What would we do without Jeff Childers ?

It was impossible to follow the developing Ukraine story yesterday, since most social media became utterly worthless, with any reliable information completely swamped by an anti-Putin propaganda-lanche. The scale was completely unprecedented, unlike anything I’ve seen before. A thousand thousand small accounts breathlessly reported that, because of the single military setback in Ukraine, Russian president Putin: was arrested, was under guard at his Dacha, was going to face trial for crimes against humanity, was deposed in a military coup, is facing impeachment in the Russian congress, has lost all support of the Russian people, will soon be executed; et cetera, ad infinitum.

Here are a couple representative examples, which don’t provide any sense of the actual scale of the thing, like offering a single salty drop to try to explain the Pacific Ocean:

“Rumours are swirling in Moscow that former generals and KGB officials are preparing to oust Russia’s president Vladimir Putin & plan to end the war in Ukraine, which is increasingly seen in Russia as a strategic mistake & above all, an economic disaster.”

Kremlin coup rumours growing in Moscow: Disgruntled generals join FSB looking to oust Putin and end Ukraine war
Rumours are swirling in Moscow that a number of former generals and KGB officials are preparing to oust Russia’s president Vladimir Putin and plan to end
cityam.com
September 12th 2022

We ask you to relieve yourself of your post’: Kremlin officials have begun a mutiny against Vladimir Putin.

‘We ask you to relieve yourself of your post’: Kremlin officials are turning against Vladimir Putin
Halfway through his invasion of Ukraine’s sixth bloody month, Russian President Vladimir Putin’s grip on power in Moscow is imploding as scores of Kremlin officials are calling upon the 69-year-old autocrat to quit.Putin had anticipated his February 24th “special military operation” to be a cakewalk…
rawstory.com
September 12th 2022

923 Retweets3,874 Likes
We need a new word to describe this kind of seemingly coordinated, completely unhinged, global propaganda. I say ‘coordinated’ because it’s all obviously completely made up, and normal people just don’t make up this kind of stuff. Apart from a few outliers, normal folks may exaggerate, they may even speculate hyperbolically and repeat dumb things they’ve heard online, but I just do not believe THIS MANY folks originate calculated lies.

So at present, the actual news — whatever it is — is buried under a tsunami of fake news. There’s nothing new about anti-Russian war propaganda, of course. You can see it at work because the anti-Russian social media army is nearly always wrong. For example, they’ve previously reported that Putin was dying any number of times. He had cancer, was poisoned, was worried about BEING poisoned, refused to leave Moscow out of fear of assassination, and so forth.

It’s happened so often that I stopped reporting on the “confirmed” news about Putin being on his deathbed.

As far as corporate media goes, as I predicted, CNN ran a long-form story yesterday celebrating the brilliant Ukrainian offensive headlined, “Russia’s Collapse In Northeast Ukraine Ignites Fury From Putin Loyalists.” The article describes how the wily Ukrainians tricked the blockheaded Russians into thinking a forward push was going to happen further south, but then broke through Russian defenses that had been thinned out in the north. Now, CNN says, Russia is all but defeated: out of weapons, out of manpower, and completely demoralized.

Thank goodness! Maybe now we can stop Venmo-ing billions of American dollars to some of the most corrupt actors in the world. Republican lawmakers, take note. As CNN says, the Ukrainians now have the war situation well under control. They don’t need more money or weapons. Or, in other words, at this point, WE need the money and weapons more than they do.

? Curiously, a similar propaganda effort targeted President Trump yesterday, albeit on a smaller scale. After corporate media reported that he’d been seen landing in Washington, DC, the fake social media army went to work claiming that President Trump: was indicted; was arrested on the tarmac outside his plan; had been met by FBI agents and local law enforcement; was obviously dressed in a hurry because he wanted to turn himself in before being arrested in front of news cameras; is now sitting in a DC jail; would soon be tried for crimes against humanity; and so on, and so forth.

Here’s a representative example:

Twitter avatar for @blucking
bernadette
@blucking
This. Now. Trump is in DC on a tarmac w no entourage. Arrested? https://t.co/F9ploIH3Ua
Angry Staffer ? @Angry_Staffer

A lot of folks have asked, but I don’t have a clue why Trump is in DC. My thoughts: 1. Health issue / going to Walter Reed 2. Turning himself in? ???? It’s not often Trump does anything without fanfare, so this makes me think it’s a narrative he can’t control. https://t.co/IGXsPzeBhb
September 12th 2022

6 Likes
So, it’s weird — right? — that on the VERY SAME DAY, social media armies pushed rumors about both Trump and Putin that both leaders were separately being arrested to face trial for their myriad “crimes against humanity.”

One might fairly speculate whether this stuff all originates from a single polluted spring.