All right, y'all, welcome to the Scott Horton Show.
I am the Director of the Libertarian Institute, Editorial Director of Antiwar.com, author of the book Fool's Errand, Time to End the War in Afghanistan, and I've recorded more than 5,000 interviews going back to 2003, all of which are available at scotthorton.org.
We can also sign up for the podcast feed.
The full archive is also available at youtube.com slash scotthortonshow.
All right, you guys, on the line, I've got Alan McLeod, and he is Senior Staff Writer for Mint Press News, and we also find him from time to time over at Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting, and this one's a bit of a doozy here.
Facebook hires NATO Press Officer as Intelligence Chief.
This is the sovereign state of Facebook.
Welcome back to the show.
How are you doing, Alan?
It's good to be with you.
Good to have you here.
So, who is Ben Nimmo?
Well, Ben Nimmo is the new Facebook Intelligence Chief.
He's been described as the Witchfinder General for Russiagate.
For the past 10 years or so- The what finder?
The Witchfinder General.
The Witchfinder General.
I like that.
Was that a Blumenthal quote?
I think it was Craig Murray, a former British Ambassador to Uzbekistan who called him that, actually.
I like that very much.
Okay, I'm sorry.
Please go ahead.
Yeah, the last 10 years, he's really been involved in disinformation, counter disinformation, online warfare.
And one of his roles, I mean, he's had a lot.
He's been in a lot of think tanks.
He's worked for the Atlantic Council, but perhaps the most notable of his roles has been as NATO Press Officer, which is basically the public relations side of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, the organization which is bombing or occupying a number of Middle Eastern countries as we speak.
And Nemo has basically been one of the most prominent proponents of the Russiagate theory.
And he has outed an awful lot of people as being secretly Kremlin aligned or mouthpieces for Vladimir Putin.
And he does it using all sorts of complex technical big data formulas, which seem to prove that Russia is behind everything from, you know, the January 6th uprising to the election of Donald Trump in 2016.
But I think more generally, I think this is a big problematic part of our modern media discourse.
I mean, people think of social media as this big open sea where, you know, everybody gets to speak.
But in reality, it's being controlled by very large corporations who have connections to the U.S. government.
And this is just one more example of this, you know, I mean, Facebook, Twitter, etc.
They've all got either contracts with the U.S. government or they're employing people who used to be spokespersons for certain defense contractors or what have you.
And it's just another example of the intertwining of state and media, which is going on right now to the point where it's difficult sometimes to see where the deep state ends and the fourth estate begins.
Yeah, well, it's been like that for a while now, too.
But yeah, it is interesting.
I mean, I remember when the suppression, the organized suppression of the Republicans' October surprise happened, Hunter Biden's laptop episode and all that in October before the election, Greenwald highlighted this, that it was, I forgot the guy's exact position, but was a very high ranking Democratic Party official who was in charge of whatever the office was at Facebook, who announced that we're claiming that this is Russian and we're suppressing it.
We're not going to let anybody post anything about it.
And the conflict of interest there is just, what else could you say about it?
I mean, this guy came from the Democratic Party to Facebook and here he is squashing a story that makes the Democrats look back and based on a complete and ridiculous lie that the Russians must have planted this laptop at this repair shop in Delaware.
That's true.
It was just incredible.
It's an increasing aspect of the revolving door between the Democratic Party and Silicon Valley.
It's well known that Silicon Valley in general tends to prefer the Democrats over the Republicans.
The Republicans have got their own big corporate constituents, like, for instance, the big oil manufacturers tend to like the GOP a bit more.
But yeah, that was astonishing in October when that story came out, that the media was just, and social media as well, were just squashing the New York Post reporting about Biden's connections to Ukraine.
And we just found out very recently when Nathan J. Robinson was kicked out of the Guardian for criticizing Israel, he said he only ever had one column spiked and the column he got spiked for political reasons was a column criticizing Biden for his connections to Ukraine and representing this whole Burisma scandal.
So the Guardian was at it as well from across the pond.
And you know, they've had this whole thing from the beginning too, where, and this is very convenient for the center-left liberal Democrats, that, hey, look, as we're purging all these right-wingers and libertarians off of the internet, we're going after leftists too.
See?
We persecute the World Socialist website and persecute the truth out in the truth digs.
See?
So there's balance here.
It's not partisan.
They're just suppressing the voices of regular people who are trying to participate in politics outside of their system.
So you can either be a Democrat or you're a terrorist, or at least a white supremacist or some kind of disinformation project.
And so, you know, if you're a leftist, anyone on the right is a white supremacist, I guess.
Anyone on the left is, I don't know what, they're just, I don't even know if they really use excuses or not, like they didn't even have a case against the World Socialist website at all, other than, see, we're being fair by also going after these guys.
Yeah, exactly.
I mean, throughout the 90s and the 2000s, we sort of thought about the internet as this amazing Wild West where people could really get their views out.
And to a certain extent, that was true, you know, I mean, people were able to build up big followings completely away from the corporate media setting.
But since 2016, and this hysteria about fake news, which, you know, there is plenty of fake news on the internet, do not get me wrong, there's a ton of like low quality websites out there which are doing well.
But the real upshot of all these algorithm changes, which were demanded by politicians has been to limit the range of debate and retighten the corporate grip over the means of communication.
So as you said, all these left wing websites were purged, antiwar.com I know has been hit really hard with this.
There's also a lot of right wing websites, which is, this is going on as well.
And basically what it seems to, what seems to be happening is to, it's really an attempt to try and narrow the range of opinion towards something along the lines of a Liz Warren kind of Democrat to a Jeb Bush kind of Republican, right?
And anyone who doesn't fit in that beltway is really not welcome, either in corporate media, we already know that, but also online.
And that's the real worry about this, which is, a lot of people are going to start losing their voices, or at least starting to lose their influence, and their ability to actually speak to other people online because of this.
Yeah.
You know, it's funny, when they first changed the Facebook algorithm, from you get to see whatever you wanted to see, to you get to see whatever we are going to show you.
Back years ago, I remember my first instinct was, well, this isn't going to fly.
This algorithm sucks now.
And so people, there's going to be an outcry and they're going to have to turn it back.
And then of course, that was stupid.
And then I quit just a few weeks later, because I realized it.
I had this giant community that Facebook essentially had taken from my blog, where everyone had just moved all of their internetting to Facebook from wherever comment sections we had communities.
But I had a constant community of people who lived on my wall, because my posts were on their feed, but it was the same, I don't know, 50 or 100 people or something, with others coming in and out, but there was a community of people on my Facebook page every day.
And then they were gone, because they weren't going to just type in slash Scott Horton Show every time, right?
If they're not seeing it, they're just not seeing it.
And they were just gone.
And then Facebook started telling me, if he wants to show this post to anybody, you have to give us $40.
And then that was when I was like, yeah, screw you guys and just quit the thing.
I still have a guy who runs my page for me, but I haven't even dropped by since.
I'm just done.
But that's the thing of it, right?
Is that doesn't everybody feel like we feel about that?
Like, you can't, what are you doing, man?
If I clicked on this kind of car that I clicked like on this kind of car, now, you know, what kind of special instructions do I have to enter to see their posts, man?
What if I want to see that?
Or this kind of politics, or whatever it is, this movie that I like that's coming out?
Who gets to decide whether I see it or not, other than whether I click like?
And so I'm sorry, I'm rambling.
But here's the point, though, is isn't some app that is not dependent on any Zuckerberg or any whatever that guy's named, Zach or whoever at Twitter, that it's just an app that everybody has?
Isn't that going to supplant Twitter and Facebook, like, presently?
What are we waiting for?
Why is it Mines and Mastodon and these other websites?
I guess Telegram is a bit like what I'm talking about, right?
That's how it should be.
Where everybody has the app, there is no website.
It's the app, and everybody interconnects with it that way.
And then there's not a company in California who can tell us what we're allowed to think or not.
Right.
But, you know, as soon as these sorts of apps start getting big, you know, Google was once an upstart company with the motto, don't be evil, and a real sort of anti establishment ethos about it.
But what happens is when that money starts rolling in, and when people start signing those checks, and you start making deals with big government, things start to change.
You know, we saw all sorts of companies change from being sort of plucky forums to becoming enormous corporate, you know, behemoths.
Reddit is a great example.
Just a few years ago, it was this really anarchistic kind of, you know, a disconnected peer to peer network.
But now when you look at, you know, who controls it, the director of policy at Reddit is a former Atlantic Council employee and a former, you know, that's the basically the front for NATO.
So we really have to start looking about these connections and what's going on and who actually controls and owns the means of communication, because the rules can change whenever they want.
You know, they can just send you a thing which says, these are the terms of service and everyone clicks I agree, and they don't know what's going on.
They don't know what data they're giving up.
They don't know what changes to the algorithm is going on.
I think most people, when you explain it to them, they are very concerned about it.
But most people just don't hear about it, because you know, where are they going to hear about it from?
These big companies have no interest in showing you how the how the sausage is made.
And so the process just continues.
Yeah.
You know, and as you said, too, and this is really worth highlighting, all this started just because the Democrats lost in 2016.
And they made up all these lies that the Russians stole it from them.
And they even the New York Times ran a big thing about, you know, these actual fake news sites when that word actually had a definition.
It meant sites like the EU Times, where every story was just made up.
Right.
And then there was this group of and that goes back a little further.
But then there was this group of Macedonian teenagers who all figured out how to copy each other's HTML and make these sort of fake newspapers, the Denver Post Intelligencer or whatever.
They just make up a new one.
Yeah.
And then say the Pope endorsed Donald Trump and then post that on Facebook where they knew that right wing idiots would click on it.
And then they're just making money.
And so the New York Times ran this whole thing about, yeah, it was a bunch of Macedonian teenagers were the ones doing that.
And then, no, it doesn't matter.
We're just going to pretend that it was all cooked up in Vladimir Putin's office.
And then based on that lie, they have begun this entire new era of censorship.
It's had a massive utility, that story.
And that's why it keeps going on, even after years and years of it getting punctured constantly.
You know, I'm thinking the Miller Report and all of that.
There's a huge utility for corporate media, for one, because it allows them to retake control over the Internet.
There's a huge utility for people like Hillary Clinton and the establishment Democrats because it gives them a convenient excuse as to why they lost against the least popular presidential candidate in American history.
And it means that they certainly don't have to look at themselves or even cede any ground to the Bernie or AOC wing of the party.
No, no, no.
Let's just keep things as they're going.
And there's also a huge utility for the national security state because it's as g'd up a huge amount of liberals into jingoistic FBI, CIA supporting types.
Whereas a generation ago, that would have been unthinkable that you'd sort of that liberals would support that kind of closed, unaccountable power.
But you know, that's now what's going on.
Suddenly everybody's praising the FBI, loving the CIA.
I even see kind of anti-establishment outlets like the Young Turks doing that.
It's astonishing how this sort of partisan mindset has made so many people just lose their minds.
It is.
It's just nuts.
And, you know, as much as Trump was a great psyop on the right in the one major sense of telling them, don't we all renounce George Bush's wars?
Yeah.
And they all went, yeah.
So that was wonderful.
But at the same time, even besides the fake Russiagate hoax, allegation, frame up job against him and all that, he's such a bananas type of a, you know, basket case of a chaotic so-called leader up there for all that time that, you know, they get to claim somewhat credibly.
I'm not saying I believe it, but I'm just saying they can spin this narrative that everything was fine until Mr. Basket Case came and screwed everything up and all of that.
And that was an aberration and it wasn't fair.
And the Russians intervened and did it.
Otherwise it would have been like this all along, which is what the American people want.
And he has, we have no one to blame but him for that.
You know what I mean?
As far as them framing him up on Russia and all that aside, still, he acted like a child every day for four years, no matter what.
And that makes Joe Biden, for God's sake, Bill Clinton's little brother makes him look like the reasonable guy in town.
You know, the whole thing is just a mess.
And the cycle is going to continue for four years again, because we found a convenient scapegoat to blame all of America's problems on.
I mean, listen, I think Trump's got plenty of problems, but he he was a symptom of a much deeper malaise.
He wasn't the cause of it, frankly.
Right.
Of course, he was the American people's attempt.
And it's funny you mention how he is the least popular candidate ever and all of that.
Norm Macdonald had a great joke about this.
We said the American people hated Hillary Clinton so much.
And he could have been saying to the whole establishment that she stood for, too.
But the American people hated her so much.
They voted for someone they hated even more than her just to make the point to her how much they hated her, you know, just to just to really drive home the repudiation that this is who we're going to repudiate you with.
But then just unfortunately, he brought nothing but disaster to the tale.
I guess he did shake hands with Kim and I was going to say one other nice thing.
I forgot that was it.
But oh, and he signed the Afghan withdrawal deal.
But other than that, I mean, he let them make the case that, boy, we don't ever want to let the American people pick a president again.
Look what happened that time.
You know, Bush's and Clinton's from now on.
Yeah.
And Biden's promised, you know, nothing will fundamentally change.
So it tends sounds like it's going to be four years of him trying to reach across the aisle to the Republicans and the Republicans rejecting him.
So more centrist establishment politics and nothing like that is going to heal the great wounds that are scarring American society right now, which makes the likelihood of another Trump Trumpist like figure appearing all the more likely.
And one who almost by definition would have to be more competent than him at the things that he was bad on.
Yeah.
And I'll tell you what, people don't like being censored.
You know, I interviewed this lady, Cynthia Storer, from the CIA about I forgot exactly what all.
But she was the one who confirmed to me that there were only 400 al-Qaeda in Afghanistan in 2001, which was nice.
She was a pretty high level CIA counterterrorism analyst.
And she was saying, look, and we're talking about radical Islam and this and that.
And she was saying, look, terrorism, the CIA's framework, she called it.
The CIA's framework for what causes terrorism doesn't have a damn thing to do with religion.
Religion is not even on the piece of paper, has nothing to do with it.
Terrorism is what happens when people feel like there's nothing else they can do to strike back against unaccountable power.
You know, you won't let us run for election.
You won't let us hold a protest.
You won't let us do this.
You won't let us do that.
I guess we're going to have to start assassinating you.
That's where it comes from.
And, you know, same as kind of everywhere.
And here, these people's narrative is that the entire right half of the American population are all white supremacist Nazi terrorists.
And we're going to outlaw them speaking, at least de facto.
We're going to try to prevent them from being able to communicate with each other about anything.
I mean, from the CIA's own way of looking at this, their framework of looking at this, you're just guaranteeing that when they are allowed to speak to each other, the maddest voices are the ones that are heard, that look at what our enemies are doing to us and how long are we going to stand for this.
And then the next step is violence.
This is all a self-fulfilling prophecy on the part of the Democrats.
I guess for the FBI and Homeland Security and the Democratic Party, it'll be great, but it'll destroy our society.
Yeah, I mean, I think when you look at the polls, the vast majority of people think the United States is going in the wrong direction, that people are getting more suspicious of other people, especially if they don't belong to the same political clique as them.
This is not a recipe for a healthy society.
Even though Biden talks about bringing everybody together, his policies around not giving people a $2,000 check, not doing any kind of medical relief, not doing any kind of huge infrastructural bill or a jobs guarantee, this is going to make sure that the rich keep getting richer over the next four years and the poor keep getting more desperate.
And that is a recipe for a disaster.
I don't know what's going to happen, but it's certainly, we're not on the train to the right sort of destination right now.
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Well, and the fact that they're keeping these lockdowns, too, and just bankrupting, what, the bottom half of all businesses in America, so that we're all living in some dystopia, like an idiocracy, where Costco is the whole economy.
It's completely crazy.
And then, as you say, they force everybody out of work, turn business owners into homeless people, and then they give them $1,200 a year?
What's that going to do?
That won't pay your rent for a month.
In Austin, Texas, you can't get an efficiency for that.
You kidding me?
You can go buy a tent from Academy Surplus and live in the woods.
Yeah, man, evictions are going crazy as well.
I mean, Texas is the worst we've seen.
We've seen over 11,000 people, by one estimate, have died as a result of being evicted during the COVID pandemic, which is just crazy.
And at the same time, you have every Californian fleeing the totalitarian police state out there coming to Texas, and they're just gentrifying the entire city of Austin of Austinites.
You can't find an Austinite anywhere, because it's all Californians came in, and the price of housing is going up like 10% every couple of months right now.
It's completely insane.
The inventory of houses on the market is two days.
And so, that means that all those people who were forced out of a job because they couldn't pay their rent, they're not ever going to be able to pay rent again, either, because it just went up $500.
And they're never going to be able to buy a house, either, because they just went up from $300,000 to $375,000 to get into a house in the last few months, because of the distortions of this economy like you're talking about.
So, yeah, it's going to be bananas.
You think last year was bad?
It's only just getting started.
Oh, and, by the way, it's going to be illegal for us to complain about this.
Right now, we're getting away with this, Alan, because of the podcast loophole, which is soon to be closed.
And this will be posted at the top of Antiwar.com, which, as you already said, has been deranked by Google so that nobody can see it.
I mean, which is not true, not nobody, but you have to be looking for it, pretty much.
And these will be the good old days, back when this was all just beginning here in a little while, I think.
Yeah, I mean, this is one of the major things that people don't think about when they think about censorship or propaganda or fake news, is how much power these massive corporations have over what we see and what we don't see, crucially.
You know, if you get demoted to the second page of a Google search result, that is catastrophic for your business.
And what's been happening is a ton of alternative media have been going out of business because suddenly they get 30, 40, 50 percent less traffic than they did last month.
And they have to downsize, they have to fire people, or sometimes they just have to pack it up and say, let's go, that's it.
And so Google and Facebook are having a highly deleterious effect on both, both alternative media, but also legacy media, because especially local outlets used to really just rely on small listings, little advertisings to really keep going.
But now Facebook marketplace has just taken that away.
And Google AdSense is just a much better way of tracking customers and getting to the people you want.
And so the entire business model for media has been just ripped under, you know, taken away from under their feet.
And these big legacy media outlets are scrambling to try and to try and find some way to keep going.
And it's the same for alternative media, but they have far fewer resources, so they're hitting the wall faster.
Yeah.
Yeah.
I saw a thing.
There's this famous independent reporter, Ford Fisher, who's done such great work, who's not a partisan at all.
He's not a participant.
He's simply a reporter, a documentarian filming these different protest movements and stuff, Black Lives Matter and three percenters and these kinds of things.
And I guess he had some footage from the Capitol riot and he had a tweet yesterday showing how on Google, on YouTube, the Democrats had used one of his clips in the presentation and NBC played that clip and YouTube let that go out.
No problem.
But the exact same clip, his clip that they used when he posts it, they derank it and put big warnings over it and say that this is not suitable.
And in fact, I think they even pulled it.
I forgot exactly.
But, you know, they were certain they even kicked him off of YouTube entirely a few days ago and then, I guess, had to concede and let him back on again.
I saw a great tweet about this, too, that I had not thought of this.
But they said pretty soon, and this is the only reason it worked on me, was I saw this tweet said pretty soon it's going to dawn on the American people that the same people who are choosing what they're allowed to see on Facebook and Google are the same Indians in the call centers that they get when they try to call customer service.
That's who's our overlords here are Indian contractors who, yeah, they speak English because they used to be imperialized by the British.
But otherwise, they have authority over you and me because of what?
Because the Democrats insisted that Facebook give it to them?
This is insane, man.
And he must be right about that, right?
This isn't all, you know, I mean, not that it would be any better if it was people in your town, but that just makes it seem more perverse.
You know what I mean?
Not that I have anything against Indians, just this is my country and that's theirs.
And why would I be in charge of censoring them any more than them being in charge of censoring me?
You know?
Well, you know, Facebook and, you know, WhatsApp or Twitter or YouTube actually have worldwide power.
You know, Facebook's got over two and a half billion users worldwide.
And there was a case about a year ago where Trump assassinated General Soleimani.
Now Soleimani is head of the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps, which is a terrorist organization, according to the White House.
And what that means is, is that Facebook, because it's an American company, has to take down any pro-Soleimani or IRGC content across its platforms, which meant that in the wake of Trump killing the most popular man in Iran, they had to take down on Instagram, on WhatsApp, on Facebook, any pro-Soleimani messages from Iranians speaking in Farsi to other Iranians in Iran.
And that was done because the White House basically commanded Facebook to do so.
And it just kind of shows you the sort of a creeping state censorship, you know, a sort of one step away from a global state censorship network, which is going on.
And it's something that people really are not aware is going on, frankly, I think we need to be because it's one of the most pressing problems in media studies and society right now.
Yeah.
Well, listen, I hope this doesn't sound like cynical or corny or, you know, some kind of ripoff or anything.
It's meaningful to me that Tommy Raskin, our great writer at the Libertarian Institute and great peace activist who committed suicide on New Year's Eve, sadly, his last piece for us was the anti-war movement must fight for the First Amendment.
In other words, those of us who do know, like you just said, most people don't, boy, is getting coming on us to fight like hell right now before it's too late.
That's it.
Yeah, man.
Speak the truth.
All right.
Listen, I'm so sorry I'm out of time here because I wanted to ask you more about Ben Nimmo.
But I took you all over the place in this thing.
But everyone, please go and read this horrifying article at Mint Press News and spread it around as much as you can past the shadow bands.
Facebook hires NATO press officer as intelligence chief.
Thank you.
No worries.
Nice to speak to you.
The Scott Horton Show, anti-war radio, can be heard on KPFK 90.7 FM in L.A., APSradio.com, antiwar.com, scotthorton.org, and libertarianinstitute.org.
