US government is silencing media outlets — Lamestream does not object

© 2020 Peter Free

 

09 November 2020

 

 

Are "totalitarian" and "US" synonymous?

 

A few days ago, I discovered that the American Herald Tribune's website had disappeared from the air.

 

Government and Google, I suspect, slyly hid what happened.

 

Eventually, I found this:

 

 

The United States announced on Wednesday it has seized 27 domains that were used by Iran's Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) to spread global covert influence campaigns.

 

According to the Department of Justice (DoJ), four of the 27 domain names -- "rpfront.com", "ahtribune.com", "awdnews.com", and "criticalstudies.org" -- were seized as they breached the Foreign Agents Registration Act, which requires website holders to submit periodic registration statements containing truthful information about their activities and the income earned from them.

 

The four domains purported to be genuine news outlets, but they were controlled by the IRGC and targeted audiences in the United States with pro-Iranian propaganda, the department said in a statement.

 

Meanwhile, the remaining 23 domains were seized as they targeted audiences in other parts of the world, the department added.

 

This follows an earlier crop of similar seizures made by the DoJ last month. For that earlier crop, the DoJ shut down 92 domains that were also used by the IRGC for disinformation campaigns.

 

© 2020 Campbell Kwan, US seizes another crop of Iranian propaganda domains masked as news outlets, ZDNet (05 November 2020)

 

 

Consider that

 

The American Herald Tribune is (or was) a comparatively bland left-leaning, non-mainstream news source. Occasionally, articles objected to Israel's oppression of Palestinians.

 

"Disinformation" and "covert influence" are ridiculous terms for those combined points of widely held, globally distributed views.

 

Given that American government and media are (virtually completely) in the propaganda business, why would "disinformation" be a disqualifier for a foreign source? Aren't foreign cultures expected to have differing perspectives?

 

The answer (in this case) is that Israel probably got its (self-destructively braindead) lapdog — the United States — to stamp out easy-to-get opposition to Israel's continuing expansion into the West Bank.

 

 

Curiously . . .

 

. . . or not, in view of its long-running pusillanimity, no one in the US Lamestream objected to the Tribune shutdown. I guess that's understandable because those same folk did not respond to the persecution of Julian Assange, either.

 

Why have principle, when it is easier to have none?

 

 

Evaluate still larger implications

 

In the United States, the Department of Justice gets to control who says what to whom?

 

 

The moral? — How is American government's extinguishment of speech different from China's totalitarian bent?

 

The United States is increasingly marked by viciously paranoid forms of mind-pillaging.