Giant Satirical Billboards—Mounted on Trucks Driven All Over the Nation’s Capital—Are Publicly Shaming Democratic Party Leaders for Their Illegal Persecution of Julian Assange
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The mobile billboards are a brainchild of standup-comic-turned- activist Randy Credico. Each one is 15 feet long and circulates around DC’s most famous landmarks, skewering the hypocrisy of Joe Biden, Merrick Garland, Jerald Nadler, Nancy Pelosi and other top Democrats.
D.C. residents and tourists—as many as 40,000 a day—are stopping in their tracks, doing a double take, then breaking into big smiles whenever one of comic-turned-activist Randy Credico’s huge 100-square-foot billboards drives by.
Randy Credico talks about his Assange motorized billboard campaign with Grayzone founder Max Blumenthal.
Publicly shaming government officials this way, with ridicule and sarcasm, is being welcomed by D.C. residents as entertainment, since this is a city where political commentary is usually tedious, boring and ponderous—more likely to put you to sleep than make you perk up and smile.
One billboard features a blow-up of the infamous “fist-bump” that Joe Biden lovingly delivered to Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman on July 15, nakedly revealing Biden’s hypocrisy to the entire world. The billboard speech balloon has Joe Biden saying:
“Here’s the deal. I won’t mention Khashoggi if you don’t mention Assange.”
This is total moral hypocrisy on Biden’s part.
As the world well knows, after bin Salman masterminded the grisly murder and dismemberment of Saudi Washington Post columnist Jamal Khashoggi, Biden called Saudi Arabia a “pariah” state with “no redeeming social value” that murdered “innocent people.
Billboard truck in front of the courthouse for the Eastern District of Virginia, where Assange will be tried if he is extradited, and where so many whistleblowers have been sent to prison by CIA-friendly judges and juries. [Source: Photo Courtesy of Randy Credico]
During his 2020 presidential campaign, Biden insisted that bin Salman and the Saudis “have to be held accountable,” and that “a Biden-Harris administration will … make sure America does not check its values at the door to sell arms or buy oil.”
Pandering to a Bloody Autocrat for Arms and Oil
But Biden certainly did check America’s values at the door. He gave bin Salman a pass for Khashoggi’s murder—and for hundreds of thousands murdered in Yemen—precisely to buy more oil at lower prices (which, in fact, for all his pandering, he did not succeed in getting, returning home from his Middle East trip embarrassingly empty-handed).
So it is no surprise that Biden caved to pressure from the intelligence community, and is pursuing the same warped vendetta against Julian Assange as Trump’s former CIA Director, Mike Pompeo. The Biden administration is brutally murdering Assange just as deliberately as bin Salman murdered Khashoggi—and for the same reason—because Assange exposed incriminating information that the government wanted to cover up.
In a just world, Assange would be celebrated for exposing deceit, corruption and criminal behavior. Instead, he is being victimized on behalf of the very criminals whose crimes he exposed.
Most upsetting of all is how Assange has been abandoned by his former media partners at The New York Times, Le Monde, The Guardian, El Pais and Der Spiegel. This abandonment is ironic, since the secret documents that Assange gave them to publish—and for which they earned numerous journalistic accolades—are the very documents for which the U.S. is indicting Assange under the Espionage Act.
Assange’s crime was to tell the American public about the evil its government was committing in its name. The public’s crime would be to allow him to be imprisoned for life by the very government that committed those crimes.
Billboard truck driving past Washington Monument. [Source: Photo courtesy of Randy Credico]
That’s what Credico’s giant motorized billboards hope to prevent. They are alerting the public to this parody of justice, and hopefully will pressure Biden and Attorney General Merrick Garland to drop the case against Assange.
If the U.S. government succeeds in jailing Assange for revealing its crimes, it will kill independent investigative journalism forever. It will allow any journalist, from any country in the world, who dares to reveal U.S. crimes, to be extradited for treason, dragged to this country, and imprisoned.
If you want to support Credico’s mobile billboard campaign to free Assange (it requires money to keep those trucks rolling), you can make a donation HERE.
NOTE 1: Randy Credico is a recent winner of an “Award for Journalistic Excellence” from the Society for Independent Investigative Journalism. He hosts the influential radio and podcast series Assange: Countdown to Freedom and is a tireless creator of “awareness events” to generate public and political pressure for release of the most important publisher of the 21st century.
NOTE 2: Credico first tried to buy billboard space for his “Free Assange” campaign from Clear Channel, the world’s largest outdoor media company, whose billboards dominate the entire DC area. But Clear Channel is tightly tied to the U.S. extreme right, and–no surprise—refused to run billboards urging (gasp!) freedom for a Hillary-hugging, Russia-loving traitor like Julian Assange. “Your billboards don’t meet our community standards,” he was told.
Fortunately, Randy was rescued by the plucky owner of a one-man outdoor media company called DC Mobile Ads, who convinced Randy to forget about traditional billboards and put his campaign on wheels—which he happily did. The company owner loves the billboards so much that he volunteered to drive one of the trucks all over D.C. himself. An especially nice touch is that the graphic designer for the billboards is an Australian resident named Somerset Bean (@somersetbean), who is delighted to do his part to help an Aussie countryman out of a tough spot.
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Steve Brown is a member of the Editorial Board of CovertAction Magazine. He can be reached at [email protected].
Featured image: Randy Credico’s Billboard truck driving past Capitol Building while House and Senate are in session. [Source: Photo Courtesy of Randy Credico]
