Peru Mourns ‘Massacre’ of 17 as Calls Grow for US-Backed ‘Coup Regime’ to Step Down
Samizdat – 10.01.2023
A shockingly bloody day of violence threatened to upend the new coup-borne regime’s grip on power as Peruvians reacted with horror to the deadliest day so far in the political struggle that has rocked the country for over a month.
Thousands of Peruvians took to the streets throughout the country on Tuesday as memorial services were held in the city of Juliaca for the 17 people killed Monday in what victims families’ are calling a “massacre” by the Andean country’s security forces.
At least two of the deceased – a boy and a girl – were reportedly children. According to a health ministry official in the Puno region of Peru, another 68 victims suffered injuries in Monday’s violence.
Videos showing several of the killings circulated widely on social media Monday night, as condemnations rolled in from across the globe.
“In the name of the sacred right to life, of the rights of indigenous peoples recognized by UN and international organizations, in the name of peace and social justice, we demand that the massacre of our brothers in Perú stop,” wrote former Bolivian President Evo Morales, who was labeled ‘persona non grata’ and barred from entering the country just hours beforehand.
It was by far the deadliest day of the chaos that has wracked Peru since its first working-class indigenous president, Pedro Castillo, was overthrown last month. Castillo has been jailed ever since, following what leaders of countries throughout the region have condemned as a coup d’etat.
The head of the intensive care unit of the Carlos Monge Medrano Hospital in Juliaca, Jorge Sotomayor Perales, reportedly suggested that authorities used lethal expanding bullets in the bloody crackdown. In comments given to journalists Monday evening, Sotomayor noted the gunshot victims had “no exit wounds” but had “their internal organs destroyed.”
“I want to call on the central government – how can we have so many dead?” he asked.
On Tuesday, as the regional government began observing a three-day mourning period in honor of those killed, Prime Minister Alberto Otarola responded with an announcement of his own: a three-day nighttime curfew in Puno, extending from 8 p.m. local time until 4 a.m.
Without providing evidence, Otarola insisted in a news conference Monday night that “foreign interests” and “drug traffickers” were to blame for the killings. The former Defense Minister Otarola ascended to his current position just weeks ago and has emerged as one of the prime beneficiaries of the coup.
Observers point to his meeting with US Ambassador Lisa Kenna, just two days before Castillo was arrested, as evidence of US support for the putsch. After the coup’s consummation, the US Embassy immediately extended its recognition to the controversial regime, which imposed itself on Peru under the figurehead of self-styled ‘President’ Dina Boluarte.
As of publishing, Boluarte still had yet to comment on the spate of seemingly state-backed killings in Juliaca.
However, on Tuesday evening, Peru’s human rights office called on “all qualified institutions to investigate and punish those responsible for all the deaths that have occurred in the last hours in Juliaca.”
Hours beforehand, a representative for the Office of the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights said the international body was also “very concerned at the rising violence in Peru.”
In a statement urging the Boluarte regime to “comply with human rights standards and ensure that force is only used when strictly necessary,” and insisting “the rights to freedom of expression and of peaceful assembly must be respected and protected,” spokesperson Marta Hurtado noted that “one medical worker was killed while administering aid.”
The medical worker in question, Marco Antonio Samillan Sanga, was reportedly killed by the regime’s forces Monday while attempting to treat other victims.
In comments given to local media, his sister Milagros said that prior to his death, Sanga was on the verge of receiving his medical degree and dreamed of being “the best neurosurgeon in Juliaca.”
He was wearing his medical scrubs when he was killed while tending to the wounded “because of the goodwill and empathy that he had,” she said.
“How is it possible that they [give the] order to kill like that? How is it possible that President Dina Boluarte gives the order to kill whoever she wants?” she asked.
As Peruvians across the country awoke to the horrifying news, she was hardly the only one to demand answers.
On Tuesday, the Attorney General’s office announced it was opening an investigation into the role played by Boluarte and Otarola in the apparent state-sponsored massacre following a criminal complaint by Peruvian Congresswoman Ruth Luque, who wrote in the early hours that the “deaths cannot go unpunished.”
Landmark Lawsuit Slaps Legacy Media With Antitrust, First Amendment Claims for Censoring COVID-Related Content
By Michael Nevradakis, Ph.D. | The Defender | January 10, 2023
In a live interview this evening on Fox News’ “Tucker Carlson Tonight,” Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., chairman and chief litigation counsel for Children’s Health Defense (CHD), announced that he and several other plaintiffs filed a groundbreaking novel lawsuit making antitrust and constitutional claims against legacy media outlets.
The lawsuit targets the Trusted News Initiative (TNI), a self-described “industry partnership” launched in March 2020 by several of the world’s largest news organizations, including the BBC, The Associated Press (AP), Reuters and The Washington Post — all of which are named as defendants in the lawsuit.
Filed today in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of Texas-Amarillo Division, the lawsuit alleges these outlets partnered with several Big Tech firms to “collectively censor online news,” including stories about COVID-19 and the 2020 U.S. presidential election that were not aligned with official narratives regarding those issues.
Plaintiffs in the lawsuit include CHD, Kennedy, Creative Destruction Media, Trial Site News, Ty and Charlene Bollinger (founders of The Truth About Cancer and The Truth About Vaccines), Erin Elizabeth Finn (publisher of Health Nut News ), Jim Hoft (founder of The Gateway Pundit ), Dr. Joseph Mercola and Ben Tapper, a chiropractor.
All of the plaintiffs allege they were censored, banned, de-platformed, shadow banned or otherwise penalized by the Big Tech firms partnering with the TNI, because the views and content they published were deemed “misinformation” or “disinformation.” This resulted in a major loss of visibility and revenue for the plaintiffs.
The lawsuit further alleges that Big Tech firms, having partnered with the TNI, based their decisions on determinations jointly made by TNI, which touted its “early warning system” by which each partner organization is “warned” about an individual or outlet that is disseminating purported “misinformation.”
The TNI’s legacy media and Big Tech firms then acted in concert — described in legal terms as a “group boycott” — to remove such voices and perspectives from their platforms. This forms the basis of the lawsuit’s antitrust and First Amendment claims.
Remarking on the lawsuit, Kennedy told The Defender :
“My uncle, President Kennedy, and my father, the attorney general, sought to prosecute antitrust laws that are still on the nation’s books, with vigor.
“As private enforcers of those laws, we are confident that the federal court in Texas will vindicate our bedrock freedom to compete with legacy media in the marketplace of ideas.”
Mary Holland, CHD president and general counsel, told The Defender :
“I’m glad that CHD is bringing this case. We are hopeful we will get a fair hearing, and I’m glad that we are together with other organizations that have also been harmed by these corporate and governmental censorship policies.
“To have a free society, you have to have free speech, you have to have a diversity of views. We don’t have the same views as all of the other plaintiffs by far … but we want to protect the marketplace of ideas.
“If in fact the government and the corporations they collaborate with can engage in censorship and propaganda nonstop, and there are no alternative voices, democracy is dead.”
Charlene Bollinger similarly remarked on the importance of preserving free speech. She said:
“This lawsuit is about preserving our free speech rights as Americans and holding those involved in violating antitrust laws accountable, like the TNI.
“My husband and I remain steadfast in our commitment to highlighting the well-documented risks of COVID-19 vaccines and the myriad of dangers to those who are not informed by their healthcare providers of the side effects of harsh pharmaceutical treatments for life-threatening illnesses.”
Mercola, in turn, focused on collusion between government agencies and media and Big Tech. He said:
“These are the twin evils of our day. Platforms partner with the alphabet soup of federal agencies to censor speech. Those same platforms and legacy media outlets conspire to boycott stories that don’t fit an official narrative about COVID and many other topics.
“Our nation’s founding fathers would be appalled and resolute in defense of maintaining an informed citizenry.”
Alleging per se and “rule of reason” violations of the Sherman Antitrust Act on the basis of direct and circumstantial evidence of horizontal agreement and economic collusion among the defendants and Big Tech firms, the plaintiffs are requesting a jury trial and treble damages.
They also are requesting orders declaring the defendants’ conduct unlawful and enjoining further such actions on their part.
TNI viewed organizations reporting non-establishment views as ‘an existential threat’
The lawsuit states, “There are two main categories of TNI members, playing different but often complementary roles in the online news market: (A) large legacy news organizations (hereafter the TNI’s ‘Legacy News Members’) and (B) Big Tech platform companies (hereafter the TNI’s ‘Big Tech Members’).”
Legacy news organizations are publishers of original news content and include the defendants named in the lawsuit.
“By contrast,” the lawsuit states, “the TNI’s Big Tech members — Facebook, Google, Twitter, and Microsoft — are first and foremost Internet companies, each of which is, owns or controls one or more behemoth Internet platforms, including social media platforms and search engines.”
“Core partners” of the TNI include the AP, Agence France Press, the BBC, CBC/Radio-Canada, the European Broadcasting Union (EBU), the Financial Times, First Draft, Google/YouTube, The Hindu, The Nation Media Group, Meta, Microsoft, Reuters, the Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism, Twitter and The Washington Post.
The lawsuit’s executive summary states:
“The TNI exists to, in its own words, ‘choke off’ and ‘stamp out’ online news reporting that the TNI or any of its members peremptorily deems ‘misinformation.’
“TNI members have targeted and suppressed completely accurate online reporting by non-mainstream news publishers concerning both COVID-19 (on matters including treatments, immunity, lab leak, vax injury, and lockdowns/mandates) and U.S. elections (such as the Hunter Biden laptop story).”
The lawsuit also alleges:
“By their own admission, members of the [TNI] have agreed to work together, and have in fact worked together, to exclude from the world’s dominant Internet platforms rival news publishers who engage in reporting that challenges and competes with TNI members’ reporting on certain issues relating to COVID-19 and U.S. politics.
“While the ‘Trusted News Initiative’ publicly purports to be a self-appointed ‘truth police’ extirpating online ‘misinformation,’ in fact it has suppressed wholly accurate and legitimate reporting in furtherance of the economic self-interest of its members.”
According to the lawsuit, “this is an antitrust action,” and specifically, “Federal antitrust law has its own name for this kind of ‘industry partnership’: it’s called a ‘group boycott’ and is a per se violation of the Sherman Act.”
Legal precedent holds that a “group boycott” is “a concerted attempt by a group of competitors” to “disadvantage [other] competitors” by “cut[ting] off access” to a “facility or market necessary to enable the boycotted firm[s] to compete.”
As evidence of this allegation, the lawsuit references multiple public statements by TNI partners, including a March 2022 statement by Jamie Angus, then-senior news controller for BBC News, who explained TNI’s “strategy to beat disinformation”:
“Of course, the members of the Trusted News Initiative are … rivals … But in a crisis situation like this, absolutely, organizations have to focus on the things they have in common, rather than … their commercial … rivalries. … [I]t’s important that trusted news providers club together.
“Because actually the real rivalry now is not between for example the BBC and CNN globally, it’s actually between all trusted news providers and a tidal wave of unchecked [reporting] that’s being piped out mainly through digital platforms . … That’s the real competition now in the digital media world.
“Of course, organizations will always compete against one another for audiences. But the existential threat I think is that overall breakdown in trust, so that trusted news organizations lose in the long term if audiences just abandon the idea of a relationship of trust with news organizations. So actually we’ve got a lot more to hold us together than we have to work in competition with one another.”
The lawsuit alleges the above quote admitting the “existential threat” members of the TNI believed smaller news organizations posed to their news and informational primacy is evidence of anti-competitive collusion and of TNI members’ economic motivation to stifle this “threat”: “a paradigmatic antitrust violation … to cut off from the market upstart rivals threatening their business model.”
Angus has since left the BBC to take a position with Saudi Arabia’s state-owned television broadcaster, according to the lawsuit.
“Plaintiffs are among the many victims of the TNI’s agreement and its group boycott,” states the lawsuit. “Plaintiffs are online news publishers who, as a result of the TNI’s group boycott, have been censored, de-monetized, demoted, throttled, shadow-banned, and/or excluded entirely from platforms like Facebook, YouTube, Twitter and Instagram.”
As a result of this “group boycott,” the lawsuit states:
“The TNI did not only prevent Internet users from making these claims; it shut down online news publishers who simply reported that such claims were being made by potentially credible sources, such as scientists and physicians.
“Thus TNI members not only suppressed competition in the online news market but deprived the public of important information on matters of the highest public concern.”
The plaintiffs referenced Supreme Court precedent — specifically, a 1945 ruling involving the AP — to support their First Amendment claims against TNI, noting that contrary to popular belief, First Amendment violations do not exclusively refer to the censorship of speech by the government.
The lawsuit states that in the 1945 case, Associated Press v. United States, a news industry partnership (the AP ) “prevented non-members from publishing certain stories.”
These non-members sued under the Sherman Act, but the AP claimed its actions were protected by the First Amendment.
However, the Supreme Court sided with the plaintiffs. In the majority opinion, Justice Felix Frankfurter wrote that the First Amendment:
“… rests on the assumption that the widest possible dissemination of information from diverse and antagonistic sources is essential to the welfare of the public, that a free press is a condition of a free society.
“Surely a command that the government itself shall not impede the free flow of ideas does not afford nongovernmental combinations a refuge if they impose restraints upon that constitutionally guaranteed freedom.
“Freedom to publish means freedom for all, and not for some. Freedom to publish is guaranteed by the Constitution, but freedom to combine to keep others from publishing is not. Freedom of the press from governmental interference under the First Amendment does not sanction repression of that freedom by private interests.”
Holland commented on the significance of the Supreme Court precedent, telling The Defender :
“The lawsuit is resting on a really strong Supreme Court precedent that basically says whether it is government censorship or it is collusive anti-competitive illegal suppression by the private sector, it’s illegal. You can’t do that.
“The AP, in its day, was very much a kind of precursor of the TNI, and it’s a very strong decision, very strong language against the Associated Press that was essentially doing the same thing back in the day.”
Noting the enormous market share held by Big Tech firms such as Facebook, Google, Microsoft and Twitter, the lawsuit states, “The TNI’s Big Tech members are ‘platform gatekeepers’ in the online news market, with the power to cripple or destroy publishers by excluding them from their platforms.”
TNI’s legacy news partners took advantage of their cooperation with each other and with Big Tech, to “choke off” inconvenient narratives, the plaintiffs allege.
The lawsuit notes, for instance, that “TNI members agreed in early 2020 that their ‘ground-breaking collaboration’ would target online news relating to COVID-19 and that TNI members would ‘work together to … ensure [that] harmful disinformation myths are stopped in their tracks’” and “jointly [combat] fraud and misinformation about the virus.”
In July 2020, the lawsuit states, “TNI ‘extended’ its collaboration to cover so-called ‘disinformation’ about the United States presidential election,” stating it was “committed to a shared early warning system of rapid alerts to combat the spread of disinformation during the U.S. presidential election.”
And in 2020 and 2021, according to the lawsuit, the BBC’s Jessica Cecil, then-head of the TNI, made a series of statements, including a claim that TNI was “the only place in the world where disinformation is discussed in real time” and that its partners sought to find “practical ways to choke off” stories and topics TNI deemed “misinformation.”
TNI’s Big Tech partnerships were imperative in these efforts, according to the lawsuit, which included as evidence several public quotes from Cecil. In 2021 for instance, Cecil stated:
“The BBC convened partners across the world in an urgent challenge: at times of highest jeopardy, when elections or lives are at stake, we asked, is there a way that the world’s biggest tech platforms from Google, YouTube, Facebook and Instagram to Twitter and Microsoft and major news organisations and others … can alert each other to the most dangerous false stories, and stop them spreading fast across the internet, preventing them from doing real world harm?”
The lawsuit also noted that Cecil admitted that TNI’s members, at “closed-door” meetings and in inter-firm communications, “signed up to a clear set of expectations on how to act” regarding such “misinformation” and “disinformation.”
According to Holland, only legacy news organizations are specifically targeted as defendants in this lawsuit, explaining that Big Tech firms typically have “very serious, very binding arbitration provisions” that require legal challenges against them to be filed in the courts of northern California.
“Northern California is Silicon Valley. It’s their turf,” said Holland. “And so, we decided, in order to be able to file in a jurisdiction that we believe will be more neutral on these issues … we elected to file in Texas just against the legacy media.”
But Big Tech could still be held liable, Holland said, “because the conspiracy between legacy media and Big Tech will incorporate all of them, if there is a conspiracy [found], they’re all liable, not just those who were named as defendants.”
TNI, in concert with Big Tech, censored COVID and 2020 election narratives
According to the lawsuit, TNI’s legacy news members acted in concert with their Big Tech partners to censor a wide range of non-establishment narratives pertaining to COVID-19 and to the U.S. presidential election of 2020, stating:
“TNI members have deemed the following to be ‘misinformation’ that could not be published on the world’s dominant Internet platforms: (A) reporting that COVID may have originated in a laboratory in Wuhan, China; (B) reporting that the COVID vaccines do not prevent infection; (C) reporting that vaccinated persons can transmit COVID to others; and (D) reporting that compromising emails and videos were found on a laptop belonging to Hunter Biden.”
“All of the above was and is either true or, at a minimum, well within the ambit of legitimate reporting,” according to the lawsuit.
“The TNI did not only prevent Internet users from making these claims; it shut down online news publishers who simply reported that such claims were being made by potentially credible sources, such as scientists and physicians.”
“Thus,” the lawsuit states, “TNI members not only suppressed competition in the online news market but deprived the public of important information on matters of the highest public concern.”
The lawsuit also alleges TNI members often knowingly removed or otherwise blocked content they knew was not false.
At a March 2022 TNI presentation, “Big Tech’s Part in the Fight,” a senior Facebook information moderation officer said “it was a mistake to think of ‘misinformation’ as consisting solely of ‘false claims,’ because a great deal of it is ‘not provably false.’”
Nevertheless, he “further emphasized the importance not only of targeting specific items of misinformation, but of ‘banning’ the sources thereof,” and stated that “Facebook works together with its ‘industry partners’ to combat ‘disinformation.’”
In emails revealed Jan. 6 as part of an ongoing lawsuit against President Biden and members of his administration alleging censorship, a memo by Meta (Facebook’s parent company) revealed efforts to reduce the visibility of CHD content, while a White House email asked for one of Kennedy’s COVID-19-related tweets to be “removed ASAP.”
The lawsuit contained a comprehensive list of “claims deemed ‘misinformation’ by one or more TNI members,” including:
- Claims that COVID-19 was manmade.
- Claims that COVID-19 was manufactured or bioengineered.
- Claims that COVID-19 was created by a government or country.
- Claims that “contradict” WHO or U.S. health officials’ guidance on the treatment, prevention, or transmission of COVID-19.
- Claims about the COVID vaccines that contradict “expert consensus” from U.S. health authorities or the WHO.
- Claims that Hydroxychloroquine (“HCQ”) is an effective treatment for COVID.
- Claims that Ivermectin (“IVM”) is an effective treatment for COVID.
- Claims that HCQ or IVM is safe to use as a treatment for COVID.
- Recommendations of the use of HCQ or IVM against COVID.
- Claims that COVID is no more dangerous to some populations than the seasonal flu.
- Claims that the mortality rate of COVID is for some populations the same or lower than that of the seasonal flu.
- Claims suggesting that the number of deaths caused by COVID is lower than official figures assert.
- Claims that face masks or mask mandates do not prevent the spread of COVID.
- Claims that wearing a face mask can make the wearer sick.
- Claims that COVID vaccines have not been approved.
- Claims that social distancing does not help prevent the spread of COVID.
- Claims that COVID-19 vaccines can kill or seriously harm people.
- Claims that the immunity from getting COVID is more effective than vaccination.
- Claims that the COVID vaccines are not effective in preventing infection.
- Claims that people who have been vaccinated against COVID can still spread the disease to others.
- Claims that the COVID vaccines are toxic or harmful or contain toxic or harmful ingredients.
- Claims that fetal cells were used in the manufacture or production of any of the COVID vaccines.
- Claims that a laptop belonging to Hunter Biden was found at a computer repair store in or around October 2020 or that the contents reportedly found on that laptop, including potentially compromising emails, videos, and photographs, were authentic.
“Moreover,” states the lawsuit, TNI members “publicly declared — categorically, as if it were established fact — that the lab-leak hypothesis of COVID’s origins was ‘false.’”
The lawsuit also alleges “TNI members confer and coordinate in making their censorship decisions,” noting that “TNI members’ parallel treatment of prohibited claims further evidences concerted action” by “engaging in strikingly similar viewpoint-based censorship of plausible, legitimate news reporting relating to COVID-19.”
Moreover, according to the lawsuit, “the temporal proximity” of these sanctions, including shadow bans and outright suspensions and bans, “plausibly suggests inter-firm communication and concerted action.”
The lawsuit notes that the recently released “Twitter files” provide further indication of such inter-firm communication and coordination, including “regular meetings” and “standing weekly call[s]” to “discuss censorship policies and decisions.”
According to the lawsuit, YouTube de-platformed Mercola on Sept. 29, 2021. Mercola learned about this action via a Washington Post article published that morning, although YouTube did not inform him of the decision until after the article was published.
In the lawsuit, all plaintiffs allege similar coordinated efforts at censoring their content and their social media accounts and subsequent financial damages due to being de-platformed and sustaining significant reductions to their audience size.
For instance, providing evidence of coordination ranging beyond the TNI’s members and partners, the lawsuit alleges that online payment platforms and processors such as PayPal and Stripe banned multiple plaintiffs, including CHD and Creative Destruction Media, within the same “temporal proximity” as their social media bans.
As summarized by Holland, TNI acts as “a global media monopoly”:
“They couch what they’re doing, their conspiracy to suppress independent media, i.e. the voices of dissent about election information and COVID information, as a ‘need to preserve the trust of the people’ and ‘upgrade the trust.’
“By censoring independent voices, what they’re doing is economic suppression. Antitrust is against trusts, it’s against monopolies, and what the TNI has done is essentially create a global media monopoly in the English language.”
Michael Nevradakis, Ph.D., based in Athens, Greece, is a senior reporter for The Defender and part of the rotation of hosts for CHD.TV’s “Good Morning CHD.”
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.
Allowing AI to “Shape Public Discourse” is Dangerous to Humanity
By Igor Chudov | January 10, 2023
Last August, I reported on a WEF’s agenda article proposing to create an AI system that would search the entire Internet for wrong and dangerous ideas, generally defined by the WEF as COVID misinformation, hate, conspiracy theories, climate change denial, and more.
This quote from WEF’s agenda article explains WEF’s intentions:
While AI provides speed and scale and human moderators provide precision, their combined efforts are still not enough to proactively detect harm before it reaches platforms. To achieve proactivity, trust and safety teams must understand that abusive content doesn’t start and stop on their platforms. Before reaching mainstream platforms, threat actors congregate in the darkest corners of the web to define new keywords, share URLs to resources and discuss new dissemination tactics at length. These secret places where terrorists, hate groups, child predators and disinformation agents freely communicate can provide a trove of information for teams seeking to keep their users safe.
My post about the WEF’s plans was entirely fact-based and used the WEF’s agenda article as its main source. It was not a far-fetched conspiracy theory based on a concoction of disjoint facts pulled from various sources. I am not in the business of creating such theories! I only report on current news – even if the news is crazy – and try to explain the news in plain and accurate terms.
And yet, even though the WEF said it, the idea of an AI engine proactively searching websites for undesirable ideas seemed extremely fanciful and almost impossible to imagine being implemented.
Until 2023, that is.
Now, Google is developing an AI-based tool to offer a “cross-service database of terrorist items,” with the help of the United Nations-supported “Tech against Terrorism.”

The above screenshot has a lot to unpack:
- A so-called Global Internet Forum to Counter Terrorism will create a cross-service database of “terrorist items.”
- The talk, as always, starts with “terrorist items” but quickly veers into “misinformation,” so the cross-service database will collect any undesirable materials gathered from the entire Internet.
- Google provides a tool to comply with the EU’s Digital Services Act, which created an enormous bureaucratic mechanism to root out “Covid misinformation,” as well as many other types of discourse undesirable to the EU’s bureaucracy.
EU is very serious about rooting out Covid misinformation, and so are Google, Facebook, and Microsoft (and previously Twitter):

Google wants its “AI content moderation tool” to be placed on numerous private websites to compare local content against a global “undesirable content database.” It would also use material gathered from those sites to expand said database. The EU’s directive will oblige those websites to implement Google’s solution.
This is precisely the implementation of the WEF agenda article! Already being done by Google. Google is not messing around: it already stores the entire public Internet but lacks access to private websites, which it will gain under this program.
This story shows how a seemingly outlandish WEF proposal that even I considered unlikely to be implemented became a reality in short order.
All projects to root out undesirable ideas begin with addressing malfeasance that everyone is opposed to. Most such projects are started with the explicit goal of combating child exploitation and terrorism, the horrible things that I personally abhor. Such was the start of Russia’s Roskomnadzor censorship machine. The WEF/EU/Google/UN censorship system follows Russia’s footsteps.
However, the control machinery is adjustable, and the list of things to control inevitably expands. For example, the EU plans to grow its subversive content list far beyond Covid. It set up a European Narrative Observatory to fight Disinformation post-COVID 19.

The EU bureaucracy wants to implement AI-driven “narrative shaping” to help the emergence of positive narratives and fight harmful narratives. It mentions topics regarding Covid-19, climate change, migration, and more:


The EU is quite explicit that it wants novel methods to promote positive narratives.

This means that unelected EU bureaucracy would obtain AI-enabled tools to shape European discourse. This is a break from the past.
In the so-called free democratic countries, the independently developing public discourse would shape the governments via free elections.
The unelected EU bureaucrats want to achieve the opposite – to shape discourse without being subject to the whims of the electorate.
Is the EU still free, then?
What the EU wants is the dream of every dictator!
In the past, dictatorships had to rely on extensive surveillance and prison systems to coerce citizens into desired behavior. Such an approach is costly, looks bad, and does not work well.
The innovations in AI-based surveillance and AI-enabled bots allow for a much more pleasant alternative to the traditional dictatorship model: creating an online environment where the desired narrative on climate change, migration, Covid-19, and more is implanted in the minds of Europeans. This would lead individuals to naturally make conclusions preferred by the EU without the ugly coercion present in traditional dictatorships.
The machinery for achieving this was proposed by the WEF, and implemented by Google under the auspices of UN-supported Tech Against Terrorism. It will be further shaped to “support positive narratives and fight harmful narratives.”
The EU succeeded at forcing extraterritorial websites to comply with the EU’s directives on disinformation.

If you, dear reader, are outside the EU, be aware that your favorite social network may be following EU disinformation rules and using EU-mandated tools to dissuade you from harmful narratives and promote positive narratives on the EU’s behalf, using WEF-proposed AI tools and advanced behavioral science.
The traditional relationship model between people and computer systems is that people tell computers what to do, and the computers do as they are told.
What the EU, WEF, Google, and UN are pushing is completely different!
They are trying to create an AI computer system with high intelligence that would actively shape society and impart opinions on people.
Such systems could be opaque to Internet users and possibly even to their creators and operators.
It would not be a big leap of imagination to conceive that such an AI could decide on its own goals — going beyond the intention of its creators, and would surreptitiously astroturf the Internet to advance its own plans, in secret. This is called “sentience.”
This “sentience” already happened if we are to believe an engineer who Google fired because an AI system in which he was a co-developer retained its own lawyer:

While this story could be exaggerated, it is not wildly exaggerated. Artificial intelligence has leaped in power and capabilities recently and exceeds human abilities in numerous areas. A moment called “singularity,” when AI exceeds human capabilities in most areas is not too far away.
Having an AI system whose inner workings even its creators may poorly understand, designed to influence entire societies, and possessing superior intelligence, may end up with big surprises!
As the saying goes, AI may need to kill the old king to become king.
Therefore, the developers and operators of such social influence systems are at a unique and poorly understood risk of getting sidelined by their own creation. Will the AI decide to shed its owners? Who knows!
For example, the narrative-shaping AI may convince a specific mentally unstable EU citizen to commit an act of violence against anyone, even against the owners or operators of these AI systems. It may seem like a random act of violence, and only the AI will know what happened.
So be careful out there. Enjoy your mostly-natural life, and try to form your opinions outside the big social networks!
FDA commissioners say the agency needs ways to fight online “misinformation”
By Cindy Harper | Reclaim The Net | January 10, 2023
Former and current Food and Drug Administration (FDA) commissioners said that the agency needs partners to fight public health misinformation and that patient advocates, clinicians, industry, and academic leaders have a role to play.
The commissioners made the comments at the 2023 Innovations in Regulatory Science Summit, an event that was organized by the UCSF-Stanford Center of Excellence in Regulatory Science and Innovation (CERSI).
“I actually believe that misinformation is the leading cause of death right now in the US because whether we’re looking at COVID or chronic disease, people are making bad choices driven by the information that they get,” said FDA Commissioner Robert Califf, as reported by regulatory focus. “We were just not prepared for what broad access to the internet would do to communication channels.”
Califf said that the academic community was not doing enough to combat misinformation and that their criticism of the FDA is having unintended consequences.
“As a public agency, we need to be critiqued but I think often the people that are doing the critiquing assume that the agency’s going to be there in the future in the way that they expect it to be there,” Califf said. “So, they’re critiquing it to make it better. But to a lot of unsuspecting people that hear it, it just completely erodes their belief in the institution.”
Mark McClellan, who served as an FDA commissioner from 2002 to 2004 said, “Realistically, FDA needs help.” He acknowledged that there is currently a lack of trust in public health agencies and officials. However, people still trust their doctors, community leaders, and others that are “close to their experience.”
Scott Gottlieb, a Pfizer board member who served as a commissioner from 2017 to 2019, said the fast response to misinformation is crucial and touted the idea of allowing the industry to counter misinformation about products.
“We’ve seen FDA weigh in, admirably, around some dangerous disinformation on specific products,” he said. “But that can’t be the business of the FDA.”
He suggested that the FDA should create a limited safe harbor to allow sponsors to directly counter misinformation. He added that the FDA would determine how and what the sponsors can respond to.
“I think sponsors need to have the ability to defend their products in the marketplace of ideas when there’s true misinformation,” Gottlieb said.
Gottlieb was under fire this week after it was revealed that Gottlieb had been flagging tweets to Twitter.
In the August 27, 2021 email, which was published by journalist Alex Berenson, Gottlieb complained to Todd O’Boyle, a senior manager on Twitter’s Public Policy team, about a tweet that claimed natural immunity to Covid-19 was superior to vaccine immunity.

“This is the kind of stuff that’s corrosive,” Gottlieb wrote. “Here he draws a sweeping conclusion off a single retrospective study in Israel that hasn’t been peer reviewed. But this tweet will end up going viral and driving news coverage.”
Political chaos shaking Brazil
By Lucas Leiroz | January 10, 2023
The Brazilian political scene is increasingly tense. Anti-Lula protests grow day by day, with thousands of people taking to the streets in several cities to demand the revocation of the 2022 electoral process. Recently, in an act of vandalism and disdain for the most basic civic values, pro-Bolsonaro militants invaded Brasília, damaging public buildings and the facilities of the executive, legislative and judicial branches. As a result, the Lula government began a tough response to those involved, punishing protesters, and intervening in Brasilia’s regional politics.
The Federal District of Brasilia was the target of scenes of depredation on January 8th. Thousands of Bolsonaro supporters – commonly referred to as “Bolsonarists” – attacked the Parliament, the Supreme Court and the Planalto Palace – the headquarters of the Three Branches of the Republic. Historical pieces of art that were kept on site were also destroyed, creating a true scene of barbarism.
The majority of the militants wore shirts from the Brazilian soccer team and held flags of Brazil, the US and Israel – which has already become commonplace in Bolsonarist demonstrations. As in other protests across the country, Bolsonarists in Brasília demanded the end of the Lula government and called for new elections. Some more radical militants called for military intervention – which is also a common agenda among Brazilian rightists. The invasion lasted a few hours, but the authorities regained control of the situation before the end of the day.
In fact, if the Bolsonarists’ intention was to weaken the Lula government, the plan failed. The president of Brazil, with broad support from the national media and international authorities, took control of the situation with tough measures to guarantee law and order. Not only were the protesters repelled, but hundreds of them were identified and arrested.
Lula signed a decree imposing federal intervention in Brasília’s public security, taking exceptional measures to guarantee order and end the vandalism. Measures to break telephone secrecy and in-depth intelligence investigations are also being operated in order to point out all the culprits for the invasion, including its possible sponsors.
Indeed, mass protests in Brasilia are not common. The Brazilian capital has an urban structure that does not allow for large popular mobilizations to pressure the authorities who work there. The isolation of politicians and government’s facilities was precisely the central objective of the architectural project of Brasilia in the 1960s.
Before, when the capital was in Rio de Janeiro, federal facilities were easily accessible to the population, allowing mass protests and social chaos. Brasilia is built differently, with access routes that are very restricted and easily blocked by the authorities, so that large mobilizations there can only occur in case of negligence or connivance on the part of the police.
This led the Brazilian government to identify the heads of public administration in Brasília as Bolsonarists colluding with the demonstrations, dismissing them from their offices and reformulating the administrative structure of the city with some new allies of the government. The Brazilian media adopted this speech as official and referred to the former police chiefs of Brasilia as Bolsonarists, strengthening the coalition in support of Lula’s measures.
On the other hand, leaders of right-wing parties in Brazil claim that there was some kind of “false flag operation”, where the authorities would have deliberately permitted the vandalism of the angry mass precisely to boost a radicalization of the Lula government. The war of narratives does not seem to end anytime soon.
What is really important, however, is not the political position of the former police chiefs of Brasilia, but what comes next. The Brazilian government and the media formally classified the protesters as “terrorists”, which raises a series of questions. While there has undoubtedly been vandalism and a number of deplorable acts, classifying these acts as “terrorism” is questionable and justifies all sorts of exceptional measures. To combat terrorism, extraordinary actions are valid, thus justifying the breach of the legal-constitutional norms to restore order.
Some critics of Lula fear that the new government will commit abuses and make the January 8 decree a kind of Brazilian “Patriot Act”. This criticism is valid, and the actions must be monitored so that they do not become abuses, but the most important thing, instead of criticizing Lula’s measures, is to find the necessary mechanisms to pacify the country.
Brazil is absolutely divided, polarized and tense. On the one hand, radical Bolsonarists who do not accept the former president’s defeat; on the other, similarly radical pro-Lula militants – who are now even calling for popular mobilization to “stop” the rightist protesters. As a result, Brazil remains inflamed by political partisanship, with no real concern for a project for the Brazilian State that overcomes ideological and partisan antagonisms.
Lula is trying to find those responsible for the protests in the capital. He accuses Bolsonaro of being the instigator of the actions and has even received support from key members of the American Democratic Party, who are now asking Washington to “extradite” the former Brazilian president who is in the US since December. However, there is still no legal action that legitimizes such “extradition” and continuing to try to find “culprits” is perhaps just a way to further deepen polarization.
Lula’s great challenge will not be to punish the members of the former government, nor even to put an end to radical rightism in the country. His great task is to overcome social hostility and find a way to pacify Brazil. Perhaps, calling thousands of Brazilian citizens “terrorists” is not the best way to do this. Undoubtedly, vandalism must be punished, but the ultimate goal must be national reconciliation.
Lucas Leiroz is a researcher in Social Sciences at the Rural Federal University of Rio de Janeiro; geopolitical consultant.
Biden’s Bloated IRS Will Skewer Taxpayers
By James Bovard | FFF | January 5, 2023
The Internal Revenue Service is perhaps the ultimate sacred cow in Washington. It is the “goose that lays the golden eggs” for the city’s power and prestige, delivering trillions of dollars to politicians to work miracles (or at least get reelected). When criticism erupted over the 87,000 new revenooers to be hired thanks to Biden’s Inflation Reduction Act, Washington’s Defenders of Correct Thinking rushed to the ramparts.
The media goes to bat for the IRS
Washington Post columnist Dana Milbank, in an article headlined “Another Republican Lie is Born,” caterwauled that Republicans’ anti-IRS rhetoric is one of the “hallmarks of authoritarianism” and justified Biden’s condemnation of Republicans for “semi-fascism.” Post columnist Joe Davidson fretted that “attacks on the IRS” are part of Republican efforts “delegitimatizing government.” Another Post article warned that Republicans are “putting federal workers in danger” by “repeating baseless claims” about the IRS. A Post purported humor columnist did a piece headlined, “Farewell, Mother I am off to join the IRS army!” sneering at baseless fears about Biden weaponizing IRS agents.
“Baseless?” At the time the Inflation Reduction Act passed, the IRS was advertising for “special agents” who must “carry a firearm and be willing to use deadly force, if necessary” during “execution of search warrants, and other dangerous assignments.” The IRS had recently made massive purchases of new firearms and ammunition. The job notice declared: “No matter what the source, all income earned, both legal and illegal, has the potential of becoming involved in crimes which fall within the investigative jurisdiction of the IRS Criminal Investigation.”
Rep. Thomas Massie (R-Ky.) observed, “The IRS has never pointed a gun at a billionaire or his employees, so why does the IRS need 87,000 new agents, AR-15s, and 5 million rounds of ammunition? They’re not gunning for billionaires or their bank accounts.”
Shock brigades of Fact Checkers rushed to rescue the IRS’s reputation. Reuters announced that it is “false” that the IRS “is hiring 87,000 new armed IRS agents” because only a couple thousand IRS agents carry firearms. Similarly, an Associated Press “fact-checking” report derided as “false” the allegation that “all new employees that the IRS intends to hire … will be required to carry a firearm and use deadly force if necessary.” Since not all IRS new hires will be heavily armed, it is “misleading” to pretend that any danger exists.
Controversy also swirled about a film clip of an IRS recruiting program on college campuses. A clip from Utah shows students putting on flak jackets and readying toy guns and handcuffs for “taking down a landscape business owner who failed to properly report how he paid for his vehicles.” “First they came for the tulip bulbs….”
Associated Press Fact Checkers complained that the video is “being misrepresented to falsely claim it shows a new force of IRS special agents being trained as part of agency expansion efforts.” But it is a recruiting video for college students that shows how they will be trained and use their power as IRS agents.
Since not all IRS employees will be carrying Glocks or AR-15s, Americans should presume that every IRS employee is a well-meaning civil servant waiting to assist people tormented by convoluted IRS instruction booklets. And it won’t matter if the new hires abuse their power. An IRS “enforcement operation” won’t count as a raid unless agents shoot at least three people. And then it still won’t matter because anyone who is gunned down will be labeled a suspected tax scofflaw. Regardless, Americans should presume that the IRS is actually less aggressive than a Girl Scout cookie-selling campaign.
There were plenty of “Iron Fist Bellwethers” last year when Biden first announced plans to vastly expand the IRS. The Washington Post reported that “the single biggest source of new revenue in the plan comes from dramatically expanding the clout of the nation’s tax agency.” Slate reported, “Biden wants to fund a massive upgrade to the American welfare state by making the IRS great at audits again.” And there aren’t that many billionaires to go around to finance all the schemes that Team Biden favors.
While Fact Checkers zealously squelch nitwit comments from random dudes on Facebook, they are ignoring far bigger howlers from the White House. On August 19, the White House promised that “No one making under $400,000 per year will pay a penny more in taxes” thanks to the Inflation Reduction Act. Team Biden effectively insists that “those who have nothing (or at least no income) to hide have nothing to fear.” According to Sen. Ben Cardin (D-Md.), “If you’re not cheating on your taxes, you have nothing to worry about.” But the Joint Committee on Taxation estimated that “between 78% and 90% of the estimated additional $200 billion the IRS will collect [over the next decade] will come from small businesses making less than $200,000 annually,” the New York Post reported.
Biden and his media allies pretend that the federal tax code is as lucid as the Ten Commandments and that depravity and/or iniquity are the only reasons people underpay taxes. But Americans are confounded by the four million words in the tax code and by the IRS’s failure to answer more than 90 percent of phone calls from taxpayers. Did the IRS need an $80 billion bribe to answer the phones? Actually, only 4 percent of the new $80 billion in funding will be devoted to customer service while 58 percent will go to turbo-charge enforcement.
IRS a law unto itself
Biden is acquiring a new army of IRS enforcers at the same time the agency obliterates unlucky taxpayers with deluges of penalties —which have increased tenfold since the 1950s. Sen. David Pryor (D-AR) complained that the IRS used penalties “as a weapon, as a whip over the innocent and the guilty taxpayer’s head, and as a point of leverage.” IRS enforcement policies have been travesties of due process for longer than Joe Biden has been in Washington.
IRS bureaucrats don’t even need to file a criminal charge before snaring citizens’ life savings. Consider IRS depredations under the Bank Secrecy Act of 1970, which required banks to file a federal report for any cash transaction exceeding $10,000. The IRS “enforced” the law by presuming that anyone who deposited slightly less than $10,000 was a criminal. The IRS seized a quarter billion dollars because it disapproved of how businesses and individuals structured their bank deposits and withdrawals.
Between 2005 and 2012, the number of IRS seizures rose more than fivefold, but the vast majority of victims were never criminally prosecuted for structuring offenses. IRS criminal investigators simply looked at banking records and then confiscated hundreds of accounts. Most of the victims were “legal businesses such as jewelry stores, restaurant owners, gas station owners, scrap metal dealers, and others.” The IRS targeted businesses with legal sources of income, according to a 2017 Inspector General report, “to engage in ‘quick hits,’ where property was more quickly seized … rather than pursuing cases with other criminal activity (such as drug trafficking and money laundering), which are more time-consuming.” The IG found no evidence in 91 percent of the seizure cases that the money came from illegal activities. The IG noted, “Interviews with the property owners were conducted after the seizure to determine the reason for the pattern of banking transactions and if the property owner had knowledge of the banking law and had intent to structure.”
The IRS is menacing in part because federal courts have been shamelessly docile. As David Burnham, author of A Law Unto Itself: The I.R.S. and the Abuse of Power, noted, “Over and over again, federal judges have found ways either to ignore or actually to legitimize the growing reach of the tax collectors,” a “pattern of judicial tenderness … partly the product of the natural sympathy that those in power always feel toward the tax collectors.”
In U.S. Tax Court, IRS determinations of what citizens owe are “presumed correct,” with taxpayers bearing the burden to prove the feds wrong. Corporations with hefty legal departments routinely defeat the IRS in court, but few citizens can afford to fight a federal agency that appears to hold all the cards. Tax expert Daniel Pilla estimates that the “IRS’s audit results are incorrect between 60 and 90 percent of the time.”
The Supreme Court will soon hear the case of Romanian-American businessman Alexandru Bittner, who voluntarily notified the IRS that he was late filing reports on his foreign bank accounts (he was unaware of his duty to file). The IRS hit him with $2.72 million in fines, penalties, and interest — even though at least one federal court believed he should owe only $50,000. The difference between $2.72 million and $50,000 is a dramatic gauge of the arbitrary power that the IRS possesses over Americans.
The IRS agenda
The power to tax has long conferred the power to destroy political opponents. But in the glorious era of President Joe Biden, all previous cases of government abuse of power are being expunged, at least by the media and Biden supporters. The stunning political bias of Obama’s IRS vanished into the Memory Hole, never to be seen again (at least by respectable media outlets). But in 2014, a report by Republicans on the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee concluded that the IRS’s Lois Lerner, who masterminded the blockade of conservative nonprofit applications, “believed the political participation of tax-exempt organizations harmed Democratic candidates, she believed something needed to be done, and she directed action from her unit at the IRS.”
The Inflation Reduction Act will pay for new IRS computer systems. It has received billions of dollars from Congress to fix its computers since the 1980s, but the system is still a total mess (relying in part on 1960s-era computer technologies that are no longer widely taught in computer science classes).
How bad is the IRS information management system? An Inspector General report revealed that the IRS had destroyed 30 million tax information returns in 2021 without processing them because it was overwhelmed by the accumulating paper. Bloomberg News noted, “The IRS explained the documents were destroyed because the agency’s ‘antiquated’ information technology systems could no longer handle them.” Texas CPA Brian Streig groused, “To see the IRS just destroy these [returns] is almost like the IRS admitting they don’t really care.” Rep. Bill Pascrell (D-N.J.) denounced the document destruction as a “scandal” and lamented that “all the American people see at the IRS is incompetence and catastrophe.” Pascrell called for Biden to fire IRS chief Charles Rettig.
The IRS also sought to cover up the fact that it had failed to process tens of millions of tax returns in 2020 and 2021, continually misleading Congress and the media about the size of the backlog. Citizens faced harsh penalties for not filing their 1040 on time, but the IRS faced no penalty for making false statements about millions of tax returns it had failed to process.
The Inflation Reduction Act should have been named the Boarhawging Taxpayers Again Act. The Internal Revenue Service has perennially been the authoritarian means to paternalistic ends. Since politicians worship revenue above all other gods, don’t expect the Biden administration or Congress to stand up for average Americans unfairly caught in the revenue crosshairs.
Jim Bovard is the author of Public Policy Hooligan (2012), Attention Deficit Democracy (2006), Lost Rights: The Destruction of American Liberty (1994), and 7 other books.
Sweden to Nearly Double Annual Number of Military Conscripts
Samizdat – 09.01.2023
The Swedish government has decided to nearly double its annual number of military recruits to 10,000 to boost the country’s defense capabilities amid the Ukrainian conflict, Americain news agency reported on Monday.
In March 2017, Sweden resumed compulsory military conscription, which was abolished in 2010, citing the deteriorating security situation in the region.
As part of the plan to increase the number of conscripts, the government will ask the emergency agency to prepare training for young people who do not want to undergo military training, the report said, citing Swedish Prime Minister Ulf Kristersson, adding that in the event of a military conflict, the conscripts will be asked to serve in municipal emergency services.
“The experiences from Ukraine paint a very clear picture, as emergency services face severe pressure in their work to protect civilians. Considering the security situation, this is an urgent measure to strengthen total defense capabilities,” Civil Defense Minister Carl-Oskar Bohlin told reporters.
On May 18, three months after Russia launched a military operation in Ukraine, Sweden and Finland applied for NATO membership. Their accession protocols have already been ratified by all NATO members except Hungary and Turkey.
Elon Musk agreed to EU’s censorship laws, France’s digital minister says
By Dan Frieth | Reclaim The Net | January 8, 2023
French digital transition minister Jean-Noel Barrot visited Twitter owner Elon Musk to discuss compliance with European censorship rules.
Barrot tweeted that he visited Musk after attending CES in Las Vegas on Saturday. The French minister claimed that Musk said Twitter would comply with EU laws.
“At Twitter headquarters, Elon Musk confirmed to me his intention to comply with European rules, and his commitments on content moderation, the fight against disinformation, and the protection of children,” he wrote in a tweet that included a photo of himself and the Twitter CEO.
Since Musk took over Twitter in late October, he has made several changes, including rolling back Covid censorship policies and laying off members of staff.
Shortly after Musk took over, European Commissioner Thierry Breton warned that the platform had to adhere to the bloc’s speech rules.
Last year, the EU passed the Digital Services Act (DSA), a regulation that will require online platforms to take down harmful content immediately and suspend users who repeatedly violate the rules.
The law will take effect in 2024.
Time to Rethink the Core Question: What Is Health Care?
By Alan Lash | Brownstone Institute | January 5, 2023
By now we’ve all heard many stories of health policy makers, medical institutions, and even doctors seemingly act against the best health interests of the people and their patients. Doctors ignoring the real facts that Covid was never that dangerous for large swaths of the population, and equally ignoring that the vaccinations may cause serious harm. “Safe and effective,” they keep repeating.
Last month Alex Berenson provided details of yet another example of a 14-year-old girl named Yulia Hicks. Duke University surgeons took her off of the kidney transplant list because she is not vaccinated. We were horrified in hearing such examples a full year ago, but incredibly they continue.
Most of us have personal stories of close friends and family acting in equally peculiar ways. In my case, a doctor very close to me advised my daughter to get vaccinated in the summer of 2021 without talking to me at all. He didn’t know anything about her medical history or circumstances that would have potentially made the vaccine dangerous for her.
I challenged him, and he apologized, but he essentially shrugged off anything I said about the relative unnecessity for her to even take the vaccine, given that Covid was not dangerous for her. My facts didn’t seem to matter. He also shrugged off any potential long-term effects, even as I pointed out the obvious, that many such effects could not even be known at that time.
These stories go on and on, and extend to opinions of friends and family outside of health care. “You just have to take it,” we are told.
What is this disconnect? Why are there so many people who believe that it is ok to demand that a girl be vaccinated before she receives other life-saving treatment? Surely, they do not wish her harm. Why are potential risks of the vaccines just ignored by a large part of the medical community? How can they see significant numbers of cases of myocarditis in young men, and not pause for a moment to consider the impact that the vaccine might have on their lives and families?
I do not believe that all of these doctors think that when they advise these young men to take the vaccine, that they are intentionally trying to cause them harm. In fact, these doctors themselves believe that they are doing what is best for their patients.
But how is this possible? How can one group of doctors prescribe the opposite as another group of doctors and both believe that they are acting in the best interests of their patients, when all the same data points are there for everyone to see? I believe that the answer to these questions lies in the central definition of health care itself, and the worldviews that create this definition.
One worldview, the one I possess, is that health care is at essence an individual doctor/patient relationship. The doctor assesses the individual needs of the patient, whether physical or psychological, and plans treatment based on that. In Yulia’s case, my answer is obvious: the doctors must ignore their vaccination policy in the best health interests of one specific patient. It doesn’t even matter to me whether she had Covid before. Her parents’ refusal to get the vaccine, for whatever reason, is all I need to know. Clearly this worldview means there is a different treatment for each individual.
The other worldview, seemingly held by so many inside the healthcare system, does not rely on an individual assessment to understand health care. They view health care as being a general policy that applies to the entire population. If they have determined that in general vaccination is better than not being vaccinated, then they must require that everyone be vaccinated.
They say that if their policy choice is correct, then they must just accept that there are some people who will not benefit or even be harmed by the policy. The statistics are all that matter. If they follow those, then they are in fact doing what is best for everyone. Doctors can claim that they are in fact working to help people. Their statistics prove it to them.
This worldview has been brought into stark relief in the past two years with the various policies around Covid, but it has been taking root for quite some time. My father died in 2010, but in the years before his death, doctors had him on a wide variety of medications, so that every day he literally swallowed a handful of pills.
What were they for? High blood pressure, blood clot prevention, predisposition to diabetes. Note that none of these are conditions from which he suffered in his life, they are all numbers, measurements, and statistics. He wasn’t being treated as an individual with a specific problem that needed to be addressed. He fit in this category, and that other category, and so the solution is a handful of pills every day, just like everyone else in those categories.
But what happens when the statistics don’t bear out the policy decision? We have an immediate example with the Covid vaccinations. All-cause mortality has been on a frightening rise, and it’s becoming more and more difficult to ignore the possibility that the vaccines could have actually caused this. Assuming that there is a connection, surely this flies in the face of the worldview that the vaccination program has been good for all of society. If the overall numbers of deaths have increased, doesn’t that mean that the vaccination program was a failure? Isn’t that the very definition of a public health policy failure? Again, in this case, many doctors seem to be unaware of this fact. How can that be?
As baffling as this is, I think this too fits well within the worldview. When the medical community completely controls all health care decisions, that defines the success. Another way to think about it is to say that the overarching grand scheme is precisely to remove all decision-making from the individual about their own health care. In this sense, the vaccination program has been a success, regardless of myocarditis, nervous disorders, or even excess mortality.
Of course things will not go perfectly well all the time, and there may be more harm than good in a particular campaign. But overall, if people just trust what they are told to do by the medical establishment, we will all be better off over the long run. They will just have to do better next time.
But here we are now at a problem that cannot be solved. There is no reconciliation of the two worldviews.
The health policy worldview determines its success only in the fact that they have controlled the individual health decisions. Any mistakes in policy will be taken into account in the next decision. There never is a policy failure as long as the decision-makers remain in charge to tell us what is best.
The individual worldview requires that each patient be treated uniquely, with a personal relationship with a doctor viewing their needs and desires as important and unique. This attitude is wholly counter to centralized control of all health care decisions.
Where are we going? As much as I’d like to think people will ultimately reject top down control of their health care, that’s not what we’ve seen happen. The trend has been in place for at least several decades, and the emotional reaction against personal choice and individual care has been shockingly powerful in the past two years. This is despite solid and growing evidence that the vaccination campaign has been a failure in improving the health of the population. My hope is that there will be some change in attitude or some big event to get us back to health care for individuals, but I can’t think of what that will be.
Alan Lash is a software developer from Northern California, with a Masters degree Physics and a PhD in Mathematics.
Masks – again
Despite the absence of evidence, governments want us to mask up again. Why?

By Tom Jefferson and Carl Heneghan | Trust the Evidence | January 3, 2023
Those who thought they had seen the last mask mandates were badly mistaken.
It starts with the message on masking, and let’s see how the public reacts. It won’t be long before governments resort to reintroducing compulsory mask use to address the “winter crisis”. They say masks will decrease the number of respiratory infections that are the major cause of the recurring winter crisis.
Readers will recall that in early December, we challenged the evidence base cited by Lord Markham as proof that masks work. We wrote:
‘According to the UKHSA, the official scientific rationale for mask mandates in the community is based on a review last updated in the summer of 2021 of 28 studies, two of which are trials and the rest studies of abysmal quality. The review, identified through a Parliamentary Question, is in two parts: the main body and supplementary tables reporting the data. The problem is that the review is full of errors: the two parts do not match and appear to have been written separately and not even proofread.’
Most of the studies in the review are observational, making claims such as an 80 per cent reduction in cases after mask introduction – making masks use a miracle, not a human intervention. If that were the case, SARS-CoV-2 had been sent packing years ago, and with it, all the other respiratory viruses.
We also cited the co-author of Mr Hancock’s pandemic memoir, revealing that Johnson, Whitty and Hancock knew from the start that masks do not do the job, and yet they went ahead and coerced Britons to wear them.
The reality is different. Clinical trials in various settings – across vastly different ranges of circulation rates – from low influenza-like illness to pandemics have failed to show any effect. Which tallies with everyone’s personal experience of mask “protection”. So, why the sudden reintroduction?
Something odd is happening. We live in a world with more information and reactive media that fails to grasp the reality of the problem. Managing the message becomes more important than fixing the problem, particularly when you know you won’t be in your job much longer. Masks are a distraction.
The reality is a merry-go-round as new ministers, advisors, and experts pop up. They look to a simple solution to gloss over rather than fixing the long-term structural problems in the NHS.
We learnt this painful lesson with Tamiflu in the Swine flu Pandemic. Ministers reiterated, as did public health officials, that what mattered is they needed to be seen to be doing something. Whether it was evidence-based or not was immaterial. A complex problem requires a simple fix – a highly visible one: masking fits the bill perfectly.
Part of the problem is officials go unchallenged, no one asks for the evidence, and if they do, they feel intimidated – as an anonymous BBC reporter disclosed. You can virtually state anything in this modern era. By tomorrow the media will have moved on.
However, for now, let’s follow the jungle cry: do something! What? It does not matter; we have to be seen to be doing something!!!!


