The 'Free Press' Publishes Pro-War Propaganda From Neo-Con Mike Pompeo.

The "Independent" outlet "The Free Press" publishes pro-war propaganda from an authoritarian neo-con.

Neo-Conservatism Alt Media Style.

One of the things I find most interesting about neo-conservatives is their ability to rebrand, always finding a new audience to sell a war to.

Many Bush-era neocons moved over to the Democratic Party in 2016, heavily pushing the Russiagate hoax, in order to get liberals to support their desired new cold war with Russia and eventually the Ukraine proxy war.

The rise of independent media is a major roadblock to this, given that most alternative media outlets on the left and the right tend to be skeptical of foreign intervention.

Because of this problem, many neocons have infiltrated the alternative media scene to try to leave their pro-war mark.

Perhaps the most obvious and sloppy example of this is the Substack outlet “The Free Press”.

The outlet was founded by Bari Weiss, a former neo-conservative New York Times columnist who resigned due to her disagreements with the paper on issues like cancel culture and identity politics.

In 2022, Weiss founded “The Free Press”, a Substack outlet that touts itself as an edgier alternative to the mainstream media. The outlet’s about page says:

The Free Press is a new media company founded by Bari Weiss and built on the ideals that once were the bedrock of great journalism: honesty, doggedness, and fierce independence. We publish investigative stories and provocative commentary about the world as it actually is—with the quality once expected from the legacy press, but the fearlessness of the new.

However, outside of limited areas like identity politics, the outlet is basically indistinguishable from the mainstream media.

Weiss was a supporter of the CIA proxy war in Syria. In one viral moment, she called then-presidential candidate Tulsi Gabbard and “Assad toady”(meaning a sycophant) on the Joe Rogan podcast for Gabbard’s opposition to the war.

In an embarrassing moment, Weiss could not define the word toady when Rogan pushed back, saying: “think it means what I think it means,” and could not offer any evidence that Tulsi Gabbard was an Assad toady, saying “I'm pretty positive about that, but maybe I'm wrong I don't think I'm wrong”.

She is also completely in line with the mainstream media’s support for backing the proxy war in Ukraine, the Isreali genocide in Gaza, and an eventual proxy war with China over Taiwan.

In a 2024 interview, Weiss said:

Many people, especially many of our elites, well, there’s no sense of duty and responsibility. Leaving Israel [was] walking back into a society that I don’t think has fully recognised the history that has come for Israel and has come for Ukraine, and maybe will soon come from Taiwan, will come for us. How can you even conceive of war if you don’t even understand what it is that people are willing to fight and die for? And what are you willing to fight and die for?

So her issue with America’s elites is not that they are pushing for endless proxy wars for the military-industrial complex, but that they are not supportive enough of them by repeating the age-old neocon trope of “if we don’t fight them over there, we will have to fight them over here”.

Wiess’s outlet, the Free Press, publishes non-stop neo-conservative propaganda. The outlet has put out multiple articles by neo-con Eli Lake lamenting the end of the National Endowment for Democracy, which he claims “supports grassroots freedom movements around the world”.

In reality, the ostensible NGO was exposed as a cutout of the CIA by CIA whistleblower Philip Agee years ago and has been used by the U.S. government to back coups around the world, including against elected governments in countries like Bolivia, Ecuador, Venezuela, Haiti, and Romania.

More than anything, the outlet has been strongly supportive of Israel’s mass murder campaign against Palestinians in Gaza and the U.S. support for it.

Perhaps the most disturbing thing the outlet’s founder, Bari Weiss, ever did was spread propaganda that helped get a Palestinian academic targeted and killed by Israel.

For context, the ultra-religious volunteer force in Israel, Zaka, was sent to pick up the bodies in the aftermath of October 7th -despite them having no forensic knowledge- and came up with a series of false claims and hoaxes that were uncritically repeated by the Israeli and Western governments along with the mainstream media.

The most comical of these hoaxes was the fabricated claim that Hamas “baked a baby in an oven”.

This cartoonish lie was correctly mocked at the time by the Palestinian professor and poet Refaat Alareer, who tweeted “with or without baby powder”, mocking one of the most ridiculous pieces of atrocity propaganda in history.

Bari Weiss took this tweet out of context on Twitter, claiming that Alareer was “joking about whether or not an Israeli baby, burned alive in an oven, was cooked ‘with or without baking powder.’”

Weiss was attempting to imply that Alareer was supportive of an Israeli baby being killed when, in reality, he was making fun of the ridiculous atrocity propaganda used to justify mass murder in Gaza.

Shortly after, Alareer posted a number of threats he received from Israelis on Twitter, and wrote :

If I get killed by Israeli bombs or my family is harmed, I blame Bari Weiss and her likes.

Many maniacal Israeli soldiers already bombing Gaza take these lies and smears seriously and they act upon them.

The threats icluded Isrealis saying things like “When we get to Gaza I personally will rape rawdog your old mother” and “Send me your adress, we are going to wipe you out in Gaza”.

A few months later, in December 2023, Alareer was targeted and killed by an IDF air strike.

Alareer was widely seen as one of the most effective advocates of the Palestinian cause to the outside world.

He actively spoke out against anti-Semitism and urged his students not to conflate Zionism with Judaism.

Journalist Max Blumenthal wrote in his 2015 book “The 51 Day War: Life and Loathing in Greater Israel” that Alareer hosted the Jewish anti-zionist journalist Dan Cohen in his class in 2014 and “emphasized to the class that not all Jews were Zionists, and challenged them not to implicate an entire group for the cruelty of a state that claimed to be acting in their name.”

Blumenthal quoted Alareer saying, “I told my students about my time in the US staying with Jewish friends, being with their families, about seeing them defend Palestinians”.

Despite this, Weiss actively smeared him as an anti-semite because he mocked an obvious hoax, a smear campaign that eventually helped get him killed.

Pictured Above: Tweet From Refaat Alareer posted a few months before he was targeted and killed by Isreali forces.

The Anti-Free Press

Publishing neo-cons, warmongers, and Zionists is one thing, but by publishing Mike Pompeo, the free press is publishing someone who is directly responsible for war crimes.

Pompeo served as Trump’s CIA director in 2017 and publicly bragged about his corruption while there. In an infamous clip, Pompeo said, “When I was a cadet, the cadet motto was you will not lie, cheat, or steal or tolerate those who do, I was the CIA director, we lied, we cheated, we stole”.

He later served as Trump’s secretary of state, beginning in April of 2018, where he oversaw a whole host of war crimes, including backing Saudi Arabia’s genocidal war in Yemen, an airstrike in Syria that killed 70 civilians, an increase in civilian casualties through drone strikes, and the backing of a massacre of Palestinian protests in Gaza.

Perhaps the most disgusting part of an outlet called the “Free Press” publishing Mike Pompeo is the fact that he played a large part in the lawfare campaign against journalist Julian Assange because he published evidence of U.S. war crimes.

A lengthy investigation in Yahoo News based on inside sources found that the bogus case against Assange was largely driven by Pompeo.

The report found that “President Trump’s newly installed CIA director, Mike Pompeo, was seeking revenge on WikiLeaks and Assange” due to him being “completely detached from reality because they were so embarrassed about Vault 7”.

Vault 7 was a leak from within the CIA published on WikiLeaks that revealed the CIA’s spying capabilities.

Yahoo News reported that Pompeo was so mad about this leak that he “publicly described the group (Wikileaks) in 2017 as a ‘non-state hostile intelligence service.’”

The investigation noted that “the designation opened the door for agency operatives to take far more aggressive actions, treating the organization as it does adversary spy services”.

A former Trump administration national security official said to Yahoo News that “WikiLeaks was a complete obsession of Pompeo” when he served as Secretary of State and CIA director, and that “After Vault 7, Pompeo wanted vengeance on Assange”.

Yahoo reported that “Pompeo began discussing kidnapping Assange, according to four former officials,” while he was CIA head. According to the investigation, “While the notion of kidnapping Assange preceded Pompeo’s arrival at Langley, the new director championed the proposals, according to former officials.”

Pompeo even reportedly introduced the idea of killing Assange to the Trump administration. The Yahoo news report noted that:

Some senior officials inside the CIA and the Trump administration even discussed killing Assange, going so far as to request ‘sketches’ or ‘options’ for how to assassinate him. Discussions over kidnapping or killing Assange occurred ‘at the highest levels’ of the Trump administration, said a former senior counterintelligence official. ‘There seemed to be no boundaries.’

A former staffer for David Morales, the founder of the security consulting firm, UC Global, which worked with U.S. intelligence to spy on Assange in the Ecuadorian embassy, said that Pompeo even floated the idea of poisoning Assange.

The staffer told journalist Max Blumenthal that Pompeo and the Trump administration discussed “the possibility of poisoning Mr. Assange”.

Eventually, Pompeo settled on prosecuting Assange under the Espionage Act for his revelations of U.S. war crimes in Iraq through the “collateral murder” video, an infamous video published on WikiLeaks showing U.S. forces deliberately targeting first responders.

This led to Assange spending 5 years in Britain’s harshest security prison, Belmarsh Prison.

Assange was forced into solitary confinement at this time, which the UN Special Rapporteur on torture, Nils Melzer, said amounts to “psychological torture”.

After visiting Assange in Belmarsh, Melzer said that Assange “showed all the symptoms typical for prolonged exposure to psychological torture”.

Melzer said that this torture was done as retaliation for Assange’s journalism, saying it was about “making him pay the price for exposing serious governmental misconduct, including alleged war crimes and corruption.”

I think there is something especially sick about an outlet called the “Free Press” publishing a corrupt war criminal who plotted to kidnap, kill, and poison one of the most important journalists in history.

I think there is a real dark irony to the fact that an outlet that purports to be “built on the ideals that once were the bedrock of great journalism” publishes a man who had a brave and heroic journalist arrested and tortured for exposing war crimes.

Responding To Pompeo’s War Propaganda.

In Mike Pompeo’s pro-war propaganda article, he argues that Trump should not “make a deal with Iran”.

What Pompeo is pushing Trump to do is follow through with the Israeli plan to bomb Iran instead of making a deal.

The New York Times recently reported that “Israeli officials had recently developed plans to attack Iranian nuclear sites in May. They were prepared to carry them out, and at times were optimistic that the United States would sign off.”

The Times reported that “Almost all of the plans would have required U.S. help not just to defend Israel from Iranian retaliation, but also to ensure that an Israeli attack was successful, making the United States a central part of the attack itself.”

The paper reported that at first, the Trump administration was supportive of this plan and even moved military equipment, which was “part of the planning for potentially supporting Israel in a conflict with Iran.”

The plan was reportedly called off by the Trump administration because multiple officials in his administration, including Tulsi Gabbard, Pete Hegseth, JD Vance, and Mike Waltz, believed “The buildup of American weaponry could potentially spark a wider conflict with Iran that the United States did not want”.

The New York Times reported that Netanyahu’s recent visit to Washington was in large part meant to convince Trump to support this war with Iran, but Trump called it off. As the paper wrote:

Mr. Netanyahu arrived in Washington on April 7. While the trip was presented as an opportunity for him to argue against Mr. Trump’s tariffs, the most important discussion for the Israelis was their planned strike on Iran.

But while Mr. Netanyahu was still at the White House, Mr. Trump publicly announced the talks with Iran.

The official argument for war with Iran is the claim echoed by Pompeo that the U.S. needs to “deter Iran by denying it the resources to obtain weapons of mass destruction.” (Sound Familiar?)

But unlike the Iraq WMD deception, even U.S. intelligence admits that Iran has no intention of building a nuclear weapon.

Biden’s CIA director, William Burns, said before leaving his position that “we do not see evidence today that the supreme leader (of Iran) has reversed the decision that he took at the end of 2003 to suspend the weaponization program”.

Current director of national intelligence Tulsi Gabbard agreed with this assessment, stating publicly that U.S. intelligence: “continues to assess that Iran is not building a nuclear weapon and Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei has not authorized the nuclear weapons program he suspended in 2003”.

The real push for war with Iran was signaled by Pompeo in his Free Press article. In the article, he states that:

President Trump is pursuing a deal with Iran while it is at its weakest strategic point in decades. Its proxies—Hamas and Hezbollah—have been decimated by Israel. Sunni states, like Saudi Arabia, are readying for normalization with the Jewish state—and are opposed to a nuclear Iran.

The president’s hand could not be stronger.

The question is stronger for what? The answer is aiding Benjamin Netanyahu with building his Greater Israel project.

This plan was laid out by Benjamin Netanyahu at the United Nations shortly before October 7th. As Journalist Jeremy Scahill reported

Just two weeks before the October 7 attacks, the Israeli leader (Netanyahu) delivered a speech at the UN general assembly in New York, brandishing a map of what he promised could be the “New Middle East.” It depicted a state of Israel that stretched continuously from the Jordan River to the Mediterranean Sea. Gaza and the West Bank, as Palestinian lands, were erased.

During that speech, Netanyahu portrayed the full normalization of relations with Saudi Arabia as the linchpin of his vision for this “new” reality.

While normalizing with Saudi Arabia was one of the key “linchpins” for this plan, getting rid of enemies that would oppose this plan to annex Gaza and the West Bank and create a “great Israel” was another.

Netanyahu also held up a map during the same UN speech that included the "cursed" countries that would get in the way of this plan: those being Syria, Iraq, Iran, and Lebanon.

Hamas and Hezbollah have been weakened, and the Trump administration is currently bombing the Houthis in Yemen because they are the only group that poses a threat to Israel’s genocide in Gaza.

The Isreali paper Jerusalem Post reported that Trump’s bombing of Yemen was “coordinated” with Netanyahu’s return to the genocide in Gaza.

The paper reported that this was because “The Houthis, with their ballistic missiles, are the last Iranian proxy that could most viably threaten Israel immediately in retaliation for a return to war such as seems to be happening.”

Meanwhile, the Trump administration is pressuring Syria to remove Palestinian groups from its territory in return for relief from the starvation sanctions still on the country.

The Wall Street Journal reported that the Trump administration is willing to lift the sanctions only if “Syria will ban Palestinian militant groups from operating in the country, including raising funds there, and expel members of those groups from the country.”

With Hamas and Hezbollah weakened, the Houthis being bombed, Saudi Arabia on the way to normalization with Israel, and Syria being pressured to remove Palestinian groups from its territory, the only obstacle in the way of Netanyahu’s greater Israel plan is Iran.

Pompeo in the article signals that Trump should pressure Iran to stop opposing Israel and funding groups opposed to Israel and normalizing relations like Saudi Arabia, writing:

Iran should make peace with its Gulf Arab neighbors and cease threatening them and Israel by dismantling the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) external terror network it has built to wreak havoc in the region.

Pompeo writes that if Iran should not comply, “a military attack on Iran” should be “the alternative”.

Pompeo’s push for this war, and the greater Israel project, comes not just from a desire for easier access to the Middle East’s resources but from evangelical religious beliefs.

A 2020 article written in the New Republic by journalist Sarah Posner noted that Pompeo was a “devout evangelical and major ally” of the “Christian Zionist advocacy group Christians United for Israel”.

Posner reported that the group “is best known for its unflagging ‘support’ for Israel—that is, for Israel’s expansion of settlements in the occupied West Bank and protracted erasure of the possibility of a future Palestinian state”.

She reported that the groups founder John Hagee in 2006 “called for military action against Iran, then led by President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad”, “claiming that Iran would soon ‘have the nuclear capability to make a bomb, a suitcase bomb, a missile head, or anything they want to do with it’” despite the fact that “That was untrue, given contemporaneous expert assessments of Iran’s projected nuclear advances.”

Even more disturbing, Posner reported that in his book Jerusalem Countdown, Hagee hoped that “a U.S. or Israeli strike on Iran would trigger an ‘inferno [that] will explode across the Middle East, plunging the world toward Armageddon’ in hopes that this would fulfill “biblical prophecy about the Rapture and Second Coming”.

The Fakest Independent Outlet Ever

The “Free Press” has to be the biggest joke of an independent adversarial outlet I have ever seen in my life.

It is run by a fanatical neocon and Israel defender who claims to support free speech, but openly supports censorship of pro-Palestine speech.

The publishing of the article by Mike Pompeo goes against everything the outlet pretends to stand for.

They are not only publishing a corrupt war criminal responsible for the torture of an actual free journalist (Julian Assange) but also acting as an arm of the Israel lobby, by pushing for yet another war that will allow Israel to expand its territory and gain regional dominance.

To add insult to injury, they are publishing someone who supports this not only out of cynical geopolitical reasons but out of a fanatical rapture-ready religious ideology.

I think this example should teach the important lesson that just because an outlet or person claims to be an outsider doing objective anti-establishment journalism doesn’t mean they actually are.

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