My Excursion with PutinProp
David Haggith

Yes, I wrote for Russia, and here is why.

Labor reports are all over the place today in such confusion that it almost looks as if they are all trying to head-fake each other. So, today’s reports plus the big one out tomorrow will have to wait for tomorrow’s Deeper Dive to try to dig in enough to see if any sense can be made out of them. I suspect, however, that most of what is behind the abundant chaos was captured in this choice headline today: 

“Leaked Reports and Political Heat Testing Trust in Economic Data”

What we see in that report is the mainstream press finally waking up to the reason I call the BLS the “Bureau of Lying Statistics.” Maybe they are not so much just waking up to the reality about how bad the BLS is but that the BLS has simply become so bad that even the mainstream media can no longer run cover for it. Anyway, it does my little heart good to see the BLS finally taking a little heat (though not nearly enough) for the errors of its ways.

My experience with PutinProp

What I want to talk about today is another kind of lying—the kind that happens by wrapping disinformation or highly biased news in truth. (Such as a few key stories that are not true buried among many stories that are or by njust picking and choosing stories to always make your enemy look his worst and you your best.) Putin is a master at that kind of lying, which is why he was head of European disinformation for the KGB. You don’t get a top disinformation post for a superpower during the Cold War without, first, becoming a world master at lying. Putin knows better than anyone how to wrap lies in lots and lots of truth and how to sound entirely objective and convincing.

The Russian government provides a stream of good news about Russia and bad news about the US by creating US and European media outlets to mess with the US in every way it can. Several articles appeared today about that. I want to write about that as a writer who has had quite a bit of first-hand experience with the named Russian propaganda sites.

The main outfit mentioned is the Kremlin-financed RT, which used to go by “Russia Today.” It is an English-language entity designed by the Russian government to look like an independent mainstream media site in order to present the US as bad wherever it can and to sow anger and confusion in the US populace and to make Russia look a little-less bad than reality merits when coverage elsewhere is bad—and even good when it can. Putin is sly enough to know RT has to always remain plausible and sound objective, or it won’t gain a broad audience. So, RT colors the news by selection, rather than tell outright lies.

First, let me say my knowledge about RT comes from the year when I wrote for them after Joe Biden fired me from the school where I worked because I exercised my constitutional right to refuse the Trump vaccine. Naturally, I wanted to write about my horrid Covid experience ala Joe and about the vaccine in general, but Joe was not content with firing me from my day job and cutting off my livelihood. So, once I started writing on Covid, he made certain that Google cut me off at the throat everywhere else. I had quickly developed about a$1,000/mo income stream from my writing after my vaccine firing, and Biden brought that to a bitter end too, as Google, under his “influence,” cut off my main publisher (and cut off my own Covid articles on my own small site from any ad revenue, which they explained to me by email). I was under siege.

So, when RT was willing to published everything I sent on Covid, I figured, I’d be perfectly happy to take Putin’s money in order to criticize the illegal Biden administration banishment and the vaccine since American publishers wouldn’t touch anything I wrote on that subject. What choice did I have if I was to be heard? Many Americans read RT and watch its broadcasts, and RT was even willing to interview me on its television network regarding my Covid firing as well as my daugher’s-in-law termination from a hospital as a surgery tech for her refusals to get vaccinated because she was pregnant. 

(And she worked in obstetrics where they always tell patients not to take any medication that has not been scrupulously tested on a small number of pregnant women before general release. Now they were so obsessed with Covid that they forced her to use this untested vaccine or lose her job, so she chose the latter … even though they demanded she work extra time when there was no vaccine available because Covid supposedly left them short-handed. (It was more like their own extreme Covid prep left them short-handed.)

So, I made up the $1,000 per month from the one publisher by writing for RT. And that’s how I came to know just how close to Putin RT really is. All my payments and contacts for each article for my writing were from the Russian entity named in today’s article about US Treasury sanctions—TV-Novosti—and were wired straight from their Moscow bank account to my bank account. That is the legal entity behind RT. 

However, Google started hurting RT over those articles, too, just as my former publisher had told me they were doing over my Covid articles, costing them nearly a million readers per day. Since Putin is a Covidphobe anyway, it wasn’t long before new management at RT told me I couldn’t write on that subject any longer through them either.

Oh well, there were plenty of other subjects that looked bad for America, such as my articles on the economic shenanigans by the BLS that the mainstream media is now barely digging into almost three years after I started publishing that kind of content on RT. RT was happy to keep publishing those, and also asked me to cover US elections, feeling certain I would call out the biased reporting wherever I saw it, as I am want to do.

I figured it like this. I love my county, and I don’t want to do anything to make it look bad in order to make the “Evil Empire,” as Reagan called it, look better by comparison. Russia is every bit as full of evil all the way to the top as either US or Ukraine. However, I do not love the corruption in my country nor the bad ideas that are becoming more common in my country. So, if American publishers were not interested at all in what I write (and they are not, other than alternative press sites, but none of the big mainstream publishers), then I’d be glad to have RT’s audience and get paid for it with Putin’s money because the truth needs to be known by whatever route it take to get it out.

(And now, today, we see truth finally edging out in the article mentioned at the top of this editorial that lightly takes the BLS to task for how inept or corrupt they are, though they give it a very light touch. So, what I was writing about the BLS back then was truth, but I had to go elsewhere to have any chance of sharing it. That truth is now only slowly creeping out—like Covid lab leaks—into the mainstream press.)

Then Putin started his invasion of Ukraine, and RT asked me to join a regular television panel to cover the not-war. Not being allowed to use the word “war,” I’m sure I would not have been the fit they were thinking I was, as I would’ve almost certainly used the contraband word. Since I had written many negative articles about corruption in the US, I’m sure they figured I do my best to make the US look bad; but making the US look bad is never in my agenda.

My agenda are just truth, as best I can sort truths out, and there was no way I would use my writing or talking to make Putin the Invader, who slaughters civilians left and right as an intentional terror tactic, look better by making the US look like the solereprehensible evil in this invasion (even though I used to write about the US’ evil involvement in Ukrainian politics back in 2012). I refuse to use my own nation’s imperialism to justify another nation’s violent imperialism. I’m not going to let any of what I write be cover for Putin’s own imperialism, which is every bit as obvious and odious as US imperialism.

I find Putin’s attacks on a corrupt neighbor who never once attacked Russia beneath reprehensible. (What nations are not riddled with corruption as part of the human condition?) So, I told RT I would no longer write for them. With sanctions on Russian use of American banking systems, I didn’t want any money even trying to move from a Moscow bank into my own bank (and likely it would never make it through the transfer anyway; but I wouldn’t want it even if it did.) So, I severed ties with Putin’s propaganda machine completely because we are now in a time of war.

I did have fun writing for RT while it lasted. You can find the articles here: My favorite article that laid out American military corruption was this one: “Sex, lies and trade deals: how a businessman bribed half the US navy.” It had all the big ingredients that make a powerful story—sex, money and power. If you read it, you will see why I was willing to be published on a Russian site that tries to make America look bad. You’ll see the writing is no different than a 60-Minutes takedown of corruption in America. Corruption needs to be exposed, and this was some first-class, high-rolling military corruption. I didn’t write it to make America look bad. I wrote it because I don’t like people doing bad things in America and getting away with it.

RT, by the way, NEVER told me what to write or how to slant it. They never edited my articles to make them say what they wanted. They just picked and chose from pieces that made America look weird or evil, and there is always enough of that being exposed in my writing. What I noticed is that, if the article didn’t make America look bad, they took a pass on it, and steered my writing choices that way; but they never said, “Can you make this look more anti-American.” It just became clear they liked stuff that made America look bad. Often-times they would run an article idea by me, like the one I just listed and provide some info sources, and I’d dig into it because it sounded interesting. (Always glad to root out corruption or lunacy wherever I find it.)

Zeroing in on other Russian propaganda

It’s the same reason I wrote a lot in the past on what I learned late along the way was another Russian propaganda site—Zero Hedge. I’ve posted two old mainstream articles that expose the roots of ZH in the headlines below. My parting of ways came with ZHover the Ukraine invasion, too. Once I started writing negatively about Putin in their comments section and in my articles, they banned me (apparently for life as the ban has gone on for over two years now) because they do not exist to let bad things be said about Putin.

I found that ironic coming from the publisher that once complained they were banned from Twitter over exposing the lab source of Covid. They played the martyr well (as well they should) when they were banned, but then turned around and banned me on their platform from commenting against Putin’s invasion and quit promoting any of my articles, which they had long promoted at the top of their main page.

So, don’t step out of line with Papa Putin if you want to stay in good standing on that site with its old Soviet heritage. I, on the other hand, have not banned them in my own publication; so, whenever they carry a good article that I can’t get elsewhere, I will carry it. No hard feelings. I do try to avoid all their obvious PutinProp, but they have a lot of views about the American economy that are the kind of truth that American media is not covering; so, I’ll include their articles in my headlines regularly, regardless of their dismissal of me. But, yes, they are Russian offshoots, too. Indirect, as in not financed by Putin so far as I know, but with a solid historic connection to Putin and even the old Soviet government. (I’ll let the articles below cover the ZH story for you if you’re interested since it is now old news.)

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