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Brownstone Institute

Evidence of Early Spread in the US: What We Know

Published

35 minute read

From the Brownstone Institute

BY Bill RiceBILL RICE

In Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s short story “Silver Blaze,” Sherlock Holmes famously solved a murder case by noting a dog that didn’t bark.

Gregory (Scotland Yard detective to Holmes): “Is there any other point to which you would wish to draw my attention?”
Holmes: “To the curious incident of the dog in the night-time.”
Gregory: “The dog did nothing in the night-time.”
Holmes: “That was the curious incident.”

The “official” timeline of the spread of the novel coronavirus has been false from the very beginning. The “dog that didn’t bark” is the fact officials have refused to sincerely investigate the copious evidence of “early spread.”

When events and activities that clearly should have happened obviously did not happen, a truth-seeking detective would ask several common-sense questions.

For example: Why didn’t these activities take place? Are America’s trusted officials perhaps hiding something, and, if so, why? Should certain people and certain organizations be considered the primary suspects in one of the most shocking crimes in world history?

In previous articles, I identified 17 known Americans who possess antibody evidence of being infected by the novel coronavirus months before the virus was supposed to be circulating in America. Three of these Americans had antibody evidence of infection by November 2019.

I also recently identified at least seven other Americans who claim to have had Covid symptoms in November or December 2019 who state they later received positive antibody results. I’ve thus identified at least 24  known Americans who very likely had Covid at some point in the year 2019. Also and significantly, federal officials never interviewed any of these people.

Today’s deep dive into “early spread” evidence focusses on 106 other Americans who also had antibody evidence of early spread. These 106 Americans tested positive for Covid antibodies in a CDC study of Red Cross blood donors.

While the “Red Cross Blood Study” received a fair amount of media coverage when belatedly published on November 30, 2020, the “narrative-changing” or “seismic” implications of this study have still not been given the weight they deserve.

Conclusions flowing from this analysis include the following:

* By late December 2019, more than 7 million Americans had likely been infected by the coronavirus… more than three months before the lockdowns of mid-March 2020, lockdowns implemented to “slow” or “stop” the spread of a virus that had spread across the country and world many months earlier.

“Probable” cases of Covid had already occurred in at least 16 U.S. states by January 1st, 2020 – weeks or months before the first “confirmed” case of Covid in America was recorded January 19, 2020.

  • Antibody studies of archived blood in Italy and France also support the hypothesis that that virus had infected large numbers of people in these two nations as early as September 2019.

Key unanswered questions include:

Why was the Red Cross blood study the only antibody study of blood samples collected by blood bank organizations?

Why did it take so long to publish the results of this one Red Cross blood study?

When did officials test this blood and when did U.S. policy makers know the results?(This is literally a trillion-dollar question. Also, If this blood had been tested earlier, millions of lives might have been saved).

Why didn’t officials interview the 106 Americans who had antibody evidence of prior infection?

It’s possible at least some public health experts may have intentionally concealed evidence of early spread. Reasons prompting this disturbing conclusion are presented below.

The first known knowable

Between December 13-16, 2019, 1,912 Americans in the states of California, Oregon and Washington donated blood via the American Red Cross. Another 5,477 Americans also donated blood via the Red Cross between Dec. 30, 2019 and January 17, 2020. These donors were from the states of Massachusetts, Michigan, Rhode Island, Connecticut, Wisconsin and Iowa.

At some point, the CDC decided it should test these 7,389 samples of  “archived” blood for Covid antibodies. When this took place – and why it took so long for this to happen – are two of many still-unanswered questions.

DISCUSSION – Tranche 1 (California, Oregon and Washington)

Of the 1,912 samples tested for Covid antibodies, 39 were positive for IgG and/or IgM antibodies.

The above represents 2.04 percent of the total samples from this tranche. In samples tested from the Red Cross’s Northern California district, 2.4 percent of the sera samples tested positive for Covid-19 via an ELISA assay.

If this was a representative sample of the American population, 2.04 percent would translate to approximately 7.94 million Americans who had already been infected by this virus in the weeks before Dec. 13-16. (Math: American population of 331 million x 0.024 percent = 7.94 million).

If we include both tranches, the 106 positive donors represents 1.43 percent of the larger “sample group.” This seroprevalence rate would translate to 4.73 million Americans nationwide being infected by some time in early January 2020.

We’re not supposed to perform this extrapolation

Public health officials working overtime to hype the fear factor must appreciate the fact  journalists in the mainstream press did not perform the extrapolations I just performed above.

This particular “dog that didn’t bark” (a press that wouldn’t perform common-sense extrapolations) is probably explained by language/guidance the authors included in the study.

From the study: Findings “may not be representative of all blood donors or donations in these states and the findings may not be generalizable to all blood donors during the donation dates reported here. Therefore, population-based seroprevalence estimates or inference on magnitude of infections on a national or state level cannot be made.”

I did note the authors used the words “may not be generalizable to all blood donors during the donation dates reported here.”  To me, this choice of words does not rule out the possibility these results may be generalizable to the larger population.

The authors’ reasons that readers should not “generalize” the results to the entire population are unconvincing. A random group of blood donors is about as good a sample as one can perform. For example, this was NOT a “biased” sample of people who thought they may have had Covid earlier.

This sample almost certainly undercounts virus prevalence in these states

In mainstream press stories about this study, all of them report as fact that this study dates the possible beginning of virus spread to December 2019. This is not accurate. The findings, for reasons outlined below, actually reveal that Americans were becoming infected in November 2019 or (almost-certainly) even earlier.

Regarding the possibility the sample may have under-counted true prevalence, the following points should be considered.

Some of the donors, especially those who had asymptomatic cases and never even knew they were sick, may not have had time to develop antibodies by the time they donated blood. Per one study, “the average time to detectable neutralization was 14.3 days post on-set of symptoms (range 3-59 days.)”

Also, it’s possible some of the donors may have had detectable levels of antibodies at an earlier date, but those antibodies had “waned” or “faded” and were no longer “detectable” at the time they gave blood samples.

Furthermore, all regular blood donors know that they should not donate blood if they have recently been sick. This deduction further backs up the possible date of infection for some “positive” donors by at least two weeks.

Also, backing up the true “infection date” of many of the donors is the fact that 32.23 percent of the donors who tested positive for “neutralizing antibodies” tested negative for the IgM antibody and positive for the IgG antibody.

Per many studies, IgM-positive antibodies only persist for approximately one month. That is, after 30 days, those who were previously infected by Covid will test negative for IgM antibodies. However, IgG antibodies can last for many months, years or, in some people, perhaps a lifetime.

Per the Red Cross study, 32 percent of donors were negative-IgM but positive IgG, which suggests that approximately one-third of this sample were infected a month or more before they donated blood. This combination of antibody results would push likely infection dates back to October (or even September) for some percentage of positive donors.

We don’t know when these people in the three Western states (or the other six Midwestern and Northeast states) may have been infected – but for probably most of them it would have been many weeks or even months before they donated blood.That is, the “Red Cross blood study” provides compelling evidence that early spread in America probably occurred by at least early October and perhaps even September.

What does the word ‘spread’ really mean?

Also, the fact that positive samples were found in ALL nine states (California, Oregon, Washington, Massachusetts, Michigan, Wisconsin, Iowa, Connecticut and Rhode Island) by itself strongly suggests virus “spread.” Question: How could a virus be infecting people in nine widely-dispersed states without first “spreading?”

To these nine states, we can add seven other states  (New Jersey, Florida and Alabama) from my first round of stories and now also New YorkTexasNebraska andNorth Carolina from my most recent story where readers with antibody evidence contacted me. This gives us 16 states where this allegedly non-existent or “isolated” virus had infected people before the first official case in America.

I would also note that whatever virus made many of these people “sick” spread between family members. For example, at least four married couples infected each other and/or at least one child. Mayor Michael Melham says “many” people at the conference where he first became sick with Covid symptoms also became sick at the same time, which, to this layman’s definition, connotes virus “spread.”

To the above numbers, we could add all the unknown individuals who infected these people … as well as the unknown individuals who infected these unknown individuals.

It should also be noted that the Red Cross blood study was not a perfect sample as blood donors are much older than the median age. In this sample, the median age was 52 – 13 years older than the U.S. median age of 38.6. Common sense tells us that older retirees do not interact with nearly as many people on a daily basis as more active younger people.

I’ve also come to believe it’s possible that officials who “authorized” or approved official antibody tests may have manipulated the tests to ensure fewer “confirmed” or “positive” cases, a result that would minimize any fallout from larger percentages of positives. A difference of 1 or 2 percent in seroprevalence estimates might not seem like much. However, in real terms, this would represent 3.3 to 6.6 million additional early cases.

For these reasons, I believe the number of Americans who’d been infected by the novel coronavirus in the year 2019 is notably higher than 1.43 or 2.04 percent of America’s population.

The Dog that Didn’t Bark Evidence

Regarding the Red Cross antibody study, several points deserve much greater attention than they’ve received. The following unanswered questions address these points:

Why was only ONE study of archived Red Cross blood performed?

By December 31, 2019, every American public health official was acutely aware that Chinese officials had reported an outbreak of a novel new type of “pneumonia” virus to the World Health Organization.

It’s my belief at least some U.S. officials either knew or had compelling reasons to suspect this months earlier. (This topic/theory will be explored in future articles).

Even if one accepts that the Dec. 31st notification was the first American officials had heard of a possible global pandemic, wouldn’t one of the first reactions of these officials be to test archived blood to see if this virus might have been spreading in this country?

One answer to this question might be that America’s scientific community simply did not have an antibody test capable of testing for antibodies in early January. This may be true, but, per my research, creating an antibody test for any virus poses no formidable challenge to smart and motivated scientists.  If such an assay wasn’t available in the early weeks of the official pandemic, one should have certainly been available by the end of January.

Also, I’ve read several studies authored by Chinese scientists who were performing antibody tests in January 2020. For example, this study “was published on January 24, 2020” and includes the following sentence:

“Additional evidence to confirm the etiologic significance of 2019-nCoV in the Wuhan outbreak include … detection of IgM and IgG antiviral antibodies …”

Surely, in the face of an unfolding “global crisis,” America’s top scientific minds could have done the same thing (or just borrowed the technology from the Chinese).

The Red Cross didn’t have any more spare blood?

It must also be true that plenty of “archived” blood samples from throughout the country were available for testing (and the Red Cross is not the only organization that serves as a blood bank for hospitals).

In the face of a national emergency, it would seem odd if all of these organizations presented  serious objections to some of their stored blood being “repurposed” for important research.

If two tranches of blood were donated for science, couldn’t other tranches of Red Cross blood have similarly been donated? Why was no Red Cross blood collected before December 13th tested for antibodies? Why was blood collected and tested from only nine states? Why not all 50 states? Why wasn’t blood from the same locations tested two or three weeks later (or from earlier dates) … or two months later to see if the percentage of positives might be increasing?

The public doesn’t know the answer to any of these questions and apparently no reporter asked officials these questions.

Again, projects that would seem like common-sense to most people … did NOT take place.

When did officials test this blood and when did U.S. policy makers know the results?

One piece of information not included in the report is the date the archived blood was finally tested. This is actually (and literally) a trillion-dollar question.

Another “known knowable” is the date in which lockdowns commenced – roughly March 13th 2020, the date Fauci, Birx et all “snuck in” the provisions of what the non-pharmaceutical intervention would actually entail (basically closing all non-essential businesses and organizations).

One might ask if the decision to lock down the country to “slow” or “stop’ the “spread” of this virus would have been authorized if it had been known that Americans in nine states already had antibody-evidence of infection by early January (or December or November)? Asked differently, if these results had been known by, say, late February 2020 how would officials justify the lockdowns?

Late February would be 73 days after the first tranche of Red Cross blood had been collected from donors and 58 days after the Wuhan Outbreak became known. How long does it really take to transport 1,900 units of blood to the CDC’s preferred testing lab and then test such a small batch of samples for antibodies? If this was a national emergency and scientists and lab workers were working 24-7, it would not have taken 58 days.

Perhaps the only reason this would not have occurred is that no member of the U.S. Scientific Bureaucracy thought of doing this …. a possibility this author finds hard to believe.

An alternative explanation is that officials intentionally delayed the testing of this blood so there would be no reason to call off the lockdowns. Here the assumption is that if Americans learned that many millions of Americans had already been infected with this virus by early December – and nobody in the entire country had even noticed – maybe the fear and panic that did ensue would not have ensued.

Why did it take so long to publish the results of this one Red Cross blood study?

Not only was the California-Washington-Oregon tranche of blood not tested in time to avert the lockdowns (at least as far as the public knows), the study that did take place wasn’t published until November 30, 2020. This was almost 12 months (!) after 1,900 people had donated blood Dec. 13-16.

In my research, I found numerous examples of serology studies that were conceived, conducted and the results published in a matter of weeks (In one case in Idaho in a matter of days).

Tucker Carlson thinks like I do

I’m a big fan of Tucker Carlson’s contrarian monologues, but I missed the fact he posed some of my same questions in a commentary that aired in the days after the Red Cross blood study was finally published.

Tucker: “So clearly, what we have been told for almost a year about the origins of the coronavirus is not true.

“Why are we just learning this now, a month after a presidential election? We’ve had reliable antibody tests since the summer, yet no one thought to test Red Cross blood samples until now?”

“Why weren’t elected officials demanding a coherent account of where this virus that has changed American history forever came from, how it got to the United States and how it spread through our population? Why don’t we know that yet?”

My only quibble with Tucker’s essay is that the American scientific community would have had “reliable” antibody tests far before “summer.”

(Another personal hypothesis: I also think “authorized” antibody tests were not made widely available until late April to conceal evidence of early spread,  another theory I will expound on in a future article).

Carlson pointed out that as of December 2020, Americans still didn’t know where
this virus that “changed American history forever came from (or) how it got to the United States and how it spread through our population? Why don’t we know that yet?”

Carlson asked these questions two years ago … and Americans still have no answer.

As to Carlson’s question as to “why we don’t know that yet?” I can offer one possible answer: Because the people who know the answer must know that their fingerprints are on the creation of this virus. If the truth became known, they might be facing charges of “crimes against humanity.”

If the dog did bark and tell the sordid tale, it wouldn’t be one felon Sherlock Holmes nabbed, but a swamp full of felons. As it turns out, the felons are almost guaranteed protection by the massive numbers of accomplices (“stakeholders” in the authorized narrative) who are also interested in the truth never being revealed.

Why didn’t officials interview the 106 Americans who had antibody evidence of prior infection?

Any public health official genuinely interested in tracking down the earliest known cases would have rushed to interview every one of these 106 Americans.

The obvious goal would be to ascertain if any of these individuals happened to experience Covid-like symptoms weeks or months before they donated blood. If they had, available medical records (and perhaps even preserved tissue samples) might support this diagnosis. “Contact tracers” chasing down possible “Case Zeros” could have also found out if any of these individuals’ close contacts might have been sick.

But this did not happen (yet another dog that didn’t bark). Instead, we learn from the language in the study that blood donors were “de-identified” for unstated reasons.

Presumably, this was done to protect the medical privacy of these individuals. However, it’s hard to imagine a scenario where an American citizen in January or February 2020 would have been offended if a public servant investigating the origins of the century’s greatest pandemic asked him or her a few questions.

This hypothetical excuse would also be shown to be a canard by the fact that public health officials in France also performed an antibody study of archived stored blood. This study (summarized below) also found copious evidence of early spread, including French citizens who had antibody evidence of infection in early November 2019.

However, in France, unlike in America, public health officials did take the time to interview some of the positive subjects.

French Antibody Study found 3.9 percent of residents had antibody evidence of early spread

The French study selected and tested 9,144 serum samples collected betweenNovember 4, 2019 and March 16, 2020 in participants living in the 12 mainland French regions.

Three-hundred and fifty-three (3.9%) participants were ELISA-S positive, 138 were undetermined and 8653 were negative (undetermined and negative, 96.1%). The proportion of ELISA-S positive increased from 1.9% (42 of 2218) in November and 1.3% (20 of 1534) in December to 5.0% (114 of 2268) in January, 5.2% (114 of 2179) in February and 6.7% (63 or 945) in the first half of March.

A few observations/comments:

The percentage of positive samples (3.9 percent) of French participants is more than double the rate of the American Red Cross study (1.44 percent among 7,392 donors).  The total number of positive cases (353) is more than three times greater than was found in the smaller Red Cross study (106 positive samples).

The American Red Cross study found “positives” in all nine states sampled and the French study found positives in all 12 mainland French regions … thus the results of both studies strongly suggest that the virus had spread across both countries.

In France, two percent (1.99 percent) of those studied had antibody evidence of infection by November 2019 – approximately four months before the global lockdowns. Perhaps surprisingly, the rates went down in December but then spiked to 5.0 percent in January and kept rising in February 5.2 percent) and had reached 6.7 percent in the first half of March (before the lockdowns).

The population of France in 2020 was 67.38 million. This means 6.7 percent of the population already had evidence of infection before the lockdowns commenced. Extrapolated to the entire French population, this would equate to 4.51 million French citizens.  For context, the first  three “confirmed” cases of Covid in France are still recorded as January 24, 2020.

No “pre-pandemic” serology study including archived blood collected in February 2020 was performed in America.  If 5.2 percent of Americans had antibody evidence of infection by February (as was the case in France), this would equate to 17.21 million Americans.

French public officials did interview some early spread possibilities

From the study: “Participants with both ELISA-S and SN positive tests in serum sampled before February 1, 2020 were interviewed to identify potential exposure to SARS-CoV-2 infection. A trained investigator collected standardized information on clinical details … and any remarkable event in close contacts (e.g. unexplained pneumonia).

According to the French study, 13 people tested positive with “neutralizing antibodies” (a higher standard than just plain IgM or IgG positives) “between November 5, 2019 and January 30, 2020.”

Table 1 describes the serological results in these 13 participants, among whom 11 were interviewed.

Of the 11 subjects who were interviewed, eight (8) – 73 percent –  were either sick themselves or had close contacts with someone who was sick with Covid-like symptoms. For purposes of illustration, three of these individuals’ findings are presented below:

Person 3 – Sampled in November 2019: Positive with Covid symptoms. Also noted: Her partner was sick with intense cough in October 2019 …”

Person 6 – blood drawn November 2019 … Travel in Spain in early November. She had daily encounters with a family member who had a respiratory illness of unknown origin between October and December. She suffered from dysgeusia, hyposmia, and cough before the sample was taken, but could not remember the date of illness …”

Person 7: Positive in November with symptoms. The participant and his partner were sick with a severe cough in October 2019. He had a follow-up serology at the end of July, 2020. ELISA-S = 3.82. (Note: This means this person received TWO positive antibody tests).

The above information provides another benefit of interviewing people who have antibody evidence of early infection – namely, officials can re-test these individuals at different points in the future to see how long antibodies last. Furthermore, if a large percentage of these early spread candidates did not later develop PCR-confirmed cases, this would suggest they do, in fact, have “natural immunity” (which would be further evidence of an earlier infection).

Italy Antibody Study is eye-opening

The most eye-opening “pre-pandemic” antibody study was carried out by a team of academic researchers in Italy.

The main text: “SARS-CoV-2 RBD-specific antibodies were detected in 111 of 959 (11.6%) individuals, starting from September 2019 (14%), with a cluster of positive cases (>30%) in the second week of February 2020 and the highest number (53.2%) in Lombardy. This study shows an unexpected very early circulation of SARS-CoV-2 among asymptomatic individuals in Italy several months before the first patient was identified, and clarifies the onset and spread of the coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic.”

“Table 1 reports anti-SARS-CoV-2 RBD antibody detection according to the time of sample collection in Italy. In the first 2 months, September–October 2019, 23/162 (14.2%) patients in September and 27/166 (16.3%) in October displayed IgG or IgM antibodies, or both.”

“The first positive sample (IgM-positive) was recorded on September 3 in the Veneto region …

The 959 recruited patients came from all Italian regions, and at least one SARS-CoV-2–positive patient was detected in 13 regions – more evidence of wide-spread and “early,” person-to-person transmission.

More from the study: “Notably, two peaks of positivity for anti-SARS-CoV-2 RBD antibodies were visible: the first one started at the end of September, reaching 18% and 17% of IgM-positive cases in the second and third weeks of October, respectively. A second one occurred in February 2020, with a peak of over 30% of IgM-positive cases in the second week.”

According to the study’s authors: “Finding SARS-CoV-2 antibodies in asymptomatic people before the COVID-19 outbreak in Italy may reshape the history of pandemic.

My comment: I’ve thought the same thing with all the articles I’ve written that presented copious evidence of “early spread.” However, I clearly thought wrong. Apparently, for some reason, the “early spread” dog ain’t barking.

Reprinted from the author’s Substack

Author

  • Bill Rice

    Bill Rice, Jr. is a freelance journalist in Troy, Alabama.

Brownstone Institute

If Trump Wins

Published on

From the Brownstone Institute

By  Bret Swanson  

How will he organize the “deportation” of illegal migrants? In the best case, it will be difficult. There will be scuffles and chases. Critics will charge the new Administration as cruel and worse. How much stomach will Republicans have for a messy process?

Trump enjoys the momentum. Four of the most recent major national polls show him up 2 to 3%, while Democratic-friendly outlets like the New York Times and CNN both show a TIE race in their final surveys. The 2016 and 2020 elections were razor close even though Clinton (5%) and Biden (8%) had solid polling leads at this point. We need to contemplate a Trump win not only in the electoral college but also in the popular vote.

Here are some thoughts:

  1. JD Vance ascendant, obviously. Big implications for the Republican trajectory.
  2. Will Trump replace Fed chairman Jay Powell? Or merely jawbone for a change in policy? In a new CNBC interview, former Fed governor Kevin Warsh argues that the Fed has juiced both the stock market and inflation. Would reducing inflation, which Trump has promised, automatically therefore lead to a stock market correction and economic slowdown? Not necessarily. If Trump unleashes productive economic activity and Congress ends the fiscal blowout, the Fed could normalize monetary policy without causing a major economic slump.
  3. Will Trump impose the broad and deep tariffs he proposed? Or will he mostly threaten them as a bargaining tool with China? I’m betting on some of the former but more of the latter. We notice, however, Trump allies are floating a trial balloon to replace income taxes with tariffs. As impractical and improbable as that may be, we’re glad to see the mention of radical tax reform reemerge after too long an absence from the national discussion.
  4. How will he organize the “deportation” of illegal migrants? In the best case, it will be difficult. There will be scuffles and chases. Critics will charge the new Administration as cruel and worse. How much stomach will Republicans have for a messy process? One idea would be to offer a “reverse amnesty” – if you leave peacefully and agree not to return illegally, we will forgive your previous illegal entry(s) and minor violations. This would incentivize self-identification and quiet departure. Plus it would help authorities track those leaving. Would migrant departures truly hit the economy, as critics charge? We doubt large effects. Substantial native populations are still underemployed or absent from the workforce.
  5. We should expect a major retrenchment of regulatory intrusions across the economy – from energy to crypto. Combined with recent Supreme Court action, such as the Chevron reversal, and assisted by the Elon Musk’s substance and narrative, it could be a regulatory renaissance. Extension of the 2017 tax cuts also becomes far more likely.
  6. Trump has never worried much about debt, deficits, or spending. But he’s tapped Elon Musk as government efficiency czar. It’s an orthogonal approach to spending reform instead of the traditional (and unsuccessful) Paul Ryan playbook. Can this good cop-bad cop duo at the very least return out-of-control outlays to a pre-Covid path? Can they at least cancel purely kleptocratic programs, such as the $370-billion Green Energy slush funds? Might they go even further – leveraging the unpopular spending explosion and resulting inflation to achieve more revolutionary effects on government spending and reach? Or will the powerful and perennial forces of government expansion win yet again, sustaining a one-way ratchet not even Elon can defeat?
  7. What if the economy turns south? One catalyst might be the gigantic unrealized bond losses on bank balance sheets; another might be commercial real estate collapse. Although reported GDP growth has been okay, the inflation hangover is helping Trump win on the economy. But many believe the post-pandemic economic expansion is merely a sugar-high and has already lasted longer than expected. A downturn early in Trump’s term could complicate many of his plans.
  8. How will NATO and its transatlantic network respond? Or more generally, what will the neocon and neoliberal hawks, concentrated in DC and the media, but little loved otherwise, do? Does this item from Anne Applebaum — arguing Trump resembles Hitler, Mussolini, and Stalin all rolled into one — portend continued all-out war on prudent foreign policy? Or will they adopt a more sophisticated approach? If the neocons move wholesale and formally (back) into the Democratic fold, how long will the coalition of wokes and militarists hold? On the economic front, Europe, already underperforming vis-a-vis the US, will fall even further behind without big changes. Reformers should gain at the expense of the transatlantic WEF-style bureaucrats.
  9. Can Trump avoid another internal sabotage of his Administration? Before then, if the election results are tight, will the Democrats seek to complicate or even block his inauguration? Can he win approval for his appointees in the Senate? Can he clean house across the vast public agencies? How long will it take to recruit, train, and reinvigorate talented military leadership, which we chased away in recent years? And how will Trump counter – and avoid overreacting to – taunts, riots, unrest, and lawfare, designed to bolster the case he’s an authoritarian?
  10. Will the Democrats reorient toward the center, a la Bill Clinton? Or will the blinding hatred of Trump fuel yet more radicalism? Orthodox political thinking suggests a moderation. Especially if Trump wins the popular vote, or comes close, pragmatic Democrats will counsel a reformation. James Carville, for example, already complains that his party careened recklessly away from male voters. And Trump’s apparent pickups among Black and Latino voters complicate the Democrats’ longstanding identity-focused strategy. Other incentives might push toward continued belligerence and extreme wokeness, however, and thus an intra-party war.
  11. Will the half of the country which inexplicably retains any confidence in the legacy media at least begin rethinking its information diet and filters? Or has the infowarp inflicted permanent damage?
  12. Will big business, which shifted hard toward Democrats over the last 15 years, recalibrate toward the GOP? Parts of Silicon Valley over the last year began a reorientation — e.g. Elon Musk, Marc Andreessen, David Sacks, and before them, Peter Thiel in 2016. But those are the entrepreneurs. In the receding past, businesses large and small generally lined up against government overreach. Then Big Business and Big Government merged. Now, a chief divide is between politically-enmeshed bureaucratic businesses and entrepreneurial ones. Does the GOP even want many of the big guys back? The GOP’s new alignment with “Little Tech” is an exciting development, especially after being shut out of Silicon Valley for the last two decades.
  13. Industry winners: traditional energy, nuclear energy, Little Tech. Industry losers: Green Energy, Big Tech, Big Pharma, Big Food. Individual winners: X (nee Twitter), Elon Musk, RFK, Jr.
  14. How will the Censorship Industrial Complex react? A Trump win will pose both a symbolic and operational blow to governmental, non-governmental, old media, and new media outlets determined to craft and control facts and narratives. It will complicate their mission, funding, and organizational web. Will they persist in their “mis/disinformation” framing and their badgering of old media and social media companies to moderate content aggressively? Or will they devise a new strategy? A.I. is pretty clearly the next frontier in the information wars. How will those who propagandize and rewire human minds attempt to program and prewire artificial ones?
  15. How will Trump integrate RFK, Jr. and his movement? Will RFK, Jr. achieve real influence, especially on health issues? Big Pharma and Big Public Health will wage a holy war to block reforms in general and accountability for Covid mistakes in particular.
  16. Trump has promised to end the war between Russia and Ukraine. On one hand, it should be easy. Despite what you hear from DC media and think tanks, Ukraine is losing badly. Hundreds of thousands are dead, and its military is depleted and faltering. Ukraine should want a deal quickly, before it loses yet more people and territory. Russia, meanwhile, always said it wants a deal, even before the war started, focusing on Ukrainian neutrality. Why Ukrainian neutrality should bother the US was always a mystery. And yet even critics of the West’s support for Ukraine, who want an agreement, think it will be difficult to achieve. The Western foreign policy establishment has invested too much credibility and emotion. It will charge “appeasement” and “betrayal” and make any deal difficult for Trump. Russia, meanwhile, has secured so much territory and now has Odessa and Kharkiv in its sights. Putin will not be eager to accept a deal he would have taken in 2021 or before. The far better path for all involved was a pre-war agreement, or the one negotiated but scuttled in April 2022.
  17. What if A.I. launches a new productivity boom, enabled by an agenda of energy abundance, including a nuclear power revival? The economic tailwinds could remake politics even more than we currently see.
  18. Can Trump, having run and won his last campaign, consolidate gains by reaching out and uniting the portions of the country willing to take an extended hand?

Republished from the author’s Substack

Author

Bret Swanson is president of the technology research firm Entropy Economics LLC, a nonresident senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, and writes the Infonomena Substack.

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Brownstone Institute

They Are Scrubbing the Internet Right Now

Published on

From the Brownstone Institute

By Jeffrey A TuckerJeffrey A. TuckerDebbie Lerman  

For the first time in 30 years, we have gone a long swath of time – since October 8-10 – since this service has chronicled the life of the Internet in real time.

Instances of censorship are growing to the point of normalization. Despite ongoing litigation and more public attention, mainstream social media has been more ferocious in recent months than ever before. Podcasters know for sure what will be instantly deleted and debate among themselves over content in gray areas. Some like Brownstone have given up on YouTube in favor of Rumble, sacrificing vast audiences if only to see their content survive to see the light of day.

It’s not always about being censored or not. Today’s algorithms include a range of tools that affect searchability and findability. For example, the Joe Rogan interview with Donald Trump racked up an astonishing 34 million views before YouTube and Google tweaked their search engines to make it hard to discover, while even presiding over a technical malfunction that disabled viewing for many people. Faced with this, Rogan went to the platform X to post all three hours.

Navigating this thicket of censorship and quasi-censorship has become part of the business model of alternative media.

Those are just the headline cases. Beneath the headlines, there are technical events taking place that are fundamentally affecting the ability of any historian even to look back and tell what is happening. Incredibly, the service Archive.org which has been around since 1994 has stopped taking images of content on all platforms. For the first time in 30 years, we have gone a long swath of time – since October 8-10 – since this service has chronicled the life of the Internet in real time.

As of this writing, we have no way to verify content that has been posted for three weeks of October leading to the days of the most contentious and consequential election of our lifetimes. Crucially, this is not about partisanship or ideological discrimination. No websites on the Internet are being archived in ways that are available to users. In effect, the whole memory of our main information system is just a big black hole right now.

The trouble on Archive.org began on October 8, 2024, when the service was suddenly hit with a massive Denial of Service attack (DDOS) that not only took down the service but introduced a level of failure that nearly took it out completely. Working around the clock, Archive.org came back as a read-only service where it stands today. However, you can only read content that was posted before the attack. The service has yet to resume any public display of mirroring of any sites on the Internet.

In other words, the only source on the entire World Wide Web that mirrors content in real time has been disabled. For the first time since the invention of the web browser itself, researchers have been robbed of the ability to compare past with future content, an action that is a staple of researchers looking into government and corporate actions.

It was using this service, for example, that enabled Brownstone researchers to discover precisely what the CDC had said about Plexiglas, filtration systems, mail-in ballots, and rental moratoriums. That content was all later scrubbed off the live Internet, so accessing archive copies was the only way we could know and verify what was true. It was the same with the World Health Organization and its disparagement of natural immunity which was later changed. We were able to document the shifting definitions thanks only to this tool which is now disabled.

What this means is the following: Any website can post anything today and take it down tomorrow and leave no record of what they posted unless some user somewhere happened to take a screenshot. Even then there is no way to verify its authenticity. The standard approach to know who said what and when is now gone. That is to say that the whole Internet is already being censored in real time so that during these crucial weeks, when vast swaths of the public fully expect foul play, anyone in the information industry can get away with anything and not get caught.

We know what you are thinking. Surely this DDOS attack was not a coincidence. The time was just too perfect. And maybe that is right. We just do not know. Does Archive.org suspect something along those lines? Here is what they say:

Last week, along with a DDOS attack and exposure of patron email addresses and encrypted passwords, the Internet Archive’s website javascript was defaced, leading us to bring the site down to access and improve our security. The stored data of the Internet Archive is safe and we are working on resuming services safely. This new reality requires heightened attention to cyber security and we are responding. We apologize for the impact of these library services being unavailable.

Deep state? As with all these things, there is no way to know, but the effort to blast away the ability of the Internet to have a verified history fits neatly into the stakeholder model of information distribution that has clearly been prioritized on a global level. The Declaration of the Future of the Internet makes that very clear: the Internet should be “governed through the multi-stakeholder approach, whereby governments and relevant authorities partner with academics, civil society, the private sector, technical community and others.”  All of these stakeholders benefit from the ability to act online without leaving a trace.

To be sure, a librarian at Archive.org has written that “While the Wayback Machine has been in read-only mode, web crawling and archiving have continued. Those materials will be available via the Wayback Machine as services are secured.”

When? We do not know. Before the election? In five years? There might be some technical reasons but it might seem that if web crawling is continuing behind the scenes, as the note suggests, that too could be available in read-only mode now. It is not.

Disturbingly, this erasure of Internet memory is happening in more than one place. For many years,  Google offered a cached version of the link you were seeking just below the live version. They have plenty of server space to enable that now, but no: that service is now completely gone. In fact, the Google cache service officially ended just a week or two before the Archive.org crash, at the end of September 2024.

Thus the two available tools for searching cached pages on the Internet disappeared within weeks of each other and within weeks of the November 5th election.

Other disturbing trends are also turning Internet search results increasingly into AI-controlled lists of establishment-approved narratives. The web standard used to be for search result rankings to be governed by user behavior, links, citations, and so forth. These were more or less organic metrics, based on an aggregation of data indicating how useful a search result was to Internet users. Put very simply, the more people found a search result useful, the higher it would rank. Google now uses very different metrics to rank search results, including what it considers “trusted sources” and other opaque, subjective determinations.

Furthermore, the most widely used service that once ranked websites based on traffic is now gone. That service was called Alexa. The company that created it was independent. Then one day in 1999, it was bought by Amazon. That seemed encouraging because Amazon was well-heeled. The acquisition seemed to codify the tool that everyone was using as a kind of metric of status on the web. It was common back in the day to take note of an article somewhere on the web and then look it up on Alexa to see its reach. If it was important, one would take notice, but if it was not, no one particularly cared.

This is how an entire generation of web technicians functioned. The system worked as well as one could possibly expect.

Then, in 2014, years after acquiring the ranking service Alexa, Amazon did a strange thing. It released its home assistant (and surveillance device) with the same name. Suddenly, everyone had them in their homes and would find out anything by saying “Hey Alexa.” Something seemed strange about Amazon naming its new product after an unrelated business it had acquired years earlier. No doubt there was some confusion caused by the naming overlap.

Here’s what happened next. In 2022, Amazon actively took down the web ranking tool. It didn’t sell it. It didn’t raise the prices. It didn’t do anything with it. It suddenly made it go completely dark.

No one could figure out why. It was the industry standard, and suddenly it was gone. Not sold, just blasted away. No longer could anyone figure out the traffic-based website rankings of anything without paying very high prices for hard-to-use proprietary products.

All of these data points that might seem unrelated when considered individually, are actually part of a long trajectory that has shifted our information landscape into unrecognizable territory. The Covid events of 2020-2023, with massive global censorship and propaganda efforts, greatly accelerated these trends.

One wonders if anyone will remember what it was once like. The hacking and hobbling of Archive.org underscores the point: there will be no more memory.

As of this writing, fully three weeks of web content have not been archived. What we are missing and what has changed is anyone’s guess. And we have no idea when the service will come back. It is entirely possible that it will not come back, that the only real history to which we can take recourse will be pre-October 8, 2024, the date on which everything changed.

The Internet was founded to be free and democratic. It will require herculean efforts at this point to restore that vision, because something else is quickly replacing it.

Authors

Jeffrey A Tucker

Jeffrey Tucker is Founder, Author, and President at Brownstone Institute. He is also Senior Economics Columnist for Epoch Times, author of 10 books, including Life After Lockdown, and many thousands of articles in the scholarly and popular press. He speaks widely on topics of economics, technology, social philosophy, and culture.

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