Brett Weinstein streams with Odysee after YouTube suspension

By Didi Rankovic | Reclaim the Net | June 20, 2021
Are YouTube – and those behind it – actually confident that once a channel is banned there and on similar tech giant-controlled places – it actually disappears from the web?
If so, how short-sighted they must be. These days – not thanks to YouTube’s own dismal policies and the seemingly general trend towards perilous centralization of the internet – alternatives like Odysee, LBRY’s blockchain file-sharing and payment network website, are emerging as viable alternatives.
One of the shows that have been driven off YouTube is biology professor Bret Weinstein and co-host Heather Heying’s DarkHorse Podcast. But a tweet from LBRY announced this saying that the hosts will now be broadcasting exclusively on Odysee. And that you, the listener… can always #FollowTheSilence.
Or if you’re actually into listening to your media content – DarkHorse is (still) available as a downloadable/streaming audio file on any app perusing Apple Podcasts directory – or better yet – via the Podcast Index.
With the actual online availability of it unscathed, in an apparent age of rampant and largely inexplicable – at least in any terms a democratic society might choose to easily explain itself for censoring reach and content in the 21st century – out of the way, let’s delve into what DarkHorse podcast is.
Weinstein and Heying are both biology PhDs, and their knack seems to be viewing the world around them through an evolutionary lens.
What drove Weinstein, a historical Bernie Sanders supporter, and Heying, his wife, to launch the DarkHorse podcast was their own “revolutionary” lens – when dozens of Weinstein’s Evergreen State College students came to his classroom in 2017 to ask that he resign.

It was the “new reality” forming in the wake of the 2016 US election when the college demanded that Weinstein resign for not observing something called “Days of Absence,” during which white students and faculty were asked to stay home.
“What is occurring on college campuses is about power and control. Speech is impeded as a last resort,” Weinstein later told the House Oversight Committee.
Ousted from academia, Weinstein was hoping his voice might still be allowed on platforms like YouTube. But that was only until he brought up the highly weaponized Covid treatments like the politically weaponized Ivermectin in one of the videos, Matt Taibbi writes.
They Denied A Lab Leak At Wuhan. They Are Wrong About Other Things.
By Mary Beth Pfeiffer | Trial Site News | June 16, 2021
After months of denial, the U.S. government has acknowledged that the COVID-19 catastrophe may indeed have originated in a leak from a laboratory in Wuhan, China.
We are now allowed to talk about what until May 13 was a debunked conspiracy theory. Like many facets of the pandemic of our age, Wuhan was censored with the dreaded “disinformation” label, on Facebook and just about everywhere else. Not anymore.
The Wuhan debacle shows what happens when public health institutions have too much power, and the media plays mouthpiece rather than watchdog. Truth suffers. So does trust.
This commentary isn’t about the media’s wholesale buy-in of a possibly mythical pangolin that caused a pandemic.
This is about other potential Wuhans — issues that social and mainstream media have put to rest and closed to honest examination. We are told: Vaccines are safe. Lockdowns are just. We must protect, and be protected from, children. All those statements should be open to debate — and dispute.
I have spent the last eight months attacking another insidious COVID myth. It holds that there is no early treatment.
This actual disinformation has led to deaths and debility. In reporting it, the guardians of media have endowed public figures and institutions with wisdom they surely did not and do not have. Once definitive, Dr. Anthony Fauci of the National Institutes of Health and Dr. Tedros Ghebreyesus of the World Health Organization have reversed themselves on a potential Wuhan lab leak.
Then: “Extremely unlikely,” WHO said after a cursory probe.
Now: “Not convinced” the virus came from nature, said Fauci.
What else might they have gotten wrong?
‘Trusted’ News
Just months into the pandemic, research suggested that a handful of approved generic drugs could potentially quell COVID and save lives. By late last year, a safe drug that won its developers the Nobel Prize in Medicine in 2015 had risen to the top: ivermectin.
Fifty-eight trials now show this 40-year-old drug, off patent since 1997, greatly reduces the ravages of COVID. It lessens severity, lowers hospitalization, and saves lives. Significantly, it also prevents infection.
That few Americans know this is a direct result of two things: First is an unreasonably high, and shifting, bar set by the NIH, FDA and WHO, which collectively reject, cherry-pick or ignore what is now a trove of studies. Second is a media campaign that upholds the anti-IVM dictum, using charged language – from “controversial” to “snake oil” — that makes doctors, medical journals and other media fearful of backlash.
In a case of government propaganda, the Food and Drug Administration actually warned against ivermectin last spring, based, it said, on “multiple” people sickened by an animal formulation, which turned out to be four. Moreover, FDA admitted it “hadn’t studied” the considerable data then available on treatment with the human form.
As government failed us, mainstream and social media did something unique in modern history. Google, YouTube, Facebook, BBC, Washington Post, Associated Press, Reuters and others conspired to shape content and coverage in the government’s image.
They called it, ironically, the Trusted News Initiative. It existed to ferret out falsehoods and declare certainty in a rapidly changing information landscape. The media became a COVID fact-checking apparatus, devoid of nuance or meaningful investigation.
In the wake of Wuhan relevations, some outlets are now correcting the record.
Vaccine OR Treatment
From the start, there was no room for both vaccines and treatments under the statute that has allowed millions of Americans to be vaccinated with an unlicensed, largely unstudied substance. The key mechanism on which this turned was the vaccine’s “Emergency Use Authorization,” which can be granted by the FDA only if there is “no adequate, approved, and available alternative to the product for diagnosing, preventing or treating” a disease.
But even as the vaccine was minimally tested and maximally hyped, there was an alternative. Ivermectin.
“It’s the most effective antiviral agent we have,” Dr. Paul E. Marik, co-founder of Front Line COVID-19 Critical Care Alliance, said in a conversation for this article. “If the WHO was to say that or the NIH — were they to approve ivermectin — the EUA for all the vaccines would become invalid.”
Ivermectin, said FLCCC president Dr. Pierre Kory, “would kneecap the entire global vaccine policy around the world.”
The choice was always vaccines OR treatment. Not both. Operation Warp Speed spent three times as much — $18 billion — to develop a vaccine as it did to develop a treatment. Moreover, money for therapeutics went largely toward costly new drugs, some of which failed and others still in development.
The media did not question the oversight of existing drugs and emerging research. Instead, it became an arm of government in a shared single fixed goal: Vaccinate quickly and at any expense.
A Year Lost
America’s COVID Czar Anthony Fauci predicted in July of 2020 that an antiviral would be available by that fall. Then, last December he said his “highest priority” was a quick-acting COVID drug. In reality, NIH waited until April 29, 2021 to announce a large study of safety-tested, FDA-approved drugs. That was roughly 400 days – and nearly 600,000 U.S. deaths — into the pandemic.
Forget a few dozen studies – most from other countries — that universally agreed on ivermectin’s efficacy. Forget a peer-reviewed meta-analysis that showed 83 percent fewer deaths. Forget the experiences of hundreds of real treating doctors in the U.S. and around the world.
Viewed in the kindest possible way, that delay, that lost year, wasn’t so much intentional as institutionalized. U.S. treatments are driven by the integral and outsized influence of pharmaceutical money on the regulatory process, and no one was putting up $20 million for what are considered, questionably, the “gold-standard” of evidence-based medicine: randomized control trials.
Dr. Robert Malone, a vaccine researcher and inventor of mRNA technology, went bankrupt trying to repurpose old antiviral drugs to treat the Zika virus in the 2010s. “The investment community had zero interest because there’s no way to make a buck,” he said in a must-see podcast on pandemic missteps. “The financial incentives around drug repurposing are such that it doesn’t get done.”
Ivermectin is the penicillin of COVID, particularly when combined with other generics like fluvoxamine and the vilified but effective hydroxychloroquine. Now, however, as at the start of COVID, newly infected patients are still denied treatment and turned back into the community, often to infect others.
As Malone put it, “We’re sending people home and telling them not to come back until your lips are blue.”
“Were this a hundred years ago,” a Pennsylvania opthamologist named Neil Chasin told me months ago, “and Ivermectin was available, it would be used everywhere.”
Media Sees No Evil
The dereliction of duty, by the New York Times, Washington Post, Wall Street Journal (with the Wuhan exception), Associated Press, USA Today and other media giants, likely cost many thousands of lives. The questions that were never asked, the issues never investigated, include:
–In April 2020, Fauci endorsed the high-priced anti-viral remdesivir, calling it the “standard of care” before the first study was published. Did anyone in those investigative powerhouses question the financial ties between the NIH and the drug’s maker, Gilead? Did they care that the study showed no mortality improvement, and the trial’s endpoint was changed to improve benefits so marginal that the WHO advises against the drug?
–Hospitals vehemently oppose ivermectin, forcing some patients’ families to obtain court orders to get it. Does this comport with their liberal use of treatments like monoclonal antibodies and convalescent plasma that are still considered experimental? Just 19 deaths were associated with ivermectin in 20 years; 503 were linked to remdesivir in its first year. Annualized, that’s roughly a 500-fold higher toll for remdesivir. Why is ivermectin — safe, FDA-approved — not used off-label, especially in dying ICU patients, when the potential harm is miniscule?
–The COVID pandemic has led to the most widespread, government-sanctioned wave of censorship and authoritarian message control in American history. Rather than fighting this, the media carries the water. When Merck disingenuously disavowed ivermectin’s safety — a drug it gave away by the billion in a life-saving campaign against parasites — widespread media reports failed to note the company’s potential to make big money on patented new drugs on which it was already working.
–More importantly, the evidence in favor of ivermectin aligns so uniformly that the odds of it being wrong are infinitesimal. Why not read the studies? Why not talk to doctors who have used the drug and patients who have taken it?
The unholy alliance of media and money was foreshadowed at a 2016 conference on preparation for the next SARS epidemic. There, Peter Daszak, whose NIH funding for virus research in China is under scrutiny, emphasized the need to use the press. He is quoted in the proceedings:
“A key driver is the media, and the economics follow the hype. We need to use that hype to our advantage … Investors will respond if they see profit at the end of process, Daszak stated.”
So far, the hype has prevailed. But it can be wrong. Can we now talk about ivermectin?
***
Mary Beth Pfeiffer is an investigative journalist and author of two books. A list of her article links can be found here.
Meeting minutes suggest Facebook’s Nick Clegg said “fact checkers” are “not necessarily objective”
Behind closed doors
By Didi Rankovic | Reclaim the Net | June 13, 2021
A European Commission document from a meeting held in November with Facebook VP Nick Clegg shows that this former high ranking UK politician who found a new career with the social media giant believed that fact-checkers the company hired could be politically biased.
The focus on fact-checking, carried out by third parties, was one of the ways Facebook tried to keep critics off its back in the wake of the 2016 US presidential election, when theories about Donald Trump’s victory happening thanks to fake news on the platform started to emerge.
The power of fact-checkers – some 80 organizations from around the world – is to declare that a post contains misinformation, leading to Facebook putting warning labels on it, and more importantly, algorithmically demoting it in a way that makes it effectively invisible to most users.
But when Clegg spoke with European Commission VP Vera Jourova, although the meeting was dedicated to the ways Facebook was fighting what’s deemed to be misinformation, one of his statements regarding the fact-checking scheme now looks to be the most striking. Namely, he stressed that “independent fact-checkers are not necessarily objective because they have their own agenda.”
The quote was found in the minutes from the meeting that the Daily Mail obtained.
Former member of the British government, David Jones, commented by saying that Clegg’s admission “completely destroys the credibility of Facebook’s own procedures.”
He pointed out that this means news media can get censored on Facebook without proper avenue to appeal, even if the decision is made by fact-checkers who are there not to establish the veracity of content but promote their own agenda.
One of the topics heavily “fact-checked” and then censored until just a few weeks ago was that of the origin of coronavirus and other issues around the pandemic, including by silencing scientists and major news organizations like the Wall Street Journal – along with an unknown number of less influential, “ordinary” users.
However, even if Clegg clearly admitted that fact-checkers can be biased, Facebook late on Friday reacted to the emergence of the Brussels document by denying that he actually made such a suggestion. Instead, the company continued to talk up its at this point seriously compromised scheme.
“Nick never suggested there is bias in our fact-checking program. He did describe that one benefit of having a range of independent fact-checking partners is the variety of specialisms in different countries and issue areas that they bring,” said Facebook.
YouTube censors Dr Noorchashm, a retired cardiac surgeon with a PhD in immunology, for “misinformation”
By Christina Maas | Reclaim the Net | June 13, 2021
Fox News’ Tucker Carlson slammed YouTube for removing his interview with a cardiology and immunology expert who said immunizing young people who have recovered from COVID is a mistake.
Dr. Hooman Noorchashm appeared on Tucker Carlson’s Fox News show where he said that vaccinating the youth was risky, calling it “a colossal error in public health judgment.” Dr. Noorchashm is a retired cardiac surgeon and Harvard Medical School professor, who also holds a PhD in immunology.
According to Noorchashm, young people should not be vaccinated, because of the fact that most of them have already been infected with the virus and recovered, meaning they already have antibodies. Additionally, young people are at a low risk of dying from the virus.
“If a person does not need or stand to benefit from a vaccine, or any medical treatment, they should not be given it because it only opens the door to harm,” he said.
“In addition, we’re doing something unprecedented during this pandemic, which is that we’re vaccinating people in the middle of an outbreak where a lot of people are either asymptomatically infected or have had recent infections.
“And that’s just a recipe for disaster as the data is bearing out.”
On Friday night’s show, Carlson explained that Noorchashm uploaded their exchange on YouTube, which was removed for violating the Google-owned platform’s policy on COVID-19 misinformation.
“Other parents have an absolute right to know these facts,” Carlson said. “But the tech monopolies would no longer allow that discussion.”
The video he uploaded on YouTube was taken down on Friday. YouTube sent him an email stating: “Our team has reviewed your content and unfortunately we think it violates our misinformation policy. We have removed the following content from YouTube.”
The doctor took to Twitter to announce the censorship, saying the video was removed because he was “contradicting expert consensus.” He then added that “in America one can no longer express a dissenting professional opinion or a personal experience.”
Carlson said: “For reasons that we can’t know for certain but are clearly sinister and certainly incompatible with the functioning democracy, Big Tech will no longer allow any questions about vaccines, even from Harvard trained immunologists, who are quoting government data.”
“They censor everything but happy talk and propaganda about vaccines, period,” he added before proceeding to give other cases of censorship of experts that have appeared on his show.
Mozilla suggests regulators issue laws that curb recommendations of “conspiracy theory videos”
Mozilla flirts with censorship as it flounders for a purpose
By Didi Rankovic | Reclaim the Net | June 12, 2021
Mozilla Foundation used to do one thing, and do it well: lead the development of the free and open source Firefox browser. Sadly, that browser, once with a huge chunk of the market and representing a revolutionary step up from Microsoft’s Internet Explorer, is falling by the wayside as Google’s Chrome has taken over.
Chrome and the giant behind it are riddled with (un)answered questions and concerns about privacy and safety; while Mozilla has always touted itself as the opposite, an organization that is all about promoting those values.
Why then, when Mozilla these days feels the need to “take on” a Google property, is the story not about all the drawbacks of using Chrome and promoting the use of Firefox? Why is Mozilla instead virtue signaling by joining the “war on misinformation” and calling out Google’s YouTube?
And of all the things YouTube can be criticized for, Mozilla chooses the way videos that it feels fall into the conspiracy theory category are recommended on the platform.
A blog post published in a section of the website that could be dubbed, “mozillasplaining,” talks about the well-known fact that YouTube’s massive revenues come from its advertising business model that requires more clicks and engagement to grow. Not to mention that Mozilla’s own (in truth, non-existent) “business model” depends directly on the hundreds of millions of dollars of Google money it receives each year through a search deal.
Perhaps that is why the post doesn’t go into the nature of the advertising business itself, which is one of the murkiest parts of the web today, or criticize the recommendation algorithm per se – but instead wants it to be tweaked in a way that would prevent “hatred and conspiracies” from surfacing in people’s YouTube app.
“Users can quickly fall prey to a domino effect, where one conspiracy video leads to another,” says the post, making bold claims such as that watching videos it deems to contain “hateful” content can lead people to radicalization. Neither terms are defined at any point in the write-up.
As for solutions – Mozilla wants its audience to share stories of YouTube recommendation algorithms “leading them astray.”
And – it would also like “regulators (to) step in and issue laws that begin to curb this.”
Related: 🛡 The fall of Mozilla
Jessica Ashooh: The Taming of Reddit and the National Security State Plant Tabbed to Do It
How and why did a hawkish young mandarin hothoused at elite universities and in the halls of state power end up an executive at an anarchic messageboard site with an anti-establishment reputation?

Photo | Graphic by Antonio Cabrera
By Alan Macleod | MintPress News | June 11, 2021
Reddit is one of the world’s most influential news and social media platforms. The website attracted over 1.2 billion visits in April 2021 alone, making it the United States’ eighth most visited site, ahead of other leviathans like Twitter, Instagram and eBay. Now majority-owned by a much larger corporate publishing empire, Reddit is also far ahead of more established news sites, garnering three times the numbers of Fox News and five times those of The New York Times.
That is why it was so surprising that so little was made of the company’s decision to appoint foreign policy hawk Jessica Ashooh to the position of Director of Policy in 2017, at which time it was also the eight most visited site in the U.S. Ashooh, who had been a Middle East foreign policy wonk at NATO’s think tank the Atlantic Council, was appointed at around the same time that the Senate Select Intelligence Committee was demanding more control over the popular website, on the grounds that it was being used to spread disinformation. In her role as Director of Policy, she oversees all government relations and public policy for the company, in addition to managing content, product and advertising. Yet a Google search for “Jessica Ashooh Reddit” filtered between late 2016 and early 2017 (after she was appointed) elicits zero relevant results, meaning not one media outlet even mentioned the questionable appointment.
This is all the more hair-raising, given her resume as a high state official — all of which raises serious questions about the extent of collaboration between Silicon Valley and the national security state.
A hawk’s talons on Syria
The Atlantic Council is the de-facto brains of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization and takes funding from the military alliance, as well as from the U.S. government, the U.S. military, Middle Eastern dictatorships, other Western governments, big tech companies, and weapons manufacturers. Its board of directors has been and continues to be a who’s who of high U.S. statespeople like Henry Kissinger, Colin Powell and Condoleezza Rice, as well as senior military commanders such as retired generals Wesley Clark, David Petraeus, H.R. McMaster, James “Mad Dog” Mattis, the late Lt. Gen. Brent Scowcroft, and Admiral James Stavridis. At least seven former CIA directors are also on the board. As such, the council chooses to represent both political wings of the national security state.
Ashooh’s LinkedIn resume epitomizes the troubling relantionship between think tanks and big tech.
Between 2015 and 2017, Ashooh was Deputy Director of the Atlantic Council’s Middle East Strategy Task Force, working directly with and under Madeline Albright and Stephen Hadley. This is particularly noteworthy, given both these individuals’ roles in the region. As Bill Clinton’s secretary of state, Albright oversaw the Iraq sanctions and the Oil for Food Program, denounced as “genocide” by the successive United Nations diplomats charged with carrying them out. In an infamous interview with 60 Minutes, Albright casually brushed off a question about her role in the killing of half a million children, stating “the price is worth it.” Meanwhile, Hadley was deputy or senior national security advisor to the government of George W. Bush throughout the Afghanistan and Iraq invasions, surely the greatest crimes against humanity thus far in the 21st century.
Ashooh appears to be as hawkish as her bosses. Her particular area of expertise is the war in Syria, regarding which she has been among the most belligerent voices, constantly calling for more American intervention to overthrow the government of Bashar al-Assad. In a 2015 interview with Al Jazeera, she praised the U.K. government’s decision to bomb the country, claiming that the British public was “coming around” to the idea of war. A shocked interviewer asked “how will the British airstrikes [on] Syria… make the British public any safer?” Ashooh replied that it was “generally a positive decision” because “it goes a long way in improving international consensus on the way forward on Syria,” although she lamented that there wouldn’t be “much improvement in the situation without ground troops.” There will be “no political solution without a military element,” she predicted, essentially making the pitch for war.
Ashooh has also constantly praised and supported Syria’s opposition forces. In 2016, she said that she was very happy that “fighters on the ground from a number of key factions” were uniting against the “Assad regime.” She condemned Russia for claiming these opposition forces were members of terrorist groups like Al-Nusra, Jaysh al-Islam or ISIS, insisting that these were “moderate” rebels.
Of course, the idea that there was still any measurable distance between “moderate” rebels and outright militant jihadists by 2016 was hard to maintain. Even The Washington Post by this time was admitting as much, noting that so-called moderates were now so “intermingled” with al-Nusra that it was difficult to tell them apart.
Nevertheless, the New Hampshire native took to the pages of The New York Times to demand that the U.S. arm the opposition. Of course, it was already doing so, the CIA spending $1 billion per year fielding rebel mercenary armies in the conflict — with one in every 15 dollars the agency spent going to this endeavor. All of this Ashooh surely knew, yet she maintained that the West must continue to “jack up the price” of Russia defending Assad. “As long as [Assad] remains in power and remains the figurehead of the Syrian government… this conflict won’t end,” she said, laying out her regime-change-or-bust position. Just weeks before unexpectedly taking over at Reddit, Ashooh seemed to still be in full foreign-policy-hawk mode, condemning Obama in the pages of The Washington Post for his apparent softness on Syria and demanding that Trump “restore U.S. credibility” by “order[ing] targeted, punitive strikes against the Assad regime.”

Ashooh attends British Polo Day at Abu Dhabi’s Ghantoot Racing and Polo Club. Photo | Ahlan
Dirty war, dirty warrior
Ashooh is actually even more involved in the Syrian conflict than one might realize from her hawkish opinions alone. Between 2011 and 2015, she worked for the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of the United Arab Emirates, in her own words, “[p]rovid[ing] senior decision makers with policy analysis and strategic advice, with a particular focus on Syria.”
At that time the UAE was using its enormous financial clout to arm and fund a myriad of jihadist groups attempting to overthow the secular strongman Assad and establish some kind of Islamic state. Far from a conspiracy theory, this comes straight from the horse’s mouth, as then-Vice President Joe Biden revealed in a Q&A session in 2014. The future president frankly stated:
The Saudis, the Emiratis, what were they doing?… They poured hundreds of millions of dollars and tens of thousands of tons of weapons into anyone who would fight against Assad, except that the people who were being supplied were al-Nusra and al-Qaeda and the extremist elements of jihadis coming from other parts of the world. “
Under pressure, he later apologized for his loose lips.
MintPress News asked the Emirati Ministry of Foreign Affairs to comment on precisely what Ashooh’s role was, but they failed to respond.

Ashooh is pictured during her time as a “consultant” in Iraqi Kurdistan. Photo | Academyalumni
Ashooh herself appears to have been a relatively major player in the Syrian Civil War. In her previously mentioned Washington Post article, she notes that her boss was a former Emirati Air Force General and that she was flown to Istanbul in 2013 to attend an emergency meeting with leaders of the Syrian opposition, as well as ambassadors from unnamed Arab and Western states, in order to plan a response to a reported chemical weapons attack and to help the U.S. “coordinate with the Syrian opposition.”
At the same time as she was advising the nation on Middle Eastern affairs, the UAE was widely accused of flying ISIS and al-Qaeda leaders into Yemen to help them intensify the Saudi-led onslaught on the impoverished nation and of smuggling U.S.-made weaponry — including small arms, TOW missiles and Oshkosh fighting vehicles — to the jihadist groups. While Ashooh’s writing is careful to maintain a distinction between the “moderate” rebels she supports and the fundamentalist radicals she does not, it certainly is noteworthy that the entities she worked for consistently seem to end up in league with the most regressive forces in the region. MintPress also reached out to Reddit for comment on why they appointed Ashooh, given her past history, and on the wider phenomenon of government penetration of social media. The company initially promised to issue a response to the inquiry but has not followed through with it.
Opposing some dictatorships, supporting others
Regime change is on the table for more than just one Middle Eastern nation. In a 2017 paper for the Center for the National Interest — a think tank established by former Republican President Richard Nixon and the “Godfather of Neoconservatism,” Irving Kristol — Ashooh explores the different options for forcing regime change in Iran, but concludes that overthrowing the “odious regime” is an impossible task right now, and criticizes the idea as a quixotic dream.
Nevertheless, she is far from an Iran dove. An Atlantic Council report she co-wrote insists that “Iranian interference in the Arab world must be deterred,” and that “America’s friends and partners must be reassured that the U.S. opposes Iranian hegemony and will work with them to prevent it.”
Ashooh’s commitment to fighting against Middle Eastern dictatorships might seem more principled if she did not appear so enamored of the least democratic one of them all. In 2016, she accompanied Albright and Hadley to Saudi Arabia and praised the monarchy’s dynamic leadership on the economy and its nurturing of a new generation. “It was really really exciting to see that level of energy and the level of government support for these young people who were interested in shaping their own futures… it was just wonderful,” she said. In an article about her experience for business news website Market Watch, she waxed lyrical about how forward-thinking the Saudi government is and how the country has become “a hub for the dynamic and positive change that is swelling up throughout the region.” Presumably, this excludes Yemen, a nation they were bombing relentlessly. In a 2020 interview, Ashooh revealed that her dream job would be U.S. Ambassador to Saudi Arabia. One of her earliest comments on her public Reddit page (made before she began working there) is deflecting the Kingdom from criticism of its dreadful treatment of women.
As part of the Atlantic Council, Ashooh was tasked with envisaging a new Middle East for the 21st century. Given her output, it seems that she advocates for a transition towards a more privatized, free-market economic setup, not completely unlike the shock therapy tried in Latin America in the 1970s and 1980s. “We have to “encourage states to make the reforms that move economies from state-based to ones that support entrepreneurship, because the age of state-based economies is over,” she said at a talk at New York University in 2015, adding:
You’ve got to move to support entrepreneurship in the region and let people take advantage of the natural industrial tendencies of people in the Middle East. My God, if you’ve ever been to a Turkish bazaar or a market in Cairo you know that these countries are perfectly capable of having functioning market economies. But the state has gotten in the way.
Ashooh’s LinkedIn profile also notes that in 2010, she worked as an advisor to the Iraqi Ministry of Planning “on a variety of strategic and economic development issues,” but does not go into any more detail about what those issues were. A further biography merely states that her consultancy agency “provid[ed] strategic and management consulting services to the Ministry of Planning of the Kurdistan Regional Government in Northern Iraq.” Unsurprisingly, the organization has links to the U.S. military; the agency’s lead partner being a former Army captain.
Think Tankie
Ashooh comes from a relatively prominent New Hampshire family of Lebanese descent, the most notable of which is probably her uncle Richard. Richard Ashooh was Donald Trump’s Assistant Secretary of Commerce for Export Administration and a former executive at weapons manufacturer BAE Systems. Unlike her uncle, Jessica appears to lean more Democratic, having donated money to a number of local politicians, as well as to anti-Trump Republican groups aimed at convincing them to vote blue, such as Right Side PAC and the now infamous Lincoln Project. However, she also appears to have great respect for many Republicans, having written her doctoral thesis at Oxford University on the Middle East policy of the George W. Bush administration. She also stated that the person she would have most liked to have met was 41st President George Bush Senior, describing him as possessing “incredible amounts of strategy, finesse and restraint.” Thus, her political views appear to be exactly in the center of the neoliberal “blob” in Washington.
Ashooh also worked for the right-wing think tank the CATO Institute and is a Term Member of the more Democratic-aligned Council on Foreign Relations (CFR). The CFR’s term member program is intended to, in its own words, “cultivate the next generation of foreign policy leaders.”
Surveillance Valley
How and why, then, did a hawkish young mandarin hothoused at elite universities and in the halls of state power end up an executive at an anarchic messageboard site with an anti-establishment reputation? Virtually everyone else in senior roles at Reddit has relevant backgrounds in marketing or tech, having worked with comparable companies such as Yelp, Expedia and Snapchat.
Tom Secker — a journalist, podcaster and researcher who runs SpyCulture.com, an online archive about government involvement in the entertainment industry — was deeply skeptical. “That someone whose entire career has been in international relations and foreign affairs is now the senior policy wonk at Reddit is simply bizarre. Given her ties to the CFR, Atlantic Council and the like, it’s downright suspicious,” Secker told MintPress.
Underneath the surface, however, the Atlantic Council has been rapidly expanding its influence and control over big social media companies. In 2018, it announced that it would be partnering with Facebook to promote trustworthy sources and derank, demote and even delete low quality or fake news, thus effectively curating what the platform’s 2.85 billion worldwide users see in their news feeds. But the effect of recent algorithmic changes has been to throttle alternative media traffic in favor of establishment sources such as CNN, Fox News and The New York Times. Even such more mainstream liberal sites as Mother Jones have seen their numbers crater. Facebook later admitted that they were directly targeting Mother Jones because of its left-leaning content, raising the question that if such a middle-of-the-road liberal outlet was being penalized, wasn’t the collapse in traffic to more radical publications surely deliberate? Given the Atlantic Council’s funding and the identities of those on its board, their control over social media is tantamount to state censorship on a global level.
Earlier this year, Facebook also hired NATO press officer Ben Nimmo to be its intelligence chief, in another move that dismayed free-speech advocates. In the past, Nimmo has identified a Welsh pensioner and an internationally known Ukranian pianist as Russian bots, raising more questions about the suitability of the Atlantic Council to be an arbiter of truth online.
The Facebook-Atlantic Council link mirrors that of Microsoft with NewsGuard, a new piece of software purportedly trying to fight fake news by placing either green shields or red warning logos, corresponding to an outlet’s credibility, beside all links in its browser, Microsoft Edge — this credibility being decided entirely by NewsGuard itself. Newsguard pushed Microsoft to install the software on all its products as standard. Again, however, NewsGuard’s system rated establishment websites like Fox News and CNN as trustworthy but independent media as suspect. And again, a glance at its advisory board makes it clear that this is a state operation. Those in key positions included George W. Bush’s Secretary of Homeland Security and former NSA and CIA Director General Michael Hayden; ex-White House Communications Director Don Baer; and former Secretary General of NATO Anders Fogh Rasmussen. Worse still, NewsGuard is also linked to a PR agency employed in whitewashing the Saudi government’s human-rights record and its role in the carnage in Yemen.
Twitter, too, has some extremely troubling links with state power. In 2019 Gordon MacMillan, a senior Twitter executive responsible for the Middle East region, was outed as an active duty officer in the British Army’s 77th Brigade, a unit dedicated to online operations and psychological warfare. Far from causing a scandal, only one major U.S. outlet even mentioned the story, and the journalist in question resigned from the profession weeks later, claiming the existence of a network of top-down state censors who quash stories that threaten the power and prestige of the national security state. To this day, MacMillan remains in his post at Twitter, strongly suggesting the social media company knew of his role before he was hired.
Over the past few years, Twitter, Reddit and Facebook have announced the deletion of hundreds of thousands of accounts linked to sources in Russia, Iran, China and other enemy states, often on the recommendation of Western governments or state-sponsored intelligence organizations. However, they never seem willing or able to find any manipulation of their platforms by Western governments. Thus, the upshot of this has been to slowly dissuade critics of Western foreign policy from using their services.
“The mainstream media-politik establishment has managed to get a hold over Twitter, Facebook and Instagram — shadow-banning and downrating posts considered ‘Russian propaganda’ or whatever other excuse they use to marginalize perspectives and content outside of the mainstream,” Secker told MintPress. “Audiences for this sort of content are increasingly pissed off and alienated by the major social media sites.”
Increasingly, unwelcome political voices are either brushed off by centrist pundits as repeating Russian talking points or smeared as being amplified by Kremlin-based bot farms. The popularity of movements on the left like Black Lives Matter or the Bernie Sanders’ campaign were written off as partially linked to Russia, while others suggested that the January 6 insurrection in Washington was essentially a Russian operation.
The irony is that many of the wildest accusations against Putin that have fed this climate of suspicion began life in Atlantic Council documents. For example, the organization has published a series of studies that suggest that virtually every European political party challenging the neoliberal status quo in some way — from Labour and UKIP in the U.K. to Syriza and Golden Dawn in Greece and PODEMOS and Vox in Spain — are secretly controlled by Russia, functioning as the “Kremlin’s Trojan Horses,” in its words.
The Atlantic Council is also deeply intertwined with a U.K. government-funded organization called the Integrity Initiative, something that purports to be a group defending democracy from disinformation. However, in practice, it appears to be doing the opposite: planting disinformation about politicians’ supposed links to Russia in order to undermine them. The Integrity Initiative is a government-backed cluster of journalists who operate in unison to conduct propaganda blitzes on unsuspecting publics. In 2018, it launched a successful operation to prevent Colonel Pedro Baños being appointed Spain’s head of national security. Considering Baños too soft on Russia for the Atlantic Council and other hawks’ liking, the initiative sprung into action, creating a storm of protest that led to another individual being chosen.
Reddit actually played a key role in a 2019 propaganda blitz against anti-war Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn. A few days before the U.K.’s general election, Corbyn promoted documents leaked on the platform that showed that Conservative Prime Minister Boris Johnson was negotiating with American companies, putting much of the country’s National Health Service up for sale. With just days to go before polls opened, it could have proved a game changer. Reddit quickly came to Johnson’s rescue, however, asserting that the documents were part of a Russian disinformation campaign. The story in the pliant British press switched from “Boris Johnson is selling off the NHS” to “Corbyn promotes Russian disinfo,” thus greasing the skids for an easy victory for the hardline anti-Russia Conservative Party, an outcome the hawks at the Atlantic Council were no doubt relieved by, given Corbyn’s open skepticism about war, empire and nuclear weapons. The veracity of the documents was not challenged.
For a while…
Founded in 2005, Reddit has grown to become one of the world’s largest and most influential websites. However, it began life as an anarchistic messageboard whose culture was profoundly libertarian and anti-establishment. For years, the company’s administrators took a near free speech absolutist position. Aaron Swartz, Reddit’s co-founder, was an open source hacktivist and even attempted to download and publish the entirety of academic publisher Jstor’s library. When authorities got wind of what he was doing, they threatened him with 40 years in prison, an action that caused him to take his own life in 2013.
Reddit’s own position on free information and free speech was often so extreme it caused huge controversy. The site became the internet’s largest source of child pornography. It was only after CNN began reporting on it to a nationwide audience that things began to change. Other, grossly offensive communities like /r/BeatingWomen and /r/CoonTown were also protected.
Nevertheless, the culture established by anarchistic tech bros remained for some years, with the site resembling darker corners of the internet like 4Chan and 8Chan as much as more family-friendly mainstream social media like Facebook.
Ashooh’s arrival in 2017 coincided with a new era in the site’s history. Gone were the days of protecting communities that would bring in bad publicity. Her team quickly brought in a new content policy and began to delete communities that violated it. Last year, she oversaw the banning of over 2,000 communities in a single day, including /r/The_Donald, the main Donald Trump subreddit, and /r/ChapoTrapHouse, the most active left-wing community. These decisions have helped the money flow in; since 2017 revenue has more than tripled.
However, what has been lost across the internet is the liberatory potential of these technologies. In the 1990s and 2000s, many predicted that the internet would usher in a new era of egalitarianism and genuine democracy, helping even to reduce barriers and tensions between nations. For a while, the new medium allowed political actors to challenge the status quo and gain huge followings quickly. Alternative media was easily outperforming legacy media, and challenging the status quo when it came to news. Seeing that, the reaction since 2016 has been swift, as the elite have moved to retighten their grip over the means of communication. Ashooh’s jump from national security state official to Reddit Director of Policy is just one more point of reference on that chart.
Alan MacLeod is Senior Staff Writer for MintPress News. After completing his PhD in 2017 he published two books: Bad News From Venezuela: Twenty Years of Fake News and Misreporting and Propaganda in the Information Age: Still Manufacturing Consent, as well as a number of academic articles.
Hydroxychloroquine supporters who were censored online feel vindicated by new study
By Didi Rankovic | Reclaim the Net | June 11, 2021
It’s no secret that the Covid pandemic was in many instances weaponized to censor former President Donald Trump, by his political opponents and traditional and social media companies.
Trump’s position and policy on a number of issues – from the origin of the virus to the best way to treat the disease – was consistently censored online as misleading and dangerous misinformation, even though the WHO’s main objection to using the drugs Hydroxychloroquine and Azithromycin was that they are allegedly ineffective rather than harmful.
The censorship of many ideas over the last year and the speed at which social media companies labeled them “conspiracy theories” to get them censored, highlighted how much power these companies have over public discourse and how there’s little accountability when they’re found to be wrong.
While the lab theory of the origin of the coronavirus was originally censored online, and then allowed a year later when more information was released to back up what was last year called a conspiracy theory, it’s not the only topic that suffered the same fate.
One of the topics that became “forbidden” in this context was the use of the Hydroxychloroquine combined with zinc, in treating Covid patients – something that Trump publicly endorsed and even said took himself.
Doctors that promoted this treatment and were even actively prescribing it to their patients were quickly banned from the likes of Twitter, Facebook, and YouTube.
Researchers even had trouble trying to study the effect this combination of drugs has and publish their findings, facing obstacles from scientific journals who were on board with the censorship of the topic. But now one such study has seen the light of day, and seems to be vindicating those who said Hydroxychloroquine is in fact beneficial in coronavirus treatment.
New Jersey’s Saint Barnabas Medical Center published the observational study that included 255 patients in medRxiv, stating that Hydroxychloroquine, Azithromycin, and zinc can increase the survival rate by close to 200 percent. This scenario required higher doses administered to severely ill Covid patients who had to be put on ventilators.
Once again, Dr. Anthony Fauci, who is among those opposed to using the combination of drugs, is being called out for what many see as a series of missteps he has made during the pandemic.
“How many people died because Dr. Fauci said trust the science and Hydroxychloroquine isn’t effective?,” Georgia Congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Greene was blunt on Twitter, at the same time citing the study’s findings, and concluding, “Trump was right.”
But last summer, Twitter appeared to be certain that Trump and others promoting the use of hydroxychloroquine were wrong. In July 2020, the company went as far as to limit Donald Trump Jr’s account features, accusing him of posting false information by tweeting a video claiming the drug was effective in Covid treatment.
YouTube bans Senator Ron Johnson for seven days over hydroxychloroquine video
Another elected official censored by the tech giant
By Tom Parker | Reclaim the Net | June 11, 2021
YouTube has removed one of Senator Ron Johnson where he criticized health agencies for their rejection of hydroxychloroquine and banned him from uploading to the platform for seven days.
In the removed video, Johnson shared his support of both Operation Warp Speed, which fast-tracked the development of COVID-19 vaccines, and early coronavirus treatments.
“I thought it was brilliant the way the Trump administration squeezed all of the economic efficiencies out of producing the vaccine, but I think we’re still going to need early treatments,” Johnson said in the video.
He added that “world-renowned experts… have come to a different conclusion than our health agencies” and said the health agencies had “pretty well sabotaged the ability for many doctors to even consider hydroxychloroquine, ivermectin, or other of these multi-drug generic repurpose drug approaches here.”
Johnson’s comments follow a recent study that stated hydroxychloroquine, azithromycin, and zinc can increase COVID survival rates by almost 200%.
But even with the publication of this study, YouTube insisted that what Johnson said violated its “medical misinformation” policies “which don’t allow content that encourages people to use hydroxychloroquine or ivermectin to treat or prevent the virus.”
“YouTube’s ongoing COVID censorship proves they have accumulated too much unaccountable power,” Johnson told Fox News. “Big Tech and mainstream media believe they are smarter than medical doctors who have devoted their lives to science and use their skills to save lives. They have decided there is only one medical viewpoint allowed, and it is the viewpoint dictated by government agencies. How many lives will be lost as a result? How many lives could have been saved with a free exchange of medical ideas?”
Johnson is the latest of several elected officials to be censored by Big Tech for discussing hydroxychloroquine with Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro and US President Donald Trump also being censored for talking about the drug.
Outside of elected officials, numerous doctors have been censored by the tech giants for advocating for hydroxychloroquine.
And despite more evidence becoming available that vindicates those who were censored by Big Tech, the tech giants continue to stand by their rigid policies that prohibit support of hydroxychloroquine.
I’m on a ‘hit list’ Kiev allows to silence dissent & journalism. That’s all you need to know about Ukrainian ‘democracy’
By Eva Bartlett | RT | June 12, 2021
Address issues which Ukraine, the West’s client state, does not like and you could end up on a ‘hit list’. Because that’s apparently how flourishing democracies roll…
Last week, photojournalist Dean O’Brien participated in a United Nations meeting to give his perspective on the war in Donbass, Ukraine’s breakaway region in the east. Shortly after the discussion, O’Brien came under fire from the Ukrainian embassy in the UK.
However, smears from Ukrainian officials are nothing compared to what the controversial ‘enemies of Ukraine’ database, the Mirotvorets (Peacekeeper) website, could bring.
In May, O’Brien and I discussed this hit list, noting that we were both on it, with photos of us published on the witch-hunt website.
“It’s a website called ‘Peacemaker.’ It’s anything but, really. It seems to be a hit list, a target for journalists or anybody that goes against the grain in Ukraine. If you’re reporting on them, they see you as some kind of threat and put you on this list,” he said.
The platform was created in 2014, shortly after Crimea was reabsorbed by Russia and the Kiev government’s military campaign in eastern Ukraine was launched. As TASS noted in 2019, Mirotvorets “aims to identify and publish personal data of all who allegedly threaten the national security of Ukraine. In recent years, the personal data of journalists, artists or politicians who have visited Crimea, Donbass, or for some other reason have caused a negative assessment of the authors of the site, have been blacklisted by Peacemaker.”
Talking about the horrors that Donbass civilians endure under Ukrainian shelling is, according to this rationale, a threat to Ukraine’s national security. As is going to Crimea, maintaining that Crimeans chose to be a part of Russia (or, as many in Crimea told me, to return to Russia) and criticising the influence neo-Nazis wield in Kiev.
“The most worrying thing is that they seem to be able to get a hold of people’s passports, visas,” O’Brien told me. “The fact that they can get ahold of your passport photo, your visa photocopies, these can only come from official government offices in Ukraine. This is a governmental website, it’s been discussed in parliament, to close it down. They’re not interested in closing it down. This website is kind of like a hit list, really.”
That might seem like an exaggeration, but people listed on Mirotvorets have been targeted and even killed.
A report by the Foundation for the Study of Democracy titled “Ukrainian War Crimes and Human Rights Violations (2017-2020)” gave the example of a Ukrainian journalist assassinated in 2015 after his personal details were published on the website.
“A few days before his death, Oles Buzina’s details, including his home address, had been posted on the Canadian-based Mirotvorets website, created with the initiative of Anton Gerashchenko, the Ukrainian deputy minister of internal affairs. The people listed on it are recommended for liquidation and arrest, and the total number of people listed are in the tens of thousands.
According to many experts, it was the listing on the site and the publication of the home address that prompted the murder of Oles Buzina, Oleg Kalashnikov, and many other opposition figures by members of the Ukrainian ‘death squads’.
Back in 2015, Georgiy Tuka, who participated in the creation and operation of the site, stated that, of the people listed on the site, “more than 300 were either arrested or destroyed,” the report states.
When in April 2015 the Ukrainian parliament’s Commissioner for Human Rights Valeriya Lutkovskaya launched an effort to shut the list down, the then-adviser to Minister of Internal Affairs Anton Gerashchenko threatened her position and stated that the work of the site was “extremely important for the national security of Ukraine.” He said that “anyone who does not understand this or tries to interfere with this work is either a puppet in the hands of others or works against the interests of national security.”
So the website remains active, with Ukraine’s security service reportedly stating that it did not see any violations of Ukrainian law in the activities of the Mirotvorets website.
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky, too, has refused to have the website shut down, ironically claiming that it’s wrong to interfere with the work of websites and the media.
Let’s remember that in Ukraine, untold numbers of journalists, activists and civilians have been imprisoned, and killed, for their crimes of voicing criticism of the government and neo-Nazi groups.
Ukraine isn’t the only country to host such a hit list. Although Stop the ISM (International Solidarity Movement) – the project of crazed US-based journalist, Lee Kaplan – named activists, including myself, for our crimes of reporting on Israel’s brutal bombardment of Gaza in 2008/09, the website has since changed format and is far less detailed. But cached versions show the extent of its insanity, including a clear call for our murders:
“ALERT THE IDF MILITARY TO TARGET ISM
“Number to call if you can pinpoint the locations of Hamas with their ISM members with them. Help us neutralise the ISM that is now definitely a part of Hamas since the war began.”
Others on the kill list were named for their crimes of reporting Israel’s systematic abuse and killing of Palestinians. Their personal details, including passport information, were published.
An article on this heinous website noted: “The dossiers are openly addressed to the Israeli military so as to help them eliminate ‘dangerous’ targets physically, unless others see to it first.”
Although arguably that website was the project of one lunatic and their allies, the fact that for many years it stayed active and called for the murders of international peace activists speaks volumes on America’s own values.
I’m sure these two hit-list examples are not isolated ones. Quite likely, there are similar lists targeting journalists reporting on the crimes of other countries. But they are the height of absurdity, and fascism: targeting people whose reporting aims to help persecuted civilians.
Meanwhile in Donbass, Ukraine reportedly continues its shelling of civilian areas. Recently in Gorlovka, a northern city hammered by Ukrainian bombing over the years, a mine blew off part of a woman’s leg as she gathered mushrooms.
In spite of the hit list, journalists, rightly, continue to report on these war crimes.
Eva Bartlett is a Canadian independent journalist and activist. She has spent years on the ground covering conflict zones in the Middle East, especially in Syria and Palestine (where she lived for nearly four years).
At G7, Joe Biden and Boris Johnson sign charter committing to defend against “disinformation”
A sign of more censorship to come?
By Tom Parker | Reclaim the Net | June 10, 2021
At the 2021 G7 summit, an annual meeting attended by seven wealthy democracies, US President Joe Biden and UK Prime Minister Boris Johnson signed a charter that vows to collectively defend against a series of “new and old challenges” including “disinformation.”
The charter is a “revitalized” version of the original 1941 Atlantic Charter declaration that was released by US President Franklin D. Roosevelt and UK Prime Minister Winston Churchill on August 14, 1941 and provided a broad statement of US and British World War II aims.
This new version of the charter says that it will build on “the commitments and aspirations set out eighty years ago,” affirm the US and UK’s “ongoing commitment to sustaining our enduring values and defending them against new and old challenges,” and counter “the efforts of those who seek to undermine our alliances and institutions.”
It contains eight broad commitments with the third commitment containing a pledge against disinformation.
“We oppose interference through disinformation or other malign influences, including in elections, and reaffirm our commitment to debt transparency, sustainability and sound governance of debt relief,” the charter states.
We obtained a copy of the new Atlantic Charter for you here.
This new version of the Atlantic Charter doesn’t detail how the duo plan to fight what they deem to be disinformation but follows both countries signaling that they plan further crackdowns on online content based on censorship buzzwords such as disinformation and “misinformation.”
During a recent press briefing, White House Press Secretary Jen Psaki told reporters “the President’s view is that the major platforms have a responsibility related to the health and safety of all Americans to stop amplifying untrustworthy content, disinformation, and misinformation, especially related to COVID-19, vaccinations, and elections.”
She added: “His view is that there’s more that needs to be done to ensure that this type of misinformation; disinformation; damaging, sometimes life-threatening information is not going out to the American public.”
In the UK, efforts to censor disinformation are coming through a new draft “Online Safety Bill” which intends to block social media sites in the country if they fail to take down disinformation or “legal but harmful content.”


