Revealed: How journalism and awards work together to promote genocide and regime change
Prizes, grants and OSINT are all part of a carefully crafted network of regime change
In 2020, three Buzzfeed writers — Megha Rajagopalan, Alison Killing, and Christo Buschek — received a Pulitzer prize for their research into the ‘Uyghur Genocide’, giving final credence to a myth the US State Department had been pushing for all of that year.
Their ‘research’ was pretty damning and was upheld by various entities — both state and non-state, both authoritative in their own ways — as a shining example of investigative journalism. They poured over satellite imagery, witness statements and official documents, and ended up turning that original piece into a 5-parter.
In the weeks and months following the publication of the Buzzfeed article, the US government used it and other similar investigative pieces to push legislation against China and Xinjiang province specifically. Under the guise of protecting Uyghurs against China, they passed economic sanctions which ended up making life harder for Uyghurs — creating the complete opposite of their public message.
Under the 2022 Uyghur Forced Labor Prevention Act (UFLPA), all goods produced in Xinjiang were considered to be made with forced labor with no investigation or presumption of innocence, and thus not allowed to enter the United States, period. Companies stopped using Xinjiang cotton (which produces over 20% of the world’s cotton using fully automated labor, a far cry from the UFLPA claims). This predictably put cotton workers out of a job, leading to them losing their livelihoods and creating a humanitarian crisis of a sudden spike in unemployment and an economic recession in Xinjiang. But this was always the goal: not protecting Xinjiang residents (which are usually reduced to just Uyghurs by the western media), but harming them. By making their lives harder, the plan was that they would turn against the Chinese government and demand action. Then, through this popular unrest, the US government would swoop in like they have done many times before (see for one example the Euromaidan protests) and hijack the protests for their own separatist ends.
Just like that, manufacturing consent against China was achieved. For all of 2020 and 2021, it was the right thing to do to boycott China and companies that did business in Xinjiang. All over a genocide that never existed, while our well-meaning governments were bombing Muslims in Yemen, Afghanistan and Palestine.
Of course, the US government doesn’t care about Muslims, in China or elsewhere — just look at how they enable the genocide of Palestinians, and have been doing so for decades (it was famously France that gave “Israel” the nuclear bomb). For years, the US was funding and bombing ETIM (the East Turkestan Independence Movement) in Pakistan. They also officially recognized ETIM as a terrorist group up until November 2020, when the group was taken out of the list by Marco Rubio, Secretary of State, the same person who pushed the most for sanctions against China.
ETIM is also the group that China was combating in Xinjiang, a historically rural province owing to its vastly desert climate and geography and its warlording past. Except China is not using bombs and weapons against them in foreign countries, invading them regardless of the wishes of the local population.
To combat extremism in Xinjiang, China correctly deduced that they had to look at the systematic causes: they identified those to be lack of education, which closed down opportunities for Xinjiang natives (which are not solely the Uyghurs), lack of infrastructure which promotes isolation and poverty, and of course the influence of terror groups operating from beyond the border, who send young men to kill themselves in terror attacks while rich leaders give the orders safe in their mansions — just to illustrate that point, there have been more than 30 terrorist acts committed in Xinjiang between 1990 and 2016, mostly carried out with knives or bombs, killing leaders (including Muslim leaders) and hundreds of innocent people.
This is what China’s vast program aimed to eradicate: poverty and foreign influence. And they did it without firing a single shot. In the West, our response would have been to bomb Libya for 20 years until terror attacks in Xinjiang magically stopped.
Yet, the countries who have gleefully bombed Muslims for the past 30 years (namely the US, France, Germany and the UK) were suddenly very concerned about Uyghurs in China specifically, despite that China has several other Muslim groups that have apparently never been targeted by state repressions, e.g. the Hui people.
It is even more grotesque that the United States had been, by its own admission, bombing Uyghurs for over 10 years in Pakistan before they suddenly pivoted to “defending” Uyghurs in Xinjiang.
There is a lot more to be said about ETIM, the Uyghur genocide myth, and China’s response to extremism, for which I would point you to this page and the links found within to learn more. It’s also a very interesting investigation into the roots of the ETIM movement and separatism in Xinjiang promoted by the likes of the US State Department and Adrian Zenz.
Who is really behind ‘independent’ journalism?
The Buzzfeed paper gives the game away from the start, but in such a blink-and-you-might-miss-it move that, well, everyone blinked and missed it.
This is where our investigation begins proper.
In the opening words of the first part, Buzzfeed clearly states:
This project was supported by the Open Technology Fund, the Pulitzer Center, and the Eyebeam Center for the Future of Journalism.
Of course Buzzfeed could not have achieved their series — a 5-part gigantic investigative paper that relies on official documents obtained from China (and by extension translated from Chinese), witness statements from Xinjiang itself, and satellite imagery that does not entirely come from Google Maps but more sophisticated satellites.
They simply don’t have the structure to provide this kind of investigation the size of a book and release it all for free on their website out of the goodness of their hearts. This is the kind of stuff some researchers spend their entire life on, especially as most of it is original research, making Buzzfeed the primary source of these findings.
Yet, the Open Technology Fund, the Pulitzer Center and the Eyebeam Center are only mentioned once, in a very short by-line at the beginning and without much detail. What exactly did they provide to Buzzfeed and what was the extent of their ‘support’?
To answer that, it might help to understand who is behind these three organizations first.
The Open Technology Fund is a U.S. Agency for Global Media (USAGM) outfit. From their own website (emphasis mine):
Funding is appropriated for OTF through the annual Department of State, Foreign Operations, and Related Programs appropriations and provided to OTF via a grant agreement from USAGM.
USAGM also oversees Voice of America and Radio Free Europe, which was started by the CIA as a propaganda outlet against the Soviet Union and socialism in Europe during the Cold War.
This means that the Open Tech Fund is not impartial, and not without an agenda (but its name containing ‘Open Technology’ is designed to make you think it is). Already we can make a link: why would a US government agency, at a time where the State Department and Congress were banging the war drums and passing bills to militarize against China, not want to fund research that supports their point?
Even people like Tucker Carlson, who very prominently position themselves against war in Iran and in West Asia only do so because they want to redirect the military towards China, which they see as an existential threat. Why would the US government, who has brought nothing but pain and terror to the world, suddenly say “Well gosh, we really want war against China but there’s laws, you know? Alas, we simply can’t send 50 million dollars, which is nothing for us, to fund propaganda pieces. Here’s 10 billion more to purchasing missiles to bomb kids in Palestine though. For some reason, this is perfectly moral.”
The Open Technology Fundy will certainly claim to be impartial and independent, able to dispose of its money however it wants. But here is the trap: even if they truly believe that (which has yet to be proven; we have no reason to take them at their word), this is objectively not true. If they started sending this money to the Chinese government, for example, they would quickly be defunded and audited. Thus, they objectively cannot be independent and it is in the board’s interest to follow along with what they believe the government’s agenda to be. This is the charitable conclusion; the more realistic one is that someone in government sends them orders with no ifs and buts.
The State Department, the same one that under Marco Rubio was taking away ETIM’s terrorist status and destroying livelihoods in Xinjiang, basically funded the Buzzfeed investigation by passing money around. Then, they used the results of that investigation to legislate. In this way, the State Department kept its hands clean: the investigation seemed to have been made ‘independently’, was then verified by third-parties, and is thus completely trustworthy for the State Department to use in legislation. But none of it ever left the State Department in the first place.
The second supporter of the Buzzfeed investigation was the Eyebeam Center for the Future of Journalism. The Eyebeam center was founded in 2018 by Marisa Mazria Katz and funded by the Craig Newmark Philanthropies, the man behind Craigslist — and yet another tech billionaire with their hands in ‘philanthropy’.
It is noteworthy that Marisa Katz is of Syrian descent and in 2009, received funding from the US State Department for a four-year program in Casablanca, Morocco to teach journalism to impoverished communities — not as a recipient of the program, but as a participant in it.
From 2011 to 2017, she was the editor-in-chief of a section of the New York Times related to artists. We are reminded here that in the 1959, the United States held the American National Exhibition in Moscow, USSR. This exhibition was part of an attempt at destabilizing the Soviet Union by showcasing the American Way of Life™ and creating envy in the Soviet mind. The exhibit also showcased modern artists such as Jackson Pollock. The CIA, through programs like the Congress for Cultural Freedom and with the help of the Museum of Modern Art, funded modern art both in the United States and abroad, and in doing so managed to embed itself deeper into it, creating a new way to act abroad — which is what the CIA actually does; it doesn’t promote artists for the beauty of art.
The next key step came in 1950, when the International Organisations Division (IOD) was set up under Tom Braden. It was this office which subsidised the animated version of George Orwell's Animal Farm, which sponsored American jazz artists, opera recitals, the Boston Symphony Orchestra's international touring programme. Its agents were placed in the film industry, in publishing houses, even as travel writers for the celebrated Fodor guides. And, we now know, it promoted America's anarchic avant-garde movement, Abstract Expressionism.
… wrote the Independent in 1995.
Because art is seen as non-political and as existing outside of society, it is at times able to be used as a vehicle for regime change attempts: hosting art exhibits or, indeed, sending outright assets posing as professionals in the business more easily. In the 1950s, CIA agent Peter Matthiessen co-founded the The Paris Review, a generalistic art magazine, to keep an eye on expatriates in Paris and fund anti-Soviet propaganda through the lens of art instead of the more usual lens of journalism.
And if you think this is old news, not quite: it’s still happening today. The Paris Review still exists (they have a website). Actors Ben Affleck and Jennifer Garner collaborated closely with the CIA on their project Argo (2012) and Alias (2001-2006) to ensure a positive portrayal of the agency.
The art industry itself is a money laundering scheme, with millionaires purchasing and reselling art pieces that never ever leave their racks in duty-free vaults in Geneva, Switzerland (and of course, the linked article can’t help but talk about Russian ‘oligarchs’ in a piece about something that is happening nowhere near Russia). Because art is not a renewable resource — traditionally, an artist’s reputation was built over a lifetime by the public and they can only put out so many works before their death, an industry was created around modern art, the same one that was also promoted to the public by the CIA, to be able to industrialize production of art and ensure there will always be a supply of art commodities and thus a market to speak of.
Finally, the Buzzfeed piece was also sponsored by the Pulitzer Center. This one is perhaps the most interesting sponsor of the Buzzfeed piece, and deserves more careful observation. The Center is a sister foundation to the Pulitzer Prize — the one these three Buzzfeed writers received for this paper. In their 2024 report, the Center admits to being funded by the following organizations:
Support for the Pulitzer Center this year came from Arnold Ventures, Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, Charles Stewart Mott Foundation, Chicago Council on Global Affairs, Clinton Family Foundation, DC Commission on the Arts and Humanities, Facebook Journalism Project, Ford Foundation, Fore River Foundation, Golden Globe Foundation, Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation, Henry L. Kimelman Family Foundation, Howard Hughes Medical Institute, Humanity United, John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation, Julian Grace Foundation, Laudes Foundation, Leona M. and Harry B. Helmsley Charitable Trust, Luminate Group, Norad [editor’s note: The Norwegian Agency for Development Cooperation], Norway’s International Climate and Forest Initiative (NICFI), Notre Dame-IBM Technology Ethics Lab, Open Society Foundations, Poklon Foundation, The IV Fund, Trellis Charitable Fund, Walton Family Foundation, Wellspring Philanthropic Fund, and our Campus Consortium partner schools.
It would be overbearing to go through every one of those NGOs, but some stick out prominently (bolded above).
The Bill and Melinda Gates foundation is of course refering to Bill Gates the tech billionaire. With this foundation, much like the Open Society Foundations (founded by billionaire George Soros), Gates influences law and policy for billions of people, particularly in the Global South. The foundation works to enforce pro-western policies that favor the interests of pharmaceutical companies over actual needs in ex-colonial countries, keeping them in a state of poverty and instability so as to make the exploitation of their labor and the extraction of the value they produce easier for western companies. A single billionaire decides who gets to live and die for billions of people and even manages to make money in the process — the Gates Foundation publicly states that it is funded by Bill, Melinda and Warren Buffett’s stock portfolio. That is to say, the more they are able to grow their stock value (the companies they invest in), the more money they will make. It is lobbying in anything but name; it is modern imperialism and neocolonialism done by and for individuals who are already among the richest in the world, yet still always want more, more, more.
If billionaires really cared about making the world better, they would give their money away to organizations not connected to them, with no strings attached. But they don’t; they want to influence policy around the world to remodel the world in their individual image. They use these mechanisms to keep growing their own fortune and assets. For example, billionaire Charles Johnson gave his 130 million dollar mansion to his foundation, thereby writing off the purchase as an expense for the foundation, rendering it tax-free, while continuing private use. Upon the billionaire’s death, their vast wealth is transferred tax-free to their foundation and their children and spouse continue managing this money. This starts to explain why Gates ‘disinherited’ his children, gaining mass approval when he made his famous announcement. If he bequeathed them the money directly, they would have to pay taxes on it.
There is no innocent philanthropy. The most striking thing when looking into any NGO’s funding is that the same organizations appear over and over again. They fund and work with each other, creating an intricate web that some websites like Influence Watch are starting to peer into, though it should be noted the people behind these projects are not without their biases — as anybody is, of course.
The Ford Foundation, another funder of the Pulitzer Center, was originally created to protect the assets of the Ford family, the very same nazi sympathiser behind Ford Motors. At the height of the Cold War, the Foundation provided a $150,000 grant to the Fighting Group Against Inhumanity, a CIA-controlled group in West Berlin engaged in intelligence-gathering and sabotage in East Germany. The grant was managed by the National Committee for a Free Europe, a CIA front, to bolster the group's legitimacy as an independent organization. Under chairman John J. McCloy (1958–1965), the Ford foundation knowingly employed U.S. intelligence agents and set up a committee to handle CIA requests. In the 1960s, the Foundation expanded internationally in Latin America, funding programs promoting democracy and freedom (the same excuse we’ve all heard leading to the invasion of Iraq, today also used to justify “Israel’s” genocide) in areas where socialism specifically was taking hold.
Are we to believe that the Ford Foundation suddenly had a change of heart sometime in the 1990s or 2000s and is now completely independent and working for the greater good of the world? Or should we believe what the evidence leads us to, that the Pulitzer Center sponsored the Buzzfeed paper exactly because it aligned with the interests of the State Department and CIA? The Ford Foundation is to this day still one of the three biggest NGOs in the US.
There is no such thing as independent journalism. Even investigative journalists are by and large assets of the state, even if they don’t know it. In 2016 the Panama Papers were leaked: a huge database of tax evaders, directly naming millionaires and billionaires. Spoiler alert: every millionaire does tax evasion regarldess of whether they appear in a paper or not. But more interestingly, the Panama Papers gave rise to its own copycats later.
A year later in 2017, the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists (a very official and serious-sounding name) published the Paradise Papers, a whopping 1.4 terabytes of data on tax evasion schemes from 120,000 individuals and companies. Yet, the papers were instantly caught on for not including a whole lot of US-based companies or millionaires. In 1.4 terabytes of documents, only a few (and big) US companies appeared.
A quick look into the ICIJ easily reveals the deception. The ICIJ is funded by the usual suspects: the National Endowment for Democracy, the Open Society Foundations, and the U.S. State Department directly.
Yet one wouldn’t think this from their name alone, which, like the World Uyghur Congress (we’ll get to them in a minute) and other state-sponsored NGOs is something they capitalize on.
The people in charge of these NGOs are also important to look through. Facebook, for example, is a famous example of intelligence collaboration. A Grayzone investigation reported its head of AI policy, Shira Anderson, (AI itself being an industry linked intimately with the US military) was a non-commissioned officer in the IOF Foreign Relations Unit, writing propaganda reports. Since April 2025, Shira is now Policy Counsel at OpenAI. Eyal Klein, Head of Data Science and the Messenger app, was a captain in the infamous Unit 8200, an intelligence unit of the IOF. According to the Grayzone investigation, over 100 ex-IOF were found to be employed by Meta Inc. Other Unit 8200 veterans are embedded in big tech companies such as Google, Microsoft, and Amazon.
But it also pays to look at other tools of this industry. The Pulitzer Prize, for example, who votes every year for an influential writing piece (such as the Buzzfeed piece), had some very interesting people on its 2021-2022 board.
One of them was Anne Applebaum, a writer for the Atlantic. Applebaum is best known for her anti-communist and downright fabricated history of the Soviet Union, repeating well-known lies and myths as par for the course for western ‘Sovietology’. Her work has been heavily criticized by actual historians but, strangely, this doesn’t prevent her from continuously getting new books published that just rehash older Robert Conquest talking points (himself an MI6 asset in his time). Anne has also been a fellow at the National Endowment for Democracy — them again, of course — and the Council on Foreign Relations, which receives government funding to post articles like “How Trump Can Finish the Job in Iran—and the Middle East” to their magazine, Foreign Affairs.
Another member of the Pulitzer prize board was Minouche Shafik, president of Columbia University at the time of the student encampments for Palestine. She is the one who sent the New York police loose on the students, and collaborated with the police department to later help them arrest students who had participated in the protests. She was on the Pulitzer Prize 2023-2024 board.
The relationship with OSINT and CIA journalists
OSINT stands for ‘open-source intelligence’. The name itself, while not entirely wrong, is sort of a misnomer. One would readily assume that it has something to do with open-source software, which is generally independent and maintained as a labor of love by small groups of developers who do not see a cent of profit from their creation. Open-source intelligence has nothing to do with that; the word open-source comes from the idea that the sources they use are ‘open’ (which doesn’t mean anything), such as Google Maps imagery or Linkedin profiles.
While it is true that one can use these resources to some extent, e.g. to track the Pizza Index on Google Business sheets, it is not an innovative, deep-hitting tool that strikes fear in the hearts of evil tyrants everywhere, giving power back to the people.
This is still the job of the US State Department, the NSA and the CIA.
That is to say, while OSINT ‘experts’ like to claim that they are doing independent investigations and using tools “anyone can use” to make their claims, there is a much deeper tie with the US government at play: much like the Buzzfeed investigation or the ICIJ Paradise Papers, intelligence agencies send the information over to their ‘investigative journalists’ to be repackaged in a way that seems trustworthy and a result of hard manual work.
The reality is anything but. Bellingcat, which describes itself as an independent international collective of researchers, investigators and citizen journalists (using OSINT in the process) is actually funded almost entirely by European, UK and US intelligence agencies including, once again, the NED as well as the European Union and the Human Rights Foundation — another cog in the MICIMATT, the extension to the Military-Industrial complex that stands for Military-Industrial-Congressional-Intelligence-Media-Academia-Think-Tank complex.
The Buzzfeed investigation into Xinjiang province also relied on what they would call open-source intelligence (though they did not use the term): the satellite imagery, for one.
Adrian Zenz was also a prominent figure around the height of the Uyghur genocide myth. He is a fundamentalist Christian who believes that he was sent by God on a mission against communism. He also relied on open-source intelligence and published ‘leaked’ documents that were later found to be fabricated (which asks the question: who exactly would fabricate a document that justifies regime change and leak it to the public?). On top of which he admitted himself that he was unable to read Chinese. He is now a Senior Fellow in China studies (despite not speaking a word of Chinese) at the Victims of Communism Foundation, a foundation started by the US congress.
His inability to read Chinese is a trait he shares with Sophie Richardson, who served as the China Director for the Human Rights Watch from 2006 to 2023 and, by her own admission, never picked up a word of Chinese despite 17 years of opportunities. She is now employed at the Chinese Human Rights Defenders NGO — another “NGO” based in the West that is very, very concerned about what goes on in China while not disclosing what their ties are — presumably having still not learned a word of Chinese. It’s also interesting that a white person cares so much about the plight of the Chinese people (despite that they by and large support their government’s policies) that she would make an entire career out of it, but doesn’t care enough to learn their language. In a Reddit AMA (archive link), she admitted that she only visited China once, in 1989, and that her Chinese is ‘not so great these days’. She also admits in that AMA to finding ways to embed assets in China past legal migration means, essentially confessing to circumventing Chinese law.
OSINT itself leads to deaths and the manufacturing of consent for those deaths. In 2025, during the “Israeli”-conducted genocide on Gaza, a Twitter user named VleckieHond posted a satellite image she obtained online of what she claimed to have analyzed as a “possible Houthi military site”. The US military bombed the site three days later, and killed the 28 people there. They were children and civilians gathering for a traditional event. Vleckie has been publicly cited by the West Point academy as an ‘ever-resourceful analyst’. In response, Vleckie has made a measly 500 Euros donation to two NGOs, but has not vowed to stop doing “OSINT”.
This is not entirely new either. In the modern day, people place value around indie media of all kinds: music, games, movies, and even online content. We want products made by the little man, not poisoned by corporate interests and focus groups. We want things that come from the heart, made for the love of the game and not profit. The state will understandably exploit this, much like marketers do (see how most ‘independent’ music labels are owned by one of the five big record labels). It’s the same as pinkwashing, exploiting LGBT issues to bomb ‘backwards’ countries in a pretext of being progressive. For decades our countries banned anything regarding the rights of LGBT individuals; it’s only been in the last two decades that progress has reliably been made in their struggles. Now that it is more socially acceptable to be LGBT, it has been co-opted by the state to be used as a weapon to facilitate more imperialism. It taunts us — all of us, not just the affected minorities — with our grassroots victories, saying “now that we kindly gave you rights, surely you will support us killing people in your name?”
In the 20th century, in the context of the Cold War, the CIA could operate more openly. Edward Hunter was a prolific journalist in the 1950s, writing for the International News Service. During the invasion of Korea (1950-1953), he coined the term brainwashing, using it as a form of propaganda to discredit US soldiers who refused to fight against North Korea. Hunter was a CIA agent, and not just on their payroll, but an actual employee of the CIA on assignment as a journalist.
The idea behind brainwashing was that there was an ancient, mystical practice known only to the Chinese (who came to Korea’s defense as part of a volunteer battalion) to ‘reprogram’ people. It gave rise to an entire genre of fiction and the idea of the ‘trigger phrase’ that activates the ‘programming’. During the war, 5000 of the 7200 captured US POWs petitioned the US government to stop the war. The government used the idea of brainwashing, laundered by their journalist to the public, to attack them as having low IQs, being alcoholics, or even having STDs to explain why they would be susceptible to brainwashing into supporting the ‘evil’ communists who were, in actuality, fighting for their country’s independence from imperialist meddling. These soldiers correctly recognized they had no reason to be dying in Korea for business interests, especially with how hard the campaign was in the winter.
It becomes clear that most of this information is collected and analyzed much, much higher in the pipeline, and what we see is but the very end of a long process far larger than three Buzzfeed journalists could ever achieve. Ultimately, all the ‘journalists’ do is publish something that has been investigated, vetted and analyzed with greatly more powerful tools than Google Maps and documents leaked to a Proton Mail address by a good samaritan. They only append their name to it so as to collect the fame and money, and perhaps even win a Pulitzer prize to rub their ego.
The information laundering pipeline
The pipeline goes like this: The US State Department sets an agenda → the CIA collects information to manufacture consent for it → this information is disseminated to ‘independent’, trustworthy journalists and their outlets → the State Department uses the resulting articles to act on their agenda → the ‘investigation’ then receives awards and prizes so as to render it even more trustworthy and deflect possible questioning into the government’s actions.
All of this forms information laundering. The government pass money through a few middlemen, and what comes out at the end of the pipeline is essentially a State Department report, if one that is not attached to their name but has the veneer of ‘independent’ or ‘investigative’ journalism attached to it. Because philanthropy is usually seen positively (no doubt through the millions spent by the likes of the Open Society or Gates Foundation to whitewash their name), this information is usually easy to find from the NGOs’ own websites. They are proud to tell the world that they are funded by CIA outfits and the US government.
The link is not so obvious anymore with the National Endowment for Democracy. The NED is a CIA outfit — this much they don’t deny. However, following a Grayzone investigation in 2024, the NED took their grants database offline, which provided an easy-to-search interface of all the destabilizing NGOs they funded around the world. At this time, the database only remains on the Wayback Machine in a toned-down version: the organization name auto-complete still works, but their page is not searchable.
When typing out “world uyghur”, one finds that the NED has provided money to the World Uyghur Congress, a Germany-based outfit with a serious-sounding name that claims to represent all Uyghurs in the world, despite not being based in Xinjiang China, their homeland. The World Uyhgur Congress has ties to ETIM (and the Grey Wolves, a terrorist group operating in Turkey) through its spiritual founder, Isa Yusuf Alptekin, a failed warlord in WW2-era China and father to the World Uyghur Congress founder Erkin Alptekin. In 2019, Isa Dolkun, the current president of the WUC received the 2019 Democracy Award from the NED. The World Uyghur Congress is based in Munich, which is also where Radio Free Europe was located, and Erkin himself worked for Radio Free Europe before creating the World Uyghur Congress.
The succeeding president of the WUC after Erkin was Rebiya Kadeer, a multi-millionaire who is married to Sidik Rouzi. Sidik worked for Voice of America and Radio Free Asia — them again. Omer Kanat is the WUC’s chairman of the Executive committee and, you guessed it, also worked for Radio Free Asia. Specifically, he was the senior editor to the RFA from 1999 to 2009.
It’s the CIA all the way down.
To pretend to the public that the WUC is not a tool of imperial agenda, they feature a prominent ‘Donate now’ button on their website, where unwitting visitors are encouraged to donate as much as 1000 dollars in one go.
Much like the Pulitzer prize, these prestigious awards (e.g. the NED democracy award) are only prestigious because we are told they are prestigious. Yet, their recipients are decided far in advance to advance an imperial agenda. What was relevant in 2019 to make Isa the recipient of an award over 2018, or 2020? Well, in 2019 there were the Hong Kong riots (themselves funded by the NED), and the US was also publishing a lot of news about them.
Similarly, in late 2024 Proton Mail, used by activists worldwide for their encrypted email service, sent out an email to its customers about a fundraiser they were doing. One recipient — the first one — to this fundraiser was Freedom House. Freedom House is a far-right NGO, once again operating under an acceptable name (everybody likes freedom, right? Freedom is a good thing, so Freedom House is a good thing), a US government outfit. It was founded by Eleanor Roosevelt, wife of then-President Franklin Delano Roosevelt, and is currently funded by the US State Department.
Freedom House is pretty openly right-wing, and doesn’t need anyone’s money: it gets more than enough from the literal US government.
There is thus a link between Proton Mail and the US government, and this is instantly worrying. Freedom House clearly doesn’t need funding from poor civilians like you or I. If the government deems them important for a specific goal they are trying to achieve, they will increase their budget. Therefore, why is Proton Mail — a company based in Switzerland, but not founded by Swiss nationals — running a fundraiser for them at this time?
It is not the first time the CIA would be embedded in Swiss politics. In 1952, a company named Crypto AG was founded in Zug, Switzerland. They provided cryptography services mostly to governments, which at the times were entire machines. It was found out that the company was a joint CIA-BND front (Western Germany’s intelligence service) in the 1990s. For decades, they had supplied encryption machines to governments around the world while secretly retaining the decryption keys. A Swiss government investigation found that the Swiss intelligence services were well aware of Crypto AG’s true owners. They even benefited from it.
Freedom House is perhaps best known for its ‘freedom in the world’ map, a map that conveniently paints US allies as “free” countries (whatever that means), and current US enemies as “unfree” countries. In their methodology, they point out that a big indicator of freedom is market regulations. That is, the fewer regulations against companies poisoning our food and water, the more free a country will be (search for the keyword ‘economic’ on this page).
Why does all of this happen?
The burning question remains: why does all of this happen? Why does the US government create these vast networks of human rights organizations, awards and prizes, fake journalists who publish what they’re given — but also relies on them to draw on this information?
The answer is as simple as it is logical: the state exists for a purpose, and that purpose is to enforce the will of a class over another. In the United States as in much of the world, that class is the capitalists — those who own production, and decide where, when and how it happens for all of us. We, on the other hand, work for them to make things that belong to our employers from the moment they exist.
In other words, the state works for class interests. This is a constant truth in history, no matter the state. As far back as the earliest states (see Mesopotamia), this has been true, because the state emerges in history to fulfill a purpose, not because two people were bored one day and said “what if we invented the state”.
In that quest to have its interests safeguarded, expanded, and giving dividends year after year, the class in control of the state will do anything it needs to. This is not so much a criticism by itself; it’s an observation. But in doing so, the capitalist state will bomb weddings in Yemen. It will set up spy networks in China, and cry when its spies get rightfully arrested. It will arrest dissidents who protest genocide. It will launder information through reputable news outlets so as to get you on board with its agenda, making you think that killing 28 children and civilians in Sana’a was actually good and necessary. It will try to make you think that invading Iraq was necessary, that bombing Iran is in your interest, or that you should support “Israel”.
But it doesn’t stop at “Israel” and Palestine. It’s a whole system that has existed since before any of us were born. While the US is conducting genocide in Palestine, it is also conducting regime change in Sudan and Yemen. It is gearing for war against China over Taiwan — and this is why you’ve been hearing a lot about the Taiwan ‘issue’ in Western media and how pressing it is for Trump to do something about it soon, despite China saying over and over again they have all the time in the world and want to resolve this diplomatically between themselves. The state does this because not to do so would eventually put it in jeopardy and threaten its existence.
You may have heard the (truthful) joke that after a trial the judge, prosecutor and attorney all get drinks together. The same is true of capitalists: they may be in competition with each other economically, but their goal as a class is to facilitate the extraction of profits and make money. To do so, they will make the state do their bidding as a class (even if individuals from that class sometimes emerge above others, e.g. how Bill Gates was the wealthiest person on Earth for decades, and snuffed out competition). Because the purpose of the state is not to protect you or offer you a good quality of life or anything like that. This is secondary to its true goal, which is to continue the supremacy of one class over another. It may give you some concessions once in a while, but this is only so that it can continue doing what it was meant to do. We talked recently about how the purpose of a system is what it does. Well, this is it. The purpose of the capitalist state is to facilitate capitalist interests. If the capitalist says “I want to exploit Haitians for pennies on the dollar”, the state says “yes sir.” If the capitalist says “I want to sell more missiles,” the state says “of course sir.” That’s all there is to it.
And that is why there is a media laundering industry today.
As always, please feel free to post Palestinian fundraisers in the comment section, including your own.
Excellent article.