HOW TO WRITE A BAD ARTICLE ABOUT RUSSIA
By Paul Robinson | IRRUSSIANALITY | April 26, 2021
Several press articles I’ve seen in the past few days have annoyed me rather, but I think that they are useful as examples of how reporting on Russia is distorted. For they demonstrate the methods used by journalists to paint a picture of the world that is far from accurate.
The articles in question come from those bastions of balanced reporting, The New York Times and The Guardian. The first is from Sunday’s edition of the NYT, with the title ‘The Arms Dealer in the Crosshairs of Russia’s Elite Assassination Squad’. This discusses Bulgarian arms dealer Emilian Gebrev, whose weapons were destroyed in an explosion in the Czech Republic in 2014, allegedly by Russian secret agents.
The second article is also from the NYT. This one has the title ‘After Testing the World’s Limits, Putin Steps Back From the Brink,’ and analyzes what author Anton Troianovski calls Russia’s ‘escalatory approach to foreign policy’, as seen by the Russian military build up near the Ukrainian border.
The third and final piece is from The Guardian, and is about last week’s protests in support of jailed oppositionist Alexei Navalny. This is somewhat schizophrenic, on the one hand saying that the pro-Navalny movement is in trouble, but on the other hand portraying the protests as a relative success and ending on a confident note that however grim things look for the opposition now, this can change at any moment.
Anyway, as one reads these articles one notices certain techniques that are used to paint a distorted picture of reality. So if you want to be a journalist, here’s what the articles teach that you should do:
1. Make stuff up. In the Guardian article, authors Andrew Roth and Luke Harding (yes, he!) begin by telling readers that ‘The future looked unspeakably grim for Alexey Navalny’s supporters before this week’s protests’. But it then lifts our spirits with the following:
What followed was surprisingly normal: a core of tens of thousands of Navalny supporters rallied near the Kremlin, waving mobile phone torches and chanting “Putin is a thief!” The police stood back in Moscow (there was a violent crackdown in St Petersburg). For an evening, the crowd roved the streets of the capital at will.
“This feeling of enthusiasm, of overcoming fear, the protest ended on a positive note … It left me with the feeling that nothing is lost, it’s still not the final battle, and that street protests in Russia are not over forever,” said Ivan Zhdanov, the head of Navalny’s Anti-Corruption Foundation, in an interview from Europe.
Ah yes, the protests were a huge success, euphoric. There were ‘tens of thousands of Navalny supporters rallied near the Kremlin.’
Except that most reporters said that there was nothing of the sort, and that the turnout was far below expectations.
Estimates of the size of the protest crowd vary, but the Russian Interior Ministry reckoned the numbers as 14,000 across the entire country and only 6,000 in Moscow. Interior Ministry counts tend to be on the low size, so you can treat them with a pinch of salt, but Russian media outlets were claiming a crowd in Moscow of 10,000 to 15,000, , while Western journalists’ estimates were in the same ballpark. Max Seddon of the Financial Times, for instance, reckoned the number at about 10,000 and commented that it was much lower than in the last protests in January. So ‘tens of thousands’ as The Guardian claims? Apparently not.
The Guardian isn’t alone in providing misleading data. In its article about the Bulgarian arms dealer, The New York Times has the following to say:
After pro-democracy protestors toppled the Kremlin’s puppet government there [i.e. Ukraine], Russia special forces units wearing unmarked uniforms seized and annexed the Crimean peninsula and also instigated a separatist uprising that is still going on in the east.
Let’s unravel this a bit: Were the demonstrators in Kiev really ‘pro-democracy’? Debatable, though not provably 100% false. But definitely untrue is the idea that the Ukrainian government that was toppled in February 2014 was a ‘Russian puppet’. That’s simply false. As for Russian special forces ‘annexing’ Crimea, it’s true in a way, although not the whole story of what happened. But the claim that Russian special forces ‘instigated a separatist uprising’ in Donbass is without foundation. I know of no evidence of ‘Russian special forces’ having been present in Donbass in the early weeks of the uprising there. (Strelkov and his goons were not ‘Russian special forces’, and most analyses of the uprising show how it was overwhelmingly spontaneous and local in origin.)
So, again, making stuff up.
2. Mention that others have ‘reported’, ‘claimed’, or ‘alleged’ something without pointing out that the claim in question is dubious at best, or false at worst.
For example. The NYT piece about Mr Gebrev talks about the alleged Russian spy unit, Unit 29155, and tell us that:
Last year, the Times revealed a CIA assessment that officers from the unit may have carried out a secret operation to pay bounties to a network of criminal militants in Afghanistan in exchange for attacks on US and coalition troops.
This is superficially true in that the Times did reveal this assessment. But what it doesn’t tell you is that the US government only has low to medium confidence that the claim is true. That’s kind of important, don’t you think? Shouldn’t it be mentioned? By failing to do so, the Times makes out that something is true that probably isn’t.
It’s not the only example. Talking of Ukraine a little later, the same article tells us that after war broke out in Donbass,
Russian assassins fanned out across the country, killing senior Ukrainian military and intelligence officials who were central to the war effort, according to Ukrainian officials.
They did, did they? Well, maybe ‘according to Ukrainian officials’ they did. But I have to say that it’s the first I’ve ever heard of it, and if it were true wouldn’t there have been news of lots of dead Ukrainian military and intelligence officers? Given that there wasn’t any such news, why repeat the claim? Shouldn’t the Times at least check it first.
3. Cite only sources that back up the narrative you are trying to tell. Ignore alternative viewpoints.
This kind of follows on from the last. If you are writing about Ukraine, cite ‘Ukrainian officials’. But don’t cite rebel spokesmen. If you’re talking about Russia, cite oppositionists. Ignore pro-government analysts.
We can see this in the Guardian piece. This quotes a couple of members of Navalny’s team, a British professor, a pro-Navalny Russia high schooler, and then to finish off some completely random former advisor to one-time British foreign minister Robin Cook, whose connection to, and knowledge of, Russia is completely unexplained. The only reason for giving him the final word seems to be that he came up with some nice lines about how opposition movements can suddenly triumph even when they seem to be losing. Needless to say, dissenting viewpoints are nowhere to be heard in the article.
The NYT piece about Russia stepping ‘back from the brink’ is similarly loaded with carefully chosen sources. First up is the ever-present Gleb Pavlovsky, a one-time advisor to Vladimir Putin turned oppositionist, who seems to be the eternal go-to person for anti-Putin quotes. After him, the article gives us a quote from Navalny’s assistant Leonid Volkov, a statement from Ukrainian National Security Advisor Oleksiy Danilov, and a few words from the generally pretty anti-Putin Estonian analyst Kadri Liik. For a pretence of balance we also get a statement by Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov and the opinion of Konstantin Remchukov, editor of Nezavisimaia Gazeta, a newspaper whose political stance isn’t 100% clear to me but strikes me as sort-of oppositional, sort of not (given that Remchukov ran the re-election campaign of Moscow mayor Sergei Sobyanin). All in all, the anti-government voices get the bulk of the space.
So there you have it. Make some stuff up. Reference ‘claims’ and ‘allegations’ without pointing out that they are unsubstantiated or even false. And throw in lots of quotes from pundits who support the chosen narrative. Easy as pie. A career as a journalist awaits you. Just don’t bother trying to be accurate. Understood?
ACLU Again Cowardly Abstains From an Online Censorship Controversy: This Time Over BLM
Black Trans Lives Matters’ march in London. (Photo by Dave Rushen/SOPA Images/LightRocket via Getty Images)
By Glenn Greenwald | April 26, 2021
Enormous sums of money have poured into racial justice groups since the May, 2020 murder of George Floyd by the Minneapolis Police Department. “The foundation widely seen as a steward of the Black Lives Matter movement says it took in just over $90 million last year,” according to a February Associated Press review, while at least $5 billion was raised by groups associated with that cause in the first two months alone following Floyd’s death.
Two weeks after the Floyd killing, The New York Times said that the “money has come in so fast and so unexpectedly that some groups even began to turn away and redirect donors elsewhere,” while “others said they still could not yet account for how much had arrived.” Propelled by the emotions and nationwide protest movements that emerged last summer, corporations, oligarchs, celebrities and the general public opened their wallets and began pouring money into BLM coffers and have not stopped doing so.
Where that money has gone has been the topic of numerous media investigations as well as concerns expressed by racial justice advocates. AP noted that BLM’s sharing of financial data in February “marks the first time in the movement’s nearly eight-year history that BLM leaders have revealed a detailed look at their finances.” That newfound transparency was prompted by what AP called “longstanding tensions boil[ing] over between some of the movement’s grassroots organizers and national leaders — the former went public last fall with grievances about financial transparency, decision-making and accountability.”
In December, ten local BLM chapters severed ties with the national group amidst questions and suspicions over the handling of activities and finances by one of its co-founders, Patrisse Cullors, who had assumed the title of Executive Director. On April 10, The New York Post published an exposé on what it called Cullors’ “million-dollar real estate buying binge.” The paper noted that as protests were unfolding around the country, the BLM official was “snagging four high-end homes for $3.2 million in the US alone, according to property records,” including a California property valued at $1.4 million. The article also revealed that the self-described Marxist and her partner “were spotted in the Bahamas looking for a unit at the Albany,” an “elite enclave laid out on 600 oceanside acres,” which “features a private marina and designer golf course.” The Post included photos of several of the properties obtained from public real estate listings.
In an interview about that Post story with Marc Lamont Hill, Cullors — except saying she has not visited the Bahamas since the age of 15 — did not deny the accuracy of the reporting, but instead justified her real estate acquisitions. She denied she had taken a salary from the BLM group, pointing to other income she earns as a professor, author, and a YouTube content creator as the source of this sudden outburst of real estate purchases. She denounced the Post reporting as “frankly racist, and sexist.”
So that seems like a perfectly healthy cycle for covering a controversy, obviously in the public interest. In the wake of concerns from activists about where this massive amount of BLM money has gone, The New York Post did its job of unearthing the splurge of real estate acquisitions by the person who controls and directs BLM’s budget and who has been a target of accusations and suspicions from activists. Cullors then had the opportunity to publicly provide her side of the story concerning her aggressive and ample financial investments.
But then something quite unhealthy and unusual occurred. Five days after publication of that Post article, the Substack journalists Shant Mesrobian and Zaid Jilani reported that Facebook was banning the sharing of that article worldwide on its platform — similar to what Twitter and Facebook did in the weeks leading up to the 2020 election to The New York Post‘s reporting on the Biden family’s business dealings in China and Ukraine. The Substack reporters noted that Facebook ultimately confirmed the worldwide ban of the Post‘s reporting to The New York Times’ media reporter Ben Smith, justifying it on the ground that the article “revealed personal details about [Cullors] and her residence in violation of Facebook’s community standards.”
In his weekly New York Times Sunday night media column, Smith returned to this subject. When a Facebook lawyer justified the censorship by citing an alleged policy that the tech monopoly will ban any “article [which] shows your home or apartment, says what city you’re in and you don’t like it,” Smith expressed extreme skepticism:
The policy sounds crazy because it could apply to dozens, if not hundreds, of news articles every day — indeed, to a staple of reporting for generations that has included Michael Bloomberg’s expansion of his townhouse in 2009 and the comings and goings of the Hamptons elites. Alex Rodriguez doesn’t like a story that includes a photo of him and his former fiancée, Jennifer Lopez, smiling in front of his house? Delete it. Donald Trump is annoyed about a story that includes a photo of him outside his suite at Mar-a-Lago? Gone. Facebook’s hands, the lawyer told me, are tied by its own policies.
Presumably, the only reason this doesn’t happen constantly is because nobody knows about the policy. But now you do!
Smith was additionally disturbed that Facebook was, in essence, overriding the editorial judgment of news outlets, which grapple every day with how to strike the balance between ensuring the public knows of information in the public interest and protecting a person’s right to privacy. For obvious reasons, public figures and organizations — which both BLM and Cullors undoubtedly are — are deemed to have a lower expectation of privacy when it comes to what is newsworthy. That is why, for example, the extramarital affairs of Donald Trump or Bill Clinton are deemed newsworthy whereas, outside of the dead-but-returning Gawker sewer, the sex lives of private citizens are not. Yet Facebook accords no deference to the editorial judgments even of the most established media outlets. Instead, they told Smith, “Facebook alone decides.”
Whatever one’s views are on this particular censorship controversy, there is no doubt that it is part of the highly consequential debate over online free speech and the ability of monopolies like Facebook to control the dissemination of news and the boundaries of political discourse and debate. That is why Smith devoted his weekly column to it. And yet, when Smith approached the standard free speech advocacy groups for comment on this story, virtually none was willing to speak up. “Facebook’s usual critics have been strikingly silent as the company has extended its purview over speech into day-to-day editorial calls,” he wrote.
Among those groups which insisted that it would not comment on Facebook’s censorship of the Post‘s BLM story was the vaunted, brave and deeply principled free speech organization, the American Civil Liberties Union. “We don’t have anyone who is closely plugged into that situation right now so we don’t have anything to say at this point in time,” emailed Aaron Madrid Aksoz, an ACLU spokesman. Smith said “the only criticism he could obtain came from the News Media Alliance, the old newspaper lobby, whose chief executive, David Chavern, called blocking The Post’s link ‘completely arbitrary’ and noted that ‘Facebook and Google stand between publishers and their audiences and determine how and whether news content is seen.’”
How is it possible that the ACLU is all but invisible on one of the central free speech debates of our time: namely, how much censorship should Silicon Valley tech monopolists be imposing on our political speech? As someone who intensively reports on these controversies, I can barely remember any time when the ACLU spoke up loudly on any of these censorship debates, let alone assumed the central role that any civil liberties group with any integrity would, by definition, assume on this growing controversy.
In lieu of the traditional, iconic and organization-defining willingness — eagerness — of the ACLU to defend free speech precisely when it has been most controversial and upsetting to liberals, what we now get instead are cowardly, P.R.-consultant-scripted excuses for staying as far away as possible: “We don’t have anyone who is closely plugged into that situation right now so we don’t have anything to say at this point in time.” That sounds like something Marco Rubio’s office says when asked about a Trump tweet or that a corporate headquarters would say to avoid an inflammatory controversy, not the reaction of a stalwart civil liberties group to a publicly debated act of political censorship.
In this particular case, it is not difficult to understand the cause of the ACLU’s silence. They obviously cannot defend Facebook’s censorship — affirmatively defending the stifling of political speech is, at least for now, still a bridge too far for the group — but they are petrified of saying anything that might seem even remotely critical of, let alone adversarial to, BLM activists and organizations. That is because BLM is one of the most cherished left-liberal causes, and the ACLU now relies almost entirely on donations and grants from those who have standard left-liberal politics and want and expect the ACLU to advance that ideological and partisan agenda above its nonpartisan civil liberties principles. Criticizing BLM is a third rail in left-liberal political circles, which is where the ACLU now resides almost entirely, and thus it again cowers in silence as another online act of censorship which advances political liberalism emerges. Indeed, BLM is an organization which the ACLU frequently champions:
Like so many liberal-left media outlets and advocacy groups, the ACLU was suffering financially before they were saved and then enriched beyond their wildest dreams by Donald Trump and the #Resistance movement he spawned. “The American Civil Liberties Union this week laid off 23 employees, about 7 percent of the organization’s national staff,” announced The Washington Post in April, 2015. But in the Trump era, the money flowed in almost as quickly and furiously as post-Floyd money to BLM. In February, 2017, said AP, the group “is suddenly awash in donations and new members as it does battle with President Donald Trump over the extent of his constitutional authority, with nearly $80 million in online contributions alone pouring in since the election.” So that is the donor base it now serves.
The ACLU’s we-know-nothing routine for abstaining from commenting on Facebook’s censorship of the BLM article is, for so many reasons, preposterous. The group funds what it calls its Speech, Privacy, and Technology Project, and some of its best lawyers oversee it. Clearly they focus on these issues. And the ACLU in general has taken a firm and borderline-absolutist position against online censorship by Silicon Valley monopolies: principles whose application to this particular case would be easy and obvious. The ACLU has a section of its website devoted to “Internet Speech,” and its position on such matters is stated explicitly:
The ACLU believes in an uncensored Internet, a vast free-speech zone deserving at least as much First Amendment protection as that afforded to traditional media such as books, newspapers, and magazines….The ACLU has been at the forefront of protecting online freedom of expression in its myriad forms. We brought the first case in which the U.S. Supreme Court declared speech on the Internet equally worthy of the First Amendment’s historical protections.
In a July, 2018 article published on the group’s site entitled “Facebook Shouldn’t Censor Offensive Speech,” the group praised Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg’s controversial pledge “to keep Facebook from diving deeper into the business of censorship” as “the right call.”
Unlike in response to the BLM controversy, the ACLU had no trouble back then recognizing that “what’s at stake here is the ability of one platform that serves as a forum for the speech of billions of people to use its enormous power to censor speech on the basis of its own determinations of what is true, what is hateful, and what is offensive.” The ACLU’s stated policy on these controversies could not have been clearer: “given Facebook’s nearly unparalleled status as a forum for political speech and debate, it should not take down anything but unlawful speech, like incitement to violence.” In light of that principle, how is it remotely hard to denounce Facebook’s censorship of the Post‘s article given that it does not even arguably fall within the scope of those narrow exceptions?
Because the ACLU still employs a few old-school civil libertarians among its hundreds of lawyers and staff, those employees manage to do work and express views that are consistent with the ACLU’s old-school civil liberties agenda even when contrary to the interests of liberal politics. But the tactics used by the ACLU in those cases to downplay or hide those aberrations are as transparent as they are craven.
When three Silicon Valley monopolies united to remove the social media app Parler from the internet in January, 2021 after influential Democratic lawmakers demanded it — one of the most brute acts of monopolistic censorship yet — an ACLU lawyer, Ben Wizner, was cited in The New York Times as labelling Parler’s destruction “troubling,” telling the paper: “I think we should recognize the importance of neutrality when we’re talking about the infrastructure of the internet.” But on the ACLU’s highly active and influential Twitter account — the group’s primary platform for promoting its work, expressing its views, and soliciting donations, where it has two million followers and often tweets up to fifty times a day — the group said absolutely nothing about the removal of an entire social media app from the internet.
Indeed, the ACLU — outside of a few token, hidden statements — has chosen to play at most a minor role in the key free speech controversies of the day, ones focusing on such weighty matters as internet freedom and online censorship over our political debates by Silicon Valley monopolies. Over the last four years, as Facebook’s censorship has expanded rapidly, the ACLU has said little to nothing about it — including remaining in utter silence about the extraordinary decision to censor pre-election reporting on Hunter Biden’s laptop and what it revealed about Joe Biden’s business dealings. Last month, Substack reporter Michael Tracey reviewed the ACLU’s prior 100 tweets and found that 63 of them were about trans issues while a grand total of one was about free speech and none about due process. A comparison of the number of ACLU statements on online censorship controversies to its manifestations on trans issues similarly reveals a fixation on the latter with very little interest in the former.
It goes without saying that the ACLU has every right to devote a huge bulk of its institutional resources and public advocacy to the cause of trans equality if it chooses to do so. But what that reveals is that the group is becoming exactly what its leaders always vowed it would never be: just another garden-variety liberal political advocacy group. After all, there is no shortage of extremely well-financed LGBT groups doing the same advocacy on trans issues. Those LGBT groups shifted their focus almost entirely to trans issues when they won the entire agenda of gay and lesbian equality with the Supreme Court’s 2015 legalization of same-sex marriage in all fifty states, and supporting trans rights is the mainstream, standard view of Democratic Party leaders and liberal activists.
The ACLU’s refusal to engage with growing online censorship is baffling even from the perspective of its liberal politics given that radical leftists are increasingly (and predictably) the targets of tech censorship alongside anti-establishment right-wing voices. Just yesterday, the highly popular trans YouTube host Natalie Wynn of Contrapoints complained that one of her past episodes had just been demonetized and urged: “Free speech should be reclaimed as an essential leftist issue. We should not surrender the most fundamental civil right to Google LLC in the name of deplatforming rightists and curtailing harassment.” Wynn’s last video, rebutting the views of J.K. Rowling on trans issues, featured Wynn’s list of the telltale signs of “indirect bigotry” toward trans people, and she included “free speech advocacy,” but — as happens to so many people — Wynn has apparently reconsidered that view and has discovered the centrality of free speech values now that her own speech is targeted. But agitating for more online political censorship still remains a cause deeply popular among establishment liberals, further explaining the ACLU’s reluctance to involve itself in these controversies on the side of free expression.
ACLU page touting its advocacy of trans and nonbinary rights
What always distinguished the ACLU in the past — and what gave it credibility with judges in courtrooms — was its devotion to and focus on non-partisan free speech, free press and due process causes that were too unpopular or controversial for other groups to touch, particularly liberal groups who could not afford to offend the political sensibilities of Democrats. There are still some isolated occasions when the ACLU does such things — such as when it spoke up in defense of the NRA against New York Governor Andrew Cuomo’s efforts to target the group with destruction or when the ACLU recently denounced parts of the Democrats’ H.R.1 “reforms”— but the ACLU largely hides those exceptions on its most popular public platforms, and they are becoming increasingly rare.
And now we have arrived at the truly depressing and tawdry place where the ACLU is afraid to apply its long-stated principles to denounce Facebook’s censorship because the censorship in question happened to be an article that reflected poorly on the sacred-among-liberals BLM group. In the place of brave lawyers and activists defending the constitutional rights and civil liberties even of those people and groups most despised, we have instead a corporate spokesman emailing The New York Times with excuses about why it cannot and will not speak up about a major censorship controversy that has been brewing for two weeks. In that decline one finds the ACLU’s sorry trajectory from stalwart civil liberties group into a lavishly funded arm of the Democratic Party’s liberal political wing.
Australian MP blasts Facebook’s ‘interference’ after his OFFICIAL page was banned for Covid-19 ‘misinformation’
RT | April 26, 2021
After Facebook deleted the official page of Craig Kelly for spreading “misinformation” about the coronavirus and vaccines, the independent MP said the “book-burning” US social media giant was interfering in Australia’s democracy.
Kelly was informed of Facebook’s ban by text on Monday morning, he told the media, describing the move as “censorship.”
Banning the page with some 86,000 followers represents “interference in Australian democracy,” he said.
“This was the most popular, highly used political Facebook page in the country,” he said, in remarks quoted by ABC. “They have basically burnt and torched and incinerated and obliterated from the record, previous comments and previous things that I’d made.”
Kelly’s personal page and Instagram account remained active, for now. A Facebook spokesperson said in a statement that the Australian MP had “repeatedly” violated their policies.
“We don’t allow anyone, including elected officials, to share misinformation about Covid-19 that could lead to imminent physical harm or [Covid-19] vaccines that have been debunked by public health experts,” the spokesperson said.
“It is not misinformation if you have a difference of opinion,” Kelly shot back. “The idea that they are some purveyors of all truth is just absolutely outrageous.” The ban is not just outrageous but also violates the principles of free speech, he added.
Facebook did not just remove a few posts, but the entire page, he said, describing it as “like setting fire to a book, not just removing the pages they disagree with.”
These people are the heirs to those who used to go around burning books because that is effectively what they have done.
Kelly has represented Hughes, a parliamentary district south of Sydney in New South Wales, since 2010. He resigned from the ruling Liberal Party in February, after Facebook suspended him for “misinformation” about Covid-19 and someone from the office of Prime Minister Scott Morrison told him to “shut up” about the virus.
Flush from the success of “fortifying” the 2020 US presidential election, Facebook announced in December that it would ban any “false claims” and “misinformation” about Covid-19, even if posted by public officials.
In January, Mark Zuckerberg’s social media behemoth clashed with Canberra over a proposed law requiring social media to pay for news content. After a week-long Facebook ban on all news content in Australia, the government relented and proposed an amended law, which critics said favored major corporations over local and independent news outlets.
The Targets of Biden’s War on “Domestic Extremists” May Not Be Who You Think
By Leighton Woodhouse | April 26, 2021
Last May, several months into a global pandemic that had capsized the economy, hog farmers had a problem on their hands. With restaurants closed, demand for their product had evaporated. With outbreaks shuttering meat processing plants all over the country, they had nowhere to send their animals to be slaughtered. If kept alive, the pigs would quickly outgrow facilities designed to hold them only for highly abbreviated lives, and the costs of feeding and watering them would become astronomical.
So some major pork producers, among them Iowa’s largest, Iowa Select Farms, made a horrifying decision. They would mass exterminate their animals in one fell swoop, using a technique that promised efficiency for themselves but guaranteed incomprehensible suffering for the pigs.
The method was called “ventilation shutdown,” and it entailed, basically, roasting the pigs alive. Workers would close all of the vents into the barns, shut down the air conditioning, and pipe steam into the buildings until the animals died by asphyxiation or hyperthermia, a process that took several hours. Then a worker would walk through the piles of corpses with a captive bolt gun, shooting whatever stragglers had survived.
The company, however, was unaware that there was a whistleblower within their ranks. An ISF truck driver named Lucas Walker, who had long been appalled by the company’s treatment of its pigs, had informed an activist named Matt Johnson of the company’s plans. Johnson snuck into the barns, placed hidden cameras, and recorded video and audio of the massacre to later release to the news media.
An Iowa Select Farms worker on May 19, 2020, carrying a gun in a barn after ventilation shutdown has been used to kill “excess” pigs (credit: DxE still).
Neither Johnson nor Walker is what most people of conscience would consider a dangerous political extremist. They had no desire to bring any physical harm to anyone; on the contrary, they were moved by the cause of putting a halt to needless suffering. But both a new state law in Iowa and a bill currently being considered in Congress could render them such in the eyes of the criminal justice system. It is just one example of the moral hazard posed by the ongoing effort in Congress and within the Biden administration to erect a new domestic security state apparatus in response to the Trump years and the Capitol Riot — an effort the CIA has joined, while animal rights groups and environmental campaigners have been explicitly listed among its targets.
In 2011, Iowa Select Farms had been the subject of an undercover investigation by the animal rights group Mercy For Animals. Liz Pachaud, an animal rights activist with MFA, had taken a job at the farm and, over the course of four months, documented appalling conditions there with an undercover camera. When the gruesome footage was released, it caused a major crisis for ISF, with numerous grocery chains dropping the company as a supplier.
The following year, the animal agriculture industry successfully lobbied the Iowa state legislature to make what Pachaud had done a crime. The law was one of many so-called “Ag Gag” laws in agricultural states across the country, which make undercover investigations on factory farms by animal rights groups unlawful (an estimated 99 percent of animals raised for meat are factory farmed; the very few small family farms that are left are being systematically driven out of business by the industrialization and economic consolidation of the industry). As Ag gag laws effectively criminalize speech, some of the more sloppily written among them have been subject to successful constitutional challenges; Iowa’s 2012 law was among them. In 2019, a federal judge struck down Iowa’s 2012 law.
That same month, a new Governor took office in Iowa. Kim Reynolds had won her office in 2018 with the conspicuous help of Iowa Select Farms. ISF’s co-owners, Jeff and Deborah Hansen, have donated nearly $300,000 to Governor Reynolds. During the 2018 race, Deborah was the Governor’s biggest individual campaign contributor. Kim Reynolds had been the guest of honor at the Hansens’ family foundation.
Governor Reynolds had barely been in office a month before a newly re-written Ag Gag bill was introduced into the legislature. By summer, she had signed it into law.
Now, Johnson has become the first person to be charged under the 2019 Ag Gag law for attempting to enter one ISF facility. He is facing a separate wiretap charge for the hidden cameras in the barn where the company carried out its ventilation shutdown. In the meantime, yet another Ag Gag law has passed through the Iowa legislature, which increases penalties for the crime of planting hidden cameras in animal agriculture facilities. Governor Reynolds is expected to sign the new bill into law any day now.
As should surprise nobody who lived through the political aftermath of 9/11, these laws were passed under the pretext of combatting “terrorism.” Radical animal rights and environmental activists have, in fact, long been among the FBI’s top “domestic terrorism” targets, as well as targets of draconian new legislation. In 2006, at the behest of the pharmaceutical and animal agriculture industries, Congress passed a law specifically defining animal rights activism aimed at “damaging or interfering with the operations of an animal enterprise” — whether or not violence was involved — as “terrorism.” Direct Action Everywhere (DxE), the group Johnson belongs to (I used to cover DxE as a reporter and have since become a member myself), was the subject of a major FBI investigation over the “theft” of two dying piglets from a factory farm. After he was discovered, the FBI interviewed Walker, asking him if DxE sells drugs or guns to finance their activism, and tried to recruit him as an informant into their activities.
This dismal history should be an obvious cautionary tale about the hazards of enhancing the state’s power to surveil and prosecute people for politically motivated activity, beyond the ample criminal laws already on the books. But in the wake of the January 6 MAGA Capitol Riot, progressives, in particular, have gained an appetite for more.
Currently, a bill with 196 Democratic co-sponsors (and 3 Republicans) is before Congress, which would begin to build the legal and bureaucratic architecture for an interagency domestic terrorism response unit within the Department of Justice, the FBI, and the Department of Homeland Security. The legislation is explicitly a response to the Capitol Riot and is pointed particularly at “White supremacist” and “neo-Nazi” groups — a particularly unsympathetic and uncontroversial cast of culprits.
But the PATRIOT Act was also purported to target only the most hateful, murderous people in the world — Islamic terrorists — before it metastasized into a massive surveillance state infrastructure that spied on literally every single American with an internet connection. Are we to expect that a domestic analogue to the PATRIOT Act will draw the line at violent sociopathic racists? The intelligence community demonstrably does not: a recently declassified report lists animal rights and environmental activists, abortion activists on both the pro-life and the pro-choice sides, anarchists, and anti-capitalists as potential domestic terrorist threats.
If we’ve learned anything from the last few years, it’s that corporations are all too eager to co-opt the progressive rhetoric du jour, whether to sell sneakers or to protect themselves against workplace discrimination lawsuits. And the FBI has been more than willing to investigate activists engaged in non-violent activities as terrorists under the 2006 Animal Enterprise Terrorism Act. A new domestic federal law enforcement bureaucracy dedicated to surveilling and investigating anyone the government claims to suspect is a “terrorist” would be a bonanza to industries facing concerted activist pressure, whether animal agriculture or fossil fuels, or a company in any industry facing a unionization drive. What possible reason is there to believe that corporations won’t lobby the Biden administration and future administrations to use their new powers to ensnare activists who campaign against them, all in the name of ridding the country of violent political extremists and “insurrectionists”?
The answer is that there is no reason to believe it, and every reason to believe the hunt for “domestic terrorists” could eventually be turned against anyone with the will and the means to effectively confront those who hold concentrated political and corporate power — including through strictly non-violent means. A demonstrated willingness to use violence has never been a requisite for law enforcement agencies to brand those they wish to malign as “terrorists”, as DxE activists know all too well. All that’s required is their willingness to use the label.
After 9/11, passage of the PATRIOT Act was enabled by the bullying of dissidents in a climate of enforced jingoism. It was dangerous to ask critical questions then; safety was found only in conformity. We’re in such a moment again, but this time from within a liberal rather than a right-wing consensus. But the outcome will be the same: the hardening of state power, made possible through organized collective hysteria.
Has the new MI6 boss read the Paris Agreement?
Global Warming Policy Forum | April 26, 2021
Richard Moore, the new chief of the UK’s secret service, suggests countries such as China will be watched to ensure climate commitments are kept. What climate commitment? Has nobody at MI6 informed Mr Moore about the Paris Agreement?
After all, under international law, China, India, and all emerging and developing nations are exempt from any CO2 emission cuts until 2030 or later.
The Daily Telegraph – 26/04/21:
Richard Moore, head of the UK’s foreign intelligence service, described climate change as the “foremost international foreign policy item for this country and for the planet” CREDIT: PA
MI6 is placing the climate emergency at the forefront of its international espionage with “green spying” on the world’s big polluters, its new chief has revealed.
Richard Moore, head of the UK’s foreign intelligence service, described climate change as the “foremost international foreign policy item for this country and for the planet”.
It means the big industrial countries will be monitored by MI6 to ensure they are upholding their commitments to combating rising global temperatures.
Mr Moore, known as ‘C’, took charge of the intelligence agency in October and has become the first head of the service to ever give a broadcast interview.
He indicated that British spies will make China the focus of much of their climate-related espionage by pointing out that Beijing is “certainly the largest emitter” of carbon.
“Our job is to shine a light in places where people might not want it shone and so clearly we are going to support what is the foremost international foreign policy agenda item for this country and for the planet, which is around the climate emergency, and of course we have a role in that space,” he told Times Radio.
“Where people sign up to commitments on climate change, it is perhaps our job to make sure that what they are really doing reflects what they have signed up to.”
10 Covid-Skeptic Memes to Get You Through the Day
By Kim Usbourne | OffGuardian | April 26, 2021
What’s occurring in the world nowadays is no joke. But if you’re living under oppression for over a year, it’s probably healthy to have a laugh once in a while.
And so, on this late-April Monday morning, here are 10 memes to give you a quick chuckle in these maddening times:
1.
A meme that uses historical artwork always makes me chortle…
2.
A tasty treat for the mindless masses?
3.
Some contemporary artwork from MadebyJimbob (you can even get this on a greeting card to send to your ever-wary neighbours…)
4.
Ok ok, the distortion of the original photo is upsetting to anyone who does graphic design, but it’s still bloody funny…
5.
I don’t know why, but the fact that it’s a teenage Zac Efron just makes this even funnier!
6.
They keep telling me I’m going to get sick but I have this amazing immunity superpower called “thinking it’s all complete nonsense”
7.
In my humble opinion, the use of “Hide the Pain Harold” as the weatherman is perfection.
8.
“Take my money” comes to mind… I want one of these badges!
9.
I’ve never actually seen ‘Dumb & Dumber’ but those are words I’d use to describe the general public nowadays…
10.
Ok this one might be a little depressing, but it’s not wrong!
AND…
… if you’ve been on facebook or Twitter during the last year and haven’t seen any of those, chances are they were taken down because…
Here’s wishing every skeptic, “conspiracy theorist”, freethinker, “dissenter” and “covidiot” a fantastic week!
French Report Urges Halt to Covid Mass-Jabbing
By Stephen Lendman | April 26, 2021
There’s nothing remotely safe and effective about experimental/unapproved Pfizer/Moderna mRNA technology and J & J’s vaccine for covid mass-jabbing.
Translated into English, a report by an independent French drug assessment center — the Centre territorial d’Information indépendante et d’Avis pharmaceutiques — CTIAP) called for halting mass-jabbing for covid “as a matter of urgency.”
It stressed that experimental Pfizer, Moderna, AstraZeneca and J & J covid drugs lacked sufficient testing, adding:
Their excipients (coloring agents, preservatives, fillers and other ingredients) should be considered as new active substances.”
They were OK’d for emergency use — when no emergency exists — before there was “proof of quality for the active substance and the finished product.”
CTIAP also called their manufacturing processes problematic.
Its report stressed that “variabilities, which impact the very core of the product, could even invalidate any clinical trials conducted” ahead, adding:
“Can we imagine launching a car manufacturing line and putting vehicles on the road, despite the uncertainties noted in the official documents published?”
“These uncertainties are related to the quality of the parts making up the engine and the various other parts, including those related to safety, the manufacturing process, the reproducibility of the batches that are being marketed, etc.”
“In the field of medicines (including covid mRNA technology and vaccines), the pharmaceutical act of ‘release’ of the finished product (an authorized product intended for sale) constitutes the final stage of control that precedes the release of these products to the population.”
“This key step of ‘release’ is under the pharmaceutical responsibility of the manufacturers.”
“Prudence…dictate(s) that, in all countries where these vaccines against (covid) have been marketed, all the batches thus ‘released’ should be withdrawn immediately.”
“These MAs (marketing authorizations) that have been granted should be suspended, or even canceled, as a matter of urgency until further notice.”
European Medicines Agency (EMA) documents explain lack of sufficient evidence to show whether experimental covid drugs are safe and effective.
Marketing authorization granted them by the EMA is “conditional” for up to one year — based on “incomplete data.”
Separately on Friday, a CDC advisory panel recommended unrestricted use of J & J’s hazardous covid vaccine for individuals aged-18 and older.
If approved by the Pharma-connected CDC and FDA as expected, J & J covid mass-jabbing will resume.
Claiming benefits — that don’t exist — outweigh risks defies reality.
The same holds for Pfizer/Moderna mRNA technology and AstraZeneca’s covid vaccine.
They’re experimental, inadequately tested, rushed to market drugs that are too hazardous for human use.
Mass-jabbing with them already caused countless numbers of adverse events, including deaths in the US, Europe and elsewhere.
Ignored by the CDC, FDA, and EMA is that no need or justification exists for use of these high-risk experimental drugs.
Safe, effective, low cost drugs, and alternative non-drug therapy, works to prevent, treat and cure seasonal flu-renamed covid as needed.
Defying reality, the pro-mass-jabbing NYT falsely claimed that “pause(d) (use of J & J’s covid vaccine) was widely considered a blow to national and global vaccination efforts (sic) and removed an effective vaccine (sic) that many states and countries had counted on to deploy in hard-to-reach places (sic).”
Experimental covid drugs don’t protect. They risk serious adverse events near-or-longer-term, including possible death.
Preserving and protecting health requires rejecting them.
The alternative is playing fast and loose with what’s too precious to lose.
“No Evidence Facemasks Keep Kids & Teachers Safe”
By Richie Allen | April 26, 2021
Speaking on Talk Radio this morning, Oxford University epidemiologist Carl Heneghan said that there is no evidence that face masks help to keep pupils and teachers safe in the classroom.
Heneghan told Julia Hartley-Brewer;
“What I would say to people is, in the absence of evidence, if you think they should be wearing them, go and talk to some children. That’s what I’ve done. And I’ve said, what’s the reality on the ground? What’s it like for you in class? How does it feel?
And I can tell you they hate them. They find it really difficult. They don’t adhere to the guidelines. So for instance at the end of class they go into their pocket. They pull them out. That’s a dangerous issue with co-infections and the potential of that to stay infected for a period of time.”
Heneghan went on to say that medical interventions must be backed by hard evidence that the intervention will work. He said;
“That’s all I ever do is say, where’s the evidence to inform what we do and if it’s lacking, you have to come down on the side of not intervening.
Now one of the key problems we’ve got when we intervene, is it becomes incredibly difficult to roll back interventions. And that’s what we are saying. That’s the great problem now, the just in-case approach. That’s not how to perform in healthcare.”
Should Unvaccinated and Obese Be Penalized by Government?
By Dr. Joseph Mercola | April 23, 2021
“Vaccine refusal will come at a cost — for all of us,” Edward-Isaac Dovere, a staff writer for The Atlantic, proclaims in an April 10, 2021, political commentary.1 Unvaccinated individuals “will have higher health care costs,” he says, and the vaccinated will have to foot the bill, either through taxes or insurance premiums.
This argument could have been made for decades, and can still be made today, for any number of groups. Obese individuals have far higher health care costs than those of normal weight. Insulin resistant people and those with Type 2 diabetes end up costing the health care system enormous sums. Who pays for them?
Overall, healthy individuals — people who generally do what they can to take good care of themselves to prevent chronic conditions — have always paid for those who are less particular about their diets and lifestyle.
The Economic Costs of Vaccination Vs. Vaccine Refusal
Dovere predicts the economic costs of vaccine refusal will begin to feature heavily as we move forward. He quotes Washington Gov. Jay Inslee, who told him,2 “You have a liberty right, and that unfortunately is imposing on everyone else and their liberty right not to have to pay for your stubbornness.” Not surprisingly, Dovere and Inslee both focus on just one side of what needs to be a two- if not four-sided equation.
When making public health policy, you have an obligation to analyze both the benefit and the cost of any given policy. In this case, what might be the cost of vaccine side effects, both in terms of health care costs and lives lost? As of April 1, 2021, VAERS had received 56,869 adverse events following COVID-19 vaccination, including 7,971 serious injuries and 2,342 deaths.3 By April 13, the had updated that death toll to 3,005.4
What might be the cost if the vaccines don’t work and you get sick anyway? As of April 15, 2021, some 5,800 Americans who had been fully vaccinated against COVID-19 had been diagnosed with COVID-19 post-vaccination; 396 (7%) required hospitalization and 74 died.5 These cases are popping up all over the world.
The vaccines are not foolproof. In fact, so-called “breakthrough cases,” meaning cases in which a fully vaccinated individual is diagnosed with COVID-19 are to be expected. I’m not sure why anyone is surprised, seeing how the vaccine makers have acknowledged that the mRNA injections are not designed to actually make you immune to SARS-CoV-2.
You can still contract the virus and spread it to others. What the shots may do is lessen your symptoms if and when you get infected with SARS-CoV-2. So, of course people can still get sick, as they did before. Some will require hospitalization. Some will die — just like they did previously, before the vaccine.
Then there’s the question of whether vaccinated individuals end up being more susceptible to variants of the virus than unvaccinated individuals. Preliminary research6,7,8,9 found that people who had received both doses of the Pfizer COVID-19 vaccine were eight times more susceptible to contracting the South African variant of SARS-CoV-2, called B.1.351, (5.4% compared to 0.7%).
Unfortunately, the study was too small to glean any information about outcomes, so we don’t know whether they developed milder or more serious illness than unvaccinated people sickened by the same variant.
Either way, if vaccinated people are more susceptible to more dangerous variants (which they claim B.1351 is), why assume that unvaccinated people would incur higher health care costs? Variants are now cropping up all over the place, so maybe vaccinated people will end up being responsible for a greater share of medical expenses. Maybe, if they have milder illness and unvaccinated have more serious illness, the costs might end up about the same for each group.
May There Be Economic Benefits to Vaccine Refusal?
In my view, the notion that COVID-19 vaccines will end this pandemic is an illogical fallacy since these shots do not provide actual immunity. The fizz in Dovere’s argument starts going flat on that basis alone. But there’s much more.
To really determine what’s best for public health, you’d also want to do the benefit and cost analysis of not vaccinating and relying on naturally-acquired immunity in combination with immune-boosting strategies instead, such as improving vitamin D levels across the entire population, for example.
Only when you have made all of those calculations — the benefit and cost of vaccinating, and the benefit and cost of not vaccinating — can you compare the two and begin to make statements about how certain groups of people may incur higher health care costs, and which strategy is likely to save the most lives. As of right now, it’s pure guesswork as to who’s going to cost more in the long run.
For example, I don’t know of any actual data showing that the health of people who are planning to forgo the vaccine place them at increased risk of serious COVID-19. If I were to guess, and this is pure speculation, people who have decided not to get vaccinated may be doing so because a) they know they’re in a low-risk category and/or b) they are health-conscious people who feel confident that they can prevent and/or treat COVID-19 in other cost-effective ways, should they get sick.
There are a lot of data that need to be compiled and analyzed before we can start declaring the COVID-19 vaccination campaign a public health care success, let alone a cost-saving imperative.
Appeal to Illogical Reasoning
Dovere goes on to discuss some of the messaging campaigns employed to lure people out of their vaccine hesitancy:10
“Two appeals seem to work best: First, the vaccines are safe, and they’re more effective than the flu vaccine. Second, you deserve this, and getting vaccinated will help preserve your liberty and encourage the government to lift restrictions.
(That last idea is what Jerry Falwell Jr. focused on in the vaccination selfie he posted11 this week, captioned, ‘Please get vaccinated so our nutcase of a governor will have less reasons for mindless restrictions!’) Inslee hopes that emphasizing those points will persuade more Republican men to get their shots.”
Sometimes it can help to spell out a logical fallacy using different words. (Personally, I believe Falwell was simply trying to be funny, but Dovere and Inslee have apparently seized the “lift restrictions” angle as a social conditioning opportunity, so that’s really what I’m addressing here.)
One rewrite of Falwell’s plea could be: “Please ignore your current health status and potential vaccine risks and just obey so that our governor will have less reason to impose unconstitutional and unscientific limitations on our basic rights and freedoms.”
In my view, a more appropriate way to prevent “mindless restrictions” would be to peacefully disobey and/or take the governor to court, as has been done to California Gov. Gavin Newsom. The Supreme Court has ruled against him no less than six times, finding he abused his power, overstepped his authority and violated the Constitution with his pandemic restrictions on churches.12
Urging someone to take a vaccine to prevent an elected official — who can be unseated — from implementing unscientific and/or unconstitutional restrictions is hardly rational. Let’s not forget that cost-benefit analyses13 have actually been done for lockdowns — perhaps one of the most mindless of restrictions — and the cost is far greater than the benefit.
The cost of the lockdowns in the U.K., in terms of Wellbeing Years (WELLBY), is five times greater than might optimistically be saved, and may in reality be anywhere from 50 times to 87 times greater. The cost for lockdowns in Canada is at least 10 times greater than the benefit.
In Australia, the minimum cost is 6.6 times higher, and in the U.S., the cost is estimated to be at least 5.2 times higher than the benefit of lockdowns. A cost-benefit analysis performed for New Zealand, which looked at the cost of adding just five extra days of “COVID-19 alert level 4” found the cost in Quality Adjusted Life Years (QALY) was 94.9 times higher than the benefit.
Should We Penalize Obesity and Vitamin D Deficiency?
If it’s determined that unvaccinated individuals need to be penalized socially, financially or otherwise, then how can we not also penalize other choices that significantly add to the COVID-19 burden? We know, for example, that vitamin D deficiency significantly raises your risk of COVID-19. In one analysis,14 82.2% of COVID-19 patients were vitamin D deficient.
I published a scientific review15 on the impact of vitamin D in COVID-19 in October 2020, co-written with William Grant, Ph.D., and Dr. Carol Wagner, both of whom are part of the GrassrootsHealth expert vitamin D panel. You can read the paper for free on the journal’s website.
Another major COVID-19 factor is obesity. As reported by CNN16 March 5, 2021, the COVID-19 death rates were more than 10 times higher in countries where more than half the adult population was overweight, compared to countries in which the obesity rate was below 50%. The COVID-19 death rates also rose in tandem with the prevalence of obesity, thereby strengthening the link, according to the report, released by the World Obesity Federation.
At the lowest end is Vietnam, which has an obesity rate of 18.3% and a COVID-19 death rate of 0.04 per 100,000. Toward the high end is the U.S., which has an obesity rate of 67.9% and a COVID-19 death rate of 152.49 per 100,000. (Of course, this report used COVID-19 mortality statistics that have been proven to be wildly exaggerated, as detailed in my interview with Dr. Henele.)
Making an already dire situation worse, recent data17 show 42% of U.S. adults have packed on unwanted pounds, with an average weight gain of 29 pounds, since the start of the pandemic. Only 18% report undesired weight loss, with an average weight loss of 26 pounds.
Government Has Ignored the Value of Healthy Population
According to the World Obesity Federation report, obesity was the second most important risk factor for hospitalization and death from COVID-19 — old age being the primary risk factor — and as noted by Johanna Ralston, CEO of the World Obesity Federation:18
“Old age is unavoidable, but the conditions that contribute to overweight and obesity can be highly avoidable if governments step up and we all join forces to reduce the impact of this disease. The failure to address the root causes of obesity over many decades is clearly responsible for hundreds of thousands of preventable deaths.”
Lead author of the report, Dr. Tim Lobstein, added:19
“Governments have been negligent, and ignored the economic value of a healthy population at their peril. For the last decade they have failed to tackle obesity, despite setting themselves targets at United Nations meetings. COVID-19 is only the latest infection exacerbated by weight issues, but the warning signs were there. We have seen it in the past with MERS, H1N1 and other respiratory diseases.”
Let’s Not Accept Hypocrisy and Double Standards
Even WHO Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus commented on the report saying it “must act as a wake-up call to governments globally,” as “The correlation between obesity and mortality rates from COVID-19 is clear and compelling.”
That said, let’s get back to Dovere’s argument that unvaccinated people are bound to incur higher health care costs due to COVID-19, and therefore there must be some way to penalize those people or force them into compliance.
Using that logic, what, then, do we need to do about obese individuals, whose risk of hospitalization due to COVID-19 is anywhere from 40% to 113% greater, and their chances of requiring intensive care 74% higher,20 than that of their non-obese peers? What do we need to do about people who just refuse to get their vitamin D levels up, and end up taking up the lion’s share of hospital beds?
To be clear, I am NOT proposing we penalize people based on their weight, metabolic flexibility or vitamin D status. I do not support that any more than I support penalizing unvaccinated people — and that is the whole point. Most would agree that this would be completely ridiculous.
My point is, if you cannot fathom penalizing obesity, insulin resistance, diabetes or vitamin D deficiency — conditions known to significantly raise your risk of severe COVID-19 — then how could you possibly consider penalizing an unvaccinated person based on that single parameter alone?
The question is especially valid because, again, vaccinated persons can contract and spread SARS-CoV-2 like anyone else. It’s really unclear how vaccinated people are “safer” than unvaccinated ones, when the only person standing to gain from these shots is the person getting it (in the form of milder symptoms when sickened).
Are You ‘Pure’ Enough for Your Government?
I think it’s important to realize that the COVID-19 vaccine campaign is less about protecting public health and more about creating the infrastructure and psychological climate required for the implementation of global tyranny, which will likely begin with the introduction of vaccine passports that are very similar to the China social credit system.
As discussed in “Vaccines Are the New ‘Purity Test,’” it can almost be likened to a loyalty test. Or perhaps it could best be described as a totalitarian submission test?
Getting private companies to require these vaccine passports only makes sense if there is a strong vaccine push, and this is one of many clues as to what’s really behind the stated “need” for the whole world to get vaccinated.
We’re not all at risk for COVID-19. For a vast majority of individuals, the vaccines make little or no sense, as for young, healthy individuals, their risks outweigh the benefit. Now they are pushing to vaccinate children, whose risk of getting COVID-19 is well-established as being profoundly minuscule.
They are at exponentially higher risk from many other factors. There are currently fewer than 500 children who are reported to have died from COVID-19, even with the massively manipulated causes of death. Remember, if you had a positive COVID test and died from terminal cancer or a motorcycle accident, you were classified as a COVID-19 death.
As you can see from the graph below, there are 10 higher risks of death than COVID-19 for children. To be logically consistent, the government would need to be equally rigid about addressing all of these causes as aggressively as they are pursuing COVID-19 vaccination for children.
But it’s not about simply getting a vaccine into your arm. Ultimately, it’s about getting you tied into the digital system being launched in the form of vaccine passports. As explained by former Clinton adviser and author Naomi Wolf (whom I will be interviewing shortly) in a March 28, 2021, interview with Fox News’ Steve Hilton:21,22
“‘Vaccine passport’ sounds like a fine thing if you don’t understand what those platforms can do. I’m [the] CEO of a tech company, I understand what these platforms can do. It is not about the vaccine, it’s not about the virus, it’s about your data.
Once this rolls out, you don’t have a choice about being part of the system. What people have to understand is that any other functionality can be loaded onto that platform with no problem at all. It can be merged with your Paypal account, with your digital currency. Microsoft is already talking about merging it with payment plans.
Your network can be sucked up. It geolocates you everywhere you go. Your credit history can be included. All of your medical and health history can be included … It is absolutely so much more than a vaccine pass … I cannot stress enough that it has the power to turn off your life, or to turn on your life, to let you engage in society or be marginalized.”
Dangerous Curves Ahead
Wolf also points out the horrific history of IBM, which developed a sophisticated system of punch cards that allowed Nazi Germany to create a two-tier society and ultimately facilitated the rounding up of Jews for extermination. Fast-forward to today, and IBM is now a leader in the vaccine passport business. I wrote about this in “IBM Colluded With Hitler, Now Makes Vaccine Passports.”
In Nazi Germany, the obsession with purity — both in terms of hygiene and race theory — drove the genocide of Jews, the old, the handicapped and the mentally challenged.
In present day, the public narrative has eerily followed Nazi Germany’s playbook for genocide, starting with the scapegoating of healthy people, as the rapid spread of COVID-19 was blamed on asymptomatic individuals not properly masking, social distancing and self-isolating.
That then grew into the nurturing of prejudice against people who refuse to wear masks, and now we’re seeing the narrative building toward persecution of those who do not want to get the vaccine. It will start with discrimination, and already, we’re hearing talk of how only vaccinated people ought to have the right to partake in certain social activities. If that is tolerated, then outright persecution will be the inevitable next step.
This is why I reject and counter commentaries such as that by Dovere. These half-baked, one-sided, persecutory arguments must be challenged at every turn, because they only lead us one way. And unless you’re part of the technocratic elite, you — regardless of how you feel about vaccination right now — do not want to end up there.
Sources and References
- 1, 2, 10 The Atlantic April 10, 2021
- 3 The Defender April 9, 2021
- 4 CDC, Selected Adverse Events Reported after COVID-19 Vaccination April 13, 2021
- 5 The Defender April 15, 2021
- 6 Epoch Times April 11, 2021
- 7 Reuters April 10, 2021
- 8 Washington Examiner April 11, 2021
- 9 Medical Xpress April 11, 2021
- 11 Twitter Ruth Graham April 8, 2021
- 12 Townhall April 13, 2021
- 13 Preprints.org 2020: 2020100330 DOI: 10.20944/preprints202010.0330.v2
- 14 The Journal of Clinical Endocrinology & Metabolism October 27, 2020; dgaa733 [Epub ahead of print], Results
- 15 Nutrients October 31, 2020;12, 3361; doi:10.3390/nu12113361
- 16, 18, 19, 20 CNN March 5, 2021
- 17 APA.org Undesired Weight Change Since Start of Pandemic
- 21 Real Clear Politics March 29, 2021
- 22 The Epoch Times March 29, 2021
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From the Archives
Is this a War?
Resetting the relationship between The State and The Citizen
LIES ARE UNBEKOMING | NOVEMBER 6, 2021
I’ve been wondering for quite some time about whether we are in a War and the resolution of my thoughts on the subject has recently improved.
Oddly enough, I have some standing on the subject.
I lived in Iraq between 1981 to 1991, a period that covered almost all of the Iraq/Iran War and all of the Gulf War, the original, not the sequels.
It was an old school type of war, with two parties fighting over territory and trying to redraw a border. A lot of people died over 8 years and the border stayed the same. But weapons were sold, and internal power was consolidated.
That’s really what war is about, territory. You have something that I want, and I will fight you for it.
So, if this is a war, who are the warring parties and what is the fight over?
The war is between “the state” and “the citizen”. The latter is YOU and ME… continue
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- Aarhus University Researchers Find Arctic Warmer, Ice-Free In Summertime 10,000 Years Ago!
- Professors: The Entire Fossil Fuel Industry Must Be ‘Euthanized’ To Save Humanity From Warmth
- German Green Parliamentarian Shocks The Nation…Couldn’t Even Name First German Empire Chancellor!
- Another New Study Shows The Siberian Arctic Is Warmer When CO2 Is Low And Colder As CO2 Rises
- German Greens In Crisis, Plummet 40% In Opinion Polls As Anger Mounts Over Bans, Scandals
- Germany’s Growing List Of Bans: Next Up: Wood Stoves And Heating With Wood!
- New Study: The Lowest Tibetan Plateau Glacial Temps Were Still 3°C Warmer Than Today
- Germany’s Federal Network Agency Plans To Ration Electricity As Electric Power Crisis Heightens
- California’s Mean Annual Temps Were Up To 3.8°C Warmer Than Today During The Last Glacial
Aletho News 
