This is a long,scary read, but if you guys wanna keep your internet and media the way it is I ask you for a small bit of time. This is a nutball with a real opportunity to make a profound change that can affect us all and our way of life. And my experience tells me nutballs are the most dangerous.

Most of you have probably seen a lot written about FreePress, a Marxist-think tank started by Robert McChesney and Josh Silver. Silver is now the Executive Director with McChesney still on the board. But don’t let the innocent name fool you. Free Press doesn’t advocate anything “free.” It was created with the explicit purpose of orchestrating a total government/socialist grab of both the entire media and the internet.

While I was at RightOnline I picked up from NetRoots, a FreePress Media Reform Toolkit, Resources for Media Activists.

Inside are:

• A “welcome letter” from Josh Silver.
• A 64-page Media Reform Action Guide: tools, tips & techniques for promoting CHANGE.
• A 16-page Media Policy 101: what you need to know to change the media.
• A colorful pamphlet 10 Things Big Media don’t want you to know. Here McChesney complains “big media want to control the internet, big media gut quality journalism, U.S. broadband is slow and expensive”; among other things.
• Another colorful pamphlet where he kevetches “we have to listen to the same songs, we have to watch infomercials, the news is filled with celebrity gossip.” You get the idea.
• A variety of different stickers. I’ll get into that one later.

In case some of you are unconvinced that McChesney’s group is a Marxist think tank, I’ll offer this up to you, all links can be found on my previous post Obama Orchestrates the perfect storm for elimination of the 1st amendment.

• McChesney is a prof at U of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and gave an “award” to leftist-president-Thug-in-Chief-Chavez-wannabe Rafael Correa of Ecuador.
• Many of McChesney’s tenets have made it into the FTC document Potential Policy Recommendations to Support the Reinvention of Journalism.
• Seton Motley on Glenn Beck tells us McChesney is quoted as saying:

There is no real answer but to remove brick by brick the capitalist system itself, rebuilding the entire society on socialist principles.

• Ben Scott, who used to work for FreePress now works for the State Dept. We have Adam Thierer of the Progress and Freedom Foundation stating:

“Essentially we have someone from a neomarxist media outfit setting America’s global policy on information issues at the State Department,”

• Per the Daily Caller:

FCC Chairman Julius Genachowski has Free Press alumna Jen Howard on his staff. Before flacking for Genachowski, Howard was the spokesperson for Free Press. Since joining the FCC, she’s worked tirelessly to make sure her boss’s messaging lines up with that of her former employer. [emphasis mine].

• From the preamble of The Bullet, a socialist project where McChesney is interviewed:

In The German Ideology, Marx said the following about the media: “The class which has the means of material production at its disposal has control at the same time over the means of mental production, so that thereby, generally speaking, the ideas of those who lack the means of mental production are subject to it.”

And from McChesney himself in The Bullet:

Educating people about the media and fighting to make changes in the short-term, not just in the long term, became of utmost importance. Instead of waiting for the revolution to happen, we learned that unless you make significant changes in the media, it will be vastly more difficult to have a revolution. While the media is not the single most important issue in the world, it is one of the core issues that any successful Left project needs to integrate into its strategic program [emphasis mine].

And another quote from The Bullet under the “Hypercommercialism” section:

Advertising is commercial propaganda; or, as the great critic James Rorty put it in the 1930s: “advertising is our master’s voice.” Advertising is the voice of capital. We need to do whatever we can to limit capitalist propaganda, regulate it, minimize it, and perhaps even eliminate it.

Real scary stuff.

• And from the “welcome letter” I mentioned above:

This is our moment. A new administration brings sweeping new opportunities for change. The election of a president who has endorsed many of the goals of the media reform movement presents us with the chance to turn his campaign promises into reality. At Free Press we are excited about our nation’s new direction.

• A review of his book The Political Economy of Media:

More than any other work, The Political Economy of Media demonstrates the incompatibility of the corporate media system with a viable democratic public sphere, and the corrupt policymaking process that brings the system into existence. [sic] The Political Economy of Media provides a comprehensive critique of the degradation of journalism, the hyper-commercialization of culture, the Internet, and the emergence of the contemporary media reform movement.

• Got one more little tidbit of info for you. Avowed Marxist Van Jones is a former Free Press board member. Per their 2008 Annual Report:

Van, you little Marxist, you. Now I give you the Media Reform Action Guide. It’s written I would say at middle-school reading level which tells us he is targeting any and all audiences. The first instance I really knew these guys are certifiable and belong in Nurse Ratchett’s ward in One Flew Over the Kuckoo’s Nest is on page 10.

Media Reform Action_Guide

Here is one of the sticker’s included in my “kit.”

According to page 10, McChesney wants everyone to place the above sticker on newspaper boxes, TVs at your “big box” store like Best Buy and Target (that one is really gonna go over big, like a charge for vandalism), bus stops, subways and TVs in public areas. The latter will go over big as well. However, he tries to “empower you” to be “bold,” claiming a clerk at Best Buy allowed this after an explanation. Right. Also included in the kit are a couple of other stickers:

And this one:

Notice the word “transform” on the above sticker. Where have I heard that word before? Also in the booklet are the usual suggested ways of getting any reform such as writing & phoning Congress, starting petitions, writing letters to the editors of newspapers, filing comments on “change” to the FCC, host a “House Party” about Media Reform (a la OFA, right), working with city councils, attending a public hearing, and another that caught my eye: on pages 43-47 to “show up at your media outlet, ask to see files and records and inspect them. Take notes, report to FCC any violations and file a complaint with them if necessary.” Maybe I should try that and see if they oblige.

As far as the Media Policy 101 booklet so as to not take up more space, here is the link. McChesney whines about:

• The news fails to inform.
• We see and hear the same stuff all the time.
• Society is misrepresented.
• Advertising is out of control.
• Internet access is too expensive.

On page 12 he says:

A broadband connection is fast becoming a basic public necessity, just like water and electricity. We need to enact a national broadband policy to provide universal, affordable broadband access to all Americans. Congress and the FCC need to protect “Net Neutrality” the principle that prevents phone and cable companies from discriminating against Web sites and services they don’t own.

Next the Welfare Dept will be passing out vouchers for broadband as a “public entitlement.”

But that’s now all. My research tells me apparently a company called Harmony Institute, innocent sounding, but again not, was hired by McChesney’s Marxist group (Free Press is listed at a “partner”) to make a concerted plan for ways to subliminally plant messages into all of us by psychological means to influence a favorable opinion of media takeover and Net Neutrality. A quote from Harmony’s website as far as its goals of the project:

Using net neutrality as a case-study, Harmony will introduce a proven methodology for embedding social issues into media productions [emphasis mine]. The guide is written for policy makers, advocacy workers, media creators, and local organizations that seek a comprehensive framework for embracing entertainment as an effective advocacy tool.

What sci-fi movie have I seen this in? Isn’t this where they plant that little chip in your brain? And Part II of the project:

The second phase of this project will employ the messaging recommendations outlined in the Entertainment and Messaging Guide to Net Neutrality in a six-part animated web show that informs and persuades online audiences of the need to support net neutrality. By consulting with the show’s writing and production team, HI has helped embed issue statements and calls to action within the show’s narrative to further inform the beliefs, attitudes and behaviors of the audience. The end goal is to persuade individuals to take quantifiable steps to positively impact the cause [emphasis mine].

Anyone who wants to view the whole, sordid, Marxist/Alinskyist document you can find it here.

After seeing all this and feeling a bit nauseous I think it’s time to take a break. But I know you guys know it doesn’t end here.

After all, it ain’t just about Free Press. We have to discover the corrupt networks.

Cheers!

Crossposted at Emerging Corruption

Crossposted at Conservative Outlooks