(C) Daily Kos This story was originally published by Daily Kos and is unaltered. . . . . . . . . . . The Santos Dilemma [1] ['This Content Is Not Subject To Review Daily Kos Staff Prior To Publication.', 'Backgroundurl Avatar_Large', 'Nickname', 'Joined', 'Created_At', 'Story Count', 'N_Stories', 'Comment Count', 'N_Comments', 'Popular Tags'] Date: 2023-02-17 George Santos is a walking, talking, viral Internet meme character who blatantly mocks the integrity of our political system every time he enters the house chambers. The news media’s belated interest in the meteoric, and increasingly questionable, rise of Republican Congressman George Anthony Devolder Santos should be a warning to all Americans. We desperately need quality journalism to speak truth to power and challenge the unjust actions of dishonest people and corrupt institutions. How did this happen? How does a serial liar possessing little money and no political experience, save for a loudly proclaimed allegiance to former President Donald Trump, win a seat in one of the wealthiest districts in the country? Are we witnessing the normalization of the transnational right, and why are the major news outlets playing catch up on this story? Seeds of Disaster Belmarsh Prison — Julian Assange Julian Assange could tell you. It began the moment he was forced to jump bail and flee trumped-up rape charges in Sweden. The year was 2012, and the abject failure of America’s most powerful news agencies to come to his defense signaled a growing lack of will among these organizations to challenge the United States government on national security issues. Assange had published a classified government video depicting U.S. armed forces ruthlessly shooting Reuters journalists and helpless civilians. The worldwide release of the video, in April, 2010, drew immediate condemnation across the globe. Despite the veracity of the video, U.S. officials quickly branded Assange as a spy and hunted him like a common criminal. Four months later, while Assange was attending a conference in Sweden, two Wikileaks volunteers went to the police and filed rape charges against their house guest, Julian Assange. Assange, speaking from London, described the charges as a political smear and a thinly veiled pretext for his extradition to the U.S. where he would face a hostile government seeking charges of political espionage. A conviction could result in the death penalty. In light of the circumstances, Assange breached his bail, forfeiting £240,000 in cash and sureties, and sought asylum in the Ecuadorean Embassy. There he would spend the next seven years of his life. Despite the challenges of living in a single room of the Ecuadorean Embassy in London, Assange continued to regularly publish groundbreaking news stories. In 2016, during the U.S. Presidential campaign, Assange’s website, Wikileaks, published emails leaked from the Democratic National Committee. It was, indisputably, the biggest story of the year. The information released, incredibly damaging to the Democratic candidate, Hilary Clinton, served to play a consequential role in the election of Republican Donald Trump to the United States Presidency. In 2017, Wikileaks released a trove of sensitive CIA documents, code-named Vault 7, detailing the hacking and illegal surveillance capabilities of the Central Intelligence Agency. Once again, Assange outperformed the greatest news agencies in the United States while sheltering in a heavily surveilled room in a foreign embassy. His continuing success contrasted sharply with the inability of U.S. news groups to hold President Trump accountable for thousands of half truths and lies. In 2019, Assange, significantly debilitated by nearly seven years of political persecution, was expelled from the Ecuadorean Embassy by President Moreno for breaching the terms of his asylum. Assange denied the charges but London’s Metropolitan police were swift to enter the embassy and arrest him for skipping bail in 2012. Assange was found guilty of breaching his bail and remanded to Belmarsh Prison to serve 50 weeks. While serving his time in Belmarsh, Assange was predictably charged by U.S. prosecutors for his role in assisting Chelsea Manning to decrypt the classified video that had so embarrassed and enraged the United States government in 2010. Extradition proceedings commenced immediately and they continue to this day. Sadly, Assange has now been incarcerated, under the most difficult of conditions, for nearly four years. This unanticipated confinement follows seven years of isolation in the Ecuadorean Embassy. Despite huge risks to his health and mental well being, Assange continues to fight extradition to the United States. Assange has long asserted that he is a journalist and I think his track record speaks for itself. He has published sensitive government war logs, diplomatic cables, and a host of emails detailing the dark machinations of a major United States government political party. These are some of the most significant news stories of the decade. More importantly, Assange has openly acknowledged his role as a lightning rod for the Wikileaks organization and his unwavering determination to hold the most powerful nation in the world accountable for it’s covert actions says a lot about his world view and his conviction to the truth. It is a shame that so few others share the same vision and courage. “You have to start with the truth.” — Julian Assange The quantity and quality of news in the United States has declined significantly since Assange was hounded across the globe and forced into hiding in 2012. Assange was the last person to speak truth to power on a scale commensurate to the horrific acts of violence and corruption detailed on the Wikileaks website. Going forward, the collective failure of the news media to recognize, accept, and defend these truths has created a troubling precedent that has favored lies, political expediency, and punishing individual journalists in favor of telling the truth. I know it’s a broad and bold statement to make, especially since most news organizations would rather attribute their decline to the unrivaled growth of the Internet, but their failure to back Assange’s work, his use of the Internet and its associated technological challenges, especially with regard to whistle blower privacy and the decryption of classified documents, has done more to choke the ongoing collection and dissemination of newsworthy information than the loss of classified ad income. Assange dared to tell the truth about a war waged in our name using state secrets given to him by whistle blower Chelsea Manning. Like many journalists before him, Assange received classified information that called into question our country’s democratic integrity. This time, however, that truth was tragically vanquished by the United States government’s threat of prosecution under the Espionage Act. No other political leak of this magnitude has ever been treated in this manner. For example, in 1971, The Citizen’s Commission to Investigate the FBI, a political activist group of eight ordinary citizens, broke into a FBI office in Pennsylvania, stole over 1,000 classified documents, and leaked them anonymously to multiple newspapers. The publication of these documents by the Washington Post forced FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover to publicly acknowledge the COINTELPRO program and declare the cessation of its operation within a year of the burglary. Further public pressure resulted in the formation of a federal commission, the Church Committee, to investigate the FBI’s secret program. This investigation confirmed that the COINTELPRO program had been used to illegally spy on Americans, especially those involved in the anti-war and black civil rights movements. Daniel Ellsberg leaked the Pentagon Papers to the New York Times in 1971. This information revealed that the United States government had been expanding military operations in South East Asia, particularly North Vietnam, Cambodia, and Laos while deceiving congress and the American people about the design and scope of the war. Ellsberg was initially indicted for stealing and holding secret documents but further examination of his motivation and legal support from the New York Times, the publisher of the Pentagon Papers, revealed that Americans were better served knowing about the growing conflict. The release of this information, and Ellsberg’s subsequent acquittal, turned the tide against continued U.S. involvement in South East Asia and led to a complete withdrawal from Vietnam in 1975. In 2002 Thomas Drake and several other National Security Agency employees alerted the Department of Defense to the fraud, waste, and illegal collection of Americans personal data by the National Security Agency’s Trailblazer program. Despite following formal channels, the complaints were never addressed. In fact, use of the program continued unabated even after the NSA Inspector General publicly declared that the Trailblazer program had been an expensive failure in 2003. In 2005, Drake, tired of waiting for change, leaked information to the Baltimore Sun detailing the ongoing problems with the Trailblazer program. Although he was careful not to disclose sensitive documents, the articles garnered significant public acclaim for exposing government wrongdoing. Drake’s home was subsequently raided by the FBI in 2007. The discovery of sensitive documents in his residence culminated in charges of willful retention of national defense information in 2010. In 2011 the government pressed to indict Drake despite questions over the actual classification of the documents discovered and the removal of charges against others at NSA who took part in the original complaints. Public scrutiny of the trial was closely guarded by the government and several efforts were made by prosecutors to restrict and redact information available to jurors. Despite the government’s efforts to limit public knowledge, and oversight of the trial, the acclaimed news program 60 Minutes profiled Drake in a Sunday night segment on May 22, 2011. Shortly after the broadcast, all previous charges were reduced to one misdemeanor count of misusing the agency’s computer system. Drake, at great cost to his personal and public life, had told the truth about our government and won. In all these cases, the government was implicated in hiding information from the public. It took the resolve of dedicated citizens working with powerful news agencies to right these wrongs. Where are these news agencies today? Who will tell us the truth about Santos, Trump, and the Russians backing them? Who is willing to pierce the veil of collusion that underpins the accumulation of their power and wealth? I recently watched a live stream of the Belmarsh Tribunal. Many respected journalists, some of them recipients of classified materials leaked in an earlier era, hailed Assange as an unwavering voice of truth and integrity. It was a moving tribute to a man who has endured tremendous sacrifices to bring us the truth about our government. In contrast, the bewildering presence of George Santos in the very same government that continues to aggressively hound Assange for telling the truth about two failed wars would be a tragic irony if it wasn’t such a farce. What does this mean to most Americans? Well, it means that we have jettisoned a lot of the “glue” that held us together in better times. We have turned to a fantastical form of thinking, denial really, that masks the pain and suffering all around us. We blame others instead of accepting responsibility, and in doing so, we fail to see what is happening right before our eyes. Life expectancy is down, gun deaths are up, as are drug overdoses, traffic fatalities, and the national debt. Inflation is rampant and journalism, the type of journalism that would expose the hypocrisy of the entire system, is on life support. Taken together, this daily grind of socioeconomic collapse, and the purposeful beggaring of the truth, creates a pervasive dissonance that numbs the mind, and invites us to grasp for heroes, ill-equipped, and unprepared to judge their truthfulness. We act without thinking. We are easily deceived by foolish little marionettes like George Santos and the wealthy puppeteers who conspire to support him. It should come as no surprise that Santos is Brazilian. What we are seeing is a normalization of the transnational right. This political group, fronted by authoritarian leaders like Putin, Orbán, Bolsonaro, and Trump, envisions a world where the material wealth of nations belongs to them. The government is their wallet, and their mission is to divide and conquer. This simple-minded drama, now headlined in political theaters across the globe, has been relentlessly promoted by a tiny subset of very special people who believe that they are different, better really, than the rest of us. They are the rich billionaires who loudly proclaim that only fools pay their taxes. They are the rich billionaires who promote a tattered screenplay that invites followers of their political mercenaries to believe that their failure to find happiness, their inability to find meaning in the vagaries of life, is somehow the fault of other people. They point to the systematically disenfranchised and accuse them of failing all of us. It is a pointless and absurd abuse of power that is without control, without finesse, and without decency. Representative Santos — Official Portrait of the 118th Congress When I first glimpsed George Santos on the nightly news a few weeks ago, his appearance immediately struck me as both comical and contrived. The pastiche of oversized eyeglasses, sports jackets, and sweaters worn over dress shirts reflected an overarching desire to appear wealthy and intelligent. He is not. He is an actor, a spy, a changeling seeking attention. We know this thanks to the truthful and diligent reporting of the North Shore Leader. This tiny local newspaper was the first to report that Santos willfully misrepresented his education and work history to voters. It was also the first news organization to debunk his false claims of Jewish ancestry, and question his declaration of being “very much gay” after reporters discovered that he had been married to a woman for seven years. The North Shore Leader was also first to report on the dubious and obtuse nature of his finances. According to his most recent political filing, his net worth rose from nearly nothing in 2020, to a self-reported 11 million dollars in 2022. These obfuscations, these outright lies, and our near failure to recognize them, should worry us. The presence of George Santos in the halls of Congress symbolizes a complete failure to come face to face with the malignant heart of the matter. He mocks our ignorance while reveling in it. That is the one and only truth to be gleaned from the matter. Without a healthy diet of accurate and truthful news, good basic journalism by any reasonable account, we expose ourselves to charlatans willing to subvert our trust for political and financial gain. Who, what, where, why, and how? In hindsight, it is now clear that the wealthy scions of this dying democracy have staffed our government with paid actors and half-witted children for decades. They do not even try to hide their disdain for our government. They have wanted to shrink it to a point where it can be drowned in a bathtub since 1992 — thank you Grover Norquist. Santos is just the latest in a string of dismal political offerings from the Republican party. Think of Donald Trump, Lauren Boebert, Jim Jordan, Matt Gaetz, Marjory Taylor Green, and the recently confirmed Speaker of the House, Kevin McCarthy. These individuals want to destroy our government from the inside. They are political actors, bought and paid for by wealthy activists who seek to shrink government and bend it to their will. They certainly don’t want journalists keeping a record of their misdeeds. Their wish is for the majority of Americans to remain ignorant of their plans. Their desire is to take a club to American democracy and smash it like a Mexican pinata. Their plan is to return to a time when oligarchs ruled the nation with Pinkerton cops and machine guns. Listen, we don’t need to reinvent the wheel here. There’s a good reason why Thomas Paine is considered the father of the American Revolution. He believed in telling the plain truth. Good government is rooted in the informed consent of the governed. What we have here in America is a rigged system that manufactures consent. It is a system that trumpets free will and independence while computer algorithms collect vast amounts of incredibly detailed personal information about our lives and then deploy that data to exploit our political voices. Use any hackneyed malapropism you want — the shoe is now the other foot, the world has been turned inside out — but the political reality suggests that they have a lot more information about us than we could ever imagine having about them. That said, the election of Santos signifies a deep, systemic corruption that is entirely dependent on the willful destruction of our news media. Inspired by the political ascendancy of Donald Trump, the far right has gleefully embraced the decline, going so far as to suggest that unemployed journalists “learn to code”. For those unaware of the sub-text, learn to code is “an expression used to mock journalists who were laid off from their jobs, encouraging them to learn software development as an alternate career path.” Let me be clear, these are statements made by people who are wholly cognizant of their self-serving bombast. They don’t care what you think. [END] --- [1] Url: https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2023/2/17/2153440/-The-Santos-Dilemma Published and (C) by Daily Kos Content appears here under this condition or license: Site content may be used for any purpose without permission unless otherwise specified. via Magical.Fish Gopher News Feeds: gopher://magical.fish/1/feeds/news/dailykos/