Hear just a few clips, excerpts of not Fox, but of MSNBC and CNN introducing their guests.
JOY-ANN REID: Joining me now, MSNBC contributor Malcolm Nance and former CIA analyst Fred Fleitz.
ERIN BURNETT: The former CIA counterterrorism official Phil Mudd.
ANA CABRERA: I’m joined by former CIA undercover operative Lindsay Moran.
HALLIE JACKSON: Jeremy Bash, former chief of staff at the CIA and Department of Defense and an MSNBC national security analyst.
Allan Nairn talking:
many liberals are relying on authoritarian institutions to save them from the authoritarian, authoritarian institutions like the CIA, FBI, Pentagon. If you come from one of those places, you have a better chance of getting on, say, MSNBC than you do if you’re an activist.
the Trump administration and also the very radical Republican Party, which now controls both houses of Congress and 34 governorships and state legislatures. And they’ve already done a lot. I mean, Trump has an executive order demanding that two regulations, on things like health, safety, labor rights, air pollution, water pollution—everything you can imagine—get revoked for every new one that’s put in. They’re allowing institutions like Sinclair Broadcasting, which had an actual financial deal, exchange, with the Trump campaign, a radical right-wing outfit, to expand their TV station holdings nationwide to twice the level that would usually be allowed under the regulatory regime.
There’s many steps that are being taken that are not going to be rolled back, even if there is a change in administration. Even if you got, you know, a left-wing president, once Sinclair takes over ownership of those stations, they’re not going to—there’s no piece of paper they can sign to roll that back. Many of these actions they’re taking have—are either very difficult to reverse or they are irreversible, like death. You know, the various estimates about the repeal of Obamacare perhaps causing 28,000 deaths, 43,000 deaths, that’s not even to mention the amount of deaths that are occurring, the tens of thousands that are occurring, because of our failure, day by day, to implement a full coverage, as under single payer. You know, these consequences are irreversible. And they’re not—they haven’t achieved nearly as much as they could, because of Trump’s craziness. But they are moving.
And they are seeking to take advantage of the fact that the U.S. system is much less democratic than many people realize. There are a series of levers that can be used to overcome democracy, ranging from the Electoral College to a Senate system where a minority of voters have a vast—a large majority of senators, to congressional and state legislative-level gerrymandering, to the possibility of voter suppression, to the House and Senate rules which allow you to block a bill even if it has big support from a majority of the senators or House members. The only way to overcome these structural obstacles is through a mass wave of democratic participation, a grassroots surge. And that’s why they’re so interested in voter suppression, because they want to block that. They want to shrink the pool of voters to be dominated by their supporters.
for many months, you’ve seen like an 80/20 ratio of coverage, Russia/other matters. And I think the fact that the press has done that and that many liberals have let these two commercial outfits, CNN and MSNBC, largely dominate, set their political agenda, that’s one reason why Trump’s approval rating is as high as it is, you know, in the mid to high thirties.
I think if the ratio were reversed and you were giving 20 percent coverage to Russia, 80 percent to the actual substantive acts of Trump and the Republican Congress and the Republican governors, I think Trump’s rating would be down in the twenties, (now it’s only at 33 percent) because the fact facts are so outrageous. But because of the structural levers that the right has—now has control over on every front, because of the structural advantages, I—my own personal guess is if the Trump-Clinton election were rerun today, if the congressional elections were held today, I think Trump would squeak out another win. I think the Republicans would lose seats but narrowly retain control of Congress.
Look at the predictions before the general election, you know. And Trump, during the general election campaign, Trump’s approval ratings were often lower than they are right now. But it shouldn’t even be close. If the press were hammering away at the substance of what this rightist revolution is doing, they would be wiped out electorally.
the basic allegation is that Russia used U.S.-style election meddling against the U.S. Because that’s half of the mission of the CIA since the CIA was created, to intervene in foreign elections and foreign governments. There was one academic study that cited 81 cases of such intervention just between the end of World War II and the year 2000. Personally, my guess is, yeah, Russia probably did do an intervention like that. But even if the charges are true, even if Russia was the source of the WikiLeaks material and they sent in all the false news through bots, that would have—you could say that that tipped the election, because in such a close Electoral College election, any one of a dozen factors can be said to tip the election. But it would be impossible to make a legitimate case that such Russia intervention had more impact than, say, voter suppression, where, if you look at the voter suppression impact in the swing states that swung it to Trump, those numbers vastly, like in Wisconsin, for example, vastly outweigh Trump’s winning margin. So, if instead of that 80 percent of coverage being on Russia, had it been on, say, voter suppression, Kobach and the state—Republican state legislators, who have introduced a hundred voter suppression bills across the country, they wouldn’t be able to get away with it. They’d be—they’d be back on their heels.
The Trump immigration policy, as announced by Miller the other day, is inspired by the Immigration Act of 1924 and the white—the old White Australia policy. The 1924 act grew out the U.S. eugenics movement, which was pushed by the top academics at U.S. universities, and it claimed to be based on merit. They were using standardized test results to argue, at that time, in 1924, that Nordics and Aryans were intellectually superior, and the U.S.. had to exclude what they called the inferior races, who at that time they defined as Italians, Eastern Europeans, Africans, Asians and Jews. This led to the passage of the 1924 Immigration Act. And also the eugenics movement inspired things like forced sterilization laws. When the Nazis did their Nuremberg racial laws, they specifically cited these U.S. measures as a large part of their inspiration. The immigration law of 1924.
I did a chapter on this in the report I did years ago for Nader on the Educational Testing Service. “The Reign of ETS: The Corporation That Makes Up Minds” And that’s what Sessions and Miller and Trump are proposing again. But the key is, as Miller was talking about the other day, he was saying, “Oh, this will be immigration based on merit.” That’s exactly what they were saying in 1924, because the basic claim is Aryan whites have more merit.
Now Steve Miller is being considered—Stephen Miller—to be the communications chief. he does communicate their message, in a sense.
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Allan Nairn
longtime investigative journalist and activist.
— source democracynow.org 2017-08-09