In the aftermath of President-Elect Trump’s surprise victory over establishment power’s chosen horse, Hillary Clinton, liberal punditry has compiled an impressive list of culprits responsible for this distortion in the fabric of American history.

Everyone from Vladimir Putin to BernieBros to Jill Stein are somehow responsible for obstructing the Pantsuit Khaleesi’s path to the Oval Office; faultless in her inability to use the near-infinite wealth and resources at her disposal to carry out a victory against a reality gameshow neofascist.

When the fourth estate loses its grasp over the pulse of America, and fails to provide answers for the misery millions of Americans face in their day to day toils for a system that actively disregards their despair, the people will look elsewhere. The rise of Breitbart, Alex Jones, and other misinformation despots say there is an answer – these demagogues paint a picture of nefarious masterminds who have manipulated America into servitude, and only you, the loyal viewers at home, are privileged to understand what is really going on. 

This intoxicating melodramatic self-importance has driven people to what can only be described as a collective madness, as the recent “Pizzagate” melodrama has shown. Birthed from the Podesta emails provided by Wikileaks, Pizzagate recently came to a head with a man driving across three states with an assault rifle to shoot up a pizza shop only to discover there never was a secret Democrat pedophile child-trafficking cult in the first place – and now his former Internet comrades are labelling him a “crisis actor,” a magical explanation for all the world’s gun-related tragedies. If random people who never log off are taking their military-grade weapons and driving across three states to shoot up pizza parlors at the drop of a pin, shouldn’t there be a crusade against assault rifles or mental illness?

Instead, the current crusade is against “fake news:” those shady clickbait headlines flooding Facebook and other social media websites, making absurd claims backed by nothing, like DONALD TRUMP FUCKED A SPACE ALIEN AT AREA 51 and HILLARY WORSHIPS THE DEVIL IN SECRET PEDOPHILE RING. Other, more insidious falsifications include Trump keeping factory jobs in America with a simple phone call, when it was actually the work of unions. What makes this venture profitable is the mechanics of social media “sharing” combined with the bullshit economy of ad revenue for pageviews – which should have died a violent death a long time ago, and now we’re seeing the consequences come to fruition.

Worse yet, our youth have struggles telling the difference between fake news and reality. I could have told you this over a decade ago when I was in public school, getting into squabbles with fellow classmates who angrily insisted that Saddam Hussein was responsible for the attacks on September 11th. However, Facebook and the “Fake News” regime wasn’t nearly as prominent as it is now. So how did these young impressionable youth in deeply liberal Western Washington get this idea? Surely, this “fake news” must have come from somewhere?

Oh, right. It originated on NBC, more specifically Meet The Press on December 9th, 2001 – from the mouth of then Vice President Dick Cheney and  corroborated by host Tim Russert – implying that Iraq was hosting al-Qaeda training camps, among other false claims. This became one of the main justifications of America’s illegal devastation and occupation of Iraq, and over half the country was convinced Saddam Hussein played some part in the attacks on September 11th. Which of course, could be instantly disproved by anyone with a rough understanding of the politics of the Middle East – but the “Real News” brigade of respectable, esteemed, award winning journalists pushed this and other lies to manufacture the consent of the American public for yet another reckless military excursion causing the senseless death of devastation of countless lives. Somewhere between half a million to over a million people are counted dead in a conflict that achieved absolutely nothing of worth.

Not only conservative voices, but esteemed liberal voices such as Jonathan Chait and Tom Friedman pushed the case for war – Friedman himself said we needed to “burst that bubble,” and tell them to “suck on this.” Friedman was last seen crying in the New York Times about how millennials needed to “listen to the old spies,” you can probably find him now in some expensive Upper East Side apartment cranking his hog to vintage Tom Clancy novels, waiting for the 24 reboot to start. Chait proudly declared we should “give war a chance” in The New Republic back in October 2002. These were well-paid, award winning, respected opinion havers pushing a false narrative for war that has ended countless lives who will never have justice for what was done to them. Some might be brave enough to call this “a gross display of privilege,” more common people would simply refer to it as criminal.

Is it really that unbelievable that after this utterly avoidable and completely unnecessary shitshow, people might find themselves pursuing alternative sources for the news? Better yet, shouldn’t there be a cause for alarm that millions of adult Americans were led to believe fake news to push a very real real war with no end in sight, even when a President elected on a mandate to end it, manages to extend it indefinitely so that neverending, trillion dollar wars become the mundane?

More importantly, just who exactly defines “Fake News” at this point? The “Real News” has spent the past half a year or so trying to paint any and all opposition to Hillary Clinton as the work of the Kremlin, and just the other day the same publication that broke Watergate just pushed an anonymous blacklist with names like Robert Parry (broke Iran-Contra), Naked Capitalism (well-regarded by anyone in journalism when it comes to finance), and Robert Scheer (former target of the CIA), and Bruce Dixon (radical black leftist voice since the 70s) as agents of the Russian Government, calling for the United States Government to open a formal investigation for espionage.

The problem with such an absurd request is that the federal government is about to be led by an administration which includes an executive chair of the same media organization that helped drive someone to drive across three states with an assault rifle and threaten a pizza joint – Steve Bannon of Breitbart. If the Podesta Emails revealed anything about how political campaigns and the punditry colluded to push disingenuous narratives about Clinton’s primary opponent, Bernie Sanders (and his legion of “bros”), then it would be fair to presume Breitbart would essentially be the propaganda arm of the Trump Administration – the same website which hosts such eye-opening headlines like “Six Reasons Pamela Geller’s Muhammad Cartoon Contest Is No Different than Selma,” “Five Great Home Defense Shotguns For Your Christmas Wish List,” and “Milo Destroys Social Justice Warrior Who Says Trump Support Makes You ‘White Supremacist.” Shotguns and cults of personality – two sensational tastes that taste great together!  

Ironically enough, while men like Parry and Dixon were exposing the abuses of the United States government during the Cold War, the Central Intelligence Agency was running Operation Mockingbird – a state sanctioned “fake news” scheme to forward the foreign policy interests of the same dullards who thought that after countless failed attempts to kill the late Fidel Castro, maybe it was worth one more shot? Oh, were you expecting Silicon Valley to save us? Google and Facebook have grown into influence peddling powerhouses, so don’t expect those mystical algorithms of pure reason and logic to contradict the needs of your favorite alphabet agencies.

Perhaps the answer lies back with our youth – if secondary school prioritized teaching children how perceived authorities like the news media, politicians, corporations, advertisements, and others with power, resources, and an agenda seek to deceive and manufacture consent – we could perhaps better intellectually arm our citizenry to reject the false promises of demagogues like Donald Trump, and not fall so easily for fake news that seeks to forward pointlessly destructive campaigns of misinformation. Of course, that might possibly delegitimize paid opinion havers such as Tom Friedman – and no, we couldn’t possibly have that. Besides, both Democrats and Republicans agree we should privatize all the schools and shove iPads into the hands of youth. Their future is a bleak vision where the only rule is “learn to code.”  

On the other side of the legitimacy spectrum opposite from Friedman sit Alex Jones disciples who find a sense of security in beliefs such as an all-powerful globalist cabal controlling the world’s events & economy – to believe, in all their despair, that at least somebody is in charge, is far more palatable than accepting the reality of unyielding chaos and exploitation, to string together correlation into causation as affirmation and fortification of existing beliefs.

In the rapid-fire misinformation sensory overload that is getting your news through Twitter, it’s easy to see the similarities between the thought processes “George Soros funds every protester” conspiracy theorists and…Nobel laureate and New York Times columnist Paul Krugman, assigned with the simple task of being too smart to fall for this shit, pushing fake news like Jill Stein was the reason Trump was elected also Comey and the Kremlin plotted to rig the election for Trump on his personal Twitter account – which sits atop a network of over two million followers, many in influential circles. What separates the two is what makes them similar – wealth and prestige. For Krugman and many Hillary loyalists, it’s far more comforting to believe that the Kremlin rigged the election than to accept the chaotic reality that their view of the world is wrong, and that their wealth and prestige is well deserved for how right they are, much like the conspiracy theorist’s belief that their lack of it is due to shadowy forces at work, preventing the world from recognizing their brilliance.

With this personal bias at hand, it’s easy to see how one can immediately believe or even push “fake news” to reinforce their personal beliefs – I myself have been guilty of it from time to time, and you only have to look at the recent CNN Porn Broadcast Scandal to see how quickly mistruths can become canonized as fact. 

On the opposite side of the legitimacy spectrum, Clinton loyalists’ rush to blame third party voters, Millennials, and the infinite power of the white working class’ magical racism for Trump’s victory fail to acknowledge the depressing truth: Donald Trump simply campaigned harder, against a deeply unpopular candidate whose campaign decided to play 12th-dimensional-chess via out-of-touch Twitter burns or simply not campaigning in places like the Rust Belt – which had sunk deeper into economic turmoil under the Obama Administration. The comfort of having some external, formless villain to blame for life’s onslaught of disappointments will remain ever more comforting than the depressing reality – a billion dollar campaign machine headed by rich old white people utterly out of touch with the average American ran a campaign for themselves. Donald Trump is a horrific rebuttal of the philosophy of meritocracy this country roots itself in. The “real news” is that voter turnout plummeted, because neither political party was interested in offering real solutions to the riptide of despair that non-millionaire America finds itself waddling deeper and deeper into.

The sad truth is that the real news is never as exciting as “fake news.” There’s no foreign supervillains (Putin), no evil political powerbroker pedophile conspiracies (Pizzagate), no Hollywood twists ending in bombastic shootouts. The machinations of misery – which can largely be filed under either greed, delusion, or incompetence – don’t inspire snazzy headlines or offer easy solutions. The sinking feeling of chaos, the unyielding uncertainty – they burden the mind in unhealthy ways, with no real outlet for anger. One has to wonder if it’s easier, living life like the Pizzagate fanatics, making death threats at random pizza restaurant employees.

But what do I know? I’m just a Russian agent who has a side hustle taking small-time crisis acting gigs, obviously. Blame the gig economy.

Written by Jeff Kunzler 

Paul Jay and Abby Martin discuss Trump’s cabinet appointments, the Green Party effort to recount the vote, and who’s really producing the fake news.

Abby Martin & Paul Jay on Trump’s Appointees & “Fake News”

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PAUL JAY: Welcome to The Real News Network. I’m Paul Jay. Well, Thanksgiving is over, and for those of you who may have thought that after Thanksgiving it all would have been over and it would’ve turned out the world had moved into an episode of The Twilight Zone that actually had come to an end, in fact, no. Donald Trump is the President-Elect, and now to discuss all of that and the consequences with me are Abby Martin. Abby joins me from New York. Abby’s the creator and host of The Empire Files on teleSUR English, and a show that I was Executive Producer of. Thanks for joining us, Abby.

ABBY MARTIN: Hey, Paul. Nice to be on.

PAUL JAY: So, I guess it’s a little bizarre. I’ve said to some people that it almost feels like a 9/11 moment to me, and not not quite the disaster of 9/11, but the day after 9/11, if you didn’t live in the shadows of what were the Twin Towers, you kind of went back to kind of normal life, but knowing that everything had changed to a large extent. And I feel somewhat the same with the Trump presidency. This is not to in any way idealize the Obama presidency. Anybody that watches The Real News knows that we were mostly scathingly critical of the Obama Administration. On the other hand, as you and I have talked about before, this is… it looks like with Pence, the return of Cheneyesque politics. What do you make of it?

ABBY MARTIN: Oh, yeah. I mean, Mike Pence himself said that his… the person that he idealizes the most is Dick Cheney. He says that he wants his vice-presidency to be, quote, “very active”. We’re talking about a person who received the most funds from Erik Prince, the founder of Blackwater, and we’re looking at the administration now. It’s shaping up quite nicely for these billionaire Christian evangelicals, Betsy DeVos, Erik Prince’s sister, pioneer of charter schools, undermining of public education, and now she’s running the Education Department in the US.

So, Mike Pence is a very scary figure. Not only did he support the Iraq War, vote for it, he also was one of the main pioneers of the conspiracy theory that Saddam was involved in the anthrax attacks, and going out there selling that, not to mention his vehement anti-gay policies, public push for conversion therapy in Indiana. He is a pretty scary figure, Paul, especially when you consider that Trump asked him to run, quote, “foreign and domestic policy”, as we know from John Kasich, who was told and asked if he wanted to be VP, and he was told, “You’re going to run foreign and domestic policy.” That’s how insane the situation is.

So people who are telling me, “Oh, Trump is this mastermind. He’s just pulling together all these people. He’s really going to change things.” He is a puppet. He knows nothing. He has no insight on global affairs or policy plans at all. He didn’t even know the difference between Hezbollah and Hamas. He said, “I’ll worry about that when I’m in.” So, he is just getting sidelined. I mean, it is a fire sale right now in the White House of people who are the craziest outliers of the GOP that hitched their wagons on him — that were smart enough to do that, right? — that have been completely castigated and ostracized from mainstream establishment. They’ve hitched their wagons to Trump, and they are getting lavishly rewarded as we speak.

PAUL JAY: We’ve talked about before on The Real News, but I think one should keep repeating, the power that helped elect Donald Trump, in the final analysis, was the billionaire Robert Mercer. Working for Mercer was Steve Bannon, who Breitbart News Mercer’s the primary owner of, Kellyanne Conway ran Mercer’s super PAC for Ted Cruz. So, two of the critical people, one who now is going to be Chief Strategist in the White House, Steve Bannon, described by Jared Kushner, the son-in-law, as being a very good Zionist, and I think that’s part of what’s not being touched on enough by people commenting on all this, the extent to which all of the people in foreign policy are very, very strong — not supporters of Israel — supporters of Likud, supporters of the most right-wing politics in Israel.

ABBY MARTIN: Yeah. I think the mainstream media is missing the point when they’re focusing on anti-Semitism when it comes to Breitbart. Breitbart is a hardcore Zionist. Everyone on that platform supports Zionism, like you said, the Likud Party, extreme, extreme ideological, right-wing party in Israel. You know, just like Theodor Herzl said, the founder of Zionism, “Anti-Semitism is our greatest friend.” I mean, they know that that works hand-in-hand to legitimize the State of Israel.

Look, I wanted to talk about Mike Pence again really quickly, because he said something insane, Paul. He said that right now we’ll have a President that will no longer tell the American people what he won’t do in regards to torture. Someone asked him if torture was off the table. And that was his bizarre, opaque response to that. As we know, Trump has already said that he would waterboard not only terrorists but their innocent family members. You know, Mike Pompeo. You look at all of these people, and I think there’s one common theme is that they’re all hardcore Islamophobes, which is very scary at a time when we are essentially bombing seven countries. Obama just increased the role of the drone campaign to al-Shabaab, I think, in Somalia, and he’s handing this over to a reality star game show host that knows absolutely nothing — he’s handing over the most vast, unprecedented executive power apparatus to Donald Trump.

And, so, yes, we have every right to be scared of what Trump is doing and everyone he’s appointing, and we should be on alert. But, like you said, no one should be apologizing for the Obama Administration and all the things that he failed to do that now Trump will be overseeing. Guantanamo Bay. I mean, are you kidding me? Bannon — you talked about Bannon — here, we’re talking about fake news all over the media, here’s the real pioneer of fake news. This is going to be de facto state media. Breitbart is now going to be the chair… you know, in the ear of the Commander-in-Chief, Breitbart. You know when you’re looking at Donald Trump tweeting and everyone thinks oh, he’s this… he’s this genius, right? He’s trying to, oh, he’s challenging safe spaces by saying that Hamilton should be a safe space. No, he is a moron. What you see on Twitter IS the real Donald Trump. Okay? These people are throwing him for a loop. I mean, they are getting in there and really running the show.

PAUL JAY: And Breitbart News was apparently created while Breitbart, the founder, was in Israel, and his idea, his vision was a Huffington Post that was an unmitigatedly pro-Israel. The slogan they had as the guiding line was “pro-Israel, pro-freedom”. The whole origins of Breitbart are in this ultra-ultra-right wing Zionism, and Steve Bannon, after Breitbart dies, Mercer comes in and becomes the main financier, brings in Bannon, and carry on that mission, and that’s one of the common threads that runs through all the people around Trump is bringing to Cabinet. Then there’s one other common thread: they all want to target Iran.

ABBY MARTIN: Look, there is one good thing: we’ve staved off war with Russia, potentially, for a couple of months. What no one is talking about is the insane fear-mongering and war-mongering against Iran. Donald Trump brought this up multiple times during his candidacy, which was all the Obama Administration was too soft on Iran. The deal was bad. He wanted to eradicate the deal. What is that going to do? And then you have people like John Bolton who’s obsessed with bombing Iran. I mean, all of these people are. So, yeah. This wasn’t a loss for the neo-cons, okay? This wasn’t a loss for the war hawks or defense contractors. Iran is as scary to me as the build-up in Syria. So, this is not a joke. These people are serious, and they are obsessed with Iran. So, yes, on one hand, we’ve staved off an escalation of the Cold War; on the other hand, Iran is right around the corner, Paul, and no one’s really talking about that.

PAUL JAY: Other than The Real News. But, yeah, you’re right. There’s very little talk about it. In fact, I see on some of the sites that are alternative, progressive, left, a kind of idea that maybe in Trump there might be some hope that there wasn’t in Clinton, that he’ll be more accommodating with Russia and such. And while there might be some short-term accommodation with Russia — and I think it will be in order to advance the targeting of Iran — the people that are around Trump that are really going to run the foreign policy are every bit as aggressive in their rhetoric about Russia as Clinton, and then some. In fact, when Pence was running with Trump — and he would speak, not Trump, but Pence — he was attacking Clinton for not being aggressive enough towards Russia. That was one of his main critiques of her at the State Department.

ABBY MARTIN: Yeah, and Pence also said that he wanted a no-fly zone in Syria, and when Trump was asked, he said, “Oh, I didn’t know that Mike Pence said that. I disagree with him.” Well, too bad. Mike Pence is going to be running foreign and domestic policy, so if he wants a no-fly zone, well, I guess that’s not off the table, either. And then you look at Jeff Sessions, it’s a complete disaster. I mean, here you have the NAACP coming out and saying, “This is the man who has, literally his entire career, lobbied against civil liberties and equality.” That’s not a good mark on your record, Sessions, to be denied as a federal judge because you were too racist, and now you’re Attorney General? Wow. And he’s horrible on criminal reform and drugs. He thinks that Obama’s biggest problem was being too lackadaisical on marijuana reform. I mean… It just gets better and better, Paul.

PAUL JAY: Yeah. I think one of the things — and a tell of where the Trump Administration is going — is that there’s virtually not a single appointment that’s a sop, a giveaway, to half of America, or more than half, that voted, that didn’t vote for him. There’s not even something symbolic, okay, the odd meeting here, like with Tulsi Gabbard. But no attempt at, quote-unquote, “compromise”. If this had been the Democrats in the Obama Administration, they would’ve made sure they threw in some hard-right Republican here and there just to appease that camp, because they were always about appeasing that camp. But no. This is unmitigated hard right from beginning to end.

ABBY MARTIN: And a lot of people I’ve heard will apologize for Trump saying, “Look, he said whatever he…” because they acknowledge that he’s a con artist, right? And they’re, like, “Look, he just said whatever he needed to to get elected.” Well, that may be true, but I think the one constant factor about Trump is his unpredictability, because he can blow wherever the wind blows. And that’s actually scary, because we have no reason to believe that he doesn’t mean the things that he said. We have no reason to believe, especially when you’re looking at the first hundred days of his agenda, and the people that he’s appointing, we have every reason to believe that he is meaning to go through with the most extreme, hawkish, anti-immigrant policies, anti-Muslim policies. I don’t see why people are continuing to apologize for him and saying, “Let’s wait and see.” I don’t think that we need to wait and see. We’re seeing right now with his agenda online and also his appointees. It’s very crystal clear. So I don’t see this whole, you know, “Trump is really a liberal. He’s a secret Democrat.” No, he…

PAUL JAY: Yeah. Give him a chance. Let’s see what… give him a chance. Let’s see what he does. Some people have called this normalizing the Trump presidency, and I agree with that, that you can’t normalize this presidency. Yes. All the presidents from World War II on are essentially… I don’t think there’s an exception that couldn’t be charged with war crimes, but this is a step in the Cheneyesque direction. This is an aggressive US foreign policy on steroids, and a policy that is already aggressive. But let’s move on a little bit. What do you make of this attempt by the Green Party to have a recount in some of the close swing states?

ABBY MARTIN: Well, I know that a couple of people, Green Party representatives, Chris Hedges, came out yesterday to publicly disagree with Jill Stein’s approach. Look, I thought it was bizarre. I didn’t really know what to make of it. I had no idea why Jill Stein was doing this on behalf of the Democratic Party, especially when you’re looking at 2000, completely stolen election, 2004, there were also discrepancies with the exit polls. That was never recounted. And we just got Bush again. So, I find it odd now to do this. However, I do support it, and I’ll tell you why. A, we don’t live in a democracy. We all know that. We live in an oligarchy. There’s a two-party dictatorship. We have the worst electoral system in the developed world — literally. Like, the Electoral College is so frickin’ archaic, it’s insane that we haven’t repealed that yet.

So, you know, that all aside, I take Greg Palast’s approach, where he’s saying, look, forget about the Russian hacking — that’s what I disagree with him, the statement kind of alludes like, gives legitimacy to that, that theory that Russia had something to do with hacking the election. I agree with Greg Palast where he’s saying there were millions of people not that voted illegally, like Donald Trump says based on Infowars as fake news, but he’s saying, yes, millions of people weren’t counted. Millions of provisional ballots, millions of absentee ballots, millions of people who were purged from the GOP scam Crosscheck. That is a fact. That happened.

So, at the very least, maybe we can start a conversation about how screwed up our electoral system is. And maybe at the very least we could talk about how there is massive election fraud on behalf of the establishment to squelch out minority voices in this country. And I, for one, would like to see the discrepancy with the paper ballots and hand-counting with the voting machines. Because I voted with a provisional ballot and I would like to see, hey, was that counted, or not? Like, this is a huge problem here. The Crosscheck is an insane thing. Everyone should watch Greg Palast’s documentary on that.

But, yeah, I mean, in that respect, I do agree with it. And let’s see what happens. But it is odd that, on one hand, you could see it as giving legitimacy to the Democratic Party, and we know that the millions of dollars to fund this is really coming from the Democrats, and I think it really speaks to their spinelessness that they refuse to lead the charge on any of the elections when there was clear, either election fraud or whatever, and now you have Jill Stein taking it upon herself. It’s an odd situation, but, at the end of the day, I do think our elections are horrible, and I agree with paying attention to them.

PAUL JAY: I don’t see how that helps the Green Party, to have this kind of critique. I mean, it is, it’s done, and she’s doing it, and I don’t know what the internal decision-making processes are. I mean, frankly, it’s… if you’re asking me, I don’t think there’s any much chance that this recount will change things.

ABBY MARTIN: It’s a pipe dream.

PAUL JAY: On the other hand, if there’s a wildest odds that it might, I mean, I’ve said all along, as aggressive and militarist as Clinton is, I think this is going to be worse in the same way Cheney-Bush was worse. So, we’ll see. But it’s not a good thing to wage this kind of fight publicly like this. I’m not sure it’s good for the future fortunes of the Green Party. But that’s not up to me. Let’s go on to fake news. A lot of big hubbub about fake news and some website came out with a whole list of websites that are supposedly echoing Russian propaganda, including some sites like Truthdig and Truthout, and some others that in my opinion are journalistic sites, and do not do that. The Real News is not on that list. I guess — I don’t know — if someone watches our coverage, they’ll see that, in fact, we have no… we’re not shy about critiquing the Russian oligarchy or Putin, although we always make sure we talk about American war crimes first, which make Russian crimes pale in scale, but at any rate, what do you make of this whole fake news thing?

ABBY MARTIN: I agree that fake news is a problem. Right? We have Breitbart de facto state media, we have Infowars basically in the ear of the President and he’s tweeting out insane, preposterous, outlandish, false, blatantly… things. Right? But on the other hand, you have Establishment media like The Washington Post and you have this anonymous propaganda finder account called Prop or Not, which is publishing this hit list — it’s essentially McCarthyism, right? — in the new era. It’s including very credible sites like Truthdig, Counterpunch, Black Agenda Report, Naked Capitalism, conflating it with fake news sites that you can say are legitimately fake or skewed or biased extremely, right? Like Infowars or Breitbart. And, of course, Breitbart, I don’t think is on there, which speaks to a lot.

So, I think it says a lot when we’re focusing and trying to conflate actual investigative journalism and journalism that goes against the grain with Russian provocateurs and the whole main thing that this account is trying to do: the premise of their argument is that these, quote-unquote, “fake news” sites actually shaped the election in favor of Trump. That they purposefully muddy the waters, poison the well, to make people believe all this fake stuff, and basically that’s how Trump won. I don’t think that’s the case at all. I think that they’re completely missing the point here. The point is — back to this Infowars thing — Trump tapped into this kind of conspiracy culture like no one else has ever, and I think that not enough people are talking about… everyone’s so shocked at all these white working class voters who came out to vote for him. No one’s really talking about the Alex Jones audience that came out in droves, that probably were never politically active before. And it stems back from the fake news thing.

Trump tweeted out that the protesters were paid. That they were professional. There is a serious problem on the Internet right now where people are either not fact-checking anything and they believe everything they read, and they conflate every alternative news site with these crazy blogs that are totally unfounded and have no credibility. And I think that that just comes back to media literacy. Don’t read a list on Washington Post, and take it with a grain of salt: fact-find for yourself. It’s not that hard. I mean, it took me five seconds even not knowing how to have any journalistic skills whatsoever, someone who is involved in canvass organizing in college, I knew immediately that that paid protester thing on Craigslist was just a canvassing job position. I mean, the bus picture where people said the protesters were bused in. Once again, it was debunked by the original tweeter. He took down the tweet.

So, these things, I think it comes back to media literacy, understanding what the truth is, and not just taking any website with a grain of salt, and understanding the agenda that places like Infowars has. Look, they hitched their wagon to Pamela Geller gravy train, long ago, when they knew that Islamophobia made money, and it’s basically a Fear Inc. operation. So, you look at credible sites like Truthdig and Real News, which has no corporate state funding at all, those are the sites that I think people should be looking at, and not sites like Infowars that sells penis pills in between their insane fear-mongering broadcasts. And, unfortunately, that’s who’s in the ear of Trump.

PAUL JAY: And if you want to talk about why Trump won, and then you want to connect that to fake news, you need look no further than all — almost all — of the corporate-owned news, which is the biggest fake news that helped elect Trump. And I’ll give you on three points: first and most important, why aren’t there screaming headlines every single day, both on corporate TV news and newspapers about climate change? If they had been dealing with the climate change crisis with the urgency it requires and what all scientists say, including recent reports that say we could pass the 2 degree threshold by 2050 — that’s 34 years away. And that model was before Trump was elected — who knows what that does to that model now, in terms of when we hit 2 degrees, given it just exploded most climate change policy around the globe, Trump’s election.

So, if people had been really educated and given the urgency that objective facts call out for, how the hell would so many people vote for a climate denier? Number two. Even now the coverage of the Cabinet, and the people, there’s almost no conversation about what we were talking about, that they’re all focusing and targeting on Iran, and they all have a strategy of regime change, weakening Iran — in other words, they’re talking about another war in the region. No talk about that. Yes, they talk about how crazy some of these people are and so on, but that issue, and certainly leading up to the election, that’s no surprise that that’s where this Trump Administration was going.

You look at Rudy Giuliani’s speech at the Republican Convention, he was crediting Iran with supporting terrorist attacks on the United States. Which is clearly there’s no evidence of, and if he’s going to talk about anybody doing that, it’d be the Saudis, but, no, Giuliani targets Iran, as did others that spoke at the Republican convention. And then, of course, the whole way corporate media has dealt with the economic crisis. And not dealing with the issue of who really is responsible for that crisis, and how the whole bailout of ’07-’08 made massive more money for the billionaire class, and so on. They treated Sanders as some kind of marginal outlier. So, yeah, of course, they can point to some small sites that supposedly are manipulated by the Russians, most of whom that accusation’s ridiculous. But it’s corporate news elected Donald Trump.

ABBY MARTIN: You just hit it right on the head. Here’s why people even believe this fake news, because mainstream media is completely distrusted. There’s an all-time distrust in corporate media. And we’ve known that for a long, long time, right? And I think that’s, to your point, that’s why Trump became president, is because the entire media Establishment lined up behind Hillary, and that was as clear as day, even during the debates, other than the Fox News debate, it was just every single question was for Trump, hammering Trump. And people saw that, and people absorbed that, and people already think the media is lying to them, and so when they think Trump is an ally to them, and that the media is lying to them, that sows a dangerous, dangerous sentiment where you have them kind of believing, and then you have it validated by the Commander-in-Chief, saying that there are millions of people voting illegally, the protesters are paid.

So, I understand why people are completely shutting out all of the establishment press and going to these sites. The problem is these establishment press is blaming the only solution, which is the credible, independent, grassroots journalism that is telling the truth, that isn’t fake news. So it’s a really, really dangerous conflation on behalf of the establishment media, instead, of course, look in the mirror, having some introspection. Why did we lose? Why don’t people trust us? Instead, they have to punch down to the people who are doing the real work.

PAUL JAY: All right. Thanks very much, Abby.

ABBY MARTIN: Thanks so much, Paul. Great to talk to you.

PAUL JAY: Thanks for joining us on The Real News Network.

Filmmaker Robbie Martin and Paul Jay discuss Trump and Pence’s foreign policy appointments and advisors which include many of the neocons who created The Project for the New American Century and are now targeting Iran.

Robbie Martin on Trump’s Web of Militarists Who Want to Attack Iran

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PAUL JAY: Welcome to The Real News Network. I’m Paul Jay. Well, various balloons, trial balloons are coming out of Trump Tower in New York. Donald Trump met with Tulsi Gabbard, a congresswoman from Hawaii, who’s known as very non-interventionist, was against the war in Iraq and thinks the war to overthrow Assad in Syria is illegal. And apparently, they both had a nice meeting and came to some conclusion. They had some foreign policy ideas in common. Donald Trump met with The New York Times and sounded as reasonable as one might hope someone might sound talking to The New York Times. Telling The New York Times, more or less what they would like to hear, and various other balloons making Donald sound like he’s not the crazy person in the campaign. Apparently, he’s willing to accept a fence rather than a wall in certain places. He isn’t planning, apparently, to deport 11 or 12 million people, just go after some of the very bad actors. In fact, his immigration deportation policy sounds like it might almost be more modest than Barack Obama, who’s been coined at times the “Deporter in Chief.”

But the real Donald Trump, the proof of the Donald Trump pudding is in his appointments, not in who he meets and what he happens to say, ’cause he will say anything on any given day that seems to suit his purposes. Whereas, the appointments to his cabinet and other agencies, those are people who will exercise some real power. And now joining us to talk about just who some of those appointments are, and some of the roots of those people, is Robbie Martin. He’s a journalist, filmmaker and musician. He writes for the magazine White Fungus, the website MintPress News and Oakland-based Media Roots. As a filmmaker, he’s the mind behind the documentary shorts, American Bisque, American Anthrax and now the full-length documentary trilogy, A Very Heavy Agenda. Thanks for joining us, Robbie.

ROBBIE MARTIN: Thanks for having me, Paul.

PAUL JAY: So, Donald Trump, in spite of his anti-interventionist rhetoric has not appointed anybody that even smells slightly of someone who’s anti-interventionist. Let’s go back a little bit into the roots of all this, though. In your film, you spend some time talking about a document that came out in the late 1990s called “The Project for the New American Century.” And, anyone who doesn’t know this document really should go find it, it’s still easy to find on the Internet. And some very senior people signed it who later became the major foreign policy team around George Bush, including Rumsfeld and Cheney and Wolfowitz, Kagan and others, Richard Perle, and essentially asserted itself, the document said, that America should now use its single super-power status to reshape the world in the image it pleases. Talk a bit about PNAC and how they envisioned US foreign policy.

ROBBIE MARTIN: Well, PNAC, or The Project for the New American Century, was started in the 1990s under Bill Clinton. And the reason why Bill Kristol and Robert Kagan and Gary Schmitt said that they started this think tank was because they wanted to encourage the Clinton Administration’s interventionist foreign policy. Because at the time, a sort of Pat Buchanan-esque anti-interventionist attitude was becoming quite trendy in the Republic Party. So Bill Kristol’s the Weekly Standard and along with this think tank The Project for the New American Century, they wanted to start the trend that, even though Clinton was a Democrat, that hawkish Republicans like them should encourage and cheer on Bill Clinton for his military interventions. And this attitude, of course, carried over to the Bush Administration and many, many members of Project for the New American Century, I believe, 17 signatories of their papers, actually got into the Bush Administration.

And now what’s happened is you’ve seen sort of this neocon consensus that formed around The Project for the New American Century, there’s been almost a split where, when the GOP imploded because of Trump’s rise in the primaries, that’s where it really started, you also have sort of a split in the neoconservative consensus in DC. So you have people like Robert Kagan, Max Boot, Eliot Cohen, all openly advocating for Hillary Clinton, similarly to how they were advocating for Bill Clinton in the ’90s, at least his foreign policy. But, while that was happening, which I think took most of the focus away from the other neocons, there were people like Michael Ledeen, James Woolsey, John Bolton, who are all part of Project for the New American Century, it caused them to actually split off and go towards Trump. And that’s… I think that got a little bit overshadowed by just how much focus there was towards the neocons going towards Hillary.

PAUL JAY: Because they all thought Hillary would win. Most of the ones that went to Hillary were pretty sure she was going to emerge the winner of this.

ROBBIE MARTIN: Oh, yeah, absolutely. I mean, as did I. And we’ve already actually seen Eliot Cohen, for example, reach out to the Trump campaign after he won, to try to get some kind of advisory position. And he was told, “You lost.” And he didn’t say who told him that but it might have been, you know, Bannon or someone else from inside the Trump campaign.

PAUL JAY: Let’s go back into this group and the document, the PNAC group. The Project for the New American Century, its basic thesis, if I understand it correctly, is that because this is now a single super-power world, things like international law are no longer necessary — that it’s time to assert raw American military might because there’s no reason not to. And the plan, I think, it’s laid out rather explicitly, that it starts with regime change in Iraq, regime change in Syria, and the real prize is regime change in Iran, and that’s the way to assure the American Century in the Middle East and then some. Those were just the places to begin. Talk a little bit about some of the things those people were saying around the time of the lead-up to the Iraq War, including the idea in this document that in order to pull off these regime changes and use such American military force — which means troops on the ground, it’s not just bombing campaigns — you need the American people onside. And it says explicitly in the document that you can’t do that without a new Pearl Harbor.

ROBBIE MARTIN: Yeah. I mean, back to what you said about the whole notion of international law does not exist. John Bolton specifically has been key to that sort of premise. In the Bush Administration, he was UN Ambassador and made a point to be defiant continuously against the UN, and this is, of course, after the Bush Administration defied the UN in invading Iraq. But, going before that, when The Project for the New American Century wrote the document, “Rebuilding America’s Defenses,” the thesis from that document actually came from a document written by Richard Perle and Douglas Feith for the incoming Netanyahu administration in the ’90s and this document was called “A Clean Break: Securing the Realm.”

Now, the reason why this document and “Rebuilding America’s Defenses” is different than what’s come before it is because, even though US foreign policy has always had a sort of pre-emptive philosophy behind it, it was never stated this, I would say, arrogantly or this candidly in a document, where the core principle behind the document is a philosophy of pre-emption– that we should invade countries that pose no immediate threat to us because at some point in the future they might pose a threat to us. And that whole mindset defined the Bush Administration and also largely defines our foreign policy outlook today, even continuing into the Obama Administration.

PAUL JAY: Part of the message of the document is that naked use of force, overt use of force, does not have to be apologized for. Again, they got their Pearl Harbor, which was 9/11, which gave them the American public opinion and, of course, they did everything they could to link Saddam Hussein to 9/11, even though there was no evidence at all that there was such a thing. I know the story of Greg Thielmann, who dealt with proliferation of weapons of mass destruction for the State Department, and at that time Bolton was Under Secretary of that department responsible for that. And Thielmann would go week after week to Bolton saying “Well, we don’t have any link between Iraq and weapons of mass destruction. We don’t think there are any.” And Bolton would say, “Well, you come back when you’ve got it. You come back when you’ve got it.” And, eventually, Thielmann didn’t have it, ’cause it wasn’t there and he told Thielmann, “Well, you can stop coming to our meetings now.” You have a similar thing happening at the level of Richard Clarke, the anti-terrorism czar, Cheney keeps saying to him, “If you don’t have terrorist attacks linked to Iraq, we’re not interested.” They had an agenda from day one and it’s part of this PNAC vision.

ROBBIE MARTIN: Oh, absolutely. And that’s part of what’s so troubling about Trump supporters — they have a blind spot for these Bush Era neocons creeping back into what will become his administration. I mean, John Bolton specifically actually helped Trump get elected. First, he ran a PAC against Rand Paul early in the Republican primaries, painting Rand Paul as a pacifist on Iran and there’s actually footage of nuclear bombs going off. I think the commercial actually starts with a family eating dinner and just a mushroom cloud exploding in the background.

PAUL JAY: And just quickly for people who don’t know, Rand Paul is the son of Ron Paul, you know, more or less is a fairly consistent Libertarian anti-interventionist. In fact, he said that if John Bolton, who’s been rumored to be getting Secretary of State, Paul has said if it is Bolton he’ll filibuster to try to stop him from being confirmed in the Senate.

ROBBIE MARTIN: Yeah, and I hope that he actually follows through on that because it seems like it’s a pretty sure bet that John Bolton’s going to have some kind of position. I mean, now that Bannon from Breitbart is part of the administration, Breitbart is now running articles trying to tell their audience that Bolton isn’t a neocon, that he wasn’t instrumental in the Iraq war. And I find that amusing because Breitbart has sort of carried this tradition of being different from sort of the neoconservative, more establishment GOP consensus in DC; now that they’re part of the establishment, they’re going to run cover and sort of deflect away these criticisms that are, I think, going to be amplified over time with Trump, just between him and his supporters.

PAUL JAY: Right. There’s a very interesting network of connections here. Breitbart News, the primary owner of Breitbart News is a billionaire named Robert Mercer. Mercer backed Ted Cruz, and his daughter Rebecca Mercer, were real players in the Cruz campaign. Breitbart News, as I said, Mercer is the major owner of that, which means Steve Bannon from Breitbart essentially worked for Mercer. Kellyanne Conway, that became the campaign manager, of course, Bannon became what they call the CEO of the Trump campaign, Kellyanne Conway became the manager. She worked for Mercer as head of the PAC that Mercer put something like 11 or 12 million dollars into backing Ted Cruz and now look at the transition team. Rebecca Mercer is on the transition team. And, of course, Kellyanne Conway seems to be continuing to run the campaign.

Pence, who they recruited, Bannon and Kellyanne Conway got on the Trump campaign prior to the Republican Convention and they’re the ones that recruited Vice President Pence who’s on the same page. And just to add another little wrinkle to this circle, this rogues’ gallery, another John Bolton type who’s being rumored as having, or will have a role in the Trump campaign, is a guy named Frank Gaffney. And Gaffney advised Cruz while Cruz’s campaign was being run by Mercer and now Mercer’s people are now running Trump and perhaps running the White House. And so, it’s likely to see Frank Gaffney back into the picture. Tell us a bit about what you know about Gaffney.

ROBBIE MARTIN: Well, Gaffney’s an interesting character in all this because he was one of the only PNAC neocons who managed to build a bridge to the alt-right movement very early on. He actually has a column at Breitbart and most of his writings revolve around how Sharia Law is apparently going to take over the United States and the White House. He’s written pamphlets on how the Muslim Brotherhood has infiltrated the White House. But most notably, Frank Gaffney is the originator of the ban Muslims immigration policy that was part of Trump’s campaign. And, as you said, he was also an advisor for Ted Cruz, but it recently got announced that he may be in charge of the foreign policy end of Trump’s transition team, even though he publicly denies it. What’s interesting about that is he actually has Trump’s whole transition team, including Pence, as regular recurring guests of his talk radio show. A year previous to Trump winning the primary–

PAUL JAY: This is Gaffney’s radio show. Pence is a regular on Gaffney’s radio show.

ROBBIE MARTIN: Correct, yeah. Newt Gingrich, John Bolton, even James Woolsey were regular guests. And these aren’t just guests out of dozens and dozens of guests, these were a handful of people that he would regularly have on. So, I believe that Frank Gaffney is probably someone that everybody should be taking a closer look at during this whole process, ‘because he seemed to have known who Trump was going to bring into office once he got elected.

PAUL JAY: Yeah, one of the things most of these guys have in common is they consider Islam and the Arab world the enemy of Western civilization and I think you quote in your film, maybe it’s Ledeen quoting Machiavelli saying, “When the country’s interests are being asserted, evil is acceptable,” something along those lines.

ROBBIE MARTIN: Yeah, that we are permitted to do evil in the act of protecting our nation. So, of course, you know, to a neoconservative that essentially means a pre-emptive strike or who knows what that means? It could be something even worse than that.

PAUL JAY: The most important appointment, of course, of all of these people is Pence. Some people have considered him to be, or will be, the new Cheney and it’s gotten some play that when he was asked who his role model for Vice President would be, he said Dick Cheney. And that’s a rather telling thing. Everyone knows how powerful Cheney was in the White House. Everyone knows Cheney helped create the entire false intelligence about weapons in Iraq. So, he’s saying a guy who lied through his teeth, and lied the United States into war, is his role model and has no problem saying that on 60 Minutes or national television. That tells us a lot. Tell us more about Pence and his own views and his relationships to these guys.

ROBBIE MARTIN: Well, Pence himself actually comes from right wing talk radio culture, as well. He used to host his own show, even set up a makeshift studio in his offices once he was elected. And as a freshman Senator, Mike Pence was actually one of the only government officials to keep trying to go out to the media, writing letters to John Ashcroft, using time on the House floor to convince people that Saddam Hussein was behind the 2001 anthrax attacks. And he continued to do this for about a year after anthrax was sent to Tom Daschle and Patrick Leahy.

Now, he says that his office was infected with anthrax, which may have actually happened, but Patrick Leahy and Daschle were not trying to play politics at all with that event; in fact, they still doubt the official conclusions of that investigation that it was from a lone scientist named Bruce Ivins from Fort Detrick, Maryland. Mike Pence, even against the instructions of Ari Fleischer who told the press that Saddam had nothing to do with it, that bentonite wasn’t found in the anthrax, Mike Pence continued to assert this connection which I think is a very strange thing to do for any freshman Senator to be making such a strong declaration of something during an emotional hysteria like that.

PAUL JAY: Again, this cast of characters has various other players, we can’t get through them all now, but it’s important, I think, to talk about James Woolsey who was under Clinton and then under Bush. Woolsey was CIA, right?

ROBBIE MARTIN: Woolsey was a CIA Director under Bill Clinton, for a very brief amount of time.

PAUL JAY: And Woolsey at the time of the Israeli-Lebanon War was saying, “We should take advantage of this opportunity to bomb Syria and try to get rid of Assad.” I guess the point here, and I must say, let me throw Giuliani in the mix here, too, because, at the Republican Convention, Giuliani says that it’s Iran waging terrorist threats and attacks against the United States. Iran is the source of terrorism against the United States, which everybody knows is not the case. Of course, Israel doesn’t like Iran’s support for Hezbollah but it’s clear from any number of sources, not the least of which the Joint Congressional Investigation to 9/11 that it’s, in fact, Saudi Arabia that’s allied with terrorist threats and actual terrorist attacks against the United States. But talk a little bit about Woolsey and then a little bit about Giuliani.

ROBBIE MARTIN: Well, one common thread that links all these people together — and I call them “The Craziers” which is a reference to Ray McGovern calling the old neoconservatives in the Reagan Administration “The Crazies” — I would describe these people as crazier: Gaffney, Ledeen, Bolton, Woolsey, they all actually prefer not to overthrow Assad. And I’m sure that Woolsey has said some things in the past about overthrowing Assad but, make no mistake, it’s not because they are pacifists on Syria or they don’t want a regime change in Syria, that’s actually not the case; they prefer that we overthrow the regime of Iran first. Because, in their mindset, that would cut off the head of the snake, which is Assad in Syria.

PAUL JAY: Which was the terminology that the King of Saudi Arabia used trying to goad the Americans into bombing Iran.

ROBBIE MARTIN: Yeah. So, this is a very troubling development that the Trump Administration appears to be a cabal of neoconservatives who are very fixated on militarily invading or attacking Iran. Which is something that the Bush Administration did have – you know, there was a neoconservative consensus within it that wanted to do that but it ended up not winning out in the end. So, hopefully, it doesn’t this time either, but I’m not so hopeful. But, in terms of Giuliani, who’s also said things about Iran, Giuliani is probably the dirtiest character in this whole lineup of people. He has connections, time and time again, to just various aspects of the deep state. Even when he was running as Mayor, in 1989, he lost pretty badly because Ed Koch and other opponents pointed out that he actually represented General Manuel Noriega, a Panamanian drug lord.

PAUL JAY: And a CIA asset for quite awhile.

ROBBIE MARTIN: Of course, yeah. And Rudy has supported MEK, which is another terrorist organization. But there’s also just strange, convenient circumstances that Rudy has found himself in. For example, his company Bio-One, made millions of dollars off the 2001 anthrax attacks. He had a company before 9/11 that specialized in bio terror contamination clean up. And his company ended up cleaning out the Florida Sun building where the first anthrax victim was located. Rudy also invests in border technology. He has a company called SkyWatch that specializes in digital surveillance grid technology for Mexican border security in collaboration with Raytheon. So, I mean, in my mind, it’s possible Rudy contacted Trump and said, “Hey, you want to build a wall, here’s what we can do,” and sort of connected those business appendages together.

PAUL JAY: Right. I think what drives all US foreign policy, certainly President Obama and Clinton and you can go back, the underlying driving force is American corporate interests, the need to control raw materials, control overseas markets, control cheap labor, to be able to export and loan money and skin cats twice through interest rates, all of that drives all American foreign policy, but this particular group, the group that was around Cheney and now the group that President-Elect Trump is gathering around him, it’s all of that and almost a vulgar direct criminality, a kind of corruption. I think by the time this regime is done its course, four years from now or eight years from now, the number of scandals and the amount of pure pillaging of the public trough in the name of fighting terrorism is going to be unparalleled.

ROBBIE MARTIN: Yeah, I mean, I hope that a lot of the people really study these characters because they’re going to be back in power again. I mean, the idea of James Woolsey being back in power again terrifies the crap out of me. And I think it should terrify many of Trump supporters, as well, who are hoping that he’d be this sort of anti-war, drain the swamp, anti-establish candidate. I mean, Woolsey himself, he doesn’t even have a problem admitting that the CIA itself was used as a tool of corporate espionage. He brags in a Wall Street Journal editorial about how we spy on Europe, the CIA spies on Europe because Europe bribes a lot. So, and he’s talking about European businesses to get American businesses, an advantage over them. So these people that are openly corrupt and have no problem bragging about their corruption.

PAUL JAY: Well, I’ll say it again, it doesn’t matter what anti-interventionist or somewhat slightly reasonable words come out of the Donald’s mouth, the proof is in the appointments and you look at the people around Trump and you can see what direction his foreign policy is going. Thanks very much for joining us, Robbie. We’ll pick this up again.

ROBBIE MARTIN: Thank you very much, Paul.

PAUL JAY: Thank you for joining us on The Real News Network.

Leader of the Cuban revolution, Fidel Castro, has died on his own terms, after surviving at least 638 assassination attempts by the CIA. Unlike the glorification of brutal theocratic leaders like Saudi Arabia’s late King Abdullah, the establishment will be giving no accolades to Castro. 

Capitalism’s defenders vociferously attack Cuba as a freedomless dystopia, while downplaying the country’s amazing achievements under socialism.

You cannot look at Cuba in isolation without understanding the long history of economic and political sabotage in the country on behalf of the U.S. Empire. From the crippling embargo, to the sponsoring of political dissent to the creation of an immigration policy designed for defection, the U.S. government has done everything in its power to undermine Cuba’s success.

Despite its severe economic restrictions, Cuba has a lower infant mortality rate than the U.S. and a near perfect literacy rate of 99.8%. Cuba’s system of free preventative healthcare is one of the best in the world.

The country’s philosophy of medical solidarity trains anyone to become a doctor, and has sent the world’s largest contingent of medical professionals to fight Ebola in Liberia, Sierra Leone, and Guinea. From Haiti to Pakistan, Cuba is usually the first country on the front lines helping with every natural disaster and medical emergency. Today, more than 50,000 Cuban healthcare workers are operating in 66 countries around the world.

Because it provides basic amenities like food, shelter and healthcare for all citizens, Cuba also has one of the lowest crime rates in the Western Hemisphere.

Cuba is not perfect, yet far from the “police state” it is painted to be. I didn’t see one police officer when I was there, and people spoke freely about their discontent with the government. There was even a government sponsored art space that was full of cutting, self-reflexive political commentary.

In a three part series finale to Breaking the Set, I explain the history of Cuba-U.S. tensions and highlight underreported aspects of society and culture in an on-the-ground report.

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Cuba Part I: Revolution, Sabotage & Un-Normal Relations

BTS explains the history of Cuba and U.S. attempts of regime change, and talks to average Cubans both in Havana and in Miami about their views on the state of U.S. relations. Featuring an interview with Kenia Serrano, a high ranking Cuban parliament member, about everything from internet access to the crackdown on free speech in the country.

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Ebola Solidarity & Castro’s Daughter on LGBTQ Rights

BTS covers Cuba’s exemplary medical achievements with a Cuban doctor and students at the Latin American School of Medicine, an international medical school that trains anyone to become a doctor for free, as well as the U.S. programs that actively undermine international health efforts. Featuring an interview with Mariela Castro, daughter of President Raul Castro, and director of Cuba’s sex ed program CENESEX about LGBTQ rights in the country.

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The Evolution of Revolution

BTS focuses on reforms to the country’s economic and agricultural models, giving an overview of how Cuba’s cooperative and food system works, as well as operating private enterprise. Feauturing an interview with Ricardo Alarcón, Cuba’s former minister of foreign affairs and president of the People’s National Assembly of Power.

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@AbbyMartin

Abby and Robbie Martin talk about the surrealness of the 2016 presidential election, how the entire establishment was blindsided, why the DNC failed so abysmally what can be expected from POTUS Donald Trump on a Media Roots Radio election special.

This Media Roots podcast is the product of many long hours of hard work and love. If you want to encourage our voice, please consider supporting us on Patreon. Listen to all previous episodes of Media Roots Radio on soundcloud or subscribe on itunes.

Abby talks about the failure of the Democratic party to bring out its base and why millions around the country are protesting POTUS Donald Trump on teleSUR English.

New Resistance Movement Born out of Trump Presidency

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Follow @FluorescentGrey | @AbbyMartin | @EmpireFiles