39 Comments

Like most of us, I can only afford to pay for a few substacks. I'm delighted to include both Hedges and Taibbi in that shortlist.

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Same! And Greenwald. That’s the three I am willing and able to pay.

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My third is Scott Ritter for his informed, anti-war stance on Ukraine.

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My third and fourth are fifth are Caitlyn Johnstone, Aaron Mate, and Useful Idiots. I know Caitlyn is free, but I want her to be able to eat.

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Caitlin Johnstone is free! The Taibbi of Down Under. And she writes every day.

https://caitlinjohnstone.substack.com/

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Also, she is excellent! I follow her too, and wish I had money to subscribe, but I still occasionally buy some of her one offs, like her poetry and artwork.

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Amen!

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I watched that Congressional hearing. I didn't think much of the Democratic party but it was worse than I expected. They are protecting their censorship system by censoring all mention of censorship. They don't even try to argue that it is legitimate instead they just muddy the waters, make a stink, and accuse anyone who opposes widespread censorship of being an unwitting agent of Putin.

The more we spend on national security the more afraid we are. What's wrong with this picture?

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I admire Taibi's work, having read his exposé of Wall Street, the slimy conduct of Goldman Sachs in particular, during & after the country's 2008 financial meltdown.

What he is telling us here is spooky; it certainly casts doubt on the future of serious journalism & of all who try to speak truth to power.

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Taibbi's observations about the radical change in the understanding of information and the first amendment by liberals, Democrats and media were profoundly correct and important.

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Thanks for this.

Our rights are turning into wrongs on MSM and beyond. Free speach please.....to all.

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Matt is a rare and endangered species, as are all who speak truth to power now. Despite the efforts of the bad guys and the very bad guys, he has not been shuffled off to the upper reaches of uninhabited slopes like some de facto invisible rara avis.

He deserves every last bit of support that we can give. The stakes are high.

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I have imprinted in my brain Matt sitting there testifying, basically gobsmacked at the Orwellian tragicomedy these courtier politicians made him endure.

When you are the fully rational one being told to take off your tin foil hat....well, I suppose they will start calling him Hitler soon, too. It’s just mind blowing how stupid we all are; that this is where we got to. How did these people get their hands on the levers of power???

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I am 75 and have followed Chris Hedges long before I followed Matt Taibbi and I followed Taibbi since Moscow.

John Ralston Saul is a European historian and last I checked is still breathing and thinking.

He is the WORLD'S expert on Press Freedom and he can tell you there was no press freedom from before Gutenberg.

This is the 30th anniversary edition of Voltaire's Bastards and Chris Hedges wrote a foreword to a previous edition.

In A Doubter's Companion; A Dictionary of Aggressive Common Sense, John Ralston Saul defines cynicism as democracy's greatest threat. That was 29 years ago.

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founding

Driven to the edges of community, truth is a dangerous commodity.

Truth and it’s brother, Reason, have been painted in an unnatural patina eliciting a fear of those who would engage it and date to trespass the unmentioned policy as such, that Truth not to be handled by mortals but by a priesthood of those anointed as ‘qualified’ to decipher and elicit their constructs supplicating the policy needs of the gods of wealth, finance, war and imperialism.

As constructed by those masters of greed, truth is seen as the illicit commodity of ‘gangster journalism’’, while public sentiment knows that these Robin Hoods sharing truths are their benefactors against a brutal, illegitimate defense of confiscated wealth and power.

The attempt to crush truth by the self-identified ‘good-cop’ side of a detested duopoly, soils the squads of uniform collaboration and renders any claim to legitimacy an embarrassment viewed in plain sight.

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Leonard Cohen attended Westmount High School in Westmount. It has been an elite High School for 150 years. Its motto is Dux Vitae Ration Reason is the guide to life.

https://westmount.emsb.qc.ca/whs

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Westmount,_Quebec

You may have heard of another Westmount grad Kamala Harris she has one of many Westmount accents.

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gimme a break. legacy news has always been manufacturing consent for the elites who run the country. this is not a new role for "journalism." what is happening is merely the advance of more extreme control mechanisms to manage collapse of empire as the business model of newspapers has been crashed within capitalisms last money grabs.

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Perfect!!!

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"The censored content was almost exclusively produced by those critical of the dominant narrative advanced by the Democratic Party and the old establishment wing of the Republican Party. Which has joined forces with the Democrats.

Joining me to discuss this wholesale censorship, and the efforts by the ruling establishment, including the Democratic Party"

Come on man. I can feel the discomfort coming to the honest admission that this is 90% Democrat party doings... and started with Obama. If we cannot just admit that, we are not ready to discuss the problem and the required solutions. The weaponization of the government agencies for political purpose was something that was done in bits under the cover knowing that the risk was the press would uncover it and justifiably wreck the careers of those involved. Since Obama the press turned propaganda arm of the DNC... next it was big tech... and now the Democrats don't hide it and go big.

Any GOPers still doing that junk are old style under the covers. They fundamentally know it is wrong and will never accept being caught doing it.

Conversely, Democrats today have adopted an any means to their desired end as being moral and ethical. They are righteous in cause, and thus are the dangerous tyrants we should always identify and defeat.

I know that people like Matt and Chris are in a difficult spot... it is THEIR OLD TEAM that is responsible and it is very difficult to turn against their team when there is no other team to support. But I would look at it this way... imposters and idiot activists have infiltrated their party and have corrupted it to a mess. They should directly attack their old party as being broken and needing repair. There is really nothing to be gained by pulling in the minority of old crusty white dudes in the GOP stuck in that old military industrial complex paradigm. The GOP is already well in reform steps to purge that crap.

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founding

Please inform us the fellow readers of the identity of “the old team” which you’ve tagged to the subjects of this podcast episode.

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The Bible is great literature. It has breached a span a time and each generation brings a new interpretation. Woodrow Wilson's Committee on Public Information taught Goebbels everything he knew.

The American revolution was never about democracy it was about sovereignty. There was a huge division even amongst the Boston Patriots. Conservatives like the Federalist president John Adams believed in design and liberals like Franklin and Jefferson believed in evolution.

Conservatives have always believed in the words of Stalin the Pig.

"All men are created equal; but some are more equal than others."

Revere's depiction of the Boston Massacre was complete fabrication. It was the photo shop of 1770.

https://www.britannica.com/event/Boston-Massacre

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"The lie is a weapon of war" affirmed the Greek philosopher Aeschylus more than 2,500 years ago.

Whoever reads bourgeois newspapers becomes blind and deaf: away with the stultifying bandages! Arbeiter-Illustrierte Zeitung (AIZ) 9. no. 6

https://www.wikiart.org/en/john-heartfield/whoever-reads-bourgeois-newspapers-becomes-blind-and-deaf-away-with-the-stultifying-bandages-1930

Amazing anti-fascist artist from the 1930's.

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Dear Chris Hedges: I just read a superb piece by Thom Hartmann, see:

https://scheerpost.com/2023/06/22/the-unlimited-campaign-spending-by-corporations-and-billionaires-has-destroyed-democracy/

It reminded me that Public Power, implemented via the current Federal Power Marketing Administrations, was a BIG part and core element of Bernie Sanders’ original Green New Deal, see:

https://berniesanders.com/issues/green-new-deal/

What we need right now, and I suggest that you should draft it for the Cornel West campaign, is a version of our own "Powell memo". You could call it the "New Deal Restoration" memo.

That could be used to focus and organize the kind of coalition that was able to make the New Deal a reality.

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Speaking from a spot where Vermont is just out the window. I just became an owner of a number of New England's hydro electric dams. My government's Crown Corporation Hydro Quebec loves hydro (gravity) driven electricity. We are supposed to be fossil fuel free in 2023. Our CONSERVATIVE government wrote the legislation. We are the other side of the Looking Glass from Texas. In QUEBEC FREDOM IS FREEDOM and SLAVERY IS SLAVERY.

It is 2023 not 1984.

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I believe it is entirely plausible that the Security State planted the Minecraft platform player with the “secrets” in order to set up a public demonstration of how the establishment want the media to behave. They are nudging the idea of a media that will act in concert, in cooperation, with the oligarchy and in opposition to democracy. I’m surprised and concerned that some in the alternative press, who I deeply respect and value, are naive regarding the shift from a weak democracy into a full on oligarchic state. Oligarchy is a different beast, with different strategies and tactics. Please adjust accordingly.

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I am so disturbed by this whole interview. I am watching from my perch not in the US and just so disturbed by the whole thing. Mr. Taibbi is a respected journalist - by those who respect real journalism anyway.

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Bertolt

https://off-guardian.org/2018/12/01/fascism-is-the-true-face-of-capitalism/

“NOWADAYS, anyone who wishes to combat lies and ignorance and to write the truth must overcome at least five difficulties.

He must have

1. the courage to write the truth when truth is everywhere opposed;

2. the keenness to recognize it, although it is everywhere concealed;

3. the skill to manipulate it as a weapon;

4. the judgment to select those in whose hands it will be effective; and

5. the cunning to spread the truth among such persons.

These are formidable problems for writers living under Fascism, but they exist also for those writers who have fled or been exiled; they exist even for writers working in countries where civil liberty prevails.”

Bertolt Brecht (1935). Writing the truth: Five difficulties. Translation by Richard Winston, for the magazine ‘Twice a Year’. Collected in William Wasserstrom, ed., Civil Liberties and the Arts: Selections from Twice a Year, 1938-48. Syracuse University Press, 1964.

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Thanks

The shark has teeth dear and he flashes them pearly white.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X7eO7MKEZAY

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Authoritarianism. The same unAmericans calling people Putin puppets are the ones acting like Soviet operatives. You can't make this hypocrisy up.

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