By Matt Agorist

As the clock hits midnight, rest assured that the information controllers within the mainstream media and the establishment are preparing an entire year’s worth of propaganda and misinformation to keep you in the dark about issues that really matter in 2019.

As divisive partisan rubbish filled the airways to keep Americans divided in 2018, many very important stories were buried under a sea of misinformation — much of which was likely deliberate.

The Free Thought Project has compiled a list of five of the biggest stories the mainstream media ignored or swept under the rug in 2018.

1. The Real Crimes of George H.W. Bush

Kicking off the list at number one is an issue that we watched play out all December long as flags across the country sat at half mast to honor war criminal and mass murder George H.W. Bush. Although countless hours of coverage were devoted to honoring Bush, not a single mainstream media outlet reported on his crimes during his presidency.

Bush was a man “of the highest character,” said his son and fellow former president, George W. Bush. “He loved America and served with character, class, and integrity,” tweeted former U.S. Attorney and #Resistance icon Preet Bharara. According to Barack Obama, Bush’s life was “a testament to the notion that public service is a noble, joyous calling. And he did tremendous good along the journey.” Apple boss Tim Cook even weighed in and said: “We have lost a great American.”

While the establishment praised Bush for opening charities and his legacy as president, the media conveniently ignored the fact that Dubya’s daddy slaughtered women and children in Iraq in the ’90s.

Just like his criminal son, this “great American” lied about weapons of mass destruction to invade and occupy Iraq. During his presidency, he committed war crimes, dropping 88,500 tons of bombs on Iraq which resulted in the utter slaughter of thousands of innocent civilians. According to Human Rights Watch, these attacks were “a serious violation of the laws of war.”

It was George Bush Snr. who ordered the bombing of the “Highway of Death” in 1991. The death toll remains unknown. Robert Fisk, the journalist, said he “lost count of the Iraqi corpses crammed into the smoldering wreckage or slumped face down in the sand”. pic.twitter.com/Fj8cnC4aAi — Crimes of USA (@CrimesofUS) December 1, 2018

But fret not, free world, this great American “served” his country proudly and is a hero and advocate of freedom—according to your television.

2. The yellow vests protests, their success, and the fact that police joined in

A grassroots movement made up of citizens who have become fed up with the political establishment in France has been growing since early November and it was largely downplayed by Western media. The movement, known as “gilets jaunes” or “yellow vests” began as an anti-tax protest but then merged folks from the left and the right into a much broader anti-government protest.

Because populist movements reject the left/right paradigm, they are far stronger as they bring in people from all over the spectrum. It also makes them quite rare; and what we are witnessing with the yellow vest movement is approaching historical levels of populism.

As philosopher and political analyst Aleksandr Gelyevich Dugin explains:

First of all, the fact that populist movements are directed against the political elite as a whole, without making a distinction, whether it is right or left-wing, is striking. This is the ‘uprising of the periphery of society against its center’.

As the yellow vests protests took place across France, the government slowly acquiesced to the demands of citizens. The protest was so successful that French Prime Minister Edouard Philippe announced a six-month suspension of the fuel tax which triggered the unrest.

Also, police officers were seen in multiple videos joining the protesters. They even threatened a protest of their own after they found that the French government was ripping them off as well.

3. The federal government acknowledged the possibility that explosives were used to destroy WTCs on 9/11

In what can be described as a monumental step forward in the relentless pursuit of 9/11 truth, a United States Attorney has agreed to comply with federal law requiring submission to a Special Grand Jury of evidence that explosives were used to bring down the World Trade Centers.

The Lawyers’ Committee for 9/11 Inquiry successfully submitted a petition to the federal government demanding that the U.S. Attorney present to a Special Grand Jury extensive evidence of yet-to-be-prosecuted federal crimes relating to the destruction of three World Trade Center Towers on 9/11 (WTC1, WTC2 and WTC7).

After waiting months for the reply, the U.S. Attorney responded in a letter, noting that they will comply with the law. According to the report:

The Lawyers’ Committee’s April 10th 52-page original Petition was accompanied by 57 exhibits and presented extensive evidence that explosives were used to destroy three WTC buildings. That evidence included independent scientific laboratory analysis of WTC dust samples showing the presence of high-tech explosives and/or incendiaries; numerous first-hand reports by First Responders of explosions at the WTC on 9/11; expert analysis of seismic evidence that explosions occurred at the WTC towers on 9/11 prior to the airplane impacts and prior to the building collapses; and expert analysis by architects, engineers, and scientists concluding that the rapid onset symmetrical near-free-fall acceleration collapse of three WTC high rise buildings on 9/11 exhibited the key characteristics of controlled demolition.

4. Videos, officer testimonies, and citizen journalists revealed startling new information in regards to 1 October

For months after the shooting, the LVMPD refused to release any information. Only after they fought the release all the way to the state supreme court, and were handed down a ruling forcing them to release information, did they ever budge.

Luckily, there are outlets like the Las Vegas Review-Journal who have been persistent in scrubbing the details of this case. However, because the mainstream media no longer reports on this information, it essentially gets buried upon its release.

TFTP has been compiling this information as it is nothing short of bombshell.

In August, a report surfaced suggesting that Stephen Paddock’s girlfriend, Marilou Danley could’ve been an FBI asset. According to a credit application, as reported by True Pundit, Danley listed the FBI as an employer.

Also, damning video footage showed officers cowering in fear one floor below Paddock as he murdered people below. This footage barely registered as a blip in the media.

As “fact checkers” dismissed any claims of multiple shooters that day as “dangerous conspiracy theories,” officer testimony has since been released, showing that multiple officers, some of whom were on the ground when the shooting began, reported multiple shooters at multiple hotels throughout the strip.

“Multiple shooters” is mentioned ten times in the officer testimonies which was quietly released earlier this year. Not surprisingly, no major media outlets reported on it.

5. Alternative media was attacked, hundreds of outlets — including TFTP — wiped off the face of social media

Finishing off the list of stories ignored by the mainstream media is the fact that the mainstream media, social media giants, and the Atlantic Council all moved to silence those of us who’d dare to question the establishment.

In October, Facebook and Twitter — without warning or justification — deleted the pages of Free Thought Project and Police the Police which had over 5 million followers. During this purge, they also removed hundreds of other pages including massive police accountability groups, antiwar activists, alternative media, and libertarian news outlets.

As TFTP previously reported, in May, after Americans were successfully whipped into a tizzy of Russian hacking and meddling, along with the fake news hysteria, the Americans begging for censorship craze came to a head when Facebook partnered with the Atlantic Council.

Facebook announced that it partnered with the arm of the Council, known as the Digital Forensic Research Lab that was brought on to help the social media behemoth with “real-time insights and updates on emerging threats and disinformation campaigns from around the world.”

Apparently, Free Thought Project was one of those threats and now the hemp industry is too.

Facebook partnered with the Atlantic Council, so what, right? They can do whatever they want and hire outside third parties to help them police the platform they own, right? Yes, this is correct. However, the Atlantic Council is funded by government which makes this move especially insidious.

The Atlantic Council is the group that NATO uses to whitewash wars and foster hatred toward Russia, which in turn allows them to continue to justify themselves. It’s funded by arms manufacturers like Raytheon, Lockheed Martin, and Boeing. It is also funded by billionaire oligarchs like the Ukraine’s Victor Pinchuk and Saudi billionaire Bahaa Hariri.

The list goes on. The highly unethical HSBC group — who has been caught numerous times laundering money for cartels and terrorists — is listed as one of their top donors. They are also funded by the pharmaceutical industry, Google, the United States, the US Army, and the Air Force.

The “think tank” Facebook partnered with to make decisions on who they censor is directly funded by multiple state actors — including the United States — which voids any and all claims that Facebook is a wholly “private actor.”

It gets worse.

The Atlantic Council wields massive influence over mainstream media too, which is why when this partnership was announced, no one in the mainstream press pointed it out as the Orwellian idea that it is. Instead, headlines such as “US think tank’s tiny lab helps Facebook battle fake social media(Reuters)” and “Facebook partners with Atlantic Council to improve election security (The Hill)” were put out to spin the fact that a NATO propaganda arm is now censoring the information Americans see on Facebook.

They have even been caught engaging in the creation of actual fake news and no one in the mainstream has called them out on it.

As Bryan MacDonald so aptly noted, some of the stuff the Atlantic Council itself gets away with serves to show its power over the mainstream media. For instance, when Ben Nimmo, a one-time NATO press officer, and Atlantic Council board member, himself ludicrously insisted grammar mistakes were “proof” that social media users critical of NATO were paid Kremlin trolls, and later when he smeared a British man by labeling him a Russian bot, the popular press didn’t bother to question whether he was a fit and proper person for Facebook to engage as a censor. Even after the victim appeared on Sky News to prove he was a real person. Thus, what should have been a warning of the dangers of DFR Lab was essentially ignored.

At the time, Nimmo, instead of apologizing, wrote “interesting to see the real face of Ian56789, rather than the David Gandy one, at last (referring to his Twitter avatar). Not a troll factory account. Rather, a pro-Kremlin troll(definition based on [sic] use of someone else’s picture, systematic use of Kremlin narratives, and repetitive abusive behaviour),”

WikiLeaks was the sole voice of reason, and challenged the lobbyist. “You literally produced, with money from weapons companies and dictatorships, a fake news story that spread all over the world, defaming a very British retiree, who wants to reduce arms company profits, as a Kremlin bot,” they wrote. “So who’s the paid troll?”

You literally produced, with money from weapons companies and dictatorships, a fake news story that spread all over the world, defaming a very British retiree, who wants to reduce arms company profits, as a Kremlin bot. So who’s the paid troll? — WikiLeaks (@wikileaks) April 21, 2018

This is the group Facebook is now taking direction from in regard to who is allowed to post information on their platform. The Atlantic Council has been proven to create fake news to slander people who have an antiwar stance in an effort to keep their pro-war weapons companies in the black. It is utter insanity. However, in today’s information war, it is to be expected.

However, unless we fight back in the form of sharing information deemed “wrong think” by the censors, this problem will only continue to get worse. We must continue to alert our fellow humans to this censorship before it becomes the norm. We must use this recent purge as our Streisand moment and turn this massive and blatant act of censorship around as a tool to expose the tyrants behind it.

Matt Agorist is an honorably discharged veteran of the USMC and former intelligence operator directly tasked by the NSA. This prior experience gives him unique insight into the world of government corruption and the American police state. Agorist has been an independent journalist for over a decade and has been featured on mainstream networks around the world. Agorist is also the Editor at Large at the Free Thought Project, where this article first appeared. Follow @MattAgorist on Twitter, Steemit, and now on Facebook.