“Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the government for a redress of grievances.”
— First Amendment to the U.S. Constitution
My last essay detailed the process by which the corporate structure of the legacy media produced propaganda and censorship. Now I will address the escalation of propaganda and censorship in digital media.
Net neutrality
“Net neutrality” refers to a set of rules designed to prevent internet service providers (ISPs) from discriminating against providers of content and services by blocking or slowing down certain data or by putting certain companies at a pricing disadvantage.1
In 2002, the European Union (EU) laid down the basic framework of net neutrality, and on June 30, 2015, finalized an EU-wide set of rules for keeping digital flow of information open.2
In June 2012, the Netherlands became the second country in the world — right behind Chile — to enact an actual law protecting net neutrality. Slovenia followed suit at the end of that year with a law protecting internet consumers of news and services.3
In the U.S., many citizens have been striving since the early 1990s to preserve the Title II provision of the FCC against Internet Service Providers’ (ISP) campaigns. Title II establishes the internet as a “common carrier,” such as a phone company, available equally to all.
In 2015, the FCC did finally vote for Title II, thus establishing net neutrality. However, President Obama’s Republican appointee to the Commission, Ajit Pai, was elevated to chairman of the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) by President Trump. As chair, Pai soon began unveiling plans to roll back consumer internet protections. He succeeded in 2017, when the FCC voted 3 to 2, along party lines, in favor of reversing Title II regulations — in spite of the millions of Americans who voiced their desire to maintain the protections of the net.4 The fight rages on, including attempts by both California and Maine to establish net neutrality in their states.5
To insure that we’re being fair, let’s look at another viewpoint: As with any debate on regulation of public utilities that are necessary for life in a modern society — such as water, gas, electricity, phone service, or the internet — some consumers cheer for limits on large corporate enterprises to protect citizens from exploitation. Others cheer a “free market,” arguing that within the 400-page, net-neutrality manual (adopted in 2015) is found a vague “general conduct” clause open to interpretation by the FCC bureaucrats who are appointed by whoever is currently the U. S. president. They argue that we may have better internet service with less regulation and by spurring competition from smaller ISPs. Proponents of this view argue that service improved when phone companies were diversified, whereas the monopoly that was AT&T held back advancements in the telecommunications industry. In short, they argue for freedom versus government regulation.6
Not being an economist, I am in no position to parse this debate. However, I can at least raise some questions: First, does our relatively unfettered capitalistic economic system really allow for true competition? Second, in this age of few limits on monopolies, can a truly free market exist? Third, as corporations pursue their bottom line, do they act in ways that are best for society? The reader will need to make up his or her own mind by looking at the various sides of this consideration. The bottom line is that consumers need an internet with equality of the free flow of all information.
Net censorship
The net-neutrality controversy aside, investigative journalism can still be found in pockets on the internet. So can thorough analyses of the news (and what passes as news), ample critiques of corporate media, and rich debate. The marketplace of ideas — the free flow of uncensored information — upon which our relatively open society depends rests on keeping the high-tech communications highway open and free.
Even though the internet is the last bastion of media freedom, this freedom is being eroded rapidly and relentlessly. YouTube and other major social media platforms (Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, and others) have stepped up their bald-faced censorship of speech that challenges U.S. foreign policy — an aggressive, imperial foreign policy that clearly transcends whether we have a Democratic or Republican administration.
For example, the Trump administration ramped up the disinformation war against Venezuela, Syria, and Iran. But the Biden Administration shows clear signs that propaganda for “empire as usual” continues unabated with the appointment of Richard (“Rick”) Stengel to the United States Agency for Global Media (USAGM), a state media propaganda organization previously called the Broadcasting Board of Governors (BBG) until it rebranded in 2018. Stengel was the self-proclaimed “chief propagandist” for the Obama administration’s State Department. He is on record proposing “rethinking” the First Amendment:7
I’m not against propaganda. Every country does it, and they have to do it to their own population. And I don’t necessarily think it’s that awful. Having once been almost a First Amendment absolutist, I have really moved my position on it, because I just think for practical reasons in society, we have to kind of rethink some of those things.8
The Grayzone’s Ben Norton laments:
As the state-backed censorship dragnet expands, independent media outlets increasingly find themselves in the crosshairs. In the past year, social media platforms have purged hundreds of accounts of foreign news publications, journalists, activists, and government officials from countries targeted by the United States for regime change.9
More than foreign policy is censored. Whatever the administration in power wants censored becomes a target. And we must remember that all of the aforementioned social media platforms are colossal monopolies.
YouTube, owned by the world’s predominant internet search engine Google (whose parent company is Alphabet), has instituted a policy clearly designed to censor videos that it deems “inappropriate or offensive to some audiences.” The platform either outright bans videos10 or puts them in a “limited state” if they are controversial enough to be considered objectionable but not illegal.
Objectionable to whom? Evidently, to YouTube and Google management, but no one really knows why this authoritarian censorship is thrust upon certain videos. Video producers who are put in a “limited state” have comments by viewers disabled and are “demonetized,” which renders them unable to earn money through advertising.11 Demonetized channels are shunned in other ways, too: Their videos can’t be shared on social media, commented upon, or embedded elsewhere.12 This de facto censorship is especially dangerous when objectively provable scientific studies — such as those of Architects and Engineers for 9/11 Truth, Scientists for 9/11 Truth, 911speakout.org, and Richardgage911.org — that debunk falsehood-filled narratives are removed from public view.
The curtailing of free speech on YouTube reached a danger point on November 24, 2020, when four U.S. senators (all Democrats) sent a letter13 to YouTube, not only strongly urging censorship of “election misinformation” (targeting Trump supporters) but also requesting the company identify “groups or organizations using YouTube to spread election misinformation.”
The senators asked for a response by December 8, 2020. Bingo. On December 9th, YouTube formally announced14 its censorship of any debate of the 2020 election results. However, corporate-funded media questioning of the 2016 election remains untouched by YouTube, even the extremely shaky allegations of Russian interference in that election.15
These “requests” are clear violations of the First Amendment. They are actually demands accompanied by threats, and they escalated. On July 15, 2021, Glenn Greenwald tweeted:
Democrats have summoned tech executives to the Congress at least four times in the last year. The last time, they repeatedly and explicitly threatened regulatory and other legal punishment if they don’t start censoring more: the content Dems regard as disinformation or ‘hate speech.’16
Greenwald warns:
It is vital not to lose sight of how truly despotic hearings like this are. It is easy to overlook because we have become so accustomed to political leaders successfully demanding that social media companies censor the internet in accordance with their whims.17
YouTube even removed a video by Consortium News (CN), a highly acclaimed left leaning news outlet, for showing Trump supporters claiming that the 2020 election was stolen — within the context of refuting that claim, reporting instead about voter suppression in Georgia by Republicans! Meanwhile, The New York Times, CNN, and other corporate media continue to show videos and report about Trump and his supporters making stolen-election claims with no hint of censorship pressure from anyone!18
YouTube’s mind-boggling report to CN follows:
We reviewed your content carefully, and have confirmed that it violates our spam, deceptive practices and scams policy. We know this is probably disappointing news, but it’s our job to make sure that YouTube is a safe place for all.19
No matter what one thinks of President Trump or the 2020 election results, government officials who urge media to censor, for all intents and purposes, have breached the protections of the First Amendment. Whichever party is in power will determine whether the social media companies will get tax breaks, government contracts, and whether or not their industry will be regulated. When considered in this light, these “requests” are reminiscent of what would have been outright “demands” from the Communist Party of the Soviet Union to the government mouthpiece Pravda. It has no legitimate place in the U.S.
Russian opposition leader and anticorruption activist Alexey Navalny confirms my analogy. He warns us that private media corporations became the “best friends” of both Chinese and Russian governments and “the enablers when it comes to censorship.”20
Moreover, Google uses its search engine to actually intervene in elections. In 2016, the internet giant apparently manipulated search results in favor of Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton, possibly adding three million popular votes for her against Republican rival Donald Trump.21 In 2020, Google again manipulated a U.S. election, this time against Tulsi Gabbard. A court ruled that Google was within legal bounds when it both manipulated search results and denied campaign advertisements for Democrat Presidential candidate Gabbard’s 2020 political campaign.22
If Big Tech’s interference in our elections is allowed to develop unchecked, these companies will succeed in what the First Amendment drafters were adamantly trying to prevent: the suppression of political movements, resulting in one party rule. In other words, the end of democracy and the cementing of an unaccountable oligarchy.
Search engine manipulation now has its own acronym, SEME: Search Engine Manipulation Effect.23
SEME was used by Google as early as September 11, 2013, when the RT “going viral” video, “The Truthseeker: 9/11 and Operation Gladio (Episode 23),” suddenly flatlined, “like a heart monitor when a patient dies,” wrote author Elizabeth Woodworth. The YouTube search engine had suddenly failed to locate the various uploads of this video that in less than four days were viewed by a total of over a quarter of a million people.24
Woodworth continues:
Perhaps the most disturbing element of this case study is that for more than two weeks after September 11, 2013, it was impossible for some people to transmit by email the link to the original YouTube Episode 23 that had started to go viral. An email containing this link would at first appear to have transmitted normally, for it would show up in the sender’s Sent Mail. But it would not be received by the addressees — including the sender, if copied to self.25
“There is no benign explanation for this,” said one of the IT professionals who helped with this investigation.26 Wouldn’t this cyberspace-disappearance trick be in line with NSA capability? 27
In March 2019 President Donald Trump accused Facebook, Google, and Twitter of “colluding” to censor conservative voices.28 It took the World Socialist Web Site (WSWS), however, to carry out an investigation of the alleged collusion — not against conservatives, but against itself. The WSWS proved that it was targeted by a Google SEME operation called Project Owl, which was designed to “surface more authoritative content.” Translation: Google’s algorithms put establishment sites such as The New York Times or the Washington Post in privileged positions among its first few search results and deliberately lowered the ranking for alternative sites like WSWS, which had previously been listed among the first few choices in Google internet searches.29
WSWS’s sleuthing was triggered when its staff noticed a steep decline in traffic in 2016 and a whopping 75% decrease by July 2017 — after the election of Trump and calls to regulate “fake news.” They found that the WSWS was not the only left-leaning alternative site targeted: “Alternet down 63 percent, Common Dreams down 37 percent, Democracy Now! down 36 percent, Truth Out, down 25 percent. . . . Even Wikileaks, in the middle of an international furor over Russiagate,30 was down 30 percent.”31
Investigative journalist Matt Taibbi reached out to Andre Damon, writer and editor for the WSWS, to ask about the site’s experiences. Damon responded:
The actions by Google were the outcome of a campaign, largely bipartisan but led by the Democrats and their affiliated news outlets, to claim that domestic social opposition was the product of interference by foreign countries, particularly Russia. At repeated hearings in Washington, figures like Mark Warner and Adam Schiff [both Democrats] would demand over and over again that Google, Facebook, and Twitter censor left-wing content. It was all a clear and flagrant violation of the First Amendment, which says that Congress does not have the power to limit the freedom of expression. But here was Congress instigating private companies to do exactly that, and threatening to regulate or fine them if they did not comply.32
Damon ended his testimony with these words:
We fight fascism by telling the truth about the fascists and exposing their high-level connections to the state. The decision of what is true and false, what can and cannot be said, is not for self-interested corporations to decide. Working people need to know the truth. And the only way to get there is for them to be able to read whatever they please and to make up their own minds.33
For the reader who is not politically aligned with the WSWS, you are also probably not aligned with the Nazi Party, yet the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), in recognizing the importance of free speech for everyone, defended a Nazi group that in 1978 marched through the Chicago suburb of Skokie, Illinois, where many Jewish holocaust survivors lived. The ACLU lost many members over its defense of the First Amendment in this unpopular case.34
9/11 skeptics have not been immune to this capricious censorship from authoritarian tech giants. As of this writing, Facebook35 has arbitrarily banned links to solid websites such as 911TruthNews.com and Scientistsfor911Truth.com, with no recourse for owners of those sites. Dan Dicks, who published “9:11: Decade of Deception,” a film summarizing the strongest evidence given at the 2011 international Toronto Hearings,36 has been censored with a triple assault. First, GoFundMe terminated his account. Then, in what appears to be a coordinated attack, YouTube and Mailchimp permanently disabled his accounts. Due to the Mailchimp termination, he lost the data for all of his subscribers.
Dicks laments that, in the case of his YouTube account, “Over 14 years of work, 5 documentary films, 270k subscribers with over 35M video views all gone in the blink of an eye.”37 He recommends that activists who want to present material that disagrees with official narratives use other platforms such as BitChute, LBRY/Odysee, Flote, MINDS, and dlive.
An especially eerie tool employed by social media censors is “shadow banning.” With this censorship method, the person or post is not removed from the service, but Facebook restricts visibility so that only the user sees himself and his posts. Others do not — with the possible exception of a very limited number of followers.38
Social media’s arbitrary censorship of the free flow of ideas cannot be effectively probed without mentioning the connection of these popular platforms with the CIA, the Pentagon, and the National Security Agency (NSA). (As you will recall, I detailed corporate media’s intimate relationship with the CIA and the Pentagon in Part 22.)
Google, which has been intertwined with U.S. intelligence agencies from its inception, has received grants from the CIA and NSA for doing mass surveillance of Google.com searchers.39 It currently receives hundreds of subcontracts from the Department of Defense.40
Amazon, the world’s largest online retailer, has a cozy relationship with the CIA. Not a social media company, the behemoth nevertheless wields a big censorship club. In late 2010, at the behest of Joe Lieberman, then Chairman of the Senate Committee on Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs, Amazon removed its hosting of the famous whistleblowing site, Wikileaks.41 Seven years later it removed hosting for Parlor, in conjunction with Apple suspending Parlor at its app store.42
Keep in mind, says journalist and media critic Norman Soloman, “Amazon maintains a humongous trove of detailed information about hundreds of millions of people. Are we to believe that the CIA and other intelligence agencies have no interest in Amazon’s data?”43
Many of my left leaning friends will likely cheer when right leaning authoritarians and war mongers (as opposed to left leaning authoritarians and war mongers) are de-platformed and punished by Big Tech. Former President Trump has been an easy target for the Left’s fear and outrage. But these biased friends are dangerously short sighted as they claim the moral high ground while abandoning the principle of free speech, as is clearly demonstrated by the aforementioned censorship of left targets.
What is the solution to this dangerous increase in censorship of controversial subjects or false information? Bill Ottman, CEO of Minds.com, has a sensible strategy:
. . . Freedom is the best policy. And it’s also the policy that results in the least harm. . . . Where we draw the line . . . is around the First Amendment.44
Ottman asserts that banning bad content is actually socially riskier over the long term for our entire culture. He quotes from a Nature study that suggests that policing content can shunt it to more hidden places: “Our mathematical model predicts that policing within a single platform, such as Facebook, can make matters worse and will eventually generate global dark pools in which online hate will flourish.”45
Controversy, debate, and civil discourse is where truth is winnowed from falsehood, where corruption is exposed to disinfecting light. Shutting down rich discourse means our nation becomes a closed society with minds dominated by official fictional narratives — as already seen in many closed societies around the world.46 At least in the U.S., we can still see light shining from 9/11 researchers47 who, through the application of science, challenge the official 9/11 fantasy.
Enter the novel coronavirus
I am writing this portion of Part 23B during the beautiful summer and autumn of 2020. The usually clean Colorado air is tainted only by the collective fear of SARS-CoV-2. Indeed, the disease Covid-19, that may result from exposure to this virus, can be serious and long-lasting for some.48 Nascent research is ongoing regarding the treatment of the syndrome called “long Covid,”49 but more importantly, on its prevention.50 Long Covid can be a nightmare. It is not to be regarded cavalierly.
The majority of people, though, have mild or no symptoms, and overall, deaths have been 0.2–0.26 percent for populations worldwide, with the great preponderance of that percentage falling on the elderly and/or those with various underlying medical conditions.51 Those who have circled the sun 70 or more years have a 4% chance of death, not an insignificant number. For children, the statistics are vastly different. In 2020, two to three times more children died from the flu than from Covid-19.52 From data so far, the only people for whom Covid is more dangerous than the flu are those over 60, and those under 40 have an infection fatality rate of a mere 0.01 percent.53
Irish chemical engineer Ivor Cummins demonstrates that the Covid-19 pandemic in each country appears to have a set trajectory despite the nearly ubiquitous and devastating worldwide lockdown and mask mandates.54 What is unknown, however, is how precise any statistics are since the PCR tests are scandalously inaccurate.55
My intent, though, is not to speak to the relative seriousness of this disease depending on age or health status, nor the controversial measures mandated in a misguided56 attempt to contain it. Instead, I will primarily address the disquieting censorship that governments and corporations have instituted, which I maintain is unjustifiable for any reason in a democratic society. Censorship is a totalitarian response, which, when applied in even the least degree, weakens the free flow of ideas and the debate that are absolutely essential to an open society.
Facebook, Twitter, and Google are in close communication with the White House for guidance on removing Covid information deemed “misinformation.” What “misinformation” actually means is any information, factual or not, that the White House, the pharmaceutical industries, the WHO, the NIH, or the CDC deem false or simply do not publicly support.57
The sacred myth of Covid-19
Fictional sacred myths take root and grow when other voices are censored by our media. Remember the 9/11 sacred myth from the Introduction of this essay series — the one from our government and the sycophant media, that 19 Muslims attacked us because they hate our freedoms? Well, another sacred myth has taken hold regarding Covid-19. This myth, promulgated by virtually all media worldwide, goes something like this:
In 2020, a deadly, infectious, new virus swept the planet. It came from a bat and suddenly transferred to humans. Millions are expected to die worldwide because nobody is immune and there is no cure. Asymptomatic people are major drivers of the disease, so we have to shut down small businesses, stay inside and work from our homes, avoid our family members and friends, don’t schedule weddings or memorial services, and wear masks (at least one!) whenever we have to leave our shelter. We must do this until there is a life-saving vaccine. The world will not go back to normal until virtually everyone on the planet is vaccinated. Anyone who challenges this narrative is a lunatic, a danger to society, is selfish, and has sociopathic tendencies.
(I hope you, reader, will open your mind at this point if you have thoroughly believed the one allowable narrative about Covid-19 promulgated by our media. If you have been fearful of this “deadly” virus, you may find it difficult to receive the following information and follow the sources I cite without wanting to discredit the messengers. We are all subject to confirmation bias. I am no exception, but if any fact below is proven false, I hope, after thoroughly doing your homework, you will contact me so that civil discussion can ensue. Meanwhile, I am doing my best to present accurate information that contradicts one of the most divisive and contentious issues I have ever encountered.)
So, what is the truth?
This new virus is 80 percent similar to the 2003 SARS,58 though it does have some unique characteristics. Gain-of-function (bioweapon) research of a similar coronavirus in the U.S. was transferred to the Wuhan, China, lab by Dr. Anthony Fauci’s National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Disease (NIAID) at taxpayers’ expense.59
The SARS-CoV-2 virus that causes Covid-19 is indeed quite infectious. Without early treatment, the risk is high for a few, usually the elderly with comorbidities, though 78% of those admitted to the hospital or died from Covid were obese or overweight.60 Most people, however, easily recover from the disease.
Studies show that 20 to 50 percent of people have some immunity to SARS-CoV-2 due to prior exposure to coronaviruses that cause the common cold.61
There have been several prophylactics and early treatments for Covid, including hydroxychloroquine (HCQ) and ivermectin, that were used very successfully in other countries and a few pockets in this country.62 Ivermectin was shamefully smeared by U.S. media, and both were suppressed in the U.S. and some other countries.63 As many as 85 percent of deaths in the U.S. may have been prevented had these early treatments been allowed. 64
Why this suppression? Well, because the FDA could not issue Emergency Use Authorization (EUA) for the profitable vaccines if there was even one adequate treatment receiving approval from the FDA.65
What enabled this suppression? There was collusion among the media, educational institutions, and academic literature to suppress these treatments and prophylactics.66 The FDA could have easily issued an EUA for these inexpensive and safe preventatives and treatments, but did not.67 Instead, it issued a fictional online warning disqualifying hydroxychloroquine.68
In spite of media and government messages to the public, research is clear that asymptomatic people rarely drive this disease69 — despite Dr. Fauci’s flip flop on this issue.70
Widespread lockdowns and mask mandates have not been recommended by public health agencies in the past, and contrary to conventional understanding, they are not effective for stemming the transmission of SARS-CoV-2.71 They have, in fact, caused harm.72
Since the vulnerable were not protected with prophylactics nor given early treatments, they died in great numbers.
Moreover, many questions remain about these deaths due to the scandalous inaccuracy of the PCR tests, the diagnosing protocols, and the suppression of life-saving treatments.73
How did we get to this point?
On May 22, 2020, two of the world’s top medical journals, The Lancet and The New England Journal of Medicine, publish fraudulent research by a suspect company discrediting hydroxychloroquine (HCQ) as a treatment for Covid.74 The WHO and other agencies then stopped their studies on HCQ and the WHO ordered countries to stop using it. The media jumped on this bandwagon convincing the public that HCQ was dangerous.
Authorization for any drug
For those identifying with the left side of the political spectrum, the fact that President Trump recommended HCQ cognitively cemented this false narrative as truth. Thus, a medical treatment became nearly ubiquitously politicized across our nation. As more than one friend has told me, “If Trump or any Republican says something, then I automatically disbelieve it.”
On June 4, 2020, both medical journals embarrassingly retracted these published papers, but by that time the public had internalized the disinformation that HCQ was hazardous.75 Evidence sleuthed by medical librarian Elizabeth Woodworth reveals that the fraudulent study was ultimately the work of the pharmaceutical industry.76
Meryl Nass, MD, internist and bioterrorism and anthrax specialist, offers some insight into the entanglement of medical journals and the pharmaceutical industry. She writes:
Richard Smith, former editor-in-chief of the British Medical Journal (BMJ) helps us understand why [medical journals are biased toward publishing negative news about HCQ]: “Medical Journals are an extension of the marketing arm of pharmaceutical companies.” He was backed up by Richard Horton [editor-in- chief of The Lancet]: “Journals have devolved into information laundering operations for the pharmaceutical industry.”77
But it is the media, not medical journals, that inform the layperson. Elizabeth Woodworth calls out corporate media for colluding with the criminal pharmaceutical industries:
The drastic failure to report honestly on HCQ goes far beyond incompetence: it is abetting the unspeakable forces who do not want people to be reliably cured during this pandemic until they can realize pandemic-level profits.78[From the minimally tested new vaccines.]
Ivermectin is another inexpensive and safe drug that has had huge success in saving lives in various countries around the world. Despite its near miraculous prevention and treatment of this disease, it is smeared, censored, and forbidden in the U.S. for Covid.79 Both ivermectin and HCQ have been awarded the WHO’s “World’s List of Essential Medicines.” I repeat for emphasis: Both are inexpensive and safe and both are suppressed in the U.S. for treatment of Covid patients.
From this evidence we can establish a working hypothesis that the powerful pharmaceutical companies heavily influence and collude with medical journals, academic journals, academic institutions, corporate media, and politicians who push for censorship of information that contradicts Covid and vaccine official narratives.
What is the result of this propaganda and censorship?
While the big boys play their power games, assisted by those “just following orders,” (for example, governors and hospital administrators) huge numbers of the elderly and those with comorbidities die from, or with, Covid.
The CDC, the government, and media, backed by the powerful pharmaceutical companies, aggressively push inoculation of these minimally tested experimental vaccines into all of humanity — even those populations who were not included in the trials, such as pregnant women and people who have recovered from Covid. There is something terribly, horribly amiss with an agency that would recommend these experimental vaccines to pregnant women and other untested populations.80
As this occurs, thousands die, thousands of miscarriages occur, and tens of thousands become severely and permanently injured by all brands of these new-technology vaccines.81 Adding insult to injury, if the unaware and uninformed subjects in the U.S. are vaccine injured, they will have no recourse since the pharmaceutical industries have immunity from prosecution. This sets the stage for untold suffering and medical bankruptcy for many U.S. families.
As the vaccines are rolled out worldwide, Nazi-style Covid passports — which don’t prove immunity but do prove compliance — have been instated in other countries and loom on the horizon for the U.S., coercing many to accept these injections without informed consent.
People comply, often not for medical reasons (the only reason anyone should accept a medical intervention), but for social reasons, so they will be allowed by authorities to work, travel, and live normal lives.
I call this what it obviously is: a crime against humanity by untitled, entitled, and deceptive tyrants. Both the 9/11 and the Covid sacred myths — ubiquitously promoted by media — have caused massive destruction and death.
Why are so many Americans uninformed to the point of making very bad decisions about their — and their children’s — health?
In the case of 9/11, Americans believed the official and media lies to “patriotically” join the military, in order to kill others, yet, in turn, to be killed or terribly injured. In the case of Covid, people around the world believed the official and media lies to “patriotically” volunteer to receive an experimental vaccine in order to both alleviate their fear of the virus and be “part of the solution.”
The sacred Covid myth is shamelessly promoted to this day, as was the sacred 9/11 myth shamelessly and incessantly promoted for years — and is actually still invoked as needed. The government and the fawning stenographers in media keep our fears alive for future manipulation. Even if you have been “fully vaccinated,” says the CDC, you must still be very careful. Rules are provided to “keep you safe.” If you are unvaccinated, including unvaccinated children, you are even more dangerous to others, invoking the myth of asymptomatic transmission.82
The state of our nation is comparable to a dysfunctional family, in which parents keep their children in a state of fear so they can persuade them to behave in the ways they want them to. Parental officials actually consulted behavioral scientists to learn how to manipulate the populace (perceived children) through fear, as the section below on “Whistleblowers and the politics of fear” will make abundantly clear.
This dynamic is playing out throughout most of the world affecting billions. I am immensely grateful that Sweden has been a notable exception and thus a model from which we should learn.83
Tyrants — who are actually fearful, immature individuals themselves — will forever try to manipulate others. But without media propaganda and censorship, they cannot succeed.
The question that lies most heavily on my heart, however, is “When we know from the biodistribution study that shows that the lipid nanoparticles that contain the mRNA genetic sequence that produces the toxic spike proteins does not stay in the deltoid muscle of the arm, as thought, but travel to all areas of the body,84 especially to the ovaries,85 why in heaven’s name are the politicians, the CDC, the WHO, the NIH, and the pharmaceutical companies continuing to push this vaccine on young adults and on children? What is going on?”
The warp-speed of censorship
With much fanfare, President Trump introduced “Operation Warp Speed”86 to develop and distribute a Covid-19 vaccine in record time. On its heels has come the nightmare of an “Operation Warp Speed” of censorship.
For example, in 2020, schools in the U.S., including universities, have depended on Zoom for online classes due to the government-mandated lockdown, which has prevented students from physically attending classes and seminars. Alarmingly, Zoom canceled academic seminars on Palestinian rights after being pressured by pro-Israel groups. This blatant and biased censorship ignited a firestorm of protest from academic freedom and free-speech advocates.87
Furthermore, since the advent of Covid, YouTube, Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, Microsoft, Reddit, Spotify, and Twitter have censored whatever contradicts the official pandemic narratives — for our “protection,” they claim. In March 2020, the White House asked these companies to help fight “misinformation” related to the virus. As though dutifully following marching orders, they are “elevating authoritative content” on their sites “to keep our communities healthy and safe.”88
In actuality, these benign-sounding words mean that information that contradicts the government and corporate media narrative about Covid-19 is being arbitrarily censored89 — even information from highly credentialed doctors and scientists, and even from politicians or senate hearings.90 For example, Twitter has banned all links to Mercola.com, a popular health site that presents information contrary to the official narratives on SARS-CoV-2. Dr. Joseph Mercola writes a regular column in which he looks at natural and holistic approaches to health, including, during this era of Covid, how to enhance our immune systems to protect ourselves from the severity of this disease. In this vein, he also attempts to piece together clues pointing to the truth about the lethality and origin of the novel coronavirus.91
Medical librarian Elizabeth Woodworth has written an excellent article, “COVID-19 and the Shadowy “Trusted News Initiative,’” (TNI)92 exposing the uncanny, worldwide singularity of the media narrative about the pandemic. How did this echo chamber possibly extend worldwide? For example, a friend challenged me with a ridiculing tone, “Do you really think that all these media could be wrong?”
Woodworth explains that yes, the TNI, functioning as an early warning system, directs the media worldwide — what these media must allow and must not allow. She explains the initial partnership of the TNI were
the European Broadcasting Union (EBU), Facebook, Financial Times, First Draft, Google, The Hindu, and The Wall Street Journal. . . .
The TNI next agreed to engage with a new verification technology called Project Origin, led by a coalition of the BBC, CBC/Radio-Canada, Microsoft and The New York Times — with a mandate to identify non-authorized news stories for suppression. . . .
The TNI reports Covid-19 health policy from the world’s major public health agencies, including the World Health Organization (WHO), the US Centers for Disease Control (CDC), the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA), and the US National Institutes of Health (NIH).
This policy is passed down through national and state governments, who convey it to the public via their media and websites, along with local case reports (based on the questionable PCR test) and deaths. . . .
[T]he social media giants refer to the WHO, CDC, FDA, and NIH policies as their justification [of suppression]. Discussions such as the source of the virus, early treatments, and vaccine adverse effects — if they originate outside of these agencies — are quickly suppressed by the coordinated TNI network.
“Unfortunately,” Woodworth concludes,
this top-down leadership has at best been illogical and inconsistent, and at worst corrupted by the vast profits of the vaccine industry.93
The suppression of information from qualified scientists and doctors about the prophylactics and early treatments for Covid has resulted in the deaths and severe suffering of hundreds of thousands.94
Additionally, the suppression of information about the deaths and adverse reactions from the Covid vaccines has resulted in many people naively accepting these vaccines without informed consent. Thus, many more people, than otherwise would have, died and were severely injured.95
Dr. Piers Robinson, co-director of the Organisation for Propaganda Studies, assesses, “It wouldn’t be an underestimation to say that this is probably one of the biggest propaganda operations that we have seen in history.”96
Astonishingly, the warp-speed censorship by media, especially social media, was dramatically rehearsed in October 2019, a week or two before Covid began spreading. In Event 201, a group of powerful individuals role-played how to “flood” the media with only the official, panic-based narrative about an imagined coronavirus pandemic, how to censor questions and alternative narratives, how to censure highly credible experts, and how to control populations worldwide.97
Who organized this eerie simulation? None other than our true-believer in experimental vaccinations for nearly eight billion people, Bill Gates.98
As if the rigid, no-recourse, authoritarian tactics of the social media giants were not egregious enough, investigative journalist Whitney Webb reports that the UK and the U.S. have discreetly unveiled “cyber tools and online tactics previously designed for use in the post-9/11 ‘war on terror’ [that] are now being repurposed for use against information sources promoting ‘vaccine hesitancy’ and information related to Covid-19 that runs counter to their state narratives.”99
Did you catch that? The cyber warfare attack is against “information sources,” such as websites! Targets included in its “sights” are “sites” that critique — and criticize — the pharmaceutical companies that develop Covid-19 vaccines.100
What entities are primarily responsible for both the warp speed of vaccine development and warp-speed censorship? In the U.S., they include the Center for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) (which receives funds from pharmaceutical companies),101 the intelligence agencies, and the military.102
Both the legacy media and social media have been responsible for the warp-speed of censorship, motivated by the billions of dollars they receive from Big Pharma.103
Further control of the narrative is guaranteed by the direct connection between those same media and a certain philanthropic foundation. To wit, through June 2020, the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation gave grants totaling more than $250 million to purveyors of news, including publicly owned radio station NPR (National Public Radio) who accepted a $17.5 million handout.104 In 2021, Gates’ “gifts” to media increased to over $319 million, which included $24.7 million to NPR.105 To put the Gates’ grants in perspective, Amazon’s Jeff Bezos paid $250 million to purchase the Washington Post in 2013.106
Only the hopelessly naïve would think these gifts to journalism were given without stringent strings attached. Billionaire Gates, who has been the world’s most visible promoter of vaccines (and who in January 2010 proclaimed the next ten years to be the “Decade of Vaccines,”) has repeatedly promised — or threatened — that the world “won’t go back to truly normal until we have a vaccine that we’ve gotten out to basically the entire world.”107
Has the pharma-financed, conflict-of-interest-riddled media challenged Gates’ motivation and his devastating vaccination projects? If not, why not? A little digging, even on an algorithmically biased search engine, reveals the tragic truth behind his pretense of caring about our health: Bill Gates has promoted and financed polio vaccines in Africa, India,108 and other third-world countries that have resulted in hundreds of thousands of cases of paralysis in the children who received them — not to mention a resurgence of vaccine-induced polio.109 I’ve yet to hear any remorse whatsoever from this so-called philanthropist.
Fortunately, an increasing number of brave individuals and organizations are publicly standing up to the pandemic hype. Instead of accepting various governments’ totalitarian edicts and censorship, they are fighting back with truth.
In Germany, for example, attorney Reiner Feullmich, who practices in both Germany and the U.S., is a founding member of the German Corona Investigative Committee. He is leading the committee’s international class-action lawsuit that was to be filed against those responsible for using the fraudulent PCR testing to persuade the people of the world that a dangerous pandemic was raging across the world. The fear engendered by this propaganda convinced much of the world to comply with the economically devastating worldwide lockdowns and the mask mandates. Feullmich estimated that more than 50 countries would follow suit.110
Dr. Joseph Mercola’s organization has investigated the web of players creating propaganda and censorship. Mercola informs us how vast this web is:
Public deception is now being carried out at a mass scale, and the whole thing appears to be led and organized by another major PR firm, this time the Publicis Groupe. Publicis’ fingerprints can be found throughout the net of censorship and misdirection that is now being cast across the digital landscape. The Publicis Groupe has manipulated what people think about commercial products for nearly a century.111
Dr. Mercola concludes with his short list of these propagandist web players:
[W]e find connections between the drug industry, NewsGuard/HealthGuard, educational institutions, Big Tech companies like Google, Microsoft and Bing, the U.S. State Department and DoD, global technocratic institutions like the WHO, national and global NGOs like the CCDH [Center for Countering Digital Hate112] and the World Economic Forum, and dominating health websites like WebMD and Medscape. . . . [This is] merely a small sampling of readily obvious relationships. Toward the center of this web is the Publicis Groupe, the clients of which include major drug companies, Big Tech companies and financial institutions in more than 100 countries.113
Another example of those fighting back against this unprecedented worldwide propaganda agenda is the Children’s Health Defense (CHD), led by Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., and other health freedom groups that are suing Facebook for censoring factual information. RFK, Jr., says of the lawsuit: “This is an important First Amendment case testing the boundaries of government authority to openly censor unwanted critiques of government policies and pharmaceutical and telecom products on privately owned internet platforms.”114
With that well-known Kennedy family facility for speaking passionately, cogently, eloquently, Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., has articulated the case for questioning lockdowns and the coerced experimental vaccines in his speeches on many a world stage. On September 26, 2020, in a speech titled, “An International Message of Hope for Humanity,” in solidarity with the thousands of citizens in at least 15 countries who attended rallies to protest the global movement toward totalitarianism, Kennedy quoted President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s famous line, “The only thing we have to fear is fear itself.” He then reminded his audience that during the Great Depression, Eastern Europe, Germany, Italy, and Spain turned toward fascism, while the same crisis turned the eastern countries of the world toward communism. Both “isms” are marked by their authoritarian systems of government.
Authoritarians depend on our fear to persuade us to comply with their totalitarian agendas. In order to implement their plans, they have to remove citizens’ civil rights. We in the U.S. have certainly not been immune to authoritarians’ use of the “politics of fear.” In America, that ancient strategy will culminate if, due to our fear, we allow the destruction of the first freedom enshrined in the Bill of Rights — the freedom of speech and the press.
When Kennedy warns that oligarchs and plutocrats are responsible for today’s rampant censorship, he appeals to all citizens of the world. In his “Hope for Humanity” speech, he explains our global situation about which so many Americans are, due to censorship, completely unaware:
The coup d’état that we are all fighting today is a coup d’état that starts with a conspiracy between the government agencies and the big technology companies . . . the Silicon billionaires, the people like Zuckerberg and Bill Gates and the people who run Google and Facebook and Pinterest and all of these other Silicon Valley corporations . . . to make sure we cannot talk about our grievances: We cannot say bad things about pharmaceutical products. We cannot question government policies that make no sense to us. . . .
Most Americans and most of the people on this planet . . . want leadership but we don’t want bullying, and we know the difference between leadership and bullying.
And you notice the same people who are getting richest from this quarantine are the same people who are censoring criticism of this quarantine. 115
We’re not scared of debate. The free flow of information, the cauldron of debate, is the only thing that allows governments to develop rational policies in which self-governance will actually triumph. [This is] the battle to save democracy and freedom and human liberty and human dignity from this totalitarian cartel that is trying to rob us simultaneously in every nation in the world of the rights that every human being is born with.116
One independent investigative journalist who writes occasional articles for CHD in an effort to present facts that help readers make informed decisions about their healthcare is Jeremy R. Hammond. In June 2020 he authored, under the CHD banner, the (free) e-book, How Censorship is Redefining ‘Informed Consent’ as ‘Misinformation.’117
Enter the Fact Checkers
Former CBS and CNN investigative journalist Sharyl Attkisson has traced the beginnings of the fact-checking trend to David Brock, who began his career as a right-wing investigative reporter in the 1990s, according to Wikipedia. In 1997, Brock abruptly switched the target of his smears from liberal to conservative media. He is best known for bashing right-wing media through his nonprofit watchdog group, Media Matters for America, which he founded in 2004, and for serving Hillary Rodham Clinton as a consultant in her 2008 and 2016 runs for president.118
Fearful that Donald Trump would be elected in 2016, Brock, through his Media Matters, successfully lobbied Facebook to take on the role of fact-checker. At that point, checking media facts was not being demanded by the public but was, says Attkisson:
. . . [a] pretend demand created by the propagandists who wanted to control the information. . . . The fact checking is usually fake fact-checking, meaning it’s not a genuine effort [but] a propaganda effort. [T]hird parties, academic institutions and Newsguard insert themselves. But, of course, they’re all backed by certain money and special interests. They’re no more in a position to fact-check than an ordinary person walking on the street. They make sure certain things are not seen, even if true. And I think this is the most serious threat that I’m looking at right now to our media environment.119
Third parties, such as Snopes, AP Fact Check, NewsGuard/HealthGuard, Publicis, Poynter’s Politifact and International Fact-Checking Network (IFCN), Full Fact, Facebook’s FactCheck.org, and PropOrNot120 have sprung up in the last few years. They all purport to provide authoritative answers and to have perfect knowledge of which sources give us reliable or unreliable information. Media Bias Chart tells us which sources have liberal, moderate, or conservative biases, according to their definitions of these categories.121
Wikipedia has now set itself up as an authority on what news outlets should be relied upon or shunned. Bear in mind that Wikipedia appears to be controlled by politically motivated editors who keep a sharp eye 24/7 on the updates to every page that covers controversial issues. These self-appointed guardians ensure that those pages are written in a way that slants them away from anti-imperialist material.122
Writes The Grayzone’s Ben Norton:
Wikipedia is corrupted on a fundamental level. It has been purged of any sense of internal democracy, and a fanatical gang of obsessive, politically motivated editors control its content. . . . With their silent commission, [Wikipedia has] given approval to a global censorship machine that aims to scrub the internet of any reporting or viewpoints that run counter to the prevailing official perspective in Washington.123
I can sympathize with those who readily turn for guidance to these third parties who profess to be authoritative on what is true or false. We live in an era of divisive, strident, opinionated anchors — whether aligning left or right — ostensibly reporting news, but who actually spin and slant and slander to the point of being enviable to the worst of the rancorous talk show hosts. We live in an era of information overload. And we live in an era of urban legends frequently crossing our social media pages, for which I have actually found the fact checkers useful.
I’ve been embarrassed several times after sharing false stories, so I’ve learned to check Snopes.com or search the internet first to verify certain kinds of information. I will continue to do so, although now with a much more critical eye toward the spin I so often find from these self-proclaimed authorities.
We all look to various authorities in an effort to differentiate between solid information and misinformation, if not disinformation. The authorities we trust usually depends on our biases. As mentioned earlier, we want the truth (our accuracy goal), but we also want information that supports our existing beliefs (our directional goal or confirmation bias). If we choose to be disciplined, we will read and listen widely, leaving our habitual media silos and personal comfort zones to check out sources from all the sides.
If we are sincere about digging deeply for truth, if we want to avoid propaganda, if we truly want to confront our tendency toward confirmation bias, and if we are willing to face cognitive dissonance (see Part 5), then, when we turn to these third-party sites, we must consider them to be only one source of information that needs scrutiny. And we must keep in mind that according to the Wall Street Journal Board as well as Sharyl Attkisson, many of these fact checkers, if not most of them, are consciously abetting propaganda from government agencies and powerful corporations — in other words they are partners with these entities.124 When we choose to look at these posts, we must bear in mind these questions:
- Who checks the fact checkers?125What are the biases of the individual fact checkers and the bias checkers? How are they screened by their company before being employed?126
- Who funds the fact checkers? What relationships do they have with government authorities, PR companies (such as Publicis127 that funds Newsguard), ultra-wealthy individuals and foundations (such as the Gates Foundation),128or with corporations — especially the pharmaceutical industry in this Covid era?
- Are the statements being checked actually facts, or are they opinions?
- Are the fact checkers distracting you by drawing you into a morass of irrelevant details? By challenging random facts associated with a story and then declaring those random facts false? Have they conflated key words, confusing the reader?129
- Are the fact checkers relying on one photo that could have been planted?
- Are the fact checkers critical of official narratives? Or are they virtually always critical of alternative viewpoints?
- Have the fact checkers used straw man arguments? In other words, do they trivialize an opposing point of view by focusing on an easily debunked position within that view while distracting the reader from the strongest opposing arguments?
- Does the headline focus on a subtopic, random fact, or straw man argument, then after paragraphs of irrelevant information declare this fact “misleading,” or “unsubstantiated,” which to the reader would translate as “false”?
Omission is one of the most successful techniques of propaganda. To recognize — and not fall for — both straw man arguments and purposeful omission (lying by omission), we must study all sides of an issue.
For example, I searched Snopes for “collapse of World Trade Center 7 (WTC 7).” Two listings came up claiming to debunk supposed 9/11 Truth articles, but nothing came up that would speak for those of us who see problems with the official story about how the WTC 7 building collapsed. And nothing at all came up for this infamous collapse on Facebook’s Factcheck.org. This is propaganda by omission.
Then I searched AP Fact Check and found that in an article dated June 13, 2017, the site claims that WTC 7 collapsed as a result of office fires.130 That “fact” remains to this day. AP Fact Check is lying to prop up the official narrative by omitting key research proving that office fires were not the cause of that free fall collapse.
Here is how I know that my accusation that these AP fact checkers are lying is correct:
In August 2008, physics teacher David S. Chandler challenged NIST (National Institute of Standards and Technology) causing them to add a graph to their final report showing free fall of WTC 7.131 The only way a building can collapse at absolute free fall is through a controlled demolition.
This research was followed, most notably, by Dr. Leroy Hulsey and two graduate students at the engineering department of the University of Alaska Fairbanks (UAF). They conducted, over a four-year period, the most thorough scientific analysis of the mechanical structure of WTC 7 to date. The UAF report, published in final form on March 25, 2020, made the categorical and conclusive statement:
[F]ire did not cause the collapse of WTC 7 on 9/11, contrary to the conclusions of NIST and private engineering firms that studied the collapse.132
AP Fact Check should have written a different report in 2017 reflecting the Chandler measurements, and it certainly has no excuse for not updating its WTC 7 facts in 2020 to reflect the results of the UAF study. Presumably, its checkers know by now that they are peddling disinformation. “This is a common problem with so called fact checkers,” writes journalist and blogger Iain Davis. “Due to the political nature of their role, all too often they stray into opinion rather than fact.”133
There is no substitute for reading widely, studying all sides of an issue, and then trusting our own discernment. If we instead rely only on certain authorities to tell us what is true or false, we run the grave risk of making poor decisions, causing harm to others and ourselves. Trusting any one source, especially a self-proclaimed authority, is a misguided strategy, not only for our personal decisions, but for our political ones.
Evidently, The Atlantic doesn’t grasp that authoritarianism and censorship are dangerous to the public weal and individual freedom. Its April 2020 article lauding digital censorship in the face of Covid-19 is titled “Internet Speech Will Never Go Back to Normal” and is jaw-droppingly subtitled: “In the debate over freedom versus control of the global network, China was largely correct, and the U.S. was wrong.” The article even suggests that perhaps we Americans should rethink our understanding of the First and Fourth Amendments, as the “harms from digital speech” grow and “the social costs of a relatively open Internet multiply.”134
I am astonished. So is journalist Matt Taibbi, whose critique of The Atlantic piece concludes: “Turning ourselves into China for any reason is the definition of a cure being worse than the disease.”135
Some will argue that the social-media titans are private companies and thus can censor as they wish. It is true that they are private, but it is also true that they are monopolies. I agree wholeheartedly with the gonzo-light journalist Caitlin Johnstone, who opines:
But how “private” is a corporation that is interlaced with government power with increasing inseparability? The reality is that in a corporatist system of government with vanishingly few meaningful distinctions between corporate power and state power, corporate censorship is state censorship.136
State power and digital media monopolies are joined at the hip. This digital media structure guarantees that we will receive propaganda and censorship — not the information we need to make good decisions.
The psychology of fear
Fear is our most powerful emotion, and it has been abused throughout the ages by those in power in order to manipulate others. We might think that anger (or rage) is our most powerful emotion, because on the surface it sure looks scary. But anger is simply a psychological defense against fear, terror, hurt, confusion, or some other vulnerable feeling. In other words, anger is a defense against the vulnerable feelings we conceal from ourselves and others.
We naturally fear many things: the unknown, disease, torture, anger from others, loss, rejection, ostracization, and enemies — especially invisible enemies such as “sleeper cells of terrorists” or pathogens. But ultimately, we fear death. (Recall Part 10, on Terror Management Theory, where we learned how we behave when we are in a state of “mortality salience.”)
I see strong parallels between the 9/11 and Covid events, but I will stick to the psycho-social comparisons in this essay, especially how fear was abused to manipulate people to behave in the way authorities desired. For those who want to explore the other parallels, I refer you to Kevin Ryan, a respected scientist and 9/11 researcher, who lays out the similarities of the war on communism, the war on terrorism, and the war on Covid-19 in his essay, “Is the Coronavirus Scare a Psychological Operation?”137
Philosopher Charles Eisenstein’s exquisite essay, “The Coronation,” perfectly articulates my own observations with this statement:
The virus we face here is fear, whether it is fear of COVID-19, or fear of the totalitarian response to it, and this virus too has its terrain.138
This insight applies to the events of 9/11 too. What did our fears settle on after the attacks of September 11, 2001? Did we fear Muslims? Anthrax in the mail? Or was our fear focused on the totalitarian responses such as the loss of civil liberties or on the beat of war drums by the Bush administration and the corporate media?
To become more self-aware, we each need to understand the “terrain,” or the “ground,” of our fears — meaning their origin.
We humans are very susceptible to fear. But why do some react with more fear to events such as 9/11 and Covid than others do?
As stated in the Introduction to this essay series, we humans are complicated creatures. I cannot know all the reasons some are more susceptible to fear than others. Without any intent to be reductionist, however, I can share what I do know.
From my work as a depth psychotherapist, I am keenly aware that many of us face death early in life — maybe through a crisis while still in the womb or from birth trauma, perhaps during our pre-verbal years or later in life. We normally have no conscious memory of the pre- verbal traumas. My experience tells me that, for the most part, the emotional impressions caused by these crises remain in our body/mind until, through regression therapy, we relive both the original events and the repressed or suppressed feelings associated with those events. Healing from these traumas, therefore, is not an easy journey.
Nonetheless, if we do not heal them these buried emotional impressions will be “triggered” when subsequent crises occur that remind us of the early death-related traumas. Then our natural fear response is intensified. In other words, our fear becomes much greater than it otherwise would be if we did not harbor these early traumas. Both 9/11 and Covid are examples of events that will trigger these repressed fears.
When we experience heightened fear and anxiety due to events such as 9/11 or Covid, our magnified fear, anxiety, and anger become firmly associated with the current crisis, while the memories of the early traumas remain buried due to our psychological defenses.139
My fear after the September 11, 2001, attacks will illustrate this dynamic. By the summer of 2002 I had read enough to reach the conviction that there was something seriously amiss with the official story of what happened that infamous day. In fact, the evidence led not to 19 Muslim hijackers, but to insiders in the U.S. government-military-industrial complex. My stomach-churning thought was, “My God! If they could do that, they could do anything.” This included coming after me since I was already educating others about what I had learned. The visceral fear engendered by this realization made me consider leaving the country.
But luckily, I was aware that such strong fear could come from early trauma — as much as it may seem justified in the present situation. And I already knew I had very early trauma in which I had faced death. So, I asked myself: “Would I feel safer if I lived in another country?” The answer was immediate: “No. I would feel equally unsafe!”
The next step was obvious: Get into psychotherapy to see if I could access the origin (the terrain) of the fear. I found a regression therapist, and while being held in the safety of the therapeutic relationship, I was able to access the early trauma, experience and express the emotions associated with it, and in this way, slowly exorcise these toxic emotions from my body/mind. As a result, I became more effective in my 9/11 Truth activism, more at ease in relationships, and in general, more appreciative of people.
One purpose of telling this personal story is to let readers know that healing is possible. I won’t tell you that healing trauma is easy. It can be very difficult. Each individual must find his or her own healing path, but if you are motivated, success is probable. We are extremely fortunate to have many paths available in this era.
Another purpose is to remind myself and the reader that we cannot talk people out of their intensified fear. It runs too deep. We can only compassionately offer these people, when appropriate, a fact or two that may ameliorate their inordinate fear. Moreover, if we are to have any chance of reaching them, our empathy will be key.
But I would be negligent if I did not share my deepest insight regarding why we humans are so susceptible to fear. After decades of research, Western psychology is gradually accepting the reality of “spiritually transformative experiences (STEs). These are also called “transpersonal experiences” since they take us beyond our identification with our mind and body.140
Along with millions of others, I was fortunate enough to have an STE in which I experienced the unity and divinity of all beings and all things. In this beautiful state, which I experienced as an ultimate truth, an ultimate reality, I realized that, for the first time in my life, I had absolutely no fear. I clearly understood that the origin of all fear (the deepest terrain) is the illusion of separation in which virtually all of us are constantly immersed. This “unity consciousness” or “cosmic consciousness,” and the love and presence we experience when we transcend the illusion of separation, is what we all search for in order to be awakened to the consciousness of wholeness.
The politics of fear
To reiterate, those with power have manipulated others through fear throughout history.
As early as the 15th century, English philosopher Thomas Hobbes warned that fear is an exploitable force, one that could culminate in a concentration of state power. In The Anatomy of Fake News, Nolan Higdon warns that fear of the “other” is a common technique of authoritarian control. For example, he writes:
The Nazis blamed Catholics, communists, the physically challenged, feminists, and liberals. Fear of “others” was often stoked by fake news films that manufactured statistics about undocumented immigrant and Jewish crimes and exaggerated the prevalence of sexual relations between Jewish men and German women, with the implication that the supposed Aryan racial characteristics of the German people would be diluted, corrupted, or destroyed. People whose fears were stirred up by these stories went along with measures that took away Jews’ civil rights and eventually their lives. Those who were ambivalent about treatment of Jews saw their own civil liberties diminished or taken away. Hitler’s propaganda would result in the deaths of eleven million civilians.141
This is a warning to us to be aware of our inclination to fear “others” — people who seem different from ourselves. Especially, we must awaken to our all too human proclivity to believe authorities or friends who tell us that others are diseased, unclean, or dangerous, and our tendency to ostracize and demonize based on such assertions.
A few historical examples illustrate this unfortunate human tendency: A hundred years ago, Jews and Roma in Europe were seen as spreaders of disease. Less than a hundred years ago in the segregated south, Blacks were treated as unclean — they had separate water fountains and bathrooms and had to sit in the back of the bus away from white people. For the last 20 years, Muslims have been demonized by the false flag of 9/11 as potentially dangerous and enemies of freedom and democracy. Hispanic immigrants are accused of being criminals and spreading disease. And today, politicians — from governors to presidents — tell us142 we have a “pandemic of the unvaccinated,” thus blaming those not vaccinated for the spread of SARS-CoV-2, despite clear evidence to the contrary.143
This disinformation and divisive rhetoric from authorities is creating two camps fearful of each other, devolving into civil strife ripe for violence. What could be the motivation of these politicians? They cannot be ignorant of the facts. Even the CDC acknowledges that, when symptomatic, the vaccinated and the unvaccinated transmit this virus equally.144
Fear of the “other” is stoked by authorities to create derision and division. Especially, fear of invisible enemies (unseen but everywhere) such as “sleeper cells of terrorists” and of viruses cause us to accept authoritarian edicts to “keep us safe.” Due to the attacks of 9/11 and the emergence of Covid, civil liberties have been withdrawn to “keep us safe.” Recently, lockdown and mask mandates are to “keep us safe.” Warp-speed censorship is to “keep us safe.” Surely, we understand by now that when people are in a heightened state of fear, unspeakable atrocities can take place. This is the ongoing sordid story of human history.
The 2001 traumas of 9/11 and the anthrax attacks made Americans fearful enough to believe the government’s simplistic explanation that “the terrorists hate us because of our freedoms.” In shock from these horrific attacks, we accepted with little protest the removal of key civil rights such as habeas corpus, the basic right in any democracy that protects citizens from imprisonment without being brought before a court. Local jurisdictions and the Supreme Court have only minimally addressed this fundamental attack on our democratic system.145
The fear and outrage from the 9/11 attacks motivated many to enlist in the military to fight, torture, and kill those thought to be the guilty terrorists, and outraged Americans abused Muslims in our own country.
In 2020 and 2021, governments around the world — through a compliant media — fed their citizens a steady diet of fear-messaging about Covid-19. Media horror stories were given out of context. The U.S. government via the stenographic media did not emphasize that 81 percent of us with Covid would have mild or no symptoms.146 There was little if any mention that those of us with elevated levels of vitamin D3 do much better with Covid-19.147 If noted, it was only in passing and not emphasized.
Most scandalously, we were not informed that most of the “cases” were not cases at all, but the result of false positive results of improperly conducted PCR tests.148
The news was not balanced by mentioning recovery rates in different age groups. The corporate media made no mention of the hopeful research around the world and by independent doctors in the U.S. in which an untold number of lives were saved by the use of prophylactics and early treatments, such as ivermectin and hydroxychloroquine.149 Instead, shockingly, there was a vigorous suppression of this information.150 How many of the hundreds of thousands of deaths either “from” or “with” Covid could have been prevented if this information had been reported to the public?
The media made no mention of the encouraging news that those who recovered from Covid would likely have immunity for life.151 Such immunity extends even to variants since natural immunity responds to the whole virus, whereas vaccine immunity targets only the spike protein. Furthermore, natural immunity brings other natural immune response factors into play.152
Once research became known, why did the media not tell the public that those who were vaccinated had 6.72 times greater chance of becoming infected than those who had acquired natural immunity?153 And once known, why did the media and the government not tell the public that “during natural infection your body is exposed to the entire virus, which includes the spike protein plus the other 4 proteins coded in the SARS-CoV-2 genome”?154 This superior immunity results in a 96.7 percent reduction in reinfection in people who previously had Covid-19, and this effectiveness appears to apply to the continually emerging variants.155
Instead of truth and balance, the corporate media continued promoting fear, egged on by politicians pressuring social media to censor any positive news. I have asked several friends and neighbors, “Have you ever heard of ivermectin?” None had. I asked, “Did you know that hydroxychloroquine is saving lives?” None had heard that there had been fraudulent studies to demonize this drug.156 (Some looked at me askance, probably thinking I must be a Trump supporter!)
Let me emphasize that I am talking about balance here. I am not trying to minimize the fact that some people have very serious cases of Covid, nor the devastating impact on them and their families. Instead, I am documenting how our immature government and media terrorized us with constant reminders of death and adverse reactions to the disease, yet suppressed information that was needed to prevent serious disease. The politicians and the media did not include context and facts that would lend truth to reporting. Such a balanced approach would come from mature authorities treating the population as adults, not children to be manipulated into submission with horror stories.
If we did not grasp that the “terror porn” we consumed was conscious manipulation, the next segment on whistleblowers will make this clear. The SARS-CoV-2 virus did not cause the pandemonium in our world. The fear-based, manipulative response to it did, both from governments and media — and by our human proclivity to buy into that fear messaging.
Fear is the primary strategy for inducing compliance. It has been used in dysfunctional families and dysfunctional countries throughout the ages. But worldwide censorship is key to the global success of those fear-based narratives.
One of my favorite researchers, Irish engineer Ivor Cummins, explains the “Pandemic of Panic: The Root Cause Diagram” in 3 minutes.157 His posts are always a treat!
Whistleblowers on the politics of fear
Laura Dodsworth reveals that whistleblowers in the UK have admitted responsibility for persuading their government to manipulate its citizens through fear. On May 16, 2021, her groundbreaking book, A State of Fear: How the UK Government Weaponised Fear During the Covid-19 Pandemic, was published.158 With the curtain pulled back, we can see an unobstructed view of the unethical use of psychology to terrorize a population into submission to authorities’ edicts of lockdowns and masks. Behavioral scientists within the Scientific Pandemic Influenza Group on Behavior (SPI-B), a subcommittee of the Scientific Advisory Group for Emergencies (SAGE), advised the UK government to use fear to persuade UK citizens to comply to these stringent methods of control.
The heartening news is that some of these scientists have a conscience and subsequently realized their error. In what context did they advise terrorizing the UK population?
On March 16, 2020, a study team from the Imperial College London predicted from their sophisticated modeling that without “control measures” deaths from Covid-19 could be as high as 510,000 in the UK and 2.2 million in the U.S. Dr. Neil Ferguson, the lead author of the study and considered one of the best modelers in the world, also told The New York Times that the potential health impacts of Covid were comparable to the devastating 1918 flu. Fear swept the globe.159
Motivated by their own fear, the behavioral scientists of the SPI-B fervently advised the U.K. government to use manipulative techniques on the public to try to control citizens’ behavior in order to stem these predictions.160 But once they saw that their social-control strategies went too far, and people had become more fearful than they had anticipated, they have shown remorse for their actions. In their own words, as reported by The Telegraph, they admit:
One SPI-B scientist told Ms. Dodsworth: “In March [2020] the Government was very worried about compliance and they thought people wouldn’t want to be locked down. There were discussions about fear being needed to encourage compliance, and decisions were made about how to ramp up the fear. The way we have used fear is dystopian.”
“The use of fear has definitely been ethically questionable. It’s been like a weird experiment. Ultimately, it backfired because people became too scared.”
Another SPI-B member said: “You could call psychology ‘mind control’. That’s what we do . . . clearly we try and go about it in a positive way, but it has been used nefariously in the past.”
One warned that “people use the pandemic to grab power and drive through things that wouldn’t happen otherwise. We have to be very careful about the authoritarianism that is creeping in”.
Another said: “Without a vaccine, psychology is your main weapon. Psychology has had a really good epidemic, actually.”
As well as overt warnings about the danger of the virus, the Government has been accused of feeding the public a non-stop diet of bad news, such as deaths and hospitalisations, without ever putting the figures in context with news of how many people have recovered, or whether daily death tolls are above or below seasonal averages.
Another member of SPI-B said they were “stunned by the weaponisation of behavioural psychology” during the pandemic, and that “psychologists didn’t seem to notice when it stopped being altruistic and became manipulative. They have too much power and it intoxicates them”.
Gavin Morgan, a psychologist on the team, said: “Clearly, using fear as a means of control is not ethical. Using fear smacks of totalitarianism. It’s not an ethical stance for any modern government. By nature I am an optimistic person, but all this has given me a more pessimistic view of people.”
Steve Baker, the deputy chairman of the Covid Recovery Group of Tory MPs, said: “If it is true that the state took the decision to terrify the public to get compliance with rules, that raises extremely serious questions about the type of society we want to become.
“If we’re being really honest, do I fear that Government policy today is playing into the roots of totalitarianism? Yes, of course it is.”161 (Emphases added to the above quotes. Punctuation is consistent with the quotes in The Telegraph.)
Moreover, according to Dodsworth, authorities contradictory recommendations and vague instructions are given out intentionally, to keep us psychologically vulnerable. “When you create a state of confusion, people become ever more reliant on the messaging. Instead of feeling confident about making decisions, they end up waiting for instructions from the Government.”162 She provided the example of Christmas 2020:
“Family Christmases were on, then off, then back on, then off again. You have got someone tightening the screw, then loosening the screw, then tightening it again. It’s like a torture scenario.”163
In the fall of 2021, the UK government is again up to its old tricks to “nudge” the unvaccinated to go ahead and take the jab in order to “save Christmas,” writes Dodsworth. UK business secretary Kwasi Kwarteng announced on television, “I don’t want to reverse back to a situation where we have lockdowns, I don’t think it’s necessary.”164
Not much reading between the lines needed here for the average Joe. With this vague language within the context of blaming the unvaccinated for the pandemic, the authority is letting it be known that if there are more mandated lockdowns, it would be the fault of those who refuse the vaccine. Once again, uncertainty. Once again, pitting one group against another — as is continually done by U.S. authorities and the media — treating the population as would a dysfunctional parent, blaming one child for the punishment of everyone.
According to Dr. Peter Breggin, author of Toxic Psychiatry, “by layering confusion and uncertainty on top of fear, you can bring an individual to a state in which they can no longer think rationally. Once driven into an illogical state, they are easily manipulated.”165
Mixed messages are another way of fostering confusion. For example, we are told by authorities that, without a doubt, people can get infected after vaccination and carry enough virus to transmit the infection, but they also tell us that this is a “pandemic of the unvaccinated,” and if the overwhelming majority of people become vaccinated the virus would be crushed!
Similar weaponized-fear tactics were employed in other countries. For example, leaked documents in Germany provided some of the most egregious plans for terrorizing the population, including children. The documents emphasized that to create the most “shock effect,” the specific effects of the disease must be made clear. For example, graphic descriptions of people, including parents or grandparents, dying an agonizing death gasping for air were depicted, knowing that choking is a primal fear of everyone. Children were to understand that if their parent died, they were to blame for “forgetting to wash their hands after playing.” Ominously, the documents conclude that these tactics would not only overcome the crisis but would be “future-oriented for a new relationship between society and the state.”166
“Nudge theory is the concept in behavioural science which uses insights about our behaviour to ‘nudge’ our decision-making,” says Dodsworth. “Nudges are not mandates: they are subtle suggestions, and they happen without you even being aware.” And who coined this term? Well, harking back to 9/11, he is none other than the infamous promoter of cognitive infiltration, Cass Sunstein!167
Dodsworth writes:
Britain is one of the pioneers in nudge theory. The Behavioural Insights Team (BIT), unofficially known as ‘the Nudge Unit’ . . .is so good at behavioural insights that we export it all over the world. It has run more than 750 projects and in 2019 alone worked in 31 countries [including the U.S.]. Nudge has become a big business and it’s still growing.168
Of course, a special propaganda effort was aimed at smearing Sweden, one of the few countries to refuse drastic lockdowns, mask mandates, and fear porn. Sweden treated its population as mature adults who, for the most part, were trusted to make mature decisions about their health. The behavior scientists must have worried about the effect that Sweden’s success169 would have had on compliance in the UK and elsewhere. (See Part 3 on obeying authority and Part 6 on conformity to better understand this dynamic.)
The SPI-B group was not the only advisory team in the UK. Dodsworth writes that at least 10 different government departments in the UK work with ‘behavioral insights teams’ to manipulate the public.170
I am grateful for these UK whistleblowers for eventually acting on their conscience. They help us recognize that the inordinate fear we felt was carefully manufactured. This awareness can help free us from fear’s grip.
If you were one of the millions of people affected by this premeditated, worldwide fear campaign, if you behaved as prescribed and eventually received the experimental vaccine, I am not saying you made a wrong decision. Whether your decisions are right or wrong is for you alone to decide. I am saying, however, that we all were subjected to perhaps the most pervasive and successful propaganda campaigns I have ever witnessed.
What we can each do now is to contemplate whether we would have preferred to receive all information before making our decisions. We can imagine a government and media that are honest and mature in how they relate to us. We can become more aware of how propaganda can actually be ubiquitous, how unabashedly governments and lapdog media can manipulate, and we can determine to investigate more thoroughly for any future decisions we need to make.
Let’s hope many of us will contemplate these issues and that humanity will become more aware. In an honest world, the revelations in A State of Fear would have been headline news, yet I have heard not one peep in the U.S. corporate media about these whistleblowers!
Again, censorship is key to the success of propaganda.
Social-psychological parallels between 9/11 and the Covid-19 pandemic
Now that we are aware how the public has been pre-meditatively manipulated by fear, I will share some of my observations on the social-psychological parallels of 9/11 and Covid.
I am motivated to share these observations because I want future citizens of the world to know what those of us living in this early twenty-first century intimately experienced — and what it looked like to the observer.
And I want humanity to understand how we allowed our societies to close down more and more — or not, depending on the degree of our resistance to this totalitarian agenda. These two events are contributing to a turning point for humanity. Which way, then, will we turn?
My observations of both events:
- Extreme fear and the need to take action or, in some cases, the physiological reaction of plummeting into dissociation (See Part 16 on Dissociation).
After 9/11 and the related anthrax attacks, U.S. citizens were in a state of shock. Inordinate fear translated to rage against the alleged Islamic terrorists, and “let’s roll” became the war cry to find and kill the enemy.
2020: Citizens around the world become exceedingly fearful of the omnipresent, yet invisible, viral enemy. “We’re all in this together,” becomes the mantra of peer pressure to conform. Panicked people around the world follow lockdown orders, faithfully wear face masks, and eventually line up, excited to get the first experimental vaccines.
We are first told by authorities these mandates will be for just a few weeks to “flatten the curve” of hospitalizations. (Okay. That makes sense.) But the goal posts are continually extended to “protect ourselves and others.”
- Incessant reminders of death.
by Marc Buehler
9/11: Big Media constantly reminded us of death. We all remember the daily images of the Twin Towers being blown to smithereens from top to bottom. And we remember those horrifying TV images of people running for their lives chased by the monstrous dust cloud. As we watched, we knew thousands of people were being murdered before our eyes in those few seconds. This was so traumatic that most of us can remember precisely where we were and what we were doing when we first saw those images.
A week later, anthrax was sent in the mail to several news media offices and to Democratic Senators Patrick Leahy and Tom Daschle. At least 22 victims contracted anthrax, 11 from inhaling the spores and another 11 from absorption through the skin. Five of the inhalation victims died.171 This was a one-two punch traumatizing us further, escalating our fear and sense of being unsafe.
2020: The media constantly feeds us the Covid death count, the predicted number of deaths, and the lingering complications that some people have, called “long Covid.”172
Most of us existentially fear death, but if we have had an early trauma that involved a close encounter with death, we are retraumatized repeatedly by this steady diet of fear porn that is guaranteed to keep us anxiously tuning in to the next media installment.
- Incessant reminders of danger with color-coded threat charts.
9/11: Color-coded threat charts were ever-present in every form of media. They were displayed in airports to remind travelers that lurking terrorists might leave a bomb in an abandoned backpack or suitcase. We were reminded that “sleeper cells” of terrorists could at any moment “get the call” to wreak havoc in our country.
2020: The media dutifully presents color-coded charts warning us that we are “safer at home,” and if we have to emerge for any reason to take precautions to avoid the novel coronavirus.
- Divisive discord.
9/11 and 2020: Strangers, friends, and family members find themselves in heated arguments about both subjects, cutting off communication in many cases.
For example, incensed people call 9/11 Truth activists “un-American,” and treat them as deviants who should leave the country. Family members and friends cut off ties.
In the case of Covid, those who comply with mandates say that those who don’t conform to lockdown and face-mask edicts are selfish and have sociopathic traits.173 The vaccinated believe the unvaccinated to be immoral and dangerous carriers of disease and want to force them to become vaccinated. The shaming, shunning, blaming, and coercing of the unvaccinated by authorities, friends, and family members has reached a crescendo I’ve not before observed in my lifetime. Some of my most progressive and peace loving friends have — as though with the flip of a switch — become authoritarian, angry, and supportive of vaccine mandates, which would force others to receive a vaccine (actually, a genetically engineered drug) that they choose not to take for their own good reasons. I am amazed at how quickly people can turn on their friends and family members, dis-invite them to family holiday gatherings since they are unvaccinated, and do not even attempt civil discourse to try to understand why their friends or family members think the way they do.
There are also cases of the unvaccinated discriminating against the vaccinated, due to reports that they are shedding something unknown that makes them dangerous to those not vaccinated.
Those adhering to mask wearing bully those without masks. In one case I observed, an unmasked person in a public park bullied his masked friend. (I gently intervened.)
Additionally, in video clips we see emotional — and sometimes physical — confrontations between store employees and customers or, worse, between mask-free pedestrians and the police.
Fear is the root of this anger, this scapegoating, this violence, and all atrocities.
- Internal pressure to conform. (See Part 6 demonstrating our stunning proclivity to conform to others’ expectations.)
9/11: As I explained in Part 9 on brain research, most of us would rather be aligned with our community than be in conflict with it. This hardwired proclivity motivates some of us to display our conformity outwardly. We placed American flags on our cars, trucks, and motorcycles, wore U.S. flag pins on our lapels, or donned a stars-and- stripes bandana on our heads to demonstrate our “patriotism.”
2020 and early 2021: We wear masks in hopes of protecting others, out of fear for our own health, and as a signal of our conformity (called by some “virtue signaling”).174 Many masks serve as a fashion statement — some, with stars and stripes, as a sign of our “patriotism”!
And because we want to be in line with the expectations of our community, we accept the experimental vaccine for social, not medical, reasons, such as to be able to return to work, to fly, or because a family member pressures us.
- External pressure to conform.
9/11: For 20 years, the media has called 9/11 skeptics “conspiracy theorists,” “nut cases,” and other shaming pejoratives. We were pressured by the propaganda machine with the platitude, “United we stand,” a meme that took hold across the nation.
2020 and 2021: Authorities tell us that wearing a mask is a way of expressing caring and solidarity with our community. Media resort to shaming people who don’t conform to lockdown and face-mask edicts. Citizens jump on board with the shaming and bullying and voluntarily become “mask police.” The propaganda machine rolls out the platitude, “We’re all in this together.” By 2021, politicians and the echo-chamber media blame and shame, declaring that this is a “pandemic of the unvaccinated.”
A woman working at my local grocer (who also sews masks for others) proudly exclaimed to me, “We’re all in the together. Fighting this virus is just like our cooperation during World War II!”
Apparently, during any crisis peer pressure to accept authorities’ narratives and decrees can become extreme. Those who follow authorities’ edicts can become enraged at those who do not and even accuse them of killing others.
The Covid crisis has caused at least as much fear, emotional discord, and pressure to conform to authorities’ proclamations as 9/11 did — if not more.
The strong, divisive emotions emanating from both the 9/11 and the Covid crises could have been avoided by an honest and mature government and media. I’ll come back to that later.
The psychology of fear and the great mask and lockdown debate
To reiterate, I write my observations because I want people in the future to know what we endured during this time period and what it looked like. (I think of future film makers, for example, and the images they will need to portray this strange time.)
During the lockdown, instead of staying in my house, I went hiking. During these outings, I happily entertained myself by conducting a limited observational survey. In the summer of 2020, as I walked the trail near my home or hiked in the beautiful Colorado mountains at 8,000–to-11,000-foot altitudes, I observed that nine out of ten people who were not wearing masks made eye contact with me and smiled back, each of us acknowledging the joys of walking in nature. On the other hand, nine of ten people with masks averted their eyes and usually didn’t even grunt an acknowledgment. Instead, if they could, they purposely veered around me. One young man hurriedly climbed a boulder on the edge of a precipitous cliff on the side of the path we shared and faced away from me! It’s as though people hoped that looking anywhere but at me would protect them from the virus! At least half of the people I passed wore masks, even if they were solitary hikers.
I (and others) notice that many people wear masks when they are bicycling alone or even driving alone!
In the spring and summer of 2021, when the mask mandates were first lifted in Colorado, I would often be the only person sans mask in stores or the post office. With the advent of the Delta variant, in late summer 2021, I find a majority of people in stores have reverted to wearing masks, either from fear or perhaps anticipating orders from authorities.
The behavior of the mask-wearers speaks volumes about their level of fear. I remind myself of my inordinate fear after 9/11, and my compassion grows for these people. At the same time, I am disheartened to see how many are this fearful and thus vulnerable to manipulation by people in power.
Without question, the lockdowns (quarantining of healthy people) have caused much loss of livelihood, starvation, and suicides around the world — a fact that has not been reported in media.175 But were they also effective in stemming the tide of Covid deaths? Counter- intuitively, the lockdown and mask mandates appear not to have made any difference whatsoever in the trajectory of the disease, in country after country.176
What is the endgame of the constant media fear-mongering, mask and lockdown mandates, censorship, and threats (now manifesting) of required vaccine passports to be able to fly, attend certain events, or even to return to work or school? Surely, some leaders know that masks and lockdowns are ineffective. Others simply may not have looked deeper into the science of these measures and go along to get along, following orders from their superiors. So why maintain totalitarian mandates that make no sense? I hazard a guess that, depending on the authority, the goal is not to control a virus, but to control and manipulate people.
At least one of the goals has become exceedingly obvious: to manipulate people through fear to anxiously accept an experimental Covid vaccine — a vaccine which does not prevent transmission or infection, although (so far) does reduce the prevalence of severe disease.177
Most unnerving to me, though, is that we have no information, whatsoever, for the long-term consequences of this vaccine.
The fervent mask wearers, whom I described above, obviously have not looked at the censured medical doctors and scientists who are found on platforms alternative to YouTube. They simply choose to believe and follow their official authorities who tell us that “the science” supports lockdowns and mask wearing. Yet, I have not heard from these officials where to find this “science.”
At the very least, they have not explained in any depth the science they so cavalierly refer to, nor have they reported even once on (unless to spin and smear) the only randomized controlled trial that demonstrated that preventing coronavirus transmission by surgical masks was statistically insignificant. (More on this trial below.) With the phrase “follow the science,” these authorities are, in essence, saying: “Follow us. Ask no questions. Don’t do your own research. Trust us to keep you safe.” (Please re-read Part 3 on the hazards of blindly believing and obeying authority.)
So, what is the science of mask wearing? Well, don’t ask Dr. Anthony Fauci or you will be shaking your head in amusement when you watch how he can talk from both sides of his mouth!178
So, I delved into this myself. I considered the size of the coronavirus vs. the size of the pores in a N95 mask. The N95 mask pores are 0.3 microns. For comparison, a micron is one millionth of a meter; pollen particles can be 10 microns or larger, while bacteria are often around one micron. SARS-CoV-2, however, has a diameter of .06 – .14 microns. This means that the N95 mask pores are two to five times larger than SARS-CoV-2.
However, some experts consulted by fact checkers say the size comparison is not valid. This is because the viruses attach to water droplets or aerosols that are around 1 micron in diameter. In addition, they say that particles that are smaller than .3 microns move in an erratic motion called “Brownian motion.” So even if the viral particles are smaller than .3 microns, their zig-zagging motion increases the chance they will be snared in the electrostatic charge of the N95 mask.179 Of course, the cloth masks most people wear are much more porous, and they allow aerosols to escape from the edges.
Even though I am suspicious of fact checkers due to their role of often abetting official propaganda narratives, there may be some truth to this analysis, so I cannot come to a firm conclusion yet regarding the virus-vs.-pore-size comparison for N95 masks.
Nonetheless, when I look at studies on mask wearing, I find a different story. At first glance, the studies seem mixed. With a closer look, however, I notice that the studies performed before 2020 demonstrate that masks are ineffective at preventing transmission of influenza viruses.180 Even the N95 masks did not prevent transmission.181
Interestingly, though, most of the studies I’ve seen completed after the beginning of the Covid era favor mask wearing in their conclusions. Why this sudden change? Did N95 masks suddenly, miraculously become capable of stopping viruses? The endnotes contain links to some before- and after-Covid studies, along with questions to consider.
The “Danmask-19 Trial” study in Denmark became a notable exception. Since the advent of Covid, this is the only randomized, controlled trial on mask wearing to test for the prevention of coronavirus transmission.182 The authors found that, statistically, high quality surgical masks are ineffective at preventing transmission of SARS-CoV-2.183 The authors explain the specifics:
[A] published meta-analysis found no statistically significant difference in preventing influenza in health care workers between respirators (N95 [American standard] or FFP2 [European standard]) and surgical face masks. [and that these findings] are compatible with the findings of a review of randomized controlled trials of the efficacy of face masks for prevention (as personal protective equipment) against influenza virus.184
The authors continue:
Our results suggest that the recommendation to wear a surgical mask when outside the home among others did not reduce, at conventional levels of statistical significance, the incidence of SARS-CoV-2 infection in mask wearers in a setting where social distancing and other public health measures were in effect, mask recommendations were not among those measures, and community use of masks was uncommon.185
They warn that communities should not forego other safety measures regardless of the use of masks, and conclude:
While we await additional data to inform mask recommendations, communities must balance the seriousness of COVID-19, uncertainty about the degree of source control [infected people wearing masks] and protective effect [uninfected people wearing masks], and the absence of data suggesting serious adverse effects of masks.186
Why have I never heard Dr. Fauci or the media talk about this Danmask-19 trial? Our authorities instead admonish us that “masks save lives.” Why are journalists not reporting on this controversy? Can you imagine how every media outlet around the world would have jumped on this study, echoing it ad nauseam, had the data demonstrated effectiveness of mask wearing? Why do authorities mandate and recommend mask wearing in spite of this evidence? What’s going on here?
New York University Professor Mark Crispin Miller wanted students to talk about this taboo subject. In his course on propaganda, designed to teach students how to do their own research and think independently, he asked them to review studies on mask wearing to see if they could spot possible propaganda. Astonishingly, he was censured by his administration! 187
We shall see throughout this essay that propaganda cannot survive without its constant companion, censorship.
The connection: 9/11 and Covid-19
A slender book titled The End of America: Letter of Warning to a Young Patriot, written by Naomi Wolf and published in 2007, offers a big-picture look at the process in which relatively open societies close down. Wolf lists the ten steps that take place in any society undergoing this terrible transition. Her wisdom should be read by everyone, not just U.S. citizens. I will share a passage from her book in hopes you will read it and learn from her research:
Most of us have only a faint understanding of how societies open up or close down, become supportive of freedom or ruled by fear. . . . Like every American, I watched the events of September 11, 2001, with horror. Then, like many, I watched the reactions of the administration in power, at first with concern, then with anxiety, and then, occasionally, with shock. I started feeling that there was something familiar about how events, at times, were unfolding. . . .188
But surely, in America, the loss of habeas corpus, the massive warrantless surveillance of all citizens, the use of torture, and other State Crimes Against Democracy (Part 13) were unfortunate results of the 9/11 crisis, and we soon regained our freedoms and democratic principles, right?
Absolutely dead wrong. Nearly two decades later, our officials show no signs of reinstating in full any of these elementary rights.189 Wolf continues:
There are ten steps that are taken in order to close down a democracy or crush a prodemocratic movement, whether by capitalists, communists, or right-wing fascists. These ten steps, together, are more than the sum of their parts. Once all ten have been put in place, each magnifies the power of the others and the whole. Impossible as it may seem, we are seeing each of these ten steps taking hold in the United States today. . . .190
And the ten steps? In every case, they are designed to:
. . . invoke an external threat; develop a paramilitary force; create a secret prison system; surveil ordinary citizens; arbitrarily detain and release them; harass citizens’ groups; target writers, entertainers, and other key individuals for dissenting; intimidate the press; recast dissent as “treason” and criticism as “espionage”; and eventually subvert the rule of law.191
Sound familiar? With evoking threats of terrorism, with secret prison systems of torture and the Guantanomo Bay detention camp, with the loss of habeas corpus, with ubiquitous surveillance, with the imprisonment of Julian Assange for embarrassing the U.S. national security state, with warp-speed censorship, and with the tyrannical lockdowns and vaccine mandates, (as well as other totalitarian reactions to Covid that Kevin Ryan192 enumerates), can there be any doubt that the responses to both 9/11 and the pandemic are closely connected as steps designed to close down our once relatively open society?
“Unfortunately, while it is very difficult to sustain an open society, history shows that it is fairly simple to close one down,” warns Wolf.
Once free speech and a free press are gone, we will have no way to campaign for any civil rights, even for the First Amendment to the Constitution! This is why I consider the current censorship now underway to be the nail in the coffin of a relatively open society — a coffin we can prevent from slamming shut and being buried, if we only have the will.
We must realize that compromising Constitutional principles as a means of addressing a crisis will result in a long-lasting, if not permanent, closing of our society, for which our children and grandchildren will decry and bemoan our lack of foresight.
The inevitable questions arise: Are 9/11 and the pandemic two moves in a long-term strategy to close all societies — a strategy planned and executed by sociopathic and narcissistic elites and world leaders towards a hidden agenda? Are they two separate examples of opportunism — of autocrats taking advantage of two terrorizing events that fortuitously landed in their laps that they are using to further an agenda that benefits themselves? Is one event an orchestrated event and the other an example of opportunism? What would be the hidden agendas? Would one agenda be financial benefits to select groups and individuals? A centralized world government that the planners or opportunists create and control?
Naomi Klein in her 2007 book, The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism, interprets crises as natural phenomena — created by nature or war — that elites use opportunistically to push through unpopular policies to radically privatize the economy for their own benefit. By doing so, they also intend to prevent organic progressive change that would benefit a larger population. In some cases, such as the Iraq War, she admits that the event is orchestrated with the intent to push through unpopular policies.193
Naomi Klein believes that the responses to both the 9/11 and Covid-19 events are examples of “disaster capitalism.”194
Noami Wolf, on the other hand, while not explicitly writing that either of the events were orchestrated, recognizes their political connection:
Though in 2008, I did not explicitly foresee that a medical pandemic would be the vehicle for moving the entire globe into “Step Ten,” I have at various points warned of the dangers of medical crises as vehicles that tyranny can exploit to justify suppressions of civil rights.
Today, a much-hyped medical crisis has taken on the role of being used as a pretext to strip us all of core freedoms, that fears of terrorism did not, despite 20 years of effort, ultimately achieve.195
In essence, she says: “Open your eyes and see the pattern throughout the last decades — and see how both 9/11 and the Covid-hyped medical crises are connected as events used to close down societies.”
I do not have a definitive answer to the question regarding whether the 9/11 attacks and the 2020 pandemic are two orchestrated moves by sociopathic powers to close down relatively free societies. But I easily recall that throughout human history people with inordinate power have often had an insatiable drive for more and more control over whole populations. Think of Genghis Khan, Alexander the Great, Julius Cesar, Hitler and the Nazis, Stalin, Pol Pot. Think of the European empires that conquered and murdered many millions of innocents. These people at the helm of empire building and with an insatiable desire for power are spiritually bankrupt, having no sense of their connection with other people, having little, if any, empathy.
Thus, I have no problem imagining such spiritually bankrupt people in power today with this insatiable desire — and the means — to attempt to control the entire world.
But whatever the answer to the above question, I am grateful to each of these Naomis for bravely speaking out. Each warns, in her own way, about our closing society, and each works for freedom, transparency, and a healthy, open society.
I am confident they would agree that if we are to return to the Constitution and reclaim our republic, we must free ourselves from the fear of questioning anyone and everyone in a position of authority.
Conclusion and Solutions
As I have been writing about the role of the media regarding why good people become silent about 9/11, I never dreamed that before I completed this series, we would be confronted with another crisis that would terrify people worldwide. Indeed, another crisis that reminded people of death, and thus made them capitulate to authorities to accept an even further closing of their societies than did the so-called War on Terror.
I never dreamed that people would be confronted once again by ubiquitous media propaganda and censorship to stifle the voices of credentialed experts with opposing narratives.
I never dreamed that not only would people worldwide accept totalitarian edicts, such as lockdowns that affect their livelihoods and their ability to convene with others but would be herded by their fear into accepting into their bodies an experimental drug for which no information whatsoever is available about potential long-term effects.
Finally, I never dreamed that Philip Zelikow,196 the former executive director of the 9/11 Commission whitewash, would be chosen to lead the COVID Commission Planning Group, based at the University of Virginia’s Miller Center of Public Affairs. The mission of this group is to lay “the groundwork to discover and preserve the lessons of the COVID-19 crisis.”197 Of course, those of us who have recognized the omissions and distortions of the 9/11 Commission198 see preparation for another cover-up and a further closing down of societies.
It did not have to be this way. I easily envision a mature government and media that do not propagate fear about 9/11, or a pandemic, or any crisis. I imagine government officials who tell the full truth and who treat the public like adults. I imagine media that do not accept advertising and donations that have the potential to limit what information they will provide to the public. I envision journalists who genuinely investigate.
I easily imagine mature government officials who do not accept corporate donations (bribes) — say, from the military-industrial complex and the pharmaceutical companies — and who instead serve their constituency.
But I describe maturity which is also authenticity. I describe an honest world, honest authorities, an honest media. I pause to ask myself, “How many people really want an honest world?”
I think many would, but not all. Many of us have become inured to the dishonest world we live in and become confused, disturbed, and angry when we hear challenges to official narratives that we unconsciously suspect may be closer to the truth. We don’t want to feel ungrounded and confused, we don’t want our world turned upside down, we want to be “with” our community rather than in conflict with it (See Part 9 on brain research), so we close our eyes and ears and trust official authorities’ proclamations, which in reality, give us only a shaky sense of safety. We may, nevertheless, feel impelled to forcefully defend these official narratives to keep our worldview from being shattered.
The psychological dynamics at play here are our human tendencies to trust our authorities (See Part 3) and go into denial to avoid disturbing cognitive dissonance (See Part 5). Thus, we become willingly ignorant. And we willingly, albeit unconsciously, continue to live in the unreal worldview crafted for us by authorities and the lapdog (not watchdog) media. In truth, many of us do not want to know truth if it is disturbing! And many of us who would like to know are just too busy putting food on the table for our families. Meanwhile, as these internal dynamics play out, the realpolitik of the external world continues unabated — and this realpolitik is dark indeed.
Censorship, propaganda, and loss of civil rights — hallmarks of authoritarianism — proliferated after 9/11/01. In 2020 – 21 we observe a major worldwide increase in censorship and other authoritarian measures since the appearance of Covid-19.
The lockdowns hardly affected me, a privileged U.S. citizen who quickly recognized the fear-mongering propaganda coming from our digital and legacy media. Instead of being persuaded or forced into a jail-like situation for months on end in a tiny flat, as was the situation for millions across the globe, I cheerfully went hiking in the beautiful Rocky Mountains.
In contrast to my situation, lockdowns were brutal for millions of already poverty-stricken people. Lockdowns in the U.S., Europe, and China, for example, resulted in hundreds of thousands of starvation deaths in third world countries. And lockdowns by third-world countries themselves were disasterous for their own people.199
In the U.S., by the end of 2020, lockdowns had permanently shuttered nearly half of small businesses.200 Even in America, food insecurity increased in 2020 and 2021.201
I must conclude, without hyperbole, that the authoritarian response to this crisis rapidly shifted into a full-fledged totalitarian response, wreaking havoc on millions and causing many more deaths than those from Covid-19.202 I call it a totalitarian response since the individual, even in democratic countries, has had little, if any, recourse to object to these arbitrary and punishing government mandates.
Sweden, on the other hand, had the ability to think and act independently. This social-democratic, Nordic country did not conform to the rest of world’s mandates. Instead, their population was given adequate warnings and suggestions by Anders Tegnell, their chief epidemiologist. This strategy resulted in no more deaths in the long term from Covid than many other European countries and much less damage to the well-being of their citizens.203 Sweden took into consideration the negative effects of lockdowns and mandates on their population as they evolved their strategy, but the country was not arrogant in its analysis. They readily admit their uncertainty and their mistakes. An interview with Tegnell (a fan of the Covid vaccinations, by the way) shows the contrast of his objectivity and careful scientific analysis with the fear-promoting messaging of our UK and U.S. politicians.204
Going against the grain, being a nonconformist, is not easy in any situation. It always takes courage. Please reread Part 6 on conformity to appreciate why Sweden’s resistance to the flawed policies of other nations may hopefully be important in the long term to humanity’s learning from this crisis.
Due to the fear-based messages from government leaders and media, due to the ubiquitous censorship of other experts and scientists, billions of people fell for the most successful propaganda campaign I have witnessed in my lifetime. I cannot disparage them. They were afraid, and they believed the one allowable narrative, which motivated them to comply with government mandates. Few in the general public are media literate to the extent that they would automatically recognize even blatant manipulation of their emotions. This is why the next essay in this series will address how to recognize propaganda. Indeed, this ability may one day be life-saving.
A vibrant and free media are essential to a vibrant and free society and to peace in the world. But censorship and propaganda — two sides of the same coin — are now structurally integrated into most of our media. History has shown that this two-sided coin leads to disaster, so it is up to us to not allow our country (wherever we live) to continue to travel this path to societal ruin.
Disinformation — or fake news — stifles the robust, responsible exchange of ideas and it propagates distrust, discord, and division. Both disinformation and censorship are toxic to truth and a healthy humanity. Thus, irresponsible fake news, whether of the legacy media or the digital media, cannot be addressed sustainably with “warp- speed” authoritarian censorship.
Digital media, while central to our lives, has produced new possibilities for controlling narratives and elections that were unimaginable just a few decades prior. In The Anatomy of Fake News, Nolan Higdon argues:
[T]he fate of democracy hinges upon citizens becoming responsible media consumers and producers. . . . [U]sers need education about the veracity of content, vulnerabilities created by the internet, and how vulnerabilities can be mitigated.205
He then offers a solution:
[C]ritical media literacy education is the most effective solution for countering the pernicious influence of fake news because it empowers users, not fake-news producers.206
Why? Because history shows that suppression of content tends to lead to a rise in demand for that very content!207 Not to mention the totalitarian society that results.
For all media — the legacy broadcast and print media as well as the internet platforms — the most obvious reform needed is antitrust legislation that will break up the massive media monopolies.208 As things stand, most of our politicians do the will of the highest corporate bidders, including the media conglomerates that donate massive contributions to their campaigns. Because most of these self-interested Washington insiders have no incentive to push for media reform, solutions will have to start at the grassroots level.
At a time when centralized control of every system on the planet is taking hold, the opportunity for reform appears bleak. But it is not impossible. Take, for example, the Icelandic parliamentarian, Birgitta Jonsdottir, who confronted head-on the question, “How can we regain democratic government when the mainstream media are completely controlled [by] the corporate oligarchy?”209
In his essay “Searching for Truth,” scientist, Author, and peace activist, John Scales Avery, explains:
Believing that lack of free information was the main cause of the corruption behind Iceland’s 2008 [financial] crisis, Birgitta Jonsdottir persuaded her colleagues in the Althingi [the Icelandic parliament] to pass unanimously a law calling for complete freedom of information in Iceland. She also worked closely with Julian Assange to produce the video “Collateral Murder.” Under Brigitta Jonsdottir’s leadership, Icelandic parliamentarians have passed laws which will make Iceland a safe haven for journalistic freedom. In so doing, they will help to re-establish democratic government throughout the world. 210
Birgitta was not supported by legalized bribes from media and other industries. Her success — Iceland’s success — can be replicated in the U.S., but only if we work to elect people of integrity to office. This means electing people who have track records of resisting corporate bribery and of supporting our protective Bill of Rights.
My reason for writing these essays on the media is to raise awareness of the extent to which censorship and propaganda have pervaded what we’ve been conditioned to believe is our “free press,” and to become more aware of how propaganda and censorship have employed the “politics of fear” to manipulate us.
My final essay on the media will offer guidance on how to recognize propaganda and censorship to help us strive toward media literacy.
Copyright © Frances T. Shure, 2022
Part 24: The Role of the Media — Propaganda: How Do We Recognize It? >
Endnotes
- “Net Neutrality Explained,” NYU Law, January 3, 2018, https://www.law.nyu.edu/news/ideas/christopher-jon-sprigman-net-neutrality-explained.
- “Net Neutrality in the European Union,” Wikipedia, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Net_neutrality_in_the_European_Union. (accessed November 28, 2021)
- Ibid.
- Nilay Patel, “Ajit Pai Just Handed Republicans a Bag of Shit,” The Verge, December 14, 2017, https://www.theverge.com/2017/12/14/16777500/ajit-pai-net-neutrality-republican-politics-whoops.
- “Net Neutrality in the United States,” Wikipedia, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Net_neutrality_in_the_United_States. (accessed November 28, 2021)
- Jeffrey Tucker Destroys the Net Neutrality Propaganda,” Corbett Report Extras, Bitchute, November 27, 2017, 25:34, https://www.bitchute.com/video/sKrVIwUpKLU.
- Ben Norton, “Biden State Media Appointee Advocated Using Propaganda against Americans and ‘Rethinking’ First Amendment,” The Grayzone, November 11, 2020, https://thegrayzone.com/2020/11/11/richard-stengel-propaganda-usagm-biden.
- Ibid.
- Ibid.
- For example, the video of the April 25, 2020, International Conference “Let’s Get Rid of War Virus” on the 75th Anniversary of Italian Liberation and the End of World War II was removed with this comment: “The following content has been identified by the YouTube community as inappropriate or offensive to some audiences.” To determine how offensive it may have been, see this article: Manilio Dinucci, “Giulietto Chiesa on the Front Line Until the End,” Global Research, April 28, 2020, https://www.globalresearch.ca/giulietto-chiesa-front-line-until-end/5711084.
- Brandon Morse, “YouTube Will Suppress Some Controversial Content — Even if It Doesn’t Violate Policies,” The Blaze, August 2, 2017, https://www.theblaze.com/news/2017/08/02/youtube-will-suppress-some-controversial-content-even-if-it-doesnt-violate-policies.
- Jasper Hamill, “Down the ‘Tube: YouTube Quietly Launches New ‘Censorship’ Scheme Designed to ‘Limit’ Access to Videos,” The Sun, September 1, 2017, https://www.thesun.co.uk/tech/4372177/youtube-accused-of-censorship-over-controversial-new-bid-to-limit-access-to-videos.
- Jennifer Elias, “Senate Democrats ask YouTube CEO to remove election misinformation ahead of Georgia runoff,” CNBC, November 24, 2020, https://www.cnbc.com/2020/11/24/senate-democrats-ask-youtube-ceo-to-remove-election-misinformation-.html.
“LIVE: What It’s Like when YouTube Censors Election Content,” Alison Morrow, YouTube, Live streamed December 13, 2020, 52:20, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iCLJkzBQwGg. (accessed December 2, 2021) - “Supporting the 2020 U.S. election,” YouTube Official Blog, December 9, 2020, https://blog.youtube/news-and-events/supporting-the-2020-us-election.
- Tom Parker, “YouTube Bans Videos Alleging ‘Widespread Fraud or Errors’ Changed the 2020 US Presidential Election Outcome,” Reclaim the Net, December 9, 2020, https://reclaimthenet.org/youtube-bans-videos-alleging-widespread-fraud-errors-changed-election-outcome.
- Glenn Greenwald, Greenwald@ggreenwald, Twitter, https://twitter.com/ggreenwald/status/1415791237752360960. (accessed November 28, 2021)
- Glenn Greenwald, “Congress, in a Five-Hour Hearing, Demands Tech CEOs Censor the Internet Even More Aggressively,” March 26, 2021, https://greenwald.substack.com/p/congress-in-a-five-hour-hearing-demands-0cf.
- Joe Lauria, “YouTube Rejects Consortium News Appeal,” Consortium News, February 26, 2021,
https://web.archive.org/web/20210226202221/https://consortiumnews.com/2021/02/26/youtube-rejects-consortium-news-appeal. - Ibid.
- Ron Johnson, “YouTube Cancels the U.S. Senate,” Wall Street Journal, February 2, 2021, https://www.wsj.com/articles/youtube-cancels-the-u-s-senate-11612288061?st=n95xesd8rrvyiat&reflink=article_email_share. See the embedded video in this article at approximately 1:20 minutes.
- Robert Epstein, “Sputnik Exclusive: Research Proves Google Manipulates Millions to Favor Clinton,” Sputnik International, December 9, 2016, https://sputniknews.com/us/201609121045214398-google-clinton-manipulation-election.
- Shane Trejo, “Court Rules That Google Can Legally Manipulate Searches to Influence Political Results,” Big League Politics, March 8, 2020, https://bigleaguepolitics.com/court-rules-that-google-can-legally-manipulate-searches-to-influence-political-results.
- “Search Engine Manipulation Effect,” Wikipedia, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Search_engine_manipulation_effect. (accessed November 28, 2021)
- Elizabeth Woodworth, “Search Engine Manipulation. Google and YouTube Suppress Controversial 9/11 Truth?” Global Research, January 30, 2014, https://www.globalresearch.ca/search-engine-manipulation-google-and-youtube-suppress-911-truth/5352982.
“The Truthseeker 9 11 & Operation Gladio,” RT, YouTube, archived at Internet Archive, June 23, 2016,12:58, https://archive.org/details/TheTruthseeker911OperationGladio. - Ibid
- Ibid.
- Kevin Barrett, “Legacy Media Desperate to Silence Its Competition: In 2013, It Took the NSA to Censor the Internet. Today Censorship Is Normalized and Ubiquitous,” Kevin’s Newsletter, October 7, 2021, https://kevinbarrett.substack.com/p/legacy-media-desperate-to-silence.
- “Facebook Bans Alex Jones and Other Controversial Figures for Hate Speech,” First Amendment Watch at New York University, May 2, 2019, https://firstamendmentwatch.org/facebook-bans-alex-jones-and-other-controversial-figures-for-promoting-hate-speech-and-violence.
- Matt Taibbi, “Meet the Censored: Andre Damon,” TK, November 25, 2020, https://taibbi.substack.com/p/meet-the-censored-andre-damon.
Daisuke Wakabayashi, “As Google Fights Fake News, Voices on the Margins Raise Alarm,” The New York Times, Sept. 26, 2017, https://www.nytimes.com/2017/09/26/technology/google-search-bias- claims.html. - Aaron Maté, “CrowdStrikeOut: Mueller’s Own Report Undercuts Its Core Russia-Meddling Claims,” Real Clear Investigations, July 5, 2019, https://www.realclearinvestigations.com/articles/2019/07/05/crowdstrikeout_muellers_own_report_und ercuts_its_core_russia-meddling_claims.html#!.
- Taibbi, “Meet the Censored.”
- Ibid.
- Ibid.
- “Some Highlights Why We Do What We Do How We Do It,” https://www.aclu.org/about/aclu-history. (accessed November 29, 2021)
- “About Fact Checking on Facebook,” https://www.facebook.com/business/help/2593586717571940?id=67305. (accessed November 29, 2021)
- “9/11 The Toronto Hearings – 2011 (Full Length),” Ahijab, YouTube, September 7, 2012, 5:14:31, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kpiVv8tQdmY.
“Toronto Hearings (Uncut),” (Full, uncut versions of some of the major presentations at the Toronto Hearings), https://911speakout.org/toronto-hearings-uncut. (accessed December 2, 2021) - “Dan Dicks” Wikispooks, https://wikispooks.com/wiki/Dan_Dicks. (accessed November 29, 2021) “Press for Truth BANNED on YouTube,” Press for Truth, July 15, 2020, https://pressfortruth.ca/press-for-truth-banned-on-youtube.
“Press for Truth BANNED on YouTube,” Press for Truth, July 15, 2020, https://pressfortruth.ca/press- for-truth-banned-on-youtube. - Jon Hellevig, “The Oligarch Takeover of the US Media,” Jon Hellevig’s Blog, May 13, 2019, http://blogengine.hellevig.net/post/2019/05/13/The-oligarchy-wields-totalitarian-control-over-the-media-through-just-a-few-corporations.aspx.
Aaron Holmes, “New Records Show Google, Microsoft, and Amazon Have Thousands of Previously Unreported Military and Law Enforcement Contracts,” Business Insider, July 8, 2020, https://www.businessinsider.com/microsoft-google-amazon-pentagon-law-enforcement-contracts-2020-7. - Jeff Nesbit, “Google’s True Origin Partly Lies in CIA and NSA Research Grants for Mass Surveillance,” Quartz, December 8, 2017, https://qz.com/1145669/googles-true-origin-partly-lies-in-cia-and-nsa-research-grants-for-mass-surveillance.
For more detail, see scholar Nafeez Ahmed’s research, Part 1, “How the CIA Made Google,” Medium, January 22, 2015, https://medium.com/insurge-intelligence/how-the-cia-made-google- e836451a959e; and Part 2, “Why Google Made the NSA,” Medium, January 22, 2015, https://medium.com/insurge-intelligence/why-google-made-the-nsa-2a80584c9c1. - Holmes, “New Records Show Google.”
Edward Curtain, “Opening the CIA’s Can of Worms,” Off-Guardian, February 14, 2021, https://off-guardian.org/2021/02/14/opening-the-cias-can-of-worms. - Norman Solomon, “Why Amazon’s Collaboration with the CIA Is So Ominous — and Vulnerable,” Huffington Post, February 20, 2014, https://www.huffpost.com/entry/why-amazons-collaboration_b_4824854.
- Andrew Dunn, “Amazon’s decision to sever ties with Parler might not kill the controversial social media platform,” January 10, 2021, Business Insider, https://www.businessinsider.com/parler-shutdown-by-amazon-might-not-be-fatal-to-the-social-network-2021-1?op=1.
- Soloman, “Why Amazon’s Collaboration with the CIA.”
- John, Koetsier, “Social Censorship: Should Social Media’s Policy Be Free Speech?” Forbes, October 26, 2020, https://www.forbes.com/sites/johnkoetsier/2020/10/25/social-censorship-should-social-medias-policy-be-free-speech/?sh=6bdcc1e1489a.
- Ibid.
- “Why Do Some Countries Censor the Internet?” Open Access Government, February 5, 2019, https://www.openaccessgovernment.org/countries-censor-the-internet/58366.
- The internet contains much disinformation about the attacks of 9/11. The particular scientists and research I refer to here are found at these websites: https://ic911.org, https://www.ae911truth.org, https://scientistsfor911truth.com, https://911speakout.org, and https://richardgage911.org.
- “FLCCC Announces Treatment Protocol for Long Haul COVID-19,” Lyme Disease Association, June 21, 2021, https://lymediseaseassociation.org/covid-19-and-lyme/flccc-announces-treatment-protocol-for-long-haul-covid-19.
“I-RECOVER Management Protocol for Long Haul COVID-19 Syndrome (LHCS),” FLCCC Alliance, https://covid19criticalcare.com/covid-19-protocols/i-recover-protocol. (accessed November 29, 2021)
“The Truth About COVID-19 ‘Long-Haulers,’” drpandatv.weebly.com, November 20, 2020, https://sambentleygraphics.weebly.com/blog/the-truth-about-covid-19-long-haulers.
This article was originally published at Mercola.com with sources cited, but currently is not available. Unfortunately, this website did not include the sources. - “Chronic COVID Treatment Center,” COVID LONG HAULERS, https://covidlonghaulers.com. (accessed November 29, 2021)
- “NY Doctor Proved Everyone Wrong about Hydroxychloroquine,” drpandatv.weebly.com, February 7, 2021, https://sambentleygraphics.weebly.com/blog/ny-doctor-proved-everyone-wrong-about-hydroxychloroquine. This article was first published at Mercola.com under the title “NY Doctor Zelenko Proved Everyone Wrong about Hydroxychloroquine.” Since Dr. Joseph Mercola has not been able to keep his articles on his website, the “Sambentley graphics” website has re-posted some of his articles, but unfortunately, without the sources that Mercola provides. The main point of citing this source is to show that nascent research by Dr. Zelenko suggests that treatment within the first five days of contracting Covid prevents the long-haul Covid syndrome.
- John P. A. Ioannidis, “Infection fatality rate of COVID-19 Inferred from seroprevalence data,” Pub Med, October 14, 2020, https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/33716331.
Jay Bhattacharya, “A Sensible and Compassionate Anti-COVID Strategy,” Imprimis Volume 49, Number 10, Hillsdale College (October 2020), https://imprimis.hillsdale.edu/sensible-compassionate-anti-covid-strategy. - Ibid.
- Dr. Joseph Mercola and Ronnie Cummins, The Truth about COVID-19 (Florida Health Publishing, LLC, 2021) p. 55.
- “CRUCIAL Viral Update Dec 7th – Europe and USA Explained! (Ivor Cummins),” Vigilante Jesus, Bitchute, 22:41, https://www.bitchute.com/video/9niC5zHeIjdD. (accessed December 2, 3031). This video was first published on YouTube as “Crucial Viral
Update – Sept. 8th 2020,” by Ivor Cummins. It was censored by YouTube. - Apoorva Mandavilli, “Your Coronavirus Test Is Positive. Maybe It Shouldn’t Be,” The New York Times, August 29, 2020, https://www.nytimes.com/2020/08/29/health/coronavirus-testing.html.
“PCR: Positive Count Rising,” Thought Crime 7, Bitchute, 6:18, https://www.bitchute.com/video/xLgfRJOCmeTl. (accessed November 30, 2021)
Mercola, ”WHO Finally Admits COVID-19 PCR Test Has a ‘Problem,’”Childrens Health Defense, January 21, 2021, https://childrenshealthdefense.org/defender/who-admits-covid-pcr-test-has-a-problem.
Dr. Joseph Mercola, “COVID-19 Testing Scandal Deepens,” Principia Scientific International, December 18, 2020, https://principia-scientific.com/covid-19-testing-scandal-deepens.
Torsten Engelbrecht and Konstantin Demeter, “COVID19 PCR Tests are Scientifically Meaningless,” Off-Guardian, June 27, 2020, https://off-guardian.org/2020/06/27/covid19-pcr-tests-are-scientifically-meaningless. - I have always been suspicious of the narrative we could contain or exterminate such an infectious virus. Right from the beginning, this campaign seemed, at best, misguided.
- Megan Redshaw, “White House Enlists Social Media Giants to Suppress Vaccine ‘Misinformation,” Children’s Health Defense, February 22, 2021, https://childrenshealthdefense.org/defender/white-house-enlists-social-media-suppress-vaccine-misinformation.
Mark Zuckerberg, “Four Ideas to Regulate the Internet,” Facebook (now Meta), March 30, 2019, https://about.fb.com/news/2019/03/four-ideas-regulate-internet.
Gerrit De Vynck, “YouTube Is Banning Prominent Anti-Vaccine Activists and Blocking All Anti- Vaccine Content,” Washington Post, September 29, 2021, https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2021/09/29/youtube-ban-joseph-mercola. - Kristina Borjesson, “The Whistleblower Newsroom – Dr. Peter McCullough,” Kristina’s Podcast, June 3, 2021, 1:00:36, https://kristinaborjesson.substack.com/p/the-whistleblower-newsroom-dr-peter-25c. This interview was removed from YouTube “for violating YouTube’s Community Guidelines,” which according to YouTube means spreading information that contradicts local health authorities’ or the World Health Organization’s guidance (even if that information is accurate and backed up by research, and even if the information is from a congressional hearing — for an example, see second paragraph of endnote 62). This was my original source that was censored by Youtube: “Dr. Peter McCullough Rebuts AFP ‘Factchecker’ Remi Banet’s Assertion that He Made False Claims,” The Whistleblower Newsroom, April 16, 2021, https://web.archive.org/web/20210416170546/https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pdY-7Scf6qE.
- Fred Guterl, “Dr. Fauci Backed Controversial Wuhan Lab with U.S. Dollars for Risky Coronavirus Research,” Newsweek, April 28, 2020, https://www.newsweek.com/dr-fauci-backed-controversial-wuhan-lab-millions-us-dollars-risky-coronavirus-research-1500741.
- Berkeley Lovelace, Jr., “CDC Study Finds about 78% of People Hospitalized for Covid Were Overweight or Obese,” CNBC, March 8, 2021, https://www.cnbc.com/2021/03/08/covid-cdc-study-finds-roughly-78percent-of-people-hospitalized-were-overweight-or-obese.html.
- Jose Mateus et al, “Selective and Cross-Reactive SARS-CoV-2 T Cell Epitopes in Unexposed Humans,” Science, October 2, 2020, https://www.science.org/doi/full/10.1126/science.abd3871.
- “Ivermectin for COVID-19: Real-Time Meta Analysis of 67 Studies,” July 22, 2024, Version 231, https://ivmmeta.com. This page is continually updated due to ongoing research.
Ron Johnson, “YouTube Cancels the U.S. Senate,” Wall Street Journal, February 2, 2021, https://www.wsj.com/articles/youtube-cancels-the-u-s-senate-11612288061.
Pierre Kory, “Censorship Kills: The Shunning of a COVID Therapeutic,” Real Clear Politics, March 10, 2021, https://www.realclearpolitics.com/articles/2021/03/10/censorship_kills_the_shunning_of_a_covid_therapeutic_145376.html#!. - Lyn Redwood, “New York Times Explains the How But Not the Why Behind Lack of COVID Treatments,” Children’s Health Defense, February 1, 2021, https://childrenshealthdefense.org/defender/new-york-times-explains-lack-covid-treatments.
Kory, “Censorship Kills.”
Meryl Nass, M.D. and Belinda Brown, “Killing the Cure: The Strange War Against Hydroxychloroquine,” Life Site News, February 23, 2021, https://www.lifesitenews.com/opinion/hcq-behe.
Harvey Risch, “FDA Obstruction: Patients Die, While Trump Gets the Blame,” Washington Examiner, October 19, 2020, https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/opinion/fda-obstruction-patients-die-while-trump-gets-the-blame.
Dr. Frank Yap, MD, “Early Treatment of Covid-19: Review of a Tragically Censored Online Physician Resource,” The Medical Advisor, March 16, 2021, https://www.onedaymd.com/2021/03/early-outpatient-treatment-of-covid-19.html.
Note: The next two articles demonstrate the fraudulent campaign to demonize hydroxychloroquine:
Melissa Davey et al, “Surgisphere: Governments and WHO Changed Covid-19 Policy Based On Suspect Data from Tiny US Company,” The Guardian, June 3, 2020, https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/jun/03/covid-19-surgisphere-who-world-health-organization-hydroxychloroquine.
Sara Boseley and Melissa Davey, “Covid-19: Lancet Retracts Paper that Halted Hydroxychloroquine Trials,” The Guardian, June 4, 2020, https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/jun/04/covid-19-lancet- retracts-paper-that-halted-hydroxychloroquine-trials. - “Early Outpatient Treatment an Essential Part of a COVID-19 Solution,” U.S. Senate Committee on Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs, November 19, 2020, https://www.hsgac.senate.gov/hearings/early-outpatient-treatment-an-essential-part-of-a-covid-19-solution.
“Dr. Peter McCullough Blames High Covid Death Toll on Massive Censorship of Effective Treatment Protocol and Says that 85% of Patients Given Multi-Drug Treatment Immediately after Testing Positive Recover with ‘Complete and Durable’ Immunity,” Whistleblower Newsroom, PodBean, April 9, 2021, https://thewhistleblowernewsroom.podbean.com/e/the-whistleblower-newsroom-040921.
“Tens of Thousands of Lives Could Have Been Saved if Research on COVID TreatmentsHadn’t Been Suppressed, Doctors and Economists Say,” Children’s Health Defense, May 13, 2021, https://childrenshealthdefense.org/defender/tens-of-thousands-lives-could-have-been-saved-covid- treatments. - Redwood, “New York Times Explains the How But Not the Why.”
“Emergency Use Authorization of Medical Products and Related Authorities Guidance for Industry and Other Stakeholders,” U.S. Food and Drug Administration, January 2017, https://www.fda.gov/regulatory-information/search-fda-guidance-documents/emergency-use-authorization-medical-products-and-related-authorities. - “Dr. Peter McCullough Blames,” Whistleblower Newsroom, PodBean, April 9, 2021, https://thewhistleblowernewsroom.podbean.com/e/the-whistleblower-newsroom-040921.
- Redwood, “New York Times Explains.”
Note: “For FDA to issue an EUA, there must be no adequate, approved, and available alternative to the candidate product for diagnosing, preventing, or treating the disease or condition.” For this quote, see “B. EUA MEDICAL PRODUCTS: 1. Criteria for issuance, d. No Alternatives” at this site: “Emergency Use Authorization of Medical Products and Related Authorities Guidance for Industry and Other Stakeholders, U.S. Food and Drug Administration, January 2017, https://www.fda.gov/regulatory-information/search-fda-guidance-documents/emergency-use-authorization-medical-products-and-related-authorities. - Risch, “FDA Obstruction: Patients Die.”
- Shiyi Cao et al, “Post-Lockdown SARS-CoV-2 Nucleic Acid Screening in Nearly Ten Million Residents of Wuhan, China,” Nature Communications, November, 20, 2020, https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-020-19802-w.
Nick Murray, “The Myth of Widespread Asymptomatic Transmission,” The Maine Wire, December 31, 2020, https://www.themainewire.com/2020/12/myth-widespread-asymptomatic-transmission.
“Exposing The Lie of Asymptomatic Transmission, Once and For All/By Dr. Mike Yeadon,” Mark Taliano, March 7, 2022, https://marktaliano.net/exposing-the-lie-of-asymptomatic-transmission-once-and-for-all-by-dr-mike-yeadon.
Claude P. Muller, “Do Asymptomatic Carriers of SARS-COV-2 Transmit the Virus?” The Lancet Regional Health – Europe Vol.4, 100082, May 2021, https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lanepe/article/PIIS2666-7762(21)00059-4/fulltext.
Jeremy R. Hammond, “The Big Lie about Asymptomatic Transmission of SARS-CoV-2,” December 5, 2020, https://www.jeremyrhammond.com/2020/12/15/the-big-lie-about-asymptomatic-transmission-of-sars-cov-2.
Note: One study I found shows a higher incidence of asymptomatic spread. However, this study was the result of screening 13 articles. The inaccurate PCR tests were used in all cases for diagnosis. This meta-analysis would not compare to the screening of 10 million people in China. Additionally, more recently, there is some indication that people who are vaccinated may be spreading asymptomatically since the vaccine, so far, prevents more serious symptoms yet allows for transmission. More research is needed for this claim. - Mordechai Sones, “Anthony Fauci: Asymptomatic Transmission Never Drives Outbreaks,” Arutz Sheva7 – Israeli National News, September 9, 2020, https://www.israelnationalnews.com/News/News.aspx/286920. Here is Dr. Anthony Fauci’s January 28, 2020 original statement: “In all the history of respiratory- borne viruses of any type, asymptomatic transmission has never been the driver of outbreaks. The driver of outbreaks is ALWAYS a symptomatic person.”
- “Lockdowns Do Not Control the Coronavirus: The Evidence,” American Institute of Economic Research, December 19, 2020, https://www.aier.org/article/lockdowns-do-not-control-the- coronavirus-the-evidence.
Surjit S Bhalla, “Lockdowns and Closures vs COVID–19: COVID Wins,” November 1, 2020, http://ssbhalla.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/10/Lockdowns-Closures-vs.-COVID19-Covid-Wins-Nov-4.pdf. - “Coronavirus: Health Experts Join Global Anti-Lockdown Movement,” BBC, October 7, 2020, https://www.bbc.com/news/health-54442386.
- “Dr. Peter McCullough Blames,” Whistleblower Newsroom, April 9, 2021, https://thewhistleblowernewsroom.podbean.com/e/the-whistleblower-newsroom-040921.
- Davey et al, “Surgisphere: Governments and WHO Changed.”
- Boseley and Davey, “Covid-19: Lancet Retracts Paper.”
- Elizabeth Woodworth, “Leaked: ‘Deadly’ Hydroxychloroquine (HCQ) to Treat Covid 19: How the World’s Top Medical Journals, The Lancet and NEJM, Were Cynically Exploited by Big Pharma,” Global Research, June 1, 2020, https://www.globalresearch.ca/leaked-deadly-hcq-world-top-medical- journals-lancet-nejm-exploited-big-pharma/5715859.
- Dr. Meryl Nass, “Meryl Nass: Killing the Cure: The Strange War Against Hydroxychloroquine,” Life Site News, February 23, 2021, https://www.lifesitenews.com/opinion/hcq-behe.
- Elizabeth Woodworth, “The Media Sabotage of Hydroxychloroquine Use for COVID-19: Doctors Worldwide Protest the Disaster,” Global Research, June 30, 2020, https://www.globalresearch.ca/media-sabotage-hydroxychloroquine-covid-19-doctors-worldwide- protest-disaster/5717382.
- “Testimony of Pierre Kory, MD, Homeland Security Committee Meeting: Focus on Early Treatment of COVID-19,” December 8, 2020, https://www.hsgac.senate.gov/imo/media/doc/Testimony-Kory- 2020-12-08.pdf.
- “COVID-19 Advice for the Public: Getting Vaccinated,” WHO, English version last updated on December 2023, https://www.who.int/emergencies/diseases/novel-coronavirus-2019/covid-19-vaccines/advice. (accessed September 13, 2024)
- “VAERS COVID Vaccine Data,” Open VAERS, https://www.openvaers.com/covid-data.
- Christopher Rios, “Fully Vaccinated People Can Visit Unvaccinated Family and Friends, but One Household at a Time, CDC Official Says,” CNN, March 23, 2021, https://www.cnn.com/2021/03/22/health/fully-vaccinated-coronavirus-cdc-advice-wellness/index.html.
- Richard Orange, “The Sweden Experiment: How No Lockdowns Led to Better Mental Health, a Healthier Economy and Happier Schoolchildren,” The Telegraph, August 22, 2021, https://www.telegraph.co.uk/world-news/2021/08/22/sweden-experiment-no-lockdowns-led-better-mental-health-healthier.
- “‘We Made a Big Mistake’ — COVID Vaccine Spike Protein Travels From Injection Site, Can Cause Organ Damage,” Children’s Health Defense, June 3, 2021, https://childrenshealthdefense.org/defender/covid-vaccine-spike-protein-travels-from-injection-site-organ-damage.
- “How to Save the World, in Three Easy Steps,” Bret Weinstein’s DARKHORSE, June 9, 2021, Odysee, https://odysee.com/@BretWeinstein:f/how-to-save-the-world,-in-three-easy:0?r=FuWwFotRbicqY9GHyWBqDdTNNHpaTgC9. The presentation of the distribution study referred to begins at about 2:15.
- “Coronavirus: Operation Warp Speed,” U.S. Department of Defense, https://www.defense.gov/Explore/Spotlight/Coronavirus/Operation-Warp-Speed. (accessed November 27, 2021)
- Alice Speri and Sam Biddle, “Zoom Censorship of Palestine Seminars Sparks Fight Over Academic Freedom,” The Intercept, November 14, 2020, https://theintercept.com/2020/11/14/zoom-censorship-leila-khaled-palestine.
- Catherine Shu and Jonathan Shieber, “Facebook, Reddit, Google, LinkedIn, Microsoft, Twitter and YouTube Issue Joint Statement on Misinformation,” Tech Crunch, March 16, 2020, https://techcrunch.com/2020/03/16/facebook-reddit-google-linkedin-microsoft-twitter-and-youtube-issue-joint-statement-on-misinformation.
- Dr. Joseph Mercola, “YouTube CEO Vows to Censor Anyone Speaking Against WHO,” Organic Consumers Organization, May 5, 2020, https://www.organicconsumers.org/news/youtube-ceo-vows-censor-anyone-speaking-against-who. This is a good article to begin research on the escalation of censorship by social media. Update: When I accessed this article in September 2024, Mercola’s name as author and the title were removed.
- Tom Parker, “YouTube Censors Dr. Ron Paul’s Liberty Report after Video Questioning Bill Gates,” Reclaim the Net, April 21, 2021, https://reclaimthenet.org/youtube-censors-ron-paul-liberty-report-bill-gates.
Johnson, “YouTube Cancels,” - Dr. Joseph Mercola, “Twitter Falsely Labels All Mercola Links as Unsafe,” Organic Consumers Organization, June 10, 2020, https://www.organicconsumers.org/news/twitter-falsely-labels-all- mercola-links-unsafe.
- Elizabeth Woodworth, “COVID-19 and the Shadowy ‘Trusted News Initiative’: How it Methodically Censors Top World Public Health Experts Using an Early Warning System,” Global Research, August 13, 2021, https://www.globalresearch.ca/covid-19-shadowy-trusted-news-initiative/5752930.
- Ibid.
- AAPS Video, “Peter McCullough, MD testifies to Texas Senate HHS Committee,” Association of American Physicians and Surgeons. March 11, 2021, YouTube, 9:32, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QAHi3lX3oGM&t=1s. On March 10, 2021, Dr. Peter McCullough reports to the Texas Senate HHS Committee that from studies in McKinney, Texas, and New York City, as many as 85 percent of patients’ lives were saved with the use of early treatments.
- “VAERS COVID Vaccine Adverse Event Report,” Open VAERS, https://openvaers.com/covid-data (accessed December 2, 2021) This website is continually updated as data is received from the Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System, or VAERS.
- Woodworth, “COVID-19 and the Shadowy.”
“Covid is a Global Propaganda Operation,” Asia Pacific Today. Rumble,August 4, 2021, 44:33, https://rumble.com/vkppo0-covid-is-a-global-propaganda-operation.html. - Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., “Before COVID, Gates Planned Social Media Censorship of Vaccine Safety Advocates with Pharma, CDC, Media, China and CIA,” Children’s Health Defense, March 11, 2021, https://childrenshealthdefense.org/defender/gates-planned-social-media-censorship-vaccine-safety.
See transcript of above video at https://childrenshealthdefense.org/wp-content/uploads/Event-201-Pandemic-Exercise-Segment-4-Communications-Discussion-and-Epilogue-Video-bill-gates.pdf. - Kennedy, “Before COVID.”
- Whitney Webb, “US – UK Intel Agencies Declare Cyber War on Independent Media,” Unlimited Hangout, November 11, 2020, https://unlimitedhangout.com/2020/11/reports/us-uk-intel-agencies-declare-cyber-war-on-independent-media.
- Ibid.
- Joseph Mercola, “CDC Petitioned to Stop Lying About Pharma Funds,” Straight Line Logic, November 20, 2019, https://straightlinelogic.com/2019/11/20/cdc-petitioned-to-stop-lying-about-pharma-funds-by-joseph-mercola.
- Webb, “Cyber War.”
- Lisa L. Gill, “Spending on Consumer Drug Ads Skyrockets,” Consumer Reports, January 13, 2019, https://www.consumerreports.org/drug-advertising/spending-on-consumer-drug-ads-skyrockets.
- Tim Schwab, “Journalism’s Gates Keepers,” Columbia Journalism Review, August 21, 2020, https://www.cjr.org/criticism/gates-foundation-journalism-funding.php.
- Alan MacLeod, “Revealed: Documents Show Bill Gates Has Given $319 Million to Media Outlets,” Mint Press News, November 12, 2021, https://www.mintpressnews.com/documents-show-bill-gates-has-given-319-million-to-media-outlets/278943.
- Schwab, “Journalism’s Gates Keepers.”
- Tim Hains, “Bill Gates: “Things Won’t Get Back To Normal Until We Have Gotten A Vaccine Out To The Entire World,” Real Clear Politics, April 5, 2020, https://www.realclearpolitics.com/video/2020/04/05/bill_gates_things_wont_get_back_to_normal_until_we_have_got_a_vaccine.html.
- “Polio Vaccine Causing Polio Outbreaks in Africa, WHO Admits,” Children’s Health Defense, September 3, 2020, https://childrenshealthdefense.org/news/polio-vaccine-causing-polio-outbreaks-in- africa-who-admits.
- Bindu Shajan Perappadan, “Vaccine-Induced Paralysis Calls for Action, Says Study,” The Hindu, August 21, 2018,
Isobel M. Blake et al, “Type 2 Poliovirus Detection after Global Withdrawal of Trivalent Oral Vaccine,” The New England Journal of Medicine, August 30, 2018, https://www.nejm.org/doi/pdf/10.1056/NEJMoa1716677.
Rachana Dhiman et al., “Correlation Between Non-Polio Acute Flaccid Paralysis Rates with Pulse Polio Frequency in India,” International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health, August 15, 2018, https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6121585.
Isobel M. Blake et al, “Type 2 Poliovirus Detection after Global Withdrawal of Trivalent Oral Vaccine,” The New England Journal of Medicine, August 30, 2018, https://www.nejm.org/doi/pdf/10.1056/NEJMoa1716677. - Mordechai Sones, “Lawyers to Sue WHO for ‘Misleading World over COVID-19 Outbreak,’” Arutz Sheva 7 – Israel National News, February 28, 2021, https://www.israelnationalnews.com/News/News.aspx/297626.
- The Mercola article with this quote has disappeared from the internet, but a summary of it can be found in this article: Alicia Cashman, “The Web of Players Trying to Silence Truth,” Principia Scientific International, February 20, 2021, https://principia-scientific.com/the-web-of-players-trying-to-silence-truth. Should the original Mercola article be needed, I have an archived copy.
- “Center for Countering Digital Hate,” Wikipedia, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Center_for_Countering_Digital_Hate. (accessed December 1, 2021)
- See endnote no. 111.
- Naga Pramod, “Children’s Health Defense Sues Facebook and Fact-Checkers for Censoring Its Content,” Reclaim the Net, August 19, 2020, https://reclaimthenet.org/childrens-health-defense-sues-facebook.
- Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., “Critics Must Be Silenced for Billionaires to Keep Profiting from Pandemic,” Children’s Health Defense, February 16, 2021, https://childrenshealthdefense.org/defender/billionaires-profiting-pandemic.
- “An International Message of Hope for Humanity from RFK, Jr.,” Children’s Health Defense, September 26, 2020, https://childrenshealthdefense.org/defender/message-of-hope-for-humanity.
- Jeremy R. Hammond, “eBook Sign up—How Censorship is Redefining Informed Consent as ‘Misinformation,’” Children’s Health Defense, March 16, 2020, https://childrenshealthdefense.org/ebook-sign-up-how-censorship-is-redefining-informed-consent-as-misinformation.
- Sharyl Attkisson, The Smear: How Shady Political Operatives and Fake News Control What You See, What You Think, and How You Vote, (HarperCollins Publishers, 2017) chap. 2.
- Mercola, “Sharyl Attkisson on Media Bias,” The Burning Platform, originally published at Mercola.com on December 6, 2020 and republished on this site on August 28, 2022, https://theburningplatform.com/2022/08/28/sharyl-attkisson-on-media-bias.
- Pam Martens and Russ Martens, “Who’s Behind Prop Or Not’s Blacklist of News Websites,” Wall Street on Parade, February 7, 2016, https://wallstreetonparade.com/2016/12/whos-behind-propornots- blacklist-of-news-websites.
- “Home of the Media Bias Chart,” Ad Fontes Media, https://www.adfontesmedia.com. (accessed November 27, 2021)
- Ben Norton, “Wikipedia Formally Censors The Grayzone as Regime-Change Advocates Monopolize Editing,” The Grayzone, June 10, 2020, https://thegrayzone.com/2020/06/10/wikipedia-formally-censors-the-grayzone-as-regime-change-advocates-monopolize-editing.
- Ibid.
- Megan Redshaw, “WSJ Editorial Board: Facebook Censors Scientific Debate,” Children’s Health Defense, March 9, 2021, https://childrenshealthdefense.org/defender/wsj-facebook-censorship- scientific-debate.
- Cathy Hill, “Who Will Check Facebook’s ‘Fact Checkers?’” The Hill, December 16, 2016, https://thehill.com/blogs/pundits-blog/media/310849-who-will-check-facebooks-fact-checkers.
- Kalev Leetaru, “The Daily Mail Snopes Story and Fact Checking the Fact Checkers,” Forbes, December 22, 2016, https://www.forbes.com/sites/kalevleetaru/2016/12/22/the-daily-mail-snopes- story-and-fact-checking-the-fact-checkers/#18b86d38227f.
- Dr. Joseph Mercola, “New Thought Police NewsGuard Is Owned by Big Pharma,” Organic Consumers Organization, January 24, 2020, https://www.organicconsumers.org/news/new-thought-police-newsguard-owned-big-pharma.
- Schwab, “Journalism’s Gates Keepers.”
“Fake Fact,” Green Med Info, November 12, 2020, https://www.greenmedinfo.com/blog/who-funds-facebook-fact-checkers?
Mercola, “Sharyl Attkisson on Media.” - Recognizing these fake arguments can be tricky and requires careful reading. A good example of conflating key words to make an erroneous point which supports an official narrative is revealed in this article: Jeremy R. Hammond, “Facebook ‘Fact Check’ Lies about PCR Tests and COVID-19 ‘Cases,” Jeremy R. Hammond, November 19, 2020, https://www.jeremyrhammond.com/2020/11/19/facebook-fact-check-lies-about-pcr-tests-and-covid-19-cases.
- “AP FACT CHECK: Fire, not demolition, brought down WTC towers,” AP News, June 13, 2017, https://apnews.com/article/c73885568689484eb30f12bb40b654b2.
Iain Davis, “Not Fact Checkers,” Aletho News, February 28, 2020, https://alethonews.com/2020/07/08/not-fact-checkers. - “WTC7 in Freefall: No Longer Controversial,” DavidChandler911, YouTube, 9:33, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rVCDpL4Ax7I&list=PL206C1F5EDFC83824&t=44s. Also see this same video at https://911speakout.org/david-chandler. (accessed December 2, 2021)
- Leroy Hulsey, Zhili Quan, Feng Xiao, “A Structural Reevaluation of the Collapse of World Trade Center 7,” March 2020, https://files.wtc7report.org/file/public-download/A-Structural-Reevaluation-of-the-Collapse-of-World-Trade-Center-7-March2020.pdf.
- Davis, “Not Fact Checkers.”
- Jack Goldsmith and Andrew Keane Woods, “Internet Speech Will Never Go Back to Normal,” The Atlantic, April 25, 2020, https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2020/04/what-covid-revealed_about-internet/610549.
- Matt Taibbi, “The Inevitable Coronavirus Censorship Crisis is Here,” TK News by Matt Taibbi, April 30, 2020, https://taibbi.substack.com/p/temporary-coronavirus-censorship.
- Caitlin Johnstone, “Why You Should Oppose the Censorship of David Icke (Hint: It’s Got Nothing To Do With Icke),” May 3, 2020, https://caitlinjohnstone.com/2020/05/03/why-you-should-oppose-the-censorship-of-david-icke-hint-its-got-nothing-to-do-with-icke.
- Kevin Ryan, “Is the Coronavirus Scare a Psychological Operation?” Dig Within, June 3, 2020, https://digwithin.net/2020/06/03/coronavirus-scare.
- Charles Eisenstein, “The Coronation,” Charles Eisenstein, March 2020, https://charleseisenstein.org/essays/the-coronation/?_page=5.
- Stanislov Grof, MD, The Holotropic Mind, (HarperCollins, 1993).
Arthur Janov, PhD, Imprints: The Lifelong Effects of the Birth Experience,(Coward-McCann, Inc. 1983).
Barbara Findeisen, Womb Prints: Discover Life’s First Impressions (Arizona Lithographers, 2016). - “Transpersonal Psychology,” Wikipedia, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transpersonal_psychology#Origins. (accessed December 2, 2021)
Stanislav Grof, Wikipedia, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stanislav_Grof. (accessed December 2, 2021) - Nolan Higdon, The Anatomy of Fake News: A Critical News Literacy Education (University of California Press, 2020) 74 – 75.
- A plethora of authoritarian, divisive rhetoric includes the following:
Vice President Kamala Harris’ tweet: “By vaccinating the unvaccinated, increasing our testing and masking, and protecting the vaccinated, we can end this pandemic. That’s exactly what we are committed to doing.” See Brian Flood, “Kamala Harris questioned after announcing steps for ‘protecting the vaccinated’: ‘Doesn’t the vax do that?’” Fox News, September 13, 2021, https://www.foxnews.com/media/harris-vaccine-tweet.
President Joe Biden shames with his divisive rhetoric. See Glenn Greenwald, “An NBA Star and New York’s Governor Show That Liberal COVID Discourse is Devoid of Science,” Glenn Greenwald, September 28, 2021, https://greenwald.substack.com/p/an-nba-star-and-new-yorks-governor-8d1.
Here are the divisive, demeaning, and senseless words (contrary to evidence) of President Joe Biden that Greenwald refers to:
“This is a pandemic of the unvaccinated. And it’s caused by the fact that despite America having an unprecedented and successful vaccination program, despite the fact that for almost five months free vaccines have been available in 80,000 different locations, we still have nearly 80 million Americans who have failed to get the shot. , , , The unvaccinated overcrowd our hospitals, are overrunning the emergency rooms and intensive care units, leaving no room for someone with a heart attack, or pancreitis [pancreatitis], or cancer. We cannot allow these actions to stand in the way of protecting the large majority of Americans who have done their part and want to get back to life as normal.”
[He then announces his Covid-19 Action Plan, which includes (1) the controversial requirement that federal employees or contractors who work with federal employees to be vaccinated, and (2) the controversial requirement that companies with 100 or more employees to mandate Covid vaccinations or submit to weekly Covid tests, under the directive of OSHA (the Occupational Safety and Health Administration).]
Here is the source of President Biden’s words: “Remarks by President Biden on Fighting the COVID-19 Pandemic,” September 09, 2021, https://www.whitehouse.gov/briefing-room/speeches-remarks/2021/09/09/remarks-by-president-biden-on-fighting-the-covid-19-pandem.
A Tweet of Biden’s remark: REPORTER: “How many Americans need to be vaccinated for us to get back to normal?” BIDEN: “97%, 98%. I think we’ll get awful close. But I’m not the scientist. I think one thing is for certain. A quarter of the country can’t go unvaccinated and us not continue to have a problem.” Townhall.com@townhallcom, Twitter, September 27, 2021, https://twitter.com/townhallcom/status/1442539882165981191?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw%7Ctwcamp%5Etweetembed%7Ctwterm%5E1442539882165981191%7Ctwgr%5E%7Ctwcon%5Es1_&ref_url=https%3A%2F%2Fpatriotpulse.net%2Fjoe-biden-just-revealed-the-one-thing-he-will-require-ever.
Colorado Governor Jared Polis toes the party line (as do other Democratic governors): “This remains a pandemic of the unvaccinated and that threatens our freedom – your freedom to receive routine or lifesaving medical care like cancer treatment. Until more unvaccinated people do the right thing to protect themselves and our economy – Coloradans should wear masks, get the booster and get tested if you have symptoms.” See Madelynn Fellet, “Governor Polis Provides Update on COVID-19 Boosters and State Testing Capacity,” KJCTNEWS8, September 28, 2021, https://www.kjct8.com/2021/09/28/governor-polis-provides-update-covid-19-boosters-state-testing-capacity.
And consider this statement from the Colorado governor as he ups the ante by likening unvaccinated people to the delivery system of a deadly missile. This fear-mongering manipulation is laughably transparent, as well as reprehensible: “If you are unvaccinated, a regular trip to the grocery store, a night out to dinner are more dangerous than they have been at any point during this pandemic,” Polis said, according to NBC News. “The delta variant is brutally effective at seeking out the unvaccinated, like a laser-guided missile.” See Kyle Becker, “Dem Governor Signs Executive Order to Turn Away Unvaccinated from Hospitals and Prioritize Treatment to Vaccinated Patients,” Stillness in the Storm: An agent of Conscious Evolution, November 14, 2021, https://stillnessinthestorm.com/2021/11/14/dem-governor-signs-executive-order-to-turn-away-unvaccinated-from-hospitals-and-prioritize-treatment-to-vaccinated-patients/15/33/19/138912/news/stillness-in-the-storm. - S. V. Subramanian and Akhil Kumar “Increases in COVID-19 Are Unrelated to Levels of Vaccination across 68 Countries and 2947 Counties in the United States,” European Journal of Epidemiology, September 9, 2021, https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s10654-021-00808-7. This is a Harvard study.
- “Outbreak of SARS-CoV-2 Infections, Including COVID-19 Vaccine Breakthrough Infections, Associated with Large Public Gatherings — Barnstable County, Massachusetts, July 2021,” CDC, August 6, 2021 / 70(31);1059-1062, https://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/volumes/70/wr/mm7031e2.htm? s_cid=mm7031e2_w.
- Joe Wolverton, II, J.D. “Oxford, Mass., Adopts Anti-NDAA Resolution,” The New American, November 21, 2013, https://thenewamerican.com/oxford-mass-adopts-anti-ndaa-resolution/.
“Rule of Law,” America, The Jesuit Review, July 21, 2008, https://www.americamagazine.org/issue/662/editorial/rule-law.
“Top Ten Abuses of Power Since 9/11,” ACLU, September 6, 2006, https://www.aclu.org/other/top-ten-abuses-power-911. - “Interim Clinical Guidance for Management of Patients with Confirmed Coronavirus Disease (COVID-19),” CDC, https://www.cdc.gov/covid/?CDC_AAref_Val=https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-ncov/hcp/clinical-guidance-management-patients.html. (accessed September 11, 2024)
- “Vitamin D and COVID 19: The Evidence for Prevention and Treatment of Coronavirus (SARS CoV 2),” MedCram – Medical Lectures Explained CLEARLY,” YouTube, 1:00:23, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ha2mLz-Xdpg. (accessed December 2, 2021)
- Kit Knightly, “WHO (finally) admits PCR tests create false positives,” Off-Guardian, December 18, 2020, https://off-guardian.org/2020/12/18/who-finally-admits-pcr-tests-create-false-positives.
Mandavilli, “Your Coronavirus Test.”
Mercola, “WHO Finally Admits COVID-19 PCR Test Has a ‘Problem,’” Children’s Health Defense, January 21,2021, https://childrenshealthdefense.org/defender/who-admits-covid-pcr-test-has-a-problem. - “Ivermectin for COVID-19,” https://ivmmeta.com.
Emma Colton, “Yale Epidemiologist Says Hydroxychloroquine Could Save Up to 100K Lives if Used for Coronavirus,” Washington Examiner, July 22, 2020, https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/news/yale-epidemiologist-says-hydroxychloroquine-could-save-up-to-100k-lives-if-used-for-coronavirus. - “Fight Against Ivermectin Has Begun,” Swiss Policy Research, July, 2022, https://swprs.org/fight-against-ivermectin-begins.
- Turner et al, “SARS-CoV-2 Infection Induces Long-Lived Bone Marrow Plasma Cells in Humans,” Nature, May 24, 2021, https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-021-03647-4.pdf.
David Rosenberg, “Study: People Infected with COVID Are Likely Immune for Life,” Arutz Sheva 7 – Israel National News, May 31, 2012, https://www.israelnationalnews.com/News/News.aspx/307208.
“Could Natural COVID Immunity be better than Vaccinated Immunity?” Medicine with Dr. Moran, YouTube, 9:33, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_vxe9pJRQcs. (accessed September 11, 2024)
AAPS Video, “Peter McCullough, MD testifies to Texas.”
Update in September 2024: While natural immunity gave extremely robust immunity to contacting Covid-19 again, the variant Omicron was different enough from the original strains that people could easily become ill again. This variant was, nonetheless, less virulent. - Dr. Sanchari Sinha Dutta, “Striking Difference Identified Between mRNA Vaccination vs. SARS- CoV-2 Infection Immune Responses,” News Medical Life Sciences, April 22, 2021, https://www.news- medical.net/news/20210422/Striking-difference-identified-between-mRNA-vaccination-vs-SARS-CoV-2-infection-immune-responses.aspx.
- “Could Natural COVID Immunity? Medicine with Dr. Moran.
- Ian Martiszus, “COVID-19 Natural Immunity vs Vaccine Immunity,” cure-hub, June 11, 2021, https://www.cure-hub.com/post/covid-19-natural-infection-vs-vaccine-immunity.
- Ibid.
Nadya Swart, “Natural Immunity vs Covid-19 Vaccine-Immunity – Marc Girardot of PANDA,” BizNews, June 28, 2021, https://www.biznews.com/health/2021/06/28/covid-19-vaccine-immunity. - Davey, “Surgisphere: Governments and WHO.”
Boseley and Davey, “Covid-19: Lancet Retracts Paper.”
Woodworth, “Leaked: ‘Deadly’ Hydroxychloroquine.” - Ivor Cummins, “This Pandemic of Panic – Explained Simply – in 3 Minutes Flat!” https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QsRCmhjtekE. Sorry folks, this humorous video has been censored by YouTube (and I have not found it elsewhere), but information about how your fear is used to control you can be seen in this article:
Dr. Joseph Mercola, “Fear Is Contagious and Used to Control You,” June 18, 2021, https://media.mercola.com/ImageServer/Public/2021/June/PDF/fear-contagious-pdf.pdf. - Laura Dodsworth, “A State of Fear, How the UK Government Weaponized Fear During the COVID-19 Pandemic,” (Pinter and Martin Ltd, 2021).
- David Bernstein, “2.2 Million American Deaths from Covid-19?” The Volokh Conspiracy, March 31, 2020, https://reason.com/volokh/2020/03/31/2-2-million-american-deaths-from-covid-19/.
- Sarah Knapton, “Sage Papers: The Guidance Scientists Offered to Government Ministers,” The Telegraph, May 29, 2020, https://archive.is/Hq1Yl#selection-67.1-67.110.
Sarah Knapton, “Revealed: How the Government Ignored Its Own Coronavirus Experts on the Risks of Reopening Shops and Schools.” The Telegraph, May 29, 2021, https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2020/05/29/revealed-government-ignored-coronavirus-experts-risks-reopening. - Gordon Rayner, “Use of Fear to Control Behaviour in Covid Crisis Was ‘Totalitarian’, Admit Scientists,” The Telegraph, May 14, 2021, https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2021/05/14/scientists-admit-totalitarian-use-fear-control-behaviour-covid.
- Ibid.
- Ibid.
- Laura Dodsworth, “How We Will Be ‘Nudged’ This Winter,” The Telegraph, October 21, 2021, https://www.telegraph.co.uk/health-fitness/mind/will-nudged-winter.
- David DeGraw, “Follow the Science on PSYOPS to Understand the Enslavement of Humanity,” June 23, 2021, https://degraw.substack.com/p/follow-the-science-on-psyops-to-understand.
- Dodsworth, State of Fear, 66 – 67.
- Dodsworth, State of Fear, 58.
- Dodsworth, State of Fear, 59.
- Orange, “The Sweden Experiment.”
Fraser Nelson, “If Sweden’s Covid Strategy Is Such a Disaster, Why Is it Still So Popular?” The Telegraph, August 22, 2021, https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2021/04/15/swedens-covid-strategy-disaster-still-popular/. - Ibid.
Mercola, “Fear Is Contagious,” Mercola, June 18, 2021, https://media.mercola.com/ImageServer/Public/2021/June/PDF/fear-contagious-pdf.pdf. - Ameritrax Investigative Summary, https://www.justice.gov/archive/amerithrax/docs/amx- investigative-summary2.pdf. (accessed December 1, 2021)
See this article comparing the terror from the 9/11 anthrax attacks and the terror of Covid-19: Laurie Garrett, “The Forgotten Biological Terror of 9/11,” Foreign Policy, September 10, 2021, https://foreignpolicy.com/2021/09/10/the-forgotten-biological-terror-of-9-11. - Mercola, “The Truth About COVID-19 ‘Long-Haulers.’”
- Fabiano Koich Miguel et al, “Compliance with Containment Measures to the COVID-19 Pandemic Over Time: Do Antisocial Traits Matter?” Science Direct, January 1, 2021, https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0191886920305377.
- To learn more about the science of mask wearing, see these articles:
“47 Studies Confirm Ineffectiveness of Masks for COVID and 32 More Confirm Their Negative Health Effects,” Life Site News, July 23,2021, https://www.lifesitenews.com/news/47-studies-confirm-inefectiveness-of-masks-for-covid-and-32-more-confirm-their-negative-health-effects.
Here is a PDF of the above cited 47 studies: https://www.lifesitenews.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/07/VARIOUS-FACE-MASK-STUDIES-PROVE-THEIR-INEFFECTIVENESS-PDF.pdf.
Jeremy R. Hammond, “No, the Science on Universal Mask Use Is Not Settled,” Jeremy R. Hammond, September 23, 2020, https://www.jeremyrhammond.com/2020/09/23/science-on-universal-mask-use.
“Should You Wear a Mask When You Exercise Outdoors?” Dr. Mirkin, May 23, 2020, https://www.drmirkin.com/fitness/should-you-wear-a-mask-when-you-exercise-outdoors.html.
“Blaylock: Face Masks Pose Serious Risks to the Healthy,” Technocracy News and Trends, May 11, 2020, https://www.technocracy.news/blaylock-face-masks-pose-serious-risks-to-the-healthy.
Marc Morano, “Landmark Danish Study Finds No Significant Effect For Facemask Wearers,” Climate Depot, November 24, 2020 https://www.climatedepot.com/2020/11/24/landmark-danish-study-finds-no-significant-effect-for-facemask-wearers.
Bundgaard et al, “Effectiveness of Adding a Mask Recommendation to Other Public Health Measures to Prevent SARS-CoV-2 Infection in Danish Mask Wearers – A Randomized Controlled Trial,” Annuls of Internal Medicine, March 2021, https://www.acpjournals.org/doi/10.7326/M20-6817.
For contrast, see the following studies and articles that are proponents for mask wearing. Notice that all of them were published in 2020, after the official policy recommending mask wearing. Why do the earlier studies show limited, if any, effect, in preventing transmission of influenza viruses while these later studies favor mask wearing? Do you see language in these later studies that suggests that their purpose is to support the official policy of mask wearing? Can you determine what funding lies behind these later studies? How do these later pro-mask studies compare to the above studies, especially the “Danmask-19 Trial” study that found that mask wearing did not offer statistically significant protection against infection (immediately above). I do not claim to have answers to these questions but offer them as a way to begin looking critically at scientific studies and articles that turn away from decades of studies that show the ineffectiveness of masks for preventing transmission and that suddenly favor official policies.
Jeremy Howard et al, “Face Masks Against COVID-19: An Evidence Review,” April 10, 2020, https://files.fast.ai/papers/masks_lit_review.pdf.
Kevin P. Fennelly, “Particle Sizes of Infectious Aerosols: Implications for Infection Control,” The Lancet, July 24, 2020, https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lanres/article/PIIS2213-2600(20)30323-4/fulltext#back-bib140. This is a viewpoint that explores droplets and aerosols with mixed reviews on masks, yet as an aside, recommends using them in community settings.
Nina Bai, “Still Confused About Masks? Here’s the Science Behind How Face Masks Prevent Coronavirus,” June 26, 2020, University of California San Francisco, https://www.ucsf.edu/news/2020/06/417906/still-confused-about-masks-heres-science-behind-how-face-masks-prevent.
De Kai et al, “Universal Masking is Urgent in the COVID-19 Pandemic: SEIR and Agent Based Models, Empirical Validation, Policy Recommendations,” April 22, 2020, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2004.13553.pdf.
“How Well Do Face Masks Protect Against Coronavirus?” Mayo Clinic, https://www.mayoclinic.org/diseases-conditions/coronavirus/in-depth/coronavirus-mask/art-20485449. (accessed December 2, 2021)
“Maria Godoy, “Wear Masks To Protect Yourself From The Coronavirus, Not Only Others, CDC Stresses,” NPR, November 11, 2020, https://www.npr.org/sections/health-shots/2020/11/11/933903848/wear-masks-to-protect-yourself-from-the-coronavirus-not-only-others-cdc-stresses.
“Guidance for Wearing Masks – Considerations for Wearing Masks,” CDC, February 18, 2021, https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-ncov/prevent-getting-sick/cloth-face-cover-guidance.html.
Krista Conger, “5 Questions: Stanford Scientists on COVID-19 Mask Guidelines,” Stanford Medicine News Center, June 19, 2020, https://med.stanford.edu/news/all-news/2020/06/stanford-scientists-contribute-to-who-mask-guidelines.html.
Derek K Chu, MD, “Physical Distancing, Face Masks, and Eye Protection to Prevent Person-to-Person Transmission of SARS-CoV-2 and COVID-19: A Systematic Review and Meta-Analysis,” Lancet, June 1, 2020, https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-6736(20)31142-9/fulltext. - Lori Hinnant and Sam Mednick, “Virus-Linked Hunger Tied to 10,000 Child Deaths Each Month,” Washington Post, June 27, 2020, https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/middle_east/virus-linked-hunger-tied-to-10000-child-deaths-each-month/2020/07/27/84d349ca-d059-11ea-826b- cc394d824e35_story.html.
“Megan Redshaw and Beth Giuffre, “COVID’s Deadly Toll on Youth: A Sharp Rise in Suicides,” Children’s Health Defense, February 3, 2021, https://childrenshealthdefense.org/defender/covids-deadly-toll-youth-suicides/?utm_source=salsa&eType=EmailBlastContent&eId=9343239a-899c-422b-b3b8-5f0092eb8e39. - Published Papers and Data on Lockdown Weak Efficacy – and Lockdown Huge Harms,” The Fat Emperor, https://thefatemperor.com/published-papers-and-data-on-lockdown-weak-efficacy-and-lockdown-huge-harms. (Accessed September 13, 2024)
- Jeffrey Morris, “Israeli data: How Can Efficacy vs. Severe Disease Be Strong When 60% of Hospitalized Are Vaccinated?” Covid-19 Data Science, August 17, 2021, https://www.covid-datascience.com/post/israeli-data-how-can-efficacy-vs-severe-disease-be-strong-when-60-of-hospitalized-are-vaccinated.
- See Dr. Anthony’s Fauci’s amusing flip flop in this 2-minute video: JustinHart@justin_hart. Twitter, https://twitter.com/justin_hart/status/1419833290421272580?s=12.
- Eric Litke, “Fact Check: No, N95 Filters Are Not Too Large to Stop COVID-19 Particles,” USA Today, June 11, 2020, https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/factcheck/2020/06/11/fact-check-n-95-filters-not-too-large-stop-covid-19-particles/5343537002/.
- “Featured Review: Physical Interventions to Interrupt or Reduce the Spread of Respiratory Viruses,” Cochrane, November 20, 2020, https://www.cochrane.org/news/featured-review-physical-interventions-interrupt-or-reduce-spread-respiratory-viruses.
- Faisal bin‐Reza et al, “The Use of Masks and Respirators to Prevent Transmission of Influenza: A Systematic Review of the Scientific Evidence,” US National Library of Medicine, National Institute of Health, December 21, 2011, https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5779801.
- Marc Morano, “Landmark Danish Study.”
- Bundgaard et al, “Effectiveness of Adding.”
- Ibid.
- Ibid.
- Ibid.
- “Crackdown on Academic Freedom: Prof Under Attack for Asking Students to Think Independently,” Children’s Health Defense, June 7, 2021, https://childrenshealthdefense.org/defender/academic-freedom-propaganda-mark-crispin-miller.
“IWWH Ep 03: Masking the Truth ~ Mark Crispin Miller,” October 16, 2020, Argusfest. YouTube, 1:19:14, https://web.archive.org/web/20220128144845/https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b5B1sFp4UjA. (accessed January 28, 2022) - Naomi Wolf, The End of America: Letter of Warning to a Young Patriot–A Citizen’s Call to Action (Chelsea Green Publishing, White River Junction, Vermont, 2007), 4–5. Also see an interview of Naomi Wolf on Fox News with Tucker Carlson that demonstrates that current totalitarian government actions are decried by both the political left and right: Yael Halon, “Ex-Clinton adviser Naomi Wolf Warns US Becoming ‘Totalitarian State Before Our Eyes’ Under Biden,” February 22, 2021, Fox News, https://www.foxnews.com/media/naomi-wolf-tucker-clinton-adviser-biden-lockdowns.
- “Top Ten Abuses of Power Since 9/11,” ACLU, September 6, 2006, https://www.aclu.org/other/top-ten-abuses-power-911.
- Wolf, End of America, 11.
- Wolf, End of America, 29.
- Kevin Ryan, “Is the Coronavirus Scare a Psychological Operation?” Dig Within, June 3, 2020, https://digwithin.net/2020/06/03/coronavirus-scare.
- “The Shock Doctrine,” Naomi Klein, https://naomiklein.org/the-shock-doctrine. (accessed November 28, 2021)
“The Shock Doctrine,” Wikipedia, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Shock_Doctrine. (accessed November 28, 2021) - Marie Solis, “Coronavirus Is the Perfect Disaster for ‘Disaster Capitalism,” VICE, March 13, 2020, https://www.vice.com/en/article/5dmqyk/naomi-klein-interview-on-coronavirus-and-disaster-capitalism-shock-doctrine.
- Naomi Wolf, “We’ve Reached ‘Step Ten’ of the 10 Steps to Fascism,” Children’s Health Defense, March 5, 2021, https://childrenshealthdefense.org/defender/naomi-wolf-steps-to-fascism.
- “Philip D. Zelikow,” SourceWatch, https://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php?title=Philip_D._Zelikow. (accessed November 28, 2021)
- Howard Witt, “Broad COVID Commission Planning Group Will Be Based at UVA’s Miller Center,” UVA Today, April 13, 2021. https://news.virginia.edu/content/broad-covid-commission-planning-group-will-be-based-uvas-miller-center.
- David Ray Griffin, The 9/11 Commission Report: Omissions And Distortions (Olive Branch Press, November 30, 2004).
- Ellie Gardey, “Did the Lockdowns in America Kill People in Africa?Starvation Could Be Worse than the Disease,” The American Spectator, July 17, 2020, https://spectator.org/starvation-lockdowns-coronavirus.
Lori Hinnant and Sam Mednick, “Virus-Linked Hunger Tied to 10,000 Child Deaths Each Month,” Washington Post, June 27, 2020, https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/middle_east/virus-linked- hunger-tied-to-10000-child-deaths-each-month/2020/07/27/84d349ca-d059-11ea-826b- cc394d824e35_story.html. - Chuck Castro, “Alignable: 48% of Small Businesses Risk Closing in Q4, New Poll Says,” Alignable, Nov. 25, 2020, https://www.alignable.com/forum/alignable-48-of-small-businesses-risk-closing-for-good-new-poll.
- “The Impact of the Coronavirus on Food Insecurity in 2020 & 2021,” Feeding America, March 2021, https://www.feedingamerica.org/sites/default/files/2021-03/National%20Projections%20Brief_3.9.2021_0.pdf.
- “COVID-Related Hunger Could Kill More People than the Virus,” United Nations Global Compact, https://www.unglobalcompact.org/take-action/20th-anniversary-campaign/covid-related%20hunger-could-kill-more-people-than-the-virus. (accessed November 28, 2021)
Kevin Ryan, “Could the Covid19 Response be More Deadly than the Virus?” Off-Guardian, April 1, 2020, https://off-guardian.org/2020/04/01/could-the-covid19-response-be-more-deadly-than-the-virus.
David Henderson, “890 Thousand Excess Deaths Due to Covid and Lockdowns, Econlib, January 5, 2021, https://www.econlib.org/890-thousand-excess-deaths-due-to-covid-and-lockdowns. - Orange, “The Sweden Experiment.”
- “Dr Anders Tegnell | Full Q&A | Oxford Union Web Series,” Oxford Union, YouTube, March 17, 2021, 48:49, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uBbWpo3gAL8.
- Higdon, The Anatomy of Fake News.”
- Ibid.
- Ibid.
- Craig Aaron and JosephTorres, “Consolidation Won’t Save the Media,” The Guardian, March 26, 2009, https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/cifamerica/2009/mar/26/pelosi-media-consolidation.
- John Scales Avery, “Searching for Truth,” October 22, 2018, http://eacpe.org/app/wp-content/uploads/2018/10/Searching-for-truth-by-John-Scales-Avery.pdf, 209.
- Avery, “Searching for Truth,” 209–210.
Note: Electronic sources in the endnotes have been archived. If they can no longer be found by a search on the Internet, readers desiring a copy may contact Frances Shure using this email address: franshure [at] estreet.com
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