//www.youtube.com/watch?v=80s5xuvzCtg
Last week, the Mainstream Media had some snarky fun ridiculing “Q”, a decentralized movement of Trump supporters galvanized by posts made to anonymous online chatboards by “QAnon”, a self-described government agent with a top-level security clearance who posts purported clues about what’s really going on behind the scenes in the Trump Administration, with assurances of “sealed indictments” and imminent mass-arrests of corrupt government officials.
This 4-minute video was created either by the “Q collective” or by a group self-appointed as such and it could be seen as Q’s latest “State of the Union”. I cannot vouch for all the claims made here but it’s a full frontal assault on the corrupt DOJ, FBI and the Mainstream Media, so I love it.
Readers of my site will know that I’ve largely ignored this Q business, referring to it as so much “hope p0rn”, while also recognizing that people I respect and who clearly aren’t stupid are avid Q followers, including radio host and YouTube personality, Lionel (aka Michael LeBron).
I remain as uninterested as ever in verifying the validity or the accuracy of Q. However, I am interested in where the followers are going with it. To the degree to which this Pokémon-Go-esque phenomenon gets people engaged with their government, I have no complaints.
This video, called ‘Killing the Mockingbird’ refers to Operation Mockingbird, an early 1950s CIA project led by Frank Wisner and said to have been created to counter alleged Kremlin bribery of US and European journalists to disseminate views supporting the Communist cause.
Frank Wisner had been a member of the OSS during WWII and he helped to integrate the newly-formed CIA with the knowledge base of Nazi General Reinhard Gehlen. (Yes, I know).
In 1948, Wisner recruited Phil Graham from The Washington Post to run the project within the news industry and within a couple of years, Wisner is said to have “owned” respected members of The New York Times, Newsweek, CBS and other major news entities. In 1977, the once-great, now-shill Carl Bernstein wrote in the once-great, now-pathetic Rolling Stone that by 1953, Operation Mockingbird was overseen by CIA Director Allen Dulles and had gained major influence over 25 newspapers and wire agencies. Given Bernstein’s heroic roles in breaking the Watergate story and in covering the Church Committee hearings, one wonders what has caused him to slink to such depths as to stump on every media outlet these past 2 weeks, pantomiming outrage over Trump’s statement that the press was the enemy of the people. If it wasn’t shot already, Bernstein’s legacy is now officially garbage.
The basic modus operandi of Mockingbird was to provide CIA-developed reports to journalists (whether witting or not), which would, in turn be repeated or cited by other reporters and throughout the wire services. According to Bernstein, the main players in this operation included among others, William Paley (CBS), Henry Luce (Time and Life), Arthur Hays Sulzberger (The New York Times), Alfred Friendly (The Washington Post) and Joseph Harrison (The Christian Science Monitor). The ideological bent of the operation at that time was Liberal, pro-American-big-business and anti-Soviet.
Following the Watergate scandal in the 1972-1974 Church Committee hearings in Congress, it was revealed that the CIA maintained an international network of several hundred people to influence opinion through covert propaganda. Domestically, it was revealed that, “Approximately 50 of the [CIA’s] assets are individual American journalists or employees of US media organizations…More than a dozen United States news organizations and commercial publishing houses formerly provided cover for CIA agents abroad.”
In 1973, CIA Director William Colby claimed that he would stop this practice and in 1976, CIA Director George HW Bush went further, announcing, “Effective immediately, CIA will not enter into any paid or contractual relationship with any full-time or part-time news correspondent accredited by any US news service, newspaper, periodical, radio or television network or station.”
However, in 2014, Udo Ulfkotte, Assistant Editor of Germany’s main daily newspaper, the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung revealed that Operation Mockingbird was alive and well when he went public about having been one of many major journalists who were bribed for decades by the CIA to write propaganda articles in support of US State Department objectives. Ulfkotte was dead two years later, at 56.
The English-language translation of Ulfkotte’s book, ‘Journalists for Hire: How the CIA Buys the News’ can only be purchased used, from $900!
It would be nice if Q is not just hope p0rn.
