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New report unveils how CIA schemes color revolutions around the world

By Yuan Hong | Global Times | May 4, 2023

For a long time, the US Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) has plotted “peaceful evolution” and “color revolutions” as well as spying activities around the world. Although details about these operations have always been murky, a new report released by China’s National Computer Virus Emergency Response Center and Chinese cybersecurity company 360 on Thursday unveiled the main technical means the CIA has used to scheme and promote unrest around the world.

According to the report, since the beginning of the 21st century, the rapid development of the internet offered “new opportunity” for CIA’s infiltration activities in other countries and regions. Any institutions or individuals from anywhere in the world that use US digital equipment or software could be turned into the CIA’s “puppet agent.”

For decades, the CIA has overthrown or attempted to overthrow at least 50 legitimate governments abroad (the CIA has only recognized seven of these instances), causing turmoil in related countries. Whether it is the “color revolution” in Ukraine in 2014, the “sunflower revolution” in Taiwan island, China, or the “saffron revolution” in Myanmar in 2007, the “green revolution” in Iran in 2009, and other attempted “color revolutions” — the US intelligence agencies are behind them all, according to the report.

The US’ leading position in technologies of telecommunication and on-site command has provided unprecedented possibilities for the US intelligence community to launch “color revolutions” abroad. The report released by the National Computer Virus Emergency Response Center and 360 disclosed five methods commonly used by the CIA.

The first is to provide encrypted network communication services. In order to help protesters in some countries in the Middle East keep in touch and avoid being tracked and arrested, an American company, which, reportedly, has a US military background, developed TOR technology that can stealthily access the internet — the Onion Router technology.

The servers encrypt all information that flows through them to help certain users to surf the web anonymously. After the project was launched by American companies, it was immediately provided free of charge to anti-government elements in Iran, Tunisia, Egypt and other countries and regions to ensure that those “young dissidents who want to shake their own government’s rule” can avoid the scrutiny of the government, according to the report.

The second method is to provide offline communication services. For example, in order to ensure that anti-government personnel in Tunisia, Egypt and other countries can still keep in touch with the outside world when the internet is disconnected, Google and Twitter quickly launched a special service called “Speak2Tweet,” which allows users to dial and upload voice notes for free.

These messages are automatically converted into tweets and then uploaded to the internet, and publicly released through Twitter and other platforms to complete the “real-time reporting” of the event on site, said the report.

The third method is to provide on-site command tools for rallies and parades based on the internet and wireless communications. The report noted that the US RAND Corporation has spent several years developing a non-traditional regime change technology called “swarming.” The tool is used to help a large number of young people connected through the internet join the “one shot for another place” mobile protest movement, greatly improving the efficiency of on-site command of the event.

The fourth is American developed software called “Riot.” The software supports 100 percent independent broadband network, provides variable WiFi network, does not rely on any traditional physical access method, does not need telephone, cable or satellite connection, and can easily escape any form of government monitoring.

The last one is the “anti-censorship” information system. The US State Department regards the research and development of the system as an important task and has injected more than $30 million into the project.

High vigilance needed

Moreover, the National Computer Virus Emergency Response Center and 360 company have spotted Trojan horse programs or plug-ins related to the CIA in recent cyberattacks targeting China. The public security authorities have investigated these cases, the Global Times has learned.

Aside from the five methods the CIA has used to incite unrest globally, through further technical analysis, the National Computer Virus Emergency Response Center and 360 company also identified another nine methods used by the CIA as “weapons” for cyberattacks, including attack module delivery, remote control, information collection and stealing, and third-party open-source tools.

The response center and 360 company also spotted an information-stealing tool used by the CIA, which is also one of the 48 advanced cyber weapons exposed in the confidential document of the US National Security Agency.

The discovery of these information-stealing tools shows that the CIA and the US National Security Agency will jointly attack the same victim, or share cyberattack weapons with each other, or provide relevant technical or human support, according to the report.

These new findings also offer important new evidence in tracing the identity of the APT-C-39 attackers. In 2020, 360 company independently discovered an APT organization that had never been exposed to the outside world, and named it APT-C-39. The organization specifically targets China and its friendly countries to carry out cyberattack and stealing activities, and its victims are spread all over the world.

The report also noted that the danger of CIA attack weapons can be glimpsed from third-party open-source tools as it often uses these tools to carry out cyberattacks.

The initial attack of the CIA cyberattack operation will generally be carried out against the victim’s network equipment or server. After obtaining the target purview, it will further explore the network topology of the target organization and move to other networked devices in the internal network to steal more sensitive information and data.

The controlled target computer is monitored in real time for 24 hours, and all information will be recorded. Once a USB device is connected, the private files in the victim’s USB device will be monitored and automatically stolen. When conditions permit, the camera, microphone and GPS positioning device on the user terminal will be remotely controlled and accessed, according to the report.

These CIA cyber weapons use standardized espionage technical specifications, and various attack methods echo and interlock and have now covered almost all internet and IoT assets worldwide, and can control other countries’ networks anytime, anywhere to steal important and sensitive data from other countries.

The American-style cyber hegemony is evident, the report notes.

Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesperson Mao Ning said on Thursday that US intelligence and espionage activities and cyberattacks on other countries deserve high vigilance from the international community.

The US must take seriously and respond to the concerns from the international community, and stop using cyber weapons to carry out espionage and cyberattacks around the world, Mao said.

In response to the highly systematic, intelligent, and concealed cyberattacks launched by the CIA against China, it is important for domestic government agencies, scientific research institutions, industrial enterprises, and commercial organizations to quickly find out and deal with them immediately upon discovery, the report says.

The report suggests that in order to effectively deal with imminent network and real-world threats, while adopting self-controllable localized equipment, China should organize self-inspection against APT attacks as soon as possible, and gradually establish a long-term defense system to achieve comprehensive systematic prevention and control against advanced attacks.

May 4, 2023 Posted by | Deception, Timeless or most popular | , , , | Leave a comment

CLIMATE HOAX, MILITARY COMPLEX, SOLD OUT SCIENTISTS. — KARY MULLIS

Dr Kary Mullis @ TED 2009

May 4, 2023 Posted by | Science and Pseudo-Science, Timeless or most popular, Video | Leave a comment

Doctors must take back control

Has fear of GMC retribution crushed proper clinical practice?

Health Advisory & Recovery Team | May 3, 2023

Somewhere in England in early 2023, a large group of medics gathered together for an annual conference. No need for the details, lest the GMC attack dogs start frothing at the mouth at the idea of yet another potential witch hunt. Suffice to say, one brave soul among them decided to share some clinical observations with regard to extremely unusual surgical presentations and dared to utter the unspoken heresy that they may be as a result of the mass roll-out of novel mRNA gene therapies.

The main point of this story that should terrify anyone who uses state healthcare is that it took 2 years for this individual to even be able to utter these suspicions in a forum with colleagues. The fear of GMC retribution is so entrenched — and so potentially catastrophic for the individual — that medical thoughtcrime has been self-censored out of existence by the overwhelming majority of clinical staff. The battered corpses of the Andrew Wakefields and the Sam Whites appear like ghouls in the imaginations of anyone wishing to remain employed by the monopolistic NHS.

Of interest, was the response in the room. The speaker reports that it catalysed a measured discussion, suddenly giving others who had noticed similar patterns permission to speak up. An African colleague reported seeing the same phenomena in their own country within an affluent, highly vaccinated population. It provoked something that should be par for the course: a clinical discussion among experts without fear of being tarred and feathered. The surgeon who raised the topic reflected that 10-15 years ago they were taught to critically appraise evidence and dissect articles in regular journal clubs and examinations preparation. That culture has been totally replaced by top-down protocols and bureaucratic policy driven healthcare. An eminent retired surgeon in the room was stunned following the revelations and was moved to remind everyone that they have a duty to raise concerns. He was appalled to hear that the GMC had suspended colleagues simply for questioning the prevailing covid narrative.

In a recent Twitter Space (timestamp 53:45), Dr Simon Fox made a crucial point:

“Medicine has become very politicised, particularly here in the UK…therefore it shouldn’t be a surprise to us that reality is twisted in order to suit ideology and we get this phenomenon of policy-based evidence as opposed to evidence-based policy. We as doctors have become used to following guidelines, saying things that we know not to be the case because that has been handed down from on high…. what I call the third person in the consultation room is always there. The dead hand of the state, the regulatory capture is always there and it is in the back of our minds. And we all have families, we all have hopes and dreams. We would all rather not pick a fight with authorities that would result in us losing our livelihoods. That is a strong force, and it takes serious bravery to start to say things that are manifestly the truth.”

Science begins with observation. Collective observations are more powerful as numbers of anecdotes grow and theories can be constructed and tested. If individuals are not free to collectively observe, or compare notes, progress inevitably stalls. It is a closed-loop system that does not allow for paradigm shift. All totalitarian systems work in this way and they are without exception very, very dangerous. Everyone buzzing around in their own cognitive coffin, not daring to verbalise things they are seeing with their very own eyes in case The Party doesn’t appreciate their particular version of events.

There is currently a theme on social media: doctors being castigated for their part in the last 3 years. This is extremely unfair. It has been a military grade psy-op, decades in the making. That is not a metaphor. It has been rolled out with such an exquisite knowledge of behavioural science, learning from the mistakes of various other attempts (e.g. swine flu, which coincidentally involved an identical cast of characters; Fauci, Drosten, Ferguson), ironing out all the pesky moral obstacles to ensure total psychological checkmate. This is not the fault of (most) well-meaning doctors and nurses. They have been psychologically manipulated within an inch of their lives along with the rest of the population.

It was 6 months after roll-out that this particular medic started to see a pattern. Bizarre occurrences (and recurrences) of cancer in younger and younger patients. Aggressive, inoperable stage 4 cancers with widespread metastases. Cases of thromboses that just weren’t ‘normal’ and an odd uptick in appendicitis, also not in line with expected normal distribution.

The latest edition of Pravda, sorry the Telegraph, is trying to mind-ninja you into believing that these phenomena are all due to lockdowns, lack of screening and so forth. According to our source, this is just not a viable explanation, clinically speaking. Firstly, screenings did not stop. In fact, in their particular Trust, they were inheriting more cases, earlier, due to GPs being inaccessible and referrals coming straight to them. Secondly — and more compellingly — it is the precise nature of the cancers at point of diagnosis that should be causing more than raised eyebrows. This is in fact echoed in data from the US: delayed screenings do not explain an increase in odd and ill-defined cancers, nor a dramatic increase in younger age groups.

All of this calls for an immediate halt to the roll-out of this novel gene therapy along with a prompt and thorough investigation of these hitherto unseen clinical presentations (being coined ‘turbo cancers’) to ascertain whether the injections are indeed the cause. Unless the answer is a categoric, unequivocal ‘no’, no more of these experimental drugs should be injected into a single human being, let alone ‘vulnerable babies’. We are living in a terrifying medical clown world where the whirling dervish just continues to spin, unfettered.

This quote from the Journal of Clinical Investigation, 2006 should make your blood run cold. It is taken from a review of the book Doctors from hell: The horrific account of Nazi experiments on humans written by Dr Andrew Marks of Columbia University:

What lessons have been learned from the medical experimentation horrors of the Nazis? Today, in my own field of cardiology, I am aware of clinical studies now ongoing, particularly in the areas of gene therapy and cell-based therapy, for which there are inadequately convincing animal data, yet patients are being subjected to experimentation that puts them at great risk. What chance do patients have, even the most well informed, when an arrogant and egotistically driven physician tells them that they are going to die unless they submit themselves to an unproven treatment? Are the patients told the truth — that we don’t have a lot of options, and this is an unproven therapy that will likely do more harm than good, but we need to experiment on you?

How shocked the author must be that just 15 years later, they would be experimenting, unencumbered, on entire global populations including young, healthy children.

May 3, 2023 Posted by | Civil Liberties, Full Spectrum Dominance, Science and Pseudo-Science, Timeless or most popular, War Crimes | , | Leave a comment

The Global Pandemic Treaty Is A Threat To Us All

Corbett • 04/28/2023

Today, James delivers a statement for the National Citizens Inquiry in Canada on the WHO, the global pandemic treaty, the amendments to the International Health Regulations, and the formation of the coming technocratic biosecurity control grid. [statement begins at 5:10]

Watch on Archive / BitChute / Odysee / Rokfin / Rumble / Substack / Download the mp4

For those with limited bandwidth, CLICK HERE to download a smaller, lower file size version of this episode.

For those interested in audio quality, CLICK HERE for the highest-quality version of this episode (WARNING: very large download).

TRANSCRIPT

Hello. I’m James Corbett of The Corbett Report.

For those who don’t know, I’m a Canadian who’s been living and working in Japan for 19 years and founded The Corbett Report in 2007 as a source for news and information about politics, economics, science, philosophy and society, and in that regard I’ve been covering the corruption of the World Health Organization and warning about the dawning biosecurity state for over 15 years now.

So I would like to thank the inquiry for giving me the time to address the extremely important topic of the pending global pandemic treaty, but I know my time is limited today so I’d like to get straight into detailing the relevant background and context for understanding this story.

Firstly, the World Health Organization was established in 1948 to promote “the attainment by all peoples of the highest possible level of health.” It proposes to achieve this by acting as “the directing and co-ordinating authority on international health work.”

Accordingly, the WHO’s governing body, the World Health Assembly, adopted the International Sanitary Regulations in 1951 to consolidate the multiple, overlapping international agreements then governing quarantine procedures and other international health controls into a single convention.

In 1969, this was superseded by the International Health Regulations, which, as amended in 1973 and 1981, covered six diseases but focused on three: cholera, yellow fever and plague.

Worries about the “emergence, re-emergence and international spread of disease and other threats” concurrent with the surge in international travel in the 1990s gave rise to calls for a substantial revision of the treaty, and, in the wake of the 2003 SARS event and the 2004 avian influenza A epidemic (if you remember that one), a renewed sense of urgency led to the 2005 revision of the IHR.

This revision included the creation of a new category of declaration by the World Health Organization: the Public Health Emergency of International Concern, which is appropriately enough abbreviated as PHEIC.

A PHEIC declaration grants the WHO the power to obtain and share information about any declared health crisis anywhere within the IHR territories with or without the consent of the individual governments involved. And, according to Stephen Morrison—the director of the Global Health Policy Center at the Center for Strategic and International Studies—this potentially allows for “boots-on-the-ground” intervention by the US military or other NATO member countries to operate in these environments in terms of ground transport, supply chain, and distribution of commodities.

The PHEIC was declared for the first time in 2009 during the so-called Swine Flu pandemic, which, as was later shown, was based on severely overestimated case numbers. In fact, the swine flu “pandemic” did not meet the WHO website’s own definition of “an enormous number of deaths and cases of the disease” and, when that was pointed out by a CNN reporter on May 4, 2009, that language was promptly removed.

At the time, Richard Schabas—the former chief medical officer for Canada’s Ontario Province—was quoted as saying: “Sometimes some of us think that WHO stands for World Hysteria Organization.”

Indeed, in 2010, a British Medical Journal investigation and an investigation by the Council of Europe both concluded that the key scientists who advised then-WHO Director Margaret Chan to declare the PHEIC for the swine flu scare “had done paid work for pharmaceutical firms that stood to gain from the guidance they were preparing” and excoriated the WHO for its complete lack of transparency about the process.

PHEICs were subsequently declared for the 2014 polio declaration, the 2013 outbreak of Ebola in Western Africa, the 2015 Zika virus “epidemic,” the 2018–2020 Kivu Ebola epidemic, and, of course, in 2020 for the so-called novel coronavirus pandemic and in 2022 for the monkeypox “pandemic”(?).

Each of these cases similarly resulted in massive paydays for pharmaceutical manufacturers and other beneficiaries of the growing biosecurity complex and massive increases in power for “health authorities” in each country and for the WHO in particular. In fact, we are told that the current WHO Director even ignored the decision of his “expert advisory council” to unilaterally declare last year’s Monkeypox outbreak as a Public Health Emergency of International Concern.

Incredibly, the WHO is not satisfied with the remarkable power that it already enjoys. It is currently engaged in a deliberately confusing process to simultaneously do two things:

  • Firstly, to once again amend the International Health Regulations to give the WHO even more powers of surveillance and control during any arbitrarily declared health crisis.
  • And secondly, to create a global pandemic treaty that would supersede the sovereignty of individual nation-states and cede even more authority to the WHO to monitor and control public health agencies in the name of preventing the next pandemic.

The process for these two separate negotiations are happening simultaneously, and although there is the fig leaf of public input in these processes, in reality only accredited organizations are given time to voice their opinion about the need for such a treaty and even then the WHO is under no obligation to even consider such input.

Instead, actual negotiations are taking place behind closed doors in off-camera sessions, and draft documents and meeting minutes are only occasionally dribbled out for public consumption.

Worse, as the WHO has already demonstrated, their procedure for adoption of these proposed amendments is at best a formality, and, at worst, pure theatrics.

That a completely unelected, unaccountable body that wields so much power over international affairs is meeting behind closed doors to decide the future of humanity under the pretense of the next declared emergency should be worrying enough. But the few details that have leaked out about these negotiations are even more frightening.

These include:

While these ideas may seem benign or even noble to those who do not know the history of the WHO or the erection of the biosecurity grid, to those of us who have lived through three years of unprecedented medical tyranny—from forced quarantines and lockdowns to the attempt to illegally mandate experimental medical interventions—stopping the WHO’s unprecedented power grab must be our greatest priority.

The World Health Organization currently consists of 194 member states, including Canada. In order to become a member of the WHO, a state must ratify the WHO Constitution, which grants the WHO’s governing body, the World Health Assembly (WHA), the power to “adopt conventions or agreements with respect to any matter within the competence of the Organization,” which, when ratified, obliges each member state to adopt those conventions or to notify the WHO’s Director-General of rejection or reservations to that adoption within 18 months.

As a WHO member state, Canada is obligated to abide by World Health Assembly decisions or to provide specific reasons for partial or incomplete compliance with WHA rules and agreements. Accordingly, the Public Health Agency of Canada provides regular “self-assessment reports” regarding its own International Health Regulations compliance.

At an absolute minimum, Canadians must exert whatever power they have in whatever way they are able to reassert Canada’s sovereignty over its public health by registering its reservations about the IHR and the pandemic treaty. That would of course not be a solution to the problem posed by the WHO, but it would be a start. A more thoroughgoing solution would be the withdrawal of Canada from the WHO altogether.

But, as someone who is not just deeply cynical about the ability of the public to influence such affairs, but actually believes the political process itself—with its inherent abrogation of individual sovereignty and thus, by extension, bodily autonomy—to be invalid and immoral, I would suggest that a more radical approach might be appropriate. That is, active and coordinated widescale civil disobedience of medical decrees and mandates, whether federal or provincial, that are not in the interest of individual health, including, if possible, the foundation of private medical organizations with doctors and others of like mind who are willing to disregard the dictates of the WHO, Public Health Canada, and any other self-declared health authority to provide health care regardless of vaccination status or any other unreasonable dictate.

I know that such a movement will not take place without a sea change in public perception, and such a change would have to be predicated on a sea change in public awareness and understanding. That is why I participate in inquiries like this and do the work that I do to help raise awareness of these issues.

I hope you can appreciate that there is much, much more to be said about this problem and its solution than can possibly be done justice in a short presentation like this. If you’re interested in hearing more about this topic, I suggest you follow the hyperlinked transcript of this statement that is available at corbettreport.com/pandemictreaty, as well as check The Corbett Report archives for my previous work on the WHO and the biosecurity state and follow my monthly conversations with Dr. Meryl Nass on Children’s Health Defense as we document the progress of the IHR amendments and the pandemic treaty toward their proposed ratification at the 77th World Health Assembly in May of next year.

But in closing, let me just say this: The WHO was established in 1948 to coordinate international efforts to promote public health. But what is health?

That may seem like a trivial question, but as we’ve seen over the last few years, the answer to that question can affect every aspect of our lives, from what medical interventions we are obligated to take to whether or not we are permitted to leave our house.

We cannot afford to let government appointees and unelected technocrats at the WHO answer this incredibly important question for us. It is up to us to answer that question for ourselves and to decide what health precautions we are willing to take and under what circumstances we are willing to take them.

Any treaty, health regulation or other document that would seek to undermine our bodily autonomy is null and void and should be treated as if it never existed.

Thank you for your time.

May 3, 2023 Posted by | Civil Liberties, Timeless or most popular, Video | , , | Leave a comment

The Extreme Center: How the Neocons Went Woke

By Oliver Williams | The Occidental Observer | May 2, 2023

No lessons, no consequences

The Iraq war was spearheaded by a remarkably small group of people. It has become politically untenable to justify that overt disaster and some of the key architects of that war have, much belatedly, come to acknowledge as much. As late as 2013 Max Boot was still arguing there was No Need to Repent for the Iraq War. He had changed his tune by 2018, writing in his book The Corrosion of Conservatism: Why I Left the Right, “I regret advocating the invasion and feel guilty about all the lives lost.” Boot claims, “It was a chastening lesson in the limits of American power,” yet in the same book complains that the modern conservative movement is “permeated with” racism, extremism and isolationism.

David Frum now describes the invasion as “a grave and costly error” and gives a thoroughly equivocal mea culpa. Robert Kagan says that the war “didn’t go exactly the way we wanted it to” and that “many aspects of the war” were “unfortunate.” Bill Kristol acknowledges that Iraq was “very difficult” and that “many things were done badly,” but concludes, “I’m inclined not to think it was [a mistake].” Since the inauguration of Trump, Kristol has changed his mind on trans rights, on gays, on abortion — but not on the catastrophe that led to over a hundred thousand civilian deaths. He told Jewish Insider: “Ironically, I’d say I’ve changed or rethought my views more on domestic policy issues… Foreign policy, I haven’t really changed my views. And I’ve been critical of Biden for the withdrawal from Afghanistan.”

Despite the repeated disasters in Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya and elsewhere, these figures remain as combative as ever. In 2018 Kristol told Vox, “the fact that the public is, quote, “war-weary”… those instincts have be challenged.” He told the Al Franken podcast that the Iraq intervention “didn’t destabilize the entire Middle East, I wish it had destabilized some of those places more.”

The neocons have been consistently wrong about foreign policy, and not just wrong, but wrong in the loudest, most doctrinaire and most uncompromising way possible. You’d think they might face some career blowback…

What actually happened?

Liberal adulation

On his MSNBC show, Ari Melber referred to 2018 as the year when “many people began referring to ‘woke Bill Kristol’.” According to Melber, this was “A tribute to the idea that people do evolve and that Trumpism can create strange bedfellows.”

Joy Reid, perhaps the most noxious personality on MSNBC, was positively glowing with praise:

One of the most amazing outcomes of the Trump administration is the number of neo-conservatives that are now my friends and I am aligned with. I found myself agreeing on a panel with Bill Kristol. I agree more with Jennifer Rubin, David Frum, and Max Boot than I do with some people on the far left. I am shocked at the way that Donald Trump has brought people together.

It turned out that in the throes of Trump Derangement Syndrome, being vehemently against Trump was enough to garner liberal adulation. During Donald Trump’s four years in office we saw the wholesale rehabilitation of the most discredited propagandists of the war on terror. After Trump called the Iraq war a “big fat mistake” in the 2016 Republican presidential debate, the neocons rebranded themselves as the ‘moderate’ voice against the danger of a Trump presidency. They went on to find lucrative positions in the liberal messaging apparatus. Frum became a senior editor for The Atlantic. Boot is now a senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations, a CNN analyst, a columnist at The Washington Post, and a contributor to the New York Times op-ed pages. Robert Kagan is a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution and an editor at large for The Washington Post. Kristol is a frequent commentator on CNN and MSNBC.

In the liberal imagination, the Neocons shifted from being war criminals to sensible moderate centrists, and, after the 2020 election and January 6th, brave and principled defenders of democracy.

How did this happen?

Hawks for Hillary

In 2014 Jacob Heilbrunn, author of They Knew They Were Right: The Rise of the Neocons, predicted “the neocons may be preparing a more brazen feat: aligning themselves with Hillary Rodham Clinton and her nascent presidential campaign, in a bid to return to the driver’s seat of American foreign policy.” Attending a Foreign-Policy-Professionals-for-Hillary fundraiser, Robert Kagan was quoted as saying, “I would say all Republican foreign policy professionals are anti-Trump. I would say that a majority of people in my circle will vote for Hillary.” Hillary won the endorsement of almost every high-profile Neoconservative you could nameEliot Cohen, co-founder of the Project for the New American Century; John McCain speechwriter Mark Salter; think tank goon James Kirchick. Boot said he would “sooner vote for Josef Stalin than[he] would vote for Donald Trump.” The Wall Street Journal’s most hawkish columnist, neocon Bret Stephens, penned an op-ed titled Hillary: The Conservative Hope. But no one else went as far as Bill Kristol, who, when, after running a rival candidate in 2016 proved a fool’s errand, tweeted that he would “prefer the deep state to the Trump state.”

This wholesale coalition between Bush-era neocons and hawkish Democrats started before Trump and it continued after he left the White House. In 2008 The Weekly Standard celebrated Hillary Clinton as “the great right hope” of foreign policy, hailing her transformation from “First Feminist” to “Warrior Queen.” In 2013 John McCain described Hillary Clinton as a foreign policy “rock star.” In a 2014 profile of Robert Kagan in The New York Times, Kagan mentions that he served on Hillary’s “bipartisan group of foreign-policy heavy hitters at the State Department, where his wife worked as her spokeswoman.” He said of Clinton’s foreign policy, “it’s something that might have been called neocon, but clearly her supporters are not going to call it that.”

This was more than a temporary marriage of convenience to stop Donald Trump. This is more than a pragmatic alliance. It’s an ideological convergence. The Neocons have cast off any pretence to conservatism while the Democrat Party has become uniformly pro-war. David Frum explained the realignment:

Trump pushed Never Trump Republicans into partnership with moderate Democrats — and prodded even formerly conservative minded people — to see power in ideas like Me Too and Black Lives Matter. … Old patterns are dissolving into something new.

The neocons had lost access to power in the GOP and needed to find a new constituency. Robert Kagan co-authored an article in 2019 attacking “America First” foreign policy with Antony Blinken, who is now Joe Biden’s Secretary of State. Kagan’s wife is Victoria Nuland. The two fell in love “talking about democracy and the role of America in the world.” Nuland is the ultimate example of the continuity (only interrupted briefly by Donald Trump) of personnel regardless of the administration. Nuland was a foreign policy adviser to Vice President Dick Cheney, a State Department spokesperson under Obama, and Under Secretary of State for Political Affairs in the Biden administration. Her worldview is identical to that of her husband.

The Alliance for Securing Democracy, the national security advocacy group responsible for the Hamilton 68 scam of Russian pro-Trump influence, is governed by a board that includes Michael Chertoff, former secretary of homeland security under George W. Bush; Michael McFaul, former ambassador to Russia under Barack Obama; Bill Kristol; John Podesta; and, at one time, Jake Sullivan, now national-security adviser to President Biden. If there were ever a meaningful distinction between the liberal interventionists and the Neoconservatives, the two are now fully merged.

Invade the world, invite the world: Imperialism + Immigration

High-profile neoconservative figures have radically changed their positions on a whole range of issues to appeal to their new liberal followers but they’ve always been remarkably consistent on two policies: never ending war and unrestrained immigration. Preventing the migration of Muslims from such terror-prone countries as Afghanistan is beyond the pale, bombing those same people is seen as just fine.

Bill Kristol wants “new Americans” to replace a population he brands “lazy” and “spoilt” — “luckily you have these waves of people coming in.” Kristol has mourned the “insanity and cruelty” of ICE raids. “I’d take in a heartbeat a group of newly naturalized American citizens over the spoiled native-born know-nothings of CPAC” he tweeted in 2018. Kristol made open borders a litmus test of respectability. Asked about his previous endorsement of the brain-dead Sarah Palin he said: “I regret that. … To be fair, if you look at what she said in 2008, apart from some of the silliness, she was not anti-immigration. She was not xenophobic. She was not isolationist. … So, in a funny way, if we could have co-opted some of the populism and given them a place in a McCain-nominated Republican Party, maybe that would have been a good outcome.”

He told Vox : “I will say, you know, the Weekly Standard was pretty unapologetically anti-Buchanan. … Pretty liberal on immigration.”

As documented by the repentant former neocon Scott McConnell in a 2003 article in the American Conservative, and more extensively in the book The Great Purge: The Deformation of the Conservative Movement, the neocons were instrumental in the cancellation of any Conservative that expressed reservations about immigration.

Boot expressed the ultimate synthesis of imperialism abroad and multicultural colonisation at home . Bemoaning the size of the America’s fighting force, he noted, “there is a pretty big pool of manpower that’s not being tapped: everyone on the planet who is not a U.S. citizen.” He floated the idea of simply paying Afghans to occupy their own country: “The most efficient way to expand the government’s corps of Pashto or Arabic speakers isn’t to send native-born Americans to language schools; it’s to recruit native speakers of those languages.”

Historically the imperial project enabled the successful military power to attain new territory for its people to settle. Under the new imperialist framework, America invades countries only to welcome the waves of refugees that war inevitably creates. So the return on the blood and treasure expended in Iraq and Afghanistan and Libya is ever more Iraqi’s, Afghan’s and Libyan’s finding living space in the USA. According to the New York Times, in 2005, just a few years after 9/11, “more people from Muslim countries became legal permanent United States residents—nearly 96,000—than in any year in the previous two decades.”

Invade/invite are both formed by a similar panglossian view of diversity. For all the celebration of diversity, there’s a blindness to it, a belief that that deep down we’re all basically Americans, yearning for secular democracy and ‘freedom’ (in the form of unrestrained liberal hedonism and free markets). If diversity is a strength, there’s no reason to think that forcing democracy on a deeply sectarian country like Iraq might not work out. Here’s Kristol on Iraq: “I think there’s been a certain amount of, frankly, a kind of pop sociology in America that, you know, somehow the Shia can’t get along with the Sunni.”

In reality the Shia didn’t get along with the Sunni and horrific bloodshed between the two groups followed Saddam’s ouster.

In 2016 Robert Kagan wrote an article about Trump titled This is how Fascism comes to America :

His public discourse consists of attacking or ridiculing a wide range of “others” — Muslims, Hispanics, women, Chinese, Mexicans, Europeans, Arabs, immigrants, refugees — whom he depicts either as threats or as objects of derision. His program, such as it is, consists chiefly of promises to get tough with foreigners and people of nonwhite complexion. He will deport them, bar them, get them to knuckle under, make them pay up or make them shut up.

But he won’t bomb them. Therein lies the problem.

Anarchy at home, military occupation abroad

In 2020 over 130 senior Republican national security officials signed a statement that condemned Donald Trump because he “stokes fears that ‘angry mobs’ and ‘anarchists’ are destroying our country” and violated America’s “legacy as a nation of immigrants.” America’s foreign policy elite would like to wage non-stop war to “keep America safe,” yet when America’s urban centers themselves resemble war zones, the establishment either shrugs or cheers on the rioters (at least 25 people died during the BLM riots, including a Trump supporter assassinated in the middle of the street in Portland).

Kori Schake, Director of Foreign and Defense Policy at the American Enterprise Institute, writes: “Recent protests in Amsterdam, London, and elsewhere show that what happens in America matters for the advance of human rights and civil liberties elsewhere. … Our struggles are the world’s struggles, because the values that form our republic are universal values.” Schake was a foreign policy adviser to the McCain-Palin 2008 presidential campaign and served as director for Defense Strategy on the National Security Council under George W. Bush. In an article titled “This Upheaval Is How America Gets Better,” Schake celebrated the violent riots of 2020: “We are now seeing America becoming better than it was. This churning, disputatious, and even sometimes violent dynamic is what social change in America looks like.” She praised the military for “modeling how to amplify black voices” while linking to a video of Dave Goldfein, Chief of Staff of the U.S. Air Force, talking about turning the force into a “safe space.”

“I used to be a smart-alecky conservative who scoffed at ‘political correctness,’” wrote Max Boot, but 2017 was “the Year I Learned About My White Privilege.” “The Trump era has opened my eyes. … I have had my consciousness raised. Seriously.” He has referred to increasing support for BLM as “a reason for optimism.” This is the man who, a month after 9/11, penned an essay for the Weekly Standard titled “The Case for American Empire” where he called for America to “embrace its imperial role.”

David Frum, the man who coined the infamously ludicrous “axis of evil” phrase as a speechwriter for George W. Bush, is a senior editor for The Atlantic, a magazine that marries Black radicalism with rabid militarism. During the wildly destructive Black Lives Matter riots it published articles with titles like “Anger Can Build a Better World” and “How Rage Can Battle Racism.” I’ve previously written that The hegemonic ideology of America is now a mutant symbiosis of the thought of Dick Cheney and Ibram X. Kendi.” On theatlantic.com articles by Kendi and David Frum (albeit not Cheney himself) are but a click apart (Joe Biden’s Special Representative for Racial Equity and Justice at the State Department recently met with Kendi and had a discussion about “the ongoing, global impact of white supremacy & the importance of collective effort across sectors to build a world where racial & ethnic equity & social justice prevail”). The New York Times, the ultimate vector of elite consensus-forming, became a home for Max Boot and Bret Stephens to call for America to act as the world police while also publishing articles like Yes, We Mean Literally Abolish the Police – but not, of course, the military.

Jennifer Rubin, another former neocon and a deeply unserious blogger who specialises in emotion-laden hyper-partisan bluster, has performed a remarkable political one-eighty, but continues to be one of the nation’s most rabid warmongers. Rubin went from being an anti-abortion zealot to worrying “if women cannot get abortions, will the military have trouble recruiting women?” In 2011 she criticised Newt Gingrich for being insufficiently enthusiastic about the Iraq war. She wrote a blog post that called out John McCain for opposing “enhanced interrogation techniques.” More recently, Rubin has become the Biden White House’s favorite pundit.

Responding to census data, Rubin tweeted, “a more diverse, more inclusive society. this is fabulous news. Now we need to prevent minority White rule.” During the widespread riots and looting of 2020, Rubin tweeted “BLM is peaceful.” “White Christian nationalism”, by contrast, “will inevitably lead to violence, cruelty and lawlessness.” She blamed the violence of 2020 on “white agitators.” Combining both her neocon and woke credentials in a single sentence, upon the death of civil rights agitator John Lewis she claimed it “is easy to be despondent — as many were after the passing of John McCain.” Lewis’s courage, she tweeted, was “honored and echoed in the actions of BLM protesters.”

Speaking on MSNBC’s AM Joy of Trump supporters, Rubin said of the Republican Party (that she’d been a member of just a few years earlier):

What we should be doing is shunning these people. Shunning, shaming these people is a statement of moral indignation that these people are not fit for polite society.… We have to collectively, in essence, burn down the Republican Party. We have to level them because if there are survivors, if there are people who weather this storm, they will do it again.

Rubin has shown herself more than willing to support the actual physical levelling of ideological enemies abroad, so perhaps this isn’t hyperbolic rhetoric so much as a literal policy prescription.

When the official GOP Twitter account accurately pointed out that Supreme Court nominee Ketanji Brown Jackson supported critical race theory, Bill Kristol shot back “No more dog whistles. Just unabashed bigotry.”

Conclusion

In “Unpatriotic Conservatives,” David Frum managed to accuse those conservatives sceptical of the Iraq war of being both nativists and unpatriotic. The neocons managed to instrumentalize and exploit a redefined version of American nationalism that entangled American identity and nationalism itself with their own ideological proclivities. In that essay Frum accuses the great conservative intellectual Sam Francis of pursuing “a politics devoted to the protection of the interests of what he called the ‘Euro-American cultural core’ of the American nation,” and he condemns White advocates like Kevin MacDonald. That, in the minds of Neocons, is the very definition of unpatriotic.

Many conservatives still reflexively venerate the military. This increasingly resembles a case of battered-wife syndrome. Enoch Powell once told Margaret Thatcher that if Britain were to become communist, he would still fight for his country in war. I always regarded that as a moronic sentiment. One wonders how long Toby Keith-style nationalism can be instrumentalized for a political project that is fundamentally at odds with the interests of those actually doing the fighting and the dying. For all his faults, Trump was correct when he told Tucker Carlson that the biggest threat to the United States is no external enemy: “Who’s the biggest problem? Is it China? Could it be Russia? Could it be North Korea? No. The biggest problem is from within. It’s these sick, radical people from within.”

In a campaign video Trump reiterates, “The greatest threat to Western civilization today is not Russia. It’s ourselves.”

America won the Cold War against the Evil Empire only to one day resemble a gay, trans, racialized version of it — a woke Leviathan straddling the globe. Michael Ledeen, perhaps the most overtly deranged of all the Neoconservatives, wrote in his book War Against the Terror Masters:

We tear down the old order every day. … Our enemies have always hated this whirlwind of energy and creativity, which menaces their traditions (whatever they may be) and shames them for their inability to keep pace. Seeing America undo traditional societies, they fear us, for they do not wish to be undone. They cannot feel secure so long as we are there, for our very existence—our existence, not our politics—threatens their legitimacy. They must attack us in order to survive, just as we must destroy them to advance our historic mission.

Increasingly, that historic mission is the global spread of critical race theory and radical gender ideology. If ever it had any moral claim to police the world or export its way of life, that claim was burnt to the ground in 2020. It’s when the woke mob stops burning the American flag and starts waving it that the world really has a problem. When the moral certitude of social justice meets the impervious militarism of Neoconservatism, it will make for the most noxious and destructive brand of imperialism the world has ever seen.

May 2, 2023 Posted by | Mainstream Media, Warmongering, Militarism, Timeless or most popular, Wars for Israel | , , | Leave a comment

DETRANSITIONING: LUKA’S STORY

The Highwire with Del Bigtree | April 27, 2023

Del sits down with Luka, an advocate for protecting kids from gender medicine, who herself medically transitioned as a teen before transitioning back to a female. Hear her trying journey telling of how the medical and trans communities have turned their backs on her.

May 1, 2023 Posted by | Timeless or most popular, Video | Leave a comment

‘Tucker Twitter Files’ Reveal How WHO Helped Twitter Censor Tucker Carlson

By Michael Nevradakis, Ph.D. | The Defender | April 28, 2023

Tucker Carlson made headlines this week for being suddenly ousted by Fox News — but in the latest release of the “Twitter files” the former news commentator made headlines for a different reason.

The documents, titled the “Tucker Twitter files,” released Thursday by investigative journalist Paul D. Thacker, show that in June 2021, Twitter sought to censor Carlson after he published an op-ed for Fox News saying that the COVID-19 vaccines are dangerous for children.

Carlson’s op-ed cited information that was, up until that point, publicly viewable on the World Health Organization’s (WHO) website. However, after Carlson’s op-ed was published, that information disappeared from the site.

The files released Thursday also reveal that Twitter executives held internal debates over how best to censor the content in Carlson’s op-ed — an initiative that was led by a former press secretary for Sen. Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.).

In an exclusive interview with The Defender on Thursday, Thacker expounded on the significance of these findings — and hinted at what the next “Twitter files” dump might reveal.

Twitter ‘clipping Tucker Carlson’s wings’

Thacker, who wrote about his findings on his Substack, said that the “bird factory” — referring to Twitter — engaged in “clipping Tucker Carlson’s wings” via its attempted censorship of his op-ed.

Despite being “controversial and polarizing,” Thacker said, Carlson was “One of the few Americans to challenge the official framework of acceptable narratives” and, as such, was “hated by the mainstream reporters for daring to throw darts at liberal pieties.”

“Why did Twitter censor Tucker Carlson? Better yet, who helped Twitter do that?” Thacker asked.

Thacker noted that while he was “reading an endless sea of #TwitterFiles” pertaining to efforts to “censor alleged ‘COVID misinformation,’” he unexpectedly discovered documents detailing attempts to censor Carlson.

These efforts appear to have begun on June 24, 2021, when Elizabeth Busby, a policy communications specialist with “Twitter Comms,” sent an email to colleagues inquiring if an op-ed Carlson had written the previous day should be flagged for COVID-19 “misinformation.”

In her email, Busby inquired whether links to Carlson’s op-ed “violate our COVID-19 misleading information policy and qualify for enforcement under our URL policy.” She added, “We’ve seen some Tweets with the link … and some that contain counterspeech.”

In the same message, Busby noted that “in the past,” Twitter had applied a boilerplate warning “to sites containing COVID-19 misinfo” and “Given Tucker’s visibility, we anticipate there may be some press interest regardless of the enforcement outcome.”

Thacker discovered that Busby was not just an ordinary Twitter employee. She joined Twitter in 2020, after leaving the U.S. Senate, where she worked as the deputy national press secretary to then-Senate Majority Leader Schumer.

According to Thacker, “Busby’s work history includes a stint at SKDKnickerbocker, a PR and lobby shop closely aligned with the Democratic party. Busby now leads ‘trust and safety communications’ at Twitch.”

He also noted that Schumer was “a frequent critic of Tucker Carlson.”

WHO ‘stealth-edited’ its COVID vaccine guidance for children after Carlson’s op-ed

What was all the fuss about? Carlson’s June 23, 2021, op-ed for Fox News — “The COVID vaccine is dangerous for kids, Big Tech doesn’t want you to know that” — referred to language available on the WHO’s website that explicitly did not recommend the COVID-19 vaccines for children.

In that op-ed, which was adapted from Carlson’s opening commentary on that day’s broadcast of “Tucker Carlson Tonight,” he referred to then-new guidance from the WHO and also recommendations from medical experts.

Carlson said:

“Since the beginning of the pandemic, key pieces of medical guidance from the World Health Organization have proven to be disastrously false — false enough to cost lives. It was the WHO, you’ll remember, that told us COVID couldn’t be transmitted between people, even as the virus was spreading into the United States. It was the WHO that worked in stealth with the Chinese government to obscure the source of the outbreak at the beginning, and then hide its origins from the world. …

“… bureaucrats at the WHO published new vaccine guidance. Here’s what it says: Children should not take the coronavirus vaccine. Why? The drugs are too dangerous. There’s not nearly enough data to understand the long-term effects or to show that the benefits are worth the risk that they bring.

“This is terrible news, of course, for the pharmaceutical industry. Big Pharma has been planning to test the vaccine on 6-month-olds.”

According to Thacker, the WHO published an evaluation of vaccine safety and efficacy on April 8, 2021, for the Pfizer-BioNTech, Moderna, Johnson & Johnson (J&J) and AstraZeneca COVID-19 vaccines.

For children, the WHO issued the following recommendation:

“Children should not be vaccinated for the moment. There is not yet enough evidence on the use of vaccines against COVID-19 in children to make recommendations for children to be vaccinated against COVID-19.

“Children and adolescents tend to have milder disease compared to adults. However, children should continue to have the recommended childhood vaccines.”

The information that Carlson appears to have referenced was still on the WHO’s website as of June 22, 2021, according to Thacker. However, after Carlson’s op-ed was published, the WHO “stealth-edited their page,” according to Thacker, and replaced it with new guidance, which stated:

“Unless they are part of a group at higher risk of severe COVID-19, it is less urgent to vaccinate them than older people, those with chronic health conditions and health workers.

“More evidence is needed on the use of the different COVID-19 vaccines in children to be able to make general recommendations on vaccinating children against COVID-19.

“WHO’s Strategic Advisory Group of Experts (SAGE) has concluded that the Pfizer/BionTech vaccine is suitable for use by people aged 12 years and above.”

“In other instances where the WHO has updated their vaccine guidance, they note this change with a date at the top of the webpage,” Thacker wrote. “But no update exists for changes the WHO made the day of Tucker’s essay.”

Thacker added:

“While some of the language in Tucker’s piece could be viewed as inflammatory — the WHO did not say the vaccines were ‘dangerous’ — independent experts also were advising that children not receive the COVID vaccines, as rare but serious adverse events were not studied.”

The subtitle to Carlson’s op-ed read: “Even posting WHO guidance could get you censored.”

On April 10, 2021, WHO tweeted: “#COVID19 trials for children are under way. Following proven health measures is still the best way to keep everyone, including children, safe from COVID-19.” The tweet remains online to this day.

Twitter sought to censor Carlson while avoiding ‘political risks’

According to Thacker, the day after the WHO “stealth-edited” its vaccine guidance, Twitter officials began discussing Tucker’s essay — after Busby brought it to their attention.

Twitter employee Brian Clarke responded to Busby’s June 24, 2021, email that same day, writing, “We are going to proceed with labeling any Tweets linking to the article we detect that advance the claim that WHO has deemed the vaccine dangerous for children.”

However, Clarke said, “Given that this article’s narrative is related to ‘big tech censorship’, I want to be mindful that taking action on the URL level could lead to this particular article gaining more traction rather than mitigating the harm associated with it.”

“We’re going to keep an eye on any ongoing discussions related to the article and if it happens to gain traction we will review again under our URL guidelines,” Clarke added.

According to Thacker, “Twitter officials also discussed looping in top Twitter execs, such as the general counsel, due to the ‘political risks’ associated with such actions. Yoel Roth [then-head of Trust and Safety for Twitter] agreed with this approach to ‘escalate.’”

This included a recommendation that then-general counsel for Twitter Vijaya Gadde review any actions taken against Fox News, “given political risks,” while Roth stated that any action against Fox would be “escalated” internally within Twitter.

Joseph Guay, at the time Twitter’s senior policy specialist for “misinformation,” then shared an email with Busby, Clarke and other Twitter personnel, advising them on various options they had available to them to take action against tweets containing a link to Carlson’s op-ed, without directly censoring Fox News.

Thacker noted that Guay, who “seems to have made the [final] call on Tucker’s op-ed,” departed Twitter earlier this year for a position as TikTok’s “Global Policy Lead on Deceptive Actors & Behaviors.”

Upon departing Twitter, Guay, in a post on his LinkedIn page, referred to his work at Twitter policing “the bad guys”:

“Our teams worked tirelessly to ship bold new policies (such as the COVID-19 Misleading Information Policy, or the Crisis Misinformation Policy) to prevent virulent misinformation and cognitive manipulation from bringing harm to vulnerable people.

“I remain as committed as ever to building resiliency to weaponized information, and making it a little harder for the bad guys.”

Guay’s LinkedIn profile states he is engaged in “fighting information threats globally.”

Thacker also noted that Twitter’s apparent distaste for Carlson was evident in more than just this instance.

“Tucker Carlson would have never known this happened, but when Twitter held a meet and greet months, later, they wrote of Tucker’s producer, ‘[I]t was pretty apparent from the get-go we understood the very different goals we have at work,’” Thacker tweeted, referencing internal Twitter documents regarding a meeting between Twitter officials and Alex Pfeiffer, Carlson’s producer.

Thacker wrote:

“Months after Twitter took action against tweets advancing claims in Tucker’s essay, the company met with reporters in New York to strengthen ties with journalists covering social media.

“In their assessment of reporters, one Twitter official noted of Tucker’s producer, Alex Pfeiffer, ‘[I]t was pretty apparent from the get-go we understood the very different goals we have at work, this was mainly to relationship build.’”

In remarks he shared with The Defender, Thacker noted that Twitter was attempting to strike a balancing act between censoring Carlson’s narrative while not running afoul of Fox.

“They were trying to limit Tucker Carlson’s impact,” he said, “and they were doing it in a way that they would not be brought into direct conflict with Fox.”

According to Thacker, this balancing act nevertheless belied Twitter’s political bias.

“There’s this issue they had with conservative media, and they’re biased in one direction,” Thacker told The Defender. “The way you know this is that the person who brings it to their attention is the former deputy national press secretary of Sen. Chuck Schumer.”

Thacker said that while some of what Carlson had written in his op-ed was “inflammatory,” it nevertheless “wasn’t inaccurate.” He added:

“The WHO edited its website on the same day Tucker’s article came out, and the next day, Twitter starts to go after his story. What do you say about that? Who does Twitter work for?

“Apparently, you don’t question the WHO, or you don’t write what the WHO says. It shows you that you cannot trust these social media people. They are in the tank in one direction.”

Furthering this point, Thacker highlighted a potential conflict of interest between Twitter and one of the COVID-19 vaccine manufacturers, J&J. In Thacker’s previous “Twitter files” revelations, he found that Twitter partnered with J&J on a COVID-19 vaccine “marketing strategy.”

Such efforts were not limited to COVID-19 vaccines. “By the summer of 2021,” Thacker wrote as part of his previous “Twitter files” release, “Johnson & Johnson began a full court press to market a ton of their products on Twitter, including a controversial antidepressant.”

“I don’t know what else is influencing Twitter,” Thacker told The Defender. “Johnson & Johnson was one of the vaccines mentioned on the WHO site, and that was a client of Twitter’s.”

Remarking on the revelations made in the “Tucker Twitter files,” Michael Rectenwald, Ph.D., author of “Google Archipelago: The Digital Gulag and the Simulation of Freedom” and a former New York University liberal studies professor, told The Defender :

“This installment of the Twitter files proves that not only the government but also international governance bodies like the WHO established direct censorship channels within Twitter — to censor information that contradicted the narrative of vaccine safety, even when ‘the science’ contradicted the narrative.

“No doubt we will learn that international NGOs like the World Economic Forum also had such channels.”

Rectenwald was a guest on the final “Tucker Carlson Originals” broadcast on Fox News before Carlson was let go by the network.

WHO partnered with social media platforms to combat ‘misinformation’

Indeed, in several instances, the WHO has partnered with social media platforms such as Twitter to police alleged “misinformation” and “disinformation” pertaining to COVID-19 vaccines and countermeasures — and has also previously expressed misgivings about Elon Musk’s plans to allow more “free speech” on the platform.

Dr. Mike Ryan, executive of WHO’s Health Emergencies Programme, stated on April 26, 2022 — when Musk was contemplating purchasing Twitter — that Musk will have a “huge influence” over the curbing and potential spreading of vaccine misinformation on Twitter, and that Twitter and all social media platforms must address “misinformation.”

Thacker: Twitter attempted to ‘manufacture consent’

Thacker compared Twitter’s actions to what Noam Chomsky once described as “manufacturing consent.” Chomsky described manufacturing consent in a 2018 interview, during which he said:

“The myth is that the media are independent, adversarial, courageous, struggling against power.

“That’s actually true of some. There are often very fine reporters, correspondents. In fact, the media does a fine job, but within a framework that determines what to discuss, not to discuss.”

However, in an Oct. 24, 2021, interview, Chomsky suggested that unvaccinated individuals should be isolated, claiming they were placing the public at risk.

Chomsky said at the time:

“If people decide ‘I am willing to be a danger to the community by refusing the vaccine’ they should then say, ‘well, I also have the decency to isolate myself. I don’t want a vaccine but I don’t have the right to run around harming people.’

“That should be a convention. Enforcing is a different question. It should be understood, and we should try to get it to be understood. If it really reaches the point where they are severely endangering people, then of course you have to do something about it.”

In a follow-up interview, Chomsky doubled down on his previous remarks. “How can we get food to them? Well, that’s actually their problem.”

On his Substack, Thacker noted that the media’s response to the recent news that Carlson was ousted from Fox News is characteristic of what Chomsky had once warned about. He wrote:

“The majority of reporters have shrugged aside their colleagues’ reporting fiascoes and the damage done to their own reputations, and continue to blame most failures in journalism on one person: Tucker Carlson.

“So it was not surprising that reporters began a week-long celebration this Monday when Fox fired Tucker.”

Referring to the latest Twitter files revelations about Carlson, Thacker told The Defender, “I can’t believe this is not everywhere, that everyone is not reading this right now.”

He said he will soon release more documents as part of the “Twitter files”:

“There are more stories. I had another story that I was working on, and I pushed that aside to work on this one.

“There’s probably another 10 stories, with more examples of the way they were working with the media, especially the media they favored.”


Michael Nevradakis, Ph.D., based in Athens, Greece, is a senior reporter for The Defender and part of the rotation of hosts for CHD.TV’s “Good Morning CHD.”

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.

April 30, 2023 Posted by | Deception, Full Spectrum Dominance, Science and Pseudo-Science, Timeless or most popular, War Crimes | , , | Leave a comment

Revisionist history: Fauci and Weingarten distance themselves from the School Closure policy they enacted & encouraged

Media does not hold them accountable because they are political allies

BY VINAY PRASAD | OBSERVATIONS AND THOUGHTS | APRIL 29, 2023

I always say that the most common way people change their mind is that they rewrite their memories and imagine they always agreed with you. Years ago, we published a provocative paper that qualified the percent of cancer patients eligible for genomic drugs. (it was ~8%), and the same doctors who had until recently claimed that these drugs have changed care for most people, were quick to say, “I always said only a fraction are eligible.” Sure you did, buddy. Sure you did.

To some degree, it is forgivable. The human ego is strong, and it is hard for many to admit they were wrong. When it comes to everyday Americans, I support their right to mis-remember their historical views on COVID19 policy. In fact, I predicted a great swing on this issue specifically — schools.

But, my concession does not extend to the architects of school closure. The experts who went on TV and repeatedly scared the public out of sending their kids to schools, and scared Governors, districts and teachers out of their duty to kids. These people should be remember as being on the wrong side of history, and receive the punishment they deserve: being precluded from shaping policy every again.

That includes Anthony Fauci and Randi Weingarten— two people who are doing an aggressive media campaign to distance themselves from the policies they set in motion.

One of Fauci’s defenses is that he just gave advice, and did not shut anything down. This is contradicted by the fact that he previously took credit for lockdowns, and specifically noted that in early march 2020, Trump faithfully followed his advice.

Of course the NIAID director and WH Covid counsel member has a special responsibility to give good advice, and should know the probability his advice shapes policy is high.

Additionally, he controls a multibillion dollar research budget. Why did he run zero RCTs of masking? School reopening? Distancing? Cohorting? Busing? Ventilation? That was entirely in his power, and there is no excuse for giving advice while not studying your advice, when you control the entire research budget!

Fauci’s next claim is that he always wanted schools reopened. This is contradicted by a detailed timeline of his position on schools, which was consistently to fearmonger about kids and keep them closed.

In the summer of 2020, Fauci was still opposed to schools.

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In spring 2020, when DeSantis reopened Fauci went on multiple news outlets to sabotage those efforts

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As for Randi, the most accurate comment was in this clip from a distressed parent:

Randi claims she just wanted to open schools safety, but the problem is you didn’t need 750 billion dollars and hepa filtration to open safely. Even masks were unnecessary. Ultimately, schools reopened and ~100% of kids got COVID anyway, the vast majority did fine, most did not have the vaccine beforehand, and there is no reliable evidence the vax lowered the risk of severe disease for kids. All you needed to reopen were teachers with courage, sadly Randi and Tony sapped that away from them with constant inaccurate rhetoric.

The truth is Randi asked for things she knew she would not get, so she could justify her position that teachers be paid, get first dips on vaccine (over the elderly), and continue to not work in person.

School closure has already destroyed a generation of kids. The full damage is not yet appreciated, but the first signs are showing.

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The virus was comparable to other viruses in healthy children, and no one should have disrupted their lives. It was not only wrong in retrospect, it was wrong at the time, and many of us saw it instantly and clearly. It was a human rights violation to close schools for kids.

Fauci and Weingarten are the tip of the spear of school closure. History should remember that, and no one should ever entertain their opinion on a policy matter again. The media coverage of them has been meek and toothless.

April 30, 2023 Posted by | Civil Liberties, Deception, Science and Pseudo-Science, Timeless or most popular, Video, War Crimes | , , , , | Leave a comment

Red Line Crossed: DNA Contamination of mRNA “Vaccines” Poses Risk to Everyone on the Planet

Why the disturbing discovery of DNA contamination with plasmids poses a severe risk to the mRNA  “vaccinated” and the people around them

Written by the WCH Health and Science Committee | April 27, 2023

The following article is the World Council for Health’s summary and interpretation of the conclusions of the outstanding paper by McKernan et al (2023): Sequencing of bivalent Moderna and Pfizer mRNA vaccines reveals nanogram to microgram quantities of expression vector dsDNA per dose

Another red line has been crossed…

In a recent publication by a group of experienced geneticists, more contamination in mRNA “vaccines” (Pfizer and Moderna), excluding metal residues, which had been identified in the past, was found. Multiple methods highlighted high levels of DNA contamination.

Of special concern was that they found replicable DNA, so-called plasmids, in both the monovalent and bivalent vaccines, which should not be there at all. This time the researchers found DNA contamination that far exceeded the European Medicines Agency (EMA) requirement and the U.S. FDA’s dose requirements.

But why is this find so alarming?

The Threat of DNA Integration

As we knew from the beginning, Covid-19 (C19) injections have been a gene therapy, and the definition of a vaccine had to be altered to call them a vaccine. While we are still told of the safety and the effectiveness of the injections, Swedish researchers have shown that the mRNA of the Pfizer vaccine was integrated into liver cells.

This raised many eyebrows about whether the interference with our genome could pose the risk of integration of the mRNA coding into our genome. Usually, the body needs an enzyme called reverse transcriptase to do so. But now, findings of this new paper suggest a different scenario in which DNA integration may occur.

The Role of So-Called Plasmids

Plasmids are circular DNA that enable bacteria to exchange information. When scientists became aware of this, they soon started using these plasmids to produce custom-made proteins by genetically modifying their information. This is, for example, how insulin is currently produced. Plasmids are also the “production site” of the novel mRNA used in the Covid-19 injections. Once the DNA templates or plasmids are transcribed into strands of mRNA the injection vials should be filtered out to prevent continuous production of the information. Yet these plasmids are precisely what the scientists found. Why it is there gives rise to many explanations ranging from carelessness, the impossibility of ensuring complete separation, or even potential intent, which, knowing what we know, can no longer be excluded.

Plasmid Integration into Bacteria

So what could be so concerning about the integration of this information? The human body contains far more bacteria than cells, known as the human microbiome. The origin of the used plasmid stem from E. coli bacteria, which also happens to be a part of our intestinal microbiome, suggesting that there is the possibility for plasmid integration into our microbiome.

Plasmid Integration into Human Cells

While it was believed that plasmid integration was restricted to bacteria, other researchers observed that integration could occur in the telophase of cell division. Whether this can now occur with the mRNA injections should be a top priority for all regulatory bodies like EMA and FDA to address. Residual injected DNA can result in so-called type I interferon responses and increase the potential for DNA integration. A so-called SV 40 promotor also enables the plasmid integration into human cells.

An urgent evaluation into these mechanisms in the context of the covid mRNA-producing plasmids is needed to determine the extent to which this foreign genetic information is able to become a part of us.

Implication of Integration

The highly concerning consequence of genomic integration into microbiome cells is that this would ensure the ongoing production of mRNA and, thus, the production of pathogenic viral particles, the spike proteins. Typically, mRNA begins to degrade in the body after 10 minutes. Genetic modification, however, has made the C19 ‘vaccines’ mRNA more stable and it has now been observed to last up to 60 days. In autopsies in Germany, it was even found that mRNA was produced in endothelial cells after 12 months. mRNA has also been found in breast milk.

Could the persistence of plasmids and, thus, the integration into our genome be the reason for this?

Potential of Shedding

In a recent publication: “Persistent Nonviral Plasmid Vector in Nasal Tissues Causes False-Positive SARS-CoV-2 Diagnostic Nucleic Acid Tests” by Beck at al., asymptomatic laboratory workers who tested positive for SARS-CoV-2 were found to harbor a laboratory plasmid vector containing SARS-CoV-2 DNA, which they had worked with in the past, in their nasal secretions. While prior studies had documented contamination of research personnel with PCR amplicons (bits of DNA sequences artificially produced), their observation was novel, as these individuals shed the laboratory plasmid over days to months, including during isolation in their homes.

This suggests that the plasmid was in their nasal tissues or that bacteria containing the plasmid had colonized their noses. Thus we urgently ask the global health care systems to screen for plasmids in vaccinated and unvaccinated individuals.

As we breathe out, we usually exhale multiple elements from our gut microbiome. If we now can assume that cells from it have been instructed to produce mRNA, what will be the consequence for people in proximity to the individual spreading them? We need to find out as soon as possible.

Plasmid Contamination

The paper also alerts us to plasmid contamination from E. coli as preparations are often co-contaminated with lipopolysaccharides (LPS). E. coli endotoxin contamination can lead to anaphylaxis upon injection and thus should certainly not be present.

Antibiotic Resistance

For plasmids to remain stable, they are usually antibiotic-resistant to two antibiotics (Neomycin, Kanamycin). This information could also be integrated into the microbiome or body cells.

What WCH Health and Science Committee Conclude

First, it demonstrates again the apparent neglect of scientific and regulatory board standards.

The Nuremberg Code (August 19, 1947) Article 10 clearly states that:

“During the experiment, the scientist in charge must be prepared to interrupt the experiment at any moment when he begins to believe that the continuation of the experiment may involve injury, disability, or death to the subject.”

This has happened multiple times, and the crossing of several safety signals questioning safety and efficiency has filled countless pages.

Apart from the manufacturers’ fraudulent approach, the more concerning aspect is the regulatory bodies’ failure to react to these apparent problems. This is not surprising as they are mainly financed by the industry itself (EMA around 90%). Ensuring the ongoing distribution of these harmful and dangerous injections lacks any moral and ethical backbone.

This also highlights the EMA limits for DNA contamination, which doesn’t consider the nature of the DNA contaminants. Replication-competent DNA should arguably have a more stringent limit. DNA with mammalian promoters or antibiotic resistance genes may also be of more concern than just background E. coli genomic DNA from a plasmid preparation. More mRNA means more production of the pathogenic part of SARS-CoV-2 that was chosen to be produced by our own cells, namely the spike protein.

The potential of shedding even to the unvaccinated poses a serious question for the entire population of this planet.

We can only speculate how it will end, but what needs to happen today after the publication of this paper is an immediate stop of the “Covid-19 vaccine” program.

Meanwhile, we should boost our oral and nasal microbiome by walking in the woods and inhaling beneficial microbes. And improve our gut microbiome through the consumption of fermented foods such as freshly unpasteurized Sauerkraut or Kimchi  and prebiotic foods such as colorful root vegetables.

In a recent interview with The New American, Dr Mark Trozzi explains the role of bacterial plasmids and E. coli bacteria in the manufacturing process of mRNA injections. Watch the full interview here.

April 30, 2023 Posted by | Science and Pseudo-Science, Timeless or most popular, War Crimes | | Leave a comment

Bombing Japan After the Atomic Bombings

Tales of the American Empire | April 27, 2023

Americans who read about Japan’s surrender in August 1945 learn only part of what happened because historical accounts are incomplete. They recite the official narrative of the United States government that invading Japan would have caused a million American casualties. Luckily, the United States had developed the atomic bomb. After dropping two atomic bombs Japan quickly surrendered. This official history fails to mention that Japan was seeking to negotiate a surrender since late 1944 after it was clear the war was lost, but powerful people wanted the war to continue longer to demonstrate the power of atomic bombs.

The two atomic bomb attacks produced the same destruction as previous raids involving hundreds of B-29 bombers so they had little impact on the war or Japanese leaders, who were really terrified that Soviet forces had landed in northern Japan. Delaying the end of the war to demonstrate two atomic bombs was immoral and counterproductive. For unknown reasons, the Americans launched a massive bombing raid five days after the second atomic bomb was dropped.

___________________________

“Japs Asked Peace in January”; Walter Trohan; Chicago Tribune; August 19, 1945; http://wyso.weebly.com/uploads/2/2/9/…

Related Tale: “Japan’s Conditional Surrender”;    • Japan’s Condition…  

“Was There a Diplomatic Alternative? The Atomic Bombing and Japan’s Surrender”; Jeremy Kuzmarov; The Asia-Pacific Journal; October 15, 2021; https://apjjf.org/2021/20/Kuzmarov-Pe…

“The B-29 Raid That Ended World War II”; J.A. Hitchcock; http://www.jahitchcock.com/mission/b2…

“Bombing of Kumagaya in World War II”; (five days after Nagasaki was bombed); Wikipedia; https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bombing…

“American Had Plans to Help Russia Invade Japan During World War II”; Sebastien Roblin; The National Interest; December 31, 2020; https://nationalinterest.org/blog/reb…

Related Tale: “The Japanese Victory on Iwo Jima”;    • The Japanese Vict…  

Related Tale: “The Disastrous Liberation of the Philippines”;    • The Disastrous Li…  

April 30, 2023 Posted by | Militarism, Timeless or most popular, Video | , | Leave a comment

Let a Hundred Schools of Thought Contend

By Michael Tomlinson | Brownstone Institute | April 28, 2023

The thrust of Let a hundred flowers bloom was that the world’s response to COVID-19 should not have been exempted from the normal processes of policy formation and development, which in a democracy have informed debate at their core. By exempting pandemic policy from critique, governments were attempting to ensure that the correct response was undertaken, but in fact increased the likelihood of falling into serious error.

Governments felt that in a public health emergency there was no time to explore policy alternatives, and it was essential to take a disciplined approach to defeat the enemy (i.e. the virus). It was necessary for governments to control information given out to the population from the centre and to suppress ‘unreliable’ sources of information that might promulgate ‘incorrect’ information, and thereby cause the deaths of people who were led astray from the true path.

Jacinda Ardern, the former Prime Minister of New Zealand, notoriously declared ‘we will continue to be your single source of truth.’ She advised the New Zealand people to listen to the Director General of Health and the Ministry of Health and ‘dismiss anything else.’

There should be no scenarios in which governments and government agencies are the single source of truth. No organisation, no individual and no groups of individuals can be infallible. She is now headed to Harvard University to expound on disinformation with and to the best and brightest.

Therefore, we need to go through a divergent phase of policy development in the first instance, in which all the relevant diverse sources of knowledge and diverse voices are consulted. This is sometimes referred to as ‘the wisdom of crowds,’ but ‘the wisdom of crowds’ must be distinguished from ‘the groupthink of herds.’

The prices of companies on the stock market are thought to reflect the combined knowledge of all traders and therefore the true market price. But stock prices go through cycles of boom and bust, in which true underlying prices are distorted for a time by the famous ‘animal spirits,’ and rise exponentially before falling, much like the pandemic curve indeed.

The need to bring diverse perspectives to bear on common problems is why we have parliaments and congresses instead of dictatorships. There is widespread disillusionment with parliaments, but they exemplify Winston Churchill’s famous dictum: ‘Democracy is the worst form of government – except for all the others that have been tried.’ Deliberative decision-making in which all voices are heard is an essential safeguard which can lead to sound policy formation if deployed carefully, avoiding the pitfalls of groupthink, and it is superior to all other forms of decision-making that have been tried.

Governments must choose a path forward, they must make strategic choices, but they should do so with full knowledge of the policy options, and they should never attempt to prevent other options from being discussed. But this is what happened in the COVID-19 pandemic.

It was driven by a simplistic view of science in which the scientific community supposedly formed a ‘scientific consensus’ about the best ways to handle the pandemic, based on universal measures aimed at the entire population. But the Great Barrington Declaration advocated an alternative strategy of ‘focused protection’ instead, and was originally signed by 46 distinguished experts, including a Nobel Prize winner. It has subsequently been signed by over 16,000 medical and public health scientists, and nearly 50,000 medical practitioners. Whatever you may think about the Great Barrington Declaration, these simple facts demonstrate that there was no consensus.

When activists refer to ‘the scientific consensus,’ what they mean is ‘the establishment consensus’ – the consensus of sages and worthies of the type referred to by Jacinda Ardern and referred to in ‘Let a hundred flowers bloom.’ These agency heads, advisory panels, and ministries of health are naturally predisposed to accept their own advice and ignore contrarian voices. Yet contrarian voices remind us of ‘inconvenient facts,’ data that conflicts with the establishment view. It is through the dialogue between diverse voices that we work closer to the truth. ‘The authorities’ must be held accountable, even in a pandemic.

The key point about the establishment consensus is that it is always entirely devoid of individual insight. In order to qualify to be a sage or a worthy and to sit on government advisory panels or be an agency head, you have to show your capacity to toe the line at all times and never say anything remotely controversial. This was expressed so well by George Bernard Shaw: ‘The reasonable man adapts himself to the world; the unreasonable man persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore all progress depends on the unreasonable man.’

The pandemic response has been dominated by the reasonable ones who trim to the wind and accept the current framework whatever it is.

In early 2020, an establishment consensus formed within weeks around the grand strategy (which, remember, was neither grand nor strategic) of suppressing the spread of the pandemic through lockdowns until vaccination could end it. At that stage, there were no vaccines in existence and there was literally zero evidence that lockdowns could ‘stop the spread,’ but alternative strategies were never considered. Since then, the establishment has had greater success in suppressing debate than in suppressing spread of the virus.

Maryanne Demasi, who has a fatal tendency to think for herself that has got her into trouble in the past, has written about this ‘consensus by censorship’ in a Substack article: ‘It is not difficult to reach a scientific consensus when you squelch dissenting voices.’ Scientists such as Norman Fenton and Martin Neill, with hundreds of publications to their name, have been unable to get papers published if they raise any questions about papers with favourable findings on COVID-19 vaccines. They have written about their experiences with the Lancet here. Eyal Shahar has given three examples here.

This is unacceptable. COVID-19 vaccines, like any other therapeutic product, should be subject to rigorous ongoing analysis for safety, and strategies must be adapted where necessary in the light of emerging knowledge. Again, there can be no exemptions from this.

Even with these impediments, some papers slip through the net, such as the rigorous analysis of the primary clinical trial evidence by Joseph Fraiman, Peter Doshi et al: Serious adverse events of special interest following mRNA COVID-19 vaccination in randomized trials in adults.’ But many papers with adverse findings about the vaccine are blocked at the pre-print stage, such as the paper on COVID vaccination and age-stratified all-cause mortality risk by Pantazatos and Seligmann, which concluded that the data suggests ‘the risks of COVID vaccines and boosters outweigh the benefits in children, young adults and older adults with low occupational risk or previous coronavirus exposure.’

Pantazatos described his experience with the medical journals here. This demonstrates that the most effective tactic to dispose of contrarian research is not to refute it, but to suppress it and then ignore it. Indeed, establishment researchers have ignored the whole issue and have not addressed the effect of COVID-19 vaccines on all-cause mortality at all. This is extraordinary, as the entire goal of the pandemic response is supposed to be to reduce mortality. But two years after the commencement of mass vaccination, researchers have not conducted controlled studies of its effect on overall mortality, even retrospectively. This is incomprehensible. Are they afraid of what they might find?

Demasi’s blog came under attack from the ultra-orthodox David Gorski, who wrote in response: ‘Antivaxxers attack scientific consensus as a “manufactured construct.”’ The title is a big giveaway – since when was ‘antivaxxer’ a scientific term? His blog merely throws mud at Demasi, without engaging with her arguments about pandemic policy, let alone engaging with the analysis in the pre-print she wrote with Peter Gøtzsche: ‘Serious harms of the COVID-19 vaccines: a systematic review.’

Gorski has nothing to contribute on the subject. The nearest thing he has to an argument is that individual studies do not necessarily invalidate a scientific consensus. But Gøtzsche and Demasi’s paper is based on a meta review of 18 systematic reviews, 14 randomised trials and 34 other studies with a control group. It has been open for review on the pre-print site and I am not aware of any substantive objections to the information and analysis therein.

Words like ‘anti-vaxxer,’ ‘anti-science,’ and ‘cranks’ are thought-stoppers – rhetorical devices designed to signal to the orthodox that their cherished convictions are safe, and they don’t need to understand the arguments and evidence put forward by dissidents because they think they are by definition disreputable people out to mislead. Resorting to these methods and ad hominem attacks is in fact anti-intellectual,

The fake consensus has indeed been ‘manufactured.’ The scientific debate on COVID-19 was closed from the outset, particularly at the level of opinion, whereas a hallmark of true scientific consensus is openness.

Consider, as a case study, the great debate between the advocates of the ‘big bang’ theory of the origins of the universe and the ‘steady state’ theory, the history of which is related in this account by the American Institute of Physics. The steady state theory (in which the universe is expanding at a steady rate with matter being continuously created to fill the space created as stars and galaxies move apart) was advocated by Fred Hoyle, one of the most eminent physicists of his generation, over more than 20 years, until the weight of empirical observations by radio astronomy brought about its demise. The debate was ended in the traditional way, whereby the predictions of the steady state theory were falsified.

The grand strategy of COVID-19 pandemic responses, which was supposed to end the pandemic and end excess deaths, has been contradicted by empirical observations. The pandemic did not end, almost everyone became infected, excess deaths have continued and there is no hard evidence especially from randomised controlled trials that the vaccines can prevent or reduce all-cause mortality. In Australia, the bulk of our excess deaths have come during the mass vaccination period.

And yet, the orthodox continue to have faith in the strategy and continue to ignore and suppress alternative strategies, believing that the science has been settled, when it seems to be decidedly unsettled.

This leads to the war against ‘disinformation and misinformation,’ which is in fact a war against contrarian viewpoints. Government has colluded with establishment scientists and social media companies to systematically censor alternative observations and strategies.

The straw-man arguments usually deployed to justify this highlight irrational ideas such as rumours that the vaccines contain microchips, etc. But they completely ignore the issues raised by serious scientists such as Doshi, Fenton, and Gøtzsche. The orthodox hold that sceptics are science denialists, whereas the reverse is true: the establishment denies the diversity of findings in the scientific literature.

The market in ideas should be the freest of all markets, as there is much to be gained and little to be lost by engaging with all ideas that derive from evidence-based analysis. By contrast, pandemic policy has been characterised by a kind of intellectual protectionism, in which orthodox ideas are privileged.

The fake consensus has been used as the basis for academic studies of ‘disinformation.’ There is no precise conceptual basis for the concept of disinformation, which is assumed to be ‘false or misleading information.’ Who determines what is false? This is usually defined derivatively as any information that goes contrary to the established narrative.

The self-appointed Aspen Commission in its final report on ‘information disorder,’ referred to some of these issues, by asking for example ‘who gets to determine mis-and disinformation?’ and acknowledging that ‘there are concomitant risks of silencing good-faith dissent’ – and then proceeded to ignore them. Without defining it, a key recommendation was: ’Establish a comprehensive strategic approach to countering disinformation and the spread of misinformation including a centralised national response strategy’ (p30).

A further recommendation is: ‘Call on community, corporate, professional, and political leaders to promote new norms that create personal and professional consequences within their communities and networks for individuals who willfully violate the public trust and use their privilege to harm the public.’ In other words, pursue and persecute those who step out of line, with no consideration of whether they may be relying simply on different information, not misinformation.

  1. They go on to make helpful practical suggestions on how to implement their vaguely worded recommendation:
  • Ask professional standards bodies like medical associations to hold their members accountable when they share false health information with the public for profit.
  • Encourage advertisers to withhold advertising from platforms whose practices fail to protect their customers from harmful misinformation.
  • Spur media organizations to adopt practices that foreground fact-based information, and ensure they give readers context, including when public officials lie to the public.

All of this assumes that there is a simple distinction to be made between ‘true’ and ‘false’ information, and underlying this, a naïve trust that only the health authorities are relying on ‘fact-based information’ and contrary views are self-evidently not fact-based. But, as we have seen, Doshi, Fenton, Gøtzsche and Demasi have published contrarian papers that are heavily fact-based.

In an academic extension of the ad hominem attack, there is even research into the psychological characteristics of dissidents, which brings to mind the worst excesses of the Soviet Union. Examples provided by ChatGPT of general studies on misinformation indicated that those of us who question established narratives are apparently led astray by confirmation bias, have a ‘low cognitive ability,’ and are biased by our political views. This implies that those who support conventional positions are unbiased, smart, and are never influenced by their political orientation. These assumptions should also be tested by research, perhaps?

In relation to COVID-19, it turns out that us dissidents are also prone to ‘epistemic vices such as indifference to the truth or rigidity in [our] belief structures,’ according to Meyer et al. This was based on testing people’s willingness to believe 12 patently ridiculous statements, such as ‘Adding pepper to your meals prevents COVID-19,’ which I have never heard of before. Willingness to agree with these statements was then stretched to equate with more serious issues:

People who accept COVID-19 misinformation may be more likely to put themselves and others at risk, to strain already overburdened medical systems and infrastructures, and to spread misinformation to others. Of particular concern is the prospect that a vaccine for the novel coronavirus will be rejected by a sizeable proportion of the population because they have been taken in by misinformation about the safety or effectiveness of the vaccine.

None of these issues were tested in the research, yet it was extended beyond the findings to justify these conclusions.

In an article back in 2020 for the Harvard Kennedy School Misinformation Review, Uscinski et al asked: Why do people believe COVID-19 conspiracy theories? They summarised their findings as:

  • Using a representative survey of U.S. adults fielded March 17-19, 2020 (n=2,023), we examine the prevalence and correlates of beliefs in two conspiracy theories about COVID-19.
  • 29% of respondents agree that the threat of COVID-19 has been exaggerated to damage President Trump; 31% agree that the virus was purposefully created and spread.

These beliefs are certainly debatable and are held to be founded once again in denialism: ‘a psychological predisposition to reject expert information and accounts of major events.’ Denialism was further broken down to these:

  • Much of the information we receive is wrong.
  • I often disagree with conventional views about the world.
  • Official government accounts of events cannot be trusted.
  • Major events are not always what they seem.

Are you telling me these statements are not true?! I will have to rethink everything!

These studies all equate dissident views with ‘conspiracy theories.’ They assume that dissident views are self-evidently contrary to the scientific record, invalid and plain wrong; and they do not see any need to support this with references. They are insufferably superior and patronising, resting on immense confidence in their unfalsifiable academic findings.

The scientific method contains many valuable tools for counteracting confirmation bias – the tendency we all have to interpret all data as favourable to our pre-existing ideas. Pandemic science has shown that these tools themselves can be misused to reinforce confirmation bias. This leads to a kind of objectivity trap – the sages become blind to their own bias because they think they are immune.

They are founded in a belief that dissidents must be fundamentally anti-social since they are ‘anti-science.’ They must be either bad actors or gullible and misled. These authors do not consider the positive attributes that could be associated with dissident beliefs: a proclivity for independent thinking and the critical thinking that is supposed to be inculcated by higher education.

Establishments have been trying to suppress rebels and dissidents for hundreds if not thousands of years. But every society needs (non-violent) rebels to challenge beliefs that are not well-founded.

The establishment consensus on COVID-19 is built on sand and should be challenged. It arose from premature closure of the scientific debate, followed by suppression of contrarian evidence-based analysis. Dissidents include scientists, who are clearly not anti-science but are opposed to flawed science based on ‘low cognitive ability’ and confirmation bias in favour of establishment ideas. They are pushing for better science.

The most reliable policy arises from open science and open debate, not from protectionism and closed science.

Let a hundred schools of thought contend – or we are all lost!

Michael Tomlinson is a Higher Education Governance and Quality Consultant. He was formerly Director of the Assurance Group at Australia’s Tertiary Education Quality and Standards Agency, where he led teams to conduct assessments of all registered providers of higher education (including all of Australia’s universities) against the Higher Education Threshold Standards. Before that, for twenty years he held senior positions in Australian universities. He has been an expert panel member for a number of offshore reviews of universities in the Asia-Pacific region. Dr Tomlinson is a Fellow of the Governance Institute of Australia and of the (international) Chartered Governance Institute.

April 29, 2023 Posted by | Full Spectrum Dominance, Science and Pseudo-Science, Timeless or most popular | , | Leave a comment