The Strip: Getting to the Meat of the Matter

Here’s a pilot run for a new feature I’m considering that I’d call The Strip, in which I will take a story from the mainstream media and strip out the propaganda, political spin or neo-con nonsense and give you the truth or the real libertarian principles at the meat of the matter. What do you think? Would you like to get regular articles like this from me?

One year ago, I watched the official narrative of the Boston Marathon Bombing evolve before my eyes with the final version (if you could nail it down) contradicting the facts and evidence that had emerged, often morphing to try to shoe horn new items into the old story, sometimes rewriting the story or burying the facts when the shoe was just too tight – and the mainstream media dutifully reporting whatever implausible or impossible explanation “anonymous sources who were not authorized to comment” told them.

Not too long after that, the Snowden Affair emerged and NSA spying was front-page news. I would read The Wall Street Journal day after day and see it report things that I knew couldn’t be true based simply on the previous reports I had read in The Wall Street Journal! I was particularly aghast when I read The Journal straight-facedly report General Alexander’s claim that the NY subway plot was foiled using metadata, without mentioning the fact that it had been widely reported that the plot was foiled when British intelligence turned over an email to the US from a specific source it was monitoring.

At first I was shocked when I realized that major media knowingly misrepresented actual facts. I knew there was bias and spin, but I thought facts were reported if only because fear of libel suits keep those institutions in line. Now I know better.

A year ago, I would have been shocked to realize that NBC’s Meet The Press, but even more, The Wall Street Journal, would propagate such an implausible fraud as the letter in Eastern Ukraine that demanded Jews register themselves. That story was impossible to believe from the start because a main issue the East has with the regime in Kiev is its alliance with and reliance on neo-nazis led by the very powerful Olek Tyanhibok and a gang of ultranationalist thugs, also very powerful, called the Right Sector.

With Ukraine’s history at the center of some of the most awful conflict between Nazis and Soviets during World War II, the largely ethnic Russian east is not willing to capitulate to the new coalition in Kiev because of, among other things, the rabid anti-Russian sentiment among these far right types – a sentiment that goes hand in hand with their anti-semitism.

Here is an old quote from Tyanhibok that demonstrates the mindset of some of the elements in the new coalition in Kiev:

They were not afraid and we should not be afraid. They took their automatic guns on their necks and went into the woods, and fought against the Moskali, Germans, Jews and other scum who wanted to take away our Ukrainian state.

But it isn’t just logic that tells us that the letter demanding that Jews register is a fake. The person whose name is on it, Denis Pushilin, was reported on April 18 to have denied the letter’s validity and explained the ways it is an obvious forgery, from describing him with the wrong title to getting the official stamp wrong. Perhaps it is believable (though I don’t believe it) that John Kerry thought the letter was valid when he referred to it on April 17, but it’s not believable that David Gregory of Meet the Press and his guest, acting Ukrainian Prime Minister Arseniy Yatsenyuk, failed to look into the plausibility of this story or looked into it and found it irrefutable as late as April 20 when discussing the letter on the Sunday morning show, or that The Wall Street Journal in good faith thought it valid on April 21 when it printed the Meet the Press exchange in its feature Notable & Quotable.

The letter was a false flag and continuing to report on it as if it is genuine is an act of propaganda of the basest kind by a media whose main goal is to manufacture consent for the actions of the government, right or wrong.

Here is the “Notable & Quotable” feature in The Wall Street Journal published today – well after the fraud was exposed – excerpting Sunday’s appearance of Arseniy Yatsenyuk on Meet the Press during which he discussed with anger the fake letter as though it were real: Notable & Quotable.