The disappointing results in the US mid-term elections from the point of view of popular opposition shouldn’t have been surprising to anyone. The United States is now effectively a one-party state, and seeking redress through elections is no longer a plausible path.
The critical point was already established in the stolen 2020 US Presidential election as the cardinal distinction between ballots and votes.
Whereas votes are linked to specific individuals, and cannot be cast by people who are no longer alive or no longer live in the area, ballots are harvested, potentially months in advance, by party workers mailing out returns to high population density housing projects and retirement homes, and picking them up again.
Because it lacks any practically enforceable safeguards, the ballot system is fundamentally vulnerable to organised fraud. This is why it was adopted and will remain the system going forward.
We are already beyond any question of rigging elections because the electoral system itself is now fundamentally rigged – that is, fundamentally organised to engineer Democratic Party majorities, which is to say rote acclamations of corruption and oligarchy, because the Democrats control high-population urban voting districts.
Where necessary, voter suppression techniques are applied on election day in the form of a shortage of ballots or malfunctioning voting machines, as happened this year in Arizona and elsewhere.
None of this is especially sophisticated – ultimately it represents a 21st century version of 19th century Democrat urban machine politics associated with the infamous Tammany Hall.
It should also be recognised that US democracy was never without fraud. Elections were also sporadically fixed in the 20th century, most notably in Illinois in the 1960 Presidential election, when Richard Daley got out the vote in the graveyards of Chicago to deliver a victory for Kennedy.
Nonetheless, the extent to which the new ballot system represents an electoral new normal is an innovation, and one which it is hard to see being reversed. Additionally the new system is fortified by an increasingly vicious security state, which labels everyone asking the most obvious questions as insurrectionists and election deniers.
American democracy is now caught in the vice of a Catch-22. There is no possibility of achieving political change through elections so long as this system remains in place, and therefore no possibility of changing the electoral system. States that retain local control over the legislature, notably Texas and Florida, may be able to hold the line for the moment, but as things stand national democracy is finished in the United States, and it isn’t coming back.
Just as the triumph of the Nazi Party in Germany would not have been possible had the Weimar Republic been healthy, the fact that the Democrats were able to install this new system in the first place is the result of longer-term trends.
In the short term, one can point to the complicity of the Republican Party especially, but also the failure of Trump, whose fateful decisions in the first weeks of the so-called pandemic set the stage for what history will eventually come to understand, unambiguously, as a coup.
The role of the Republican Party in the US political system will also eventually be clearly perceived. In truth, the GOP represents the inverse of a political party, which instead of aiming to reward its supporters by winning political power, robs them to maintain the personal privileges of its leadership. In the UK, the Conservative Party plays a similar role.
The systematic misallocation of funding made this year by the national Republican leadership reveals the party’s priorities with crystalline clarity. Mitch McConnell, one of the richest men in the Senate, withdrew money from tight races in Arizona, Nevada and Georgia to entrench establishment candidates in Alaska and elsewhere more in tune with his essentially larcenous motives. As the Babylon Bee website noted, the Republican Party staved off a red wave.
Seen from the point of view in which one of them is actually imagined to achieve national office, the current discussions about the relative merits of Trump versus DeSantis in 2024 are either completely delusional, or deliberate distractions.
It is inconceivable that the US administrative state which blocked his victory in 2020, and has spent the last two years viciously persecuting his supporters, would allow Trump to return to the White House in 2024. It’s also true that Trump failed in his first term to prevent the Democrats from seizing the power they have, and unclear what he now could do differently.
Given the position of dominance that the Democrats and their allies in the American Securitate occupy, it also seems highly unlikely DeSantis would be allowed to make meaningful changes. The heart of the matter is that US elections no longer mean anything.
November 16, 2022
Posted by aletho |
Civil Liberties, Timeless or most popular | United States |
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An investigation into how the British government groomed young, impressionable Iraqis to serve as their political agents.
Throughout the 20th century, it was frequently said by residents of West Asia, “lift up a mullah’s beard, and you’ll see the words ‘Made in England’ written underneath it.”
Such cynicism is understandable, given Britain’s history of covertly co-opting Imams and sheikhs to further its malign interests across the region.
Yet explosive leaked files reviewed by The Cradle show that this time-tested clandestine strategy hasn’t waned as the traditional role of religious teachers in West Asia is increasingly supplanted, or at least challenged, by politicians ostensibly elected by democratic vote.
Rather, it has evolved and been asserted in more modern forms, which are just as insidious, but may perhaps be even more effective in ensuring West Asian leaders at every level can be reliably depended upon to do London’s bidding.
Another youth initiative
The documents reviewed by The Cradle relate to a Foreign Office project in Baghdad, dubbed “Youth Political Leadership, “set to run for at least a year from August 2016. An accompanying “statement of requirements” not for public consumption laid out its objectives in stark detail. In brief, London sought to “identify young Iraqis…who will join the political establishment,” and train them in “values; representation; and political skills.”
This schooling would “ideally” be complete by Spring 2017, so “successful graduates” could “participate as candidates in the 2017 (or 2018, circumstances depending) local elections.” The desired end goal was that Iraq’s parliament and government alike would be “replenished with a professionalised and young class of political figures” who could be depended upon to serve London’s interests.
“The influx of these young Iraqis,” the statement explained, stood to “benefit” Britain, in particular by facilitating the spook-infested National Security Council’s strategy for Baghdad.
‘No functioning government’
Construction and management of the training program was outsourced to private contractors who were tasked with putting together a “comprehensive plan” for “gender diverse” Iraqis aged 27 or below with “a realistic prospect of entering the political sphere,” including a dedicated “curriculum” that would inculcate “professional ethics” and “hard political skills” in students, to ensure they could optimally “influence” voters.
Trainees were to be subject to intensive “monitoring and assessment” both during and after the course, with top performers whisked to London for a state-funded “study tour,” where they would be assigned “individual mentors” to “help support their career ambitions.”
Subsequently, a “graduate network” would be operated on- and offline in cooperation with the British embassy in Baghdad, to ensure “regular contact” between students and the Foreign Office – and thus MI6 – “through their political careers.”
Prospective candidates would be rigorously vetted before enrolment to ensure they had “an appropriate vision for Iraq,” with a “realistic” prospect of, and plan for, entering the political sphere upon graduation, such as “being chosen as a parliamentary advisor or selected to run as a provincial council member.”
These individuals would then be rigorously taught the Foreign Office’s approved curriculum, so as to instill them with “the right [emphasis added] technical knowledge, skills, attitudes and behaviours” in candidates.
“Practical training on how to function as a political representative,” such as “campaign work (e.g. canvassing, usage of social media),” and “the skills needed to collaboratively function as a member of the legislature,” would also be provided.
Adam Smith International
London’s call was answered by Adam Smith International (ASI). The company clearly grasped the urgency of the project. In detailed submissions to the Foreign Office, it noted that “recent events clearly indicate there is pressing need to address the failure of the Iraqi political establishment to provide an effective government,” making repeated reference to large-scale protests in Baghdad’s historic Tahrir Square, which occurred in July 2016.
Those incendiary scenes were part of several wide-ranging upheavals that unfolded across Iraq that year, spurred by anger over high-level corruption, and never-ending government gridlock.
Incidentally, these were themselves by-products of the byzantine political structure imposed upon Baghdad in the wake of the illegal US-led invasion of Iraq in 2003. Western occupation forces enforced strict ethnic, sectarian, and party quotas on every office of state, ensuring perpetual division, inertia, and gridlock – essentially an inability to address basic public needs.
In the ensuing power vacuum, sectarian groups rose to the fore as the primary means by which average citizens could pressure parliament into implementing vital reforms. This development was no doubt extremely unwelcome to London – after all, many of these movements were Shia-led, raising the obvious prospect of neighboring Iran’s influence increasing considerably within the country.
This concern is reflected in ASI’s submissions. In bemoaning “the absence of a functioning government,” and emphasizing the resultant need to identify and groom future leaders promptly, the company noted firebrand Shia cleric Muqtada al-Sadr was a leading figure in the 2016 protest movement.
“Unless steps are taken to provide avenues for the next generation of Iraqis to enter the legislature, the existing political cadres will continue to dominate the scene, leading to rising frustration and increasing social unrest,” ASI cautioned. “Practical assistance and continuing career support has the potential to stymy the rising tide of frustration among the youth of Iraq in the short term.”
Meddling in Iraq’s internal affairs
In a perverse irony, ASI purportedly played a pivotal role in shaping Iraq’s unworkable political system from its initial stages, enforcing the precise construction which the Foreign Office became resolved to shatter.
In sections of the leaked files outlining its experience of working in Iraq, the company noted that since 2004, it had on behalf of the British government “[provided] assistance to centre of government institutions in Iraq,” including “[developing] key parts of the machinery of government.”
Its in-country team was even said to have “worked closely” with representatives of the Prime Minister’s and Deputy Prime Minister’s offices, granting them a “detailed understanding of the functioning of the Iraqi political system.”
“ASI will leverage the contacts and experience from this project to help facilitate the outreach among political parties,” the contractor pledged. Little did those who ASI previously installed and shored up in office know, that in assisting their Foreign Office friends identify recruits for the leadership training program, they were signing their own political death warrants.
A region-wide strategy
Evidently, the assorted individuals and organizations serving British interests in West Asia at any given time are highly expendable – and should the governance structure they’re drafted to run on London’s behalf perform poorly, or become difficult to effectively control, another must be constructed in its place, filled with all-new representatives in order to create the bogus impression of “change.”
All along, the Foreign Office’s hand in steering a government’s composition and policies, and picking its public faces, will remain hidden, obscured by layer-upon-layer of private contractors, and lofty rhetoric about progress and democracy.
The leaked files exposed here represent a particularly candid insight into how Britain pursues its imperial ambitions in the modern day – but just one. The Cradle has previously exposed a similar connivance in Lebanon, wherein London covertly recruited “agents of change” from among the country’s youth, teaching them how to “maximise their impact” and boost their “name recognition and credibility,” in order to eventually elevate them to parliament.
It stands to reason that Baghdad and Beirut are far from alone in this regard. As such, it behooves all residents of West Asia to ask themselves for whom their elected representatives are truly working, and what interests they ultimately serve.
November 15, 2022
Posted by aletho |
Corruption, Deception, Timeless or most popular | Iraq, Lebanon, Middle East, UK, United States |
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The crime committed against Dr. Paul Marik and his patients
The following post is from The Courage to Face COVID-19: Preventing Hospitalization and Death While Battling the Bio-Pharmaceutical Complex, by John Leake and Peter A. McCullough. MD, MPH.
Dr. Paul Marik testifying at the US Senate on January 24, 2022
At the same time that Dr. McCullough was stripped of his job and professorships, his colleague and kindred spirit, Dr. Paul Marik, experienced a similar fate. On October 15, 2021, his hospital’s administration circulated a memo to the entire healthcare system stating that its doctors were authorized to administer remdesivir to COVID-19 patients, but not ivermectin or a host of other repurposed drugs. As Dr. Marik read the memo, he marveled at the sheer perfidy of it. Especially grotesque was the inclusion of “Ascorbic acid” (vitamin C) on the list of banned substances.
The administration issued this directive at a time when seven COVID-19 patients were in the ICU, desperately in need of Dr. Marik’s care. He, in turn, desperately wanted to treat them with the drug regimen that he knew would give them a good chance of recovery. Three months later, at the January 24, 2022 panel discussion (COVID-19: A Second Opinion),hosted by Senator Ron Johnson, Dr. Marik recounted his helplessness. His heart-wrenching testimony (starting at 4:19:30) was probably the most dramatic moment in the extraordinary conference.
This system was effectively preventing me from treating my patients according to my best clinical judgement. … As a clinician for the first time in my entire career, I could not be a doctor. I could not treat patients. I had seven Covid patients [he holds up his hands showing seven digits] including a 31-year-old woman. I was not allowed to treat these people. I had to stand by idly [he clenches and raises his fists with anguish and begins to weep]. I had to stand by idly, watching these people die.
I then tried to sue the system, so then they did something called peer sham review. It is a disgusting and evil concept. They then accused me of seven most outrageous crimes … and [claimed] that I was such a severe threat to the safety of patients, they immediately suspended my hospital privileges because I posed such a threat to these patients—ignoring the fact that under my care, mortality was 50% less than it was under my colleagues. I then went on to this sham peer review. I went to a Kangaroo Court, where they continued this, and the end result was that I lost my hospital privilege and was reported to the National Practitioner Databank. So here I was standing up for my patients’ rights, and this hospital, this evil hospital, ended my medical career.
November 15, 2022
Posted by aletho |
Book Review, Civil Liberties, Full Spectrum Dominance, Science and Pseudo-Science, Timeless or most popular | Covid-19, Human rights |
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By now, Corbett Reporteers know all about the CIA’s infiltration of the news media, from Wisner’s Wurlitzer and the CIA’s global propaganda network to the Church Committee revelations and the CIA whistleblowers of the 1980s. We were told that the CIA stopped all that (which is a lie, of course). But do you know how the CIA is manipulating the media today? Join James on today’s important edition of The Corbett Report podcast as he exposes the incredibly brazen trick behind The CIA and the News Media 2.0.
Watch on Archive / BitChute / Odysee / Rokfin / Rumble / Substack / Download the mp4
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DOCUMENTATION
| “There has never been a conspiracy in this country!” (I’ll leave this as an Easter Egg for now. Can you remember/find this clip? The answer will be included in next weekend’s subscriber exclusive video!) |
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39:05 |
November 15, 2022
Posted by aletho |
Fake News, Mainstream Media, Warmongering, Timeless or most popular, Video | CIA, FBI, United States |
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The General Medical Council was established in 1858 to regulate doctors and to protect patients from charlatans. Quite right too. Doctors are trained to look at the science and translate this into the ‘art’ of treatment for individual patients. This works well for established disease processes, but what happens when a new disease appears?
This became a real issue in the spring of 2020 with Covid-19. Doctors working on the front line used their experience of treating similar viral infections, consulted widely with colleagues, perused the scientific literature as it became available, repurposed old drugs and developed treatments that were biologically plausible and relevant to the clinical imperatives. These treatments were intrinsically safe and, most importantly, remarkably effective. Yes, people died but death rates were no worse than the usual seasonal influenza. We know seasonal flu kills those with co-morbidities such as cancer or heart disease. Covid-19 was the same – it is simply another flu-like illness.
In their management of Covid-19, front-line doctors quickly established three clinical principles that needed tackling: first to improve basic immunity, secondly to reduce the viral load and thirdly to prevent the cytokine storm with anti-inflammatory interventions. For your information, those treatments are:
· Improve immune function with low carbohydrate diets, vitamin D 10,000iu, zinc 30mg and vitamin C 5g.
· At the first hint of any symptom, reduce the viral load with vitamin C 5g (and more), iodine mouthwash or inhalation (povidone iodine or Lugol’s iodine), ivermectin 12mg twice daily, hydroxychloroquine 200mg twice daily.
· Reduce inflammation to prevent the cytokine storm: vitamin C 5g, vitamin D 20,000iu, B complex, curcumin 500mg twice daily, fish oil 4g daily, nigella sativa 500mg twice daily. Possibly NSAIs and steroids.
These safe and effective treatments are inexpensive and available to all. But this did not fit with the prevailing narrative that Covid-19 was extremely dangerous, necessitating draconian measures such as lockdown, mask-wearing and vaccinations. We now know these measures are not just ineffective at preventing Covid-19 but have generated pathology in their own right – lockdown rendered many stressed, miserable, fat, poor, unfit, ill, un-educated and anti-social. These are all risk factors for cancer, heart disease and dementia.
The official narrative was that there were no treatments available. People were advised to stay at home until they became really ill. Only a vaccine would save us from disease and death. The nation, driven by the BBC, came to believe the official narrative and vaccines were rolled out. The consequence? During 2022, death rates have increased to 16 per cent above average with more than 1,500 people a month dying above the expected rate. We now have consultant cardiologists, paediatricians and obstetricians calling for an immediate halt to the vaccine programme because of the excess death rates, miscarriages and stillbirths directly attributed to vaccines. These doctors expect the situation to get worse since the malign effects of vaccines increase with more doses.
So what happened to all those doctors who advocated these safe and effective interventions, all of which, as a bonus, help to prevent heart disease and cancer? Remember these doctors are advocating low carbohydrate diets, nutritional supplements, herbal preparations and repurposed safe prescription drugs. What happened to those doctors who eschewed the narrative that the only way to prevent covid was a vaccination programme? They have been and continue to be targeted by the General Medical Council. They have or are being investigated because they have stuck to their principles. Principles enshrined by the Hippocratic Oath and GMC codes of conduct and ethical actions. The overriding rule is ‘First, do no harm. Make the patient your first concern’. Any doctor who advises a patient not to receive a Covid vaccine risks prosecution by the GMC – and this risks loss of livelihood, career, income, pension and all such securities. Any doctor who advocates diet, nutrition, herbal or homeopathic remedies or repurposed drugs risks GMC prosecution. It is no surprise that doctors, to save their own skins, have become puppets of the narrative. Many are leaving the NHS demoralised and disempowered.
Any medical intervention, including administering a vaccine, demands informed consent. This is part of English law. It is my experience, and that of many of my colleagues, that people are not getting proper informed consent. Critical parts of informed consent that are being routinely omitted include:
· The right to be informed of all risks including potential long-term risks;
· The right to be informed of all alternative treatments;
· The right not to be coerced.
No vaccinated person who has consulted with me has ever been informed of long-term risks (such as heart disease, infertility, cancer), they have never been informed of the efficacy of safe treatments detailed above and they have been coerced by non-medical issues such as the need to travel, to hold down a job, to be educated or entertained.
I have now reported ten doctors to the GMC for obvious breaches of Good Medical Practice. Some of the nonsenses these doctors have stated in the public arena include:
‘All we can offer is a ventilator . . .’
‘[People should] accept a vaccine with exceptional, and demonstrable, safety and effectiveness.’
‘The vaccine won’t do you any harm.’
‘It’s incredibly safe.’
‘After 12 days from the first vaccination of the AstraZeneca vaccine, you are 100 per cent protected against hospitalisation and death.’
‘It [the vaccine] actually reduces your chance of catching it [Covid-19] in the first place.’
‘The vaccine reduces your chances of passing it on which is why it is such a good idea.’
The GMC has refused to investigate any of these doctors.
By contrast, I am currently being investigated by the GMC for my advocacy of vitamin C, vitamin D and iodine. These are all scientifically proven, effective, inexpensive, safe interventions which are available to all. The GMC has chosen to ignore the science and punish all these who do such.
The GMC is the longest-established regulatory body in the world. All institutions become self-serving and, in the opinion of many, the GMC is in the terminal stages of senile dementia. It has achieved this by ignoring the science, punishing those doctors who dare question the narrative and allowing bad doctors to spout non-evidence-based opinion. The NHS is in a state of decline largely because the GMC will not allow doctors to doctor.
November 14, 2022
Posted by aletho |
Science and Pseudo-Science, Timeless or most popular, War Crimes | Covid-19, COVID-19 Vaccine, UK |
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As a truth-seeking journalist writing on Covid policies surrounding the young, I have been bewildered by the scientific establishment’s failure to have an honest, rational discussion of the data. Being an ordinary, critical-thinking person with no prior scientific expertise, my impression was always that the costs and benefits of an medical intervention must be carefully weighed before making a decision. Moreover, I assumed there is no “one-size-fits-all” medicine — everything from Tylenol, prescription drugs, to novel psychedelic therapies — that can be universally recommended.
According to the foremost public health “experts”, I was wrong.
This suddenly dawned on me when I watched CNN’s Dr. Sanjay Gupta refuse to acknowledge the risk of vaccine myocarditis in young boys on Joe Rogan’s podcast, then appear on CNN shortly after doubling-down on his assertions by presenting a study finding infection-induced myocarditis poses a greater risk compared to the vaccine (across the population, as opposed to young men specifically).
Publication after publication have printed articles quoting medical experts “debunking” concerns of vaccine myocarditis in young males using flawed CDC data or aggregate population-level data which shows the risk of Covid myocarditis exceeding that from the vaccine.
This is incredibly dishonest. The conversation from the start has always oriented around the specific risk in young men.
Among the most rigorous, comprehensive data we have on vaccine myocarditis is from Katie Sharff who analyzed a database from Kaiser Permanente. She found a 1/1,862 rate of myocarditis after the second dose in young men ages 18 – 24. For boys ages 12 – 17, the rate was 1/2,650. Active surveillance monitoring in Hong Kong shows virtually identical figures.
After failing the Joe Rogan test, Dr. Gupta decided to promote his one-size-fits-all vaccine advocacy on a less questioning and critical-thinking platform: Sesame Street. “The second vaccine dose gives you stronger, longer, and wider protection,” he stated on the kids program. “Hopefully the protection lasts a long time!”
Leading public health officials who do honestly discuss vaccine risks are immediately punished. Last week, after Ontario’s Chief Medical Officer of Health conceded the possible 1/5,000 risk of myocarditis for healthy young people at a conference promoting the fourth dose, a number of top “doctors” in the province rebuked his remarks.
“The incidence of myocarditis after vaccination is much lower than 1 in 5000,” cardiac radiologist Dr. Kate Hanneman stated, referring to the risk in the wider population.
City News: ‘Much lower than 1-in-5,000’, doctors take issue with Dr. Moore’s myocarditis claim
As a result of the mainstream medical community’s failure to weigh the age-specific cost and benefits of vaccination, young people across North America have been coerced, misinformed, and marginalized. Virtually all across Canada, anyone unvaccinated between 15-30 (and over) was barred from exercising at a gym, dining in at restaurants, and attending large gatherings.
In the United States, a number of school districts are now bizarrely mandating the primary vaccine series for the fall, despite newer variants and a seroprevalence rate indicating prior covid infection in children of 75% (pre-Omicron).
ABC News DC to require students 12 and older to be vaccinated against COVID-19 this fall
As Megyn Kelly recently lamented, her kids are now not only facing exclusion from sports and after school activities, but expulsion if they don’t get double vaccinated at their school in Connecticut.
The institutional push to mandate and coerce vaccination in the young is not only pushed in schools and public health centers, but by journalists as well. As a pro-vaccine writer reporting on vaccine myocarditis in a specific demographic (arguing only for personal choice and no mandates), I have been stunned by a number of reputable outlets refusing to publish anything that acknowledge the risks.
After pitching one editor, she replied:
“The _____ is a pro-vaccine publication. We don’t run any pieces that discourage the public from getting vaccinated.”
Another editor:
“Rav, I don’t know why you’re still writing about this. I personally think everyone should get vaccinated already and stop making this a big deal for everyone. The risks for young men are still incredibly small.”
One editor I had a very close relationship with:
“I think the risk of vaccine myocarditis has been vastly exaggerated. It comprises a minuscule fraction of vaccinations. Please pitch this to another outlet.”
The scientific community’s misleading claims have also permitted the violation of informed consent and a number of preventable vaccine-induced myocarditis incidents.
In a recent long-form investigative article (rejected by several publications), I interviewed a 33-year-old previously healthy and incredibly fit man who unwillingly got double-vaccinated to keep his job in law-enforcement.
He didn’t hear the term “vaccine-induced myocarditis” till the doctor told him his diagnosis when he ended up in the hospital after almost dying from heart failure (210 beats per minute) following the second Pfizer dose.
Or take the recent viral story of a triple-vaccinated mother who followed the advice of public health authorities and got her 14-year-old son double-vaccinated, resulting in vaccine myocarditis:
Mom Whose 14-Year-Old Son Developed Myocarditis After Pfizer Vaccine No Longer Trusts CDC, Public Health Officials
We’ve known that teenage boys are at two to three times higher risk of vaccine myocarditis than Covid hospitalization. We’ve known men under the age of 40 remain at elevated risk of vaccine myocarditis (Oxford analysis).
Yet, the government — as informed by “top epidemiologists” — has not created any public awareness surrounding this issue. Perhaps they are worried this would discourage some people from getting vaccinated, and they want as many people vaccinated as possible.
Instead of making careful, age-stratified recommendations, they now strongly encourage everyone to get three doses. Hardly day goes by without a Canadian government advertisement popping up on YouTube prompting teenagers and young adults get boosted to “prevent serious illness.”
Many in the media and medical establishment promote vaccination to prevent serious illness or death in the elderly, but react to any information that questions the safety and efficacy of vaccination in children with a kind of religious opposition.
Supporting the vaccine means judiciously recommending it to those who have more to gain and less to lose and being transparent about the real risks of vaccination in specific demographics — without either agenda-driven minimization or exaggeration. Obfuscating, downplaying, and misleading the public, on the other hand, undermines trust in public health recommendations.
November 14, 2022
Posted by aletho |
Full Spectrum Dominance, Science and Pseudo-Science, Timeless or most popular | COVID-19 Vaccine |
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The lords of lockdown barely escaped their worst possible fate, namely that the topic would become the national and international source of scandal that it should be. And let’s add the vaccine mandates here too: even if such had been morally justified, which they were not, there is absolutely no practical reason for them at all.
To have imposed both of these within the course of one year – with zero evidence that they achieved anything for public health and vast amounts of unfolding evidence that they ruined life quality for countless millions – qualifies as a scandal for the ages. It was in the US but also in nearly every country in the world but a few.
Might that have huge political implications? One would suppose so. And yet today it appears that truth and justice are further off than ever. The most passionate of the anti-lockdown governors – those who never locked down or opened earlier than the rest of the country – won on their record. Most of the rest joined the entire political establishment in pretending that all of this is a non-issue. Tragically, this tactic seems to have worked better than it should have.
Meanwhile, a few points to consider:
The US government, through the Transportation Safety Administration, has signed yet another order extending the ban on unvaccinated international visitors until January 8, 2023. This means that no person who has managed to refuse the shot is allowed to come to the US for any reason. This is 30% of the world’s population, banned even to enter the US on their own dime. Something like this would have been inconceivably illiberal three years ago, and been a source of enormous controversy and outrage. Today, the extension hardly made the news.
The Biden administration has once again extended the Covid emergency declaration another 90 days, which continues to grant government vast powers without Congressional approval. Under a state of emergency, the Constitutional structure of the US is effectively suspended and the country remains on a wartime footing. This announcement was not controversial, and, like the above, it barely made the news.
Many colleges and universities, and also other schools and public agencies, continue to enforce the vaccine mandate even without any solid science behind the approval of the bivalent shots or any real rationale behind the push, given that most people have long ago been exposed and acquired natural immunity, and, moreover, it is very well established that the shots do not protect anyone from infection nor stop transmission. They just keep doing this anyway.
Masking is not in disrepute because we never really obtained anything like an honest admission of their failure to control the spread. Even today, there is a percentage of people out there permanently traumatized. On travels, I’m seeing perhaps 10-20% but in some Northeastern cities, regular wearing of masks is also very common. Once they became a symbol of political compliance and virtue, that sealed the deal and the culture was changed. Now we face the threat of mask mandates whenever government deems it necessary because the Transportation Safety Authority has been given the go-ahead by the courts.
The end of vaccine mandates in most areas of life, and hence also the drive for a passport to distinguish between clean and unclean people, is a good sign. But the infrastructure is still in place and becoming more sophisticated. It is hardly a final victory. It might only be a temporary respite, while all the ambitions are still extant.
More than that, the Biden administration (and all that it represents, including the World Economic Forum, the World Health Organization, and everything else called the establishment) has its own pandemic plans in place. The idea is not to dial back the mandates or cool it on them. It’s the reverse: centralize all pandemic planning to make a South Dakota, Georgia, and Florida experience impossible the next time. Also, spend tens of billions in more money.
The principle seems to have emerged among the agencies, intellectuals, and politicians who did this. Whatever you do, never admit to having made any major mistakes. And never connect the economic, cultural, health, and educational disasters all around us to anything the govenrment did in 2020 or 2021! That would be nothing but a conspiracy theory.
The pandemic racket is so huge at this point that it is even embroiled in the FTX meltdown over the weekend. Sam Bankman-Fried’s brother Gabe actually founded a nonprofit solely for the purpose of providing “support” for the $30 billion that the Biden administration has allocated to pandemic planning. The institution “Guarding Against Pandemics” is very obviously a honeypot for such funding, complete with on-the-record endorsements from many Democrat Party candidates who won election.
Meanwhile, yes, there have been many successful court challenges to many features of the pandemic response. But not enough. The main machinery that took away liberty and property in the name of virus control is still in place in all its essentials. The CDC to this day brags of its awesome quarantine powers that it can deploy any time government deems it necessary. Nothing about that has changed.
In the big picture and rendered in a philosophical sense, humanity seems to have lost its ability to learn from its own errors. Put in more gritty terms, too many people among ruling-class interests gained financially and in terms of the lust for power during the pandemic to prompt any serious rethinking and reform.
In any case, that rethinking and reform is now put off for another day. Anyone seriously concerned about the future of humanity and the civilizations it built must throw themselves into the long-term battle for truth and reason. That will require that we use every bit of what remains of free speech and what remains of the longing for integrity and accountability in public life. The group we have come to call “they” want a demoralized population and a silent public square.
We cannot allow that to happen.
Jeffrey A. Tucker, Founder and President of the Brownstone Institute, is an economist and author. He has written 10 books, including Liberty or Lockdown, and thousands of articles in the scholarly and popular press.
November 14, 2022
Posted by aletho |
Civil Liberties, Corruption, Science and Pseudo-Science, Timeless or most popular | Covid-19, COVID-19 Vaccine, Human rights, United States |
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Did the Russiagate conspiracy entitle the federal government to censor Americans forever? Did federal shenanigans swing the 2020 election? A new report reveals how a new federal agency and federal grantees exploited a 2016 scam to launch the greatest covert censorship campaign in U.S. history.
In 2016, top FBI officials and the Obama administration fueled a conspiracy that the Trump presidential campaign was colluding with the Russian government. Numerous false FBI claims spurred a massive wiretapping operation approved by the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court. The allegations led to the appointment of Special Counsel Robert Mueller, who spent two years investigating before admitting that there was nothing to prosecute for his primary charge. But by that point, Trump had been irredeemably tainted and the Democrats had exploited the controversy to capture control of the U.S. House of Representatives in 2018.
Thanks to Russiagate, Congress created a new federal agency in 2018—the Cybersecurity Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) in the Department of Homeland Security (DHS). CISA was purportedly intended to fight foreign threats to election security and U.S. infrastructure. But the agency quickly shifted its target to American citizens. As a report last week from the Foundation for Freedom Online (FFO) revealed, “Any U.S. citizen posting what DHS considered misinformation’ online was suddenly conducting a cyber attack against US critical infrastructure.”
CISA and DHS realized that they could not directly muzzle Americans so they colluded with a number of federal grantees who comprised the Election Integrity Project, a coalition formed in mid-2020. The result was “censorship by proxy,” as law professor Jonathan Turley observed, bludgeoning social media companies into submission. The DHS-spurred crackdown in 2020 resulted in the suppression of “22 million tweets labeled ‘misinformation’ on Twitter” and “hundreds of millions of individual Facebook posts, YouTube videos, TikToks, and tweets impacted” thanks to changes that would not have occurred without “‘huge regulatory pressure’ from government,” FFO reported.
Once the government claims a prerogative to censor “misinformation,” the definition of misinformation mushrooms to serve political purposes. The Election Integrity Partnership bragged about how social media posts were targeted that were merely purportedly guilty of offenses such as “exaggerate issue,” “misleading stats” and “out of context.” Many of those alleged factual infractions were piddling compared to the sweeping falsehoods continually uncorked by presidential candidates Trump and Biden.
Prior to the 2020 election, “the censorship focus was always and consistently foremost targeted at speech casting doubt on mail-in ballots,” FFO reported. Democrats exploited the COVID-19 pandemic to push through electoral changes that opened the floodgates to unverified mail-in ballots. Some states like Michigan sent absentee ballots to all voters, violating the Election Clause of the Constitution (which specifies that state legislatures make the rules for federal elections).
Election regimes that scrutinized mail-in ballots routinely had a high rejection rate. New York City relied on mail-in ballots for a June 2020 primary that the New York Daily News derided as a “dumpster fire.” Up to 20% of ballots “were declared invalid before even being opened, based on mistakes with their exterior envelopes,” The Washington Post noted, thanks largely to missing postmarks or signatures. Trump claimed that the shift to mail-in ballots could result in “the most corrupt vote in our nation’s history.”
But federal string-pulling minimized controversies. FFO noted, “Pre-censoring U.S. citizen debate about mail-in ballots five months before an election has the impact of devastating the ability of concerned citizens to pressure their state representatives to take legal action on changing voting procedures.” Rather than the traditional scrutiny for mail-in ballots, many locales defaulted to accepting practically any piece of paper with a mark. Mail-in ballots determined the outcome of the 2020 election. Trump received more votes on Election Day but 43,000 mail-in ballots in three states sealed Biden’s victory—a minuscule portion of the tens of millions of mail-in votes he received.
In a July 28, 2020 article for the American Institute for Economic Research, I warned that the controversies over mail-in ballots could lead to “the death of political legitimacy…Deep State federal agencies are a Godzilla that have established their prerogative to undermine if not overturn election results.”
Until I read the new FFO report, I did not realize that “the biggest category for [2020] censorship was ‘delegitimization’… defined to mean any speech that ‘casts doubt’ on any kind of election process, outcome or integrity issues [which] made all conservative and populist criticism of the administration of the election pre-banned at the narrative level, five months in advance of Election Day.” Damn, no wonder that article of mine got so little traction on Twitter and Facebook! “Delegitimization” resulted in “72% of its censorship tickets and targeted over 99% of the posts throttled by narrative during the 2020 election.”
The entire process looks like a Monty Python parody of democracy. As Mike Benz, the former State Department official who heads FFO, observed, “The same obscure DHS subagency tasked with election security also gained the power to censor any questions about election security.”
How much impact did federal censorship and suppression have on the most recent elections? The Election Integrity Project browbeat tech companies to accept “that social media posts about the 2022 elections be censorable under a low bar of simply ‘misleading,’” according to FFO. For the midterm elections, “the Election Integrity Project is tightly monitoring and working to censor ‘discussions surrounding the delays in counting ballots’ being ‘framed as fraud,’” FFO reported. Damned convenient considering the debacle in Arizona—which was foreseen if not foreordained. In a Washington speech just before the election, President Biden told listeners that “in some cases we won’t know the winner…until a few days after the election. It takes time to count all legitimate ballots in a legal and orderly manner.” Biden stressed that citizens must be “patient. That’s how this is supposed to work.”
But it never consistently worked that way before in American history. Arizona’s voting machines dismally failed on Election Day and Democrats are vehemently resisting a hand recount of all ballots.
The real goal is to control Americans’ minds—and not just on Election Day. Jen Easterly, the NSA honcho who Biden chose to run CISA, declared that “the most critical infrastructure is our cognitive infrastructure, so building that resilience to misinformation and disinformation… is incredibly important.” And the most important cognitive “fix” is to train Americans to never doubt Uncle Sam. In a March 2022 meeting with top Twitter executives, FBI official Laura Dehmlow “warned that the threat of subversive information on social media could undermine support for the U.S. government,” The Intercept recently reported. The FBI has 80 agents on a task force to curb “subversive data utilized to drive a wedge between the populace and the government.”
“Disinformation” is often simply the lag time between the pronouncement and the debunking of government falsehoods. If the feds can censor most if not almost all of their online critics, their cons become almost irrefutable. Perhaps that is the only way that many federal policies can retain any shard of legitimacy. As Mike Benz warns, “DHS is carrying out an official state policy that if public trust is not earned, it must be installed.” That is a recipe for the death of democracy.
Jim Bovard is the author of Public Policy Hooligan (2012), Attention Deficit Democracy (2006), Lost Rights: The Destruction of American Liberty (1994), and 7 other books. He is a member of the USA Today Board of Contributors and has also written for the New York Times, Wall Street Journal, Playboy, Washington Post, and other publications. His articles have been publicly denounced by the chief of the FBI, the Postmaster General, the Secretary of HUD, and the heads of the DEA, FEMA, and EEOC and numerous federal agencies.
November 14, 2022
Posted by aletho |
Civil Liberties, Corruption, Deception, Full Spectrum Dominance, Timeless or most popular | CISA, DHS, Facebook, FBI, Human rights, Twitter, United States |
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World leaders have been taking energy advice from people like Michael Mann and Greta Thunberg, who have no experience or expertise related to energy. Simultaneously, governments have been refusing to listen to the people who provide the world’s energy.
November 14, 2022
Posted by aletho |
Science and Pseudo-Science, Timeless or most popular, Video |
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History shows that hiding clinical trial data can be deadly.
Vioxx is a well-known example of how the US drug regulator withheld important information about the harms of the drug for over three years, before it was withdrawn from the market and tens of thousands of people died as a consequence.
Numerous initiatives have been launched over the past two decades to improve access to trial data after it became evident that what was reported in peer-reviewed journals was often cherry-picked and misleading.
Eminent scientists have succeeded in gaining access to trial data from the European and Canadian drug regulators, but a recent analysis published in the Journal of Law, Medicine, & Ethics, found that the US FDA still lags behind others when it comes to data transparency.
Drug regulators have traditionally been the guardians of a treasure trove of trial data which they kept hidden from the public. But, over a decade ago, the efforts of Danish professor Peter Gøtzsche turned that on its head.
Gøtzsche and his PhD student were studying the effects of an anti-obesity drug and requested the trial data held by the European Medicines Agency (EMA).
“We already had good evidence that the efficacy and harms of drugs were incompletely reported in the medical journals, so by asking for the regulatory data for the anti-obesity pills, we were convinced it would get us closer to the truth”, said Gøtzsche.
At first, EMA denied their request, saying that it needed to protect commercially confidential information, but Gøtzsche was undeterred. He made a formal complaint to the European Ombudsman.
After an arduous 3-year process, the Ombudsman accused EMA of “maladministration” for refusing to share its data – it was a serious and embarrassing charge, so EMA had no choice but to capitulate.
In 2013, EMA announced that it would provide public access to regulatory data – which included study reports, protocols and the raw anonymised patient data in statistical programmes enabling anyone to independently scrutinise the data for all new drugs that it approved.
It was a bitter-sweet moment for Gøtzsche.
“I was satisfied with the outcome, but I also felt a bit betrayed. When EMA praised itself for being transparent, it conveniently omitted telling the public that it was basically forced to make the decision because of my efforts and that of the Ombudsman,” said Gøtzsche.
“I’ve been around a while to know that this is exactly how the drug industry operates. They cover up their failures while praising themselves for what others force them to do,” he added.
Millions of pages containing trial data have since been released. Interestingly though, this remarkable feat has gone largely unrecognised and the response from the research community has been rather tepid.
Gøtzsche suspects it’s because analysing regulatory documents is complex and requires experience to decipher regulatory data – skills that few researchers have.
“It is a huge job to do systematic reviews of clinical study reports held by drug regulators, but it is the difference between producing reliable reviews or merely “garbage-in, garbage-out” reviews,” said Gøtzsche.
Since then, Gøtzsche’s group showed this was the case for reviews of antidepressant drug trials.
When they compared data from medical journals to that from regulatory documents, they found major discrepancies such as underreporting of harms, including suicide attempts and aggressive behaviour.
Following the landmark policy change in Europe, researchers believed it would help unlock regulatory documents elsewhere that were historically kept hidden from the public.
In 2016, Peter Doshi, professor at the University of Maryland and senior editor of The BMJ requested the release of unpublished clinical trial data relating to antivirals for the treatment of influenza (Tamiflu, Relenza) and three human papillomavirus vaccines from the Canadian drug regulator, Health Canada.
After some resistance, Health Canada agreed to allow Doshi access to the documents but imposed a confidentiality agreement that would prevent him from making his findings public.
When Doshi refused to sign the confidentially agreement, his request for access to the trial data was denied, so he filed a lawsuit in a federal court seeking a judicial review of the regulator’s decision.
Remarkably, in 2018, in the case of Peter Doshi v. Attorney General of Canada, a federal court judge ruled in favour of Doshi and in the public’s interest, ordering Health Canada to hand over the trial data for independent scrutiny.
It was hailed a “major victory” for transparency and after the win, Doshi told The BMJ, “For me this case has always been about something larger than my specific request. It is about the principle of transparency. If my case sets a precedent and Health Canada begins making clinical trial data available to others—promptly, and without imposing confidentiality agreements—that will be the real victory.”
Notably, the Canadian drug regulator has gone one step further than EMA by proactively releasing data for not only approved drug submissions, but also “unapproved, and withdrawn drug and biologic submissions… Class III and IV medical device applications.”
The US FDA houses the largest known repository of clinical trial data in the world, but it doesn’t proactively share it.
In 2018, the FDA launched a new pilot program to proactively publish clinical study reports from the pivotal studies of nine recently approved drugs – but the agency put an end to that program in March 2020.
“It is just so typical of the FDA, which is very beholden to industry, and which some have dubbed the Foot Dragging Agency when it comes to the public interest,” said Gøtzsche.
Now, the only mechanism to ascertain regulatory data for FDA-approved drugs is to submit Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests, a lengthy process which often results in heavily redacted documents of limited value.
A study by US researchers, analysed the FDA’s willingness to release data, compared to other regulators, EMA and Health Canada.
They found that between 2016 and April 2021, EMA released data for 123 unique medical products, while Health Canada released data for 73 unique medical products between 2019 and April 2021.
In stark contrast, the FDA only proactively disclosed data supporting one single drug that was approved in 2018, clearly demonstrating that the agency has failed to keep pace with the European and Canadian regulatory bodies.
The problem of data secrecy within the FDA has been especially evident during the pandemic. Recently, I reported in The BMJ that the agency had failed to disclose covid-19 vaccine ‘safety signals’ derived from post-marketing data.
Also, the non-profit group, Public Health and Medical Professionals for Transparency had to sue the FDA for access to trial documents used as the basis for licensing Pfizer’s covid-19 mRNA vaccine. Initially, the agency wanted 75 years to release all the data but a Federal Court Judge rejected its request, ordering the release of the documents at a rate of 55,000 pages per month, taking approximately 8 months.
Given the widespread use of this important public health intervention, and the billions of dollars in public funds used to conduct vaccine research and development, these data should have been made publicly available immediately.
Data secrecy has undermined the health care system by subverting the allocation of scare resources and eroding public trust. The damage done to people’s confidence in vaccines, and medicines more broadly, will be felt for generations and likely to harm public health.
November 13, 2022
Posted by aletho |
Deception, Science and Pseudo-Science, Timeless or most popular | EMA, FDA, Health Canada |
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This week marked the 47th anniversary of the dismissal of former Australian prime minister Gough Whitlam by the country’s British-appointed governor-general John Kerr.
The role and power of governors-general is little known, let alone understood today, but they wield enormous clout over many countries that once comprised the British Empire.
Appointed by a royal decree, they serve as the reigning British monarch’s local representatives, appoint government ministers, judges and ambassadors, grant royal assent to laws passed by parliament, bestow state honors, and are commanders-in-chief of the respective nation’s armed forces, among other things.
The unceremonious dismissal of Whitlam and his elected government is largely forgotten today, but the sordid episode detonated the myth that constituents of the British Commonwealth are independent, sovereign states, free from control or influence of their former imperial master – however briefly.
Elected in 1972 on a wave of popular upheaval, Whitlam was an upstart social democrat who made clear his country would not be dominated by the interests of foreign powers.
Within months, he abolished royal patronage, recognised the People’s Republic of China, drew up plans for Aboriginal land rights, ended conscription, and withdrew all Australian troops from Vietnam, with his ministers referring to the US war as “corrupt and barbaric.”
Fast forward to November 1975, and he was thrown out of office upon the request of governor-general John Kerr. When that fateful day came, Queen Elizabeth II’s deputy private secretary William Heseltine, an Australian citizen, stated that “the palace was in a state of total ignorance.”
Secret communications between Buckingham Palace and Kerr, recently reported on in forensic detail by Declassified Australia, prove Helestine’s professions to be an outright lie, beyond doubt.
Doing the monarchy ‘good’
In a series of letters, starting in September 1975, Kerr openly discussed ways in which Whitlam could be removed from power in a bloodless coup with both the Queen and Prince Charles, now King of Great Britain, and Australia.
This was despite vice-regal convention dictating that a governor-general must “advise, counsel and warn” an elected prime minister about their planning and thinking, even in the event of potential dismissal, the British monarch theoretically being duty-bound to remain disinterested and politically neutral, and Australian High Court justice Anthony Mason warning Kerr that his behavior was “deceptive”.
Both he and the palace were unfazed, no doubt confident that “royal secrecy” laws would conceal their activities forever.
Among the earliest communications are notes from a meeting between Prince Charles and Kerr during Papua New Guinea’s 1975 independence celebrations. The governor-general made clear what he was plotting, but expressed anxiety that Whitlam, if he caught wind of the conspiracy, would dismiss him first.
“The Queen should not have to accept advice that you should be recalled at the very time, should this happen, when you were considering having to dismiss the government,” Kerr cited Charles as saying.
Upon returning to Britain, Charles informed the Queen of the plan in motion. Charteris then wrote to Kerr outlining how he would be protected in the event Whitlam requested that the palace recall the governor-general.
Should that “contingency” arise, Charteris said, Elizabeth II would “try to delay things” rather than responding promptly according to protocol, allowing Kerr to plunge the dagger first.
While the Queen took the lead role in consulting with Kerr on legal and regulatory routes to oust Whitlam, Prince Charles was also intimately involved, actively encouraging and counseling the governor-general.
In order to legitimize his sinister scheme, Kerr sought the advice of Australia’s two most senior law officers as to whether Whitlam could be dismissed under “reserve powers”. This authority, only usable in specific, adverse circumstances such as crises, would allow the governor-general to act unilaterally, without governmental or parliamentary approval.
Kerr knew that it was likely no legitimate grounds for such an extraordinary intervention would be identified, and accordingly warned the palace in early November, although made clear he would move ahead anyway.
In a series of letters, Charteris variously reassured Kerr, “that you have powers is recognised,” “those powers do exist,” and “if you do, as you will, what the constitution dictates, you cannot possibly do the monarchy any avoidable harm. The chances are you will do it good.”
The senior Australian legal officers’ opinion arrived on November 6, 1975 – and as expected, they warned Kerr he had no legal or constitutional grounds for overthrowing the Whitlam government. Five days later, he did so anyway.
In March 1976, Prince Charles wrote to Kerr, praising him for his actions and stellar work as Buckingham Palace’s man Down Under more generally.
“I wanted you to know that I appreciate what you do and admire enormously the way you have performed in your many and varied duties. Please don’t lose heart. What you did last year was right and the courageous thing to do,” the King-in-waiting fawned.
Web of lies and connivance
The public would be utterly in the dark about this web of lies and connivance, were it not for a bitter four-year-long High Court battle in Australia to secure declassification of these highly incriminating papers.
Within hours of the release of letters, Buckingham Palace issued a public statement, denying the dark reality so amply exposed by the disclosure: “Neither Her Majesty nor the Royal Household had any part to play in Kerr’s decision to dismiss Whitlam.”
The High Court decision was a landmark development, marking the first time the concept of “royal secrecy” had been overturned anywhere in the British Commonwealth.
It has remained unchallenged in every other constituent country ever since, meaning the obvious question of whether similar chicanery was undertaken against troublesomely independent figures elsewhere in the political association remains an open one.
This is particularly relevant to consider given that the new British King has a dual history of directly pressuring state officials at home to structure policy and action domestically and internationally according to his personal will, and doggedly attempting to keep such lobbying hidden from public view.
In May 2015, over two dozen private communications between then-Prince Charles and British ministers were published after a 10-year-long legal struggle, which cost successive governments hundreds of thousands of pounds.
The contents of these letters showed Charles – again in breach of conventions on “political neutrality” – petitioning elected representatives on subjects ranging from the Iraq War to alternative medicines.
In some, then-heir to the British throne openly warned a health secretary that “chickens will come home to roost” in their government department if redevelopment of a hospital – in which the Prince’s architecture charity was involved – was not accelerated.
It’s clear though that Charles didn’t typically need to rely on threats – government officials were usually willing to obsequiously roll over how and when he requested them to.
In response to one royal intervention, then-Prime Minister Tony Blair unctuously stated: “I always value and look forward to your views.” In another, an education secretary signed off: “I have the honour to be Your Royal Highness’s most humble and obedient servant.”
The letters were released at a time when speculation was rife in the mainstream media that Charles intended to rule in a far more outspoken way than his publicly taciturn mother.
Since taking the throne, there is little sign publicly of this – although that could in part be attributed to the British government amending the Freedom of Information Act to provide an “absolute exemption” on all requests relating to the royal family since.
Now that more and more countries are choosing to unbridle themselves from the yoke of British rule and secede from the Commonwealth, it’s surely never been more important for the royal family to maintain an intensive cloak of secrecy around their political influence.
And the temptation to employ “reserve powers” to displace upstart governments in the manner of Gough Whitlam’s has surely never been higher.
November 13, 2022
Posted by aletho |
Civil Liberties, Deception, Timeless or most popular | Australia, UK |
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One novel feature of the pandemic, from the standpoint of public debate, is the fact that so much name-calling, ‘fact-checking’ and censorship was aimed not just at random dissidents but at credentialed scientists.
Academics who’d reached esteemed positions within their field were denounced as ‘Covid deniers’, accused of spreading ‘misinformation’, and subjected to multiple forms of censorship.
Renowned scholars had warning labels attached to their tweets, and found their articles blacklisted on sites like Facebook and LinkedIn. In one particularly egregious case, the Great Barrington Declaration was downranked by Google, so that when users searched for it, articles critical of the Declaration appeared above the Declaration itself.
Somehow, Big Tech firms felt they were in position to adjudicate complex scientific debates. This would be like two scientists having an argument at speaker’s corner in Hyde Park, but the groundskeeper keeps blasting an airhorn every time one of them speaks.
And it wasn’t just Big Tech that restricted one side’s freedom of speech. Academics who questioned the mainstream view on Covid faced sanctions from their universities, journals and professional associations.
In a recent paper, Yaffa Shir-Raz and colleagues analysed the tactics that were used against dissenting scientists, based on semi-structured interviews with some of the targets. Their findings have already been summarised by Carl Heneghan and Tom Jefferson, but it’s worth pulling out a few anecdotes from the paper.
One interviewee recounted that he/she was even censored on Google docs – a program for creating documents and spreadsheets (like Microsoft Office):
Google Docs started restricting and censoring my ability to share documents… This is not Twitter throwing me off like they did. This is an organisation telling me that I cannot send a private communication to a colleague or to a friend, or to a family member.
Another interviewee explained that his/her employment contract was re-written after he/she deviated from the narrative:
They offered me a new contract… we got some new terms for you, because my old contract was not restricted. The new one basically had like seven or eight restrictions of my First Amendment rights… basically I couldn’t talk to the press, I couldn’t speak in public… unless I said, these are my opinions not that of my employer… It was a relatively short conversation. I said that’s never going to happen, I’m never going to sign that thing.
A third interviewee described how he/she was cancelled by several organisations without any due process:
There was a whole series of actions taken again with no due process and no explanation… I received a notice from the [medical association] that I was being stripped from a committee position… I received a letter from a journal…where I was the Editor-in-Chief, being stripped of the editorship, again with no due process, no phone calls no, tractable explanation… I received a letter from the National Institutes of Health being stripped from a longstanding committee position.
Remember, these were all “established doctors and scientists”, not foreign spies engaged in subversion.
The point isn’t that dissenting scientists were right about everything (although they were right about a lot). It’s that we can’t have a proper debate if one side faces a barrage of name-calling, ‘fact-checking’ and censorship. Enforcing a narrative around Covid shouldn’t be the role of Big Tech companies. And it certainly shouldn’t be the role of academic institutions.
November 13, 2022
Posted by aletho |
Civil Liberties, Full Spectrum Dominance, Science and Pseudo-Science, Timeless or most popular | Covid-19, COVID-19 Vaccine, Facebook, Google, Human rights, LinkedIn |
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