Double-Check Your Informational Ecosystem

If you eat shitty food, your body will suffer. If you ingest shitty information, you will act "rationally" on the basis of that bad information. If you are extremely smart, you will think and act extremely well on behalf of that shitty information. There are thousands of Iago-equivalents on on the federal payroll. Their job is to insidiously gain control of your brain so that (in the case of modern-day Democrats) you'll become pro-censorship, pro-war and and a big believer in race-essentialism (among many other things). In short, you'll become the opposite of what you were 10 years ago, you won't know why you did the 180 and you won't even be concerned that you have betrayed many of your deepest convictions.

Before you weigh in on any issue of national importance, then, the first question you need to ask yourself is whether your world view has been hijacked by US censorship and propaganda. The "misinformation" and "malinformation" system is extremely sophisticated, developed over the decades by deep state experts. Based on recent disclosures, legacy media have been significantly funded by USAID and other federal sources for many years, going back to Project Mockingbird and beyond. Whether you are "smart" has nothing to do with it. Your only hope is to read widely and read news sources that conflict with each other so you can weigh the evidence for yourself. This will take too much work for many people. They will stick with U.S. approved "news" sources and they are the most over-confident people here on FB. And for those who still think they are well informed by relying on legacy news, did you know this:

For those still skeptical about the CIA’s role in censoring and propagandizing the U.S. public, a good starting point is The CIA and the Media, by Carl Bernstein. Published in 1977 in Rolling Stone, this investigative piece by a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist details how the CIA cultivated relationships with major news outlets, including The New York Times, CBS, and Time-Life, to shape narratives and suppress stories. For more recent accounts of CIA manipulation of Americans, follow Mike Benz on X, see the Twitter Files on X and follow Matt Taibbi at Racket News.

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FFFO Report: EU, Financed by U.S. Taxpayers is Trying to Shut Down Free Speech in the U.S

Excerpt from a new must-read report issued by the Foundation for Freedom Online: "23 US-Funded Organizations Drive The EU’s War on Tech Companies."

The American taxpayer is bankrolling online censorship in Europe. Multiple organizations involved in enforcing the EU’s draconian Digital Services Act (DSA), which imposes massive fines on American tech platforms found guilty of carrying “misinformation” or “hate speech,” are American entities backed by American government funding.

Supporters of these efforts, many of whom are deeply tied to the legacy US foreign policy establishment, admit that the goal of these efforts is to shut down free speech for Americans. The pressure is about to mount, as the previously-voluntary EU code of practice on disinformation becomes a mandatory regulation governing tech companies operating in the region.

The Foundation for Freedom Online has analyzed organizations that signed the EU’s code of practice, or are involved in enforcing it, finding eight organizations that receive funding from US government sources.

Additionally, two of the organizations on the list, NewsGuard and Bellingcat, are drectly involved in enforcing the EU’s censorship regime, as active participants in Europe’s network of EU-backed “digital observatories” aimed at detecting disfavored online narratives that can be analysed and targeted for censorship.

Who are these U.S. funded entities that are working overtime to deny Americans their right to free speech?  The above report names the names. And it is all looking incredibly ominous. The bottom line is that the U.S. right to free speech is being attacked by "foreign" entities that are financed by U.S. taxpayers. Americans are afflicted with the free speech version of an auto-immune dysfunction. Here is more from the report:

As the Foundation for Freedom Online highlighted in its 2024 Censorship Index, the U.S. government also pushed censorship in Europe through the State Department’s office of public diplomacy:

Gave the Atlantic Council a $300,000 grant to build a “transatlantic response to disinformation.” This grant was seemingly used to fund a conference involving conversations about cooperating on the EU Digital Services Ac (DSA)t. A grant transaction description mentions a June 2022 conference.

The Delegation of the EU to the United States and the Atlantic Council hosted a June 2022 EU-US Defense and Future Forum. During the conference, members of an audience, which included officials from the U.S. State Department, asked questions to and attended a talk by Gerard De Graaf on the EU-US Digital Policy Agenda, largely centered around the DSA.

Gerard De Graff was the Director of Digital Transformation at the European Commission. He is responsible largely for the creation of the DSA. De Graff was named Special Envoy for Digital to the US and head of the newly created EU San Francisco Office in September 2022, seemingly fitted near Silicon Valley to push American tech platforms into compliance with Orwellian European regulations.

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Mike Benz Explains USAID’s “Internews”

Stunning information from Mike Benz, being interviewed by Joe Rogan. It was a long detailed interview that is extremely important for everyone to read.  This is shocking, but we all knew that there was coordination in all of the "news outlets that have been marching in lockstep for the past five years to stamp out dissent, including stamping out true information that the government found to be inconvenient. I transcribed the portion of the interview provided in the following Tweet by KanekoaTheGreat. See below.

Mike Benz

On Internews, I've been talking about it for a long time, but now the stage is set to really show the extent of this. What we do is we create these pretty little predicates, these pretty little lie words, weasel words, to hide from the American people, and especially from foreign governments what we're really doing in the area. So we have a catchphrase at State and in state craft. It's called "independent media." You can think of that as the State Department's word for a good guy. Okay, doesn't mean independent. They are funded by us. They are not independent from the government. They literally submit their work and approval plans for their work plans, for what their cover, for review and approval to the US State Department. They are dog walked the whole way. But we call them independent because they are said to be independent from foreign governments who influence.

So basically, they're independent from the Chinese government, or they're independent from the Russian government. So there's just like with the word USAID itself that we talked about last time, it's your mind playing tricks on you. You're seeing "aid," but it's Agency for International Development. They do the same thing with independent media, which is that, internally to them, it means it's a good guy for us, because it's independent from our enemies, but when Americans see that, they think, well, "independent" that means it's a free actor who's not being sponsored by any government. But under the banner of USAID's independent media and media sustainability branches, we fund half a billion dollars a year to this network of, again, over 4000 media outlets. It reaches 778 million people, 9000 journalists "trained." Remember last time we went over the training? The Atlantic Council with seven CIA directors and annual funding from USAID as well as the State Department and pentagon, how they were holding up "I call BS" placards and putting Trump tweets on screen to flag for disinformation? If you remember, we went over that. Well, this is what training journalists looks like. Not only do they have the direct spawn of media octopus under their direct sub-grantee group, but they then go out and train the journalists who work at all the other ones who aren't directly sponsored. So they reach everywhere. And you'll see here, for example, it makes reference to to Jean Bourgault, who is making a half million dollars a year there. . . This has been going viral on X. I've been talking about USAID's role in the censorship industry forever. And if you look up, if you just look up "Internews," and you just plug in the name, you know, if you just copy paste that, you know, "Jean Bourgault" phrase, you'll see this in the video section, because it's everywhere now. She made speeches for a long time.

[More ...]

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J.K. Rowling Summarizes the Damage Done by Gender Ideology

Here's one more J.K. Rowling post dedicated to those people who sat on your hands while thousands of confused teenaged girls were being butchered and/or injected with hormones that would lead to their permanent sterilization. Moreover, as Rowling notes, there is the problem with luxury beliefs like this, benefitting only the elites. There's also the problem with the men who take advantage of vulnerable women. Rowling, who has been subjected to non-stop death threats for years, has this to say:

"This 'why do you care about a tiny fraction of the population?' line is, and always was, utterly ridiculous.

Gender ideology has undermined freedom of speech, scientific truth, gay rights, and women's and girls' safety, privacy and dignity. It's also caused irreparable physical damage to vulnerable kids.

Nobody voted for it, the vast majority of people disagree with it, yet it has been imposed, top down, by politicians, healthcare bodies, academia, sections of the media, celebrities and even the police. Its activists have threatened and enacted violence on those who've dared oppose it. People have been defamed and discriminated against for questioning it. Jobs have been lost and lives have been ruined, all for the crime of knowing that sex is real and matters.

When the smoke clears, it will be only too evident that this was never about a so-called vulnerable minority, notwithstanding the fact that some very vulnerable people have been harmed. The power dynamics underpinning our society have been reinforced, not dismantled. The loudest voices throughout this entire fiasco have been people insulated from consequences by their wealth and/or status. They aren't likely to find themselves locked in a prison cell with a 6'4" rapist who's decided his name's now Dolores. They don't need state-funded rape crisis centres, nor do they ever frequent high street changing rooms. They simper from talk show sofas about those nasty far-right bigots who don't want penises swinging around the girls' showers, secure in the knowledge that their private pool remains the safe place it always was.

Those who've benefited most from gender identity ideology are men, both trans-identified and not. Some have been rewarded for having a cross-dressing kink by access to all spaces previously reserved for women. Others have parlayed their delicious new victim status into an excuse to threaten, assault and harass women. Non-trans-identified leftybros have found a magnificent platform from which to display their own impeccably progressive credentials, by jeering and sneering at the needs of women and girls, all while patting themselves on the back for giving away rights that aren't theirs.

The actual victims in this mess have been women and children, especially the most vulnerable, gay people who've resisted the movement and paid a horrible price, and regular people working in environments where one misplaced pronoun could see you vilified or constructively dismissed. Do not tell me this is about a tiny minority. This movement has impacted society in disastrous ways, and if you had any sense, you'd be quietly deleting every trace of activist mantras, ad hominem attacks, false equivalence and circular arguments from your X feeds, because the day is fast approaching when you'll want to pretend you always saw through the craziness and never believed it for a second."

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Matt Taibbi: The Bullshit Stories of 2024

Matt Taibbi:

2024 was the year in which people we used to call “elites,” i.e. party heads, intelligence chiefs, CEOs, media celebrities, university presidents, and so on, exhausted real-life strategies for maintaining institutional trust and were reduced to trying to bullshit their way through crises holding no cards at all. Stories like “the politics of joy” were patches used to cover up what in 2024 became big cracks in the illusion of elite competence. For every over-covered pseudo-story like “joy” or “the new masculinity,” 2024 saw ostentatious non-coverage of big, real questions, many still unanswered.

Here are Taibbi's nominations for the top four BS stories o 2024:

1. WHO’S RUNNING THE COUNTRY? "We now know America hasn’t had a functioning president for at least this year and probably longer, which means someone other than the president has been making presidential decisions.

2. HOW WAS JOE BIDEN INDUCED TO END HIS 2024 CAMPAIGN? "Sy Hersh, writing in a July 27th Substack piece called Leaving Las Vegas, reported an unnamed “official” said the deal went down Saturday, July 20th. “Obama called Biden after breakfast and said, ‘Here’s the deal. We have Kamala’s approval to invoke the 25th Amendment,’” the source said."

3. WHO WERE TRUMP’S WOULD-BE ASSASSINS? "[A]ctual coverage of the assassination attempt in papers like the Washington Post was near zero, with little to no information emerging from law enforcement sources and even editorial treatments mostly limited to denunciations of “conspiracy theories” that emerged in the wake of Trump’s shooting."

4. WHAT’S WITH THE DRONE GASLIGHTING? "Is there a threat or not? Someone is lying. Kentucky’s Rand Paul blocked the Senate measure, but the ongoing episode demonstrates that the FAA, DOD, DHS, FBI etc. are holding back what they know about the recent War of the Worlds remake for… what reason exactly? Has unreality become a principle all its own?" Matt Taibbi, excerpt from "Gaslit Nation: From drones to terrorists, authorities are having a laugh at the public's expense":

If you’re in the growing population of Americans that is tired of being fed streams of sensational and inexplicable news stories, while authorities that appear to delight in public confusion sit back with buttoned lips, yesterday might have been the last straw. We are officially Gaslit Nation ... I don’t know what officials are up to, when they leak like sieves about some issues (Russiagate, Luigi Mangione) and refuse to provide even basic answers about others (New Jersey drones, Thomas Crooks, Covid origins). All we know is there’s an elaborate media strategy at work, one that in the content moderation age extends to outright removal of certain materials, like Shamsud bin Jabbar’s Facebook videos. Trying to unwind the logic of these decisions is tiring enough when it’s voluntary, but living in a country that won’t explain things flying over your house is absurd. I get that the president is a corpse, but can’t someone be found to give an old-fashioned Oval Office speech? Why leave us to chew over so much crazy?

Continue ReadingMatt Taibbi: The Bullshit Stories of 2024