Top White House Covid Advisor Admits: ‘No Study in the World Shows Masks Work’
Infowars | December 28, 2022
A viral video features top White House Covid adviser Dr. Ashish Jha admitting there are no studies that show face masks work.
“There’s no study in the world that shows that masks work that well,” Jha told The Philadelphia Inquirer earlier this month.
“So you’re never going to get the kind of benefit from mandatory year-round masking as you would from making substantial improvements in indoor air quality, plus it’s a lot easier to implement as well,” he continued. “So this is an area where we’re doing a lot and trying to really encourage people to use the resources they have to make those investments and start really improving ventilation filtration in buildings.”
Despite his admission, Dr. Jha and other top Covid advisers have previously advocated for masking.
Jha’s vacillation on whether masks work parallels with NIAID Director Anthony Fauci’s own back-and-forth remarks on masks, which he initially claimed do not work.
Jha has previously been criticized for giving Americans shady medical advice encouraging them to take both flu and Covid-19 jabs at the same time, saying, “That’s why God gave you two arms.”
Despite their questionable efficacy, many places around the country are once again considering implementing mandatory face mask policies.
Twitter lawyer Jim Baker wanted to know why Trump wasn’t censored for tweet saying “don’t fear Covid”
Twitter execs had to explain why optimism isn’t a violation of the rules
By Didi Rankovic | Reclaim The Net | December 27, 2022
Lawyer James Baker, formerly of the FBI and working for Twitter until recently – and an excellent example of the “revolving door” policy happening between Big Tech and “Big Government” – shows up in several censorship controversies that have come to light thanks to the release of the “Twitter Files.”
In the fall of 2020, Baker was Twitter’s deputy general counsel with an eye on President Donald Trump’s account and apparently looking for just about any way to silence him, even when Trump’s tweets sought to lift people’s spirits at the peak of the pandemic and lockdowns.
On October 4, 2020, Trump was about to leave the hospital where he was treated for Covid for several days, and tweeted about this, telling 86 million followers that he was feeling well, and advising them not to be afraid of Covid, or allow it to dominate their lives.
“Don’t be afraid of Covid. Don’t let it dominate your life. We have developed, under the Trump Administration, some really great drugs & knowledge. I feel better than I did 20 years ago!,” the president’s optimistic tweet read.
However, the content of the published internal communications suggest that Baker – whom one of the journalists now releasing Twitter Files says was “one of the most powerful people” in the US intelligence community – wanted you to be afraid.
Soon after Trump posted his message, Baker emailed Yoel Roth, who was at the time head of Twitter’s Trust & Safety, asking why the tweet was not considered a violation of the social site’s Covid policies.
“Why isn’t this POTUS tweet a violation of our COVID-19 policy (especially the ‘Don’t be afraid of COVID’ statement)?,” Baker quizzed the Twitter exec.
Roth’s response was that Trump had made “a broad, optimistic statement” which could not be interpreted as a violation since it didn’t encourage his followers to do anything harmful or even not to wear masks.
That tweet eventually stayed up, but Baker had better luck in convincing those at Twitter responsible for suppressing the New York Post story about Hunter Biden’s laptop, by misleading them to believe the laptop’s contents were “likely” inauthentic.
For this, Baker might be investigated by Republican congressmen, who suggested this earlier in December.
And the former FBI and DoJ man even tried to “review” the documents that are now being released as “Twitter Files” – before he was let go by Elon Musk.
Powering up the WHO: be alert and alarmed
Why proposed changes to the International Health Regulations are a VERY BAD idea
By Libby Klein | Reclaim Ethical Medicine | December 18, 2022
One might think that of course we need an international body that can help everyone around the world to work together in times of crisis to combat pandemics and other scary global things.
Well that sounds sensible.
One might think that’s what we have the World Health Organisation (WHO) for.
Well that may have been the original idea, but it turns out there’s a few issues with the WHO. How effective is it and what role should it have?
Seems the world has skipped past those questions and gone straight to: let’s give the WHO all the power it needs so that it can do a better job of controlling pandemics.
And let’s not just tweak one or two things here and there. Let’s have a whole new treaty. And let’s call it something really long, like Convention, Agreement or Other International Instrument on Pandemic Prevention, Preparedness and Response and give it a confusing acronym, like CA+.
AND let’s also simultaneously amend the existing International Health Regulations. In ways that overlap. Through forums which are supposedly transparent but which are largely conducted in secret.
There’s a lot going on here. But don’t be fooled by the flowery language or put off by the density and complexity of the documents. Be assured there are some big issues which warrant your attention.
I’ve listed some of the issues in the most recent proposals to amend the International Health Regulations below. Please add your comments and share your insights!
Note: they don’t call a spade a spade and they don’t call a pandemic a pandemic. They call it a “Public Health Emergency of International Concern”. There’s 2 reasons for that:
- they like to use long confusing names and make up impressive acronyms (“PHEIC”)
- they want to have power to do all sorts of things whether or not there’s actually a pandemic and even where they think there might be something happening which one day may result in a pandemic.
The scope of WHO’s powers is to be broadened significantly, from “public health risk” to “all risks with a potential to impact public health” (Article 2)
- Proposed new article 13A recognises the WHO as the authority of public health response during a Public Health Emergency of International Concern. (Note: none of the published submissions make this suggestion. Where did it come from?)
- Article 13A includes an undertaking by all Member States, that they will follow WHO’s “recommendations”. Earlier in the document, “recommendations” are defined to be legally binding.
- Countries are also required to ensure they have regulatory agency with legal authority to implement WHO’s dictates. (Article 4 para 1)
- Countries can contest the legally binding recommendations but the Emergency Committee’s review decision will be final, following which the country must report to the WHO that it has complied. (Article 43 para 6).
- The World Health Assembly can make decisions “on the strengthening of the implementation of these Regulations and improvement of compliance” – obscure language – does this mean the World Health Assembly can decide on sanctions?
- Developed countries must provide funding (Article 44 para 2(f); Annex 1 new para “1 bis”)
- The World Health Assembly will oversee expenditure of funds that Member States are required to provide (Article 44A para 2).
- WHO decides on allocation of health products (Article 13A).
- WHO requires Member States to scale up production (Article 13A para 4), and to supply health products to the WHO or other Member States as directed by the WHO (Article 13 para 5).
- The Director General – a single person – can make temporary, binding “recommendations” on the basis that an event has the potential to become a Public Health Emergency of International Concern, and those recommendations can continue in force beyond the end of a Public Health Emergency of International Concern (Article 15).
- The concept of public health measures which are aimed at achieving “the appropriate level of health protection” is to be removed. The new objective is to attain the “highest achievable level of health protection” without any consideration of proportionality.
- WHO can impose restrictions on international travel – and may not even disclose the information it has relied on in doing so – Article 11.
- Any discussions that countries have amongst themselves must be reported to the WHO (Article 44 para 3).
- Countries must comply with requests by WHO or other countries (Annex 10).
- Governments will be required to enforce compliance with WHO health measures by all actors including NGOs (Article 42).
- Countries must cooperate in censorship of information which the WHO deems to be “false and unreliable (Article 44 para 1(h)).
- WHO will strengthen capacities to counter misinformation and disinformation (Annex 1 para 7).
- The Director General – a single person – unilaterally determines whether there is a (potential or actual) Public Health Emergency of International Concern in a particular location. (Article 12 para 1).
- In deciding whether to declare a Public Health Emergency of International Concern, the Director General does not have to consult with the country concerned or its own Emergency Committee (Article 12 para 2). (And at any rate the Director General chooses the members of the Emergency Committee – Article 48 para 2.)
- The ability of the country to object to the WHO’s declaration of a Public Health Emergency of International Concern has been removed (Article 12 para 3).
- There is to be “secure global digital exchange of health information” (Article 44 para 2(d))
- Centralised data sharing is to be controlled by the WHO (Article 11)
- Governments can agree to share and store your personal health data (Article 45 para 4).
- Regulatory dossiers submitted by manufacturers concerning safety and efficacy, and manufacturing and quality control measures, have to be shared, but countries can only use that information for accelerating the manufacture and supply of those products and technologies. There is no reference to using the data to make their own assessment of safety and efficacy, betraying a blind spot on the part of the drafters: they are so focussed on facilitating the imposition of pharmaceutical products on everybody that they don’t even think to make provisions regarding sharing of information for the purpose of assessing or monitoring safety and efficacy.
- There is a requirement to adopt “legal, administrative and technical measures to diversify and increase production of health products” (Annex 1 para 7) (but not to promote development of early treatment protocols for example).
- Rules of engagement: Malaysia (article 12 para 7) and Africa (article 13A para 7) have proposed new wording which ostensibly puts some guard rails around how the WHO engages with non-State actors, by requiring the WHO to comply with paragraph 73 of the Framework for Engagement of Non-State Actors (FENSA). However, that paragraph in FENSA does not impose any constraints on the WHO. On the contrary, it grants the Director-General complete flexibility: “… the Director-General may exercise flexibility as might be needed in the application of procedures of this framework in those responses, when he/she deems necessary, in accordance with WHO’s responsibilities as health cluster lead.” This complete flexibility is given to a single individual, the Director-General of the WHO.
- In terms of disclosure, the new article 13A does require the WHO to report all its engagements with other stakeholders to the World Health Assembly, and to “provide documents and information relating to such engagements upon request of State Parties.” However, this is far from requiring full disclosure. The WHO could supply summary documents and information, rather than making full disclosure. The WHO has not disclosed who has proposed this new article 13A.
Is Trump Tucker Carlson’s JFK Assassination Source?
By Jacob G. Hornberger | FFF | December 27, 2022
On December 15, 2022, Fox News commentator Tucker Carlson delivered a monologue stating his conviction that the CIA was involved in the assassination of President John F. Kennedy. The presentation was remarkable given that that sort of thing is never found in the mainstream media. As most everyone knows, the mainstream media avoids the Kennedy assassination like the plague.
Carlson’s presentation motivated Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., to issue the following highly dangerous tweet: “The most courageous newscast in 60 years. The CIA’s murder of my uncle was a successful coup d’état from which our democracy has never recovered. @TuckerCarlson.”
Carlson made his presentation in the context of the CIA’s continued steadfast refusal to disclose thousands of its assassination-related records to the American people, along with President Biden’s decision to go along with the CIA’s decision. These are records that the CIA was mandated to release to the American people by the JFK Records Act, which was enacted in 1992 — thirty years ago!
As I have long maintained, there is only one reason for the CIA’s continued secrecy. Those thousands of records contain pieces of incriminating circumstantial evidence that further establish criminal culpability on the part of the CIA in the assassination of President Kennedy. Obviously, the CIA has concluded that it simply cannot afford to permit the American people, especially assassination researchers, to view those records. Better to have the American people believing that the records are incriminating rather than letting them know that they are incriminating.
On November 8, 2022 — approximately one month before the Carlson presentation — Gerald Celente conducted an interview with Judge Andrew Napolitano, a former judicial analyst for Fox News. In that interview, Napolitano recounted a conversation with President Trump, with whom he was friends. In that interview, the pertinent part of which you can view here, Napolitano stated:
I once had a conversation … with President Trump when he was in the White House. He used to call me all the time. And we talked about everything under the sun. I said, “Are you going to release those documents or not?” And he said to me, “If you saw what I saw, you wouldn’t release them.”
In his presentation, Carlson stated the following:
In 1992, Congress passed the President John F. Kennedy Assassination Records Collection Act. That act mandated full disclosure of all documents by 2017, 54 years after JFK was killed. The last administration promised to comply fully with that law. But under intense pressure from CIA Director Mike Pompeo, withheld, in the end, thousands of pages of CIA documents.
Today, this afternoon, the Biden administration did exactly the same thing. That would be thousands of pages of documents after nearly 60 years, after the death of every single person involved. But we still can’t see them. Clearly, it’s not to protect any person. They’re all dead. It’s to protect an institution. But why?
Well, today we decided to find out. We spoke to someone who had access to these still hidden CIA documents, a person who was deeply familiar with what they contained. We asked this person directly, “Did the CIA have a hand in the murder of John F. Kennedy, an American President?” And here’s the reply we received verbatim. Quote, “The answer is yes. I believe they were involved. It’s a whole different country from what we thought it was. It’s all fake.” (Emphasis added.)
Is Trump Carlson’s source? It would make sense that he is. After all, just a little more than a month ago, Trump told Napolitano that he had seen the CIA’s still-secret records. He also implied to Napolitano that the still-secret records contain explosive information of an incriminating nature. What else could he have meant when he said, “If you saw what I saw, you wouldn’t release them”?
It also stands to reason that Carlson would have known about the Napolitano interview, given Napolitano’s longtime relationship with Fox News. It also stands to reason that Carlson would have reached out to Trump and that Trump would have talked to him, given Trump’s longtime close relationship with Fox News.
But whether Trump is Carlson’s source or not, the obvious question arises: Why didn’t Trump order the release of those long-secret records of the CIA? Why did he, like Biden, participate in the CIA’s assassination cover-up by authorizing the CIA to continue keeping its half-century-old records secret? Indeed, why doesn’t Trump, a recently announced candidate for president, go public right now with what he saw in those records?
One possibility is that the CIA “Hoovered” Trump into continuing to keep the CIA’s decades-old assassination-related records secret. By “Hoovered” I am referring to J. Edgar Hoover, who was a serial blackmailer when he was serving as FBI director. Hoover would acquire personal information about people with the aim of blackmailing them into bending them to his will. If they complied, he would keep the information secret. If they refused to comply with Hoover’s will, he would release the information through trusted assets in the mainstream press.
My hunch is that that is what happened with Trump. After all, when the deadline for release was coming due, Trump publicly announced that he intended to order the release of the CIA’s assassination-related records. Then, just before the deadline came due, however, the CIA somehow prevailed on Trump to suddenly change his mind and instead to grant the CIA’s demand to extend the time for secrecy.
In the final analysis though, the CIA’s steadfast refusal to disclose those thousands of assassination-related records is, largely, irrelevant. As I have maintained over the years, once it was established beyond a reasonable doubt that the national-security establishment conducted a fraudulent autopsy on Kennedy’s body, the gig was up. That’s because there is no innocent explanation for a fraudulent autopsy. None! No one has ever come up with an innocent explanation for the fraudulent autopsy, and no one ever will. A fraudulent autopsy necessarily means criminal culpability in the assassination itself. See my article “Why the JFK Assassination Should Matter to Everyone.” Also see my books The Kennedy Autopsy, The Kennedy Autopsy 2, Regime Change: The JFK Assassination, and, most recently, An Encounter with Evil: The Abraham Zapruder Story,
The CIA’s continued steadfast refusal to release the thousands of remaining assassination-related records tends to confirm what Trump told Napolitano. But those records would simply add additional evidence to what the fraudulent autopsy has already established: that the November 22, 1963, assassination was a regime-change operation intended to protect “national security” from a president who was determined to lead America in a direction different from the direction that the Pentagon and the CIA were determined to lead America.
NOTE: Credit is given to Charles Burris, who first raised the possibility that Trump is Carlson’s source in the following article at LewRockwell.com: “Will Tucker Carlson Reveal The High Level Source Which Confirmed That The Deep State Murdered JFK In A Regime Change Coup d’état?
Every social media company censoring for government – Elon Musk
RT | December 27, 2022
All social media platforms work with the US government to censor content, Twitter CEO Elon Musk claimed on Tuesday. Documents released by Musk following his purchase of Twitter showed that the platform colluded with the FBI, CIA, Pentagon and other government agencies to suppress information on elections, Ukraine, and Covid-19.
“*Every* social media company is engaged in heavy censorship, with significant involvement of and, at times, explicit direction of the government,” Musk tweeted, adding that “Google frequently makes links disappear, for example.”
Musk was referring to internal Twitter communications published by journalist Matt Taibbi, which suggested that the platform’s senior executives held regular meetings with members of the FBI and CIA, during which the agencies gave them lists of “hundreds of problem accounts” to suspend in the runup to the 2020 election.
In addition to Twitter, the government was in contact “with virtually every major tech firm,” Taibbi claimed. “These included Facebook, Microsoft, Verizon, Reddit, even Pinterest.” CIA agents “nearly always” sat in on meetings of these firms with the FBI’s Foreign Influence Task Force, Taibbi claimed, explaining that although this task force was convened to fight alleged election interference by foreign states, it made “mountains of domestic moderation requests.”
A lawsuit filed earlier this year by the attorneys general of Missouri and Louisiana alleges that officials from no fewer than 12 government agencies met weekly with representatives of Twitter, Facebook, and other Big Tech firms in 2020 to decide which narratives and users to censor, with topics ranging from alleged election interference to Covid-19.
A self-described “free speech absolutist,” Musk purchased Twitter for $44 billion in October. He has since released batches of documents shedding light on the platform’s previously opaque censorship policies. Published by several independent journalists, these document dumps have shown how Twitter suppressed information damaging to Joe Biden’s election campaign, colluded with the FBI to remove content the agency wanted hidden, assisted the US military’s online influence campaigns, and censored “anti-Ukraine narratives” on behalf of multiple US intelligence agencies.
The FBI said last week that correspondence between its agents and Twitter staff “show nothing more than examples of our tradition [of] longstanding and ongoing federal government and private sector engagements.”
The White House has refused to answer allegations that the FBI directed Twitter to censor information damaging to Joe Biden’s 2020 campaign.
FBI COINTELPRO Is Back, And Worse Than Ever
By Jim Bovard | The Libertarian Institute | December 27, 2022
Elon Musk has opened the floodgates to expose the FBI’s latest war on Americans’ freedom of speech. The FBI massively intervened to pressure Twitter to suppress accounts and tweets from individuals the FBI disapproved of, including parody accounts. The FBI and other federal agencies also browbeat Facebook, Instagram, and many other social media companies.
Thus far, most of the American corporate media has ignored or downplayed the story, known as the Twitter Files. Since many of the individuals who the FBI got squelched were pro-Trump, the violation of their rights is a non-issue (or a cause for quiet celebration). At this point, it is difficult to know whether the scant reaction to the Twitter Files is the result of political bias, collective amnesia, or simply a total ignorance of American history.
The history of the FBI provides the best guide to the abuses that may be now occurring. From 1956 to 1971, the FBI carried out “a secret war against those citizens it considers threats to the established order,” a 1976 Senate report noted. The FBI’s Operation COINTELPRO involved thousands of covert operations to incite street warfare between violent groups, to get people fired, to portray innocent people as government informants, to destroy activists’ marriages, and to cripple or destroy left-wing, black, communist, white racist, and anti-war organizations. The FBI let no corner of American life escape its vigilance; it even worked to expose and discredit “communists who are secretly operating in legitimate organizations and employments, such as the Young Men’s Christian Association and Boy Scouts.”
While many people are aware of how the FBI hounded Martin Luther King Jr. and pressured him to commit suicide, that was not even the tip of the iceberg of the FBI’s racial persecution. Almost any black organization could be targeted for illegal wiretaps. One black leader was monitored largely because he had “recommended the possession of firearms by members for their self-protection.” At that time, some southern police departments and sheriffs were notorious for attacking blacks who stood up for their civil rights.
The FBI office in San Diego instigated violence between the local Black Panthers and a rival black organization, US (United Slaves Inc.). Agents sent forged letters making accusations and threats to the groups purportedly from their rivals, along with crude cartoons and drawings meant to enrage the recipients. Three Black Panthers and one member of the US were killed during the time the FBI was fanning the flames. A few days after shootings in which two Panthers were wounded and one was killed, and in which the US headquarters was bombed, the FBI office reported to headquarters: “Efforts are being made to determine how this situation can be capitalized upon for the benefit of the Counterintelligence Program.” The FBI office bragged shortly thereafter: “Shootings, beatings, and a high degree of unrest continues to prevail in the ghetto area of southeast San Diego… it is felt that a substantial amount of the unrest is directly attributable to this [FBI] program.”
The FBI set up a Ghetto Informant Program that continued after COINTELPRO and that had 7,402 informants, including proprietors of candy stores and barbershops, as of September 1972. The informants served as “listening posts” “to identify extremists passing through or locating in the ghetto area, to identify purveyors of extremist literature,” and to keep an eye on “Afro-American type bookstores” (including obtaining the names of the bookstore’s “clientele”). The informants’ reports were stockpiled in the FBI’s Racial Intelligence Unit. The FBI also created a national “Rabble Rouser” Index, a “major intelligence program… to identify ‘demagogues.’”
The FBI targeted the women’s liberation movement, resulting in “intensive reporting on the identities and opinions of women who attended” women’s lib meetings. One FBI informant reported to headquarters of a meeting in New York: “Each woman at this meeting stated why she had come to the meeting and how she felt oppressed, sexually or otherwise… They are mostly against marriage, children, and other states of oppression caused by men.” Women’s lib informants were instructed to “go to meetings, write up reports… to try to identify the background of every person there… [and] who they were sleeping with.” The Senate report noted that “the intensive FBI investigation of the Women’s Liberation Movement was predicated on the theory that the activities of women in that Movement might lead to demonstrations and violence.”
The FBI took a shotgun approach toward protesters partly because of its “belief that dissident speech and association should be prevented because they were incipient steps toward the possible ultimate commission of an act which might be criminal.” Some FBI agents may have viewed dissident speech or protests as a “gateway drug” to blowing up the Washington Monument. The Senate report noted that the clearest FBI COINTELPRO constitutional violations consisted of “targeting speakers, teachers, writers or publications, and meetings or peaceful demonstrations… The cases include attempts (sometimes successful) to get university and high school teachers fired… to prevent the distribution of books, newspapers, or periodicals; to disrupt peaceful demonstrations, including… most of the large antiwar marches.”
The FBI especially loathed any opposition to the Vietnam War. The bureau ordered field offices in 1968 to gather information illustrating the “scurrilous and depraved nature of many of the characters, activities, habits, and living conditions representative of New Left adherents.” FBI agents were told: “Every avenue of possible embarrassment must be vigorously and enthusiastically explored. It cannot be expected that information of this type will be easily obtained, and an imaginative approach by your personnel is imperative to its success.” One FBI internal newsletter encouraged agents to conduct more interviews with antiwar activists “for plenty of reasons, chief of which are it will enhance the paranoia endemic in these circles and will further serve to get the point across that there is an FBI agent behind every mailbox.”
An FBI memo warned that “the anarchist activities of a few can paralyze institutions of learning, [conscription] induction centers, cripple traffic, and tie the arms of law enforcement officials, all to the detriment of our society.” The FBI declared: “The New Left has on many occasions viciously and scurrilously attacked the Director [J. Edgar Hoover] and the Bureau in an attempt to hamper our investigation of it and to drive us off the college campuses.”
Other federal agencies also trampled citizens’ privacy, rights, and lives during the late 1960s and early 1970s. The IRS used COINTELPRO leads to launch audits against thousands of suspected political enemies of the Nixon administration. The U.S. Army set up its own surveillance program, creating files on 100,000 Americans and targeting domestic organizations such as the Young Americans for Freedom, the John Birch Society, and the Anti-Defamation League of B’Nai B’rith. Nixon aide Tom Charles Huston, testifying to Congress in 1973, lamented the FBI’s tendency “to move from the kid with a bomb to the kid with a picket sign, and from the kid with the picket sign to the kid with the bumper sticker of the opposing candidate. And you just keep going down the line.”
Throughout the COINTELPRO era, presidents, congressmen, and other high-ranking federal officials assured Americans that the federal government was obeying the law and upholding the Constitution. It took a burglary of an FBI office in Media, Pennsylvania to break the biggest scandal in the history of federal law enforcement. After hundreds of pages of confidential records were commandeered, the “Citizen’s Commission to Investigate the FBI” began passing out the incriminating documents to the media. The shocking material sparked congressional and news investigations that eventually (temporarily) shattered the FBI’s legendary ability to control its own image.
The Senate report on COINTELPRO concluded: “Only a combination of legislative prohibition and Departmental control can guarantee that COINTELPRO will not happen again.” But the Ford administration derailed legislative reforms by promising an administrative fix. In 2002, Attorney General John Ashcroft threw out many of those reforms as part of “a concerted effort to free the [FBI] field agents… from the bureaucratic, organizational, and operational restrictions” imposed after their prior abuses. Ashcroft declared: “In its 94-year history, the Federal Bureau of Investigation has been… the tireless protector of civil rights and civil liberties for all Americans.” The same tripe has been uttered by many Democrats and liberals in the last five years.
The FBI’s latest war on wrong-thinking Americans took off after the FBI helped fabricate the narrative that the Russian government conspired with the Trump presidential campaign to interfere in the 2016 U.S. presidential election. The 1976 Senate report noted that COINTELPRO’s origins “are rooted in the Bureau’s jurisdiction to investigate hostile foreign intelligence activities on American soil” and that the FBI used the “techniques of wartime.” William Sullivan, former assistant to the FBI director, declared, “No holds were barred…We have used [these techniques] against Soviet agents… [The same methods were] brought home against any organization against which we were targeted. We did not differentiate.” Senate investigators warned in 1976 that the “FBI intelligence system developed to a point where no one inside or outside the bureau was willing or able to tell the difference between legitimate national security or law enforcement information and purely political intelligence.”
In our time, FBI officials pressured Twitter to suppress Americans based on false claims of fighting foreign influence. The same pretext was used by the Department of Homeland Security to massively suppress Americans’ criticism of election procedures (especially mail-in ballots) for the 2020 presidential election.
One of the biggest “misses” in the media coverage of the Twitter Files is the stunning failure of Congress to expose the abuses that Elon Musk is revealing. A few months ago, FBI director Christopher Wray, facing vigorous questioning from Sen. Charles Grassley (R-IA) and others, walked out of a Senate oversight hearing claiming that he had an urgent appointment he must keep. It was later revealed that Wray’s “appointment” was hopping on an FBI jet for a family vacation. Congress punished the FBI with a $570 million budget increase, plowing $11.3 billion into its coffers in the coming year.
Is Congress terrified of the FBI nowadays like congressmen were in the COINTELPRO era? In 1971, House Majority Leader Hale Boggs revealed the shameless kowtowing on Capitol Hill: “Our very fear of speaking out [against the FBI]… has watered the roots and hastened the growth of a vine of tyranny… Our society cannot survive a planned and programmed fear of its own government bureaus and agencies.” Boggs vindicated a 1924 American Civil Liberties Union warning that the FBI had become “a secret police system of a political character.” (The Louisiana congressman died a year later in an apparent plane crash.)
But old quotes provide no protection against new depredations. The Twitter Files prove that G-men have been off the leash for years. We still have no idea how far the FBI and other federal agencies have gone to suppress our freedom of speech. Until federal abuses are fully exposed, Americans would be damn fools to believe their constitutional rights are safe.
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. He is a member of the USA Today Board of Contributors and has also written for the New York Times, Wall Street Journal, Playboy, Washington Post, and other publications. His articles have been publicly denounced by the chief of the FBI, the Postmaster General, the Secretary of HUD, and the heads of the DEA, FEMA, and EEOC and numerous federal agencies.
Twitter Files describe Covid censorship campaign
RT | December 26, 2022
The latest batch of Twitter documents released by CEO Elon Musk show how the platform censored posts about Covid-19 that didn’t align with the White House’s message. Qualified doctors and epidemiologists were suppressed and banned at the direct request of the Biden administration, the documents suggest.
Both the Trump and Biden administrations pushed Twitter to moderate coronavirus-related content, journalist David Zweig reported on Monday, citing the company’s internal communications. While Trump’s team wanted to tamp down rumors of grocery-store shortages to combat panic-buying, Biden switched focus to “misinformation” about vaccines once his team took over in January 2021.
According to files seen by Zweig, Biden’s staff directly pressured Twitter to ban “high-profile anti-vaxxer accounts,” including that of former New York Times reporter Alex Berenson, who has persistently claimed that the risks of vaccination outweigh the benefits. Twitter complied and suspended Berenson in July 2021, but Twitter employees said afterwards that “the Biden team” was still “not satisfied” with the platform’s censorship efforts, and angrily demanded that it “de-platform several accounts.”
Twitter placed a warning label on the account of a Harvard epidemiologist who argued that “those with prior natural infection” do not need to be vaccinated, and flagged as “misleading” tweets that cited the Biden administration’s own data on Covid death rates. It used a combination of AI “bots” and contracted moderators in foreign countries to make these decisions.
A physician was flagged for sharing the results of a peer-reviewed study linking vaccination with cardiac arrests in young people, while another doctor was permanently suspended for referring to a published study suggesting that vaccination temporarily impairs male patients’ sperm count.
“Dissident yet legitimate content was labeled as misinformation, and the accounts of doctors and others were suspended both for tweeting opinions and demonstrably true information,” Zweig tweeted.
When former President Donald Trump urged his followers not to “be afraid of Covid” following his own recovery from the illness, Twitter’s senior moderators debated taking action against the tweet, before concluding that Trump’s “optimistic” assessment did not count as misinformation.
Since purchasing Twitter for $44 billion in October, Musk has released batches of documents shedding light on the platform’s previously opaque censorship policies. Published by several independent journalists, these document dumps have shown how Twitter suppressed information damaging to Joe Biden’s election campaign, colluded with the FBI to remove content the agency wanted hidden, assisted the US military’s online influence campaigns, and censored “anti-Ukraine narratives” on behalf of multiple US intelligence agencies.
Twitter Files – The important question
The decline of the MSM
The Naked Emperor’s Newsletter | December 26, 2022
When Elon Musk bought Twitter for $44 billion in October, he promised to scrutinise the previous administration. Whether this was because he genuinely wanted to emancipate the company or because he was annoyed at being forced to pay the price he paid (after being sued), who knows but it provides for some interesting reading.
Musk enlisted the help of several journalists, including Matt Taibbi, Bari Weiss, Michael Shellenberger and Lee Fang. Apparently, his one request was that any information found must first be revealed on Twitter.
On 2 December, the first instalment of the Twitter files was released with the most recent, ninth part, published on Christmas Eve.
So, what have we learnt so far?
Benjamin Carlson provides a good summary:
- History changed because of this:
- Hunter Biden’s alleged corruption censored;
- Covid 19 lockdown debate stifled;
- Trump silenced.
You may agree with each decision. But there is no denying that halting information flow and free debate had real consequences.
- Many things called conspiracy theories were true:
- FBI was working with Twitter and paid them million of dollars;
- Blacklists and shadow bans were real;
- US intel lobbied to censor accounts;
- Covid-19 conversation was heavily manipulated;
- Twitter rules changed and enforced by whim.
- Censorship is being cloaked in the language of safety:
- ‘Safety, harm, violence’ redefined to apply to ideas;
- Opinions and information deemed ‘unsafe’ subject to silencing;
- Jokes, memes, questions about the origin of Covid off limits.
- The government is policing opinion:
- FBI has 80 staff monitoring speech;
- Small accounts on left and right flagged;
- FBI held frequent meetings with Twitter;
- Facebook, Youtube and Instagram = similar?
- Private censors & police control what you say and to whom.
- Social media executives lie freely:
- Twitter execs repeatedly and publicly denied shadow bans;
- In reality, bans were in place as “visibility filtering”;
- Ultimately, no accountability to public.
- Free speech is controlled by a small group:
- Biggest decisions in Twitter Files made by 3-4 individuals;
- Despite misgivings and doubts, once made, decisions stuck;
- Now it’s Musk.
One difference: his embrace of public polls to set policy.
- The slippery slope is real:
- Staff rebellion led to Trump ban;
- Staff called for more covid-19 censorship;
- 2021-22 saw increase of bans and ‘one-offs’.
This is how you get Billy Baldwin in the crosshairs.
Once you silence a president, who has a right to speak?
This is all massive stuff but nothing most of us didn’t already know or suspect. And the Fauci files that Musk keeps saying he will release haven’t been published yet.
But the important question is, why have the Main Stream Media barely reported on it? If we had learnt that the secret services in another country had meddled with elections in their country, it would be everywhere. But happens in the West and nothing.
I keep getting adverts from the BBC popping up telling me to trust them.
So what have the BBC written about the Twitter files to earn my trust? It seems they have only written a brief article, two weeks ago, merely touching on the issues mentioned above. The article titled “Twitter Files spark debate about ‘blacklisting’” says we are missing the context as to whether other accounts have faced similar treatment. Furthermore, they question whether the restricted accounts were in breach of rules for example spreading false claims about Covid.
The BBC continues, “restricting accounts can be a useful tool if they are spreading harmful material.” and “there have been various reports suggesting marginalised groups including trans and plus size people were more likely to have their accounts restricted.”
So, unfortunately, I can’t trust you BBC, you haven’t written one sentence on the implications such meddling could have had on the US elections. If there had been an equivalent Russian Twitter Files, you would have been on the case every single day.
Marianna Spring, the BBC’s infamous disinformation correspondent analyses the situation at the end of the article. Unsurprisingly, but predictably, her main point is that how you interpret the “Twitter Files” depends on how you think misinformation should be dealt with. She also says that those caught up in the revelations have received backlash online.
Again, nothing about how the misinformation and censorship may have changed the outcome of the US election.
But that’s about it from the BBC.
Next on to the Guardian. They have one article called “I read Elon Musk’s ‘Twitter Files’ so you don’t have to” which pretty much sums up their position. The article describes the censorship as “individual examples of rightwing users being on the end of light-touch moderation” and Jay Bhattacharya as a “Covid sceptic”.
And again, other than this, the Guardian haven’t reported on the issue since.
The more right wing leaning newspapers have a few more stories. The Times and Telegraph reported on how Twitter aided the Pentagon, how Donald Trump was banned and a Republican claim that the Biden family is the most corrupt in history.
The Daily Mail is probably the only UK paper to have covered this story in detail.
So why, after all of the revelations from the “Twitter Files” is much of the Main Stream Media so happy to ignore what had been going on? It’s a rhetorical question. I know the answer and you know the answer but it’s one which erodes any remaining trust we might have in MSM reporting.
Most people, especially older people, trust the BBC, read the odd headline and watch the evening news. So, when the real scandals revealed in the “Twitter Files” are never reported on, the general population don’t have a clue. Even with well-read people, I have tried to discuss the topic but they haven’t even heard of the “Twitter Files”, let alone what has been revealed.
And this is before the Fauci files are released, if they ever are. But if they are, then don’t for one second think that the general public will hear about them or change their position on anything to do with Covid. It just won’t happen unfortunately. If the MSM do report on the Fauci files, it will be brief and they will conclude that lockdowns were necessary to prevent deaths and vaccines are a miracle from God.
The FBI won’t name other social media companies it pays
By Cindy Harper | Reclaim The Net | December 25, 2022
The Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) has refused to indicate the exact social networks it has paid. This follows recent revelations verifying that the bureau paid Twitter at least $3.5 million.
Representatives for the FBI already spoke to Fox News and said that the substantial Twitter payment was a “reimbursement” for expenses and costs of its requests. The representatives indicated that the payment was to compensate the social media platform for acting in accordance with legal “requests.”
The FBI stated that the group had compensated social media platforms beyond Twitter as well. The news network requested the names of other companies that the FBI had paid for these purposes. The federal agency, however, was not willing to provide further information regarding the matter. The representatives did say, though, that the FBI has to offer reimbursement for any and all reasonable expenses that tie in with the acquisition of information that is essential for legal processes.
“While we are not able to speak to specific payments, the government is required to provide reimbursement for reasonable expenses directly related to searching for, assembling, reproducing, or otherwise providing the information responsive to the legal process. This requirement is set by federal law and the courts are the final arbiters of what is reasonable compensation,” the FBI officials said.
Christmas in Palestine: Then and Now
By James J. Zogby | The Jordan Times | December 28, 2021
The Christmas story as it is told in the West contains timeless elements that have shaped our culture in significant ways. As we tell it, year in and year out, the story conveys to those who listen powerful themes evoking deep feelings.
It is, at its core, the tale of a helpless child born as an outcast whose role became transformative in human history.
Unrecognised at first, the importance of this birth was initially only understood by the lowly of the earth — “the shepherds of the field”. Later “kings from the East” came to pay homage bringing gifts. Their appearance raised the ire of local rulers forcing the baby’s parents to flee in order to save the life of their newborn child.
I want to take a moment to reflect on this story, seeing contemporary realities through its prism.
Two thousand years ago, Palestine was subject to a harsh occupation, much as it is today. In some ways, though, the conditions back then allowed the residents of occupied Palestine greater mobility than the current inhabitants of that land.
As we are told in the bible story, Joseph had to take his expectant wife from Nazareth, where they were living, to Bethlehem, their ancestral village, in order to fulfill a requirement imposed by the authorities to register as part of a nationwide census. Today, of course, all of that would be impossible.
In the first place, no Palestinian originally from Bethlehem could ever have moved to Nazareth. The occupation and closure of the West Bank makes that sort of movement impossible. Furthermore, Israeli law prohibits an Arab from Nazareth from marrying a Bethlehemite and bringing their spouse across the Green Line to live with them in Israel.
Additionally, while thousands of Palestinians in Bethlehem, both Muslim and Christian, can see Jerusalem from their homes, they cannot go to the Holy City to pray. And Arab Christians from Jerusalem, likewise, cannot easily go the Christmas services in Bethlehem to pray alongside their co-religionists at the seasonal event.
Bethlehem of old was overcrowded and under siege. Today, as well, the city itself is being strangled, hemmed in by settlements that have confiscated the town’s ancestral lands to make way for a 30-foot barrier wall and massive Jewish-only housing colonies that cut the Arab residents off from nearby Jerusalem. The constriction of growth and the lack of economic opportunity have forced Bethlehemites to flee in search of jobs and freedom, with tens of thousands of them and their descendants now living in the US and the Americas. They can return to visit Bethlehem with difficulty but are not permitted by the occupation authorities to take up permanent residency in the town of their origins.
While the kings of old, we are told, were able to travel from afar bearing gifts to honour the newborn child, one can only imagine the difficulties they would encounter today dealing with Israeli soldiers at the Allenby Bridge. Having personally endured their interrogations, I can hear the kings answering hours of questions, such as “Where are you from?” “Who are your parents, grandparents?” “Why are you here?” Who are you visiting?” “What are these gifts for?” The questioning is reminiscent of Herod’s interrogation of the biblical visitors. In today’s Israel/Palestine, it is doubtful whether those hapless “kings from the East” would have gained entry.
That Joseph, Mary and Jesus were able to flee to Egypt to escape Herod’s vengeful wrath was possible back then. Today, that option is unlikely. The barrier/wall that encapsulates the West Bank, the hundreds of checkpoints, and the closure of Gaza would make such a life-saving flight impossible.
Finally, as I reflect on the birth of Jesus, I cannot help but think of the almost 400 babies who will be born, this very day, to Palestinian parents in the West Bank and Gaza. I think as well of the number of those who will perish at birth because of inadequate medical services. (Some babies have been put at fatal risk at checkpoints, because Israeli soldiers would not permit their delivering mothers to pass.) And I think of Mary, 2000 years ago, and am grateful that, despite all she endured, there were no checkpoints blocking her way to Bethlehem.
Our traditions tell us that Mary’s joy at the birth of her son was tempered by foresight. She knew her child would grow and endure great suffering. Likewise, the joy that Palestinian parents experience when greeting new life these days must, no doubt, be accompanied by similar concerns. Not only must they question how they will provide for their new child, but they must face down their fears of bringing up a son or daughter under occupation, with its dangers and hardships. From the violence, pressures and humiliation encountered daily by Palestinians in the West Bank at the hands of the Israeli military and settlers, to the grinding poverty and despair facing those trapped in Gaza, life under hostile foreign rule can drain joy out of even the most blessed events.
There is a traditional Christmas carol that asks the question “What child is this?” — the answer, of course, being “Jesus, the son of Mary”. But given the universal message conveyed by the Christmas story we also understand that the child is for us, a reminder of our responsibility to care for the helpless and the unrecognised. And so, when we think of the vulnerable children born today not only in Palestine, but those born anywhere where life is at risk (including here at home), we are not to ask: “What child is this?” — because we know that they are ours — to acknowledge and protect, like the shepherds and kings, enabling all of these children to grow, receive health care, and be educated so that they can grow and help change our world. Because all these children are ours, we have a responsibility to protect and care for them.
James J. Zogby is a president of Arab American Institute.
Copyright © James J. Zogby, The Jordan Times, 2022
Merry Christmas
eugyppius: a plague chronicle | December 24, 2022
In 2020 it was the lockdowners who destroyed Christmas, and in 2021 it was the vaccinators. All of it was for nothing. Sweden, which never locked down, has lower cumulative excess mortality than Germany, which locked down longer and harder than almost any other country in Europe. Nor did anyone even try to pretend that excluding the unvaccinated from public life would reduce the incidence of infection or death. The vaccinators claim that their elixirs reduce the rate of severe outcome from SARS-2 infection, but mass vaccination has coincided with increases in all-cause mortality and higher rates of transmission everywhere that it has been tried.
In the end, the lockdowners and the vaccinators lost. Alas, it wasn’t our alleged rights or democratic principles that saved us, but only Omicron, which crashed the pandemicists’ mythology faster than the Federal Republic of Germany could get their coercive proposals before the Bundestag. Today, the German Corona regime is all but dead, and even China has sworn off Zero Covid.
While I like to think that we may have played a small part in defeating the hysterical clowns and their virus circus, their greatest opponent was always reality. They stirred up enough panic and utopian hope to impede ordinary social life for the better part of two years, but they were too wrong about too many things to survive as any kind of durable political movement.
While they’ve done incalculable damage and changed many aspects of our lives and our societies forever, it feels really, really great to have Christmas back again.
Merry Christmas to all of my readers.
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Secret document reveals plans for civil war in Lebanon, Israeli false flags, and invasion
By Randi Nord | Geopolitics Alert | April 5, 2019
Beirut – During his visit with US Secretary of State, Mike Pompeo, Lebanese President Michael Aoun reportedly received a US-Israeli document detailing plans for creating a civil war in Lebanon with covert false flag operations and possible Israeli invasion.
Although the source of the document is Israeli and created in partnership with Washington, no one knows who presented it to Aoun. The Lebanese TV station, Al-Jadeed, initially reported the document on Lebanese TV and a video on its website. Geopolitics Alert translated the report for this article. … continue
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