Censorship and the Legacy Media’s Misinformation Monopoly

Summary

• Robert F. Kennedy, Jr.’s organization Children’s Health Defense (CHD) has filed an antitrust lawsuit against a cabal of mainstream media organizations who have colluded with Big Tech companies to block access to the market for competing sources of information.
• While reaching alarming extremes in the past few years, the censorship of truth had become a serious problem well before the COVID‑19 pandemic. As an example, my own website Foreign Policy Journal was ridiculously maligned as a source for “Russian disinformation”, and manipulation of Google’s internet search algorithm resulted in many of my formerly top-ranking articles being removed from search results.
• The “Russiagate” saga illuminates how the left-leaning mainstream media colluded with the Deep State to propagate a red herring narrative to shift the public’s focus away from the damaging information about presidential candidate Hillary Clinton and the Democratic National Convention (DNC) that was revealed by leaked materials obtained by Julian Assange’s organization WikiLeaks.
• As another illustration of how the mainstream media have colluded with what is sometimes known as the “Deep State” to wage a disinformation campaign against the American public is their role in manufacturing consent for the illegal war on Iraq by uncritically parroting lies from government officials. In time, even the CIA acknowledged that Iraq in fact had not been maintaining stockpiles of weapons of mass destruction (WMD), much less that it was actively manufacturing additional chemical and biological weapons and developing a nuclear weapons program. Yet another false propaganda narrative was introduced that there was an innocent “intelligence failure”, which served to obfuscate how the media had colluded with the military/intelligence establishment to successfully manipulated public opinion by waging information warfare against the American people.
• One propaganda device central to the efforts by the government, mainstream media, and Big Tech companies to censor truth is to use the term “misinformation” as a euphemism to mean any information, no matter how factual, that does not align with the mainstream propaganda narrative. Even before the COVID‑19 pandemic, the simple act of advocating the right to informed consent, for example, had been equated with the spread of vaccine “misinformation”.
• As an example of the extremity that the censorship has reached in recent years and the challenges faced by truly independent journalists, I was permanently suspended from LinkedIn for accurately reporting how the CDC’s claim that natural immunity is inferior to the protection induced by COVID‑19 vaccines was contradicted by the scientific literature, which overwhelmingly demonstrated the superiority of natural immunity, and was later even falsified by the CDC’s own data reported by its own researchers in its own journal.
• To overcome this problem of the major media essentially waging an information war against alternative voices and news outlets, it is critically important for news consumers to do their part to help get the truth out and awaken others to the deceptions propagated by the government and establishment media. While this task can seem daunting given the censorship and the reasonable expectation of personal attacks for voicing a perspective or simply sharing knowledge that challenges official orthodoxy, simple changes in mindset and perseverance in discerning fact from fiction can overcome the psychological barriers to entry.

CHD Sues Media Cabal Over Censorship

Last week, I read the news that Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. and his organization Children’s Health Defense (CHD), along with other plaintiffs, have filed an antitrust lawsuit against the “Trusted News Initiative” (TNI), a media industry partnership including the BBC, the Associated Press (AP), Reuters, and the Washington Post. The lawsuit argues that these media organizations have colluded with Big Tech companies like Facebook, Twitter, and Google, to establish monopoly control over what information the American public is exposed to.

Interestingly, there is a precedent Supreme Court case from 1945 in which the court basically ruled that just because the First Amendment prohibits the government from inhibiting free speech does not mean that it is legal for private actors to infringe on that right. The corollary of that ruling is that this cabal of private companies may not collude to prevent competitors from exercising their right to free speech and free press.

As the Court stated in that case:

Surely a command that the government itself shall not impede the free flow of ideas does not afford nongovernmental combinations a refuge if they impose restraints upon that constitutionally guaranteed freedom. Freedom to publish means freedom for all, and not for some. Freedom to publish is guaranteed by the Constitution, but freedom to combine to keep others from publishing is not. Freedom of the press from governmental interference under the First Amendment does not sanction repression of that freedom by private interests.

As CHD further explains:

Federal antitrust law prohibits firms from colluding to deny critical facilities or market access to rivals. Such agreements are called “group boycotts,” and they are per se illegal. The TNI is a massive group boycott. Since 2020, it has successfully denied critical market facilities—i.e., the world’s dominant social media platforms—to rival news publishers whose reporting competes with and challenges TNI orthodoxy.

There is no question that mainstream media corporations and Big Tech companies like Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, and Google have been colluding to prevent the public from being exposed information that does not align with various political agendas, such as by silencing voices speaking truths that don’t align with the government’s authoritarian policy responses to the COVID‑19 pandemic and the policy aim of achieving high uptake of COVID‑19 vaccines.

Indeed, the maligning and censorship of independent journalists by the legacy media has been going on for far too long. It predates the COVID‑19 pandemic, although the extremity of the censorship reached in the past three years has at least had the beneficial effect of bringing the problem to everyone’s attention.

The Pre-COVID Censorship of ‘Russian Disinformation’

To illustrate, I wrote an article in December 2019 about how mainstream media corporations like the New York Times were concerned about people getting their news freely online from their social media feeds rather than from a newspaper subscription. Therefore, the media were attempting to malign alternative news sources whose information challenged mainstream orthodoxy.

According to the narrative propagated by the legacy media, only they could be trusted, and anyone getting their news from alternative online sources was being misinformed. The legacy media desire for us to recognize them as the sole arbiters of truth when in reality they are the greatest purveyors of dangerous misinformation.

My article was titled “Who Will Tell the Truth about the So-Called Free Press?”, which I borrowed from a New York Times headline that was the same, but without the “So-Called”. My modification to their headline was intended to communicate how the idea that we have a free press in the United States is largely illusory.

What we instead have are media institutions that, instead of doing objective journalism, produce dangerously misinformative political propaganda, and challenging the deceptions from the government and legacy media are ragged bands of independent voices struggling to be heard in the face of well-financed cabals that aim to maintain their dominance as broadcasters of misinformation by viciously maligning and silencing alternative sources.

In the article, I explained how I was tacitly accused of being a Russian disinformation agent by the Washington Post, which published a story proclaiming that alternative news sites had spread “fake news” to influence the 2016 presidential election in favor of Donald Trump. The basis for the article was a list of websites compiled by a shadowy group called PropOrNot, which accused the sites on its list of disseminating Russian propaganda. My own publication Foreign Policy Journal (FPJ)was on the list.

(As I related in my interview last week with Mickey Z., I ceased publishing FPJ in 2020 due to the focus of my journalism shifting entirely to domestic policies out of the need to combat the existential threat of medical tyranny, which shift began well before the COVID‑19 pandemic, in 2012, when I became a father. I also needed to be able to spend more time on my own research and writing rather than spending so much time reviewing and editing others’ work.)

I was certainly not publishing any content at FPJ with the aim of influencing people to vote for Trump. I did not support him, didn’t vote for him, and encouraged others not to vote for either Hillary Clinton or Trump. In 2008, I wrote an article urging people to vote their conscience rather than for someone from one of the two major parties out of the misperceived need to vote for the lesser of two evils. In a 2012 article, I described the insistence on voting either Democrat or Republican “mass insanity”. In 2016, I again viewed the option of either Trump or Clinton as a false choice, and I expressed my view that the act of voting merely serves to legitimize our own disenfranchisement.

Some of the authors I published may have supported Trump, but then, others certainly did not. Although the US Constitution has utterly failed in its aim of limiting the powers of the federal government, I still view it as an innovative document that represented a great step forward, an improvement relative to all preexisting forms of government. So, while I have no love for the US government as it has existed throughout my lifetime, I have even less regard for the Russian government and certainly didn’t publish any content aimed at glorifying Russia or its policies, as opposed to simply countering US government propaganda about this perceived adversary.

Evidently, the reason my site made the PropOrNot list was that I was publishing articles by myself and others, such as Paul Craig Roberts and David Swanson, observing how, for example, there was a major propaganda campaign underway to manufacture consent for maintaining existing US foreign policies by making it politically infeasible for Trump to alter those policies as president.

In particular, Trump had spoken during his campaign about drawing down military interventionism abroad and establishing friendlier relations with Russia, including closer cooperation in Syria, where US policy had been aligned in an adversarial position, with the US having fueled the rise of the terrorist organization the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria (ISIS) and supported that and other extremist groups in their effort to overthrow the regime of Bashar al-Assad in Syria. Russia, by contrast, had intervened to support the Assad regime in its efforts to crush those extremist groups.

The grim reality of the situation, wherein US intervention was serving to escalate and prolong the violence, was obfuscated by the ridiculously false propaganda narrative that the ongoing violence in Syria was due to a failure of the US to intervene.

Trump not unreasonably viewed it as being in the interests of the United States to oppose rather than to support terrorist organizations and work to improve rather than to further deteriorate its relationship with Russia. Those two viewpoints were unacceptable to the political establishment in Washington.

The legacy media, for their part, served to make those views also unacceptable in the mainstream discourse. Any information contrary to the adopted political agendas was lazily dubbed “fake news” or “Russian disinformation” by the media to manufacture consent for existing government policies.

The Democratic establishment had aligned itself with the military/intelligence establishment to deflect attention away from the revelations from leaked emails published by WikiLeaks about how Clinton and the Democratic National Convention (DNC) had worked to undermine democracy by ensuring that Clinton, and not Bernie Sanders, would be the party’s candidate for president.

This along with other information reflected negatively on Clinton, such as her telling a housing trade group that “you need both a public and a private position” on certain issues and telling a group of bankers at a Goldman Sachs event that she was serving their interests.

It is also important context that WikiLeaks’ founder, Julian Assange, has long been persecuted by the US government for exposing its criminal activity, including war crimes.

To deflect attention away from the corruption within the Democratic establishment, the unflattering portrayal of Clinton as a wealthy two-faced politician pretending to serve the poor and middle class while representing the financial elite, and the US government’s criminal activities abroad, an alternative propaganda narrative was created, which was the conspiracy theory that Trump had colluded with Russia to steal the election from Clinton.

Thus was born the whole “Russiagate” saga.

The official narrative included the claim that the Russian government had hacked into the DNC computer system and the email account of John Podesta, who is presently senior advisor to President Joe Biden on “Green Energy Innovation and Implementation”. The mainstream media reported this hacking as though proven fact, even though no solid evidence was ever produced that Russians were responsible for the alleged hacking, much less that it was the Russian government.

Indeed, WikiLeaks maintained that the materials were obtained as the result of a leak, not a hack, and  a former top codebreaker from the National Security Agency (NSA), William Binney, pointed to evidence that it was an inside job.

The DNC had hired the cyber security company CrowdStrike to do an investigation of its servers, and the company reported its conclusion that there was a hack by Russians, but there was never any independent corroboration of the allegation. The Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) never did its own forensic investigation of the supposedly hacked server.

That the conclusion was predetermined to serve the political agenda of the Democratic establishment remains a distinct possibility, and of course that narrative also served the interests of the military/intelligence establishment, entrenched as it was in the view that the solution to the world’s problems is more US interventionism and not less. The thought of less interventionism and friendlier relations with Russia were anathema to the political establishment.

Statist media outlets like the New York Times and Washington Post naturally aligned themselves with the mutual political agenda of the Democratic Party and what is sometimes called the “Deep State”, which refers to the idea that there is a type of shadow government involving elements of the military/intelligence complex whereby political machinations are made behind the scenes and the president serves as essentially a figurehead, a puppet whose strings are being pulled by other powerful players within the political establishment.

The Legacy Media’s Collaboration with the Deep State’s Agenda

Although the legacy media portray it as a conspiratorial concept, we needn’t conceptualize the Deep State as such. Indeed, it should be uncontroversial that systems can take on a life of their own, that actors within those systems may serve as cogs in the machine despite perceived independence of action, and that powerful individuals behind the scenes exercise undue influence on our lives through the government.

We have seen clearly how this works, for example, with how President George W. Bush served as the puppet to push forth the political agenda of the so-called “neoconservatives” in the wake of the 9/11 terrorist attacks.

The intelligence establishment throughout 2002 and early 2003 perpetrated a disinformation campaign against the American public to manufacture consent for the planned war against Iraq based on the false pretext that Iraq manufactured and possessed stockpiles of “weapons of mass destruction”, or “WMD”, which refers to chemical, biological, and nuclear weapons.

In addition to stockpiles of chemical and biological weapons (CBW), Iraq was falsely accused of continued development of a nuclear weapons program. For example, it was alleged that Iraq sought to obtain aluminum tubes for the manufacture of centrifuges to enrich uranium to weapons grade. In fact, as was recognized by the top experts on centrifuges within the US intelligence community, the tubes were intended for a conventional rocket program and couldn’t be used for centrifuges.

Of course, the alleged WMD were never found, and the intelligence community eventually admitted that Iraq’s chemical and biological weapons programs had been ended and its stockpiles destroyed in 1991.

To conceal the fact that the Deep State, with the collaboration of the legacy media, had conducted a disinformation campaign against the American public to manufacture consent for an illegal war of aggression, another disinformation campaign was concocted to serve as cover: the demonstrably false claim that there had been an “intelligence failure” resulting in intelligence agencies innocently drawing the mistaken conclusion that Iraq had WMD.

In truth, there was not an intelligence failure but a counterintelligence success. The Deep State got its long-preplanned war for regime change in Iraq.

As a very clear example of how the legacy media served the agenda in the wake of the 2016 presidential election, the New York Times persisted in propagating the conspiracy theory that the government of Russia had literally hacked into US electoral systems, reporting that this had occurred as though proven fact even though not a shred of credible evidence was ever produced to support the claim—and, indeed, even the evidence that was produced in an attempt to support the claim actually indicated, upon more careful analysis, that this had not occurred.

As one of the rare journalists with integrity whose voice penetrates the mainstream discourse, Glenn Greenwald, recently commented on Twitter, “Russiagate was – and is – one of the most deranged and unhinged conspiracy theories in modern times. It wasn’t spread by QAnon or 4Chan users by the vast majority of media corporations, ‘scholars,’ think tank frauds, and NYT/NBC’s ‘disinformation units”.

Greenwald, it’s worth noting, used to write for Salon and then The Guardian before helping to start The Intercept, which he ultimately left after that news organization betrayed the values upon which Greenwald had helped found the enterprise by attempting to censor certain of his criticisms of Biden.

Greenwald’s content now resides on Substack, a haven of sorts for independent journalists and commentators who have faced censorship elsewhere. Given the propensity of Google-owned YouTube to ban users for posting videos providing unorthodox viewpoints, his news show is hosted by the alternative video-hosting site Rumble. This illustrates how journalists who speak truth to power are forced to turn to alternative means of publication to be heard because certain information is simply unallowable in the mainstream discourse, the confines of which are narrowly determined by the thought-controlling legacy media.

Indeed, it was for simply exposing the deep corruption in Washington and the propaganda serving to manufacture consent for the US government’s criminal policies that my own website Foreign Policy Journal was stupidly dubbed a Russian disinformation outlet.

How Google Manipulates Its Search Algorithm to Censor

As I commented about the maligning and outright censorship of independent journalists and alternative voices in December 2019, prior to the COVID‑19 pandemic:

Companies like Facebook and Google use complex algorithms that are constantly being adapted toward the goal of better enabling users to find the types of informational content that they want. In other words, they are responding to a market demand by continually trying to improve their services.

This threatens the business model of the mainstream media because if people can gain the knowledge they’re seeking for free just by checking their Facebook feed or doing a quick Google search and reading content that’s not behind a paywall, then they have no need to subscribe to major newspapers like the New York Times. . . .

As we’ve since seen, Big Tech’s solution to this problem has been to manipulate their own algorithms so as not to present users with the information they are seeking if that information does not align with various political agendas; that information is instead suppressed in favor of information pushing the orthodox view.

Foreign Policy Journal experienced this type of censorship. Some of my articles there had previously been ranking very highly for years in Google search results, but then came certain algorithm updates, and my site disappeared.

Take, for example, my 2017 article “The ‘Forgotten’ US Shootdown of Iranian Airliner Flight 655”, which used to compete with such sources as The Washington Post and History.com for the top spots in Google search results for various related terms such as “US shootdown Iranian airliner” or “shootdown of Flight 655”. Looking back, although at the time I didn’t think to document the sudden change, it was probably right around the time that FPJ got dubbed a Russian disinformation outlet that the algorithm changes occurred that wiped that article from the search results.

I had the same experience around the same time with numerous other articles for which I had successfully done search engine optimization (SEO), like my 2017 essay “What Was the Balfour Declaration of 1917 and Why Is It Significant?”, the title of which was taken verbatim from a Google feature where it recommended popular related questions that people search for, presented separate from other search results in a “People Also Ask . . .” box. That article used to rank very highly for a variety of popular search phrases related to the declaration, including, of course, for the title question, but it has since also been disappeared by Google.

A very clear example of FPJ being penalized by algorithm manipulation is illustrated by searching for one of my most popular articles of all time, published in 2010, “The Myth of the UN Creation of Israel”, which used to rank highly for the search “UN creation of Israel”, but which now is nowhere to be found even if you type in the full title, and even if you type the full title in quotation marks (which makes it an exact-match search).

An important feature of Google’s default unmanipulated search algorithm is that it prioritizes original sources over republished duplicate content. If others take my content and republish it on their own sites, my site as the original publisher should still take precedence in search results. Tellingly, however, presently, while the original article has been disappeared by Google, another website that republished my article (without my permission, although with proper attribution and a link to the original) is ranking in the number two position for the search “myth of UN creation of Israel” (without the quotation marks).

Just as tellingly, the very top spot is another site with an article titled “Myth: The United States created Israel”, which is based on and cites my own series of articles on the subject. That article citing my work also ranks fairly high up for the broader search “UN creation of Israel” (without quotation marks), and while you have to scroll quite far down, the site that copied and pasted my article verbatim also appears.

Scrolling further down the results, an Israel National News (Arutz Sheva)article appears asking, “Did UN Create Israel?” That article was a direct response to my own, a vainly attempted rebuttal that actually confirmed that my thesis is correct that UN General Assembly 181 neither partitioned Palestine nor conferred any legal authority to the Zionists for the establishment of their “Jewish state”, which was in fact created via the ethnic cleansing of most of the Arab population from their homes.

Even an exact match search for “myth of the UN creation of Israel” does not cause my original article to appear. Doing that search, all three of those other articles appear, as well as several other websites that similarly republished my article (again, without my permission although with proper attribution), many additional sites that reference my article, and a post of mine on Twitter from April 2022 in which I shared the link to my article—but the original article itself remains scrubbed from the results.

“Organic” search results, meaning those that are not paid advertisements, used to be the most important driver of traffic to FPJ, but once Google evidently manipulated its algorithm to censor me, people could no longer find the website via the search engine, and Facebook took over as the leading source of traffic—although Facebook during the COVID‑19 pandemic also penalized my page for sharing factually accurate information that its algorithm falsely dubbed “misinformation”. Facebook presently tells me that my page is in good standing, but as far as I know, Facebook’s algorithm, too, is manipulated to reduce the reach of my posts (so-called “shadow banning”).

[Additional note, May 19, 2023: I used to generate revenue on FPJ from Google AdSense ads, but in early 2020, as I began to produce content opposing the authoritarian lockdowns and their coerced mass vaccination endgame, Google suspended my ad account on the pretext that I had violated their terms of service prohibiting ads from being displayed on sites that publish content related to a major health crisis that contradicts the proclamations of so-called authorities (“authoritative scientific consensus”). Of course, it is not logically possible for any of the content I published to have contradicted any authoritative scientific consensus that lockdowns were good for us since no such consensus existed, and I was citing the scientific literature to support my dissenting view by incontrovertibly demonstrating how the “authorities” were lying to the public.]

My site JeremyRHammond.com has suffered the same fate as FPJ. Whereas many of my articles on this site once were findable using popular related searches, it has now been virtually disappeared by Google. People do still manage to find me on Google somehow, but whereas this used to be the primary source of traffic for me, today, organic search is a minor contributor, and most people who come to my site are those who are already aware of it and come to it directly or via links in my email newsletters, or people who click links to my site on social media.

This demonstrates the importance of social media to independent journalists like me. Without social media, due to the censorship via search engine algorithm manipulation, it would be practically impossible for me to reach new audiences with my messages.

Hence the major orchestrated efforts on the part of the legacy media and Big Tech to prevent independent voices from being able to use social media to combat mainstream propaganda narratives.

How Government, Legacy Media, and Big Tech Collude to Suppress Truth

Returning to my 2019 article about how the mainstream corporate media were positioning themselves as sole arbiters of truth by maliciously maligning alternative voices, here is how I explained the situation at the time, before the COVID‑19 pandemic (bold emphasis added):

As a corporation prone to institutionalized biases, the Times also adopts various political agendas—including the agenda to silence the large number of small competitors whose collective voice frequently challenge mainstream propaganda narratives on important issues. Alternative online publications and truly independent journalists regularly force alternative perspectives into the mainstream discourse despite the corporate media’s best efforts to either marginalize them or pretend they don’t exist.

. . . The Times wants to remain among an elite few who dictate to the rest of us what constitutes “misinformation”. The problem is that terms like “fake news” and “misinformation” are being used euphemistically to mean any information, no matter how factual, that challenges whatever political agendas are being pushed during any given news cycle.

The Times, in other words, wishes for the corporate media to preserve their oligopoly in determining what information the public should and should not be made aware of. The Times editors wish to preserve their leadership in determining for us what we should think about any given issue and to determine for us which issues we should regard as important. . . .

The mainstream corporate media have a long and continuous history of propagating fake news to manufacture consent for government policies and the agendas of the politically and financially elite. . . .

In instances when independent alternative sources bring the facts to the public’s attention such that the truth can no longer be ignored, the mainstream media, in dutiful service to the state, dismiss the information as “fake news”, “misinformation”, “conspiracy theory”, “Russian propaganda”, or whatever other euphemism intended to delude the masses in to believing that truth is fiction and fiction truth.

While it is now widely recognized that censorship has been taking place due to the extremities it has reached during the COVID‑19 pandemic, what many people still do not understand is that this censorship had already been occurring for years prior, with the legacy media essentially trying to maintain their own dominance as spreaders of misinformation.

As another example, in February 2019, Congressman Adam Schiff sent a letter to the CEOs of Facebook, Google, and Amazon demanding that they take action to prevent the spread of vaccine “misinformation”. But as observed in response letters that I authored on behalf of Children’s Health Defense, which were sent to each of the CEOs that March, Schiff had euphemistically defined “misinformation” as any information, no matter how factual, that might lead a parent to the conclusion that strictly complying with the CDC’s routine childhood vaccine schedule would not be in the best interests of their child’s health.

In June 2020, an e-book I authored was published by Children’s Health Defense responding to the accusation spread by the legacy media in November 2019 that CHD was the leading spreader of vaccine “misinformation” on Facebook, which claim was based upon a government-funded study published in the journal Vaccine that did indeed level that accusation while advocating greater censorship. But as I explained in an article titled “CHD Responds to Accusation of Spreading ‘Misinformation’ on Facebook” (bold emphasis added):

What the media failed to inform the public, however, is that the government-funded authors of this study failed to identify even a single example of a Facebook ad from CHD that contained any misinformation. . . .

The authors of the study did not trouble themselves to determine the truthfulness of vaccine-related Facebook advertisements. Instead, they simply categorized any ads that did not conform with the public policy goal of sustaining or increasing vaccination rates as “anti-vaccine”. Under their adopted criteria, even the simple act of advocating the right to informed consent constituted “anti-vaccine” behavior.

Then the authors lazily and dogmatically equated anything “anti-vaccine” with “misinformation”, which label they used euphemistically to mean any information, no matter how factual and well-grounded in science, that might cause people to question the wisdom of strictly complying with the vaccine recommendations of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC).

By this means, the study authors ludicrously equated advocacy of the right to informed consent with the propagation of “misinformation” about vaccines.

The e-book is titled How Censorship is Redefining Informed Consent as ‘Misinformation’, which can be obtained for free by signing up for CHD’s newsletter (which I encourage you to do, along with signing up for my own newsletter for a free e-book exposing the FDA’s reliance on scientific fraud for the authorization of COVID‑19 vaccines).

How LinkedIn Blocks Journalists from Exposing Government Disinformation

While predating the pandemic, the censorship has become more overt, which has resulted in it becoming widespread public knowledge that this malicious activity is occurring.

As an illuminating example of the extremity of the censorship, I was permanently banned from LinkedIn for allegedly violating their community guidelines, which prohibit “misinformation”, euphemistically defined by the guidelines as any information that was contrary to the information provided by “authorities” like the CDC.

In my unfortunately vain appeals, I maintained that I had not violated LinkedIn’s terms of use because the information I was reporting was factually accurate and, indeed, that I had documented disinformation propagated by the very “authorities” whom LinkedIn was relying on as the arbiters of truth.

In particular, I was repeatedly blocked and ultimately banned for reporting how the CDC’s claim in August 2021 that the COVID‑19 vaccines conferred protection against SARS‑CoV‑2 that was superior to natural immunity was contradicted by a very large body of scientific literature and falsified in January 2022 by the CDC’s own data reported by its own researchers in its own journal.

As I documented in November 2021 in an article titled “Fact Checking the ‘Fact Checkers’ on Natural Immunity to SARS‑CoV‑2”, Twitter was propagating the CDC’s false claim by promoting an AP “fact check” article ridiculously expecting us to accept the CDC’s proclamations as gospel truth while completely ignoring literally all of the non-CDC scientific literature, which had already overwhelmingly demonstrated the superiority of natural immunity. Indeed, the only two studies the CDC could ever cite as supposed evidence of the inferiority of natural immunity were its own studies, and neither of those two studies were actually designed to determine the relative effectiveness of natural immunity compared to that induced by the vaccines.

Hence, I was banned by LinkedIn for doing my job as a truly independent journalist to expose government and mainstream media disinformation. LinkedIn clearly interpreted its own community guidelines as prohibiting me from accurately and objectively reporting how the CDC had blatantly lied for the purpose of increasing vaccine uptake. Instructively, when I specifically asked LinkedIn whether its guidelines prohibited me from reporting factual accurate information correcting provable disinformation from “public health” authorities like the CDC, LinkedIn’s instructive response was that it does not provide “interpretations” of its guidelines.

Thus, I was permanently banned by LinkedIn without any evidence ever being presented to me that I had spread any misinformation and without any kind of real appeal process despite the promise of such being included in LinkedIn’s user agreement. Indeed, I was transparently banned precisely because the information I was reporting was truthful, which explains LinkedIn’s persistent refusal to specify what information I had shared it was alleging to be false or misleading as well as its refusal to otherwise explain how it had arrived at the conclusion that I had violated the community guidelines.

How Can We Solve This Problem?

As I discussed with the hosts of CHD TV’s show “Tea Time” in a recent interview, the hoax “fact check” industry serves to censor truth and propagate government-sanctioned disinformation. As lead host Polly Tommey eloquently summarized at the end of our discussion, the solution to the problem of how to beat the media is to be the media.

That’s essentially what social media platforms started out enabling us to do, which is precisely why so much pressure has been brought forth to bear on these Big Tech companies by the government and corporate media to do more to silence independent voices.

So, now the challenge is to make our voices heard despite the marginalization and censorship.

Looking again at my own experience for illustration, mainstream media organizations like the New York Times would never publish the kind of articles I write, and not just because I tend to produce long-form content delving deeply into topics, but precisely because my work focuses on exposing dangerous state propaganda spread by the Times and other major media outlets.

Google has disappeared me with its algorithm manipulation.

I have managed to get through the pandemic without being banned by Facebook or Twitter, but LinkedIn’s permanent suspension of my account for accurately exposing disinformation from the very “authorities” it relies on as arbiters of truth illustrates how challenging it is for independent journalists and alternative media outlets to make their voices heard.

I have written many additional articles fact-checking the mainstream media’s faux “fact checkers”, but a particularly salient one in light of CHD’s new antitrust lawsuit is my September 2022 article “Can mRNA COVID-19 vaccines alter your DNA? Here’s what the CDC and ‘Fact-Checkers’ got wrong.” In it, I explained how the CDC and “fact checkers” had systematically misinformed the public about the theoretical possibility of mRNA from COVID‑19 vaccines integrating into human DNA by utilizing logical fallacies to support the conclusion that this is biologically impossible.

I reviewed many different mainstream media and “fact check” articles propagating the same fallacious arguments and mapped out the following illustration of the web of interconnections constituting a cabal aimed at propagating government-sanctioned disinformation and censoring truth. Not unlike the role of the “Trusted News Initiative” outlined by CHD’s new lawsuit, that investigation of mine revealed the duplicitous role of the Poynter Institute’s “International Fact-Checking Network” (IFCN) in censoring factual information challenging government-sanctioned disinformation. Here is a graphic I created to illustrate this web of deception:

So, what is the solution to this problem? How do we be the media?

It is critically important that we all make the effort to educate ourselves and to share empowering knowledge with others.

The first part of that can be a daunting challenge. There is a great deal of contradictory information, and it can be very time consuming to do the research required to determine truth. However, the more you learn how propaganda works and become able to recognize it when you see it, the less susceptible you will be to becoming deceived, and hence the more empowered you will be to make decisions and choices that will serve your own interests and help to improve our society.

My own work aims largely at helping my readers to develop these skills by walking through my own thinking process, with many if not most of my articles following the same structure of reviewing what we are being told by the mainstream media and then exposing that deceptive propaganda narrative by highlighting the factual errors, missing context, and logical fallacies employed to lead the public into false beliefs.

Sharing the wealth of knowledge can also be a daunting task. Some interesting insights are provided by a survey among my own newsletter subscribers last year, after I was banned by LinkedIn and sought to expand my presence on alternative non-censoring social media platforms.

Among respondents, 34 percent said that they were not active on social media, and among those who were, 42 percent said they were not following any of my own social profiles (even though the links to each are included at the foot of all my email newsletters).

Additionally, 26 percent said they did not use their social media accounts “for activist purposes (such as sharing information to help educate others about an issue or speaking out against criminal government policies)?”

When I asked those individuals what reasons they had for not using social media for activist purposes, the answers from most- to least-selected among the multiple-choice selections I presented were:

1. “I would just be censored by Big Tech anyway.”
2. “I would be personally attacked for speaking out on contentious issues.”
3. “I don’t have enough confidence in my knowledge of the issues.”
4. “It would cause division within my family.”
5. “I would lose friends.”

I also had an “Other” option, which was by far the most highly selected. These included many reiterations of the same obstacles I presented with my multiple-choice selections along with additional reasons including:

• the perception of social media as a waste of time or an unhealthy use of time,
• not having enough time for it, and
• privacy concerns.

I can certainly understand these perspectives, but I would encourage readers to overcome these obstacles and join the struggle to help effect positive change by raising awareness and disabusing others of the false beliefs that have come to as a result of being deceived by government and media propaganda.

It is true that social media censorship is an obstacle, but I say it is better to share knowledge and be blocked or banned than to not even try to utilize this tool to help make a difference. Again, despite the censorship, Facebook and Twitter have remained very important tools for me to get information out to people who aren’t already familiar with my work.

The personal attacks you are frankly likely to receive if you speak out are another understandable obstacle, and there’s no simple solution to it, but if you remain respectful toward those with orthodox views and don’t aim to offend, then negative emotional reactions can be understood simply to reflect the indoctrination for which you are importantly trying to provide an antidote.

I received a good tip about this problem early into my own endeavors to share knowledge from the late William Blum, the author of the excellent books Killing Hope and Rogue State. I had become frustrated by my failures to get through to friends and family about how the government was lying to start a war against Iraq, and as a fan of his books, I asked him how it was possible to do so. He kindly replied to my email, and what he said has stuck with me: some people, he said, would go on believing in the benevolence of the government until government agents kick down their door and steal their firstborn, and we just have to learn to recognize who is beyond hope and whom we have a chance of getting through to. I think that is sage advice that I encourage you to take to heart, also.

The key point is that there are people who can be reached, and we have a moral obligation to try to reach them. 

As I explained in my interview last week with Mickey Z., it took me a few years from the time I started deeply researching vaccines until I started speaking out publicly against government vaccine policies because it took a while before I had acquired sufficient confidence in my own knowledge of the subject to be willing to place a huge target on my back by taking on the entire medical establishment. I am an introvert by nature, I should mention. So, I think that is really key: if you put in the time required to discern truth from deception, once you have that knowledge, the courage to speak up about it will follow.

Indeed, I reached a point where my conscience compelled me, and I couldn’t go on not speaking up about the issue.

Relevantly, Mickey Z. and I also discussed how we’d both lost friends as a result of speaking out on various issues, and before I started publishing articles about vaccines, I was sharing information about vaccines with family members, which, like my experience speaking out against the Iraq war, was a negative experience, so I understand the concern about getting into arguments with family as well as the concern about losing friends. However, in hindsight, despite the familial rifts it caused, I am glad that I expressed my opposing views. Everyone eventually came to see that I had been right about Iraq, and while some family members remain ensconced in the official narrative about the pharmaceutical products known as “vaccines”, others have since come around to something closer to my perspective.

I have also gained insights into what types of approaches work. Expressing vitriol and making comments intended to offend those with opposing views just causes people to put up a psychological barrier so that they will not hear anything you say no matter how valid your points are. I am content with the understanding that many people are naturally going to be offended by things I say no matter how respectfully and objectively I say them, but my aim is to at least get those people to start to think and question. Sometimes you can succeed in planting a seed that will eventually grow and bear fruit.

Another way to see it is that if we are not expressing ourselves honestly, then we are not being true to ourselves. I find it easier to live with the emotional bruises that accompany the expression of unorthodox views than to suffer the burden of pretending to be someone other than me. Why should we be afraid of speaking honestly with others? Why should everyone be so mentally delicate as to not be able to handle hearing other people’s differing perspectives and opinions?

The fact that we even feel this type of intimidation to not plainly speak our minds simply illustrates how truly awful our society is and how imperative it is that we make the effort to effect positive change. We need to be willing to shun the societal constraints imposed upon us by speaking out with honest expression. Again, the courage to speak out will follow the acquisition of a sufficient level of knowledge, at which point, you will know what to do because your conscience will compel you to it.

I also understand the privacy concerns. But I do not see this as a great obstacle because there are simple things one can do to protect one’s privacy. It’s important to understand how your data may be used by social media companies, and a simple rule of thumb is to just not provide information that could risk your privacy. Maintain good security practices with strong passwords (password management software can be used to generate highly secure passwords that you don’t have to remember), two-step authentication, and data encryption, and consider using a virtual private network (VPN) for browsing the internet. I personally use Bitdefender software. I also use the Brave browser and search engine for greater privacy.

I once did but no longer use Facebook for personal reasons. I use it almost exclusively for my work. While I used to view it as a convenient way to try to stay more connected to family and friends, in time, I came to view the audience of my Facebook “friends” as being incompatible with my free expression of ideas. I found that people whom I knew personally generally didn’t want to hear what I had to say, whereas I had a loyal reader community of virtual strangers who were showing me great respect and appreciation. Due to that as well as to increasing concerns about my own privacy, I stopped using my Facebook profile and instead post almost exclusively to my business page (which you can follow here). While my “friends” might not ever see my posts, those who do see them are able to do so precisely because they took an action to tell Facebook that they are interested in seeing my posts in their feeds.

I have sometimes had readers suggest to me that I should quit Facebook in protest of its censorship, but the fact is that I would be shooting myself in the foot by doing so because this platform remains one of the best tools in my arsenal for reaching people with my message and growing my audience. A considerable amount of my website traffic comes from Facebook. While this places the company in a position to cause me great harm, were I ever to be banned like I was from LinkedIn, the way I see it, as long as this tool is useful and helps me to achieve my aim of awakening others, I would be foolish not to continue utilizing it.

Moving on to another objection, certainly, social media can be a huge waste of time, but it can also be a powerful tool for productivity. You just have to choose which way you are going to utilize it and develop the self-discipline to not allow it to become a distraction.

As for the objection that use of social media is unhealthy, that is a complex one that could be interpreted in a multitude of ways. Certainly, there is a lot of truth to that view. But, again, I think whether the social media experience is healthy or fruitful depends on the choices one makes about how it is used.

Certainly, I would agree that “unhealthy” is an apt description for the types of arguments and divisions I’ve experienced with family and friends, as well as countless negative experiences with strangers including trolls leveling personal attacks. I sometimes dread checking my social media, but, then, I also get great joy and satisfaction out of much of the time I spend trying to get my messages out. My work gives me a sense of pride as well as purpose.

While I used to have other motivations, since becoming a father, the key motivation is simply the consideration of what type of world I want my son growing up on. I envision a world much different than the one we are currently living in, one in which humankind has finally become civilized, and I take action to bring that civilized world into existence.

This, then, also just comes down to acquiring enough knowledge to have the confidence to speak out, along with learning how to deal with the types of arguments and personal attacks you are likely to be confronted with for doing so. I consider myself to have been somewhat of a coward in my youth, always afraid of expressing myself honestly for fear of others disliking me. I was very self-conscious when I was younger, and I recall feeling disappointed with myself on occasion for not taking a stand. I figure that if I can find my voice and the courage to use it, most other people can, too.

This brings us to what I perceive as the single greatest obstacle, which is time. But this, too, can be overcome with good time management and productivity skills. Indeed, my choice to quit seeking other employment and to try to figure out a way to make a living from my journalism forced me to develop these skills. I am constantly making efforts to improve efficiency and to be more productive, and as a result, I am now able to make a living from researching and speaking out about various controversial topics. While making a career out of it may not be for everyone, I think my own example demonstrates how pretty much anyone can make a difference and have a positive impact; it simply requires determining to try and the perseverance to not give up when the going gets tough. In short, you have to learn to believe in yourself and not worry that others don’t believe in you.

So, those are my immediate thoughts about how to solve the problem. We have the opportunity to effect a revolution in journalism that would overturn the business model of the mainstream corporate media and result in a truly free press, a true free market of ideas, but reaching that goal will require a collective effort in which content creators as well as consumers each do their part. As Polly Tommey said, to beat the media, be the media.

Together, we can make a difference. We have to, for the sake of humanity. Our children’s future depends on it. Let’s not let down future generations of humanity. A civilized society is possible. We just have to choose to get there.

There are a number of important actions that news consumers can take to help overturn the business model of the legacy media and effect the revolution in journalism required to move civilization forward toward a world of peace and prosperity.

First, if you appreciate content that you consume online, please share the knowledge with others. This is a simple thing that everyone can do that costs no money, only a moment of your time, but that is hugely important for all of us who spend countless hours creating that informational content. Even if our voices are censored yours might not be, and we absolutely depend on those who consume our content to help get the message out.

Second, if you have the means, consider financially supporting those individuals or organizations whose content you find great value in. Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., and Children’s Health Defense, for example, have been on the front lines not only in terms of helping to educate the public but also in the legal arena, including the new antitrust lawsuit aimed at ending the orchestrated efforts to censor voices whose message is contrary to official orthodoxy. In my view, this is an organization worth supporting. Of course, I would be remiss not to encourage any readers who find value in my own writings to support my own work with a donation.

Also, before you leave this site, if you aren’t already signed up, be sure to subscribe to my email newsletters, and be sure to follow any of the social media profiles you’ll find at the foot of all my emails on platforms where you, too, are active. (I follow back people I know as well as followers who share my work and otherwise engage with my posts.)

The more resources we content creators have, the better we will be able to take on and expose the dangerous misinformation propagated by the establishment media, and if we can just reach a critical mass of awakened citizenry, we can usher in the paradigm shifts necessary to bring about a more civilized society. There needs to be a revolution in journalism, and if you want to see that happen, you need to be a part of it.

Act now as your conscience compels you.

And feel free to share your own thoughts about how to overcome this problem in the comments section below.