A Truly Horrendous and Shocking Revelation that Bodes Ill for 2020

There is a helpful roundup today in RT (see "Huge Psy-op in UK? Not interested. British media silent on Integrity Initiative months on") regarding the lack of coverage in the British media on the Integrity Initiative.

The Integrity Initiative (II) is a project of the Institute for Statecraft, a Scottish charity, funded by, among others, the British Ministry of Defense, the British Foreign Office, the U.S. State Department, NATO and Facebook. The Institute for Statecraft's stated mission is to educate about governance and advance human rights; it's real mission is to shore up support for a fracturing neoliberal consensus by fabricating a hostile Russian bogeyman.

That's where the Integrity Initiative project comes in: It's supposed to combat Russian disinformation, but in fact the Integrity Initiative produces fake news about Russian disinformation. It disseminates this Russiaphobia through clusters of journalists, politicians and academics.

Since the Institute for Statecraft was hacked in November what has become clear to me -- and what explains the silence in the mainstream Western media (RT focused solely on the mainstream British media, but the same goes for the U.S.) -- is that the II is how the mainstream media operates in general: clusters of journalists, politicians, academics and think-tankers are managed by the government (even if the form happens to be a charity) to produce official enemies.

A peek behind the Great Oz's curtain can be found in Glenn Greenwald's story Sunday, "NBC News, to Claim Russia Supports Tulsi Gabbard, Relies on Firm Just Caught Fabricating Russia Data for the Democratic Party." In a nutshell, NBC News Russiabaited antiwar presidential aspirant Tulsi Gabbard by citing analysis from New Knowledge identifying "‘chatter’ related to Gabbard in anonymous online message boards, including those known for fomenting right-wing troll campaigns.”

As Greenwald points out:

What NBC — amazingly — concealed is a fact that reveals its article to be a journalistic fraud: That same firm, New Knowledge, was caught just six weeks ago engaging in a massive scam to create fictitious Russian troll accounts on Facebook and Twitter in order to claim that the Kremlin was working to defeat Democratic Senate nominee Doug Jones in Alabama. The New York Times, when exposing the scam, quoted a New Knowledge report that boasted of its fabrications: “We orchestrated an elaborate ‘false flag’ operation that planted the idea that the [Roy] Moore campaign was amplified on social media by a Russian botnet.'”

It's not as if New Knowledge's information warfare went under the radar. The New York Times alone has published six stories since it was revealed in December that New Knowledge's Jonathon Morgan created a ersatz Russian botnet to support the GOP's Roy Moore in the special election for the U.S. Senate in Alabama:

• "Secret Experiment in Alabama Senate Race Imitated Russian Tactics," Dec 19
• "Doug Jones ‘Outraged’ by Russian-Style Tactics Used in His Senate Race," Dec 20
• "Facebook Closes 5 Accounts Tied to Russia-Like Tactics in Alabama Senate Race," Dec 22
• "LinkedIn Co-Founder Apologizes for Deception in Alabama Senate Race," Dec 26
• "Democrats Faked Online Push to Outlaw Alcohol in Alabama Race," Jan 7
• "Fake News as ‘Moral Imperative’? Democrats’ Alabama Move Hints at Ugly 2020," Jan 13

All of this is an enormous body blow to the McCarthyite anti-Russian hysteria that undergirds much of the official Democratic Party. As Jim Rutenberg points out in the last article in the above list of six:

New Knowledge helped build the website for the Alliance’s [Alliance for Securing Democracy] disinformation-tracking database, Hamilton68, which had monitored suspected Russian-linked accounts, tracking the falsehoods they spread and the discord they tried to sow. (New Knowledge also helped write a report on Russian troll activity released last month by the Senate Intelligence Committee.) The Alabama project, Mr. Schafer told me, “undercuts our collective ability to take other countries to task for their deceptive, online behavior.”

A more appropriate question to ask, the one implied, is how much of the putative deceptive online activity attributed to hostile foreign actors is actually homegrown?

What are we supposed to do with "Russians Meddling in the Midterms? Here’s the Data" and "After Florida School Shooting, Russian ‘Bot’ Army Pounced," both sourced to Jonathon Morgan? Have these storylines been debunked and publicly repudiated? When are the congressional hearings scheduled?

NBC News citing Morgan and New Knowledge to tar the antiwar Gabbard is evidence that the fakeness of mainstream media is exposure proof. A truly horrendous and shocking revelation that bodes ill for 2020.