💭 Kari Lake Halperin, an American former television news anchor and political candidate, held a press conference on Tuesday following her three-day Maricopa County Superior Court trial fighting Maricopa County’s fraudulent mail-in ballot signature verification procedures.
As revealed at trial by Lake’s attorneys and Maricopa County’s own data, Maricopa County did not accurately verify tens, if not hundreds, of thousands of mail-in signatures; they couldn’t possibly have.
Judge Peter A. Thompson again ruled in favor of Defendants late last night, claiming that “level one and level two signature review did take place in some fashion.” This is a complete lie and he knows it. But it plays into the Democrat Party’s integrity-free election plans. Anything goes. Everything will be counted.
This is the end of America. But Democrats want power.
Kari Lake attorney Kurt Olsen told the Court, “11 of the signature verification workers approved 170k signatures at a rate of less than 0 and 2.99 seconds with a 99.97% approval rating.” Later, in closing argument, Olsen revealed that “there were approximately 274,000 ballot signatures compared and verified in less than three seconds.”
It didn’t matter Thompson ruled that anything goes. Laws are suggestions.
During her press conference on Tuesday far-left reporter Brahm Resnick asked a nasty question about Kari’s attorneys.
That’s when Kari let him have it, telling the crowd Brahm has been wrong on every major story and that he even wanted masks on kids.
Brahm did not appreciate this and lashed out, “You make up sh*t!”
This did not go over well with the crowd who booed the leftist hack loudly.
Kari went on to school him some more. It was a rough afternoon for potty-mouth Brahm Resnick.
Posted by addisethiopia / አዲስ ኢትዮጵያ on February 15, 2023
💭 ‘Radio War Nerd’ talk to legendary Pulitzer Prize winning reporter Seymour Hersh about his latest bombshell scoop: the United States, on President Biden’s orders, blew up the Nord Stream pipelines that were foundational to Germany’s export economy until last year.
💭 I’d make it easier. The people involved in the operation saw that the president wanted Germany to freeze for its short-term political goals, and that appalled them. I am talking here about Americans who are very loyal to the United States. At the CIA it is the case that, as I put it in my article, people work for power and not for the Constitution.
The political advantage of the CIA is that a president who does not get through his plans in Congress can walk with the CIA director in the Rose Garden of the White House to plan something secret that can meet many people on the other side of the Atlantic – or wherever in the world. That was always the unique selling point of the CIA – with which I have my problems. But even this community is appalled that Biden decided to expose Europe to the cold to support a war he will not win. This is nefarious to me.
What is brave about telling the truth? Our job as reporters is not to be afraid. And sometimes it gets ugly. There were times in my life when… – You know, I’m not talking about it. But threats are not made to people like me, but to the children of people like me. There were terrible things. But you don’t worry about it, you can’t. You just have to do what you do.
💭 Nord Stream Bombshell: United States Sabotaged The Pipeline, According to Pulitzer Prize Winner
😮 I Haven’t seen something like this in years, oh my! Some humans ain’t human, but demons in human form.
💭 Pfizer Director Physically Assaults James O’Keefe and Veritas Staff, Destroys iPad Showing Undercover Recordings About “Mutating” Covid Virus – NYPD Responds
James O’Keefe confronted Walker at a restaurant and showed him the undercover recordings about Pfizer’s plans to potentially mutate the Covid virus.
“You f*cked up!” Walker shouted before destroying the iPad showing the PV undercover recordings about the “mutating” Covid virus.
Project Veritas on Wednesday night released explosive video of Jordon Trishton Walker, Pfizer Director of Research and Development, Strategic Operations, admitting the pharma giant is exploring ‘mutating’ Covid-19 via ‘directed evolution’ so the company can continue to profit off of vaccines.
“One of the things we’re exploring is like, why don’t we just mutate it [COVID] ourselves so we could create — preemptively develop new vaccines, right? So, we have to do that. If we’re gonna do that though, there’s a risk of like, as you could imagine — no one wants to be having a pharma company mutating f**king viruses,” Walker told the undercover Project Veritas journalist.
“Don’t tell anyone. Promise you won’t tell anyone. The way it [the experiment] would work is that we put the virus in monkeys, and we successively cause them to keep infecting each other, and we collect serial samples from them,” he said in the undercover recordings.
“I’m just someone who’s working in a company that’s trying to literally help the public,” Walker said during the confrontation.
Walker insisted he was just ‘trying to impress his date.’
😲 Wow! BBC news studio windows being plastered with stickers, posters, and pictures of loved ones believed to be injured or killed by the Covid-19 vaccine.
For years, Facebook has faced allegations that it has failed to prevent the spread of harmful content in Ethiopia, a country wracked by ethnic violence in a divisive civil war. Now, Facebook’s parent company Meta has been hit by a lawsuit containing alleged evidence of deaths “contributed to” by the platform’s amplification of, and failure to remove, hateful posts there.
One of the lawsuit’s two plaintiffs is Abrham Meareg, a Tigrayan man whose father was killed in an attack, that he says was a direct result of ethnically-motivated misinformation shared on the platform.
Meareg’s father, Meareg Amare, was a respected chemistry professor at Bahir Dar University in the Amhara region of Ethiopia, according to his son’s witness statement accompanying the lawsuit, filed in Nairobi, Kenya. As a Tigrayan, Amare was an ethnic minority in the region. In the fall of 2021, as conflict escalated between Amharas and Tigrayans in the Ethiopian civil war, several accounts on Facebook shared Amare’s name and photograph, and posted comments accusing him of being a “snake” and posing a threat to ethnic Amharas. Although his son saw and reported many of the posts to the platform, Facebook declined to remove them, the witness statement alleges.
On Nov. 3, 2021, a group of men followed Amare home from the university and shot him dead outside his home, the lawsuit says. He lay dying in the street for seven hours, the lawsuit adds, with the men warning onlookers that they too would be shot if they gave him medical assistance.
“I hold Facebook responsible for my father’s killing,” Abrham Meareg told TIME. “Facebook causes hate and violence to spread in Ethiopia with zero consequences.”
The other plaintiff in the case is former Amnesty International researcher, Fisseha Tekle, who gathered evidence of Facebook posts that the lawsuit says contributed to real-world killings. His work led to him and his family becoming targets of abuse, the lawsuit says.
Ethiopia has long been a key example cited by critics of Facebook’s role in ethnic violence internationally, along with Myanmar, where Facebook has admitted it did not do enough to prevent what some observers have labeled a genocide. In 2021, documents leaked by former Facebook employee Frances Haugen revealed that staff at the platform knew it was not doing enough to prevent armed groups in Ethiopia using the platform to spread ethnic hatred. “Current mitigation strategies are not enough,” one of the internal documents said. But the new lawsuit is the first to directly present allegations of Facebook posts leading to deaths there.
The lawsuit demands Meta impose measures to further reduce the spread of hatred and incitement to violence in Ethiopia. The company took similar “break glass” steps during the January 6 riot at the U.S. Capitol in 2021, when the platform “down-ranked” content that its algorithms determined posed a risk of incitement to violence. The plaintiffs are petitioning the court to force Meta to create a $1.6 billion fund for “victims of hate and violence incited on Facebook.” The lawsuit also proposes that Facebook hire more content moderators with Ethiopian language expertise at its Africa hub in Nairobi, where TIME exposed low pay and alleged workers’ rights violations in an investigation earlier this year.
Lawyers for Tekle and Meareg said they filed the lawsuit in a court in Kenya rather than in Ethiopia, because Nairobi is the base for Facebook’s content moderation operation in Sub-Saharan Africa. “Nairobi has become a Hub for Big Tech,” Mercy Mutemi, the lawyer representing the plaintiffs, said in a statement. “Not investing adequately in the African market has already caused Africans to die from unsafe systems. We know that a better Facebook is possible—because we have seen how preferentially they treat other markets. African Facebook users deserve better. More importantly, Africans deserve to be protected from the havoc caused by underinvesting in protection of human rights.”
Haugen’s disclosures “show Facebook knows that this is a really serious problem, that their software design is promoting viral hate and violent inciting posts,” says Rosa Curling, co-director at the legal nonprofit Foxglove, which is supporting the case. “They are not doing anything to change that, and on the face of it it looks as if that’s being done simply for the benefit of their profits.”
In a statement, a Meta spokesperson said: “We have strict rules that outline what is and isn’t allowed on Facebook and Instagram. Hate speech and incitement to violence are against these rules, and we invest heavily in teams and technology to help us find and remove this content. Feedback from local civil society organizations and international institutions guides our safety and integrity work in Ethiopia. We employ staff with local knowledge and expertise and continue to develop our capabilities to catch violating content in the most widely spoken languages in the country, including Amharic, Oromo, Somali and Tigrinya.”
Facebook has 21 days to respond to the lawsuit in the Nairobi court.
😈 Soon it’s Anthony John Blinken – the Son of a Holocaust survivor – who will be sued for shaking hands with the Devil, aka black Hitler Abiy Ahmed Ali.
💭 The South African television and radio journalist and war correspondent Lara Logan is fired from television after going live on air, saying elite drink babies blood, they want you eating insects!
The Newsmax cable news outlet has severed ties with Lara Logan after the former “60 Minutes” correspondent went on a bizarre rant alleging that world leaders “dine on the blood of children.”
Logan, an award-winning former war correspondent, was interviewed Wednesday by Newsmax host Eric Bolling, who anchors a show called “The Balance.”
Bolling invited Logan to his program to discuss global elites and their favoritism toward leftist policies. He then asked Logan about the situation along the southern border, where undocumented migrants have crossed into the United States in droves.
“And he knows that the open border is Satan’s way of taking control of the world through all of these people who are his stooges and his servants.”
Logan then added: “And they may think that they’re going to become gods. That’s what they tell us. You’ve all known [historian Yuval Noah] Harari and all the rest of them at the World Economic Forum.
“You know, the ones who want us eating insects, cockroaches, and that while they dine on the blood of children?”
Logan added: “Those are the people, right? They’re not gonna win. They’re not going to win.”
“Newsmax condemns in the strongest terms the reprehensible statements made by Lara Logan and her views do not reflect our network,” Newsmax said in a statement to the Daily Beast. “We have no plans to interview her again.”
💭 Very sad! An Oklahoma news anchor suffered a stroke during a live newscast. Anchor Julie Chin says she suddenly lost vision in one eye. Then her arm went numb and her speech became garbled. She says her symptoms came out of nowhere. Her colleagues recognized something was wrong and called 911. The newscaster says tests at the hospital showed she suffered the early stages of a stroke. Chin says “There are still lots of questions, and lots to follow up on, but the bottom line is I should be just fine.”
💭 The Economist’s correspondent was expelled after a shadowy online campaign against him
💭 “I became a correspondent for The Economist in Ethiopia in 2016, the country seemed to be in the midst of a peaceful, epochal transformation. I was beguiled by its deep sense of history – the national myth stretches back 3,000 years – by its beauty and by the energy of its capital.”
“I continued to look into the machinations behind the war. I was interested in how research conducted in Ethiopia by a Western scholar seemed to be enabling the government to whitewash war crimes, which included the use of hunger as a weapon against Tigray.”
“Today, Ethiopia seemed to be tearing itself apart, tweet by tweet, Facebook post by Facebook post.”
👉 By Tom Gardner, The Economist
Last July I travelled to Amhara hoping to interview soldiers wounded in Ethiopia’s civil war with Tigrayan rebels. I was accompanied by a young Ethiopian journalist, who was also translating for me. A group of federal police officers stopped us outside a hospital and threw us in the back of an open-top jeep. While the vehicle wound its way towards a police station, four or five officers stood over us as we knelt or sat on our haunches. Bystanders jeered from both sides of the street. The man driving the car behind us stared at me, then made a gesture of slitting his throat. When the police started beating us, my Ethiopian colleague got the worst of it: his mouth filled with blood from the blows. I was hit in the head at least twice with a rifle butt. I made a pleading motion for the officers to stop; they laughed. That was a turning point for me. In the grips of civil war, an already brutal authoritarian regime was taking a darker turn. Anyone could become the enemy. Including me.
I did not expect to become a war correspondent. Like many people, my early associations with Ethiopia were news stories about famine. I got a more nuanced view when I studied African politics as a Masters student. In the few years before I became a correspondent for The Economist in Ethiopia in 2016, the country seemed to be in the midst of a peaceful, epochal transformation. I was beguiled by its deep sense of history – the national myth stretches back 3,000 years – by its beauty and by the energy of its capital. The state remained rigid and authoritarian; protests against it were gathering momentum. But, from afar, Ethiopia still seemed to be a land full of ambition and possibility.
In an already brutal authoritarian regime, anyone could become the enemy. Including me
At first I wrote about urbanisation and infrastructure – railways, new housing projects, industrial parks and mega-dams that had been supercharged by Chinese investment and a Chinese model of state-led growth. Many welcomed the ascension of Abiy Ahmed as prime minister in 2018 and the advent of “Abiymania”. Pop songs with titles like “He Awakens Us” lauded his rise; people wore t-shirts bearing his image; a book comparing Abiy to Moses became a bestseller. Abiy offered a glimmer of hope for an opening of political and press freedom, too; he was awarded the Nobel peace prize in 2019 for negotiating a peace deal with neighbouring Eritrea. Stepping aboard the first commercial flight between the two countries in 20 years, watching tearful families reunite, I felt like a witness to history.
Yet there were darker cross-currents. The brief unity brought by Abiy belied a more contested, painful reality. Decades of dictatorship and the long-simmering border conflict with Eritrea had obscured fractious rivalries within Ethiopia, particularly between the country’s three most powerful ethnic groups, the Oromo people, the Amharas and the Tigrayans, the smallest of the three, who comprised just 6% of the population but until recently held outsized power. Those fissures started to widen.
The Eritrean regime and Abiy shared a common adversary in the Tigrayan People’s Liberation Front (TPLF), which started as a band of guerrillas in 1975, toppled Ethiopia’s military dictatorship in 1991, then dominated the regime that ran the country for more than a quarter-century. Abiy ousted the TPLF amid public protests against the party’s imperious reign, and repeatedly blamed it for Ethiopia’s woes. But after Abiy made peace with Eritrea, TPLF leaders feared that Eritrea’s and Ethiopia’s armies would combine forces to crush Tigray, the TPLF’s homeland in the north.
When I visited Tigray in late October 2020, mobile communications were shut down for four hours amid rising tensions, a precursor of a much longer blackout to come for the region. Days later war broke out, after Tigrayan forces attacked a federal army barracks. War fever quickly took hold in Addis Ababa, with blood drives and rallies in support of government troops. Tigrayan militiamen committed a massacre of Amharas in a border town just inside Tigray. (Tigrayan civilians were killed or chased from their homes in tit-for-tat attacks.) Videos emerged of piles of corpses; bodies were carried through the streets as their relatives wailed. Abiy’s regime seized on these images, pointing to them as a retrospective justification for the conflict. The propaganda battle was on.
Suddenly I was covering a war. To some partisans in Abiy’s government, I was fulfilling a secret purpose: on social media, members of the Ethiopian diaspora labelled me an agent of the cia (later I would also be called an agent of mi6). Along with other journalists, I was accused of siding with the TPLF. At first, I laughed off such conspiratorial accusations. At the time there was little sign that the government would take such talk seriously. Independent Ethiopian journalists, however, were already under pressure. Always constrained in their reporting, after the war began some were detained for daring to contradict the official government line. A number were physically assaulted.
I was labelled an agent of the CIA, then of MI6
Soon the regime escalated its attacks against me and other foreign journalists, human-rights workers and employees of the United Nations and other international institutions. In December 2020, a local magazine ran a cover story which accused me, along with a preposterously long list of foreign and local journalists, of being part of a grand British conspiracy to overthrow Abiy’s government.
That an established journalist could spread such lies, and in a publication that many thought was respectable, marked a disturbing shift. Government officials seemed to approve of the story. One even recommended it to another member of the foreign press corps.
Pro-government activists and trolls were making similar attacks against me and others online. On Facebook a post began circulating: a collection of mug shots of foreign and Ethiopian journalists and academics – my photo among them – presented as though we were criminals and supported the TPLF. The post popped up whenever a story appeared in the Western press that cast Abiy’s regime in a negative light. That happened often, as government troops blockaded the region; human-rights groups accused the forces of ethnic cleansing and crimes against humanity, including mass murder, forced hunger and rape. I reported on these atrocities, as did other journalists, and tweeted about them. A Facebook post appeared with images of 12 foreign correspondents, including me: “Please follow these people on Twitter and expose their lies”, the post said, calling us “TPLF sympathisers”.
Twitter and Facebook have served different functions during the war. Twitter has been a forum for international, English-language discourse, where members of the diaspora and people inside Ethiopia waged a propaganda war that was, at least in part, intended for a foreign audience. On Facebook, Ethiopians increasingly spread hate speech and disinformation in local languages that could sometimes incite real-world violence.
Abiy himself poured fuel on the fire of the propaganda war. In April 2021 he urged Ethiopians not to “bow” to Western media “campaigns”. In August, he called for a mass social-media campaign to counter “lies” in the Western media. That same month, state media accused me, along with journalists from the bbc, cnn and New York Times, of working for the TPLF. The state was now openly encouraging hostility against Western media as well as the human-rights groups and international institutions that were monitoring the regime’s war crimes.
Tigrayans and other Ethiopians suffered the most. By August 2021 foreign media and Amnesty International had documented the systematic rape and sexual enslavement of Tigrayan women by Eritrean and Ethiopian soldiers. (Tigrayan forces were also found to have committed mass rapes against women in the Amhara and Afar regions.) On social media, government officials and their supporters engaged in a cruel campaign to cast doubt on Tigrayan accusers. They argued that victims’ testimonials were false or exaggerated, that rape was endemic in Tigray and that many such assaults had actually been committed by Tigrayan criminals who had been released from prison. They also smeared Tigrayan refugees in Sudan as perpetrators of a massacre, to cast suspicion on Tigrayans’ own claims of war crimes. Regime apologists downplayed horrific acts and denounced as lies even some documented incidents, such as a video of security forces burning a man alive. Ethiopia seemed to be tearing itself apart, tweet by tweet, Facebook post by Facebook post.
Ethiopia seemed to be tearing itself apart, tweet by tweet
Attacks were gathering against foreign interests of any kind. A campaign under the hashtag #NoMore – that is, “no more” Western intervention, colonialism and lies – started trending on Twitter and Facebook in late 2021. The social-media posts showing my face seemed increasingly ubiquitous. Previously I had felt safe in Addis Ababa. Now I started to worry about being recognised in public and subjected to abuse, or that I might return home one day to discover my landlord had changed the locks.
Some of this was paranoia. During this time thousands of Ethiopians, usually ethnic Tigrayans, were rounded up and thrown into internment camps. Even when I was roughed up in Amhara, my Ethiopian colleague suffered the brunt of the abuse. Foreigners were sheltered by comparison. But I felt a creeping sense of the nastiness online bleeding into my real life. In mid-2021 billboards had been put up in parts of Addis Ababa calling for “white demons” to leave the country. They were the handiwork of a fire-and-brimstone preacher advertising his YouTube channel. It seemed telling, though, that the government let them stay up.
I was ever more conscious of my status as an outsider – distrusted, unwelcome. I was on a trip with friends in the eastern town of Harar when, one night, the owner of a bar told me that because I was British I must be a journalist – and because I was a British journalist, I must be in the pay of the TPLF. Rattled, I slipped out into the night. When the regime declared a state of emergency late last year, police began conducting house raids and arrests throughout the capital. I slept uneasily for weeks, expecting a loud knock at the door.
In March this year the government agreed a truce with the TPLF. The situation was calmer and relations between Abiy’s regime and the West were improving. I continued to look into the machinations behind the war. I was interested in how research conducted in Ethiopia by a Western scholar seemed to be enabling the government to whitewash war crimes, which included the use of hunger as a weapon against Tigray. A polite email I sent on May 1st to a Western think-tank sparked yet another online campaign, this time against me personally, lasting two weeks. My email to the think-tank was made public on Twitter, where pro-government figures (yet again) spread wild accusations that I was operating on behalf of the TPLF. One thing had changed: there were also calls for my journalist accreditation to be revoked.
Some social-media posts came from the Ethiopian diaspora, others from Western apologists for Abiy. State media republished claims of my “despicable behaviour”, along with the suggestion that I be “given the boot home and fired”. On May 13th, the government’s media authority summoned me to its office and handed me a letter: my press accreditation had been revoked. The next day an immigration official called to tell me I had 48 hours to leave the country. Just like that, my life in Ethiopia was over.
In the short time since I left in May, many more Ethiopian journalists and activists have been detained. One of those arrested was the author of the magazine story that attacked me and other journalists early in the war. Even he had not kept faithfully enough to the government line. (His family says he was beaten in custody.) He joins scores of other writers, commentators and photographers who have been jailed since 2020. Last year two journalists were murdered. Others have been hounded out of the country. Several other foreign journalists have been banished or barred from reporting. Ethiopia’s own human-rights commissioner has called the situation a “new low” for the country.
I started to worry about being recognised in public or that I might return home one day to discover my landlord had changed the locks
Friends in Addis Ababa sent me a video posted just days after I was expelled. An Ethiopian commentator, Seyoum Teshome, was celebrating my departure on a YouTube talk show. A fiery, Tucker Carlson-like figure, he wrote the word “journalists” in sneering inverted commas in tweets. Now he was making explicit his charge that I and others worked for the TPLF. “Tom Gardner has been expelled, hasn’t he? Why?” he said, speaking Amharic. “I’ve proved 30 or 40 times that he is a criminal. Before he was expelled, I came here and told you, ‘Look at him’, didn’t I?” He said he “proved 1,000 times” that I was part of the TPLF.
This televised tirade, since viewed on YouTube more than 100,000 times, was the coda to the long digital campaign against me. Modern digital warfare, designed to sow confusion, is now being waged everywhere from Ukraine and Syria to China and beyond. The experience was a painful reminder to me that China was a model not just for Ethiopia’s state-directed economic development. The government had also taken more disturbing lessons from China and other authoritarian states. It was learning how to become a modern, digital autocracy.
💭 British journalist told to ‘go back to your country’ by Republican firebrand Marjorie Taylor Greene in clash about American gun laws is a Washington correspondent for a major UK network who has won awards for her 9/11 coverage.
☆ Marjorie Taylor Green, 48, told a British journalist to ‘go back to your country’ in a heated debate over tighter gun laws
☆ The journalist questioned that schoolchildren are afraid of going to class and that mass shootings don’t happen in the UK when Greene snapped at her
☆ ‘You have mass stabbings, lady. You have all kinds of murder and you’ve got laws against that,’ Greene snapped at her before telling her to go back the UK
☆ She also claimed ‘We like our [guns] here,’ despite a recent poll suggesting the majority of voters actually support tighter gun laws
☆ According to a Morning Consult/Politico poll, 65 percent of voters support gun reform after the Uvalde, Texas, massacre
☆ The journalist has since been identified as Siobhan Kennedy, who works as a Washington correspondent for Channel 4 – one of the UK’s most prominent news stations.
☆ Greene, a leading figure in the GOP, was one of several to speak at the assembly – which was held a day after the US Senate took steps to pass a federal gun safety law following the mass shooting at Robb Elementary in Texas, last month.
Posted by addisethiopia / አዲስ ኢትዮጵያ on May 24, 2022
💭 The Time Person of The Year is ‘The Person Who Most Affected The News and Our Lives, for Good or Ill.’
😈 This is why Abiy Ahmed is one of the 100 most influential people of 2022:
👉 From Time Magazine
In 2019, the Nobel Committee awarded the Peace Prize to Ethiopia’s new Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed for his efforts to end his country’s decades-long conflict with neighboring Eritrea. Abiy’s peace treaty with Eritrean dictator Isaias Afwerki inspired hopes for a transformed region, but also planted the seeds for an Ethiopian civil war. In November 2020, Abiy, with Afwerki’s support, launched a military campaign against their shared enemy: leaders of the rebellious northern Tigray region that borders Eritrea.
The civil war, now in its 19th month, has become a byword for atrocities against Tigrayans: Abiy’s forces have been accused of massacres, sexual assault, and ethnic cleansing. Famine looms with millions impacted. In March, he declared a truce to allow humanitarian access to the region, which had been blocked for months. But like a previous “humanitarian truce” in June 2021, it appears to be largely strategic, and little real aid has arrived. Abiy has started calling Tigrayan rebels “weeds” in a rise in hate speech. African civil-society groups are now pleading with the U.N. to act, lest Ethiopia devolve into ethnic cleansing reminiscent of Rwanda. In January, the Norwegian Nobel Committee in a rare move criticized Abiy, noting he has “a special responsibility to end the conflict and contribute to peace.”
In late 1927, editors at Time magazine collectively facepalmed over the fact they hadn’t yet devoted a cover to Charles Lindbergh, the pilot who’d become a global sensation earlier that year by flying solo cross the Atlantic. As they’d missed the boat on the original news story, Time needed an excuse to belatedly put Lindbergh on the cover. So, they came up with the concept of the ‘Man of the Year’, beginning an annual tradition – since re-named Person of the Year – that still triggers discussion and debate to this day.
Politicians, business titans, activists and religious leaders are among those who’ve been declared Time’s Person of the Year. Some choices may seem surprising or even shocking at first glance, but that’s because the designation isn’t necessarily supposed to mark someone out as worthy of praise. Instead, the Person of the Year is any individual who’s had the biggest impact, for better or for worse. Here are some of the most striking examples from across the past century.
😈 Adolf Hitler – 1938
The fact that Hitler was named Man of the Year in 1938 has long provoked disbelief among those who aren’t aware of Time magazine’s morally neutral criteria for selection. In Hitler’s case, he was selected because of his malign influence in Europe, and the magazine was absolutely vehement in its condemnation. The cover of the issue depicted the dictator playing a gothic organ draped with dead bodies, while the article poured scorn on the ‘horrified and apparently impotent world’ for allowing Hitler to re-establish Germany as a military power. It also powerfully and accurately described the Nazi leader as ‘the greatest threatening force that the democratic, freedom-loving world faces today.’
😈 Joseph Stalin – 1939 and 1942
Hitler’s closest rival in the pantheon of 20th Century despots, Joseph Stalin was twice ‘awarded’ the title Man of the Year. The first time, it was for doing the unthinkable by signing a non-aggression pact between the Soviet Union and Nazi Germany. As Time put it, at one stroke Stalin had ‘not only sacrificed the good will of thousands of people the world over sympathetic to the ideals of Socialism, he matched himself with Adolf Hitler as the world’s most hated man.’ In 1942, however, the turmoil of the war led Time to take a very different tone. This time round, it praised the Soviet dictator for standing resolute against Hitler in what the magazine described as the ‘year of blood and strength’.
😈 Henry Kissinger – 1972
Serving as National Security Advisor and US Secretary of State, Henry Kissinger was one of the dominant figures of the Cold War, helping to forge closer relations with the USSR and – significantly – China. In 1972, he and President Richard Nixon were named Men of the Year for ‘accomplishing the most profound arrangement of the Earth’s political powers since the beginning of the Cold War.’ However, many have long regarded Kissinger as a ruthless Machiavellian strategist and war criminal, citing his involvement in the secret American carpet-bombing of Cambodia, among other things. There was certainly a collective raising of eyebrows when he was awarded the 1973 Nobel Peace Prize for his efforts to end the Vietnam war. Singer Tom Lehrer famously commented that ‘Political satire became obsolete when Henry Kissinger was awarded the Nobel peace prize.’
😈 Ayatollah Khomeini – 1979
One of Time’s most controversial picks for Man of the Year was the Ayatollah Khomeini. The Islamic cleric had become the Supreme Leader of Iran in 1979, following the overthrow of the pro-Western Shah. The same year, Iranian students stormed the US Embassy in Tehran, taking dozens of staffers hostage. Time magazine slammed Khomeini as a glorified terrorist, saying ‘the revolution that he led to triumph threatens to upset the world balance of power more than any other political event since Hitler’s conquest of Europe.’ While this was obviously a highly critical take, the magazine’s decision to ‘award” Khomeini the Man of the Year title nevertheless triggered backlash in the US, largely because the embassy siege was still going on (and would in fact not end until 1981).
😈 George W. Bush – 2000 and 2004
The 2000 US presidential election was one of the most polarising political debacles in the nation’s history, with George W. Bush just scraping to victory after a recount. Those who believed Al Gore should really have become president may well have been incensed by Bush being named Person of the Year, even though Time did acknowledge that ‘the candidate with the perfect bloodlines comes to office amid charges that his is a bastard presidency.’ Perhaps even more controversial was Bush’s 2004 citation as Man of the Year. In the midst of the bitterly contentious Iraq War, Time dubbed Bush an ‘American revolutionary’ who had reshaped politics to ‘fit his 10-gallon-hat leadership style’.
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