This incident sheds light on the broader implications of the fight against online “misinformation,” particularly how premature labeling of claims can potentially suppress legitimate grievances and criticisms that later prove to have been based on some truth, something that happened often in 2020 and the Covid era.

The controversy surrounding a FEMA employee who allegedly directed a relief team to ignore homes displaying support for then-Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump has sparked outrage and demands for a thorough investigation by legislators. As first reported by The Daily Wire, the employee, who has now been fired, instructed team members to bypass these homes, an action condemned by FEMA administrator Deanne Criswell as a “clear violation of FEMA’s core values & principles to help people regardless of their political affiliation.”

Criswell’s confirmation of the dismissal came through a post on X, following online reports about the employee’s conduct. While she didn’t specify which hurricane’s relief efforts were affected, ABC News and The New York Times reported it was during the aftermath of Hurricane Milton in Florida. This hurricane struck shortly after the catastrophic Hurricane Helene.

The rush to curb the spread of misinformation online is a top priority for many pro-censorship platforms and legacy institutions claiming to protect public discourse from false narratives. However, this incident exemplifies the complexities and risks inherent in these efforts. Initially, the claims regarding any of FEMA’s discriminatory practices were quickly categorized as baseless and part of an online misinformation campaign. This not only stifled debate but potentially delayed the scrutiny necessary to uncover and address any wrongdoing.

In a June episode of his “Politics War Room” podcast, Carville advocated for media outlets to increase their “slanted” coverage of former President Donald Trump to prevent his reelection, claiming “the entire Constitution is in peril.” Carville reiterated this stance during a Thursday episode, shifting his focus to fact-checkers and expanding his advocacy to include Republicans generally, rather than just Trump.

LISTEN:

“So let’s take the fact-check industry and let me tell you something, and I defy anyone to disagree on this: by 5 to 1, they would rather fact-check a misleading Democratic claim ’cause Republicans have so many … They want to say, ‘We’re just umpires, man, we just call it like [we] see it, we don’t really have anything.’ And, of course, there are times when Democrats exaggerate,” Carville said. “My thing is, how would you fact-check World War II? … They’re treating this like it’s just a normal time where you got shirts and skins and we just call ’em like we see ’em.”

“I think the whole industry has to decide: what is our role here? Is our role to be objective, impartial observers that report as accurately and fairly as we can, or is our role here to try to help save the Constitution of the United States?” he continued. “Because they’re two different things.”

New York Times non-fiction book critic Jennifer Szalai on Saturday published an article on Saturday titled, “The Constitution Is Sacred. Is It Also Dangerous?” featuring a subheading that reads, “One of the biggest threats to America’s politics might be the country’s founding document.” The article was a review of a University of California law school dean Erwin Chemerinsky’s “No Democracy Lasts Forever,” which was released Aug. 20 and asserts that the Constitution has become a “threat to American democracy” that is “beyond redemption.

Szalai claimed in her review that “Constitution worship” is potentially harmful to the American political system and referenced the arguments of Chemerinsky and other liberal legal scholars. The law school dean also advocated for a fresh Constitution on “Morning Joe” Friday, suggesting that failure to adjust the current document would lead the U.S. to “drift toward authoritarianism.”

George Washington University law professor Jonathan Turley warned Wednesday that “a Harris-Walz administration would be a perfect nightmare for free speech.”

“Free speech is on the ballot. Not democracy,” Turley said. “Free speech is on the ballot.

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(Mercola)—In the video above, PragerU CEO Marissa Streit takes a look at NewsGuard, a for-profit fact checking organization backed by Big Pharma, Big Tech, the teachers union and the U.S. government.

NewsGuard has set itself up as the self-appointed global arbiter of what information is “trustworthy” based on nine “credibility and transparency” factors, for information viewed on private electronic devices, in schools and in public libraries.^1,2

NewsGuard’s $6 million startup was funded in part by the Publicis Groupe,³ one of the largest PR firms in the world.⁴ Many of the largest drug companies use their services, and the Publicis Health board also consists of a power pack of high-profile individuals with Big Pharma position backgrounds or affiliations.^5,6,7,8 I detailed these connections in my October 5, 2021, article, “The Web of Players Trying to Silence Truth.”

NewsGuard Censors Truth, Not Fake News

In the spring of 2020, NewsGuard classified mercola.com as “fake news” because we reported the SARS-CoV-2 virus as potentially having been leaked from the biosafety level 4 laboratory in Wuhan City, China, the epicenter of the COVID-19 outbreak.

Fast-forward a year, and the U.S. Congress launched an investigation to explore the lab accident theory after it became apparent that the National Institutes of Health had funded gain-of-function research on bat coronaviruses at the Wuhan Institute of Virology.

Interestingly, an April 16, 2020, report⁹ by CNN revealed the censorship of articles mentioning the possibility that SARS-CoV-2 may have leaked from the Wuhan BSL4 facility appears to be directed by China, which means NewsGuard has been functionally protecting Chinese interests.

As noted by Streit, if you’re a for-profit company getting paid by Big Pharma, just how neutral and unbiased can you be when fact checking articles that are critical of the industry? It’s a well-known fact that the one with the purse strings has a lot of pull.

The NewsGuard Racket

According to Streit, most of the NewsGuard staff are also “left-leaning activists” who can’t stand non-liberal news outlets like PragerU, The Daily Wire, the Federalist and Breitbart.

She correctly explains how their little game of “unbiased investigation” works. First, they send you an email with a list of accusatory questions on a hot-button issue you’ve addressed on your site. If you respond, they ignore your answers and send you a new list of questions. If you do not respond, you have in their eyes confirmed that you are not a reliable source.

“Heads they win, tails you lose,” Streit says.

No matter which approach you use, NewsGuard will put a fake news label on your site to drive readers away and tell ad agencies and major corporations to steer clear and put their advertising dollars elsewhere.

As noted by Streit, for news outlets that require advertisers to stay afloat, “that can get very expensive, very fast.” Companies can easily be driven out of business this way, and “of course, that’s the plan,” she says.

NewsGuard also serves as a firewall that protects Big Tech companies from accusations of censorship.

When conservative sources say Big Tech is censoring their views, the tech companies simply say, “We didn’t make any judgments. We hired this third-party fact checker and they told us this story, or that website, can’t be trusted.” “In short, NewsGuard enables them to censor speech without leaving any fingerprints,” Streit says.

NewsGuard Sued for Suppressing Foreign Policy Dissent

Also, let’s not forget the U.S. government is sponsoring NewsGuard as well. The U.S. Defense Department has paid NewsGuard $750,000¹⁰ “to monitor ‘misinformation’ trends online,” “which is an Orwellian way of saying ‘information that the defense department doesn’t like,” Streit says.

Case in point: In late October 2023, Consortium News sued^11,12,13 NewsGuard and the U.S. government for defamation and First Amendment violations, arguing the fact checker colluded with U.S. intelligence to suppress foreign policy dissent. As reported by Consortium News, October 23, 2023:¹⁴

“The United States government and internet ‘watchdog’ NewsGuard Technologies, Inc. were sued today in federal court in Manhattan for First Amendment violations and defamation by news organization Consortium for Independent Journalism, a nonprofit that publishes Consortium News.

Consortium News’s court filing charges the Pentagon’s Cyber Command, an element of the Intelligence Community, with contracting with NewsGuard to identify, report and abridge the speech of American media organizations that dissent from U.S. official positions on foreign policy.

In the course of its contract with the Pentagon, NewsGuard is ‘acting jointly or in concert with the United States to coerce news organizations to alter viewpoints’ as to Ukraine, Russia, and Syria, imposing a form of ‘censorship and repression of views’ that differ or dissent from policies of the United States and its allies …

‘When media groups are condemned by the government as ‘anti-U.S.’ and are accused of publishing ‘false content’ because they disagree with U.S. policies, the result is self-censorship and a destruction of the public debate intended by the First Amendment,’ [Consortium News attorney Bruce] Afran said.”

According to the complaint, NewsGuard uses software to tag targeted sites with warning labels that describe the content as “disinformation” or “false content.” In the case of Consortium News, its site was labeled as an “anti-U.S.” media organization, even though NewsGuard only took issue with six of its more than 20,000 articles and none of its videos. According to Consortium News:

“The complaint seeks a permanent injunction declaring the joint program unconstitutional; barring the government and NewsGuard from continuing such practices and more than $13 million in damages for defamation and civil rights violations.”

The U.S. government has also been caught bankrolling the now discredited Global Disinformation Index (GDI), which selectively targeted conservative and non-liberal media.^15,16 According to the Washington Examiner,¹⁷ the GDI sent blacklists to advertising companies “with the intent of defunding and shutting down websites peddling alleged ‘disinformation.'”

NewsGuard’s Task Is to Silence Alternative Media

The CIA’s Mockingbird^18,19 enterprise may have been officially cancelled in 1976, but that doesn’t mean its control over the media ended. If the last three years have shown us anything, it’s that all of mainstream media are now completely controlled.

If you want any variation of opinion from the prevailing narrative, you have to seek out independent news sources, and these sources are what NewsGuard is trying to destroy. Caitlin Johnstone addressed this in a January 2019 article:²⁰

“A report²¹ seeded throughout the mainstream media by anonymous intelligence officials back in September claimed that US government workers in Cuba had suffered concussion-like brain damage after hearing strange noises in homes and hotels with the most likely culprit being ‘sophisticated microwaves or another type of electromagnetic weapon’ from Russia.

A recording of one such highly sophisticated attack was analyzed by scientists and turned out to be the mating call of the male indies short-tailed cricket²² … The actual story, when stripped of hyperventilating Russia panic, is that some government workers heard some crickets in Cuba …

These are just the latest in a long, ongoing pattern of terrible mass media debacles as reporters eager to demonstrate their unquestioning fealty to the US-centralized empire fall all over themselves to report any story that makes Russia look bad without practicing due diligence.

The only voices who have been questioning the establishment Russia narrative … have been those which the mass media refuses to platform. Alternative media outlets are the only major platforms for dissent from the authorized narratives of the plutocrat-owned political/media class.

Imagine, then, how disastrous it would be if these last strongholds of skepticism and holding power to account were removed from the media landscape. Well, that’s exactly what a shady organization called NewsGuard is trying to do …

A new report²³ by journalist Whitney Webb for MintPress News details how NewsGuard is working to hide and demonetize alternative media outlets like MintPress …”

As Johnstone points out, NewsGuard is “led by some of the most virulently pro-imperialist individuals in America,” and that “its agenda to shore up narrative control for the ruling power establishment is clear.”

NewsGuard Linked to Anti-American Council on Foreign Relations

Indeed, one of NewsGuard’s CEOs, Louis Gordon Crovitz, is a member of the Council on Foreign Relations (CFR), a key player behind The Great Reset. The CFR is financed in part by the Gates,²⁴ Rockefeller, Ford and Carnegie foundations,²⁵ and has influenced U.S. foreign policy ever since its inception 95 years ago.

Almost all U.S. secretaries of defense have been lifetime members, as have most CIA directors. This is of crucial importance, considering the CFR’s goal, from the start, has been to bring about a totalitarian one world government, a New World Order (NWO) with global top-down rule.

In 1950, the son of one of the CFR’s founders, James Warburg, said to the Senate Foreign Relations Committee: “We shall have world government whether or not you like it — by conquest or consent.”²⁶ Similarly, in 1975 CFR insider Admiral Chester Ward wrote that the goal of the CFR was “submergence of U.S. sovereignty and national independence into an all-powerful one-world government.”²⁷

According to Ward, the desire to “surrender the sovereignty and independence of the United States is pervasive throughout most of its membership,” and “In the entire CFR lexicon, there is no term of revulsion carrying a meaning so deep as ‘America First.'”

With Ward’s last comment in mind, published in 1975, it’s interesting to contemplate who has opposed President Trump’s America First agenda, and why. Many Americans, even if they don’t like or support Trump personally, agree that taking care of America and Americans’ interests first is a rational decision for any leadership, and they’ve been hard-pressed to rationalize how an anti-America First policy can be good for the nation.

Well, Ward gives us the answer. Those who oppose “America First” policies do so because they’re working on behalf of a network that seeks to eliminate nationalism. The idea of government waging war on its own citizens seems completely irrational and inexplicable — until you realize that the CFR has controlled U.S. foreign relations for nearly a century, and its primary goal has always been to undermine U.S. sovereignty and abet the creation of a one-world government.

NewsGuard’s advisory board is also loaded with neocon think tank members, including Tom Ridge (George W. Bush’s secretary of Homeland Security), Michael Hayden (an intelligence community insider), and Richard Stengel (Obama’s under secretary of state for public diplomacy and pubic affairs and a former editor at Time Magazine).

Tellingly, Stengel has publicly stated that he supports²⁸ the use of domestic propaganda against U.S. citizens.²⁹ As noted by Johnstone:

“Whoever controls the narrative controls the world. Ruling power’s desire to regulate people’s access to information is so desperate that it has become as clumsy and ham-fisted as a teenager pawing at his date in the back seat of a car, and it feels about as enjoyable.

They’re barely even concealing their desire to control our minds anymore, so it shouldn’t be too difficult to wake everyone up to their manipulations. We need to use every inch of our ability to communicate with each other before it gets shut down for good.”

‘Middleware’ — The Latest Plan to Shut Down Free Speech

The "Middleware" Plan To Restructure The Censorship Industry

1. Middleware = 'censorship as a service' orgs

2. Morphing from top-down to middle-out

3. Regs + middleware = disinfo compliance market pic.twitter.com/lDPqH72HrD

— Mike Benz (@MikeBenzCyber) August 1, 2023

In an August 1, 2023, video posted to Twitter/X, Mike Benz,³⁰ executive director of the Foundation for Freedom Online, reviewed the latest strategy in the global effort to shut down free speech. It’s called “middleware.” Middleware refers to third-party censorship organizations, such as NewsGuard.

In short, they’re trying to restructure the censorship industry “away from a top-down government-driven model” to a “competitive middleware model” where “content curation” (read censorship) is simply outsourced to third-party organizations.

This way, a “legal” disinformation compliance market is created while government can claim it has nothing to do with the control of information. Basically, what we’re looking at is the emergence of organized global corporate censorship. Of course, artificial intelligence will also be more broadly employed to “identify and slow the spread of false and harmful content.”³¹

NewsGuard is also reportedly working with the European Union on a new “disinformation code” to uphold new global standards from the European Commission, which compels brands and ad tech companies to prevent advertising on sites that publish “misinformation.”³² Again, this is all about shutting down alternative media by starving them of ad revenue.

In late October 2023, Elon Musk, owner of Twitter, rebranded X, called out NewsGuard’s ratings as a “scam,” saying it ought to be “disbanded immediately.”³³

Musk’s statement came in response to posts by Benz and Timcast news CEO Tim Pool, who said NewsGuard downrated his site “because we ran five stories out of nearly 5,000 that quoted Trump. They claimed that reporting on Trump’s statements was irresponsible because we should be fact checking him instead and Trump was wrong. They now claim we don’t correct errors because we didn’t respond to their false claims last month.”³⁴

Elon, here's more info on NewsGuard's origins. The military, intelligence & EU push for NewsGuard came from fear, after 2016 Brexit/Trump, that populist parties would win flood of EU elections & undercut NATO

so the transatlantic national security state struck back w/ NewsGuard https://t.co/gnXACUdyP8 pic.twitter.com/hNVyWehzR3

— Mike Benz (@MikeBenzCyber) October 24, 2023

What You Can Do to Stop This Abuse

In the final analysis, NewsGuard is just another business aimed at protecting the globalist alliance of governments and private corporations that are trying to implement a totalitarian one world government regime. They do that by discrediting and eliminating unwanted competitors and analysts who empower you with information that runs counter to the official narrative.

You can learn more about NewsGuard in my previous article, “Thought Police NewsGuard Is Owned by Big Pharma.”

If you’re as disturbed by the growing censorship as I am, be sure to contact your local library today to find out if they’re using NewsGuard. If they are, then ask them if they’re aware of NewsGuard’s censorship of truthful news that is now encroaching on scientific freedom and threatening the very roots of our democracy.

If your local library is using NewsGuard, start a campaign to get it removed. Also, warn your social circle about using NewsGuard. As noted by Streit:

“If you don’t want to think for yourself anymore, NewsGuard has got you covered. But if you do want to think for yourself, you’ve been warned. If NewsGuard has red-flagged a source, all you need to know is that the Left doesn’t want you to read it, watch it or hear it. And what does that make you want to do?”

• ¹ American Libraries Magazine November 1, 2019
• ² NewsGuardTech.com, Libraries
• ³ Washington Post March 3, 2018
• ⁴ Publicis Groupe
• ⁵ Bloomberg, Alexandra von Plato
• ⁶ Lyn Falconio
• ⁷ LinkedIn, Shannon Boyle
• ⁸ MarketScreener, Michael du Toit
• ⁹ CNN April 16, 2020
• ^10, 15 The Federalist March 14, 2023
• ¹¹ Consortium News Legal Complaint Against NewsGuard Docket No. 23-cv-07088
• ¹² Consortium News Legal Complaint Against NewsGuard, Exhibits
• ¹³ Racket.com October 25, 2023
• ¹⁴ Consortium News October 23, 2023
• ¹⁶ Fox News February 16, 2023
• ¹⁷ Washington Examiner February 9, 2023
• ¹⁸ ATI March 12, 2018
• ¹⁹ Washington Examiner February 9, 2023
• ^20, 29 Caitlinjohnstone.com January 10, 2019
• ²¹ YouTube January 7, 2019
• ²² The Intercept January 7, 2019
• ²³ Mint Press News, NewsGuard Exposed
• ²⁴ Gates Foundation Grants to CFR
• ²⁵ CFR Funding
• ^26, 27 Wakeup-World August 31, 2016
• ²⁸ Twitter William Craddick May 11, 2018
• ³⁰ Twitter Mike Benz August 1, 2023
• ³¹ Twitter Mike Benz October 19, 2023
• ³² Twitter Elon Musk October 19, 2023
• ^33, 34 Newsmax October 20, 2023

To begin with, the entire premise of “fact-checking” is ludicrous as it is based on the idea that media outlets do not – and do not need to – automatically start from a factual basis for their reporting. As an editor once said to me: “Just because someone says something doesn’t mean you have to put it in the paper.”

If the media followed this one simple rule, there would be no need for “fact-checking” at all.

But the media does not and will not follow this rule because printing lies – as long as they are said by a government official the media likes or about an official they don’t like – is now an integral part of the industry.

Lies from government officials and lies from nonprofit and advocacy groups and non-governmental organizations (who directly pay news outlets for the “coverage” of an issue they are involved in) are all waived through as gospel. And these types of lies – lies they agree with – tend not to get “fact-checked” anyway, making the entire process even more dangerously absurd.

It’s dangerous because a “true” rating is just that: something has been determined to be true and can therefore never be questioned again or something is mostly true so any error can be tied back to an accidental misspeak. And then this “truth” can be spread as 100 percent Grade-A verified fact, no matter whether it actually is or not. It has received an imprimatur from on high and that’s that.

Problematic truths that are so obviously true are dealt with in a slightly different manner – they are “contexted” into being false.

The process seems pretty simple: Person outside the power structure says X, person inside the power structure says Y, so therefore X is false. Person inside the power structure says X, person also inside, but lower down and/or “expert,” the power structure says X so therefore X is true.

In searching through a random assortment of “fact-checks,” that process appears to happen time and time again.

Let’s start with one quick example – money was set aside in the Biden Infrastructure bill last year to create a system that would enable your car to tell if you’re drunk (without one of those blow tubes) and not let the car start if you were. The concept was immediately criticized as being a government-mandate “kill switch” for every new car after 2035 or thereabout.

Each of the “fact-checking” services quickly and thoroughly said no, no that’s not true, it’s not a “kill switch.” And they quoted an auto safety expert saying so.

Of course, the experts were already in a partnership with the government to develop the technology in question and said that the data collected by the vehicle would “never leave the vehicle” and that the system is not currently envisioned as a law enforcement tool.

Therefore, the “kill switch” story was false.

It was false because the legislation doesn’t use that exact term – so what? – it was false because the people developing it said they had no plans to use it that way, it was false because the system would be isolated to each vehicle – impossible: does Tesla send someone to your house when they need to do an update? – and it was false because people who have a financial and political incentive to say it was false said it was false.

In other words, you can’t call him Bob because it says Robert on the birth certificate.

The “fact-checking” process is itself inherently false because it starts with a conscious, biased choice of which “facts” to check (by the way, we reached out to PolitiFact and its parent nonprofit, the Poynter Institute, and neither responded, but there is this on the website and do please ignore the actual true fact that Poynter is a hyper-progressive organization that itself has a track record of politically shading the truth, is a key player in the Censorship-Industrial Complex, and is funded by Facebook, the Newmark Foundation, and the Koch brothers.)

Let’s say a fact-checker decides to look into X which they think at the outset is false, but it turns out to be true. Does it get written up? If it helps certain people, the answer is yes – if it goes against the current thoughtcloud, the answer is no.

In public relations there is a concept known as “third party validation.” That involves getting a very trusted someone or some group that is seemingly unrelated to whatever project or product you are pitching to say “Hey – that’s really good.” The PR team can then say to the public that so and so group that “you’ve known for years – they care for sick puppies remember? – they think it’s neat we want to bury toxic waste next to the elementary school so it has to be a good idea, right?”

The public trusts the validator so it lets its guard drop, it second-guesses itself even if the truth of the matter is plain to see.

Sometimes the third-party validator is innocent; sometimes – more often than not – they’re getting a little sumthin sumthin on the side like a shiny new building (see: environmental groups staying quiet about wind farms killing whales.)

In a specific instance, a writer was contacted and asked to prove the main point of a very inconvenient COVID-related article. The writer sent the fact-checker all of the backing material – public records, reputable studies, etc. – proving the assertion was true.

That fact-check – on an important subject directly related to public health dangers – never appeared. Because they couldn’t dare to call it false – there was a paper trail – and they couldn’t call it a truth because it just didn’t fit.

Then there is the issue of intentional obfuscation. PolitiFact said reports that “California passed a law ‘reducing penalties for oral, anal sex with willing children’” were false because the state didn’t reduce the penalty – it merely stopped placing those offenders on the registered sex offender list if the age difference was less than 10 years.

Not having to register as a sex offender for the rest of one’s life is absolutely clearly a reduction in the penalty, but because the law in question didn’t specifically change the direct punishment at the time of conviction the claim was therefore false.

In other words, the staff at PolitiFact must have decided that having to register as a sex offender for life is not a penalty.  Helpful hint – do not invite PolitiFact to your kid’s middle school graduation.

And the public wonders how so many in the media can willfully not see the truth staring at them in the face – that’s how it’s done (if you don’t want to lose your job.)

On a personal note, that particular fact-check reminds me of a time when I was mayor of Lake Elsinore, Cal. and asked my City Manager how much the minor league baseball stadium that was built before I was elected cost. He gave me a figure and I noted that it didn’t appear to include a certain related property transfer.

He responded by saying I had previously asked how much the stadium cost, not the stadium project (roads, sewers, land, etc.) in total. The difference was about $14 million.

Lesson: always ask the right question. But I digress.

There is also the puzzlement of where “fact-checkers” get their own facts. In the case of PolitiFact, when it comes to the transgender youth issue, the World Professional Association for Transgender Health is a go-to organization despite its aggressive politicization of the issue, its creation of a “standards of care” protocol that is jaw-droppingly counter-factual, and its promotion of genital tucking for children.

But they’re the experts, says PolitiFact.

This approach is standard for “fact-checkers” as most turn to “experts” who have financial, political, and cultural reasons to say what they say. The “fact-checkers” know in advance what the “experts” will say because of who they are and what they do; therefore all you have to do is call the right one that will agree with your desired rating outcome and that’s that.

And never ever call someone who might say something you may not want to hear. And it doesn’t matter how often they have been wrong in the past – see Dr. Peter Hotez and COVID – just stay with them to make sure you get the answer you want (bad reporters do this, too.)

The COVID-related examples of fact-checkers being aggressively, dangerously wrong are too numerous to mention. However, these past three years have revealed a corollary matter: fact-checking tends to involve asking a liar if something a connected person said is a lie and declaring it the truth when the second liar says it’s true and occasionally a few more liars are thrown in the mix to add weight. And it involves asking the same liars to judge the truth of something coming from somewhere else or someone outside the incestuous oppression bubble now floating over the globe.

It is a vulturous circle.

The record of the fact-checking industry during the pandemic is not only abominable, it even made everything much much worse. Everything – and everyone -outside the approved script was vilified, lives were upended, jobs were lost.

It turned out – of course – that most everything the fact-checkers deemed false was in fact true and that everything they deemed true was in fact false.

Even further, the idea that the “vaccines” were not properly tested and might – just might – not be called for for everyone was treated as being on a par with assertions like “Jews can’t see fuchsia” and “Hats were invented in Tunisia in 1743.”

There is also the matter of falsehood by association.

The recent terrible fires in Maui launched many, many absurd claims onto the internet. Laser beams started the fire, Oprah started it to buy land, etc. Other obviously not “facts” checks include Trump said Biden is an extraterrestrial, Hillary Clinton was executed, Michelle talked about Barack being gay, and on and on. This Weekly World News kind of stuff appears often, right alongside serious and debatable topics.

Recently, GOP presidential candidate Vivek Ramaswamy’s “pants on fire” rating for saying climate policies kill more people than climate change (an appropriate topic for debate and very arguably true, by the way) appeared right next to another “pants on fire” saying that, no, the assistant director of FEMA had not been arrested.

Giving an equal rating to a legitimate political concept and to a typical example of internet batshittery makes the origins of both equally untrustworthy in the public’s mind.

In other words, the intentional point is to make Ramaswamy look just as nuts – and untrustworthy in general – as the people who think Hillary was executed five years ago or that hats were invented in Tunisia in 1743 or that Jews can’t see fuchsia.

It is somewhat akin to the intellectual destruction wrought by the term “denier.” The word is used to shut down debate and to implicitly tar the “denier” as being like people who deny the Holocaust occurred because that’s where the use – appropriately in that case – of the term originated.

If you “deny” climate change it’s just as bad as denying the Holocaust; if you’re considered as wrong as a flat earther, you must be wrong about everything.

For “fact-checking” to have any legitimacy whatsoever, it needs to ditch rating the crazies. It also should start each week with releasing a list of 20 items, check each of those, and then write about all of them, true or false. At the very least, the public would know the fact-checkers aren’t hiding facts they don’t like.

Truth is not always beautiful; in fact, it typically is not. It is hard and cold and sterile and unflinching and stares back at you until either you acknowledge it or you become terrified and have to look away.

Looking at truth, finding truth, speaking truth – all are acts of real courage. And the truth is fact-checking is a lie.

Published under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License For reprints, please set the canonical link back to the original Brownstone Institute Article and Author.

About the Author

Thomas Buckley is the former mayor of Lake Elsinore, Cal. and a former newspaper reporter. He is currently the operator of a small communications and planning consultancy and can be reached directly at [email protected]. You can read more of his work at: https://thomas699.substack.com/

For a while we believed it but certain revelations changed that. We came to realize that the posts labeled false were typically contrary to regime narratives. And a close look at the supposed refutation revealed that many points were very much in dispute. The companies developed a talent for seeming to reveal something false that was actually still debatable and interesting to consider. In most cases, what was declared false was still under consideration.

As time went on, the attempts to censor became more brazen and obvious. Then the Twitter files and other FOIAs generated proof of what many suspected all along. These entities were funded either directly or indirectly by government or by other dark-money sources as quid pro quos for other relationships they had cultivated with interested parties.

In other words, they were not some independent, science-based entities at all but rather hit squads with a hard political agenda. What was actually happening here was a form of censorship laundering. Government wants to censor but cannot so it turns to the social-media company to do the dirty work. To make this hand-in-glove racket less obvious, the companies would outsource to a fact-checking organization, making the lines of control even more blurry.

Sometime within the last several months, the whole racket seems to have unraveled. I rarely see the fact-checks cited at all. Or maybe they are cited ironically: what is declared false came to be seen as a badge of honor, a confirmation of core truth. That might seem crazy but these are the times in which we live. Nothing is as it seems.

At any one time, Brownstone and The Epoch Times deal with a range of ongoing fact-checks, some of which result in a hit piece but others just go away for no apparent reason. I’m coming to realize that the harassing emails themselves serve a purpose. They are designed to scare publishers and chill free speech. Risk-averse managers might be inclined not to run with a story rather than be put through the ringer and deal with possible reputation hits.

It’s all become ridiculously predictable.

Three days ago, a data maven who writes for Brownstone revealed a first look at some numbers he had been crunching over the CDC’s listing of COVID as cause of death. He initially sent the results to a private email list and I suggested we go with what he had discovered as an initial look.

He had death certificates from Missouri and Massachusetts and was able to cross-check them with the same once they got into the hands of the CDC. He found thousands of instances in which COVID was not listed as cause of death in the coroner’s report but it was added directly by the CDC. The scale of the problem is vast. The implications of this are rather ominous. We’ve been relying on CDC data for three-plus years to understand the scope of COVID’s mortality.

“The worst pandemic in 100 years,” they kept saying, and that might be true. But obviously the claim is highly contingent on correctly marking the cause-of-death codes. What Aaron Hertzberg found is that the CDC was changing the code to inflate the numbers. By how much it is hard to say but based on the data so far, this is a very serious problem with awesome implications for how we understand what happened to us.

The immediate question concerns the decision-making at the CDC. We know that Deborah Birx, coronavirus task force coordinator, said from the podium that they would mark every death with COVID as being from COVID. That was in the spring of 2020 and had already set off alarm bells. Changing the cause of death to COVID from something else is next-level crazy.

Under whose authority did the CDC act? Birx was not in charge of the CDC. Indeed, her power and status was always unclear. No question that she came to the White House by recommendation of Matthew Pottinger of the National Security Council. Also we know for certain that from March 13, 2020, onward, the NSC was the lead agency with the CDC reduced to operations. If the CDC had faced some formal order to mark COVID as cause of death regardless of what state certificates said, no one has ever seen such an order.

The implications of all of this are rather ominous. And keep in mind that this discovery was not made by a whistleblower or a specialist in this field but an obsessive data maven from the citizen world who has a passion to get to the truth. If he is right, the documentation here implies a level of treachery that even I had not considered.

I saw two reactions to the article once published. The most common reaction was that this is nothing new. Everyone knew this was happening the whole time. We saw the death numbers go up and up from COVID and equally down for every other cause. It was pretty clear that there was something fishy going on. So some people said that there is nothing surprising here. The CDC is capable of any degree of malfeasance.

The other reaction was flat-out denial and accusing Brownstone and the author of simply making things up. Indeed, many people were outraged that we could or would ever suggest that the CDC was anything other than truth-telling.

Watching all of this unfold, I began awaiting the arrival of the inevitable intimidating emails from fact-check organizations. Sure enough, they did arrive. They came to the author, to other scholars, to me personally, and everyone else. It was a true blitzkrieg. Maybe there was a time when I would have stopped my day and become defensive and answered them all, getting more data from the author and so on, and then worrying about the fallout. But this is not my first rodeo. At this point, it was easy to brush off all this drama as completely manufactured and fake. That’s exactly what I did.

To be sure, if the author made mistakes, they should be corrected. I’m sure the author would be the first to do so. This kind of research is lonely and he would welcome others to join in his efforts. That’s how science works: a community shares data and strives to get closer to the truth. But that’s not what fact-checks are about. They start with the presumption that they know the truth and you do not, and then schoolmarm you to the point that you admit them to be correct.

Here’s what I’ve concluded. Fact-check false really means: likely true but not what you are allowed to believe.

A final footnote here. A major claim of the fact-checkers for more than three years is that it is a conspiracy theory and false that the Wuhan lab conducted gain-of-function research and that the virus was a result of that research and a likely leak. Fauci dismissed this for a very long time, and fact-checkers frequently cited him and said the claim was false.

As a result of the Republican takeover of Congress, we’ve gained more access to the fullness of what was going on in those days. A committee has released an unredacted email dated Feb. 1, 2020, in which Fauci says that Wuhan was engaged in gain-of-function and that this virus might be the result.

At this point, it’s reasonable to assume that nearly every official source on the virus was wrong or lying for years now. You probably know this. In any case, my intuition here is that we are only at the beginning of discovery of the fullness of the duplicity. The stakes are very high: American liberty suffered a grave blow during the COVID response. If the reason wasn’t the virus, what was it then?

Article cross-posted from our premium news partners at The Epoch Times.

In other words, there is a completely different standard for misinformation when it comes from the mouths of pundits, pharma hacks and so-called “experts” at the CDC, FDA or on MSM. For example, when it comes to promoting the Covid clot shots, it’s fairly wide open to claim just about anything positive about them, even when it’s not based on science, data or clinical trials. Simply go on television and swear up and down that the Wuhan virus jabs are “safe and effective,” and have no side effects, and always work, and keep you from getting a “bad case” of coronavirus. Say anything and it remains posted, uncensored, unedited, never corrected or taken down.

On the other hand, say anything negative about the Fauci Flu stabs, and within minutes or hours it will be taken down or labeled as ‘misinformation’ and ‘disinformation.’ Even when the bad news about the clot shots is verified by scientific studies, autopsies of the vaccinated, analyzed data and thousands of VAERS complaints, according to MSM, it’s fake news, conspiracy theory and misinformation.

Simply go on YouTube or any social media platform and talk or publish information about all the injuries and deaths caused by the Covid-19 vaccines, and the search results in Google for those posts and videos will turn up nothing (if the information is not deleted completely). That’s why the jabbed-up masses are locked in their hypnotic state, while their blood is polluted with millions of toxic “spike protein” prions. Even if they hear some countering information to the lies they have adopted as truth, when they go to verify that information, Google tells them otherwise.

Completely different ‘standard’ for misinformation when MSM disseminates it, where no rules apply for censorship whatsoever

Here are clips of the ultimate pharma shill and CDC Director Rochelle Walensky, and libtard pundit Rachel Maddow (where Russell Brand exposes her) swearing the Fauci Flu vaccine always works and nobody who gets jabbed can ever catch or spread the virus, plus she claims that’s not just in the clinical trials but proven in real world data. And they’re STILL UP on YouTube and social media. They even post faked CDC data that also has yet to be censored, corrected or taken down.

That’s how you know that the vaccine industrial complex (VIC) runs nearly all media, because the lies stay posted and the truth gets taken down, permanently. The vax-shills keep getting paid while the truth-tellers are de-funded and bankrupted by pharma. If you don’t bow down to the VIC, CDC and CCP (Chinese Communist Party) in Washington DC, then you are a “conspiracy theorist” and “domestic terrorist” spreading harmful disinformation that is responsible for killing fellow Americans, according to the script-reading pharma shills.

Keep your truth news in check by adding Preparedness.news to your favorites list and tuning in daily for updates on real news about surviving and thriving in the near future, and news that’s being scrubbed from MSM and social media as you read this.

Sources for this article include:

• TheGatewayPundit.com
• Censored.news
• NaturalNews.com
• NATURAL NEWS