Greg Palast telling it like it is

A little while ago I was having a beer with a couple of people and we got to talking about the effectiveness, or rather lack of effectiveness, of Left Wing activism.

Being true to my Conspiraloon™ roots, I suggested that a lot of that failure was due to the fact that ordinary politically active people are being deliberately jerked-off and misdirected by journalists and writers from the established, state-sanctioned Left

and then I played one of my favourite cards and asked ‘Name an established Left Wing writer with access to the mainstream press who you trust?’

It’s not as easy a question to answer as some might think

At some point Greg Palast’s name came up




Now, I’d be the first to admit that he’s written some decent stuff.

On the other hand that whole Sam Spade investigative journalist in a trench coat and fedora thing is just a tad too cheesy for my tastes. He also repeatedly attempts to validate what he has to say by constant references to his association with the BBC and its flagship news program Newsnight

Hmmm, hardly the hallmark of quality in my book

But that’s all by the by

The reason why I don’t trust the self-publicising fucker is not because of his silly hat or what he says and writes. It’s what he doesn’t say that bothers me.

That's what misdirection is all about

Take his work on voting fraud in the US as probably the simplest example.

Yup, there is definitely something dodgy about the roll-out of paperless, unverifiable voting machines in the US. And yup there is plenty of evidence that thousands of eligible voters have been denied a vote through underhand practices

But so fucking what?

Would it really make any difference to US domestic and international policies if the Democrats won more elections?

The Democrats did pretty well on an anti-war ticket in the midterm elections last year and subsequently they endorsed an increase in US forces in Iraq.

Nothing changed. Nothing changed because the Democrats and the Republicans are in the pockets of the same lobbies

And I suspect a growing number of people in the UK are realising that the same situation applies here with Labour and the Conservatives

Meanwhile, Palast and Co are wanking off as many people who are worried about the state of politics as possible with distractive bullshit.

If all the political parties on a ballot are bent why should anyone give a toss about how the votes are counted?

In fact, personally, I quite like the idea of everyone suspecting that vote counting is bent as it strips away what little veneer of democracy is left over the whole crooked process.

Anyway, all of the above is just an intro to this clip of Palast ‘doing a Chomsky’ whilst being interviewed on the subject of 9/11 scepticism…





It’s not the fact that Palast’s views on 9/11 differ to my own that I think leaves him looking like an idiot-shill-gatekeeper-twat in this clip. It’s the fact that he contradicts himself quite severely in the space of a few seconds - first maintaining that, as a serious investigative journalist, he has no definitive opinion on the subject because he has done no research and then going on to talk about all the research he’s done.

The unedited video of the full interview is available here and does an even better job of showcasing the change in Palast’s demeanour into mumbling bumbling bullshit mode once he starts talking about 9/11

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