CIA-Funded Washington Post Lets Tomahawk Missile Lobbyist Write Pro-War Editorials Without Disclosing His Ties

Wow. I don’t know how they keep doing it, but peak corporatism in America just keeps getting more and more radicalized.

As I never tire of reminding readers, despite the Washington Post’s owner Jeff Bezos received a $600 million contract with the CIA (more than twice what he paid for the Post), WaPo has never followed standard journalistic procedure when reporting on the US intelligence community and disclosed this conflict of interest. This despite the fact that WaPo has become the prefered publishing outlet for anonymous leaks from the CIA.

And now, in what feels like a test to see just how far they can push this thing, we learn that they have been allowing a lobbyist from Raytheon to publish enthusiastic pro-war editorials on their pages without disclosing the author’s lobbying background. Raytheon is the manufacturer of the Tomahawk cruise missiles used in Trump’s strike on a Syrian air base last week.

Speaking of Raytheon, guess whose stocks shot up astronomically immediately following the missile strike? If you want a nauseating peek at American capitalism at its finest, check out this Wall Street site gushing about bullish options traders jumping all over the “red hot Raytheon stock” betting on the administration becoming a much more enthusiastic consumer of Raytheon’s child-killing product.

Yeeehaw! Boy howdy, that’s more American than Ronald McDonald in a deep-fried monster truck! A military industrial complex lobbyist writing pro-war propaganda for a CIA-entrenched media outlet while shrewd war profiteers send his company’s stock soaring like a bald eagle to the tune of Bruce Springsteen’s “Born in the USA”? There’s so much freedom it makes my gums bleed.

The lobbyist’s cheerleading for more cruise missile consumption needs to be seen to be believed, too. The man’s name is Ed Rogers, and his April 8th reaction to Trump’s Tomahawk™ strike is titled “Could it be? Is President Trump on a roll?” Hilariously published in a section called “PostPartisan”, the first sentence in this neocon bedtime story reads, “I don’t want to jinx anything, but President Trump may be experiencing the best sequence of events since he became president.”

And it only gets worse from there. Rogers writes that Trump “launched an attack against Syria while his Chinese counterpart was present and able to witness the aftermath in the media was a powerful stroke of good luck for the White House. In case Xi needed any reminding of just how serious Trump may be about taking action in North Korea, the Syria attack couldn’t have been a better example or come at a better time.” He refers to the support for the strike as “bipartisan” — which he’s only able to do because neoconservativism is thriving on both sides of the political aisle — and concludes by suggesting that Trump should do more of the same in order to cultivate this support, speculating that perhaps “he’s enjoying the warm, cozy feeling of success and will decide he wants to spend more time in an environment like the one he finds himself in this weekend.”

We laugh so we don’t cry, but seriously, how is this a thing? How is the Washington Post still looked at as a legitimate news outlet by millions upon millions of people? While progressive YouTubers are getting blacklisted and demonetized by Google for their solid, fact-based coverage of what’s actually happening in their country, a CIA-funded corporatist rag is running blatant war propaganda by actual, literal military industrial complex lobbyists and I keep seeing its articles on the front page of Reddit as though it’s a legitimate news outlet.

We don’t have to do it this way anymore. The internet has given us an unprecedented ability to network and share information in a way that enables us to unplug from the propaganda and derail the bloodthirsty corporatist narratives these monsters have been spoonfeeding us for our entire lifetimes. Please support alternative media, help struggling political YouTubers through the crisis they’re experiencing, and let’s work together to kill the corrupt legacy media once and for all.

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