Mainstream Media IMPLODES Post-Debate
Katie and Aaron laugh at all the corporate pundits and politicians as they scramble to protect Genocide Joe
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Sanctions Are a Form of Warfare
“Sanctions are a form of war. They’re economic warfare. And they destroy people’s lives.”
Joshua Landis (https://twitter.com/joshua_landis), Sandra Mackey Chair in Middle East Studies at the University of Oklahoma, is one of the foremost experts on Syria. This week, as Syria, along with neighbor Turkiye, grapples with the aftermath of the devastating earthquake, Professor Landis joins the Useful Idiots to explain the deadly consequences that sanctions pile on to the damage.
“America likes to talk about all its precision bombing and hitting someone with a drone to avoid collateral damage,” Landis explains. “But sanctions? It’s all about collateral damage. Very little of it is targeted.”
But if you read corporate media outlets like the New York Times or Washington Post, you’d find a much different story. Both papers this week published headlines that were hastily changed when they realized they were being a little too truthful. See if you can tell the difference:
The ...
00:01:17
"Shameful" New York Times Changes Headline to Protect Sanctions
“Sanctions are a form of war. They’re economic warfare. And they destroy people’s lives.”
Joshua Landis (https://twitter.com/joshua_landis), Sandra Mackey Chair in Middle East Studies at the University of Oklahoma, is one of the foremost experts on Syria. This week, as Syria, along with neighbor Turkiye, grapples with the aftermath of the devastating earthquake, Professor Landis joins the Useful Idiots to explain the deadly consequences that sanctions pile on to the damage.
“America likes to talk about all its precision bombing and hitting someone with a drone to avoid collateral damage,” Landis explains. “But sanctions? It’s all about collateral damage. Very little of it is targeted.”
But if you read corporate media outlets like the New York Times or Washington Post, you’d find a much different story. Both papers this week published headlines that were hastily changed when they realized they were being a little too truthful. See if you can tell the difference:
The ...
00:01:24
Free preview: Matt Taibbi Exposes Russiagate Bots
With Matt Taibbi’s Twitter Files and Jeff Gerth’s new in-depth reporting for CJR exposing the years of lies spread by Russiagaters, bitter attacks from outed journalists are rolling in.
Gerth and Taibbi, who come from the old style of journalism where you fact check your work and don’t accept government officials’ claims on faith, have each shown clear, indisputable evidence of disinformation campaigns pushed by corporate reporters. And since the so-called journalists can’t argue the facts, they dig themselves a deeper hole with more lies and name-calling.
Jeff Gerth has been working as a reporter for decades and published, in the very mainstream Columbia Journalism Review, a 20,000-word report on his findings, only to be called a liar and misdirecting magician in the most self-important article by Mother Jones’ David Corn (“The true media failure is that Trump got away with it and that articles like this one that you are now reading are still necessary.”) And possibly worse ...
00:54:34
Good to be part of the community. I think that Aaron and Katie do a brilliant job in these hellish times when such great in - depth research and reporting are essential.
The full Video is now up on our Locals Channel; Truckers Roost.
Our intrepid reporter, Mr. Fat Flabbie Doobie, reports on the war between Russia and Ukraine in the former Crimean Khanate:
By around 800 a.d. the Kievan Rus was the dominant force in Rus culture, but the Crimea, and all coastal areas, were dominated by nomadic Turkic peoples, with ancient Greek port settlements scattered along the coast. In 1222 Ghengis Khan invaded the Crimea and defeated the Turks there. In the years that followed, his Golden Horde would conquer the entirety of the Crimea and the Kievan Rus. In 1441, the descendants of Ghengis Khan established a new nation, the Krimean Khanate, encompassing the Crimean peninsula and the Donbas region. In the meantime the center of Rus culture had shifted to Moscow and had slowly pushed the Mongols out of the greater Rus. In 1783, Catherine the great finally defeated the Khanate (ruled by Khans of Ghengis' Giray clan) and annexed it into Russia. For the next 134 ...
Israel is heading for "national suicide" says Jewish Arab Israeli
Former Zionist Alon Mizrahi thinks this will be "the war that breaks Israel"
Subscribe for the full episode at the bottom of the page. Watch a free preview here:
“If this is my story, then how do Palestinians feel?”
This was the turning point for Jewish Arab Israeli Alon Mizrahi, a Mizrahi Jew who grew up in Israel facing racism and discrimination his whole life because of the color of his skin and the type of Jew he is. Mizrahi Jews ancestrally come from the Middle East. Ashkenazi Jews, like Netanyahu, come from Central and Eastern Europe.
“I wasn't an Israeli,” Alon says. “I was treated differently, I was looked at differently by teachers in school, in university, by people everywhere. And when I was willing to accept that there's no such thing as an Israeli, my next step was, if this is my story, how do Palestinians feel? Or how do Arabs feel?”
Alon felt the long-engrained Zionism taught to him beginning to splinter. “And then I started reading about the actual history of Zionism and Palestine. And it didn't take long for me to get it. It has nothing to do with reality. Zionism is 100% fiction. There's not one grain of truth to all of it.”
So as the story he was told began to break apart and the death tolls of Palestinians rose each year, all without any word from the media he was instructed to trust, Alon’s worldview, like many people’s these days, has turned cold.
“I'm in a stage in my life,” he says, “where I question everything. Nothing is sacred for me. Nothing. People are sacred. Children and babies are sacred. But that's the only thing. The rest I don't give a f*ck about. I'm willing to accept everything I know about anything is a lie, a political lie, brainwashing, propaganda.”
As an Israeli who is now awake inside of Israel, Alon Mizrahi tells us his government’s plans:
“Netanyahu is preparing for a bigger and more apocalyptic war.” He believes Netanyahu will soon invade Lebanon, opening up a new front in order to keep his power steady as the war rages on. But Lebanon is not Hamas: their army and arsenal are fully equipped. Which is why Alon has such a dark prediction for Israel’s current fate: “National suicide.”
And how does that end? “I think this is going to be the war that breaks Israel.”
Subscribe for the full interview with Alon Mizrahi on Netanyahu’s promise not to stop his assault on Gaza, the wider war with Lebanon, and the prospect of a coming Armageddon.
Plus, catch this week’s Thursday Throwdown: NYT accidentally exposes Biden's big debate lie
Thanks for supporting independent media. Subscribe for the full episode here:
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NYT accidentally exposes Biden's big debate lie
The biggest lie at the debate almost went unchecked. The New York Times ruined that
“The fact is that Putin is a war criminal,” whispered Biden during his debate against Trump. “He’s killed thousands and thousands of people. And he has made one thing clear: he wants to re-establish what was part of the Soviet empire, not just a piece, he wants all of Ukraine.”
He went on, so far unchecked by Dana Bash and Jake Tapper: “And then you think he’ll stop there? Do you think he’ll stop when he – if he takes Ukraine? What do you think happens to Poland? What do you think happens to Belarus? What do you think happens to those NATO countries?”
And while the media went on to fact check Trump’s many lies, they avoided all of Biden’s, covering up his trail of falsehoods perfectly.
Except for the New York Times.
They wrote this week: "Throughout the war, U.S. officials have assessed that President Vladimir V. Putin is loath to expand the war beyond Ukraine’s borders."
The New York Times must be having a very shameful week knowing that it didn’t perfectly perform the duties of state media stenography.
And that’s not all they’re in trouble for. Prime Minister Netanyahu slammed the Times for accusing Israel of being willing to accept a peace deal.
“I am here to make it unequivocally clear,” he said, “This will not happen. The war will end once Israel achieves all of its objectives. We will not capitulate to the winds of defeatism, neither in the New York Times nor anywhere else.”
Ouch, strike two for the paper that used to be so good at following the government line. We’re sure they will rectify it immediately.
It’s all this, and so much more, on this week’s episode of Thursday Throwdown: your midweek dose of media madness. Join Katie and Aaron so you can laugh instead of cry at it all.
Subscribe to watch the full episode here:
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The one way to stop Israel – w/ Diana Buttu
Harrowing first-hand stories, told from inside Israel
265 days into Israel’s assault on Gaza, Palestinian-Canadian lawyer and former spokesperson for the Palestine Liberation Organization Diana Buttu joins us from Haifa with a stark warning:
Things are going to get worse.
“For Netanyahu,” she explains, “he needs to open up another front in order to maintain his power. He's made it clear that he's not going to push for a ceasefire. He doesn't care about the Israeli captives. And so it's pretty clear to me that he's going to go ahead and attack Lebanon.”
Israel has no aim to rescue its hostages. It never did. “If they actually cared about them, they would have done what should have been done very early on, which is negotiate a ceasefire. Instead, they’ve done the opposite. And this is why you can look at these ceasefire proposals with such skepticism. Because instead, what they’ve done is bombed Gaza to virtual smithereens.”
Diana, whose father survived the Nakba in 1948, moved to Haifa in 2000. And like many others, she believed what the media told everyone to believe: that with a simple peace plan, Palestine would be fixed.
Then she arrived in Palestine and saw the true reality.
“All of the things that had been dismissed by the mainstream media,” she says, “I had dismissed too. I had dismissed this idea of settlements and the impact of settlements. And I kept thinking, it'll be undone. It'll all be undone. I dismissed the harm of what it means to be a Palestinian political prisoner, to be somebody who's abducted in the middle of the night. I dismissed the harm of the checkpoints. I dismissed a lot of things. And so when I arrived here, it was the first time that I had to confront the reality that this political process was not going to undo any of those harms.”
Stopping the bombs is one thing. Stopping settlements, returning land, granting rights to Palestinians, and removing the literal wall that cages them is another.
“They talk about reconfiguring the prison, reconfiguring the occupation, but they never talk about ending the occupation because this mentality of control permeates deep inside Israel.”
There’s only one way this ends, Diana says. “It's going to end when the world says that it's enough. And that's it.”
Diana also shares haunting stories of Palestinian children who were kept in Israeli torture prisons for months, and the ways that western corporate media has worked to cover it up.
This week’s interview with Diana Buttu will not be paywalled. We hope you’ll listen to and share her important perspective.
Plus, catch this week’s Thursday Throwdown: CNN compares Keffiyehs to Confederate Flags, where Van Jones claims that wearing a keffiyeh around Israeli government supporters is as much a call for violence as waving a confederate flag in Harlem. And we celebrate the freedom of Julian Assange, a rare victory that couldn’t have happened without supporters of independent media like you.
Thanks for your support, we’ll see you next time.
