orcas

Media Faces Reckoning After Helping Trump Downplay Project 2025 on Campaign Trail

Spread the love

Original article by Stephen Prager republished from Common Dreams under Creative Commons (CC BY-NC-ND 3.0). 

The Democratic National Committee sponsors a billboard about then-Republican candidate Donald Trump and Project 2025 at 12th & Vine Streets on September 9, 2024, in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. (Photo by Lisa Lake/Getty Images for the Democratic National Committee)

“A Trump denial is not a fact,” said one media critic.

As President Donald Trump openly embraces Project 2025, mainstream media outlets are facing criticism for their role in helping him downplay his ties to the wildly unpopular far-right governing playbook in the lead-up to his reelection last year.

After she became the Democratic nominee in July, former Vice President Kamala Harris made the Heritage Foundation’s over 900-page manifesto for “the next conservative president” central to her case against Trump during the 2024 election, often referring to it as “Trump’s Project 2025.”

She and other Democrats warned that if he retook power, he would swiftly enact many of its most extreme and unpopular proposals and dramatically expand executive power while doing it.

Among those proposals were steep cuts to social safety net programs like Medicaid and the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP), the “mass deportations” of millions of immigrants, the elimination of the Department of Education, new restrictions on abortions, the gutting of climate protections, and the replacement of career civil servants with political appointees, among many others.

Democrats amplified the plan’s danger at the Democratic National Convention and in campaign ads, and Trump began to distance himself from the platform. Despite the fact that as many as 140 people who’d worked in his first administration—including Paul Dans, Heritage’s director of Project 2025—had a hand in its creation, Trump said: “I know nothing about Project 2025. I have no idea who is behind it.”

This was demonstrably untrue, even at the time. Media Matters for America dug up a clip from as far back as May 2023 of Dans stating that “President Trump’s very bought in with this,” speaking of the program.

Project 2025 was almost inconceivably unpopular. An NBC News poll from September 2024 showed that while 57% of registered voters viewed the plan negatively, just 4% viewed it positively.

But in the critical months leading up to the election, many media outlets took Trump’s denial at face value, publishing fact checks and other commentary that painted Democrats’ warnings about his connection to the plan as alarmist or misleading.

Responding to a social media post in July stating that “Trump has made his authoritarian intentions quite clear with his Project 2025 plan,” a fact check by USA Today rated the statement “false,” because, as the headline said, “Project 2025 is an effort by the Heritage Foundation, not Donald Trump.”

In September, after Harris confronted Trump about Project 2025 at the first and only debate between the two, the paper published another fact-check with the headline: “Harris repeats claim that Project 2025 is Trump’s plan. That’s still not right.”

In response to Harris’ claim during the debate that Project 2025 was “a detailed and dangerous plan… that the former president intends on implementing if he were elected,” Washington Post fact-checker Glenn Kessler, whose coverage received a fair bit of criticism during the 2024 cycle, reported in bold text that “Project 2025 is not an official campaign document.”

A CNN fact check of the Harris campaign’s social media in September remarked that one account “frequently invokes Project 2025,” before caveating that “Project 2025 is not Trump’s initiative, and he has said he disagrees with some of its proposals.”

In an October interview on CBS‘s“Face the Nation,”anchor Norah O’Donnell, Harris attempted to warn about Project 2025, before O’Donnell responded: “You know that Donald Trump has disavowed Project 2025. He says that is not his campaign plan.”

After nine months back in power, the website Project 2025 Tracker estimates that Trump has already implemented approximately 48% of the objectives outlined in the policy document.

In addition to his key campaign promises many of his second administration’s policies are highly specific to Project 2025, such as his pledge to abolish the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA), his efforts to privatize the National Weather Service (NWS), his reconfiguration of Title X funding to promote pregnancy, and his elimination of the Office for Civil Rights and Civil Liberties.

Trump is no longer hiding his connection to Project 2025, having brought in many of its hiring picks and authors to staff his administration almost immediately after his victory last November.

This week, he began to boast about it openly. As his Office of Management and Budget (OMB) director, Russ Vought, one of Project 2025’s architects, began using the current government shutdown to unilaterally cut off funding to infrastructure projects in blue states and cities, Trump lauded him as “he of PROJECT 2025 Fame.”

“This was always the plan,” Harris responded on social media.

While many commentators expressed outrage that Trump blatantly lied about his connections to Project 2025, others dredged up old clips of newspapers and anchors taking him at his word.

“All those 2024 media fact checks that said, ‘Donald Trump and the Trump campaign deny any connection to Project 2025’ look pretty ridiculous right now,” said MeidasTouch editor-in-chief Ron Filipkowski. “A Trump denial is not a fact. You just used his lies to ‘debunk’ a reality that was obvious to anyone paying attention.”

Mehdi Hasan, the founder of the independent media company Zeteo, highlighted the CBS interview, saying Trump’s embrace of Project 2025 was “embarrassing not just for Norah O’Donnell but a whole host of leading American anchors and reporters who echoed Trump’s false denials.”

“Nothing showed the difference between mainstream and independent media better than the response to Trump’s obvious lie about not knowing anything about Project 2025,” said David Pepper, author of the book Saving Democracy: A User’s Manual. “Most mainstream media started fact-checking those who claimed a connection to be somehow false. Others ‘both sides’ed’ it. Far more in independent media called it out as a whopping lie.”

Original article by Stephen Prager republished from Common Dreams under Creative Commons (CC BY-NC-ND 3.0). 

Elon Musk urges you to be a Fascist like him, says that you can ignore facts and reality then.
Elon Musk urges you to be a Fascist like him, says that you can ignore facts and reality then.
Donald Fuhrump says that Amerikkka doesn't bother with crimes or charges anymore, not being 100% Amerikkkan and opposing his real estate intentions is enough.
Donald Fuhrump says that Amerikkka doesn’t bother with crimes or charges anymore, not being 100% Amerikkkan and opposing his real estate intentions is enough.
Orcas discuss how Trump was re-elected and him being an obviously insane, xenophobic Fascist.
Orcas discuss how Trump was re-elected and him being an obviously insane, xenophobic Fascist.

Continue ReadingMedia Faces Reckoning After Helping Trump Downplay Project 2025 on Campaign Trail

Israel pays influencers up to $7,000 per post to occupy information space

Spread the love

This work by Middle East Monitor is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License. 

In this photo illustration the logos of social media applications “TikTok, Twitter, Instagram, YouTube, Facebook, Pinterest, Snapchat, LinkedIn, Twitch” are displayed on a smart phone screen in Ankara, Turkey on September 30, 2021. [Ali Balıkçı – Anadolu Agency]

As global public opinion shifts decisively against Israel’s genocidal campaign in Gaza, the occupation state is intensifying efforts to dominate the information space through a network of paid influencers, algorithm manipulation, AI content framing and covert media partnerships. Recent revelations from filings under the US Foreign Agents Registration Act expose a sprawling Israeli propaganda campaign designed to distort public discourse, especially among younger audiences, and deflect mounting accusations of genocide.

At the centre of this campaign is a covert influence operation, exposed in documents filed under the US Foreign Agents Registration Act. The Israeli Ministry of Foreign Affairs, through its contractor Bridges Partners, has reportedly paid up to $7,000 per post for influencers to publish pro-Israel content on platforms such as TikTok and Instagram. 

According to Responsible Statecraft, the “Influencer Campaign” was budgeted at $900,000 to cover 75–90 posts between June and September 2024. The content is being produced under an initiative called the “Esther Project.”

The name bears resemblance to a separate initiative by the right-wing US think tank, the Heritage Foundation, which launched its own “Project Esther” in October 2024. The Heritage campaign aims to identify and counter what it describes as “antisemitic” rhetoric on US campuses and in public discourse—an effort that critics say equates legitimate criticism of Israel with support for terrorism. 

According to Responsible Statecraft, while the two projects are not officially connected, they appear to share ideological aims: conflating Palestinian solidarity and criticism of Israe with extremism in order to delegitimise dissent.

The wider strategy involves not only the dissemination of pro-Israel content but also direct efforts to alter the architecture of information platforms themselves. 

WATCH: MEMO Monitoring: Is Israel losing control of images emerging from Gaza?

A $6 million contract was awarded by the Israeli government to a firm named Clock Tower X LLC, whose leadership includes Brad Parscale, former campaign manager for Donald Trump. The contract focuses on disseminating pro-Israel messaging to Gen Z audiences across TikTok, Instagram, YouTube and other platforms. The firm aims to reach at least 50 million impressions monthly.

Significantly, the Clock Tower contract includes efforts to influence how artificial intelligence tools—such as ChatGPT—respond to questions about Israel and Palestine. The firm plans to launch a network of pro-Israel websites and populate them with content designed to shape how AI models “frame” certain topics. Because tools like ChatGPT learn by drawing on vast amounts of publicly available text from the internet, flooding the web with specific narratives can alter how these models answer sensitive questions.

In practical terms, this means that if someone asks ChatGPT a question about Israeli policies or the situation in Gaza, the AI might be more likely to echo pro-Israel talking points—not because they are factually correct, but because the internet has been strategically seeded with that perspective.

Clock Tower is also using advanced software such as MarketBrew AI—a tool designed to reverse-engineer search engine algorithms—to ensure pro-Israel narratives appear higher in Google and Bing search results. This approach, known as predictive search engine optimisation (SEO), helps push critical or dissenting perspectives further down the rankings, making them less visible to the average reader.

In a related move, Oracle co-founder Larry Ellison—reportedly the single largest private donor to the Israeli military—is expected to play a major role in the acquisition of TikTok. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has publicly backed the bid, saying it “could be consequential.”

The entire operation comes as Israel faces growing international condemnation over its ongoing military campaign in Gaza, which has killed more than 68,000 Palestinians—most of them women and children—since October 2023. Recent polling shows that only 9 per cent of Americans aged 18-34 support Israel’s actions, with broader public opinion also shifting.

In remarks to Israeli influencers last week, Netanyahu acknowledged that the digital space is now “the most important” front in Israel’s efforts to justify its war. “You can’t fight today with swords, that doesn’t work very well,” he said. “The most important [weapons] are the social media.”

READ: Israel’s influence on Big Tech: Silencing pro-Palestine media

This work by Middle East Monitor is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License. 

Orcas discuss Genocide-supporting and complicit Zionists. Donald Trump, Keith Starmer, David Lammy, Rachel Reeves, Angela Rayner are called evil genocide-complicit and supporting cnuts.
Orcas discuss Genocide-supporting and complicit Zionists. Donald Trump, Keith Starmer, David Lammy, Rachel Reeves, Angela Rayner are called evil genocide-complicit and supporting cnuts.
Keir Starmer objects to criticism of the IDF. He asks how could anyone object to them starving people to death, forced marches like the Nazis did, bombing Gaza's hospitals and universities, mass-murdering journalists, healthworkers and starving people queuing for food, killing and raping prisoners and murdering children. He calls for people to stop obstructing his genocide for Israel.
Keir Starmer objects to criticism of the IDF. He asks how could anyone object to them starving people to death, forced marches like the Nazis did, bombing Gaza’s hospitals and universities, mass-murdering journalists, healthworkers and starving people queuing for food, killing and raping prisoners and murdering children. He calls for people to stop obstructing his genocide for Israel.
Continue ReadingIsrael pays influencers up to $7,000 per post to occupy information space

Trump Antifa Order Seen as a Weapon to Attack Left-Wing Speech, Protests

Spread the love

Original article by Julia Conley republished from Common Dreams under Creative Commons (CC BY-NC-ND 3.0).

Protesters march through the streets of downtown Chicago as part of a nationwide “No Kings” demonstration on June 14, 2025. (Photo by Jim Vondruska/Getty Images)

“The order appears to be a green light to law enforcement and intelligence to spy on and investigate left-wing political speech,” said one First Amendment advocate.

The executive order issued by US President Donald Trump Monday evening claimed a legal authority that the president doesn’t have to designate the “antifa” movement as a “domestic terrorist organization,” despite the fact that no central group exists to assign the designation to—but rights advocates said Trump’s claims about antifa weren’t the point of the order.

“This isn’t an attack on antifa,” said Melanie D’Arrigo, executive director of the Campaign for New York Healthcare. “It’s an attack on our rights.”

RECOMMENDED…

Protest in Los Angeles, CA

‘There Is No Antifa Organization,’ But Trump Still Wants to Designate It a ‘Major Terrorist’ Group

Rally To Say NO To Tax Breaks For Billionaires & Corporations

Vowing to Fight Back, Senate Dems Decry Trump Attack on Liberal-Left Groups

The executive order states that antifa, a portmanteau of the term “anti-fascist,” will be designated a “domestic terrorist organization.” The movement is comprised of autonomous individuals and loosely affiliated groups who oppose fascism, but has no central organizational structure or leaders. People associated with the movement mobilized in 2017 to oppose the white nationalist “Unite the Right” rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, where a nonviolent anti-racist protester, Heather Heyer, was killed by a white supremacist who rammed a car into a group of demonstrators.

In the order, the president pinned blame for a “pattern of political violence” on anti-fascist protesters and organizers and pledged that the executive branch will “utilize all applicable authorities to investigate, disrupt, and dismantle any and all illegal operations—especially those involving terrorist actions—conducted by Antifa or any person claiming to act on behalf of Antifa.”

The order was written so broadly, said journalist Prem Thakker of Zeteo, that it suggests “someone recording masked agents snatching people off the streets, or asking these agents what they’re doing, can be deemed a ‘terrorist.‘”

The president has ordered US citizens, he added, “to be anti-antifa.”

With no central organization to assign the “domestic terrorist organization” to, said rights advocates, the executive order will likely be used to crack down on a wide range of left-wing protest activity and speech.

Aaron Reichlin-Melnick, senior fellow at the American Immigration Council, was among those who noted that no US law or statute gives the president the authority “to designate anything as a ‘domestic terrorist organization.‘”

All 219 groups that have been designated as terrorist organizations, such as ISIS and al-Qaeda, are foreign entities, and the designation makes it possible for people who provide material support to those groups to be prosecuted by the federal government.

“This would appear to have no direct legal effect beyond acting as a statement of policy for the executive branch,” said Reichlin-Melnick.

Chip Gibbons, policy director at the First Amendment advocacy group Defending Rights and Dissent, said that while the order “is without statutory basis, a close read of the language mirrors existing FBI powers, such as ‘terrorist enterprise investigations’ into ‘anarchist extremists.‘”

“The order appears to be a green light to law enforcement and intelligence to spy on and investigate left-wing political speech,” said Gibbons. “Given the FBI’s current guidelines, which encourage preventative intelligence in the name of counterterrorism, the FBI will have no problem continuing its sordid history of preemptively investigating political speech under the pretext of thwarting terrorism.”

At The Conversation, Dafydd Townley, a University of Portsmouth teaching fellow, wrote that the classification of antifa “as a terrorist organization could have profound effects on the First Amendment rights of large numbers of law-abiding US citizens.”

“It would be a serious danger to American democracy if US citizens were unable to voice their protest and exercise their right to free speech because of this classification,” Townley wrote.

The designation was announced amid widespread public opposition to many of Trump’s policies, including the deployment of federal troops to US cities to crack down on unhoused populations, immigrant communities, and what the president has claimed is a wave of violent crime—despite statistics showing crime is on the decline in all the cities he’s targeted.

Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents have already responded violently to people protesting raids and arrests of immigrant neighbors, including last week when an ICE agent was filmed throwing US congressional candidate Kat Abughazaleh to the ground at a protest in the Chicago suburbs.

“This isn’t about ‘antifa’—whatever that is,” said journalist Erin Overbey on Tuesday. “Trump’s new executive order is written so that anyone protesting against the US government, ICE, or even top politicians can potentially be deemed a terrorist.”

“It’s federal weaponization against free speech and the right to protest itself. Full stop,” she said. “And it’s un-American as hell.”

Original article by Julia Conley republished from Common Dreams under Creative Commons (CC BY-NC-ND 3.0).

Elon Musk urges you to be a Fascist like him, says that you can ignore facts and reality then.
Elon Musk urges you to be a Fascist like him, says that you can ignore facts and reality then.
Donald Trump urges you to be a Climate Science denier like him. He says that he makes millions and millions for destroying the planet, Burn, Baby, Burn and Flood, Baby, Flood.
Donald Trump urges you to be a Climate Science denier like him. He says that he makes millions and millions for destroying the planet, Burn, Baby, Burn and Flood, Baby, Flood.
Orcas discuss how Trump was re-elected and him being an insane, xenophobic Fascist.
Orcas discuss how Trump was re-elected and him being an insane, xenophobic Fascist.

Continue ReadingTrump Antifa Order Seen as a Weapon to Attack Left-Wing Speech, Protests

Trump’s New Restrictions on Pentagon Reporters ‘Should Alarm Every American’

Spread the love

Original article by Jon Queally republished from Common Dreams under Creative Commons (CC BY-NC-ND 3.0). 

President-elect Donald Trump’s nominee to be Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth speaks to reporters as he leaves the Russell Senate Office Building on November 21, 2024 in Washington, DC. (Photo by Kevin Dietsch/Getty Images)

“If the news about our military must first be approved by the government, then the public is no longer getting independent reporting,” warned the National Press Club after journalists told of rule changes.

Journalists and defenders of press freedom are expressing alarm and condemnation after the Pentagon, under the command of President Donald Trump and Secretary of War Pete Hegseth, announced new restrictions on reporters that include pre-approval of stories that include even unclassified material and a new pledge to not publish any material without permissions from government officials.

The New York Times, among the first to report on a 17-page memo detailing the new rules, noted how the “move could drastically restrict the flow of information about the U.S. military to the public.” The National Press Club (NPC) was quick to rebuke the restrictions as an assault on the public’s right to know and fundamental journalistic freedoms.

“The Pentagon is now demanding that journalists sign a pledge not to obtain or report any information—even if unclassified—unless it has been expressly authorized by the government,” said Mike Balsamo, president of the NPC, in a statement. “This is a direct assault on independent journalism at the very place where independent scrutiny matters most: the U.S. military.”

Balsamo continued:

For generations, Pentagon reporters have provided the public with vital information about how wars are fought, how defense dollars are spent, and how decisions are made that put American lives at risk. That work has only been possible because reporters could seek out facts without needing government permission.

If the news about our military must first be approved by the government, then the public is no longer getting independent reporting. It is getting only what officials want them to see. That should alarm every American.

Independent reporting on the military is essential to democracy. It is what allows citizens to hold leaders accountable and ensures that decisions of war and peace are made in the light of day. This pledge undermines that principle, and the National Press Club calls on the Pentagon to rescind it immediately.

Seth Stern, director of advocacy at Freedom of the Press Foundation, explained to the Times that the government is prohibited by law from demanding journalists surrender their right to investigate the government in exchange for access or credentials.

“This policy operates as a prior restraint on publication which is considered the most serious of First Amendment violations,” Stern said. “The government cannot prohibit journalists from public information merely by claiming it’s a secret or even a national security threat.”

In comments to the Washington Post, Katie Fallow, deputy litigation director at the Knight First Amendment Institute at Columbia University, called the new policy part of “the Trump administration’s broader assault on free speech and press freedom.”

Any journalist, she added, “who publishes only what the government ‘authorizes’ is doing something other than reporting.”

Kenneth Roth, former executive director of Human Rights Watch and now a visiting professor at Princeton University, put it this way: “In Trump’s Pentagon, journalists who venture beyond reporting official propaganda now risk having their credentials revoked.”

Individual journalists, including veteran reporters who have covered the Pentagon for years or decades, also chimed in.

Konstantin Toropin, the Pentagon correspondent for the Associated Press, expressed alarm and dismay at the new restrictions.

“The Pentagon, which has claimed to [have] aspirations of being the most transparent in history, is once again cracking down on basic press access,” Toropin said in a social media post. “Denying access to the Pentagon makes covering our military, our troops, and our actions abroad harder. Full stop.”

Toropin said the rule forbidding the unapproved release of unclassified material, sometimes marked with the acronym “CUI,” is “an incredibly broad and ill-defined rule that could be easily abused.”

As his colleague Brian Everstine, the Pentagon editor at Aviation Week, noted:

At a time when Trump is being accused of severe abuses of power, including a series of attacks on alleged illegal drug runners in the Caribbean Sea, which international law experts have condemned as ”extrajudicial executions,” further restrictions on the ability of journalists to report on the internal workings of the president’s military operations are seen as particularly dangerous.

Barbara Starr, who worked as CNN’s chief Pentagon correspondent for many years who is now a senior fellow at the University of Southern California Annenberg Center for Communication, Leadership and Policy, told ABC News that the entire effort “is extremely troubling because it’s being done in an era of unprecedented public hostility from the secretary of defense to the news media.”

Original article by Jon Queally republished from Common Dreams under Creative Commons (CC BY-NC-ND 3.0). 

Donald Fuhrump says that Amerikkka doesn't bother with crimes or charges anymore, not being 100% Amerikkkan and opposing his real estate intentions is enough.
Donald Fuhrump says that Amerikkka doesn’t bother with crimes or charges anymore, not being 100% Amerikkkan and opposing his real estate intentions is enough.
Elon Musk urges you to be a Fascist like him, says that you can ignore facts and reality then.
Elon Musk urges you to be a Fascist like him, says that you can ignore facts and reality then.
Orcas discuss how Trump was re-elected and him being an insane, xenophobic Fascist.
Orcas discuss how Trump was re-elected and him being an insane, xenophobic Fascist.

Continue ReadingTrump’s New Restrictions on Pentagon Reporters ‘Should Alarm Every American’