Tag Archives: propaganda

Make Sure You Download the Latest Ministry of Propaganda Updates

Posted on by
2

By Charles Hugh Smith

Source: Of Two Minds

It’s time once again to check for Ministry of Propaganda updates, which like Windows and iOS is constantly being updated to counter new threats and enhance the user experience (heh).

Much like the other operating systems that underpin our daily lives, the core functions of the MoP don’t change much. My chart from 2007 remains an instructive summary of MoP operations, with the only changes being Mr. Buffett is now buying oil companies and social media corporations are now major media players.

The core mission of the Ministry of Propaganda isn’t just to push a desirable narrative–it’s to mystify the underlying dynamics of a system that benefits the few at the expense of the many by promoting a self-serving worldview (weltanschauung) that explains how the world works in a way that protects the interests of those in power.

As science fiction author Philip K. Dick explains in the quote below, the MoP narrative isn’t just a cloak thrown over the underlying dynamics, it’s the creation of an entire universe / worldview, including contexts for understanding what’s going on, establishing what’s valuable and what isn’t, and what behaviors enhance status and which ones marginalize us.

The Ministry of Propaganda isn’t monolithic: various factions compete to push their self-serving narratives. As Dick noted, this includes governments, corporations, religious and political groups, each of which understands that once the populace accepts their worldview, their power is cemented in realms far above mere force.

A key mechanism in establishing a dominant worldview is the think-tank or equivalent self-serving body claiming authority over what’s true / false and important / unimportant. This can be authority over the “correct” interpretation of spiritual texts, economic policies, healthcare “standards of care,” geopolitical goals, etc.

Since humans are innately social, status-striving beings, hierarchies of authority and power are the air we breathe. Those who establish themselves as authorities don’t just gain power, they cement their power on the basis of their authority rather than on loyalty or competence.

The enormous powers of social media and traditional media to promote claims of authority have generated a deranging snarl of conflicting agendas and narratives. Various centers of power collaborate on pushing worldviews that benefit their interests, but this isn’t entirely coherent. The one thing all participants in the Ministry of Propaganda agree on is our power is deserved and must be defended against all threats, which includes hostile entities inside and outside the national borders.

This fragmented, constantly shifting cacophony of competing authorities is destabilizing. As the tectonic plates of worldviews collide, the edges crumble and people naturally seek the safety of some core set of beliefs, in effect “circling the wagons” in an attempt to restore some internal stability.

We see this in the intense political polarization of this era (see chart below). To make sense of the competing claims of authority, we reduce the perimeter of what’s defendable, putting more of the world into “outside enemies” (them) and reserving the “safe, trusted place” for fewer of “us.”

With so many competing factions in the Ministry of Propaganda, there’s a proliferation of propaganda such that there is literally nothing left but PR. In a universe constructed of nothing but agit-prop and PR, we all have our favorites examples. James Bond picks up his Nokia phone. Even though nobody’s seen a Nokia phone in ages, if you want to be cool like Bond, go buy a Nokia phone.

Marketing is the MoP’s entire universe. Everybody’s selling something to gain or maintain power, status, mindshare or the ultimate prize, the dominant worldview.

To ease the confusion, please download the latest updates from the Ministry. These updates replace all that misinformation, misdirection, and blatant marketing with the, ahem, facts, or the correct interpretation of the facts. (We had to destroy the village in order to save it. OK, got it.)

While it’s fun to sort all the propaganda into various boxes, we would do well to look for what all the marketers / MoP players seek to mystify. In my analysis, what must be mystified at all costs boils down to the unsustainability of 1) the current consumption of resources, 2) the current method of creating capital so the few can buy up the planet’s most valuable assets, 3) neocolonialism, the modern replacement for the old model of occupation and exploitation by force, and 4) neofeudalism, the economic / social /political arrangement in which the majority of the populace are modern-day serfs with extremely limited agency and power which they are told is limitless.

“You can be anything you choose to be!” Or at least your digital avatar can do so, and that’s practically as good as actually having agency and power in the real world. Or so we’re told, mindlessly, endlessly without pause or respite.

More on these topics in the coming weeks.

CNN Medical Analyst Dr. Leana Wen’s Evolved Position on Masking Children

Posted on by
Reply

Dr. Leana Wen was a vocal proponent of lockdowns, including mandatory masking of children in schools. Now she advocates choice. What happened?

By Jeremy R. Hammond

Source: JeremyHammond.com

Among the more notorious advocates of authoritarian lockdown measures during the COVID‑19 pandemic has been Dr. Leana Wen, a medical doctor, former Baltimore health commissioner, contributing writer for the Washington Post, and CNN medical analyst.

She gained notoriety for explicitly advocating social punishment of unvaccinated people as a means of coercing them into getting vaccinated, even if they chose to remain unvaccinated because they had already acquired superior natural immunity. She based her position at the time on the false claim that the fCOVID‑19 vaccines would stop transmission of SARS‑CoV‑2, the coronavirus that causes the disease.

I discussed this in my article “The Official Ignorance of Natural Immunity to SARS‑CoV‑2”, which was the second installment of my multi-part series exposing how the “public health” and mainstream media establishments were systematically deceiving the public about natural immunity versus the effectiveness of vaccines to manufacture consent for the policy goal of achieving high vaccine uptake.

In that article, I documented how on March 12, 2021, Leana Wen declared on CNN that, for people who hadn’t been persuaded yet to accept vaccination, “we need to make it clear to them that the vaccine is the ticket back to pre-pandemic life.”

Dr. Wen expressed deep concern that, with states already having begun to drop lockdown measures and open society up, “the window to do that”—meaning to coerce people into getting vaccinated—“is really narrowing”. As she elucidated (emphasis added):

We have a very narrow window to tie reopening policy to vaccination status. Because otherwise if everything is reopened, then what’s the carrot going to be? How are we going to incentivize people to actually get the vaccine? So that’s why I think the CDC and the Biden administration needs to come out a lot bolder and say, “If you are vaccinated, you can do all these things. Here are all the freedoms that you have.” Because otherwise, people are going to go out and enjoy these freedoms anyway.

You can watch her advocate the systematic violation of individuals’ right to informed consent in the video embedded in this tweet of hers:

The premise of her argument that people should be coerced into getting vaccinated was the falsehood that the vaccines would prevent transmission. This misinformation was also propagated by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC).

As I also document in that article, the message that the vaccines would prevent transmission was implicitly communicated to the public with the CDC’s declaration on March 8, 2021, that fully vaccinated people no longer needed to wear a mask or maintain social distancing in public or in private gatherings.

The message that natural immunity offered no protection against infection and transmission was also implicitly communicated by the CDC’s refusal to inform people who had already recovered from SARS‑CoV‑2 infection that they had acquired immunity and therefore were at far lower risk of becoming infected and transmitting the virus.

A New York Times headline celebrated the discrimination against unvaccinated people, including the naturally immune, with the headline “Let the Unmasked Gatherings Begin”! The article quoted CDC Director Dr. Rochelle P. Walensky telling the public that “a growing body of evidence” told us that fully vaccinated people could resume normal activities “at low risk to themselves”, saying nothing about people who’d already recovered from infection being able to do so.

Dr. Wen’s comment on March 12 advocating coerced vaccination was part of a criticism of the CDC’s policy update telling fully vaccinated people they no longer had to wear masks. Her concern was that unvaccinated people—including the naturally immune—would just act like they were vaccinated to be able to participate normally in society.

The CDC expanded its discrimination against other unvaccinated people on May 13, telling the public that once you’ve been fully vaccinated, “you can resume activities that you did prior to the pandemic.” The message to unvaccinated people with natural immunity, by contrast, was to “find a vaccine.”

In a Twitter post announcing the updated policy guidance, Walensky stated, “If you are fully vaccinated against #COVID19, you can now start doing things that you had stopped doing because of the pandemic. You can participate in indoor and outdoor activities – large or small – without wearing a mask or physically distancing.”

President Joseph R. Biden also took to Twitter to threaten, “The rule is now simple: get vaccinated or wear a mask until you do. The choice is yours.” That order went for naturally immune people, too.

Neither the CDC nor Biden were extreme enough in their efforts to systematically violate the right of individuals to informed consent with policy measures to coerce people into getting vaccinated, in Dr. Wen’s view.

The extremity of Leana Wen’s authoritarian position extended to her views on the masking of children.

On Twitter on May 28, 2021, Wen advocated mandatory masking of unvaccinated children—including those with natural immunity—at summer camp.

The same day, she criticized the governor of Georgia for prohibiting schools from making mask use mandatory for children.

On June 14, she made a display of her son Eli “practicing his mask-wearing” at home in anticipation of his first day of summer camp. (Note in the photo that the mask is not properly fitted, leaving large gaps at the side.)

On July 9, she praised the CDC for recommending mandatory masking of unvaccinated children. “I am really glad that they have said that masks are going to be required for unvaccinated children over the age of two”, she said, describing mandatory masking as “essential”.

But then, within four months since telling fully vaccinated people that they no longer needed to wear a mask, the CDC’s own data established that outbreaks could occur among fully vaccinated people. By the end of July 2021, it was already apparent that the emerging data were falsifying the repeatedly communicated message from the entire “public health” establishment that the vaccines would provide durable protection against infection and transmission.

That month, CDC researchers learned of a large outbreak in Massachusetts in which 74 percent of COVID‑19 cases were in fully vaccinated people. Furthermore, they observed that the amount of virus shed by vaccinated people was just as high as with the unvaccinated, implying equal contagiousness.

This finding prompted to CDC at the end of July to flip-flop and return to advising fully vaccinated people to start masking up once again.

Leana Wen took to the media to criticize the CDC again, this time for conveying what she felt was a confusing message by reversing its guidance. In a Washington Post article on July 29, Wen acknowledged the CDC’s “research showing that vaccinated people who become infected with the delta variant carry a similar amount of virus to those who are unvaccinated and infected”, which “suggests that vaccinated people could be carriers and therefore capable of spreading the coronavirus to family members”.

Her concern nevertheless remained “that the unvaccinated could be a danger” to her and her family. By her dizzying reasoning, it was only because of “unvaccinated” people that she, a fully vaccinated person, “could contract the coronavirus and bring it back to my vulnerable family members.”

On Twitter, she summarized her criticism by describing the CDC’s reversal as “confusing” and “muddled”, curiously arguing despite her acknowledgment of the data showing that fully vaccinated people were spreading the virus that indoor mask mandates were needed “not because the vaccinated are suddenly a problem, but because we don’t trust the unvaccinated to voluntarily do the right thing.”

She did not explain how it could logically be the case that only unvaccinated people posed that risk to her given that vaccination did not work to stop transmission.

While acknowledgment of cellular immunity, as distinct from the humoral immunity provided by antibodies, had been practically nonexistent in the public messaging of the “public health” establishment until then, suddenly, in August 2021, the CDC and other “authorities” appeared to discover that, even if someone’s antibody levels waned and failed to protect them against infection, they would still be protected against severe disease and death due to cellular immune responses!

Curiously, that never crossed their mind when the public message was that natural immunity must be weak and short-lived since antibodies were observed to rapidly wane from peak levels seen post-infection.

It also never crossed their minds to inform the public that this rapid decline is normal and expected after recovery from acute infection. As I cover in great detail in my series on the superiority of natural immunity, the claims of short-lived natural immunity, propagated by the CDC and others, were falsified by studies demonstrating natural immunity to be robust, broad, and durable, with the induction of immunological memory capable of rapidly churning out antibodies as necessary in the event of reexposure.

The public messaging shifted from telling everyone to get vaccinated as a selfless social duty to protect others by preventing the spread of the virus to telling everyone get vaccinated to protect themselves against severe disease.

On CNN on August, 2021, Walensky reassured that the data continued to indicate that being fully vaccinated was protective against severe illness and death from the then-predominant Delta variant of SARS‑CoV‑2. “But what they can’t do anymore”, Walensky said, “is prevent transmission.”

That was disingenuous. By saying “anymore”, she was implying that the loss of sterilizing immunity, meaning protection against infection and transmission (as distinct from protection against disease), was a function of the newly predominant Delta variant, but it was primarily a function of the vaccine and their inability to induce durable sterilizing immunity regardless of the variant.

Meanwhile, on major social media platforms, it remained prohibited to tell the truth. For example, Google continued its policy whereby YouTube videos saying that “that COVID-19 vaccines are not effective in preventing the spread of COVID-19” were subject to deletion and the users to deplatforming. (YouTube quietly dropped this and other prohibitions of truth-telling earlier this year.)

Leana Wen continued her advocacy of masking of children.

On August 10, she quoted a New York Times article saying, “If we send children to school without masks, we increased their risk of acquiring #covid19. Some could suffer illness or die. If we close schools, millions of children will suffer learning loss….” Her comment was, “Hence the solution: Keep schools open, with masking.”

Six days later, she argued in favor of masking children in “all schools in this country”. On August 16, she argued on Twitter that “Masking in schools reduces #covid19 transmission” and suggested that parents whose children go to schools that “do not require masking” should organize to make mask-wearing “the norm”.

On August 21, expressing agreement with a comment by former CDC director Dr. Tom Frieden, she said that it was “Exactly right” to equate being “anti-mask”—a euphemism inclusive of anyone opposed to mandatory masking of children—with being “anti-science” and “basically pro-virus and anti-child.”

Fast forward to March 2020. By this time, Leana Wen had surrendered to the reality that the vaccines do not prevent transmission and that people needed to start getting back to living their lives normally anyway. On March 22, she said on Twitter, “For those who don’t agree that the vaccinated can return to pre-pandemic normal, I ask: What should we all do? Perpetual masking? Forever not dining out, avoiding large weddings & indoor gatherings, etc? Virtually everything has risk, and zero covid is not a viable strategy.”

Now, recall that the CDC had been recommending that people wear cloth or surgical facemasks to protect themselves and others. The CDC had specifically told people not to wear an N95 mask in order to preserve them for health care workers. The CDC only stopped recommending the use of cloth masks in favor of surgical or N95 masks in January 2022.

Leana Wen bluntly alluded to the rationale for this change in a tweet on March 23, stating that “simple cloth masks are little more than facial decorations” and “have no place against extremely contagious variants”. People should “ideally” opt for an N95, instead, she suggested.

This was not because “the science” on masks had “changed”. It was what many people were saying from the start. It was what many people on social media were banned for saying, just as many were banned for pointing out that the claims by “public health” officials that the vaccines would provide durable protection and stop transmission were unsupported by scientific evidence. To oppose the CDC’s recommendation for children in school to wear a cloth mask was “anti-science”, “pro-virus”, and “anti-child”, Wen had previously suggested.

Now she was admitting that simple cloth masks do practically nothing to protect the wearer or stop the wearer from spreading the virus to others. Her evolving position on mask use didn’t stop there. She also came around to acknowledging another truth that opponents of the policies she advocated were banned from saying on social media: that forcing children to wear masks can harm them.

On August 23, the Washington Post published an article by Wen under the headline: “I’m a doctor. Here’s why my kids won’t wear masks this school year.”

She stated, “It became clear that the goal I’d hoped for—containment of covid‑19—was not reachable. This coronavirus is here to stay.” Her “benefit-risk calculus” for her own children had changed. “I was willing to limit my children’s activities for a year or two but not for their entire childhood.”

That it was a mistake to singularly focus on avoiding COVID‑19 is precisely what many people censored on social media had been saying when speaking out in opposition to the policies that Leana Wen had previously advocated. It was the central message of The Great Barrington Declaration, whose scientifically credentialed authors experienced censorship for speaking out against the authoritarian lockdowns.

Wen listed a number of ostensible rationalizations for her change of view on the masking of her own children. It was the Omicron variant now, which was more contagious and caused milder illness. Most people, including most children, had already been infected with the coronavirus. Her children were now fully vaccinated.

She continued:

Now that they are full vaccinated, we do not plan to limit their activities, and—like most parents in their school—will not be masking them in the classroom.

I accept the risk that my kids will probably contract covid‑19 this school year, just as they could contract the flu, respiratory syncytial virus and other contagious diseases.

Then she disclosed another reason why she would no longer be forcing her own kids to wear a mask:

Masking has harmed our son’s language development, and limiting both kids’ extracurriculars and social interactions would negatively affect their childhood and hinder my and my husband’s ability to work.

While she had previously dismissed anyone who opposed the policies she advocated as not just “anti-mask” but “anti-science” and “anti-child”, she added: “To be clear, my family’s decision not to mask our kids should not be mislabeled as being antimask; we would never stigmatize other parents and caregivers for the difficult choices they must make.”

That, of course, was a bald-faced lie. She had in fact stigmatized other parents for the difficult choices they must make about what is in the best interests of their children’s health, calling them insulting names and advocating policies specifically to penalize them for making choices that were different from hers.

She closed by saying that her changed approach “reflects the evolution of the pandemic and the acknowledgment that avoiding covid-19 cannot be the singular metric of people’s overall health and well-being.”

That it was a mistake to singularly focus on avoiding COVID‑19 is precisely what many people censored on social media had been saying when speaking out in opposition to the policies that Leana Wen had previously advocated.

Yet here now we have this prominent advocate of mandatory masking of children in schools disclosing that her own child had been harmed from having to wear a mask all the time.

She disclosed additional details on Twitter. “In my case,” she shared on August 24, “I have the ‘before’ and ‘after’. After my son’s school went mask optional, there was a profound change in speech and social development after he (& nearly all of his class, including his teacher) took off masks.”

(Note that she observed this in reply to a comment criticizing that personal anecdotes do not establish causation, with the specific example cited of the belief of many parents that vaccination is what caused their child’s autism. Wen’s appropriate point about gaslighting equally applies to parents of autistic children who likewise saw the “before” and “after”.)

She added, “Yes, this is anecdote. But it feels like gaslighting when others are telling parents that we don’t know what’s causing problems for our kids, when we have seen it for ourselves. Recognizing that masks COULD have harm for SOME is all that a lot of parents are asking for.”

(Following up on the point about autism, note that then CDC Director Julie Gerberding admitted on CNN in 2008 that vaccination can cause encephalopathy manifesting as symptoms of autism. She was referring to the case of a girl named Hannah Poling, who had been developing normally but regressed into diagnosed autism after receiving nine vaccine doses at once at nineteen months of age. The long-time director of the CDC’s Immunization Safety Office, Dr. Frank DeStefano, acknowledged in an interview in 2018 that “it’s a possibility” that vaccines could cause autism in genetically susceptible individuals, but that the problem is it’s “hard to predict who those children might be”, and research designed to identify underlying cofactors that place certain children at greater risk of vaccine injury is “very difficult to do”.)

The same day, former US Surgeon General Jerome Adams took to Twitter to deny that masks can harm children. “I’m saying, after 2 years and millions masked, show me the data that says it delays speech. Because I can’t find it.”

Of course, it is easy to say that evidence does not exist that forcing masks on children causes harm when policymakers forced masks on children in the absence of studies to determine the benefits versus risks.

In response to Adams, Wen retorted, “Those data don’t exist yet. Neither do data that school mask mandates (especially w/cloth masks), in a time of omicron, saves lives. That’s why where the US has landed—allowing individual choice—is sensible. Allow parents to decide what’s best for their kids, masks on or not.”

Of course, that forcing children to wear masks could harm some of them was precisely what many people she had previously dismissed as “anti-child” were saying from the start. It is among the concerns that social media companies prohibited people from expressing, citing the policy recommendations that Leana Wen advocated as the basis for their censorship.

To cite YouTube again as an example, the Google-owned video platform had long prohibited “Claims that wearing a mask is dangerous or causes negative physical health effects.” This is among the prohibitions that YouTube has since dropped from its community guidelines.

It is an encouraging sign that an extremist like Dr. Wen can come around to the view that risk-benefit assessments need to be individualized and mask use voluntary, and it is good to see her confronting Jerome Adams for trying to gaslight parents into disbelieving their own experiences and empirical evidence. It is just sad that her son, by her own account, became harmed by the very intervention she had so fervently argued should be forced upon school children.

An apology from Wen to other parents of children harmed by the policies she advocated has not, to my knowledge, been forthcoming. Her son has my sympathies.

She Has an Opinion!

Posted on by
4

Call-out the Thought Po-po

By Cindy Sheehan

Source: Cindy Sheehan Substack

Before President Orange Crush broke every liberal on the planet, it wasn’t considered so tragic to have an opinion that differed from the prevailing narrative: in fact, in some cases, differing opinions were welcomed and supported.

It’s not that I haven’t lost a lot of personal attachments since my son was killed: from former best-friends, to relatives, when I started speaking out against Bush and his wars, it just seems that some of those that rushed in to fill that void, are rushing out with the tide of corporate disinfo, and demonization, now.

I seem to recall, a time not of “good old days” because those are mostly a myth; Situationally, times can be good, or bad, depending on time, place, and/or circumstances. But I do remember times when we could disagree with someone, then lay out why we held our beliefs and resume normal relations whether agreement was reached, or not. No longer! Now, it’s “you don’t stand with Ukraine: BUZZ OFF!” Or, “you didn’t get the hokey-pokey—you’re not welcome at our event, home, or social media wall.” People have fallen for the Bush line, “you’re either with us, or against us.” This phenomenon is true, even if you agree with someone 90% of the time, if there’s that tiny 10%, you become the banned, the erased, the misleader, the pariah.

Growing up during the Vietnam War is what formed my basis for mistrusting government and media. The distrust I had for these rotting institutions was solidified after 9/11/01, where, it seemed to me, a mom in Southern California, that not one person was telling the truth. An icon like Phil Donahue was kicked of of MSNBCia for questioning the rush to war in Iraq.

My grandchildren’s generation will be formed by Covid and that angers me, as well. The always confusing, at times harmful, and mixed-messages we all received harmed our children, the most, I think. Along with the closure of their schools: the mental toll may never be able to be fully determined.

This reminds me of a time when my daughter was getting a few good friends together to meet at the local (closed) school to play kickball out in the fresh-air and sunshine. You might say these 3-4 families were in our “affinity” group. The children were running around, having fun, not hugging or spitting in each other’s mouths. The very next thing we knew, the school-district had plowed up the baseball diamond we used for this safe-recreation. The children witnessed that: sunshine, play, fresh-air, and good health were criminalized for a population that had very little risk, but paid a high-price.

As you may have surmised, by the time Covid-19 rolled around, I was hyper-critical of the prevailing narrative. My opinions were not formed by cable, or legacy media outlets like the WashedUp Post, or NY Slimes. By February 2020, I already had trusted friends, colleagues, comrades, and news sources and not one of them were corporate, or profited off of the lockdowns, or mandates.

Now, though, instead of honest debate, or democratization of information, we have the de-platform, or no-platform era. The evil nanny state has entered a new phase: one where we disobedient children cannot even be allowed to be exposed to information that is not sanitized, or scrubbed for our “protection,” This is what annoys the heck out of me. Technocrats and bureaucrats are conspiring against me to funnel me, and, us all into one big, miserable reality. I am not having any of it.

Meta (jackass) Corp (Facebook and Instagram) have scrubbed Robert Kennedy, Jr’s organization Children’s Health Defense from its platforms, and I am not okay with that, either. Even though I don’t agree 100% with everything they do, or say, I think they have important things to do, and say. In my opinion (oh dear), more people should be exposed to the information that CHD disseminates, not less.

So, since the CDC has quietly made lockdowns, masks, and mandates, disappear, finally catching up with CHD, does that mean that Meta (jackass) Corp will be taking down its pages, as well? Somehow, I doubt it.

I have never told anyone what to think, or not to think; and/or what to put in their body, or not—I always offer my own opinion and post what I am doing. People are free to do, or not do, what they want with one caveat: properly informed choices. As long as billionaires and bureaucrats prevent access to a wide variety of information, informed consent is not a possibility.

We still have a lot of work to do:

The harvest is great, the workers are few!

Ukraine and the Politics of Permanent War

Posted on by
2

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.

U.S.-BACKED UKRAINIAN OFFICIALS ARE TRYING TO PROSECUTE JOURNALISTS FOR SPREADING TRUE INFO

Posted on by
2

By Lee Camp

Source: Mint Press News

This past May, Rand Paul, the Senator from Kentucky, did something that made a lot of sense. Before a vote to send another $40 Billion to Ukraine, Paul demanded language that would create oversight for that money.

Most of Congress was furious with him for daring to put restrictions on U.S. funding for the proxy forces in Ukraine. One of his peers who was most upset with him was Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer.

As former UN weapons inspector Scott Ritter writes for Consortium News, three weeks after Schumer forced that bill through and got the money for the proxy war in Ukraine, something funny happened,

…[O]n July 14, Andriy Shapovalov, a Ukrainian civil servant whose salary was paid for by U.S. taxpayer monies, convened a “round table” in Kiev on ‘countering disinformation.’ Shapovalov …published a list of the names of 72 people whom he accused of deliberately spreading disinformation about Ukraine. Shapovalov labeled them ‘information terrorists,’ adding that Ukraine was preparing legislation so that such people can be prosecuted as ‘war criminals.’”

They want the power to call people war criminals for printing something Ukraine doesn’t like, and you can bet that the U.S. supports this outrageous policy.

Ritter continued,

The “round table’ was organized by the U.S. Civil Research and Development Fund (CRDF Global Ukraine), an ostensible nonprofit organization authorized by U.S. Congress to promote ‘international scientific and technical collaboration.’ It is supported by the U.S. State Department, some of whose officials sat in attendance.”

This committee was organized by a U.S.-backed nonprofit, and State Department officials were in the room.

Who exactly do they want to call information terrorists who should be prosecuted as war criminals? “One of the people singled out by Shapovalov as an ‘information terrorist’ targeted for criminal prosecution as a ‘war criminal’ was none other than Rand Paul,” reported Ritter. So Sen. Paul is being called a war criminal for trying to get some oversight on the billions of dollars sent to Ukrainian Nazis.

The senator from Kentucky isn’t the only U.S. politician on the list. An obscure New York Senate candidate named Diane Sare also appears on the list of information terrorists.

But how did she get on there?

Ritter wrote, “On May 31, Diane Sare, a LaRouche candidate challenging Schumer for his Senate seat in November, filed 66,000 signatures — well over the 45,000 required by law — with the New York State Board of Elections, thereby getting her name on the ballot.” Do you think, perhaps, that Sen. Schumer might have some say on that list?

Everyone in the U.S. should be repulsed at the idea of people being labeled “terrorists” or “war criminals” for standing up to U.S. propaganda about the proxy war in Ukraine. But beyond that, we should be more disgusted by the Senate Majority leader using taxpayer money to seemingly go after his political opponents.

Who is the U.S. and its proxy government in Ukraine to tell people what is and is not the truth? That’s like Fred Durst telling you what is and is not good music.

Lee Camp is an American stand-up comedian, writer, actor and activist. Camp is the host of Behind The Headlines’ new series: The Most Censored News With Lee Camp. He is a former comedy writer for the Onion and the Huffington Post and has been a touring stand-up comic for 20 years.

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

Posted on by
2

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

Posted on by
1

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.

Hegemon USA’s War on Humanity

Posted on by
Reply

By Stephen Lendman

Source: StephanLendman.org

In stark contrast to earlier hegemons on the world stage, the empire of lies and mass deception operates globally with super-weapons able to destroy planet earth and all its life forms.

While risking nuclear war with Russia and China, it’s pushing unparalleled genocide to eliminate unwanted millions and billions of people by kill shots at home and worldwide.

Coming to a neighborhood near you and your own, the great reset aims to more greatly enrich the privileged few by transferring maximum wealth from ordinary people to them.

It’s part of a diabolical scheme to transform the world community of nations into ruler/serf societies.

It’s a depopulation scheme to eliminate the unwanted by kill shots, wars, starvation and other diabolical tactics.

It’s a dystopian nightmare wrapped in deceptive socioeconomic mumbo jumbo.

Long before health-destroying kill shots were rolled out, Ernest Hemingway warned that debasing currencies by inflation and wars ruin nations, adding:

“Both bring temporary prosperity.”

“Both bring permanent ruin.” 

“Both are the refuge of political and economic opportunists” — serving special interests and their own.

Britain is the first nation to approve a new Moderna kill shot — what’s crucial to shun.

Phony claims of its safety and effectiveness are similar to earlier approved kill shots.

Irreparable harm to countless millions throughout the US/West and elsewhere revealed a worlds apart reality.

Most everything approved by the Pharma-controlled FDA and CDC are automatically suspect.

Truth-telling Dr. Vernon Coleman minced no words, saying:

“An adequate test of a (new) drug (like Moderna’s) should go on for 10 years at least” before approval or rejection.

The company’s “current (flu)covid booster jab has been given to 9.4 million people.”

“If the new jab is now given to, say 10 million people (with scant testing of far too few people), there could be 10,000 deaths within five seconds if my fearful scenario were to be fulfilled.”

“(T)he conspirators and their bought and paid for collaborators will doubtless now do more killing and maiming.”

“The medical (and nursing) profession care only about their massive pay demands.”

“They don’t seem to give a damn about patients.” 

Weeks earlier, the Pharma-controlled Biden regime’s HHS reported the following:

In cahoots with the US war department, HHS agreed to buy “66 million doses of Moderna’s (new) bivalent (kill shot) booster for potential (sic) use in the fall and winter.”

It’s “in addition to 105 million doses” of Pfizer’s bivalent entry for mass-jabbing with health-destroying toxins.

And this NYT rubbish on new bivalent kill shots:

Saying they’ll protect against “the original virus and (more scariant then variant) omicron” ignored the following like earlier.

The so-called SARS-CoV-2 virus doesn’t exist.

During flu season — now called covid year-round — all strains are virtually alike.

Not a dime’s worth of difference separates one from others.

Claims made about all brands of kill shots were fabricated to mind-manipulate maximum numbers of people to unwittingly self-inflict harm.

Since health-destroying mass-jabbing began in December 2020, millions of healthcare professionals throughout the US/West were sacked for refusing to go along with what causes irreparable harm on the phony pretext of protecting what’s too precious to lose.

Dedicated to “honest healthcare solutions,” to medicine as it should be practiced, co-founder of America’s Frontline Doctors (AFD), Simone Gold MD JD, was falsely arrested on January 6, 2021.

She and others were wrongfully accused entering a “restricted building” on Capitol Hill, as well as for “violent entry and disorderly conduct (sic).”

Their police state mistreatment was for the “crime” of exercising their First Amendment rights of “freedom of speech…(to) peaceably assemble, and…petition the government for redress of grievances.”

Events of that day were planned by undemocratic Dems, an anti-Trump false flag that preceded ascension to power of unelected Biden/Harris on January 20, 2021.

Gold had nothing to do Dem-sponsored violence.

In June, she was unconstitutionally sentenced to two months imprisonment — to intimidate and silence her.

On Monday, she was able to issue the following statement by email, saying:

“I remain in this Miami prison, serving time for a bogus trespassing charge.”

Limited to 15-minute computer time sessions, she expressed gratitude for countless letters of support and prayers on her behalf, adding:

“Even the prison staff noted the volume of supportive mail.”

“I am both humbled and strengthened. Thank you!” 

“All incoming female inmates are put into a punishment isolation cell under the guise of a ‘quarantine.’ ” 

“They told me it wasn’t for punishment, but it was certainly a punishing and inhumane experience.”

“Another form of arbitrary punishment is moving me, along with other inmates, to new cells with no notice.”

“A guard simply yells my name, and I’m expected to move at any moment.”

“My staff knows that if I stop emailing or calling, it’s because they  moved me or possibly put me back into isolation.”

Gold also explained the following:

“I’ve noticed activity in the prison that makes me fearful for my own safety.”

Yet she stressed:

“My spirits are high. I am more determined than ever to keep fighting for you and medical freedom.”

Along with unjustifiable prison time, Gold faces 12 months of supervised release and was fined $9,500.

Because of her activism for healthcare as it should be and opposition to toxic kill shots, Gold will remain vulnerable to rearrest on fabricated charges — and perhaps imprisonment longer-term ahead.

Separately as reported by the Epoch Times:

“Nurses who witnessed ‘brutal’ hospital (flu/covid) (mis)treatment protocols kill patients paint a bleak picture of what is taking place in state and federally funded health care systems.”

Nurse practitioner, Stacy Kay, explained the following:

What’s going on is “horrific, and they’re all in lockstep” with each other. 

Unwilling to go along with the health-destroying system, she “left the hospital system” involved in harming patients instead of aiding their recovery “to start her own early treatment private practice,” saying: 

“They will not consider protocols outside of what’s given to them by the (Pharma-controlled) CDC and NIH. And nobody is asking why,” adding:

“I’ve seen people die with their family watching via iPad on facetime. It was brutal.”

As a former intensive care nurse, she often saw tragedy on the job.

Grievous mistreatment of flu/covid patients “had (her) waking up in the middle of the night in a cold sweat with chest pains.”

“I hated my job,” she said. 

“I hated going to work.”

“I was stressed in a way I’ve never been before in my entire life.”

As explained before in my writing, jabbed individuals comprise the vast majority of flu/covid outbreaks, along with one or a combination of other serious illnesses, including heart disease and cancer.

All things flu/covid is the mother of all state-sponsored, MSM supported, scams — with mass-extermination and elimination of what little remains of greatly eroded freedoms in mind.

That’s the dismal state of things throughout the US/West and elsewhere.

Largely in the eye of the storm at this time, the worst of things likely lies ahead.