Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg created one of the world's largest and most important platforms for spreading news and information, even when it's fake. (AP Photo/Nam Y. Huh)
The Bolshevik Revolution turned 100 last October. As Friday’s indictment of Russia's Internet Research Agency reminds us, it's been 100 years of tyrannical and murderous Russian regimes working to subvert democracy wherever they can and distort American public opinion by any means they can devise.
For decades, even in the post-Soviet era, the left wing of American politics laughed off this threat. It was not until Nov. 8, 2016, that it decided that Russia posed a serious threat to this country. This damascene conversion to faith in a new Red Scare helps them cling to conspiracy theories about President Trump colluding with Russian President Vladimir Putin to take over the U.S. government.
But none of even the president's most ardent domestic opponents have been able to offer any plausible evidence of what this Trump-Russia collusion looks like or whether investigators of Russian interference will find anything on Trump at all. Certainly, Peter Strzok, one of the most virulently anti-Trump FBI officials who was investigating the president, thought there was "no big there there."
So, while you're waiting for something tangible to develop, let us recommend a more credible and immediate target for your anger.
As of this week, Mark Zuckerberg, owner of Facebook, is now directly colluding with Putin to influence world opinion in favor of the tyrant's regime. It’s happening before your very eyes.
Zuckerberg created one of the world’s largest and most important platforms for spreading news and information — and fake news and disinformation. It was one of the platforms Russian and other foreign propagandists used most effectively in 2016 to pass off lies as real news stories and to spread messages designed to divide Americans by race.
But what Facebook once allowed through organizational passivity, it is now doing willfully. Zuckerberg’s company, the owner of Instagram, has caved to pressure from Moscow and has agreed to suppress Instagram posts that Putin's critics have dug up and presented as concrete evidence of astounding official corruption.
Alexei Navalny, leader of the political opposition, alerted the world this week to Instagram posts that gave Russians and others a rare look at the high-flying lifestyle that government officials enjoy. In contrast to Putin’s manufactured image as a selfless public servant, the posts show Russia’s deputy prime minister, a powerful Putin ally, socializing on a yacht owned by Russian industrialist Oleg Deripaska, on a trip where the available evidence strongly hints they traded corrupt favors. The two men also tried to conceal the fact of their meeting, with the deputy prime minister leaving the yacht before it returned to port.
In a video showcasing these posts about the yacht trip, along with other evidence of corruption, Navalny presents a compelling case that the official was also brought there on the oligarch’s plane. He states that the free trip, the free jaunt on the yacht, and the prostitutes on board would probably all count as bribes, if Russia had honest law enforcement or courts.
Navalny throws in drone footage showing this lifetime civil servant’s 17,000-square-foot mansion on seven acres of land. Navalny notes that this Russian official reports on his official disclosure forms that his wife has made millions of dollars in recent years, even though she has no job and owns no other sources of income. This all screams of a huge source of illicit income for one of the most powerful officials in Russia. (Deripaska, by the way, has also been in the news in connection with former lobbyist and erstwhile Trump campaign chairman Paul Manafort.)
Americans take for granted that Putin’s regime and its top officials are kleptocrats, but the regime tries to prevent most Russians from seeing this. That’s one reason Putin’s approval ratings are so high in Russia — he controls the news, and his enemies can expect to be at least harassed, at worst assassinated.
Navalny’s muckraking represents a sudden threat to Putin, which is why his regime put so much pressure on Zuckerberg to help him by blocking the posts under the flimsy pretext that the video violated Deripaska’s privacy on his yacht. That Zuckerberg capitulated in this matter, choosing to collude with the Putin dictatorship in suppressing real news is a sickening and saddening development.
One bright spot is that Putin has so far failed to force Google into removing YouTube videos about this, including this follow-up video.
A few weeks ago, Zuckerberg announced Facebook’s plans to purify news content that appears on the platform so less “fake news” reaches users. People wondered who would decide what news is real and what is fake.
Keep these in mind as you contemplate the direction of the American government over the past 50 years and especially since the Obama election.
The Goals of Communism
(as read into the congressional record January 10, 1963, from "The Naked Communist" by Cleon Skousen)
1. U.S. acceptance of coexistence as the only alternative to atomic war.
2. U.S. willingness to capitulate in preference to engaging in atomic war.
3. Develop the illusion that total disarmament of the United States would be a demonstration of moral strength.
4. Permit free trade between all nations regardless of Communist affiliation and regardless of whether or not items could be used for war.
5. Extension of long-term loans to Russia and Soviet satellites.
6. Provide American aid to all nations regardless of Communist domination.
7. Grant recognition of Red China. Admission of Red China to the U.N.
8. Set up East and West Germany as separate states in spite of Khrushchev's promise in 1955 to settle the German question by free elections under supervision of the U.N.
9. Prolong the conferences to ban atomic tests because the United States has agreed to suspend tests as long as negotiations are in progress.
10. Allow all Soviet satellites individual representation in the U.N.
11. Promote the U.N. as the only hope for mankind. If its charter is rewritten, demand that it be set up as a one-world government with its own independent armed forces. (Some Communist leaders believe the world can be taken over as easily by the U.N. as by Moscow. Sometimes these two centers compete with each other as they are now doing in the Congo.)
12. Resist any attempt to outlaw the Communist Party.
13. Do away with all loyalty oaths.
14. Continue giving Russia access to the U.S. Patent Office.
15. Capture one or both of the political parties in the United States.
16. Use technical decisions of the courts to weaken basic American institutions by claiming their activities violate civil rights.
17. Get control of the schools. Use them as transmission belts for socialism and current Communist propaganda. Soften the curriculum. Get control of teachers' associations. Put the party line in textbooks.
18. Gain control of all student newspapers.
19. Use student riots to foment public protests against programs or organizations which are under Communist attack.
20. Infiltrate the press. Get control of book-review assignments, editorial writing, policymaking positions.
21. Gain control of key positions in radio, TV, and motion pictures.
22. Continue discrediting American culture by degrading all forms of artistic expression. An American Communist cell was told to "eliminate all good sculpture from parks and buildings, substitute shapeless, awkward and meaningless forms."
23. Control art critics and directors of art museums. "Our plan is to promote ugliness, repulsive, meaningless art."
24. Eliminate all laws governing obscenity by calling them "censorship" and a violation of free speech and free press.
25. Break down cultural standards of morality by promoting pornography and obscenity in books, magazines, motion pictures, radio, and TV.
26. Present homosexuality, degeneracy and promiscuity as "normal, natural, healthy."
27. Infiltrate the churches and replace revealed religion with "social" religion. Discredit the Bible and emphasize the need for intellectual maturity which does not need a "religious crutch."
28. Eliminate prayer or any phase of religious expression in the schools on the ground that it violates the principle of "separation of church and state."
29. Discredit the American Constitution by calling it inadequate, old-fashioned, out of step with modern needs, a hindrance to cooperation between nations on a worldwide basis.
30. Discredit the American Founding Fathers. Present them as selfish aristocrats who had no concern for the "common man."
31. Belittle all forms of American culture and discourage the teaching of American history on the ground that it was only a minor part of the "big picture." Give more emphasis to Russian history since the Communists took over.
32. Support any socialist movement to give centralized control over any part of the culture--education, social agencies, welfare programs, mental health clinics, etc.
33. Eliminate all laws or procedures which interfere with the operation of the Communist apparatus.
34. Eliminate the House Committee on Un-American Activities.
35. Discredit and eventually dismantle the FBI.
36. Infiltrate and gain control of more unions.
37. Infiltrate and gain control of big business.
38. Transfer some of the powers of arrest from the police to social agencies. Treat all behavioral problems as psychiatric disorders which no one but psychiatrists can understand.
39. Dominate the psychiatric profession and use mental health laws as a means of gaining coercive control over those who oppose Communist goals.
40. Discredit the family as an institution. Encourage promiscuity and easy divorce.
41. Emphasize the need to raise children away from the negative influence of parents. Attribute prejudices, mental blocks and retarding of children to suppressive influence of parents.
42. Create the impression that violence and insurrection are legitimate aspects of the American tradition; that students and special-interest groups should rise up and use united force to solve economic, political or social problems.
43. Overthrow all colonial governments before native populations are ready for self-government.
44. Internationalize the Panama Canal.
45. Repeal the Connally reservation so the United States cannot prevent the World Court from seizing jurisdiction over nations and individuals alike.
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