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US admits Kiev killed Russian journalist Daria Dugina 

But it remains silent about Western possible involvement in the crime

By Lucas Leiroz | October 7, 2022

In a recent article published by The New York Times, it was reported that US intelligence believes Kiev authorized the terrorist attack that murdered Russian journalist and activist Daria Dugina, daughter of the political scientist and philosopher Aleksandr Dugin. With this, the prevailing narrative on the case in the US takes on an accusatory tone against Ukraine, but the silence remains on the connivance of Western countries, which refused to help the Russians to capture those responsible for the attack.

The article cites unidentified sources that confirm the Russian version that Dugina’s death was caused by an intelligence operation planned, authorized, and executed by Kiev’s agents. According to NYT’s sources, information confirming the Ukrainian authorship of the attack was shared among US officials recently, thus corroborating the suspicions previously showed not only by Moscow, but also by many experts around the world. 

The article, however, emphasizes that the operation was conducted exclusively by Ukrainian officials, with no US agents participating. Apparently, American intelligence did not take note of any planned Ukrainian attack and only obtained confirmation about the plans of its Ukrainian partners much later, with the Americans even “admonishing” Kiev for having conducted such a bold operation.

“The United States took no part in the attack, either by providing intelligence or other assistance, officials said. American officials also said they were not aware of the operation ahead of time and would have opposed the killing had they been consulted. Afterward, American officials admonished Ukrainian officials over the assassination, they said”, the article mentions.

It is curious to observe how the American media has suddenly changed its assertion, after months denying the veracity of the reports published by the Russian government on the case. Some Western journalists even spread conspiracy theories about the possible involvement of the Russian state itself in the attack, trying to create the story that Moscow had planned a false flag operation to justify a military escalation.

Over time, however, the veracity of the Russian explanation of the case became undeniable. Russia did not initiate any escalation in the conflict, which made the false flag plot lose credibility. And the very Ukrainian practice of murdering civilians became so well known that it could no longer be hidden. Thus, for the NYT disseminating this type of content precisely at this time serves American interests perfectly, as a large media vehicle is getting ahead in releasing an “official version” of the facts, preemptively taking control of the narrative.

It is important to emphasize that American intelligence does not act in defense of “press freedom” when it communicates data to the major newspapers. There are always well-defined strategies and clear objectives to be achieved. In this case, the objective is to isolate the blame for the attack in Kiev and to exempt Western countries from any co-responsibility before Russian investigations go even deeper and other data are revealed. Now, any eventual Western involvement could be called a “conspiracy theory”.

However, it is curious to think that there is such a lack of communication between the Ukrainian and American intelligences. The Ukrainian neo-Nazi regime not only serves as a proxy for American interests but is virtually guided by the US in all its decisions, with NATO agents acting among the strategists in Kiev. It is hard to believe that NATO was not even aware that an operation as complex as the one that killed Daria was being planned by its partners.

However, Western contribution to Daria’s assassination goes beyond that. Western countries refused to cooperate with Russia to capture Daria’s murderer even after Moscow published official data on the conclusion of its investigations. Daria’s assassin, the Ukrainian spy, member of the Azov Battalion Natalya Vovk, after committing the crime fled to Estonia and then to Austria. Russia asked for cooperation and asked European authorities to help find the killer but received no response. In fact, this can be interpreted as a form of “participation”, considering that Western countries deliberately prevented Russia from capturing a criminal responsible for the death of a civilian, even though there was sufficient evidence of Vovk’s involvement in the crime.

Now that the Americans have admitted that their proxies killed an innocent civilian – and assuming the narration that the Ukrainians acted alone to be true – the least the Europeans should do is a formal apology and start cooperating so that Ukrainian criminals do not freely cross their borders when they are wanted in other countries. And the US should commit to preventing Kiev from doing anything like that again.

It remains to be seen, however, if the West is really innocent in this case or if this NYT’s publication was just a strategic move to take control of the narrative before something more frightening is revealed in the near future.

Lucas Leiroz is a researcher in Social Sciences at the Rural Federal University of Rio de Janeiro; geopolitical consultant. You can follow Lucas on Telegram.

October 7, 2022 Posted by | Deception | , | Leave a comment

Whodunit?

By Way of Deception, Thou Shalt do War

By Doug E. Steil | Aletho News | October 7, 2022

With the mainstream crying Russia, which makes zero sense… (I have the keys to the taxi I’m driving, which pays my bills but to turn it off, I’ll blow it up also:

On 25 July 2022, Gazprom announced it will reduce gas flows to Germany to 20% of the maximum capacity, or 50% of the current throughput. The company shut down the pipeline for 10 days because of maintenance.

On 31 August 2022, Gazprom halted any gas delivery through Nord Stream 1 for three days, officially because of maintenance. On 2 September 2022, the company announced that natural gas supplies via the Nord Stream 1 pipeline would remain shut off indefinitely until the main gas turbine at the Portovaya compressor station near St Petersburg was fixed from an engine oil leak.

And the alternative mainstream crying USA, which makes more sense, but the plethora of memes and ease in which the ‘almost mainstream’ talks about this option… including the infamous ‘thank you USA’ tweet from the (Jewish) former Polish foreign minister, Sikorski, who then deleted it (after millions of views and re-tweets)… it all looks remarkably ‘black or white’; and this, as always, should be a red flag.

Who? How? Why? are the questions everyone is asking… but no one asked when?

So when did this happen?

On 26 September 2022, Danish and Swedish authorities reported a number of explosions at both Nord Stream lines (only string A in NS2): the resulting damage causing a series of gas leaks. The European Union considers the incident to be intentional sabotage.

Anything else occured on September 26, 2022?

Rosh Hashanah 2022 began in the evening of Sunday, September 25 and ended in the evening of Tuesday, September 27.

Ah… but what is Rosh Hashanah ?

Rosh HaShanah (Hebrew: רֹאשׁ הַשָּׁנָה, Rōʾš hašŠānā, lit. “head of the year”) is the Jewish New Year. The biblical name for this holiday is Yom Teruah (יוֹם תְּרוּעָה, Yōm Tərūʿā), literally “day of shouting or blasting.” It is the first of the Jewish High Holy Days (יָמִים נוֹרָאִים, Yāmīm NōrāʾīmDays of Awe”).

Literally day of shouting or BLASTING?

Who suffers most with Nordstream being blown up? Germany. Do a little google search for « germans to freeze this winter »…  there are thousands of articles… most written even before september…

Nordstream was a way for Germany to get gas direct from Russia, without paying expensive transit costs through Eastern European middlemen… Eastern European middlemen.

October 7, 2022 Posted by | Deception, Timeless or most popular, War Crimes | , | Leave a comment

A history of US threats to use nuclear weapons

By David North | WSWS | October 5, 2022

The Biden administration and the media present Putin’s threat to use nuclear weapons in response to military setbacks as an unprecedented break with long-established and hitherto unquestioned rules of international statecraft. This narrative is a lie.

In fact, the United States and other imperialist powers have not only considered on several critical occasions using nuclear weapons to reverse military defeats. They have directly threatened to drop atom bombs in order to extract concessions from their enemies.

There are the well-documented demands of General Douglas MacArthur for the dropping of nuclear bombs on China, President Eisenhower’s weighing of France’s request for the detonation of nuclear devices at Dien Bien Phu, and President Kennedy’s threats during the Cuban Missile Crisis.

Far less known and even more serious were the use of nuclear threats by President Nixon against the USSR and Vietnam. Operation Giant Lance was initiated on October 27, 1969, according to Wikipedia, to force a settlement of the Vietnam War on terms favorable to the US.

According to Wikipedia, Nixon “authorized a squadron of 18 B-52 bombers to patrol the Arctic polar ice caps and escalate the nuclear threat … to coerce both the Soviet Union and North Vietnam to agree on favorable terms with the US, and conclusively end the Vietnam War.”

Nixon made use of what was referred to as the “madman” tactic to convince the Soviet Union that he was capable of ordering a nuclear strike. Another operation, related to Giant Lance, was “Duck Hook.”

Its purpose was to force North Vietnam, using the threat of a massive nuclear strike, to accept US terms for ending the war. Wikipedia states that Duck Hook called for the nuclear bombing of military targets throughout North Vietnam. This included “the saturation bombing of Hanoi and Haiphong, the bombing of dikes to destroy the food supply of much of the population of North Vietnam, air strikes against North Vietnam’s northeast line of communications as well as passes and bridges at the Chinese border …”

Henry Kissinger, Nixon’s criminal accomplice, told the president that the US had to be prepared to use nuclear weapons. In a memo to Nixon, Kissinger wrote: “To achieve its full effect on Hanoi’s thinking, the action must be brutal.”

Eventually, because of doubts about its strategic effectiveness and fear of a violent popular reaction, Duck Hook was not implemented. But Nixon continued to threaten Vietnam and the Soviet Union with nuclear war.

This history proves that 1) the claims that Putin is breaking a previously unquestioned taboo on the use of nuclear weapons are fraudulent; and 2) that the US, if confronted with the prospect of military defeat, would certainly resort to nuclear warfare.

Knowing that the US would use nuclear weapons if confronted with a desperate military situation, the Biden administration’s relentless efforts to push Putin into a corner and force capitulation are totally reckless.

October 7, 2022 Posted by | Deception, Militarism, Timeless or most popular | | Leave a comment

Doctors Call for Investigation Into FSMB Attacks on Physicians, Ties to Big Pharma

By Suzanne Burdick, Ph.D. | The Defender | October 4, 2022

Scroll down for video

Dr. Emanuel Garcia, a New Zealand doctor who said he believes he lost his medical license for questioning and speaking out against the official COVID-19 narrative, also believes that the U.S.-based Federation of State Medical Boards (FSMB) played a role.

“We desperately need a real and deep investigation into this private entity that is pulling strings worldwide,” Garcia told The Defender.

Garcia — a psychoanalyst and psychotherapist who received his M.D. from the University of Pennsylvania in 1986 — is board-certified in psychiatry and neurology by the American Board of Psychiatry and Neurology. He has lived in New Zealand since 2006.

Garcia was a public health consultant psychiatrist until the end of October 2021, when he resigned from his position at the Hutt Valley District Health Board rather than get a COVID-19 vaccine, he said.

His medical license came up for renewal with the Medical Council of New Zealand at that same time.

Garcia reapplied for his license to keep it — but instead of receiving a successful renewal notice from the country’s medical council, Oct. 29, 2021, he received a letter stating that the council had “resolved” to suspend him from practicing because, “Dr. Garcia’s conduct raises one or more questions about the appropriateness of his conduct or the safety of his practice.”

In an interview with The Defender, Garcia said:

“Apparently, the chief psychiatrist of my hospital reported me to the medical council because I made these videos wherein I spoke about natural immunity, the early treatment, how ridiculous it was to try to eliminate a respiratory environment.”

The council found fault with Garcia’s lack of “adherence” to the council’s May 6, 2021, guidance statement, “COVID-19 Vaccine and Your Professional Responsibility,” and his lack of “adherence” to other statements made by the council.

Council Chair Dr. Curtis Walker said there was no place for “anti-vaccine messages” in a medical professional’s practice — or on their social media.

In its letter, the council listed complaints about Garcia’s behavior, including that he wrote an open letter to the prime minister titled, “Another Disastrous National Lockdown,” posted videos about COVID-19 on Voices For FreedomYouTube and Odysee, and voiced opinions about the handling of COVID-19 on social media that did not align with the council’s statements.

Garcia called the letter “a farce.” He said none of the things he did were “great” or “revolutionary” — in his mind, he was pointing out “basic things” to the public as he witnessed the unfolding of the COVID-19 pandemic and the New Zealand government’s response to it.

Garcia didn’t fight the suspension because he was “sick of their duplicity” and “wanted out.”

“My lawyers were advising me to fight and to sign a so-called ‘voluntary undertaking’ which would have muzzled me,” he said.

If he had signed the voluntary undertaking, Garcia would have agreed to not say anything that ran counter to the council’s statements on COVID-19. The idea was, he said, that doctors who signed a voluntary undertaking were signaling to the council that they were willing to “play by their rules” and that the council, therefore, would “be more lenient with the punishment they dole out” — such as fines or suspension of the doctors’ license.

“I refused,” Garcia said. “I gave a lot of talks at parliament during the protests here in New Zealand, and I spoke freely — unfettered.”

Garcia said he chose to retain his freedom of speech and was able to “fully disengage” from the council through the use of common law, or equity law, to legally sever his professional ties to the council.

“According to the rules and principles of equity, I exercised my equitable right to annul, abrogate and cancel my registration with the Medical Council of New Zealand,” Garcia said.

Soon afterward, Garcia learned about the council’s connection with the International Association of Medical Regulatory Authorities (IAMRA), which is the international arm of the FSMB.

“The Chair-Elect of the IAMRA, Joan Simeon, just happens to be the CEO of the Medical Council of New Zealand, and the Secretary of the IAMRA, Dr. Humayun Chaudhry, just happens to be the President and CEO of the FSMB,” Garcia said.

Doctors worldwide who have “questioned things” have come under attack by their medical boards — and these medical boards “all come under the aegis of the FSMB,” Garcia said.

Garcia told The Defender :

“We have to do something different. We have to create an entirely new medical system that is out of the grip of these board-run matrices, one that honors basic medical precepts and practices rather than following algorithmic guideline-driven procedures engineered by bureaucrats.

“There is an opportunity for a magnificent renaissance of healthcare and it WON’T happen within the existing totalitarian system, it has to come from us.”

FSMB report targets practitioners of alternative medicine

Most doctors have not heard of the FSMB and are unaware of its influence, according to Garcia. He, himself, was unaware until his colleague, Dr. Bruce Dooley, a U.S.-trained medical practitioner who also lives in New Zealand, told him about it.

Dooley recently spoke out publicly about his knowledge of the FSMB.

In an “explosive” Sept. 24 interview with FreeNZ’s Liz Gunn, Dooley explained that the FSMB and IAMRA are private “registered charities with ‘hidden and anonymous’ donors who oversee disciplinary action of licensed medical doctors.”

Dooley — who trained at Jefferson Medical College (now called Sidney Kimmel Medical College) in Philadelphia, has a master’s in immunology and virus research from Villanova University and is a medical practitioner licensed in Hawaii, Florida and New Zealand — said the FSMB and IAMRA particularly target clinicians working beyond the Big Pharma paradigm, whom they label as “fringe” or “quack.”

“Big money must not be allowed to beat integrity and experience,” said a New Zealand Doctors Speaking Out With Science spokesperson in a Sept. 28 press release about Dooley’s interview with Liz Gunn.

In the late 1990s and early 2000s, while he was the president of the Florida chapter of the American College for Advancement in Medicine (ACAM), Dooley witnessed first-hand the FSMB’s attack on doctors who practice complementary and alternative medicine (CAM).

ACAM is a nonprofit organization dedicated to educating physicians and other healthcare professionals on the safe and effective application of integrative medicine.

At the rate ACAM was growing during the late 1990s, the “world’s medical scene” would have become a “totally different thing” if the FSMB had not attacked integrative doctors 25 years ago, Dooley told The Defender.

“We had 1,200 members,” Dooley said, as doctors from New Zealand, Australia and Europe who were exploring integrative medicine were joining ACAM in large numbers and bringing with them their financial resources.

“We had a million dollars in the bank,” he added.

As a leading CAM practitioner, Dooley testified about the value of CAM during the Clinton administration for the White House Commission on Complementary and Alternative Medicine Policy.

During this time, Dooley also investigated the FSMB by attending its annual meetings as a paying conference participant. He noted how during conference sessions, FSMB leaders encouraged doctors to harass their fellow doctors who were offering natural health treatments.

Moreover, Dooley obtained a report produced by the Special Committee on Health Care Fraud (later renamed the Special Committee on Questionable and Deceptive Health Care Practices) showing that the FSMB perceived CAM and doctors who practiced it to be a “risk to public health.”

The FSMB’s governing body in April 1997 accepted the committee’s report as policy.

The report — which is no longer available on the FSMB website but which Dooley shared with The Defender — negatively labeled CAM as “questionable” practices that could constitute “health care fraud.”

The report said:

“In April 1995, Federation President Robert E. Porter, MD, established a special committee on health care fraud. The need for such a committee arose from the proliferation of unconventional and unproven medical practices and promotions in the United States, some of which may be questionable and thereby pose a risk to public health, safety and welfare.”

But according to Dooley, the committee’s motivation was not to ensure public well-being but to ensure that Big Pharma continued to get money. Natural and integrative medicine treatments, such as CAM, were getting in the way of profits for pharmaceutical companies.

The committee’s report said, “It has been estimated that up to $100 billion is lost to health care fraud in the United States annually.”

The committee members added:

“Medical interventions that do not conform to prevailing scientific standards are becoming increasingly popular.

“It is estimated that in 1990, Americans made 425 million visits to providers of ‘unconventional’ medicine, exceeding the number of visits to all U.S. primary care physicians, at a cost of approximately $13.7 billion.”

According to Dooley, the committee’s statements are essentially anti-competitive. “It’s such an anti-competitive piece,” he told The Defender, adding:

“Basically, the end says to the medical councils, ‘Look, we’ve got to stop this. This questionable medicine stuff is growing too fast. You need to get on board with us to pretty much slap down these doctors.’”

Now, 25 years later, Dooley said, the FSMB is employing a similar tactic against doctors who share what the FSMB calls “misinformation” or “disinformation” about COVID-19.

Some doctors, like Garcia, who questioned the pharma-driven global response to the COVID-19 pandemic had their licenses suspended.

Moreover, the FSMB actively seeks to influence federal and state legal policies, thus suggesting it may have played a direct role in generating California’s new law, signed last week, that punishes doctors who share “misinformation” or “disinformation” about COVID-19 with their patients.

The FSMB’s report obtained by Dooley openly stated:

“Through its Legislative Services Department and government relations firm, the Federation monitors federal legislative initiatives to identify proposals that could impact state medical boards.

“Upon the identification of such measures, the Federation develops strategies to intervene and oppose measures that could negatively affect state medical boards. The committee supports and encourages the Federation in its legislative efforts to protect the authority of state medical boards to regulate the practice of medicine, both conventional and unconventional.”

Indeed, the FSMB’s current website says it plays a “crucial role” in advocating for federal and state policies that “positively impact the health and safety of patients and the medical regulatory system.”

Could Sherman Anti-Trust Act be key to exposing FSMB?

Dooley agreed with Garcia that there needs to be a full and transparent investigation into who exactly funds the FSMB.

An effective way to accomplish that, he said, would be for a group of doctors who practice CAM or who have lost their licenses due to sharing COVID-19 “misinformation” to form a class-action lawsuit against FSMB for violating the Sherman Anti-Trust Act.

Dooley said he voiced this idea in the late 1990s, to a class-action law firm. “After I went to two of their [FSMB’s] meetings, I actually took tapes and everything they had given out.”

“They’re quite arrogant, and they just tape everything. People are talking about ‘quack this’ and ‘how to get the quack’ in your area,’” he said.

Dooley said he told the law firm:

“Look at this. This is anti-competitive. I can get 100 doctors together who have all been ‘beaten up’ by their medical boards, all in the same way. Then we can, under discovery, find out who supports this ‘monster.’

“Because that’s the only way you’re going to get their books.”

Garcia and Dooley participate in New Zealand Doctors Speaking Out With Science, a group that has written letters to the New Zealand government expressing concern about the Pfizer COVID-19 shot, “as well as the implication from our regulatory bodies that we would be considered incompetent in our duties if we provided fully informed consent about this procedure.”

Garcia told The Defender that New Zealand Doctors Speaking Out With Science steering committee member, Dr. Matt Shelton — a primary care medical doctor since 1985 and a lecturer and examiner in integrative medicine — has had his license suspended twice.

The Defender contacted Shelton, but he was unable to give an interview by deadline.

In a Sept. 28 press release for Dooley’s interview with Liz Gunn of FreeNZ, New Zealand Doctors Speaking Out With Science said it “agrees with Ontario Supreme Court Judge Pazaratz,” who asked if “misinformation is even a real word … or has it become a crass, self-serving tool to pre-empt scrutiny and discredit your opponent?”

Watch Dooley’s interview with Liz Gunn on FreeNZ here:


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.

October 6, 2022 Posted by | Corruption, Deception, Full Spectrum Dominance, Science and Pseudo-Science | , , , | Leave a comment

Facebook and the US government have united against Americans with the ‘wrong’ views

By Felix Livshitz | Samizdat | October 6, 2022

It’s been revealed by sources within the US Department of Justice that direct messages sent through Facebook by American users, along with public postings, have been rigorously monitored, and reported to the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) if they express anti-government, anti-authority views, or if they question the legitimacy of the November 2020 presidential election’s outcome.

Witch hunt on the web

Under the terms of a secret collaboration agreement with the FBI, a Facebook staffer has, over the past 19 months, been red-flagging content they consider to be “subversive” and immediately transmitting it to the Bureau’s domestic terrorism operational unit, without the FBI having filed a single subpoena – outside the established US legal process, without probable cause, and in breach of the First Amendment, in other words.

Just as shockingly, these intercepted communications were then provided as leads and tips to FBI field offices across the US, which in turn secured subpoenas in order to officially obtain the private conversations that they already possessed, and thus cover up the fact the material had been obtained extra-legally. Facebook invariably complied with these subpoenas, and would send back “gigabytes of data and photos” within an hour, suggesting the content sought was already packaged and awaiting legal confirmation before distribution.

It is uncertain quite how many users were flagged, but it’s abundantly clear a specific type of person was of interest to the FBI – “red-blooded” conservative right-wingers, many of whom supported the right to bear arms. No one connected to Antifa, BLM or any other left-wing group was ever informed on.

It seems not a single Facebook user snitched upon for daring to be possessed of troublesome political opinions was ever arrested, or prosecuted, for their wrongthink, even though some were reportedly subject to covert surveillance and other forms of intrusion and harassment. Their views were consistently found to not translate to criminality or violence – their words were simply brutal condemnations of Biden’s election and presidency, and aggressive calls for protests.

However, once these users’ information reached FBI headquarters, it appears to have been selectively and misleadingly edited, “the most egregious parts highlighted and taken out of context” in order to perk the interest of field offices. Once the same data was sought and accessed by them via subpoena, the conversations “didn’t sound as bad” and none pointed to any “plan or orchestration to carry out any kind of violence.” No one spoke of injuring, let alone killing, anyone.

The entire operation appears to have been a gigantic waste of time but, given the Biden administration’s rhetoric about the January 6 Capitol “insurrection,” it would hardly surprise if the FBI was under intense political pressure to make as many arrests as possible of “right-wing terrorists” in order to make the sensationalist fantasies of White House officials a reality.

During the War on Terror, the FBI was in effect charged with creating a domestic terror threat, and delivered on a grand scale. Almost every major terrorism-related case in the post 9/11 period was effectively entrapment, with informants and undercover agents encouraging often mentally ill people to commit violent acts, helping them sketch mass casualty plans, and even providing the weapons to be used in the plots, which the FBI heroically busts at the last minute.

Luckily for those Facebook users flagged to the FBI, none were the victim of similar sting operations, although in the case of the October 2020 kidnapping plot targeting Michigan governor Gretchen Whitmer by militia members, at least 12 individuals involved in the planning were working for the Bureau.

Who polices the police?

In two separate statements to the New York Post, a Facebook spokesperson seemed to contradict themselves on whether the Justice Department whistleblowers’ claims were accurate. First, they said the allegations were“false because they reflect a misunderstanding of how our systems protect people from harm and how we engage with law enforcement.” An hour later, they got in touch unprompted to say the accusations were “just wrong,” rather than “false.”

Coincidentally, that spokesperson previously worked for Planned Parenthood and “Obama for America.” The latter campaign, to get the then-President re-elected in 2012, not only employed the exact same tactics as Cambridge Analytica to harvest user data without knowledge or consent, but has also admitted it was allowed by Facebook to “do things they wouldn’t have allowed someone else to do because they were on our side.”

For its part, the FBI would neither confirm nor deny the incendiary charges, although that the Bureau maintains a little-known “unclassified/law enforcement sensitive” relationship with Facebook has long-been a matter of record, and a spokesperson did concede that this connection allows for a “quick exchange” of information in an “ongoing dialogue.”

Even more ominously, if we accept that Facebook’s denial it has a subpoena-less agreement for the unfettered sharing of private user data to be truthful, this could imply that the FBI is running an agent –a “confidential human source,” in Bureau parlance– within the social media giant who has unfettered access, whether granted or not, to sensitive, private information on millions of users.

Of course, Facebook’s denial could just be a lie – or a literally true but consciously dishonest statement, in that it is aware a senior staffer is passing the FBI information and has approved the arrangement but this is not formal or officially admitted. Such a setup would grant the social media monopoly plausible deniability were questions to arise about misuse of users’ data – as they now have.

There are strong grounds to believe that whether Facebook is fully aware of the staffer’s relationship with the FBI or not, it would approve of the arrangement, and its upper-tier employees assisting US security and intelligence agencies in their work.

The Washington Post recently exposed how the Pentagon is conducting an extensive internal audit of all its psychological warfare operations online, after several fake accounts it was running were identified by researchers.

A fascinating passage in the article noted that, back in Summer 2020, David Agranovich, Facebook’s Director of Global Threat Disruption, who spent six years at the Pentagon then served as Director for Intelligence at the elite White House National Security Council, got in touch with his Pentagon pals directly, to warn them he and his team had identified a number of US military-managed trolls and bots on its network, and “if Facebook could sniff them out, so could US adversaries.”

“His point was, ‘Guys, you got caught. That’s a problem.’”

The obvious meaning of all this, which The Post apparently missed, is that senior Facebook staff consider their platform being weaponized for information warfare purposes to be acceptable if not welcome, as long as it’s US military and intelligence operatives doing it, and they don’t get “burned” – and they are willing to provide American spies with helpful guidance on how to operate in secret more effectively.

October 6, 2022 Posted by | Civil Liberties, Deception, Full Spectrum Dominance | , | Leave a comment

Population Control? Planned Parenthood Encourages Teens To Take Puberty Blockers

By Tyler Durden | Zero Hedge | October 5, 2022

Why is Planned Parenthood so interested in trans identity politics when trans people are highly unlikely to have children (only 19%)? It’s just another sign that the trans agenda is far more about population reduction that is about personal rights.

A recently unearthed infomercial made by Planned Parenthood last year is marketed directly to teens and promotes puberty blockers as a means to disrupt natural body changes in order to make teens “feel more” like the gender they believe themselves to be psychologically.

In other words, they suggest confused teens fight against their own biology by taking pharmaceuticals which are known to potentially cause chemical castration as well as permanent damage to reproductive processes. This is medically proven to occur, but with leftist politics now poisoning the sciences over the past few years there is a growing narrative that claims puberty blockers are “safe and reversible.”

The claim relies on the use of “unknown quantities,” as there is very little data on the long term effects of puberty blockers in the MAJORITY of people who take them, and in some cases short term usage means POSSIBLE reversal and limited damage to fertility. Advocates for gender affirmation surgeries and hormone therapies will often say that there “is no proof” that puberty blockers are dangerous – This is because of limited studies and data, not because the chemicals and therapies have been proven safe.

In other words, gender activists argue that you can’t prove that puberty blockers are NOT safe for everyone. While this is medically disingenuous, it’s true that we have no idea what the negative consequences of widespread gender treatments will be 20 years from now. But why take the chance in the first place?

Why allow mentally underdeveloped children with impulsive tendencies to undergo potentially permanent and damaging medical procedures? Why let them destroy themselves in the future just to make them “feel better” today? In the meantime, the data that does exist shows risk of fertility damage depending on length of use.

Furthermore, the primary rationale for the use of puberty blockers and affirmation surgery is to improve the mental health of the individual patient. Yet, we can use the same conditions as the gender activists here by pointing out there there is little proof that such measures actually help the mental health of people with gender dysphoria.

Planned Parenthood from its very creation by elitist Margarate Sanger has made population control its primary mission.  As Sanger once stated:

“The most serious evil of our times is that of encouraging the bringing into the world of large families. The most immoral practice of the day is breeding too many children… The most merciful thing that the large family does to one of its infant members is to kill it.”

From “Woman and the New Race,” 1920, Chapter 5: The Wickedness of Creating Large Families

Sanger was an avid supporter of the “Baby Code” in 1934, which would have required married couples to get a permit in order to have a child, and the government would determine if the couple was “fit” to raise a child. Her contentions are recorded in her article “America Needs a Code for Babies,” March 27, 1934, Margaret Sanger Papers, Library of Congress, 128:0312B

The trans agenda along with puberty blockers and affirmation surgeries seem to be a natural extension of the population control goals of the founders of Planned Parenthood. Therefore, it’s not at all surprising that they would become so involved in the issue.


The Blaze

… On “The News & Why It Matters,” BlazeTV host Sara Gonzales blasted Planned Parenthood’s predatory new revenue source and revealed the ugly truth about these so-called “safe” medical “treatments.”

“The reason that I find this [commercial] to be particularly infuriating is because I know the truth about these puberty blockers,” Sara said. “I know the truth about this gender-affirming care, and all of these medications, and all of these things with potential side effects, and potentially irreversible effects that are not discussed within the medical community. The ‘trusted adult’ that they mention [in the video], the doctors, the nurses, none of those people actually tell you the real truth about what can happen.”

Sara then played a heartbreaking video clip of a “detransitioned” woman who suffers from borderline personality disorder but was misled to believe that a gender transition was the “cure” for her very difficult mental illness.

“I just took the cure that was handed to me. I was told that I was being given a cure, and I wouldn’t want to kill myself any more. Um, and it wasn’t true,” the woman sobs. “I lost my voice. I lost my chest. I don’t know if I’m going to be able to have kids. I feel like no one wants to date me or love me because I’m ruined.”

“Difficult to watch? Yes. Absolutely necessary to watch? Yes,” Sara stated. “Because this is the real truth about what the medical community is doing to all of these confused or mentally ill kids, and teens, and adults. And they don’t want to talk about it, but we will.”

Watch the video clip to catch the conversation or find full episodes of “The News & Why It Matters” here. Can’t watch? Download the podcast here.

October 6, 2022 Posted by | Deception, Timeless or most popular, Video | | Leave a comment

The buffoon delivering a permanent energy crisis

By Andrew Montford | TCW Defending Freedom | October 4, 2022

In 2017 it was announced that windfarms had agreed to sell power to the grid at just £57 per megawatt hour. It heralded, said the cutters-and-pasters of press releases in the mainstream media, a new era of cheap renewable power. A few stubborn souls pointed out that there was no sign that windfarms were getting any cheaper to build and run, but such naysayers were shunned and insulted, and the establishment carried on as if nothing had happened.

Five years on, and the windfarms concerned are busily selling power into the open market at anything between four and ten times the prices they had agreed. Their agreements have gone unfulfilled. The extra cost to consumers is running into billions of pounds every year.

We were tricked, big time. But we live and learn by our errors. You’d have to be pretty slow on the uptake to fall for a multi-billion-pound trick like that a second time, wouldn’t you?

Unfortunately, this is precisely what Sir John Armitt, the chairman of the National Infrastructure Commission, seems to have done. In fact, rather than being ‘once bitten twice shy’, he seems to be pleading ‘Bite me harder, and this time do it where is really hurts.’ Let me explain.

In an article in the Telegraph, Sir John says we need lots more renewable energy, and adds that the latest auctions ‘secured prices nine times cheaper than current high electricity prices set by gas generation’. Well, yes, but we have already seen that auction price contracts are a trick; the last round of agreements were abandoned the moment operators found they could get more in the open market. Does Sir John not know this? Can the chairman of the National Infrastructure Commission really be so divorced from the realities of the energy system? Moreover, he clearly understands that the price differential between gas-fired and wind prices is mostly temporary – a function of the war in Ukraine driving up gas prices – but still believes it should motivate permanent changes to the electricity system. What can he be thinking?

Sir John’s positions on other aspects of the energy system are equally mystifying. He seems to think there is a global market for gas. But a global market would have a global price, and that is simply not the case: European gas prices are (in dollar terms) currently 70 per cent higher than UK ones and 800 per cent higher than US ones (!) Does Sir John not understand this? How can he possibly think there is a global market? Is there nobody at the National Infrastructure Commission who can put him right?

Nor is the auction price trick the only example of Sir John failing to learn from experience. In one notable flight of fantasy in his article he says that ‘reducing prices, enhancing energy security and reaching net zero carbon emissions by 2050 all point in the same direction’. Huh? Between 2002 and 2020, a period when gas prices were broadly flat, electricity prices for consumers roughly doubled, a function of the inefficiencies that renewables impose on every other generator and on the grid as a whole. How can he think that more renewables will bring lower prices? He understands that the gas price spike is temporary! And as for security, the electricity grid has been severely destabilised by renewables (because they have no ‘inertia’, in the jargon). A million people were left in the dark in 2019, and the grid as whole is now in danger of falling over completely. But Sir John wants more!

In similar fashion, he says we should be furiously insulating our housing stock. Yet we simply cannot get away from the fact that most of the housing stock is old and, in our humid maritime climate, needs to breathe to prevent damp and mould. Has Sir John not learned from the fiasco the last time a crash insulation programme was tried? Two million homes were damaged. Lives were ruined. Is he even aware that this happened?

On and on he goes. We should use hydrogen to store energy, he suggests, without apparently a thought to the cost involved. Can the chairman of the National Infrastructure Commission really not understand that in going from electricity to hydrogen and back, two-thirds of the energy is lost? So when we start emptying the hydrogen store, it will set market prices, which will soar in response, probably to levels similar to what we see today, far, far higher than the economy can bear.

In other words, Sir John’s ideas will deliver a permanent energy crisis and a great depression. It is no more than you would expect from such an epitome of the British establishment: urbane, erudite, a consummate networker. And utterly incompetent.

October 5, 2022 Posted by | Deception, Economics, Malthusian Ideology, Phony Scarcity | | Leave a comment

Sliding doors

The publication of Prozac Nation was a societal inflection point that ushered in multiple pharmacological disasters

By Toby Rogers | October 5, 2022

I. The Promise

In the late 1980s/early 1990s my parents spent a small fortune to send me to what was, at the time, the top-ranked small liberal arts college in the country. While the Ivies train up the future ruling class, small private liberal arts colleges offered something far more alluring.

Hanging in the air at these small private colleges was a promise that went something like this: the social sciences, particularly psychology and sociology, have figured things out. If we just follow their wise teachings, we will emerge in a utopian society where there is depth and meaning, people are decent and real with each other, differences are worked out (through “I” statements and “position switching” amongst other tools), and above all people are happy.

I imagine it began with Freud and Jung, accelerated with Foucault and Butler, but it was also present in the pragmatic psychologists including Barry Schwartz and the later happiness researchers.

The promise co-opted the central notion of many 20th century revolutions — that a new man and new woman were being born from the ashes of the old system and that we would find better ways of relating to each other than any society heretofore.

This promise was EVERYWHERE — from the new student orientation to the mandatory date rape prevention workshops to resident advisor trainings to student clubs and late-night conversations in the common areas of the dorms. A better world was possible and we were the ones to usher it in. The promise was going to radiate out to the rest of society like a pebble dropped into a pond.

It’s heartbreaking to reflect on this now because: 1.) the promise was never fulfilled (perhaps because it was always just a fantasy); and, 2.) to the extent that this vision soldiers on in some form it has taken an incredibly dark turn and now resembles fascism more than anything else.


II. An inflection point

Elizabeth Wurtzel was a fierce talent. Yes, she went to Harvard but she was the embodiment of the promise. A third wave feminist, she was unabashed in her celebration of sexuality and pleasure. As a writer she was a sorceress — able to pull magic, truth, and wisdom out of thin air.

Ms. Wurtzel popularized the Pain & Suffering Memoir genre with the publication of her book Prozac Nation in 1994. The book was raw, confessional, and witty. It felt like she had discovered capital T Truth. She went inside, as the psychologists (and Buddhists) had trained us to do, explored her emotional pain with all of its searing intensity, and redeemed it by giving it meaning. Ms. Wurtzel modeled how to be vulnerable, ironic, and strong. By the end of the book she was our friend and shrink. She had gone through the dark night of the soul and had come out on the other side, victorious.

I loved Prozac Nation and I’m devastated by what has transpired since.


III. The misuse of a once-in-a-generation talent

There was always a strange sleight of hand involved in Prozac Nation. In spite of the extraordinary psychological heavy lifting for over three hundred pages — the remedy in the end was a magic little pill.

In retrospect, Elizabeth Wurtzel and all of us got played by the most corrupt industry in the history of the world.

The success of Prozac Nation was not an accident. For a while, the book was everywhere — on magazine covers, on all of the chatty morning shows, and in doctors’ waiting rooms. It was part of a wave of books including Listening to Prozac that assured the public that the scientists have it figured out and this magic little pill will make all of your troubles go away. I am almost certain that behind the scenes Pharma spent millions of dollars to promote this book and turn Ms. Wurtzel into a household name.

With the success of Prozac Nation an entire generation abandoned the century-long promise of the social sciences and said, “just write me that script doc.”

The tragedy of Elizabeth Wurtzel is that Pharma took a spectacularly talented thinker and writer and used her to betray her whole generation. The end result has been the gradual enslavement of Generation X (and the rest of society) to the cartel.


IV. The demise of Elizabeth Wurtzel

Things did not turn out well for Ms. Wurtzel. Her next book was Bitch: In Praise of Difficult Women. Apparently, the Prozac had stopped working so she resorted to snorting upwards of 40 crushed Ritalin tablets a day — and when that didn’t work she turned to cocaine. That led to rehab and another memoir — this time about dealing with addiction (More, Now, Again: A Memoir of Addiction). By this point she had lost the plot to her own story. She managed a brief reset by going to Yale Law School (always the best) and working for super lawyer David Boies for a few years. At 47 she developed breast cancer and she wrote about that in her trademark style. At 52 she was dead from leptomeningeal cancer.

(Photo credit: Dan Callister/Shutterstock)

In all of her brilliant writing, Ms. Wurtzel never criticized the white coats nor their pharmaceutical handlers in spite of the myriad ways that they failed her. Ms. Wurtzel blamed the BRCA gene mutation for her breast cancer and praised the heroic doctors and scientists who identified it and treated it (with a double mastectomy and reconstruction surgery).

The BRCA gene mutation very well could be the cause of her death. But there is another explanation that is also plausible — one that is not allowed in the mainstream media. Prozac is a fluoride compound (fluoxetine). Fluoxetine is 18.5% fluoride by weight.

Fluoride is toxic. Ms. Wurtzel’s miracle pill was actually depositing poison into her bone marrow, brain, thyroid gland, lymph nodes, fatty tissue, and vital organs, day after day, year after year.

It never cured her depression — any gains were short-lived and supplemented by drugs and alcohol.

The entire story of Prozac Nation was based a toxic and deadly lie.


V. The legacy of Prozac Nation

Things did not turn out well for the rest of us either.

Psychiatrist David Healy figured out the scam early on and went to great lengths to alert others with books including Let Them Eat Prozac (2002) and Pharmageddon (2004). He was later joined by Peter Gøtzsche (Deadly Medicines and Organized Crime, 2017) and many others.

But it took 30 years before the mainstream media admitted what was knowable on the first day — these products do not work as advertised. Even the usually reliable Pharma mouthpiece, The Guardian, was recently forced to admit that the entire theory of the case in connection with Selective Serotonin Reuptake Inhibitors was just glorified marketing copy:

The study in Molecular Psychiatry on which that article is based is (here). If you click through to read The Guardian article you’ll see defenders of the status quo at the end explaining that ‘it works even though there is no evidence that it works.’ Sound familiar?

By this point, about 1 in 5 American women and 1 in 10 men are on these drugs. They are given to pregnant women even though they are linked with autism (see literature review in my thesis). People are on them for decades in spite of no safety studies on long term use. They create dependency and once started, it is very difficult to stop.

It was not a foregone conclusion that Prozac would take off in the United States. German regulators (who actually examined the underlying data) rejected it and it was only approved in Sweden through outright bribery. But FDA regulators were primed to look the other way. In the meantime, Ms. Wurtzel made mental illness and these magic fluoride capsules sexy and cool. One can see how this set the stage for normalizing the other mass poisoning events that followed.

The adoption of SSRIs followed a pattern. Pharma pushed them, the FDA blessed them based on shoddy studies, the media and trusted messengers promoted them, and society gobbled up that snake oil like candy. Anyone who questioned the grift was shunned.

There was just too much money to be made for anyone to do the right thing. Once the pattern was set, more pharmacological disasters soon followed.

Next we were told that opioids, including OxyContin®, were not addictive. Once again the FDA blessed them based on shoddy data, the media promoted them, and society took these pills in massive quantities. On average, every year the U.S. now loses more Americans to opioids than died in combat in the entire (decade-long) Vietnam War.

Now it is happening yet again with Safe & Effective™️ Covid-19 shots that disable and kill at an astonishing rate. There is just so much money to be made from poisoning society that Pharma (+ the media and the political system that they own) cannot resist.

And millions of people who once believed in the promise of a better society are now mindless zombies who just want more pills, more injections, and more drugs to cure the human condition. But even that’s not enough — they want a society where Pharma idolatry is enshrined in law and everyone is forced to obey (setting up Pharma totalitarianism is basically the entire purpose of the California Democratic Party at this point).


VI. Sliding doors: imagine if Elizabeth Wurtzel had chosen differently

Hindsight is 20/20 and Ms. Wurtzel is not here to defend herself. But she was so incredibly talented. One can imagine a world where she might have chosen differently. Imagine if she had said, now wait, hang on, you’re telling me that several millennia of philosophy and a century of psychology are nonsense and that these drug dealers can solve the human condition with fluoride? That seems far-fetched.

One can imagine a world where Ms. Wurtzel used her fierce intellect to actually read the junk science clinical trials and study the FDA sham regulatory process instead of just surfing the zeitgeist. Any amount of honest due diligence would have quickly raised extraordinary doubts.

But the promise of magic pills was irresistible — for Ms. Wurtzel, society, and the drug dealers in white coats who stood to gain billions of dollars.

I want to be clear that it is not the responsibility of a 26 year old creative writer to save civilization. There should have been some adults in the room at her publisher (Houghton Mifflin) or the FDA who could have tapped the brakes on the rush to promote a fluoride compound as some sort of miracle cure. Ms. Wurtzel was uniquely influential but there were hundreds of thousands of others who also made ethically questionable choices in connection with this product. Furthermore, Ms. Wurtzel’s impulsiveness suggests that she may have already had some neurological damage, perhaps from the 10 to 13 shots that were common for Generation X. So perhaps she physically could not have chosen otherwise.

On the other hand, warrior mamas and Covid critical thinkers perform proper due diligence every day. As a result we are attacked by the mainstream media, hunted by the cartel, censored by the Stasi, and blacklisted by corporations and government. I guess if Elizabeth Wurtzel had chosen otherwise we never would have heard of her and they would have promoted someone else to fill that trusted spokesmodel role.

Here’s what I cannot figure out. Was the promise (that I began this article with) always a lie? Is the human condition such that we are always at the mercy of primitive instinct? Conservative Presbyterians believe in the doctrine of “total depravity” — that human beings are always flawed and fallen and the best we can hope for is divine grace that cannot be earned. Are they right?

I confess that I still believe in the promise (even though the last two years have shown me mountains of evidence that it’s not possible). I want to believe in a world where people are decent to each other, where we can find better ways to relate to each other that reduce strife and provide meaning and connection. It’s a far cry better than the alternative — magic pills & injections that are actually deadly, promoted by an entire society built on lies.

October 5, 2022 Posted by | Book Review, Corruption, Deception, Science and Pseudo-Science, Timeless or most popular | | Leave a comment

Informed Consent Action Network obtains CDC V-Safe data

ICAN | October 3, 2022

ICAN has now obtained CDC data for the approximate 10 million v-safe users.

As explained in our prior update, v-safe is a new smartphone-based CDC program that allows users to register after getting a Covid-19 vaccine and provide health check-ins.

ICAN wanted to obtain this data. So, it deployed its legal team, headed by Aaron Siri, to obtain the v-safe data.

After suing the CDC twice, and following months of legal wrangling, the CDC finally capitulated, resulting in a court order that required it to produce this data. The first batch of data, containing 144 million rows of health entries by v-safe users, has now been obtained by ICAN and you can search it using a user-friendly interface that ICAN worked around the clock to create.

This first batch of data includes the responses v-safe users provided to pre-populated ‘check-the-box’ fields. It does not include data from the fields that allowed free-text responses. It nonetheless reveals shocking information that should have caused the CDC to immediately shut down its Covid-19 vaccine program.

Among numerous alarming results, out of the approximate 10 million individuals that registered and submitted data to v-safe, 782,913 individuals, or over 7.7% of v-safe users, had a health event requiring medical attention, emergency room intervention, and/or hospitalization. Over 25% had an event that required them to miss school or work and/or prevented normal activities.

There were also 71 million reports of symptoms in the pre-populated fields from the approximately 10 million users. This is an average of over 7 symptoms reported per v-safe registrant. Reported symptoms include, for example, over 4 million reports of joint pain, a very concerning immune reaction. While around 2 million of these joint pain reports were mild, over 1.8 million of the reports were for moderate joint pain and over 400,000 were for severe joint pain. Since v-safe only included less than 4 percent of people that received a Covid-19 vaccine, tens of millions of Americans likely had an immune reaction to the Covid-19 vaccine in their joints that resulted in debilitating pain and potential long-term harm.

There were also approximately 13,000 infants under 2 years of age who were registered for v-safe. For these 13,000 children, there were over 33,000 symptoms experienced that were significant enough to report, with the most common symptoms being irritability, sleeplessness, pain, and loss of appetite. These are very concerning since babies cannot speak and hence these symptoms are how they often communicate that something is wrong.

These data also reflect a disproportionate amount of negative health impacts, including medical events, following the Moderna vaccine versus the Pfizer vaccine. There was also a disproportionate number of negative events reported by women versus men. This is consistent with what was seen in Pfizer’s initial post-authorization safety report sent to the FDA (a report which likewise had to be obtained by lawsuit) which similarly showed a disproportionate number of neurological events experienced by women following the Pfizer Covid-19 vaccine.

But please do your own research. The data is voluminous (one of the files, alone, is over 23 gigabytes) and so ICAN worked diligently and around the clock to get it into a user-friendly format for you to review, which you can do here.

And remember, the data produced thus far is only from the pre-populated fields within v-safe, which supplied v-safe registrants with only a limited number of options to choose from. There are also numerous free-text fields within v-safe where registrants were able to enter additional information. No doubt a lot of the detailed and interesting information is in these free-text fields. ICAN’s legal team continues to litigate to obtain that data.

This is a big win in the nearly two-year-long fight for transparency from our federal health agencies on the real safety data for Covid-19 vaccines.  As additional v-safe data is produced, ICAN will immediately bring it to your attention and make it available.

October 4, 2022 Posted by | Deception, War Crimes | | Leave a comment

Fauci doubled his wealth during Covid-19 – report

Samizdat | October 2, 2022

US chief medical officer Anthony Fauci’s net worth surged to $12.6 million in 2021, nearly twice the $7.6 million it had been in 2019, watchdog group OpenTheBooks revealed on Friday, citing financial disclosures it obtained from Fauci’s employer, the National Institutes of Health.

Already the highest-paid employee in the federal government before the pandemic as director of the National Institutes for Allergies and Infectious Diseases, Fauci pulled down a salary of $456,000 in 2021 and $480,000 in 2022. However, that paycheck represents just a fraction of the money he made while his Covid-19 policies helped push the US economy into a recession.

The disclosures show multiple trusts, retirement accounts, and other financial assets, all of which seem to have appreciated in value during the pandemic even as much of the real economy suffered. Book royalties and the $1 million Dan David Prize from Israel, as well as appearances and speaking fees, round out Fauci’s Covid-19 windfall. When OpenTheBooks asked the NIH to see all royalties paid to the doctor, however, the document they received – which would have shown exactly how much Fauci was financially benefiting from drugs and other patents – was reportedly heavily redacted.

“While Dr. Fauci has been a government bureaucrat for more than 55 years, his household net worth skyrocketed during the pandemic,” OpenTheBooks CEO Adam Andrzejewski told Fox News, attributing the doctor’s wealth spurt to “career-end salary spiking, lucrative cash prizes awarded by nonprofit organizations around the world, and an ever-larger investment portfolio.”

Fauci has been criticized throughout the pandemic for allegedly profiting off the pricey antiviral medication remdesivir, which he proclaimed the standard for treating Covid-19 despite lackluster clinical trial results and having been against the initial advice of the World Health Organization.

Fauci appears to dislike discussing his finances in public, having been caught on a hot mic describing Republican Senator Roger Marshall as a “moron” for merely asking to see what were supposed to be publicly available documents. The Kansas senator, who is also a doctor, asked to see Fauci’s financials during a January hearing only for the NIAID chief to insist they were already public – a statement that was not true at the time. OpenTheBooks sued for access in January and only recently received the documents it posted on Friday.

Following the hearing, Marshall introduced the FAUCI Act (Financial Accountability for Uniquely Compensated Individuals) to require that government employees’ financial disclosures be publicly accessible on the Office of Government Ethics website.

October 2, 2022 Posted by | Corruption, Deception, Science and Pseudo-Science, Timeless or most popular | , , , , | Leave a comment

Twitter hides all videos in search results for Italy’s next Prime Minister, Giorgia Meloni

By Cindy Harper | Reclaim The Net | September 29, 2022

Twitter is suppressing video searches for Giorgia Meloni, who was this week elected as Italy’s first woman Prime Minister.

At the time of writing, when Twitter users type her name in the search bar and choose “Videos” no results come up. An archive of the search captured the censorship here.

“No results for “‘Giorgia Meloni’” Twitter says.

The Twitter blockade follows YouTube saying it made an error when it deleted a video of Meloni’s family values speech.

Giorgia Meloni is the head of the conservative populist Brothers of Italy party and won her race to become Prime Minister last Sunday.

The Brothers of Italy party has seen a meteoric rise in popularity since 2018, when it received only 4 percent of the vote.

October 1, 2022 Posted by | Deception, Full Spectrum Dominance | , | Leave a comment

Decoding the Pentagon’s online war against Iran

Photo Credit: The Cradle
By Kit Klarenberg | The Cradle | October 1, 2022

The civil unrest in Iran in response to the recent death of 22-year-old Mahsa Amini while she was waiting at a Tehran police station, although rooted in legitimate grievances, also bears the hallmark of a western-sponsored covert war, covering multiple fronts.

Mere days after the protests erupted on 16 September, the Washington Post revealed that the Pentagon had initiated a wide-ranging audit of all its online psyops efforts, after a number of bot and troll accounts operated by its Central Command (CENTCOM) division – which covers all US military actions in West Asia, North Africa and South and Central Asia – were exposed, and subsequently banned by major social networks and online spaces.

The accounts were busted in a joint investigation carried out by social media research firm Graphika, and the Stanford Internet Observatory, which evaluated “five years of pro-Western covert influence operations.”

Published in late August, it attracted minimal English-language press coverage at the time, but evidently was noticed, raising concerns at the highest levels of the US government, prompting the audit.

While the Washington Post ludicrously suggested the government’s umbrage stemmed from CENTCOM’s egregious, manipulative activities which could compromise US “values” and its “moral high ground,” it is abundantly clear that the real problem was CENTCOM being exposed.

#OpIran

CENTCOM’s geographical purview includes Iran, and given the Islamic Republic’s longstanding status as a key US enemy state, it’s perhaps unsurprising that a significant proportion of the unit’s online disinformation and psychological warfare efforts were directed there.

A key strategy employed by US military psyops specialists is the creation of multiple sham media outlets publishing content in Farsi. Numerous online channels were maintained for these platforms, spanning Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, YouTube and even Telegram.

In some cases too, fake journalists and pundits, with numerous “followers” on those platforms emerged, along with profile photos created via artificial intelligence.

For example, Fahim News claimed to provide “accurate news and information” on events in Iran, prominently publishing posts declaring “the regime uses all of its efforts to censor and filter the internet,” and encouraging readers to stick to online sources as a result.

Meanwhile, Dariche News claimed to be an “independent website unaffiliated with any group or organization,” committed to providing “uncensored and unbiased news” to Iranians within and without the country, in particular information on “the destructive role of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps in all the affairs and issues of Iran and the region.”

Their respective YouTube channels pumped out numerous short-form videos, presumably in the hope they would be mistaken for organic content, and go viral on other social networks. The researchers identified one instance in which media outlets elsewhere had embedded Dariche News content into articles.

An army of bots and trolls

Some of the fake news organizations published original material, but much of their output was recycled content from US government-funded propaganda outfits such as Radio Farda and Voice of America Farsi.

They also repurposed and shared articles from the British-based Iran International, which appears to receive arm’s length funding from Saudi Arabia, as did several fake personas attached to these outlets.

These personas frequently posted non-political content, including Iranian poetry and photos of Persian food, in order to increase their authenticity. They also engaged with real Iranians on Twitter, often joking with them about internet memes.

Pentagon bots and trolls used different narrative techniques and approaches in an attempt to influence perceptions and engender engagement. A handful promoted “hardliner” views, criticizing the Iranian government for insufficiently hawkish foreign policy while being excessively reformist and liberal domestically.

One such bogus user, a purported “political science expert,” accrued thousands of followers on Twitter and Telegram by posting content praising Shia Islam’s growing power in West Asia, while other “hardliner” accounts praised the late General Qassem Soleimani of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC), slain in an illegal US drone strike in January 2020, as a martyr, and encouraged the wearing of hijabs.

The researchers state the purpose of these efforts was unclear, although an obvious explanation is the Pentagon sought to foster anti-government discontent among conservative Iranians, while creating lists of local “extremists” to monitor online.

Orchestrated opposition

Overwhelmingly though, Pentagon-linked accounts were viciously critical of the Iranian government, and the IRGC. Numerous Pentagon bots and trolls sought to blame food and medicine shortages on the latter, which was likened to ISIS, and posting videos of Iranians protesting and looting supermarkets captioned in Pashto, English, and Urdu.

More sober posts criticized Tehran for redistributing much-needed food to give to Lebanon’s Hezbollah movement, while others highlighted embarrassing incidents, such as a reported power outage that caused the country’s chess team to lose an international online tournament.

Furthermore, multiple fake users claimed to seek “justice for the victims of #Flight752”, referring to the Ukraine International Airlines flight accidentally shot down by the IRGC in January 2020.

Using hashtags such as #PS752 and #PS752justice hundreds of times, they blamed Iranian Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei personally for the incident.

Following the outbreak of war in Ukraine in February, these accounts used Persian versions of widely-trending hashtags #No_To_Putin and #No_To_War – themselves overwhelmingly disseminated on Twitter by pro-Ukraine bot and troll accounts, according to separate research.

The users condemned Khamenei’s verbal support of Putin and accused Iran of supplying drones to Moscow, which it was claimed were used to kill civilians.

They also pushed the narrative that Iran’s collusion with Russia would result in adverse political and economic repercussions for Tehran, while making unflattering comparisons between Khamenei and Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky.

“One has sold Iran to Russia and ordered their peoples’ murder,” one account tweeted. “The other is wearing a combat uniform alongside his people and has stopped the colonization of Ukraine by Russia with all his might.”

Scattershot fury

There were also cloak-and-dagger initiatives intended to damage Iran’s standing in neighboring countries, and undermine its regional influence. Much of this work seems to have been concerned with spreading panic and alarm, and creating a hostile environment for Iranians abroad.

For instance, accounts targeting audiences in Afghanistan claimed that Quds Force personnel were infiltrating Kabul posing as journalists in order to crush opposition to the Taliban. They also published articles from a US military-linked website that claimed on the basis of zero evidence that the bodies of dead refugees who’d fled to Iran were being returned to their families back home with missing organs.

Yet another damaging false narrative perpetuated by this cluster in late 2021 and early 2022 was that the IRGC was forcing Afghan refugees to join militias fighting in Syria and Yemen, and that those who refused were being deported.

Iraq was a country of particular interest to the Pentagon’s cyber warriors, with memes widely shared throughout Baghdad and beyond depicting IRGC influence in the country as a destructive disease, and content claiming Iraqi militias, and elements of the government, were effective tools of Tehran, fighting to further Iran’s imperial designs over the wider West Asia.

Militias were also accused of killing Iraqis in rocket strikes, engineering droughts by damaging water supply infrastructure, smuggling weapons and fuel out of Iraq and into Syria, and fuelling the country’s crystal meth epidemic.

Another cluster of Pentagon accounts focused on Iran’s involvement in Yemen, publishing content on major social networks critical of the Ansarallah-led de-facto government in Sanaa, accusing it of deliberately blocking humanitarian aid deliveries, acting as an unquestioning proxy of Tehran and Hezbollah, and closing bookstores, radio stations, and other cultural institutions.

Several of their posts blamed Iran for the deaths of civilians via landmine, on the basis Tehran may have supplied them.

Laying the ground

Other CENTCOM psychological warfare (psywar) narratives have direct relevance to the protests that have engulfed Iran.

There was a particular focus among one group of bots and trolls on women’s rights. Dozens of posts compared Iranian women’s opportunities abroad with those in Iran – one meme on this theme contrasted photos of an astronaut with a victim of violent spousal abuse – while others promoted protests against the hijab.

Alleged government corruption and rising living costs were also recurrently emphasized, particularly in respect of food and medicine – production of which in Iran is controlled by the IRGC, a fact CENTCOM’s online operatives repeatedly drew attention to.

Women’s rights, corruption, and the cost of living – the latter of which directly results from suffocating US sanctions – are all key stated motivating factors for the protesters.

Despite the rioters’ widespread acts of violence and vandalism, targeted at civilians and authorities alike, such as the destruction of an ambulance ferrying police officers away from the scene of a riot, they also claim to be motivated by human rights concerns.

Establishment and fringe journalists and pundits have dismissed as conspiracy theories, any suggestions that protests in Iran and beyond are anything other than organic and grassroots in nature.

Yet, clear proof of foreign direction and sponsorship abounds, not least in the very public face of the anti-hijab movement, Masih Alinejad, who for many years has encouraged Iranian women to ceremonially burn their headscarves from the confines of an FBI safehouse in New York City, then publicizes the images online, which travel round the world and back via social media and mainstream news outlets.

A regime-change war by other means

Alinejad’s activities have generated a vast amount of fawning and credulous media coverage, without a single journalist or outlet questioning whether her prominent role in the supposedly grassroots, locally-initiated protest movement is affiliated with foreign hostile interference.

This is despite Alinejad posing for photos with former CIA director Mike Pompeo, and receiving a staggering $628,000 in US federal government contracts since 2015.

Much of these funds flowed from the Broadcasting Board of Governors, the US government agency that oversees propaganda platforms such as Radio Free Europe, and Voice of America, the latter of which has produced a Farsi-language show fronted by Alinejad for seven years.

These clusters of social media posts may appear innocuous and authentic in an age of click-bait and viral fake news, yet when aggregated and analysed, they form a potent and potentially dangerous weapon which it turns out is one of many in the Pentagon’s regime-change arsenal.

October 1, 2022 Posted by | Deception | , , , | Leave a comment