By Jeffrey A. Tucker | Brownstone Institute | July 21, 2023
It was a strange experience watching the House hearing in which Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. was testifying. The topic was censorship and how and to what extent federal government agencies under two administrations muscled social media companies to take down posts, ban users, and throttle content. The majority made its case.
What was strange was the minority reaction throughout. They tried to shut down RFK. They moved to go to executive session so that the public could not hear the proceedings. The effort failed. Then they shouted over his words when they were questioning him. They wildly smeared him and defamed him. They even began with an attempt to block him from speaking at all, and 8 Democrats voted to support that.
This was a hearing on censorship and they were trying to censor him. It only made the point.
It became so awful that RFK was compelled to give a short tutorial on the importance of free speech as an essential right, without which all other rights and freedoms are in jeopardy. Even those words he could barely speak given the rancor in the room. It’s fair to say that free speech, even as a core principle, is in grave trouble. We cannot even get a consensus on the basics.
It seemed to viewers that RFK was the adult in the room. Put other ways, he was the preacher of fidelity in the brothel, the keeper of memory in a room full of amnesiacs, the practitioner of sanity in the sanatorium, or, as Mencken might say, the hurler of a dead cat into the temple.
It was oddly strange to hear the voice of wise statesmen in that hothouse culture of infantile corruption: it reminded the public just how far things have fallen. Notably, it was he and not the people who wanted him gagged who was citing scientific papers.
The protests against his statements were shrill and shocking. They moved quickly from “Censorship didn’t happen” to “It was necessary and wonderful” to “We need more of it.” Reporting on the spectacle, the New York Times said these are “thorny questions”: “Is misinformation protected by the First Amendment? When is it appropriate for the federal government to seek to tamp down the spread of falsehoods?”
These are not thorny questions. The real issue concerns who is to be the arbiter of truth?
Such attacks on free speech do have precedent in American history. We have already discussed the Alien and Sedition Acts of 1798 which led to a complete political upheaval that swept Thomas Jefferson into the White House. There were two additional bouts of censorship folly in the 20th century. Both followed great wars and an explosion in government size and reach.
The first came with the Red Scare (1917-1020) following the Great War (WWI). The Bolshevik Revolution and political instability in Europe led to a wild bout of political paranoia in the US that the communists, anarchists, and labor movement were plotting a takeover of the US government. The result was an imposition of censorship along with strict laws concerning political loyalty.
The Espionage Act of 1917 was one result. It is still in force and being deployed today, most recently against former President Trump. Many states passed censorship laws. The feds deported many people suspected of sedition and treason. Suspected communists were hauled in front of Congress and grilled.
The second bout occurred after the Second World War with the House UnAmerican Activities Committee (HUAC) and the Army-McCarthy hearings that led to blacklists and media smears of every sort. The result was a chilling of free speech across American industry that hit media particularly hard. That incident later became legendary due to the exaggerations and disregard for the First Amendment.
How does the Covid-era censorship fit into this historical context? At Brownstone, we’ve compared the wild Covid response to a wartime footing that caused as much trauma on the homeland as previous world wars.
Three years of research, documents, and reporting have established that the lockdowns and all that followed were not directed by public health authorities. They were the veneer for the national security state, which took charge in the month of February 2020 and deployed the full takeover of both government and society in mid-March. This is one reason that it’s been so difficult getting information on how and why all of this happened to us: it’s been mostly classified under the guise of national security.
In other words, this was war and the nation was ruled for a time (and maybe still is) by what amounts to quasi-martial law. Indeed, it felt like that. No one knew for sure who was in charge and who was making all these wild decisions for our lives and work. It was never clear what the penalties would be for noncompliance. The rules and edicts seemed arbitrary, having no real connection to the goal; indeed no one really knew what the goal was besides more and more control. There was no real exit strategy or end game.
As with the two previous bouts of censorship in the last century, there commenced a closure of public debate. It began almost immediately as the lockdowns edict were issued. They tightened over the months and years. Elites sought to plug every leak in the official narrative through every means possible. They invaded every space. Those they could not get to (like Parler) were simply unplugged. Amazon rejected books. YouTube deleted millions of posts. Twitter was brutal, while once-friendly Facebook became the enforcer of regime propaganda.
The hunt for dissenters took strange forms. Those who held gatherings were shamed. People who did not socially distance were called disease spreaders. Walking outside without a mask one day, a man shouted out to me in anger that “masks are socially recommended.” I kept turning that phrase around in my mind because it made no sense. The mask, no matter how obviously ineffective, was imposed as a tactic of humiliation and an exclusionary measure that targeted the incredulous. It was also a symbol: stop talking because your voice does not matter. Your speech will be muffled.
The vaccine of course came next: deployed as a tool to purge the military, public sector, academia, and the corporate world. The moment the New York Times reported that vaccine uptake was lower in states that supported Trump, the Biden administration had its talking points and agenda. The shot would be deployed to purge. Indeed, five cities briefly segregated themselves to exclude the unvaccinated from public spaces. The continued spread of the virus itself was blamed on the noncompliant.
Those who decried the trajectory could hardly find a voice much less assemble a social network. The idea was to make us all feel isolated even if we might have been the overwhelming majority. We just could not tell either way.
War and censorship go together because it is wartime that allows ruling elites to declare that ideas alone are dangerous to the goal of defeating the enemy. “Loose lips sink ships” is a clever phrase but it applies across the board in wartime. The goal is always to whip up the public in a frenzy of hate against the foreign enemy (“The Kaiser!”) and ferret out the rebels, the traitors, the subversives, and promoters of unrest. There is a reason that the protestors on January 6 were called “insurrectionists.” It is because it happened in wartime.
The war, however, was of domestic origin and targeted at Americans themselves. That’s why the precedent of 20th century censorship holds in this case. The war on Covid was in many ways an action of the national security state, something akin to a military operation prompted and administered by intelligence services in close cooperation with the administrative state. And they want to make the protocols that governed us over these years permanent. Already, European governments are issuing stay-at-home recommendations for the heat.
If you had told me that this was the essence of what was happening in 2020 or 2021, I would have rolled my eyes in disbelief. But all evidence Brownstone has gathered since then has shown exactly that. In this case, the censorship was a predictable part of the mix. The Red Scare mutated a century later to become the virus scare in which the real pathogen they tried to kill was your willingness to think for yourself.
By Gavin O’Reilly | OffGuardian | July 17, 2023
Over the past several weeks, Ireland has been rocked by a scandal related to the significant undeclared earnings of Ryan Tubridy, the most prominent presenter on the public broadcaster of the 26-County State, RTÉ, and the long-time host of its flagship talk show, The Late Late Show, until his departure earlier this year – prior to the revelations related to his salary becoming public knowledge.
In response, Director General of RTÉ Dee Forbes tendered her resignation, and both Tubridy and his agent Noel Kelly have been brought before a government tribunal to account for the undeclared earnings, something that has received significant media coverage across Ireland, including OJ Simpson-style live television coverage of the proceedings.
What has been noticeable however is how this extensive media attention lies in stark contrast to the virtually non-existent mainstream media coverage of RTÉ’s endorsement of the World Economic Forum’s Great Reset initiative over the past three years, intended to usher in a totalitarian global corporate dictatorship, where technology is used to stifle and censor debate.
From the outset of the ‘Covid Pandemic’ in March 2020, Ireland, like numerous other countries, introduced stringent lockdowns under the guise of preventing the spread of an alleged virus. In reality, the forced closure of vast swathes of society served the purpose of making it virtually impossible for smaller businesses to operate, thus creating a greater dependence on corporate outlets such as Amazon.
As a result, the global lockdowns saw the greatest upwards transfer of wealth from the working and middle-classes in history, with corporate elements receiving upwards of $1tn in profit.
With Taoiseach Leo Varadkar being a WEF ‘Young Global Leader’, RTÉ was fully complicit in endorsing the ‘Pandemic’ narrative, WEF-linked scientist Luke O’Neill being a regular guest on The Late Late Show under Ryan Tubridy in order to further its promotion.
The public broadcaster would also condemn Irish anti-lockdown protests as being ‘organised by the far-right’ in lock-step with similar mainstream media descriptions being ascribed to protests in New Zealand, France and Canada – each country also being under the respective rule of WEF ‘Young Global Leaders’, Jacinda Ardern, Emmanuel Macron and Justin Trudeau.
What would be perhaps the most sinister aspect of RTÉ’s two-year promotion of the ‘Pandemic’ narrative however, was the use of children to promote uptake of the ‘Covid’ Vaccine during the 2020 edition of The Late Late Toy Show, a seasonal edition of the programme used to showcase that Christmas’s latest toy selection, one that is traditionally very popular amongst families with young children.
Indeed, Ryan Tubridy himself would later double down on his promotion of the vaccine by infamously using his radio platform to encourage listeners to disinvite guests from weddings who had not been vaccinated, his incendiary remarks coming amidst a time when access to bars, restaurants, hairdressers and gyms in the southern Irish state, was forbidden to those who had not yet received a ‘Covid’ jab and the resulting digital QR code that would subsequently be placed on their smartphone.
This enforced segregation, in Ireland and further afield, served as a dry-run for the introduction of mandatory digital ID, a key part of the ‘Fourth Industrial Revolution’ that the WEF envisages will come about as a result of the Great Reset, with the ultimate goal being a cashless society. One where the corporate-government alliance has full control over its citizen’s financial transactions, and can easily impose sanctions against those it deems to be dissidents.
Indeed, this very situation would play out during last year’s Freedom Convoy in Canada, when Justin Trudeau would use emergency legislation to freeze the bank accounts of Truckers protesting against his decision to mandate that truck drivers re-entering Canada from the US had to be vaccinated. A truly dystopian move, and one that could be far more easily implemented in a society with no physical cash.
RTÉ’s two-year endorsement of the introduction of such a totalitarian society has come in for little criticism since the sudden collapse of the ‘Pandemic’ narrative last January however, the undeclared earnings of its chief propagandist being a far more newsworthy item it would seem.
Gavin O’Reilly is an Irish Republican activist from Dublin, Ireland, with a strong interest in the effects of British and US Imperialism; he was a writer for the American Herald Tribune from January 2018 up until their seizure by the FBI in 2021, with his work also appearing on The Duran, Al-Masdar, MintPress News, Global Research and SouthFront. He can be reached through Twitter and Facebook and supported on Patreon.
By Sheldon Richman | The Libertarian Institute | July 14, 2023
The Biden administration, along with mainstream politicians and journalists, are really upset that U.S. District Judge Terry A. Doughty has forbidden the executive branch of the central government from communicating with social-media platforms for the purpose of censoring or otherwise suppressing constitutionally protected speech. Judge Doughty’s action came in an important free-speech lawsuit filed against the government.
He wrote in an accompanying statement:
During the COVID-19 pandemic, a period perhaps best characterized by widespread doubt and uncertainty, the United States Government seems to have assumed a role similar to an Orwellian ‘Ministry of Truth.’
So-called respectable government officials, journalists, and pundits — the alleged adults in a room — consider the judge’s temporary injunction the worse thing that could possibly happen. The headline in the “progressive” publication The American Prospect screamed in panic: “Trump Judge Effectively Names Himself President.” (That “Trump judge,” by the way, was confirmed by the Senate 98-0.)
Imagine it: agents from the FBI, the Department of Homeland Security, and other government agencies may not even “suggest” to Facebook, Twitter, etc., that they ought to take down or hide posts that take issue with the government’s official line about … whatever. Of course, when government officials suggest something to a private party, the suggestion may be interpreted as being accompanied by the subtle threat to retaliate legally if the suggestion is ignored. Think of protection racketeer telling a shop owner, “You have a nice place here. It would be a shame if it burned down.” Get the picture?
As we know, the government has been doing stuff like this for years, whether the matter was related to the COVID-19 pandemic, the Hunter Biden laptop, the Russia-Ukraine war, Russia’s alleged collusive 2016 election tampering, and who knows what else. According to a congressional committee, the FBI apparently even collaborated with Ukrainian intelligence to censor Americans’ frowned-on discussion of the Ukraine war on social media.
The posts that government agencies wanted suppressed included not only statements that were perhaps provably wrong — incorrect speech per se is constitutionally protected, incidentally — but also accurate information that the government simply found inconvenient, like posts and links that might make people hesitate to get the COVID-19 vaccine, wear masks, accept totalitarian social lockdowns, or trust that the coronavirus came from a Chinese market rather than a U.S.-funded lab in Wuhan, China.
Let’s remember that much of the challenge to the government’s take on the pandemic and other matters — criticism belittled as “tin-foil” conspiracy-mongering — turned out to be true. Contrary to the government’s position, the search for the truth requires the freedom to openly disagree and debate. That search abhors centralization, coercion, and the exclusion of anyone but the politically anointed “experts.” The right to free speech is a practical necessity if we are to pursue our well-being. Any step toward the paternalistic centralization of research and control of communication is not only immoral (by whatever standard you like) but also inimical to health, wealth, and other aspects of a fully human way of life.
In other words, as the judge acknowledged, the central government has gone to extraordinary lengths to control what the public can read and say on social media. It’s as if free speech were not a pillar of liberal philosophy and tradition — liberal in the older and best sense of a presumption of individual liberty in all spheres. Further, it’s as if the first restriction on government power in the Bill of Rights was not the absolute prohibition on the infringement of free speech and press. It’s a well-established principle of American law that the government may not pressure private parties to do what it itself may not constitutionally do. Yet that’s exactly what happened — repeatedly. It’s a disgrace. How can the government be trusted? It never could be.
Since the Biden administration, urged on by the power elite and the insecure establishment media, does not like being told that it may not violate our freedom of speech, it asked Judge Doughty to suspend his temporary injunction while the Justice Department appeals it. Judge Doughty said no. So the action moved to the appellate court. The Washington Post said that “The Justice Department’s filing signaled that it could seek the intervention of the Supreme Court, saying that at a minimum, the 5th Circuit should put the order on pause for 10 days to give the nation’s highest court time to consider an application for a stay.”
I sense desperation. The judge must have done something right. Remember that the injunction, alas, does not bar all government contact with social-media companies: he listed exceptions for actual criminality and national security. Only interference with constitutionally protected expression was included. I don’t remind readers of these exceptions to comfort them — the government will likely abuse the exceptions. I remind readers only to show that the order contains those exceptions. So what is the government so worried about? It says that the judge’s order is hopelessly vague and doesn’t address every possible eventuality. The answer is easy: if the choice is between vagueness in restricting government power and violating individual liberty, I know which I prefer. This is supposed to be America, isn’t it? Rights precede government.
Good people have enough to be concerned about when it comes to social media restricting their expression. Yes, they are private companies, and it’s easy to think of people who are so obnoxious that one wouldn’t want to encounter them online.
On the other hand, no one has reason to be confident that Twitter, Facebook, YouTube (Google), etc., will use that right judiciously. That you have a right to do something does not mean you should do it. Can does not imply ought. YouTube reportedly deleted Jordan Peterson’s interview with Robert F. Kennedy Jr. because it contains what it regards as — and well may be — misinformation about vaccines. Kennedy is challenging Joe Biden for the 2024 Democratic presidential nomination. One need not agree with Kennedy on vaccines (I’m inclined not to) to be uneasy about YouTube’s decision. We also can’t rule out that YouTube acted in anticipation of the government’s disapproval. Government casts a shadow over everything.
We mustn’t call on the government to manage social media through antitrust or regulation. We should favor real competition. But we should insist on a prohibition of government action, direct and indirect, to suppress speech on those platforms or anywhere else. Judge Doughty understands that. Let’s hope other judges do too.
By Brenda Baletti, Ph.D. | The Defender | July 12, 2023
Two coauthors of the March 2020 Nature Medicine paper that asserted, just months into the pandemic, that COVID-19’s origins were “clearly” natural rather than lab-made faced questioning Tuesday during a hearing of the House Select Subcommittee on the Coronavirus pandemic.
The hearing investigated “whether government officials, regardless of who they are, unfairly and perhaps biasedly tipped the scales toward a preferred origin theory,” Rep. Brad Wenstrup (R-Ohio), committee chair, said in opening remarks.
“We are examining whether scientific integrity was disregarded in favor of political expediency, maybe to conceal or diminish the government’s relationship with the Wuhan Institute of Virology or perhaps its funding of risky gain-of-function coronavirus research,” he said.
Tulane virologist Robert Garry, Ph.D., and Scripps Research evolutionary biologist Kristian Andersen, Ph.D., denied the allegations in written testimony submitted prior to the hearing as “absurd and false.” And in more than three hours of questioning Tuesday by committee members, they insisted their conclusions in the paper were based solely on the “scientific process.”
Republicans’ questioning focused on demonstrating the Nature Medicine paper was coordinated and unduly influenced by government officials.
Lawmakers laid out evidence that all of the authors initially expressed serious concerns the virus may have leaked from a lab and of how that position changed just a few days later after a Feb. 1, 2020, teleconference with Dr. Anthony Fauci, Dr. Francis Collins and Jeremy Farrar, Ph.D.
The scientists drafted their paper “The Proximal Origins of SARS-CoV-2” within a few days of the call and published it the following month. The early drafts were shared with Farrar, Collins and Fauci, Paul Thacker reported.
Prior to yesterday’ hearing, the panel’s Republican majority issued a report, “The Proximal Origin of a Cover-up,” asserting a coordinated effort by Fauci and others to downplay the lab-leak hypothesis and suppress scientific discourse.
The report was based on 25 hours of testimony by the authors of the Proximal Origins paper and a review of 8,000 pages of documents, including subpoenaed emails and slack messages that had not yet been revealed publicly.
The evidence showed that in conversations with one another, the Proximal Origin authors expressed a lack of certainty about their singular conclusion but feared the political fallout of giving credence to the lab origin hypothesis.
Democrats vehemently countered the Republican assertions, insisting Fauci and Collins had no role in the findings. They produced their own report — “They Played No Role” — drawing on the same evidence to conclude that “that there was no cover-up of the origins of the COVID-19 pandemic and no suppression of the lab leak theory on the parts of Dr. Fauci and Dr. Collins.”
In the highly partisan hearing, the Democrats used their time to accuse Republicans of having a “vendetta,” of “weaponizing” the origin discussion, using “extreme rhetoric” and of making “baseless allegations” that they claimed were responsible for the public’s loss of faith in public institutions.
Ranking Democrat Dr. Raul Ruiz (D-Calif.) repeatedly accused the Republicans of “confirmation bias” in their assertion that the lab leak is the more probable origin of the virus and of making “conspiratorial accusations without proof,” rather than “pursuing an objective analysis of the virus’s origins that is free from political interference.”
The ‘Proximal Origins’ fallout
The paper in question, “The Proximal Origin of SARS-CoV-2” played a key early role in shutting down debate about the origin of the virus.
Top public health officials used the paper as “independent science” to influence public discussion of the topic. Collins, then director of the National Institutes of Health (NIH) posted the findings on the agency website. And in an April 17, 2020, press briefing at the White House, when asked whether COVID-19 had come from the Wuhan lab, Fauci cited the paper’s conclusions as definitive.
The paper had a major impact in the scientific community and the popular press, spurring thousands of articles declaring the lab-leak theory to be implausible or a conspiracy theory.
But communications obtained via Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests by U.S. Right to Know, and a memo released in March by the congressional subcommittee have since showed that Collins, Fauci and Farrar of the Wellcome Trust played a key, previously undisclosed role in persuading the scientists to write the paper.
The FOIA requests also revealed that all of the paper’s authors had privately expressed suspicions that the virus was engineered or about the Wuhan Institute of Virology’s store of novel coronaviruses and work on them at low biosafety levels, US Right to Know reported.
‘Proximal origin of a cover-up’ vs. ‘they played no role’
Republicans questioned the scientists on their rapid shift from thinking that the virus was likely lab-made to their certainty, professed in both drafts and final versions of the paper, about its natural origins in a matter of days.
Representative Nicole Malliotakis (R-NY) quoted a communication from Garry where he said:
“I really can’t think of a plausible natural scenario where you get from, from the bat virus or one very similar to it to, uh, COVID-19 where you insert exactly four amino acids, 12 nucleotides and all have to be added at the exact same time to gain this function.
“I just can’t figure out how this all gets accomplished in nature.”
She said, “So then within a matter of days, something changed, and that’s what this committee is trying to get to the bottom of, what happened within that three day period between the conference call and the paper that all of a sudden you did a 180.”
In response to repeated questioning on this topic, Andersen and Garry insisted their change in thinking was based on “the scientific process.”
They said new evidence emerged that changed their thinking, that their shift in thinking “evolved over time from early hypotheses to later conclusions published in the paper.” And that their shift had nothing to do with pressure from Fauci, Collins or Farrar.
Rather, Andersen said their paper presented “an agnostic view of what the evidence actually does tell us.”
Garry testified that Collins and Fauci had very little input at the Feb. 1 teleconference and he thought they were just on the call “to gather information” from the experts.
Andersen and Garry along with several of the Democratic committee members repeatedly emphasized that Farrar — not Fauci or Collins — coordinated the call and provided the authors with significant guidance on the paper. Andersen said, “I describe him as a father figure” for the paper, Andersen said, “because I think that captures it.”
Ruiz and Jamie Raskin (D-Md.) both suggested Farrar’s role in organizing the call exonerated Fauci and Collins, effectively disproving the idea that there was political interference in the findings.
But, Farrar — former director of the Wellcome Trust and currently chief scientist at the World Health Organization — has been a central figure in dismissing the lab leak theory as a “conspiracy theory,” Sam Husseini reported.
In February 2020, along with Peter Daszak, 25 other scientists signed a letter in The Lancet that dismissed the possibility of a lab origin of COVID-19.
“We stand together to strongly condemn conspiracy theories suggesting that COVID-19 does not have a natural origin,” the letter said.
Rep. David Joyce (R-Ohio) questioned whether this continued certainty about natural origins today made sense given that it contradicted the testimony by former director of the National Intelligence Agency, John Ratcliffe.
Ratcliffe told the committee that, “If our intelligence and evidence supporting a lab leak theory was placed side by side with our intelligence and evidence pointing to a naturally occurring spillover theory, the lab leak side of the ledger would be long and overwhelming while the spillover side would be nearly empty, nearly empty.”
Ruiz claimed that most government agencies — four of them — deny the lab leak theory with low confidence. But the FBI and the Department of Energy have also determined with moderate confidence that the virus most likely originated in a lab.
Democratic members alleged the Republicans’ effort to investigate the politicization of the investigation of the origins of the pandemic inhibited the work of preparing for “the next pandemic.”
Ruiz said the Republicans’ actions had also led to “threats against scientists and public health officials.” Anderson agreed, saying “the misinformation, dis and conspiracy theories around the paper have resulted in significant harassment and threats” similar to those undergone by Peter Hotez, and alleged that he is on a “kill list.”
Rep. Jill Tokuda (D-Hawaii) said that such investigations “are actually creating a very chilling effect on the scientific process,” which hinders the ability of scientists and public health officials to thoroughly investigate and study future disease outbreaks.
She suggested that in the future the researchers should “double think what they put on their slack messages and channels and their emails and their text threads.”
But just last week the House subcommittee began investigating Dr. David M. Morens, a 25-year veteran of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID), after it was revealed he used his personal email address to evade FOIA requests for communications related to the origins of COVID-19, The Defender reported.
Wenstrom broke the news in the meeting that the National Archives and Records Administration (NARA) was also involved in the investigation.
Near the end of the hearing, both Garry and Andersen confirmed that they had been consulted by the CIA and FBI about the origins of COVID-19.
Wenstrup concluded by saying,“We’re exploring a potential coverup. That is what we are doing.”
He added, “You receive federal dollars, we appropriate those. Congress appropriates those federal dollars. We have a responsibility of oversight on behalf of our constituents and the very taxpayers that pay you. Sorry about that. But it’s our job whether you like it or not. And I take it seriously.”
Brenda Baletti Ph.D. is a reporter for The Defender. She wrote and taught about capitalism and politics for 10 years in the writing program at Duke University. She holds a Ph.D. in human geography from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and a master’s from the University of Texas at Austin.
This article was originally published by The Defender — Children’s Health Defense’s News & Views Website under Creative Commons license CC BY-NC-ND 4.0. Please consider subscribing to The Defender or donating to Children’s Health Defense.
How long does it take to conclude some authority is lying? We don’t know this answer yet … apparently many years.
BY BILL RICE, JR. | JULY 11, 2023
I recently discovered an excellent Substack Newsletter authored by a registered nurse (Dee Dee) who has treated many (alleged) Covid patients. This nurse finally had enough and decided to share her stories and thoughts via her own Substack, which she started May 25th.
From reading a couple of her pithy posts, my take-away is Nurse Dee must feel like the main character in Joseph Heller’s classic novel Catch 22.
In that novel the experiences and observations of a fictional WW II bombardier tell readers the guidance and logic used by his superiors is complete madness.
Dee’s observations prompted my own question: When do citizens or employees finally realize that every supposedly-true thing they’ve been told is, in fact, a brazen lie?
For most people, at least with Covid proclamations, the answer seems to be “never.”
In other words, for many people, being lied to over and over doesn’t matter.
To put it mildly, such a revelation is a tad disconcerting.
Dee Dee’s observations from a June 2nd dispatch might show readers why I thought of “Catch-22,” where the message to bomber crews was “just do what you are told;” don’t try to figure out the logic.
With Covid, Nurse Dee identifies the goal of all orders. Instead of just “fly the dangerous mission,” the key message is: “Just take the shot.”
“The logic surrounding COVID-19 was circular. Every dictated premise, required blind faith and the goal was always the same; to take the shot.
“… You could not question the narrative and remain a good citizen …The mantra erupted, this is a pandemic of the unvaccinated.
“No argument could be interjected in the logic. It didn’t matter if you had not seen a new illness with unique symptoms … It didn’t matter if the science didn’t make sense. It didn’t matter if the measures were opposite to all your previous medical training.
… It didn’t matter that the vaccine did not stop transmission, and it didn’t matter if you had natural immunity. Essentially, we were told to accept every claim without evidence or reason. The orders had been given, just take the shot.”
In a recent dispatch, Dee listed about 30 truisms she (and all of us) were told. A few examples:
We were told the vaccine wouldn’t be mandatory.
We were told there would be two shots.
We were (then) told a booster was needed.
We were (then) told another booster was needed.
We were told there had been clinical trails conducted by the pharmaceutical companies that proved safe and effective.
We were told the vaccine would prevent the COVID-19 illness.
We were then told the vaccine would prevent serious illness.
We were told if everyone would just take the shot, it would be over.
We were (then) told there were breakthrough cases, where the vaccinated person became sick with COVID-19.
We were told even if you weren’t sick, you could give the disease to grandma.
We were told the unvaccinated are spreading the virus and creating mutations.
We were told, this is a “pandemic of the unvaccinated.”
We were told vaccine passports were the new normal and would be required.
We were told the vaccine was mandatory for employment.
We were told nurses who refused the shot were stupid …”
Back to me: Forget the pronouncements of the CDC experts, of Dr. Fauci, or of Nurse Dee’s hospital supervisors … just think about people you’ve interacted with in your own life.
At some point, when someone has told you one falsehood after another, do you stop believing them?
For most people, three big lies and you’re out.
“Fool me once, shame on you; fool me twice, shame on me …”
At some point, villagers did stop listening to the little boy who kept screaming, “A wolf is coming!”
Even politicians can take lying too far.
Here I recall John Edwards, a former U.S. Senator who was almost elected vice president of the United States.
Edwards lied repeatedly about an affair and then about fathering a baby with his mistress. Even when he “came clean” in a TV interview, his “confession” was replete with more lies.
I don’t know what John Edwards is doing with his life today, but I know he’s not running for political office. If he did, he’d be laughed off the podium. Everyone now gets that they can’t trust John Edwards.
The question I’m grappling with today is how many lies does someone have to tell before people conclude they’re listening to a serial liar? Is there a quota for one-lie-too-many, or a lie cut-off point?
In every-day normal life, it only takes a couple big whoppers before a friend becomes a “former friend,” a person to be avoided at all costs.
But not with our Covid liars. Apparently, there’s no limit to how many lies “trusted authorities” can tell … and still be considered “trusted” authorities.
In her very fist post, Nurse Dee wrote:
“Thrust upon our population was a labyrinth of lies. There were new daily mandates offering no explanation, making little if any, medical sense.
“… The medical interventions … coupled with preposterous statements from our leading experts, led me to personally, question everything. One question led to many questions until one day, I came to the realization, there were no answers.
“My questions met a variety of responses that included silence, laughter, and hostility. This was my first experience of being discouraged from asking questions.”
How does a person continue to function – as a sane human being – in a world that’s apparently insane?
Somehow, Nurse Dee (and me and you) … are still here, but we’ve had to adopt a new survival mechanism and are now functioning in a surreal new matrix where we know we have to live with insane notions; where we realize a never-ending cascade of “accepted” lies is our New Normal.
After reading Dee’s “Catch-22” anecdotes, I also had this question: How do serial liars keep telling all these lies? How do they get away with it?
This answer seems clear. Except for people like Dee, very few people call them out on their lies. (Thank you, mainstream media “watchdog” journalists).
Also, as I learned from a big story making the rounds today, the lying officials just keep doubling down on their lies.
An organization called the International Coalition of Medicine Regulatory Authorities (ICMRA) just issued a big press release telling everyone that the vaccines are still safe and effective and, just like we’ve all been told a million times … everyone should keep getting their next rounds of shots.
It’s clear to me that the purpose of this document is to counter the growing “spread” of world citizens who might, finally, be starting to question the pronouncements of trusted health authorities.
A few of the “Key messages from this group, which “brings together 38 medicines regulatory authorities from every region in the world, with the WHO as an observer” (In other words, a centralized, clearinghouse of expert liars):
* “False and misleading information about the safety of COVID-19 vaccines on social media often exaggerates the frequency and severity of side effects. Misinformation also wrongly attributes unrelated medical events to the vaccines.”
* “There is no evidence that COVID-19 vaccines have contributed to excess mortality during the pandemic …”
* Under the header, “Benefits of COVID-19 Vaccination,” the public is told that
“Millions of lives are estimated to have been saved by COVID-19 vaccination …”
I learned of this document from colleagues at the Brownstone Institute’s writer group.
A fellow Substacker added the link with this note: “A meticulous and immaculately supported take-down of this statement is needed. It’s been all over MSM today.”
I read the propaganda and immediately posted this reply:
“You could debunk/challenge every sentence …”
Two seconds before I made my post, another colleague posted this:
“Wow. Every single bullet point is a lie.”
Key take-away: The lies Nurse Dee was told every day – or almost immediately figured out on her own – are still being told today.
The damn liars have simply worn us down. I could debunk every one of those bullet points, but I’m growing tired of writing the same rebuttals over and over.
And as Dee observes, what’s the point? Even if someone does debunk all of these whoppers, these people are just going to keep lying … and keep telling us what to do.
The only conclusion I can make is that – especially regarding topics that might involve “life and death” – people, for some surreal reason, simply want to keep believing the liars.
Most people in the world must feel “safer” believing lies, lies that have killed and injured millions of their fellow citizens, including family members, friends and neighbors.
In our “Catch-22” world, the bigger the lies – and the more often serial lies prevaricate, the better.
For the liars, the benefits of lying are impressive. For the world’s skeptics, the costs of calling out liars are quite unpleasant.
Anyway, the lies aren’t going to stop.
BY BILL RICE, JR. | JULY 8, 2023
I wanted to make a quick post to recommend an exceptional and important essay published by The Wall Street Journal’s Opinion section.
In a brief essay (“Covid Censorship Proved to be Deadly”) author Brett Swanson shows how the Censorship Industrial Complex – or what he perfectly describes as “full spectrum censorship” – has effectively caused the unnecessary deaths (and misery) of huge numbers of world citizens.
As the essay makes clear, “truth” and “facts” have become “false narratives” or “dangerous misinformation” …. while false beliefs have become accepted as gospel/infallible truths.
Claims that are wrong, dangerous or dubious cannot be challenged.
As Swanson points out, the masses on social media quickly gleaned the speech they could not make (this shows the toxic effects of “self censorship.”)
The opinions of those who believe the “experts” might be “ignorant” were censored or not allowed to reach large numbers of people. Because of this, “falsehoods” could NOT be “dispelled.”
Swanson points out such a surreal template is the exact opposite of real science, which exists to challenge dubious claims.
A technology (the Internet) that could and should have been used to save many lives – and rebut many falsehoods – was instead used to bully and silence skeptics, who were really just trying to save lives and prevent outcomes that ultimately produced mass misery and devastating consequences for billions of world inhabitants.
The censored, bullied and demonetized skeptics are the real altruistic heroes, not the villains.
I’m currently working on a story regarding the Covid outbreak aboard the USS Theodore Roosevelt aircraft carrier.
The true/vital lesson from this case study should have been that Covid does NOT threaten “everyone.” Per the lessons of the Roosevelt outbreak, this virus certainly doesn’t pose any real mortality risk to the young and middle aged.
But the “false narrative” quickly became that Covid threatens “everyone” … that younger adults and children were also “vulnerable.”
The truth – which would have eliminated irrational fear in most people – could NOT be disseminated as it would threaten the most important (false) narratives/initiatives.
As Swanson points out, the real goal in all of this “full spectrum censorship” is to PROTECT “authority.”
It would have constituted a “crisis” for those in authority if their pronouncements were exposed as “ignorance.”
The bottom line is that the massive and coordinated Censorship Industrial Complex was created to protect the power, wealth and continued control of those in authority.
… Also, The WSJ op-ed section deserves kudos for publishing this piece.
The author didn’t have the space to document the evidence of the huge spike in all-cause (non-Covid) excess deaths, but he still worked those points into his essay.
This by itself is a “win” for our side.
Shocking numbers of “vaccine” deaths/injuries and iatrogenic deaths/injuries are the giant elephants in the room in the mainstream media.
The reason most every-day citizens aren’t shocked by these scandals/truths … is that this story has been … censored. That is, this is NOT a “story.”
But at least The WSJ acknowledged this by publishing Swanson’s superlative essay.
Maybe the “news” division of the WSJ will follow-up on the author’s points and do some real journalism on these taboo topics?
Somehow I doubt this … but, still, the needle exposing the false narratives is moving in the right direction.
MERYL NASS | JULY 10, 2023
The UN has put out a number of concerning policy briefs and documents in the past 2 years and I will share them with you. This is the first :
First, now is the time to re-embrace global solidarity and find new ways to work together for the common good. This must include a global vaccination plan to deliver vaccines against COVID-19 into the arms ofthe millions of people who are still denied this basic lifesaving measure. Moreover, it must include urgentand bold steps to address the triple crisis of climate disruption, biodiversity loss and pollution destroying our planet.
Second, now is the time to renew the social contract between Governments and their people and within societies, so as to rebuild trust and embrace a comprehensive vision of human rights. People need to see results reflected in their daily lives. This must include the active and equal participation of women and girls, without whom no meaningful social contract is possible. It should also include updated governance arrangements to deliver better public goods and usher in a new era of universal social protection, health coverage, education, skills, decent work and housing, as well as universal access to the Internet by 2030 as a basic human right. I invite all countries to conduct inclusive and meaningful national listening consultations so all citizens have a say in envisioning their countries’ futures.
Third, now is the time to end the “infodemic” plaguing our world by defending a common, empirically backed consensus around facts, science and knowledge. The “war on science” must end. All policy and budget decisions should be backed by science and expertise, and I am calling for a global code of conduct that promotes integrity in public information.
Fourth, now is the time to correct a glaring blind spot in how we measure economic prosperity and progress. When profits come at the expense of people and our planet, we are left with an incomplete picture of the true cost of economic growth. As currently measured, gross domestic product (GDP) fails to capture the human and environmental destruction of some business activities. I call for new measures to complement GDP, so that people can gain a full understanding of the impacts of business activities and how we can and must do better to support people and our planet. [So clever how the wordsmiths portray the globalists’ desire to get rid of measures of economic activity as if this is linked to preventing environmental destruction!—Nass ]
Fifth, now is the time to think for the long term, to deliver more for young people and succeeding generations and to be better prepared for the challenges ahead. Our Common Agenda includes recommendations for meaningful, diverse and effective youth engagement both within and outside the United Nations, including through better political representation and by transforming education, skills training and lifelong learning. I am also making proposals, such as a repurposed Trusteeship Council, a Futures Lab, a Declaration on Future Generations and a United Nations Special Envoy to ensure that policy and budget decisions take into account their impact on future generations. We also need to be better prepared to prevent and respond to major global risks. It will be important for the United Nations to issue a Strategic Foresight and Global Risk Report on a regular basis, and I also propose an Emergency Platform, to be convened in response to complex global crises.
Sixth, now is the time for a stronger, more networked and inclusive multilateral system, anchored within the United Nations. Effective multilateralism depends on an effective United Nations, one able to adapt to global challenges while living up to the purposes and principles of its Charter. For example, I am proposing a new agenda for peace, multi-stakeholder dialogues on outer space and a Global Digital Compact, as well as a Biennial Summit between the members of the Group of 20 and of the Economic and Social Council, the Secretary-General and the heads of the international financial institutions. Throughout, we need stronger involvement of all relevant stakeholders, and we will seek to have an Advisory Group on Local and Regional Governments.
For 75 years, the United Nations has gathered the world around addressing global challenges: from conflicts and hunger, to ending disease, to outer space and the digital world, to human rights and disarmament. In this time of division, fracture and mistrust, this space is needed more than ever if we are to secure a better, greener, more peaceful future for all people. Based on this report, I will ask a High-level Advisory Board, led by former Heads of State and Government, to identify global public goods and other areas of common interest where governance improvements are most needed, and to propose options for how this could be achieved…
or go to
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By Dr Bouthaina Shaaban | February 23, 2017
A recently declassified CIA document prepared in 1983, and released on 20 January 2017, shows that the United States had at the time encouraged Saddam Hussein to attack Syria, which would have led to a vicious conflict between the two countries, thus draining their resources.
The report, which was then prepared by CIA officer Graham Fuller, indicates that the US tried adamantly to convince Saddam to attack Syria under any pretense available, in order to get the two most powerful countries in the Arab East to destroy each other, turning their attention away from the Arab-Israeli conflict. … continue
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