Guest Column: Mainstream Boogie

Life and death in the fake news business
by Jon Rappoport [Original column here]

I wrote this piece based on my knowledge of mainstream reporters and their work, their lives, their forgotten hopes, their realizations (in some cases) that they’re trapped in a system.
Most of them don’t want to get out. They become creatures of the night they once wanted to illuminate.
You’re a mainstream reporter striving to stay afloat. The word has drifted down from the top that this is the season for inflicting wounds on Donald Trump, no matter what, no matter what happened or didn’t happen on a rumpled bed in a hotel room in Moscow, no matter what Putin did or didn’t do to influence the election, no matter who leaked the DNC emails to WikiLeaks, no matter what Michael Flynn said or didn’t say to a Russian on the phone, no matter who or what James Comey is fronting for; every real or possible or non-existent detail needs to be blown up into a gigantic scandal of the moment, this president has to go, and your assignment is to keep cutting him, it’s beyond the point where anybody in your business cares who he is and what he’s done and what he’s doing, so pump up the hysteria, shove in the blade wherever you can, THIS is how your success will be measured, you want a light to shine on you, so attack, attack without let-up, don’t think, don’t think about what’s going on here, the important thing is:
The news business is: careers.

Continue reading

Book Review: The Secret behind Secret Societies (2003)

by Jon Rappoport
2003, Truth Seeker Books, 392 pages
Review by Brian R. Wright (originally posted March 2007)

BW: Reposting review 8/30/2017, on the eve of taking in Mr. Rappoport’s ‘Matrix’ series (three volumes available via his nomorefakenews site: The Matrix Revealed, Exiting the Matrix, and Life outside the Matrix.) Halfway thru the first volume, and I assure you it’s worth every penny, talk about positive life transformation! This book was my entry roughly 10 years ago to “Rappaportianism;” my own breakthru has  been finding its own way since then, evidenced in my works via Global Spring, and now coming to a full boil thanks to the Matrix compendia. The Secret behind Secret Societies makes a solid foundation for anyone seeking a way out via expanded wholly independent and individual creative consciousness. Looks like it’s run out of print; I’m personally taking an action item to chat with Jon and find out how we can make his seminal work widely available once again, at a reasonable price.

This is a ‘different’ book even for me, or perhaps especially for me, as I’m at least a common-sense advocate of Aristotelian-Rand-ian rationality.  The author’s main proposition is: Two artistic visions have fought with each other about the course of humanity:

  1. One is the formula of the secret society which uses symbols and ritual to control and dominate others and claims exclusive knowledge.
  2. The other is the “Tradition of the Imagination,” which holds each of us possesses immense creative power to achieve our own fascinating artistic vision of life in voluntary community with others.

In this Tradition of Imagination lies our future if we are to have a future, and we shall overcome the secret-society conspiracy of power by outcreating it. Continue reading

Guest Column: Whither the Independent?

Obsolete phrase: “independence of mind”
By Jon Rappoport [Full original column here.]

Like a car with high fins and long protruding tail lights, the phrase “independence of mind” has gone out of style, especially at colleges and universities where it ought to be the most profound ideal. The thugs have taken over.

As recently as 2008, a professor of Jurisprudence at King’s College London, Timothy Macklem, described the phrase in this fashion:

“Independence of Mind [explores] the ways in which the fundamental freedoms help us to achieve something even more profound, by enabling us to arrive at beliefs, convictions and voices of our own, so that we truly come to think, believe, and speak for ourselves in the rich and various ways that the freedoms then protect. Privacy grants us the distance and refuge from others necessary to develop views of our own; freedom of speech calls on us to imagine ways of expressing ourselves that are both true to the views we have developed and innovative in their own right; freedom of conscience enables each of us to create a distinctive rational personality in which to embed the convictions that we wish to treat as non-negotiable…” Continue reading

Guest Column: Trump Fires Comey

Spin doctors go wild in the swamp
By Jon Rappoport [original column here]

In the political swamp that is Washington, and in the press swamp, motor boats began speeding every which way in the wake of Trump’s decision to fire FBI Director Comey.

People in the boats are holding up signs to explain the reason for the firing.

The first sign was: COMEY LIED. Comey lied the other day. He lied in testimony before Congress, when he said Huma Abedin, Hillary Clinton’s long-time aide, had sent “hundreds and thousands” of emails to her husband, Anthony Weiner, some of which contained classified information. The truth was, the FBI says, contradicting Comey, a great many of those emails were merely “backed up” on Weiner’s laptop via “backup devices.” Huh? Does that actually mean something? Weiner obtained those emails out of the sky, delivered by a chariot, and not from Huma? Weiner’s laptop was serving as a storage device, a personal little cloud? Somebody not connected to the Hillary campaign was using the social-media’s porn star as a backup for classified data? Who would that be? Putin? Putin hacked the Hillary/DNC emails, and sent them to both WikiLeaks and Anthony Weiner? “Hi Anthony. Vlad here. Keep these thousands of emails for posterity.” Continue reading

Guest Column: Are Speech Rights Grinding to a Halt?

The suppression of ideas and the closing out of debate
by Jon Rappoport [Original column in Nomorefakenews.com here]

Let’s start with an extreme case. A case that has been roiled in emotion for decades. A case that triggers people into making all sorts of comments.

At quora.com, there is an interesting Q and A. The subject is the Nazi holocaust.

The question is: Why is holocaust denial a crime in some countries?

One answer is offered by Olaf Simons, who states he is an “historian at the Gotha Research Centre.” Here is an excerpt:

“Anyone who tells you it [the holocaust] is ‘not real’ (because he has found something to support his doubt) is manipulating you with a political agenda.”

That’s quite a far-reaching assertion. It’s obvious that a) someone might come to the conclusion that the holocaust didn’t happen and b) he has no political agenda. Whether that person’s conclusion about the holocaust is true or false is beside the point. And even if that person did have a political agenda, why should his comments about the holocaust be suppressed? Continue reading

Guest Column: Howard Roark and the Collective

Why go to fiction to learn about power?
by Jon Rappoport [original column at nomorefakenews.com here]

Why go to fiction to learn about power?

Because in art we can see our visions. We can see ideals and archetypes. These fictional characters have the energy we strive for.

When Ayn Rand, the author of The Fountainhead (1943), was asked whether Howard Roark, the hero of her novel, could exist in real life, she answered, with annoyance, “Of course.”

Her implication was: don’t you have the desire to discover your own highest ideals and live them out?

Roark is an architect who creates buildings no one has imagined before. His refusal to compromise his vision is legendary. He suffers deprivation and poverty and rejection with an astonishing amount of indifference. He is the epitome of the creative individual living in a collective world.

For reasons no one can discover (must there always be reasons?), Roark has freed himself from The Group. Perhaps he was born free.

Roark’s hidden nemesis is a little man named Ellsworth Toohey, an architecture columnist for a New York newspaper, who is quietly building a consensus that has, as its ultimate goal, the destruction of all thought and action by the individual for the individual. Continue reading

Movie Review: The Matrix (1999)

Emotional fuel for world liberation ___ 10/10
Review by Brian Wright

“As long as the Matrix exists, the human race will never be free.”
— Morpheus

This review is the third of four commentaries that suggest a general approach to healing our world.  The book I just reviewed, The Secret behind Secret Societies, discusses the conspiracy of power that underlies the current machinery of the Western global-corporate empire.

Written and Directed by
Andy Wachowski and Larry Wachowski

Keanu Reeves … Neo
Laurence Fishburne … Morpheus
Carrie-Anne Moss … Trinity
Hugo Weaving …  Agent Smith
Gloria Foster … Oracle
Joe Pantoliano … Cypher

This controlling central power (let’s call it the Beast) is the fundamental ailment we are in sore need of healing from. The movie The Matrix is a metaphor of our own heroic struggle for liberty against the Beast, and provides a hopeful message that vigorously stirs the blood of freedom people.

The time is approximately 200 years from now, planet Earth.  Early in the 21st century, humans achieve functional artificial intelligence (AI) which instead of leading to a comfortable human-machine Singularity[1] results in an earth-razing cataclysm.  Machines (computers) 1: Humans 0.

The machine uber-intelligence (MUI) that takes over is analogous to our “Beast.” Continue reading