In politics, don’t talk through your hat. Do your homework.

Presuming—to the annoyance of many—on my longevity in politics, let me say that one of the most important things for serious political people is to never talk through your hat, never develop convictions about an issue without thorough investigation. Intuitions & suspicions shouldn’t be ignored but they are never sufficient as evidence & must always be investigated because often those intuitions turn out to be nothing more than projected prejudices. That requires vetting every source of information.

Too many progressives today have been influenced by libertarian analytical methods: suspicions, paranoia, class biases against working people, conspiracy thinking, & most regrettably the anti-Semitic belief that Jews & Israel run the world. Global Research is the epitome of that method though it takes distance from the most egregious expressions of anti-Semitism. It isn’t that libertarians don’t investigate issues but when reality doesn’t fit their prejudices, they deny reality or invent a new one.

Behind the libertarian method is disdain for working people as agents of social change. They believe massive, popular uprisings are all orchestrated by nefarious elite forces like the CIA & Mossad. So for Global Research, the Arab uprisings of 2011 involving millions of people in several countries were nothing more than CIA-orchestrated street theater. The journal takes particular vengeance toward the Syrian uprising, relying on Muslim-hating prejudices & orientalist beliefs that Assad is just too stylish & western to be a murderous dictator.

(This comes up because I was asked about an article from the Denver Guardian circulating on social media claiming an “FBI agent suspected in Clinton email links was found dead in an apparent murder-suicide.” There is no such newspaper as the Denver Guardian. It’s a planted story.
The issues involved in accepting such reports are not just significant but life & death when they involve the issue of war & revolution against dictatorship in Syria.)