Category Archives: Media Literacy

UN Declares War On ‘Conspiracy Theories’, Here Are Several That Already Came True

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If we went by the United Nations advice, blissfully believing the official story, how much truth would we actually know?

By Don Via Jr.

Source: The Free Thought Project

On August 1st, the United Nations Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) announced the beginning of a new campaign — #ThinkBeforeSharing. Intended to help counter and stop the spread of what it claims is harmful disinformation and conspiracy theories online.

They say, quite matter-of-factly, “The COVID-19 pandemic has sparked a worrying rise in disinformation and conspiracy theories. Conspiracy theories can be dangerous: they often target and discriminate against vulnerable groups, ignore scientific evidence and polarize society with serious consequences. This needs to stop.”

Later quoting the UNESCO director general who says,

“Conspiracy theories cause real harm to people, to their health, and also to their physical safety. They amplify and legitimize misconceptions about the pandemic, and reinforce stereotypes which can fuel violence and violent extremist ideologies.”

Going on to affirm,

“A new campaign helps you learn how to identify, debunk, react to and report on conspiracy theories to prevent their spread. Check out the infographics and social media pack below and help spread the word that facts matter and no one is to blame. Thinking critically and being informed about conspiracy theories is key to challenging them.

This UNESCO campaign is implemented jointly with the European Commission, Twitter and the World Jewish Congress.”

Surly these would be noble sentiments, if they were genuine. But as you continue to peruse through the infographics it becomes quite apparent that the architects of this campaign only have one interest in mind: stifling public discourse, and discrediting anyone who dares to challenge the status quo narrative.

Indeed, upon browsing through the material provided it quickly establishes an air that only the supposed authorities are to be trusted, they would never lie to you or purposefully peddle false information. No, only those with whom the establishment has deemed fair, just, and honest are to be trusted. While seemingly encouraging critical thinking, they demand that you toss aside any critical thinking skills and blindly trust the figures whom you are told represent the best interests of everyone. While going on to paint anyone who disagrees and/or promotes alleged conspiracy theories as a dangerous bigot, and how one should react if you encounter one these dangerous people and their harmful ideas.

It is a carefully crafted package on how to identify “wrong think”. The latest salvo in the ongoing information war, paired with just enough of a Limited Hangout to appear good natured to the unaware.

In this special edition of The Free Thought Project’s Conspiracy Fact Series, we will dive into this latest propaganda effort to refute some of its key logical fallacies, before providing a number of examples of true conspiracies’ in order to demonstrate exactly why these kind of campaigns are antithetical to their stated purpose.

First of all, let us address the broadest question; What is a conspiracy theory? Put plainly, it is a hypothesis postulating that a conspiracy has or is taking place. And what is a conspiracy? A conspiracy is defined as follows:

  1. An agreement to perform together an illegal, wrongful, or subversive act.
  2. A group of conspirators.
  3. An agreement between two or more persons to commit a crime or accomplish a legal purpose through illegal action.

Conspiracies happen daily, and most places have laws regarding them within their legal code. Conspiracy to commit murder, conspiracy to commit fraud, conspiracy to traffic illicit material, etcetera, happen regularly and are charges faced by individuals within the legal system. And technically speaking, until law enforcement gathers enough evidence to prove that individuals participated in such a plot, the allegations against them would be considered conspiracy theories.

Of course the allegation ceases to be a theory when you have evidence. But somewhere along the line in our common discourse the term conspiracy theory has taken on a new meaning, it has become equated with “fake news”, insinuating that the mere postulation that one or more individuals may be involved in a conspiracy is in and of itself preposterous. An idea to be denied and ridiculed outright. This goes against logical thinking and is simply not the case. In reality this is what would be referred to as a thought terminating cliché.

Right at the start, in the second infographic dedicated to how to identify conspiracy theories, we are told one way to determine if a story is a conspiracy theory or not is to check the author. If they are connected to a reputable media outlet or organization then they are to be trusted.

You mean like so-called reputable organizations like the New York Times or the Washington Post who carried stories demonizing the Hunter Biden laptop scandal and peddling the unfounded conspiracy theory that it was “Russian disinformation” when it was in fact 100% true? Or those who pushed the thoroughly debunked Russiagate election meddling hoax? Both which we backed by seemingly trustworthy officials in the intelligence community who were then proven to be either incredibly incompetent at their jobs or outright liars.

It then goes on to say that trustworthy authors will use verifiable facts and evidence from academic or scientific research. And yet this flies in the face of corporate media practices during the COVID-19 pandemic when they refused to even consider the research of some of the world’s top virologists, epidemiologists, and other reputable medical professionals from esteemed institutions; such as those of The Great Berrington Declaration or Dr. John P. A. Ioannidis, one of the most esteemed in his field, who critiqued the establishments response to COVID-19 such as lockdown policies. Who in hindsight have clearly been proven right. Or the literal hundreds of medical studies providing evidence that such interventionist policies provided little benefit, while simultaneously carrying with them an incomprehensible amount of suffering and destruction.

Where was the harsh criticism for all those who claimed that should one receive a COVID-19 vaccine they will not catch the virus and will not get sick, which is now a demonstrably false statement. And according to former CDC director Dr. Deborah Birx, a statement in which they knew was false from the beginning.

It also goes on to link so-called conspiracy theories and those who espouse them to hate, racism, and anti-Semitism. While this is certainly true in some circles and such beliefs should be ardently condemned and disavowed, one has to keep in mind that the true purpose of the UN campaign isn’t merely to target untrue conspiracy theories, but rather to discredit ANY dialog dissenting from the status quo. And it has been an emerging tactic in recent years to unfairly and incorrectly link any critique of the establishment to hate and racism as a means of discrediting it without engaging in debate.

The UNESCO diagram then goes on to assert that linking allegations of wrongdoing to Jewish individuals such as the Rothschild family, George Soros, or the state of Israel, is tantamount to anti-Semitic conspiracy theories. The logical fallacy here is that the majority of criticism towards those such as the aforementioned has nothing to do with the fact that they are Jewish, and everything to do with the fact that they are powerful, notably corrupt, globalist insiders with a known history of manipulating economies and governments.

Similarly with regard to the settler-colonial state of Israel, the crimes of the Zionist regime are apparent for all to see. With reputable human rights organizations such as Amnesty International condemning the nation as an apartheid state for its heinous crimes against humanity committed in occupied Palestine; and whos intelligence service is arguably among the most corrupt in the world right along with our own CIA. Criticisms of such atrocities are not leveled due to the jewishness of the nation’s inhabitants, but rather due to the fact that such heinous acts are abhorrent.

No government should be free from criticism, especially those committing acts of ethnic cleansing. And attempting to dismiss such valid criticisms by exploiting the perpetrators Hebrew lineage is equally as despicable.

Next, in the “prebunking and debunking” portion, the campaign goes on to completely contradict itself. In order to empower people to be more resilient against dastardly conspiracy theories they encourage the use of rational thinking and questioning, while in the very next sentence asserting that a key trait of conspiratorial thinking is the suspicion of official accounts.

While also once again reiterating the perfunctory reliance on so-called fact checkers to be the arbiters of truth. The same fact checkers are routinely biased and wrong, many whom posses financial conflicts of interest, ties to intelligence communities, have deliberately labeled true information as misinformation, and have openly admitted in court to being mere opinion? While notably being found to actually amplify the spread of misinformation?

They then begin to take aim at COVID-19 specifically, continuing in its overbearingly hubristic tone. Deriding what is described as deceptive conspiracy theories that ignore scientific evidence and falsely blame individuals and groups not responsible for the pandemic. Listing four major red flags that one should look out for.

They include;

  • Claims that the virus was artificially created (e.g. in a laboratory) by people with a specific interest. (e.g. reducing world population)
  • Claims that the virus was spread intentionally or its natural spread augmented to harm as many people as possible (e.g. through 5G signals)
  • Claims that vaccines and cures are intentionally withheld to not disrupt the spread and harm as many people as possible.
  • Claims that certain sanitary measures to counter the spread of the virus are used to intentionally harm or control society (e.g. vaccines, masks)

Firstly, to say that there is an accepted consensus among where the virus did or did not originate is dishonest considering that both the World Health Organization, and top officials of one of the worlds most prestigious medical journals both now believe that the lab leak hypothesis is a strong plausibility.

This is compounded by what we know regarding gain-of-function research that took place in the Wuhan Institute of Virology, in which documents obtained via the Freedom of Information Act prove that the United States was in fact funding gain-of-function research on ‘Bat Coronaviruses Likely to Infect Humans’. In direct contradiction to Dr. Fauci’s sworn testimony before Congress.

What’s more, the shady ties and practices of EcoHealth Alliance, who partnered with the USAID and NIH in Wuhan, raises further concerns. Including an EcoHealth whistleblower, former Associate Vice President Dr. Andrew Huff, publicly accusing EcoHealth of being a cutout for the CIA citing a conversation with its President Peter Daszak.

Additionally, asserting that effective treatments for COVID-19 weren’t suppressed by the medical establishment are demonstrably false as well. Look at Ivermectin for example. It is an undeniable fact that as Ivermectin — which has won awards for its effectiveness in treating human ailments and was widely praised as a “wonder drug” in the years prior to COVID — gained more recognition that the medical establishment and mainstream media virtually went to war to discredit it and vilify anyone who promoted it, despite a growing body of evidence it can be effective against COVID-19.

A slew of mainstream press including but not limited to MSNBC and Rachel Maddow, The Hill, The Guardian, Rolling Stone, New York Daily News and others all spread an easily debunkable outright lie about a rural hospital becoming overwhelmed with a flood of ivermectin overdoses. And when the lie was exposed they were not only spared the ire of the “fact checkers”, but refused to retract it at all.

CNN lambasted Joe Rogan for his use of Ivermectin after catching COVID, unfavorably framing the drug as a “horse dewormer”, defaming Rogan and going so far as to alter the lighting of his Instagram video to make him appear more sick than he was.

Following the incident, CNN’s chief medical advisor Dr. Sanjay Gupta joined Joe Rogan on his podcast and was confronted about the defamatory statements. Ultimately conceding that the network made a mistake. However, after the episode aired, CNN’s Don Lemon yet again doubled down on their skewed coverage.

Finally, the assertion that certain measures definitely weren’t utilized as a means of controlling the population is also easily refuted. Again, by the admission of the very same people responsible for doing so.

An article penned in the UK Telegraph on 14th May, 2021 by the papers Associate Editor Gordon Rayner titled Use of fear to control behaviour in Covid crisis was ‘totalitarian’, admit scientists specifically details the accounts from several doctors in the UK governments Scientific Pandemic Influenza Group on Behaviour lamenting their overt use of fear as a means of controlling the population and enforcing lockdown mandates.

In Germany, the Editor-in-Chief of the countries top newspaper, Bild, apologized for their participation in a fear based propaganda campaign not unlike that mentioned in the UK.

Similar techniques were also carried out elsewhere such as in Canada. Where documents from the Canadian Joint Operations Command revealed how the military saw the pandemic as a unique opportunity to test propaganda techniques against the domestic citizenry without the approval of the presidential cabinet, utilizing some of the same information warfare tactics deployed in Afghanistan.

Reported by the Ottawa Citizen;

The plan devised by the Canadian Joint Operations Command, also known as CJOC, relied on propaganda techniques similar to those employed during the Afghanistan war. The campaign called for “shaping” and “exploiting” information. CJOC claimed the information operations scheme was needed to head off civil disobedience by Canadians during the coronavirus pandemic and to bolster government messages about the pandemic.

In Israel, Health Minister Nitzan Horowitz was caught on a hot mic admitting that restrictions such as the ‘Green Pass’ vaccine passport is meant to incentivize compliance with vaccine mandates on the population, touting the inaccurate “pandemic of the unvaccinated” trope. This was weeks after a major Israeli study confirmed once again that natural immunity is just as if perhaps not more effective than the jab. Now more than a year later and the social consequences of such policies have played a major role in tearing the country apart.

Fast forward to today and justification for vaccine passports and forced vaccination has been completely demolished, as in the United States the CDC has once again updated their guidelines now instructing policy to make no differentiation between vaccinated and unvaccinated. Creating quite the awkward situation for the thousands of people who were fired from their jobs, removed from school, harassed, and otherwise segregated and discriminated against for exercising bodily autonomy.

Speaking of the United States, rest assured much of the aforementioned manipulations apply here as well. Such as when A study from the US National Library of Medicine found that researchers at Yale University were testing propaganda messaging for the COVID-19 vaccine six months prior to its rollout. This was the exact same kind of messaging that was later adopted by media and government officials using some of the most classic propaganda tactics of shame, fear, anger, and embarrassment to coerce individuals into injecting themselves with the experimental shot.

Corroborated by a batch of emails obtained under the Freedom of Information Act in March of this year which reveals clearly a conspiracy of collaboration between the Biden administration, the Department of Health and Human Services, and various mainstream media outlets to push a jab propaganda campaign.

These, combined with a number of other factors such as the brazen hubris of the tyrant class openly flouting their own restrictions, demonstrate quite concisely that it was never about science, only your compliance.

With all this talk of state and corporate collusion conspiring to commit propaganda campaigns, it seems no better time than to transition into the final portion of this treatise. It has been shown above that the UN’s latest initiative is at best logically inconsistent and full of holes, and at worst deliberately disingenuous.

Yet further still to exemplify the true insidious nature of what is fundamentally at its core a campaign which implores individuals to abandon their faculties of rumination and trust only the official approved version of events as recounted to them by persons and institutions with perhaps the most sordid track record of dishonesty known to man.

So we will provide a few examples of so-called conspiracy theories that are now accepted common fact. Truths that, if the UN had their way with this model of thinking, would still be relegated to the realm of tinfoil hat nonsense despite the veracity behind them.

1.) Mockingbird Media

Of course having just mentioned propaganda operations we would be remiss not to mention first and foremost one of the most notable, far reaching, and still active conspiracies of the last several decades — Operation Mockingbird. As detailed in part one of this series, titled How Truth Was Destroyed So Americans Would Crave Propaganda, we concisely outline in great detail the hard evidence proving the United States corporate media apparatus is subservient to the intelligence community. Fully infiltrated by and under the influence of the Central Intelligence Agency.

From the early days of ad manipulation in the 1920s and the father of propaganda himself Dr. Edward Bernays, to the Nazi origins of CIA media influence operations imported to the US via Project Paperclip; To the 1975 Church and Pike congressional committees, and the explosive investigation by renowned journalist Carl Bernstein, and even a myriad of leaked and declassified documents through to the modern day. The empirical evidence establishes the irrefutable fact that the mainstream corporate media by and large operates at the behest of state interests exerting undue influence on the public as purveyors of propaganda.

2.) Provocation Operations

Governments are, by their very nature, two things incontrovertibly; pathological liars, and monopolies on violence. Nowhere is this better seen than with warfare. Nations concocting untrue narratives to manufacture consent and justify military assaults on their adversaries is almost as old as time itself. Though only recently was the concept of false flag attacks ushered from the realm of tinfoil hat lunacy to the accepting arms of the mainstream.

For the longest time if you claimed that the government staged an attack against itself and framed its rival in order to justify military intervention abroad you would be considered crazy, “They would never do that!” detractors would exclaim. However as pointed out in Part two of this series, in the midst of the fervor of US/ NATO backed warmongering in Eastern Europe, government officials through their own accusations outright confirmed that false flag attacks indeed do happen.

But of course us “conspiracy theorists” didn’t need the pontifications of Jake Sullivan to know that. The historical proof of false flag operations has been out in the open for anyone willing to research for decades. As we elaborated in our article, whether it be the Nazis’ Operation Himmler to justify the invasion of Poland at the beginning of World War Two; The Israeli military blunder in Egypt known as The Lavon Affair; Or the infamous Operation Northwoods. In which officially declassified documents prove the CIA had planned to orchestrate a campaign of terror attacks against innocent Americans to justify an invasion of Cuba at the height of the Cuban missile crisis — the official admission of false flag operations by government officials is but the most recent example of conspiracy theory becoming openly acknowledged as conspiracy fact. But one that was a fact all along.

3.) Mass Surveillance

One of the more tame yet no less prolific conspiracy theories that has been around since at least the 1930’s is the allegation that the government is spying on you. For decades accusations abound that the feds were able to track every conversation and know everything we do. And for decades such an argument would have one labeled as a paranoid lunatic.

But in the spring of 2013 everything changed. That’s when a young contractor by the name of Edward Snowden leaked explosive documents to journalist Glenn Greenwald revealing the scope of an illegal mass surveillance program conducted by the United States National Security Agency (NSA) known as PRISM.

Since then, Snowden has become a household name, as well as the various real life conspiracies of warrantless mass spying that he helped to uncover. In the years since, various other spying scandals have occurred which have vindicated Snowden even further, Now, the government can even spy on you through your TV. But it was Snowden’s revelations in and of themselves that vindicated all who came before him. The so-called conspiracy theorists who had for so long tried to expose the government’s longstanding practice of spying on their own citizens. Whether it be PRISM, The Echelon Affair of the late 1990s, the FBI’s COINTELPRO operation (or it’s modern counterpart), going as far back as 1895, as revealed by renowned journalist Meyer Berger in a 1938 article for The New Yorker, and again in a 1955 New York Times exposé on wiretapping. Evidence abounds proving the conspiracy theories were conspiracy facts.

4.) Inhumane Experiments

Throughout the entirety of the coronavirus pandemic proponents of mandatory medical intervention have constantly made the case that the experimental injection is 100% safe, and the oh so virtuous multinational pharmaceutical corporations who stand to make billions upon billions of dollars off of it, who certainly don’t have a long documented track record of corruption, would never mislead the public about their health. That it is a ridiculous conspiracy theory to ever question whether or not the federal government and their corporate cohorts would engage in such malfeasance as to put our health at risk, or even worse, to deliberately endanger the public’s well-being.

Despite this however, as The Free Thought Project reported in January of 2021, there are a myriad of facts stretching back decades exemplifying precisely why blind trust for these authorities either federal or corporate is ill advised. They can and often have put citizens at great risk for their own benefit.

In this comprehensive analysis, we outlined hundreds of instances corroborated by official government documents of blatant wrongdoing. Including but not limited to, unethical radiation experiments on handicapped children and infants; Clandestine military operations exposing Americans to carcinogenic substances; Eugenics based forced sterilization; Knowingly allowing the spread of syphilis throughout African American communities; Kidnapping and torturing American citizens during the MK ULTURA program; hundreds of germ warfare tests on the unconsenting public; Agrochemical corporations deliberately exposing Americans to cancer causing herbicides; Distributing contaminated doses of polio vaccine; and much, much more.

But if the UN had their way, you wouldn’t know any of this. It would be dismissed as wrong think and censored, leaving us all none the wiser.

There are so many more examples of alleged conspiracy theories throughout the decades to mention that were once ridiculed and now openly accepted as fact. The Business Plot of the mid-1930’s literally conspired to overthrow the Roosevelt presidency and install a fascist dictatorship in the United States. The CIA trafficking drugs into urban communities is such a widely known fact now that that it’s featured as a key plot point in movies and prime time FX dramas and no one bats an eye. You get the point.

The notorious saga of disgraced financier Jeffrey Epstein is perhaps one of the most egregious examples. Before the case became public knowledge if you were to try to have a serious conversation about high level government officials, up to and including intelligence agencies, the President of the United States, end even royalty, being tied to an international child trafficking and pedophilia ring you would run the risk of being institutionalized. But since the Epstein saga has unfolded so dramatically the whole world is now well aware of that fact. And for the astute observer, the conspiracy theorist, they were already well aware of it. Looking at instances such as Jimmy Savile in the UK, The Finders, the NXIVM cult, the Catholic church, and so on just to name a few all point to a very deep rooted and sadistic web of child trafficking and abuse among the world’s most powerful.

If we went by the United Nations advice, blissfully believing the official story, completely credulous and entirely dependent on the proper authorities, how much of this information would we actually know? How much of the world would still be secreted away from us? There is no virtue in being willfully ignorant. No matter how much the social engineers of civilization attempt to convince you otherwise. The lesson remains the same — always question authority.

Exclusive: Dr. Robert Malone on Why He’s Suing the WaPo, Plus the Future of Corporate Media and What’s Next for Fauci

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In an exclusive interview with The Defender, Dr. Robert Malone discussed his defamation lawsuit against The Washington Post, why he thinks corporate media is “alarmed” and where he thinks Dr. Anthony Fauci will go after he retires from his government jobs in December.

The Washington Post: Where Democracy Dies in Darkness

By Michael Nevradakis, Ph.D.

Source: The Defender

Dr. Robert Malone, who helped develop the mRNA technology used in COVID-19 vaccines, is seeking $50.35 million in compensatory and punitive damages from The Washington Post for alleged defamation.

Malone, an outspoken critic of COVID-19 vaccines and countermeasures, on Aug. 19 filed a lawsuit against the newspaper, owned by Jeff Bezos, in the U.S. District Court for the Western District of Virginia.

Malone’s defamation claims arise from a Jan. 24 article by The Washington Post — “A vaccine scientist’s discredited claims have bolstered a movement of misinformation.”

The article, published one day after the “Defeat the Mandates” rally in Washington, D.C., draws on Malone’s speech at the event.

Malone is demanding a jury trial.

In an exclusive interview with The Defender, Malone discussed the lawsuit, claims made about him by the mass media and also the establishment’s efforts to stifle so-called “conspiracy theories” and “misinformation.”

Malone also discussed developments around Monday’s announcement by Dr. Anthony Fauci that he will retire from his government positions in December.

Post took remarks from Malone’s ‘Defeat the Mandates’ speech ‘out of context’

Malone’s lawsuit describes him as “an internationally recognized scientist/physician and the original inventor of mRNA vaccination as a technology, DNA vaccination, and multiple non-viral DNA and RNA/mRNA platform delivery technologies.”

According to the complaint, he is “the leading contributor to the [mRNA] science exploited by Pfizer and other pharmaceutical corporations to create the alleged ‘vaccines’ for the novel coronavirus.”

The lawsuit alleges, “WaPo falsely accused Dr. Malone of fraud, disinformation, dishonesty, deception, lying to the American public, lack of integrity, immorality and ethical improprieties.”

“The gist of the article is that Dr. Malone is unfit to be a medical doctor and scientist [and] exposed Dr. Malone to public ridicule, scorn, and contempt, and severely prejudiced Dr. Malone in his employment,” the lawsuit states.

Malone told The Defender that while multiple mainstream media outlets have made defamatory statements against him, those published by The Washington Post were particularly egregious, resulting in the lawsuit.

“What we have done together with my attorney is, we went through and identified the most high-profile, egregious defamatory statements in the major press outlets,” said Malone, listing stories published by The New York Times, The Atlantic, Rolling Stone, and The Scientist, in addition to The Washington Post.

Malone sent cease-and-desist letters to the publications, which he said “were representational” of the defamatory claims made against him in the mainstream media.

According to Malone, all five outlets “denied that there was any merit to our defamation and cease-and-desist request, denied “any claims or liability” for anything they published about him and declined to take any action, such as retracting the articles in question or publishing corrections.

Out of these though, the story published by The Washington Post was the most extreme example of defamation, Malone said.

Malone told The Defender:

“In the case of The Washington Post, they had made these statements regarding what I had said on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial and then also the usual ‘spreader of misinformation’ [claim].

“They directly used terms like ‘lying’ [and] statements about misinformation. That just made it so that particular case was the most clear and the most compelling. And that’s why we decided to go with that one as the initial case.”

Malone added:

“They never used the term ‘disinformation.’ It’s always ‘misinformation.’ They rarely, if ever, identify what that ‘misinformation’ constitutes … they just throw it out as a characterization.”

According to Malone, The Washington Post took his remarks “out of context” and then “refuted” them “with information that the CDC had recently published on their MMWR [Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report] page, which is not peer-reviewed.”

The newspaper twisted his remarks that “the vaccines are not working,” he said:

“What I clearly, unequivocally said is the vaccines are not working with Omicron. They are not preventing infection, replication and spread of this virus. I said nothing about death and disease, because I knew that was still controversial.

“What The Washington Post did was call me a liar, because the CDC had published just recently … that the vaccines were still effective at reducing death and disease from the virus.”

According to Malone, “There are many videos of the speech, so this can all be played out in court. The speech was very consciously written, knowing that I was likely to be attacked by ‘fact-checkers’ and others,” he said.

The lawsuit states that on June 7, Malone served The Washington Post “with written notice advising WaPo that the Statements in the Article were false and defamatory and demanding that the Statements be retracted and/or corrected and removed from the Internet,” which the newspaper refused to do.

Instead, according to the complaint, The Washington Post “chose to increase Dr. Malone’s damages by republishing the Article,” an action Malone, in his interview with The Defender, characterized as “adding even more fuel to the fire.”

The lawsuit quotes verbatim several specific instances of alleged defamation in The Washington Post article, including:

  • Malone’s claims have been “discredited” and his views constitute “misinformation.”
  • “Robert Malone stood on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial before thousands of anti-vaccine and anti-mandate demonstrators [and] repeated the falsehoods that have garnered him legions of followers.”
  • “‘Regarding the genetic COVID vaccines, the science is settled,’ [Malone] said in a 15-minute speech … ‘They are not working.’ The misinformation came two days after the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention released its first studies.”
  • Malone’s “claims and suggestions have been discredited … as not only wrong, but also dangerous.”
  • “There is a huge market for misinformation … The way he’s framed in the conspiracy-theory world is that he’s a courageous whistleblower rather than someone who is spreading misinformation — and it’s only enhancing his profile.”
  • “While Malone is a brilliant scientist who has a tremendous amount of experience and knowledge about vaccines, there is reason to be concerned about how his newfound stardom could be a public health risk.”
  • “There’s a risk we’re all facing when he’s not accurately representing the information.”
  • “On [the Joe Rogan Experience], he promoted an unfounded theory called ‘mass-formation psychosis,’ telling Rogan that a ‘third of the population [is] basically being hypnotized’ into believing what the mainstream media and Anthony S. Fauci report on the vaccine.”
  • “Malone has weaponized bad research.”
  • “With his increased profile in recent weeks, some are calling on him to take a step back and reflect on the damage his misinformation is causing.”

Based on these statements, the lawsuit argues that “the qualities WaPo disparaged — Dr. Malone’s honesty, veracity, integrity, competence, judgment, morals and ethics as a licensed medical doctor and scientist — are peculiarly valuable to Dr. Malone and are absolutely necessary in the practice and profession of any medical doctor and scientist.”

The lawsuit alleges The Washington Post “ascribes to Dr. Malone conduct, characteristics and conditions, including fraud, disinformation, misinformation, deception and dishonesty, that would adversely affect his fitness to be a medical professional and to conduct the business of a medical doctor.”

In doing so, the lawsuit reads, “WaPo was well-aware of Dr. Malone’s expertise and experience … intentionally ignored Dr. Malone’s credentials and stature, and chose to impugn his standing in the medical and scientific communities.”

Malone said The Washington Post’s intentions were evident to him from the first time they reached out to him, prior to publishing the article. Referring to Timothy Bella, who authored the piece, Malone told The Defender:

“[There was] something about the way this guy was approaching it and the fact that it was The Washington Post. I knew [it] was absolutely not going to be a friendly story.

“And so I said ‘no.’ I was very careful not to say ‘no’ in any way that would prejudice him. But I just said it wasn’t going to be possible.”

Malone referred to a prior experience being contacted by a reporter for The Atlantic before they ran a story about him, an experience that showed him how journalists from such media outlets often attempt to mislead individuals like him when first approaching them for an interview.

According to Malone:

“What they do is, they say. ‘I just want to be your friend and put out your story.’ They may say something to the effect that they acknowledge that I’ve been maligned in prior stories, and then they gain your confidence.

“It’s really a confidence game. We use the term ‘con artists’ … and many of these journalists, in my opinion, that seek to gain one’s confidence in this way really are con artists. That’s how they play it.”

According to Malone, Bella reached out to a colleague of his, who Malone infers is the same individual “that had made a negative comment in the Atlantic piece anonymously.”

The lawsuit addresses this, stating:

“WaPo blindly relied upon and republished statements of ‘sources’ that WaPo knew were unreliable, including sources known to be wildly biased and to have an ax to grind against Dr. Malone and who were intent on ruining his reputation.”

The lawsuit also describes how the newspaper’s president, Stephen Hills, “got in on the calumny” by tweeting, in reference to Malone, that “a vaccine scientist’s discredited claims have bolstered a movement of misinformation.”

The lawsuit alleges:

“Readers of the Article and followers of WaPo on Twitter immediately understood the [article’s] statements to convey the intended and endorsed defamatory gist and meaning: that Dr. Malone is a disreputable medical professional, that he should lose his license, that he is dishonest and dangerous, that he spreads lies and misinformation, and that he engages in fraud and disinformation.”

Such claims, “including [the article’s] direct and powerful accusations of ‘fraud’ and medical disinformation,” are considered “fighting words,” which are actionable under Virginia law, the suit argues.

The scope of potential damage to Malone’s reputation is also estimated in the lawsuit, which states that “in addition to publishing the Article in print and on its website, WaPo and its agents conspicuously published the Article to a third target audience — 19,703,612+ Twitter followers.”

In addition, the lawsuit states, “The Article was republished millions of times in Virginia [the state where the suit was filed], including by WaPo and its agents and followers, by Politico and its agents and by many others, most notably Democratic Party operatives.”

WaPo coordinated false narrative with Biden administration, lawsuit alleges

Claims of political motivation on the part of The Washington Post figure prominently in the lawsuit, which alleges:

“WaPo manufactured the story line and coordinated the false narrative with the Biden Administration and its agents and operatives with the specific purpose to target Dr. Malone.

“WaPo did not seek the truth or report it. Rather, WaPo betrayed the truth for the sake of its institutional bias and desire to support the political operations and machinations of the Biden Administration.”

In his interview, Malone highlighted the significance of this particular aspect of the lawsuit. He said:

“If this [lawsuit] is allowed to proceed … what we’re likely to see come out of discovery is further granularity about the interaction between The Washington Post and, by extension, a number of other corporate media outlets that are very aligned with the current administration and [its] political interests.

“If one can establish that these corporate media outlets were operating with directions and, in some cases, capitalization by the federal government, then we meet the criteria for those organizations acting as a surrogate for the federal government and … suppressing free speech on behalf of the government.”

This would carry constitutional implications, according to Malone:

“The federal government … cannot circumvent freedom of speech, First Amendment restrictions, by employing surrogates such as [the] corporate press or Big Tech.

“What we observe is the remarkable alignment over time between the positions taken particularly by the Biden administration, but also going back to the Trump administration.

“So it transcends left and right. This is not a left versus right issue. This is an administrative state issue.”

It’s also a part of a broader pattern, according to the lawsuit, which refers to “the sheer number and nature of the hit pieces published by WaPo since 2020.”

According to the complaint, “WaPo and its agents harbor an institutional hostility, hatred, extreme bias, spite and ill-will towards Dr. Malone and other medical professionals … who speak the inconvenient truth about COVID-19 and the so-called ‘vaccines.’”

Doubling down on its claims, The Washington Post reprinted aspects of the story on several occasions, according to the lawsuit, including on July 30, in an article that “falsely repeated that Dr. Malone ‘spread discredited information about coronavirus vaccines.’”

According to Malone, such republication — especially once a cease-and-desist letter has been served to the publication — “constitutes clear evidence of malice.”

The lawsuit argues it also violates the republication rule, upheld by Virginia legal precedent in Weaver v. Beneficial Finance (1957) and Moore v. Allied Chemical (1979).

Lawsuit: WaPo ‘acted with actual malice and reckless disregard for the truth’

Malone’s lawsuit seeks $50 million in compensatory damages and $350,000 in punitive damages, recovery of legal costs, and prejudgment and postjudgment interest of 6% per annum beginning on Jan. 24, the date the article was published.

In seeking these damages, the lawsuit alleges The Washington Post “published the Statements with actual or constructive knowledge that they were false or with reckless disregard for whether they were false,” adding the newspaper “acted with actual malice and reckless disregard for the truth.”

The lawsuit further claims Malone suffered “injury to reputation (past and future), insult, pain and mental suffering (past and future),” in addition to “special damages, including lost income, career damage and impairment of future earnings capacity.”

Career damage includes “los[t] business and income, lost public appearances due to perceived reputational risk … and impact upon [Malone’s] prospects for career advancement.”

Malone told The Defender that The Washington Post article “is often cited by physicians when presented with data from their patients about the risks of the [COVID] vaccine, and comments where patients are asking their physicians to just listen to what Dr. Malone has been saying.”

“What they get back,” according to Malone, are claims that “Dr. Malone spreads misinformation, according to The Washington Post.”

As a result, Malone said, “The Washington Post article succeeded … in its intention, which was to delegitimize [me], at least for those that are wrapped up in this kind of groupthink world … to not have to account for the information that I have been sharing over the last year and a half.”

The lawsuit also cited defamatory postings made by Twitter users in response to The Washington Post article, claiming among other things that “Malone is an anti-vaxx disinfo diva” and calling for medical professionals like Malone to “start losing licenses.”

According to the lawsuit, “Read as a whole, the Statements represent an egregious attack on Dr. Malone’s character, experience, standing in the medical community, and the truth.

The lawsuit argues that “Dr. Malone’s mission is to ensure vaccine safety [and] his goal is to save lives,” and that he “discovered short-cuts, database issues, obfuscation and, frankly, lies told in the development of” the COVID-19 vaccines.

Malone said if he prevails, society stands to benefit more than he will personally:

“Am I ever going to have my reputation corrected by prevailing in a lawsuit against The Washington Post? It would be minor. I think the proper term is ‘Pyrrhic victory.’

“But in terms of the broader implications for our government and the American experiment, establishing that it’s not acceptable for the government to employ its intelligence agencies or surrogates in the media to suppress information … would be a huge step forward for the right of free speech for individuals and super important as we move into this new media environment where things are not centralized … and where alternative voices are going to become among the most important information streams.”

Corporate media ‘alarmed’ by loss of control over messaging

In his interview, Malone remarked on recent efforts by the United Nations and the World Economic Forum (WEF), and also social media platforms, to further restrict and police “conspiracy theories” and alleged “misinformation,” predicting that alternative voices will find themselves in a stronger position of prominence “in the next couple of years.”

He told The Defender:

“We are now moving into a time where there is a great hunger for accountability.

“I think the big underlying message here, as we look forward over the next two years, is going to be the slow erosion of the power of corporate, centralized corporate media and the emergence of a much more balkanized media landscape in which users select the information streams that they wish to subscribe to.

“It will be increasingly difficult to control the narrative in the way that it’s been done in the past because of this balkanization.”

Major institutions and media outlets are increasingly alarmed by this, according to Malone:

“I think that what we are not seeing [on the part of major media outlets and institutions] is a reaction to loss of message control.

“Damage to the WEF is damage to [French President] Emmanuel Macron, damage to [Canadian Prime Minister] Justin Trudeau and the prime minister of New Zealand and the leadership in Australia. So all of that has to be controlled and they have to recapture control of the storyline.

“You’re seeing a more global effort to recapture control of the messaging and the storyline by these global players that have been partially damaged.”

Malone highlighted the role of major investment funds like Vanguard, BlackRock and State Street, which due to their significant ownership stakes in multiple companies across many industries — ranging from the media to banks to pharmaceuticals — leads to a situation where they “all function as one company” due to their “common ownership.”

Citing an example of such attempted control of the narrative, Malone argued that Google’s search algorithms have recently altered the results of searches containing the term “mass formation psychosis,” which he famously expressed during his interview with Rogan.

Malone said the Rogan interview is itself now “very hard to find, even though it’s probably got well over 100 million views … you can’t find it on Google.”

He described such actions as “a concerted effort to deny the validity” of the “mass formation psychosis” hypothesis, and of himself and other scholars who have promoted it, including researcher Mattias Desmet.

Malone cited recent attacks against professor of health policy Dr. Leana Wen, a CNN analyst who, ironically, is also a frequent Washington Post contributor.

Wen, who previously supported stringent COVID-19 countermeasures and vaccine mandates, has come under fire from her peers for now supporting a more moderate approach.

Fauci resigning early to avoid ‘witch hunt’?

Malone also addressed Fauci’s announcement Monday that he will step down from his position in December, rather than at the end of the Biden administration, as he had previously claimed.

Malone suggested that with the high likelihood that the House of Representatives, in particular, may flip to Republican control following the midterm elections, there is a strong chance there will be “significant investigations in the House come January.”

According to Malone, “The common explanation is that Fauci got out of the job now so that he could avoid being called to testify by the new Congress in January.”

But Malone dismissed these claims. “He’s going to be called no matter what,” he said.

Instead, by announcing a December departure, Fauci seeks to achieve two benefits, according to Malone. One possible benefit is that his departure will help the Democrats, because “the polling [likely] shows that Tony Fauci is a major problem for the Democratic Party heading into the midterms.”

The other potential benefit, Malone said, is that “it will give him the opportunity to select his successor and get that successor confirmed prior to the new House and Senate being convened.”

A departure at that point could allow Fauci to entirely avoid providing Congressional testimony, according to Malone.

“I suspect he steps up,” Malone said, “The pathway is the World Health Organization, a senior position at the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, or CEPI [the Coalition for Epidemic Preparedness Innovations].” “These are the pathways” followed by former public health officials from the U.S. and other countries, he said.

What this would mean, Malone told The Defender, is that Fauci “might well resist U.S. Congressional subpoenas for his testimony on the grounds that he’s doing very important work on the world stage now and that he has no time to waste on Republican ‘witch hunts,’ or some sort of messaging like that.”

Ukraine and the Politics of Permanent War

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Permanent war requires permanent censorship.

War Inc. – by Mr. Fish

By Chris Hedges

Source: The Chris Hedges Report

No one, including the most bullish supporters of Ukraine, expect the nation’s war with Russia to end soon. The fighting has been reduced to artillery duels across hundreds of miles of front lines and creeping advances and retreats. Ukraine, like Afghanistan, will bleed for a very long time. This is by design.

On August 24, the Biden administration announced yet another massive military aid package to Ukraine worth nearly $3 billion. It will take months, and in some cases years, for this military equipment to reach Ukraine. In another sign that Washington assumes the conflict will be a long war of attrition it will give a name to the U.S. military assistance mission in Ukraine and make it a separate command overseen by a two- or three-star general. Since August 2021, Biden has approved more than $8 billion in weapons transfers from existing stockpiles, known as drawdowns, to be shipped to Ukraine, which do not require Congressional approval.

Including humanitarian assistance, replenishing depleting U.S. weapons stocks and expanding U.S. troop presence in Europe, Congress has approved over $53.6 billion ($13.6 billion in March and a further $40.1 billion in May) since Russia’s February 24 invasion. War takes precedence over the most serious existential threats we face. The proposed budget for the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) in fiscal year 2023 is $10.675 billion while the proposed budget for the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) is $11.881 billion. Our approved assistance to Ukraine is more than twice these amounts. 

The militarists who have waged permanent war costing trillions of dollars over the past two decades have invested heavily in controlling the public narrative. The enemy, whether Saddam Hussein or Vladimir Putin, is always the epitome of evil, the new Hitler. Those we support are always heroic defenders of liberty and democracy. Anyone who questions the righteousness of the cause is accused of being an agent of a foreign power and a traitor.

The mass media cravenly disseminates these binary absurdities in 24-hour news cycles. Its news celebrities and experts, universally drawn from the intelligence community and military, rarely deviate from the approved script. Day and night, the drums of war never stop beating. Its goal: to keep billions of dollars flowing into the hands of the war industry and prevent the public from asking inconvenient questions. 

In the face of this barrage, no dissent is permitted. CBS News caved to pressure and retracted its documentary which charged that only 30 percent of arms shipped to Ukraine were making it to the front lines, with the rest siphoned off to the black market, a finding that was separately reported upon by U.S. journalist Lindsey Snell. CNN has acknowledged there is no oversight of weapons once they arrive in Ukraine, long considered the most corrupt country in Europe. According to a poll of executives responsible for tackling fraud, completed by Ernst & Young in 2018, Ukraine was ranked the ninth-most corrupt nation from 53 surveyed. 

There is little ostensible reason for censoring critics of the war in Ukraine. The U.S. is not at war with Russia. No U.S. troops are fighting in Ukraine. Criticism of the war in Ukraine does not jeopardize our national security. There are no long-standing cultural and historical ties to Ukraine, as there are to Great Britain. But if permanent war, with potentially tenuous public support, is the primary objective, censorship makes sense.

War is the primary business of the U.S. empire and the bedrock of the U.S. economy. The two ruling political parties slavishly perpetuate permanent war, as they do austerity programs, trade deals, the virtual tax boycott for corporations and the rich, wholesale government surveillance, the militarization of the police and the maintenance of the largest prison system in the world. They bow before the dictates of the militarists, who have created a state within a state. This militarism, as Seymour Melman writes in The Permanent War Economy: American Capitalism in Decline, “is fundamentally contradictory to the formation of a new political economy based upon democracy, instead of hierarchy, in the workplace and the rest of society.” 

“The idea that war economy brings prosperity has become more than an American illusion,” Melman writes. “When converted, as it has been, into ideology that justifies the militarization of society and moral debasement, as in Vietnam, then critical reassessment of that illusion is a matter of urgency. It is a primary responsibility of thoughtful people who are committed to humane values to confront and respond to the prospect that deterioration of American economy and society, owing to the ravages of war economy, can become irreversible.”

If permanent war is to be halted, as Melman writes, the ideological control of the war industry must be shattered. The war industry’s funding of  politicians, research centers and think tanks, as well as its domination of the media monopolies, must end. The public must be made aware, Melman writes, of how the federal government “sustains itself as the directorate of the largest industrial corporate empire in the world; how the war economy is organized and operated in parallel with centralized political power — often contradicting the laws of Congress and the Constitution itself; how the directorate of the war economy converts pro-peace sentiment in the population into pro-militarist majorities in the  Congress; how ideology and fears of job losses are manipulated to marshal support in Congress and the general public for war economy; how the directorate of the war economy uses its power to prevent planning for orderly conversion to an economy of peace.”

Rampant, unchecked militarism, as historian Arnold Toynbee notes, “has been by far the commonest cause of the breakdown of civilizations.” 

This breakdown is accelerated by the rigid standardization and uniformity of public discourse. The manipulation of public opinion, what Walter Lippman calls “the manufacture of consent,” is imperative as the militarists gut social programs; let the nation’s crumbling infrastructure decay; refuse to raise the minimum wage; sustain an inept, mercenary for-profit health care system that resulted in 25 percent of global Covid deaths — although we are less than 5 percent of the world’s population — to gouge the public; carries out deindustrialization; do nothing to curb the predatory behavior of banks and corporations or invest in substantial programs to combat the climate crisis. 

Critics, already shut out from the corporate media, are relentlessly attacked, discredited and silenced for speaking a truth that threatens the public’s quiescence while the U.S. Treasury is pillaged by the war industry and the nation disemboweled. 

You can watch my discussion with Matt Taibbi about the rot that infects journalism here and here.

The war industry, deified by the mass media, including the entertainment industry, is never held accountable for the military fiascos, cost overruns, dud weapons systems and profligate waste. No matter how many disasters — from Vietnam to Afghanistan — it orchestrates, it is showered with larger and larger amounts of federal funds, nearly half of all the government’s discretionary spending. The monopolization of capital by the military has driven the U.S. debt to over $30 trillion, $6 trillion more than the U.S. GDP of $24 trillion. Servicing this debt costs $300 billion a year. We spend more on the military, $813 billion for fiscal year 2023, than the next nine countries, including China and Russia, combined.

An organization like NewsGuard, which has been rating what it says are trustworthy and untrustworthy sites based on their reporting on Ukraine, is one of the many indoctrination tools of the war industry. Sites that raise what are deemed “false” assertions about Ukraine, including that there was a U.S.-backed coup in 2014 and neo-Nazi forces are part of Ukraine’s military and power structure, are tagged as unreliable. Consortium News, Daily Kos, Mint Press and Grayzone have been given a red warning label. Sites that do not raise these issues, such as CNN, receive the “green” rating” for truth and credibility.  (NewsGuard, after being heavily criticized for giving Fox News a green rating of approval in July revised its rating for Fox News and MSNBC, giving them red labels.) 

The ratings are arbitrary. The Daily Caller, which published fake naked pictures of Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, was given a green rating, along with a media outlet owned and operated by The Heritage Foundation. NewsGuard gives WikiLeaks a red label for “failing” to publish retractions despite admitting that all of the information WikiLeaks has published thus far is accurate. What WikiLeaks was supposed to retract remains a mystery. The New York Times and The Washington Post, which shared a Pulitzer in 2018 for reporting that Donald Trump colluded with Vladimir Putin to help sway the 2016 election, a conspiracy theory the Mueller investigation imploded, are awarded perfect scores. These ratings are not about vetting journalism. They are about enforcing conformity.

NewsGuard, established in 2018, “partners” with the State Department and the Pentagon, as well as corporations such as Microsoft. Its advisory board includes the former Director of the CIA and NSA, Gen. Michael Hayden; the first U.S. Homeland Security director Tom Ridge and Anders Fogh Rasmussen, a former secretary general of NATO.

Readers who regularly go to targeted sites could probably care less if they are tagged with a red label. But that is not the point. The point is to rate these sites so that anyone who has a NewsGuard extension installed on their devices will be warned away from visiting them. NewsGuard is being installed in libraries and schools and on the computers of active-duty troops. A warning pops up on targeted sites that reads: “Proceed with caution: This website generally fails to maintain basic standards of accuracy and accountability.”

Negative ratings will drive away advertisers, which is the intent. It is also a very short step from blacklisting these sites to censoring them, as happened when YouTube erased six years of my show On Contact that was broadcast on RT America and RT International. Not one show was about Russia. And not one violated the guidelines for content imposed by YouTube. But many did examine the evils of U.S. militarism.

In an exhaustive rebuttal to NewsGuard, which is worth reading, Joe Lauria, the editor-in-chief of Consortium News, ends with this observation:

NewsGuard’s accusations against Consortium News that could potentially limit its readership and financial support must be seen in the context of the West’s war mania over Ukraine, about which dissenting voices are being suppressed. Three CN writers have  been kicked off Twitter. 

PayPal’s cancellation of Consortium News’ account is an evident attempt to defund it for what is almost certainly the company’s view that CN violated its restrictions on “providing false or misleading information.” It cannot be known with 100 percent certainty because PayPal is hiding behind its reasons, but CN trades in information and nothing else.  

CN supports no side in the Ukraine war but seeks to examine the causes of the conflict within its recent historical context, all of which are being whitewashed from mainstream Western media.

Those causes are: NATO’s expansion eastward despite its promise not to do so; the coup and eight-year war on Donbass against coup resisters; the lack of implementation of the Minsk Accords to end that conflict; and the outright rejection of treaty proposals by Moscow to create a new security architecture in Europe taking Russia’s security concerns into account.  

Historians who point out the onerous Versailles conditions imposed on Germany after World War I as a cause of Nazism and World War II are neither excusing Nazi Germany nor are they smeared as its defenders.

The frantic effort to corral viewers and readers into the embrace of the establishment media — only 16 percent of Americans have a great deal/quite a lot of confidence in newspapers and only 11 percent have some degree of confidence in television news — is a sign of desperation. 

As the persecution of Julian Assange illustrates, the throttling of press freedom is bipartisan. This assault on truth leaves a population unmoored. It feeds wild conspiracy theories. It shreds the credibility of the ruling class. It empowers demagogues. It creates an information desert, one where truth and lies are indistinguishable. It frog-marches us towards tyranny. This censorship only serves the interests of the militarists who, as Karl Liebknecht reminded his fellow Germans in World War I, are the enemy within.

Censorship and Global Information Control: Who Is Behind the “Trusted News Initiative”(TNI)?

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By Dr. Joseph Mercola

Source: Global Research

Story at-a-glance

  • The Trusted News Initiative (TNI) was founded by the BBC in July 2019. While TNI claims to promote democracy and freedom, its purpose for being is global information control
  • Partners in the initiative include global media outlets such as The Washington Post, Reuters, The Associated Press, AFP, the Financial Times and the European Broadcasting Union (EBU), and Big Tech partners such as Google, Facebook, Twitter, YouTube and Microsoft
  • TNI was formed mere weeks after a Reuters Institute report revealed trust in U.S. media had slipped to an all-time low of just 29% — the lowest of the 46 countries included. Clearly, people were going elsewhere for the facts, and that probably had everything to do with the creation of TNI. They have no control over alternative media, so they needed a comprehensive way to shut them all down
  • By suppressing information about early treatment and the adverse effects suffered from the COVID shots, TNI partners have played a direct role in the destruction of lives. In short, TNI is the converse of “trusted news.” It is the very “fake news” it claims to combat
  • In addition to TNI, Google also has a similar program going on, called the Google News Initiative, which includes a $300 million funding commitment to the future of the news industry. The Google News Initiative is partnered with advertising agencies in a program called Trusted News for Trusted Advertising (TNTA), to ensure advertisers don’t have their ads associated with “false or misleading news,” thereby allowing them to “regain control of the media on which they publish the advertising”

https://odysee.com/$/download/Vaccine-Safety-Research-Foundation-TNI/e12aa5cff1d4330b882766cf4f00ed41c42a532c

What is the Trusted News Initiative (TNI)? As you may have discovered, Orwellian doublespeak is rampant these days, and many organizations are named in complete opposition to their intended purposes. Such is the case with the TNI as well.

As explained in the video above, created by Steve Kirsch’s Vaccine Safety Research Foundation (VSRF), TNI is an organization created for the purpose of global information control. It was founded by the BBC in July 2019,1,2,3 mere months before the COVID pandemic shattered all semblance of free speech rights.

Partners in the initiative include global media outlets such as The Washington Post, Reuters, The Associated Press, AFP, the Financial Times and the European Broadcasting Union (EBU), and Big Tech partners such as Google, Facebook, Twitter, YouTube and Microsoft, just to name a few.4,5

TNI Formed as Trust in Mainstream Media Hit Rock Bottom

As astutely noted by Elizabeth Woodsworth in The Liberty Beacon,6 TNI was formed mere weeks after a Reuters Institute report revealed trust in U.S. media had slipped to an all-time low of just 29% — the lowest of the 46 countries included. Canadians trust in mainstream media was only slightly better at 45%.

Also supporting the distrust in the media is an even more appalling recent Gallup Poll.7 Just 16% of U.S. adults now say they have “a great deal” or “quite a lot” of confidence in newspapers and 11% in television news. Jimmy Dore goes into more details below.

This massive slip “can only mean that people are going elsewhere for their news,” Woodsworth said. And that probably had everything to do with the creation of TNI. They realized people didn’t trust mainstream media anymore and were looking elsewhere for the facts.

This presented a serious problem, as they had no control over alternative media. How then would they shut down undesirable facts and theories that might jeopardize the smooth transition into the New World Order? Enter TNI and a new cadre of “fact checking” organizations to wrangle the unruly masses back into the brainwashing line.

Promoting ‘Freedom and Democracy’ Through Censorship

According to TNI, its first order of business was to “promote freedom and democracy” by preventing foreign interference in the 2020 election. However, TNI’s mission didn’t end there. Its Big Pharma backers had a vaccination agenda right from the start, and TNI has been instrumental in promoting that agenda and upholding their financial interests.

In 2019 — before we knew anything about the COVID shots to come — TNI warned that “anti-vaxxers are gaining traction” and that online platforms would need to intervene using algorithms to suppress the growing anti-vaccine movement.

In addition to suppressing undesirable vaccine content, TNI also floods online users with pro-vaccine messages to drown out what little opposition is left. As noted by VSRF, from the start, TNI sought to normalize the use of this experimental gene transfer technology, despite a mountain of unanswered questions about the safety and efficacy of mRNA technology.

Suppressing early treatment successes was also part of the vaccine agenda, as early treatment options posed a direct threat to the Emergency Use Authorization of these experimental shots.

To that same end, TNI also fueled hatred against the unvaccinated, and hired so-called “fact checkers” to publish false fact checks and hit pieces on those who questioned the sanity and safety of pandemic countermeasures, such as masks and lockdowns, or raised concerns about the experimental shots.

We’re Made to Pay for Our Own Destruction

Hundreds of outspoken doctors and scientists — including experts from Harvard, Stanford and Oxford — have been banned and deplatformed over the past two and a half years.

No matter how prestigious their careers, they’ve been labeled “dangerous” and targeted for neutralization. Many have lost their careers. They’ve been ousted from professional associations and stripped of their medical licenses.By suppressing information about early treatment and the adverse effects suffered from the shots, TNI partners have played a direct role in the destruction of lives. In short, TNI is the very ‘fake news’ it claims to combat.

Thousands of vaccine-injured people have also been accused of spreading “misinformation” and have been targeted for elimination from social media, while mainstream media (MSM) have roundly ignored their plight and pleas for recognition and help.

As noted by VSRF, by suppressing information about early treatment and the adverse effects suffered from the shots, TNI partners have played a direct role in the destruction of lives. In short, TNI is the converse of “trusted news.” It actually creates and promotes mis- and disinformation. It is the very “fake news” it claims to combat.

And “Who’s paying for this harmful suppression of science?” VSRF asks. The answer: YOU are. We all are, through our taxes. Government has spent billions of tax dollars to promote the experimental COVID jabs, which benefits no one but Big Pharma, various patent holders and investors.

Legacy Media Is on the Wrong Side of History

In a June 25, 2021, article, unidentified staff at TrialSite News commented on the shocking censorship that was already becoming apparent:8

“Since time immemorial, those with power have used it to control those without. In the modern world, big government and big tech represent the seats of power when it comes to who is allowed to say what. Of course, many think that ‘private companies’ can regulate speech in any way they see fit. But from either an ethical or legal point of view, this is false …

COVID-19 and the Shadowy “Trusted News Initiative”

Legally, the Supreme Court has long held that when a private company creates something that functions as a public square (think of a company town), the First Amendment comes into play.

Way back in April 2020, it was already clear that the then-existing online socio-political censorship was going to expand into the world of science, medicine, and academia in the new COVID-19 era. On April 1 of that year, early in the pandemic, Foreign Policy took a look at these questions in a piece titled, ‘Coronavirus Has Started a Censorship Pandemic’9 …

[D]isallowing good-faith medical information because the public can’t be presumed to properly weigh claims is infantilizing said public, along with dismantling the free speech culture …

The efforts now underway to completely suppress positive data associated with early-onset treatment prospects such as ivermectin or the squelching of any discussion of vaccine safety issues is completely unacceptable in a civilized, democratic market-based society. Those perpetuating such offenses are in fact on the wrong side of history.”

And who are the ones perpetuating these offenses? The TNI, for sure. TNI partners have censored and tried to ruin the reputations and careers of fully qualified and licensed public health experts, doctors and scientists — all in the name of protecting you, the audience, from the life-saving information these experts are trying to share. In her closing remarks, Woodsworth says:10

“Regarding COVID-19, Dr. Piers Robinson, co-director of the Organization for Propaganda Studies, has judged, ‘It wouldn’t be an underestimation to say that this is probably one of the biggest propaganda operations that we have seen in history,’ concluding ‘what happens is down to how people resist and how much force and coercion the authorities use.’

Indeed, the very foundation of democracy is that public wisdom should be consulted and given its head in self-rule. The public has the constitutional right to full information to form and express its own conclusions and does not need a coordinated TNI to corral and contain it.

It is utterly outrageous that the voices the public needs from the top public health figures at its best universities are being denied to its hearing. A far superior job of investigative reporting is being done by the hard-working alternative media researchers without Big Pharma’s blood-stained advertising dollars.”

Organized Control

The reason the TNI has been so effective in shutting out opposing views is because all of the partners work together in a highly-organized manner. When one identifies a piece of “misinformation,” the order to quash it is shared across platforms. The same goes for the official narrative. Everyone supports and promotes it, no matter how illogical.

A debunking piece by one legacy media partner is used as “proof” by another, and Big Tech platforms, of course, have unprecedented ability to suppress unwanted content and push “official” or approved content to the front using algorithms alone.

As for who actually decides what the official narrative is supposed to be, your guess is as good as mine. What we do know is that wealthy and powerful interests control media worldwide.

Two major media controllers are BlackRock and the Vanguard Group, which combined own a vast majority of the world’s assets, including media companies. Another is Bill Gates, whose self-serving “donations” ensure media treat him like a medical expert (or climate expert, or nutritional expert, or agricultural expert) when, in reality, he’s just promoting ideas that will make him a ton of money.

TNI’s Not-so-Trustworthy Sources

And what about TNI’s “trusted sources”? Aside from other TNI partners and their fact checkers, trusted sources are the public health agencies, such as the World Health Organization, the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration and the U.S. National Institutes of Health.

Every one of these agencies has a long “rap sheet” when it comes to corruption and errors in judgment, and their unreliability have been highlighted time and again over the course of the COVID pandemic. They’ve broken a long list of rules and regulations intended to ensure public safety, and rewritten others on the fly — again without following proper protocols.

Time and again, people have scratched their heads, saying, “How can they do that? That’s not lawful. They CAN’T do that!” Well, the reality is, they used to be merely corrupt, but now they’re completely lawless. And no one is stopping them.

Decisions made by the FDA, CDC, NIH and the WHO over the course of the pandemic have been downright shocking in their absolute absence of any moral compass. They’ve repeatedly deferred to Big Pharma and blatantly ignored even the most basic of safety protocols, putting even babies lives at risk.

In the past, we’d expect the Fourth Estate — journalists with integrity — to expose the kind of fraud and lawlessness these agencies are engaging in. But sadly, legacy media, just like nearly every federal regulatory agency, has been captured by the military industrial complex.

Legacy media is no longer the “free press.” It certainly is in no way shape or form your trusted source of news. Those days are long gone. They are completely captured; hardly a sentence is uttered that isn’t directed to them by the government and repeated parroting by all of legacy media in all their varied forms.

Google News Initiative

In addition to TNI, Google also has a similar program going on, called the Google News Initiative, which includes a $300 million funding commitment to the future of the news industry.

The Google News Initiative is partnered with advertising agencies in a program called Trusted News for Trusted Advertising (TNTA),11 to ensure advertisers don’t have their ads associated with “false or misleading news,” thereby allowing them to “regain control of the media on which they publish the advertising.”

This is wrong on so many levels. Advertising and news/editorial departments are not supposed to be mixed, period. They are intended to operate independently, not as complements or supporting helpmates. The very fact that newspapers are failing and ad revenue is dropping makes the entire press corps susceptible to doing whatever the advertisers want.

And, online, advertisers include the CDC and NIH, as evidenced by their many ads on social media. So, the TNTA program is really all about building revenue. It has nothing to do with providing trustworthy news.

Several other copycats also exist that have nearly the same name as TNI. There’s the Trusting News Initiative, the Trust Project, the News Integrity Initiative, the Journalism Trust Initiative, you get the idea.12 Some share partners with the TNI, further widening the media network of controlled news.

Add to that NewsGuard and scores of fact-checking organizations, all of whom work in tandem to promote the official narrative while suppressing opposing views. As I’ve stated before, NewsGuard received startup funds13 from the Publicis Groupe, one of the largest PR companies in the world, which serves the needs of several of the largest drug companies in the world.

Last but not least, there’s a tightly woven web of interlocking “fact-checking” agencies that work for advertisers in an effort to manipulate the news in favor of the advertisers or other entities with vested interests, such as governments and health organizations.

This web of fact-checkers is funded by hundreds of millions, possibly billions, of dollars. I believe this was planned long before the pandemic, and their goal is to steer the news into a second horn for advertisers. Not surprisingly, the drug industry has one of the largest advertising budgets, which is part of why you can’t get the truth about drugs and health from the legacy media or any of these fact-checkers.

TNI and Hitler’s Principles

In his Substack article, “Propaganda, Corporatism and the Hidden Global Coup,” Dr. Robert Malone describes the TNI thus:14

“The TNI uses advocacy journalism and journals to promote their causes. The Trusted News Initiative is more than this though; if you go back to Hitler’s basic principles, the members of the TNI are using these core principles to control the public.”

Hitler’s basic principles are described in the book, “Propaganda and Persuasion,” and are listed as:15

  • Avoid abstract ideas — appeal to the emotions
  • Constantly repeat just a few ideas. Use stereotyped phrases
  • Give only one side of the argument
  • Continuously criticize your opponents
  • Pick out one special “enemy” for special vilification

I believe Dr. Malone is onto something. These principles have certainly become media norms over the past couple of years. Who knows — perhaps I was picked to be a “special enemy for special vilification” because the TNI and those who pull their puppet strings are all Nazis. I didn’t expect it to be that simplistic, but who knows?

We’re all getting an education in psychopathy these days, and there’s nothing normal about psychopathic logic. Their brains are wired differently and you won’t be able to understand their motivations no matter how hard you try. Is this perhaps why so many decisions handed down to us make no rational sense, either from a scientific, medical or humanitarian perspective?

If it’s true that many of those who are trying to take over the world in a global coup are in fact on the psychopathic spectrum, then our response needs to be suitably appropriate.

Appropriate responses when faced with a psychopath include keeping your emotions in check (as they seek to manipulate your emotions); standing your ground in an assertive manner; not buying into their stories (especially not victim stories); and paying attention only to their actions, not their words.16,17

To be more precise, most experts have one primary suggestion for dealing with a psychopath, and that is, “Don’t.”18 Since we’re talking about media here, that’s a fairly simple action item. Just turn them off, and find alternative news sources that aren’t tainted by blood money and an overt attempt for global slavery.

You owe it to yourself and your family to take control of your health and avoid these propaganda tools and restrict your information to truly trusted and vetted sources.

Notes

1 Parispeaceforum TNI

2 BBC TNI

3, 6, 10 The Liberty Beacon August 13, 2021

4 Media Space TNI

5 EBU July 13, 2020

7 Gallup July 18, 2022

8 TrialSite News June 25, 2021

9 Foreign Policy April 1, 2020

11 Google News Initiative TNTA

12 Nieman Lab A Guide to the New Efforts Fighting for Journalism

13 CrunchBase NewsGuard

14, 15 RW Malone Substack February 28, 2022

16 INC How to Deal With a Psychopath

17, 18 Bakadesyo How to Deal With Psychopaths

Trump Derangement Syndrome Returns

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By Margaret Kimberley

Source: Black Agenda Report

Why would Black people laud the FBI or criticize protection against self-incrimination? The FBI search of Donald Trump’s home has reawakened Trump Derangement Syndrome.

Progressives love the FBI? Leftists embrace the Espionage Act? Of course, one man is responsible for this madness, and he is none other than Donald J. Trump, 45th president of the United States. The fallout from the FBI search conducted at Trump’s home shows the rank confusion spread by people who call themselves liberal but who are as dangerous as anyone on the right. From the moment that Trump announced the raid they were in full fascist mode, even as they claimed to be fighting fascism.

Trump did what he usually does, play fast and loose with the truth. Of all former presidents only he would ignore subpoenas and claim to have declassified documents when he hadn’t done so. He can’t get out of his own way and thus makes himself a target. But Democrats should know that the search is seen as nothing more than a personal attack against him. Millions of people who love Trump will love him all the more and conclude that the raid was meant to keep him from running for president again. Liberal dead-enders will be happy, but everyone else will say that something rotten was conducted at Mar a Lago.

Attorney General Merrick Garland says that the documents were subpoenaed but the former president didn’t respond. The FBI search warrant states that the search encompassed three different issues: gathering, transmitting or losing defense information, which is part of the Espionage Act; concealment, removal, or mutilation concerning the handling of records and reports; and the destruction, alteration, or falsification of records in Federal investigations and bankruptcy, which is part of a section dealing with obstruction of justice. The warrant also states a search for information on Roger Stone and on the President of France.

Aside from the item descriptions, no one knows what Trump had or what the FBI found. Leaks from the Justice Department indicate something about nuclear weapons, but no one knows what that means. The lack of information hasn’t stopped the speculation which Trump always causes. There is conjecture that he was selling information to Russia or to Saudi Arabia or was plotting some other treason. There are even claims that documents were buried with his recently deceased ex-wife. It is fascinating that there can be so much guesswork about issues no one can know.

The years long Russiagate investigation is responsible for ordinarily sensible people losing their minds. Hardly anyone recalls that the charge of collusion was actually disproven, that Robert Mueller only indicted for process crimes, such as those which occur when people let down their guard and talk to the FBI. Most Americans who know the name Paul Manafort think he was a Russian spy but don’t know that he went to jail for tax and bank fraud. Propaganda works very well when it is repeated over and over again.

Worse than the silly Trump inspired derangement is the way that those who call themselves left or progressive have chosen to defend federal law enforcement and bad legislation like the Espionage Act. The Espionage Act is a relic from the earliest days of the cold war, and Woodrow Wilson’s infamous Palmer Raids which targeted the left for persecution and prosecution. Barack Obama used it more than all previous presidents combined in order to prosecute journalists who published what the state didn’t want us to know. As for the FBI, its Counter Intelligence Program, COINTELPRO, created dissension in the liberation movement, targeted individuals for prosecution, spied on Martin Luther King and told him to commit suicide, and killed Fred Hampton and Mark Clark among others. The FBI continues to use informants to entrap Black people in phony terror cases.

It is truly shameful to see Black people exalt the FBI and act as if punishing Trump is the organizing principle of all political activity. The Trump organization is also under investigation by the New York Attorney and the former president refused to answer questions put to him in a deposition. The right to remain silent is one of the most important in American law and should be used a lot more often. But copaganda television shows and Trump hatred have caused their own form of insanity, and his exercise of a fundamental right was widely lampooned. No one should ever be condemned for utilizing their fifth amendment right, not even Donald Trump.

Of course, this spectacle is also used to deflect from Biden administration failures. His approval rating is still low, for the simple reason that he didn’t do what he claimed he would for American voters. He continues to pour public money into the losing effort in Ukraine and needlessly provokes Russia and China. But who is paying attention if there is speculation that Trump put files in Ivana’s casket?

It is time to nip this foolishness in the bud before it goes any further. Trump should not live rent free in our collective consciousness any longer. He cannot be allowed to distract from the current president’s actions or become a rallying point for politics which will inevitably be useless. No one has to follow Trump’s shenanigans any longer or allow the corporate media or the democratic party to make him their focus. Doing so only makes it harder to do the already hard work of recreating Black politics.

At the Lost and Found

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By Edward Curtin

Source: Behind the Curtain

“Nothing is more real than nothing.”
Samuel Beckett, Malone Dies

Those who are never lost are forever lost.  Only those who know they are lost and that life is a shipwreck have a chance to find their way to shore.

The world’s great religions, including Taoism and Existential philosophy, understand that at the heart of human existence is the presence of the not (death, emptiness, void), but this negative reality, this “nothingness” interpenetrates with the positive of being alive so that our knowledge coincides with our ignorance, our lives with our death, and our truth with untruth.  This is also common sense.

Everyone is a pilgrim on the way, and because there are no maps, we all get lost.  And it is only by getting lost in a deep sense that we can find ourselves and discover the truth about the world.

It is well known that Ernest Hemingway made famous the phrase “the lost generation” when he opened his novel The Sun Also Rises with the epigram “You are all a lost generation,” attributed to Gertrude Stein, who said she heard it from a garage owner who said it about a young auto mechanic in his employ.

It is less well known that Hemingway later wrote “that all generations were lost by something and always had been and always would be …But to hell with her lost-generation talk and all the dirty easy labels.”

He was thinking of how the madness of war with the calls to patriotism and God and country and the never-ending official lies about everything maimed people at very deep levels.  His words in A Farewell to Arms have lasted because they are so true in their dismissal of abstract obscenities and their embrace of the concrete:

I was always embarrassed by the words sacred, glorious, and sacrifice and the expression in vain …. And I had seen nothing sacred, and the things that were glorious had no glory and the sacrifices were like the stockyards of Chicago if nothing were done with the meat except to bury it …. Abstract words such as glory, honor, courage, or hallow were obscene beside the concrete names of villages, the numbers of roads, the names of rivers, the numbers of regiments and the dates.

No doubt he was also thinking of the existential anxiety of being alive and the fear of death and nothingness that is conveyed in his powerful short story, “A Clean Well-Lighted Place” that appeared in the 1930 volume Winner Take Nothing.  He was well acquainted with nothing (the not, nada) and knew that social circumstances only add to it, particularly wars and the nihilistic death wishes of lying political leaders.

Some say nothing has changed for millennia and that every age is similar and people are the same, always complaining about the present and recalling the good old days.  There is some truth in this, but the issue of assessing today in all its uniqueness remains paramount.  For every age and every generation is different; therein lies its potential and dangers.  Each can only be understood within its place and time.  We live in the era of high technology that has never before existed.  It is unique.  And it is uniquely dangerous.

Today is a time of unprecedented official lies about everything, endless wars hot and cold, class wars of the rich against the poor, medical wars of international elites against everyone, etc. –  it is a daily electronic digital  barrage meant to pound people into the deepest despair.  Call it “The Lost World of the Information Superhighway.”  These lies have sown a vast sense of bewilderment, as intended.  Lostness for so many, including those who don’t know it and take those lies for truth. People who don’t know that there are still places, although they are shrinking, where truth can be found.  The problem is, of course, that even when they are told about media sites and writers that operate honestly and outside the propaganda mill, they usually refuse to go there.  They prefer to live inside what Jim Garrison, the former New Orleans District Attorney who brought the only trial in the assassination of President Kennedy, correctly termed “the Doll’s House.”

Picking through the bins at the lost and found on the Internet, which is dominated by intelligence services and their Silicon Valley big tech partners, many who feel lost find “things” they think they have lost but which are counterfeit.  They cling to them as to false gods, not realizing that they have been placed there by the elite mountebanks and their accomplices, a process similar to a document dump that contains fabricated records.  It is an old trick.  Often what is really lost is the sense that life makes sense and is meaningful, but this awareness is often replaced with shards of false reassurance meant to distract and far too much information for anyone to comprehend.

What’s up?  Check your cell phone and head down the primrose path to unreality.

Just as there are two senses to being lost, one based on the awareness that if we refuse to grasp at straws and proceed through life by faith, the unknown road will bear us up (Thoreau said, “How vigilant we are! determined not to live by faith if we can avoid it…”), and the other being the more socially induced one of incessant propaganda, so too there are two ways of thinking about nothing.  The existential sense as described by Hemingway in his famous story mentioned above, and the sense of trivia or superficial preoccupations that distract.  C.S. Lewis described the latter sense very well:

The Christians describe the enemy as one ‘without whom Nothing is strong’. And Nothing is very strong: strong enough to steal away a man’s best years not in sweet sins but in a dreary flickering of the mind over it knows not what and knows not why, in the gratification of curiosities so feeble that the man is only half aware of them, in drumming of fingers and kicking of heels, in whistling tunes that he does not like, or in the long dim labyrinth of reveries that have not even lust or ambition to give them relish, but which, once chance association has started them, the creature is too weak and fuddled to shake off.

This is a perfect description of the passivity of scrolling the internet or social media.  Much ado about absolutely nothing but distractions.  Tranquilized by trivia.

Our current situation has been long in coming.  Back in the early 1960s, there was a  highly touted intellectual named Marshall McLuhan whose 1964 book, Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man, was gobbled up by the baby boomers raised on television, whose rebellious members protested the inhumanity of IBM computer technology of that time.  Ironically, it was members of this generation who later created the computer revolution and have promoted the digital revolution.  They carry cell phones as sidearms to defend themselves from reality.

Newsweek called McLuhan “the oracle of the New Communications.”  He was an obscurantic celebrator of the electronic media and retribalized man long before the Internet, cell phones, personal computers, and digital mania.  McLuhan’s paeans to technology sounded very profound and liberating  with their vaguely Gnostic and Jungian rhetoric, which also fit with the 1960s “vibes.”  He called the electronic media our gods whom we must serve, for they in turn would liberate us.  He gave life to things while taking it from persons.  He wrote:

Electromagnetic technology requires utter human docility and quiescence of meditation such as befits an organism that now wears its brain outside its skull and its nerves outside its hide. Man must serve his electronic technology with the same servo-mechanistic fidelity with which he served his coracle, his canoe, his typography, and all other extensions of his physical organs. But there is this difference, that previous technologies were partial and fragmentary, and the electric is total and inclusive. An external consensus or conscience is now as necessary as private consciousness. [my emphases]

Clearly this was a message of a prescient religious crank: mystical, mythological, technological nonsense perfectly in tune with the dawning new age. Not any coming of the Age of Aquarius, however, but that of the Age of Digital Control and endless wars.

By turning the person inside out and giving life to things, McLuhan was certainly anticipating and promoting the developments of the past forty years.  His ideas gave legitimacy to the passivity of the person in the face of the burgeoning mass media consumer culture.  They supported the growing commodification of all aspects of life, especially people.  By externalizing the person, McLuhan was eliminating the idea of the autonomous self and opening the way for today’s era of consumers, blank screens for the reception of advertising, public relations, and propaganda on a vast scale.  In fact, what he wrote of television runs deeper for cell phones and computer screens.  “ … with TV,” he wrote, “the viewer is the screen.  He is bombarded with light impulses that James Joyce called the ‘Charge of the Light Brigade’ that imbues his ‘soulskin with subconscious inklings.’ “

Inklings of abstract obscenities at war with the lost world of reality.

While many people sense this, they still embrace their killers, feeling that they would be lost without them. They have become appendages of their electronic appendages.  The current push to transform all person-to-person life into a digital one run by Artificial Intelligence (AI) technologies with its mass surveillance powers is recognized by many but dismissed as a weird conspiracy.  This is so far from the truth.  A good indicator of this nonchalant attitude toward such developing trends is the vastly increased popularity of on-line shopping.  Its innocence conceals the future that is coming.

I recently won a very high-tech looking electric toothbrush at the dentist.  When I opened it, I discovered it contained a gadget with a suction cup that could hold a “smart phone” that you could attach to the mirror.  The phone could electronically be linked to the toothbrush and it would monitor your brushing as you watched yourself brush.  Poor me, I felt so stupid: a man without a smart phone!

While everybody knows that the boat is leaking and the captain lied, to paraphrase Leonard Cohen, such knowledge is abstract.  It is a sort-of knowledge, sensed but also denied.  Real but unreal.  Known but unknown.  And that’s how it goes.  It is very difficult for many conventional people to admit that the life they have known is disappearing while they dawdle in fantasy land, believing the propaganda of their rulers.  To live in the U.S.A. is to live in Neverland where no one ever has to be alone, never grow up, and always be “in touch” through the ether.  It is a country of lost children.

You can choose any issue of importance and its official explanation is certain to be untrue, obvious or subtle propaganda.  The lies about Ukraine and Russia; Covid-19, lockdowns, and vaccines; China and Taiwan; U.S. forces in Syria and U.S. support for Israeli aggression against Syria and the Palestinians; its support for Saudi Arabia’s ruthless policies and war against Yemen; the economy, central banking, and inflation; the increasing censorship of dissident voices; digital IDs, digital programmable currencies, and social credit systems; the persecution of Julian Assange; the Great Reset; a series of binaries meant to suggest false alternatives, etc.  The list is endless.  All official lies to support a sinking ship captained by psychopathic liars seemingly intent on a world war that will destroy the world.  Melville’s Captain Ahab writ large. Like those traveling on the Titanic, today’s passengers on the flailing American empire’s Good Ship Lollipop are in for a surprise, and it won’t be a sweet trip to a candy shop.

Hemingway was surely right that “Winner Take Nothing.”  Yet losers also exit empty-handed.  Everybody knows this but goes on surrounding themselves with stuff, lots of things.  Hoarders are a popular TV subject because they represent the extreme form of this madcap method of trying to secure oneself from loss.  It is a form of mental and spiritual despair that could only exist in advanced capitalist consumer society.  Too many possessions and too much information.  Cluttered minds, cluttered abodes.  There is a reason why the world’s poor are called the dispossessed.  One could say hoarders are the possessed, and it is a form of demonic possession.

Recently I was called upon to help a hospitalized elderly relative by checking on her house.  The house is filled from attic to basement, in every nook and cranny, with collected things that serve no life purpose but were kept to provide a security blanket that was really a strangulation cord.  I will spare you the details, except to say that this relative is an intelligent woman, as was her deceased husband, and yet they surrounded themselves with so much “stuff,” never threw things out, kept papers from 70 years ago, old keys and coins, empty jewelry boxes by the score, etc.  An overwhelming scene to behold.  And why did they do this?  Because they thought they were protecting themselves against loss, against nothing, nada.

As T. S. Eliot wrote in The Wasteland: “These fragments I have shored against my ruins.”  But there is nothing that will protect against the loss Eliot was referring to – the social, psychological, and spiritual fragmentation of Europe as a result of World War I.  A wasteland created by politicians. Like today.

We too are now living in a wasteland, and the only way to find our way forward is to acknowledge that we are lost and to jettison the false security of believing the vast tapestry of lies promulgated by the captains of the American-led Titanic.

I often think of the words of the poet Rilke as good advice, a step in the right direction where there is a lost and found worth visiting and insights await us. While primarily writing about the artist who time and again is that someone who emerges from the crowd and whose “winged heart everywhere beats against the walls of their time,” I think his words apply to every person, including journalists.  To plumb the depths of our sordid current world demands aesthetic, political, and spiritual resistance rooted in the open sociological imagination, a willingness to go wherever the facts and intuition leads us.  Rilke said:

Not any self-control or self-limitation for the sake of specific ends, but rather a carefree letting go of oneself; not caution, but rather a wise blindness; not working to acquire silent, slowly increasing possessions, but rather a continuous squandering of all perishable values. This way of being has something naïve and instinctive about it, and resembles that period of the unconscious best characterized by a joyous confidence, namely the period of childhood …. [the child] has no anxiety about losing things …. And whatever he has once been lit up in love remains as an image, never more to be lost, and the image is possession; that is why children are so rich.

For a country of lost children, this is a good place to start.

War Propaganda About Ukraine Starting to Wear Thin

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By Chay Bowes

Source: Covert Action

More and More Are Seeing Through the Lies

As Amnesty International confirms the inconvenient truths, which many independent journalists and political observers already knew, about the Ukrainian army’s behavior in Donbass, it’s worth examining how manipulating the truth has become—not only an everyday occurrence but a central element of the West’s proxy war in Ukraine.

An increasing number of mainstream journalists, commentators and ordinary individuals who had rushed to “Stand with Ukraine ” are finding the inconvenient truths about the Zelensky regime and its Army harder and harder to ignore.

It was the icon of American democracy, President Abraham Lincoln that said “You can fool part of the people some of the time, you can fool some of the people all of the time, but you cannot fool all the people all of the time.” Of course, even though Lincoln’s astute observation has been widely misquoted, it certainly has a particular resonance when we consider the recent misadventures and persistent foreign policy failures of his beloved United States.

Most particularly are American efforts to maintain an increasingly skeptical public’s support for its faltering and hugely costly geopolitical ambitions in Ukraine.

So far it hasn’t been too difficult to package a message for general consumption, a drive-through narrative if you will, that is easily accessible and digestible by a trusting public, particularly when that same public has been globally denied key factual insights into the background of a long running complex conflict into which they have been seduced as blindfolded supporters.

The current crisis in Ukraine is however different; it has seen the pro-Western media machine cultivate and disseminate disinformation, propaganda and fake news on a previously unseen scale. While the U.S. and its NATO allies prosecute their proxy conflict on the ground, in the air, and at sea, another illicit battle is being fought on social media, TV and radio.

Of course, propaganda and the winning of “hearts and minds” is nothing new when it comes to conflict. As far back as the 19th century Governments were aware of how important the narrative was at home, they actively sought to suppress details which they thought may be offensive or unhelpful to the home audience.

In the second Boer war in South Africa (1899-1902), when the British Army’s colonial war was failing it resorted to imprisoning Boer Women and children in vast ill equipped concentration camps where a stunning 26,000 of them would die from starvation, ill treatment and disease. The British actively considered creating a publicity campaign to hide the true horror of the hellish camps, including false reports and newspaper stories.

Again, during World War I the gruesome details of mass casualties in the horrendous and inhumane trenches of the western front were also sterilized and minimized for the home audience. As far as the public were concerned the Kaiser was the killer, the Germans ate Belgian babies and the repulsive Teutonic octopus had to be stopped at all costs.

Of course, the fact that the entire conflict was about imperial power, commerce and competition between the three grandchildren of the British Queen Victoria was conveniently ignored. In July 1916 British newspaper reports on the Battle of the Somme, one of the bloodiest battles in human history, famously read “Our casualties are not heavy,” an utterly misleading headline which sounds disturbingly familiar today.

When we consider Americas most recent large-scale military misadventures in Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria and Libya these ill-advised and bloody failures have yet again been portrayed as the “good guys against the bad guys”, it’s the Cowboys against the Indians, the dangerous and untrustworthy Muslim savages against the very existence of Western civilisation.

The immeasurable human suffering that these wars have visited on the innocent populations seldom features. American complicity and responsibility for creating the very problems they now seek to “solve” is bizarrely entirely ignored in its client media.

Today’s conflict in Ukraine is no exception, a similar narrative is peddled with the historical truths about where conflict grew from remaining unreported. Some of the most critical facts relating to Ukraine are routinely and conveniently rendered invisible by the mainstream media, such as when this civil war began and most crucially, who paid for and built the scaffolding on which it is now burning.

It is of course unpopular in any instance to swim against the flow of the tide, to be the child suggesting the emperor has no clothes, and to challenge “realities” that have been broadly accepted by a trusting public. Despite the gross imbalance in the presentation of the facts, up to now at least dissent was something accepted as a privilege of western democratic society, that freedom of speech and opinion is however in grave danger, particularly if it is based on inconvenient truths.

The “Absolute Truth”

When it comes to Ukraine a new, dangerous and lavishly funded weapon in the counter truth war has been deployed by western governments and media, I call it “Absolute Truth”. The Absolute truth doesn’t tolerate any challenges, when its allegations are proven false those realities are suppressed and ignored.

It immediately and efficiently targets any dissent from the prescribed narrative and brands challengers as “enemies,” “foreign agents,” or “useful idiots.” Critically there is no room for debate of any kind, there is no analysis of facts, there is only their Absolute Truth.   

Should a journalist, State or individual question this Absolute Truth or merely suggest an objective analysis of the facts they are immediately and brutally marginalised and then targeted for retribution. This determined and choreographed punishment can range from the loss of a job to the isolation of an entire nation with threats of violence commonplace.

The fact that the West’s “Absolute Truth” narrative relies implicitly on mass censorship and the wholesale destruction of freedom of speech is apparently irrelevant to its architects and disciples, if these pillars of liberal democracy must be abandoned in this war against the facts, so be it.

Absolute truth also has a selective attitude when it comes to the behavior of its idols, when Mr Zelensky’s election with the assistance, cash and muscle of a corrupt oligarch is highlighted this is ignored, when his antidemocratic banning of all opposition and the imprisonment of its leaders comes up, its fine. if the Absolute Truth requires the acceptance and deployment of brutal Nazi militias against civilians, (previously designated by the west as terrorists) that is again entirely acceptable.

Indeed, the Absolute truth brigade have a magical ability to erase history, assign hero status to mass murders (Stepan Bandera) and demonise those that defeated Nazism in Europe. The Absolute Truth now defines the narrative, the facts do not, facts and independent evidence will be selectively deployed if at all, those that challenge this are immediately designated as collaborators, war mongers and enemies of democracy.

Another sinister element of the cult of Absolute Truth is the reluctance to correct the record or admit when you get it wrong, from the “massacre” at Snake Island that never happened to the fake headlines about the Mariupol maternity hospital to name but a few, there is never any attempt to correct the record which begs the question how sincere were the allegations in the first place?

Interestingly, when the internationally respected Amnesty international bravely countered the Absolute truth with indisputable facts, it was itself attacked by an increasingly paranoid Zelensky. There is now a distinct element of “the boy who cried wolf” about Zelensky’s persistent and now routine allegations of genocide, targeting of civilians and the apparent desire to “erase Ukraine from the map”.

Any cursory examination of the facts around the Ukrainian Army’s “counter terrorist” operation against its own people in 2014 in Donbas would suggest it was an increasingly radicalised Ukrainian military that first assaulted the ethnic Russian populations in the east in 2014.

As NATOs exceptionally costly and increasingly destructive proxy war against Russia grinds on, the prospect of any military victory for Ukraine fades almost hourly, the likelihood that Russia will seek settlement also fades by the day, any incentive to do so now strategically valueless.

Western support for Zelensky’s seemingly rudderless and incompetent regime is privately wavering as the impact of ham-fisted sanctions against Russia threatens social cohesion in Europe and America alongside a global energy crisis.

Promised counter offensives in the south have not materialized, the much vaunted “Million-man army” has failed to appear and yet again, the American and European press that presented this as fact have not rowed back on their outlandish claims.

The harsh reality of war is seemingly lost on the “absolute Truth” brigade who are happy to “stand with Ukraine” but will never stand in Ukraine.

The western public are a fickle audience, given the lack of initial scrutiny generally applied to the mainstream narrative on Ukraine it’s likely that as more of the inconvenient truths about Zelensky, his junta and the realities of this conflict appear, more and more westerns will be creeping into their yards in the dead of night to take down their hastily hoisted Ukrainian flags.

Contrary to the best efforts of those that have funded, molded and justified this proxy war the truth has a habit of resurfacing. It will be impossible to “manage” the oncoming tide of reality that will gush out of Ukraine as the western powers refocus on their self-inflicted domestic troubles this winter, Zelensky himself may become the fall guy for the failed NATO escapade in Ukraine.

That’s the thing about those inconvenient facts, they keep persisting under the surface, the truth doesn’t have a sell by date, and it is patient, the memory of the countless dead demands it to be.

And of course, as good old Abraham Lincoln said, “You can fool part of the people some of the time, you can fool some of the people all of the time, but you cannot fool all the people all of the time.”

Repression, Terror, Fear: The Government Wants to Silence the Opposition

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By John & Nisha Whitehead

Source: The Rutherford Institute

“Once a government is committed to the principle of silencing the voice of opposition, it has only one way to go, and that is down the path of increasingly repressive measures, until it becomes a source of terror to all its citizens and creates a country where everyone lives in fear.” — President Harry S. Truman

Militarized police. Riot squads. Camouflage gear. Black uniforms. Armored vehicles. Mass arrests. Pepper spray. Tear gas. Batons. Strip searches. Surveillance cameras. Kevlar vests. Drones. Lethal weapons. Less-than-lethal weapons unleashed with deadly force. Rubber bullets. Water cannons. Stun grenades. Arrests of journalists. Crowd control tactics. Intimidation tactics. Brutality. Lockdowns.

This is not the language of freedom. This is not even the language of law and order.

This is the language of force.

This is how the government at all levels—federal, state and local—now responds to those who speak out against government corruption, misconduct and abuse.

These overreaching, heavy-handed lessons in how to rule by force have become standard operating procedure for a government that communicates with its citizenry primarily through the language of brutality, intimidation and fear.

We didn’t know it then, but what happened five years ago in Charlottesville, Va., was a foretaste of what was to come.

At the time, Charlottesville was at the center of a growing struggle over how to reconcile the right to think and speak freely, especially about controversial ideas, with the push to sanitize the environment of anything—words and images—that might cause offense. That fear of offense prompted the Charlottesville City Council to get rid of a statue of Confederate General Robert E. Lee that had graced one of its public parks for 82 years.

In attempting to err on the side of political correctness by placating one group while muzzling critics of the city’s actions, Charlottesville attracted the unwanted attention of the Ku Klux Klan, neo-Nazis and the alt-Right, all of whom descended on the little college town with the intention of exercising their First Amendment right to be disagreeable, to assemble, and to protest.

That’s when everything went haywire.

When put to the test, Charlottesville did not handle things well at all.

On August 12, 2017, government officials took what should have been a legitimate exercise in constitutional principles (free speech, assembly and protest) and turned it into a lesson in authoritarianism by manipulating warring factions and engineering events in such a way as to foment unrest, lockdown the city, and justify further power grabs.

On the day of scheduled protests, police deliberately engineered a situation in which two opposing camps of protesters would confront each other, tensions would bubble over, and things would turn just violent enough to justify allowing the government to shut everything down.

Despite the fact that 1,000 first responders (including 300 state police troopers and members of the National Guard)—many of whom had been preparing for the downtown rally for months—had been called on to work the event, and police in riot gear surrounded Emancipation Park on three sides, police failed to do their jobs.

In fact, as the Washington Post reports, police “seemed to watch as groups beat each other with sticks and bludgeoned one another with shields… At one point, police appeared to retreat and then watch the beatings before eventually moving in to end the free-for-all, make arrests and tend to the injured.”

“Police Stood By As Mayhem Mounted in Charlottesville,” reported ProPublica.

Incredibly, when the first signs of open violence broke out, the police chief allegedly instructed his staff to “let them fight, it will make it easier to declare an unlawful assembly.”

In this way, police who were supposed to uphold the law and prevent violence failed to do either.

Indeed, a 220-page post-mortem of the protests and the Charlottesville government’s response by former U.S. attorney Timothy J. Heaphy concluded that “the City of Charlottesville protected neither free expression nor public safety.”

In other words, the government failed to uphold its constitutional mandates.

The police failed to carry out their duties as peace officers.

And the citizens found themselves unable to trust either the police or the government to do its job in respecting their rights and ensuring their safety.

This is not much different from what is happening on the present-day national scene.

Indeed, there’s a pattern emerging if you pay close enough attention.

Civil discontent leads to civil unrest, which leads to protests and counterprotests. Tensions rise, violence escalates, police stand down, and federal armies move in. Meanwhile, despite the protests and the outrage, the government’s abuses continue unabated.

It’s all part of an elaborate setup by the architects of the police state. The government wants a reason to crack down and lock down and bring in its biggest guns.

They want us divided. They want us to turn on one another.

They want us powerless in the face of their artillery and armed forces.

They want us silent, servile and compliant.

They certainly do not want us to remember that we have rights, let alone attempting to exercise those rights peaceably and lawfully, whether it’s protesting politically correct efforts to whitewash the past, challenging COVID-19 mandates, questioning election outcomes, or listening to alternate viewpoints—even conspiratorial ones—in order to form our own opinions about the true nature of government.  

And they definitely do not want us to engage in First Amendment activities that challenge the government’s power, reveal the government’s corruption, expose the government’s lies, and encourage the citizenry to push back against the government’s many injustices.

Why else do you think Wikileaks founder Julian Assange continues to molder in jail for daring to blow the whistle about the U.S. government’s war crimes, while government officials who rape, plunder and kill walk away with little more than a slap on the wrist?

This is how it begins.

We are moving fast down that slippery slope to an authoritarian society in which the only opinions, ideas and speech expressed are the ones permitted by the government and its corporate cohorts.

In the wake of the Jan. 6 riots at the Capitol, “domestic terrorism” has become the new poster child for expanding the government’s powers at the expense of civil liberties.

Of course, “domestic terrorist” is just the latest bull’s eye phrase, to be used interchangeably with “anti-government,” “extremist” and “terrorist,” to describe anyone who might fall somewhere on a very broad spectrum of viewpoints that could be considered “dangerous.”

This unilateral power to muzzle free speech represents a far greater danger than any so-called right- or left-wing extremist might pose. The ramifications are so far-reaching as to render almost every American an extremist in word, deed, thought or by association.

Watch and see: we are all about to become enemies of the state.

As I make clear in my book Battlefield America: The War on the American People and in its fictional counterpart The Erik Blair Diaries, anytime you have a government that operates in the shadows, speaks in a language of force, and rules by fiat, you’d better beware.

So what’s the answer?

For starters, we need to remember that we’ve all got rights, and we need to exercise them.

Most of all, we need to protect the rights of the people to speak truth to power, whatever that truth might be. Either “we the people” believe in free speech or we don’t.

Fifty years ago, Supreme Court Justice William O. Douglas asked:

“Since when have we Americans been expected to bow submissively to authority and speak with awe and reverence to those who represent us? The constitutional theory is that we the people are the sovereigns, the state and federal officials only our agents. We who have the final word can speak softly or angrily. We can seek to challenge and annoy, as we need not stay docile and quiet… [A]t the constitutional level, speech need not be a sedative; it can be disruptive… [A] function of free speech under our system of government is to invite dispute. It may indeed best serve its high purpose when it induces a condition of unrest, creates dissatisfaction with conditions as they are, or even stirs people to anger.”

In other words, the Constitution does not require Americans to be servile or even civil to government officials. Neither does the Constitution require obedience (although it does insist on nonviolence).

Somehow, the government keeps overlooking this important element in the equation.