A college student named Olivia posted a viral TikTok video in which she revealed she received a zero on her final assignment based on woke ideology, not the content of her work merely because she used the term “biological woman” in her project.
Olivia does not reveal her last name, nor does she identify her woke college or professor, but in her now-viral TikTok video, she tells her followers that she got a zero because she used the term “biological woman” as a description. She said her professor told her that the term was “exclusionary” and perpetuates “heteronormativity.”
— Right Side of History™️ (@xxclusionary) May 22, 2023
SIDEBAR: WTH?
In other words, “We’re here, we’re queer, deal with it!”
The student even noted that the professor told her that her paper was good except for that one verboten term.
“Olivia, this is a solid proposal,” Olivia said the woke teacher allegedly wrote. “However, the terms ‘biological women’ are exclusionary and are not allowed in this course as they further reinforce heteronormativity.”
The student called the grade thoroughly “the most biased grade ever” and said her project “is about transgenders competing in biological women’s sports. How am I supposed to do my final project if I can’t use the word ‘biological women,’ but that’s what my project is about?”
Since that first video, Olivia has posted several follow-ups to explain what is happening in her school.
“This is exactly the issue nowadays. It is not OK or acceptable to be a biological woman,” Olivia said in one video. She said she was told in a meeting with her professor that “it’s transphobic to use the term ‘biological woman’” and that doing so is “implementing T.E.R.F. ideology, which is trans-exclusionary radical feminism,” which the professor said means “women who fight for women’s rights but exclude trans because they think that women’s rights are being affected by trans people.” Olivia then quipped, “Which is literally true.”
Olivia also said she took her case to the school’s Office for Equal Opportunity.
In yet another clip, Olivia said that the rules in her class actually said outright that what the professor did was not proper. Her syllabus says students “will not be graded on the content of your opinions, so long as your opinions do not create emotional and/or mental harm for your diverse classmates or espouse bigoted or anti-scientific views.”
The student said that in her estimation she was using the term in a “scientific” sense, not a political or “emotional” one.
That doesn’t make sense!
Olivia also said the professor insisted that she alter the point of her paper to focus on “women” not “females” so that it satisfies the professor’s political goal of saying anyone can be a woman.
“I know what she’s trying to say, but it doesn’t work because for my project, if I change the wording, it would be … ‘women’s rights and opportunities are being affected because women are competing in women’s sports.’ That doesn’t make sense,” Olivia said.
Who is the real sucker here?
Many people on social media were energized by the school’s political attack on Olivia. But host Jesse Kelly had an extremely important point, saying, “Who is the real sucker? The communist professor?” and adding, “Or the upper middle class Republican parents paying six figures to have their daughter ‘educated’ by said professor?”
Kelly is right. Parents and students who are paying these colleges tens of thousands and sometimes going decades into debt as these crooked, left-wing schools peddle this anti-American ideology that passes for “education.”
It’s bad enough that these extremist, left-wing ideals so permeate our system of higher education, but what is worse is that these biased schools are not even permitting the opposing ideas to be heard. College should be a place for the free exchange of ideas, not a place of stifling bias and indoctrination.
This garbage is happening all over the country. Just this month a boy in Massachusetts was censured by his school for daring to wear a T-shirt that states his personal beliefs about the gender discussion.
Olivia deserves much credit for standing her ground, for keeping her videos centered on the issues, and for not using her platform as a weapon against her school and professor.
Regardless of how you view yourself or how you mutilate yourself, if you have a “Y” chromosome, you are a male. (This does not include those EXTREMELY rare individuals born XXY rather than XX or XY.) — TPR
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Woke corporations, ever committed to ESG and DEI initiatives, have long advanced leftist propaganda without consequence. However, transitioning a once-beloved beer into a symbol of radical gender ideology and making a mockery of womanhood was for many Americans the last straw.
Investor’s Business Daily reported that the market value of Anheuser-Busch InBev has dropped $15.7 billion since April 1 on account of the Bud Light boycott. That figure is based upon data from S&P Global Market Intelligence.
The unforced error that drew the ire of Bud drinkers was the company’s partnership with transvestite TikTok personality Dylan Mulvaney, whose activism has involved “normalizing the bulge” among other transvestites and promoting transgenderism.
This politicization and the corresponding baggage the brand picked up as a consequence prompted outrage. That outrage was tactically and effectively channeled.
While some former drinkers ultimately used Bud Light for target practice, many elected to avoid it altogether, such that cases of the light beer languished on store shelves and went untouched at sporting events.
Jared Dinges, beverage analyst at JPMorgan Chase, revealed to clients that Bud Light sales were down more than 23% as of the week ending May 6, reported Investor’s Business Daily.
“We believe there is a subset of American consumers who will not drink a Bud Light for the foreseeable future,” said Dinges. “We believe a 12% to 13% volume decline on an annualized basis would be a reasonable assumption.”
While Anheuser-Busch reaps the whirlwind, its competitors have added $3.2 billion in market value.
Reuters reported that Heineken, aware that many Americans are swapping out Bud for other brews, is making forays into the light beer market.
The Dutch brewer is spending $100 million to push Heineken Silver in the U.S., where sales of light beers make up roughly half of the market and generated $118 billion last year. This marketing push entails the provision of over two million free samples at various upcoming events, including the U.S. Open tennis tournament this summer and the Las Vegas Formula One Grand Prix in November.
While Heineken has big aspirations, the boycott’s biggest winner among Bud Light’s competitors is reportedly Molson Coors Beverage, which has seen its shares jump up more than 20% since April 1 — adding roughly $2.2 billion in market value to the stock.
JPMorgan figures the boycott will continue to serve as a fiscal reminder to Anheuser-Busch that the American people don’t care much for its politics, suggesting that its beer volumes will drop by 12% this year.
Dinges said, “We do not expect the lost sales to be recovered in fiscal year 2024.”
TheBlaze recently reported that the former president of Anheuser-Busch, Anson Frericks, predicted it will be a “a long, hot, dry summer for Anheuser-Busch.”
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The underlying theme of this story is, once again, elected officials obtaining and sustaining their power through the devices of deceit and withholding their true intentions from the public and, even worse, the ones they should represent. How would we ever know what they have planned? Will they continue to conceal their ploys and attempts to revoke our freedoms? Without citizen journalists willing to take on corruption around us and expose it for the world to see, they WILL succeed in this goal.
The story features Special Assistant Luke Borwegan, who is not only the primary aid to the Senator, but is also tasked with holding the iPad for his reading abilities and, according to Borwegan, is the one who has to follow him around at all times.
Luke tells the journalist that Fetterman would “be okay with overturning the second amendment.”
Yes, that’s a direct quote from Borwegan.
I have said for some time that Fetterman was not elected but was installed. Seriously, what other idiot would show up at a Senate presser in his campaign attire of hoodie and shorts? If he had started dressing this way after his stroke, we could pass it off as an after-effect, but he dressed like a walking advertisement for the Hell’s Angels before then.
And like FJB, he has to have handlers aides follow him around.
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By Geraldyn Berry for One America News 2:55 PM – Wednesday, May 17, 2023
Washington, D.C., Mayor Muriel Bowser baffled legislators when she claimed in her testimony that just over 200 homeless persons live in the nation’s capital.
In her hearing on Tuesday before the House Oversight and Accountability Committee, Bowser asserted that her figures are “the facts,” despite the fact that other estimates are far higher. She spoke with Representative William Timmons (R-S.C.).
D.C. Mayor Muriel Bowser says there are only 221 homeless people in Washington. pic.twitter.com/eWNlEYfCZI
“Do you agree that we have a major, major problem in Washington, D.C., as it relates to homelessness?” Timmons asked.
“We have 221 people, as of today’s count, who are living on the street,” Bowser responded. “Those are the people that you are referring to.”
“Councilman [Charles] Allen gave me a 5,000 number. He sent me a report that was produced by your –,” Timmons said prior to Bowser interrupting him off.
“There are not 5,000 people living on the street, sir –,” she said before being cut off herself.
“There’s 221 people living under 395. We can go right now. It’s 300 yards away,” Timmons responded. “What are you talking about?”
“I’m talking about facts,” Bowser said. “There are not 300 people under 295 or 395. We have outreach teams that are out across all eight wards, and those are the facts.”
“Your own councilman sent me a report saying 5,000 people are homeless in D.C. What are you – OK, look, we’re going to move on,” Timmons said.
A copy of the homelessness study from Timmons’ office showed that, according to a point-in-time study from the Metropolitan Washington Council of Governments, 4,922 “people experiencing literal homelessness” were present in the city as of 2023.
A request for Bowser’s office to clarify how she calculated the 221 number went unanswered.
In a news statement issued by her own office in April of last year, Bowser used the report’s 2022 iteration. According to the 2022 report, there were 4,410 homeless individuals in the city, a 13.7% decrease from 2021, she boasted.
Despite the inclusion of certain regions that are not strictly inside the city limits, the MWCG report from 2023 revealed that 8,944 people were homeless throughout the entire Washington, D.C., metropolitan area.
A request for Bowser’s office to clarify how she calculated the 221 number went unanswered. The mayor’s office also did not explain why she chose a number that was far less than her earlier estimate of 4,410.
If you believe her story, I have a wonderful deal for you. Cash only, and small bills.
A bigger question would be why she had to preface her answers with a paragraphs-long statement about how DC hadn’t had an elected government until a year after she was born. I won’t even bother to check whether her parents could not vote for President before that time. I’m pretty sure that the President was the ONLY office they could vote for in D.C.
I sincerely doubt that — in the District of Columbia proper — they pay more in Federal taxes than some states do. Too many federal buildings, for one thing.
Why do these people have to lie so BADLY?
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On January 17, 1961, outgoing President and former Supreme Allied Commander Dwight D. Eisenhower gave one of the most consequential speeches in American history. Eisenhower for eight years had been a popular president, whose appeal drew upon a reputation as a person of great personal fortitude, who’d guided the United States to victory in an existential fight for survival in World War II. Nonetheless, as he prepared to vacate the Oval Office for handsome young John F. Kennedy, he warned the country it was now at the mercy of a power even he could not overcome.
Until World War II, America had no permanent arms manufacturing industry. Now it did, and this new sector, Eisenhower said, was building up around itself a cultural, financial, and political support system accruing enormous power. This “conjunction of an immense military establishment and a large arms industry is new in the American experience,” he said, adding:
In the councils of government, we must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the military-industrial complex. The potential for the disastrous rise of misplaced power exists and will persist.
We must never let the weight of this combination endanger our liberties or democratic processes… Only an alert and knowledgeable citizenry can compel the proper meshing of the huge industrial and military machinery of defense with our peaceful methods and goals, so that security and liberty may prosper together.
This was the direst of warnings, but the address has tended in the popular press to be ignored. After sixty-plus years, most of America – including most of the American left, which traditionally focused the most on this issue – has lost its fear that our arms industry might conquer democracy from within.
Now, however, we’ve unfortunately found cause to reconsider Eisenhower’s warning.
While the civilian population only in recent years began haggling over “de-platforming” incidents involving figures like Alex Jones and Milo Yiannopoulos, government agencies had already long been advancing a new theory of international conflict, in which the informational landscape is more importantly understood as a battlefield than a forum for exchanging ideas. In this view, “spammy” ads, “junk” news, and the sharing of work from “disinformation agents” like Jones aren’t inevitable features of a free Internet, but sorties in a new form of conflict called “hybrid warfare.”
In 1996, just as the Internet was becoming part of daily life in America, the U.S. Army published “Field Manual 100-6,” which spoke of “an expanding information domain termed the Global Information Environment” that contains “information processes and systems that are beyond the direct influence of the military.” Military commanders needed to understand that “information dominance” in the “GIE” would henceforth be a crucial element for “operating effectively.”
You’ll often see it implied that “information operations” are only practiced by America’s enemies, because only America’s enemies are low enough, and deprived enough of real firepower, to require the use of such tactics, needing as they do to “overcome military limitations.” We rarely hear about America’s own lengthy history with “active measures” and “information operations,” but popular media gives us space to read about the desperate tactics of the Asiatic enemy, perennially described as something like an incurable trans-continental golf cheat.
Indeed, part of the new mania surrounding “hybrid warfare” is the idea that while the American human being is accustomed to living in clear states of “war” or “peace,” the Russian, Chinese, or Iranian citizen is born into a state of constant conflict, where war is always ongoing, whether declared or not. In the face of such adversaries, America’s “open” information landscape is little more than military weakness.
In March of 2017, in a hearing of the House Armed Services Committee on hybrid war, chairman Mac Thornberry opened the session with ominous remarks, suggesting that in the wider context of history, an America built on constitutional principles of decentralized power might have been badly designed:
Americans are used to thinking of a binary state of either war or peace. That is the way our organizations, doctrine, and approaches are geared. Other countries, including Russia, China, and Iran, use a wider array of centrally controlled, or at least centrally directed, instruments of national power and influence to achieve their objectives…
Whether it is contributing to foreign political parties, targeted assassinations of opponents, infiltrating non-uniformed personnel such as the little green men, traditional media and social media, influence operations, or cyber-connected activity, all of these tactics and more are used to advance their national interests and most often to damage American national interests…
The historical records suggest that hybrid warfare in one form or another may well be the norm for human conflict, rather than the exception.
Around that same time, i.e. shortly after the election of Donald Trump, it was becoming gospel among the future leaders of the “Censorship-Industrial Complex” that interference by “malign foreign threat actors” and the vicissitudes of Western domestic politics must be linked. Everything, from John Podesta’s emails to Trump’s Rust Belt primary victories to Brexit, were to be understood first and foremost as hybrid war events.
This is why the Trump-Russia scandal in the United States will likely be remembered as a crucial moment in 21st-century history, even though the investigation superficially ended a non-story, fake news in itself. What the Mueller investigation didn’t accomplish in ousting Trump from office, it did accomplish in birthing a vast new public-private bureaucracy devoted to stopping “mis-, dis-, and malinformation,” while smoothing public acquiescence to the emergence of a spate of new government agencies with “information warfare” missions.
The “Censorship-Industrial Complex” is just the Military-Industrial Complex reborn for the “hybrid warfare” age.
Much like the war industry, pleased to call itself the “defense” sector, the “anti-disinformation” complex markets itself as merely defensive, designed to fend off the hostile attacks of foreign cyber-adversaries who unlike us have “military limitations.” The CIC, however, is neither wholly about defense, nor even mostly focused on foreign “disinformation.” It’s become instead a relentless, unified messaging system aimed primarily at domestic populations, who are told that political discord at home aids the enemy’s undeclared hybrid assault on democracy.
They suggest we must rethink old conceptions about rights, and give ourselves over to new surveillance techniques like “toxicity monitoring,” replace the musty old free press with editors claiming a “nose for news” with an updated model that uses automated assignment tools like “newsworthy claim extraction,” and submit to frank thought-policing mechanisms like the “redirect method,” which sends ads at online browsers of dangerous content, pushing them toward “constructive alternative messages.”
Binding all this is a commitment to a new homogeneous politics, which the complex of public and private agencies listed below seeks to capture in something like a Unified Field Theory of neoliberal narrative, which can be perpetually tweaked and amplified online via algorithm and machine learning. This is what some of the organizations on this list mean when they talk about coming up with a “shared vocabulary” of information disorder, or “credibility,” or “media literacy.”
Anti-disinformation groups talk endlessly about building “resilience” to disinformation (which in practice means making sure the public hears approved narratives so often that anything else seems frightening or repellent), and audiences are trained to question not only the need for checks and balances, but competition. Competition is increasingly frowned upon not just in the “marketplace of ideas” (an idea itself more and more often described as outdated), but in the traditional capitalist sense. In the Twitter Files we repeatedly find documents like this unsigned “Sphere of Influence” review circulated by the Carnegie Endowment that wonders aloud if tech companies really need to be competing to “get it right”:
In place of competition, the groups we’ve been tracking favor the concept of the “shared endeavor” (one British group has even started a “Shared Endeavour” program), in which key “stakeholders” hash out their disagreements in private, but present a unified front.
Who are the leaders of these messaging campaigns? If you care to ask, the groups below are a good place to start.
“The Top 50 List” is intended as a resource for reporters and researchers beginning their journey toward learning the scale and ambition of the “Censorship-Industrial Complex.” Written like a magazine feature, it tries to answer a few basic questions about funding, organization type, history, and especially, methodology. Many anti-disinformation groups adhere to the same formulaic approach to research, often using the same “hate-mapping,” guilt-by-association-type analysis to identify wrong-thinkers and suppressive persons. There is even a tendency to use what one Twitter Files source described as the same “hairball” graphs.
Where they compete, often, is in the area of gibberish verbiage describing their respective analytical methods. My favorite came from the Public Good Projects, which in a display of predictive skills reminiscent of the “unsinkable Titanic” described itself as the “Buzzfeed of public health.”
Together, these groups are fast achieving what Eisenhower feared: the elimination of “balance” between the democratic need for liberalizing laws and institutions, and the vigilance required for military preparation. Democratic society requires the nourishment of free debate, disagreement, and intellectual tension, but the groups below seek instead that “shared vocabulary” to deploy on the hybrid battlefield. They propose to serve as the guardians of that “vocabulary,” which sounds very like the scenario Ike outlined in 1961, in which “public policy could itself become the captive of a scientific and technological elite.”
Without further ado, an introduction to the main players in this “CIC”:
1. Information Futures Lab (IFL) at Brown University (formerly, First Draft):
Type: A university institute, housed within the School of Public Health, to combat “misinformation” and “outdated communications practices.” The successor to First Draft, one of the earliest and more prominent “anti-disinformation” outfits.
You may have read about them when: You first heard the terms Mis-, dis-, and malinformation. The term was coined by FD Director Claire Wardle. IFL/FD are also the only academic/non-profit organization involved in the Trusted News Initiative, a large-scale legacy media consortium established to control debate around the pandemic response. Wardle was Twitter executives’ first pick for a signal group of anti-misinformation advisors it put together. She also participated in the Aspen Institute’s Hunter Biden laptop tabletop in August 2020 (before the laptop story broke). IFL’s co-founder Stefanie Friedhoff serves on the White House Covid-19 Response Team. First Draft staffers were also revealed in the #TwitterFiles to be frequent and trusted partners to a leading public face of the Censorship-Industrial Complex, Renee DiResta, now of Stanford University.
What we know about funding: First Draft was funded by a huge number of entities including Craig Newmark, Rockefeller, the National Science Foundation, Facebook, the Ford Foundation, Google, the Knight Foundation, the Wellcome Trust, Open Society Foundations, and more. Funding for the IFL includes the Rockefeller Foundation for a “building vaccine demand” initiative.
What they do/What they are selling: IFL/First Draft position themselves as the vanguard of disinformation studies, acting as key advisors to media, technology, and public health consortiums, bringing together a wide range of academic skill sets.
Characteristic/worldview quotes: High use of terms like coordinated inauthentic behavior, information pollution, the future Homeland Security catchwords mis-, dis-, and malinformation, and information disorder.
In the #TwitterFiles: First Draft is featured extensively in the files. They were the first proposed name when Twitter decided to assemble a small group of “trusted people to come together to talk about what they’re seeing,” were part of the Aspen Institute’s Burisma tabletop, and appeared in multiple emails with Pentagon officials.
Goofy graphage:
Closely connected to: Almost all the leading lights of the CIC, including the Stanford Internet Observatory, the Trusted News Initiative, Shorenstein Center, DFRLabs, the World Economic Forum, the Aspen Institute, Meedan, and Bellingcat.
In sum: With a strong ability to both know and direct emerging trends, and with a large array of elite networks in tow, the IFL will continue to serve as one of the key tastemakers in the “anti-disinformation” field.
Type: Medium-sized non-profit specializing in technology and countering “disinformation.”
You may have read about them when: Meedan ran a range of Covid-19 misinformation initiatives “to support pandemic fact-checking efforts” with funding from BigTech, the Omidyar Foundation, the National Science Foundation and more. Partners included Britain’s now-disgraced Behavioural Insights Team, or “nudge unit,” known for scaring the pants off Brits about a range of medical manias. Among Meedan’s “anti-disinformation” projects is an effort to peer into private, encrypted messages. The Meedan board includes Tim Hwang (former Substack General Counsel), free speech skeptic Zeynep Tufecki, and Maria Ressa, a Nobel Prize winner with very close ties to eBay founder Pierre Omidyar and the National Endowment for Democracy. Ressa believes Wikileaks “isn’t journalism.” Meedan co-founder Muna AbuSulayman was the founding Secretary General of the Saudi Alwaleed bin Talal Foundation. Alwaleed bin Talal is one of the largest shareholders in Twitter, both pre-Elon Musk and now, with Musk.
What we know about funding: Widespread public and private funding including from Omidyar, Twitter, Facebook, Google, the National Science Foundation, the Swedish International Development Cooperation Agency, and more.
What they do/What they are selling: Meedan positions itself as an NGO leader in the “anti-disinformation” field; convening networks, developing technology, and establishing new initiatives. Strong support and development are given to “fact-checking” organizations and building the technology to support them.
Characteristic/worldview quote: “Detection of controversial and hateful content.”
Gibberish verbiage: “Our work shows that there are far more matches between tipline content and public group messages on WhatsApp than between public group messages and either published fact checks or open social media content.”
Connected to: Twitter, Factcheck.org, AuCoDe, the Berkman Klein Center for Internet and Society, the Behavioral Insights Team, the Oxford Internet Institute, Stanford Internet Observatory, and First Draft.
In sum: Meedan exemplifies the NGO-to-Stasi stylistic shift, where spying and snitching on private messages in the name of “anti-disinformation” is now considered a public good.
3. Harvard Shorenstein Center on Media, Politics and Public Policy (Technology and Social Change Project)
Type: An elite academic project once regarded as one of the leading centers in the “anti-disinformation” field.
You may have read about them when: It was announced that the center would be closed in 2024 on the spurious grounds that project lead Joan Donovan lacked sufficient academic credentials to run the initiative (what was spurious is that it took that long for this realization to come about). Donovan was already widely known for partisanship and getting things wrong, in particular repeatedly claiming the Hunter Biden laptop was not genuine. The Shorenstein Center birthed two other key “anti-disinformation” initiatives, the aforementioned First Draft and the Algorithmic Transparency Initiative. Cameron Hickey, ATI’s lead, is now CEO of the much larger National Congress on Citizenship. In this video, Joan Donavan sits alongside Richard Stengel, the first head of the Global Engagement Center, an agency housed in the State Department with a remit to “counter foreign state and non-state propaganda and disinformation efforts.” The closing of the Technology and Social Change Project is a minor victory in an otherwise exploding field.
What we know about funding: Money from: the Ford Foundation, Open Society Foundations, Craig Newmark Philanthropies, Gates Foundation, Google, Facebook Journalism Project, and the W.K. Kellogg Foundation.
What they do/What they are selling: Academic research into “disinformation,” a fellows program, field convening, and frequent media commentary. The Shorenstein Center also produces a leading “misinformation studies” journal.
Characteristic/worldview quote: Donovan’s infamous tweet, posed with an Atlantic staffer: “Me and @cwarzel Looking at the content on the Hunter Biden Laptop, the most popular straw man question at #Disinfo2022.”
Closely connected to: First Draft, Algorithmic Transparency Initiative/NCoC, Berkman Center for Internet and Society, Data and Society, and the Aspen Institute.
In sum: An “anti-disinformation” project that got it wrong so often, even the center that housed it cut ties.
Type: Non-profit consultancy, specializing in health communications, marketing, technology and “disinformation.”
You may have read about them when: Whilst PGP seem to do some front-facing work, they are also guns for hire for a large range of corporate and government programs. Twitter files show PGP had contracts with biotech lobby group BIO (whose members include Pfizer and Moderna) to run the Stronger campaign, which according to Lee Fang “worked w/Twitter to set content moderation rules around covid ‘misinformation.’” Jennifer McDonald of Twitter’s Public Policy team noted in an email that PGP was also among Twitter’s four “strongest information sharing partnerships” for Covid “misinformation”. PGP partnered with UNICEF on the Vaccine Demand Observatory which aims to “decrease the impact of misinformation and increase vaccine demand around the world.” The board includes the former CEO of Pepsi and Levi’s, a Morgan Stanley Vice-President, and Merck Pharmaceuticals’ Director of Public Health Partnerships.
What we know about funding: $1.25 million from BIO as well as partnerships with Google, Rockefeller, and UNICEF.
What they do/What they are selling: A suite of communications activities including marketing, research, media production, social media monitoring, vaccine promotion, and campaigns. They also use AI and natural language processing to “identify, track, and respond to narratives, trends, and urgent issues” in order to “perform fact-checking” and “power behavior change strategies.”
Type: For-profit firm with defense connections specializing in “digital marketing and disinformation & analysis.”
You may have read about them when: Graphika was one of two outside groups hired in 2017 by the Senate Intelligence Committee to assess the Russian cyber menace. Graphika was also a “core four” partner to Stanford’s Election Integrity Partnership and its Virality Project, both subjects of #TwitterFiles reports. Made headlines for claiming a leak of US-UK trade discussions, publicized by Jeremy Corbyn, was part of an operation called “secondary Infektion” traceable to Russia.
Former Director of Investigations Ben Nimmo was previously a NATO press officer and DFRLabs fellow, and is now Facebook’s Global Threat Intelligence Lead. Head of Innovation Camille Francois was previously Google Jigsaw’s principal researcher.
What we know about funding: $3 million from the Department of Defense for 2020-2022, “to support and stimulate basic and applied research and technology at educational institutions”; boasts of partnerships with the Defense Advanced Partnerships Research Agency (DARPA) and the U.S. Air Force. According to USAspending.gov, defense agencies have provided almost $7 million.
What they do/What they are selling: Long-form reports and subscription services for corporate and governmental clients, often focused on identifying “leading influencers” and “misinformation and disinformation risks,” along with highly sophisticated AI for surveilling social media.
Characteristic/worldview quote: “seeding doubt and uncertainty in authoritative voices leads to a society that finds it too challenging to identify what’s true.”
Gibberish verbiage: Tendency to impressively horrific puns (“More-troll Kombat,” “Lights, Camera, Coordinated Action!” “Step into my Parler”).
In the #TwitterFiles: In 2017-2018, Twitter was unaware the Senate Intelligence Committee would be sharing their data on supposed Russia-linked accounts with commercial entities.
In sum: With deep Pentagon ties and a patina of public-facing commercial legitimacy, Graphika is set up to be the Rand Corporation of the Anti-Disinformation age.
Connected to: Stanford Internet Observatory, DFRLabs, Department of Defense, DARPA, Knight Foundation, Bellingcat
Type: Public-facing disinformation research arm of highly influential, extravagantly funded, NATO-aligned think tank, the Atlantic Council.
You may have read about them when: In May of 2018, Facebook announced a “New Election Partnership With the Atlantic Council,” to “prevent our service from being abused during elections.” The announcement was made by former National Republican Senatorial Committee Chief Digital Strategist Katie Harbath, weeks after a contentious hearing in the Senate in which Mark Zuckerberg answered questions about the “abuse of data” on Facebook. The Atlantic Council’s DFRLabs at the time included such figures as Eliot Higgins (from Bellingcat) and Ben Nimmo, future Director of Investigations at Graphika. This became a watershed moment, as Facebook soon after announced a series of purges of accountsaccused of “coordinated inauthentic activity,” including small indie sites like Anti-Media, End The War on Drugs, ‘Murica Today, Reverb, and Anonymous News, beginning an era of mass deletions.
DFRLab was a core partner for Stanford’s “Election Integrity Partnership,” and the “Virality Project.” The Atlantic Council also organizes the elite 360/Open Summit whose 2018 disinformation edition included the private Vanguard-25 forum that brought together Madeleine Albright, former Swedish Prime Minister Carl Bildt, the head of the Munich Security Conference, Nobel Peace Prize winner Maria Ressa, Edelman (the world’s biggest PR company), Facebook, Twitter, Microsoft, Bellingcat, Graphika, and more.
What we know about funding: “DFRLab has received grants from the Department of State’s Global Engagement Center that support programming with an exclusively international focus,” Graham Brookie of DFRLabs told Racket. The Atlantic Council receives funding from the U.S. Army and Navy, Blackstone, Raytheon, Lockheed, the NATO STRATCOM Center of Excellence and a long list of other financial, military, and diplomatic entities.
Characteristic/worldview quote: On “rumors about Covid-19s origins,” particularly the “disinformation” that the virus may have originated in a laboratory: “The cumulative effect of this was to distract the U.S. public’s attention away from the federal government’s disjointed approach to mitigating the virus and point the blame at China.”
Gibberish verbiage: Awesome quantities; site seethes at public’s unwillingness to popularize nom d’équipe “Digital Sherlocks”; insists so often it is relying only on “open-source information” that one doubts it; relies heavily on schlock military (“Narrative Arms Race”) and medical (“Infodemic”) metaphors to describe disinformation threat.
In sum: DFRLabs is not only funded by the Global Engagement Center, and had initial GEC chief Richard Stengel as a fellow, but uses substantial state and corporate resources to evangelize GEC’s “ecosystem” theory of disinformation, which holds that views that overlap with foreign threat actors are themselves part of the threat.
Connected to: the Stanford Internet Observatory, University of Washington Center for an Informed Public, Graphika, Bellingcat, and the NYU Center for Social Media and Politics
U. S. Government Concerns Grow Over EPCOT’s New Offering
Why did the government feel that EPCOT might present a threat to homeland security? According to heavily redacted FBI files, the Bureau had major concerns, particularly about the China pavilion at World Showcase. As such, FBI agents closely monitored all of the delegates on World Showcase.
EPCOT’s China pavilion/Credit: Disney Parks
According to a post at MuckRock, EPCOT’s World Showcase “initially called for cultural installations from nine countries” and was “intended to be the ultimate harmonious international village, a shining example of global unity. Naturally, the FBI had a problem with it.”
While this has been going on since 1982, when Epcot opened, there seems to be an increase in their presence there. Why?
Per Muckrock:
The Tampa field office [of the Federal Bureau of Investigation] seemed concerned that any terrorist organizations operating within or around the participating nations, “Canada, France, China, Italy, Japan, UK, West Germany, Africa, and Mexico,” would converge on EPCOT.
Real good job there, FBI. You were so busy chasing and spying all those dangerous EPCOT delegates that you completely missed the 9/11 terrorists training at TWO nearby flight schools. Bravo! /s
If they are still there and have increased their presence, why? Shouldn’t they be along the Mexican border to help with the onslaught of illegal immigrants pouring across our southern border?
Oh, wait, the illegals are future Democratic voters. Carry on.
The Biden White House barred the New York Post from attending Monday’s event in the South Court Auditorium as prosecutors consider charges against Hunter Biden.
On Monday, Joe Biden and Pete Buttigieg delivered remarks on flight delays and cancelations from Biden’s fake White House set in the South Court Auditorium.
Biden mumbled through his remarks before shuffling away and refusing to answer questions.
Only 30 reporters were present.
The White House press office blocked the New York Post from attending Biden’s only public event for the day.
According to The Post, there were 20 empty seats in the South Court Auditorium on Monday, but their request for a press credential was still denied.
The White House press office barred The Post from attending President Biden’s only daytime public event Monday as federal prosecutors near a decision on criminally charging first son Hunter Biden for tax fraud and other crimes.
The Post has closely covered the president’s ties to his relatives’ foreign dealings and first reported in October 2020 on files from Hunter’s abandoned laptop that link Joe Biden to ventures in China and Ukraine.
Biden, who falsely characterized The Post’s reporting as Russian disinformation, appeared with Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg to talk about airline policies in the White House-adjacent Eisenhower Executive Office Building
In a Monday email, White House staff informed The Post: “We are unable to accommodate your credential request to attend the Investing in Airline Accountability Remarks on 5/8. The remarks will be live-streamed and can be viewed at WH.gov. Thank you for understanding. We will let you know if a credential becomes available.”
The email does not claim that the exclusion is due to “space limitations” — an excuse that was used until recently to justify the press office’s mysterious prescreening of reporters let into large presidential events, which under past administrations were open to all journalists on White House grounds.
In the same room this February, Biden chose to answer The Post’s query about whether his family’s links to China compromised his ability to steer US policy. He fumed about the lack of “polite” reporters and stormed out.
The Post has the fifth-largest news website by US readership — or fourth when excluding aggregator MSN. It is the nation’s second-most-read newspaper online and as of last year, The Post had the fifth-largest print circulation.
In June 2022, 73 journalists representing nearly two-thirds of White House briefing room seats signed a letter demanding the end of the mysterious prescreening process for events. But the unprecedented access restrictions remained in place, and press officers refused to explain the criteria for selection even to leaders of the White House Correspondents’ Association.
The White House did not respond to questions from The Post about the exclusion from Monday’s presidential event. At least two other journalists were initially barred, but the press office relented and let one of them in.
Empty seats at the press conference.
In addition to prescreening reporters let into Biden’s events — which critics say sets a troubling precedent for press access — the White House moved Friday to close a longstanding legal loophole that prevented authorities from stripping reporters of press badges and unveiled a formal process to do so.
Less than 1/3 of the White House press corps were present. WHY?
It’s obvious what the criteria for admittance are:
Do you report things contrary to or supportive of the narrative?
Do you ask hard or softball questions?
Are you reporting on the Biden crime family or just handwaving it away as “disinformation”?
And while holding airlines responsible for at-fault delays is a good idea, when will Pete Buttigieg be held accountable for the delays HE caused? Oh, wait…
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Peter Baldrige, former Assistant General Counsel of the Calif Dept of Public Health, notified the agency they were violating the law by not investigating COVID vaccine injuries and deaths. They ignored him. So I will be filing a writ of mandamus, a court order to force them to do their job. If the court grants the writ, we will likely get to have input on how they do it. That will be a nice change, won’t it?
Executive summary
The California Department of Public Health (CDPH) hasn’t investigated any link between the COVID vaccines and death. That’s a violation of California law to look the other way.
Peter Baldridge, former Assistant Chief Counsel of the CDPH, expressly brought this violation to the attention of the head of the department. As you might expect, the CDPH ignored him and did absolutely nothing.
We have proof of this.
Since the California government is not doing its job in following the law, I will be filing a writ of mandamus to compel the CDPH to do their job. The California court should also award me attorney fees. Also, the investigation should be under the supervision of the court and they should be required to:
do the requisite histopathology tests to assess causality
produce the death-vax records.
In addition, Mr. Baldridge and I have both made a FOIA request to see the death-vax records; something that no state or world government has ever produced.
One way or another, the truth will be exposed soon for all to see.
Peter Baldridge’s requests
By letter dated December 17, 2022, Mr. Baldridge requested under the Public Records Act (Govt. Code, §§6250, et seq.) all records pertaining to any and all special investigations conducted or being conducted by the California Department of Public Health (CDPH) into the COVID vaccine adverse events.
On January 10, 2023, he received CDPH’s response: CDPH provided no records of any special investigation in Covid-19 vaccine adverse events after January, 2021, and had no records of any other investigation for periods later than June, 2021.
So in a letter dated April 17, 2023, Mr. Baldridge requested, under the California Public Records Act (Govt. Code, §§7920, et seq.), any and all records pertaining to special investigations into Covid-19 vaccine adverse events commenced after January 10, 2023, the date of the Department’s first response in order to see if anything happened.
On April 27, 2023 the Department responded that it had no responsive records to his request:
In other words, they were informed of what the law required them to do and they chose to do nothing.
Peter Baldrige’s letters to CDPH
Here is the full text of the letters Mr. Baldridge sent to the CDPH:
December 17, 2022: Peter requests to produce the records of the investigations that were required by law
Jan 29, 2023: Peter points out that the response to his previous request was inadequate and the department has not done its duty under the law. He reminds them again what is required.
April 17, 2023: Peter asks for the records of the investigation that the department should have commenced after receiving his previous letter.
May 5, 2023: Peter recounts what has happened to date and points out that there was again nothing done in response to his request to comply with the law. Peter shifts gears and makes a FOIA request for the correlated death and vaccination records.
My FOIA request filed on May 5, 2023
I also decided to make a FOIA request using the official CDPH portal:
It appears that the Department has little interest in or intention to investigate the reports of deaths in California related to Covid-19 vaccinations as required by law. I believe it is in the public’s interest that the correlation of vaccination and subsequent deaths be explored, particularly since, as of April 27, 2023, the Department continued to promote the Covid-19 vaccines as both safe and effective.
The Department has in its possession records related to deaths in California commencing January, 2021, when the vaccine rollout began. The Department also has in its possession vaccination records for Californians. The Department also possesses the ability to correlate this data using personally identifying information including, but not limited to: Social Security Number, street address, zip code, date of birth, name, and gender.
Accordingly, I hereby request under the California Public Records Act (Govt. Code, §§7920, et seq.) that the Department correlate these data sets and provide for each individual who has died since January1, 202l the following data fields for each individual as follows:
Date(s) of COVID-19 vaccination(s): <if any>
Five year age range of the individual who died (e.g. 50-54)
Date of death
In lieu of personally identifying information, I request that the Department create a random identification number for each individual so that the identity of the individual remains confidential.
You may contact me at xxxxxx if you have any questions.
Note: the JOIN of the databases cannot be done through the CAIR because they do not have the death records. CDPH controls both databases, so if this is not the proper request portal, please let me know which is the correct place to submit the database JOIN request.
Here is the receipt from my FOIA request: P018493-050523
Who wants to see the data?
As Ryan Cole is fond of saying, “You will never find what you don’t look for.”
Let’s be clear. California is not looking into any injuries or deaths caused by the vaccines. They are looking out for the interests of the drug companies, not your health. They don’t care how many people in California have been injured or died, and your injuries and deaths are immaterial. They don’t care, and they don’t even want to look.
The medical community in California is not better. They don’t want an investigation, either. Have you heard of a single doctor, Dean of Medicine, or medical association in California calling for an investigation? Of course not!
Does Governor Newsom want an investigation? No way. Newsom himself is vaccine injured, so he knows the vaccines cause harm, and that’s why he dropped out of sight for weeks after his booster shot. A proper investigation would show that the vaccines killed people, which means that Newsom instituted policies that likely led to the untimely demise of tens of thousands of innocent residents of California and the injury of many times that number.
The only person who called for an investigation, as required by law, is the former Assistant Chief Counsel of the California Department of Public Health. He worked there for 27 years and is appalled by what is happening there now. They can’t take away his medical license because he’s not a doctor. They could try to take away his license to practice law, but he’s retired. This is a problem for them. They ran into someone they couldn’t intimidate.
The vaccination rollout data
The vax-death data is good, but you need the vaccination data by age pictured below. This allows me to normalize the deaths of the unvaccinated since people move from unvaccinated to vaccinated over time. Without an upward adjustment, it will look like the unvaccinated are not dying at an even rate. With normalization, I can compare death curves for people who got the shot with those who didn’t. I can also compute the death rate of people in the vaxxed group with the death rate of people in the unvaxxed group.
Summary
It is clear at this point that neither the CDPH, the governor, the California legislature, the medical community, nor the mainstream media have any interest or intention to investigate the reports of injuries and deaths in California related to the COVID vaccinations.
This is why I’ll be bringing a writ of mandamus action against the CDPH for not investigating the injuries and deaths.
In addition, I have sent a FOIA to the CDPH for the death-vax records. If the CDPH does not comply with my FOIA request, I will bring another writ of mandamus request action against them.
*This post has been lightly edited for grammar from its original form.*
Considering CA is already a lawsuit hotbed, why wouldn’t they want to hide their culpability? — TPR
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“Of all the 69 reports we now have, this is the most disturbing,” expressed DailyClout CEO Dr. Naomi Wolf in a live stream on Sunday. “Because the bottom line is, according to a new tranche of Pfizer documents released just this month, this past month, April of 2023. And these are documents that go back to April of 2021 — exactly two years ago. Both Pfizer and the FDA knew that the mRNA COVID vaccine caused dire fetal and infant harms, including death.”
The batch of Pfizer clinical trial documents released in April 2023 by the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) under court order contains a shocking, eight-page document titled, “Pregnancy and Lactation Cumulative Review” …
This document is among the most horrifying yet to emerge into public view. It reveals that both Pfizer and the FDA knew by early 2021 that Pfizer’s mRNA COVID vaccine, BNT162b2, resulted in horrible damage to fetuses and babies.
• Adverse events in over 54% of cases of “maternal exposure” to the vaccine (248 out of 458). The language “maternal exposure” implies that Pfizer acknowledged intercourse, inhalation, and skin contact as methods of exposure to its mRNA injection, as also evidenced by Protocol Amendment 14.
• Six premature labor and delivery cases resulting in two newborn deaths.
• 19% (41/215) of babies in Pfizer’s records exposed to the company’s COVID mRNA vaccine via their mothers’ breast milk were recorded as suffering from 48 different categories of adverse events.
The damage and suffering feel even more real when you narrow it down to individual stories.
• “A 15-month-old infant with medical history of vomiting experienced skin exfoliation and infant irritability while being breastfed (latency <7 days). The outcome of the event’ skin exfoliation’ was not recovered and outcome of event’ infant irritability’ was unknown.”
• “A 9-month-old infant with a medical history of meningococcal vaccine and no history of allergies, asthma, eczema or anaphylaxis experienced rash and urticaria a day after exposure via lactation.”
• “A day after the mother received vaccination, a baby developed a rash after breastfeeding. At the time of the report, the event was ‘not recovered.”
• “An 8-month-old infant experienced angioedema [an area of swelling of the lower layer of skin and tissue just under the skin or mucous membranes] one day after his mother received vaccination.”
• “There were 2 cases reporting ‘illness’ after exposure via breast milk’. In the first case, a 6-month-old infant developed an unspecified sickness 2 days post-mother’s vaccination. The outcome of the event sickness was recovered, and no causality assessment was provided. The second case, a 3-month-old infant developed an unspecified illness and required hospitalization for 6 days post-exposure via breast milk (>7 days latency).”
Pfizer employee, Robert T. Maroko, approved the Review with these horrific findings on April 20, 2021.
“This is a real person working at Pfizer, Mr. Robert T. Maroko, who looked at this damage to babies, these dead babies, these dead fetuses, these miserably-injured babies — approved it and sent it on to the FDA. The FDA approved it and gave it to Rochelle Walensky and the CDC,” shared Dr. Wolf.
And three days later, on April 23, 2021, CDC Director Rochelle Walensky held a press conference, which kicked off an aggressive campaign to get pregnant women vaccinated.
“No safety concerns were observed for people vaccinated in the third trimester or safety concerns for their babies. As such, CDC recommends that pregnant people receive the COVID-19 vaccine.”
“The FDA signed off on this document showing dead babies, sick babies, dead from the injection, sick from nursing, the spontaneous abortions, or dead subsequent to the injection, the spontaneous abortions, the respiratory distress, babies hospitalized … These monsters looked at whether the babies would get sick and die or whether the fetuses would spontaneously abort, and they did. And they saw that they did, and they kept going.”
“This was just [four] months into the rollout,” Dr. Wolf mentioned. “And I want to remind you that breastfeeding has gone from 34% of moms and babies at the start of the pandemic to only 15% now, meaning that babies are having a terrible time with their mother’s breast milk. Pfizer knew they would!” she exclaimed. “Pfizer knew they would! The FDA knew they would, and they told pregnant women and lactating women to get vaccinated anyway.”
“At the end of this horrific, demonic analysis of all these sick and dying babies, all these aborted fetuses, all these babies getting sick from poisoned breast milk. Seriously sick. Damaged. They held a press conference. And Dr. Walensky, who has this report in hand, who has this report in hand,” Dr. Wolf said twice with emphasis, “told the women of America and anyone else who is listening in the world that these vaccines were safe and effective for pregnant women and for their babies. And that to protect their babies, they had to get vaccinated. They knew. They knew. Absolutely criminal.”
And there are 68 other damning reports — just like this one — using primary source Pfizer documents released under court order by the U.S. FDA.
These important summaries, which detail astonishing ranges of deaths, disabilities, and other systematic harms to subjects — damage that both Pfizer and the FDA sought to keep hidden from the public for 75 years — contain vastly important headlines: twenty forms of menstrual damage to women — how Pfizer covered up a flood of adverse events — PEG in breast milk — within a month of rollout, Pfizer knew the mRNA vaccines did not work.
Now, the information Pfizer and the FDA wanted to keep hidden for 75 years is available in paperback form. Funds and proceeds raised go to the research project, which helps makes more Pfizer Documents Analysis Reports possible. So, please, show your support and get your hands on this critical information in one place — by ordering your copy today.
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Welp, now we know why they didn’t want to have their records audited!
A new report says at least 222 noncitizens have registered to vote in Arizona’s Maricopa County since 2015.
The Public Interest Legal Foundation said that the federal motor voter law that allows people to register to vote at their local motor vehicle offices is partly to blame for the problem.
For 30 years, foreign nationals have been getting registered to vote.
“Motor Voter leads to problems for immigrants across America. Signing the wrong form at the DMV can haunt you years later when your naturalization process switches to deportation. For 30 years, foreign nationals have been getting registered to vote. Congress must modernize Motor Voter to reflect the technologies and demographics of today,” said J. Christian Adams, the foundation’s president.
Adams said that 222 noncitizens disclosed to local officials that they were on the rolls. Of those, at least nine voted in federal elections. The 222 names in Maricopa County are of people who self-reported as noncitizens. How many others have NOT reported? Mr. Adams said immigrants seeking citizenship often come forward and acknowledge that they are on the rolls because one of the questions on the naturalization form is whether they ever were illegally registered. Lying on that form can quickly earn deportation.
In a report in The Washington Times, Adams said there is no way to know how many other noncitizens are on the rolls in Maricopa County, which the Times said was America’s fourth most populous county.
The problem with Motor Voter is that some states have offered registration to everyone — even noncitizens who, under federal law, are not eligible to vote in national elections.
Among the most significant hiccups was Pennsylvania, where officials discovered that the motor vehicle system allowed over 11,000 noncitizens who had sneaked onto voter lists.
How many Foreign nationals?
Adams said the issue is not how many noncitizens vote but that there is not enough protection written in the motor voter law to prevent noncitizens from getting on the voting rolls in the first place.
“When you have a failure in the system, whether or not it’s rampant doesn’t matter when it involves foreigners voting in American elections,” he said.
“If this problem had been detected 10 years ago, or maybe 15 years ago, I think there would have been a quick bipartisan fix in Congress,” he said. “But the Democrats have become so radicalized now about every voting issue in Congress.”
A new law that took effect April 7 puts the label “noncitizen” on driver’s licenses issued to those who are not American citizens while also requiring ID to be shown at a polling place.
“I can tell you from my experience at the attorney general’s office that while voter fraud cases are indeed rare, the overwhelming majority of such cases involve noncitizen voting, sometimes even at the BMV through the motor-voter program; circumstances would then cascade when the application proceeds without catching that the applicant was a noncitizen, and the individual would eventually be sent a notice of their neighborhood polling place and be encouraged to cast a vote, leading some to do so and eventually being identified as an illegal noncitizen voter,” said Dan Tierney, a representative for Ohio Gov. Mike DeWine.
Virginia recently found 18,990 deceased voters on its rolls by checking death records that went back to 1960.
“I knew that there was something there, but I didn’t know that it was this big,” Virginia Elections Commissioner Susan Beals said.
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