Breaking911
@Breaking911
🚨President Trump confirms the U.S. will continue to send "secured" aid to Ukraine in exchange for rare earth.
"If we didn't do that, then Putin would say he won. We're the thing that's holding it back. We'll go as long as we have to go."
Do you support this?
https://x.com/Breaking911/status/1889822916432597139
Demoralization shills are in
Do not engage
Matt Taibbi's Opening Statement To Congress About USAID, Free Speech, And The 'Censorship Machine'
https://youtu.be/SiwLGLJcuf0
Thank you, Mr. Chairman.
Two years ago, when Michael and I first testified before your Weaponization of Government Subcommittee, Democratic members called us “so-called journalists,” suggested we were bought-off “scribes,” and questioned our ethics and loyalties. When we tried to answer, we were told to shut up, take off our tinfoil hats, and remember two things: one, there is no digital censorship, two, if there is digital censorship, it’s for our own good.
I was shocked. I thought the whole thing had to be a mistake. No way the party I gave votes to all my life was now pro-censorship. Then last year I listened to John Kerry, whom I voted for, talk to the World Economic Forum. Speaking about disinformation, he said “our First Amendment stands as a major block” to our ability to “hammer it out of existence.”
He complained that “it’s really hard to govern” because “people self-select where they go for their news,” which makes it “much harder to build consensus…”
I defended Kerry when people said he “looks French,” but Marie Antoinette would have been embarrassed by this speech. He was essentially complaining that the peasants are “self-selecting” their own media. What’s next, letting them make up up their own minds?
Lastly, “building consensus” may be a politician’s job, but it’s not mine as a citizen or as a journalist. In fact, making it hard to govern is exactly the media’s job. The failure to understand this is why we have a censorship problem.
This is an Alamo moment for the First Amendment. Most of America’s closest allies have already adopted draconian speech laws. We’re surrounded. The EU’s new Digital Services Act is the most comprehensive censorship law ever instituted in a democratic society.
Ranking member Raskin, you don’t have to as far as Russiaor China to find people jailed for speech. Our allies in England now have an Online Safety Act which empowers the government to jail people for nebulous offenses like “false communication” or causing “psychological harm.” Germany, France, Australia, Canada, and other nations have implemented similar ideas.
These laws are totally incompatible with our system. Our own citizens have been arrested in some of these countries, but our government hasn’t stood up for them. Why? Because many of our bureaucrats believe in these laws.
https://youtu.be/fP82o_dH2kE
Take USAID. Many Americans are in an uproar now because they learned about over $400 million going to an organization called Internews, whose chief Jeanne Bourgault boasted to Congress about training “hundreds of thousands of people” in journalism. Her views are almost identical to Kerry’s.
She gave a talk about “building trust and combatting misinformation” in India during the pandemic. She said that after months of a “really beautifully unified Covid-19 message,” vaccine enthusiasm rose to 87%, but when “mixed information on vaccine efficacy” got out, hesitancy ensued.
We’re paying this person to train journalists, and she doesn’t know the press doesn’t exist to promote “unity” or political goals like vaccine enthusiasm. That’s propaganda, not journalism.
Bourgault also once said that to fight “bad content,” we need to “work really hard on exclusion lists or inclusion lists” and “really try to focus our ad dollars” toward “the good news.”
Again, you don’t know the fastest way to erode “trust” in media is by having government sponsor “exclusion lists,” you shouldn’t be getting a dollar in taxpayer money, let alone $476 million. And USAID is just a tiny piece of a censorship machine Michael and I saw across a long list of agencies. Collectively they’ve bought up every part of the news production line: sources, think-tanks, research, “fact-checking,” “anti-disinformation,” commercial media scoring, and when all else fails, censorship.
It’s a giant closed messaging loop, whose purpose is to transform the free press into a consensus machine. There’s no way to remove the rot surgically. The whole mechanism has to go.
Is there “right-wing misinformation”? Hell yes. It exists in every direction. But I grew up a Democrat and don’t remember being afraid of it. At the time, we didn’t need censorship because we figured we had the better argument.
Obviously, some of you lack that same confidence. You took billions from taxpayers and blew it on programs whose entire purpose was to tell them they’re wrong about things they can see with their own eyes.
You sold us out, and until these “rather tiresome” questions are answered, this problem is not fixed. Thank you.
Playing the hero with old Anon digs
Mike Benz: «Trump wanted to take out ISIS. ISIS, according to the previous White House. We have leaked WikiLeaks emails from Jake Sullivan telling Hillary Clinton that Al Qaeda is on our side in Syria and that, effectively, ISIS was a useful ally against Bashar al-Assad.
Trump wanted to take out ISIS. How do you fund ISIS if the president wants to eradicate ISIS? If you still want to use them as assets in the region, you won't get interagency approval if the CIA does it as a covered operation. But what if USAID does it?
And that's how you see all this USAID money flowing to ISIS, Al Qaeda, and Taliban groups. I think they found $122 million from USAID for them just this week. I guarantee that number is much higher.
ADVERTISEMENT
Trump's OIG, which just took over USAID, published a report. It was unknown to the American public until now that there is a big legal loophole in USAID. Everyone can read that OIG report. John Solomon from Just the News published all of this.
But essentially, USAID can look the other way because there are no restrictions on its contractors regarding sanctioned money flows and terrorist financing—or at least, there are massive loopholes.
"The State Department can fund terrorist groups and get away with it in a way that no other US government agency can."
https://gatewayhispanic.com/video/mike-benz-on-jake-sullivans-email-to-clinton-and-bypassing-trump/
US Intelligence Suggests Israel Is Trying To Drag Trump Into Preemptive Attack On Iran
A fresh report Wednesday in The Wall Street Journal has reviewed a US intelligence assessment which concludes Israel currently sees an opening for strikes on Iranian nuclear sites, sensing Tehran's weakness after Hezbollah's leadership was decimated, Assad fell in Syria, and following tit-for-tat major strikes between Israel and the Islamic Republic last year.
The key line in the report is that "The intelligence analysis concluded Israel would push the Trump administration to back the strikes, viewing him as more likely to join an attack than now-former President Joe Biden and fearing the window for halting Tehran’s pursuit of a nuclear weapon was closing, two of the people familiar with the intelligence said."
https://www.wsj.com/world/middle-east/israel-sees-opening-for-strikes-on-iranian-nuclear-sites-u-s-intelligence-warned-76a7fa24
The assessment, produced by multiple intelligence agencies, was issued within weeks of Trump taking office, but a similar follow-up conclusion was forwarded to President Trump upon his entering the Oval Office.
"The U.S. intelligence community produced a second report delivered during the early days of President Trump’s administration reiterating that Israel is considering such strikes on Iranian nuclear facilities, according to one of the U.S. officials familiar with the intelligence," the WSJ continues.
But it also says that Israel would likely have to rely on Pentagon help. The WSJ cites US military officials who conclude that American "military support and munitions would likely be needed for an Israeli attack on Iran’s heavily fortified nuclear sites given their complexity."
While Trump has taken a hard pro-Israel line on the Gaza crisis, just this week telling Hamas it must release all remaining Israeli captives by noon Saturday or else there will be "hell" to pay, he has also long vowed to end 'wars of choice' and needless foreign military adventurism abroad.
A major joint US-Israel attack on Iran's nuclear facilities certainly fits the definition of a 'war of choice' from the American public's perspective, given war weariness has also long set in regarding the Ukraine war, and Washington's costly role in it. But during his first term he showed a willingness to shoot from the hip, ordering the risky drone strike which took out IRGC Quds Force chief Qasem Soleimani at the Baghdad airport in January 2020 (risky, that is, in terms of blowback and the potential of starting a regional war).
But certainly the new WSJ reporting signals that Israeli officials are trying to drag the Trump administration into a heightened conflict with Iran.
"Iran is more exposed than ever to strikes on its nuclear facilities," Israeli Defense Minister Israel Katz announced in November. "We have the opportunity to achieve our most important goal—to thwart and eliminate the existential threat to the State of Israel."
Trump on Monday warned no option is off the table to prevent the Iranians from achieving nuclear weapons status. But he also seems to be in the mood for a more peaceful negotiated solution.
https://www.zerohedge.com/geopolitical/us-intelligence-report-suggests-israel-trying-drag-trump-preemptive-attack-iran