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Brownstone Institute

How To Create a Fake News Cycle

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From the Brownstone Institute

BY Pierre KoryPIERRE KORY 

Despite the best efforts of the mainstream media to pillory him as an anti-vaccine conspiracy theorist, Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. is having a moment. A recent poll from CNN of all places showed him earning 20 percent of Democratic primary voters – and that was before his Joe Rogan interview and shirtless push-up video went viral. Kennedy’s support only confirms the titanic loss of trust between voters and mainstream media.

Except for those in the business, few people understand the inner workings of the media world. As a doctor and lifelong Democratic voter who pulled the lever for Biden in 2020, I had no clue. Prior to COVID-19, I trusted that what I was reading represented the truth. My experience running the Front Line COVID-19 Critical Care Alliance (FLCCC) quickly disabused me of that idea.

The first wave hit in December 2020, when I testified in the Senate that corticosteroids were saving my COVID patients’ lives. My recommendations weren’t just ignored – they were attacked, and I was personally ridiculed as a fraud and Trump puppet. My life and career were upended. I felt forced to resign my faculty position. It was cold comfort when a few months later, a large study confirmed my testimony and government agencies added steroids to the standard of care for COVID patients.

I struggled to make sense of it through much of 2021. The Biden administration and the mainstream media single-mindedly pushed untested vaccines even as the FLCCC accumulated more and more evidence that cheap, generic medicines could stop COVID. As I detailed in my new book, The War on Ivermectin, simply presenting evidence that doctors were using the medicine to treat and prevent COVID around the world was a dog whistle for the mob.

After this crash course in media manipulation, I was much savvier and learned to spot the tactics. When in September 2021 Rachel Maddow tweeted a local news story to her 10 million followers about Oklahoma hospitals being overrun with ivermectin overdoses, I knew it was fake news.

The report quoted a doctor claiming that patients overdosing on ivermectin were backing up rural hospitals. Supposedly people coming to the ER with serious injuries – even gunshot wounds – could not access care. The story was laundered through countless media outlets and blue checks, who were already skeptical of ivermectin because of its association with Trump and his supporters. In their eyes, a bunch of MAGA lunatics overdosing on “horse dewormer” were killing grandma.

Six days later, the hospital where the doctor worked confirmed that the story was a total fabrication. There were no ivermectin overdoses – none – and the doctor hadn’t worked at the hospital in more than two months.

This was easily the sloppiest and most brazen hit job the media pulled during the pandemic. But Rolling Stone’s coverage took the cakes. The outlet used a photo portraying people lined up outside wearing winter clothes – wrong season. As the saying goes, “A lie is halfway round the world before the truth has got its boots on.” To this day, Rolling Stone still hasn’t taken the story down. It simply changed the headline and slapped on a disclaimer.

The whole debacle presents a neat lesson in how to create a fake news cycle. It goes like this.

Step one: Identify a public tool, such as poison control centers, that are easy to manipulate. These organizations have a public hotline and email address that anyone can use to report a problem. The reports are logged as “adverse events,” but they are not easily confirmed and typically will be tabulated for public records whether or not they have been verified. This is exactly what happened with the Oklahoma story. The local poison control center was deluged with fake calls from people claiming they overdosed on ivermectin.

Step two: Deploy “independent,” seemingly credible voices to validate and embellish the false claims. Doctors are among the most trusted professionals, but having a medical degree doesn’t make you an honest broker. Many doctors struggle to earn a living practicing medicine, and sadly some – like the Oklahoma ER doc – will stoop to industry or political hit jobs if it pays the bills. And doctors willing to go on the record expressing concern about a health scare – ivermectin overdoses – are all a reporter needs for a juicy scoop.

Step three: Coordinate with institutional allies to add legitimacy – FDA, American Medical Association, and GAVI (The Vaccine Alliance) – to add credibility and fan the flames with outraged public statements and targeted ad buys. Reporters can pose questions to their representatives at televised briefings, which carried more significance during the pandemic.

Finally, step four: Activate the echo chamber in mainstream and social media. Twitter influencers who live and play in the Acela corridor can talk to each other in the green rooms of cable news studios and glitzy Beltway gatherings. They can pat each other on the back for exposing the crazies and conspiracy theorists.

The pharmaceutical company didn’t invent this playbook, though it used it effectively to wage war on ivermectin and rake in more than $30 billion from COVID vaccines. Tobacco, energy, chemicals, and other industries have deployed these same tactics to neutralize competition and preserve market control.

Big business has been gaming the system for a long time, but the rise of social media has turned once respected media institutions into clickbait machines easily manipulated by industry. With Americans locked in their homes and constantly primed to accuse each other of killing grandma, the pandemic rapidly accelerated this trend and gave pharma – and its media allies – strong motive and ample opportunity.

From masks and lockdowns to vaccines and remote learning: Time and again, solutions touted by the media oversold and underdelivered. We may never know how many lives were lost because of the tactics used to suppress ivermectin, but we know we can’t trust the media. That explains RFK Jr.’s rise – and it’s why I wouldn’t bet against him.

Reprinted from RealClearPolitics

Author

  • Pierre Kory

    Pierre Kory is a Pulmonary and Critical Care Specialist, Teacher/Researcher. He is also the President and Chief Medical Officer of the non-profit organization Front Line COVID-19 Critical Care Alliance whose mission is to develop the most effective, evidence/expertise-based COVID-19 treatment protocols.

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Brownstone Institute

The Numbers Favour Our Side

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From the Brownstone Institute

BY Bill RiceBILL RICE 

For me, it’s not difficult to see what the world’s real rulers are trying to achieve. They’re trying to obtain more power and control for themselves. In fact, they’ve largely already achieved this goal. The terrifying thought is they are far from done.

We know they are not finished because their most conspicuous initiative at the moment is their quest to slay the petulances of “misinformation” and “disinformation.”

The correct definition of misinformation/disinformation is any speech that challenges what authority figures say is the truth.

The world’s real rulers don’t want their pronouncements challenged, as this would pose a grave risk to their continued rule and their ability to implement myriad programs that will effectively defeat, once and for all, human freedom.

As long as persuasive dissent doesn’t go viral, the Powers that Be know they will achieve their objectives, which are authoritarian world government much closer to the communist utopia envisioned by thinkers and tyrants like MarxMao, and Lenin.

But real communism is not the real goal either, as communism was supposed to make every person equal. The modern form of communism, not unlike all previous forms of communism, ensures the world’s elite organizations will remain ultra-powerful while the proletariat will beg for crumbs.

Who are the World’s Elite Organizations?

They are every important organization – those with great influence (and police-state powers) – including all governmental agencies and departments as well as international government organizations like the UN, WHO, and European Union.

They are also all the major “crony” corporations that benefit from close ties to government and non-governmental organizations.

Plus, foundations like the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, the Wellcome Trust, and the Rockefeller Foundation, which have more money than many nations and certainly more ideological commitment to deploy their resources to implement their agendas.

A simple method to define the establishment organizations would be to simply identify the world’s key authorized narratives and then ask yourself what organizations zealously support these initiatives (aka “The Current Thing”).

In the last four years, any organization that vociferously supported all the Covid protocols would be examples of “captured” organizations that enthusiastically supported the Current Thing.

But these same organizations also support all the other ascendant political movements, such as the fight against (allegedly) man-made Climate Change, numerous wars or “interventions” to advance “democracy,” central bank digital currency, and ever more mRNA “vaccines.”

Furthermore, it’s obvious these same organizations support initiatives designed to discredit long-accepted cultural norms in favor of more “progressive” thinking that normalizes gender reversal, race grievances, LGBT+ initiatives, or any reform that advances “diversity, inclusion, or equity.”

The promotion of policies that make mass illegal immigration much easier to achieve has also become a crucial program of our planet’s establishment rulers.


I believe the above summary provides an accurate assessment of the state of the world today.

I also note that it’s an undeniable truth that every program of these establishment organizations has made the world a darker place, with future developments planned by our leaders guaranteed to decrease the qualify of life for children or young adults who may live another 50 to 80 years.

For example, at the moment, unelected delegates who serve on the World Health Organization continue to deliberate in secret as they finalize a new health treaty and make changes to “international regulations” that will affect virtually every citizen on the planet in decades to come.

The salient point about the WHO is that this agency was provably and disastrously wrong on every policy and piece of guidance it issued involving the response to Covid-19.

Another way to identify the members of the Establishment ruling class is to simply identify those who were spectacularly wrong on every key issue of our times. These are the people and organizations who are seeking even more power and control.

Who Will Prevail in the End?

The good news is our side – those who still believe in human liberty – vastly outnumbers the group that is clearly aligned against us.

Above I listed many of the world’s captured organizations. These organizations are staffed by probably a couple hundred thousand key leaders who are committed to supporting the nefarious and freedom -eradicating components  of “The Current Thing.”

As I’ll show below, the numbers who identify with “our side” surely exceed tens of millions of citizens.

The bad news is the the enemies of freedom – the worshippers of Big Brother – control all of the institutions and organizations in the world that actually matter.

Whoever sought to capture all of these organizations – from the CDC, the military, the Federal Reserve, the WEF, and the mainstream press – didn’t embark on these projects just to entertain themselves. They did this for a reason. This reason? They wanted to use these organizations to advance/achieve their goals.

To be more specific, they must have known that if they captured all of these organizations it would be almost impossible for any private citizens to stop their plans.

Our Side Actually has a Major Numeric Advantage

Still, the committed generals and staff officers who are seeking even more global control of the masses are…greatly outnumbered by people who are repulsed by their programs.

I’m currently working on a business idea that might supplement the dissident class of independent writers or “citizen journalists” found in the alternative media and on Substack.

In working on this project, I’m very interested in gauging the size of the market for content that resonates with the world’s population that still values freedom. This would be the group of citizens who is skeptical of the authorized narratives and values (genuine) “watchdog” journalism.

My estimate is there must be tens of millions of people who think like I do, people who would like to stop all the goals of the WEF, Davos, and WHO crowd.

The Tucker Carlson Metric

Perhaps the simplest way to estimate the size of this market is to examine the audience of one of the world’s best-known “contrarian journalists,” Tucker Carlson.

Before Carlson was fired by Fox News, his nightly news show routinely drew four million viewers per night, which made it the top-rated news program in North America. Over the course of a month, the show might have attracted 10 million viewers.

As we all know, Carlson was fired for producing content that was extremely popular with millions of adults. But Carlson didn’t disappear or stop producing “taboo” commentary and news segments, he simply moved to Twitter (now X) and kept doing the exact same thing.

Carlson’s interview with Vladimir Putin garnered more than 150 million views and his various streaming podcasts routinely double or triple the number of people he was reaching on Fox News.

Since Tucker covers many of the same “taboo” subjects I do, one can conservatively estimate that at least 10 million of Carlson’s regular viewers strongly oppose everything the world’s so-called leaders want to make a reality. And that’s just Carlson’s audience.

Substack has more than 35 million subscribers, probably 20 percent of whom are searching for content they know they won’t find in, say, the New York Times or CBS News. That would be a “market” of 7 million freedom-supporting citizens.

Tucker was recently the guest on Joe Rogan’s podcast show. Rogan probably has an audience just as large and loyal as Carlson. Indeed, in their wide-ranging and fascinating conversation, Rogan made the point that shows like his and Tucker’s should now be considered “mainstream”…because they reach far more viewers than, say, the newscasts of the big TV networks (which actually aren’t so big anymore).

As far as I can tell, all the “alternative media” outlets are growing rapidly while all the traditional news outlets are Dead Men Walking.

Again, this is an extremely encouraging sign for anyone who believes that skeptical and independent speech is important to help ensure a world where real freedom might continue to exist.

But I Haven’t Mentioned the Biggest Group of Citizens

While “our side” greatly outnumbers the figure of key employees occupying all the captured organizations, the real population group that matters is the immense group that is sitting out this existential battle for freedom.

The citizens who will probably determine the outcome of this battle are the people who have not discovered the Substack contrarians or who never watch Joe Rogan…or who think Tucker Carlson is a dangerous extremist who should have been fired by Fox (and should now be fired by Elon Musk and X). This group numbers in the billions. 

(This would be the group that doesn’t want to think anymore about the Covid response or think about the possibility that scary-looking, worm-like clots might be in their veins and arteries right now.)

This group just wants to get through each day with adequate supplies of bread…and if they’re given a few mildly entertaining circuses to distract them from the challenges of their daily lives, that’s enough.

For this segment of the population, any big debate on “freedom” is either boring, not germane to their lives, or they love and appreciate Big Brother and are convinced he is protecting them.


What this means to you and me is that the denouement of this historic battle will be determined by a relatively small percentage of the world’s population.

On one side, we have the 200,000 or so leaders of thousands of important captured organizations. On the other side, we have 10 to 20 million citizens who’ve found each other in the alternative media. In the middle, we have a couple billion people who are oblivious to what’s really at stake.

Whatever way this massive middle group swings in the future, so goes the world.

One suspects the world’s real rulers know that their track record and planned agendas won’t stand up to close scrutiny. They know that their arguments are not as persuasive and could easily be debunked if our side’s arguments were to “go viral.”

To help keep this middle group indifferent or on their side, the Deep State concocted the concepts of disinformation and misinformation to smear or throttle the influence of those on our side.

The ever-growing Censorship Industrial Complex has performed its most important job with (disgusting) distinction. For now at least, the depressing truth is the masses don’t seem to care much about the issues that some of us think are tectonic.

This means recruiting the legions of people we need to recruit will be a strangely tough sale.

Our charge of persuading more of our neighbors to join our side has been made far more difficult by the false narrative that all of the important disinformation is coming from citizens like us, when, in fact, we don’t control any of the important information.

If and when the masses realize who’s been producing the real disinformation, freedom might pull an upset victory.

Republished from the author’s Substack

Author

  • Bill Rice

    Bill Rice, Jr. is a freelance journalist in Troy, Alabama.

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Brownstone Institute

The Teams Are Set for World War III

Published on

From the Brownstone Institute

BY Toby RogersTOBY ROGERS

I’ve seen some crazy things over the last few years but this is off-the-charts insane.

Last week, Michael E. Mann spoke at the EcoHeath Alliance: Green Planet One Health Benefit 2024. Just to recap who each of these players are:

  • Michael E. Mann is the creator of the “hockey stick graph” that has driven the global warming debate for the last 25 years.
  • EcoHealth Alliance is the CIA cutout led by Peter Daszak that launders money from the NIH to the Wuhan Institute of Virology to create gain-of-function viruses (including SARS-CoV-2 which killed over 7 million people).
  • “One Health” is the pretext the World Health Organization (WHO) is using to drive the Pandemic Treaty that will vastly expand the powers of the WHO and create economic incentives for every nation on earth to develop new gain-of-function viruses.

So a leader in the global warming movement spoke at an event to raise money for the organization that just murdered 7 million people and the campaign that intends to launch new pandemics in perpetuity to enrich the biowarfare industrial complex.

And then just for good measure, Peter Hotez reposted all of this information on Twitter, I imagine in solidarity with all of the exciting genociding going on.

Mann’s appearance at this event is emblematic of a disturbing shift that has been years in the making. Serious and thoughtful people in the environmental movement tried to address industrial and military pollution for decades. Now their cause has been co-opted by Big Tech and other corporate actors with malevolent intentions — and the rest of the environmental movement has gone along with this, apparently without objection. So we are witnessing a convergence between the global warming movement, the biowarfare industrial complex, and the WHO pandemic treaty grifters.

I wish it wasn’t true but here we are.

Before I go any further I need to make one thing clear: the notion that pandemics are driven by global warming is complete and total bullsh*t. The evidence is overwhelming that pandemics are created by the biowarfare industrial complex including the 13,000 psychopaths who work at over 400 US bioweapons labs (as described in great detail in The Wuhan Cover-Up).

Unfortunately “global warming” has become a cover for the proliferation of the biowarfare industrial economy.

Mann’s appearance at an event to raise money for people who are clearly guilty of genocide (and planning more carnage) made me realize that this really is World War III. They are straight-up telling us who they are and what they intend to do.

The different sides in this war are not nation-states. Instead, Team Tyranny is a bunch of different business interests pushing what has become a giant multi-trillion dollar grift. And Team Freedom is ordinary people throughout the world just trying to return to the classical economic and political liberalism that drove human progress from 1776 until 2020.

Here’s how I see the battle lines being drawn:


TEAM TYRANNY

Their base: Elites, billionaires, the ruling class, the biowarfare industrial complex, intelligence agencies, and bougie technocrats.

Institutions they control: WEF, WHO, UN, BMGF, World Bank, IMF, most universities, the mainstream media, and liberal governments throughout the developed world.

Economic philosophy: The billionaires should control all wealth on earth. The peasants should only be allowed to exist to serve the billionaires, grow food, and fix the machines when necessary. Robots and Artificial Intelligence will soon be able to replace most of the peasants.

Political philosophy: Centralized control of everything. Elites know best. The 90% should shut up, pay their taxes, take their vaccines, develop chronic disease, and die. High tech global totalitarianism is the best form of government. Billionaires are God.

Philosophy of medicine: Allopathic. Cut, poison, burn, kill. Corporations create all knowledge. Bodies are machines. Transhumanism is ideal. The billionaires will soon live forever in the digital cloud.

Their currency: For now, inflationary Federal Reserve policies. Soon, Central Bank Digital Currency (CBDC) that will put the peasants in their place once and for all.

Policy vehicles to advance their agenda: One Health; WHO Pandemic Treaty; social credit scores; climate scores; vaccine mandates/passports; lockdowns and quarantine camps; elimination of small farms and livestock; corporate control of all food, land, water, transportation, and the weather; corporate control of social movements; and 15-minute cities for the peasants.

Military strategy: Gain-of-function viruses, propaganda, and vaccines.


TEAM FREEDOM

Our base: The medical freedom movement, Constitutionalists, small “l” libertarians, independent farmers, natural meat and milk producers, pirate parties, natural healers, homeopaths, chiropractors, integrative and functional medicine doctors, and osteopaths.

Aligned institutions: CHD, ICAN, Brownstone Institute, NVIC, SFHF, the RFK, Jr. campaign, the Republican party at the county level…

Economic philosophy: Small “c” capitalism. Competition. Entrepreneurship.

Political philosophy: Classical liberalism. The people, using their own ingenuity, will generally figure out the best way to do things. Decentralize everything including the internet. If the elites would just leave us alone the world would be a much more peaceful, creative, and prosperous place. Human freedom leads to human flourishing.

Philosophy of medicine: Nature is infinite in its wisdom. Listen to the body. Systems have the ability to heal and regenerate.

Our currency: Cash, gold, crypto, and barter. (I don’t love crypto but lots of smart people in our movement do.)

Policy ideas: Exit the WHO. Boycott WEF companies. Repeal the Bayh-Dole Act, NCVIA Act, Patriot Act, and PREP Act. Add medical freedom to the Constitution. Prosecute the Faucistas at Nuremberg 2.0. Overhaul the NIH, FDA, CDC, EPA, USDA, FCC, DoD, and intelligence agencies. Make all publicly-funded scientific data available to the public. Ban insider trading by Congress. Support and protect organic food, farms, and farmers’ markets. Break up monopolies. Cut the size of the federal government in half (or more).

Our preferred tools to create change: Ideas, love for humanity, logic and reason, common sense, art and music, and popular uprising.

What would you add, subtract, or change in each of these lists?

Republished from the author’s Substack

Author

  • Toby Rogers

    Toby Rogers has a Ph.D. in political economy from the University of Sydney in Australia and a Master of Public Policy degree from the University of California, Berkeley. His research focus is on regulatory capture and corruption in the pharmaceutical industry. Dr. Rogers does grassroots political organizing with medical freedom groups across the country working to stop the epidemic of chronic illness in children. He writes about the political economy of public health on Substack.

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