The Democratic Party Will ALWAYS Be This Way: Notes From The Edge Of The Narrative Matrix
Chevron—the actual corporation—just sent a lawyer to prison for standing up to the fossil fuel industry, and now British judges are weighing whether or not to send a journalist to a US jail cell for practicing journalism. Western nations need to shut the fuck up about human rights in other parts of the world.
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It's important to remember that before Assange was dragged out of the embassy on a Trump administration arrest warrant in 2019, liberal journalists would mock and smear him relentlessly any time he was in the news. They are silent now, but they helped pave the way for what's happening now.
Never forget that liberal journos participated in a nonstop smear campaign of shocking aggression and astonishing scale against Assange from 2016-2019, and that their smears helped manufacture consent for his imprisonment. Not until they were confronted with the cold hard reality of a journalist being arrested and charged under the Espionage Act for publishing did they realize this isn't a fucking game and stopped.
Now he's in prison, for practicing journalism, and his health is fading, and they are silent. I hope they're silent and ashamed. I hope one day they look in the mirror and see someone who helped torture an autistic man for doing their job better than them.
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So are we all just supposed to pretend it's fine and normal that the most important press freedom case of the century has been proceeding without the presence of the defendant?
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The worst atrocities in history have all been legal. All the worst examples of genocide, slavery, tyranny and bloodshed have been allowed or actively facilitated by the state. The persecution of Assange is geared toward entering the imprisonment of journalists into this category.
A regime which legally extradites and imprisons journalists right out in the open for reporting on its crimes is more evil and more tyrannical than a regime which disappears journalists in secret, because its entire system supports such acts of tyranny and publicly asserts that it is fine. At least the ones who hide it are tacitly acknowledging that it is immoral by hiding it instead of proudly demonstrating its fascism in broad daylight.
Obviously journalists who expose severe malfeasance in the US war machine will always be at risk for being targeted, but establishing such journalism as actually illegal and capable of being prosecuted legally, right out in the open, would be a huge victory for the war machine.
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The Democratic Party is doing exactly what anyone who knows anything predicted it would do when they reclaimed the White House and the Senate and it's going to be rad watching American liberals learn exactly zero lessons from it.
Right after Biden was sworn in I wrote that the next two years are going to be the Democratic Party at its most transparent, because the Democratic Party exists to kill all leftward movement in the most powerful government on earth.
"Unable to blame their refusal to advance progressive policies and basic human decency on Trump and Vladimir Putin these next two years, they'll be forced to kill any leftward movement all on their own," I said. That's exactly what we're seeing now. It's not about Joe Manchin or Kyrsten Sinema or the Parliamentarian, it's the Democratic Party doing the thing it is built to do. The only thing it ever will do. If it wasn't Machin and Sinema it would be someone else.
But watch the mental gymnastics people do to claim that the problem is not electing the right kind of Democrats.
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It's crazy how easy it is to brand yourself an up-punching anti-fascist without ever actually opposing the most fascistic agendas of the most powerful government on earth.
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Facebook changing its name to Meta feels the same as when one of my spiritual friends would change their name to Ramana or Moksha or some grandiose bullshit. It's like shut the fuck up Darryl, you're a white asshole from the suburbs like the rest of us and you work in IT.
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Notice how none of the Australians who oppose their government are asking the US for crushing economic sanctions like US puppets in nations like Venezuela do? That's because they're not being paid to ask for those things by CIA fronts like the National Endowment for Democracy. No normal person asks to be starved.
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The best argument against the current world order is the world order itself. We're destroying our biosphere while flirting with nuclear armageddon and waging endless wars, and those who shape global policies are focusing on censoring the internet and giving everyone a digital ID.
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When I was young there was a meme -- of course we didn't call it that -- of an old man wearing several sweaters sitting on a park bench mumbling about the government. I've come to realize this is me now.
How did America become so spectacularly wall-to-wall rotten? I hope someday I can grow to laugh at all this but I'm currently stuck in that awkward phase of giving a shit.
Keep writing, Caitlin. Every day. Every word.
I disagree that the corporate media shut up when they realized that a journalist was going to be charged under the Espionage Act. They shut up after their smear campaign because it worked, and anything else they said about Julian Assange eventually would bring about more sympathy for him than harm. They're using blackout now - that's all it is - and they haven't connected the dots with their position as journalists because they aren't journalists. They aren't remorseful.