Aletho News

ΑΛΗΘΩΣ

The Cynical and Dangerous Weaponization of the “White Supremacist” Label

By Glenn Greenwald | November 27, 2021

Within hours of the August 25, 2020, shootings in Kenosha, Wisconsin — not days, but hours — it was decreed as unquestioned fact in mainstream political and media circles that the shooter, Kyle Rittenhouse, was a “white supremacist.” Over the next fifteen months, up to and including his acquittal by a jury of his peers on all charges, this label was applied to him more times than one can count by corporate media outlets as though it were proven fact. Indeed, that Rittenhouse was a “white supremacist” was deemed so unquestionably true that questioning it was cast as evidence of one’s own racist inclinations (defending a white supremacist).

Yet all along, there was never any substantial evidence, let alone convincing proof, that it was true. This fact is, or at least should be, an extraordinary, even scandalous, event: a 17-year-old was widely vilified as being a white supremacist by a union of national media and major politicians despite there being no evidence to support the accusation. Yet it took his acquittal by a jury who heard all the evidence and testimony for parts of the corporate press to finally summon the courage to point out that what had been Gospel about Rittenhouse for the last fifteen months was, in fact, utterly baseless.

A Washington Post news article was published late last week that was designed to chide “both sides” for exploiting the Rittenhouse case for their own purposes while failing to adhere carefully to actual facts. Ever since the shootings in Kenosha, they lamented, “Kyle Rittenhouse has been a human canvas onto which the nation’s political divisions were mapped.” In attempting to set the record straight, the Post article contained this amazing admission:

As conservatives coalesced around the idea of Rittenhouse as a blameless defender of law and order, many on the left just as quickly cast him as the embodiment of the far-right threat. Despite a lack of evidence, hundreds of social media posts immediately pinned Rittenhouse with extremist labels: white supremacist, self-styled militia member, a “boogaloo boy” seeking violent revolution, or part of the misogynistic “incel” movement.

“On the left he’s become a symbol of white supremacy that isn’t being held accountable in the United States today,” said Becca Lewis, a researcher of far-right movements and a doctoral candidate at Stanford University. “You see him getting conflated with a lot of the police officers who’ve shot unarmed Black men and with Trump himself and all these other things. On both sides, he’s become a symbol much bigger than himself.”

Soon after the shootings, then-candidate Joe Biden told CNN’s Anderson Cooper that Rittenhouse was allegedly part of a militia group in Illinois. In the next sentence, Biden segued to criticism of Trump and hate groups: “Have you ever heard this president say one negative thing about white supremacists?

Valuable though this rather belated admission is, there were two grand ironies about this passage. The first is that The Post itself was one of the newspapers which published multiple articles and columns applying this evidence-free “white supremacist” label to Rittenhouse. Indeed, four days after this admission by The Post‘s newsroom, their opinion editors published an op-ed by Robert Jones that flatly asserted the very same accusation which The Post itself says is bereft of evidence: “Despite his boyish white frat boy appearance, there was plenty of evidence of Rittenhouse’s deeper white supremacist orientation.” In other words, Post editors approved publication of grave accusations which, just four days earlier, their own newsroom explicitly stated lacked evidence.

The second irony is that while the Post article lamented everyone else’s carelessness with the facts of this case, the publication itself — while purporting to fact-check the rest of the world — affirmed one of the most common falsehoods: namely, that Rittenhouse carried a gun across state lines. The article thus now carries this correction at the top: “An earlier version of this story incorrectly stated that Kyle Rittenhouse brought his AR-15 across state lines. He has testified that he picked up the weapon from a friend’s house in Wisconsin. This article has been corrected.”

It continues to be staggering how media outlets which purport to explain the Rittenhouse case get caught over and over spreading utter falsehoods about the most basic facts of the case, proving they did not watch the trial or learn much about what happened beyond what they heard in passing from like-minded liberals on Twitter. There is simply no way to have paid close attention to this case, let alone have watched the trial, and believe that he carried a gun across state lines, yet this false assertion made it past numerous Post reporters, editors and fact-checkers purporting to “correct the record” about this case. Yet again, we find that the same news outlets which love to accuse others of “disinformation” — and want the internet censored in the name of stopping it — frequently pontificate on topics about which they know nothing, without the slightest concern for whether or not it is true.

Those who continue to condemn Rittenhouse as a white supremacist — including the author of The Post op-ed published four days after the paper concluded the accusation was baseless — typically point to his appearance at a bar in January, 2021, for a photo alongside members of the Proud Boys in which he was photographed making the “okay” sign. That once-common gesture, according to USA Today, “has become a symbol used by white supremacists.” Rittenhouse insists that the appearance was arranged by his right-wing attorneys Lin Wood and John Pierce — whom he quickly fired and accused of exploiting him for fund-raising purposes — and that he had no idea that the people with whom he was posing for a photo were Proud Boys members (“I thought they were just a bunch of, like, construction dudes based on how they looked”), nor had he ever heard that the “OK” sign was a symbol of “white power.”

Rittenhouse’s denial about this once-benign gesture seems shocking to people who spend all their days drowning in highly politicized Twitter discourse — where such a claim is treated as common knowledge — but is completely believable for the vast majority of Americans who do not. In fact, the whole point of the adolescent 4chan hoax was to convert one of the most common and benign gestures into a symbol of white power so that anyone making it would be suspect. As The New York Times recounted, the gesture has long been “used for several purposes in sign languages, and in yoga as a symbol to demonstrate inner perfection. It figures in an innocuous made-you-look game. Most of all, it has been commonly used for generations to signal ‘O.K.,’ or all is well.”

But whatever one chooses to believe about that episode is irrelevant to whether these immediate declarations of Rittenhouse’s “white supremacy” were valid. That bar appearance took place in January, 2021 — five months after the Kenosha shootings. Yet Rittenhouse was instantly declared to be a “white supremacist” — and by “instantly,” I mean: within hours of the shooting. “A 17 year old white supremacist domestic terrorist drove across state lines, armed with an AR 15,” was how Rep. Ayanna Pressley (D-MA) described Rittenhouse the next day in a mega-viral tweet; her tweet consecrated not only this “white supremacist” accusation which persisted for months, but also affirmed the falsehood that he crossed state lines with an AR-15. It does not require an advanced degree in physics to understand that his posing for a photo in that bar with Proud Boys members, flashing the OK sign, five months later in January, 2021, could not serve as a rational evidentiary basis for Rep. Pressley’s accusation the day after the shootings that he was a “white supremacist,” nor could it serve as the justification for five consecutive months of national media outlets accusing him of the same. Unless his accusers had the power to see into the future, they branded him a white supremacist with no basis whatsoever — or, as The Post put it this week, “despite a lack of evidence.”

The only other “evidence” ever cited to support the rather grave accusation that this 17-year-old is a “white supremacist” were social media postings of his in which he expressed positive sentiments toward the police and then-President Trump, including with the phrase “Blue Lives Matter.” That was all that existed — the entirety of the case — that led the most powerful media outlets and politicians to stamp on this adolescent’s forehead the gravest accusation one can face in American culture. This is really the heart of the matter: this episode vividly demonstrates how cheapened and emptied and cynically wielded this “white supremacist” slogan has become. The oft-implicit but sometimes-explicit premise in liberal discourse is that everyone who deviates in any way from liberal dogma is a white supremacist by definition.

Within this rubric, perhaps the most decisive “evidence” that one is a white supremacist is that one supports the Republican Party and former President Trump — i.e., that half of the voting electorate in the U.S. at least are white supremacists. A subsidiary assumption is that anyone who views the police as a necessary, positive force in U.S. society is inherently guilty of racism (it is fine to revere federal policing agencies such as the FBI and other federal security forces such as the CIA, as most Democrats do; the hallmark of a white supremacist is someone who believes that the local police — the ones who show up when citizens call 911 — is a generally positive rather than negative force in society).

An illustration of how casually and recklessly this accusation is tossed around occurred last year, shortly after the George Floyd killing, when my long-time friend and colleague, Intercept journalist Lee Fang, was widely vilified as a racist and white supremacist, first by his own Intercept colleague, journalist Akela Lacy, and then — in one of the most stunningly mindless acts of herd behavior — by literally hundreds if not thousands of members of the national press, including many who barely knew who Lee was but nonetheless were content to echo the accusation (that Lee is himself not white is, of course, not an impediment, not even a speed bump, on the road to castigating him as a modern-day KKK adherent). As Matt Taibbi wrote in disgust about this shameful media episode:

[Lacy’s accustory] tweet received tens of thousands of likes and responses along the lines of, “Lee Fang has been like this for years, but the current moment only makes his anti-Blackness more glaring,” and “Lee Fang spouting racist bullshit it must be a day ending in day.” A significant number of Fang’s co-workers, nearly all white, as well as reporters from other major news organizations like the New York Times and MSNBC and political activists (one former Elizabeth Warren staffer tweeted, “Get him!”), issued likes and messages of support for the notion that Fang was a racist.

Writing in New York Magazine, Jonathan Chait documented that “Lacy called him racist in a pair of tweets, the first of which alone received more than 30,000 likes and 5,000 retweets.”

What was the evidence justifying Lee Fang’s conviction by mob justice of these charges? He (like Rittenhouse) has expressed the view that police, despite needing reforms, are largely a positive presence in protecting innocent people from violent crime; he suggested that resorting to violence harms rather than helps social justice causes; and he published a video interview he conducted with a young BLM supporter, who complained that many liberals only care when white police officers kill black people but not when black people in his neighborhood are killed by anyone who is not white.

Now-deleted tweets from Intercept reporter Akela Lacy, accusing her Intercept colleague Lee Fang of being a racist, June 3, 2020.

That such banal and commonly held views are woefully insufficient to justify the reputation-destroying accusation that someone is a white supremacist should be too self-evident to require any explanation. But in case such an explanation is required, consider that polls continually and reliably show that the pro-police sentiments of the type that caused Rittenhouse, Fang, and so many others to be vilified by liberal elites as “white supremacists” are held not only by a majority of Americans, but by a majority of black and brown Americans, the very people on whose behalf these elite accusers purport to speak.

For years, polling data has shown that the communities which want at least the same level of policing if not more are communities composed primarily of Black, Brown and poor people. It is not hard to understand why. If the police are defunded or radically reduced, rich people will simply hire private security (even more than they already employ for their homes, neighborhoods and persons), and any resulting crime increases will fall most heavily on poorer communities. Thus, polling data reliably shows that it is these communities that want either the same level of policing or more — the exact view which, if you express, will result in guardians of elite liberal discourse declaring you to be a “white supremacist.” Indeed — according to one Gallup poll taken in the wake of the George Floyd killing, when anti-police sentiment was at its peak — the groups that most want a greater police presence in their communities are Black and Latino citizens:

In the wake of anger over the Floyd and Jacob Blake cases, several large liberal cities succeeded in placing referendums on the ballot for this year that proposed major defunding or restructuring of local police. They failed in almost all cases, including ones with large Black populations such as Minneapolis, where Floyd died, precisely because non-white voters rejected it. In other words, expressing the same views about policing that large numbers of Black residents hold somehow subjects one to accusations of “white supremacy” in the dominant elite liberal discourse.

What all of this demonstrates is that insult terms like “white supremacist” and “racist” and “white nationalist” have lost any fixed meaning. They are instead being trivialized and degraded into little more than discourse toys to be tossed around for fun and reputation-destruction by liberals, who believe they have ascended to a place of such elevated racial enlightenment that they are now the sole and exclusive owners of these terms and thus free to hurl them in whatever manner they please. It is not an overstatement to observe that in elite liberal discourse, there are literally no evidentiary requirements that must be fulfilled before one is free to malign political adversaries with those accusatory terms. That is why editors at The Washington Post published an op-ed proclaiming Rittenhouse was plagued by “deeper white supremacist orientation” just four days after its news division explicitly concluded that such an accusation “lacks evidence” — because it it permissible to accuse people of racism and white supremacy without any evidence needed.

It is inherently disturbing and destructive any time a person is publicly branded as something for which there is no evidence. That is intrinsically something we should collectively abhor. But this growing trend in liberal discourse is not just ethically repellent but dangerous. By so flagrantly cheapening and exploiting the “white supremacist” accusation from what it should be (a potent weapon deployed to stigmatize and ostracize actual racists) into something far more tawdry (a plaything used by Democrats to demean and destroy their enemies whenever the mood strikes), its cynical abusers are draining the term of all of its vibrancy, potency and force, so that when it is needed, for actual racists, people will have tuned it out, knowing that is used deceitfully, recklessly and for cheap entertainment.

A similar dynamic emerged with accusations of anti-semitism and the weaponization of it to demonize criticisms of Israel. It is, of course, true that some criticisms of the Israeli government are partially grounded or even largely motivated by anti-semitism — just as it is true that some championing of the local police or support for Trump grows out of racist sentiments. But the converse is just as true: one can vehemently criticize the actions of the Israeli government the same as any other government without being driven by an iota of anti-semitism (indeed, many of the most vocal critics of Israel are proudly Jewish), in exactly the same way as one can be highly supportive of the local police or Donald Trump without an iota of racism (a proposition that should need no proof, but is nonetheless highlighted by the uncomfortable fact that growing numbers of non-whites support both Trump and the police). But the cynical, manipulative weaponization of anti-semitism accusations to smear all critics of Israel has rendered the accusation far weaker and more easily dismissible than it once was — exactly as is now happening to the accusatory terms “white supremacist” and “white nationalist” and “racist,” which are being increasingly understood, validly so, not as a grave and sincere condemnation but a cheap tactic to be applied recklessly, for the tawdry entertainment one derives from public rituals of reputation-destruction.

BBC, Nov. 22, 2020

Ever since his acquittal, Rittenhouse has made a series of public statements directly at odds with the dark, hateful image constructed of him by the national press over the last sixteen months, while he was forced to remain silent due to the charges he faced. He has professed support for the Black Lives Matter movement, argued that the U.S. is plagued by structural racism, and suggested that he would have suffered a worse fate if he had been Black. The same people who are smugly certain that his entire character and soul was permanently captured by that fleeting moment in a bar when he was seventeen and flashed an “okay” symbol — and who are certain that his denials that he knew what it meant or with whom he was posing are false — have, of course, scoffed at these recent statements of his as self-serving and insincere, even though they offer far greater insight into Rittenhouse’s actual views on questions of race than anything thus far presented.

But that is the point. The political and media faction that casually and recklessly brands people as “white supremacists” the way normal people utter “excuse me” while navigating a large crowd have no interest at all in whether the accusation is true. They are devoted to reducing everyone whose political ideology diverges from their own to their worst possible moment — no matter how long ago it happened or how unrepresentative of their lives it is — in order to derive the most ungenerous and destructive meaning from it. It is a movement that is at once driven by rigorous rules resulting in righteous decrees of sin and sweeping denunciations, yet completely bereft of the possibility of grace or redemption.

And its most cherished weapon is accusing anyone who they decide is an enemy or even just an adversary of being a white supremacist, a white nationalist, a racist — to the point where these terms now sound more like reflexively recited daily prayer slogans than anything one needs to take seriously or which has the possibility to engage on the merits. For fifteen months, it was gospel in political and media circles that Kyle Rittenhouse was a “white supremacist terrorist” only for The Washington Post to suddenly announce that this claim persisted “despite a lack of evidence.”

But that lack of evidence really does not matter, which is why that announcement by The Post received so little notice. Under the rules of this rotted discourse, evidence is not a requirement to affirm this accusation. All that is needed is an intuition, a tingly sensation, and — above all else — the realization that hurling the accusation will yield some personal or political advantage. Like all cynical weapons, it worked for awhile, but is rapidly running out of efficacy as its manipulative usage becomes more and more visible. The term is still needed as a tool to fight actual racism, but those who most vocally and flamboyantly proclaim themselves solemnly devoted to that cause have rendered that tool virtually useless, thanks to their self-interested misuse and abuse of it.

November 28, 2021 Posted by | Fake News, Mainstream Media, Warmongering, Progressive Hypocrite, Timeless or most popular | , | Leave a comment

Guardian Claims Covid in Hospitals Has “Largely Become a Disease of the Unvaccinated” – Data Shows Opposite

By Will Jones • The Daily Sceptic • November 23, 2021

An article appeared in the Guardian this week written by an anonymous NHS respiratory consultant claiming that “in hospital, COVID-19 has largely become a disease of the unvaccinated”.

Of course, there are people who have their vaccinations but still get sick. These people may be elderly or frail, or have underlying health problems. Those with illnesses affecting the immune system, particularly patients who have had chemotherapy for blood cancers, are especially vulnerable. Some unlucky healthy people will also end up on our general wards with Covid after being vaccinated, usually needing a modest amount of oxygen for a few days.

But the story is different on our intensive care unit. Here, the patient population consists of a few vulnerable people with severe underlying health problems and a majority of fit, healthy, younger people unvaccinated by choice. … If everyone got vaccinated, hospitals would be under much less pressure; this is beyond debate. Your wait for your clinic appointment/operation/diagnostic test/A&E department would be shorter. Your ambulance would arrive sooner. Reports of the pressure on the NHS are not exaggerated, I promise you. … Most of the resources that we are devoting to Covid in hospital are now being spent on the unvaccinated.

This reads to me like a blatant attempt to stigmatise the unvaccinated as selfish, a burden on society and a threat to the vaccinated. (The clue is in the headline: “ICU is full of the unvaccinated – my patience with them is wearing thin.”) Given the polling (which may not be very reliable of course) showing that 45% of U.K. adults would support an indefinite lockdown of the unvaccinated, this is all starting to look and sound rather ugly.

The most frustrating thing about this anonymously written article is it doesn’t cite any data even though its arguments are based on claims which only data can validate. It consists instead only of a single medic’s subjective impressions, with no sources provided to see if his claims holds water.

Are the hospitalised mostly unvaccinated? Not according to Government data from the UKHSA. Here is the breakdown of hospitalisations by vaccination status in England for the four weeks up to November 14th from the latest Vaccine Surveillance report.

Adding these figures up we find that 3,200 of 9,831 or 33% of Covid hospitalisations are of unvaccinated people, leaving 67% of Covid hospital patients in the vaccinated category, most of them with two doses. Focusing just on adults, we find 2,692 of 9,278 or 29% of Covid hospitalisations are unvaccinated, leaving 71% vaccinated. Seeing as just 68% of the U.K. population is double vaccinated, 67% of Covid hospital patients having received at least one dose hardly seems like a strong result. Indeed, it suggests the unvaccinated are barely over-represented in hospitals at all.

What about Covid deaths – are the unvaccinated over-represented there? Here’s the table from the same report.

Adding them up we find that 675 of 3,676 or 18% of Covid deaths in the month up to November 14th are in unvaccinated people, leaving 82% in the vaccinated, most with two doses. Only in the under-40s do deaths in the unvaccinated outnumber those in the vaccinated.

It’s hard to square this data with the picture painted by the anonymous medic. Far from COVID-19 having “largely become a disease of the unvaccinated”, with most Covid hospital resources “now being spent on the unvaccinated”, a large majority of hospitalisations and deaths are occurring in the vaccinated, not the unvaccinated.

But what about ICU admissions? And is it true that the vaccinated-sick all have underlying health issues whereas the unvaccinated-sick are all healthy?

The problem with addressing these claims is that we don’t have the data to check them out. The data on ICU admissions by vaccination status has not been updated since July as far as I can see (if you are aware of a more recent update do let me know), and I am not aware of any data on co-morbidities (again, if you are aware of any please drop me a line).

The anonymous writer states: “I can’t think of a single case offhand of a person who was previously fit and healthy who has ended up needing intensive care after being fully vaccinated. It may not stop you from catching Covid. But it can save your life when you do.” But again, this is anecdotal and therefore not terribly helpful.

It’s fair to note that much data does appear to show that the vaccines protect people well against severe disease and death, at least for several months, though some recent analysis has questioned whether such efficacy has been overestimated.

But however well the vaccines protect against severe disease, that is no excuse for turning the unvaccinated into pariahs or scapegoats and blaming them for the strains on the health service. Such moralised blaming of a minority for supposedly disadvantaging the majority (‘Can’t get a doctor’s appointment? Surgery been cancelled again? The unvaccinated are to blame!’) has a very ugly history and rarely ends well. It’s particularly odd to see this scapegoating in a supposedly liberal newspaper. It needs to stop now.

November 24, 2021 Posted by | Fake News, Mainstream Media, Warmongering, Science and Pseudo-Science | , , | Leave a comment

This perverse ban on ivermectin, cheap and proven to work

By Kathy Gyngell | TCW Defending Freedom | November 23, 2021

GIVEN the feared winter resurgence of Covid infection despite, or because of, the government’s mass vaccination programme, the continued ban on ivermectin in this country becomes ever more perverse.

It beggars belief that the British public is still denied access to this proven prophylactic and treatment. If the public health authorities are genuinely worried about pressure on hospitals, why have not the Medicines and Health products Regulatory Agency (MHRA), Public Health England, the NHS and Department of Health all gone flat out over this last year to approve ivermectin with the same zeal they gave emergency authorisation to the limited trialled, novel gene therapy, Covid vaccines?

The answer is widespread misinformation from the top down. Put ‘ivermectin’ into the Google search box and what do you come up with? Topping the list is a warning from the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) why it should NOT be used to treat or prevent Covid-19. Their reason? It’s as simple as the fact that they have not approved it and, because they have not approved, it cannot be used. Trials are ongoing they say. Maybe some are. But plenty have been completed, as Dr Pierre Kory’s paper (he was the lead author) ‘Review of the Emerging Evidence Demonstrating the Efficacy of Ivermectin in the Prophylaxis and Treatment of Covid-19’, published by the American Journal of Therapeutics earlier this year, made quite clear.

By contrast with this detailed review of the evidence the FDA’s substantive concern appears to rest on random reports of harms deriving from self-medication with ivermectin.

The BBC not to be behindhand entered the fray with its customary selective and biased take on ‘the science’. Its recent report entitled ‘How false science created a Covid ‘miracle’ drug‘ made not even the most minimal of checks on the veracity of their assertions, which are pulled apart here. A letter sent to a programme journalist in response to their request for information (in advance of transmission) by Dr Tess Lawrie, the Director of the British Ivermectin Recommendation Development Group (BIRD), an advocacy group of clinicians and scientists from around the world, setting out the science behind the case for authorising it, was completely ignored. Her letter can be found here.

How the BBC came not to ask how it was that remdesivir – a standard medication for Covid in the UK – was approved on the basis of one study when ivermectin, with 63 studies, of them 31 Randomised Controlled Trials (RCT), 7 meta-analyses, 32 Observational Controlled Trials (OCT), multiple country case studies, expert opinion, patient testimony ALL pointing in favour of the medication, was not, is inexplicable.

This is the news source the public is still told to trust.

A blog posted on BIRD last week asked whether there are indeed any genuine gripes about the quality of the evidence, as the FDA and others suggest?

No, there are not. The author argues it is down to a misinformation campaign based on misleading information produced by high profile public health agencies, like the World Health Organisation, itself a victim of disinformation tactics, that has been ‘perpetrated by a minority of corporations to manipulate and delay government action on matters that would adversely affect their income and profit’. Speculation of course. But every indication points that way.

As reported extensively in TCW Defending Freedom, for example here, the WHO is subject to the huge financial influence of the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, the organisation’s second biggest donor. Since one of the BMGF’s long-term interest is in delivering vaccines, why would they show any interest in promoting the use of cheap, old repurposed medications in the treatment and prevention of Covid-19? It’s for the very same reason that ivermectin has proved of so little interest to Big Pharma -it’s hardly the money spinner that indemnified world-wide vaccination is.

Worse perhaps than what these big interests have not done is what they have actively done to discredit ivermectin. The BIRD blog relays an analysis by Dr Kory setting out what the WHO ‘did’ with the ivermectin evidence. He says it:

·         Failed to publish a pre-established protocol for data exclusion

·         Excluded two ‘quasi-randomised’ controlled trials (RCTs) with lower mortality

·         Excluded two RCTs that compared ivermectin to or gave it together with other medications, all reporting lower mortality

·         Excluded seven other available ivermectin RCT results

·         Excluded all RCTs and observational controlled trials (OCTs) investigating ivermectin in the prevention of Covid-19

·         Excluded 13 OCTs, more than 5,500 patients, that showed reductions in mortality

·         Excluded numerous published and pre-print epidemiologic studies.

The bottom line, however, remains – if ivermectin is good enough and provenly effective for the more than 20 lower-income countries which do distribute it and also benefit from lower Covid rates, why are the populations of wealthier nations and individuals still being denied?

It’s a point that clearly has bothered the chairman of the Tokyo Medical Association, Dr Haruo Ozaki, who would recommend ivermectin for Covid patients, noting that the parts of Africa that use ivermectin to control parasites have a Covid death rate of just 2.2 per 100,000 population, compared with 13 times that death rate among African countries that do not use ivermectin.

‘I would like,’ said Dr Ozaki, ‘the government to consider treatment at the level of the family doctor’ with the informed consent of the patient. So would we.

November 23, 2021 Posted by | Deception, Fake News, Mainstream Media, Warmongering, Science and Pseudo-Science, War Crimes | , , , , | Leave a comment

Russiagate: Proof It was Hillary All Along

By Peter VAN BUREN | We Meant Well | November 20, 2021 

The indictment by Special Counsel John Durham of Igor Danchenko for lying to the FBI demonstrates conclusively the Steele dossier was wholly untrue. Clinton paid for the dossier to be created and Clinton people supplied the fodder. Steele, working with journalists, pushed the dossier into the hands of the FBI to try to derail the Trump campaign. When that failed, the dossier was used to attack the elected president of the United States. The whole thing was the actual and moral equivalent of a Cold War op where someone was targeted by the FBI with fake photos of them in bed with a prostitute.

Start with a quick review of what Durham uncovered about the most destructive political assassination since Kennedy.

Christopher Steele, paid by the Clinton campaign (after Clinton’s denial, it took a year for congressional investigators to uncover the dossier was commissioned by the opposition research firm Fusion GPS, working for the Democratic Party and Hillary Clinton’s campaign, paid through the Perkins-Coie law firm) did no investigative work. Instead, his reputation as a former British intelligence officer was purchased to validate a dossier of lies and then to traffic those lies to the FBI and journalists.

Durham’s investigation confirms one of Steele’s key “sources” is the now-arrested Danchenko, a Russian émigré living in the U.S. Steele was introduced to the Russian by Fiona Hill, then of the Brookings Institute (Hill would go on to play a key role in the Ukraine impeachment scam.) Danchenko completely made up most of what he told Steele about Trump-Russian collusion. What he did not make up himself he was spoon fed by Charles Dolan, a long-time Clinton hack and campaign regular. Ironically, Dolan had close ties not only to the Clintons but to the Russians as well; he and the public relations firm where he worked represented the Russian government and were registered as foreign agents for Russia. Dolan is credited with, among other things, making up the pee tape episode. Dolan also fed bogus info to Olga Galkina, another Russian who passed the information to Danchenko for inclusion in the dossier. Galkina noted in e-mails she was expecting Dolan to get her a job in the Hillary administration. Steele, a life-long Russia and intelligence expert, never questioned or verified anything he was told.

In short: Clinton pays for the dossier, Steele fills it with lies fed to him by a Clinton PR stooge through Russian cutouts, and the FBI swallowed the whole story. There never was a Russiagate. The only campaign which colluded with Russia was Clinton’s. And Democrats, knowing this, actually had the guts to claim it was Trump who obstructed justice.

That the dossier was a sham was evident to anyone who ever read a decent spy novel. It was a textbook information op and The American Conservative, without any access to the documents Durham now has, saw through it years ago, as did many other non-MSM outlets. See here (2/5/2018). Here (2/15/2018). Here (6/15/2018.) Here (3/25/2019.) Here (12/11/2019) and more. What was obvious from the publicly available information was, well, obvious to everyone but the FBI.

The dossier was the flimsy excuse the FBI used to justify a full-on investigation unprecedented in a democracy into the Trump campaign. That included electronic surveillance (obtained by the FBI lying directly to the FISA court and presenting Steele’s lies as corroborating evidence,) the use of undercover operatives, false flag ops with foreign diplomats and case officers, and prosecution threats over minor procedural acts designed to legally torture low level Trump staffers (Carter Page, who the FBI knew was a CIA source, and George Papadopoulos)  into “flipping” on the candidate.

Page in particular was a nobody with nothing, but the FBI needed him. Agents “believed at the time they approached the decision point on a second FISA renewal that, based upon the evidence already collected, Carter Page was a distraction in the investigation, not a key player in the Trump campaign, and was not critical to the overarching investigation.” They renewed the warrants anyway, three times, due to their value under the “two hop” rule. The FBI can extend surveillance two hops from its target, so if Carter Page called Michael Flynn who called Trump, all of those calls are legally open to monitoring. Page was a handy little bug used for a fishing expedition.

What’s left is only to answer was the FBI really that inept that they could not see a textbook op run against them or that the FBI knew early on they had been handed a pile of rubbish but needed some sort of legal cover for their own operation, spying on Trump, and thus decided to look the other way at the obvious shortcomings of Steele’s work.

“The fact pattern that John Durham is methodically establishing shows what James Comey and Andrew McCabe likely knew from day one the Steele dossier was politically-driven nonsense created at the behest of the Clinton campaign,” said Kevin Brock, the FBI’s former intelligence chief. “And yet they knowingly ran with its false information to obtain legal process against an American citizen. They defrauded not just a federal court, they defrauded the FBI and the American people.”

The 2019 Horowitz Report, a look into the FBI’s conduct by the Justice Department Inspector General, made clear the FBI knew the dossier was bunk and purposefully lied to the FISA court in claiming instead the dossier was backed up by investigative news reports, which themselves were secretly based on the dossier. The FBI knew Steele, who was on their payroll as a paid informant, had created a classic intel officer’s information loop, secretly becoming his own corroborating source, and gleefully looked the other way because it supported their goals.

How bad was it? At no point in handling info accusing the sitting president of being a Russian agent, what would have been the most significant political event in American history, did the FBI seriously ask themselves “So exactly where did this information come from, specific sources and methods please, and how could those sources have known it?” Were all the polygraphs broken? The FBI learned Danchenko was Steele’s primary source in 2017, via the Carter Page tap, and moved ahead anyway.

From the FBI’s perspective, turning a blind eye was not even that risky a gambit. They were so certain they would succeed (FBI agents and illicit lovers Peter Strzok and Lisa Page exchanged texts saying “Page: “Trump’s not ever going to become president, right? Strzok: No. No he’s not. We’ll stop it.”) and Hillary would ascend to the Oval Office that they felt they would have top cover for their evil. After Trump won and the FBI’s coup planners shifted to impeachment, they held on to their top cover as James Comey presented himself as the man on the cross, aided by a MSM which cared only about a) ending Donald Trump and b) cranking up their ratings with dollops of the dossier’s innuendo. A mass media that bought lies about nonexistent weapons of mass destruction in Iraq and then promised “never again” did it again.

If a genie granted me a wish, I would want a conversation with Robert Mueller under some sort of truth spell. Did Mueller “miss” all the lies in his lengthy investigation, hoping to protect his beloved FBI? Or did he see himself as a reluctant white knight, having realized during his investigation the real crime committed was coup planning by the FBI and thinking that by ignoring their actions but clearing Trump he would bring the whole affair to its least worst conclusion?

I suspect Mueller realized he had been handed a coup-in-progress to either abet (by indicting Trump on demonstrably false information) or bury. He could not bring himself to destroy his beloved FBI. But the former Marine could also not bring himself to become the Colin Powell of his generation, squandering his hard won reputation to validate something he knew was not true. Mueller split the difference, and kept silent on the FBI and left Trump to his own fates.

This is the third indictment by Durham. Danchenko’s indictment, Clinton campaign lawyer Michael Sussmann’s, and FBI lawyer Kevin Clinesmith’s depict criminal efforts to get Trump. The arrest of Danchenko makes clear Durham knows the whole story. What will he do with it? Will he walk his indictments up the ladder ever-closer to Hillary? Will he proceed sideways, leaving Hillary but moving deeper into the FBI? Maybe see if Fiona Hill connects the failed Russiagate coup she played a pivotal role in with the failed Ukrainegate impeachment she played a pivotal role in? Or will he use the stage of Congressional hearings as a way to bypass Joe Biden’s Justice Department and throw the real decision making back to the voters?

History will record this chapter of America’s story as one of its more sordid affairs. Only time however will tell if the greater tale is one of how close we came to ending our democracy via an intelligence agency coup, or whether Russiagate was just a nascent practice run by the FBI, on a longer road which leads to our demise a president or two later. For those who belittled the idea of the Deep State, this is what it looks like exposed, all pink and naked.

November 22, 2021 Posted by | Deception, Fake News, Mainstream Media, Warmongering, Timeless or most popular | , | Leave a comment

Will mainstream media heads roll over Trump ‘Russiagate’ fraud?

By Paul Robinson | RT | November 19, 2021

If you want to know how reliable journalists and TV talking heads are, look at their record when it comes to the biggest stories of the past decade: Iraq’s purported ‘weapons of mass destruction’ or the invasion of Afghanistan.

If they told you at the time that Iraq was knee-deep in lethal chemicals and victory over Islamist militias across the border would surely come in another six months’ time, then you have grounds for considering them to be less than reliable. If, on the other hand, they told you that all that WMD stuff was built on shaky ground and the war in Afghanistan would probably end badly, then you’ve got grounds for trusting them.

Once you start doing this, you reach a sad conclusion. The people who got it wrong have risen onwards and upwards to greater things, never having to repent for their errors, while those who got it right have been shoved to the margins. There is, in short, an astonishing lack of accountability for journalistic failure.

Still, errors need explaining, so it’s interesting to see how people go about it. Roughly speaking, there are three methods: first, deny any error; second, say you never actually believed it; and third, say you were the victim of deception. So, with the invasion of Iraq, you have a few who still maintain it was a good idea; a bunch who claim that they were secret doubters all along; and then some more who argue that the real problem was that Saddam Hussein deliberately misled everybody into thinking he had WMD, so it was quite reasonable to believe it.

Move on a few years and we can see much the same process at work in the aftermath of Russiagate – the breathless scandal that obsessed the American media for the best part of four years, with allegations that Donald Trump had colluded with the Russian state to win the 2016 election. Much like Iraq’s secretive chemical weapons program, proof of collusion has proved embarrassingly elusive. Moreover, as has become very clear, one of the key documents driving the story, the so-called Steele dossier, has turned out to be utterly worthless.

The latest nail in the coffin of the collusion narrative came with the arrest this month of the man who compiled the dossier on behalf of former British spy Christopher Steele, one Igor Danchenko. The reaction of the punditocracy has echoed that which followed the failure to find Iraqi WMD: denial by some; claims by others that they never believed the story; and, last, allegations that the whole affair was a deliberate act of deception by the Russian state.

Prime place among the first group, the deniers, goes to Max Boot. Writing in the Washington Post on Thursday, Boot showed not the slightest bit of repentance for boosting the Steele Dossier, any more than he has previously shown for backing the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. “Even if the Steele dossier is discredited, there’s plenty of evidence of Trump’s collusion with Russia,” he says.

Paul Pillar, writing in the National Interest this week, likewise claims the dossier was unimportant. Pillar doubles down on what he knows to be the truth, that “Trump and his circle encouraged, welcomed, facilitated, and exploited a foreign power’s interference in a US election.” Incredibly, Pillar concludes that what is needed is, “a well-funded investigation to look into this further,” as if the only reason that proof of collusion is lacking is that we haven’t looked hard enough.

Given just how hard a huge number of people have looked, this is patently silly. But at least the deniers display the virtue of consistency. Perhaps more irritating are those who are now coming forward to claim that, although they didn’t say so until now, they never believed in collusion. They were, you might say, secret, silent sceptics.

Thus, Max Seddon of the Financial Times turned to Twitter to declare that the lesson of the affair was to “listen to reporters on the ground.” “I don’t know a single Moscow corr[espondent] who bought the dossier,” he says, adding that the immense fuss about Russiagate was the fault of “editors” who wasted journalists’ time on the matter rather than on “substantive coverage of Russia.”

I’m willing to believe Seddon when he implies that he never swallowed the nonsense in the Steele dossier as well as the rest of the collusion narrative. But I have to ask him, “Why didn’t you say so at the time?” Lots of people did. One assumes he’d blame his editors, and I get it – when you work for a media outlet, you’re constrained by what your editors want. But that hardly lets journalists off the hook. All it does is explain why the people who did publicly scoff at the dossier were to be found outside the mainstream media, while the likes of The Guardian’s Luke Harding were earning big bucks writing books on collusion and telling everybody what a great guy Christopher Steele was. But it doesn’t explain why all those journalists who say that they disbelieved the collusion story never called out Harding and co. Clearly something is amiss.

And then, we have the third group: those who claim innocence on the grounds of deception. The logic here is that the dossier was indeed garbage, but very clever garbage dreamt up by Russian intelligence to deceive us all. By spreading stories of Trump-Russia collusion, the Russians aimed to sow chaos and set Americans at each other’s throats.

It is, of course, ridiculous, but that hasn’t stopped many supposedly serious commentators from suggesting it as a means of excusing their own gullibility. For instance, Newsweek’s deputy opinion editor Batya Ungar-Sargon went on air to discuss the “irony of American journalists falling for Russian disinformation en masse because it confirmed what they *really* wanted to believe.”

For, you see, all those stories saying the Russians were spreading disinformation were themselves Russian disinformation. Damn, but those Ruskies are clever!

The reality is this – the Steele dossier was obvious rubbish from the start, but the mass of the journalistic community either swallowed it wholesale or, alternatively, chose to stay silent about its doubts while allowing the believers to dominate the headlines. Belated claims that “I never believed,” or absurd allegations that the whole thing was a Russian plot, are just excuses designed to deflect blame. If we are to avoid such failures in the future, we need an honest reckoning. Judging by what’s come out from Western journalists this week, it doesn’t seem we are likely to get it.

Paul Robinson is a professor at the University of Ottawa. He writes about Russian and Soviet history, military history and military ethics, and is author of the Irrussianality blog.

November 21, 2021 Posted by | Fake News, Mainstream Media, Warmongering, Russophobia | , , | Leave a comment

PATRIOT PURGE, PART 1

TUCKER CARLSON | November 2nd, 2021

November 19, 2021 Posted by | Civil Liberties, Deception, Fake News, False Flag Terrorism, Mainstream Media, Warmongering, Subjugation - Torture, Timeless or most popular, Video | | Leave a comment

Bill Gates Gave $319 Million to Major Media Outlets, Documents Reveal

By Alan Macleod | MintPress News | November 15, 2021

Up until his recent messy divorce, Bill Gates enjoyed something of a free pass in corporate media. Generally presented as a kindly nerd who wants to save the world, the Microsoft co-founder was even unironically christened “Saint Bill” by The Guardian.

While other billionaires’ media empires are relatively well known, the extent to which Gates’s cash underwrites the modern media landscape is not. After sorting through over 30,000 individual grants, MintPress can reveal that the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation (BMGF) has made over $300 million worth of donations to fund media projects.

Recipients of this cash include many of America’s most important news outlets, including CNN, NBC, NPR, PBS and The Atlantic.

Gates also sponsors a myriad of influential foreign organizations, including the BBC, The Guardian, The Financial Times and The Daily Telegraph in the UK; prominent European newspapers such as Le Monde (France), Der Spiegel (Germany) and El País (Spain); as well as big global broadcasters like Al-Jazeera.

The Gates Foundation money going towards media programs has been split up into a number of sections, presented in descending numerical order, and includes a link to the relevant grant on the organization’s website.

Awards Directly to Media Outlets:

Together, these donations total $166,216,526. The money is generally directed towards issues close to the Gates’ hearts.

For example, the $3.6 million CNN grant went towards “report[ing] on gender equality with a particular focus on least developed countries, producing journalism on the everyday inequalities endured by women and girls across the world,” while the Texas Tribune received millions to “to increase public awareness and engagement of education reform issues in Texas.”

Given that Bill is one of the charter schools’ most fervent supporters, a cynic might interpret this as planting pro-corporate charter school propaganda into the media, disguised as objective news reporting.

The Gates Foundation has also given nearly $63 million to charities closely aligned with big media outlets, including nearly $53 million to BBC Media Action, over $9 million to MTV’s Staying Alive Foundation and $1 million to The New York Times Neediest Causes Fund.

While not specifically funding journalism, donations to the philanthropic arm of a media player should still be noted.

Gates continues to underwrite a wide network of investigative journalism centers as well, totaling just over $38 million, more than half of which has gone to the D.C.-based International Center for Journalists to expand and develop African media.

These centers include:

  • International Center for Journalists — $20,436,938.
  • Premium Times Centre for Investigative Journalism (Nigeria) — $3,800,357.
  • The Pulitzer Center for Crisis Reporting — $2,432,552.
  • Fondation EurActiv Politech — $2,368,300.
  • International Women’s Media Foundation — $1,500,000.
  • Center for Investigative Reporting — $1,446,639.
  • InterMedia Survey institute — $1,297,545.
  • The Bureau of Investigative Journalism — $1,068,169.
  • Internews Network — $985,126.
  • Communications Consortium Media Center — $858,000.
  • Institute for Nonprofit News — $650,021.
  • The Poynter Institute for Media Studies — $382,997.
  • Wole Soyinka Centre for Investigative Journalism (Nigeria) — $360,211.
  • Institute for Advanced Journalism Studies — $254,500.
  • Global Forum for Media Development (Belgium) — $124,823.
  • Mississippi Center for Investigative Reporting — $100,000.

In addition to this, the Gates Foundation also plies press and journalism associations with cash, to the tune of at least $12 million. For example, the National Newspaper Publishers Association — a group representing more than 200 outlets — has received $3.2 million.

The list of these organizations includes:

  • Education Writers Association — $5,938,475.
  • National Newspaper Publishers Association —$3,249,176.
  • National Press Foundation — $1,916,172.
  • Washington News Council — $698,200.
  • American Society of News Editors Foundation — $250,000.
  • Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press — $25,000.

This brings our running total up to $216.4 million.

The foundation also puts up the money to directly train journalists all over the world, in the form of scholarships, courses and workshops.

Today, it is possible for an individual to train as a reporter thanks to a Gates Foundation grant, find work at a Gates-funded outlet, and to belong to a press association funded by Gates.

This is especially true of journalists working in the fields of health, education and global development, the ones Gates himself is most active in and where scrutiny of the billionaire’s actions and motives are most necessary.

Gates Foundation grants pertaining to the instruction of journalists include:

  • Johns Hopkins University — $1,866,408.
  • Teachers College, Columbia University — $1,462,500.
  • University of California Berkeley — $767,800.
  • Tsinghua University (China) — $450,000.
  • Seattle University — $414,524.
  • Institute for Advanced Journalism Studies — $254,500.
  • Rhodes University (South Africa) — $189,000.
  • Montclair State University —$160,538.
  • Pan-Atlantic University Foundation — $130,718.
  • World Health Organization — $38,403.
  • The Aftermath Project — $15,435.

The BMGF also pays for a wide range of specific media campaigns around the world. For example, since 2014 it has donated $5.7 million to the Population Foundation of India in order to create dramas that promote sexual and reproductive health, with the intent to increase family planning methods in South Asia.

Meanwhile, it alloted over $3.5 million to a Senegalese organization to develop radio shows and online content that would feature health information.

Supporters consider this to be helping critically underfunded media, while opponents might consider it a case of a billionaire using his money to plant his ideas and opinions into the press.

Media projects supported by the Gates Foundation:

Total: $97,315,408

$319.4 million and (a lot) more

Added together, these Gates-sponsored media projects come to a total of $319.4 million.

However, there are clear shortcomings with this non-exhaustive list, meaning the true figure is undoubtedly far higher. First, it does not count sub-grants — money given by recipients to media around the world.

And while the Gates Foundation fosters an air of openness about itself, there is actually precious little public information about what happens to the money from each grant, save for a short, one- or two-sentence description written by the foundation itself on its website.

Only donations to press organizations themselves or projects that could be identified from the information on the Gates Foundation’s website as media campaigns were counted, meaning that thousands of grants having some media element do not appear in this list.

A case in point is the BMGF’s partnership with ViacomCBS, the company that controls CBS News, MTV, VH1, Nickelodeon and BET. Media reports at the time noted that the Gates Foundation was paying the entertainment giant to insert information and PSAs into its programming and that Gates had intervened to change storylines in popular shows like ER and Law & Order: SVU.

However, when checking BMGF’s grants database, “Viacom” and “CBS” are nowhere to be found, the likely grant in question (totaling over $6 million) merely describing the project as a “public engagement campaign aimed at improving high school graduation rates and postsecondary completion rates specifically aimed at parents and students,” meaning that it was not counted in the official total.

There are surely many more examples like this. “For a tax-privileged charity that so very often trumpets the importance of transparency, it’s remarkable how intensely secretive the Gates Foundation is about its financial flows,” Tim Schwab, one of the few investigative journalists who has scrutinized the tech billionaire, told MintPress.

Also not included are grants aimed at producing articles for academic journals. While these articles are not meant for mass consumption, they regularly form the basis for stories in the mainstream press and help shape narratives around key issues.

The Gates Foundation has given far and wide to academic sources, with at least $13.6 million going toward creating content for the prestigious medical journal The Lancet.

And, of course, even money given to universities for purely research projects eventually ends up in academic journals, and ultimately, downstream into mass media. Academics are under heavy pressure to print their results in prestigious journals; “publish or perish” is the mantra in university departments.

Therefore, even these sorts of grants have an effect on our media. Neither these nor grants funding the printing of books or establishment of websites counted in the total, although they too are forms of media.

Low profile, long tentacles

In comparison to other tech billionaires, Gates has kept his profile as a media controller relatively low. Amazon founder Jeff Bezos’s purchase of The Washington Post for $250 million in 2013 was a very clear and obvious form of media influence, as was eBay founder Pierre Omidyar’s creation of First Look Media, the company that owns The Intercept.

Despite flying more under the radar, Gates and his companies have amassed considerable influence in media.

We already rely on Microsoft-owned products for communication (e.g., Skype, Hotmail), social media (LinkedIn), and entertainment (Microsoft XBox). Furthermore, the hardware and software we use to communicate often comes courtesy of the 66-year-old Seattleite.

How many people reading this are doing so on a Microsoft Surface or Windows phone and doing so via Windows OS? Not only that, Microsoft owns stakes in media giants such as Comcast and AT&T. And the “MS” in MSNBC stands for Microsoft.

Media Gates keepers

That the Gates Foundation is underwriting a significant chunk of our media ecosystem leads to serious problems with objectivity. “The foundation’s grants to media organizations … raise obvious conflict-of-interest questions: How can reporting be unbiased when a major player holds the purse strings?” wrote Gates’s local Seattle Times in 2011.

This was before the newspaper accepted BMGF money to fund its “education lab” section.

Schwab’s research has found that this conflict of interests goes right to the very top: two New York Times columnists had been writing glowingly about the Gates Foundation for years without disclosing that they also work for a group — the Solutions Journalism Network — that, as shown above, has received over $7 million from the tech billionaire’s charity.

Earlier this year, Schwab also declined to co-report on a story about COVAX for The Bureau of Investigative Journalism, suspecting that the money Gates had been pumping into the outlet would make it impossible to accurately report on a subject so close to Gates’s heart.

Sure enough, when the article was published last month, it repeated the assertion that Gates had little to do with COVAX’s failure, mirroring the BMGF’s stance and quoting them throughout. Only at the very end of the more than 5,000-word story did it reveal that the organization it was defending was paying the wages of its staff.

“I don’t believe Gates told The Bureau of Investigative Journalism what to write. I think the bureau implicitly, if subconsciously, knew they had to find a way to tell this story that didn’t target their funder.

The biasing effects of financial conflicts are complex but very real and reliable,” Schwab said, describing it as “a case study in the perils of Gates-funded journalism.”

MintPress also contacted the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation for comment, but it did not respond. … Full article

November 18, 2021 Posted by | Corruption, Mainstream Media, Warmongering | | Leave a comment

Fact checking the Radio New Zealand fact check

COVID Plan B | November 17, 2021

Radio New Zealand has recently criticized a Facebook live conversation between former National MP Matt King and epidemiologist Dr Simon Thornley. While people should undertake their own research, we provide some comments related to the media’s critique. The evidence related to covid-19 policy continues to change and be updated.

In the interview, Professor Rod Jackson made several claims, decrying Thornley personally during the interview. Let’s examine them in turn.

  1. “There is no trial evidence that ivermectin [an anti-parasitic drug used as early treatment for covid-19 in some parts of the world] works in people with Covid – it doesn’t exist.”

Trials do exist. In fact a meta-analysis or summary study of six such trials exist. The pooled effect of these trials is a 79% decline in all-cause mortality (95% confidence interval: 89% to 58%). These trials are from Iraq, Iran, Bangladesh, Egypt, Turkey and India, places less reticent about its use. But they are trials, and the reduction in all-cause mortality is stark, an endpoint which is generally considered clinically important and free of error and bias. Another trial points to effective treatment, such as from vitamin D supplementation, which reduced intensive care admissions to 1/50 (2%) in the treated from 13/26 (50%) in the untreated in Spanish covid-19 patients.

We’re not advocating ivermectin at all. But we are prepared to look at the evidence. The fact that Jackson didn’t know there were trials invalidates his point.

  1. “Professor Jackson also said claiming Covid-19 was no worse than the flu was nonsense”.

In the interview, Thornley claimed the infection fatality rate of covid-19 was as bad as a ‘severe flu’. A summary study of many countries indicates that the average global infection fatality rate of covid-19 is 0.15% or 1/667 people.

The fatality rate for H1N1 influenza is variable, but this figure from covid-19 is well within the range of estimates presented from a similar summary study.

The comparison between covid-19 and flu is therefore fair and accurate. Jackson’s claim is misinformation.

We should note that many fatality studies take the definition of a covid-19 death at face value but it does not mean the individual died exclusively from the virus. This was exemplified by the counting a recent covid-19 death in a man who was actually shot and killed, yet tested positive for SARS-CoV-2 during the autopsy. This was defended by the Ministry of Health, as it conformed with World Health Organization policy.

We are able to test the accuracy of Jackson’s claimed fatality risk. In May 2020, Jackson admonished Sweden for its lax approach. He said the fatality rate of covid-19 was 1/100 people infected, so predicted 56,000 deaths from covid-19 in the country, assuming 60% of the population would be infected. To date, there have been about 15,000 covid-19 deaths, with an age distribution similar to that of background deaths (figure). In fact, by all accounts, Sweden has fared through the epidemic particularly well compared to other European countries.

Figure. Deaths with covid-19 in Sweden, by age at November 3, 2021. Source: statistica.com
  1. “This is a severe disease and we have a evidence-based treatment [the vaccine] where there is definitive evidence that it reduces the risk of severe disease and death by 95 percent, in that order.”

This is an extraordinary claim for several reasons. First, the original Pfizer trial reported about the same number of overall deaths in the treated and the untreated groups (14 in the treated and 13 in the untreated). In the six-month trial results, only three covid-19 deaths occurred, one in the treated and two in the untreated group. This is not consistent with Jackson’s assertion of a 95% reduction in risk of severe disease and death.

Given the numbers of deaths in the original trial, it is possible to work out whether the trial would have picked up a 95% reduction as Jackson claims. The trial would have been expected to have only one death in the treated group, and would have detected a difference more than expected by chance with 96% certainty.

There is observational evidence from Sweden of reduced covid-19 hospitalisations and deaths (not from all-causes), however, the vaccine effect diminished to zero for all three outcomes eight months after the date that the vaccine was administered.

To compound the confusion about the effect of the vaccine, the original Pfizer trial now is marred by whistle-blowers who have given the British Medical Journal evidence of fraud occurring during its conduct. Sixteen Swedish doctors have now called for the injection to be suspended as a result of these revelations.

Both Jackson and RNZ use extensive use of ad hominem attacks, which are considered an invalid, and lowest, form of argument.

Examples include:

  • “anti-vax”
  • “discredited academic”
  • “And we have someone who is questioning that evidence, who doesn’t know what they’re talking about, talking to an epidemiologist who doesn’t know what he’s talking about.”
  • “outlier in his field”.

The purveyors and writers of such ‘argument’ appear to have no embarrassment at the anti-intellectualism and inhumanity of their conduct.

We’ll stick to the contest of ideas by again considering Jackson’s accuracy. Back in August 2020, Jackson and his colleagues claimed that elimination was still the best strategy for New Zealand to tackle covid-19. That article has not dated well, yet the personalised tirade and arguments are familiar.

“He [Thornley] is the only dissenter in the epidemiological community,”

“It’s not like this is a discussion like a boxing match with two equal partners. What you’ve got is every experienced epidemiologist in the country supporting the Government’s elimination approach.”

“We are all advising the Government, and we speak with one voice. And you have got a junior epidemiologist who is presenting a different case.”

Jackson has made increasingly inaccurate claims during the pandemic, claiming, unchallenged that one in five infected people will be hospitalised after infection with covid-19. No media have ever fact checked this.

New Zealand’s own government data shows Jackson  overestimated by at least a factor of ten, since the proportion of cases (rather than infections) hospitalised is 2% (table).

Table. Counts of cases of covid-19 in New Zealand (16 November 2021).

Count %
Self-isolation 2058 56%
Isolation Complete 969 26%
Managed Isolation 396 11%
Hospital 73 2%
Other 198 5%

 

As sailing great Russell Coutts has recently pointed out, it is questionable how “media entities can maintain objectivity when they have accepted a government grant that is conditional on them promoting certain government policies”.

It is prudent to check all sources of information, not only those who dare to question the what is coming from the Beehive.

November 18, 2021 Posted by | Deception, Fake News, Mainstream Media, Warmongering, Science and Pseudo-Science | | Leave a comment

BBC Believes a Conspiracy Drives Climate Conspiracy Theories

By Eric Worrall | Watts Up With That? | November 16, 2021

Shadows everywhere: The possibility that people might want to reject climate lockdowns and Covid lockdowns of their own volition does not seem to occur to BBC conspiracy theorists.

Covid denial to climate denial: How conspiracists are shifting focus

By Marianna Spring
Specialist disinformation reporter, BBC News

Members of an online movement infected with pandemic conspiracies are shifting their focus – and are increasingly peddling falsehoods about climate change. 

Matthew is convinced that shadowy forces lie behind two of the biggest news stories of our time, and that he’s not being told the truth.

“This whole campaign of fear and propaganda is an attempt to try and drive some agenda,” he says. “It doesn’t matter whether it’s climate change or a virus or something else.” […]

And recently, groups like the ones he’s a part of have been sharing misleading claims not only about Covid, but about climate change. He sees “Covid and climate propaganda” as part of the same so-called plot.

The White Rose network

It’s part of a larger pattern. Anti-lockdown and anti-vaccine Telegram groups, which once focused exclusively on the pandemic, are now injecting the climate change debate with the same conspiratorial narratives they use to explain the pandemic.

The posts go far beyond political criticism and debate – they’re full of incorrect information, fake stories and pseudoscience.

According to researchers at the Institute for Strategic Dialogue (ISD), a think tank that researches global disinformation trends, some anti-lockdown groups have become polluted by misleading posts about climate change being overplayed, or even a so-called “hoax” designed to control people.

“Increasingly, terminology around Covid-19 measures is being used to stoke fear and mobilise against climate action,” says the ISD’s Jennie King.

She says this isn’t really about climate as a policy issue.

“It’s the fact that these are really neat vectors to get themes like power, personal freedom, agency, citizen against state, loss of traditional lifestyles – to get all of those ideas to a much broader audience.”

One group which has adopted such ideas is the White Rose – a network with locally-run subgroups around the world, from the UK to the US, Germany and New Zealand – where Matthew came across it.

“It’s not run by any one or two people,” Matthew explains. “It’s kind of a decentralised community organisation, so you obtain stickers and then post them on lampposts and things like that.” […]

While we chat, he mentions “The Great Reset” – an unfounded conspiracy theory that a global elite is using the pandemic to establish a shadowy New World Order, a “super-government” that will control the lives of citizens around the world. … Full article: https://www.bbc.com/news/blogs-trending-59255165

The Great Reset is a public programme promoted by the World Economic Forum. The annual “Great Reset” WEF Davos event costs more than $50,000. According to Wikipedia, in 2011 an annual membership cost $52,000 for an individual member, $263,000 for “Industry Partner” and $527,000 for “Strategic Partner”. An admission fee cost $19,000 per person. In 2014, WEF raised annual fees by 20 percent, bringing the cost for “Strategic Partner” from CHF 500,000 ($523,000) to CHF 600,000 ($628,000)

A simple google search turns up the WEF page near the top of the list of searches. The page cites Covid and climate change as justifications for their programme.

In my opinion there is room to debate the true nature of the Great Reset programme, but calling it “unfounded”, as in non-existent, is at best plain ignorant, and well below the BBC journalistic standards we once thought we had a right to expect.

As for the White Rose network, never heard of it. I have no doubt White Rose and many similar groups exist, in our unsettled world there are plenty of concerned people seeking out like minded fellows. But some groups are run by people with their own agenda, who are not acting in their member’s best interests, and any significant group will be heavily monitored by the government, so I strongly urge caution for anyone who participates in large private social media groups.

In Britain there is a “malicious communication act”, which makes it an offence to distribute written material which causes offence or anxiety, which has been used to arrest people campaigning against British government Covid policy. I am not a lawyer, but in my opinion it is only a matter of time before this act is used against people who oppose other high priority government policies in Britain. Be careful what electronic footprints you leave, your words could be misinterpreted. Above all, stay within the law, wherever you live.

November 17, 2021 Posted by | Fake News, Full Spectrum Dominance, Mainstream Media, Warmongering | , , | Leave a comment

Media Declares ‘Climate Lockdowns’ a “Conspiracy Theory” as India Prepares to Impose Climate Lockdown

By Paul Joseph Watson | Summit News | November 17, 2021

While the media declares the notion of ‘climate lockdowns’ to be a fake news “conspiracy theory,” India is preparing to impose a climate lockdown to reduce pollution.

Yes, really.

NPR reports the details of the lockdown under the headline ‘New Delhi’s air pollution is so bad, officials are calling for a citywide lockdown’.

“India’s Supreme Court is calling for a lockdown in the capital, New Delhi. It’s because of a health emergency, but it’s not about COVID-19. It’s about air pollution,” states the piece.

Authorities are set to ban all nonessential travel on roads in the national capital region while ordering tens of millions of people to work from home.

Construction sites are also closing along with schools, many of which only recently opened after the COVID-19 lockdown.

Delhi’s chief minister is also calling on neighboring states to impose similar measures.

The announcement is timed perfectly given that UK broadcaster Sky News just published a lengthy article claiming that ‘climate lockdowns’ are a fake news conspiracy theory invented by COVID-19 deniers.

“The most common green conspiracy is the claim of an upcoming “climate lockdown”, where countries will be locked down for long periods to meet climate change targets,” states the article, labeling the idea a “fake theory.”

The article quotes Callum Hood, from the Center for Countering Digital Hate, who says conspiracy theorists are pushing the false idea of climate lockdowns as a means of “justifying their conspiracy theories about the COVID pandemic.”

“As many COVID restrictions are lifted, some of these groups are instead claiming that ‘climate lockdowns’ will be used to achieve the same goals,” said Hood.

So you’re a dangerous conspiracy theorist for suggesting that ‘climate lockdowns’ may be used by governments as a tool of population control… while India is literally rolling out plans to do precisely that.

Note once more how the media and state-backed censors ring fence ideas by declaring them to be “conspiracy theories” and ‘fake news’ even as the second-most populous country in the world is literally about to implement that very agenda.

November 17, 2021 Posted by | Fake News, Mainstream Media, Warmongering, Science and Pseudo-Science, Timeless or most popular | , | Leave a comment

Australian War Propaganda Keeps Getting Crazier

By Caitlin Johnstone | November 15, 2021

60 Minutes Australia has churned out yet another fearmongering war propaganda piece on China, this one so ham-fisted in its call to beef up military spending that it goes so far as to run a brazen advertisement for an actual Australian weapons manufacturer disguised as news reporting.

This round of psychological conformity-making features Australian former major general Jim “The Butcher of Fallujah” Molan saying that in three to ten years a war will be fought against China over Taiwan and that Australians are going to have to fight in that war to prevent a future Chinese invasion of the land down under. He argues Australia will need to greatly increase its military spending in order to accomplish this, because it can’t be certain the United States will protect it from Chinese aggression.

“Australia is monstrously vulnerable at the moment; we have this naive faith that American military power is infinite, and it’s not,” says Molan, who is a contributor to government/arms industry-funded think tanks Lowy Institute and Australian Strategic Policy Institute.

Decrying what he calls “panda huggers” (meaning people who aren’t China hawks), Molan claims that “the Chinese Communist Party’s aim is to be dominant in this region and perhaps dominant in the world.” Asked when war might break out, he claims “Given the power that they have in their military they could act any time from now on, and that’s what frightens me more than anything.”

“The next war is not going to be ten or twenty years away, it’s going to be in the next three to ten years,” Molan asserts. “My estimate is that in a serious fight the Australian Defense Force only has enough missiles for days. This is not going to be resolved in days. And of course we’re not big enough. We should expand the defense force significantly… We should fund defense now based on our assessment of the national security strategy which is based on the war that we want to win.”

“In short do you think Australia needs to prepare for war tomorrow?” the interviewer asks Molan.

“Absolutely,” he replies.

Molan makes the ridiculous argument that if Australia does not to commit to defending Taiwan from the mainland then it won’t be long before they can expect a Chinese invasion at home, as though there’s any line that could be drawn between the resolution to a decades-old Chinese civil war and China deciding to invade a random continent full of white foreigners thousands of miles away.

“Suppose we said okay Taiwan you’re on your own up there and the Chinese snapped it up, and the Chinese started looking around the world and they might snap up other liberal democracies like Australia,” Molan argues. “And we might then turn to America and say America well could you give us a bit of a hand here? And the Americans might say what we said to Taiwan. Where do you draw the line? This situation that is developing now is an existential threat to Australia as a liberal democracy.”

Incredibly, the 60 Minutes segment then plunges into several minutes of blatant advertising for Australian defense technology company Defendtex which manufactures weaponized drones designed to be used in clusters, saying such systems could handily be used to defeat China militarily in a cost-effective manner.

The segment also promotes bare-faced lies which have become commonplace in anti-China propaganda, repeating the false claim that Chinese fighter planes have been “breaching Taiwanese airspace” and repeating a mistranslation of comments by Xi Jinping which it used in a previous anti-China segment made to sound more aggressive than they actually were.

This segment follows a cartoonishly hysterical fear porn piece on China put out by the same program this past September which featured Australian Strategic Policy Institute ghouls insisting that Australians must be prepared to fight and die in defense of Taiwan and that a Chinese invasion of Australia is a very real threat. That 60 Minutes segment was preceded by an equally crazy one in May which branded New Zealand “New Xi-Land” for refusing to perfectly align with US dictates on one small foreign policy issue.

To be perfectly clear, there is no evidence of any kind that China will ever have any interest in an unprovoked attack on Australia, much less an invasion, and attempts to tie that imaginary nonsense threat to Beijing’s interest in an island right off its coast which calls itself the Republic of China are absurd.

As we’ve discussed previously, anyone who’d support entering into a war against China over Taiwan is a crazy idiot. In the unfortunate event that tensions between Beijing and Taipei cannot be resolved peacefully in the future there is no justification whatsoever for the US and its allies to enter into a world war between nuclear powers to determine who governs Taiwan. The cost-to-benefit ratio in a conflict which would easily kill tens of millions and could lead to the deaths of billions if it goes nuclear makes such a war very, very, very far from being worth entering into, especially since there’s no actual evidence that Beijing has any interest in attacking nations it doesn’t see as Chinese territory.

There’s so much propaganda going toward generating China hysteria in westerners generally and Australians in particular, and it’s been depressingly successful toward that end. Watching these mass-scale psyops take control of people’s minds one after another has been like watching a zombie outbreak in real time; people’s critical thinking faculties just fall out their ears and then all of a sudden they’re all about cranking up military spending and sending other people’s kids off to die defending US interests in some island.

Please don’t become a zombie. Keep your brain. Stay conscious.

November 17, 2021 Posted by | Mainstream Media, Warmongering, Militarism | | Leave a comment

Ukraine gives its view on alleged Russian military buildup near border

By Jonny Tickle | RT | November 16, 2021

Ukraine’s State Border Service has rejected claims that Russia’s military is gathering near the two countries’ shared border, after NATO’s Secretary-General said there was a “large and unusual” build-up of forces at the frontier.

Speaking to the Ukraine-24 TV channel on Monday, border service spokesman Andrey Demchenko revealed that Kiev does not have reason to believe Russian troops are accumulating nearby.

“We do not register any movement of equipment or military of our neighbouring country near the border,” he explained. “If any actions are taking place, it may be dozens or even hundreds of kilometres from the state border.”

Demchenko’s comments directly contradict a claim from NATO head Jens Stoltenberg, made earlier that day. “We see an unusual concentration of troops, and we know that Russia has been willing to use these types of military capabilities before to conduct aggressive actions against Ukraine,” Stoltenberg said.

Last week, American business outlet Bloomberg reported that US officials warned their European counterparts that Moscow may be planning an invasion of Ukraine, noting that their concerns were backed by “publicly available evidence.”

The suggestion of an invasion was quickly slammed by Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov groundless.

“This is not the first publication and not the first statement by the US that they are concerned about the movement of our armed forces in Russia,” he said. “We have repeatedly said that the movement of our armed forces on our own territory should be of no concern to anyone. Russia poses no threat to anyone.”

November 16, 2021 Posted by | Fake News, Mainstream Media, Warmongering, Russophobia | , | Leave a comment

« Previous Entries     Next Entries »