How Billionaires Took Over Liberalism and Destroyed It

Eric Zuesse

They’ve done it via the ‘news’-media — their propaganda-operations. So, this is about how billionaires do that; how they’ve done it.

Ever since at least the time of Thucydides in the 5th century BC, the wealthiest have ruled, and did it by conquest and plunder. The acquisition of exceptional wealth was by theft: it was coercion, which could be either physical against the body (violence), or mental against the mind (deception). Exceptional wealth was acquired by some form of theft. The wealthiest controlled the government, which then enforced that theft as legal “ownership.” That’s how the economy worked. The government is the ultimate authority on who owns what. None of this has changed over the millennia. However, the technologies today are different, depending less on the wielding of steely weapons, and more on the statement of stealthy words, than in the ancient past. Increasingly, control is being achieved by deceiving the public. (For example, America’s leading liberal politician, Joe Biden, was one of the U.S. Senate’s leading segregationists and back-room opponents of the NAACP, but claims to be a supporter of “civil rights”, and is thus voted for by the overwhelming majority of America’s Blacks — but America’s press hides his segregationist record, and so they don’t know about it. Those voters’ ignorance is that politician’s strength, and it all comes from America’s billionaires.) Today’s methods of deceiving (and thus controlling) the public are considerably more sophisticated and professional than in the past. The aristocracy (the billionaires) do it nowadays mainly by means of their buying and selling, and hiring and firing, of the news-media, which thus have far more importance than in ancient times, because deceit is today’s main way to control the public.

Whereas conservative media rely unashamedly upon the existing popular mythology, liberal media need to rely upon that but to pretend not to, and to be instead ‘humanitarian’ and ‘enlightened’ in a more tolerant and open-minded sense: they specialize in hypocrisy — it’s liberal aristocrats’ particular style of art-form; they’re the ‘not conservative’ type of aristocrats. They pretend to be what they aren’t (champions of democracy — which they actually despise and crave to overcome, if it exists at all).

Progressive media (to the extent they exist at all, which is only very slight, anywhere) avoid both hypocrisy and mythology: they are openly anti-aristocratic, and rejecting also any mythology — they are populist, while not affirming the popular (or any) mythology. (By contrast: conservative ‘populists’ are committed to the existing popular mythology, and can therefore be manipulated by openly conservative aristocrats — they can be “Tories,” or even “Nazis,” and they can therefore vote against their own “class interests.” It’s stupid, but conservative ‘populists’ nonetheless do it routinely.)

As a result of this (since the progressives’ appeal — rejecting both the aristocracy and the mythology — is so small), politics almost invariably pits conservatives against liberals, and therefore promotes dictatorship (rule of the nation by its aristocracy), either way.

This means that, almost invariably, it’s either the conservative aristocrats, or else the liberal aristocrats, who rule a country. (Democracy — rule by the public — is thus very rare.)

Perhaps the most famous of all liberal news-media during the Twentieth Century was Britain’s Guardian newspaper, which was anti-imperialist — and that’s a core component of progressivism, because the aristocracy derive wealth not only by exploiting their domestic public, but also (if they are internationally successful, meaning control vassal-nations) by exploiting foreign publics. These aristocrats exploit foreign publics by controlling foreign governments. That’s called “imperialism.”

The Guardian newspaper was widely considered, until recently, to be not only liberal, but even progressive. It promoted government-expenditures for the benefit of the people, instead of for international conquest (which billionaires much prefer). Consequently, the aristocracy hated it, and wanted to take it over.

Tragically, that newspaper was, in fact, taken over, culminating in 2016, by American billionaires’ ‘charities’, and promptly it became perhaps the world’s most-rabidly pro-imperialistic propaganda-sheet (even worse than America’s own Washington Post and New York Times, both of which were infamous villains, which had, for example, helped to promote George W. Bush’s lies to invade and destroy Iraq for WMD that didn’t even exist except in their own lies about the matter — and those were definitely lies, not mere errors such as the liars and their propaganda-media claimed afterward). They are constantly whipping up hatred against Russia’s Government and against any nations (like Iraq 2003, Libya 2011, Syria 2012, Ukraine 2014, and Venezuela 2015, were, and like China and Iran are now) that were friendly toward Russia — because Russia is the main country that America’s billionaires want to conquer and control that they don’t yet  control. So, they constantly propagandize against Russia, where they all want “regime change” (meaning, actually, conquest).

Just as for at least the past 2,500 years, conquest is the aristocracy’s chief goal. All aristocrats support imperialism. (Any who would oppose it would no longer be accepted within the aristocracy. It would hurt them in their business-dealings with other aristocrats. Amongst their fellow aristocrats, they would be rejected.)

This journalistic transformation at the Guardian, from anti-imperialist, to becoming a champion of the Military-Industrial Complex (which is owned and controlled by the billionaires), is typical.

Understanding this transformation toward pure propaganda is helpful in order to understand the functioning of today’s most destructive Government, the U.S. Government — the country (whose Government is controlled by its billionaires — no democracy) that has perpetrated far more invasions and coups, and done far more damage in and to the world, than all other Governments in the world combined, ever since the end of World War II. It has mass-murdered tens of millions of people, not only via invasions, but by coups that were followed by U.S.-imposed brutal dictatorships (which served the U.S. aristocracy) — and all the while with the U.S. regime pretending to advance ‘democracy’ and ‘human rights’ (such as in Iraq 2003-, Libya 2011-, and Syria 2012-). (After all: it’s liberal; it is hypocritical — it pretends to be progressive but isn’t.)

Though this incredibly hypocritical global-tyrannical U.S. regime is accepted world-wide, as if it weren’t today’s equivalent of Nazi Germany (only bigger than that), it is by far the world’s most evil Government, much as Nazi Germany’s Government was, in its time. Whereas America under President FDR (who was sincerely an enemy of Nazi Germany) was largely a democracy, America is now an aristocracy of its billionaires — a dictatorship by its own super-rich (and they are vicious, comparable to what Germany’s Nazis were, though using far more-liberal rhetoric).

A typical example of today’s Guardian (which is no longer a newspaper but just an online propaganda-site funded by those billionaires’ ‘charities’, and by readers who are stupid enough to donate and pay in order to be deceived by ‘news’ they read there) is two ‘news’-reports that were published in the Guardian on the same day, and unconnected with one-another except that they were both fact-less, undocumented, and rabidly hateful against Russia’s Government — that’s to say, against the bête noire of American-and-allied (such as UK) billionaires.

On 16 July 2020, the Guardian headlined both “Russian state-sponsored hackers target Covid-19 vaccine researchers” and “UK says Russia sought to interfere in 2019 election by spreading documents online”. Both were probably lies, but certainly unverified by any clear facts — totally uninformative, and just strings of allegations, pure war-propaganda — much of it stenographically citing from official government sources in the U.S. and UK dictatorships (just like the “WMD in Iraq” lie was).

The Guardian is now a typical liberal ‘news’-medium, which means that it is at least as imperialistic as the openly conservative ‘news’-media (such as Rupert Murdoch’s Times of London) are.

To show how such propaganda is created and spread, and has been used with enormous success by the millions of hired agents (including publicly elected governmental officials) of the U.S. aristocracy, a few examples will be cited here that have already been sufficiently studied and exposed to be frauds — such as those two ‘news’-stories in the July 16th Guardian have not yet been exposed, but (based on that ‘news’-medium’s record) probably also are frauds.

On August 7th, I headlined “‘Russiagate’ Hoax Unravels, but Their Anti-Russia Sanctions Don’t,” and documented, in considerable detail, the fraudulence of the main U.S. Government hoax against Russia, a hoax that was promulgated in the Mueller Report and in all of the Democratic-Party-created “Russiagate” case against America’s current atrocious (Republican-Party-billionaire-representing) President, Donald Trump (accusing him of being ‘a puppet of Putin’).

What’s stunning there is that, with such a horrid President as Trump, the Democrats selected this hoaxed case to bring against him, in order to force him out of office — as if there weren’t authentic crimes that he had been perpetrating during his Presidency (and even before). They refused to bring any of the authentic cases against him, because they — the Democratic Party itself, its own Senators and Representatives and the Democratic National Committee — were themselves participating in those crimes (such as this and this and this and this). So, they instead brought this “Russiagate” case (which had been manufactured by the prior, Democratic Party, President’s Administration, in conjunction with MI6; and, so, Democratic Party officials could bring it), which is entirely disprovable. All of their ‘news’-media (such as the New York Times, and the Washington Post, and even the formerly British Guardian) therefore hid the hoaxiness of the charges, so as to sucker the Democratic Party’s voters (their readers) into supporting their own Democratic-Party-billionaire-serving politicians, instead of the Republican Party ones, who instead represented Republican Party billionaires. The villain was Russia (their bête noire), instead of Hillary Clinton and their own controlling aristocracy.

That “Russiagate” case in the United States was co-created by America’s CIA and Britain’s MI6; so, not only was it a real crime by the (traitorous) U.S. Government against its own American public, but it was a fictitious crime also by a foreign Government (Russia, ‘the enemy’), against the American people. And, as I have also documented, there are many such governmental crimes. And the more that they can be blamed against countries that America’s aristocracy wants to conquer (such as “Russiagate” was), the better it is for America’s aristocrats. So, this is the routine reality now (and under Trump it has increasingly been also against Iran and China), so as to pump up the Military-Industrial Complex, which is virtually owned by the aristocracy.

I document many things that are consistently denied in America’s mainstream ‘news’-media, and therefore none of those media will publish these articles (though all of my articles are submitted to all of them); but, just today as I am writing, a webmaster at a non-mainstream site objected because I provide “too many” links. Even though he operates an online news-site, he fails to know or respect the fact that ONLY online text-articles possess even the ability to enable their readers to check out easily — just by the reader’s clicking onto a link — the evidence for any reasonably questionable allegation that is being made in the given article (such as this one). Broadcast journalism doesn’t do that. Paper-and-ink journalism also doesn’t. Therefore, all of the traditional ‘news’-media don’t empower their audiences to be intelligently skeptical, and to have easy access to the actual evidence behind any reasonably questionable assertion that is being put forth by them.

Furthermore, even when traditional ‘news’-media establish online sites, any links there are often uninformative, such as to that site’s own archive of references to a given term that is being linked in their article. They assume that you trust one Party or the other, and they provide no easy means of digging deeper — because they don’t want their audience to be able to understand. Those are all billionaire-controlled ‘news’-media. So, all of them lie routinely, in order to advance the business-interests of those owners and control their audience. It’s like they are just nonstop advertisements instead of real news-media. And, since there are no links to their ultimate sources, those audiences would have to become investigators, themselves, in order to separate out which allegations are facts and which allegations are frauds. Readers don’t have the time to do that; and listeners don’t have any way in which they can do it, even if they did have the time. In other words: those audiences will choose to believe and to disbelieve whatever they want. This is the reason for the increasing political-Party polarization. It has become so bad in America now, so that the current U.S. Presidential election is between two rabidly racist contenders: the openly conservative one, Donald Trump, who hardly even tries to hide his racism, versus the other, Joe Biden, who does try to hide the fact that he was one of the U.S. Senate’s leading segregationists and was even allied on segregation-issues with the Senate’s leading segregationist, the Republican Party’s Senator Jesse Helms. Only by means of the ‘news’-media’s hiding Biden’s White-supremacist background, can they pretend that the two Parties are offering the electorate a ‘progressive’ option, in the billionaires’ 2020 Presidential (s)‘election’. Non-racist Americans are offered, by the billionaires’ two Parties, only White-supremacist options (the overtly segregationist Trump, or else the covertly segregationist Biden) to vote for to become the next President.

The entire national public then increasingly consists of people who are prejudiced in whatever ways that they are — increasingly set in their existing false beliefs — their existing myths. To allow billionaires to place their heavy thumbs upon the scales of truth and justice that they own, by means of their control over ‘news’-media, is a sure way for any democracy to degenerate into dictatorship, so that the public are fighting more against each other than against the aristocracy. This is what billionaires want and what has happened. Some things change, but others remain the same. And rule-by-the-richest seems to be in the latter category.

So: this is how one of the very few remaining progressive news-media became switched, in just the past few years, to being whored to the liberal aristocracy. The Guardian, RIP, was almost the opposite of today’s Guardian.

On August 10th, Jonathan Cook, who used to be a Guardian journalist when it was its previous, progressive newspaper, headlined “How the Guardian betrayed not only Corbyn but the last vestiges of British democracy”, and he exposed his former employer as the opposite of what it had been and as having become perhaps even the chief tool by billionaires to destroy the post-Tony-Blair Labour Party which had been led by the progressive Jeremy Corbyn, and as having reflected the Labour Party billionaires’ preference instead to defeat Corby’s Labour Party, in order to help to install as Prime Minister the far-right Tory Boris Johnson so as to restore, as being that Conservative Party’s opposition, the pro-imperialist Labour Party that had joined itself full-force to George W. Bush’s lie-based invasion of Iraq in 2003. “Racism was endemic in the language and behaviours of Labour’s senior, rightwing officials,” whom today’s Guardian had helped to make the Labour Party’s current leaders. This new Guardian was the opposite of the old Guardian, which had given a voice “for control of the Labour party so that it might really represent the poor and vulnerable against rule by the rich.” Today’s Guardian was instead instrumental in killing–off  that Labour Party, and thereby leaving UK with no progressive party at all, and without even a single Party that has any actually functioning progressive wing to it, at all.

The way that billionaires took over liberalism and destroyed it is by their having taken control over non-conservative media (most of which were liberal, but a few of which were even progressive, as the Guardian used to be) and stripped out of them any opposition that those media previously had had toward imperialism, and replaced that by championing imperialism, so long as it’s of the ‘right’ kind, namely sanctions and coups and invasions by ‘our’ country, against countries that never even threatened one’s own country (but that are friendly toward Russia). By definition, attempting to conquer a country that isn’t attempting to conquer that aggressor-country is the biggest of all international war-crimes; it’s “aggressive war” — and Nazi leaders were hanged for it at Nuremberg — but it’s entirely unpunished when the world’s most powerful country (and its allies) are doing it, such as now. A popular term for it (i.e., for the supreme crime that was being prosecuted at the Nuremberg Tribunals) today is “neoconservatism,” and the only way in which it differs from the Nazi Party is that America’s aggressions are aiming at different targets to destroy.

The easiest way to end democracy is to take control over the news-media so as to make them instead ‘news’-media; and, therefore, that’s the way it has been done.