 Frank will introduce our next testifier giving testimony. Okay, thanks, Rachel. Mickey Huff is a professor of social science, history, and journalism, chair of journalism, co-chair of history at Diablo Valley College in California. He is director of the Media Watchdog Project Sensor and president of its parent nonprofit, the Media Freedom Foundation. Recently, he was co-author of the United States of Distraction, media manipulation in post-truth America and what we can do about it. And he's the co-editor of Project Sensor State of the Free Press 2021. Mickey, you're on. Unmute, you gotta unmute. Thanks so much. I was just given permission to unmute. So thanks so much for having me. Of course, Code Pink, Frank, Rachel, all of you, thanks so much for this very, very important moment of this historic event itself about the significance of history. And so again, it's a real honor to be here with so many wonderful people, many of whom I know and others whom I haven't met that I greatly admire. Teaching history matters and that's what I do. I'm sort of at the intersection of both history and journalism, recent historiography and the importance of journalism, more specifically independent truth-telling journalism that speaks truth to power and speaks truth as power. And I'm gonna repeat again that teaching history matters. Censoring the truth during the US Cold War up to the present is the title of the brief presentation today. So I'm gonna kind of pack in a number of things that I think are pretty significant. There's been so many fantastic people before me here today that have mentioned a lot of these things. So I don't wanna be too redundant. A number of fantastic people to follow, including my great friend, Peter Phillips, the former director of Project Sensor. You know, William Faulkner once wrote that the past is never dead, it's not even past. And it's so important for us to acknowledge that. Mark Twain quipped once upon a time that history may not repeat itself, but it rhymes. And we are certainly in a Dr. Seuss moment historiographically, never mind the fact that Dr. Seuss is back in the news for other reasons. Talk about that maybe some other time. You know, I'd also like to rift briefly here with a nod too to the covert action quarterly folks. Paraphrasing Ralph McGhee, the great CIA whistleblower, today's fake news is tomorrow's fake history. And so yesterday's fake history frames today's fake news. So this is a Cold War Redux feedback loop, right? And what is fake news again? It's nothing new, it's misinformation, it's disinformation, it's propaganda, it's information control. And you go back to the 1960s, we recall the grams over at the Washington Post. Yes, that's still the CIA paper of record with Jeff Bezos and the $600 million cloud contract they've gotten. Journalism is the first rough draft of history. And if that's the case, we really need to get it right the first time. And I don't mean with the disinformation that we saw in these legacy papers buttressing Cold War propaganda. I mean, you know, going back to George Seldie's and IF Stone, meaning that the role of journalists is to tell the public what's actually going on. And if we do go back in our history and the independent alternative annals of our past, we have long had truth tellers, we've long had people telling us what was happening, whether it's long before the Cold War, during or since in its next or new recent iteration. So, you know, the Cold War itself is sometime in the making, officially 45 years long, but the actual hostility toward Russia or Communism are specifically long predates the Cold War. The real reasons for our hostilities, again, civil rights and labor movements in the United States were long shrouded. It's been through xenophobia, fear of immigration, fear of taking jobs, fear of invasion, fear of rivals, trying to threaten to take Americans freedom. None of those things have actually really been true. And this is why we need untold histories to be told with a nod to Peter Kuznick and Oliver Stone. Peter earlier today, speaking with everyone. So if you go back and follow this hostility rooted in U.S. oppression against civil rights and labor movements, wage slavery, pro-capitalist plutocratic forces go way back before the Civil War. We heard that earlier today too with the abolitionist women and so on, really ramped up significantly with the Haymarket Massacre in 1886, right? There's a gross hostility towards labor rights and this type of actual freedom in our history. There's a strong anti-capitalist sort of fear that the establishment has that they wanna cramp down. And so that predates the Cold War specifically. We saw it during the, working with the police at the Haymarket Square, working with private Pinkertons and places like Homestead and other places all the way up through the beginning of the FBI, later Cohen-Telpro. There's been a serious effort to control narratives and suppressed narratives that don't jive with the fear, the fear-mongering that takes place from the top down. And so, the U.S. is of course, and involved not only in the suppression of critics during World War I at home, but the U.S. also meddled in the Bolshevik Revolution, the whole first red scare that spawned the Soviet arc, right? The hostility against people from Emma Goldman to presidential candidate socialists like Eugene Depps, the Espionage and Sedition Act, largely aimed not just to suppress critics of World War I, but to suppress critics of pro-capitalism and to suppress any support for the Bolshevik Revolution. You go, this by the way is a story that's been told by filmmakers like Scott Noble, just directed a brand new series called The War at Home that I highly recommend I wrote a review for. And you can see it at projectcensor.org. There are many folks as I'm saying that have talked about the history of suppression and the suppression of the truth in our historiographic narratives. But historically, World War I was really a big kickoff. That's where we saw Eddie Bernays, the nephew of Sigmund Freud, working with the Creole Commission to fashion false narratives against Germany at the time, but also those morphed into anti-Russia, anti-Soviet, anti-communism type narratives. If you go back and look what Bernays said in 1928, the conscious and intelligent manipulation and organized habits and opinions of the masses is an important element in quote, democratic society, right? And it is these, those who manipulate this unseen mechanism of society constitute an invisible government, which is the trueling power of the country. It is they who pull the wires, which control the public mind. And it is from that period forward, right? That we will see this effort to control narratives, right? Where is it gone down the memory hole of the 1934 business plot to overthrow FDR, who claimed he saved capitalism and ADAs? He's not even a socialist, right? Smedley Butler, the most decorated Marine in US history, warned us that war was a racket, not about democracy, not about liberation, but it was about suppression of people's movements for actual freedom and economic liberty. So, you know, this is a long standing conflict that we see coming through the Great Depression. It led, of course, to, you know, the US, don't forget, during this period, supported. Major corporations in the US supported the rise of Hitler to power, supported the Nazis in Germany against the Soviet Union at the time. And then, of course, we significantly ramped up our efforts against the Soviet Union, again, at the ending of World War II with the bombing of Japan, as Peter Kuznick and Oliver Stone point out, the betrayal of Henry Wallace and so forth. So we have a rich history that tells these stories, but we don't really get to teach it. Not enough people teach this history moving forward. And it's important that we do, because the Cold War is a long period of our time that was marked by the murder of tens of millions of people, the suppression of the rights of millions of people at home, further collaboration with Nazis and neo-Nazis from Operation Paperclip all the way through with the Klan, all the way through the Obama-Biden administration with working with neo-Nazis in Ukraine. This is our untold history. After World War II, we get the second red scare under McCarthy, building off of the House and American Activities Committee, ramping off of Cointel Pro, the suppression of anti-war and civil rights movement, the lies of the Gulf of Tonkin incident, the Norm Solomon eloquently points out in his work that he compares with the WMD's lies. Again, there's been a long raft of propaganda, suppression and lies that are all in maintenance of the U.S. as a corporation, as a major global hegemon, right? Vietnam, one of the longest of those, including the Kent State oppression, the killing of people at Kent State. We see all the way through Cointel Pro, through the church committee hearings, only to re-kick off another kind of Cold War raft in the 1980s against mostly the Middle East and Latin and South America. Again, history may not repeat itself, but surely it seems to rhyme. The war on drugs is a big part of this, as we heard earlier, and great truth tellers and whistleblowers like Gary Webb calling attention to that. We've only seen this sort of get doubled down in the so-called war on terror era, where the same playbook has been used over and over and over to demonize countries and Russia has been back in that playbook for the last decade. So I would like again to remind everybody that this serious ramping up of the anti-Russia is a throwback to a Cold War that is not actually ended. We see it now with open threats against Russia calling Putin a killer, which perhaps of course he is, but that doesn't exonerate the U.S. or NATO that have been further expanding and is responsible for the deaths of millions of people, even since the so-called ending of the Cold War in Iraq, in the Middle East. These are real serious and ongoing problems that we really need to turn our attention to. The latest iteration of this in Russian meddling in this canard, I know will be addressed later by people like David Swanson, most recently by Matt Taibi. We really need to call on their face these bald-faced lies. We need to call them for what they are. We need to really support pro-democracy and freedom movements, not just at home, but abroad. And we need to not succumb to the fear-mongering of this third red scare, as we have called it and written about it in Counterpunch and the work we've done at Project Censored, continues to call out these bogus and false top-down narratives and maintenance of U.S. power. So I know my time is up, but I'd like to remind us all that a better world is possible. Organizations that sponsored this event and put them on make it possible, but we can't do it without understanding our history. And in order to understand our history, we have to uncensor it and we need journalistic integrity in the present that goes back and resurrects that history so that we can have more contextualized narratives in the present that call out the current lies and propaganda moving forward. And with that, I'd like to thank all of you for all the amazing work you do and you can follow more of our work at ProjectCensored.org. Many thanks to all of you. Right on. Wonderful, very inspiring. And teachers, you're a college professor. I'm a high school teacher. We, y'all need to try and get into the high schools, however you can, because the teacher's politics, the politics of teachers at the level where I'm teaching at and how they're teaching history is why they're coming to you in college, not knowing anything. So it's very important we reach down to the younger kids also. I wanna say also maybe January 6th was one of the best things that ever happened because it freaked a lot of people out. One of the calls right now is tomorrow, Monday, call our Congress people on this, put them on notice for this larger picture that we're coming to understand and put more into the public eye. And please, if someone can find and remembers the reference, those pictures of January 6th when they're finally flooding up the stairs, I've been looking on the internet. You see it on the video, but there's no still shot. Please, someone tell me in the chat that they have seen it also. You've seen it dozens of times. There's one sign at the top of that stair. There's a bunch of crazy people and a bunch of flags, a bunch of Trump people, a bunch of guns, but there's one white sign and it says, the true hidden enemy is communism. People, if we have that still shot and we go tomorrow to our Congress people and say, do you understand that you've been making this and you've been allowing this and you've been appeasing this for 75 years, maybe they'll start to understand because people are genuinely freaked out and we have to honor that, but that sign, find that, it's very powerful.