The End of Truth . . . Or Is It?
Introduction by Kennedy Applebaum
Quemado Institute
April 24, 2019
Julian Assange: Not even lawyers can visit him (–TeleSUR)
In the first commentary posted below, Caitlin Johnstone makes an alarming case that an imminent truth blackout is bound to result from the US indictment and extradition of Julian Assange. Johnstone’s bedrock premise, as revealed in a separate article, equates to the fearful if not paranoid belief that President Donald Trump will betray the free press and allow Assange to suffer untold horrors at the mercy of his American accusors. Journalist Robert Bridge, in the second article below, hints at a sneak Trump-Assange alliance to derail the deep state, lending an element of hope. Yet neither asks the pointed question: Does Trump have the power to steer Assange’s fate?
A repeated flaw in political thought today stems from the willful, or perhaps unwitting, blindness toward the de facto dictatorship of the global elite. Based primarily in Britain, the New World Order ruling aristocracy controls the money and information flow throughout the Western sphere of influence, which arguably spans the better part of the world with tendrils into Moscow. Trump, meanwhile, is just one man. Demands and expectations applied to the President are not just unrealistic, they are fantastically overblown to the point of being mythical. These royal personages and billionaire tycoons are the covert commanders of society, whether executing information suppression a la 1984, destruction of the earth through geoengineering, eradication of nations and cultures by war and mass migration, or human depopulation via exponential roll-outs of deadly microwave radiation, also known as 5G cellular technology and beyond. It is these transnational oligarchs Trump must contend with
Is there hope for a free and peaceful world? Absolutely, to those who recognize the power of mind and spirit.
The Prosecution of Julian Assange is Infinitely Bigger Than Assange
By Caitlin Johnstone
Sott.net
April 21, 2019
Posted Quemado Institute
April 25, 2019
Julian Assange’s mother reported yesterday that the WikiLeaks founder has not been permitted any visitors during his detention in Belmarsh Prison, including from doctors and his lawyers. Doctors who visited Assange in the Ecuadorian Embassy have attested that he urgently needs medical care. Belmarsh is a maximum security prison sometimes referred to as “the UK’s Guantanamo Bay“.
And yet we’re asked to believe that this has something to do with an alleged bail violation and a US extradition request for alleged computer crimes carrying a maximum sentence of five years. If you zoom out and listen to the less-informed chatter of the overt propagandists and the brainwashed rank-and-file Western mass media consumers, you will also see that people believe this has something to do with Russia and rape allegations as well.
Actually, none of these things are true. Assange is being imprisoned under draconian conditions for journalism, and for journalism only. The Obama administration declined to prosecute him after WikiLeaks’ publication of the Manning leaks out of concern that doing so would endanger press freedoms, and the Obama administration didn’t have any more evidence at its disposal than the Trump administration has now. The “crime” Assange is accused of consists of nothing other than standard journalistic practices that investigative journalists engage in all the time, including source protection and encouraging the source to obtain more material. The only thing that has changed is an increased willingness in the White House to prosecute journalists for practicing journalism, and there are an abundance of reasons to believe that he will be hit with far more serious charges once extradited to US soil. They’re not going to all this trouble for a bail violation and a five-year maximum sentence.
But if you zoom out even further, in the grand scheme of things this barely even has anything to do with Assange. Sure, he has of course been a thorn in the side of those who operate the transnational western power alliance, and given the choice they would of course prefer him to be locked up or dead than free and alive. But that’s not what the corrupt influencers who are strangling our world are shooting for here. They are making a grab for something much, much bigger. Assange just happens to be a stepping stone along the way.
As we’ve discussed previously, the prosecution of Assange is really designed to set a legal precedent which will enable the US government to imprison journalists for trying to hold it to account using journalism. The reason you are seeing the phrase “Assange is not a journalist” bleated constantly by empire lackeys all around the world today is because they need a counter-narrative for the indisputable fact that this precedent poses a threat to journalists around the world, the argument being that since Assange isn’t a journalist (pure bullshit by the way), this isn’t setting a precedent for journalists. As though their personal definition of what a “real journalist” is will be the one used by the US government when determining whether or not to prosecute other people for doing things similar to what Assange did, instead of whatever definition happens to suit US government agendas in that instance.
But in order to get the really, really big picture perspective of what these bastards are going for, we need to zoom out even further than that.
In the sci-fi novel Ender’s Game, the young protagonist applies a vicious beating to one of his bullies, killing him. When asked why he did this by his handlers, the boy, who has been bred and raised to become a strategic savant, explains that he did it not out of malice toward the bully, nor only to win the fight, but to win all future fights as well. If the kids at school see what savagery he’s capable of and know he’s not to be trifled with, he won’t ever have to fight them.
If this sounds a bit sociopathic to you, that’s because it is. And, with the notable difference of the bully and victim roles being reversed, this is exactly the principle we are seeing exercised with Assange.
The entire world is watching what is being done to Assange currently. No matter how propagandized you are, no matter how much you hate the man personally, you’re watching that happen and learning a lesson from it. And that lesson is, never do anything remotely like what that guy did, or you’ll meet the same fate. This is the real goal of Assange’s persecution, and it doesn’t impact merely one Australian publisher in a UK jail cell, nor even merely the investigative journalists around the world who are interested in practicing the lost art of holding power to account using journalism, but everyone in the world who consumes news media.
And it works. I know it works because it works on me. I’ll say right here and now, if you’ve got information that incriminates the most powerful people in the world, keep it the hell away from me. Give it to someone else, literally anyone else, because I myself am far too cowardly and have far too much to lose by getting involved in anything that could lead to me rotting in some overseas prison cell. I’ve got kids. I’m in love. I cannot and will not go down that path. And if this is true for me I know for certain that it’s true for countless others as well. They’ve brutalized whistleblowers to the point that it’s surely had a severe chilling effect on those who would otherwise become key leak sources, and now they’re brutalizing the journalists who publish those leaks as well. The odds of someone willing to blow the whistle on real power meeting a journalist who is willing to help them are rapidly diminishing to zero.
They’re trying to win this fight against Assange in brutal fashion to ensure that they win all future fights as well.
Which is why it’s absolutely stupid that this conversation so often gets fixated on Assange the man, whether it’s smears or praise.
The other day I published a massive mega-article attacking the major smears about Assange I’ve encountered. There are 27 of them in total so far, and I’ll be adding more soon. This mountain of smears exists because instead of paying attention to the world-shaping dangers I just outlined which threaten to make it impossible to oppose the leaders of the US-centralized empire who are marching us towards either extinction or dystopia, people are babbling about Assange’s personality, or whether or not he cleaned up after his cat while at the embassy.
The flip-side of this is people who fixate on Assange as a hero, which can of course help draw attention to his plight and therefore be of some benefit, but ultimately that’s also missing the forest for the trees. This is so very, very much bigger than Assange, and we need to oppose it for reasons that are far, far more significant than the individual characteristics of one man who, depending on what we’ve heard, we may or may not believe is a nice person.
Never lose sight of this: the intimidation of whistleblowers and leak publishers threatens to stop truth from informing the behaviors of our entire species, leaving only the whims of the most powerful to decide our fate. The most powerful people are those most dedicated to pursuing power, those sociopathic enough to step on anyone’s head and do whatever it takes to secure as much control as possible over as many humans as possible. That’s who we’re handing the steering wheel of our world to if we allow truth to be intimidated into silence.
And never lose sight of this, either: with the imprisonment and prosecution of Julian Assange, these same sociopathic oppressors have exposed themselves. They have ripped off the friendly Big Brother mask and exposed the dark infernal entities which squirm and hiss underneath. This sudden interest in the legal technicalities of bail protocol and journalistic source protection protocol happen to look exactly the same as prosecuting a journalist for publishing facts because that is exactly what is happening. Don’t ever let anyone gaslight you into believing otherwise, and don’t you dare miss this rare opportunity to point out to your fellow humans how our oppressors have revealed their true nature.
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Will Julian Assange ‘Team up’ With Trump to Bury Russiagate – and Just Maybe the Deep State – Once and for All?
By Robert Bridge
Strategic Culture Foundation
April 24, 2019
Posted Quemado Institute
April 25, 2019
Julian Assange, Ecuadorian Embassy, December 20, 2012 (–Sputnik)
Coming just days after the release of the anticlimactic Mueller Report, Julian Assange was deprived of asylum and arrested at the Ecuadorian embassy in London, where he now faces extradition to the United States. Was the timing of this dramatic move a mere coincidence, or is something else going on?
The WikiLeaks founder and editor was dragged into the blinding light of London just 30 days after the IMF approved a $4.2-billion loan for cash-strapped Ecuador, and 18 days after the conclusion of the two-year Robert Mueller investigation, which failed to unearth any trace of Russian collusion. Hang on, that’s not all. One day before Assange lost his asylum, Attorney General William Barr told US lawmakers that he believed the Trump presidential campaign was spied on during the 2016 election.
“I am reviewing the conduct of the investigation and trying to get my arms around all the aspects of the counterintelligence investigation that was conducted during the summer of 2016,” Barr told a House panel on April 10, one day before Assange’s apprehension.
Vanity Fair wondered aloud in a headline, “Will Trump get his Grand Inquisition?”
Last but not least, Chelsea Manning, the former US Army intelligence officer who leaked some 750,000 documents, videos, diplomatic cables, was sent back to prison for refusing to testify before a grand jury against WikiLeaks and its founder Julian Assange.
One possible explanation for all of this ‘chatter’ is that Donald Trump is about to undertake a deep-sea expedition for something much larger than Julian Assange. Unless the Republican leader’s declared intention along the campaign trail to ‘drain the swamp’ was mere rhetorical bombast, then Assange may turn out to be Trump’s unlikely and unwitting ally in an operation of almost unfathomable depth and implications. More on that in a moment.
There is also the question of Russiagate. It goes without saying that Trump would covet an opportunity to settle scores with the Democratic Party over that witch hunt, which, in cahoots with the mainstream media, stalked the US leader and his administration for two painstaking years. And even now, after the release of the Mueller Report, the Democrats refuse to throw in the towel and are plotting to interrogate the interrogator himself, Robert Mueller. This is where Julian Assange might help halt the madness, although that is not to suggest, of course, that he is necessarily predisposed to such an opportunity. Yet he may find himself with no choice in the matter. Before continuing with that line of discussion, there are some rather strange things about the Assange case that need mentioning.
Just weeks after the final nail was hammered into the ‘Russiagate’ investigation, British police arrested Assange, who is wanted in the United States for his efforts to “break a password to a classified U.S. government computer,” according to the Justice Department indictment. That is a serious federal offense, and far worse than just publishing leaked materials. In other words, it appears Trump has the legal goods on the WikiLeaks leader.
Another thing worth mentioning about the Assange case is Donald Trump’s purported disinterest in WikiLeaks, as well as its famous founder. “I know nothing about Wikileaks. It’s not my thing,” the US leader told a huddle of reporters inside the Oval Office. On the question of Assange, Trump remarked, “I know nothing really about him,” saying that he would leave the matter to his freshly minted Attorney General, William Barr. Alleging that he has no interest in the work of Julian Assange sounds highly implausible since it was WikiLeaks that opened up the can of worms against not only Hillary Clinton, but the Democratic National Committee, which in turn led to the Russians and the two-year Mueller debacle. Thus, for Trump to display indifference to the Assange case looks like a straight-faced poker player keeping his cards close to his chest.
Finally, the mainstream media, which disseminated the story that Assange worked with the Russians to exploit Hillary Clinton and the DNC’s computers, have naturally cheered his arrest. The Washington Post, for example, declared he was “no free-press hero,” while the Wall Street Journal called for “accountability,” saying, “His targets always seem to be democratic institutions or governments.” The 21st Century Wire, attempting to make sense of it all, asked in a headline, ‘Why has the Guardian declared war on Assange and WikiLeaks?’
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