20 State AGs Put Top U.S. Pediatric Group On Notice for “Abusive” and “Experimental” Trans Therapy Guidance
By Jefferey Jaxen | September 26, 2024
“It is abusive to treat a child with biologically altering drugs that have an unknown physiological trajectory and end point. It is also inhumane to endorse such experimentation without a confident safety profile, especially if more times than not, it proves to be medically unnecessary.”
This statement unpins the tone of the legal notice signed by 20 state Attorneys General to the American Academy of Pediatrics (AAP) asking the group to answer to possible violations of state consumer protection statutes over its questionable standards on gender dysphoria care for minors.
“… the AAP continues to authoritatively declare that puberty blockers are ‘reversible,’” the letter continued. “That claim is scientifically unsupported and contradicts what is medically known. And because that claim raises questions under most state consumer protection laws, it has the undersigned alarmed,” the letter goes on to state.
Idaho AG and co-signer of the action letter Raúl Labrador stated, “It is shameful the most basic tenet of medicine – do no harm – has been abandoned by professional associations when politically pressured,” said Attorney General Labrador. “These organizations are sacrificing the health and well-being of children with medically unproven treatments that leave a wake of permanent damage.”
Why are these AGs acting now? The momentum has gained breakaway speed regarding the science of gender affirming care for minors.
Puberty blockers are not fully reversible and come with serious long-term consequences. According to the Cass Report commissioned by NHS England, using puberty blockers are used to suppress hormones during or before puberty can interfere with neurocognitive development, compromise bone density and may negatively affect metabolic health and weight.
And when puberty blocker use is followed directly by cross-sex hormone use, which is often the case, infertility and sterility is a known consequence.
The controversial world of gender care isn’t the only space that the AAP has dove into without an abundance of caution. The group made headlines in 2023 by radically altering their front line weight loss recommendations children ages 12 and up to include a new class of risky drugs and weight-loss surgery.
The AAP’s murky ‘science’ recommendations reached an early level of appalling shame in 2019 when, during a public hearing in 2019 to discuss an act before it was signed into law, pediatrician Dr. Helene Felman, representing Washington D.C.’s chapter of the American Academy of Pediatrics (AAP), stated:
“As a pediatrician, I like the legislation as it stands because it offers the opportunity to capture those young adults who can make informed decisions at technically any age.”
11 was ultimately decided upon until a federal court for the District of Columbia granted a preliminary injunction in a case funded by The Informed Consent Action Network.
The American Medical Association (AMA) had also thrown its full weight behind attempting to remove the parents from medical decisions involving their children.
Looking at where their energy has gone in key moments, one thing appears clear, the AAP wants children isolated from their parents and given over to the medical system for pharmaceutical interventions with known risk profiles. Why?
Runaway Pesticide Toxicity of Food Supply Shows Generational EPA Failure
By Jefferey Jaxen | September 24, 2024
The decades-long push to clean up the American food supply has received supercharged momentum over the last month thanks, in part, to Robert F. Kennedy Jr. His media messaging to reform regulatory agencies has gained critical mass through social media outlets along with breaking into the mainstream of political talking points.
Meanwhile, the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) has recently acted using a rare emergency order for the first time in 40 years to stop the use of a problematic pesticide, Dacthal, from the market.
Why? According to their press release, “EPA has taken this action because unborn babies whose pregnant mothers are exposed to DCPA, sometimes without even knowing the exposure has occurred, could experience changes to fetal thyroid hormone levels, and these changes are generally linked to low birth weight, impaired brain development, decreased IQ, and impaired motor skills later in life, some of which may be irreversible.”
Does this prove the agency is listening to The People and responding to the current social momentum towards healthy food? Is the Biden–Harris administration (or whoever is truly running the country) making historic change?
Not really…
The issue of toxins, agrochemicals, and inferior ingredients harming American health through our food supply has long been a bipartisan operation – handed down from administration to administration without pause from what could only be deemed a food industrial complex… a corporate health deep state of sorts.
The EPA classified Dacthal as a “possible carcinogen” in 1995 after its studies done by the manufacturer found it could cause thyroid tumors in animals.
The entire European Union banned the pesticide in 2009 due to irrefutable health concerns. Not the EPA… it was big business as usual.
The Environmental Working Group reports:
“In 2013, the EPA required AMVAC, the sole DCPA manufacturer in the U.S., to submit an additional study showing the chemical’s effects on the fetal thyroid among other information.
AMVAC’s research, finally submitted to the EPA in 2022, showed even low doses of DCPA exposure can harm the developing fetus.
During the nearly 10 years before it finally complied with the EPA’s requirement, the company continued producing and selling Dacthal.”
In other words, the EPA dragged its feet, through multiple administrations, to slow roll the removal of this known, health-damaging pesticide.
Another point in play is the EPA’s regulatory hypocrisy claiming it removed Dacthal because it caused changes in fetal thyroid hormone levels, low birth weight, impaired brain development, decreased IQ, and impaired motor skills later in life.
Lowered IQ… Changes in thyroid function…
Meanwhile, the EPA is literally defending in court, for multiple years, the practice of widespread water fluoridation. Even though a new government report from the Department of Health and Human Services’s National Toxicology Program found it lowered IQ in children… which has been known for a long time.
Furthermore, a review of developmental fluoride neurotoxicity research shows fluoride is an endocrine disrupter causing toxicity to the thyroid gland that can affect thyroid function at intake levels as low as 0.01 to 0.03 mg/kg/day in individuals with iodine deficiency.
Yet fluoride can’t be touched. The EPA defends this practice considered one of the greatest public health achievements over the last 100 years.
How about glyphosate? The EPA acted fast on that one right?
The chemical was only removed from the U.S. market by its manufacturer due to overwhelming litigation costs of lost lawsuits threatening the corporate viability of Bayer. EPA… silent.
So here we are with an EPA that’s still broken. The results?
Continued tests of the American food supply reveals widespread pesticide contamination with a recent finding of a cocktail of 21 different pesticides in Target’s baby food. Twelve of the pesticides found are classified as highly hazardous to the environment and/or human health and eight are banned in the European Union.
A new systematic review looking at the impact of organic foods on chronic diseases found:
“A significant inverse relationship between organic food consumption and cardiometabolic risk factors, including obesity, diabetes mellitus, hypertension, and hyperlipidemia, was observed in the majority of prospective studies… Clinical trials consistently indicated lower pesticide exposure in participants on organic diets, suggesting potential health benefits.”
While its been clear to anyone paying attention that the U.S. regulatory agencies often act as barriers to optimal health rather than protectors. The parents, activists, non-profits and lawyers have stepped up, continuously, to fill the role of watchdog often battling the very agencies being funded to the tune of untold billions to oversee the regulation of environmental, medical, and health products and concerns of Americans.
As this narrative gets breathing room, the current messaging of clean, healthy food is also running head long into record low consumer confidence and higher food prices making basics challenging for most Americans. For it to continue the staying power it needs and desperately deserves, real change will be required from a combined political and grassroots union to overturn the very culture of regulatory agencies away from corporate capture and the conflicts of interest revolving door influence that has corrupted the core of American oversight for over half a century. No small task.
Fluoride in Water Poses ‘Unreasonable Risk’ to Children, Federal Judge Rules
By Brenda Baletti, Ph.D. | The Defender | September 25, 2024
In a decision that could end the practice of water fluoridation in the U.S., a federal judge late Tuesday ruled that water fluoridation at current U.S. levels poses an “unreasonable risk” of reduced IQ in children.
The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) can no longer ignore that risk, and must take regulatory action, Judge Edward Chen of the U.S. District Court of the Northern District of California wrote in the long-awaited landmark decision.
More than 200 million Americans drink water treated with fluoride at the “optimal” level of 0.7 milligrams per liter (mg/L). However, Chen ruled that a preponderance of scientific evidence shows this level of fluoride exposure may damage human health, particularly that of pregnant mothers and young children.
The verdict delivers a major blow to the EPA, public health agencies like the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) and professional lobbying groups like the American Dental Association (ADA), which have staked their reputations on the claim that water fluoridation is one of the greatest public health achievements of the 20th century and an unqualified public good.
Fluoride proponents refused to reexamine that stance despite mounting scientific evidence from top researchers and government agencies of fluoride’s neurotoxic risks, particularly for infants’ developing brains.
Instead, they attempted to weaken and suppress the research and discredit the scientists carrying it out.
Rick North, board member of Fluoride Action Network, one of the plaintiffs in the lawsuit, told The Defender, “What’s false is the CDC claiming that fluoridation is one of the 10 greatest health achievements of the 20th century. What’s true is that ending fluoridation will be one of the 10 greatest health achievements of the 21st century.”
“The judge did what EPA has long refused to do, and that is to apply the EPA standard risk assessment framework to fluoride,” said Michael Connett, attorney for the plaintiffs. “In so doing, the court has shown that the widespread exposure to fluoride that we now have in the United States is unreasonably and precariously close to the levels that we know cause harm.”
The EPA can appeal Tuesday’s decision. The agency told The Defender it is reviewing the decision and has no comment at this time. The U.S. Department of Justice, which represents the EPA in the lawsuit, also said it has no comment.
EPA’s argument ‘not persuasive’
The ruling concludes a historic lawsuit — one that has dragged on for seven years — brought against the EPA by environmental and consumer advocacy organizations like the Fluoride Action Network, Moms Against Fluoridation and Food & Water Watch, along with individual parents and children.
It is the first lawsuit to go to a federal trial under the Toxic Substances Control Act (TSCA), as amended by Congress in 2016. The TSCA allows U.S. citizens to petition the EPA to evaluate whether a chemical presents an unreasonable risk to public health and should be regulated.
If the EPA denies a TSCA citizen petition — which the agency did when the plaintiffs asked it to reexamine water fluoridation in 2016 — the petitioners are entitled to a “de novo” judicial review of the science without the deference to the agency typically afforded it in legal cases.
Chen’s 80-page ruling, issued six months after closing arguments in February, offers a careful and detailed articulation of the EPA’s review process for chemicals that pose a hazard to human health and evaluates and summarizes the extensive scientific data presented at trial.
Chen wrote, “EPA’s own expert agrees that fluoride is hazardous at some level.” He cited a key report issued by the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) National Toxicology Program (NTP), which undertook a systematic review of all available scientific research at the time of publication.
The report “concluded that fluoride is indeed associated with reduced IQ in children, at least at exposure levels at or above 1.5 mg/L,” Chen wrote.
The NTP also reported that although there are technical challenges to measuring fluoride’s toxic effects at low levels, “scientists have observed a statistically significant association between fluoride and adverse effects in children even at such ‘lower’ exposure levels,” Chen wrote.
He said that despite recognizing that fluoride is hazardous, the EPA’s defense rested largely on the fact that the exact level at which it is hazardous is too unclear for the agency to determine whether the chemical presents an unreasonable risk.
This argument is “not persuasive,” Chen wrote.
Pregnant women exposed to fluoride in water at levels exceeding the hazard level
The EPA requires a margin of error by a factor of at least 10 to exist between the hazard level for a toxin and the acceptable human exposure level. “Put differently, only an exposure that is below 1/10th of the hazard level would be deemed safe under Amended TSCA, given the margin of error required,” Chen wrote.
That means that even if the hazard level were 4 mg/L — well above the 1.5 mg/L identified by the NTP — the safe level of fluoride exposure would be 0.4 mg/L, well below the current “optimal” fluoride level in the U.S., Chen wrote.
The much lower probable hazard level established by high-quality studies indicates that many pregnant women in the U.S. are already exposed to fluoride in water at levels exceeding the hazard level.
“Under even the most conservative estimates of this level, there is not enough of a margin between the accepted hazard level and the actual human exposure levels to find that fluoride is safe,” Chen concluded.
“Simply put, the risk to health at exposure levels in United States drinking water is sufficiently high to trigger regulatory response by the EPA under Amended TSCA.”
The law dictates that the EPA must take regulatory action, but it does not specify what that action has to be. EPA regulatory actions can range from notifying the public of risks to banning chemicals.
Philippe Grandjean, M.D., Ph.D., adjunct professor in environmental health at Harvard and chair of environmental medicine at the University of Southern Denmark, top researcher on fluoride’s neurotoxicity and expert witness for plaintiffs in the case told The Defender he thought the court’s decision was “well-justified.”
He said the ruling made it incumbent on the EPA to go beyond simply ending water fluoridation.
“EPA will have to consider what to do in the southwestern parts of the country where the fluoride content of groundwater is too high due to minerals in the soil containing fluoride,” he said. “And then there is the question about ingestion of toothpaste.”
The CDC and the ADA did not immediately respond to The Defender’s request for comment.
More than 70 years of controversy
For more than seven decades, U.S. public health officials have steadfastly supported water fluoridation, claiming the practice is a key strategy for maintaining and improving dental health.
Proponents of water fluoridation, with help from the mainstream press, often attempted to cast those questioning fluoride’s benefits and raising concerns about its safety as conspiracy theorists.
The EPA in 1975 recommended adding fluoride to water at an optimal level of 1.2 mg/L for its dental benefits, but recommended a maximum level of 4 mg/L, the ruling said.
As more evidence has emerged about fluoride’s adverse health effects, including skeletal fluorosis, recommended levels were revised.
Surgeon General Vivek Murthy, officially lowered the recommended dosage for water fluoridation in 2015 from 0.7-1.2 mg/L to 0.7 mg/L after considering “adverse health effects” along with alleged benefits.
However, evidence that fluoride poses a neurotoxic risk has existed for decades.
In 2017, after the EPA rejected their citizen petition to end fluoridation of drinking water in the U.S. based on evidence of health risks, namely neurotoxicity, the plaintiffs filed the lawsuit.
A seven-day trial took place in federal court in San Francisco in June 2020, but Chen put the proceedings on hold pending the release of the NTP’s systematic review of research available on the neurotoxic effects of fluoride.
The NTP sought to publish its report — which consisted of a “state of the science” monograph and a meta-analysis — in May 2022, but dental officials at the CDC and the National Institutes of Health National Institute of Dental and Craniofacial Research pressured HHS Assistant Secretary for Health Rachel Levine to prevent the review from being published.
The ADA also sought to suppress the report.
Levine told the NTP to not publish the report but to put it on hold and allow for further review.
Plaintiffs submitted documents obtained via the Freedom of Information Act exposing this intervention to the court. The revelation prompted Chen to rule that the trial should go forward using the draft report from the NTP.
The trial resumed in January in San Francisco, with arguments presented over the course of two weeks.
The NTP’s monograph was finalized and published last month on its website. The meta-analysis is forthcoming in a peer-reviewed journal.
Connett said that Congress created the citizen petition provision in TSCA as a counterweight to bureaucratic lethargy and as a check on the EPA.
The statute, he said, is a powerful tool for overcoming politicized science.
“When science becomes fossilized in political inertia, the citizen petition provision of TSCA is a very powerful tool for citizens,” Connett said. “Through this case, we have been able to effectuate what Congress had envisioned with this part of the statute.”
This article was originally published by The Defender — Children’s Health Defense’s News & Views Website under Creative Commons license CC BY-NC-ND 4.0. Please consider subscribing to The Defender or donating to Children’s Health Defense.
Could Bird Flu Be the October Surprise?
By Clayton J. Baker, MD | Brownstone Institute | September 21, 2024
Bird flu was the hot topic in pandemic fear-mongering until very recently. Just a few months ago, former CDC director Robert Redfield publicly described Bird flu (also known as H5N1 Influenza A or Avian Influenza virus) as the likely next pandemic – predicting a laboratory-leaked virus as the cause. Meanwhile, Deborah Birx, aka the “Scarf Lady” of Covid infamy, was making the TV news, promoting an unrealistic and excessive program of testing farm animals and humans for Bird flu.
At present, bird flu seems to have been put on the back burner by the authorities. Monkeypox has since taken center stage, with the World Health Organization declaring a state of emergency over that virus. Furthermore, the “experts” have trotted out numerous other viruses with which to terrify the public. Examples include West Nile virus – who no less than Anthony Fauci himself supposedly contracted – and even the exotic “Sloth virus” (also known as Oropouche virus).
The first step in dealing with these continual reports of horrific pathogens is recognizing the vital importance of living in knowledge rather than in fear. “Fear porn” is a real psychological weapon and one that is being used against us on a daily basis. As we painfully learned during Covid, a terrified population is easily manipulated, controlled, and exploited. As free citizens, we must remain mindful and knowledgeable, rather than fearful, about the flood of information and propaganda that is hurled at us.
Regarding bird flu, we should remain mindful of the following. In its current iteration, bird flu has caused no widespread human illness, no human deaths, and sporadic outbreaks in farm animal populations. However, there is much evidence that bird flu could be used as a bioweapon. Furthermore, it could also be applied to disrupt the November 5 US Presidential election.
Here are 3 reasons why bird flu may still be weaponized to alter the election:
- Multiple bio labs in the United States and abroad – such as the lab run by Yoshihiro Kawaoka, PhD at the University of Wisconsin – perform alarming Gain-of-Function research on the H5N1 virus, making variants of the virus that are much more dangerous to humans than variants that occur in nature. These labs have had leaks with alarming frequency. The current strains of bird flu in the US show strong genetic evidence of having originated in a laboratory. A laboratory leak of a new strain of the virus, manipulated to be highly transmissible and/or pathogenic in humans, remains a real possibility.
- The “International Bird Flu Summit” will be held on October 2-4, 2024 at the Hilton Fairfax in Fairfax, VA – just outside Washington, DC – exactly one month prior to the election. Listed topics include “Command, Control and Management,” “Emergency Response Management,” and “Surveillance and Data Management.” If this sounds eerily reminiscent to you of the Covid lockdowns – which were also closely preceded by government-based planning exercises – your memory serves you well.
- The infrastructure is already in place for a “pandemic” of bird flu, much more than it is for other potential pathogens. Already, widespread testing of farms is underway. The development of bird flu vaccines has increased dramatically. The FDA has already approved vaccines made by Sanofi, GSK subsidiary ID Biomedical Corporation of Quebec, and CSL Seqirus, while Moderna recently received a $176 million government grant for its mRNA-based bird flu injection, which is in development.
In the bigger picture, a number of viruses could potentially be employed as an “October Surprise” to disrupt the election. Bird flu appears to be a leading candidate (pun intended), but it is not the only one.
We, as citizens, must remain vigilant to this threat to our electoral process. We should contact our local and state officials now, before anything is attempted, and express our absolute insistence on fair, legal, and regular elections. We should share this information widely with others so that all are aware of what might be attempted. Over the longer term, we must work to end Gain-of-Function research.
With Covid, we experienced first-hand what can be done to our civil rights and to our Constitutionally guaranteed electoral and governmental processes when a fear-driven, emergency-based takeover of society occurs. As free citizens, we must never allow this to happen again. From now on, we must live in knowledge, not in fear.
C.J. Baker, M.D. is an internal medicine physician with a quarter century in clinical practice. He has held numerous academic medical appointments, and his work has appeared in many journals, including the Journal of the American Medical Association and the New England Journal of Medicine. From 2012 to 2018 he was Clinical Associate Professor of Medical Humanities and Bioethics at the University of Rochester.
They Think We Are Stupid, Volume 11
Everything you need to know about our ruling class’s opinion of you
By Aaron Kheriaty, MD | Human Flourishing | September 19, 2024
New Report: State Department Funded Fact-checkers to Censor ‘Lawful Speech’
By Michael Nevradakis, Ph.D. | The Defender | September 18, 2024
The U.S. Department of State-funded domestic and international fact-checking entities that censored American independent media outlets and social media users who questioned the Biden administration’s COVID-19 and other policies, according to a congressional report.
The report by the U.S. House of Representatives Committee on Small Business stated:
“The Federal government has funded, developed, and promoted entities that aim to demonetize news and information outlets because of their lawful speech.”
The government’s actions fueled “a censorship ecosystem” that suppressed “individuals’ First Amendment rights” and “the ability of certain small businesses to compete online.”
The report focused on the State Department’s Global Engagement Center (GEC), which promoted and funded “tech start-ups and other small businesses in the disinformation detection space … with domestic censorship capabilities.”
The “fact-checking” firms named in the report include the International Fact-Checking Network — owned by the Poynter Institute — and NewsGuard.
The International Fact-Checking Network, established in 2015, has received funding from another State Department-affiliated group, the National Endowment for Democracy — and from Google, the Open Society Foundations and the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation.
According to the House report, the federal government “assisted the private sector in detecting alleged MDM [misinformation-disinformation-malinformation] for moderation” and “worked with foreign governments with strict internet speech laws,” including European Union member states and the United Kingdom, to censor speech.
The report determined that the GEC and the National Endowment for Democracy violated international restrictions by “collaborating with fact-checking entities” to assess the content of domestic media outlets.
The “fact-checking” operations targeted independent media outlets, and as a result, “the scales are tipped in favor of outlets which express certain partisan narratives rather than holding the government accountable.”
Whether the State Department’s actions rise to “unconstitutional violations of the First Amendment is currently before the courts,” the report stated.
The State Department and several GEC officials are defendants in Murthy v. Missouri, a lawsuit alleging the Biden administration colluded with social media to censor free speech.
Children’s Health Defense (CHD) and its chairman on leave, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., are plaintiffs in Kennedy v. Biden, a similar lawsuit that last year was consolidated with Murthy v. Missouri.
The Poynter Institute is a defendant in another censorship lawsuit, CHD v. Meta, that CHD filed against Facebook’s parent company.
NewsGuard partnered with CDC, WHO to censor online content
According to the report, NewsGuard used money it received from the GEC and the U.S. Department of Defense to fund efforts to lower the advertising revenue “of businesses purported to spread MDM.”
“A system that rates the credibility of press is fatally flawed as it is subject to the partisan lens of the assessor, making the ratings unreliable,” the report states.
NewsGuard leveraged taxpayer dollars to develop Misinformation Fingerprints, a product that “catalogues what it determines to be the most prominent falsehoods and ‘misinformation narratives’” circulating online, “essentially outsourcing the U.S. government’s perception of fact to NewsGuard,” the report states.
NewsGuard later partnered with dozens of companies, organizations, universities and media outlets, including the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the Office of the Surgeon General and the World Health Organization (WHO).
“During the pandemic, the WHO enlisted NewsGuard for its input, including regular reports, on which COVID-19 narratives it determined to be misinformation were prevalent online,” the report states. “The WHO then contacted social media companies and search engines asking them to remove this content.”
‘Nobody wanted’ fact-checkers until ‘actual truths started getting out’
Tim Hinchliffe, publisher of The Sociable, told The Defender, “These so-called ‘fact-checkers’ are not in the business of actually checking facts. They are in the business of controlling narratives … Nobody wanted or needed these organizations until actual truths started getting out.”
Catherine Austin Fitts, founder and publisher of the Solari Report and former U.S. assistant secretary of Housing and Urban Development, told The Defender the government increasingly relies on censorship to promote its favored narratives.
“They need to institute more and more censorship,” Fitts said. “It’s hard to refute the gaslighting that flows from this imagination factory.”
Francis Boyle, J.D., Ph.D., professor of international law at the University of Illinois, told The Defender he wasn’t surprised that the State Department is “working to censor those who disagree with U.S. government policies and their globalist agenda.”
The report recommends that no federal funds “should be used to grow companies whose operations are designed to demonetize and interfere with the domestic press” and that federal agencies “should not be outsourcing their perception of fact to speech-police organizations subject to partisan bias.”
GEC also faces the loss of its government funding. According to the Washington Examiner, “A provision through the annual State Department appropriations bill, which passed the House this summer and will be negotiated in the Senate, aims to ban future checks to the GEC.”
But for Boyle, this is not enough. He said the State Department has, “at a minimum,” committed “the federal crime of conspiracy to defraud the U.S. government.”
Censorship ‘a pendulum that swings both ways’
The Gateway Pundit last week reported on additional links between the International Fact-Checking Network, other “fact-checking” firms and Big Tech.
In 2015, Poynter partnered with Google News Lab, which earlier that year, helped establish First Draft News. Active until 2022, First Draft was a consortium of social media verification groups that shared methods for combating “fake news.”
Another First Draft founder, fact-checking firm Bellingcat, also received funding from the National Endowment for Democracy.
First Draft was previously led by Claire Wardle, Ph.D., a Brown University professor who, according to “Twitter Files” released last year, advised the Biden administration on COVID-19 “misinformation” — despite having no science or medical credentials.
In 2016, Poynter and the International Fact-Checking Network partnered with First Draft “to tackle common issues, including ways to streamline the [news] verification process.” Other partners included Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, The New York Times, The Washington Post, CNN, ABC News, NBC News and BBC News.
In 2017, Google News Lab partnered with the International Fact-Checking Network “to dramatically increase the searchable output of fact-checkers worldwide, expand fact-checking to new markets and support fact-checking beyond politics, such as in sports, health and science.” The following year, Poynter acquired PolitiFact.com.
Google was also one of the original funders of The Trust Project, a consortium of news organizations that developed eight “trust indicators” to help the public “easily assess the integrity of news.”
These “trust indicators” later became “one of the sources being used by NewsGuard Technologies for a new product to improve news literacy,” and formed “a foundation for NewsGuard review development.”
Hinchliffe warned that the beneficiaries of censorship based on today’s “fact-checking” may become its targets in the future.
“One of the problems of censorship that operates under the guise of misinformation and disinformation, apart from stifling free speech and suppressing actual truths, is that it’s a pendulum that swings both ways,” he said. “The people calling for censorship now may be in a greater position of power to do so, but it will one day swing back at them.”
This article was originally published by The Defender — Children’s Health Defense’s News & Views Website under Creative Commons license CC BY-NC-ND 4.0. Please consider subscribing to The Defender or donating to Children’s Health Defense.
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Book Review
The Greatest Threat to World Peace? A Review of Daniele Ganser’s ‘USA: The Ruthless Empire’
Review by Marilyn Langlois | November 10, 2023
If you regard the United States as perhaps flawed but overall a force for good in the world . . .
If you scoff at the notion that the US, a republic founded on principles of freedom and democracy, has morphed into a world empire, perpetrating assassinations, coups d’état, acts of terror and illegal warfare . . .
If you want to promote peace but haven’t yet explored deceptive events that precipitate US warmongering . . .
. . . here is a volume that will clear the air and paint an honest picture of the significant, not-so-rosy impact US foreign policy and actions have had in the world around us.
USA: The Ruthless Empire, by Swiss historian and peace researcher Daniele Ganser, is the newly published English language translation of his book Imperium USA, originally written in German and published in 2020. Here is a summary of key points — including some lesser-known ones — along with remedies for a more peaceful future, that are covered in the book. … continue
Blog Roll
Aletho News- Villains of Judea: Douglas Feith
- US pension fund invests hundreds of millions in weapons firms supplying Israel
- US bill to grant Americans serving in Israeli army same rights as US troops
- What a president, a movie star, a congressman, and a cell phone all dared to say
- ‘An entire nation is being humiliated by the Iranian leadership’: Merz
- Pakistan Throws Open Its Gates for Iran’s Transit Trade to Third Countries
- Iran to charge ships passing Strait of Hormuz in rial: Lawmaker
- Talks would resume if US accepts 3-phase framework Iran put forward
- Israeli forces raid Syria’s Dara’a, Quneitra countryside, set up checkpoints
- IRGC says to reverse engineer 15 undetonated US missiles uncovered in southern Iran
- If Americans Knew
- Israel escalates in Gaza: killing, torture, hunger – Daily Update
- Six Months into Gaza Ceasefire, Setting the Record Straight About Aid
- ‘Silent suffering’: Why children in Gaza are losing their ability to speak
- In Gaza, 17,000 infections linked to rodents and external parasites – Daily Update
- Lobby group taking journalists on propaganda tours of Israel
- The Shattered Figure of Jesus Is Not an Exception. It’s a Pattern
- Israel’s idea of ceasefire includes killing 21 in one day – Daily Update
- Christians in Israel and Palestine, past and present
- Israel eager to restart Iran war, Gaza genocide – Daily Update
- Meet the Top “Content” Producers Linked to Canary Mission
- No Tricks Zone
- New Study: Extreme Heat Records, Heatwaves, Extreme Cold Records Declining Across US Since 1899
- It’s The Cold, Stupid! Cold 20 Times More Lethal Than Heat, Multiple Studies Show
- European Institute For Climate And Energy: “Climate Debate is Seldom About Science”
- New Study: The Climate May Be 5 Times More Sensitive To Solar Forcing Than Commonly Assumed
- EV Industry Reached $70 Billion In Losses In 2024 Due To Delusional Green Ideologies
- Reality Check: Maldives Have Actually Grown In Size Or Remained Stable Over Recent Decades
- Abrupt Climate Change Also Occurred NATURALLY In The Past …25 Times During Last Ice Age
- Cave Discovery Reveals Today’s Desert Climates Were Recently Far Warmer, Wetter, Teeming With Life
- German Expert: Heat Dome Led To Record Temps In Western USA…Warmer In 1934, 1936
- New Study: No Linear Warming Or Glacier Retreat Along Northern Antarctic Peninsula Since 1980s
Aletho News 