{"id":47390,"date":"2016-08-28T08:24:47","date_gmt":"2016-08-28T12:24:47","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/stateofthenation2012.com\/?p=47390"},"modified":"2016-08-28T08:25:01","modified_gmt":"2016-08-28T12:25:01","slug":"the-war-on-whistleblowers-why-americas-next-president-will-kill-julian-assange","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/stateofthenation2012.com\/?p=47390","title":{"rendered":"The War On Whistleblowers & Why America’s Next President Will Kill Julian Assange"},"content":{"rendered":"

Submitted by Jake Anderson via TheAntiMedia.org,<\/em><\/a><\/p>\n

I\u2019m worried about Julian Assange.<\/strong> This is not a maternal instinct, but rather, a pragmatic one. The increasingly hostile statements<\/a>\u00a0made by top state officials and their surrogates show a widespread condemnation of whistleblowers in the halls of government.<\/strong> President Obama set the tone<\/a> early in his administration.<\/p>\n

In the case of WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange, the rhetoric goes well beyond condemnation of methodology and straight to advocating for his brutal murder<\/a>.<\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n

We already know that Obama, Clinton, Sanders, and Trump have all said they would prosecute Assange. Clinton, to get more specific, wants him extradited from Ecuador, prosecuted for espionage, and his WikiLeaks removed from the Internet. Her desire to charge him with espionage is only a little ironic considering the Clinton Foundation\u2019s Pay-to-Play system\u00a0<\/a>arguably warrants an espionage indictment, as does Clinton\u2019s storing of\u00a0Special Access Program intelligence<\/a> on an unencrypted private server.<\/em><\/p>\n

Meanwhile, over in the Trump Tower of Mordor, the business mogul\u2019s draconian approach to just about everything includes a ruthless hatred of all journalists<\/a>, and most certainly whistleblowers. Trump has indicated his treatment of an extradited Assange or Snowden would be severely harsh. Snowden, in particular, would be assassinated if Trump had his way<\/a>. I can only shiver imagining how a President Trump would react to a major leak from the inner chambers of his new political empire.<\/em><\/p>\n

The transition from authorities\u2019 vows of prosecution to their use of surrogates who openly call for Assange\u2019s assassination is highly disturbing, to say the least. <\/strong>\u00a0Granted, Assange supposedly has his \u2018thermonuclear\u2019 device<\/a> \u2014 a 1.4 GB cache of files containing the identity of spies, military secrets, and unredacted documents from Bank of America and BP that can be unencrypted and released upon his death or arrest \u2014 but with a large faction of the mainstream media acting as a bullhorn for state propaganda<\/a>, any damage inflicted by Julian\u2019s \u2018insurance\u2019 packet could likely be mitigated by some social engineering. Remember the Panama Papers<\/a>? A couple months ago people were saying it was the biggest leak in human history. Have you heard even a nostalgic reference to it since?<\/strong><\/p>\n

All this wouldn\u2019t be quite as surprising \u2014 or alarming \u2014 if the anti-democratic venom hadn\u2019t trickled down into the daily talking points of media figures and network journalists (whom I affectionately refer to as the State Department\u2019s paid interns). Voices from across the political spectrum have repeated the claim that Russia has \u2018weaponized\u2019 Wikileaks<\/a>. Sometimes they pose the conspiracy theory as a question. \u201cHas Russia weaponized Wikileaks to disrupt a U.S. election?\u201d<\/em> My question in response would be: has the U.S. media questionized<\/em> State Department propaganda in order to deflect attention away from a rigged primary and a political power structure that is rotten to the core?<\/strong> It\u2019s actually a brilliant little piece of state agitprop. They managed to turn the public\u2019s attention away from one of the most egregious examples of election fraud in recent history and\u00a0<\/em>demonize both Russia and Wikileaks in one fell swoop.<\/p>\n

Such blatant propaganda is to be expected from the government.<\/strong><\/u> But coming from a journalistic establishment that is ostensibly there to dig for the truth, it\u2019s rather shocking to see rampant election tampering from a major American political party get trumped by an unproven accusation toward a foreign country. Regardless of one\u2019s conspiratorial appetite, seeing the 4th estate function as the infotainment branch of the State Department, parroting its every chirp of propaganda, should be profoundly distressing.<\/p>\n

Let me give you a couple of examples<\/strong><\/u>, first from a mainstream right-of-center publication, then from a wildly popular left-of-center ideologue. In the former, we have TIME<\/em> Magazine<\/em>, which has had the hickeys of state propaganda on its neck for decades. On August 12th, 2016, TIME<\/em> published an article called \u201cWikiLeaks Is Getting Scarier Than the NSA.\u201d<\/a> I\u2019ll let that sink in for a moment. I don\u2019t even have the emotional bandwidth to explain why that title earns the \u2018Psyop of the Century\u2019 award. Just. . . remember to be scared.<\/p>\n

On the left, we have Bill Maher<\/strong>, whose excoriations of hypocritical Republicans can be extremely entertaining and perceptive. Like The Daily Show<\/em>, Maher functions as the liberal end of what some cultural philosophers think of as a manufactured spectrum<\/a> of acceptable discourse. When Maher, who claims solidarity with Assange and the cause of WikiLeaks, repeats the same government talking point that Russia is tampering with our elections, it kind of forces you to consider that all corporate media \u2014 left or right \u2014 operates under the same tent.<\/p>\n

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