A child has been forcefully taken away from his Muslim family by Germany’s “child protection services” and police forces because his parents were allegedly teaching him that homosexuality is not accepted in Islam.
A video that has gone viral apparently shows the outraged family trying to stop the incident, as the screaming child struggles to get out of police officers’ hold.
Others said it was very clear that the child did not want to be removed from his parent’s home, given the way he cried and struggled with the police.
“In Germany, this kid goes to school, they bring up the topic of homosexuality and so he tells him that it is Haram according to his religion. So the school call the child care services and the police show up at his door and forcibly take him away from his family,” a comment on the video said.
“This is from Germany and there’s a lot of similar cases in a lot of European countries like Sweden they take those children not only from Muslim families but also some Christian families!” another said on the child removal case, which was said to be a frequent occurrence in Sweden.
The incident happened after the child’s teachers learned that his parents were teaching him that being gay was a sin as Muslims. The teachers then reported it to child protection services that got in touch with the police to take him away.
In 2012, the Nordic Committee for Human Rights (NHCR) wrote a letter to the Secretary General of the Council of Europe, strongly condemning the “destructive child removal” activities taking place in Nordic countries, including Sweden.
“Mostly young, sole parent families, economically and educationally weaker families, families with health challenges and immigrant parents are targeted by the social service in Sweden, Norway, Denmark, and Finland,” the letter said.
“Also parents with religious and philosophical beliefs, which do not seem to be politically accepted, are often deemed as unsuitable parents, which invariably leads the social councils, acting upon the advice of the social workers, to remove the children from their families and place them in foster homes,” The letter added.
According to the letter, even highly educated parents with high-profile professions have experienced social workers’ interference in their private and family lives. – Video
Ukrainian intelligence has partnered with the FBI and other US government agencies to remove ‘Russian’ content on Silicon Valley platforms, a senior official told independent journalist Lee Fang earlier this week at the RSA Convention in San Francisco.
“Once we have a trace or evidence of disinformation campaigns via Facebook or other resources that are from the US, we pass this information to the FBI, along with writing directly to Facebook,” Ilya Vitiuk, head of the Department of Cyber Information Security in the Security Service of Ukraine (SBU), told Fang.
Vitiuk spoke at the cyber security conference, sitting on a panel alongside FBI Cyber Division Assistant Director Bryan Vorndran, Special Agent Alex Kobzanets from the San Francisco field office, and Laura Galante from the Office of the Director of National Intelligence.
Fang noted that the Ukrainian official thanked the many “private sector allies” in the US, including Google, Amazon, Starlink, and CrowdStrike – the DNC contractor that claimed ‘Russian hacking’ in 2016 but later testified it had no evidence for it.
“I don’t know how many times we’ve called the CEOs here in San Francisco to drive to their office on a Sunday afternoon and really engage with our Ukrainian partners,” Kobzanets said during the panel.
According to Vitiuk, the SBU tells the FBI that a certain person or account is “probably Russia’s influence” in order to get them censored. He described the FBI as his agency’s “top partner” and US cyber support as a “psychological game changer” for Ukraine.
“Everything that is against our country, consider it a fake, even if it’s not,” Vitiuk told Fang when asked how the SBU determines what might be disinformation. “Right now, for our victory, it is important to have that kind of understanding, not to be fooled.”
By way of example, Vitiuk cited reports of tensions between President Vladimir Zelensky and Ukraine’s top general, Valery Zaluzhny, saying they were completely fabricated by Russia. In early March, the openly pro-Ukraine German tabloid Bildreported on their disagreements about military tactics.
Fang has previously documented US government plans to work with social media platforms on censoring “disinformation” related to “the nature of US support to Ukraine.” In December, he also revealed that the Pentagon had teamed up with Twitter to “amplify certain messages” for the US military.
Tucker Carlson’s departure from Fox News comes as independent media appears to have been muzzled in the US, with corporations playing a hefty role in limiting the kind of information that gets out to people, Larry Johnson, retired CIA intelligence officer and State Department official, told Sputnik.
Truthful media coverage of a whole host of issues in the United States is discouraged. It is even frowned upon, Larry Johnson, a former US official, told Sputnik in the wake of the abrupt departure of Tucker Carlson from Fox News.
“Media corporations over the course of the last 30 years have become increasingly concentrated in a small number of organizations. So, the independent media that used to exist is virtually nonexistent now, except for what appears on the Internet and podcasts,” the retired CIA intelligence officer stated.
He pointed out that The Washington Post, owned by Jeff Bezos of Amazon, “has become very much of a political outlet, as opposed to a news outlet”. Similarly, The New York Times, the Los Angeles Times, all previously separate newspapers, have been “consolidated under centralized corporate control.”
“Those corporations play a heavy role in limiting the kind of information that gets out to people. That coupled with reporters who are desperate to keep their jobs, and normally they’ll just play along with whatever the company policies are,” Larry Johnson said.
Several days after Fox News unexpectedly announced on April 24 that its outspoken anchor Tucker Carlson would be parting ways with the cable news network, the pundit himself made a video address telling viewers that media bosses were trying to stifle any form of debate in the industry.
“The people in charge… are hysterical and aggressive. They’re afraid. They’ve given up persuasion – they’re resorting to force… But it won’t work… true things prevail,” Carlson said in a two-minute video clip posted on his Twitter account on Wednesday.
In his monologue, Carlson said that debates on “big topics” like war, corporate power, and civil liberties “are not permitted in American media,” because, “both political parties – and their donors – have reached consensus… to shut down any conversation about it.”
Weighing in on the seasoned journalist’s verbal barrage, Larry Johnson agreed that truthful media coverage in the US is being stifled.
“The corporate media’s normal coverage about economic issues, for example, is always trying to emphasize the positive, even when the actual data points to some very alarming trends. On the foreign policy front this comes down to the concentration of power in the hands of a few corporations, and those corporations are wielding enormous influence. Basically, the defense industry and the pharmaceutical industry in the United States have enormous influence over the public debate, what gets publicized and what is ignored,” he said.
Even attempts in the media to label Tucker Carlson, who was refusing to accept official narratives, as a right-winger, Johnson said, was a “hallmark of censorship.” The journalist was simply somebody who was trying to get to the truth, the one-time State Department official underscored.
“Tucker is really more of a libertarian from the standpoint that he does not subscribe to the positions of the Republican Party or the Democrat Party. But he would take each issue on its own, and ask legitimate questions, such as the protests that took place on January 6, 2021 [which] were described by the regime as an insurrection and [it] characterized anybody who was up there on Capitol Hill as basically a terrorist. In fact, the vast majority of the people out there were peaceful and they were not attacking and destroying the Capitol by any standpoint,” Larry Johnson explained.
He deplored the “tremendous amounts of propaganda” in the United States, adding: “What I see now is there is far more press freedom in Russia than in the United States, or places like Canada.”
What was once an open society, allowing the questioning of issues, with “an aggressive, actually free press,” has transformed into a landscape of “almost state-controlled media,” with “people happily involved with suppressing dissident voices,” the retired CIA intelligence officer stated.
Larry Johnson concluded by urging people to look at multiple sources and listen to as many voices as possible to be able to “make their own judgment.”
Chairman of the House Judiciary Committee, Rep. Jim Jordan, has sent subpoenas to the heads of three federal agencies for records on communications with social media companies to censor online content.
Jordan sent the subpoenas to head of Homeland Security’s Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) head Jen Easterly, State Department’s Global Engagement Center (GEC) coordinator James Rubin, and director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) Dr. Rochelle Walensky.
We obtained an example of one of the letters for you here.
The subpoenas are part of the efforts to reveal the collusion between the federal government and social media to censor certain viewpoints.
“Numerous documents made publicly available reflect the weaponization of the federal government’s power to censor speech online directly and by proxy,” Jordan wrote in his letter to Dr. Walensky. (Documents obtained in the lawsuit filed by Louisiana and Missouri attorneys general against the Biden administration and the Twitter Files published by Matt Taibbi and other independent journalists have shown that officials at several federal agencies, including the FBI and DHS, constantly contacted social media companies to have certain people and content censored.)
“It is necessary for Congress to gauge the extent to which the CDC coerced, pressured, worked with, or relied upon social media and other tech companies in order to censor speech.”
Jordan sent all three agencies letters to produce the records, but they failed to adequately provide the records requested. The subpoenas are an attempt to force them to produce all the records required.
All three agencies have until May 22 to provide the records.
Tucker Carlson made headlines this week for being suddenly ousted by Fox News — but in the latest release of the “Twitter files” the former news commentator made headlines for a different reason.
Carlson’s op-ed cited information that was, up until that point, publicly viewable on the World Health Organization’s (WHO) website. However, after Carlson’s op-ed was published, that information disappeared from the site.
The files released Thursday also reveal that Twitter executives held internal debates over how best to censor the content in Carlson’s op-ed — an initiative that was led by a former press secretary for Sen. Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.).
In an exclusive interview with The Defender on Thursday, Thacker expounded on the significance of these findings — and hinted at what the next “Twitter files” dump might reveal.
Twitter ‘clipping Tucker Carlson’s wings’
Thacker, who wrote about his findings on his Substack, said that the “bird factory” — referring to Twitter — engaged in “clipping Tucker Carlson’s wings” via its attempted censorship of his op-ed.
Despite being “controversial and polarizing,” Thacker said, Carlson was “One of the few Americans to challenge the official framework of acceptable narratives” and, as such, was “hated by the mainstream reporters for daring to throw darts at liberal pieties.”
“Why did Twitter censor Tucker Carlson? Better yet, who helped Twitter do that?” Thacker asked.
Thacker noted that while he was “reading an endless sea of #TwitterFiles” pertaining to efforts to “censor alleged ‘COVID misinformation,’” he unexpectedly discovered documents detailing attempts to censor Carlson.
These efforts appear to have begun on June 24, 2021, when Elizabeth Busby, a policy communications specialist with “Twitter Comms,” sent an email to colleagues inquiring if an op-ed Carlson had written the previous day should be flagged for COVID-19 “misinformation.”
In her email, Busby inquired whether links to Carlson’s op-ed “violate our COVID-19 misleading information policy and qualify for enforcement under our URL policy.” She added, “We’ve seen some Tweets with the link … and some that contain counterspeech.”
In the same message, Busby noted that “in the past,” Twitter had applied a boilerplate warning “to sites containing COVID-19 misinfo” and “Given Tucker’s visibility, we anticipate there may be some press interest regardless of the enforcement outcome.”
Thacker discovered that Busby was not just an ordinary Twitter employee. She joined Twitter in 2020, after leaving the U.S. Senate, where she worked as the deputy national press secretary to then-Senate Majority Leader Schumer.
According to Thacker, “Busby’s work history includes a stint at SKDKnickerbocker, a PR and lobby shop closely aligned with the Democratic party. Busby now leads ‘trust and safety communications’ at Twitch.”
WHO ‘stealth-edited’ its COVID vaccine guidance for children after Carlson’s op-ed
What was all the fuss about? Carlson’s June 23, 2021, op-ed for Fox News — “The COVID vaccine is dangerous for kids, Big Tech doesn’t want you to know that” — referred to language available on the WHO’s website that explicitly did not recommend the COVID-19 vaccines for children.
In that op-ed, which was adapted from Carlson’s opening commentary on that day’s broadcast of “Tucker Carlson Tonight,” he referred to then-new guidance from the WHO and also recommendations from medical experts.
Carlson said:
“Since the beginning of the pandemic, key pieces of medical guidance from the World Health Organization have proven to be disastrously false — false enough to cost lives. It was the WHO, you’ll remember, that told us COVID couldn’t be transmitted between people, even as the virus was spreading into the United States. It was the WHO that worked in stealth with the Chinese government to obscure the source of the outbreak at the beginning, and then hide its origins from the world. …
“… bureaucrats at the WHO published new vaccine guidance. Here’s what it says: Children should not take the coronavirus vaccine. Why? The drugs are too dangerous. There’s not nearly enough data to understand the long-term effects or to show that the benefits are worth the risk that they bring.
“This is terrible news, of course, for the pharmaceutical industry. Big Pharma has been planning to test the vaccine on 6-month-olds.”
According to Thacker, the WHO published an evaluation of vaccine safety and efficacy on April 8, 2021, for the Pfizer-BioNTech, Moderna, Johnson & Johnson (J&J) and AstraZeneca COVID-19 vaccines.
For children, the WHO issued the following recommendation:
“Children should not be vaccinated for the moment. There is not yet enough evidence on the use of vaccines against COVID-19 in children to make recommendations for children to be vaccinated against COVID-19.
“Children and adolescents tend to have milder disease compared to adults. However, children should continue to have the recommended childhood vaccines.”
The information that Carlson appears to have referenced was still on the WHO’s website as of June 22, 2021, according to Thacker. However, after Carlson’s op-ed was published, the WHO “stealth-edited their page,” according to Thacker, and replaced it with new guidance, which stated:
“Unless they are part of a group at higher risk of severe COVID-19, it is less urgent to vaccinate them than older people, those with chronic health conditions and health workers.
“More evidence is needed on the use of the different COVID-19 vaccines in children to be able to make general recommendations on vaccinating children against COVID-19.
“WHO’s Strategic Advisory Group of Experts (SAGE) has concluded that the Pfizer/BionTech vaccine is suitable for use by people aged 12 years and above.”
“In other instances where the WHO has updated their vaccine guidance, they note this change with a date at the top of the webpage,” Thacker wrote. “But no update exists for changes the WHO made the day of Tucker’s essay.”
Thacker added:
“While some of the language in Tucker’s piece could be viewed as inflammatory — the WHO did not say the vaccines were ‘dangerous’ — independent experts also were advising that children not receive the COVID vaccines, as rare but serious adverse events were not studied.”
The subtitle to Carlson’s op-ed read: “Even posting WHO guidance could get you censored.”
On April 10, 2021, WHO tweeted: “#COVID19 trials for children are under way. Following proven health measures is still the best way to keep everyone, including children, safe from COVID-19.” The tweet remains online to this day.
Twitter sought to censor Carlson while avoiding ‘political risks’
According to Thacker, the day after the WHO “stealth-edited” its vaccine guidance, Twitter officials began discussing Tucker’s essay — after Busby brought it to their attention.
Twitter employee Brian Clarke responded to Busby’s June 24, 2021, email that same day, writing, “We are going to proceed with labeling any Tweets linking to the article we detect that advance the claim that WHO has deemed the vaccine dangerous for children.”
However, Clarke said, “Given that this article’s narrative is related to ‘big tech censorship’, I want to be mindful that taking action on the URL level could lead to this particular article gaining more traction rather than mitigating the harm associated with it.”
“We’re going to keep an eye on any ongoing discussions related to the article and if it happens to gain traction we will review again under our URL guidelines,” Clarke added.
According to Thacker, “Twitter officials also discussed looping in top Twitter execs, such as the general counsel, due to the ‘political risks’ associated with such actions. Yoel Roth [then-head of Trust and Safety for Twitter] agreed with this approach to ‘escalate.’”
This included a recommendation that then-general counsel for Twitter Vijaya Gadde review any actions taken against Fox News, “given political risks,” while Roth stated that any action against Fox would be “escalated” internally within Twitter.
Joseph Guay, at the time Twitter’s senior policy specialist for “misinformation,” then shared an email with Busby, Clarke and other Twitter personnel, advising them on various options they had available to them to take action against tweets containing a link to Carlson’s op-ed, without directly censoring Fox News.
Thacker noted that Guay, who “seems to have made the [final] call on Tucker’s op-ed,” departed Twitter earlier this year for a position as TikTok’s “Global Policy Lead on Deceptive Actors & Behaviors.”
Upon departing Twitter, Guay, in a post on his LinkedIn page, referred to his work at Twitter policing “the bad guys”:
“Our teams worked tirelessly to ship bold new policies (such as the COVID-19 Misleading Information Policy, or the Crisis Misinformation Policy) to prevent virulent misinformation and cognitive manipulation from bringing harm to vulnerable people.
“I remain as committed as ever to building resiliency to weaponized information, and making it a little harder for the bad guys.”
Guay’s LinkedIn profile states he is engaged in “fighting information threats globally.”
Thacker also noted that Twitter’s apparent distaste for Carlson was evident in more than just this instance.
“Tucker Carlson would have never known this happened, but when Twitter held a meet and greet months, later, they wrote of Tucker’s producer, ‘[I]t was pretty apparent from the get-go we understood the very different goals we have at work,’” Thacker tweeted, referencing internal Twitter documents regarding a meeting between Twitter officials and Alex Pfeiffer, Carlson’s producer.
Thacker wrote:
“Months after Twitter took action against tweets advancing claims in Tucker’s essay, the company met with reporters in New York to strengthen ties with journalists covering social media.
“In their assessment of reporters, one Twitter official noted of Tucker’s producer, Alex Pfeiffer, ‘[I]t was pretty apparent from the get-go we understood the very different goals we have at work, this was mainly to relationship build.’”
In remarks he shared with The Defender, Thacker noted that Twitter was attempting to strike a balancing act between censoring Carlson’s narrative while not running afoul of Fox.
“They were trying to limit Tucker Carlson’s impact,” he said, “and they were doing it in a way that they would not be brought into direct conflict with Fox.”
According to Thacker, this balancing act nevertheless belied Twitter’s political bias.
“There’s this issue they had with conservative media, and they’re biased in one direction,” Thacker told The Defender. “The way you know this is that the person who brings it to their attention is the former deputy national press secretary of Sen. Chuck Schumer.”
Thacker said that while some of what Carlson had written in his op-ed was “inflammatory,” it nevertheless “wasn’t inaccurate.” He added:
“The WHO edited its website on the same day Tucker’s article came out, and the next day, Twitter starts to go after his story. What do you say about that? Who does Twitter work for?
“Apparently, you don’t question the WHO, or you don’t write what the WHO says. It shows you that you cannot trust these social media people. They are in the tank in one direction.”
Furthering this point, Thacker highlighted a potential conflict of interest between Twitter and one of the COVID-19 vaccine manufacturers, J&J. In Thacker’s previous “Twitter files” revelations, he found that Twitter partnered with J&J on a COVID-19 vaccine “marketing strategy.”
Such efforts were not limited to COVID-19 vaccines. “By the summer of 2021,” Thacker wrote as part of his previous “Twitter files” release, “Johnson & Johnson began a full court press to market a ton of their products on Twitter, including a controversial antidepressant.”
“I don’t know what else is influencing Twitter,” Thacker told The Defender. “Johnson & Johnson was one of the vaccines mentioned on the WHO site, and that was a client of Twitter’s.”
Remarking on the revelations made in the “Tucker Twitter files,” Michael Rectenwald, Ph.D., author of “Google Archipelago: The Digital Gulag and the Simulation of Freedom” and a former New York University liberal studies professor, told The Defender :
“This installment of the Twitter files proves that not only the government but also international governance bodies like the WHO established direct censorship channels within Twitter — to censor information that contradicted the narrative of vaccine safety, even when ‘the science’ contradicted the narrative.
“No doubt we will learn that international NGOs like the World Economic Forum also had such channels.”
Rectenwald was a guest on the final “Tucker Carlson Originals” broadcast on Fox News before Carlson was let go by the network.
WHO partnered with social media platforms to combat ‘misinformation’
Indeed, in several instances, the WHO has partnered with social media platforms such as Twitter to police alleged “misinformation” and “disinformation” pertaining to COVID-19 vaccines and countermeasures — and has also previously expressed misgivings about Elon Musk’s plans to allow more “free speech” on the platform.
Dr. Mike Ryan, executive of WHO’s Health Emergencies Programme, stated on April 26, 2022 — when Musk was contemplating purchasing Twitter — that Musk will have a “huge influence” over the curbing and potential spreading of vaccine misinformation on Twitter, and that Twitter and all social media platforms must address “misinformation.”
Thacker: Twitter attempted to ‘manufacture consent’
Thacker compared Twitter’s actions to what Noam Chomsky once described as “manufacturing consent.” Chomsky described manufacturing consent in a 2018 interview, during which he said:
“The myth is that the media are independent, adversarial, courageous, struggling against power.
“That’s actually true of some. There are often very fine reporters, correspondents. In fact, the media does a fine job, but within a framework that determines what to discuss, not to discuss.”
“If people decide ‘I am willing to be a danger to the community by refusing the vaccine’ they should then say, ‘well, I also have the decency to isolate myself. I don’t want a vaccine but I don’t have the right to run around harming people.’
“That should be a convention. Enforcing is a different question. It should be understood, and we should try to get it to be understood. If it really reaches the point where they are severely endangering people, then of course you have to do something about it.”
In a follow-up interview, Chomsky doubled down on his previous remarks. “How can we get food to them? Well, that’s actually their problem.”
On his Substack, Thacker noted that the media’s response to the recent news that Carlson was ousted from Fox News is characteristic of what Chomsky had once warned about. He wrote:
“The majority of reporters have shrugged aside their colleagues’ reporting fiascoes and the damage done to their own reputations, and continue to blame most failures in journalism on one person: Tucker Carlson.
“So it was not surprising that reporters began a week-long celebration this Monday when Fox fired Tucker.”
Referring to the latest Twitter files revelations about Carlson, Thacker told The Defender, “I can’t believe this is not everywhere, that everyone is not reading this right now.”
He said he will soon release more documents as part of the “Twitter files”:
“There are more stories. I had another story that I was working on, and I pushed that aside to work on this one.
“There’s probably another 10 stories, with more examples of the way they were working with the media, especially the media they favored.”
Michael Nevradakis, Ph.D., based in Athens, Greece, is a senior reporter for The Defender and part of the rotation of hosts for CHD.TV’s “Good Morning CHD.”
The thrust of Let a hundred flowers bloom was that the world’s response to COVID-19 should not have been exempted from the normal processes of policy formation and development, which in a democracy have informed debate at their core. By exempting pandemic policy from critique, governments were attempting to ensure that the correct response was undertaken, but in fact increased the likelihood of falling into serious error.
Governments felt that in a public health emergency there was no time to explore policy alternatives, and it was essential to take a disciplined approach to defeat the enemy (i.e. the virus). It was necessary for governments to control information given out to the population from the centre and to suppress ‘unreliable’ sources of information that might promulgate ‘incorrect’ information, and thereby cause the deaths of people who were led astray from the true path.
Jacinda Ardern, the former Prime Minister of New Zealand, notoriously declared ‘we will continue to be your single source of truth.’ She advised the New Zealand people to listen to the Director General of Health and the Ministry of Health and ‘dismiss anything else.’
There should be no scenarios in which governments and government agencies are the single source of truth. No organisation, no individual and no groups of individuals can be infallible. She is now headed to Harvard University to expound on disinformation with and to the best and brightest.
Therefore, we need to go through a divergent phase of policy development in the first instance, in which all the relevant diverse sources of knowledge and diverse voices are consulted. This is sometimes referred to as ‘the wisdom of crowds,’ but ‘the wisdom of crowds’ must be distinguished from ‘the groupthink of herds.’
The prices of companies on the stock market are thought to reflect the combined knowledge of all traders and therefore the true market price. But stock prices go through cycles of boom and bust, in which true underlying prices are distorted for a time by the famous ‘animal spirits,’ and rise exponentially before falling, much like the pandemic curve indeed.
The need to bring diverse perspectives to bear on common problems is why we have parliaments and congresses instead of dictatorships. There is widespread disillusionment with parliaments, but they exemplify Winston Churchill’s famous dictum: ‘Democracy is the worst form of government – except for all the others that have been tried.’ Deliberative decision-making in which all voices are heard is an essential safeguard which can lead to sound policy formation if deployed carefully, avoiding the pitfalls of groupthink, and it is superior to all other forms of decision-making that have been tried.
Governments must choose a path forward, they must make strategic choices, but they should do so with full knowledge of the policy options, and they should never attempt to prevent other options from being discussed. But this is what happened in the COVID-19 pandemic.
It was driven by a simplistic view of science in which the scientific community supposedly formed a ‘scientific consensus’ about the best ways to handle the pandemic, based on universal measures aimed at the entire population. But the Great Barrington Declaration advocated an alternative strategy of ‘focused protection’ instead, and was originally signed by 46 distinguished experts, including a Nobel Prize winner. It has subsequently been signed by over 16,000 medical and public health scientists, and nearly 50,000 medical practitioners. Whatever you may think about the Great Barrington Declaration, these simple facts demonstrate that there was no consensus.
When activists refer to ‘the scientific consensus,’ what they mean is ‘the establishment consensus’ – the consensus of sages and worthies of the type referred to by Jacinda Ardern and referred to in ‘Let a hundred flowers bloom.’ These agency heads, advisory panels, and ministries of health are naturally predisposed to accept their own advice and ignore contrarian voices. Yet contrarian voices remind us of ‘inconvenient facts,’ data that conflicts with the establishment view. It is through the dialogue between diverse voices that we work closer to the truth. ‘The authorities’ must be held accountable, even in a pandemic.
The key point about the establishment consensus is that it is always entirely devoid of individual insight. In order to qualify to be a sage or a worthy and to sit on government advisory panels or be an agency head, you have to show your capacity to toe the line at all times and never say anything remotely controversial. This was expressed so well by George Bernard Shaw: ‘The reasonable man adapts himself to the world; the unreasonable man persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore all progress depends on the unreasonable man.’
The pandemic response has been dominated by the reasonable ones who trim to the wind and accept the current framework whatever it is.
In early 2020, an establishment consensus formed within weeks around the grand strategy (which, remember, was neither grand nor strategic) of suppressing the spread of the pandemic through lockdowns until vaccination could end it. At that stage, there were no vaccines in existence and there was literally zero evidence that lockdowns could ‘stop the spread,’ but alternative strategies were never considered. Since then, the establishment has had greater success in suppressing debate than in suppressing spread of the virus.
Maryanne Demasi, who has a fatal tendency to think for herself that has got her into trouble in the past, has written about this ‘consensus by censorship’ in a Substack article: ‘It is not difficult to reach a scientific consensus when you squelch dissenting voices.’ Scientists such as Norman Fenton and Martin Neill, with hundreds of publications to their name, have been unable to get papers published if they raise any questions about papers with favourable findings on COVID-19 vaccines. They have written about their experiences with the Lancethere. Eyal Shahar has given three examples here.
This is unacceptable. COVID-19 vaccines, like any other therapeutic product, should be subject to rigorous ongoing analysis for safety, and strategies must be adapted where necessary in the light of emerging knowledge. Again, there can be no exemptions from this.
Even with these impediments, some papers slip through the net, such as the rigorous analysis of the primary clinical trial evidence by Joseph Fraiman, Peter Doshi et al: ‘Serious adverse events of special interest following mRNA COVID-19 vaccination in randomized trials in adults.’ But many papers with adverse findings about the vaccine are blocked at the pre-print stage, such as the paper on COVID vaccination and age-stratified all-cause mortality risk by Pantazatos and Seligmann, which concluded that the data suggests ‘the risks of COVID vaccines and boosters outweigh the benefits in children, young adults and older adults with low occupational risk or previous coronavirus exposure.’
Pantazatos described his experience with the medical journals here. This demonstrates that the most effective tactic to dispose of contrarian research is not to refute it, but to suppress it and then ignore it. Indeed, establishment researchers have ignored the whole issue and have not addressed the effect of COVID-19 vaccines on all-cause mortality at all. This is extraordinary, as the entire goal of the pandemic response is supposed to be to reduce mortality. But two years after the commencement of mass vaccination, researchers have not conducted controlled studies of its effect on overall mortality, even retrospectively. This is incomprehensible. Are they afraid of what they might find?
Gorski has nothing to contribute on the subject. The nearest thing he has to an argument is that individual studies do not necessarily invalidate a scientific consensus. But Gøtzsche and Demasi’s paper is based on a meta review of 18 systematic reviews, 14 randomised trials and 34 other studies with a control group. It has been open for review on the pre-print site and I am not aware of any substantive objections to the information and analysis therein.
Words like ‘anti-vaxxer,’ ‘anti-science,’ and ‘cranks’ are thought-stoppers – rhetorical devices designed to signal to the orthodox that their cherished convictions are safe, and they don’t need to understand the arguments and evidence put forward by dissidents because they think they are by definition disreputable people out to mislead. Resorting to these methods and ad hominem attacks is in fact anti-intellectual,
The fake consensus has indeed been ‘manufactured.’ The scientific debate on COVID-19 was closed from the outset, particularly at the level of opinion, whereas a hallmark of true scientific consensus is openness.
Consider, as a case study, the great debate between the advocates of the ‘big bang’ theory of the origins of the universe and the ‘steady state’ theory, the history of which is related in this account by the American Institute of Physics. The steady state theory (in which the universe is expanding at a steady rate with matter being continuously created to fill the space created as stars and galaxies move apart) was advocated by Fred Hoyle, one of the most eminent physicists of his generation, over more than 20 years, until the weight of empirical observations by radio astronomy brought about its demise. The debate was ended in the traditional way, whereby the predictions of the steady state theory were falsified.
The grand strategy of COVID-19 pandemic responses, which was supposed to end the pandemic and end excess deaths, has been contradicted by empirical observations. The pandemic did not end, almost everyone became infected, excess deaths have continued and there is no hard evidence especially from randomised controlled trials that the vaccines can prevent or reduce all-cause mortality. In Australia, the bulk of our excess deaths have come during the mass vaccination period.
And yet, the orthodox continue to have faith in the strategy and continue to ignore and suppress alternative strategies, believing that the science has been settled, when it seems to be decidedly unsettled.
This leads to the war against ‘disinformation and misinformation,’ which is in fact a war against contrarian viewpoints. Government has colluded with establishment scientists and social media companies to systematically censor alternative observations and strategies.
The straw-man arguments usually deployed to justify this highlight irrational ideas such as rumours that the vaccines contain microchips, etc. But they completely ignore the issues raised by serious scientists such as Doshi, Fenton, and Gøtzsche. The orthodox hold that sceptics are science denialists, whereas the reverse is true: the establishment denies the diversity of findings in the scientific literature.
The market in ideas should be the freest of all markets, as there is much to be gained and little to be lost by engaging with all ideas that derive from evidence-based analysis. By contrast, pandemic policy has been characterised by a kind of intellectual protectionism, in which orthodox ideas are privileged.
The fake consensus has been used as the basis for academic studies of ‘disinformation.’ There is no precise conceptual basis for the concept of disinformation, which is assumed to be ‘false or misleading information.’ Who determines what is false? This is usually defined derivatively as any information that goes contrary to the established narrative.
The self-appointed Aspen Commission in its final report on ‘information disorder,’ referred to some of these issues, by asking for example ‘who gets to determine mis-and disinformation?’ and acknowledging that ‘there are concomitant risks of silencing good-faith dissent’ – and then proceeded to ignore them. Without defining it, a key recommendation was: ’Establish a comprehensive strategic approach to countering disinformation and the spread of misinformation including a centralised national response strategy’ (p30).
A further recommendation is: ‘Call on community, corporate, professional, and political leaders to promote new norms that create personal and professional consequences within their communities and networks for individuals who willfully violate the public trust and use their privilege to harm the public.’ In other words, pursue and persecute those who step out of line, with no consideration of whether they may be relying simply on different information, not misinformation.
They go on to make helpful practical suggestions on how to implement their vaguely worded recommendation:
Ask professional standards bodies like medical associations to hold their members accountable when they share false health information with the public for profit.
Encourage advertisers to withhold advertising from platforms whose practices fail to protect their customers from harmful misinformation.
Spur media organizations to adopt practices that foreground fact-based information, and ensure they give readers context, including when public officials lie to the public.
All of this assumes that there is a simple distinction to be made between ‘true’ and ‘false’ information, and underlying this, a naïve trust that only the health authorities are relying on ‘fact-based information’ and contrary views are self-evidently not fact-based. But, as we have seen, Doshi, Fenton, Gøtzsche and Demasi have published contrarian papers that are heavily fact-based.
In an academic extension of the ad hominem attack, there is even research into the psychological characteristics of dissidents, which brings to mind the worst excesses of the Soviet Union. Examples provided by ChatGPT of general studies on misinformation indicated that those of us who question established narratives are apparently led astray by confirmation bias, have a ‘low cognitive ability,’ and are biased by our political views. This implies that those who support conventional positions are unbiased, smart, and are never influenced by their political orientation. These assumptions should also be tested by research, perhaps?
In relation to COVID-19, it turns out that us dissidents are also prone to ‘epistemic vices such as indifference to the truth or rigidity in [our] belief structures,’ according to Meyer et al. This was based on testing people’s willingness to believe 12 patently ridiculous statements, such as ‘Adding pepper to your meals prevents COVID-19,’ which I have never heard of before. Willingness to agree with these statements was then stretched to equate with more serious issues:
People who accept COVID-19 misinformation may be more likely to put themselves and others at risk, to strain already overburdened medical systems and infrastructures, and to spread misinformation to others. Of particular concern is the prospect that a vaccine for the novel coronavirus will be rejected by a sizeable proportion of the population because they have been taken in by misinformation about the safety or effectiveness of the vaccine.
None of these issues were tested in the research, yet it was extended beyond the findings to justify these conclusions.
Using a representative survey of U.S. adults fielded March 17-19, 2020 (n=2,023), we examine the prevalence and correlates of beliefs in two conspiracy theories about COVID-19.
29% of respondents agree that the threat of COVID-19 has been exaggerated to damage President Trump; 31% agree that the virus was purposefully created and spread.
These beliefs are certainly debatable and are held to be founded once again in denialism: ‘a psychological predisposition to reject expert information and accounts of major events.’ Denialism was further broken down to these:
Much of the information we receive is wrong.
I often disagree with conventional views about the world.
Official government accounts of events cannot be trusted.
Major events are not always what they seem.
Are you telling me these statements are not true?! I will have to rethink everything!
These studies all equate dissident views with ‘conspiracy theories.’ They assume that dissident views are self-evidently contrary to the scientific record, invalid and plain wrong; and they do not see any need to support this with references. They are insufferably superior and patronising, resting on immense confidence in their unfalsifiable academic findings.
The scientific method contains many valuable tools for counteracting confirmation bias – the tendency we all have to interpret all data as favourable to our pre-existing ideas. Pandemic science has shown that these tools themselves can be misused to reinforce confirmation bias. This leads to a kind of objectivity trap – the sages become blind to their own bias because they think they are immune.
They are founded in a belief that dissidents must be fundamentally anti-social since they are ‘anti-science.’ They must be either bad actors or gullible and misled. These authors do not consider the positive attributes that could be associated with dissident beliefs: a proclivity for independent thinking and the critical thinking that is supposed to be inculcated by higher education.
Establishments have been trying to suppress rebels and dissidents for hundreds if not thousands of years. But every society needs (non-violent) rebels to challenge beliefs that are not well-founded.
The establishment consensus on COVID-19 is built on sand and should be challenged. It arose from premature closure of the scientific debate, followed by suppression of contrarian evidence-based analysis. Dissidents include scientists, who are clearly not anti-science but are opposed to flawed science based on ‘low cognitive ability’ and confirmation bias in favour of establishment ideas. They are pushing for better science.
The most reliable policy arises from open science and open debate, not from protectionism and closed science.
Let a hundred schools of thought contend – or we are all lost!
Michael Tomlinson is a Higher Education Governance and Quality Consultant. He was formerly Director of the Assurance Group at Australia’s Tertiary Education Quality and Standards Agency, where he led teams to conduct assessments of all registered providers of higher education (including all of Australia’s universities) against the Higher Education Threshold Standards. Before that, for twenty years he held senior positions in Australian universities. He has been an expert panel member for a number of offshore reviews of universities in the Asia-Pacific region. Dr Tomlinson is a Fellow of the Governance Institute of Australia and of the (international) Chartered Governance Institute.
Don’t ask me why, but I woke up this morning thinking about fear …. And how it’s really the fear of fear that explains every scary thing happening in our world today.
Fear of Covid is the most-recent example of how authorities and our most influential and important organizations profit from selling (and exaggerating) “threats” we should all fear.
Thirty years ago, few people recognized that the CDC or Fauci’s NIAID or the World Health Organization would obtain so much power over our lives.
There’s no need to recount the draconian “mitigation measures” these authorities created to compel mass compliance with their dictates.
But more citizens should probably think about how these people exploited the population’s irrational fear of a respiratory virus to achieve even more immense power and control.
The greatest fear of all is death. It follows logically that any group that tells you they can and will prevent your death is probably going to receive our blind support … which of course happened in Covid times.
Non-sensical fear campaigns aren’t new …
These agencies actually cemented their power decades earlier.
RFK, Jr. argues in “The Real Anthony Fauci” that Anthony Fauci became one of the world’s most influential people in the early and mid 1980s when he leveraged “fear of AIDS” to dramatically increase the funding and influence of his obscure health agency.
Back then, the fear was everyone was at risk of dying from AIDS (or HIV).
Like 99 percent of society’s great “threats,” the notion that AIDS was a potential killer of everyone was preposterously wrong. AIDS is actually only a risk to promiscuous gay men and drug users who share dirty needles.
Until the Great AIDS Scare, science and medical bureaucracies didn’t have tremendous influence on all of our lives. Back then our great fear (kind of like today) was “Russia! Russia! Russia” except four decades ago it was “Soviet Union! Soviet Union! Soviet Union!”
Today’s Great Fear is respiratory viruses.
In 1984 (the year, not the novel), nobody thought alleged experts in some Alphabet Bureaucratic Agency would end up telling everyone 100 things they had to do … and 100 things we couldn’t do.
But fear is a powerful thing and that’s exactly what happened. Not only did it happen, hardly anyone questioned the power given to these “experts.” (And those who did question the authorized narrative …. suddenly had a lot to fear).
It’s still surreal to me that in the “Land of the Free” so few people fear the growth of the government …. or the growth of censorship.
Why did everyone suddenly become a huge fan of Bigger Government?
I’ve thought a good bit about how or why all the key organizations and corporations went along with the massive growth of government.
Again, fear must provide the answer.
One assumes Amazon, Wal-Mart, JP Morgan, the colleges, Facebook, Twitter and Google, etc. must have been motivated, in part, by fear as well.
What these companies probably all fear is getting on the wrong side of the world’s 900-pound gorilla – the federal government.
If one happens to fear some person or organization, one strategy might be to become friends or allies with this mean-spirited bully. If you are too scared to fight “City Hall” … go ahead and join forces with this behemoth. Which is exactly what happened … on a grand scale.
As it turns out, the people who lead mega companies and influential organizations also fear losing their power, status and wealth.
They also fear “competition.” If the government (via its policies and crony-benefitting decisions) can make it much less likely a competitor will take away your company’s market share, it probably makes economic sense to support this ally.
Once upon a time, political scientists defined this result as “fascism.” Fascism occurs when big government and big business join forces to protect and expand their influence.
People also fear going against ‘The Current Thing’
I’ve also written a good bit about the power of “The Current Thing” (aka the “authorized narrative.”)
In today’s world, the vast majority of citizens possess a fear of going against the Current Thing. What these people really fear is being cast out out of the “herd” for challenging the thinking of the pack … or of the pack’s leader(s).
A key question for our times is who created all the false or dubious narratives in the first place.
I don’t think government officials birthed all of society’s fear-producing narratives. But government has the most power and, ultimately, matters most.
Put it this way, if George Soros, Bill Gates,BlackRock or the Davos club members are really the master puppeteer’s pulling the most-important strings, they still couldn’t do anything they want without an army of enforcers in government.
Two months ago I wrote a piece arguing that all the most important “truth-seeking” institutions in society now seemingly exist to conceal important truths. One of these institutions is “academia” or higher education.
But why did the key leaders of 99.9 percent of the colleges go along with 100-percent of the authorized Covid narratives?
Fear strikes again. The colleges were simply afraid to lose billions of dollars of research grants and federal funding, which they knew would happen if they bit the hand of the beast who was feeding them.
Government and its cronies are also afraid …
Which brings me to my final point of this meditation on fear: The people and organizations who rule the world are also motivated by great fears. Their fear is losing control, losing their lofty status in society’s hierarchy.
At some level, they must also fear legions of citizens going for those proverbial pitch forks and coming after them.
By now, practically every Substack author has opined on why Fox News executives decided to dismiss Tucker Carlson. (This despite the fact Carlson produced the most popular TV news talk show on the planet).
My best guess is that someone in some high place (inside this company or outside of it) had to be afraid of the scathing monologues Tucker was airing on a nightly basis.
Tucker’s segments were beginning to resonate with far too many people. And virtually all of his programs had one common theme:
“Folks,” argued Tucker, “It’s about time we started identifying the real Bad Guys who are ruining our world.”
What Tucker was really telling his sizable audience is that government – and all its sycophant cronies – were the real threat to our society.
So someone decided Tucker had to go.
Before this, someone decided that Jame O’Keefe, the founder of Project Veritas, had to go.
Before that, someone figured out how to capture and neutralize The Drudge Report.
And before that someone decided that Julian Assange had to be locked up for life (for the crime of publishing true documents the Powers that Be didn’t want published.)
“Someone” also decided that social media and Big Tech had to heavily censor “dangerous misinformation” to “protect” people from the “harm” of free speech.
Until recent years, most Americans didn’t even know that free speech was that dangerous to them.
We the People are the Boogie Men to our rulers …
John and Nisha Whitehead just wrote an excellent essay which tells readers who is really afraid.
“The war on free speech is really a war on the right to criticize the government,” they wrote.
“… In fact, the government has become increasingly intolerant of speech that challenges its power, reveals its corruption, exposes its lies, and encourages the citizenry to push back against the government’s many injustices.”
That is, the government (and all its many cronies) are afraid of any speech that doesn’t square with its own fear-producing narratives.
In short, the government is afraid of We the People.
More specifically, the government is afraid of large numbers of citizens shedding their irrational fears. If and when this happens, the majority of citizens may no longer run to their Nanny to protect them.
Tucker Carlson referenced this in his first tweet since being dismissed by Fox News. This message has now been viewed by more than 74 million people … so clearly Carlson’s message resonates with massive numbers of people.
The key message: There’s a lot more of us than there are of them. One suspects the people who benefit from selling fear also know this … which must be what scares the hell out of them.
The victor in the existential battle currently being waged will be determined by what message resonates with the most people – the government’s message (that only the government can save us all) … or the message being shared by the dissidents our government clearly fears.
If we’re all going to continue to be motivated by fear, let’s hope more people at least begin to fear our real enemy … which (great news) I think is starting to happen.
A list of “correct” phrases, narratives and names emailed to media outlets in Serbia is genuine and came at the instruction of the foreign ministry in Kiev, Ukraine’s embassy in Belgrade confirmed on Friday.
“It’s a recommendation we sent out to the media so that they would use correct terminology in their reporting regarding the war in Ukraine,” the embassy told the daily Novosti. According to RT Balkans, the email was sent to all print and electronic media in Serbia on Thursday.
According to the instructions, reporters should use “Russia’s war of aggression against Ukraine” instead of calling it a crisis, conflict, war, or even “Russian war in Ukraine.” Another guideline insists that “unprovoked full-scale military invasion” should be used instead of “special military operation.”
The Pentagon and multiple US and UK outlets already use this terminology, but it is unclear whether they adopted it on “recommendations” from the Ukrainian Foreign Ministry, or if it was the other way around.
The email comes after the US and the EU demanded Belgrade censor and ban Russian outlets such as RT Balkans and Sputnik, and crack down on ‘Russian narratives’ about Ukraine. While some Western-owned media in Serbia already use Kiev’s preferred phrasing, some outlets were offended by the embassy’s efforts to censor their reporting.
“Who are they to recommend to anyone how to work, or write?” Filip Rodic, the deputy head editor at Pecat magazine, told Novosti. “If they think they can censor the entire world, that’s total insanity.”
There was no explanation why the document sent to Serbian media was entirely in English, either. Some of the politically proscribed phrases in it – “the Ukraine,” for example – are already meaningless in Serbian, whose grammar has no articles. It is also a phonetic language that doesn’t spell, which makes the insistence on using Ukrainian spellings for place names – Horlivka and not Gorlovka, Kharkiv and not Kharkov, Mykolaiv and not Nikolaev, etc. – likewise not applicable.
In places, the document appears to confuse official narratives for recommended phrasing, demanding the use of “Ukraine’s legitimate efforts to de-occupy Crimea, which is a part of Ukraine’s sovereign territory within the internationally recognized borders,” in place of “Ukraine’s attacks on Crimea,” for example.
The government in Kiev has insisted for years on using its preferred phrases and place names, such as imposing “Kyiv” on English speakers. One prominent Ukrainian activist explained last month that language “plays a critical role” in the hybrid war, because it “creates a mental map in our mind which we use to make sense of what’s happening.”
“One of the best ways to support us is using Ukraine-centric terminology,” said Alona Shevchenko of Ukraine DAO.
Social media groups Facebook and Twitter have come under pressure from pro-Israel lobby groups to remove accounts of Iran’s leading broadcaster Press TV from their platforms.
The Center for Countering Digital Hate (CCHD) and the Anti-Defamation League (ADL) have demanded that Press TV be blocked for publishing content in Britain, The Telegraph reported Thursday.
ADL chief executive Jonathan Greenblatt said it was “inexcusable” to offer Press TV a platform.
“We urge Meta [the owner of Facebook] and Twitter to immediately launch an investigation and to take action to prevent Press TV and the Iranian other media outlets from misusing these social platforms.”
“Facebook and Twitter profit by providing Iranian state propagandists with the reach and amplification they need to evade domestic broadcast bans, and influence millions of new viewers in the West,” Imran Ahmed, chief executive of the CCHD, said.
Their concern is particularly focused around Press TV’s “Palestine Declassified” program, formerly hosted by former UK MP Chris Williamson and former Bristol University professor David Miller.
Williamson was suspended from the Labour Party after dismissing concerns about anti-Semitism in the party as “smears” and “bulls—.” And Miller was dismissed from Bristol University after he revealed Jewish students critical of his views were “directed by Israel.”
The groups cite an episode of the Press TV program devoted to unpacking the “witch hunt” in Labour and the way the party was “captured by key Israel lobby groups.”
Another episode dealt with a network of “Zionist” individuals and organizations which exerted a disproportionate influence over global affairs, including the West’s intervention in the Ukraine war and a “campaign to improve King Charles III’s image in the UK Muslim community.”
The groups are rattled by videos on Press TV’s program that exposes Jewish influence over global affairs and the entertainment industry.
In July 2013, Press TV was forced off the air in the UK after the media regulator Ofcom revoked its license for allegedly breaching the Communications Act.
In the same year, it was taken off the air in North America after the US Treasury Department announced sanctions against the Islamic Republic of Iran Broadcasting (IRIB).
Press TV was dropped from the Galaxy 19 satellite platform that allowed it to broadcast in the United States and Canada, without saying when it was dropped.
The network has denounced the measures as “media terrorism.”
The broadcaster has a large number of viewers across Western countries and a considerable number of followers on social media.
In December 2022, Firas al-Najim, a Canadian human rights advocate, said Press TV is the voice of the oppressed, a news network working to expose the crimes and double standards of the West against free nations.
Weeks after the European Union imposed sanctions on the leading broadcaster, French satellite operator Eutelsat notified Press TV of its plan to take the network off the air. Najim said then that the move unmasked the conspiracy of the Western governments.
Canada’s controversial Online Streaming Act, Bill C-11, will become law.
Bill C-11 reforms the Broadcasting Act to apply to online content. Streaming services like YouTube, Spotify, and Netflix will be forced to follow the same rules that apply to traditional broadcasters and will be regulated by the Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission (CRTC).
Streaming services will be required to invest in and prioritize Canadian content. Critics of the bill have warned that it would negatively impact individual content creators and give the government control of the content Canadians see online.
Online platforms also criticized the bill, with YouTube running a campaign to warn content creators that the bill could affect their income.
The Senate proposed several amendments that were rejected by the lower chamber. However, the passed bill included “public assurance” that it “will not apply to user-generated digital content” because it doesn’t regulate the independent content uploaders themselves. However, it does apply to the platforms that these users upload their content to and so the independent creators are affected.
The government insisted that the bill contains adequate safeguards to protect individual content creators and rejected amendments with further protection because they would affect its ability to “publicly consult on, and issue, a policy direction to the CRTC to appropriately scope the regulation of social media services.”
The bill gives the CRTC discretion to determine how to enforce it.
Only moments after the passing of the bill, groups that say they’re representing Canadian culture demanded more action. The lobbyists called for the CRTC to establish social media rules.
The Coalition for the Diversity of Cultural Expressions (CDCE), said it “applauds the passage of Bill C-11,” but wants more.
“The CDCE celebrates a great day, but notes that the real work has just begun,” the lobbyists said, calling for more rules for social media.
“In the coming months, the government will issue a policy direction to the CRTC, and the latter will then have the important responsibility of developing the rules that will apply to each of the new services that are now clearly under its jurisdiction, i.e. audiovisual and audio streaming services and social media,” the group wrote in a press release.
The group then added that: “The CRTC will thus ensure that everyone makes a significant contribution to the creation, production and promotion of Canadian music, programs and films, while taking into account Canada’s unique diversity.”
In a statement, People’s Party of Canada leader, Maxime Bernier, said: “In the case of Bill C-11, it’s unfortunate that the majority of Senators caved in and voted for the bill even after the government had rejected a crucial amendment proposed by senators Julie Miville-Dechêne and Paula Simons to clarify that it would not be used to regulate independent creators on YouTube and other platforms, which would be a clear violation of free expression.”
Bernier added: “In the first place, there is absolutely no need for the government and the CRTC to tell platforms to modify their algorithms to promote Canadian content. Canadians can decide what they want for themselves without the government holding their hands. This is a first step in creating a wall around the Canadian internet like the Chinese government does in China.”
The Conservative Party of Canada (CPC) said that it would repeal the bill if it forms a government.
Conservative Party leader Pierre Poilievre said that, “the power-hungry Trudeau Liberals have rammed through their censorship bill into law. But this isn’t over, not by a long shot.”
Poilievre said that, if elected, his government would, “restore freedom of expression online & repeal Trudeau’s C-11 censorship law.”
One hypothesis for why Fox News fired popular television commentator Tucker Carlson is because he had been badmouthing company officials. But are top executives for a major U.S. corporation so sensitive to personal criticism that they’re willing to ditch their most popular commentator for saying some bad things about them? That’s hard to believe.
Another hypothesis is that Carlson was also saying bad things about Fox News colleagues. That too doesn’t make much sense to me. Doesn’t that sort of thing go on in most large companies? It’s called human nature. Again, it doesn’t seem serious enough to can the network’s most popular commentator.
Let me weigh in on another possibility — that the Pentagon and the CIA may have been the ones who put the quietus on Tucker and possibly signaled to Fox executives that he had to go.
Last December, Carlson broadcast a program on the assassination of President Kennedy in which he accused the CIA of having participated in the assassination. In doing so, Carlson violated a taboo that has existed within the mainstream media since November 22, 1963, the day that Kennedy was assassinated.
It’s considered permissible for the mainstream press to run articles and programs that analyze the assassination in an “objective” way, or that support the official lone-nut narrative, or that analyze why people subscribe to conspiracy theories. But what has been verboten since the assassination is the running of articles and programs that point to the Pentagon and the CIA as the orchestrators of the assassination or that feature evidence pointing to their criminal culpability.
By violating that sacred taboo, Carlson put himself at risk of being subjected to the omnipotent power and influence of the national-security establishment. As New York Congressman Charles Schumer candidly and succinctly put it, “Let me tell you, you take on the intelligence community, they have six ways from Sunday at getting back at you.”
In upcoming episodes of my new video/podcast series “The JFK Assassination: Sixty Years Later,” I point to specific examples of where the mainstream press steadfastly and scrupulously avoided confronting clear and convincing evidence of criminal culpability by the national-security establishment in the Kennedy assassination.
Let’s examine one of those examples. (I’m covering several others in my new series.)
In 1992, the Assassination Records Review Board was brought into existence to enforce The President John F. Kennedy Assassination Records Collection Act of 1992, which mandated that the Pentagon, the CIA, and other federal entities release their long-secret assassination-related records to the public.
The ARRB discovered the existence of a man named Roger Boyajian, who told the agency a remarkable story. He said that on November 22, 1963, he was a Marine sergeant stationed at the Bethesda National Naval Medical Center. After JFK’s assassination, he was ordered to the facility where the autopsy on President Kennedy’s body was to be conducted by the military. He told the ARRB that a team brought JFK’s body into the Bethesda morgue at 6:35 p.m. on that evening.
Boyajian’s statement presented problems for the military. That’s because the official narrative has always been that JFK’s body was brought into the Bethesda morgue only one time — at 8 p.m. — by an official honor guard consisting of the members of the armed forces. Boyajian’s statement meant that the military had lied — that there were actually two different entries of JFK’s body into the morgue on that evening.
Was there any corroboration for Boyajian’s extraordinary claim? Actually there was. Boyajian had kept a copy of his “after-action report” that he had submitted to his superiors the week following the assassination. The report, which he shared with the ARRB, confirmed that the president’s body was brought into the morgue at 6:35 p.m. Perhaps it’s worth mentioning that the Pentagon never disclosed that report to the ARRB, which the JFK Records Act required it to do.
Further corroboration came in the form of statements and testimony from several Navy enlisted men who said that they met a large black hearse outside the morgue and carried the president’s body from the vehicle into the morgue. They said that the president’s body was in a shipping casket rather than the heavy, ornate casket into which the president’s body had been placed in Dallas. The enlisted men said that there were men with suits in the hearse whose identities are still unknown to this date.
The ARRB also discovered a memorandum from Gawler’s Funeral Home in Washington, D.C., which performed the embalming of JFK’s body after the autopsy. The memorandum stated that the president’s body had been brought into the morgue in a shipping casket.
In 1969, Col. Pierre Finck, one of the three military pathologists who performed the autopsy on Kennedy’s body, testified in a criminal case in New Orleans that had been brought by a district attorney named Jim Garrison against a man named Clay Shaw. During the trial, Garrison questioned the official lone-nut narrative of the assassination and charged that the assassination was actually a national-security state regime-change operation, one that was no different in principle from such other U.S. national-security regime-change operations as Iran (1953), Guatemala (1964), and Congo (1961).
During the trial, Finck testified that he received a telephone call at 8 p.m. on November 22, 1963, from Navy Commander James Humes, a pathologist in charge of performing the autopsy on Kennedy’s body. Humes invited Finck to come to the Bethesda morgue to assist with the autopsy. During that 8 p.m. conversation, Humes told Finck that they already had x-rays of the president’s head.
That’s what the law calls an “admission against interest.” It’s not exactly a confession but it’s similar to a confession, which is why the law places tremendous weight on it. With his sworn testimony, Finck was inadvertently confirming that the president’s body was, in fact, sneaked into the morgue almost an hour-and-a-half before the official entry time of 8 p.m. After all, at the risk of emphasizing the obvious, the only way they could already have x-rays of the president’s head at 8 p.m. is if the president’s body had already been in the morgue before 8 p.m. — i.e., at 6:35 p.m. (No x-rays were taken at Parkland Hospital in Dallas, where JFK was treated after being shot.)
Now, wouldn’t you think that this set of facts would be a dream-come-true for any investigative reporter within the mainstream press? After all, sneaking the president’s body into the morgue and then lying about it and covering it up would obviously be a fairly big story, especially if the press could discover what the military was up to.
Keep in mind something else: Someone had slipped a provision into the JFK Records Act prohibiting the ARRB from investigating any aspect of the assassination. Thus, the ARRB could not investigate the early introduction of the president’s body into the Bethesda morgue and, equally important, what was done with the body in the one-and-a-half hours before the second introduction of the body into the morgue — the official one that took place at 8 p.m.
But the law certainly did not prohibit the mainstream press from investigating the matter. Moreover, in the 1990s, many of the people involved in the autopsy were still alive. An investigative reporter could have contacted everyone involved and gotten to the bottom of the military was up to.
By the 1990s, when Boyajian shared his story with the ARRB, it was clear that the Pentagon and the CIA did not want the mainstream press to investigate any of the sinister aspects of the Kennedy autopsy. (See my books The Kennedy Autopsy, The Kennedy Autopsy 2, and An Encounter with Evil: The Abraham Zapruder Story.) Thus, the early sneaking of JFK’s body into the morgue was simply “airbrushed” out of the mainstream press. The standard response to the sinister aspects of the Kennedy autopsy became “Conspiracy theory!” which was the term that the CIA early on advised the mainstream press to employ against those who challenged the official lone-nut narrative of the assassination.
Did Tucker Carlson pay a price for violating the JFK taboo? It certainly wouldn’t surprise me.
A former US Army psychological warfare officer says that Tucker Carlson was fired by Fox News because of the regime’s agenda to maintain an “uninformed semi lobotomized quasi retarded population.”
The remarks were made by US counter-terror expert Scott Bennett.
Carlson and Fox News “parted ways” on Monday with speculation still raging as to the specific reason why the network canned its highest rated and most popular host.
According to Bennett, Carlson posed too much of a threat to institutional power because he turned Americans into proper “researchers and thinkers”.
Carlson offered an “intellectualism, truthfulness, and an analytical depth that no other news personality has ever done in the history of the United States as far back as I can remember,” said Bennett.
Tucker needed to be “silenced” because he represented too big a threat to the “powers and principalities, institutions and agendas that seek an unenlightened uninformed semi lobotomized quasi retarded population that do not question, do not research, do not analyze but simply digest and follow instructions,” according to Bennett.
“Tucker Carlson also exposed the fraud and money laundering racketeering crimes of FTX and the Democrat Party in Ukraine involving the United States government. He exposed the US biochemical labs in Ukraine and their connection to the Democrat Party, President Barack Obama, Vice President Biden, Hillary Clinton, George Soros, Bill Gates, and other US government agencies and pharmaceutical companies,” Bennett told Sputnik.
The ex-host’s anti-regime rhetoric “could no longer be tolerated by the corrupt American media and political establishment,” said Bennett, adding that his exit signals “the death of American media”.
The former US army psyops officer suggested that Senator Chuck Schumer had threatened to utilize the CIA and the FBI to deploy secret government operations against Tucker to get him off air unless he was fired.
Schumer previously called for Carlson to be taken off air after he broadcast footage showing the January 6 ‘riot’ leaders were actually allowed into the Capitol and chaperoned around by authorities.
As we highlighted earlier, one of the reasons behind Tucker’s dismissal is a lawsuit fired by former show producer Abby Grossberg, who claims she was bullied and subjected to sexist and anti-semitic harassment.
However, Grossberg’s own lawyer revealed that she has never even met Carlson.
In December 1945 and January 1946, the British Mandate authorities carried out an extensive survey of Palestine, in support of the work of the United Nations Special Committee on Palestine. The results were published in the Survey of Palestine, which has been scanned and made available online by Palestine Remembered; all 1300 pages can be read here.
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The word “alleged” is deemed to occur before the word “fraud.” Since the rule of law still applies. To peasants, at least.
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