Millions of taxpayer dollars being spent on programs that target speech
By Tom Parker | Reclaim The Net | September 19, 2023
Since the start of September, the Biden administration’s National Science Foundation (NSF) and State Department have awarded grants totaling more than $4 million to programs, studies, and other initiatives that target “misinformation” — a term that the Biden admin has used to demand censorship of content that challenges the federal government’s Covid narrative.
The NSF has awarded the following nine grants since September 1:
The State Department has awarded the following five grants since September 1:
These awards were granted as the Biden admin faces a major lawsuit for pressuring Big Tech to censor content that it deems to be misinformation.
An appeals court recently stated that the Biden regime violated the First Amendment when pushing social media platforms to censor and in an Independence Day ruling on this case, a judge described the Biden admin’s actions as “Orwellian.” The Supreme Court is now considering whether to hear the case.
While some of the grants focus have been awarded to non-American organizations, whose misinformation targeting efforts don’t fall under the scope of the First Amendment, these types of programs can result in the speech of Americans being targeted.
For example, Biden’s State Department has previously funded foreign think tanks that created “disinformation” blacklists. These blacklists were used to target American conservative media outlets.
Both of the agencies that awarded these grants have been involved in prior censorship controversies.
In addition to funding groups that created disinformation blacklists, Biden’s State Department has flagged thousands of accounts to Twitter, now known as X, for censorship.
Meanwhile, the NSF has been accused of funding programs that develop tech that targets vaccine dissent and has funded research on correcting “false beliefs” online.
The Naked Emperor’s Newsletter | September 18, 2023
Nothing screams ‘cult’ more than a building being lit up in corporate colours to celebrate a product launch.
Further evidence of the big pharma brainwashing can be seen with the Empire State Building turning Pfizer blue in celebration of the CDC recommending that everyone, from 6 months of age and older, can get this season’s updated Covid shot.
They then sponsored news articles to tell everyone that Covid is here again but that Pfizer is here to save us.
Seems like COVID’s everywhere again. But here’s good news from Pfizer!
This season’s updated COVID-19 shots are now available for ages 6 months and up, and they’re designed to help protect against recent variants.
That is why today, at 8pm, the Empire State Building turned its iconic building blue to announce that the CDC recommends everyone 6 months of age and older get this season’s updated COVID-19 shot. The blue light symbolizes our gratitude and appreciation for the updated vaccines and all those who made it possible.
COVID-19 isn’t gone, and vaccination remains one of our best tools to help protect against the virus that causes the disease. Ask your doctor or pharmacist about this season’s updated COVID-19 shots. Learn more and schedule at the CDC’s website, vaccines.gov.
Sponsored by Pfizer.
In almost religious like devotion, Pfizer wants your gratitude and appreciation for the updated vaccines. Because billions of dollars just isn’t enough anymore, they also want your adoration and eventually your soul.
We have got to the point now where everyone knows Covid is mild for most and that the vaccines don’t do anything. But there is a significant percentage of the population who are still in denial and convince themselves that the jabs work, save lives and make them morally superior.
Bobs Cartoons summed it up nicely with this image.
The Highwire with Del Bigtree | September 14, 2023
After shunning COVID vaccines during the early pandemic response, Tanzania became a natural experiment for all-cause mortality rates. Compared to large U.S. states like Texas and California, Tanzania, with one of the lowest COVID vaccination rates in the world, succeeded in having one of the lowest all-cause mortality rates on earth, through the worst of the pandemic.
The Highwire with Del Bigtree | September 14, 2023
Citing a public health emergency, New Mexico governor Michelle Grisham revoked the 2nd amendment rights of residents of her state this week. After citing that constitutional rights and oaths taken by public officials were not “absolute”, she was quickly condemned by some of the highest officials in the state.
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By David Bell | Brownstone Institute | September 15, 2023
On September 20th our representatives meeting at the United Nations (UN) will sign off on a ‘Declaration’ titled: “Political Declaration of the United Nations General Assembly High-level Meeting on Pandemic Prevention, Preparedness and Response.”
This was announced as a ‘silence procedure,’ meaning that States not responding will be deemed supporters of the text. The document expresses a new policy pathway for managing populations when the World Health Organization (WHO), the health arm of the UN, declares a future viral variant to be a ‘public health emergency of international concern.’
The WHO noted in 2019 that pandemics are rare, and insignificant in terms of overall mortality over the last century. Since then, it decided that the 2019 old-normal population were simply oblivious to impending annihilation. The WHO and the entire UN system now consider pandemics an existential and imminent threat. This matters, because:
Staff who drafted this Declaration did so because it is their job. They were paid to write a text that is clearly contradictory, sometimes fallacious, and often quite meaningless. They are part of a rapidly growing industry, and the Declaration is intended to justify this growth and the centralization of power that goes with it. The document will almost certainly be agreed by your governments because, frankly, this is where the momentum and money are.
Whilst the Declaration’s thirteen pages are all over the place in terms of reality and farce, they are not atypical of recent UN output. People are trained to use trigger words, slogans, and propaganda themes (e.g., “equity,” “empowerment of all women and girls,” “access to education,” “technology transfer hubs”) that no one could oppose without risking being labeled a denier, far-right, or colonialist.
The Declaration should be read in the context of what these institutions, and their staff, have just done. It is difficult to summarize such a compendium of right-speak intended to veil reality, but it is hoped this short summary will prompt some thought. Wickedness is not a mistake but an intended deception, so we need to distinguish these clearly.
Doing Darkness Behind a Veil of Light
Put together, the following two extracts summarize the internal contradiction of the Declaration’s agenda and its staggering shamelessness and lack of empathy:
“In this regard, we:
PP3: Recognize also the need to tackle health inequities and inequalities, within and among countries, …
PP5: “Recognize that the illness, death, socio-economic disruption and devastation caused by the COVID-19 pandemic, …”
‘Recognition’ of devastation is important. SARS-COV-2 was associated with mortality predominantly within wealthy countries, where the median age of Covid-associated death was between 75 and 85 years. Nearly all of these people had significant comorbidities such as obesity and diabetes, meaning their life expectancy was already restricted. People contributing significantly to economic health were at very low risk, a profile known in early 2020.
These three years of socio-economic devastation must, therefore, be overwhelmingly due to the response. The virus did not starve people, as the Declaration’s writers would like us to believe. Deteriorating disease control was predicted by the WHO and others in early 2020, increasing malaria, tuberculosis, HIV/AIDS, and malnutrition. Economic disruption in low-income countries specifically results in more infant and child deaths.
In Western countries, adult mortality has risen as expected when screening for cancer and heart disease are reduced and poverty and stress increase. Knowing this, the WHO advised in late 2019 to ”not under any circumstances” impose the lockdown-like measures for pandemic influenza. In early 2020, under the influence of their sponsors, they advocated for them for Covid-19. The Declaration, however, carries no note of contrition or repentance.
Undeterred by incongruity, the Declaration goes on to describe Covid-19 as “one of the greatest challenges” in UN history (PP6), noting that somehow this outbreak resulted in “exacerbation of poverty in all its forms and dimensions, including extreme poverty…”. In fact, it acknowledges that this caused:
“… (a) negative impact on equity, human and economic development across all spheres of society, as well as on global humanitarian needs, gender equality and the empowerment of all women and girls, the enjoyment of human rights, livelihoods, food security and nutrition, education, its disruption to economies, supply chains, trade, societies and the environment, within and among countries, which is reversing hard-won development gains and hampering progress…” (PP6)
To restate the obvious, this does not happen due to a virus targeting sick elderly people. It occurs when children and productive adults are barred from school, work, healthcare, and participation in markets for goods and services. Economic, social, and health catastrophe inevitably results, disproportionately harming poorer people and low-income countries, conveniently far indeed from the halls of Geneva and New York.
No, we were not all in this together.
Not all were negatively impacted by this catastrophe. People and corporations who sponsor much of the WHO’s health emergency work, and that of its sister organizations such as CEPI, Gavi, and Unitaid, did very well from the policies they advocated so strongly for. Software and Pharma companies made unprecedently high profits, while this mass impoverishment played out. The international agencies have also gained; construction and recruitment are strong in Geneva. Philanthro-capitalism is good for some.
The main aim of the Declaration is to back the proposed WHO international health regulation (IHR) amendments and treaty (PP26), key to ensuring that viral outbreaks that have such a small impact can remain highly profitable. An additional $10 billion per year in new financing is requested to support this (PP29). There is a reason why most countries have laws against scams. The UN and its agencies, fortunately for its staff, are outside of any national jurisdiction.
Based on their sponsors’ assessments, the staff of these agencies are doing their job well. For the rest of humanity, their work is an unmitigated disaster. In 2019 they said never lock down, then spent 2020 defending top-down lockdowns and mandates. For three years, they theatrically pretended that decades of knowledge on immunity, disease burden, and the association of poverty with mortality did not exist.
Now they write this UN Declaration to fund their industry further through taxpayers they so recently impoverished. Once tasked to serve the world’s vast populations, particularly the poor and vulnerable, the UN vision has been consumed by public-private partnerships, the allure of Davos, and a fascination with high-net-worth individuals.
When Words are Used to Obscure Actions
While the Declaration underlines the importance of educating children during pandemics (PP23), these same organizations backed school closures for hundreds of millions of children at minimal risk from Covid-19. Among them, several million more girls are now being farmed off to nightly rape as child brides, others in child labor. Women and girls were disproportionately removed from education and from employment. They weren’t asked if they supported these policies!
The girls are being raped because the people paid to implement these policies did so. They know the contradiction, and the harm. But this is a job like many others. The only unusual aspects, from a business standpoint, are the sheer amorality and lack of empathy that must be engaged to excel in it.
To justify wrecking African children’s lives, the UN claims that the continent has “over 100 major public health emergencies annually” (OP4). Africa has a rising burden of endemic diseases that dwarfs mortality from such outbreaks – over half a million children die every year from malaria (increased through the Covid-19 lockdowns) and similar burdens from tuberculosis and HIV. By contrast, total Covid-19 deaths recorded in Africa over the past 3 years are just 256,000. The 2015 West African Ebola outbreak, the largest such recent emergency pre-Covid, killed 11,300 people. MERS and SARS1 killed less than 1,000 each globally. However, induced poverty does cause famine, raises child mortality, and wrecks health systems – is this the health emergency that the UN is referring to? Or are they simply making things up?
Through the IHR amendments, these agencies will coordinate the locking down, border closures, mandated medical examinations, and vaccination of you and your family. Their Pharma sponsors reasonably expect to make several hundred billion more dollars from these actions, so we can be confident that emergencies will be declared. By claiming 100 such events annually in Africa alone, they are signaling how these new powers will be used. We are to believe the world is such that only the abandonment of our rights and sovereignty, for the enrichment of others, can save us.
The UN and the WHO do recognize that some will question this illogic. In PP35, they characterize such skepticism as:
“health-related misinformation, disinformation, hate speech and stigmatization.”
The WHO recently publicly characterized people who discuss adverse effects of Covid vaccines and question WHO policies as “far-right,” “anti-science aggressors,” and “a killing force.” This is unhinged. It is the denigration and hate speech that fascist regimes use. The reader must decide whether such an organization should control their freedom of expression and decide what constitutes truth.
It is not helpful here to give details of all 13 pages of right-speak, contradiction, and fallacy. You will find similar rhetoric in other UN and WHO documents, particularly on pandemic preparedness. Straight talk is contrary to business requirements. However, the first paragraph in the Declaration’s ‘Call to Action’ sets the tone:
“We therefore commit to scale up our efforts to strengthen pandemic prevention, preparedness and response and further implement the following actions and express our strong resolve to:
OP1. Strengthen regional and international cooperation, multilateralism, global solidarity, coordination and governance at the highest political levels and across all relevant sectors, with the determination to overcome inequities and ensure the sustainable, affordable, fair, equitable, effective, efficient and timely access to medical countermeasures including vaccines, diagnostics, therapeutics and other health products to ensure high-level attention through a multisectoral approach to prevent, prepare for and respond to pandemics and other health emergencies, particularly in developing countries;”
There are 48 more. You paid taxes so that someone could write that!
Those millions of girls suffering at night, the hundreds of millions of children who had their futures stolen, the mothers of those malaria-killed children, and all suffering under the increasing burden of poverty and inequality unleashed by this farce are watching. The Declaration, like the WHO IHR and treaty it supports, awaits the signatures of the governments that purport to represent us.
David Bell, Senior Scholar at Brownstone Institute, is a public health physician and biotech consultant in global health. He is a former medical officer and scientist at the World Health Organization (WHO), Programme Head for malaria and febrile diseases at the Foundation for Innovative New Diagnostics (FIND) in Geneva, Switzerland, and Director of Global Health Technologies at Intellectual Ventures Global Good Fund in Bellevue, WA, USA.
BY DR ROGER WATSON | THE DAILY SCEPTIC | SEPTEMBER 15, 2023
Prolonged wearing of a surgical face mask, made compulsory in many settings in many countries during the Covid years, reduces cognitive function and increases reaction time in addition to increasing shortness of breath and fatigue. These are the findings of a study published in Nurse Education in Practice, an international peer reviewed journal, on September 15th 2023.
The study, carried out in Turkey and titled ‘The effect of prolonged use of surgical masks during face-to-face teaching on cognitive and physiological parameters of nursing students: a cross-sectional and descriptive study’ involved 61 nursing students who volunteered to participate in the study. The sample size was determined to be adequate for the study using the statistical method of power analysis. Information was collected on cognitive fatigue and dyspnoea (shortness of breath) using a self-administered questionnaire and cognitive reaction time was measured objectively using an app. Body temperature and blood oxygen saturation were also measured.
The students were asked to complete the questionnaires and measure the above parameters at the start of a five-hour class and to repeat the process at the end. Surgical face masks were worn for the duration of the class. With the exception of blood oxygen saturation, all the remaining parameters were adversely and statistically significantly affected over the course of the class.
At the end of the class, the students reported greater shortness of breath, cognitive fatigue and had demonstrably slower reaction times. They experienced a rise in body temperature which is an established correlate of physical fatigue.
The authors of the study are careful to point out that the design of their study was a pre-test/post-test where the participants were, effectively, acting as their own controls. It is possible, therefore, that alternative explanations may exist to explain the observations. For example, we do not know if or to what extent the observed changes in parameters may have taken place anyway after five hours in class. For that reason, as recommended by the authors, further study is required of these phenomena using a parallel control group who undergo the five-hour class but who are not subjected to wearing surgical face masks for the duration. The reported study was carried out under Covid restrictions, therefore, there was no possibility of incorporating a control group.
Assuming that the outcome of the study does provide evidence for the adverse effects of face masks then further study should be conducted. Furthermore, the implications of the study could be very important if transposed to clinical practice. Prolonged wearing of surgical (and even more restrictive) face masks was compulsory during Covid restrictions. The ramifications for the ability of clinicians to make the correct decisions and to act quickly in emergency situations are surely worrying.
Declaration of interests: the author is Editor-in-Chief of Nurse Education in Practice.
Dr. Roger Watson is Academic Dean of Nursing at Southwest Medical University, China. He has a PhD in biochemistry. He writes in a personal capacity.
By Tom Parker | Reclaim The Net | September 15, 2023
The District of Columbia (DC) Court of Appeals has rejected Meta’s appeal to quash a sweeping subpoena that demanded it hand over “documents sufficient to identify all Facebook groups, pages, and accounts that have violated Facebook’s COVID-19 misinformation policy with respect to content concerning vaccines” to the DC government.
Millions of users, many of whom made truthful statements that challenged the government’s Covid narrative, are likely to be swept up in this government data grab due to the scope of Facebook’s “Covid-19 misinformation” rules and the number of users that were impacted by them.
Facebook’s Covid-19 misinformation rules prohibited many truthful statements during the pandemic. For example, at one point claiming that “vaccines are not effective at preventing the disease they are meant to protect against” was banned — an assertion that health officials have now reluctantly admitted is true.
Even Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg has acknowledged that Facebook censored truthful information.
And millions of people were impacted by these far-reaching censorship rules. In some quarters, Facebook censored over 100 million posts for violating these rules. Some of the groups Facebook took down under these rules also had hundreds of thousands of users.
Meta had challenged the subpoena on free speech and privacy grounds, arguing that it violated the First Amendment and that a warrant was required to compel disclosure of the requested data.
Specifically, Meta argued that the subpoena violated Meta’s own First Amendment rights by “prob[ing] and penaliz[ing]” its ability to exercise editorial control over content on its platform and also violated Meta users’ First Amendment rights because it would deter them from engaging in future online discussions of controversial topics.
Additionally, Meta cited the warrant requirements in the Stored Communications Act (SCA) — a law that sought to provide Fourth Amendment-like privacy protections by statute to communications held by third party service providers.
However, the DC appeals court rejected Meta’s arguments.
The court stated that Meta had not shown the subpoena will result in its free speech or associational rights being chilled. Additionally, it said Meta users’ First Amendment rights wouldn’t be chilled because “the users who made those posts have already openly associated themselves with their espoused views by publicly posting them to Facebook.”
The court also insisted that the warrant requirement in the SCA does not apply to public posts and that the subpoena “does not require Meta to ‘unmask’ any anonymous Users.”
Furthermore, the court characterized this mass request for user data as “reasonably relevant” to the DC’s investigation and said the subpoena is “narrowly tailored to the government’s asserted interest.”
We obtained a copy of the opinion for you here.
Not only does the subpoena require Facebook to hand over the data of users that were banned for sharing dissenting opinions on Covid but the Covid-19 misinformation policy the subpoena centered around is starting to be rolled back by Meta.
By Cindy Harper | Reclaim The Net | September 12, 2023
Meta is once again up to its old tricks. The new social networking app Threads, which was marketed as an alternative to the platform formerly known as Twitter, is now limiting access to information and prohibiting searches related to key terms such as “coronavirus” and “vaccines,” as revealed by the Washington Post.
Despite only being a couple of months old, the platform has already been observed to deliberately muzzle certain search terms in its novel search functionality.
Meta has previously implemented search blackouts around Covid-related terms due to combating what it says is “misinformation.”
Offering an explanation for the obstruction, Meta conceded to the Washington Post, “The search functionality temporarily doesn’t provide results for keywords that may show potentially sensitive content.”
They assured that they would reinstate search results for these terms when they believed the content quality was up to their standards. However, they declined to disclose a complete list of obstructed search terms, leaving users guessing.
Apparently, Meta has opted for strict keyword censorship, instead of engaging in complex debates about what content concerning the Coronavirus should be permissible.
This move is suggestive of their unwillingness to disclose more internal correspondences, many of which came to light during the ongoing inquiries on censorship stemming from COVID-related discussions.
Letter to Director of the CIA
The Naked Emperor’s Newsletter | September 12, 2023
Today, Brad Wenstrup, Chairman of the Select Subcommittee on the Coronavirus Pandemic and Mike Turner, Chairman of the Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence wrote to William J. Burns, Director of the Central Intelligence Agency (Agency).
They wrote to Director Burns because they “have received new and concerning whistleblower testimony regarding the Agency’s investigation into the origin of COVID-19”.
According to the letter “a multi-decade, senior-level, current Agency officer has come forward to provide information to the Committees regarding the Agency’s analysis into the origins of COVID-19. According to the whistleblower, the Agency assigned seven officers to a COVID Discovery Team (Team). The Team consisted of multi-disciplinary and experienced officers with significant scientific expertise. According to the whistleblower, at the end of its review, six of the seven members of the Team believed the intelligence and science were sufficient to make a low confidence assessment that COVID-19 originated from a laboratory in Wuhan, China.
The seventh member of the Team, who also happened to be the most senior, was the lone officer to believe COVID-19 originated through zoonosis. The whistleblower further contends that to come to the eventual public determination of uncertainty, the other six members were given a significant monetary incentive to change their position”.
As a result, they have requested further documents and communications, no later than September 26 2023, including information on financial or performance based incentives or financial bonuses given to members of the Team.
Whilst this may be shifting the blame on to China, the letter does say that the Select Subcommittee is authorised to investigate “the origins of the Coronavirus pandemic, including but not limited to the Federal Government’s funding of gain-of function research”.
Hopefully, even if they conclude that the virus originated in Wuhan, they will still investigate how the research was funded and by whom.
By Jessica Hockett | Wood House 76 | September 8, 2023
It’s unacceptable that officials haven’t had to substantiate the biggest mass casualty event in New York’s history. Until they do, I’m not buying this all-cause death curve.
See this? It’s INSANE.
It’s 37,469 New Yorkers dying in two and a half months — a mortality increase equivalent to almost more than eight 9/11 events. A ridiculous 20,000 deaths list COVID-19 as underlying cause, including a suspiciously high number of younger adults who died in hospitals.
Unlike 9/11, we don’t know who all died.1 Investigative journalism and public burial records for Hart Island (where unclaimed decedents and city burials go) have aggregated less than 10% of names of New Yorkers who are purported to have passed away in spring 2020.
Unlike with the city’s historical archives for 1855-1949, we cannot review digitized proof of death for each decedent.
Unlike Chicago & Milwaukee, New York has no public database that shows individual deaths processed by the medical examiner’s office.
Unlike in Massachusetts & Minnesota, death certificates are not subject to FOI request and have not been obtained under public records disclosure laws.
Unlike in Ohio, the release of death certificate data is not being litigated.
So we’re left with numbers in reports and Excel spreadsheets, records sent to the feds and protected in CDC WONDER, and no real proof that this number of people died on the days they are alleged to have died.
Sorry, but I’m not buying what this ⬆️ is trying to sell. 2
The steepness of the daily death curve simply doesn’t work.
Viruses aren’t bombs – including pathogens with the infection fatality ratio of influenza at most. A “spreading” risk-additive pathogen doesn’t show up in mortality data overnight. 3
There would be signs and signals. Yet, we see none and are asked to believe that government officials were prescient enough to catch the virus “just in time”.
Elsewhere, I’ve spelled out many of the deadly iatrogenic policies implemented all at once. But the scale of deaths in hospitals plagues me. Whether we’re talking ED visits or inpatient admissions at “epicenter” and high-death hospitals, the city simply did not have the patient intake to make the numbers make sense. Consider: peak census for COVID-positive inpatients is reportedly ~15,000. The number of inpatient deaths that cite COVID as underlying cause in that time is… ~15,000. 🤔 [CORRECTION, 9/11/23: I misread the state’s presentation of the census. Peak COVID inpatient census was 12,184, which makes the 14,704 inpatient deaths in the spring that attribute underlying cause to COVID even MORE ridiculous.]
How do you lose [more than] the peak COVID census equivalent in 11 weeks with record-low intake???
The only way that starts to work is if a whole lotta people who were already in the hospital as of March 1 were tested for COVID and died, with their deaths attributed to the “novel virus,” and the public made to believe it was spread that killed those people.
Since third-party witnesses were banned from healthcare settings, and the public hasn’t compelled proof of what went on inside those settings, officials can apparently claim whatever they want and get away with it.
I, for one, want certainty that the deaths actually happened on the days they are claimed to have happened. It seems silly to dissect what caused the deaths if the deaths haven’t truly been substantiated.
Could there be fraud?
People ask me about the “F” word – fraud – and I’ve come to the unfortunate conclusion that YES, we could be looking at a fraudulent all-cause death curve.
Based on everything I’ve obtained & reviewed in the past 15 months – including some things I haven’t yet written or spoken about publicly (but will) – I’m concerned that one or more of the following could have occurred in/with New York City:
Any of these could have involved holding death certificates for later processing and part of what was behind thousands of “probable” COVID deaths the city added between April 14 and June 1, 2020.
If fraud isn’t in the mix – and the deaths legitimate in every way – then officials should have no problem releasing the records to back up their assertions.
We’ve been lied to about everything in this mess.
I want proof.
1 Memorialized in March 2021, but without disclosure of names.
2 This data was obtained from NYC DOHMH and differs somewhat from federal data. I wrote about the differences here.
3 Spread of mass-testing does.
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Lawrence of Cyberia | March 19, 2010
In December 1945 and January 1946, the British Mandate authorities carried out an extensive survey of Palestine, in support of the work of the United Nations Special Committee on Palestine. The results were published in the Survey of Palestine, which has been scanned and made available online by Palestine Remembered; all 1300 pages can be read here.
Aletho News If Americans Knew No Tricks Zone
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