Due to its long track record of disinformation, the US government has no right to tell the American people what the truth is, Kentucky Senator Rand Paul has stated.
During a Senate hearing on Wednesday, Paul grilled Secretary of Homeland Security Alejandro Mayorkas over the ‘Disinformation Governance Board’ his agency is setting up to help social media platforms filter out ‘fake news.’
“Here’s the problem: we can’t even agree what disinformation is,” the Republican Senator pointed out. “You can’t even agree if it was disinformation that the Russians fed information to the Steele dossier.”
He was referring to the controversial and largely dismissed report that relied on info from anonymous sources to allege collusion between the Donald Trump campaign and Moscow ahead of the 2016 presidential election in the US.
“If you can’t agree to that, how are we ever going to come to an agreement on what is disinformation, so that you can police it on social media?” Paul wondered.
“Do you know who the greatest propagator of disinformation in the history of the world is? The US government!” he insisted.
In order to back his claim, the Senator mentioned several examples of false information being deliberately spread by Washington over the past decades.
Among them were the so-called Pentagon Papers, which revealed that the US government had been misinforming the public about the scale of its military operations during the Vietnam War. The documents were officially declassified in 2011, but the media had been reporting on them since 1971.
Paul also mentioned “George W. Bush and the weapons of mass destruction,” referring to American claims that Saddam Hussein’s regime had been in possession of WMD, claims that were used by the US to justify the invasion of Iraq in 2003, but were never confirmed by findings on the grounds.
His other example was the Iran–Contra affair, which saw top US officials secretly organizing the sale of weapons to Iran in violation of an arms embargo between 1981 and 1986 in order to obtain money to fund the Contras insurgent group in Nicaragua.
“I mean, think over all the debates and disputes we’ve had over the last 50 years in our country. We work them out by debating them. We don’t work them out by the government being the arbiter,” the Senator said.
“I want you to have nothing to do with speech… You think the American people are so stupid they need you to tell them what the truth is?” Paul added.
The creation of the Disinformation Governance Board was announced in late April. According to the Department of Homeland Security (DHS), the new body would help counter disinformation, which is being spread by “foreign states such as Russia, China and Iran,” and by human traffickers operating on the US-Mexico border, among others.
The DHS gave assurances that it won’t be targeting US citizens. But critics were quick to nickname the board ‘The Ministry of Truth,’ after a fictional organization from George Orwell’s iconic dystopian novel ‘1984’.
29 YEARS AGO, Soviet defector and KGB operative Yuri Bezmenov, specializing in the fields of Marxist-Leninist propaganda and ideological subversion; warned us about the silent war being waged against America as part of a long term plan to take over and destroy the American system and way of life. Watch this clip in AMAZEMENT as you realize he is describing EXACTLY what’s happening in America today, where by Obama and his gang of Marxist usurpers who now have control of your government are just the culmination of a very long term plan, but are the ones who are about to bring it into fruition.
Bezmenov was born in 1939 in Mytishchi, near Moscow to a high-ranking Soviet Army officer. At the age of seventeen, he entered the Institute of Oriental Languages, a part of the Moscow State University which was under the direct control of the KGB and the Communist Central Committee. In addition to languages, he studied history, literature, and music, and became an expert on Indian culture. During his second year, Bezmenov sought to look like a person from India; his teachers encouraged this because graduates of the school were employed as diplomats, foreign journalists, or spies.[2]
As a Soviet student, he was also required to take compulsory military training in which he was taught how to play “strategic war games” using the maps of foreign countries, as well as how to interrogate prisoners of war.[2]
Social media platforms are aggressively censoring challenges to the dominant narrative on Ukraine, the ruling Democratic Party, the wars in the Middle East and the corporate state.
The ruling class, made up of the traditional elites that run the Republican Party and the Democratic Party, is employing draconian forms of censorship on its right-wing and left-wing critics in a desperate effort to cling to power.
The traditional elites were discredited for pushing through a series of corporate assaults on workers, from deindustrialization to trade deals. They were unable to stem rising inflation, the looming economic crisis and the ecological emergency.
They were incapable of carrying out significant social and political reform to ameliorate widespread suffering and refused to accept responsibility for two decades of military fiascos in the Middle East.
And now they have launched a new and sophisticated McCarthyism. Character assassination. Algorithms. Shadow banning. De-platforming.
Censorship is the last resort of desperate and unpopular regimes. It magically appears to make a crisis go away. It comforts the powerful with the narrative they want to hear, one fed back to them by courtiers in the media, government agencies, think tanks and academia. The problem of Donald Trump is solved by censoring Donald Trump. The problem of left-wing critics, such as myself, is solved by censoring us. The result is a world of make-believe.
“A new and sophisticated McCarthyism. Character assassination. Algorithms. Shadow banning. De-platforming.”
YouTube disappeared six years of my RT show, “On Contact,” although not one episode dealt with Russia. It is not a secret as to why my show vanished. It gave a voice to writers and dissidents, including Noam Chomsky and Cornel West, as well as activists from Extinction Rebellion, Black Lives Matter, third parties and the prison abolitionist movement. It called out the Democratic Party for its subservience to corporate power. It excoriated the crimes of the apartheid state of Israel. It covered Julian Assange in numerous episodes. It gave a voice to military critics, many of them combat veterans, who condemned US war crimes.
It no longer matters how prominent you are or how big a following you have. If you challenge power, you are at risk of being censored. Former British MP George Galloway detailed a similar experience during an April 15 panel organized by Consortium News in which I took part:
“I have been threatened with travel restrictions were I to continue the television broadcast I had been doing for almost an entire decade. I have been stamped by the false label ‘Russian State Media,’ which I never had, by the way, when I was presenting a show on Russian state media. It was only given after I ceased to have a show on Russian state media, ceased because the government made it a crime for me to do so.”
My 417,000 Twitter followers had been gaining a thousand a day, going like a runaway train, then suddenly it hit the buffers when the Elon Musk story emerged. I expressed the view that oligarch that he no doubt is, I prefer Elon Musk to the kings of Saudi Arabia, who it turns out are presently major shareholders in the Twitter company. As soon as I joined that fight, my numbers literally crashed to a halt, with shadow bans and all the rest of it…
All of this is happening before the consequences of the economic crash brought about by Western policy and our misnamed leaders has really hit yet. When economies begin to not just slow down, not just hiccup, not just experience levels of inflation not seen for years, or decades, but becomes a crash, as well it might, there will be even more for the state to suppress, especially any alternative analysis as to how we got here and what we must do to get out of it.
Scott Ritter, a former UN weapons inspector in Iraq and Marine Corp intelligence officer, called out the lie about weapons of mass destruction prior to the U.S. invasion of Iraq in 2003.
Recently, he was banned from Twitter for offering a counter narrative about dozens of killings in the Kyiv western suburb of Bucha. Many of the victims in Bucha were found with gunshot wounds to the head and with their hands tied behind their back. International observers and eyewitnesses have blamed Russia for the killings. Ritter’s alternative analysis, right or wrong, saw him silenced.
Ritter lamented the Twitter ban at the forum:
“It took me three years to get 4,000 followers on Twitter. I thought that was a big deal. Then this Ukraine thing comes up. It exploded. When I got suspended for the first time for questioning the narrative in Bucha my account had just gotten over 14,000. By the time my suspension was lifted I was up to 60,000. By the time they suspended me again I was close to 100,000. It was out of control, which is why I am convinced the algorithm said: You must delete. You must delete. And they did. The excuse they gave was absurd. I was abusive and I was harassing by telling what I thought was the truth.
I don’t have the same insight in the Ukraine I had in Iraq. Iraq, I was on the ground doing the job. But the techniques of observation and evaluation that you are trained as an intelligence officer to apply to any given set apply to Ukraine today. Simply looking at the available data set, you cannot help but draw the conclusion that it was Ukrainian national police, mainly because you have all the elements. You have motive. They don’t like Russian collaborators. How do I know? They said so on their website. You have the commander of the national police ordering his people to shoot people in Bucha on the day in question. You have the evidence. The dead bodies on the street with white armbands carrying Russian food packets. Could I be wrong? Absolutely. Could there be data out there I am not aware of? Absolutely. But it is not there. As an intelligence officer I take the available data. I access the available data. I provide assessments based on that available data. And Twitter found that objectionable.”
Two pivotal incidents contributed to this censorship. The first was the publication of classified documents by Julian Assange and WikiLeaks. The second was the presidential election of Donald Trump. The ruling class was unprepared. The exposure of their war crimes, corruption, callous indifference to the plight of those they ruled and extreme concentration of wealth shredded their credibility. The election of Trump, which they did not expect, made them afraid they would be supplanted. The Republican Party establishment and the Democratic Party establishment joined forces to demand greater and greater censorship from social media.
Jill Stein.
Even marginal critics suddenly became dangerous. They had to be silenced. Dr. Jill Stein, the Green Party presidential candidate in 2016, lost about half her social media following after mysteriously going offline for 12 hours during the campaign. The discredited Steele dossier, paid for by the Hillary Clinton campaign, charged Stein, along with Trump, with being a Russian asset. The Senate Intelligence Committee spent three years investigating Stein, issuing five different reports before exonerating her.
Stein spoke of the threat to freedom of speech during the forum:
“We are in an incredibly perilous moment. It’s not only freedom of the press and freedom of speech, but it is really democracy in all its dimensions that is under threat. There are all these draconian laws now against protest. There are 36 that have been passed that are as bad as a 10-year prison sentence for demonstrating on a sidewalk without a permit. They differ state by state. You need to know the laws in your state if you protest. Drivers have been given license to kill you if you are out in the street in some states as part of a protest.”
The first indication that we were not only being marginalized – one accepts that if you defy established power and practice independent journalism, you will be marginalized – but censored came in November 2016.
The Washington Post building. (Wikimedia Commons/ Daniel X. O’Neil)
Craig Timberg, a technology reporter for TheWashington Post, published a story headlined “Russian propaganda effort helped spread ‘fake news’ during election, experts say.”
It referred to some 200 websites, including Truthdig where I wrote a weekly column, as “routine peddlers of Russian propaganda.”
Unnamed analysts, described as “a collection of researchers with foreign policy, military and technology backgrounds” from the anonymous “organization” PropOrNot, made the charges in the story. PropOrNot’s report drew up “the list” of 200 offending sites that included WikiLeaks,Truthout, Black Agenda Report, Naked Capitalism, Counterpunch, AntiWar.com, LewRockwell.com,ConsortiumNews and the Ron Paul Institute.
All these sites, they said, either wittingly or unwittingly functioned as Russian assets. No evidence was offered for the charges, since of course there was none. The only common denominator was that all were critics of the Democratic Party leadership.
When we challenged the story, PropOrNot tweeted out:
“Awww, wook at all the angwy Putinists, trying to change the subject – they’re so vewwy angwy!!”
We were blacklisted by anonymous trolls who sent out Twitter messages, later deleted, that sounded as if they were written by a gamer living in his parent’s basement.
Timberg did not contact any of us beforehand. He and the paper refused to reveal the identity of those behind PropOrNot. I taught at the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism. If one of my students had turned in Timberg’s story as a class assignment, he or she would have failed.
The established elites desperately needed a narrative to explain the defeat of Hillary Clinton and their own growing unpopularity. Russia fit. Fake news stories, they said, had been planted by Russians in social media to elect Trump. All critics, on the left and the right, became Russian Assets. Then the fun began.
The outliers many of us find repugnant began to disappear. In 2018, Facebook, Apple, YouTube and Spotify deleted the podcasts, pages and channels of conspiracy theorist Alex Jones and his Infowars website from their platforms. The precedent was set. Once they could do it to Jones, they could do it to anyone.
“The outliers many of us find repugnant began to disappear.”
Twitter, Google, Facebook and Youtube used the charge of foreign influence to start employing algorithms and shadow banning to silence critics. Saudi Prince Al Waleed bin Talal Al Saud, chair of the Kingdom Holding Company, which dismissed Elon Musk’s recent offer to buy the social media platform, has a large stake in Twitter. It is hard to find a more despotic regime than Saudi Arabia, or one more hostile to the press, but I digress.
Sites that once attracted tens or hundreds of thousands of followers suddenly saw their numbers nosedive. Google’s “Project Owl,” designed to eradicate “fake news,” employed “algorithmic updates to surface more authoritative content” and downgrade “offensive” material.
Traffic fell for sites such as Alternet by 63 percent, Democracy Now by 36 percent, Common Dreams by 37 percent, Truthout by 25 percent, The Intercept by 19 percent, and Counterpunch by 21 percent. The World Socialist Web site saw its traffic fall by two-thirds. Julian Assange and WikiLeaks were all but erased. Mother Jones editors in 2019 wrote that they suffereda sharp decline in its Facebook audience, which translated to an estimated loss of $600,000 over 18 months.
(Geralt via Wikimedia Commons)
The IT people at Truthdig, where I had a weekly column at the time, found that impressions – specific words such as “imperialism” typed into Google that bring up recent stories including mine – now did not include my stories. Referrals to the site from impressions for my stories fell from over 700,000 to below 200,000 in a 12-month period.
But pushing us to the sidelines was not enough, especially with Democrats’ looming loss of Congress in the midterm elections and Joe Biden’s abysmal poll numbers. Now we must be erased. Dozens of lesser-known sites, writers and videographers are disappearing. Facebook, for example, removed a “No Unite The Right 2-DC” event connected to a page called “Resisters,” appearing to advertise a counter-rally on the anniversary of the violence in Charlottesville, Virginia. Paul Jay, who runs a site calledThe Analysis, ran a video essay on Feb. 7, 2021 called, “A Failed Coup Inside a Failed Coup.” YouTube banned the piece, saying it was “content that advances false claims that widespread fraud, errors, or glitches changed the outcome of the U.S presidential election is not allowed on YouTube.”
Tulsi Gabbard, after posting on March 13 that the U.S. funded bio labs in Ukraine and blaming the Russian invasion of Ukraine on Biden’s foreign policy, said she was shadowbanned on Twitter.
The “Russians with Attitude” podcast account was suspended on Twitter. It covered the information war in Ukraine and “cried foul” on the Ghost of Kiev. Social media platforms have been especially harsh on those questioning Covid policy, blocking websites and forcing users, social media platforms, or online outlets to delete posts.
These sites make billions of dollars by selling our personal information to corporations, advertising agencies and political public relations firms. They know everything about us. We know nothing about them. They cater to our proclivities, fears, habits and prejudices. And they will silence our voices if we do not conform.
Censorship will not halt America’s march towards Christian fascism. Weimar Germany attempted to thwart Nazi fascism by enforcing rigorous hate-speech laws.
In the 1920s, it banned the Nazi party. Nazi leaders, including Joseph Goebbels, were prosecuted for hate speech. Julius Streicher, who ran the virulently anti-Semetic tabloid The Stormer (Der Stürmer), was fired from his teaching post, repeatedly fined and had his newspapers confiscated. He was taken to court numerous times for libel and served a series of jail sentences.
Donald Trump speaking to supporters at the “Save America” rally in Washington, Jan. 6, 2021. (Voice of America, Wikimedia Commons)
But like those serving sentences for the assault on the Capitol on Jan. 6, or like Trump, the persecution of Nazi leaders only enhanced their stature the longer the German ruling class failed to address the economic and social misery.
There are many similarities to the 1930s, including the power of predatory international banks to consolidate wealth into the hands of a few oligarchs and impose punishing austerity measures on the global working class.
“More than anything else, the Nazis were a nationalist protest movement against globalization,” notes Benjamin Carter Hett in The Death of Democracy: Hitler’s Rise to Power and The Downfall of the Weimar Republic.
Shutting down critics in a decayed and corrupt society is equivalent to turning off the oxygen on a seriously ill patient. It hastens mortality rather than delaying or preventing it. The convergence of a looming economic crisis, fear by a bankrupt ruling class that they will soon be banished from power, the growing ecological catastrophe and the inability to thwart self-destructive military adventurism against Russia and China, have set the stage for an American implosion.
Those of us who see it coming, and who desperately seek to prevent it, have become the enemy.
Chris Hedges is a Pulitzer Prize–winning journalist who was a foreign correspondent for 15 years for The New York Times, where he served as the Middle East bureau chief and Balkan bureau chief for the paper. He previously worked overseas for The Dallas Morning News, The Christian Science Monitor and NPR. He is the host of show The Chris Hedges Report.
Author’s Note to Readers: There is now no way left for me to continue to write a weekly column for ScheerPost and produce my weekly television show without your help. The walls are closing in, with startling rapidity, on independent journalism, with the elites, including the Democratic Party elites, clamoring for more and more censorship. Bob Scheer, who runs ScheerPost on a shoestring budget, and I will not waiver in our commitment to independent and honest journalism, and we will never put ScheerPost behind a paywall, charge a subscription for it, sell your data or accept advertising. Please, if you can, sign up atchrishedges.substack.com so I can continue to post my Monday column on ScheerPost and produce my weekly television show, The Chris Hedges Report.
Can't believe we've been watching people lose their social media accounts for posting "misinformation" this whole time only for US officials to come right out and admit that they've been running an active disinformation campaign where they knowingly circulate lies about Russia.
A former executive on British television confirmed that mainstream media (MSM) outlets are prevented from questioning the official government narrative. He also denounced these outlets for being “cheerleaders” for the government instead of upholding the tenets of journalism.
Mark Sharman, former Sky News executive and ITV producer, made these revelations during an interview on “The HighWire.” Citing an example from his homeland, Sharman told program host Del Bigtree that the British Office of Communications (Ofcom) is responsible for keeping television stations in line with what the government wants to hear.
Bigtree played a short clip of the TV executive during his March 20 interview with talk show host Dan Wootton.
“[Ofcom issued] a warning – actually, it’s like a little bulletin – that basically says ‘Do not question the official government line.’ To be fair, [it] said you can have opposition voices on, but … you must intervene if there’s any danger of harmful misinformation,” Sharman said at the time.
“I think that warning affected all broadcasters. Most of the major [ones] followed; only one or two smaller [broadcasters] got caught. One community radio was censored for putting something out. I think it’s created an environment which will lead to the biggest assault on freedom of speech and democracy I’ve known in my lifetime.”
Sharman concluded his interview with Wootton by saying: “I’ve never seen a warning from Ofcom like that, [and] I’ve never seen broadcasters toe the line. Rather than question the government, they became cheerleaders for the government.”
“As I said on the other clip, I’ve never seen an instruction that warns broadcasters not to question government policy. But what’s emerging is not really government policy, it’s worldwide policy,” the erstwhile TV executive told Bigtree. “It’s not a coincidence that every country in the Western world reacted in exactly the same way. Anybody that questions the official line is taken down.” (Related: The fall of the mainstream media and the biggest lies they told in 2021.)
Bigtree: We lose democracy if we lose free news
Bigtree said: “We are under attack, [and] we have lost the free press. The news was considered the fourth branch of government and if we lose a free news system, then we will lose democracy. The news must always be free [and] unaffected by the government, so it can always challenge the government with whatever challenge it wants [and] never beckons to bias or agenda.”
Sharman agreed with “The HighWire” host with regard to the free press being lost.
“It feels to me like free speech and democracy [is going down] with it. We’re in a room – [but] the walls are coming in, the ceiling’s coming down and the floor’s coming up. You’ve got Big Tech on one side and [the] MSM on the other closing us out. Somebody at the world level decides what the answer is, and we’re all prevented from that point on from asking any questions,” Sharman said.
“It’s a very, very dangerous precedent. Who are these people that are deciding what’s information and what’s misinformation? Who are they to dismiss eminent scientists and doctors who question the official narrative and say it’s misinformation? Since when did science stop? We’re losing the ability to debate.”
Sharman pointed to the BBC‘s Trusted News Initiative (TNI) as an example of how the “free” press is no longer free as people know it. According to the TNI website, it seeks to bring together “organizations across media and technology to tackle harmful disinformation in real-time.”
“Bear in mind [that] we have the BBC, which retains a reputation for truth around the world. I’m sorry to say it’s not deserved at the moment. They employ their own disinformation reporter … and they also have the TNI. When you look at that, that’s in partnership with Microsoft and Facebook – all the same people. They wouldn’t have called it the Zuckerberg TNI, would they?”
Visit NewsCartels.com to read more stories about MSM outlets following the government narrative.
Watch the interview between Del Bigtree and Mark Sharman about mainstream media outlets following the official government narrative below.
Yuval Noah Harari, 𝙄𝙣 𝙝𝙞𝙨 𝙤𝙬𝙣 𝙬𝙤𝙧𝙙𝙨… "Are we close the point when we can systematically HACK millions of people meaning, knowing them better than they know themselves ?…We can predict and manipulate their decisions better than they can…." pic.twitter.com/jHpa68MMBx
So we can put sanctions on the oligarchs in Russia but apparently we can never put sanctions on the oligarchs in the US who underpay workers, steal time, treat employees like garbage and engage in price gouging while calling it "inflation".
The lion’s share of propaganda goes not toward convincing us to accept new agendas of the powerful, but toward keeping us entranced in the status quo dream world which enables the powerful to have power in the first place. Toward normalizing status quo systems and training us to shape ourselves to fit into them like neat little cogs in a well-oiled machine.
And it’s all a lie. A dream world, made entirely of narrative, constructed by the powerful for the benefit of the powerful. Things as intimate as the thoughts in our heads and the movement of our interest and attention are controlled and dominated with iron-fisted force, all for the benefit of some stupid made-up games about imaginary money and fictional authority.
Propaganda isn’t just about manufacturing consent for wars and ridiculous governmental measures we’d never normally accept. That’s what most people think of when they hear that word, but there’s so very, very much more to it than that.
The lion’s share of propaganda goes not toward convincing us to accept new agendas of the powerful, but toward keeping us entranced in the status quo dream world which enables the powerful to have power in the first place. Toward normalizing status quo systems and training us to shape ourselves to fit into them like neat little cogs in a well-oiled machine.
And it’s not even a grand, monolithic conspiracy in most cases. The giant corporations who indoctrinate us with their advertisements, their Hollywood movies and shows, their apps, their websites, and their news media are all naturally incentivized to point us further and further into delusion by the fact that they benefit from the status quo systems which have elevated them to wealth.
So day in and day out we are presented with media which train us what to value, where to place our interest and attention, what success looks like, and how a normal human behaves on this planet. And it always aligns perfectly with the interests of the rich and powerful.
They don’t just teach us what to believe. They teach us who we are. They give us the frameworks upon which we cast our ambitions and evaluate our success, and we build psychological identities out of those constructs. I am a businessman. I am unemployed. My life is about making money. My life is about disappointing people. I am a success. I am a failure. They invent the test of our adequacy, and they invent the system by which we are graded on that test.
These artificial constructs take up such vast portions of our personal psychology that people will live their entire lives completely enslaved to them, making them their entire focus. This enslavement is so pervasive that people will often even take their own lives based on what those made-up constructs tell them about who they are and what they’re worth.
And it’s all a lie. A dream world, made entirely of narrative, constructed by the powerful for the benefit of the powerful. Things as intimate as the thoughts in our heads and the movement of our interest and attention are controlled and dominated with iron-fisted force, all for the benefit of some stupid made-up games about imaginary money and fictional authority.
So most of us sleepwalk through life chasing make-believe goals and fleeing artificially constructed demons. Too preoccupied with the illusion to look up and notice the thunderous majesty of life as it really is, and usually too confused to truly perceive it even on those rare occasions when we snap out of the trance for a moment to make an effort.
Untangling yourself from this dream world isn’t easy. It takes time. It takes work. It takes a deep, sustained curiosity about what’s really going on underneath all the muddled mental chatter, about what life truly is underneath all the stories we’ve been told about what life is, about who we truly are underneath all the stories we’ve been told about who we are.
The difference between what we’ve been told and what we find over the course of this investigation is the difference between dream and waking life. The real world is as different from the status quo narrative about the world as it is from any other work of fiction. The two things really could not be any more different.
And the good news is that just as your false view of yourself and your world shaped your human expression in the service of the powerful, the rolling back of that mind fog shapes your human expression into something else entirely. Something grounded in reality. Something authentic. Something primal. Something that exists not for the benefit of some faceless oligarchic empire, but for the same reason the grass grows and the galaxies spin in the cosmos.
And that’s what humanity looks like on the other side of this awkward transition phase that our species is going through at this adolescent point in its development. Free from illusion. In harmony with the real. Enslaved to nobody. Striding clear-eyed into the mystery of what’s to come.
Fact-checking is one part of the campaign to control what you see online, and therefore what you think and how you perceive reality
Investigative journalist Sharyl Attkisson explains how virtually everything you see and hear online has been co-opted, or taken over to serve a greater agenda
Instead of real journalists and reporters, the media is infiltrated with propagandists who dictate what’s “fake news” and what’s not
The public is being manipulated to want their information censored by third-party “fact”-checkers, which were introduced as a tool to confuse and control the public further
“Conspiracy theory”, “debunked”, “quackery” and “antivaccine” are examples of terms that are being used as propaganda tools; if you hear them, it should make you dig deeper for the truth
Those who rely solely on the internet for their information are at serious risk of being controlled; you can fight back by doing your own research, trusting your cognitive dissonance and using your common sense
*
Prior to 2015 or 2016, you could still read what you wanted online without much interference. This has since changed, as propagandists have infiltrated the media and, along with other major players, like Big Tech and government, set out to control information. Fact-checking — a once-obscure term that’s since gone mainstream — is one part of the campaign to control what you see online, and therefore what you think and how you perceive reality — but it’s all a ruse.
Speaking with Jan Jekielek, The Epoch Times senior editor and host of the show “American Thought Leaders,” investigative journalist Sharyl Attkisson explains how virtually everything you see and hear online has been co-opted, or taken over to serve a greater agenda:1
“One has to understand that nearly every mode of information has been co-opted, if it can be co-opted by some group. Fact checks are no different either, they’ve been coopted in many instances or created for the purpose of distributing narratives and propaganda.
And your common sense is accurate when it tells you that the way they chose this fact check and how they decided to word it so they could say this thing is not true when at its heart it really is true, but the message they’re trying to send is that you shouldn’t believe it, your common sense is right.
That’s been created as part of a propaganda effort by somebody, somewhere, as part of a narrative to distribute to the public so virtually every piece of information that can be co-opted has been.”
The Information Landscape Is Being Controlled
Attkisson calls out several common online sources that are heavily manipulated — Wikipedia, Snopes and most “fact” checkers to name a few, along with HealthFeedback.org, which is a fake science group used by Facebook and other Big Tech companies to debunk science that is actually true.
Fact-checkers are often referred to as scientists, but this, too, is “part of a very well-funded, well-organized landscape that dictates and slants the information they want us to have.” While there have always been efforts to shape the information being given out by the media, it used to be that news reporters would push back against organizations to ensure the public had the other side of the story.
Beginning in the early 2000s, Attkisson noted a shift from efforts to simply shape information to those that attempt to keep certain information from being reported at all. This was particularly true among the pharmaceutical companies she was covering at that time. Attkisson described “efforts by these large global PR firms that have been hired by the pharmaceutical industry, by government partners that work with the pharmaceutical industry, to keep the story from being reported at all.”2
Now, suppressing and censoring information that those in charge don’t want to be heard is really common. Attkisson believes the practice really took off in 2015 to 2016, “with Donald Trump proving to be a unique danger perceived by both Democrats and Republicans, and by that I mean by the interests that support and pay for them to be in office and make certain decisions.”3
With a wild card in office, a campaign was organized that exploited a media that was already conflicted and less apt to report what was actually going on. “This all dovetailed together to create this crazy information landscape we have today,” she said. Instead of journalists seeking to uncover the truth, we have “writers seeking to spread whatever establishment scientists or politicians want them to say, uncritically and at the expense, oftentimes, of accuracy.”
Now, instead of real journalists and reporters, the media is infiltrated with propagandists who dictate what’s “fake news” and what’s not. Many believe that fake news is a product of Trump, but Big Tech was brought into the campaign early on. A lobby campaign by behind-the-scenes propagandists met with Facebook and said you’ve got to start censoring and “fact” checking information, Attkisson said.
The term “fake news” was popularized after Trump was elected, but it actually got its start before that — it was an invention of political activist website First Draft News, which is partially funded by Google.4
Inviting Propagandists Into the Newsroom
We’re in the midst of an information war where it’s difficult to tell truth from fiction or lies. Journalists are no longer the watchdogs; instead, they take information from obviously conflicted sources and then try to convince the public to believe that particular viewpoint. Other information that’s in conflict is censored or “debunked.”
It’s an unusual time in history where efforts are even underway to manipulate the public to want their information censored and appreciate third-party “fact”-checkers, which were introduced as a tool to confuse and manipulate the public further.5
Yet, when you only hear one side of the story, and you can’t access other information to the contrary, it’s nearly impossible to uncover the truth — and that’s precisely the point. Is this all just a matter of reporters not knowing how to think critically and ask the right questions, or believing that they’re doing the right thing?
Attkisson states that it goes much deeper. A lot of propagandists have become part of the media, and while there used to be a firewall between reporters and the people they reported on, “that’s long gone.” She says:6
“We’ve not just invited them to influence what we report, but we’ve hired them, not just as pundits and analysts but they are reporters. They are editorial presences within our newsrooms. Now we are one and the same.
It’s hard to say that there’s a distinctive difference in many instances between the people trying to get out a message and the messengers in the media who should be doing a more independent job of reporting accurately.”
The COVID Misinformation Campaign
In early 2020, as the pandemic first started brewing, Attkisson talked to everyone she could, including scientists with the government and outside the government. “Pretty quickly, I could see that certain things that were being said publicly were bearing out as not true, and certain things that other scientists were telling me privately rang true, and in hindsight have actually been proven to be true.”7
Early on, quite a few scientists she talked to were questioning the advice being given by government scientists, including Dr. Anthony Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases and lead spokesperson for the president’s COVID response. She asked them if they should say something and speak out about their concerns, but they all came back with the same response:8
“They said they dared not speak out for fear of being controversialized and for fear of being called coronavirus deniers, because that phrase was starting to be used in the media. And secondly, they feared contradicting Dr. Fauci, who they said had been kind of lionized or canonized in the press for reasons that they couldn’t understand, because they really didn’t think that his guidance that he was giving publicly was the right guidance.”
Certainly, those scientists’ opinions deserved to be heard, but the fear of speaking out silenced them. They feared losing their grants, as most grants for research are funded by the government. If the government doesn’t like what you say or do, you can get fired or never get a grant again, ending your career and threatening your very livelihood.
“That started to strike me as, this is a really dangerous environment, when esteemed scientists who have valuable information and opinions are afraid to give them, and instead we’re hearing a party line that many of them disagree with but won’t say so,” Attkisson said.9
She mentioned the controversial U.S. government funding of gain-of-function research in China, and the notion that SARS-CoV-2 could have come from a Chinese laboratory — both were glaring issues that no one would talk about.
“These are the kinds of things early on that were sort of a red flag to me that says somebody’s trying to shape the information,” she continued. “They’re using reporters to do it. Public health figures are involved in some instances and that makes me want to know what’s really behind it.”10
‘Conspiracy Theory’ Was Devised by the CIA
The term “conspiracy theory” is now used to dismiss narratives that go against the grain. According to Attkisson, this is intentional, as the term itself was devised by the CIA as a response to theories about the assassination of JFK.
“It was shown in documents that there was a suggestion that agents go out and talk to reporters about these things as conspiracy theories — and again, common sense should tell you, as it does me, I’m married to a former law enforcement official who has said to me many times, you know the conspiracy theory phrase in its use doesn’t make sense. Nearly everything is a conspiracy.”11
Anything that involves two or more people is technically a conspiracy, but now when people hear the term, they’re conditioned to think it’s false. “That’s designed to pluck this little part of your brain that says, ‘well that thing’s not true.’” When Attkisson hears the term, however, she thinks that information may well be true. “If somebody’s trying to debunk it, it usually means a powerful interest is behind it and it makes me want to go search for more information on that thing.”
The term “conspiracy theory” has lost meaning now because it’s used so much. “Debunked”, “quackery” and “antivaccine” are all terms that are similarly being used as propaganda tools. “There’s a whole cast of propaganda phrases that I’ve outlined that are cues. When you hear them, they should make you think, ‘I need to find out more about it,’” Attkisson says.
Fact Checkers Pounce on Accurate BMJ Investigation
In another example of the lengths that fact-checkers will go to discredit a story — even if it’s true — take an article published in the BMJ, titled, “COVID-19: Researchers blows the whistle on data integrity issues in Pfizer’s vaccine trial.”12 Written by investigative journalist Paul D. Thacker, it details a series of problems with laboratory management and quality control checks by Pfizer subcontractor Ventavia Research Group, which was testing Pfizer’s COVID-19 vaccine.
According to a regional director formerly employed by Ventavia, she witnessed falsified data, unblinded patients, inadequately trained vaccinators and lack of proper follow-up on adverse events that were reported. After notifying Ventavia about her concerns, repeatedly, she made a complaint to the U.S. Food and Drug Administration — and was fired the same day.13
Soon after Thacker’s investigative piece was published in BMJ, it was “fact checked” by a group called Lead Stories, which referred to the investigation as a “hoax alert” in the related URL. Along with “correcting” statements that Thacker did not make, Lead Stories disparaged the investigation for “missing context,” but as investigative reporter Matt Taibbi explained, “‘Missing context’ has become a term to disparage reporting that is true but inconvenient.”14
Lead Stories took further issue with the BMJ investigation because it was shared by people such as Dr. Robert Malone and Robert F. Kennedy, who themselves have been targeted by fake fact checkers. Taibbi added:15
“The real issue with Thacker’s piece is that it went viral and was retweeted by the wrong people. As Lead Stories noted with marked disapproval, some of those sharers included the likes of Dr. Robert Malone and Robert F. Kennedy. To them, this clearly showed that the article was bad somehow, but the problem was, there was nothing to say the story was untrue.”
Thacker also called the “fact check” against his BMJ investigation “insane,” telling Taibbi:16
“Here’s what they do. They’re not fact checking facts. What they’re doing is checking narratives. They can’t say that your facts are wrong, so it’s like, ‘Aha, there’s no context.’ Or, ‘It’s misleading.’ But that’s not a fact check. You just don’t like the story.”
Reality Is Being Altered in Real Time
As it stands, information is being changed in real time to meet the common agenda. This includes definitions in dictionaries and on official government websites. Examples of definitions that have been changed recently include those for pandemic, herd immunity, vaccines and anti-vaxxer. Attkisson reiterates:17
“Virtually every form of information and sourcing that can be co-opted has been. That includes the dictionary definitions; that includes everything because these are important ways to influence thought. Language is very powerful. People don’t want to be affiliated with certain names and labels.
It reminds me of ‘1984,’ the George Orwell story about the futuristic society, under which history was being rewritten in real time to jive with the version that the government wanted or the party wanted it to be. Definitions now are being rewritten and changed in real time to fit with the vision that the establishment wants people to think.”
For now, you can still use the Internet Archive, commonly known as Archive.org and IA, as a historical archive. In addition to digitally hosting more than 1.4 million books and other documents, Archive.org acts as a historical vault for the Internet, preserving cached versions of websites that are no longer accessible to the public.18
Archive.org’s Wayback machine preserves digital information that has been removed or deleted, whether intentionally or for other reasons, but it, too, could one day disappear. Attkisson says:19
“It’s been a fascinating way to prove the effort to change our perception of how things are and the reality and what we thought we remembered from the other day, because all we really have now is the electronic record, by and large, and if that can be manipulated, there could be a time when — if they get rid of the Wayback machine, for example — that we can’t ever prove that anything was any different.”
Attkisson is maintaining a running list of things the media or public policy got wrong during the pandemic, which can still be verified using the Wayback machine, but which were not acknowledged for being wrong or corrected by the press. They include:20
You Can Be Controlled if You Live Inside the Box
Attkisson references a whole generation of people who live inside the box, meaning the internet. Those who rely solely on the internet for their information are at serious risk of being controlled. She explains:22
“They didn’t know a time when information was to be gathered elsewhere by looking around and seeing what you hear, and seeing what you saw, and talking to people around you and looking at books and research and so on.
And the people that want to control the information understand that if they can only control really a few basic sources — we’re talking about Google, Twitter, Facebook and Wikipedia — they’ve got a lock on information, because we’ve all been funneled to those few sources, and that’s been the goal.
So if you think of it that way, there’s a whole lot of people that get pretty much everything they know through the internet. And the goal of the people trying to make the narrative is to make people live online and to think that’s reality.”
The danger of this is that the internet paints a picture that’s different from reality. You may read something that doesn’t sound quite right, or that you don’t agree with, but the internet makes you feel like you’re in the minority — even if you’re really not.
“Understand that you may actually be in the majority,” Attkisson says, “… but the goal of what they do online is to make you think you’re an outlier when you’re not, to make you afraid to talk about your viewpoint or what you think, because you may actually be the majority opinion but they want to control that and make you think you’re the one who’s crazy.” The solution? Live outside the box:23
“You can be made to believe that — if you live in the box. So, I’m constantly telling people live outside the box. Yes, you can get information there and do what you do online, but certainly trust your cognitive dissonance, talk to the people around you. If you travel, talk to the people in the places you go. You’ll get a whole different picture, as I do, of what’s really happening out here than if you look online.”
The Truth Finds a Way To Be Told
While there are powerful forces at play to control information, all is not lost. Attkisson is aware of three entities that are actively working on a solution, which include:
Investors who want to invest in independent news organizations
Technical people trying to invent platforms that can’t be controlled and deplatformed by Big Tech
Journalists who want to work or contribute to these efforts
Outlets like Substack newsletters and the video platforms Rumble, Bitchute and Odysee, which don’t censor videos for ideological reasons, are actively getting around the censorship of Big Tech, and Attkisson believes that these efforts will accelerate in the next couple of years.
Further, she says, “The propagandists may have overplayed their hand by being so heavy-handed and obvious about the control of information and the censorship. It’s no longer deniable. Even people who want their information curated, they can’t always be happy with the notion that they’re not going to be able to get the full story, or that they’re only getting one side of something.”24
Ultimately, she adds, “I think the truth finds a way to be told … it may take some time and there may be a lot of people that don’t want the truth out, but we inherently as humans seek it.”25 On a personal level, you can go a long way toward finding the truth by following your own common sense and reason, and Attkisson agrees.
“I always say, do your own research, make up your own mind, think for yourself. Trust your cognitive dissonance, use your common sense. You’re going to be right more often than you think, but open up your mind, read a lot, think a lot and don’t buy into the prevailing narrative at face value.”26
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The American film industry changed beyond recognition after the milestone year of 2001, director Oliver Stone told RT, with producers using financial restraints to censor movies challenging the US military or the CIA.
“Maybe in the 1980s, when I did ‘Platoon’, ‘Born on the Fourth of July’ and ‘Heaven & Earth’, I could do that, because it was a slightly more relaxed system,” said the award-winning filmmaker, mentioning his famed movies while making his case during former Ecuadorean President Rafael Correa’s show on RT Spanish.
When the Iron Curtain fell and the Cold War ended, things didn’t change for the better, Stone believes. “My film career has suffered, because sometimes I’ve said things that American producers hate to hear,” he revealed, adding that those sponsoring film productions sometimes resort to “economic censorship.”
Hollywood has changed since 2001. It has become more censored. The military, the CIA, the depictions of these organizations has been very favorable.
“You can take the budgets down… let’s say you want to make a film criticizing the American military, taking an Iraq war story or a horror story that recently happened in Iraq… You do those kinds of stories, it’s not going to happen,” he explained.
Stone, who scored a number of Academy, BAFTA and Golden Globe awards, has been widely criticized for his anti-war dramas and, most recently, for a series of films questioning the widespread Western narrative on the Ukrainian turmoil, as well as exclusive interviews with Vladimir Putin.
“Now, censorship isn’t something that exclusively affects the American film industry,” Stone lamented, “I can read the American media but they all say the same things … And you don’t hear from Iran and China, you don’t hear from [North] Korea, you don’t hear from Venezuela, you don’t get their point of view.”
The CIA realized – after World War II, basically – they [went into] the business, the news business, they put their people, their agents at newspapers, at magazines and television.
‘It’s all right-wings fighting with right-wings’
The famed film director sounded pessimistic when asked if there is hope for change – or, at least, if the system allows for that change. He said that both parties – be it Democrats or Republicans – act by the same playbook when dealing with issues of war and peace.
“There is no party in the United States, no democratic voice except third parties that are small, that would say ‘Why are we fighting wars?’” Stone exclaimed, adding, “it’s all right-wings fighting with right-wings.” Democrats are no better than Republicans, he says: “Hillary Clinton and her group, and Joe Biden, are just as pro-war as any Republican Dick Cheney.”
Stone thinks Donald Trump who has done “horrible things” by pulling out of the Paris climate accords and the hard-earned 2015 Iran nuclear deal. But, argued Stone, at least Trump was asking why the US needs to fight the Russians, which alarmed the mainstream so much that the media was attacking him from day one.
Stone lamented that politics is transiting from the art of the possible to the art of raising money.
“So much money is spent in politics, it’s impossible for my vote to make any difference… Candidates in America now have to raise billions of dollars to be considered serious,” Stone said.
Empires fall. Let’s pray that this empire, these evil things… because we are the evil empire. What Reagan said about Russia is true about us.
Russia’s meddling in the United States’ elections is not a hoax. It’s the culmination of Moscow’s decades-long campaign to tear the West apart. “Operation InfeKtion” reveals the ways in which one of the Soviets’ central tactics — the promulgation of lies about America — continues today, from Pizzagate to George Soros conspiracies. Meet the KGB spies who conceived this virus and the American truth squads who tried — and are still trying — to fight it. Countries from Pakistan to Brazil are now debating reality, and in Vladimir Putin’s greatest triumph, Americans are using Russia’s playbook against one another without the faintest clue.
“Our citizens should know the urgent facts…but they don’t because our media serves imperial, not popular interests. They lie, deceive, connive and suppress what everyone needs to know, substituting managed news misinformation and rubbish for hard truths…”—Oliver Stone
Tales from the Conspiratum 