By Dr. Kevin Barrett
The Canadian Freedom Convoy left Prince Rupert on Jan. 22, arriving in Ottawa one week later, Jan. 29. During its week on the road, the convoy got no mainstream media attention whatsoever. Nor did the fake left pseudo-alternative media (“Democracy Now,” The Nation, Mother Jones) cover the convoy, the biggest protest by workers in North America since teachers occupied the Wisconsin state capitol in 2011. Only after Ottawa was noisily occupied by the truckers and their supporters did the media finally break its silence. Rather than balanced coverage, they’ve emitted a steady outpouring of slander.
In similar fashion, Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s The Real Anthony Fauci spent a month at the top of the national bestseller lists after its publication on Nov. 16, 2021—and the media failed to notice the book’s existence, much less review it. Then on Dec. 15, as writer Ron Unz explains:
The Freedom Convoy and RFK Jr.’s book should have been huge stories from day one. Instead, the media, under orders from their oligarch owners, ignored them as long as possible. Finally, when it became obvious the stories were too big to ignore, the oligarchs ordered a fusilade of character assassination.
The Jeffrey Epstein case also illustrates the silence-to-slander method. From 2005, when Epstein was first charged with sex crimes, alternative media reported on the Israel-linked financier’s sexual blackmail activities. In 2012, Nick Bryant, author of The Franklin Scandal, published Epstein’s “black book” featuring names and phone numbers of presidents, princes, and potentates. But the mainstream media assiduously looked the other way while the Zionist sexual blackmailer shamelessly continued to pimp underage girls. Finally, Epstein was arrested again in 2019 and suicided in short order. Today, those who don’t believe Epstein killed himself—the vast majority of Americans—are derided by our media overlords as “conspiracy theorists.”
The same silence-to-slander pattern pertained during the rise of the 9/11 truth movement. In the early years (2001-2006) the movement was subjected to a media blackout. Then in mid-2006, when polls showed that more than a third of Americans thought it likely that 9/11 was an inside job designed to trigger the invasions of Muslim countries—and the truth movement had attracted endorsements from over 100 university professors—the powers-that-be decided it was time to push back. Suddenly the 9/11 truth movement came under attack, and I found myself widely reviled on television and in mainstream newspapers as a “radical professor teaching evil conspiracy theories to our nation’s innocent youth.”
Something similar happened in the wake of the JFK assassination. From November 1963 until 1967, the media largely ignored the people raising questions about President John F. Kennedy’s death. But, after the publication of Mark Lane’s surprise 1966 bestseller Rush to Judgment—which, like RFK Jr.’s The Real Anthony Fauci 55 years later, sold hundreds of thousands of copies through word-of-mouth—the cover-up team shifted strategy from “total blackout” to “kill the messenger.” In 1967, the CIA issued Document 1035-960 and distributed it to its thousands of Operation Mockingbird media assets. Document 1035-960 laid out a strategy for “countering and discrediting the claims of the conspiracy theorists.” The expression “conspiracy theorists” had not previously been in common use. So we can thank the CIA for putting that term into circulation.
The media-intelligence complex’s war on “JFK conspiracy theorists” peaked in 1969. That year, New Orleans District Attorney Jim Garrison tried to prosecute some of JFK’s killers, and was rewarded by being slimed in the media (and having his key witnesses drop dead shortly before they were scheduled to testify.)
Today a growing number of people are wise to the Mockingbird media’s tricks. Nobody believes the official Jeffrey Epstein story. And the Canadian Freedom Convoy has garnered massive public support despite the near-total opposition of mainstream and pseudo-alternative media.
As an apocryphal quote has it: “Gandhi once observed that every movement goes through four stages: First they ignore you; then they abuse you; then they crack down on you; and then you win.”
Things move faster now than they did in Gandhi’s time. The abuse and the crackdown stages are now telescoped together—just look at what’s happening in Ottawa. How long will it take the people to tire of endless abuse and crackdowns, and finally rise up and win?
Kevin Barrett, Ph.D., is an Arabist-Islamologist scholar and one of America’s best-known critics of the War on Terror. From 1991 through 2006, Dr. Barrett taught at colleges and universities in San Francisco, Paris, and Wisconsin. In 2006, however, he was attacked by Republican state legislators who called for him to be fired from his job at the University of Wisconsin-Madison due to his political opinions.
