One of my least popular conspiracy theories, and thus one more likely to be true, observed that Facebook’s downhill trajectory, mainstream media finally acknowledging Cambridge Analytica and all, coincided with the Saudi crown prince’s world tour. I think his private circle of jerks from among the hundreds of Saudi royals have been trying to destabilize Israeli alliances with the west, along with expanding their own business relationships with the civil warring “nuke spooks” and “virtual spooks” of the west.
Now, a trio of Wall Street Journal contributors are reporting that these same Saudi media darlings proactively contracted the chodes of VICE media to help build their public relations with global audiences. Which also backs another assertion of mine, that the USA doesn’t have state-run media in the traditional sense, but a privatized form to that end. The disconcerting part I want to focus on here, is how a major western media platform was passing duplicitous PR for a foreign enterprise off as news to its own regional viewers. What America and its closest allies regularly do, they openly and unironically accuse foreign competitors of doing. Propagandists know a thing or two about propaganda, in the way of “He who smelt it, dealt it”. The misinfo/disinfo game is never simply a matter of telling lies. It can be as sublime as the tone itself, and about decidedly not addressing certain topics. Such as how the Intercept avoids mention of its own billionaire owner financially supporting the USA-backed NeoNazi coup in the Ukraine against the Russian government. Glenn Greenwald has done a lot of good, but for a paycheck has he mindfully avoided doing all that he could.
VICE can afford to be less sly, decorating itself in pushup bras and rock music and its whip-smart millennial audiences hungrily prove themselves powerless in absorbing its talking points and raising its status as a news platform.
What’s especially interesting is that these Saudi royals had only earlier this year ordered for the western-based Netflix to censor itself over an American comedian’s comedy series pointing out a mere handful of the blood droplets decorating the robes of the royals. At the time, I sagely commented on the strangeness of the act, as longtime Saudi ally Barack Obama and his wife currently head a production studio for Netflix, and a former chief staffer of the Obama administration who served Obama’s first term as Ambassador to the United Nations and his second term as National Security Adviser, herself sits on the Board of Directors of Netflix.
Now, VICE has always garnered criticism from those paying attention, all the way back to a group of its reporters doxxing a journalist working for the UN, over said journalist herself reporting on crimes against humanity perpetrated by USA- (and Saudi-) backed “moderate rebels” fighting the government in Syria. As the founders of VICE are themselves also founders of the Proud Boys, a far-right group that hides its Neo-Nazi inclinations under hipster beards and excessive hair gel, and as the Saudi royals are the sort who actively behead their own citizens for such crimes as feminism and homosexuality, it should come as no surprise that VICE management would be willing to play ball for Saudi currency. And as yet another example for just how rightwing Neoliberalism truly is, another former Obama staffer, specifically his White House Deputy Chief of Staff for Operations, has for the past several years been the Chief Operating Officer of VICE media.
As reward for its idiotic contributors helping to build up a far-right superpower, improving publicity for the world’s largest purchaser of arms, VICE media has announced that 10% of its overwhelmingly masturbatory staff will finally get laid.
But let’s talk about Russian influence on western media.