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The One Paragraph That Reveals All

The One Paragraph That Reveals All

Authored by Bill Rice via The Brownstone Institute,

The mountain of evidence proving beyond a reasonable…

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The One Paragraph That Reveals All

Authored by Bill Rice via The Brownstone Institute,

The mountain of evidence proving beyond a reasonable doubt officials in the Biden White House bullied Facebook (and other social media) executives to perform Orwellian censorship has now reached Mt. Everest elevations.

Yesterday, I spent several hours reading media reports and Twitter comments after Rep. Jim Jordan (R-Ohio) published the third installment of the “Facebook Files.”

Forget the Hunter and Joe Biden influence-peddling operations; if the revelations in these files don’t qualify as “impeachable offenses” nothing will.

I hope people will read articles published by the Washington Stand,  Fox News and this Twitter-thread summary to learn more details regarding this scandal and egregious violation of the US Constitution.

Instead of rehashing the evidence in these articles, here I simply parse one brief “note” composed by an unnamed Facebook executive who attended censorship meetings with White House officials. (These notes were subpoenaed by Rep. Jordan’s committee.)

This paragraph might be all readers need to grasp the scale of this operation and to learn how eager Facebook executives were to do the bidding of Big Brother (the government of the United States of America.) 

The One Paragraph that Tells Us Everything …

Facebook employee (name redacted for some reason) – July 16, 2021:

“And we attack virality aspect through feed demotions. We remove content that can lead to imminent physical harm. For content that doesn’t meet that threshold, we instituted borderline demotions. For example, someone sharing negative side effect posts. Similarly, posts questioning whether you get a vaccine under a mandate, whether it’s government overreach. We demote those. That’s not false information but it leads to a vaccine negative environment. When it comes to looking at COVID misinformation, it’s a different approach. What we normally do is just remove or leave to fact checkers. Here, we introduced a middle ground.”

What follows is my sentence-by-sentence parsing of information one can glean from this one stunning paragraph: 

“…we  (Facebook) attack virality aspect through feed demotions.”

My comment: Here we have Stanford University’s “Virality Project” in operation. The goal is to prevent certain information from “going viral,” to prevent Facebook’s contrarian users from reaching (and thus influencing) more than a handful of the platform’s one billion users.

For the record, the information Facebook ensured did NOT go viral turned out to be truthful information, information that could have saved millions of lives or prevented millions of people from suffering medical (or economic) harm.

As it turns out, almost every post that was blocked or demoted contained information which, if widely disseminated, could have perhaps debunked all the false narratives the government was committed to spreading. 

I’ve written this 50 times, but let’s make it 51: The government and its many narrative-protecting “partners” are the actual spreaders of toxic and dangerous misinformation/disinformation.

A Giant Protection Racket …

The entire censorship operation was an effort to protect the organizations that were spreading false and misleading information. 

The entire operation was/is a massive and coordinated disinformation project conceived and executed by at least 50 organizations that comprise the Censorship Industrial Complex – the most important players in this Complex being the US government and social media companies that have billions of followers.

As the first sentence in this paragraph reveals, Facebook admits (brags?that it accomplished this objective via “feed demotions.” 

Trust me. I have first-hand knowledge of every censorship tool referenced in this paragraph … as I was one of the critical-thinking skeptics Facebook and our government worked tirelessly to make sure had no real influence on my fellow citizens. 

That is, none of my criticisms of any Covid responses ever went viral. In fact, these posts kept getting my account banned, suspended, or deboosted. Also, my potential “influence” in democratic debates is still being blocked by Facebook today.

(Aside: Many readers question why I remain on Facebook given how repulsive this company’s activities are. In today’s Reader Comments, I list some of the reasons I’ve decided to keep my account active. For example, I know FB is still censoring or deboosting my Covid posts only because, technically, I’m, still a FB user … to better keep an eye on what FB is doing and how it’s doing this … I need to be on FB.)

“… We remove content that can lead to imminent physical harm …”

My comment: Note here that Facebook (or the government) decided on its own what speech (“content”) “can” lead to “imminent physical harm.”  

All conclusions – expressed as statements of fact – are actually highly subjective and all tacitly accept that government sources and social media companies get to be the final arbiters of what is or isn’t “misinformation” or “disinformation.”

Again, everything the company said “can” lead to imminent physical harm … would not have led to imminent physical harm. 

FWIW, semantically, the word “can” implies that “cannot” or “does not” are also possibilities.

The first three words of the sentence simply say, “We remove content.” Again, the company is admitting what it did. This is as brazen as censorship gets.

As the social media company is still removing content today, I have concluded Facebook is not afraid of  Rep. Jim Jordan or this Committee.

(As one Twitter wag noted, what’s the Committee going to do about any of this? Send a “strongly-worded letter” to Facebook?)

“For content that doesn’t meet that threshold, we instituted borderline demotions.”

My comment: So if Facebook decided it couldn’t remove certain content, the company can at least “institute borderline demotions.” So the two possibilities are “total removal of speech” or “borderline demotions.” Got it.

For emphasis, Door Three: “Let people say what they want to say” or “don’t muzzle the speech of your users” … was not an option.

“… For example, someone sharing negative side effect posts.”

My comment: In America and on Facebook – per the non-stop coercion and threats of Biden White House officials – someone literally could not “share” with all their Facebook followers that they experienced a “negative side effect” from a “vaccine.” 

These Facebook users would simply be “sharing” a truth as they perceive it  … but they couldn’t do this – per Facebook and the Biden government.  

Which is our government. A government created by the US Constitution, whose First Amendment (allegedly) protects “free speech” and says the government can never bully citizens or companies into saying only what the government demands.

Let that sink in.

In a later note, one of the government’s key censorship henchmen (Rob Flaherty) actually says it’s his “dream” that Facebook would “play ball” with Big Brother (a dream that came true.)

My dream is that more Americans would wake up and understand that our “right” to free speech is being eviscerated by a coordinated and massive conspiracy of criminals and lying virtue-signalers. 

“… Similarly, posts questioning whether you get a vaccine under a mandate, whether it’s government overreach.”

My comment: Here we learn that Facebook users also couldn’t fully share the opinion that “vaccine mandates were government overreach.” 

Apparently our government has not “overreached” when it tells citizens and companies that they can’t share certain opinions. 

Whether people realize this or not, statements like this mean we might as well be living in North Korea or 1978 East Germany. Basically, one cannot accuse our own democratically-elected government of “overreaching” – per government decree!

“We demote those.”

My comment: Well, of course you do. Big Brother was watching you and you were watching every one of your billion customers … No unauthorized speech was going to “go viral” under your watch.

Facebook could (accurately) claim this company was bullied and threatened by the government, but its executives can’t claim they were overly troubled by this. Or that they forcefully pushed back against this bullying. What they did was roll over like a puppy.

When one of the largest and most influential companies in the world – one that has tens of millions of intelligent users who could have used this speech platform to push-back against “government over-reach” – lacks the guts to do this … this should tell us all something about:

A) How captured all Big Corporations are and … 

B) That not ONE of these companies has any brave or principled true “leaders” who are willing to publicly call out a tyrannical government.

“That’s not false information but it leads to vaccine negative environment.”

My comment: So, per official Facebook posting policy, the social media company knew this wasn’t false information – which means it was very likely/possibly  “true information.  Still, Facebook replies it had a great or valid reason to censor true speech … because said speech “leads to vaccine negative environment.”

Here we reach the censorship bottom-line …

 Nobody in the world (at least on Facebook) is allowed to to say anything that might create a “negative vaccine environment.

Even if said vaccine has killed many people (which these non-vaccines probably have by now), no Facebook user can say anything “negative” about such a vaccine.

And vaccine deaths and adverse events were not and are not “hypothetical.” They were real and began occurring the first day the shots were administered. 

Jews, gypsies, and political dissidents were being killed, harmed or falsely imprisoned from the day the first Nazi concentration camp opened. But – per government policy (endorsed by every important organization in Germany) – nobody in Germany could say this was happening.

Does anyone get this analogy? If I tried to make this analogy on Facebook, I’d be banned.

Language in this same paragraph highlights the great concern of censors about preventing  potential “imminent physical harm.” Facebook users who were trying to report to their fellow citizens that this harm was not only “imminent” – it was happening right now – couldn’t say this.

“When it comes to looking at COVID misinformation, it’s a different approach.”

My comment: I’m a writer and try to choose my words carefully. This sentence should have at least said, “When it comes to looking at alleged COVID misinformation …” 

Facebook just accepts that everything “contrarian” users such as myself tried to post about the vaccines was definitely “misinformation” … because the government said it was. And Facebook believed the CDC over Bill Rice, Jr., plenty of authentic scientists and medical professionals and millions of other people who were trying to cry out, “This is NOT the truth! Do NOT trust these alleged experts!” 

The Back-up Plan …

“What we normally do is just remove (such content) or leave it to fact checkers.”

My comment: Note that by this time in the pandemic, removing such content was “normal” operating procedure for Facebook. By early in the vaccine rollout, Facebook had already gotten very good at “removing content.” 

Still, as emerging documents reveal, Facebook and other social media companies still weren’t removing nearly enough (true) content to satisfy the Censorship Pit Bulls working for Joe Biden and the more than 50 organizations that make up the Censorship Industrial Complex.

Thank you, Redacted Employee, for also mentioning the vital role played by the designated “fact-checkers” of the Censorship Industrial Complex. What Facebook, Twitter, Google and YouTube might not have censored, these companies “left it to” the “fact-checkers” to shut down or “flag.”

The “fact-checkers” were like outfielders backing up infielders in case a ground ball got under the second baseman’s glove.

I hope more Americans are now beginning to sense the massive team effort involved in making sure unauthorized speech either didn’t get posted or was demoted so such true speech didn’t reach hardly anyone.

And the last sentence …

“Here, we introduced a middle ground.”

My comment: “Middle ground?!” This is the compromise Facebook came up with so its executives, employees and army of 15,000-plus “content moderators” could sleep comfortably at night? Are they spinning their massive censorship operation to mean they fought back a little?

If this is the “middle-ground” solution, one wonders what the more extreme solution was or is. 

Tyler Durden Thu, 08/10/2023 - 15:20

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Looking Back At COVID’s Authoritarian Regimes

After having moved from Canada to the United States, partly to be wealthier and partly to be freer (those two are connected, by the way), I was shocked,…

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After having moved from Canada to the United States, partly to be wealthier and partly to be freer (those two are connected, by the way), I was shocked, in March 2020, when President Trump and most US governors imposed heavy restrictions on people’s freedom. The purpose, said Trump and his COVID-19 advisers, was to “flatten the curve”: shut down people’s mobility for two weeks so that hospitals could catch up with the expected demand from COVID patients. In her book Silent Invasion, Dr. Deborah Birx, the coordinator of the White House Coronavirus Task Force, admitted that she was scrambling during those two weeks to come up with a reason to extend the lockdowns for much longer. As she put it, “I didn’t have the numbers in front of me yet to make the case for extending it longer, but I had two weeks to get them.” In short, she chose the goal and then tried to find the data to justify the goal. This, by the way, was from someone who, along with her task force colleague Dr. Anthony Fauci, kept talking about the importance of the scientific method. By the end of April 2020, the term “flatten the curve” had all but disappeared from public discussion.

Now that we are four years past that awful time, it makes sense to look back and see whether those heavy restrictions on the lives of people of all ages made sense. I’ll save you the suspense. They didn’t. The damage to the economy was huge. Remember that “the economy” is not a term used to describe a big machine; it’s a shorthand for the trillions of interactions among hundreds of millions of people. The lockdowns and the subsequent federal spending ballooned the budget deficit and consequent federal debt. The effect on children’s learning, not just in school but outside of school, was huge. These effects will be with us for a long time. It’s not as if there wasn’t another way to go. The people who came up with the idea of lockdowns did so on the basis of abstract models that had not been tested. They ignored a model of human behavior, which I’ll call Hayekian, that is tested every day.

These are the opening two paragraphs of my latest Defining Ideas article, “Looking Back at COVID’s Authoritarian Regimes,” Defining Ideas, March 14, 2024.

Another excerpt:

That wasn’t the only uncertainty. My daughter Karen lived in San Francisco and made her living teaching Pilates. San Francisco mayor London Breed shut down all the gyms, and so there went my daughter’s business. (The good news was that she quickly got online and shifted many of her clients to virtual Pilates. But that’s another story.) We tried to see her every six weeks or so, whether that meant our driving up to San Fran or her driving down to Monterey. But were we allowed to drive to see her? In that first month and a half, we simply didn’t know.

Read the whole thing, which is longer than usual.

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Problems After COVID-19 Vaccination More Prevalent Among Naturally Immune: Study

Problems After COVID-19 Vaccination More Prevalent Among Naturally Immune: Study

Authored by Zachary Stieber via The Epoch Times (emphasis…

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Problems After COVID-19 Vaccination More Prevalent Among Naturally Immune: Study

Authored by Zachary Stieber via The Epoch Times (emphasis ours),

People who recovered from COVID-19 and received a COVID-19 shot were more likely to suffer adverse reactions, researchers in Europe are reporting.

A medical worker administers a dose of the Pfizer-BioNTech COVID-19 vaccine to a patient at a vaccination center in Ancenis-Saint-Gereon, France, on Nov. 17, 2021. (Stephane Mahe//Reuters)

Participants in the study were more likely to experience an adverse reaction after vaccination regardless of the type of shot, with one exception, the researchers found.

Across all vaccine brands, people with prior COVID-19 were 2.6 times as likely after dose one to suffer an adverse reaction, according to the new study. Such people are commonly known as having a type of protection known as natural immunity after recovery.

People with previous COVID-19 were also 1.25 times as likely after dose 2 to experience an adverse reaction.

The findings held true across all vaccine types following dose one.

Of the female participants who received the Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine, for instance, 82 percent who had COVID-19 previously experienced an adverse reaction after their first dose, compared to 59 percent of females who did not have prior COVID-19.

The only exception to the trend was among males who received a second AstraZeneca dose. The percentage of males who suffered an adverse reaction was higher, 33 percent to 24 percent, among those without a COVID-19 history.

Participants who had a prior SARS-CoV-2 infection (confirmed with a positive test) experienced at least one adverse reaction more often after the 1st dose compared to participants who did not have prior COVID-19. This pattern was observed in both men and women and across vaccine brands,” Florence van Hunsel, an epidemiologist with the Netherlands Pharmacovigilance Centre Lareb, and her co-authors wrote.

There were only slightly higher odds of the naturally immune suffering an adverse reaction following receipt of a Pfizer or Moderna booster, the researchers also found.

The researchers performed what’s known as a cohort event monitoring study, following 29,387 participants as they received at least one dose of a COVID-19 vaccine. The participants live in a European country such as Belgium, France, or Slovakia.

Overall, three-quarters of the participants reported at least one adverse reaction, although some were minor such as injection site pain.

Adverse reactions described as serious were reported by 0.24 percent of people who received a first or second dose and 0.26 percent for people who received a booster. Different examples of serious reactions were not listed in the study.

Participants were only specifically asked to record a range of minor adverse reactions (ADRs). They could provide details of other reactions in free text form.

“The unsolicited events were manually assessed and coded, and the seriousness was classified based on international criteria,” researchers said.

The free text answers were not provided by researchers in the paper.

The authors note, ‘In this manuscript, the focus was not on serious ADRs and adverse events of special interest.’” Yet, in their highlights section they state, “The percentage of serious ADRs in the study is low for 1st and 2nd vaccination and booster.”

Dr. Joel Wallskog, co-chair of the group React19, which advocates for people who were injured by vaccines, told The Epoch Times: “It is intellectually dishonest to set out to study minor adverse events after COVID-19 vaccination then make conclusions about the frequency of serious adverse events. They also fail to provide the free text data.” He added that the paper showed “yet another study that is in my opinion, deficient by design.”

Ms. Hunsel did not respond to a request for comment.

She and other researchers listed limitations in the paper, including how they did not provide data broken down by country.

The paper was published by the journal Vaccine on March 6.

The study was funded by the European Medicines Agency and the Dutch government.

No authors declared conflicts of interest.

Some previous papers have also found that people with prior COVID-19 infection had more adverse events following COVID-19 vaccination, including a 2021 paper from French researchers. A U.S. study identified prior COVID-19 as a predictor of the severity of side effects.

Some other studies have determined COVID-19 vaccines confer little or no benefit to people with a history of infection, including those who had received a primary series.

The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention still recommends people who recovered from COVID-19 receive a COVID-19 vaccine, although a number of other health authorities have stopped recommending the shot for people who have prior COVID-19.

Another New Study

In another new paper, South Korean researchers outlined how they found people were more likely to report certain adverse reactions after COVID-19 vaccination than after receipt of another vaccine.

The reporting of myocarditis, a form of heart inflammation, or pericarditis, a related condition, was nearly 20 times as high among children as the reporting odds following receipt of all other vaccines, the researchers found.

The reporting odds were also much higher for multisystem inflammatory syndrome or Kawasaki disease among adolescent COVID-19 recipients.

Researchers analyzed reports made to VigiBase, which is run by the World Health Organization.

Based on our results, close monitoring for these rare but serious inflammatory reactions after COVID-19 vaccination among adolescents until definitive causal relationship can be established,” the researchers wrote.

The study was published by the Journal of Korean Medical Science in its March edition.

Limitations include VigiBase receiving reports of problems, with some reports going unconfirmed.

Funding came from the South Korean government. One author reported receiving grants from pharmaceutical companies, including Pfizer.

Tyler Durden Fri, 03/15/2024 - 05:00

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‘Excess Mortality Skyrocketed’: Tucker Carlson and Dr. Pierre Kory Unpack ‘Criminal’ COVID Response

‘Excess Mortality Skyrocketed’: Tucker Carlson and Dr. Pierre Kory Unpack ‘Criminal’ COVID Response

As the global pandemic unfolded, government-funded…

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'Excess Mortality Skyrocketed': Tucker Carlson and Dr. Pierre Kory Unpack 'Criminal' COVID Response

As the global pandemic unfolded, government-funded experimental vaccines were hastily developed for a virus which primarily killed the old and fat (and those with other obvious comorbidities), and an aggressive, global campaign to coerce billions into injecting them ensued.

Then there were the lockdowns - with some countries (New Zealand, for example) building internment camps for those who tested positive for Covid-19, and others such as China welding entire apartment buildings shut to trap people inside.

It was an egregious and unnecessary response to a virus that, while highly virulent, was survivable by the vast majority of the general population.

Oh, and the vaccines, which governments are still pushing, didn't work as advertised to the point where health officials changed the definition of "vaccine" multiple times.

Tucker Carlson recently sat down with Dr. Pierre Kory, a critical care specialist and vocal critic of vaccines. The two had a wide-ranging discussion, which included vaccine safety and efficacy, excess mortality, demographic impacts of the virus, big pharma, and the professional price Kory has paid for speaking out.

Keep reading below, or if you have roughly 50 minutes, watch it in its entirety for free on X:

"Do we have any real sense of what the cost, the physical cost to the country and world has been of those vaccines?" Carlson asked, kicking off the interview.

"I do think we have some understanding of the cost. I mean, I think, you know, you're aware of the work of of Ed Dowd, who's put together a team and looked, analytically at a lot of the epidemiologic data," Kory replied. "I mean, time with that vaccination rollout is when all of the numbers started going sideways, the excess mortality started to skyrocket."

When asked "what kind of death toll are we looking at?", Kory responded "...in 2023 alone, in the first nine months, we had what's called an excess mortality of 158,000 Americans," adding "But this is in 2023. I mean, we've  had Omicron now for two years, which is a mild variant. Not that many go to the hospital."

'Safe and Effective'

Tucker also asked Kory why the people who claimed the vaccine were "safe and effective" aren't being held criminally liable for abetting the "killing of all these Americans," to which Kory replied: "It’s my kind of belief, looking back, that [safe and effective] was a predetermined conclusion. There was no data to support that, but it was agreed upon that it would be presented as safe and effective."

Carlson and Kory then discussed the different segments of the population that experienced vaccine side effects, with Kory noting an "explosion in dying in the youngest and healthiest sectors of society," adding "And why did the employed fare far worse than those that weren't? And this particularly white collar, white collar, more than gray collar, more than blue collar."

Kory also said that Big Pharma is 'terrified' of Vitamin D because it "threatens the disease model." As journalist The Vigilant Fox notes on X, "Vitamin D showed about a 60% effectiveness against the incidence of COVID-19 in randomized control trials," and "showed about 40-50% effectiveness in reducing the incidence of COVID-19 in observational studies."

Professional costs

Kory - while risking professional suicide by speaking out, has undoubtedly helped save countless lives by advocating for alternate treatments such as Ivermectin.

Kory shared his own experiences of job loss and censorship, highlighting the challenges of advocating for a more nuanced understanding of vaccine safety in an environment often resistant to dissenting voices.

"I wrote a book called The War on Ivermectin and the the genesis of that book," he said, adding "Not only is my expertise on Ivermectin and my vast clinical experience, but and I tell the story before, but I got an email, during this journey from a guy named William B Grant, who's a professor out in California, and he wrote to me this email just one day, my life was going totally sideways because our protocols focused on Ivermectin. I was using a lot in my practice, as were tens of thousands of doctors around the world, to really good benefits. And I was getting attacked, hit jobs in the media, and he wrote me this email on and he said, Dear Dr. Kory, what they're doing to Ivermectin, they've been doing to vitamin D for decades..."

"And it's got five tactics. And these are the five tactics that all industries employ when science emerges, that's inconvenient to their interests. And so I'm just going to give you an example. Ivermectin science was extremely inconvenient to the interests of the pharmaceutical industrial complex. I mean, it threatened the vaccine campaign. It threatened vaccine hesitancy, which was public enemy number one. We know that, that everything, all the propaganda censorship was literally going after something called vaccine hesitancy."

Money makes the world go 'round

Carlson then hit on perhaps the most devious aspect of the relationship between drug companies and the medical establishment, and how special interests completely taint science to the point where public distrust of institutions has spiked in recent years.

"I think all of it starts at the level the medical journals," said Kory. "Because once you have something established in the medical journals as a, let's say, a proven fact or a generally accepted consensus, consensus comes out of the journals."

"I have dozens of rejection letters from investigators around the world who did good trials on ivermectin, tried to publish it. No thank you, no thank you, no thank you. And then the ones that do get in all purportedly prove that ivermectin didn't work," Kory continued.

"So and then when you look at the ones that actually got in and this is where like probably my biggest estrangement and why I don't recognize science and don't trust it anymore, is the trials that flew to publication in the top journals in the world were so brazenly manipulated and corrupted in the design and conduct in, many of us wrote about it. But they flew to publication, and then every time they were published, you saw these huge PR campaigns in the media. New York Times, Boston Globe, L.A. times, ivermectin doesn't work. Latest high quality, rigorous study says. I'm sitting here in my office watching these lies just ripple throughout the media sphere based on fraudulent studies published in the top journals. And that's that's that has changed. Now that's why I say I'm estranged and I don't know what to trust anymore."

Vaccine Injuries

Carlson asked Kory about his clinical experience with vaccine injuries.

"So how this is how I divide, this is just kind of my perception of vaccine injury is that when I use the term vaccine injury, I'm usually referring to what I call a single organ problem, like pericarditis, myocarditis, stroke, something like that. An autoimmune disease," he replied.

"What I specialize in my practice, is I treat patients with what we call a long Covid long vaxx. It's the same disease, just different triggers, right? One is triggered by Covid, the other one is triggered by the spike protein from the vaccine. Much more common is long vax. The only real differences between the two conditions is that the vaccinated are, on average, sicker and more disabled than the long Covids, with some pretty prominent exceptions to that."

Watch the entire interview above, and you can support Tucker Carlson's endeavors by joining the Tucker Carlson Network here...

Tyler Durden Thu, 03/14/2024 - 16:20

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