Stuart Jeanne Bramhall's Blog: The Most Revolutionary Act , page 543
July 6, 2022
Two and 3-year-old kids with seizures is “the new normal”
Steve KirschI’m getting multiple reports from my nurse friends about kids 2 and 3 years old having seizures. It is ONLY happening on vaccinated kids, and symptoms start 2 to 5 days after the COVID vaccine.
Doctors are mystified by a rash of seizures, rashes, etc. happening to 2 and 3-year-old kids.
The only thing these kids have in common is that they were given the COVID vaccine just days earlier (two to five days earlier).
The doctors cannot figure out what is causing the seizures (since it couldn’t be the vaccine since those are safe and effective). The medical staff is not permitted to talk about the cases to the press or on social media or they will be fired.
One nurse posted something to the effect of “how is this legal????” I had to paraphrase to protect the poster.
This is why you are hearing these reports from me. They can’t fire me.
There is nothing on the mainstream media about this since the nurses and doctors aren’t allowed to talk about it.
This will all come out some day, but for now, everyone is keeping quiet about it and the doctors are instructed to convince the parents that it isn’t vaccine related and that they are the only ones having the problem.
Because that’s how science works.
Via https://stevekirsch.substack.com/p/two-and-3-year-old-kids-with-seizures
Nurse Erin Talks About FBI Harassing Her: They’re Scared of the Information I Have
Dr Eddy Betterman
Whistleblower Erin Olszewski, better known as Nurse Erin, joined Owen Shroyer and guest host Kristi Lee in “War Room” to talk about how the government is purging individuals who go against the Wuhan coronavirus (COVID-19) narrative.
“The FBI [Federal Bureau of Investigation] has been at my door, they continue to harass me. And there’s a reason behind that: It’s because they’re scared of the information that I have,” Nurse Erin said.
“They just get rid of anyone who doesn’t follow the status quo. And if they continue speaking up like I have been … then they’ll just go after any type of income so you can’t feed your families.”
At the same time, she said the government has been lifting the murder of babies by giving them COVID-19 vaccines unnecessarily. “They don’t care about the children,” Nurse Erin said about the government as she narrated how she was fired from her job despite never being written up for misconduct during her entire career. (Related: Medical experts warn: Coronavirus boosters kill more lives than they save.)
“You build up your social media platforms — that gets too big — and you’re being too influential, so they tore that down, too.” Then she described how they went after her Linktree account and then her PayPal account. She even thinks that they will cut her Venmo shortly as well.
“The only thing I use PayPal for was just to be able to sell my books — like signed copies of my books — because they won’t put them on shelves either. So it’s just a modern-day book burning all over again,” Nurse Erin said.
Harassed, discredited for telling the truthAll these happened because Nurse Erin went viral for exposing hospital operations and how the corrupt healthcare system is killing patients who have or have been exposed to COVID-19. Then, they retaliated by having pro-government “media” assassinate her character online to discredit her.
An unnamed physician at Elmhurst Hospital, where she used to work, said that she “spoke from a place of ignorance,” and that she used “lazy and faulty conclusions” based on her superficial observations to “assassinate the character” of people.
She was also being harassed by the FBI, such as stopping her from speaking to the public about her experience in the hospital. Her hospital in New York fired her, the FBI took away her public platforms and her payment processing sites and she went on to deal with the everyday problems they were dealing her.
[…]
Via https://dreddymd.com/2022/07/06/nurse-erin-talks-about-harassed-by-fbi/
The Turkish Conquest of Northern India
Episode 24: The Sultans of Dehli
Barbarian Empires of the Steppes (2014)
Dr Kenneth Harl
Film Review
In this lecture, Harl focuses on the Turkish conquest of northern India in the late 12th and early 13th century.
After clinching numerous victories in Delhi and other Hindu cities in northern India, the Seljuk Turk Muhammad of Ghazni died in 1206. The son of a slave soldier* himself, Muhammad delegated administration of the conquered territory to slave soldiers. Thus Delhi rulers following Mahmud’s death are frequently referred to as the “Slave Sultans of Delhi.”
Mahmud’s son Iltutmish extended the Seljuk conquest as far south as the Ganges. He ruled with the oversight of a governing council consisting of Muqtis (landholders). Iltutmish groomed his daughter Radiza Begum to succeed him.** Despite being an able (but not great) ruler, her efforts to reduce the power of her governing council led to a full scale rebellion to overthrow her rule.
Her successors continued to conduct raids into the Hindu kingdoms of southern India for loot to finance the Turkish occupation.
Although the sultans of India successfully resisted repeated Mongol invasions from 1220 on, they had a relatively weak military and focused mainly on public monument construction (mosques, madrassas, minarets, mausoleums, etc). Many were built from the remains of Hindu temples. Delhi, formerly a minor city became the center of Muslim power in India. Many of the minarets and mosques from this period persist to the present day.
Despite the Turkish military occupation, Islam would remain a minor religion in India. This was in part due to the failure of large numbers of Turk settlers to migrate to India and in part due to the persistence of strong Tantric (Hindu) rituals in the rural villages. By 1350, all the Muslim cities of northern India were still surrounded by Hindu farm communities.
*As growing numbers of steppes Turks converted to Islam, it became common for their Islamic overlords (as well as the Turks themselves) to enslave warriors they captured in battle to serve in their own armies.
**This was consistent with steppes tradition of appointing women of high rank to become rulers.
Film can be viewed free with a library card on Kanopy.
The Sultans of Delhi
Episode 24: The Sultans of Dehli
Barbarian Empires of the Steppes (2014)
Dr Kenneth Harl
Film Review
In this lecture, Harl focuses on the Turkish conquest of northern India in the late 12th and early 13th century.
After clinching numerous victories in Delhi and other Hindu cities in northern India, the Seljuk Turk Muhammad of Ghazni died in 1206. The son of a slave soldier* himself, Muhammad delegated administration of the conquered territory to slave soldiers. Thus Delhi rulers following Mahmud’s death are frequently referred to as the “Slave Sultans of Delhi.”
Mahmud’s son Iltutmish extended the Seljuk conquest as far south as the Ganges. He ruled with the oversight of a governing council consisting of Muqtis (landholders). Iltutmish groomed his daughter Radiza Begum to succeed him.** Despite being an able (but not great) ruler, her efforts to reduce the power of her governing council led to a full scale rebellion to overthrow her rule.
Her successors continued to conduct raids into the Hindu kingdoms of southern India for loot to finance the Turkish occupation.
Although the sultans of India successfully resisted repeated Mongol invasions from 1220 on, they had a relatively weak military and focused mainly on public monument construction (mosques, madrassas, minarets, mausoleums, etc). Many were built from the remains of Hindu temples. Delhi, formerly a minor city became the center of Muslim power in India. Many of the minarets and mosques from this period persist to the present day.
Despite the Turkish military occupation, Islam would remain a minor religion in India. This was in part due to the failure of large numbers of Turk settlers to migrate to India and in part due to the persistence of strong Tantric (Hindu) rituals in the rural villages. By 1350, all the Muslim cities of northern India were still surrounded by Hindu farm communities.
*As growing numbers of steppes Turks converted to Islam, it became common for their Islamic overlords (as well as the Turks themselves) to enslave warriors they captured in battle to serve in their own armies.
**This was consistent with steppes tradition of appointing women of high rank to become rulers.
Film can be viewed free with a library card on Kanopy.
July 5, 2022
Pfizer Asks Court to Dismiss Whistleblower Lawsuit Because Government Was Aware of Fraud
By Michael Nevradakis, Ph.D. In an interview with The Defender, the lawyer representing whistleblower Brook Jackson said Pfizer is arguing the court should dismiss Jackson’s lawsuit alleging fraud in Pfizer’s COVID-19 clinical trials because the U.S. government knew about the wrongdoings but continued to do business with the vaccine maker.
A lawsuit filed by whistleblower Brook Jackson alleging Pfizer and two of its contractors manipulated data and committed other acts of fraud during Pfizer’s COVID-19 clinical trials is paused following a motion by the defendants to dismiss the case.In an interview with The Defender, Jackson’s lawyer said Pfizer argued the lawsuit, which was filed under the False Claims Act, should be dismissed because the U.S. government knew of the wrongdoings in the clinical trials but continued to do business with the vaccine maker.
Under the False Claims Act, whistleblowers can be rewarded for confidentially disclosing fraud that results in a financial loss to the federal government.
However, a 2016 U.S. Supreme Court decision that expanded the scope of a legal principle known as “materiality” resulted in a series of federal court decisions in which fraud cases brought under the False Claims Act were dismissed.
As interpreted by the Supreme Court, if the government continued paying a contractor despite the contractor’s fraudulent activity, the fraud was not considered “material” to the contract.
Pfizer is a federal contractor because it signed multiple contracts with the U.S. government to provide COVID-19 vaccines and Paxlovid, a pill used to treat the virus.
“Pfizer claims they can get away with fraud as long as the government would write them a check despite knowing about the fraud,” attorney Robert Barnes said.
The other two defendants in the case are Ventavia Research Group, which conducted vaccine trials on behalf of Pfizer, and ICON PLC, also a Pfizer contractor.
In an attempt to strengthen the False Claims Act’s anti-retaliation provisions and install new safeguards against industry-level blacklisting of whistleblowers seeking employment, Congress in July 2021 introduced the False Claims Amendments Act of 2021.
In December 2021, Pfizer hired a well-connected lobbyist, Hazen Marshall, and the law firm Williams & Jensen to lobby against the bill.
Pfizer previously was heavily fined in connection with the False Claims Act. As part of a 2009 settlement, the company paid $2.3 billion in fines — the largest healthcare fraud settlement in the history of the U.S. Department of Justice — stemming from allegations of illegal marketing of off-label products not approved by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA).
“Pfizer, one of the most criminally fined drug companies in the world, wants to weaken the laws that hold them accountable,” Barnes told The Defender.
Congress has taken no action on the False Claims Amendments Act since November 2021, when the bill was added to the Senate’s legislative calendar.
Barnes said the outcome of Jackson’s case against Pfizer is significant not just for his client, but also for the American public.
“This case will determine if Big Pharma can rip off the American people using a dangerous drug that harms millions without any legal remedy because they claim the government was in on the scam.”
Jackson was a regional director for Ventavia for a brief period in 2020 but was fired after she notified the FDA about issues with Pfizer’s vaccine trials.
After she was fired, she gave The BMJ a cache of internal company documents, photos and recordings highlighting the alleged wrongdoing by Ventavia.
The documents she provided contained evidence of falsified data, blind trial failures and awareness on the part of at least one Ventavia executive that members of the company’s staff were “falsifying data.”
Jackson’s documents also provided evidence of administrators who had “no training” or medical certifications, or who provided “very little oversight” during the trials.
Jackson filed her complaint in August 2021, in the U.S. District Court, Eastern District of Texas, Beaumont Division, alleging Pfizer, Ventavia and ICON “deliberately withheld crucial information from the United States that calls the safety and efficacy of their vaccine into question.”
A district court judge in February unsealed Jackson’s complaint, which included 400 pages of exhibits.
According to the complaint, Jackson, who had more than 15 years of experience working with clinical trials, “repeatedly informed her superiors of poor laboratory management, patient safety concerns and data integrity issues” during the approximately two weeks she was employed by Ventavia.
“Brook [Jackson] brought a Qui Tam action and a retaliatory discharge case against Pfizer and others for fraud on the people concerning Pfizer’s false certifications to the U.S. Department of Defense about the safety and efficacy of their COVID-19 vaccine,” Barnes said.
A Qui Tam case refers to a provision under the False Claims Act that allows individuals and entities with evidence of fraud against federal programs or contracts to sue the wrongdoer on behalf of the U.S. government
“She was part of the clinical trials, witnessed extraordinary malfeasance, blew the whistle, and was quickly fired after she blew the whistle.”
Barnes said his legal team will in August file its opposition brief to Pfizer’s motion to dismiss, and the judge may rule on the motion to dismiss by fall 2022.
[…]
Via https://childrenshealthdefense.org/defender/pfizer-whistleblower-lawsuit-fraud/
Wall Street Journal Questions Push to Vaccinate Infants and Toddlers
By Susan C. Olmstead Allysia Finley, a member of Wall Street Journal’s editorial board, Monday called into question the motives behind the U.S. Food and Drug Administration’s decision to extend emergency use of Pfizer and Moderna’s COVID-19 vaccines to infants and toddlers.
A Wall Street Journal (WSJ) editorial board member Monday called into question the motives behind the U.S. Food and Drug Administration’s (FDA) decision to extend Emergency Use Authorization of Pfizer and Moderna’s COVID-19 vaccines to toddlers and infants as young as 6 months old, writing that the decision was motivated by politics and pressure rather than science.
In her WSJ opinion piece — “Why the Rush for Toddler Vaccines?” — Allysia Finley wrote:
“The FDA standard for approving vaccines in otherwise healthy people, especially children, is supposed to be higher than for drugs that treat the sick.
“But the FDA conspicuously lowered its standards to approve COVID vaccines for toddlers. Why?”
Finley started her piece with a quote from President Biden, which praised the FDA’s recommendation: “This is a very historic milestone. The United States is now the first country in the world to offer safe and effective COVID-19 vaccines for children as young as six months old.”
She responded, writing, “In fact, we don’t know if the vaccines are safe and effective.”
She continued:
“The rushed FDA action was based on extremely weak evidence. It’s one thing to show regulatory flexibility during an emergency. But for children, Covid isn’t an emergency.
“The FDA bent its standards to an unusual degree and brushed aside troubling evidence that warrants more investigation.”
“Mr. Biden’s hypocrisy is hard to stomach,” she wrote, listing many reasons for caution in vaccinating young children against COVID-19, including:
Children are at low risk of dying from COVID-19: Only 209 kids between 6 months and 4 years old have died from COVID-19 — about 0.02% of all virus deaths in the U.S. About half as many toddlers were hospitalized with COVID-19 between October 2020 and September 2021 as were hospitalized with the flu during the previous winter.The two children in Pfizer’s trial who got sickest with COVID-19 also tested positive for other viruses. It’s possible that many hospitalizations attributed to COVID-19 this winter were instigated or exacerbated by other viruses.The FDA authorized vaccines for toddlers based on a comparison of the antibodies they generated to the original Wuhan variant with those in young adults who had received two doses. But two doses offer little if any protection against Omicron infection in adults, and even protection against hospitalization is only around 40% to 60%.Vaccinated toddlers in Pfizer’s trial were more likely to get severely ill with COVID-19 than those who received a placebo. Most children who developed multiple infections during the trial were vaccinated.“FDA granted the Pfizer and Moderna vaccines for toddlers an emergency-use authorization allowing the agency to expedite access for products that ‘prevent serious or life-threatening diseases or conditions,’” wrote Finley.
“While adult COVID vaccines clearly met this standard in late 2020, the toddler vaccines don’t.”
[…]
Via https://childrenshealthdefense.org/defender/toddler-covid-vaccines-fda-eua-wall-street-journal/
Parents Catch FBI In Plot To Force Mentally Ill Son To Be A Right Wing Terrorist
Aletho News
It’s become a near-weekly occurrence. Somewhere in some state, the FBI will announce that they’ve foiled yet another terrorist plot and saved lives. However, as the data shows, the majority of these cases involve psychologically diminished patsies who’ve been entirely groomed, armed, and entrapped by FBI agents. Simply put, the FBI manufactures terror threats and then takes credit for stopping them.
While many of these cases have garnered attention and been exposed in the alternative media, a recent case out of Oklahoma sets a new low for FBI and exposes how insidious these plots can be.
Through the hundreds of ‘foiled terror plots’ the FBI has ‘busted’ over the years, many of them have been focused on people of Middle Eastern descent or people associated with ISIS or al-Qaeda. This time, in the case of Jerry Drake Varnell, the 23-year-old diagnosed schizophrenic, accused of attempting to bomb a bank, the FBI fomented terror from a right wing dialogue.
In a June meeting with the agent, according to FBI documents, Varnell described himself as a believer in “Three Percenter” ideology, a right-wing group claiming to be committed to standing against and exposing corruption and injustice.
According to federal documents, Varnell drove what he believed was a stolen van containing a 1,000-pound ammonium nitrate bomb on Saturday morning to blow up an Oklahoma City bank. Vile, indeed.
However, if we backtrack just a bit, to when the FBI began grooming their would-be right-wing militia terrorist, the vileness comes directly from the government.
“The FBI knew he was schizophrenic,” Varnell’s parents declared on Wednesday in an open letter bravely published by NewsOK.
“Underneath his condition, he is a sweet-hearted person and we are extremely shocked that this event has happened. However, what truly has us flabbergasted is the fact that the FBI knew he was schizophrenic. The State of Oklahoma found him mentally incompetent and we, his parents have legal guardianship over him by the Court. These documents are sealed from the public, which is why no news media outlet has been able to obtain them. The FBI clearly knew that he was schizophrenic because they have gathered every ounce of information on him.”
Yet they knowingly continued to groom him, despite the clear immoral implications.
When they began grooming him, according to the family, the FBI knew that Varnell was declared mentally unfit to live by himself and that he was a paranoid schizophrenic. Without their criminal informant and the FBI tactics playing mind games with this vulnerable man, the idea of him committing an act of terror would have likely never materialized.
“What the public should be looking at is the fact that the FBI gave our son the means to make this happen. He has no job, no money, no vehicle, and no driver’s license, due to the fact that he is schizophrenic and we; his parents do everything we can possible to keep him safe and functional….. He has suffered through countless serious full-blown schizophrenic delusional episodes and he has been put in numerous mental hospitals since he was 16 years old. The FBI came and picked him up from our home, they gave him a vehicle, gave him a fake bomb, and every means to make this happen none of which he had access to on his own.”
The parents noted that during the setup, they suspected something was going on and Jerry’s father told the informant to stay away from their son. However, according to the parents, the informant “continued to sneak onto our residence. The FBI paid him to continue this operation and I believe they have cleared his criminal record.”
Because they knew Varnell had severe mental disabilities, the FBI should have had stopped their plans to do this and immediately sought an option of hospitalization. However, they pressed on.
Knowing a sane person would likely never attempt to blow up a bank, the FBI deliberately targeted a severely delusional and mentally ill person. This is wrong on so many levels. Will the next mass murderer they groom come directly from a mental institution?
“The FBI should have filed conspiracy on our son and had him committed to a mental institution. They should not have aided and abetted a paranoid schizophrenic to commit this act. There are many more facts that I will not make public that will support my son and the disturbing acts made by the FBI.
I realize that many will say my son could have found another person to commit this act. Yet, any person that has access to the materials and the state of mind necessary to bomb a building would not have any need for a schizophrenic who has no resources to contribute.”
Clifford and Melonie Varnell, Jerry’s parents make a powerful point. No one — other than the FBI — would’ve attempted to get a schizophrenic man with nothing to contribute to do their bidding as it would most likely be a futile effort — unless you are the FBI looking for an easy patsy to keep fear alive.
David Steele, a 20-year Marine Corps intelligence officer, the second-highest-ranking civilian in the U.S. Marine Corps Intelligence, and former CIA clandestine services case officer, had this to say about these most unscrupulous operations:
“Most terrorists are false flag terrorists, or are created by our own security services. In the United States, every single terrorist incident we have had has been a false flag, or has been an informant pushed on by the FBI. In fact, we now have citizens taking out restraining orders against FBI informants that are trying to incite terrorism. We’ve become a lunatic asylum.”
[…]
Cancer-causing Chemicals Leaching into Food from Packaging
Chemical Free Life
Scientists have now identified over three thousand chemicals leaching into food from the food packaging*, 65 percent of which were previously never discovered to be in contact with food. The study found more than two-thirds were identified in plastic packaging. Experts warn that some of the chemicals found were extremely dangerous and could cause cancer. The chemicals found in the study include Bisphenol A, Formaldehyde, Antimony, Phthalates (Diethylhexylphthalate), and Styrene.*
“These are amongst the most frequently studied and measured chemicals, and they are known chemicals of concern with possible implications including the development of metabolic disorders like immune toxicity and neurotoxicity, leukemia, cancer and hormonal disruption.”- Jane Muncke, CEO, Food Packaging Forum
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*Chemical migration to food depends on factors such as temperature, contact time, the surface-volume ration, and the type of food or food simulant.
**For scientific study data on the health effects of these chemicals, go to our home page, scroll to the search box at the bottom of the page and type in the chemical name. Or Contact us and we will send you the links to the scientific studies.
Starbucks and Amazon Wins Inspire Organizing at Trader Joe’s, REI, Target, and Apple
Labor Notes
“Seven months ago if you asked me about a union I would’ve said, ‘I don’t know, cops have them?’” says Sarah Pappin, a shift supervisor at a Seattle Starbucks. But on June 6, she and her co-workers voted unanimously to join Starbucks Workers United, part of an upsurge of organizing by younger workers with little union experience that is breathing new life into the labor movement.
Now they’re dreaming even bigger. “We want to not just open the door for the rest of the food service industry, we want to kick it down,” said Pappin, who’s worked full-time at Starbucks for eight years. “Eventually you get tired of jumping to the next job and praying it’s gonna be better. You realize you should just take a stand where you have some good ground.”
The union wave at Starbucks and the Amazon Labor Union (ALU) victory on Staten Island have sparked a new sense of possibility among workers at some of the country’s biggest nonunion employers, where unions have struggled for decades to establish any sort of foothold.
Since their April win, ALU organizers say they’ve heard from workers at another 100 Amazon facilities across the country who want to unionize. And in recent months workers have filed for union elections at Trader Joe’s stores in Massachusetts and Minneapolis, an REI in Manhattan, a Target in Virginia, and Apple stores in Atlanta and Towson, Maryland.
Workers in other largely non-union sectors are also organizing, with workers at an Activision Blizzard subsidiary forming the first union at a major video game company in May and tech workers at The New York Times becoming the largest bargaining unit in tech in March.
A CASCADING EFFECTThe organizing wave is turning the labor movement’s prevailing wisdom on its head. Until now unions have mostly avoided filing for election at single workplaces that are part of big chains, like fast food restaurants or Amazon warehouses, not seeing a viable route to a first contract.
But the worker-organizers behind the current upsurge have relied on grassroots organizing to produce a cascading effect.
“The most beautiful thing about this whole movement is that we only have to win one to show what’s possible,” says Casey Moore, a barista at a Starbucks in Buffalo, the city that was home to the union’s first victory last year.
After the December vote count, Moore said, “we just started getting flooded with emails and direct messages on social media saying ‘We’re so inspired, how can we do it here?’”
Boston barista Kylah Clay was among those inspired. “We started talking about our working conditions in this new light—that we can actually change them,” she said. Clay is now helping Starbucks workers throughout New England to organize.
As we went to press, the upstart union had won elections at 177 Starbucks stores in 30 states, and lost just 30; 98 more stores had filed for elections. Workers have also struck over issues ranging from leaky ceilings and malfunctioning grease traps to cuts in hours and retaliatory firings.
Starbucks baristas have a tight workplace culture that helps explain their success. Many of the workers are younger, queer, and work there in part for the gender-affirming health benefits. “We work shoulder to shoulder in very frustrating conditions,” says Pappin. “We already know what the power of working together is.”
Directed from Below
The level of self-direction is a novel aspect of these recent campaigns. While Starbucks Workers United is getting advice and legal help from the SEIU affiliate Workers United, most of the organizing is being done by Starbucks workers. ALU is independent.
“What strikes me about what’s going on now is that it’s not being done by professional organizers,” says Labor Notes co-founder Kim Moody. “A lot of these campaigns are being initiated by the workers themselves, much as auto workers did in the 1930s.”
“It’s different from anything I’ve seen in the worker arena,” said Stephanie Luce, a professor at the CUNY School of Labor and Urban Studies. “It feels like elements of what we saw around other upsurges of protest—the globalization moment, the Occupy moment, the George Floyd moment. What those had in common was that they were not directed from above.”
When ALU filed at the Staten Island warehouse with signatures from just 30 percent of the workforce—the bare minimum to get a union election—most labor organizers scoffed at their chances. The general rule is that you have to file with at least 60 percent support (and preferably more) to withstand management’s anti-union campaign.
But ALU shocked the world and won. “It caused me to rethink the old rules of organizing,” said Peter Olney, former organizing director for the Longshore and Warehouse Union (ILWU). “You start to think: what about the churn at Amazon? You’re never gonna get to 70 or 80 percent with the churn [the high rate of turnover –Eds]. If you have the organization to get to 30 percent, then you may have the organization to win an election.”
Olney said he’s now encouraging unions to take more seriously the idea of filing for election sooner: “Shouldn’t we be viewing this as a moment to engage in mass filings to stress management and their union-busters? Say you’ve been building out a committee, done actions, marched on the boss—couldn’t you win an election? And wouldn’t winning an election put you on the map?
“Yes, we’ll lose some, but if we were to win at an Amazon facility in Southern California, imagine the media and public reverberations of such a victory.”
[…]
July 4, 2022
Information Anarchism
By Caitlan Johnstone
Our civilization is built upon lies and obfuscation to such an extent that advocating for transparency and the democratization of information can be a complete political ideology, all by itself.
Rather than claiming to know what’s best for society (whether we should move left or right, whether we should espouse this model or that model), it is perfectly legitimate to simply support giving humanity the information tools necessary to know the truth about what’s happening so that they can collectively determine for themselves what direction to take.
This would mean supporting the end of the mass-scale manipulations and obfuscations used by the powerful to influence the way the public thinks, acts and votes, and it would mean giving them the democratic infrastructure to steer their civilization in response to the true information they’ve got access to.
It would mean supporting the end of government secrecy and advocating transparency for any institution with any degree of power over the people. The more power and influence they have, the more transparency should be required of them, whether they be governmental, corporate, or financial institutions.
It would mean supporting the democratization of information and the end of mass media propaganda. It would mean breaking up institutions which have too much information-sharing ability and giving more information-sharing ability to those who don’t have enough. Rather than a few plutocrats influencing the public, the public influences the public. The public can collectively uplift individual voices and ideas that they like, but no voice is given an unfair advantage in whether or not that will happen.
Society Is Made Of Narrative. Realizing This Is Awakening From The Matrix.
Life in our society is like the movie The Matrix, except instead of AI keeping us asleep in an illusory world, it’s psychopathic oligarchs. And instead of code, it’s narrative.https://t.co/mkk41xhtZK
— Caitlin Johnstone
(@caitoz) July 13, 2021
Information anarchism is just as radical a goal as any other revolutionary ideology, because information control is so important to the continued existence of our status quo systems that it could never be achieved without drastic measures taken by the collective. The difference is that rather than claiming to know whether ideological models like communism or anarcho-capitalism would be better, for example, one only supports giving the people the means to collectively decide for themselves.
The idea of true information anarchy can be as frightening to the ego as the idea of total societal anarchy, because nobody being in control means there’s nobody to stop it from going in a frightening direction. What if ideas I don’t like gain popularity? What if people start thinking wrong thoughts and believing wrong beliefs?
But that’s kind of the appeal, in my opinion. Really taking the brakes off of the way information moves through our world and letting humanity take full unbridaled advantage of the interconnectedness of our brains at this unprecedented juncture in terrestrial history could lead somewhere very bad, but it could also lead somewhere very good. And whatever ends up happening would be because of our own decisions instead of the decisions of a few powerful manipulators.
And right now the latter is what’s happening. We’re on a collision course with extinction via environmental catastrophe or nuclear war, and it’s because of the decisions made by powerful people who are continuously working to control what ideas and information we consume. If information was really freed up, along with our ability to collectively control the direction humanity takes going forward, it’s hard to imagine we’d mess it up any worse than they have.
[…]
Via https://caitlinjohnstone.com/2022/07/04/information-anarchism/
The Most Revolutionary Act
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