Month: August 2024

Authored by Jonathan Turley,

In its hit song London Calling the Clash warns:

“London calling to the faraway towns

Now that war is declared and battle come down

London calling to the underworld

Come out of the cupboard, all you boys and girls”

According to a new report, the British punk rock band may have been prophetic in 1979 in a way never foreseen in its apocalyptic lyrics.  This week, Metropolitan Police Commissioner Sir Mark Rowley said that the police will not necessarily confine its arrests for speech crimes to London or even the United Kingdom. Rowley suggests that Americans and other citizens could be extradited and brought to London for online postings.

London has been hit with days of violent protests over immigration policies, including attacks and arson directed at immigration centers. This violence has been fueled by false reports spread online about the person responsible for an attack at a Taylor Swift-themed dance event that left three girls dead and others wounded. Despite false claims about his being an asylum seeker, the culprit was an 18-year-old British citizen born to Rwandan parents.

News outlets and pundits have condemned the false reports and the violent protests. However, the police are moving to arrest those who are repeating false claims or engaging in inflammatory speech. Rowley is warning that they will not stop at the city limit or even the country’s borders.

He warned “We will throw the full force of the law at people. And whether you’re in this country committing crimes on the streets or committing crimes from further afield online, we will come after you.”

Rowley was asked by a reporter about the criticism by Elon Musk and others over the response of the government. Musk noted a video of someone allegedly arrested for offensive online comments with a question, “Is this Britain or the Soviet Union?”

Pundits and politicians in the United Kingdom have called for an investigation or the arrest of Musk for merely speaking publicly on the controversy.

The reporter said that high profile figures have been “whipping up the hatred,” and that “the likes of Elon Musk” are involved in the online speech. She then asked what the London police are prepared to do “when it comes to dealing with people who are whipping up this kind of behavior from behind the keyboard who may be in a different country?”

Rowley told the reporter:

“Being a keyboard warrior does not make you safe from the law. You can be guilty of offenses of incitement, of stirring up racial hatred, there are numerous terrorist offenses regarding the publishing of material. All of those offenses are in play if people are provoking hatred and violence on the streets, and we will come after those individuals just as we will physically confront on the streets the thugs and the yobs who are taking — who are causing the problems for communities.”

The message is chilling because free speech has been in a free fall in the United Kingdom as well as other Western countries. I discuss this trend in my new book, The Indispensable Right: Free Speech in an Age of Rage.

The decline of free speech in the United Kingdom has long been a concern for free speech advocates. A man was convicted for sending a tweet while drunk referring to dead soldiers. Another was arrested for an anti-police t-shirt. Another was arrested for calling the Irish boyfriend of his ex-girlfriend a “leprechaun.” Yet another was arrested for singing “Kung Fu Fighting.” A teenager was arrested for protesting outside of a Scientology center with a sign calling the religion a “cult.”

We also discussed the arrest of a woman who was praying to herself near an abortion clinic. English courts have seen criminalized “toxic ideologies” as part of this crack down on free speech.

The London police are now deputized to stop or arrest those engaged in speech deemed inciteful or inflammatory. Last year, the police stopped a man from walking in the street because there were pro-Palestinian protesters and his presence would be inciteful because he was “quite openly Jewish.”

The United Kingdom has a myriad of laws criminalizing speech with vague terms allowing for arbitrary enforcement. For example, Public Order Act 1986 prohibits any expressions of racial hatred, defined as hatred against a group of persons by reason of the group’s color, race, nationality (including citizenship) or ethnic or national origins.

Section 18 of the Act specifically includes any speech that is “threatening, abusive, or insulting.” An arrest does not have to be based on a showing of intent to “stir up racial hatred,” but can merely be based on a charge that “having regard to all the circumstances racial hatred is likely to be stirred up thereby.”

The country has also targeted social media companies to force them to censor users for speech deemed threatening, abusive or insulting by the government.

These ambiguous laws are written on the same “trust us, we’re the government” rationale. The police insist that they will use their discretion wisely in what speech will result in arrest.

Ordinarily, one would expect the U.S. government to push back on the suggestion that these laws could be used to arrest and extradite its citizens for the use of free speech. However, the Biden-Harris Administration has been a proponent of censorship and blacklisting for years. At the same time, leading Democrats have called for European-type laws to be adopted or enforced against U.S. citizens for their views on social media.

We previously discussed how Democratic leaders like Hillary Clinton called on foreign countries to use or pass censorship laws to prevent Elon Musk from restoring free speech protections on Twitter.

The effort of these politicians would allow free speech to be reduced to the lowest common denominator as countries export their anti-free speech laws. When Clinton called upon Europeans to censor Americans, this is precisely what such actions would look like.  These foreign countries could force Americans to curtail their speech under the threat of ruinous financial penalties or even arrest.

As some of us predicted, these laws have expanded as the desire to silence others becomes an insatiable appetite. Advocacy groups have pushed the police to crackdown on their critics.  Now, the threat to “throw the full force of the law at people” may be extended to the people of other nations.

We could all soon be dancing to that same tune:

“London calling, see we ain’t got no swing

Except for the ring of that truncheon thing”

*  *  *

Jonathan Turley is the Shapiro Professor of Public Interest Law at George Washington University. He is the author of “The Indispensable Right: Free Speech in an Age of Rage” (Simon & Schuster).

Vice President Kamala Harris has been the biggest ‘Bidenomics’ cheerleader over the last 3.5 years.

“That is called Bidenomics! Ha ha ha! That is called Bidenomics and we are very proud of Bidenomics!” VP Harris said one year ago. 

Kamala Harris 367 days ago: “That is called Bidenomics! Ha ha ha! That is called Bidenomics and we are very proud of Bidenomics!” pic.twitter.com/gOxPZvxTCk

— Steve Guest (@SteveGuest) August 5, 2024

“Bidenomics is working,” VP Harris said at a separate event earlier in President Biden’s first term. 

Kamala: “Bidenomics is working.” pic.twitter.com/nNtSe4E7pP

— The Post Millennial (@TPostMillennial) August 15, 2023

Again and again and again. She has raised her leftist pom poms and cheered: “Bidenomics is working” … 

New Trump ad paints Harris as face of ‘Bidenomics’ | The Hill

A new advertisement for former President Trump’s campaign tries to paint Vice President Harris as the face of “Bidenomics.”

The nearly minute-long ad, which Trump posted on his Truth Social account Friday, features… pic.twitter.com/cj2BtcetQR

— Owen Gregorian (@OwenGregorian) July 27, 2024

You can hear the nervous chuckle when she claims over and over again, “Bidenomics is working.” But in reality, America’s working poor and middle class have been financially devastated by elevated inflation and high interest rates. If you talk with any blue-collar American and bring up supermarket prices, they instantly become enraged. The same goes for auto prices, shelter costs, power bills, insurance rates, pump prices, and on and on and on.

The Federal Reserve’s latest monthly consumer credit report shows precisely why Americans are furious about Bidenomics—tens of millions of them have depleted savings and maxed out credit cards and are just a couple of steps away from financial ruin.  

Crushing credit card interest rates. 

Is the music about to stop for the consumer? 

So, back to VP Harris. The chuckle in her voice when she mentions Bidenomics possibly signifies that she, too, understands that out-of-control government spending on ‘green’ policies has been one of the main drivers of inflation.

And on Friday evening, she addressed a campaign rally in Arizona by saying, “We believe in a future where we lower the cost of living for America’s families … so that they have a chance not just to get by but to get ahead.” 

She’s literally running against herself. https://t.co/qTGVBIK207

— Stephen Miller (@StephenM) August 10, 2024

But hold up, wait a second. The whole point of Bidenomics, stated by the White House (read: here), was to “rebuild our economy from the middle out and the bottom up, not the top down—and that strategy is working.” 

VP Harris is quite literally running against herself by pointing out the ongoing cost of living crisis. In other words, she’s admitting Bidenmoics has failed the working poor and middle class.

What’s even more troubling, as Michael Shellenberger explained, is that VP Harris’ team has yet to unveil a policy-based agenda on the campaign’s website. 

The media says Kamala Harris is a serious person. But she’s not. She’s adopted vapid branding, won’t hold a press conference, and hasn’t put a policy agenda on her website. The reason her campaign is soulless is because the Democrats are out of ideas and the media doesn’t care. pic.twitter.com/1AT4bS9mth

— Michael Shellenberger (@shellenberger) August 9, 2024

Shellenberger explained why: “The reason her campaign is soulless is because the Democrats are out of ideas and the media doesn’t care.” 

Let’s be blunt. The same leftist MSM corporate media that fueled misinformation and disinformation campaigns about Covid origins (remember the narrative: seafood market), Hunter Biden’s laptop, Russia-Trump collusion, and President Biden’s mental actuality are the same group of people in their ivory towers (colluding with big tech) who have spent the last several weeks waging an all-out info war against the American public, pushing them to support a candidate (VP Harris) who doesn’t even have a policy agenda listed on her campaign website. 

Authored by C.A.Skeet via PJMedia.com,

Name one advantage that mass immigration from third-world countries has brought to any Western nation, anywhere, at any time. I’ll wait…

The riots that engulfed Britain this past week have again shone a spotlight on the issue that the authorities keep insisting is “beneath discussion.” And the issue isn’t racism, xenophobia, white supremacy, or any other scare word. The issue is Western ruling classes importing, against the expressed will of their citizenries, enormous numbers of immigrants who have absolutely no desire to assimilate into Western society or to respect Western values.

Following their operating manuals, the political classes and their media eunuchs refer to the British riots, along with any opposition in the Western world to mass immigration, as “far-right.” But for the past 25 years, mass immigration has been THE top concern for a plurality of American voters. Half of Americans currently view mass immigration as a “critical threat.” Half of Americans, including 42% of Democrats, favor mass deportations of illegals. It does beg the question: If half the country is “far-right,” then what does “moderate right” look like? The Green Party? The Trotskyists? Raul Castro?

And when I ask what advantages mass numbers of third-world immigrants bring, I’m talking about tangible benefits, not theoretical paeans to “diversity.” Diversity in and of itself is not a benefit. When I speak of benefits, I’m talking about a raised GDP. Safer neighborhoods and lower crime rates. Higher test scores. Stable labor markets. Respected liberties. Independence from the state welfare apparatus. Successful assimilation.

If mass immigration negatively affects all of these advantages, then sensible people will oppose it, irrespective of the argument that these migrants are simply “doing the jobs that Americans won’t do.” If the cost of maintaining these advantages — necessities, really, for a free people — means that we suck it up and endure the tediousness of maintaining our own yards or paying more money for actual Americans to perform low-skilled labor, then so be it.

Diversity is our strength? Whose strength? It doesn’t seem to be strengthening anybody, including the shortsighted “migrants” who, had they not been so immersed in their own chauvinistic, xenophobic, bigoted, and meritless pride, might experience a shred of humility and concede that maybe, just maybe, their unfortunate lot in life is the result of their own society’s cultural shortcomings rather than some ever omnipresent but never detectable “white supremacy.”

Though much of illegal immigration to the United States originates from Central and South America, we still experience the same detrimental rot of immigration from more sinister quarters. The British rioters, in particular, have been accused of targeting “Asian-owned businesses.” Asian, huh? Asia is a big place; care to narrow that down for us? You must mean Korea, right? No? The Philippines? Mongolia? Nepal? India? Are they from the same part of “Asia” as 18 of the 19 terrorists who carried out the September 11 attacks?

To suburban white women whose sun rises and sets on the solitary issue of abortion, you would do well to consider what life would be like under a culture in which abortions are allowed and encouraged so long as the fetus is female. Where the Handmaid’s Tale cosplayers would be stoned to death for exposing too much skin. Where teenage girls aren’t encouraged to change their gender but are mandated to have clitorectomies. Where it doesn’t matter whether or not you Believe Her© because women who are raped are they themselves murdered for “dishonoring” the family.

And if you’re banking on your “men” to save you, don’t forget what happened at the École Polytechnique in Montreal. An Algerian-Canadian, Gamil Gharbi, walked into a classroom with a rifle and ordered the fifty men to leave and the nine women to stay. All fifty “men” sheepishly complied, after which Gharbi gunned down the women, killing six of them. Gharbi then calmly left the classroom and walked past all fifty “men,” none of whom did anything other than avoid eye contact. Gharbi spent nearly twenty minutes shooting more women, killing fourteen in total before killing himself.

For the record, Gharbi had previously changed his legal name to Marc Lépine. Which name do you think the media used?

That was in 1989. White suburban liberal women have spent the last 35 years completely emasculating the concept of masculinity. So should any of Gharbi’s misogynist brethren open fire in a classroom at, let’s say, Columbia or Berkeley, we should expect no less cowardice from our latte-sipping, intentionally lisping “men,” other than to maybe offer the shooter a solidarity keffiyeh. Men like the Islamist shooter and the passive Western effeminates are both a far more “toxic” threat to your very existence than all the loud-mufflered, backward-hatted, white incels ever could be.

For Western cultists worshipping the golden calf of diversity, no crime is too ghastly to rattle their faith. Three British girls stabbed to death in Southport by a “Welsh” youth? Simply a tragedy, as unpredictable as a shark attack or a lightning strike. Muslim grooming gangs in Rotherham raping young British girls en masse, with the connivance of the authorities? Hey, let’s not be hasty, no need to pay any attention to those local sharia courts which, whatever else one can say about them, are at least enforcing Islamic law more effectively than the British system enforces British law. 

Roving bands of “youths” sexually assaulting 1,200 German women in Cologne on New Year’s Eve? German papers refused to publish anything about the attackers’ ethnicity for nearly a week to avoid driving the public “into the hands of the extreme right.” 

European cities like Molenbeek, Utrecht, Mälmo, and significant swathes of Brussels, Paris, and London have devolved into “no-go zones” for police and certainly for the native citizenry because they’ve effectively become self-contained outposts of radical Islam. Like their American counterparts’ singlehanded zeal for abortion, Europeans’ love affair with their precious welfare state is blinding them to the bigger threat at hand.

As of 2022, nearly 15% of the UK population was foreign-born. In Germany, the number is 18.4%. Here in America, the number is 13.8%. These numbers are simply unsustainable for any Western democracy wishing to retain the designation. The Islamization of Europe and the Balkanization of America may serve our elites’ interests at present, but even they will wake up one day to find the barbarians at their gates. And their gates’ security guards will have joined them.

This isn’t about skin color. This is about culture. And the crystal clear reality is that some cultures are superior to others. The generous bequeathment of Western culture to the world has been largely reciprocated not with gratitude, but with resentment, jealousy, and overt hostility. Immigrant groups proving themselves unwilling or unable to assimilate into Western culture or to respect Western values need to be deported immediately. Because this is a zero-sum game, and two diametrically opposed cultures will never peacefully co-exist.

We in the West have rights too. And for some of us, these rights are still worth fighting for. We have the right to our own institutions, our own history, our own security, our own prosperity, and our own futures. We have the right to exist as sovereign, independent nations, free from the overwhelming influx of savage, bigoted minds perpetually stuck in the early medieval period. Those who can’t understand that or refuse to respect that do not belong here.

We are past the “discussion.” It’s time to act. President Trump’s biggest mistake while in office was not initiating mass deportations as a necessary twin pillar to the wall construction. He’s already voiced a willingness to rectify this, but he has to win reelection first. If we lose this November, the United States of America as we understand it, as a beacon of hope for freedom-loving people, is over.

*  *  *

Views expressed in this article are opinions of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of ZeroHedge.

Authored by Ray McGovern via Consortium News,

Russiagate continues to survive like a science fiction monster resilient to bullets.   

The latest effort at rehabilitating it is an interview by Adam Rawnsley in the current issue of Rolling Stone magazine of one Michael van Landingham, an intelligence analyst who is proud of having written the first draft of the cornerstone “analysis” of Russiagate, the so-called Intelligence Community Assessment.

The ICA blamed the Russians for helping Trump defeat Hillary Clinton in 2016.  It was released two weeks before Trump assumed office. The thoroughly politicized assessment was an embarrassment to the profession of intelligence.

Worse, it was consequential in emasculating Trump to prevent him from working for a more decent relationship with Russia.

In July 2018, Ambassador Jack Matlock (the last U.S. envoy to the Soviet Union), was moved to write his own stinging assessment of the “Assessment” under the title: “Former US Envoy to Moscow Calls Intelligence Report on Alleged Russian Interference ‘Politically Motivated.’” 

In January 2019, I wrote the following about the ICA: 

“A glance at the title of the Intelligence Community Assessment (ICA) (which was not endorsed by the whole community) — ‘Assessing Russian Activities and Intentions in Recent US Elections’ — would suffice to show that the widely respected and independently-minded State Department intelligence bureau should have been included. State intelligence had demurred on several points made in the Oct. 2002 Estimate on Iraq, and even insisted on including a footnote of dissent.

James Clapper, then director of national intelligence who put together the ICA, knew that all too well. So he evidently thought it would be better not to involve troublesome dissenters, or even inform them what was afoot.

Similarly, the Defense Intelligence Agency should have been included, particularly since it has considerable expertise on the G.R.U., the Russian military intelligence agency, which has been blamed for Russian hacking of the DNC emails.

But DIA, too, has an independent streak and, in fact, is capable of reaching judgments Clapper would reject as anathema. …

With help from the Times and other mainstream media, Clapper, mostly by his silence, was able to foster the charade that the ICA was actually a bonafide product of the entire intelligence community for as long as he could get away with it. After four months it came time to fess up that the ICA had not been prepared, as Secretary Clinton and the media kept claiming, by ‘all 17 intelligence agencies.’

In fact, Clapper went one better, proudly asserting — with striking naiveté — that the ICA writers were ‘handpicked analysts’ from only the F.B.I., C.I.A., and NSA. He may have thought that this would enhance the ICA’s credibility. It is a no-brainer, however, that when you want handpicked answers, you better handpick the analysts. And so he did.”

[See: The January 2017 ‘Assessment’ on Russiagate] 

Buried in Annex B of the ICA is this curious disclaimer:

“Assessments are based on collected information, which is often incomplete or fragmentary, as well as logic, argumentation, and precedents. … High confidence in a judgment does not imply that the assessment is a fact or a certainty; such judgments might be wrong.”

Small wonder, then, that a New York Times report on the day the ICA was released noted:

“What is missing from the public report is what many Americans most eagerly anticipated: hard evidence to back up the agencies’ claims that the Russian government engineered the election attack. That is a significant omission…”

Burying Obama’s Role

Mainstream journalism has successfully buried parts of the Russiagate story, including the role played by former President Barack Obama.

Was Obama aware of the “Russian hack” chicanery? There’s ample evidence he was “all in.” More than a month before the 2016 election, while the F.B.I. was still waiting for the findings of cyber-firm CrowdStrike, which the Democratic Party had hired in place of the F.B.I. to find out who had breached their servers, Obama told Clapper and Dept. of Homeland Security head Jeh Johnson not to wait.

So with the election looming, the two dutifully published a Joint Statement on Oct. 7, 2016:

“The U.S. Intelligence Community (USIC) is confident that the Russian Government directed the recent compromises of e-mails from US persons and institutions, including from US political organizations. The recent disclosures of alleged hacked e-mails on sites like DCLeaks.com and WikiLeaks and by the Guccifer 2.0 online persona are consistent with the methods and motivations of Russian-directed efforts. These thefts and disclosures are intended to interfere with the US election process. … “

Obama’s role was revealed in 2022 when the F.B.I. was forced to make public F.B.I. emails in connection with the trial of fellow Russiagate plotter, Democratic lawyer Michael Sussmann

Clapper and the C.I.A., F.B.I., and NSA directors briefed Obama on the ICA on Jan. 5, 2017. That was the day before they gave it personally to President-elect Donald Trump, telling him it showed the Russians helped him win, and that it had just been made public.

On Jan. 18, 2017, at his final press conference, Obama used lawyerly language in an awkward attempt to cover his derriere:

“The conclusions of the intelligence community with respect to the Russian hacking were not conclusive as to whether WikiLeaks was witting or not in being the conduit through which we heard about the DNC e-mails that were leaked.”

So we ended up with “inconclusive conclusions” on that admittedly crucial point… and, for good measure, use of both words — “hacking” and “leaked.” 

The tale that Russia hacked the Democratic National Committee in 2016 was then disproved on Dec. 5, 2017 by the head of CrowdStrike’s sworn testimony to Congress. Shawn Henry told the House Intelligence committee behind closed doors that CrowdStrike found no evidence that anyone had successfully hacked the DNC servers. 

But it is still widely believed because The New York Times and other Democrat-allied corporate media never reported on that testimony when it was finally made public on May 7, 2020.

Enter Michael van Landingham

Rolling Stone’s article on July 28 about van Landingham says he is still proud of his role as one of the “hand-picked analysts” in drafting the discredited ICA.

The piece is entitled: “He Confirmed Russia Meddled in 2016 to Help Trump. Now, He’s Speaking Out.” It says: “Trump viewed the 2017 intel report as his ‘Achilles heel.’ The analyst who wrote it opens up about Trump, Russia and what really happened in 2016.” 

Without ever mentioning that the conclusions of the ICA were proven false, by Henry’s testimony and the conclusions of Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation that found no evidence of Trump-Russia “collusion,” Rolling Stone says:

“The 2017 Intelligence Community Assessment (ICA), dubbed ‘Assessing Russian Activities and Intentions in Recent U.S. Elections,’ was one of the most consequential documents in modern American history. It helped trigger investigations by the House and Senate intelligence committees and a special counsel investigation, and it fueled an eight-year-long grudge that Trump has nursed against the intelligence community.” 

Rawnsley writes in Rolling Stone the following as gospel truth, without providing any evidence to back it up. 

“When WikiLeaks published a tranche of [John] Podesta’s emails in late October, the link between the Russian hackers and the releases became undeniable. The dump contained the original spear phishing message that Russian hackers had used to trick Podesta into coughing up his password. News outlets quickly seized on the email, crediting it for what it was: proof that the Russians were behind the campaign.”

Because Rawnsley didn’t tell us, it’s not clear how this “spear phishing message” provides “undeniable” proof that Russia was behind it. Consortium News has contacted Rawnsley to provide more detail to back up his assertion. 

Craig Murray, the former British ambassador to Uzbekistan and close friend of Julian Assange,  suggested to Scott Horton on Horton’s radio show in 2016 that the DNC leak and the Podesta leak came from two different sources, neither of them the Russian government.

“The Podesta emails and the DNC emails are, of course, two separate things and we shouldn’t conclude that they both have the same source,” Murray said. “In both cases we’re talking of a leak, not a hack, in that the person who was responsible for getting that information out had legal access to that information.”

Reading between the lines of the interview, one could interpret Murray’s comments as suggesting that the DNC leak came from a Democratic source and that the Podesta leak came from someone inside the U.S. intelligence community, which may have been monitoring John Podesta’s emails because the Podesta Group, which he founded with his brother Tony, served as a registered “foreign agent” for Saudi Arabia.

“John Podesta was a paid lobbyist for the Saudi government,” Murray noted. “If the American security services were not watching the communications of the Saudi government’s paid lobbyist in Washington, then the American security services would not be doing their job. … His communications are going to be of interest to a great number of other security services as well.”

Leak by Americans

Horton then asked, “Is it fair to say that you’re saying that the Podesta leak came from inside the intelligence services, NSA [the electronic spying National Security Agency] or another agency?”

“I think what I said was certainly compatible with that kind of interpretation, yeah,” Murray responded. “In both cases they are leaks by Americans.”

William Binney, a former U.S. National Security Agency technical director, told Consortium News this regarding Rolling Stone‘s assertion about the Podesta emails:

“Saying something does not make it so. There is no evidence the phishers or hackers were Russian. In today’s networks, you really have to have the underlying internet protocol (IP nr) or device medium access control (MAC nr) to show the routing to/from [sending and receiving] devices to show exfiltration plus trace route evidence to show if that data went any further.

[In other words, you would need the unique computer addresses of the hacked and the hacker and anyone they may have relayed it to, if it were a hack.]

[Rawnsley] gives none of this type of data.  So, until he provides this type of data, I view his statements as an opinion and not worth much at all. 

The whole world-wide network has to have these numbers to get data from point A to point B in the world. No one (NSA included) has shown this data going to Wikileaks for publication. The 5EYES have Wikileaks under cast iron cover/analysis and would know this and report it.”

“There is one more aspect that’s important to take into account,” Binney added. “It’s the network log. This contains a record of every instruction sent on the network along with addresses for the sender and receiver. It’s held for a period of time according to storage allocated to it.”

Binney said:

“So, if there’s a hack, then the instruction to achieve the hack is in the log. Remember, Crowd Strike did the analysis of the DNC server all through this time and never talked about the network log. Now, Podesta’s computer does not have a network log, but the DNC and worldwide network providers do.”

Binney told CN that he proposed automated analysis of the worldwide log for the NSA in 1992, “but they refused it as it would expose all the money and program corruption in NSA contracts.”

Binney said he was putting that function into the ThinThread program in 1999/2000 that he was developing for the NSA, but the agency “removed it in 2001 after 9/11.”

A report by the private cybersecurity firm SecureWorks in June 2016 assessed with “moderate confidence” that a group identified as APT28, nicknamed “Fancy Bear” among other names “operating from the Russian Federation … gathering intelligence on behalf of the Russian government” was behind the Podesta phishing, though as Binney points out, the NSA found no such evidence, when it would have had to, had Russia done it.   

The name “Fancy Bear” of the alleged hackers from GRU, the Russian defense intelligence agency, incidentally, was coined by Dmitri Alperovich, the anti-Putin Russian co-founder of CrowdStrike. 

“This whole Russiagate affair was a concoction of the DNC, the Clintons, the F.B.I. etc. and none of them have produced any specific basic evidence to support their assertions,” Binney said. “The idea that the word ‘Bear’ implies Russia is about the level of technical intellect we are dealing with here.”  

Binney said these are the key technical questions that still need to be answered: 

1. What are the IP and/or MAC numbers involved? And, what are the allocations of these numbers by the Internet Assigned Numbers Authority (network number allocation authority)?

2. What are the trace routes of the hacked packets going across the worldwide network?

3. What instructions are in the network log indicating data exfiltration of data?

4. Are there any other specific technical aspects that are relevant to a potential hack? No opinions or guesses, that’s not factual evidence of anything beyond the writers biases.”

Binney said in email:

“Even if you assume the Russians did the hack and have the DNC/Podesta emails, you still have to show the transfer of these emails to Wikileaks to know who really did the deed. So far, no one has evidence the emails were sent to Wikileaks.

Most importantly, Julian Assange publicly said it was not the Russians. Kimdotcom said he helped others (not the Russians) to get data to Wikileaks. Craig Murray talked about physical transfer of data. These statements by people involved in WikiLeaks is clearly consistent with the technical evidence I and others have assembled.”

Binny said that “until such time as those others produce specific technical evidence for peer review and validation (like we have), they are just pushing sludge up an inclined plane with a narrow squeegee hoping they can get it over the top and accepted by all.”

Binney noted that the ancient Greek school of sophism called this the fallacy of repetition. “That’s where they keep repeating a falsehood over and over again till it is believed (it helps when they say the same thing from many different directions especially by people in positions of authority),” Binney said.

So the head of CrowdStrike testifies that there’s no evidence anyone hacked the DNC and according to Binney and Murray, there is no definitive proof that Russia was behind the Podesta phishing expedition either.  WikiLeaks maintains that a state actor was not the source of either. 

And yet the Russiagate myth persists. It is useful in so many ways for those in the U.S. who still want to ratchet up even more tension with Russia (as though Ukraine isn’t enough) and for a political party to perhaps again explain away an election loss if it happens in November. 

Thanks to Bill Binney and two other VIPS very senior NSA “alumni”, and the detailed charts and other data revealed by Edward Snowden, Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity (VIPS) was able to publish a memorandum on Dec. 12, 2016 that, based on technical evidence, labeled the Russian hacking allegations “baseless.” The following July we issued a similar VIPS  memo, with the title asking the neuralgic question, “Was the ‘Russian Hack’ an Inside Job?” The question lingers.

Shameless or Just Dumb? Michael van Landingham brags to Rolling Stone that he wrote the first draft of the meretricious cornerstone of Russiagate, the “Intelligence Community” Assessment falsely blaming the Russians for helping Trump defeat Hillary in 2016https://t.co/1yWupvqvcg

— Ray McGovern (@raymcgovern) July 30, 2024

I have now posted an item on X to call attention to this latest Russiagate indignity.

I cannot escape the conclusion that journalism is not like war: In war the victors get to write the history; in today’s journalism, the losers — who get it wrong — get to write it.

O Tempora, O Mores!

With a net approval rate of 13 percent, Democratic nominee for the vice presidency, Tim Walz, is only the 36th most popular governor in the country. He currently is the first in command in Minnesota.

However, as Statista’s Katharina Buchholz reports, other governors who were reportedly being considered for Kamala Harris’ running mate in the upcoming 2024 election are much more popular at home, namely Andy Beshear, who has a net approval rate of 40 percent in Kentucky, and Josh Shapiro of Pennsylvania, who places 16th with a net approval of 25 percent. This is according to data collected by Morning Consult.

You will find more infographics at Statista

However, according to NBC, Walz and Harris reportedly got along best in person and the Democratic nominee for president felt that he was best suited for a role of supporting the president loyally.

Walz, who has (admittedly controversial) military experience in the Army National Guard, worked a blue collar job in addition to having been a teacher and is a gun-owning hunter, is hoped to appeal to moderates and voters from non-coastal states and therefore complement Harris’ profile. 

Voters describe Walz as “normal” and “genuine”, but his policies are progressive despite his regular guy image, which might have also endeared him to Harris and her campaign. However, Walz’s stance has also caused pushback among more conservative voters in Minnesota, resulting in a lowish net approval.

Additionally, he has been criticized both for his handling of the Covid-19 pandemic as well as the protest that followed the death of George Floyd at the hands of police in Minneapolis in 2020.

Authored by Tom Ozimek via The Epoch Times (emphasis ours),

Microsoft’s cyber threat assessment unit said on Aug. 9 that a high-ranking official on a U.S. presidential campaign had been hacked by an Iran-backed group, with the Trump campaign later revealing that it had been the target of a cyber attack and linked the breach to “foreign sources hostile to the United States.”

The report from the Microsoft Threat Analysis Center (MTAC) indicates that an Iranian group called Mint Sandstorm that is connected to the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps sent a spear phishing email in June to a high-ranking official on a presidential campaign from the compromised email account belonging to a former senior campaign adviser.

“Mint Sandstorm similarly targeted a presidential campaign in May and June 2020 five to six months ahead of the last U.S. presidential election,” MTAC said, adding that the same group also tried but failed to breach an account belonging to a former presidential candidate.

No details were released on the official’s identity, but Microsoft’s threat assessment team said that the Iranian-linked breaches related to increasing attempts to influence the U.S. presidential election in November.

“This recent cyber-enabled influence activity arises from a combination of actors which are conducting initial cyber reconnaissance and seeding online personas and websites into the information space,” according to the report.

Following the release of the report, the Trump 2024 presidential campaign confirmed that it had been the target of a cyberattack in which campaign documents were stolen.

The breach, which Trump campaign spokesperson Steven Cheung told Politico on Aug. 10 has been attributed to “foreign sources hostile to the United States,” marks a significant development in the area of foreign interference in U.S. elections as the race for the White House heats up.

Politico reported that, on July 22, it began receiving emails from an anonymous source using the alias “Robert.” The emails reportedly contained internal documents from the Trump campaign, including a 271-page research dossier on Sen. JD Vance (R-Ohio), who was vetted as a potential vice presidential nominee and later chosen as former President Donald Trump’s running mate.

Cheung pointed to the Microsoft report and its finding that Iranian hackers had broken into the account of a high-ranking official on the U.S. presidential campaign as evidence of involvement of a foreign hostile power in the Trump campaign breach.

“These documents were obtained illegally from foreign sources hostile to the United States, intended to interfere with the 2024 election and sow chaos throughout our democratic process,” Cheung told the outlet.

He also linked the timing of the breach to reports of Iranian plots against Trump, who remains a target of Iranian hostility after ordering the 2020 assassination of Iranian General Qassem Soleimani.

Cheung, who did not immediately respond to a request from The Epoch Times for more details of the development, declined to tell Politico whether the Trump campaign had contacted law enforcement in regards to the breach.

U.S. intelligence officials recently stated that Iran had been hard at work sowing political discord in the United States via the use of clandestine or ghost social media accounts. Iran has denied that such practices are taking place and said that any actions against the United States are purely defensive and do not involve cyber attacks.

The Office of the Director of National Intelligence (ODNI) released a statement in July confirming that Iranian groups had targeted the U.S. political campaign, specifically that of Trump, to influence the upcoming election.

The U.S. intelligence community “has observed Tehran working to influence the presidential election, probably because Iranian leaders want to avoid an outcome they perceive would increase tensions with the United States,” the statement reads.

Microsoft’s report said that the hackers’ activity also covered a wider scope, including gaining intelligence on U.S. political campaigns, which allowed Iranian groups to target political swing states in the United States.

The report also stated that the previous breach involving the county official, which took place in May, was part of a wider “password spray operation.” This type of operation involves the use of common or leaked passwords, which hackers use on multiple accounts until they find a match and break into one.

The report confirmed that no other accounts were compromised through the breach and that all other targeted officials were notified of the cyber attack.

According to a recent report, around half of OECD countries are earning less now than they had before the pandemic.

As Statista’s Katharine Buchholz reports, when considering hourly real wages – wages adjusted for inflation – people in the United States, Canada, Japan, Australia and many European countries now have less money at their disposal than roughly four years ago. No data was published for Turkey, Chile and Colombia.

While the pandemic caused issues for some industries, others also started paying workers more as they wound up being in short supply due to the upheavals to employment Covid-19 caused. After the invasion of Ukraine by Russia in early 2022, most workers around the world took a hit to their real wages as inflation was running hot in many countries, causing price increases to effectively outweigh any potential wage growth.

You will find more infographics at Statista

Finland, Italy, the Czech Republic, Sweden and New Zealand were hardest hit by this phenomenon according to the OECD Employment Outlook 2024, seeing real wages decrease by more than 5%. Sweden saw wages dwindle most, by 7.5%. The country is known for relatively low real wages compared to its pricy standard of living—pay is 11% lower than in neighboring Denmark and 16-20% lower than in Germany, the Netherlands or Norway. Trade unions negotiate a majority contracts in the country that has placed a focus on equality, but like in many European nations, collective bargaining has become more contentious. In this context, observers have even referred to a “lost decade” for Swedish wages.

The United States fared better than others as real wages were just 0.8% lower in Q1 of 2024 than in Q4 of 2019. Neighbor Canada lost 2.4% of hourly real wages in roughly the same time period, while the loss was even more severe in Australia at 4.8%. The University of Sydney comments that a departure from collective bargaining and a decrease in manufacturing have affected the jobs that used to be peak performers for wage growth in the country.

Authored by Michael Snyder via The Economic Collapse blog,

Should we be alarmed? 

Many of us have been watching the spread of a deadly new strain of Monkeypox for quite some time, and now it appears that this crisis is about to reach a boiling point.  It is being reported that the World Health Organization is going to hold an “emergency meeting” to determine whether or not to declare a “public health emergency of international concern” due to a rapidly growing outbreak of Monkeypox in central Africa.  For those that are not familiar, a “public health emergency of international concern” is the highest level of alert that the WHO issues.  For example, in January 2020 a “public health emergency of international concern” was declared when COVID started to spread like wildfire inside China. 

So could we now be on the verge of the next great global health scare?

Two years ago, an outbreak of Monkeypox quickly spread all over the planet, and it is truly a horrifying disease…

Mpox is a viral disease that causes painful rashes and flu-like symptoms such as fever, headaches and body aches. The virus that causes it comes from the same family as that of smallpox. It spreads from person to person and from animals to people through direct contact.

In May, scientists reported a new strain of the virus in the DRC that they said was more virulent and might spread more easily.

Right now, if you somehow got infected with the strain that spread throughout the world in 2022, there is a good chance that you would be in so much pain that you would actually believe that you were about to die.

But that strain was rarely fatal.

Unfortunately, this strain is much more deadly.

According to the head of the World Health Organization, this new strain has already killed more than 500 people in the Democratic Republic of the Congo so far this year…

The outbreak, which began in the Democratic Republic of the Congo but has spread recently to at least three other neighboring countries, has involved more than 14,000 reported cases so far this year alone, Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus said, with at least 511 deaths reported.

Some experts believe that this new strain also spreads more easily.

Like the strain that spread all over the globe in 2022, this new strain spreads through sexual contact, but apparently it also spreads in other ways as well…

The CDC said in the alert that outbreaks in some provinces in the Democratic Republic of Congo have been associated with sexual contact.

In other parts of the country, however, patients have gotten sick through contact with infected animals, household transmission or patient care, the CDC said, adding that a high proportion of cases have been reported in children younger than 15.

“Most reported cases in known endemic provinces continue to be among children under 15 years of age,” the World Health Organization wrote on its website on June 14. “Infants and children under five years of age are at highest risk of severe disease and death.”

In 2022, very few children got infected.

But this time around lots of children are getting infected.

There had been hope that this outbreak could be confined to the Democratic Republic of Congo, but that didn’t happen.

At this point, confirmed cases have been detected in four nations that directly border the Democratic Republic of Congo…

The WHO said the virus has now ‘spread to previously unaffected provinces.’

In the past month, at least 50 Mpox cases have been reported in four other countries bordering the DRC – countries that have not experienced the virus before.

They include Burundi, Kenya, Rwanda and Uganda.

The genie is out of the bottle.

What are they going to do now?

Well, it appears that the first step will be to declare a “public health emergency of international concern”…

World Health Organization chief Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus on Wednesday called an “emergency” meeting of international experts amidst growing worries over the mpox virus.

With mpox spreading outside of the Democratic Republic of Congo, Tedros said the WHO emergency committee would meet “as soon as possible” to advise him on “whether the outbreak represents a public health emergency of international concern.”

When a “public health emergency of international concern” is officially declared, it will get a ton of media attention and that will really ramp up the fear level.

As I noted earlier, it is the “highest level of alert” that the WHO can issue…

PHEIC, the emergency classification Ghebreyesus referred to, is the W.H.O.’s highest level of alert. The W.H.O. declared a PHEIC over the novel coronavirus that was first detected in China in late January 2020.

Thankfully, there have been no confirmed cases outside of Africa yet.

But last week the CDC instructed doctors in the United States “to be on the lookout” for cases…

The Centers for Disease Control on Wednesday alerted doctors to be on the lookout for a deadly new strain of mpox spreading through parts of Africa while U.S. officials committed $424 million to the Democratic Republic of the Congo, which is the epicenter of the outbreak.

What are they expecting?

Do they anticipate that there will soon be confirmed cases here in the United States?

Needless to say, such a development would deeply alarm millions of people.

Interestingly, the CDC is also instructing Americans to limit contact with animals at county fairs all over the nation due to concerns about the bird flu…

Your trip to the county fair might look a little different this year all because of avian influenza also known as “bird flu.”

Organizers across the U.S. are working to ensure their events do not lead to the spread of the virus.

Children under five, people 65 years and older, pregnant people, people with certain chronic medical conditions, and others are at a higher risk of developing serious flu complications and should limit contact with animals that could carry influenza viruses, if possible, according tothe Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

Will H5N1 cause more panic during the months ahead, or will it be Monkeypox?

We will just have to wait and see how all of this plays out.

In any event, it is just a matter of time before the next major health scare paralyzes the entire globe just like we witnessed a few years ago.

Even as you read this article, scientists in secret labs all over the planet are playing around with some of the deadliest diseases ever known to humanity, and as we have seen it is way too easy for an “accident” to happen.

We live at a time when great pestilences will be a constant threat, and fear of those great pestilences will cause chaos all over the world.

So buckle up and hold on tight, because what we went through before was just a preview of what is ahead.

*  *  *

Michael’s new book entitled “Chaos” is available in paperback and for the Kindle on Amazon.com, and you can subscribe to his Substack newsletter at michaeltsnyder.substack.com.

As 20% of California suffers in poverty amid soaring power bills, soaring homelessness, businesses fleeing the state, and sky-high taxes, one might expect the state’s leadership to focus on solutions. Instead, Governor Gavin Newsom has taken a rather unconventional approach: hiring a celebrity photographer, Charles Ommanney, with a $200,000 annual salary to enhance his public image.

Yes, you read that right. In a state where many struggle to make ends meet, Newsom has brought on board a photographer known for capturing the likes of Mark Zuckerberg, George W. Bush, and Barack Obama. Ommanney’s task? To ensure that the governor is photographed in his most flattering light, whether it’s wearing aviator sunglasses while picking up trash from a homeless encampment or surveying wildfire damage in designer workwear.

This new role, which was quietly created and filled without the usual fanfare, is particularly egregious amid the backdrop of California’s economic struggles. With Ommanney now a full-time member of the governor’s team, his photos aren’t just about documenting events—they’re about crafting a carefully curated image of Newsom as a hands-on leader, Politico reports.

And while residents suffer, their governor is ramping up his meticulously polished persona, perhaps with an eye on the national stage. Earlier this year, instead of delivering the traditional State of the State address, Newsom’s office produced a glossy video, complete with dramatic visuals—some of which were shot by Ommanney—highlighting national issues over local crises.

Izzy Gardon, a spokesperson for Newsom, defended the hire.

“Charles plays an instrumental role in communicating the work of state government across visual platforms — including social media, helping us meet Californians where they are at.”

Yet, it’s hard to overlook the absurdity of this situation: a governor who earns $234,101 annually is paying a photographer nearly as much to follow him around the state, capturing photos that are, in essence, taxpayer-funded PR.

In a time when California’s residents need real solutions and tangible action, the governor’s decision to prioritize a high-priced image consultant raises more than a few eyebrows. For a state in dire need of economic revival, the focus on optics over substance is a bitter pill to swallow.

Authored by Paul D. Thacker via The Disinformation Chronicle,

Hey guys, I had a piece last week in UnHerd discussing hundreds of emails I had gone through that found social media influencer Zeynep Tufekci pressured the prestigious medical nonprofit Cochrane to put out a statement attacking their own review that found there is little evidence that masks stop respiratory viruses. One of the people Tufekci interviewed for the piece also told me that she twisted his words, which is obvious from the emails.

I want to walk you through some of those emails, but if you’d like to read the piece in UnHerd, it’s here: How the NYT undermined mask evidence: Leaked emails reveal how scientists were smeared.

The emails were sent to me after someone had filed Freedom of Information requests at different universities, and I got others from a person at Cochrane who is upset at what is happening inside the organization. Let’s first set the stage for what happened.

Mask activist on the attack

In March 2023, New York Times columnist Zeynep Tufekci wrote an essay arguing that “masks work” while attacking a review on masks by Cochrane, which publishes the gold standard of evidence for medical interventions. When Tufekci’s piece first appeared, I knew it smelled fishy.

Just a month prior, I had published a long Q&A with Tom Jefferson, the lead author of the Cochrane 2023 mask review. Jefferson loves going into all kinds of details about the hierarchy of evidence, how reviews are done, the contrasts between different types of reviews, and other tiny bits of medical information that only interest people with decades of expertise in clinical trials and medical research.

In short, very hard to follow.

My interest in masks was to help readers cut through all the controversy, to understand whether they really help with COVID and if mask mandates make sense in their schools and local community. I had noticed videos and news stories circulating on social media pointing out that several public health officials had done a 180 from the early months of the pandemic, first stating that masks don’t work, before pivoting to advocate for masks.

I called this the “great mask-science flip flop of 2020” and participants included Canada’s chief health officer, Theresa Tam, as well as the leading public health official in England, Jenny Harries.

Even Tony Fauci performed a mask-science flip flop, first arguing that masks didn’t work, before pivoting into full-on mask activist.

As Jefferson kept rambling on with tiny details about how to perform medical reviews that nobody but an expert in medical reviews could really follow, I stopped him.

“Wait, did you just say that Cochrane has done this mask review several times?” I asked. “This isn’t the first one?”

“Yes,” he replied.

So we went down the list. The Cochrane mask review published in February 2023 wasn’t the first time Cochrane scientists had examined the scientific literature to see if there was any evidence masks worked to stop viruses. They had published prior updates finding the same thing in 2020, 2011 2010, 2009, and 2007.

So the whole thing started 17 years ago.

Every time Cochrane has put out a review that looked at masks, nobody said anything, because masking wasn’t controversial. Everyone agreed that masks didn’t seem to stop viruses. Physicians had first started using masks over a hundred years ago but that was to stop spreading bacteria during surgery. And bacteria are hundreds of times larger than viruses.

I then started digging around and found several scientific studies concluding masks don’t do much to stop respiratory viruses, as well as several examples of international medical bodies drawing similar conclusions. For example, the World Health Organizations stated in their 2019 pandemic preparedness plan, “There have been a number of high-quality randomised controlled trials (RCTs) demonstrating that personal protective measures such as hand hygiene and face masks have, at best, a small effect on influenza transmission.”

So why was I reading a “masks work” essay in the New York Times?

The only explanation is Zeynep Tufekci. I didn’t really know Tufekci until I read her “masks work” essay last year, and when I looked into her background I found that she was mostly unknown in the scientific world until COVID. Once the pandemic started she made a name for herself writing essays in places like Wired and Scientific American. Intrigued, I looked into her academic publishing record and found that her academic CV was a tad barren, with few peer-reviewed studies but a slew of opinion articles.

Plus, Tufecki has no training in medicine or public health.

I then discovered that her profile had exploded in March 2020 when a New York Times media reporter praised Tufekci for a March 1 tweetstorm and March 17 essay in The New York Times that swayed the CDC to alter federal guidance and begin advising people to mask.

As I read the article praising Tufekci, I started laughing at how crazy it was that national policy could be set by tweets and an essay, not anything published by scientists. It was just so bizarre.

Tufekci has bounced around to different universities in the past four years, but at the beginning of the pandemic, she was a professor at the University of North Carolina. North Carolina’s big paper is the Raleigh News & Observer, and I found that they profiled Tufekci in 2021, anointing her a COVID hero who had challenged top health officials and got the facts right — but with essays, not science.

Instead of conducting lab experiments related to Covid-19, she used her platform on Twitter and in the opinion sections of Scientific American, The Atlantic and The New York Times to inform the public with practical advice about what to do and why.

I read that newspaper article thinking, “Thank God Tufekci didn’t use her platform on Twitter to challenge airline pilots at Raleigh-Durham International that she could fly a 747 to London’s Heathrow.”

And then I got the emails.

Opinions mean nothing, emails and documents everything

One of the first things I noticed was that Tufecki had emailed Michael Brown, a physician at Michigan State University, on February 24, 2023. According to other emails, I learned that Michael Brown had been the sign off editor for the mask review.

Why, I wondered, had Tufekci contacted Brown at this time?

Searching the news, I realized that Tufekci’s New York Times colleague, Bret Stephens, had published an essay three days prior, ribbing mask advocates like Tufekci because of Cochrane’s mask review: “The Mask Mandates Did Nothing. Will Any Lessons Be Learned?”

Tufekci’s rise in prominence is based mostly on her mask advocacy, and the thrust of Stephens’ piece in the New York Times must have cut her open like a surgeon’s scalpel:

[W]hen it comes to the population-level benefits of masking, the verdict is in: Mask mandates were a bust. Those skeptics who were furiously mocked as cranks and occasionally censored as “misinformers” for opposing mandates were right. The mainstream experts and pundits who supported mandates were wrong. 

Without much of a scientific publishing record and so much of her credibility tied to her mask advocacy, Stephens’ essay must have felt threatening.

But when she contacted Brown, Tufekci laid it on thick that she was an academic researcher, claiming expertise in statistics and causal inference, as well as scientific reviews.

“I use and participate in reviews myself (I’m writing one in my own field soon) and thus am familiar with many of the challenges and issues.”

You don’t need to have attended university to know that Tufekci is fibbing here. I glanced through Google Scholar to see what Tufeckci has published in the academic literature and didn’t find much except opinion pieces. In all of 2024, Tufecki has not published a single article in the scientific literature, and in 2023, she published one piece: an opinion essay.

As for the review Tufeckis told Brown in March 2023 that she was writing “in my own field soon”? It has never appeared.

When I contacted Brown about Tufekci, he told me that he had been a bit naive perhaps in dealing with her, as he hadn’t looked into her background, and didn’t realize that she was a mask activist. But what Tufecki did with the quotes she took from Brown is quite disturbing.

In her article, Tufekci quoted Brown and followed up in the next paragraph implying that he supported the idea that “the evidence is really straightforward” that masks provide protection from COVID. But Brown told me that’s not what the science concludes.

Here’s the section of Tufekci’s essay:

Brown, who led the Cochrane review’s approval process, told me that mask mandates may not be tenable now, but he has a starkly different feeling about their effects in the first year of a pandemic.

“Mask mandates, social distancing, the other shutdowns we had in terms of even restaurants and things like that — if places like New York City didn’t do that, the number of deaths would have been much higher,” he told me. “I’m very confident of that statement.”

So the evidence is relatively straightforward: Consistently wearing a mask, preferably a high-quality, well-fitting one, provides protection against the coronavirus.

This is just sleazy.

When I contacted Brown, he said that Tufecki spun his words, because the evidence is clear that masks don’t seem to do much. Brown actually stated as much some months after Tufekci interviewed him. Emailing the organizer of a talk he was giving, Brown wrote that masks “likely” provide “some” protection but “do not make a major impact at the community level when promoted as a public health intervention.”

This is basically the opposite of how Tufekci framed Brown’s quote in her essay.

Brown also told me that he had told Tufekci to contact the scientists who wrote the Cochrane review, because they are the real experts. Duh! While he was the editor of the review, he hadn’t read each and every published study like the review authors.

But Tufekci ignored Brown. Instead, Tufekci contacted Karla Soares-Weiser, the woman running Cochrane. Apparently, Tufekci sent a slew of questions, because Soares-Weiser then emailed Lisa Bero, a professor medicine at the University of Colorado who serves as Cochrane ethics advisor.

“Lisa, I have been back and forth with NYT about the mask review. CAN I GET YOUR VIEWS ON THE FOLLOWING QUESTIONS?” emailed Soares-Weiser. She then sent questions to Bero that she had gotten from Tufekci.

What makes this all comical is that Tufekci obviously knows nothing about reviews, yet Soares-Weiser freaked out because Tufekci writes a column at the New York Times.

It’s science by essay writer.

After Bero answered the questions, Soares-Weiser thanked her. “Thank you, Lisa. I’m navigating a difficult situation and of course need to take these points into account. Help appreciated.”  

For anyone with a passing familiarity with scientific research, one thought should come immediately to mind: why didn’t Soares-Weiser tell Tufekci to send those questions to scientists who had written the review? That’s what Michael Brown did.

That will become clear in a bit.

I got a copy of the email Tufekci sent Jefferson for questions and it’s dated March 9, the day before she published her 2000+ word essay. I’ve written for the New York Times. It’s a rather laborious process dealing with editors and fact checkers. It would impossible for Tufekci to contact Jefferson for comment and then slam out a 2000+ word essay, get that essay edited, deal with those edits, and then get it fact checked.

What those dates tell you is that Tufekci had the essay ready to publish before she contacted Jefferson for comment, suggesting she didn’t even care what he had to say. Jefferson has been publishing scientific research on respiratory virus for several decades, but Tufekci wasn’t interested in what he had to say because she already considered herself the expert.

The day Tufecki published her essay, Soares-Weiser then rushed out a statement claiming she was working to fix problems in the Cochrane mask review. But Soares-Weiser did this without consulting the scientists who had done the work. This would be like the editor-in-chief of the New York Times publishing an essay complaining about a New York Times investigative series without bothering to consult any of the reporters or editors who had done the work.

“I will not speak for the others but am deeply distressed by this course of events which have occurred without our knowledge,” replied Jon Conly, a professor and former head of the department of medicine at the University of Calgary.

Michael Brown responded that he had spoken to Tufekci and told her that “I stood by the conclusions of the review but asked that she reach out to you, the authors, to answer some of her questions directly. She assured me that she would do so.”

Of course, Tufekci did NOT reach out to the scientific authors, because she wasn’t interested in what they had to say.

Brown then sent an email to Soares-Weiser and several of the Cochrane editors reminding them that changes were being considered to the mask review language, even though it was the same wording as had been used in the 2020 update.

Why were changes being considered then? As Brown explained, it had nothing to do with science. “[I]t was only under intense media coverage and criticism that these revisions were suggested.”

Emails find that Soares-Weiser appeared to be in a bit of panic, monitoring negative commentary about her decision to publish a statement without bothering to consult the scientists. “I had a challenging meeting with the [governing board] yesterday. I am holding on, stressed, but OK,” she emailed Lisa Bero.

Bero then suggested to Soares-Weiser that Cochrane publish negative comments being submitted by outsiders criticizing the mask review. “That should be published as soon as possible (following screening for libel or profanity),” Bero emailed. “It is important for readers to know that criticism has not just come through the media, but through the formal channels that we have.”

Shortly after bullying Cochrane’s Soares-Weiser to put out a statement claiming she would make changes to the mask review, Tufekci began tweeting that she had gotten the review “corrected.”

However, this isn’t true.

A month back, Soares-Weiser put out a correction to her prior statement, and now says that Cochrane will not make any changes to the mask review.

The entire saga calls into question Zeynep Tufekci’s ethics and whether Soares-Weiser is still fit to lead Cochrane.