Tag Archives: Social Media

We Create Our Own Reality

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By Julien Charles

Source: Off-Guardian

The world watched in varying states of mind as the Davos set enjoyed its annual turn on the world stage, supping on sumptuous Atlantic crab and fresh Iberian pork, sustainable Norweigian cod, and the best Italian coffee.

When not tucking into a lavish feast, they bandied about their ideas for how the world ought to exploited (the key euphemisms here are “sustainable,” “stakeholder,” and “impossible beef.”)

Some revile and protest the annual ruling class summit, but many millions more embrace it, even gaze admirably at the mandarins of the new world order as they flit across mobile screens and offer uplifting quotes to curious media attendees.

Indeed, few seem to care as the cabal of monied interests chat amiably about centrally managed digital currencies, consolidating global health authority in unelected bodies, collapsing the world economy, generating needless food shortages, unpopular fake meat, and other new market opportunities. Fewer still see the implicit threat of globalist agendas to the rule of sovereign states.

There is such little resistance largely because billions of people believe what they read and what they are told by the news media. A healthy dose of distrust would serve the global populace well, if only it could release itself from the grip of mainstream corporate news.

In this respect, it’s worth remembering two quotes from the incomparable muckraker Upton Sinclair–author of the startling expose The Jungle.

In his book The Brass Check, Sinclair betrays the great lie of modern media, namely that it is independent. This easy falsehood is widely accepted. Millions of Americans believe that the truly deceitful media are the ones that YouTube labels as “state-affiliated media,” a damning modifier that instantly discredits every outlet so identified.

But Sinclair reminds us that “[Media] represents private interests, not public interests.” He could have gone farther and said mainstream media represents the private interests of elite capital. Marx said that every state serves a particular class. So does corporate media.

Sinclair later writes that, “It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends on his not understanding it.”

This second quote explains why so much of the MSM go along quite happily with the prescribed narrative from Washington. Their livelihoods depend on it. Occasionally a pious mainstream journalist will fiercely declare his independence from any malign editorial influence.

But as Michael Parenti responds,

“They like what you write because you write what they like.”

The principles of American exceptionalism are a prerequisite for any journalist hoping to earn a slot at a high-paying MSM outlet. They have long internalized the values of power. Put together, these quotes tell us that we are subjected to an official narrative that serves the interests of elite capital and is dutifully disseminated by a cabal of right-thinking stenographers.

The same elite interests that own the government own the media. Hence the narrative consistency.

ALTERNATE REALITY

Given that elite interests are largely out of step with the interests of the vast majority of Americans, we often find ourselves living in an alternate reality. The war in Ukraine is just the latest iteration. Most of the reality of the conflict has been obscured from view, sins of omission that ensure the public is largely misled. Fierce and ‘principled’ op-eds reinforce the bias. For instance, little attention is paid to:

Economic motivations underlying the conflict: arms sales for American defense contractors; oil and grain profits by crisis-oriented commodity monopolies; and broader agricultural profiteering by Monsanto and Dupont via a post-coup IMF agreement; the foreclosure of the Nord Stream 2 gas pipeline from the Baltic Sea into Germany, which opens the door to western consortiums supplying the shortfall.

Ukrainian academic Olga Baysha gave a telling interview to The Gray Zone. She noted how Volodymyr Zelensky’s neoliberal policies were sold as “westernization” and “modernization” to the Ukrainian public. But these were camouflage for privatization, deregulation, and downsizing of the public sphere, all commonplace neoliberal prescriptions for wealth extraction by global corporations. To secure this narrative, Zelensky shuttered opposition media channels and political parties, including sanctions and repression before the final step.

Zelensky was following the post-coup government’s deployment of ultranationalist battalions to violently extinguish the anti-coup resistance in Donbas. That “anti-terrorist operation” was really the beginning of a civil war by Kiev against its own population, including tanks and artillery, gunships and warplanes. The subsequent Minsk peace agreements were likewise largely ignored by the aggressive Kiev action against the East.

All of these political and national conflicts seem to evolve from—and devolve into—imperial economic relations. West against East, with Ukraine as a battleground. War is a revenue stream in capitalism. War is a profit center for the elites that own the media; it is only carnage for the lower classes. This distinction is rarely made.

WHY SOCIAL MEDIA HAS ABDICATED ITS ROLE

What is relatively unique in the propaganda about the Ukraine war is the degree to which social media has advanced its repressive apparatus in line with state directives. Social media became a serious thorn in the side of state power and corporate media when it consistently exposed falsehoods about the 2016 election, Russiagate, and the pandemic.

Though much war propaganda has been uncovered by scrupulous independent journalists (with a working class bias), the success of the Ukrainian narrative has been stupendous. Social media is falling in line, censoring or discrediting wrongthink whenever it appears.

What Google and YouTube and others are doing at the behest of the federal government is as Brett Weinstein said of the pandemic narrative, “They are infantilizing a huge fraction of the population. They are making certain discussions off limits.” We must “…adhere to certain pre-digested conclusions and we pretend that they emerged from evidence, which they do not.”

What we need is rational discussion. The answer to bad speech is more speech, not less. One would expect Google and YouTube and Facebook and Twitter to know this. In fact, it is very likely they do know this. As the venerable linguist politico Noam Chomsky once derisively commented, there’s no point in speaking truth to power: they already know the truth, and don’t care.

What has happened is what happens to all new media in a corporate fascist state: it is threatened until it complies with the official narrative being disseminated by the government, which is effectively owned by elite capital. Congress may have a word with Justice, and Justice may on a quiet Tuesday open the preliminaries of an antitrust investigation.

Suddenly the bright horizons of the Silicon giants are considerably dimmed. It is similar with the news media. The MSM rely too heavily on the gossip and good favor of well-placed officials; they bend too easily to the unspoken preferences of the advertisers who line their coffers; they keel too readily at the unctuous general who cavils over the soft treatment of a geopolitical rival. These perverse incentives are nicely modeled in Manufacturing Consent.

Elite capital may be loosely defined as those groups that are making enormous amounts of money off the status quo, even as many more millions are harmed by the same status quo. Elite capital used to be called “special interests.”

They are the rich and powerful billionaires who can be seen at Davos, on the boards and membership lists of the Rockefeller and Ford Foundations, the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation and the Clinton Foundation; the Trilateral Commission and the Council on Foreign Relations; and in important think tanks like the Heritage Foundation, the American Enterprise Institute, the Brookings Institute, RAND Corporation, Cato, Hoover, CSIS, and Center for American Progress, among a proliferation of others.

They are thus not a monolithic or discrete coalition of individuals, but rather intertwined interests that share a common desire to uphold the existing establishment, by force or fraud.

MASTERS OF MYTH

Our current experience—in which we are terrifically afraid of a mild seasonal respiratory virus and terrifically xenophobic toward Russians—is reminiscent of the heyday of the Bush administration, when the neoconservative believers were riding high on a surfeit of manufactured intelligence.

Abetted by the ghoulish founder of Blairism, who claimed kindly London burghers might be liquidated by Arab WMDs in just 45 minutes. From launch to impact. From Baghdad missile shed to Kensington glade in less than an hour. Around that frightful time, George Bush’s svengali Karl Rove, educated a stunned reporter about what reality truly meant at the Metropole, in the imperium itself,

We’re an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality. And while you’re studying that reality — judiciously, as you will — we’ll act again, creating other new realities, which you can study too, and that’s how things will sort out. We’re history’s actors … and you, all of you, will be left to just study what we do.”

That reality is what Henry Giroux called, “…the deadening unity and totalizing narratives that now marks dominant neoliberal and instrumental ideologies of the West.”

More than any moment in recent American history, we find ourselves under the spell of these reality makers, who have over the past five years produced a breathtaking array of crises that have utterly enthralled the population.

From the stunning election of a reeling madman, to chilling revelations of foreign influence, feckless investigations, failed impeachments, lethal pathogens launched from fog-draped bio labs in polluted Sino capitals, and finally to the good news of a redemptive election, only to be circumscribed by fatal new “variants” spread by pathologically stupid Trumpists.

And finally, the plague is swept from the marquee by Russian imperialism on the march in Europe. The masses automatically swap their masks for Ukrainian flags. The fear and anger remain, but are merely redirected.

WAGE SLAVERY AND PUBLIC CONSCIOUSNESS

The indoctrination of individuals into the doctrinal system of American exceptionalism is driven not only by media consolidation but also economic enslavement. First a couple of figures—as if we need more—from a John Steppling’s essay on his Aesthetic Resistance blog. He notes that in 1870 some 67 percent of Americans were self-employed, probably artisans or farmers of some kind.

Once industrial capitalism particularly in urban areas grew, that number plummeted. Today it stands at 6 percent. The point being that the independence of millions of Americans has been compromised. Now they work—millions of them—not for themselves but for vast faceless corporations.

Companies that are essentially fascist constructs, whose decisions are inscrutable to most employees, and which typically sweep the scythe of cost cutting through the ranks every few years, and increasingly turn to automated processes that are merely overseen by an incrementally deskilled workforce.

This alienation from our own work was not unaccompanied by attendent catastrophes. Alongside the vast migration of men and women into wage labor came first a rise and then a fierce destruction of union representation. That too stands at around 7 percent today, once as high as 35 percent in the early to mid 20th century, when there were socialists roaming the untamed streets and word of a Bolshevik Revolution rippled through bourgeois mansions.

The currents of the time were not overlooked by the managers of the economy. The bankers bought the papers. The president created a commission for public information. The business roundtable sketched anti-labor plot lines. Sigmund Freud’s nephew invented the dark arts of public relations.

A similar phenomenon occurred after the cultural explosion of the Sixties. The neoliberal rollback of the so-called welfare state on one hand (happily embraced by hippies as they tossed aside their tasseled suede for wide lapels and polyester pantsuits) and the co-optation of counterculture on the other.

As hippies reproduced, they found themselves suddenly needing the money on offer from the corporate monoliths they once defaced the logos of. No longer able to sustain themselves as village artisans or independent producers, they succumbed to the economic pressures and joined the rat race.

Madison Avenue, a Cyclopean beast capable of the most astonishing mimetic performances, quickly absorbed the counterculture and regurgitated rebellion as offbeat consumerism.

Everything became a style code. Facing down a lynch mob or jackbooted police cordon was replaced with wearing Chuck Conners sneakers, running marathons in ‘Just Do It’ Nikes, or donning a Coca-Cola tee shirt with a sardonic grin. At the radical end of the spectrum, burning draft cards were replaced with ‘buy nothing’ anti-consumer holidays.

Irony supplants resistance, a concession of the educated classes to the diminished prospects for revolution.

And so, having been alienated from their work, having had their counterculture killed, gutted, dressed, and stuffed, the average person has little recourse for independent thinking. At work, he is conditioned by a corporate culture that esteems ‘yes men’, pathologizes optimism, and encourages virtue signaling on behalf of the corporate charter, the values of which one is welcome to adopt as one’s own.

Away from the office, he encounters an ersatz ‘culture’ of media news and entertainment that reifies the values of the corporate state, which ostensibly include diversity, multiculturalism, and inclusion. The news instantiates the tropes of the corporate news hour, which feature the sly demonization of other societies under the guise of national security and the banner of freedom.

Then entertainment reinforces them. One reads of new sanctions levied against a rogue regime in Caracas, and then watches a new action series on Netflix in which an earnest American thwarts a diabolical scheme by the brown Venezuelan with an unquenchable thirst for yanquee blood.

IDEOLOGIES AND SUB-IDEOLOGIES

But should one spy the troubling contradictions between our professed values of inclusion and our foreign policy of exclusion, there is nowhere to turn. Unless one knows about marginalized progressive websites, Noam Chomsky primers, or a nearby Communist Meet Up, one is left with the cardboard caricatures of corporate media, which go to great lengths to convince you those contradictions are all a misunderstanding—your own, to be sure.

Without ‘comrades’ to confirm your natural mistrust, it will tend to fade as the omnipresent corporate conditioning takes over.

Louis Althusser, the French Marxist philosopher, wrote that we are all conditioned by the Ideological State Apparatuses (ISAs) and repressed by Repressive State Apparatuses (RSAs). He said we are ‘interpellated’ by the ISAs into the helpful groupthink that sustains the status quo. Perhaps to keep his readers from guzzling Drano, he did concede that ‘interventions’ were possible in which a sub-ideology breaks through a crack in the dominant ideology.

What this intervention produces, though, is indeterminate. A riotous uprising that is brutally put down by some frightful caudillo general? Whose leaders are liquidated in the bowels of some rusting soccer stadium held over from the Pan Am Games? Or perhaps the glorious, dreamed of Revolution (capital ‘R’) that guts the capitalist oligarchy, assumes its productive forces, and achieves a breathtaking synthesis of revolutionary theory and worker power? The pipe-puffing Althusser declined to say.

REALITY REPEATS ITSELF: AMOR FATI?

It is no surprise when we see such little resistance in the population to the supplying of $40 billion in lethal aid to Ukraine, or to aggressive authoritarian mandates of the government regarding the pandemic. For all of the aforementioned reasons, the dominant response is unquestioning compliance and even gratitude.

After all, having never been taught the past, or having deliberately compartmentalized those troubling histories, we digest the official narrative like a child accepts the spoonfuls of baby food from a doting mother. Tens of millions of doses of soma shoveled down the hatch at daybreak or dusk, or both, do their numbing best to aid and abet digestion of those sometimes thorny narratives, so thick with intrigue and, not occasionally, senselessness. The reward of the incurious is consensus.

Within the official narratives themselves, there is at least one constant: the demonization of the other. We can easily see parallels in the gross caricature of unvaccinated individuals as pathogenic threats in need of the needle and the demonization of Russians as barbaric hordes in need of European refinements.

These depictions are not far from the efforts of German National Socialists to segregate non-Aryans, mostly of Jewish origin, from the righteous population of pure-blood Volk. Yet one needn’t leave one’s own history to see this blatant segregationist behavior. The dark era of Jim Crow, and the modern version of the carceral state, evince the deep hostility of society for the other, those that differ in skin color, sex, gender, sexual preference, religion, ideology, economic model, or worldview.

Edward Said notes in Orientalism how the western Orientalist needed to whittle down Islam to the caricature of “tent and tribe” in order to fit it into his orderly cosmology, in which the rationalism of the European Enlightenment prevailed. Today the West performs the same reductionist act on Eurasia.

Reclining in his sumptuous country estate, the elitist Marquis tells Charles Darnay in A Tale of Two Cities, “Repression is the only lasting philosophy. The dark deference of fear and slavery…will keep the dogs obedient to the whip, as long as this roof shuts out the sky.”

Like Sinclair, Charles Dickens historicized his novels, and it might be noted that the Marquis’ venerable roof would soon fall with the collapsing scenery of the French Revolution. Whenever we are sold those confident, end-of-history tales from the corridors of elite power—be it a French chateau or a chalet in the Swiss Alps—we’d do well to recall the timeless warning of every marketplace and bazaar: caveat emptor.

Nostalgic for the Future

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By Edward Curtin

Source: Behind the Curtain

Despite its pedigree as a fundamental element in civilization’s greatest stories, nostalgia has come to be associated with treacly sentimentality, defeatism, and spurious spiritual inclinations.  Homer, Vergil, Dante, the Biblical writers, and their ilk would demur, of course, but they have been dead for a few years, so progress’s mantra urges us to get on with it.  This is now.

But now is always, and like its twin – exile – nostalgia is perpetual.  The aching for “home” – from Greek algos, pain + nostos, homecoming – is not simply a desire for the past, whether in reality or imagination, time or place, but a passionate yearning for the best from the past to be brought into the future.

Nostalgia may be more a long ache of old people, but it is also a feeling that follows everyone along life’s way.  Its presence may be shorter in youth, and it may be brief, intermittent, and unrecognized, but it is there.  Surely it grows with experience.  As everyone knows, a taste, a smell, a sight, a sound, a song – can conjure up a moment’s happiness, a reverie of possibility.  Paradise regained, but differently.  A yearning recognized, as with seeing for the first time how Van Gogh’s blue paint opens a door to ecstasy or a line of poetry cracks open a space in one’s heart for prospective love.  Hope reborn as an  aperture to the beyond reimagined and made possible.

There is no need to ever leave where we are to find that we are already no longer there, for living is a perpetual leaving-taking, and the ache of loss is its price.

But like all pains, it is one we wish to relieve in the future; and in order to make a future, we must be able to imagine or remember it first.  We are all exiled in our own ways. Home was yesterday, and our lost homes lie in our futures, if we hold to the dream of homecoming, whatever that may mean to each person.  But it also has a universal meaning, since we dwell on this earth together, our one home for our entire human family.

You may think I am engaging in fluff and puff and flimsy imaginings.  But no.

All across the world there are hundreds of millions of exiles, forced by wars, power politics, poverty, starvation, destructive capitalism, and modernization’s calamitous consequences to leave their homes and suffer the disorientation of wandering.  Emigration, immigration, salvaging bits of the old in the new strange lands – thus is their plight.  So much lost and small hopes found in nostalgic remembering. Piecing together the fragments.

But in a far less physical sense, the homeless mind is the rule today.  There are very few people these days who don’t wish to somehow return to a time when the madness that engulfs us didn’t exist; to escape the whirligig of fragmented consciousness in which the world appears – i.e. is presented by the media – as a pointillistic painting whose dots move so rapidly that a coherent picture is near impossible.  This feeling is widespread.  It is not a question of politics.  It crisscrosses the world following the hyper-real unreality of the technologies that join us in a state of transcendental homelessness and anxiety.  All the propaganda about a “new normal” and a digital disembodied future ring hollow. The Great Reset is the Great Nightmare.  Nothing seems normal anymore and the future seems even less so.

The world has become Weirdsville. This is something that most people – young and old – feel, even if they can’t articulate it.  The feeling that all the news is false and that some massive con game is underway is pandemic.

Here is an insignificant bit of nostalgia.  I mention it because it points beyond itself, then and now.  It has always been nostalgia for the future.  I think it is a commonplace experience.

When I was in high school, there was a tiny cheese shop on Lexington Avenue and 85th St. in New York City near the subway that I took to and home from school.  It was the size of a walk-in closet.  Thousands of cheeses surrounded you when you entered. The smells were overwhelming.  I would often stop in there with empty pockets on my way home from school.  The proprietor, knowing I was in awe of the thousands of cheeses, would often give me little samples with pieces of crusty French bread.  He would regale me with tales of Paris and the histories of the various European cheeses. He would emphasize their livingness, how they breathed.  By the door was a large basket filled with long loaves of fragrant French bread flown in every morning from Paris by Air France.  These were the days before every supermarket sold knockoff versions of the genuine thing.  Each long loaf was in a colorful French tricolored paper bag.

Those loaves of bread in the French colors always transported me to Paris, a place I had never been, but whose language I was studying.  Then, and for years afterwards, I was nostalgic for a Paris that was not yet part of my physical experience.  How could this be? I asked myself.  One day I realized that I was not nostalgic for Paris or the cheese shop, nor for the cheese or the bread, which I had tasted many times, but for the paper bags the bread came in.  Why?

This question perplexed me until I realized my notion of nostalgia was wrong.  For those bags had always represented the future for me, the birds of flight a sign of freedom beckoning as my youthful world expanded.  My nostalgia for the Air France bags was a way to go back to go forward, not to wallow in sentimentality and the “good old days,” but to read the entrails for their prophetic message: the small-life world is limiting – expand your horizons.

It was not a question of jumping on a plane and going somewhere different, although that in time would also be good.  It was not an invitation to revisit that cheese shop, as if that were possible, for the store was long gone and in any case it would not mean the same thing.  It was not a desire to become a teenager again. You cannot repeat an experience, despite F. Scott Fitzgerald writing:  “You can’t repeat the past?…Why of course you can.”

The past in that sense is quicksand, a death wish.  For many people (and this is the prevalent understanding of nostalgia as an exclusively negative way of thinking), embittered nostalgia is their way of denying the present and the future, often by the fictitious creation of “the good old days” when everything was supposedly so much better.

But nostalgia can also be an impetus to create a better future, a reminder that good aspects of what has been lost need to be regained to change the course of the present’s future trajectory.

Today most people are bamboozled by world events, as an idiot wind blows through the putrescent words of the media sycophants who churn out their endlessly deceptive and confusing propaganda on behalf of their elite masters.  Given a few minutes peace of mind to analyze this drivel – a tranquility destroyed by the electronic frenzy – it becomes apparent that their fear, anxiety, and contradictory reports are intentional, part of a strategy to pound down the public into drooling, quaking morons.

But many people in their better moments do recall times when they experienced glimpses of a better life, transitory as those experiences might have been.  Moments when they felt more at home in their skin in a world where they belonged and they could make better sense of the news they received.  Not lost and wandering and constantly fearfully agitated by a future seemingly chaotic, leading to dusty death in a story told by an idiot full of sound and fury signifying nothing.

I suggest that those nostalgic moments revolve around the changing nature of our experience of space and time.  There was a time when time was time and space and speed had some human meaning, for people lived within the limits of the natural world of which they were a part.  As I wrote once before:

In former days you could cross over to other people’s lives and come back with a different perspective, knowing what was obvious was true and that to exist meant to be composed of flesh and blood like all the others in different places and to be bound by the natural cycles of life and death, spring and fall, summer and winter. There were limits then, on the land, water, and even in the sky, where space too had dimensions and the stars and planets weren’t imaginary landing strips for mad scientists and their partners in celluloid fantasies.

In that rapidly disappearing world where people felt situated in space and time, life was not yet a holographic spectacle of repetitive images and words, a pseudo-world of shadowy figures engaging in pseudo-debates on electronic screens with people traveling from one place to another only to find that they never left home. When the mind is homeless and the grey magic of digital propaganda is its element, life becomes a vast circinate wandering to nowhere. The experience of traveling thousands of miles only to see the same chain of stores lining the same roads in the same towns across a country where the same people live with their same machines and same thoughts in their same lives in their same clothes. A mass society of mass minds in the hive created by cell phones and measured in nanoseconds where the choices are the freedom to choose what is always the same within a cage of categories meant to render all reality a ‘mediated reality.’

Nostalgia is always about time and space. In that sense, it is equivalent to all human experience that also takes place within these dimensions.  And when technology has radically disrupted our human sense of limits in their regard, it becomes harder and harder to feel at home, to dwell enough to grasp what is happening in the world.

I believe that many people feel nostalgic for slower and more silent days when they could hear themselves think a bit.  When the sense of always being on the go and lacking time predominates as it does today, thinking becomes very difficult.  To think, one must dethrone King Rush and silence Queen Noise, the two conditions that the speed and noise of digital technology render impossible.  Tranquilized by the beeping trivia pouring out of the omnipresent electronic gadgets, the very devices being used by the elites to control the masses, a profound grasp of the source of one’s disquietude is impossible. The world becomes impossible to read. The sense of always being away, ungrounded, and mentally homeless in a cacophonous madhouse becomes the norm.  One feels sick in heart and mind.

Most people sense this, and whether they think of it as nostalgia or not, I believe they feel that something important is missing and that they are wandering like rolling stones, as Dylan voiced it so poetically, with no direction home.

How does it feel?  It feels lousy.

So it’s not a question of returning to “the good old days.”  The future beckons.  But if we don’t find a way to rediscover those essential human needs of slowness and silence, to name but two, I am afraid we will find ourselves speeding along into an inferno of our own making, where it’s noisy as hell and not fit for human habitation.

Joe Rogan shows us the real purpose of cancel culture

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By Kit Knightly

Source: Off-Guardian

Joe Rogan has just been cancelled. Again. It’s not about covid “misinformation” this time.

No, now he’s a racist.

Some enterprising young mind combed through 13 years and hundreds of episodes of The Joe Rogan Experience, and cut together around twenty instances of Rogan using “the n-word”.

This video was shared by award-winning musician India Arie, and used to explain her pulling her music from Spotify’s platform in protest of Rogan’s continued presence there.

Rogan claims that these clips are all taken out of context in his recent apology video, and none were ever intended to be racist. This may well be true…we can’t check for ourselves, because Spotify removed all the episodes.

These important bits of context were, naturally, removed from the viral video. Besides, it has since been said that context doesn’t even matter.

And you know what, they’re right. The context doesn’t matter, perhaps the intention doesn’t even matter, what matters is “Why now?”

Some of these clips are over twelve years old, and yet there have never been any calls to boycott Spotify or cancel his show until just the last couple of days.

Were they not racist before? Or was everyone just OK with the racism? Could there be something else behind this?

…but why bother pausing the hate-fest to ask questions, right?

The only message that matters is – Joe Rogan is a racist now, and streaming giant Spotify have pulled over seventy episodes of his show from their platform as a result.

Of course the cyber-torches and internet-pitchforks coming for Joe Rogan is nothing new. Having preached the tenets of a healthy lifestyle, promoted alternate Covid treatments, and invited dissenting experts onto his show, Rogan has obviously been on the establishment’s hit list for a while.

This reached a peak in January when ageing rock royalty Neil Young gave Spotify an ultimatum: Remove Joe Rogan’s “misinformation”, or take my music down.

Despite adding a weasely disclaimer to the beginning of the podcast’s episodes, Spotify essentially sided with Rogan, probably because they couldn’t be seen to bow to that kind of pressure, and because they figured most people had forgotten Neil Young was still alive.

In short, and despite other musicians like Joni Mitchell adding their voices to Young’s, the gambit failed and Rogan remained on the air.

Then, just last week, White House Press Secretary Jen Psaki added fuel to the fire by announcing the President would like to see “more done” by tech companies to “limit the amount of misinformation” on their platforms.

Within days of that press conference, the viral video compilation of racial slurs had appeared, and Rogan is now a racist as well as an “anti-vax covidiot” or whatever they are calling us these days.

He’s also an object lesson in the entire purpose of cancel culture, and extreme identity politics in general.

I don’t know how many of our readers are gamers, or remember Half Life 2, but go with me here…

Around two-thirds of the way through the game you encounter giant insect-like aliens called Ant Lions, and soon afterwards get a special attack: The ability to “paint” enemies with pheromones which cause an unending swarm of Ant Lions to attack them.

Of course, the giant insects don’t know WHY they are attacking your enemies, they don’t sympathise with your aims and are not capable of understanding your plans, all they know is the chemical signals driving them to fits of rage.

You probably don’t need me to explain the metaphor.

This is the purpose of rampant, hysterical identity politics. You can paint your enemies as a target and watch the mindless swarm do its work.

As much as “cancel culture” is portrayed as a totally organic process, without any top-down control, this is simply not the case.

It is almost NEVER organic, and seemingly ALWAYS contrived.

If you need to be persuaded of that, simply look at who is immune to it.

Both Joe Biden and Justin Trudeau have got enough racist (or at least racist-seeming) scandals to get them cancelled if the process really was anything but a covert tool of maintaining the status quo. And yet still they stand.

To show how selective it is, we have examples of the same exact behaviour eliciting complete opposite responses depending on the person involved.

When Gina Carano compared the hatred of the unmasked and unvaccinated to the way Jews were treated in Nazi Germany, she lost her job and her agent.

When Margaret Hodge made similar comments about Corbyn’s Labour party, there was no rebuke at all.

It seems only people outside the establishment, or promoting the ‘wrong’ opinions, are ever in real danger of falling victim to ‘organic’ cancellation.

Indeed, one can be a totally white-bread member of the entertainment industry for years and be safe in the knowledge your racism/homophobia/misogyny etc will never really come to light, but step out of line on the wrong subject at the wrong time, and you will suddenly find yourself facing a tidal wave of past “sins” about to wash over you.

Look at Donald Trump, an insider to the bone when he was just a billionaire reality TV host, but then he ran against Hillary and became “literally Hitler” overnight.

Rogan is a perfect examplar of this phenomenon. Spend ten years going on about legalising weed, taking DMT and talking about martial arts and you can say “the n-word” as much as you want and nobody notices or cares. But the minute you even mildly interrogate an important media narrative, then the mob ‘organically’ remembers you were a racist the whole time.

The evidence of contrivance is obvious. Simply ask yourself: where did this video compilation of racial slurs actually come from? Who made it?

Rogan’s uses of “the n-word” are not new. They are all several years old and from 23 separate episodes, all multiple hours long. And there are almost 1800 episodes of the show to plough through if you decide to go searching. So making this video is at least two days’ work of simply watching the episodes – and that’s assuming you know where to start looking.

And that’s before editing or trying to make it “go viral”.

Was all this done on a whim by some bored pro-vaxxer?

Does that sound likely?

Far more likely is that it was created and deployed to discredit Rogan’s COVID-questioning without having to engage with the Covid sceptic evidence or arguments.

It’s even possible the video may even have already existed before the current controversy. After all, why create this climate of stifling sensitivity if you don’t have the tools to use it?

Perhaps most authors, actors, comedians etc. have a “tape” in the vault somewhere. A database of racism, homophobia or transphobia just waiting to be released when needed. A collection of neo-kompromat that works best as a deterrent, but is always ready to be loosed if needed.

Those people who do step too far out of their box are taken down, and act as an example to others. Ensuring everyone on the public stage is singing from the same hymn sheet.

Because that, it seems, is what cancel culture is for.

Is it already too late to say goodbye?

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By Jonathan Cook

Source: Jonathan Cook Blog

It seems we may have reached the moment when it is time to say goodbye. It has been fun, educational and sometimes cathartic – for me at least. I hope you got something from our time together too.

I am not going anywhere, of course. Not for now at least. I love to write. For as long as I feasibly can, I will continue to rail against injustice, call out corporate power and its abuses, and demand a fairer and more open society.

But I have to be realistic. I have to recognise that a growing number of you will not be joining me here on this page for much longer. And it feels rude after so much time together not to bid you a fond farewell before it is too late. I will miss you.

Many of you may have assumed it wouldn’t end this way. You probably imagined that I would get banned by Facebook or Twitter. You would be able to rally round, send in complaints worded in the strongest possible terms, and lobby for my reinstatement. Maybe even sign a petition.

But it isn’t going to end like that. There will be no bang. I have been too careful for that to be my fate. I have avoided rude and crude words. I have steered clear of insults (apologies if my responses have sometimes been a little caustic). I have not defamed anyone. I have avoided “fake news” – except to critique it. I have not peddled “conspiracy theories”, unless quoting the British Medical Journal on Covid now counts as misinformation (yes, I know for a few of you it does).

But none of that has helped. My blog posts once attracted tens of thousands of shares. Then, as the algorithms tightened, it became thousands. Now, as they throttle me further, shares can often be counted in the hundreds. “Going viral” is a distant memory.

No, I won’t be banned. I will fade incrementally, like a small star in the night sky – one among millions – gradually eclipsed as its neighbouring suns grow ever bigger and brighter. I will disappear from view so slowly you won’t even notice.

Which is why I am saying my goodbyes now while I can still reach you, my most obstinate followers.

But this isn’t really about one small light being snuffed out. This isn’t just about our relationship coming to an end. Something bigger, and more disturbing, is taking place.

Journalists like me are part of an experiment – in a new, more democratised media landscape. We have developed new reader-funded models so that we can break free of the media corporations, which until now ensured billionaires and the state controlled the flow of information in one direction only: to speak down to us.

The corporate media need corporate advertising – or their owners’ deep pockets – to survive. They don’t need you, except as a captive audience. You’re both their prisoner and their product.

But the lifeblood of a reader-funded journalist, as the name suggests, are readers. The more of you we attract, the better chance there is that we can generate donations and income and make the model sustainable. Our Achilles’ heel is our dependence on social media to find you, to keep reaching you, to offer you an alternative from the corporate media.

If Facebook (sorry, the Meta universe) and Twitter stop independent writers from growing their readerships by manipulating the algorithms, by ghosting and shadow-banning them, and by all the other trickery we do not yet understand, then new voices cannot grow their funding base and break free of corporate control.

And equally, for those like me who are already established and have significant numbers of readers, these tech giants can whittle them away one by one. Ostensibly, I have many tens of thousands of followers, but for several years now I have been reaching fewer and fewer of you. I am starved of connection. The danger, already only too obvious, is that my readership, and funding model, will slowly start to shrivel and die.

Joe Rogan, Russell Brand and a handful of titans of the new media age are so big they can probably weather it out. But the rest of us will not be so lucky.

Readers will lose sight of us, as our light slowly fades, and then we will be gone completely. Vanished.

I have lost count of the followers who – because, god knows, an algorithm slipped up? – tell me they have received a social media post many months after they last saw one from me. In the cacophony of media noise, they had not noticed that I had unexpectedly gone quiet until that reminder arrived or else they assumed I had given up writing.

Which is why, if you want to keep seeing posts from me and writers like me, if this is not soon to be a final goodbye, if you think it important to read non-corporate analysis and commentary, then you need to act. You should be bookmarking your favourite writers and visiting their sites regularly – not just when you are prompted to by Mark Zuckerberg.

You need to be an active consumer of news – not a passive one, as you were raised to be when the choice was between three TV channels and a dozen print newspapers.

You need to search out and maintain those connections before they are gone entirely and the window has closed. Because those voices you prize now will wither and decay like autumn leaves if they have no audience. If you leave it too long, even when you finally remember to go search for them, you may find they are no longer there to be discovered. You will have missed the chance to say goodbye.

So let us say it now, while we still can: Farewell.

UPDATE:

Writing is a solitary activity, and it can be easy to imagine that what was obvious inside your head will be clear to others when that idea takes its place in the outside world. But a proportion of early readers of this post have mistaken it for an actual goodbye, rather than as a cautionary tale of what has been happening and what is still to come. So let me reassure you: I am going to continue writing and you can continue reading me, so long as either Twitter and Facebook direct you to me or you make the effort to find me.

Here’s hoping that my goodbye will prove unnecessary.

Covid: A Collision of Historical and Scientific Illiteracy

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By Kevin Ryan

Source: The Burning Platform

It’s been a year since I’ve written anything for this blog. The reason, frankly, is that I have been at a loss for words. What has happened to human society in the last two years has been, for anyone with an understanding of history, beyond belief.

Of course, it should not be beyond belief because we know history repeats itself. And in the last two years it has been repeating with a vengeance.

I spent 18 years working to understand, and help others understand, the crimes of September 11, 2001. Those crimes were never honestly investigated apart from the work of independent researchers. The official accounts are widely known to be false and those who have taken the time to look deeper have found that there are good reasons to believe that people within government and major corporations were involved in planning and executing the attacks.

September 11th was a deception used by rich and powerful people to steal resources, consolidate power, and control the masses. It was just one example of such a mass deception.  Others include the following.

  • The CIA’s assassination of JFK
  • The false Gulf of Tonkin incident that escalated the CIA’s war in Vietnam
  • The deceptions used to justify the 1991 Gulf War
  • The government-sponsored 2001 anthrax attacks
  • Claims of weapons of mass destruction used to justify the second invasion of Iraq
  • The many manufactured terrorist events following 9/11
  • Previously hyped pandemics, including the 2005 “Bird Flu” and 2009 “Swine Flu” that were grossly exaggerated by the World Health Organization for the benefit of big pharma companies

Along with these conveniently over-looked crimes, the last 18 months have shown that the 9/11 lie was not taken seriously. Anyone who still believes that governments and media care about our health has forgotten that deep state actors murdered thousands of citizens on 9/11. The corporate media and corporate-owned governments then covered it up so that a million more could be murdered to steal resources and control people.

Historical illiteracy is largely to blame for the Covid scare although much of that illiteracy is by choice, through willful ignorance of events that cause cognitive dissonance. The examples cited above are but a few in the long history of deceptions used by governments to drive the agendas of the powerful few. People who ignore these historical facts not only turn a bind eye to history, they ignore painfully obvious features of current affairs including that “terrorism” has mysteriously disappeared.

People don’t want to acknowledge the fact that we do not live in democratic societies any longer. Yet today the world is fully run by an oligarchy and that oligarchy wants us to be diverted and outraged about superficial things while staying ignorant or silent on issues important to us like the following.

  • Indefinite detention without charges at Guantanamo Bay
  • Unwarranted mass surveillance
  • Voting machine hacking and election theft
  • Failure to prosecute the crimes of previous administrations (e.g. drone killings targeting weddings and funerals, torture at CIA black sites)
  • The increasing totalitarian censorship of dissenting views

Some people have accepted or ignored the poverty and famine being driven by the reckless response to Covid. And they have also ignored that the people driving the Covid scare have a history of crimes against humanity.  Not the least of these are Bill Gates, who has monopolized healthcare and has tried to buy off the media, and Anthony Fauci, who is known for having killed nearly 200,000 HIV patients with the toxic drug AZT.

How has the public’s willful ignorance been established so easily?  The Covid crimes were carefully practiced beforehand through a series of exercises conducted by governments and corporations since 9/11. And the operation builds upon elements utilized in all the previous government crimes against humanity.  Here are three primary components.

  1. As has been demonstrated through all of history, the most effective way to dumb down a population is through fear.  Communism, terrorism, WMDs, virus… it all works the same way. This basic feature of the Covid scare is one of many features and outcomes that it shares with previous psychological operations.
  2. Censorship is another hallmark of authoritarian tyranny and we are seeing it raised to a new level in the media today. Any doctor or scientist who has spoken out about the obvious lack of scientific scrutiny applied to the Covid scare has been blocked on social media and ignored or smeared on television, radio, and in print.
  3. In America the most useful tool driving willful ignorance has been the narrative behind the phony 2-party system in politics. The Covid scare works in part because many Americans are easily controlled through the farcical theater of “right-left” identity politics. Today if you want “the left” to take a position, all that is needed is to frame it as opposition to Trump.  Control of “the right” is just as easy. This works despite the fact that we are ruled by an oligarchy that does the same things no matter who is in office.

Added to this formula of fear, censorship, and cartoonish politics has been the complete abandonment of science. Scientific illiteracy is known to be quite high in America, but that has become the case for many nations and today anyone with a lab coat and a pointer promoted by the media is accepted as a scientific authority. What people often forget is that it was doctors, not soldiers, who committed the worst crimes in Nazi Germany. These days it is just as easy to buy a doctor or a scientist as it is to buy a politician.

Scientific literacy in America took a giant leap downward after 9/11. The absurd anti-scientific approach taken by the government for the destruction of the Word Trade Center buildings was either accepted or left unquestioned by many Americans. No doubt the death of science with respect to 9/11 was a key step in enabling the Covid scam.

Here are a few examples of how people around the world abandoned science when it came to Covid.

  1. The PCR test for Covid infection in the U.S., which was used in many other countries as well, did not identify a unique coronavirus. In other words, the test had a high rate of false positives. Still, people accepted the narrative of “cases” that drove the fear.
  2. The policy endorsed by the WHO and the CDC that attributed Covid as a cause of death for anyone who tested positive using the false PCR test, no matter what their actual cause of death was, dramatically inflated the number of deaths attributed to Covid.
  3. Both the word vaccine and the word pandemic were redefined by agencies like the WHO to enable the Covid scare.
  4. The “vaccines” are experimental gene therapies that are making people sick and killing them. Those bought into the vaccine narrative responded to this fact with the diversionary claim that the Covid drugs do not change your DNA. But most gene therapies do not change your DNA. Instead, they provide a functioning gene in addition to your DNA. More importantly, all the Covid “vaccines” provide genetic material that drives the production of toxic spike proteins that cause blood clotting, endothelial tissue damage, antibody dependent enhancement, and death.
  5. The Emergency Use Authorizations under which these Covid drugs were granted temporary approvals were based on fraudulent attacks against long-established, effective treatments like Ivermectin and Hydroxychloroquine.  The suppression of these effective drugs is responsible for the deaths of the patients who did die from Covid (instead of just with Covid).

How do we go forward realizing that many of our friends, family, and coworkers have decided to remain willfully ignorant of history and science and the facts about the Covid psychological operation?

It is a difficult question but one that has a few clear answers. First, we must stop parroting the absurd official narrative regarding Covid. It is an illness that has a 99.7% survival rate for the elderly and higher for everyone else. And it is very obviously a tool of propaganda in a psychological operation that exhibits all the features and outcomes of previous psychological operations. So, the first step is to not accept or repeat the nonsense narrative.

Secondly, since social media and other corporate media are completely compromised and engage in censorship of any facts related to Covid, we must reach people directly. This means speaking out locally, and contacting your city, county, and state government representatives to oppose the Covid agenda.

There are creative ways to resist as well. For example, if you are forced to wear a mask in public areas in order to conduct your life, put a message on the mask that lets like minded people see you. Something like “Mind Control” or “You stay safe, I’ll stay free” would work.

Finally, realizing that this will all get much worse before it gets better, plan to reduce your dependence on goods and services controlled by the oligarchy. If you can, get off the grid. In other words, find alternative sources of power, food, water, and the other necessities of life before the ultimate tool of control—the vaccine passport—limits your access.

The psychological operations of the media and political establishment are ramping up. They’re targeting every weakness of the gullible public, from its scientific and historical illiteracy to its most banal prejudices, in order to inflame superficial separations from the farcical left/right division to racial tensions. They know us better than we know ourselves.

Let’s resist these provocations and see if we can establish control groups within this corrupt system that can survive and educate future generations.

Kevin Ryan is a chemist, former laboratory director, and prominent voice in the 9/11 Truth movement. You can read more his work at his blog. You can also watch his testimony to the Toronto Hearings on 9/11 here, his video on the parallels between 9/11 and Covid here and his interview as part of our Covid19/11 series here.

Those Who Support Internet Censorship Lack Psychological Maturity

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REUTERS/Jonathan Ernst

By Caitlin Johnstone

Source: CaitlinJohnstone.com

Twitter has permanently suspended the personal account of Republican Congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Greene for what the platform calls “repeated violations of our COVID-19 misinformation policy,” much to the delight of liberals and pro-censorship leftists everywhere. This follows the Twitter ban of Dr Robert Malone on the same grounds a few days prior, which followed an unbroken pattern of continually escalating and expanding censorship protocols ever since the 2016 US election.

In reality nobody ever gets banned for “Covid misinformation”; that’s just today’s excuse. Before that it was the fallout from the Capitol riot, before that it was election security, before that it was Russian disinformation, foreign influence ops, fake news, etc. In reality the real agenda behind the normalization of internet censorship is the normalization of internet censorship itself. That’s the real reason so many people get banned.

I myself had already written many, many articles warning warning about the increasingly widespread use of internet censorship via algorithm manipulation and deplatforming long before the first “Covid misinformation” bans started happening. Arguably the most significant political moment in the US since 9/11 and its aftermath was when liberal institutions decided that Trump’s 2016 election was not a failure of status quo politics but a failure of information control, which just so happened to align perfectly with the agendas of the ruling power structure to control the dominant narratives about what’s going on in the world. 

We saw this exemplified in 2017 when Google, Facebook and Twitter were called before the Senate Judiciary Committee and instructed to come up with a strategy “to prevent the fomenting of discord”.

“We all must act now on the social media battlefield to quell information rebellions that can quickly lead to violent confrontations and easily transform us into the Divided States of America,” the social media giants were told by think tanker and former FBI agent Clint Watts, who added, “Stopping the false information artillery barrage landing on social media users comes only when those outlets distributing bogus stories are silenced—silence the guns and the barrage will end.”

Since that time the coordination between those tech platforms and the US government in determining whose voices should be silenced has gotten progressively more intimate, so now we have these giant platforms which people have come to rely on to share ideas and information censoring speech in complete alignment with the will of the most powerful government on earth.

The danger of this is obvious to anyone who isn’t a stunted emotional infant. The danger of government-tied monopolistic tech platforms controlling worldwide speech far outweighs the danger of whatever voice you might happen to dislike at any given moment. The only way for this not to be clear to you is if you are so psychologically maladjusted that you can’t imagine anything bad coming from your personal preferences for human expression being imposed upon society by the most powerful institutions on earth.

It really only takes the tiniest bit of personal growth to understand this. I for example absolutely hate QAnoners. Hate them, hate them, hate them. They always used to make my job annoying because they saw my criticisms of the mass media and the oligarchic empire as aligning with their view that Donald Trump was leading a righteous crusade against the Deep State, so they’d often clutter my comments sections with foam-brained idiocy that perfectly served the very power structures I oppose. They saw me as on their side when in reality we had virtually nothing in common and couldn’t really be more opposed.

When QAnon accounts were purged from all mainstream social media platforms following the Capitol riot, it made my work significantly less irritating. I no longer had to share social media spaces with people I despised, and, if I were an immature person, I would see this as an inherently good thing. But because I am a grown adult, I understand that the danger of giant monopolistic government-tied platforms controlling worldwide human speech to a greater and greater extent far outweighs the emotional ease I personally receive from their absence.

I therefore would choose to allow QAnoners to voice their dopey nonsense freely on those platforms if it were up to me. Whatever damage they might do is vastly less destructive than allowing widespread communication to be regulated by powerful oligarchic institutions who amount to US government proxies. The same is true of Marjorie Taylor Greene and everyone like her.

This should not be an uncommon perspective. It doesn’t require a lot of maturity to get this, it just requires some basic self-preservation and enough psychological growth to understand that the world should not be forced to align with your personal will. It says bad things about the future that even this kindergarten-level degree of insight has become rare in some circles.

Corporate Media Largely Silent as Millions Protest Vaccine Mandates Worldwide

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By Matt Agorist

Source: The Free Thought Project

When protests in the United States happen that help the establishment in some way, whether by stoking divide or pushing an establishment agenda, corporate media is all over them, bombarding us with news of packed streets. However, when massive crowds take to the streets to have their anti-establishment voices heard, it’s crickets on FOXSNBCNN.

Such is the case recently as millions of people across the world have taken to the streets to protest the draconian laws which segregate society and deprive people of their freedoms over their choice in taking a vaccine they may not even need.

Such is the case recently as millions of people across the world have taken to the streets to protest the draconian laws which segregate society and deprive people of their freedoms over their choice in taking a vaccine they may not even need.

https://twitter.com/atlasshrugs/status/1446131725893980164

One place, in particular, that is currently seeing massive protests is Italy whose government just passed the strictest vaccine mandate in Europe. Starting on October 15, Italy begins enforcing the new workplace green pass requirement. If employees cannot show proof of vaccination, they will not be allowed to go to work nor will they be able to enter any public places like restaurants, theaters, gyms, etc.

If an Italian citizen misses five days of work by failing to comply with the new mandate, the government forces their employer to stop paying them. If employees are caught working without a green pass, the state will extort them to the tune of $2,100 per instance.

https://twitter.com/disclosetv/status/1446867103932469251

Naturally, moves like this have pissed a lot of people off. It is well known now that the antibodies from the covid vaccines fade over time, which is why Israel is now requiring boosters for all of their citizens. It is also well known that immunity from natural infection is far superior to the vaccine.

A person who had the jab back in January and likely has very few antibodies left is considered “green.” However, at the same time, a person who may have caught covid last month and recovered, thereby drastically reducing their ability to catch and spread the disease, is considered a threat and cannot go to work or public places. There is zero logic in these mandates, which prove one thing — they are about control — not your safety.

This is why people are in the streets across the country and all over Europe and Australia. Civil disobedience is their only option left as they are forced out of their jobs, denied entry into public places, and forbidden from travelling.

https://twitter.com/PROTEST__NEWS/status/1447119427435171842

As the mainstream media refuses to question the idea behind mandating vaccinations, they have made their role clear in this tyranny as enablers. This should come as no surprise either given the money that pours into their coffers from the ones who stand to gain the most from vaccine mandates — big pharma.

As we are currently witnessing with their silence in regard to vaccine mandate protests, it is no secret that the pharmaceutical industry wields immense control over the government, big tech, and the media. It is their control which keeps this and any other negative press about their products from seeing the light of day. However, most people likely do not know the scope of this control.

As Mike Papantonio, attorney and host of the international television show America’s Lawyer, explains, with the exception of CBS, every major media outlet in the United States shares at least one board member with at least one pharmaceutical company. To put that into perspective: These board members wake up, go to a meeting at Merck or Pfizer, then they have their driver take them over to a meeting with NBC to decide what kind of programming that network is going to air.

We have even reported incidents in which reporters have been cut off by the network for mentioning the connection on air. In a clear example of how beholden mainstream media is to the pharmaceutical industries who manufacture and market these drugs, FOX News’ Sean Hannity was recorded in 2018, blatantly cutting off a reporter who dared mention Nikolas Cruz’s reported association with antidepressants.

In the report below, Papantonio explains how the billions of dollars big pharma gives to mainstream media outlets every year is used to keep them subservient and complicit in covering up the slew of deadly side effects from their products.

As we can see with the current censorship and narrative control in regard to those questioning the safety of the COVID-19 vaccines, big pharma wields massive control over the information you are allowed to talk about and consume. Once we zoom out and see the entire situation, it becomes exceedingly evident as to why Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, and the rest of Big Tech, have made it their mission to wipe out any and all content that questions the “official narrative.”

Why is there no debate about ‘leaky’ vaccines?

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By Jonathan Cook

Source: Jonathan Cook Blog

Do you know what “leaky vaccines” are? There’s a good chance you don’t because discussion about them has been mostly shunted to the fringes of the web, with videos on the subject even excised from Youtube. The subject is treated as though it is something only tinfoil hat-wearing loons would take seriously.

But leaky vaccines have been an established concern in the medical community for years. A paper discussing the potential problems with them was published in a reputable medical journal by experts well before anyone had heard of Covid.

In brief, leaky vaccines don’t offer full protection against the virus they are designed to deal with. Such vaccines don’t stop you from catching the virus. They work in the sense that they are likely to reduce your symptoms and lessen the chance of transmission to others.

That’s a good thing, but researchers have worried that leaky vaccines can have potential drawbacks, possibly very serious ones. If a vaccine erects an imperfect barrier against a virus, one the virus can sometimes breach even if weakly, the virus persists and has every incentive and opportunity to adapt. That is, it is encouraged to grow stronger.

Over time, variants of the virus are likely to find a way past the immune system’s defences mounted by the vaccine. Because the new variant has an evolutionary advantage over the original strain of virus, it comes to dominate – until a new variant supplants it in turn.

Endless arms race

In short, a leaky vaccine is at risk of becoming less effective over time. New vaccines may be needed in an endless arms race against the virus that encourages it to keep adapting and evolving to become ever more potent.

Most of us should be able to understand this problem because we have heard about it in a closely related medical context: so-called “superbugs“.

Antibiotics were invented nearly a century ago to put an end to deadly bacterial infections. They proved highly effective and saved many lives. They were so effective that doctors were encouraged by profit-seeking pharmaceutical companies – as well as the public’s desire for a pain-free life – to prescribe antibiotics for every tickly throat.

Making things worse, farmers looking to maximise profits had every incentive to routinely use antibiotics on livestock – to prevent illness and deaths among animals they packed into warehouses in unnatural and unsanitary conditions.

This abuse of antibiotics led to the current situation where some strains of bacteria have adapted so effectively they can resist every antibiotic on the market. These superbugs put hundreds of thousands of Americans in hospital every year and are reported to kill 35,000 of them annually.

‘Waning immunity’

So what does this have to do with Covid?

As you may have already guessed, the Covid vaccines are all leaky vaccines. In fact, it appears they were known to be leaky before the first person was vaccinated with them. It’s just no one thought to highlight it to us – not our politicians, the vaccine-makers or the corporate media.

We can see quite how leaky they are in the current obsession with “booster” shots to deal with what are being called “breakthrough” cases – only months after most people received what they assumed would be their one and only round of vaccination.

The justification for these boosters is framed as dealing with “waning immunity” and the fact that the delta variant is more “transmissable”. But this medical jargon, though reassuring, may in fact be concealing something significant about the direction the virus is heading in – something that was evident in earlier vaccine research.

‘Nastier’ viral strains

Until Covid, the only way to research how leaky vaccines worked in the midst of a major epidemic was by studying their use in animals. These studies were carried out in part because of concerns about what the effects of leaky vaccines might be if used during a human pandemic.

We now have that pandemic.

In 2015, four years before anyone had ever heard of Covid, the scientific journal PLOS Biology published a paper titled “Imperfect Vaccination Can Enhance the Transmission of Highly Virulent Pathogens”. It examined what happened in the treatment of chickens for a virus called Marek’s disease, caused by a strain of herpes more virulent – if you’re a chicken – than Ebola.

As one of the researchers concluded: “Our research demonstrates that the use of leaky vaccines can promote the evolution of nastier ‘hot’ viral strains that put unvaccinated individuals at greater risk.”

Uncharted territory

In other words, once you start routinely using a leaky vaccine, the very leakiness of the virus in the vaccinated population risks putting the unvaccinated in greater danger by exposing them to turbo-charged variants of the virus their immune systems struggle to overcome.

Because the vaccinated are less aware of being ill – they don’t take to their beds – they can become the equivalent of super-spreaders.

So the solution is simple, no? Just ensure everyone gets vaccinated. (We’ll draw a veil over the issue of what to do with those who can’t get vaccinated for medical reasons.)

But there is a potential problem here too. Because if the leaky vaccines simply allow the virus to adapt and evolve, never putting out the fire, the virus keeps spreading and could get more deadly over time. As with those superbugs, we could reach a point where much nastier strains of the virus become resistant to all the vaccines we have. Delta may be an early indication of how this might happen.

That’s the theory anyway. No one can be sure whether that is what will happen with the Covid pandemic for two reasons.

First, because – from what I can tell – a leaky vaccine has never before been used in the midst of a global pandemic. This is uncharted territory.

And second, because in the case of those chickens, the spread of the disease could be halted, in addition to vaccination, through the culling of infected animals. That – I should hope – is not a solution anyone is contemplating for dealing with Covid.

No debate

Now for the disclaimer. I am not a doctor. I don’t know what the most likely outcome of using leaky vaccines against Covid is, and I don’t claim to. In any case, I doubt most readers care what I think on the subject.

What I am concerned about – and I would hope most other people are too – is that experts in this field be allowed to have a medical debate about these issues in public.

Which is exactly what isn’t happening at the moment. Corporate media companies, from the New York Times and BBC to Facebook and Youtube – many of them invested in pharmaceuticals themselves – are deciding that you shouldn’t even know that the Covid vaccines are leaky, let alone the potential pitfalls.

Maybe that wouldn’t be so serious if we could trust the medical establishment and regulatory authorities to be doing that job for us. But it seems clear we can’t.

The truth is that most doctors, even eminent ones, are little better placed than you or me to judge the dangers of leaky vaccines. This is a very specialist field of research. Those qualified to have an expert opinion on the matter are mostly those doing advanced and very costly research for vaccine companies, especially those working on mRNA technology which has been so central to the Covid vaccination programme.

Difficult to whistleblow

But if there were really a problem with the leaky Covid vaccines, why isn’t this small group of experts not speaking up to warn us? Isn’t their silence proof that this is pure hyperbole?

Here we get to the rub.

Let’s take a comparable case. The first scientists to predict the current trajectory of climate change – to an extremely high degree of accuracy – did so back in the 1970s and 1980s and they worked for the oil companies. They kept their findings secret, as we now know many decades later.

Exxon, BP, Shell and the others invested huge sums in modelling climate change so they would be the first to understand the risks to their industry. They needed to know how long they could get away with destroying the planet before the damage became so apparent they would be required to reinvent themselves as pioneers of green technologies.

The crunch moment those scientists predicted was reached a few years back – about the time the oil companies indeed did start reinventing themselves as pioneers of green technologies.

Similarly, the scientists who best understand the risks of leaky vaccines are those employed by the vaccine companies.

There is no more reason to believe that they will whistleblow on the pharmaceuticals industry than the scientists who worked for the fossil fuel industry, or the tobacco industry, or the car industry.

Any scientist who does have concerns about leaky Covid vaccines knows that by speaking out they will make themselves unemployable, they will be labelled a crazy conspiracy theorist by the media, and in any case they will be unable to reach large audiences because social media companies will censor them either directly or through changes to the search engine algorithms.

Captured by the elite

So what is needed if we are to learn about scientific concerns relating to leaky vaccines in general and leaky Covid vaccines specifically, and not simply the talking points of Big Pharma, is for the odd expert to step forward as an industry whistleblower. Any who do are almost certain to be mavericks – those who have little to lose, those who have retired, those who already hold grievances with the way public health policy is made.

And these are precisely the people who have been raising their voices.

A few disgruntled, former insiders are speaking up – while most of their colleagues keep their heads down. Is that because their colleagues think that they are wrong? Or is it because their colleagues have more to lose – like all those scientists who worked for Exxon and BP and never got round to telling us about the evidence for climate change they had unearthed.

The problem is we just don’t know. And we don’t know because our system of information dissemination is entirely captured by corporate interests. The wealth-elite that profits from rapacious, conscience-less, profit-driven, consumption-led capitalism is also the elite that buys our political class, owns our media, funds our regulatory authorities.

Playing with fire

One expert whistleblower is Dr Robert Malone, who was given a platform this week by Jimmy Dore to express his fears that what happened to the chicken virus may also happen to Covid.

His view is that we are playing with fire by trying to enforce a mass vaccination programme through a mix of mandates, incentives and social pressure . He believes only the most vulnerable to Covid should be vaccinated. Meanwhile, doctors should be working on developing an armoury of repurposed drugs for the small numbers of younger and healthier people who suffer serious ill-effects from Covid.

This, in his view, would have been the wisest and safest strategy.

I don’t know whether he’s right, but I sure would like to hear his and other experts’ concerns being addressed in public – and ideally refuted – instead of what is happening: their concerns are being brushed under the carpet.

I don’t know whether these concerns have been ignored because they are fanciful nonsense, or because the medical establishment has no good arguments to counter them and doesn’t want to frighten us, the children.

Gutter journalism

My worries have only been heightened – and yours should be too – by the fact that no one appears willing to engage in any kind of debate about the potential problems with leaky Covid vaccines.

There should be no doubt that Dr Malone qualifies as an expert. He describes himself as the inventor of the very mRNA technology that is the basis of the Pfizer and Moderna vaccines.

But in practice, that authority to speak on the subject is being used against him. Which should set off alarm bells.

Here is one execrable attempt to discredit Dr Malone rather than address his concerns – this one from the supposedly prestigious Atlantic magazine. The article’s headline, “The Vaccine Scientist Spreading Vaccine Misinformation”, is designed to make us assume – as the author and editors doubtless hope we will assume without reading on – that the piece proves Dr Malone is peddling conspiracy theories.

That headline suggests that the doubts Dr Malone has raised about the safety of leaky Covid vaccines will be discredited in the article with countervailing scientific evidence, presumably from other experts.

The article, however, does nothing of the sort.

It is dedicated instead to painting Dr Malone as an embittered fantasist. It does so not with evidence but by quibbling over whether he can in fact be credited with inventing mRNA technology, as he says, or whether he was simply one of its leading pioneers.

Is Dr Malone the most knowledgeable person on mRNA technology or just one of a handful of them? Unless the first is true, the Atlantic implies, everything he has to say about the potential dangers of leaky Covid vaccines based on mRNA technology is worthless and can be safely discounted.

The Atlantic’s article is what we journalists call a hatchet job. It’s what journalists do when they have no evidence to make a stronger case. You play the man, not the ball. It is the very worst kind of gutter journalism.

Treated like child

I don’t know about you but that simply isn’t good enough for me. I want to hear what Dr Malone is saying and I want to hear experts who are as eminently qualified as him address his concerns. I’m not interested in having corporate journalists and editors no more qualified than me declare me a gullible fool for listening to him or for wanting to hear a scientific rejoinder to his arguments.

I also don’t want politicians and social media corporations deciding whether Dr Malone gets to speak, or the medical establishment pretending that he and the research literature he draws on don’t exist.

And I don’t want Pfizer and Moderna deciding for themselves – and without a proper discussion – whether I and my children should be made to take vaccines for the rest of our lives and whether that is a safe or wise strategy.

I can’t understand why anyone would not feel the same, unless they would prefer to be treated like a child, cocooned from taking any responsibility for their own and their family’s health, safe in the illusion that the establishment has never made a mistake or ever told a self-interested lie.

I want to be treated like a grown-up. I want Dr Malone treated like the expert he undoubtedly is. I want a conversation – before it’s too late to have a conversation.

UPDATE:

The Twitter warriors have been out in force again, insisting to me that there has been no silencing of a debate by experts on the potential dangers of leaky Covid vaccines, while paradoxically also telling me to pipe down as I ask for the chance to be exposed to that debate. Disappointingly, none of these enforcers of discourse conformity seems to be an expert on vaccines.

Strangely, we have gone from being subjected to the Atlantic magazine’s discourse policing on the issue of leaky vaccines to the Twitter mob’s discourse policing. That wasn’t quite the progress I was hoping for.

I wrote this post for two reasons.

First, when concerns about matters relating to Covid start to go viral (sic) – whether prompted by experts, as in this case, or not – it is incumbent upon our political and media class to engage with those concerns, not pretend they don’t exist or imperiously berate those who repeat the concerns.

Rightly, levels of trust in politicians and media have been falling ever lower. Treating sections of the public who entertain doubts as gullible fools who can be safely ignored will prove entirely counter-productive and simply fuel more cynicism towards our already largely unaccountable, corrupt systems of power.

And second, when potentially unjustified certainty on medical matters – especially by non-experts – translates into an attitude of rigid moral rectitude, as we are increasingly witnessing in Covid vaccine debates, we are in very dangerous, divisive territory.

When the majority is focused on finger-pointing, demanding that vaccine mandates and passports be required before fellow citizens are allowed to work or enter the public square, we ought to be pretty damn sure we know that the vaccines are absolutely essential for everyone and that they are the only safe medical option before us.

This is precisely not the time for lazy assumptions, group-think, censorship or standing back as the corporate media decides which experts should be allowed to be part of the public conversation.

One prominent web journalist led the charge against this piece, accusing me of being “disingenuous” in wanting an open debate among experts so we can all be clearer whether there are any potential dangers with leaky Covid vaccines.

But I think there are very good reasons to demand that debate.

If there is, in fact, genuine scientific uncertainty about where the enforcement of mass vaccination at the height of a pandemic might lead, then we ought to be a little more cautious and tolerant before directing our fire at those hesitant to vaccinate themselves or their children.

It might also be wise to demand a little more vociferously that other methods of treating Covid be developed, in addition to vaccines, and that public health care be properly funded rather than put all our eggs in the vaccine basket.

Whereas if there is certainty, then we can all rally enthusiastically behind these vaccines, our doubts assuaged.

My experience is, I suspect, common. I have been exposed on the web for many months to what may indeed be a “conspiracy theory” by dissident experts about leaky vaccines, and yet I haven’t been exposed to the pushback against this theory from similar experts in the “mainstream” corporate media. That shouldn’t be treated as my fault. It is a problem with the current, dominant, corporate media conversation.

If lots of experts know Dr Malone and others are talking nonsense, why did the Atlantic, for example, engage in a hatchet job on Dr Malone rather than quote some of those experts pointing out the glaring fallacies in his thinking?

I am a journalist, and so is my colleague-critic. We know that you play your strongest cards when you write a polemical piece. So why was the only card the Atlantic played the character assassination of Dr Malone? Any journalist happy with that approach is forgetting what journalism is there to do: inform public debate, not fuel hate mobs and prop up group-think.

When asked for links to the vigorous public debate on leaky vaccines that is supposedly taking place, my colleague declined to provide any. Instead he switched tactics and suggested that this be left to peer-reviewed papers in scientific journals.

But the concerns raised by experts that he seems so sure – as a complete non-expert – can be dismissed as quackery are out there on the web right now. They relate to public policy decisions that are being formulated right now. If they are indeed simply conspiracy theories, we don’t need to wait months or years for researchers to share their findings. We need these conspiracy theories engaged with and exposed right now.

You don’t put out a fire by turning your back on it. Those who prefer to silence debate, supposedly in the interests of science, only increase the division, they fuel the blame campaigns, they rationalise the demands for more censorship. And they drive those who refuse to accept the silence deeper into the opposing camp.

Interestingly, in response to my article someone did finally post a piece by an expert relevant to this debate – written, in fact, by one of the researchers behind the chicken study I cited above. It was published in a relatively obscure online publication, fittingly named The Conversation.

I will leave you to assess it as a response to Dr Malone’s concerns. Contrary to the certainty of the Twitter warriors, Prof Andrew Read appears to accept that the virus could adapt under pressure from the leaky Covid vaccines into nastier variants, though he also seems to think that this is not very likely and that there are ways to nullify that threat – mostly by intensifying the use of boosters and further refining the vaccines.

He concludes:

There are probably ways the available COVID-19 vaccines could be improved in the future to better reduce transmission. Booster shots, larger doses or different intervals between doses might help; so too, combinations of existing vaccines. Researchers are working hard on these questions. Next-generation vaccines might be even better at blocking transmission.

The fact that hardly anyone engaged in the social media “row” provoked by my post appeared to know of Prof Read’s rejoinder to the viral videos of Dr Malone underscores exactly the point I was making. It is the responsibility of corporate media like the BBC and New York Times to air these scientific debates through experts, not draw a veil over them.

We need less polarisation and more engagement with prevalent concerns or confusion about Covid and its treatment. And that surely won’t happen as long as the corporate media and Twitter warriors insist on policing the discourse.