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Mar 21, 2023·edited Mar 21, 2023

I can't think of a specific "propaganda leftover" right now, but I probably will. I can remember many instances since I went fully "a pox on both sides" towards US Red/Blue politics in 2016 that I looked at a "leftover" person/institution and thought, "There is no reason anymore to take their opinion on faith. Not after what 'the left' did to Bernie in 2016."

I was a NYT subscriber for about 15 years. 2016 I watched in real-time as the entire editorial staff walked in lock-step supporting Hillary. Because of the time difference between the US and Europe and how (at the time) the NYT would post on-line content, I saw the content post in the middle of the night US Eastern time. Several times I saw opinion pieces about a Hillary/Bernie debate that were posted within 10-15 minutes after the debate finished, raving for Hillary.

It was clear that these articles could not have been written, reviewed, edited and posted that fast unless they were written ahead of time. It was a real eye opener.

Then the NYT started curating its comments, because there were too many pro-Berne comments.

I posted a comment comparing 2016 Paul Krugman vs. 2006 Paul Krugman. Krugman turned 180° on Medicare for All. My comment was held for hours before posting, making sure it would get minimum eyeballs.

All that together made me question everything I believed about the NYT. And I cancelled my subscription. Something similar happened at DailyKos, although I got a permanent friend out of it, but that is another story.

PS: Sorry I can't join the chats lately. Too much work.

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Great !!

PATRICK LAWRENCE: Trump & the Stormy Deep State -- March 20, 2023

https://consortiumnews.com/2023/03/20/patrick-lawrence-trump-the-stormy-deep-state/?eType=EmailBlastContent&eId=e320af29-4cf6-441a-b4e6-261af47d6c2a

We keep coming face-to-face with the wreckage of the Russiagate years, when the 45th president threatened the national security apparatus for, possibly, the first time since Kennedy fired Allen Dulles as C.I.A. director in 1961.

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Muammar Qadaffi....we killed him. He was Libya's leader, who deposed a British puppet, King Idris. I read U.S. and British articles, and assumed he was a blood thirsty and corrupt despot. Years later, when I wasn't working and raising kids, I started my own research. He was a populist and ruled as an honorable and firm Arab leader. He had brilliant economic plans for the Arab world, but they did coincide with the West's. Now I'm a forever skeptic...an idiot, but sometimes useful. Sorry, but farms don't let us watch live streams!

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At the moment I can't think of an example of *my own* leftover propagandizement, but I just heard an infuriating example on NPR of their persistent propaganda about the US invasion and occupation of Iraq: characterizing Iraqis who fought back as criminal "insurgents."

They did a segment interviewing an Iraqi man who was imprisoned and tortured by US troops at Abu Ghraib prison in which the "wrongness" of what happened to him largely hinges on the idea that he was "innocent" of fighting back at the US as if doing so would have made him a legitimate target for arrest and abuse.

Here's the link:

https://www.npr.org/2023/03/21/1164916991/looking-back-on-shocking-revelations-u-s-forces-tortured-iraqis-at-abu-ghraib

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The great recession and Snowden did a pretty good job of cleaning up any propaganda leftovers I had post-WMD. At this point for me a big leftover is probably the economic religion of capitalism and the dogma of its auto-merits to which I still find myself pretty uncritically involuntarily defaulting. Otherwise the nihilistic skepticism is close to impenetrable by even what might be good propaganda.

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Biden and Co. are mindless puppets of global finance, media-tech oligarchs , the deep state, and the PMC (Ehrenreich), as have been most Presidents, most CongressCritterz, and the “establishment “.

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The Last Child of My Lai -- JEFFREY ST. CLAIR – Mar. 19, 2023

https://www.counterpunch.org/2023/03/19/the-last-child-of-my-lai/

The My Lai Massacre, where American GIs murdered 502 unarmed Vietnamese civilians, occurred 55 years ago this week.

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Stephen Colbert and Quentin Tarantino. Actually I still think both are fine in their earlier incarnations, but obviously Colbert went off the deep-end with Trump, and Tarantino lost me with the "Hateful 8," which is a misogynistic, racist mess of a movie. The entire Entertainment Industrial Complex has become a caricature of what a certain conservative perspective always said that it was, which is doubly ironic in Colbert's case, since his shtick used to be a fun parody of that type of conservative or right-wing mindset; now he's the fuddy-duddy he used to mock.

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Having grown up in a “center-liberal” military family in the 60s and the Nixon-Watergate era, believing any foreign policy REGIME PROPAGANDA is usually dumb. That goes for China and Russia, the EU, etc. as well.

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Deep State and Dems are in absolute panic about Trump candidacy in 2024.

DeSantis issued a very poor/weak defense of the latest (threat of Trump arrest) legal outrage – essentially eliminating itself as a serious 2024 candidate.

The only and the best solution for DeSantis and for the US democracy is to issue a statement that

-– he will not run in 2024 elections but

-- that he will be honored if Trump selects him as VP.

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