WADE FRAZIER : A Healed Planet

[Wade Frazier]

From Substack:

The key to understanding Ed Herman’s and Noam Chomsky’s work is their simple ethics. The golden rule of doing unto others as you would have done to yourself is what guided their thinking. Noam said that we are all the most responsible for the predictable consequences of our actions. In their simple ethics, it was like Robert Fulghum’s list of what we all learned by kindergarten. Most of what Ed and Noam did in their political writings was to show how their nation failed to meet those elementary ethical principles, and how the cultural system labored mightily to obscure those failures and even turn reality on its head, as mass murders were transformed into heroic deeds or, at worst, “mistakes” in the USA’s self-appointed mission of policing the world for its own good. It was a standard imperial formula, but what was notable about the American version was the level of deceit behind it when contrasted with the stated intentions.

Ed and Noam largely just pointed out the hypocrisy in American behavior and how the media reported it. Ed wrote that hypocrisy was too tame a term to use for what he encountered, and he began calling it chutzpah.

The First Amendment theoretically guarantees the press’s right to hold the powerful to account, but Ed’s Propaganda Model showed how the powerful controlled the media, so the media almost never held them to account. Noam often remarked that Ed’s Propaganda Model was really a special case of the constraints that all intellectuals in capitalist societies face, not just journalists and editors. Noam took it further, and noted that even in Old Testament times, dissident intellectuals (“prophets”) who called out the hypocrisy of the powerful were punished.

Noam’s political coming-out essay was about the responsibility of intellectuals, whose duty was to expose the deceit and hypocrisy in their societies, not other societies, as criticizing their own could have an impact. Criticizing other nations was worthless grandstanding, especially when those intellectuals failed to criticize their own, which was like Jesus’s observation that people look for the splinters in their neighbors’ eyes while ignoring the beams in their own. Most of Noam’s political work showed how intellectuals failed to meet their responsibilities.

More than Noam did, Ed focused on the American media, and Ed used a scientific approach to test the idea that the media was an impartial reporter of the truth. Ed’s favorite method was the paired example, in which two similar situations existed, but one served American interests while the other did not. Then Ed performed scientific studies about how the media reported each situation.

In their first work together, Ed invented the terminology that he used for the rest of his life, which was their “bloodbath” framework, which categorized crimes depending on who did it:

• Constructive: crimes that directly advanced American interests, so were celebrated;
• Benign: crimes perpetrated by allies, client states, and states with little American political-economic involvement, so were ignored;
• Nefarious: crimes committed by enemy regimes, so were denounced;
• Mythical: a subcategory of nefarious bloodbaths, which were crimes that were either not committed by enemy regimes or were minor events inflated into legendary status.

In the first book that they jointly wrote, they introduced that framework, and as if to prove them right, the publisher destroyed its own publishing company to prevent the publication of Noam and Ed’s book, in one of the most outrageous instances of Western censorship in the last half of the 20^th century.

Ed invented many ideas and terms to describe how the media works, and one was called worthy and unworthy victims. Worthy victims are victims of our enemies, while unworthy victims are our victims. The most famous instance was the example that Ed used in Manufacturing Consent, when he compared the murder of one Polish priest by Poland’s secret police to the murders of 100 priests and nuns in Latin America by American client regimes. The murder of that Polish priest got more American media coverage than the 100 Latin American church workers combined. Not only was the coverage over 100 times greater for the Polish priest, but that priest was portrayed in saintly terms, while the Latin American church workers received no such hagiography and were often portrayed as deserving of their murders, even when they were American nuns.

Ed’s simple ethics are not presented in his libelous Wikipedia biography, as the propaganda purveyors do all that they can to obscure what Ed really wrote, so that they can engage in straw-man attacks on his work.

The rest of my posts on Ed will be on how he worked with that framework from the 1960s until his death in 2017. Ed’s output was extraordinary.

Best,

Wade

[Wade Frazier]

From Substack:

Edward S. Herman’s first political effort that I know of was his book with Richard B. Du Boff, published in 1966. It was about the USA in Vietnam. There were a few interesting aspects of that first effort. One is how it was a joint effort. Ed was the consummate collaborator. He published several works with Du Boff, who also wrote an article for Lies our Times, which Ed edited. People who worked with Ed usually loved him. Ed was a sweet man.

Another interesting aspect of that first effort is that nowhere in it was anything that hinted at a media critique. In that book, Ed and Du Boff criticized the American government, not the media. They clearly laid out the USA’s duplicity in Vietnam, as well as the imperial and genocidal nature of the American invasion. Ed began protesting the Vietnam War in those days.

In 1968, Ed published his The Great Society Dictionary, which I was never able to obtain, as it has long been out of print. But I know that it was the satirical predecessor of Ed’s “Doublespeak Dictionary,” which was produced in his Beyond Hypocrisy, in 1992. I produced quotes from it on the Wikiquotes page that I made for Ed. Readers might notice that one entry was for “Magic Bullet,” which referred to the JFK assassination. Ed was onboard with the idea that JFK was killed in a conspiracy that was covered up, and he was intrigued by Gary’s tale. When Ed edited Lies of Our Times, a backyard photo of Oswald was on the cover of an issue, and a story in it was about how the media attacked Oliver Stone’s JFK before the movie was even made. Ed was not like Noam Chomsky on that score, as Noam wrote a book to debunk the idea that the CIA would have had any motivation to kill JFK. Noam’s effort was badly misguided, in my opinion.

Ed was one of the few among the radical left who did not align with the Warren Commission on the JFK hit. Michael Parenti (who also wrote an article for Lies of Our Times), wrote that the “left” had a “conspiracy phobia.” Ed did not have that phobia, but he didn’t really promote conspiracy theories, either. Ed always thought that structural factors explained more about how our societies operated than conspiracy theories did. I agree, as I learned that the hard way before I ever heard of Ed.

Ed’s next book was a solo effort, titled Atrocities in Vietnam: Myths and Realities, published in 1970. Once again, there was no hint of a media critique in that book, as it took the American government to task. Ed used media accounts, but Ed focused on the government’s lies in Atrocities in Vietnam, he showed that the USA outperformed the Nazis at times, and he argued that the American effort was as racist as the Nazi effort. Once again, Ed made the case that the USA was committing genocide in Vietnam, which was quite a charge for a Jew to make.

Although it was a slim book, Atrocities in Vietnam was filled with the meticulous scholarship and astute observations that made me a fan of Ed’s work. I did not read it until I began working on Ed’s bio in the spring of 2017. It became one of my favorite works of his.

Ed’s experience in publishing Atrocities in Vietnam was a gentle prelude to what happened when he and Noam published their first book together, or at least attempted to. Ed’s enthusiastic editor for Atrocities in Vietnam lost his job over the book. The publishing company never promoted the book and soon remaindered it. In my studies over the years, I have seen Ed’s Atrocities in Vietnam considered one of the classics of dissident American literature on the Vietnam War.

Best,

Wade

[Wade Frazier]

From Substack:

Edward S. Herman and Noam Chomsky had both established their dissent to the war in Vietnam when they decided to work together, and the result was Counter-Revolutionary Violence: Bloodbaths in Fact and Propaganda (CRV), which is a similar title to Ed’s Atrocities in Vietnam: Myths and Realities. It is the first time that Ed critiqued the media that I know of, and it was a relatively terse critique, which only mentioned the New York Times a few times. Ed’s bloodbath framework was presented for the first time in CRV.

I don’t need to go into detail on what happened next, as I have a chapter of Ed’s bio devoted to it, which is the most thorough account on the Internet that I know of. Warner Communications actually killed off its own subsidiary to prevent the publication of Noam and Ed’s book, for one of the most outrageous instances of Western censorship in the last half of the 20^th century.

Their first joint work that was not censored was published in 1974, and my guess is that Ed came up with the title, “Saigon’s Corruption Crisis: The Search for an Honest Quisling.” That was typical of Ed’s wit, which is part of what attracted me to his work. In 1977, Noam and Ed published their first uncensored critique of the media in the Nation. The article took the media to task for its poorly sourced reporting on postwar Cambodia, and here is an important aspect of Noam and Ed’s work on the media. Noam and Ed did not try to determine the reality of post-war Cambodia, but critiqued the propagandistic treatment by the American media. They argued that the media was not doing its job to determine the truth and report it, but instead their reporting was propaganda that took liberties with the facts and ignored a great deal of contrary evidence. But that article began a propaganda campaign to portray Noam and Ed as apologists for Pol Pot. There was never any credible evidence for that assertion, but the propaganda continues to this day, and Ed’s Wikipedia bio is a good example of it.

I wrote at length on Philip Cross’s dishonest account of CRV’s censorship in Ed’s Wikipedia bio, and Cross’s treatment stands at Wikipedia to this day, and all attempts to correct it have been defeated by Wikipedia’s editors and admins. I was able to help make the account of the censorship of CRV accurate in Wikipedia’s article on CRV, and I was also able to introduce the bloodbath framework there, which is forbidden in Ed’s bio. If that framework was allowed in Ed’s bio, it would expose the ideological nature of Ed’s bio, as Ed is mainly attacked over three “nefarious” bloodbaths, in Cambodia, Yugoslavia, and Rwanda. Propagandists do not appreciate it when their lies are exposed, especially for nefarious bloodbaths.

Ed’s focus on nations in which the USA intervened was always on the USA’s actions and the media’s reporting on it, which was the basis of his bloodbath framework. Postwar Cambodia was a “nefarious” bloodbath, as the USA had already engaged in genocidal bombing of Cambodia in its “secret” war, and here are connections to Brian O’Leary and Dennis Lee. Brian’s first White House protest came a week after the Kent State shootings, which was triggered by student protests after Nixon finally disclosed the war in Cambodia. Dennis was inducted into a Special Forces mission to clean up a CIA mission gone bad in Cambodia, to help keep the secret war secret. It was no secret to Cambodians, but it was secret from the American people, with great media complicity. It would be as if the German people had no idea that the Nazis had invaded Poland.

What the USA did in Indochina was the greatest international crime since the Nazis. Ed and Noam’s calling that out was dishonestly transformed into their being supporters for the programs of the USA’s victims.

It took another six years before Noam and Ed’s work in CRV got published without being censored, in their 1979 two-volume work on the wars in Indochina, which was five times as big as CRV. One might notice that Noam and Ed were not publishing anything in the mainstream back then. Their two-volume work was published by the founders of Z Magazine, Ed published a number of books at their publishing house, and Ed had an article a month in Z for over 20 years, until his health failed at his life’s end. I eagerly looked forward to his Z articles each month.

In their first book of that two-volume work, The Washington Connection, Noam and Ed called out the USA’s imperial behavior, such as overthrowing Latin American governments, its support for torture, the CIA’s activities, there was the first inkling of Ed’s Propaganda Model in it, and their emphasis was not on Cambodian bloodshed, but comparing it to comparable bloodshed in East Timor that was committed by an American client regime in Indonesia, so it was a benign bloodbath (and the CIA-enabled coup in Indonesia in the 1960s was a “constructive” bloodbath). While postwar Cambodia was prominent news in the mainstream media, there was complete silence on Indonesia’s genocide in East Timor. That was the point of their reporting on postwar Cambodia, not who the good guys and bad guys were in Indochina, other than the USA’s role.

In the first half of the 1970s, a great deal of corruption in the USA was exposed and discussed. That climate led to CRV, even though it was censored. Nixon resigned over the Watergate Scandal, the Church Committee investigated the CIA, and a new investigation was opened into the assassinations of JFK and Martin Luther King, Jr. The official investigations were all compromised and barely scratched the surface, and the second volume of Noam and Ed’s two-volume work was about how the USA went about reconstructing its imperial ideology after the Indochina wars. American propagandists transformed the Nazi-like crime of invading Indochina into the USA’s somehow having clean hands, after their noble “mistake” in Indochina, and the USA could moralize about the failures of the postwar regimes in Indochina, both real and imagined.

In that work, After the Cataclysm, Noam and Ed analyzed the media much more than in The Washington Connection, and concluded that the American propaganda campaign had succeeded brilliantly in reconstructing the USA’s imperial ideology. That book became the basis of a propaganda campaign that lasts to this day to portray Noam, and to a lesser extent Ed, as Pol Pot supporters. There is not a shred of evidence for that claim, and it is at odds with the body of work that Noam and Ed produced, which was always primarily about the USA’s behavior, which they saw as their moral duty as Americans. Time magazine unsuccessfully tried to bait Noam into eliciting support for Pol Pot, and Noam responded with a list of media fabrications about Cambodia, including Time’s. Noam later said about the media and Cambodia that deliberately lying about something and being right by accident is not the same thing as pursuing the truth.

In just about every attack that I have seen on Ed and Noam’s work, the distinction is ignored that they are focusing on the USA’s behaviors, not those of our victims, as they are dishonestly portrayed as supporters for the programs of our victims. It is a false dichotomy that Noam and Ed often remarked on. Later, in Manufacturing Consent, Ed and Noam summarized the decade of catastrophe in Cambodia and the American media’s treatment of it, as Cambodians transformed from unworthy to worthy victims, depending on whether we were bombing them or not.

Ed and Noam’s most famous collaboration was ahead of them, but that came after a great deal of other writing by Ed, as he became a prolific writer whose focus was always on the media. That will be the subject of the next post.

Best,

Wade

[Wade Frazier]

From Substack:

Edward S. Herman and Noam Chomsky, in their 1979 joint effort, called out the myth that Jimmy Carter was a “human-rights” president. Carter presided over the biggest proportional genocide since the Nazis. Chomsky later noted Zbigniew Brzezinski’s bragging about baiting the Soviet Union into invading Afghanistan. Carter was handpicked for the presidency by David Rockefeller, who was anything but a human-rights advocate.

Ronald Reagan became president, aided by the October Surprise operation, for which the evidence has been increasingly amassed, although Carter could have readily avoided the entire situation. Reagan ditched Carter’s human-rights slogan for escalating the Cold War with red scares and fighting terrorists. Reagan began his political career with red-baiting, as did Nixon, so it was a natural play for Reagan.

Anti-terror rhetoric was reaching a fevered pitch in the media when Reagan assumed the presidency. Claire Sterling published The Terror Network in 1981, in which she argued that the Soviet Union was running a global terror operation. In their The Washington Connection, Noam and Ed devoted a chapter each to “benign” and “constructive” terror. In 1982, Ed published a rebuttal to Sterling’s book with The Real Terror Network. Ed began The Real Terror Network with the dictionary definition of terrorism: “a mode of governing, or of opposing government, by intimidation.” Western governments simply defined their own terror operations out of existence, and reserved the term to describe enemy regimes or non-state actors.

Ed showed, with his usual statistical rigor, that terror operations mounted by Western states and their client regimes inflicted death tolls more than an order of magnitude greater than that of enemy regimes and non-state actors. When Western terror operations could no longer be denied, they were described with euphemisms in the Western media such as maintaining “security” and “stability.” Ed wrote at length on the media’s enabling role for national-security-state terror operations. The USA was Terror Central on Earth, but its terror operations were simply ignored or given Orwellian euphemisms. The terror operations in Latin American client states of the Reagan administration were legendary, which Ed and Noam wrote about in Manufacturing Consent.

Because Ed and Noam were Americans, they felt a duty to expose American crimes, and because they were Jews, they felt a duty to expose Israeli crimes. Ed wrote at length about Israeli terror operations, in both The Real Terror Network and his 1989 The Terrorism Industry, written with Gerry O’Sullivan. They wrote about how Israel killed more than 20 times as many people as Palestinian terrorist acts did, but Israeli terror was defined out of existence. They noted how Israel’s violence was primarily offensive in nature, and they quoted Israeli Prime Minister Moshe Sharett, who frankly wrote that Israel’s prodigious crimes were its “sacred terrorism.” Ed would have been very active, writing about the genocide in Gaza, if he were alive today.

In 1984, Ed published Demonstration Elections with Frank Brodhead. Ed defined demonstration elections as electoral farces that were intended to deceive Americans that nations that the USA intervened in were models of democracy. The illusion was achieved by slaughtering opposition candidates and by many procedural irregularities. But the mainstream media could be counted on to portray the fraudulent elections in glowing terms. Conversely, the media would always denigrate elections in enemy nations, even when they were deemed fair by independent observers. Those flagrant double standards were examples of Ed’s chutzpah.

In 1986, Ed and Frank published The Rise and Fall of the Bulgarian Connection, which was about the assassination attempt on the pope, which the American media tried to pin on the Soviet Union. Claire Sterling led the propaganda effort, but that entire Soviet connection disintegrated in the courtroom. There was never any credible connection to the Soviet Union and, in fact, the connections of the assassin to the CIA were impressive. When the conspiracy case collapsed in the courtroom, the Western media quietly folded its tents. Ed and Frank wrote that not only were there no repercussions in the media for reporting such flimsy allegations, but even after exposure, the myths can still live on in the West.

Best,

Wade

[Wade Frazier]

From Substack:

As I have written, Edward S. Herman did not begin to criticize the media, as far as I know, until his first work with Noam Chomsky. That their effort was censored in spectacular fashion may have had something to do with their increasing criticisms of the press. The first hint of what became Ed’s Propaganda Model was in his 1979 effort with Noam. All of Ed’s efforts since then were primarily media critiques. In 1986, Ed presented a propaganda model that was very close to what became the Propaganda Model in Manufacturing Consent.

With Noam’s characteristic integrity, he insisted that Ed be named as the primary author of Manufacturing Consent, so Ed’s name was listed first on the book cover. Ed wrote the first part of the book, while Noam wrote the last chapters on Indochina. Noam was far more than a celebrity coauthor, but future mentions of Manufacturing Consent could entirely omit Ed’s name, and Ed was fine with that. Not only is Manufacturing Consent what Ed is primarily known for, but it is also the case with Noam, as far as the general public goes, even though he is a towering academic figure and the only living human who can be credibly compared to Einstein.

Ed’s Propaganda Model is a structural model of how the media operates and how various elite influences undermine the media’s stated purpose of holding the powerful to account, which is what the First Amendment was partly about.

There was some discussion of “worthy victims” in Noam and Ed’s 1979 collaboration, but in Manufacturing Consent the idea was fleshed out with its most famous example, of how the media covers the murders of priests and nuns, depending on who is doing the killing. The last words that Ed published in his lifetime were that the Propaganda Model was as applicable as it was 30 years earlier, when he invented it. As long as we have a commercial media under elite control, the Propaganda Model will be applicable. Ed and Noam periodically reassessed the Propaganda Model, especially its ideological filter.

Ed’s Propaganda Model has never been credibly challenged by any academic or journalist. Instead, it was attacked by irrational approaches and the media has done its best to ignore the Propaganda Model. While I am the only person on the Internet who carries Brian O’Leary’s torch, I am happy to report that Ed’s work still reverberates through the halls of academia. No less than four works were dedicated to Ed’s memory after he died, and those works were filled with analyses of the Propaganda Model and its application to many situations on Earth. I hope that I live to see a professional biography produced on Ed’s life, as it more than merits one.

Best,

Wade

[Wade Frazier]

From Substack:

When Edward S. Herman published Manufacturing Consent with Noam Chomsky in 1988, they were both still full-time professors. Ed retired the next year, and the next ten years of his life were his most active as a writer. In 1989, he published The Terrorism Industry with Gerry O’Sullivan and also wrote a chapter of Hope and Folly, on the USA’s withdrawal from UNESCO, which Ed thought was one of his best media-analysis efforts.

In 1990, Ed became the editor of a new magazine titled Lies of our Times (LOOT), which is when my involvement began. I first heard of Noam in 1989 from a roommate, when Dennis Lee was in jail. My life had been ruined by then, and I had been radicalized. In early 1990, I heard of LOOT on a talk-radio show as I commuted to my job in LA. It was an interview with somebody at LOOT, maybe an owner. I used to wonder if it was Ed, but it probably was not. Later that year, I moved to Ohio and my days of study began. The first thing that I did was subscribe to LOOT, and I was ready for its message. I subscribed to it until it went out of business in 1994, but the first page of my first issue is the one that I remember best, as I was startled that the New York Times could simply make it up as it went along, with editorial standards below a tabloid’s.

Noam wrote a monthly column in LOOT, which has been compiled into a book. I did not know who Ed was when I subscribed to LOOT, but I eagerly read LOOT and slowly learned who Ed was. He not only edited LOOT, but contributed at least an article to each issue. I soon read Ralph McGehee’s memoirs, subscribed to Covert Action Information Bulletin, the Christic Institute’s magazine, and those were years of revelation for me. I began writing publicly in 1991. I was an eager student, but it still took me about two years to really understand Noam’s political writings, as they were so alien to what I had been taught.

In late 1992, my wife and I watched the documentary on Noam’s life at Ohio State University. It never played at mainstream theaters or on network TV in the USA, even though it was the most popular documentary in Canadian history to that time (which proved Noam’s point). There is a brief clip of Ed in it. A few days later, I was driven from my sleep to write a 17-page letter to Noam, and the gist of it was asking why the left rarely covered the energy issue and never free-energy efforts. I was surprised to receive a letter from Noam about two weeks later. It is still the most gracious reply that I ever received from the left on the free-energy issue. Noam soon politely brushed me off, but I didn’t blame him. He had his hands full. That memoir by his assistant clearly showed how besieged he was. In his later years, I read that each day, he would have to decline more than 20 invitations. It is a wonder that he replied to me at all.

By 1992, I was deep into studying the history that my formal education never taught me. I read Howard Zinn’s and David Stannard’s work and learned unsavory truths about American heroes and saints such as Christopher Columbus, Junípero Serra, George Washington, etc.

When I saw Ed in Manufacturing Consent, I knew who he was by then and was a fan. I cannot recall any one particular event, but as I read LOOT each month, I began to gain an appreciation for Ed’s writings. They were clear and straightforward, and Ed’s dry wit was regularly in evidence. In 1992, Ed published his Beyond Hypocrisy, which was openly humorous, with his Doublespeak Dictionary. A political cartoonist illustrated Beyond Hypocrisy, which was never the case for Noam’s books. Noam was not that kind of writer. I thought that Ed was also a better writer than Noam was, and I slowly fell in love with Ed’s work. When LOOT went out of business in 1994, I then subscribed to Z Magazine, and for the next generation, I looked forward to Ed’s monthly articles in Z. Ed covered a wide range of topics in Z, but always with an emphasis on the media.

In 1995, Ed published Triumph of the Market, which was largely a compendium of his Z articles. In 1997, with Robert McChesney, Ed published Global Media: The Missionaries of Global Capitalism, in which they presciently warned about the rise of the Internet. In 1999, Ed published The Myth of the Liberal Media: An Edward Herman Reader, which was again a compendium of essays that Ed published in Z and elsewhere, during that prodigious decade of writing. Global Media, published when Ed was 72, was the last large book that Ed published in his life. He concentrated on essays after that and he acquired a permanent co-author soon afterward, David Peterson, who capably carried Ed’s spears for the rest of Ed’s life. The day before Ed died, he talked with David about future projects.

Ed became my writing role model, and like Ed did, I am trying to get my most time-consuming writings done before I am 70 and the wind starts coming out of my sails.

Best,

Wade

[ThePythonicCow]

Posted by Wade Frazier (here)
I am trying to get my most time-consuming writings done before I am 70 and the wind starts coming out of my sails.

One's sails can be as full at 76 as they were at 70, if one continues to refine one's life, light, and diet.

[Wade Frazier]

From Substack:

Edward S. Herman did not collaborate with Noam Chomsky much after the demise of Lies of Our Times. They did a joint interview on the Propaganda Model in 2009, Noam wrote some forewords to Ed’s books (The Myth of the Liberal Media and The Politics of Genocide), but that is all that I can recall seeing. Ed later admitted that Noam was not happy that Ed took on so-called “leftists” such as Christopher Hitchens, Todd Gitlin, and other pro-war “leftists,” as Noam thought that it would divide the left. Hitchens and Gitlin supported the USA-led “humanitarian” bombing of Yugoslavia in 1999, and Hitchens enthusiastically endorsed the USA’s invasion of Iraq (and Gitlin supported the invasion of Afghanistan), which is the greatest crime of the 21^st-century so far. Ed dubbed them members of “The Cruise Missile Left.” I never saw Ed advocate violence, which is partly why I became his biographer.

The American-led bombing of Yugoslavia initiated Ed’s writings on what happened to Yugoslavia, and he began writing about it in late 1999, only a few months after the bombing campaign, as he called Bill Clinton the world’s leading active war criminal. Ed’s thesis was that the West tore apart Yugoslavia after the Soviet Union collapsed. For the rest of his life, Yugoslavia became one of Ed’s most prominent topics, particularly the “genocide” at Srebrenica. Ed led an effort that was published in 2011. Ed’s basic point about the Srebrenica massacre was that it was a “nefarious” bloodbath, so it was subjected to a barrage of Western propaganda from the beginning, as the slaughter of maybe 800 men, mainly soldiers, was inflated into a “genocide” of 8,000 people.

As usual, Ed framed it in terms of the media’s treatment of the facts, and compared the Srebrenica massacre to a slaughter of at least 8,000 men, women, and children in a Hutu refugee camp in Rwanda by Paul Kagame’s Tutsi forces. Even though ten times as many people were murdered, it was a “benign” bloodbath committed by an American asset, so almost nobody in the West ever heard of the Kibeho massacre, which happened only a few months before the Srebrenica massacre. The only Western media that covered the Kibeho massacre was Australian, because an Australian UN contingent witnessed it and helped prevent it from becoming worse.

Ed and David Peterson contributed a chapter on CNN in a 2000 book that Ed helped edit on the media’s performance on Yugoslavia. As late as 2015, Ed and David wrote about the Srebrenica massacre. In early 2000, Ed co-wrote an article with human-rights attorney Christopher Black, who led Slobodan Milošević’s defense effort at the kangaroo court tribunal that the USA ran. Chris thought that the tribunal may have poisoned Milošević, as he was defending himself quite capably, while Ed argued that denying Milošević the medical treatment that he requested is what killed him. Either way, Milošević’s blood was on the tribunal’s hands and several defendants died in that tribunal’s custody.

In Ed and David’s The Politics of Genocide, published in 2010, they introduced a novel statistic: how many people died in an incident versus how often the media called it a genocide. A civilian death in Kosovo was called part of a genocide more than 25,000 times as often as the death of a Hutu refugee was. I have never encountered a more extreme statistic in the social sciences. It made Ed’s ratio of worthy and unworthy victims in Manufacturing Consent, of a disparity of less than 200-fold, pale to insignificance. Ed’s many assailants completely ignored those kinds of disparities, as they never mounted credible critiques of his work that I ever saw, and I have read many of them, going back to the 1990s.

Best,

Wade

[Wade Frazier]

From Substack:

Along with Yugoslavia, the other big subject that Edward S. Herman tackled in his last years was Rwanda. Ed’s hypothesis about Rwanda was this: the Western propaganda system completely flipped perpetrators and victims. The media portrayed the Rwandan situation as an attempted genocide against the Tutsis by the Hutus, but Ed and David Peterson argued that the opposite was true, and their evidence was highly impressive but completely suppressed in the American media.

Ed and David wrote a slim book on the subject and published many articles over the years. They argued that the entire affair was about interests in the USA, UK, and Canada that supplanted French interests in the region. Tutsis were the former colonial elite of Rwanda and neighboring nations, but the USA and friends worked to put them back in power. The so-called Hutu conspiracy to exterminate the Tutsis was never credibly established, even by the kangaroo court tribunal that the USA mounted in Rwanda, similar to the tribunal that the USA created in Yugoslavia, which even used the same personnel. Chris Black amazingly secured an acquittal in that court, after a death threat from the CIA and his being on Paul Kagame’s assassination list. Ed wrote that those tribunals were legal farces.

Kagame was going to military school in the USA when Tutsi forces invaded from Uganda, and he quickly returned and led the invasion. Years later, after murdering the president of Rwanda, the Tutsis conquered Rwanda in months. After securing Rwanda, Kagame then led the invasion of Zaire/Congo, to plunder its mineral wealth, which killed several million people. Instead of being described as arguably the greatest living mass murderer, Kagame was feted as some kind of heroic Abe Lincoln figure in the USA’s, UK’s, and Canada’s media and embraced by the likes of Bill Gates, as Kagame lets Gates use Rwandans as expendable guinea pigs. Bill Clinton enabled the entire affair with his usual lies. After the Kibeho massacre killed at least 8,000 people, Kagame’s “investigation” yielded less than 400 deaths, for an example of his credibility.

Just like with all such situations, there were plenty of soul-sold intellectuals willing to do the elite’s bidding, portraying Kagame in hagiographic terms and viciously attacking people such as Ed for challenging the mythology. When a BBC show very belatedly challenged the dominant narrative, a barrage of derision and calls for censorship came from those “humanitarian” propagandists.

Kagame’s “elections” as Rwanda’s dictator have all been outrageous farces, but as with all such demonstration elections, the American media turns a blind eye to their murderous irregularities. Ed spoke about Rwanda to his life’s end.

Best,

Wade

[Wade Frazier]

From Substack:

Edward S. Herman wrote about Ukraine soon after the American-instigated coup in 2014. Ed’s first political writings were about the USA’s war against communism, but it was really about expanding and maintaining the American Empire. As Ralph McGehee learned the hard way, American anticommunism was a fantasy that was intended to demonize nations that refused to be exploited, to justify the imperial violence that was about to be unleashed on them.

The coup in Ukraine was part of the USA’s war against Russia, ever since Vladimir Putin ended Russia’s doormat status to the West. Life expectancy in Russia plunged after the Soviet Union disintegrated, which Ed wrote about but imperial apologists ignored, as Russia and Putin were demonized. Ed wrote about the PropOrNot smear campaign after Donald Trump was elected, which turned out to have been mounted in Ukraine with CIA assistance. It was an attack on the USA’s independent media.

The last two articles that Ed published to the Internet were about the revived anti-Russian hysteria in the USA and how the American media had been peddling fake news about Russia for a century. If Ed was alive, he would have written at length about the war in Ukraine, as the USA goads Russia toward nuclear war.

In a late-life interview, Ed was asked what he thought his chief contribution to scholarship was, and he said that it was the introduction of a structural model of the media combined with pairing analysis, which could be used in a wide range of applications. Ed noted that while he did not invent those approaches, his efforts may have made them more prominent. Ed also thought that an important contribution was the idea that the American media serves elite interests, just like it does in totalitarian societies, and he said that all of his work had that theme.

Ed was also asked in that interview if he would have done anything differently, with the benefit of hindsight, and he didn’t think so, although it was tempting to think that they could have qualified their Cambodia analysis more, but Ed decided that they did the right thing.

Ed’s output only began flagging at age 91, as he was dying from bladder cancer, which was not diagnosed until after his death.

In the last essay published in his lifetime, Ed’s last words were: “The Propaganda Model is as strong and applicable as it was thirty years ago […].  The Propaganda Model lives on.”

Noam led the eulogies, which poured in from the independent media. At least four academic works were devoted to Ed’s memory in the years after his death.

Noam will likely never engage the public again, not since his massive stroke last year. When Noam passes, it will be the end of an era. The top bookshelf of the figures of Western thought, which includes Newton, Einstein, and Socrates, will have to make room for Noam. Ed’s work won’t reside on that shelf, but I believe that future historians will place Ed in the first ranks of American dissident intellectuals.

I have a little ways to go on these Ed posts.

Best,

Wade

[Wade Frazier]

From Substack:

When I contacted Noam Chomsky, Howard Zinn, Peter Ward, and Edward S. Herman, I did not know when I would hear back, or even if I would hear back. Each one of them was immediately responsive and gracious, which confirmed the opinion of them that I got from their work. They are/were all great humans. When I first contacted Ed, I noted that I thought of him as “Uncle Ed.” I often addressed him as Uncle Ed in those early days, and over the years since that first email in 2001, at least once, Ed signed off an email to me with “Uncle Ed.” I smile and chuckle every time that I think of that. I have all of my emails from Ed.

Ed is the only one of the four above that I began a relationship with, at his encouragement. It was only an email relationship, but it was a great one. After the catastrophe of my free-energy revolutionary days, I hid out in corporate America, making decent money, digging out of my financial abyss, and I donated to organizations such as Z Magazine and Amnesty International.

Early in my relationship with Ed, I began getting letters from Amnesty International, which asked me to join their campaign to have Slobodan Milošević arrested and delivered to that kangaroo court tribunal that the USA set up and ran. I still had some naïveté to lose. I was shocked, and I asked Ed about it. He agreed that it was scandalous that Amnesty International was doing that, and he wrote that he only supported a few local human-rights organizations. The international ones were all corrupted. Since Milošević died in custody, killed by the tribunal, I consider Amnesty International an accessory to murder.

After Ed co-wrote an article in 2007, exposing the sham that is Human Rights Watch, I asked him if he would do one on Amnesty International, and he did not plan to. Amnesty International was not as bad as Human Rights Watch, in his opinion. In the decade after that exchange, Ed repeatedly wrote about “human rights” scams, and he included Amnesty International in his critiques (1, 2), which I was happy to see. Those organizations became parodies of human-rights organizations as they played imperial lapdogs.

Ed was an economist by profession. I do not have a high opinion of economists in general, as they rarely deal with the real world, with their fancy math and other problems. I generally see them as intellectual warriors for capitalism. They are particularly deficient in understanding the relationship of energy and economic activity, such as understanding the benefit to humanity that a barrel of oil delivers.

Ed specialized in financial institutions and conflicts of interest, so energy was off of his radar, too, unfortunately. I once wrote him on the energy/economy issue, and he admitted that he neglected the issue. During my New Energy Movement days with Brian O’Leary, I tried to introduce Ed to Brian three or four times, but Ed was never interested. I never held it against Ed, as he was plenty busy as arguably Earth’s foremost media analyst, and I never found anybody from the “left” that was interested in free energy. After those attempts, I never brought up energy again with Ed.

Early in our relationship, I mentioned Gary Wean’s JFK tale, and Ed was intrigued by it. Ed was one of the few on the left who was onboard with the idea that JFK was murdered in a conspiracy.

Ed was never very disclosing of his personal life in his writings, and I did not know his marital status. One New Age activist that I introduced Ed to, around the Iraq War days, got the hots for Ed, which was kind of embarrassing for me, and I would have been doubly embarrassed if I knew that Ed had been married for over 50 years at the time.

On Ed’s 90^th birthday, I marveled at how active he still was, with his monthly Z articles, among his other work. Ed replied that he still had pretty good health, and hoped to encourage people like me about how active we could still be late in our lives. On his 92^nd birthday, I noted how terrible his Wikipedia bio was and I offered to improve it, as I had done with Brian’s Wikipedia bio. Ed took me up on it, but insisted, with his characteristic integrity, that I was under no obligation to. Ed admitted how disgusting his Wikipedia bio was, but that he never suffered any repercussions from it. That was all the encouragement that I needed, which began my bio project for Ed.

Those 92^nd-birthday emails were my last exchanges with Ed, and his writing output largely halted as he slowly died from bladder cancer that was not diagnosed until after he died later that year. The last email that I got from Ed copied in some of his pals, which is how I met Sam Husseini and Chris Black, who remain my friends to this day. A couple of months after that last email, Ed died. He never saw my biography work on his life. Oh, how I miss my monthly dose of Ed’s writings. Ed was a great one, in my pantheon. It was an honor to interact with him, and one of my life’s greatest honors is being his first and so far only biographer. As I have written, I hope that I live to see a professional biography of his life. Ed’s life more than merits one.

Best,

Wade

[Wade Frazier]

From Substack:

As I have written, it took about two years before I really understood what Noam Chomsky was saying, and I was an eager student. That was in the early 1990s, before the days of the Internet. So I raided the references and began building my library in earnest. Including Kindle books, my library likely exceeds 3,000 books and includes stacks of magazines, some of which I have disposed of, as I have downsized my library some in recent years.

What Noam, Ed Herman, Howard Zinn, and other scholars had to say was so contrary to what I was taught that I dove deep on the references and sought critiques of their work. Maybe they were exaggerating, playing fast-and-loose with the facts, etc. I had my doubts that they did, because I had been radicalized by my experiences before I ever heard of those guys, but I did my homework. Here is Noam in 1997, in Z Magazine, describing how the media and academia work. It is pretty straightforward and easy to understand. I also raided the references of works such as American Holocaust, where I first read that maybe Junípero Serra was not such a saint after all, just as I first read unflattering things about Columbus in Zinn’s masterpiece.

Their work held up and then some. Also, it gradually became appalling how poor the criticisms of their work were. It was as if their critics could not string two rational thoughts together when they weren’t lying. An example was a critique of Zinn’s work by a Stanford professor that is either a deliberate deception or the professor lost his sanity. Among “skeptics,” those kinds of misrepresentations are standard. I had my own “skeptical” stalker who did the same thing, with lies that a five-year-old could see through. Ed wrote that when pundits turn those logical summersaults that only fool themselves and those willing to be gulled, they are incapable of understanding obvious truths.

Ed’s question was very simple: did the American media pursue the truth or not? Ed’s statistical cases are known in academia as testing the null hypothesis, which in these instances would be the idea that the media impartially seeks the truth. Then Ed compared the situation of the murders of priests and nuns and the media coverage. A priest murdered by an enemy regime received more than 100 times as much coverage as a priest murdered by a client regime. Also, a priest murdered by the enemy regime received hagiographic coverage, and when a priest was murdered by a client regime, if his murder was even noticed, the media would suggest that his murder was justified.

Another analysis by Ed and David Peterson was the deaths of civilians, in both enemy and client regimes, and how often a death was called part of a genocide. A death inflicted by an enemy regime was called genocide more than 25,000 times as often as a death inflicted by a client regime. Those statistics call the null hypothesis into question, to put it mildly.

It was pretty simple and it would be straightforward to reproduce or dispute. I never saw one of Ed and Noam’s critics credibly engage those simple statistical exercises. To be fair, explaining away a discrepancy of more than 25,000-fold would be a tall task, so the critics never even tried to, and instead engaged in personal attacks, completely misrepresented their positions, and the like. Ed never backed down from his critics and regularly wrote rebuttals that demonstrated how far off-base the criticisms were. Ed also critiqued attacks on Noam. Noam noted that such scholars were so brainwashed that they were unable to comprehend “trivial realities,” which was more effective brainwashing than that found in totalitarian states.

In that 1997 Z article by Noam, he discussed how such findings will never be discussed in the media. It was like the predictions that he made in Necessary Illusions about how studies like those would be received. Noam predicted that exposures of the lies around “nefarious” bloodbaths (by enemy regimes) would result in great indignation. And, in fact, the greatest attacks on Ed were his exposures of the media’s lies around the nefarious bloodbaths in Cambodia, Yugoslavia, and Rwanda. He exposed the Cambodian lies with Noam, and there has been a propaganda campaign to this day to portray Ed and Noam as supporters of Pol Pot, abetted by scholars (1, 2). There has never been a shred of evidence for such a claim, but it served the purpose of deflecting attention from the media’s lies. Noam and Ed tried to forestall the coming propaganda campaign, to no avail.

In Wikipedia’s libelous bio of Ed, most of the lies are about Ed’s examination of the media’s reporting regarding atrocities in Cambodia, Yugoslavia, and Rwanda, which perfectly conforms to the Propaganda Model’s predictions. Not only will Ed and Noam’s positions be misrepresented, their framework will not even be mentioned, and whether the atrocity in question was constructive, benign, or nefarious.

Ed’s obituary in the New York Times was a classic instance of how his work is misrepresented. The New York Times even did the bogus critics one better by stating that Ed and Noam were criticized for “soft-pedaling” evidence of atrocities in Srebrenica and Rwanda in Manufacturing Consent, when those atrocities happened several years after Manufacturing Consent was published. Totally absent from the New York Times obituary was that those atrocities were analyzed to see how the media dealt with the atrocities, not how Ed and Noam did, as they flipped Ed and Noam’s work on its head.

Some around me thought that the New York Times’s misrepresentations in Ed’s obituary were deliberate. Ed might have called it just another example of a structural limitation, in which people were unable to see what was right in front of them.

Ed and Noam did their best to not take the attacks personally, as those people were likely unable to comprehend what they were doing. During my studies over the years, I began to understand that those critics were simply practicing in-group defense, as they licked the hand that fed them. In kind, it was no different from a dog that protected its master’s house from intruders. Such behaviors truly bring up Brian O’Leary’s question of whether we are a sentient species, that such “smart” people could be so irrational. Those attacks were also more examples of my journey’s primary lesson. Noam, Ed, and Howard were beacons in the darkness.

Best,

Wade

[Wade Frazier]

From Substack:

As I sat down to write this, I realized that I need to give proper credit where it is due: if not for Wikipedia’s libelous biography of Edward S. Herman, I would have never become Ed’s biographer. If Google had not de-ranked my bio of Ed to oblivion, I might not have done this at Substack. It was like how Mr. Deputy was responsible for my life’s pivotal moment, as he rubbed my face in evil. The dark side deserves some credit.

To be fair, Ed is far from alone in being libeled by Wikipedia, as it has smeared many figures from the right, left (1, 2), alternative medicine, and anybody who does not echo Establishment views.

Several years ago, I wrote an essay that applied the Propaganda Model to Wikipedia, and Ed’s Wikipedia bio was an ironic confirmation of the Propaganda Model, just as Ed’s New York Times obituary was. I went into a fair amount of detail on the libelous parts of Ed’s Wikipedia bio, so I will only hit a few highlights.

Anybody with the slightest familiarity with Ed’s work knows that he never denied bloodbaths, except for some of the “mythical” ones, such as at Racak and Huế, and even for Racak’s the bloodshed was not denied, but focused who did it, who died, and why. Ed’s emphasis was always on the media’s treatment of them and who committed them – the USA and its allies and clients, or enemy regimes. The American media’s performance was really little different from wartime propaganda.

For the Srebrenica massacre, Ed eventually mounted a project on it. As those who have done their homework know, the Srebrenica massacre was the execution of maybe 800 men, mainly soldiers, who had been abandoned by the West, very likely so that they would be massacred, subjected to Serbian vengeance for the slaughter of Serbian civilians for years, as justification for the West’s murderous interventions. The West’s propaganda machine inflated that massacre into a “genocide,” and it is a punishable crime in Europe to even dispute that designation. Oh, what Orwell would have had to say about that.

Marko Attila Hoare’s claim to fame is that he helped draft the indictment against Slobodan Milošević in the kangaroo-court tribunal. Ed wrote about the ideological service that Hoare provided to the USA’s imperial effort. Just as I consider Amnesty International an accessory to murder in Milošević’s death, so is Hoare. Hoare has repeatedly gone on the record stating that the Srebrenica-research effort that Ed launched was intended to deny that the Srebrenica massacre even happened. That is a bold-faced lie.

In Ed’s Wikipedia bio, Hoare’s lie was added by Philip Cross, who was arguably Wikipedia’s most notorious editor, as he smeared many people, generally antiwar activists. Cross’s editorial crimes were so extreme that Wikipedia banned him from editing. Cross’s original addition of Hoare’s lie was taken from David Horowitz’s far right-wing rag, which even Wikipedia does not consider to be a reliable source. The month after I published my essay on Wikipedia and the Propaganda Model, I pointed out the false statements from unreliable sources in Ed’s Wikipedia bio. The Wikipedia admin’s response was to leave in Hoare’s lie but source it from something more “reliable.” A lie is a lie. Wikipedia is untroubled by printing lies and preventing anybody from removing them. This is an example of Ed’s chutzpah.

Sophal Ear lied about Noam and Ed’s work on Cambodia, as he portrayed them as Khmer Rouge supporters. Ear’s claim to fame is attacking Noam over Cambodia. Ear first made his false claim in a college paper, which falls far short of Wikipedia’s reliable-sources standards. But Ear’s collegiate lie has a place of prominence in Ed’s Wikipedia bio, as well as the ravings of a former janitor with zero scholarly credentials – Bruce Sharp – who also wrote deceptively about Noam and Ed’s work on Cambodia, and even wrote an essay that called them “evil scholars.” Cross added those lies to Ed’s Wikipedia bio more than a decade ago, and any attempts to remove them have been defeated by Wikipedia’s editors and admins.

Wikipedia’s libelous efforts on Ed’s bio are merely part of the propaganda barrage directed at Ed for around 50 years. As Ed said about such propaganda, it robs readers of an opportunity to understand how the world really works. On almost anything with any contemporary political-economic relevance, Wikipedia is a propaganda rag that services the American Empire above all else.

Best,

Wade

[Wade Frazier]

From Substack:

Edward S. Herman’s last words published in his lifetime were: “The Propaganda Model lives on.” Does it ever. I was so happy to see that no less than four works were devoted to Ed’s memory soon after his death, and those works were filled with academic assessments of the Propaganda Model, applications of it to many global issues, proposals for new filters, and the like. Academics could ask for no more, that their work would inspire so much ferment. That is what academic heaven looks like. Even though the media has done its best to ignore it, the Propaganda Model is increasingly accepted globally, as trust in the mainstream media has correspondingly plummeted, for good reason. I have to give the American public some credit there, of slowly awakening to how execrable the mainstream media is.

I made my own small contribution when I added a little tobacco vignette to my discussion of the advertising filter. Little did I know how relevant that would become a couple of years later, during the COVID-19 pandemic, as the propaganda and censorship reached new levels, and that is saying something. The USA’s medical system is abysmally corrupt, and even the defenders of science call medical science science’s flimsiest and most corrupt branch. Western medical interventions are almost all worthless, deadly, and lucrative. It was never more apparent than during the COVID pandemic. If Noam Chomsky had only understood that. About a quarter of American TV news ad minutes are drug ads, which is Ed’s advertising filter on steroids.

I see the continuing relevance of the Propaganda Model daily. As I write this, Facebook is censoring a documentary on the medical racket, to keep its Big Pharma partners happy. Ed warned about Facebook in his last interview.

As long as we have a capitalistic media, the Propaganda Model will be relevant, and as Noam said, the Propaganda Model is only a special case of the constraints that all intellectuals in capitalistic societies are subjected to. Very few rise above it, those who do are endlessly attacked, and I documented the attacks on Ed, even posthumously.

Until the Fifth Epoch arrives, Ed’s Propaganda Model will likely remain relevant.

Best,

Wade

[Wade Frazier]

From Substack:

This is a summary of my posts on Ed, and this post will only link to my Substack posts. Ed was born in 1925 to Jewish parents in Philadelphia, and spent nearly his entire life there. His parents were members of the Democratic Party and he had some radical cousins. Being raised in the Great Depression and during the rise of Hitler and the Holocaust influenced Ed while young. Ed studied economics and went to Berkeley to get his doctorate, because of the radical influences there. Ed got his doctorate in 1953 and taught at Penn State before he landed a job at Wharton, which is one of the world’s most prestigious business schools, in 1958. Ed spent the rest of his career at Wharton and was an excellent professor. Wharton contracted with the federal government to study financial institutions. Ed coauthored studies on mutual funds and savings-and-loan banks in the 1960s, and his specialty was examining conflicts of interest. In 1981, Ed published a classic work on corporate power structures, which helped Ed develop his Propaganda Model of media performance, which is a conflict-of-interest model. Ed retired from Wharton in 1989. Ed was married for 67 years to his first wife, until she died. Ed never had children. He fed stray cats, loved good French food and red wine after a day of study and writing, and played Classical piano music.

Ed began his career as a political writer with his 1966 publication of America’s Vietnam Policy: The Strategy of Deception, with Richard B. Du Boff. He followed that in 1968 with a book on the Orwellian language that the American government used. In 1970, Ed wrote a book on atrocities in Vietnam and how the American government lied about them.

Ed’s ethical stance was like Noam Chomsky’s. They felt a duty to criticize the USA, as Americans, as criticizing their nation could impact it, particularly when it was committing epic crimes as history’s richest and most powerful nation and acting as empires do.

Ed’s first collaboration with Noam was in 1973, and they began critiquing the American media in that book, particularly the New York Times. In it, they presented their bloodbath framework, which Ed named, of constructive, benign, nefarious, and mythical bloodbaths, and the media’s hypocritical coverage of them, which depended on whether the bloodbaths were committed by the USA and its allies and clients, or by enemy regimes. The parent company of their publisher put it out of business to prevent the publication of Noam and Ed’s book, in one of the most outrageous instances of Western censorship ever. All of Ed’s writings since his first collaboration with Noam focused on the American mainstream media and how it covered events.

After that disaster, Noam and Ed began writing articles in periodicals, again focusing on Indochina. In 1979, they published a two-volume series of books that dealt with American imperial behavior and the media’s treatment of it. They went with a radical publishing house, owned by the founders of Z Magazine, so it could not be suppressed. The books built on their censored work from 1973, and the second volume dealt with the USA’s reconstruction of its imperial ideology after the catastrophes of the 1970s, such as “losing” the war in Vietnam (with massive protests), Nixon’s resignation, a Congressional investigation of the CIA, and other disillusioning events. The second volume particularly focused on the media’s treatment of postwar Cambodia and was the direct precursor to Ed and Noam’s Manufacturing Consent, published in 1988.

Although their 1979 books could not be suppressed, they led to a propaganda campaign that lasts to this day, to falsely portray Noam, and to a lesser extent Ed, as supporters of Cambodia’s Khmer Rouge. What Noam and Ed really did was examine the double standards that the media used in reporting about postwar Indochina, as a way to justify the USA’s genocidal invasion.

Ed developed a scientific approach to exposing media bias, which was to find two similar bloodbaths, but one was constructive or benign, while the other was nefarious. Then he compared the media’s treatment of each atrocity. The media’s bias was tellingly exposed by those exercises. Ed found that the media’s and government’s hypocrisy was so great that he began using the term “chutzpah” to describe it. For the rest of his life, Ed’s work focused on the media’s double standards of coverage, which always served elite interests at the expense of accurately informing the American public.

Ed wrote his first book on the USA’s terror operations (and those of its allies, including Israel) and the media’s enablement in 1982. In the early 1980s, Ed worked with Frank Brodhead to write a book about the sham elections that the USA staged in nations where it overthrew their governments and supported bloody dictatorships. They also wrote a book on the assassination attempt on the pope that the American media tried to pin on the Soviet Union, with flimsy pretexts that collapsed in the courtroom.

In 1986, Ed published a propaganda model that was very close to the one that he used in Manufacturing Consent with Noam. Manufacturing Consent not only became Ed’s most famous work, but it is Noam’s too, at least with the general public.

The year after Ed and Noam published Manufacturing Consent, Ed retired from Wharton, and the next decade was his most active as a writer. He wrote another book on Western terrorism in 1989 with Gerry O’Sullivan and contributed a chapter of a book on the USA’s withdrawal from UNESCO. In 1990, Ed became the editor of Lies of Our Times, which Noam wrote a monthly column for. Ed wrote an article each month in Z Magazine, and his articles could be found in many publications in those years. In the 1990s, he published compendiums of his essays and in 1997, with Robert McChesney, they wrote a book that presciently warned about the rise of the Internet, that it would become just one more corporate/imperial vehicle, which is what has happened. Ed had remarkably thick skin with his critics, and I never saw his critics make valid criticisms of Ed’s work, as they all defended the Empire in the most irrational and even dishonest ways.

In 2000, Ed was 75 years old, and for the rest of his life, he usually partnered with David Peterson, a youngster who capably carried Ed’s spears. Ed’s subjects in this millennium were largely about Yugoslavia and Rwanda, as the media again flipped reality upside-down on behalf of its imperial masters. Ed and David wrote a book in 2010 on the politicization of the word “genocide,” which Noam wrote the foreword to.

In Ed’s last years, he wrote about Russia and Ukraine, and the media’s Orwellian treatment of those subjects. Ed wrote until his life’s end, when he died of bladder cancer at age 92, which was not diagnosed until after his death.

I subscribed to Lies of Our Times in 1990, which was how I became familiar with Ed and Noam’s writings, during my early years of study. I soon became Ed’s fan and first contacted him in 2001. Our email relationship lasted the rest of Ed’s life, and on his 92^nd birthday, I offered to improve his libelous Wikipedia bio. Ed took me up on it, and that was how I became his biographer.

Ed’s Propaganda Model has outlived him, which is the most that an academic can ask for. Ed’s Propaganda Model will remain relevant as long as the media is under capitalist control, as it serves elite interests. Ed will go down in history as one of the USA’s greatest dissident intellectuals.

Best,

Wade

[Wade Frazier]

From Substack:

As I just did for Ed Herman, I will do the same thing for Brian O’Leary and summarize my Substack posts on him in this post, as part of my Substack experiment. This will also only link to my Substack posts.

Brian was born in 1940 in Boston to a politically conservative Irish-Catholic family. He developed an interest in astronomy as a child and avidly read Wernher von Braun’s Collier’s articles on space exploration. When Sputnik went into orbit, Brian planned to become an astronaut and scientist. His early college days were kind of wild and Brian was a mediocre physics student. But he climbed the Matterhorn and ran in the Boston Marathon in those days, achiever that he was. He got his masters in astronomy at Georgetown but was expelled from the program for writing a satirical play on the faculty. Under the mentorship of Donald Rae, Brian finally blossomed as an astronomer in his doctoral studies at Berkeley (the decade after Ed got his doctorate at Berkeley).

While still at Berkeley, Brian applied to NASA’s astronaut program, and in his astronaut interview in 1967, Brian was asked/ordered to go to Mars, for the first time that a human was publicly asked to visit another planet. Brian later learned that von Braun was behind his astronaut selection, as part of his longtime plans for Mars. But NASA lost the budget battle with the Pentagon over the Vietnam War, the Mars plans were canceled, and Brian soon quit NASA. Nobody from his selection group went into space for 15 years and several quit before going up.

After NASA, Carl Sagan recruited Brian to teach at Cornell. Brian and Carl were leading Mars experts and they studied mascons, which are mass-and-gravitational anomalies. Brian worked for NASA for the Mariner 10 probe, and he predicted and named Caloris Planitia on Mercury. In 1970, Brian led a protest at the White House over the war in Cambodia, and was invited into the White House to air his grievances. That began Brian’s politically active years, although he advised George McGovern for his 1968 presidential campaign. Brian became a NASA gadfly, publicly calling it out. Brian became Mo Udall’s speechwriter and energy advisor for his 1976 presidential campaign. That campaign wrecked Brian’s marriage. His astronaut-interview roommate, Gerard O’Neill, recruited Brian into the Princeton physics faculty, where they studied the feasibility of space colonies.

While at Princeton, Brian had a remote-viewing experience in a human-potential class in 1979, which ruined him as a mainstream scientist, as he could no longer believe in the materialistic perspective that dominated mainstream science. Brian had a near-death experience in 1981, soon left Princeton, and got a job with a space contractor in LA. Brian got Buzz Aldrin a job there and shared an office with him. But Brian refused to work on military applications during Reagan’s Star Wars days and lost his job in 1987, which ended his career of working for the scientific establishment.

Brian began navigating the fringes of science and he advocated the scientific investigation of paranormal phenomena. Brian called for a new science that relinquished its materialism. I met Brian while chauffeuring him to a fringe-science conference in 1991, and we had a great deal in common, including free energy. The next year, Brian co-hosted a UFO conference. High-ranking military officials arrived to try to take over the conference. They also offered Brian work on classified UFO projects. Brian rejected their “offer” and nearly died of a heart attack immediately afterward, in what Brian believed was a murder attempt. His health never recovered from that incident and it shortened his life. Brian endured attempts by the Establishment to defrock him after he left the fold, to the degree where they denied that Brian had been an astronaut.

Even with his impaired health, Brian traveled the world, visiting psychics, fringe-science labs, free-energy inventors, and he did a great deal of public speaking. His third “fringe” book, published in 1996, was about his free-energy investigations, and Brian began his ride as the Paul Revere of Free Energy. I became that book’s biggest fan and our collaborations began then.

Brian ended up sucking me into the Apollo Moon landings issue in 2001, when he said on national TV that he was not sure if astronauts landed on the Moon. I had already been looking into it, I spent several months examining the evidence, and I was satisfied that the Moon landings happened as presented, although there may have been a cover-up of ET encounters on the Moon. In the wake of my Apollo investigations, Brian invited me to California in August 2001, where he was trying to interest California’s governor in free energy, as Enron was in the midst of raping California. We had an epic note-trading session. I told him of my friend’s underground exotic-technology show, which included free energy and antigravity technologies. Brian was not even surprised, and he was more interested in my close relative who was a CIA contract agent who worked for Henry Kissinger.

In the spring of 2003, as the dust was settling from the USA’s invasion of Iraq, Brian asked me to help him found the New Energy Movement, which was a disaster, and Brian was eventually kicked out of the organization. Brian’s free-energy and UFO colleagues had violent deaths around our New Energy Movement conference in 2004. Brian was understandably spooked and soon moved to Ecuador, where he spent the rest of his life.

A few years later, Brian came back into my life. I carried his spears and began doing interviews. The fringes could be a nutty place to be, and Brian was regularly dragged into fringe topics by people who sought to capitalize on his fame.

Brian’s health continued declining, with a cancer bout and second heart attack. We both realized that the end was likely near. I wrote his NASA bio and got it published, and improved his Wikipedia bio. Brian died a few months later, in July 2011.

Brian was a great man who lived a preposterous life. If free-energy technology makes it past the organized suppression and humanity’s inertia, Brian will become a significant historical figure.

Best,

Wade

[Wade Frazier]

From Substack:

I wrote a brief post on conspiratorial topics and have discussed the JFK hit, the global rackets, free-energy suppression, and other topics. For the people that I seek, they need to have a relatively sophisticated understanding of these issues. They do not need to be rocket scientists, but they need worldliness, keen discernment, and ideally some experience with some of the issues. Otherwise, it is all armchair awareness, which is usually not enough to reach productive understandings. There are a million rabbit holes to nowhere that beckon for newcomers to these issues, and I have seen many people disappear down them, never to be seen again, as they lived in a world of delusion, tabloid-level rumors, flimsy “evidence” with wild interpretations, and so on (QAnon was a good recent example). I have watched people go insane when encountering these topics. People need to have both feet firmly on the ground to productively engage these issues. I have already had to ban two armchair conspiracists at Substack, and I have a little trepidation for making the coming posts, as the crazies can come running. But here goes.

My recent posts on Ed Herman’s life and work saw me reread Ed’s final chapter of his research project on the Srebrenica massacre, which I had not read in years. Not only was Osama bin Laden repeatedly seen in Bosnia in 1994, but so were two men identified as 9/11 hijackers, as well as the “mastermind” of the 9/11 terror attacks. I recently wrote about Chris Black’s revelation that bin Laden was not only in Kosovo in 1998-1999, leading the Islamic fighters, under American military supervision, but Slobodan Milošević called Bill Clinton to have him remove bin Laden from Kosovo, and Clinton refused to. Milošević was highly skeptical that the man who was protected by the sitting American president in 1999, who had been a CIA asset for nearly 20 years by that time, organized the 9/11 terror attacks a couple of years later. Something stinks to high heaven about the 9/11 terror attacks. As I was editing my recent essay, a friend gave me credible information that somebody saw the plan for 9/11 on Dick Cheney’s desk. Nothing would surprise me about 9/11. Even Noam Chomsky, who dismissed all conspiracy theories around 9/11, said that 9/11 was a gift from heaven for the neocons, who had openly wished for something like 9/11. Was it all too convenient?

The USA lost its sanity after 9/11, and I withdrew from public interaction for several years, beginning in early 2002, when the attacks on me became so crazed and vicious. I spent 100 hours or so (maybe 200 by now) looking into the 9/11 evidence, and plenty does not add up. But I also encountered plenty of conspiracist craziness, such as no planes hit the World Trade Center buildings (it was all a hologram), etc. That is a standard problem when poking into such issues: the official explanations are full of holes, there is plenty to be suspicious of, but then conspiracists get involved and spin the most elaborate yarns possible but provide literally no credible evidence for their claims. That armchair conspiracist that I had to ban, who argued that the JFK hit was an elaborate hoax, yet provided zero evidence for his claim, is an example. That is common, for conspiracists to peddle their rubbish to me, and when I don’t buy it, they insult me. The other conspiracist that I banned did the same thing, as well as a free-energy inventor. This is a very common pattern of behavior, and I waste as little time as possible with such people and I would not be at Substack unless I could ban them. I rarely hesitate to ban such people anymore, and I can usually tell in their first comment where it is heading.

It is possible to approach these topics as a scientist who adduces and weighs evidence, who accepts when a hypothesis has been falsified, and keeps a level head about it without resorting to the crass and crazed tactics of Orwellian “skeptics” who do nothing but defend the Establishment.

One “coincidence” that I noticed was that the JFK hit was a fake assassination attempt that turned into a real one. For 9/11, there were numerous training exercises enacted on 9/11, including a hijacked plane, which seems to have confused some of the people who could have made an early response to the 9/11 planes. There was a bombing-simulation exercise as the 7-7 London subway bombings were being carried out. Is that a standard spook modus operandi? What are the odds of such “coincidences”? And they were all immediately attributed to the usual suspects: a communist for JFK and Islamic terrorists after the Soviet Union collapsed.

I don’t know what the ultimate truth is, but the John Tower conversation, which I have no doubt was genuine, means that Oswald did not kill JFK, and that is enough for me. The revelations of 9/11 suspects in Yugoslavia, helping the American cause of tearing Yugoslavia apart, make me highly suspicious of the USA’s possible involvement in 9/11 (especially the CIA), which was the justification for an imperial rampage and the curtailment of many civil rights. It was also a prelude to the militarized response to COVID-19, which very likely came out of a biowarfare lab, and the COVID-19 response in the USA was “coincidentally” the biggest transfer of wealth in world history, from the working class to the elite.

It is very legitimate to wonder how connected those might be. I am skeptical, however, that the global elite were very involved in those events. They may have been, but I saw organized suppression emanate from all levels of the USA’s power structure, as they all play the same game. The biggest problem is how easily the herd is manipulated. I am nearly the only person in my circles who did not get the COVID vaccine. All “responsible” Americans stepped right up to be guinea pigs of Big Pharma and attacked anybody who failed to, including Noam, very sadly. It would not surprise me at all if Noam’s stroke was from the vaccine. My friend’s brain cancer likely is, another friend was crippled by the vaccine, and it killed his mother. I have been besieged with tales of vaccine injuries, and I never asked for them. People around me volunteered them, knowing that I would not scoff and consider them crazy. About 100 million Americans were discernably injured by the COVID vaccine, with several hundred thousand deaths, and it is all being covered up with the help of a very compliant media that turned up the propaganda and censorship to new levels.

The conspiracist mindset is a tribal one, explaining all of our woes as the result of evildoers from outside their in-groups, and failing to take any personal responsibility for the state of affairs. This is going to take quite a few posts, as I cover many conspiratorial topics.

Best,

Wade

[Wade Frazier]

From Substack:

I will begin this string of posts on conspiratorial topics with not only the most important conspiratorial topic on Earth; it is the most important topic on Earth, by far, as it dwarfs all other issues. Also, it is the conspiratorial topic that I know best, because I lived it.

For all conspiratorial topics, it pays to minimize speculation and try to draw the picture from the best data points. But conspiracies by their very nature do not leave paper trails for scholars to study. That is the nature of the beast, and partly why scholars rarely engage such issues often or deeply.

What I did for Ed Herman and Brian O’Leary I will also do for Dennis Lee one day soon. While Ed and Brian were great men, Dennis was on another level, an Indiana-Jones-type figure who gave the people who run the world some sleepless nights. I don’t know of anybody else on Earth like Dennis.

Unlike Brian and Ed, Dennis is still alive, and while he is alive, I write under some constraints. I can’t write publicly much about his most spectacular adventures while he lives, and he definitely does not tell me everything. If I outlive Dennis, I’ll have plenty more to write about him. My wild ride with Dennis, which began in 1986, introduced me to organized suppression, as we bore the brunt of it. The CIA offered Dennis a billion dollars to fold our operation before they lowered the boom on us, but that is just one part of a highly complex issue, and I’ll sketch some of those complexities in this post.

A decade after those crazy and horrific days, I heard Tom Bearden talk about organized suppression. In Steven Greer’s latest movie, he briefly described the tactics of organized suppression, and I had lived through or heard of all of them but one. Bearden described the “game theory” methods of organized suppression, and the most effective organized suppression is when the victims do not even realize that they were suppressed. Around a trillion dollars has been spent on suppressing independent efforts to develop free-energy and other exotic technologies, but that is only a facet of the issue.

Dennis should be dead dozens of times over, and his early days in the energy business on the East Coast saw him survive multiple murder attempts by mobsters, and his companies were repeatedly stolen by his business associates and mobsters. But that was all just a prelude. Dennis sold the world’s best heating system (it still is) and put it on customers’ homes for free, for the most brilliant and benevolent business strategy that I ever heard of.

Like me, Dennis was born in Washington State, but he could not sell his heating system in a state with the lowest energy bills on Earth, with its many hydroelectric projects. But after his company was stolen by mobsters in New York, Dennis visited his parents in his home town, Yakima, and learned of an energy disaster in Washington. Projections from the 1960s showed that Washington would run out of energy, and the state’s electric companies, working with the federal agency that controlled the hydroelectric dams, began building five nuclear power plants. Like all nuclear power plants, the costs of construction were vastly underestimated, that projected growth in energy consumption did not materialize, and four of the five nuclear power plants were scrapped, which led to the largest municipal-bond default in American history to that time.

Dennis arrived in Yakima as electric costs began to skyrocket because of that disaster. Because electricity had historically been so cheap, at one cent per kilowatt-hour, many homes and businesses heated with electricity. Dennis’s heat pump saved 70% over fossil-fuel heating systems, but would save about 85% of heating costs if it replaced electric heating. Dennis saw full-page ads from the electric companies that encouraged electricity conservation. Dennis thought that the electric companies would give him a tickertape parade for delivering a technology that saved 85% of heating costs. Dennis had yet to realize that he was offering more conservation than they had in mind. The electric companies planned to promote inferior heat pumps that would only save 50% over electric-resistance heating (like an electric stove). They saw 85% savings as a catastrophe that would see them lose billions of dollars of revenue.

Dennis had experienced organized suppression before in his insulation business on the East Coast, but he hadn’t seen anything yet. Dennis did everything that he could to interest the electric companies in his heat pump, but not only did they not welcome him, they began surreptitiously killing the business deals that he was putting together. Dennis had to leave the Seattle area to find a bank that had not been compromised by the electric companies, and he found one in Spokane.

Just when it looked like Dennis was about to carpet the Seattle area with his heat pump, the electric companies called in all of their favors to wipe out Dennis’s company. The TV news, newspapers, Attorney General’s office, bankruptcy courts, and other governmental organizations were mobilized. The federal agency later admitted that all that they thought about was Dennis for months. That agency hired a corporate hit man to infiltrate the company and try to take it down from the inside, as it weathered attacks from the outside, in what I call an inside-outside job. That hit man was responsible for the death of one of Dennis’s employees, which radicalized Dennis in his energy efforts.

I came into the picture by a series of unbelievable events and I got to see the death throes of that company before it was stolen by Mormon grifters. Those days comprised the beginning of my awakening, although it arguably began when I was 12.

What amazed me, even though I was still quite naïve, was how many of my fellow employees not only joined forces with the hit man, but cheered when the Mormon grifters stole Dennis’s company, two weeks after they stole Dennis’s finance company in Spokane. I saw only two people from Dennis’s company bow out with honor. A Mormon also was the ringleader in stealing our Ventura company two years later, and once again, I was amazed at the people around me who joined up with that effort. Many years later, I heard Steven Greer say that the Mormon Financial Empire was the ringleader of the global elite that suppresses free-energy and other technologies. It was one of my many “Isn’t that interesting?” moments. Dennis also learned that the Mormon Financial Empire was the single biggest investor in Washington’s electric companies. Dennis had unwittingly walked into the lion’s den.

While most employees realized that the Washington power structure was wiping out Dennis’s company, all that most of them cared about was keeping their jobs. I saw people who were skeptical of the hit man’s motivation, thinking that he was merely a disgruntled employee.

My boss helped engineer the theft of Dennis’s company, and even then, before I really knew much about what was happening, I could not believe that he was stupid enough to think that his cronies would be allowed to sell Dennis’s heating system after what they had just witnessed. It was during those days that I began to realize that organized suppression was 1% conspiracy and 99% complicity.

But I was just getting my feet wet in those days, and the next three years were my lifetime’s most educational. I became Dennis’s partner just as he began to pursue free energy, the global elite almost immediately tried to buy us out, and we heard from both the “White Hat” and “Black Hat” factions. I eventually watched officials act like gangsters, as my life was ruined. The Rockefellers and CIA got involved, among others. The top of the world’s power structure was involved with wiping us out in Ventura, but I saw complicity by those around me that I could not believe at first. In the end, county, state, and federal officials were in on it, abetted by nearly everybody around me, but it was likely instigated by the global elite.

Not only were people around me incredibly naïve to what was happening, but when they finally began to get glimmers of understanding, they could go paranoid and I ended up being attacked in their paranoia. It was a three-ring circus of a nightmare that I would not wish on anybody. When Dennis was in solitary confinement and it looked like he would never live to see this side of the bars again, I sacrificed my life, which led to the greatest miracle that I ever witnessed.

I have written on these events at great length in my work, but to make it short, global interests were involved with wiping us out, but there was complicity from the federal, state, and local governments, the media pumped out libelous propaganda (which primed me for Noam and Ed’s work) and it is legitimate to wonder how independent some of the activity was, not coordinated by the global elite. But I also saw complicity by nearly everybody around me, and that was the hardest part for me to believe, not that the global elite had decided to wipe us out. Brian’s Suppression Syndrome is a brilliant summation of the dynamics. Those days gave me my journey’s primary lesson: personal integrity is the world’s scarcest but most precious commodity.

The sitting American president is far down the hierarchy of power on Earth, especially after JFK’s murder. The global elite have spent around a trillion dollars to keep upstarts like us at bay, because we represent the end of the world as we know it.

I estimate that at least half of what my friend saw in his underground technology show was developed from ET technology. The free-energy and ET coverups seem to be conjoined (the ET cover-up shortened Brian’s life). If E. Howard Hunt is to be believed, JFK was killed over the ET cover-up, which does not surprise me.

The ET/exotic-technology cover-ups are history’s greatest, and all other “conspiracies” are in a distant second place.

Best,

Wade

[Wade Frazier]

From Substack:

Before I leave the suppression of exotic technology for the other conspiratorial topics that I plan to cover, I would like to discuss a few more issues related to it. Since it is the most important topic on Earth, it deserves a little more examination, although I have already discussed it plenty in my public writings and at Substack. There is always more to explore on that subject, as it has many dimensions. Energy does not just run the universe; energy is the universe. Nothing will ever outrank the energy issue in our universe.

In 2007, I wrote about the levels of free-energy awareness. I invented those categories in less than an hour, as I recall, as I had thousands of reactions to the idea of free energy to draw upon. For the few people who get past the denial levels (1, 2, and 3), they usually end up in Levels 4, 5, or 8. Very few actually try to do something about the situation.

What most reactions below Level 12 have in common are delusions about how the world really works. And that is not really because of some conspiracy to brainwash people, at least not entirely or even substantially. Everybody gets indoctrinated and conditioned into their particular in-group ideologies, and scientists are far from immune to it, as Brian O’Leary noted in his Suppression Syndrome discussion.

Wiping out the competition is the essence of capitalism, as Adam Smith noted before capitalism even had a name. Disruptive technologies can be very bad for business and can even wipe out entire industries and professions. Potentially disruptive innovations are usually stolen or suppressed where the big industries and professions are concerned.

Our societal systems are criminal enterprises, from top to bottom. With systems that are that corrupt, conspiracies to tilt the table even more in their favor should not be surprising. I’ll be writing about the medical racket in these posts, but here is a little preview. The dictator of American medicine promoted cigarettes for a generation and even spearheaded the “research” for an asbestos cigarette filter, of all things. That same man made sure that the Journal of the American Medical Association never hinted that smoking and lung cancer might be related, although German scientists learned that a generation earlier and even King James I campaigned against tobacco. That same man also tried to buy out and monopolize cancer treatments (1, 2), and then wiped them out when they refused to sell out. And it was all unrelated? His right and left hands were not aware of each other? In order to dismiss conspiratorial intent, people have to believe that the right and left sides of Morris Fishbein’s brain were ignorant of each other. Maybe he really was that stupid, or maybe he knew exactly what he was doing.

I see the same thing today when watching sporting events on TV, as an ad for junk food is followed by an ad for a drug that treats the symptoms of eating junk food. And nobody high up sees the connection? I call it vertical integration in the medical racket.

I found that the only people who can help with that I am doing have to care and be awake, which means relinquishing their in-group conditioning, which is particularly insidious with the “smart.” They are often the most brainwashed of all, as Orwell noted. I seek disillusioned idealists, and my message is that not all is lost. There is a way out of this existential mess, but it will take an unprecedented act of integrity and sentience by a relative few, and nobody needs to risk their lives.

That there is a global effort to ensure that the most disruptive technologies of all never see the light of day should not be surprising. I lived through enough, and traded notes with people such as Brian enough, and the tales of Tom Bearden and Steven Greer perfectly aligned with my experiences, so that people really have to have their heads in the sand to deny it all. But that does not mean becoming a QAnon crazy, either. There is a middle path, of acknowledgment without a tabloid-level paranoid obsession, as people think like victims instead of creators. Not many can walk that razor’s edge, but they are the people that I seek. The heart has to lead this one, then the world as we know it will end, and nobody will miss it.

Best,

Wade

[Wade Frazier]

From Substack:

If Dennis’s efforts with his heat pump had not been wiped out so many times, by his business associates, mobsters, and then the electric interests in Washington State, there would have been an industry built around that heat pump, the USA would have been carpeted by them, the USA would have reduced its energy expended for heating by more than half, and that technology would have gone global. It would have been the biggest event in energy conservation ever. It is still the world’s best heating system, which has been totally wiped out in North America, and Dennis put it on customers’ homes for free, in the most brilliant and benevolent business strategy that I ever heard of.

If our operation had not been wiped out in Ventura, we would all live in the Fifth Epoch today and the world would have ended as we knew it. But it was not to be. A few months after I became Dennis’s partner, the global elite approached us repeatedly. The first time was when they made the friendly buyout offer. I would have been an instant millionaire, but that was not our goal. Then Dennis began getting encouraging phone calls in the night from the so-called “White Hat” faction.

We were so ignorant back then that we did not even know that there was a free-energy field or that we were only part of a long line of inventors and entrepreneurs who had been thwarted for generations. When I saw those emissaries of the global elite come into our office to make their friendly buyout offer, I had no idea what was happening. Dennis did not tell me about the CIA’s billion-dollar offer to fold our operation – I read it in his book nearly a decade later.

When people play at the level where the global elite get involved, their lives becomes insanely risky. Brian O’Leary’s life was shortened because he co-hosted a UFO conference. Former astronauts who stage UFO conferences definitely draw the attention of the global elite. It seems that JFK was murdered over the ET issue, which did not surprise me. The closest that Brian came to publicly discussing that life-shortening event was in his last book. Dennis should be dead dozens of times over. He is the Indiana Jones of the free-energy field.

When Dennis finally wore me down and I rejoined him again briefly in 1996-1997, we were subjected to an elaborate sting operation and I nearly went to prison (or worse) for my trouble. Even then, I had little awareness of the global elite or what we had gotten tangled in. It was only when I heard Tom Bearden speak of it, after trading notes with Brian, and after hearing Steven Green talk about his interactions with the global elite, that I began to really understand what had happened. Greer discussed the tactics of organized suppression in his latest movie, and I had lived through most of them. Also, before I left my home town of Ventura, never to return, I first heard of a free-energy inventor with the goods, Sparky Sweet. Brian knew him, and in our epic note-trading session, I heard of Sparky’s grim end. A few years after I heard about Sparky, a close friend was kidnapped by White-Hats and given an underground exotic technology show, which included free-energy and antigravity technologies. Some of the craziest conspiracy theories about these issues are at least partly true.

People will not encounter the global elite unless they engage in activities like what Dennis, Brian, and Greer did. Mormons stole both our Seattle and Ventura companies, but I was not sure that they were connected until I heard Greer say said that the Mormon Financial Empire was the current ringleader of the global elite. Dennis called those shadowy interests the “Big Boys,” Greer called them Godzilla, and I call them the Global Controllers. My life was ruined by those people, and they have not forgotten about me. I have assumed that I have been under surveillance since the 1980s, but they only listen, as far as I know. I had my own “skeptical” stalker for years, who finally folded his tents when Dennis was banned from the energy industry in the USA.

The man whose advice helped me spring Dennis from jail knew three weeks after the JFK hit that Oswald did not do it. In my many years of study since those unbelievable events, my sense is that the global elite began their rise with Europe’s conquest of the world and they have had centuries to hone their craft. The sitting American president is far down the hierarchy of power on Earth. I believe that the American presidency was permanently demoted with JFK’s murder and that all American presidents since him were puppets and knew it. What I call retail politics is all for show. None of the important decisions on Earth are made by politicians.

Today’s retail elite, such as Bill Gates and Elon Musk, are seen by the global elite as boys with their toys. Retail elites with much awareness must realize how relatively powerless they are, and some of them may be in on it as junior members.

I have written about the global elite at Substack a bit (1, 2, 3), but they are not my focus. Strangely, the left denies that those elites even exist while right-wing conspiracists are obsessed with them, often at a tabloid-level of understanding, for a strange schism in political-economic thought. Neither pole has reached productive understandings of the issues. I have had to ban conspiracists at Substack, and likely not for the last time. No conspiracist that I ever heard of was important enough to get the treatment that Dennis, Brian, and Greer did. The global elite are not threatened by hyperventilating conspiracists, such as QAnon enthusiasts.

The global elite are real, the public has never heard their names, and they rule the world today. They do not need to micromanage things. Just keep disruptive technologies out of the public’s hands and the rest kind of takes care of itself, as humanity is its own worst enemy.

As I work my way through various conspiratorial topics, I’ll refer to the global elite periodically. For most of the topics that I will cover, I doubt that the global elite have been involved.

Best,

Wade