery, suffrage for women, and granting of legal rights to other minorities. The world is a cold, cruel place in terms of power politics, and I appreciate that the NY Times and other establishment institutions are trying to spread the enlightenment, and fight back against Trumpian efforts to diminish enlightenment ideals.
I'm a humanist and look forward to engaging constructively with as many people, whatever background or political persuasion, as possible.
PeaceData published articles from a left-wing perspective, the majority of which criticized US military interventions and Western imperialism. Most of these posts were reprinted without permission from real, independent progressive news outlets.
In fact the list of the websites whose reporting was lifted by PeaceData is a veritable who’s who of independent media outlets that the US government would not be favorably disposed to. They comprise the very few platforms that provide an alternative, factual and highly critical perspective on US foreign policy. Among them is this outlet, The Grayzone.
Every aspect of PeaceData’s existence and online behavior appears suspicious. The only third party that had access to the website’s social media data is a Pentagon contractor called Graphika. This US government-backed tech firm prepared a lengthy report on PeaceData, but offered absolutely no proof that Moscow was behind it.
Facebook, Twitter, and major Western corporate media outlets eagerly bit at the FBI’s bait, amplifying the unsubstantiated narrative that PeaceData was part of a dangerous Kremlin operation to help Donald Trump win the US presidential election by turning progressives away from the Democratic Party and its candidate Joe Biden.
The narrative was contradicted in several glaring ways. For one, a mere 5 percent of PeaceData’s total articles were about the US election, representing just around 35 posts.
Those allegedly recruited by PeaceData to write as freelancers were highly suspect as well. The most high-profile former contributor to the website, who was interviewed by the New York Times after the supposed Russian active measure was exposed, happens to be an actor for hire who strongly supports Joe Biden, has admitted to severe mental illness, and has previously collaborated with the FBI. He publicly claims to be “a black man trapped in a white man’s body” and writes about his visions of aliens.
Another former PeaceData writer who was given a large platform in The Guardian previously interned for conservative Democrat Congressman Don Beyer, wrote anti-Russian articles, and pushes Russiagate narratives on social media.
Why would dubious and apparently compromised figures like these have leapt at the opportunity to write for an unknown website whose editorial line was so clearly at odds with their stated views? And how did that previously unknown online operation find these obscure figures?
And so on ....
Thus, all Graphika demonstrated was that the people behind the page lied about their identities. PeaceData could just as likely have been run by disinformation operatives working for the US government, or the UK government, or some private entity – perhaps some government contractor desperate to rustle up new contracts to combat disinformation...
Therefore the possibility must be considered that private contractors for US intelligence agencies borrowed the same tactics they employed during the scandalous 2018 Alabama Senate false flag operation, creating the PeaceData network themselves and falsely posing as Russians in order to smear authentic American independent media outlets as Kremlin-linked disinformation operations, to build the case for ultimately censoring them, and to justify their own paychecks.
In fact, in its report on the PeaceData controversy, the Washington Post quoted a figure who was directly involved in that Alabama false flag operation.
The Post cited Renée DiResta as a putative expert who “tracked the strategy” of how alleged Russian “disinformation operatives” like those supposedly behind PeaceData recruit “unwitting locals.”
What the Post failed to acknowledge was that DiResta was not a mere observer of the strategy; she participated in the Alabama disinformation operation while working as director of research of the US government contractor, New Knowledge (now Yonder)...
PeaceData’s Wikipedia page created by same neocon editors that censored The Grayzone...
One of the main editors of the new PeaceData page happens to be Philip Cross, a notorious neocon account that spends hours per day, every single day, removing any anti-war perspectives on Wikipedia, censoring facts inconvenient to NATO members, and spreading pro-US propaganda...
While major questions surrounding PeaceData remain unanswered, it is clear that US intelligence agencies and their private contractors have independent anti-imperialist media in their crosshairs.
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