The consistently insightful Branko Marcetic has a new article out with Jacobin titled "After the Ukraine Documents Leak, Mainstream Media Is Missing the Story" about the way imperial narrative managers have been manipulating the discourse about the information released in the Pentagon leaks by Jack Teixeira.

Marcetic criticizes the way mass media outlets like The Washington Post and The New York Times (who actually hunted down and outed Teixeira before the FBI even brought him in) have been dragging the conversation kicking and screaming away from the contents of the leaks into discussions about how bad leaks are and what a bad, bad man Teixeira is.

"What's more corrosive to US democracy?" asks Marcetic. "That the president secretly put US boots on the ground in an incredibly dangerous, constantly escalating war zone, explicitly breaking a promise in the process and acting against the wishes of the majority of the voting public? Or that the public was finally told about it? If we truly believe that 'Democracy Dies in Darkness,' then it makes little sense to vehemently oppose turning on a light."

"It also means less time and energy spent on thinking about the years-long, bipartisan war on leaks that this young airman is the latest to be ensnared in," Marcetic adds. "It means no one discusses the government's now-routine practice of ruining people's lives over even admittedly inconsequential leaks, and how the point of it is to intimidate future leakers and ensure the political and economic elite can continue to operate in secrecy."