(LifeSiteNews) — On August 28, The Grayzone – an independent news outlet that has, among other things, been providing reliable reporting on the Ukraine War – announced that GoFundMe had effectively seized $90,000 dollars of its reader donations. The money has not been released, nor has it been returned to the donors. As The Grayzone reported, GoFundMe took this action due to “Some external concerns.”
The Grayzone’s editor, Max Blumenthal, described this non-explanation as “…nothing more than a vague allusion to pressure from powerful outside forces.”
In a recent video, comedian and left-wing political commentator Jimmy Dore interviewed Blumenthal, who gave a simple explanation for the latest of many attacks on his brand of journalism.
“Independent outlets that challenge the war state – the national security state – are being financially sanctioned by the same national security state that sanctions from Venezuela to Iran to Cuba.”
“The war is here at home,” he added.
Expanding on his point, Blumenthal stated that his media operation is being targeted to maintain control of the narrative.
“What they want is media to be accountable to billionaires, to be accountable to the state that provides the Washington Post and the New York Times with all its sources on the Ukraine proxy war or Iran or covid – and they don’t want people like us…”
Blumenthal and The Grayzone are no fly-by-night amateurish news source. See below his 14-minute presentation two months ago to the U.N. Security Council on Ukraine aid.
A faceless corporate state
Jimmy Dore’s own assessment of the situation was stark. He believes that the restriction of information at home is at one with the attempt to enforce global control by the same unelected elite.
“The western regime that it is sanctioning one third of the world’s population – is now sanctioning its own citizens.”
His claim that, “The dictator has been replaced by the faceless corporate state” and that “…the government is run by corporations (Blackrock, etc),” was reinforced not only by The Grayzone’s treatment, but by much of what Blumenthal and his small team have uncovered in their investigations.
Dore also compared the treatment of The Grayzone to that faced by the Canadian Freedom Convoy.
“Banks were instructed to seize truckers’ assets,” he said. “When that failed, they imposed emergency law on February 7th, 2022 – effectively martial law.”
Dore described how the same process was followed by GoFundMe, whose initial intention was seemingly to keep the money for themselves. As Dore noted, “GoFundMe immediately seized closed to ten million Canadian dollars.”
Only under threat of U.S. investigation did GoFundMe agree to give the money back to the donors. So far, GoFundMe has not returned the $90,000 dollars in donations to The Grayzone it has frozen.
If you care about the truth, you should care about The Grayzone. You may not have heard of them until now, and that is part of the reason why they matter.
‘Factual journalism is disinformation’
Max Blumenthal is one of the few journalists who actually investigates the news. His website features the work of several other reporters, who have faced interrogation and threats, alongside repeated attempts to discredit and shut down The Grayzone itself.
Why would Blumenthal and his journalists be subjected to this treatment? A glance at their recent work would supply the evidence. With reports on how the U.S. is targeted with a PR offensive” to promote the war in Ukraine, and the lucrative “baby factories” operated in that nation, Blumenthal’s small operation has also supplied reports on corruption in the Biden administration and evidence suggesting U.S. involvement in the NordStream pipeline sabotage.
His reporting takes in the global realignment represented by the BRICS group, which he describes as a development showing the willingness of many nations to escape a system of control enforced by sanctions – a policy which Jimmy Dore claims is now applied at home.
“The western regime that is sanctioning one third of the world’s population – is now sanctioning its own citizens.”
Shaping history in secret
Blumenthal has not only investigated the news, but also reports on the clandestine and powerful organization which ultimately decides what is the news – and what is “misinformation.”
In another report, he details the secretive Bilderberg group and its enormous power to mold world events in private meetings. He describes it in the following video as “A forum for the international elite, for maintaining U.S. dominance over Europe.”
Held in a secret location every year, Blumenthal says it is up to “independent, scrappy journalists” to discover the meeting’s location and name its attendees. He went to the 2022 meeting in Washington D.C., noting the delegates included media figures, the current NATO chief, former world leaders and big tech billionaires.
These are “the people who are shaping history” he claims, saying the Bilderberg group operates in secrecy as it exemplifies the “anti-democratic tendencies of the transatlantic elite”.
Thanks to people like Blumenthal, you can find out that the few journalists permitted to cover the event are always “sworn to secrecy, under Chatham House rules.” These rules prohibit the naming of the source of any quote, making accurate reporting impossible. This is no accident, says Blumenthal to Dore.
“Factual journalism is to them disinformation because it contravenes the objective of this transatlantic elite. So they’re obsessed with disinformation – they’re fearful of the public – and these meetings are designed to provide them with a forum to interact and plan without scrutiny.”
Blumenthal’s argument is that these “…out of touch, unaccountable, warlike and possibly even demonic elites” want to keep the public out of the way of the decision-making process which will shape their lives. In addition, he says those in control seek to maintain their position by controlling the description of reality in the media.
The illusion of liberal democracy
Blumenthal has a wider argument about the nature of Western Liberalism. He cites the opinion of Sheldon Wolin that we in the West inhabit an “inverted totalitarianism.” Wolin argued in his 2017 book Democracy Incorporated that Western elites are eager to keep citizens “politically uninterested and submissive” in a “managed democracy.”
As Blumenthal explains, this is “…where a state maintains the illusion of liberal democracy because it’s a more effective tool for managing and controlling its own citizens.”
He claims the National Security State is “hiding its fingerprints” in big tech “Silicon Valley companies … which are effectively our digital commons” whilst “Small outfits like ours have to rely on fundraising.”
The Grayzone, he says, is being “financially sanctioned” and “starved – so we can’t report anymore.”
He continues, “…unlike an outright dictatorship they want to maintain the soft power of a liberal democracy. So they can’t just come out and just ban us. They can’t criminalize The GrayZone directly – but we have documented a clear and outright campaign of repression against our personnel by Western State intelligence agencies from Kiev to London.”
Featured on The Grayzone’s site alongside stories detailing the shocking corruption in the use of U.S. “aid” to Ukraine are many reports detailing how this “campaign of repression” has been conducted.
‘No wonder people are conspiratorial’
The revelation of secrecy, whether by design or in the deliberate exclusion of investigative reporting, is a common feature in Blumenthal’s work. In one aside to Dore brought up the fact that last year “the Pfizer CEO Albert Bourla held an off-the-record secret meeting with world leaders and industry heads on the next pandemic.”
“I mean how frightening is that? The public cannot know what was discussed, when we are going to have to live through whatever lockstep plan they put into place?”
He concludes, “It’s no wonder people are conspiratorial.”
These are genuine conspiracies. Describing them accurately attracts derision, criticism and in The Grayzone’s case, the combined efforts of many agencies and individuals to shut you down. They have brought news of how the FBI helps Twitter censor users, and how two 9-11 hijackers were CIA recruits. Even Wikipedia has joined the fight to undermine their reporting, resulting in another Grayzone expose on the “corrupt encyclopedia.”
“If you think your government is actually running your country you’re a chump.” See medical freedom hero Dr. Paul Elias Alexander’s confirmation of this.
The Grayzone has been described on Wikipedia as a “far-right and far left news website,” with fact-checkers describing their output as “propaganda, conspiracies, false claims.”
Since its inception, it has faced many attempts to destroy it completely. Its reporting focuses on who controls the media, and what the mainstream news excludes from the reality it frames for its audience.
The story of The Grayzone reveals the story of our times: it shows how the news is made, by whom, and what happens to people who report outside the lines it defines. This is a small organization whose business is to investigate the production of news itself. Their reports have cast doubt on many major U.S. and U.K. government narratives, showing the official line to be far less evidence based than claimed.
Blumenthal’s work has revealed how little of our fate is decided as a result of elections, with the shaping of our lives taking place in secret meetings of a globally coordinated elite.
In short, the crime of The Grayzone is to have fact-checked the news. This is an embarrassment to a mainstream media whose ties to the intelligence community have been well documented by independent journalists like Blumenthal, who document the “Censorship-Industrial Complex.”
This is a well-established mechanism of control, whose nexus has been described as “The politburo of capitalism.”
The quote above, and the image below which accompanies it, refers to a report by the independent Swiss Policy Research group on the Council on Foreign Relations. The membership of this shady group supplied every U.S. President from H.W. Bush to Barack Obama. As the report concludes, “It was not until the 2016 election that the Council couldn’t, apparently, prevail.”
The Swiss report of 2017 details for the first time the cooperation between the Council on Foreign relations, established in 1921 to “awaken America to its worldwide responsibilities,” and the equally clandestine Bilderberg Group and Trilateral Commission.
It explains the purpose of these organizations as the coordination of the actions of global elites.
As the SPR report says, “The CFR and its close to 5000 elite members for decades have shaped U.S. foreign policy and public discourse about it.”
As a well-known Council member famously explained, they transformed the American republic into a global empire, albeit a “benevolent” one.”
That “well-known” Council member is Robert Kagan, a chief architect of the U.S. policy of “forever war,” whose regime change doctrine is presented as the defense of global democracy.
The Swiss Policy report used public data to evidence the network of influence shown in the diagram.
“Based on official membership rosters, the illustration depicts for the first time the extensive media network of the CFR and its two major international affiliate organizations: the Bilderberg Group (mainly covering the U.S. and Europe) and the Trilateral Commission (covering North America, Europe and East Asia), both established by Council leaders to foster elite cooperation at the global level.”
This is a powerful organization shaping world events and their perception in secrecy, whose very mention invites the label of “conspiracy theorist.” The captive media’s business is to maintain this illusion – that the truth about power is a paranoid fantasy. The result is to tinge anyone who notices the facts with madness.
‘The civil liberties groups are not confronting this’
When Blumenthal and others speak of the “censorship-industrial complex,” groups like the CFR come to light. The control of the media is necessary to keep the public from knowledge of how the world is actually run.
It is journalists like Blumenthal who work to inform you of who does run your country, and who decides how the management will be described. This is an operation beyond party politics, and beyond the reach and sight of the electoral process. Democracy takes place in public, but the machinery of power is operated in private.
The mechanisms to protect civil rights simply do not appear to apply to critics of power. As Blumenthal pointed out, “The civil liberties groups like the ACLU are not confronting this.”
Jimmy Dore’s summary of the situation ties the current political crisis in the United States to a reality behind that presented by a captive media.
“The people doing this to Trump are the people who own the Democratic party and the Republican party and the military-industrial complex.”
As Dore observes, we are none of us invited to the party in power. Without independent journalism, we would never even hear about it. According to the ruling elite, that’s just how things should be in a well-managed democracy.