Tech investor Peter Thiel criticizes “Ministry of Truth” and creation of “fake consensus”
By Cindy Harper | Reclaim The Net | November 2, 2021
During the National Conservatism Conference, held on October 31, tech billionaire Peter Thiel warned against “centralized misinformation” because it creates a “fake consensus.”
Thiel asserted that the centralized misinformation problem is responsible for the silencing of debate on important issues such as inflation of the American economy, COVID-19, and the presence of US troops in Afghanistan.
In his speech, Thiel gave examples of what he described as the “incredible derangement of various forms of thought.” He referenced Stanford’s professor Jay Bhattacharya’s experience. Pictures of the professor were plastered all over the school because he spoke against masks.
He said: “When you have to call things science, you know they aren’t – like climate science or political science,” Epoch reported.
According to Thiel, such excessive dogmatism is the reason for the failed policies by the US government in Afghanistan for more than twenty years.
The PayPal co-founder went on to say that the US is currently experiencing a “runaway, non-transitory inflation” and the “complete bankruptcy of the Fed” because of the inability to tolerate differing ideas and opinions that are unpopular.
“If there’s a misinformation problem, it’s a centralized misinformation problem—and it’s the misinformation coming from the Ministry of Truth,” said Thiel.
American Academy of Pediatrics Shills for Big Pharma, Pushes COVID Vaccines for Kids
By David Marks | The Defender | October 28, 2021
The public relations campaign to push COVID vaccines on children is at full throttle, as evidenced by a telling opinion piece published Tuesday in the New York Times — the same day an advisory panel to the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) recommended granting Emergency Use Authorization for Pfizer’s shot for 5- to 11-year-olds.
In her op-ed, Dr. Lee Savio Beers — president of the American Academy of Pediatrics (AAP) — bluntly dictated the requisite information under the headline: “Yes, You’ll Want to Vaccinate Your Kids Against Covid. An Expert Explains Why.”
Times readers might make wiser decisions if they had more information about the true risks to their children. Beers acknowledged the widely supported data demonstrating children are at very low risk for severe illness or death — then made an eloquent though unfounded case for why they should be vaccinated anyway.
Beers declared vaccinating children will help slow the spread of the disease — contradicting conclusive studies that show vaccines do not stop transmission.
Beers and the AAP might have some conflict of interest due to the close financial and professional relationship they have with Pfizer.
Yet no one blinks, as an expert comes forward to front a product, manufactured by his pharmaceutical pals, as the FDA prepares to make an important decision.
Beers’ attempt at persuasion is a classic snake-oil sales pitch, declaring the special qualities of his cure, albeit with no supporting data.
With unfounded confidence, she projects sacrosanct wisdom, even daring to say: “The expanded availability of vaccines should bring peace of mind to many families …”
The extremis of vaccine promotion has reached a ludicrous new level. However, the damage that is about to be inflicted on children is criminal.
Although the FDA heard concerns about the practicality and risks of vaccinating young children, it seemed members of the panel had already made up their minds.
U.S. government regulators and their colleagues at the AAP are complicit in devious criminality.
The AAP has a history of supporting the position of Big Pharma. It includes denying the dangers of mercury and thimerosal in vaccines, endorsing routine HPV vaccines and recommending Ritalin, a psychiatric drug, for 4-year-olds.
The academy also officially denied any dangers of GMO foods, including milk containing growth hormones — proven to have disease-inducing estrogen levels — suggesting there are no benefits to organic products.
Before trusting the latest sage advice from Beers and the AAP, parents should know the AAP was ambiguous for years, and certainly didn’t mount any campaign around the issue, even though they were aware of the evidence linking pesticides and cancer in children.
How many children’s lives could have been saved if there were opinion pieces in newspapers across the country warning about the risks of household chemicals?
The AAP’s failure to alert the public to the known risk of childhood leukemia from chemical exposure before birth and a child’s early years is negligent, yet the academy wasted no time in advising parents to inject a risky, experimental vaccine into healthy young children for a virus that poses little if any risk to them.
Severe illness and deaths among children are much greater than the repercussions of the COVID virus, yet the scare tactics are being ramped up to sell the vaccine.
In what is potentially the greatest historical instance of iatrogenesis, the youth of America are about to participate in an experiment promulgated by those who should be protecting them.
If the AAP is truly concerned about children’s health, we should be reading opinion pieces regarding the dangers of environmental toxins, the benefits of breastfeeding in reducing cancer, dietary risks of denatured foods and concerns for the immense pressure that children are under to conform to a society distorted by the pressure to consume at any cost.
David Marks is an investigative reporter and documentary producer. His new book, “The Way,” is an interpretation of the Chinese classic, the Tao Te Ching, available at LaoTzu-TheWay.org.
© [Article Date] Children’s Health Defense, Inc. This work is reproduced and distributed with the permission of Children’s Health Defense, Inc. Want to learn more from Children’s Health Defense? Sign up for free news and updates from Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. and the Children’s Health Defense. Your donation will help to support us in our efforts.
Pharma-Controlled CDC Fake News on Breakthrough Infections
By Stephen Lendmann | October 30, 2021
Nothing reported by the Pharma-Controlled CDC, FDA and other US anti-public health agencies can be taken at face value.
The same goes for their MSM press agents.
The vast majority of flu/covid outbreaks occur in jabbed individuals.
Based on CDC fake news, the NYT falsely reported that fully-jabbed Americans “had a much lower chance of testing positive for flu/covid or dying from it” than their unjabbed counterparts (sic).
Reality is the other way around.
Except for natural immunity that protects best against infection, staying unjabbed is significantly safer from contracting the viral illness than if jabbed.
The Times quoted Pharma-connected epidemiologist David Dowdy’s Big Lie claim that jabs are “working (sic)” — ignoring indisputable evidence of the serious harm they cause.
The above fake news is all about pushing refuseniks to get theirs, along with urging double-jabbed individuals to get a third dose of health-destroying toxins from booster-jabs.
The more gotten, the greater the damage to health — at some point leading to premature death.
If hospitalized in the US for flu/covid, individuals aged-50 and older are willfully and maliciously mistreated with intent to eliminate them in cold blood.
For bloodcurdling more on what’s going on, see my article titled Healthcare Redefined: Hospitals Transformed into Prisons — for extermination of unwanted older Americans.
More Times-repeated CDC Big Lies followed, saying:
“(F)ederal data (show) that all three brands of (jabs) administered in the US substantially reduced rates of cases and deaths (sic).”
According to peer-reviewed truth-telling science, it’s the other way around.
Toxins in jabs destroy health and shorten lifespans. Jab-free individuals live longer in better health than their jabbed counterparts.
According to UK data, deaths of children in the country increased by 62% since mass-jabbing began — based on the average percent of fatalities of the group over the previous five years.
Kaiser Family Foundation data show that 72% of unjabbed US workers vow to quit if ordered to roll up their sleeve for doses of toxins designed to destroy their health.
Many thousands of US healthcare professionals and staff refuse to agree to destroying their health from jabs as a condition of employment.
According to one nurse likely speaking for countless others:
As “an intelligent, healthy, and empowered healthcare professional that takes excellent care of herself, it is an insult to expect that I would accept an injection of unknown substance and efficacy and provide an example to the great people that I serve that they too should submit their power over to pharmaceutical companies — convicted felons — in an effort to put a band-aid on the gaping wound of reality.”
“It is unconscionable to mandate injections without exemption, especially when the injection is a brand new medical product still undergoing its first year of study.”
“Breakthrough cases are not properly reported on.”
“We know (these jabs are) ‘leaky.’ ”
“The(ir) safety and effectiveness has not been proven.”
“There are other safe and alternative treatments.”
“It is impossible to give fully informed consent without longterm, unbiased data.”
“Threatening our jobs is blatant coercion.”
“Our God-given right to bodily integrity and personal autonomy has been stripped with these mandates and we will not stand for it.”
Another nurse made similar comments, saying:
“I did not take the (jab), even though I will be terminated.”
“Why would I need a (jab) for something with a 99% survival rate?”
“Health care workers are not taking it because they know that the side effects are real.”
“In urgent care, I have seen myocarditis, cellulitis, (and) unusual neurological symptoms, among a variety of other side effects.”
“I have seen people very ill post-(jabbing), and then go on to test positive.”
“The positivity rate for contracting (flu/covid) on the (jabbed) is very high per recent studies and what I am seeing in my clinic.”
Flu/covid jabs are “not working.”
“I will never take risk (harm) on myself.”
The above remarks are a snapshot of widespread opposition to jabs from healthcare professionals.
They’ve seen what damage they’ve done to countless numbers of people.
September survey data from the Trafalgar Group and Convention of States Action showed that over 70% of respondents oppose mandated jabs.
Growing numbers in the US reject and oppose the steady drumbeat of pro-jabbing propaganda by Biden regime officials and their MSM press agents.
According to head of Convention of States Action Mark Meckler:
“Americans have never taken kindly to being told what to do, and they are not going to start now.”
“After being told ‘my body, my choice’ for nearly five decades by the same crowd now hypocritically pushing mandates, is it any wonder the public isn’t on board?”
If enough Americans and others reject mass-jabbing madness, refusing more doses by those already inoculated and none by others entirely free from their harm, the ugly scheme will collapse under the weight of Big Lies, mass deception and false promises.
The Covid vaccine victims who will not be silenced
By Kathy Gyngell | TCW Defending Freedom | October 28, 2021
IT’S hard to tell sometimes whether the mainstream media is ingenuous and stupid, or disingenuous and malign. Their across-the-board, uncritical and almost adulatory reporting of Israel’s ‘first out of the traps’ mass vaccination programme prompts this observation. Check out Israel on Google: however many pages you search, you won’t find one critical article on the Israeli vaccination programme’s efficacy or ethics.
Had it been an unmitigated success there’d be no cause for surprise. But the truth is otherwise. Despite its early roll-out and achieving rates of vaccination in vulnerable groups upwards of 90 per cent, it’s no secret that over the summer the country experienced another wave of the virus that vaccination proved no barrier to. By early August the vaccinated (not the unvaccinated) in Israel were reported by a leading Israeli health official to account for 95 per cent of severe and 90 per cent of new hospitalisations for Covid-19. Significant ‘excess’ deaths in non-Covid vulnerable age groups also raised serious questions about the vaccines’ safety. In addition, this pre-print study (un-peer reviewed) published in August found natural immunity conferred longer lasting and stronger protection against the disease and hospitalisation caused by the Delta variant than the vaccine.
None of this evidence caused Israel’s government even a pause for thought. Au contraire the country was first off the mark again – this time with ‘booster’ third and fourth jabs all endorsed by the MSM with articles crediting it with powers its predecessors strangely lacked:
‘ . . . third doses are highly effective at preventing people from becoming infected with Delta, among those who are willing to be vaccinated,’ one enthusiastic professor opined. He said they not only dramatically reduce a person’s susceptibility to infection, they create a barrier to the onward transmission and spread of the virus.
The message from Israel for the UK is clear, or so the i newspaper would also have us believe. The booster is the way forward that our Government must follow with all speed.
It’s not just the politicos and the MSM mouthing the mantra. The Brookings Institute has opined tortuously that despite Israel’s ‘successful’ vaccination programme, its mounting cases make ‘the booster shot of the Covid-19 vaccine more necessary than ever’.
No academic looking for a living, breathing example of cognitive dissonance could find a better one.
This is the theory we’ve explained more than once in these pages. It accounts for the unaccountable – in this case for vaccine enthusiasts’ (do more) irrational response to the vaccines’ failure to deliver; for the ‘doubling down’ phenomenon – anything rather than acknowledge they may have got it wrong or placed too much reliance on what was always uncertain.
Faithful to the theory, they claim in face of negative data that their actions were successful in averting the worst, going further into denial with professions that had they not acted it would have been worse; thus setting up a canny ‘heads-we-win, tails-you-lose’ interpretation of things.
Festinger, the originator of this particular theory of human behaviour, explains it as ‘a psychic condition of tension and discomfort brought about by a palpable contradiction in an individual’s mental world’. It is an unease that must be eliminated: ‘Accordingly, something in the individual’s conscious awareness has to be invented, altered, ignored or denied.’
What is undoubtedly being denied by the authorities and their propagandists is the other side of the story – not only the inconvenient data but the human testimonies of those who have fallen foul of the experimental vaccine. This is the ultimate denial, keeping invisible the very real victims and survivors of the vaccines whose accounts are too threatening to the official narrative for the authorities to acknowledge.
Thank God then for the The Testimonies Project from Israel … to make sure their voices are heard, since they are not being heard in the Israeli media.
It’s a project that needs replicating worldwide to ensure that the millions of Covid vaccine victims are not airbrushed out of history and that there will be record of the human suffering that politicians can and must be brought to account for.
You can watch it here.
Crop Failures & The “Climate Disaster”
By Paul Homewood | Not A Lot Of People Know That | October 26, 2021
We looked at this phony Guardian report the other day:
One section deals with what it calls crop failure:
It claims that once-a-decade droughts are becoming more frequent, in comparison with 1850-1900! This apparently comes from the IPCC, but who was counting droughts in the 19thC?
As with disaster databases, it is only in recent years that organisations have been set up to monitor humanitarian crises and provide aid. A hundred years ago, there was no internet, television or mobile phones to relay the news.
A famine in Madagascar would simply have happened without being noticed.
The Guardian then goes on to “prove” its point, by cherry picking droughts in Guatemala and Zambia, as if they had never happened before. They are not even in the same year!
The dip in agricultural production in Guatemala is evident in 2017, but the trend for both countries is remorselessly up.
https://www.fao.org/faostat/en/#compare
If there was any truth in the Guardian’s apocalyptic version of events, we would see global food production staggering from one crisis to another.
But we don’t.
The Guardian reckons that India and Pakistan will be particularly badly hit by crop failures, even in this decade:
But this goes totally opposite to what is actually happening there.
And long term monsoon trends clearly show that droughts are not becoming more severe or common in India, global warming or not. Most droughts are, in fact, associated with El Ninos, and not climate change:
https://www.tropmet.res.in/~kolli/MOL/Monsoon/frameindex.html
Joanna Lumley Suggests Wartime Rationing Could Solve Climate Crisis
By Richie Allen | October 26, 2021
Joanna Lumley has said that a return to rationing could help solve the climate crisis. The 75 year-old actress said that eating meat and travelling could be rationed to save the planet.
Speaking to Radio Times Lumley said:
“These are tough times and I think there’s got to be legislation. That was how the war was and at some stage we might even have to go back to some kind of rationing, where you’re given a certain number of points and it’s up to you how to spend them – whether it’s buying a bottle of whisky or flying in an aeroplane.”
She said that people could be compelled to cut back on weekend breaks abroad and to move to a plant based diet:
“Perhaps people have got to think a bit harder. Maybe more of our holidays should be at home or taking trains, and not hopping on a plane to Magaluf for the weekend.
I don’t get ill because I’m vegetarian. I still have plenty of energy. I am absolutely fine, I gave up meat 45 years ago.”
When you frame any problem, whether real or imagined as a war, you can justify almost anything right? Remember all that “workers on the front line” nonsense at the beginning of the scamdemic? Remember “the war on covid?”
Didn’t I say last year, that climate lockdowns would be a thing? I said that Sunday driving would be rationed as well as certain foods. This will tie in with the social credit system of course.
Not reducing your meat consumption, your travel, your overall carbon footprint ultimately, will eventually be seen as treachery.
Things are moving very quickly now.
University receives $750k of federal funds to stop reporters from creating “negative unintended outcomes”
The government continues to get involved with shaping journalism
By Christina Maas | Reclaim The Net | October 24, 2021
Researchers at Temple University received $750,000 from the National Science Foundation (NSF) to develop a tool that warns journalists that they are about to publish polarizing content. The NSF is a federal government agency focused on supporting research and education in non-medical fields of engineering and science.
The initiative is part of NSF’s “Trust & Authenticity in Communication Systems.” It is called the “America’s Fourth Estate at Risk: A System for Mapping the (local) Journalism Life Cycle to Rebuild the Nation’s News Trust.”
The focus of the project, according to a report on Campus Reform, is creating a system that alerts journalists that the content they are about to publish might have “negative unintended outcomes” such as “the triggering of uncivil, polarizing discourse, audience misinterpretation, the production of misinformation, and the perpetuation of false narratives.”
The researchers hope that the system will help journalists measure the long-term impact of their stories, that go beyond existing metrics such as likes, comments, and shares.
One of the researchers involved in the project, Temple University’s professor Eduard Dragut, said that the system will “use natural language processing algorithms along with social networking tools to mine the communities where [misinformation] may happen.”
“You can imagine that each news article is usually, or actually almost all the time, accompanied by user comments and reactions on Twitter. One goal of the project is to retrieve those and then use natural language processing tools or algorithms to mine and recommend to some users [that] this space of talking, this set of tweets, which may lead to a set of people, like a sub-community, where this article is used for wrong reasons,” he added.
Journalists and other players in the news industry will be involved with the project, which already includes researchers from other universities including Boston University and the University of Illinois-Chicago.
“We want journalists to be part of the process, not just the mere users of the product itself,” Dragut said. “So you can imagine sort of an analytics tool that informs the journalists and editors and other people involved in this business how their products or how their creative act is used or misused in social media.”
He added that the project is attempting to “create a collaborative environment with both social media platform[s] and other organizations like Google” because of their expertise.
“We have some preliminary conversation with Bloomberg, for instance, and we will have to define exactly how they are going to help us. Google has an initiative to help local news, and we are working to create a relationship with them, and there are others,” Dragut told Campus Reform. “This product will not work unless we are successful in bringing some of these high tech companies into the game.”
Another researcher involved in the project, professor Lance Holbert, said that, for now, the misinformation the project is focusing on is that of the spread on local media.
“Certainly some topics over time will become more versus less interesting, but also we’re focused here initially on local media as well, so each locality may have different topics or particular points of interest that come up in the news,” he said. “We’re trying to keep this generalizable across topics.”
Holbert noted that misinformation is not “happening in the political spectrum” alone.
“[It’s happening] in sports, it’s happening in economics,” he said. “Like a few years back, I know, an example from Starbucks where there was a sort of a campaign on Twitter [saying] that Starbucks is targeting, in the wrong way, African Americans, which was wrong.”
The NSF is expected to further fund the project when its first phase becomes successful.
BBC Climate Expert Explains How Australia Could Live Without Coal Exports
By Eric Worrall | Watts Up With That? | October 22, 2021
Coal is both Australia’s second largest export and something Australia could live without, according to the BBC:
Australia could end its literally toxic relationship with coal fairly quickly, experts say.
Its economy is stable and well-diversified to absorb the loss of coal exports. […]
This has frustrated those who say Australia should be investing to become a renewables superpower.
As one of the sunniest and windiest continents on Earth, Australia is “uniquely placed to benefit economically” from its abundant natural resources, says the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD), an intergovernmental organisation.
The BBC economic analysis leaves out an important detail – the $55 billion / year annual coal export industry keeps the the Australian dollar afloat. Without that $55 billion annual influx of foreign currency, the value of the Aussie dollar would likely collapse.
What about Australia’s alleged opportunity to become a green energy superpower?
My question: Why are the experts who claim Australia could be a “renewables superpower” demanding government support, instead of putting their own money where their mouth is?
The reason, of course, is the numbers don’t add up.
Australia might be one of the sunniest and windiest continents on Earth, but it is also one of the driest and dustiest places on Earth.
The Australian outback is an incredibly hostile environment for machinery.
Even on the coast, where I live, everything gets covered with a thick layer of dust in days. Gearboxes and bearings fill with grit. Surfaces get abraded. Plastic and rubber rapidly disintegrates under our hot ultraviolet soaked sunlight.
If I park my automobile outside at night, by morning I need to wash my windscreen using the wipers.
Some of the dust contains salt and organic compounds, and picks up electrostatic charges as it is blown by the wind, so it sticks to surfaces like glue, and has to be washed off. You cannot just shake or brush it off.
In the desert, away from the coast, it is even worse.
Unless you have a good supply of fresh water and soap for washing dust off everything you care about, lubricating oil to clean out dust contaminated bearings, and maintenance people to fix all the stuff which breaks, no machinery installation in the Australian interior survives for long.
Vast supplies of fresh water are not easy to find in Australia. Where fresh water is available, it is mostly already claimed by others, who would have to be compensated for loss of access. Billions of dollars would be required, to buy out farmers and miners who are already using every scrap of fresh water which is available, assuming you could convince any of them to sell.
Why would the cleaning water have to be fresh? What about pumping salt water from the ocean?
Salt water would be a disaster for cleaning renewable energy installations. The water would leave a film of translucent salt on everything. Stalagmites and stalactites of electrically conductive salt would accumulate on the edges of solar panels and sensitive electric installations, creating short circuits and fires. Salt water is far more corrosive than fresh water, it would rapidly attack any alumina fittings and all but high grade stainless steel. Salt water use could even lead to accelerated structural failures if there were any significant earth leakages, by accelerating corrosion of any structural metal components in contact with the ground. The influx of salt would remain in the environment, causing a localised ecological disaster.
Remember, the interior of Australia is sunny AND windy. Those solar panels better be anchored to the ground with lots of concrete and structural steel, otherwise they will blow away. The UV gelcoat protection on wind turbine blades would have to be meticulously maintained, to prevent our harsh sunlight from wrecking the plastic. And lets not forget, the freak storms which occasionally sweep in from the coast can drop rock hard hailstones the size of baseballs – not a good thing for anything caught under the storm.
This in my opinion is why companies are demanding large infusions of government cash before they’ll touch our alleged amazing opportunity to become a “renewables superpower”. As with most renewable energy schemes, I believe people behind the Australian “renewables superpower” vision expect any profit will come from milking taxpayers, not from genuinely profitable commercial sales of their product.
Billionaire Pierre Omidyar’s secret backing of Facebook ‘whistleblower’ raises new questions about her agenda
(L) Frances Haugen © REUTERS / Matt McClain; (R) Pierre Omidyar © REUTERS / Tim Shaffer
By Kit Klarenberg | RT | October 21, 2021
The plot has thickened further in the case of Frances Haugen, with the revelation she is being funded by Pierre Omidyar. Given his history of backing of US-friendly organisations abroad, it’s hard not to question her motives.
It’s been revealed by Politico that Haugen, the Facebook ‘whistleblower’ who has generated such intense mainstream attention in recent weeks, receives “behind the scenes” financial assistance from controversial US billionaire Omidyar.
The backing is extensive. Omidyar’s Luminate is handling all her press and government relations in Europe, her top public relations representative in the US is a former Obama White House spokesperson who runs public affairs for a non-profit funded by Omidyar, and last year the tech guru gifted $150,000 to Whistleblower Aid, another organization supporting Haugen.
Politico asserts that this enormous wellspring offers her “a potentially crucial boost” in her crusade against the social network giant, granting Haugen “an edge that many corporate whistleblowers lack” – but then again, she’s a far from typical whistleblower.
A Silicon Valley veteran, Haugen’s stint at Facebook’s Threat Intelligence put her in extremely close quarters with former high-ranking US intelligence officials, who occupy senior divisions in the unit. An ad for an analyst vacancy in the division, posted just days before Haugen’s well-publicized Senate testimony, cites “5+ years of experience working in intelligence [in] international geopolitical, cybersecurity, or human rights functions” as an absolute “minimum qualification” for anyone wishing to apply.
There’s no indication Haugen herself has such a background, but it’s hard to imagine two-and-a-half-years spent rubbing shoulders with CIA, NSA, and Pentagon journeymen didn’t leave an impression on her.
As such, one needn’t be a cynic to suggest her public claims that the purported exploitation of Facebook by Western state-mandated “enemy” countries, against which her former colleagues have a clear and demonstrable bias, represents a threat to US national security may have been insidiously influenced to some degree. This would, of course, necessitate greater governmental censorship and surveillance powers in respect of social media, which White House and Pentagon officials have demanded for a decade or more.
Whatever the truth of the matter, given Haugen’s public positions, it’s hardly surprising Omidyar has taken such an interest in her. The eBay founder has for many years used his vast personal fortune to sponsor anti-government media operations, activist groups and NGOs in countries targeted for regime change by Washington, often in quiet concert with CIA-front organizations the National Endowment for Democracy and USAID.
Luminate’s ‘Strategic Plan’ for 2018–2022 spells this out in not so many words. It claims that “counter forces to liberalism have gained strength,” due to “Russia’s disruptive tactics” and “China’s state-centric alternative model,” and in response, the organization pledges to “to engage in ‘Countries in Transition’ where a potential inflection point and evidence of reform leads us to believe our support could catalyse significant change in an accelerated timeframe.”
“Our goal for this work is to provide critical support to courageous individuals and organisations seeking democratic gains in settings where civil society has been suppressed and where media has been circumscribed,” it ominously states. “We also work with government reformers post-transition to achieve positive policy outcomes which benefit large populations.”
Just two examples of “critical support” doled out by Omidyar over the past decade include bankrolling groups and news platforms at the forefront of Ukraine’s 2014 Maidan coup, and financing a welter of youth radicalization initiatives in Zimbabwe via the Harare-based Magamba Cultural Activist Network. A 2016 Omidyar Network-funded report on “People-Powered Media Innovation in West Africa” made clear the destabilizing intention behind such initiatives.
In a section discussing the “challenge” of “converting passive readers to active citizens,” the report recommended sponsoring the publication of “politically opportunistic” content “tied to unfulfilled promises” in order to “motivate citizens and government to act in the public interest.” It cited “recent, major successes of citizen and media efforts” in Nigeria that demonstrated “how public energy and conversation can be further harnessed and directed.”
In one case, a local radio station partnered with an NGO to “[develop] a radio program dedicated to education issues,” which “quickly gained popularity, and a highly engaged listenership.” Within a year, the government had “implemented several overdue policy reforms,” and the radio station was said to have since “applied this strategy to other negligent government bodies.”
“With the spectre of potential citizen mobilization looming in politicians’ minds, media outlets also have the potential to elicit government response directly,” the report boasted. “In some cases… government was motivated to act in order to prevent citizen action, instead of in response to it.”
Not coincidentally, Omidyar finances several media organizations in Lagos, including the radical Sahara Reporters, which focuses on corruption in the public sector – its founder allegedly has to sneak in and out of the country as his work has made him an enemy of the state. The Nigerian government evidently has much reason to fear Omidyar, which is perhaps why there has been no high-level opposition to his effective takeover of the country’s tech sector.
Clearly, the man well understands what can be achieved when citizens are stirred to action, and how they can be. In light of this, the help afforded to Haugen by Whistleblower Aid gains a rather sinister resonance. While widely reported that this assistance is strictly legal in nature, the organization’s founder Mark Zaid has made an intriguing disclosure.
“[We] prep clients in order to be focused on how to answer questions properly,” he told Gizmodo on October 6. “We have media experts that we work with to guide folks with something as simple as, you know, where do you look when you’re talking to a camera or a host? How do you best fluidly answer a question to come across in a positive way? Everything that might be connected to ensuring the individual’s image and substance are at their best.”
This direction surely explains why Haugen’s interviews with major media outlets have been so universally slick, and her Senate testimony was so extensively peppered with attention-grabbing quotes seemingly custom-made for repetition in headlines and news reports. At the very least, her involvement with Zaid casts even more doubt on how genuine she is.
Despite his organization’s name and stated aims, Zaid has a history of maligning individuals who have actually spoken out in the public interest, including Julian Assange, Edward Snowden and Reality Winner.
What’s more, he’s been accused in open court by an FBI agent of specifically approaching the CIA and informing it his client Jeffrey Sterling, an Agency operative, had “voiced his concerns about an operation that was nuclear in nature, and he threatened to go to the media.” Sterling was subsequently sentenced to three-and-a-half years in prison for leaking that very information to a journalist.
It can only be considered a shocking indictment of the Western media that the revelation of Omidyar’s secret support for Haugen has not prompted a single mainstream journalist to question whether she is ultimately serving a wider, darker agenda, and what that agenda might be. After all, her public intervention surely represents an “inflection point”, Omidyar’s support of which “could catalyse significant change in an accelerated timeframe.”
Kit Klarenberg is an investigative journalist exploring the role of intelligence services in shaping politics and perceptions.
“David’s Law”: How the Amess attack will be used to control the internet
The recent killing is already being used as ammunition to attack independent social media and the very idea of anonymity on the web
By Kit Knightly | OffGuardian | October 21, 2021
On October 15th Sir David Amess MP was attending a constituency “surgery” at Belfairs church in Leigh-on-Sea. During the meeting, a young man emerged from the crowd and stabbed the MP several times.
Ambulances and police were called. They attempted to revive him at the scene, but he was declared dead.
The suspect, meanwhile, made no attempt to flee. It has since been reported he is the son of a Somali politician, was known to the UK’s “Prevent” counter-terrorism programme, and was reportedly “radicalised online”.
The killing is being treated as a “terrorist incident”.
These are the alleged facts of the case as they have been released to the public.
Are they true? Maybe. Maybe not. It’s too early to say, and we’ll likely never know for sure. The truth is – for everyone outside the Amess family and friends – it really isn’t the most pressing issue. Whatever the reality of the “attack”, what we, the 99%, need to be most concerned about is the agenda coming in its wake
Real attack or not, false flag or not, the fallout is the same: Censorship, state control and “David’s Law”.
THE ONLINE HARMS BILL
The first reaction to the Amess attack has been renewed coverage of, and loud calls for, the “online harms” bill to be put to a vote. All this despite there being no publicly released evidence linking the Amess attack to any “online harms” at all.
The “Online Harms Prevention Bill” is not in any way a response to Amess’ death and has actually been in development for a while. A white paper reporting the need for the bill was first published in April 2019, then updated in December 2020.
This was followed by a draft bill in May 2021 and then a report on “Regulating Online Harms”, published in August.
The Bill has existed for over eighteen months, and any attempts to link it to David Amess are purely manipulative tactics designed to force it through parliament on a wave of emotion.
It might be dismissed by some as ‘callous’ to talk about the alleged murder of a seemingly innocent person in terms of cynical agenda – but it’s the very opposite. It’s an expression of concern and social responsibility. The establishment uses these events as gambits, so we have to get used to reading them as such if we want to protect the rights and freedoms that will be freshly attacked.
We’re already seeing a deluge of coverage in the press talking up the dangers of our “toxic political discourse” and the threat that “divisive polarised speech” poses because it can “radicalise” people and “create the climate where violence becomes inevitable”.
The Mirror warns of an increase in “bedroom radicals” thanks to lockdowns. The Guardian echoes this, claiming “online hate” is “nastier than ever” and “action is required”.
The Telegraph headlines: “Social media companies ‘must do more’ to protect MPs from online hate”
Politicians are likewise prepping the ground for the bill to pass.
Deputy Prime Minister and Justice Secretary Dominic Raab went on Sky News to talk about “online hate” being “out of control”.
Sir Keir Starmer, leader of the supposed “opposition”, used the first PMQs since the attack to rail against the lack of regulation of the internet and call for something to be done. Boris has already committed to bringing the “Online Harms” vote forward “before Christmas” when it was previously expected to wait until at least spring of 2022.
So, what’s in this bill?
Nothing much that hasn’t been said before. The White Paper and report proselytise about the need to protect children, women, ethnic minorities and “the vulnerable” from “hate”. The bill itself suggests a new “statutory duty of care” for the internet, and a new “regulatory body” with a “suite of powers” to ensure companies fulfil this “duty of care”.
There are chapters dedicated to actual crimes, such as child pornography and threats of violence, but also much murkier “harms” described as “legal but harmful”. These include, but are not limited to, “disinformation” and “bullying”. As always, the language of legislature is deliberately obscure, shrouded in the muddied meaning of bureaucratic double-talk.
One concrete, and concerning, clause would grant OfCom the power to demand private user information from internet providers and social media companies (although we do know they do this already).
But the most dangerous part of the bill may not even be written yet…
“DAVID’S LAW”
Within days of the news breaking Tory MPs were calling on Boris Johnson to enact “David’s Law”.
“David’s Law” would be either new legislation or a “strengthening” of the current proposed legislation, to totally remove online anonymity.
Tory MP Mark Francois, said in a speech to the Commons:
So let’s put, if I may be so presumptuous, David’s Law onto the statute book, the essence of which would be that while people in public life must remain open to legitimate criticism, they can no longer be vilified or their families subject to the most horrendous abuse, especially from people who hide behind a cloak of anonymity with the connivance of the social media companies for profit.”
Priti Patel is already “considering” taking away the “right to anonymity online”.
Other politicians, including Dominiic Raab and Lindsey Hoyle, the speaker of the house, have expressed total agreement.
Politico headlines the UK is “wrestling with anonymity”.
But what exactly would “ending anonymity” entail? That’s not clear. The white paper discusses how “anonymous accounts” can be used to “hide illegal activity”, and that companies should do more to prevent this, but there is nothing in there about outright banning them.
Any such formal ban would involve amending the bill, or writing a new one. Hence we have talk in parliament of “strengthening” the proposed legislation, but does that mean a ban? Perhaps, perhaps not.
A more likely (and more British) approach, as we are already seeing with vaccine passports, would be to make it an informal ban by pressuring the companies themselves to act outside of legislative compulsion. Parliament will author new “guidance” or “recommendations” on the opening of social media accounts, without ever enforcing them as law.
But partner this with steep fines for illegal activity, “hate speech” or “misinformation”, along with the proposal to make platforms criminally liable for “harmful content”, and companies become their own strict censors in the name of protecting their profit margin.
This is not a fringe theory at all, David Davis MP of all people, described exactly this process in warning that the online harms bill could become a “censor’s charter”.
It’s not hard to see how that system could be used to totally remove the idea of online anonymity without ever making it actually illegal, but rather making it too financially risky. Thus skirting any accusations of state censorship or authoritarianism.
We already know major internet players work hand-in-glove with governments all over the world, so they can be relied upon to enforce any new “duty of care” regulations. But the smaller competitors, who use privacy as a major selling point, can expect to be put in the media crosshairs.
Enter Telegram.
THE WAR ON TELEGRAM
Telegram, for those who aren’t familiar, is an encrypted private messaging service created by Russian Pavel Durov. It became the go-to encrypted service after Facebook bought Whatsapp, and its “channel” feature is a very useful way to communicate with thousands upon thousands of people at once. During the “pandemic” it has become a hub for those organizing protests and broadcasting information banned from mainstream platforms.
All of that has clearly put it on the state’s hit list, because somehow, in all the outpouring of emotion following Amess’ stabbing, it is Telegram that comes in for specific criticism.
To be clear: Telegram is not yet known to have played any part whatsoever in the attack on David Amess. None. It’s not even known whether or not the alleged killer had a telegram account.
Despite this, yesterday in Parliament, Sir Keir Starmer attacked Telegram as the “app of choice for extremists”.
Interestingly, he was citing a report from the NGO Hope Not Hate which was released on October 13th, just two days before Amess was stabbed.
In fact, Telegram has been the subject of ongoing media smears for years, and these have only intensified in the last few days.
Back in 2016, Gizmodo was telling people they should “delete telegram right now”, ironically because it wasn’t really encrypted enough. This story was repeated byVice in November 2020 and then Wired in January of this year.
Also in January, following the “riot” on Capitol Hill, Telegram was accused of being a safe haven for the “far-right”.
Vox headlined:
Why right-wing extremists’ favorite new platform is so dangerous
The Washington Post went with:
Far-right groups move online conversations from social media to chat apps — and out of view of law enforcement
In April Forbes reported that Telegram was “dangerous”. In May it was a platform “where cyber criminals share stolen data”. And then in June the New York Times called it a “misinformation hotspot”.
A September article in Politico accuses Telegram of allowing “misinformation” intended to influence the recent German election.
Also in September, the Financial Times called Telegram a new “dark web for cyber criminals”.
And an October article in Wired accuses the platform of being a “cesspool of antisemtic content”.
It goes on and on and on.
Perhaps most tellingly, Telegram is regularly blamed for Covid-related “misinformation”, along with selling fake Vaccine passes and allowing “threats to NHS workers”.
ARE YOU SEEING THE PATTERN?
Well… are you?
Although all this is framed as a response to the death of David Amess, none of it has yet been shown to have any relevance to the Amess case at all, and all of it predates the murder happening.
The online harms bill is almost three years old, the attacks on Telegram have been going on for over a year, and you can find a steady stream of media attacks on online anonymity going back over a decade.
As so often, the “reaction” to this “problem” is selling us a “solution” they’ve had planned for years.
Since at least 2016 MPs have been talking about “reclaiming the net”, while outlets like The Guardian have been talking about creating “the web we want”, and producing tortured statistical reports to paint the web as a dangerous place.
(Interesting note: those butchered “statistics” are referenced in the Online Harms white paper, a little incite into the self-sustaining nature of propaganda).
The lesson we should all learn: “Policy” is never a response, policy is an aim, a predetermined conclusion.
It is decided and written, and then the “reality” that justifies that policy is constructed, either through opportunistic use of real tragedies, cultivated public opinion, false-flag attacks or pure invention.
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