These are tough days to be a serious journalist. Report a story now, with your facts all lined up nicely, and you’re still likely to have it labeled “fake news” by anyone whose ox you’ve gored — and even by friends who don’t share your political perspective. For good measure, they’ll say you’ve based it on “alternative facts.”

Mi sono costretto a guardare il documentario The White Helmets, disponibile su Netflix. È lungo 40 minuti, è tecnicamente ben fatto e racconta una storia molto convincente. È un gran bel pezzo di propaganda, tanto che ha vinto numerosi premi, tra cui l’Oscar per il Miglior Documentario Corto, e i Caschi bianchi stessi sono stati nominati al Nobel per la Pace. Racconta cosa sta accadendo in Siria: dipinge i “ribelli” come i buoni e Assad e il suo governo come il male assoluto.

THE US GOVERNMENT ILLEGALLY SPIES ON ITS OWN CITIZENS

This used to be laughed at as a dystopian fantasy derived from an overactive imagination, Orwell’s 1984, and a juvenile distrust of the government. When you claimed “they” were spying on you, people labeled you a paranoid conspiracy theorist, a tinfoil hat-wearing loon.

Even after it was revealed that the NSA has been illegally eavesdropping on us and collecting our cell phone metadata for over a decade, people still hedged on the meaning of it. Yes, they are analyzing our transmissions, but it’s under the auspices of national security. “In a post 9/11 world” certain liberties must be sacrificed for the sake of security, right?

For years, activists who feared a sinister globalist corporatocracy were told they were being paranoid. Whether you want to call it the New World Order or not: they were right.

In 2013, WikiLeaks released the secretly negotiated draft text for the entire TPP (Trans-Pacific Partnership) Intellectual Property Rights Chapter. It revealed a closed-door regional free trade agreement being negotiated by countries in the Asia-Pacific region, including Australia, Brunei Darussalam, Canada, Chile, Japan, Malaysia, Mexico, New Zealand, Peru, Singapore, the United States, and Vietnam.

Operation Snow White is the name given to an unprecedented infiltration of the US government by the Church of Scientology during the 1970s. They stole classified government files regarding Scientology from dozens of government agencies.

In the late 1940s, as the Cold War was just getting underway, the CIA launched a top secret project called Operation Mockingbird. Their goal was to buy influence and control among the major media outlets. They also planned to put journalists and reporters directly on the CIA payroll, which some claim is ongoing to this day. The architects of this plan were Frank Wisner, Allen Dulles, Richard Helms, and Philip Graham (publisher of The Washington Post), who planned to enlist American news organizations and journalists to basically become spies and propagandists.

During the 1980s, the CIA facilitated the sale of cocaine to the Crips and Bloods street gangs of Los Angeles and funneled millions in drug profits to a Latin American guerrilla army.

It’s convoluted and complex, but it’s true.

The CIA ran secret mind control experiments on US citizens from the 1950s until 1973.

It’s so true that in 1995 President Clinton actually issued a formal apology on behalf of the US government.

Essentially, the CIA used drugs, electronics, hypnosis, sensory deprivation, verbal and sexual abuse, and torture to conduct experimental behavioral engineering experiments on subjects. The program subcontracted hundreds of these projects to over 80 different institutions, including universities, hospitals, prisons, and pharmaceutical companies.

Between 1932 and 1972, the US Public Health Service conducted a clinical study on rural African American men who had contracted syphilis. The Public Health Service never informed these men they had a sexually transmitted disease, nor did they offer treatment, even after penicillin became available as a cure in the 1940s.

Tragically, it’s true. Rather than receiving treatment, the subjects of these studies were told they had “bad blood.”

The Joint Chiefs of Staff of the US military drew up and approved plans to create acts of terrorism on US soil in order to sway the American public into supporting a war against Cuba.

It’s true and the documents are out there.

In recent years, the mere notion of conspiracy theories has increasingly been stigmatized and ridiculed by mainstream news outlets, internet trolls, and “rational” thinkers. Yet, with powerful revelations by Edward Snowden, Chelsea Manning, WikiLeaks, and generations of intrepid journalists, we now know that many outlandish geopolitical and domestic “conspiracy theories” were and are cold-blooded truths of the modern world. Here are 10 that are well-documented and profoundly disturbing…

The Gulf of Tonkin incident, a major escalator of US involvement in the Vietnam War, never actually occurred.

On Monday, in between endless reports about the terrorist distraction attacks in Jersey and New York, CNN, MSNBC, Fox “News” and the other corporate media speckled in a few stories about how Russia and Syria were now the responsible parties for the collapse of the Syrian cease-fire agreement because one of the two of them used airstrikes to attack a UN humanitarian aid convoy after it crossed the conflict line in the Big Orem area of the Syrian city of Aleppo.

Nothing was said all day Monday about the US “accidentally” attacking Syrian troops on Saturday, killing 63 of them, in support of “ISIS”

No. By then, the story was all about how it “must have been” the Syrians or the Russians because it was “definitely” an air attack from war planes and the US says they didn’t have any in the area. Ergo… it “must have been them”