Judge calls California’s medical misinformation law “nonsense,” blocks it
By Christina Maas | Reclaim The Net | January 25, 2023
A federal judge questioned the new California law that penalizes doctors for sharing COVID-19 “misinformation.”
The new law, which came into effect on January 1 this year, prohibits doctors from spreading what the state deems to be misinformation to patients, or risk being penalized for “unprofessional conduct,” which could result in their licenses being revoked.
Here’s a summary of the case so far if you’re not up to date.
The law has been challenged through separate lawsuits filed by two organizations and a group of doctors on the grounds of First Amendment violations. They filed a motion at the US District Court of Sacramento to hold the law until the cases are concluded.
In a hearing, Senior Judge William Shubb described the law’s definition of misinformation as “nonsense.”
We obtained a copy of the order for you here.
“Because AB 2098 [the misinformation law] implicates [plaintiff’s] First Amendment right to receive information, she has standing,” the court wrote.
“Vague statutes are particularly objectionable when they involve sensitive areas of First Amendment freedoms because they operate to inhibit the exercise of those freedoms,” the court added, referring to a 2001 case, California Teachers Association v. State Board of Education.
“When the challenged law implicates First Amendment rights, a facial challenge based on vagueness is appropriate.”
The court granted the plaintiffs a hearing to challenge the law and blocked the enforcement of the law until the case is decided.
The law defines misinformation as “false information that is contradicted by contemporary scientific consensus contrary to the standard of care.”
Shubb noted that “standard of care” is not a new principle, but argued, “contemporary scientific consensus” is.
According to Deputy Attorney General Kristin Liska, who is representing Gov. Gavin Newsom, a medical professional has to violate all three aspects of the definition of misinformation for punishment to be applicable; share misinformation, contradict scientific consensus, and go against the standard of care.
However, she refused to give examples of statements that would fit the definition, saying that it would depend on the circumstances. Shubb then asked how she expects medical professionals to know what would violate the law.
Changing Your Mind Is A Strength Not A Weakness
A Better Way to Health with Dr Tess Lawrie | January 24, 2023
This is a story about the value of standing your ground, and never letting THEM (The Hierarchy Exploiting Medics) dupe you into believing they have power over you. Truth wins out.
On 30th September 2021, I gave an invited academic lecture at a philosophical institute in Bath called Bath Royal Literary and Scientific Institution (BRLSI). As the General Medical Council (GMC) states in its letter to me:
“The Institution is an independent charity that promotes science, literature and art to the City of Bath; tickets for its lectures can be bought by both member and non-members of the Institution.”
The title of my lecture was ‘Covid and the State of Evidence-based Medicine’ and I covered what I knew at the time about early treatments for Covid, as well as the emerging evidence on the Covid-19 vaccines suggesting serious safety issues. I have alluded to this talk and associated investigation in a previous Substack article.
There were probably not more than forty people in the room, with a number attending via Zoom too. Towards the end of the talk, a man’s voice came loudly through the microphone, facilitated by whomever was controlling the Zoom permissions, drowning out mine, and declaring that I should be ashamed of myself for what I had said.
The lovely organiser of the meeting was suitably embarrassed, but it was clear that his feelings were not shared by his masked and furious medical colleague, who had clearly facilitated the heckler’s dramatic outburst. The colleague later denied access to the lecture recording, which was never more widely published as is usually the case for these events.
A couple of months later I was notified by the GMC that I was under investigation for “misconduct” in relation to my lecture at the BRLSI, the allegations being that I “denied the safety of Covid-19 vaccines and spread misinformation about Covid-19 treatments”. The GMC investigation was opened to determine whether I had made “inaccurate and/or misleading comments about Covid-19 and Covid-19 vaccines”.
I received excellent advice from Solicitor Philip Hyland who responded to the GMC quite simply on my behalf pointing out that “taken at its highest there is a substantial body of medical opinion that supports what Doctor Lawrie is saying.”
This week I received the outcome of the GMC’s investigation, which is “closure of the case with no action”. In its letter to me, the GMC noted that:
“During the investigation the GMC obtained a video copy and transcript of the Lecture. During the initial part of the Lecture Dr Lawrie presented her views on the evidence on ivermectin as a treatment for Covid-19, later in her lecture Dr Lawrie presented her views on vaccines.
“It was established during the GMC investigation that the advertisement for the Lecture stated that Dr Lawrie was an external consultant to the World Health Organisation, a clinical practice guideline expert, and that she was Director of the Evidence-Based Medicine Consultancy Ltd and Ebmcsquared CIC. The Ebmcsquared CIC website states that it was established by Dr Lawrie as a ‘a non-profit company in March 2021 in response to the tremendous need for independent and objective health care research and provision, arising out of the Covid-19 health emergency.’
Dr Lawrie’s comments
On 10 February 2022, Dr Lawrie’s representatives submitted that ‘taken at its highest there is a substantial body of medical opinion that supports what Doctor Lawrie is saying.’
Reasons for our decision
As case examiners we must decide whether there is a realistic prospect of establishing that a doctor’s fitness to practise is currently impaired to a degree justifying action on his or her registration.
This test has two parts.
- We must decide if the allegations are serious enough to warrant action on the doctor’s registration.
- We must also consider whether the allegations are capable of proof to the required standard, namely that it is more likely than not that the alleged events occurred.
In making decisions, we should have regard to the GMC’s objectives. These are to protect, promote and maintain the health and safety of the public; promote and maintain public confidence in the profession; and promote and maintain proper standards and conduct for members of the profession.
Doctors are entitled to hold and express personal views, however they also have an overriding duty to patients and to uphold the public’s confidence in the profession. In the absence of expert or other evidence capable of proving that Dr Lawrie’s conduct was such that public confidence in the medical profession would be undermined, or that it risked the health, safety and well-being of the public, or that it undermined proper standards and conduct for members of the profession, we agree that there is no realistic prospect of establishing evidentially that Dr Lawrie’s fitness to practise is impaired to a degree justifying action on her registration.
Conclusion
For the reasons given above, we have decided to close the case with no action.”
To my medical colleagues out there, I do hope that this will reassure you and encourage you to speak out now.
Please remember, as the GMC letter states, that you “have an overriding duty to patients and to uphold the public’s confidence in the profession”, which is unequivocally at an all-time low. We know how busy you are, that you had little time to do your own investigations, and that being at the frontline of what was communicated to be a deadly pandemic was probably terrifying. We know you were told that the Covid-19 vaccines were safe and effective.
However, now that you know the Covid-19 vaccines are not safe and effective, that they are not the same as traditional vaccines, that there are unprecedented numbers of adverse drug reactions (ADR) reported to the official ADR databases, and that Covid ‘boosters’ are systematically destroying people’s immunity not ‘boosting’ it, please stand up for the truth, uphold your Hippocratic Oath, and do what is right. It is a strength not a weakness to be able to change one’s mind when new information comes to light. We have been waiting for you, now please stand up together with us. There’s undoubtedly a better way forward for health and wellbeing!
A few next steps you can take as a doctor
For doctors in the UK, you will find that www.doctorsforpatientsuk.com is a good starting point for peer learning and support.
Please find further reassurance in this article about GMC complaints related to Dr Aseem Malhotra’s BBC interview in which he called for a halt to the Covid vaccination programme. This interview has been viewed over 20 million times and counting.
If you are considering leaving the NHS and starting private practice, I encourage you to register as a practitioner on World Council for Health’s new community platform, Source. This is an online platform connecting local people with doctors and other health professionals in their area. Registration is free – the only condition is that you agree to abide by the Better Way Charter. We receive requests every day from people seeking doctors they can trust: allow us to direct them to you via Source.
Lastly, everything I said at BRLSI on 21 September 2021 about ivermectin and the safety issues with Covid injections is as applicable now more than ever. I will present an updated version of this lecture, ‘Covid and the State of Evidence-based Medicine’ at the ‘Harmonising Modern Medicines with Natures Remedies’ conference in The Philippines in February. Perhaps I’ll see you there!
Unvaccinated German care home worker, accused of sparking a November 2021 outbreak that left three elderly women dead, faces criminal trial
eugyppius: a plague chronicle | January 18, 2023
From the Deutsche Presse-Agentur :
After a Corona outbreak that left three dead in a Hildesheim care home, a former employee will face trial in February…. She stands accused of one count of negligent homicide and two counts of negligent bodily injury, as well as forgery. The 45-year-old allegedly faked double vaccination against Corona by presenting a fake vaccine certificate …
Despite the infection of her son, the woman was at first allowed to continue working in late November 2021. … She is alleged to have been infected without noticing, and initially transmitted the virus to a colleague during a coffee break. Thus, a “chain of infection is alleged to have been set in motion.” Three female residents aged 80, 85 and 93 died in the outbreak.
According to the indictment, forensic medical examination revealed that Corona was the cause of death in the case of the 80-year-old. Other causes could not be ruled out for the other two victims … The woman has admitted to falsifying her vaccine certificate, but denies responsibility for the outbreak.
There were three other infections among home staff, and 11 among residents … Because the woman was known to oppose vaccination, her employer obtained information about the the date and batch numbers [listed on her certificate]. These … made it clear it was a forgery.
I’ve followed this case for a while, but I’ve avoided writing about it, because it just makes me depressed.
There’s the little things that irritate me, like the contact-tracing hocus-pocus and the ridiculous assumption that moments of transmission can be located as precisely as a coffee break. Or the awkward fact, that of the three Covid deaths this incident achieved for our un-unpluggable mortality ticker, medical examiners could assign only one to the virus with any confidence. The main thing, though, is just the incredible injustice of blaming fellow humans for infections with pervasive seasonal respiratory pathogens. This poor woman only faked vaccination to keep her job, and the outbreak at her home occurred well after the myth of vaccine efficacy against infection had collapsed. There’s just no reason to bring charges here.
If anything killed those old women, it was the care home and their decision to keep employees with positive close contacts at work. They almost certainly had no choice: These places suffer chronic staffing shortages, vastly exacerbated by pandemic-era mismanagement. And indeed, why should anyone work in a care home now? The pay is poor, you endure unusual levels of harassment over personal medical choices, and you can even face prosecution for passing on viruses your kids pick up at school.
Pregnant Women Reject COVID-19 Vaccination
Post-Partum Hemorrhage Among Many Reasons to Decline Experimental Injection
By Peter A. McCullough, MD, MPH | Courageous Discourse | January 18, 2023
Early in 2021 the American College of Obstetrics and Gynecology accepted an undisclosed amount of money from the US government (HHS WH) as part of the COVID-19 Community Corps Program. From that point forward, ACOG broke with traditional practice on experimental and and novel therapies being contraindicated, and with federal dollars in hand, moved to a wholesale endorsement of COVID-19 vaccination with no assurances on short or long-term safety. Throughout the campaign, enthusiasm for vaccination was tepid among gravid women with <20% at any time having accepted a vaccine. However, the sharpest decline in rates of uptake occurred in the gravid and by summer of 2022, fewer than 2% were getting vaccinated.

There were no large scale randomized, placebo-controlled double blind clinical trials demonstrating safety in pregnant women. The non-randomized literature was prone to financial conflict-of-interest bias since the doctors and editors were likely affiliated with ACOG, and influenced by the government money and aspiration to promote mass vaccination. Thus, as a clinical scientist, my concern is only the neutral papers on safety were being written and published. A paper by Dick et al, caught my attention by reporting a nearly fourfold post-partum hemorrhage rate among those triple compared to double vaccinated. One could imagine how large the magnitude would have been compared to unvaccinated where hemostasis is not impaired.

Dick A, Rosenbloom JI, Karavani G, Gutman-Ido E, Lessans N, Chill HH. Safety of third SARS-CoV-2 vaccine (booster dose) during pregnancy. Am J Obstet Gynecol MFM. 2022 Jul;4(4):100637. doi: 10.1016/j.ajogmf.2022.100637. Epub 2022 Apr 7. PMID: 35398583; PMCID: PMC8988438.
In 2021, McCullough and Stricker published that because of the known dangerous mechanism of action of COVID-19 vaccination and the lack of any assurances on maternal-fetal safety, that all of the products are considered pregnancy category X which means they should not be used. This message got out to the community and rates of vaccination have progressively winnowed. As we sit here today, we should understand that ACOG and the OB/GYN community is compromised and thereby putting the maternal-fetal health of women at risk by promoting COVID-19 vaccination. Under no circumstances should a woman of childbearing potential or gravid should receive a COVID-19 vaccine. It is absolutely contraindicated.
McCullough PA Lack of Compelling Safety data for mRNA COVID Vaccines in Pregnant Women, 2021
The Game Is Over and They Have Lost
By Robert Blumen | Brownstone Institute | January 23, 2023
The Guardian on Jan 15, 2023 published the most perfect piece of new normal nostalgia that ever was or could be: Coronavirus: ‘People aren’t taking this seriously’: experts say US Covid surge is big risk by Melody Schreiber.

This piece may be studied as a Platonic Form. Nothing could more perfectly demonstrate the inability of the covid fear porn publishers to let go of the narrative. If the author didn’t have her own website, I would have attributed the piece to an instance of ChatGPT trained on every Guardian and New York Times article from the past three years.
The writer employs every single discredited covid trope at least once. I will list a few of the best, here. To cover them all I would have to quote the entire article and that would violate the Fair Use Doctrine. I have chosen a tabular form with a quote alongside the trope that it is derived from:
| Quote | Trope |
| “In the fourth year of the pandemic.” | We are still in a pandemic. It will never end. |
| “This is one of the greatest surges of Covid cases in the entire pandemic, according to wastewater analyses of the virus.” | The current wave is the worst wave ever. |
| “Covid-19 is once again spreading across America and being driven by the recent holidays.” | Super-spreader events and family gatherings. |
| “The Omicron subvariants BQ.1.1 and BQ.1 as well as the quickly expanding XBB.1.5 make up the majority of cases.” | Just when you thought we were over it, a new variant has emerged. |
| “With XBB, there’s such a significant transmission advantage that exposure is really risky – it’s riskier now than it’s ever been” in terms of transmissibility, Sehgal said.” | The new variant is more dangerous than previous variants. |
| “And the more the virus spreads, the more opportunities it has to evolve, potentially picking up mutations that make it easier to overcome immunity.” | The variants only get worse over time, never more mild. |
| “the winter surge, which is once again putting pressure on health systems.”“Williams is worried that hospitals are reaching maximum capacity.”“Health workers have experienced three years of burnout, disability and death, and some have needed to exit the workforce.” | The health care system is under pressure. It will probably collapse. People will be dying in the streets, unable to obtain care. |
| “Despite the high rates of Covid spread, hospitalizations have not yet reached previous peaks seen earlier in the pandemic, probably due to immunity … but that protection should not be taken for granted, he said, particularly because immunity wanes.” | Natural immunity does not protect you. Even if you are immune, you should still get all the vaccines and boosters. |
| “The severe cases we are seeing are probably at least somewhat avoidable, if folks make sure that they stay updated on vaccination, because that’s still the safest way to gain immunity.” | Vaccination stops the spread. |
| “You’re just fighting a lot of misinformation.” | Everything that you have read contrary to this narrative consists of lies by malevolent misinformation spreaders. |
| When Joe Biden declared the pandemic was “over” in September, he said, it probably stalled public enthusiasm for the new booster. | Happy talk about the end of covid is dangerous. |
| “While vaccines are very important…” | All roads lead to vaccination. |
| “In New Hampshire, nursing homes will not admit those that they feel that they cannot staff to care for, which I think is admirable, but the consequence of that is that the hospitals are jammed up,” he said. Hospitals that might release patients to care facilities for transitional or long-term care will see beds filled for longer.” | The elderly in care homes are at risk. |
| “The share for children under four roughly doubled in 2022.” | Children are at risk. |
| “As Ray put it: ‘When we could be wearing a mask, why aren’t we?’” | Masks work to prevent respiratory viral transmission. |
My favorite part of the piece is, “Yet because of poor messaging from officials, many people may not even realize the US is experiencing a surge.” I am one of those many people who did not know this. A surge of what? A normal seasonal flu that makes people feel a bit under the weather for a week? A bad cold-vid?
We can celebrate our return to the old normal when an outbreak of a seasonal virus is of concern to those who are infected or who care for a family member. All of society need not be thrust into a panic over such things. The more normal the world is, the more resources of those who are impacted will have to deal with their troubles. And the better will those who are not directly affected be able to support them.
As a software engineer I note with some amusement that the variant (or as I like to call them “scariant”) names now have two periods. In a software release version a version with double dot is used for a minor bug fix release, (e.g. 3.0.1). “Minor” means that the release is not important enough for users to upgrade immediately. Perhaps the same thinking should be applied to the way we handle the emergence of new viral variants.
When Biden said that the pandemic is over, followed by “If you notice, no one’s wearing masks. Everybody seems to be in pretty good shape,” that may have been his dementia inhibiting the filter that was supposed to kick in before he said something truthful. Biden only said the quiet part out loud: the public has put the panic phase in the rearview. Even Anthony Fauci made the incomprehensible statement that the pandemic isn’t over but we are out of the “pandemic phase.” Every statement like this is more toothpaste for the pandemic dead-enders to put back in the tube.
The article bemoans the low acceptance rate of the booster vaccinations. We are told that cases are avoidable if patients had sought additional injections. First thing: do we care about cases? Second thing: it is not true that the covid vaccines prevent infection. That could only be so if the failed claim of sterilizing immunity were valid.
Vaccine advocates have walked back the earlier claims that one or any number of shots would prevent the recipient from getting infected. It was let out late in 2022 that the clinical trials did not even test for the ability of the drugs to stop transmission. It’s hard to believe that anyone can still say that after so many multiply-vaccinated-and-boosted public figures have gotten covid.
My friend Kevin Duffy, a professional investor, after seeing the Guardian article, sent me this image. The graph shows the market psychology of a financial bubble and subsequent market crash. I have added the red oval highlighting where Kevin thinks we are now: in the denial phase, after the bubble has burst.

I am also reminded of the Kubler-Ross stages of grief that a patient or a loved one goes through when receiving a terminal diagnosis. The stage in her sequence is denial. The subsequent stages are anger, bargaining, depression and acceptance.
The same could be said of all of these tropes: Does anyone believe them anymore? This is not news. It is a last-gasp attempt to squeeze more juice out of a dehydrated lemon. These messages were potent fear generators two years ago. But with each use, the charge becomes weaker.
The script has worn itself out. These tropes are now tired and ineffective. The fear-pushers seem unaware that the message has lost its effect, but do not have anything else to offer. The tell is not that they publish articles like this. It is how much these pieces show that they don’t know that the game is over and they have lost.
Incentivizing Censorship: a Snitch in Every Skull
Traveling the nine circles of thought-police hell with TJ Coles, the cancelled University of Plymouth academic.
Helen of desTroy | January 22, 2023
An informational iron curtain is coming down across the West, and its architects are determined to make examples out of those who refuse to pick a side. Our Democracy™ has adopted a zero-tolerance policy for pollution of the information ecosystem, and the Thought Police are standing by to halt rogue infodemics in their tracks, lest the people lose trust in their institutions. Dr. Tim Coles, a freelance writer and postdoctoral researcher until recently at the University of Plymouth didn’t realize he was in their crosshairs until he found himself locked out of his university email account in October. Tech support was no help; department staff refused to talk to him, closing ranks and sending him a threatening email demanding he cease contact. Clearly, he had violated some unwritten law. But what?
The chain of emails that had culminated in his removal only raised further questions about why an apparent stranger whom Plymouth has refused to name – a university employee, he suspects – had complained about his writing for Australian magazine Nexus to his old PhD examiner. In a Kafkaesque turn, the complaint lacked a single concrete accusation of wrongdoing that Coles could defend himself against, instead equivocating around familiar “conspiracy theorist” tropes.
At any rate, no one had thought to consult Coles, perhaps believing him to be a disgruntled ex-student trading on his old university email rather than a researcher whose work at the university was funded by an outside trust and had nothing to do with his political writing. Rather than pause for clarification, his PhD examiner appeared to jump in with both feet, urging tech staff to help get Coles “off [the university’s] books.”
While a prolific writer on many controversial topics – US funding and training of neo-Nazis in Ukraine, the West’s neocolonial plunder of Africa under the guise of fighting terrorism, and Big Pharma’s giant power-grab under cover of Covid-19 unholy alliance of Big Pharma and Big Tech amid the coronavirus outbreak are just a few – Coles believes he ran afoul of the university censors with a series of articles about intelligence agencies blackmailing people with child sexual abuse that ran in Nexus not long before the cancellation effort began. That particular subject has a tendency to get journalists killed, and Coles wonders if his ejection from Plymouth might be a warning shot from groups displeased with his inquiries. He acknowledges, however, that the timing may be a coincidence – Hope Not Hate and other intelligence-controlled censorship advocates were apparently trying to have Nexus banned in the UK around the same time for its publication of unorthodox views on Covid-19.
While he believes the evidence in the email chain is enough to prove wrongdoing by the university, Coles couldn’t even file a complaint through the normal channels, as his inquisitors had roped the complaints department into their conspiracy by including them in the email chain. He has considered releasing the messages publicly as a last resort, but first plans to employ an outside arbitrator and give the System one last chance – more than he was given, at any rate.
Dr. Coles is far from the first to be booted from a British university campus for thoughtcrime. He sees parallels between his case and that of David Miller, the University of Bristol sociology professor who was subjected to a ferocious academic inquisition and ultimately drummed out of his post in late 2021 after the Board of Deputies of British Jews deliberately misinterpreted comments he had made about Israel weaponizing Jewish students abroad. The university’s Union of Jewish Students had been attacking him for years before seizing upon the supposedly discriminatory comment, which they only heard because they had sent in an activist ’spy’ to monitor one of his classes – ironically validating the professor’s claims better than his own arguments could have.
Like Coles, Miller was never directly confronted by his accuser, who opted for mealy-mouthed pseudo-accusations (“conspiracy theorist,” “inciting hatred”) over potentially-disprovable crimes. Like Plymouth, Bristol took the side of the accuser against its employee almost reflexively. Former Labour MP Chris Williamson, himself a victim of the Israeli lobby’s devastating smear machine, joined the Support David Miller campaign in warning that the university’s failure to stand up for the professor would only encourage “bad faith actors” to pursue further censorship.
Shortly before the lobby finally convinced Miller’s university to mount an investigation into his supposed bigotry, he observed that such pressure tactics were imported from the Israel lobby in the US and pointed out that if any other foreign lobby attempted to wage such total war on its critics, they would be “laughed out of the room.” But Coles’ experience suggests other groups have taken lessons from the Israelis – and that Williamson’s warning was prescient.
Academic “cancel culture” is a well-known scourge of American campuses, where careless tweeting costs lives and professors can be axed for using the wrong pronouns. But while most discussion of the phenomenon centers on the targeting of conservative professors, it has targeted left-wing heterodoxy with equal fury, as tenured New York University media studies professor Mark Crispin Miller discovered when a student demanded his firing via Twitter after taking offense to a discussion questioning the utility of masks in his 2020 class on Propaganda.
Like Coles and his fellow Miller across the pond, Miller was attacked by university colleagues with vague allegations of “attacks on students and others in our community,” “aggressions and microaggressions,” and “explicit hate speech” and an investigation was launched behind his back even in the absence of any specific forbidden act. Administrators went one step further and contacted all his students to remind them of the CDC’s mask guidance, lest their fragile minds have been corrupted by the conspiracy theorist in the classroom. They couldn’t fire him – he was tenured, after all – but they did their best to make his life so miserable that he would leave, forbidding him from teaching his beloved Propaganda class, and he has been on sabbatical since.
Even Kenneth Roth, the former executive director of Human Rights Watch, was recently denied a fellowship at the Carr Center for Human Rights, part of Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government, on the basis of wrongthink – what its dean described as his “anti-Israel bias.” Roth has toed the line on foreign policy groupthink elsewhere, dutifully demonizing Putin, Assad, Trump, and so on as the needs of Empire demanded. But his refusal to ignore Israel’s increasingly bold apartheid policies got him the David Miller treatment despite years of faithful service. If Roth isn’t safe, many academics have begun to wonder, what the hell are they going to do to me?!
While Dr. Coles questions if universities were ever really the freethinkers’ utopia so many academic misfits yearn for, there is no denying groupthink has tightened its hold in recent years. While an academic might once have been left alone to research controversial subjects on his own time so long as he didn’t embarrass his employer, this laissez-faire approach has been replaced by an administrative panopticon that is both hyper-responsive and reflexively condemnatory – a “cottage industry of shutting people down.” Censorship has been outsourced from the state and its corporate minions to “academics and think tanks who are given a well-funded government hammer so they see everything as a nail of disinformation,” Coles explains. Not simply salaried, they are financially incentivized to bag-and-tag as many pieces of “disinformation” as they can, essentially bounty hunters for inconvenient truths, enabling a much tighter, more granular control of information than was ever possible under a traditional totalitarian model.
These programs and campaigns – with names like Integrity Initiative, Center for Countering Digital Hate, Trusted News Initiative – initially appear to be independent nonprofits that just happen to share a common devotion to fighting fake news. However, their cooperation is more than superficial, with many of the same entities ultimately directing their actions as they work together to artificially muscle the discourse in the desired direction, choking off competing narratives while maintaining plausible deniability regarding their connections to the state.
In this model of soft totalitarianism, the dissident is not so much ordered to cease publishing objectionable ideas, or even threatened with execution or creative torture. He is merely subjected to mounting insults, ‘nudged’ in certain directions, and gradually stripped of resources, especially any public platform he may have had in accordance with his refusal to follow the rules. Amid this complex ballet of carrot and stick, he is constantly reminded that these are his decisions, making him (in his own mind, at least) a willing participant in his own spiritual suffocation.
Fact-checkers, once mere newsroom employees tasked with verifying the details of major stories, have been artificially elevated into a caste of gatekeepers, deemed impartial arbiters of truth even as their donor lists burst with conflicts of interest from Pierre Omidyar to Bill Gates to George Soros. This veneer of independence allows them much greater latitude than any equivalent government body, as the ignominious collapse of the US’ Disinformation Governance Board last year proved. This official Ministry of Truth, which would have operated out of the Department of Homeland Security, was a bridge too far even for the American media establishment, which had long since embraced its unofficial equivalent censoring tweets and Facebook posts to keep the world safe for democracy.

All it took to get English-speaking countries to accept the need for these newly-minted (the International Fact Checking Network was only launched in 2015) cognitive babysitters was for a few pathological liars to blame Trump’s 2016 electoral victory and Brexit on Russian disinformation. Never mind that neither hypothesis was ever substantiated, or that both have since been thoroughly discredited – unfiltered access to information has joined the lengthy list of threats to social harmony, and the fact-checkers, having tasted power, are unlikely to return to the newsroom. Given that a free press is integral to a functioning democracy, it goes without saying that any regime looking to dismantle the latter would want to get the former out of the way.
No sooner had Dr. Coles been chased out of his university for his writing in one Australian alt-media magazine then he was engulfed in a censorship firestorm over another. An article appeared earlier this month in New Zealand news outlet Stuff excoriating bookstore chain Whitcoulls for carrying the latest edition of New Dawn, a publication which proudly bills itself as a “forum for alternative, non-mainstream ideas that question consensus reality.” Stuff’s coverage berated the bookstore for exposing unsuspecting customers to the jungle of “conspiracy theories” barely restrained within its pages (full disclosure: I have also contributed writing to New Dawn), focusing its rage on Coles’ “The curious case of Brenton Tarrant,” about the Christchurch mosque shooter.
When Whitcoulls did not immediately capitulate, “disinformation expert” Kate Hannah was called in to warn Kiwis who picked up the magazine that they were enabling “dark agendas” seeking to “destabilize liberal democracy.” Reading Coles’ article wasn’t just engaging in wrongthink, but actually committing a crime, she explained, because the article included information on how to access the illegal-in-New-Zealand helmet-cam video Tarrant recorded while shooting his way through the mosque. Just reading about where to find the video might run afoul of hate speech laws, she mused in a radio interview.
Of course, the article includes no such instructions, nor does it – as Hannah claimed – claim Tarrant didn’t shoot anyone. Coles is baffled by the disinfo expert’s disinfo, but suspects the reason they didn’t include his name (standard practice in establishment hit-pieces) in the pressure campaign is that he could justifiably sue for libel. But the mere threat of legal repercussions was sufficient to keep 99.9% of Kiwis away from the forbidden magazine, and perhaps sensing no sales in its future, Whitcoulls finally pulled the issue from its shelves.
New Zealand’s size and isolation make it a perfect experimental laboratory, and the other Four Eyes haven’t hesitated to use it as such. Nor have the Israelis, whose operation was exposed during the 2011 Christchurch earthquake. The 2019 shooting that launched the current touchless torture regime was preceded as such events often are by a series of odd ‘coincidences’ and foreshadowings. Just a few months before the massacre, a group of American survivors of the Parkland, Florida high school shooting visited the city to discuss “living through a tragedy” with their Kiwi counterparts; two Parkland survivors and a Sandy Hook survivor allegedly committed suicide in the months following the mosque killings. A police drill just happened to be taking place near the fleeing gunman, allowing participants to “heroically” capture him in what media dutifully described as a “hell of a coincidence.”

The speedy gun-grab that followed the tragedy left citizens helpless in the claws of Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern, and the subsequent clampdown on the internet was unprecedented in any other western “democracy,” with prison sentences meted out for merely sharing a link. Ostensibly to prevent anyone from reading Tarrant’s manifesto or watching the curiously videogame-like footage of the killings, the rules had the effect of banning access to entire video archives, international forums, and other information resources that might have helped the country’s residents make sense of what had just been done to them, and they were designed to be copied by the other four Eyes – or any other country that should want them.
While all five Eyes adopted unprecedented controls on social media during Covid-19, New Zealand went much further than its peers in controlling the actual publication of news. In March 2020, facing rumors that lockdown was imminent, Ardern warned upstanding citizens to avoid all unauthorized sources of information, urging them to stick with the government’s official site as “your single source of truth.” The message didn’t age well – New Zealand was locked down within the week – but her point had gotten across loud and clear. Arrested while protesting Auckland’s return to lockdown in 2021 over just three “cases,” popular radio host and pandemic dissident Vinny Eastwood was only released on the conditions that he remain under house arrest 24/7 and stay off the internet – draconian requirements for a man who made his living live-streaming. He was later permitted back online, but only on the condition that he not advocate against Covid-19 restrictions – a deliberately subjective line in the sand meant to encourage self-censorship above all.
While the media establishment overflowed with praise for Ardern over her iron-fisted suppression of the population – er, pandemic – no one has thought to ask why, if the West questions all Covid-19 stats coming out of China due to government control of all information sources, they believed the numbers coming out of New Zealand. Even news sites like Stuff, which describes itself as “fiercely independent,” are actually public-private partnerships – in this case funded by the New Zealand government and the Google News Initiative, powered by the bonanza of helicopter money that was dumped on the news media in 2020 to fight the “infodemic” of Covid-19 “disinformation.” That the campaign against New Dawn was no organic outrage was clear – Coles’ article is the last in the issue, and the likelihood of an indignant civilian pawing through 70 pages of conspiracy contraband just to find something they can claim is illegal approaches zero. Its favorable result means it will likely become the blueprint for future book-burning campaigns.
But why go after a couple of obscure Australian conspiracy magazines? Especially in New Zealand, but increasingly in the US and Europe, Big Tech no longer allows the average user to stumble upon the kind of content published by New Dawn or Nexus. Even non-Google search results from once-reliable alternatives like DuckDuckGo and Brave have been scrubbed clean of all deviations from the establishment line on topics like Covid-19 or the war in Ukraine, let alone the Christchurch shooting, and as Coles remarked, the censorship is even creeping through time into the Wayback Machine, the internet researcher’s go-to that once contained archives of much of the internet dating back decades – but now increasingly turns up error pages or sloppily retconned fact-checks. However, Kiwis browsing at Whitcoulls had at their fingertips a powderkeg of new information, rendered all the more volatile by three years spent in informational quarantine. Just as a person locked down for months will see her immune system suffer for lack of outside stimulation, any novel pathogens hitting her much harder when she finally goes outside, the Good Citizen who imbibed only Ardern-approved data for three years will likely be unable to muster even the slightest argument against whatever outrageous claims she finds in New Dawn and perhaps become lost to the weak grasp of establishment propaganda forever.

There’s an easy solution to this problem, should New Zealand want to solve it. Teach children to think critically, instead of the dumbed-down “media literacy” programs being promoted by every self-proclaimed “disinfo expert” this side of PropOrNot. Thought-stopping “information hygiene” techniques (Google it! Look it up on Wikipedia!) and reflexive appeals to authority (only a scientist can interpret that study for you!) do not help an individual resist persuasion. But a population armed with the ability to recognize an official lie and dismantle it would not allow themselves to be locked down over a few cases of a disease they were almost 100% certain to survive anyway – so of course New Dawn couldn’t be permitted to question Christchurch. It is the (shaky) foundation on which Ardern’s hastily-constructed police state was built. As rumors fly about her surprise resignation on Thursday and the media establishment rends its garments over how “unfairly” this “icon of many” was treated by “far-right extremists,” it seems clear her departure will be weaponized to further crack down on the increasingly nebulous specter of “hate speech.”
Americans who believe the New Dawn affair could only have happened in an unarmed, isolated nation like New Zealand should pay attention to what their Congress is up to. Rep. Sheila Jackson Lee (D-Texas) earlier this month introduced a bill that would criminalize the publication of “antagonism based on ‘replacement theory’” and “hate speech that vilifies or is otherwise directed against any non-White person or group” on social media if it can be said that the perpetrator of a “white supremacy inspired hate crime” had encountered the material before committing the crime – or that if they had encountered the material, it could conceivably have motivated them to take such actions.
Without bothering to define such critical terms as “hate speech” or even “replacement theory,” often trotted out for effect when the speaker needs to strike an emotional chord, the bill leapfrogs pre-crime to a total reversal of cause and effect. A content creator can be charged with conspiracy to commit a white supremacy motivated hate crime so long as the actual criminal can be shown to have engaged with their content before committing the crime. In fact, they don’t even need to engage with it – so long as the content could theoretically motivate a “person predisposed to engaging in a white supremacy inspired hate crime” to, well, you know. It’s completely subjective, based on what a “reasonable person” would do when no “reasonable person” would be caught dead in the same room as this bill. This means if someone reads the nursery rhyme “Baa baa black sheep” – declared ‘problematic’ nearly a decade ago for its racial overtones – then picks up an AR-15 and shoots a black family at church, the nursery rhyme writers could be charged with conspiracy to commit a white supremacy-motivated hate crime. Jackson Lee herself cited the example of “someone making a post online that catches the attention of someone who then drives to North Texas and kills 20 Mexican Americans” to make clear precisely how unhinged she is.
It’s doubtful that such a case would make it to court, or lead to a conviction if it did, but public opinion – a product of think tank fellows rather than crowds – can turn on a dime. What sorority girl getting sloshed on margaritas in an oversized Cinco de Mayo sombrero in 2012 would have thought she’d be sentenced to remedial readings of “White Fragility” in 2022? The aim is not to create more work for the official censors but to spook the target into silence with fear of what could happen. Leaving the definition of “white supremacy” open-ended allows an ever-larger spectrum of opinion to be cordoned off as toxic, banned from university campuses and social media, and finally memory-holed as unthinkable. At the same time, actual racists like Ukraine’s neo-Nazi Azov Battalion are invited with open arms to travel the US speaking on university campuses, swastika tattoos and all. While the Anti-Defamation League is quick to tar and feather any academic who points out Israeli war crimes, the censorship-loving Jewish organization has issued what amounts to an official indulgence for Ukraine’s biggest Third Reich fanboys.

I know what would look great with that swastika – another swastika!
Given the FBI’s penchant for crafting terrorism plots out of whole cloth, it would be a simple matter to take out all online wrongthinkers in one fell swoop under the white supremacy conspiracy law – just set up the usual militia honeypot for disaffected white boys, hand them the gear and point them at the minority in question, and make sure a manifesto is found nearby conspicuously listing the websites of every influential dissident in America. While last year’s Missouri v. Biden lawsuit proved – and the Twitter Files confirmed – that social media platforms were being used by a dozen or more government agencies to circumvent First Amendment prohibitions on state censorship, this new arrangement would eliminate even the need for that end-run, requiring only the fig leaf of Unacceptable White Supremacist Beliefs™ to justify the most egregious constitutional abuses.
“Replacement theory” – the idea that white Americans and/or Europeans are being deliberately supplanted in “their” nations by swarthy foreign hordes to suit nefarious ruling class purposes – first entered the mainstream discourse when Tarrant, who titled his manifesto “The Great Replacement,” supposedly set out to kill as many Muslims as possible because they were out-breeding Europeans. Tarrant’s manifesto would have gotten quite a few people in trouble as white-supremacy conspirators, many of them dead – it includes poems from Dylan Thomas and Rudyard Kipling, memes, Wikipedia articles, and an infamous passage explicitly citing black conservative commentator Candace Owens as his ideological inspiration. Tarrant and copycats like Payton Gendron (the Buffalo supermarket shooter and friend of the FBI whose manifesto borrowed liberally from Tarrant and others) have helped transform the epithet “conspiracy theory” from CIA-sponsored smear to precursor of violent extremism, though they couldn’t have done it without UNESCO, the World Jewish Congress, and the Council of Europe, who recently joined forces to remind humanity that “conspiracy theories cause real harm to people, to their health, and also to their physical safety.”
Europe has taken the legal lead in equating conspiracy theory to terrorism, banning author David Icke from the entire Schengen Area last year because his scheduled speech at a peace rally in the Netherlands posed a potential “threat to public order.” Rather than stand up to the police state, the media eagerly flew to its side, quoting “experts” who sagely opined that the “danger” posed by Icke’s “conspiracy ideology” was both clear and present and could inflict “lasting harm” upon the country. This is in keeping with the refrain the WHO has kept up all alongside Covid-19 – that a deadly “infodemic” is spreading through sharing unapproved information about the virus, and that good citizens refrain from posting conspiracy theories online because words are equivalent to violence. This is a central part of children’s “media literacy” classes, aimed at building the perfect content filter directly into the child – because Big Brother can’t be everywhere. The idea is to graduate a generation for whom privacy is alien, dissent is criminal, obedience is a competitive sport, and turning in your parents for wrongthink is second-nature, all justified by the vague nonspecific crisis that has been looming in the background since they were born.
The censorship of New Dawn, the university witch-hunts against Dr. Coles and both Millers, the absurd white supremacy conspiracy bill, are all symptoms of the same totalitarian virus gradually sucking the will to resist out of humanity. Just as viruses need host cells to multiply, so does this one require an army of facilitators – “fake news” bounty hunters, “disinformation experts,” and the like – to smooth out humanity’s rough edges into blissful obedience. A pandemic – even an artificially-inflated synthetic one like Covid-19 – has to end, but an infodemic is forever, and this one has proven 100% fatal to human rights.
Meta gave the CDC de facto power to police Covid “misinfo”
By Didi Rankovic | Reclaim The Net | January 20, 2023
The mask is slipping (pun fully intended), all over the place – regarding the Big Tech/Big Government collusion. Now it’s time to pay close attention to the role played by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC).
We’ve already been awed – just by the magnitude of the whole thing – if not exactly “shocked” by the Twitter Files.
After all, while it was happening, a whole lot of observers surmised that something of the sort had to be behind the unprecedented and, seemingly inexplicable levels of censorship on the platform.
But – what in the world was happening at Facebook, around the same time? After all, Facebook is an almost orders of magnitude bigger and more influential social network than Twitter.
For the time being, we don’t have the same “direct line” to internal documents as is the case with Twitter, which was made possible by the dedication to transparency by the new owner himself.
However, what could be dubbed as the “Facebook Files” are based on credible sources, too – Reason is coming out with a story based on confidential emails that emerged thanks to a court case – the state of Missouri suing the Biden administration.
The emails show that Facebook (and by extension Instagram) representatives and the CDC not only kept in touch at all times, but that the tech giant also “routinely asked government health officials to vet claims relating to the virus, mitigation efforts such as masks, and vaccines.”
In turn, the CDC kept a watchful eye on what speech was allowed on Facebook, what policies toward censorship of “inconvenient” Covid topics applied, and this government agency had no problem instructing the social network behemoth how to behave in these instances.
Robbie Soave, a senior editor for Reason, revealed some examples of what was happening in a series of tweets citing the emails and providing screenshots. One shows that in May 2021, CDC started to get involved in “vetting” content on Facebook that concerns Covid vaccines. And CDC had the last word on what was allowed to remain online as “accurate.”
Other emails show that Facebook (Meta) made sure the CDC was given de facto power to police Covid “misinformation,” while at the same time flagging content for the CDC, consulting with it on claims that could “contribute to vaccine refusals.”





At the same time, Reason is acknowledging that this was by no means the only federal agency to engage in similar activities, all aimed at pressuring some of the world’s biggest social platforms to allow only a certain narrative, and discredit any skepticism, even that coming from medical professionals and scientists.
Even President Biden made sure to “contribute” to this effort, when he in June 2021 bizarrely accused Facebook of “killing people.”
This was really meant to say that the giant had better not dare allow any Covid content the White House failed to “vet” behind the scenes – one way or another.
And the giant obliged, sometimes probably even exceeding the level of compliance expected from the administration. An internal email now reveals that Facebook went as far as to “snitch” on its own users making fun of Anthony Fauci, apparently in a bid to defend his reputation – again, at the expense of free speech.
“One email warned the CDC that Facebook users were mocking Fauci for changing his mind about masking and double-masking. The CDC replied that this information was ‘very helpful’,” Soave, the magazine’s senior editor and host on The Hill TV channel, tweeted.
The upcoming, March issue of Reason delves into how the CDC turned into the speech police when it came to pressuring social media to block content that the government agency decided was Covid “misinformation.”
And this was online speech that this, and other government agencies, have no constitutional way of directly suppressing without breaking the law.
“There is a word for government officials using the threat of punishment to extort desired behaviors from private actors. That word is: jawboning,” Soave remarked in one of the tweets.
And one can imagine – and the emails now show – just how gun-shy and ready to please those in power Facebook had become, after years of public vilification, and who knows what kind of pressure behind the scenes in the wake of the 2016 US election.


