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https://thegrayzone.com/2020/02/03/huffpost-uk-editor-censorship-dsma-russia-jess-brammar/#more-20070
HuffPost UK ran yet another hit piece smearing academic critics of the dirty war on Syria as Russian stooges. The outlet’s editor-in-chief Jess Brammar assists a British government program that censors journalism that may “compromise UK military and intelligence operations.”
By Ben Norton
The Huffington Post has relied on Western government officials and organizations funded by Western governments to viciously smear anti-war academics as “useful idiots” of Russia, claiming they are being “used” by the Kremlin.
Ironically, HuffPost UK has done this while its own editor-in-chief actively collaborates with the British Ministry of Defense in a program that censors journalism on behalf of “UK military and intelligence operations,” in order to protect “national security” interests.
HuffPost UK published a hit piece by reporter and senior editor Chris York on January 29 that hearkens back to the era of McCarthyite witch hunts. Titled “The ‘Useful Idiots’: How These British Academics Helped Russia Deny War Crimes At The UN,” York’s hatchet job is dedicated to destroying the reputations of several anti-war scholars who have done extensive research exposing the lies and regime-change propaganda spread by Western governments in their hybrid war on Syria.
It was York’s 12th piece attacking this small group of academics. From the perspective of the British public, a group of semi-obscure professors is an unusual source of such intense interest. However, it appears that the UK regime-change apparatus that has dumped untold millions of pounds into overthrowing Syria’s government feels threatened by their research.
York’s article relies almost entirely on the unsubstantiated opinions of European government officials and groups that are bankrolled by the United States and European governments. It also features some glaring omissions, leaving out key details and misleading readers.
HuffPost UK editor-in-chief Jess Brammar took to Twitter to promote the hit piece, claiming it shows “how a group of British academics have been used by Russia to help them deny war crimes by the Assad regime at the UN.”
(UPDATE, February 4, 2020: Mere hours after this article was published, Brammar was promoted from executive editor to editor-in-chief of HuffPost UK. This piece has been updated to reflect her promotion.)
“It’s quite a tale – please give it a read,” Brammar wrote on Twitter. The article is indeed a tale — and a tall one at that, given it dabbles in fiction with unsubstantiated hyperbolic claims based on Cold War-era propaganda tropes.
Brammar shared a quote from the piece that is attributed to an anonymous “European diplomat,” who claimed anti-war British scholars are “unwittingly and naively acting as agents of propaganda for the Russians, or actively support[ing] Russian disinformation.”
Jess Brammar
✔@jessbrammar
· Jan 29, 2020
We are leading on this fascinating and important story from @ChrisDYork today about how a group of British academics have been used by Russia to help them deny war crimes by the Assad regime at the UN. It’s quite a tale - please give it a read. https://www.huffingtonpost.co.uk/entry/the-useful-idiots_uk_5e2b107ac5b67d8874b0dd9d …
The 'Useful Idiots': How These British Academics Helped Russia Deny War Crimes At The UN
Lecturers from the Universities of Edinburgh, Leicester and Bristol have accused rescue workers the White Helmets of mass murder in Syria – to condemnation from Amnesty International and others.huffingtonpost.co.uk
Jess Brammar
✔@jessbrammar
A European diplomat told us these lecturers from UK universities were either “unwittingly and naively acting as agents of propaganda for the Russians, or actively support[ing] Russian disinformation”.
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While HuffPost UK’s editor-in-chief smears dissenting academics as “agents of propaganda for the Russians,” she herself actively collaborates with a British government censorship program — as writer Caitlin Johnstone first pointed out.
Jess Brammar is a member of the Defence and Security Media Advisory (DSMA) Committee, a government initiative overseen by the Ministry of Defence (MOD) that, according to its official website, exists “to prevent inadvertent public disclosure of information that would compromise UK military and intelligence operations and methods” or potentially challenge “national security” interests.
In other words, the DSMA Committee is a group of media elites who voluntarily agree to collaborate with the British government to censor stories and information the UK military and spy operations deem inconvenient or too dangerous for the public to see.
The DSMA Committee is chaired by the director of general security policy for the UK Ministry of Defense. It includes four more government officials: the directors of national security at the MOD, the Foreign and Commonwealth Office, the Home Office, and the Cabinet Office. They are joined by three military officials in secretarial positions, along with a government assistant.
Rounding out the committee are 17 media elites, representing major publishers such as the Huffington Post, the Times, the Telegraph, the Daily Mail, Sky News, ITV, the BBC, the Press Association, Harper Colins UK, and more.
Brammar was one of the only two members of the committee to be nominated directly by the chair and vice-chairs. In other words, the director of general security policy for the UK Ministry of Defense personally approved her seat on the DSMA Committee — a clear stamp of approval for her editorial judgment from the British military establishment.
In a report entitled, “How the UK Security Services neutralised the country’s leading liberal newspaper,” journalists Matt Kennard and Mark Curtis demonstrated how the military-intelligence apparatus cultivated The Guardian as its tool. The process began in earnest after the Guardian embarrassed Western governments by publishing secret documents leaked by National Security Agency (NSA) contractor Edward Snowden.
The DSMA Committee was previously called the Defence Advisory Notice (DA-Notice) and Defence Notice (D-Notice) Committee, and purports to be voluntary. Kennard dug through officials minutes of meetings held by the committee and found that the secretary implied otherwise, insisting, “The Guardian was obliged to seek … advice under the terms of the DA notice code,” and “This failure to seek advice was a key source of concern and considerable efforts had been made to address it.”
Periodically, the MOD-led committee sends out a private message to British media outlets called a D-Notice, which warns the ostensibly independent press against publishing information that would “jeopardise both national security and possibly UK personnel.”
Kennard outlined how these D-Notices have been used to muffle journalists, and prevent the publication of stories that threatened to embarrass the British government.
HuffPost UK editor Jess Brammar is at the heart of this government effort to silence critical media.
Jess Brammar
✔@jessbrammar
· Jan 29, 2020
Replying to @jessbrammar
Amnesty International told us: “The millions of Syrians whose lives have been devastated by years of barrel bombing, chemical weapons attacks, imprisonment, torture and killing deserve genuine truth and justice, not this squalid propaganda.”
Jess Brammar
✔@jessbrammar
Every time @ChrisDYork reports on this group of individuals he is subject to abuse online, including being called complicit in war crimes, something I am also accused of by their supporters. We won’t stop reporting on stories like this when they need to be told.
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War stenography for Western governments
But it is not just Brammar’s ongoing, willing participation in a British military-led censorship program that makes her attempts to portray Huffington Post and her reporter Chris York as noble truth-tellers fending off attacks by a baying mob of Kremlin-sponsored abusers so hypocritical.
HuffPost UK smearing independent thinkers and critical-minded academics as Russian puppets while actively peddling regime-change talking points from Western government officials is astoundingly ironic.
In his wildly misleading article, York describes the Working Group on Syria, Propaganda and Media (WGSPM), a collective of dissident British scholars, as “agents of propaganda for the Russians.”
The thrust of this smear piece is the unsubstantiated opinion of an unnamed “European diplomat,” who is quoted in five paragraphs viciously maligning the scholars, and whose personal partisan views are presented as absolute fact.
The HuffPost UK hatchet job provides no actual evidence that these scholars have been working with or for the Russian government. The only links to the Kremlin that York could find are hilariously thin: one Russian official praised the group, and another tweeted a link to their work.
Moreover, some of the so-called experts cited by York happen to work for pro-war organizations funded directly by Western governments.
York relies on pundit Shadi Hamid to depict WGSPM as crazy loons. Hamid works at the hawkish think tank the Brookings Institution, which is funded by the Qatari monarchy and US governments.
Hamid is also a vocal advocate for Western military intervention who has gone to absurd lengths to defend NATO’s regime-change war on Libya, which destroyed the most prosperous country in Africa and left behind a failed state that turned into a massive ISIS base and a hub for trafficking and enslavement of African refugees.
Another purported “expert” cited by York is the “open source” reporter Eliot Higgins, who smears the WGSPM as “useful idiots.”
Higgins is the founder of the pro-NATO blog Bellingcat, which is funded directly by the US government’s regime-change arm the National Endowment for Democracy (NED), a notorious CIA cutout. Bellingcat is also part of a UK government-financed program backed by the British Foreign Office. And Higgins’ former employer is the Atlantic Council, NATO’s unofficial think tank, also bankrolled by Western governments as well as Gulf monarchies and the arms industry.
Kit Klarenberg@KitKlarenberg
Further confirmation UK gov's 'Open Information Partnership' is the 'Expose Network' from the latest #IntegrityInitiative file dump - so @EliotHiggins was indeed lying when he said @bellingcat hadn't received "funding or information" from the FCO.
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While HuffPost UK’s in-house regime-change cheerleader Chris York treats the Bellingcat founder as an expert, even the New York Times acknowledged in a puff piece that Higgins has no real expertise. “Higgins attributed his skill not to any special knowledge of international conflicts or digital data,” the paper noted, “but to the hours he had spent playing video games, which, he said, gave him the idea that any mystery can be cracked.”
Misleading ‘reporting’ that leaves out crucial information
In recent months, the Working Group on Syria, Propaganda and Media published leaks from the Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons (OPCW) revealing that at least two whistleblowers complained that the UN-created organization had become politicized, accusing the management of suppressing and even reversing scientific findings under US government pressure.
The apparent OPCW suppression concerns the allegations that the Syrian government used chemical weapons in the city of Douma in April 2018, in an area occupied by Salafi-jihadist insurgents.
The US, British, and French governments claimed without evidence that Damascus had launched a gas attack in this Islamist extremist-occupied area. In response, Washington and its allies launched missile strikes against the Syrian government in violation of international law.
Numerous leaks from the OPCW have cast doubt on the unsubstantiated allegations of Western governments. Along with the WGSPM, WikiLeaks has published several batches of leaks from the OPCW, including internal emails that show signs of high-level suppression of inconvenient scientific findings about the incident in Douma.
HuffPost UK’s Chris York did not even mention WikiLeaks in his wildly misleading article. Instead, York falsely asserts that there “is no reliable evidence to support the theory” that the alleged Douma gas attack was staged by the Salafi-jihadist insurgents on the ground.
Conspicuously absent from York’s article was the smoking gun that arrived in the form of testimony at the United Nations Security Council by former OPCW inspection team leader and engineering expert Ian Henderson.
In January, Henderson told the UN via video that OPCW management had suppressed the fact-finding mission (FFM) team’s findings on the ground in Douma. (Henderson had wanted to testify in person at the UN, but the US government did not give him a visa.)
“We had serious misgivings that a chemical attack had occurred,” Henderson explained. The former OPCW expert added that his months of research “provided further support for the view that there had not been a chemical attack.”
The Grayzone@TheGrayzoneNews
A former OPCW inspection team leader and engineering expert told the UN Security Council that their investigation in Douma, Syria suggested no chemical attack took place. But their findings were suppressed and reversed
Read more here: https://thegrayzone.com/2020/01/22/ian-henderson-opcw-whistleblower-un-no-chemical-attack-douma-syria/ …
via @BenjaminNorton
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In his article, York completely avoided mention of Henderson and UN testimony, in a very egregious and misleading oversight. And this striking omission appears to be intentional, because on Twitter, York later condemned Henderson, along with the other OPCW whistleblower who goes by Alex, claiming they are “wrong.”
The fact that York would conveniently leave out Henderson’s UN testimony — the most important, and scandalous piece of evidence yet of OPCW chicanery — while publicly smearing him on Twitter shows that the methodology of the reporting itself is clearly biased, sloppy, and unprofessional.
Citing dubious regime-change activist ‘Leila al-Shami’ as an ‘expert’
Chris York’s attack piece is also self-referential. In one especially dubious sentence, he claims the WGSPM “has previously been accused of ‘whitewashing war crimes.'” To support this grave accusation, York links to an article he himself wrote in 2018, which is essentially a mimeograph of his latest attack.
This 2018 smear piece accusing the WGSPM academics of “whitewashing war crimes” attributes the outrageous accusation not to a legal expert on war crimes but rather to Leila al-Shami, who has spent years lobbying for foreign intervention to violently overthrow the Syrian government.
Al-Shami is, in fact, the pen name for a mysterious British activist whose credentials are impossible to validate. According to Robin Yassin-Kassab, the co-author of her book “Burning Syria,” Leila al-Shami “is the pseudonym of another British Syrian who worked in Syria in the human rights field before the” war broke out in 2011.
For years, al-Shami has refused to show her face on camera. Hosts routinely ask the audience not to take photos, and during a 2016 event at NYU’s Kevorkian Center, attendees were forbidden from filming al-Shami’s talk “for security reasons.”
In a June 2017 interview with Spain’s El Nacional (in which she and Yassin-Kassab wrongly forecasted a partition of Syria), al-Shami was photographed turning away to hide her face. She claimed that she could not be seen publicly “for security reasons.”
However, during an April 2016 event at New York City’s New School, al-Shami was photographed and filmed while on stage. Video of the talk was published by Flatiron Hot News, a local culture publication.
One of the only known images of regime-change activist Leila al-Shami (on left)
Al-Shami is best known for marketing the cause of regime change in Syria to the Western left, painting it as a glorious grassroots struggle for participatory democracy, while branding its leftist opponents as crypto-fascists and “idiots.”
Her book, “Burning Country,” contains no on-the-ground reporting, relying instead on reports by and about opposition activists largely funded by the US government and Gulf monarchies such as the White Helmets and Raed Fares.
While al-Shami claims to have “been involved in human rights and social justice struggles in Syria,” the human rights group she supposedly co-founded, Tahrir-ICN, appears to be an empty shell that consists of a few barely active social media pages and a dormant blog.
Chris York’s reliance on a shady figure like this further highlights his misleading tactics. By citing regime-change activists as credible experts while heaping scorn on his subjects with passive-voice phrases like “have been accused of,” he disguises his own opinions as objective reporting.
Under the leadership of editor-in-chief and British security state collaborator Jess Brammar, York’s brand of dubious, highly partisan reporting is not only tolerated at HuffPost UK; it is encouraged.
York’s hit piece on the Working Group on Syria, Propaganda and Media was, in fact, his 12th attack on the small band of dissident academics. Desperate to suppress inconvenient facts about the dirty war on Syria, some powerful forces have found reliable stenographers at the HuffPost UK.
Ben Norton
https://thegrayzone.com/2020/02/04/pro-israel-buttigieg-seth-klarman-iowas-voting-app/
Behind the app that delayed Iowa’s voting results is a dark money operation funded by anti-Bernie Sanders billionaires. Its top donor Seth Klarman is a Buttigieg backer who has dumped money into pro-settler Israel lobby groups.
By Max Blumenthal
At the time of publication, 12 hours after voting in the Democratic Party’s Iowa caucuses ended, the results have not been announced. The delay in reporting is the result of a failed app developed by a company appropriately named Shadow Inc.
This firm was staffed by Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama campaign veterans and created by a Democratic dark money nonprofit backed by hedge-fund billionaires including Seth Klarman. A prolific funder of pro-settler Israel lobby organizations, Klarman has also contributed directly to Pete Buttigieg’s campaign.
The delay in the vote reporting denied a victory speech to Senator Bernie Sanders, the presumptive winner of the opening contest in the Democratic presidential primary. Though not one exit poll indicated that Buttigieg would have won, the South Bend, Indiana mayor took to Twitter to confidently proclaim himself the victor.
Pete Buttigieg
✔@PeteButtigieg
Iowa, you have shocked the nation.
By all indications, we are going on to New Hampshire victorious. #IowaCaucuses
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The bizarre scenario was made possible by a mysterious voting app whose origins had been kept secret by Democratic National Committee officials. For hours, it was unclear who created the failed technology, or how it wound up in the hands of Iowa party officials.
Though a dark money Democratic operation turned out to be the source of the disastrous app, suspicion initially centered on former Hillary Clinton campaign manager Robby Mook and his Russiagate-related elections integrity initiative.
Leveraging Russia hysteria into lucrative election opportunities
While Iowa Democratic Party Chairman Troy Price refused to say who was behind the failed app, he told NPR that he “worked with the national party’s cybersecurity team and Harvard University’s Defending Digital Democracy project…” Price did not offer details on his collaboration with the Harvard group, however.
The New York Times reported that this same outfit had teamed up with Iowa Democrats to run a “drill of worst-case scenarios” and possible foreign threats, but was also vague on details.
Robby Mook, the former campaign manager for Hillary Clinton’s failed 2016 presidential campaign, was the co-founder of Defending Digital Democracy. His initiative arose out of the national freakout over Russian meddling that he and his former boss helped stir when they blamed their loss on Russian interference. Mook’s new outfit pledged to “protect from hackers and propaganda attacks.”
He founded the organization with help from Matt Rhoades, a former campaign manager for Republican Mitt Romney whose public relations company was sued by a Silicon Valley investor after it branded him “an agent of the Russian government” and “a friend of Russian President, Vladimir Putin.” Rhoades’ firm had been contracted by a business rival to destroy the investor’s reputation.
As outrage grew over the delay in Iowa caucus results, Mook publicly denied any role in designing the notorious app.
Franklin Leonard
✔@franklinleonard
· Feb 3, 2020
You know it’s bad when... https://twitter.com/RobbyMook/status/1224555538790395904 …
Robby Mook
✔@RobbyMook
Sorry, folks. I did NOT have anythjng to do with building the Iowa caucus app. I dont know anything about it, had no role in it, and dont own a company that makes mobile appa. Please contact @iowademocrats with questions about it.
Franklin Leonard
✔@franklinleonard
.@RobbyMook, you may not have built the app, but the @nytimes is reporting that you were involved in stress testing it.
Any comment? https://www.nytimes.com/2020/01/31/us/politics/iowa-caucuses-hacking-security.html …
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Hours later, journalist Lee Fang reported that a previously unknown tech outfit called Shadow Inc. had contracted with the Iowa Democratic Party to create the failed technology. The firm was comprised of former staffers for Obama and Clinton as well as the tech industry, and had been paid for “software rights” by the Buttigieg campaign.
FEC filings show the Iowa Democratic Party and Pete Buttigieg campaign paid Shadow Inc., which developed the flawed app used in the Iowa caucus
An Israel lobby moneyman’s path to Mayor Pete’s wine cave
Shadow Inc. was launched by a major Democratic dark money nonprofit called Acronym, which also gave birth to a $7.7 million Super PAC known as Pacronym.
According to Sludge, Pacronym’s largest donor is Seth Klarman. A billionaire hedge funder, Klarman also happens to be a top donor to Buttigieg and Amy Klobuchar.
Though he has attracted some attention for his role in the campaign, Klarman’s prolific funding of the pro-settler Israel lobby and Islamophobic initiatives has gone almost entirely unmentioned.
Seth Klarman is the founder of the Boston-based Baupost Group hedge fund and a longtime donor to corporate Republican candidates. After Donald Trump called for forgiving Puerto Rico’s debt, Klarman – the owner of $911 million of the island’s bonds – flipped and began funding Trump’s opponents.
The billionaire’s crusade against Trump ultimately led him to Mayor Pete’s wine cave.
By the end of 2019, Klarman had donated $5,600 to Buttigieg and pumped money into the campaigns of Amy Klobuchar, Cory Booker, and Kamala Harris as well.
The billionaire’s support for centrist candidates appears to be not only about his own financial interests, but also his deep and abiding ideological commitment to Israel and its expansionist project.
As I reported for Mondoweiss, Klarman has been a top funder for major Israel lobby outfits, including those that support the expansion of illegal settlements and Islamophobic campaigns.
Klarman was the principal financier of The Israel Project, the recently disbanded Israeli government-linked propaganda organization that lobbied against the Iran nuclear deal and backed the Israeli settlement enterprise.
Klarman has heaped hundreds of thousands of dollars on the Middle East Media Research Institute (MEMRI) and the American Jewish Committee. And he funded The David Project, which was established to suppress Palestine solidarity organizing on college campuses across the US and battled to block the establishment of a Muslim community center in Boston.
Through his support for the Friends of Ir David Inc., Klarman directly involved himself in the Israeli settlement enterprise, assisting the US-based tax-exempt arm of the organization that oversaw a wave of Palestinian expulsions in the occupied East Jerusalem neighborhood of Silwan.
Other pro-Israel groups reaping the benefits of Klarman’s generosity include Birthright Israel, the AIPAC-founded Washington Institute for Near East Policy (WINEP), and the Foundation for the Defense of Democracies (FDD), a neoconservative think tank that helped devise Trump’s “maximum pressure” campaign of economic warfare on Iran.
Klarman is the owner of the Times of Israel, an Israeli media outlet that once published a call for Palestinian genocide. (The op-ed was ultimately removed following public backlash.)
In recent weeks, Buttigieg has sought to distinguish himself from Sanders on the issue of Israel-Palestine. During a testy exchange this January with a self-proclaimed Jewish supporter of Palestinian human rights, the South Bend mayor backtracked on a previous pledge to withhold military aid to Israel if it annexed parts of the West Bank.
IfNotNow
@IfNotNowOrg
NEW: The day after Trump unveiled his plan green-lighting Israeli annexation and Netanyahu’s announcement of a cabinet vote on annexation this Tuesday, @PeteButtigieg backtracked on his repeated promise that the "U.S. will not foot the bill for annexation." #StopFundingOccupation
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Another recipient of Klarman’s funding, Amy Klobuchar, has taken a strongly pro-Israel line, vowing to support Trump’s relocation of the US embassy from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem.
Klarman’s interest in Israel has apparently led him to support regime change in Syria. In 2017, the pro-Israel billionaire’s foundation donated $100,000 to the Syrian American Medical Society, a US-based non-profit that has lobbied aggressively for US intervention in Syria while partnering on the ground with foreign-backed extremists that occupied large swaths of the country.
The Klarman Family Foundation 2017 990 form shows it funds the Syrian American Medical Society (SAMS)
Back home in the US, Klarman has contributed heavily to funding the CIA Memorial Foundation. He is listed alongside former CIA Director George Tenet as a top individual contributor to the group.
Billionaire Seth Klarman is listed as a top donor to the CIA Memorial Foundation
Klarman’s support for Buttigieg, The Grayzone previously reported, has been complimented by a surprisingly long roster of former high-ranking CIA officials, regime-change architects, and global financiers.
Battling Bernie with hedge fund money and sexism claims
Like Klarman, Donald Sussman is a hedge funder who has channeled his fortune into Pacronym. He has given $1 million to the Super PAC and was also top donor to Hillary Clinton in 2016.
Sussman’s Paloma Partners operates through a series of offshore shell companies, and received tens of millions of dollars in the 2009 federal bailout of the banking industry.
His daughter, Democratic operative Emily Tisch Sussman, declared on MSNBC in September that “if you still support Sanders over Warren, it’s kind of showing your sexism.”
Ibrahim@ibrahimpols
MSNBC pundit says if you support Bernie Sanders over Elizabeth Warren it’s “showing your sexism.”
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As Democratic elites like the Sussmans braced for a Bernie Sanders triumph in Iowa, a mysterious piece of technology spun out by a group they supported delayed the vote results, preventing Sanders from delivering a victory speech.
And the politician many of them supported, Pete Buttigieg, exploited the moment to declare himself the winner.
In such a strange scenario, the conspiracy theories write themselves.
Max Blumenthal
https://thegrayzone.com/2020/02/07/nicaragua-opposition-support-us-eu-coalition/
The US embassy and European Union are meeting with right-wing Nicaraguan opposition leaders and pressuring them to unite against elected leftist President Daniel Ortega in the lead-up to the 2021 election.
By Ben Norton
A far-right opposition figure in Nicaragua has boasted that the country’s unpopular opposition forces are meeting with representatives from the US embassy and European Union, who have pledged them support in their bid to oust the ruling leftist Sandinista Front government.
According to this rightist Evangelical leader, the US government and EU are pressuring Nicaragua’s badly divided opposition to unite in the lead-up to the 2021 election, with the goal of unseating the Sandinistas.
This frank admission of foreign meddling in Nicaragua’s democracy comes after a violent coup attempt in 2018, in which right-wing groups funded and supported by the US government failed to overthrow the elected president, Daniel Ortega.
The Donald Trump administration has declared the small nation of Nicaragua to be a supposed “national security threat,” and has imposed several rounds of aggressive sanctions on the country, with the aim of destabilizing its economy.
The violence and economic warfare has failed to weaken the popularity of the ruling FSLN party, however. A survey released this January by a mainstream polling firm found that 63.5 percent of Nicaraguans plan to vote for the Sandinistas in the upcoming election, while the opposition really only has the dedicated support of around 11.5 percent of the population.
The Grayzone@TheGrayzoneNews
A fringe far-right Evangelical leader in Nicaragua revealed opposition forces are meeting with advisers from the US embassy and EU, who pledged support and are pressuring them to unite to try to oust the elected leftist Sandinista Front.
Read more here: https://thegrayzone.com/2020/02/07/nicaragua-opposition-support-us-eu-coalition/ …
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‘We met with political advisers from the US embassy and the European Union’
On January 30, right-wing leaders from a group called the Civic Alliance for Justice and Democracy (ACJD) held a press conference to announce their expansion as part of a process of “fortifying.”
The ACJD is a coalition of opposition groups, several of which are funded by the US government and coordinate closely with Washington. It was formed in 2018 during the coup attempt against the Sandinistas.
In the press conference and a subsequent printed statement, the ACJD announced that it is in the process of creating “a National Coalition, wide, pluralist, and committed to the change that Nicaragua needs.”
Among the opposition figures at the presser was Saturnino Cerrato, the fundamentalist Evangelical leader of the rabidly right-wing Party for Democratic Restoration (PRD).
Cerrato, a minor figure in Nicaraguan politics who is barely known outside far-right circles, said his party is eager to become part of the right-wing National Coalition, arguing “there is a total opening” for the opposition.
He revealed that this demand for opposition unity is not only coming from inside the country, but also from powerful foreign actors.
“First it is a national demand, from the national community, and next it is also a demand from the international community,” Cerrato explained.
“In these days — the day before yesterday and today — we met with political advisers from the US embassy and the European Union,” Cerrato said in the January 30 press conference, which was livestreamed on Facebook.
The US embassy and EU told the opposition leaders, “We are ready to support a large movement that is formed in Nicaragua,” he recalled.
“And one of the advisers said, ‘We are surprised that it has taken so much time to form that unity,'” he added.
Cerrato said the pressure both from within and outside convinced his party to join the National Coalition efforts.
Saturnino Cerrato speaking at the Nicaraguan opposition Civic Alliance press conference on January 30, sitting next to Juan Sebastián Chamorro
US and EU backing far-right fringe figures in Latin America
Before the US-backed coup attempt against Nicaragua’s elected Sandinista government in 2018, Saturnino Cerrato was virtually unknown in the country. His PRD party received just over 4 percent in the 2016 general elections.
A 2017 poll by major firm showed that more than 85 percent of Nicaraguans did not even know who Cerrato was or had no opinion of him. Of those who did know the right-wing pastor, they had a mostly negative view of him. (For perspective, this same poll found that 80 percent of Nicaraguans had a positive view of the leftist President Daniel Ortega, and just 11 percent had a negative view.)
A Nicaraguan activist told The Grayzone that figures like Cerrato “don’t have much local influence. But he is an Evangelical pastor who have the ability to influence many Evangelical groups.”
“He does not have a lot of people, he has one of the parties with very few votes,” the activist said. “But after the coup attempt they have tried to become more influential.”
The US government has a long history of elevating fringe far-right figures like these in coup efforts targeting independent leftist governments in Latin America.
In the putsch against Bolivia’s democratically elected leftist government in November 2019, for instance, Washington supported the installation of a Christian extremist with a long and documented history of anti-indigenous racism, Jeanine Añez. Her fringe opposition party also reaped just over 4 percent of the vote in the 2019 general elections.
More US-backed opposition groups leading Nicaragua alliance efforts
The opposition is moving towards greater unity while the Trump administration escalates its pressure campaign against Nicaragua’s government.
On January 31, the acting assistant secretary for the US State Department’s Bureau of Western Hemisphere Affairs, Michael G. Kozak, tweeted condemnation of the elected Ortega government and expressed support for the major right-wing newspaper, La Prensa.
Owned by the oligarchic Chamorro family, La Prensa is the traditional mouthpiece for the opposition. It has a long history of receiving funding from the US government through the CIA front the National Endowment for Democracy (NED) and was indispensable in the US government’s propaganda campaign against Nicaragua during its Contra proxy war in the 1980s.
Michael G. Kozak
✔@WHAAsstSecty
The Ortega regime continues to squeeze free press by blocking #Nicaragua’s @laprensa from importing paper & ink, which will silence Nicaragua’s oldest independent newspaper and its vital work. Ortega, fulfill your commitment from last March and release these supplies.
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1:56 PM - Jan 31, 2020
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The January 30 press conference held by Nicaragua’s Civic Alliance for Justice and Democracy featured several other prominent right-wing opposition activists who are backed by Washington.
Among the co-sponsors was Juan Sebastián Chamorro of the powerful Chamorro clan, a wealthy family that has controlled Nicaragua for much of its history. His neoliberal think tank, the Nicaraguan Foundation for Economic and Social Development (FUNIDES), has been bankrolled with millions of dollars by the US government’s soft-power arm the US Agency for International Development (USAID) and used as a conduit for funding smaller opposition groups.
Helping to organize the press conference was the group Blue and White National Unity (UNAB). Like the right-wing Civic Alliance, the UNAB was founded in 2018, in the wake of the failed coup attempt. It is an integral part of the US- and EU-backed efforts to form an opposition alliance. UNAB has even changed its photos on social media to call for a “National Coalition.”
Ben Norton
https://thegrayzone.com/2020/02/07/iowa-debacle-fueled-by-anti-bernie-billionaires-russiagate-hucksters-failed-dnc-elites/
Max Blumenthal breaks down the shadowy network of billionaires, Democratic elites, and Russiagate profiteers behind the Shadow app that ruined the Iowa caucuses, and a wider effort to stop Bernie Sanders’ progressive momentum.
Iowa’s voting debacle has renewed fears that the DNC is again working against Bernie Sanders and his grassroots campaign. Iowa Democrats slowly released the tallies from areas that favored Pete Buttigeg – allowing him to falsely claim an early victory. DNC chair Tom Perez called for a recanvassing of the vote amid widespread uncertainty about its accuracy. And the firm behind the Iowa Democrats’ faulty voting tabulation app, Shadow, is tied to veteran Clinton and Obama operatives, and a dark money operation funded by anti-Bernie Sanders billionaires.
Guest: Max Blumenthal, Editor of The Grayzone and author of The Management of Savagery.
TRANSCRIPT
AARON MATÉ: Welcome to Pushback. I’m Aaron Maté. Bernie Sanders has declared victory in the Iowa caucuses after days of confusion. The voting debacle has renewed fears that the DNC is once again working against Sanders and his grassroots movement. Iowa Democrats slowly released the tallies from areas that favored Pete Buttigieg, allowing Buttigieg to falsely claim an early victory. DNC chair Tom Perez called for a recanvassing of the vote amid widespread uncertainty about its accuracy.
My colleague Max Blumenthal has explored another angle of this story. The firm behind the Iowa Democrats’ faulty voting tabulation app, Shadow, is tied to veteran Clinton and Obama operatives and a dark money operation funded by anti-Bernie Sanders billionaires. Max Blumenthal is editor of The Grayzone and author of The Management of Savagery.
Max, before we get into your reporting at TheGrayzone.com about the dark money forces behind this app that ruined the Iowa caucus, let me just ask you, first, your overall reaction to what has transpired in Iowa over these last few days.
MAX BLUMENTHAL: Why, I think what we saw was sort of unprecedented. We’ve seen the Iowa caucuses be completely delegitimized before our eyes, just absolutely destroyed. And, you know, there’s no way to talk about it without getting into the reporting that I’ve done, because what I’m doing is kind of connecting the dots and exposing the political network that’s at the heart of this catastrophe. And what we’ve been told is that this was all just a big mistake, that it boils down to an app that malfunctioned, there are some problems in the coding or maybe some people had trouble working the app who were more familiar with the kind of analog technology that insured fair results, or maybe the problem was just that the Iowa caucuses don’t really reflect America and that they’re archaic and they’re decided by coin tosses. But the more that this goes on, the longer this goes on ─ and you see that all of the results aren’t released, and the results that are released don’t show the areas of strength for Bernie Sanders in Des Moines or in the college towns, or that the Iowa caucus chair is sort of a Hillary Clinton apparatchik and that he was having dinner the night before with Tara McGowan, who’s behind the Shadow, Inc. app that destroyed everything, or that DNC chair Tom Perez, who was installed after this campaign was run against Keith Ellison to prevent Bernie Sanders from getting control over the DNC, is now calling for a recanvass at the same moment that Bernie Sanders declares victory ─ the whole thing starts to appear in a more sinister light.
There does appear to be some kind of deliberate campaign to deny Bernie Sanders an opening victory that would generate momentum heading into New Hampshire, Nevada, California, and make him, you know, these victories would make his campaign kind of an unstoppable juggernaut. And, so, we have to start, kind of…I started kind of connecting the dots and what, you know, I’ve been able to see by looking at the political network that brought Tara McGowan into being and her group Acronym, which spun out the Shadow, Inc. app, is, first of all, a political network that’s deeply connected to Pete Buttigieg and his campaign, that’s in the tank for Buttigieg, but also one that has been practicing techniques of disinformation in political campaigns across the country for the past several years.
AARON MATÉ: Right, so in terms of those connections to Buttigieg, you point out that McGowan, the head of Acronym, which is behind the Shadow app, is married to a senior adviser on the Pete Buttigieg campaign. And you also identify these dark money forces, including the founder of LinkedIn, Reid Hoffman. Talk about his role here.
MAX BLUMENTHAL: Yeah, well, first of all, let’s just kind of, like, put the building blocks together. So, Tara McGowan is a 33-year-old veteran of Obama’s two political campaigns. She’s getting tons and tons of positive PR in Silicon Valley publications like Ozy, which called her, you know, the most dangerous political weapon and, you know, the most important Democratic consultant, this kind of thing. And she, you know, was using this PR at the same time that, you know, to build up her name and to reap donations at the same time that her group Acronym was being funded and developed by the person you just named, the billionaire Reid Hoffman, who funded LinkedIn. He’s close friends with Peter Thiel at PayPal. He used to be at PayPal. He was a mentor to Mark Zuckerberg. He’s worth $2 billion.
And what Hoffman decided to do after Trump was elected was to kind of supplant the pre-existing Democratic apparatus by funding what he called “founders.” So, founders like Tara McGowan of online organizations, 30- and 40-something, tech-savvy, Ivy league-educated type people who know how to manipulate social media. And Hoffman hired this political strategist who has really walked the line between the corporate world and Democratic politics, participated in a lot of campaigns to privatize public schools with Michelle Rhee. He also is cashing in on the prison industry through this shady operation to give prisoners tablets to learn to code. His name is Dmitri Mehlhorn, and what they’ve aimed to do ─ besides and in addition to funding all of these various new groups that will move in and supplant the Democratic Party apparatus ─ is to bring in center-right voters in swing states into the Democratic Party, using techniques that can only be described as disinformation or manipulation.
In fact, Mehlhorn has explicitly said that one of his models for social media messaging is the Internet Research Agency, the online troll farm from Russia that was investigated by the Senate Intelligence Committee and figured heavily in The Mueller Report. We were told this was this gigantic attack on democracy, these $100,000 of ads, most of which came out after the 2016 campaign, but this is ─ and I’ll get more into detail ─ but this is what they’ve been doing through figures like McGowan. So, it’s not surprising to me that they’re at the center of this gigantic fiasco where a democratic process has been completely shredded, and at the center of it are them and Robbie Mook and all of these different hucksters of a certain generation who are promising to bring their high-tech solutions to protect elections.
AARON MATÉ: And you point out in your piece that one of the things that Reid Hoffman funded was this experiment, or what even internally was called a false flag operation, intervening in the Alabama Senate race in 2018. Can you explain what happened there?
MAX BLUMENTHAL: Yeah, Reid Hoffman has apologized and he said he knew nothing about it, but the organization that he uses to fund Tara McGowan and all of these other different newfangled Democratic social media operations is called Investing In US, and an Investing In US employee was directly involved in this operation. So, basically when the…in the special Senate election in 2017 between the far-right candidate Roy Moore and the moderate Republican running as a Democrat Doug Jones, which is this really dramatic race, it was seen as a referendum on Trump in 2017, Reid Hoffman dumped some money through an American enterprises technology [American Engagement Technologies (AET)], another one of these firms run by an Obama veteran, and then that firm gave money to New Knowledge, which was a collection of Obama administration veterans and national security state operators who took out fake…created fake Facebook pages ─ and this is their M.O. ─ and even tried to gin up media for a dark-horse write-in Republican candidate in order to take votes away from Roy Moore. They managed to actually get interviews for this candidate whose name was, like, Mack Jones, and he was a lawnmower salesman, in Mother Jones, in Alabama local media and, you know, they were trying to attract interest through Facebook for him in order to take away from Roy Moore. At the same time, it appears that they purchased Russian bots with Cyrillic language names to follow Roy Moore’s Twitter account, and Roy Moore was then accused in national media, through their PR operation, of being supported by the Kremlin.
So, they basically false-flagged Kremlin interference in Alabama’s election. And this was all unknown to the public and to Alabama voters. It was called Project Birmingham. Reid Hoffman funded it with $100,000, and in documents…internal documents that were later leaked that were kind of debriefing notes, called the Project Birmingham Debrief, New Knowledge’s black operations claimed credit for moving enough votes to ensure a Doug Jones victory.
So, this false flag operation may have proven decisive. It’s been written about in The New York Times, The Washington Post, but I think we covered it most thoroughly. And, you know, one of them…since you cover RussiaGate so much, Aaron, I mean, one of the most interesting parts of it is that the Senate Intelligence Committee report on, you know, Russian interference on Facebook through the Internet Research Agency was written by New Knowledge, the same Democratic cyber intelligence firm that was behind this sinister attack on democracy. They’re actually emulating what Internet Research Agency supposedly does, or what the Senate accused them of doing, to attack American democracy from within. I mean, I think this is a much bigger scandal than we even realized.
But when I heard that Tara McGowan was involved in Iowa, I started…I realized this is someone who Reid Hoffman’s supporting. We’ve been covering this for years, and I needed to put these pieces together. And when you do put the pieces together, the whole thing appears in a much more sinister light.
AARON MATÉ: It sure does, and it speaks to just that the extent of the RussiaGate racket is not fully appreciated. I mean, we know that it benefited failed Democratic elites who lost to Trump in 2016 and needed an excuse for their loss and needed an excuse for not becoming a real opposition party. We also know that it converged with the interests of the national security state officials who didn’t see Trump as a suitable steward of the U.S. Empire, and wanted to undermine his calls for better relations with Russia, however sincere that call actually was. But we also know that it’s been literally used as a cottage industry, and so the fear of the…the fear-mongering about Russian interference and Russian disinformation has led to all the same people who lost to Trump in 2016 ─ Obama and Clinton campaign veterans ─ profiting off of that and creating all these firms that then leveraged the panic about Russian interference to create apps like Shadow did, that ultimately undermine democracy in far more profound ways than anything that they accused Russia of.
MAX BLUMENTHAL: Yeah, I mean, anyone who covers domestic politics on a long-term basis, they’ll…you’ll just come into contact with not just, you know, the politicians but the political consultants. And the consultant class is just this parasitic collection of carpetbagging hucksters who are looking to gin up any possible scheme or any fear in order to cash in. And that’s what RussiaGate was for people like Robby Mook, for example. Robby Mook is one of the biggest failures in American politics. He’s this another 40-something, data-centric, Ivy-educated character who destroyed Hillary…helped destroy Hillary Clinton’s campaign against Donald Trump. He was her campaign manager. He was part of the decision, as you’ve reported to, you know, just hours after she lost, blame Russian hackers. And then what does Robby Mook do? He sets up a group at Harvard, of course, at the Belfer Center, funded by Facebook and Pierre Omidyar, to protect elections from Russian…the same Russian interference that he has, you know, warned about. You know, he stirred up this fear, then he cashed in.
And it was Robby Mook who was supposedly crash-testing all of the Democratic Party chairs ahead of the Iowa caucuses and preparing them for a quote “worst case scenario,” which of course meant, you know, Russian hacking. He was working with the chief of staff to Obama’s defense secretary Ash Carter to kind of put precinct captains and county chairs on a literal war footing, and it… whatever they told them to do completely either failed or it succeeded in that it denied Bernie Sanders a victory speech. But now Robby Mook is trying to claim he had nothing to do with any of the fiasco that occurred in Iowa and he’s laughing all the way to the bank.
AARON MATÉ: Right. And so, one other aspect of this is, you know, along with benefitting failed Democratic elites and helping to justify their losses, there’s ultimately, under the guise of fighting Russian interference and even fighting Donald Trump, that ultimately this serves a fundamentally right-wing agenda.
And one more face we can put on that, on top of Reid Hoffman, that we talked about before is Seth Klarman, who, as you also point out in your reporting at The Grayzone, is another major funder behind Acronym, the group behind…the group that funded the app, the group Shadow. So, can you talk to us more about who Seth Klarman is?
MAX BLUMENTHAL: Well, see, I’ve been talking about Reid Hoffman because he’s the person through Investing In US that really spun Acronym out and helped kind of cultivate Tara McGowan as a force in the party that he can work through. So that’s the seed money. But then once Acronym’s put into being ─ and they presented it as a media group; in fact it was a dark money nonprofit whose donors were kind of unknown ─ then McGowan starts up a super PAC called Pacronym and starts raking in money from people like Seth Klarman. Another top donor is George Soros. It’s like the conspiracies write themselves. Donald Sussman. I don’t know if you remember on MSNBC, there was a woman who worked for the Center for American Progress who was Sussman’s daughter, who said that if you vote, if you prefer Bernie Sanders over Elizabeth Warren, you’re a sexist because Elizabeth Warren has better plans.
EMILY TISCH SUSSMAN on MSNBC: “I actually heard, overheard someone saying that I thought was an interesting point, that basically at this point if you are still supporting Sanders as opposed to Warren, it’s kind of showing your sexism because she has more detailed plans and her plans have evolved. I thought it was an interesting point and I think there may be something to it.”
So, these are hedge funders. They move their money around through shell companies, they’re offshoring, they’re using all these, you know, dirty tactics to avoid paying taxes. And they are funding the future generation of the Democratic Party, and they’re also funding Pete Buttigieg.
And, you know, the reason that I wrote about Seth Klarman was, besides this, you know, scandal around Acronym and Pacronym that he’s their top donor, today Seth Klarman is also a top individual contributor to Pete Buttigieg. And Pete Buttigieg is really out there trying to distinguish himself from Bernie Sanders as the pro-Israel candidate. Seth Klarman has dedicated his life since his first visit to Israel to funding the Israel lobby. He is one of the most prolific funders of the Israel lobby. He owns The Times of Israel newspaper, he’s funded pro-settlement groups ─ groups that are expelling Palestinians from East Jerusalem. He’s also funded The David Project, which fought to prevent an Islamic community center from being built in Boston. So, these are Islamophobic groups, and Pete Buttigieg is clearly under the influence of one of the biggest funders of the Israel lobby in his wine cave. It’s like the AIPAC wine cave. So, I thought it was significant to show how donors are influencing Buttigieg, but also to show how this political network ─ this is a $75 million dollar operation, Acronym is, ─ it really is the future of the Democratic establishment and it’s in the tank for Buttigieg. Biden is really a spent force, and these are people who have personal relationships with the Buttigieg campaign. But they also come out of a similar cultural milieu.
So, let’s look at this person I mentioned before, Dmitri Mehlhorn, who’s Reid Hoffman’s, kind of like, henchman. He’s his political strategist. He graduated from Harvard Kennedy School of Government, he launched his career at McKinsey and Associates [McKinsey & Company] and then he moved into Democratic politics. It sounds exactly like Pete Buttigieg, who did the exact same things.
Also sounds like Deval Patrick, another kind of strange figure who’s been involved in Iowa. Somehow Deval Patrick, who was kind of like the prototype for Obama ─ former governor of Massachusetts, worked for Bain Capital, graduated from Harvard Kennedy School ─ he was getting votes in rural counties in Iowa. When I heard that Deval Patrick was getting votes in rural counties in Iowa, I remembered that Deval Patrick was running for president. Because I’d totally forgotten that he was even running. I mean, do you remember when he tried to launch his campaign at Morehouse? Nobody showed up and so he had to cancel his launch speech. But somehow he’s getting votes. And then a lot of those votes were reversed and given back to Bernie Sanders. It just…there’s just something very strange going on here and I don’t know what it is, but a lot of it goes back to Harvard.
AARON MATÉ: You know, Klarman, who you also put out in your piece, he also…the group he funded, one of the groups he funded, The Israel Project, was also a major opponent of the Iran deal. So, all these right-wing interests converging and all of them converging around Pete Buttigieg and around the dark money forces that sabotaged the Iowa caucus.
Speaking of right-wing, let’s talk about the overall state of the corporate Democrats right now. You had Nancy Pelosi tearing up a copy of Donald Trump’s speech after he finished the State of the Union, but during that speech she stood up to applaud as he welcomed the Venezuelan coup leader he’s trying to install in Venezuela, Juan Guaidó. You have the failure of the impeachment vote, which was predictable, or at least predicted by a small group, including us. And meanwhile you have Bernie Sanders supporters understandably still aggrieved from 2016, now seeing a repeat again, where once again the DNC appears at least to be working against him, working to undermine him. I’m wondering if you see perhaps some momentum for the Sanders campaign coming from just the utter disarray of the establishment Democrats right now and, again, this open hostility that they’re once again showing towards him?
MAX BLUMENTHAL: Yeah, I mean, I can imagine that if there were emails that were leaked or hacked from the DNC today, it would be ten times worse and more invidious than what we saw under Debbie Wasserman-Schultz’s watch in 2016, in the desire to do away with Bernie Sanders. And, I mean, you can just look at what Tom Perez is doing openly to understand how bad it would be in private, you know. Julian Assange is in prison right now, so it’s important to remember that. But the Democrats, what they’re showing in public is opposition to Trump through a campaign that nobody in Iowa cared about, nobody voted on the basis of impeachment, nobody thought about it when they were making their votes, no one that any reporter talked to mentioned UkraineGate or any quid pro quo or Russia. It’s not even in the top ten of issues that concern Democratic voters, particularly
in a place like Iowa. And when they appear at Donald Trump’s State of the Union, and Juan Guaidó, the Pete Buttigieg-like figure who’s been self-appointed president in Venezuela with US taxpayer money funding his salary and his white collar mafia to just basically hang around and pretend to be president, he’s not even the president of the National Assembly anymore, and you see consensus, almost every single Democrat stood and applauded Juan Guaidó. So, they’re showing consensus for empire, consensus for a project that necessitates trillions of dollars of American bases and waste around the globe that we could spend at home.
And that really clarifies where Bernie Sanders stands apart. He stands apart, at least his movement…then the movement behind him stands apart from that consensus, stands apart from the consensus on capitalism, where you have Elizabeth Warren declaring that she’s a capitalist to her bones. Nancy Pelosi was asked once about socialism and she ─ by a young person at a public forum ─ and she just shot it down. And that’s the threat Bernie Sanders poses. So, what we’re going to see moving forward is the consensus against Bernie Sanders. And whether it’s Pete Buttigieg, if Buttigieg fails, then we’ll see Mike Bloomberg enter the fray, and everyone who stands for the consensus will get behind Bloomberg. If Bloomberg fails, they will get behind Donald Trump because they ─ meaning the Democratic Party elites ─ actually have more in common with the interests Donald Trump represents than they do with those represented by Bernie Sanders.
AARON MATÉ: Finally, what do you think Bernie Sanders needs to do going forward, and what kind of attacks on him do you expect in the coming months as he continues to gather momentum?
MAX BLUMENTHAL: I mean, we’re seeing Bernie kind of ─ I don’t know, it may be a deliberate strategy, he’s made some really welcome comments about his willingness and desire to take on the oligarchy, that he welcomes their antagonism, kind of reminds me of FDR calling out the economic royalists and saying that he welcomes their hatred ─ but Sanders has been sort of unwilling to go head-to-head with his opponents. He hasn’t really used any language that suggests Iowa was rigged and he’s working through surrogates to do that. That might be the right approach right now, but when he is…I think Israel’s going to become an issue. They’re going to try to make it an issue.
The Democratic Majority for Israel, an Israel lobby group inside the Democratic Party, has taken out hundreds of thousands [of dollars] of ads to challenge his electability. Tom Perez has nominated a board member of that group to the DNC platform committee. And he’s obviously got to take a much stronger line than Jeremy Corbyn did in condemning these phony attacks that are inevitable. He can’t be throwing surrogates under the bus. I don’t think there was any point in distancing himself from Cenk Uygur, and beyond that, you know, if Iowa is somehow re-canvassed, it’s not worth moving on, you can’t move on, you can’t let this happen, doing that would be sort of be reminiscent of what Al Gore did in Florida in 2000, where he should have stayed there and called out the troops and brought people out into the streets until the vote was continued. Bernie Sanders is going to face a full-scale coup and he needs to mobilize his supporters and use the power that he has. The power that he has is this movement.
But beyond that I really don’t have any specific advice. I just am looking at a…I’m looking really closely at the same network that we’ve been covering at The Grayzone for the past few years, of these RussiaGate hucksters, and it’s pretty clear that they’re willing to use any disinformation tactic to get what they want, and we’re just going to keep covering it and keep exposing it. And hopefully, you know, people with bigger platforms than us will start calling it out.
AARON MATÉ: I’m not holding my breath on that one.
MAX BLUMENTHAL: No, no, and I honestly, uh, you know, what Bernie’s people should be doing is sharing Grayzone articles.
AARON MATÉ: Hear, hear! Hear, hear! Well…
MAX BLUMENTHAL: I mean, what’s the problem there?
AARON MATÉ: Max Blumenthal, editor of The Grayzone, author of The Management of Savagery, thanks very much.
MAX BLUMENTHAL: Thanks a lot, Aaron.
