The Great Reset, page 20
Dr. Scott Atlas, a member of the Trump White House COVID team, ran afoul of Big Tech censorship as well. Atlas was suspended on Twitter for questioning the effectiveness of masks.
“Atlas, a senior fellow at Stanford’s Hoover Institute, not only had his tweets removed, he was banned from tweeting until he deleted the tweets that Twitter for unclear reasons objects to,” David Marcus reported at The Federalist.
Atlas explained to Marcus: “In the deleted tweet, I cited the following evidence against general population masks. In Atlas’s words:16
Cases exploded even with mandates: Los Angeles County, Miami-Dade County, Hawaii, Alabama, the Philippines, Japan, the United Kingdom, Spain, France, Israel.
Dr. Carl Heneghan, University of Oxford, director of the Centre for Evidence-Based Medicine and editor in chief of British Medical Journal Evidence-Based Medicine: “It would appear that despite two decades of pandemic preparedness, there is considerable uncertainty as to the value of wearing masks.”17
The WHO: “The widespread use of masks by healthy people in the community setting is not yet supported by high quality or direct scientific evidence and there are potential benefits and harms to consider.”18
The CDC: “Our systematic review found no significant effect of face masks on transmission of laboratory-confirmed influenza.”19
Marcus commented, “Notwithstanding this evidence regarding arguably the most important and contentious debate raging in American society—the constant mandate of masks—it appears some 20-something with his pronouns in his Twitter bio just pushed a button and erased scientifically accurate information. For some reason, which hopefully Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey can explain when he is dragged before the Senate, Atlas was silenced by the tech giant.”20
Former New York Times reporter Alex Berenson asked the pertinent question: “Does it seem like the entire elite media speaks with one voice on the [co]ro[navirus]?” And he pointed to the answer: “There’s a reason. They’ve explicitly committed to working together—and with Big Tech, in the ‘Trusted News Initiative,’ which isn’t exactly a secret but isn’t exactly well-publicized.”21
The “Trusted News Initiative” is the Orwellian name for what you might think was a conspiracy theory if the BBC hadn’t reported on it.22
Government Is “Your Single Source of Truth”
Prime minister of New Zealand Jacinda Ardern’s efforts to protect the citizens from COVID-19 “rumors” and misinformation led to her declaring there was only one “single source of truth”—her government! “You can trust us as a source of that information. You can also trust the Director General of Health and the Ministry of Health. For that information, do feel free to visit at any time—to clarify any rumor you may hear—the covid19.govt.nz,” Ardern said in 2020. “Otherwise dismiss anything else. We will continue to be your single source of truth.”23
“Dis Information”
“Dey won’t be giving you dis information, only dat information. Dey know what’s best for you! The most dangerous part of this is that it makes news organizations explicit partners with FaceGoogle. Repeat after me: these companies need more independent scrutiny, not less.” —Alex Berenson to his hundreds of thousands of followers on Twitter, which eventually banned him for reporting inconvenient facts about COVID-1924
The big social media platforms, including YouTube, Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter, implemented COVID-19 “misinformation” policies that became increasingly restrictive as the lockdowns persisted. YouTube, for example, removed any video that violated their policy of medical “misinformation.”25
That meant any information that was not in-line with the consensus views of the major public health organizations. “YouTube says it doesn’t allow content that poses a serious risk of egregious harm, such as videos that contradict the consensus of local and global health authorities regarding the efficacy of masks,” according to a report from the Kaiser Family Foundation.
“According to data shared by YouTube in March [2021], the company has removed more than 800,000 videos containing coronavirus misinformation since February of last year. Facebook reported in February that the company and its sister platform, Instagram, had removed more than 1 million pieces of covid misinformation in the last three months of 2020. And last month, Twitter said it had removed more than 8,400 tweets and challenged 11.5 million accounts since the implementation of the covid guidance,” Kaiser reported.26
Biotech entrepreneur Vivek Ramaswamy detailed the power of Big Tech: “Facebook and Twitter… actually get to determine what ideas we do and don’t discuss, and that actually makes them the most powerful companies in the course of history. Not because they’re able to make a bunch of profit. I’m okay with that. But because they’re able to exercise power over what we can and can’t discuss, and to me that was the biggest threat to democracy of all.”27
Factcheck.org is funded by the Annenberg Foundation, which receives grants from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation.28 The people pushing the Great Reset literally control the fact-checkers who police the public discussion on COVID-19—its origins, treatments, lockdowns, and mask mandates.
“Stay Muzzled, Locked Down Forever”
“There is nothing—absolutely nothing—within the Great Barrington Declaration which could possibly breach either Google’s or Reddit’s terms and conditions and justify closing it down….
“Big Tech has become so shamelessly left-wing that it is now barely capable of embarrassment about its relentless bias. Big Tech supports full lockdowns, enforced mask-wearing, quarantines, curfews and all the other authoritarian baggage because it aligns with its own interests in global rule by a technocratic elite, in ever bigger government, in the globalist new world order promoted by institutions like the World Economic Forum (Davos) and the Chinese-controlled World Health Organisation.
“Increasingly it is flexing its muscles to suppress any dissent.” —James Delingpole at Breitbart in an article headlined “Big Tech Wants You to Stay Muzzled, Locked Down Forever”29
In 2021, thousands of Anthony Fauci’s emails were released as a result of Freedom of Information Act requests. The emails revealed that, despite past denials, the United States may have funded gain-of-function research for infectious viruses at the Wuhan lab in China and COVID-19 may have been released from the lab—not a bat.
“When Trump began to speak about a possible lab leak in Wuhan last year and calling for an investigation to identify its origin, Fauci roundly dismissed these notions, to the media’s delight,” wrote William Sullivan in American Thinker in an article titled “The Fall of St. Fauci.”
Fauci doubled down, claiming that the evidence “very, very strongly [indicated] this could not have been artificially or deliberately manipulated.”30
The Wall Came Tumbling Down
The collapse of the zoonotic (animal-to-human) origin theory of COVID-19 in 2021 illustrates just how Big Tech served to block not only the truth but any attempt to ask even basic questions.
Scott McKay described in the American Spectator what happened after Fauci’s emails caused “the collapse of the narrative on the Wuhan virus lab-leak theory.”
“Now that the Narrative Wall has come down in a manner metaphorically quite similar to what happened to the civil infrastructure in Jericho, we can see just how devoid of merit is the American mainstream media,” McKay wrote. “For an entire year these people, aided by the totalitarians who run the Big Tech social media sites (and one way to let the market punish those guys is to click here and join us at The Speakeasy), have done everything they could to squelch any notion that COVID-19 is the product of irresponsible, if not downright evil, virology research gone wrong in Wuhan, China.”
Before the release of Fauci’s emails, “the lab-leak theory was nuttery. It was a conspiracy theory. It was a racist lie” according to our establishment-media overlords, explained McKay.31
“Typical of Organized Crime”
Ron Wright, a retired police detective, detailed how the Big Tech acted like “organized crime.”
“These people were derided and marginalized for having heretical thoughts. Big Tech aided by deplatforming, silencing, and suppressing these questioning reports of this narrative as conspiracy theories, false, partially false, lacking context, and other trite phrases as not conforming with the Orwellian World of Newspeak,” Wright explained at American Thinker.
“What broke the ice was distinguished science reporter Nicholas Wade’s, ‘Origin of COVID—Following the Clues,’ which first was published in the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists,” Wright wrote. “Wade’s article is the metaphorical straw that broke the camel’s back. He exposed the lies that were told to the American people by our elected representatives, the administrative deep state, the media, big pharma, and big tech that united together to tell the big lie for many self-interested reasons and in many cases were criminal. This behavior is typical of organized crime or a criminal enterprise as defined in the federal RICO Act. Organized crime can’t exist without corrupt law enforcement,” he added.
Since the publication of Wade’s investigation, “a tsunami drowned the lies of our media and those who aided and abetted in propagating these lies. No longer can this cabal maintain control of the narrative. Dr. Fauci’s almost deity-like shroud was torn asunder,” Wright noted.32
“This Is Not Fact Checking. This Is Consensus Checking”
PolitiFact explained in 2021 that its “fact-checks” don’t actually deal in “facts” but instead in expert “assertions,” which may or may not be factual. “When this fact-check [ruling against the lab-leak theory of COVID-19’s origins] was first published in September 2020, Politifact’s sources included researchers who asserted the Sars-CoV-2 virus could not have been manipulated. That assertion is now more widely disputed. For that reason, we are removing this fact-check from our database,” PolitiFact explained in a May 17, 2021, “Editor’s note.”
Eric Weinstein, the managing director of Thiel Capital, ripped the flip-flopping “fact-checkers.” “Our fact-checkers have one job. Only one reason for being. They are supposed to focus on facts only & check them,” Weinstein wrote. “This is not fact-checking Politifact. This is consensus checking. That has nothing to do with facts. You aren’t a fact-checker. You opened us all to groupthink.”33
Did We Say Fact-Check? We Meant to Say Opinion-Check
In 2021, in response to a defamation lawsuit filed by newsman John Stossel, Facebook was forced to reveal in federal court that their fact-checks were in reality opinions. As Facebook admitted in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California, “The labels themselves are neither false nor defamatory; to the contrary, they constitute protected opinion.”34
“I sued them because they defamed me. They, along with one of their ‘fact-checkers,’ a group called Science Feedback, lied about me and continue to lie about me,” Stossel, the founder of Stossel TV, explained. He had been “fact-checked” over a climate change segment he produced. “Now Facebook has responded to my lawsuit in court. Amazingly, their lawyers now claim that Facebook’s ‘fact-checks’ are merely ‘opinion’ and therefore immune from defamation,” Stossel wrote. “I want Facebook to learn that censorship—especially sloppy, malicious censorship, censorship without any meaningful appeal process is NOT the way to go. The world needs more freedom to discuss things, not less.”35
But perhaps the most jaw-dropping revelation about the “fact-checkers” was a different instance, in which Facebook had cited a scientist linked to the Wuhan lab to debunk the lab-leak theory.
Despite a close relationship with the Wuhan lab, EcoHealth Alliance president Peter Daszak “appeared in multiple media fact-checks and reports over the past year dispelling the notion that the coronavirus accidentally emerged from the lab.” “Daszak’s organization sent $3.4 million in National Institutes of Health grants to the Wuhan lab between 2014 and 2019,” Fox News reported.36
Melissa Chen of The Spectator raised the obvious question: “Someone at Facebook needs to explain why Peter Daszak, head of EcoHealth & the person with THE MOST glaring conflict of interest, was considered a source for fact-checking content on covid19 origins. It’s like asking Ayatollah Khamenei to fact-check content about Iran’s nukes.”37
Don’t Listen to That Science
“When the media says ‘listen to the science,’ what they really mean is ‘listen to the science that we didn’t censor from social media.’ ” —Dr. Simone Gold, founder of America’s Frontline Doctors38
Oppose Lockdowns and Mask Mandates? You’re Mentally Ill!
According to a study by Dr. Bruce L. Miller published in the Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA) on November 2, 2020, “The US public health response to coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) has been dismal, characterized by antimask behavior, antivaccine beliefs, conspiracy theories about the origins of COVID-19, and vocal support by elected officials for unproven therapies…. The content of false beliefs in dementia with Lewy bodies and frontotemporal dementia differ but may offer insights into the shared neural mechanisms by which humans misperceive information.”39
Former New York Times reporter Alex Berenson commented: “Here’s a PHYSICIAN comparing people who disagree with his views on masks or vaccines to patients with Capgras syndrome (a severe psychosis where you believe the people around you are actually imposters).”
Physicist Denis Rancourt also ripped the claim: “This is the most unethical publication I have seen in a scientific journal in my lifetime. Psychosis advanced to ‘explain’ mask and COVID skeptics! I conclude: Medicine is a sick profession, in need of treatment.”40
COVID-19 censorship expanded relentlessly. Epidemiologist Knut Wittkowski slammed the coronavirus lockdowns and ripped the “scientific studies” funded to support government policy in 2020. For his honesty, Wittkowski was promptly banned from YouTube, as lockdown dissenters were from all social media platforms.41
Big Tech censored the Great Barrington Declaration, a petition calling for an end to government tyranny related to COVID-19, which was signed by more than half a million people including prominent scientists, medical doctors, and public health experts.
The Declaration was authored by three respected public health experts—Harvard professor Martin Kulldorff, Oxford professor Sunetra Gupta, and Stanford professor Dr. Jay Bhattacharya.
“Lockdown is a blunt, indiscriminate policy that forces the poorest and most vulnerable people to bear the brunt of the fight against coronavirus. As an infectious diseases epidemiologist, I believe there has to be a better way,” explained Gupta.
“At the heart of our proposal is the recognition that mass lockdowns cause enormous damage. We are already seeing how current lockdown policies are producing devastating effects on short and long-term public health,” Gupta added.42
The Declaration was censored by Reddit, shadow-banned by Google, and attacked by the mainstream media.43
Gupta explained: “When I signed the Great Barrington Declaration on October 4, [2020,] I did so with fellow scientists to express our view that national lockdowns won’t cure us of Covid. Clearly, none of us anticipated such a vitriolic response. The abuse that has followed has been nothing short of shameful.”
“I was utterly unprepared for the onslaught of insults, personal criticism, intimidation and threats that met our proposal. The level of vitriol and hostility, not just from members of the public online but from journalists and academics, has horrified me,” she admitted.
As Gupta pointed out, “Proponents of lockdown policies have seemed intent on shutting down debate rather than promoting reasoned discussion.” She added, “This refusal to cherish the value of the scientific method strikes at the heart of everything I, as a scientist, hold dear. To me, the reasoned exchange of ideas is the basis of civilized society.”44
According to emails that the American Institute for Economic Research obtained in 2021 through the Freedom of Information Act, the two most prominent public health figures in the United States, Dr. Anthony Fauci and Francis Collins (at that time the director of the National Institutes of Health) colluded with the media to help discredit and smear the thousands of signatories to the Great Barrington Declaration.
“In private, the two sainted public-health officials schemed to quash dissenting views from top scientists,” the Wall Street Journal reported. Dr. Collins wrote to Fauci in an October 8, 2020, email, “This proposal from the three fringe epidemiologists… seems to be getting a lot of attention—and even a co-signature from Nobel Prize winner Mike Levitt at Stanford. There needs to be a quick and devastating published take down of its premises. Is it underway?” Fauci replied that an effort was indeed underway.
“The emails suggest a feedback loop: The media cited Dr. Fauci as an unquestionable authority, and Dr. Fauci got his talking points from the media. Facebook censored mentions of the Great Barrington Declaration. This is how groupthink works,” the Wall Street Journal’s editorial board concluded.45
Stanford University epidemiologist Dr. John Ioannidis ripped the media censorship:
Big Tech companies, which gained trillions of dollars in cumulative market value from the virtual transformation of human life during lockdown, developed powerful censorship machineries that skewed the information available to users on their platforms. Consultants who made millions of dollars from corporate and government consultation were given prestigious positions, power, and public praise, while unconflicted scientists who worked pro bono but dared to question dominant narratives were smeared as being conflicted.46
