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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Hindawi and Wiley to retract over 500 papers linked to peer review rings
Retraction Watch | September 28, 2022
After months of investigation that identified networks of reviewers and editors manipulating the peer review process, Hindawi plans to retract 511 papers across 16 journals, Retraction Watch has learned.
The retractions, which the publisher and its parent company, Wiley, will announce tomorrow in a blog post, will be issued in the next month, and more may come as its investigation continues. They are not yet making the list available.
Hindawi’s research integrity team found several signs of manipulated peer reviews for the affected papers, including reviews that contained duplicated text, a few individuals who did a lot of reviews, reviewers who turned in their reviews extremely quickly, and misuse of databases that publishers use to vet potential reviewers.
Richard Bennett, vice president of researcher and publishing services for Hindawi, told us that the publisher suspects “coordinated peer review rings” consisting of reviewers and editors working together to advance manuscripts through to publication. Some of the manuscripts appeared to come from paper mills, he said.
We asked what prompted the investigation. Bennett told us:
In April 2022, Hindawi’s Research Integrity team led an initial investigation into a single Special Issue (SI) after a Chief Editor raised concerns about some of the papers published in it. The team decided to investigate the content of the journal further. Through this investigation, the team highlighted a pattern of irregular and concerning reviewer activity and identified potential ‘bad actors’ that were present across many of these publications.
These concerns prompted the Publishing Insights and Research Integrity teams, enabled by recently enhanced analytic capabilities and newly developed dashboards providing views across all reviewer activity, to conduct a wider investigation to determine whether these same bad actors were involved in peer review manipulation elsewhere in the Hindawi portfolio.
Following the discovery that these bad actors were present in other journals, the Hindawi leadership team put in place a cross-functional working team combining the manual and data-driven investigation which resulted in the identification of further published articles.
In early August, Hindawi expanded the investigation under a combined investigation team comprising Research Integrity experts, data and analytics experts, publishing and operational teams, and legal counsel from both Wiley and Hindawi. This team evaluated in depth review activity across all potentially impacted articles and manuscripts. This resulted in a list of ‘compromised’ reviewers and editors in addition to the bad actors already discovered, identification of networks that exist between them, patterns of review activity, and insight into published articles and manuscripts at each stage in the review process that we could initially label as ‘compromised’. On September 6, the combined investigation team began assessing published articles which led to the initial recommendation to retract 511 articles that are compromised based on reviewer activity alone. We expect ongoing investigations to result in further retractions.
The publisher also held up the review and production of submitted manuscripts in which “potentially compromised” individuals were involved, and will begin assessing those articles.
We asked about what Hindawi will do to prevent something similar from happening again, but Bennett declined to share specifics, “as we believe it will simply open up new targets for those who seek to exploit a system based on trust.”
He did say that the publisher has banned the individuals its investigation identified, will contact research integrity officers or department heads as appropriate, and has shared its findings with industry groups:
It is increasingly apparent to all involved in safeguarding and investigating issues of research integrity that closing rings down at one publisher can simply move the problem to others. We are committed to taking an active role in preventing that.
Other publishers have announced large batches of retractions recently. IOP Publishing earlier this month said it planned to retract nearly 500 articles likely from paper mills, and PLOS in August announced it would retract over 100 papers from its flagship journal over manipulated peer review.
In a prepared statement, Liz Ferguson, Wiley senior vice president of research publishing for Wiley, said that attacks on research integrity such as paper mills, manipulated peer review, and image duplication and doctoring “are sophisticated and appear to be coordinated.”
Her statement continued:
As these attacks increase in frequency and intensity, we remain committed to upholding research integrity throughout our publishing programs. We have and will continue to share our findings with our peers and industry bodies to advance a cross-industry approach. This is absolutely essential to safeguard trust in research.
It’s something that we at Wiley are committed to and as a result we have taken the step of sharing our findings as transparently as possible, not just with our peers, but with industry associations, third party databases, and others.
These conversations have been very constructive. Our industry is one of trust – this remains our greatest asset. Only through concerted and collaborative action will we succeed together. This is our goal, and Wiley and Hindawi will continue to advance it tirelessly.
Bill Gates-Funded Scientists Found NO mRNA in Breast Milk a Year Ago
They Tried Hard NOT to Find Anything!
By Igor Chudov | September 28, 2022
My recent post about scientists finding mRNA nanoparticles containing Covid vaccine genetic code, in the breast milk of vaccinated mothers, and mentioning an infant documented to have died thereof, got quite a bit of traction online.
Today, I want to look at a study from a year ago that purported to NOT find mRNA nanoparticles in breast milk. We will see why exactly the team having Bill Gates and CDC-sponsored researchers, could not find what the independent scientists could find a year later!
I decided to compare the two studies (one that found mRNA in breast milk and the other that did not) very closely and compare their methodologies using the “Modern Discontent” method.
Modern Discontent has a great post about his method, but he mostly is saying “pay close attention and understand the whole f… thing”, which is basically what I usually do with something interesting and important anyway. He posted his method three days ago, and I had my substack for a while longer. So, I intuitively used many of his approaches, but he laid them out very systematically and clearly. His article is extremely useful for all people writing about biomedical science, so take a look:
At first sight, both studies, which I will call the 2022 shedding study (which I discussed two days ago) and the 2021 no-shedding study, superficially appear to be similarly designed. They took several lactating women and tested their milk. One study found shedding, while the other did not. Upon a closer look, the differences between these studies turned out to be extremely important!
Here’s a summary of their differences:
You can see that the study that found mRNA lipid nanoparticle shedding, was done more thoroughly. The shedding study had:
- More participants (11 vs 7)
- More milk samples were taken (131 vs 13!)
- Samples better preserved (frozen immediately)
- Samples were taken at varied moments post-vaccination including within mere hours, and also days
- Looked at very important Extracellular Vesicles
As a result of being more thorough and covering more cases, the shedding study found actual shedding! Surprise!
What if the women in the shedding study, getting the same vaccines, were analyzed using the poorer methodology of the no-shedding study?
I took the chart from the shedding study showing five women with milk samples positive for mRNA nanoparticles. I crossed out samples that WOULD NOT BE DETECTED, if the no-shedding study methodology was applied to the samples of the shedding study:
You can see that if the researchers in the shedding study used the crippled methodology of the no-shedding study, they would detect only two positive samples, instead of seven.
The methodology of the no-shedding study would miss all extracellular vesicle (EV) samples because they did not look at EVs. That is shown in the column on the right that is entirely crossed out.
The no-shedding study would also miss the 1 hour and three-hour samples because they did not take those samples (save for just ONE woman who happened not to be positive).
As a result, had the less thorough no-shedding study methodology been applied to the shedding study, only 2 positive samples, instead of 7, would be detected!
Since the actual no-shedding study collected only 13 samples and not 131 samples and used deficient methodology, no wonder they missed all positive instances!
It is as if the no-shedding study was intentionally designed not to find anything. Hmmm…
Let me give an analogy that many will understand — fishing using fishing nets.
Let’s say that a good fisherman (the shedding study) was asked to do his best job fishing to see if a particular lake has fish (mRNA nanoparticles). A bad fisherman, on the contrary, would be asked to design his fishing expedition to not catch any fish, so as to falsely prove that the lake has no fish. What would they do? This infographic shows the difference:
What’s up with Bill Gates and the CDC?
By pure coincidence, the study that did not find mRNA nanoparticles in breast milk (the no-shedding study), had key scientists sponsored by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. They also received money from the CDC. You can see that Prof. Gaw and Dr. Flaherman were key participants, making the most important decisions and analyses!
Did these sponsorships influence the authors’ approach to designing the experiment? We cannot know this. We can only wonder.
Why would a fisherman try to NOT catch fish?
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From the Archives
Why Saudi Ties to 9/11 Mean U.S. Ties to 9/11
By Kevin Ryan | Dig Within | September 27, 2015
Media interest in Saudi Arabian connections to the crimes of 9/11 has centered on calls for the release of the 28 missing pages from the Joint Congressional Inquiry’s report. However, those calls focus on the question of hijacker financing and omit the most interesting links between the 9/11 attacks and Saudi Arabia—links that implicate powerful people in the United States. Here are twenty examples. … continue
Blog Roll
Aletho News- EUROPE FEARS RUSSIA’S NEXT MOVE / Ian Proud
- Big tech hands in its DSA censorship reports to the EU
- ‘A Big Victory’ – Palestine Chronicle Wins Two-Year Legal Battle
- IAEA inspectors cannot return to Iran amid US threats: Russia
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- Iraqi Resistance faction links arms to sovereignty, questions US exit
- Cannon fodder no more… South Korea rejects Trump’s pressure to join his criminal war on Iran
- Neria Leiter Was A Legitimate Military Target
- Integrity Initiative: UK-funded network framed dissent as Russian disinformation for years
- If Americans Knew
- ‘This is where I live now, the back of a truck’: a day in the life of a grandmother in Gaza
- In UN Speech, Iran’s President Displays Pictures of Children Killed by US, Brings Attention to Israel’s Nuclear Arsenal
- Israel displaces hundreds of Palestinians amid wave of demolitions in West Bank
- Aid, reconstruction, and Israel’s history of obstruction in Gaza
- Trump administration digs an ever-deeper hole of complicity in genocide – Daily Update
- US-Israel $2.8 Billion Arms Deal, 40,000-Bomb Supply Faces New Gaza Complicity Accusations
- Caught on Tape: AIPAC CEO Boasted of Controlling Trump’s National Security Officials
- Why Hamas Attacked Israel in October 2023 – Israeli professor Ilan Pappé
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- Winter could turn Gaza’s treacherous, war-damaged buildings into deathtraps
- No Tricks Zone
- New Study: Earth And Venus Surface Warmth Largely Explained By Convection And Lapse Rate, Not CO2 Or Radiation
- 2025 Nature Paper Claiming Worsening Global Drought Gets RETRACTED …Heavily Flawed
- New Study: ‘Global Drought Shows No Detectable Recent Acceleration Under Climate Warming’
- Economic Masterminds: German Socialists Suggest Taxing Productivity Gains Stemming From Using AI
- The South China Sea Has Not Been Cooperating With The Climate Change Narrative
- Energy Crisis: Germany Enters Heating Season With Historically Low Gas Reserve Fill Levels
- New Study: The Antarctic Ice Sheet Gained Mass From 2020-2024 Due To Staggering Snow And Ice Accumulation
- Study: Ocean Heating Rates From Thousands Of Years Ago ‘Dwarf’ Modern Ocean Heating Rates
- Climate Extremists Target, Attack Large-Scale Power Grid Infrastructure In Germany!
- New Study: Antarctic Ice Melt Has Contributed Less Than 1 Centimeter To Sea Level Rise In The Last 30 Years
