CAITLIN JOHNSTONE—Highlighting the depravity and murderousness of the empire. Use any and all media and forums you find to be effective.
Everything you do on this front makes a difference, and don’t ever let anyone tell you otherwise. The propaganda machine is the linchpin of their power. It’s what holds the empire together. Without the ability to manipulate the public at mass scale, our rulers cannot rule.
EDITOR—The panel discusses the outstanding aspects of Tucker Carlson’s Putin Interview, what it signifies in the context of US imperial propaganda in an age of challenges and decline, whether the format of the interview itself—one of unusual depth and length—will help or harm the ultimate aim of educating Westerners, especially Americans, about the realities of the world so that peace can be secured, warmongers defeated once and for all, and a nuclear war can be averted.
IAN KUMMER—The most important question is also the most difficult one. What will be the short and long term impacts of the interview? I do not think this will have any impact on opposing camps in the US political establishment who have already made up their minds on the Ukraine issue. But this will influence public opinion. For millions of American citizens, this is the first time in their lives they’ve heard the unadulterated Russian perspective, and that is in of itself significant. The interview has over 100 million views (and the exact number is hard to count because it has been shared so far and wide), and is already being translated into other languages and broken up into digestible sound bytes for people not interested in watching the whole video. And this is part of the reason I think it was good for Putin to focus on such broad historical topics because that makes the video evergreen, it will still be relevant in 5 years even if the conflict in Ukraine has already ended.
BRIAN BERLETIC—FPV drones transform cheap, easy-to-produce drones into precision guided weapons. FPV drones have several disadvantages including loss-of-signal as it begins its attack dive or encounters electronic warfare. AI targeting allows an operator to designate a target while still in signal line-of-sight and before entering an area defended by electronic warfare, for the AI to then automatically guide the drone to its target without any external signal. Russia’s large military industrial base lends its an advantage in both quantity and quality over Ukraine and its Western sponsors.
PATRICE GREANVILLE—So Greg Abbott, the Texas Governor, capitalising on the “migrant invasion” hysteria, is now toying with secession, to the acclaim of more than two dozen fellow Governors and tens of millions of Americans from Texas to Alaska. Sensing blood in the water given Biden’s stunning number of deficits and boondoggles, including a major personal scandal and three active wars and more in the offing, Abbot has decided to throw down the gauntlet and defy Biden’s Constitutional prerogatives.