Ed Snowden: "The most important video of the year was filmed in 1983. The entire thing is much longer, but *entirely* worth the watch. The government sued Snepp in a case that went all the way to the Supreme Court, which ruled intelligence workers had to submit any statement for censorship, even those unrelated to secrets."
Walter Kirn has personally and repeatedly seen the corruption of Twitter. An excerpt from his article at Common Sense:
My forebodings were confirmed with the launch of the “Russiagate” investigation. I doubted its premises highly from its inception, but when I voiced these doubts on Twitter curious things occurred. My tweets on the subject, my followers reported, often were invisible to them, and yet, to my eye, they drew engagement. Strange. The Twitter users who “liked” my tweets tended to have tiny followings, I found, and they didn’t follow me. Their profile photos were often stock images. I ran an experiment one night and sent out a tweet of a controversial nature which I expected would be suppressed or screwed with, and then, when it was, I used screenshots of the mischief to prove to my followers that Twitter was dishonest.
I looked crazy. Concerned DMs arrived. One accused me of grandiosity for thinking I mattered enough to provoke intervention from on high. Innocence about Twitter still prevailed then; its cheerful bluebird logo still charmed the public mind. We had yet to learn, as we finally did this week (in a manner which confirmed my worst suspicions) of the hidden but direct coordination between Twitter’s management and the government, including the Department of Homeland Security, to suppress and guide opinion on topics from war to public health. (“One could argue we’re in the business of critical infrastructure, and the most critical infrastructure is cognitive infrastructure,” one government official put it.)
For two years I have been amazed at the news media's non-interest in the origin of the COVID virus, especially given my presumption that many news outlets serve as the lapdog for the U.S. government. Here is a summary of where we are, as well as an itemized list of significant events, including what appear to be cover-ups of the lab origin story. First, from Reason Magazine, Zach Weisssmueller and Regan Taylor have this to say (this is an excerpt) in their article, "The Lab Leak Deception: Public Officials concealed their conflicts of interest and role in funding research that may have caused the pandemic, says health reporter Emily Kopp":
Journalists and scientists routinely dismissed the lab leak hypothesis as a crackpot theory and even as "racist," up until the summer of 2021 when science journalist Nicholas Wade published an influential article, and a viral rant by Jon Stewart pushed it into the mainstream. Until that point, social media platforms had been removing or throttling posts that took it seriously. Anthony Fauci, who didn't respond to our interview request, said it wasn't worth even considering the possibility that COVID could have originated in a lab.
More recently, emails made public through the Freedom of Information Act have revealed that Fauci, National Institutes of Health (NIH) director Francis Collins, and other prominent public officials took the possibility of a lab origin far more seriously than they were letting on.
"Top virologists, sort of giants in this field, were looking at the genome and freaking out, basically," says health reporter Emily Kopp, who works at the nonprofit U.S. Right to Know, an organization that has obtained thousands of pages of official documents and correspondence, some of which reveal an orchestrated effort by scientists to downplay the lab leak theory. It's also extensively analyzed emails obtained via a lawsuit by Buzzfeed's Jason Leopold that reveal the huge disconnect between what health officials were telling the public and what they were saying in private.
The above article refers us to this timeline compiled by Emily Kopp: "Timeline: The proximal origin of SARS-CoV-2." Here are some excerpts:
In February 2020 — about a month before a pandemic had been declared — five top virologists huddled to examine aspects of a rapidly emerging coronavirus that seemed primed to infect human cells. (The furin cleavage site kept one virologist up all night.) A few days later, they concluded the virus had not been engineered. In March, their conclusions were published in Nature Medicine.[More . . . ]
Glenn Greenwald Talks with Tucker Carlson:
The US corporate press is trying to train Americans to believe the first and most solemn duty of citizenship is instantly accept whatever institutions of authority tell you to believe. No wanting to see evidence, no noting contradictions: just happily recite what you're told.
Colin Wright:
There are many other examples in the past few years that SciAm has lost its way.