Jon Stewart – The Daily Show – Serious Propaganda

by

       M. Richard Maxson

     

      There was a time when I watched The Daily Show with anticipation. It was a funny satire on American politics and life in the United States. Then something changed. The show began to be a one-sided Lefist view of the world. It wasn't funny anymore because it smelled like propaganda and now we know why. Jon Stewart , the man who claimed to be nonpartisan, a person who follows the truth wherever it leads, has been secretly taking trips to the White House to receive intense one-on-one lobbying from President Obama. Moreover, it has been reported that Daily' Show” staffers routinely call up the White House to get the administration’s suggestions on how a topic was to be presented.

      Austan Goolsbee, a former top economic adviser to the president, frequently emailed with his college classmate Scott Bodow, a “Daily Show” executive producer, to offer spin. Mr Obama's associate, David Axelrod, often reached out directly to Stewart. Mr. Obama himself would summon Stewart to Washington for meetings.

      Did the White House effect what was broadcast? Last year, under fire for the horrifying conditions at Veterans Administration hospitals that led to the deaths of hundreds of vets, Obama tried to reroute the nation’s attention with the release of POW Bowe Bergdahl in Afghanistan. This was to be another "smoke and mirror" event expected to warm the hearts of America except it immediately became obvious that Bergdahl, for whom Obama had traded five Taliban prisoners, was a likely deserter. A charge that Bergdahl is currently awaiting trial on. Stewart’s response was to blast away at Mr Obama's favorite target, Fox News, for suggesting Bergdahl was a deserter. Jon Stewart’s pose as an honest observer helped cement the impression with liberals that there was nothing wrong with the Bergdahl decision.

       Talk show host Ben Shapiro recently interviewed several major Hollywood prime time television producers and one after another they saluted -- even cheered -- their hostility toward conservatives. Some openly bragged about injecting liberal messages in programming. 

The media business, for those who now own and run it, is more than just a money-making operation. The owners promote their political agenda through selecting and disseminating news like presenting propaganda like “the recession is over” or “drones almost always hit their targets.” The media moguls and celebrities push the public to support the Leftist agenda, from their political candidates to their endless wars.

       It's a sad time in America when even entertainment, used by many as an escape from everyday problems, becomes a clandestine propaganda effort for one political party. On a level playing field it the duty of all comedians to be the loyal opposition, to speak truth to the party in power. Under the Republican president, Jon Stewart did just that, but today, Stewart does the opposite. Mild sarcasm is about the worst Stewart can hurl at the Left, but when it comes to Mr. Obama's opponents his mood is never ending assault, whether it be against
conservatives, Fox News, or whoever he is advised to attack.

      “The Daily Show” isn’t no longer enduring political satire. Jon Stewart has gone to the dark side while still pretending to be one of us. His show today is more of a rah-rah talk radio for liberals. Yes, there was a time that I eagerly awaited to hear Jon's show but now I can only say "Good Riddance."  

What Is Important, Is Now Being Lost

by

       Zeno Potas

     

       Probably no one has more misunderstandings about America than Americans. This has been deliberately brought about by the government designing our public education system that no child, taking American history, ever gets past the Battle of Gettysburg. For decades now, American children wondered what happened in that gap between Gettysburg and their birth, but after a while, since no one they knew ever knew either, they stopped being curious.

       Consequently, Americans are full of wrong ideas about their own

country. Most think, for example, that we are a democracy when in fact our Constitution was designed to create a republic. The authors of our Constitution were dead set against democracy, figuring that democracies self destruct as soon as people learn to loot the public treasury with their votes. They did not allow everyone to vote and thought future generations would not allow it either.

       Another example is that many people think the American government is against communism, another misconception. Every time communism has gotten itself into a real trouble, the American government, a.k.a. the elite, has stepped in to save it. We fed it after the Revolution, sold it machinery during Lenin's New Economic Policy, gave it diplomatic recognition and credit during the economic hard times of 1933, helped Stalin industrialize, helped it defeat the Nazis.

       Communism has served the elitists in order to justify the current global foreign policy. Our forefathers warned us against entanglements but whenever the powers-that-be wish to meddle in the internal affairs of another country or finance a coup, the intervention, which is always for economic reasons, is justified on the basis of our being against communism.

       The last generation of Americans were too busy and the media was
too entertaining to wonder how it is possible we could fight communism
in Vietnam, guarantee it's , preservation in Cuba, and trade with it in communist Eastern Europe, all at the same time. Today, the mainstream media is still the main source of information for a great many Americans. They can name every member of the Kardashian family, but they don’t know who their Member of Congress is. What was important, has now been lost. 

       Another misconception is that we have a strong two-party system in the United States when in fact we have two parties, but they are not the ones people think. The two parties consist of them and us. Democrats and Republicans. are merely two sides of the same coin. Both support slightly different forms of a socialistic future for this country. Both parties support the Federal Reserve using it as a “war for profit” tool. Both support the tax system with variations based mainly on having different constituencies to reward. Both support a vigorous hostel global foreign policy favoring weapons manufacturers of the military industrial complex. Their differences are on details and in the degree of competence of their leaders in carrying out the same policies.

 

      Finally, just as the American government isn't really against communism it is not really for free enterprise. It is for a form of corporate capitalism, run by elites, with a welfare state - paid for by the working class - the purpose of which is to keep the masses relatively content or use their restlessness to their advantage socially and politically.

The United States Domestic Propaganda

by

       M. Richard Maxson

      Congress was quietly planning to officially lift a 64-year old

law preventing the US government from using propaganda on its own citizenry. Before the House passed its defense budget a bipartisan group of congressmen tacked on an amendment that would "essentially neutralize" a set of time-tested guidelines "that had been passed to protect U.S. audiences from our own government's misinformation campaigns." President Barack Obama endorsed this at Georgetown University that "we're going to have to change how our body politic thinks, which means we're going to have to change how the media reports on ... issues." This should be enough to send a shudder down the spine.  Politicians always have lied but the media was there to, if not serve as an impartial referee, at least hold the players to some sort of standard. No more. Big Brother is not only watching, he's now legally manipulating their environment and blurring the line between fiction and reality.  

"There are very sophisticated efforts to manipulate the images and the information that you see every day, in ways that you won’t recognize.” - Sharyl Attkisson -CBS

      Upton Sinclair, said it best when he defined journalism in the United States as “the day-to-day, between elections propaganda, whereby the minds of the people are kept in a state of acquiescence." Journalism, as it is taught in schools, is about discovering, or at least suggesting, through a series of well-defined techniques what is actually happening in events of interest and reporting the findings in a non-biased, almost scientific, way, but, remarkably, this is something which virtually never happens in American journalism. Truthfulness and journalistic principles simply have no place in the intensely  politically-charged atmosphere of America where no event and no utterance is without political dimensions. Actually, this has been the case for a very long time, but it just hasn’t always been so starkly clear as it is now. 

      We sat down in a discussion group of residents who had state run medias in their countries in eastern Europe, Soviet Union, China, etc. When we discussed how the state managed to control public opinion these people would usually produce a weary, knowledgeable, cynical smile and point out that propaganda in those countries was really done quite incompetently. If you really want to know propaganda, they said, you need to study American propaganda techniques. According to them, it is, undeniably, the best in the world. The consensus was that propaganda in those countries was too obvious "As soon as you read the first sentence you knew it was a bunch of propaganda, so you didn’t even bother to read it. If you heard a speech, you knew in the first few words that it was propaganda, and you tuned it out," stated one. Even though communists had total control of the press, the people just tuned it out.

       American propaganda, however, is much cleverer. American propaganda, they patiently explained, relies

entirely on emotional appeals. It doesn’t depend on a rational theory that can be disproved: it appeals to things no one can object to. American propaganda had its birth in the advertising industry. The pioneers of advertising learned early on that people would respond to purely emotional appeals. Appeals to sexiness, to pride of ownership, to fear of falling behind the neighbors are the stock American advertising and propaganda has been refined over the years into a malevolent science, based on the assumption that most people react, not to ideas, but to naked emotion.  Fear, envy, greed, hatred, and lust: these are the basic tools for good propaganda and effective advertising. By far, the most powerful motivating emotion—the top, most-sought-after copy writers will tell you, in an unguarded moment—is fear, followed closely by greed.

      This is not the whole picture, thanks to Edward Snowden, we now have solid proof that paid government agents are using “psychology based influence techniques” on social media websites such as YouTube,

Facebook and Twitter. Documents leaked by Snowden also reveal that government agents have been conducting denial-of-service attacks, flooding social media websites with thinly veiled propaganda and have been purposely attempting to warp public discourse misinformation. The U.S. government has actually been caught manipulating discourse on Reddit and editing Wikipedia. In addition, the State Department has confirmed that it has been working to convince major media and entertainment companies, including Sony Pictures, to help with the American propaganda machine to counter other non-aligned views here and around the world.

"Propaganda does exist on all sides of us, and it does change our mental pictures of the world". -  Edward Bernays

      The times we live in are so dangerous and so distorted in public perception that propaganda is no longer, as Edward Bernays called it, an "invisible government". It is the government. It rules directly without fear of contradiction and its principal aim is the conquest of us: our sense of the world, our ability to separate truth from lies.

      We are governed, our minds are molded, our tastes formed, our ideas suggested, largely by men we have never heard of.  In almost every act of our daily lives, whether in the sphere of politics or business, in our social conduct or our ethical thinking, we are dominated by the relatively small number of persons...who understand the mental processes and social patterns of the masses. It is they who pull the wires which control the public mind using propaganda to regiment the collective mind in a variety of areas, including government, politics, art, science and education. The terrible truth in all of this is that the average American doesn't even know it is happening to them. Can we truly be a free people when our minds are so tightly controlled by unknown entities or is our national consiousness an illusion?

Germany Speaks Out Against the U.S. European Policies

by

       Phillip Todd

     A group of former German generals recently sat down to discuss what they feel is a blatant attempt by the United States and the western elites to instigate a new European war.“We witness war becoming a permanent companion of humanity once again. The new world order that the USA and their allies have been trying to establish has recently led to nothing but new wars." The former German generals pointed to NATO’s “intensive militarization of Europe” saying that war “has returned” to the continent. “The United States as well as the other NATO members have recently returned to the policy of the Cold War and they justify it by imaginary Russian aggression.” 

 Excerpts from the letter..... 

                                                                  Europe

      "For decades we ensured peace together and we are proud of that but now we are seeing it dismantled," said Manfred Graetz, former German Deputy Minister of Defense. “The aim of the American strategy consists in defeating Russia as a competitor to the US as well as in weakening the EU. The US hopes to isolate Russia and to corrode its ties to Europe and particularly to Germany by admitting Ukraine to NATO,” the letter reads. "They are surrounding Russia from all sides - even today there are already bases just several hundred kilometers from Moscow and St.Petersburg,"  - Manfred Volland, Lieutenant-General in the German armed forces.

                                                        
                                                                   Ukraine 

      The United States refused to be a part of European attempts at peace. It was left largely to Germany and France to part with America and join with Russia to achieve a temporary peaceful solution.  "Ukraine will be the launching ground for the complete encirclement," said Graetz. “We are set against military power becoming a key instrument in modern international politics. We are absolutely sure that urgent political problems cannot be resolved by military means.” Russia has made Ukraine the"red line in the sand" and the United States is making a serious miscalculation in regards to this. Russia has stated that "limited nuclear weapons are on the table in any attempt to attack Russian citizens or interests no matter where they are."

                                             
                                                         Western  Propaganda  

      The US and their allies are launching an “unprecedented media campaign,” which aims to “to win the trust of people in western countries over to their cause." Headlines such as  “Vlad Putin Wins Again,” “The new Ukrainian peace deal may be worse than no deal at all,” or “Why Is Putin Smiling About Ukraine?” and the likes are all over the US media. "Those taking part in this campaign are just irredeemable politicians and corrupt leftist journalists that stir up hostility, hatred and war hysteria,” the letter states.
Anti-Russian stories abound daily in the US media whipping up calls for war.

                                                             
                                            
                                                                        Peace 

       The West needs to cooperate with Moscow to solve international issues, the letter stressed, urging for a “peaceful dialogue and not combative rhetoric.” It also points out that the EU shouldn’t depend on the US in issues of military security. “Instead of the NATO ‘Rapid Deployment force’ near the Russian border we need more tourist and youth exchanges as well as peace conferences between us and our eastern neighbor,” it adds. 

     

      Among the signatories are two former German defense ministers, three former Chiefs of Staff of the Army, 19 lieutenant generals, 61 major generals and several admirals. There are plans to distribute the letter among members of the German parliament as well send it to the embassies of NATO countries in Germany. The organizers of the campaign also plan to send the text to Russia. 
      
      Miscalculation beget WWI and the political and military situation in Europe is very similar to that of 100 years ago. Even a limited exchange could produce a nuclear winter that would last 10-20 years. Most life may not survive. We MUST regain control of our country from the elitists and put an end to this madness. Since we were founded our Constitution served as a model for the world surviving longer than most constitutions have in all of history. The question is, can we save it and ourselves in the near future or will we be regulated to the dust bin of history - if there is a history left.

This is Not the America of Our Forefathers

by

       M. Richard Maxson


     “The accumulation of all powers, legislative, executive, and judiciary, in the same hands…may justly be pronounced the very definition of tyranny.” 
                                                                                            - James Madison – Federalist #47 

      Over the last 100 years, with the growth in the federal government, the Executive branch has accumulated powers so vast that Madison’s words have been reduced to an interesting historical artifact.  Congress has abdicated the major powers it was given in Article I of the Constitution. The Federal Reserve coins money and manages the economy, not the Congress.  Trade agreements with foreign nations are done by the Executive on a “fast track” with little input from Congress. The Constitution directs the Congress to “raise and support armies” and yet military base closure decisions are made by unelected commissions. The Congress is happy to let the President decide questions of war and peace; we have gone to war in Iraq again without a new resolution by Congress.  And, of course, Article I provides Congress with the authority to “establish a uniform rule of naturalization.” ( immigration )

      “There is scarce a king in a hundred who would not, if he could, follow the example of Pharaoh, get first all the peoples’ money, then all their lands and then make them and their children servants forever.”
                                                                                                                               - Ben Franklin 

      
      The Constitution separates the powers of government to protect the liberty of the American people and prevent the tyranny of a self-aggrandizing government. Attempts by the Executive Branch to assume the legislative function

deprives the People of an open debate conducted by their politically accountable representatives and is antithetical to the Constitution’s design. Today, the Executive branch has emerged as the dominant branch of government wielding immense power, and with that, the era of constitutional government has largely ended. The immensity of the Executive has transformed the Congress and the Judiciary into political irrelevancies. 


       The Legislative branch has become largely powerless due to it's obsession of getting re-elected by playing the game of spreading government monies and protection from losing any of it. The entire superstructure of the American political order is now built upon the benefit-dispensing and regulatory power of the federal government. The deepest desire of the post-constitutional congressman is not to decide the great and important questions facing our nation such as war and peace, but rather to hold hearings on the menu for school lunches, to add new benefits under Medicare, or to issue yet another press release about a newly-funded bridge for the district. 


        As America prepares to celebrate its 239th birthday, it is obvious that the country

has changed forever. The fundamental goal of the Constitution’s authors was to ensure liberty; by separating the different powers of government they barred one branch of government from having all the tools to dominate. the country. There is little hope of going back to those traditions, the ones that built this nation. The idea is poignant, but impossible.  The days of prayer in public schools, protecting unborn babies, and upholding traditional marriage are officially over. To go back would mean dismantling of the entitlement state. The idea that the American “people” would support this dismantlement, in all its particularities, is a political fantasy. Leaders of both political parties have been adding entitlements, not dismantling them. The new Amerika is the home to socialized medicine, unbridled government spending and interference, legalized gay marriage, and rampant illegal immigration.

       It’s the end of America as we know it and most Americans don’t seem to know, care, or understand the significance of what is happening around them. Life goes

on. Stores stay open, paychecks keep getting cashed, new tech toys abound faster than we can absorb them, and everyone’s favorite reality TV shows continue to fill channel after channel. Until Americans start taking their liberties seriously,and I’m not sure that will happen anytime soon, things will continue to get worse until the people determine, as they did more than 200 years ago, that they desire a government that truly represents them and respects them. That is the foundation of our freedom. Until then, those who believe in liberty must do everything they can to convince their neighbors of the importance of freedom and the dangers facing our way of life that Americans have known for over two centuries.