by Ron Unz, The Unz Review:
Last week I published a widely-discussed article on YouTube’s growing climate of censorship, while noting one surprising exception. Over the last week, these disturbing trends have continued and possibly even accelerated.
- American Pravda: YouTube Censorship and the Curious Case of Candace Owens
Ron Unz • The Unz Review • August 26, 2024 • 6,700 Words
I regularly watch the podcast of Judge Andrew Napolitano, which has accumulated an absolutely top-flight collection of weekly interview guests from the highest ranks of our academic and national security communities, including Jeffrey Sachs, John Mearsheimer, Ray McGovern, Chas Freeman, Lawrence Wilkerson, Douglas Macgregor, Alastair Crooke, and numerous others.
TRUTH LIVES on at https://sgtreport.tv/
If circumstances were different, these individuals might currently be holding top-ranking positions in our government and its foreign policy and national security apparatus, or at least be welcomed as frequent contributors to the opinion pages of our most elite publications and as guests on our cable news shows. But instead of bending to Orwellian official lies, they have maintained their firm commitment to the reality of the world and to American national interests, and as a consequence they have all been completely blacklisted from government service and from our mainstream media.
Two decades ago during 2002 and 2003, America had similarly been lied into its disastrous Iraq War by the loud claims of Saddam’s WMDs made by the officials of the Bush Administration, claims almost universally repeated by our dishonest media. At the time almost the sole exception to that thick blanket of fraudulent media coverage had been the courageous reporting of the Knight-Ridder chain, willing to declare that no WMDs existed, and I’d always been a little curious about how that one bit of honest reporting came about.
Col. Wilkerson had served as the long-time chief of staff to Secretary of State Colin Powell, and in his latest podcast interview, he revealed—possibly for the first time—that he had been the secret source of that information, personally risking his career and possibly even his freedom in an unsuccessful attempt to save our country from its gigantic looming disaster. We all owe him a huge debt of gratitude for that heroic effort.
Unfortunately, Napolitano’s channel recently received a YouTube Strike and was suspended for a week, raising concerns that it may soon be eliminated by the world’s leading video platform.
Aside from those distinguished older guests, Napolitano also regularly features interviews with young progressive journalists Max Blumenthal, Aaron Maté, and Anya Parampil of the Grayzone, which over the last few years has done important reporting on the Israel/Gaza conflict, the Ukraine war, the Syrian civil war, and other major global flashpoints. In a highly suspicious coincidence, their channel also just received a YouTube Strike, leading to its temporary suspension.
However, the Grayzone is now back in service and in their latest livestream broadcast a few days ago they focused upon the shocking case of British journalist Richard Medhurst who had been arrested and temporarily held by his own government on accusations of supporting terrorism merely for doing the sort of honest reporting from Gaza that his own country’s leading publications have completely avoided. There have been other brutal arrests of pro-Gaza activists by Britain’s increasingly totalitarian regime, and I would urge people to watch the beginning of that segment for the shocking details.
