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Greenwald: Ex-Spies Run Censorship Operations for Tech Giants

By Brenda Baletti, Ph.D. | The Defender | July 14, 2023

Former security state operatives occupy the highest positions at Big Tech internet platforms, and are responsible for censoring political content and limiting public debate, Glenn Greenwald reported on Tuesday.

Americans have been aware of security state efforts to control media narratives since the 1970s, when the Senate’s Church Committee exposed the CIA’s Operation Mockingbird, Greenwald told listeners of his podcast, “System Update.”

Under that program, CIA agents covertly infiltrated and influenced the nation’s largest news organizations.

Project Mockingbird’s exposure greatly embarrassed the media and the government,  as the CIA is forbidden from targeting the American public, Greenwald said.

Over the past decade, a series of whistleblowers revealed the U.S. security state has again amped up its covert targeting of American citizens, particularly since the start of the post-9/11 War on Terror.

News that intelligence agencies spied on Americans or infiltrated the news media was considered scandalous just over a decade ago.

But today, things have changed, Greenwald said. In fact, it has become common for top news outlets to openly hire former U.S. security state agents to report and comment on the news.

And in the last few months, the Twitter files and the latest Missouri v. Biden decision made clear how aggressive the censorship regime has become.

The U.S. government, in part, dictates what content social media platforms ought to allow on their sites, Greenwald said. But, he added:

“There’s another element, another layer to it, which is they’ve infiltrated these Big Tech companies — these ex-CIA agents have — exactly like they’ve infiltrated corporate news outlets. They’re all over these censorship regimes.”

Greenwald said top positions at the tech firms are now held by people coming directly from intelligence agencies.

For example James Baker, who the Twitter Files revealed was involved in most censorship decisions prior to Elon Musk’s takeover of the platform, worked as general counsel for the FBI before he became deputy counsel for Twitter.

“So the FBI sent its top lawyer to go work in the part of Twitter that censored political content,” Greenwald said. “Do you understand? That’s the FBI controlling our domestic political discourse and the limits of it.”

MintPress News profiled a number of former CIA agents who now manage and develop misinformation policies for Facebook in a July 2022 article that Greenwald shared.

According to the article, the problem isn’t that these people are incompetent. “The problem is that having so many former CIA employees running the world’s most important information and news platforms is only one small step removed from the agency itself deciding what you see and what you do not see online — and all with essentially no public oversight.”

Greenwald said this allows the intelligence agencies to maintain significant influence over news and information flows, while maintaining “some veneer of plausible deniability.”

The U.S. government doesn’t need to tell the platforms what to do because the people making the decisions rose in the ranks of the National Security State first — “meaning their outlooks match those of Washington’s,” Greenwald said, quoting MintPress News.

Greenwald said this is evidence of a multi-pronged effort, where on the one side, former security state operatives propagandize the American people on corporate media and on the other side, they control what can be said on the largest Big Tech platforms.

As a result, he said, the entire range of dissenting views is “simply banned.”

The ‘censorship-industrial complex’

The Twitter account @NameRedacted247 tracks the movement of security state operatives into social media corporations where they work on misinformation and disinformation.

The account provided a thread, which Greenwald’s team confirmed, reporting that as of December 2022, Google employed at least 165 people in high-ranking positions from the intelligence community.

Across the company there were 27 former CIA agents, 52 former FBI agents, 30 people who came from the National Security Agency (NSA), 50 from the U.S. Department of Homeland Security (DHS) and six from the Director of National Intelligence.

Facebook had at least 115 former security state operatives in high-ranking positions — 17 from the CIA, 37 from the FBI, 23 from the NSA and 38 from DHS.

Google’s “trust and safety team,” which manages what content is allowed on the platform, is managed by three former CIA agents who control misinformation and hate speech.

One of them, Nick Rossman, referred to “anti-vaxxers” on Twitter as “Nazis” and “Confederates,” Greenwald said, asking:

“Do you think these people are objective arbiters of misinformation? Or do you think they’re using their censorship power inside Big Tech for this in the same way that people inside corporate media are using it to advance the propaganda games of these agencies against their own citizens?”

Greenwald presented a series of online profiles of people who worked in intelligence for years or decades before recently moving into their new roles in Big Tech.

Matt Taibbi reported that the companies began hiring former intelligence agents after the 2016 election when the FBI established its social media-focused task force, The Foreign Influence Task Force or FITF.

Since then, a massive “censorship-industrial complex” has grown up, Greenwald said, that includes the U.S. state, philanthropic foundations, “fact-checking” organizations, Big Tech, universities, think tanks, nonprofits and private contractors.

The ‘hallmark of totalitarianism’

But the most amazing part of this story, Greewnald said, is the lack of pushback by liberals, who used to be the primary critics of the security state. “Central to left liberal politics was the view that these agencies are nefarious,” he said. But that all changed with the Trump presidency:

“… in 2015, in 2016, the US Security state aligned itself against Donald Trump and devoted itself to sabotaging first the Trump campaign and then the Trump presidency.

“That’s where Russiagate came from. That’s where all of those scams came from, including the lie in 2020 if the Hunter Biden laptop was misinformation.”

And because there are now very few media outlets reporting critically on these agencies, he said, they are at “the peak of their power, more powerful than ever.”

Because of that, he said they are embedded in the biggest corporations that control information and propaganda in the U.S. — corporate media and Big Tech.

Greenwald concluded:

“This is why they’re so obsessed with destroying the few outposts of independent media, the few places they cannot control, because without those, they really do have a fully closed information system.

“And a fully closed information system is the hallmark of totalitarianism. If you can control how people think and prevent them from hearing dissent, you can control all of their actions because their actions are based in what their thoughts are.

“And if you can control their thoughts, you don’t even need to control their actions. And that is the system that is being created.”


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

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

July 14, 2023 Posted by | Civil Liberties, Deception, Full Spectrum Dominance, Science and Pseudo-Science, Timeless or most popular, Video | , , , , , | Leave a comment

Health is being rejiggered into pandemic preparedness: Documents from the EU Commission and US government

Huge expenses and rapid deployment of mRNA vaccines for infections but maybe all other medical conditions

BY MERYL NASS | JULY 13, 2023

Europe and the USA have already bought into the Global Biosecurity Agenda aka Pandemic Preparedness.

Europe issued its report on its Global Health Agenda in March, and it isn’t about health, it is about making health the driver for the WHO/globalist agenda. No surprise I guess. But to see it in print, with lots of pretty pictures, all spelled out: well, I was surprised. Please take a look at it.

But then I stumbled on this 2021 US document, signed by Eric Lander (then the Assistant to the President for Science and Technology) and Jake Sullivan, still the National Security Advisor.

https://www.whitehouse.gov/wp-content/uploads/2021/09/American-Pandemic-Preparedness-Transforming-Our-Capabilities-Final-For-Web.pdf

They equate the US government’s broad pandemic preparedness initiative with the Apollo (mission to the moon) program. Was that an oops? Because didn’t the Apollo mission suck up a ton of money but wind up in a studio being filmed by Stanley Kubrick instead, to fake out us gullible Americans?

Did Lander and Sullivan (or whoever wrote this report) give us a broad hint that the “biological preparedness” they envision will suck up a lot of money but go nowhere?

I don’t know if we went to the moon or not. But watching the astronauts at their press conference on their return to earth, I was convinced they were ashamed of their performance, rather than triumphant. Watch it.

The funding required in this report for pandemic preparedness is just over $65 Billion. To be spent over 7-10 years. But as I showed you 2 days ago, the President’s budget to Congress asks for $20 Billion next fiscal year for biopreparedness. The price has gone up.

By far the largest line item is vaccines: $24.2 billion.

This is a quote:

The development of mRNA vaccine technology and other ‘programmable platforms’3 — thanks to more than a decade of foresighted investment by the public and private sector — have been game- changing. mRNA vaccines shortened the time needed to design and test vaccines to a record-setting 314 days — far less than previous vaccines, which had taken several years. They have also been surprisingly effective against COVID-19.

Another quote from the report to justify “spending billions to save trillions” which is verbatim from the EU report linked above and from certain US documents:

In addition to protecting American lives, the annual investment is strongly justified from an economic standpoint: If major pandemics similar to COVID-19, costing the U.S. roughly $16 trillion, occur at a frequency of every 20 years, the annualized economic impact on the U.S. would be $800 billion per year. Even for somewhat milder pandemics, the annualized cost would likely exceed $500 billion

Then there is this, a vaccine timetable that is identical to the CEPI plan (Gates-Farrar being the main originators of CEPI) to get vaccines to the populace so fast that there is no time to test them in humans. In 130 days they plan to have enough vaccine for every American. Great, huh? No, it is scary.

Now you know what they are planning. We are only in the second stage of a very big battle for our bodily integrity and many other rights and freedoms, not to mention our property. Forewarned is forearmed!

July 14, 2023 Posted by | Deception, Science and Pseudo-Science, Timeless or most popular, Video | , , | Leave a comment

Former FBI Agent: Wray ‘Evasive’ Under Scrutiny Because Bureau Has Become ‘Ministry of Truth’

By Fantine Gardinier – Sputnik – 14.07.2023

FBI Director Christopher Wray was grilled by lawmakers at a Thursday hearing called by the House Judiciary Committee that demanded answers about the bureau’s coordination with social media companies, its alleged abuse of a secret intelligence court, and use of informants during the January 6 insurrection at the US Capitol Building.

FBI Director Christopher Wray has been blasted by US House Judiciary Committee Chairman Rep. Jim Jordan (R-OH) for “weaponization of the government against the American people,” which he said had eroded public confidence in the integrity of the FBI, on Thursday.

Jordan and other GOP lawmakers spent several hours interrogating the federal law enforcement chief about a number of incidents they said proved the FBI was being used as a political bludgeon against conservatives, including the use of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court (FISC) to spy on Donald Trump’s presidential campaign during the 2016 election, a now-withdrawn memo from the FBI’s office in Richmond, Virginia, that suggested spying on Catholic anti-abortion groups over domestic terrorism fears, and news that some people involved in the breaching of the US Capitol by Trump supporters on January 6, 2021, were paid FBI informants who acted as provocateurs.

In response, Wray pointed to the fact that he is a registered Republican Party member, telling lawmakers that “the idea that I’m biased against conservatives seems somewhat insane to me, given my own personal background.”

He also rejected the GOP lawmakers’ assertions that the FBI used agent provocateurs to encourage people to commit crimes on January 6 or that the agency was protecting the Biden family by sitting on potentially incriminating information or suppressing a news story about the contents of Hunter Biden’s abandoned laptop computer. However, he acknowledged the FBI’s failings in properly using the FISC, in line with previous findings by special counsel John Durham and a DoJ Inspector General’s report.

Coleen Rowley, a retired FBI agent and whistleblower over the bureau’s failure to stop the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, said Wray was “evasive” and had to resort to “euphemistic bromides” to defend the FBI’s reputation, because of the demands placed on the bureau by US policies.

Noting that Wray had adopted a “9/11 changed everything” mindset, Rowley pointed out that “it’s one of the few things they don’t lie about: 9/11 did change everything. Between the Vietnam War and the so-called War on Terror, that now has morphed into a war on rival economic nuclear superpowers … has created all of this polarization and power mongering and control of the media through propaganda, which is what we’re talking about with the FBI now serving as liaison – if you want a nice term for it – our liaison telling social media what to censor.”

She noted that in a recent federal court order blocking the Biden administration from much of the coordination over suppressing so-called “disinformation” on social media, the judge noted there are some 80 FBI agents working in that area.

“We talked about all the work on violent crime and the FBI work against child predators, etc. I disagree that those are the priorities. The priority has been supporting the narrative. And you can see this going all the way back to Russiagate with [Peter] Strzok and all the rest, trying to do what they could on election issues, etc., and carrying through to today where 80 FBI agents are in this disinformation component.”

“He tried to say, ‘no no, it’s not about us declaring what is disinformation to the social media, it’s all about foreign influence’. So he’s trying to steer it in that direction, which makes it more difficult for the Republicans to attack. But in fact, I think it’s been acknowledged that this was a truth ministry. And in fact, that’s the Orwell term: Ministry of Truth. And that’s actually in the judge’s injunction, that the FBI is acting as a Ministry of Truth, deciding what is misinformation or not. And, of course, we’re living in an era where government propaganda has been legalized.”

Rowley turned to the subject of Ray Epps, an Arizona man who has filed a lawsuit against Fox News for pushing a story that Epps was “an undercover FBI agent and was responsible for the mob that violently broke into the Capitol and interfered with the peaceful transition of power for the first time in this country’s history,” according to the filing.

In a short video, Epps can be heard telling demonstrators they need to go into the Capitol but will probably be arrested for doing so, after which someone started chanting “Fed, Fed, Fed!”

“Let me just explain a few additional points about this business of ’undercover agents,’” Rowley told Sputnik. “This was a confusing thing, some of the Congress people didn’t understand: when you ask about an undercover agent, that’s a specific meaning. That means an actual FBI special agent who has gone through the special training that they give, behavioral training, to assume a role. It goes through a whole process. So what they really wanted to ask, Ray Epps was not an undercover agent by the FBI definition. What he was, if anything, was an informant, or they call it now a ‘confidential human source’ or something like that – there’s different categories even of confidential human sources.”

However, the former FBI agent pointed out that “when it comes to a protest, the FBI would have been remiss not to have lots of agents being on the ground. So, even if you go back to 2008 in the Twin Cities, when the Republican National Convention occurred, I was in a library room with 20 people talking about [how] there was going to be a march against the RNC and there was going to be a peace picnic, etc. And we were in this little library room: three of the people in the room were FBI or Joint Terrorism Task Force, okay? There were only 20 people listening and two or three of them were law enforcement. One guy was hiding, he thought I might recognize him, so he was hiding behind someone else.”

Rowley noted that the FBI also designates “special events” where they dispatch agents, which even includes non-political events such as golf tournaments.

“So that’s one thing. Then the other thing is the operation of actual FBI informants. And that, of course, has to be cloaked with complete secrecy. So I don’t know if it has to be in some cases, but that’s the rule, that’s the procedure. So of course, Wray was hedging on this. He would not answer.”

“A lot of the entrapments that we saw in the War on Terror, they were issues of an informant or a source egging on a group of people to pretend that they were, you know, bombing something. And that’s the modus operandi here. And so then, of course, the source has to back out. They what they do is they egg it on and then at the end, they don’t show up at the tail end. So for the actual event, that’s a common profile. That’s what in fact, that’s what they’re trying to do. So Ray Epps actually does fit that profile, whether or not he could have been just a normal person out there and, you know, maybe he got cold feet after a while. Or, he does fit the profile. And therefore, if Tucker Carlson said, ‘What’s the explanation?’ You know, really, that’s a good question. What is the truth? And, of course, the FBI won’t tell you the truth about any informants who commit criminal acts,” Rowley explained. “They’re allowed to do that under the cloak of secrecy.”

July 14, 2023 Posted by | Civil Liberties, Deception, Full Spectrum Dominance | , , | Leave a comment

Santa Clara University Students Must Take Covid Vaccines or Withdraw

By Lucia Sinatra | Brownstone Institute | July 11, 2023

College COVID vaccine mandates remain some of the most coercive mandates ever declared. While most colleges have now rescinded their mandates, some colleges refuse to let go, and Santa Clara University in California is one of the most oppressive.

In late April 2021, after most incoming freshmen had committed, SCU announced that all students were required to get COVID vaccines for fall enrollment or after full approval, whichever was later.

Then by mid-summer, SCU announced that students would be required to receive the vaccine even if it remained authorized only for emergency (EUA) and despite the fact that the CA Health and Safety Code codifies the Nuremberg Code. Section 24172 states

“(t)here is, and will continue to be, a growing need for protection for citizens of the state from unauthorized, needless, hazardous, or negligently performed medical experiments on human beings. It is, therefore, the intent of the Legislature, in the enacting of this chapter, to provide minimum statutory protection for the citizens of this state with regard to human experimentation and to provide penalties for those who violate such provisions.”

SCU (and many other CA colleges and universities) are in direct violation of this Code for removing informed consent by mandating EUA medical treatments.

Despite lack of efficacy or adequate safety data for this overwhelmingly healthy young adult population, in December 2021, SCU mandated the booster, midway through the academic year when students would have no choice but to comply or leave tens of thousands of dollars behind. SCU’s three-dose requirement remained through the 2022-23 school year.

In complete disregard for the end of the emergency declarations, in early April 2023, when most universities like nearby Stanford were announcing the end of their COVID vaccine mandates, SCU updated its requirement for incoming freshmen.

On May 8th, one week after the fall 2023 enrollment deadline, SCU quietly updated its COVID vaccine policy to require one bivalent dose for incoming freshmen (but not returning students) regardless of how many COVD vaccines they had previously taken. SCU backdated this announcement to May 1st thinking no one would take notice, but in private emails from incoming students we learned that some were furious. We encouraged them to withdraw and accept another offer.

On May 31st, SCU updated its policy again. They now require either three previously taken monovalent doses or one bivalent dose for all community members. As with the University’s previous mandates, SCU offers no religious exemptions and limited medical exemptions for students even in the most extreme of circumstances as explained below. Faculty and staff, however, are permitted to request exemptions.

SCU’s policy is determined by its opaque “COVID-19 team,” believed to be led by campus physician Dr. Lewis Osofsky, who also holds several positions at Santa Clara County Medical Association (SCCMA). SCCMA partners with the Santa Clara County Public Health Department (SCCPH) to maximize COVID-19 vaccinations. Santa Clara County is one of the most vaccinated counties in the country, with more than a third having received the bivalent booster, twice the national average, and 88.5 percent having received the primary series.

Osofsky’s positions in the SCCMA include chair of the Professional Standards and Conduct committee, tasked with promoting high ethical standards for physicians and investigating disputes involving unethical conduct. This is ironic, as Osofsky is believed to be a driving force behind SCU’s ethically-indefensible mandate. Medical ethics would require, at a minimum, both transmission prevention and a proven benefit for students. An antibody increase from vaccines, with no established antibody level correlate of protection, wanes in mere weeks, and cannot support the ethics of a mandate. In fact, a recent study demonstrated that the “greater the number of vaccine doses previously received the higher the risk of COVID-19.”

It is alleged that Osofsky has improperly denied student medical exemptions. In a March 2022 lawsuit filed against SCU, Harlow Glenn, one of the student plaintiffs, claims that she had serious adverse reactions to her primary series COVID vaccines, including an emergency room visit due to leg paralysis and abnormal bleeding. According to the complaint, Osofsky refused to grant her a medical exemption for the required booster and actively interfered with her doctor-patient relationship by contacting her private doctors to persuade them to retract their medical exemption documentation.

Such aggressive tactics are nothing new for Osofsky, as he apparently employs them against patients in his private pediatric practice. Parents have complained in online reviews that Osofsky’s office forced vaccines and didn’t listen to their concerns. As it turns out, Blue Cross Blue Shield pays pediatricians in private practice a $40,000 bonus for every 100 patients under the age of 2 that they fully vaccinate, if at least 63 percent of the patients are fully vaccinated (including the annual flu vaccine).

Osofsky’s roles with SCCMA, which is in partnership with the SCCPH whose goal is to maximize COVID vaccination, as well as his aggressive private practice approach to vaccination, have likely played a large role in SCU’s continued COVID vaccine mandates.

On June 14, 2023, attorneys for the plaintiffs filed their opening brief against SCU in the Sixth Appellate District in California. It is expected that SCU will oppose the appeal and insist on its right to demand that students submit to EUA boosters to “protect the campus community.” Protect the community? That justification went out the window long ago when CDC Director Rochelle Walensky admitted that the COVID vaccine did not prevent infection or transmission. Recently released documents confirmed that Walensky actually knew this information in January of 2021, well before colleges announced COVID vaccination requirements.

Given that the emergency is officially over, and the shots have proven to be both ineffective and in some cases harmful, now more than ever, SCU must defend the science and ethics behind their refusal to drop them.

In the absence of such transparency, we are left to assume that Osofsky, along with SCCMA and SCCPH, must be using SCU students as mere pawns to achieve their unscientific and authoritarian vaccination goals and quotas.

Lucia is a recovering corporate securities attorney. After becoming a mother, Lucia turned her attention to fighting inequities in public schools in California for students with learning disabilities. She co-founded NoCollegeMandates.com to help fight college vaccine mandates.

July 13, 2023 Posted by | Civil Liberties, Corruption, Deception, Science and Pseudo-Science | , , | Leave a comment

Democrats, Republicans Face Off During U.S. House Hearing on COVID Origins and Possible Cover-Up

By Brenda Baletti, Ph.D. | The Defender | July 12, 2023

Two coauthors of the March 2020 Nature Medicine paper that asserted, just months into the pandemic, that COVID-19’s origins were “clearly” natural rather than lab-made faced questioning Tuesday during a hearing of the House Select Subcommittee on the Coronavirus pandemic.

The hearing investigated “whether government officials, regardless of who they are, unfairly and perhaps biasedly tipped the scales toward a preferred origin theory,” Rep. Brad Wenstrup (R-Ohio), committee chair, said in opening remarks.

“We are examining whether scientific integrity was disregarded in favor of political expediency, maybe to conceal or diminish the government’s relationship with the Wuhan Institute of Virology or perhaps its funding of risky gain-of-function coronavirus research,” he said.

Tulane virologist Robert Garry, Ph.D., and Scripps Research evolutionary biologist Kristian Andersen, Ph.D., denied the allegations in written testimony submitted prior to the hearing as “absurd and false.” And in more than three hours of questioning Tuesday by committee members, they insisted their conclusions in the paper were based solely on the “scientific process.”

Republicans’ questioning focused on demonstrating the Nature Medicine paper was coordinated and unduly influenced by government officials.

Lawmakers laid out evidence that all of the authors initially expressed serious concerns the virus may have leaked from a lab and of how that position changed just a few days later after a Feb. 1, 2020, teleconference with Dr. Anthony Fauci, Dr. Francis Collins and Jeremy Farrar, Ph.D.

The scientists drafted their paper “The Proximal Origins of SARS-CoV-2” within a few days of the call and published it the following month. The early drafts were shared with Farrar, Collins and Fauci, Paul Thacker reported.

Prior to yesterday’ hearing, the panel’s Republican majority issued a report, “The Proximal Origin of a Cover-up,” asserting a coordinated effort by Fauci and others to downplay the lab-leak hypothesis and suppress scientific discourse.

The report was based on 25 hours of testimony by the authors of the Proximal Origins paper and a review of 8,000 pages of documents, including subpoenaed emails and slack messages that had not yet been revealed publicly.

The evidence showed that in conversations with one another, the Proximal Origin authors expressed a lack of certainty about their singular conclusion but feared the political fallout of giving credence to the lab origin hypothesis.

Democrats vehemently countered the Republican assertions, insisting Fauci and Collins had no role in the findings. They produced their own report — “They Played No Role” — drawing on the same evidence to conclude that “that there was no cover-up of the origins of the COVID-19 pandemic and no suppression of the lab leak theory on the parts of Dr. Fauci and Dr. Collins.”

In the highly partisan hearing, the Democrats used their time to accuse Republicans of having a “vendetta,” of “weaponizing” the origin discussion, using “extreme rhetoric” and of making “baseless allegations” that they claimed were responsible for the public’s loss of faith in public institutions.

Ranking Democrat Dr. Raul Ruiz (D-Calif.) repeatedly accused the Republicans of “confirmation bias” in their assertion that the lab leak is the more probable origin of the virus and of making “conspiratorial accusations without proof,” rather than “pursuing an objective analysis of the virus’s origins that is free from political interference.”

The ‘Proximal Origins’ fallout

The paper in question, “The Proximal Origin of SARS-CoV-2” played a key early role in shutting down debate about the origin of the virus.

Top public health officials used the paper as “independent science” to influence public discussion of the topic. Collins, then director of the National Institutes of Health (NIH) posted the findings on the agency website. And in an April 17, 2020, press briefing at the White House, when asked whether COVID-19 had come from the Wuhan lab, Fauci cited the paper’s conclusions as definitive.

The paper had a major impact in the scientific community and the popular press, spurring thousands of articles declaring the lab-leak theory to be implausible or a conspiracy theory.

But communications obtained via Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests by U.S. Right to Know, and a memo released in March by the congressional subcommittee have since showed that Collins, Fauci and Farrar of the Wellcome Trust played a key, previously undisclosed role in persuading the scientists to write the paper.

The FOIA requests also revealed that all of the paper’s authors had privately expressed suspicions that the virus was engineered or about the Wuhan Institute of Virology’s store of novel coronaviruses and work on them at low biosafety levels, US Right to Know reported.

‘Proximal origin of a cover-up’ vs. ‘they played no role’

Republicans questioned the scientists on their rapid shift from thinking that the virus was likely lab-made to their certainty, professed in both drafts and final versions of the paper, about its natural origins in a matter of days.

Representative Nicole Malliotakis (R-NY) quoted a communication from Garry where he said:

“I really can’t think of a plausible natural scenario where you get from, from the bat virus or one very similar to it to, uh, COVID-19 where you insert exactly four amino acids, 12 nucleotides and all have to be added at the exact same time to gain this function.

“I just can’t figure out how this all gets accomplished in nature.”

She said, “So then within a matter of days, something changed, and that’s what this committee is trying to get to the bottom of, what happened within that three day period between the conference call and the paper that all of a sudden you did a 180.”

In response to repeated questioning on this topic, Andersen and Garry insisted their change in thinking was based on “the scientific process.”

They said new evidence emerged that changed their thinking, that their shift in thinking “evolved over time from early hypotheses to later conclusions published in the paper.” And that their shift had nothing to do with pressure from Fauci, Collins or Farrar.

Rather, Andersen said their paper presented “an agnostic view of what the evidence actually does tell us.”

Garry testified that Collins and Fauci had very little input at the Feb. 1 teleconference and he thought they were just on the call “to gather information” from the experts.

Andersen and Garry along with several of the Democratic committee members repeatedly emphasized that Farrar — not Fauci or Collins — coordinated the call and provided the authors with significant guidance on the paper. Andersen said, “I describe him as a father figure” for the paper, Andersen said, “because I think that captures it.”

Ruiz and Jamie Raskin (D-Md.) both suggested Farrar’s role in organizing the call exonerated Fauci and Collins, effectively disproving the idea that there was political interference in the findings.

But, Farrar — former director of the Wellcome Trust and currently chief scientist at the World Health Organization — has been a central figure in dismissing the lab leak theory as a “conspiracy theory,” Sam Husseini reported.

In February 2020, along with Peter Daszak, 25 other scientists signed a letter in The Lancet that dismissed the possibility of a lab origin of COVID-19.

“We stand together to strongly condemn conspiracy theories suggesting that COVID-19 does not have a natural origin,” the letter said.

Rep. David Joyce (R-Ohio) questioned whether this continued certainty about natural origins today made sense given that it contradicted the testimony by former director of the National Intelligence Agency, John Ratcliffe.

Ratcliffe told the committee that, “If our intelligence and evidence supporting a lab leak theory was placed side by side with our intelligence and evidence pointing to a naturally occurring spillover theory, the lab leak side of the ledger would be long and overwhelming while the spillover side would be nearly empty, nearly empty.”

Ruiz claimed that most government agencies — four of them — deny the lab leak theory with low confidence. But the FBI and the Department of Energy have also determined with moderate confidence that the virus most likely originated in a lab.

Democratic members alleged the Republicans’ effort to investigate the politicization of the investigation of the origins of the pandemic inhibited the work of preparing for “the next pandemic.”

Ruiz said the Republicans’ actions had also led to “threats against scientists and public health officials.” Anderson agreed, saying “the misinformation, dis and conspiracy theories around the paper have resulted in significant harassment and threats” similar to those undergone by Peter Hotez, and alleged that he is on a “kill list.”

Rep. Jill Tokuda (D-Hawaii) said that such investigations “are actually creating a very chilling effect on the scientific process,” which hinders the ability of scientists and public health officials to thoroughly investigate and study future disease outbreaks.

She suggested that in the future the researchers should “double think what they put on their slack messages and channels and their emails and their text threads.”

But just last week the House subcommittee began investigating Dr. David M. Morens, a 25-year veteran of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID), after it was revealed he used his personal email address to evade FOIA requests for communications related to the origins of COVID-19, The Defender reported.

Wenstrom broke the news in the meeting that the National Archives and Records Administration (NARA) was also involved in the investigation.

Near the end of the hearing, both Garry and Andersen confirmed that they had been consulted by the CIA and FBI about the origins of COVID-19.

Wenstrup concluded by saying,“We’re exploring a potential coverup. That is what we are doing.”

He added, “You receive federal dollars, we appropriate those. Congress appropriates those federal dollars. We have a responsibility of oversight on behalf of our constituents and the very taxpayers that pay you. Sorry about that. But it’s our job whether you like it or not. And I take it seriously.”


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

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

July 13, 2023 Posted by | Deception, Science and Pseudo-Science | , | Leave a comment

The War on ‘Misinformation’: Outlawing Dissident Data on the Road to Tyranny

Judge Terry A. Doughty’s Defense of the Right to be Wrong

Michael Hoffman’s Revelation of the Method | July 12, 2023

“Misinformation” [noun]: Any data that contradicts Establishment dogma

Fittingly, on Independence Day, July 4, U.S. Federal Judge Terry A. Doughty in the Western District of Louisiana, issued a preliminary injunction in the case of Missouri v. Biden, documenting and excoriating the Federal government’s abrogation of the First Amendment with regard to policing social media.

The patricians assigned exalted status as “First Amendment experts” by their cronies in the legacy media, have lied about Judge Doughty’s ruling and presume to explain it to the rest of us mere plebians in the hope that we will not read the 155 pages of his decision.

Thus, His Eminence Laurence Tribe, Carl M. Loeb University Professor of Constitutional Law Emeritus at Harvard University, together with Leah Litman,  professor of law at the University of Michigan, contemptuously dismiss Justice Doughty’s decision as buncombe. They rely on their prestige to convince us of their evidence-free claim that, “The impetus behind the case is the now thoroughly debunked conspiracy theory that the government is somehow strong-arming Big Tech into censoring conservative speech and speakers in violation of the First Amendment.”

Words Intended to Trigger our Obeisance

Notice the words intended to trigger our obeisance to the anathema which Tribe and Litman have pronounced: “thoroughly debunked,” and the old reliable put-down, “conspiracy theory.”

No respectable true believer in the stature and renown of the Carl M. Loeb University Professor of Constitutional Law Emeritus will dare to think otherwise than as prescribed.

Tribe and Litman add to their pejorative-laden rant, stating, “the absurdity of different aspects of the decision…….Each step in the reasoning of the decision manages to be more outlandish than the last…”

“Absurd.” “Outlandish.”

They go further: “There is no shortage of errors in this opinion, which is trying to make the infamous ‘Twitter files’ into constitutional law. Who knows whether the equally infamous U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit will correct any of these mistakes…”

“Infamous.” “Equally infamous.”

A heretical thought occurs to the reader of Tribe and Litman’s invective: prove it. They can’t, so they don’t bother.

Ah, but there’s the rub, fellow plebe. This legal duo need not prove anything. They are famous legal scholars.

Musk’s Twitter file revelations are “infamous” and Justice Doughty is “absurd.” Therefore, predicated on their ad hominem adjudication, Tribe and Litman don’t stoop to offering a refutation because none is necessary. Their ipse dixit is sufficient. We are in the realm of the blind faith required of people by the secular religion that enforces a fundamentalist intellectual conformity which brooks no dissent.

Witness the 155 pages of Doughty’s decision dismissed without a single factual reply concerning the Federal government illegally threatening and pressuring social media which publish disfavored authors and data on the Internet.

But is misinformation really the crux of the issue? Witness the misinformation that pours forth daily from the presses of the sacrosanct New York Times. We need look no further than Michael Shear and David McCabe’s report July 5 in the Times regarding Judge Doughty’s ruling. The issue of government censorship, which concerns all civil libertarians across the political spectrum, is reduced to an “effort by conservatives to document what they contend is a liberal conspiracy.”

That’s not just misinformation, it’s a lie. Two victims of the government crackdown on social media who are plaintiffs in the case of Missouri v. Biden, Dr. Jay Bhattacharya and Dr. Martin Kulldorff, are infectious disease epidemiologists, not conservative Republican politics wonks.

The Great Barrington Declaration of October 4, 2020, criticized lockdown policies and expressed concern about the damaging physical and mental health impacts of lockdowns. Shortly after being published, the Great Barrington Declaration, which was signed and endorsed by numerous health science personnel holding a variety of political views, was censored on social media by Google, Facebook and Twitter under the threat of reprisals from the Biden administration.

Jill Hines is Co-Director of Health Freedom Louisiana, a consumer and human rights advocacy organization. Hines was censored because she advocated against the use of mask mandates for young children. Health Freedom Louisiana’s social-media page was suspended on Facebook in January 2022 for sharing a display board that contained Pfizer’s preclinical trial data. Facebook did the government’s bidding.

There are dozens of examples like these. The New York Times is misinforming its readers into believing that Missouri v. Biden is mainly an issue of Republican partisanship, with no wider significance for all liberty-loving Americans. The Times expects us to believe that Justice Doughty ruled in favor of the victims of government-inspired viewpoint censorship because, in the words of Shear and McCable, he is “favorable to right-wing lawsuits.”

The New York Times is determined to engage in misinformation by falsely characterizing the paramount issue, interdiction of freedom of the press by agents of the Federal government, as something of concern to right-wingers who see “liberal conspiracies” under every bed.

As of July 12, in almost every instance of legacy media misinformation related to the judge’s ruling that we have encountered, at no time were readers provided a link to Justice Doughty’s decision, which is published online, in order to facilitate the now out-of-fashion principle that the people should be encouraged to decide for themselves, rather than being told what to think.

Instead, the Times referred its readers to Litman and Tribe’s splenetic fulmination, in which government censorship is “content moderation,” and ensuring the Biden administration doesn’t threaten online news media if they don’t submit to their censorship orders, becomes, “a huge blow to vital government efforts to harden U.S. democracy against threats of misinformation.”

Without apprehension, we ought to call a thing by its accurate description. In their report, which appeared on New York University’s website, JustSecurity.org, we regret to say that the University of Michigan’s Litman, and Harvard’s Tribe, lied about Judge Doughty’s ruling—as follows:

“… the district court made no effort to identify circumstances where the government came even close to coercing social media companies into doing something they didn’t want to do…”

How does one parse a mendacity that is so transparently false it is beyond chutzpagh? The duo who put forth the preceding statement are insulting the intelligence of their readers on the assumption that they are too lazy to find and study Justice Doughty’s ruling—in which he clearly “identifies” the points at which the Federal government coerced social media companies into censoring scientists, activists and vital alternative information.

Judge for yourself:

Excerpts from Missouri v. Biden documenting Government Coercion of Social Media Companies

“On May 5, 2021, then-White House Press Secretary Jen Psaki (“Psaki”) publicly began pushing Facebook and other social-media platforms to censor COVID-19 misinformation. At a White House Press Conference, Psaki publicly reminded Facebook and other social-media platforms of the threat of ‘legal consequences’ if they do not censor misinformation more aggressively.

“Psaki further stated: ‘The President’s view is that the major platforms have a responsibility related to the health and safety of all Americans to stop amplifying untrustworthy content, disinformation, and misinformation, especially related to COVID-19 vaccinations and elections.’ Psaki linked the threat of a ‘robust anti-trust program’ with the White House’s censorship demand: ‘He also supports better privacy protections and a robust anti-trust program. So, his view is that there’s more that needs to be done to ensure that this type of misinformation; disinformation; damaging, sometime life-threatening information, is not going out to the American public.”

“On January 23, 2021, three days after President Biden took office, Clarke Humphrey (“Humphrey”), who at the time was the Digital Director for the COVID-19 Response Team, emailed Twitter and requested the removal of an anti-COVID-19 vaccine tweet by Robert F. Kennedy, Jr.2 Humphrey sent a copy of the email to Rob Flaherty (“Flaherty”), former Deputy Assistant to the President and Director of Digital Strategy…

“On February 7, 2021, Twitter sent Flaherty a ‘Twitter’s Partner Support Portal’ for expedited review of flagging content for censorship. Twitter recommended that Flaherty designate a list of authorized White House staff to enroll in Twitter’s Partner Support Portal and explained that when authorized reporters submit a ‘ticket’ using the portal, the requests are ‘prioritized’ automatically. Twitter also stated that it had been ‘recently bombarded’ with censorship requests from the White House and would prefer to have a streamlined process. Twitter noted that ‘[i]n a given day last week for example, we had more than four different people within the White House reaching out for issues…”

“On March 15, 2021, Flaherty…demanded a report from Facebook on a recent Washington Post article that accused Facebook of allowing the spread of information leading to vaccine hesitancy…Flaherty followed up by making clear that the White House was seeking more aggressive action on ‘borderline content.”

“On March 22, 2021, Flaherty responded to this email, demanding more detailed information and a plan from Facebook to censor the spread of ‘vaccine hesitancy’ on Facebook. Flaherty also requested more information about and demanded greater censorship by Facebook of ‘sensational,’ ‘vaccine skeptical’ content.”

“On April 13, 2021, after the temporary halt of the Johnson & Johnson vaccine…Flaherty also requested that Facebook monitor ‘misinformation’ relating to the Johnson & Johnson pause and demanded from Facebook a detailed report within twenty-four hours. Facebook provided the detailed report the same day.”

“On April 14, 2021, Flaherty demanded the censorship of Fox News hosts Tucker Carlson and Tomi Lahren because the top post about vaccines that day was ‘Tucker Carlson saying vaccines don’t work and Tomi Lahren stating she won’t take a vaccine..”

“Two days later, on April 16, 2021, Flaherty demanded immediate answers from Facebook regarding the Tucker Carlson video…Facebook…gave the video a 50% demotion for seven days and stated that it would continue to demote the video.”

“…examples of posts that did not violate Facebook’s policies but would nonetheless be suppressed included content that originated from the Children’s Health Defense, a nonprofit activist group headed by Robert F. Kennedy, Jr.” (Mr. Kennedy’s group was abeled by the government as one of the “Disinformation Dozen”).

“On April 21, 2021, Flaherty, Slavitt, and other HHS officials, met with Twitter officials about ‘Twitter Vaccine Misinfo Briefing.’…Twitter discovery responses indicated that during the meeting, White House officials wanted to know why Alex Berenson (“Berenson”) had not been ‘kicked off’ Twitter. Slavitt suggested Berenson was ‘the epicenter of disinfo that radiated outwards to the persuadable public.’ Berenson was suspended thereafter on July 16, 2021, and was permanently deplatformed on August 28, 2021.”

“On April 23, 2021, Flaherty sent Facebook an email including a document entitled “Facebook COVID-19 Vaccine Misinformation Brief” (“the Brief”)…The Brief recommended much more aggressive censorship of Facebook’s enforcement policies and called for progressively severe penalties.”

“From May 28, 2021, to July 10, 2021, a senior Meta (Facebook’s parent) executive reportedly copied Andrew Slavitt (‘Slavitt’), former White House Senior COVID-19 Advisor, on his emails to Surgeon General Murthy (‘Murthy’), alerting them that Meta was engaging in censorship of COVID-19 misinformation according to the White House’s ‘requests’ and indicating ‘expanded penalties’ for individual Facebook accounts that share misinformation…”

“Eric Waldo (‘Waldo’) is the Senior Advisor to the Surgeon General and was formerly Chief Engagement Officer for the Surgeon General’s office…Waldo and the Office of the Surgeon General received a briefing from the Center for Countering Digital Hate (‘CCDH’) about the “Disinformation Dozen.” The Center for Countering Digital Hate gave a presentation about the Disinformation Dozen and how they (CCDH) measured and determined that the Disinformation Dozen were primarily responsible for a significant amount of online misinformation.”

“At the July 15, 2021 press conference, Murthy described health misinformation as one of the biggest obstacles to ending the pandemic; insisted that his advisory was on an urgent public health threat; and stated that misinformation poses an imminent threat to the nation’s health and takes away the freedom to make informed decisions….Murthy also stated that people who question mask mandates and decline vaccinations are following misinformation, which results in illnesses and death. Murthy placed specific blame on social-media platforms for allowing ‘poison’ to spread and further called for an ‘all-of-society approach’ to fight health misinformation. Murthy called upon social-media platforms to operate with greater transparency and accountability, to monitor information more clearly, and to ‘consistently take action against misinformation super-spreaders on their platforms.’ Notably, Waldo agreed in his deposition that the word ‘accountable’ carries with it the threat of consequences.” (Emphasis supplied)

“…on July 20, 2021, at a White House Press Conference, White House Communications Director Kate Bedingfield (‘Bedingfield’) stated that the White House would be announcing whether social-media platforms are legally liable for misinformation spread on their platforms and examining how misinformation fits into the liability protection granted by Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act (which shields social-media platforms from being responsible for posts by third parties on their sites). Bedingfield further stated the administration was reviewing policies that could include amending the Communication Decency Act and that the social-media platforms ‘should be held accountable.’ The public and private pressure from the White House apparently had its intended effect. All twelve members of the ‘Disinformation Dozen’ were censored, and pages, groups, and accounts linked to the Disinformation Dozen were removed…”

“Murthy made statements on the following platforms: a December 21, 2021 podcast threatening to hold social-media platforms accountable for not censoring misinformation; a January 3, 2022 podcast with Alyssa Milano stating that ‘platformers need to step up to be accountable…”

“In addition to ‘misinformation’ regarding COVID-19, the White House also asked social-media companies to censor misinformation regarding climate change, gender discussions, abortion, and economic policy. At an Axios event entitled ‘A Conversation on Battling Misinformation,’ held on June 14, 2022, the White House National Climate Advisor Gina McCarthy (‘McCarthy’) blamed social-media companies for allowing misinformation and disinformation about climate change to spread and explicitly tied these censorship demands with threats of adverse legislation regarding the Communications Decency Act.”

“On June 16, 2022, the White House announced a new task force to target ‘general misinformation’ and disinformation campaigns targeted at women and LBGTQI individuals who are public and political figures, government and civic leaders, activists, and journalists. The June 16, 2022, Memorandum discussed the creation of a task force to reel in ‘online harassment and abuse’ and to develop programs targeting such disinformation campaigns. The Memorandum also called for the Task Force to confer with technology experts and again threatened social-media platforms with adverse legal consequences if the platforms did not censor aggressively enough.”

End quote of excerpts from Missouri v. Biden, July 4, 2023. This judicial freedom document is worthy of study and publication in its entirety.

The War on “Misinformation” — Outlawing Dissident Data on the Road to Tyranny

The question of who is qualified to arbitrate what constitutes misinformation is seldom discussed and mostly neglected, for obvious reasons. If it were deliberated, the bias of the legacy media’s anointed “misinformation experts” (Stanford Internet Observatory, Virality Project, Center for Countering Digital Hate, etc.) would be apparent, along with a larger question: why is “misinformation” supposedly lethal to the commonweal?

In the claustrophobic corridors of conformity where roost our supposed intellectual superiors, there is little historical memory of ideas once denounced as the vilest heresy having been proved right over the course of time, unless those views were on the “progressive” side of the ideological scale.

A truly non-partisan recollection of the past would lead to tolerance and judicious latitude for ideas which the 21st century consensus considers outside the limits of acceptable belief.

Error Has Rights

The precept that error has rights is as old as the Jeffersonian democracy which the Biden administration and its friends in high places, claim to defend. The battle for this principle was successfully fought in the 1780s, and again in the 1960s and ‘70s. It has since been nearly overturned in the new millennium, where it now hangs by a thread.

“Free Press” Smokescreen

The free press debate is mostly a smokescreen for an ideological conflict in which one side of the political spectrum seeks to gain an advantage over the other. Concerning censorship, the Left and the Right are often partners in slime. Trying to find an authentic Jeffersonian on either side is like searching for a Baptist in Mecca. The right of scholars who analyze flaws in the Talmud and the atrocities of the Israeli government to be free of censorship and cancellation, has zero support among most of the Republican legislators, jurists and pundits who are indignant over the suppression of their viewpoints by Biden’s bureaucrats.

In America, much of the interdiction of ideas and obstruction of free inquiry is perpetrated by private companies, and more specifically, the usury industry, which monopolizes online payment systems. In resistance to their monopoly, dissident writers are paid and sustained by readers rather than corporations, which helps to encourage the widest possible diversity of opinion, as well as independent investigative reporting which is vital to the democracy which Prof. Tribe and our would-be Overlords cynically extol with seigneurial conceit, and simultaneously thwart.

In 1789 the Catholic idea that the Blessed Virgin Mary was conceived without sin and assumed bodily into heaven was considered a depraved belief in the eyes of the majority of the Protestant population of the United States. Had it not been for the liberty of conscience enshrined in the Bill of Rights that year, those Catholic beliefs may very well have been outlawed.

234 years later, modern science has discovered that babies in the womb share the cells of their mothers: “Mothers around the world say they feel like their children are still a part of them long after they’ve given birth. As it turns out, that is literally true… Fetomaternal transfer… occurs in all pregnancies and in humans the fetal cells can persist for decades. Microchimeric fetal cells are found in various maternal tissues and organs including blood, bone marrow, skin and liver” (cf. here and here).

Consequently, the Son of God who was of one flesh with the humble Israelite girl we know as His mother Mary, shared his very tissue with her. In light of that discovery by avant-garde science, it seems far less likely that God would have allowed the body that contained within it the flesh of Jesus Christ, to rot on earth. In 1950, when Pius XII declared the bodily assumption of Mary into heaven, it seems he was prescient indeed.

Nowadays, with the desacralization of our society, where the outcome of the colosseum sports game is of infinitely greater interest than the corporeal fate of the human that served as the vessel for the incarnation of God, the once hotly disputed veracity or falsehood of the pontiff’s declaration doesn’t necessitate First Amendment protection. Other controversies however, are ablaze in the white hot fire of zealotry and the certitude that one side is right and the other is not only wrong, it has no right to be wrong. For example, disputing trans claims and COVID orthodoxies are subject to intense proscription.

The Left pretends to want libraries free of censorship. Some of them support trans books in children’s libraries because they have faith in the inherent value of that literature as drivers of transformative thinking in children, not due to any allegiance to the civil libertarian tenets of the First Amendment. Not for a minute would most Leftists countenance the introduction of holocaust denial or white supremacist books in a library under their control. For these folks “freedom of the press” is a pretext for overcoming the censorship demands of one’s adversaries while practicing it oneself.

The Right wants libraries stocked with writings by Karl Rove, Ludwig von Mises, Glenn Beck, John Bolton, Hannity and O’Reilly. A majority actively oppose the presence of books in public libraries by Noam Chomsky, Margaret Atwood, Edward Said, Alexander Cockburn, and Maureen Dowd. Like the Left, the Right mainly operates by a dual standard.

Knowledge of the history of the struggle for intellectual freedom and the life stories of John Lilburne, Michael Servetus, John Tyndale, Edmund Campion, Ignaz Semmelweis, Eugene V. Debs, Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Harry Elmer Barnes, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn and Norman Finkelstein, are instrumental in kindling a commitment to the American Way: •rights of conscience, •the necessity of a free press, and •toleration of opinions designated as “misinformation.”

The debate turns on whether or not a free people require intervention by “expert authorities” like fallible Fauci, who filter what would otherwise be unfettered access to information.

To prove his points in the Declaration of Independence, Jefferson stated, “… let Facts be submitted to a candid world.” The Founders of our nation were unequivocal in proclaiming their confidence in the people judging for themselves, without a king, commissar or president—backed by propaganda conglomerates in New York and Hollywood— preventing them from undertaking this sacred civic responsibility and divine right.

That the interdiction of information online is termed by Lucifer’s lexicographers “a defense of democracy,” is among the most egregious evocations of doublethink since George Orwell put pen to paper.

Distilled to its first principle, the defense of democracy depends on the defense of the right to be wrong.

The New York Times, Laurence Tribe, Leah Litman, Dr. Jay Bhattacharya, Bobby Kennedy Jr., Alex Berenson and Tucker Carlson, all have a right to be in error. Without that Constitutional liberty guaranteed to every individual — whether heretic or grandee — Fascism from the Right or Communism from the Left will inevitably take control and sift our nation like wheat.

“This country is planted thick with laws… And if you cut them down… do you really think you could stand upright in the winds that would blow then? Yes, I’d give the Devil benefit of law, for my own safety’s sake.” —Robert Bolt, A Man for All Seasons


FOR THE ADVANCEMENT TO KNOWLEDGE CONTRA CANCEL CULTURE

Michael Hoffman is the author of Secret Societies and Psychological Warfare (2001), The Occult Renaissance Church of Rome (2017) , Twilight Language (2021), six other books published in the United States, as well as overseas in Japanese and French translation, and 122 issues of Revisionist History® newsletter, 1997-2022. Since January, twenty-eight of his essays have been published on Substack. He is a former reporter for the New York bureau of the Associated Press. His podcast, Michael Hoffman’s Revisionist History,® is heard around the world.

Twitter: @HoffmanMichaelA

Copyright ©2023 Independent History and Research, Coeur d’Alene, Idaho 83816-0849

July 12, 2023 Posted by | Civil Liberties, Deception, Fake News, Full Spectrum Dominance, Mainstream Media, Warmongering | , | Leave a comment

The Lies We Were Told

How long does it take to conclude some authority is lying? We don’t know this answer yet … apparently many years.

BY BILL RICE, JR. | JULY 11, 2023

I recently discovered an excellent Substack Newsletter authored by a registered nurse (Dee Dee) who has treated many (alleged) Covid patients. This nurse finally had enough and decided to share her stories and thoughts via her own Substack, which she started May 25th.

From reading a couple of her pithy posts, my take-away is Nurse Dee must feel like the main character in Joseph Heller’s classic novel Catch 22. 

In that novel the experiences and observations of a fictional WW II bombardier tell readers the guidance and logic used by his superiors is complete madness.

Dee’s observations prompted my own question: When do citizens or employees finally realize that every supposedly-true thing they’ve been told is, in fact, a brazen lie?

For most people, at least with Covid proclamations, the answer seems to be “never.”

In other words, for many people, being lied to over and over doesn’t matter.

To put it mildly, such a revelation is a tad disconcerting.

One message – and it wasn’t subtle …

Dee Dee’s observations from a June 2nd dispatch might show readers why I thought of “Catch-22,” where the message to bomber crews was “just do what you are told;” don’t try to figure out the logic.

With Covid, Nurse Dee identifies the goal of all orders. Instead of just “fly the dangerous mission,” the key message is: “Just take the shot.”

“The logic surrounding COVID-19 was circular. Every dictated premise, required blind faith and the goal was always the same; to take the shot.

“… You could not question the narrative and remain a good citizen …The mantra erupted, this is a pandemic of the unvaccinated.

“No argument could be interjected in the logic. It didn’t matter if you had not seen a new illness with unique symptoms … It didn’t matter if the science didn’t make sense. It didn’t matter if the measures were opposite to all your previous medical training.

… It didn’t matter that the vaccine did not stop transmission, and it didn’t matter if you had natural immunity.  Essentially, we were told to accept every claim without evidence or reason. The orders had been given, just take the shot.”

What one nurse was told …

In a recent dispatch, Dee listed about 30 truisms she (and all of us) were told. A few examples:

We were told the vaccine wouldn’t be mandatory.

We were told there would be two shots.

We were (then) told a booster was needed.

We were (then) told another booster was needed.

We were told there had been clinical trails conducted by the pharmaceutical companies that proved safe and effective.

We were told the vaccine would prevent the COVID-19 illness.

We were then told the vaccine would prevent serious illness.

We were told if everyone would just take the shot, it would be over.

We were (then) told there were breakthrough cases, where the vaccinated person became sick with COVID-19.

We were told even if you weren’t sick, you could give the disease to grandma.

We were told the unvaccinated are spreading the virus and creating mutations.

We were told, this is a “pandemic of the unvaccinated.”

We were told vaccine passports were the new normal and would be required.

We were told the vaccine was mandatory for employment.

We were told nurses who refused the shot were stupid …”  

But in our daily lives, a different standard applies

Back to me: Forget the pronouncements of the CDC experts, of Dr. Fauci, or of Nurse Dee’s hospital supervisors  … just think about people you’ve interacted with in your own life.

At some point, when someone has told you one falsehood after another, do you stop believing them?

For most people, three big lies and you’re out.

“Fool me once, shame on you; fool me twice, shame on me …”

At some point, villagers did stop listening to the little boy who kept screaming, “A wolf is coming!”

Even politicians can take lying too far.

Here I recall John Edwards, a former U.S. Senator who was almost elected vice president of the United States.

Edwards lied repeatedly about an affair and then about fathering a baby with his mistress. Even when he “came clean” in a TV interview, his “confession” was replete with more lies.

I don’t know what John Edwards is doing with his life today, but I know he’s not running for political office. If he did, he’d be laughed off the podium. Everyone now gets that they can’t trust John Edwards.

The question I’m grappling with today is how many lies does someone have to tell before people conclude they’re listening to a serial liar? Is there a quota for one-lie-too-many, or a lie cut-off point?

In every-day normal life, it only takes a couple big whoppers before a friend becomes a “former friend,” a person to be avoided at all costs.

But not with our Covid liars. Apparently, there’s no limit to how many lies “trusted authorities” can tell … and still be considered “trusted” authorities.

In her very fist post, Nurse Dee wrote:

“Thrust upon our population was a labyrinth of lies. There were new daily mandates offering no explanation, making little if any, medical sense.

“… The medical interventions … coupled with preposterous statements from our leading experts, led me to personally, question everything. One question led to many questions until one day, I came to the realization, there were no answers.

“My questions met a variety of responses that included silence, laughter, and hostility.  This was my first experience of being discouraged from asking questions.”

Serious question …

How does a person continue to function – as a sane human being – in a world that’s apparently insane?

Somehow, Nurse Dee (and me and you) … are still here, but we’ve had to adopt a new survival mechanism and are now functioning in a surreal new matrix where we know we have to live with insane notions; where we realize a never-ending cascade of “accepted” lies is our New Normal.

And this question …

After reading Dee’s “Catch-22” anecdotes, I also had this question: How do serial liars keep telling all these lies? How do they get away with it?

This answer seems clear. Except for people like Dee, very few people call them out on their lies. (Thank you, mainstream media “watchdog” journalists).

Once you start lying, you can’t stop …

Also, as I learned from a big story making the rounds today, the lying officials just keep doubling down on their lies.

An organization called the International Coalition of Medicine Regulatory Authorities (ICMRA)  just issued a big press release telling everyone that the vaccines are still safe and effective and, just like we’ve all been told a million times … everyone  should keep getting their next rounds of shots.

It’s clear to me that the purpose of this document is to counter the growing “spread” of world citizens who might, finally, be starting to question the pronouncements of trusted health authorities.

A few of the “Key messages from this group, which “brings together 38 medicines regulatory authorities from every region in the world, with the WHO as an observer” (In other words, a centralized, clearinghouse of expert liars):

* “False and misleading information about the safety of COVID-19 vaccines on social media often exaggerates the frequency and severity of side effects. Misinformation also wrongly attributes unrelated medical events to the vaccines.”

* “There is no evidence that COVID-19 vaccines have contributed to excess mortality during the pandemic …”

* Under the header, “Benefits of COVID-19 Vaccination,” the public is told that

“Millions of lives are estimated to have been saved by COVID-19 vaccination …”

I learned of this document from colleagues at the Brownstone Institute’s writer group.

A fellow Substacker added the link with this note: “A meticulous and immaculately supported take-down of this statement is needed. It’s been all over MSM today.”

I read the propaganda and immediately posted this reply:

“You could debunk/challenge every sentence …”

Two seconds before I made my post, another colleague posted this:

“Wow. Every single bullet point is a lie.”

There’s now too many lies to easily debunk …

Key take-away: The lies Nurse Dee was told every day – or almost immediately figured out on her own – are still being told today.

The damn liars have simply worn us down. I could debunk every one of those bullet points, but I’m growing tired of writing the same rebuttals over and over.

And as Dee observes, what’s the point? Even if someone does debunk all of these whoppers, these people are just going to keep lying … and keep telling us what to do.

The only conclusion I can make is that – especially regarding topics that might involve  “life and death” – people, for some surreal reason, simply want to keep believing the liars.

Most people in the world must feel “safer” believing lies, lies that have killed and injured millions of their fellow citizens, including family members, friends and neighbors.

In our “Catch-22” world, the bigger the lies – and the more often serial lies prevaricate, the better.

For the liars, the benefits of lying are impressive. For the world’s skeptics, the costs of calling out liars are quite unpleasant.

Anyway, the lies aren’t going to stop.

July 11, 2023 Posted by | Deception, Science and Pseudo-Science | , | Leave a comment

Erdogan still firmly in NATO bloc despite blackmailing EU

By Ahmed Adel | July 11, 2023

Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan urged the European Union on July 9 to open the doors for his country to join the bloc if they want to secure support for Sweden’s accession to NATO. His blackmailing of the EU, which ultimately produced results, comes only days after he controversially broke an agreement with Moscow by releasing neo-Nazi Azov Battalion members under Turkey’s custody to Ukraine.

“Turkey has been waiting at the door of the European Union for over 50 years now, and almost all of the NATO member countries are now members of the European Union. I am making this call to these countries that have kept Turkey waiting at the gates of the European Union for more than 50 years,” Erdogan said. “First, open the way to Turkey’s membership of the European Union, and then we will open it for Sweden, just as we had opened it for Finland.”

Turkey has been an EU member candidate since 1999. Since 2016, negotiations on a visa-free regime between Turkey and the EU have been on hold. The country’s bid for EU membership has been stalled due to democratic backsliding and an unrelenting occupation of the northern portion of EU-member Cyprus since 1974.

Ultimately, Erdogan backflipped just mere hours after issuing his blackmail.

“I’m glad to announce … that President Erdogan has agreed to forward the accession protocol for Sweden to the grand national assembly as soon as possible, and work closely with the assembly to ensure ratification,” said NATO secretary general Jens Stoltenberg on the eve of the alliance summit in Vilnius, which will be held on July 11-12.

Finland and Sweden applied to join the bloc in May 2022. Finland gained its membership on April 4, 2023, while the Swedes await approval from Hungary and Turkey. As Turkey will never surrender its occupation of northern Cyprus, its EU membership will be forever stalled, making Erdogan’s ultimatum either a desperate action or a calculated manoeuvre to advance other interests.

Swedish Foreign Minister Tobias Billström told public broadcaster SVT that he expects Turkey will eventually signal that it will let Sweden join the alliance, though he could not say whether that would happen at the NATO summit in the Lithuanian capital. Sweden’s top diplomat said he expects Hungary, which also has not ratified Sweden’s accession, to do so before Turkey.

Turkey and Hungary remain the only NATO members still standing in the way of Sweden becoming the 32nd member of the US-led bloc, with Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban strongly signalling he will follow Erdogan’s lead and approve Sweden’s membership only if Turkey does the same.

Now that Erdogan has reportedly unblocked Sweden’s path, the question is what was offered to appease the Turkish leader. Presumably, Erdogan would have only unblocked the accession process with the promise of receiving F-16 fighter jets, advancing EU membership talks without altering domestic oppression and ethnic cleansing abroad, or securing Western funding as the Turkish economy continues to tank with Gulf money all dried up.

The NATO summit will be dominated by how the alliance will see its future relationship with Kiev amid endless efforts by President Volodymyr Zelensky for Ukraine to become a member and a signatory to the mutual defence pact. Evidently, though, Sweden’s situation will also be discussed since Turkey is the main hindrance to their accession.

German Chancellor Olaf Scholz, for his part, joined a chorus of other European leaders and officials who said Sweden’s NATO membership should not be tied to Ankara’s stalled EU membership bid.

“Sweden meets all the requirements for NATO membership. The other question is one that is not connected with it. And that is why I do not think it should be seen as a connected issue,” the German chancellor said.

Stoltenberg also expressed before announcing Erdogan’s unblocking that the two issues have nothing to do with one another, reminding that while he supports Ankara’s bid for EU membership, it was not one of the conditions in the agreement signed by Turkey, Sweden, and Finland in 2022 at the NATO summit in Madrid.

Despite Erdogan initially adding another condition to Sweden’s accession, it is not a sign that Turkey has gone rogue within NATO, but rather it is the Turkish president blackmailing the alliance and EU to gain advantages for his country – what they are specifically since EU membership is not realistic, remains to be seen.

Erdogan broke a deal he had with Moscow by releasing on July 8, only days before the NATO summit, five Ukrainian Azov Battalion officers, who returned to Ukraine on a presidential plane. The Azov Battalion militants had been prisoners since the battle of Azovstal following the Russian liberation of the port city of Mariupol. Erdogan had no obvious reason for breaking the deal, meaning that he will now want something at the NATO summit for doing this.

Although it may appear that Erdogan has gone rogue by attaching an impossible condition for Sweden to become a NATO member, he is just leveraging to gain some advantage for Turkey. The release of the Azov Battalion members for seemingly no good reason demonstrates that Turkey is still firmly within the NATO bloc.

Ahmed Adel is a Cairo-based geopolitics and political economy researcher.

July 11, 2023 Posted by | Deception | , , | Leave a comment

White House opposes independent oversight of Ukraine aid

RT | July 11, 2023

President Joe Biden’s administration has objected to plans by US lawmakers to establish an independent inspector general who would scrutinize Washington’s massive military and economic aid packages for Ukraine.

At issue is a provision added to the $874 billion US defense budget for the government’s next fiscal year, calling for an additional oversight layer on Ukraine aid modeled after the inspector general established for reconstruction in Afghanistan. Conservative lawmakers, including Representative Matt Gaetz, a Republican from Florida, have argued that the White House lacks adequate controls to prevent fraud and other misuse of the $113 billion in aid approved by Congress to support Ukraine in its conflict with Russia.

However, the administration argued on Monday that the Pentagon inspector general and the Government Accountability Office (GAO) are already working with relevant congressional committees to “ensure accountability” for Ukraine aid. The Pentagon inspector general and the GAO are currently conducting investigations of “every aspect of this assistance,” the White House Office of Management and Budget (OMB) said in a statement.

The White House also opposes an amendment to the defense bill that would expand the authority of the Afghanistan reconstruction inspector general. “This expansion is both unnecessary and unprecedented” because inspectors from both the US State Department and the US Agency for International Development already oversee the aid, the OMB said.

John Sopko, the independent inspector general for Afghanistan reconstruction, warned in February that strong safeguards were needed to prevent corruption from undermining Washington’s aid packages for Ukraine. Failure to learn from the US mistakes in Afghanistan, where much aid was “diverted or stolen,” could lead to a repeat in Ukraine.

“You’re bound to get corrupt elements of not only the Ukrainian or host government, but also of US government contractors or other third-party contractors to steal the money,” Sopko told Fox News.

Last year, Congress blocked an initiative spearheaded by Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene, a Republican from Georgia, to audit the aid to Kiev.

Ukraine consistently ranks as one of the most corrupt countries in Europe. Ukrainian President Vladimir Zelensky fired a number of top officials earlier this year for profiteering. An August 2022 report by CBS News indicated that only about 30% of the Western weaponry sent to Kiev was actually making it to the front lines because of waste and corruption.

July 10, 2023 Posted by | Corruption, Deception | , | Leave a comment

Hunter Biden Reportedly Has Extensive Ties With a Dozen Senior US Officials

Sputnik – 10.07.2023

WASHINGTON – US President Joe Biden’s son, Hunter Biden, has reportedly maintained “extensive ties” with almost a dozen of current and former senior government officials since the time when his father served as vice president under the Obama administration.

A digital analysis carried out by Fox News detailed a list of officials with whom Hunter Biden was or continues to be in close contact, and includes US Secretary of State Antony Blinken, national security adviser Jake Sullivan, senior Biden adviser Michael Donilon, and a close aide to Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin, among several other people.

Hunter Biden and Sullivan were cooperating with each other during their joint work on the board of the Truman National Security Project, a liberal foreign policy think tank. Sullivan worked there in 2017-2019, while Hunter was also serving on the board of Ukrainian energy company Burisma Holdings and the Chinese private equity fund BHR Partners. The US is currently investigating those and his other foreign business activities.

The outlet noted that former White House official Mike McCormick accused Sullivan of being a “conspirator” in the Biden family’s “kickback scheme” in Ukraine at the time.

The report also cites an extensive email exchange between Hunter Biden, at the time when he was with Burisma, and then-Deputy Secretary of State Antony Blinken. That correspondence shows the two men scheduled at least one meeting with each other.

Moreover, their communications go back at least a decade. For instance, Hunter contacted Blinken’s wife, Evan Ryan, in June 2010 asking for Blinken’s non-government email address, the report said. “Can I get Toni’s non-govt email? I wanted to send him something,” the message read.

Ryan is currently serving as White House cabinet secretary.

The report also mentioned email exchanges between Hunter Biden and several other cabinet members.

US House Oversight Committee launched an investigation into alleged criminal acts committed by the Biden family, including corruption and influence peddling. Earlier this month, panel chairman Rep. James Comer (R-KY) characterized the alleged actions as “organized crime.”

The committee’s probe is partially based on accusations from a confidential FBI informant, who alleges Joe and Hunter Biden received millions of dollars from a Ukrainian energy company. Lawmakers are also investigating deals tied to China.

In June, Hunter Biden’s attorneys and the US Justice Department announced an agreement under which he will plead guilty to misdemeanor tax charges and enter a pretrial diversionary agreement on a felony firearms offense in an effort to resolve the criminal probe against him and avoid prison time.

July 10, 2023 Posted by | Corruption, Deception | , , | Leave a comment

Elizabeth Tsurkov Was Up To No Good When She Went Missing In Iraq

BY ANDREW KORYBKO | JULY 10, 2023

It was just reported that US-based Russian-Israeli academic Elizabeth Tsurkov went missing in Iraq, where she was conducting fieldwork as part of her research at Princeton. She reportedly arrived in the country on her Russian passport since Iraq doesn’t allow Israeli citizens to enter. Iran is accused of organizing her kidnapping via its local allies, which one outlet speculated was to set up a high-profile prisoner exchange for an IRGC operative who Israel claimed last month was captured inside the Islamic Republic itself.

The Mainstream Media is portraying Tsurkov as an innocent victim after an unnamed senior Israeli official denied that she’s a member of Mossad like some had begun to suspect. Regardless of whatever her ties with that country’s intelligence agency may or may not be, she was up to no good when she went missing in Iraq. From the perspective of local patriotic groups, it would have been legitimate to detain Tsurkov for the five reasons that will now be explained.

For starters, she should never have entered a country that prohibits entry to Israeli citizens like herself. By arriving in Iraqi on her Russian passport, she deliberately deceived the authorities. Once this was discovered, it immediately put her and everyone who she’d hitherto come into contact with there under suspicion of being spies. She therefore behaved highly irresponsibly, which is unbecoming of an Ivy League researcher like she presents herself as and thus casts further doubt on her credibility.

The second point is that the very nature of her work makes her suspicious. According to the New Lines Institute for Strategy and Policy where she’s a Non-Resident Fellow, “Her research is based on a large network of contacts – ordinary civilians, activists, combatants and communal, political and military leaders – which she has established across the Middle East and particularly in Syria, Iraq and Israel-Palestine.” The Iraqi counterintelligence service therefore had grounds to be concerned by her activity.

Third, she was clandestinely cultivating her vast regional network with sources whose countries prohibit their people from having any ties with her country or its nationals. She as an Israeli would have certainly known this, which means that she purposely put these people at risk for reasons that only she herself can account for. Researchers are supposed to operate according to a code of ethics whereby they never do anything that could bring harm to their subjects, though Tsurkov did precisely the opposite.

The fourth point is that she was conscious of her work advancing Israeli interests, whether the way she subjectively understands them as being or per speculative orders from suspected handlers, as evidenced by the fact that her Twitter handle @Elizrael explicitly references that country. She has the right to publicly self-identify with any country and thus be associated with it by others, especially if she’s its national, but this just goes to show that she knew that everything she was doing put her sources at risk.

And finally, local patriotic groups might not have trusted their corrupt country’s security services to properly deal with the counterintelligence threat posed by Tsurkov upon discovering her ties to Israel and the suspicious nature of her work, which is why they might have acted unilaterally as vigilantes. No value judgement is being made either way about the scenario in which such groups might have been responsible for her disappearance, but just to point out why they might have acted outside legal bounds.

Tsurkov should have known better than to visit Iraq seeing as how it’s illegal for Israeli citizens to do so, yet she still went anyway in order to expand her network of sources there on the pretext of conducting fieldwork as part of her research at Princeton and deceptively entered on her Russian passport. Even if she had nothing to do with Israel, her work would have still placed her on the radar of regional counterintelligence services, who investigate foreign-connected networks inside their countries.

Nobody who’s truly up to any good would ever enter a country where they’re legally prohibited from visiting by using another passport, let alone to clandestinely expand their network of sources there. She knowingly misled the authorities and then put her contacts at risk by meeting with them in person afterwards. Even worse, she did all this while publicly self-identifying on social media with the same country that they’re legally prohibited from having any ties.

One can still support Tsurkov and remain convinced that she’s supposedly an innocent victim exactly as the Mainstream Media claims, but it’s dishonest to deny that she behaved highly irresponsibly at great risk to herself and her sources inside Iraq, which contradicted expectations of an Ivy League researcher. For that reason, there are indeed plausible reasons to suspect her of conducting espionage under that cover, though whether or not she should have reportedly been detained remains a matter of debate.

July 10, 2023 Posted by | Deception | , | Leave a comment

How FDA Spins the Science on Cellphone Radiation and Human Health Risks

By Suzanne Burdick, Ph.D. | The Defender | July 7, 2023

Editor’s note: This is the first in a three-part series examining key questions in the public debate on the safety of wireless radiation. Part I addresses the question, How did the FDA arrive at its position on cellphones and cancer?

The U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) claims there’s not enough scientific evidence to link cellphone use to health problems — but according to Devra Davis, Ph.D., MPH, a toxicologist and epidemiologist, the FDA’s claim is untrue and misleading.

Davis spoke with The Defender about the important backstory leading up to the FDA’s position on cellphone radiation as it relates to human health.

To support its statement — that “the weight of scientific evidence has not linked exposure to radio frequency energy from cell phone use with any health problems” — the FDA references a 2008-2018 literature review it conducted on radiofrequency (RF) radiation and cancer.

After completing the review, the FDA stated: “To date, there is no consistent or credible scientific evidence of health problems caused by the exposure to radio frequency energy emitted by cell phones.”

However, Davis said the FDA’s review was never signed. In other words, the names of the individuals who authored the report were never publicly released.

Davis has authored more than 200 peer-reviewed publications in books and journals, ranging from the Lancet to the Journal of the American Medical Association. She is the founding director of the Board on Environmental Studies and Toxicology of the U.S. National Research Council at the National Academy of Sciences and the founder and president of Environmental Health Trust.

Davis, who worked as a scientific adviser under multiple presidential administrations said, “Normally, when you have a review at that high level it’s quite consequential and it’s always signed.”

“The reason it was unsigned, I believe,” Davis told The Defender, “is because no one in the FDA was willing to put their name behind such a piece of junk. It was absolute nonsense,” she said. “It ignored many publications and only relied on an incredibly skewed interpretation of the literature — and I’m being generous when I say it like that.”

Davis pointed out that the FDA issued the review shortly after the National Toxicology Program (NTP) completed its multi-year $30 million study on cellphone radiation.

In that study, NTP researchers concluded there was “clear evidence” that male rats exposed to high levels of RF like that used in 2G and 3G cellphones developed cancerous heart tumors, and “some evidence” of tumors in the brain and adrenal gland of exposed male rats.

The NTP for decades has been the premier governmental testing program for pharmaceuticals, chemicals and radiation, said Davis, who served on the board of scientific counselors for the NTP when it was first started in the 1980s.

‘Gold Standard’ NTP study findings suppressed 

Davis told The Defender that the government had access to a “gold standard program testing with positive results” that were consistent with and corroborated dozens of other studies. “It wasn’t like it [the NTP study] was a one-off study,” she said.

Once the word got out that the findings of the NTP study were positive — meaning the government researchers had found an association between cellphone radiation and the growth of cancerous tumors — the telecommunication industry “started its tactics” to suppress the findings, Davis said.

Davis has been researching such tactics for more than a decade. This fall she plans to release a new edition of her 2010 book, “Disconnect: The Truth About Cell Phone Radiation, What the Industry Is Doing to Hide It, and How to Protect Your Family.”

Instead of the NTP study report being released in 2016 when it was first ready, she said, the telecom industry exerted pressure to subject the study’s conclusions to an unprecedented level of scrutiny.

“When the first drafts began to circulate internally, it was elevated for a peer review unlike any that has ever been conducted in the history of the entire program — and I can say that with great certainty. No other compound or substance [studied by the NTP] has ever been subject to this level of peer review,” Davis said.

A panel of external scientific experts convened for a three-day review of the study and its conclusions in March 2018.

However, rather than downplaying the study’s conclusions, the experts concluded that the scientific evidence in the study was so strong that they recommended the NTP reclassify some of its conclusions from “some evidence” to “clear evidence” of carcinogenic activity.

Davis — who attended the three-day review — said, “The reviewers that had been picked were people who were top-of-the-game toxicologists from Proctor and Gamble, from [Nokia] Bell Labs. [They were] industry toxicologists, but they were straight-up people.”

Davis said many of the experts spoke with her privately. “The woman from Proctor and Gamble was concerned about her kids. She said, ‘This [cellphone radiation] is not appropriate.’ I said, ‘Yes, that’s what we’ve been trying to say for some time.’”

More than 250 scientists — who together have published over 2,000 papers and letters on the biologic and health effects of non-ionizing electromagnetic fields (EMFs) produced by wireless devices, including cellphones — signed the International EMF Scientist Appeal, which calls for health warnings and stronger exposure limits.

FDA rejects study it solicited, ‘spins’ it as faulty 

When the experts’ review of the NTP study was released, the FDA — which in 1999 requested the study and reviewed all its protocols, interim reports and final reports — the agency in November 2018, repudiated the study and in February 2020, released the unsigned literature review that criticized the study.

“They [the FDA] suddenly said, ‘Well, the exposure chambers [used in the study] are not relevant to humans. The [radiation] levels were too high,’” Davis said. “They were not.”

Davis was not alone in disagreeing with the FDA’s rejection of the NTP study. More than 20 scientists, including Davis, wrote a letter calling on the FDA to retract the literature review. Many scientists individually wrote to the FDA as well.

Moreover, the Environmental Health Trust wrote a 188-page report on the FDA’s inaccuracies in its research review and safety determinations about cellphone radiation.

Joel Moskowitz, Ph.D., director of the Center for Family and Community Health at the University of California, Berkeley, who has researched cellphone radiation for over a decade, identified nine “biased statements” made about the NTP study that “tend to create doubt about data quality and implications.”

In “SPIN vs FACT: National Toxicology Program report on cancer risk from cellphone radiation,” Moskowitz lists and counters each statement. For example, Moskowitz noted that the claim the study’s conclusions were faulty was rebutted by the study report itself.

Moskowitz also pointed out that Christopher Portier, Ph.D., a retired head of the NTP who helped launch the study and still sometimes works for the federal government as a consultant scientist, told Scientific American, “This is by far — far and away — the most carefully done cell phone bioassay, a biological assessment.”

How telecom industry war-gamed study’s results to manufacture doubt

According to Davis, the telecom industry has for decades influenced governmental agencies such as the FDA to “manufacture doubt” about scientific studies — such as the NTP study — that do not benefit it.

She pointed out that in the early 1990s, Motorola launched a “disinformation campaign to confuse the public.” According to the Environmental Health Trust:

“When first reports that cell phone radiation could damage DNA emerged from the laboratory of Henry Lai and N.P. Singh [both researchers at the University of Washington, Seattle] in the 90’s, a memo written by Motorola to their media advisors in 1994 announced the clear strategy that remains alive and well: war-game the science.”

The “wargame” memo — first released by Microwave News (see page 13) — showed that Norman Sandler of Motorola’s corporate communications department on Dec. 13, 1994, wrote to Michael Kehs of the Burson-Marsteller public relations firm in Washington to plan how Motorola would respond to Lai and Singh’s findings.

Sandler and Kehs had a three-point plan to impede further scientific research on how cellphone radiation might cause DNA damage and to create public doubt in such studies. The plan involved:

  1. Delaying — or halting — Lai and Singh from continuing their DNA research.
  2. Preventing other scientists from replicating the study, or carefully selecting scientists who would.
  3. Convincing the press and the public using industry-selected scientists that the Lai-Singh DNA study results were of marginal importance and with questionable relevance in regard to the question of whether cellphones are safe for humans.

“I think we have sufficiently war-gamed the Lai-Singh issue, assuming SAG [the Scientific Advisory Group] and CTIA [the Cellular Telecommunications Industry Association] have done their homework,” Sandler said.

Sandler said Motorola’s executive vice president was “adamant” that the industry come up with a “forceful one- or two-sentence portion of our standby statement that puts a damper on speculation arising from this research.”

Sandler proposed the industry say:

“While this work raises some interesting questions about possible biological effects, it is our understanding that there are too many uncertainties — related to the methodology employed, the findings that have been reported and the science that underlies them — to draw any conclusions about its significance at this time.”

“That exact message,” Davis said, “keeps getting repeated and is well-funded to create doubts.”

She added:

“The [telecom] industry has been very effective in their war games against science and scientists. We have to do a better job of clarifying the science and countering misleading and selective data from industry.”

Next in this series: What’s behind the 5G rollout?


Suzanne Burdick, Ph.D., is a reporter and researcher for The Defender based in Fairfield, Iowa. She holds a Ph.D. in Communication Studies from the University of Texas at Austin (2021), and a master’s degree in communication and leadership from Gonzaga University (2015). Her scholarship has been published in Health Communication. She has taught at various academic institutions in the United States and is fluent in Spanish.

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

July 9, 2023 Posted by | Deception, Science and Pseudo-Science, Timeless or most popular | | Leave a comment