The thought that dare not speak its name
Bloomberg hosts panic as respected commentator states the obvious on who likely sabotaged Russia-Germany gas pipeline
Columbia University professor Jeffrey Sachs stunned the hosts of a Bloomberg show on which he appeared Monday by straying from the accepted American media script, saying he “would bet” the US was behind the destruction of the Nord Stream pipeline, possibly with the assistance of a proxy country like Poland.
What was most interesting about this was not what Sachs said, although it was remarkable that he, a mainstream commentator with wide experience appearing in national media and advising organizations like the Pentagon and the UN, had the courage to say it. The most interesting thing was the hosts’ reactions. Visibly aghast, Tom Keene, the bow-tied, spectacled dean of Bloomberg Surveillance, quickly intervened like a teacher interrogating an unruly student. Ah, Jeff, Jeff, we gotta stop there […] what evidence do you have of that?
When Sachs responded with well-stated reasons for why one might come to that conclusion — why, in fact, anyone with a half-functioning brain should come to that conclusion — co-host Lisa Abramowicz, clearly uncomfortable at having to clean up this mess, ushered Sachs onto the safer ground of another topic after repeated attempts to interrupt him:
Professor…well…Professor… I, I really don’t want to get into tit for tat about what did or did not happen with Nord Stream because I don’t have the evidence and we don’t have…uh…a counter-balance to this…
This is how things work in American media. You’re free to speculate to your heart’s content on the most outlandish claims — in fact, you’re encouraged to do so — when the alleged perpetrator is a person, organization, or country that is out of favor or out of step with elite establishment thought or considered an adversary of the United States. No evidence required, no counter-balance necessary, no push-back whatsoever. But the moment you tread on ground that could implicate a favored individual or institution, or, worst of all, the US government, the ground shifts. Evidence is demanded. Balance is required, usually supplied by dried-up husks that were once government officials.
Russia “hacked” our election? (whatever that means). Yes! Of course they did!
The Republicans had a server in Trump Tower in constant communication with a Russian bank? Tell us more!
Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction? Chilling!
Syrian President Bashar Assad used chemical weapons against his own people? No doubt about it!
Russia put a bounty on the heads of American soldiers in Afghanistan? That’s an outrage!
The Republican Party is owned by the billionaire Koch brothers who push their hidden libertarian schemes to wipe out government and further enrich and empower themselves? I knew it!
Billionaire George Soros has spent tens of millions of dollars supporting left-wing prosecutors in major US cities to end tough policing and mass incarceration? Uhhh…wait a minute…are you sure about that one? Are you an anti-semite?
Israel has rained down hundreds of missiles on Syria in recent years, many of them in the middle of the night in populated areas, killing civilians? I’m not sure that’s true, but if they did they probably had good reason to.
The Clinton campaign did precisely what they falsely accused the Trump campaign of doing in 2016: paid agents of a foreign power to manufacture lies about a political opponent? We’re moving into dangerous, irresponsible conspiracy theory territory now. This is ancient history anyway.
The US sponsored a coup in Ukraine in 2014 to overthrow an elected Ukrainian president who was deemed insufficiently hostile to Russia, starting the whole mess that led us to where we are today? That’s a preposterous claim!! Where’s your evidence for that?? On second thought, let’s just move on…
The thing about the list above is that the allegations go from incoherent, demonstrably false, or totally unsubstantiated to fairly easy to prove as you move down the list, but they also depart further and further from acceptable views of reality from an American media standpoint and are therefor off limits in any major media interview that’s not being conducted by Tucker Carlson (what have we come to as a country that we have to resort to Carlson for discussions of controversial subjects that are based in reality?).
The inflexion point in the list is of course the difference in the treatment of allegations against the Koch brothers versus those against George Soros. The Kochs aren’t in the media much these days, but there was a time a few years ago when their names were used in vain hourly on MSNBC. In that network’s Marvel Universe view of reality the Kochs might as well have been called the Thanos brothers, such was their alleged evil-doing.
Contrast that to the stir Newt Gingrich created a couple of years ago on Fox News (Fox News!) when he had the temerity to name George Soros as one he believed had contributed to rising crime in large cities with district attorneys whose campaigns Soros had funded.
The point is not that Gingrich was correct in his conclusion that Soros was complicit in the rise of violent crime in big cities. He may or may not have been a contributor to that trend. The point is Fox News co-host Melissa Francis declared (or was told to declare through her earpiece) that tying Soros to rising inner-city crime was simply off limits as a discussion topic, leading to the awkward silence that followed. We’re talking about a billionaire public figure who has chosen to insert himself and his money into the public arena at a level few can equal, where his actions should be subject to open debate. The hosts of these shows should be asking these kinds of questions, not acting like someone flipped off Mother Theresa when a guest brings them up.
This is why Americans need to have a skeptical approach when consuming what passes for news these days. It’s not a left versus right thing. It’s an establishment versus outsider thing. Our media is curated to indoctrinate those who consume it to adopt a particular worldview that benefits one or another stakeholder who holds sway over the particular outlet. The famous liberal political activist Noam Chomsky called it “manufacturing consent” when liberals used to recognize the phenomenon in the 1980s.
In modern terms, if you think of CNN being the house media agency for the Pentagon, the FBI, and the so-called Intelligence Community (all of which have been primarily aligned with the Democratic Party in the post-George W. Bush era), MSNBC for the Democratic Party itself, and Fox News for what’s left of the establishment Republican Party, and consider their takes on events in that light, you usually won’t be too far off.
As with everything, there are exceptions. It never ceases to amaze me what Tucker Carlson gets away with on Fox on a weekly basis when it comes to stating the plain facts about raw American geopolitical power plays. This isn’t a full-throated endorsement of Tucker Carlson and I’m not a daily viewer of his show. There are areas of policy on which I disagree with him and think he abandons the rightful skepticism he shows in other areas. But no one on a major network show today lays bare with such eloquence the true machinations of the American war machine, Big Pharma, and their government and media agents like Carlson does. His metamorphosis from irritating, bow-tied traditional Republican in the 1990s to today’s free-thinking anti-interventionist is sometimes astounding. I guess the ratings are just too good to de-platform him.
For virtually everyone else, it seems the best evidence on matters of global significance is whatever the US government says. Everything else is a wild-eyed conspiracy theory, certainly false. You can accuse America’s adversaries of the most outlandish things imaginable and get invited back again and again to spout off, but the second you say something that’s not on what Tom Woods has called the index card of allowable opinion, you’re getting reprimanded or abruptly cut off at best and ostracized or blacklisted at worst.
In the past this reflexive belief that whatever our government says in world affairs reflects reality largely worked. Generations had been raised to believe that the United States was an exceptional country whose government acted altruistically as a force for good in the world. The reality that geopolitics is all about power and the interests of the dominant country’s wealthy elites, and that the United States is not immune to that dynamic, are slowly dawning on Americans. They’ve experienced over 20 years of history in which they intuitively know that the words emanating from political, media, and sometimes even official scientific sources don’t reflect the reality they know to be true.
When information and perceptions conflict with strongly held beliefs and emotions, such as a belief in the basic goodness of one’s country, a state of cognitive dissonance can set in where we filter out the information that doesn’t fit the reality grid we’ve constructed. If new facts can’t be assimilated into the construction, we have the psychological ability to actually ignore them as if they don’t exist. But for some that can go on only for so long before a threshold is reached and their worldview fundamentally shifts, allowing the conflicting information to be assimilated, however painful that process may be. Millions of people are at that threshold or beyond today. The numbers are growing.
In many ways, the United States is an exceptional country. Our technological achievements, our cultural reach, our economic preeminence, and many aspects of our history all combine to make us a country like no other the world has seen. Over time, though, we’ve evolved from a democratic republic to an oligarchic empire with only the trappings of representative government, mostly window-dressing. All empires to date have come to the same fate eventually. For many it feels like we’ve either crossed the Rubicon or the shoreline is just about within reach. They no longer believe that Middle East wars will bring democracy and peace, that government borrowing and money printing will bring prosperity, that legally enforced social isolation, experimental shots, and compliance with unscientific mass mandates will bring health.
It does us no good to see ourselves only through rose-colored glasses. Beginning to perceive clearly and acknowledging what we see is not really an indictment of ourselves as a people as much as it is an indictment of our political class and their media foot soldiers. America is not the government. America is the people for whom the government supposedly works and to whom it is supposedly accountable. The government and media try hard to blur that distinction so that our sense of patriotism blunts any demands for accountability, blunts any hints of the emergence of a fundamental break with the constructed worldview that serves powerful interests.
And so we really can’t expect much to change in the near term about the way journalists cover our world. They will continue to carry water for the interests they serve, and individuals will occasionally — more frequently as time passes, one hopes — have the courage to say things not found on any index cards but that a growing number, deep down, see, feel, and know. And then they can revel in the fallout, whether it be awkward or angry, knowing that in that space truth resides.
Richie Graham is based in Little Rock Arkansas USA and writes from a free-market libertarian, anti-interventionist perspective.