COVID-19
Researchers run up the score on ‘journalists’ – Many conspiracies are not so theoretical after all
From the Frontier Centre for Public Policy
By Ian Madsen
Conspiracy Theorists Beat Authorities in Credibility
Journalistic objectivity, curiosity, skepticism, neutrality, and even impartiality are in decline.
It is not merely how quickly and savagely that opinion analysis, or commentary elements of most news organizations are to dismiss challenges to establishment claims, pronouncements and proposals. The bigger disappointment is that the ‘news’ side swiftly dismisses or contradicts anything that goes against what government or government-aligned officials, and spokesmen, declare.
Nowhere was this more evident than in Covid-era propaganda. Or, rather, outright disinformation was disseminated. Often ‘facts’ were wrong – and their defenders knew better.
A basic glaring fabrication was defended for years. It was the cover story that Covid first leapt to human beings in a ‘wet market’ in Wuhan, China. This was, to some, apparently less ‘racist’ than a lab leak from the nearby Wuhan Institute of Virology. This in effect conveniently protected those involved in the research (such as including those in the U.S. government who financed it).
More Covid fallacies: the fatality rate was high – but in reality it was (lower than the flu for the vast majority of people); ‘social distancing’ of two metres could stop transmission; and everyone was at equal risk (yet children and youth had negligible risk; the old or obese far more). Also, that lockdowns would stop or that newly developed vaccines would work. Yet more: cloth and surgical masks were protective while vaccines were better than natural or acquired immunity. The biggest fallacy: health authorities knew what they were doing.
Several earlier infectious disease scares failed to have prepared experts (SARS-2003, West Nile, Zika, MERS, Ebola, Dengue Fever, others). Also, despite years of experience, proper information, protocols, procedures, facilities, equipment, personnel or supplies.
Related fallacies were that massive Covid-panic spending was noninflationary, or, that inflation was ‘transitory’, still cause pain today. ‘Modern Monetary Theory’ pundits encouraged governments and central bankers to monetize the debt issued to fund handouts and stimulus schemes. Critics who were castigated for warning that Canada’s government health care was disaster-bound are now validated.
Another sinking Establishment battleship is the Climate ‘Crisis’ lobby’s catastrophizing. The shrillest claim is that Earth’s, supposed, rapid warming is an ‘existential threat’. This fantasy is used to justify any and all countermeasures, no matter how destructive or expensive.
Rational adaptation to warming has been ignored: moving away from coastal areas (subject to rising sea levels), strengthening infrastructure, using more fireproofing, augmenting water supplies, changing agricultural practices, altering outdoor work hours, and employing more air conditioning.
Predictions of warming over the past thirty years have been repeatedly exaggerated. Heat-related deaths still far outnumber those of cold. Another claim, that carbon dioxide is ‘evil’, is false; it is a plant food that increases crop yields dramatically.
Climate crusaders claim that solar and wind energy can reliably and cheaply replace fossil fuels. That is, again, incorrect. Yet, still widely supported by politicians and the media. One related example is the promotion of heat pumps to replace gas furnaces, despite being more expensive to buy, and to run than natural gas furnaces are.
A related fallacy is that ‘green’ and, more honestly, anti-hydrocarbon Environmental, Social and Governance, ‘ESG’ investment funds outperform regular stock market indexes. That has been disproven.
‘Conspiracy Theorists’: Many touchdowns. Authority Figures and Mainstream Media: Zero.
Remain skeptical.
Ian Madsen is the Senior Policy Analyst at the Frontier Centre for Public Policy
Censorship Industrial Complex
UNESCO launches course aimed at ‘training’ social media influencers to ‘report hate speech’
From LifeSiteNews
UNESCO’s bills its new ‘training’ initiative as empowering participants to be more credible and resilient while simply turning independent content creators into talking heads for the establishment.
UNESCO and the Knight Center for Journalism launch training courses, e-books, and surveys on disinformation and hate speech for influencers and content creators, big and small.
Last month, UNESCO published the results of a survey called “Behind the Screens: Insights from Digital Content Creators” that concluded that among 500 content creators in 45 countries that had a minimum of 1,000 followers, 62 percent said they did “not carry out rigorous and systematic fact-checking of information prior to sharing it,” while 73 percent expressed “the wish to be trained to do so.”
And lo and behold! UNESCO and the Knight Center for Journalism in the Americas have launched a re-education course to brainwash independent creators into thinking like unelected globalists and the legacy media, whose credibility are at an all-time low:
The journalism industry is on high alert as news audiences continue to migrate away from legacy media to social media, and many young people place more trust in TikTokers than journalists working at storied news outlets
“Respondents to the survey expressed interest in taking UNESCO’s free online course designed to equip participants with media and information literacy skills and knowledge,” the report states.
To get an idea of the make-up of those 500 content creators that were surveyed in the UNESCO study:
- 68 percent were nano-influencers – those with 1,000 to 10,000 followers
- 25 percent were micro-influencers – those with 10,000 to 100,000 followers
- 4 percent were macro-influencers – those with 100,000 to 1,000,000 followers
- 6 percent were mega-influencers – those with over 1,000,000 followers
Only 12.2 percent of the 500 people surveyed produced content under the category of “current affairs/politics and economy” while the majority covered “fashion/lifestyle” (39.3 percent), “beauty” (34 percent), “travel and food” (30 percent), and “gaming” (29 percent).
Equip yourself to combat online misinformation, disinformation, hate speech, and harmful AI content. Collaborate with fellow journalists and content creators to promote transparency and accountability on digital platforms, empowering your audience with the media and information literacy skills they need to navigate today’s information landscape.
In addition to the survey and the online course called “Digital Content Creators and Journalists: How to Be a Trusted Voice Online,” UNESCO and the Knight Center also published an e-book in October called “Content Creators and Journalists: Redefining News and Credibility in the Digital Age.”
This pyramid of propaganda is billed as empowering influencers to be more credible and resilient, but these efforts are also aimed at turning independent content creators into talking heads for the establishment.
Despite their expanding outreach, many digital content creators who work independently face significant challenges including the lack of institutional support, guidance, and recognition. — UNESCO, Behind the Screens: Insights from Digital Content Creators, November 2024
How can an independent content creator remain independent if he or she needs institutional support, guidance, and recognition?
This is an attempt by the United Nations to take independence away from the equation, so that its messaging becomes indistinguishable from mainstream, establishment narratives.
And between the survey and the e-book, there is not one, single, solitary example of disinformation or hate speech – save perhaps the claim that denying official climate change narratives is considered disinformation, but that’s highly debatable.
Threats to collective climate action are often perpetuated not only by individual creators but by industries, like fossil fuels, that actively shape public discourse to their advantage.
Speaking of climate change, the e-book contains a lengthy chapter called “Content Creators and Climate Change” that is entirely dedicated to pushing climate activism while claiming climate change disinformation is often perpetuated by coordinated campaigns from fossil fuel industries.
The UNESCO documents place heavy emphasis on disclosing who’s funding content creators while ignoring its partner, the Chinese Communist Party’s (CCP), and its alleged influence over UNESCO:
The Chinese Communist Party uses UNESCO to “rewrite history” and to “legitimize the party’s rule over regions with large ethnic minorities.”
When held to a mirror, UNESCO comes off as little more than hypocritical with massive conflicts of interests of its own:
One of the biggest ethical questions is knowing from where content creators derive their income.
At the same time, UNESCO points readers towards organizations like factcheck.org, which itself is funded by the likes of the U.S. State Department and the Robert Woods Johnson Foundation, the latter of which holds approximately $2 billion of stock in COVID vaccine manufacturer J&J, according to U.S. Rep. Thomas Massie.
In January 2021, UNESCO, the WHO, UNDP, EU, and the Knight Center for Journalism in the Americas ran a similar type of propaganda campaign for so-called COVID vaccine disinformation training for journalists as they are now doing for so-called climate change disinformation for content creators.
Another goal of UNESCO and the Knight Center is to create an environment where content creators snitch on one another under the guise of “hate speech”:
Among those targeted by hate speech, most chose to ignore it (31.5%). Only one-fifth (20.4%) reported it to social media platforms. This indicates an area where UNESCO and its partners could provide valuable training for digital content creators on how to effectively address and report hate speech.
In other words, the U.N. is partnering with journalists to teach influencers how to become victims that need protection.
Hey! Content creators. Were you aware that any criticism against the propaganda that we’ve planted within you means that you were a victim of hate speech? No? Well, climb on board and let’s “effectively address and report hate speech!”
Reprinted with permission from The Sociable.
COVID-19
Health Canada received over a million reports of COVID vaccine adverse events: records
From LifeSiteNews
As reported first by True North, according to Access to Information correspondence, from December 2020 to December 2022 Health Canada got over a million serious adverse event reports regarding the COVID vaccines.
Newly uncovered records have revealed that during the so-called pandemic thousands of serious adverse event reports related to the mRNA COVID jabs were reported to Health Canada each day, at the same time public health officials and the media claimed the experimental vaccines were safe.
As reported first by True North, according to Access to Information (ATIP) correspondence, from December 2020 to December 2022 Health Canada got over a million serious adverse events (SAE) reports regarding the COVID vaccines from Pfizer, AstraZeneca, Moderna and Janssen. Broken down, some 600,000 of the reports related to the Pfizer jab, 220,000 to AstraZeneca, 160,000 to Moderna and 22,000 to Janssen. Of note is that the Pfizer jab was the most widely distributed in Canada.
As per regulations, pharmaceutical companies must report SAE that happen anywhere in the world to Canada’s public health minister within “15 days after receiving or becoming aware of the information.”
The access to information coordinator noted that a “broader interpretation (of your request) could encompass millions of records,” adding that as they had a “processing capacity of about 500 pages per month,” handling such a large volume would “require a significant amount of time to complete.”
Broken down, if one serious adverse event report totals just a page each, at the given processing speed, it would take 167 years before all the SAEs would be processed.
The first COVID jab to be approved for use in Canada was Pfizer’s BioNTech mRNA injection, which became available on December 9, 2020. Moderna’s mRNA jab soon followed a couple of weeks later. Of important note is the launch of the jabs came after the government of Prime Minister Justin Trudeau gave vaccine makers a shield from liability regarding jab-related injuries.
Health minister would have seen SAE submissions
By June of 2021, the SAE submissions just for the Pfizer shot totaled over 100,000 reports worldwide, with some 820 in Canada alone. Canada’s then-Minister of Health Patty Hadju would have had information at this time from the various drug jab makers showing how many SAEs there were both domestically and worldwide.
It is estimated that overall Health Canada was getting about 10,000 SAE reports from worldwide sources every week.
All levels of Canadian government heavily promoted the COVID shots, regularly touting them as both “safe and effective.”
However, LifeSiteNews has published an extensive amount of research on the dangers of the experimental COVID mRNA jabs, which include heart damage and blood clots.
The mRNA shots have also been linked to a multitude of negative and often severe side effects in children and all have connections to cell lines derived from aborted babies.
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