Censorship by Wealth and Stealth: How Our Capitalist Masters Murdered Press Freedom; Why They Persecute Julian Assange
16 April 2019
Jailing of Journalist for Exposing Poisonous Depth of U.S. Corruption Forever Nullifies the Pivotal 1734 Peter Zenger Case, Again Revealing "American Democracy" as Our Species' Most Self-Destructive Big Lie
THE PERSECUTION OF JULIAN ASSANGE reduces to used toilet paper the Peter Zenger verdict, the pivotal 1734 finding by a British colonial jury that truth is always the ultimate defense against prosecution for seditious libel.
And that's just one of the many ways Assange's arrest lays bare the Big Lie of "American democracy."
It also adds yet another chapter of atrocities to four centuries of damning evidence that would have long ago reduced the U.S. pretense of "democracy" to a bitter joke in any polity even slightly less dishonest or hypocritical than than pridefully ignorant, habitually hateful Moron Nation. It demonstrates just how thoroughly the First Amendment and indeed the entire Bill of Rights have been reduced to be nothing more than stage-props.
Ultimately what Assange's illegal arrest shows us is the extent to which the tyranny implicit in "American exceptionalism" -- an older more euphemistically disguised variant of the bigotry that launched German Nazism -- has again been elevated to the dominant doctrine of U.S. governance.
Given the reality of the Roberts Court -- which I dub "the Robber Court" because I cannot doubt its intent to rob us of the last few remnants of New Deal humanitarianism -- the Assange case is merely another tombstone in the graveyard of U.S. democratic process.
But -- as my Tory ancestors might have told themselves after they were raped and beaten and tarred-and-feathered and harried into exile -- one could hardly expect better from a nation founded by Southron slave-owners and their New England bankers to protect slavery and preserve the enormous profits generated by unpaid captive laborers.
"American democracy" is thus revealed -- at least to the remaining few of us not already brain-warped either to stupefied babbling or submissive silence -- as naught but the most flagrantly dishonest of white Christian Europe's serf-and-slave realms.
Nor are the horrors implicit in this damning truth any way diminished by the fact the Imperial U.S. is ruled not by a single dictator, but by a mostly anonymous, ever-more-omnipotent cabal of plutocrats -- the unapologetically evil upper echilon of the One Percent aristocracy.
Thus with its malignancy disguised by intricately woven deceptions, the United States has become the most deadly threat to survival in the history of Planet Earth.
***
HERE IS a brief review of Zenger's significance. The Printer's Trial: the Case of John Peter Zenger and the Fight for a Free Press (Gail Jarrow; Calkins Creek: 2006) tells us that after Zenger's acquittal on a charge of criminal libel, "British governors were reluctant to charge American printers with seditious libel. They realized that colonial juries would likely refuse to convict anyone for publishing criticisms of royal officials. Because of this, the colonial press became more open and free. During the years leading up to the American Revolution, printers published attacks on British authority as well as calls for independence.”
Assange, of course, is denied any such opportunity for judicial relief. His will be a show trial performed by a kangaroo court. Given the (additional) Big Lie of "American justice," Assange's conviction -- and in all probability his death sentence (whether by lethal injection or by the slower more agonizing torture of solitary confinement) -- is already assured. Thus do U.S. puppet-states like the United Kingdom obey the dictates of their Wall Street overlords.
***
U.S. CENSORSHIP IS seemingly unofficial -- another example of the founders' long-range cunning in their efforts to protect plutocracy and slavery. Hence the First Amendment's prefatory stipulation "Congress shall make no law..."
But that prohibition does nothing to limit the power of publishers, editors, educators and religious authorities to suppress whatever information they choose -- including information that today might challenge the absolutism of the Neoliberal/ChristoNazi plutocracy and its ever-more-undeniable embrace of the antebellum slave plantation as its ultimate model for human society. Nor does it prevent their clandestine collaboration with the Central Intelligence Agency or any other malign elements of the ruling Neoliberal plutocracy.
What that tells us is our founders were so sure of themselves -- and so certain of the ideological faithfulness of their descendants -- they felt no need to impose the formal censorship characteristic of Europe.
As a result, by deliberate design, U.S. censorship is far sneakier than any of its official counterparts elsewhere.
And that sneakiness is why, as proven by the oppressive reality of Moron Nation -- the most pridefully ignorant, hateful, morally imbecilic population in the developed world -- U.S. censorship is demonstrably the most diabolically effective methodology of thought control ever devised.
Note for example -- and I promise this is not a non sequitur -- how the coup-protecting Warren Report was rammed down our collective throats:
In October 1964 -- when the Associated Press first released its 366-page, one-volume summary of the evidence presented to support the Big Lie President John Fitzgerald Kennedy was murdered not by a seasoned death squad but by a deranged lone gunman -- the hardbound book was distributed free to members of the working press.
If memory serves, the nation's AP-member papers gave away innumerable copies of the book as promotional gifts to new subscribers, though ostensibly it was to be peddled for $1 per copy.
It is also my recollection the AP claimed at the time its effort to publicize and disseminate the Warren Commission's assertions had no precedent in U.S. history. In any case it provides a telling example of an allegedly "democratic" method of imposing national conformity and the irresistible momentum behind it.
As disclosed by the Church Committee:
The CIA currently maintains a network of several hundred foreign individuals around the world who provide intelligence for the CIA and at times attempt to influence opinion through the use of covert propaganda. These individuals provide the CIA with direct access to a large number of newspapers and periodicals, scores of press services and news agencies, radio and television stations, commercial book publishers, and other foreign media outlets.
In this context, the enormous importance our overlords gave to squelching anti-Warren Commission debate becomes evidence in its own right.
***
HENCE THE RELEVANCE of my own encounters with assassination-related censorship:
From August 1963 until just after Christmas 1964, I was the sports editor, crime reporter and general-assignment photographer for The Oak Ridger, a tiny afternoon daily that -- because Oak Ridge, Tennessee is the global birthplace of thermonuclear apocalypse -- was in Cold War retrospect undoubtedly no less a critical CIA station than The New York Times or The Washington Post is today.
Which probably explains how and why Richard Smyser -- the diminutive, socially awkward, whiny-voiced managing editor of a paper with only about 10,000 paid subscribers -- quickly and somewhat mysteriously rose to chair the internationally prominent Associated Press Managing Editors' Freedom of Information Committee.
It also suggests why -- as we buttoned down the newsroom after the 17-hour workday occasioned by the murder of President Kennedy -- Smyser meticulously collected every single scrap of assassination-related wire-service copy. Not only that: he also -- very uncharacteristically, I thought -- threatened each of us on the five-member news staff with instant firing should we be caught withholding even a single paragraph of the reams of post-assassination dispatches that had reached us via the AP's teletype machines.
At the time, Smyser acted as if his edict of confiscation was motivated by nothing more than editorial privilege, just as, nearly a year later, he acted as if it were mere curiosity that prompted him to interrogate all of us in detail as to our views of the Warren Commission's verdict and the AP summary thereof.
I remember that interrogation vividly because it was one of only two occasions in which Smyser belittled me mercilessly and at the top of his voice in the presence of all my newsroom colleagues.
When he asked me for my opinion of the AP summary, I replied truthfully. I said I could not accept the report's ballistic conclusions because -- as a former Regular Army soldier, a firearms collector, the son of a national match competitor and a competitive shooter myself -- I found them improbable if not downright absurd.
At the time I was a bit more than halfway between my 24th and 25th birthdays. Smyser's response was to seize upon my age and poverty-inflicted lack of a college degree and then -- shouting as loudly as I ever heard him shout -- to denounce me as an arrogantly disruptive, grotesquely disobedient child who refused to accept the truth and wisdom of those who were not only my socioeconomic, educational and intellectual "betters," but were so far above my station in life, I had no right to question their findings at all.
It was indeed an interesting revelation of Ruling Class bigotry -- especially since it was voiced by the editor presumably charged with national responsibility for maintaining our (alleged) freedom of the press.
Twenty years later, in a conversation with a half-dozen equally seasoned members of the working press during an evening in the late, lamented and now-legendary Lion's Head -- in essence the unofficial New York City Press Club -- I learned that identical confiscations-of-copy and post-Warren-Commission interrogations had occurred at most U.S. daily newspapers.
Why the confiscations? That too is obvious in retrospect. The AP dispatches included several reports that might have later revealed the Warren Report as fiction. One described the Dallas cops' discovery, in the parking lot behind the infamous grassy knoll, of a pair of Lee-Enfields -- British service-rifles that, as the fastest bolt-action rifles ever made, could in trained hands easily have produced the illusion of "three bursts of automatic gunfire" to which combat-veteran reporters and many other witnesses testified. Another report, less than an hour after the shooting, told of a light aircraft ignoring vehement protests by Dallas air traffic controllers, taking off without authorization and fleeing toward Mexico; I remarked at the time, "there go the killers."
As far as I am able to determine, all of this contrary evidence -- and there was a great deal of it on the wires that day -- has vanished down the Orwell hole. Thus is deniability made plausible.
***
HERE FROM A slightly revised version of my 2013 essay entitled, "Censorship: Lessons from Nader and a Knoxville Atrocity" are two additional examples of how U.S. the censorship apparatus functions. Each demonstrates how -- thanks to the founders' plutocratic foresight -- what today we recognize as the Mainstream Media Propaganda Machine is the world's first privately-owned, for-profit equivalent of the Reich Ministry of Public Enlightenment and Propaganda:
In 1964 Ralph Nader entrusted me with the revelations that, a year later, would be published in Unsafe at Any Speed, his exposé of capitalism in action, specifically of how the U.S. automobile manufacturers were maximizing profits by minimizing vehicular safety.
But this piece never saw the proverbial light of day. It was killed by Smyser, my second bitter schooling in the harsh realities of censorship that are cleverly hidden beneath the claim the United States has “freedom of the press,” and it was memorably painful because I had expected better -- much better -- from The Oak Ridger. Why? Because its top executives, Publisher Don McKay, Business Manager Tom Hill and Smyser himself had been courageous enough to hire me despite The Knoxville Journal's continuing effort to slander me into professional and personal oblivion.
That episode is a story unto itself. I had worked for The Journal since September 1957, first as a part-time sports stringer through the fall of 1959, when finances forced me to drop out of college and enlist in the U.S. Army. In September 1962, having served 18 months in Korea and finished my required three-year term of active duty, I was immediately rehired by The Journal as a full-time staff sportswriter. Obviously the paper liked me and my reporting; Assistant Sports Editor Ben Byrd once told me he believed I was destined for The New York Times or some equally prestigious publication.
But on 2 June 1963, a raid by a combined force of Knoxville cops and Knox County sheriff's deputies jailed a racially mixed group of 40 men and women on charges I knew to be utterly without basis in fact. I was one of those arrested, but on the strength of my press card I was immediately released, and now – naive idiot that I was – I believed I could convince Journal Editor/Publisher Guy L. Smith and City Editor Dick Evans the arrests were at the very least a terrible mistake and more probably a deliberate atrocity. Instead Smith and Evans rejected everything I said, concluding I was what in the parlance of the Jim Crow South was called a “nigger-lover” – probably a Communist as well – and Smith had me re-arrested in his newsroom, then publicly fired me on Page One of his newspaper.
My termination notice was a maliciously slanderous story by Ron McMahan, who knowingly wrote a deliberate Big Lie that would have been equally at home in Adolf Hitler's Völkischer Beobachter: “Forty Negroes and whites, most of them students at the University of Tennessee, were arrested early Sunday morning during what police described as 'a drunken sex orgy' at a South Knoxville residence...Booked at county jail on a charge of disorderly conduct was Loren Bliss, 23, of 1537 Laurel Avenue, a former Journal sportswriter.”
There was of course neither orgy nor drunkenness; the gathering was nothing more than a quiet garden party, attended by nearly as many UT faculty members, civil rights activists, young local professionals and business executives as older students. It celebrated the graduation of a woman named Maline Robinson, who had just earned a master-of-fine-arts degree from UT and who would later teach art history at the University of Wisconsin. Despite The Journal's lurid prose (“partly-clad couples were lying all over the front lawn...on tables, in closets and on the floor...Lewdness charges were not placed against anyone because during the melee everyone scattered”), the sexual allegations were nothing more than typical fabrications of the forever undiminished, never-to-be-quenched hatefulness that rules the vindictively pornographic Southron mind. Such is the racist fear, blood-lust and never-to-be-acknowledged envy implicit in the old joke that asks, “what is ten inches and white,” then answers, “nothing.”
That the police raid occurred just as the local Ku Klux Klan and its many affiliated churches were pulpit-pounding against “interracial love feasts” was hardly coincidental. Martin Southern, the ironically named American Civil Liberties Union lawyer in Knoxville, said he believed the raid had been carefully planned by a cabal of high ranking officials at UT, the sheriff's office and the police department plus top executives of The Journal and The Knoxville News-Sentinel to facilitate purging the university of anyone the local Ruling Class deemed “trouble-makers” and/or “outside agitators.”
Southern warned me that because I was the one genuinely credible witness to everything that had actually occurred -- he said I was “the fly, as it were, in the segregationist ointment” -- my own life was in danger. Not many days later, a would-be killer tried to invade my ground-floor apartment via its kitchen window, but the attempted hit was thwarted by my vigilant German shepherd Brunhilda and my own expert-class skill with a handgun – a story for another time.
Meanwhile Marion Barry, then Tennessee field secretary for the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, later the mayor of Washington D.C., had arranged for me to cover the mass-arrest story for a local African-American weekly. But that report too was intrusively censored, not by blacks but by two white civil rights activists, Congress of Racial Equality members Steve Wagner and Phillip Bacon, who claimed they feared accurate description of the incident's more telling moments would discredit the narrative as “sensationalism.” Thus to my eternal regret I allowed them to cut several key passages from my original draft. These included a word-for-word account of my confrontation with Smith, in which he made it clear my alternatives were either to fabricate a lie describing an imaginary sex orgy or suffer the consequences; details of the police assault on a Latin American diplomat who was a guest at the party; and a brief description of the attempt on my life that arguably confirmed Southern's hypothesis of a Rightist conspiracy far broader than a mere police raid. The following, under my own byline, is what remained after Bacon and Wagner finished censoring it. It's from the 3 August 1963 edition of The Knoxville Flashlight-Herald:
Although The Knoxville Journal had opportunity to publish a staff member's eye-witness account of the now-famed graduation party held for some University of Tennessee students by Mr. and Mrs. Malcolm Ottaway, it declined to utilize that source and relied instead upon police and sheriff's reports.
That those reports were something less than reliable has since been proven in Knox County Sessions Court.
This writer, at the time a sports reporter for The Journal, attended the party with friends and was subsequently arrested, then freed after deputies learned he was a Journal staff member. He was re-arrested and booked some 14 hours later after unsuccessfully attempting to interest Journal City Editor Dick Evans in a factual account of events before and during the arrests...
Included in this writer's report would have been a statement that the party was quiet and proper despite the number of persons present and information that police and deputies had acted without grounds.
Those taken to city jail, where there is a drunkometer (a Breathalyzer by which suspects can challenge a drunkenness charge), were not charged with drunkenness, but those taken to county jail, where there is no drunkometer, were charged with drunkenness in addition to disorderly conduct...
Cases against those charged by Knox County, including this writer, were dismissed July 1. City Court cases were continued by order of Journal-supported Judge Charles Kelly and will be heard in October.
Included on the city docket is Milton Vargas, the Panamanian Vice-Consul here. Mr. Vargas, who has filed a full report with the Panamanian government, has charged he was slapped by police officers...
The only uncensored coverage of the arrests was provided by TASS – Tyelyegrafnoye agyentstvo Sovyetskogo Soyuza or Telegraph Agency of the Soviet Union. The story appeared on page one of Pravda, as I recall in the 5 June edition. It was also -- or so I was told by several UT students -- broadcast in English by Radio Moscow.
Given the prurient hatefulness that so often defines southern racism, The Oak Ridger's bravery in hiring me in mid-August, even before all the court cases had been decided, was beyond exceptional. Indeed, since The Journal's vindictively aggressive slanders were blacklisting me even amongst Northern employers, until The Oak Ridger came to my rescue I had feared my journalism career was over.
Which brings us back to Ralph Nader. Maybe a year after the Knoxville incident, he was in Oak Ridge visiting his sister, a scientist with some big-league connection to what today would be called the nuclear energy cartel. Smyser arranged for me to interview Nader, exactly where I no longer remember. What I do recall is that I questioned Nader for hours, that eventually we adjourned to continue the interview at his sister's apartment, and that after I photographed him with the paper's Polaroid-back Speed Graphic, we talked literally until dawn.
Nader doubted the story would run. Citing the paper's bold defiance of the region's characteristic racism, I assured him it would.
Then I drove from his sister's place directly to the The Oak Ridger building on Tyrone Road, put the sports page to bed as quickly as I could and hammered out the Nader story on my issue Royal Standard typewriter. My lead said something like “'Unsafe at any speed' -- that's how Ralph Nader describes many of Detroit's best-selling automobiles.” The second graf laid out Nader's credentials -- a Harvard-educated lawyer, he had been campaigning for safer cars since the late 1950s -- and the remainder detailed his complaints against Chevrolet's Corvair. The text ran to at least six takes – six double-spaced typewritten pages of about 300 words apiece.
Despite the befogged mind that even at age 24 is the penance we pay for a sleepless all-nighter, I thought I'd done a damn fine job of reporting. But -- perhaps because Smyser himself drove a sherbet-green Corvair -- the story evoked not the anticipated thank you for the warning but instead provoked him to rage at me, startling the entire five-person staff as he shouted his denunciations the length of the newsroom.
My memory still flinches at how he grimaced as he dropped the Nader copy into the circular gray waist-high trash bin that stood guard beside his desk. His expression suggested he was disposing of something grossly distasteful, at least as repugnant as a cat turd.
When I phoned Nader and apologetically told him there would be no story, he nevertheless thanked me for my effort. Years after that I realized I was the one who should have thanked him – not just for all the time he spent telling me about the built-in hazards of those Detroit cars, but for the lesson in journalistic reality.
Such is the USian variant of a “free press,” its invisible restrictions so effective, no official censorship is necessary, the result uncomfortably reminiscent of a slogan in George Orwell's 1984: “ignorance is strength.”
***
AS TO WHY ASSANGE is being targeted, I suspect -- despite suggestions to the contrary -- it has little or nothing to do with the sadistic vindictiveness of Hillary Clinton and her Democratic (sic) Party apparatus.
More likely the effort against Assange -- which by its bipartisanship bares the despotic Neoliberal unity the Democrats and Republicans normally work so diligently to conceal -- is in reaction to such findings as this Harvard study that documents substantial public response to alternative media. Or, perhaps more pointedly, to how Assange and his colleagues are nullifying even the carefully disguised censorship that defines the United States.
In any case it is yet more irrefutable evidence of our Neoliberal overlords' increasingly frantic efforts to silence dissent by any means possible -- thereby ending forever their pretense this "one nation under God" stands for anything remotely akin to "liberty and justice for all."
Quoth the 1971 Powell Memo:
There should be no hesitation to attack the Naders, the Marcuses and others who openly seek destruction of the system. There should not be the slightest hesitation to press vigorously in all political arenas for support of the enterprise system. Nor should there be reluctance to penalize politically those who oppose it.
A detailed analysis of the memo is here.
***
ALL OF WHICH should alleviate -- or so I hope -- any need for explain further why I think the Assange story is so important it demands the most thorough coverage I am able to provide:
UK Judge Calls Assange "A Narcissist," Sets Extradition Court Date
Why the Assange Arrest Should Scare Reporters
The Assange Arrest is a Warning From History
RSN: The Railroad That Awaits Julian Assange
The Martyrdom of Julian Assange
After 7 Years of Deceptions About Assange, the US Readies for Its First Media Rendition
Assange's Arrest Erases What America Suppposedly Stood For
Assange’s Indictment Treats Journalism as a Crime
Worldwide outrage over arrest of WikiLeaks publisher Julian Assange
*****
This Week's Most Damning Juxtapositions of Evidence
The socioeconomic and environmental Apocalypse is undeniably upon us. But the lies, deceptions and betrayals promulgated by the One Percenters and their minions no longer hide how -- in accordance with their shock-doctrine -- they are using the Apocalypse to impose the ultimate regime-change: the reordering of human society into Neoliberal utopia: Ayn Rand opulence for our masters, serfdom and slavery for the few 99 Percenters they allow to survive.
Democrats 'Wasting Time While Our Climate Burns' With Insufficient Resolution
Another of the woefully uninformative, glaringly illiterate heads that so frequently define Common Dreams as one of our shoddier examples of nonprofessional alternative journalism. What the head should say -- corrected both for its misplaced modifier and its sloppy misstatement of fact -- is Friends of Earth Denounce Democrats for "Wasting Time" on Climate Crisis. Unfortunately the story fails to ask why the Democratic (sic) Party is diddling and dallying rather than moving to help sustain our species in the face of what is already the gravest-ever threat to human survival. But two other stories combine to reveal "over-population" as dog-whistle code for genocide and the trillion-dollar momentum that -- unless we are rescued by socialist revolution -- defines the Neoliberal (neo-Nazi) "Final Solution" to the environmental crisis. Then we have
Republicans Push Anti-Wind Bills in Several States as Renewables Grow Increasingly Popular
In which context we should consider the implications of
The return of the population bombers
Neoliberalism and the Machinery of Disposability , .
While never forgetting the post-World-War-II, build-a-new-Nazi-Reich inputs to the present-day governance of the U.S. Empire:
How Thousands Of Nazis Were 'Rewarded' With Life In The U.S.
As I trust we are learning, the conclusion fostered by viewing the evidence as expressions of capabilities and intent are entirely different from what one concludes when it is viewed as manifestations of chaos and coincidence. It is also useful to remember an axiom of analysis that is undoubtedly older than Rome: "once is happenstance; twice is questionable; three times is enemy action."
***
Our Mother Earth: the Patriarchy's Ultimate Rape Victim
The Abrahamic religions' fear and hatred of femaleness expressed as the ultimate misogyny of ecocide.
Arctic Is Warmest It's Been in 10,000 Years, Study Suggests
This Is How Human Extinction Could Play Out
Researchers Warn Arctic Has Entered 'Unprecedented State' That Threatens Global Climate Stability
For some river towns, flood protection is simply too costly
FOCUS: A Lawyer Set Himself on Fire to Protest Climate Change. Did Anyone Care?
Saying Goodbye to Planet Earth
***
Imperial War-Mongering for God, Profit and Sadistic Delight
Another African Convicted In Another Racist, Chauvinist Western Court
US Military Threatens Syria-Like War In Venezuela, Awaits Trump's Order
The Israeli-Palestinian Peace Process Is Dead. An Expert Explains Why.
Reckoning With Failure In The War On Terror
Labeling The Iranian Revolutionary Guard 'Terrorists' Is A Step Toward War
ISIS/Al Qaeda in the Middle East and Ukraine's "Neo-Nazis": Two Sides of the Imperial Coin
Venezuela Prepared To Defend The Revolution Against US Imperialism
***
Atrocities and Outrages
Events and patterns -- including slow-motion genocide disguised as "austerity" -- that define the U.S. as the (de facto) Fourth Reich
US Denies Entry To BDS Cofounder Omar Barghouti
Katie Bouman and the Black Hole That Made Her Famous
Badly misleading head: the story is about the Gamergating of a woman who dares to be great.
Breastfeeding Mother Hit with $115 Ticket for Breastfeeding in Midtown NYC Traffic
Trump officials discussed using troops to run migrant detention camps
Eleven-Year-Old Ordered to Be Deported to El Salvador Without Her Family
Trump Reportedly Pushed to Drop Asylum Seekers in Democratic Sanctuary Cities
Trump's Transgender Military Ban Takes Effect Today
West Virginia college axes liberal arts; Pennsylvania Historical Society slashes workforce
US Workers Are Highly Taxed If You Count Premiums
The Trump Administration Is Abandoning the Dakota Tribes as They Face a Second Catastrophic Storm
Republicans Are Taking Ilhan Omar's Comments on 9/11 Out of Context to Smear Her
Why Has Congress Stalled on Investigating Money Laundering Allegations at Trump Properties?
Police tower casts a shadow over South Seattle Safeway
Monsters Inc: They Treated Us Like We Were Animals
On Toddler Torturers: There Are Some Lines That Simply Can't Be Crossed
Congress Is About to Ban the Government From Offering Free Online Tax Filing. Thank TurboTax.
Scapegoating Unions For The Postal Service's Phony Crisis
Obama Pushes Neoliberal Myths on Health Care at Fundraiser
Homeland Security Purge Ushers in the Stephen Miller Administration
Kings Bay Plowshares: Peace Activists Face 25 Years for Action at US Nuclear Submarine Base
Right wing takes Wisconsin court seat in a strident hate campaign
Rising number of Michigan and US households unable to afford basic necessities
Obama, Pelosi push Democrats further to the right
***
Religion and Spirituality
Trump Administration Lets Foster Agency Turn Away Catholic and Jewish Parents
Trump and the Global Rise of the Christian Right
Clarence Thomas: Atheists Can’t Be Trusted Since Oaths Mean Nothing to Them
***
Racism
Trump's Attack on Ilhan Omar Is a Trap for Democrats
Let Freedom Ring
I had forgotten -- until I read this paradoxically triumphant yet damning report (which we should therefore all read) -- the Ku-Klux intensity of the racism manifest by the Daughters of the American Revolution.
***
Media and Censorship
On False Dichotomies, Real and Fake, at MSDNC
If You Have Alexa, Amazon Is Listening
Missouri Bill Banning Anonymity of Atheist Plaintiffs in Lawsuits Passes House
***
Sparks of Anger, Murmurs of Rebellion
But absolutely nothing to indicate the emergence of effectively organized and disciplined resistance in the United States and its Empire.
Turkey's Only Communist Mayor Scores Another Election Victory
Freedom Rider: Scoundrels and Reparations
AMNH Under Fire for Hosting Brazil's Jair Bolsonaro
Medicaid Work Requirements: Do They Actually Help?
Illinois Billboard Welcomes Missouri Women Who Want a “Safe, Legal Abortion”
Indian Country Today video news report for April 11, 2019, with Vincent Schilling - IndianCountryToday.com
Almost always some relevant stories here, but they are impossible to link separately because of the way the site is designed.
Will you Rise up for Climate Justice Next Week? Don’t Let Fatalism and Cynicism Hold you Back
Read my comment and its correction to see why environmentalism without anti-Capitalist revolution is doomed -- and why such pseudo-environmentalism is therefore in apocalyptic reality yet another form of anti-environmentalism.
'Huge Victory': French Court Finds Monsanto Guilty of Poisoning Farmer
Progressives hit attempt by Democratic Party establishment to crush primary challengers
A Reckoning for Al Sharpton and the Black Misleadership Class
Runaway Inequality Is a National Emergency, Billionaire Banker Warns
Tell Netflix: Speak Up for Women
***
In Closing
Please, please, please heed the distress call by Reader Supported News for funding. The fact its founder and I have sometimes had our differences has nothing to do with the overall superb quality of the website's anthologies of the day's most important stories.
LB/16 April 2019
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