POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH

Forza Berlusconi! Silvio in Sardinia

A brilliant essay below by Boris Johnson. As one rather expects of a Latinist, Boris is a past-master at English writing and he magnificently turns his talent below to writing humorous and vivid prose. You have to know what an inflorescence is, though.

I grew up among Italians and tend to like them and Berlusconi was enormousely Italian -- something that Italians recognized well and rewarded with their votes. I miss him and am pleased that the essay below encapsulates him so marvelously

My favourite Silvio anecdote is when he congratulated Barack Obama on his suntan. The American media were beside themselves with horror over it but Italians laughed

Silvio Berlusconi, who had three spells as Italian prime minister, has died at the age of 86. Boris Johnson, at the time editor of this magazine, and Nicholas Farrell were summoned to interview him in 2003.

It is twilight in Sardinia. The sun has vanished behind the beetling crags. The crickets have momentarily stopped. The machine-gun-toting guards face out into the maquis of myrtle and olive, and the richest man in Europe is gripping me by the upper arm. His voice is excited. ‘Look’ he says, pointing his flashlight. ‘Look at the strength of that tree.’ It is indeed a suggestive sight.

An olive of seemingly Jurassic antiquity has grown from a crack in the rock, and like some patient wooden python it has split the huge grey boulder in two. ‘Extraordinary,’ I murmur. My host and I stand lost in awe at olive power. If Silvio Berlusconi, 67, Italian Prime Minister, is secretly hoping that a metaphor will form in my head, he is not disappointed.

What does it show, this outrageous olive, but the force which through the green fuse drives Berlusconi himself? And what does it stand for, this colossal cracked stone? You could try the Italian political establishment; or the European liberal elite; or just civilised Western opinion: all things which Silvio has scandalised and divided. Only last week the Swedish foreign minister, Anna Lindh, anathematised not just Berlusconi, but Italy itself.

Under the government of Forza Italia, she claimed, Italy could no longer be said to be part of the Western European tradition or share its values. You may think that a flaming cheek, given that Europe’s founding text is the Treaty of Rome. Where was Sweden, hey, at the 1955 Conference of Messina? You may find, like me, that at the sight of Berlusconi being monstered by Anna Lindh, your sword instinctively flies from its scabbard in his defence. But it was the attack by the Economist newspaper that, I suspect, got in among Berlusconi and his team, not least because it is read in — or lies inert on the coffee tables of – American boardrooms.

Twice now, this distinguished paper (motto: the wit to be dull) has given Silvio a frenzied kicking. It has said that he is not fit to govern Italy, and in a recent edition it laid 28 charges against him and said that not only was he unfit to govern Italy, he was also unfit to be president of the EU — an office he holds until December. It is the Economist attack which may have contributed to the presence of The Spectator here amid the wattle and rosemary of his 170 acre Costa Smeralda estate. Nick Farrell, our Italy correspondent and biographer of Mussolini, has flown in from Predappio. I have been summoned from the other side of the island where, coincidentally, the Johnson family has also been staying in infinitely less splendid accommodation.

When Farrell and I meet for a tactics talk in a Porto Rotondo bar, we decide that the charges must of course be raised with signor il presidente, as the Prime Minister is confusingly called. But we know that we are unlikely to reach a verdict on the key questions, relating as they do to the abortive 1985 sale of a state-owned biscuit company to Buitoni, the spaghetti kings. Let us leave those matters to the lawyers and the desiccated calculators of the Economist. We have a broader and higher purpose: that is, to establish whether or not we feel that Sig. Berlusconi is on the whole a force for good in Italy, Europe and the world.

For three hours we have been in his presence. We have sat at a table in his drawing room, Berlusconi at the head, nipples showing through his white Marlon Brando pyjama-suit, and from time to time that table has been pounded vigorously enough to shake the glass bibelots and naked female figurines that dot the room. We have drunk pints of sweet iced tea, brought silently and unprompted, as he has outlined his robust, neo-conservative view of the world. At one stage, after about an hour, the Prime Minister has vanished into the kitchen himself, and caused the appearance of three plates of vanilla and pistachio ice cream, as if to refuel his torrential loquacity. We have heard him extol Thatcher, praise Blair (I have never known us to disagree on anything), laud Bush and damn the Italian magistracy as ‘anthropologically diverse from the rest of humanity.’

It has been, says Valentino, his charming interpreter, the most detailed and generous interview that the leader has ever given, and by 7 p.m. Farrell and I are feeling, frankly, a bit limp. But there is no stopping the balding, beaming, bouncing multi-billionaire. He had a brush with cancer a couple of years ago; his skin is a little sallow for a man who has spent August in Sardinia; he looks less like a million dollars than a million lire. But he is the fizziest old dog you have ever seen. ‘Facciamo un giro,’ he says, by which he means, let’s go for a ride.

When Berlusconi takes the wheel of a golf buggy, he does not trundle: he prefers to whang it and weave it down the swept paths of his estate, like Niki Lauda on the Monza hairpin. And as his passengers sway like sea anemones, he gestures at a landscape which is, of course, naturally lovely, with the sun setting and the Tyrrhenian sea turning from indigo to faded denim. But everywhere he sees signs of his own handiwork and everything seems somehow the product of his own imagination. ‘There’ he says, pointing to a bank of blue plumbago. ‘This is the flower of Forza Italia. The flower doesn’t know it, but I know it.’

Forza Italia! Come on, Italy! The very name, with its football-terrace echo, is enough to wrinkle the nostrils of Anna Lindh and the Euro-nomenklatura. Forza Italia was the movement he founded in 1994 with his $12 billion fortune, and with which he first seized the premiership, only to lose it when his right-wing allies ratted on him, and the lawyers closed in. He was indicted on various charges of bribery and corruption. He struggled on in opposition. But the forza was strong in Berlusconi and in 2001 he came storming back. From port to port went the Forza Italia cruise ship — not unlike the one on which the 17-year-old Berlusconi had sung — and adoring crowds were produced for the cameras. At a cost of $20 million he peppered 12 million Italian households with his magnificent, 128-page all-colour Berluscography, An Italian Life. In it they found a story of fantastic, volcanic American self-propulsion; the early skill in Latin and Greek, a facility he hired for cash to less able pupils; the devoted friends who have remained with him as he expanded his empire, beginning with the town he built in 1960 in a swamp outside Milan which has 4,000 inhabitants and which seems from its photographs to be agreeable in a Milton Keynes-ish way.

We have sat at a table in his drawing room, Berlusconi at the head, nipples showing through his white Marlon Brando pyjama-suit, and from time to time that table has been pounded vigorously enough to shake the glass bibelots and naked female figurines that dot the room

They learnt of his first wife and how their feelings for each other turned ‘from love to friendship’ before he acquired his second wife, knock-out blonde soap-star Veronica Lario. There was news about his suits (Ferdinando Caraceni), his cook, his cancer and, above all, the testimony of his mother Rosella. Silvio’s mother said Silvio was a hell of a guy, and whatever Silvio’s mother said, other mothers took very seriously. Studded on every page were his cheery chipmunk grin and his Disneyish nose. To every small Italian businessman he stood for optimism and confidence and an ability to get things done. And here, in the first stop of our wacky races golf-cart tour, is a lesson in his can-do approach.

One day Silvio came along and found they had flattened the trees, in a 50-metre radius, to make a helicopter pad. He didn’t want a helicopter pad. He was devastated. He went to sleep on Easter night, wrestling with the problem. ‘At a certain point I decided that out of each evil you must find a good thing. I thought I could create a labyrinth, and then I decided to make something which had never existed before — a museum of cacti!’ We dismount and admire this bizarre amphitheatre in which an audience of 4,000 prickly customers, comprising 400 species from seven countries, looks down from circular terraces on to a beautiful blue pool facing out to the bay. It is cracked but somehow brilliant.

‘This is the brain of my finance minister,’ says Silvio, pointing to a thing looking like a wrathful artichoke, ‘ideas everywhere.’ He caresses the powdery flanks of another plant to show its ingenious defence against climbing ants. ‘And this,’ he says, pointing to a villainous set of spines, ‘is the mother-in-law’s cushion. This rock came from Lanzarote!’ Why did it come from Lanzarote? Was it really essential, this red pumice? Perhaps not: but it showed that Silvio could move mountains.

He has certainly moved Farrell, who is evincing signs of rapture. ‘Bravo, Signor Presidente’ says the biographer of Mussolini. Veramente bravo!’

Berlusconi waves aside our enthusiasm but cannot resist the moral. ‘See,’ he says, ‘this is what the private sector can do! I did this! I did it in three months!’ I did this: the boast of every alpha male. Thus the three-year-old to his doting mother; thus Agrippa on the frieze of the Pantheon.

The Italian population liked him for his energy and they handsomely returned him. In 2001 he achieved an unprecedented majority, commanding both houses of parliament. He had a huge opportunity to enact what he proclaimed was his vision: a Thatcherian tax-cutting reform of Italy. His enemies went into spasms of indignation and, in truth, one can see the cause of their unease. It is unsettling that one man should have such a concentration of commercial and political authority. It does make one queasy to think that this charming man is not only the biggest media magnate in Italy, owning Mondadori, the biggest publisher, AC Milan, the biggest football club, several newspapers and a huge chunk of Italian television — but is also Prime Minister.

We put these concerns to him and Berlusconi bats it all back in phrases honed with use. No, he didn’t go into politics to protect his own commercial interests, as Enzo Biagi, a columnist, has alleged that he privately confessed. ‘I couldn’t work all my life in Italy with a communist, left-wing government,’ he says. No, there is no conflict of interest. People can write what they like in his papers. ‘I am the most liberal publisher in history.’ And no, the Economist charges are old, footling, groundless, and the table incurs a good thudding as he iterates his defence.

It is quite the done thing, he protests, to pass a law exempting himself from prosecution for the term of his office. Chirac has done the same. But it was never our goal, in this interview, to establish the dodginess of his business practices. We were trying only to judge whether he was on balance a good thing. Our answer, when the trolley ride finally ends and we are sitting like a pair of oiled guillemots over a beer in Porto Rotondo, is an unambiguous yes.

It is hard not to be charmed by a man who takes such an interest in cacti and who will crack jokes at important EU gatherings, not only about Nazi camp commandants but also about whether or not his wife is running off with someone else. There is something heroic about his style, something hilariously imperial — from the huge swimming pool he has created by flooding a basin in the Sardinian hills, to the four thalassotherapy pools he has sunk for Veronica, powered by computers more advanced than those used on the moon shots.

It may or not be important that he claims never to have sacked any of his 46,000 employees. We scan closely the faces of his cook and a butler as they pass us in another golf cart and hail him matily. ‘Where are you off to?’ asks Berlusconi. ‘We’re off for a ride!’ they say. Yes, they seem happy. His appeal, for me, is that he is like so many of the things he has brought to this Sardinian coast. He is a transplant.

Suddenly, after decades in which Italian politics was in thrall to a procession of gloomy, portentous, jargon-laden partitocrats, there appeared this influorescence of American gung-hoery. Yes, he may have been involved in questionable business practices; he may even yet be found out and pay the price. For the time being, though, it seems reasonable to let him get on with his programme. He may fail. But then, of course — and this is the point that someone should write in block capitals, fold up and stuff in the mouth of Anna Lindh, Swedish foreign minister — he can be rejected by the Italian people.

She may not like it but he was democratically elected and can be removed by the very people Anna Lindh insults. If we are obliged to compare Silvio Berlusconi with Anna Lindh, and other bossy, high-taxing European politicians. I agree with Farrell: as the narrator says of Jay Gatsby, a man Berlusconi to some extent resembles, he is ‘better than the whole damn lot of them’.

https://www.spectator.com.au/2023/06/forza-berlusconi-silvio-in-sardinia/

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California Keeps Shooting Itself in the Foot on Affordable Rental Housing

Why would any property-owner risk renting out his place in CA? You will get treated like a public enemy

It is universally acknowledged that housing affordability has reached crisis levels in California. This crisis has only gotten worse in recent years as state and local officials have continued to double down on failed policies. The Golden State will not significantly improve the situation until it stops shooting itself in the foot.

For starters, if you want more properties for housing, you need strong property rights protections. But that has not been the case in California, particularly in recent years. Extended eviction moratoriums are a case in point.

State and local prohibitions on evictions were rationalized largely due to other harmful government policies: the lockdowns and other stringent economic regulations imposed during the coronavirus pandemic. These laws, which contravened prior public health standards and responses to outbreaks, proved to be wholly ineffective, but they did succeed in destroying countless people’s livelihoods, stunting children’s educational growth and preventing people from visiting dying loved ones in hospitals and nursing homes. California’s COVID-19 laws were notoriously among the strictest in the nation.

After eliminating millions of people’s incomes unnecessarily, governments compounded the error by enacting eviction moratoriums so that people could not be evicted for failing to pay rent due to economic hardships experienced during the pandemic. Taxpayers were further sapped to pay for rental assistance programs to cover some of this lost income (which, again, government policies were largely responsible for creating).

But many landlords never received what they were owed, particularly since the programs generally required the cooperation of deadbeat tenants. In major metropolitan areas like Los Angeles County, San Francisco and Oakland, eviction moratoriums persisted three years after the onset of the pandemic, long after the vast majority of people returned to work. There are now billions of dollars in unpaid rent in California, and many landlords, who still must pay mortgages and property taxes even as their own incomes have disappeared, have lost their properties as a result, some of which also served as their personal homes.

It is hardly the only insidious policy that the state and local governments have adopted, however. In 2019, Assembly Bill 1482 limited rent increases to five percent plus inflation, up to a maximum of 10 percent; made it more difficult to evict tenants from certain types of properties; and required landlords to provide relocation assistance equal to one-month’s rent to tenants in “no fault” evictions.

A current proposal, Senate Bill 567, by state Sen. María Elena Durazo, D-Los Angeles, sought to further restrict landlords’ control over their own properties by lowering the rent cap to 5 percent (even less than inflation the past two years); eliminating the existing exemption for single-family houses and condominiums; prohibiting eviction if the property owner or their relative wants to move into the unit and if the tenant is aged 60 years or older, disabled, or terminally ill; require that if there is an eviction to enable the owner or their relative to occupy the residence, the owner or relative must use the unit as their primary residence for at least three years; and mandate that if a tenant is evicted because the owner is withdrawing the property from the rental market, the property must remain off the market for at least 10 years. In addition to the obvious violations of private property rights and the right of contract, it should be noted that this would have led to discrimination against the elderly and disabled, as property owners would fear renting to them because then they may not be able to move back into their own properties in the future!

Fortunately, these measures were eventually stripped from the bill (though owners or their relatives would still have to remain in a property for one year, instead of the original three years, if they evicted the previous occupants). The bill now is mostly focused on providing greater enforcement of the AB 1482 measures by allowing wrongfully evicted tenants to sue landlords for triple the amount of actual damages, plus punitive damages and attorneys’ fees.
While the most radical provisions of SB 567 were ultimately stripped out this time, there is a strong likelihood that they will be pushed—and possibly adopted—next year or the year after that. The prospect hangs like the sword of Damocles over the heads of property owners in California.

It is no wonder then why, despite a significant housing shortage, developers and landlords are reluctant to provide more housing. If the state and local governments continue to demonize landlords, allow tenants to steal from them through unpaid rent and force them to endure costly and lengthy legal processes to get rid of nightmare tenants, more and more current and potential landlords and developers will rationally conclude that it just is not worth the hassle and risk—and the housing supply will shrink further, making the affordability crisis worse.

https://www.independent.org/news/article.asp?id=14545&omhide=true&trk=title

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Tide Turning Against Biological Men Competing in Women’s Sports, New Poll Finds—Even Among Democrats

The tide appears to be turning against radical gender ideology in a big way. Just this Saturday, a transgender cyclist won a North Carolina race by more than five minutes. Retired tennis star Martina Navratilova said of the result: “What a joke.”

A joke, indeed. It seems many Americans agree with Navratilova.

A new Gallup poll, released Monday, showed a marked shift in how Americans view transgender issues, especially in regard to sports.

“A larger majority of Americans now (69%) than in 2021 (62%) say transgender athletes should only be allowed to compete on sports teams that conform with their birth gender,” Gallup noted. “Likewise, fewer endorse transgender athletes being able to play on teams that match their current gender identity, 26%, down from 34%.”

The poll indicates that a wide swath of Americans is turning against the transgender movement, at least as it applies to men participating in women’s athletics. In fact, the shift was noticeable in almost every political and demographic group. Republicans, independents, and even Democrats all increasingly oppose biological males competing against girls and women.

Since 2021, the percentage of Democrats who think that biological males shouldn’t compete in female sports has risen from 41% to 48%. The new poll shows that 47% of Democrats say they should be allowed to participate, so it’s sharply divided—even in the political party that’s been relentless in promoting the transgender issue.

Americans familiar with transgender people on a personal level had an even more dramatic shift. Among those who say they know a transgender person, 64% say that males shouldn’t be able to play sports against females. That’s an increase from 53% in 2021.

Most of the respondents to the poll said that “changing one’s gender” is morally wrong, up from 51% in 2021 to 55% in 2023.

As my colleague Tyler O’Neil pointed out, Gallup’s numbers may even underestimate the shift on this issue, inasmuch as the phrasing of the poll questions muddied the water of what was being asked. For instance, it asks whether transgender athletes should be able to play on sports teams that “match their current gender identity or should only be allowed to play on sports teams that match their gender?”

Whether understated or not, the polling trend is encouraging.

Transgenderism has become an epidemic among young people, but many Americans are turning against the extreme ideological claims. There’s still some common sense left in this country, even if it no longer manifests itself in our cultural and ruling elites. The shift over the past few years is noteworthy because it has occurred despite a relentless campaign by the liberal media and the Biden administration to push the ideology to the absolute limit.

It’s not working. In fact, it may be actively turning many Americans against them.

It must also be said that a handful of brave people—most notably Riley Gaines and Chloe Cole, alongside other female athletes and detransitioners who have had experience with this issue—may be breaking through to the larger public with their message.

Courage can be infectious. Their stories have opened eyes to the breadth and depth of the problem.

This is mostly good news, but a word of caution is in order here. This is likely only the beginning of the fight. The Left isn’t sitting still and letting waning popularity for this issue dissuade it from codifying gender ideology into law.

For instance, California legislators are trying to pass a law to make parents who don’t affirm transgenderism for their child guilty of child abuse. The Biden administration aims to change Title IX law to prohibit states from banning biological males from competing against biological females.

The Left hopes that by changing the law, it can browbeat Americans into accepting the ideology, whether we like it or not. That strategy has worked for them in the past on other issues.

It’s up to Americans to put their foot down to stop this madness while the question is still being decided. The tide has turned in our favor, but that tide could go out again.

https://www.dailysignal.com/2023/06/12/tide-turning-against-biological-men-competing-womens-sports-new-poll-findseven-among-democrats

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The mass media used to publish perspectives on Ukraine they would never publish today

The other day I stumbled across a 2014 opinion piece in The Guardian titled “It’s not Russia that’s pushed Ukraine to the brink of war” by Seumas Milne, who the following year would go on to become the Labour Party’s Executive Director of Strategy and Communications under Jeremy Corbyn.

I bring this up because the perspectives you’ll find in that article are jarring in how severely they deviate from anything you’ll see published in the mainstream press about Ukraine in 2023. It places the brunt of the blame for the violence and tensions in that nation at that time squarely at Washington’s feet, opening with a warning that the “threat of war in Ukraine is growing” and saying there’s an “unelected government in Kiev,” and it only gets naughtier from there.

I strongly recommend reading the article in full if you want some perspective in just how dramatically the mass media has clamped down on dissenting ideas about Ukraine and Russia, beginning with the frenzied stoking of Russia hysteria in 2016 and exploding exponentially with the Russian invasion last year. I doubt there’s a single paragraph which could get published in any mainstream outlet in the media environment of today.

Milne writes about how “the Ukrainian president was replaced by a US-selected administration, in an entirely unconstitutional takeover,” and about “the role of the fascistic right on the streets and in the new Ukrainian regime.” He says that “Crimeans voted overwhelmingly to join Russia,” and that “you don’t hear much about the Ukrainian government’s veneration of wartime Nazi collaborators and pogromists, or the arson attacks on the homes and offices of elected communist leaders, or the integration of the extreme Right Sector into the national guard, while the anti-semitism and white supremacism of the government’s ultra-nationalists is assiduously played down.” He says that “after two decades of eastward Nato expansion, this crisis was triggered by the west’s attempt to pull Ukraine decisively into its orbit and defence structure.”

Milne says “Putin’s absorption of Crimea and support for the rebellion in eastern Ukraine is clearly defensive,” and says the US and its allies have been “encouraging the military crackdown on protesters after visits from Joe Biden and the CIA director, John Brennan.” He correctly predicts that “one outcome of the crisis is likely to be a closer alliance between China and Russia, as the US continues its anti-Chinese ‘pivot’ to Asia,” and presciently warns of “the threat of a return of big-power conflict” as Ukraine moves toward war.

To be clear, Milne was not some fringe voice who happened to get picked up for one Guardian op-ed by a strange editorial fluke; he published hundreds of articles with The Guardian over the course of many years, and kept on publishing for a year and a half after this Ukraine piece came out, right up until he went to work for Corbyn. He was on the left end of the mainstream media, but he was very much part of the mainstream media.

This article would of course have drawn controversy and criticism at the time; there were many people who were on the opposite side of the debate in 2014, though they would’ve had a fraction of the numbers of the shrieking conformity enforcers we see on all matters related to Ukraine today. Milne himself says that “the bulk of the western media abandoned any hint of even-handed coverage” after the Crimea annexation, so his article would have been an outlier to be sure. But the fact remains that it was published in The Guardian, and that it would never be published there today.

Seriously, try to imagine an article like that about what happened in Ukraine in 2014 appearing in a mainstream publication like The Guardian in 2023. Can you imagine the hysterics? The histrionic garment-rending from the establishment narrative managers? The social media swarming of Zelenskyite trolls? This is after all the same media environment that pressured CBS to retract its story about how arms shipments to Ukraine weren’t getting where they were supposed to, and pressured Amnesty International to apologise for saying anything about Ukrainian war crimes.

Or how about this Guardian article by John Pilger titled “In Ukraine, the US is dragging us towards war with Russia,” subtitled “Washington’s role in Ukraine, and its backing for the regime’s neo-Nazis, has huge implications for the rest of the world,” published two weeks after Milne’s?

Pilger’s article is somehow even more heretical than Milne’s, saying Washington “masterminded the coup in February against the democratically elected government in Kiev” and that “Ukraine has been turned into a CIA theme park – run personally by CIA director John Brennan in Kiev, with dozens of ‘special units’ from the CIA and FBI setting up a ‘security structure’ that oversees savage attacks on those who opposed the February coup.”

As with Milne, Pilger criticises the media environment at the time, saying “propaganda” about what’s happening in Ukraine is happening in an “Orwellian style”. But again, his article was published in The Guardian, whereas today it never would be.

Pilger has actually provided some background for this shift in mass media reporting, saying that there was a “purge” of dissident voices from The Guardian’s ranks around 2014-2015.

“My written journalism is no longer welcome in The Guardian which, three years ago, got rid of people like me in pretty much a purge of those who really were saying what The Guardian no longer says any more,” Pilger reported in a January 2018 radio interview.

Interestingly, a 2019 Declassified UK report found that British intelligence services began aggressively targeting The Guardian after its 2013 publication of the Edward Snowden documents, and found their in when the outlet’s editor-in-chief Alan Rusbridger was replaced by Katharine Viner in March 2015. After that point The Guardian began moving away from critical investigative reporting and began publishing softball “interviews” with MI5 and MI6 chiefs and willingly participating in the west’s information war against Russia.

Once the western world plunged in unison into blinkered Russia hysteria after Hillary Clinton lost the US presidential election in 2016, we began seeing things like that time a BBC reporter admonished a guest for voicing unauthorised opinions about Syria because “we’re in an information war with Russia.”

Whether or not you agree with the perspectives authored by Milne and Pilger is irrelevant to the very important fact that they could say things in the mainstream media in 2014 that they could never say in the mainstream media in 2023. The dramatic shift from a media environment where criticism of establishment Russia narratives is permitted to one where it is not permitted is worth noting, because it means there was a conscious shift toward converting the mass media into full-fledged cold war propaganda outlets.

A lot of things have happened since 2014, but nothing about what happened in 2014 has changed since 2014. It’s still the same year it always was, because that’s how time works; nothing has changed about 2014 other than the thoughts you’re permitted to voice about it in mainstream outlets like The Guardian.

This bizarre historical revisionism has been occurring not just in The Guardian but throughout the mainstream media. Last year Moon of Alabama published a piece titled “Media Are Now Whitewashing Nazis They Had Previously Condemned” which compiles many, many instances in which the mass media have reported on Ukraine’s neo-Nazi problem over the years, and contrasts this with the way the mass media now whitewashes those paramilitaries and pretends they’re just fine upstanding patriots. In the years prior to the Russian invasion there were neo-Nazis in Ukraine; now there are no neo-Nazis in Ukraine and there never have been and you’re a treasonous Putin puppet if you say otherwise. Nothing actually changed about Ukraine’s neo-Nazi problem; all that changed is the narrative.

Everyone should be aware that the mass media have drastically changed the perspectives they’re willing to publish on Ukraine, because it proves that these outlets are not working to help create a well-informed populace and facilitate important conversations, but are in fact knowingly operating as war propaganda firms. They’re not trying to inform people about what’s going on in the world, they’re trying to manipulate the way people think about the world. These two goals could not possibly be more different.

Power is controlling what happens; true power is controlling what people think about what happens. They’re re-writing history to influence control over what people think about the present. As old Orwell put it, “Who controls the past controls the future. Who controls the present controls the past.”

https://johnmenadue.com/the-mass-media-used-to-publish-perspectives-on-ukraine-they-would-never-publish-today/