A younger (Left) and older (Right) Chuck D. Photo: MintPress News.
By Alan MacLeod – Aug 22, 2024
Surprising many, legendary rapper and activist Chuck D appeared at the White House earlier this summer, announcing that he was joining forces with YouTube and Antony Blinken’s State Department to become one of Washington’s “global music ambassadors” – a role directly modeled on Washington’s Cold War-era efforts to use the arts to inspire US-backed regime change in Eastern Europe, and to use musical tours as covers that the CIA could use to assassinate foreign leaders.
Among a crowd of artists that included Herbie Hancock, Armani White, BRELAND, Denyce Graves, Grace Bowers, Jelly Roll, Justin Tranter, Kane Brown, Lainey Wilson, and Teddy Swims, the Public Enemy frontman was centerstage, standing directly on Blinken’s right-hand side, and was the first artist in the room mentioned by the Secretary of State, earning a round of applause from the journalists and dignitaries assembled. “I would like to thank everybody in the US State Department and also YouTube for having me being invited to being a United States global music ambassador,” he said.
All this is a far cry from Chuck D.’s beginnings and outward image. The rapper and writer of such songs as “Fight the Power” and “Rebel Without a Cause” used both the aesthetics and message of the Black Panther Party in his performances and was seen as Malcolm X with a microphone. He lists the Panthers and Malcolm X as influences during his formative years. “I was in the Black Panther lunch program,” he told the Historic.ly podcast. Thus, for an artist to go from unapologetically demanding black power to now enthusiastically supporting state power is a bitter pill to swallow for his millions of fans.
The Cultural Cold War
Although the State Department was careful to frame its new venture as one designed to support peace, the program’s history and the United States’ foreign policy moves strongly undermine that claim.
Throughout the press conference announcing the project’s inauguration, both Blinken and YouTube’s global music head, Lyor Cohen, constantly mentioned the CIA’s secret Cold War program to use music and the arts as weapons for regime change. Referencing sending Louis Armstrong to play behind the Iron Curtain, Blinken stated, “America’s secret weapon is a blue note and a minor chord. Music is such a powerful diplomatic force because, I think, it taps into something fundamental, universal.” “In Berlin, just before the wall came down, Bruce Springsteen played to the adoration of countless fans,” he added.
Cohen explained that YouTube was teaming up with the US State Department to help them “leverage global events.” “We will utilize major international gatherings to inspire action,” he said. What kind of “actions” the State Department is interested in fomenting was not stated but is not difficult to ascertain.
Throughout the Cold War, the United States flooded enemy nations with propaganda. But it often found that a more subtle approach was far more effective. To that end, it spent vast sums sending famous artists such as Nina Simone, Louis Armstrong, Dizzy Gillespie and Ella Fitzgerald overseas, to the point where jazz became synonymous with individualism and democracy. US media networks like Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty bombarded Eastern Europe with music which Soviet authorities banned. It was thus transformed into a subversive, countercultural weapon. Voice of America—another US-funded network targeted at Communist countries—called its jazz radio show the “Hour of Freedom.”
The CIA deliberately chose to front the campaign with black musicians, helping to soften America’s image and promote a (false) message of racial harmony to counter well-founded Russian criticism of the United States as a structurally racist society.
In the wake of World War II, the Soviet Union engendered massive worldwide goodwill. Primarily responsible for defeating European fascism, millions around the world saw Communism as the way out of poverty and considered it far more supportive of high culture and the arts than capitalism.
Knowing they had to do something quickly to win the war for the planet’s future, the CIA almost immediately established the Congress for Cultural Freedom—a worldwide group of intellectuals and artists dedicated to opposing Communism, some of whom were completely unaware that this was not an organic, grassroots movement.
The goal was clear: destroy Communism and initiate regime change worldwide, installing pro-US puppets wherever possible. “Give me a hundred million dollars and a thousand dedicated people, and I will guarantee to generate such a wave of democratic unrest among the masses, yes, even among the soldiers of Stalin’s own empire, that all his problems for a long period of time, to come will be internal. I can find the people,” anti-communist philosopher Sidney Hook begged the CIA.
Hook got what he wanted, and the CIA became a principal driver of both high and low culture across the globe. Operating through its front organization, the Congress for Cultural Freedom, the CIA funded and promoted artists, writers, musicians and intellectuals who advanced US government interests in dozens of countries worldwide. It received help for these activities from organizations such as the Museum of Modern Art (MOMA), whose former executive director, Thomas Braden, was a CIA employee. Institutions like MOMA acted as front groups for CIA schemes, ensuring a veneer of plausibility and respectability to events.
At the height of its influence, the CIA published highly influential magazines, built up a book-publishing empire promoting anti-Communist literature, raised money for the production of hit movies, started academic journals, and sponsored conferences the world over.
The CIA promoted the work of George Orwell, pushing his books, and even funded the 1954 film adaptation of Animal Farm. Thus, the author, who is most closely synonymous with propaganda and government control over society, in an ironic twist, owed his massive popularity in no small part to a giant decades-long CIA propaganda campaign.
Dissident Russian authors like Boris Pasternak also owed their notoriety to the Congress on Cultural Freedom’s work. Pasternak’s epic anti-communist book, Dr. Zhivago was translated and circulated widely, both inside and outside the Communist bloc, by the CIA front group. Thus, much of what we in the West consider the classic and fundamental tomes of modern society are, in fact, partly a product of CIA activities.
The Congress on Cultural Freedom made pains to appear as if it was actually a leftist organization, preferring not to support overtly conservative or reactionary art or content. It was careful to woo more radical-sounding intellectuals to its cause as long as they were willing to attack the Soviet Union, China, Cuba, or other US foes, thereby helping with American efforts at regime change. This included Hook himself, who was a former Communist. The congress set up a wide range of faux-radical groups which were designed to defame the worldwide Communist movement, promote the idea that the US and Western Europe tolerated leftist dissent, and tie up and confuse would-be radicals at home into pointless organizations that would do nothing to truly challenge power.
It was not only high culture, however, that the US attempted to hijack. The CIA also published astrology magazines and gossip rags, all with subtle (and often not-so-subtle) anti-Communist undertones to them.
The project continued until the successful overthrow of Communism in Eastern Europe—events in which the US government played a significant role. There have long been extremely strong rumors that the CIA wrote and promoted the Scorpions’ hit song “Winds of Change” as regime change propaganda. Meanwhile, David Hasselhoff – the American singer who has long been inexplicably popular in Germany – has strongly insinuated that he worked with the agency to bring down the Berlin Wall. His song, “Looking for Freedom,” became the unofficial anthem of the wall’s destruction, and he played it to a huge Berlin crowd in 1989.
By his own admission, Chuck D and Public Enemy were also involved in the destruction of the Berlin Wall. The group traveled to the German city and played concerts there. Seeing their counterparts in West Berlin enjoying hip-hop gigs, the rapper explained, contributed to their sense of frustration with the system they lived under. “The Eastern [Berlin] fans can’t get there, and the closer they get to the wall, they ain’t thinking about hip hop at that wall,” he said.
Selling a Fantasy
The message of freedom the US projected was a total fabrication. In reality, the black stars it sent around the world to promote the idea that the US was the home of liberty and tolerance were not even allowed to enter many music halls in their home states, let alone play in them. Genuine leftists were being ruthlessly purged from public life in the anti-communist McCarthyist witch hunts.
This included many of America’s finest talents. Singer Paul Robeson and actor Charlie Chaplain had their lives destroyed for supporting socialism, the latter spending the last 25 years of his life unable to return to the United States under fear of arrest for his political views. Scientist Albert Einstein was mistrusted by authorities and blocked from influential positions because of his socialist organizing. Playwright Arthur Miller and his actress wife Marilyn Monroe were constantly hounded by their political leanings.
But their treatment was nothing compared to how US authorities attacked black leaders such as Malcolm X and the Black Panthers—groups that served as inspiration for Chuck D’s career. In 1969, police carried out the murder of Black Panther leader Fred Hampton in Chicago, while in 1985, Philadelphia police carried out an airstrike against black liberation organization MOVE, destroying an entire residential neighborhood block and killing 11 people.
Perhaps even more notable, however, is how the CIA used these “goodwill” tours of black artists as cover to get close to African leaders in order to carry out assassinations. A case in point is Louis Armstrong’s 1960 tour of the [Democratic Republic of the] Congo. The newly independent country had just elected Patrice Lumumba as president. Young and charismatic, Lumumba was a radical who believed that his nation’s immense resources should be used to build a democratic, egalitarian society. This, for CIA director Allen Dulles, who described him as an “African [Fidel] Castro,” signed his death warrant.
The CIA attached itself to the jazz legend’s tour, accompanying him around the country and gathering crucial information on Lumumba’s whereabouts and security to carry out an assassination. Lumumba was killed a few months later. The killer’s identity remains debated, but what is clear is that, after his death, Congo went into a 60-year tailspin of dictatorships and civil war, from which it has not recovered. Throughout the violence, Western corporations continue to control the nation’s vast mineral resources.
In 1962, the CIA passed information to the apartheid government in South Africa that led to the arrest and imprisonment of Nelson Mandela for 27 years, while an investigation by Seymour Hersh for the New York Times found that the agency was involved in the overthrow of Ghana’s first president Kwame Nkrumah, widely considered one of the finest leaders the continent has ever produced.
Nonsensical Responses
Chuck D is aware of the history of the CIA using this program to overthrow countries and assassinate foreign leaders, referencing it in his interview with Historic.ly. Nevertheless, he insisted that, “I ain’t got nothing to do with fucking government. Their language is blood, bombs and bullets.”
He offered a unique justification for working with the power he claimed to be fighting, arguing that the modern world has transcended governments to the point where the nation-state is no longer relevant. Hence, it was acceptable to work with any and all governments to push agendas. As he said:
I was accused of being with the State Department of the United States, I am basically telling people: get them symbols and them titles out your fucking head. That shit is no longer applicable. There are really no such thing as fucking countries and nations. It is technology that has become that. My only thing, and my only ulterior motive is hip hop music, rap, art culture, that’s it! That’s my fucking religion and fucking nation at this point. I trust no governments. They are all the same.”
When asked whether it hurt his credibility to be associated with a regime-change operation, he insisted that times have changed. “It was 75 years ago! The jazz ambassadorships, when they talk about Louis Armstrong and Ella Fitzgerald, that’s 1952 in the Cold War. What the fuck has that got to do with 2025?!” he retorted. He also noted that he is not receiving any financial compensation for the partnership.
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The Tall Israeli Running Rap
Standing next to Chuck D at the White House was Lyor Cohen, a man he has long described as his “mentor.” Cohen has long been one of the most powerful men in the rap business, but with his 2016 appointment as global head of music at YouTube, he became arguably the most important person in the music industry.
Cohen was born in New York City to Israeli parents with deep ties to the Zionist paramilitary group the Haganah. His father, Elisha, was a member of the infamous Harel Brigade during the 1948 Nakba. The Harel Brigade played a pivotal role in the killings of thousands of Palestinians and the expulsion of hundreds of thousands more. This included carrying out biological warfare against the indigenous population. After the 1948 war, he became an officer in the Israeli Defense Forces.
Lyor’s formative years included living in Kfar Haim in Israel, at a settlement named after Haim Arlosoroff, a Zionist negotiator who worked with Nazi Germany in the 1930s, transferring German Jews and their assets to historic Palestine.
He got his start in hip hop in the 1980s at Russell Simmons’ Rush Management, working with the likes of Run-DMC and the Beastie Boys before becoming president of Def Jam Records, an iconic label associated with many of the industry’s biggest names.
He began working with Public Enemy in the 1980s and immediately began attempting to clean up its image. Cohen successfully lobbied Chuck D to fire Professor Griff from Public Enemy after the latter made antisemitic comments. While at Warner Music, he reportedly obstructed the promotion and release of an album by Lupe Fiasco, an artist known for his radical politics and committed support for Palestinian liberation. More recently, in November of last year, at the height of interest in Israel’s attack on Gaza, some have connected him with YouTube’s decision to remove the song “Terrorist” by MintPress’ Lowkey from the platform, after almost 14 years and 5.5 million views.
While Cohen’s power is legendary, he prefers to stay out of the limelight. “The Rape Over,” a song by Yasinn Bey (formerly known as Mos Def) about how corporate forces have taken over hip hop, described Cohen as the “tall Israeli [who] is running this rap shit.” The song, and more specifically, this particular lyric, was condemned as antisemitic and was removed from the rapper’s back catalog, the track having been essentially banned.
The incident is a microcosm of how a once politically conscious, revolutionary, and entirely non-politically correct art form has been defanged and reshaped by corporate forces to make it more palatable to those at the top of society. Chuck D is far from the first old rap legend accused of selling out. Ice-T found fame by releasing tracks like “Cop Killer” to eventually playing one on Law and Order: Special Victims Unit. Ice Cube, meanwhile, went from “Fuck the Police” and “Arrest the President” to allying himself with Donald Trump.
(Counter)Revolutionary Rhythm
Despite the official end of the Cold War, the United States has never stopped using music and musicians to foment unrest and spark regime change. In 2021, it sponsored, promoted and attempted a counter-revolution in Cuba led by hip-hop artists that it had been funding and promoting for years.
Chief amongst those artists is Yotuel, whose song “Patria y Vida” became the anthem of the failed movement. The song was publicly promoted by all manner of US officials, up to and including President Biden himself. The song and the anti-government hip-hop movement were given glowing write-ups in establishment media such as NPR and The New York Times.
But what all failed to inform the public was that Cuban rappers like Yotuel were recruited and nurtured by the US government to sow discontent and spark regime change on the island.
The 2021 grants publication database of the National Endowment for Democracy (NED)—an organization established by the Reagan administration as a front group for the CIA—lists several such projects.
For instance, one project, entitled “Empowering Cuban Hip-Hop Artists as Leaders in Society,” states that its goal is to “promote citizen participation and social change” and to “raise awareness about the role hip-hop artists have in strengthening democracy in the region.” Another, called “Promoting Freedom of Expression in Cuba through the Arts,” claims it is helping local artists on projects related to “democracy, human rights, and historical memory” and to help “increase awareness about the Cuban reality.
Meanwhile, during the Cuban protests, the NED’s sister organization, USAID, offered $2 million worth of funding to groups that use culture to bring about social change in Cuba. The announcement itself references Yotuel’s song, suggesting to applicants that they want more content in this vein.” Artists and musicians have taken to the streets to protest government repression, producing anthems such as “Patria y Vida,” which has not only brought greater global awareness to the plight of the Cuban people but also served as a rallying cry for change on the island,” it notes.
In Venezuela, the NED [US National Endowment for Democracy] funded and supported rock bands producing music aimed at destabilizing and overthrowing the socialist government. In 2011, for example, the NED was involved in approximately two dozen agreements for funding the performance and distribution of such music. It helped fund a national music contest, with the winners playing in Caracas. The documents, obtained under the Freedom of Information Act, note that the project aimed to “promote greater reflection among Venezuelan youth about freedom of expression, their connection with democracy, and the state of democracy in the country.”
Such is the reactionary nature of the anti-government opposition in Venezuela, however, that the contest’s local organizers chose the song “Primates” as the national winner – a track that compared the (primarily black and mixed race) government and its supporters as subhuman monkeys and gorillas—perhaps a little too on-the-nose for the likes of Antony Blinken and the State Department to support as it did with “Patria y Vida.”
Blinken himself has personally used music to advance a political agenda. In May of this year, he played a cover of Neil Young’s “Rockin’ in the Free World” in front of a host of TV cameras in a Kyiv bar. The message he was trying to project was that the US stands with Ukraine and for freedom against the authoritarian dictatorship in the Kremlin. What Blinken either forgot or did not care about, however, is that “Rockin’ in the Free World” is a satirical protest song, mocking how politicians sing odes to “freedom” in the US while its people go hungry and sleep on the streets.
Big Tech and Big Brother
The partnership between YouTube and the State Department will see the platform push pro-US music and messaging across the world, supposedly to promote “peace.” However, the United States has been at war for 229 of its 248-year history. Its military spending rivals that of all other countries combined, and it operates a network of around 1,000 military bases around the globe, including nearly 400 encircling China. It has, by its own estimation, launched 251 foreign military interventions between 1991 and 2022 alone and is currently supporting a genocide in Gaza. Thus, the idea that it will use this new initiative to push peace is at least as dubious as its previous claims of sponsoring “freedom” during the Cold War.
However, this is far from YouTube’s only connection to the US national security state. Its parent company, Google, is essentially a creation of the CIA. Both the CIA and the NSA bankrolled the Ph.D. research of Google founder Sergey Brin, and senior CIA officials oversaw the evolution of Google during its pre-launch phase. As late as 2005, the CIA was still a major shareholder in Google. These shares resulted from Google’s acquisition of Keyhole, Inc., a CIA-backed surveillance firm whose software eventually became Google Earth—the civilian offshoot of a spying software the US government uses to surveil and target its friends and enemies. Since then, Google has become a major CIA contractor, securing a cloud services contract worth tens of billions of dollars.
Other MintPress News investigations have found similar networks of ex-CIA agents working in top jobs at Facebook, TikTok and other platforms.
These individuals were not being appointed to politically neutral areas, such as sales or customer service, but were instead parachuted into positions where they affected what billions of people see, read and hear every day in their newsfeeds, usually with little to no relevant expertise in that field except their longtime careers as spies and spooks.
That individuals like this are in charge of defining real from fake news is deeply problematic, given the CIA’s long history of being the source of false information. John Stockwell, former head of a CIA task force, explained on camera how his organization infiltrated media departments the world over, created fake newspapers and news agencies, and planted false news about Washington’s enemies. “I had propagandists all over the world,” he said, adding,
We pumped dozens of stories about Cuban atrocities, Cuban rapists [to the media]… We ran [faked] photographs that made almost every newspaper in the country… We didn’t know of one single atrocity committed by the Cubans. It was pure, raw, false propaganda to create an illusion of communists eating babies for breakfast.”
The US national security state is also intimately involved in producing pop culture. The military has produced or co-produced thousands of TV shows and Hollywood movies, including many of the biggest blockbuster franchises, such as Iron Man, The Avengers, Jurassic Park, and Top Gun.
The CIA, meanwhile, was deeply involved in the production of films as diverse as Mission: Impossible, Borat, and Salt. And video game mega-franchises like Call of Duty are produced by ex-CIA chiefs. Brian Bulatao, the chief administration officer for Call of Duty producer Activision Blizzard, was formerly chief operating officer for the CIA, placing him third in command of the agency.
A MintPress investigation into the connections between Call of Duty and the national security state found that Air Force leaders were also deeply involved in game production, flying Activision Blizzard staff out to military bases to “showcase” their hardware to them and to make the industry more “credible advocates” for the US war machine.
Cold War 2.0
It is little secret that the United States is embarking on a new Cold War against both Russia and China. China’s economic rise poses a threat to American dominance of the globe. In addition to the hundreds of military bases encircling the two nations, this new war is being fought economically, digitally and culturally. War planners are already describing how the United States is trying to “kick China under the table,” such as commissioning “Taiwanese Tom Clancy” novels intended to demonize China and demoralize its citizens. Chinese-linked apps such as TikTok are under threat of possible deletion. YouTube stars collaborate with the military to promote the military-industrial complex to their tens of millions of impressionable, young fans. And President Biden briefs influencers on how best to explain the Ukraine War to their followers.
It is in this vein that we should see the State Department’s recent announcement to partner with musicians to push pro-US propaganda throughout the world. That they are doing this should be no surprise. What is remarkable, however, is how a musician with such widespread respect as a radical, anti-establishment figure would decide to join forces with the very institution he has railed against for decades.
At the White House press conference, Blinken unironically celebrated Chuck D, introducing him as “a legendary rapper from Flushing, Queens, who inspired us to fight the power.” Does Blinken not realize that he is the very power Public Enemy was rapping about? By choosing to team up with Blinken and join a project openly being pitched as a psychological operation aimed at regime change, Chuck D has, lamentably, gone from fighting the power to working for the power.
Alan MacLeod
Alan MacLeod is a member of the Glasgow University Media Group and a Senior Staff Writer for MintPress News. After completing his PhD in 2017 he published two books: Bad News From Venezuela: Twenty Years of Fake News and Misreporting and Propaganda in the Information Age: Still Manufacturing Consent, as well as a number of academic articles. He has also contributed to FAIR.org, The Guardian, Salon, The Grayzone, Jacobin Magazine, and Common Dreams.
