Kid Berwyn
Kid Berwyn's JournalU.S. Embassy Staffer Who Drugged, Molested Women on Video Was in CIA, Feds Say
Source: The Daily Beast
The FBI, which on Monday revealed convicted sex criminal Brian Jeffrey Raymond was in fact an intelligence officer, is urging additional victims to come forward.
Justin Rohrlich
The Daily Beast, Reporter, Oct. 26, 2021
A U.S. Embassy staffer accused of drugging and sexually assaulting at least 24 women over a 14-year period was in fact a longtime CIA employee, the FBI announced Monday, as the bureau urged any possible victims to come forward in the case.
Serial molester Brian Jeffrey Raymond, 45, was arrested Oct. 9, 2020, in La Mesa, California, where he had been staying with his parents after abruptly quitting his job at the U.S. Embassy in Mexico City. He pleaded guilty this past July to two counts of sexual abuse and one count of transporting obscene material, and will be required to register as a sex offender for the rest of his life upon his eventual release from prison.
FBI spokeswoman Samantha Shero confirmed to The Daily Beast that Raymond was working for the CIA during his embassy posting in Mexico. She declined to provide further details about his exact position with the spy agency. A CIA spokesperson told The Daily Beast in an emailed statement, “CIA condemns in the strongest terms the crimes committed by former Agency officer Brian Jeffrey Raymond.” A source familiar with the case said the CIA took administrative action after Raymond’s arrest, and that he resigned from his position soon after.
Snip…
Raymond, who speaks Spanish and Mandarin Chinese and worked in at least six different countries over some 20 years of federal service that Raymond’s defense team described as “exemplary,” met his unsuspecting victims on Bumble, Hinge, and other dating apps. After meeting Raymond for a date, his victims reported “drinking alcohol supplied and/or prepared by Raymond and experiencing memory loss during their time with Raymond,” states Raymond’s plea agreement. At least nine of Raymond’s attacks occurred in his official government residence.
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Read more: https://www.thedailybeast.com/us-embassy-staffer-brian-jeffrey-raymond-who-drugged-molested-women-on-video-was-in-cia-feds-say?ref=home
Guy must’ve figured out how to pass the lie detector tests.
As for why no coverage in MSM...
The Propaganda System That Has Helped Create a Permanent Overclass Is Over a Century in the MakingPulling back the curtain on how intent the wealthiest Americans have been on establishing a propaganda tool to subvert democracy.
Wednesday, 17 April 2013 00:00
By Andrew Gavin Marshall, AlterNet | News Analysis
Where there is the possibility of democracy, there is the inevitability of elite insecurity. All through its history, democracy has been under a sustained attack by elite interests, political, economic, and cultural. There is a simple reason for this: democracy – as in true democracy – places power with people. In such circumstances, the few who hold power become threatened. With technological changes in modern history, with literacy and education, mass communication, organization and activism, elites have had to react to the changing nature of society – locally and globally.
From the late 19th century on, the “threats” to elite interests from the possibility of true democracy mobilized institutions, ideologies, and individuals in support of power. What began was a massive social engineering project with one objective: control. Through educational institutions, the social sciences, philanthropic foundations, public relations and advertising agencies, corporations, banks, and states, powerful interests sought to reform and protect their power from the potential of popular democracy.
SNIP...
The development of psychology, psychoanalysis, and other disciplines increasingly portrayed the “public” and the population as irrational beings incapable of making their own decisions. The premise was simple: if the population was driven by dangerous, irrational emotions, they needed to be kept out of power and ruled over by those who were driven by reason and rationality, naturally, those who were already in power.
The Princeton Radio Project, which began in the 1930s with Rockefeller Foundation funding, brought together many psychologists, social scientists, and “experts” armed with an interest in social control, mass communication, and propaganda. The Princeton Radio Project had a profound influence upon the development of a modern "democratic propaganda" in the United States and elsewhere in the industrialized world. It helped in establishing and nurturing the ideas, institutions, and individuals who would come to shape America’s “democratic propaganda” throughout the Cold War, a program fostered between the private corporations which own the media, advertising, marketing, and public relations industries, and the state itself.
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http://truth-out.org/news/item/15784-the-propaganda-system-that-has-helped-create-a-permanent-overclass-is-over-a-century-in-the-making
New Whistleblower: Facebook Exempted Breitbart from Censure
A new whistleblower reportedly claimed Facebook exempted right-wing outlet Breitbart from certain rules because it didn't want to 'start a fight with Steve Bannon'
Katie Canales
Business Insider, Fri, October 22, 2021
* Facebook "whitelisted" Breitbart to avoid angering Republicans, a new whistleblower told The Washington Post.
* When an employee questioned the move, an exec reportedly said "do you want to start a fight with Steve Bannon?"
* Facebook has long been ensnared in a political war over how it moderates users and content.
Another whistleblower has come forward with claims against Facebook, according to The Washington Post.
The anonymous former employee told the outlet that Facebook's Public Policy team - helmed by the company's now-vice president of global public policy, Joel Kaplan - defended "whitelisting" the right-wing news outlet Breitbart, run at the time by former Trump White House strategist Steve Bannon.
"Whitelisting" refers to exempting certain elite, high-profile figures online from rules that apply to ordinary users. When Facebook defended "whitelisting" Brietbart, an employee questioned the move, the whistleblower told The Post.
Source: https://www.yahoo.com/news/whistleblower-reportedly-claimed-facebook-exempted-203602205.html
(For those new to the subject) Why’s this matter?
Facebook And Steve Bannon Hacked The Media. And They Won’t Stop.
Unless we build something better.
MONIKA BAUERLEIN
Mother Jones, OCTOBER 31, 2020
Let’s talk about Steve Bannon—I’d like to say “one last time” but who are we kidding? Regardless of the election outcome, we know that America’s political and media ecosystem has been inexorably changed by a racist novel-loving, dual collar-wearing media entrepreneur from Norfolk, Virginia. And if you thought the Bannon story was over after he got booted from the White House, or after he got pushed out of Breitbart News, or after his arrest by Postal Service agents this summer—you were wrong. Like a bad penny, Bannon keeps coming back, and in the closing weeks of this high-stakes election, he has been hauling out all of his old tricks to accomplish one simple goal: Sow chaos and confusion about Joe Biden, by any means necessary.
It was Bannon who shopped dubious material, supposedly off a Hunter Biden laptop, to the New York Post and other news outlets. It was people in Bannon’s circles who have been desperately trying to “pizzagate” Biden with baseless rumors. It is Bannon and Rudy Giuliani who, as my colleagues David Corn and Dan Friedman have comprehensively reported, keep pushing ever thinner and more loathsome allegations to every right-wing outlet site around. And while mainstream media are not being hoodwinked as much as they were in the past, it doesn’t matter as much anymore because it’s easier—and more profitable—than ever to pump propaganda directly into America’s political bloodstream.
What made Bannon so effective over the years is the reengineering of our news ecosystem by tech platforms, most notably Facebook. If Bannon helped make Trump, Facebook helped make Bannon. And even if Bannon were to end up behind bars, and Trump were to be booted out of the Oval, we’ll be living in the world they created for a long, long time.
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But we misunderstood what Zuckerberg meant when he said “news.” He wasn’t talking about journalism, or any verified account of facts. He was talking about content—any content, of any quality. And, given that Facebook was laser-focused on growth, and growth was fueled by sharing, and sharing was fueled by emotion, he was in particular talking about content that riled you up. Content that made you love, but also content that made you hate.
What many of us didn’t know—but Steve Bannon did—was that content that makes you hate is easy to produce, and very clickable and shareable. And so, Breitbart turned the volume up to 11. It launched a vertical literally called “Black Crime.” It gave bylines to extremists and white nationalists. It became, as Bannon would tell Mother Jones as Trump’s 2016 campaign roared ahead, “the platform for the alt-right.”
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https://www.motherjones.com/politics/2020/10/facebook-bannon-trump/
And that’s how fascism got popularized.
The pivotal battle is for those with functioning critical faculties.
Many if not most who inhabit a polluted information environment may be irredeemable. We still should try for their mind space. The most effective way is to tell the best story and control the narrative.
You may enjoy the Nobel Lecture by playwright Harold Pinter:
Dulles Brothers 1953-present day.
Nazi Sympathizers.
Like Allen Dulles, John McCloy also represented on the Warren Commission.
Once upon a time, fascists decided to create their own reality.
Tom Tomorrow saw where the Big Lie was going from 2012:
Time to make the fascists face the facts.
Met at least six times. So.
Ron DeSantis as Florida governor-elect, thanks Ukrainian-born businessman Lev Parnas of Boca Raton while Parnas' partner Igor Fruman takes a photo, on election night in November. (Chris Urso/Tampa Bay Times/TNS)
DeSantis, indicted Ukrainian-American Parnas met at least 6 times, governor’s office says
https://www.orlandosentinel.com/politics/os-ne-desantis-parnas-fruman-20191115-ex5bvk6ezfavxgksokpnjoldty-story.html
Bannon Wants to Destroy Our Democracy. He Must Be Prosecuted.
Bannon Wants to Destroy Our Democracy. He Must Be Prosecuted.
Ruth Ben-Ghiat
Lucid.Substack.com, October 19, 2021
For those who study authoritarianism, Steve Bannon's refusal to respond to the subpoena issued by the Congressional committee tasked with investigating Jan. 6 is hardly a surprise. Bannon's aim is to destroy our democracy, and responding to a subpoena issued by a democratic judiciary would affirm the legitimacy of a system he seeks to overthrow.
Bannon had big dreams to become a little Duce in Italy, training Europe's next right-wing "gladiators" in an Italian monastery, but that project failed. Now he's back in America, which in his mind is the new frontier of autocracy. He already feels empowered to discard the rule of law and respect for judicial process. "We control the country. We've got to start acting like it," he said recently on his War Room podcast about his plan to prepare tens of thousands of "shock troops" for an anti-democratic takeover of government once the Republicans return to the White House by legal or other means.
Snip…
For the creators of the Trumpcult have a problem. 2024 is too far away to satisfy the angry demands of Trump's base for action. Even the 2022 midterms are a year out. Without a catalyzing event, it can be hard to keep up momentum. That's why many authoritarian leaders, including Mussolini, who Bannon admires, have made "permanent revolution" a propaganda point.
And that's why our political situation will become more volatile over the next year, and all bets are off after the midterms, whichever way the votes land. Bannon has already floated a scheme that hinges on making Trump Speaker of the House, and then president once Biden and Vice-President Kamala Harris are impeached — a prospect sufficiently alarming to prompt Rep. Brendan Boyle (D-PA) to introduce a bill to restrict the speakership to House members.
The gravity of these possibilities, and Bannon's openness about his seditious aims, make concerns that an eventual Department of Justice prosecution of him might look "partisan" misplaced, to say the least. So are fears that pursuing Trump and his inner circle could lead to civil unrest. We've already experienced unrest, on Jan. 6, and the only way to avoid an even bigger calamity is to hold the organizers and perpetrators of the deadly coup attempt accountable.
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https://lucid.substack.com/p/bannon-wants-to-destroy-our-democracy
We need to get on top of this Thing. RFN
An idea relevant to the current political situation.
Edgar Mitchell sets up an Apollo lunar surface experiments package made up of a set of scientific instruments placed at the landing site. The instruments were designed to run autonomously for long term studies of the moon's environment.
“I theorize that there is a spectrum of consciousness available to human beings. At one end is material consciousness. At the other end is what we call 'field' consciousness, where a person is at one with the universe, perceiving the universe. Just by looking at our planet on the way back, I saw or felt a field consciousness state.” — Edgar D. Mitchell, PhD.
William Shatner is a son of a bitch (in the very best sense of the term)
Earth as seen from Apollo 14 in lunar orbit…
What the late astronaut Edgar Mitchell observed from the moon:
“You develop an instant global consciousness, a people orientation, an intense dissatisfaction with the state of the world, and a compulsion to do something about it. From out there on the moon, international politics look so petty. You want to grab a politician by the scruff of the neck and drag him a quarter of a million miles out and say, ‘Look at that, you son of a bitch.’”
― Edgar D. Mitchell
The space traveler, known for his portrayal of the fictional Captain Kirk, observed after his return to earth:
Those profound observations of deadly space and our life-supporting home planet were made near-earth, after a sub-orbital flight.
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