The fantasy explanations for excess deaths as panic sets in
By Guy Hatchard | TCW Defending Freedom | July 25, 2023
The writer is in New Zealand
On Saturday the Daily Express headlined a story ‘Experts call for urgent investigation as excess deaths spark “dangerous” theories’. UK excess deaths in 2023 have risen to levels commensurate with 2020 alpha variant deaths during the height of the pandemic, but the article admits that the 2023 excess is not due to Covid. Most concerning is the death toll in the 15-44 age group which exceeds 2020 and prior years, an age group which was mostly mildly affected by Covid.
As here in New Zealand, where our rates of excess death are measurably higher than the UK, the Westminster government is keeping quiet and looking the other way. Dr Charles Levinson, Medical Director of private GP service Doctorcall, said the ‘silence’ from the government was allowing conspiracy theories to flourish, including from anti-vaxxers, and added: ‘A refusal to openly discuss these statistics is an abdication of responsibility from parts of the scientific community [and the government], leading to an irreversible erosion of trust by parts of society.’ We agree.
So we are not conspiracy theorists when we warn that excess deaths are up, mainstream scientists agree with us, but they don’t want the jabs they pushed on people to be revealed as the cause, or even openly discussed – that could be very embarrassing.
Why aren’t governments investigating? It might be a fair guess that governments are well aware of excess deaths and afraid to investigate, because what limited data they have released suggests clearly that those asking questions about vaccine safety are right about the cause.
Excess deaths appear to be clustered around a range of cardiac events scientifically proven and acknowledged to be related to mRNA vaccines, and cancers suspected to be. The Boston Globe for example headlines ‘Rise in cancer among younger people worries and puzzles doctors’. Indian doctor Feruzi Mehta from Mumbai tweets that heart attack deaths among younger people now make up 15-20 per cent of the total, when it was just 1-2 per cent ten years ago.
Doctors like Mehta speaking up are risking de-registration. Therefore most others, faced by rising incidence of illness and death especially among the young, are remaining silent. However, some diehards are doubling down or even succumbing to the irrational.
Silence is one thing, but the NZ Prime Minister’s office is actively funding a disinformation project dedicated to discrediting anyone who asks questions about vaccine safety, labelling them violent extremists, paedophiles, satanists, anti-Semites, animal torturers, white supremacists, neo-Nazis and anti-transgender. All these wild and incredible accusations are explicitly made during the first 12 minutes of the first episode of a seven-part podcast series produced by RNZ called Undercurrent in which they interview government-funded disinformation experts. (Twelve minutes of this half-baked smear campaign was enough exposure for me to press the pause button.)
The problem with the RNZ podcast so far (aside from its lengthy episodes and unrelenting madness) is that it doesn’t actually discuss vaccine injuries or unprecedented rates of excess deaths (or even mention that there are such things). RNZ began putting the podcast series together more than ten months ago. Since that time it has become apparent that worrying excess death rates have persisted, but RNZ has apparently decided to avoid mentioning the problem. There is a possible reason for this: once you get into inventing causes of excess deaths you really do begin to sound mad.
For example, the NY Times suggests that extreme heat is causing hundreds of extra deaths. Alex Berenson, award-winning former NYT journalist, responds to this kind of reporting with ‘The New York Times has lost its mind. And by mind, I mean principles and understanding of the First Amendment (the right to free speech).’ In which he says the NYT has walked into the government censorship trap, cancelling those voicing concerns including himself.
A quick survey of other suggested causes of record excess deaths suggested by mainstream media ranges from the just possible marginal effect of lockdowns to the implausible alcohol consumption, loneliness, too much exercise, gardening, vacations, climate change and the really far out: ‘there is too much air’. One News in NZ tweeted that people in Mount Maunganui are dying of air pollution in large numbers, along with a picture of its pristine coastline. You can feel the panic setting in, can’t you? Something terrible is happening, but people are very afraid to face up to it.
Pro-vaccine advocate Professor Peter Hotez is recommending staying at home. He is warning against going to see the blockbuster Barbie or Oppenheimer movies at the cinema because you might bring Covid home with you. Incredibly he joins with RNZ in thinking that concern about vaccine safety is a form of anti-Semitism.
It doesn’t take much thought to realise that the underlying concern here is the increasingly noticeable high rate of excess deaths and the lack of any plausible explanation. All this is happening after mass vaccinations with a novel biotechnology drug. How long are we going to go on without acknowledging the elephant in the room or more especially tabulating how many among those dying are vaccinated or unvaccinated?
Just remember the paragraph with which we started this article. Scientists are now warning us that excess deaths are real and very concerning, not imaginary as our politicians and some uninformed medicos and media hacks are still pressing us to accept, against the evidence.
We are facing a real-life emergency. Our EDs and hospitals are overwhelmed. Young people are dying of conditions that used to mainly affect the elderly, but the media, the government, and the medical establishment want the subject to remain taboo. They are funding efforts to marginalise those asking questions, shooting the messenger rather than acknowledging the problem and searching for solutions. Time to wake up from the fantasy.
RFK Jr’s cautionary position on Cell Phone radiation is supported by “the science”
Unlike mRNA technology, exposure to Cell Phone radiation cannot be avoided. Many studies confirm that it is far from harmless.
By Madhava Setty | An Insult to Intuition | July 11, 2023
The Federal Communications Commission (FCC) regulates communications technology but does not independently review its safety. It relies on the FDA, an agency that has been derelict in its duty to protect the public from emerging technology like mRNA “vaccines”.
Last month RFK, Jr appeared on the Joe Rogan Experience podcast for another long form discussion. Rogan announced up front that he intended to allow Kennedy to speak without interrupting him. A lesson he learned after watching an embarrassing exchange between Kennedy and Krystal Ball, co-host of “Breaking Points”, in May.
In that interview, Ball stated that although she believed that Kennedy was a genuine person, she disagreed with his views on vaccines. But rather than allowing Kennedy to explain his position and cite the evidence that supported it, Ball stepped out of her role as an objective journalist and played the part of a defense attorney for the medical establishment, repeatedly raising objections every few seconds.
Her audience took note. She was skewered in the comment section while Kennedy was lauded for his composure and patience.
With license to riff on JRE, Kennedy laid out coherent and defensible explanations for the decline in our population’s physical and psychological health. As to be expected, the schismatic MSM framed his hypotheses as more kooky conspiracy theories from the biggest spreader of dangerous misinformation who also happens to be arguably the biggest and most successful environmentalist on the planet who has fought polluters in the interest of public health for over three decades.
What they still cannot seem to grasp (or purposefully choose not to) is that Kennedy is asserting that there are plausible explanations for our deteriorating health that need to be sincerely investigated before being dismissed out of hand.
Chronic diseases among children exploded with the expansion of the Childhood Vaccination Schedule. Shouldn’t we rule this out as a potential cause if we care about our kids?
How do we know that environmental toxins aren’t contributing to gender dysphoria? We don’t.
Midway through the conversation with Rogan, Kennedy floated the possibility that 5G radiation is opening up our blood brain barrier to toxins. The blood brain barrier is a highly selective biological system designed to protect our central nervous system.
Kennedy asserted that he never puts his cellular phone next to his ear while speaking and that he carries his phone in his rear pocket. Kennedy let us know that he has seen enough evidence that incriminates ElectroMagnetic Radiation (EMR) as the cause of brain tumors in some cases.
Rogan asked Kennedy how 5G EMR could mess with the Blood Brain Barrier. Kennedy admitted that it was outside his scope of knowledge. Kennedy critics mocked the pair, criticizing him for his inability to explain complex biochemistry and Rogan for accepting the “crazy” theory prima facie.
Even Dr. Vinay Prasad, a sensible critic of public policy over the last three years tweeted that while Kennedy would be a formidable opponent in a debate with the scientific orthodoxy, his position on radiation spewing from your wifi router was nuts:
In his tweet above Prasad lets us know that he thinks Kennedy has made good points in his criticism of the pandemic response but is still prone to unsubstantiated opinions.
Prasad, a professor of Epidemiology and Biostatistics at UCSF, has been one of the saner voices coming from the medical establishment. He’s been critical of lockdowns, masking and the exaggeration of “long Covid”. He is a proponent of evidence-based medicine, peer-reviewed literature and meta-analyses of randomized controlled studies.
My biggest criticism of Prasad is that he doesn’t seem to acknowledge the bias in published literature nearly enough. I believe this has led him to reject the possibility of effective early treatment of Covid-19. Though I disagree with him on this subject, I acknowledge that he has investigated the evidence before coming to any conclusion.
For someone who prides himself on only taking stands that are backed by “good” data, Prasad’s blithe dismissal of the dangers of WiFi radiation is puzzling. I don’t think he has actually done any research into the topic. At the very least he hasn’t cited any data that proves that wifi technology is safe. Instead he is relying on his own common sense, which somehow in this case suffices for decisive proof.
Your wireless device exchanges vast amounts of information with cellular towers and wifi routers using electromagnetic waves. Download and upload speeds are dependent upon the frequency of the EM waves used. The higher the frequency, the more information that can be transferred in a given amount of time.
All good. Want quicker downloads of hi-def video? You’re going to need a system that relies on higher frequency photons.
The problem is that frequency of the EM waves is directly proportional to its energy. This fundamental relationship is known as the Planck-Einstein relation:
E = hv
Where v = frequency, h = Planck’s constant and E = Energy.
As you can see, our 3G phones from just a decade ago emit and receive EMR at frequencies 100x less than today’s 5G devices. The energy of photons emitted and received by our new phones is 100x greater than 3G phones, more or less.
Prevailing opinion assumes that photons are generally safe if their frequency is below a certain threshold, making it non-ionizing. Non-ionizing radiation cannot break chemical bonds. However with regard to the complex physiology of living beings where cellular function relies on tiny and ephemeral membrane potentials, this explanation is intuitively over simplistic.
The FCC has been busy auctioning 5G frequency bands to telecommunications companies:
“The FCC has made auctioning high-band spectrum a priority. The FCC concluded its first 5G spectrum auctions in the 28 GHz band; the 24 GHz band; and the upper 37 GHz, 39 GHz, and 47 GHz bands.”
Moreover they believe that this technology is vital for economic growth and needs to be pushed along:
“The FCC must update infrastructure policy to encourage investment in 5G networks. As Chairwoman Rosenworcel has said: ‘if we want broad economic growth and widespread mobile opportunity, we need to avoid unnecessary delays in the state and local approval process. That’s because they can slow deployment.’”
If the FCC is so clearly interested in the expansion of wireless technology, it must be safe, right?
Wrong.
Going down the Rabbit Hole…
The FCC has no formal body that investigates the safety of the technology it manages/regulates. The FCC takes its cues from the FDA and states:
“According to the FDA and the World Health Organization (WHO), among other organizations, to date, there is no consistent or credible scientific evidence of health problems caused by the exposure to radio frequency energy emitted by cell phones. The FDA further states that “the weight of the scientific evidence does not support an increase in health risks from radio frequency exposure from cell phone use at or below the radio frequency exposure limits set by the FCC”
This statement on the FCC website then directs us to this page from the FDA, “Scientific Evidence for Cell Phone Safety” where it is definitively stated:
“The state of scientific knowledge continues to demonstrate that:
- The current limit on radio frequency (RF) energy set by the Federal Communications Commission remains acceptable for protecting the public health. The FDA recently provided an updated assessment of the current limits based on the currently available scientific evidence (see Letter from the FDA to the FCC on Radiofrequency Exposure– PDF 74KB).
Okay. Now let’s look at this letter from the FDA that apparently provides an updated assessment of the available evidence.
It is a letter from Jeffrey Shuren, M.D., J.D., Director Center for Devices and Radiological Health at the FDA to Mr. Julius Knapp, Chief Office of Engineering and Technology at the FCC in response to Knapp’s request for guidance with regard to safety standards of 5G technology. This letter was written on April 14, 2019.
Here’s the key paragraph from the letter:
Dr. Shuran, from the FDA, assures the FCC that no changes to safety standards are warranted at this time.
The rodent study from the NTP mentioned is titled “Cell Phone Radio Frequency Radiation”. They summarize:
NTP conducted two-year toxicology studies in rats and mice to help clarify potential health hazards, including cancer risk, from exposure to RFR (Radio Frequency Radiation) like that used in 2G and 3G cell phones which operate within a range of frequencies from about 700–2700 megahertz (MHz). These were published as Technical Reports in November 2018.
The NTP studies found that high exposure to RFR (900 MHz) used by cell phones was associated with:
- Clear evidence of an association with tumors in the hearts of male rats. The tumors were malignant schwannomas.
- Some evidence of an association with tumors in the brains of male rats. The tumors were malignant gliomas.
- Some evidence of an association with tumors in the adrenal glands of male rats. The tumors were benign, malignant, or complex combined pheochromocytoma.
NTP scientists found that RFR exposure was associated with an increase in DNA damage. Specifically, they found RFR exposure was linked with significant increases in DNA damage in:
- the frontal cortex of the brain in male mice,
- the blood cells of female mice, and
- the hippocampus of male rats.
So… the latest safety guidelines with regard to 5G radiation cite a study from 2018 that found evidence of heart, brain and adrenal tumors in rodents that were associated with exposure to 2 and 3G cellphone radiation.
The study also showed an association of RFR with DNA damage. This is reasonable evidence that there is more to be understood about the safety of non-ionizing radiation.
Moreover, there are studies like this one that was done over 40 years ago demonstrating that periods of RFR exposure in the 1.3 GHz range do, in fact, make the blood brain barrier more permeable in rats. Still sound nutty to you, Dr. Prasad?
But there’s no cause for concern because Dr. Shuran says that “NTP’s experimental findings should not be applied to human cell phone usage.”
Most people in this country have abandoned their 2 and 3G devices years ago for ones that use the updated networks. Perhaps it’s time to do a few more studies around the technology that the FCC is so excited for us to enjoy.
Contrary to the public’s and the FDA’s complacency around this rapidly deployed technology, scientists from around the world have been urging the FCC to place a moratorium on the expansion of RFR bands required for 5G communications.
This is an excellent summary article that appeared in the Observations/Opinions section of Scientific American in 2019 around the time the FDA vouched for the technology: “We Have No Reason to Believe that 5G is Safe”.
Author Joel Moskowitz lays out a damning refutation of the FDA’s position citing over 500 studies that demonstrate biological effects from RFR from cellphones, celltowers, wifi routers and power lines. Furthermore, Moskowitz reports that:
- 240 scientists who have authored peer-reviewed, published papers on the topic have signed the International EMF Scientist Appeal, which calls for more stringent safety guidelines
- The World Health Organization’s International Agency for Research on Cancer (IARC) classified RFR as “possibly carcinogenic to humans” in 2011.
- There is no research on health effects of 5G technology. However, we have considerable evidence about the harmful effects of 2G and 3G. Little is known about the effects of exposure to 4G, a 10-year-old technology, because governments have been remiss in funding this research.
- There are 250 scientists and medical doctors who signed the 5G Appeal which calls for an immediate moratorium on the deployment of 5G
Beyond influencers like Dr. Prasad who call the potential risk of increasing EMR in our environment “nutty”, there is a clear campaign to frame any such danger as another “conspiracy theory”.
Articles like this one from the Science section of the NYT titled, “Your 5G phone won’t hurt you, but Russia wants you to think otherwise” attempt to convince us that EMR in the 5G band must be safe because publications like RT America (formerly known as Russia Today) say it isn’t.
The piece is a wonderful of example of propaganda from what is widely considered a reliable source of information among “educated” readers. It’s loaded with pseudoscience and citations that don’t actually substantiate the author’s thesis that 5G EMR is perfectly safe. It’s written for an audience that would rather be spoonfed than educated.
This was the article that opened my eyes to how far the Gray Lady would go to spin the truth. I was embarrassingly late to the game. I didn’t write a rebuttal until 2020:
What we are seeing today is an inexplicable abandonment of common sense. Highly profitable, international entities are granted the same rights as a defendant in a trial. They are innocent until proven guilty beyond any reasonable doubt.
Why is the standard of proof of harm for new technologies like mRNA therapies and 5G so high?
One may argue that the Covid shots afforded a brief period of protection from a highly survivable disease and should be given some latitude, but what is the life saving benefit of faster downloads?
Unlike the jabs, which could be avoided (albeit often impractically), every person is constantly being bombarded with higher frequency radiation whether they like it or not. Shouldn’t this technology meet an even greater standard of safety?
US veteran faked heroics on Ukraine battlefield to become rich
By Ahmed Adel | July 19, 2023
A US military veteran, who claimed battlefield victories as a combatant in Ukraine and gained fame through media interviews and Twitter posts by boasting about his exploits against Russian forces, has been exposed for lying to create a false image that he could take advantage of after the end of the conflict to become rich. This again demonstrates the unprofessionalism of Western media, which knowingly advanced the lies of a mercenary for propaganda reasons.
James Vasquez, who has amassed more than 400,000 followers on Twitter and is regularly quoted by CNN and the New York Times, has falsely claimed exploits on the Ukraine battlefield, Insider reported on July 16.
The portal, which cited allegations by four other foreign volunteers in Ukraine, also confirmed through the Pentagon that Vasquez lied about his military history when he claimed to have had combat deployments as a sergeant in the US Army in Iraq and Kuwait. It is revealed that he served as an electrical systems repairman in the US Army Reserve.
Vasquez’s social media posts often went viral, purportedly about his exploits on the front lines.
“In his videos and posts, he bragged about capturing Russians and taking out tanks, was regularly interviewed by the news media, and made catchy claims including that he imagined the ‘punchable’ Tucker Carlson when preparing for battle,” wrote the portal.
Other fighters told the media that Vasquez boasted he would become a millionaire when the conflict ended.
“James said, and I quote, ‘I’m never gonna go back to work as a handyman. I’m probably never gonna have to work again after this war. I’m gonna be famous,’” said Tim, an American man working with the Ukrainian army who spoke to Insider on the condition of withholding his last name.
Vasquez created his claims by going to areas where battles had recently occurred, filming videos of destroyed equipment and claiming achievements as his own, say other foreigners. In one case, he claimed on Twitter that he was heading to Soledar, where heavy fighting was allegedly occurring. However, Ukrainian forces had withdrawn from the area days earlier.
Accusations against Vasquez apparently began to surface earlier this year. Sarah Ashton-Cirillo, an American who works in the Ukrainian Territorial Defence Forces media department, said in a Twitter post in March that Vasquez could not have legally gone on combat missions because he did not have a contract with the Ukrainian Armed Forces.
“I met James Vasquez three times for a total of about four hours,” she told Insider. “During our last meeting, in the presence of another person, he gave himself up and confirmed what I had known since last summer, that he was never a member of the AFU. That night he stated clearly he never had a contract nor had he ever been paid. This was in January. It was the last time I saw him.”
Although Vasquez was often accused of being a fraud or a scammer who exploited the situation in Ukraine for personal gain or fame, one of the most serious accusations against him was that he endangered the safety of his fellow fighters for social media clout. In one instance, he posted a video on Twitter that showed him standing next to a sign that indicated the exact coordinates of the unit he was with, which could have exposed them to a Russian attack.
Ashton-Cirillo told Insider : “As someone who notified a large media outlet about James Vasquez in June of 2022 and stated to them clearly that Vasquez had no combat experience and was filming fake fight scenes, it is disgraceful that they and so many other journalists advanced his lies for so long.”
This is far from being the only example of propaganda deployed by Western media in relation to Ukraine, and Ashton-Cirillo is fully aware of this fact considering her own position. In fact, she engages in such propaganda. Rather, her main concern was that Vasquez became too obvious in his propaganda stunts, and she knew it was only a matter of time until it all is exposed.
For her part, April Huggett, a Canadian volunteer who knew Vasquez, told Insider in a text message that he would exaggerate how close he was to the heavy fighting.
“I did realise very quickly he was sitting comfy right in Maidan and he was not leaving Kiev very often,” she said. “He also drank so much.”
“James just kept talking about becoming a millionaire after this,” Huggett continued.
“I’m tired, but I’m not sorry I exposed the lying scammer. […] We took away his fame and fortune, we made people see him for the disgrace he is,” she added.
Ahmed Adel is a Cairo-based geopolitics and political economy researcher.
An Illustrious Censorship Institute
Harvard’s “Berkmen Klein Center for Internet & Society”
Former New Zealand Tyrant Jacinda Ardern delivering keynote address at Harvard
By John Leake | Courageous Discourse | July 17, 2023
A friend recently sent me a flagrantly political New York Times Editorial by Kate Klonick, “an associate professor of law at St. John’s University who studies law and technology, including the governance of online speech by private platforms.”
In her Opinion, Professor Klonick asserts:
No feat of rhetoric could disguise the flagrantly political nature of the federal court ruling on July 4 that restricted the Biden administration’s communications with social media platforms — but Judge Terry A. Doughty, who wrote the opinion, did his best to cover his tracks. The 155-page opinion, which could hinder the government’s efforts to counter false and misleading online speech about issues like election interference and vaccine safety, is laced with lofty references to George Orwell and quotations from Benjamin Franklin and Thomas Jefferson, making it more reminiscent of a civics essay than a federal judicial opinion.
Two things immediately came to mind as I read this essay:
1). Gramsci’s “Long March Through the Institutions” is now complete, having now made its way through the law department as St. John’s University. Words can’t express how disheartening I found this.
2). Professor Klonick should spend less time pontificating about “online speech” and “vaccine safety” and more time studying civics.
The trouble with lawyers like her is that they don’t understand the SPIRIT of the First Amendment. Because humans are mortal and human affairs are unstable and subject to powerful external forces, the state can always point to innumerable threats (real, perceived, and exaggerated) against which it invokes Emergency Power to reduce or suspend constitutional rules in order “to protect” the citizenry from itself and from foreigners.
James Madison, the author of the U.S. Constitution, recognized that in the grand scheme of human affairs, an overgrown executive posed a greater threat to the citizenry than the unfettered expression of free speech, which will often contain errors.
After reading Professor Klonick’s flagrantly political editorial, I pondered the question: how does the New York Times go about curating columnists like her—that is, a person with a distinguished academic resume who is willing to advocate America’s baleful new censorship regime?
A little Googling revealed that she is is on leave from St. John’s for 2022-2023 serving as a Visiting Scholar at the Rebooting Social Media Institute at Harvard University. An examination of this Institute revealed that it’s a project of Harvard’s Berkman Klein Center for Internet & Society, which recently announced that “Former New Zealand leader Jacinda Ardern joins Berkman Klein Center as Knight Tech Governance Leadership Fellow.”
Her appointment is a notable example of how many prominent public figures who advocated or imposed COVID-19 vaccine mandates “fell upward” by landing plum positions at America’s most prestigious academic institutions after public backlash against their policies and conduct. During her tenure as New Zealand Prime Minister, Ardern imposed some of the most draconian lockdowns and vaccine mandates in the world. In the spring of this year, as New Zealanders grew weary of her tyranny, she resigned and was shortly thereafter offered a job a Harvard.
A little research of financial supports of the Berkman Klein center resulted in this list of donors, which includes the Gates Foundation, George Soros’s Open Society Foundation, Microsoft, USAID, and the World Economic Forum.
And so we see how easy it is to capture men and women who have demonstrated great ambition, ability, and success in their careers, but who have no real interest in or understanding of Constitutional government.
The New York Times’ Latest Smear Piece Against Tucker Shows That Liberals Have Lost The Plot
BY ANDREW KORYBKO | JULY 16, 2023
The New York Times’ (NYT) Jonathan Weisman lost the plot in the article that he wrote in response to Tucker Carlson asking Republican presidential candidates about Ukraine. Titled “Tucker Carlson Turns a Christian Presidential Forum Into a Putin Showcase”, this self-described “veteran journalist” wanted to manipulate his audience’s perceptions about his much more popular peer by getting them to think that he’s shilling for the Russian leader. Instead, Weisman came off as cringey, desperate, and hateful.
Right at the start, the NYT’s correspondent declared that “Jesus is out. Vladimir V. Putin is in”, which was meant to make it seem like the Christians at Friday’s Family Leadership conference in Des Moise abandoned their god for a false idol. Nobody who sincerely respects Christians would ever imply what Weisman just did, which suggests that he was so triggered by Tucker’s questions about Ukraine that he lost his cool by attacking all of his target’s fellow believers as a form of collective punishment.
This wouldn’t be the first time that he couldn’t control his emotions either since he was demoted in August 2019 after an ethno-misogynist bigotry scandal that he sparked on social media. Weisman therefore has a track record of lashing out against certain identity groups in response to being offended by something that one of their representatives said or did, which extends credence to the abovementioned interpretation of what he intended to convey in that particular passage of his article.
Moving along, Weisman described Tucker as “confrontational” for reacting to former Vice President Mike Pence’s criticism of the Biden Administration’s supposedly slow dispatch of military aid to Ukraine after he wondered aloud why that Republican presidential candidate is so distressed about this. There’s nothing “confrontational” in asking why a person running for the country’s top office cares more about a foreign country than their own, however, which is another example of Weisman’s false framing.
The next one came right after when he wrote that “For good measure, Mr. Carlson called Ukraine an American ‘client state,’ accused Ukraine’s Jewish leader, Volodymyr Zelensky, of persecuting Christians and strongly indicated Mr. Pence had been conned, despite evidence to the contrary.” Weisman wanted his audience to think that Tucker was just peddling conspiracy theories, but the reality is that it’s this NYT correspondent who was yet again attempting to manipulate his audience by falsely framing everything.
To debunk each of his points in the order that they were shared: 1) Ukraine’s top commander Valery Zaluzhny complained to the Washington Post on the same day as Weisman’s article that Kiev’s allies have placed conditions on the use of the weapons they’ve provided; 2) Kiev is cracking down against the Ukrainian Orthodox Church (UOC) on the pretext that it’s a ‘fifth column’; and 3) Zelensky’s former advisor Alexey Arestovich recently admitted that Ukraine only has “emotional” influence over the West.
Expanding on the above: 1) No truly sovereign state would ever accept anyone telling them what they can do with weapons in the hands of their own soldiers; 2) Pope Francis’ and the UN’s public expressions of concern over this crackdown prove that it’s not just the Kremlin that’s critical of Kiev’s campaign against the UOC; and 3) Arestovich, who can’t credibly be described as a so-called “Russian agent”, has a solid point about the means that Ukraine employs to manipulate Western perceptions about the conflict.
It should also be said that Weisman’s reference to Zelensky’s Jewish faith doesn’t discredit Pope Francis’ and the UN’s concern about Kiev’s latest campaign against a particular Christian community, which is being carried out for Russophobic reasons, not any other ones. In fact, drawing attention to the Ukrainian leader’s religion risks being interpreted by anti-Semites as a dog whistle prompting them to remind everyone that local Jews were responsible for the Romans putting Jesus to death.
This observation is tragically ironic since Weisman’s brief NYT bio mentions that he’s the author of “(((Semitism))): Being Jewish in America in the Age of Trump”, which warns about what he claims is the revival of anti-Semitism in the US. He previously told NPR that he was inspired to write it after being viciously trolled by fascists on Twitter, yet now he might have just unwittingly provoked them into more online hatemongering after falsely implying that Zelensky’s faith means that Kiev can’t be anti-Christian.
Nobody’s identity immunizes them from being bigoted towards anyone else, which Weisman himself knows for a fact as proven by his previously cited ethno-misogynist bigotry scandal. Likewise, Zelensky’s Jewish faith is irrelevant to his regime’s anti-Christian policies, just like any particular aspect of an anti-Semite’s identity is irrelevant to their hatred of Jews. Had Weisman not been so triggered by Tucker getting Pence to discredit himself before voters, then he’d likely never have suggested otherwise.
His train wreck of an article then continued after he declined to address the indisputable fact brought up by his much more popular peer in his question to Senator Tim Scott about why he cares more about dead Ukrainians than about his own fellow Americans who are killed by fentanyl from Mexico. All that Weisman could muster in response was to describe Tucker’s question as “a signature dismissive response”, which was actually another example of he himself attempting to dismiss Tucker’s valid point.
He then tries to explain away his efforts thus far to manipulate his audience’s perceptions by writing that “The divide in the Republican Party between traditional conservatives who favor the projection of American military might and a new, more isolationist wing that leans toward Russia is nothing new. But the Family Leadership Summit was supposed to be a showcase of Christian values, where social issues like abortion and transgender rights were expected to be center stage.”
What Weisman either can’t countenance due to his hardcore liberal bias or is too dishonest to openly admit is that Tucker’s questions about Ukraine are inextricably connected to Christian values from the Republican base’s perspective. As they see it, pumping a country with tens of billions of dollars’ worth of taxpayer-provided weapons to fight a proxy war that’s impossible for their side to win perpetuates the internecine slaughter of tens of thousands of fellow believers, which is anti-Christian to the core.
While he has the right to see things differently, it was extremely disrespectful for him to mock Christians in the way that he did in his response to Tucker, which shows that Weisman was once again unable to remain calm after being triggered by a contrarian opinion. The NYT’s editors should have caught his thinly disguised attack against that entire religious community, especially considering his earlier bigotry scandal, but it’s likely that they agree with him and that’s why they declined to remove that part.
The takeaway is that liberals have lost the plot now that they’re attacking Christians like Weisman just did in his piece for the NYT after one the world’s most popular journalists questioned Republican presidential candidates about their support for NATO’s proxy war on Russia in Ukraine. They can’t accept that Kiev’s counteroffensive failed and peace talks will thus likely resume by year’s end since it goes against their ideology, which is why they’re attacking an entire religion out of cognitive dissonance.
The War on ‘Misinformation’: Outlawing Dissident Data on the Road to Tyranny
Judge Terry A. Doughty’s Defense of the Right to be Wrong
Michael Hoffman’s Revelation of the Method | July 12, 2023
“Misinformation” [noun]: Any data that contradicts Establishment dogma
Fittingly, on Independence Day, July 4, U.S. Federal Judge Terry A. Doughty in the Western District of Louisiana, issued a preliminary injunction in the case of Missouri v. Biden, documenting and excoriating the Federal government’s abrogation of the First Amendment with regard to policing social media.
The patricians assigned exalted status as “First Amendment experts” by their cronies in the legacy media, have lied about Judge Doughty’s ruling and presume to explain it to the rest of us mere plebians in the hope that we will not read the 155 pages of his decision.
Thus, His Eminence Laurence Tribe, Carl M. Loeb University Professor of Constitutional Law Emeritus at Harvard University, together with Leah Litman, professor of law at the University of Michigan, contemptuously dismiss Justice Doughty’s decision as buncombe. They rely on their prestige to convince us of their evidence-free claim that, “The impetus behind the case is the now thoroughly debunked conspiracy theory that the government is somehow strong-arming Big Tech into censoring conservative speech and speakers in violation of the First Amendment.”
Words Intended to Trigger our Obeisance
Notice the words intended to trigger our obeisance to the anathema which Tribe and Litman have pronounced: “thoroughly debunked,” and the old reliable put-down, “conspiracy theory.”
No respectable true believer in the stature and renown of the Carl M. Loeb University Professor of Constitutional Law Emeritus will dare to think otherwise than as prescribed.
Tribe and Litman add to their pejorative-laden rant, stating, “the absurdity of different aspects of the decision…….Each step in the reasoning of the decision manages to be more outlandish than the last…”
“Absurd.” “Outlandish.”
They go further: “There is no shortage of errors in this opinion, which is trying to make the infamous ‘Twitter files’ into constitutional law. Who knows whether the equally infamous U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit will correct any of these mistakes…”
“Infamous.” “Equally infamous.”
A heretical thought occurs to the reader of Tribe and Litman’s invective: prove it. They can’t, so they don’t bother.
Ah, but there’s the rub, fellow plebe. This legal duo need not prove anything. They are famous legal scholars.
Musk’s Twitter file revelations are “infamous” and Justice Doughty is “absurd.” Therefore, predicated on their ad hominem adjudication, Tribe and Litman don’t stoop to offering a refutation because none is necessary. Their ipse dixit is sufficient. We are in the realm of the blind faith required of people by the secular religion that enforces a fundamentalist intellectual conformity which brooks no dissent.
Witness the 155 pages of Doughty’s decision dismissed without a single factual reply concerning the Federal government illegally threatening and pressuring social media which publish disfavored authors and data on the Internet.
But is misinformation really the crux of the issue? Witness the misinformation that pours forth daily from the presses of the sacrosanct New York Times. We need look no further than Michael Shear and David McCabe’s report July 5 in the Times regarding Judge Doughty’s ruling. The issue of government censorship, which concerns all civil libertarians across the political spectrum, is reduced to an “effort by conservatives to document what they contend is a liberal conspiracy.”
That’s not just misinformation, it’s a lie. Two victims of the government crackdown on social media who are plaintiffs in the case of Missouri v. Biden, Dr. Jay Bhattacharya and Dr. Martin Kulldorff, are infectious disease epidemiologists, not conservative Republican politics wonks.
The Great Barrington Declaration of October 4, 2020, criticized lockdown policies and expressed concern about the damaging physical and mental health impacts of lockdowns. Shortly after being published, the Great Barrington Declaration, which was signed and endorsed by numerous health science personnel holding a variety of political views, was censored on social media by Google, Facebook and Twitter under the threat of reprisals from the Biden administration.
Jill Hines is Co-Director of Health Freedom Louisiana, a consumer and human rights advocacy organization. Hines was censored because she advocated against the use of mask mandates for young children. Health Freedom Louisiana’s social-media page was suspended on Facebook in January 2022 for sharing a display board that contained Pfizer’s preclinical trial data. Facebook did the government’s bidding.
There are dozens of examples like these. The New York Times is misinforming its readers into believing that Missouri v. Biden is mainly an issue of Republican partisanship, with no wider significance for all liberty-loving Americans. The Times expects us to believe that Justice Doughty ruled in favor of the victims of government-inspired viewpoint censorship because, in the words of Shear and McCable, he is “favorable to right-wing lawsuits.”
The New York Times is determined to engage in misinformation by falsely characterizing the paramount issue, interdiction of freedom of the press by agents of the Federal government, as something of concern to right-wingers who see “liberal conspiracies” under every bed.
As of July 12, in almost every instance of legacy media misinformation related to the judge’s ruling that we have encountered, at no time were readers provided a link to Justice Doughty’s decision, which is published online, in order to facilitate the now out-of-fashion principle that the people should be encouraged to decide for themselves, rather than being told what to think.
Instead, the Times referred its readers to Litman and Tribe’s splenetic fulmination, in which government censorship is “content moderation,” and ensuring the Biden administration doesn’t threaten online news media if they don’t submit to their censorship orders, becomes, “a huge blow to vital government efforts to harden U.S. democracy against threats of misinformation.”
Without apprehension, we ought to call a thing by its accurate description. In their report, which appeared on New York University’s website, JustSecurity.org, we regret to say that the University of Michigan’s Litman, and Harvard’s Tribe, lied about Judge Doughty’s ruling—as follows:
“… the district court made no effort to identify circumstances where the government came even close to coercing social media companies into doing something they didn’t want to do…”
How does one parse a mendacity that is so transparently false it is beyond chutzpagh? The duo who put forth the preceding statement are insulting the intelligence of their readers on the assumption that they are too lazy to find and study Justice Doughty’s ruling—in which he clearly “identifies” the points at which the Federal government coerced social media companies into censoring scientists, activists and vital alternative information.
Judge for yourself:
Excerpts from Missouri v. Biden documenting Government Coercion of Social Media Companies
“On May 5, 2021, then-White House Press Secretary Jen Psaki (“Psaki”) publicly began pushing Facebook and other social-media platforms to censor COVID-19 misinformation. At a White House Press Conference, Psaki publicly reminded Facebook and other social-media platforms of the threat of ‘legal consequences’ if they do not censor misinformation more aggressively.
“Psaki further stated: ‘The President’s view is that the major platforms have a responsibility related to the health and safety of all Americans to stop amplifying untrustworthy content, disinformation, and misinformation, especially related to COVID-19 vaccinations and elections.’ Psaki linked the threat of a ‘robust anti-trust program’ with the White House’s censorship demand: ‘He also supports better privacy protections and a robust anti-trust program. So, his view is that there’s more that needs to be done to ensure that this type of misinformation; disinformation; damaging, sometime life-threatening information, is not going out to the American public.”
“On January 23, 2021, three days after President Biden took office, Clarke Humphrey (“Humphrey”), who at the time was the Digital Director for the COVID-19 Response Team, emailed Twitter and requested the removal of an anti-COVID-19 vaccine tweet by Robert F. Kennedy, Jr.2 Humphrey sent a copy of the email to Rob Flaherty (“Flaherty”), former Deputy Assistant to the President and Director of Digital Strategy…
“On February 7, 2021, Twitter sent Flaherty a ‘Twitter’s Partner Support Portal’ for expedited review of flagging content for censorship. Twitter recommended that Flaherty designate a list of authorized White House staff to enroll in Twitter’s Partner Support Portal and explained that when authorized reporters submit a ‘ticket’ using the portal, the requests are ‘prioritized’ automatically. Twitter also stated that it had been ‘recently bombarded’ with censorship requests from the White House and would prefer to have a streamlined process. Twitter noted that ‘[i]n a given day last week for example, we had more than four different people within the White House reaching out for issues…”
“On March 15, 2021, Flaherty…demanded a report from Facebook on a recent Washington Post article that accused Facebook of allowing the spread of information leading to vaccine hesitancy…Flaherty followed up by making clear that the White House was seeking more aggressive action on ‘borderline content.”
“On March 22, 2021, Flaherty responded to this email, demanding more detailed information and a plan from Facebook to censor the spread of ‘vaccine hesitancy’ on Facebook. Flaherty also requested more information about and demanded greater censorship by Facebook of ‘sensational,’ ‘vaccine skeptical’ content.”
“On April 13, 2021, after the temporary halt of the Johnson & Johnson vaccine…Flaherty also requested that Facebook monitor ‘misinformation’ relating to the Johnson & Johnson pause and demanded from Facebook a detailed report within twenty-four hours. Facebook provided the detailed report the same day.”
“On April 14, 2021, Flaherty demanded the censorship of Fox News hosts Tucker Carlson and Tomi Lahren because the top post about vaccines that day was ‘Tucker Carlson saying vaccines don’t work and Tomi Lahren stating she won’t take a vaccine..”
“Two days later, on April 16, 2021, Flaherty demanded immediate answers from Facebook regarding the Tucker Carlson video…Facebook…gave the video a 50% demotion for seven days and stated that it would continue to demote the video.”
“…examples of posts that did not violate Facebook’s policies but would nonetheless be suppressed included content that originated from the Children’s Health Defense, a nonprofit activist group headed by Robert F. Kennedy, Jr.” (Mr. Kennedy’s group was abeled by the government as one of the “Disinformation Dozen”).
“On April 21, 2021, Flaherty, Slavitt, and other HHS officials, met with Twitter officials about ‘Twitter Vaccine Misinfo Briefing.’…Twitter discovery responses indicated that during the meeting, White House officials wanted to know why Alex Berenson (“Berenson”) had not been ‘kicked off’ Twitter. Slavitt suggested Berenson was ‘the epicenter of disinfo that radiated outwards to the persuadable public.’ Berenson was suspended thereafter on July 16, 2021, and was permanently deplatformed on August 28, 2021.”
“On April 23, 2021, Flaherty sent Facebook an email including a document entitled “Facebook COVID-19 Vaccine Misinformation Brief” (“the Brief”)…The Brief recommended much more aggressive censorship of Facebook’s enforcement policies and called for progressively severe penalties.”
“From May 28, 2021, to July 10, 2021, a senior Meta (Facebook’s parent) executive reportedly copied Andrew Slavitt (‘Slavitt’), former White House Senior COVID-19 Advisor, on his emails to Surgeon General Murthy (‘Murthy’), alerting them that Meta was engaging in censorship of COVID-19 misinformation according to the White House’s ‘requests’ and indicating ‘expanded penalties’ for individual Facebook accounts that share misinformation…”
“Eric Waldo (‘Waldo’) is the Senior Advisor to the Surgeon General and was formerly Chief Engagement Officer for the Surgeon General’s office…Waldo and the Office of the Surgeon General received a briefing from the Center for Countering Digital Hate (‘CCDH’) about the “Disinformation Dozen.” The Center for Countering Digital Hate gave a presentation about the Disinformation Dozen and how they (CCDH) measured and determined that the Disinformation Dozen were primarily responsible for a significant amount of online misinformation.”
“At the July 15, 2021 press conference, Murthy described health misinformation as one of the biggest obstacles to ending the pandemic; insisted that his advisory was on an urgent public health threat; and stated that misinformation poses an imminent threat to the nation’s health and takes away the freedom to make informed decisions….Murthy also stated that people who question mask mandates and decline vaccinations are following misinformation, which results in illnesses and death. Murthy placed specific blame on social-media platforms for allowing ‘poison’ to spread and further called for an ‘all-of-society approach’ to fight health misinformation. Murthy called upon social-media platforms to operate with greater transparency and accountability, to monitor information more clearly, and to ‘consistently take action against misinformation super-spreaders on their platforms.’ Notably, Waldo agreed in his deposition that the word ‘accountable’ carries with it the threat of consequences.” (Emphasis supplied)
“…on July 20, 2021, at a White House Press Conference, White House Communications Director Kate Bedingfield (‘Bedingfield’) stated that the White House would be announcing whether social-media platforms are legally liable for misinformation spread on their platforms and examining how misinformation fits into the liability protection granted by Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act (which shields social-media platforms from being responsible for posts by third parties on their sites). Bedingfield further stated the administration was reviewing policies that could include amending the Communication Decency Act and that the social-media platforms ‘should be held accountable.’ The public and private pressure from the White House apparently had its intended effect. All twelve members of the ‘Disinformation Dozen’ were censored, and pages, groups, and accounts linked to the Disinformation Dozen were removed…”
“Murthy made statements on the following platforms: a December 21, 2021 podcast threatening to hold social-media platforms accountable for not censoring misinformation; a January 3, 2022 podcast with Alyssa Milano stating that ‘platformers need to step up to be accountable…”
“In addition to ‘misinformation’ regarding COVID-19, the White House also asked social-media companies to censor misinformation regarding climate change, gender discussions, abortion, and economic policy. At an Axios event entitled ‘A Conversation on Battling Misinformation,’ held on June 14, 2022, the White House National Climate Advisor Gina McCarthy (‘McCarthy’) blamed social-media companies for allowing misinformation and disinformation about climate change to spread and explicitly tied these censorship demands with threats of adverse legislation regarding the Communications Decency Act.”
“On June 16, 2022, the White House announced a new task force to target ‘general misinformation’ and disinformation campaigns targeted at women and LBGTQI individuals who are public and political figures, government and civic leaders, activists, and journalists. The June 16, 2022, Memorandum discussed the creation of a task force to reel in ‘online harassment and abuse’ and to develop programs targeting such disinformation campaigns. The Memorandum also called for the Task Force to confer with technology experts and again threatened social-media platforms with adverse legal consequences if the platforms did not censor aggressively enough.”
End quote of excerpts from Missouri v. Biden, July 4, 2023. This judicial freedom document is worthy of study and publication in its entirety.
The War on “Misinformation” — Outlawing Dissident Data on the Road to Tyranny
The question of who is qualified to arbitrate what constitutes misinformation is seldom discussed and mostly neglected, for obvious reasons. If it were deliberated, the bias of the legacy media’s anointed “misinformation experts” (Stanford Internet Observatory, Virality Project, Center for Countering Digital Hate, etc.) would be apparent, along with a larger question: why is “misinformation” supposedly lethal to the commonweal?
In the claustrophobic corridors of conformity where roost our supposed intellectual superiors, there is little historical memory of ideas once denounced as the vilest heresy having been proved right over the course of time, unless those views were on the “progressive” side of the ideological scale.
A truly non-partisan recollection of the past would lead to tolerance and judicious latitude for ideas which the 21st century consensus considers outside the limits of acceptable belief.
Error Has Rights
The precept that error has rights is as old as the Jeffersonian democracy which the Biden administration and its friends in high places, claim to defend. The battle for this principle was successfully fought in the 1780s, and again in the 1960s and ‘70s. It has since been nearly overturned in the new millennium, where it now hangs by a thread.
“Free Press” Smokescreen
The free press debate is mostly a smokescreen for an ideological conflict in which one side of the political spectrum seeks to gain an advantage over the other. Concerning censorship, the Left and the Right are often partners in slime. Trying to find an authentic Jeffersonian on either side is like searching for a Baptist in Mecca. The right of scholars who analyze flaws in the Talmud and the atrocities of the Israeli government to be free of censorship and cancellation, has zero support among most of the Republican legislators, jurists and pundits who are indignant over the suppression of their viewpoints by Biden’s bureaucrats.
In America, much of the interdiction of ideas and obstruction of free inquiry is perpetrated by private companies, and more specifically, the usury industry, which monopolizes online payment systems. In resistance to their monopoly, dissident writers are paid and sustained by readers rather than corporations, which helps to encourage the widest possible diversity of opinion, as well as independent investigative reporting which is vital to the democracy which Prof. Tribe and our would-be Overlords cynically extol with seigneurial conceit, and simultaneously thwart.
In 1789 the Catholic idea that the Blessed Virgin Mary was conceived without sin and assumed bodily into heaven was considered a depraved belief in the eyes of the majority of the Protestant population of the United States. Had it not been for the liberty of conscience enshrined in the Bill of Rights that year, those Catholic beliefs may very well have been outlawed.
234 years later, modern science has discovered that babies in the womb share the cells of their mothers: “Mothers around the world say they feel like their children are still a part of them long after they’ve given birth. As it turns out, that is literally true… Fetomaternal transfer… occurs in all pregnancies and in humans the fetal cells can persist for decades. Microchimeric fetal cells are found in various maternal tissues and organs including blood, bone marrow, skin and liver” (cf. here and here).
Consequently, the Son of God who was of one flesh with the humble Israelite girl we know as His mother Mary, shared his very tissue with her. In light of that discovery by avant-garde science, it seems far less likely that God would have allowed the body that contained within it the flesh of Jesus Christ, to rot on earth. In 1950, when Pius XII declared the bodily assumption of Mary into heaven, it seems he was prescient indeed.
Nowadays, with the desacralization of our society, where the outcome of the colosseum sports game is of infinitely greater interest than the corporeal fate of the human that served as the vessel for the incarnation of God, the once hotly disputed veracity or falsehood of the pontiff’s declaration doesn’t necessitate First Amendment protection. Other controversies however, are ablaze in the white hot fire of zealotry and the certitude that one side is right and the other is not only wrong, it has no right to be wrong. For example, disputing trans claims and COVID orthodoxies are subject to intense proscription.
The Left pretends to want libraries free of censorship. Some of them support trans books in children’s libraries because they have faith in the inherent value of that literature as drivers of transformative thinking in children, not due to any allegiance to the civil libertarian tenets of the First Amendment. Not for a minute would most Leftists countenance the introduction of holocaust denial or white supremacist books in a library under their control. For these folks “freedom of the press” is a pretext for overcoming the censorship demands of one’s adversaries while practicing it oneself.
The Right wants libraries stocked with writings by Karl Rove, Ludwig von Mises, Glenn Beck, John Bolton, Hannity and O’Reilly. A majority actively oppose the presence of books in public libraries by Noam Chomsky, Margaret Atwood, Edward Said, Alexander Cockburn, and Maureen Dowd. Like the Left, the Right mainly operates by a dual standard.
Knowledge of the history of the struggle for intellectual freedom and the life stories of John Lilburne, Michael Servetus, John Tyndale, Edmund Campion, Ignaz Semmelweis, Eugene V. Debs, Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Harry Elmer Barnes, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn and Norman Finkelstein, are instrumental in kindling a commitment to the American Way: •rights of conscience, •the necessity of a free press, and •toleration of opinions designated as “misinformation.”
The debate turns on whether or not a free people require intervention by “expert authorities” like fallible Fauci, who filter what would otherwise be unfettered access to information.
To prove his points in the Declaration of Independence, Jefferson stated, “… let Facts be submitted to a candid world.” The Founders of our nation were unequivocal in proclaiming their confidence in the people judging for themselves, without a king, commissar or president—backed by propaganda conglomerates in New York and Hollywood— preventing them from undertaking this sacred civic responsibility and divine right.
That the interdiction of information online is termed by Lucifer’s lexicographers “a defense of democracy,” is among the most egregious evocations of doublethink since George Orwell put pen to paper.
Distilled to its first principle, the defense of democracy depends on the defense of the right to be wrong.
The New York Times, Laurence Tribe, Leah Litman, Dr. Jay Bhattacharya, Bobby Kennedy Jr., Alex Berenson and Tucker Carlson, all have a right to be in error. Without that Constitutional liberty guaranteed to every individual — whether heretic or grandee — Fascism from the Right or Communism from the Left will inevitably take control and sift our nation like wheat.
“This country is planted thick with laws… And if you cut them down… do you really think you could stand upright in the winds that would blow then? Yes, I’d give the Devil benefit of law, for my own safety’s sake.” —Robert Bolt, A Man for All Seasons
FOR THE ADVANCEMENT TO KNOWLEDGE CONTRA CANCEL CULTURE
Michael Hoffman is the author of Secret Societies and Psychological Warfare (2001), The Occult Renaissance Church of Rome (2017) , Twilight Language (2021), six other books published in the United States, as well as overseas in Japanese and French translation, and 122 issues of Revisionist History® newsletter, 1997-2022. Since January, twenty-eight of his essays have been published on Substack. He is a former reporter for the New York bureau of the Associated Press. His podcast, Michael Hoffman’s Revisionist History,® is heard around the world.
Twitter: @HoffmanMichaelA
Copyright ©2023 Independent History and Research, Coeur d’Alene, Idaho 83816-0849
The Western Media Disinformation Campaign: Fall of Bakhmut, a case in point
By Gilbert Doctorow | May 21, 2023
Our language is in constant evolution. Partly this is bottom up, from the inventiveness of creative personalities or writers for commercial advertising. Partly it is top down, from the powers that be as they seek to manipulate and control the thought processes of the broad public.
My brief essay today addresses the latter phenomenon and the introduction of the word “disinformation” into common parlance. There is a charming freshness to it, unlike the stale and repugnant word “propaganda.”
The word “disinformation” has a specific context in time and intent: it is used by the powers that be and by the mainstream media they control to denigrate, marginalize and suppress sources of military, political, economic and other information that might contradict the official government narrative and so dilute the control exercised by those in power over the general population. It is to remove “disinformation” from public life that the United States and EU member states ban RT and other Russian media outlets from the internet, from satellite and cable television channels. The censorship here in Europe varies from country to country and is probably most drastic in France and Germany. One would think that these European states are truly at war with Russia, not just giving a helping hand to Kiev.
In reality, it is these censorious states and the mass media that carry their messages with stenographic precision into print and electronic dissemination who are the ones that day after day feed disinformation to the public. It is cynically composed and consists of a toxic blend of ‘spin,’ by which is meant misleading interpretation of events, and outright lies.
The many months long battle for the provincial Donbas city of Bakhmut, or Artyomovsk as it is known in Russia, has been described variously from on high in Washington, London and Berlin. When the likely outcome was unclear, the defense of Bakhmut was called heroic and demonstrative of the brave fighting spirit of the Ukrainians.
Casualty figures issued by Kiev and then trumpeted from Washington suggested that the Russians were stupidly throwing away the lives of their fighting men by using WWI style human waves of attackers who were decimated by the defenders. Russian lives are cheap was the message. The fact that Russian artillery on site outnumbered and outperformed Ukrainian artillery by a factor of five or seven to one was freely admitted by the Western propagandists as they pleaded for increased supplies to Kiev. They, nonetheless, issued casualty reports for the Russians that inverted the force correlation. It was assumed, obviously with reason, that the public was too lazy or too uninterested to do the arithmetic.
At one moment, the spin doctors in Washington, London and Berlin said that Ukrainian defense of Bakhmut made sense because it was pinning down Russian forces and giving time to the Ukrainians to train and position their men for the heralded “counter offensive” during which they would overrun Russian positions at chosen points in the 600 mile line of combat and drive a wedge through to the Sea of Azov, opening the way for recapture of Crimea. Those were grand words and ambitions to justify continued and ever rising Western military assistance to Kiev.
At another point, the spin doctors said it would be better if Ukraine stopped losing men in Bakhmut and launched instead that much vaunted counter-offensive. Now we were told that Bakhmut is just a Russian fantasy, that it has no strategic value.
In the past couple of weeks, the Russian command has issued daily reports on the progressive capture by Russian forces of Bakhmut, square kilometer after square kilometer. We were told they controlled 75%, then 80% and most recently more than 90% of the city proper while artillery bombardment of the remaining blocks of high rise residential buildings that were being used by Ukrainian defenders for their sniper attacks and intelligence reports on Russian troop movements pulverized everything in their path.
At this point, the attention of Western media defending truth against Russian disinformation was directed at the Ukrainian “successes” in recapturing settlements on the flanks of Bakhmut. Just three days ago The New York Times was telling its readers that these “breakthroughs” by the Ukrainians put in jeopardy the Russian forces holding the city proper: they might be surrounded and compelled to surrender or die. The possibility that the offensives on the flanks were only intended to facilitate withdrawal of remaining Ukrainian soldiers from Bakhmut and were tolerated by the Russians to avoid bloody fights to the death – that possibility crossed no one’s mind at the NYT, it seems.
Midday yesterday, 20 May, Yevgeny Prigozhin, the leader of the Wagner Group which did most of the fighting for Bakhmut on the ground, claimed total victory. In the evening, President Vladimir Putin announced to the Russian public that Bakhmut was taken. Joyous messages of congratulations filled the internet message services in Russia as the broad public celebrated a victory as iconic as the Battle for Stalingrad.
Meanwhile, the defenders of the Western public against Russian “disinformation” were hard at work, straining their brains to find what to say. This morning’s New York Times still speaks of the battle for Bakhmut as undecided, pointing yet again to the Ukrainian hold on the flanks.
Given their losses in men and materiel defending Bakhmut, the surrender of the city to the Russians will be a great blow to Ukrainian fighting morale when it is finally admitted. So will the fate of their Commander in Chief General Zaluzhny who, according to Russian sources, has been hospitalized for the past two weeks and remains in critical condition after falling victim to a Russian strike on a provincial command center which killed most of the high officers around him. If nothing else, this speaks to the amazing success of Russian military intelligence directing their firepower.
Meanwhile, Western media attention to Ukraine is conveniently redirected at the nonstop travels of President Zalensky who went from his European tour on to the Middle East, where he attended the meeting of the Arab League, and thence via French military jet to the G7 gathering in Hiroshima where he held talks with fellow heads of state and joined them for the obligatory group photos. All the talk was about when the U.S. will formally give its consent to the dispatch of F16s to Kiev. For the disseminators of Western disinformation this is a wonderful distraction from a war that clearly is going badly for Kiev and in particular a distraction from the counter offensive that looks less likely with each passing day of Russian military strikes on the command centers and weapons stores of the Ukrainian side.
The plume of radioactive smoke and ash that rose from the Khmelnitsky store of British depleted uranium artillery shells in Western Ukraine after a Russian missile strike, just like the extensive damage to the Patriot air defense installation near Kiev by a Russian Kinzhal hypersonic missile tell us all what will be the fate of future Western arms deliveries to Ukraine. It is an interesting question how much longer the Ukrainian military or politicians will put up with their high flying, good life President while the country is well on its way to hell.
©Gilbert Doctorow, 2023
Special Counsel John Durham’s Report Released
New York Times especially revolting in perpetration of massive and ridiculous fraud
By John Leake | Courageous Discourse | May 16, 2023
On Sunday, June 12, 2016, WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange said in an interview on the British political show, ITV Peston: “We have upcoming leaks in relation to Hillary Clinton … We have emails pending publication, that is correct,” Assange said.
Just two days after Assange made this statement, the Washington Post published a report titled “Russian government hackers penetrated DNC, stole opposition research on Trump.”
As soon as I saw this Washington Post report, I suspected it was a fraud perpetrated by Hillary Clinton’s friends in the U.S. government and mainstream media. Prima facie, it was pretty clear that the “Russian DNC” hack story was a way to distract attention away from the embarrassing content of the leaked DNC E-mails.
One of the oldest dirty tricks in the political playbook is to speak of the treachery of foreigners whenever a country’s rulers perceive that their power if threatened. As James Madison put it:
The means of defence against foreign danger have been always the instruments of tyranny at home. Among the Romans it was a standing maxim to excite a war, whenever a revolt was apprehended.
The E-mail correspondence of Hillary Clinton and her campaign manager, John Podesta, contained numerous expressions of a duplicitous, cynical, and Machiavellian nature. Clearly they felt threatened by the publication of these documents that showed their true colors. They therefore felt compelled to take strong action to change the subject. And what better way to change the subject than to speak loudly about Russian perfidy?
And so the Russian-Collusion Hoax was born. At the time I was astonished that such a huge swath of the permanent political class and mainstream media were all—in a perfectly coordinated fashion—talking such patently mendacious nonsense. I remember thinking that such orchestrated lying revealed extraordinary centralized control of our institutions. I also remember thinking that if this network of power could get away with telling—for months on end—such a whopper about President Trump, there was no telling what other colossal, organized frauds were going to be committed in the years ahead. “Wow, what’s next?” I asked my younger brother in one of our conversations about the hoax.
I am about 1/3 through reading the just-released report by Special Counsel John Durham titled REPORT ON MATTERS RELATED TO INTELLIGENCE ACTIVITIES AND INVESTIGATIONS ARISING OUT OF THE 2016 PRESIDENTIAL CAMPAIGN.
The first 100 pages contain nothing particularly surprising. Mostly it provides the meticulous details of what I already knew to be the case in the summer of 2016. However, on page 104, I ran across the following section:
iii. What the FBI knew from its intelligence collections as of early 2017. As the record reflects, as of early 2017, the FBI still did not possess any intelligence showing that anyone associated with the Trump campaign was in contact with Russian intelligence officers during the campaign. Indeed, based on declassified documents from early 2017, the FBI’s own records show that reports published by The New York Times in February and March 2017 concerning what four unnamed current and former U.S. intelligence officials claimed about Trump campaign personnel being in touch with any Russian intelligence officers was untrue.
These unidentified sources reportedly stated that (i) U.S. law enforcement and intelligence agencies intercepted communications of members of Trump’s campaign and other Trump associates that showed repeated contacts with senior Russian intelligence officials in the year before the election; (ii) former Trump campaign chairman Paul Manafort had been one of the individuals picked up on the intercepted “calls;” and (iii) the intercepted communications between Trump associates and Russians had been initially captured by the NSA. However, official FBI documentation reflects that all three of these highly concerning claims of Trump-related contacts with Russian intelligence were untrue. Indeed, in a contemporaneous critique of the Times article prepared by Peter Strzok, who was steeped in the details of Crossfire Hurricane, all three of the above-referenced allegations were explicitly refuted. Strzok’s evaluation of the allegations included the following:
• The FBI had not seen any evidence of any individuals affiliated with the Trump team in contact with Russian intelligence officers. He characterized this allegation as misleading and inaccurate as written. He noted that there had been some individuals in contact with Russians, both governmental and non-governmental, but none of these individuals had an affiliation with Russian intelligence. He also noted previous contact between Carter Page and a Russian intelligence officer, but this contact did not occur during Page’s association with the Trump campaign.
• The FBI had no information in its holdings, nor had it received any such information from other members of the Intelligence Community, that Paul Manafort had been a party to a call with any Russian government official. Strzok noted that the Intelligence Community had not provided the FBI with any such information even though the FBI had advised certain agencies of its interest in anything they might hold or collect regarding Manafort.
• Regarding the allegation that the NSA initially captured these communications between Trump campaign officials and Trump associates and the Russians, Strzok repeated that if such communications had been collected by the NSA, the FBI was not aware of that fact.
In other words, in its Russian-Collusion reporting, the New York Times published assertions from “four unnamed current and former U.S. intelligence officials” that were entirely false. Thus, the practice of using “unidentified sources”—a practice that was once heavily frowned upon by respectable journalists—enabled the commission of a giant deception that inflicted untold damage to our political system.
Even at that time (in early 2017) I told anyone who would listen that if it was possible to take down a sitting President of the United States by publishing the assertions of anonymous sources from within the state bureaucracy, then our government by elected officials was over, and our true masters were the “unnamed intelligence officials.”
Is the US about to conduct a nuclear false flag in Ukraine and blame Russia for it?
By Drago Bosnic | May 2, 2023
The United States is the only country in history to have used all three types of weapons of mass destruction (nuclear, biological, chemical), starting with the atomic bombings of Japan in the closing months of the Second World War to mass usage of chemical and biological weapons against numerous other countries it has attacked ever since (particularly Vietnam). And yet, the belligerent thalassocracy just adores chest-thumping about its supposed “morality” and even “warns” that its geopolitical adversaries are about to use such weapons (naturally, without ever providing any evidence). This is precisely what’s been happening in Ukraine in recent weeks.
On April 28, one of the most prominent neoliberal mouthpieces, the New York Times, ran a story about America setting up numerous radiation sensors across Ukraine in order to detect nuclear blasts. The NYT claims that “such sensors can detect bursts of radiation from a nuclear weapon or a dirty bomb and can confirm the identity of the attacker”. It adds that “the goal is to make sure that if Russia detonates a radioactive weapon on Ukrainian soil, its atomic signature and Moscow’s culpability could be verified”, further claiming that “…experts have worried about whether President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia would use nuclear arms in combat for the first time since the American bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945″.
Firstly, it should be noted that Russia has a very clear doctrine about the usage of WMDs in an armed conflict, one that has even been updated recently and that states in what sort of situations Moscow would use such weapons. The Ukrainian conflict is still nowhere near a point where Russian WMDs could be used. Secondly, the Russian military dominates the battlefield, inflicting enormous losses on the Kiev regime forces. Even in the case of the much-touted offensive against newly integrated Russian regions in the Donbass and former southern Ukraine, Russia wouldn’t use nuclear weapons. However, the NYT claims precisely that is the case, supposedly because Russia is “desperate” to stop the attack.
Expectedly, “experts” the NYT allegedly spoke to are anonymous and they claim that the goal is to “prevent Russia from conducting a possible dirty bomb false flag in Ukraine”. The operation is officially run by the Nuclear Emergency Support Team (NEST), part of the Nation Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA). Interestingly, the NYT notes, citing a 2009 book “Defusing Armageddon” by Jeffrey T. Richelson, that “the NEST often teamed up with the Joint Special Operations Command (JSOC), an elite military unit so secretive that the Pentagon for years refused to acknowledge its existence”. It should be noted that JSOC is being used to conduct covert operations of all kinds across the world, including false flags.
So, according to these so-called “experts”, we are supposed to believe that US agencies and military units involved in actual false flag operations around the globe will prevent an alleged “Russian false flag” and not use the opportunity to conduct yet another covert op to fake such an event and then blame Russia for it? The NYT itself claims that “Moscow could falsely claim that Kyiv set off a nuclear blast on the battlefield to try to draw the West into deeper war assistance” and that “…in theory, with the sensor network in place, Washington would be able to point to its own nuclear attribution analyses to reveal that Moscow was in fact the attacker”.
The NYT then parrots the usual about Russia’s supposed “battlefield failures” that are “making Mr. Putin, if anything, more dependent on his nuclear arsenal” and how this “could increase his willingness to pull the nuclear trigger”. Even though such claims are laughable to anyone familiar with the actual situation on the battlefield, in the minds of rabid Russophobes this makes “perfect sense”. In addition, recent weeks have seen a dramatic surge in the Kiev regime’s attacks on civilians not only in the Donbass and other newly integrated Russian regions, but also in areas such as Bryansk and Belgorod oblasts (regions), with dozens of civilian casualties.
All this would be used to push the narrative that Russia could indeed be the alleged culprit behind a dirty bomb false flag. On the other hand, back in October last year, when Moscow warned that the Kiev regime might use a dirty bomb and then blame Russia for it, the political West rejected it all as a “conspiracy theory”. According to their “logic”, it’s only Russia that could do such a thing, because the Neo-Nazi junta, as a “true beacon of freedom and democracy”, certainly has the “moral high ground”. Additionally, the mainstream propaganda machine usually claims that the Kiev regime doesn’t have the capacity to create dirty bombs, so it allegedly couldn’t do it even if it wanted to.
However, recent reports about “sensitive US nuclear technologies” in (former) Ukrainian nuclear power plants (NPPs) show such claims are patently false. Russia controls one of such NPPs, but still hasn’t disclosed what sort of covert US support the Neo-Nazi junta got. Washington DC itself has “demanded” Moscow to return these “sensitive US nuclear technologies”, meaning they are worried about what might be revealed to the world. It’s not unlikely Russia is keeping the evidence secret for the time being as a possible deterrent to US and Kiev regime’s plan on detonating such a device and then blaming Moscow, which could simply reveal the evidence in case a dirty bomb is used.
Drago Bosnic is an independent geopolitical and military analyst.
US Nuclear Sensors in Ukraine Deployed to Scapegoat Russia
By Ekaterina Blinova – Sputnik – 29.04.2023
The reason behind Washington setting up sensors across Ukraine to detect a potential nuclear blast may involve shifting the blame to Russia if a radioactive weapon is used, or even if it is not used, but only reported in Western media, Karen Kwiatkowski, former US Department of Defense analyst and retired Air Force lieutenant colonel, told Sputnik.
The Nuclear Emergency Support Team (NEST), a group of scientists, technicians, and engineers operating under the United States Department of Energy’s National Nuclear Security Administration, is deploying nuclear sensors throughout Ukraine to both detect bursts of radiation from a nuclear weapon or a dirty bomb and identify the attacker. As per The New York Times, the goal is to verify Moscow’s culpability if Russia detonates a radioactive weapon on Ukrainian soil. The Western media has long disseminated groundless claims that Moscow may resort to the use of nuclear arms if defeated in Ukraine. Russia has resolutely shredded the assumptions, referring to intelligence alleging the Kiev regime’s potential detonation of a so-called “dirty bomb,” a “radiological dispersal device” (RDD) that combines a conventional explosive with radioactive material. The purpose of the possible provocation would be to blame Moscow for the resulting radioactive contamination.
“It makes sense that the secretive NEST team is being deployed to very quickly shift blame to Russia if any radioactive weapon is used (or even if it is not used, but only reported in Western media),” said Karen Kwiatkowski. “The US track record is provocative and the policy players are unwise, almost to a person. There is an argument to be made that this is one more way the US hopes to ‘win’ the narrative, and threaten Russia, by reporting a nuclear release, and immediately blaming Russia (as the story is already structured to do) and protecting the last Ukrainian war enthusiasts from accountability. To this day, despite evidence and logic to the contrary, most of the Western world still believes it was Russians shooting at Zaporozhye [Nuclear Power Plant] last year from Ukrainian territory, while those same Russians were holding and operating the reactor.”
One cannot completely rule out that this preventative deployment is meant to ensure Ukrainians don’t use radioactive weapons in their own last ditch efforts as the war comes to an end, according to the US Air Force veteran. Kwiatkowski suggested that the deployment could serve as a direct message to the remnants of the Ukrainian military and political leaders who could run amok, thus upsetting big Western corporations’ plans to rebuild Ukraine and upending enthusiasm of Western donors. “You can be sure BlackRock intends to profit from rebuilding Ukraine, and cleaning up nuclear contamination is not a profit center,” she stressed. Still, it raises questions how corporations’ interests would correlate with the UK plans to provide the Kiev regime with depleted uranium shells which can contaminate water, soil, and inflict irreparable harm on people’s health in the region. The former Pentagon analyst pointed out that the NEST’s network of sensors must include an array of sensor types to capture and measure the wide variety of radiation types and also be able to collect and test physical samples at the atomic level.
“Radiation from a nuclear plant leak is different from radiation from a radioactive weapon or even a dirty bomb,” Kwiatkowski explained. “The NEST itself is focused on response to radiation events, and there may be innocent explanations for this deployment to Ukraine. For example, looking for radiation leakage from nuclear reactors like at Zaporozhye may be a concern for NATO soldiers and the Ukrainian Army, vis-a-vis rebuilding and infrastructure repair planned for the future. But that is not how the NYT, a state media organ with direct connections to Pentagon intelligence and policy, described it.”
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Book Review
“Davos Can Really Replace the UN”
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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