These are but a few examples of US ruling-class financing of anti anti-imperialist leftists, an effective means to channel and organize the left milieu into an opposition that poses no real threat to their control.
An essential characteristic of this milieu is looking to the Democratic Party as a lesser-evil ally.
Alexander Cockburn pointed out the dangers of this financing back in 2010:
... the financial clout of the "non-profit" foundations, tax-exempt bodies formed by rich people to dispense their wealth according to political taste" Much of the "progressive sector" in America owes its financial survival - salaries, office accommodation etc "- to the annual disbursements of these foundations which cease abruptly at the first manifestation of radical heterodoxy. In the other words, most of the progressive sector is an extrusion of the dominant corporate world, just as are the academies, similarly dependent on corporate endowments.
Right after Trump's surprise 2016 election win, the Washington Post cranked up the anti-Russia McCarthyism by introducing PropOrNot. ProporNot's catalog of supposed Putin-controlled outlets sought to resurrect the witchhunts of the Red Scare era, when 6.6 million people were investigated just between 1947-1952. The PropOrNot blacklist includes some of the most alternative and anti-war news sites on the web, including Anti-war.com, Black Agenda Report, Truthdig, Naked Capitalism, Consortium News, Truthout, Lew Rockwell.com, Global Research, Unz.com, Zero Hedge, and many others.
PropOrNot asserted 200 websites were "Russian propaganda outlets." No evidence was offered. PropOrNot refused to reveal who they were or their funding. Alan Mcleod recently uncovered: "A scan of PropOrNot's website showed that it was controlled by The Interpreter, a magazine of which [Michael] Weiss is editor-in-chief--[a] senior fellow of NATO think tank The Atlantic Council." The Atlantic Council itself is financed by the US government and Middle Eastern dictatorships, weapons manufacturers Raytheon, Northrop Grumman and Lockheed Martin, Wall Street banks such as Goldman Sachs; and petrochemical giants like BP and Chevron. Mcleod concluded, "Thus, claims of a huge [foreign] state propaganda campaign were themselves state propaganda."
Soon after PropOrNot, the German Marshall Fund, largely financed by the US government, concocted Hamilton 68: A New Tool to Track Russian Disinformation on Twitter. This identifies supposed "accounts that are involved in promoting Russian influence and disinformation goals." Daniel McAdams of Ron Paul Liberty Report noted, "They are using US and other government money in an effort to eliminate any news organization or individual who deviates from the official neocon foreign policy line on Russia, Syria, Ukraine, etc."
This year, the Department of Homeland Security presented a new censorship and disinformation organ, allegedly to combat pro-Russian fake news, the Disinformation Governance Board. As the Countering Disinformation and Propaganda Act and PropOrNot showed, what challenges US national security-state narratives is often labeled Russian disinformation. Glenn Greenwald forewarned, "The purpose of empowering the Department of Homeland Security to decree what is and is not 'disinformation' is to bestow all government assertions with a pretense of authoritative expertise and official sanction and, conversely, to officially decree dissent from government claims to be false and deceitful."
The national security state, which lied about Russiagate, lied about National Security Agency's 24/7 spying on the US population, lied about weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, plans to decide what is true and false, and enforce that on big business and alternative media outlets.
Thus, the CIA's secret Operation Mongoose, devoted to encouraging hostility to actually existing socialism among the left, has morphed into official, public US government McCarthyite agencies directed at shutting down or smearing outlets and activism opposing the US empire and its wars.
What Corporate Social Media instruments are targeting which anti-war outlets?
This joint US government-corporate media censorship has become an increasingly open attack. Paypal has allied itself with the pro-Israel Anti-Defamation League to "fight extremism and hate through the financial industry and across at-risk communities... with policymakers and law enforcement."
Twitter has shut down many political accounts, even possessed the power to suppress the President of the United States' account. In 2020, Twitter deleted 170,000 accounts "spreading geopolitical narratives favorable to the Communist Party of China," and in 2021, it deleted hundreds of accounts for "undermining faith in the NATO alliance and its stability." The company has hired a number of FBI officers for this censorship work. Twitter executive for Middle East is British Army 'psyops' soldier Gordon MacMillan of the 77th Brigade, which uses social media platforms such as Twitter, Instagram, and Facebook to conduct "information warfare."
Google and Youtube executives team up with government spy agencies to censor anti-imperialist voices. Google's "Project Owl," designed to eradicate "fake news," employed "algorithmic updates to surface more authoritative [compatible] content" and downgrade "offensive" [anti-imperialist] material. As a result, traffic dropped off to websites such as Mint Press News, Alternet, Global Research, Consortium News, liberal-left Common Dreams and Truthout.
Wikipedia censors articles on its website, as Ben Norton notes: "The CIA, FBI, New York Police Department, Vatican, and fossil fuel colossus BP, to name just a few, have all been caught directly editing Wikipedia articles."
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