The NSF has awarded the following nine grants since September 1:
A $330,000 grant to a postdoctoral fellowship that will “develop educational materials to help identify misinformation in media.” The associated program began on September 1, 2023.
A $1.5 million grant to Arizona State University as part of a biological sciences program. The grant will help build “new risk management strategies” and its description claims that the “rapid dissemination of information on the internet is contributing to the spread of misinformation about hazards, risks, and how to manage them.” The associated program began on September 1, 2023.
A $529,609 grant to Florida International University to conduct a study on “detection and containment of influence campaigns” that “distribute and amplify misinformation and hate speech with significant societal impact.” The associated program is due to start on October 1, 2023.
Two grants totaling $600,000 to the University of Rochester and Trustees of Indiana University for a collaborative research program that aims to increase the efficiency of an AI technique that can be applied to various areas, including “identifying misinformation on social media.” The associated programs are due to start on October 1, 2023.
The State Department has awarded the following five grants since September 1:
A $14,500 grant to Paraguay’s American Cultural Center that will be used to implement workshops that “seek to combat misinformation and promote responsible digital citizenship.” The associated program began on September 1, 2023.
A $50,000 grant to New York University to complete the implementation of a speaker series that supports “countering misinformation.” The associated program is due to start on October 1, 2023.
A $50,000 grant to the non-profit Digital Rights Nepal “to create a sustainable network of youth to promote digital rights, safer internet use and a collective resilience towards misinformation and disinformation.” The associated program is due to start on October 2, 2023.
These awards were granted as the Biden admin faces a major lawsuit for pressuring Big Tech to censor content that it deems to be misinformation.
While some of the grants focus have been awarded to non-American organizations, whose misinformation targeting efforts don’t fall under the scope of the First Amendment, these types of programs can result in the speech of Americans being targeted.
“Man is born free but everywhere is in chains.”—Jean-Jacques Rousseau
Authoritarian control freaks out to micromanage our lives have become the new normal or, to be more accurate, the new abnormal when it comes to how the government relates to the citizenry.
This overbearing despotism, which pre-dates the COVID-19 hysteria, is the very definition of a Nanny State, where government representatives (those elected and appointed to work for us) adopt the authoritarian notion that the government knows best and therefore must control, regulate and dictate almost everything about the citizenry’s public, private and professional lives.
Indeed, it’s a dangerous time for anyone who still clings to the idea that freedom means the right to think for yourself and act responsibly according to your best judgment.
This tug-of-war for control and sovereignty over our selves impacts almost every aspect of our lives, whether you’re talking about decisions relating to our health, our homes, how we raise our children, what we consume, what we drive, what we wear, how we spend our money, how we protect ourselves and our loved ones, and even who we associate with and what we think.
You can’t even buy a stove, a dishwasher, a showerhead, a leaf blower, or a lightbulb anymore without running afoul of the Nanny State.
In this way, under the guise of pseudo-benevolence, the government has meted out this bureaucratic tyranny in such a way as to nullify the inalienable rights of the individual and limit our choices to those few that the government deems safe enough.
Yet limited choice is no choice at all. Likewise, regulated freedom is no freedom at all.
Indeed, as a study by the Cato Institute concludes, for the average American, freedom has declined generally over the past 20 years. As researchers William Ruger and Jason Sorens explain, “We ground our conception of freedom on an individual rights framework. In our view, individuals should be allowed to dispose of their lives, liberties, and property as they see fit, so long as they do not infringe on the rights of others.”
The overt signs of the despotism exercised by the increasingly authoritarian regime that passes itself off as the United States government (and its corporate partners in crime) are all around us: censorship, criminalizing, shadow banning and de-platforming of individuals who express ideas that are politically incorrect or unpopular; warrantless surveillance of Americans’ movements and communications; SWAT team raids of Americans’ homes; shootings of unarmed citizens by police; harsh punishments meted out to schoolchildren in the name of zero tolerance; community-wide lockdowns and health mandates that strip Americans of their freedom of movement and bodily integrity; armed drones taking to the skies domestically; endless wars; out-of-control spending; militarized police; roadside strip searches; privatized prisons with a profit incentive for jailing Americans; fusion centers that spy on, collect and disseminate data on Americans’ private transactions; and militarized agencies with stockpiles of ammunition, to name some of the most appalling.
Yet as egregious as these incursions on our rights may be, it’s the endless, petty tyrannies—the heavy-handed, punitive-laden dictates inflicted by a self-righteous, Big-Brother-Knows-Best bureaucracy on an overtaxed, overregulated, and underrepresented populace—that illustrate so clearly the degree to which “we the people” are viewed as incapable of common sense, moral judgment, fairness, and intelligence, not to mention lacking a basic understanding of how to stay alive, raise a family, or be part of a functioning community.
When the dictates of petty bureaucrats carry greater weight than the individual rights of the citizenry, we’re in trouble, folks.
Federal and state governments have used the law as a bludgeon to litigate, legislate and micromanage our lives through overregulation and overcriminalization.
This is what happens when bureaucrats run the show, and the rule of law becomes little more than a cattle prod for forcing the citizenry to march in lockstep with the government.
Overregulation is just the other side of the coin to overcriminalization, that phenomenon in which everything is rendered illegal, and everyone becomes a lawbreaker.
You don’t have to look far to find abundant examples of Nanny State laws that infantilize individuals and strip them of their ability to decide things for themselves. Back in 2012, then-New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg infamously proposed a ban on the sale of sodas and large sugary drinks in order to guard against obesity. Other localities enacted bans on texting while jaywalking, wearing saggy pants, having too much mud on your car, smoking outdoors, storing trash in your car, improperly sorting your trash, cursing within earshot of others, or screeching your tires.
Yet while there are endless ways for the Nanny State to micromanage our lives, things become truly ominous when the government adopts mechanisms enabling it to monitor us for violations in order to enforce its many laws.
Nanny State, meet the all-seeing, all-knowing Surveillance State and its sidekick, the muscle-flexing Police State.
You see, in an age of overcriminalization—when the law is wielded like a hammer to force compliance to the government’s dictates whatever they might be—you don’t have to do anything “wrong” to be fined, arrested or subjected to raids and seizures and surveillance.
You just have to refuse to march in lockstep with the government.
As policy analyst Michael Van Beek warns, the problem with overcriminalization is that there are so many laws at the federal, state and local levels—that we can’t possibly know them all.
“It’s also impossible to enforce all these laws. Instead, law enforcement officials must choose which ones are important and which are not. The result is that they pick the laws Americans really must follow, because they’re the ones deciding which laws really matter,” concludes Van Beek. “Federal, state and local regulations — rules created by unelected government bureaucrats — carry the same force of law and can turn you into a criminal if you violate any one of them… if we violate these rules, we could be prosecuted as criminals. No matter how antiquated or ridiculous, they still carry the full force of the law. By letting so many of these sit around, just waiting to be used against us, we increase the power of law enforcement, which has lots of options to charge people with legal and regulatory violations.”
This is the police state’s superpower: empowered by the Nanny State, it has been vested with the authority to make our lives a bureaucratic hell.
The groundwork laid with COVID-19 is a prologue to what will become the police state’s conquest of a new, relatively uncharted, frontier: inner space, specifically, the inner workings (genetic, biological, biometric, mental, emotional) of the human race.
Consider how many more ways the government could “protect us” from ourselves under the guise of public health and safety.
For instance, under the guise of public health and safety, the government could use mental health care as a pretext for targeting and locking up dissidents, activists and anyone unfortunate enough to be placed on a government watch list.
When combined with advances in mass surveillance technologies, artificial intelligence-powered programs that can track people by their biometrics and behavior, mental health sensor data (tracked by wearable data and monitored by government agencies such as HARPA), threat assessments, behavioral sensing warnings, precrime initiatives, red flag gun laws, and mental health first-aid programs aimed at training gatekeepers to identify who might pose a threat to public safety, these preemptive mental health programs could well signal a tipping point in the government’s efforts to penalize those engaging in so-called “thought crimes.”
This is how it begins.
On a daily basis, Americans are already relinquishing (in many cases, voluntarily) the most intimate details of who we are—their biological makeup, our genetic blueprints, and our biometrics (facial characteristics and structure, fingerprints, iris scans, etc.)—in order to navigate an increasingly technologically-enabled world.
Having conditioned the population to the idea that being part of society is a privilege and not a right, such access could easily be predicated on social credit scores, the worthiness of one’s political views, or the extent to which one is willing to comply with the government’s dictates, no matter what they might be.
COVID-19 with its talk of mass testing, screening checkpoints, contact tracing, immunity passports, and snitch tip lines for reporting “rule breakers” to the authorities was a preview of what’s to come.
We should all be leery and afraid.
At a time when the government has a growing list—shared with fusion centers and law enforcement agencies—of ideologies, behaviors, affiliations and other characteristics that could flag someone as suspicious and result in their being labeled potential enemies of the state, it won’t take much for any of us to be considered outlaws or terrorists.
After all, the government likes to use the words “anti-government,” “extremist” and “terrorist” interchangeably. The Department of Homeland Security broadly defines extremists as individuals “that are mainly antigovernment, rejecting federal authority in favor of state or local authority, or rejecting government authority entirely.”
At some point, being an individualist will be considered as dangerous as being a terrorist.
When anything goes when it’s done in the name of national security, crime fighting and terrorism, “we the people” have little to no protection against SWAT team raids, domestic surveillance, police shootings of unarmed citizens, indefinite detentions, and the like, whether or not you’ve done anything wrong.
In an age of overcriminalization, you’re already a criminal.
All the government needs is proof of your law-breaking. They’ll get it, too.
The latest evidence there are mentally diseased Nazi psychopaths on the loose comes from an American—described as “trans” going by the name of Sarah Ashton-Cirillo, formerly Michael Ashton-Cirillo—a “reassigned” former USG military person from Nevada, now spokesperson for Ukraine’s “territorial defense,” home to the racist, murderous, and Stepan Bandera-worshipping Azov Battalion. It is not an insult to describe Ashton-Cirillo as a wanna-be Nazi. It is also not an insult to characterize this LGBT+ person as a psychopath.
It looks like the corporate war propaganda media has refused to mention the threats issued by Ashton-Cirillo against all critics of the war in Ukraine. The threat to track down and murder journalists and others opposed to the insane war in Ukraine dovetailed with hints dropped post-coup president Zelenskyy.
Sarah Ashton Cirillo recently called for the murder of “propagandists” who oppose the regime in Kiev. The following day, Ukraine President Zelensky made thinly veiled threats of widespread terrorist attacks by Ukrainian refugees in Europe and the American continent.
The corporate war propaganda media has remained silent on threats made by the Nazi-infected territorial defense forces, designed primarily to kill ethnic Russians in the Donbas and southern Ukraine following the USG-orchestrated coup in 2014.
I can only assume the “journalists” and their bosses at CNN, MSNBC, FOX, et al, approve of murdering civilians in direct contradiction to the Geneva Conventions.
Making death threats against civilians and journalists is a grave violation of international humanitarian law and should be regarded as an act of terrorism, regardless of the circumstances. Upholding the principles of distinction and protecting non-combatants are essential for preserving the rights and safety of innocent individuals during times of conflict.
One has only to look at the Myrotvorets website to see the evidence of these violations. Or simply look at the lists of journalists who have disappeared or been murdered within Ukraine since the Maidan coup.
Since Ashton-Cirillo’s proclamation, a friend’s home has been vandalised and 17 death threats were made to her. This is what the collective west is supporting in Ukraine.
Nazis, of course, don’t do international law (or, for that matter, do American neocons). They are the worst sort of Machiavellians. For the racist, violent, hateful Machiavellian, the end justifies the means—and the means include rape, torture, disappearance, and assassination—the same as it did for real Nazis, their brownshirts, and SS Gestapo henchmen.
Feminists and so-called progressives believe “silence is violence.” In the case of the CIA narrative telegraphing corporate media, however, it is fair to say “omission is violence,” although this does not rhyme.
David Ignatius, favored CIA conduit at The Washington Post, does not need to worry about being double tapped by a Banderite assassin as he departs the WaPo compound at One Franklin Square in DC.
Glenn Greenwald? Maybe he needs a bodyguard. Ditto Seymour Hersh. Scott Ritter and Douglas McGregor might know how to handle such a threat. I don’t think Elon Musk has to worry.
There are thousands of others the Banderite Nazis in Ukraine plan to murder. Following the USG-orchestrated coup on Kyiv, the Banderite-Nazi government established the Myrotvorets website. It contains around 200,000 people, mostly Russians, but also Europeans and Americans the Nazis would love to see tortured, raped, and murdered.
As of October 2019, the Myrotvorets website claims it holds the “records of more than 6,000 anti-Ukrainian propagandists and associates of the Russian aggressor who participate in the information war against Ukraine, justify the aggression and war crimes of Russia against Ukraine.”
The Banderite-Nazi Myrotvorets (alternatively, Mirotvorets, translated as “Peacekeeper”) website includes a facial recognition function, using the IDentigraF system. The database for this system is described as containing more than two million images of “persons who have committed crimes against Ukraine and its citizens.”
The website contains the names of other well-known personalities, including musician Roger Waters, Hungarian president Viktor Orbán, Syrian President Bashar al-Assad, the late Italian PM Silvio Berlusconi, Russian pop stars, Henry Kissinger (the global elite don’t get a pass), and even the former PM of Ukraine, Yulia Tymoshenko.
The Banderite-Nazis are using high technology to identify and target individuals able to cut through the patently absurd CIA-USG-SBU narrative propaganda and outright lies fed to largely ignorant populations in America and Europe.
I’m not an influential blogger. I post irregularly. I have around 300-400 subscribers to my Substack. I don’t believe my criticism of Ukraine and its Banderite-Nazis will get me targeted.
However, I am not entirely dismissing the prospect considering I have been threatened in the past for blog posts in opposition to war. That said, the Uko Banderite-Nazis have more important and visible targets than your humble blogger. I did not find my name listed on the website.
However, it is wise to never underestimate ethnic cleansers with a superiority complex. They are extremely radicalized and violently insane. If the opportunity to murder all critics, collectively denounced as Russian collaborators, presents itself, the Banderite-Nazis will respond, especially if they get a nod from the Nazi-infused CIA.
Orwell, again. 1984 was prescient on so many concepts that it seems it was written for the Biden era. Underlying it all is the concept of disinformation, the root of propaganda and mind control. So it is in 2023. Just ask FBI Director Chris Wray. Or Facebook.
George Orwell’s novel explores the concept of disinformation and its role in controlling and manipulating society. Orwell presents a dystopian future where a totalitarian regime, led by the Party and its figurehead Big Brother, exerts complete control over its citizens’ lives, including their thinking. The Party employs a variety of techniques to disseminate disinformation and maintain its power. One of the most prominent examples is the concept of “Newspeak,” a language designed to restrict and manipulate thought by reducing the range of expressible ideas. Newspeak aims to replace words and concepts that could challenge or criticize the Party’s ideology, effectively controlling the way people think and communicate (unhomed, misspoke, LGBQTIAXYZ+, nati0nalist, terrorist.)
Orwell also introduces the concept of doublethink, which refers to the ability to hold two contradictory beliefs simultaneously and accept them both as true. This psychological manipulation technique allows the Party to control the minds of its citizens and make them believe in false information or embrace contradictory ideas without questioning (masks which do not prevent disease transmission are still mandatory.) The Party in 1984 alters historical records and disseminates false information through the Ministry of Truth. This manipulation of historical events and facts aims to control the collective memory of the society in a post-truth era, ensuring that the Party’s version of reality remains unquestioned (war in Ukraine, Iraq, El Salvador, Vietnam, all to protect our freedom at home.)
Through these portrayals, Orwell highlights the dangers of disinformation and its potential to distort truth, manipulate public opinion, and maintain oppressive systems of power. The novel serves as a warning about the importance of critical thinking, independent thought, and the preservation of objective truth in the face of disinformation and propaganda.
Disinformation is bad. But replacing disinformation with censorship and/or replacement with other disinformation is worse. 1984 closed down the marketplace of ideas. So for 2023.
In 2023 America the medium is social media and the Ministry of Truth is the Executive Branch, primarily the FBI. Topics the FBI at one point labeled disinformation and sought to censor in the name of protecting Americans from disinformation include but are not limited to the contents of Hunter Biden’s laptop, the Covid lab leak theory, the efficiency and value to society of masks, lockdowns, and vaccines, speech about election integrity and the 2020 presidential election, the security of voting by mail, even parody accounts mocking the president (about Finnegan Biden, Hunter Biden’s daughter.)
When asked before Congress to define disinformation, FBI Director Christopher Wray could not do it, even though it is the basis for the FBI’s campaign to censor Americans. It’s a made up term with no fixed meaning. That gives it its power, like “terrorism” was used a decade or so earlier. Remember “domestic terrorism”? That stretched to cover everything from white power advocates to J6 marchers to BLM protestors to Moms for Liberty. It just can’t be all those things all the time but it can be all those things at different times, as needed. The term “hate speech” is another flexible tool of enforcement and is why efforts to codify banning hate speech under the First Amendment must be resisted so strongly. Same for QAnon. We’ve heard about QAnon for years now but still can’t figure out if it even exists. To read the MSM, you would think it is the most powerful and sinister thing one can imagine yet seems to be imaginary, another Cthulhu. Do they have an office, an email address, a lair somewhere?
In simple words: the government is using social media companies as proxies to censor the contrary thoughts of Americans, all under the guise of correcting misinformation and in direct contrivance of the First Amendment.
How bad does it get? As part of its 2023 investigation into the federal government’s role in censoring lawful speech on social media platforms, the House Committee on the Judiciary issued a subpoena to Meta, the parent company of Facebook and Instagram, and Alphabet, the parent of Google and YouTube. Documents obtained revealed the FBI, on behalf of a compromised Ukrainian intelligence service, requested and, in some cases, directed, the world’s largest social media platforms to censor Americans engaging in constitutionally protected speech online about the war in Ukraine.
Another tool of thought control is the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA), which was supposed to be used to spy on foreigners but has been improperly used against thousands of Americans. Over 100,000 Americans were spied on in 2022, down from three million in 2021.
Does it sound familiar? An amorphous threat is pounded into the heads of Americans (Communism and Red Scares, Covid, terrorism, disinformation) and in its name nearly anything is justified, including in the most recent battle for freedom, censorship. The wrapper is that it is all for our own protection (Biden himself accused social-media companies of “killing people,” the more modern version of the terrorism-era’s “blood on their hands”) with the government assuming the role of knowing what is right and correct for Americans to know. The target in name is always some Ruskie-type foreigner, but in reality morphs to be censorship of our citizens ourselves (stained as “pro-Putin.”) Yet Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg admitted the government asked Facebook to suppress true information. He said during the Covid era the scientific establishment within the government asked “for a bunch of things to be censored that, in retrospect, ended up being more debatable or true.”
Under President Joe Biden, the government has undertaken “the most massive attack against free speech in United States history.” That was the extraordinary conclusion reached by a federal judge in Missouri v. Biden. The case exposed the incredible lengths to which the Biden White House and its federal agencies have gone to bully social-media platforms into removing political views they dislike. The White House is appealing and attained a stay, hoping to retain this powerful tool of thought control right out of 1984. A victory for censorship of Americans and their thoughts could be the greatest threat to free speech in American history.
On critical matters, our medical authorities have no interest in settling the science. Instead, battles are won in the arena of smear and insinuation
The reality is that most of us are not ready for the truth. We want reassurance. We cling to our comfort blankets because the idea that we live in a world in which our and our families’ interests are not paramount is too disturbing.
The idea that our fates are entirely dependent on a giant Ponzi scheme that might come crashing down at any moment from any one of multiple design flaws – an ecological crisis, a nuclear catastrophe, a pandemic or a hubristic mis-step with Artificial Intelligence – is simply too terrifying.
So, even as we mock a figurehead like Donald Trump, Joe Biden or Boris Johnson, we remain deeply invested in the system that keeps producing them. We need to believe – and just as desperately as a child refusing, a little longer, to give in to suspicions that Father Christmas might not exist. Despite all the evidence to the contrary, our societies, we insist, are on a continuous upwards trajectory named progress.
Few are willing to consider that we might actually be in a death spiral. So instead of doing something to change the world, we bury our heads. We ignore every sign, however blatant, of the system’s inherent dysfunction and corruption.
Horse dewormer
These dark thoughts are prompted in part by the very belated concession from the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) – whispered by government lawyers in a court hearing – that for two years it has been peddling disinformation about both Ivermectin and the fact that doctors were not authorised to prescribe it in the treatment of Covid.
Ok, let’s pause right there. Because already I sense you reaching for the remote to change channels. Isn’t Ivermectin a horse drug that only anti-vaxxers and Covid deniers ever talk about?
Before I lose you entirely, let me hurriedly issue a disclaimer. This piece isn’t really about Ivermectin – least of all its efficacy in the treatment of Covid. I’m not a doctor and I’m not qualified to judge. I talk about things I am familiar with, that I have some insight on.
I’m not interested in medical debates about Ivermectin. I’m interested in deconstructing the political debates around it – and what they tell us about the way medical matters, and much else besides, have been entirely captured by political and commercial interests.
I can assure you I have no shares in Ivermectin and won’t profit either way, whether its use increases or declines. Unlike Big Pharma, that’s not the reason I’m taking an interest.
It just so happens that Ivermectin is a particularly fascinating case study – both of the corruption of our governance and regulatory systems, and of our own unwillingness to recognise that corruption out of fear of what it might signify.
Ivermectin provides one more data point that might help drag each of us out of our carefully constructed cocoon of ideological comfort. It might make us a little angrier, a little more willing to fight for our species’ survival.
‘Merely quips’
After all, the general assumption that Ivermectin is a horse dewormer didn’t come from nowhere. It was a view cultivated in us by the FDA and the corporate media. Here is the tweet the agency sent out exactly two years ago to persuade us that only dangerous nutjobs talk about Ivermectin:
I am guessing that those 108,000 likes make it one of the most influential tweets ever by the FDA. There is a reason why it went so viral.
The corporate media worked overtime to promote exactly the same messaging: that Ivermectin was only good for horses and cows. The media echoed the FDA in implying very strongly that the drug’s use in humans was not safe. There was not a late-night show host who did not mock Ivermectin as a horse drug and ridicule its supporters, even leading doctors.
Super-star podcaster Joe Rogan’s admission that he had been prescribed Ivermectin by his doctor when he fell ill with Covid were enough to foment demands for his banning from social media for spreading misinformation.
Social media giants like Youtube played their own part, treating any reference to Ivermectin, in pretty much any positive context, even by doctors, as “misinformation”. The algorithms were adjusted accordingly, which is why I will have to avoid mentioning Ivermectin when I post this story on social media.
And yet now, two years on, the FDA is quietly admitting that it, not Rogan, outright lied. Ivermectin isn’t a medicine used only by vets. It’s a human drug that’s been prescribed billions of times – and so successfully that it won the Nobel prize for medicine in 2015.
And not just that. It is now the FDA – not Rogan – admitting that Ivermectin is safe and that doctors, including Rogan’s, do indeed have the authority to prescribe the drug, not just to treat parasites but to treat Covid too.
It was tweets like the one above that instigated a witch-hunt by US state medical boards against doctors who prescribed Ivermectin, the matter at the heart of the case currently before the 5th US Circuit Court of Appeals.
With the FDA’s statements about Ivermectin now being harshly criticised by the judges hearing the case, the US government has fallen back on the barely credible argument that its comments were meant as “merely quips”.
So why would the FDA lie about Ivermectin – and maintain that lie for at least two years until forced to come clean under cross-examination by the courts?
And why did all those expert medical correspondents working for Big Media, journalists who knew only too well that Ivermectin was a human drug, conspire with the FDA in promoting a blatant lie?
Here, for example, is Dr Sunjay Gupta of CNN being put on the spot by Rogan when he appeared on his show. He is forced to admit, uncomfortably, that the media were not telling the truth about Ivermectin.
Emergency use
Which brings us to the politics surrounding Ivermectin – which is far more revelatory than any medical debate about it.
Remember, the FDA’s drug division receives three-quarters of its funding from the pharmaceutical industry. That doesn’t just mean the continuing salaries of many thousands of government officials depend on keeping Big Pharma happy. It also ensures wider political pressures. Washington prefers not to alienate Big Pharma and then have to foot the FDA’s budget through higher taxes. And, as we shall see, leading politicians have every incentive to avoid picking a fight with a corporate America.
The reality is that Ivermectin and other drugs that might have been repurposed for Covid posed an enormous threat in principle to the FDA and its funders in Big Pharma – completely aside from the practical question of whether those drugs actually work against Covid.
The new, experimental mRNA vaccines could only be rushed out for use in humans on the basis of an emergency authorisation so long as no other drug could be shown to be an effective treatment for Covid.
Well, that was a good thing, I hear you say. Those vaccines reduced the severest symptoms, even if sadly they didn’t actually stop transmission.
Let’s pull back a second and try to see the bigger picture for a moment. Let’s do precisely what the FDA and Pfizer don’t want us to do: engage our critical faculties.
Ivermectin has been off-patent for years. No one can make any serious money from it, and certainly not giant pharmaceuticals based in the United States. Any Indian factory with the right approvals can knock out the tablets for a few cents.
So in short, Big Pharma, which was poised to become fabulously enriched by its new vaccines, had every financial incentive imaginable to make sure there were no rivals in the stakes for a Covid miracle cure. The focus had to be entirely and exclusively on the vaccines.
Endless profiteering
The corporate media had exactly the same priorities. Why?
A superficial, if truthful analysis is that companies like Pfizer subsidise the corporate media as heavily as they do the FDA. Just watch this short compilation video to get a sense of quite how complete Big Pharma’s stranglehold of sponsorship is on the main TV networks:
But a deeper analysis is that Big Pharma and Big Media are just separate wings of the same Big Business empire headquartered in the US. What’s good for Big Pharma is good for Big Weapons is good for Big Farming is good for Big Food is good for Big Media, and so on.
What is important for all of them is the maintenance of a political and economic climate that allows for Big Everything’s permanent profiteering. What is good for one of them is good for all.
So Ivermectin was never going to be allowed a look-in, irrespective of whether it worked.
But that doesn’t really matter, I hear you interject, because Ivermectin doesn’t work against Covid.
And how do we know that? The anwer is we don’t. Our assumption that Ivermectin is useless against Covid is nothing more than that. It is an assumption. Some studies suggest it doesn’t help, while others suggest possible effectiveness.
Medicine has an established way to deal with such uncertainties. It settles them with an expensive, large-scale, randomised, controlled study.
In a time of profound crisis such as a pandemic, politics has an additional way to settle such questions: move heaven and earth to carry out emergency trials of drugs that look like they may be suitable for repurposing against the threat. Shift into a war footing.
Which is exactly what would have happened – not just for Ivermectin but for other promising potential treatments like the mis-named sunshine hormone Vitamin D – if we lived in a world in which scientific principles, not profiteering by a tiny wealth-elite, guided our societies’ decisions.
Instead, all of us – even children who were under no threat from Covid – were forced to worship exclusively at the altar of the novel vaccines.
That should make your blood boil.
Many millions of people died. Some of them might have been helped through the use of safe, potentially beneficial treatments before the vaccines were rolled out.
Some of those who refused to take the vaccines – the heretics – might have had their lives saved through the approval of other treatments.
Everyone, even the vaccinated and multi-boosted, might have had even better outcomes with the help of treatments to complement the vaccines.
Instead, the response to the pandemic prioritised one thing only: not saving lives, but maximising to the greatest extent possible the profits of Big Pharma.
I don’t know whether Ivermectin would have helped. You don’t know whether it would have helped. But what’s important – what is scandalous – is that the FDA doesn’t know either, and still doesn’t care to know whether lives would have been saved through the use of treatments in place of, or in addition to, the vaccines.
That is a violation both of fundamental medical ethics and of the social contract. I can barely believe I need to spell it out – and even less that I will be called irresponsible for doing so by the vaccine cultists.
Smears and insinuation
The issue isn’t whether Ivermectin works against Covid. That narrow issue is the one Big Pharma, Big Media and the FDA want you focusing on. Because they have made sure the question will only ever be settled in the arena of official smear amd insinuation, in misleading social media soundbites like the FDA’s horse drug one.
That isn’t science, it’s propaganda.
To run a controlled trial of Ivermectin for treating Covid – even now, three years too late – costs a small fortune. One that can be afforded only by Big Pharma or governments. And in the circumstances, neither has any interest to find out.
Why does this matter? It shouldn’t need stating. But from reactions on social media, I see that it very much does.
It matters because it shows that we live in a world where “facts” are of no interest, where science is not followed, unless it can be monetised. Science is no longer for the benefit of all. It has become private property – the property of powerful, unaccountable corporations – like everything else in our societies. Science has been weaponised to further enrich a corrupt wealth-elite.
It matters because, if we continue to resign ourselves so passively to these constant mind-games and manipulations, we must also accept that the profiteering they conceal should take priority over our health, over saving lives.
Ivermectin isn’t the issue. It’s a waymark: to the depths of corruption to which our supposedly Enlightened, rational civilisation has been sunk by money and its worship.
“When players are piled on top of each other after a mad scramble for a loose ball, it’s a free-for-all. There are no rules. Anything goes. That’s because there’s nobody in the pile to monitor what’s going on.”—Mike Thomas, sports editor
What is playing out before our eyes right now should be familiar to any fan of football: it’s called the pile on, a brutal, frenzied, desperate play to seize control and gain power while crushing the opposition.
In this particular analogy, “we the people” are trapped at the bottom of that pile, buried under a mountain of bread-and-circus distractions, economic worries, environmental disasters, power plays, power grabs, police raids, indictments and circus politics.
The Maui wildfires. The Trump indictments. Hunter Biden’s legal troubles. The looming 2024 presidential election. The Ukraine-Russia conflict.
In the midst of this pile on of woes, worries and semi-manufactured crises falling with sledgehammer-like frequency, monopolizing the media narrative and eclipsing all other news, it’s difficult to stay focused on what’s really going on, and yet something is brewing.
Pay attention.
Caught up in the partisan boxing match that is politics today, it’s easy to lose sight of what’s real.
The indictments against Trump, the investigation of Hunter Biden, and the chatter of the political classes aren’t real; they are more sound and fury, signifying nothing in the end.
As Aldous Huxley observed in Brave New World Revisited:
“Non-stop distractions of the most fascinating nature are deliberately used as instruments of policy, for the purpose of preventing people from paying too much attention to the realities of the social and political situation… Only the vigilant can maintain their liberties, and only those who are constantly and intelligently on the spot can hope to govern themselves effectively by democratic procedures.”
So what is real?
What’s real is the $5,000 fine and five-year jail sentence that could be levied against anyone found driving an illegal immigrant in their car in the state of Florida.
What’s real is what happened in Marion, Kansas, on Fri., Aug. 11, 2023, when police raided the office of the Marion County Record, blowing past the constitutional safeguards intended to safeguard the freedom of the press.
Are you starting to get the picture yet?
The manufactured media spectacles, piled on one after another, have a very real purpose, which is to distract us from the government’s constant encroachments on our freedoms.
In the larger scheme of things, these individual incidents—the police raid of a small-town newspaper, a state ban on who gets to be inside your car, an outrageous fine for feeding the destitute, a politician’s use of an enemies list to silence critics—might easily go unremarked, yet they are all part of the police state’s tendency to pile on: pile on the distractions, pile on the retribution, pile on the show of force in order to completely eviscerate anything that even remotely resembles opposition.
The police state has embarked on a ruthless, take-no-prisoners, all-out assault on anyone who even questions its authority, let alone challenges its chokehold on power.
“We the people”—the proverbial nails to the police state’s heavy-handed tactics—will be hammered into compliance, intimidated into subservience, and terrorized into silence.
It doesn’t matter which party dominates in Congress or the White House: all of us are in danger from these fear-inducing, mind-altering, soul-destroying, smash-your-face-in tactics.
In this way, anarchy is being loosed upon the nation.
Day after day, the government’s crimes against the citizenry grow more egregious, more treacherous and more tragic. And day after day, the prison walls holding the American people captive become ever more inescapable.
The upcoming election and its aftermath will undoubtedly keep the citizenry divided and at each other’s throats, so busy fighting each other that they never manage to present a unified front against tyranny in any form.
Yet the winner has already been decided.
As American satirist H.L. Mencken predicted almost a century ago:
You cannot have a republican form of government—nor a democratic one, for that matter—when the government views itself as superior to the citizenry, when it no longer operates for the benefit of the people, when the people are no longer able to peacefully reform their government, when government officials cease to act like public servants, when elected officials no longer represent the will of the people, when the government routinely violates the rights of the people and perpetrates more violence against the citizenry than the criminal class, when government spending is unaccountable and unaccounted for, when the judiciary act as courts of order rather than justice, and when the government is no longer bound by the laws of the Constitution.
The U.S. Mainstream Media Is Almost Always Pro-War
In the “liberal” New York Times today, I saw an article on “Putin’s forever war” that has the following short synopsis: “Vladimir Putin wants to lead Russians into a civilizational conflict with the West far larger than Ukraine. Will they follow him?”
Is this true? Does Putin truly seek a “civilizational conflict” with the West? One that’s “far larger” than the Ukraine war? It doesn’t seem likely. Russian forces have struggled in Ukraine. Already embroiled in a destructive regional war that’s become somewhat of a quagmire, why would Putin seek to widen it? Is Putin always the aggressor, the bad guy, and the West always the aggrieved party, the good guys, holding back a “red storm rising”? I thought the West won the Cold War more than 30 years ago.
It’s remarkable how easy it is to get alarmist articles about Russia or China published in the U.S. mainstream media (MSM). Wars and rumors of war dominate. The West is always portrayed as the defender of democracy; other countries such as China and Russia are portrayed as threats to civilization and its “rules-based order.” Strictly speaking, this is simplistic, one-sided, propaganda.
Back in 2017, I wrote about how difficult it is in the MSM to read honest accounts of war. In the runup to the Iraq War in 2003, critical voices were actively suppressed and punished. Back then, I focused my article on MSNBC, which like the New York Times is allegedly “liberal.” At “liberal” newspapers and networks, shouldn’t America expect at least a few critical critiques of war narratives? The answer here is “no,” as I wrote here:
Jesse Ventura, former governor of Minnesota (1999-2003), was a hot media commodity as the Bush/Cheney administration was preparing for its invasion of Iraq in 2003. Ventura, a U.S. Navy veteran who gained notoriety as a professional wrestler before he entered politics, was both popular and outspoken. MSNBC won the bidding war for his services in 2003, signing him to a lucrative three-year contract to create his own show – until, that is, the network learned he was against the Iraq war. Ventura’s show quickly went away, even as the network paid him for three years to do nothing.
I heard this revealing story from a new podcast, the TARFU Report, hosted by Matt Taibbi and Alex Pareene. By his own account, Jesse Ventura was bought off by the network, which back then was owned by General Electric, a major defense contractor that was due to make billions of dollars off the war.
Of course, Ventura was hardly the only war critic to run afoul of GE/NBC. Phil Donahue, the famous talk show host, saw his highly rated show cancelled when he gave dissenters and anti-war voices a fair hearing. Ashleigh Banfield, a reporter who covered the Iraq war, gave a speech in late April 2003 that criticized the antiseptic coverage of the war (extracts to follow below). For her perceptiveness and her honesty, she was reassigned and marginalized, demoted and silenced.
So much for freedom of speech, as well as the press.
As Phil Donahue said, his show “wasn’t good for business.” NBC didn’t want to lose ratings by being associated with “unpatriotic” elements when the other networks were waving the flag in support of the Iraq war. In sidelining Ventura and Donahue, NBC acted to squelch any serious dissent from the push for war, and punished Ashleigh Banfield in the immediate aftermath of the war for her honesty in criticizing the coverage shown (and constructed) by the mainstream media, coverage that was facilitated by the U.S. military and rubber-stamped by corporate ownership.
Speaking of Banfield’s critique, here are some excerpts from her speech on Iraq war coverage in April 2003. Note that her critique remains telling for all U.S. media war coverage since then:
That said, what didn’t you see [in U.S. media coverage of the Iraq war]? You didn’t see where those bullets landed. You didn’t see what happened when the mortar landed. A puff of smoke is not what a mortar looks like when it explodes, believe me. There are horrors that were completely left out of this war. So was this journalism or was this coverage? There is a grand difference between journalism and coverage, and getting access does not mean you’re getting the story, it just means you’re getting one more arm or leg of the story. And that’s what we got, and it was a glorious, wonderful picture that had a lot of people watching and a lot of advertisers excited about cable news. But it wasn’t journalism, because I’m not so sure that we in America are hesitant to do this again, to fight another war, because it looked like a glorious and courageous and so successful terrific endeavor, and we got rid of a horrible leader: We got rid of a dictator, we got rid of a monster, but we didn’t see what it took to do that.
With admirable honesty, Banfield spoke of the horrific face of war at Kansas State Univ. in 2003. Soon after her speech, she was demoted (Image courtesy of KSU)
I can’t tell you how bad the civilian casualties were. I saw a couple of pictures. I saw French television pictures, I saw a few things here and there, but to truly understand what war is all about you’ve got to be on both sides…
Some of the soldiers, according to our embeds had never seen a dead body throughout the entire three-week campaign. It was like Game Boy. I think that’s amazing in two different ways. It makes you a far more successful warrior because you can just barrel right along but it takes away a lot of what war is all about, which is what I mentioned earlier. The TV technology took that away too. We couldn’t see where the bullets landed. Nobody could see the horrors of this so that we seriously revisit the concept of warfare the next time we have to deal with it.
I think there were a lot of dissenting voices before this war about the horrors of war, but I’m very concerned about this three-week TV show and how it may have changed people’s opinions. It was very sanitized.
This TV show [Iraq invasion coverage] that we just gave you was extraordinarily entertaining, and I really hope that the legacy that it leaves behind is not one that shows war as glorious, because there’s nothing more dangerous than a democracy that thinks this is a glorious thing to do.
War is ugly and it’s dangerous, and in this world the way we are discussed on the Arab street, it feeds and fuels their hatred and their desire to kill themselves to take out Americans. It’s a dangerous thing to propagate…
I’m hoping that I will have a future in news in cable, but not the way some cable news operators wrap themselves in the American flag and patriotism and go after a certain target demographic, which is very lucrative. You can already see the effects, you can already see the big hires on other networks, right wing hires to chase after this effect, and you can already see that flag waving in the corners of those cable news stations where they have exciting American music to go along with their war coverage.
Nothing has changed since Banfield’s powerful critique. Indeed, the networks have only hired more retired generals and admirals to give “unbiased” coverage of America’s military actions. And reporters and “journalists” like Brian Williams have learned too. Recall how Williams cheered the “beautiful” U.S. Tomahawk cruise missiles as they were launched against Syria earlier this year [2017].
It’s not just that U.S. media coverage actively suppresses dissent of America’s wars: it passively does so as well, which is arguably more insidious. Any young journalist with smarts recognizes the way to get ahead is to be a cheerleader for U.S. military action, a stenographer to the powerful. Being a critic leads to getting fired (like Donahue); demoted and exiled (like Banfield); and, in Ventura’s case, if you can’t be fired or demoted or otherwise punished, you can simply be denied air time.
When you consider that billions and billions of dollars are at stake, whether in weapons sales or in advertising revenue tied to ratings, none of this is that surprising. What’s surprising is that so few Americans know about how pro-authority and uncritical U.S. media coverage of war and its makers is. If anything, the narrative is often that the U.S. media is too critical of the military to the detriment of the generals. Talk about false narratives and alternative facts!
America’s greed-wars persist for many reasons, but certainly a big one is the lack of critical voices in the mainstream media. Today’s journalists, thinking about their career prospects and their salaries (and who is ultimately their boss at corporate HQ), learn to censor themselves, assuming they have any radical thoughts to begin with. Some, like Brian Williams, even learn how to stop worrying and love the beautiful bombs.
[After I wrote this in 2017, I added this comment at the site.]
One thing that troubles me is the mindset that criticism of America’s wars undermines the troops. That it could even be a form of betrayal. This mindset is very dangerous. It not only protects the decisions and actions of those at the highest levels of the military and government. It acts to prolong wars and to endanger the lives of the troops (and of their “enemies” as well).
During the Iraq war, I recall instances of U.S. troops speaking clearly and frankly against the war. Their voices were heard, yet their advice was not taken. Instead, generals like David Petraeus were trotted out to assure the American people that the war was being won, even if the gains were characterized by weasel words like “fragile” and “reversible.” And so those gains have proved — even so, Petraeus remains in demand, and is still trotted out, now in mufti, to explain how we must stay the course and continue to defer to the military.
There’s a powerful book to be written here, and it should focus in part on the silencing or marginalization of anti-war voices (even those that wear or wore the uniform), even as pro-war elements are given the main stage as the voices of probity and sanity.
“There is more than one way to burn a book. And the world is full of people running about with lit matches.”—Ray Bradbury
What we are witnessing is the modern-day equivalent of book burning which involves doing away with dangerous ideas—legitimate or not—and the people who espouse them. Seventy years after Ray Bradbury’s novel Fahrenheit 451 depicted a fictional world in which books are burned in order to suppress dissenting ideas, while televised entertainment is used to anesthetize the populace and render them easily pacified, distracted and controlled, we find ourselves navigating an eerily similar reality.
Welcome to the age of technocensorship.
On paper—under the First Amendment, at least—we are technically free to speak.
In reality, however, we are now only as free to speak as a government official—or corporate entities such as Facebook, Google or YouTube—may allow.
By “censor,” we’re referring to concerted efforts by the government to muzzle, silence and altogether eradicate any speech that runs afoul of the government’s own approved narrative.
This is political correctness taken to its most chilling and oppressive extreme.
Clothed in tyrannical self-righteousness, technofascism is powered by technological behemoths (both corporate and governmental) working in tandem to achieve a common goal.
The government is not protecting us from “dangerous” disinformation campaigns. It is laying the groundwork to insulate us from “dangerous” ideas that might cause us to think for ourselves and, in so doing, challenge the power elite’s stranglehold over our lives.
Thus far, the tech giants have been able to sidestep the First Amendment by virtue of their non-governmental status, but it’s a dubious distinction at best when they are marching in lockstep with the government’s dictates.
Nothing good can come from allowing the government to sidestep the Constitution.
The steady, pervasive censorship creep that is being inflicted on us by corporate tech giants with the blessing of the powers-that-be threatens to bring about a restructuring of reality straight out of Orwell’s 1984, where the Ministry of Truth polices speech and ensures that facts conform to whatever version of reality the government propagandists embrace.
Orwell intended 1984 as a warning. Instead, it is being used as a dystopian instruction manual for socially engineering a populace that is compliant, conformist and obedient to Big Brother.
This is the slippery slope that leads to the end of free speech as we once knew it.
In a world increasingly automated and filtered through the lens of artificial intelligence, we are finding ourselves at the mercy of inflexible algorithms that dictate the boundaries of our liberties.
Eventually, depending on how the government and its corporate allies define what constitutes “extremism, “we the people” might all be considered guilty of some thought crime or other.
Whatever we tolerate now—whatever we turn a blind eye to—whatever we rationalize when it is inflicted on others, whether in the name of securing racial justice or defending democracy or combatting fascism, will eventually come back to imprison us, one and all.
Watch and learn.
We should all be alarmed when any individual or group—prominent or not—is censored, silenced and made to disappear from Facebook, Twitter, YouTube and Instagram for voicing ideas that are deemed politically incorrect, hateful, dangerous or conspiratorial.
Given what we know about the government’s tendency to define its own reality and attach its own labels to behavior and speech that challenges its authority, this should be cause for alarm across the entire political spectrum.
Here’s the point: you don’t have to like or agree with anyone who has been muzzled or made to disappear online because of their views, but to ignore the long-term ramifications of such censorship is dangerously naïve, because whatever powers you allow the government and its corporate operatives to claim now will eventually be used against you by tyrants of your own making.
The glaring fallacy that always lies at the heart of pro-censorship sentiments is the gullible, delusional belief that censorship powers will be deployed only to suppress views one dislikes, but never one’s own views… Facebook is not some benevolent, kind, compassionate parent or a subversive, radical actor who is going to police our discourse in order to protect the weak and marginalized or serve as a noble check on mischief by the powerful. They are almost always going to do exactly the opposite: protect the powerful from those who seek to undermine elite institutions and reject their orthodoxies. Tech giants, like all corporations, are required by law to have one overriding objective: maximizing shareholder value. They are always going to use their power to appease those they perceive wield the greatest political and economic power.
Be warned: it’s a slippery slope from censoring so-called illegitimate ideas to silencing truth.
Eventually, as George Orwell predicted, telling the truth will become a revolutionary act.
If the government can control speech, it can control thought and, in turn, it can control the minds of the citizenry.
It’s happening already.
With every passing day, we’re being moved further down the road towards a totalitarian society characterized by government censorship, violence, corruption, hypocrisy and intolerance, all packaged for our supposed benefit in the Orwellian doublespeak of national security, tolerance and so-called “government speech.”
Little by little, Americans are being conditioned to accept routine incursions on their freedoms.
This is how oppression becomes systemic, what is referred to as creeping normality, or a death by a thousand cuts.
It’s a concept invoked by Pulitzer Prize-winning scientist Jared Diamond to describe how major changes, if implemented slowly in small stages over time, can be accepted as normal without the shock and resistance that might greet a sudden upheaval.
Diamond’s concerns related to Easter Island’s now-vanished civilization and the societal decline and environmental degradation that contributed to it, but it’s a powerful analogy for the steady erosion of our freedoms and decline of our country right under our noses.
As Diamond explains, “In just a few centuries, the people of Easter Island wiped out their forest, drove their plants and animals to extinction, and saw their complex society spiral into chaos and cannibalism… Why didn’t they look around, realize what they were doing, and stop before it was too late? What were they thinking when they cut down the last palm tree?”
Much like America’s own colonists, Easter Island’s early colonists discovered a new world—“a pristine paradise”—teeming with life. Yet almost 2000 years after its first settlers arrived, Easter Island was reduced to a barren graveyard by a populace so focused on their immediate needs that they failed to preserve paradise for future generations.
The same could be said of the America today: it, too, is being reduced to a barren graveyard by a populace so focused on their immediate needs that they are failing to preserve freedom for future generations.
The forest…vanished slowly, over decades. Perhaps war interrupted the moving teams; perhaps by the time the carvers had finished their work, the last rope snapped. In the meantime, any islander who tried to warn about the dangers of progressive deforestation would have been overridden by vested interests of carvers, bureaucrats, and chiefs, whose jobs depended on continued deforestation… The changes in forest cover from year to year would have been hard to detect… Only older people, recollecting their childhoods decades earlier, could have recognized a difference. Gradually trees became fewer, smaller, and less important. By the time the last fruit-bearing adult palm tree was cut, palms had long since ceased to be of economic significance. That left only smaller and smaller palm saplings to clear each year, along with other bushes and treelets. No one would have noticed the felling of the last small palm.”
Sound painfully familiar yet?
We’ve already torn down the rich forest of liberties established by our founders. It has vanished slowly, over the decades. The erosion of our freedoms has happened so incrementally, no one seems to have noticed. Only the older generations, remembering what true freedom was like, recognize the difference. Gradually, the freedoms enjoyed by the citizenry have become fewer, smaller and less important. By the time the last freedom falls, no one will know the difference.
This is how tyranny rises and freedom falls: with a thousand cuts, each one justified or ignored or shrugged over as inconsequential enough by itself to bother, but they add up.
Each cut, each attempt to undermine our freedoms, each loss of some critical right—to think freely, to assemble, to speak without fear of being shamed or censored, to raise our children as we see fit, to worship or not worship as our conscience dictates, to eat what we want and love who we want, to live as we want—they add up to an immeasurable failure on the part of each and every one of us to stop the descent down that slippery slope.
After the Crash 