And Now from Google: All the News we Find Fit

Google Introduces Its New Censorship Tool: the Google News Initiative (GNI)

Google has partnered with the United Nations, World Health Organization and others in a new global censorship tool that was recently introduced. Google News Lab is “a team within the Google News Initiative (GNI) whose mission is to collaborate with journalists to fight misinformation”. GNI uses “Fact Check Tools” to eliminate dissent. The goal is to have one point of view that Google calls ‘Data Commons’. A critic wrote that Google’s algorithms are designed to delete websites that criticize topics such as Covid-19 statistics, the World Bank, the FBI’s crime statistics, PharmGKB database and a one-world global government.

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Google has partnered with the United Nations, World Health Organisation and others in a new global censorship tool that was introduced last Monday, according to LaToya Drake, head of Google News Lab.

Google News Lab is “a team within the Google News Initiative whose mission is to collaborate with journalists to fight misinformation” and other things. And, the Google News Initiative (“GNI”) “works with publishers and journalists to fight misinformation.” The GNI and its Lab seem to be one and the same thing with the Lab simply being a page on the GNI website.

Below are the short descriptions from GNI’s ‘About’ page.  The titles are misleading.  For example, following the ‘Our partners’ hyperlink contained in the words “learn more” does not lead to a list or overview of its partners.  It leads to ‘Case Studies’: Some “stories” about “how news organisations around the world are growing their news coverage and digital businesses.”  After which Google advertises some other of its products and invites the reader to “sign up for our newsletter.”

We truly have entered the era of George Orwell’s Doublethink and Doublespeak.

Google’s Global Censorship Tool

Last week, Swiss software developer Dejan Georgiev tweeted: “Google’s new global censorship tool was introduced today [7 August] at 9:10 am via an email press release.”

 

Read full article here…

From:  https://needtoknow.news/2023/08/google-introduces-its-new-censorship-tool-the-google-news-initiative-gni/

What You Say Might Just Get You

Grants Reveal Feds’ Horrific Plans To Censor Americans’ Speech

IMAGE CREDIT U.S. ARMY / FLICKR / CC BY 2.0, CROPPED

The founding fathers should have included extra text in the First Amendment: “Congress shall not make any law, Executive shall not make any rule or order, Judiciary shall make no ruling” abridging freedom of religion, freedom of speech, freedom of the press, the right to peaceable  assembly and right to protest the government for redress of our grievances.There is indisputable evidence that our own government is the driving vehicle to completely obliterate free speech in America. The Congress can rein in the Administration but unfortunately, many in Congress are complicit and even encouraging Biden and staff to intensify the attack.

The current trajectory of this war on the First Amendment will result in criminalizing speech, imposing penalties like fines, court cases and imprisonment. ⁃ TN Editor

Our government is preparing to monitor every word Americans say on the internet—the speech of journalists, politicians, religious organizations, advocacy groups, and even private citizens. Should those conversations conflict with the government’s viewpoint about what is in the best interests of our country and her citizens, that speech will be silenced.

While the “Twitter Files” offer a glimpse into the government’s efforts to censor disfavored viewpoints, what we have seen is nothing compared to what is planned, as the details of hundreds of federal awards lay bare. Research by The Federalist reveals our tax dollars are funding the development of artificial intelligence (AI) and machine-learning (ML) technology that will allow the government to easily discover “problematic” speech and track Americans reading or partaking in such conversations.

Then, in partnership with Big Tech, Big Business, and media outlets, the government will ensure the speech is censored, under the guise of combatting “misinformation” and “disinformation.”

AI and ML Technology Will Monitor Everything We Say and Read

The federal government has awarded more than 500-plus contracts or grants related to “misinformation” or “disinformation” since 2020. One predominant area of research pushed by the Department of Defense involves the use of AI and ML technology to monitor or listen to internet “conversations.”

Originally used as a marketing tool for businesses to track discussions about their brands and products and to track competitors, the DOD and other federal agencies are now paying for-profit public relations and communications firms to convert their technology into tools for the government to monitor speech on the internet.

The areas of the internet the companies monitor differ somewhat, and each business offers its own unique AI and ML proprietary technology, but the underlying approach and goals remain identical: The technology under development will “mine” large portions of the internet and identify conversations deemed indicative of an emerging harmful narrative, to allow the government to track those “threats” and adopt countermeasures before the messages go viral.

With AI and ML identifying in real-time the origins of supposed influence operations and how the messages spread, the government will have the ability to preempt the amplification of the speech, squelching even true reporting before the general populace has an opportunity to learn the news. To appreciate fully the danger this poses to free speech requires Americans to consider the use of that technology with these seven additional details.

1. Everything Everywhere All At Once

First, the AI and ML technology under development will mine every conceivable mode of conversation for the government. Consider, for example, the databases monitored by just a few of the companies the government is paying to develop this AI and ML technology.

PeakMetrics, the recipient of a $1.5 million award, tracks millions of news sites, blogs, global social platforms, podcasts, TV and radio, and email newsletters.

Omelas Inc., which received more than $1 million in taxpayer money, culls data from “the most influential newspapers, TV channels, government offices, militant groups, and more across a dozen social networks and messaging apps, thousands of websites, and thousands of RSS feeds.”

Alethea Group, which received a Phase I award of nearly $50,000 to develop a “machine learning tool for proactive disinformation/misinformation detection, assessment, and mitigation,” boasts it covers data sources including mainstream and “fringe” social media platforms, peer-to-peer messaging platforms, blogs and forums, state-affiliated media sites, “gray” propaganda sites, and the dark web.

Newsguard, awarded $750,000 by the DOD, offers two databases, including its unreliable reliability ratings database of thousands of news and information websites and a second database of purported hoaxes.

Primer, which scored a $3 million award to develop its technology, offers a database that looks to news and media data sources, publicly captured images, the dark web, cyberattacks shared by the general public, and classified—presumably for government clients—and unclassified data sources. Primer also partners with Flashpoint, which adds “Telegram, Reddit, Discord, and “the deep and dark web” to the databases mined.

2. We’re Talking Americans, Not Just Russian Bots

It is also important to recognize that the AI and ML technology under development will not just mine foreign or state-connected actors, but will monitor everyone’s speech. Both the government grants and the web pages of the monitoring companies confirm this reality.

We also know from the “Twitter Files” that the government and its fellow residents in the Censorship-Industrial Complex view the speech of Americans as related to foreign influence operations merely because the viewpoint matches what they claim is an adversary’s perspective. And we know the government pushed for the censorship of ordinary Americans.

By its nature, AI and ML technology has unlimited potential to flag problematic speech on any imaginable subject. Here, the past is prologue: Speech need not involve terrorism, acts of war, or even our electoral process for our government to consider it within its purview to fact-check. (It also need not be false; see point 4).

The “Twitter Files” and recent events provide Americans a glimpse into the breadth of the topics the government may deem harmful narratives worthy of censor—from elections, to vaccines, to runs on grocery stores. Underlying the government’s obsession with silencing misinformation, disinformation, and mal-information is the “Great Power Competition” perspective of foreign relations, under which China and Russia represent a constant threat to America’s power, influences, and interests.

With the government viewing foreign relations through the Great Power Competition paradigm, speech on any topic, touching even tangentially on America’s “power, influences, and interests,” will be fair game for censorship efforts.

3. The Great Power Competition Renders Everything Fair Game for Censorship

While to convincingly prove this reality requires a deeper exposé—coming soon—on the Great Power Competition’s connection to the government’s focus on misinformation, disinformation, and mal-information, last week Sen. Mark Kelly, D-Arizona, showcased the current thinking inspiring our leaders. During a conference call with the Federal Deposit and Insurance Corporation about the Silicon Valley Bank bailout, Kelly asked whether there was “a way to censor information on social media to prevent a run on the banks.”

Kelly’s question was “couched” “in a concern that foreign actors would be doing this,” Rep. Thomas Massie told Public, but, according to Massie, Kelly “didn’t suggest the censorship should be limited to foreigners or to things that were untrue.”

The move from the censorship of terrorism to the silencing of supposed interference in elections to censoring posts about “bank runs” follows naturally from the shift in foreign relations paradigms from the War on Terror to the Great Powers Competition. The latter views anything affecting American power or influence as fair game. We also saw this shift with the Department of Homeland Security’s Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Agency (CISA) proposal to consider “financial misinformation” within its purview.

The government’s censorship efforts won’t stop at supposed “financial misinformation,” however, because anything and everything journalists report and citizens discuss affects America’s “power, influence, and interest.” So, the government’s development of technology to monitor the entirety of the internet foretells a much more dangerous threat than apparent on the surface.

4. The Government Brands True Speech Misinformation

The threat to free speech stemming from the government’s monitoring of the internet is further increased by our overlords’ willingness to brand true speech “misinformation, disinformation, or mal-information” and then seek to censor it. The “Twitter Files” also exposed this reality, with our government and its lackeys seeking the censorship of true facts that might lead to “vaccine hesitancy” or reveal runs on grocery stores.

That our government would seek to silence true speech on such matters gives Americans reason to fear further censorship of true information.

5. Faulty Analysis and Biased Censors

The “Twitter Files” also revealed that censorship demands by the government, think tanks, and academic institutions relied on faulty misinformation analyses, including ones that identified innocent Americans as foreign actors. Also, many of those involved in the disinformation industry maintain left-leaning bias and a penchant for targeting conservatives.

In furthering its plans to monitor the internet for supposedly harmful narratives to silence, the government is continuing to work with biased groups, including ones that pushed faulty analyses, adding to the threat to free speech.

6. The Government’s Partners Are Poised to Censor

The government’s push to develop AI and ML technology to mine the internet is even more terrifying knowing that a Censorship Complex has already been built. The “Twitter Files” revealed the breadth and depth of the complex, with every alphabet-soup federal agency working with the social media giants and an array of think tanks and academic institutions, and with the legacy media providing an assist when censorship requests went ignored.

While Elon Musk may have exited Twitter from the group, the Censorship Complex still stands tall and ready to silence the speech of those who dare dissent. This public-private collaboration makes the government’s move to monitor the internet even more threatening to free speech.

7. Those Who Could Warn the Public or Stop the Plot Are All-In

The threat is further heightened because those with the power to warn the public and demand the government stop silencing Americans’ speech are complicit. The corrupt media’s coverage, or lack thereof, of Matt Taibbi and Michael Shellenberger’s congressional testimony on the Censorship Complex proves this point. So too does the Democrats’ pathetic performance during the hearings, when they exposed themselves as enemies of free speech.

With Democrats, the legacy media, and many Republicans all in on the government’s efforts to censor misinformation and disinformation, it will be extremely difficult for the public to recognize the risks free speech faces—especially since those trying to sound the alarm have already been falsely branded purveyors of disinformation.

A chance remains, though, that enough ordinary Americans will hear the message before it is too late and demand Congress close the Censorship-Industrial Complex.

Read full story here…

from:    https://www.technocracy.news/grants-reveal-feds-horrific-plans-to-censor-americans-speech/

Facts??? What Facts? Who Cares?

How the Virality Project Threatens Our Freedom

Analysis by Dr. Joseph MercolaFact Checked 

STORY AT-A-GLANCE

  • We now have proof that the U.S. Department of Homeland Security’s (DHS) Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) partnered with a censorship consortium called the Election Integrity Partnership (EIP) to illegally censor Americans
  • During the 2020 election cycle, the EIP and CISA worked with the State Department’s Global Engagement Center (GEC) and the DHS-backed Elections Infrastructure Information Sharing and Analysis Center (ISAC) to police political wrongthink on social media
  • In February 2021, the EIP rebranded itself as the Virality Project, and went on to censor COVID-19 narratives on behalf of the government, even when they knew it was true
  • The Virality Project targeted first-hand accounts of COVID jab injuries to prevent vaccine hesitancy, and posts that expressed fears about vaccine passports because being against vaccine passports was a “gateway to being anti-vax.” They also censored jokes and satirical memes on the basis that they might “exacerbate distrust” in public health officials, and made asking questions a punishable event because questioning is “commonly used by spreaders of misinformation”
  • As bad as things are, they’re about to get a whole lot worse unless Congress puts a stop to it. In the last three years, the U.S. government has granted more than 500 contracts and/or grants aimed at tackling “misinformation”
  • The Department of Defense is also focused on research involving AI and tech that can monitor internet conversations and deploy countermeasures before wrongthink goes viral. Congress must defund all of these programs, as well as any agency department or team involved in censoring Americans

As detailed in “Propaganda and Censorship Dominate the Information War,” we now have proof, courtesy of the Twitter Files, that the U.S. Department of Homeland Security’s (DHS) Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) partnered with a censorship consortium called the Election Integrity Partnership (EIP) to censor Americans.1

In an Atlantic Council interview, EIP head Alex Stamos also admitted that the partnership between the EIP and the DHS was set up to outsource censorship that the government could not do due to “lack of legal authorization.”2

Stamos, a former chief of security at Facebook, is also director of the Stanford Internet Observatory — one of the four organizations that make up the EIP — and is a partner in the cyber consulting firm Krebs Stamos Group together with former CISA director Chris Krebs.

Virality Project Is EIP Rebranded

During the 2020 election cycle, the EIP and CISA worked with the State Department’s Global Engagement Center (GEC) and the DHS-backed Elections Infrastructure Information Sharing and Analysis Center (ISAC) to police political wrongthink on social media. The EIP coordinated the take-down of undesirable content using a real-time chat app that the DHS, EIP and social media companies all share.3

In February 2021, the EIP rebranded itself as the Virality Project, and went on to censor COVID-19 narratives on behalf of the government in the same way the EIP censored election narratives on behalf of the political Left.4

According to independent journalist Matt Taibbi, the Virality Project was essentially a dry run for President Biden’s federal Disinformation Governance Board.5 In fact, the Virality Project proposed a federal “Misinformation and Disinformation Center of Excellence” just one day before President Biden announced the plan for this Orwellian outfit.

Public backlash forced Biden to reconsider, but all that means is that the government chose not to make its unconstitutional censoring of Americans official policy. They’re still doing it through partnerships with the EIP/Virality Project and other third parties.

Virality Project Censored Truth

In a March 20, 2023, report (video above), The Hill host Robby Soave detailed the goals of the Virality Project, which “above all else were to protect the perceived integrity of the federal health bureaucracy, vaccine manufacturers and government vaccine policymakers, and to advance mainstream establishment narratives and interests in general.”

As noted by Soave, the Virality Project frequently pressured social media companies to censor COVID-19-related information and/or label it as “misinformation” — even if the information was true.

“This coalition, which was working with government agencies, NGO’s and the social media companies themselves, took the position that even true information could count as dangerous misinformation if its effect was to encourage a policy that clashed with the expert consensus …

If we still value the First Amendment, we must resist these pernicious calls for censorship. A call that is coming from a sordid coalition of ‘truth czars’ and ideological activists masquerading as fact checkers,” Soave says.

The mere possibility of causing “vaccine skepticism” or “vaccine hesitancy” was enough of a justification to censor information about the deadly COVID shots, for example, even though the information was truthful and required in order to make an informed decision.

This even included true first-hand accounts of serious COVID jab injuries, which could have saved lives had they been allowed to be shared. As noted by Andrew Lowenthal, co-founder of EngageMedia and author at Brownstone Institute:6

“Rather than listening out for safety signals to protect the public, leaders in the ‘anti-disinformation’ field ran cover to protect Big Pharma, smearing and censoring critics.

The moral depravity is astounding and quite possibly criminal … [In] suppressing ‘stories of true vaccine side effects’ the Virality Project put people in danger. Rather than keeping people safe they exposed us to the depredations of Big Pharma.”

Wartime Logic

Best-selling author John Leake7 also commented on the Virality Project’s censoring of truthful information, saying:8

“This reminded me of our recent trip to Australia in which we learned the Australian Therapeutic Goods Administration (TGA) led by Dr. John Skerritt, MD, PhD, made the decision to suppress accurate reports of vaccine-induced myocarditis in young people because such reports could cause ‘vaccine hesitancy.’

As these policymakers and regulators see it, the incidence of grave and fatal side effects are sufficiently rare to warrant censoring ANY reporting of them, as such reporting could cause the greater harm of ‘vaccine hesitancy.’

By their calculus, severe injuries and deaths caused by COVID-19 vaccines are the price we as a society must pay for the purportedly greater number of lives saved by the vaccines.

Never in the history of medicine has this calculus been used to evaluate the benefit of a medical product. Only in a military context — that is, commanders in the field must accept a certain number of casualties in order to achieve the greater benefit of vanquishing the enemy — has this logic been applied.”

No Concerns, Jokes or Questions Allowed

The Virality Project also targeted posts that expressed fears about vaccine passports — because being against vaccine passports was a “gateway to being anti-vax” — and censored jokes and satirical memes on the basis that they might “exacerbate distrust” in those targeted as the butt of the joke.

Dr. Anthony Fauci is one example of a public health official whose reputation was protected in this way. They even made asking questions a punishable event, because asking questions is a tactic “commonly used by spreaders of misinformation.”9

Have You Heard of Pre-Bunking?

The Virality Project also invented “pre-bunking” strategies to “warn” the public about purported misinformation before it had time to spread.

For example, when the Johnson & Johnson COVID jab was temporarily suspended by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration and Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in April 2021, the Virality Project issued a rapid response statement10 saying the number of incidents of rare and severe types of blood clots was “very small,” especially considering the millions of doses given.

They also analyzed the narratives put forth “concerning the J&J suspension within anti-vaccine groups across social media platforms” and in foreign and international media, and how these narratives might affect “vaccine hesitancy,” and proposed strategies to counter efforts to use the suspension as support for anti-COVID jab arguments.

Twitter Files Include Calls to Censor Me

As predicted, the Twitter files also contain correspondence with social media companies relating to yours truly. Taibbi points out the Twitter files “repeatedly show media acting as proxy”11 for the NGOs in the censoring network.

As an example, he posted the email below,12 in which the Financial Times used the shady NGO Center for Countering Digital Hate’s fabricated “Misinformation Dozen” report to pressure Twitter into banning me, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., and the rest on its list.

misinformation dozen

Government Censorship Campaign Is Financed by Taxpayers

As noted by Taibbi in a March 9, 2023, Twitter thread:13

“Well, you say, so what? Why shouldn’t civil society organizations and reporters work together to boycott ‘misinformation’? Isn’t that not just an exercise of free speech, but a particularly enlightened form of it?

The difference is, these campaigns are taxpayer-funded. Though the state is supposed to stay out domestic propaganda, the Aspen Institute, Graphika, the Atlantic Council’s DFRLab, New America, and other ‘anti-disinformation’ labs are receiving huge public awards.

Some NGOs, like the GEC-funded Global Disinformation Index or the DOD-funded NewsGuard, not only seek content moderation but apply subjective ‘risk’ or ‘reliability’ scores to media outlets, which can result in reduction in revenue. Do we want government in this role? …

This is the Censorship-Industrial Complex at its essence: a bureaucracy willing to sacrifice factual truth in service of broader narrative objectives. It’s the opposite of what a free press does …

This, ultimately, is the most serious problem with the Censorship-Industrial Complex. Packaged as a bulwark against lies and falsehood, it is itself often a major source of disinformation, with American taxpayers funding their own estrangement from reality.”

Censorship Darling With a Shady Past

You can learn more about Taibbi’s work on the Twitter files in the video above. In his Twitter Files No. 19 thread, Taibbi also highlights some of the shadier characters within this censorship-industrial complex, such as Renée DiResta, technical research manager at Stanford Internet Observatory (which, again, is part of the EIP and Virality Project):14

“Profiles portray DiResta as a warrior against Russian bots and misinformation, but reporters never inquire about work with DARPA, GEC and other agencies. In the video below … Stamos introduces her as having ‘worked for the CIA.'”

“DiResta has become the public face of the Censorship-Industrial Complex, a name promoted everywhere as an unquestioned authority on truth, fact, and Internet hygiene, even though her former firm, New Knowledge, has been embroiled in two major disinformation scandals …

DiResta’s New Knowledge helped design the Hamilton 68 project exposed in the Twitter files. Although it claimed to track ‘Russian influence,’ Hamilton really followed [Conservative] Americans … Hamilton 68 was funded by the Alliance for Securing Democracy, which in turn was funded by the German Marshall Fund, which in turn is funded in part by — the Department of State.

The far worse scandal was Project Birmingham, in which thousands of fake Russian Twitter accounts were created to follow Alabama Republican Roy Moore in his 2017 race for US Senate. Newspapers reported Russia seemed to take an interest in the race, favoring Moore.

Though at least one reporter for a major American paper was at a meeting in September 2018 when New Knowledge planned the bizarre bot-and-smear campaign, the story didn’t break until December, two days after DiResta gave a report on Russian interference to the Senate …

The incident underscored the extreme danger of the Censorship-Industrial Complex. Without real oversight mechanisms, there is nothing to prevent these super-empowered information vanguards from bending the truth for their own ends.

By way of proof, no major press organization has re-examined the bold claims DiResta/New Knowledge made to the Senate — e.g. that Russian ads ‘reached 126 million people’ in 2016 — while covering up the Hamilton and Alabama frauds.”

US Government Is Building Vast Speech Suppression Web

As bad as things already are, they’re about to get a whole lot worse unless Congress puts a stop to it. In a March 21, 2023, article,15 The Federalist’s senior legal correspondent Margot Cleveland details grants showing the U.S. government is “building a vast surveillance and speech suppression web around every American.”

“Our government is preparing to monitor every word Americans say on the internet — the speech of journalists, politicians, religious organizations, advocacy groups, and even private citizens. Should those conversations conflict with the government’s viewpoint about what is in the best interests of our country and her citizens, that speech will be silenced,” she writes.16

“While the ‘Twitter Files’ offer a glimpse into the government’s efforts to censor disfavored viewpoints, what we have seen is nothing compared to what is planned, as the details of hundreds of federal awards lay bare.

Research by The Federalist reveals our tax dollars are funding the development of artificial intelligence (AI) and machine-learning (ML) technology that will allow the government to easily discover ‘problematic’ speech and track Americans reading or partaking in such conversations.

Then, in partnership with Big Tech, Big Business, and media outlets, the government will ensure the speech is censored, under the guise of combatting ‘misinformation’ and ‘disinformation.'”

In the last three years alone, the federal government has granted more than 500 contracts and/or grants aimed at tackling “misinformation” and “disinformation.” The Department of Defense itself is also focused on research involving AI and ML tech that can monitor internet conversations for objectionable viewpoints and deploy countermeasures before they go viral.

A Catch-22

Unfortunately, many of those who have the greatest power to inform the public about what’s happening, and those with the power to protect us by putting an end to this dystopian nightmare, don’t want to because they have something to gain from it, or believe they do. As noted by Cleveland:17

“The threat is further heightened because those with the power to warn the public and demand the government stop silencing Americans’ speech are complicit.

With Democrats, the legacy media, and many Republicans all in on the government’s efforts to censor misinformation and disinformation, it will be extremely difficult for the public to recognize the risks free speech faces — especially since those trying to sound the alarm have already been falsely branded purveyors of disinformation.

A chance remains, though, that enough ordinary Americans will hear the message before it is too late and demand Congress close the Censorship-Industrial Complex.”

Where Do We Go From Here?

Taibbi, in the video above, says the revelations about the Virality Project tell us two things:18

“One, as Orwellian proof-of-concept, the Virality Project was a smash success. Government, academia, and an oligopoly of would-be corporate competitors organized quickly behind a secret, unified effort to control political messaging.

Two, it accelerated the evolution of digital censorship, moving it from judging truth/untruth to a new, scarier model, openly focused on political narrative at the expense of fact.”

This is deeply problematic and will strangle democracy and end the republic that is the United States if allowed to continue. To quote Lowenthal:19

“Free speech and expression protect us from the most powerful actors on the planet, corporations, the State, and a growing plethora of international bodies. Ultimately, we need radically decentralized social media that is more immune to their capture. Our safety depends on it.”

Decentralizing social media is just one necessary defense tactic though. We must also demand Congress take swift action to defund and dismantle the “censorship-industrial complex” that is using our tax dollars to deceive us and withhold truth. Nothing less will suffice. We can’t invent enough privacy laws to protect us from what’s coming.

For a time, many of us suspected that this massive surveillance and control system was primarily funded and built by private interests, but now we’re finding that government funding is behind much, and perhaps most, of it.

Congress has, for many years, if not decades, approved funding for programs intended to destroy our constitutional rights. Now, they must defund all of them. They must also defund all government agency departments or teams involved in the federal censorship network, and that includes the FBI, CIA and DHS.

from:    https://articles.mercola.com/sites/articles/archive/2023/03/29/how-virality-project-threatens-freedom.aspx?ui=f460707c057231d228aac22d51b97f2a8dcffa7b857ec065e5a5bfbcfab498ac&sd=20211017&cid_source=dnl&cid_medium=email&cid_content=art1ReadMore&cid=20230329_HL2&cid=DM1372268&bid=1758336702

What Is Going Down In California???

(NOTE:  Full Lengthy Article attached, but Mercola’s site retains articles for only 48 hours, and this information is important)

California’s Misinformation Epidemic Pt. 1

I recently had the pleasure of getting to know one of my favorite pseudonymous writers on Substack who goes by ‘A Midwestern Doctor.’ This powerful essay needs as wide exposure as possible.

californias misinformation epidemic

By: Pierre Kory

From The Forgotten Side of Medicine Substack, this essay brilliantly details the history, current state, and future of the criminal control of information, corruption of science, and coercion of the public in regards to vaccines. I consider it an honor to host this essay for my subscribers.

When I was younger, a friend who was a corporate executive told me about “tiger teams,” an approach industry would utilize to solve a complex problem facing them or to develop a plan for achieving a long-term strategic goal. After he vividly described the tenacity with which they attacked their problem, I realized large corporations could be expected to conduct highly strategic and Machiavellian plans over long timelines that would be difficult for anyone but the most talented observer to spot.

Since that time, I’ve also come to appreciate how most businessmen and their industries will default to reusing tools that have previously proven themselves for addressing each new problem that emerges. As a result, once you learn what each of the tools are, it becomes possible to predict each of the sequential steps a tiger team will choose to accomplish its goals.

Since I have held a long-term interest in the politics of vaccination, I have been able to witness the sequential steps that played out first in California and then throughout the nation. What I still find remarkable about these events was how each one directly enabled the subsequent event, and that in many cases, what happened subsequently had previously been promised to never come to pass.

Given everything that I have observed, I am almost certain one or more tiger teams working for the vaccine industry chose to have California be the means through which to accomplish their goal of regular mandatory vaccinations for the entire American population.

At this moment, a highly unpopular law that prevents physicians from spreading “misinformation“ by questioning any orthodox perspective on COVID-19 is awaiting the governor’s signature, and if this law passes, it will likely be disastrous for the nation as additional jurisdictions adopt it.

The purpose of this article will be to discuss exactly what brought us to the point a law like that could be on the verge of passing and the important insights that can be taken from the entire process.

vax for the win

The “Truth”

Throughout human history, one of the most valuable commodities has always been ownership over the “truth,” as so much power and profit results from holding a truth that aligns with your vested interests. Once larger societies formed, determining “truth,“ was always a key societal need, and excluding a few enlightened societies, the method of determining truth normally evolved as follows:

  1. Might makes right.
  2. Judging the preponderance of evidence.
  3. A growing, and eventually unsustainable corruption of most “evidence.”
  4. Societal collapse or evolution.

Note: This trend roughly follows the 250 year life cycle of empires mapped out by a British general some suspect the U.S. is nearing the end of.

In many ways, forcing two opposing viewpoints to present their evidence and then having the appropriate parties determine which side presented the preponderance of evidence and thus “wins” is the best solution our species has developed for settling otherwise irreconcilable differences of opinion.

Unfortunately, as our times have shown, the natural response to having our society place a heavy weight on “evidence” is to have dishonest parties “win,” not by being on the side with the best evidence, but rather by buying out the entire evidence base and censoring the opposition — effectively creating a much more sophisticated form of “might makes right.”

In many ways, the anatomy of corruption within “science-based” medicine is quite simple and like many other things in business, continually reuses the same formulas. As a result, once you understand how corruption plays out in a few areas, it becomes feasible to understand how things will play out in many others.

I thus would argue many of the events we witnessed throughout COVID-19 (e.g. the sudden extreme censorship of scientific debate recently detailed by Pierre Kory), simply represents all of this longstanding corruption metastasizing to a degree which finally became visible to the general public.

Public Relations

Although Sigmund Freud is typically thought of as the most influential psychologist in history, his nephew Edward Bernays created an invisible industry that has had a far greater influence than Freud. To create his mark on the world, Bernays argued that the principles of psychology should be utilized not for individual psychotherapy but rather to control the population so that the irrational impulses of the masses could not derail the progress of society, and not surprisingly, the power-hungry elite fully embraced his narrative.

When you study the organizational structure of modern society, you will continually come across hierarchal pyramids being utilized that allow the top of the pyramid to exert a massive influence over the rest of society.

This is for instance why in medicine, doctors are expected to follow “guidelines” created by unaccountable committees that are typically composed of individuals being paid off by the pharmaceutical industry, and why in most cases it is nearly impossible for a patient to have any type of care provided to them without the approval of a doctor. Thus, by buying out a few committees, it becomes possible to exert a massive influence on the general public.

Public relations is essentially the science of how to create a pyramidal hierarchy throughout the media and to leverage that control so the general public can be manipulated into serving the interests of the sponsor.

We recently witnessed what I believe to be the most aggressive PR campaign in history and the collective effort to pull out every possible stop to sell the COVID-19 vaccines to the American public (ironically one of the individuals I know who became disabled from these vaccines worked in the industry and worked with a passionate zeal for over a year beforehand on the PR campaign for Moderna).

Studying the PR industry is quite depressing because it shows how much of the news is “fake,” just how manipulative much of it is, and how many foundational beliefs we hold in the culture are simply the product of a corporation’s public relations campaign. For those interested in this subject, an excellent book can be found here, a youtube documentary here, and an article here.

One of the most common tactics utilized in public relations is to take a complex subject and distill it down to a simple phrase that reframes it in terms that are favorable to the sponsor and removes the critical nuances from a debate (frequently this process is equated to weaponizing language).

Because the entire PR process is based around creating a pyramidal hierarchy that defers to the top, you can frequently observe these messages or scripted phrases that were developed by a PR firm be simultaneously disseminated on countless networks, including the “independent” ones:

Note: This behavior exists on both sides of the political spectrum; I am citing this one because it is the best montage I have come across.

“Misinformation”

During Obama’s presidency, the term “misinformation” started to come into vogue and was deployed to sink Trump’s presidential campaign (which failed as Trump managed to make the “fake news” meme every media platform was promoting stick to CNN instead of him). Before long, this steamrolled into “misinformation” being used as a justification to censor any viewpoint that challenged the status quo.

Initially, easy to disparage groups such as members of the far-right were targeted for censorship by Silicon Valley, before long liberal friends I knew who practiced holistic medical approaches (and had supported the initial censorship) were targeted, and by the time COVID-19 happened, this behavior had metastasized to the point it was nearly impossible to publicize any treatment for the disease or any potential harm from the vaccines.

Governments have continued their relentless push for censorship, best illustrated by the recent U.N. speech by New Zealand’s prime minister that declared free speech on the internet a weapon of war and called for the international community to work towards curating (censoring) all online information that questions government narratives.

Prior to Obama’s presidency, I had heard there was a push to establish a pyramidal hierarchy for all information on the internet, with a few major tech companies serving as the “gatekeepers” the public could access the information through, but until 2016, this always seemed like something that would happen in the far distant future. Recently, I learned that Sharyl Atkinson was able to identify when and where this all began:

“I first heard the term [curated] applied to controlling news and information in October 2016 when President Obama introduced the concept at an appearance at the private research university Carnegie Mellon. Obama claimed a “curating” function had become necessary.

The public at large had not been asking for any such thing. Instead, it was the invention of powerful interests that apparently felt the need to get a grip on public opinion — interests that were losing the information war online. But the concept is contrary to the nature of a free society and an open Internet. It would take some clever manipulation to convince the public to allow such “curating.”

“We’re going to have to rebuild, within this Wild, Wild West of information flow, some sort of curating function that people agree to,” said Obama. “… [T]here has to be, I think, some sort of way in which we can sort through information that passes some basic truthiness tests and those that we have to discard because they just don’t have any basis in anything that’s actually happening in the world.”

As far as I know, that signaled the start of what would become a global media initiative to have third parties insert themselves as arbiters of facts, opinions, and truth in the news and online [prior to this they were viewed as a joke and fortunately still are by half of the electorate].”

Credible Sources

Most of our modern hierarchies operate on the basis of being “credible.” For example, in journalism, about a century ago during the era of Bernays, the concept of “professional journalism” was created and a standard was set that news could not be considered credible unless it was disseminated by someone who belonged to a corrupt credible news organization that served the bidding of those in power.

This article for example discusses the profound consequences of the monopolization of journalism, and how as the decades have gone by, the issue has only gotten worse and worse.

Sharyl Attkisson’s book (the source of the above quotation) describes how pervasive corruption gradually entered her industry, and how despite her clout in the network as a premier news anchor, more and more of her investigations were not permitted to air by her superiors.

For example, in 1997, Clinton legalized direct pharmaceutical advertising to consumers. As the networks become beholden to their new advertisers, anything critical of that industry, such as vaccine safety, was no longer permitted to air.

In the early 2000s, Atkinson was assigned to report on the controversial military anthrax and smallpox vaccinations, and not long after, the smallpox campaign was cancelled. Now, in contrast, no criticism whatsoever is permitted of the much more dangerous COVID-19 vaccines (and now even the government is paying to incentivize this censorship).

To see how much things have shifted consider this report that was aired on the nightly news after the 1976 swine flu vaccine debacle (this vaccine was not safe and I directly know people who developed permanent complications from it that persist to this day, but at the same time, it was much safer than the COVID-19 vaccines):

Something like this could never air today.

Evidence-Based Medicine

The pyramidal hierarchy of our society requires creating faith in authoritative sources and then having each institution work in unison to promote the sanctity of those (easy to control) sources. “Professional journalism” is one such example, another is the widespread societal adherence to the CDC’s arbitrary and ineffective guidelines (best illustrated by the absurd dictates they and other Western health authorities put forward in regards to social distancing during physical intimacy).

When evidence-based medicine (EBM) started, it was sorely needed by the medical profession because many disastrous practices were unchallengeable dogmas. However, in due time, as corruption entered the process, EBM became yet another means for “[financial] might to make right” as its authority was shifted into a pyramidal hierarchy. Presently, the “authority” in EBM rests in 5 areas.

  • The sanctity of all data.
  • Conducting large randomized clinical trials.
  • Peer-reviewed publications in high-impact scientific journals.
  • Authoritative committees reviewing the previous three to produce guidelines.
  • Other institutions (e.g. the media and the courts) upholding the sanctity of the data and evidenced-based guidelines.

There have been major issues in each of these areas for decades as industry has steadily worked to expand its influence over EBM, but as many observers noted, these issues spun completely out of control during COVID-19. Let’s review each of them:

  1. The sanctity of all data — The major problem with “data” is that most of it is never made available for outside analysis, which allows those who “own” the data to only present data that casts the owner in a favorable light (which essentially makes the data worthless).
    
    

    The pharmaceutical industry nonetheless has been able to sustain this practice by arguing that disclosing their data would constitute a violation of proprietary trade secrets. Thus excluding the occasional instance where they are forced to open their records as part of the discovery process (e.g. in the lawsuits against the antidepressant manufacturers) that research fraud and the concealment of critically important safety data never come to light (and never has for vaccines).

    
    

    Previously, one of the most egregious offenders in this regard were the statin manufacturers who have deliberately withheld their data from the public for decades. A corrupt Oxford academic consortium, the Cholesterol Treatment Trialists’ (CTT) Collaboration has access to that data and has published numerous pro-industry analyses of it, but despite continual outside requests, has refused to ever make this data available for outside scrutiny.

    
    

    This is concerning given the significant evidence that has emerged demonstrating statins are both ineffective and harmful, and has led to many more honest academics attempting to independently obtain this critical data from regulators.

    
    

    Almost all of the COVID-19 vaccine data likewise was never made available to the public (although the companies have suggested it may be made available a few years from now); instead, we simply received highly curated publications in prestigious medical journals. Since the vaccines have entered the market, countless red flags on their safety and efficacy have emerged in large datasets.

    
    

    However, in many cases, that data has only been available because it was leaked by whistleblowers or obtained by court order, and as the recent events in Israel showed (Israel agreed to be Pfizer’s laboratory to test their vaccines and many global vaccine policies were crafted from the Israeli data), much of the incriminating data against this program was deliberately concealed by governments around the world.

    
    

    On one hand, I view all of this as an immensely positive development, as in the past critical data suppression like this typically remained hidden and forgotten. On the other hand, I consider it completely unacceptable the public is being forced to take a vaccination product on the basis of data they are not even permitted to review.

  2. Conducting large randomized clinical trials — We are reflexively conditioned by the educational system to assume a clinical trial has no value unless it is randomized and controlled. While it is true that controlling for the placebo effect through blinding somewhat improves the accuracy of a study, conducting a randomized controlled trial (RCT) is immensely expensive, and the biases introduced by those costs dwarf those obtained by controlling for the placebo effect.
    
    

    A little known fact is that findings from study designs that do not rely on industry funding (i.e. retrospective observational controlled studies) reach the same conclusion, on average, to those of RCT’s. Yet the former are near systematically ignored by the high-impact journals and medical societies.

    
    

    Further, a frequent narrative parroted by high-impact journals and science news writers is that findings from studies deemed to be of a “low quality design” cannot be trusted. Not true. In a comparison of conclusions between groups of high and low quality studies, no meaningful differences were found.

    
    

    Put differently, RCT’s require industry funding, and industry funding has repeatedly been found to heavily bias trial data in favor of its sponsor. To highlight the absurdity of this, as the whistleblower Brooke Jackson showed, the RCT she supervised for the Pfizer vaccine was not even blinded because the trial site cut so many corners to produce a positive result for Pfizer.

    
    

    For those who wish to know about how the industry games clinical trials, this bookthis book and this book are the three best resources I have found on the subject.

  3. Peer reviewed publications in high-impact scientific journals — In the same way we are conditioned to reflexively dismiss anything that is not a large RCT, many people will not consider a scientific trial unless it is published in a high-impact peer-reviewed journal.
    
    

    Not surprisingly, there is a lot of money in this area and most of it comes from Big Pharma (which either comes from advertisements within the journal or agreements to purchase thousands of printed copies of that issue of the journal).

    
    

    This creates a setting where studies that support industry interests regardless of their deficiencies are published (e.g. pharmaceutical ghostwriting is a major source of fraud in the peer-reviewed literature), whereas articles that challenge their interests are never published. This has been a longstanding issue, and the earliest example I remember coming across was discussed in this 2001 book:

    medical biases and politics
    (I unfortunately was never able to track down the referenced news story; please let me know if you have)

    The positions of the journal sponsors also gradually enter the medical culture, and the peer-review culture frequently censors or attacks publications that do not match industry findings. One of the best examples was Andrew Wakefield’s 1998 study which ruffled so many feathers by suggesting a link between autism and vaccination that the study was retracted and a thorough example was made of him (e.g. he lost his license) to deter further research into vaccine injuries.

    
    

    Many other examples also exist, such as the extreme hostility faced by researchers who publish data that is critical of other sacred cows like routine statin usage or psychiatric overmedication.

    
    

    Because of the systemic biases that exist against publishing anything which challenges medical orthodoxies, it can often take years or decades for bad practices to be abandoned as no one is willing to on take the risk of publishing studies refuting them.

    
    

    For example, a few of my Ph.D. friends who researched viral genomes knew within a day of the original SARS-CoV-2 genetic sequence being published that it came from a lab, yet not a single one was willing to expose themselves to the personal risk they would take from authoring a publication on that subject.

    
    

    At this point, there seems to be an unwritten understanding that the introduction and conclusion of a scientific publication must match the prevailing biases of medicine. It is hence always fascinating to see just how often an article’s conclusion is not supported by the data within it (sadly few ever read those parts of the paper).

    
    

    Throughout COVID-19, these problems also became much worse. To share a few memorable examples:

    • A large study was published in the Lancet which showed data from around the world indicated hydroxychloroquine killed COVID-19 patients who received it and was used by the WHO as justification to suspend clinical trials of hydroxychloroquine (along with governments forbidding its administration to patients).
      
      

      Outside evaluators realized the data was nonsensical (leading to serious questions over how one of the best editorial boards in the world let it be published), the company that provided the data effectively admitted fraud had been conducted, and the study was retracted. Another one of the top 5 medical journals, the NEJM, also published a study utilizing Surgisphere’s fraudulent dataset.

    • Despite a tsunami of data showing severe harm from the COVID-19 vaccines, it has been virtually impossible for any publication on the topic to enter the peer-review literature.
    • As Pierre Kory has detailed throughout the last few years, numerous large clinical trials have been conducted that clearly show a benefit from ivermectin for COVID-19 and no risks associated with the therapy. Despite the evidence for ivermectin being stronger than what can be found for almost any other drug on the market, as Kory’s recent series shows, it is nearly impossible to have a study supporting ivermectin be published (unless the conclusion says the opposite).
      
      

      When they are instead published as preprints they often are retracted for political reasons (retracting a preprint is absurd), and not surprisingly, ivermectin is now widely viewed by the medical community as both unsafe and ineffective.

    
    

    Currently I believe that of the top five medical journals, the BMJ is the only “prestigious” medical journal still conducting itself in a manner deserving of its reputation.

  4. Authoritative committees reviewing the previous three to produce guidelines — A common complaint from conservatives is that unelected bureaucrats are allowed to control our lives with impunity. One area where this is particularly true can be found within the committee model where “experts” are nominated to assess existing evidence and produce a consensus on what should be done.
    
    

    Even though those guidelines which bypassed the legislative process should not be treated as law (as was ruled by a federal judge), in most cases they are. As you might expect, the people who make it onto these committees tend to have heavy financial conflicts of interest that inevitably result in their voting for their sponsors. Consider this paraphrased example that was shared in chapter 7 of Doctoring Data:

    The National Cholesterol Education Programme (NCEP) has been tasked by the NIH to develop [legally enforceable] guidelines for treating cholesterol levels. Excluding the chair (who was by law prohibited from having financial conflicts of interest), the other 8 members on average were on the payroll of 6 statin manufacturers.

    
    

    In 2004, NCEP reviewed 5 large statin trials and recommended: “Aggressive LDL lowering for high-risk patients [primary prevention] with lifestyle changes and statins.” [these recommendations in turn were adopted around the world].

    
    

    In 2005 a Canadian division of the Cochrane Collaboration reviewed 5 large statin trials (3 were the same as NCEP’s, while the other 2 had also reached a positive conclusion for statin therapy). That assessment instead concluded: “Statins have not been shown to provide an overall health benefit in primary prevention trials.”

    
    

    Note: The Cochrane Collaboration (prior to 2012-2016 when they began taking industry money from groups like the Bill and Melinda Gates foundation and switched to defending their interests such as the HPV vaccine), was the group that best objectively evaluated existing clinical evidence.

    
    

    Many committees that directed the pandemic response have engaged in egregious misconduct. Consider for example the Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices, the CDC committee that rubber stamps each new vaccine that enters the market (the only exception I know of was overruled by the current CDC director).

    
    

    The ACIP is the committee responsible for many of the vaccine mandates we have faced, and its rulings in favor of vaccination often bordered on the absurd. Similarly, Steve Kirsch was recently able to prove that the chair of the committee is willfully choosing to disregard Israeli data that undermines the justification for the entire vaccination campaign.

    
    

    I believe that the most corrupt committee during the pandemic response was the NIH one responsible for determining the appropriate therapies for COVID-19. Some (and possibly all) of its members were appointed by Anthony Fauci, many had personal ties to Fauci and almost all of them held significant financial conflicts of interest with Gilead, remdesivir’s manufacturer.

    
    

    Not surprisingly, that committee has consistently recommended against every therapy that effectively treats COVID-19 but is off-patent (and hence not profitable). Conversely, their recommendation for remdesivir is why it was the required treatment throughout the US hospital system despite the evidence for the drug being atrocious (a more detailed and referenced summary of this corruption can be found here).

    
    

    In many ways, the remdesivir story is eerily similar to the early days of HIV. There, Fauci used his influence to keep a variety of effective therapies away from dying AIDS patients so that he could win approval for AZT, a dangerous drug many believe significantly worsened the prognosis of those who received it.

  5. Other institutions (e.g. the media and the courts) upholding the sanctity of the data and evidenced-based guidelines — Many people I know used a variety of integrative therapies (e.g. intravenous vitamin C) to treat COVID-19 during the early days of the pandemic, and successfully saved many lives at the same time countless Americans were being sent to the hospitals to die (as they had no treatment for COVID-19 besides often lethal ventilators).
    
    

    Yet, it was those who treated COVID-19 successfully (including a few of my friends) who were targeted by the government and either served with a cease and desist or prosecuted for “endangering” the public by utilizing unproven therapies not supported by the COVID-19 treatment guidelines.

    
    

    The mass media was also fully complicit in this and never once mentioned any option for COVID-19 (other than needing to get more ventilators or vaccines), except when attacking the doctors who were providing life-saving outpatient therapies. However, while the new’s conduct was egregious, by far the biggest offender was Big Tech.

Curating Information

As I think through all the things that had to come together to enable the pandemic profiteers to destroy our economy, withhold life-saving treatments from the American public, and mandate a disastrous vaccination on the populace, I believe Obama’s push for the Silicon Valley to become the arbiter of what we were allowed to see online was by far the most consequential.

Since that time, I have observed a remarkable decline in the quality of discourse on many social media websites (as many worthwhile topics are now censored or flooded with bots — Substack is a rare exception) and it has become much more difficult to find the information I am looking for online (to the point I sometimes need to use Russia’s search engine to find it).

Throughout history, freedom of speech has always been a hotly contested subject as people tend to support it, except for viewpoints they disagree with, and frequently lack the insight to recognize why those positions are at odds with each other. Societies likewise follow cyclical trends towards and away from totalitarianism and fascist censorship.

The earliest example I know of was shared with me by a scholar who had reviewed the plays of ancient Greece and had found that as censorship (e.g. political correctness) entered the plays, it immediately preceded the fall of Greek democracy and an authoritarian government taking over. From studying countless iterations of this cycle, I now believe the following:

  • It must be acknowledged that any position you hold could be wrong or based on erroneous information.
  • It is important to defend the right of those you disagree with to speak and not hate them because they hold viewpoints you adamantly oppose.
  • If you refuse to defend your position in an open and fair debate, you are probably wrong.
  • Very strict stipulations must exist on what speech can be outlawed, and those stipulations must be agreed upon by (nearly) the entire society. Some things such as shouting “fire” in a movie theater as a prank everyone can agree on. Anything everyone cannot agree on I would argue does not meet the standard that must be met for censorship.
  • The government may incentivize speech it agrees with, but it cannot restrict speech it disagrees with.
  • Any attempt you make to censor a viewpoint you disagree with is not worth it because the censorship you helped create will inevitably be turned on you in the future.

During Obama’s presidency, two major changes emerged in Silicon Valley. The first many are aware of was an obsession (by these otherwise evil companies) with saving the world through social justice that I would argue was analogous to the well known practice of Greenwashing, where an egregious polluter conducts a token environmental initiative and through doing so successfully recasts themselves as protectors of the environment.

This social justice focus was particularly problematic as it was used to justify the censorship of anything that was not politically correct and I would argue that many of the tech employees who helped spearhead the movement are now directly experiencing the consequences of the climate they created.

Note: This focus on censorship in lieu of debating opposing (“unsafe”) viewpoints also creeped into the university system and then the culture during Obama’s presidency and I believe was a direct consequence of policies enacted by his Department of Education.

The second, much more important one was that Big Tech became a key financial supporter of the Democrat party, and to varying degrees merged with the pharmaceutical industry and biotech. Because of this, there was a seismic realignment in the priorities of the Democrat party and it began ardently supporting those industries.

It is important to recognize how these two trends dovetailed. Big Tech was able to use their “altruistic” focus on social justice to distract the public from the more sinister direction their industry was moving in by using the standard for censorship they had established in the name of creating a “safe” (politically correct) environment; while at the same time targeting threats to their partners in the pharmaceutical and biotech industry by censoring any voices suggesting dangers were associated with those products.

From watching each piece of the plan that has been rolled out throughout my career, I suspect the vision of these three industries is to transform medicine into an algorithmic practice where most medical “decisions” in patient care are made by an AI system and the human body is treated as a genomic software code that can be “solved” by programmers.

Although this approach will have the ability to overcome certain issues we presently face in medicine, it is also fundamentally incapable of addressing many of the needs of each human being who goes through the healthcare system and will likely prove disastrous to our species.

Antitrust Activity

At the time Bill Gates founded the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation he was one of the most disliked individuals in America. This was because he had leveraged the power of his operating system Windows, which was on almost every computer in America, to also monopolize the software market and prevent competitors like Netscape (an early internet browser) from being used by consumers.

Since this monopolistic behavior was illegal, Microsoft was sued for antitrust violations, and throughout the court process, Bill Gates was revealed to be a nasty individual who was doing everything he could to bury his competitors. To address the negative public perception of him, Gates founded the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation to recast himself as a philanthropist and through this PR stunt was able to successfully remediate his public image.

From the foundation’s inception, Gates repeated the same antitrust behavior he had leveraged in the past but instead directed it toward the field of global public health. I first became aware of this behavior after I learned of the disastrous vaccination campaigns he conducted in India. For example to quote The Real Anthony Fauci:

“India’s Federal Ministry of Health suspended the [HPV vaccine] trials and appointed an expert parliamentary committee to investigate the scandal. Indian government investigators found that Gates-funded researchers at PATH committed pervasive ethical violations: pressuring vulnerable village girls into the trial, bullying illiterate parents, and forging consent forms. Gates provided health insurance for his PATH staff but not to any participants in the trials, and refused medical care to the hundreds of injured girls.”

Gates also diverted a large portion of the global health budget towards eradicating the last few remaining cases of polio by giving large numbers of the (live) oral vaccine to third world countries, in some instances 50 doses by the age of five. This was disastrous around the world, for example paralyzing approximately 491,000 children over two decades in India.

In addition to vaccine fanaticism, Gates engaged in other “public health” measures that are more accurately described as colonialist practices. These included forcing poor women around the world to receive Depo-Provera (this is a long-acting injectable birth control that can permanently impair fertility) and pushing communities to abandon their traditional forms of farming and switch to genetically modified industrial agriculture (which places them at risk of starvation anytime a commodity price goes up).

One of my friends who has worked for the WHO for decades told me that the WHO has implemented a lot of good public health measures that saved lives. Unfortunately, ever since Gates got involved, those measured have fallen to the wayside and the focus has been on monopolistic public health practices that ultimately serve to enrich a few select industries at the expense of the third-world citizens the measures are alleged to help.

Similarly, many in the global health community have stated that since Gates has so much influence over the global health budget (and the WHO), it is nearly impossible to criticize or question any policy he promotes. To further entrench this monopoly, his foundation has prioritized buying out the press (be it groups like the Cochrane Collaboration or putting over 300 million into countless media outlets around the world), so that anything that challenges his vision of public health is “misinformation.”

Much more could be said about Gates (and is aptly summarized within The Real Anthony Fauci). However, we will focus on the two most important correlates to the misinformation epidemic:

  • Gates made a lot of money from the pandemic. For example, on 9/4/2019, two months before COVID-19 emerged in China, he invested 55 million in the company that produced Pfizer’s vaccine. Last year that investment was worth 550 million.
  • It has now been admitted by the mainstream media that Gates (and the Wellcome Trust) directed the pandemic response that failed disastrously from a public health perspective (but not in money-making). One quote from that article is particularly telling:

    “Leaders of three of the four organizations maintained that lifting intellectual property protections [which would prevent everyone from making money] was not needed to increase vaccine supplies – which activists believed would have helped save lives.”

In the second half of this series, we will show how this antitrust behavior and militant censorship metastasized within Silicon Valley and how increasingly draconian laws enforcing vaccine mandates for the pharmaceutical industry have been implemented by the California legislature.

from:    https://takecontrol.substack.com/p/californias-misinformation-epidemic

The Terrorism of Free Speech

Americans who question government now ‘threat actors,’ DHS Says

A new federal terror advisory contains a threat assessment that characterizes Americans who “mislead” others into questioning government-approved messages as being on par with terrorists. That is as anti-American messaging as could be imagined. America was founded on questioning governments, foreign and domestic. And that has been her saving grace, the reason for her unique success.

The assessment specifically identifies those who engage in “the proliferation of false or misleading narratives, which sow discord or undermine public trust in U.S. government institutions” as “threat actors.” It also cites “widespread online proliferation of false or misleading narratives regarding unsubstantiated widespread election fraud and COVID-19” as having a deleterious effect on government institutions.

Actually, it’s the actions of government institutions that often have a deleterious effect on (people’s views of) government institutions…and on the people. But, no matter, our First Amendment rights are out the window. 1984 is here. “Wrong-thought” has been criminalized.

If not stopped—and reversed– this is the end of the Great Experiment and the Land of Opportunity.

So, fellow threat actors, what are we to do about this?

First off, we must realize that “misinformation” is what has typically been put out by governments since governments were instituted among men. The larger and more powerful the government in relation to the people, the more preposterous the misinformation, false narratives, outright lies, and other propaganda it will churn out. And the less it will tolerate dissent and independent thought. This is a historical fact. It was true of feudal kings. Offend the king and it could be “off with your head.” The Third Reich blamed all Germany’s troubles on the Jews. So it imprisoned and exterminated them. The Soviet Union killed millions of folks who didn’t toe the party line. Speak out against the government? Hello, “re-education” camp or gulag. And today we have Cuba, Venezuela, Iran, Syria, Sudan, Eritrea, North Korea…and, of course, China. (How’s your “social credit score?” You might be about to find out.) China graciously exported the pandemic to the West, and it now appears many Western nations may be attempting to appropriate its system of government, as well. Talk about forgiveness and tolerance. Amazing. The governments of Australia, New Zealand, Austria, several other European nations, and even Canada and the United States have quickly and zealously headed down the road to tyranny.

Leftists in the U.S. are attacking the First and Second Amendments (among others). These are the essence and guarantor of our freedoms, respectively. They are marginalizing, canceling, and even incarcerating those who have the effrontery to challenge their narrative. Meaning their power. That is tyranny. That is terrorism. They are “threat actors.” And they do this while accusing Trump supporters, Christians, patriots, rednecks, Rogan listeners, Republicans, rural residents, truck drivers—and anyone else with whom they disagree– of being a “threat to our democracy.”

The truth is precisely the opposite, of course. They are the threat to our democracy. Demonstrably and inarguably. They want to squelch free speech and vigorous dialogue. They wish to take away your right to protect yourself and your family. They wish to pack the court. They wish to end the filibuster. Theywish to eliminate the Electoral College. We don’t wish to do any of those things to them or anybody else. Oh, and they locked us all down and masked us all up for the past two years.

There has been much talk of a Second Civil War or a Second American Revolution. Either, of course, would be tragic, insofar as violence and bloodshed are concerned. But what we really need, and what might help avoid either of the aforementioned, is a second Declaration of Independence. If our elite rulers knew—were absolutely convinced– that we will no longer accept their forays into tyranny and despotism, will no longer meekly acquiesce to their every wish and whim no matter how banal, damaging, or evil, perhaps we could start reclaiming and restoring “our democracy.” Peacefully.

I’ll even offer to write it.

It might go something like this:

“As Americans, we still hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness. And that legitimate governments are instituted among men to secure these rights, not attempt to repeal them. We must never forget that just governments derive their powers from the consent of the governed. These are the defining characteristics of America, the blueprint for this nation, and we will not throw our birthrights away. As our Founders noted, whenever any form of government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the right of the people to alter or to abolish it. Indeed, when a government is trending towards absolute despotism, it is their duty to do so. For, as Americans, we owe it to our forefathers, ourselves, and our posterity to reclaim our former freedoms and see to a rebirth of our once blessed and unrivaled republic.

“The following are some of the abuses, injuries, and usurpations compelling us to make this Declaration:

“Our leaders have used a pandemic, that they partially paid for, to tell us that we couldn’t leave our houses. For the first time, they quarantined the healthy. They told us that we must wear a mask over our mouths and noses at all times, even indoors. They said we couldn’t visit our loved ones in hospitals or in hospice. Pure, unadulterated evil. They barred us from attending weddings and funerals. They informed many of us that our jobs are ‘not essential,’ even as they paid many not to work. Preposterous! They have fomented and excused months-long violent protests and riots by some which led to numerous deaths and billions of dollars in damage…while incarcerating without charge many who peacefully walked into our Capitol Building. They have unilaterally instituted a two-tier system of justice, where laws apply utterly differently to different people based on ideology. They have weaponized the FBI, CIA, DOJ, DHS, and IRS against the American people, and are now even attempting to do the same with our military. They have, through extreme incompetence or malevolence given succor to our enemies and created grave doubts in the minds of our friends and allies. They have decided not to tend to or defend our Southern border, leaving us wide open to criminals, drug and sex trafficking, and potential acts of terrorism. They do this because they wish to replace us, legal citizens, with those whom they can more easily control—and whom they can count on to vote for them in the future. Monstrous! Moreover, they have created conditions mandating that crime rates will surge across the nation, making all of us less safe. They have disabled our energy industry, making us once again dependent on foreign actors and adversely affecting our national security. They have mismanaged the economy, driving up inflation and diminishing our quality of life. They have—in myriad ways—caused absolutely needless pain and suffering for scores of millions of Americans, as reflected in the skyrocketing rates of substance abuse and suicides. All these are egregious and frightening acts signaling a descent into tyranny.

“Yet, whenever we have petitioned for redress, we have been summarily rebuffed. Our repeated petitions have been answered only by repeated injury. We have been mocked, scorned, canceled.

“Our leaders must know that we will not choose hopelessness and despair. We will not tolerate their arrogance, scorn, and contempt. We will, once more, be free.

“Therefore, we the citizens of the United States of America, appealing to the Supreme Judge of the universe for the righteousness of our intentions, do solemnly publish and declare that, to this end, we mutually pledge to each other our lives, our fortunes and our sacred honor.”

from:   https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2022/02/americans_who_question_government_now_threat_actors_dhs_says_.html

YouTube versus “Conspiracy” Content

1984: YouTube Will Demote Conspiracy Videos In Its Recommendation Algorithm — A Scary Prospect For Freedom Of Thought

By Aaron Kesel

YouTube said Friday it will stop recommending conspiracy videos such as those claiming the Earth is flat, or promoting alternative theories about the September 11, 2001 attacks.

We’ll continue that work this year, including taking a closer look at how we can reduce the spread of content that comes close to—but doesn’t quite cross the line of—violating our Community Guidelines. To that end, we’ll begin reducing recommendations of borderline content and content that could misinform users in harmful ways—such as videos promoting a phony miracle cure for a serious illness, claiming the earth is flat, or making blatantly false claims about historic events like 9/11.

While this shift will apply to less than one percent of the content on YouTube, we believe that limiting the recommendation of these types of videos will mean a better experience for the YouTube community. To be clear, this will only affect recommendations of what videos to watch, not whether a video is available on YouTube. As always, people can still access all videos that comply with our Community Guidelines and, when relevant, these videos may appear in recommendations for channel subscribers and in search results. We think this change strikes a balance between maintaining a platform for free speech and living up to our responsibility to users.

This change relies on a combination of machine learning and real people. We work with human evaluators and experts from all over the United States to help train the machine learning systems that generate recommendations. These evaluators are trained using public guidelines and provide critical input on the quality of a video.

While the former is a psyop — the Earth obviously isn’t flat and is a spheroid — the latter is the more worrying contention, since to this day there are still valid questions about 9/11. For information on 9/11 that doesn’t quite add up, you only need to watch two of James Corbett’s YouTube documentary films: 9/11 War Games and 9/11 Trillions: Follow The Money.

This also follows the news that a NYC Federal Grand Jury has been empaneled to investigate the claims made by Architects and Engineers for 9/11 Truth, which will look into the evidence of the World Trade Towers being a controlled demolition operation with thermite.

This YouTube algorithm and policy change further comes as a mysterious group The Dark Overlord (TDO) has claimed to hack “the truth behind 9/11,” by breaching numerous different insurers and legal firms, claiming specifically that it hacked Hiscox Syndicates Ltd, Lloyds of London, and Silverstein Properties. While not much has come out of the hack, there was one curious document alluding to military intervention in Flight 93, which if you remember was said to have been civilians who brought down the plane in a heroic move, not military intervention.

Activist Post previously reported that YouTube was planning to combat conspiracy-driven videos by introducing informative debunking boxes linking back to Wikipedia and other sources. Although it seems that’s not enough, and now they have to remove “conspiracy videos” from suggested videos as well.

We also reported that since Google was heading towards targeting critical thinkers — demonized as “Conspiracy Theorists” — who ask the difficult questions in its rating guidelines, YouTube wouldn’t be too long to follow those actions. It seems we were right!

Considering that the origination of the word “Conspiracy Theorist” comes from the CIA, I would say using a derogatory word to discuss those who think is dangerous. More modernized, in fact, it is also straight out of the JTIRG playbook that NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden revealed.

Misinformation is plaguing the Internet, but who is to decide what is and isn’t misinformation?  The readers themselves need to, because policing thought and opinion opens a door to the avenue of a Truth Council and information oversight where admins (the purveyors of truth) decide what is and isn’t fact. What happens when one of these people doesn’t dig deep enough and just dismisses something without looking at the evidence, due to lack of information or understanding? Censorship of not only ideas but also people as a whole who are effectively removed from the discussion.

As discussed in this reporter’s last article entitled “YouTube Purge: The End Of Freedom Of Expression Or The Great Awakening For Alternatives?” – questioning is healthy; and as writer Naomi Wolf exposed, you should think before it’s illegal to do so. “It’s no longer crazy to assess news events to see if they are real or not real,” she stated in the video below. As history has shown through declassified documents (overthrow of Mossadegh), leaked diplomatic cables by WikiLeaks, and reporting by murdered journalist Michael Hastings who exposed propaganda used against the Senate and Congress, “all over the world, it’s well-established, the State Department intelligence agencies engage in theatre, and it’s what they do, it’s spycraft, to create spectacles and events that people may not realize are spectacles and events…,” Naomi says.

Hastings exposed the use of propaganda to get into Afghanistan in his report entitled: “The Afghanistan Report the Pentagon Doesn’t Want You to Read.” The article was surrounding a leaked unclassified Pentagon report.  The report took the shroud off the U.S. military’s psyops operation command revealing several techniques the group uses in psychological warfare to manipulate the public, including but not limited to fake intelligence information, lack of information and social media manipulation, according to Lt. Colonel Daniel Davis. The kicker is that not only were those tactics used against the American people but the tactics were used against Senators.

It is an extremely worrying fact that the Military Industrial Complex would manipulate elected officials with fake news, especially considering that propaganda wasn’t legalized in America again until 2012. Previous legislation had been passed to protect citizens during the Church Committee hearings as part of a series of investigations into intelligence abuses during the mid-1970s, amended by the Smith-Mundt Act. Smith-Mundt was repealed in 2012 under Obama, as Business Insider reported, “The NDAA Legalizes The Use Of Propaganda On The US Public.”

As Arkansas Senator J. William Fulbright stated, VOA, Radio Free Europe, and many others “should be given the opportunity to take their rightful place in the graveyard of Cold War relics.” Fulbright’s amendment to Smith-Mundt was bolstered in 1985 by Nebraska Senator Edward Zorinsky, who argued that such “propaganda” should be kept out of America as to distinguish the U.S. “from the Soviet Union where domestic propaganda is a principal government activity.”

This is extremely dangerous; one perspective might see things in a different way because one person has acquired information, while the other lacks that information. For example, the U.S. government (specifically the CIA) used documented propaganda on the public and uses foreign propaganda against other countries. It’s not just the CIA, other nations’ intelligence services do it too.

While one person might feel that is insane, (and it quite literally is) the other person might know of the previous existence of Operation Mockingbird, which used CIA-employed journalists to produce fake stories during the Cold War-era 1950s through 1970s. They also funded student and cultural organizations and magazines as front organizations.  This CIA operation became known as Operation Mockingbird and was mentioned in the infamous CIA Family Jewels collection.

The U.K. smaller equivalent to Operation Mockingbird was known as Operation Mass Appeal. It was allegedly run by MI6 during 1997–98 and exaggerated Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction, according to former U.N. chief weapons inspector Scott Ritter. That claim was further exaggerated just a few years later in 2003 when the U.K. government Downing St. produced a fake Iraq war memo  that was exposed as being based on academic papers. It is a claim that would never have seen the light of day if it wasn’t for a doctor named David Kelly, one of the lead scientists who called the Iraq dossier a sham. Kelly was later found in the woods, and his death remains a mystery to this day.

Another example is how the media as a whole portrayed a video that was claimed to be from Syria (known as the “Syrian boy hero”) as real but was later revealed by Norwegian filmmakers to have been faked. As a result, the media had to backpedal their story issuing retractions.

Years later, in an unrelated incident, five people were arrested for using children in staged Aleppo videos, showing how dangerous it is to report any information out of Syria, as well as how important it is to have independent free thinkers.

Now, a UN panel (with little media attention) has revealed that the infamous White Helmets in Syria, the subjects of an Oscar-winning documentary, were engaged in criminal activity including but not limited to organ theft, staging rescues, and stealing from civilians.  As a further fun fact, the leader of the White Helmets, Raed Salah, was denied entry into the U.S.  at Washington’s Dulles International Airport and deported, due to “extremist connections” while on his way to receive a humanitarian relief award at a gala dinner hosted by USAID.

Really none of this should come as a surprise since White Helmets are connected to the Free Syrian Army (FSA), which in turn is connected to AlQaeda and Al-Nusra.

Perhaps a better example, and one that doesn’t involve propaganda, which more people can relate to is the situation in Flint, Michigan where water was poisoned due to negligence that was attempted to be covered up by the local government. YouTube as a medium allowed those citizens to have a voice and show the carelessness by their government officials. Further, the government even removed the citizens’ power to sue the state of Michigan over the lead contamination of its water supply.

For a moment imagine that this was called fake; these people would have been ignored far more than they were by the national mainstream media. Policing information is outright reckless and could endanger lives.

Then there is the spraying of carcinogenic chemicals on unknowing residents in the U.S. and Canada by the Army under Operation DEW and Operation Large Area Coverage (LAC) during the Cold War in testing linked to weaponry involving radioactive ingredients meant to attack the Soviet Union. Which, if I am being frank, sounds absolutely bonkers; but if you study history, you will see that this is the least that was done during that time frame, i.e. the infamous program known as Project MKUltra. During that covert program, people all over the place were tested with various experiments, many times against their own will.

So to say that YouTube will link to one source that can be edited by anyone and claim it as the moral high ground of “truth” is crazy, but to then introduce a recommendation block on “conspiratorial information” is outright insanity, which suppresses research efforts.

It doesn’t matter what your views are or what you think about a particular subject YouTube is aiming to censor the free flow of information, and this could be dangerous for a democratic society. This means that channels promoting free thinking and questioning of news events will now face further demoting within YouTube’s algorithms. These actions endanger a free and open society; no one should be able to decide what a user can and can’t search for no individual platform should be able to decide what is and isn’t the truth for their users. While in the same respect no one should be able to decide who does and doesn’t have a voice. (That’s the silencing of freedom of opinion and expression.)

YouTube is walking us straight into George Orwell’s nightmare 1984 through its proposed actions to silence free thinkers deemed “conspiracy theorists.” I will be the first one to tell you some theories are bat shit crazy such as the theory of flat Earth. But that doesn’t mean I want to censor the content. As another example, the rise of an anonymous insider who has been wrong more times then I can count on two hands:  Q. However, again I don’t want YouTube as a corporate giant to have the ability to censor anyone who speaks about the Quidiot conspiracy. Because if you give them an inch they will take a mile and begin censoring other topics or even individuals as they already have including Activist Post‘s own YouTube channel.

If someone wants to promote a ridiculous theory they should be free to do so.  After all, it’s their own credibility at stake. A democratic society is free and open and full of debates; and while YouTube wants to promote that theories about 9/11 are ludicrous, there are far more dots that don’t add up than they or the general public care to see or admit. (I won’t go into the topic as it would take far too long to dive into, but I’ll make a few quick suggestions of names and events to research – Michael Riconisciuto, John Patrick O’Neill, Bill Cooper, Able Danger, dancing Israelis, WTC7, bombs on George Washington bridge, et al.)

See my article: “The Official Narrative Of 911 A Bigger Conspiracy Theory” for just some of the various evidence against the official story.

It’s particularly worrying that they single out theories of 9/11 — one of the worst tragedies in American history shrouded in mystery — in the blog post. Since, again, there is more that doesn’t add up than makes sense in regards to 9/11. There are several holes such as the various war game drills that James Corbett goes into in detail within his documentary War Games.  We may never know what happened on 9/11, but there is way more to it than the official government narrative, and we the people have a right to know or at the very least seek out potential answers.

While YouTube wants you to think the governments of the world aren’t involved in any sort of corruption, “conspiratorial plots,” or cover-ups, history has proven quite the opposite. All of this information now risks being censored under YouTube’s policy and algorithm changes a scary and worrying prospect. It seems as though they want to protect the establishment rather than allow people to freely think for themselves. This is about the human right not to be indoctrinated with information, but rather to make up our own minds. Even if we are wrong about a particular subject (such as those of you who think the Earth is flat), this allows for healthy debate among individuals and the stopping of tyranny or tyrannical rule by dictatorships

For now, at the very least, we can be thankful that YouTube is stating that it will not outright ban all content it designates as a conspiracy theory (yet), despite the recent purge of dozens upon dozens of accounts that are connected to free speech and free thought. There are also always alternatives such as DTube, BitChute, and many others for uploading content. We need to ask ourselves is the YouTube purge the end of freedom of expression or the great awakening for alternatives?

YouTube’s moves against free thinkers could backfire for the company quite severely, because truth is stranger than fiction. Although this writer can agree with YouTube that the world is a spheroid, definitely not flat or completely round for that matter, it is important to have free independent thought and speech. Even if that means I have to share the planet with flat-Earthers or people who believe every crazed murder spree is a false flag attack (granted some might be because Operation Northwoods against Cuba and a memo suggested a false flag attack against Russia during the Cold War using civilians as cannon fodder, so it’s not that insane to suggest.)

The rapid changes we are witnessing with the main drivers of Internet perception has even drawn the attention of one of the inventors of the World Wide Web, Tim Berners-Lee. He noted in an open letter that “What was once a rich selection of blogs and websites has been compressed under the powerful weight of a few dominant platforms.” Do we really want those dominant platforms telling us their exclusive version of the truth?

Aaron Kesel writes for Activist Post. Support us at Patreon. Follow us on Minds, Steemit, SoMee, BitChute, Facebook and Twitter. Ready for solutions? Subscribe to our premium newsletter Counter Markets.

from:   https://www.activistpost.com/2019/01/1984-youtube-will-demote-conspiracy-videos-in-its-recommendation-algorithm-a-scary-prospect-for-freedom-of-thought.html