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Revealed: Dark Money Funders Behind ‘Disinformation Dozen’ Report

By Brenda Baletti, Ph.D. | The Defender | July 27, 2023

A new report published Monday by GreenMedInfo revealed nine of the dark money sources funding the Center for Countering Digital Hate (CCDH), an influential nonprofit that allegedly colluded with social media platforms and the White House to censor Children’s Health Defense (CHD), Robert F. Kennedy Jr., CHD’s chairman on leave and others for spreading “disinformation.”

The report identified CCDH’s funders primarily as U.K.-based philanthropic organizations whose directors and trustees are affiliated with legacy media organizations, the U.K. government and major global philanthropic organizations such as the Open Society Foundations and the Ford Foundation.

Despite claims by Imran Ahmed, CCDH’s CEO and founder, that the organization has “never taken government money,” the report also found at least one of its funders has received U.K. government funding.

“It appears that CCDH may be an astroturf front operation for both NGOs [nongovernmental organizations] and the U.K. government to directly interfere with and target the constitutional rights of U.S. citizens, and this should be a concern for all Americans,” report author Sayer Ji told The Defender.

CCDH famously drafted a list of the so-called “Disinformation Dozen,” which included Kennedy, Dr. Joseph Mercola, the founders of The Truth About Vaccines and The Truth About Cancer websites Ty and Charlene Bollinger, and Ji, founder of the natural health website GreenMedInfo.

CCDH alleged in its report that just 12 accounts produced the majority of “anti-vaccine disinformation” on social media.

Facebook investigated and dismissed the report, releasing a statement saying that “There isn’t any evidence” to support its claims and that the small sample used in CCDH’s analysis was “in no way representative of the hundreds of millions of posts that people have shared about COVID-19 vaccines.”

“There is no justification for [CCDH’s] claim that their data constitute a ‘representative sample’ of the content shared across our apps,” Facebook stated.

Yet, the report was used by the White House and Twitter to censor those individuals and by legacy media outlets such as NPR, The Guardian and countless others to discredit the people on the list.

Despite its baseless claims, the report was extremely effective, Ji said.

Ji told The Defender :

“CCDH’s factually baseless campaign was amplified and disseminated globally by hundreds of colluding media outlets, such that today you can find over 3,400 news articles online uncritically citing their defamatory construct ‘disinformation dozen.’

“This has wrought profound reputational damage, and has dramatically curtailed our ability to share our message, given that over 2 million of our followers have been removed, following the deplatforming efforts of those spreading these lies.”

In Kennedy’s testimony before a U.S. House of Representatives hearing organized by the Select Subcommittee on the Weaponization of the Federal Government last week, he cited his inclusion on CCDH’s list as part of a “new form of censorship, which is called ‘targeted propaganda,’ where people apply pejoratives like ‘anti-vax’ … to silence me.”

The latest “Twitter Files” released July 18 by investigative journalist Paul D. Thacker detailed how Twitter and the White House used CCHD’s “Disinformation Dozen” report as justification for censoring the people on the list.

Thacker also profiled Ahmed, who previously worked for Merrill Lynch and was a British Labour Party political operative, and is the co-author of “The New Serfdom: The Triumph of Conservative Ideas and How to Defeat Them… .” Ahmed emerged during the pandemic as a “vaccine and disinformation expert,” although lacking any experience that would qualify him as such, Thacker reported.

Thacker raised questions about who funds CCDH and reached out to the organization to investigate, but received no response.

Ji’s report published Monday provides a partial answer to that question, seeking to “contribute to the collective effort to shed a sterilizing light on the dark agenda spear-headed by astroturfing organizations like CCDH,” he wrote in the report.

CCDH’s funders primarily global but U.K.-based nonprofits

Although CCDH does not make its funders publicly available and failed to respond to Thacker’s inquiries, Ji was able to identify some of them by examining the public grant-reporting website 360 GrantNav, along with other publicly available sites, including CCDH’s 2020 website archived on the Wayback Machine.

The funders identified are primarily U.K.-based charities, some of which operate globally and generally contribute to a wide variety of causes that cluster around issues of environment and poverty, rather than health or science.

According to the report, the Paul Hamlyn Foundation in 2021 gave CCDH a £100,000 grant earmarked for “growing the digital presence and impact of the Center for Countering Digital Hate.” The foundation’s trustees include the former general-director of the BBC Tony Hall, Baron Hall of Birkenhead, and Sir Anthony Saltz, formerly on BBC’s board of governors.

The Esmée Fairbairn Foundation, a large U.K. charity with a £1.5 billion endowment, whose mission is “to improve the natural world, create a fairer future and strengthen community bonds in the UK,” gave CCDH £200,000 in October 2021 to support a salary at the organization and to “disrupt the spread of online hate and misinformation.” It awarded CCDH a second £13,333 grant in January of this year.

The Joseph Rowntree Reform Trust, which, according to the report, is a U.K.-based limited company — not a charity and therefore able to fund political causes — gave CCDH £53,400 in 2020.

CCDH is also funded by the Oak Foundation, a global environmentalist grantmaking foundation that gave CCDH $100,000 to help it shine a “spotlight on digital misinformation platforms that are polluting the public discourse.”

CCDH reported on its website that it received an undisclosed amount of money from the Barrow Cadbury Trust, whose mission is to “tackle profound social ills, including juvenile crime and urban poverty.”

The Pears Foundation, a U.K. charity that Ji’s report says focuses on “Israel-related projects” gave CCDH £250,000 over three years. The foundation is funded by the William Pears group and the U.K. government, according to the report.

The Hopewell Fund is a U.S.-based 501(c)(3) organization managed by a Washington, D.C.-based philanthropy consulting firm and is dedicated to funding “innovative social change projects.” It gave CCDH a small $15,000 grant in 2021.

Unbound Philanthropy, the final donor identified by the report, is a New York-based 501(c)(3) nonprofit organization whose executive director Taryn Higashi also sits on the advisory board of Soros’ Open Society Foundations and who formerly worked at the Ford Foundation.

But this is just a partial list, and in his report, Ji appealed to the public to continue researching the “dark money” behind the organization.

Ji also invited readers to take action on the Stand for Health Freedom campaign website “to send the message that the targeting of U.S. citizens to illegally suppress protected speech is unacceptable.”

The Defender examined CCDH’s 990 — the tax form nonprofits must file annually with the IRS — from fiscal year 2021, where the organization reported receiving $1,471,247 in contributions and grants and listed $860,457 in total assets.

The list of contributors was marked as “restricted,” and further information was not provided. It did report spending $12,633 on “lobbying activities.”

While The Defender was only able to find the single 2021 federal form 990, we did locate CCDH’s U.K. financial reporting form for fiscal year 2022 (ending Oct. 31, 2022), showing the organization received $904,452 from donations in 2022 and $638,499 in 2021.

Financial filings also reveal CCDH board member affiliations

The U.S. 990, the U.K. financial statements and the U.K.’s company information service also revealed CCDH’s frequently changing board members and directors, many of whom have close ties to government and media organizations.

Notable figures include Simon Clark, board chair, who was a resident senior fellow at the Atlantic Council’s Digital Forensic Research Lab. The Atlantic Council is a NATO, arms industry and Persian Gulf monarchies-funded think tank.

Prior to his work at the Atlantic Council, Clark was a senior fellow at the Center for American Progress, where he led the work that informed the Biden White House’s National Strategy for Countering Domestic Terrorism.

Ji found it “unsurprising” that “CCDH’s rhetorical points made it into several U.S. Department of Homeland Security terrorism bulletins equating free speech and open debate about mRNA vaccine safety and efficacy, or Covid origins, as possible new forms of domestic terrorism.”

Another CCDH director, Kirsty McNeill has also worked as Save the Children’s executive director for Policy, Advocacy and Campaigns since 2016, a period during which the Bill & Melinda Foundation donated more than $40 million to the organization.

Save the Children has also partnered with Gavi, the Vaccine Alliance. Gavi maintains a core partnership with the World Health Organization and the World Bank.

McNeill previously worked as a special adviser and speechwriter for former Prime Minister Gordon Brown. She is a member of the think tank European Council on Foreign Relations, funded by such entities as the Open Society Foundations, the United Nations and the Gates Foundation.

Aleen Keshishian and Zack Morgenroth are both CCDH board members and work at Lighthouse Management & Media, a Hollywood management agency representing top stars including Jennifer Aniston, who famously cut ties with her unvaccinated friends.

Damian Noel Thomas Collins, who joined CCDH in 2022, is a British Conservative Party politician who formerly served as a junior Minister for Tech and the Digital Economy in the Department for Digital, Culture, Media & Sport.

CCDH sought to silence the voices that were ‘most effective’ at warning the public

In addition to its government, social media and legacy media connections, CCDH has partnered with “fact-checking” firm NewsGuard — specifically, its HealthGuard product, described as “a vaccine against medical misinformation” and against critiques targeting the healthcare industry and global public health authorities.

According to an article by Off-Guardian, CCDH claimed the COVID-19 pandemic “will only be overcome by the most ambitious vaccination programme in human history” and those who question this program have “fringe and extremist views,” which “should not be permitted and should indeed be banned.”

They have also advocated for the imprisonment of “anti-vaxxers.”

Ji told The Defender that CCDH’s targeted campaign spoke to the validity of the ideas of those it sought to deplatform.

He said:

“George R. R. Martin once said, ‘When you tear out a man’s tongue, you are not proving him a liar, you’re only telling the world that you fear what he might say.’

“I believe CCDH’s campaign was intended to silence those of us who they believed were most effective at warning the public about the true dangers of the mRNA vaccine rollout and how this mass experiment violated the medical ethics principle of informed consent.”

Brenda Baletti Ph.D. is a reporter for The Defender. She wrote and taught about capitalism and politics for 10 years in the writing program at Duke University. She holds a Ph.D. in human geography from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and a master’s from the University of Texas at Austin.

This article was originally published by The Defender — Children’s Health Defense’s News & Views Website under Creative Commons license CC BY-NC-ND 4.0. Please consider subscribing to The Defender or donating to Children’s Health Defense.

July 27, 2023 Posted by | Civil Liberties, Deception, Full Spectrum Dominance | , , , , , , , | Leave a comment

Bank manager makes non-apology to Nigel Farage, fails to apologize for lying to BBC that Farage was overdrawn

But Dame Alison Rose is good at misdirecting, deflecting, delaying and blaming the law for her overreach.

BY MERYL NASS | JULY 27, 2023

What a dame. Cancels Nigel Farage’s bank accounts and then lies about the reason to the media, claiming he had negative balances. Defamation on top of her other crimes.

After that, she sends a non-apology apology to Nigel, offering to re-bank him. Here are 4 paragraphs from it:

“… I fully understand yours and the public’s concern that the processes for bank account closure are not sufficiently transparent. Customers have a right to expect their bank to make consistent decisions against publicly available criteria and those decisions should be communicated clearly and openly with them, within the constraints imposed by the law.

To achieve this, sector–wide change is required, but your experience, highlighted in recent days, has shown we need to also put our own processes under scrutiny too. As a result I am commissioning a full review of the Coutts processes for how these decisions are made and communicated, to ensure we provide a better, clearer and more consistent experience for customers in future.

The review will be reporting to me as NatWest Group CEO.

I welcome the FCA’s reviews of regulatory rules associated with Politically Exposed Persons, and we will implement the recommendations of our review alongside any changes that they or the Government makes to the overall regulatory framework…”

Her ‘non-apology’ is almost certainly lying again, and I dissect only 4 paragraphs of it:

  • claiming that ‘sector-wide change is required’ to allow people to bank as they always have? Pretty please Dame Alison, what sectoral changes have occured that you might be hiding from us that require you to ‘debank’ customers? Or are you making this up too?
  • claiming customers have a right to expect consistency and transparency around these decisions—then she provides him neither in the letter
  • she suggests maybe the law prevents transparency and consistency. Pray tell what law might that be?
  • she is commissioning a full review—the usual delaying deflecting tactic. We know she made the decision—it would not have been done without the CEO’s approval.
  • and the review will go to her, not to the public. Super. The circle-jerk.
  • And what are Politically Exposed Persons, Dame Alison, and what special rules apply to them? Help us out here.

Not only did Joe Mercola have his busines acount, his family’s accounts, and his employees’ accounts suddenly cancelled by Chase Bank, but Dr.Syed Haider had his accounts closed and his vacation cancelled (in the middle) when his credit card stopped working.

Welcome to the opening volley in the Social Credit Score onslaught. Do NOT get an iris scan because you were promised free cryptocurrency to do so, as many have just done. No digital IDs, no digital driver’s licenses, no CBDCs. Unless you want your life shut off at will. Time to fight back.

July 27, 2023 Posted by | Civil Liberties, Full Spectrum Dominance | , | Leave a comment

Documents show White House pressured Facebook to censor speech

RT | July 27, 2023

Newly unearthed documents from Facebook have revealed that US President Joe Biden’s administration pressured the world’s largest social media platform to censor commentary by its users, potentially violating their constitutional right to free speech.

US House Judiciary Committee Chairman and Republican Jim Jordan obtained the documents amid his panel’s investigation of the administration’s alleged “weaponization” of government. The documents prove that Facebook and Instagram censored posts and changed their moderation policies because of “unconstitutional pressure from the Biden White House,” Jordan said on Thursday.

Among the evidence cited by the lawmaker was an April 2021 email from a Facebook employee to top executives Mark Zuckerberg and Sheryl Sandberg. “We are facing continued pressure from external stakeholders, including the White House and the press, to remove more Covid-19 vaccine-discouraging content,” the sender said. The message noted, for example, that the White House had pushed for the censoring of a humorous meme that suggested the jabs might be unsafe.

Around the same time period, Nick Clegg, Facebook’s president for global affairs, sent a message informing his colleagues that Andy Slavitt, a senior adviser to Biden on Covid-19 policies, was “outraged” that the platform didn’t take down the anti-vaccine meme. Clegg said he countered that removing the content “would represent a significant incursion into traditional boundaries of free expression in the US,” but Slavitt disregarded that concern and argued that the meme would hinder the government’s vaccine-rollout effort.

Social media platforms themselves can legally choose how to restrict their content, but government intervention to influence those decisions could infringe on free-speech rights. After a report last October showed that the administration had set up a portal through which federal officials could make content-moderation requests to Big Tech, the American Civil Liberties Union said, “The First Amendment bars the government from deciding for us what is true or false – online or anywhere. Our government can’t use private pressure to get around our constitutional rights.”

Jordan warned earlier this week that his committee would vote to hold Zuckerberg in contempt of Congress unless Facebook provided the documents it had subpoenaed on government interventions into content moderation. He claimed that the committee had seen enough evidence to believe that Facebook was holding back on turning over evidence that would show it faced the same sort of government pressure that was previously revealed by Twitter.

Facebook executives feared repercussions if they didn’t appease the White House, Jordan said. Three months after Biden took office, Facebook’s vice president for public policy, Brian Rice, wrote in an April 2021 email that Slavitt’s pushback felt “very much like a crossroads for us with the White House in these early days.” He added, “Given what is at stake here, it would also be a good idea if we could regroup and take stock of where we are in our relations with the White House and our internal methods, too.”

Another document showed that “talking points” were prepared for Clegg to help smooth over relations with the administration. One of the suggestions was that he point out the company’s handling of a Tucker Carlson video that angered the White House. Although the video didn’t violate the platform’s policies, Facebook throttled back its distribution by 50% while it was queued to be “fact-checked.”

July 27, 2023 Posted by | Civil Liberties, Full Spectrum Dominance | , | Leave a comment

Zionist groups set up ‘taskforce’ to defend Israel under guise of combatting anti-Semitism

MEMO | July 26, 2023

Eight major pro-Israel Jewish organisations from seven different countries have united to create a new task force to defend Israel under the guides of combatting anti-Semitism. The groups in the Task Force Against Anti-Semitism have all embraced the controversial International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance (IHRA) definition of anti-Semitism and placed defending Israel from criticism at the centre of their work.

Calling themselves J7, the anti-Palestinian taskforce comprises prominent Jewish organisations from the US, the UK, France, Germany, Canada, Argentina and Australia: the Anti-Defamation League (ADL); the Conference of Presidents of American Jewish Organisations; the Board of Deputies of British Jews; Conseil Représentatif des Institutions Juives de France (CRIF); the Central Council of Jews in Germany; the Centre for Israel and Jewish Affairs (CIJA); Delegación de Asociaciones Israelitas Argentinas (DAIA); and the Executive Council of Australian Jewry (ECAJ).

“Anti-Semitism is rising around the world, especially in countries where there are large Jewish populations. We needed to meet these challenges through coordinated action,” ADL head Jonathan Greenblatt told Haaretz. “This new coalition of major organisations representing seven large Jewish Diaspora communities in liberal democracies will provide a formal framework for coordination, consultation and formulating global responses to anti-Semitic threats against the Jewish people.”

Greenblatt is one of the key proponents of the idea that anti-Zionism and legitimate criticism of the state of Israel equate to anti-Semitism. He is spearheading the initiative. “The idea for the J7 came out of conversations I had with partners in France over our shared challenges and concerns. When we reached out to these seven communities, there was instant enthusiasm about the importance of the seven of us consulting, and what we might achieve working together.”

The collaboration comes as Israel faces sharp criticism for its political shift to the far-right. Internally the occupation state is facing the prospect of a “civil war”, according to former Prime Minister Ehud Olmert; internationally, a consensus is emerging about Israel’s practice of apartheid. With the highly controversial IHRA definition of anti-Semitism conflating criticism of Israel with anti-Jewish racism, the increased focus and concern over Israeli policy has reinforced the false narrative with every condemnation of the occupation state and every voice in support of Palestine.

In a recent interview, legal expert Giovanni Fassina spoke to MEMO about the IHRA definition’s chilling repercussions. Fassina uncovered shocking examples of its weaponisation against critics of Israel and the suppression of free speech under the guise of combatting anti-Semitism.

The J7 group says that it will monitor and address expressions of hate from all origins. The leadership of J7 will meet regularly, both virtually and in person, with a significant event scheduled for ADL’s Never is Now Summit in March 2024.

July 27, 2023 Posted by | Civil Liberties, Ethnic Cleansing, Racism, Zionism, Full Spectrum Dominance | , , | Leave a comment

The Western establishment just gave itself a ‘World Peace and Liberty’ award

European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen receives World Peace & Liberty Award at UN headquarters in New York, on July 21, 2023 © Yuki IWAMURA / AFP
By Rachel Marsden | RT | July 27, 2023

Get a load of who won – and presented – a new honor that’s modestly being compared to the Nobel Peace Prize.

If you haven’t heard of the World Law Foundation non-profit organization, you could be forgiven. But despite only existing since 2019, it has already created an award described by the Western press as nothing less than the “judicial equivalent” of the world’s top award for promoting peace.

Wonder where they got that idea, if not from the organization itself. Can anyone just create a think tank and put it in charge of an award branded as the latest version of the Nobel Peace Prize? Good luck with that – unless, of course, your board is loaded up with establishment heavyweights – in which case, people just tell themselves that it must be legit since all these VIPs wouldn’t otherwise be involved.

So a few days ago, the humble folks of the World Law Foundation gathered at the United Nations in New York for the World Law Congress. One of the big items on the agenda was to hand out this year’s World Peace and Liberty Award to none other than European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen, unelected de facto Queen of Europe, who accepted it on behalf of the commission.

Wow, didn’t see that one coming. Particularly with a former EU commissioner being the vice president of the group’s board, which also includes former Polish and French prime ministers, former Slovenian and Latvian presidents, a former EU vice president, and various Western establishment corporate figures, academics, and jurists.

You’d think that the same Von der Leyen-led EU Commission would have been a controversial candidate for a peace award given that it’s constantly sided with Washington’s military interventionism or at least have done little to nothing to stop it, and even led the way in the case of Libyan regime change. Most recently, the EU had a chance to stop the conflict in Ukraine before it even started by demanding Kiev’s adherence to the Minsk agreements and rejecting the West’s arming and training of anti-Russian fighters on the border with Russia.

“For the first time ever, the European Union will finance the purchase and delivery of weapons and other equipment to a country that is under attack,” von der Leyen said last year, calling it “a watershed moment.” Know what else is a watershed moment? Giving a peace award to someone whose knee-jerk reaction to armed conflict was to flood the zone with even more weapons. Then again, maybe the Nobel Peace Prize is indeed the right comparison, given that it was prematurely awarded to former US President Barack Obama even before he could order more bombing in Africa and the Middle East.

Von der Leyen also embodies the epitome of freedom, apparently. Or at least the best that this group could find. Who was she even up against? Did Genghis Khan’s estate turn down the award or something?

“We’ll present this month a legislative proposal for a Digital Green Pass,” she tweeted in March 2021. “The Digital Green Pass should facilitate Europeans’ lives. The aim is to gradually enable them to move safely in the European Union or abroad – for work or tourism.” She conveniently left out the part about Europeans being denied the basic right to access everyday venues, travel, work, and assemble – all because you chose not to take a jab that prevented neither transmission nor acquisition of an overwhelmingly survivable virus. We’re talking about the same Big Pharma jab about which von der Leyen has yet to hand over, even to an investigative committee of the EU itself, personal communications with the CEO of Pfizer around the time the EU was making a deal with the company.

Von der Leyen has been about as open and free with that matter as she and the EU Commission have been with media platforms and narratives that risk challenging the establishment dogma, issuing top-down bans and legislation that override any due process at the nation-state level.

So after asking themselves who’d be a worthy recipient of this global freedom and peace prize, and coming up with an unelected EU bureaucrat who’s dragging Europe and the world deeper into armed conflict and Europeans into poverty with inflation and intellectual darkness with censorship, they turned to the question of the presenter. These World Peace and Liberty folks were apparently like, “Who could we get to present this that embodies freedom and peace? Hey, how about that dude in Canada who did the Freedom Convoy crackdown and whose country helped train the Azov neo-Nazis to wage war against Russia then tried to hide it from the press to avoid embarrassment?”

Enter Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau. Nothing says freedom like invoking a martial law-style crackdown over a bunch of honking truckers protesting against the two-tier society fostered by Trudeau’s authoritarian Covid mandates – and then blocking their bank accounts as a dissuasion technique.

“Brexit left many wondering if the union would continue to hold strong. Euroskepticism was on the rise. And protectionism and authoritarianism were becoming more prevalent,” Trudeau said, presumably as a newly-minted authority on authoritarianism, having just recently dabbled in it himself.

“As choruses like ‘America First’ got louder, both Canada and Europe held fast to our belief that growth doesn’t come from putting up walls and turning inwards,” the Canadian prime minister added. Actually, no one has been singing backup to the America First chorus louder than Canada and Europe, blindly following along with the agenda set in Washington on everything from Ukraine to climate, even if it’s to the detriment of their own citizens’ interests.

If both – or either – of these Western entities had unambiguously stood up to Washington on recent key issues of global importance, then the world would be in a much better place, their own citizens first and foremost. And they wouldn’t need to go around blowing their own horn and making a big deal of a fawning establishment entity also offering them a blow on the world stage.

July 27, 2023 Posted by | Civil Liberties, Full Spectrum Dominance, Militarism, Progressive Hypocrite | , | Leave a comment

Trial Date Set in Landmark Lawsuit Concerning Wrongful Death During Pandemic Hospitalization

Hospital’s Motion to Dismiss Denied — Finally A Jury Will Hear Case

By Peter A. McCullough, MD, MPH | Courageous Discourse | July 26, 2023

One of the most important rights stripped from Americans during the pandemic was the 7th amendment right to a jury trial. Devastated families lost loved ones due to therapeutic nihilism in the hospital and in some cases negligent care or even personal injury. Many are disheartened by corrupt courts and judges who dismiss cases out of hand. Finally a case is moving forward thanks to the diligence of Scott Schara, father of the late Grace Schara. Grace had Down’s syndrome and died of respiratory depression after she was given three sedatives in the setting of acute COVID-19 pneumonia.

This is a dramatic case and you can hear all the details from the father on the McCullough Report Grace Under Pressure – A Father’s Courage to Face the Biopharmaceutical Complex by Dr. Peter McCullough | Apr 10, 2023 | Health, Politics.

Here is the first page of the press release about the case:

You can read the full disclosure below. This case could open the door for a floodgate of litigation where families believe one or more breaches in the standard of inpatient care occurred:

  1. Failure to continue outpatient multidrug protocols like the McCullough Protocol (no medication reconciliation)
  2. Lack of informed consent
  3. Denied access to family members
  4. Denied adequate food and water
  5. Failure sufficiently treat with viricidal nasal sprays and gargles, full dose oral antivirals, full dose steroids, aspirin, anticoagulants and adjunctive drugs
  6. Use of remdesivir after the WHO recommends against the use of remdesivir in COVID-19 patients 20 November 2020
  7. Unnecessary intubation for low oxygen saturation without failure of respiratory drive, mechanics, or other indication

Supported in part by the McCullough Foundation

Trial Date Set in Landmark Lawsuit on Medical Killing and Informed Consent NEWS PROVIDED BY Overton & Associates July 18, 2023, 14:00 GMT

July 27, 2023 Posted by | Civil Liberties | , | Leave a comment

Were lockdowners and vaccinators really just trying to save lives? And is this what made them so dangerous in the end?

eugyppius: a plague chronicle | July 26, 2023

Daniel Hadas, whose sensitive and measured commentary on the pandemic I’ve long valued, recently offered these remarks on lockdowns and mass vaccination on Twitter:

It needs to be understood that the true motivation of the lockdown / forced vaccination Covid response really 𝑤𝑎𝑠 Saving Lives.

Saving Lives wasn’t a smokescreen for some other hidden plan.

Of course, there was opportunism: there were those who used the state of emergency to claw power, money, fame to themselves. There were both supporters and opponents of the Covid measures who did that.

Where [there] is opportunity, there will be opportunists.

But mere opportunism is not enough to drive forward the leaders and followers in a revolution on the scale of the Covid response.

That requires faith, and the faith that drove this revolution was the faith in Saving Lives.

To deny the authenticity of the project to Save Lives is to remain perilously ready to sign up to all current and future projects to remake society and morality in the name of Life-Saving.

And it is to remain blind to the fact that Saving Lives has come to mean hacking away at the limits of what can be done to men, women and children in the name of saving their lives and those of others.

This thesis angered many people, at least some of whom misconstrue what Hadas is arguing. The point is not that a genuine commitment to “Saving Lives” might excuse the response or make it better. Rather, a commitment to Life-Saving public health interventions is in Hadas’s view the ominous root of the problem, because Life Saving is in fact a shallow goal that sounds good enough to rationalise all manner of harmful, destructive policies. Almost anything can be justified – any amount of collateral damage accepted – if it is for Saving Lives, and this is why all of us should cultivate a distrust of self-appointed Life Savers everywhere we encounter them.

In this sense, then, Hadas’s thesis seems undeniable: The millions who signed on to lockdowns and demanded their governments force-vaccinate their peers were not just wrong in a direct, empirical sense – that is, for believing that lockdowns and vaccines would improve health in any way. They were also much more profoundly wrong in a moral sense. Even if lockdowns and vaccines had the potential to stop the virus, nobody deserves house arrest or forced medical treatment for the crime of being a potential vector of infection. Placing Life Saving ahead of all other outcomes is very dangerous and also very stupid, for the simple reason that we are all going to die. As a justification, it functions as a mere pretence to ignore the very real trade-offs that lurk in any alleged solution to anything. Explaining how it could be a good idea to delay the deaths of some elderly and sick people at the cost of the well-being, physical health and autonomy of billions is very hard. Pleading that “we need to save lives” is easy.

That said, I find the thesis less than complete. The public health establishment and their media collaborators carefully manufactured public support for their response by sowing far and wide the belief that it was necessary to Save Lives. Had we acted otherwise – say, by staying open and not doing very much – this, too, would’ve been marketed as the Best Way to Save Lives, and many millions would’ve believed it just as sincerely as they believed in lockdowns. To this comes the fact that Life-Saving in one form or another is profered as justification for a wide range of modern political pathologies, from mass migration schemes to climate change. Especially in ageing European countries like Germany, where an ever-growing number of pensioners and their health anxiety dominate national discourse, there are few better ways to sell noxious political programmes to the masses. Without our naive Life-Saving ethos, it’s not clear to me we wouldn’t have had lockdowns, though they would’ve required a much different kind of argument.

The extent to which states can be said to act upon clear motives at all is a further problem. A longstanding plague chronicle argument, is that modern managerial government doesn’t have goals, motivations or purposes in any human sense. Our countries every day do all kinds of truly insane things behind paper-thin justifications that bear no scrutiny. A lot of what is maligned as “conspiratorial” discourse, on both the left and the right, represents an effort to reimpose logic on state actions, generally by positing that the stated goals are a pretence for some deeper, hidden purpose. Most of the time, these analyses just aren’t convincing, and they function to obscure the blunt reality that we find ourselves beset by an incomprehensible post-liberal political order, in which state actions have been farmed out to a vastly complex network of stakeholders, NGOs, academics, bureaucrats and special advisory committees. For every area of policy the constellation of forces will be different, and nobody has any clear understanding of how the system works – not even the most powerful individuals in the midst of it all. Everything the state does is the sum of these thousands of different forces. What complicates this picture even further, is the fact that those responsible for policy formulation don’t act directly to shape outcomes in the outside world. Their motivations are almost always institutionally mediated, and for this reason much more confined and limited in perspective. They want to secure promotion and grant funding, they want to be thought well of by their peers, they want to satisfy their superiors, and many other petty careerist personal things of this nature.

To say that “climate change policy” is motivated by a desire to reduce carbon emissions, then, is merely to outline a descriptive thesis from outside. Such a thesis will sink or swim insofar as it explains actions of the system as a whole, but no such motivation is present in the system itself. The apparatus of modern governance is a vast inhuman machine consisting of human components; it doesn’t have thoughts any more than a storm system does. And in this sense, I think Saving Lives as the motivation behind lockdowns and mass vaccination is not quite right. Popular supporters of mass containment certainly saw these policies as Life Saving, and this helped enable them. The state itself, however, was playing a rather different game, one which fell (depending on the country) somewhere on a scale from “virus suppression” to “virus eradication” – lives be damned. The pandemicists’ abandonment of prior mitigationist plans entailed precisely deprioritising Life Saving in favour of a new, pathogen-centred approach.

“That may very well be, eugyppius, but what of the people at the start of it all, before lockdowns were taken up by the system? Surely they had human motivations, even if the regime cannot.”

This is true. The Neil Fergusons, Tomas Pueyos and Christian Drostens who sold lockdowns to their countries and the world surely did so for specific, personal reasons. The problem is that these reasons are very elusive. In fact, the more I read their early statements and their leaked correspondence, the more elusive they seem to me. Their words and actions, however, have a very clear and persistent sinister undertone, which is not a mere artefact of retrospect. Their mysterious coordination with each other, their willingness to engage in highly manipulative messaging and risk magnification, their reliance on foreign agents to launder research and strategies from China, and their constant efforts to justify with pseudoscientific findings apparently preconceived conclusions, are all very unsettling. The ambient Life-Saving ethos of modern society surely helped them win the argument in the moment and get away with it in the longer term, but whatever they thought they were up to, was something much different.

July 26, 2023 Posted by | Civil Liberties | , | Leave a comment

UK Ministry of Justice Invests in Social Listening Tool

Monitoring online conversations

By Didi Rankovic | Reclaim The Net | July 25, 2023

The UK’s Ministry of Justice (MoJ) has decided to spend taxpayer money in order to be able to use a monitoring tool whose job is to access people’s conversations that might impact the ministry’s “reputation.”

This decision certainly impacts that reputation, but perhaps not in a positive aspect.

And it would be an interesting full circle if the maker of the software, Brandwatch (owned by Cision, a PR outfit) – allowed the MoJ to learn how inking this three-year deal will impact its reputation.

From what is known about the contract, things don’t look good – just more outsourced good old mass surveillance carried out by governments and various departments and agencies.

The tech is described as social media and “online listening,” and will cost the MoJ £50,000 per each of the three years of the deal. The hope is that it will allow the ministry to know about any of the millions of times people mention it online.

The procurement documents show that the contract, signed last month, will give the MoJ the ability to monitor and track mentions about itself on social and online media in general, in forums, blogs, based on particular keywords, terms and topics.

The justification for needing this tool, found in the same documents, is that the MoJ has a social media presence on major platforms. And that means it is exposed to discussion – and, likely, criticism, that the officials would like to know about, all for the sake of “reputation, campaigns, and policy announcement.”

The MoJ steers very far from framing any of this as surveillance and tracking, but rather a selfless act where money will be spent simply in order to work better – by “listening” (figuratively, and literally) to what citizens and stakeholders are saying and expecting from it.

Reports say that the contract with Brandwatch will cover 100 individual users, as well as 48 million past mentions of MoJ, along with two million more “live” ones each month.

Up to 50 different terms can be fed to the software to be tracked on Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram each, and whatever information is gathered will remain accessible on the cloud, including that from the previous 2 years.

July 26, 2023 Posted by | Civil Liberties, Full Spectrum Dominance | , | Leave a comment

Chief editor at Russian media outlet flees EU country over threats

RT | July 26, 2023

Marat Kasem, a senior journalist at Russian media outlet Sputnik, has fled Latvia after President Edgars Rinkevics suggested that prosecutors had treated him too leniently in a recent case, according to Russian Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Maria Zakharova.

Kasem spent four months in a Latvian jail earlier this year before being fined for allegedly aiding and abetting Russia.

“Would somebody from the White House or Downing Street tell Rinkevics that he is failing them by showing the feral nature of the liberal diktat,” Zakharova asked, during an interview with Sputnik on Wednesday.

The Russian official argued that the US and the UK were patrons of the Baltic states, but had failed to keep their “nationalist” clients in check. Latvia specifically presents itself as a nation that supposedly upholds liberal values, including by protecting journalists, Zakharova noted.

Kasem, who is a Latvian citizen, has faced legal problems in the EU due to his work as editor-in-chief of the Lithuanian branch of Sputnik.

He was first arrested in January, when he arrived in Latvia to visit his dying grandmother. Kasem was initially accused of espionage and violation of EU sanctions, charges that could carry up to 25 years in prison. Four months later, the authorities agreed to move him to house arrest.

Two weeks ago, local media reported that the case had been resolved, with Kasem admitting to aiding and abetting Russia and paying a fine of €15,500 ($17,000).

Latvian President Rinkevics, who took office on July 8, responded to the news by tweeting that “some recent decisions” by the Prosecutor General’s Office “raise questions.” He later clarified that in Kasem’s case and several others, he believed the punishments were too mild and indicated that he intended to seek explanations.

The remarks “made it clear as daylight” that Kasem’s problems in Latvia would continue, prompting him to leave, according to Zakharova.

The Prosecutor General’s Office said the public had not been informed about numerous details of the case due to national security, which it claimed “had an influence on the choice of the final punishment.” It hinted that the interests of other nations were involved.

Moscow considers the situation to be an example of political persecution. International journalism organizations and other Western states have turned a blind eye to it, said Zakharova, who implied that Kasem had admitted guilt under duress.

July 26, 2023 Posted by | Civil Liberties, Full Spectrum Dominance, Progressive Hypocrite, Russophobia | , , | Leave a comment

Zelensky uses martial law to avoid election

RT | July 26, 2023

Ukrainian President Vladimir Zelensky on Wednesday proposed to extend the state of emergency, thereby effectively canceling the parliamentary elections scheduled for October.

Zelensky announced martial law on February 24, 2022, and has been extending it ever since. The most recent 90-day extension was announced on May 20, and is due to expire on August 18. If the Verkhovna Rada approves Zelensky’s latest request, this will see the emergency extended through November 15.

Ukrainian law calls for parliamentary elections no later than October 29, with a 60-day campaign season starting on August 28. However, it also forbids campaigning and voting during martial law. Another extension would cut into the campaign season for the presidential elections, currently scheduled for March 2024.

“If we have martial law, we cannot have elections. The constitution prohibits any elections during martial law,” Zelensky announced in May. The following month, he told the BBC that “elections need to happen in a time of peace, when there is no fighting.”

Some of Ukraine’s supporters in Europe and North America have been critical of the possible cancellation of elections. Ukraine should prepare for a vote as soon as possible, Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe (PACE) head ‘Tiny’ Kox said in an interview in May.

“Although democracy is far more than only elections, I think we all agree that without the elections, democracy cannot properly function,” Kox said at the time.

Zelensky ran on a peace platform in 2019 and won with 73% of the vote. Soon thereafter, his newly formed party – named after the TV show in which he played a fictional president of Ukraine – won a supermajority in the Verkhovna Rada as well. By late 2020, he had pivoted away from the notion of peace in Donbass and began to openly talk about a military solution for “occupied territories.”

Within three months of the conflict with Russia escalating, in May 2022, Zelensky enacted a law that allowed him to ban any political parties merely accused of being “pro-Russian,” without any right to appeal. He has outlawed a dozen parties since then, including the formerly largest parliamentary opposition bloc.

Earlier this month, the Federal Intelligence Service of Switzerland accused Zelensky of attempting to “politically eliminate” Kiev mayor Vitaly Klitschko ahead of next year’s presidential election. The FIS cited “credible intelligence” to say that Zelensky was “showing authoritarian traits” which may lead to Western pressure, according to a classified report leaked to the outlet NZZ.

July 26, 2023 Posted by | Civil Liberties, Russophobia | | Leave a comment

UK Blocks Ukrainian Orthodox Priest’s Testimony at UN Security Council

By Ekaterina Blinova – Sputnik – 26.07.2023

London prevented the religious leader from delivering his first-hand experience of repression against the church in Ukraine.

“Today is an extremely sad moment for the UN Security Council, as well as for the international community as a whole,” said Dmitry Polyansky, first deputy permanent representative of the Russian Federation in the UN.

“Western delegations actually agreed with the repressive policy of the Kiev regime against the canonical Orthodoxy. This is a clear evidence of blatant double standards in matters concerning freedom of expression, religion, and in general all those ideals that they preach. Your decision to block the participation of an Orthodox clergyman in accordance with the prerogatives of the president of the UN Security Council is clear evidence of how London treats ideals and how easily it is ready to give them up for the sake of narrowly selfish, petty attempts to prick Russia.”

The UK holds the 15-nation organ’s rotating presidency for July 2023.

Earlier, on July 18, Russia called for a meeting of the UNSC on Ukraine for July 26, in particular on the topic of repression against the canonical Ukrainian Orthodox Church.

On the same day, the Russian Foreign Ministry announced that Moscow would raise the issue of the persecution of the vicegerent of the Kiev-Pechersk Lavra, Metropolitan Bishop Pavel, at the upcoming meeting of the UN Security Council.

On July 14, a Kiev court changed the measure of restraint for Metropolitan Pavel from round-the-clock house arrest to detention until August 14.

For his part, Patriarch Kirill of Moscow and All Russia called on the UN, the Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe (OSCE) and heads of churches, including Pope Francis, to protect the vicegerent of the Kiev-Pechersk Lavra.

Earlier this month Pope Francis responded to the appeal of Patriarch Kirill and spoke against politically motivated arrests in Ukraine.

The Kiev regime started to exert pressure on the Ukrainian Orthodox Church in 2022. Ukrainian authorities gave an ultimatum to the monks of the Kiev-Pechersk Lavra to vacate the monastery’s premises until March 29 under the pretext of allegedly violating the terms of the lease – jurisdiction over which is divided between the National Kiev-Pechersk Historical and Cultural Preserve, a Ukrainian secular organization and the UOC. Lavra monks condemned the eviction order as illegal as it was not backed by a court decision. As they resisted the Kiev regime’s attempts to expel them from the monastery, the Ukrainian authorities resorted to persecution.

Other Ukrainian Orthodox priests have also been subjected to pressure from the Ukrainian authorities. Ukrainian law enforcement officers searched the homes of bishops and priests, churches and monasteries, including the Kiev-Pechersk Lavra, in order to find traces of “anti-Ukrainian activities.”

July 26, 2023 Posted by | Civil Liberties, Russophobia | , , | Leave a comment

Stacey Plaskett: allowing RFK Jr. to speak will make the Biden administration “hesitant” about stopping “misinformation”

She then complains that people are accusing her of censorship

By Didi Rankovic | Reclaim The Net | July 24, 2023

Some politicians seem either unwilling or unable to pick a lane: are they pro, or against censorship?

In other words, they’re dedicated to trying to eat their cake and have it, too. Take Democrat Congresswoman Stacey Plaskett, who on one hand wants to silence people like Robert F. Kennedy Jr. (RFK), and on the other, complains when faced with criticism of advancing censorship.

The way Plaskett rationalizes the first of her efforts is that allowing people like RFK to speak freely is not only “insidious” in nature, and not only equals “desensitizing Americans” (to what?) but brings about a host of serious, and it seems, powerful problems, that would afflict such institutions like the US administration, and (major) social platforms.

Free speech, according to Plaskett – who was commenting on RFK’s testimony in Congress, i.e., giving him an opportunity to speak there – would make the White House and social media “hesitant” to combat misinformation. You would think the First Amendment would be what gives the administration the most pause.

But then Plaskett doesn’t want to be seen as a champion of censorship. And this behavior might, or might not, prompt her supporters to stop and think what, then, it is that she is championing (other than the Biden administration). And, it becomes increasingly clear that all these roads lead to the 2024 presidential election.

The concern about Republicans “elevating” RFK – pejoratively dubbed an “anti-vaxxer” by outlets like MSNBC – is “far more insidious” than simply criticizing Biden, suggests Plaskett. That’s because of the fear the current administration might get stripped of the tools of censorship, stubbornly yet less and less convincingly promoted as noble and just fight against “untruths and misinformation.”

And if anybody was wondering if Democrats would drop the tactic of claiming that any election that doesn’t go their way must be the work of ingenious foreign masterminds – they will not.

Judging by Plaskett, the current apparently “steely will” to stop disinformation (and the Twitter Files tell us how it’s done) might turn into “hesitancy.”

And, of all times – “during the height of the 2024 presidential elections.”

And just like that, seamlessly Plaskett and MSNBC managed to link the issue of giving the likes of RFK a voice in Congress, with “Russian, Iranian, and Chinese” trolls that the congresswoman is certain will swarm the internet, as they “try to suppress the American voters.”

 

July 24, 2023 Posted by | Civil Liberties, Full Spectrum Dominance | , | Leave a comment

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