Newsweek has published what undoubtedly amounts to the most feeble, sophomoric, and embarrassing hit piece ever written, penned by an intern fresh out of college who pathetically attempts to dismiss manifestly provable conspiracies with one sentence throwaway jibes that sound like the fodder of an immature and misinformed middle school debate team.
The author of the hit piece, entitled Know Your Conspiracies, NEWSWEEK’s guide to today’s trendiest, hippest, and least likely fringe beliefs, is one David A. Graham, a 2009 graduate of Duke University and a Newsweek intern since August, a fresh face obviously keen to prove to his bosses that he’ll make for a good journalistic whore so as to seamlessly blend in with the rest of the corporate hacks at the magazine.
Unfortunately for Graham, his first mistake was to believe that Newsweek’s reputation alone as a trusted source of information was enough to excuse his lazy journalism and complete lack of research into any of the topics raised. Sadly, since nobody trusts the mainstream media anymore, merely attempting to dictate what constitutes reality by glibly scoffing “enough said” to dismiss a claim does not equate to a thorough debunking, Mr. Graham.
That’s how Graham “debunks” the 9/11 truth movement, prefacing it with, “Not even the staunchest mainstream George W. Bush bashers believe this one.” Graham was obviously too busy making the coffee for his colleagues to take note of an October 2006 CBS/New York Times poll that found that only 16% of Americans thought the government told the truth about 9/11 and the intelligence prior to the attacks. No less than six of the ten 9/11 Commissioners are on record as saying the official story is a fraud and yet Graham classes skepticism towards the official story as one of his “fringe beliefs”.
Another “fringe belief” thrown in amongst stupid speculation about Sarah Palin’s baby is the notion that Goldman Sachs was involved in and benefited from the financial collapse.
“While Goldman may have profited, that alone doesn’t prove malice or conspiracy,” scoffs Graham.
Oh really? This office tea boy obviously didn’t take the time to read a multi-part eXposé written by Greg Gordon of McClatchy Newspapers, in which it was voluminously documented how Goldman Sachs,”In 2006 and 2007…peddled more than $40 billion in securities backed by at least 200,000 risky home mortgages, but never told the buyers it was secretly betting that a sharp drop in U.S. housing prices would send the value of those securities plummeting.”
“Goldman’s sales and its clandestine wagers, completed at the brink of the housing market meltdown, enabled the nation’s premier investment bank to pass most of its potential losses to others before a flood of mortgage defaults staggered the U.S. and global economies. Only later did investors discover that what Goldman had promoted as triple-A rated investments were closer to junk,” writes Gordon.
No “malice” or “conspiracy” there, Mr Graham? Goldman Sachs betting on a housing collapse right before it happened while telling their buyers everything was hunky dory? No “malice” involved in that one, eh?
Graham’s shoddily bias and vacuous perspective is laid bare when he tries to gloss over the collapsing anthropogenic global warming fraud within the confines of a one sentence tantrum.
“Deniers have long taken advantage of scientists’ cautious statements, and “Climategate” breathed new life into the movement, but the science stands: warming is real, and it’s caused by human actions,” he sneers.
In reality, former lead authors of the UN IPCC are now coming forward to state that the “world may not be warming” and the scientist at the center of the Climategate scandal admits there has been no global warming since 1995, as endless scandal after scandal offers mountains of evidence that the progenitors of AGW have been exaggerating and lying about man’s contribution to climate change for decades.
But perhaps Graham’s most egregious falsehood arrives when he dismisses the United Nations’ desire to regulate CO2 emissions as part of a global government power grab as another baseless yarn. A similar faux pas was committed by Time Magazine’s Jonathan Kay, an article Graham links to, in a similarly weak hit piece written earlier this month.
According to Kay, a one world government run by the United Nations that will implement greenhouse gas taxes is another “toxic fantasy” of those crazy Tea Party lunatics, a view shared by Graham. In that case, I guess we must have all just imagined UN Secretary general Ban Ki-moon’s December 16 2009 Los Angeles Times interview during the Copenhagen summit in which he stated, “We will establish a global governance structure to monitor and manage the implementation of this.”
Ban Ki-moon’s October 2009 New York Times editorial in which he wrote that efforts to impose restrictions on CO2 emissions “Must include an equitable global governance structure” is also a figment of the imagination if you subscribe to Kay and Graham’s world view.
Yes – shocking as it is – top globalists like Herman Van Rompuy, Gordon Brown, Al Gore and others have all publicly and repeatedly called for a new world order and a global government. This is why even Bloomberg writers like David Reilly and former Democratic advisors like Dick Morris are finally admitting that the “conspiracy theorists” were right after all – a secret cabal of bankers and industrialists really does run the world.
Of course, if you still believe Graham and Kay’s fairytale make-believe world in which there is no “new world order” and no march towards a “global government” which would include a “global currency,” then the following You Tube compilation of top power brokers saying those very things since the 1950’s doesn’t exist either.
By number eight, Graham has ceased even bothering to form a glib sentence to “debunk” the topic at hand, and responds to the “conspiracy theory” about government internment camps with just four words, “Too silly to discuss.”
Just as well that Market Watch didn’t deem a $385 million contract awarded to KBR by the Department of Homeland Security in January 2006 “too silly to discuss”. The contract was for KBR, the engineering and construction subsidiary of Halliburton, to build detention facilities inside America that would allow authorities to deal with “an emergency influx of immigrants into the U.S., or to support the rapid development of new programs.”
Project Censored, who also didn’t regard the announcement as “too silly to discuss,” placed the story at number 14 for 2006’s most censored stories. It was explored in depth by numerous prominent and respected writers, including Peter Dale Scott, who highlighted how such “new programs” were a continuation of martial law provisions that first came to light during the Iran Contra scandal in the 1980’s. Scott also made the connection to former Attorney General John Ashcroft’s 2002 call for U.S. citizens to be detained as enemy combatants in detention camps, a story also considered not “too silly to discuss” by the Los Angeles Times’ Jonathan Turley, a professor of law at The George Washington University Law School.
Graham returns to back-slapping his peers at Time Magazine with the claim that Time did not advocate licenses to use the Internet, linking to a two paragraph blog written by Time’s Michael Scherer entitled Despite Reports, TIME Still Not Advocating Internet Driver’s Licenses.
“Time published a story reporting on a Microsoft executive who’d like to see licensing to combat anonymity. Broadcasting such a controversial proposal—regardless of its merits—is quite the opposite of censorship, as Time’s Michael Scherer rightly explained,” Graham smugly proclaims.
“The story is not true, of course, but who wants to get in the way of such fun conspiracies?,” smarts Scherer.
Both Scherer and Graham are obviously banking on their audience not actually reading the original Time article to which they refer, in which author Barbara Kiviat clearly does advocate and endorse a licensing system for Internet users.
Kiviat waxes lyrical about how society introduces more laws and regulations as it grows. “There is no reason to think the Internet shouldn’t follow the same pattern,” she writes. “But we’re entitled to anonymity on the Internet!” Really? Are you? Why do you think that?” she asks elsewhere, clearly endorsing stricter controls similar to those first proposed at the Davos Economic Forum earlier this year.
Anyone who reads Kiviat’s article in full comes away with the impression that she, and her publisher Time Magazine, endorse the call for Internet licensing. Scherer did not “rightly explain” anything! He lied through his teeth.
How much more ludicrous can this get? Are Newsweek going to start lecturing us about the “fringe belief” that the sun comes up every morning. That’s not too far removed from Graham’s overriding theme that powerful men never conspire to do bad things to increase their power and that governments are angelic and anyone who says otherwise is expressing a “fringe belief”.
As the excellent George Washington Blog explains, the corporate media’s denunciation of “conspiracy theories” is a process in diffusing criticism of the powerful in government or business.
The government spied on American citizens (even before 9/11 … confirmed here and here), while saying “we don’t spy”. The government tortured prisoners in Iraq, but said “we don’t torture”.
In other words, high-level government officials have conspired to cover up the truth.
The bottom line is that the power of the state is used to crush criticism of major government policies and actions (or failures to act) and high-level government officials.
Pay attention, and you’ll notice that criticism of “conspiracy theories” is usually aimed at attempting to protect the state and key government players. The power of the state is seldom used to crush conspiracy theories regarding people who are not powerful . . . at least to the extent that they are not important to the government.
Indeed, if “conspiracy theories” are merely “hip” and “trendy” examples of mindless gossip, as Graham’s article portrays, then why does White House regulation czar Cass Sunstein want to slap a tax on them or even ban them outright?
We are of course familiar with their tired old clichés and smear tactics, but what the mainstream still fails to grasp is the fact that the majority of Americans no longer trust them, so the sophomoric catchphrases just aren’t going to get the job done anymore.
A September 2009 Pew Research Center poll found, “Trust in news media has reached a new low, with record numbers of Americans saying reporting is inaccurate, biased and shaped by special interests.”
The poll found that just 29% of Americans still trusted the corporate media.
By labeling manifestly provable facts, such as the absolutely self-evident and admitted push for a system of global governance, as “conspiracy theories” and claiming they are false, the corporate media is only committing seppuku and dispensing with any credibility they had left.
In that case, we invite Mr. Graham, Mr. Kay, Time and Newsweek to continue to lecture us about how overwhelmingly documented facts are baseless “conspiracy theories,” because in doing so they are only making themselves and the corporate media look utterly stupid.
Enough said.
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