Disinformation and the Erosion of Democracy
Our lack of an oppositional Fourth Estate has led to the neoliberals in power to trash any hope for a functional democracy
Definition of a Legacy Media Journalist: “Arrogant, Fake, Not a Real Human Being”
(Quote from Christopher Phillips, University of Chicago Freshman 2022)
Let's take a look at Christopher Phillips, a freshman at the University of Chicago - my alma mater - who went one fine Spring day in 2022 to a three day extravaganza jack-off session conference put on by the University of Chicago Law School that, unfortunately for the participants and corporate sponsors, was open to Christopher Phillips, a Freshman.
The conference was meant to be a serious discussion about the “organized spread of disinformation and strategies to respond to it” entitled (with neoliberal alarm bells ringing) Disinformation and the Erosion of Democracy.
I wish I was there but I’ve been long gone from the University of Chicago campus for many years now. But I wish I was there to shout:
CENSOR EVERYTHING LIKE YOU’RE DOING RIGHT NOW, ASSHOLES, BECAUSE OF YOU THERE IS NO FREE SPEECH IN THE UNITED STATES!
That would have spooked them letting them in on the secret signs at every Starbucks and strip mall in the United States of a fomenting revolt as the University of Chicago campus cops drag me away from the conference hall screaming at the top of my lungs:
I’VE BEEN CENSORED BY TWITTER AND REDDIT AND THE NEW YORK TIMES OPINION SECTION FOR YEARS. I WAS ON THE VERGE OF BEING CENSORED BY FACEBOOK BUT DELETED MY ACCOUNT TO BEAT ZUCKERBERG TO IT.
THERE IS NO FREE SPEECH IN AMERICA AND, AS A RESULT, THERE SURE AS HELL NO DEMOCRACY IN THE UNITED STATES! WE’RE COMING FOR YOOOOOOUUUUUUUU!
Speaking of information?
The premise of this conference put on by and for only neoliberals,
The Definition of a Neoliberal:
A liberal person who de-emphasizes traditional liberal doctrines [like “Free Speech” and “Difference of Opinion”] in order to seek progress by more pragmatic [unlawful, awful, selfish and illiberal] means.
(Merriam-Webster.com with my edits)
that dying breed, claiming lazily that they are today’s valiant knights of “TRUTH” and “EQUALITY” and “DEMOCRACY” with flaming sword in their red veined neoliberal hands. Neoliberals are the ones who sold their dead, cynical, self-centered souls to BlackRock and Raytheon years ago. Oh, the irony!
Back to the conference to save the neoliberals’ version of a democracy only for themselves.
None of the faux journalist-panelists realized their conference - named by them - was about them and the lies they tell and the truth they gleefully repress to protect those that rule at all costs, at any cost, by these fake journalists with a talent for not asking real questions and hiding real answers.
Our lack of an oppositional Fourth Estate has led to the trashing of any hope for a functional democracy. Shit-journalism is ruining whole societies, destroying entire continents and taking the fun away from Brownie troop camp outs.
Let’s hope the Venusians have real investigative journalists because we don’t.
This is 21st century journalism, baby! Forget about voting because it's rigged! Democracy got hijacked on the watch of the worst journalists the world has ever seen!
Thank you neoliberalism because of you we now have nothing and we'll be happy about it? I think not!
Christopher Phillips (too young to feel defeated) went on the attack against these asshole journalists by aiming his sights on an easy one, a half asleep sloppy journalist named Brian Stelter who has been satiated for years with fat paychecks because Stelter is paid a lot to earnestly lie, to not ask relevant questions and to not care about kids starving in Yemen.
For example, Brian Stelter will never cover how the American middle and working classes were decimated or why the U.S. Federal minimum wage never rises anymore like it used to yearly only fourteen years ago.
Brian Stelter, and those of his ilk, spends his bright shiny days in front of expensive studio microphones and cameras and will never ask why during a recent global health crises the U.S. still refuses to provide public healthcare like most first, second and third world countries. It could’ve been easily done decades ago if we, the people, weren’t forced to foot a 3 trillion bill for a 20 year war in Afghanistan that we lost.
Democracy has indeed “died in darkness” because of the type of the slimeball-journalism peddled these days by legacy media like The Washington Post. It spews out falsehoods as it slithers on by the tent and cardboard box homes of the destroyed working class living on the filthy sidewalks of the United States.
Legacy media ignores Missouri Veterans of our 1,000 Foreign Wars, Middle School Teachers from Ohio, Someone’s Dog in Nevada, Risk Managers in Virginia, Nurses of Seattle, Bus Drivers in Detroit, Construction Workers in New York City, Novelists born in Kansas, Artists from Alabama, Kids growing up in South Carolina, Grocery Store Clerks in Texas and inquiring Scientists in California.
This lazy, lying, shame ridden journalism oozes out bald-faced lies from the pages of The Wall Street Journal, USA Today, Bloomberg, The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Chicago Tribune and Los Angeles Times. Today multi billionaire legacy media shareholders pay millionaire journalists to lie.
In 2022, lying news editors still call their news “all the news that's fit to print.” Who gets to decide what news is, me or a multi billionaire? Who determines which news should be printed?
Multi mega billionaire Saudi crown prince, mass murderer, and Wall Street shareholder Mohammed bin Salman?
BlackRock multi billionaire chairman/CEO and U.S. media shareholder, Larry Fink who owns everything?
Multi billionaire and self-appointed space cowboy Jeff Bezos?
Psychopathic-billionaire Dr. Bill Gates MD?
Bezos, Fink, Dr. Gates and MBS pay journalists to maintain their rotten economic system that favors them. Their bought-off journalists unceasingly lie. Everything is great, right? Wrong!
These sleazy journalists from the upper middle class and elite universities are eager for lots of cash, are the ones killing democracy in the United States. But they point their well-manicured finger at me and claim I’m the problem.
I’m not the problem!
They’re at the heart of what's rotten in and destroying the country of my ancestors, the United States!
I, an average citizen of the United States, say these bastards - bought and paid for slimeball journos - are fucking liars.
I find the more I know actual news when I don't read any of these “newspapers” that aren’t fit to wrap dog shit in, the more I understand what we must do to save democracy.
If we knew the truth, we would never vote for a Democrat or Republican again. We would drop the bullshit identity politics that legacy media wants us to be constantly upset about and build our gargantuan American Workers Party to stop the plundering of our country and to toss out of political office (also take our assets back and charge all of them with financial crimes - including murder and malfeasance - later) our current cabal of lying, corrupt and rotten political leaders.
This is the democracy, the real one that legacy media's multi billionaire investors are trying to kill.
Cable tv news informs no one so real democracy suffacates in the office closet of a neoliberal cable news producer.
I would rather watch a baseball game than having to suffer through watching Joy-Ann Reid lie!
Cable news is predictably awful. It’s disgusting because they are obviously lying. I avoid them because it makes me angry because I know when I'm being lied to. I'm not an idiot.
Christopher Phillips, the University of Chicago Freshman (a baby chick idealist living in a time of rampant double-dealing where ideals are routinely run over by driverless cars), dared to ask - really to state - the obvious to a brain dead Brian Stelter (in the first posted short video below) the real truth:
Isn’t it time to declare that the canon of journalistic ethics is dead or no longer operative?
We rarely hear truth these days. It's so refreshing and provides a glimmer of hope for the return of standards and professional ethics in journalism.
And maybe a real democracy will arrive in the wake of the return of ethical, honest journalism? I imagine on that day seeing daisies in bloom, clear blue skies, dogs chasing their tails, and a playground filled with kids joyously playing together while their parents know their children are safe.
This is what real democracy brings.
In the second posted short video interview (below), Christopher Phillips says his question was “a glaring truth” because he knew Brian Stelter couldn't (or didn’t dare to) answer.
Today’s neoliberal-warmongering journalists can't answer the question because these journo-propagandists are gotten on board the wrong boat full of cash.
This is the mockery of what real journalists use to be, the old-school, blue collar journalists of yore with axes to grind against the powerful for the protection of the majority, the average person.
Neoliberal journalists are without a shred of a standard, let alone having a clue of what ethics are. Selling out the people, the average person, is the wrong thing to do.
If Brian Stelter had a dying ember of self-respect in his body, or at least a desire for a miniscule of pride, he would've honestly replied to Christopher Phillips:
It's all about the paycheck, Jack! What's journalism?
I was told during my time at the University of Chicago by highly respectable-looking bespectacled professors that we UC academics must be “rigorous in our scholarship, our discourse and our inquiries.”
At least Christopher has put on life support the University of Chicago’s academic tradition of rigor in inquiry and kept it alive for a moment as this lying, sloppy journalist, Brian Stelter, with no standards or an ethic to speak of can't respond to an honest and clear question by a wide awake kid.
These lifeless journo-propagandists are dead. They wear expensive casual Friday clothing from Bergdorf Goodman and look too cool. Too bad their brains have rotted out.
They were killed by their huge salaries, their tastefully expensive lifestyles, their outsized egos polluting our air, died because of one too many gourmet brunches and, for some of them, receiving academic accolades they don't deserve like this one from the University of Chicago, my alma mater.
Multi billionaire shareholders wad up filthy U.S. dollar bills and shoved them into their bought-and-paid-for mouths of journos, suffocating them until their itty bitty hearts stop.
Look at them, they’re the neoliberal dead serving a bloated, raging while dying vicious U.S. Empire Inc. owned by global multi billionaires.
Next video, here is Christopher Phillips, the UC Freshman who is not a cynic like me, being interviewed about his speech on “journalism is dead" that went viral because what Christopher said was honest.
Christopher’s interview is bungled by another dead journalist with a great sun tan claiming he is as outraged as Christopher is by bad journalism as he executes a bad interview attempt on Christopher.
Christopher has to step, in the end, to interview himself. It's that bad.
This journo-moron attempts to be clever instead of asking real questions. The dead journo tries and fails again to be clever – a low bar cleverness is - when he should be conducting an actual interview and asking intelligent questions. The news man is pathetic and sad.
Christopher smiles while he is being covered with this sun tan oil nonsense interview because he knows he is speaking to another brain dead journo that has no clue that Christopher Phillips is critical of him too.
To Christopher and the rest of us, this journalist is just another dead one who doesn't know he has just embarrassing himself (again) by not knowing how to ask a smart kid a relevant question.
He shames his once vaunted profession (again) while Christopher resides for a while - until he becomes too old - on a much higher plane of thought and discourse, running thoughtful circles around another dead journalist. It's painful to watch.
A Glaring Truth
(Quote from Christopher Phillips, University of Chicago Freshman 2022)
I wasn't planning to write anything this week. The last essay in my substack, The Day My Name Became a Slur, exhausted me emotionally. I was taking a break and kicking back. But, oh no, I made a stupid mistake!
I only write when I'm angry. Pissed off and ticked off.
Unfortunately for me, I carelessly turned on the TV and up popped MSNBC’s Morning Joe.
This is godawful neoliberal central!
Before I could change to a sports channel or Animal Planet or anything else, I got to hear an academic/opinion spin artist lie through her well-kept teeth about NATO’s proxy war against Russia in Ukraine.
Oh my god! The lies this professor told about Russia were breathtakingly false!
The First and Only Workers State Was Born and Died an Infant: A Short History About Russia by Me
The West's capitalists will never forgive or trust Russians because they once, a long time ago, overthrew Russian capitalists and their terrible Tsar.
Instead of continuing to be brutalized by these two awful governing structures that weren't working for them, the Russian working class established a worker run country ran by a collection of worker union councils - the Soviets.
After the Reds vs Whites Russian Civil War where the Red Army (with its lone gold star and peasant tools of the hammer & sickle as its emblems) defeated the Russian ruling elite and imperial forces attempting an unwanted comeback.
Next, 26 Western armies from 26 capitalist countries ringed Russia hellbent on defeating the world's first worker run state.
Again, this is the state that lasted only five years.
The capitalist armies, one-by-one, abandoned the idea of manhandling and killing the Soviet Union, a new born baby state not given a chance. Western armies were defeated when their own Western soldiers began siding with the Russian soldiers (who democratically elected their military leaders) and Russian people.
The West’s soldiers realized they were being used again by the ruling elite and millionaires back home. They were lied to about who these Russian people were and they quickly realized that the Russians people were actually the same as them.
This class conscious solidarity became a major problem for the West fearful the new idea of a worker run state may become popular in the West.
The West's autocratic generals and well connected politicians were right to fear this new idea of worker led political and economic power.
Western soldiers, including those from the United States, returned home where they told their families, friends and neighbors about this secret worker state in faraway Russia that was organized, run by for only the benefit of the Russian Working Class.
Russia developed Working Class fans around the world. Just look up the popular socialist newspapers and periodicals from the early 20th century:
The Basics: Socialism is Rooted in Working Class Economics and Working Class Politics
I: The Workers State Must Be Fully Democratic - One Person, One Vote
II: A Socialist State is Run By Workers for their Benefit and Protection
III: The Workers State, For a Period of Time, Must Organized For It Self-defense From Coups and Capitalists Led Insurrections
IV: Socialist State Gains the Support of Working People By Providing A Better Quality of Life Than They Had Under Capitalism
V: Socialism in One State Can’t Last Because It Needs Other Socialist States For Help and Resources
With the cream of the Boleshviks dead, the Russian people were starving from not able to obtain tractors from German industry. Germany's unions were on the precipice of a General Strike that was blocked by Socialist Democrats in the Reichtag.
Think of AOC types in Congress to understand why the General Strike in Germany didn't happen. Global millionaires sent money to the new National Socialist political party.
The only workers state in the world was failing. Lenin and Trotsky, the Bolshevik party leaders - as is usually done during various working class struggles against capitalism - did not seize power for themselves because they refused to impose their will upon the Russian people.
As Trotsky said later, it was for the Russian people to decide who their leaders were and what direction they wanted.
The Russian people were hungry and exhausted from unending war. So many were dead.
Stalin, promising to see to the peoples’ needs and to make decisions for the exhausted ground-down Russians, seized power as Lenin was dying. Stalin had Leon Trotsky prosecuted, banished and ultimately killed in Mexico City eighteen years later.
Stalinism Wasn't Socialism
Stalin took over and established an undemocratic, isolated country. This is the very definition of a non-socialist state.
Stalin’s tacit agreement with Western Capitalists - to preserve his lone rule in Russia - was to repress and impede worker revolutions periodically break outs around the world from 1920s through 1980s.
For the West’s capitalist class, Stalin’s promise to repress the revolutionary spirit within the global working class was never enough. The West wants no reminder of the only worker led state ever to exist: RIP 1917 - 1922.
Nazi Germany lost to Stalin's Red Army.
Today Stalinism is dead in Russia.
Socialism is vilified around the world because Stalinism is conflated with Socialism. Stalinism was neither Socialism nor Capitalism. Stalinism was something other.
Also, the rule by one dictator never works in the end.
Russia is now a capitalist country with a Russian president that never leaves office. Putin is kind of like Rep. Nancy Pelosi and Sen. Mitch McConnell: they never leave or die out.
Russia Will Never Be Accepted or Forgiven by West's Capitalists
The idea of Russia, in whatever iteration it exists in, is never ok for the West. Russia, for a myriad of conflicting reasons, must be defeated once again by Western Capitalism.
Enter the Ukraine!
They Are Dismayed When Confronted
(Quote from Christopher Phillips, University of Chicago Freshman 2022)
The U.S. is, and has been for decades, only a paradise if you have lots of money and the right connections. Otherwise, the U.S. is a hellscape for middle, working class and poor people.
Our government lies when it says inflation today is 8% when it's really at 11% and climbing. There is no baby formula and a series of large argicultural disasters are now occurring on farms.
Bill Gates invests heavily in artificial food production and now owns the most farmable land mass in the United States? Legacy media says nothing.
The neoliberals in the Biden Administration are hellbent on forcing Europe into WWIII to cover up their stupid, moronic mistakes of collapsed economies, millions of people hate them as they continue to ride shot gun for a rapacious global oligarchy that's looting from all of us.
New York University Professor Ruth Ben-Ghiat Should Be Fired and Shunned for Lying
Knowing the above information, I was outraged after watching a Morning Joe five minute segment with the opinions from a dead neoliberal academic, a tenured professor named Ruth Ben-Ghiat.
Ben-Ghait should be fired from New York University but the rest of the rotten NYU academics are just as bad as Ben-Ghiat is, so they won’t fire her because that would mean they would have to fire themselves. Then what would the NYU PhDs do for a living?
Ben-Ghiat should be driven in a donkey led cart through Morningside Heights, to be greeted the Black and Dominican working class, and the working class NYU students who can't afford an apartment on Riverside Drive, should gather and throw rotten papaya and slime covered bananas at her.
How shameful were her statements that were just blatant lies and months old State Department warmongering talking points.
The following is an edited version of the email I sent to the NYU history department chair and professional liar, Professor Ben-Ghiat:
Monday, April 18, 2022 at 9 am (EST) via email
New York University Department of History:
Very rarely do I get involved in comments made on corporate news channels that are rejected by most Americans as biased and no place to get news these days.
Little did I expect to see an NYU professor of history today go on one of these corporate news programs and spout lies about the country of Russia, a sovereign nation with full rights to defend its borders.
When a trained history professor goes public as a professor, they must hold up standards of traditional historical discourse and couch comments within historical context.
Professor Ben-Ghiat performance did neither:
She did not mention the failed Minsk Agreement (the one the West doesn’t talk about) that led to 8 years of bombing, shelling and killing in the Eastern Donbass region with estimated 14,000 people (mainly ethnic Russians) killed.
Prof. Ben-Ghiat, an expert on fascism, made no mention of the openly Nazi identified Ukrainian troops and police attempting ethnic cleansing. This is publically reported and videos of Ukrainian Nazis boasting of committing atrocities are online.
Apparently Prof Ben-Ghiat does not believe Ukrainian Nazis when they tell her they are WWII styled Nazis.
Prof. Ben-Ghiat highlighted chemical attack allegations in the Middle East by the Russians without also acknowledging that U.S. have been caught committing atrocities in the Middle East too.
Prof Ben-Ghiat slipped in this idea to promote the narrative (that comes from the U.S. State Department) of an imminent (they’ve been predicting for months - hoping for - chemical attack by Russian aligned troops.
Does Ben-Ghiat work for the U.S. State Department too? The same State Department that claimed there was an incident in the Gulf of Tonkin way back when?
Nazis in Ukraine have clean hands, right Prof. Ben-Ghiat?
Like the students at my old school, the University of Chicago, they are confronting the lies and smears in public told by UC faculty members and members of legacy media. Good for them. It's the right thing to do.
I hope NYU students have a very public discussion with Prof. Ben-Ghiat, and other NYU professors peddling U.S. State Department talking points, in class and on campus.
Lying should always be called out.
Shame on Prof. Ben-Ghiat and the NYU History (Propaganda) Department for not telling the truth because they speak about history that is disconnected from history.
Karen Wilson, University of Chicago - 1995
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