The New Ruling Coalition: Opposition to Afghanistan Withdrawal Shows
Its Key Factions
An unholy union of the National Security State and the neocon-backed and
corporate-funded Democratic Party are about to assume power: with
media-supported internet censorship a key weapon.
Glenn Greenwald
Nov 19
The Trump era has engendered numerous fractures, one might say realignments,
in the political order. Long-time ideological allies are now adversaries,
and long-time political enemies are now in full-fledged coalitions. These
shifts are not temporary or Trump-dependent but enduring, because they are
grounded in shared core beliefs about the defining debates shaping our new
politics and how to consolidate real power: call it the Lincoln Project
Syndrome.
WASHINGTON, DC - Former CIA Director John Brennan (R) with The Atlantic's
Editor-in-Chief Jeffrey Goldberg during the Washington Ideas Forum at the
Harman Center for the Arts (Photo by Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images)
One major reason for this transformation is a fundamental difference in how
to understand Trump: is he the primary author of America's pathologies or
merely a symptom of pathologies which long pre-dated him? Relatedly: is
removing Trump from power a vital step in returning the U.S. to its previous
status as a benevolent and law-abiding republic, or is isolating him as the
principal cause for the nation's woes merely a cynical propaganda tactic for
whitewashing the sins of those who are actually responsible so that they can
rebuild their reputations and again assume power? Were Trump's policies some
radical, unprecedented aberration from U.S. political tradition or,
stylistic quirks aside, a standard continuation of it?
How one answers those questions - along with whether one believed that the
Kremlin had infiltrated the White House and assumed command of the levers of
U.S. power through elaborate blackmail schemes or whether one recognized
that this was a CIA-fabricated propaganda fraud excavated from crusty Cold
War scripts - determined where one fell on many of the most contentious
political debates over the last four years (my answer to all of the
questions is the latter choice).
That's why the millions of Americans who, due to fear of Trump, began paying
close attention to politics and consuming news products only in 2016 were
such easy marks for peddling fear-mongering narratives and revisionism:
because they lacked the crucial historical context in which to place Trump
and understand his ascension to the presidency.
Cover of TIME Magazine, May 18, 2017; Cover of The New Yorker, Feb. 24, 2017
But there is another critical debate, one that has rarely been conducted
explicitly, that is also a key determinant of where one falls in this new
alignment: what are the real power centers in the U.S., the ones most
responsible for its worst acts and greatest dangers?
There are many places where that answer resides. One can find it right now
in the ongoing effort to denounce the Trump White House for attempting to
remove troops from Afghanistan, where the U.S. has been fighting and
shooting and bombing in a war now about to enter its 20th year. Take a look
at who is demanding that those troops remain, and there you will find the
real axis of power - all of its component parts - in the United States.
________________________________________
This is not the first time the Trump administration has been condemned after
unveiling its plans to withdraw troops from Afghanistan. In July, pro-war
Democrats on the House Armed Services Committee, led by their
Lockheed-and-Raytheon-funded Chairman Adam Smith, partnered with
Congresswoman Liz Cheney and her pro-war GOP allies to block the use of
funds for removing troops (not only from Afghanistan but also Germany), as
part of a massive increasing in military spending. The oppositional
left-right coalition of anti-war Democrats such as Ro Khanna and Tulsi
Gabbard and America-First Trump supporters such as Matt Gaetz were no match
for the bipartisan pro-war coalition which attempted to block any end to the
war.
A crucial weapon which Smith, Cheney and the other anti-withdrawal Committee
members wielded was a widely-hyped New York Times scoop published days
before the Committee vote, which - in its first paragraph - announced:
American intelligence officials have concluded that a Russian military
intelligence unit secretly offered bounties to Taliban-linked militants for
killing coalition forces in Afghanistan - including targeting American
troops - amid the peace talks to end the long-running war there, according
to officials briefed on the matter.
Repeatedly citing this New York Times story, based on the claims of
anonymous "intelligence officials," the bipartisan pro-war wing of the
Committee insisted that to leave Afghanistan now would be particularly
inappropriate and dangerous in light of dastardly Russian involvement. (Top
military officials and the commander in Afghanistan later admitted the
bounty program "had not been corroborated by intelligence agencies and that
they do not believe any attacks in Afghanistan that resulted in American
casualties can be directly tied to it," but by then, the job was done).
And thus did this union of pro-war Democrats, Cheney-led neocons, the
intelligence community and their chosen mainstream media outlets succeed in
providing the perfectly crafted tool at the most opportune moment to justify
blocking an end to America's longest war. That is precisely the same
coalition that drowned U.S. politics for more than three years in the
sustained, monomaniacal disinformation campaign about Putin's takeover of
the U.S.
As Trump again signals that he intends in the lame-duck session to withdraw
troops from Afghanistan, this same united coalition is working desperately
to block it. First, Democratic Senator Tammy Duckworth of Wisconsin angrily
condemned the withdrawal plan with deranged reasoning: that Generals are
against withdrawal (as though we have no civilian control of the military);
troops will come home "in body bags" not by staying in Afghanistan but by
leaving it; and that withdrawing U.S. forces after a mere nineteen years of
fighting will endanger "our national security."
The new ruling coalition then stepped forward to fortify Duckworth's demand
that troops remain. Obama's former National Security Advisor Susan Rice -
reportedly slated to become Biden's Secretary of State - pointed to the
pronouncement by Brett McGurk, an early ruler of post-invasion Iraq and key
advocate of the Bush/Cheney "surge" who now works (of course) for NBC News,
denouncing Trump's withdrawal plan as "diplomatic malpractice" that "erodes
trust and confidence in the United States." Playing the role of Liz Cheney
in this debate was GOP Congressman Dan Crenshaw of Texas, who supported Rice
and Duckworth by attacking independent Congressman Justin Amash for
advocating troop withdrawal.
From there, Bill Kristol - a key neocon ally of McGurk during the
Bush/Cheney years who is also now a beloved MSNBC pundit - not only
denounced the efforts to withdraw troops from Afghanistan but in general
warned of the dangers of Trump's attempt to remove troops from other parts
of the world. As they usually do, Kristol's pro-imperialism tweets went
massively viral due to the large social media following he has built from
MSNBC appearances and his liberal fan base:
Bill Kristol @BillKristol
I'm told DOD has been ordered to plan further troop withdrawals, from
Somalia, South Korea and Germany. Trump is doing his best to weaken America,
our friends, and allies on his way out the door.
November 17th 2020
10,053 Retweets33,012 Likes
Here we see the new coalition of power that has formed during the Trump era:
hawkish and corporatist Democrats, united when necessary with pro-war/neocon
Republicans, Bush/Cheney operatives, the national security state and large
corporate media outlets outside of Fox News.
Democratic national security luminaries have spent the last four years
formally uniting with Bush/Cheney neocons to prepare to take power in a new
Democratic administration (though it must be remembered that neocons, as
this 2014 New York Times Op-Ed by Jacob Heilbrunn explained, saw the writing
on the wall long before Trump that the growing anti-war strain in the GOP
(as evidenced by the success of Ron Paul's candidacy) meant that their best
hope for a posture of Endless War resided in re-migrating back to what they
thought at the time would be the Hillary-run Democratic Party).
The other key components of this coalition are Silicon Valley giants and
Wall Street, both of which overwhelmingly donated to the Biden/Harris
campaign and the Democratic Party generally. The primary weapon tech
companies offer is not just huge sums of money - though that of course is
welcomed and useful - but information control: I continue to regard the
decision of Twitter and Facebook to block and suppress the ability to
disseminate The New York Post story on Hunter Biden's laptop as one of the
most shocking and alarming events of the last four years: political
censorship cheered by most of the pro-Biden press.
But that jarring pre-election internet censorship on behalf of this
Democratic-led coalition is just the tip of the iceberg of what is to come.
And the key players in that internet censorship campaign - the propagandists
who will lay the groundwork for it - are the corporate U.S. media outlets
who have long been and still are a key part of this ruling coalition.
________________________________________
When Silicon Valley giants began to see the massive potential of social
media platforms such as Facebook and Twitter, and even earlier when Google
assumed dominance of search engines, they had no intention to censor
content. Indeed, they wanted to renounce any responsibility to regulate
discourse: not because they are noble (though many did have a libertarian
belief in the value of a free internet) but because they wanted to assume
the far more profitable and less burdensome model of AT&T: we are not a
publishing company that decides what can and cannot be heard, but rather
just a content-neutral platform for anyone to use to communicate (if Alex
Jones calls Milo Yiannopoulos to plan a rally, nobody expects AT&T to
terminate their call or service: that's the hands-off model Silicon Valley
giants envisioned).
These companies began censoring the internet because that responsibility was
foisted on them - principally by corporate media outlets that ginned up
anger over the content they were allowing on their platforms, and then by
Democratic Party politicians who blamed Facebook and Twitter (but not
themselves) for their 2016 defeat.
Numerous media outlets - NBC News, CNN, The New York Times - now employ
stables of reporters whose primary function seems to be to act as hall
monitor tattletales over the internet, flagging whatever person or group
think they deserves to be censored from social media and then petulantly
whining that Facebook and Twitter are failing in their sacred duties to
regulate discourse.
Part of the motive is arrogant self-interest: ever since the emergence of
Bush-era, blogs, they despise any ability of uncredentialed serfs to
disseminate information outside of their benevolent control. Watch here as
Vox writer Dave Roberts announces this week that the public cannot possibly
be trusted to communicate freely without "gatekeepers" - meaning people like
him and his friends - deciding what can and cannot be heard:
The Mehdi Hasan Show @MehdiHasanShow
In the world of social media with no gatekeepers, @drvox says
"misinformation wins". He tells Mehdi why:
November 17th 2020
110 Retweets413 Likes
That our media "gatekeepers" have been the most prolific and destructive
disseminators of misinformation - from the Iraq War to the 2008 financial
crisis to unhinged Trump/Russia conspiracies - does not matter. They believe
they have a divine, inherent, and superior ability to determine truth from
falsity and that society must be structured to ensure the power to regulate
information remains firmly in their hands.
But the primary motive is political: these corporate media outlets know that
if they regain their monopolistic stranglehold on the dissemination of
information, then they can control political thought and societal behavior
on behalf of the factions of power which they have always existed to serve.
That this is the function of corporate media outlets such as NBC and CNN -
not to combat propaganda but to disseminate it for the interests of the
factions they serve - was once viewed as a fundamental, undeniable truth on
the left. It's the reason that Noam Chomsky and Ed Herman's "Manufacturing
Consent" became such a popular film and book, because it laid out in detail
how these entities actually function: "a propaganda approach to media
coverage suggests a systematic and highly political dichotomization in news
coverage based on serviceability to important domestic power interests." The
authors urged Americans never to be deceived about the real purpose of these
large media conglomerates:
The mass media serve as a system for communicating messages and symbols to
the general populace. It is their function to amuse, entertain, and inform,
and to inculcate individuals with the values, beliefs, and codes of behavior
that will integrate them into the institutional structures of the larger
society..
In countries where the levers of power are in the hands of a state
bureaucracy, the monopolistic control over the media, often supplemented by
official censorship, makes it clear that the media serve the ends of a
dominant elite. It is much more difficult to see a propaganda system at work
where the media are private and formal censorship is absent..A propaganda
model focuses on this inequality of wealth and power and its multilevel
effects on mass-media interests and choices. It traces the routes by which
money and power are able to filter out the news fit to print, marginalize
dissent, and allow the government and dominant private interests to get
their messages across to the public.
The elite domination of the media and marginalization of dissidents that
results from the operation of these filters occurs so naturally that media
news people, frequently operating with complete integrity and goodwill, are
able to convince themselves that they choose and interpret the news
"objectively" and on the basis of professional news values. Within the
limits of the filter constraints they often are objective; the constraints
are so powerful, and are built into the system in such a fundamental way,
that alternative bases of news choices are hardly imaginable.
Yet somehow, just a couple decades later, these corporate media outlets -
just as is true of other institutions that were long distrusted and despised
on the left: the CIA, the FBI, the NSA - are not scorned as villains
spreading propaganda but venerated as heroes valiantly devoted to combating
it.
________________________________________
The sectors inside these corporate media outlets devoted to fostering
internet censorship call themselves "disinformation reporters" who bravely
"report from disinformation spaces" - assuming the posture of a war
correspondent in Mogadishu but who in fact do nothing more than spend all
day scrolling through 4Chan forums and Facebook memes, on the prowl for
random, fringe Terms of Services violators who should be booted offline, not
unlike the junior high hall monitors who search for tardy students to report
to the teachers.
And that's the key: the "disinformation" which these NBC, CNN and New York
Times "gatekeepers" combat is not the truly potent propaganda that spews
forth from the most powerful and pernicious sectors: CIA, FBI, Wall Street,
and the corporate media outlets for which they work. That is the propaganda
and disinformation they specialize in endorsing. These are not
anti-disinformation warriors: they are disinformation agents.
But they have become beloved icons to a significant segment of American
liberals, who have somehow become convinced that these corporate media
giants - in a radical reversal of the core principles of "Manufacturing
Consent" - have suddenly transformed into truth-telling, power-confronting
armies of anti-propaganda warriors. All of this is directly related to the
overarching debate referenced above: what are the real power centers in the
U.S., the one most responsible for its worst acts and greatest dangers?
Few things will provoke the anger of liberals, and amazingly even some on
the left, more than criticizing the "disinformation" reporters of NBC and
CNN or the "tech reporters" of The New York Times who perform the same
dissent-suppressing, censorious functions. Three decades after Chomsky's
comprehensive warnings, much of U.S. liberal-left has come to see these
corporate outlets not as the instruments of authoritarianism, oligarchy and
propaganda but as their opposite: the noble bulwarks against it.
That's because - just like neocons, the CIA and the security state - these
media outlets have recognized that they can lure liberals into adoring them
by posturing as crucial allies in the fight against the rising threat of
domestic fascism. Under this rubric, the most acute threats of
authoritarianism and fascism emanate not from the FBI or CIA or their
corporate masters and media outlets; instead, these factions have been
elevated into the bravest and most important soldiers protecting us from
those regressive forces.
Every time I denounce these corporate media censorship units and their hall
monitor tattletales masquerading as "disinformation reporters," intense rage
is provoked: from their ardent fans, almost always liberals and even
leftists, who somehow believe, genuinely, that CNN and NBC and The New York
Times now expend substantial resources toward combatting disinformation and
defeating propaganda. The world in which the Bush/Cheney campaign and White
House Communications Chief Nicolle Wallace has become a beloved-by-liberals
MSNBC host is the same one in which these media conglomerates are now
revered by liberals as anti-propaganda truth-tellers.
Earlier this week, after I described the crucial role these media outlets
are playing in elevating pressure on Silicon Valley to censor the internet
even more aggressively, one liberal reporter said my critique was "so
disgusting" that she "almost cried" on behalf of the "disinfo reporters" I
had brutally maligned. One of those "disinfo reporters," NBC News' Ben
Collins, responded to her by lamenting that the the goal of critics of his
corporate employer, like me, is to "make you afraid to leave the house."
Much important than this neurotic reaction was Collins' response to me,
contained in a series of tweet frenetically spread by liberal fans of NBC,
where he listed all the work of which he is proudest, that he believes
demonstrates how intrepid of a combatant he and his NBC team are against
propaganda, disinformation and the forces of fascism.
Reviewing his list - for what it does and does not include - is indeed
highly illuminating. None of his bold, brave efforts to expose propaganda
has anything to do with the most powerful entities that spread
disinformation: the National Security State, the CIA, corporate America, the
Pentagon, and large corporate media outlets like the one that employs him.
NBC has no interest in combatting that propaganda: to the contrary, through
people like star CIA-spokesman Ken Dilianian and actual lifelong CIA
operatives like John Brennan, they are devoted to spreading, legitimizing
and affirming the disinformation that comes from those most powerful
factions.
While ignoring CIA and corporate propaganda, who, instead, are the targets
of NBC's brave "disinformation reporting"? Fringe right-wing groups like
QAnon, Proud Boys and the Boogaloo Bois; random citizens using Facebook to
post claims NBC deems to be false; "Trump supporters" and Russians and
various anti-government groups that express skepticism of the wisdom passed
down from on high.
Now, if you are someone who really believes that the true power centers in
America, the real threats to our freedoms and value, come not from the CIA
and the FBI and Wall Street and Silicon Valley - the groups whose propaganda
NBC never debunks but always spreads - but instead comes from fringe groups
of fat middle-aged guys in the deindustrialized, decimated, deprived
interior of the country cosplaying as militiamen or random, anonymous Trump
supporters, then it makes perfect sense that you would regard this work by
corporate media outlets as heroic and necessary.
If you're living in that self-glorifying fairy tale that places you on the
front lines of fighting against a new and unprecedented fascist takeover of
the U.S. - one that is perpetrated not by the CIA and FBI but which those
agencies are steadfastly seeking to defeat in order to keep America safe for
democracy - then it makes sense that you would swoon with delight and
gratitude for this work.
But look at what it is really devoted to. They are not interested in
confronting real power centers. They instead badger an elderly conservative
woman in Florida, by taking camera crews to her front lawn in Florida,
because she unwittingly posted on her Facebook page a pro-Trump rally they
claim was engineered by Russia.
Or they threaten to dox and expose some random citizen who created an
anti-Semitic meme about CNN unless he promises never to do so again. They
have their potent corporate guns turned not on the actual centers of power
and authoritarianism - those are whose interests they serve and on behalf of
whom they spread disinformation - but on random citizens who diverge and
dissent from their pieties and who they therefore want banned and silenced.
But this is why that question referenced above about where real power
resides is so crucial, so determinative of where one falls on these debates.
If you really believe that the threat to The American Way of Life comes not
from the CIA and the FBI and tech monopolies and Endless War but from the
Proud Boys and the Boogaloo Bois and anonymous citizens posting pro-Trump
Facebook memes - that somehow they're going to overthrow the most armed and
powerful government on earth and end American democracy and replace it with
their version of fascism - then it makes complete sense for you to unite
behind those entities that have successfully re-branded themselves as the
bulwarks against these proto-fascist movements: NBC and CNN and The New York
Times; the CIA and the FBI; Wall Street and Silicon Valley; and the neocons,
corporatists and militarists who rule the Democratic Party and soon the
White House. And it also makes sense for you to want to increasingly vest
those entities with the power of censoring the internet in the name of
Keeping Us Safe from these nefarious forces.
But that is a glaring and pathetic fairy tale, sold to you by large
corporate media outlets and their glittery panels from the national security
state and the neocon sectors who have every interest in getting you to
believe that they're now protecting you from disinformation rather than
filling your heads with it, so that you forget about their past sins and
view them as pro-democracy heroes and buy their books and work to empower
them in elections.
The departure of Trump is not going to rid us of this
The-Fascists-Are-Coming movie. It's been far too profitable to far too many
institutions to let it go. Even with Trump gone, they are going to use every
FBI tactic to exaggerate the threat of these domestic movements to keep you
in such a state of fear that you acquiesce to whatever powers they claim
they need to defeat them - just as they did in the Cold War with domestic
Communism and after the Oklahoma City bombing when the Clinton
Administration demanded backdoor internet access in the name of stopping
right-wing militias and again after 9/11 when people like Newt Gingrich
wanted to curb free speech in the name of stopping the threat of Islamic
radicalism. This playbook is as old and obvious as it is pernicious.
And one key tactic they will absolutely continue to use is the multi-pronged
campaign to demand, coerce and cajole Silicon Valley giants to continue to
silence and censor whoever is an adversary of this new neoliberal ruling
coalition - whether on the right or on the left. If you have any doubts
about that, just listen to the new left-wing darling, the newly re-elected
Democratic Senator from Massachusetts Ed Markey, when he spoke to Facebook
CEO Mark Zuckerberg at a Senate hearing late last month and demanded more
censorship: "The issue is not that the companies before us today is that
they're taking too many posts down. The issue is that they're leaving too
many dangerous posts up."
If you're a fan of corporate media outlets, if you are eager for Silicon
Valley giants to more aggressively and unilaterally censor who can and
cannot be heard online, if you believe that true power and authoritarianism
rests not with the national security state and the political parties funded
by oligarchical centers but in random fringe bands of your fellow citizens,
then you are many things. A warrior against fascism and authoritarianism is
most definitely not among them.
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