They Think We Are Stupid, Volume 11
Everything you need to know about our ruling class’s opinion of you
By Aaron Kheriaty, MD | Human Flourishing | September 19, 2024
New Report: State Department Funded Fact-checkers to Censor ‘Lawful Speech’
By Michael Nevradakis, Ph.D. | The Defender | September 18, 2024
The U.S. Department of State-funded domestic and international fact-checking entities that censored American independent media outlets and social media users who questioned the Biden administration’s COVID-19 and other policies, according to a congressional report.
The report by the U.S. House of Representatives Committee on Small Business stated:
“The Federal government has funded, developed, and promoted entities that aim to demonetize news and information outlets because of their lawful speech.”
The government’s actions fueled “a censorship ecosystem” that suppressed “individuals’ First Amendment rights” and “the ability of certain small businesses to compete online.”
The report focused on the State Department’s Global Engagement Center (GEC), which promoted and funded “tech start-ups and other small businesses in the disinformation detection space … with domestic censorship capabilities.”
The “fact-checking” firms named in the report include the International Fact-Checking Network — owned by the Poynter Institute — and NewsGuard.
The International Fact-Checking Network, established in 2015, has received funding from another State Department-affiliated group, the National Endowment for Democracy — and from Google, the Open Society Foundations and the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation.
According to the House report, the federal government “assisted the private sector in detecting alleged MDM [misinformation-disinformation-malinformation] for moderation” and “worked with foreign governments with strict internet speech laws,” including European Union member states and the United Kingdom, to censor speech.
The report determined that the GEC and the National Endowment for Democracy violated international restrictions by “collaborating with fact-checking entities” to assess the content of domestic media outlets.
The “fact-checking” operations targeted independent media outlets, and as a result, “the scales are tipped in favor of outlets which express certain partisan narratives rather than holding the government accountable.”
Whether the State Department’s actions rise to “unconstitutional violations of the First Amendment is currently before the courts,” the report stated.
The State Department and several GEC officials are defendants in Murthy v. Missouri, a lawsuit alleging the Biden administration colluded with social media to censor free speech.
Children’s Health Defense (CHD) and its chairman on leave, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., are plaintiffs in Kennedy v. Biden, a similar lawsuit that last year was consolidated with Murthy v. Missouri.
The Poynter Institute is a defendant in another censorship lawsuit, CHD v. Meta, that CHD filed against Facebook’s parent company.
NewsGuard partnered with CDC, WHO to censor online content
According to the report, NewsGuard used money it received from the GEC and the U.S. Department of Defense to fund efforts to lower the advertising revenue “of businesses purported to spread MDM.”
“A system that rates the credibility of press is fatally flawed as it is subject to the partisan lens of the assessor, making the ratings unreliable,” the report states.
NewsGuard leveraged taxpayer dollars to develop Misinformation Fingerprints, a product that “catalogues what it determines to be the most prominent falsehoods and ‘misinformation narratives’” circulating online, “essentially outsourcing the U.S. government’s perception of fact to NewsGuard,” the report states.
NewsGuard later partnered with dozens of companies, organizations, universities and media outlets, including the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the Office of the Surgeon General and the World Health Organization (WHO).
“During the pandemic, the WHO enlisted NewsGuard for its input, including regular reports, on which COVID-19 narratives it determined to be misinformation were prevalent online,” the report states. “The WHO then contacted social media companies and search engines asking them to remove this content.”
‘Nobody wanted’ fact-checkers until ‘actual truths started getting out’
Tim Hinchliffe, publisher of The Sociable, told The Defender, “These so-called ‘fact-checkers’ are not in the business of actually checking facts. They are in the business of controlling narratives … Nobody wanted or needed these organizations until actual truths started getting out.”
Catherine Austin Fitts, founder and publisher of the Solari Report and former U.S. assistant secretary of Housing and Urban Development, told The Defender the government increasingly relies on censorship to promote its favored narratives.
“They need to institute more and more censorship,” Fitts said. “It’s hard to refute the gaslighting that flows from this imagination factory.”
Francis Boyle, J.D., Ph.D., professor of international law at the University of Illinois, told The Defender he wasn’t surprised that the State Department is “working to censor those who disagree with U.S. government policies and their globalist agenda.”
The report recommends that no federal funds “should be used to grow companies whose operations are designed to demonetize and interfere with the domestic press” and that federal agencies “should not be outsourcing their perception of fact to speech-police organizations subject to partisan bias.”
GEC also faces the loss of its government funding. According to the Washington Examiner, “A provision through the annual State Department appropriations bill, which passed the House this summer and will be negotiated in the Senate, aims to ban future checks to the GEC.”
But for Boyle, this is not enough. He said the State Department has, “at a minimum,” committed “the federal crime of conspiracy to defraud the U.S. government.”
Censorship ‘a pendulum that swings both ways’
The Gateway Pundit last week reported on additional links between the International Fact-Checking Network, other “fact-checking” firms and Big Tech.
In 2015, Poynter partnered with Google News Lab, which earlier that year, helped establish First Draft News. Active until 2022, First Draft was a consortium of social media verification groups that shared methods for combating “fake news.”
Another First Draft founder, fact-checking firm Bellingcat, also received funding from the National Endowment for Democracy.
First Draft was previously led by Claire Wardle, Ph.D., a Brown University professor who, according to “Twitter Files” released last year, advised the Biden administration on COVID-19 “misinformation” — despite having no science or medical credentials.
In 2016, Poynter and the International Fact-Checking Network partnered with First Draft “to tackle common issues, including ways to streamline the [news] verification process.” Other partners included Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, The New York Times, The Washington Post, CNN, ABC News, NBC News and BBC News.
In 2017, Google News Lab partnered with the International Fact-Checking Network “to dramatically increase the searchable output of fact-checkers worldwide, expand fact-checking to new markets and support fact-checking beyond politics, such as in sports, health and science.” The following year, Poynter acquired PolitiFact.com.
Google was also one of the original funders of The Trust Project, a consortium of news organizations that developed eight “trust indicators” to help the public “easily assess the integrity of news.”
These “trust indicators” later became “one of the sources being used by NewsGuard Technologies for a new product to improve news literacy,” and formed “a foundation for NewsGuard review development.”
Hinchliffe warned that the beneficiaries of censorship based on today’s “fact-checking” may become its targets in the future.
“One of the problems of censorship that operates under the guise of misinformation and disinformation, apart from stifling free speech and suppressing actual truths, is that it’s a pendulum that swings both ways,” he said. “The people calling for censorship now may be in a greater position of power to do so, but it will one day swing back at them.”
This article was originally published by The Defender — Children’s Health Defense’s News & Views Website under Creative Commons license CC BY-NC-ND 4.0. Please consider subscribing to The Defender or donating to Children’s Health Defense.
No, New York Times, Climate Change Isn’t Destroying Bridges
By Anthony Watts | Climate Realism | September 6, 2024
The New York Times (NYT) recently published an article titled “Climate Change Can Cause Bridges to ‘Fall Apart Like Tinkertoys,’ Experts Say,” written by Coral Davenport. Multiple lines of evidence and examples not only refute this claim as false but expose the sheer absurdity of the claim.
These sorts of absurdly false claims have been tried before, for instance, when the I-35W bridge collapsed in Minneapolis, MN in 2007. An article in 2007 by Noel Sheppard at NewsBusters exposed the claim as false:
A former member of the Clinton administration, and current Senior Fellow at the virtual Clinton think tank the Center for American Progress, claimed Monday that global warming might have played a factor in the collapse of the I-35W bridge in Minneapolis last week.
I kid you not.
Writing at Climate Progress, the global warming blog of CAP, Joseph Romm – who served as Acting Assistant Secretary of the U.S. Department of Energy in 1997 and as Principal Deputy Assistant Secretary from 1995 though 1998 – stated in a piece amazingly entitled “Did Climate Change Contribute To The Minneapolis Bridge Collapse?“
Unsurprisingly, the actual cause had nothing to do with climate change at all but rather an engineering failure that used undersized gusset plates that were too thin for the load of the bridge:
The investigation revealed that photos from a June 2003 inspection of the bridge showed gusset-plate bowing. On November 13, 2008, the NTSB released the findings of its investigation. The primary cause of the collapse was the undersized gusset plates, at 0.5 inches (13 mm) thick. Contributing to that design or construction error was the fact that 2 inches (51 mm) of concrete had been added to the road surface over the years, increasing the static load by 20%. Another factor was the extraordinary weight of construction equipment and material resting on the bridge just above its weakest point at the time of the collapse. That load was estimated at 578,000 pounds (262 tonnes), consisting of sand, water, and vehicles.
So, human error and extra weight, not climate change, was determined to be the cause of the bridge’s failure.
Fast forward to the present. The NYT’s article makes similar claims:
Bridges designed and built decades ago with materials not intended to withstand sharp temperature swings are now rapidly swelling and contracting, leaving them weakened.
“It’s getting so hot that the pieces that hold the concrete and steel, those bridges can literally fall apart like Tinkertoys,” Dr. Chinowsky said.
As temperatures reached the hottest in recorded history this year, much of the nation’s infrastructure, from highways to runways, has suffered. But bridges face particular risks.
Really? The bridges in question weren’t engineered to handle daily temperature swings? A natural event that happens daily across seasons? That sounds like poor planning. Besides the absurdity of that claim, there are two further contradictory points to consider.
First, in the United States, we’ve seen far worse sustained heatwaves before, such as in the 1930s when the July 1936 heatwave hit America’s Midwest, where some places experienced up to 14 days of above 100°F temperatures. This is evidenced by the graph in Figure 1, provided by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency.
Figure 1. This figure shows the annual values of the U.S. Heat Wave Index, from 1895 to 2020 contiguous 48 states. Environmental Protection Agency.
In the many reports of the heatwaves in the 1930’s, there is no mention of bridge collapse, which suggests that the linkage to “extreme heat aided by climate change” claim is false. Otherwise, such temperatures in the 1930s would have resulted in collapsed bridges. However, there simply are none from that period reportedly linked to heat.
Secondly, the article says “As temperatures reached the hottest in recorded history this year, much of the nation’s infrastructure, from highways to runways, has suffered.” But this isn’t true either. The claim NYT uses is about the global temperature, not the U.S. temperature. As seen in Figure 2 below showing data from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), from the U.S. Climate Reference Network (USCRN), widely considered to be the most accurate source of surface temperature data, July 2024 was not “the hottest in recorded history.” For example, maximum U.S. temperature was higher in 2012 and 2005 than in July 2024.
Figure 2: NOAA – USCRN Maximum Temperature
Diving deeper into the NYT article, the Times attributes the failure of a railroad bridge connecting Iowa and South Dakota during floods to climate change. Flooding in the rivers and streams across and bordering Iowa and South Dakota have been common for as long as records of such event have been kept back into the mid-1800s. And railroad bridge collapses have happened repeatedly in the United States and around the world, well before climate change ever became an issue. Since data show no increase in the number or severity of flood events across the United States, in general, or in Iowa and South Dakota, in particular, there is no evidence climate change played any role in that particular railroad bridge collapse.
The next claim is that the concrete buckled and broke on a bridge in Lewiston, Maine which NYT blamed on “recent fluctuation in temperature and rain.”
Looking at the weather in Lewiston, ME when the event occurred shows that although high and low temperatures were higher than the normal average for late June, the fluctuations the NYT was so concerned about were less extreme than normal, about a 15 degree change from high to low in June 2024 rather than the historic daily average of about 20 degrees. (See figure 3, below).
Figure 3: Normal average daily fluctuations in temperatures throughout the year for Lewiston Maine. Source: Google
The high temperature for the third week of June was 95℉, above the normal maximum for the date, but it was well below the historic high temperature for the city of 99℉ recorded in 1911, 113 years of global warming ago. Lewiston’s 2024 June high was also 10 degrees lower than the high temperature record for the state as a whole of 105℉ set in North Bridgton, ME, just thirty miles away from Lewiston, also from 1911, when that temperature was hit twice.
Because temperatures in Lewiston didn’t fluctuate wildly and were also not record setting, it is implausible for the bridge’s concrete cracking and buckling to have anything at all to do with climate change. It was likely a result of poor construction or, even more likely, poor maintenance, a problem for many bridges and overpasses in Maine and the U.S. as a whole, combined with increased traffic and load, due to significant population growth in the city and the region, using the bridge.
Literally, it takes two minutes of work on Google search to find this data. Apparently, NYT reporter Coral Davenport couldn’t be troubled to seek out the facts. Or perhaps, she just doesn’t know how. This sort of slapdash reporting containing speculative claims rather than simple facts seems like something out of the old TV series The Twilight Zone.
If such an episode aired today, my suggested title would be “Bogus Maximus.” This story was pure science fiction.
I reported a piece for the New York Times on antisemitism. I found a major error, but the Times didn’t care.
An elected official alleged an antisemitic break-in. Police say it didn’t happen.
Pro-Palestinian protest in Teaneck, New Jersey outside Congregation Keter Torah on March 10, 2024. Photo: Fatih Aktas/Anadolu via Getty.
By Arvind Dilawar | Drop Site News | August 8, 2024
As a freelance journalist, I contributed to a New York Times article earlier this year about an anti-Zionist demonstration in Teaneck, New Jersey, a township just outside of New York City. Hundreds of demonstrators had gathered to protest an event organized by Israeli realtors marketing properties in the occupied Palestinian territory of the West Bank—Israeli settlements widely regarded as illegal under international law. Amid Israel’s ongoing genocide in the Gaza Strip, the Times article described the protest as contributing to escalating fear and tension in otherwise peaceable Teaneck. As a pivotal example of alleged antisemitic activity in the area, my co-author John Leland, a Times staff reporter, quoted township councilmember Hillary Goldberg, who claimed that her home had been “broken into” as part of a string of abuse in response to her vocal support of Israel and her Jewish background.
“I have been threatened; I had a box truck with my picture on it and the words ‘liar liar’ driven around town; my house has been broken into; I have received antisemitic messages,” Goldberg told Leland, adding: “I have never felt so afraid to be Jewish as now.”
It was an explosive allegation—a racially motivated break-in at the home of an elected official—and also a brand new one. Prior to the Times coverage, Goldberg was featured in an article from The Intercept about anti-Zionist organizing at Teaneck High School being suppressed by local politicians, including the councilmember. According to The Intercept, Goldberg appears to have collaborated with U.S. Representative Josh Gottheimer to have the entire Teaneck school district investigated by the U.S. Department of Education for alleged antisemitism in retaliation for students organizing for a ceasefire in Gaza last November.
There is no mention of a break-in at Goldberg’s home in The Intercept article—nor coverage of it elsewhere, either in the news or social media. Goldberg’s comments to the Times were the first, and thus far only, mention of the incident anywhere.
The way the reporting and editing process unfolded next was a window into how politically convenient claims make their way into the paper of record without corroboration—and stay in despite contradictory evidence.
When I shared my concerns regarding Goldberg’s apparent political motivations as laid out in the Intercept article, as well as the lack of coverage of this otherwise extremely newsworthy allegation, Leland assured me that the councilmember had filed a police report, meaning her story checked out. But when I requested the report, he told me he hadn’t actually seen it, only been assured by Goldberg that she had filed it. The story went to press without further verification of her claim.
I was eventually able to obtain the police reports myself via an Open Public Records Act request, and they revealed that the police had determined no break-in, nor any other crime, had been committed. According to the first police report, dated February 10, six officers responded to a call at Goldberg’s publicly listed address because, according to the complainant, “Lights basement were on // were not on when left // back door was locked when got home unlocked.” The half-dozen officers checked the property but found no sign of forced entry nor anything else amiss. Two subsequent checks of the area found nothing further, and a follow-up investigation by a sergeant two days later ended the same.
“The sergeant did respond to the residence a couple days after the initial incident was reported and spoke with the complainant,” Seth Kriegel, deputy chief of the Teaneck Police Department, reiterated to me. “And based on speaking with her and his investigation, he determined that there was no burglary that had occurred—or attempted burglary.”
Teaneck police determined that no crime had been committed at Goldberg’s property, according to Kriegel. He also noted that subsequent checks were requested by the complainant, a dozen of which were conducted before the publication of the Times article, and none found anything to report.
Believing a correction to the Times story was in order—or at least an update, to give readers a fuller picture—I shared the police reports with Leland—who told me that he had already gotten them and, despite the explicit contradictions, no correction would be issued. When presented with the police reports, management at the Times also declined to reconcile them with its coverage. Instead, managing director of external communications, Charlie Stadtlander, said in a statement that the article was “thoroughly reported, fact-checked and edited, and we stand behind its publication.” Goldberg did not respond to multiple requests for comment.
The Times has come under fire in recent months for refusing to issue corrections to several other articles about Israel and Palestine.
Perhaps most significantly, the Times continues to defend an article accusing Palestinian militants of committing “systematic” sexual violence against Israelis on October 7, despite criticism from professors of journalism, cited by The Washington Post, and others regarding significant issues with the story and its reporting. The Times was forced to issue an “update” (rather than a correction, as would be stipulated by standard journalistic practice) to address contradictory evidence that later emerged.
Anti-Zionist groups such as Writers Against the War on Gaza and publications such as Mondoweiss have also criticized the Times for minimizing Israel’s role in the ongoing famine in the Gaza Strip, casting the Israeli genocide as a feminist endeavor and largely ignoring the killings of more than a hundred fellow journalists in Gaza.
Such apparent contradictions in the Times’ coverage of Israel and Palestine led to significant internal dissent at the publication. A planned podcast episode on the aforementioned story about sexual violence had to be scrapped after producers raised questions about its reliability. At least four other contributors have also resigned or severed relationships with the Times for similar reasons, according to the outlet Them.
Unfortunately the Times is not alone in breaking with standard journalistic ethics when it comes to covering Israel and Palestine. In a decade of being a full-time freelance journalist, I have personally never come up against the kind of opposition I’ve experienced trying to cover the reverberations of the ongoing Israeli genocide in Gaza.
In December, an editor at The Smart Set, an arts and culture magazine that I contributed to for five years without issue, accepted a pitch of mine on decolonization—only to have a higher-up summarily reject the draft, without edits, notes, or payment.
In April, Times Union, the regional affiliate of Hearst Newspapers in Upstate New York, published an article that I had written about local businesses being harassed for supporting a ceasefire in Gaza. It was online for less than 24 hours before the editor-in-chief interrupted his own travel plans to force the newsroom to take it down. There were no factual errors in the article nor procedural errors in its reporting. Rather, it was Times Union that ran afoul of standard practice by refusing to issue a retraction acknowledging, much less justifying, their decision.
These experiences, as well as mine at The Times, could individually be written off as little more than professional setbacks, especially when compared to the unimaginable suffering in Gaza, where Israeli forces have killed more than 39,000 Palestinians, including at least 15,000 children, according to Al Jazeera at the time of this writing. These otherwise minor journalistic malpractices, however, should be understood as coming together to form a web, like the Kevlar-tough strands of spider’s silk, with the fates of those Palestinians caught in the middle.
‘The Movement is Winning.’: Polling Shows Drop in Support for Free Speech
By Jonathan Turley | August 2, 2024
In my new book, The Indispensable Right: Free Speech in an Age of Rage,” I write about a global anti-free speech movement that is now sweeping over the United States. While not the first, it is in my view the most dangerous movement in our history due to an unprecedented alliance of government, corporate, academic, and media forces. That fear was amplified this week with polling showing that years of attacking free speech as harmful has begun to change the views of citizens.
As discussed in the book, our own anti-free speech movement began in higher education where it continues to rage. It then metastasized throughout our politics and media. It is, therefore, not surprising to see the new Knight Foundation-Ipsos study revealing a further decline in students’ views concerning the state of free speech on college campuses.
The study shows that 70 percent of students “believe that speech can be as damaging as physical violence.” It also shows the impact of speech codes and regulations with two out of three students reporting that they “self-censor” during classroom discussions.
Not surprisingly, Republican students are the most likely to self-censor given the purging of conservative faculty and the viewpoint intolerance shown on most campuses.
Some 49 percent of Republican students report self-censoring on three or more topics. Independents are the second most likely at 40 percent. Some 38 percent of Democrats admit to self-censuring.
Sixty percent of college students strongly or somewhat agree that “[t]he climate at my school or on my campus prevents some people from saying things they believe, because others might find it offensive.”
The most alarming finding may be that only 54 percent of students believe that colleges should “allow students to be exposed to all types of speech even if they may find it offensive or biased.” That figure stood at 78 percent in 2016.
The poll follows similar results in a new poll by the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression (FIRE) of the population as a whole. It found that 53% of Americans believe that the First Amendment goes too far in protecting rights. So there is now a majority who believe that the First Amendment, including their own rights, should be curtailed.
The most supportive of limiting free speech are Democrats at a shocking 61%. However, a majority (52%) of Republicans also agreed.
Roughly 40% now trust the government to censor speech, agreeing that they trust the government “somewhat,” “very much,” or “completely” to make fair decisions about what speech should be disallowed.
It is no small feat to convince a free people to give up their freedoms. They have to be afraid or angry. These polls suggest that they appear both very afraid and very angry.
It is the result of years of indoctrinating students and citizens that free speech is harmful and dangerous. We have created a generation of speech phobics who are willing to turn their backs on centuries of struggle against censorship and speech codes.
Anti-free speech books have been heralded in the media. University of Michigan Law Professor and MSNBC legal analyst Barbara McQuade has written how dangerous free speech is for the nation. Her book, “Attack from Within,” describes how free speech is what she calls the “Achilles Heel” of America, portraying this right not as the value that defines this nation but the threat that lurks within it.
McQuade and many on the left are working to convince people that “disinformation” is a threat to them and that free speech is the vehicle that makes them vulnerable.
This view has been pushed by President Joe Biden who claims that companies refusing to censor citizens are “killing people.” The Biden administration has sought to use disinformation to justify an unprecedented system of censorship.
Recently, the New York Times ran a column by former Biden official and Columbia University law professor Tim Wu describing how the First Amendment was “out of control” in protecting too much speech.
Wu insists that the First Amendment is now “beginning to threaten many of the essential jobs of the state, such as protecting national security and the safety and privacy of its citizens.” He claims that the First Amendment “now mostly protects corporate interests.”
There is even a movement afoot to rewrite the First Amendment through an amendment. George Washington University Law School Professor Mary Anne Franks believes that the First Amendment is “aggressively individualistic” and needs to be rewritten to “redo” the work of the Framers.
Her new amendment suggestion replaces the clear statement in favor of a convoluted, ambiguous statement of free speech that will be “subject to responsibility for abuses.” It then adds that “all conflicts of such rights shall be resolved in accordance with the principle of equality and dignity of all persons.”
Franks has also dismissed objections to the censorship on social media and insisted that “the Internet model of free speech is little more than cacophony, where the loudest, most provocative, or most unlikeable voice dominates . . . If we want to protect free speech, we should not only resist the attempt to remake college campuses in the image of the Internet but consider the benefits of remaking the Internet in the image of the university.”
Franks is certainly correct that those “unlikeable voices” are less likely to be heard in academia today. As discussed in my book, faculties have largely cleansed with the ranks of conservative, Republican, libertarian, and dissenting professors through hiring bias and attrition. In self-identifying surveys, some faculties show no or just a handful of conservative or Republican members.
The discussion on most campuses now runs from the left to far left without that pesky “cacophony” of opposing viewpoints.
One of the most dangerous and successful groups in this anti-free speech movement has been Antifa. I testified in the Senate on Antifa and the growing anti-free speech movement in the United States. I specifically disagreed with the statement of House Judiciary Committee Chairman Jerry Nadler that Antifa (and its involvement in violent protests) is a “myth.”
In the meantime, Antifa continues to attack those with opposing views and anti-free speech allies continue to “deplatform” speakers on campuses and public forums. “Your speech is violence” is now a common mantra heard around the country.
Faculty continue to lead students in attacking pro-life and other demonstrators.
Antifa is now so popular in some quarters that it recently saw two members elected to the French and European parliaments.
Antifa is at its base a movement at war with free speech, defining the right itself as a tool of oppression. It is laid out in Rutgers Professor Mark Bray’s “Antifa: The Anti-Fascist Handbook” in which he emphasizes the struggle of the movement against free speech: “At the heart of the anti-fascist outlook is a rejection of the classical liberal phrase that says, ‘I disapprove of what you say but I will defend to the death your right to say it.’”
Bray quotes one Antifa member as summing up their approach to free speech as a “nonargument . . . you have the right to speak but you also have the right to be shut up.”
However, the most chilling statement may have come from arrested Antifa member Jason Charter after an attack on historic statues in Washington, D.C. After his arrest, Charter declared “The Movement is winning.” As these polls show, he is right.
Source tells Tasnim NYT report on Haniyeh assassination false
Al Mayadeen | August 3, 2024
An informed source has dismissed a recent report by The New York Times regarding the assassination of Hamas chief Ismail Haniyeh in Tehran. Speaking to Tasnim News Agency on Saturday, the source described the NYT article published on August 1 as being “riddled with lies” and a continuation of a psyop of the Israeli occupation that lacks any news value.
The source specifically highlighted the involvement of Ronen Bergman, one of the report’s authors, suggesting that his track record undermines the credibility of the article.
“The Zionist regime has crossed a major red line and committed a barbaric and cowardly assassination, whose full details are being investigated,” the source stated.
They accused the Israeli occupation of mobilizing its security elements within media outlets to disseminate false details, thereby confusing the public and experts to cover up their terrorist acts.
According to the source, vital information has surfaced about Haniyeh’s martyrdom. They refuted the NYT‘s claim that Haniyeh was killed by an explosive device covertly smuggled into his residence. Instead, the source stated that evidence indicates an aerial projectile, possibly carried by a drone, was responsible for the explosion.
The source further denied claims in the NYT report that members of Iran’s Supreme National Security Council met with the Leader of the Islamic Revolution Ayatollah Sayyed Ali Khamenei at 7 am on July 31.
The source described such details as part of an old media tactic designed to make readers believe in the authenticity of the report by providing seemingly precise information.
The New York Times Is Right, Finally; Climate Change Is Not Threatening Island Nations
By Linnea Lueken | ClimateREALISM | July 1, 2024
The New York Times (NYT) recently posted an article, titled “A Surprising Climate Find,” which explains how island nations like the Maldives and Tuvalu are not, in fact, in danger of sinking under the seas due to climate change. This is true; a fact Climate Realism has repeatedly discussed. Atolls in particular are known to grow with rising water levels, this has been known for years if not decades.
The NYT climate reporter, Raymond Zhong, explains that as “the planet warms and the oceans rise, atoll nations like the Maldives, the Marshall Islands and Tuvalu have seemed doomed to vanish, like the mythical Atlantis, into watery oblivion.”
This is an exceptionally common claim from the climate alarmist media, and some of the nations themselves that are benefitting from massive aid packages and “reparations” from wealthier countries; money not being used to help their people relocate from the “sinking” islands, but rather to build infrastructure and boost tourism. In fact, the NYT promoted this falsehood as late as April 2024, with a story, titled, “Why Time Is Running Out Across the Maldives’ Lovely Little Islands.“
In his most recent piece Zhong writes:
“Of late, though, scientists have begun telling a surprising new story about these islands. By comparing mid-20th century aerial photos with recent satellite images, they’ve been able to see how the islands have evolved over time. What they found is startling: Even though sea levels have risen, many islands haven’t shrunk. Most, in fact, have been stable. Some have even grown.”
It is true that the islands are not sinking, but Zhong is wrong when he says this fact has only been discovered “of late.” His own article references a study published in 2018, which found 89 percent of islands in the Pacific and Indian Oceans increased in area or were stable, and only 11 percent showed any sign of contracting. So just three months after the NYT published an article claiming the Maldives were disappearing beneath the waves, the paper is now reversing itself based on research that existed six years before the April article was published. Since, Climate Realism has covered the claim many times, including with regard to Tuvaluan “refugees,” looking at tropical storms, and examining other island refugee claims, one wonders whether the NYT’s fact checkers were asleep on the job when the paper published its false story in April.
The facts about atolls growth and demise are not newly discovered. Scientists have known for decades, if not more than a hundred years, that atoll islands uniquely change with changing sea levels. Charles Darwin was the first to propose that reefs were many thousands of feet thick, and grow upwards towards the light. He was partially correct, though reality is more complicated than his theory.
In 2010, as discussed in the Climate Realism post “No, Rising Seas Are Not Swallowing Island Nations,” studies found that Tuvalu and Kiribati were growing, as well as Micronesia, and some had grown dramatically. Likewise in 2015, the same group of researchers reported that 40 percent of islands in the Pacific and Indian Oceans were stable, and another 40 percent had grown.
Zhong correctly says that ocean currents and waves can cause erosion, but also “bring fresh sand ashore from the surrounding coral reefs, where the remains of corals, algae, crustaceans and other organisms are constantly being crushed into new sediment.”
Climate at a Glance: Islands and Sea Level Rise, also confirms the fact that in Tuvalu in particular –often a poster child for islands supposedly threatened by sea level rise—“eight of Tuvalu’s nine large coral atolls have grown in size during recent decades, and 75 percent of Tuvalu’s 101 smaller reef islands have increased as well.”
The only “surprising” discovery in this story is that the climate desk for the New York Times was allegedly not aware of these facts before now. This information is not new. It could be, of course, that the NYT neglected to report the truth about island nations’ status previously simply because it did not conform to the alarming climate narrative they have been trying to push, but as the data has gotten too strong to ignore, they were forced to admit the truth with regard to growing islands in the face of rising seas.
This Energy Transition Thing Really Is Not Happening
By Francis Menton | Manhattan Contrarian | June 25, 2024
From reading the left-wing media, you know (or think you know) that there is an energy “transition” going on. This is something that must happen as a matter of urgent necessity. Vast government subsidies are being disbursed to assure its rapid success. Fossil fuels are rapidly on the way out, while wind and solar are quickly taking over.
For example, you may well have seen the big piece last August in the New York Times, headline “The Clean Energy Future Is Arriving Faster Than You Think.”
Across the country, a profound shift is taking place . . . . The nation that burned coal, oil and gas for more than a century to become the richest economy on the planet, as well as historically the most polluting, is rapidly shifting away from fossil fuels.
But if you read that piece, or any one of dozens of others from the Times or other “mainstream” sources, what you won’t find are meaningful statistics on the extent to which fossil fuel use is declining, if at all, or the extent to which renewables like wind and solar are actually replacing them.
That’s why the Manhattan Contrarian turns instead to dry statistical data to try to get the real story. Several years ago I discovered an annual book of energy data called the Statistical Review of World Energy. At the time, the Statistical Review was produced by the international oil company BP. I first covered one of these Reviews in this post from July 2019. A couple of years ago BP apparently decided to get out of this business, and turned the product over to something called the Energy Institute. EI then produced a Statistical Review in June 2023 (covering 2022), and now is just out on June 20, 2024 with a Statistical Review covering 2023.
Most of the Statistical Review consists of just spreadsheets of numbers. There are some charts, but relatively few. But the takeaways are too obvious to hide. The big one is this: there is no energy “transition” going on, at least not in the sense that “renewables” are actually supplanting fossil fuels. Yes there is some considerable amount of “renewable” wind and solar electricity generation getting built (with huge government subsidies). But it is not replacing fossil fuel generation. Rather, fossil fuel generation continues to increase, and its share of overall energy production has barely budged.
Here is EI’s June 20 Press Release, which summarizes the five “key stories” that it says emerge from the statistics. The first one is the big one — increasing energy consumption led by increased production and consumption of fossil fuels:
Record global energy consumption, with coal and oil pushing fossil fuels and their emissions to record levels. Global primary energy consumption overall was at a record absolute high, up 2% on the previous year to 620 Exajoules (EJ). Global fossil fuel consumption reached a record high, up 1.5% to 505 EJ (driven by coal up 1.6%, oil up 2% to above 100 million barrels for first time, while gas was flat). As a share of the overall mix they were at 81.5%, marginally down from 82% last year.
And of course, “emissions” continue to rise:
Emissions from energy increased by 2%, exceeding 40 gigatonnes of CO2 for the first time.
No matter how much the federal government or any state threatens to punish you for your sin of fossil fuel use, aggregate global emissions from such use are not going to go down within our lifetimes.
The second “key story” relates to the contribution, or lack thereof, of solar and wind. Here EI engages in some modest spinning to make things look less bad than they are for the solar and wind promoters; but there’s not much they can do:
Solar and wind push global renewable electricity generation to another record level. Renewable generation, excluding hydro, was up 13% to a record high of 4,748 TWh. This growth was driven almost entirely by wind and solar, and accounted for 74% of all net additional electricity generated.
4,748 TWh of renewable generation — wow, that’s a lot! Or is it? Do you notice how they suddenly switched units from Exajoules to Terawatt hours when they changed from talking about fossil fuels to solar and wind. Does anybody around here know the conversion factor? Yes — it’s 277.778 TWh per EJ. That means that the 4,748 TWh of “almost entirely” solar and wind power generated in 2023 came to all of 17.1 EJ, which is just 2.7% of the 620 EJ of world primary energy consumption. Could you have imagined that it could be so little, after decades of over-the-top promotion and trillions of dollars of subsidies?
And pay attention to that line “wind and solar . . . accounted for 74% of all net additional electricity generated.” Does that somehow sound like a transition is happening? It’s the opposite. If wind and solar were actually taking over, they would have to account for 100% of additional generation, plus large further amounts to replace fossil fuel generators. As long as wind and solar account for less than all of additional generation, then fossil fuels are continuing to increase, and there is no “transition” going on at all.
I mentioned that there were relatively few charts in the Review, but some of them are striking. Here is one of my favorites, showing global coal consumption from 1965 to 2023:
Over that period, North America and Europe have cut their consumption almost by half, from almost 40 EJ per year to around 20. But over the same period the consumption in the rest of the world has gone from about 20 EJ to around 140, multiplying by a factor of 7. And don’t be fooled by the apparent leveling off of increases in total consumption in the last several years. That reflects continuing decreases in North America and Europe, which are more than offset by larger increases in the Asia Pacific region.
Robert Bryce at his Substack has many more details from the EI Statistical Review, plus several charts that he has created from the EI data. He is much better at creating charts than I am. The title of Bryce’s article is “Numbers Don’t Lie.” Bryce also has a figure for the amount of government subsidies that have gone to wind and solar generation since 2004: $4.7 trillion. That much money to fund a supposed “transition” that isn’t occurring at all.
The story is going to be effectively the same every year until finally the promoters give up on the wind/solar scam.
The Media Slowly Backpedals
By Mark Oshinskie | Dispatches from a Scamdemic | May 9, 2024
Early in my legal career, I handled many one-day trials. Late one afternoon, I returned to my office. Still wearing my suit and carrying my briefcase, I passed the open office door of a senior colleague named Ben. He called out to me, “How’d you do today?”
I stood in his doorway and replied, “Not good. I couldn’t get their witness to admit what I wanted him to.”
Ben smiled and said, “You’ve watched too much TV. You expect the witness to break down on the stand and admit everything, as grim music plays in the background. That won’t happen. You have to treat every adverse witness as someone who starts with a handful of credibility chips. You let him say whatever he wants and make himself look dishonest saying it. Ideally, he trades those chips in, one-by-one, and leaves the stand without any chips in his hand.”
This made sense. Thereafter, I adjusted my expectations and structured my questions accordingly.
—
Media outlets and writers who fomented Coronamania have, over the past two years or so, been retreating slowly from the fear and loathing they began brewing up in March, 2020. They’ve calculated that a Covid-weary, distractable public won’t remember most of what they said earlier in the Scamdemic.
Last Friday, in two, paired articles, New York Times writers Apoorva Mandavilli and David Leonhardt continue this strategically slow retreat from the Covid lies they’ve sponsored. For the first time, they acknowledge that maybe the shots they’ve praised have caused a few of what jab-o-philic readers will dismiss as minor injuries.
As he begins his summary of Mandavilli’s theme, Leonhardt admits that the notion that vaxx injuries occurred makes him “uncomfortable.” He’s not expressing discomfort about the injuries themselves. He’s concerned that the vaxx critics might be proven correct.
Why would a self-described “independent journalist” be made uncomfortable by facts? What’s so repugnant about simply calling balls and strikes? Why does Leonhardt have a rooting interest? What’s so hard about admitting he’s been wrong, not just about the shots, but about all of the Covid anxiety he and his employer have incited throughout the past three-plus years?
Bear this in mind: In early 2021, Leonhardt went on a 1,600-mile road trip to get injected as early as he could. David, kinda neurotic and def not climate friendly.
Admitting error—or outright complicity with the Scam—during the Covid overreaction would entail losses of face and credibility. After all the harm the media has done, those consequences would be just and proper.
To avoid this result, the media and bureaucrats are backpedaling slowly to try to change their views without too many people noticing. In so doing, they’re very belatedly adopting the views of those, like me, who from Day 1, called out the hysteria driving, and the downsides to, the Covid overreaction.
But while they’ve incrementally changed parts of their message, they hold tightly to the central, false narrative that Covid was a terrible disease that indiscriminately killed millions. The Covophobes continue to falsely credit the Covid injections for “saving millions of lives” and “preventing untold misery.”
Times readers are a skewed, pro-jab sample. Thus, about half of the 1000+ commenters adopt Mandavilli’s and Leonhardt’s mythology that, even if the shots injured people, they were a net positive in a world facing a universally vicious killer. Relying on that false premise, these columnists and the commenters assert that no medical intervention is risk-free and that a few metaphorical eggs were inevitably broken while making the mass vaccination omelet. In their view, such injuries are a cost of doing business.
To begin with, where was such risk/reward analysis when the lockdowns and school closures were being put in place?
Moreover, The Times writers and most pro-jab commenters pretentiously and inappropriately claim the mantle of “Science.” To many, modern medicine is a religion and “vaccines” are a sacrament. Their pro-vaxx faith is unshakable. But these ostensible Science devotees unreasonably overlooked Covid’s clearest empirical trend: SARS-CoV-2 did not threaten healthy, non-old people. Therefore, neither non-pharmaceutical interventions (“NPIs”) nor shots should have been imposed upon those not at risk. The NPI and shot backers weren’t Scientists. They were Pseudo-Scientists.
The Times’s stubborn, apocalyptic Covid narrative and pro-vaxx message has never squared with what I’ve seen with my own eyes. After four years in Covid Ground Zero, high-density New Jersey, and despite having a large social sphere, I still directly know no one who has died from this virus. I indirectly know of only five—relatives of acquaintances—said to have been killed by it. Each ostensible viral victim fits the profile that’s been clear since February, 2020: very old and unhealthy, dying with, not from, symptoms common to all respiratory virus infections, following a very unreliable diagnostic test.
Countering the intransigent shot backers, hundreds of commenters to the Mandavilli piece describe non-lethal injuries they sustained shortly after injecting. But both articles, and many commenters to the Mandavilli article, emphasize that “correlation isn’t causation.”
The persuasiveness of correlation is typically questioned only when one would viscerally prefer not to apply Occam’s Razor and adopt the most straightforward explanation for symptoms that began shortly after injection. I suspect that, in their personal dealings, those who say “correlation isn’t causation” seldom believe in coincidences.
I directly know six people who’ve had significant health setbacks shortly after taking the shots, including one death. These seem like too many coincidences. Further, what would provide convincing proof of vaxx injury causation? Autopsies are, perhaps strategically, rare. Having done litigation, I know experts will always disagree about causation if they’re paid well enough. And ultimately, doesn’t the cited “millions saved” study assume that correlation is causation?
While the peremptory assertions that the shots saved millions of lives are very questionable and poorly supported, many who read these statements will cite these as gospel because “millions” is a memorable, albeit speculative and squishy figure, and because, well, The New York Times said so!
While the columnists use this phony stat to justify mass vaccination, only one in five-thousand of those infected—nearly all of them very old and/or very sick or killed iatrogenically—had died “of Covid” before VaxxFest began. The vast majority of these deceased were likely to die soon, virus or no.
Thus, how can one say that the shots saved millions of lives? For how long were they saved? And did those who conducted the cited “millions of deaths” study believe they’d get future—professional lifeblood—grants if they didn’t find that the shots saved millions of lives?
Further, Mandavilli and Leonhardt never acknowledge—and may not even know of— the statistical sleight of hand that’s been used throughout by the jab pushers. I’ve described these tricks in prior posts. For example, there was “healthy vaccinee bias:” those who administered the shots strategically declined to inject those who were so frail that the shots’ systemic shock might kill them. And those who injected weren’t counted as “vaxxed” until 42 days after their first shot. As the shots initially suppress immunity and disrupt bodies, one should expect the shots to increase deaths in the weeks after the shot regimen begins. Injectees who died within this initial 42 days were falsely categorized as “unvaxxed.”
FWIW, my wife and I and all other non-vaxxers I know have predictably been fine. The shots didn’t save any of our lives or keep us out of the hospital. Our immune systems did. “The Virus’s” lethality was badly overhyped.
More medical intervention doesn’t necessarily improve health. To the contrary, and especially regarding the shots, less is often more.
While Mandavilli and others blame “vitriolic” anti-vaxxers for discouraging vaxx and booster uptake, vaxx failure itself more strongly discouraged injections than did anything any anti-vaxxer said. The government and media repeatedly touted the shots as “safe and effective” and guaranteed that they would “stop infection and spread.” Montages of these clips are likely still on the Net. Yet, countless injectees—including all injectees whom I know—have gotten sick, several times each.
Consequently, jabbers felt lied to. Based on such directly observable data of vaxx failure and experiencing or seeing vaxx injuries, and without reading studies or conducting courtroom trials, the public made its own observations and rendered its negative verdict about vaxx efficacy and safety by declining vaxx “boosters.” Besides, if anti-vaxxers held such sway over public opinion that they could stop people from taking boosters, their initial warnings would have stopped people from taking the initial shots.
Importantly, and by extension, as we skeptics were right about the shots, we were also right when we criticized the lockdowns, school closures, masks and tests that have been articles of Coronamanic faith. A recent CDC study so has so concluded.
Many of NPI and shot backers have taken refuge in “We-Couldn’t-Have-Known-ism.” But millions, including me, did know, based on widely available information, that the NPIs and shots were always bad ideas. And as we knew that only the old and ill were at risk and that the NPIs would cause great harm, those who are very belatedly admitting that “mistakes were made” not only also could have known; they should have known. Their failure to know reveals either a willful, opportunistic, tribalistic disregard of plainly observable information or a lack of intelligence.
Throughout the Scamdemic, Mandavilli and Leonhardt have belatedly, incrementally changed their disproven views. Their untenable alternative was to persist with a plainly failed narrative and trade in their credibility chips, issue-by-issue. But they’re doing so slowly to evade responsibility for being wrong when it mattered.
For example, for two years, Mandavilli strongly supported keeping schoolkids home. Similarly, 41 months after the Scamdemic began, Leonhardt quoted, with apparent surprise, an “expert” who says that Covid deaths correlate closely with old age. By the time they made these concessions, most of the public already knew that the columnists’ notions were wrong to begin with.
It also took Leonhardt 41 months to admit that Covid deaths were significantly overcounted. But, as when drivers who exhale a .25% blood alcohol level say they “only had a couple of beers,” neither Leonhardt nor the rest of the Covid-crazed will admit how much these numbers were strategically inflated.
Leonhardt had also backed Paxlovid, which has long since been widely devalued.
And Leonhardt very belatedly admitted that infection confers immunity: first to individuals, then to the group. By so conceding, he was merely validating a basic epidemiological principle—herd immunity—that was widely accepted before March, 2020 but, from 2020-22, was used to vilify those who stated it.
Further, while Leonhardt and Mandavilli continue to sell the phony “Pandemic of the Unvaccinated” narrative, far more vaxxed, than unvaxxed people have died with Covid.
Conspicuously, Mandavilli and Leonhardt also fail to mention that hundreds of thousands have suffered apparent vaxx injuries or deaths from heart attacks, strokes or cancers and that overall deaths have increased in highly vaxxed nations. Thus, when one considers all causes of death, the shots seem to have caused a net loss, not gain, in life span.
The Times writers ignore the tens of thousands of American post-vaxx deaths listed in the user-unfriendly, and therefore underused, VAERS database and the excess death increases in the most highly vaxxed nations in 2021-22. Unlike the vaxx injured, who are still alive, dead vaccinees tell no tales. Nor do most of their survivors because, as with families who’ve lost a young man in a war, those left to mourn don’t want to believe that their beloved has died avoidably or in vain. The reluctance to attribute deaths to the shots is particularly acute if the bereaved encouraged the decedent to inject.
While Mandavilli and Leonhardt now begrudgingly report that the shots may not, despite all of the ads and bureaucratic assurances, have been so safe after all, conceding that the shots have killed people is a bridge too far. At least for now.
But the Overton Window has been opened. Thus, the media backpedaling will continue, albeit slowly. Vaxx injuries and NPI-induced damage are not emerging trends. They’re established trends that deserve much more coverage than they’ve received. The lockdown/mask/test/vaxx supporters have been thoroughly wrong throughout. They have no credibility chips left.
I derive little satisfaction from watching their pro-vaxx/NPI case crumble. Firstly, unlike in a courtroom, where judges and juries are, at least in theory, focused on what witnesses say, most peoples’ attention is too scattered to notice the Covid fearmongers’ reversals. The media’s retreat has occurred very slowly. As the backtracking fearmongers have cynically calculated, the public’s Covid fatigue will blunt anti-media anger.
Secondly, these media’s concessions come far too late to have much practical benefit. Team Mania’s social, economic and political objectives were accomplished in 2020-22. Sadly, this damage is permanent.
Nonetheless, in order to discourage additional public health, political and economic chicanery and oppression, we must continue to say what’s true: the Scamdemic was a massive, opportunistic overreaction that most people were too naive to apprehend.
Truth is intrinsically valuable. Regardless of outcome, telling the truth is our obligation to posterity.
American Pravda: Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead in San Bernardino
BY RON UNZ • UNZ REVIEW • MAY 20, 2024
Being a college town, Palo Alto once offered a multitude of excellent new and used bookstores, perhaps as many as a dozen or so. But the rise of Amazon produced a great extinction in that business sector, and I think only two now survive, probably still more than for most towns of comparable size.
Amazon and its rivals have obviously become hugely beneficial book-buying resources that I frequently use, but they fail to offer the benefit of randomly browsing shelves and occasionally stumbling across something serendipitous. So I regularly stop by the monthly used book sale put on by Friends of the Palo Alto Library, whose offerings are also very attractively priced, with good quality paperbacks often going for as little as a quarter.
While browsing that sale a couple of weeks ago, I noticed a hardcover copy of Newsroom Confidential, a short 2022 insider account of mainstream journalism by Margaret Sullivan, who had spent four years as the Public Editor of the New York Times. I’d occasionally read her columns in that paper and had seen one or two favorable reviews of the book, so despite its pricey cost—a full $3—I bought and read it, hoping to get a sense of what she’d observed during her term as the designated reader-advocate at our national newspaper of record.
As she told her story, prior to joining the Times she had spent her entire career at the far smaller Buffalo News of her native city, eventually rising to become its editor. Although she’d been happy in that position, after eight years she decided to apply for an opening at the Times, and jumped at the offer when she received it.
Based upon her narrative, Sullivan seems very much a moderate liberal in her views, not too different from most others in her journalistic profession despite being raised in a family of more conservative blue-collar Catholics in Upstate New York. She opened the Prologue of her book by denouncing Donald Trump’s infamous “Stop the Steal” DC rally of early 2021 and she described the invasion of our Capitol by outraged Trumpists as “one of the most appalling moments in all of American history,” sentiments probably shared by at least 90% of her mainstream colleagues.
Born in 1957, Sullivan explained that as a first grader she and everyone else in her community had been horrified by the 1963 assassination of President John F. Kennedy, our first Catholic president. Less than a decade later, she was transfixed by the Watergate Scandal and the subsequent Senate hearings that led to the fall of President Richard Nixon. Like so many others of her generation, she had idolized Woodward and Bernstein, the crusading young reporters who broke the case and brought down a crooked president, especially admiring their portrayal by movie stars Robert Redford and Dustin Hoffman in the film version of All the President’s Men. Along with many other idealistic young Americans, Sullivan decided to embark upon a journalistic career as a consequence.
As far as I can tell, Sullivan seems to have been a committed and honest professional during the decades that followed, describing some of her mundane minor conflicts with colleagues but generally trying to tell their side of the story as well. As a lateral hire from a smallish Upstate newspaper, she had moved rather cautiously after joining the illustrious Times, and although she sometimes took a bit of pride in a few of her columns that attracted considerable readership or were widely Tweeted out, none of these much stuck in my mind.
As the end of her four year tenure approached, the Times tried to persuade her to extend it, but she preferred to move over to the Washington Post and become one of their media columnists.
The various tidbits of gossip she reported from those newspapers were hardly earth-shattering. She’d had a private dinner with top Times editor Jill Abramson one evening only to be shocked the next morning when the latter was summarily fired by the publisher, so she passed along the speculation about what combination of factors might have been responsible for that sudden purge. Abramson had been the first woman to serve as executive editor of the Times, and she was replaced by her deputy Dean Baquet, who became the first black to hold that post. Sullivan explained that the two had long had a contentious relationship, and many members of the newsroom speculated that Baquet had demanded that the Times leadership choose between the two of them. Apparently Abramson had a difficult personality while Baquet was much more charming, so even though he sometimes threw “temper tantrums” he was able to get away with such behavior, and he came out on top.
Although Sullivan never broke a major story nor won any important journalistic prize, she seemed very much a solid team-player rather than a prima donna and got along well with her professional colleagues. Therefore, I was hardly surprised that she was chosen to join the Pulitzer Prize Board in 2011 and eventually became executive director of a Columbia University center for journalist ethics.
Her book was a rather short one, so although I didn’t really get much out of it, it also hardly absorbed too many hours of my time. But what struck me in reading it was how a longtime editor and media columnist could have lived through some of the most shocking and dramatic events of the last sixty years without ever seeming to seriously question any of them. The Kennedy Assassinations of the 1960s, the 9/11 Attacks and the long War on Terror, the 2016 Russian election interference that put Donald Trump in the White House, the global Covid epidemic beginning in early 2020 and the massive social upheaval following the police murder of George Floyd later that same year—all those seminal incidents were discussed in her text yet she never seemed to entertain the slightest doubts about those standard narratives.
At one point she noted the striking collapse of public confidence in the honesty and reliability of American journalism, which had plummeted from around 72% soon after Watergate to just 36% these days. But she never asked herself whether the public might have a sound basis for such rapidly growing distrust of our media.
In reading Sullivan’s account of her journalistic career, two names from Shakespeare’s Hamlet came to mind: Rosencrantz and Guildenstern. Those two Danish courtiers had remained totally oblivious to the enormous events taking place around them and suffered a dire fate as a consequence, though they later became the protagonists of Tom Stoppard’s absurdist play Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead. Although fifteen or twenty years ago, I might have shared Sullivan’s tendency to ignore any deeper realities of modern American history, her book was published in 2022 and I wondered whether she had ever seriously explored the full range of information available on the Internet during the decades she had spent as an editor and a media columnist.
As she casually described some of the watershed events of her lifetime, always seeming to take them entirely at face value, I smiled a bit since over the years I had carefully analyzed most of them in my own American Pravda series and usually come to very different conclusions. But what jumped out at me was her discussion of a much smaller incident from near the end of her tenure at the Times. Although that story has been almost totally forgotten, it filled nearly four pages of her short book, occupying almost as much space as Watergate and far more than the 9/11 Attacks.
In December 2015, terrorist gunmen had attacked the public employees of San Bernardino, California at their offices, killing fourteen and wounding more than twenty, the worst mass shooting in America since Sandy Hook three years earlier. Within hours, a massive local police mobilization had located, shot, and killed the Islamic fanatics responsible and all the details of the case are provided in a very comprehensive Wikipedia article that runs more than 19,000 words.
Sullivan became involved in a controversy over whether the pro-jihadi social media posts left by one of the killers had been correctly described by an anonymous government source, whose information was the basis of a provocative front page Times story that became an important element in the political debate. Her critical column made waves and even drew the involvement of her newspaper’s top editor before the matter was ultimately settled to her complete satisfaction.
At the time of that mass shooting, I was heavily focused upon the final stages of preparing my ultimately unsuccessful campaign for the Harvard Board of Overseers, but certain elements of that incident stuck in my mind, and although Sullivan never seemed to have questioned any of its strange details, I certainly did.
During the previous few years I’d grown increasingly suspicious of many of the watershed events of our country’s modern history, but I hadn’t yet launched my American Pravda series nor even published a single article outlining any of my conspiratorial views. However, certain elements of this mass shooting raised red flags in my mind, and I soon republished a short column by longtime libertarian writer Gary North highlighting some of those issues.
On December 2nd, public employees of San Bernardino County were holding a day-long training exercise and holiday party at their offices when a deadly attack suddenly began. According to all the eyewitnesses, three large white men, wearing ski masks and dressed head-to-toe in military-style commando-outfits suddenly burst into the gathering and began raking the terrified victims with gunfire from their assault-rifles, killing fourteen and wounding more than twenty others. Although after nine years many of the YouTube videos providing the statements of survivors are no longer available, the CBS Evening News phone interview with a seemingly very credible eyewitness is still on the Internet and worth viewing.
Another witness interviewed by NBC News similarly reported seeing “3 white males” in military gear fleeing the scene of the shooting, and a later Time Magazine article seemed to confirm those same reports by all the early eyewitnesses. So three large white men dressed in commando-gear had apparently committed the brutal massacre, then escaped the scene in a black SUV.
Some 300 local law enforcement officers were quickly mobilized and although they arrived too late to catch the perpetrators, they began patrolling the vicinity, hoping to find the killers before they struck again. Their efforts were soon rewarded and four hours later they located the black SUV driving less than two miles away, and after a massive gun-battle with hundreds of rounds fired, they shot the terrorists to death. Yet oddly enough, the slain culprits turned out to be a young Pakistani Muslim married couple living nearby, Rizwan Farook and Tashfeen Malik, whose six-month-old baby girl had fortunately been left at the home of her grandmother when the parents said they needed to drive to a doctor’s appointment.
Government officials and their media allies all soon declared the case closed, explaining that the Pakistani couple had apparently self-radicalized themselves by reading Islamicist tracts on the Internet and becoming followers of the dread ISIS terrorist movement. ISIS had been much in the news during 2015, allegedly responsible for staging numerous attacks all across Western countries.
But the total divergence between the two descriptions of the suspects seemed quite remarkable, especially once the news media revealed that Malik was a very short woman, standing barely five feet tall. In conversations and later posted comments, I joked that America’s ISIS foes were formidable indeed if they possessed the magical power to transform themselves from one very short woman into two large men and then back again.
Eyewitness testimony at horrific events is notoriously unreliable and although the shooters had been described as white based upon visible portions of their skin, the commando-outfits they were wearing would have concealed most of that, so such identification might have easily been mistaken. Perhaps many of the County employees were relatively short individuals from a Hispanic, Asian, or Middle Eastern immigrant background and they merely assumed that someone large and tall was more likely to be of white European ancestry. But a tiny woman looks very different from a large man and it’s hard to confuse two shooters with three. Even after the official narrative had congealed into its final form, the eyewitness interviewed by CBS News stuck to her story when later questioned by ABC News, saying “I know what I saw.”
The background of the terrorist couple also seemed quite odd. According to news accounts, Farouk had spent the previous five years working as a County food inspector, generally known as someone who got along well with others, with baffled co-workers saying that the young couple were “living the American dream.” Meanwhile, although she’d originally trained as a pharmacist, Malik had become a stay-at-home mom, apparently still nursing her six-month-old baby girl. While I suppose it’s possible that a young, nursing mother has sometimes gone on a wild terrorist rampage, I’d never previously heard of such a case.
A few years earlier I’d become friendly with a prominent mainstream academic and had been shocked to discover that for decades he had become a strong if silent believer in all sorts of “conspiracy theories.” Later that month I happened to have lunch with him and learned that he was also very skeptical of the official story of that terrorist massacre. He’d come of age during the Vietnam War era and served in the ROTC while a student at Harvard, training on weapons during those years. So he explained that a tiny woman such as Malik would have had a very hard time handling a powerful assault-rifle such as an AR-15, revealing another major hole in the official story.
We were also told that after staging their brutal massacre, the two married terrorists had behaved in a strange way. Instead of either fleeing the area or committing other attacks, they had apparently changed back into their civilian clothes and were later caught by the swarming law enforcement officers while slowly driving their vehicle a mile and a half from the crime scene. According to the media accounts, the Bonnie and Clyde terrorist couple had gone out in a blaze of glory, killed after engaging in a huge shootout with the pursuing police. But the photos seemed to show that the windows of their bullet-riddled SUV were tightly closed, and surely they would have rolled them down if they were firing their weapons at the officers chasing them.
Given these severe inconsistences, some conspiratorially-minded individuals naturally suggested that the two Pakistani Muslims had been selected as patsies for a terrorist false-flag attack organized by our government or its allies. But that hypothesis also seemed to make little sense to me. Why would the government stage a false-flag massacre involving three large gunmen and then try to pin the blame on a Pakistani immigrant and his very short wife?
Nine years have now passed and much of the video evidence has disappeared, so determining exactly what happened seems quite difficult. But at the time I believed that a completely unrelated shooting incident in the Los Angeles area a couple of years earlier provided some important insights for this case and I still think the same today.
During February 2013, a black former LAPD officer named Charles Dorner became outraged over what he regarded as his unfair treatment and he began an assassination campaign against other police officers and their families, eventually killing four victims and wounding three more before he was finally trapped in a huge manhunt and committed suicide. During the ten days of his rampage, police departments across much of Southern California were in a state of extremely high alert, mobilizing officers for guard duty outside the homes of those officials and their families that they believed might be among his next targets. But their trigger-happy fears of that deadly cop-killer led to some unfortunate accidents.
Very early one morning, the seven police officers guarding the home of an LAPD official noticed a nearby pickup truck driving in a suspicious manner. So mistakenly believing that it matched the description of Dorner’s vehicle, they fired without warning and riddled it with more than 100 bullets. But instead of Dorner, the occupants turned out to be an elderly Hispanic woman and her middle-aged daughter, who were out delivering the Los Angeles Times in that neighborhood as they did every morning. Less than a half-hour later, other police officers opened fire on another misidentified vehicle, injuring a white surfer who had been on his way to the beach. Fortunately, the victims of those mistaken police shootings all survived and they eventually received multi-million-dollar settlements from their lawsuits.
I think we should at least consider the possibility that Farook and Malik died for similar reasons. Their fatal mistake may have been that they were driving a black SUV that closely resembled the getaway vehicle of the attackers and doing so in an area filled with hundreds of fearful officers on the lookout for terrorist commandoes armed with assault weapons. The limited visual evidence seems to show their SUV was proceeding quietly along the road at normal speed before being attacked and perforated by hundreds of bullets from the police vehicles tailing them.
Obviously, this reconstruction is quite speculative, and Wikipedia summarizes the long list of media reports providing a cornucopia of highly-incriminating evidence. These describe the enormous arsenal of weapons and home-made bombs that the young immigrant couple had allegedly amassed in preparation for their terrorist rampage. So interested readers should weigh that supposed evidence against the seemingly contrary facts that I have described above.
However, consider that the massacre prompted President Barack Obama to broadcast a rare Oval Office address, his first in five years. Given our ongoing international war against the terroristic ISIS movement of the Middle East, any admission that our police had mistakenly shot and killed a young Pakistani couple with an infant daughter might have been hugely damaging to American national security. The alternate choice of fabricating a case against two already dead foreigners would hardly have been the worst crime ever committed by a government desperate to hide its severe embarrassment.
The number of victims in the San Bernardino attack had not been that large, but wider fears of international Islamicist terror attacks had probably been responsible for Obama’s national address on the incident. Indeed, 2015 produced a bumper-crop of such terrorist assaults, with the Wikipedia page devoted to the topic showing nearly 100 such incidents, far more than for any other year. Moreover, many of these attacks occurred in the West, stoking the enormous fears of domestic terrorism that may have helped explain the massive, trigger-happy local police response in San Bernardino.
Probably the highest-profile 2015 attack had taken place in early January at the offices of Charlie Hebdo, a satirical French magazine. That Jewish-dominated publication had long directed the crudest and most vicious insults against the deep religious beliefs of Christians and Muslims, and although the former took those barbs in stride, threats from the latter had been so numerous that the government stationed a police guard outside the premises. But when the attack finally came on January 7th, he proved helpless against the two assailants, clad in commando-outfits and heavily armed with assault-rifles. They forced their way into the building and quickly executed a dozen of the staff while wounding a similar number, then shot the guard on the street while escaping. The choice of dress, weapons, and style of the two attackers seemed rather similar to those who would attack the public employees of San Bernardino eleven months later.
Nearly all of France’s political class treated the brutal killing of the Charlie Hebdo cartoonists and writers as an outrageous assault against France’s long Voltairean traditional of freedom of speech and the incident was widely described as France’s own “9/11 Attack.” Within a couple of days, the Islamicist killers responsible had been identified by the police, tracked down, and killed but the political reverberations continued. Two days later, Paris saw a gigantic march of two million protesting the attacks and denouncing Islamic extremism. More than 40 world leaders led that procession, with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu taking a prominent but controversial place at the front, and similar protests of some 1.7 million additional people occurred elsewhere in the country. France contained a large Muslim population with immigrant roots and French leaders united to endorse a severe political crackdown on perceived Islamic extremism and those who supported it. The standard account of all these events is provided in the Wikipedia page that runs around 17,000 words.
As these important French events unfolded, I’d been reading very detailed coverage in the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal, and initially accepted this entire narrative without question. But I soon discovered that others took a much more conspiratorial line, and a series of email exchanges with that same well-connected academic friend of mine brought those surprising possibilities to my attention, gradually winning me over to his perspective. Based upon some of his discussions with knowledgeable friends in France, he believed that there was a strong possibility that the attacks may have been some sort of government false-flag operation, aimed at justifying a sharp crackdown against political dissent, though the exact details were not at all clear. He also said that such suspicions were very widespread in certain French intellectual and political circles, but almost no one dared voice them in public.
Prompted by those claims coming from someone whose opinion I respected, I began noticing certain elements of the story that greatly multiplied my suspicions.
Much like their later counterparts in San Bernardino, the two terrorist attackers had been wearing face-masks and commando-outfits, and after killing their victims with bursts of assault-weapons gunfire they had easily escaped long before the French police could respond. The only reason that they were quickly identified and caught was that one of the terrorists had carelessly left his ID card behind in an abandoned getaway vehicle, a crucial fact oddly excluded from the very comprehensive Wikipedia article. This seemed a remarkably suspicious detail, eerily similar to the undamaged hijacker passport found on the streets of NYC after the fiery crash of the jetliners into the WTC towers during on September 11th, or the lost luggage of 9/11 ringleader Mohammed Atta that later provided a wealth of incriminating background material regarding the terrorist plot and his motives.
For many decades, former Presidential candidate Jean-Marie Le Pen had been the leader of France’s Far Right anti-Muslim political movement, and he had strong personal connections to the country’s military and security circles. Based upon his ideological beliefs, he might have been expected to welcome the anti-Muslim crackdown prompted by the terrorist massacre, but in an interview with Britain’s Daily Telegraph he said that the attacks seemed extremely suspicious to him and might have been a false-flag operation by some intelligence service. No other major English-language publication reported his surprising views and just a week or so later, Le Pen narrowly escaped death when his house suddenly caught fire, with that story also only being reported in the Telegraph. I later discussed these surprising developments in several comments, but the original articles themselves have now apparently vanished from the Telegraph archives, seemingly underscoring their significance. Naturally none of this information appears in the comprehensive Wikipedia articles on either the Charlie Hebdo attacks or Le Pen himself.
Wikipedia did devote a single sentence to another very odd development in the case. One day after the terrorist attack, the French police commissioner responsible for the investigation suddenly decided to commit suicide at his government office while preparing his official report, choosing to shoot himself in the head.
In the wake of the Charlie Hebdo attacks, France’s entire political leadership class declared themselves the absolute guarantors of the country’s freedom of speech and thought against the Islamic militants who challenged those sacred values. But the actual consequences that followed were somewhat different. Over the years France’s large Muslim population had become increasingly hostile to Israeli policy and Jewish influence, and such sentiments were now outlawed as constituting sympathy for terrorism, given that the alleged terrorists had come from that community and background. These harsh new prohibitions were enforced by a huge wave of arrests and investigations.
As an example of this ironic situation, consider the case of Dieudonné M’bala M’bala, a French-born citizen of half-African ancestry. Although he was one of the France’s most popular comedians, over the years his stinging criticism of overwhelming Jewish influence had caused him enormous legal and professional difficulties. So a few days after the Charlie Hebdo attacks, he posted some mocking comments on his Facebook page, noting that the same authorities who now loudly proclaimed their support for free speech had regularly persecuted him for his humor, and he was quickly arrested on charges of publicly supporting terrorism.
Later that same year, Kevin Barrett released We Are NOT Charlie Hebdo, his edited collection of about two dozen essays highlighting many of the strange and suspicious aspects of that important terrorist incident. I finally read it a couple of years ago and I would strongly recommend it as a very helpful balance to the version of events provided by the mainstream media and codified in Wikipedia. In doing so I am merely seconding the favorable verdict of Prof. Richard Falk of Princeton University, an eminent expert on international law and human rights policy.
Around that same time I also read two other books released by Progressive Press, a small alternative publisher located in Southern California. These both provided a highly-conspiratorial counter-narrative to the mainstream account of our struggle against the Islamicist terrorists of the Middle East.
A decade ago, the terroristic forces of ISIS had become notorious throughout that region and the entire world for their brutal atrocities. These were demonstrated in the videos they regularly released showing the horrific beheadings they inflicted upon their enemies in Syria and Iraq, and ISIS supporters were usually blamed for terrorist attacks in the West, including those in France and San Bernardino. As a result, ISIS allegedly became the primary target of American military operations in the Middle East, but our efforts seemed surprisingly ineffective.
However, a 2016 collection of articles and essays descriptively entitled ISIS Is Us told a very different story. A number of alternative writers and bloggers presented arguments that the CIA and our own regional allies such as Saudi Arabia, Turkey, and Israel had actually been responsible for creating and equipping that fanatical group of Sunni Muslim jihadists, then deploying them as a means of overthrowing Syria’s Shiite-aligned government, an important Iranian ally.
Indeed, that project came very close to success until Russian military intervention in September 2015 helped to turn the tide, along with the ground forces already committed by the Shiite Hezbollah militia of Southern Lebanon. Although I’d regularly seen these arguments floating around in corners of the Internet, I found it useful to have them presented in the pages of a book.
Over the last couple of decades French journalist Thierry Meyssan has become an influential figure in left-wing, conspiratorial circles, and his 2002 book 9/11: The Big Lie was one of the earliest works attacking the official 9/11 narrative, quickly becoming a huge best-seller in France and soon translated into English. That publishing success led him to establish the VoltaireNet website in Lebanon, which has maintained a strong focus on Middle Eastern issues while being sharply critical of Western policies.
In early 2019 he published Before Our Very Eyes: Fake Wars and Big Lies, adopting a very similar approach to the story of the “Arab Spring” and the Western use of Muslim Jihadists in attempts to overthrow the governments of Libya and Syria, with the former effort being successful. Although some of his claims were already known to me and seemed solidly documented, others were much more surprising. But although he provided a vast number of specific statements about important matters, he usually did so without providing any sources for his material, so it was difficult for me to judge its credibility. I assume that much of his information came from his personal contacts with various regional intelligence organizations, who obviously would have had vested interests in promoting their desired narratives, whether or not those happened to be true.
In many respects, I think these three books constituted the photographic inverse-image of Margaret Sullivan’s text, focusing exactly upon the conspiratorial elements of all the major stories that she herself had carefully avoided noticing during her decades of mainstream journalism. So I suspect that the truth lies somewhere between those two extremes.
It’s also quite possible that Sullivan knows or at least suspects far more than she indicated in her book and she was being less than candid with her readers. Positions in elite mainstream journalism or academia are difficult to obtain and can easily be lost if someone strays outside accepted boundaries. After all Jill Abramson had held the top position in all of American journalism and then was suddenly fired for unclear reasons. Times Opinion Editor James Bennet had been a leading candidate to run his newspaper but had suddenly been forced to resign merely for publishing a controversial op-ed by a leading Republican Senator. The forty-year Times career of prominent science journalist Donald McNeil came to an end when he made a few incautious remarks at an extracurricular student outing in Peru. All these individuals far outranked Sullivan and their transgressions were very minor ones compared to the deadly journalistic sin of becoming a suspected “conspiracy theorist.” Indeed, if Sullivan had raised any of the dangerous points I have discussed above, I doubt her manuscript would have even been accepted for publication.
I actually think that there exists evidence that some elite journalists may have much broader views on various issues than they would ever admit in print.
A couple of months after the very suspicious case of the Charlie Hebdo attacks, I decided to publish a highly-controversial analysis of Sen. John McCain’s Vietnam War record, an article that represented something of a sequel to Sydney Schanberg’s seminal expose of McCain’s role in the POW cover-up.
Although all my facts were drawn from fully mainstream sources—much of it from the Times itself—my analysis and conclusions were quite explosive, as indicated by a couple of my closing paragraphs:
Today when we consider the major countries of the world we see that in many cases the official leaders are also the leaders in actuality: Vladimir Putin calls the shots in Russia, Xi Jinping and his top Politburo colleagues do the same in China, and so forth. However, in America and in some other Western countries, this seems to be less and less the case, with top national figures merely being attractive front-men selected for their popular appeal and their political malleability, a development that may eventually have dire consequences for the nations they lead. As an extreme example, a drunken Boris Yeltsin freely allowed the looting of Russia’s entire national wealth by the handful of oligarchs who pulled his strings, and the result was the total impoverishment of the Russian people and a demographic collapse almost unprecedented in modern peacetime history.
An obvious problem with installing puppet rulers is the risk that they will attempt to cut their strings, much like Putin soon outmaneuvered and exiled his oligarch patron Boris Berezovsky. One means of minimizing such risk is to select puppets who are so deeply compromised that they can never break free, knowing that the political self-destruct charges buried deep within their pasts could easily be triggered if they sought independence. I have sometimes joked with my friends that perhaps the best career move for an ambitious young politician would be to secretly commit some monstrous crime and then make sure that the hard evidence of his guilt ended up in the hands of certain powerful people, thereby assuring his rapid political rise.
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- John McCain: When “Tokyo Rose” Ran for President
Ron Unz • The Unz Review • March 9, 2015 • 4,200 Words
- John McCain: When “Tokyo Rose” Ran for President
My piece received a very favorable response in alternative media circles. But to my considerable surprise, a week or two later I was contacted by a Times editor who solicited my participation in a symposium on college reform, my first appearance in several years. And the favorable reaction to my piece arguing that our elite colleges should abolish tuition prompted me to launch my campaign for the Harvard Board of Overseers at the end of that year.
Similarly, my enormous suspicions that our media was hiding the truth about both the Charlie Hebdo and San Bernardino terrorist attacks gradually convinced me that many other important stories were also being concealed or distorted by our mainstream media and I began thinking of expanding my original 2013 American Pravda article into an entire series. The July 2016 death of Sydney Schanberg prompted me to launch that series, which opened with the following paragraphs, perhaps helping to explain much of the bland and blinkered material in Sullivan’s book:
The death on Saturday of Sydney Schanberg at age 82 should sadden us not only for the loss of one of our most renowned journalists but also for what his story reveals about the nature of our national media.
Syd had made his career at the New York Times for 26 years, winning a Pulitzer Prize, two George Polk Memorial awards, and numerous other honors. His passing received the notice it deserved, with the world’s most prestigious broadsheet devoting nearly a full page of its Sunday edition to his obituary, a singular honor that in this degraded era is more typically reserved for leading pop stars or sports figures. Several photos were included of his Cambodia reporting, which had become the basis for the Oscar-winning film The Killing Fields, one of Hollywood’s most memorable accounts of our disastrous Indo-Chinese War.
But for all the 1,300 words and numerous images charting his long and illustrious journalistic history, not even a single mention was made of the biggest story of his career, which has seemingly vanished down the memory hole without trace. And therein lies a tale.
Could a news story ever be “too big” for the media to cover? Every journalist is always seeking a major expose, a piece that not merely reaches the transitory front pages but also might win a journalistic prize or even change the history books. Stories such as these appear rarely but can make a reporter’s career, and it is difficult to imagine a writer turning one down, or an editor rejecting it.
But what if the story is so big that it actually reveals dangerous truths about the real nature of the American media, portrays too many powerful people in a very negative light, and perhaps leads to a widespread loss of faith in our major news media? If readers were to see a story like that, they might naturally begin to wonder “why hadn’t we ever been told?” or even “what else might be out there?”
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- American Pravda: The Legacy of Sydney Schanberg
Ron Unz • The Unz Review • July 13, 2016 • 3,500 Words
- American Pravda: The Legacy of Sydney Schanberg
Audio version of this article:
Western Media Ignites War on China in Sports
By Rick Sterling | Dissident Voice | May 12, 2024
Western accusations of doping by Chinese swimmers threaten to exacerbate China-US tensions, undermine the World Anti Doping Agency (WADA) and seriously harm the upcoming Paris Olympics.
The controversy was ignited by investigation reports at the New York Times and German TV broadcaster ARD. These media outlets suggest there has been a cover-up of a mass doping incident among Chinese top swimmers with connivance of the Chinese Anti Doping Agency (CHINADA) and complicity from the World Anti Doping Agency (WADA). This story served as red meat to the hyper aggressive leader of the US Anti Doping Agency (USADA), Travis Tygart. It has prompted western swimming competitors to loudly complain. For example, the NY Times reports that US team swimmer Paige Madden thinks medals from the Tokyo Olympics should be reallocated. “I feel that Team USA was cheated.” British swimmer James Guy says, “Ban them all and never compete again.” What might be considered whining and poor sportsmanship is effectively being encouraged by western media.
The NY Times and ARD are the same two media that precipitated the accusations of “state sponsored doping” in Russia. It did enormous damage to thousands of Russian athletes and resulted in different levels of banning starting with the Rio Olympics in 2016. Although widely accepted as “truth” in the West, the claims of widespread Russian doping were weak when evidence was required. Most Russian athletes who challenged their banning were exonerated. The major accusers, the Stepanovs and Grigory Rodchenkov, were themselves guilty of doping and profiting from doping. Despite this, the banning has continued and escalated after the Russian intervention in Ukraine. The accusations and banning were useful in propelling the “new cold war” and “new McCarthyism”.
NYT and ARD, and their anonymous informants, may be seeking to do something similar to China. USADA has issued a response in which they say China may be engaging in “systematic doping” under a “coordinated doping regime”. On May 6 USADA’s Tygart escalated his attacks. He implies the Paris Olympics will be a “train wreck” because of WADA complicity in China’s “cheating”. He hopes the US government will “step in and help lead and fix this.” Surely a recipe for success.
What happened
On Jan 1 – 3 in 2021, the Chinese swim team was having a domestic swim meet. It was in the midst of covid lockdown. As usual, the team was drug tested but this time a strange thing happened: many swimmers tested positive for a trace amount of the banned medication trimetazadine (TMZ).
The China Anti Doping Agency (CHINADA) investigated and reported the facts to the World Anti Doping Agency as required. They found:
* 23 swimmers tested positive for a very small amount of trimetazadine (TMZ)
* the swimmers were from different regions of China with different coaches and trainers
* all 23 were staying at the same hotel eating in the same dining room
* none of the swimmers staying at a different hotel tested positive
* some of the swimmers tested positive one day, negative the next
* tests in the hotel kitchen showed the presence of TMZ on the air vent and counters
CHINADA concluded the positive TMZ tests were from hotel food and the athletes were not at fault.
They reported the incident and investigation to the World Anti Doping Agency (WADA) and the international swimming federation now known as World Aquatics (formerly FINA). Both organizations examined the facts and agreed with the findings.
Because the athletes were deemed to have no fault, the incident and names of the athletes were not publicized. WADA regulations indicate that there should be no publicity or naming of athletes deemed innocent and without an “Anti Doping Rule Violation” (ADRV).
How it has been reported
Approximately a year later, in 2022, anonymous sources reported this incident to the NY Times and ARD. Since then, the two media outlets have done further investigation but kept the story secret until two weeks ago.
They suggest something shady happened back in early 2021. They suggest WADA may be complicit in covering up anti doping violations. They almost encourage western athletes to challenge the Chinese swimming accomplishments and be “angry”. On April 20 the story was “Top Chinese Swimmers Tested Positive for Banned Drug, Then Won Olympic Gold“. On April 21 the story was “‘Team USA Was Cheated’: Chinese Doping Case Exposes Rift in Swimming“. On April 22 the story was “Top Biden Official Calls for Inquiry Into Chinese Doping Case.”
These reports ignited a flood of other sensational and accusatory reports and editorials. The Guardian report is titled “Poison in the pool: why the latest Chinese doping row is proving so toxic.” Sports Yahoo says, “Extremely concerned Olympians will not let the Chinese doping allegations die.” The PBS News Hour had a video report titled, “Chinese doping ‘swept under the carpet’: US anti-doping chief says.” Sports Illustrated said the news may alter the distribution of medals from the 2021 Tokyo Olympics.
The US Federal Bureau of Investigation is looking into the situation.
The NY Times and ARD say they have been investigating this story for two years. The release appears timed to have maximum impact and possible damage, just months before the Paris Olympics.
USADA accuses WADA
The US Anti Doping Agency (USADA) is led by the hyper-aggressive Travis Tyler. He has used the reports to claim that WADA is complicit in a Chinese “cover-up”. In a TV interview before a large national audience Tygart said, “China didn’t follow the rules. They effectively swept this under the carpet because they didn’t find a violation. They didn’t announce a violation. They didn’t disqualify the athletes from the event at which they tested positive. And this is absolutely mandatory under the world anti-doping code that all nations are required to follow.”
WADA has responded that Tygart’s comments seem “politically motivated”. They say CHINADA followed the rules, investigated and reported as required. They say China did NOT have to announce it to the world, or name the individual athletes for the very good reason that false accusations of doping can destroy a career. WADA regulations say the names of athletes should NOT be publicized until or unless it is confirmed they have an Anti Doping Rule Violation.
WADA appoints independent investigator
WADA is the international organization charged with supervising global anti-doping in sports. With its headquarters in Canada and most of its leaders from NATO countries, it is a largely western organization.
They are highly sensitive to criticism from the West. It has pushed back against some of the most extreme criticism, for example from the USADA head. They have also appointed an independent investigator to review what happened in China and whether WADA was correct to accept the Chinese investigation and report.
WADA appointed Eric Cottier, the prosecutor general of a Swiss region. WADA headquarters are in Canada but the organization is registered in Switzerland. USADA has criticized the appointment suggesting that Cottier is not sufficiently “independent”.
Thoms Bach, head of the International Olympic Committee, has voiced support for WADA.
WADA has defended their actions in a press conference and fact sheet about the case.
The controversy may quiet down. But a lot of poison has been spread around. Encouraged by the NY Times and other media, numerous western athletes now claim they feel “cheated” out of medals at the Tokyo Olympics since 5 medals were won by Chinese swimmers involved in the TMZ “doping scandal”.
It is also possible the controversy will continue. Will the “Sports Czar” of the Biden Administration get involved? Will the FBI be designated to investigate? These are now possible in the wake of the Rodchenkov Anti Doping Act which passed Congress in 2020.
Reader comments following articles indicate there is a wellspring of anti-China hostility encouraged by the accusations. The most popular comment on this article says, “When will democracies learn that authoritarian regimes play dirty, and should be viewed as suspect not deserving of good faith.” Another says, “No one knows doping like China knows doping, China knows doping best.” Another one says, “China cheats. Russia cheats. Just like the East Germans did before them. Their governments will meet the same fate as they did.”
Pushback
There has been some pushback to the sensational anti-China accusations. For example, Denis Cotterell is a world class coach who has trained both Australian and Chinese Olympic swimmers. He has spoken out strongly in support of the Chinese swimmers. He says, “I can see what they (the swimmers) go through. I see the measures… The suggestion that it’s systemic is so far from anything I have seen here the whole time. They are so adamant on having clean sport.”
An insightful article from an Australian academic sports authority and popular sports commentator suggests there are political forces at work: “WADA – like the United Nations and other organizations – finds itself in the cross hairs of the great power struggle of our time: a rising China and its challenge to US dominance.”
Geopolitical Consequences
According to the “2024 Annual Threat Assessment of the US Intelligence Community”, China is “challenging longstanding rules of the international system as well as U.S. primacy within it.” China’s positive “international image” is a challenge to U.S. leadership. By this logic, it is in the US interests to damage China’s international reputation and standing.
This raises the question: How did the TMZ get into the hotel kitchen and into the food being served to these Chinese athletes?
In February 2022, accusations of intentional doping were heaped on the Russian figure skater Kamila Valieva. A trace amount of trimetazadine (TMZ) was detected in a drug test taken seven weeks before the Beijing Olympics. There are similarities to the Chinese case: same drug, same trace amount detected, same mystery as to how it was ingested.
Because she could not explain how it got there, Valieva was condemned in the West and ultimately had her international career destroyed. The Russian figure skating sweep was prevented and the Russian team lost their gold medals. The controversy distracted and partially ruined the Beijing Olympics. The “intelligence community” undoubtedly considers this a success.
How did the TMZ get in the hotel kitchen in China? Who are the “whistle blowers” who informed the New York Times and ARD and supplied the names of the athletes who tested positive for the trace amount of TMZ?
The anti doping crusade is being manipulated by powerful forces with ignoble intentions.
More claims of ‘Hamas mass rape’ proven false
The Cradle | April 20, 2024
A report by Haaretz published on 18 April acknowledges that key allegations claiming Hamas committed mass rape on 7 October are false, including the shocking claim made by the New York Times that nails were driven into a woman’s groin.
On 28 December, the Times published an article claiming it had “viewed photographs of one woman’s corpse that emergency responders discovered in the rubble of a besieged kibbutz with dozens of nails driven into her thighs and groin.”
The authors of the article, Jeffrey Gettleman, Anat Schwartz, and Adam Sella, cited the photograph as evidence that “attacks against women were not isolated events but part of a broader pattern of gender-based violence on Oct. 7.”
However, Haaretz stated in its 18 April report that its journalists had seen the photo in question but that it does not appear to show what the Times claimed.
The photo was shown to Haaretz by Chaim Otmazgin, who is both a commander in the ZAKA rescue service and a reservist in the Israeli army.
ZAKA volunteers were allowed by the Israeli army to collect corpses at various sites on 7 October, including in Kibbutz Be’eri and at the Nova festival, where many were killed during the Hamas attack, including many by Israeli forces, per the Hannibal Directive.
The Israeli paper reported that “Otmazgin showed several of the photographs in his possession to Haaretz, including the one said to show nails having been inserted into the groin. The photograph was taken almost a week after the massacre and is definitely of poor quality. The possibility that what is depicted is indeed nails seems reasonable, certainly in combination with his testimony, but it’s impossible to determine this unequivocally.”
Haaretz added that its journalists “saw part of the documentation in Otmazgin’s possession during an in-person meeting – but he said he did not want to share the rest of out of respect for the dead and their families.”
Another key rape claim by Otmazgin has already been shown to be false. Haaretz reports further that in one of the kibbutzim near Gaza, Otmazgin found “the bodies of a mother and her two daughters, with one of the daughters found in a separate room, her clothes pulled down. He concluded, mistakenly, that the girl had been raped.”
Before Otmazgin entered the room, the bodies had already been photographed fully clothed by army explosives experts (sappers) who were combing the home to ensure it was safe to enter. It was only later that the clothes of one of the two daughters had been pulled down.
Haaretz reports, “Although the bodies were clothed when the sappers had photographed them, the clothes of one of the daughters had been pulled down while her body was being dragged to another room. The discovery of this mistake led to a correction in the report of the Association of Rape Crisis Centers and the publication of a clarification on the subject in Haaretz as well.”
It in unclear why the body was dragged, rather than carried, and by whom. This raises questions of whether Otmazgin or someone else sought to stage a rape scene by pulling the daughter’s clothes down after the sappers had photographed the bodies.
Haaretz also cited its reporting in December that Yossi Landau of ZAKA spread two false stories about alleged Hamas atrocities on 7 October. Landau falsely claimed that about 20 bound and burned bodies of children were supposedly found on a kibbutz and that he found the body of a pregnant woman whose belly had been slit open.
The story of the pregnant woman, which included the distribution of a false video that had been shot at a different time and a different place, was repeated by Israeli spokespersons.
In the 18 April report, Haaretz also notes the case of the Secret Forest project in Cyprus, which provided psychological support to more than 1,000 survivors of 7 October by telephone.
The organization claimed that when its interviewers asked survivors if they had witnessed sexual violence, eight said they had been eyewitnesses to such assaults, five said they had been earwitnesses, and two others replied in vague terms.
However, Haaretz notes, “The project is not in possession of details about these cases because the interviewers were instructed not to pursue the subject,” calling the Secret Forest project’s claims into question.
Haaretz does not say why the interviewers were instructed not to pursue the subject further.
The 18 April Haaretz report made another important acknowledgment. It added that Israeli police do not have video evidence of any cases of sexual assault from 7 October.
On 23 October, the Israeli army showed a 43-minute video to selected journalists, claiming it showed Hamas atrocities.
The Times of Israel reported that Israeli Army Major Gen. Mickey Edelstein, who briefed reporters after the viewing, said that “we have evidence” of rape but “we cannot share it,” declining to elaborate further.
However, Haaretz reported that “it emerges that the intelligence material collected by the police and the intelligence bodies, including footage from terrorists’ body cameras, does not contain visual documentation of any acts of rape themselves.”
Haaretz noted its previous reporting from November, which showed “the police had not collected any forensic evidence of the perpetration of sex crimes during the massacre.”
Haaretz added as well that forensic pathologists who examined completely or partially naked bodies for the possibility of rape at the Shura military base found “no signs on any of those bodies attesting to sexual relations having taken place or of mutilation of genitalia.”
At the same time, the pathologists only had time to examine roughly 25 percent of the corpses brought to the Shura base.
The 18 April Haaretz report also refuted the claim made by senior Israeli officials and representatives that Hamas fighters received explicit orders from the Hamas leadership to rape Israelis during the 7 October attack. “The sex crimes were planned in advance,” Israel’s UN ambassador, Gilad Erdan, claimed in December.
Defense Minister Yoav Gallant made the same claim, as reported by the Washington Post.
But a spokeswoman for Gallant told Haaretz that the quote had been “distorted and that Gallant had never said that.”
Haaretz reported that after checking with several security bodies, “Israel has no proof that the terrorists of Hamas or other organizations received explicit orders to commit acts of rape.”
Finally, Haaretz reports that although Pramila Patten, the UN’s Special Representative on Sexual Violence in Conflict, “urged Israel to sign a cooperation framework with her office” to properly investigate claims Hamas fighters committed mass rape, Israeli politicians refused to do so.
Haaretz writes, “The politicians in Israel did exactly the opposite.” Foreign Minister Yisrael Katz accused the UN of “the silencing of the sex crimes” immediately after Patten’s report was made public, even though the report was sympathetic to Israeli claims.
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Inside the book that maps the architecture behind global governance — from the Epstein files to the Pact for the Future
Lies are Unbekoming | April 1, 2026
On June 13, 2019, the United Nations and the World Economic Forum signed a partnership deal to “accelerate the implementation of the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development.” That same evening, WEF president Börge Brende — Norway’s former Foreign Minister — had dinner with Jeffrey Epstein at Epstein’s Manhattan townhouse. The Epstein files, released January 2026, contain an exchange between the two from the previous year. Epstein to Brende: “Davos can really replace the UN. C21, cyber, crypto . genetics… intl coordination.” Brende back to Epstein: “Exactly — we need a new global architecture. World Economic Forum (Davos) is uniquely positioned — public private.”
The next day, the UN General Assembly adopted the framework for restructuring global governance.
That sequence — the partnership signing, the Epstein dinner, the candid admission about replacing the UN with a public-private architecture, and then the formal adoption — opens Jacob Nordangård’s The Digital World Brain. Pages two and three. Footnoted to the UN resolution number, the Epstein files, and the General Assembly record.
I keep coming back to it because it captures what this book does that almost nothing else in the independent research space manages. I’ve followed Jacob’s work for years now and interviewed him about his research. Each book peels back another layer of the same institutional architecture, and each time I think he’s reached the limit of what can be documented, the next one goes further. Nordangård doesn’t speculate. He doesn’t editorialize much. He lays institutional actions next to each other in chronological order and lets the pattern announce itself. … continue
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