The momentous news of Julian Assange’s release has sent shockwaves throughout the political and media landscape. It is a remarkable and long-overdue conclusion to a dark journey that began with Assange’s being holed up in an Ecuadorean Embassy for nearly ten years (2010–2019) to avoid trumped-up and politically motivated “rape” charges in Sweden. In the middle of the 2016 election, Assange’s organization, Wikileaks, published a trove of emails that proved highly embarrassing to the Democrat establishment and is generally acknowledged to have played a not-insignificant role in the outcome of the 2016 election.

In the United States, no one went to prison for the 2008 crash or the disastrous Iraq War (which Wikileaks infamously exposed). On a more pedestrian level, roving bands of dysgenic zombies are able to loot and trash convenience stores with impunity. One thing that remains criminal, however, is embarrassing the corrupt and powerful, and especially so during an election year. Assange learned this the hard way when the American Justice Department unsealed a bogus, clearly politically motivated indictment against him in 2019, setting in motion a series of events that ultimately landed him in the UK’s Belmarsh Prison, where he languished under horrid conditions for five years until his release yesterday.

We at Revolver News have been enthusiastic supporters of Assange from the beginning—see, for instance, the interview we did with Assange’s fiancee here. We welcome his freedom, but of course we find it a shame that it happened this late and find the regime’s manner of saving face by forcing Assange to plea guilty to the sham conspiracy to obtain and disclose classified information in exchange for crediting Assange for his time served in Belmarsh. Many others, such as Tucker Carlson and Glenn Greenwald, celebrated Assange’s release. Not everyone, of course, was happy. Among those who publicly registered their disapproval of Assange’s newfound freedom were none other than the goober traitor Mike Pence.

It might come as a surprise to some that a former Trump administration official, let alone Trump’s vice president, should come out so publicly against Assange. After all, didn’t Wikileaks’ exposure of Democrat corruption help Trump win in 2016?

From a broader perspective, Assange and Wikileaks’ history of exposing the crimes of the national security state, in particular the War on Terror, would seem to consort ideologically with Trump, who bravely and famously defeated the Bushes and the Clintons in one of the biggest embarrassments to the establishment in 2016. The answer here is complicated. While Trump’s anti-establishment energy certainly synergized with the efforts of Wikileaks, the very same deep state elements that took every step to undermine Trump, of course, went after Assange. Trump may have been nominally in charge of the national security bureaucracies and Justice Department, but this never stopped the bureaucracies from working tirelessly to undermine his presidency. It should come as no surprise then that the same national security bureaucracy that opposed Trump while Trump was president should have gone ahead with the indictment of Assange. Most disturbingly, there have been credible reports that Trump’s own Secretary of State secretly plotted to have Assange assassinated.

That Pompeo has always been bad news, of course, should come as no surprise to regular Revolver readers. See, for instance, our classic piece here or our interview with Trump on Pompeo here.

It is worth revisiting some of the reasons the establishment and deep state hate Assange so much.

Assange Exposed the Deep State and Hillary Clinton’s Criminal Policy in Syria

In the 2016 election, one of the many fundamental differences separating Trump from Clinton was foreign policy. As Obama’s Secretary of State, Hillary Clinton was directly involved in some of the worst foreign policy disasters since Bush’s Iraq War—for instance, Clinton’s notorious involvement in ruining Libya. A particularly hot-button geopolitical issue at the time was Syria, in which the deep state was desperate for another regime change operation to topple Bashar Assad. Many who analyzed the situation at the time noted that the United States seemed to be in a very uncomfortable alliance with the so-called “Sunni rebels,” which included radical Sunni elements and, reportedly, ISIS. There was a dark logic to it—ISIS was Assad’s enemy, so we should support them, however surreptitiously.

What was clear to keen geopolitical observers became indisputable when Wikileaks leaked an email involving Hillary Clinton in which a State Department official casually let it slip that “Al Qaeda is on our side in Syria.”

Thankfully, when Donald Trump defeated Hillary, he pivoted away from US support for the Sunni rebels, Al Qaeda, and ISIS, and sure enough, this led to the fall of the ISIS caliphate in Syria.

Assange Exposed Early On the Dark Side of Big Tech

If you read one thing by Julian Assange, it must be his hilarious, incisive, and insightful assessment of big tech called “Google Is Not What It Seems.” Keep in mind that this piece was written in 2011, far before the problem of Big Tech censorship was widely understood, much less the dynamic that the censorship tools and approach were repurposed from psychological warfare tools Big Tech brought to the Arab Spring and other foreign conflicts, courtesy of former State Department Official and Google’s Censorship Architect Jared Cohen.

To get a sense of Assange’s humor and keen perception of human character, take a glance at the following two paragraphs describing his impressions of former Google CEO Eric Schmidt and Jared Cohen, respectively.

Julian Assange via Newsweek:

For a man of systematic intelligence, Schmidt’s politics—such as I could hear from our discussion—were surprisingly conventional, even banal. He grasped structural relationships quickly, but struggled to verbalize many of them, often shoehorning geopolitical subtleties into Silicon Valley marketese or the ossified State Department micro-language of his companions. He was at his best when he was speaking (perhaps without realizing it) as an engineer, breaking down complexities into their orthogonal components.

I found Cohen a good listener, but a less interesting thinker, possessed of that relentless conviviality that routinely afflicts career generalists and Rhodes Scholars. As you would expect from his foreign-policy background, Cohen had a knowledge of international flash points and conflicts and moved rapidly between them, detailing different scenarios to test my assertions. But it sometimes felt as if he was riffing on orthodoxies in a way that was designed to impress his former colleagues in official Washington.

The following paragraphs capture early and perfectly the emerging role of Big Tech as a key tool of the national security state and empire.

But as Google Ideas shows, the company’s “philanthropic” efforts, too, bring it uncomfortably close to the imperial side of U.S. influence. If Blackwater/Xe Services/Academi was running a program like Google Ideas, it would draw intense critical scrutiny. But somehow Google gets a free pass.

Whether it is being just a company or “more than just a company,” Google’s geopolitical aspirations are firmly enmeshed within the foreign-policy agenda of the world’s largest superpower. As Google’s search and Internet service monopoly grows, and as it enlarges its industrial surveillance cone to cover the majority of the world’s population, rapidly dominating the mobile phone market and racing to extend Internet access in the global south, Google is steadily becoming the Internet for many people. Its influence on the choices and behavior of the totality of individual human beings translates to real power to influence the course of history.

If the future of the Internet is to be Google, that should be of serious concern to people all over the world—in Latin America, East and Southeast Asia, the Indian subcontinent, the Middle East, sub-Saharan Africa, the former Soviet Union and even in Europe—for whom the Internet embodies the promise of an alternative to U.S. cultural, economic, and strategic hegemony.

A “don’t be evil” empire is still an empire.

Read the full piece from Assange, published at Newsweek, here.

Assange Humiliated the Military-Industrial Complex 

Assange famously called out the sad reality that the goals of our foreign wars are not to be successful but to be endless and thereby continue to fill the coffers of our security elite.

Take, for instance, the following iconic (and representative) clip:

It is a sad irony that just as Assange is freed, we face the very real prospect that President Trump, the presumptive GOP nominee for 2024, may in fact face jail time for what amounts to the same crime: embarrassing the corrupt ruling class of the United States. We will continue to follow Assange’s case with interest and congratulate him and his family on his newfound freedom.