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Censorship Industrial Complex

2024 is Going to Give us All PTSD

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16 minute read

From the Frontier Centre for Public Policy

By Terry Etam

And while there are crazies on either side of the spectrum, the difference is that right wing crazies are right wing crazies, and CBS News is CBS News.

The lazy days of summer serve a useful purpose. A few weeks away from everything clears the head, if one can escape the global cacophony.  It works. Try it if you can; declutter the mind, step out of the fray. Upon returning, it seems possible to see the forest instead of the trees, to rejoin the info flow gradually from a disconnected, higher level.

Personally, it also helps to get disconnected from the energy world as well, and to travel to places far removed from the energy epicentre to take the pulse of people that have nothing to do with it.

Having said that, it can be a shock to realize how poorly energy is understood. It shouldn’t really be a shock, of course; it is a vast and complicated topic that almost no one understands in its entirety.

It’s not unreasonable though to ask that our leaders have a better grasp, but it is frightening to realize that they do not. We see senior policy makers and geopolitically-significant people/organizations/policy makers enacting suicidal energy policies (the examples are in the hundreds, but look at Germany’s decision to shut down much-needed nuclear power plants as the poster child).

The reason leaders are so eager to throw common sense out the window and embrace energy-ignorant policies is illuminated quite clearly when speaking with the average citizen about what everyone always talks about – the weather. Maybe it’s a Canadian thing but it’s a topic that can’t be avoided, and right there, right away, the wheels come off. Climate messaging has been so resoundingly successful that, in the public’s eye, any weather deviation whatsoever is proof of man-made climate change. The news cycle ramps this phenomenon up to a fever pitch. It’s so freaking draining; getting sidetracked in a weather conversation ruins my zen and I run away.

The attitude is so pervasive it is as though everyone has forgotten that heat waves/droughts/floods existed since time immemorial, and many ancient ones were far more severe than today’s events. But as we all know, once pop culture drills something into someone’s head long enough and loud enough, it becomes a truth (former Trudeau government bigwig Catherine McKenna, climate alarmist extraordinaire, was famously recorded explaining to an acquaintance in a bar how this works: “Just keep saying the same thing louder and louder and eventually they believe it.” (A not-dumb eastern Canadian lawyer explained to me that climate change was now so bad that the earth was actually heating up from the inside, which was her explanation for why the soil was dry some 6 feet down on her property. That kind of boldly asserted absurdity is not easily pounded into heads, but once it’s there, dynamite won’t get it out.)

It’s easy to point the finger at the general population and declare “they’re all stupid,” I hear that a lot, but it’s a bit unfair. They are energy ignorant, as are most, and when it come to alarmist messaging, well, when the government itself engages in scare tactics at the highest level, such as when federal leaders hint in their crazy way that extreme weather is something they can ultimately control through government policy, a lot of people kind of just sigh and accept it, they go with the flow.

The media machine, starved for attention, loves chaos and fear and flash. It encourages us to hate by zeroing in on the inflammatory. It encourages us to rage by taking positions, and draping itself in mock-innocence – “What? Us? Biased? Outrageous. We even have fact checkers!”

Yeah…about that… CBS News reports on the ‘no tax on tips’ idea. In June 2024, Trump proposed the idea of eliminating taxes payable on tip income. CBS news ran with the story on Twitter thusly: “Former President Donald Trump’s vow to stop taxing tips would cost the federal government up to $250 billion over 10 years, according to a nonpartisan watchdog group.”

In August 2024, two months later, Kamala Harris somehow came up with the exact same policy, and CBS News covered her theft thusly: “Vice President Kamala Harris is rolling out a new policy position, saying she’ll fight to end taxes on tips for service and hospitality workers.”

They don’t even care any more. There is no shame, or self-reflection, no hesitancy. It’s pure peacock feathers.

And while there are crazies on either side of the spectrum, the difference is that right wing crazies are right wing crazies, and CBS News is CBS News.

While it is a generational thing to think that times have never been more crazy, it is hard to put today’s weirdness into any sort of historical context. “The News” is a relatively recent phenomenon in the big scheme of things, hardly more than a century or two old, and thus it is a living object, morphing over time as communications capabilities change, and as we become more interconnected at light speed. Fifty years ago we either waited for a daily or weekly newspaper to find out what was happening in the world, or tuned in to a nightly television program that chose the stories for us and read them aloud in some soothing voice.

We were told what the news was to the extent the news organizations could unearth or cover it, in a time when the ability to cover bigger events on the other side of the world was almost nonexistent. Crack reporters did great work speaking to people who either witnessed or participated in events, and politics covered what was known about what politicians were up to, and not much may have been known at all. In fact those politicians were acting in huge information vacuums as well.

Today, it’s wide open. We see everything. At least we do in the west, not so much in totalitarian states, but even there we can observe a lot. We have eyes on everything including live flight trackers doing their thing every minute of the day on social media, we can see a graphic of every trip Taylor Swift’s jets made over then course of a year (yes, she has two, apparently, another bit of trivia I have no justification or enthusiasm for knowing).

We also see an infinite assessment of government policy, how it comes to be, how it’s enacted, how it’s enforced, how it is playing out, like we never have before in history. The feedback loops are constant and detailed, and while the information is sometimes distorted for ideological purposes, the preponderance of analysis does tend to zero in on what is actually happening, shorn of much of the spin.

We can see the genesis of much of today’s craziness. One gets the feeling, from a high-enough thought plane, that some well-educated and well-funded people decided to make some very big tectonic moves that would put the world on a better path. Being God’s gift to central planning, this global who’s who fully embraced radical  – and I do mean radical – change as a prerequisite for human survival. (The IPCC for example said that, to achieve climate targets, there would need to be an unprecedented rewiring and rebuilding of pretty much the entire world, quickly. They offered no advice, just “do it or you all perish” and that was enough for the WEF crowd to pool their billions and buy the best politicians they could.)

Our western leaders, full of oats, delusions of grandeur, and a blank checkbook/chequebook – because they don’t understand the cold hard realities of how to run a successful economic enterprise – went for broke, looking to go down in history as visionaries that bent the trajectory of modern life as we know it. They burned bridges – no going back, no second guessing (any second-guessing is now deemed ‘misinformation’ or ‘disinformation’).

What we see all around us is the detritus of their failure, on so many levels, and we don’t really know what to do about it. We’ve been conditioned to accept that the ‘experts’ know what they are doing, and that capable hands will guide us through whatever fate throws at us. We turn to the simplistic world of pop culture for explanations because the stone cold reality of things is just too hard to wrap our heads around, and we don’t want to spend our days trying to figure it all out.

We are still people, and it is dumb to expect a solid grounding of complex topics that the media distorts mercilessly to pander to the fear.

And yes there are of course flat out fools, across the political spectrum and beyond. Feel free to discount them entirely. Luckily, let’s be honest, no matter our political persuasion, they’re generally not hard to spot, which is why attempting to limit free speech is such a fool’s game.

On the other hand, it appears the world’s attention is going to be dominated by the upcoming US election, and it is going to be so freaking far out and insane that it will be hard to reach December without PTSD.

Some words to keep in mind when things become so crazy it seems like it isn’t real (if you think that’s hyperbole, consider that Russia’s war against Ukraine, a bonafide war with tanks and bombs and death and endless heartache, often sadly doesn’t even make the front page, pushed aside by madness in the US, UK, Middle East, Africa…).

We are in a period of turmoil where people don’t know where to turn. Most have been led to believe that they are fundamentally bad, either through their consumption choices or their preference for “what was good before” or if their belief system doesn’t line up exactly with the mainstream narrative.

As a wise friend recently pointed out, in times of trouble people seek out “messiahs”, they look for a jolt from an outsider, because the “inside”, the swamp, has let them down and left them disoriented. Remember that Trump is a symptom, not a cause. Many, many people, perhaps a majority, are willing to overlook his bombastic antics because he represents a hope that can only come from the outside. As proof of this notion, consider this quote from an astonishing source – John Lydon of the band Public Image Ltd., formerly Johnny Rotten of the Sex Pistols, the ultimate punk of all punks, speaking of Trump: “He’s a thoroughly unpleasant fellow, no doubt about it. But he’s not a politician and I hate politicians! Screw the lot of ‘em. I’d rather have a maniac…a real estate land shark. There will be no world carrying on as long as we keep enforcing dogmas.”

No matter what happens over the next year or two, we will find a new equilibrium just as the world did post WWII. What it will look like is a good question, but there will be some sort of stability.

Probably. What the hell do I know. Good luck.

Rest assured that the future of energy providers is as strong as it ever has been, no matter what you hear on the airwaves. Energy will be the last industry standing, no matter what happens.

Terry Etam is a columnist with the BOE Report, a leading energy industry newsletter based in Calgary.  He is the author of The End of Fossil Fuel Insanity.  You can watch his Policy on the Frontier session from May 5, 2022 here.

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Censorship Industrial Complex

Former residential school student refutes ‘genocide’ claims, recalls positive experience

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From LifeSiteNews

By Clare Marie Merkowsky

An Indigenous whistleblower condemned the media-driven narrative about ‘mass’ graves at residential schools that led to church burnings across Canada.

An Indigenous whistleblower shared his positive experience at a Residential school, debunking the claim that the schools abused and murdered their students.

In an April 5 interview with Rebel News reporter Drea Humphrey, a Kamloops Band member and former Kamloops Indian Residential School student revealed that there was no”genocide” at the schools and many students benefited from the institution.

“A lot of the students were happy to be there,” the Band member, whose identity was kept anonymous, said. “They were away from abusive families, dysfunctional families, alcoholism. So, they were happy to be there.”

The former student revealed that he was treated well during his time at the residential schools in the 1970s. He also described the priests and nuns who ran the school as good people, referring to Father Noonan, the principal at the time, as “a real nice guy.”

Residential schools, while run by both the Catholic Church and other Christian churches, were mandated and set up by the federal government and ran from the late 19th century until the last school closed in 1996.

While some children did tragically die at the once-mandatory boarding schools, evidence has revealed that many of the children passed away as a result of unsanitary conditions due to underfunding by the federal government, not the Catholic Church.

As a consequence, since 2021, when the mainstream media ran with inflammatory and dubious claims that hundreds of children were buried and disregarded by Catholic priests and nuns who ran some of the schools, over 100 churches have been burned or vandalized across Canada in seeming retribution.

However, to date, there have been no mass graves discovered at any residential schools across Canada.

The Band member revealed that the Kamloops Band knows they “made a mistake” in labeling the ground anomalies as “unmarked graves.”

Therefore, if there were mass graves at that location, they would have been discovered in the 1990s, not in 2021.

The Band member revealed that he does not believe a “genocide” took place at residential schools, while condemning the church burnings across Canada.

“When I was growing up religion and church meant community and family,” he explained. “It seems like the Liberals want to destroy family so the way to do that is to attack religion.”

“Attacking religion was a good excuse to burn the churches,” he said.

Regardless of his testimony and the lack of evidence to support the claim, mainstream media outlets perpetuate the “mass graves” narrative and even threaten to punish those who oppose it. In November, CBC subtly suggested that “residential school denialism” should be criminalized.

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Censorship Industrial Complex

Scott Atlas: COVID lockdowns, censorship have left a ‘permanent black mark on America’

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From LifeSiteNews

Editor’s note: The following text is taken from a speech delivered by radiologist and political commentator Scott Atlas to the Independent Medical Alliance conference in Atlanta, Georgia, on April 5, 2025. Transcription provided by Dr. Robert Malone.

ATLANTA (Robert Malone) — First, thank you to the organizers, and to my many friends and supporters here. It’s great to be here – surrounded by people who believe in personal freedom!

At the recent international Alliance for Responsible Citizenship (ARC) forum in London, I was invited to address the question, “Can Institutions be Reformed?” Begun with Jordan Peterson, ARC joins voices from all over the world to discuss how to refresh the institutions and best values of Western heritage, values that provided the world with history’s most successful societies, particularly the commitment to freedom.

I asked that audience to first consider:

Why, at this moment in history, are we finally focusing on how institutions should be reformed, or if institutions can even be reformed?

After all, for decades we have been aware that our institutions were failing – editorialized, dishonest journalism; wasteful, corrupt government; and agenda-driven schools and universities increasingly unbalanced toward the left, with many conservative faculty and students often self-censoring, afraid to offer unpopular views.

The answer? It is COVID, the pandemic mismanagement specifically – the most tragic breakdown of leadership and ethics that free societies have seen in our lifetimes.

COVID fully exposed the massive, across-the-board, institutional failure – including the shocking reality of overt censorship in our country, the loss of freedoms and the frank violation of human rights – in this country, one explicitly founded on a commitment to freedom.

Yet, oddly, the pandemic remained invisible at the ARC conference, unmentioned by dozens of speakers addressing freedom. It was the elephant in the room – just as explaining the truth about lockdowns, the pseudoscience mandates on masks and social distancing, closing churches and businesses, prohibiting visits to elderly parents in nursing homes while they die – all are missing from post-election discussions today in the United States, including, notably, any of the very public statements and proclamations from the new administration about health care today.

Today, in the wake of COVID, we are left with an undeniable crisis in health. Trust in health guidance has plummeted more rapidly since 2019 than any other government institution, with almost two-thirds now rating the FDA and the CDC as “only fair or poor.”

Half of America no longer has much confidence in science itself. Trust in our doctors and hospitals dropped from 71 percent in 2019 to 40 percent in 2024. The loss of trust is part of the disgraceful legacy of those who held power, who were relied upon to use critical thinking and an ethical compass on behalf of the public, who were handed the precious gift of automatic credibility and almost blind trust.

To understand how to move forward to restore trust, it’s important to first acknowledge basic facts about the pandemic, and keep repeating them, because truth serves as the starting point of all rational discussion. And we must live in a society where facts are acknowledged.

Remember – lockdowns were not caused by the virus. Human beings decided to impose lockdowns.

Indeed, lockdowns were widely instituted, they failed to stop the dying, and they failed to stop the spread – that’s the data: Bjornskov, 2021; Bendavid, 2021; Agarwal, 2021; Herby, 2022; Kerpen, 2023; Ioannidis, 2024; Atlas, 2024.

Lockdowners ignored Henderson’s classic review 15 years earlier showing lockdowns were both ineffective and extremely harmful. They rejected the alternative, targeted protection, first recommended on national media in March 2020 independently by Ioannidis, by Katz, and by me (Atlas) – and then repeatedly for months – based on data already known back then, in spring of 2020. It was not learned 7 months later in 2020, when the Great Barrington Declaration reiterated it, or in 2021, or 2022, or more recently.

And the Birx-Fauci lockdowns directly inflicted massive damage on children and literally killed millions, especially, sinfully, the poor. “The U.S. alone would have had 1.6 million fewer deaths (through July 2023) if it had the performance of Sweden,” according to a review of 34 countries.  Bianchi calculates that over the next 15-20 years, the unemployment alone will cause another million additional American deaths – from the economic shutdown, not the virus.

Beyond a reckless disregard for foreseeable death from their policies, America’s leaders imposed sinful harms and long-lasting damage on our children, the totality of which may not be realized for decades. Mandatory school closings, forced isolation of teens and college students, and required injections of healthy children with experimental drugs attempting to shield adults will be a permanent black mark on America.

It is also worth remembering that this was a health policy problem.

While credentials are not the sole determinant of expertise, I was the only health policy scholar on the White House Task Force and advising the president. Virology is not health policy; epidemiology is not health policy. And while physicians are important in contributing, they are not inherently expert in health policy. Those are only pieces of a larger, more complex puzzle. The stunning fact is – I was the only medical expert there focused on stopping both the death and destruction from the virus and the death and destruction from the policy itself.

As Hannah Arendt observed in “Eichmann in Jerusalem”:

What has come to light is neither nihilism nor cynicism, as one might have expected, but a quite extraordinary confusion over elementary questions of morality.

More than massive incompetence, more than a fundamental lack of critical thinking, we saw the disappearance of society’s moral compass, so pervasive that we have rightfully lost trust in our institutions, leaders, and fellow citizens, trust that is essential to the function of any free and diverse society.

Why did free people accept these draconian, unprecedented, and illogical lockdowns?

This is the question. And the answer reveals the reason for today’s silence on the pandemic.

Clearly, censorship and propaganda are key parts of the explanation, tools of control that convinced the public of two fallacies – that a consensus of experts on lockdowns existed, and dissenters to that false consensus were highly dangerous.

Censorship first was done by the media companies themselves – when it counted most:

  • In 2020, before the Biden administration, when school closures and lockdowns were being implemented;
  • May 2020, YouTube bragged about its “aggressive policies against misinformation”;
  • August 2020, Facebook shamelessly admitted to the Washington Post it had already taken down 7 million posts on the pandemic;
  • My interviews as advisor to the president were pulled down by YouTube on September 11, 2020, by Twitter blocking me on October 18, 2020.

You might think the public – in a free society – should know what the advisor to the president was saying?

And what was the response to truth at America’s universities, our centers for the free exchange of ideas, including Stanford, my employer?

Censorship: character assassination, intimidation, and to me, formal censure.

Why is censorship used? To shut someone up, yes; but more importantly, to deceive the public – to stop others from hearing, to convince a naïve public there is a “consensus on truth.”

Truth is not a team sport.

Truth is not determined by consensus, or by numbers of people who agree, or by titles. It is discovered by debate, proven by critical analysis of evidence. Arguments are won by data and logic, not by personal attack or censoring others.

I am proud to be an outlier – happily proven right when the inliers are so wrong – but Cancel Culture is effective because it stops others from speaking. I received hundreds of emails from doctors and scientists all over the country, including from Stanford, from other professors, and from inside the NIH, saying, “Keep talking, Scott, you’re 100 percent right, but we’re afraid for our families and our jobs.”

And indeed, no one at Stanford Medical School – not a single faculty member there – spoke publicly against their attack on me. Only Martin Kulldorff, then a Harvard epidemiologist, wrote in and publicly challenged the 98 signatories at Stanford to debate on whether I was correct or not (none accepted that challenge!).

But that alone doesn’t explain today’s silence about that extraordinary collapse. It is not simply “issue fatigue.”

It is also that so many smart people, including many claiming to support the new “disruptors,” bought into the irrational measures when it counted most, when our kids and particularly the poor were being destroyed in 2020, uncomfortable to discuss and admit, but far more fundamental than the Sars2 origin, or Fauci, or the vaccine. That acquiescence, that silence, that cowardice, and that failure to grasp reality are inconvenient truths that no one wants to admit.

Today, disruption is sorely needed, and many are basking in the resounding victory of history’s most disruptive politician, President Donald J. Trump.

As promised, his new administration is moving quickly, disrupting on several fronts: national security, energy, trade, justice, immigration, and perhaps most importantly with Elon Musk’s effort to eliminate government waste and fraud, and protect our money. After all, the government has no money – it’s all our money, taxpayers’ money!

In health care, important changes in the status quo have also begun, first with Elon Musk’s much needed DOGE, streamlining tens of thousands of Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) bureaucrats while exposing massive fraud and waste in programs like Medicaid.

And Secretary of HHS Bobby Kennedy has also provoked an important, new national dialogue with his “Make America Healthy Again” mantra focused on wholesome foods to achieve the goal everyone readily supports – good health for themselves and their children. And no doubt, ensuring safety of all drugs and eliminating corruption in pharma and the food industry are also crucial to health. I am a strong supporter of those ideas.

We also have two excellent appointments in health – my friends and colleagues, Marty Makary to FDA and Jay Bhattacharya to NIH. Both Marty and Jay are highly knowledgeable, have top training and expertise, and are committed to critical thinking, to legitimate science, and most importantly to free scientific debate.

But I am concerned that most are simultaneously eager to “turn the page” on the human rights violations, the censorship, the true “constitutional crisis” – no setting the record straight, no official recognition of facts, no accountability? The ultimate disruptor won, and his disruptor appointees will now be in charge – so all is well?

Silently turning the page on modern history’s most egregious societal failure would be extraordinarily harmful. Failure to issue official statements of truth by the new government health agency leaders about the pandemic management would prevent closure for the millions who lost loved ones and whose children suffered such harms. And it would completely eliminate all accountability. Remember, only public accountability will prevent recurrence, and accountability is necessary to restore trust in institutions, leadership, and among fellow citizens.

My second concern: the era of trusting experts based solely on credentials must be over. But will that backlash against the failed “expert class” usher in a different wave of false belief? We cannot forget that legitimate expertise is still legitimate; that known, solid medical science is still valid; that unfounded theories based on simple correlations are not scientifically sound.

And we do not want to inadvertently replicate the cancel culture that harmed so many, with another wave of demonizing anyone who doesn’t 100 percent support the new narratives. It’s already begun – that if you disagree with any of the incoming opinions, then you must be “bought by pharma!” Blind support is just as bad as blind opposition; critical thinking must prevail.

What reforms are needed now?

  • The first step to restore trust is formal, official statements of truth on the COVID lockdowns, masks, and other pseudoscience mandates from new HHS, NIH, FDA, CDC, CMS leaders.
  • We need to forbid – by law – all shutdowns and reset that the CDC and other health agencies are (only) advisory. They recommend; they give information – they don’t set laws. They don’t have the power to set mandates. And if our guaranteed freedoms are not always valid, especially during crises, then they are not guaranteed at all.
  • We need to add term limits (5 years?) to all mid- and top-level health agency positions. We cannot continue the perverse incentives of career bureaucrats accruing personal power, like Anthony Fauci and Deborah Birx with their 30-plus years in government.
  • All new heads of HHS, FDA, NIH, CDC, and CMS should be prohibited from post-government company board positions in health sectors they regulate for ~5 years. It’s unethical, an overt conflict-of-interest. Why hasn’t that been announced?
  • We need to forbid drug royalty sharing by employees of the NIH, the FDA, and the CDC. $325 million of royalties were shared with pharma by those people over the 10 years prior to the pandemic. That’s a shocking conflict of interest.
  • We should forbid all mandates forcing people to take drugs. First, the essence of all ethical medical practice is informed consent. And what kind of a “free country” requires you to inject a drug into your child or yourself? No – that’s antithetical to freedom. In public health, you give the information… you shouldn’t need to force anything legitimate, but you do need to prove the case.
  • We need to require the immediate posting of discussions in all FDA, CDC, and NIH meetings. They work for us. What are they saying? We should know in real-time.
  • We need accountability for all government funding. We have 15+ universities getting >$500M/year from NIH alone. The essence of research is free debate. If they’re thwarting that with intimidation, like faculty censures, why would they be entitled to U.S. taxpayers’ money?

More broadly, I and others are working on policies to ensure the free exchange of ideas – the essence of all legitimate science, the basis for the mission of education.

Ideological gatekeeping in public discourse has no place in free societies, especially in science and health.

Here’s the point – the solution to misinformation is more information. No one should be trusted to be the arbiter of truth.

Ultimately, most solutions come from individuals, and ultimately, it is individuals, not institutions, who will save freedom.

I fear we still have a disastrous void in courage in our society today.

To quote CS Lewis, “Courage is not simply one of the virtues, but the form of every virtue at the testing point.”

We cannot have a peaceful, free society if it’s filled with people who lack the courage to speak and act with certainty on Hannah Arendt’s “elementary questions of morality.”

Finally, to the young people here, never forget what GK Chesterton said:

Right is right, even if nobody does it. Wrong is wrong, even if everybody is wrong about it.

Reprinted with permission from Robert Malone.

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