Media Driven Culture Wars
No political speech allowed on TikTok or at Universities either.
Published: 2024-04-24
Insidious Weaponry
History is boiling to the surface on campuses across the US during protests in solidarity with Palestinian children and families being murdered every day by Israeli state military and policy in Gaza.
54 years ago Ohio National Guard members killed 4 and wounded 9 unarmed students at a Kent State University protest against the US war in Vietnam. This week New York's Columbia University invited the NYPD onto campus to arrest and remove students peacefully protesting a genocide. Columbia saw fit to suspend students for peacefully speaking against the genocide by their action without use of established University procedure. This is yet another step in dissolving the right to political speech and protest.
The Kent State killings occurred not long after the beginning of the establishment of the infrastructure for the Culture Wars. The documented infestation of US media by state intelligence operatives, stringers and associated writers was begun no later than the 1960s and has been known since at least Carl Bernstein's 1977 exposé of it. The strategy is the same old divide and rule, operating in modern media. The success of this grand scale psyop was perhaps best demonstrated by the "left" and the "right" in the US arguing with each other about who was more targeted by media oppression. This all occurred during the 4 year long RussiaGoat Hoax fueled by the media in cahoots with the FBI and CIA at the behest of the 2016 Clinton campaign.
The arsenal of the mass psyop is stocked with words, old and new. An examination of the excellent report by Jessica Corbett on the political oppression at Columbia reveals the use of twisted terms by elements of modern corporate media and the faculty.
Jessica begins with a clanger quote from The Guardian [emphasis mine]:
“hundreds of members of the teaching cohort at Columbia walked out in solidarity
There is an established, normative term for a collection of teachers at a University. They are called "staff". Cohort is a collective term for soldiers from the Roman army and has nothing whatsoever to do with teachers at Universities.
In Jessica's third paragraph she quotes Yonah Lieberman, co-founder of IfNotNow, a Jewish-led U.S. group that organizes against Israel’s apartheid:
“Solidarity with these faculty members. Shame on establishment politicians and agitators who are smearing the anti-war protest at Columbia as anything other than what it is: a courageous stand for freedom and peace.”
Lieberman's language is modern and accurate. 'Agitators' and 'smearing' are terms for tactics used by the state apparatus against elements of the citizenry decrying state crimes and oppression.
Below, an embedded quote from Wajahat Ali begins with similar terminology. Then, his identification of broad support for protests against the genocide uses language which reveals the divide and rule tactics highlighted earlier in the quote from The Guardian. Ali stressed unity across the lines of division:
This is a multi faith & multi racial movement across America.
Sleepwalking at Columbia
Jessica then reports on the faculty themselves. In their quote we see a bleeding into academic language of the culture war terms used in the media:
“While we as a faculty disagree about the relevant political issues and express no opinion on the merits of the protest, we are writing to urge respect for basic rule-of-law values that ought to govern our university.”
The glaring phrase is "basic rule-of-law values". Alternate traditional phrases would be "the rule of law", or "the principles of the rule of law", or many others. Instead 'values' appears. Jessica's article continues, documenting the breakdown in societal norms and shunning of the US constitution.
Putting one’s foot down
Professor Sachs, also of Columbia University, spoke eloquently on a recent episode of Judging Freedom on this breakdown of constitutional norms. Also discussed, were laws recently passed by Congress to fund two existing and one future foreign wars, totaling $95 billion USD. Hidden within a rolled up act are two further attacks on free speech. The first is the extension of warrantless spying by US state intelligence agencies. The second is the removal of a social media system from the US market on which political speech occurs; the forced sale of TikTok.
US jurisprudence for the first amendment has solidly declared that political speech is protected. It is the most sacrosanct of all speech. How other than political speech can one categorize a sit in, or camp in, against a genocide by the Columbia students on their campus?
The divide and rule culture wars must inevitably drive into the walls of the US constitution. The language being used by the cohort of establishment journalists reporting on recent events is documenting their part in driving that car crash.
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Sources
Columbia Faculty Walk Out Over Student Suspensions, Arrest for Gaza Protests, Jessica Corbett, ScheerPost (originally Common Dreams), 2024-04-23
Kent State shootings, Wikipedia
The McCarthyist Attack on Gaza Protests Threatens Free Thought for All, Air Paul (originally FAIR, Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting), ScheerPost, 2024-04-23
Columbia Students Arrested Over Campus Rally May Face Other Consequences, Troy Closson & Anna Betts, New York Times, 2024-04-20
“The CIA And The Media”, Carl Bernstein, Rolling Stone, 1977-10-20
Episode 432 – The CIA and the News Media 2.0, James Corbett, The Corbett Report, 2022-11-14
7 easy steps to outlawing marches that call for an end to Israel's genocide in Gaza, Johnathan Cook, Jonathan Cook, 2024-04-22
Prof. Jeffrey Sachs: Congress Funding Death in Gaza and Ukraine, Sachs with Napolitano, Judging Freedom, 2024-04-23
Culture
Machine Gun - Jimi Hendrix(Edited to Vietnam Stock Footage), Tyler Malm, uploaded 2018-12-12
Copyleft: CC0
