Michael Shellenberger’s Testimony to the House Select Committee on the Weaponization of the Federal Government

Michael Shellenberger testified before Congress on March 9, 2023. This is the Executive Summary of his presentation:

In his 1961 farewell address, President Dwight Eisenhower warned of “the acquisition of unwarranted influence… by the military-industrial complex.” Eisenhower feared that the size and power of the “complex,” or cluster, of government contractors and the Department of Defense would “endanger our liberties or democratic processes.” How? Through “domination of the nation's scholars by Federal employment, project allocations, and the power of money.” He feared public policy would “become the captive of a scientific-technological elite.”

Eisenhower’s fears were well-founded. Today, American taxpayers are unwittingly financing the growth and power of a censorship-industrial complex run by America’s scientific and technological elite, which endangers our liberties and democracy. I am grateful for the opportunity to offer this testimony and sound the alarm over the shocking and disturbing emergence of state-sponsored censorship in the United States of America.

The Twitter Files, state attorneys general lawsuits, and investigative reporters have revealed a large and growing network of government agencies, academic institutions, and nongovernmental organizations that are actively censoring American citizens, often without their knowledge, on a range of issues, including on the origins of COVID2 , COVID vaccines3 , emails relating to Hunter Biden’s business dealings4 , climate change5 , renewable energy6 , fossil fuels7 , and many other issues.

I offer some cautions. I do not know how much of the censorship is coordinated beyond what we have been able to document, and I will not speculate. I recognize that the law allows Facebook, Twitter, and other private companies to moderate content on their platforms. And I support the right of governments to communicate with the public, including to dispute inaccurate and misleading information.

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How to Blame a Bat, Using Immense Research Funding as Bait

The story of one of the greatest tragedies and deceptions of all time is finally coming out. You won't find it in the corporate media yet, because the message has been controlled upstream through the powerful incentive structure of billions of $ of scientific research funding and Machiavellian pinpoint control of three historically prestigious science journals upon which corporate media outlets rely. But the narrative is starting to crumble thanks to recent Congressional hearings and this excellent article by Ashley Rindsberg. Once this entire story works its way into wider public understanding, Anthony Fauci will not be invited to throw any more ceremonial opening day pitches.

Here are a few excerpts from Rindsberg's article at Tablet,"Treason of the Science Journals: How Anthony Fauci manufactured consensus on the origins of COVID-19 with the help of science writers and the media."

At the government level, pandemic preparedness is as much about protecting critical supply chains as it is about administering medical treatments. What the COVID-19 pandemic showed is that the flow of information, which may be the single most vital resource in the supply chain, is utterly broken. In many cases, it was actively undermined by senior public health officials including the former chief medical adviser to the president, Dr. Anthony Fauci.

New emails released in a congressional probe show that Fauci helped direct the publication of “The Proximal Origin of SARS-CoV-2,” an influential scientific paper published in Nature Medicine on March 17, 2020, that claimed COVID-19 could not have leaked from a laboratory. Fauci then cited the paper—in effect quoting himself, since he coordinated the article behind the scenes and was given final approval before it published—as if it was an independent source corroborating his assertions that COVID could only have come from a bat and not from a lab.

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The Social Collapse of California

Michael Shellenberger describes the social collapse of California in his recent article at City Journal, "America’s Shadow Self: Ruinous policies have transformed California from a symbol of progress to a cautionary tale for the nation."

[California] has become America’s shadow self. True, it is more prosperous than ever, surpassing Germany last year to become the world’s fourth-largest economy. But Los Angeles, San Francisco, Sacramento, and smaller cities are today overrun by homeless encampments, which European researchers more accurately describe as “open drug scenes.” Crime has become so rampant that many have simply stopped reporting it, with nearly half of San Franciscans telling pollsters that they were a victim of theft in the last five years and a shocking one-quarter saying that they had been assaulted or threatened with assault.

These pathologies are just the most visible manifestations of a deeper rot. Less than half of California’s public school students are proficient in reading, and just one-third are proficient in math (with a stunning 9 percent of African-Americans and 12 percent of Latinos in L.A. public schools proficient in eighth-grade math). Education achievement declined precipitously in California in 2021, as the state kept children studying at home well after kids in other states had returned to the classroom. Californians pay the most income tax, gasoline tax, and sales tax in the United States, yet suffer from electricity blackouts and abysmal public services. Residential electricity prices grew three times faster in 2021 than they did in the rest of the United States. And the state government, dependent on income taxes, faces a projected $23 billion budget deficit that will only grow if the nation’s economy enters a recession. Perhaps unsurprisingly, given these trends, California’s population stopped expanding in 2014 and has slightly declined since, resulting in the loss of a congressional seat after the 2020 Census.

Homelessness and disorder loom as the biggest problems. Most of the assaults and threats that San Franciscans reported came from the city’s large number of homeless and mentally ill addicts, who are allowed to sleep, defecate, and use drugs in public. Los Angeles is in even worse shape, as the city is so much larger than San Francisco and the local government is, against stereotype, even more progressive. Skid Row can no longer contain its massive population of street homeless; the city’s government has all but legalized open-air drug dealing and use. Over the last decade, homelessness increased 43 percent in California, even as it fell 7 percent nationally.

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Crickets . . . The Sound We Will Hear from Corporate Media Instead of Apologies

The Washington Post reported a story today without mentioning that until today, the paper has been engaging in reckless journalism for many months prior. Here's today's headline:

"‘Havana syndrome’ not caused by energy weapon or foreign adversary, intelligence review finds: After a years-long assessment, five U.S. intelligence agencies conclude it is ‘very unlikely’ an enemy wielding a secret weapon was behind the mysterious ailment.

To be a modern corporate journalist, you don't need any evidence to publish a story. All you need is to know someone in the federal government who whispers something to you that furthers your employer's favorite narrative. Just look at these clowns go at it, convincing each other that the sounds made by crickets were caused by a Russian high tech weapon that was frying the brains of U.S personnel. WaPo published DOZENS of these xenophobic articles. How much of our Russia-hate these days is because of journalistic malpractice?

Glenn Greenwald adds (and I agree that this is an easy bet):

This is yet another hoax where any ethical and actual news organization would go on air and say: "for years we told you something that turned out to be false. Here's why we did it. We apologize and retract our stories."

That they don't tells you all you need to know about them.

I just checked (March 1, 2023 at 11pm CT): The corporate media refusing to mention that the story was a hoax include: NYT, Washington Post, NPR, MSNBC and CNN.

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