by Anthony Freda, Medium:
As it becomes increasingly clear that yesterday’s conspiracy theories are today’s real news, the call to kill the messengers just gets more shrill and hysterical.
The attacks on free speech with high-tech censorship campaigns and old-fashioned hit pieces in the “War on Fake News” are massive and concerted.
The book burners are starting so many fires it’s impossible to stamp them all out.
What are the horrible thought crimes committed by the alternative press?
The new media has consistently exposed the lies and crimes of our corrupt and broken institutions.
Pioneers of alt media have passionately and convincingly made the case that The Patriot Act literally reversed the gains to human liberty codified in The Bill of Rights.
Independent media dismantled the lies that were presented as the pretexts to the invasion of Iraq. The same lies aggressively promoted by Bush, Hillary Clinton, CNN and The New York Times and that resulted in the death of a million people and global chaos. By contrast, how many people have died as a result of alternative media reports? The answer is zero.
The independent press interviewed NSA whistle-blowers who accurately described how the U.S. government was illegally spying on its citizens and retaining our data, and how these whistle-blowers were being persecuted by their own government for coming forward and refusing to break the law.
This was years before anyone heard of Edward Snowden.
Amazingly, there was very little interest in these bombshell allegations in the mainstream press.
It’s hard to believe now, but in those days, people who claimed the government was spying on innocent citizens were dismissed as paranoid by the self-proclaimed arbiters of truth at the NYT and CNN.
Grassroots media detailed a decade ago how police forces all over America were becoming militarized and predicted that this dangerous trend would lead to racially charged conflict on the streets of the nation. What kooks!
We have also railed against; torture, needless wars, police brutality, government corruption, the two-party duopoly, the criminality of the banksters and the end of privacy.
Now the very same mainstream media hacks who promoted the lies that lead to war in Iraq and Libya and mindlessly regurgitate whichever talking point is uploaded onto their teleprompter are gleefully assassinating what they call “fake news” using edited tape and misleading hit-pieces.
While these discredited war cheerleaders lie about why our sons and daughters are sent to die, we are bravely exposing the fraudulent casus belli they traitorously and disgracefully promote.
While these corporate spokespeople work for the interests of the oil and drug companies and political forces that pay their salaries, we risk everything to expose the crimes and scams of these same broken institutions.
We have done a great public service by exposing the deceptive, psychological methods used by the ruling elite to warp historical narratives, manipulate patriotism and manufacture consent.
By helping people to recognize and suspend their belief in propaganda and therefore their own complicity in it, the alternative media is helping to create a public awareness to the tactics our enemies use to keep us divided, steal our rights and slaughter countless innocents all over the world.
Read More @ Medium.com
