There are not many Congressional committees regularly engaged in substantive and serious work — most are performative — but the House Judiciary’s Subcommittee on Antitrust, Commercial, and Administrative Law is an exception. Chaired by Rep. David Cicilline (D-RI) and Rep. Ken Buck (R-CO), it is, with a few exceptions, composed of lawmakers whose knowledge of tech monopolies and anti-trust law is impressive.
In October, the Committee, after a sixteen-month investigation, produced one of those most comprehensive and informative reports by any government body anywhere in the world about the multi-pronged threats to democracy raised by four Silicon Valley monopolies: Facebook, Google, Amazon and Apple. The 450-page report also proposed sweeping solutions, including ways to break up these companies and/or constrain them from controlling our political discourse and political life. That report merits much greater attention and consideration than it has thus far received.
The Subcommittee held a hearing on Friday and I was invited to testify along with Microsoft President Brad Smith; President of the News Guild-Communications Workers of America Jonathan Schleuss, the Outkick’s Clay Travis, CEO of the Graham Media Group Emily Barr, and CEO of the News Media Alliance David Chavern. The ostensible purpose the hearing was a narrow one: to consider a bill that would vest media outlets with an exemption from anti-trust laws to collectively bargain with tech companies such as Facebook and Google so that they can obtain a greater share of the ad revenue. The representatives of the news industry and Microsoft who testified were naturally in favor because this bill (they have been heavily lobbying for it) because it would benefit them commercially in numerous way (the Microsoft President maintained the conceit that the Bill-Gates-founded company was engaging in self-sacrifice for the good of Democracy by supporting the bill but the reality is the Bing search engine owners are in favor of anything that weakens Google).
While I share the ostensible motive behind the bill — to stem the serious crisis of bankruptcies and closings of local news outlets — I do not believe that this bill will end up doing that, particularly because it empowers the largest media outlets such as The New York Times and MSNBC to dominate the process and because it does not even acknowledge, let alone address, the broader problems plaguing the news industry, including collapsing trust by the public (a bill that limited this anti-trust exemption to small local news outlets so as to allow them to bargain collectively with tech companies in their own interest would seem to me to serve the claimed purpose much better than one which empowers media giants to form a negotiating cartel).
But the broader context for the bill is the one most interesting and the one on which I focused in my opening statement and testimony: namely, the relationship between social media and tech giants on the one hand, and the news media industry on the other. Contrary to the popular narrative propagated by news outlets — in which they are cast as the victims of the supremely powerful Silicon Valley giants — that narrative is sometimes (not always, but sometimes) the opposite of reality: much if not most Silicon Valley censorship of political speech emanates from pressure campaigns led by corporate media outlets and their journalists, demanding that more and more of their competitors and ideological adversaries be silenced. Big media, in other words, is coopting the power of Big Tech for their own purposes.
My written opening testimony, which is on the Committee’s site, is also printed below. The video of the full hearing can be seen here. Here is the video of my opening five-minute statement:
Opening Statement of Glenn Greenwald
March 12, 2021
Before the House Subcommittee on Antitrust, Commercial and Administrative Law
Mr. Chairman and members of the Committee:
Thank you for the opportunity to testify.
I am a constitutional lawyer, a journalist, and the author of six books on civil liberties, media and politics. After graduating New York University School of Law in 1994, I worked as a constitutional and media law litigator for more than a decade, first at the firm of Wachtell, Lipton, Rosen & Katz, and then at a firm I co-founded in 1997. During my work as a lawyer, I represented numerous clients in First Amendment free speech and press freedom cases, including individuals with highly controversial views who were targeted for punishment by state and non-state actors alike, as well as media outlets subjected to repressive state limitations on their rights of expression and reporting.
Since 2005, I have worked primarily as a journalist and author, reporting extensively on civil liberties debates, assaults on free speech and a free press, the value of a free and open internet, the implications of growing Silicon Valley monopolistic power, and the complex relationship between corporate media outlets and social media companies. That reporting has received the 2014 Pulitzer Prize for Public Service and the George Polk Award for National Security Reporting. In 2013, I co-founded the online news outlet The Intercept, and in 2016 co-founded its Brazilian branch, The Intercept Brazil.
Over the last several years, my journalistic interest in and concern about the dangers of Silicon Valley’s monopoly power has greatly intensified — particularly as wielded by Facebook, Google, Amazon and Apple. The dangers posed by their growing power manifest in multiple ways. But I am principally alarmed by the repressive effect on free discourse, a free press, and a free internet, all culminating in increasingly intrusive effects on the flow of information and ideas and an increasingly intolerable strain on a healthy democracy.
Three specific incidents over the last four months represent a serious escalation in the willingness of tech monopolies to intrude into and exert control over our domestic politics through censorship and other forms of information manipulation:
In the weeks leading up to the 2020 presidential election, The New York Post, the nation’s oldest newspaper, broke a major story based on documents and emails obtained from the laptop of Hunter Biden, son of the front-running presidential candidate Joe Biden. Those documents shed substantial light not only on the efforts of Hunter and other family members of President Biden to trade on his name and their influence on him for lucrative business deals around the world, but also raised serious questions about the extent to which President Biden himself was aware of and involved in those efforts.But Americans were barred from discussing that reporting on Twitter, and were actively impeded from reading about it by Facebook.That is because Twitter imposed a full ban on its users’ ability to link to the story: not just on their public Twitter pages but even in private Twitter chats. Twitter even locked the account of The New York Post, preventing the newspaper from using that platform for almost two weeks unless they agreed to voluntarily delete any references to their reporting about the Hunter Biden materials (the paper, rightfully, refused).
Facebook’s censorship of this reporting was more subtle and therefore more insidious: a life-long Democratic Party operative who is now a Facebook official, Andy Stone, announced (on Twitter) that Facebook would be “reducing [the article’s] distribution on our platform” pending a review “by Facebook’s third-party fact checking partners.” In other words, Facebook tinkered with its algorithms to prevent the dissemination of this reporting about a long-time politician who was leading the political party for which this Facebook official spent years working (See The Intercept, “Facebook and Twitter Cross a Far More Dangerous Line Than What They Censor,” Oct. 15, 2020).
This “fact-check” promised by Facebook never came. That is likely because it was not the New York Post’s reporting which turned out to be false but rather the claims made by these two social media giants to justify its suppression. The censorship justification was that the documents on which the reporting was based constituted either “hacked materials” and/or “Russian disinformation.”
Neither of those claims is true. Even the FBI has acknowledged that there is no evidence whatsoever of any involvement by the Russian government in the procurement of that laptop, and not even the Biden family, to this very day, has claimed that a single word contained in the published documents is fabricated or otherwise inauthentic. Ample evidence — including the testimony of others involved in the original creation and circulation of those documents — demonstrates that they were fully genuine.
This means that two of the largest and most powerful Silicon Valley giants suppressed crucial information about a leading presidential candidate — the one which employees at their companies overwhelmingly supported — shortly before voting commenced. While Twitter’s CEO Jack Dorsey apologized for this banning and acknowledged that it may have been wrong, Facebook has never done so.
While we will never know whether this censorship altered the outcome of the election, it is clear that this was one of the most direct acts of information repression about an American presidential election in decades. That was possible only because of the vast power wielded by these platforms over our political discourse and our political lives.
In the wake of the January 6 riot at the Capitol, Facebook, Google, Twitter and numerous other Silicon Valley giants united to remove the democratically elected sitting President of the United States from their platforms. While many defenders of this corporate censorship tried to minimize it by claiming the President could still be heard by giving speeches and holding press conferences, several leading news outlets followed suit by announcing that they would not carry his speeches live and would only allow to be heard the excerpts they deemed to be safe and responsible.In response, numerous world leaders — including several who had clashed in the past with President Trump — expressed grave concerns about the dangers posed to democracy by the ability of tech monopolies to effectively remove even democratically elected leaders from the internet.
German Chancellor Angela Merkel argued through her spokesperson that “it is problematic that the president’s accounts have been permanently suspended,” adding that “the right to freedom of opinion is of fundamental importance.” Attempts to regulate speech, the Chancellor said, “can be interfered with, but by law and within the framework defined by the legislature — not according to a corporate decision.”
The European Union’s Commissioner for Internal Markets Thierry Breton warned: “The fact that a CEO can pull the plug on POTUS’s loudspeaker without any checks and balances is perplexing.” Commissioner Breton noted that this collective Silicon Valley ban “is not only confirmation of the power of these platforms, but it also displays deep weaknesses in the way our society is organized in the digital space.” (CNBC, “Germany’s Merkel hits out at Twitter over ‘problematic’ Trump ban,” Jan. 21, 2021).
The Health Secretary for the United Kingdom, Matt Hanckock, sounded similar alarms. Speaking to the BBC, he said “‘tech giants are ‘taking editorial decisions’ that raise a ‘very big question’ about how social media is regulated,” adding: “That’s clear because they’re choosing who should and shouldn’t have a voice on their platform” (CNBC, “Trump’s social media bans are raising new questions on tech regulation,” Jan. 11, 2021).
Objections to Silicon Valley’s removal of President Trump from their platforms were even more severe from officials with the government of French President Emmanuel Macron. The French Minister for European Union Affairs Clement Beaune pronounced himself “shocked” by the news of President Trump’s banning, arguing: “This should be decided by citizens, not by a CEO.” And France’s Finance Minister Bruno Le Maire said: “There needs to be public regulation of big online platforms,” calling big tech “one of the threats” to democracy (Bloomberg News, “Germany and France Oppose Trump’s Twitter Exile,” Jan. 11, 2021).
Perhaps the most fervent and eloquent warnings about the dangers posed by this episode came from Mexican President Andrés Manuel López Obrador. In a press conference held the day after the announcement, he said:
It’s a bad omen that private companies decide to silence, to censor. That is an attack on freedom. Let’s not be creating a world government with the power to control social networks, a world media power. And also a censorship court, like the Holy Inquisition, but in order to shape public opinion. This is really serious.
The Associated Press further quoted President López Obrador as asking: “How can a company act as if it was all powerful, omnipotent, as a sort of Spanish Inquisition on what is expressed?.” And AP confirmed that “ Mexico’s president vowed to lead an international effort to combat what he considers censorship by social media companies that have blocked or suspended the accounts of U.S. President Donald Trump,” and is “reaching out to other governments to form a common front on the issue” (Associated Press, “Mexican President Mounts Campaign Against Social Media Bans,” Jan. 14, 2021).
These world leaders are expressing the same grave concern: that Silicon Valley giants wield power that is, in many instances, greater than that of any sovereign nation-state. But unlike the governments which govern those countries, tech monopolies apply these powers arbitrarily, without checks and without transparency. When doing so, they threaten not only American democracy but democracies around the world.
Critics of Silicon Valley power over political discourse for years have heard the same refrain: if you don’t like how they are moderating content and policing discourse, you can go start your own social media platform that is more permissive. Leaving aside the centuries-old recognition that it is impossible, by definition, to effectively compete with monopolies, we now have an incident vividly proving how inadequate that alternative is. Several individuals who primarily identify as libertarians heard this argument from Silicon Valley’s defenders and took it seriously. They set out to create a social media competitor to Twitter and Facebook — one which would provide far broader free expression rights for users and, more importantly, would offer greater privacy protections than other Silicon Valley giants by refusing to track those users and commoditize them for advertisers. They called it Parler, and in early January, 2021, it was the single most-downloaded app in the Apple Play Store. This success story seemed to be a vindication for the claim that it was possible to create competitors to existing social media monopolies.But now, a mere two months after it ascended to the top of the charts, Parler barely exists. That is because several members of Congress with the largest and most influential social media platforms demanded that Apple and Google remove Parler from their stores and ban any further downloading of the app, and further demanded that Amazon, the dominant provider of web hosting services, cease hosting the site. Within forty-eight hours, those three Silicon Valley monopolies complied with those demands, rendering Parler inoperable and effectively removing it from the internet (See “How Silicon Valley, in a Show of Monopolistic Force, Destroyed Parler,” Glenn Greenwald, Jan. 12, 2021).
Whatever else one might want to say about the destruction of Parler, it was a stark illustration of how these Silicon Valley giants could obliterate even a highly successful competitor overnight, with little effort, by uniting to do so. And it laid bare how inadequate is the claim that Silicon Valley’s monopolies can be challenged through competition.
How Congress sets out to address Silicon Valley’s immense and undemocratic power is a complicated question, posing complex challenges. The proposal to vest media companies with an antitrust exemption in order to allow them to negotiate as a consortium or cartel seeks to rectify a real and serious problem — the vacuuming up of advertising revenue by Google and Facebook at the expense of the journalistic outlets which create the news content being monetized — but empowering large media companies could easily end up creating more problems than it solves.
That is particularly so given that it is often media companies that are the cause of Silicon Valley censorship of and interference in political speech of the kind outlined above. When these social media companies were first created and in the years after, they wanted to avoid being in the business of content moderation and political censorship. This was an obligation foisted upon them, often by the most powerful media outlets using their large platforms to shame these companies and their executives for failing to censor robustly enough.
Sometimes this pressure was politically motivated — demanding the banning of people whose ideologies sharply differs from those who own and control these media outlets — but more often it was motivated by competitive objectives: a desire to prevent others from creating independent platforms and thus diluting the monopolistic stranglehold that corporate media outlets exert over our political discourse. Further empowering this already-powerful media industry — which has demonstrated it will use its force to silence competitors under the guise of “quality control” — runs the real risk of transferring the abusive monopoly power from Silicon Valley to corporate media companies or, even worse, encouraging some sort of de facto merger in which these two industries pool their power to the mutual benefit of each.
This Subcommittee produced one of the most impressive and comprehensive reports last October detailing the dangers of the classic monopoly power wielded by Google, Facebook, Amazon and Apple. That report set forth numerous legislative and regulatory solutions to comply with the law and a consensus of economic and political science experts about the need to break up monopolies wherever they arise.
Until that is done, none of these problems can be addressed in ways other than the most superficial, piecemeal and marginal. Virtually every concern that Americans across the political spectrum express about the dangers of Silicon Valley power emanates from the fact that they have been permitted to flout antitrust laws and acquire monopoly power. None of those problems — including their ability to police and control our political discourse and the flow of information — can be addressed until that core problem is resolved.
What is most striking is that while Silicon Valley censorship of online speech and interference in political discourse is recognized as a grave menace to a healthy democracy around the democratic world, it is often dismissed in the U.S. — especially by journalists — as some sort of trivial “culture war” question when they are not actively cheering and even demanding more of it. Even more bizarre is that opposition to oligarchical censorship and monopoly power is often depicted by the liberal-left as a right-wing cause, largely because they perceive (inaccurately) that such oligarchical discourse policing will operate in their favor.
Whatever labels one wants to apply to it, it should not require much work to recognize that vesting this magnitude of power in the hands of unaccountable billionaires, who operate outside the democratic process yet are highly influenced by public media-led pressure campaigns, is unsustainable.
In most nations, when a particular criminal conduct reaches epidemic proportion, the government finally acts decisively to eradicate it. Not in America; they solve the problem by legalising it. They did this with influence-peddling (lobbying) and drugs, the same now occurring with domestic propaganda which has been against the law for a very long time to protect citizens from psychological manipulation and control by their own government. The law has always been ignored, but Congress is now dispensing with the pretense in repealing two major laws, the 1948 Smith-Mundt Act (1) (2) (3) (4) and the 1987 Foreign Relations Authorization Act, so as to permit the authorities to disperse false and misleading propaganda and campaigns of misinformation against its own people. Of course, the government has always done this surreptitiously, sometimes to an overwhelming extent as in the case of war marketing, but it has always been illegal. After this, it won’t be. One Pentagon official claimed this new provision will have “No checks and balances. No one will know if the information is accurate, partially accurate, or entirely false”. In an article in USA Today, it was quoted that the US military (Pentagon) already spends about $4 billion per year on propaganda to sway public opinion, much of that directed domestically. (5) (6) (7)
We now have the sock puppets, (8) (9) the fake social media personas on the Internet, used by the US military and intelligence agencies to affect and lead public opinion in many countries, usually with the intent of inciting civil unrest and revolution. It has been obvious for some time that these tactics have been used domestically as well, the new legislation simply legalising the process. Many US government agencies have obtained this software that permits them to flood the social media with fake people making fake posts in support of government positions and discrediting those who hold contrary views or are critical of the government. The software is extremely detailed, providing extensive backgrounds for these fictitious people, permitting a single human to assume the identities of as many as 1,000 fake people, and make them appear to actually be in a certain physical place or even attending an actual event. They control the IP address, making it impossible to detect that a single person in one location is orchestrating all that activity. The program manual states, “There is a variety of social media tricks we can use to add a level of realness to all fictitious personas”. The contract requires “virtual private servers” located in and outside the US, to give false locational information, and also requires what it calls “traffic mixing”, blending the persona controllers’ internet usage with the usage of people outside Centcom in a manner that offers “excellent cover and powerful deniability”.
This “Persona management software” is now being used to manipulate public opinion on key issues, with unlimited numbers of virtual people regularly flooding US social media with pro-government propaganda in attempts to manage public perception and kill political activism. This is called “counter-messaging” and the Pentagon has made no secret of its activities in promulgating “black propaganda” – which means knowingly spreading lies to mislead and misinform the public for the purpose of stifling political dissent. In its increasing fear of political activism, the US government has labeled the Internet as a “breeding ground for domestic terrorists”, and appears to include in this category anyone who questions the government’s version of events. This is all part of a massive program to intimidate, manipulate, and crush all public dissent, and to control not only domestic discussion but also to actively manipulate worldwide opinion. Their activity is becoming common in China where, on the occurrence of an event containing useful propaganda fuel, we often see a flood of commentary on Weibo supporting the American position, these ostensibly being posted by native Chinese but almost inevitably originating in Fort Langley, Virginia.
The government has used these in smear campaigns (10) (11) (12) against reporters and other high-profile individuals who criticise US government policy, to the extent of creating fake Facebook and Twitter accounts in their names, containing fake posts meant to be personally damaging, and have even created fake websites and Wikipedia pages purporting to belong to an individual, all for the purpose of discrediting “dissidents”. When a Taiwanese scientist aired his research identifying the 5 haplotypes of COVID-19 and proving America had to be the original source since these types existed only in the USA, the VOA harassed the man so badly online that he closed all his social media accounts and went dark.
The US government performs surveillance and infiltration in attempts to control the public dialogue in many nations, creating Twitter-like social media platforms in other countries, ostensibly local but all monitored and controlled by US agencies. Most are the work of USAID. The Americans innocently proclaim the purpose as “encouraging open political discussion” (in every nation but the US), but it’s a ‘discussion’ they mean to control entirely and skew to satisfy their agenda of inciting unrest and revolution. One such platform in Cuba was widely ridiculed when knowledge of it became public in early 2014, and was killed. (13) (14) (15) Even the Associated Press reported that it “was set up to encourage political dissent”, but White House officials claimed they wanted only “to provide Cubans with a platform to share ideas and exchange information”, claiming it was used to “share cricket scores” and by farmers to “share market prices”. Maybe, but it was used primarily for political destabilisation. The State Department and USAID actively pushed for these platforms after their successes in causing the uprisings in Egypt, Tunisia and Iran. The State Department also provided several million dollars to a team of American hackers to develop a system known as a mesh network to enable US-sponsored dissidents in Cuba to communicate more freely and securely, with USAID committing yet another several million to the same cause. This is precisely what the US has been doing in Hong Kong for many years now.
The real owners and controllers of Google are reading from the same script. Google is not actively propagandising, but functions as an information gateway with all searches heavily censored and prioritised so that we see only what the secret government wants us to see and receive only the information they want or permit us to have. (16) Facebook and Twitter are not better. (17) Wikipedia is different, being one of the most criminally-dishonest active propagandists in the world. (18) There is surprisingly little in Wikipedia that is not either censored or outright false. If you want to know the number of protons in a Cesium atom, you will find the correct answer, but in any area related to history, politics, wars, government, the Jews, Israel, Arabs, ‘Axis of evil’ members, crimes of governments and corporations, the truths of the European bankers and their ravaging of the world, Wikipedia is 95% sanitised misinformation. And this propaganda is intense; Wiki has tens of thousands of ‘volunteers’ constantly scouring all the page entries to find items requiring editing or deleting. Many people have reported correcting an obviously false entry only to discover moments later that their corrections had been deleted and the page locked. Perhaps the biggest laugh is Wiki’s claim that “Content Requires Verifiable Data”. Maybe, but only from you.
The final pillar of this social engineering is the Jewish-owned and/or controlled media and entertainment industries which have long since abandoned the dissemination of truth and information and wholeheartedly adopted the primary task of propagandising the public mind. Today, the topics are different than the war marketing of Bernays, but – and this is very important to understand – the intensity remains the same. Just as Bernays once flooded every possible media channel with war-mongering hatred, today those same channels are directed to nations other than Germany (China, Russia, Iran, Iraq, Libya Cuba, Syria, Venezuela), to the instillation of fear (the war on terrorism) which is easily manipulated to achieve astonishing measures of social control, and to detail-less information to maintain public ignorance and confusion on all important issues. Paul Craig Roberts wrote that “The American media does not serve the truth. It serves the government and the interest groups that empower the government. The function of the “mainstream media” is to sell products and to brainwash the audience for the government and interest groups.” (19) That is precisely correct.
The book publishers are also onside in this vast propaganda campaign. The content of educational texts especially is heavily controlled by the disparate elements of the propaganda machine, with countless topics and theories proscribed. Howard Zinn was a notable exception in having some of his “radical” (i.e. accurate) history books published, but today, only shortly after his death, all his books are being removed from school libraries and destroyed. During the past two or three generations it has become increasingly difficult, and now almost impossible, to publish books on topics that would pose a threat to the activities of the secret government, and more than a few individuals have been killed for trying. The concentration of media and publishing power is not an accident, but part of a plan to eliminate information contradictory to the best interests of Bernays’ invisible people. Today, many publishers and authors will testify that Amazon actively suppresses many books while pretending to sell them.
Neal Gabler, author of An Empire of Their Own: How the Jews invented Hollywood, (20) (21) wrote “What is amazing is the extent to which they succeeded in promulgating this fiction throughout the world. By making a ‘shadow’ America, one which idealized every old glorifying bromide about the country, the Hollywood Jews created a powerful cluster of images and ideas so powerful that, in a sense, they colonized the American imagination. Ultimately, American values came to be defined largely by the movies the Jews made.”
The US movie industry is the worst of all media for fictionalising history and reality and replacing them with fabricated mythology. A recent example is Steven Spielberg’s unforgivably distorted portrayal of Lincoln and slavery and the American civil war. It was the Rothschild’s Barings Bank that financed the slave trade, and a great many if not most of the slave traders were Jewish. Furthermore, we have adequate documentation that it was European Jewish bankers who stimulated the slavery-related rift in American society to instigate the civil war. In this context, Spielberg’s movie is an especially offensive false and mythical portrayal of the true facts. As one columnist noted, Spielberg’s movie “had too many negroes and too few Jews”. The upshot is that tens of millions of gullible Americans will take with them to their graves a totally and absolutely false understanding of a critical period in their nation’s history.
That is the real issue, and that brings us back to Bernays who wrote: “The American motion picture is the greatest unconscious carrier of propaganda in the world to-day. It is a great distributor for ideas and opinions. The motion picture can standardize the ideas and habits of a nation.” It also begins very early to indoctrinate little minds.
“The American Jews have always used their films as an active propaganda channel to transmit not only their own political agenda but the fiction of US culture, values and way of thinking to people in other nations, these films containing an outpouring of individualism or struggles in pursuit of freedom or the realisation of the American Dream. They have always portrayed an idealised society intended to evoke in others a kind of yearning for America and the things it appears to be. All is cleverly arranged, with meticulous attention paid to the smallest details of setting, with the American flag so often prominent and Americans always portrayed as leaders of the world. All of this is a large and persistent attempt at a kind of cultural colonisation of the world, the Jews excelling at the presentation of a superficial layer of intense audio and visual effects that are “so image rich and content poor that they manipulate our emotions and short-circuit our reason”.”
The great objection to all this is that the presentation is totally false, the US being nothing like the mythical movie presentations, and the values promulgated and unconsciously accepted are not actually held by Americans, and certainly not by the nation’s leaders. Like everything similar emanating from the US, American movies are stimulating, high-quality lies, which is why many nations restrict American content.
All of the above, radio, television, newspapers, magazines, the advertising industry, Hollywood movies and TV programs, book publishing and book selling, Wikipedia, and the social media, are controlled by Jews. Their control over information is almost complete, giving them the power to directly influence people’s thoughts and behavior and to alter the course of events. All of these follow the same inescapable propaganda script. (22) (23) (24) They are not apologetic about this control; Philip Weiss wrote an article in Mondoweiss titled, “Do Jews Dominate in American Media? And So What If We Do?”. (25) I can think of several objections.
Control over the mass media and of the movie industry have always been central to the dissemination of propaganda in the US, with the media presenting the narrative to be adopted and the movies glorifying the propaganda myths disguised as entertainment. The US is the one nation most thoroughly saturated by the media, Americans being bombarded daily with thousands of images on what is essentially political ideology, guiding popular opinion in a predefined direction. The media themselves and many branches of the government spend hundreds of millions of dollars annually in the art of public propaganda directed at the bewildered herd, this mass media bombardment daily shaping the American view of reality. American author Gore Vidal wrote:
“You cannot get through the density of the propaganda with which the American people, through the dreaded media, have been filled and the horrible public educational system we have for the average person. It’s just grotesque. The corporate grip on opinion in the United States is one of the wonders of the Western world. No First World country has ever managed to eliminate so entirely from its media all objectivity, much less dissent.” (26)
All of the so-called values that Americans hold so dear and appear so determined to inflict on all other nations, have their origin in the propaganda disseminated by Bernays’ invisible government through this tightly-held media cartel. Dr. Nancy Snow, an assistant professor of political science, wrote “Propaganda is most effective when it is least noticeable. What the American people don’t know is that American propaganda is hidden, and its characteristics, integrated into communications and entertainment, convince people that they are not being manipulated. Propaganda is not supposed to be part of an ‘open society’. Much of our media now are so image rich and content poor that they just serve to capture the eye, manipulate our emotions, and short-circuit our reason. The propaganda and advertising industries therefore function increasingly like adult obedience industries. They instruct their audiences in how to feel and what to think, and increasing numbers of people follow and accept the cues without question.”
Snow described one of her previous jobs as being a “propagandist” for the US Information Agency. She said, “In the US, we don’t think of ourselves as a country that propagandises, even though to the rest of the world we are seen as really the most propagandistic nation”. According to her, the US has more PR professionals than news reporters, and the global reach of what Bernays called Public Relations is just a euphemism for propaganda that involves the entire US media. One example of this was the appointment of an advertising professional as Undersecretary of State for public diplomacy and public affairs. In an article in the LA Times, Naomi Klein wrote that “[Charlotte Beers] had no previous State Department experience, but she had held the top job at both the J. Walter Thompson and Ogilvy & Mather ad agencies, and she’s built brands for everything from dog food to power drills, and that her task now was to work her magic on the greatest branding challenge of all – to sell the United States and its war on terrorism to an increasingly hostile world”. (27) (28) (29) Secretary of State Colin Powell actively defended this: “There is nothing wrong with getting somebody who knows how to sell something. We are selling a product. We need someone who can re-brand American foreign policy, re-brand diplomacy.” (30)
I wrote elsewhere of the fake stories the US military produced for its invasions of Iraq and Libya, with fabricated video of locals apparently cheering the American invaders as liberating heroes. You may have wondered why ‘protestors for freedom’ in many foreign nations (Iraq, Libya, Yugoslavia, Iran, Ukraine) inexplicably seem to create all their protest signs in English; they are all fake, meant for an American audience. Here is some background for you, from a speech given at the US Air Force Academy by John Rendon, a PR consultant employed by the US military. Rendon said, “I am not a national security strategist or a military tactician. I am a politician, an information warrior and a perception manager”, at which point he reminded his audience that when US troops entered Kuwait City during the first Persian Gulf war, they received a wildly enthusiastic greeting from hundreds of Kuwaitis waving US flags. He then asked, “Did you ever stop to wonder how the people of Kuwait City were able to get American flags? Well, you now know the answer. That was one of my jobs then”. (31) (32) It is interesting that Americans boast so openly about their perverted manipulation of the world’s peoples. This was Pompeo boasting, “We lied, we cheated, we stole.” And the American people cheered.
American propaganda foolishness knows no bounds. Some years ago, prior to President Bush’s helicopter landing in a public downtown park on his visit to Italy, I watched dozens of Secret Service agents with cans of paint, spray-painting all the grass a lovely shade of green so Bush would look prettier on TV. When a US President or State Secretary speaks to an empty hall at the United Nations, the media obligingly cut and paste an audience from another speaker’s talk to make Americans proud that their leader was enthusiastically applauded by a full house.
Today, every part of America is all about marketing the brand, selling the sizzle instead of the steak. The operating philosophy is termed “perception management”, the attempt to substitute a utopian fictionalised version of events for reality. Great efforts are made to determine which actions or attitudes or sentiments to portray to the American public and the world, which items of information should be denied to the public, and which “indicators” are necessary to convey to audiences to influence their emotions and dull their objective reasoning. This perception management combines some facts, some unrelated truths, a great deal of deception, all wrapped in layers of what is termed “psychological operations”, and used to sell patriotism, wars, capitalism, fear and fascism. This is the legacy of Lippman and Bernays: an entire nation has degraded to the point where product substance is irrelevant and brand perception is everything.
The picture in Americans minds of their own country consists of a vast array of misinformation, falsehoods and myths, covering every facet of the human experience and which they fervently, and even belligerently, believe to be true. The reason I have dwelt on the topic of propaganda to the extent I have done, is to demonstrate the equal truth that the picture foreigners hold in their minds of the US also consists of the same vast array of lies, misinformation, falsehoods and myths, their understanding of the US equally as flawed as that of the Americans themselves. Almost everything we read, see and learn about the US is mythical propaganda far removed from reality. We are buying the sizzle without the steak, paying for the brand without understanding or even receiving the product.
Bernays’ secret government has been taking control of the ideological foundations of all of America, the propaganda onslaught including the political, corporate, banking, foreign policy, military, media, and academic sectors of the nation, attempting to force all into a single cohesive mental state. It isn’t simply information or misinformation. By controlling the sources and so deciding what you can and cannot see or learn, they plan to decide how you feel and what you think, and ultimately who has or does not have a voice. This is what led CIA Director William Casey to state, “We’ll know our disinformation program is complete when everything the American public believes is false.” (33)
The world finally appears to be awakening to the fictional foolishness that is America today. The Pew Research Center has done several recent studies which document a growing distrust of everything American in most countries (34), including China and Western Europe. At the same time, it notes that American citizens are receiving an increasingly narrow view of important world issues, exacerbating their already fabled ignorance. Pew also note that while the American people receive limited information reduced to child-like sound bytes lacking breadth, depth and context, this deliberately fabricated ignorance also increases the ease of propagandists to make false claims that appear real and are difficult to question.
One recent example was the political coup in the Ukraine, the second time the US has overthrown an elected government in that nation. The Americans first instigated a mini-revolution and installed Julia Tymoshenko as their puppet president, this queen’s reign terminated prematurely when she was imprisoned for massive fraud, embezzlement and murder. The Americans then invested – by their own admission – more than $5 billion to destabilise the country with an impressive amount of violence in a second attempt to take control. This disintegrated when most of Eastern Ukraine, especially the Crimea, objected to the US effort and voted to separate from the Ukraine and rejoin Russia. For background, the Crimea had always been part of Russia but was only recently ‘given’ to the Ukraine as a peace measure; its citizens are virtually all ethnic Russians and wanted to return home.
However, the US media carried only the news and video of riots, omitting the fact that they were all US-inspired and financed and that the CIA had a huge contingent resident in Kiev that was masterminding the events from the US Embassy. They specifically omitted video of the “democratic protestors” returning to the US Embassy compound afterward to collect their pay. The riots were attributed to Russia’s “meddling” and presented as cries for freedom by the Ukrainian people, and the secession vote by the Crimean residents which was entirely self-initiated, was described in the US media as a “Russian invasion” of the Crimea. It is in this context that the US climbs on its hypocritical moral white horse and pretends to “warn” Russia about “interfering in Ukraine’s elections”, filling American hearts with pride in their nation’s fight for truth and freedom. With this heavily-propagandised false picture flooding the US media, most Americans believe they clearly understand the situation in the Ukraine and that Russia is indeed “the evil empire”. In fact, they understand nothing clearly and what little they know is wrong, but when a nation’s government so thoroughly controls the media and the narrative, and is a pathological liar, what hope is there for the people?
This ‘perception management’ marketing of the US brand is not limited to US soil; even more time and money are spent on managing perceptions in other nations, one of these being China. The US spends more than $300 million in China each year on marketing their productless brand. It isn’t only obvious outlets like the Voice of America; the Americans make Herculean efforts to plant pro-American messages in newspapers, magazines, social media Weibo and WeChat, in the topic outline of speeches, placing visiting professors in schools and universities in China, and in thousands of other sources that reach the public. This is entirely a psychological warfare operation and is described by the Americans in these terms. The aim of this huge effort is simply to employ all manner of lies and misinformation to make China’s government look bad in the eyes of its people (and the world).
As one example, the U.S. Consul-General in Guangzhou, Jim Levy, filled the internet with outright false or badly-twisted information about sudden racial discrimination against blacks in China. For background, all visas expired during the COVID-19 epidemic, requiring foreign nationals to return home and wait for approval of new visas. Many Africans, in China to purchase low-cost goods to ship home, and reluctant to lose their income source, failed to comply, essentially hiding underground. As health officers were making the rounds to test foreigners and obtain health codes, there were many stories of Africans jumping out of windows (hopefully first-floor windows) to escape the medical authorities and avoid the necessary quarantines. Finally, the police had to instruct apartments and hotels to not provide accommodation to anyone lacking a valid visa, but the US Consulate filled Chinese social media and foreign airwaves with stories titled, “African nations, US decry racism against blacks in China”. (35) (36) My opinion of Levy is not high, especially since he was using his American diplomatic post to further the political aims of his Jewish masters. In a similar manner, Alan Dershowitz, another American Jew, this one from Harvard, not long ago gave a speech to AIPAC, the Godzilla of Jewish influence in the US, where he asked all Jews to create as much pressure as possible on China’s imaginary human rights violations in Tibet, to take the world’s attention off the Jewish atrocities in Palestine. International politics supported by propaganda, i.e. “perception management”, is a dirty business.
Hong Kong today is saturated with CIA and other US-based media control, their long-term propaganda campaign being the entire source of the Western-oriented political agitation and the persistently negative views of China that originate there. George Soros, another American Jew, finances the seditious “China Media Project” at Hong Kong University, creating a massive anti-China campaign and responsible for much of the violence there. The violence and chaos in Tibet and Xinjiang all have the same source. Philip Agee, a former CIA agent (37), wrote that the US has been conducting this illegal interference in Tibet since prior to the 1950s and 1960s, claiming that his duties in the CIA involved attempting to penetrate and manipulate the institutions of power, infiltrating and manipulating political parties, trade unions, youth and student movements, intellectual, professional and cultural societies, religious groups, women’s groups and especially the media. He details how he paid journalists to publish American propaganda as if it were the journalists’ own information, and how the CIA spent huge sums of money intervening in foreign elections to promote and elect an American puppet candidate. The NYT had very little nice to say about Agee in their obituary. (38)
Jonathan Power told us of one highly-placed British diplomat who stated, “One reads about the world’s desire for American leadership only in the United States. Everywhere else one reads about American arrogance and unilateralism”. (39) (40) Power wrote further that “America Is Sadly In The Grip Of ‘Exhausted Ideas’”. (41) And as Naomi Klein noted, nations don’t generally object to America’s so-called ‘values’, but to the fact that the US never adheres to them. Critics see only US unilateralism, defiance of all international laws, great wealth disparity, and increasing unjustified crackdowns and violations of civil rights. She wrote that America’s problem “was not with the brand but with the product”, and that the great and increasing international anger – and it is anger – arises “not only from the facts but also from a clear perception of false advertising”. In other words, American hypocrisy, the Utopia Syndrome I wrote of earlier. However, Americans seem oblivious to these realities and are redoubling their efforts to propagandise not only all Americans but the world.
Bernays and Propaganda – Part 5 of 5 —Propaganda Continues Unabated — You are now here.
Mr. Romanoff’s writing has been translated into 30 languages and his articles posted on more than 150 foreign-language news and politics websites in more than 30 countries, as well as more than 100 English language platforms. Larry Romanoff is a retired management consultant and businessman. He has held senior executive positions in international consulting firms, and owned an international import-export business. He has been a visiting professor at Shanghai’s Fudan University, presenting case studies in international affairs to senior EMBA classes. Mr. Romanoff lives in Shanghai and is currently writing a series of ten books generally related to China and the West. He is one of the contributing authors to Cynthia McKinney’s new anthology ‘When China Sneezes’.
Remember the claims that Vladimir Putin and the Russian government had a role in inciting the mob that broke into the Capitol building in Washington DC back in January? I wrote about this in an article a few weeks ago. No sooner had the dust settled than social media was abuzz with statements that Putin either arranged the whole thing or at the very least was celebrating what had happened. As former Deputy National Security Advisor Ben Rhodes put it, “This is the day that Vladimir Putin has waited for since he had to leave East Germany as a young KGB officer at the end of the Cold War.”
The idea that Putin and the Russian state want nothing more than to see Western democracies collapse into chaos is now so widespread as to be pretty much an uncontestable truth. Everybody knows that it is so. Russian “disinformation”, election “meddling”, and all of the rest of it, are put down to Putin’s enormous fear of democracy and of the West, and his concomitant desire to undermine both.
If you have any doubts, just Google “Putin, undermine democracy.” I did, and this is what I got:
As you can see, at the top of the list comes an article in The Atlantic from last year with the title “Putin’s Goal Is to Bring Down American Democracy,” after which we have a Science Direct article “Russia’s Attempt to Undermine Democracy in the West,” something from the Foreign Policy Research Institute entitled “Is Russia Undermining Democracy in the West? Conference” (I looked up the conference – the answer to the question was overwhelming “Yes), and then a Foreign Affairs article “How Russia and China Undermine Democracy” (note that there’s no question here that they do – the issue is just how). And on and on it goes.
You get the point. Putin wants to destroy Western democracy, and revels in destabilizing it at every opportunity. If you have any doubts about that, anti-disinformation campaigners point to the work of alleged Russian internet trolls and bots who, they say, latch on to divisions in Western societies and then exploit and accentuate them, in order to destabilize us from within.
I decided to put this to the Google test as well, searching for “Russia, exploit divisions America’. I got the following results:
The Atlantic again tops the rankings with an article entitled “Russia Is Still Exploiting America’s Divisions.” After that, we have the same Atlantic piece that appeared in the first search, then others with titles like “Russia exploits our divisions,” “How Russia used social media to divide Americans,” and “Russia seeks to exploit divisions in the West.”
So there we have it. Russia is out to get us. It wants domestic chaos in the West, and is doing all it can to create it.
But is this true?
Here’s the problem. No senior Russian official has ever said anything of the sort. Really. I challenge you to prove the opposite. Just find one quotation from Putin, foreign minister Lavrov, or anybody else at the top of the Kremlin pile, saying that this is what they want. I’m betting you won’t find it.
To the contrary, what you find when you study what Russians say is that the one thing they value above all else is stability. In fact, the word “stability” appears over 20 times in the 2016 Foreign Concept of the Russian Federation. And stability in foreign affairs, it is felt, depends on domestic stability. A country that is in internal turmoil is going to be incapable of pursuing a constructive foreign policy, and will likely try to deflect from its internal problems by assertiveness abroad. It’s better that other countries, even ones that are relatively hostile, are stable than that they are falling apart.
And so it is that in a meeting with businessmen on Wednesday, Vladimir Putin had the following to say:
We see what is happening, for example, overseas: of all those who walked into the US Congress building, 150 people were arrested and face anywhere from 15 to 25 years in prison. We have no way of knowing whether the internal contradictions will stop there. We really want them to stop, and I will tell you why. We are interested in steady relations with all our key partners, and internal squabbles, for internal political reasons, are in the way of achieving this kind of stability in the relations between our states.
What??
How does this square with the gospel truth we have been told to believe that Putin rejoices at every sign of turmoil in our midst, and is doing all he can to provoke chaos amongst us?
It doesn’t square at all. Something must be wrong.
Indeed something is – everything we’re being told by The Atlantic and all the rest of them is total, complete, utter nonsense. It not only isn’t supported by the evidence, but is in fact rejected by it.
Will anybody notice? Sadly, I doubt it. The same old lies will keep on being repeated. They’ve been said so often by now that nobody can imagine that they’re not true. But at least you, dear readers, will know that they’re not. And perhaps if we can spread that truth a little bit further, then drip by drip we might have some effect. I’m not optimistic, but at least we can try.
New documents raise serious questions about how well-deserved British state broadcaster BBC’s ‘unimpeachable’ reputation is, and also what impact its relationship with the UK government has on its supposedly ‘impartial’ output.
Within a tranche of secret UK Foreign, Commonwealth & Development Office (FCDO) papers, recently leaked by hacktivist collective Anonymous, are files indicating that BBC Media Action (BBCMA) – the outlets ‘charitable’ arm – plays a central role in Whitehall-funded and directed psyops initiatives targeted at Russia.
American journalist Max Blumenthal has comprehensively exposed how, at the FCDO’s behest, BBCMA covertly cultivated Russian journalists, established influence networks within and outside Russia, and promoted pro-Whitehall, anti-Moscow propaganda in Russian-speaking areas.
However, the newly released files reveal BBCMA also offered to lead a dedicated FCDO program, named ‘Independent Media in Eastern Partnership Countries’ and targeted at Georgia, Moldova, and Ukraine. This endeavor forms part of a wider £100 million ($138.9 million) effort waged by London to demonize, destabilize and isolate Russia, at home and abroad.
A Whitehall tender indicates that under the auspices of the project, set to cost a staggering £9 million ($12.5 million) from 2018 to 2021, participating contractors are charged with crafting “innovative… media interventions” targeting individuals throughout the region, via “radio, independent social media channels, and traditional outlets.”
Further detail was offered by FCDO Counter Disinformation & Media Development (CDMD) chief Andy Pryce at a June 2018 meeting with prospective suppliers.
He made it clear that the effort’s ultimate goal was to “weaken the Russian state’s influence,” via the co-option of journalists and media organizations in target countries via funding, training, and surreptitious production of anti-Russian, pro-Western content. “Girls on HBO… but in Ukraine” was, bizarrely, one suggested example of such activity.
In response, BBCMA submitted extensive proposals, in conjunction with Thomson Reuters Foundation (TRF), the global newswire’s “non-profit” wing, and since-collapsed veteran FCDO contractor Aktis Strategy.
The project was to be managed and coordinated directly by BBCMA from BBC Broadcasting House headquarters in London, with local support provided by Reuters newswire offices in Kiev and Tbilisi, and Ukraine’s Independent Association of Broadcasters.
A dedicated board, comprised of representatives of the contractors involved, the FCDO’s CDMD program, and British embassies in the target countries, would also meet privately every quarter to discuss the operation’s progress. Publicly, Whitehall’s funding and direction of the vast project was intended to be completely hidden.
The consortium boasted of having an existing “strong profile” in Eastern Partnership countries, and conducting “broad consultations” with a number of major news outlets, media organizations and journalists in the region in advance of its pitch.
For example, the National Public Broadcasting Company of Ukraine (UA:PBC) had been approached and offered “essential support,” aimed at “improving its existing programs” and “developing new and innovative formats for factual and non-news programs.”
BBCMA was moreover said to be “already” working on building the capacity of Kiev-based Hromadske TV, and wished to use the FCDO program to extend this assistance to “co-productions” and “building support to Hromadske Radio.”
Launched with initial funding from the American and Dutch embassies in Ukraine, Hromadske began broadcasting in November 2013 on the very day Viktor Yanukovich’s administration suspended preparations for the signing of an association agreement with the European Union, and went on to extensively cover the resultant Euromaidan protests, which eventually unseated the government the next year.
It subsequently received support from Pierre Omidyar, billionaire founder of The Intercept, who bankrolled a number of opposition groups in the country prior to the coup. In July 2014, Hromadske anchor Danylo Yanevsky abruptly terminated an interview with a Human Rights Watch representative after she consistently refused to blame Russia for civilian casualties in the Donbas conflict, despite his repeated demands.
Beyond dedicated news platforms, the consortium also pledged to enlist “local” and “hyperlocal” media outlets, as well as “freelancer journalists,” bloggers and “vloggers” for its information warfare efforts.
BBCMA argued “journalism education” locally would be a “long-term investment” – in other words, the identification, cultivation, and grooming of a network of reporters in the countries who could be relied upon to take the Whitehall line in future.
As such, the organization sought to establish a journalism training center in Gagauzia, Moldova in collaboration with NGO Media birlii – Uniunia. The autonomous region, bordered by Ukraine’s Odessa Oblast, was said to be home to “six TV companies, four radio stations, six newspapers and five web portals” potentially ripe for influence and infiltration by BBCMA – and in turn, the FCDO.
In Georgia, BBCMA visited the offices of Adjara TV “to discuss training priorities and possible co-productions.” The station was reportedly interested in developing “youth programming,” which represented “a gap in the market” in the country.
In June 2020, Georgia’s Coalition for Media Advocacy slammed Adjara for its “persecution” of “outspoken journalists expressing dissenting opinions,” after it fired newsroom chief Shorena Glonti.
Strikingly, the Coalition is funded by US regime-change agency, the National Endowment for Democracy, which supports numerous anti-Moscow initiatives worldwide. Perhaps Glonti had been too well-trained in “weakening the Russian state” for the broadcaster’s liking.
Estonia’s Digital Communications Network – financed by the US State Department – would be central to these efforts, offering lessons in “building online audiences, innovative business models and reaching out to breakaway regions susceptible to Kremlin narratives.”
The importance of “target audiences in breakaway regions” is outlined in another file, which explicitly states that the consortium would work closely with “independent outlets in proximity of non-government-controlled areas of Donbas in Ukraine, Transnistria in Moldova and Abkhazia and South Ossetia in Georgia.”
This undertaking aimed to counter the output of “separatist” media, and thus manipulate “hard-to-reach audiences,” which was “critical to achieving the project’s objectives.”
Any and all support covertly provided under the program was to be thoroughly intimate indeed, with “mentors” from the consortium “embedded” in target organizations, in order to provide “bespoke support across editorial, production and wider management systems and processes as well as on the co-production of content.”
These “mentors” include current and former BBC journalists.
“Our ability to recruit talented and experienced BBC staff is a great asset which will be harnessed for this initiative,” BBCMA promised.
These individuals may have been central to program efforts, if BBCMA’s pitch to the FCDO was accepted. For instance, UA:PBC was said to be “very interested” in receiving help from BBCMA to develop a “new debate show” and “discussion programming” to “enable audiences to think critically about the process and choices,” “counter disinformation” and “dispel rumors.”
Lofty objectives indeed, although commitments to nurturing analytical skills, thinking and debunking propaganda ring rather hollow when one considers the station’s output was perceived to be so overwhelmingly biased in favor of the government, opposition candidate Volodymyr Zelensky boycotted the channel’s official election debate during the 2019 presidential election.
BBCMA also proposed to establish an “independent” news platform in Ukraine, “timed for the run up to the 2019 election,” which would publish “vetted news content” freely syndicated to local and national media.
If the approach in Kiev was “successful,” the consortium would replicate the exercise in Georgia for the country’s 2020 election. Strikingly, the proposal brags of TRF’s experience establishing such platforms elsewhere, for example “the award-winning Aswat Masriya” in Egypt.
Other leaked files indicate the endeavor, founded after the 2011 revolution in Cairo, was secretly funded by the FCDO to the tune of £2 million ($2.8 million) over six years, and run out of Reuters’ Egyptian offices.
Over its lifespan, Aswat Masriya “became Egypt’s leading independent local media organization” and one of the most-visited websites in the country, providing news in English and Arabic, which was syndicated widely the world over. Its true, clandestine purpose seems to have been granting London a degree of narrative control over news coverage as events unfolded in the country, during its difficult and ultimately ill-fated transition to democracy.
That BBCMA likewise intended to use news coverage to influence politics in Eastern Partnership countries is amply underlined in the newly leaked files, with the organization pledging to “encourage” local news outlets to meet with “local stakeholders,” including lawmakers and community leaders, in order to “cement the media as a key governance actor.”
The organization furthermore sought to “foster a debate” in target nations, by producing wide-ranging analysis of the media environment therein. Its “long track record” of comparable efforts in “diverse” countries, including those “experiencing Arab uprisings,” had allegedly “shifted government policy.”
One objective of these lobbying efforts was achieving “a more enabling operating environment” for “independent” media in the target countries – i.e. ensuring regulations in the region were suitably conducive to and protective of the FCDO’s secret army of information warfare agents, to allow them to prosper for the duration of the consortium’s three-year offensive, and “post intervention.”
It’s not yet clear if BBCMA was successful in its pitch, and if so, which BBC journalists contributed to the program and as a result are implicated directly in cloak-and-dagger attempts to shape politics and perceptions in Georgia, Moldova, and Ukraine for London’s benefit.
It’s also unknown whether their commitment to fulfilling the FCDO’s objective of undermining Moscow, and furthering Whitehall’s interests, truly ends when they return to their day jobs as “objective,” “neutral” purveyors of news.
As BBCMA boasts in its pitch, the BBC is “well-known and highly regarded” in the Eastern Partnership countries, and provides “millions of viewers, listeners and online users in the region with world-class news on a daily basis.” At the very least, the leaked files make clear that neither the British state broadcaster, nor its FCDO paymasters, has any qualms about exploiting that standing and perceived credibility for malign ends.
Kit Klarenberg is an investigative journalist exploring the role of intelligence services in shaping politics and perceptions.
John Magufuli, President of Tanzania, has disappeared. He’s not been seen in public for several weeks, and speculation is building as to where he might be.
The opposition has, at various times, accused the President of being hospitalised with “Covid19”, either in Kenya or India, although there remains no evidence this is the case.
To add some context, John Magufuli is one of the “Covid denier” heads of state from Africa.
He famously had his office submit five unlabelled samples for testing – goat, motor oil, papaya, quail and jackfruit – and when four came back positive and one “inconclusive”, he banned the testing kits and called for an investigation into their origin and manufacture.
In the past, he has also questioned the safety and efficacy of the supposed “covid vaccines”, and has not permitted their use in Tanzania.
In the Western press Magufuli has been portrayed as “anti-science” and “populist”, but it is not fair to suggest that the health of the people of Tanzania is a low priority for the President. In fact it’s quite the opposite.
After winning his first election in 2015 he slashed government salaries (including his own) in order to increase funding for hospitals and buying AIDs medication. In 2015 he cancelled the Independence Day celebrations and used the money to launch an anti-Cholera campaign. Healthcare has been one of his administration’s top priorities, and Tanzanian life expectancy has increased every year while he has been in office.
The negative coverage of President Magufuli is a very recent phenomenon. Early in his Presidency he even received glowing write-ups from the Western press and Soros-backed think tanks, praising his reforms and calling him an “example” to other African nations.
All that changed when he spoke out about Covid being hoax.
When he was re-elected in October 2020 the standard Western accusations of “voter suppression” and “electoral fraud” appeared in the Western press which had previously reported his approval rating as high as 96%.
And the anti-Magufuli campaign increased momentum in the new year, with Mike “we lied, we cheated, we stole” Pompeo initiating sanctions against Tanzanian government officials as one of his final acts as Secretary of State. The sanctions were notionally due to “electoral irregularities”, but the obvious reality is that it’s due to Tanzania’s refusal to toe the Covid line.
Just last month, The Guardian, always the tip of the spear when it comes to “progressive” regime change ran an article headlined:
“It’s time for Africa to rein in Tanzania’s anti-vaxxer president”
The article makes no mention of goats, papaya and motor oil testing positive for the coronavirus, but does ask – in a very non-partisan, journalistic way:
“What is wrong with President John Magufuli? Many people in and outside Tanzania are asking this question.”
Before going on to conclude:
“Magufuli [is] fuelling anti-vaxxers as the pandemic and its new variants continue to play out. He needs to be challenged openly and directly. To look on indifferently exposes millions of people in Tanzania and across Africa’s great lakes region – as well as communities across the world – to this deadly and devastating virus.”
The author doesn’t say exactly how Magufuli should be “challenged openly and directly”, but that’s not what these articles are for. They exist simply to paint the subject as a villain, and create a climate where “something must be done”. What that “something” is – and, indeed, whether or not it is legal – are none of the Guardian-reading public’s business, and most of them don’t really care.
Oh, by the by, the article is part of the Guardian’s “Global Development” section, which is sponsored by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. Just so you know.
So, within two weeks of The Guardian publishing a Gates-sponsored article calling for something to be done about President Magufuli, he has disappeared, allegedly due to Covid. Funny how that works out.
Even if Magufuli miraculously survives his bout of “suspected Covid19”, the writing is on the wall for his political career. The Council on Foreign Relations published this article just yesterday, which goes to great lengths arguing that the President has lost all authority, and concludes:
“… a bold figure within the ruling party could capitalize on the current episode to begin to reverse course.”
It’s not hard to read the subtext there, if you can even call it “subtext” at all.
If we are about to see the sudden death and/or replacement of the President of Tanzania, he will not be the first African head of state to suffer such a fate in the age of Covid.
Last summer Pierre Nkurunziza, the President of Burundi, refused to play along with Covid and instructed the WHO delegation to leave his country… before dying suddenly of a “heart attack” or “suspected Covid19”. His successor immediately reversed every single one of his Covid policies, including inviting the WHO back to the country.
That was our first Covid coup, and it looks like Tanzania could well be next.
If I were the President of Turkmenistan or Belarus, I wouldn’t be making any longterm plans.
Last week the Guardian proclaimed Butterfly Numbers Plummeting in US West as Climate Crisis Takes Toll. Numerous media outlets flooded the internet with similar versions in response to the research article Fewer Butterflies Seen by Community Scientists Across the Warming and Drying Landscapes of The American West by lead author Dr. Matt Forister. For the factors examined, their research found climate change had the greatest statistical effect associated with changing butterfly populations. Warmer summer temperatures however had a positive effect, while warmer autumn temperatures had a negative effect. Of course, in an age where chicken little catastrophes sell, only warming fall temperatures and butterfly extinctions could promote a profitable climate crisis. Worse, the public was misled to assume “all” western butterflies were declining.
For example, a University of Arizona press release (home of Forister’s co-author) stated, “Western butterfly populations are declining at an estimated rate of 1.6% per year,… The report looks at more than 450 butterfly species.” However, the researchers only stated their databases “encompassed more than 450 species”. In reality their analyses addressed just 290 species of which only 182 or 40% of the 450 species exhibited declining populations. Another 106 species were stable or increasing, and 251 lacked sufficient data for analysis.
It’s expected that during any given decade various populations of a butterfly species will randomly increase in one area but decrease in another, but with no overall declines as recently reported for USA insects. So correctly, Forister et al. asked if a species’ population trend was restricted to a local area or widespread. To answer that they examined 3 independent datasets. The North American Butterfly Association (NABA) supplied their once‑a‑year butterfly counts, typically held around July 4th, of which only 72 different sites had the required 10+ years of data (average was 21 years) with which to determine a species’ abundance trend. A second data set came from Dr. Art Shapiro’s northern California bi-weekly surveys but covered only 10 sites from the San Francisco Bay area to the Sierra Nevada crest at Donner Pass. A third database used iNaturalist’s citizen science data that only provided flashy optics suggesting widespread coverage. Although iNaturalist is a great application that easily connects laypeople with experts for accurate identifications and determines the presence of a species in a given locale, it doesn’t provide trustworthy trend data.
To argue for widespread declines, a species had to be declining in at least two of their three datasets. Comparing trends in the NABA & Shapiro datasets, only 104 species exhibited declines in both. In other words, only 23% of the ballyhooed 450 species showed a possible widespread decline. However, when interviewed by the Washington Post for the article Butterflies Are Vanishing Out West. Scientists Say Climate Change is to Blame, Forister contrarily stated, “The influence of climate change is driving those declines, which makes sense because they’re so widespread”
Despite the real number of examined species, National Geographic still trumpeted 450 Butterfly Species Rapidly Declining Due to Warmer Autumns In The Western U.S. while shamefully ignoring the positive summer warming. Indeed Forister had reported, “locations that have been warming in the fall months have seen fewer butterflies over time”, adding an unsupported hypothesis that “fall warming likely induces physiological stress on active and diapausing stages, reduces host plant vigor, or extends activity periods for natural enemies.” But most butterfly species are no longer flying or laying eggs or feeding during the autumn. Instead, they have snuggled into relative safety from environmental changes to overwinter until the next flush of new springtime vegetation.
The larvae (caterpillars) of some declining species feed on grasses (i.e. Eufala Skipper and Sachem skipper), or herbs (i.e. Cabbage White or Sara Orange-Tip). But most grasses and herbs are dead or dormant by the end of summer. Other larvae of declining species feed on the young leaves or needles produced by trees in the spring (like Propertius duskywing or Western pine elfin). Autumn warmth has no effect on the “vigor” of dead or dormant food plants. Autumn temperatures are simply not critically important. Natural enemies like parasitic wasps typically evolved similar sensitivities to the same environmental cues as their caterpillar hosts and insect eating birds begin migrating south in August. Claiming global warming somehow selectively hurts butterflies but helps their enemies is a totally unsupported claim hurled far too often by those fabricating a climate crisis.
Disturbingly, Forister et al. simultaneously downplayed known benefits of summer warming, suggesting it only increased ‘butterfly visibility’ stating, “warming in the summer influences adult activity times directly and hence increases the probability of detection”. But to power their flight, butterflies sunbathe to raise their body temperature above ambient air temperature. Increased activity is needed for mating and finding host plants. Greater summer warmth also enables faster larval growth, which in some species enables an increased number of generations each year enabling larger summer populations (i.e. Monarchs). In other species like Edith’s checkerspot the caterpillars seek hotter surfaces to grow fast enough each summer and reach a required size allowing overwinter survival. Warmer summers benefit many species in many ways.
To my knowledge not one media outlet reported the summer benefits or the most telling conclusion of Forister et al. “Although our analyses point to warming fall temperatures as an important factor in insect declines, we acknowledge the multifaceted nature of the problem and how much remains to be understood about climate change interacting with habitat loss and degradation.”
If Forister et al. were truly trying to decipher the causes for observed butterfly declines, they should have at least adhered to the most basic scientific principle of controlling for known confounding factors. To blame climate change, confounding effects must be removed. But they were not. Thus, declining trends could be completely caused by insecticides and land use. And Forister was well aware of such important factors.
In a 2010 paper co-authored with Dr. Shapiro he found, “most severe reductions at the lowest elevations, where habitat destruction is greatest.” In a 2014 paper Forister concluded “Patterns of land use contributed to declines in species richness, but the net effect of a changing climate on butterfly richness was more difficult to discern.” In his 2016 paper he modelled negative effects of neonicotinoid insecticides. Listed as Forister’s 37th most declining species, the media highlighted the recent 99% decline of western Monarch butterflies. Yet the Monarch’s big killers are also land use change and herbicides, not climate change.
In the 1970s scientists discovered virtually all monarchs breeding east of the Rocky Mountains migrate to extremely small patches of high mountain forests in central Mexico. When that critical wintering habitat was logged, it opened the forest canopies removing its insulating effects. In January 2002, a storm brought cold rains followed by clear skies. Without the clouds’ greenhouse effect, or an insulating forest canopy, temperatures plummeted to 23°F (- 4°C). Millions of damp butterflies froze in place. Many millions more fell creating an eerie carpet of dead and dying butterflies several inches deep. Distraught researchers calculated 500 million butterflies died that winter, wiping out 80% of the entire eastern population. Similar cold events happened in 2004, 2010 and 2016.
In contrast, monarchs breeding west of the Rockies winter along the California coast to Baja where the ocean moderates temperatures and prevents freezing. Nonetheless those wintering populations also plummeted by 81% by 2014. Interestingly, tagging studies and genetics suggest California and Mexican wintering populations intermingle. Although it’s not clear if one wintering population contributes to the other, their abundance has fluctuated very similarly. In addition, a 1991 statewide study implicated land use as 38 overwintering sites in California were destroyed.
Herbicides severely reduced the monarch’s food plants, milkweeds. Adapted to colonizing open disturbed landscapes, milkweed species began invading the fertilized ground between rows of crops. As 1900s monarch populations boomed, farmers’ crops suffered. Milkweed competition reduced harvests of wheat and sorghum by 20% and most states declared milkweed a noxious weed. Attempts to eradicate milkweed by tilling only stimulated underground roots promoting more milkweed. The 1970s discovery that the herbicide glyphosate (i.e. Roundup) killed the whole plant, turned the tide against milkweed. When genetically modified herbicide‑resistant soybean and corn crops were developed in 1996, herbicide use dramatically increased, furthering the milkweeds rapid decline. That loss of milkweed now hinders monarch recovery. For monarch lovers, our best safeguard is planting more milkweed in our gardens. Likewise, we can plant butterfly friendly gardens for all species. On the bright side of climate change, warming could allow an added monarch generation.
On February 21, 2021, South Korean media outlets reported that four North Korean defectors plan to sue Unification Minister Lee In-young for defamation over his recent remarks casting doubt over what defectors say about the North’s human rights situation. The matter is that on February 3, Lee said during a press conference with foreign media reporters that human rights-related testimonies of North Korean defectors “lack a process of checking and verifying” their validity.
The four defectors affirmed that Lee deemed their testimonies as “untrustworthy lies”, while their stories represented just the tip of the iceberg of the horrible plight happening in North Korea. “Speaking to the foreign press as if their testimonies are lies is an act threatening the defectors who fled (to the South) for freedom”.
In addition, the complainants believe that Lee was unable, or is unwilling, to protect North Korean defectors and improve the human rights situation in North Korea, although this is a key responsibility borne by the Ministry of Unification. The fact is that South Korea for two consecutive years opted out of co-sponsoring a North Korean human rights resolution at the UN. Seoul sponsored the bill from 2008 to 2018, but decided not to do so in 2019 or 2020, drawing heavy backlash from the country’s conservative lawmakers as well as professional “fighters against the North Korean regime”.
At a February 22 press conference, a spokesperson for the Ministry of Unification “sweetened the pill” just in case, declaring that the testimony given by North Korean refugees was “valuable material” to help shed light on the human rights situation in that closed country. He added that their words are constantly being heeded in Seoul to create an “accurate picture” of the situation occurring in the North. In addition, it was reported that while the complainants assert that Lee In-young considered their testimony to be “untrustworthy lies,” in fact the minister simply stated that their statements could not be verified. That is no wonder, because according to South Korean law, libel can be punishable by up to two years in prison, or a fine of up to 5 million won (4,520 USD). Moreover, the laws do not speak about libel, but about defamation of character, when a person can be incarcerated for the truth if that causes reputational or moral damage.
But for the author, the fuss over the lawsuit raises the issue about to what extent the testimony given by the DPRK defectors represents a valid source, especially when it comes to heartbreaking stories of human rights violations.
The problems with defectors’ testimony can be broken down into two groups. The first has to do with the testimony of witnesses in general, and these difficulties are well comprehended by specialists.
First, not a single witness can remember a situation with complete accuracy. When people remember an event after a long time has passed, they deliberately or unwittingly distort the details involved. Second, the witness may misunderstand what is perceived. The most striking example is the statement made by one Russian journalist that there is no central heating in the DPRK because he did not see any radiators anywhere. However, in both the North and South of Korea, the traditional heating system is a “warm floor”, where the space heating system runs underneath it. Third, knowing the consequences of their actions, witnesses often engage in self-justification, or position themselves as having guessed everything from the very beginning, which makes the events in their recitals look more predictable and “orderly” than they are in reality. Fourth, people who have experienced traumatic experiences have a need to speak out and try to purge themselves of certain experiences.
That is why reconstructing events according to testimony that is given is usually done by comparing the testimony from several people. If the story told by one person may be inaccurate or biased, then describing an event from the hearsay given by numerous witnesses makes that picture more complete.
However, in regard to defectors, the issue of counterchecking their testimony runs up against certain difficulties: these people fled during different periods of time, from different places, and therefore it could be difficult to find two opinions about the same event.
And this is important, because while stories that buck against a certain trend usually elicit a desire to cross-check them (with the hope of refuting them), when a person who is a personal witness to something says things that fit well into the procrustean bed of underlying expectations, nobody counterchecks something “that is common knowledge”. Everyone already knows the recipe for the main course, and a specific story will only differ in the proportion of spices used, or where the side dish is located on the plate.
Now let’s focus on the idiosyncrasies that directly have to do with defectors from the DPRK, for whom storytelling is often an important way to improve their social status and financial situation.
First, it is important who is interviewing the defector. Son Ji-young, who has interviewed refugees for over 20 years, notes how much everything depends on how well the researcher is acquainted with a person’s context: it is easier to “pull the wool over white foreigners’ eyes”, since they do not understand the context in the same way that a Korean does.
Second, people interviewing defectors often perceive them as victims rather than witnesses. Generally speaking, they arouse sympathy in the interviewers, by virtue of which interviewers are less critical of what they hear, and therefore they do not have the desire to expose the narrator stating lies, or look for inconsistencies in the testimony.
Third, defectors try to make sure that interviews are held with them regularly and constantly, since for most defectors the fees they charge are a major increase in their income. This means that the defector can adapt to their interlocutors, and tell them things that they would like to hear. And if a fairly inexperienced interviewer gives tips about desirable responses with questions, such as “have you witnessed mass rapes at the stadium?” then the other party in the conversation may take this question as a cue to talk about that, regardless of whether he or she even saw it, heard some rumors about it, or simply thought it all up.
Some defectors embellish, exaggerate or trade their stories for money, she and other defectors said. Finally, it must be understood that the life of defectors in the South is closely controlled by the National Intelligence Service, which closely monitors the activity of defectors, and if something like “singing the praises of North Korea” is observed then they could face penalties under the National Security Act, and then the reputation of being a North Korean spy. Someone that has escaped from a totalitarian hell must expose the regime, not defend it.
These factors lead to the fact that within a set of defectors a subset of those forms that can be called “career defectors”. The most typical example is Shin Dong-hyuk. Back in 2014, his testimony was considered valid, and the basis of that the well-known UN Report on Human Rights in North Korea was drafted, drawing a direct comparison between the DPRK and Nazi Germany. However, already by early 2015 even its official co-author Blaine Harden “was forced to make an announcement that Shin admitted to making up most of his heartbreaking stories, which he fabricated to heighten their dramatic quality, and he needs to be pronounced an unreliable storyteller.
Nonetheless, in this kind of environment lying about the DPRK is not only allowed, it is something that is desirable. Kim Seong-min, the founder of Free North Korea Radio, in one of his interviews directly responded to a question about his attitude toward the most fantastic rumors that sometimes spread about what is happening in the North: “Any stories – whether they are truthful or not – are good, as long as they do not put the DPRK in a favorable light”.
However, a slew of widespread errors can be encountered in the stories told by this kind of community. They can be used to identify an “unreliable storyteller” whose testimony should be counterchecked at a minimum. The most obvious one is when the stories begin to resemble a “soap opera”, and narrators drastically overdo it with “heartbreaking details” that are aimed at evoking emotions.
A typical example of this is one quote from the stories by the famous defector Lee Soon-ok:
“… they use a kiln to bake bricks. When the newly fired bricks are removed, they push a person into this furnace. In a matter of seconds, the victim suffocates and loses consciousness… I resisted the best that I could, and burned by palms… Then they put me barefoot in the snow. As a result, I lost my toes…”
All that is left for the author to add is that the temperature in that furnace at that particular time was about 800 degrees.
As a result, while the testimony by defectors on other topics could be credible (especially when it comes to the body of testimony or conversations with ordinary, rather than career, defectors), the topic of human rights really does require additional verification. Otherwise, we get “boiled babies”, and one important problem gets its ears chewed off by fictitious stories. The more heartbreaking a story is, the more caution a scientist or journalist needs to take.
But unfortunately, given the power anti-Pyongyang propaganda has, attempts to cast doubt on this testimony provokes a reaction: “Those who have gone through such horrors cannot lie, and if you dare to doubt their words, then you yourself are no better than their executioners”. And these kinds of lawsuits are one consequence of that.
Konstantin Asmolov, PhD in History, is a leading research fellow at the Center for Korean Studies of the Institute of the Far East at the Russian Academy of Sciences.
RT in Germany is planning to take legal action against the tabloid Bild, after the Berlin newspaper ran a sensationalist tale that relied on leaked Telegram chats from a former employee, who claimed he had to spy for the channel.
In the article published on Tuesday, reporter Julian Roepcke, who has previously been aligned with the ‘Disinformation Portal’ of NATO’s Atlantic Council adjunct, claims that, according to Bild’s information, President Vladimir Putin ordered a spy op on his “public enemy number one.” It allegedly targeted opposition figure Alexey Navalny and two of his close aides. The supposed snooping is said to have happened during the activist’s treatment for alleged Novichok poisoning last year at Berlin’s Charité clinic.
On top of that, writes Roepcke, “Russia’s leadership used the Russian foreign broadcaster RT DE, which in turn relied on two German employees.” To back up the claims, Bild also ran an interview with Daniel Lange, then an employee of RT DE, who claimed he had a feeling of having been used as a spy in the case. Lange also leaked to Bild what he says were internal chats with his bosses.
Calling out Roepcke’s article, the head of RT in Germany Dinara Toktosunova said Lange had leaked Telegram chats in which he was merely being asked to do his job, after he’d failed to get any exclusive and newsworthy material about Navalny’s stay in Germany.
“We remind our colleagues of the German legislation that (for now) protects the press by allowing it to collect information about matters of public interest,” Toktosunova added.
The Bild article comes just days after Commerzbank told the parent company of RT DE and Ruptly that it would be ending their business relationship and closing their accounts at the end of May. Since Commerzbank changed its terms of service last November, RT DE had been trying to find an alternative bank, but 20 other financial institutions have either ignored its enquiries or flatly refused to open accounts on its behalf.
Toktosunova believes this to be part of a wider campaign to obstruct RT’s work in Germany. “We have every reason to believe that RT in Germany has been targeted by what is essentially a financial embargo,” she said on March 4, after the Commerzbank announcement.
Navalny was flown to Germany in August 2020, with his staff claiming he had been poisoned with Novichok, frequently described as the world’s deadliest nerve agent. He was treated at Berlin’s Charité clinic. Moscow said that Germany had refused Russia’s requests for detailed information about his condition.
Bild itself followed Navalny’s every move in Germany; not only did it gain access to the clinic, but it also published photos taken right at the entrance to Navalny’s treatment room.
The blogger and self-styled anti-corruption activist, regarded as the Russian “opposition leader” in the Western press, despite polling in the low single digits, returned to Moscow in January, where he was arrested for violating parole conditions in a case he regards as politically motivated.
The Kremlin is seriously concerned over media reports about a possible US cyberattack against Russia, the Russian president’s press secretary Dmitry Peskov told reporters on Tuesday.
“This is alarming information because a rather influential American news outlet admits the possibility of such cyberattacks. Actually, this is nothing but international cybercrime and, of course, the fact that this news outlet acknowledges the possibility of the US being involved in this cybercrime is a reason for our extreme concern”, Peskov pointed out.
He also recalled that as far as Russia is concerned, it has never been involved in cybercrimes.
“In this context, it is important to recall that we have repeatedly stated and still insist that the Russian side, the Russian state has never had and has nothing to do with any manifestations of such cybercrime and cyberterrorism”, the Russian president’s spokesman underscored.
The remarks come after The New York Times quoted unnamed US government sources as saying that Washington plans to start retaliating for the alleged Russian hacking of American government agencies and corporations detected late last year.
“The first major move is expected over the next three weeks, with a series of clandestine actions across Russian networks that are intended to be evident to President Vladimir Putin and his intelligence services and military, but not to the wider world”, the sources argued.
This followed US National Security Adviser Jake Sullivan telling CBS News in late February that the White House’s response to last year’s SolarWinds hack “will include a mix of tools seen and unseen”.
Sullivan pledged that “it will be weeks, not months” before the US prepares retaliatory measures against Moscow, adding that Washington will “ensure that Russia understands where the US draws the line on this kind of activity”.
SolarWinds Hack
In late December, the US Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) said that hackers, who used corrupted SolarWinds software to install malicious programmes, were “impacting enterprise networks across federal, state, and local governments, as well as critical infrastructure entities and other private sector organisations” in the country.
Early accusations quickly ran to Russia, with then-US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo claiming that Russia was “pretty clearly” responsible and then-US President-elect Joe Biden saying that his forthcoming administration would consider sanctioning Moscow as punishment.
In response, Kremlin spokesperson Dmitry Peskov stressed that Russia had no part in the hacking operations and that the accusations were “unfounded” and the result of “blind Russophobia”.
Following the reports, US President Donald Trump, who was “fully briefed” on the matter, said the attacks were exaggerated by the “Fake News Media”, alleging that China could have been responsible for the hack, and suggesting alleged election fraud was a much bigger issue for the United States.
Add Diabetes, heart disease, kidney failure, and eye damage to the ever expanding list of medical complaints that so-called experts are linking to coronavirus.
Don’t forget brain damage, lung damage, psoriasis and rheumatoid arthritis. Covid is the virus that keeps on giving. Professor Francesco Rubino, an expert on type 1 diabetes, based at King’s College London told The Daily Mail :
“We started to become very concerned about diabetes within the first couple of months of the pandemic, when we began to get reports from around the world of an increase in cases among hospitalised Covid patients.
These were patients in whom diabetes suddenly developed at the same time as they were sick with Covid.”
The link is tenuous. In a study published by the journal Diabetes Care, 0nly 5 children out of 30 who were diagnosed with diabetes, had coronavirus. Karen Logan, a clinical nurse specialising in diabetes, admitted that a proper controlled study is needed to prove causation.
But that doesn’t matter. Government scientists are appearing on UK media this morning warning of the terrors of “Long Covid.” Presenters just nod along as professors list all manner of ailments thought to be linked to the virus.
I never know whether to laugh or cry when after listing all of these terrifying diseases, the experts finish by saying, “more research is needed.” God help me. My kingdom for just one (w)anchor to say “You mean you’ve just made all of that up? Why are you scaremongering?” I can dream.
According to today’s Mail Online :
Thousands are already thought to be afflicted by so-called ‘long Covid’ — symptoms such as fatigue, breathlessness, chest pain, muscle aches, pounding heart and depression that persist for weeks or even months after the initial infection.
Now it seems the virus may also be capable of sparking serious and potentially incurable autoimmune conditions — where the body’s immune system attacks tissues, causing not just type 1 diabetes but the skin condition psoriasis and the joint disease rheumatoid arthritis, for example.
Meanwhile, emerging evidence points to lasting, potentially even permanent, harm to the hearts, kidneys and even the eyes of some Covid patients.
Emerging evidence? This is ridiculous. Using this logic it’s easy to see how they are doing it. If someone tests positive for covid and has an ingrowing toenail, you could conceivably claim that there is emerging evidence linking ingrowing toenails to covid. It’s laughable.
But I seem to be the only one laughing. I’m surrounded by people who are lapping it up. People haven’t suspended their disbelief, they’ve flushed it down the toilet.
In France recently, a woman was found running naked in a basement. She told paramedics that voices told her to do it. I swear to God, they linked her behaviour to coronavirus. Did the French say “pull the other one?” No! It was reported with a straight face.
In my opinion, these preposterous “Long Covid” stories are designed to scare people into having the jab and the jabs to come this Autumn. Uptake is a real problem for the government.
Hundreds of thousands of NHS workers have said they won’t have a jab. Under-40’s are far less likely to have it too. The propagandists are upping the ante.
Those of us who have been exposing the corruption in Big Pharma, and especially in the vaccine industry, for more than a decade now, knew this day was coming.
It’s been coming for a long time now, but the COVID Plandemic has shifted medical tyranny into high gear, primarily because this time around the masses have complied with the medical tyrants and, so far, voluntarily surrendered their rights all in the name of “public safety.”
Very soon now, the supply of experimental COVID vaccines will exceed the demand for those who have been lining up and begging to be injected with who-knows-what to fight the unseen enemy, the dreaded Coronavirus, and then it will be time to deal with the “vaccine resistant” who are perceived as a threat to public health.
Domestic Terrorists. That’s the new label for those who dare to question the new experimental COVID injections.
Richard Pan is a pediatrician-turned-politician who has spearheaded California’s descent into medical tyranny, since 2015, when he wrote bill SB277 to remove all religious exemptions to childhood vaccines in the State of California, despite widespread public opposition by parents, doctors, lawyers, and educators.
Dr. Pan has a long history of lying to his constituents and selling them out to Big Pharma.
Not being content with spearheading the movement to remove religious exemptions to childhood vaccines in 2015, in 2019 he spearheaded an effort to remove the medical exemptions also, by going after California doctors who were writing medical exemptions to childhood vaccines as well. See:
Today, if you live in California, it is nearly impossible to get any exemptions to childhood vaccines, which has driven many families out of California, and those that remain who want to protect their children from vaccines must home-educate their children and keep them out of the system (a good thing to do in ANY state!).
So it did not surprise me at all last week when an “Opinion” piece published in Jeff Bezos’ Washington Post titled: Opinion: Anti-vaccine extremism is akin to domestic terrorism, was written by none other than the California Big Pharma spokesperson, Richard Pan.
I have probably written a couple of dozen of articles on Senator Pan over the years, so if you want to learn more about him, click here.
Kit Knightly, writing for OffGuardian, also picked up on this, relating it back to the January 6th “insurrection” and a way to enact new legislation on “domestic terrorism.”
CALLED IT: WaPo calls anti-vaxxers “domestic terrorists”
BACK IN JANUARY I WROTE ABOUT HOW THE CAPITOL HILL “INSURECTION” WAS LAYING THE GROUNDWORK FOR BIDEN’S ADMINISTRATION TO INTRODUCE A MUCH-TALKED-ABOUT NEW “DOMESTIC TERRORISM” LAW.
The piece speculated that any definition of “domestic terrorism” will be very loose, and include essentially anybody the state finds problematic. Including those who spread “anti-vaccine misinformation” [emphasis added]:
What will “Domestic Terrorism” mean in this law? The answer to that is pretty much always “whatever they want it to mean.”
It will probably be tied into the Covid “pandemic” in some way, too. After all, what is discouraging people from taking vaccines if not the very definition of “terrorism”, right?
It took less than two months for the mainstream media to prove OffG right. Just last week the Washington Post ran an op-ed piece by California State Senator Richard Pam headlined:
Anti-vaccine extremism is akin to domestic terrorism
The article goes on to insist that “Laws need to be strengthened” to protect people administering vaccines from being “harassed”. That “Social media companies should not be complicit in this dangerous movement”, and caps it all off with glorious jingoism:
Getting vaccinated is a patriotic act. So is speaking up to support public health efforts. Let’s not allow extremism, division or fear to slow the efforts to end this deadly chapter in our nation’s history.
The message is clear: anyone who questions vaccination, especially the Covid “vaccine”, is a threat to public health and national security. A terrorist.
The WaPo is the first mainstream outlet to make the parallel so blatantly, but they almost certainly won’t be the last.
Be on the lookout for other examples. They’ll probably start building up this narrative quite fast.
And we can likely expect a new false-flag.
Something along the lines of a “lone wolf extremist” who was “radicalised online” by “militant anti-vaxxers” and then allegedly does something crazy like mail Bill Gates a suitcase full of home-made explosives or drives a tanker truck into a vaccination centre.
Of course, that will mean we need to start shutting down and censoring “vaccine misinformation” which is “encouraging violence” and “damaging public health”.
Public Health England’s Dr. Susan Hopkins warned yesterday, that coronavirus variants and the return of the flu, may lead to a difficult Autumn. The SAGE member was speaking on the BBC’s Andrew Marr Show.
Hopkins claimed that the population may have less immunity to traditional respiratory illnesses like the flu because coronavirus has been the only game in town this past year. She told Marr:
“Six months away is a long time. We have to prepare for a hard winter, not only with coronavirus, but we’ve had a year of almost no respiratory viruses of any other type. That means potentially the population immunity to that is less. So we could see surges in flu, we could see surges in other respiratory viruses and other respiratory pathogens.”
Did the intrepid Andrew Marr ask her how is it possible that we have had “no respiratory diseases of any other type” in the last year? Of course not. Marr isn’t a journalist. He’s a propagandist.
Hopkins went on:
“It’s really important that we’re prepared from the NHS point of view, from public health and contact tracing, that we have everything ready to prepare for a difficult autumn.”
A nodding dog would have done a better job than Marr. He really is hopeless. Susan Hopkins was there for the taking. By the time I’d finished with her, she wouldn’t watch television ever again, let alone appear on it.
Is Hopkins and the government getting their retaliation in first here? Are they anticipating a surge in respiratory infections caused by the mRNA gene therapy drugs? It’s very possible. I can’t say as I am not qualified to do so, but some very learned men and women have mooted that possibility.
The “vaccines” are already causing real harm. See http://www.vernoncoleman.org for an up to date list of adverse events caused by the covid jabs.
It is preposterous and insulting, that a government scientist can go on national television and claim that we have had nothing but Covid for a year. No flu, no chest infections, no bronchitis, nada, niente, zilch. How could Marr not ask her if everything else was simply being misdiagnosed as coronavirus?
The hoax hangs by a thread. It could be all over in a day, if Marr or Laura Kuenssberg had the courage to end it.
By Thomas Riggins | Dissident Voice | February 5, 2014
A new report in Science News Magazine (1-25-2014) by Bruce Bower details a reevaluation of the view that the Rapa Nuians, the native inhabitants of Easter Island (Rapa Nui), were responsible for the collapse of their population and society due to over exploitation of natural resources and the destruction of the rain forest on their island, a view recently popularized by Jared Diamond in his book Collapse (2005).
As Bower reports, the anthropologist Maria Mulrooney has published the results of her studies of the Rapa Nui culture (Journal of Archeological Science, December 2013) based on new radiocarbon dates from archeological sites on the island. She has concluded that after the clear cutting of the forest in the 1500s, to make room for agricultural production, the population of Rapa Nui remained sufficiently vibrant to carry on food production and continue their cultural development.
Exactly when the Rapa Nui arrived on Easter Island is unknown but it was on or before 1200 A.D. or so. Mulrooney maintains they had a thriving culture which was still going strong even after their “discovery” by the Dutch explorer Jacob Roggeveen on Easter Sunday 1722. This would indicate that they had not suffered “collapse” as a result of forest clearance. … continue
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The final pillar of this social engineering is the Jewish-owned and/or controlled media and entertainment industries which have long since abandoned the dissemination of truth and information and wholeheartedly adopted the primary task of propagandising the public mind. Today, the topics are different than the war marketing of Bernays, but – and this is very important to understand – the intensity remains the same. Just as Bernays once flooded every possible media channel with war-mongering hatred, today those same channels are directed to nations other than Germany (China, Russia, Iran, Iraq, Libya Cuba, Syria, Venezuela), to the instillation of fear (the war on terrorism) which is easily manipulated to achieve astonishing measures of social control, and to detail-less information to maintain public ignorance and confusion on all important issues. Paul Craig Roberts wrote that “The American media does not serve the truth. It serves the government and the interest groups that empower the government. The function of the “mainstream media” is to sell products and to brainwash the audience for the government and interest groups.” (
The link is tenuous. In a study published by the journal Diabetes Care, 0nly 5 children out of 30 who were diagnosed with diabetes, had coronavirus. Karen Logan, a clinical nurse specialising in diabetes, admitted that a proper controlled study is needed to prove causation.
Aletho News 