Senator Ted Cruz is lobbying to prevent a Chinese company from purchasing a Mexican radio station that broadcasts into the US.

He’s uncomfortable with the fact that a Hong Kong-based company wants to buy a radio station near Tijuana because he fears that this might be a front for the Chinese government to pump “propaganda” into his country. The US and Mexico have an agreement in place whereby the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) must approve any deals regarding sales of this sort in Mexico that result in foreign broadcasts being accessible within its borders. As with Trump’s recently signed Executive Order 13848 that practically paves the way for foreign-linked Alt-Media outlets critical – or at the very least, not overly supportive – of the US’ domestic and foreign policies to be sanctioned and possibly even censored, so too is Cruz’s lobbying campaign predicated on the same principle of shoring up his country’s weakening information monopoly by taking advantage of the newfound attention that the current administration has brought to suspected Chinese influence operations.

By extrapolation, it can be inferred that the American Establishment doesn’t trust its citizens to arrive at the “right” conclusions when exposed to a diversity of narratives about their country’s domestic and foreign policies, which testifies to the fact that the founding myth of “American Exceptionalism” is actually just that, a myth, and that most people will stop believing in it if presented with countervailing arguments. That’s why there’s such an obsession with retaining control over the narrative, and the pervasive cynicism in society that’s since become the contemporary zeitgeist means that it’s no longer enough just to label something so-called “propaganda” and hope that people won’t pay attention to it when this oftentimes has the opposite effect like in the case of RT.

In this instance, despite the New Cold War between the US and China, simply branding the broadcasts that might be made out of the Mexican radio station by the Hong Kong-based company as “propaganda” wouldn’t suffice in getting Americans to ignore them because some folks could actually become more attracted to these messages because of it. Cruz is apparently so concerned that enough Americans will listen to this Chinese company in spite of knowing that it’s their country’s chief geostrategic rival that he doesn’t want to take any chances that it could eventually lead to political consequences of any sort in southern California or elsewhere, hence why he’s adamant that it shouldn’t even have the chance to spread its messages within the US’ borders. Counterproductively, this says a lot more about the American Establishment’s lack of confidence in its own narratives than it does about the suspected intentions of China’s.

The post presented is the partial transcript of the CONTEXT COUNTDOWN radio program on Sputnik News, aired on Friday Sep 21, 2018:

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