John Bolton, the Genocide walrus,In an interview with CNN’s Jake Tapper on Wednesday, blatantly acknowledged organising foreign coups with the US government. You heard that right, coups, plural.
While claiming that the Capitol riot on January 6th, last year, was not a coup attempt but rather Trump fumbling about attempting to look after his own interests, Bolton rushed to withdraw authority on the topic when Tapper indicated that he could be wrong about how coups happen.
“I disagree,” Bolton responded. “As someone who has assisted in the planning of coups d’etat — not here, but in other places — it takes a lot of work, and that is not what [Trump] did.”
Places. That is Plural as well.
Tapper just ignored Bolton’s statement, as if he had not just admitted to something very heinous. However, he ultimately followed up with a request that the former National Security Advisor explain his statement.
“I am not going to get into specifics,” Bolton said with a grin.
And then, Bolton went on to proudly own the United States’ attempt to incite a civil war in Venezuela just to get the President out.
Bolton’s admission of orchestrating a coup contradicts his 2019 remarks on the US government’s unsuccessful attempt to topple President Nicolas Maduro when he told reporters that the United States shenanigans in Venezuela were “clearly not a coup.”
A wonderful new story by Alan MacLeod of Mintpress News reveals that Facebook/Instagram parent firm Meta has hired scores of former US intelligence cartel employees to assist in regulating the information that appears on the social media giant’s platforms. Some were employed directly from the CIA or had recently (officially) left the agency.
The CIA once infiltrated the media. The CIA is now the media. This trend of publicly recruiting US intelligence veterans to teach the public how to perceive the world began years ago in legacy media. We are now seeing it in new media as well.
This is part of a more significant trend in which many of the heinous actions done by the US empire in secret are now done publicly with the help of propaganda spin. In addition to openly attempting coups, as we saw in Venezuela, and simply giving intelligence insiders positions of influence within media institutions, there is the empire-funded National Endowment for Democracy (NED), which was set up to do overtly what the CIA did covertly.
From Ukraine to Russia to Hong Kong to Xinjiang, to the imperial propaganda corporation known as Bellingcat, we find NED’s fingerprints all over pretty much any case where the Western power alliance has to manipulate public opinion of a CIA-targeted regime. Rather than manipulating world narratives and fomenting dissatisfaction behind the cover of disguised identities and cutouts, as in previous CIA techniques, NED manipulates them openly by pouring cash into narrative management operations that benefit the empire while posing as promoting democratic values and human rights.
Then there are American officials telling the press that the US government has been spreading disinformation about Russia and Ukraine. Biden administration officials openly say the proxy war in Ukraine is being used to “weaken” Russia and that they are okay with the US brinkmanship with Russia.
The empire has discovered that it is unnecessary to hide as much from public view if you can alter what people believe they are seeing. Suppose the population has been sufficiently propagandised and consent has been created. In that case, it is possible to appoint any random person as the President of a foreign nation, and the rest of the globe will play along.
If your control over the narrative is strong enough, you can keep the empire functioning well even if the information you would like to remain secret becomes public. Huge articles concerning imperial misbehaviour are frequently released that have little impact, either because the mainstream media ignores them or because they portray the findings as originating from a dubious source or not carrying essential information.
People tend to overestimate the United States military force’s might and underestimate its propaganda machine’s impact. While the US military is losing a battle to the Taliban, the oligarchic empire’s media machine has the populace marching perfectly according to its will.
The more subservient and tamed the population, the more violent and abusive the empire becomes. In the end, the empire may even admit to being a manipulator because it would be convinced that it has everything under control.
We can only hope that the empire is misguided when it evaluates each of us similarly.