The Spies Who Loved Twitter

 From FBI to DNI the DNI to "OGA," the full thread on Twitter and its intelligence partners

Twitter Files Thread: The Spies Who Loved Twitter

Matt Taibbi
Dec 25, 2022

1. THREAD: The Twitter Files

TWITTER AND "OTHER GOVERNMENT AGENCIES"

2. After weeks of “Twitter Files” reports, the FBI issued a statement Wednesday. It didn’t refute allegations. Instead, it decried “conspiracy theorists” publishing “misinformation,” whose “sole aim” is to “discredit the agency.”

3.    They must think us unambitious, if our “sole aim” is to discredit the FBI. After all, a whole range of government agencies discredit themselves in the #TwitterFiles. Why stop with one?

4. The files show the FBI acting as doorman to a vast program of social media surveillance and censorship, encompassing agencies across the federal government – from the State Department to the Pentagon to the CIA.

5. The operation is far bigger than the reported 80 members of the Foreign Influence Task Force (FITF), which also facilitates requests from a wide array of smaller actors - from local cops to media to state government.

6.  Thousands upon thousands of official “reports” flowed through the FITF and the FBI’s San Francisco field office.

7. On June 29th, 2020, San Francisco FBI agent Elvis Chan wrote to pair of Twitter execs asking if he could invite an “OGA” to an upcoming NGO-sponsored conference:

8. OGA, or “Other Government Organization,” is often a euphemism for CIA, and according to multiple former intelligence officials and contractors.

9. Chuckles one: “They use it to seem mysterious to outsiders.”

10. “Other Government Agency (the place where I worked for 27 years),” says retired CIA officer Ray McGovern.

11. It was an open secret at Twitter that one of its executives was ex-CIA, which is why Chan referred to that executive’s “former employer.”

12. The first Twitter executive abandons all pretense to stealth and emails that the employee “used to work for the CIA, so that is Elvis’s question.”

13. Senior legal executive Stacia Cardille, who had good op-sec by Twitter standards, replies, “I know” and “I thought my silence was understood.”

14. Cardille then passes on conference details to recently-hired ex-FBI lawyer Jim Baker.

15. “I invited the FBI and the CIA virtually will attend too,” Cardille says to Baker, casually adding: “No need for you to attend.”

16 . The government was in constant contact not just with Twitter but with virtually every major tech firm.

17. These included Facebook, Microsoft, Verizon, Reddit, even Pinterest, and many others.

18. One of the most common forums was a regular meeting of the multi-agency Foreign Influence Task Force (FITF), attended by spates of executives, FBI personnel, and – nearly always – one or two attendees marked “OGA.”

19. The FITF meeting agendas virtually always included, at or near the beginning, an “OGA briefing,” usually about foreign matters (hold that thought).

20. Despite its official remit being “Foreign Influence,” the FITF and the SF FBI office became conduit for mountains of domestic moderation requests, from state governments, even local police:

21. Many requests arrived via Teleporter, a one-way platform in which many communications were timed to vanish:

22. Especially as the election approached in 2020, the FITF/FBI overwhelmed Twitter with requests, sending spreadsheets with hundreds of accounts:

23. Email after email came from the San Francisco office heading into the election, often adorned with an Excel attachment:

24. There were so many government requests, Twitter employees had to improvise a system for prioritizing/triaging them:

25. The FBI was clearly tailoring searches to Twitter’s policies. FBI requests were almost always phrased as “possible terms of service violation” somewhere, even in the subject line:

26. Twitter executives noticed the FBI appeared to be assigning personnel to look for Twitter violations.

27. “They have some folks in the Baltimore field office and at HQ that are just doing keyword searches for violations. This is probably the 10th request I have dealt with in the last 5 days,” remarked Cardille.

28. Even ex-FBI lawyer Jim Baker agreed: “Odd that they are searching for violations of our policies.”

29. Although so much of this activity was domestic, “Foreign meddling” had been the ostensible justification for expanded moderation since platforms like Twitter were dragged to the Hill by the Senate in 2017:

30. Yet behind the scenes, Twitter executives struggled against government claims of foreign interference, on their platform and others:

31. The #TwitterFiles show execs under constant pressure to validate theories of foreign influence – and unable to find evidence for key assertions.

32. “Found no links to Russia,” says one analyst, but suggests he could “brainstorm” to “find a stronger connection.”

33. “Extremely tenuous circumstantial chance of being related,” says another.

34. “No real matches using the info,” says former Trust and Safety chief Yoel Roth in another case, noting some links were “clearly Russian,” but another was a “house rental in South Carolina?”

35. In another case, Roth concludes a series of Venezuelan pro-Maduro accounts are unrelated to Russia’s Internet Research Agency, because they’re too high-volume:

36. The Venezuelans “were extremely high-volume tweeters… pretty uncharacteristic of a lot of the other IRA activity,” Roth says.

37. In a key email, news that the State Department is making a wobbly public assertion of Russian influence leads an exec – the same one with the “OGA” past - to make a damning admission:

38. “Due to a lack of technical evidence on our end, I've generally left it be, waiting for more evidence,” he says. “Our window on that is closing, given that government partners are becoming more aggressive on attribution.”

Translation: the “more aggressive” “government partners” had closed Twitter’s “window” of independence.

39. “Other Government Agencies” ended up sharing intelligence through the FBI and FITF not just with Twitter, but with Yahoo!, Twitch, Clouldfare, LinkedIn, even Wikimedia:

40. CIA whistleblower John Kiriakou believes these reports found in the #TwitterFiles are written by his former agency.

41. “Looks right on to me,” Kiriakou says, noting that “what was cut off above [the “tearline”] was the originating CIA office and all the copied offices.”

These reports are far more factually controversial than domestic counterparts.

42. One intel report lists accounts tied to “Ukraine ‘neo-Nazi’ Propaganda.’” This includes assertions that Joe Biden helped orchestrate a coup in 2014 and “put his son on the board of Burisma.”

43. Another report asserts a list of accounts accusing the “Biden administration” of “corruption” in vaccine distribution are part of a Russian influence campaign:

44. Often intelligence comes in the form of brief reports, followed by long lists of accounts deemed to be pro-Maduro, pro-Cuba, pro-Russia, etc: This batch contained over 1000 accounts sentenced to the digital beyond:

45. One report says a site “documenting purported rights abuses committed by Ukrainians” is directed by Russian agents:

46. Intel about the origin of these accounts might be true. But so might the information in them – about neo-Nazis, or rights abuses in Donbas, etc.

47, This is a difficult speech dilemma. Should the government be allowed to try to prevent Americans (and others) from seeing pro-Maduro or anti-Ukrainian accounts?

48. Often intel reports are just long lists of newspapers, tweets or YouTube videos guilty of “anti-Ukraine narratives”:

49. Sometimes - not always -Twitter and YouTube blocked the accounts. But now we know for sure what Roth meant by “the Bureau (and by extension the IC).”

50. The line between “misinformation” and “distorting propaganda” is thin. Are we comfortable with so many companies receiving so many reports from a “more aggressive” government?

51. The CIA declined to comment on the nature of its relationship to tech companies like Twitter. Watch @bariweiss, @shellenbergerMD, @lhfang, and this space for more, on issues ranging from Covid-19 to Twitter's relationship to congress, and more.

The US Democrats are a party of war !

Democrats position themselves as the party of virtue, cloaking their support for the war industry in moral language stretching back to Korea and Vietnam, when President Ngo Dinh Diem was as lionized as Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky.

Chris Hedges: Democrats Are a Party of War
By Chris Hedges
ScheerPost
Dec 26, 2022

All the wars they support and fund are “good” wars. All the enemies they fight, the latest being Russia’s Vladimir Putin and China’s Xi Jinping, are incarnations of evil. The photo of a beaming House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and Vice President Kamala Harris holding up a signed Ukrainian battle flag behind Zelensky as he addressed Congress last Wednesday was another example of the Democratic Party’s abject subservience to the war machine.

The Democrats, especially with the presidency of Bill Clinton, became shills not only for corporate America but for the weapons manufacturers and the Pentagon. No weapons system is too costly. No war, no matter how disastrous, goes unfunded. No military budget is too big, including the $858 billion in military spending allocated for the current fiscal year, an increase of $45 billion above what the Biden administration requested.

The historian Arnold Toynbee cited unchecked militarism as the fatal disease of empires, arguing that they ultimately commit suicide. 

There once was a wing of the Democratic Party that questioned and stood up to the war industry: Senators J. William Fulbright, George McGovern, Gene McCarthy, Mike Gravel, William Proxmire and House member Dennis Kucinich. But that opposition evaporated along with the antiwar movement.

When 30 members of the party’s progressive caucus recently issued a call for Biden to negotiate with Putin, they were forced by the party leadership and a warmongering media to back down and rescind their letter. Not that any of them, with the exception of Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, have voted against the billions of dollars in weaponry sent to Ukraine or the bloated military budget. Rashida Tlaib voted present.

The opposition to the perpetual funding of the war in Ukraine has come primarily from Republicans, 11 in the Senate and 57 in the House, several, such as Marjorie Taylor Greene, unhinged conspiracy theorists. Only nine Republicans in the House joined the Democrats in supporting the $1.7 trillion spending bill needed to prevent the government from shutting down, which included approval of $847 billion for the military.

The total is boosted to $858 billion when factoring in accounts that don’t fall under the Armed Services committees’ jurisdiction. In the Senate, 29 Republicans opposed the spending bill. The Democrats, including nearly all 100 members of the House Congressional Progressive Caucus, lined up dutifully for endless war.

This lust for war is dangerous, pushing us into a potential war with Russia and, perhaps later, with China — each a nuclear power. It is also economically ruinous. The monopolization of capital by the military has driven U.S. debt to over $30 trillion, $6 trillion more than the U.S. GDP of $24 trillion. Servicing this debt costs $300 billion a year.

The U.S. spends more on the military than the next nine countries, including China and Russia, combined. Congress is also on track to provide an extra $21.7 billion to the Pentagon — above the already expanded annual budget — to resupply Ukraine.

“But those contracts are just the leading edge of what is shaping up to be a big new defense buildup,” The New York Times reported. “Military spending next year is on track to reach its highest level in inflation-adjusted terms since the peaks in the costs of the Iraq and Afghanistan wars between 2008 and 2011, and the second highest in inflation-adjusted terms since World War II — a level that is more than the budgets for the next 10 largest cabinet agencies combined.”

Surrender

The Democratic Party, which, under the Clinton administration aggressively courted corporate donors, has surrendered its willingness to challenge, however tepidly, the war industry.

“As soon as the Democratic Party made a determination, it could have been 35 or 40 years ago, that they were going to take corporate contributions, that wiped out any distinction between the two parties,” Dennis Kucinich said when I interviewed him on my show for The Real News Network. “Because in Washington, he or she who pays the piper plays the tune. That’s what’s happened. There isn’t that much of a difference in terms of the two parties when it comes to war.”

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b079rbpYIzU

In his 1970 book The Pentagon Propaganda Machine, Fulbright describes how the Pentagon and the arms industry pour millions into shaping public opinion through public relations campaigns, Defense Department films, control over Hollywood and domination of the commercial media. Military analysts on cable news are universally former military and intelligence officials who sit on boards or work as consultants to defense industries, a fact they rarely disclose to the public.

Barry R. McCaffrey, a retired four-star army general and military analyst for NBC News, was also an employee of Defense Solutions, a military sales and project management firm. He, like most of these shills for war, personally profited from the sales of the weapons systems and expansion of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.

On the eve of every congressional vote on the Pentagon budget, lobbyists from businesses tied to the war industry meet with Congress members and their staff to push them to vote for the budget to protect jobs in their district or state. This pressure, coupled with the mantra amplified by the media that opposition to profligate war funding is unpatriotic, keeps elected officials in bondage. These politicians also depend on the lavish donations from the weapons manufacturers to fund their campaigns.

Seymour Melman, in his book Pentagon Capitalism, documented the way militarized societies destroy their domestic economies. Billions are spent on the research and development of weapons systems while renewable energy technologies languish. Universities are flooded with military-related grants while they struggle to find money for environmental studies and the humanities.

Bridges, roads, levees, rail, ports, electric grids, sewage treatment plants and drinking water infrastructures are structurally deficient and antiquated. Schools are in disrepair and lack sufficient teachers and staff. Unable to stem the COVID-19 pandemic, the for-profit health care industry forces families, including those with insurance, into bankruptcy. Domestic manufacturing, especially with the offshoring of jobs to China, Vietnam, Mexico and other nations, collapses. Families are drowning in personal debt, with 63 percent of Americans living paycheck to paycheck. The poor, the mentally ill, the sick and the unemployed are abandoned.

Melman, who coined the term “permanent war economy,” noted that since the end of the Second World War, the federal government has spent more than half its discretionary budget on past, current and future military operations. It is the largest single sustaining activity of the government. The military-industrial establishment is nothing more than gilded corporate welfare.

Military systems are sold before they are produced. Military industries are permitted to charge the federal government for huge cost overruns.

Massive profits are guaranteed. For example, this November, the Army awarded Raytheon Technologies alone more than $2 billion in contracts, on top of over $190 million awarded in August, to deliver missile systems to expand or replenish weapons sent to Ukraine.

Despite a depressed market for most other businesses, stock prices of Lockheed and Northrop Grumman have risen by more than 36 and 50 percent this year.

Militarizing Tech Giants

Tech giants, including Amazon, which supplies surveillance and facial recognition software to the police and F.B.I., have been absorbed into the permanent war economy. Amazon, Google, Microsoft and Oracle were awarded multibillion-dollar cloud computing contracts for the Joint Warfighting Cloud Capability and are eligible to receive $9 billion in Pentagon contracts to provide the military with “globally available cloud services across all security domains and classification levels, from the strategic level to the tactical edge,” through mid-2028.

Foreign aid is given to countries such as Israel, with more than $150 billion in bilateral assistance since its founding in 1948, or Egypt, which has received over $80 billion since 1978 — aid that requires foreign governments to buy weapons systems from the U.S. The U.S. public funds the research, development and building of weapons systems and purchases them for foreign governments.

Such a  circular system mocks the idea of a free-market economy. These weapons soon become obsolete and are replaced by updated and usually more costly weapons systems. It is, in economic terms, a dead end. It sustains nothing but the permanent war economy.

“The truth of the matter is that we’re in a heavily militarized society driven by greed, lust for profit, and wars are being created just to keep fueling that,” Kucinich told me.

In 2014, the U.S. backed a coup in Ukraine that installed a government that included neo-Nazis and was antagonistic to Russia. The coup triggered a civil war when the ethnic Russians in eastern Ukraine, the Donbass, sought to secede from the country, resulting in over 14,000 people dead and nearly 150,000 displaced, before Russia invaded in February.

The Russian invasion of Ukraine, according to Jacques Baud, a former NATO security advisor who also worked for Swiss intelligence, was instigated by the escalation of Ukraine’s war on the Donbass. It also followed the Biden administration’s rejection of proposals sent by the Kremlin in late 2021, which might have averted Russia’s invasion the following year.

This invasion has led to widespread U.S. and E.U. sanctions on Russia, which have boomeranged onto Europe. Inflation ravages Europe with the sharp curtailment of shipments of Russian oil and gas. Industry, especially in Germany, is crippled.  In most of Europe, it is a winter of shortages, spiraling prices and misery.

“This whole thing is blowing up in the face of the West,” Kucinich warned. “We forced Russia to pivot to Asia, as well as Brazil, India, China, South Africa and Saudi Arabia. There’s a whole new world being formed. The catalyst of it is the misjudgment that occurred about Ukraine and the effort to try to control Ukraine in 2014 that most people aren’t aware of.”

By not opposing a Democratic Party whose primary business is war, liberals become the sterile, defeated dreamers in Fyodor Dostoevsky’s Notes from the Underground. A former convict, Dostoevsky did not fear evil. He feared a society that no longer had the moral fortitude to confront evil. And war, to steal a line from my latest book, is the greatest evil.
- - -
Chris Hedges is a Pulitzer Prize–winning journalist who was a foreign correspondent for 15 years for The New York Times, where he served as the Middle East bureau chief and Balkan bureau chief for the paper. He previously worked overseas for The Dallas Morning News, The Christian Science Monitor and NPR.  He is the host of show “The Chris Hedges Report.”

Author’s Note to Readers: There is now no way left for me to continue to write a weekly column for ScheerPost and produce my weekly television show without your help. The walls are closing in, with startling rapidity, on independent journalism, with the elites, including the Democratic Party elites, clamoring for more and more censorship. Bob Scheer, who runs ScheerPost on a shoestring budget, and I will not waiver in our commitment to independent and honest journalism, and we will never put ScheerPost behind a paywall, charge a subscription for it, sell your data or accept advertising. Please, if you can, sign up at chrishedges.substack.com so I can continue to post my Monday column on ScheerPost and produce my weekly television show, The Chris Hedges Report.

The most insane piece of vaccine propaganda ever seen

Recapping two very strange years and the brighter future that awaits

What Was the Most Insane Piece of Vaccine Propaganda You've Seen?

A Midwestern Doctor
Jan 1, 2023

Cultures periodically find themselves in collective psychoses. Some like Tulip mania (where tulip flowers became the most valuable commodity in existence) in retrospect are rather comical, while others like the Salem witch trials and the earlier medieval witch hunts are quite horrifying.

The idea of burning of witches alive has permeated quite deeply into the collective consciousness of our culture. My medical practice tends to draw critical thinkers who question narratives, and quite a few female patients have told me they remember (e.g., due to a past life regression) that they had been a witch who was burned at the stake for their heretical beliefs.

The subject of witch hunts has been on my mind recently after I discovered one of the world’s leading vaccine proponents who advocates for campaigns for censoring any questions of the narrative is a fan of a priest who oversaw the Salem Witch Trials. This admiration was a result of that priest also being one of the first (and hated) proponents of mandatory vaccination.

I have a friend who had a spiritual awakening that allowed him to survive the Rwandan Genocide (one of the best contemporary examples of how bloodthirsty humans can become) while everyone around him died. Another colleague who has been fighting the mandates recently spoke with a survivor of the Rwandan genocide who left him with a very powerful message: the killing didn’t really start until the government got behind it and let everyone know it was ok to butcher their neighbors.

One of the things that has been so concerning about the pandemic has been the government stepping across that critical line to encourage violence against its own citizens (which the mainstream media has been all too happy to egg on).

Most recently, we had the World Health Organization put this out:

These types of actions are completely unacceptable in any type of Democratic society. A few of us were inspired to spend the holidays crafting responses to it, since if these lies go unchecked, they can lead to very bad things very quickly, like those observed in the totalitarian regimes of the 20th century.

One of the best ways to combat evil is through comedy. Fortunately, when societies become sufficiently insane, you don’t have to do anything besides highlight is already being said (one well-known Twitter account came to prominence for doing just that), and the insanity is often widely recognized after it has passed.

One of my favorite examples where this is now widely recognized was the medical professions attitudes towards smoking, which has gone from something they aggressively promoted for their sponsors to something they resolutely oppose.

Tess shared a few other classic examples here.

There were a few red flags with COVID-19 that informed me the vaccines would turn into a disaster. One was that their publicity campaign was the most aggressive public relations effort I had seen in my lifetime — every single stop that could be pulled out to sell a product was. This suggested that widespread public resistance would mount against their use once the adverse reactions became apparent, that mandates would be necessary to vaccinate the rest of the population, and that those mandates would be justified by the percentage of the population which had already been vaccinated due to falling for the previous PR campaign.

Because of this, I decided to collect some of the most memorable pieces of propaganda, so that once the gross malfeasance that allowed the vaccines to be approved became known, like the previous smoking example, they could serve as a lesson to future generations being targeted by similar predatory business practices.

Trashy Advertisements

Because the government spent at least a billion dollars to promote these vaccines across every media platform, it was inevitable some pretty trashy promotions would occur. One of the most well known examples was from this late night talk show.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sSkFyNVtNh8

Stephen Colbert sadly was not the only one to create trashy musicals to promote these poisons:

As you would imagine, music videos were also created:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oH6dCTtgxbY

“This ain’t eugenics, uh uh, no way”….I don’t even know what to say here.

There were also a few more professionally made produced music videos aimed at marketing the vaccines as the miraculous solution to everything we had just been put through.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o5OA1bo1h9g

The entertainment industry did everything they could to promote the vaccines, so not surprisingly, celebrities also got on the bandwagon:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v7TarriXFME

Benefit concerts to help vaccinate the world were also conducted.

Some of the most trashy campaigns (which fortunately raised more concerns about the vaccines than it persuaded to take them) were the vaccine lotteries seen across the country.

Another trashy campaign came from the Mayor of Chicago:

Joints for jabs also briefly became a national phenomena:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5WpxTPw5S90

The story above can be found here.

Sleazy Advertising:

Sex sells, so it was not surprising human relationships would be targeted throughout the pandemic.

Health authorities around the world also gave far more ridiculous advice throughout the pandemic regarding social distancing during physical intimacy, that to this day, I am still a bit in disbelief they promoted.

I’m almost sad I never got this message for Valentine’s day.

One of the many of vaccine side effects I’ve repeatedly come across is erectile dysfunction which I believe is a result of the micro-clotting they cause.

This really happened. Others were even more direct:

Vaccination Instead of Health

Years ago, I read a book that argued all successful ideologies must market themselves with messages that were universally persuasive. The two messages that fulfill that criteria are:

•You are special.

•Everything that is wrong with your life is not your fault.

I generally agree with that author’s argument, although as the previous section shows, you can also make the case that a sexual or financial appeal comes close to being a universal persuasion. Everyone I’ve spoken to believes around 90% of the population is susceptible to universal persuasions (the 3-10% that prioritize thinking critically instead want things that make sense and feel genuine).

Note: One of the sad thing I’ve observed with people in medicine, and particularly within public health is that their focus of reality becomes so narrowed that mass vaccination (and similar interventions like water fluoridation) are seen as the sole determinants of health. Because of this, I often see these people continually freaking out over vaccine hesitancy and quite literally loosing sleep at night over the small numbers of people who are not vaccinated (this frustration existed long before COVID-19 at a time when far fewer people questioned vaccination).

Throughout COVID-19, vaccinated people were made to feel like they were superior to everyone else, and all personal responsibility (e.g., having a healthy lifestyle) that was known to reduce your risk of COVID-19 was thrown out the window for the belief you could magically solve every problem in your life by having someone else simply give you a vaccine

Peter Hotez recently provided what I believe may be the most widely recognized illustrations of this mentality in history (it was seen by millions of people):

Sadly, Peter is not alone in this regard, and many others share his beliefs. The best example I know of came from the Hawaii’s government:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kOdo3ZrDFeg

Note: Keiki is Hawaiian for children.

Sadly, this same ignorance could be seen all the way across the nation:

“I want you to look at this [burger] and think of [it] when you think of vaccination. Yumm…vaccination…I’m getting a very good feeling about vaccination.”

One reader shared that New Zealand used free KFC to promote the vaccines (with the campaign being targeted to the native Maori population):

After I saw this I could not help but be reminded of a previous breast cancer promotion (there was also one done for fracking drill bits):

There was also the infamous Krispy Kreme promotion. I felt it was particularly noteworthy because I believe the only thing all members of the political spectrum were in agreement about COVID-19 was it being more dangerous for obese diabetics.

I was truly amazed at how far the media went to promote this campaign:

Or the immune system:

This was another great excuses for the vaccines failing (which I must note, was known would happen from the start of the campaign).

The FDA’s unscientific advertisements were not limited to vaccines. While working with industry to protect the market for these vaccines, the FDA also made other nonsensical claims like rebranding ivermectin as a horse dewormer:

In the same way industry and government will lie about health to sell their products, it is also very common new diseases will be created out of thin air (this is termed disease branding and sadly is much more common than you might realize, especially in psychiatry). One of the most comical examples I saw was the attempt to create this alleged condition:

A common marketing strategy is to make people want what they can’t have, and I assumed this campaign was aimed at reinforcing that (remember, when the vaccines were rolled out, they were deliberately made only available to certain groups so everyone felt left out until it was their turn).

Targeting Children

Virtually ever cult always targets children because it is well known that if you convert someone at a young age (when they lack the critical thinking to resist common brainwashing tactics) they are converted for life, which is always necessary for the long-term viability of the institution.

These advertisements become quite surreal when you see them be targeted to children (if you have any doubts, read “Elmo’s” tweet about it).

It still amazes me public health officials do not recognize needing boosters means your vaccination program has failed...

This was probably the saddest example I saw throughout the pandemic:

The most criminal example however was Pfizer’s advertising for children to be in their vaccine trials. For example, consider the case of Maddie de Garay, who was permanently disabled in the Pfizer trial for kids, had her injury documented as stomach pain, and then was kicked to the curb by Pfizer rather than receive the report that was promised.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kGuEnHJzT-c

Note: Superheroes were also used to incentivize children to vaccinate in other settings.

Holiday Festivities:

Since nothing was off limits, the holidays were also targeted and I heard more stories than I can count of people being banned from Thanksgiving or Christmas because they did not want to be vaccinated (I can’t recall another time where a government campaign targeted our critical social bonds like this).

Australia lead the charge in isolating the unvaccinated from society. Not surprisingly, their chief public health officer likewise advised against having unvaccinated family members at Christmas.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_JB8IEPqd1o

Stanford, for example, really pushed this immoral narrative.

This campaign was particularly egregious because everyone knew the vaccines did not protect against transmission (so it was irrelevant if a relative was unvaccinated). Sadly, our public officials intentionally lied about that so that they could have another argument to justify their unlawful mandates.

Near the start of the marketing campaign, Fauci helped feed into this hysteria by “vaccinating” Santa so Christmas could be saved:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YEil6VTzXdc

Note: Santa is probably one of the most socially distanced individuals on the planet.

One of the most upsetting vaccine promotions I came across echoing this theme came about a year later:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=djfKXwlisZI

Conclusion:

A classic marketing strategy is to create a need and then market a product as the solution to that need. Throughout the pandemic, it was clear the purpose of the lockdowns and social distancing was to create the “need” for vaccines, and the advertisements here should reflect how much work was done to sway those who did not initially succumb to that planted need.

If I had to pick the single most absurd message I saw throughout the pandemic, it would be the one Igor Chudov discovered:

The first runner up was the Fauci song, which was widely promoted in the media at the time it happened:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9sJ-d33a-FA

The other runner up was Biden stating:

"Let me be clear: If you're in a state where hurricanes often strike — like Florida or the Gulf Coast or into Texas — a vital part of preparing for hurricane season is to get vaccinated now.

A reader also offered an excellent contender:

Fortunately, while the last two years have been quite depressing, more and more signs are showing that mass psychosis is breaking. Almost everyone, despite Peter Hotez’s best efforts, has avoided the boosters, and according to the most recent survey, the majority of the population is concerned about the safety of these vaccines (a significant portion also doubts their efficacy). Once that psychosis breaks, it is critical to preserve these examples as reminders for the next generation so history does not repeat itself and the same cons can be pulled again.

One of the things that bothers me immensely about this is that because the messaging all of these people provided aligned with the vested interests, they could lie or spread as much misinformation as much as they wanted without any accountability (Hotez for example has been trotted out as an expert throughout COVID-19, tries to censor all “misinformation” and has had made an endless number of erroneous doom and gloom pronouncements on national television). Conversely, I feel that if, while presenting my differing narrative, if I were to state 1% of the lies many of these people have said I would not have the readership I have (as I’d be rightfully viewed as someone who is untrustworthy) and many outside parties would be eagerly jumping on those errors.

This is probably the most offensive disinformation I came across as its consequences were disastrous for many (e.g., I know many elderly individuals who died from the vaccines and unnecessary the school closures were devastating to our children).

A key theme I have been trying to highlight here is that the traditional model of governance where leaders decide (often questionable) policies and then shove them down the public’s throat with propaganda no longer works. In the past, this could be done because there was a monopoly in the media which made it possible for an absurd message like the ones shown above to be distributed throughout the populace while no competing narrative could see the light of day.

The internet has upended that equation because there are far too many people who will create competing narratives at almost no cost (whereas the traditional propaganda model is expensive), and the internet naturally selects for the most compelling arguments to be seen. For example, a few of the messages I came up with off the top of my head that were put together in my free time have now been seen by millions of people. Regardless of how much money is spent, government and industry can never compete with millions of citizens looking for ways to spread the truth online.

Over the last few years, I, and others, have come to believe we are witnessing the death spiral of the traditional propaganda model (which, as is commonly seen in failing totalitarian states, is defaulting to more absurd lies to maintain its “authority” that only further weaken the public’s trust). I cannot see any way out of this as the COVID-19 vaccine campaign’s lies were so egregious they destroyed much of the longstanding credibility our institutions had (the only other option, destroying the internet entirely, is no longer viable because too much of our economy is intertwined with it).

The authors who initially proposed that we are nearing the end of propaganda believe the only remaining option is for our government to follow the alternative model envisioned a century ago:

Instead of having a qualified leadership govern the country as it pleased, we need to develop an educated citizenry who can understand the complex problems our country faces. The populace, then of their own accord, must be convinced the policies our leadership chooses make sense and agree to follow them of their own free will. I believe this is the shift our species will go in, and we can accelerate it by having each of us do our part to help develop an informed public (I also suspect Elon Musk’s recognition of this reality led him to buy Twitter so it could be used for that purpose).

At this point, I am very hopeful for where things will go over the next few years but simultaneous recognize the previous regime that depended upon censorship and control will continue to struggle harder and harder until it is forced to accept that the times have changed.

Thank you so much for all of your support over the last year. I am still in awe of how fast this substack has taken off and I hope I can continue to reciprocate that support to each of you as we move into 2023. Please let me know in the comments if you believe there are any important vaccine promotions I forgot to highlight (I will add them in) and which your favorite example was. I also hope you have a New Year’s Resolution planned that is a bit better than Hawaii’s example shown above!

Difference in attitudes : China vs America

We are being led in our anti-China hysteria by the United States which is not concerned that China will attack us, or even the United States, but is concerned that its world hegemony is being challenged.

China has neither the intent nor the capability to attack us

By John Menadue
Jan 2, 2023

A repost from November 11, 2022

That is why the US is persistently goading China into conflict and possible war. And we follow along. As Jack Waterford put it from a US official, the US sees us as an ‘easy lay’.

What the United States really resents about China is that it is successful after almost two centuries of poverty and humiliation.

China has certainly changed but the problem is the US refuses to change and accept the fact that it’s no longer the  sole hegemon.

And the recent US election will not change anything in that regard with both the major parties having a common view about the ‘China threat’ and heavily influenced if not controlled by the military/industrial complex supported by a compliant media. We follow like a patsy.

The United States is by any measure the most aggressive and violent country in the world and will not accept a multi-polar world where countries large and small can live in peace together. The US has a dogmatic and self- righteous view that it is ‘exceptional’, a ‘chosen people’ and should set global rules for everyone.

It parrots endlessly about ‘ a rules based international order’. That is really code for US hegemony and domination. And to top up its cynicism, the US then cherry picks the rules that it decides to support.

The only military risk that we face from China is if we continue as a proxy for the US in its endless wars. The US is a dangerous ally, as Malcom Fraser put it.

With the complicity of our Ministers, senior public officials and journalists our national sovereignty is being seriously eroded. Our military is being fused with the US. We employ retired US military people in our Department of Defence. In Five Eyes our intelligence agencies take in the dirty washing of the CIA.

None of our Prime Ministers stand up for Australia in relations with the US like Gough Whitlam did fifty years ago.

In the 19th and 20th Century we were drawn into United Kingdom’s Imperial wars. We are now drawn into the United State’s imperial wars. We allow others to control our thinking and behaviour.

Our ‘leaders’, think Richard Marles, have been on an American drip feed for so long they have an instinctive Washington mind set.

As China reasserts its historic world role there is no doubt that Chinese influence and footprint is growing in our region but there is no evidence whatsoever that we are under military threat from China. Yet the assumed military threat from China guides almost everything the Albanese Government does and says on strategic and defence matters. And our captured journalist join the anti China throng.

Scott Morrison and Peter Dutton must be delighted to find themselves mimicked by Anthony Albanese and Richard Marles.

China has neither the intent nor the capability to attack us. But as a settler society we remain fearful of our region with echoes of the yellow peril and White Australia.

China does not have a history of military aggression beyond the defence of its own borders. It has only one foreign base in Djibouti, mainly for anti-piracy purposes.

In contrast, the US has over 800 overseas bases including in Guam, Diego Garcia, ROK and Japan that ring China. The US fleet, with our support, regularly patrols off the China coast.

The US would have hysterics if Chinese vessels patrolled off the Californian coast and the Florida Keys. Or if China had B-52 type aircraft based in Mexico!

Not surprisingly, China is determined that it must have the military capability to defend its homeland. However, it does not project its military power around the globe as does the US.

China has not been engaged in military activity for the past forty years. In that time, the US has overthrown numerous governments and illegally invaded many countries.

China has a large and diverse population in areas such as Xinjiang, Tibet, Hong Kong, and Taiwan. It has land borders with fourteen other countries. Not surprisingly China focuses on domestic issues and the protection of its borders.

If China was an imperial power, it would have swallowed up Mongolia, a democratic, mineral rich state which is more than twice the size of Ukraine.

Japan is the only country that has threatened Australia. China never has. Japan occupied large parts of China in WWII and was responsible for the deaths of over 20 million Chinese people. Careless of its aggressive history Japan is again leading the anti-China frenzy in QUAD.

In recent weeks Pearls and Irritations has carried many articles about the ‘China threat’.

See below some brief comments from these articles and links to the full articles.

Jocelyn Chey

A genuine threat to Australia’s basic security interests would demand preparedness for war. Threats can be either military or non-military, but only a military threat will lead to war. Australia, like every other country, has problems and disputes with other countries, and economic difficulties and natural disasters that require humanitarian solutions. These non-military threats, even if defence forces are called in to help, should not be treated as military threats. I argue that there is no military threat from China.

Joseph Camilleri

Since 1949 China has engaged in few combat operations outside its borders. The most significant of these was the push back against US and UN forces in the Korean war (1950-53), the brief war against India in 1962, and another brief war against Vietnam in 1979. It is now well over forty years since China has been at war. By contrast, the United States has repeatedly embarked on military interventions across the globe. In the course of the 20th century, it has participated in 38 armed conflicts, or one every three years, and since 2000 it has engaged in at least 11 wars, the equivalent of one every two years.

David Goodman

Fear of China is of course not new in Australia. It was a driver of Federation at the end of the 19th Century and the first act of the new Federal Parliament was long recognised as ‘The White Australia Policy.’

Geoff Miller

It is almost impossible to imagine any realistic circumstances, short of general war in the Asia-Pacific, under which China would launch a military attack on Australia. Certainly, in the context of expanding its influence in the region, China is approaching some countries, in the South Pacific in particular, that we have become used to thinking of as “ours”, but that should act as a spur for us to pay them more attention rather than anything else. The basic fact is that China has become the major resident power in the Asia-Pacific region and is, and will remain, active in it, and we simply have to accept and get used to that.

Iyanatul Islam

Forcing Asian countries, to choose between the USA and China is unlikely to work. Even close Asian allies of the US have shown that they prefer to go their own way in geopolitics.

Colin Mackerras

China only very rarely sends troops outside its borders for war and virtually never for conquest. In contemporary times, it has not initiated a war since 1979, when it imposed a very short punitive war against Vietnam. But let’s note that in that war, Chinese troops made no attempt to seize the Vietnamese capital or change its government. This is in sharp contrast to American behaviour. Some scholars have developed the idea of the “American tributary system”. But it is very different from the essentially peaceful Chinese counterpart. It designates the system of alliances and partnerships (tributaries) through which the United States attempts to control the world. Unlike China, it sends its troops constantly to control the state ideologies of other countries and their system of government. It claims to be equal, but in fact it is based on domination and the maintenance of hegemony.

Cavan Hogue

Who has a motive? No country is interested in invading Australia although there is a widespread assumption that China is hostile. Chinese hostility arises from our alliance with the USA which the Chinese see as a threat to their predominance just as the US sees China as a threat to its position as number one world power. If China and the USA went to war, China would then, but only then, have a motive to attack Australia and would certainly do so if only to take out American assets like Pine Gap, the Northwest Cape, Amberly and perhaps Darwin where US marines are based. It would have the capability to do this with missiles against virtually unprotected targets.

Teow Loon Ti

I have never felt that China was an enemy to Australia. In fact, I have always sensed that the idea of China as an enemy is a manufactured idea, and a convenient tool, to serve a range of needs ranging from Australia’s own domestic politics; insecurity as a Western nation adrift in an Asian region; an attempt to help maintain US hegemony in Asia in order to serve our security needs; a psychological need to be Deputy Sheriff to the US in Asia; fear that an authoritarian state will grow to dominate the region against the accepted status quo of Western domination; perhaps even the spectre of a Yellow Peril. Seemingly unable to deal with all these challenges alone, we put our trust in the US to stand alongside us in a show of strength. In doing so, we have effectively put our welfare, present and future, in the hands of the US. To please the Americans, we have taken their enemies as our enemies and often put ourselves forward in anticipation of their needs.

Kishore Mahbubani

America’s behaviour during its period of emergence as a great power conforms to the historical norm. China’s behaviour so far, defies the norm. Of the five permanent members of the UN Security Council (who represent the great powers), only one has not fought a war in 40 years; China. Indeed, China has not even fired a bullet across its borders since a naval skirmish with Vietnam in 1989. The recent fighting between Chinese and Indian soldiers was brutal and savage. However, both sides adhered to their agreement not to use their firearms. Article VI of this agreement, signed in 1996, states, “Neither side shall open fire, cause bio-degradation, use hazardous chemicals, conduct blast operations or hunt with guns or explosives within two kilometers from the line of actual control.” The strategic discipline shown by Chinese and Indian soldiers is commendable.

Geoff Raby

China is Prometheus Bound, or a constrained superpower. China is constrained by its history, geography but, most importantly, by its resource base. Historically, China is still an empire with vast unresolved territorial issues inside its borders – Xinjiang, Tibet, Taiwan and now more recently Hong Kong. These unsettled areas from Beijing’s perspective threaten China’s territorial integrity. Fragmentation of the empire is a constant anxiety which commands the bulk of China’s security resources. Over the ten years to 2020, expenditure on internal security grew faster than on external security, that is the military to defend the country. Geographically, China has some 22,000 kilometres of land borders to defend with 14 countries on its borders. It has been in dispute and sometimes armed conflict with many of these since the PRC’s founding. In addition, China has ongoing maritime disputes with Japan.

Greg Clark

China relies on something called soft power discovered by the Chinese long before the rest of us. Convinced of the attractiveness of its culture it long believed it can automatically draw people to its side without force of arms…

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John Menadue is the Founder and Editor in Chief of Pearls and Irritations. He was formerly Secretary of the Department of Prime Minister and Cabinet under Gough Whitlam and Malcolm Fraser, Ambassador to Japan, Secretary of the Department of Immigration and CEO of Qantas.