Antony Blinken Continues to Lecture the World on Values His Administration Aggressively Violates, by Glen Greenwald

Freedom. As a general matter, the Biden administration clearly opposes it. It specifically abhors press freedom, especially the kind that exposes things they don’t want exposed, as Julian Assange did with the Obama administration. However, when talking to foreign nations, Biden’s lightweight Secretary of State has no problem extolling press freedom. From Glen Greenwald at greenwald.substack.com:

How can you feign anger over others’ attacks on a free press when you imprison Assange as punishment for his vital revelations about U.S. officials?

U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken speaks on the importance of independence journalism, May 6, 2021 (Radio Free Europe); Julian Assange arrives at Westminster Magistrates’ Court in London in his attempt to resist extradition by the Biden administration (Photo by Victoria Jones/PA Images via Getty Images)

Continuing his world tour doling out righteous lectures to the world, U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken on Thursday proclaimed — in a sermon you have to hear to believe — that few things are more sacred in a democracy than “independent journalism.” Speaking to Radio Free Europe, Blinken paid homage to “World Press Freedom Day”; claimed that “the United States stands strongly with independent journalism”; explained that “the foundation of any democratic system” entails “holding leaders accountable” and “informing citizens”; and warned that “countries that deny freedom of the press are countries that don’t have a lot of confidence in themselves or in their systems.”

The rhetorical cherry on top of that cake came when he posed this question: “What is to be afraid of in informing the people and holding leaders accountable?” The Secretary of State then issued this vow: “Everywhere journalism and freedom of the press is challenged, we will stand with journalists and with that freedom.” Since I know that I would be extremely skeptical if someone told me that those words had just come out Blinken’s mouth, I present you here with the unedited one-minute-fifty-two-second video clip of him saying exactly this:

Continue reading→

Leave a Reply

Fill in your details below or click an icon to log in:

WordPress.com Logo

You are commenting using your WordPress.com account. Log Out /  Change )

Facebook photo

You are commenting using your Facebook account. Log Out /  Change )

Connecting to %s

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.