Wrongfooted MSM Tries to Strike Back

The mainstream media were very briefly blindsided by the latest DOGE revelations, but they’re hitting back with all they can. You have to hand it to them, they’ve got more chutzpah than an evangelical preacher caught chockablock up a rent-boy and bellowing indignantly about the invasion of his privacy.

As this gripping Substack account shows, speed was of the essence for DOGE in its unmasking of decades of Deep State malfeasance and rivers of black money. The game plan was to strike hard and fast, before the Deep State and its mainstream media lackeys could hit back with their usual smears and attacks.

They may have been wrongfooted – but only for a few days. The mainstream media are striking back with a vengeance. Only, this time, we’ve seen through the lies before the MSM have even opened their mouths.

Working with President Donald Trump’s blessing as the head of a government efficiency campaign, [Elon Musk] and others in the administration have taken over the [USAID, the agency that has distributed much of the government’s foreign aid since 1961] headquarters, frozen grants and notified employees that nearly all of them will be laid off.

The dismantling of the agency has been accompanied by a torrent of anger online from right-wing influencers and accounts that are promoting false claims and conspiratorial thinking.

There it all is: the MSM’s standard modus operandi, crammed into just a couple of paras. “Donald Trump”, “right-wing influencers”, “false claims and conspiratorial thinking”. The last is particularly rich, since false claims and conspiratorial thinking are exactly what the Age is peddling here.

Note, especially, the false claims about ‘foreign aid’. This is a deliberate obfuscation designed to fool the gullible readers of the MSM. In fact, foreign aid – in the sense the MSM want you to think, of food and water dropoffs, and so on – accounted for less than 10 per cent of USAID’s budget. What it spend the bulk of US taxpayers’ billions on was agenda peddling.

The most damaging to the MSM is the laying-out, in black-and-white, receipts’n’all, what we all already suspected: the Deep State has been funding the lickspittle mainstream media.

‘It’s not what it looks like!’ the MSM desperately scream.

Much of the frenzy online this week has centred on USAID’s many grants, information about which has been publicly available for years.

One viral claim, for example, started after an account on X with more than half a million followers suggested that Politico, the Washington news website, had received more than $US8 million from USAID.

That wasn’t true.

Except that they go right on and admit that it is indeed very true.

The website had received about $US44,000 from USAID for subscriptions to its premium environmental and energy publication over two years and more than $US8 million in subscription revenue from a variety of agencies, including the Department of Energy.

That’s like saying you didn’t pay a whore: you just gave some money to a poor woman down on her luck, who was so grateful she gave you a blowjob in a back alley. (Apologies to sex workers, by the way, for comparing them to the syphilitic whores of the MSM.)

The lies and half-truths don’t stop there.

That set off a round of other misleading claims about USAID granting money to the BBC and the New York Times. (The agency has instead granted money to an independent charity that shares a name with the BBC. The most viral claim about the New York Times was based on an inaccurate search of government records that included grants to unrelated but similar-sounding groups, like New York University. In a statement, the Times said that the payments it had received were for subscriptions.

The ‘independent charity’ is, in fact, a subsidiary of the BBC – its website is nested within the BBC’s own website! – which merely farms out BBC propaganda to other news sites around the world. The only difference between them and an Eastern European fake news content farm is the budget and the false veneer of sanctimony.

The claim that the New York Times’ involvement “was based on an inaccurate search” is exploded by the very next sentence: “the Times said that the payments it had received…” So the Times was paid by USAID. Calling them “subscriptions” instead of bribes is just calling a back-alley happy ending a ‘stress relief massage’.

What the MSM are also strategically failing to report is that not all of their bribe money was paid directly by USAID. Hundreds of millions were also funnelled through a front organisation: the so-called ‘Internews’.

As already reported by Good Oil:

Internews, a non-profit founded in 1982, claims to promote “trustworthy information” and support “media sustainability”. However, its mission is backed by staggering financial support from the US government. By 2023, the organisation had partnered with nearly 4,300 media outlets, trained thousands of journalists, and played a key role in social media censorship initiatives.

Among the most notable funding sources is USAID, which has funnelled $472.6 million into Internews. Other key donors include AOL-Time Warner Foundation, the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, and the US State Department, which has funded initiatives ranging from high-quality responsible journalism in Liberia to media enabling democracy in Moldova.

If, as they claim, this is all totally innocent, then why the attempted secrecy? The bios of its executives were scrubbed from its website – but not before being archived by WikiLeaks.

The dark money trail reaches all the way to New Zealand.

The infiltration of Internews into New Zealand’s legacy media landscape has now been directly linked to the Back to News initiative launched in 2023 in partnership with GroupM New Zealand. GroupM, the “world’s leading media investment company”, collaborated with Internews to establish an advertising and funding pipeline for selected “vetted” media outlets […]

The vetted media outlets included some of New Zealand’s largest legacy mainstream platforms: Stuff, NZME, Business Desk, Newshub, and 1News.

When lies and strategic half-truths aren’t enough, the Deep State and the MSM fall back on their other trusty weapons: smears and threats. One of DOGE’s team has been smeared for ‘racist posts’ on social media. The entire six-man team of computer experts responsible for laying bare the dark web of Deep State funding have been doxxed: their names and personal info released to the world. This is a disgusting, discredited, and, in Australia, illegal, activity whose only point is to lay its targets open to violent threats.

Hell hath no fury like a Deep State caught balls-deep in a mainstream media whore.