The US corporate media more and more resembles the Soviet media. The censorship, propaganda and conformity are startling.

For example, when Professor Jeffery Sachs observed that it was probably the US that sabotaged the Nordstream pipelines, the Bloomberg host interrupted him, “Uh, Jeff, we’ve got to stop there”. 

Actually I think the US corporate media environment more resembles Orwell’s 1984, with it’s emphasis on group-think and avoidance of wrong-think. We can look no further than the treatment of Ukrainian neo-Nazi’s for evidence of this Orwellian dynamic. The US corporate media continue to denazify Ukraine by pretending that the Nazi formations in that country, which they had long decried, are now brave warriors resisting Russian tyranny. What was once “a Ukrainian neo-Nazi paramilitary organization” which even the FBI said is notorious for its “association with neo-Nazi ideology” was first relabeled as merely “far right” before it became a normal “unit in the Ukrainian military”.

The other day the New York Times finished the progression by turning a Ukrainian government press release into a tear dripping story about the reunion of freed Azov neo-Nazi’s with their families: Released Azov commanders have an emotional reunion with family members in Turkey.

I guess we have always been at war with Eastasia.

Meanwhile, here in the homeland, liberals hate them some Nazis, especially if they’re only Trump supporters sporting a Confederate flag patch.

It’s simply remarkable.

Actually the war against Russia is not about values or a rule based liberal order or any other nonsense you might hear or read about, it is about the United States maintaining global dominance. That’s all it’s about. However, our political elites apparently assume that their tight media control will ensure that their ignorant citizenry could be made to believe–or at least pretend to believe–almost anything, even that the Russians had destroyed their own pipelines. Remember, everything bad that can’t be attributed to Trump must be due to Putin.

It just says so much about the overwhelming success of Russia-gate as a PSY-OP that the most surefire way to enrage a liberal is to say that nuclear escalation with Russia is probably a bad idea but here we are. Since 2016 progressive Democrats have been worse than useless on the single most important issue in the world, namely de-escalating tensions between the US and Russia. Because of Russia-gate they’ve been feeding into the Russia hysteria and passionately backing proxy warfare in Ukraine.

Other heretics have noticed the trend. Journalist Glenn Greenwald says that talks to de-escalate or end the conflict in Ukraine are virtually nonexistent because the corporate media and political elites have nurtured an atmosphere where to do so is considered unpatriotic. “Because everyone knows that the minute you step up and step out of line, there’s a hoard of people ready to call you unpatriotic, or a traitor, or an admirer of Vladimir Putin”. “It’s a really repressive atmosphere and squashing a debate that we absolutely have to have,” Greenwald further urged.

Strong, confident countries don’t engage in propaganda, censorship and conformity, but that’s not the US in 2022. The corporate media is telling us what to say and what we cannot say. In this way they are destroying public discourse and a vibrant public discourse conducted in public space ranks among the important sources of strength. They are also destroying people’s abilities to discern, to think, and to judge for themselves–another source of a nation’s strength.

Update: Too funny.

FT MYERS, FL — In a desperate attempt to get help for its citizens and deal with the growing humanitarian crisis in the area, a Florida town devastated by Hurricane Ian has taken the unusual step of raising the Ukrainian flag, hoping to convince Congress to send aid.

“The Ukrainian government flies this flag, and they’re just swimming in billions and billions of dollars in support from the United States. We’re just swimming in sewage,” said Ray Valdivia, the Response Coordinator working to assess the damage in the town. “We tried going through the normal channels to get help from the government, but Biden just sent us a letter of “best wishes” that looks like it may have been written in crayon.”