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Brownstone Institute

Assange and the Whistleblowers That Could’ve Been

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From the Brownstone Institute

By BILL RICE  

“‘Can’t we just drone this guy?’ Clinton openly inquired, offering a simple remedy to silence Assange and smother WikiLeaks via a planned military drone strike, according to State Department Sources…”

In the last four years of our Orwellian New Abnormal, the following thoughts occurred to me countless times:

What the world desperately needs is far more brave whistleblowers. What we need is an active and robust WikiLeaks…or far more organizations that perform the vital work of WikiLeaks.

The reasons this has not occurred are, of course, obvious.

The main reason is that the people who could disclose important information about government or Deep State crimes are simply terrified to do this.

They are afraid to do this because they, quite correctly, know they’d suffer deeply unpleasant consequences if they did disclose “inconvenient truths” that expose how corrupt the world’s most important organizations have now become.

Another reason: Organizations that might actually publish the claims of important whistleblowers, largely, do not exist. The entrepreneurs who might create and try to run these organizations have clearly noted the undeniable message the Establishment sent to Julian Assange and WikiLeaks.

That message? If you do publish documents or testimony that embarrasses or threatens us, THIS is what will happen to you.

Truth Bombs That Never Detonated

It’s true WikiLeaks continued to exist while its founder was imprisoned on bogus charges. However, the significant work product of WikiLeaks effectively disappeared while Assange was “dealt with” by the State.

With a few lower-profile exceptions, no organizations assumed the risks of performing the dangerous work of WikiLeaks.

Because of this, many narrative-changing “truth bombs” never detonated…at a time when the world needed Real Truth more than ever.

While Assange is no longer in a British prison—and won’t have to serve the rest of his life in an American Maximum Security prison—the Intimidation State largely achieved its primary goal of taking proactive measures to ensure no one would expose their crimes.

Even today, 100 shocking scandals—genuine “crimes against humanity”—could be definitively exposed if more whistleblowers came forward…and if the information provided by these whistleblowers was disseminated to the mass public.

These Revelations That Never Happened are all “unknown unknowables.” The public will never know things it might otherwise have learned about our society’s real rulers.

It is surely not a coincidence that in the 12 years Assange was either in prison or seeking refuge in an embassy, the Censorship Industrial Complex transitioned from non-existent to the largest growth industry in the bureaucratic state.

Whether it’s NewsGuard, Media Matters, or the Stanford “Virality Project,” scores of anti-disinformation organizations now exist to shut down or deamplify dissenting voices. These well-funded and coordinated organizations eagerly do the bidding of governments that fear and despise “free speech” and a “search for the truth.”

If Julian Assange was trying to warn the world that Big Brother was going to get much bigger (and he was sending this warning), he was clearly proven right.

A Few Details of the Assange Saga Should Not Be Forgotten

Before writing this story, I refreshed my memory regarding the details of the Assange saga.

I was reminded that Mike Pompeo, the former US Secretary of State and CIA director, once seriously considered a plot to assassinate Assange.

So did Hillary Clinton when she was Secretary of State.

According to this Substack review, “Hillary Clinton, one of the worst warmongers in the history of America, proposed to use Barrack (sic) Hussein Obama’s favorite illicit assassination method for Assange.

“‘Can’t we just drone this guy?’ Clinton openly inquired, offering a simple remedy to silence Assange and smother WikiLeaks via a planned military drone strike, according to State Department Sources…”

Hillary was no fan of Assange because it was WikiLeaks that revealed her sycophants conspired with the Democratic Party (via Clintonian “dirty tricks”) to ensure her nomination.

WikiLeaks went a Leak Too Far when the organization published videos showing that US Army helicopters killed many innocent Iraqi civilians—including several International journalists—in one of our nation’s wars to “protect democracy.”

The organization also published reports of torture and mistreatment of prisoners and documented revelations showing how the massive US Intelligence Community was spying on, potentially, millions of citizens.

I Get Why Most Americans Don’t Want to Think about Assange

I think I understand why many Americans view Assange as either a villain or simply prefer to not think about what’s been done to this man.

Every WikiLeak revelation supports the conclusion that America might not be the force for “freedom” most Americans grew up thinking our nation was.

For most people, the thought that “Maybe we aren’t the Good Guys after all” is intolerable medicine.

Still, the national consensus should have been that it was the country’s leaders—and government entities—who are acting as tyrants. That is, it wasn’t everyday Janes and Joes who were mimicking North Korea; it was our government and all the organizations that wanted to stay on the safer side of this 900-pound gorilla.

The message that’s yet to resonate with enough people is that “We the People” could easily get rid of these Bad Actors who are trying to rebrand the “American Way.”

Portrayed as Enemy No. 1 by our government, Julian Assange was simply trying to provide citizens the knowledge we needed to self-correct and purge these actors before they became too powerful to stop.

Let Us Not Forget Who Was Fine with Assange’s Imprisonment

As some of us celebrate Assange’s release, we should also reflect on the powerful institutions and influential citizens who never rallied to his defense.

Surreally, chief among these groups is the vast majority of members of the mainstream media “watchdog” press.

The Washington Post tells us that “Democracy dies in darkness” and yet the Post was more than content with Julian Assange languishing in a dark prison cell for the rest of his life. That is, the Post never used its considerable editorial influence to free the man who had shed the most light on the true nature of our leadership organizations.

Ninety-nine point-nine percent of the country’s activist celebrities were conspicuously silent about the deplorable treatment of Julian Assange (or Ed Snowden or Chelsey Manning or any person who disagreed with Anthony Fauci).

The best-known defenders of Julian Assange were the conceptual leader of Pink Floyd and an actress who once starred in Baywatch.

One has to ask where Bruce Springsteen, Bob Dylan, Bono, Jane Fonda, and Robert DeNiro were when Assange was in a British prison? They certainly weren’t outside his prison cell protesting.

Assange Has Not Received ‘justice’

Some are now saying that “justice” has been served for Assange. As Caitlin Johnstone reminds us, Assange hasn’t gotten any “justice.”

“So while Assange may be free, we cannot rightly say that justice has been done.

“Justice would look like Assange being granted a full and unconditional pardon and receiving millions of dollars in compensation from the US government for the torment they put him through by his imprisonment in Belmarsh beginning in 2019, his de facto imprisonment in the Ecuadorian embassy beginning in 2012, and his jailing and house arrest beginning in 2010.

“Justice would look like the US making concrete legal and policy changes guaranteeing that Washington could never again use its globe-spanning power and influence to destroy the life of a foreign journalist for reporting inconvenient facts about it, and issuing a formal apology to Julian Assange and his family.

Justice would look like the arrest and prosecution of the people whose war crimes Assange exposedand the arrest and prosecution of everyone who helped ruin his life for exposing those crimes. This would include a whole host of government operatives and officials across numerous countries, and multiple US presidents …”


On the occasion of last year’s World Freedom Day, “President” Joe Biden said, “Today—and every day—we must all stand with journalists around the world. We must all speak out against those who wish to silence them.”

Does anyone remember Joe Biden speaking out—even one time—against those who “silenced” Julian Assange?

And, for the record, who silenced him?

Republished from the author’s Substack

Author

Bill Rice, Jr. is a freelance journalist in Troy, Alabama.

Brownstone Institute

Jeff Bezos Is Right: Legacy Media Must Self-Reflect

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From the Brownstone Institute

By David ThunderDavid Thunder 

I can count on one hand the times I have seen leaders of media organizations engage in anything that could be described as hard-hitting forms of self-critique in the public square.

One of those times was when Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg went on public record, in a letter to the Republican House Judiciary Committee (dated August 26th, 2024), that he “regretted” bowing to pressure from the Biden administration to censor “certain Covid-19 content.” Another was the almost unprecedented public apology in January 2022 (here’s a report in English) by a Danish newspaper that it had towed the “official” line during the pandemic far too uncritically.

We witnessed a third moment of critical introspection from a media owner the other day, when Jeff Bezos, who owns the Washington Post and is the largest shareholder of Amazon, suggested in an op-ed in his own newspaper that legacy media may have themselves at least partly to blame for the loss of public trust in the media.

In this context, he argued that his decision not to authorize the Washington Post to endorse a presidential candidate could be “a meaningful step” toward restoring public trust in the media, by addressing the widespread perception that media organizations are “biased” or not objective.

You don’t need to be a fan of Jeff Bezos, any more than of Mark Zuckerberg, to recognize that it is a good thing that prominent representatives of the financial and political elite of modern societies, whatever their personal flaws and contradictions, at least begin to express doubts about the conduct and values of media organizations. Some truths, no matter how obvious, will not resonate across society until prominent opinion leaders viewed as “safe” or “established,” say them out loud.

Bezos opens his Washington Post op-ed by pointing out that public trust in American media has collapsed in recent generations and is now at an all-time low (a substantial decline can be seen across many European countries as well if you compare the Reuters Digital News Report from 2015 with that of 2023 — for example, Germany sees a drop from 60% to 42% trust and the UK sees a drop from 51% to 33%).

In the annual public surveys about trust and reputation, journalists and the media have regularly fallen near the very bottom, often just above Congress. But in this year’s Gallup poll, we have managed to fall below Congress. Our profession is now the least trusted of all. Something we are doing is clearly not working…Most people believe the media is biased. Anyone who doesn’t see this is paying scant attention to reality, and those who fight reality lose.

Something we are doing is clearly not working. This is the sort of candid introspection we need to see a lot more of in journalists and media owners. If someone stops trusting you, it’s easy to point the finger at someone else or blame it on “disinformation” or citizen ignoranceIt’s not so easy to make yourself vulnerable and take a long, hard look at yourself in the mirror to figure out how you’ve lost their trust.

The owner of the Washington Post does not offer an especially penetrating diagnosis of the problem. However, he does point out some relevant facts that may be worth pondering if we are to come to a deeper understanding of the fact that the Joe Rogan podcast, with an estimated audience of 11 million, now has nearly 20 times CNN’s prime-time audience:

The Washington Post and the New York Times win prizes, but increasingly we talk only to a certain elite. More and more, we talk to ourselves. (It wasn’t always this way — in the 1990s we achieved 80 percent household penetration in the DC metro area.)

More and more, we talk to ourselves. Much of the legacy media has become an ideological echo chamber, as I pointed out in an op-ed in the Irish Times a few years ago. Conversations go back and forth between journalists about things they care about, while a substantial number of ordinary citizens, whose minds are on other things, like paying their mortgage, getting a medical appointment, or worrying about the safety of their streets, switch off.

While there are some notable exceptions, the echo-chamber effect is real and may be part of the explanation for the flight of a growing number of citizens into the arms of alternative media.

The increasing disconnect between self-important legacy journalists and the man and woman on the street has been evidenced by the fact that so-called “populism” was sneered at by many journalists across Europe and North America while gathering serious momentum on the ground.

It was also evidenced by the fact that serious debates over issues like the harms of lockdowns and the problem of illegal immigration, were largely sidelined by many mainstream media across Europe while becoming a catalyst for successful political movements such as the Brothers of Italy, Le Pen’s Rassemblement National in France, Alternativ für Deutschland in Germany, and the Freedom Party in Austria.

Perhaps part of the problem is that those working in well-established media organizations tend to take the moral and intellectual high ground and severely underestimate the capacity of ordinary citizens to think through issues for themselves, or to intelligently sort through competing sources of information.

Indeed, even Jeff Bezos, in his attempt to be critical of legacy media, could not resist depicting alternative media exclusively in negative terms. “Many people,” he lamented, “are turning to off-the-cuff podcasts, inaccurate social media posts and other unverified news sources, which can quickly spread misinformation and deepen divisions.”

While there is undoubtedly an abundance of confusion and false and misleading information on social media, it is by no means absent from the legacy media, which has gotten major issues badly wrong. For example, many mainstream journalists and talk show hosts uncritically celebrated the idea that Covid vaccines would block viral transmission, in the absence of any solid scientific evidence for such a belief. Similarly, many journalists dismissed the Covid lab-leak theory out of hand, until it emerged that it was actually a scientifically respectable hypothesis.

We should thank Jeff Bezos for highlighting the crisis of trust in the media. But his complacency about the integrity of traditional news sources and his dismissive attitude toward “alternative sources” of news and information are themselves part of the reason why many people are losing respect for the legacy media.

Republished from the author’s Substack

Author

David Thunder

David Thunder is a researcher and lecturer at the University of Navarra’s Institute for Culture and Society in Pamplona, Spain, and a recipient of the prestigious Ramón y Cajal research grant (2017-2021, extended through 2023), awarded by the Spanish government to support outstanding research activities. Prior to his appointment to the University of Navarra, he held several research and teaching positions in the United States, including visiting assistant professor at Bucknell and Villanova, and Postdoctoral Research Fellow in Princeton University’s James Madison Program. Dr Thunder earned his BA and MA in philosophy at University College Dublin, and his Ph.D. in political science at the University of Notre Dame.

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Brownstone Institute

If Trump Wins

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From the Brownstone Institute

By  Bret Swanson  

How will he organize the “deportation” of illegal migrants? In the best case, it will be difficult. There will be scuffles and chases. Critics will charge the new Administration as cruel and worse. How much stomach will Republicans have for a messy process?

Trump enjoys the momentum. Four of the most recent major national polls show him up 2 to 3%, while Democratic-friendly outlets like the New York Times and CNN both show a TIE race in their final surveys. The 2016 and 2020 elections were razor close even though Clinton (5%) and Biden (8%) had solid polling leads at this point. We need to contemplate a Trump win not only in the electoral college but also in the popular vote.

Here are some thoughts:

  1. JD Vance ascendant, obviously. Big implications for the Republican trajectory.
  2. Will Trump replace Fed chairman Jay Powell? Or merely jawbone for a change in policy? In a new CNBC interview, former Fed governor Kevin Warsh argues that the Fed has juiced both the stock market and inflation. Would reducing inflation, which Trump has promised, automatically therefore lead to a stock market correction and economic slowdown? Not necessarily. If Trump unleashes productive economic activity and Congress ends the fiscal blowout, the Fed could normalize monetary policy without causing a major economic slump.
  3. Will Trump impose the broad and deep tariffs he proposed? Or will he mostly threaten them as a bargaining tool with China? I’m betting on some of the former but more of the latter. We notice, however, Trump allies are floating a trial balloon to replace income taxes with tariffs. As impractical and improbable as that may be, we’re glad to see the mention of radical tax reform reemerge after too long an absence from the national discussion.
  4. How will he organize the “deportation” of illegal migrants? In the best case, it will be difficult. There will be scuffles and chases. Critics will charge the new Administration as cruel and worse. How much stomach will Republicans have for a messy process? One idea would be to offer a “reverse amnesty” – if you leave peacefully and agree not to return illegally, we will forgive your previous illegal entry(s) and minor violations. This would incentivize self-identification and quiet departure. Plus it would help authorities track those leaving. Would migrant departures truly hit the economy, as critics charge? We doubt large effects. Substantial native populations are still underemployed or absent from the workforce.
  5. We should expect a major retrenchment of regulatory intrusions across the economy – from energy to crypto. Combined with recent Supreme Court action, such as the Chevron reversal, and assisted by the Elon Musk’s substance and narrative, it could be a regulatory renaissance. Extension of the 2017 tax cuts also becomes far more likely.
  6. Trump has never worried much about debt, deficits, or spending. But he’s tapped Elon Musk as government efficiency czar. It’s an orthogonal approach to spending reform instead of the traditional (and unsuccessful) Paul Ryan playbook. Can this good cop-bad cop duo at the very least return out-of-control outlays to a pre-Covid path? Can they at least cancel purely kleptocratic programs, such as the $370-billion Green Energy slush funds? Might they go even further – leveraging the unpopular spending explosion and resulting inflation to achieve more revolutionary effects on government spending and reach? Or will the powerful and perennial forces of government expansion win yet again, sustaining a one-way ratchet not even Elon can defeat?
  7. What if the economy turns south? One catalyst might be the gigantic unrealized bond losses on bank balance sheets; another might be commercial real estate collapse. Although reported GDP growth has been okay, the inflation hangover is helping Trump win on the economy. But many believe the post-pandemic economic expansion is merely a sugar-high and has already lasted longer than expected. A downturn early in Trump’s term could complicate many of his plans.
  8. How will NATO and its transatlantic network respond? Or more generally, what will the neocon and neoliberal hawks, concentrated in DC and the media, but little loved otherwise, do? Does this item from Anne Applebaum — arguing Trump resembles Hitler, Mussolini, and Stalin all rolled into one — portend continued all-out war on prudent foreign policy? Or will they adopt a more sophisticated approach? If the neocons move wholesale and formally (back) into the Democratic fold, how long will the coalition of wokes and militarists hold? On the economic front, Europe, already underperforming vis-a-vis the US, will fall even further behind without big changes. Reformers should gain at the expense of the transatlantic WEF-style bureaucrats.
  9. Can Trump avoid another internal sabotage of his Administration? Before then, if the election results are tight, will the Democrats seek to complicate or even block his inauguration? Can he win approval for his appointees in the Senate? Can he clean house across the vast public agencies? How long will it take to recruit, train, and reinvigorate talented military leadership, which we chased away in recent years? And how will Trump counter – and avoid overreacting to – taunts, riots, unrest, and lawfare, designed to bolster the case he’s an authoritarian?
  10. Will the Democrats reorient toward the center, a la Bill Clinton? Or will the blinding hatred of Trump fuel yet more radicalism? Orthodox political thinking suggests a moderation. Especially if Trump wins the popular vote, or comes close, pragmatic Democrats will counsel a reformation. James Carville, for example, already complains that his party careened recklessly away from male voters. And Trump’s apparent pickups among Black and Latino voters complicate the Democrats’ longstanding identity-focused strategy. Other incentives might push toward continued belligerence and extreme wokeness, however, and thus an intra-party war.
  11. Will the half of the country which inexplicably retains any confidence in the legacy media at least begin rethinking its information diet and filters? Or has the infowarp inflicted permanent damage?
  12. Will big business, which shifted hard toward Democrats over the last 15 years, recalibrate toward the GOP? Parts of Silicon Valley over the last year began a reorientation — e.g. Elon Musk, Marc Andreessen, David Sacks, and before them, Peter Thiel in 2016. But those are the entrepreneurs. In the receding past, businesses large and small generally lined up against government overreach. Then Big Business and Big Government merged. Now, a chief divide is between politically-enmeshed bureaucratic businesses and entrepreneurial ones. Does the GOP even want many of the big guys back? The GOP’s new alignment with “Little Tech” is an exciting development, especially after being shut out of Silicon Valley for the last two decades.
  13. Industry winners: traditional energy, nuclear energy, Little Tech. Industry losers: Green Energy, Big Tech, Big Pharma, Big Food. Individual winners: X (nee Twitter), Elon Musk, RFK, Jr.
  14. How will the Censorship Industrial Complex react? A Trump win will pose both a symbolic and operational blow to governmental, non-governmental, old media, and new media outlets determined to craft and control facts and narratives. It will complicate their mission, funding, and organizational web. Will they persist in their “mis/disinformation” framing and their badgering of old media and social media companies to moderate content aggressively? Or will they devise a new strategy? A.I. is pretty clearly the next frontier in the information wars. How will those who propagandize and rewire human minds attempt to program and prewire artificial ones?
  15. How will Trump integrate RFK, Jr. and his movement? Will RFK, Jr. achieve real influence, especially on health issues? Big Pharma and Big Public Health will wage a holy war to block reforms in general and accountability for Covid mistakes in particular.
  16. Trump has promised to end the war between Russia and Ukraine. On one hand, it should be easy. Despite what you hear from DC media and think tanks, Ukraine is losing badly. Hundreds of thousands are dead, and its military is depleted and faltering. Ukraine should want a deal quickly, before it loses yet more people and territory. Russia, meanwhile, always said it wants a deal, even before the war started, focusing on Ukrainian neutrality. Why Ukrainian neutrality should bother the US was always a mystery. And yet even critics of the West’s support for Ukraine, who want an agreement, think it will be difficult to achieve. The Western foreign policy establishment has invested too much credibility and emotion. It will charge “appeasement” and “betrayal” and make any deal difficult for Trump. Russia, meanwhile, has secured so much territory and now has Odessa and Kharkiv in its sights. Putin will not be eager to accept a deal he would have taken in 2021 or before. The far better path for all involved was a pre-war agreement, or the one negotiated but scuttled in April 2022.
  17. What if A.I. launches a new productivity boom, enabled by an agenda of energy abundance, including a nuclear power revival? The economic tailwinds could remake politics even more than we currently see.
  18. Can Trump, having run and won his last campaign, consolidate gains by reaching out and uniting the portions of the country willing to take an extended hand?

Republished from the author’s Substack

Author

Bret Swanson is president of the technology research firm Entropy Economics LLC, a nonresident senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, and writes the Infonomena Substack.

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