Brownstone Institute
The Deception Is Getting More Brazen
One of the most disappointing aspects of the COVID pandemic has been the willingness of adults to impose untested restrictions and policies on young children, while ignoring any potential negative impacts to their mandates.
Without pushback from the media, supposed “experts” have recommended school closures, remote learning, forced masking and now, universal vaccination for children ages 6 months-<5 years.
The lack of data or evidence suggesting a benefit to these policies has seemingly never been a hindrance to their recommendations. In fact, it often feels as if they dare others to point out that their policy mandates are not based on any high quality research.
Instead of engaging with the mountains of substantive criticism of their methodology or the discrediting flaws of the “studies” they reference, they simply revert back to appeals to authority.
They’re right, because they say so.
This phenomenon has often been applied to “interventions” forced on children, but it’s also easily applicable to the debate over the origins of COVID.
For much of the first year of the pandemic, “experts” and the “fact checking” media colluded to ensure that discussion of the lab leak theory would be censored and users banned for suggesting it as a possibility.
Only after the approved political sources deemed it acceptable to discuss did social media companies relent.
Except one of the world’s supposed leading “experts,” the head of the World Health Organization, has apparently been telling people privately that he believes the lab leak is the most likely explanation for the origin of the virus.
Of course, none involved in the expert approved censorship will apologize or demand changes as a result.
Because whatever they say is right. No matter how many times they’re wrong first.
You’d think that being caught lying, misrepresenting evidence or flouting their own rules would be enough to instill a level of shame in politicians and their ideological allies, but the recent Supreme Court decision overturning Roe v. Wade shows there truly is no limit to the hypocrisy they’re capable of.
It’s important to shine a light on these three issues — the lying, the hypocrisy and the purposeful misrepresentations. Holding the “experts” and politicians accountable is the only chance to stop the madness of COVID policy from becoming permanent.
More Embarrassments for the FDA & CDC
Possibly the most important thing to know about the FDA authorizing vaccinations for young children is that there is virtually no evidence to support their decision.
When you review the FDA documents, it’s shocking to see how little data they used to make their decision and how ineffective the trials proved to be.
Unsurprisingly, the CDC joined in by misrepresenting the risks of COVID to children.
The CDC has deservedly been at the forefront of the erosion of “expertise,” beginning with their early flip flop on masks. In spring 2020, the CDC recommended against mask wearing by the general public, in line with pre-COVID evidence. By summer 2020, the director of the organization was claiming that masks would provide better protection than vaccines.
They continued to mislead the public on the effectiveness of masks, collaborated with teacher’s unions to keep schools closed and claimed that vaccinated people did not “carry the virus.” Repeatedly, the CDC has shown that they are willing to mislead in order to achieve their policy goals.
But this latest misstep might be their worst yet.
Seemingly out of a desire to justify authorizing vaccinations for young children, the CDC presented misleading data on the risks of COVID.
At a recent meeting of the Advisory on Immunization Practices group, as chronicled in a post by writer Kelley K, the CDC presented a graphic claiming that COVID was a leading cause of death among kids 0-4.
Except this graphic is completely false.
It came from a preprint posted by researchers in the UK, who reviewed mortality data from the National Center for Health Statistics. That dataset includes deaths where COVID was the main contributor as well as those where it was present, but not the underlying cause.
This discrepancy creates a significant issue with accuracy, since the preprint claimed to “only consider Covid-19 as an underlying (and not contributing) cause of death”.
As Kelley points out, there is a noticeable difference between the NCHS statistics and the CDC’s own “WONDER” database, which delineates between contributing and underlying causes.
NCHS, which includes incidental COVID deaths, shows that 1,433 children died with COVID, but the WONDER database shows 1,088 deaths from COVID. That’s a 24% difference and would dramatically alter the graphic.
They used COVID data that included deaths with COVID and compared it to data that includes deaths from an illness.
It’s completely discrediting.
Even worse, the misleading graphic represents COVID deaths cumulatively and compares it to annualized data. Simply, they took two years of COVID related mortality and compared it to one year of data for all other causes.
Kelley re-ran the data using the correct comparisons, which significantly altered the outcome.
While the CDC rankings claimed that COVID was the 4th leading cause of death for children under the age of 1, the corrected annualized ranking was 9th, after using exclusively underlying cause data.
Similarly, the NCHS data used in the preprint and by the CDC claimed 124 deaths in that age group, but COVID was the underlying cause in only 79 deaths.
Rankings for childhood mortality are also overly simplistic, since even the “leading” causes of death pale in comparison to accidents, which caused ~25x more annualized deaths than COVID.
But the worst part about this is that the CDC likely knew that the data they were presenting was wrong and dangerously misleading. And they used it anyway.
They were so desperate to justify their desire to vaccinate young children that they were willing to use inaccurate information and comparisons to do so.
They knew that the media and influential “experts” around the internet would pick up on the graphic, creating unnecessary fear amongst parents and higher demand for the vaccines. And of course, they were right; CNN’s Leana Wen immediately shared the slides:
Instead of accurately informing the public and allowing parents to make a risk-benefit calculation, the CDC is essentially trying to coerce behavior through fear.
Even better, the lead researcher posted on Twitter that they were aware of the issues and would be making corrections.
But of course, it’s too late. The data has now been spread far and wide; the CDC and their allies did their damage. The vaccines were authorized regardless and many parents will make the decision to vaccinate their children based on misrepresented information.
It’s yet another episode in the depressing saga of experts disgracing themselves to achieve their goals and undercutting the public’s trust in the process.
The Lab Leak
A new story from the Daily Mail reports that World Health Organization Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus privately admits that he believes that the COVID-19 pandemic originated in a Wuhan laboratory.
Tedros apparently made the remarks to a prominent European politician that a “catastrophic accident” was the “most likely explanation” for the beginning of the pandemic.
The WHO in early 2021 started an investigation into the origins of the pandemic, which concluded that the lab leak hypothesis was “extremely unlikely.” However, the researcher who led that investigation claimed that China “pressured” the team to “dismiss” the lab leak theory.
Scientific journal The Lancet attempted an investigation, which was disbanded over conflicts of interest. Eco Health Alliance head Peter Daszak failed to disclose his close ties to the Wuhan lab, resulting in criticism of the committee’s objectivity.
While privately Tedros is now seemingly admitting that the lab leak is the most likely origin, the official position of the WHO is that “all hypothesis” are still possible.
It’s extremely unlikely that they will ever change their official, public statements given China’s importance to the organization.
In early 2020, for example, China contributed an additional $30 million to the WHOin what was described as a “political power move” to “boost its superficial credentials.”
The true origins of the pandemic are obviously an extremely important issue not just for China and the WHO, but the global political landscape. Beyond officially determining where the virus came from, if it is conclusively determined to have resulted from a lab leak, it would be a crushing blow to “experts” like Dr. Anthony Fauci who tried repeatedly to shut down the theory.
“The science” has been repeatedly referenced by media outlets, public health authorities and politicians as an immutable set of beliefs that are unassailable and infallible.
If a deadly global pandemic that has resulted in the deaths of millions of people, destroyed economies, increased poverty and furthered educational deterioration started in a research lab, it could mark a devastating shift in the public’s view of “science.”
What’s most infuriating about Tedros finally (and privately) giving credence to the lab leak is that for much of 2020, proponents of the hypothesis were decried as “conspiracy theorists.”
The Washington Post famously published an article calling it a “debunked” conspiracy theory and were forced to issue a humiliating correction afterwards.
Media outlets like the Post never had any justification to call the lab leak a “debunked” conspiracy, but it’s obvious they felt safe in describing at as such because it was promoted by the wrong people. Tom Cotton, a Republican Senator, had advanced the hypothesis, therefore it must be “debunked” because Cotton belongs to the wrong ideology.
That myopic, politically motivated thinking has been a common function of most major media outlets who are often desperate to declare their allegiance to the correct set of approved liberal opinions.
Social media companies like Facebook used the media and WHO as authoritative sources of information and as a result, banned users from even discussing the lab leak.
Only in mid-2021 did Facebook reverse course after admitting it was not “debunked.”
This story contains all the infuriating elements of COVID discussion – “experts” lying to the public and bowing to political pressure from China, a fake consensus of opinion created by the media, and social media outlets protecting “science” by censoring opposing viewpoints.
While China’s opposition to an actual investigation will likely prevent any conclusive findings, it’s notable that the head of the WHO admits privately that the “conspiracy theorists” were probably right all along.
Vaccine Mandate Hypocrisy
The Supreme Court decision in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization overturning Roe v. Wade has dominated the news cycle since the opinion was released Friday.
Reactions from the pro-abortion side have been ranged from deliberately misleading to woefully inaccurate to offensive, with one comedian labeling half the country as “terrorists.”
But yet another type of hypocrisy has emerged from supposed public health “experts” and politicians.
Best exemplified by U.S. Surgeon General Vivek Murthy and Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, it’s yet another indicator of how the response to Roe v. Wade is about nothing more than maintaining allegiance to the correct political ideology, intellectual consistency be damned.
In 2021, President Joe Biden attempted to mandate COVID vaccination for millions of workers throughout the United States by appealing to OSHA authority. Any employee who worked for a company with more than 100 employees would have had their freedom of choice removed by being forced to take a vaccine that does nothing to protect the safety of others.
The mandate was ultimately deemed to be illegal, but the attempt was celebrated by public health “experts” and many politicians as the correct decision, regardless of its impact on bodily autonomy.
Back in November of 2021, Murthy defended the government mandating a private health decision by saying: “It’s a necessary step to accelerate our pathway out of the pandemic.” He also referred to it as entirely “appropriate:”
“The president and the administration wouldn’t have put these requirements in place if they didn’t think they were appropriate and necessary,” Murthy told host Martha Raddatz on ABC’s “This Week.” “And the administration is certainly prepared to defend them.”
Murthy believes that when it comes to COVID vaccination, the “essential principle of maintaining an individual’s autonomy and control over their health decisions” is null and void.
Unsurprisingly, he had the exact opposite reaction to the Supreme Court’s decision:
It’s amazing how flexible the “essential principle” of “individual autonomy and control over their health decisions” apparently is.
When it suits Murthy’s political needs, he’s a staunch defender of individual choice. When he wants to mandate control over other’s bodies and personal health decisions, choice is a meaningless, easily dismissed concept.
Justin Trudeau exemplifies the same remarkable lack of shame.
Less than a year ago, Trudeau mandated vaccines for anyone attempting to travel by plane or train across Canada, as well as for all “federally-regulated” workers.
This decision, of course, removed bodily autonomy and choice for millions who need to travel or didn’t want to lose their government jobs.
Undeterred by the abject hypocrisy, Trudeau on Friday declared that “no government, politician, or man should tell a woman what she can and cannot do with her body.”
It’s hard to imagine a more blatant example of political posturing and virtue signaling.
Trudeau, who is a man, politician, and a representative of the government, told many women in Canada exactly what they had to do with their body.
Get vaccinated or lose your job and stay home.
He had no problem removing the “right to choose” when it suited his needs. Only now when he has an opportunity to signal his ideological virtue is he a champion of individual liberty.
It’s nothing new for politicians and public health authorities to be hypocritical. But their ability to blatantly disregard the principles of bodily autonomy and personal control over health decisions just a few months ago means it’s impossible to take them seriously now.
It’s almost assuredly too much to ask “experts” and politicians to be intellectually consistent, but it’s yet another example of why trust in institutions and those that run them continues to deteriorate.
It’s all part of the same depressing pattern. Experts and politicians are willing to lie or purposefully withhold information to achieve their goals.
They mislead and contradict their previous statements, knowing that the media will protect the hypocrisy and misrepresentations.
The FDA buries the data behind the authorization in documents they know no one will read.
The head of the most powerful international health body hides his true feelings to protect China and his financial partners.
It’s hard to see how this gets fixed without these individuals and the organizations they lead coming to terms with their mistakes, apologizing and changing course.
I wouldn’t hold your breath.
After all, Joe Biden already wants to give them more money for the next pandemic.
Reposted from the author’s Substack
Author
From the Brownstone Institute
The document was only removed on about March 26, 2023. During the entire intervening time, the plan survived on the CDC’s public site with little to no public notice or controversy.
No matter how bad you think Covid policies were, they were intended to be worse.
Consider the vaccine passports alone. Six cities were locked down to include only the vaccinated in public indoor places. They were New York City, Boston, Chicago, New Orleans, Washington, D.C., and Seattle. The plan was to enforce this with a vaccine passport. It broke. Once the news leaked that the shot didn’t stop infection or transmission, the planners lost public support and the scheme collapsed.
It was undoubtedly planned to be permanent and nationwide if not worldwide. Instead, the scheme had to be dialed back.
Features of the CDC’s edicts did incredible damage. It imposed the rent moratorium. It decreed the ridiculous “six feet of distance” and mask mandates. It forced Plexiglas as the interface for commercial transactions. It implied that mail-in balloting must be the norm, which probably flipped the election. It delayed the reopening as long as possible. It was sadistic.
Even with all that, worse was planned. On July 26, 2020, with the George Floyd riots having finally settled down, the CDC issued a plan for establishing nationwide quarantine camps. People were to be isolated, given only food and some cleaning supplies. They would be banned from participating in any religious services. The plan included contingencies for preventing suicide. There were no provisions made for any legal appeals or even the right to legal counsel.
The plan’s authors were unnamed but included 26 footnotes. It was completely official. The document was only removed on about March 26, 2023. During the entire intervening time, the plan survived on the CDC’s public site with little to no public notice or controversy.
It was called “Interim Operational Considerations for Implementing the Shielding Approach to Prevent COVID-19 Infections in Humanitarian Settings.”
By absence of empirical data, the meaning is: nothing like this has ever been tried. The point of the document was to map out how it could be possible and alert authorities to possible pitfalls to be avoided.
“This document presents considerations from the perspective of the U.S. Centers for Disease Control & Prevention (CDC) for implementing the shielding approach in humanitarian settings as outlined in guidance documents focused on camps, displaced populations and low-resource settings. This approach has never been documented and has raised questions and concerns among humanitarian partners who support response activities in these settings. The purpose of this document is to highlight potential implementation challenges of the shielding approach from CDC’s perspective and guide thinking around implementation in the absence of empirical data. Considerations are based on current evidence known about the transmission and severity of coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) and may need to be revised as more information becomes available.”
The meaning of “shielding” is “to reduce the number of severe Covid-19 cases by limiting contact between individuals at higher risk of developing severe disease (‘high-risk’) and the general population (‘low-risk’). High-risk individuals would be temporarily relocated to safe or ‘green zones’ established at the household, neighborhood, camp/sector, or community level depending on the context and setting. They would have minimal contact with family members and other low-risk residents.”
In other words, this is what used to be concentration camps.
Who are these people who would be rounded up? They are “older adults and people of any age who have serious underlying medical conditions.” Who determines this? Public health authorities. The purpose? The CDC explains: “physically separating high-risk individuals from the general population” allows authorities “to prioritize the use of the limited available resources.”
This sounds a lot like condemning people to death in the name of protecting them.
The model establishes three levels. First is the household level. Here high-risk people are“physically isolated from other household members.” That alone is objectionable. Elders need people to take care of them. They need love and to be surrounded by family. The CDC should never imagine that it would intervene in households to force old people into separate places.
The model jumps from households to the “neighborhood level.” Here we have the same approach: forced separation of those deemed vulnerable.
From there, the model jumps again to the “camp/sector level.” Here it is different. “A group of shelters such as schools, community buildings within a camp/sector (max 50 high-risk individuals per single green zone) where high-risk individuals are physically isolated together. One entry point is used for exchange of food, supplies, etc. A meeting area is used for residents and visitors to interact while practicing physical distancing (2 meters). No movement into or outside the green zone.”
Yes, you read that correctly. The CDC is here proposing concentration camps for the sick or anyone they deem to be in danger of medically significant consequences of infection.
Further: “to minimize external contact, each green zone should include able-bodied high-risk individuals capable of caring for residents who have disabilities or are less mobile. Otherwise, designate low-risk individuals for these tasks, preferably who have recovered from confirmed COVID-19 and are assumed to be immune.”
The plan says in passing, contradicting thousands of years of experience, “Currently, we do not know if prior infection confers immunity.” Therefore the only solution is to minimize all exposure throughout the whole population. Getting sick is criminalized.
These camps require a “dedicated staff” to “monitor each green zone. Monitoring includes both adherence to protocols and potential adverse effects or outcomes due to isolation and stigma. It may be necessary to assign someone within the green zone, if feasible, to minimize movement in/out of green zones.”
The people housed in these camps need to have good explanations of why they are denied even basic religious freedom. The report explains:
“Proactive planning ahead of time, including strong community engagement and risk communication is needed to better understand the issues and concerns of restricting individuals from participating in communal practices because they are being shielded. Failure to do so could lead to both interpersonal and communal violence.”
Further, there must be some mechanisms to prohibit suicide:
Additional stress and worry are common during any epidemic and may be more pronounced with COVID-19 due to the novelty of the disease and increased fear of infection, increased childcare responsibilities due to school closures, and loss of livelihoods. Thus, in addition to the risk of stigmatization and feeling of isolation, this shielding approach may have an important psychological impact and may lead to significant emotional distress, exacerbate existing mental illness or contribute to anxiety, depression, helplessness, grief, substance abuse, or thoughts of suicide among those who are separated or have been left behind. Shielded individuals with concurrent severe mental health conditions should not be left alone. There must be a caregiver allocated to them to prevent further protection risks such as neglect and abuse.
The biggest risk, the document explains, is as follows: “While the shielding approach is not meant to be coercive, it may appear forced or be misunderstood in humanitarian settings.”
(It should go without saying but this “shielding” approach suggested here has nothing to do with focused protection of the Great Barrington Declaration. Focused protection specifically says: “schools and universities should be open for in-person teaching. Extracurricular activities, such as sports, should be resumed. Young low-risk adults should work normally, rather than from home. Restaurants and other businesses should open. Arts, music, sport and other cultural activities should resume. People who are more at risk may participate if they wish, while society as a whole enjoys the protection conferred upon the vulnerable by those who have built up herd immunity.”)
In four years of research, and encountering truly shocking documents and evidence of what happened in the Covid years, this one certainly ranks up at the top of the list of totalitarian schemes for pathogenic control prior to vaccination. It is quite simply mind-blowing that such a scheme could ever be contemplated.
Who wrote it? What kind of deep institutional pathology exists that enabled this to be contemplated? The CDC has 10,600 full-time employees and contractors and a budget of $11.5 billion. In light of this report, and everything else that has gone on there for four years, both numbers should be zero.
Author
From the Brownstone Institute
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
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