Land of Secrets and Home of Censorship

Our American Tass and Pravda

This is another in a continuing series of “Best of” articles from my main Substack, “I Protest,” where I write regularly. You can subscribe to “I Protest” here: https://donaldjeffries.substack.com/

When I was a teenager, the first issue that really sparked my radicalism was Watergate. I was fascinated by the impressive work done by journalists, especially Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein. I decided that’s what I wanted to be- an investigative reporter, hopefully for the paper they worked for, The Washington Post.

Then I discovered just how much we’d been lied to about the JFK assassination. As a volunteer for Mark Lane’s Citizens Committee of Inquiry, I attempted to contact local reporters, whom I assumed would be fascinated by the cover up I’d discovered. After all, this was way bigger than Watergate. Dan Rather and company would really have a field day with the lies of the Warren Commission. But I was only able to contact a few of these journalists, and they weren’t remotely interested. The “magic bullet,” Oswald’s ridiculous alleged rifle, none of it interested them in the least.

Within a few years, I was politically sophisticated enough to realize what a fake scandal Watergate was. My inherent distrust of Nixon- obviously influenced by my father’s hatred of him, made it easy for me to accept the official narrative of what was in reality a confusing psyop. Not exactly the “third rate robbery” some claimed, but an obvious exaggeration of something very small and unimportant, into a major, front page story that resulted in the resignation of the President of the United States.

Later, I would speak several times with the late Len Colodny, who wrote the best-seller Silent Coup, which demolished the Woodward-Bernstein narrative. At any rate, I didn’t start liking Nixon, but I was beginning to understand that the political world wasn’t being honestly covered by the media I’d adored. I watched the horrific JFK disinformation documentary on CBS, starring my former hero Dan Rather, and the iconic Walter Cronkite, who reacted to the network’s expert sharpshooters failing to match the “rather poor shot” Oswald’s alleged performance on November 22, 1963 by saying, “This was different- Oswald was shooting at a president.”

I stopped wanting to be a member of the press, and started analyzing them. And once I began writing about Hidden History, I realized that this was all nothing new. Our so-called “free press” has been controlled by the government since at least the Civil War, when our secular saint Abraham Lincoln forcibly shut down more than 250 newspapers for criticizing him. in 1898, they promoted the first modern false flag, by falsely blaming the Spanish for blowing up the USS Maine. Media mogul William Randolph Hearst promised that “I’ll furnish the war.”

The media that advertised the slogan “Remember the Maine, to hell with Spain!” never printed any corrections, when even the odious court historians at length admitted that the Spanish hadn’t been responsible. The same thing happened with the false flag that set up American entrance into WWI, the sinking of the Lusitania. The “free press” parroted the government’s claims that Germany had sunk it, but again, they would eventually acknowledge that wasn’t true. No corrections by the newspapers of the day this time, either.

When Woodrow Wilson reacted with an iron authoritarianism to WWI protests, by throwing those who objected in jail, Eugene Debs and others appealed to the Supreme Court. In a decision that would have lasting ramifications, “liberal” Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes supported Wilson’s unconstitutional actions, and excused it by introducing the “you can’t yell fire in a crowded theater” asterisk to the First Amendment. However you look at it, Debs and the other WWI protesters were not yelling fire in a crowded theater.

The WWI era press, which had dutifully pushed pro-war propaganda on a more naive American population, didn’t object in the least to the First Amendment being abridged like that. Then, as now, obviously those paid handsomely to report the news don’t believe in free speech or true freedom of the press. Wilson created the Committee on Public Information, to disseminate pro-war propaganda to an initially dubious public. He chose George Creel, an alleged “muckraker” to head it. So, a muckraker- defined as a crusading journalist devoted to exposing corruption- was paid by the government to lie about the most senseless of all our senseless wars.

President Franklin D. Roosevelt built on the tyrannical precedents set by Lincoln and Wilson. Refining propaganda to an art, FDR created the Writers’ War Board, which boasted many literary luminaries of the day, like Franklin P. Adams, Pearl S. Buck, Stephen Vincent Benet, Edna Ferber, Langston Hughes, Edna St. Vincent Millay, Edward R. Murrow, Eugene O’Neill, Mary Roberts Rinehart, and Thornton Wilder, among many others. Under the auspices of the Treasury Department, it basically ensured that the best and brightest writers would unanimously support the war.

Many classical liberal journalists were involved in the America First Committees, with chapters all over the country. The New York chapter was led by mainstream journalist John T. Flynn, whose career was destroyed, largely through FDR’s direct efforts, because he dared to oppose American entrance into the new European war. This was before Pearl Harbor, of course. After that, we were “all in this together,” and out came the Victory Gardens, air raid drills, and “loose lips sink ships.” The entertainment media, from Hollywood to record companies, produced a nonstop barrage of pro-war propaganda. Buy Bonds!

Hard working, real journalists like H.L. Mencken were so rare that their voices were drowned out by the mob of establishment sycophants. The first person to question the “sneak” attack on Pearl Harbor, for instance, wasn’t a journalist. It was the much maligned Senator Joseph McCarthy. I’ll have much more about that in the upcoming book Hidden History 3. Our “free press” was silent about all the Allied atrocities, like the bombing of Dresden, or the post-war, Eisenhower-led “Operation Keelhaul.” I delve into these atrocities in depth in my book Crimes and Cover-Ups in American Politics: 1776-1963.

It’s seldom mentioned, but there really should have been a special addition to the First Amendment, to cover new inventions like radio and television. Because there wasn’t, the enemies of free speech (who have always been in power), engineered the creation of the Federal Communications Commission. The FCC ensured that radio broadcasts and television shows would seldom tread into conspiratorial waters. I can’t find evidence of any intrepid journalists objecting to the creation of the FCC. The only modern critics of the FCC have been those like Howard Stern, who want to be able to use profanity and talk incessantly about sex.

When JFK was assassinated, not a single mainstream journalist attempted to investigate the crime. Except Dorothy Kilgallen, who was also one of the stars of the hit TV show What’s my Line. Dorothy died under extremely strange circumstances, and her JFK files were never found. They may have disappeared along with her best friend, Florence Pritchett Smith, who died under equally mysterious circumstances the day after Dorothy. And for good measure, Florence happened to have been a former lover of JFK’s. Move along- nothing to see here.

All you need to know about the mainstream media coverage of the JFK assassination is the fact that one of the three major television networks- NBC- agreed in writing on December 11, 1963, to broadcast “only those items which are in consonance with” the FBI report. Think about that; a major television network, with stars like Huntley and Brinkley- agreeing in writing to not televise anything that deviated from the transparently ridiculous official story. I don’t think that’s what the Founders had in mind when they talked about freedom of the press.

The only reason public skepticism about the JFK assassination became so widespread, was due to the efforts of private citizens like Mark Lane, Harold Weisberg, Shirley Martin, Sylvia Meagher, Vincent Salandria, and many others. The only professional journalists who ever exposed the absurdity of the lone-assassin theory were Texas newspaper reporters Jim Marrs and Earl Golz. And Penn Jones, who was editor of the small Midlothian Mirror and wrote the Forgive my Grief series of books, which first focused attention on all the unnatural deaths of those connected to the case.

When JFK’s brother Robert F. Kennedy was assassinated too in 1968, not a single member of the vaunted press attempted to connect the two murders. As I’ve said many times, if JFK hadn’t been assassinated, RFK never would have been. In Hollywood, Orson Welles tried for years to get a movie about the RFK assassination filmed, with Sal Mineo playing Sirhan Sirhan. It never happened, and Mineo became another entry in the Body Count, when he was stabbed to death in 1976. Freddie Prinze was another unnatural death associated with the JFK assassination, as I recounted in Hidden History. So was John Belushi.

My books have covered all the corruption, conspiracies, and cover-ups that our “free press” missed. Waco, where American adults and children were murdered by the government, using a gas that was banned in warfare by the Geneva Convention. The Oklahoma City Bombing, where an Oswald-like patsy and a magic fertilizer bomb were blamed for the deaths of 168 people, including children at a day-care center. The evidence of explosives inside the building was everywhere, as I will show clearly in Hidden History 3.

Bill Clinton’s crimes, along with the accompanying Body Count, became the stuff of legend in the early, Wild West era of the internet. But not on television, or any other part of our state-controlled mainstream media. Even conservatives like Bill O’Reilly avoided Clinton’s real scandals like the plague. No Vince Foster talk. And NBC sat on Juanita Broderick’s rape allegations against our illustrious president until after the 1996 election. Obviously, because they wanted him to win. Again, not exactly what you’d expect from “investigative” reporters.

Our “free press” were shameful cheerleaders for Bush the Elder’s “Gulf War,” and introduced various talking head military generals, to “analyze” things for the people. You could pick your favorite soldier from among the “competing” television networks. They unquestioningly passed along the laughable “weapons of mass destruction” lie against our former CIA puppet Saddam Hussein. The only people or institutions that our media did question were those that threatened the powers that be. They were skeptical of the skeptics.

In my Hidden History books, I examined so many stories that were ignored or buried by the “free press.” Take the suicide of Pennsylvania state treasurer R. Budd Dwyer, who shot himself during a 1987 press conference. Every organ in the mainstream media reported that Dwyer stuck a gun in his mouth, after reading “a long rambling note.” They all described it those exact same words. The feisty populist weekly The Spotlight published his “long rambling note.” It was, in fact, a detailed indictment against them Governor Richard Thorburgh, who would go on to become Bush the Elder’s Attorney General. The Spotlight also interviewed Dwyer’s widow.

How about the suspicious death of Lori Klausutis? The attractive twenty eight year old was an aide to then Congressman Joe Scarborough. She was found dead in his Florida congressional office, with a head wound. I went into the details of this long neglected case in Hidden History. Suffice to say, “journalists” saw nothing to investigate here. I have been unable to contact Lori’s relatives over the years, and outside of my book, nothing new has been written about the case. Scarborough, of course, went from a conservative Republican in Congress to the “Woke” monstrosity on MSNBC, with Zbigniew Brzezinksi’s daughter as his co-host (and wife).

With the election of Donald Trump, and his castigation of our media as “fake news,” the press went into Orwellian mode. The Cronkites, Brokaws, and Rathers had all at least made a pretense at being objective. Of course, they weren’t. Cronkite, for example, was the voice of the giant owl at Bohemian Grove for decades, during their bizarre, male-only occult rituals. In 1999, while receiving the Norman Cousins Award (Cousins was yet another war-loving, anti-liberty “journalist”), Cronkite quipped, “I’m glad to sit here at the right hand of Satan.” I guess you had to be there.

But now, if you can stomach CNN or MSNBC coverage for even a few minutes, you will see partisanship that was once confined to drunk delegates at national political conventions. Every broadcast is one of advocacy, not of reporting. They interpret the news for you. That’s why they despise the idea that common riff-raff like me can communicate to the public, without their censorship. They hate Substack, and Rokfin, and the internet in general. They are outraged that you and I can create blogs, and our own videos. Without FCC approval. They are incredibly weak competition in the marketplace of ideas. But they’ve rigged the game, and so they keep “winning.”

I have to thank our state-controlled media, and the court historians that are employed to gatekeep the past, for one thing. Without their dishonest reporting, and continuous disinformation about every subject known to man (okay, make that humankind), my own work wouldn’t be possible. After all, almost everything I write is an attempt to expose their corruption and lies, in the present day, and throughout the past. If they’d actually done their job, then what would I have to write about? I guess I’d be writing movie reviews or covering sports. And I could have been hired for that, because with a free press, honesty would be welcomed in the worlds of sports and entertainment.

But the press is controlled across the board. Sportswriters are all, and I mean all, “Woke” virtue signalers, and largely always have been. These same social justice warriors control whatever is written about the entertainment world as well. Children’s literature is dominated by the “Woke” authoritarians. How else can we explain books like Heather has two Mommies being published, and distributed to schools? I’m fortunate that publishers like Skyhorse exist, and will publish books that are as controversial as mine.

There are no intrepid Lois Lanes out there, doing anything to get a big “scoop.” There are no James Gleason-style character actors, with a whiskey bottle at his side and a cigarette dangling from his mouth, as he pecks out the latest front page story, which will bring down some powerful figure. Bob Woodward himself, one of my early heroes, worked in Naval Intelligence and had a slew of curious connections. He also doesn’t footnote his nonfiction books. I can’t respect any writer who does that. Bernstein wrote a decent article about the CIA for Rolling Stone back in the 1970s, but has become yet another tired “liberal” who opposes anything good or decent.

Many high profile “journalists” have been members of the Council on Foreign Relations. They also invite at least a few of them to the yearly Bilderberg confabs, which they have always been ordered to keep secret. Imagine that, “curious” reporters, agreeing not to publicize anything about a meeting involving powerful government and corporate leaders from all over the world. Yet these same “journalists” will risk their lives to get a photo of some stupid celebrity wedding.

The Soviet Union had official, government sponsored news outlets like Tass and Pravda. Americans understood how incompatible that would be in a free country. For all intents and purposes, our television networks, The New York Times, Time-Warner, and their ilk are our Tass and Pravdas. The only difference is that the Russian people were astute enough to realize that they had state-controlled media. Most Americans, on the other hand, continue to believe that the likes of CNN and The Washington Post are “reliable sources,” and independent organs of a free press.

“Our liberty depends on the freedom of the press, and that cannot be limited without being lost,” Thomas Jefferson said. JFK, once an aspiring journalist himself, was a staunch defender of the First Amendment. “There is very grave danger that an announced need for increased security will be seized upon by those anxious to expand its meaning to the very limits of official censorship and concealment.” JFK declared. He also noted, “Without debate, without criticism, no administration and no country can succeed — and no republic can survive.”

Except for the Trump administration, which I believe was part of what I have dubbed the Trumpenstein Project, our “free press” has not permitted any real debate on matters of war, or class, or race, or official corruption. The press was literally at war, and remains at war, with Trump’s most attractive rhetoric. Anything that goes against the official narrative is dismissed as a “conspiracy theory.” Discussion over. No evidence needed. Just predictable name-calling. One “racist” or “White Supremacist” should suffice. The Bill of Rights weren’t written for this.

One honest national television network, just like a clear majority of honest congressional representatives, could bring down the whole rotten house of cards. But we don’t even seem to have one honest mainstream journalist. They might as well have their talking points, and approved stories, assigned to them from some dark intelligence agency. Maybe they do. Support Substack, and all the other free speech platforms. We are doing the work that highly paid professionals won’t do.