The character movie actor James Woods, who some older Americans recognize for his many roles portraying intensely nervous characters who seem to be tweaking on meth or crack, is one of the few Hollywood celebrities who doesn’t follow the liberal party line. He often takes to Twitter to express his opinions, and one of his frequent targets is Hillary Clinton, a.k.a. “The Queen of Chaos” (the title of a brand new must-read exposé about Hillary).^[1]

Hillary, in addition to threatening to become the next president, is currently accused of using her personal email account for secret government communications, and then covering it up by deleting tens of thousands of those emails, resulting in a scandal that’s considered serious enough to attach the suffix “gate” to it.

In one of his latest tweets, Mr. Woods says: “The once great investigative journalism of the MSM [mainstream media] has completely missed or willfully ignored the greatest scandal since Watergate. So pathetic that it took relentless FOIA [Freedom of Information Act] litigation to uncover the foul corruption of the Hillary email coverup, Where was the MSM [mainstream media]?”^[2]

I don’t know what the heck he’s referring to when he says “the once great investigative journalism of the mainstream media,” but I give him kudos for daring to break from the Hollywood pack and speak out on Hillary’s corruption and coverup.

But here’s a question Mr. Woods didn’t ask: Why should Hillary’s emails be secret in the first place? Why should any of our government’s communications secret? Why should we have to rely on the tedious process of making FOIA requests to find out what our government is doing? (Especially when it’s often heavily redacted anyway, as in the case of many of Hillary’s emails.)

MIT professor Noam Chomsky, America’s leading troublemaker and general know-it-all, has some answers to these questions. He explains that “government secrecy is not for security reasons, overwhelmingly…. A lot of secret internal documents get declassified after thirty years or so, and if you look over the entire long record of them, there’s virtually nothing in there that ever had any security-related concern…. The main purpose of secrecy is just to make sure that the general population here doesn’t know what’s going on.”^[3]

And the loquacious professor doesn’t stop there:

Every government has a need to frighten its population, and one way of doing that is to shroud its workings in mystery. The idea that a government has to be shrouded in mystery is something that goes back to Herodotus. You read Herodotus, and he describes how the Medes and others won their freedom by struggle, and then they lost their freedom when the institution of royalty was invented to create a cloak of mystery around power.

The idea behind royalty was that there’s this other species of individuals who are beyond the norm and who the people are not supposed to understand. That’s the standard way you cloak and protect power: you make it look mysterious and secret, above the ordinary person-otherwise why should anybody accept it? Well, they’re willing to accept it out of fear that some great enemies are about to destroy them, and because of that they’ll cede their authority to the Lord, or the King, or the President or something, just to protect themselves. That’s the way governments work-that’s the way any system of power works-and the secrecy system is part of it. ^[3]

As for Watergate, which Mr. Woods compared to Hillary’s emailgate (and which is supposedly the mainstream media’s finest hour), the professor also has many more words about that:

Right at the time of Watergate, history actually ran a controlled experiment for us. The Watergate exposures, it turns out, came at exactly the same time as the COINTELPRO exposures, [which were] a thousand times more significant than Watergate…

Watergate was a matter of a bunch of guys from the Republican National Committee breaking in a Democratic Party office for essentially unknown reasons and doing no damage. That’s petty burglary, it’s not a big deal. Well, at the exact time that Watergate was discovered, there were exposures in the courts and through the Freedom of Information Act of massive FBI operations to undermine political freedom in the United States, running through every administration back to Roosevelt, but really picking up under Kennedy….

It included Gestapo-style assassination of a Black Panther leader [Fred Hampton]; it included organizing race riots in an effort to destroy the black movements; it included attacks on the American Indian Movement, on the women’s movement, you name it… In comparison to this, Watergate is a tea party…

Well, if the press had any integrity at all, if the Washington Post had any integrity, what they would have said is, “Watergate is totally insignificant and innocuous, who cares about any of that in comparison with these other things.” But that’s not what happened, obviously. And that just shows again, very dramatically, how the press is lined up with power. ^[3]

So much for the “once-great investigative journalism of the mainstream media!”

James Woods, if you’re reading this, I suggest that you check out some independent media instead of expecting the mainstream media to tell the truth. AlternativeNews.com is a mighty fine place to start.

[1] akpress.org
[2] cnsnews.com
[3] Noam Chomsky, Understanding Power, pp. 10, 117