Why Your Hatred Of Mr. Assange Is Completely Irrelevant By Caitlin Johnstone!!!
(2019-04-27 at 12:09:18 )

Why Your Hatred Of Mr. Assange Is Completely Irrelevant by Caitlin Johnstone

By the time I publish this we will be at or around the 24-hour mark since WikiLeaks announced that two high level Ecuadorian government insiders had told them that Julian Assange faces eviction from the Ecuadorian embassy within days, which seems to have been further confirmed by the Foreign Minister of Ecuador now tweeting that states have the right to revoke political asylum at any time.

Activists are mobilizing everywhere, a round-the-clock presence has been set up outside the Ecuadorian embassy in London, and a #Unity4J emergency broadcast is currently underway full of many respected dissident voices coming together in defense of the legendary leak publisher.

-Why do you suppose the Foreign Minister of Ecuador would choose today of all days to start tweeting about mechanisms for unilaterally revoking asylum claims?
- Edward Snowden April 5, 2019

And, as we should all have come to expect by now, the establishment narrative management patrol has been going out of its way to inform us all that this is a good thing and no cause for alarm.

Whenever you voice concerns about the persecution of Julian Assange on any public forum, you will with remarkable predictability encounter empire loyalists calling Mr. Assange a stinky Nazi rapist Putin puppet Trump supporter who deserves to be in prison forever.

What is striking about these responses, which by now are as familiar to me as the keyboard I type these words on, is how extremely emotional they always are.

If you talk about economic policy or foreign policy, for example, you might get a few angry troglodytes who take internet arguments far too seriously, but you will also typically get people calmly explaining why they believe you are wrong and laying out ostensibly fact-based arguments for why this is so.

This is literally never the case with people who want to see Mr. Assange imprisoned, in my extensive experience.

There is never, ever any calm, fact-based rationale for why the benefits of prosecuting and imprisoning him for his publications outweigh the risks and costs of doing so.

It is always vitriolic, hyperbolic, frequently profanity-riddled arguments from pure emotion, usually something to the effect of "He collaborated with Russia and helped Donald Trump win the election, therefore and I want him punished because I hate him."

Which is just another way of saying, "I want Mr. Assange imprisoned because of the way my feelings feel."

Do not tease me @defendAssange this better be true
- Louise Mensch April 5, 2019

Now, aside from the established fact that the United States governments agenda to prosecute Mr. Assange has nothing to do with the 2016 election but with the exposure of United States war crimes six years earlier, this is also a completely fallacious argument from top to bottom.

Claiming that something ought to happen because of how your feelings feel is very obviously a logical fallacy, but this kind of argument comprises the entirety of support for Mr. Assanges imprisonment that Mr. Assange defenders encounter on a regular basis.

This happens because the smear campaign that has been used by the western political-media class to manufacture support for Mr. Assanges silencing and imprisonment has its foundation not in fact, but in emotion.

Smear campaigns are by their nature emotional at their core, because they are intended to elicit public disgust, disdain and hatred for their target.

That is why you will see so many mainstream news media articles claiming that Mr. Assange smells bad, for example, despite that having nothing whatsoever to do with the legitimacy or illegitimacy of Mr. Assanges work.

The goal is not to present a factual case for why it would be more helpful than harmful to prosecute the WikiLeaks founder, the goal is to make people feel disgust for him, and, by extension, disgust for his work as well.

So naturally, because they are constantly being inundated with establishment propaganda about Mr. Assange consisting of nothing other than appeals to emotion, mainstream liberals are going to believe that spewing vitriol about how their feelings feel is a perfectly legitimate response to his name coming up in political discourse.

This is all they have had modeled for them in responding to Mr. Assanges plight. It has been normalized for them.

Yes, the mainstream liberal political conversation really has gotten that crazy and stupid. Their emotions really are that insanely coddled, and facts really have become that marginalized.

That is why you can not defend Mr. Assange in public without getting a bunch of brainwashed MSM-swilling liberals falling all over themselves to show you how emotional they feel about the subject at hand.

Or, they are just sick of DJ Rapey J stinking up the place. - Rick Wilson April 5, 2019

Another reason the Mr. Assange smears focus on emotion rather than facts is because the facts are very contrary to the interests of the smear merchants.

The facts are that prosecuting Julian Assange under the Espionage Act for exposing United States war crimes, as the Donald Trump administration is attempting to do, would strike a devastating blow to press freedoms around the world.

This is because there are no legal distinctions in place separating an outlet like WikiLeaks from outlets like the New York Times, the Washington Post, or the Guardian, meaning that a precedent would be set allowing for the prosecution of those outlets on the same grounds, who also publish anonymous government leaks.

Which is why the New York Times, the Washington Post and the Guardian have all warned sternly of this precedent, which has also been recognized by the Obama administration.

These are facts.

These are facts regardless of how your feelings feel about Julian Assange and WikiLeaks.

These are facts regardless of how your feelings feel about Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump.

These are facts regardless of how your feelings feel about Russia and Vladimir Putin.

These are facts regardless of how assertively and authoritatively Rachel Maddow speaks.

These are facts regardless of how much of a stinky, stinky stink man the news media claims Mr. Assange is.

These are facts regardless of how much your emotions have been coddled by your favorite pundits, your university professors, your political cliques and your echo chamber.

These are facts.

It does not matter how your feelings feel.

Your feelings are irrelevant to this conversation.

Only facts matter here.

And the facts say that everyone, regardless of how they feel about Mr. Assange, must defend him against the United States governments attempts to prosecute him for publishing inconvenient truths.

Not because it is the right thing to do, not because anyone expects you to behave in a moral way, but out of sheer, garden variety self-interest.

We all need the ability to hold power to account, and the prosecution of Mr. Assange will necessarily cripple our ability to do that.

This is a fact. Regardless of how your feelings feel.

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