The Historic Suppression of Scientific Debate in COVID
Never before in modern history have entire topics in Medicine been actively prevented from discussion in public forums
By Pierre Kory, MD, MPA | Medical Musings | August 30, 2022
I started reading about the definition, history, and legal background of censorship. The entry on Wikipedia (ugh) was quite revealing:
Censorship is the suppression of speech, public communication, or other information. This may be done on the basis that such material is considered objectionable, harmful, or sensitive. Censorship can be conducted by governments, private institutions and other controlling bodies.
But get this, look at the examples of topics that have traditionally been censored:
General censorship occurs for a variety of claimed reasons including national security, to control obscenity, pornography, and hate speech, to protect children or other vulnerable groups, to promote or restrict political or religious views, and to prevent slander and libel.
Note that “scientific opinion” is not on there. Because scientific data nor interpretations of that data, should ever be considered offensive. You can argue that wrong interpretations of data can be harmful, but debate is how you resolve that, not censorship! Science literally rests on open debate and the sharing of data and exchanging of interpretations amongst not only experts, but the wider public.
Now, also from Wikipedia:
Censorship has been criticized throughout history for being unfair and hindering progress. Censorship is counterproductive as it prevents the censored topic from being discussed. Those who impose censorship must consider what they censor to be true, as individuals believing themselves to be correct would welcome the opportunity to disprove those with opposing views (just ask Steve Kirsch).
But again, science is not on there as a category of discourse to censor. Although history is replete with attempts to censor individuals with scientific views contrary to established orthodoxy, in all the instances I can think of, the person being censored was eventually proven correct! Galileo (earth is round), Seimelwess (importance of handwashing), Scopes (teaching of evolutionary theory) etc.
Yet, in the last 2 years we have undergone a massive censorship of the discussion and sharing of scientific data in public forums. I believe this was the proximate cause of what can now only be viewed as humanitarian catastrophes resulting from 1) the suppression of knowledge of early treatment with effective repurposed drugs and 2) the suppression of data showing the toxicity, lethality, and ineffectiveness of the vaccines.
This period should serve as one of the most damning arguments against censorship.
We were not allowed to openly discuss our data or our interpretations and applications of that scientific data (i.e. scientific opinions) in major media or social media. The journalist Matt Taibbi called me “the ghost of the internet” because whenever I had scientific discussions with folks who are now dear friends and colleagues, their content and podcasts were de-platformed or demonetized (as in the case of my dear friend Dr. Been), and/or they immediately founds their posted videos of those discussions taken down, like immediately (the speed in which I “disappeared” was astonishingly fast at times). All because we had a scientific discussion where I had shared data and interpretations of that data. I was honored with the opportunity to make my case in front of some truly expert and deep thinkers. Folks who could challenge me, ask questions, express concerns or offer alternative interpretations or hypotheses. I would say that the only problem with those discussions is that the data in support of ivermectin was just so overwhelming. It is a drug with proven efficacy in COVID. Note that conclusion is shared by some of the most highly published doctors in the history of our specialty (the FLCCC) as well as by a group of some of the top evidence-based medicine researchers in the world (Tess Lawrie, Andrew Bryant, Edmund Fordham et al. of EBMc2).
And therein lay the problem. The data could not be debated because any other interpretation than ivermectin being effective was pretty much indefensible in the face of a mountain of repeatedly and almost universally supportive data from myriad sources. So, instead, such discussions were banned from wider public view. Strong move. I think the only thing that saved a good portion of humanity was that individual and organizational websites (like the FLCCC’s, AAPS, c19early.com, and others) were largely secure and not taken down or booted off of hosting servers. But I imagine they could have been.
So, in COVID, Big Pharma and Big Government literally got media companies to shut down debate and discussion on certain topics like HCQ and IVM and vaccine toxicity and ineffectiveness. See YouTube’s community guidelines, which are so absurd, I literally turn purple with rage every time I read it. But it is also sort of comical because they literally put it in writing, right out in the open, plain to see, essentially saying “thou shalt not discuss these medicines on our platform.” And they did it while their efficacy was still being debated. In a global pandemic with thousands dying each day. Safe medicines.
Check it out:
Insane. Crazy town. Clown world. Now, keep in mind that these “guidelines” restricting any discussion of the efficacy, even potential efficacy during a global pandemic, were employed by every major media company in the world with few exceptions, like Trial Site News (although massively impactful, not yet “major media”) and maybe on a few occasions Fox News or some conservative radio hosts.
But all was not lost. Independent podcasters and some radio hosts saved the day, contributing to the dissemination of life-saving information to millions of people in this country and world. Folks like Bret Weinstein, Joe Rogan, John Campbell, Dr. Been, Dr. Mercola, Greg Hunter, Vicki McKenna and countless others. But the print and TV media giants did not have that policy written and made public for all to see (and laugh at). It was under the table, understood by all media that ivermectin should instead only be referred to as a horse dewormer. Not subtle. Alex Berenson’s recent sharing of evidence that the White House was behind his Twitter de-platforming shows how high up the censorship was coming from.
So you literally had the government and Pharma pressuring all the media and social media giants (all of them – Facebook, Linked in, Instagram, Twitter etc) to outlaw, yes, outlaw discussion of even the possibility these medications were effective. Never, ever forget this. Note how YouTube wrote that their guidelines were based on WHO recommendations. Control the top, you control everything beneath it. Read my detailed deep dive uncovering the corruption of ivermectin at the WHO here and here.
Now, one of the reasons Paul Marik was such a famous critical care doctor is that he had long been successful at debunking prevailing orthodoxy supporting standard of care practices in our specialty. He did it via lecturing and debating at national conferences and in publications within medical journals. It was how he and I met, when he congratulated me on an editorial I wrote in a major journal, where I argued against using ultrasound to measure the size of the inferior vena cava to estimate central venous pressure (CVP), largely drawing on the science and rationale he had compiled and published.
Talking to Paul this morning, he told me he is most proud of his work (note he accomplished this feat on his own) in teaching a global generation of critical care doctors that measuring the CVP to estimate the fluid needs of a patient was useless outside of a very narrow set of circumstances like hemorrhage (in those circumstances though, you don’t need the CVP to estimate fluid needs as the patients vitals and clinical presentation will tell you all you need to do.
You have to understand that the CVP was used for decades by critical care doctors in ICU patients who were in states of shock (dangerously low blood pressure). It was the standard of care in ICU’s. Paul did a deep dive into the published literature and especially into the complex physiology of the factors which influence CVP and wrote pretty much the coolest and most impactful paper ever called “Does Central Venous Pressure Predict Fluid Responsiveness?: A Systematic Review of the Literature and the Tale of Seven Mares.” The papers most memorable sentence was “the only study we could find demonstrating the utility of CVP in predicting volume status was performed in seven standing, awake mares undergoing controlled hemorrhage.” Brilliant. Funny.
His paper triggered fierce and I mean, fierce debate in critical care… for years. Reversing established orthodoxy in medicine (and anywhere really) is nearly impossible. But Paul singlehandedly pulled it off with his papers and lectures (helped by a lot of folks like me who followed his work closely). I would argue that today, the obsession with using the CVP to guide fluid resuscitation has largely (but never completely) been abandoned. Wow.
But, again, back then, you could have “debates” on controversial topics, in fact, such topics demanded them! I remember when the United Hospital Fund used to put on this terrific conference in Manhattan where they invited experts in the field to debate “controversies” in critical care (like CVP). Each speaker was given ten minutes and were assigned the pro side or the con side of a topic, but the assigned debaters could not choose the side to argue! After both speakers were heard, the audience voted on which conclusion was based on the more compelling data and argument. I was invited several years in a row and sometimes had to argue the side I was not on intellectually. Which made it even more enlightening an exercise – imagine getting Berenson to have to argue in support of ivermectin? It just might happen that he learns something important. Also, it was a “hard” ten minutes they gave you. So much so, I remember one year I got the whole room laughing because I did not shut up when the big timer hit ten minutes and the big red stoplight turned on, so a close colleague of mine ran up to the podium, put me in a headlock and started to drag me away from the podium as I was still yelling my final points. That was fun. Now, not so much.
More trips down the memory lane of debates. One of the first “corruptions” by Pharma that I experienced in my career was when Eli Lilly invented a national campaign called “Surviving Sepsis” in an attempt to create guidelines supporting optimal care practices. They involved all the professional societies in critical care to participate. Leaders in the field all with a seat at the table.
Yep, you guessed it, it turned out to be cover for their efforts in making a $5,000 harmful drug (Xygris) the standard of care in sepsis. Every single one of those committee members got money. The entire campaign and strategy was developed by a PR firm. Recall that Disinformation tactics were first invented by a PR firm in the 1950’s working for the Tobacco Industry at a time when their products were starting to look bad in the scientific literature.
I would argue that Pharma is the most skilled practitioner of Disinformation amongst all industries. I mean 20 years ago already, the entire country’s critical care doctors gave a very expensive, harmful drug to every septic patient for years based on a manipulated trial with the tiniest of mortality benefits amidst a splashy “public health” campaign concocted by a PR firm working for a pharmaceutical company.
When Xygris was eventually shown to be harmful it was abandoned. But that decision occurred on the back of fierce debates and constant re-analysis and discussion of the accumulating data. Hmm, I wonder when that will happen to Remdesivir? Fun fact: during my fellowship training in pulmonary and critical care, my mentors, Dr. Paul Mayo and Dr. Samual Acquah essentially forbade the use of Xygris at a time when every other fellow in training was using it like water. I never once ordered it for any patient.
But there were other controversial aspects of the sepsis guidelines that Paul was a beast in demolishing at national conferences. He was so good, his take on the data so expert and compelling that his lectures were always packed, like standing room only type packed. For a medical lecture.
The most debated aspect of sepsis treatment (and yes, it was debated repeatedly at national conferences) was called “early goal directed therapy” (EGDT) which required that you resuscitate patients using fluids and vasopressors to a target central venous pressure (CVP) and a target central venous oxygen saturation (SCV02), but to monitor the latter continuously, you had to insert a special catheter into the large neck veins to do it. I will not go into the detailed physiology of those parameters but the need to measure them was nonsense.
I knew it (even as a fellow), my mentors knew it, Paul knew it, yet EGDT was widely adopted across the country and world. The protocol was based on a single center study whose Principal Investigator Manny Rivers held the patent on that catheter (unknown by most at the time). Further, information later came out that the data were manipulated. That information was leaked by a whistleblower who was a fellow of Rivers at the time. The fellow was threatened by the hospital with the ending of his career if he were to continue to speak publicly about it. They even apparently threatened to “kill his kids.”
But the point is, the debates were fierce, in the open, and at conferences and hospital auditoriums across the country and world. They were data driven arguments by experts with decades of scientific inquiry and clinical expertise who reviewed the physiology and published literature. And sometimes led to conflicting interpretations. Yes, we all had biases when interpreting the data (all humans do), but we debated. It was not outlawed to say that SCV02 and IVC were unnecessary. Or to say they were critical. And you were not forced to use all aspects of EGDT in the care of patients back then as they were just “guidelines,” not rigid protocols supported by Federal government funded bonuses in every patient you used it in like we have now with Remdesivir.
Interestingly, widespread EGDT adoption actually showed consistent impacts in reducing mortality, but we knew it was not from the targeting of those parameters but instead just from the early recognition and resuscitation of sepsis. Might even be the one instance in history where a corrupt action by Big Pharma actually led to a benefit in public health. Anyway, eventually studies showed that targeting those parameters versus simply using clinical judgement led to the same outcomes and the practice was abandoned. Paul was right again.
Another aspect of the U.S resuscitation guidelines that Paul was absolutely brilliant in debunking was the decision to target a reduction in lactate as a resuscitation endpoint. This was another fiction like the CVP. Again, almost all of emergency and critical care medicine had been indoctrinated with the physiologic concept that lactate is a marker of hypo-perfusion (reduction in blood flow to organs). Now, in certain, specific clinical instances (ischemic bowel etc), a rise in lactate can reflect hypo-perfusion. But in most septic patients it is simply a marker of illness and stress. It is not harmful, in fact, if anything, lactate is better utilized by organs to maintain function and energy. However, doctors were taught to target lactate as a resuscitation endpoint instead of simply interpreting it as a marker of disease severity.
But, in this instance, that practice and belief was not the result of corruption. No-one as far as I can tell was making money off of dumb doctors and nurses being forced to check lactates repeatedly. It simply stemmed from ignorance and established practice, with leading “experts” (dotards) arrogantly teaching that it was important to target (because they were taught that and did not critically think about it). Paul’s research revealed that targeting lactate was the result of a gross misunderstanding of lactic acid physiology. It was again one of the most masterful papers I have read. He marshaled tons of physiologic knowledge and logically presented the concepts and data which defined the cause and purpose of lactic acid production.
Just like with his teachings on CVP, again you had one man arguing against an entire generation of doctors who believed that reducing lactate was important in the general septic patient. I totally agreed with Paul’s papers and conclusions. Which made my life difficult because I tried in vain to disseminate this knowledge among my trainees, trying to stop what I saw as the pervasive “lacto-bolo reflex” they were all exhibiting. Paul actually invented the term, and it was brilliant: “bolo” refers to a bolus of fluids, and the “reflex” was the ordering of an infusion of a half liter or liter of fluids every time a high lactate was measured.
Lacto-bolo reflexes unfortunately led to what he also brilliantly coined as “salt water drowning,” i.e the receipt of excessive amounts of saline fluids by patients. Every time a doctor or nurse received a report of a high lactate… the doc ordered fluids. Lacto-bolo reflex. What is crazy is that the excess fluid administration that resulted paradoxically worsened kidney function and led to more kidney failure despite the fact the doctors were trying to preserve kidney function with fluid infusions! It was insane and I knew it because of Paul’s research and teaching. I also tried for years to fight the lacto-bolo reflex in my trainees and colleagues with little success except for when I was physically present in the ICU. When I went home for the night though, my fellows and residents all continued with their lacto-bolo reflexes. When the cat’s away the mice will play.
However, in this instance, despite Paul’s papers and lectures on the topic, the unthinkable became true. “Experts” (dotards) eventually established the checking of repeated lactate as a national quality of care standard. Those standards are what hospitals are judged on which affects their reimbursement and accreditation.
So, doctors across the country are now literally mandated to repeatedly check and respond to lactates in septic patients. Again, another example of an orthodoxy based on fiction. Despite all of Pauls efforts in teaching, lecturing, and publishing on the topic, this time, he was unsuccessful in changing orthodoxy. He may have been if his career didn’t end but History marches on. I would argue that his efforts in singlehandedly trying to reverse orthodoxies unfounded by “the science” led to a widespread respect, admiration, and reverence for the deep knowledge and scientific acumen he consistently displayed. But not so much anymore it seems.
And that is solely because Paul’s final effort in academic medicine was in trying to reverse the fiction that ivermectin was ineffective in COVID. That effort ended his career because for the first time, unrealized by him at the time, instead of fighting ignorant knowledge of physiology, he was poking The Bear, i.e tackling a subject that threatened Big Pharma. In a big, big way. Thus, that effort ended his career. But let’s be specific about that – his former hospital (SENTARA GENERAL IN NORFOLK, VIRGINA) was the one who actually ended his career.
Now, how they ended it is pretty interesting, as my last job was ended in the same way. They did it by using a process that hospitals have long employed when a physician “doesn’t toe the line.” In COVID, Paul was a clinical leader in a major hospital and was employing a highly effective protocol using a combination of repurposed drugs and not using Remdesivir. And he was vocal about it. And he was teaching the doctors in training about the harms of Remdesivir and all of the data supporting “unapproved therapies.” So, they invoked a process called “sham peer review” to get rid of him. What the heck is “sham peer review?”
From a seminal paper on the topic:
In 1986, the United States Congress enacted the Healthcare Quality Improvement Act (HCQIA). which granted immunity to hospitals and reviewers participating in “good faith” peer review of physicians and dentists. These reviews were envisioned to be vehicles by which it could be determined if any actions or recommendations against a physician should become necessary on the measures of incompetence, unprofessional conduct, or behaviors that impact the doctors’ clinical privileges. However, of late, HCQIA has resulted in many unforeseen consequences, not the least of which is the rise of ‘sham peer reviews’ —and the consignment of guiltless, lifesaving, pre-eminent physicians into obscurity.
What is “Sham” Peer Review?
Sham peer review is an adverse action taken in bad faith by a hospital for purposes other than the furtherance of quality health care. It is a process that is disguised to look like legitimate peer review. But sham peer review is not objectively reasonable, precisely because it is not performed to advance the quality of health care (violation of safe harbor provision).
A sham peer review happens when the hospital invents some pretext on which to attack the physician and acts to disguise the adverse action against the targeted physician by conducting a such a review—where the truth and the facts do not matter, because the process is contrived to be rigged, and the outcome is predetermined.
Over the years, sham peer reviews have unfortunately become fairly well-known. Hospitals in the United States have mounted these proceedings for at least four decades to rid themselves of physicians who “get in their way.” Often, they are doctors who don’t ”follow the party line” and whom they consider “disruptive.” Hospital officials are resistant to physicians who bring patient safety or care quality concerns to their attention. Some hospitals retaliate against these whistleblowers, by instigating these sham peer reviews.
How Sham Peer Review works
Hospitals that use sham peer review bring trumped up, fabricated, and thoroughly false charges against the targeted physician. Although no court of law would permit depriving an accused person of files or records needed to defend himself, as it is fundamentally unfair and in violation of due process, hospitals that employ sham peer review frequently refuse to provide records required to the physician under review. Based on these totally erroneous and phony charges the physician’s hospital privileges are summarily suspended. The physician is usually given 14 days to respond in writing to the sham charges. The charges and the physician’s response are then supposedly shared with the Medical Executive Committee (MEC). The physician then meets with the Medical Executive Committee. The physician is usually denied legal representation (which is unlawful), and the meeting takes the form of a Kangaroo court.
And the above, is EXACTLY what happened to Paul. Like.. to the T. Most importantly, he had no rights during the process. No ability to bring a lawyer in to help defend him. No ability to discover the identity of the complainant or exact documentation of the complaint. That is how they can just make shit up.
I won’t go into the details because the above explains everything that happened to Paul but his was particularly egregious (mine was short and simple). They generated at least 8 anonymous, invented complaints by other providers, nurses and employees inventing things he said or did and characterizing his behavior as “disruptive.” He had never gotten a single complaint from a patient or colleague in his entire career. They even accused him of malpractice for treating a patient for severe COVID who had tested negative for COVID. I saw the patient’s films and labs, heard his history, and presentation. The guy had COVID, period. Plus, the guy was super sick, on a ventilator, and Paul saved him with his protocol. No small feat for a COVID patient on a ventilator. The patient survived yet the hospital used the case as a mark against him. Insane.
Everything was right out of the sham peer review playbook. And it resulted in the ending of his career.
My “sham peer review” was different given that I was working as an independent contractor running an ICU for a hospital in central Wisconsin. The hospital administration had been asking my partners who hired me to get rid of me as soon as they heard I had been hired, likely due to my public profile (ya think?). My partners refused as we got along great and they deeply appreciated my skills, contributions, COVID expertise and protocols. They told the administration “if he goes, we go.” And this was a hospital with a long track record of difficulty recruiting physicians. Yet, my partners were continually harassed by the administration who kept sending them “hit pieces” they found about me in newspapers and magazines.
Six months later, in November 2021, the Chief Medical Officer of the hospital knew I was not vaccinated and that a mandate was about to start. So he called me and asked if I was going to be vaccinated because he had to plan for contingencies. I asked him for a couple of days to think about it. I decided I would just get a vaccine card instead. Not proud of that plan but I knew the vaccines were built on unconscionable lies. He called me two days later, and I told him I would get vaccinated.
The next morning after my shift, my lead partner called and told me “they didn’t need me anymore.” I asked what happened (I knew they needed me, badly). He explained that I had told some ER patient to not get vaccinated and that their practice believed in vaccination so could not be associated with someone who was not. One catch – I had not been in the ER for two weeks. I defended myself, to no avail. My partner knew I was telling the truth, but I knew he was likely under an ultimatum. He apologized and said, “I am so sorry, but there is a war going on and you are unfortunately a casualty of that.” We said pleasant goodbyes and wished each other well. Pretty quick sham peer review because I was not an employee so they had the right to cancel my contract at anytime. Done. Gone.
So, as you can see from the above, COVID is not our first rodeo battling ignorance and corruption in Medicine. But we battled with debate using data, published literature, and deep knowledge of physiology. Now, no more.
Steve Kirsch has been offering 1-2 million dollars for anyone in academia or the agencies to participate in a public or even privately recorded, moderated debate of the evidence to support vaccine safety and efficacy. No-one took him up on it.
An organization in Kansas City asked me, Peter McCullough and two other experts to participate in a debate with the clinical leaders at KU. They refused to show. Their table sat empty on the stage while we debated the public statements they had made with a local TV program instead. They literally told the TV presenter that “we do not debate in public forums, only in journal clubs amongst fellow doctors.” Note he said this on TV then went on to support their policies citing what we know are corrupt and easily disprovable evidence-free narratives. What a farce.
Just as sad as the above is that Paul had long been invited every year by a medical education organization to lecture to anesthesiologists as he was a perennial favorite lecturer. This past year, he gave a masterful lecture on the data supporting the use of ivermectin in COVID. Soon after, he was told that he will never again be invited to give lectures.
He also gave the same lecture to the Anesthesia Department at Mass General (Harvard). The evaluations by attendees all complained that his lecture was full of mis-information. He will never be invited back.
Twitter, which describes itself as a “public square” has de-platformed many of my colleagues (multiple times) for sharing newly emerging data supporting the efficacy of ivermectin. Hey Juan Chamie, how many times have you been Twitterwhacked? One of life’s greatest mysteries (slight overstatement) is how I am still alive on Twitter, although to be accurate, I am only half-alive as they severely shadow ban me on that platform.
I guess we just have to accept the fact that two new commandments have come down from the mountaintop:
- Thou shalt not share favorable ivermectin data in any public media sphere
- Thou shalt not present analyses of the scientific data supporting ivermectin in lectures to physicians
The world has gone mad.
Next post, I will delve more specifically into the tactics Pharma deployed in pulling off their massive Disinformation campaign against ivermectin using propaganda as well as censorship of the FLCCC .
Germany and France want Tiktokers deployed against Russia – Bloomberg
Samizdat – August 30, 2022
TikTokers and YouTubers could help the EU drive a wedge between the Russian government and the people, Germany and France have reportedly told other members of the bloc.
Ideas on how its members could influence Russian citizens were formulated in a document circulated ahead of this week’s high-level EU meeting in Prague, Bloomberg reported on Monday. The plan is meant for discussion behind closed doors, but the news agency said it had studied the document.
Berlin and Paris suggested enrolling popular video bloggers on platforms including YouTube, Facebook, TikTok, Telegram, and VK to help disseminate EU-funded teaching courses on “media literacy,” according to Bloomberg. The courses will supposedly explain to Russians why they should dismiss “Russian propaganda” and trust “independent information” that counters what the Russian government says.
The EU should also target Russian-speaking minorities in other nations with content that serves the same goal, the report says. There is also a proposal for an “Internet Censorship Circumvention Hub” for Russians.
After Russia attacked Ukraine in late February, the EU significantly ramped up its efforts to silence Russian media within the bloc. Government-funded outlets RT and Sputnik were banned from broadcasting, while US-based tech giants such as Facebook stopped showing content from the news organizations on their platforms to EU residents. Brussels justified the censorship by the need to counter ‘Russian propaganda’.
Moscow also imposed restrictions on media, blacklisting some Western outlets in retaliation and introduced punishment for slander against Russia’s armed forces.
79% of Americans believe not censoring Hunter Biden laptop story would have changed election outcome: survey
By Christina Maas | Reclaim The Net | August 29, 2022
According to a survey conducted by the TechnoMetrica Institute of Policy and Politics (TIPP), 79% of Americans believe “truthful” coverage of the Hunter Biden laptop story, had it not been censored by Big Tech, would have changed the outcome of the 2020 presidential election.
The recently published survey was based on the responses of people who claimed that they were “very” or “somewhat” closely following the laptop story.
Overall, 79% of the respondents said that a “truthful interpretation” of the laptop story would have “very” or “somewhat” likely resulted in the reelection of former President Donald Trump.
Of the 79%, 57% of Republicans believed Trump would have won, compared to 44% of Democrats and 48% of independents.
A majority, 89% of Republicans, 74% of independents, and 61% of Democrats, said they believe the laptop story “is real.” Only 11% said that they believe the story was “created by Russia.”
81% of the respondents said that US Attorney General Merrick Garland should open an investigation into Hunter Biden’s laptop, whose contents were first reported by the New York Post.
The spread of the story was restricted on mainstream social media platforms, with Twitter going to the extent of banning it entirely and suspending the Post’s account.
On Thursday, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg appeared on The Joe Rogan Experience and said the FBI had warned Facebook of an imminent “dump” of “Russian propaganda” shortly before the Hunter Biden story broke, which caused them to decide to censor it.
The FBI: A Campaign Arm of the Democrat Party
By Brian C. Joondeph | American Thinker | August 29, 2022
“Fidelity, Bravery, and Integrity” is the FBI motto. According to the FBI website, this motto, “Succinctly describes the motivating force behind the men and women of the FBI.”
The motto may have been accurate in the 1965-1974 TV series, “The FBI”, where Efrem Zimbalist Jr epitomized those words every Sunday night on prime-time television. But today the FBI has morphed into a campaign arm of the Democrat Party, attempting to influence elections in favor of their preferred candidates, acting more like the East German Stasi or Soviet KGB rather than the premier law enforcement agency in the world.
Perhaps a new motto of “Funny Business Incorporated” or “Friendly to Biden Interests” would be more appropriate to their apparent new mission. When did the FBI, the largest and most heavily armed law enforcement agency in America, now inserting itself unconstitutionally into American politics, pivot from fidelity and integrity to partisanship and dishonesty?
Start with the 2016 presidential election. Many are already familiar with Spygate. According to Jeff Carlson:
Efforts by high-ranking officials in the CIA, FBI, Department of Justice (DOJ), and State Department to portray President Donald Trump as having colluded with Russia were the culmination of years of bias and politicization under the Obama administration.
The weaponization of the intelligence community and other government agencies created an environment that allowed for obstruction in the investigation into Hillary Clinton and the relentless pursuit of a manufactured collusion narrative against Trump.
A willing and complicit media spread unsubstantiated leaks as facts in an effort to promote the Russia-collusion narrative.
The Spygate scandal also raises a bigger question: Was the 2016 election a one-time aberration, or was it symptomatic of decades of institutional political corruption?
The FBI was in the middle of this true insurrection, meant to derail a presidential campaign, election, transition, and administration with fabricated claims of collusion, lying to Congress and the American people, and then attempting to cover everything up via the Muller/Weissman investigation, including a recent raid on Mar-a-Lago to possibly confiscate incriminating Spygate documents in President Trump’s possession.
Other Obama administration agencies and officials were also involved but the FBI was in the thick of it, with Director James Comey and Deputy Director Andrew McCabe. Other familiar names include Deputy Assistant Director of Counterintelligence Peter Strzok and his girlfriend FBI attorney Lisa Page.
Don’t forget another FBI attorney Kevin Clinesmith who knowingly lied on a FISA warrant application about Carter Page’s work for the CIA. Despite pleading guilty to a felony false statement charge, Clinesmith is once again free to practice law. Are any of the January 6 detainees recipients of such judicial largess?
There has been little or no reckoning for these Spygate players and rather than being punished for their criminal and seditious activity, they have been rewarded with university teaching gigs, book deals, and frequent appearances on left-wing cable news shows. Perhaps Special Counsel John Durham will eventually hold the FBI bad actors to account, but Spygate is now six years in the past and it is looking increasingly likely that the FBI will skate.
Jeff Carlson raised the interesting question of whether Spygate was a one-off event or part of a larger and more systemic corruption of the FBI and other three-letter agencies. Despite not derailing candidate or President Donald Trump in 2016, they certainly tried again in 2020, this time succeeding. And they are already working on 2024, before a single candidate has announced his or her candidacy.
The FBI obtained Hunter Biden’s laptop in December 2019, a full year before the presidential election. Rather than investigating and reporting on what they found, they slow rolled the laptop as it revealed knowledge of and involvement in foreign business deals with candidate Joe “Big Guy” Biden and his son Hunter, in a manner that could be construed as a quid pro quo of selling the office of the president to foreign interests.
A letter from Senator Ron Johnson to Justice Department Inspector Michael Horowitz spelled out the FBI’s role in again “campaigning” for the Democrat candidate. Senator Johnson asserted the following,
Whistleblowers have come forward to Congress alleging that FBI officials intentionally undermined efforts to investigate Hunter Biden.
After the FBI obtained the Hunter Biden laptop from the Wilmington, DE computer shop, these whistleblowers stated that local FBI leadership told employees, “You will not look at that Hunter Biden laptop” and that the FBI is “not going to change the outcome of the election again.” Further, these whistleblowers allege that the FBI did not begin to examine the contents of Hunter Biden’s laptop until after the 2020 presidential election — potentially a year after the FBI obtained the laptop in December 2019.
And influence an election they did. Media Research Center conducted a poll of 1,750 voters in seven swing states and learned that, “One of every six Biden voters (17%) said they would not have voted for him had they known the facts about several of the news stories the national media refused to investigate thoroughly because they might have hurt his candidacy.”
Jesse Watters noted that the 2020 presidential election was decided by 44,000 votes in Georgia, Wisconsin, and Arizona. The FBI suppressing the Hunter Biden laptop story would have been more than enough to account for this margin if the above survey was reflective of voter sentiment, demonstrating how the FBI interfered with and likely altered the outcome the election.
Not only did the FBI interfere directly, they also urged social media to do the same, the government suppressing the right to free speech by proxy. Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg explained to Joe Rogan recently,
Speaking on an episode of The Joe Rogan Experience, Zuckerberg explained, “The FBI, I think, basically came to us — some folks on our team — and was like, ‘Hey, just so you know, like, you should be on high alert… We thought that there was a lot of Russian propaganda in the 2016 election. We have it on notice that, basically, there’s about to be some kind of dump of that’s similar to that. So just be vigilant.’”
Zuckerberg acknowledged that “the distribution on Facebook was decreased” of the New York Post’s story about Hunter Biden’s laptop, noting, “fewer people saw it than would’ve otherwise.”
The FBI had the laptop for almost a year and right before the election conveniently declared it Russian propaganda, a falsehood parroted by “51 former intelligence officials.” The FBI, and Big Tech under FBI encouragement, fabricated and spread Russian propaganda in 2016 when it could hurt the Republican candidate and suppressed and censored a real story in 2020 it when it could hurt the Democrat candidate. That certainly sounds like election interference.
The Mar-a-Lago raid is a shot across the bow for any GOP presidential candidates for 2024, Trump being the presumptive nominee at this point. Will the FBI ask the DoJ to indict Trump on nonsensical declassification accusations? While they gave candidate Hillary Clinton a pass despite her using an unsecured server and personal email account to traffic highly classified emails? The FBI is delivering a warning to Trump. Will Governor Ron DeSantis be the next one to have his home raided by the FBI?
We expect this type of behavior from the corporate media, academia, Hollywood, big finance, big pharma, big tech, and other Democrat party constituent groups, but not the FBI and other government agencies.
This is a true insurrection, not the nonsense “soon to be former” representatives Liz Cheney and Adam Kinzinger are bloviating over. And where are congressional Republicans? Most are voicing support for the FBI, ignoring this blatant subversion of democracy and the Constitution.
Perhaps most Republicans support the new FBI mission — stopping Donald Trump at all costs, ignoring the weaponization of the federal government against political enemies. Will voters reward milquetoast Republicans, most of whom are no better than their Democrat colleagues across the aisle, or will many say “why vote Republican,” throwing up their hands on election day, not wasting time on meaningless elections? Such a strategy may not lead to an expected red wave.
Is a weaponized national police force something the Founding Fathers wrote into the Constitution? Or just another example of America sliding from a representative republic into a totalitarian state?
Brian C Joondeph, MD, is a physician and writer.
Truth Social @BrianJoondeph
DHS wants to continue its “disinformation” work, flag “falsehoods” to social media platforms
By Tom Parker | Reclaim The Net | August 29, 2022
The Department of Homeland Security’s (DHS’s) controversial “Disinformation Governance Board” was recently shut down after First Amendment concerns but the DHS seemingly still intends to continue its “disinformation” work.
A recent report from the Homeland Security Advisory Council’s “Disinformation Best Practices and Safeguards Subcommittee” states that while “there is no need for a separate Disinformation Governance Board… the Department must be able to address the disinformation threat streams that can undermine the security of our homeland.”
The report was produced after DHS Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas asked the subcommittee to make recommendations for how the DHS can “most effectively and appropriately address disinformation that poses a threat to the homeland while protecting civil rights and providing greater transparency across this work.”
In the report, the subcommittee provides a broad definition of disinformation, outlines how the DHS detects and mitigates information that falls under the scope of this definition, and provides the subcommittee’s recommendations.
The far-reaching definition of disinformation includes both deliberate and unintentional spreading of “falsehoods.” The subcommittee also deems the “intentional spreading of genuine information with the intent to cause harm” to be a form of disinformation and uses “moving private and personal information into the public sphere” as an example of this type of disinformation.
The report outlines how several US government agencies that fall under the DHS’s purview, including the Office of Intelligence and Analysis (I&A), the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA), and Customs and Border Protection (CBP), surveil online messages, forums, and social media to identify disinformation, “rumors,” and “attitudes related to migration.”
It also notes that the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA), which also falls under the purview of the DHS, flags “disinformation campaigns utilizing social media” to social media companies “for whatever action those companies see fit to take.”
In the recommendations section of the report, the subcommittee insists that the DHS’s work on disinformation is “critical” and that the DHS “needs the ability to identify, analyze, and, where necessary, address certain incorrect information.”
The subcommittee adds that the DHS should be able to flag disinformation to social media platforms:
“The Department can and should also bring such disinformation to the attention of other government agencies for appropriate action and to platforms hosting the falsehoods. It is for the platforms, alone, to determine whether any action is appropriate under their policies.”
While the report recommends that the DHS should maintain its broad powers to surveil disinformation and flag it to social media platforms, the subcommittee insists that these activities will be “consistent with the law and the relevant civil rights and privacy protections.”
We obtained a copy of this Disinformation Best Practices and Safeguards Subcommittee report for you here.
We obtained a copy of the appendix to this report (which contains examples of DHS products and activities that address disinformation) for you here.
This report and its recommendations were published on the same day that the DHS officially shut down its Disinformation Governance Board. This board was introduced in April but days after it was introduced, 20 states threatened legal action and branded it an “unacceptable and downright alarming encroachment on every citizen’s right to express his or her opinions, engage in political debate, and disagree with the government.”
While the DHS’s activities related to the Disinformation Governance Board generated mass controversy, the DHS was surveilling “misinformation” and accused of surveilling money transfers before the board was even introduced. It also has contracted with a social media surveillance company that provides surveillance software.
The recommendation that the DHS should flag alleged disinformation to social media was published one day before the Federal Bureau of Investigation’s (FBI’s) use of this tactic in the run-up to the 2020 US presidential election came under fresh scrutiny.
The scrutiny began after Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg appeared on The Joe Rogan Experience Podcast and said the FBI had warned Facebook about a “dump” of “Russian disinfo” just before the New York Post published a story alleging that Joe Biden and his son Hunter Biden had engaged in an alleged corruption scandal. This story was published a few weeks before the 2020 US presidential election and was censored by Facebook and other Big Tech platforms. At the time, many politicians and journalists blasted Big Tech for censoring a story that was unfavorable to then-Democratic presidential candidate Joe Biden. A recent poll found that 79% of Americans who followed the story believe that “truthful” coverage would have changed the outcome of the 2020 election.
Government agencies, such as the DHS and the FBI, defend this practice of flagging alleged disinformation to social media companies by insisting that they’re not directing the companies to censor and that it’s up to the platforms to decide whether they want to remove the information that’s flagged to them.
However, internal chats have revealed that when government agencies or officials flag information or accounts to platforms, they do sometimes apply pressure. For example, recently released internal Slack messages show Twitter employees discussing the White House branding journalist Alex Berenson “the epicenter of disinfo” and questioning “why Alex Berenson hasn’t been kicked off from the platform” four months before he was banned.
The narrative managers have done their best to memory-hole the Nurenberg Codes
By Helen of desTroy | August 28, 2022
You would be forgiven for not knowing that last Friday was the 75th anniversary of the Doctors’ Trial, one of 13 Nazi war crimes trials conducted at Nuremberg after World War II and the event that birthed the Nuremberg Codes, the most important medical ethics document of the modern era. The Codes set ground rules for requiring informed consent from experimental test subjects; they anchor international agreements like the Helsinki Declaration, the Geneva Convention and the United Nations’ International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights and have been codified into law in the US and other countries.
Sixteen doctors were found guilty at Nuremberg of murder and torture for carrying out a euthanasia program on mentally and physically disabled German citizens deemed “unworthy of life” and experimenting on concentration camp inmates; nine were jailed and seven were executed. Yet the expected flood of commemoratory articles and events marking the anniversary of the Allies’ crowning (if illusory) moment of moral superiority over those Evil Nazis™ has not materialized. It’s downright unnatural for the US and Europe to miss a chance to give the dead Nazi horse a good beating, but any attempts to even discuss the Nuremberg Codes in the last two years have been squelched by militant fact-checkers. Meanwhile, a coterie of corrupt “public health professionals” and the international financial cartels who control them have pulled off perhaps the most shocking and deadly crime against humanity ever committed.
The Big Lie
Mentioning Nuremberg during Covid-19 was asking to be pilloried in the “respectable” press as an anti-science, horse-paste-guzzling right-wing extremist. Fact-checkers came out of the woodwork to reflexively deny that the Nuremberg Codes applied to any aspect of the Covid-19 response, from forced masking to vaccine mandates, sometimes issuing two denials in a single day in their compulsion to keep the claim from spreading. One particularly tenacious fact-check even took issue with the claim “It was the doctors on trial in Nuremberg,” arguing that because the other 12 trials put Nazi Party officials, lawyers, and corporate executives in the dock, the statement “lacked context.”
This display of ideological lockstep was supposed to intimidate anyone who wasn’t already 100% allied with society’s enlightened institutions in defense of The Science™ against the irrational, emotionally-driven forces of ignorance. Those still on the fence about getting their “Warp Speed” car-crash of a shot were shamed by peer pressure psyops like the UK’s “Clap for our carers,” while social media was seeded with controlled but approachable “experts” who carefully crafted the illusion of overwhelming consensus that the measures being taken in the name of “stopping the spread” were not only scientifically but morally beyond reproach.
But this wasn’t an organic moment of unity. These “fact-checkers” have all received big money from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, the eugenics enthusiasts who have rapidly become the most powerful force in global health policymaking and who also control huge chunks of the education, agriculture, and “green” energy spheres. Most fact-checking organizations pay lip service to the rules set by the International Fact-Checking Network, which while it sounds like an upstanding professional association that’s been around a while was actually launched less than a decade ago. The IFCN, which admits it doesn’t follow its own code of principles, has been funded since its 2015 beginnings by the Gates Foundation, the Omidyar Network, George Soros’ Open Society Foundations, Google, Facebook, the US State Department, and CIA cutout the National Endowment for Democracy, among others. It’s hard to think of a worse group of stewards for a gaggle of helpless facts, aside from perhaps the Wikimedia Foundation, about which more later.
The IFCN is run by the Poynter Institute, a “journalism education” nonprofit funded by many of the same entities as its IFCN subsidiary. Loaded down with enough conflicts of interest to make that code of principles swoon, Poynter selects, sponsors, and trains journalists, prioritizing obedience to authority, ideological inflexibility and a total absence of shame. They are then turned loose to mow the internet’s epistemological lawn in military fashion, doxxing some popular opposition voice while merely tagging others for later deplatforming, arrest, or worse. The tactic’s resemblance to the work of Ukrainian vigilante website Mirotvorets, unofficially operated by the country’s Ministry of Information, is unlikely to be an accident, given that Omidyar and Soros both poured billions of dollars into 2014’s Maidan Square color revolution, which was itself choreographed by the State Department’s Victoria Nuland, who knows the value of a well-placed bullet or a warm cookie.
It’s easy to see why Gates just had to buy the industry for himself. If these fact-checkers could reinvent the most corrupt government in Europe, whose military was exposed by dozens of major western media outlets as a hive of neo-Nazi thugs, as a democratic paradise, surely they could spin the vaccine tycoon’s Final Solution as the solution to all humanity’s problems. The Covid-19 experiment saw the closest collaboration yet between the fact-checkers, Big Tech and governments around the world to construct an epistemological roach motel that users could enter easily but would face growing barriers – warning screens, computer failures, personal attacks, deplatforming, financial hardship and a lowered social credit score – if they tried to leave.
It’s no exaggeration to say Poynter’s army of fact-checkers set the narrative of Covid-19 for the public from Day One (or should we call it Year Zero?). The IFCN’s “Coronavirus Alliance” launched in January 2020, before most Americans even knew what a coronavirus was. While the first Twitter users in the western hemisphere were stumbling across bizarre videos of Chinese people dropping to the ground and convulsing, explained in the accompanying broken-English text to be the result of an unknown virus, the fact-checkers were implementing orders from their paymasters. One of the first narrative touchstones, the red and white 3D model of the coronavirus, soon became as ubiquitous as the footage of planes hitting towers on 9/11, triggering intense fear and doubt directed both at the outside world and at the self. After all, they might be an “asymptomatic carrier,” and the only way to be sure was to isolate from their loved ones. As with 9/11, this unfamiliar terror pushed the individual to seek solace in an increasingly totalitarian state that insisted its ‘tough love’ – locking us in our homes, forbidding us from earning money, and keeping us from our families – was for our own good. Frightened and confused, many turned on the TV and sucked down its narcotizing propaganda. Even CNN’s ratings went up that first pandemic year, as Chris Cuomo demanded Americans “sacrifice the me to the we” and compared binge-watching Netflix to landing on the beaches of Normandy while his brother mass-murdered elderly New Yorkers.
The complex choreography of the Covid-19 response could not have unfolded as it did without premeditation. The plot was lifted – not plagiarized, as the authors were the same – from Event 201, the tabletop coronavirus simulation sponsored by the Gates Foundation at Johns Hopkins University’s Center for Public Health Security. This took place just a month after the Global Preparedness Monitoring Board – the product of an unholy marriage between the WHO and the World Bank earlier that year – released a report demanding all UN member countries “conduct at least two system-wide training and simulation exercises” by the following September, “including one for covering the deliberate release of a lethal respiratory pathogen.” Video of Event 201 shows players uninterested in minimizing harm from the virus instead exploring how the “emergency” might be used to stifle undesirable narratives and ram through major changes in society. The “real” pandemic – simulation number two, by the GPMB’s counting – played out months later exactly along the exercise’s script. The WHO, Gates, the World Economic Forum and Big Business took the reins, filling the power vacuum left while individual governments, seemingly baffled by the outbreak despite having repeatedly run their own simulations, ran around in circles.
How to treat an Infodemic
The crisis was planned and then used to crack down on unauthorized views under the reasoning that humanity was in the midst of an infodemic – a surfeit of information encouraging irresponsible beliefs – and careless talk could cost lives. Spreading dissenting opinions could infect friends and loved ones with the virus of doubt, which while perhaps less deadly than the virus itself (with its 99.7% survival rate), could cause society to fracture at a time when all humanity had to unite or be destroyed by the invisible enemy. Reading or hearing “disinformation” about Covid could reduce one’s likelihood of getting vaccinated, putting one’s very life at risk.
Convincing test subjects to discard their self-preservation instincts and their critical capacity and embrace the most absurd statements as gospel truth was the main goal of the first part of the Covid-19 experiment, and given the single-mindedness with which the WHO zeroed in on the “infodemic” before it had even officially declared the real virus to be a pandemic, it’s hard to believe they were making it up as they went along, especially given that the term was allegedly invented during the original SARS outbreak in 2003 (by a Washington Post writer no less) and then apparently put on ice until almost two decades later. Seeking input on how to respond to this new threat, the WHO reached out to professionals of all stripes, with more than a quarter of advisory input coming from academics eager to test out their juiciest hypotheses on real people with no repercussions. Everyone who used social media in 2020 to discuss the Covid-19 pandemic and its aftermath thus became a test subject, “nudged” and prodded for the Public Good, and some of those experiments – particularly those aimed at developing an FBI-style psychological profile of believers in “conspiracy theories” so they can be locked up as domestic terrorists or institutionalized as incurable monsters are very much ongoing.
Those early academic papers describe a chaotic infosphere in which the WHO’s narrative failed to dominate on its merits alone. The academics rose to the challenge, burnishing their half-baked speculations with scientific-looking graphs and charts. Their solutions ranged from Orwellian – deploying “freedom of expression officers” to censor and label rogue content as much as European human rights law would allow; re-education programs for “influencers,” teachers, priests, and other likely “superspreaders,” who could then be suspended from social media entirely if they refused to get their minds right – to the lesser evils of sending in fact-checkers as the equivalent of UN peacekeeping troops to help “inoculate” social media users against the disinformation they were about to see. With distrust in public and private institutions hitting new highs, society didn’t just need a vaccine against the scary new virus, it needed one against “disinformation” as well! But like the Covid vaccines themselves, these digital inoculations didn’t come with an informed consent notice, and the clinical trial results aren’t looking good.
Experiment #1: Shock “therapy”
As the WEF’s Klaus Schwab himself admitted in his pandemic tome The Great Reset, Covid-19 is the least deadly ‘pandemic’ in the last two millennia. But he’s quite open about wanting to use the largely self-inflicted Covid-19 “crisis” to bring about the Fourth Industrial Revolution, a transhumanist “green” dystopia lovingly crafted for “stakeholder capitalists” and inspired by technocratic parasites like Yuval Noah Harari. This is no experiment for the “good of society,” nor are any efforts made to “avoid unnecessary mental and physical suffering,” as Nuremberg demands. If anything, the experiment’s designers deliberately ratcheted up the suffering, believing this was necessary to unfreeze the fixed ideas of western civilization – free will, individuality, rationality, democracy (not to be confused with Our Democracy™) in our minds and replace them with the WEF’s preferred picks: obedience, “equity” (a Newspeak term meaning equality of outcome rather than equality of opportunity), credulity, communitarianism. The group has admitted on its own website that the lockdowns and the rest of the “touchless torture” the Covid response has supposedly required constitute the “world’s biggest psychological experiment.”
The Great Reset is an especially noxious experiment in that it violates the minds and bodies of test subjects on multiple levels, burrowing down into the way we think in its megalomania. It’s the spiritual offspring of CIA-funded Canadian psychiatrist Ewen Cameron, who “de-patterned” his patients’ personalities with high-voltage electroshock, induced coma, and mega-doses of LSD, then attempted to’ ‘build them back better’ by playing their comatose forms 16 hours of tape-recorded messages at a time; and Milton Friedman, the University of Chicago economist and godfather of neoliberalism whose students, the so-called “Chicago Boys,” conducted campaigns of economic “shock therapy” on third-world nations the US worried were too left-wing, assisting far-right leaders in seizing power, further impoverishing the masses with austerity programs, terrorizing what political opposition remained with death squads and disappearances, and privatizing all state-run industries so as to attract foreign investors. Neither Cameron’s patients, most of whom came in with simple problems like anxiety or depression (and one of whom wasn’t even seeking treatment but just looking for a job) and left as husks no longer able to even use the bathroom themselves; nor the inhabitants of Chile, Brazil, Uruguay, Indonesia, Russia, or any of the long list of other countries subject to some variation on Chicago School shock treatment over the years, were ever told they were part of an experiment, let alone asked if they wanted to be.
The Great Reset has not only targeted the entire world with economic shock therapy, triggering a massive depression the current financial system is unlikely to ever shake off (spoiler alert: another experiment coming…) – it funneled unprecedented amounts of fear into populations already thrown off balance by the blinding speed of policy shifts. First scolded for “selfishly” wearing a mask, then attacked for “selfishly” not wearing one; informed their city would be “locking down” at 10pm, when a peek out the window yielded crowds of restive youths hanging out on the corner with nary a cop in sight; told vaccinations were mandatory for school, then told their child could have just “masked up” when little Polly drops dead of a heart attack not 24 hours after her first shot of Moderna; the average person soon lapsed into learned helplessness and became a shut-in, depatterning daily in the glow of the television as they degenerated into an obedient vegetable, capable of “masking up” and socially distancing but little else. Despite leaving a horrific trail of devastation in their wake, the experimental lockdowns were praised by the WEF for the slight dip in carbon emissions they caused, all but guaranteeing phase II of the nonconsensual clinical trials – climate lockdowns – will be rolled out within the year.
Experiment #2: Hackable animals
Given the mountain of evidence against them, it’s perfectly logical that the ruling class would have tried to build up an impenetrable fort of bullshit using their captive fact-checking industry to deflect accusations of war crimes under the Codes. Several patterns pervade the apologist coverage, starting with the idea that these brand new mRNA Covid vaccines, tested on under 100,000 people by Pfizer and Moderna combined (and none who were pregnant or nursing) before receiving their coveted emergency authorization, are somehow not experimental procedures. They use the synonym investigational instead, as ‘experimental’ tends to trigger thoughts of, well, human experimentation, authoritarian regimes, the very Nuremberg Nazis the media establishment is trying its best to keep the average reader away from. But the effect is the same – mRNA vaccines of any kind weren’t tried on the general population until the end of 2020, and the torrent of side effects and death that has been unleashed in the meantime suggests neither Moderna nor Pfizer had informed consent from these gen-pop guinea pigs.
That’s a big deal, because Pfizer knew before it sought emergency authorization that more vaccinated test subjects had died than unvaccinated subjects – it even fudged the numbers for the FDA. Some 1,200 trial participants died in the 90 days following their injection, and Pfizer made sure to vaccinate the placebo group at the end of the trial in order to make sure further comparisons didn’t spoil its story. Indeed, it was so sure its vaccines were going to leave a pile of bodies behind that it refused to even sell them to countries whose governments wouldn’t shield them from liability for the damage caused. One should have expected this from a company with the dubious distinction of paying the largest fine in Justice Department history in 2009 for healthcare fraud, off-label prescribing, misleading marketing and miscellaneous criminality. Nevertheless, they won the “Warp Speed” lottery under Albert Bourla, a veterinarian with a doctorate in the biotechnology of reproduction who was for some reason promoted to CEO of the entire (human-focused) drug company a year before the Covid-19 outbreak. Given that his primary achievement prior to Operation Warp Speed was developing a “vaccine” that chemically castrated boars without ruining the meat, it becomes much more difficult to see the utter disaster the mRNA vaccines have created for both male and female fertility as an accident.
Still questioning authority? The fact-checkers then attempt to distance vaccine mandates – along with health passports, mask mandates, lockdowns and the other psychological aspects of the experiment conducted on the unwitting populace – from the Nuremberg zone by categorizing them as “public health interventions,” not research, or experiments. The Codes simply do not apply. Never mind that public health interventions are supposed to be evidence-based, and no western democracy has ever engaged in anything like the Covid lockdowns before, or that the CDC pulled the six-foot social distancing rule out of its ass, or even that the only “science” backing closing schools to “stop the spread” was a computer model from a 16 year old’s science project. Lockdowns arguably killed more people than Covid-19, and they have cut short many more lives by impoverishing, immiserating, and isolating millions. Arguing public health measures can’t be experimental because they’re public health measures is merely a last-ditch effort to wall the Codes off in a museum, inapplicable to anyone but those nasty Nazis who were – as the narrative managers never tire of reminding us – a unique and special case.
Discouraging cross-time contextualization is very important to the fact-checkers, who aren’t hesitant to shoot the messenger if all else fails. Anyone talking about the Nuremberg Codes in the context of Covid-19 is dismissed as an “alt-righter”, a “covid crazy,” dangerous “extremists,” “anti-vaxxers,” or even actual Nazis who apparently got confused about whose side their team was on back in WW2. In war, dehumanizing the enemy is key to beating him, and this is nothing if not a two-pronged war being fought in our brains and our bloodstreams. “Drawing a link between this final rollout of these vaccines and what the Nazi doctors were doing is morally grotesque,” the British Medical Association’s Dr Julian Sheather told FullFact ; he didn’t explain why, and it’s not apparent why one should not draw parallels between the two cases. According to the Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System (VAERS), whose own creators admit it contains less than 1% of all adverse events associated with a given vaccine, the Covid shots have already caused nearly 30,000 deaths, over 170,000 hospitalizations, nearly 16,000 heart attacks (a common sight now on sports fields, where 60 times more athletes than normal are flatlining mid-game), and nearly 5,000 miscarriages in the US alone. Using tech entrepreneur Steven Kirsch’s calculations, the numbers are much higher: at least 478,000 Americans have been killed by Covid vaccines, to say nothing of millions permanently disabled, unable to work or function on a basic level. Worldwide, the number of deaths approaches 12 million.
While the number of victims the Nazi doctors left behind is not so meticulously recorded, especially given the high levels of typhus and malnutrition contributing to the mortality rate in the camps, one source has them consigning between 70,000 and 100,000 “unfit” Germans to death between 1939 and 1941 while sterilizing hundreds of thousands more – a detail that once again should send a chill down the spine of anyone who’s noticed the declining birthrates around the world. If the figures aren’t comparable, that’s only because the mRNA vaccine has been so much more efficient in its killing. There’s nothing “morally grotesque” about pointing that out. But since “everybody knows” the Nazis were the pinnacle of Evil™, the realization that Pfizer and Moderna’s death toll might have their doctors beat must be prevented at all costs. Thus even bringing up Nuremberg in relation to Covid-19 is deemed to be “trivializing” the crimes of the Nazis, even when the intention is to draw attention to the seriousness of their modern descendants’ crimes, and efforts are made to further poison the dialogue by suggesting there’s something antisemitic about the whole business.
In Part II: the war on “conspiracy theories,” why Nuremberg is to be memory-holed, infodemic terrorism, and more…
Facebook to let “fact checkers” comment on posts that “may not be verifiably false”
By Didi Rankovic | Reclaim The Net | August 27, 2022
Just in case anything slips through the existing “fact-checking,” narrative-enforcing cracks of Facebook’s censorship, a new “feature” is now being introduced as a pilot.
Through it, Facebook is letting a small group of US “fact-checkers” leave comments on public posts, which “may not be verifiably false, but that people may find misleading.”
This has been revealed in the tech and social media behemoth’s Community Standards Enforcement Report for the second quarter of this year. One of Facebook’s (Meta’s) activities covered in the report concerns its third-party fact-checker – aka, the “hired censorship guns” program.
At the very end of the report, Facebook briefly mentions the exceedingly interesting new pilot program. While critics will no doubt see it as yet another avenue for the giant to steer users in a particular direction, it is presented as quite the opposite: allegedly to “empower” users as they come across content and are deciding “what to read, share, and trust.”
“A small group of our US third-party fact-checking partners has the ability to comment in English and Spanish to provide more information on public Facebook posts that they determine could benefit from more context,” the report reads.
Does this mean what it looks like it means – that Facebook is using fact-checkers to appear more like real users commenting, influencing actual real users – rather than reviled enforcers slapping labels on posts that often result in deranking and outright censorship?
It’s hard to tell from the little space Facebook’s report dedicates to the project. We do know that it is separate from the “fact-checking” program that results in penalties for users.
If a “fact-checker” from the select group leaves a comment on your post, it will not represent a fact-check rating, directly result in negative consequences, or downrank content, Facebook promises.
Elsewhere in the report, Facebook reveals that in the Q2 of 2022, “fact-checker” warnings have been put on more than 200 million posts, including re-shares.
Maria Zakharova responds to Zuckerberg’s FBI revelations
Samizdat – August 26, 2022
The FBI and other US security agencies secretly control American social media giants, Russia’s foreign ministry press director has alleged. The high-level official cited a recent interview by Mark Zuckerberg, in which the Facebook CEO supposedly acknowledged such influence.
On Friday, spokesperson Maria Zakharova published a post on her Telegram channel devoted to Zuckerberg’s recent appearance on The Joe Rogan podcast. According to the Russian diplomat, Facebook’s first-in-command recounted how FBI operatives had visited him ahead of the 2020 US presidential elections, which ended in victory for Joe Biden, asking him to suppress stories revolving around the “unseemly contents” of Hunter Biden’s laptop on his platforms.
“The men in black ‘convinced’ Mark Zuckerberg… that these were all Russian fakes,” Zakharova added, referencing the podcast.
She went on to surmise that this kind of “excuse for censorship” was sufficient to have made Facebook’s CEO comply with the request. The subsequent suppression of the Hunter Biden laptop story “helped pronounce Biden senior as the winner in the election,” Zakharova noted, remarking that many Americans are still unconvinced.
The diplomat went on to argue that, with the laptop story turning out to be true and with Zuckerberg’s revelations to Rogan, “the world has learned that the US social media played a decisive role in this performance.” She added that the suspension of then-President Trump’s accounts by the main social media platforms just goes to show that the US authorities collude with the “internet monopolies.”
Zakharova concluded that all this proves that the “FBI and other American security services manually control digital giants,” with social media platforms’ leadership only too happy to “participate in dirty political games in Washington.” The senior diplomat also made the claim that “there are no democratic standards in the American electoral system: neither in theory nor in practice.”
Disappearing YouTube Misinformation Prevention Policies on Masks and Social Distancing
The Naked Emperor’s Newsletter | August 23, 2022
Earlier in the year YouTube’s COIVD-19 medical misinformation policy wouldn’t allow you to post content which contradicted the WHO’s or local health authorities’ guidance on various issues including:
- Social distancing;
- Claims that wearing a mask is dangerous or causes negative physical health effects;
- Claims that masks do not play a role in preventing the contraction or transmission of COVID-19
Now, it’s perfectly fine, signalling that those claims are no longer misinformation. Too bad if you previously had your account cancelled for questioning those policies. You should know by now when it is ok to question The Science™ and when it is verboten. Do keep up.
Pakistan threatens to cut off digital ID of “hecklers”
By Ken Macon | Reclaim The Net | August 23, 2022
Pakistan Interior Minister Rana Sanaullah Khan warned supporters of recently-ousted prime minister Imran Khan whose behavior could be considered “harassment and heckling” that they could have their biometric ID apps blocked, according to a report by The Nation.
The political climate in Pakistan is tense, with supporters of Khan threatening to “take over” and harassing government officials.
The government is now threatening those engaging in heckling and harassment will have their Computerized National Identity Card (CNIC), which is biometric, blocked. CNICs are used to access bank accounts, government services, and to register SIM cards. Blocking the ID would make life rather difficult.
Khan’s supporters could also be arrested, the Interior Minister said. On Twitter, the minister encouraged people to send identifiable videos of Khan’s supporters heckling to the Federal Agency’s Cyber Crime Wing.
Meanwhile, TV stations have been banned from airing Khan’s speeches live. The former Prime Minister accused the government of censorship for temporarily blocking YouTube on Sunday amid his speech at a political rally.
US ices its ‘Ministry of Truth’
Samizdat – August 25, 2022
The US Department of Homeland Security finally shut down the Disinformation Governance Board on Wednesday, over a month after a review panel convened to rescue the idea advised doing just that – and months after widespread condemnation of the project forced the agency to reconsider.
Citing the “prior recommendation” of the Homeland Security Advisory Council, which voted unanimously to dissolve the group last month, DHS Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas officially announced the termination of the Disinformation Governance Board and revoked its charter.
The committee’s final report affirmed that there was no need for a disinformation board, arguing the agency had fallen prey to mission creep. Instead, it was the DHS’ job to “address the disinformation threat streams that can undermine the security of our homeland,” speaking to the public in plain language and emphasizing “the importance of truth.”
Co-authored by former deputy attorney general Jamie Gorelick, the report also blamed the use of the emotionally loaded term “disinformation” for sinking the project, arguing it had inflamed the public’s imagination regarding the new group’s ambitions. “The actual work of the department has been exaggerated, and the real work is extremely straightforward.”
“They don’t have a red pencil to correct everything in the world that’s not true,” Chertoff clarified.
Launched in April, the Disinformation Governance Board immediately came under fire from civil liberties and free speech advocates, who were already concerned about the Biden administration’s cozy relationship with social media and worried about the partisan leanings of its director, Nina Jankowicz. The author and self-styled disinformation expert previously worked for the Ukrainian Foreign Ministry and as a lobbyist targeting Russia and Belarus with “democracy assistance” programs while promoting disinformation of her own, including dismissing the Hunter Biden laptop as a Russian fabrication. Leaked documents reveal she was also in the employ of the UK’s Integrity Initiative, a shadowy influence operation that meddled with the political process at home and abroad under the guise of “defending democracy.”
While the DHS initially tried to defend what critics were denouncing as Biden’s “Ministry of Truth,” it was ultimately forced to put the program on ice, bringing in Chertoff and Gorelick to attempt to salvage the idea. However, the HSAC determined last month there was “no need for a Disinformation Governance Board.”
Western Psychological Warfare Apparatus Creates False Beliefs
Tortilla con Sal | August 2022
An increasingly large number of people now agree that information of all kinds in the countries of North America, Europe and their Pacific allies is deployed overwhelmingly to serve the interests of Western corporate oligarchs and the politicians who front for them. Outlets including news media and NGOs, academic and scientific journals as well as international institutions have practically all been fully integrated now into the long standing, global psychological warfare offensive of the West’s ruling classes. At home, they work relentlessly to control the perceptions and behavior of their countries’ populations. Overseas, they seek constantly to mobilize international opinion against countries like Russia and China, governments from Syria to Venezuela, political movements like Hezbollah, and even individuals, like Julian Assange, who resist them.
The main purpose of this vast psychological warfare apparatus is to create false beliefs which over time harden into false memories. The process consolidates ruling class control domestically while also facilitating their present and future crimes of aggression around the world. Populations in the West are deliberately misinformed and misled by means of plausible misrepresentation, blatant distortion, systematic omission and downright lies. Categories of information such as journalism, academic and scientific research, investigation by NGOs or briefings from international institutions have all been deformed, distorted and devalued by their abuse so as to further the domestic and global interests of the Western oligarchies.
Since long before 20th Century public relations and psychology, the fundamental way to manipulate mass consciousness, from the Holy Inquisition to the enthronement of Science, has been to encourage submission to authority. The Milgram experiment is a notorious example, although, in one respect, itself a cause for optimism. Other more insidious means sow ruling class messaging among otherwise trusted contrary sources. Concentrated corporate control of information and communications resources has made possible mutual constant universal reinforcement between all varieties of mass media and information outlets. Like magicians, governments and corporations understand very well that suppressing resistance depends on disappearing contrary information by every means possible, including censorship, mass distraction and sensory overload.
An apparently hardly noticed corollary of this systematic perversion of good faith reporting, research and investigation has been a collapse of rationality. In Western public life, it is now effectively forbidden to compare and contrast rival versions of events which contradict the general received wisdom propagated by Western government and corporate approved information outlets. So political and intellectual argument in North America and Europe has become ever more narcissistic, self-serving and ultimately irrational. This applies also to supposedly progressive or even radical outlets which in their coverage of international affairs still depart from essentially neocolonial assumptions of Western superiority.
Over the last fifteen years or so a growing number of independent writers and reporters have sought to challenge the false information spread by well coordinated and concentrated corporate and government controlled networks of mutually reinforcing information outlets. This development has notably sharpened the relation between information and class. More clearly than ever the production and distribution of information has become a vast theater of propaganda operations controlled by a multinational intellectual managerial class with shared imperatives. They promote and enforce a class monopoly of access to information outlets for producers of information and similarly a corresponding monopoly of distribution outlets, both mainstream and ostensibly alternative, for its consumption.
All production and distribution of information involves some variety of reporting which, like any other human activity, can be good or bad. Reporting in general has always been an arena of competing interests and rationalities. But, even so, fundamental components of competent reporting have generally been held to include, among other things, recording first hand accounts of events, clearly sourcing those accounts, presenting trustworthy data and documentary evidence, offering provenance of those sources, acknowledging loyalties and bias while considering competing rival versions, making the reporting accessible and frankly submitting all this material to free and open scrutiny.
It is certainly debatable when contemporary reporting began its categorical collapse into the current gross, unrelenting pyschological warfare offensive by North American and European oligarchies against their own peoples and the majority world. However, the rapidly increasing numbers of independent reporting outlets signal the reality of that collapse and also help reveal its class nature, its class nuances and its irrationality. The currently developing fierce efforts by the West’s ruling oligarchs to repress and censor independent reporting confirm the wholesale abandonment of rationality by Western societies and their leaders. A principal criterion for appraising rationality in an individual or a society is precisely their ability and self-confidence in making a case against rival arguments.
Attempts at outright censorship, or the many other kinds of arbitrary intellectual and cultural repression deployed, represent a failure to be able to reason effectively, to promote consensus or to accommodate legitimate dissent. This collapse of reason and its accompanying deformation of self-confidence into dismissal and exclusion are self-evident in the routine reporting practice and editorial policies of the managers controlling academic and scientific production and the propaganda theater most people still like to call journalism, among the board members and staff of influential non governmental organizations, among the personnel of international institutions and also among the managerial class controlling artistic and cultural production.
Given the intense concentration of political and economic power among the Western oligarchs who have successfully conspired to control all these sectors, the resulting general unanimity of presuppositions among their respective subaltern intellectual and cultural managerial classes is as much to be expected as their complete lack of accountability. Anyone openly challenging or contradicting received wisdom is marginalized and ostracised in what is a truly authentic class warfare waged by North American and European oligarchs against their own peoples and the majority world.
In response, as a class phenomenon, the proliferation of independent reporting outlets reflects not just underlying genuine popular outrage at being permanently misled. It is also a correspondingly authentic, resilient grassroots challenge to the status quo. Conventional liberal or social democrat opinion gauges the authenticity of independent reporting by the criteria of financial and/or editorial independence. But a low budget is no guarantee of integrity and a genuinely independent information outlet may or may not be ideologically aligned with a foreign political movement or government. Under contemporary conditions a more authentic criteria of reporting independence is the degree of legitimate defence of governments and peoples who are victims of the crimes of Western ruling elites.
Truly independent reporting takes this position while at the same time using conventional reporting norms to cover issues and events Western mainstream and alternative media obfuscate or conceal. Doing so necessarily endows genuinely independent reporting outlets, regardless of their political allegiances, with class characteristics by the very nature of their readiness to expose contradictions in accounts of events and issues produced by corporate capitalist information outlets. Paradoxically or not, class solidarity with the victims of imperialist crimes becomes the principal criteria of reporting independence both in terms of what is reported and too how it is reported. For the moment, that means being in solidarity with the world’s peoples defending their basic rights against Western ruling class aggression.
This text was produced by Stephen Sefton with research by Lauren Smith and comments from others.
Featured Video
Douglas Macgregor: No Peace – U.S. Prepares for ‘Total War’ Against Iran
or go to
Aletho News Archives – Video-Images
Book Review
Palantir CEO Calls for Draft to Fight the Empire’s Wars
Involuntary servitude is good for business
By Kurt Nimmo | Another Day in the Empire | April 20, 2026
In 2025, Alex Karp, the CEO of government and military tech contractor Palantir, published The New York Times best-seller, The Technological Republic: Hard Power, Soft Belief, and the Future of the West. The Wall Street Journal praised the book as a cri de coeur, a passionate appeal “that takes aim at the tech industry for abandoning its history of helping America and its allies,” while Wired praised the book as a “readable polemic that skewers Silicon Valley for insufficient patriotism.”
On April 18, 2026, Palantir posted twenty-two points to social media summarizing the book. In addition to taking Silicon Valley to task for insufficient patriotism, advocating a role for AI in forever war, and denouncing the “psychologization of modern politics,” the Palantir post on X declares: “National service should be a universal duty. We should, as a society, seriously consider moving away from an all-volunteer force and only fight the next war if everyone shares in the risk and the cost.”
National conscription, a form of involuntary servitude, and the wars it portends, is good for business, especially for corporations within the orbit of the Pentagon, the CIA, and the national security state. Palantir fits comfortably within this amalgamation. … continue
Blog Roll
Aletho News- The Voters’ Self-Induced Matrix
- Douglas Macgregor: No Peace – U.S. Prepares for ‘Total War’ Against Iran
- How A Fake Iranian Terror Group Was Invented To Proscribe IRGC in Europe
- Iran’s judiciary rejects Trump’s claim on ‘planned execution’ of 8 women
- Israeli army blows up school in southern Lebanon in violation of ceasefire
- The desalination front: Water as Israel’s Achilles heel
- Washington cuts flow of US dollars to Iraqi central bank until ‘acceptable’ government formed
- China blames US for diplomatic impasse with Iran, urges it to show ‘sincerity’ in talks
- Iran announces new Hormuz restrictions after US ceasefire violations
- After Islamabad: How the Global South Is Reshaping Eurasian Geopolitics
- If Americans Knew
- Israeli soldiers using sexual assault to force Palestinians out of West Bank, report says
- Top Biden Official Supports Trump Iran Attack, Says Biden May Have Done The Same
- A history of Israel’s invasions of Lebanon
- How the powerful pro-Israel lobby keeps controlling Democrats in the US
- Replay: Israel’s slow ethnic cleansing of Christians from the Holy Land
- 5 times Israelis desecrated Christian sites in the past two years
- US running out of weaponry for Israel’s war; Iran has plenty – Daily Update
- Israel is (still) killing aid workers in Gaza
- Catholics finally splitting with Trump over Iran war and Israel
- Israel’s “Black Wednesday” Massacre Leaves Lebanese Families Giving DNA To ID Loved One’s Remains
- No Tricks Zone
- New Study: The Climate May Be 5 Times More Sensitive To Solar Forcing Than Commonly Assumed
- EV Industry Reached $70 Billion In Losses In 2024 Due To Delusional Green Ideologies
- Reality Check: Maldives Have Actually Grown In Size Or Remained Stable Over Recent Decades
- Abrupt Climate Change Also Occurred NATURALLY In The Past …25 Times During Last Ice Age
- Cave Discovery Reveals Today’s Desert Climates Were Recently Far Warmer, Wetter, Teeming With Life
- German Expert: Heat Dome Led To Record Temps In Western USA…Warmer In 1934, 1936
- New Study: No Linear Warming Or Glacier Retreat Along Northern Antarctic Peninsula Since 1980s
- An Inconvenient Tree: Uncovered In Alps… Europe Much Warmer Than Today 6000 Years Ago
- New Study Reports A 60% Slowdown In Greenland’s Ice Loss Rate In The Last Decade
- Low Intensity Tornado Wrecks Major Solar Farm, Creating A Potential Toxic Dump
Aletho News 