Whether you are an American citizen daring to oppose the leadership or the leader of a nation designated ‘adversarial’, the methods of character assassination Washington’s PR machine hits you with are not much different. 

“Nothing would fundamentally change” if he got elected, Joe Biden told a group of billionaires at a fundraising event during the 2020 presidential campaign. Like the saying goes, when someone tells you who they are, believe them.

As I stood up to tell my own history with Joe Biden, his multi-million-dollar public relations machine pushed back hard. The playbook used on every single survivor that tries to come forward about a powerful person rarely varies.

 

By Tara Reade, author, poet, actor and former Senate aide, author of Left Out: When the Truth Doesn't Fit In. Follow her on Twitter

 

Silence, attack the character, terrorize the supporters, dehumanize and repeat. These tactics are also used on foreign countries and leaders we want to attack and demonize.

Last week however, it backfired quite gloriously.

 

You see, our political machine needs to be seen as justified when it attacks someone, be it a dissident at home or a foreign leader we don’t like. And what better way to justify it, to manufacture consent, than to dehumanize, demonize, simplify, take all complexity away, until the target du jour is seen as little more than a comic-book villain to be smacked down with a resounding KA-POW?

Use simple words. ‘Killer’, ‘bully’, ‘strongman’, ‘tyrant’, ‘thug’. Paint your opponent in the simplest, darkest colors possible. Then, you can be the superhero figure… provided you can put together a coherent phrase.

When you have to be led up to even the simplest of name-calling, and your opponent responds with calm, saturnine wit, even the most steadfast media support can’t save your façade from cracking.

After Joe Biden’s “Putin is a killer” (though what he actually said technically was “uh-huh”) interview many Americans chose to side with Putin, refusing to fall for the villainization anymore. The exchange put the two presidents in stark contrast – and made it impossible to see Putin as a simple, dumb ‘strongman’ next to Biden with his inane “uh-huh”.

The comic-book juxtaposition starts to flake when the ‘supervillian’ is so obviously more coherent and more in control than the ‘superhero’. And Biden and his administration are obviously aware – feeling too insecure about Putin to agree to a live debate. A live discussion would be an unmitigated disaster for Biden. That said, ordinary Americans want to hear from Russians and know their views. But balance of ideas is not high on the Democratic agenda. The likes of Rachel Maddow will keep raking in thousands of dollars daily to eviscerate everything Russian – even as fewer and fewer people believe them.

 

For a day or so after my recent on-air interview with RT, my social media feed filled up with blue-check Democrats like Edward Isaac Dovere from the Atlantic, posting all my past pro-Russia blogs and trotting out the old Russian-asset narrative. Last time that came up was 2019 when I first came forward about Joe Biden. Back then, Dovere’s online attacks resulted in death threats from strangers.

This time was different. No death threats and little harassment. I had positive feedback, with some people admitting they shared my affinity for Putin. In fact, I made the executive decision to answer all my trolls with President Putin quotes. That seems to quiet them down. One problem with American culture is the cult of personality. It is not emotionally healthy to hero-worship or demonize leaders. They are humans and to elevate them to superhuman status does not serve the greater good.

There are clear signals that Americans are craving balance in the media. The public shift may be because the Democratic Party has devolved with obvious, smug hypocrisy. An example of this is the boorish lineup planned for Kamala Harris’s World Summit discussion on Girl & Women's Empowerment with none other than Bill Clinton.

 

Read more:

https://www.rt.com/op-ed/519344-tara-reade-biden-putin/

 

See also:

https://www.rt.com/op-ed/520639-tara-reade-aoc-tweet-israel/

 

Free Julian Assange Now !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

 

By Glenn Greenwald

 

The British spy agency GCHQ is so aggressive, extreme and unconstrained by law or ethics that the NSA — not exactly world renowned for its restraint — often farms out spying activities too scandalous or illegal for the NSA to their eager British counterparts. There is, as the Snowden reporting demonstrated, virtually nothing too deceitful or invasive for the GCHQ. They spy on entire populations, deliberately disseminate fake news, exploit psychological research to control behavior and manipulate public perception, and destroy the reputations, including through the use of sex traps, of anyone deemed adversarial to the British government.

But they want you to know that they absolutely adore gay people. In fact, they love the cause of LGBT equality so very much that, beginning on May 17, 2015 — International Day against Homophobia, Transphobia and Biphobia — they started draping their creepy, UFO-style headquarters in the colors of the rainbow flag. The prior year, in 2014, they had merely raised the rainbow flag in front of their headquarters, but in 2015, they announced, “we wanted to make a bold statement to show the nation we serve how strongly we believe in this.”

 

Who could possibly be opposed to an institution that offers such noble gestures and works behind such a pretty facade? How bad could the GCHQ really be if they are so deeply committed to the rights of gay men, lesbians, bisexuals and trans people? Sure, maybe they go a little overboard with the spying sometimes, and maybe some of their surveillance and disinformation programs are a bit questionable, and they do not necessarily have the highest regard for law, privacy and truth. But we know that, deep down, these are fundamentally good people working within a fundamentally benign institution. Just look at their flamboyant support for this virtuous cause of social justice.

 

Similar agencies of deceit, militarism and imperialism now robustly use this same branding tactic. The CIA — in between military coups, domestic disinformation campaigns, planting false stories with their journalist-partners, and drone-assassinating U.S. citizens without due process — joyously celebrates Women’s Day, promotes what it calls The Agency Network of Gay, Lesbian, Bisexual, and Transgender Officers (ANGLE), hosts activities for Pride Month, and organizes events to commemorate Black History Month. The FBI does the same.

 

It’s so sweet that one is tempted to forget about, or at least be more understanding of, all the bombing campaigns and all the dictatorships they install and prop up that repress and kill the very people that they purport to honor and cherish. Like the GCHQ, how menacing can an intelligence agency be when it is so deeply and sincerely supportive of the rights of the people they routinely spy on, repress and kill? 

Again, this does not make the CIA perfect — sure, they make some mistakes and engage in some actions that are worthy of criticism — but to combat real evil, you do not go protest at Langley. They are engaged in important work combating homophobia, racism and misogyny. Thus, real warriors against evil look not to them but instead go searching online for the Boogaloo Boys and boomers on Facebook who post Q-Anon and other problematic memes. That is where your focus should remain if you want to root out the real threats.

Large corporations have obviously witnessed the success of this tactic — to prettify the face of militarism and imperialism with the costumes of social justice — and are now weaponizing it for themselves. As a result, they are becoming increasingly aggressive in their involvement in partisan and highly politicized debates, always on the side of the same causes of social justice which entities of imperialism and militarism have so effectively co-opted. 

Corporations have always sought to control the legislative process and executive branch, usually with much success. They purchase politicians and their powerful aides by hiring them as lobbyists and consultants when they leave government, and those bought-and-paid-for influence-peddlers then proceed to exploit their connections in Washington or state capitals to ensure that laws are written and regulations enforced (or not enforced) to benefit the corporations’ profit interests. These large corporations achieve the same goal by filling the campaign coffers of politicians from both parties. This is standard, age-old K Street sleaze that allows large corporations to control American democracy at the expense of those who cannot afford to buy this influence.

But they are now going far beyond clandestine corporatist control of the government for their own interests. They are now becoming increasingly powerful participants in highly polarizing and democratic debates. In the wake of the George Floyd killing last summer, it became virtually obligatory for every large corporation to proclaim support for the #BlackLivesMatter agenda even though many, if not most, had never previously evinced the slightest interest in questions of racial justice or policing. 

One of the very few companies that refused to do so was the Silicon Valley-based cryptocurrency exchange platform called Coinbase — which announced that it would remain apolitical and not involve itself in partisan debates or causes of social justice unrelated to its core business mission. When announcing that policy of political neutrality, the company’s co-founder Brian Armstrong explained that “the reason is that while I think these efforts are well intentioned, they have the potential to destroy a lot of value at most companies, both by being a distraction, and by creating internal division.” That once-anodyne announcement — to stay out of politics as a corporate entity — produced instant backlash. And exactly two months after, the notoriously censorious and politicized “tech reporters” of The New York Times punished the company for its heresy of neutrality with a lengthy article depicting Coinbase as a bastion of racism and toxic bigotry (the company was also savaged by journalists because of its audacity to reveal and respond to the NYT’s allegations in advance of the paper’s decision to publish).

 

Ever since, large corporations are diving into numerous other political debates with great vigor and force — provided that their views are in alignment with affluent liberal culture and prevailing social justice pieties (though, like NBA officials and stars, they confine themselves to easy domestic causes and scripted liberal platitudes while they steadfastly avoid commenting on any injustices that may implicate their business interests, such as debates over labor abuses in China or Amazon’s abuse of its workers). The Wall Street Journal on Sunday reported that “dozens of chief executives and other senior leaders gathered on Zoom this weekend to plot what several said big businesses should do next about new voting laws under way in Texas and other states.” The campaign against these laws includes not just corporate giants but also the nation’s largest and richest corporate law firms.

Part of the motive may be self-serving strategy. With Democrats controlling both houses of Congress as well as the Executive Branch — all of the instruments that can legislate and regulate their businesses — they may be calculating that using their massive weight to serve the Democratic Party’s political agenda is wise. Doing so could curry favor with powerful lawmakers and regulators and result in rewards or, conversely, allow them to avoid punishment and recrimination for the crime of refusing to engage in activism. That motive at least partially explains why they have been so generous with their donations to Democratic candidates. “Wall Street is putting its money behind Democrat Barack Obama for president,” reported Reuters in 2008, while they did the same overwhelmingly in 2020 to support Biden over Trump (just as Democrats have increasingly become the party of affluent suburbanites, they are also increasingly supported by the wealthiest corporate and tech power centers).

The farcical nature of all of this is obvious. Just as it is laughable that the CIA and GCHQ care about social justice, feminism, and racial diversity as they bomb and subvert the rest of the world in ways that contradict all of those professed values, the idea that corporate giants who use sweatshops, slave labor, mass layoffs and abuse of their workforce care about any of these causes would make any rational person suffocate on the stench of their insincerity.

 

Read more:

 

https://greenwald.substack.com/p/big-corporations-now-deploying-woke

 

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assange

The Russian Foreign Ministry announced on Thursday that it would soon respond in kind to a new package of sanctions unveiled against the country by US President Joe Biden, with Washington also expelling ten of Moscow’s diplomats. 

Maria Zakharova, the ministry’s spokeswoman, told reporters that retaliation against the move was “unavoidable,” and that the American ambassador, John Sullivan, had been summoned for “tough talks.” She said, “I would hardly have said this before, but I can say it now: It’s not going to be a pleasant meeting for him.”

Biden signed the decree on Thursday morning, ushering in sanctions against more than 30 Russian individuals and organizations over claims that Moscow meddled in the 2020 US presidential election and was behind the colossal SolarWinds cyber-espionage case that saw hackers gain access to more than 100 corporate networks, as well as nine American government agencies. The Kremlin has denied accusations it was involved in either case.

The new measures include a ban on American financial institutions directly purchasing Russian sovereign debt, which is traditionally used by governments as a way to shore up their economies.

Just weeks ago, the country’s Deputy Foreign Minister Alexander Pankin warned that the US may resort to attacking bonds as part of “a deliberate calculation to create a toxic atmosphere around Russian securities in order to reduce their investment potential.” He revealed that Moscow has already been working to create a battle plan to limit the effect such sanctions would have on the economy.

White House National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan defended the move later on Thursday, saying that the package of sanctions comprised “proportionate measures to defend American interests in response to harmful Russia actions including cyber intrusions and election interference.” Ned Price, the State Department spokesman, also tweeted that “we are sending a clear message to Moscow” with the new measures.

However, Dmitry Polyanskiy, Russia’s deputy permanent representative to the UN, replied saying that “now it is our turn to ‘hold the US to account’ for promoting unsubstantiated allegations and unfriendly moves. That’s how it works in diplomacy.”

Vyacheslav Volodin, the speaker of Russia’s State Duma, claimed the measures demonstrated that the “whole arsenal of accusations has been exhausted, and the US is going in a circle.” He added that “by imposing sanctions, they punish themselves. In the end, they will have to build relationships that they themselves have destroyed.”

 

Responding to the news, the US-led NATO military bloc said that its members “support and express their solidarity” with Washington, and warned that “Russia continues to adhere to a recurring pattern of destabilizing behavior.” The statement concluded that its constituency nations “will continue to work in close consultation on how to respond to Russian actions that pose a threat to Euro-Atlantic security.”

The EU’s foreign policy chief, Josep Borrell, added his voice to those backing Biden’s move. “We share the concerns of our partners about the increasing number of malicious cyber activities,” the former Spanish foreign minister said. “All actors must refrain from irresponsible and destabilizing behavior in cyberspace.”

 

Read more:

https://www.rt.com/russia/521148-us-sanctions-national-debt-retaliation/

 

 

 

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 Tara Reade: Joe Biden didn’t need Russia to ruin his reputation before the election. He did that all by himself (yet still won)

 

By Tara Reade, author, poet, actor and former Senate aide, author of Left Out: When the Truth Doesn't Fit In. Follow her on Twitter @readealexandra

 The US has just imposed sanctions on Russia, in the new tradition of doing so after a presidential election. But frankly, Moscow didn’t have to do anything to smear Biden, who won merely because he was the lesser of two evils. 

Biden has asserted in interviews with the corporate media that his reputation during the election was negatively impacted by Russia – or, more specifically, Vladimir Putin.

Never mind that Biden won the presidential election. His megalomania is not satisfied.

Biden was not the popular choice for the Democratic nominee, and he was often called the lesser of two evils. But the lesser evil is still an evil.

 

There is a short version of a laundry list of reasons why Biden’s reputation was never affected by anything other than his own behavior. The crime bill he sponsored that was passed in 1994 led to the mass incarceration of black and brown people in America. Even his current veep has some choice words regarding this bill.

“I have a great deal of respect for Vice President Joe Biden, but I disagree. That crime bill, that 1994 crime bill, it did contribute to mass incarceration in this country,” Harris, whose own prosecutorial years had earned her a reputation of a hardliner on crime, told reporters after a town hall meeting in New Hampshire.

Harris added that the bill “encouraged and was the first time that we had a federal three-strikes law.”

Hundreds of thousands dead in Iraq, the world’s worst humanitarian crisis triggered by the Saudi-led, US-backed war in Yemen, the original policy to cage children at the border – Biden had a part in it all during his time as Barack Obama’s vice president. And the list goes on…

Not to mention Ukraine and the Burisma deals that enriched his family while he was VP. Any accurate reporting around his son Hunter’s involvement and enrichment by the Ukrainian company remains convoluted or shut down altogether by mainstream American media.

Then there are his many awkward public gaffes, and his cognitive functioning being called into question, just like Donald Trump’s had been before him.

Finally, of course there is the matter of eight women, including me, who have come forward with allegations about his inappropriate and unwanted touching of women.

Joe Biden’s reputation around women has long been both an open secret and the subject of jokes so as to downplay the seriousness of the issue. But then the corporate media began toeing the Democratic National Convention line that Biden was the friendly old uncle full of empathy because he can cry on cue for the camera.

 

I know a very different Joe Biden. When I complained about experiencing sexual harassment while working as his staffer in ’93, I didn’t go to the media. I went through proper office protocol, though I was too scared at the time to write about the direct sexual assault I also experienced. But even so, the complaint was covered up and is now apparently nowhere to be found. Biden made a show of requesting a search of archives to find it, but that got mired in Congress legality and never happened. The University of Delaware, another possible resting place of my complaint, has also refused to release Biden’s sealed Senate documents that had been donated to it.

In 2020, I finally told my full history with Joe Biden on the Katie Halper Show. But Biden’s PR campaign just stepped over it and rolled on towards nomination and then the presidency.

None of this had anything to do with Russia.

As I stated in my book, Left Out: When the Truth Doesn’t Fit In,

“I was an American staffer working for an American Senator and he assaulted me at the American Capitol.”

If Biden wants to blame someone for the negative narratives about him, then he will have to blame himself. And if it has to be someone other than himself, then it should be me. I was the one who stepped up publicly and talked truthfully about what happened while I worked for him. I continue to speak out and I refuse to be intimidated by his public relations machine and the threats to be silent, or the media attacks on me.

Joe Biden’s reputation harmed during the election by Russia? I think not. Russia is off the hook for this one.

 

Read more:

https://www.rt.com/op-ed/521275-biden-russia-election-reputation/

 

 

Note:

Tara Reade's reputation was tarnished by POLITICO, (‘Manipulative, deceitful, user’: Tara Reade left a trail of aggrieved acquaintances) — when it looked that she had traction against Joe Biden... But one can see that POLITICO has been playing political games in order to get their man, Joe Biden, Elected:

 

In March 2019 Politico was accused again of anti-semitism when an article depicting imagery of presidential candidate Bernie Sanders next to money trees was published. Sanders, one of two Jewish candidates for the 2020 US presidential election, was targeted for the amount of wealth he accumulated over his lifetime.[62] Politico staff writer Michael Kruse wrote the article detailing the senator's wealth, writing that Sanders "might still be cheap", according to one of the senator's friends, "but he's sure not poor", which was criticised as combining two anti-Semitic tropes (Jews are cheap; Jews are rich). Politico's official Twitter account used the quote to share the story; the tweet was later deleted.

 

as well:

 

Politico Magazine published an article in April 2017 purporting to show long-term links among U.S. President Donald Trump, Russian President Vladimir Putin and the Jewish outreach organization Chabad-Lubavitch.[56] The article was widely condemned, with the head of the Anti-Defamation League, Jonathan Greenblatt, saying that it "evokes age-old myths about Jews".[57][58]

Cambridge Analytica micro-targeted pro-Trump voters and anti-Clinton voters with native advertising and sponsored or branded content on Politico.

 

Read more:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Politico

 

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assange2

superjoeNo stranger to taking a little shut-eye on the global stage, US President Joe Biden recently snatched headlines again after he appeared to nod off while participating in the COP26 climate change summit in Scotland.Footage of the latest incident captured Biden dozing off for less than 30 seconds before an aide approached him, effectively prompting the American commander-in-chief to become more alert during the conference.The not-to-surprising development unfolded just moments before the president had previously nodded off for less than 10 seconds during the summit's opening speeches. The cat naps took place amid human rights activist Eddie Ndopu's address.Biden closed out his participation at the climate summit on Tuesday, momentarily blasting China for not taking part in the conference. He further detailed that he would be holding virtual talks with Chinese President Xi Jinping at an undisclosed date and time. Read more: https://sputniknews.com/20211102/dreamin-joe-1090426091.html As an old kook, Gus knows about the importance of the nap (sometimes called the "power nap"). Nothing important or powerful happens while you are napping.When you wake up, your brains are like mush-paste... One has to realise that for someone who should have retired long ago, having to play President of the world with so many issues to consider, having to spend more than two hours in the astute awake mode is basically impossible. Joe can delegate: You — you, the head chauffeur of the 85 car cavalcade — you tell me what to say, should the teleprompter fail... Tell China where to get off? Sure... Let's go back to sleep... Read from top. of course... FREE JULIAN ASSANGE NOW WWWW W W W W  WWWW !!!!