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Genocide walrus John Bolton outright admitted to planning foreign coups with the US government in conversation with CNN’s Jake Tapper on Wednesday. That’s coups, plural.
While arguing that the Capitol riot on January 6th of last year was not an attempted coup but rather just Trump stumbling around trying to look after his own interests, Bolton hastened to pull authority on the matter when Tapper suggested that he might not be correct about how coups work.
“I disagree with that,” Bolton said. “As somebody who has helped plan coups d’etat — not here, but, you know, other places — it takes a lot of work, and that’s not what [Trump] did.”
Places. Plural.
Tapper just let Bolton’s remark slide like he didn’t just admit to something extraordinarily fiendish, but did eventually follow up with a request that the former National Security Advisor elaborate.
“I do want to ask a follow up,” Tapper said. “When we were talking about what is capable, or what you need to do to be able to plan a coup, and you cited your expertise having planned coups.”
“I’m not going to get into the specifics,” replied Bolton with a chuckle.
“Successful coups?” Tapper asked.
“Well, I wrote about Venezuela in the book,” Bolton answered. “And it turned out not to be successful – not that we had all that much to do with it, but I saw what it took for an opposition to try and overturn an illegally elected president, and they failed. The notion that Donald Trump was half as competent as the Venezuelan opposition is laughable.”
“I feel like there’s other stuff you’re not telling me, though,” Tapper responded.
“I’m sure there is,” Bolton said, grinning like he just finished boiling a puppy.
Tapper pursued the matter no further, because he is a propagandist first and a journalist second, and he would be acutely aware that Bolton was saying things that you are not supposed to admit to on television.
Bolton’s sole admission to coup plotting runs counter to his comments about the US government’s failed attempt to oust President Nicolas Maduro while he was facilitating that bizarre operation under the Trump administration, telling reporters in 2019 that the empire’s Venezuela shenanigans were “clearly not a coup.”
https://twitter.com/AlanRMacLeod/status/1546965650920411136?s=20&t=ggH27y2u4K-HT_YYEp7JBw
In other examples of the US empire just rearing its ugly head right out in broad daylight, an excellent new report by Alan MacLeod with Mintpress News shows that Facebook/Instagram parent company Meta has been hiring dozens of people who previously worked in the US intelligence cartel to help regulate what content gets seen on the social media giant’s platforms. Some were hired from straight out of the CIA or had (officially) left the agency very recently.
The CIA used to infiltrate the media. Now the CIA is the media. This trend of openly hiring US intelligence veterans to help teach the public what thoughts to think about the world began a few years ago in the legacy media, and now we’re seeing it in the new media as well.
This is part of a broader trend in which many of the ugly things the US empire used to do in secret it now does openly with the aid of propaganda spin. In addition to attempting coups right out in the open as we saw in Venezuela and just giving intelligence insiders positions of influence within both new and old media institutions, you’ve got things like the US government-funded National Endowment for Democracy (NED), which according to its own founding officials was set up to do overtly what the CIA used to do covertly.
We see NED’s fingerprints all over pretty much any situation where the western power alliance needs to manage public perception about a CIA-targeted government, from Ukraine to Russia to Hong Kong to Xinjiang, to the imperial propaganda firm known as Bellingcat. Rather than manipulate world narratives and foment discontent from behind the veil of hidden identities and cutouts as in CIA tactics of old, NED just manipulates them openly by pouring funds into narrative management operations which benefit the empire while framing it as promoting democracy and human rights.
To further #humanrights & human dignity for all people in China, the National Endowment for Democracy has funded Uyghur groups since 2004. #NEDemocracy #HumanRightsDay https://t.co/C0LJEyWxq1 pic.twitter.com/OqZdehdxXN
— NEDemocracy (@NEDemocracy) December 10, 2020
Then you’ve got things like American officials telling the press that the US government has been circulating disinformation about Russia and Ukraine, Biden administration officials saying the proxy war in Ukraine is being used to “weaken” Russia and that they are fine with US brinkmanship with Russia causing global recession and hunger, and western officials telling the press that Ukraine is crawling with CIA personnel.
What the empire has found is that you don’t need to hide as much from public visibility as long as you can manipulate what people think they’re seeing. If the public is sufficiently propagandized and consent has been adequately manufactured, you can get away with just proclaiming some random guy the president of a foreign country and seeing if you can manipulate the rest of the world into playing along with you.
If your narrative control is strong enough, you can even keep the empire running smoothly when information gets out into the open that you’d rather stay hidden. Very often these days major stories about imperial malfeasance will come out that simply have no impact, either because the mainstream news media unite to ignore them or because they spin those revelations as coming from someone bad or not containing important information.
People tend to overrate the power of the US war machine and underrate the power of the US propaganda machine. While the US military finds itself losing a war to the Taliban, the awesome power of its propaganda engine has people marching in perfect alignment with the will of the oligarchic empire.
When I was in an abusive relationship, the more ground down and submitted I became the more my abuser would flaunt his abusiveness in the plain light of day. Toward the end he was just outright admitting he was a sociopath and a manipulator and openly telling me he was going to do monstrous things to me before he did them, because he was that confident that he had me wrapped around his finger.
Luckily, he was wrong. And hopefully the empire is wrong as it makes this same calculation with all of us.
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39 responses to “The Empire Is Showing More And More Of Its True Face”
The Empire should look in a mirror and see its true face which is not beautiful and go down Memory Lane and see how empires die.
Can anyone finish this joke?
Lyin’ Mlke, The Genocide Walrus and The Torture Queen go into a bar…
Perfect and humorous message !
Marc Van Gysel (Belgium)
There are multiple forms of US subversion that are well short of coups and are far less visible.
If you haven’t read it yet, check out Perkins’ book: “Confessions of an Economic Hit Man”
Ms. Johnstone: I have tried in vain to find an English translation of German journalist Udo Ulfkotte’s best-selling book, Gekaufte Journalisten (Bought Journalists). The English version appears to have been suppressed throughout North America and Europe. On May 15, 2017 Next Revelation Press, an imprint of US-Canadian-based publisher Tayen Lane, released the English version of Bought Journalists, under the title, Journalists for Hire: How the CIA Buys the News. If you or any of your readers have an English pdf copy, you would be doing a service to post it on your website for all of us to download. Thanks for your writing and insights.
Genocide walrus John Bolton. Fitting. I’ve referred to him as the Mark Twain wan-a-be with a peanut brain minus the heart.
I also like John ‘Yosemite Sam’ Bolton — though his serial incompetence and faux machismo is a not so funny living version of that cartoon character.
I feel like such a sap.
I was shocked that the US strategic petroleum reserves (SPR) was sold on the world market. The propagandized spin of it was part of it ended up in China to a company that Hunter Biden has connections with, which is classic Republicrat good cop, bad cop bullshit. True of not, it’s classic redirection slight-of-hand.
Color me naive, but in my idealistic desire to believe that SOME US policies must indeed still be for the ultimate benefit of Americans, it seems to me that the SPR existed to ease supply IN THE US, and would eventually end up on our dinner plate in the form of less expensive gasoline during a time of impacted world supply.
(And never mind that the world supply issues are completely of the US’ doing as they sanction Russia.)
But the way it actually works, apparently, is we release our strategic reserves to be bid on by the WORLD market.
Why? According to the White House to increase supply and decrease prices of crude on the world market.
Then when prices go down, they use the money made on the sale to resupply the SPR.
Sounds great to the average celebrating capitalist citizen, right? Sell high, buy low. Classic capitalism.
But before Congress repealed the limitation in 2015, the SPR could not be exported.
That seems like it would have been the original purpose of the SPR – to release less expensive crude to US refineries in exchange for those companies offering consumers less expensive gasoline than the world market.
Forgive me, but wouldn’t that makes sense as a policy? What a joke. What a sap to ever believe that any US government policy is actually meant to benefit the average American.
As a child of 60’s mid-America, this is just another nail in the coffin of the shattering of my sheltered indoctrination as a US citizen to believe that the US EVER cared about its citizenry. Doesn’t now, never did.
Any law or bill or policy that ever accidentally did benefit Americans has been usurped, or leveraged, or repealed.
I consider myself pretty well informed, at least to the extent that I can be, but the sheer magnitude of fuckery is so extensive, the level of bullshit is so great, and the misdirection is so complete, I just find myself shocked by the reality over and over again. And I didn’t just fall off the turnip truck. I didn’t start this yesterday. And even at that, I find myself well, well beyond in awareness than ALL of my peers, and the majority of everyone else in the US that absolutely does not have one clue. I really can’t have what I consider to be an informed or non-propagandized conversation with anyone that I know.
So you say “Strategic Petroleum Reserves” to the average American, and I guarantee that the idea that conjures in their mind is a far cry from the reality of it. Classic conditioning based on a lifetime of indoctrination and shaping of these fine American Citizens. You tell them we just sold our SPR to other countries including China and they go “Ohhhh, that fucking Biden…!. Seriously? Like this just started last month? Because they believe those reserves were meant for our benefit, not the world’s benefit. And why wouldn’t they think that. It’s what they’ve been led to believe.
What’s it gonna take? I’m not certain, but I have a habit of naming decades for their overall trajectory. This one I’ve already decided is the Decade of Devastation and Despair as Americans fully come to realize how they’ve been duped.
Watch the tolls rise in untimely or unexplained deaths throughout all age groups. Most people my age won’t be able to take it, and will find a way out whether through illness or otherwise. I don’t expect much different for any other age group. That American Dream has crumbled for just about everyone unless you’re at the top. And it isn’t going to be pretty for the rest of the 20’s – I’m certain of that.
I guess this has turned out to be quite a requiem for my lost idealism. It seems there is no soft breeze to lift it any more. I mean, I already knew it was all fucked, I just never quite grasped the extent of it.
So that leaves me to run out the rest of my clock the best I can. The one thing I’ve learned is that if you have no expectations, you can never be disappointed. I just need to work on the expectation part then.
I watch my children suffer through the unchecked Corporatism and Inflation, and it breaks my heart to see them blame themselves, as if they’re not doing it right or they’re stupid. And you can’t tell them otherwise. Because they’ve been indoctrinated as well.
And that’s the same story and vibe you get from our government anytime you question it – narcissistic gaslighting. And I feel absolutely powerless to do anything about it while these fucking parties and my neighbors and everyone I know tells us to vote harder and exploit standard run-of-the-mill Republicrat policy to elicit votes. It just makes me ill.
What’s it gonna take people? What’s it gonna take?
Thank you for sharing my friend. I feel what you described in a very bad way; how I feel like I can’t actually have an honest conversation with anyone I know about the state of the world. I try to finesse my way around some things, because I know if I were to try to fully divulge my thoughts I would most assuredly be dismissed as an absolute loon, but it is emotionally taxing to constantly keep the guard on. That’s even with people who I know are relatively well-informed and earnest in their thought process.
The biggest thing is the gaslighting. I blamed myself for being a “failure” for a very long time before realizing the metrics by which I was judging myself were impossible to live up to, and were deliberately designed to instill that sense of helplessness. Even now that I realize it is a manufactured psychological attack to keep people docile and complacent, I still have trouble with it. Internalizing a message you’ve been surrounded by in every facet of your life in every way is hard to shake.
I try to tell anyone I see blaming themselves for being a victim that it isn’t their fault, and why. Even if I don’t convince them, just to plant that seed. It’s the best I can do. I hope your children eventually break free from that mental prison.
General strikes FOR the Common Good.
Of course Bolton would not admit, while part of the Trump administration, that the Venezuela mess was a coup. Similarly, now that he has no government position, he is free to claim whatever he wants. Had I been him, I would have stuck to the ‘not a coup’ story even in the CNN interview. It was so poorly planned and operated, that admitting that he was the main driver of that mess, not only leaves him as the psychopath and war monger we know, but it makes him look like a bungling fool. Ah, but what one won’t do for money.
I already knew the US government is a multiface death machine but “Genocide walrus” and “grinning like he just finished boiling a puppy” is copy you don’t get elsewhere. Caitlin is like Hunter S. Thompson meets Oscar Wilde.
The article ends on a deeply personal and moving note. I hope the author is in a happier place now. The ugly truth about power, be it a man dominating a woman in a domestic setting or an empire dominating other states, is that it’s all about control. But humans never have full control of the narrative – only limited – and that’s because power is an illusion. Yet we cannot accept that: cannot accept that power is not real – cannot accept the warnings of history.
https://patternofhistory.wordpress.com/
A couple of times at the store in the US I saw a good looking lady and fine looking gentlemen , unrelated, dressed in yellow and blue and smiling happily.
Nothing to smile about when it comes to Ukraine. It affects everybody adversely.
Why remind us when we can see the gas prices posted everywhere, and food is becoming not only more expensive but is missing from the shelves even here.
Mark Z just warned FB employees about upcoming layoffs, bcs Apple cut FB’s profits my giving people more privacy choices.
So Mark offered his people to leave voluntarily if they do not contribute to company’s bottom line. You know who you are, he said.
Maybe he meant all the CIA folk on his staff. Maybe they dont’ need two jobs to survive high inflation.
Or, more likely, Zuckerberg answers to the CIA since Faceborg is part of its psyops war on Americans.
Dont you find it interesting that hardly anyone watches MSM news today. If you add all of them up, print, cable etc., we are talking less than 10% of the population. Bolton can say whatever he wants on an outlet that no one watches with no consequence. No one listens, no one votes and no one cares.
While nobody is listening, somehow the MSM still manages to implant their version of reality, their propaganda, into the cultural sphere. Just see how quickly Ukraine became the cause du jour back in March … and how quickly Russia became the enemy of all in the “west”. How did that happen, if no one is watching/listening?
The fact is that our culture is all immersive. You may think you are not watching CNN; but you will see those pretty-faced talking heads out of the corner of your eyes as you’re waiting to board your plane, as you’re waiting in the doctor’s office, as you pump gas, etc.. Even more perniciously, your entertainment products get their cues from MSM and programming gets bent in that direction, subtly or not so subtly.
This “war” in which we are not even actually engaged has been an eye opener for many, I think, in how we are herded to think.
Russia will succeed where the American left failed. The global East and South have already freed themselves from CIA propaganda, while most Americans are still mired in it. They will be the last to get it, but get it they will thanks to Russia’s actions in the real world, as opposed to the virtual world where most Americans live. Propaganda rules the virtual world but can only go so far in the real one. As Caitlin points out, propaganda has reached its zenith in the West, but it has simultaniously reached its breaking point elsewhere–a harbinger of what’s coming home perhaps sooner than we dared to imagine.
Russia and others will indeed succeed by decoupling from the west before it implodes.
I saw this clearly first when Dubya was speaking on the aircraft carrier. I can’t remember exactly what he said, but the gist of it, and especially the look in his eye as he addressed the camera (the American public), said “I know I’m lying, and you may know I’m lying, but we’re going to do this, and whether you like it or not, you are fucked, and there’s nothing you can do about it.”
Someone in the Bush Administration (Karl Rove?) actually said something very similar. From Suskind’s book:
“The aide said that guys like me were ‘in what we call the reality-based community,’ which he defined as people who ‘believe that solutions emerge from your judicious study of discernible reality.’ […] ‘That’s not the way the world really works anymore,’ he continued. ‘We’re an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality. And while you’re studying that reality—judiciously, as you will—we’ll act again, creating other new realities, which you can study too, and that’s how things will sort out. We’re history’s actors…and you, all of you, will be left to just study what we do.”
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reality-based_community
Heh-heh. The neoliberalcons’ faith-based delusions are now crashing into a reality-based world.
Wise words once again, Caitlin!
I keep saying, our problem is not with the system, our main threat is our media. We cannot change the system without changing the media first. If we changed the media, the system wouldn’t last a week.
The status quo will continue until this happens. It will one day. Either by popular uprising (doubtful due to the abive) or some decisive form of government where it is in their interests. Trump is an example of this, although not a good example..
He is admitting to something we have known for ages. This is the caliber of American politicians running our world straight into the ground. And we let them???
Horror of horrors that is spilling out into the open and I guess if more of those like Bolton would come out, the entire world would be in tears. Who killed the Kennedys, MLK ,Malcolm X and others? Why were atrocious wars unleashed upon weaker nations in the Middle East, Asia and Africa? Why was the apartheid regime given a lifeline by the West and helped to last as long as it has? Why is the US working hand in glove with Big Pharma who are in the process of annihilating mankind with experimental injections? What is it that the populations of the West are being given to be clueless and helpless in the face of such provocative and criminal acts by their rulers? Now it is becoming more apparent why the Ukraine tragedy was inevitable. Finally, whether we it like or not, someone is standing up to resist and to bring an end to the evil marching of Western imperialism.
I am sure you are aware of the fact that the ‘peace loving and democratic’ America only cares for itself while hypocritically pretending to do ‘good around the world’. I figured out long time ago that, when the US offers any kind of help, it already figured out how it will profit from this ‘help’ before offering it. What I will never understand…why do so many on this planet keep falling for this ruse.
The empire’s front office only needs to buy off the top dogs in the target country. Even tin pot dictators are not fooled, they simply sell out for the long green that the empire dangles in front of them. Maduro and Ortega I’m sure were offered deals by Washington that would have made them wealthy puppets, like Noriega was before the US betrayed him, but they valued their integrity and their socialist cause more than American cash. Pretty much all the cash stays within the social circle of the Big Club. You and your immediate family have membership, not your country, certainly not your peasantry, and only as long as you implement all American foreign policy in your vassalage. Turning down an American offer to personally join the Big Club certainly has risks. Ask Gadaffi, Assad, Morales, Allende etc, etc about the down side.
They send the “jackals” as John Perkins calls them in his 2004 book Confessions of an Economic Hit Man.
What is truly Goebbelsian about America is this: The same America that has been infiltrating, destabilizing, or regime changing scores of nations around the world for over a century is the same America that whines like a little entitled b!tch that *other* nations (especially Russia or China) are supposedly trying to infiltrate, destabilize, or regime change the innocent and morally virtuous “Land of the Free.”
Overthrow: 100 Years of U.S. Meddling & Regime Change, from Iran to Nicaragua to Hawaii to Cuba
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f9Q19QJpJ4s
Killing Hope: U.S. Military and CIA Interventions Since World War II
https://williamblum.org/books/killing-hope
Psychological projection is fundamental to the warped American mentality from not only the political elites but also down to Main Street, USA.
In terms of foreign policy, the only political differences among Americans are the “foreign enemy” that they project their own crimes onto.
Red State America focuses on projecting the USA’s regime change machinations onto China.
Blue State America focuses on projecting the USA’s regime change machinations onto Russia.
Liberal NPCs Hate Russia, Conservative NPCs Hate China
https://caityjohnstone.medium.com/liberal-npcs-hate-russia-conservative-npcs-hate-china-9b4ac2f853
But all political factions of the American Empire are gaslighting sociopaths.
America whining about “foreign interference” in its politics is like a serial rapist complaining about being sexual harassed….
I think that Vladimir Putin is more legitimately the president of his people, representing their choice and effecting their will, than Lord Biden was really picked by the American people and works to upgrade their quality of life. Biden is more a flunky, a puppet of unseen forces, and a senile demented on at that.
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No question that an oligarchy, as well as a cloak and dagger deep state including truly nefarious agencies like the CIA and NSA, play major roles in both societies, but I think the American covert state is more entrenched, more refined and robust than any Russian insider elites who are still learning how to convincingly feign democracy while practicing autocracy.
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A casual read of history suggests that all governments change, they evolve over time. Perhaps inevitable corruption and the concentration of power via long term trends will inevitably bring every purportedly democratic state to the end state that America finds itself in: tyranny, chaos and terminal collapse. No empire in history has lasted forever. All are in the past tense. The closest to a perennial super power is China, but it has also gone through cycles of collapse, conquest, civil war and re-invention of itself on multiple occasions. That is what Russia is still experiencing now, as it struggles to transform from its Soviet incarnation, which the US, foreseeing its own demise, wants to strangle in its crib.
Exactly! Jimmy Dore nailed it perfectly in this piece (below), showing the cringe-making glee with which Joe Biden bragged about a law he’d just devised in 1994 that would send anybody caught with the equivalent of a nickel size of crack on them, straight to jail for five years and the zero tolerance he intended to show and he didn’t [fucking] care how the guy became a sociopath for an excuse – which basically sent thousands of black kids to prison – but his son Hunter has filmed himself smoking and now weighing crack for years and not only Joe Biden, who’s perfectly aware of it, hasn’t had him sent to jail but his handlers and self-censorship make sure that the media keep a lid on it and work the memory hole overtime to keep it off limits and under the radar as “Russian disinformation”. I’m asking you…
Without double standards, the US would only be a shadow of its true self! And it’s nothing new either! It’s consubstantial and comes with puritanism :o)
This was a reply to USA-MA
PS: And all this while the crack crisis was generated by the CIA according to journalist Gary Webb who later died of two gunshots to the head which an observant coroner called suicide :o)
Hunter Biden is just one of the more visible symbols of pervasive perversion within our western aristocracy, like Jeffrey Epstein and clients (Gates, Clinton, Trump, Prince Andrew, etc.). Our “elites’” depravity and debauchery would make the latter -day Roman imperium blush with shame. They are the true “deplorables”, reprobates who have no shame and flaunt their crimes.
Great work. Thanks
I’m reminded of Marshall McLuhan’s “The Medium is the message” and all the howling monkeys are just raising the global consciousness toward an awakening.
I pray it’s not too late!
I think it is more likely that no one is listening.