Brownstone Institute
Poynter’s Creepy ‘Fact-Based Expression’

From the Brownstone Institute
BY
Fact-based expression.
That is what the once vaunted now openly vile Poynter Institute – a pivot point of the international censorship-industrial complex – wishes to “strengthen…around the globe.”
Pointedly, not “free speech,” but “fact-based expression.”
They’re not the same thing.
This absurd term, floated through the invite to read the institute’s annual and recently released “Impact Report,” may at first blush seem to be yet another silly woke wiggle, like “birthing person (mother) or “involved in the criminal justice system” (a felon) or “experiencing homelessness” (vagrant).
Like many Orwellian neologisms, it might, if you hear it only once or twice, seem to make a tiny bit of sense because “fact-based expression” implies telling the truth.
But like so many other progressive rewordings, it is purely an attempt to sound reasonable so as to mask a deeply ominous intent.
That intent? To control speech and public discourse by being the lone decider as to what is factual and what is not and those decisions are being – and will be – made based on the sociopolitical outlook of the progressive woke elite, the socialite socialist statist global drivers that fund Poynter.
But the Poynter Institute – once the premier media/journalism teaching and thinking, for lack of a better term, organizations – made a significant error in rolling out the term: it appears right after “free press,” inviting the clear comparison.
“…meaningful achievements we have made to help strengthen a free press and fact-based expression around the globe,” is how the email introduction to the report read.
So why not simply say “free speech?”
Because that’s not what they want at all (they don’t really believe in a free press either, noting the importance of the press being “responsible,” i.e..housebroken.)
To the contrary, “fact-based expression” demands both self and external censorship, a political, social, and cultural censorship that will drown out and drone on.
That is the business Poynter is in now – fact-checking. So Poynter will be telling the world what constitutes “fact-based expression” and what is not, what is verboten.
How convenient for Poynter, how wonderful for the globalists, how terrible for everyone else.
And Poynter has the connections to make it stick – take December, 2020 and Covid for example.
The American Medical Association “partnered” with Poynter to spread the gospel of vaccines, of pandemic panic, and the evils of “misinformation.”
Poynter even offered an online course that local (and national) news people from around the country could take that would leverage the trust they have built in the community to convince people to take the “vaccine:”
We know from previous vaccination efforts that local news is critically important: Audiences trust local news the most, and local journalists will be critical in guiding the public to vaccine administration sites and explaining eligibility.
The first rounds of vaccines will be based on new mRNA technology that, while being a scientific breakthrough, may raise questions in the public’s mind about safety and efficacy. We will explain the technology in ways you can pass along to the public.
The course made sure the locals reported how safe the vaccine was, how important it was, and what “misinformation” about the vaccine needed to be shot down.
Oddly enough, it also worked to help journalists “explain to audiences the importance of the second dosage of the vaccines.” On December 4, 2020 – curiously early for that specific topic – the “vaccine” had been out for only a couple of weeks.
As for all of 2020, you can see Poynter’s round-up here. Note it features the term “covidiot.”
(And you can watch a rerun of the webinar here.)
How convenient for Poynter, how wonderful for the globalists, how terrible for everyone else.
Just nine years ago, Poynter had a budget of $3.8 million and, unless you worked in the media, you had no idea it even existed. Today, thanks to massive support from the likes of Google, Meta (Facebook), and others, Poynter is a $15 million a year nexus point for those who wish to control the press and, more importantly, what everyone else says.
Poynter runs PolitiFact, a media outlet that pretends to be in the business of checking facts.
But it does no such thing. It is a global elite swamp third-party validation machine that twists and turns and backflips to put its “FACT” stamp of approval on just about anything that needs to be buttressed.
Or, more importantly, it stamps “FALSE” on a statement or story or concept that is at odds with the current popular narrative that keeps that same global elite in power (a litany of Poynter’s obfuscation and the tricks it uses can be found here).
It runs MediaWise, an outfit that claims to train (largely) younger people how to spot “misinformation,” something that does not actually exist but is a pillar of the censor’s claim to their right to exist. And through its “Teen Fact Checking Network,” Poynter is training a new generation of censors.
If Poynter were honestly trying to stop misinformation, it would not practice the art so well.
And Poynter is the home of the International Fact Checking Network, a group of global media and other fact-checking organizations that is dedicated to “fighting repression and misinformation.”
To quote the IFCN chief: “Misinformation is on the march. The politically powerful are using disinformation to confuse the public and control the agenda. And fact-checkers and other journalists face attack and harassment simply for doing their jobs,” said Angie Drobnic Holan, IFCN director. “Yet our work continues. We are on the side of truth. We are on the side of information integrity.”
And the IFCN determines what is the truth, what information has the requisite “integrity” to pass muster?
In other words, doing to the world what it has done to the United States: work with social media and government agencies to stamp out dissent.
April 2 was “International Fact Checking Day.” To honor the occasion, Drobnic Holan took to her blog to claim that fact-checkers are not censors and, it appears, that the Murthy v. Missouri case currently in front of the United States Supreme Court is not really about the basic and immutable American tenet of freedom of speech but about letting misinformers keep muddying the waters of official truth:
The Supreme Court case is primarily about the government’s actions in dealing with tech platforms: Did the Biden administration go too far in asking for takedowns of vaccine-related misinformation? For years, similar attacks have been aimed at fact-checkers. As director of the International Fact-Checking Network, I’ve watched this movement label fact-checkers as part of a “censorship industrial complex,” claiming that fact-checkers are trying to suppress debatable information.
Ironically, this deeply misleading argument itself is aimed at suppressing critique and debate.
Google and Meta (Facebook) and TikTok are, as noted, Poynter funders and use its products to help decide what is or is not allowed on their platforms. That actual fact does not bode well for the neutrality of Poynter’s fact-checking efforts.
Specifically as to TikTok, Poynter proudly claims that “(T)hrough innovative fact-checking partnerships with Meta and TikTok, PolitiFact is slowing the spread of thousands of pieces of false or harmful online content each month — reducing future views of false information by 80% on average.”
And Poynter decides what is “harmful” and “false.”
And just a few days ago, clearly in response to the bill to force the sale of TikTok going through Congress, Poynter decided to “fact check” who really owns TikTok. Poynter decided that the statement that the “Chinese government owns TikTok” is – surprise surprise – false.
Because of its vaunted past, Poynter is the respectable (actually becoming less respectable with each passing million) face of the international movement to determine what the public can talk about.
And it seems being in the “fact” industry is good for business – budget tripled, staff doubled, got far more notoriety, and getting a bit of actual global power, all in the past decade.
Google, Meta, the Omidyar network (lefty media funders), The Just Trust (a spinoff of the Chan-Zuckerberg Initiative that focuses on “criminal justice), TikTok, the MacArthur Foundation, and the Stanford Impact Labs, which “invests in teams of researchers working with leaders in government, business, and communities to design, test, and scale interventions that can help us make progress on some of the world’s most pressing and persistent social challenges” are some of the major funders of Poynter.
All of the above are powerful progressive/woke companies and foundations and are intertwined with the global movement to muzzle the freedom of the average person, to create a rental world in which people will simply be interchangeable cogs to be watched, fed, and placated.
Another funder of Poynter is the National Endowment for Democracy (NED), one of the most caustic – and powerful – members of the international “civil society” behemoth that lay somewhere between government and private industry and is now more powerful than either.
Note: NED was specifically founded in the 1980s to do in public what the CIA could no longer do in secret: play international politics, foment revolutions, buy supporters, and influence foreign media.
Another Poynter partner is the Alliance for Securing Democracy (ASD), a stepchild of the still-extant German Marshall Fund.
Reminder – the Marshall Plan was set up after World War II to help rebuild Germany and Europe; the Fund was created by the West German government and is now one of most slithery internationalist think tanks on the planet.
Last November, Poynter hosted a very very poorly attended “United Facts of America” online symposium, which included the participation of the Fund and the ASD. The ASD was the group behind the “Hamilton 68” Russian disinformation dashboard, a tool used countless times by the mainstream media to show how much Russia had warped the American electoral process.
The world can expect to see “fact-based expression” more often in the very near future, can expect to hear “Are you in favor of lying?” arguments if you say you are worried about the new rubric, and can expect to see ‘fact-based expression” in law books soon as an appropriate mitigation of free and unfettered speech.
The concept is already making headway – see the Online Harms Bill proposed in Canada, which “authorizes house arrest and electronic tagging for a person considered likely to commit a future (hate) crime.”
Poynter is a far far distance away from its original mission, but in theory still understands the actual news business. We asked them what exactly is “fact-based expression:”
“What is ‘fact-based expression’ exactly? What does that term mean? It has to be different from ‘free speech’ because (the report intro) would have read ‘free speech’ just as it did ‘free press.’”
The response from the transparent media training foundation?
“We have seen your message and I have shared it with the team. We did see your deadline note in the subject line and in the body text. We’ll try to respond as soon as we can, keeping your deadline in mind.”
No further response – I guess “the team” didn’t want to answer the question or they didn’t have a “fact-based expression” to reply with.
Brownstone Institute
Information Disorder Syndrome

From the Brownstone Institute
By
Information disorder is a term coined in 2017 in a report titled “Information Disorder Toward an interdisciplinary framework for research and policymaking” that was drafted for the Council of Europe. (Derakhshan & Hossein, 2017). Information disorder refers to the sharing or developing of false information, categorized as misinformation, disinformation, and malinformation. Of interest, the original 2016 election of President Trump triggered the commission of this report.
From the report:

This concept has been further developed by think tanks, academics, NGOs, governments, and others now invested in the vast fact-checking and industrial-censorship complex. We have all become well-versed in these concepts over the past few years.
A 2020 peer-reviewed study took this concept further and made information disorder into a mental health condition.

Abstract:
Many of us may be unknowingly suffering from information disorder syndrome. It is more prevalent due to the digitized world where the information flows to every individual’s phone, tablet and computer in no time. Information disorder syndrome is the sharing or developing of false information with or without the intent of harming and they are categorized as misinformation, disinformation and malinformation.
The severity of the syndrome is categorized into three grades. Grade 1 is a milder form in which the individual shares false information without the intent of harming others. Grade 2 is a moderate form in which the individual develops and shares false information with the intent of making money and political gain, but not with the intent of harming people. Grade 3 is a severe form in which the individual develops and shares false information with the intent of harming others.
The management of this disorder requires the management of false information, which is rumor surveillance, targeted messaging and community engagement.
Repeated sufferers at the Grade 1 level, all sufferers from Grade 2 and 3 levels need psycho-social counseling and sometimes require strong regulations and enforcement to control such information disorder.
The most critical intervention is to be mindful of the fact that not all posts in social media and news are real, and need to be interpreted carefully.
From this paper, the idea of “information disorder syndrome” quickly jumped into the lexicon of both the censorship-industrial complex and the mental health industry. It is important to note that the terms syndrome, disease, and mental disorders are often used interchangeably. In this case, it has been determined by organizations such as First Draft and the Aspen Institute that the way to cure this syndrome is to stop the flow of misinformation, disinformation, and malinformation online.

Is it just a matter of time before the American Psychiatric Association puts this new “syndrome” into the next edition of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM)?
Is this a possibility?
The American Psychological Association is at least considering how to fit “information disorder” or even “information disorder syndrome” into their modalities. The APA has developed a consensus statement report on fighting health misinformation, which we taxpayers paid for. The CDC paid the APA $2 million for this project.

Next up will be the National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH) developing a funding program to research how to cure or manage this new mental health disorder; considered a new syndrome because of the pernicious tendrils of the internet.
As information disorder syndrome is not a formally recognized mental health condition yet, so far, specific NIMH funding has been absent. However, suppose information disorder syndrome continues to evolve by the medical establishment into a mental health condition. In that case, it is conceivable that NIMH could support studies in the future, particularly for the “sufferers from grade 2 and 3 levels who need psycho-social counseling and sometimes require strong regulations and enforcement to control such information disorder.”
This is yet another example of how the government can and has previously exerted control over individuals. What happens when the APA stigmatizes people who have contrarian views or lifestyles or posts mis, dis or mal-information repeatedly online? The APA has a long history of discriminating and labeling categories of people who differ from the norm, such as when being gay became a mental health disorder in the 1950s.
This lasted for decades, and the APA endorsed many medical treatments such as surgical interventions, including castrations, vasectomies, hysterectomies, and lobotomies, drug therapies (including aversion therapy, which included inducing nausea, vomiting, or paralysis when exposed to same-sex erotic images or thoughts) and even chemical castration, sexual depressants and stimulants, LSD, estrogen and testosterone and also electroconvulsive therapy—which involved administering electric shocks to patients.
Taking this back to the topic at hand, making information disorder a syndrome affecting the individual allows the state through the medical and insurance industries to step in and force the individual to conform to societal norms. As shown in the example above, this is within the realm of possibilities.
Is this a future that is going to happen? Who knows, but it could. And we have to be prepared for this future manifesting in various planning stages. This is why terms such as “information disorder” and “information disorder syndrome” are being propagated throughout new media and must be rejected at all levels.
”Free speech is the most pragmatic tool we have for ascertaining truth. Only by examining all sides of an issue can the truth be chiseled out like a statue out of marble. But the underlying reality is that there can be many truths; we each have our own experiences, values, mores, and life. That is the beauty and wonder of being an individual. There can be no free speech without free and open access to ideas, knowledge, truths, and untruths. Without free speech, we are little more than slaves.
We must defend all speech—whether untrue, hateful, or intolerable, as that is the only way to protect our rights and abilities to understand the world. As soon as free speech is restricted, that restriction will be used to sway public opinion. As soon as one person can be defined as a heretic for uttering words, then soon everyone opposing the “officially approved” side of an issue will be labeled as a heretic. The next logical step will be for the state to define acts of heresy as criminal offenses. As soon as governments and those in power can sway public opinion by restricting free speech, democracy and even our republic of United States will be lost.”
Republished from the author’s Substack
Brownstone Institute
Trump Takes Over and Implements Communication Freeze at HHS, CDC, and NIH

From the Brownstone Institute
By
Part of the sweep of government in the first days of the Trump administration has been a freeze on communications. The explosion has hit the whole of public health bureaucracies, which Trump personally blames in part for the meltdown of his previous term of president in his last year. The pause in operations is designed to figure out exactly what is going on.
It is certainly not the case that Donald Trump wants you to die, contrary to Paul Krugman’s claim. No longer writing at the New York Times, he reserved his rather extreme view for his Substack account.
Recall that Krugman was 100 percent for lockdowns and all the rest including the fake science behind vaccine mandates. While most of the world was in cages, he was proclaiming the dawn of the great reset. With that reversed, he has reverted to form.

What actually seems to be dying the death is the public health bureaucracy.
As the Wall Street Journal explained in their story headlined “Swaths of U.S. Government Grind to a Halt After Trump Shock Therapy:” “While glitches aren’t uncommon during the early days of presidential transitions, some longtime federal employees said the chaos seemed more extreme this week due in part to wide-spanning differences between the agendas of the previous administration and the new one. The stalled initiatives extended far beyond Trump’s cancellation of federal DEI programs.”
I seriously doubt that public opinion registers much concern.
Let’s take a look at the actions of these agencies in the pre-inauguration days before the freeze.
The Department of Health and Human Services announced on January 17, three days before the inauguration, a jaw-dropping $590 million grant to Moderna, a driving force behind global vaccination with mRNA shots during Covid. The announcement of this grant changed the fortunes of the company’s stock price, which had been in a two-year slide.

The timing alone cries out for explanation. Was this to dump largess on the deep-state partner before Trump could stop it? Or was it tacitly approved by the incoming administration in order to keep Trump’s fingerprints from it? We’ll know based on whether this goes ahead. It will certainly be a test of the agency’s future under the leadership of Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., provided he is confirmed by the Senate.
For now, it has all the earmarks of an old regime grabbing whatever it can on the way out.
Over at the CDC, which exists as part of a suite of agencies under the control of HHS, we have one last communication dating also from January 17. It was to announce the “first-ever National One Health Framework to Address Zoonotic Diseases and Advance Public Health Preparedness in the United States.”
David Bell at Brownstone has been writing about this for longer than a year. As he describes it:
“Those pushing it envision a world in which any lifeform is considered intrinsically equal worth to others. If you must choose between your daughter and a rat, the choice should weigh the probability of survival of each, or may do the least harm to other lifeforms after being saved. Within this ‘equitable’ worldview, humans become a pollutant. Ever-growing human populations have driven other species to extinction through environmental change, from the megafauna of ancient Australasia to the plummeting insect populations of modern Europe. Humans become a plague upon the earth, and their restriction, impoverishment, and death may therefore be justified for a greater good.”
The connection here to Fauci et al, and their view concerning spillover diseases from animals to humans – a major reason why they were so insistent on the zoonotic origins of Covid – is rather obvious.
In the middle of the worst part of US lockdowns, Fauci and his co-author David Morens wrote an article for Cell in which they explain that the real problem with life on earth began 12,000 years ago when “human hunter-gatherers settled into villages to domesticate animals and cultivate crops. These beginnings of domestication were the earliest steps in man’s systematic, widespread manipulation of nature.”
It’s always with the same theme. If there were fewer of us, had we never had much contact with each other, if we never dared to cultivate crops, domestic animals, store water, and move around, we could have been spared all diseases.
The real problem is what we call civilization itself, which is why the article ends with an assault on “overcrowding in dwellings and places of human congregation (sports venues, bars, restaurants, beaches, airports), as well as human geographic movement,” all of which “catalyzes disease spread.”
The only solution, in this view, is “rebuilding the infrastructures of human existence, from cities to homes to workplaces, to water and sewer systems, to recreational and gatherings venues.”
One Health, as newly embraced by the CDC, amounts to a radical transformation of the basis of social order itself, under the guidance of god-like scientists who alone know how to structure the best life for all living things, even if that comes at the expense of human flourishing.
David Bell describes this creepy strain of belief as a “cult” but it might also be described as an ideology very different from the dominant ones in the 20th century. Socialism might have proven unworkable but at least it aspired to the improvement of human life. Capitalist ideology was the same. This is something different, with more in common with the far-flung imaginings of Rousseau or the Prophet Mani who shared in common the belief that all attempts to create what we call civilization are inherently corrupting of our perfect state of nature.
This was part of the underlying philosophical infrastructure of lockdowns and vaccine mandates, not merely a public health establishment doing crazy things that happened to be captured by high-powered industrial interests. There was a dreamy and ultimately ghastly utopianism backing all of these actions, stemming from hot-house salons of government-funded science cabals where they not only refuse to speak to normal people; they have nothing but disdain for the aspirations of the common folk and their attachments to property, family, and tradition (which includes, for example, home remedies on dealing with infectious disease).
How it came to be that our main engines of public health came to be captured in whole by such a crazed ideology would require a deep and expansive investigation. Certainly, it happened gradually and largely out of the public eye, so much so that even our best investigative writers are still trying to wrap their brains around it all. Whatever this ideology is, it captured nearly the entire planet Earth in the years 2020-2023 or thereabouts and resulted in a health crisis without precedent in modern times.
Part of the result of that grand experiment was the unseating of a variety of populist leaders in the US, UK, and Brazil. This seems to have set in motion what Walter Kirn has called “a coup against a coup,” as the astonishing avalanche of executive orders reveals. The flurry of news – including a full reaffirmation of free speech, a purge of all DEI edicts, a deletion of previous dictates on Central Bank Digital Currencies, and a full hiring freeze in the federal government – has been so massive that the pundit class has been left gasping to stay on top of it all.
As for NIH, Jay Bhattacharya has been tagged to head the agency. As he awaits Senate confirmation, the acting head is Dr. Matthew Memoli, an award-winning vaccinologist who has worked at NIH for 16 years. In defiance of the regime, he argued in 2021 that “with existing vaccines, blanket vaccination of people at low risk of severe illness could hamper the development of more-robust immunity gained across a population from infection.”
Our own Fellow Bret Swanson took note of this one dissident within the Fauci ranks and celebrated his resolve to speak truth to power, in a complete takedown of evil four years ago. The doctor came under fire for daring to disagree.
Now Dr. Memoli heads the agency he defied. He remains in that position until the man once called a “fringe epidemiologist” by the previous head of NIH takes full control. This is as close to revolution and counterrevolution as you will find in a democratic society.
Something big and potentially wonderful is happening in the realm of public health, which was deployed for egregious purposes only a few years ago. It is a turning point of some sort, and one can hope that the results are consistent with the health, well-being, and freedom of everyone.
For now, there doesn’t seem to be too much in the way of public panic about the big freeze at HHS-related agencies, much less the removal of Anthony Fauci’s expensive security detail.
-
Business2 days ago
Preston Manning offers advice for Canada’s response to Trump Tariffs
-
International2 days ago
Media Suffers Complete MELTDOWN Over USAID
-
Business2 days ago
Trudeau still refusing to recall Parliament despite ongoing Trump tariff threats
-
Business2 days ago
Trudeau Liberals pledge $41.5 million for over 100 pro-2SLGBTQI+ projects
-
Business2 days ago
Liberals, globalists flip out after Trump orders USAID freeze
-
Alberta1 day ago
Trudeau “Played Doctor” With Children
-
COVID-192 days ago
Trudeau government back in court to appeal ruling against its use of the Emergencies Act
-
Economy2 days ago
Human population set to decline for the first time since the Black Death