New York Times reporter deletes tweets calling Trump supporters ‘enemies of the state’
By Graham Dockery | RT | July 28, 2021
New York Times reporter Katie Benner has deleted a series of tweets calling Trump supporters “enemies of the state.” Benner called the tweets “wrongly worded,” but her sentiment is largely shared by the state itself.
As a Democrat-run committee investigating the pro-Trump riot on Capitol Hill in January got underway on Tuesday, viewers were treated to garish tales of violence and tears from lawmakers who lamented the “dark day” they experienced in January. Portrayed by Republican leadership as a “sham” that “no-one will believe,” the hearing evidently worked as intended on New York Times journalist Katie Benner.
Midway through the proceedings, Benner angrily called for the US’ national security apparatus to target supporters of former President Donald Trump.
“Today’s #January6thSelectCommittee underscores America’s current, essential natsec dilemma: Work to combat legitimate national security threats now entails calling a politician’s supporters enemies of the state,” she tweeted.
“As Americans, we believe that state power should not be used to work against a political figure or a political party. But what happens if a politician seems to threaten the state? If the politician continues to do so out of office and his entire party supports that threat?” she continued.
Benner apparently viewed Trump and his supporters as a “threat” long before January 6, as she pointed out that two impeachments and the ‘Russiagate’ investigation had left this “dilemma… unresolved.”
Benner’s tweets triggered an avalanche of criticism from the right, and she later deleted them, claiming that they had been “unclearly worded.”
Benner’s sentiment is shared by the Biden administration and its security apparatus, though they speak of “extremists” rather than “Trump supporters.” The Democratic Party and its spokespeople have painted January 6 as an “insurrection,” a “coup,” and “domestic terrorism” for the last six months, and these words have been translated into policy. The White House’s new domestic terrorism strategy, for example, focuses heavily on the supposed threat posed by the right, and lists the “attack” on the US Capitol alongside mass shootings in Pittsburgh and El Paso. The strategy promises increased funding for the Department of Homeland Security, and states that the federal government will work closer with the tech industry to combat “extremist content” and “disinformation and misinformation.”
Meanwhile, right-wingers deemed extremists are being purged from military and law enforcement ranks, participants in the January 6 riot are being detained in allegedly brutal conditions with court dates at least six months off, and the FBI is encouraging Americans to turn in family members for “homegrown violent extremism.” Concurrently, the Capitol Police – a force immune from Freedom of Information Act requests – is expanding its operations beyond Washington and purchasing military-grade surveillance equipment for use on Americans.
Benner is not the only journalist to openly call on the state to target Trump’s supporters. ABC News has called for “cleansing the movement” Trump created, a lawyer for PBS suggested that the former president’s “stupid” supporters be sent to “re-education camps,” and former FBI assistant director turned MSNBC analyst Frank Figliuzzi has called for the arrest of pro-Trump Republicans in Congress “in order to really tackle terrorism.”
It is unclear whether Benner deleted her tweets at the direction of the Times or of her own accord. However, back in 2018 the newspaper denounced Trump for referring to journalists as “enemies of the people,” saying that such terminology could “lead to violence” against the media. At time of writing, the Times has not condemned Benner’s tweets, or warned that they could lead to violence against Trump supporters.
Piers Morgan Calls For Unvaccinated to be Denied Medical Treatment
By Paul Joseph Watson | Summit News | July 28, 2021
Professional attention-seeker Piers Morgan is leading the charge for unvaccinated people to face state-sanctioned discrimination after he asserted that those who haven’t had the COVID jab should be denied medical treatment.
Yes, really.
“Those who refuse to be vaccinated, with no medical reason not to, should be refused NHS care if they then catch covid,” tweeted Morgan. “I’m hearing of anti-vaxxers using up ICU beds in London at vast expense to the taxpayer. Let them pay for their own stupidity & selfishness.”
Morgan failed to mention that those who have chosen not to take the vaccine also pay for the NHS through their taxes.
He subsequently called those who haven’t taken the shot “incredibly stupid and deeply depressing,” asking, “What the f*ck is wrong with you????”
Essentially, Morgan is arguing that people who refuse to allow themselves to be injected with vaccines linked with innumerable side-effects to ward off a virus for which they have a 99.8 per cent survival rate should be left to die in order to save money.
If enacted, his ‘solution’ would also end up killing people who are admitted to hospital for ailments that have nothing to do with COVID, given that positive tests in hospitals are counted as COVID admissions even if the person is asymptomatic and is being treated for a non-COVID illness.
As we have repeatedly stressed, a two-tier society is now being created where discrimination targeting the unvaccinated is becoming not only normalized but encouraged.
Morgan is about one step removed from openly calling for the unvaccinated to be rounded up and incarcerated in medical prison camps.
An added irony to his faux-populist authoritarianism is that Morgan himself has been caught repeatedly flouting the same COVID-19 rules that he aggressively demands be imposed on everyone else.
How a Psychic Healer Blog Convinced the Government to Fund “Long Covid” Research
By Phillip W. Magness | AIER | July 27, 2021
The National Institutes for Health (NIH) is exceptionally keen on the study of “Long Covid.” The federal agency recently allocated over $1 billion in funding for this purpose, and NIH Director Francis Collins has made the claimed ailment a recurring subject of his press commentary over the last year. The Department of Health and Human Services similarly signaled that it intends to classify “Long Covid” as a recognized disability for government funding and classification purposes.
So what is Long Covid, and why is it drawing so much attention and funding out of the federal government? As with any respiratory illness, Covid-19 does appear to have long-term sufferers who do not follow the normal recovery pattern and continue to demonstrate symptoms for weeks or months after an infection. At the same time however, the push to make “Long Covid” a distinctive medical classification unto itself appears to be a political phenomenon, wrapped up in clear signs of pseudoscience and linked back to a fringe “alternative wellness” blog that originally coined the term in March 2020.
A recent study published in the Lancet-owned journal EClinicalMedicine purported to document over 200 symptoms of Long Covid, ranging from fairly common Covid-19 ailments such as fatigue, cough, or long-term loss of smell to an eclectic assortment of problems such as hallucination, brain fog, tearfulness, insomnia, and mood anxiety. Media reports breathlessly repeated these findings to press the urgency of funding for Long Covid research, while also hyping the syndrome as a further justification for alarmism in justifying lockdowns and similar measures. After all, if Long Covid afflicts a sizable subset of Covid patients – as some claim – and can strike young people who are at a much lower mortality risk from the virus itself, then perhaps more restrictive measures are warranted on the general population – or so the argument goes.
Many lockdown advocates have seized onto the Long Covid narrative, incorporating it into their defenses of the draconian non-pharmaceutical interventions they have advocated over the last year and a half. The CovidFAQ website – a UK-based project set up by “neoliberal” activist Sam Bowman and British MP Neil O’Brien – invokes the threat of Long Covid in its attacks the Great Barrington Declaration (GBD), arguing that the hypothesized syndrome undermines evidence that the virus is substantially less-severe among younger demographics. Several pro-lockdown scientists and epidemiologists issued coordinated statements attacking the GBD in October 2020 for “ignor[ing] the emerging burdens of long COVID.” These statements are usually offered as declarative assessments, treating Long Covid as an established medical fact.
With billion-dollar budgets and the prospect of additional sweeping policy measures at stake, it only makes sense to ask if the science behind Long Covid is sound. There is no doubt that some Covid-19 victims have symptoms that linger for weeks or months beyond the typical recovery, although that is true of many diseases. Whether it has 200 plus symptoms is another story – and a closer look reveals an alarming amount of outright quackery is currently shaping the scientific and media discourse around Long Covid.
The problem arises from the amorphous definition of the phrase “Long Covid” itself. Far from a careful clinical diagnosis, Long Covid has become a catch-all term for any extended medical ailment, real or imagined, attributed to the effects of the Covid-19 virus. An alarming amount of alleged data about the phenomenon traces back to a single source called the “Body Politic Wellness Collective” – an alternative medicine blog with dubious scientific credentials. To quote one recent study of the term’s origins, “the emergence and recognition of Long COVID as a potentially major public health problem is largely due to advocacy groups such as the Body Politic COVID-19 Support Group, and Patient Led Research For COVID-19” – the latter an affiliated survey administrator that, according to its own website, was “born out of the Body Politic Slack support group.”
The same Body Politic group frequently appears in an already large and growing literature on “Long Covid” in other scientific journals. In September 2020, NIH Director Collins devoted his personal column on the agency’s website to touting the group. He later credited their work when launching the aforementioned $1 billion research initiative. In July 2021, Body Politic reappeared at the center of the aforementioned EClinicalMedicine study along with a spinoff organization called the Patient-Led Research Collaborative. The two groups administered the survey behind the claim that Long Covid carries over 200 symptoms.
Before we get into the survey itself, it’s useful to take a closer look at the Body Politic group. TheWall Street Journal recently ran a lengthy expose of the organization by Jeremy Devine, an Ontario-based psychiatrist. Devine found that the group’s initiatives sprang to life at the outset of the pandemic in March 2020. They first coined the Long Covid moniker around this time, promoting it in a flurry of media appearances. In early April, the New York Times ran an op-Ed by Body Politic’s co-founder calling attention to the syndrome and recounting her own experience as a “long hauler” (which, at the time, consisted of experiencing symptoms for about three weeks after testing positive).
As Devine documented in the WSJ, the Body Politic group’s approach to scientific survey design appeared highly unorthodox. It frequently relied on self-reported descriptions of Long Covid symptoms, instead of independent medical verification. It also had a habit of diagnosing people with Long Covid even after they tested negative for Covid-19 itself. A March 2021 report by Adam Gaffney for StatNews called attention to similar problems with Body Politic’s research design. “[A]t least some people who identify themselves as having long Covid appear never to have been infected with the SARS-CoV-2 virus,” Gaffney noted. They were nonetheless touted by the media as case studies in the alleged syndrome.
A closer look at the Body Politic group itself raises several red flags about their scientific qualifications. The group’s executive board boasts few, if any, actual medical practitioners or scientific experts. Instead we find an eclectic assortment of political activists, musicians, poets, and journalists, many of whom share common interests in “alternative medicine.” Body Politic’s Treasurer and principle support group organizer describes herself as a “practicing Spiritual Medium” who specializes in detecting “invisible illness.” The website’s Vice President is a “social & racial justice activist,” and its Secretary is an “aspiring sex coach.” Other affiliates include a self-described “socialist poet,” multiple “social justice activists,” and people who describe their careers as operating at the intersection between art and natural wellness. The group’s website and social media accounts frequently invoke political terminology from the critical theory literature. They describe themselves as “a queer feminist wellness collective and a space for inclusivity, accessibility, and crucial discussions about the very real connection between wellness, politics, and personal identity.” Their values statement espouses “patient-led” research to “democratize” medicine – descriptions that appear to forgo traditional scientific methods of testing and verification in favor of placing heavier reliance on patient testimonials and personal experience.
While the group’s activism alone does not disqualify their commentary, the unconventional qualifications of its leadership should raise suspicion about their claimed expertise on Long Covid. When NIH Director Collins personally promotes Body Politic’s work, he is creating a false sense of scientific credibility around their work. Few who read Collins’s statements are aware that the group he praises as “citizen scientists” might be better characterized as an odd assortment of psychic healers, magic crystal gurus, and alternative medicine activists. As a leading public health official, Collins’s many endorsements of this quackery border on irresponsible.
Turning to Body Politic’s survey projects, we quickly find that skepticism of their credibility is warranted. The group’s survey design specifically eschews requiring a positive Covid-19 test or antibody test to confirm that their respondents actually had the disease. “[W]e do not believe people’s experiences with COVID-19 symptoms should be discounted because they did not receive a positive test result,” states one justification for this unconventional data collection procedure. To qualify as a sufferer of Long Covid, it seems, a person needs only to claim that he or she suffers from Long Covid. Lived experience of the disease trumps any requirement of scientific verification.
The prevalence of unverified and untested Covid claimants being classified nonetheless as Long Covid sufferers is stunning. In the WSJ, Devine reports the numbers from the group’s first survey, administered through their website in 2020: “Nearly half (47.8%)” of Body Politic’s survey respondents “never had testing and 27.5% tested negative for Covid-19. Body Politic publicized the results of a larger, second survey in December 2020. Of the 3,762 respondents, a mere 600, or 15.9%, had tested positive for the virus at any time.” As Gaffney notes in StatNews, this practice raises the distinct possibility that survey respondents are misattributing other chronic symptoms to the virus.
Their new study in the Lancet’s journal EClinical Medicine does not offer much hope that Body Politic has improved its survey design. Its authors state that “We analyzed responses from 3762 participants with confirmed (diagnostic/antibody positive; 1020) or suspected (diagnostic/antibody negative or untested; 2742) COVID-19, from 56 countries.” Unconfirmed Covid patients with self-reported Long Covid symptoms outnumber confirmed Covid patients by almost 2.7 to 1. To their credit, the group discloses the lack of PCR or antibody testing confirmation among the majority of their respondents. The extremely high rates of unconfirmed cases, however, are more than sufficient to cast doubt upon their claims to have identified over 200 separate Long Covid symptoms.
The survey’s design also appears to self-select for people who are inclined to claim Long Covid symptoms, whether valid or not. According to the paper, the survey consisted of 257 questions, took almost 70 minutes on average to complete, allowed participants to revisit their answers for up to 30 days, and was primarily marketed to readers of the Body Politic group’s various blogs and Slack channels. This design practically ensures that the majority of the people who received and completed the survey were drawn from a readership that already gravitates towards the group’s political messaging and medical eccentricities.
Imagine if a survey on diet products collected its sample entirely from the mailing list of Gwyneth Paltrow’s “Goop” store. And imagine if the CDC decided to use that survey as a basis for a billion dollar program to revise its food nutrition guidelines, claiming that it is a representative study of the average American’s diet. Because that’s essentially what NIH Director Francis Collins has done with Body Politic’s surveys when justifying his current research initiative into Long Covid before the public.
With most Long Covid research at the moment, self-diagnosis by amateur groups appears to have supplanted scientific rigor in driving the NIH’s research priorities. Even minimal scrutiny should cast doubt upon the Body Politic group’s deficit of scientific credentials and surplus of outright “alternative medicine” quackery. Yet in January 2021 the New York Times heavily leaned on testimonials from Body Politic’s resident psychics and alternative wellness healers in a feature story on so-called Long Covid, aiming to demonstrate the scientific validity of the diagnosis.
So did an August 2020 piece in the Atlantic that is widely credited with popularizing the concept. Indeed, the New York Times has turned its opinion page over to Body Politic writers on multiple occasions over the last year, giving them free rein to promote unscientific claims about the concept. Simply scanning over mainstream media coverage of “Long Covid” in the last year reveals that Body Politic-affiliated activists with dubious scientific credentials have become go-to “experts” on the subject. Here they are being interviewed in Vox, in the Guardian, in the Washington Post, on NPR, in Buzzfeed, and on MSNBC.
In calling attention to Body Politic’s influence over shaping the Long Covid narrative, I do not question the possibility that some of the organization’s activists may exhibit genuine long-term Covid-related symptoms, even if they are not a distinct classification unto itself. But scientific assessment of their claims remains woefully inadequate relative to the authority that the media has bestowed upon them. In this sense, much of the Long Covid literature bears striking resemblance to other claimed chronic illnesses that have less-than-robust scientific grounding (for example, consider the difference between Celiac disease – a rare but severe dietary illness involving gluten – and the mid-2010s “gluten sensitivity” craze, which mixed together real and imagined but also self-diagnosed symptoms, fad dietary practices, and dubious scientific attestation)
Despite their scientific shortcomings, Body Politic’s own surveys have found a welcome audience among many academics who should know better. Even leading medical journals now regularly tout Body Politic’s dubious survey results as if they are scientific fact.
Last fall, the BMJ published an article on “Long Covid” from a team of scientists led by Oxford’s Trisha Greenhalgh, an outspoken pro-lockdown regular on the BBC and other UK media circuits. Greenhalgh’s team estimated that perhaps as many as 10% of people infected with Covid develop “Long Covid” symptoms – a number that has since become a standard estimate for Long Covid risks.
Their empirical “evidence” for Greenhalgh’s claim, in turn, derives primarily from Body Politic’s “patient-led survey” of alleged Long Covid sufferers – the same survey where half or more of respondents never even had a confirmed Covid diagnosis. This was no accidental reliance on a substandard source, deriving from insufficient scrutiny of the survey’s methods. Greenhalgh credited the Body Politic group by name on Twitter for inspiring their paper, endorsing the “lived experience” of their “patient-led research.” Echoing the Body Politic survey, Greenhalgh and her co-authors further embrace the proposition “that a positive test for covid-19 is not a prerequisite for diagnosis” for Long Covid. It’s apparently sufficient to simply believe that you had a prior bout with Covid, and attribute your claimed long-term symptoms to the same.
Not surprisingly, Long Covid has become a favored fallback argument among lockdowner epidemiologists to argue for prolonged restrictions. Duke University’s Gavin Yamey has made a name for himself by credulously circulating conspiracy theories about the Great Barrington Declaration by blogger Nafeez Ahmed. Sure enough, he’s also a Long Covid activist, promoting Greenhalgh’s study as well as an assortment of news articles that blur the lines between legitimate reporting of long-term symptoms and quackery.
Although Body Politic is far from the only group advocating for Long Covid research funding, their high-profile promotion by the NIH, by leading news outlets, and by medical journals suggests a similar phenomenon to the pattern seen among other lockdown advocates in allegedly-mainstream epidemiology. We’re witnessing a full-scale breakdown of the screening mechanisms that normally steer scientific discourse away from fringe and conspiracist viewpoints – provided that those viewpoints may be used to advance the alarmist ideologies that have emerged around Covid policy over the last year. The doors have, sadly, been thrown wide open to psychic healing and alternative wellness gibberish. Lockdowner scientists have, in turn, given these suspect claims and defective survey designs a welcome home in the most prestigious institutions of journalism, government, and the ivory tower.
Phillip W. Magness is a Senior Research Fellow at the American Institute for Economic Research. He holds a PhD and MPP from George Mason University’s School of Public Policy, and a BA from the University of St. Thomas (Houston).
Prior to joining AIER, Dr. Magness spent over a decade teaching public policy, economics, and international trade at institutions including American University, George Mason University, and Berry College.
Daily COVID Deaths in Sweden Hit Zero, as Other Nations Brace for More Lockdowns
Sweden isn’t in the news much these days. There’s a reason for that.
By Jon Miltimore | FEE | July 22, 2021
More than 100,000 people flooded streets in France over the weekend and multiple COVID vaccination centers were vandalized as opposition grew to the government’s most recent pandemic strategy. In President Emmanuel Macron’s latest incarnation of lockdowns, government officials have decreed that unvaccinated individuals will no longer be allowed to enter cafes, restaurants, theaters, public transportation and more.
Needless to say, people were not happy.
France’s approach is unique, but it’s just one of many countries around the world imposing new restrictions as fears grow over a new variant of COVID-19. Australia’s recent restrictions have placed half the country under strict lockdown—even though a record 82,000 tests had identified just 111 new coronavirus cases—while restaurants in Portugal are struggling to survive amid newly imposed restrictions.
One country not making much news is Sweden.
Sweden, of course, was maligned in 2020 for foregoing a strict lockdown. The Guardian called its approach “a catastrophe” in the making, while CBS News said Sweden had become “an example of how not to handle COVID-19.”
Despite these criticisms, Sweden’s laissez-faire approach to the pandemic continues today. In contrast to its European neighbors, Sweden is welcoming tourists. Businesses and schools are open with almost no restrictions. And as far as masks are concerned, not only is there no mandate in place, Swedish health officials are not even recommending them.
What are the results of Sweden’s much-derided laissez-faire policy? Data show the 7-day rolling average for COVID deaths yesterday was zero (see below). As in nada. And it’s been at zero for about a week now.
Even a year ago, it was clear the hyperbolic claims about “the Swedish catastrophe” were false; just ask Elon Musk (also see: here, here, and here). But a year later the evidence is overwhelming that Sweden got the pandemic mostly right. Sweden’s overall mortality rate in 2020 was lower than most of Europe and its economy suffered far less. Meanwhile, today Sweden is freer and healthier than virtually any other country in Europe.
As much of the world remains gripped in fear and nations devise new restrictions to curtail basic freedoms, Sweden remains a vital and shining reminder that there is a better way.
Disillusioned journalists form alliance against censorship of alternative coronavirus viewpoints
By Christina Maas | Reclaim The Net | July 26, 2021
A group of 26 journalists has come together to object to the COVID-19 “fearmongering” and the censorship of alternative views by mainstream media and Big Tech platforms since the beginning of the pandemic.
According to the group, the result of the fearmongering and censorship has been the public receiving a “distorted view of the truth.”
The group calls itself “Holding the Line: Journalists Against COVID Censorship.”
It comprises mostly UK-based journalists working at newspapers, broadcasters, and PR companies as staffers or freelancers.
The members were interviewed by Press Gazette, with most preferring to remain anonymous for fear of retribution from their employers.
However, some were more than happy to be named, including Sonia Elijah and Karen Harradine, investigative journalists for The Conservative Woman, former BBC journalist Tony Gosling, and Laura Berril, a PR and tech journalist.
The group’s mission is to promote a “prejudice-free” environment where journalists can air their concerns and raise awareness on lesser-covered issues.
To them, the media is doing “incredible work.” But there are some failures, especially surrounding COVID reporting, such as “a lack of context for statistics, due coverage for alternative treatments, scrutiny of PCR testing, attention to adverse vaccine reactions, or balanced examinations of the costs of lockdown.”
The group accused the UK media of often publishing “fear-inducing and sometimes inaccurate” reports, which in turn create hostility towards those who would prefer not to get the vaccines.
“It’s been unprecedented the way COVID-19 has been reported in the UK but not just in the UK, worldwide,” said Sonia Elijah, one of the members of the group who allowed Press Gazette to mention her name.
“There’s only been one official narrative played out in the mainstream media and that has not changed over time.
“There’s only been one ‘scientific truth’ allowed to be discussed: the one endorsed by worldwide governmental regulatory bodies, even that has been very selective. This has given the public a distorted view of the truth which has been highly damaging.”
Elijah expressed her concern about censorship of information that contradicts the narrative provided by the Trusted News Initiative.
“For a long time, we’ve been in this dark era of censorship that’s been embodied by the Trusted News Initiative which cuts across big tech and all mainstream media,” she said.
“It’s been packaged around this war on disinformation or misinformation- where anything that’s gone against the official narrative has not just been ‘fact checked’ but has been suppressed or removed.”
According to Gosling, the group is championing for balanced debate.
Gosling said: “Our main concern is that there’s a very powerful lobby behind many of these COVID measures, including treatment, lack of treatment and vaccines, obviously, but there isn’t much of a lobby in the other direction. And I think most of us feel that our employers of various sorts have not been representing both sides.”
Gosling had two of his interviews featuring doctors advocating for early treatment post-diagnosis, the effectiveness of ivermectin, and the dangers of the “experimental” vaccines removed by YouTube.
As an example of the “sometimes inaccurate” coverage, he pointed to a BBC report where the contributor claims the Pfizer jab was “100% safe” for kids between the ages of 12 and 15. It was only after his complaint that the BBC removed the “shocking” and “disgusting” claim and provided a correction.
Gosling added: “My own aim is to provide balance, that’s it basically. And also to point out to the public that the journalists don’t always get to choose what gets published.
“It’s the owners and the editors that have the final say, so we are all of the same mind that we would like to see more journalists being editors and having their own newspapers, having their own TV/radio stations but that’s very, very rare. So there’s always an editor somewhere just saying no, I don’t want this, and particularly through this pandemic that’s the way it’s been, people have found it difficult to get stories in, and it’s been frustrating.”
Met Office Issues First Ever Extreme Heat Warning!
By Paul Homewood | Not A Lot Of People Know That | July 24, 2021
The Met Office issued its first ever extreme heat warning last Tuesday:
https://news.sky.com/story/uk-weather-met-office-to-issue-first-ever-extreme-heat-warning-amid-sweltering-conditions-across-country-12359242
Now if you’re thinking that this is surely not the first time Britain has had hot weather, you would be right, as the small print (ie the bit nobody ever reads) in the Sky report explains:
In other words, its the first heat warning since 1st June!
I wonder, by the way, whether they will also be issuing “extreme cold warnings” this winter? Surely the Met Office would not be doing this just to scare the public about global warming?
As for this “extreme heat”, the heatwave in England has been pretty run of the mill.
In Central England, there were only five days above 28C, and no day topped 30C, which PHE say is their average threshold for a heatwave, depending on location.
So far this summer, these are the only days above 28C, whereas in 1976 there were seventeen, and sixteen in 1995:
https://www.metoffice.gov.uk/hadobs/hadcet/cet_info_mean.html
I gather that GB News were discussing the heatwave earlier this week. One might have hoped they would show a bit of realism, but sadly they appear to be just as gullible as the rest of the media. I am told they started harping on about the hot weather, and the fact that heatwaves last 13 days not 5 days as they used to.
Perhaps somebody should have told them that heatwaves are not caused by carbon dioxide, but by anti-cyclonic weather systems. I am not aware of any mechanism by which carbon dioxide can keep high pressure systems over Britain.
It never ceases to amaze me how grown up people can get themselves into such a tizzy about a few days of sunshine. Meanwhile, we are already back to typical British summer weather, sunshine and showers and average temperatures. No doubt the rest of the summer will carry on the same.
Why is disgraced ex-spy Christopher Steele involved in a controversial group seeking harsh Covid restrictions?
By Kit Klarenberg | RT | July 24, 2021
Christopher Steele, the ex-MI6 spy, is involved in the ‘parent’ organisation called Independent SAGE – a collective that regularly criticizes the UK government for not introducing tougher measures to achieve ‘Zero Covid.’
On July 17, The Daily Telegraph brought to public attention that Independent SAGE, the highly controversial scientist collective advocating for excessively harsh coronavirus restrictions, was the creation of The Citizens, a shadowy campaign organization led by Guardian journalist Carole Cadwalladr.
In response, Cadwalladr took to Twitter to rubbish the “scoop,” noting that the connection between the two groups had been acknowledged on Independent SAGE’s website for 17 months – which is true, although the scientist collective seems very much keen to downplay it, merely referring to The Citizens as “a small support team” helping with public events and media activities.
This is totally at odds with Cadwalladr’s recently updated Twitter biography, which designates her as “cofounder” of The Citizens, the “parent” of Independent SAGE, and The Citizens’ own Twitter account, which characterizes itself as the “founder and producer” of Independent SAGE.
The reasons for this chasmic discrepancy aren’t certain, although the most glaring oddity at the heart of The Citizens – unacknowledged by The Telegraph, and never before reported upon by the mainstream media – is undoubtedly that former MI6 spy Christopher Steele, author of the utterly discredited Trump-Russia dossier, is seemingly involved in the endeavor in some way.
In a statement, Firstlight Group, which provides “media relations support and consultancy to Independent Sage,” contended that The Citizens “drew on a wide and diverse collection of unpaid advisors before it launched,” of which Steele was just one.
“He has never played any active or other role in the organisation or Independent SAGE,” the PR firm added, although in a followup email Firstlight said Steele was part of a “a network of pro-bono advisors we can call upon as needed,” suggesting he could be drafted in to support The Citizens, and by extension Independent SAGE, at any time in the future. Requests for clarity on what precisely he did for The Citizens pre-launch were simply ignored.
What’s nonetheless clear is that Cadwalladr has long-been a fervent advocate of Steele, and frequently ended up in extremely close quarters with the purportedly former spook, as several photos of the pair together, and screengrabs of Zoom conversations with one another, surely attest.
This relationship has endured despite Robert Mueller’s Special Counsel investigation failing to validate, if not outright disproving, most of the incendiary allegations made in Steele’s dossier alleging co-operation between Donald Trump’s presidential campaign and the Russian government in 2016.
Steele’s biography on The Citizens’ website even specifically draws attention to his role in producing the dossier – unsurprisingly, no mention is made of declassified FBI documents revealing that, as early as January 2017, it was abundantly clear the dossier was unsubstantiated and unverifiable bunkum, fed to him by a single, dubious source for cash.
Cadwalladr was likewise an enthusiastic proponent of Mueller, to the extent of launching a podcast – Dial M for Mueller – calling for a similar investigation into the June 2016 Brexit referendum in the UK. Despite much initial fanfare, it produced a mere three episodes before abruptly ending, which may be explained by the actual Mueller report being an embarrassing nothingburger.
Steele’s involvement in The Citizens may account for the clear attempts by Independent SAGE to distance itself somewhat from its purported “parent” and “producer.” However, the central if surreptitious role played by The Citizens in the endeavor is quite clear – a crowdfunding campaign for the collective instigated following its June 2020 launch was created by The Citizens, described as Independent Sage’s “partner,” which had been offering “time and skills to help behind the scenes.”
The quietly published official record of a meeting of Independent SAGE’s ‘Behavioural Advisory Group’ that same month is even fishier. It shows that Zack King, representative of Firstlight Group, took a principal role in proceedings, introducing “the work of Independent Sage to date” and leading a dedicated “item” on press relations.
Along the way, King stressed that he, his company and Carole Cadwalladr “handled press issues” and Independent SAGE could use them if and when they wanted to “involve” the media in its activities.
“Zack and Carole work together on press side. Most press relations are undertaken via Zack and his PR firm,” the minutes state.
This excerpt raises serious questions about whether Cadwalladr’s journalistic output and social media postings on the pandemic represent a conflict of interest, given she has repeatedly advocated Independent SAGE’s harsh proposals for dealing with coronavirus. Furthermore, a July 2020 Guardian editorial effusively endorsed Independent SAGE’s ‘zero covid’ strategy, despite the outfit itself acknowledging that the total eradication of a disease has only ever been achieved once in history, in the case of smallpox.
It’s inarguably an extremely strange situation, in which Cadwalladr and Firstlight Group provide “media relations support and consultancy” to Independent SAGE and help “involve” the press in its work, and then Cadwalladr and her employer amplify their sensationalist, unscientific prognostications.
For example, on July 14, ahead of ‘Freedom Day,’ Cadwalladr spoke of her growing “dread” about the UK “sleepwalking into disaster.” Two days earlier, Independent SAGE published an “emergency statement” on the impending removal of pandemic restrictions via The Citizens’ website, calling the move a “terrible mistake” that would “lead to many avoidable deaths and long-term illness.”
This one-two punch is rendered all the more suspect given Cadwalladr’s leading role in The Citizens has only recently been made at all clear. It’s also rather peculiar that she isn’t listed as a director of the operation – perhaps explained by another company she founded not having filed accounts since December 2018, in contravention of its legal obligations.
Then again, Independent SAGE is an extremely shady operation. While unaffiliated to the government, and engaged in attempts to lobby government policy, many of its members are part of the official SAGE (Scientific Advisory Group for Emergencies) advisory group itself.
Overwhelmingly, though, Independent SAGE’s membership is comprised of behavioral scientists and clinical psychologists, not epidemiologists or virologists – in other words, not obvious candidates for effectively managing and resolving a public health crisis, but absolutely the kind of people one would enlist to sell certain ideas to the public.
The overlap between membership of SAGE and Independent SAGE membership also means that representatives of both can appear in the media billed as mouthpieces of the former only, and make alarmist, headline-grabbing projections that don’t reflect SAGE’s official position or modelling, without this crucial caveat being acknowledged. Witness Susan Michie stating in June that government-enforced social distancing and mask wearing will have to remain in place forever, contrary to published SAGE wisdom.
Steele’s dodgy dossier gripped journalists’ attention the world over and drove news coverage for months before its exposure as flagrant nonsense. How long it’ll take before Independent SAGE’s dubious prognoses and baseless hysteria is similarly laid bare is anyone’s guess.
Kit Klarenberg is an investigative journalist exploring the role of intelligence services in shaping politics and perceptions.
FBI Using the Same Fear Tactic From the First War on Terror: Orchestrating its Own Terrorism Plots
Questioning the FBI’s role in 1/6 was maligned by corporate media as deranged. But only ignorance about the FBI or a desire to deceive could produce such a reaction.
By Glenn Greenwald | July 24, 2021
The narrative that domestic anti-government extremism is the greatest threat to U.S. national security — the official position of the U.S. security state and the Biden administration — received its most potent boost in October 2020, less than one month before the 2020 presidential election. That was when the F.B.I. and Michigan state officials announced the arrest of thirteen people on terrorism, conspiracy and weapons charges, with six of them accused of participating in a plot to kidnap Michigan’s Democratic Governor Gretchen Whitmer, who had been a particular target of criticism from President Trump for her advocacy for harsh COVID lockdown measures.
The headlines that followed were dramatic and fear-inducing: “F.B.I. Says Michigan Anti-Government Group Plotted to Kidnap Gov. Gretchen Whitmer,” announced The New York Times. That same night, ABC News began its broadcast this way: “Tonight, we take you into a hidden world, a place authorities say gave birth to a violent domestic terror plot in Michigan — foiled by the FBI.”
Democrats and liberal journalists instantly seized on this storyline to spin a pre-election theme that was as extreme as it was predictable. Gov. Whitmer herself blamed Trump, claiming that the plotters “heard the president’s words not as a rebuke but as a rallying cry — as a call to action.” Rep. Maxine Waters (D-CA) claimed that “the president is a deranged lunatic and he’s inspired white supremacists to violence, the latest of which was a plot to kidnap Gov. Whitmer,” adding: “these groups have attempted to KILL many of us in recent years. They are following Trump’s lead.” Vox’s paid television-watcher and video-manipulator, Aaron Rupar, drew this inference: “Trump hasn’t commended the FBI for breaking up Whitmer kidnapping/murder plot because as always he doesn’t want to denounce his base.” Michael Moore called for Trump’s arrest for having incited the kidnapping plot against Gov. Whitmer. One viral tweet from a popular Democratic Party activist similarly declared: “Trump should be arrested for this plot to kidnap Governor Whitmer. There’s no doubt he inspired this terrorism.”
New York Governor Andrew Cuomo instantly declared it to be a terrorist attack on America: “We must condemn and call out the cowardly plot against Governor Whitmer for what it is: Domestic terrorism.” MSNBC’s social media star Kyle Griffin cast it as a coup attempt: “The FBI thwarted what they described as a plot to violently overthrow the government and kidnap Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer.” CNN’s Jim Sciutto pronounced it “deeply alarming.”
A lengthy CNN article — dressed up as an investigative exposé that was little more than stenography of FBI messaging disseminated from behind a shield of anonymity — purported in the headline to take the reader “Inside the plot to kidnap Gov. Whitmer.” It claimed that it all began when angry discussions about COVID restrictions “spiraled into a terrorism plot, officials say, with Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer the target of a kidnapping scheme.” CNN heralded the FBI’s use of informants and agents to break up the plot but depicted them as nothing more than passive bystanders reporting what the domestic terrorists were plotting:
The Watchmen had been flagged to the FBI in March, and one of its members was now an informant. That informant, others on the inside, as well as undercover operatives and recordings, allowed the bureau to monitor what was happening from then on.
The article never once hinted at let alone described the highly active role of these informants and agents themselves in encouraging and designing the plot. Instead, it depicted these anti-government activists as leading one another — on their own — to commit what CNN called “treason in a quaint town.” The more honest headline for this CNN article would have been: “Inside the FBI’s tale of the plot to kidnap Gov. Whitmer.” But since CNN never questions the FBI — they employ their top agents and operatives once they leave the bureau in order to disseminate their propaganda — this is what the country got from The Most Trusted Name in News:
Gov. Whitmer herself attempted to prolong the news cycle as much as possible, all but declaring herself off-limits from criticism by equating any critiques of her governance with incitement to terrorism. Appearing on Meet the Press two Sundays after the plot was revealed, Whitmer said it was “incredibly disturbing that the president of the United States—10 days after a plot to kidnap, put me on trial, and execute me, 10 days after that was uncovered—the president is at it again, and inspiring, and incentivizing, and inciting this kind of domestic terrorism.”
On October 22 — just two weeks before Election Day — MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow hosted Whitmer and told the Michigan Governor that the evidence was clear that Trump had been “turning on a faucet of violent threats” against her. Whitmer agreed that Trump was to blame for the kidnapping plot by having repeatedly attacked her in his rallies:
Joe Biden also made repeated use of this storyline. Appearing at a campaign rally in Michigan on October 16, the Democratic candidate blasted Trump for the crime of continuing to criticize Whitmer even after she was the target of a terror plot. He explicitly blamed Trump for having incited it: “When the president tweeted ‘Liberate Michigan, Liberate Michigan,’ that’s the call that was heard. That was the dog whistle.” And he accused Trump of purposely stoking a wave of the worst kind of terrorism on U.S. soil: “it’s the sort of behavior you might expect from ISIS,” he said of the accused.
Yet from the start, there were ample and potent reasons to distrust the FBI’s version of events. To begin with, FBI press releases are typically filled with lies, yet media outlets — due to some combination of excessive gullibility, an inability to learn lessons, or a desire to be deceived — continue to treat them as Gospel. For another, the majority of “terror plots” the FBI claimed to detect and break up during the first War on Terror were, in fact, plots manufactured, funded and driven by the FBI itself.
Indeed, the FBI has previously acknowledged that its own powers and budget depend on keeping Americans in fear of such attacks. Former FBI Assistant Director Thomas Fuentes, in a documentary called “The Newberg Sting” about a 2009 FBI arrest of four men on terrorism charges, uttered this extremely candid admission:
If you’re submitting budget proposals for a law enforcement agency, for an intelligence agency, you’re not going to submit the proposal that “We won the war on terror and everything’s great,” cuz the first thing that’s gonna happen is your budget’s gonna be cut in half. You know, it’s my opposite of Jesse Jackson’s ‘Keep Hope Alive’—it’s ‘Keep Fear Alive.’ Keep it alive.
In the Whitmer kidnapping case, the FBI’s own affidavit in support of the charges acknowledged the involvement in the plot of both informants and undercover FBI agents “over several months.”
Excerpt of FBI affidavit criminal complaint accompanying the criminal complaint in U.S. District Court against six defendants in the Whitmer plot
In sum, there was no way to avoid suspicions about the FBI’s crucial role in a plot like this absent extreme ignorance about the bureau’s behavior over the last two decades or an intentional desire to sow fear about right-wing extremists attacking Democratic Party officials one month before the 2020 presidential election. In fact, the signs of FBI involvement were there from the start for those who — unlike CNN — wanted to know the truth.
A report from the Detroit Free Press published just two days after CNN’s FBI stenography noted that the FBI agents were incapable of identifying any specifics of this supposed plot, adding that defense attorneys were adamant that those accused were merely engaged in idle chatter, boasting that they were never really serious about following through. Then the paper added that, for defense lawyers, “it remains to be seen what roles the undercover informants and FBI agents played in the case, and whether they pushed the others into carrying out the plan.” Meanwhile, an actually independent journalist, Michael Tracey, had no trouble identifying the telltale signs of FBI orchestration that were so apparent countless times during the first War on Terror. Three days before the CNN story, he wrote:
But the value of depicting Trump as having incited a frightening terrorist attack just weeks before the election, and the zeal to feed the broader narrative pushed by the U.S. security state that anti-government extremism is America’s greatest national security threat, drowned out any skepticism. The storyline was clear and unquestioned: Trump was inciting ISIS-like terrorism on U.S. soil and right-wing extremists, who would fester even after Trump was done, were the primary menace that requires new domestic powers and larger budgets in order to defeat.
Yet just as happened with so many other narratives — from the origins of COVID to Hunter Biden’s corrupt use of his ties to his father — Trump’s defeat means the media is now willing to reconsider some of the propaganda that was pushed in the lead-up to the election. An excellent piece of investigative journalism published by BuzzFeed on Tuesday documents that, far from being passive observers of the plot, FBI informants and agents were the key drivers of it:
An examination of the case by BuzzFeed News also reveals that some of those informants, acting under the direction of the FBI, played a far larger role than has previously been reported. Working in secret, they did more than just passively observe and report on the actions of the suspects. Instead, they had a hand in nearly every aspect of the alleged plot, starting with its inception. The extent of their involvement raises questions as to whether there would have even been a conspiracy without them.
So central to this plot were those acting at the behest of the FBI that many of the accused plotters only met each other because of meetings arranged at the direction of the FBI, who targeted them based on social media postings and other political activities that suggested anti-government and anti-Whitmer sentiments which could be exploited:
A longtime government informant from Wisconsin, for example, helped organize a series of meetings around the country where many of the alleged plotters first met one another and the earliest notions of a plan took root, some of those people say. The Wisconsin informant even paid for some hotel rooms and food as an incentive to get people to come.
One of the FBI’s informants, a former Iraq War soldier, “became so deeply enmeshed in a Michigan militant group that he rose to become its second-in-command.” With his leadership role in one of the key groups, and all while acting under the direction of the FBI, he was “encouraging members to collaborate with other potential suspects and paying for their transportation to meetings.” Indeed, he even “prodded the alleged mastermind of the kidnapping plot to advance his plan, then baited the trap that led to the arrest.”
A review of not only the BuzzFeed reporting but also the underlying court documents leaves little doubt that the primary impetus for this plot came over and over from the FBI. On July 12, a lawyer for one of the defendants filed a motion asking the court to compel the FBI to turn over all chats which their agents and informants involving the plot. He did so on the ground that the few chats they had obtained themselves — from their own clients — repeatedly show the FBI pushing and prodding its agents over and over to lure defendants into more meetings, to join in “recon” exercises, and to take as many steps as possible toward the plot.
While it was clear from the start that there were FBI informants and agents in the middle of all of this, it turns out that at least half of those involved were acting on FBI orders: twelve informants and agents. As BuzzFeed says, those acting at the behest of the FBI “had a hand in nearly every aspect of the alleged plot, starting with its inception.” All of that, concluded the reporters, “raises questions as to whether there would have even been a conspiracy without them.”
But this evidence does not so much raise that question as much as it answers it. The idea of kidnapping Gov. Whitmer came from the FBI. It was a plot designed by the agency, and they then went on the hunt to target people they believed they could manipulate into joining their plot — either people were easily manipulated due to psychological weakness, financial vulnerability, and/or their strongly held political views. In sum, the FBI devised this plot, was the primary organizer of it, funded it, purposely directed their targets to pose for incriminating pictures that they then released to the press, and then heaped praise on themselves for stopping what they themselves had created.
For anyone covering the FBI during the first War on Terror, none of this is new. So many of the supposed “terror plots” the FBI purported to disrupt over the last twenty years were — just like the Michigan plot — ones that were created and driven by, and would not have happened without, the FBI’s own planning, funding and direction.
Just as they are doing now, the FBI used those plots to elevate fear levels and justify more domestic surveillance power and funding for the U.S. security state. While the targets then were typically young American Muslims with anti-government views rather than young right-wing white men with anti-government views, the tactics were identical.
The examples are far too numerous to count. As one illustrative example, in 2015, the FBI flamboyantly praised itself for arresting three Brooklyn men on charges of “attempt and conspiracy to provide material support to the Islamic State of Iraq.” Then, as now, outlets such as The New York Times promoted the FBI’s maximalist-fear-mongering version of events: “3 Brooklyn Men Accused of Plot to Aid ISIS’ Fight,” blared the headline.
But even that largely pro-FBI Times article raised the question of whether this plot was real or manufactured by the bureau:
The case against the three men relies in part on a confidential informant paid by the government, court documents show. Defense lawyers have criticized the government’s use of informers in similar cases, saying they may lure targets into making extreme plans or statements. In some cases, the threat has turned out to be overstated.
And the FBI itself admitted that the “threats of violence” from the three arrested — such as killing President Obama — “had an ‘aspirational’ quality to them, with no indication that the suspects were close to staging an attack, large or small.” The Times article also noted that the FBI observed that “in online postings, the two younger men seem to be searching for meaning in their lives,” adding that “as they were led into court, the youthfulness of Mr. Juraboev and Mr. Saidakhmetov was striking.”
Analyzing all the evidence in this case, my then-colleague at The Intercept Murtaza Hussain documented “the integral role a paid informant appears to have played in generating the charges against the men, and helping turn a fantastical ‘plot’ into something even remotely tangible.” Indeed, he wrote, “none of the three men was in any condition to travel or support the Islamic State, without help from the FBI informant.” It was only when the FBI sent an older Muslim man to gain their trust — acting as an FBI informant and being paid for his services — did anything resembling a crime start to form. The paid FBI informant encouraged the young men to pursue the plan more concretely, and only then did they begin agreeing with the informant’s proposed plot. The informant befriended them, moved in with them, and spent months “convincing both of them that he intended to travel to Syria and join Islamic State.”
Just as was true in the Michigan case, Hussain wrote about this arrest: “Crucially, it appears that only after the introduction of the informant did any actual arrangements to commit a criminal act come into existence.” In sum, “the covert informant under the direction of the FBI” — which employs teams of psychologists and other mental health professions who are experts in how to manipulate people’s thinking — “evidently helped encourage the two toward terrorism over the course of these months.”
Article by Murtaza Hussain of The Intercept, Feb. 20, 2015
I have also covered countless other FBI plots over the years where all the same attributes were present. After the 2015 “ISIS arrest,” I wrote an article compiling how often the FBI was doing this and asked this question in the headline: “Why Does the FBI Have to Manufacture its Own Plots if Terrorism and ISIS Are Such Grave Threats?,” noting that the bureau’s behavior “is akin to having the DEA constantly warn of the severe threat posed by drug addiction while it simultaneously uses pushers on its payroll to deliberately get people hooked on drugs so that they can arrest the addicts they’ve created and thus justify their own warnings and budgets.”
Months before the 2015 ISIS arrests, the FBI issued a press release praising itself for arresting “a Cincinnati-area man for a plot to attack the U.S. Capitol and kill government officials.” But as I reported, the scary terrorist was “20-year-old Christopher Cornell, [who] is unemployed, lives at home, spends most of his time playing video games in his bedroom, still addresses his mother as ‘Mommy’ and regards his cat as his best friend; he was described as ‘a typical student’ and ‘quiet but not overly reserved’ by the principal of the local high school he graduated in 2012.”
Then House Speaker John Boehner immediately seized on that arrest to warn Americans to be afraid: “We live in a dangerous country, and we get reminded every week of the dangers that are out there.” Boehner also told Americans they should be grateful for domestic surveillance and not try to curb it: the Speaker claimed that “the National Security Agency’s snooping powers helped stop a plot to attack the Capitol and that his colleagues need to keep that in mind as they debate whether to renew the law that allows the government to collect bulk information from its citizens.” Yet the only way Cornell got close to any crimes was because the FBI informant began suggesting to him that he act on his rage against U.S. officials by attacking the Capitol.
Salon articles of my reporting on FBI’s creation of terror plots it “stops”: Nov. 28, 2010 and Sep. 29, 2011
One of the most egregious cases I covered was the 2011 arrest of James Cromitie, an African-American convert to Islam who the FBI attempted to convince — over the course of eight months — to join a terror plot, only for him to adamantly refuse over and over. Only once they dangled a payment of $250,000 in front of his nose right after the impoverished American had lost his job did he agree to join, and then the FBI swooped in, arrested him, and touted their heroic efforts in stopping a terrorist plot.
The U.S. federal judge who sentenced Cromitie to decades in prison, Colleen McMahon, said she did so only because the law of “entrapment” is so narrow that it is virtually impossible for a defendant to win, but in doing so, she repeatedly condemned the FBI in the harshest terms for single-handedly converting Cromitie from a helpless but resentful anti-government fanatic into a criminal. The defendant “was incapable of committing an act of terrorism on his own,” she said, adding: “only the government could have made a terrorist out of Mr. Cromitie, whose buffoonery is positively Shakespearean in scope.” She added: “There is not the slightest doubt in my mind that James Cromitie could never have dreamed up the scenario in which he actually became involved.”
Her written ruling is worth quoting at length because of how relevant it is to current FBI activities. The judge began by noting that Cromitie “had successfully resisted going too far for eight months,” and agreed only after “the Government dangled what had to be almost irresistible temptation in front of an impoverished man from what I have come (after literally dozens of cases) to view as the saddest and most dysfunctional community in the Southern District of New York.” It was the FBI’s own informant, she wrote, who “was the prime mover and instigator of all the criminal activity that occurred.” She then wrote (emphasis added):
The Government indisputably “manufactured” the crimes of which defendants stand convicted. The Government invented all of the details of the scheme – many of them, such as the trip to Connecticut and the inclusion of Stewart AFB as a target, for specific legal purposes of which the defendants could not possibly have been aware (the former gave rise to federal jurisdiction and the latter mandated a twenty-five year minimum sentence). The Government selected the targets. The Government designed and built the phony ordnance that the defendants planted (or planned to plant) at Government-selected targets. The Government provided every item used in the plot: cameras, cell phones, cars, maps and even a gun. The Government did all the driving (as none of the defendants had a car or a driver’s license). The Government funded the entire project. And the Government, through its agent, offered the defendants large sums of money, contingent on their participation in the heinous scheme.
Additionally, before deciding that the defendants (particularly Cromitie, who was in their sights for nine months) presented any real danger, the Government appears to have done minimal due diligence, relying instead on reports from its Confidential Informant, who passed on information about Cromitie information that could easily have been verified (or not verified, since much of it was untrue), but that no one thought it necessary to check before offering a jihadist opportunity to a man who had no contact with any extremist groups and no history of anything other than drug crimes.
One of the reporters who has most extensively covered the FBI’s role in manufacturing terrorism cases it then proceeds to “break up” is Trevor Aaronson. In 2011, he documented, working with the Investigative Reporting Program at the University of California-Berkeley, that of 508 post-9/11 terrorism defendants, “nearly half the prosecutions involved the use of informants, many of them incentivized by money.” After 9/11, the FBI’s budget-increasing, power-enhancing strategy was to target “tens of thousands of law-abiding people, seeking to identify those disgruntled few who might participate in a plot given the means and the opportunity” by monitoring their social media postings, and “then, in case after case, the government provides the plot, the means, and the opportunity.” Of the terrorism arrests from sting operations, almost 1/3 were ones in which “defendants participated in plots led by an agent provocateur—an FBI operative instigating terrorist action.”
It is this long history and mountain of evidence that compels an investigation into the role played by the FBI in the planning of the 1/6 riot at the Capitol. And it is that same evidence that made the corporate media’s derisive reaction to such demands — as voiced by Darren Beattie’s Revolver News, Fox News’ Tucker Carlson and myself — so ignorant and subservient. They acted as if only some unhinged conspiracy theorist could possibly believe that the FBI would have informants and agents embedded in the groups that planned that Capitol riot rather than what it is: the only logical conclusion for anyone who knows how the FBI actually behaves.
Indeed, the BuzzFeed reporters who investigated the FBI’s key role in the Michigan case must have been very disturbed by what they found since they used their reporting to raise that taboo topic: what role did the FBI have in 1/6? Moreover, they asked, is this yet another era where the FBI is targeting Americans not for criminality but for their political views, and then orchestrating their own plots that justify the U.S. security state’s massive budget and unlimited powers?
Instead, [the accused] say, they were targeted because of their political views. Some describe the case as a premeditated campaign by the government to undermine the Patriot movement, an ideology based on fealty to the Second Amendment and the conviction that the government has violated the Constitution and is therefore illegitimate. They argue that the recordings and text messages that the government calls proof of a criminal conspiracy are in fact constitutionally protected speech — expressions of frustration at what they see as the government’s betrayal of its citizens.
The Michigan case is unfolding at another fraught moment in American history. In court, the government has drawn a direct line between the alleged kidnapping plot and the Jan. 6 insurrection, holding up the storming of the US Capitol as evidence that the Michigan defendants posed a profound threat. . . . [I]f the defense is able to undermine the methods used to build the Michigan case, it could add weight to the theory that the administration is conducting a witch hunt against militant groups — and, by extension, that the Jan. 6 insurrection was a black op engineered by the FBI.
When Carlson raised these same questions on his Fox program, he did what I did when doing so: cited my reporting as well as Trevor Aaronson’s about the FBI’s long history of orchestrating such plots and luring people into them using informants and undercover agents. Much of that reporting about the FBI’s tactics was published by The Intercept, which — when aimed at American Muslims during the First War on Terror — had an editorial view that it was extremely improper and dangerous for the FBI to do this. But now that it is being done to American anti-government activists on the right, the site’s liberal editors seem happy about it. They got Aaronson to write an article under the headline “Tucker Carlson Distorted My Reporting in His Latest Jan. 6 Conspiracy Theory.”
But that headline was an absolute lie. There was nothing in Aaronson’s article that pointed to any “distortions” in how Carlson (or I) cited Aaronson’s work. To the contrary, Aaronson himself acknowledged that the FBI’s past history — including in the Whitmer case — made such questions highly rational and necessary:
In many of these stings, informants or undercover agents provided all the money and weapons for terrorist plots, and sometimes even the ideas — raising significant questions about whether any of these people would have committed the crimes were it not for the FBI’s encouragement. Many targets of these FBI stings were mentally ill or otherwise easily manipulated. . . .
Carlson’s claim fits an existing and well-established argument: that the FBI creates crimes through aggressive stings where no crimes would otherwise exist. . . . I think it’s worth noting that there’s a reason for the cultural stickiness of the claim by Revolver and Carlson. It might be a conspiracy theory, but it’s not exactly “baseless,” as the Post described it. That’s because there are genuine concerns that the sting tactics used over the past two decades against impressionable Muslims will be used against equally impressionable Americans with right-wing ideologies. In the supposed plot to kidnap Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer, for example, FBI agents and an informant played significant roles, raising the same question that surrounds so many supposed Islamic State and Al Qaeda cases in the United States: Would this plot have happened were it not for the FBI?
In addition, there is evidence the FBI is assigning informants to infiltrate groups based solely on right-wing ideology. And the increase in right-wing violence in recent years has prompted calls for new anti-terorrism laws that would give the FBI even more power.
I think the FBI’s investigation of potential right-wing threats, and the degree to which the bureau replicates its abusive post-9/11 tactics, will be a critically important story in the coming years. How news organizations report on it will be a significant test.
While Aaronson insists that no proof has yet been presented that the FBI had foreknowledge of the 1/6 plot or encouraged it to happen, and also seized on a minor error in the Revolver News article originally raising these questions about “confidential informants” — an error I noted in my own article about this topic while explaining that it was ancillary and insignificant to the overall question — Aaronson’s article has far more in common with the primary theme raised by Carlson than it does arguments that Carlson “distorted” anything. In particular, Aaronson writes, the FBI’s ample history requires a serious investigation into the role it may have played in knowing about and/or encouraging the 1/6 plotters.
As I documented in my own reporting on this question, there is ample evidence to believe that the FBI had informants embedded in at least two of three key groups it says were behind the 1/6 Capitol riot. As I noted at the time, most of the corporate press spewed contempt and scorn on these questions because 1/6 has become an event that carries virtually religious importance to them, and their reverence for the U.S. security state makes them resistant to any suggestions that the FBI may have acted deceitfully — an utterly bizarre mindset for U.S. journalists to possess. But such is the state of the liberal sector of the corporate press today.
Now that one of their own liberal members in good standing — BuzzFeed — has not only proven the FBI’s key role in the Whitmer plot but also themselves suggested that it makes more plausible the bureau’s involvement in 1/6, these questions are becoming increasingly unavoidable. Both the Whitmer plot and especially 1/6 are absolutely crucial to everything that has happened since: the launch of the new War on Terror, billions more in funds for the security state, proposals for greater surveillance, Biden’s use of the intelligence community to insist that anti-government activists constitute the greatest threat to U.S. national security. Asking what role the FBI played in the episode at the Capitol is not only rational but imperative.
Here is how you do the Big Lie/ CNBC and the 99.5% of deaths in the unvaccinated
By Meryl Nass, MD | July 22, 2021
First CNBC set up the story. It provided facts that actually don’t mean very much but sound frightening. It said the virus is 1,000 times more transmissible than the original. In fact, precisely this strategy was used in the early days of Covid.
The variant is highly contagious, largely because people infected with the delta strain can carry up to 1,000 times more virus in their nasal passages than those infected with the original strain, according to new data.
At the onset of the pandemic, in March 2020, SARS-2 was alleged to be 1,000 times more transmissible than SARS-1. And today, the hot story is that the Delta variant is 1,000 times more transmissible than the original strain of SARS-2. Which would make it 1 million times more transmissible than SARS-1.
But what does that really mean? In the real world, more transmissibility is generally associated with lowered virulence. And that is precisely the case when you compare SARS-1 and SARS-2, and the Delta versus the original Covid strain. Each has considerably less virulence than the earlier coronavirus.
It means the Delta variant might be as transmissible as the flu. And it happens to be the least virulent of the seven variants being evaluated in the UK.
Now that you have gotten everyone’s attention, you throw in some quotes from the CDC Director, who happily obliges with more meaningless drivel:
“The delta variant is more aggressive and much more transmissible than previously circulating strains,” CDC Director Dr. Rochelle Walensky told reporters at a briefing Thursday. “It is one of the most infectious respiratory viruses we know of, and that I have seen in my 20-year career.”
Aggressive sounds pretty bad, but what does it mean? In fact, it has no medical meaning. The claim of high transmissibility is repeated, while nothing else is being said.
How transmissible is flu? CDC states that between 3% and 20% of Americans get the flu each winter, within a brief 3 months. Delta is presumably in the same ballpark.
The stage has been prepared. The CDC Director has opined on the latest horribleness. The audience is nervous and paying full attention.
What comes next appears to be from a reliable source. But in fact, it came out of left field. There is no source. No attribution whatsoever.
CNBC stated:
“In hospitals around the country, 97% of people admitted with Covid symptoms are unvaccinated, and 99.5% of all Covid deaths are also among the unvaccinated.”
The numbers cannot be verified by the press, or by me, or by anyone who does not have an official list of the vaccinated. Most people were vaccinated in mass clinics. The vaccinations are not in their medical records. There are no insurance claims for the vaccine, which was free. While the states and CDC do have those lists, somewhere, CDC has previously claimed it could not match the list of the vaccinated to reported post-vaccination deaths to corroborate and evaluate them.
In the UK, with similar vaccination rates as the US, it was reported that the majority of hospitalizations are occurring in the VACCINATED. This according to Sir Patrick Vallance, the UK’s chief science advisor, who is also known as a member of the Fauci Covid origin cover-up cabal.
According to Reuters, Vallance now says he misspoke.
Vallance earlier said at a news conference with Prime Minister Boris Johnson that 60% of people being admitted to hospital with COVID-19 have had two doses of vaccine.
“Correcting a statistic I gave at the press conference,” Vallance said on Twitter. “About 60% of hospitalisations from COVID are not from double vaccinated people, rather 60% of hospitalisations from COVID are currently from unvaccinated people.”
When the public has no means of verification, the media (as well as government officials) can say anything they please. How does 99.5% sound? There’s nothing stopping you. So why not go for broke? And if there is pushback, just change the numbers tomorrow.
Johnson’s journey from reason to tyranny
By Gary Oliver | The Conservative Woman | July 23, 2021
ACCORDING to his resentful former chief of staff, last October Boris Johnson initially resisted another national lockdown because, as paraphrased by Dominic Cummings, ‘The people dying are essentially all over 80 and we can’t kill the economy just because of people dying over 80.’
Even if the words attributed to Johnson are not verbatim, the sentiment is consistent with the reservations the Prime Minister put in writing at the time, when he questioned the need to reimpose restrictions for ‘Covid fatalities [having] a median age . . . that is above life expectancy’.
Cummings and BBC interviewer Laura Kuenssberg cosily concurred that Johnson’s reluctance to reinstate restraints was an egregious example of him ‘putting his own political interests ahead of people’s lives’. The detractors who decry Johnson for having been insufficiently authoritarian will no doubt agree and accuse him of callous indifference; however, it is difficult to understand how defying the large, loud and influential pro-lockdown lobby would have been in ‘his own political interests’.
Despite his apparent reservations, at the end of October 2020 Johnson did of course succumb to the siren calls and issued a further stay-at-home order – again enraging sceptics for whom lockdowns have been a dementedly disproportionate response and an unconscionable violation of our freedoms.
From the lockdown addicts, there is much confected shock and outrage that last autumn Johnson did not concentrate solely on the coronavirus casualties, but instead wanted to weigh the titanic trade-offs between lives, livelihoods and liberty. From those of us who deplore him being a stooge for scheming scientists and mendacious modellers, there is surprise that the Johnson of October 2020 seemingly was still capable of rational and independent thought, albeit he soon surrendered to the scaremongers.
Nine months on, this week’s pusillanimous performance by Johnson confirms that he has been completely captured by the public health partisans. On what was bogusly billed as ‘freedom day’, it was horrifying to hear the UK Prime Minister announce: ‘I would remind everybody that some of life’s most important pleasures and opportunities are likely to be increasingly dependent on vaccination.’
A chilling prospect, and a dystopia which Johnson warns might only be two months away: ‘By the end of September . . . we’re planning to make full vaccination a condition of entry to nightclubs and other venues where large crowds gather. Proof of a negative test will no longer be enough.’
Some on the Right complacently regard this as an idle threat to pressgang young adults into accepting a vaccination for which they have no need. According to Sarah Knapton, the Telegraph’s Science Editor: ‘It may even teach them a little something about collective responsibility – and in an era of epidemic levels of self-absorption, that can only be a good thing.’
To be clear: this is the science editor – repeat, science editor – of an allegedly conservative newspaper arguing that young people should not only submit to a coerced and unnecessary medical procedure but also be grateful for a lesson in morality.
Knapton should be ashamed of herself, as should Boris Johnson for even suggesting that vaccination status should be a condition of entry to any social gathering. Regardless of whether it is a tactical threat or a repressive promise, from the British Prime Minister it is reprehensible rhetoric.
Leave aside the impracticalities and suspect science which underpins the plan: Conservative MPs should publicly oppose on principle this contemptible plan which Big Brother Watch accurately describes as ‘divisive, discriminatory and wrong’.
Depressingly, most Tories are too lily-livered to resist, and at the time of writing only 42 of the parliamentary party have pledged: ‘We oppose the divisive and discriminatory use of Covid status certification to deny individuals access to general services, businesses or jobs.’
So far Big Brother Watch’s petition against Covid passes has been signed by almost as many LibDem and Labour MPs. Right now, there is more reason to respect signatories Diane Abbot, Richard Burgon and Dawn Butler than the unconcerned and cowardly Conservatives.
British Disinfo Machine Out of Whack: The Guardian’s Trump-Russia ‘Bombshell’ Reeks of Forgery
By Ekaterina Blinova – Sputnik – 22.07.2021
The Guardian’s latest “bombshell” story about how President Vladimir Putin ordered Russian spies at a closed session of the National Security Council to use “all possible force” to make Donald Trump win in 2016 has not got as much media attention as it was apparently planned.
The article written, by Luke Harding, Dan Sabbagh, and Julian Borger appeared on The Guardian’s website on 15 July at 10:00 GMT. Another op-ed on the matter with a byline containing only Harding and Sabbagh was published on the same day at 17:05 GMT. The news was also advertised in the website’s First Thing section on 15 and 16 July and yet, surprisingly, just a “few Western mainstream media outlets have written or reported on what they were all speculating and salivating about for all four years of the Trump presidency”, notes Mark Sleboda, a US military veteran and international affairs and security analyst.
Still, there’s an obvious explanation why the MSM has not taken the bait: the so-called “leak” smacks of an obvious bunk, according to the analyst, who outlines some obvious discrepancies in The Guardian’s “exposé”:
First, it’s absolutely unclear how the supposed “leaked docs” ended up in The Guardian’s hands: there is no chain of custody or explanation at all.
Second, despite The Guardian’s claims that Western intelligence agencies have had these documents for months, no Western government or intelligence agency, neither the British nor the Americans, has so much as made a comment or peep about it.
Third, almost universally native Russian speakers have noticed and called out numerous incidences of lexical awkwardness and mistakes in the snippets, suggesting that the text was written by a non-native Russian speaker with limited cultural fluency.
Fourth, the Russian National Security Council is a formal political body which is not designed for discussing sensitive clandestine operations.
Fifth, the President’s Expert Directorate headed by economist Vladimir Simonenko – named by The Guardian as the apparent author of the grand design to take over the US elections – in fact deals entirely with domestic matters, including the financing of the president and the presidential administration’s activities, as well as collecting, analysing and preparing materials for the president’s annual addresses.
Sixth, the alleged secret meeting took place in January 2016 when Donald Trump was not even considered as a serious presidential candidate, let alone the Republican nominee.
Seventh, the article is riddled with hedging words and expressions, papers “appear to show”, “documents suggest”, “assessed to be”, etc., as if the authors knew that they were peddling disinformation.
The Guardian report “reeks of disinformation operation”, former Director of Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency Chris Krebs remarked on 15 July. Krebs echoes another cybersecurity expert, Thomas Rid of John Hopkins University, who listed a series of issues with the “Kremlin leak” in a Twitter thread.
Many more former Western intelligence operatives and experts publicly questioned the documents’ veracity in both media and social media, including Director of Russian Studies at CNA Michael Kofman, former Information Security Specialist for GCHQ Matt Tait, and former US NSC staff Gavin Wilde.
Even Dmitri Alperovitch, a co-founder and former CTO of Crowdstrike, who groundlessly blamed “Russian hackers” for breaching DNC servers back in 2016, has weighed in, dismissing the “leak” as forgery.
What’s Behind the ‘Kremlin Leak’ Story?
On the surface, the “leak” appears to confirm practically every Russiagate fantasy and makes an oblique reference to unspecified “kompromat” on Trump – an apparent reference to ex-MI6 agent Christopher Steele’s “dirty dossier” on the then presidential candidate and his campaign, Sleboda points out.
The analyst highlights that one of the authors of The Guardian’s latest exposé – Luke Harding – has long been an ardent adept of the Steele dossier, despite the ex-British spook’s bizarre claims having neither been corroborated nor confirmed by Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s Trump-Russia investigation.
“There seems a likely possibility that these new ‘Kremlin documents’ like the previous Steele dossiers, were fabricated by British intelligence or elements within it, for the same purposes of discrediting Trump and preventing any, even faint, detente in US-Russian relations, whether under Trump or Biden”, suggests Sleboda.
The UK has played a special role in the Trump-Russia story: “There has long been a widely held belief by many because of the prominence of the Steele dossier during the whole Russigate episode that there was a significant degree of the British tail wagging the US political dog”, the analyst says.
Four years ago, Harding claimed that the UK intelligence service GCHQ became aware of “suspicious ‘interactions’ between figures connected to Trump and known or suspected Russian agents” as early as in 2015, well before their American counterparts. Citing unnamed sources in the UK intelligence community, the journalist presumed that British and EU spies collected information on Trump between late 2015 and summer 2016.
“It is understood that GCHQ was at no point carrying out a targeted operation against Trump or his team or proactively seeking information”, Harding asserted on 13 April 2017. “The alleged conversations were picked up by chance as part of routine surveillance of Russian intelligence assets”.
Furthermore, “[Harding] has previously claimed in The Guardian that British intelligence and Foreign Office was given the Steele dossier before it was sent to the United States and vouched for Steele’s ‘credibility’ in reference to it”, Sleboda remarks.
In 2021 alone, the British media has published a number of articles in support of Steele’s debunked narrative:
· in January, The Guardian ran an outlandish story of Trump being “cultivated” by the Soviet KGB for 40 years;
· in May, The Telegraph broke a story about a “second dossier” written by Steele during Trump’s presidency;
· four days prior to Harding’s “bombshell”, Guardian contributor Charles Kaiser tried to rehabilitate at least part of Steele’s “dirty dossier”, alleging that Trump aide Carter Page may have struck a lucrative deal with Russia’s Rosneft, something that wasn’t confirmed by Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation.
The fact that Steele’s story is being kept alive in the British media would seem to indicate that the UK establishment is still backing Steele’s anti-Trump/anti-Russia disinformation campaign, the security analyst believes.
If the “Kremlin documents” were indeed deliberately planted by the UK intelligence elements to target Trump’s potential 2024 election bid as well as US-Russia relations under Biden, this is “an extremely important and dangerous situation”, according to Sleboda.
“It would mean that the British government and/or intelligence have repeatedly conducted active measures to manipulate and interfere in both US domestic elections and foreign policy, destabilising the US political system domestically and putting the entire world at risk by deliberately increasing tensions between the world’s two foremost nuclear armed powers”, he says. “There will likely be no investigation or accountability into this latest Guardian piece of disinformation about Russia in the Western MSM but there most certainly should and desperately needs to be one”.
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The toxic legacy of nuclear weapons testing serves as a stark warning of the danger these weapons pose
By Scott Ritter | RT | March 11, 2021
Millions of people suffer and die from the effects of radiation exposure from decades of nuclear weapons testing. Their experience should give serious pause to those who continue to embrace the viability of a nuclear deterrent. … continue
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