BBC gets government funding for global crusade against ‘fake news’
RT | May 3, 2021
UK Foreign Secretary Dominic Raab has given the BBC World Service an £8 million funding boost to “tackle harmful disinformation.” What that means is unclear, but the BBC has a history of waging infowars for the UK government.
Broadcast in more than 40 languages to 350 million listeners per week, the BBC World Service brings news and debate from London to the furthest reaches of the globe. Funded by the Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Office (FCDO), the British taxpayer, and some limited advertising, the service gives the British government worldwide messaging power via a news organization Raab described on Saturday as “unbiased and impartial.”
Behind the veneer of impartiality, the World Service is viewed by the British government as a tool. This year’s ‘Integrated Review’, a document that lays out London’s foreign policy and defense priorities, identified the World Service as an instrument of “soft power” for Britain – one of a range of tools to be used against “systemic competitors like Russia and China.”
Based on that report, Raab announced on Saturday that the World Service would receive £8 million in extra funding to “tackle harmful disinformation, challenge inaccurate reporting around the world and improve digital engagement.” The fresh funding comes on top of the £378 million the service has received from the FCDO since 2016.
Raab accused “some states” of producing “harmful content” and “fake news around the coronavirus pandemic,” including content “encouraging scepticism around vaccines.” Promoting vaccines has been a key goal of the British government for several months now, to the point where military intelligence units and Government Communications Headquarters spies have reportedly been deployed to wage “information warfare” against anti-vaxx internet posts.
The messaging war around the coronavirus is the only clear example cited by Raab, and his announcement speaks of a broader war against “global disinformation,” “inaccurate reporting,” and “states and criminal gangs” who “twist the news to exploit others.” These terms are not backed up with examples, and are contentious in their own right. “Fake news,” for instance, was a term made famous during Donald Trump’s presidency, and was used by both Trump and the press to describe each other’s messaging.
The BBC’s funding, as well as its vague mission to fight “fake news,” may indicate that it will engage in an information campaign for the geopolitical benefit of the British government. The broadcaster reportedly has a history of doing this, and documents leaked in March revealed that BBC Media Action, the outlet’s charitable arm, overtly cultivated Russian journalists, established influence networks within and outside Russia, and promoted pro-Whitehall, anti-Moscow propaganda in Russian-speaking areas, all at the FCDO’s behest.
FCDO Counter Disinformation & Media Development chief Andy Pryce, explained the government’s mission in no uncertain terms at a 2018 meeting, during which he said its ultimate goal was to “weaken the Russian state’s influence” via the co-option of journalists and media organizations.
The BBC isn’t the only “impartial” news service involved in the FCDO’s influence campaign. The Thomson Reuters Foundation (TRF) also volunteered its services, establishing news outlets in “countries of interest” to the FCDO. A cited example of this activity is Aswat Masriya, an “independent” media outlet in Egypt, created by TRF in the wake of the 2011 Egyptian revolution.
Given the history of partnership between the BBC and the FCDO, the latest investment is likely aimed more at ensuring the British government’s version of the truth wins out against foreign powers than it is in fighting falsehood and disinformation.
Biden lied about Yemen
By Caitlin Johnstone | April 29, 2021
The Biden administration has finally admitted that the US is indeed providing offensive material support to Saudi Arabia’s genocidal assault on Yemen, directly contradicting Biden’s February claim that it would no longer be providing offensive support in that war. We are being lied to about yet another US war by yet another US president.
“The United States continues to provide maintenance support to Saudi Arabia’s Air Force given the critical role it plays in Saudi air defense and our longstanding security partnership,” Pentagon spokesperson Jessica McNulty has informed Vox reporter Alex Ward.
“Multiple US defense officials and experts acknowledged that, through a US government process, the Saudi government pays commercial contractors to maintain and service their aircraft, and those contractors keep Saudi warplanes in the air. What the Saudis do with those fighter jets, however, is up to them,” Ward reported, adding, “The US could cancel those contracts at any time, thus effectively grounding the Saudi Air Force, but doing so would risk losing Riyadh as a key regional partner.”
“The recent admission by the Department of Defense that US companies are still authorized to maintain Saudi warplanes … means that our government is still enabling the Saudi operations, including bombings and enforcing a blockade on Yemen’s ports,” Hassan El-Tayyab, the legislative manager for Middle East policy at the Friends Committee on National Legislation lobbying group, told Ward.
El-Tayyab is on record speaking out after Biden’s deceitful February announcement, saying this administration needs to make it abundantly clear what it actually means by ending offensive support for the war on Yemen and actually stick to it.
“I’m not a full pessimist here. I welcome the news,” he told Al Jazeera at the time, adding, “But I’m just trying to stay vigilant and not take the foot off the gas on advocacy pressure. Because we don’t know what’s going to happen.”
Well, now we do know. The US is maintaining and servicing the warplanes that are bombing Yemen and enforcing a blockade, which has killed hundreds of thousands and the United Nations warns could kill 400,000 more this year alone if conditions don’t change, proving Joe Biden a liar and vindicating the experts and activists who cautioned against accepting his announcement on blind faith.
Getting to this point where questions are finally answered about the reality of the Biden administration’s Yemen policy has been like pulling teeth, with officials giving questioners the runaround for months on this issue. Watch this clip of US Yemen Envoy Tim Lenderking dodging questions like George Bush dodges shoes as congressman Ted Lieu tries to get a straight answer as to whether the US has stopped supporting the war on Yemen:
Antiwar’s Dave DeCamp writes the following:
“The admission comes over two months since President Biden said he was ending support for Riyadh’s ‘offensive’ operations in Yemen. Vox reporter Alex Ward asked Pentagon spokesman John Kirby on Monday if the planes that the US is servicing could be used for offensive operations in Yemen. Kirby admitted that the ‘maintenance support for systems could be used for both’ offensive and defensive operations. … Besides continuing to maintain the Saudi Air Force, the Biden administration has given Riyadh the political cover to continue enforcing the blockade on Yemen. Biden officials have claimed that Yemen is not under a blockade, even though Saudi warships are preventing fuel shipments from docking in the port of Hudaydah, which makes it impossible to deliver food to Yemen’s starving civilian population.”
The United Nations conservatively estimates that some 233,000 Yemenis have been killed in the [Saudi-led] war … mostly from what it calls “indirect causes.” Those indirect causes would be disease and starvation resulting from what UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres calls “the worst famine the world has seen for decades.”
When people hear the word “famine” they usually think of mass hunger caused by droughts or other naturally occurring phenomena, but in reality the starvation deaths we are seeing in Yemen (a huge percentage of which are children under the age of five) are caused by something that is no more natural than the starvation deaths you’d see in a medieval siege. They are the result of the Saudi coalition’s use of blockades and its deliberate targeting of farms, fishing boats, marketplaces, food storage sites, and cholera treatment centers with airstrikes aimed at making those parts [of the country, which are] controlled by Yemen’s Ansarullah movement so weak and miserable that they break.
The United States lies about all its wars with the help of the mass media, but up until this year its lies about Yemen have largely consisted of lies by omission: simply not talking about Yemen (like when MSNBC went an entire year without mentioning it a single time during the height of Russiagate hysteria), reporting on the famine as though it’s the result of a tragic natural disaster, or omitting America’s role in the slaughter. This time, it was just a straightforward lie: Biden said the US was ending offensive support, and it wasn’t.
As we’ve discussed previously, when the people demand something of their government it’s a lot easier to simply tell them you’re on their side and redirect them than to tell them no. Democrats are especially good at this.
As awareness grows that Yemen is the single most horrifying atrocity taking place in our world today, pressure is mounting for the US government to use its tremendous amount of leverage over Saudi Arabia to cease the human butchery. Rather than increasing that pressure by saying no, the Biden administration defused it by falsely pretending to give in to the demands. Because the risk of “losing Riyadh as a key regional partner” was deemed too great.
And meanwhile the slaughter continues, unbroken from Obama to Trump and from Trump to Biden. The names change, the narratives change, but the murderous imperial war machine rolls on uninterrupted.
Hancock has blood on his hands – Shocking rise in expectant mothers who’ve lost their baby after having the Covid Vaccine
THE DAILY EXPOSE • APRIL 29, 2021
A tragic milestone has been surpassed as the effects of the mass roll-out of an experimental vaccine continue to devastate the lives of those who “get the jab, when they get the call”. It is with sadness that we have to report that over 100 women have now lost their unborn or newborn baby after having one of the Covid vaccines.
Health authorities in the UK advise women to avoid things like smoked fish, soft cheese, wet paint, coffee, herbal tea, vitamin supplements, and processed junk foods when pregnant. But for some strange and sinister reason they are now adamant the Covid vaccines are 100% safe for use in pregnant women despite the fact there have not been any trials conducted to prove this.
The Joint Committee on Vaccination and Immunisation (JCVI) released a statement just a few short weeks ago saying “it’s preferable for pregnant women in the UK to be offered the Pfizer-BioNTech or Moderna vaccines where available. There is no evidence to suggest that other vaccines are unsafe for pregnant women, but more research is needed.”
This led to the Health Secretary, Matt Hancock to announce on Twitter – “I encourage all pregnant women when they are called to get the jab”.
The fact the JCVI could say “it is preferable for pregnant women” to have the jab, and “more research is needed” in the same sentence would be laughable if it didn’t have such dire consequences. And the fact Hancock actively encouraged pregnant women to get the jab despite the existing evidence it was not safe is criminal.
Unfortunately but not surprisingly the JCVI and Hancock now have blood on their hands since these statements were made.
Blood on their hands because according to the UK Governments latest report on adverse reactions to the Covid-19 vaccines, as of the 21st April 2021 a total of 58 women had suffered a miscarriage after receiving a dose of the Pfizer / BioNTech mRNA vaccine. But the devastation doesn’t end there. The Pfizer jab had also caused two foetal deaths as of the 21st April, 1 still birth and the death of 1 premature baby.
The AstraZeneca viral vector vaccine is also causing devastation to countless lives. As of the 21st April a total of 37 women had sadly suffered a miscarriage after receiving a dose of the AstraZeneca jab, as well as a total of 3 still births.
These numbers may seem small considering the fact we are told tens of millions of people have now received a dose of an experimental Covid vaccine. But let’s put these figures into context. The Covid jab is only just being offered to those in their early 40’s, which means the majority of those who have been vaccinated so far are over the age of 50. The average age for a woman to reach the menopause is 51. This means they cannot get pregnant and therefore cannot suffer a miscarriage.
But then we also have to consider the fact that up until this ghastly unscientific announcement from the JCVI and Hancock the UK Governments advice on administering the Covid vaccine to pregnant women was as follows –
‘Pregnancy
There are no or limited amount of data from the use of COVID-19 mRNA Vaccine BNT162b2.
Animal reproductive toxicity studies have not been completed. COVID-19 mRNA Vaccine
BNT162b2 is not recommended during pregnancy.
For women of childbearing age, pregnancy should be excluded before vaccination. In addition, women
of childbearing age should be advised to avoid pregnancy for at least 2 months after their second dose.
Taking all of this into account, the 102 expectant mothers who have sadly lost their child after having the Covid vaccine as of the 21st April suddenly becomes an extraordinarily high number.
How many more women need to lose their baby for the health authorities to say enough is enough?
UK Gov. awards £320 million tax-payer funded contract for ‘Covid-19 Media Propaganda Campaign’ which runs until April 2022
THE DAILY EXPOSE • MAY 2, 2021
You don’t think things are going to go back to normal on the 21st June 2021 do you? The evidence is mounting to the contrary and the latest piece of the puzzle has cost the British tax-payer £320 million.
Previous pieces of the puzzle have come in the form of a document produced for the UK Government entitled ‘Summary of further modelling of easing of restrictions – Roadmap Step 2’, and a contract currently out for tender for the employment of ‘Covid Marshals’.
The former declares that a third wave is inevitable and that it will be the fault of children and those who refuse the experimental Covid-19 vaccines. Whilst the latter confirms that Covid Marshals will be employed from the 1st July 2021 until the end of January 2022 at the earliest, to the tune of £3 million of tax-payers money.
The latest evidence that things will not be returning to normal on the 21st June 2021 comes in the form of a contract which has been awarded to a single company, costing the British tax-payer £320 million. The contract has a start date of 1st April 2021 and is due to run until the 31st March 2022. It’s stated purpose? “The provision of Media buying services for COVID 19 campaigns.”
The closing date for applications was 12am on the 31st March 2021 and the contract was awarded to ‘OMD Group Limited’. The company is based in London and has a financial director named ‘BELL, Ronald James‘ who has been with the company since the 1st November 2017. But we can also see that there have been three new appointees to the board on the 22nd February 2021. These include FENTON, Laura Claire who has been appointed as CEO. PANESAR, Ravinder who has been appointed as a financial director. And STURGEON, Natalie who has been appointed as CEO.
The three new appointees have certainly struck gold rather quick. We wonder if these people have any ties or links to any members of Boris Johnson’s current Cabinet? Track record would suggest so.
The Government has already spent hundreds of millions of tax payers money since March 2020 to advertise the fact that there is a pandemic and now plan to carry on the tradition for at least another year. The question is, if there was really a deadly pandemic would authorities need to advertise it?
The answer of course lies in the fact that this has never been about a virus, and has always been about control. This £320 million contract is to fund propaganda and maintain the level of fear that they have created in a large amount of the UK population.
The contract also explains why the mainstream media have remained largely silent and toed the line at all times in regards to the narrative being portrayed by the UK Government and their circle of scientific advisors. It would cost them millions of pounds in advertising fees if they refused to do so.
Think things will go back to normal on the 21st June 2021? Think again. This won’t end until we all say it does.
There is no scientific foundation to the concept of Vaccine Passports: Doctors for Covid Ethics
By Oliver May • THE DAILY EXPOSE • April 29, 2021
Doctors for Covid Ethics, a group of doctors across Europe and North America, say studies on Covid-19’s closest-related virus to infect humans, SARS, revealed that those who had acquired natural immunity in 2003 remain protected even now. They also maintain that, even before the onset of vaccination campaigns, most people had become immune to Covid-19, either through infection with the virus itself, often without symptoms or with only mild, uncharacteristic ones, or due to cross-immunity conferred by other, naturally occurring coronaviruses.
But under an Article of Law Decree just published by the European Union, its proposed Digital Green Pass will have validity for just six months. Once this expires the holder would need to be re-vaccinated or have had Covid in the last six months or take a test every 48 hours in order to regain their freedoms.
Doctors for Covid Ethics argue there is no rational case for such a pass, which is currently being used in Israel and proposed in the UK, adding that immunity from infection is likely to be durable and unaffected by variants.
Doctors for Covid Ethics said: “There is no scientific foundation to the concept of vaccine passports and no rational case at all for vaccine passports. To set a six-month cut-off is bizarre and arbitrary. Examining the time course of antibodies in blood samples is not a valid approach to the question of, ‘how long does immunity last?’.
“This is because antibodies aren’t the most important host defence mechanism in immunity to viruses. That’s considered to be T-cell memory (cytotoxic as well as ‘helper’ lymphocytes) and B-memory (antibody producing) cells. Antibodies naturally fall over time if you’re no longer constantly rechallenged with the infective pathogen. As community prevalence falls away, this re-exposure to the virus also diminishes.
“When durability of immunity to the closest known virus, SARS, was studied, those who had acquired immunity naturally, through infection in 2003, all retained immunity 17 years later. There is speculation that ‘variants’ of SARS-CoV-2 might ‘break through’ the immunity gained through natural infection or vaccination. There is absolutely no evidence for this at all.
“In fact, there is very strong evidence to the contrary – that no variant is sufficiently different from the original virus that it’s even possible for ‘immune escape’ to occur. Several groups of immunologists have shown convincingly that people immune to one variant have T-cells which recognise all the other variants tested. This isn’t a surprise, for no variant differs from the original sequence by more than 0.3 per cent.
“In fact, those who had retained immunity to SARS also possessed cross-immunity to SARS-CoV-2. These two viruses differ by approximately 20 per cent. Obviously, if our immune systems easily recognise two viruses which share 80 per cent similarity, it follows that differences of 0.3 per cent are completely irrelevant, from an immunological perspective.”
The group went on to add that focusing on antibodies in the context of vaccination against SARS-CoV-2 is “flawed” and so coercing people into so-called booster vaccines in order to regain their freedoms withdrawn by Governments is wholly inappropriate.
“The whole concept of antibody-based immunity against an air-borne pathogen is flawed because the antibodies are on the wrong side of the wall and cannot intercept viral entry into the respiratory tract epithelium,” added the group.
“Secreted IgA antibodies play no significant role either: selective IgA deficiency does not enhance susceptibility towards coronavirus infections.”
The group also highlights that vaccine companies have been exempt from legal liability for vaccine-induced harm, adding that, for the vast majority of people, SARS-CoV-2 is a non-lethal, typically mild to moderately severe illness. They said: “The overwhelming majority of people are not at risk from COVID-19 and do not require vaccination for their own protection.
“The vaccines have been touted as a means to prevent asymptomatic infection and, by extension, asymptomatic transmission. However, “asymptomatic transmission” is an artefact of invalid and unreliable PCR test procedures and interpretations, leading to high false-positive rates. Evidence indicates that PCR-positive, asymptomatic people are healthy false-positives, not carriers. A comprehensive study of 9,899,828 people in China found that asymptomatic individuals testing positive for COVID-19 never infected others.
“In contrast, the papers cited by the Centre for Disease Control to justify claims of asymptomatic transmission are based on hypothetical models, not empirical studies; they present assumptions and estimates rather than evidence. Preventing asymptomatic infection is not a viable rationale for promoting vaccination of the general population.”
They have written to MEP’s, putting them on notice that liability for adverse reactions to the vaccines will fall on them, should they vote for the Digital Green Pass, which was debated on Wednesday.
And last week, Doctors for Covid Ethics wrote their third letter to the European Medicines Agency, warning executive director Emer Cooke that cerebral venous sinus thrombosis (CVST) dominates the list of adverse reactions from the vaccines and is not as rare as the EMA suggests.
Coming COVID Commission Is a Gates-Led Cover-Up
By Dr. Joseph Mercola | April 27, 2021
Having gone as far as he can with the World Health Organization’s cover-up, Bill Gates takes another bite at the apple with his corporate-funded investigation into the origins of COVID-19 to cleverly cover up this massive conspiracy with an “official” investigation.
While the so-called COVID Commission Planning Group — set up to create and support an investigative commission like that for 9/11 — is advertised as a nonpartisan effort, you really couldn’t come up with a more dangerously biased set of participants.
In short, individuals and organizations with some of the most egregious conflicts of interest, and everything to gain by being in charge of analyzing and writing the history of this pandemic, are leading and supporting this effort. This is a classic fox guarding the henhouse scenario.
According to the Miller Center, the planning group will lay out the plans for nine separate task forces, each focused on one of the following topics, to lay “the foundation for a future commission to investigate”:1
- The origins of SARS-CoV-2 and its prevention
- Threat assessment, including the creation of an international network for detection and warning, “biological intelligence” and other data collection
- National readiness and a review of the initial response
- At-risk communities and how to address gaps in public health capacities, worker safety and the responsibilities of private businesses
- State and local readiness, containment and mitigation, including when and how to use lockdowns, mandates and school closings
- Health care challenges surrounding patient care, including those with long-hauler syndrome
- Diagnostics, therapeutics and vaccines, including the regulatory environment that might benefit or stifle innovation and/or global supply chains
- Telling the stories of COVID-19 victims, frontline workers and public health officials (i.e., propaganda generation)
- Solving data issues
Philip Zelikow — Chief Investigator for the Cabal
The chosen leader of this new planning group is Philip Zelikow, former executive director of the 9/11 Commission2 and a member of the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation’s Global Development Program Advisory Panel.3,4 While Gates may not be a physical member of this planning group, he’s certainly involved indirectly. Of that we can be virtually assured.
Zelikow, a former director of the Miller Center of Public Affairs at the University of Virginia, is also a current strategy group member of the Aspen Institute,5 a technocratic hub that has groomed and mentored executives from around the world about the subtleties of globalization.
He also directed the Markle Foundation’s Task Force on National Security in the Information Age,6 the focus of which has been to make information relating to potential security threats discoverable and accessible to officials without breaking civil liberty laws.7 As reported by the University of Virginia:8
“The planning group hopes to prepare the way for a potential National COVID Commission set up to help America and the world learn from this pandemic and safeguard against future threats. ‘This is perhaps the greatest crisis suffered by America, if not the world, since 1945,’ said Zelikow … ‘It is vital to take stock, in a massive way, of what happened and why.
These sorts of civilizational challenges may become more common in the 21st century, and we need to learn from this crisis to strengthen our society … Scholars and journalists will do their jobs, but there is also a role for the kind of massive investigation and research effort that only a large-scale commission can provide.’”
Foundations Backing the COVID Commission
As reported by the Miller Center,9 the COVID Commission Planning Group includes more than two dozen virologists, public health personas and former government officials, and is backed by four charitable foundations — all of whom have histories revealing them to be part of the technocratic alliance that for years, in some cases decades, have been plotting and planning for the wealth redistribution and global power grab we’re now experiencing. These foundations include:
•Schmidt Futures,10 founded by Eric Schmidt, former CEO and executive chairman of Google and Alphabet Inc., which owns the greatest artificial intelligence (AI) team in the world.11
•The Skoll Foundation, founded by Jeff Skoll, a former eBay president, to “pursue his vision of a sustainable world” by catalyzing “transformational social change.”12 It acts as a support organization to the Silicon Valley Community Foundation.
Skoll has funded pandemic preparedness and prevention since 2009 through the Skoll Global Threats Fund, and his movie production company Participant Media produced the movie “Contagion” and Al Gore’s documentary “An Inconvenient Truth.”13
•Stand Together Foundation, which is part of the Koch Network, founded by Charles Koch. Its primary focus is criminal justice and poverty issues, and it teaches Koch’s “market based management” philosophy to community leaders.14
•The Rockefeller Foundation, which in April 2020 released the white paper,15 “National COVID-19 Testing Action Plan,” laying out a strategic framework clearly intended to become part of a permanent surveillance and social control structure that severely limits personal liberty and freedom of choice. I wrote about this in “Rockefeller Foundation’s Plan to Track Americans.”
The tracking system it calls for is eerily similar to that already being used in China, where residents are required to enroll in a health condition registry. Once enrolled, they get a personal QR code, which they must then enter in order to gain access to grocery stores and other facilities.16 The plan also demands access to other medical data.
Operation Lockstep
The Rockefellers, like Gates, built an empire around health and medicine despite having no medical expertise whatsoever. Their influence is rooted in money, which is spent in self-serving ways. While Rockefeller and Gates are both known as philanthropists, their donations grow their wealth, as the money they spend on “charity” ultimately ends up benefiting their own investments and/or business interests.
In addition to the COVID-19 Action Plan document cited above — which doesn’t even try to hide its draconian overreach and intent to permanently alter life and society as we know it — the Rockefeller Foundation also published a 2010 report17 titled “Scenarios for the Future of Technology and International Development,” in which they laid out their “Lockstep” scenario — a coordinated global response to a lethal pandemic.
While the name and origin of the virus differs, the scenario laid out in this document matches many of the details of our present. A deadly viral pandemic. A deadly effect on economies. International mobility coming to a screeching halt, debilitating industries, tourism and global supply chains. “Even locally, normally bustling shops and office buildings sat empty for months, devoid of both employees and customers,” the document reads.
“In the absence of official containment protocols,” the virus spread like wildfire. In this narrative, the U.S. administration’s failure to place strict travel restrictions on its citizens proved to be a fatal flaw, as it allowed the virus to spread past its borders. China, on the other hand, fared particularly well due to its rapid imposition of universal quarantines of all citizens, which proved effective for curbing the spread of the virus.
Many other nations where leaders “flexed their authority” and imposed severe restrictions on their citizens — “from the mandatory wearing of face masks to body-temperature checks at the entries of communal spaces like train stations and supermarkets” — also fared well.
These and other reports spell out what the ultimate plan actually is. It’s to use bioterrorism to take control of the world’s resources, wealth and people. It’s to use coordinated pandemic response as a justification for wealth redistribution and the resetting of the global financial system.
What most fail to realize is that the wealth distribution they’re talking about is not distribution from the wealthy to the poor, even though that’s what they want you to believe. It’s to centralize wealth at the top and eliminate private property rights and private business ownership from the lower and middle classes. The “equitable” living standards they’re talking about is poverty for all but themselves. It’s really crucial to begin to grasp this reality now, before it’s too late.
Pieces of a Global Puzzle
The Rockefeller Foundation is also a founding sponsor of The Mojaloop Foundation, set up to “promote digital payments for people outside the financial system, with support from Google and the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation.”18
Right there we have Google, the Gates Foundation and the Rockefeller Foundation, all in one little nonprofit with a heart set on giving poor people access to digital banking using their cellphones. This is probably the three most dangerous nonprofits on the planet, as they are likely the most powerful and committed to global tyranny.
All-digital banking using a centralized digital currency is a key component of the Great Reset, so this project has little to do with honest philanthropy and everything to do with making sure everyone can be swept into the digital net, which will include round-the-clock surveillance and tracking of physical location and biological data, a digital ID, along with your health data (including but not limited to vaccination status), banking and, ultimately, a social credit system.
All of the pieces needed for the Great Reset are already in place; it’s just a matter of seeing how all the separate pieces fit together. For example, Gavi, the vaccine alliance, set up with funds from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, partnered with the ID2020 Alliance to launch a digital identity program called ID2020.19
Gates also funded the creation of EarthNow, a project involving 500 satellites equipped with machine learning technology to surveil the entire planet with real-time video.20 As one would expect, AI — a Google specialty — is also a key component of this global surveillance plot.
COVID-19 — A Launch Pad for the Great Reset
Another key player in the COVID Commission Planning Group is the Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security at the Bloomberg School of Public Health. As you may recall, Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security co-hosted the pandemic preparedness simulation for a “novel coronavirus,” known as Event 201, in October 2019 along with the Gates Foundation and the World Economic Forum.
The event eerily predicted what would happen just 10 weeks later, when COVID-19 appeared. Gates and the World Economic Forum, in turn, are both partnered21 with the United Nations which, while keeping a relatively low profile, appears to be at the heart of the globalist takeover agenda.
The World Economic Forum, while a private organization, works as the social and economic branch of the U.N. and is a key driving force behind modern technocracy and the Great Reset agenda. Its founder and chairman, Klaus Schwab, publicly declared the need for a global “reset” to restore order in June 2020.22
Technocratic rule, which is what the Great Reset will bring about, hinges on the use of technology — in particular artificial intelligence, digital surveillance and Big Data collection (which is what 5G is for) — and the digitization of industry, banking and government, which in turn allows for the automation of social engineering and social rule (although that part is never expressly stated).
Beyond pandemic preparedness and response, the justification for the implementation of the Great Reset agenda in its totality will be climate change. The Great Reset, sometimes referred to as the “build back better” plan, specifically calls for all nations to implement “green” regulations and “sustainable development goals”23,24 as part of the post-COVID recovery effort.
But the end goal is far from what the typical person envisions when they hear these plans. The end goal is to turn us into serfs without rights to privacy, private ownership or anything else. In short, the pandemic is being used to destroy the local economies around the world, which will then allow the World Economic Forum to come in and “rescue” debt-ridden countries. The price for this salvation is your liberty.
The Great Reset
While the New World Order was long derided as a “conspiracy theory” that you’d have to be crazy to believe, the Great Reset, which is simply a rebranding of the same old NWO plan that has been in circulation for well over a decade, is now public fact.
Many world leaders have spoken about it in an official capacity, and in June 2020, Zia Khan, senior vice president of innovation at the Rockefeller Foundation penned the article25 “Rebuilding Toward the Great Reset: Crisis, COVID-19, and the Sustainable Development Goals,” reviewing the “social crisis” necessitating the world’s acceptance of a new world order.
The article was co-written with John McArthur, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institute, which is one of several technocratic think-tanks. Keeping in mind what I’ve just said about what the Great Reset is really all about, and the justifications used to implement the theft of wealth and freedom, read how they posit these changes as being in your best interest:
“Upheaval can yield new understanding and opportunity. Outdated or unjust norms can succumb to society’s pressing need for better approaches. For example, the need for massive and urgent government intervention has drawn fresh attention to social safety nets and the possibility of dramatic policy enhancements.
Tragic consequences of racial discrimination have catapulted awareness of systemic problems and triggered prospects for much-needed social reforms. Rapid environmental improvements linked to economic shutdown have rekindled consciousness of the profound interconnections between ecosystems, economies, and societies …
Rather than passively allowing norms to evolve through inertia or randomness, we can all pursue actions for Response and, soon enough, Recovery in a manner that improve the odds of a Reset toward better long-term outcomes.
Fortunately, we already have a strong starting point for what the world’s economic, social, and environmental outcomes should be. Five years ago, in 2015, all 193 UN member states agreed on the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) as a common set of priorities to be achieved in all countries by 2030.”
Another article titled “The Great Reset,” written by Jimmy Chang, CFA, for the Rockefeller Capital Management blog, reads, in part:26
“Regarding the post-pandemic reconstruction effort, progressives, led by the so-called Davos elites (of the World Economic Forum fame), are advocating an urgent ‘Great Reset’ of capitalism to ensure equality and sustainability. They also call for harnessing the Fourth Industrial Revolution (i.e., Big Tech) to address health and social challenges.
Their vision for the future could be gleaned from a 2016 article penned by a young Danish politician with the title ‘Welcome to 2030. I Own Nothing, Have No Privacy, and Life Has Never Been Better.’ This title was so controversial that its posting on the World Economic Forum website was changed to a bland ‘Here’s how life could change in my city by the year 2030.’
The pace of the Great Reset will in part depend on the final outcome of the U.S. election as it will determine whether Trump’s ‘America First’ doctrine will be relegated to the dustbin of history. Still, some resets will be unavoidable since COVID-19 has exacerbated some longstanding issues such as the world’s debt dependency and the widening gap between the haves and the have-nots.
There will be elevated levels of bankruptcy and debt restructuring. Governments may further increase their leverage to bail out the economy and placate electorates that demand more generous social contracts.
Riccardo Fraccaro, Italy’s Secretary of the Council of Ministers and a close aide of Prime Minister Giuseppe Conte, even floated a trial balloon on sovereign debt restructuring by suggesting that the European Central Bank consider ‘canceling sovereign bonds bought during the pandemic or perpetually extending their maturity.’
Businesses will also need to respond to lasting behavioral changes caused by the pandemic. In sum, there is no going back to the pre-COVID-19 world, and markets will need to adjust.”
Wolves in Sheep’s Clothing
The Great Reset is not some wild conspiracy theory but a publicly released agenda that is moving forward, whether we like it or not. I believe the only way to stop it is through our collective responses to the various pieces and parts of the plan that are being rolled out. They want you to believe that none of the things being introduced have anything to do with each other but, in fact, they are all pieces of the same puzzle.
The final image is the inside of a prison cell. It may not be a physical prison. It may be largely digital in nature. It may look like the four walls of your own home. But it’s a prison nonetheless.
I believe it would be a tragic mistake to trust Gates, Rockefeller, Google or any of the other players — including Zelikow — that are being brought before us as the saviors of the day. They’re all wolves in sheep’s clothing.
To learn more about the hidden power structure running this global reorganization toward authoritarian control, see “Bill Gates Wants to Realize Global Vision in His Lifetime,” “The Great Reset and Build Back Better,” “Technocracy and the Great Reset” and “Who Pressed the Great Reset Button?”
Be Part of the Answer
The good news is, Americans now have a brand-new weapon in our fight for freedom. I recently interviewed Naomi Wolf about her new digital platform, Daily Clout, that will allow citizens to lobby bills to their legislators.
Many state legislators are not lawyers, and they don’t have lawyers at their beck and call. Daily Clout has hired an attorney who is busy drafting turnkey bills that protect us against the continued erosion of freedom and reestablish rights and liberties. Citizens can now send these model bills to their legislators, knowing that they’ve undergone legal review and are ready to be passed. You can also go even further than that. As explained by Wolf:
“You can tell us the bill you want. We can upload a campaign for that bill. We can hire our lawyer to draft a model bill and then you can pass it. What we’ve been doing is gathering names and zip codes, so that we can add real voters to this piece of model legislation in real states and send it to real state legislators and say, ‘Look, the supporters are all there. All you have to do is pass this.’
It’s a fantastic intervention in the political process, restoring real democracy. It’s why we founded Daily Clout, but it’s beautiful to see hundreds and hundreds of people from all walks of life rushing to give us support and resources, to become members and give us donations, which we appreciate, so that we can keep our lawyer busy creating these draft bills. It’s not just for this issue.
Once we get our rights and freedoms back, whatever [citizens] want, we can draft a bill for you, and you can [call on your legislators to] pass it.”
To get involved, go to dailyclout.io and sign up to become a paying member or free subscriber. You will then receive an email explaining how to use the Five Freedoms Campaign. Presently, there is a model “no vaccination passports” bill that you can send to your state legislator.
There’s a feature called BillCam, where you can see who your state legislator is by entering your zip code. Once you’re a subscriber or member, you’ll get regular updates about happenings around the U.S. and community events.
The Great Reset is at our doorstep, and your freedom, and that of future generations, hinges on you getting involved and fighting for it. The Daily Clout platform can be a major help in this regard, as using legislation to preserve and protect our rights and freedoms is far preferable to more violent alternatives or resigning ourselves to the fate prescribed by our globalist would-be “overlords.”
Sources and References
- 1, 9 Miller Center, COVID Commission Planning Group
- 2 The Last American Vagabond September 7, 2016
- 3 Source Watch Philip Zelikow
- 4, 6 Miller Center, Philip Zelikow
- 5 Aspen Institute, Philip Zelikow
- 7 Markle.org
- 8 University of Virginia April 14, 2021
- 10 Schmidt Futures
- 11 TechCrunch January 26, 2014
- 12 Skoll Foundation
- 13 Forbes How the Billionaire Behind “Contagion” is working to stop this pandemic
- 14 Influence Watch, Stand Together Foundation
- 15 The Rockefeller Foundation, National COVID-19 Testing Action Plan — Strategic Steps to Reopen Our Workplaces and Our Communities, April 21, 2020 (PDF)
- 16 Berggruen Institute March 6, 2020
- 17 Scenarios for the Future of Technology and International Development
- 18 Techxplore.com May 6, 2020
- 19 Biometric Update September 20, 2019
- 20 Technology Review April 18, 2018
- 21 Canadian Truths, COVID-19 Bill Gates, United Nations and World Economic Forum
- 22 Technocracy.news June 29, 2020
- 23 Canadian Post, World Economic Forum Wheel of Evil
- 24 Intelligence.weforum.org COVID-19
- 25 Rockefeller Foundation June 19, 2020
- 26 Rockefeller Capital Management December 1, 2020
Lavrov Calls Out Perfidious Albion in EU Diplomat Spat
By Finian Cunningham | Strategic Culture Foundation | April 28, 2021
Britain is fomenting a diplomatic crisis between the European Union and Russia, according to Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov. Evidence and precedent indicate Lavrov has his sight well-trained.
The British establishment’s notorious ability for machination and intrigue – hence the ancient moniker Perfidious Albion – can be seen as stirring the escalating row between the European Union and Russia in which diplomats are being expelled pell-mell.
This week, Russia ordered the withdrawal of representatives from Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, and Slovakia. That came in response to the expulsion of Russian diplomats from those countries. Russia has also ordered home more diplomats from the Czech Republic. Poland and Italy have also been caught up in diplomatic antagonism with Moscow.
The row blew up last week when the Czech Republic accused Russian state agents of being responsible for twin explosions on its territory back in 2104. The blasts caused the deaths of two workers at an ammunition depot near the village of Vrbetice close to the border with Slovakia. Until recently, the Czech authorities had concluded that the explosions were an industrial accident.
What prompted the Czechs to revise their ideas and to now blame Russia for sabotage is the interpolation of Britain in providing “new information”. Specifically, it was the MI6-sponsored media group Bellingcat (a so-called private investigatory agency) which appears to have furnished the disinformation which purports to show the involvement of Russian military intelligence (GRU). Incredibly, the British claim their “evidence” shows that two of the GRU agents were also the same individuals who were alleged to have been involved in poisoning the Russian traitor-spy Sergei Skripal in England in 2018. The British claim to have passport information to support their claims, but such methodology is rife with forgery – a black art that the British are all-too skilled at.
On leveling the accusation against Russia, the Czech Republic then ordered the expulsion of 18 Russian diplomats. Moscow responded angrily, saying that the claims of sabotage were a “dirty fabrication” and pointing out that Prague did not provide any information for verification. Russia took swift reciprocal action by banishing 20 Czech diplomats from its territory.
However, the row continues to flare with the Baltic states entering the fray by banning Russian officials in “solidarity” with the Czech Republic. The move by the Baltic states is predictable as they are supercharged by anti-Russian political sentiment. It’s a case of any excuse for them to inflame relations.
The dispute comes at a fraught time when the European Union is discussing imposing more sanctions on Russia over wider concerns about the conflict in Ukraine, the imprisonment of blogger Alexei Navalny and a Russian security crackdown on Navalny’s shadowy Western-backed “opposition” network.
The skirmishing over diplomats is a convenient way to further damage relations between the EU and Russia, especially as the strategically important Nord Stream-2 gas pipeline project nears completion – a project that Washington wants to eviscerate for its own selfish commercial reasons. Uncle Sam’s junior partner Britain may be obliging in that regard and thus trying to curry favor for garnering an American trade deal in the post-Brexit world.
Certainly, Russia’s top diplomat Sergei Lavrov is clear about the stealthy British hand in recent events. In a media interview this week, Lavrov mentioned the United Kingdom in wary terms, saying: “As far as the relations between Russia and Europe are concerned, I still believe that the UK is playing an active and a very serious subversive role. It withdrew from the European Union, but we see no decrease in its activities on this track. On the contrary, they are trying to influence EU member states’ approaches to Russia to the maximum possible extent.”
It should be recalled that Britain has played a starring duplicitous role in demonizing Russia and poisoning international relations.
It was Bellingcat (MI6) that pushed the narrative that Russia was complicit in the shooting down of the Malaysian airliner in 2014 over Eastern Ukraine with the loss of nearly 300 lives. Based on British “evidence” (which has been debunked as fabrication), a Dutch investigation into the disaster has accused Russia. That affair has hardened European prejudices against Russia which has fomented the imposition of sanctions.
It was a former British MI6 operative Christopher Steele who was instrumental in promoting the Russiagate dossier around 2016 which destroyed bilateral relations between the United States and Russia, and which continues to fuel fabrications about Moscow’s interference in American and European politics (even those Steele’s “dirty dossier” is a risible load of rubbish and has been debunked).
And it was the Skripal saga in Salisbury in March 2018 which Britain hatched to further poison international relations with Russia. That saga – with no proof against Russia – has become a concocted “standard proof” for the subsequent saga of “poisoning” the blogger conman Alexei Navalny. Western governments and media refer to the “Kremlin plot” to kill Skripal as “evidence” for another “Kremlin plot” to assassinate Navalny. This is tantamount to one fiction being used to prove another fiction. The same saga is now feeding into the Czech explosion row. And it all comes back to the devious ingenuity of Perfidious Albion.
Foreign Minister Lavrov added a further incisive comment on the role of Britain. He said: “At the same time, you know, they send us signals, they propose establishing contacts. This means, they do not shy away from communication [with Russia], but try to discourage others. Again, probably [this can be explained by] their desire to have a monopoly of these contacts and again prove that they are superior to others.”
The British establishment likes to boast that they “punch above their weight” in terms of influence beyond their territorial size. It’s not hard to see how they manage such a feat. It’s called duplicity, intrigue, lies, and dividing and ruling. Perfidious Albion par excellence.
Why Can’t the Government be More Transparent About the Data Guiding its Decisions?
By Professor Anthony A. Fryer | Lockdown Sceptics | April 27, 2021
When I look back over the last year or so of the pandemic, I can forgive the first couple of months. We were all finding our feet with a largely unknown entity. However, as a clinical scientist with over 30 years in NHS laboratories and as an academic researcher with over 200 peer-reviewed clinical research articles in scientific and medical journals (including over 130 involving use of the polymerase chain reaction [PCR]), I found my views increasingly divergent from those of the Government and its advisors. Those who know me will know that it takes a lot to get me annoyed, but I could not sit by and do nothing when I could see the immense damage being done to countless lives and businesses in the name of supposedly protecting us from SARS-CoV-2.
But let me say at the start; I am not one to deny the damage that COVID-19 can do. (And I deliberately use that term, rather than SARS-CoV-2. It’s the disease that causes the problems – most people manage the virus without much difficulty.) COVID-19 can be very nasty and my heart goes out to all those affected. But the way in which the Government handled the pandemic has, in my view, been shocking. It’s felt like it has focused blindly on the virus (and not very well at that either – just think about PPE in care homes for a start) and ignored the massive implications on every other level.
So I wrote. I wrote letters to the local paper, emailed the Chief Medical Officer, submitted evidence to a Parliamentary Inquiry, signed the Great Barrington Declaration, published scientific papers on the ineffectiveness of face coverings and on the non-Covid harms to people with diabetes, and wrote to my MP. Several times. I also joined UsforThem and the Health Advisory and Recovery Team (HART).
Back in October 2020, I wrote one of my letters to my MP, Fiona Bruce, raising a number of concerns about the Government’s handling of the pandemic, and requesting that she raise these concerns with the powers that be on my behalf. While the letter was written as a member of the public, I felt that my expertise and experience put me in a position to comment in a way that perhaps others couldn’t.
In the letter, I highlighted three main concerns:
1. Evidence. That measures to reduce the spread of coronavirus SARS-CoV-2 were introduced without evidence to support them.
2. Context. That such measures were generating more harms than those caused by the virus itself, and this was not being reflected in a balanced way in the press briefings, including in the figures presented, thereby creating an atmosphere of fear.
3. Testing. That the way in which testing data has been presented had been misleading to the public and media. This area was of particular concern to me, given my clinical and research experience in the field.
In respect of the above three areas, I requested the following of my MP:
1. Please could you lobby that scientific evidence underpinning decisions is provided with all future communications.
2. I would ask that you raise this with the Prime Minister and Secretary of State for Health as a matter of urgency to ensure that contextual information is co-presented at press briefings for comparison.
3. I would be grateful if you could impress upon the Secretary of State for Health, the Chief Medical Officers and the Chief Scientific Officer to present adjusted data in a more balanced way to reflect the major difference in rates of cases now with those in April.
… and…
I would request that you (i) ask the Secretary of State for Health to ensure that all positive tests are repeated before labelling an individual as positive, and (ii) that the estimated one third of deaths attributed to COVID-19 because of a SARS-CoV-2 positive test, but where the cause of death was not COVID-19, be removed from the figures.
On April 13th 2021, some six months later, the reply arrived, along with a letter from Lord Bethell (Parliamentary Under Secretary of State at the Department of Health and Social Care), dated April 7th.
The response, which you can read here, was both enlightening and disheartening, if not unexpected.
Here is my commentary on the response from Lord Bethell, passed on by my MP:
Evidence
Lord Bethell referred to the release of papers and minutes from SAGE, presumably to exemplify the evidence underpinning the decisions to implement mitigation measures. The complete lack of credibility of anything coming from SAGE notwithstanding, this is hardly an independent assessment of the evidence underpinning the Government’s decisions.
To me, anyone with any scientific nous could present a fairly long list of actions that the Government has taken without first presenting clear evidence to indicate their effectiveness and an evidence-based risk-assessment of potential non-Covid harms. The “Rule of Six”, the 10pm curfew, face coverings (anywhere, let alone in schools), lockdowns (in any of its many guises, including Tiers), etc, etc, etc. Where is the assessment of non-Covid physical and mental health harms, economic impact, or the effect on our children’s education and wellbeing? Or even evidence on reducing transmission of the virus itself, for that matter?
All we have seem to have seen is exaggerated figures predicting doomsday scenarios, mostly based on modelling rather than actual data, none of which have come to pass. These seem only aimed at scaring the public into following their non-evidence-based guidelines (an approach which, to me, could itself have a potentially significant negative mental health impact).
Context
In terms of presenting COVID-19 data in a wider context, Lord Bethell’s response seemed silent on this one. I am still waiting to hear a press conference which presents the non-Covid harms that we are hearing about all the time in the scientific literature, from the mental health sector, from education, from the business world and from thousands of individual stories.
We are instead presented with advertising campaigns which tell us to “act like you have it”. Not only is that completely illogical – if we all took that literally, society would stop. All of it. No hospitals, no supermarkets, no police, nothing. We’d all be at home self-isolating. But it verging on emotional blackmail. Please give the public some respect and allow them to make responsible decisions.
Testing
The third area covered three distinct points:
- Comparing like with like. A request to not compare figures in October with those in April when testing levels were at a much lower level.
- False positives. A request to define positive ‘cases’ accurately by correctly addressing the issue of false positives.
- ‘With’, not ‘from’. A request to exclude deaths where COVID-19 was not the cause of death from the figures for COVID-associated deaths.
a. Comparing like with like. On the first of these, it’s hard to identify whether Lord Bethell had anything to say on this. He didn’t address it directly. My point focused on the unbalanced way figures were presented back in October which, in my view, presented to the public another doomsday, worst-case scenario to frighten them into compliance with Government wishes. Models presenting huge potential death tolls, all of which were subsequently shown to be out by orders of magnitude.
b. False positives. On the second point, Lord Bethell’s response went into some detail, the content of which itself seemed to either miss the point, or indeed add fuel to my initial concern.
On the positive side, there were some admissions about the PCR test. For example, his response stated: “We are also aware that when PCR test detects viral material it does not indicate that the virus is intact and infectious.” So a positive test doesn’t equate to infectiousness, or even having the virus at all. That’s obvious. It’s just a pity this isn’t mentioned in any of the press briefings along with an evidence-based assessment of its impact on the figures. “Positive tests”, “infections” and “cases” are used interchangeably.
Regarding the PCR test cycle threshold (Ct), he also acknowledged that “…values obtained in this way are semi-quantitative, meaning they do not measure the precise quantity of the virus…” He focuses on the small number of samples with a cycle threshold of over 37. I would be interested in what proportion are above 27, as there is increasing evidence that test samples above this level are significantly less likely to be infectious (and have a much higher false positive risk). Indeed, some data published by the Oxford Group based on the UK’s COVID-19 Infection Survey illustrated that the vast majority of ‘positive’ PCR tests have a Ct value of >27 (Pritchard et al. Impact of vaccination on SARS-CoV-2 cases in the community: a population-based study using the UK’s COVID-19 Infection Survey). So most of the positive tests contain low levels of virus (if any) and the risk of transmission is small.
But even taking Lord Bethell’s Ct cut-off, his comments on test specificity are particularly revealing. He acknowledges that, “Like any diagnostic test, there is a possibility of a false negative or false positive result”, but goes on to say, “but this is very small”. He states that: “Independent, confirmatory testing of positive samples indicates a test specificity that exceeds 99.3%, meaning the false positive rate is less than 1%.”
My HART colleague Dr Claire Craig did some sums on this. At a false positive rate of 0.7%, there would have been 8,700 false positives and 6,200 true positives for the week beginning April 12th on PCR. In other words, 58% of the positives would have been false. If we include the Lateral Flow Tests, then 70% of the cases would have been false positive that week.
My real question is, why are the ‘case’ figures not revised downwards accordingly, or at least the impact of false positives explained at the briefings?
c. “With”, not “from”. On the third point, Lord Bethell made some valid points, though their interpretation was a little off kilter. My concern related to the definition of the figures used to define Covid-associated deaths in official figures. In my mind there were three ways these could be derived; (i) those where the cause of death was primarily COVID-19 (“from” Covid), (ii) those where the person had a SARS-CoV-2, or even COVID-19, but where this was not the cause of death (“with” Covid), and (iii) those who had a false positive test for SARS-CoV-2 (i.e., did not actually have the virus or COVID-19 when they died).
My view was that these latter two would over-estimate the figures for Covid-associated deaths and should be excluded (though I acknowledge that separating the first two from each other can sometimes be difficult in clinical practice). Lord Bethell rightly pointed out three other possible scenarios that could theoretically cause an under-estimate of the figures. Firstly, those who “had COVID-19 but had not been tested”, secondly, those who had “tested positive only via a non-NHS or PHE laboratory” so their positive result was not recorded on their death certificate, and thirdly, those who “had tested negative and subsequently caught the virus and died”. He also acknowledged that it is possible that my options (ii) and (iii) above are plausible scenarios: “It is true that people who have tested positive for COVID 19 could, in a few cases, have died from something else.” (His phrasing is interesting here – I wonder if he realises that PCR is not a test for the disease, COVID-19, but for the virus, SARS-CoV-2?) It is saddening that he feels the need to qualify the option that overestimates death with the phrase “in a few cases”, but not his three scenarios that might lead to under-counting, despite the likelihood that these have much less impact on the figures.
Have we moved on since October?
My feeling is that we have moved on in some areas. Now we have the vast majority of susceptible individuals vaccinated (one of the few success stories), a huge number of people who are resistant or immune, herd immunity, and a whole range of effective treatments (and that’s excluding the two magic pills we are promised by autumn). This should mean that we are completely back to normal – no masks, no distancing, no sanitisers – and focusing on how we can help those in other countries to get to the same place, and recovering from the damage caused by the mitigation measures.
But sadly we still don’t get anything high profile (e.g. in Government briefings) on my areas of concern. Nothing on the evidence underpinning the Government’s decisions, nothing on non-Covid harms, nothing on the impact of false positives on “cases” and Covid-associated deaths. And still, millions of people in the UK suffer needlessly. An apology would be nice.
In the first paragraph of his response, Lord Bethell states that “we are committed to open sharing of the scientific advice that guides our response to COVID-19 where possible”. I am yet to be convinced.
Dr Anthony Fryer is Professor of Clinical Biochemistry at the Institute for Science and Technology in Medicine at Keele University and member of HART and is writing in a personal capacity.
CNN’s New “Reporter,” Natasha Bertrand, is a Deranged Conspiracy Theorist and Scandal-Plagued CIA Propagandist
CNN’s new national security reporter Natasha Bertrand, then of Politico and NBC News, with MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow, Sept. 19, 2019
By Glenn Greenwald | April 27, 2021
The most important axiom for understanding how the U.S. corporate media functions is that there is never accountability for those who serve as propagandists for the U.S. security state. The opposite is true: the more aggressively and recklessly you spread CIA narratives or pro-war manipulation, the more rewarded you will be in that world.
The classic case is Jeffrey Goldberg, who wrote one of the most deceitful and destructive articles of his generation: a lengthy New Yorker article in May, 2002 — right as the propagandistic groundwork for the invasion of Iraq was being laid — that claimed Saddam Hussein had formed an alliance with Al Qaeda and Osama bin Laden. In February, 2003, on the eve of the invasion of Iraq, NPR host Robert Siegel devoted a long segment to this claim. When he asked Goldberg about “a man named Abu Musab al-Zarqawi,” Goldberg replied: “He is one of several men who might personify a link between Iraq and al-Qaeda.”
Needless to say, nothing could generate hatred for someone among the American population — just nine months away from the 9/11 attack — more than associating them with bin Laden. Five months after Goldberg’s New Yorker article, the U.S. Congress authorized the use of military force to impose regime change on Iraq; ten months later, the U.S. invaded Iraq; and by September, 2003, close to 70% of Americans believed the lie that Saddam had personally participated in the 9/11 attack.
Goldberg’s fabrication-driven article generated ample celebratory media attention and even prestigious journalism awards. It also led to great financial reward and career advancement. In 2007, The Atlantic‘s publisher David Bradley lured Goldberg away from The New Yorker by lavishing him with a huge signing bonus and even sent exotic horses to entertain Goldberg’s children. Goldberg is now the editor-in-chief of that magazine and thus one of the most influential figures in media. In other words, the person who wrote what is arguably the most disastrous article of that decade was one most rewarded by the industry — all because he served the aims of the U.S. security state and its war aims. That is how U.S. corporate journalism functions.
Another illustrative mascot for this lucrative career path is NBC’s national security correspondent Ken Dilanian. In 2014, his own former paper, The Los Angeles Times, acknowledged his “collaborative” relationship with the CIA. During his stint there, he mimicked false claims from John Brennan’s CIA that no innocent people were killed from a 2012 Obama drone strike, only for human rights groups and leaked documents to prove many were.
A FOIA request produced documents published by The Intercept in 2015 that showed Dilanian submitting his “reporting” to the CIA for approval in violation of The LA Times’ own ethical guidelines and then repeating what he was told to say. But again, serving the CIA even with false “reporting” and unethical behavior is a career benefit in corporate media, not an impediment, and Dilanian rapidly fell upward after these embarrassing revelations. He first went to Associated Press and then to NBC News, where he broadcast numerous false Russiagate scams including purporting to “independently confirm” CNN’s ultimately retracted bombshell that Donald Trump, Jr. obtained advance access to the 2016 WikiLeaks archive.
On Monday, CNN made clear that this dynamic still drives the corporate media world. The network proudly announced that it had hired Natasha Bertrand away from Politico. In doing so, they added to their stable of former CIA operatives, NSA spies, Pentagon Generals and FBI agents a reporter who has done as much as anyone, if not more so, to advance the scripts of those agencies.
Bertrand’s career began taking off when, while at Business Insider, she abandoned her obsession with Russia’s role in Syria in 2016 in order to monomaniacally fixate on every last conspiracy theory and gossip item that drove the Russiagate fraud during the 2016 campaign and then into the Trump presidency. Each month, Bertrand produced dozens of Russiagate articles for the site that were so unhinged that they made Rachel Maddow look sober, cautious and reliable.
In 2018, it was Jeffrey Goldberg himself — knowing a star CIA propagandist when he sees one — who gave Bertrand her first big break by hiring her away from Business Insider to cover Russiagate for The Atlantic. Shortly after, she joined the Queen of Russiagate conspiracies herself by becoming a national security analyst for MSNBC and NBC News. From there, it was onto Politico and now CNN : the ideal, rapid career climb that is the dream of every liberal security state servant calling themselves a journalist. Her final conspiratorial article for The Atlantic before moving to Politico is the perfect illustration of who and what she is:
CNN’s new national security star was no ordinary Russiagate fanatic. There was no conspiracy theory too unhinged or evidence-free for her to promote. As The Washington Post‘s media reporter Erik Wemple documented once the Steele Dossier was debunked, there was arguably nobody in media other than Rachel Maddow who promoted and ratified that hoax as aggressively, uncritically and persistently as Bertrand. She defended it even after the Mueller Report corroborated virtually none of its key claims.
In a February, 2020 article headlined “How Politico’s Natasha Bertrand bootstrapped dossier credulity into MSNBC gig,” Wemple described how she was rewarded over and over for “journalism” that would be regarded in any healthy profession with nothing but scorn:
Where there’s a report on Russian meddling, there’s an MSNBC segment waiting to be taped. Last Thursday night, MSNBC host Joy Reid — subbing for “All In” host Chris Hayes — turned to Politico national security reporter Natasha Bertrand with a question about whether Trump “wants” Russian meddling or whether he can’t accept that “foreign help is there.“ Bertrand responded: “We don’t have the reporting that suggests that the president has told aides, for example, that he really wants Russia to interfere because he thinks that it’s going to help him, right?”
No, we don’t have that reporting — though there’s no prohibition against fantasizing about it on national television. Such is the theme of Bertrand’s commentary during previous coverage of Russian interference, specifically the dossier of memos drawn up by former British intelligence officer Christopher Steele. With winks and nods from MSNBC hosts, Bertrand heaped credibility on the dossier — which was published in full by BuzzFeed News in January 2017 — in repeated television appearances.
Wemple systematically reviewed the mountain of speculation, unproven conspiracies and outright falsehoods Bertrand shoveled to the public as she was repeatedly promoted. But it was the document that gave us deranged delusions about pee-pee tape blackmail and Michael Cohen’s trip to Prague that was her crown jewel: “The Bertrand highlight reel features a great deal of thumb-on-scale speculation regarding the dossier,” Wemple wrote.
And when information started being declassified that proved much of Bertrand’s claims about collusion to be a fraud, she complained that there was too much transparency, implying that the Trump administration was harming national security by allowing the public to know too much — namely, allowing the public to see that her reporting was a fraud. A journalist who complains about too much transparency is like a cardiologist who complains that a patient has stopped smoking cigarettes, or like a journalist who voluntarily rats out her own source to the FBI or who agitates for censorship of political speech: a walking negation of the professional values they are supposed to uphold. But that is Natasha Bertrand, and, to the extent that there are some people who still believe that working at CNN is desirable, she was just rewarded for it again yesterday — just as journalists who rat out their own sources to the FBI and advocate for internet censorship are now celebrated in today’s rotted media climate.
Bertrand’s trail of journalistic scandals and recklessness extend well beyond her Russiagate conspiracies. Last October, she published an article in Politico strongly implying that Director of National Intelligence John Ratcliffe was speaking without authorization or any evidence when he said Iran was attempting to undermine President Trump’s 2020 presidential campaign. But last month, the Biden administration declassified an intelligence report which said they had “high confidence” that Iran had done exactly what Ratcliffe alleged: namely, run an influence campaign to hurt Trump’s candidacy. A former national security official, Cliff Sims, said upon hearing of CNN’s hiring that he explicitly warned Bertrand’s editors that the story was false but they chose to publish it anyway.
It was also Bertrand who most effectively laundered the extremely significant CIA lie in October, 2020 that the documents obtained by The New York Post about the Biden family’s business dealings in China and Ukraine were “Russian disinformation.” Even though the John-Brennan-led former intelligence officials admitted from the start that they had no evidence for this claim, Bertrand not only amplified it but vouched for its credibility by writing that the Post‘s reporting “has drawn comparisons to 2016, when Russian hackers dumped troves of emails from Democrats onto the internet — producing few damaging revelations but fueling accusations of corruption by Trump” (that those 2016 DNC and Podesta documents produced “few damaging revelations” would come as a big surprise to the five DNC operatives, led by Chairwoman Debbie Wasserman-Schultz, who were forced to resign when their pro-Hillary cheating was revealed).
It was this Politico article by Bertrand that was then used by Facebook and Twitter to justify their joint censorship of the Post‘s reporting in the weeks before the 2020 election, and numerous media outlets — including The Intercept — gullibly told their readers to ignore the revelations on the ground that these authentic documents were “Russian disinformation.” Yet once it did its job of helping defeat Trump, that claim was debunked when even the intelligence community acknowledged it had no evidence of Russian involvement in the appearance of these materials, and Hunter Biden himself admitted he was the subject of a federal investigation for the transactions revealed by those documents.
Politico, Oct. 19, 2020
But even when her fantasies and conspiracies are debunked, Bertrand — like a good intelligence soldier — never cedes any ground in her propaganda campaigns. She was, needless to say, one of the journalists who most vocally promoted the CIA’s story — published as Trump was announcing his plans to withdraw from Afghanistan — that Russia had paid bounties to the Taliban for the death of U.S. soldiers. Yet even when the U.S. intelligence community under Joe Biden admitted last week that it has only “low to moderate” confidence that this even happened — with the NSA and other surveillance agencies saying it could find no evidence to corroborate the CIA’s story — she continued to insist that nothing had changed with the story, denying last week on a Mediaite podcast that anything had happened to cast doubt on the original story: “I think it’s much more nuanced than it being a walk-back. I don’t think that’s right actually.”
Even a cursory review of Bertrand’s prolific output reveals an endless array of gossip, conspiracy and speculative assertions masquerading as journalism. The commentator Luke Thomas detailed many of these transgressions on Monday and correctly observed that “arguably no single reporter has contributed more to the deranged and paranoid national security fantasies of the center-left than Natasha Bertrand. She’s an embarrassment to her profession and will, therefore, fit right in at CNN.”
As Thomas noted, beyond all of Bertrand’s well-documented and consequential propaganda, “she sees conspiracies and perfidiousness around every corner,” pointing to this demented yet highly viral tweet that deciphered comments from former Sen. Orrin Hatch (R-UT) as inadvertently revealing some secret scheme to expand Trump’s pardon powers. That scheme, like most of her speculative predictions, never materialized.
Then there is her garden-variety ethical scandal. In January, freelancer Dean Sterling Jones accused Bertrand of stealing his work without credit or payment. In a post he published, Jones documented how he emailed Bertrand a draft with reporting he had been working on, and in response she agreed to report it jointly with him on a co-byline. Yet two weeks later, the article appeared in The Atlantic with Bertrand as the only named reporter. Only after Jones complained did they insert a sentence into the story begrudgingly citing him as a source. “By my count,” Jones wrote, “Bertrand’s article contains at least six unequivocal examples of direct copying and revisions of my work.” When he published his post detailing his accusations, Bertrand arrogantly refused even to provide comment to the freelancer whose work she pilfered.
Natasha Bertrand has spent the last five years working as a spokesperson for the alliance composed of the CIA and the Democratic Party, spreading every unvetted and unproven conspiracy theory about Russiagate that they fed her. The more loyally she performed that propagandistic function, the more rapidly she was promoted and rewarded. Now she arrives at her latest destination: CNN, not only Russiagate Central along with MSNBC but also the home to countless ex-operatives of the security state agencies on whose behalf Bertrand speaks.
Once again we see the two key truths of modern corporate journalism in the U.S. First, we have the Jeffrey Goldberg Principle: you can never go wrong, but only right, by disseminating lies and propaganda from the CIA. Second, the organs that spread the most disinformation and crave disinformation agents as their employees are the very same ones who demand censorship of the internet in the name of stopping disinformation.
I’ve long said that if you want to understand how to thrive in this part of the media world, you should study the career advancement of Jeffrey Goldberg, propelled by one reckless act after the next. But now the sequel to the Goldberg Rise is the thriving career of this new CNN reporter whose value as a CIA propagandist Goldberg, notably, was the first to spot and reward.
New FBI Documents Reveal Seth Rich May Have Been Assassinated In Murder for Hire Plot After All
By Eric Striker | National Justice | April 26, 2021
For years, officials in the US government have held that Democratic National Convention voter expansion data director Seth Rich was killed during a random robbery in July 2016. Nothing was taken and there are currently no suspects in the case.
Julian Assange and others have suggested that Rich was in fact the source for the Wikileak’s dump of DNC emails and that foul play from political actors was involved in his death. Debate on this matter has been suppressed through high powered litigation and dismissed as a baseless conspiracy theory.
Now, lawyers representing the Rich family have been able to obtain 68 pages of heavily redacted FBI documents on the case that reveal Assange and others may have been right after all.
While the FBI has repeatedly asserted over the years that it was not involved in the investigation into Rich’s death, the documents show that they were lying.
New information shows that Rich’s homicide was in fact the subject of a Department of Justice meeting in 2018. In another document, it is speculated that “given [redacted] it is conceivable that an individual or group would want to pay for his death.”
Most pressing is the revelation that an individual, whose name is also redacted, had snatched Rich’s laptop and taken it home. The FBI is currently in possession of the laptop but will not say if anything was altered or deleted from it. The FBI revealed this information earlier this year, but has stated it has not investigated a pertinent piece of evidence in the case.
According to the narrative spun by the Metropolitan Police Department, Rich was killed in a failed robbery after leaving a bar in Washington DC.
Rich was still alive when the police reached him, but was supposedly “too drunk” to describe his attacker before his death. Journalist Joe Hoft reported in 2017 that the police body camera footage from the encounter has mysteriously gone missing.
Countless pages of the FBI’s records on Rich are redacted in their entirety. The FBI’s FOIA office has been battling in court for more time to meet the rest of their Rich FOIA obligations (hundreds of more pages) citing the need to fully censor information in the interest of “privacy.” As others have pointed out, the FBI and DoJ don’t have any problem releasing totally unredacted files on people they dislike.
Ultimately, its clear that the FBI and DoJ agree with skeptics that the Rich murder wasn’t just a mugging gone bad. The explosive story appears to be heavily suppressed by Google search algorithms. Suspicions of Rich being a victim of a US government sponsored or otherwise politically motivated assassination will only rise the more the FBI drags its feet and covers for the suspects.
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Anti-science
The infinite list
The Naked Emperor’s Newsletter | October 12, 2022
Almost three years ago science entered a new dark age.
Jay Bhattacharya, a professor of medicine at Stanford University and co-author of the Great Barrington Declaration, seems to agree. He has been compiling a list of the examples of anti-science we have unfortunately become used to.
I have listed his thoughts so far but the list is continually expanding... continue
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