The Day Zero Hedge Goes Dark

revelationmovement.com
revelationmovement.com

The alternative media is a giant thorn in the side of the powers that be. They will strike back.

Guest post by Robert Gore at Straight Line Logic

The mainstream media’s (MSM) coverage of Hillary Clinton’s medical travails offers yet another instance of its blatant bias, and its distortion and outright suppression of the news. The roots of the captive MSM stretch back to the 1940s, which helps explain the waning prospects for dissemination of the truth in 2016.

Veracity is the first casualty of war. During World War II, the government openly co-opted the media, including Hollywood, as propaganda organs. Radio and television stations and networks had to obtain permission from the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) to operate. They toed the government’s World War II line. A few newspapers and individual journalists, notably H.L. Mencken and John T. Flynn, challenged it, but Roosevelt pretense of being against US involvement in the war, Pearl Harbor’s vulnerability, the alliance with Joseph Stalin, who was at least as bloodthirsty and tyrannical as Hitler, massive fire bombing of civilian populations in Germany and Japan, and the decision to deploy the atomic bomb should have raised far more questions than they did.

Without missing a beat the government transferred its World War II rationales for “managing” the news and media to the Cold War. The key figure of the era was Allen Dulles, the Director of the CIA from 1953 until 1961. In 1977, Carl Bernstein, of Watergate fame, detailed the CIA’s relationship with the press in the 1950s and 1960s in a lengthy expose for The Rolling Stone. Dulles instituted a partnership, Operation Mockingbird, between the agency and the media. The agency would supply journalists with information and access to situations that would have been otherwise inaccessible in exchange for on-the-ground intelligence and the occasional performance of agency requests. Implicit in the arrangement: journalists would hew to the CIA line.

A veritable who’s who of the media elite embraced the arrangement. Per Bernstein: “By far the most valuable of these associations, according to CIA officials, have been with the New York Times, CBS and Time Inc.” No questions were asked in the bland reports that the duly elected leaders of Iran and Guatemala had been deposed, CIA-orchestrated operations. Nor were they asked in the early days of Vietnam, as the CIA set up shop in Saigon and the press worried about falling dominoes in Southeast Asia.

Some of the agency’s screw-ups were too big to whitewash. After the Bay of Pigs fiasco, President Kennedy asked Dulles for his resignation. Dulles’ subsequent membership on the Warren Commission, where he stage-managed the investigation to its preordained conclusion, raised eyebrows. However, the raised-eyebrow set were disparaged as “conspiracy theorists,” a term invented by the CIA to discredit anyone questioning the official version of anything.

The Vietnam War was too extensive and lengthy to hide. As the years rolled on and the body count mounted, questions were asked. Journalists had remarkable latitude to roam, often accompanying military units to battle zones. They saw fighting first-hand and talked directly to the fighters. Their stories were a sharp contrast to the military’s bland briefings in Saigon. That Vietnam was, at best, a hopeless quagmire and probably a lost cause was a bottom-up realization; the soldiers and the in-the-field press covering them knew it long before the brass and its house-broken reporters. Publication of The Pentagon Papers in 1971 marked the media’s finest hour in Vietnam. Its revelations of duplicity reinforced America’s mood; by then all it wanted from Vietnam was a graceful exit.

After a ten-year hiatus dating from the end of the Cold War in 1991, the US establishment acquired a new enemy. Despite the pyrotechnics of 9/11, the terrorists presented orders of magnitude less of a threat than the Axis powers in World War II or the Soviet Union during the Cold War. However, a war on a tactic—terrorism—can be waged anywhere and against anybody the government chooses. It can and apparently will go on forever; victory in such a conflict being impossible to define, much less achieve. All this was obvious before the US ventured into Afghanistan and Iraq, but few in the media questioned the conceptual basis of those forays.

Judging by restrictions on civil liberties embedded in the Patriot Act, subsequent legislation, and judicial interpretations, rag-tag terrorists whose main weapons are stolen artillery and firearms, improvised explosive devices, and blowing themselves up pose a greater threat than the US’s World War II and Cold War foes. A measure of how captive the MSM has become: it labeled Edward Snowden a traitor for exposing the government’s Orwellian surveillance in the name of “fighting terrorism.” Snowden should have been hailed. Such surveillance makes a free press impossible; if it cannot shield its secrets from the government it cannot operate.

For the press and freedom of press to mean anything, the media must be outside the government, looking in. Currently, that characterization only applies to the independent segments of the media, mostly the Internet, that takes a reflexively adversarial stance towards the powers that be, including the MSM. Call it the alternative media. What it lacks in the docile MSM’s cherished “access” it more than makes up for in pugnacity.

The Drudge Report made a name for itself publicizing Bill Clinton scandals the MSM ignored. It is the most powerful and widely viewed alternative site. Zero Hedge, like the Drudge Report, aggregates news, analysis, and commentary from a variety of sources, but it also features its own analyses and comments (Zero Hedges has reposted Straight Line Logic articles). Financially oriented, Zero Hedge made its bones during the last crisis, which it saw coming well before it arrived. Its commentary and stories since on the government and Federal Reserve’s responses—the bailouts, stimulus, and quantitative easing—have been scathing.

These two sites are the vanguard of the alternative media: hundreds, perhaps thousands, of sites worldwide that probe virtually every idiocy and prevarication emanating not just from governments and central banks, but large corporations, academia, militaries, intelligence services, and the MSM itself. The alternative media has little capacity to generate original news coverage (although leaks, hacking, and videos have been invaluable), but publicly available material is virtually inexhaustible. It has become a giant thorn in the side of what it variously calls the establishment, the powers that be, the deep state, the Empire, globalists, or the new world order. Although not all in the alternative media support Donald Trump, they are united in their contempt for Hillary Clinton. Their relentless skepticism, disclosures, and editorializing have been bastions for the Trump campaign. It’s probably not an overstatement to say that campaign wouldn’t be where it is without the alternative media.

The established order recognizes the threat. Hillary Clinton’s recent speeches condemning the alt-right and the “basket of deplorables,” and President Obama’s comments Monday about unspecified blogs “churning out a lot of misinformation” confirm the apprehension. The alt-right is part of the alternative media and takes a politically incorrect perspective on the mainstream’s racial, ethnic, sexual, and gender catechism. As such, it makes the easiest target, however, it is not the establishment’s real target. Obama gave up the game with the word “misinformation.” He’s not worried about misinformation—if he were Obamacare never would have become law—he’s worried about correct information, also known as the truth.

The alternative press shatters the cozy arrangement midwifed by Allen Dulles’ between the government and the MSM. The biggest threat to powers that be is always the truth. Just as they will steal everything you’ve got (see “You Will Be Poor”), they will suppress the truth. The alternative media has gone from success to success, but if Trump is elected, it will probably mark an apotheosis. The establishment will neither forgive nor forget, and sooner or later the alternative media will train its sights on Trump himself. It’s hard to believe that he won’t give it reason to do so—power does corrupt—especially for that segment of the alternative media with a more libertarian perspective.

Alternative media hubris is an unaffordable luxury. The counterattack is coming—take Hillary and Barack’s word for it—and the alternative media is extraordinarily vulnerable. It can be silenced by someone pulling the plug on the Internet or parts thereof. Like a “Funds Inaccessible” message on our bank accounts, a “Site Not Available” message may well greet us one morning when we try to pull up Zero Hedge . The rationale could be “deplorable” racism, sexism, homophobia, xenophobia, or Islamophobia, or peddling what has been officially deemed “misinformation,” but make no mistake, the truth that emerges from the alternative media poses a grave threat to those who would rule us, and they know it.

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diogenes
diogenes

Holy Shitte! That headline sent a chill down my back. I look at Drudge, Zero Hedge and TBP everyday!

JC
JC

And Woodpile once a week…..

ditchner

Drudge seems more like the MSM these days. Many more anti-trump headlines than anti-Hillary.

Iska Waran
Iska Waran

When YouTube briefly thought they could bury the video of catatonic Hillary falling into her handicap van on 9/11, it showed what they’re willing to do to cover for the establishment. Unfortunately for Google/YouTube, the video had already been seen by tens of millions and had been captured many times over.

DC Sunsets

The appearance of power is but an illusion.

This discussion is a corollary of the “war on cash,” the Globalist Elite’s “plan” to eliminate cash. Two of my sons work in the financial industry. I discussed this with the younger one last weekend. He laughed.

Why?

“Dad, do you know that 18% of Americans are unbanked? The figure is higher than in 2009 and it’s rising. Many of them are involuntarily “unbanked.” Why? They were chronically over-drawn, or committed some sort of financial crime often enough that their names made it onto a blacklist. No bank will LET them open an account. Do you really think almost one in five Americans can be told, F. U., if you can’t qualify for a credit card and no bank will do business with you, then you have to starve to death? The cities would burn.”

We live in an age of the appearance of Total Power. But it really is just the Wizard of Oz.

Wip
Wip

Why wouldn’t a simple EBT card keep th from rioting?

DC Sunsets

Eventually we’ll end up in Peak Distrust. None of us will believe our own eyes, and we sure as hell won’t believe anyone else’s “news.”

Rumors will spread around like wildfire. It’s going to be UG LY.

nkit
nkit

I’m still lamenting The Day The White House Went Dark….

ConcernedCitizen
ConcernedCitizen

Hey Robert, I have not been much of a reader throughout my life, but lately I can’t get enough. I’ll be sure to read yours. I want to bounce another book off of you, From Freedom to Slavery by Gerry Spence. I really like it. It seems to say what I really feel but could never get the words right to describe it. Have you read it and if you did, did you like it?

bb

Robert , hope you got somewhere to hide .You do know you are probably on the terrorists watch list by now .If you believe in the next life then it makes this world more bearable.The next life is truly my only hope. If Christ is God then I win the lottery. If not then I lose nothing.

Phil

All the more reason to support them.
Take my word for it, the MSM and the PTB watch the blogs religiously. I have a now mothballed blog that was pretty much obscure and got linked to by the Wall Street Journal one time when there was the big To Do over a certain former Louisiana Senator and a crooked lawyer after Hurricane Katrina that I was covering.
Regular visitors to that site also included the office of Sergeant of Arms for the United States Senate.
Every time I laid into that skeezeball Joe Lieberman someone from there would show up like clockwork and this was years ago.
Now the amount of three letter agencies monitoring the blogs is staggering.
DOJ, Treasury, (Secret Service), DoD, , even obscure ones are all over the place.

The Alternative media is very quickly becoming the new main stream media for people who know the current MSM is nothing more than the propaganda arm of the government and are looking for news that they can’t and won’t find anywhere else.
They are a vital source of critical information and the government would love to find a reason to make them all go away.

Thurston Howell III
Thurston Howell III

Did not Hillary or her foundation buy the Onion, in anticipation of hilarious articles at her expense?

Won’t the same happen to Zero Hedge (or did it already happen)

Heck, this site is only worth $15k per the donation meter.

I might buy it for myself.

RT Rider
RT Rider

Although I agree that the Deep State will clamp down on all dissent, if necessary, I’m not sure Zero Hedge is as important in the grand scheme, as other media.

To be sure, it’s a major pain in the ass to the Narrative, but it’s readership demographic is narrow compared to major media, and the complexity of much of it’s content is way beyond the knowledge of the general public. What we know as conspiracy fact, to use a Zero Hedge phrase, is very much considered tin-foil hat thinking to the vast majority.

However, the state will never pass up using a sledge hammer when a tack hammer will do, so I suspect you’re correct – it will go dark at some point.

James the Wanderer

ZH’s servers are located overseas, so they cannot be silenced by simple raid. However, once the ICANN gives up ownership of the DNS, simply changing the ZH DNS address(es) would make it impossible to find ….
And all those foreigners who donated to the Clinton Cash Karneval might want exactly that, since several don’t like online dissent in any fashion …
It’s only one more conspiracy theory; it doesn’t become a conspiracy fact until later

kgbgb
kgbgb

IP ADDRESS FOR ZEROHEDGE 52.73.139.75
We really ought to start listing I.P. addresses explicitly on the sort of websites they might go for.

Anonymous
Anonymous

Unless that’s a static IP address then it is subject to change every few hours. And then there’s IPv6, which is being implemented right now. That’s an IPv4 address. IPv6 addresses are strings of letters, numbers, and symbols 39 characters long.

Rise Up

Doesn’t appear to be a dynamic IP address. Your post was yesterday and today it’s still the same IP. Look at line 39 in the HTML source code (right click anywhere in the page and select “view page source”).

unit472
unit472

The bigger danger is the loss of real news. I don’t need Chris Matthews or Bill O’Reilly to tell me what is going on. OTOH, I don’t trust the New York Times or the Washington Post to either and, let’s face it, they don’t make money anymore.

Paywalls and loss of ad revenue is making it too expensive to send a correspondent to Aleppo and report what is taking place on the battlefield. “News” is increasingly political talking heads, ‘think tank’ studies or virtue signaling reporters emoting on the scene. There aren’t anymore ‘reporters’!

Yancey Ward
Yancey Ward

Those places are full of people with smartphones and computers, still. I think I could literally walk down 10 blocks of any place on Earth and randomly pick out 10 people with the technology to record, write, and upload the important news of their town or city in a way that is both more honest and more competently done than I would find with any ten reporters I could find on the news room floor of any media company on the planet.

The disappearance you are worried about isn’t the problem.

Unreported
Unreported

I believe it was a U.S. senator or congressmen in the early 1900’s who once said: “The first casualty of War is Truth”.

RG says: “Veracity is the first casualty of war.”

I was trying to decide which sounds more eloquent but it’s just too close to call.

Regardless, I don’t believe the war ever ends. If it’s not being fought with munitions, it is with words. No matter what, “truth” remains the most powerful weapon. And this piece is another hand grenade thrown into the Establishment’s trench.

Nice work.

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Suzanna
Suzanna

Mr. Gore,

What a brilliant passionate essay you have written! I love it.
And I will be waiting for the special offer for TBP readers, but
regardless that, I will buy your book. You are a wonderful writer.
Suzanna

I do not want to intrude, but I will add a link to a short Ron Paul
speech that compliments your writing. The talk is from 2011.

poorwallstreetdude
poorwallstreetdude

I work for a Wall Street company and I go to Zero Hedge every day for financial news. You can not get the level of honest analysis backed up with solid real numbers from Bloomberg or Fox or anywhere else. Zero Hedge is great. I filter out any tin hat stuff that occasionally appears there. Most everyone I work with also frequents Zero Hedge. Zero Hedge is famous on Wall Street. It is like an underground secret. Even Tom Keene on the Bloomberg Surveillance morning show mentions it from time to time. I have even heard it mentioned on Squawk Box which is clearly biassed toward the main stream version of what’s happening. When was the last time you heard someone on CNBC or Bloomberg say the economy looks real bad due to this and that and this other thing and recommend you sell treasury instruments/equities and buy gold/silver due to the coming financial emergency ? Anyone who says that kind of stuff will be cut off (time for a commercial) and they will not be back. The day the government shuts down Zero Hedge will be a big and very bad day for America. No telling what will happen after that.

Ouirphuqd
Ouirphuqd

We were warned, it will be shut down and the scrambling will begin. Tyrants gain control by so called emergencies. Look on the bright side, we finally have to chose sides, for what it’s worth!

IndenturedServant

Nice article Robert. My thoughts exactly!

I don’t think the readership of alternative media is small by any definition. I think the numbers that comment on it are small but those reading are Legion! People aren’t abandoning MSM in droves to sit around in the silent darkness.

Someone once told me that the most valuable commodity in the world is information. That is largely why I’ve never trusted or used super market discount cards, social media and even email if any of it is tied directly to the real me. Sure they can trace it by IP address but that requires effort and humans are basically lazy. Besides, my IP address has changed a dozen or more times over the years so that adds another level of complexity to be overcome by laziness.

Da goobermint may have the ability to record everything we ever do on Unky Al’s innerwebz and beyond but their ability to locate or parse that data is still extremely limited.

I still think the oligarchs shot their wad about a decade too early. The (sh)people will eventually prevail but we’re going to go around our elbow to get to our asshole on the way.

EDIT: Meant to add that since abandoning MSM years ago, I’ve been exposed to more viewpoints, especially those that challenge my own, than I ever would have had I stayed hypnotized by the MSM. That probably holds true for most people who have any curiosity left in them at all. The people are so addicted to the internet that any attempt to shut it off will be met by huge opposition.

IndenturedServant

Just saw that T4C. tRump urges Hitlary to Sleep Well.

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Stucky

“Someone once told me that the most valuable commodity in the world is information.” ——-I_S

Close. MAIL is the most valuable commodity.

IndenturedServant

You may be right but I expect the USPS to go the way of the Dodo bird once this behemoth finds a place to settle and finish decaying.

Bea Lever
Bea Lever

The Russians who control ZH would find a work around to get the information out.

IndenturedServant

Bea, on a nice clear day what color is the sky? What about water? Is it wet? 🙂

Bea Lever
Bea Lever

I’m sorry I/S, I don’t get your snide joke. I thought everyone knew ZH was Russian……the Tyler(s) are Russian. That site is as Russian as RT.

They will find a way around whatever, even if they had to go old school in print. What is your point?

IndenturedServant

The only point I have is on my head.

Bea Lever
Bea Lever

I/S- Me too! 🙂

Khmer white
Khmer white

Two years ago I was somehow introduced to lewrockwell.com and since then have really enjoyed receiving and reading their daily newsletter sent to my hotmail account through MSN. Just within the last 2 months I have noticed that the Lew Rockwell letter has been getting sent to my “junk” file and I immediately react by marking said newsletter as “not junk” and it is moved back to my inbox for one day. MSN is quite consistent marking it as “junk” and trying to control what I read. By the way, I rarely read any articles on MSN as they are so absolutely left-wing biased crap, I just want to access my hotmail. Is anyone else experiencing this threat to our 1st Amendment????
Hey MSN and you TPTB, FUCK YOU!!!! I know what you are trying to do. So help me God you will not succeed in destroying the 1st Amendment, especially as me and millions of others are hard core supporters of the 2nd Amendment.
I offer a special “THANK YOU” to TBP, Drudge Report, Zerohedge, and Will Grigg for the great work you all do.

mike
mike

MSN??? WTF???
Isn’t that as “yesterday” as HRC’s crones using AOL?
Iceland beckons … (unseen.is)

starfcker the deplorable
starfcker the deplorable

Robert, nice piece. Looks like we might dodge that bullet. I don’t know anyone who believes network or cable news anymore. I’ve been waiting for some of the talking heads to rebel, Willie Geist was very impressive this morning, with assists from Katy Tur and Joe Scarborough. They tore up Robbie Mook. We will win. Keep up the good work.

starfcker the deplorable
starfcker the deplorable
Col. B. Bunny

** “churning out a lot of misinformation” **

That’s rich from the guy who pushed “the video” as the cause of the Benghazi attack and who has a birth certificate that’s been doctored so much it should make medical history. The biggest con has been his “natural born citizen” deal, followed by his “I’m a Christian” shuck.

His “deportations are up” and “the economy is improving” gambits will be studied in journalism school for generations. And you just have to admire the man who can say over 90 million not working amounts to an unemployment rate of 5%.

“His” two autobiographies were secretly written by a communist terrorist whom Obama described as “a guy who lives in my neighborhood.” Obama also “forgot” to make clear that the “Frank” mentioned in one of the books was a card-carrying commie.

Bea Lever
Bea Lever

Look, I think ZH is a top notch financial site and I think many of you never bother to source your information which is why you were so quick to down me. Ratting out the Wall Street banksters needs to be done by someone in the world, Russians , Bulgarians whatever. Why take it so personal? I stand by my original comment in this thread, down away.

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