Category Archives: YTT

UK Government Conspired with Social Media, A.I. Firms to Monitor and Censor Lockdown Critics – Report

Originally in the Telegraph, reported by Breitbart

Writes Peter Caddle:

The UK government worked with social media and A.I. firms to surveil and censor critics of coronavirus lockdowns, a report has claimed.

Officials within the UK government reportedly worked clandestinely with social media companies, such as Google, Facebook, and Twitter as well as A.I. firms to monitor critics of the lockdown regime, as well as to identify and ultimately censor speech criticising the draconian government policy.

Published by The Telegraph, the claims bear many similarities to the so-called “Twitter files”, which revealed how U.S. authorities worked hand-in-glove with social media firms to censor criticism of government COVID-19 policy.

Continue reading here.

Here is some more about Covid revisionism:

We’ve been firmly in the grips of Covid revisionism for a while. Celebrities and pundits and politicians have all taken steps to downplay their complicity or talk about how “crazy” the pandemic was, as if it was impossible not to get caught up in it.

Further, there is an onslaught of policy “re-evaluation” that ranges from nit-picking to sweeping but is united in its reinforcement of Covid myths. The re-writing of the role ventilators played was especially unpleasant.

However, this one might be more grating, simply for the smallness of it.

A couple of days ago the Telegraph ran a “scoop”, revealing that the UK government’s counter-disinformation unit censored lockdown critics at the height of the pandemic (This really isn’t news, but more on that in a few days). Former editor of the Sunday Times Andrew Neil tweeted about it, neglecting to mention (or apologise for) his column in the Daily Mail calling for “vaccine refuseniks” to be “punished”.

A willing spreader and consumer of propaganda, suddenly claiming to realise propaganda was terrible…pretty nauseating.

As the UK gears up for the latest hearing in its farcical “Covid Inquiry” we can expect more and more of this rewriting of history.

The war on disinformation is just a war on dissent

The British state’s monitoring of lockdown sceptics is a democratic outrage.

Writes Tom Slater:

We need to retire the word ‘disinformation’, the apparent dread of governments, BBC specialist reporters and NGOs everywhere. Or at the very least we need to remember what it actually means. The definition of disinformation is ‘false information which is intended to mislead’. Until recently, it was largely used to describe propaganda pumped out by hostile foreign states. But in the great disinformation panic of our time, sparked by the populist revolts of 2016 and sent into hyperdrive by the paranoia of the pandemic, the word has come to mean something very different among our elites. It has come to mean inconvenient facts, or a differing opinion. Tackling disinformation is now just a euphemism for demonising and silencing dissent.

Just take a look at the latest revelations about the British state’s monitoring of lockdown sceptics during the pandemic. A new blockbuster investigation by the Telegraph and civil-liberties group Big Brother Watch details the shady activities of the Counter-Disinformation Unit, which is still operating and was set up by the Department for Culture, Media and Sport (DCMS), and the now-closed Rapid Response Unit, which was run out of the Cabinet Office. They compiled reports about prominent lockdown sceptics including Carl Heneghan, director of the University of Oxford’s Centre for Evidence-Based Medicine, and Molly Kingsley, co-founder of UsForThem, which valiantly campaigned against Covid school closures. The government also employed an artificial-intelligence firm to ‘scour social-media sites’ for wrongthink.

Read on here.

Peer-Reviewed Study Confirms Fatal Flaw in PCR Testing

42% False Discovery Rate for SARS-CoV-2 nonQ-RT-PCR Test. This means COVID-19 Vaccine Outcomes Rate Data are Unreliable and Invalid

Writes James Lyons-Weiler:

All COVID-19 Vaccine Studies Used nonQ-RT-PCR to determine case status. All of the estimates of outcome are unreliable. This is the most important study we will ever likely publish in our journal.

Read on here.

If You Get More Doses, You Put Others at Higher Risk

The Cleveland Clinic Study is Now Published as Peer Reviewed Science

Writes James Lyons-Weiler:

Finally, after peer review, the Cleveland clinic study that report that “The higher the number of vaccines previously received, the higher the risk of contracting COVID-19” has been properly published.

“Risk of COVID-19… increased with time since most recent prior COVID-19 episode and with the number of vaccine doses previously received.’

Continue here.

Propaganda Restricts Speech More Than Censorship Does

Writes Caitlin Johnstone:

The biggest impediment to free speech is people’s belief that they have it. Not censorship. Not refusal to platform critical voices. Not the war on journalism. It’s the fact that most people are propagandized into saying what the powerful want them to say, and don’t know it.

What makes our dilemma so historically unique is that we live under an empire which makes extensive use of the post-Bernays science of mass-scale psychological manipulation to trick its subjects into believing that they are thinking, speaking, and gathering information freely. In this way our rulers suppress any revolution long before it starts, not by making people’s lives better, nor by violent repression, but by manipulating people into thinking there’s nothing to revolt against, because they have no rulers and they are already free.

[. . .]

This problem can be addressed simply by bringing awareness to it in every way we can. Manipulation only works if you don’t know it’s happening, so drawing attention to it and describing how it happens in as many ways as possible helps people start seeing through it.

Christianity is now in a post-Constantinian era

Writes Justo L. González in the second volume of his “The Story of Christianity”:

One of the main issues confronted by all Christians in the twenty-first century is how to live in the post-Constantinian era. What is meant by this phrase is that the church can no longer count on the political support that it enjoyed since the times of Constantine. As we have seen in the preceding chapters, in a process beginning with the American and French Revolutions, Western Christianity had to face the challenge of secular states that, although not always hostile, tended to ignore it. For Eastern Christianity, on the other hand, that process began when Constantinople fell to the Turks in 1453.

(p. 373)

What Caleb said to Joshua

He gave an honest report and did not fearmonger

From Joshua 14:

I was forty years old when Moses the servant of the Lord sent me from Kadesh Barnea to explore the land. And I brought him back a report according to my convictions, 8 but my fellow Israelites who went up with me made the hearts of the people melt in fear. I, however, followed the Lord my God wholeheartedly. 

The Metaphysical Presumptions of Science

Are derived from Christianity, says Jordan Peterson

Jordan Peterson, while interviewing British theologian, academic and author Dr. Nigel Biggar (under the title “Separating Good from Evil in the British Empire“), gives a brief lecture on the five metaphysical presumptions of science. He says (link prompted):

They are metaphysical presumptions which you have to accept before you can operate as a scientist.

You have to believe there is a logos or logic in the objective world. Youi have to believe there is an objective world. You have to believe that that logic is apprehensible. You have to believe that apprehending that logic is a moral good. Because otherwise why would you bother? And then you have to believe that truth in relation to that apprehension is the most important orienting principle.

Those are all metaphysical presumptions. I actually think they are metaphysical presumptions that are derived from Christianity itself, which is why science emerged in Europe and not elsewhere.

Poll: What parishioners want from their churches

In Germany

They don’t want their churches supporting “Extinction Rebellion” or similar groups. Only 17 percent supported that policy, 50 percent were against. The rest either said they don’t care (18 percent) or didn’t know (12 percent) or declined to answer (3 percent).

56 percent said the churches should concentrate more on their spiritual and pastoral tasks.

51 percent supported the fact that the churches appealed to everyone to get vaccinated against covid.

However, only 43 percent (a relative majority) thought closing churches during lockdown was a good idea (30 percent disagreed)

15 percent say they are definitely going to leave the church, a further 21 percent say they are considering leaving.

The relevant article is here.

“Question authority”

"Until we take over", the new authoritarians said to themselves

Writes Tom Woods in today’s newsletter:

What are the textbooks going to say?

That’s what I asked Scott Horton on the Tom Woods Show in our episode on the Durham Report [also here], which definitively exposed the “Russiagate” nonsense as the hoax any non-comatose person knew it was.

But here’s the problem.

American historians are reliable stenographers of the regime. They tell the story the way the Establishment wants it told. Can you imagine an American history textbook admitting that in their zeal to get Trump, entire agencies compromised themselves and major political figures fabricated bizarre stories of Russian collusion?

Historians — some of whom probably once believed the old leftist slogan “question authority” — dearly love the FBI, the CIA, all these agencies. A handful tell bad stories about them from the past, but those stories from the past evidently inspire zero skepticism about them among historians today.

“Question authority” was never meant to be taken seriously. It meant: undermine authority until we take over, and then use that authority to entrench ourselves via lies and dirty tricks.

Matt Taibbi has been on the left his whole life, and has no particular reason to want to exonerate Donald Trump. Except for one thing: he dislikes lies and liars.

Here’s Taibbi’s response to the report:

“I read Special Counsel John Durham’s ‘Report on Matters Related to Intelligence Activities and Investigations Arising Out of the 2016 Presidential Campaigns’ yesterday in a state I can only describe as psychic exhaustion. As Sue Schmidt’s ‘Eight Key Takeaways’ summary shows, the stuff in this report should kill the Trump-Russia conspiracy theory ten times over, but we know better than that. This story never dies. Every time you shoot at it, it splits into six new deep state fantasies.

“I’ve given up. Nearly seven years ago this idiotic tale dropped in my relatively uncomplicated life like a grenade, upending professional relationships, friendships, even family life. Those of us in media who were skeptics or even just uninterested were cast out as from a religious sect — colleagues unironically called us ‘denialists’ — denounced in the best case as pathological wreckers and refuseniks, in the worst as literal agents of the FSB.”

I myself hear the words “Russian disinformation” or “Russian asset” or “Russian talking points” and instantly think: I am speaking to a very low-IQ, highly suggestible person, who repeats whatever phrases are fed to him.

Time after time these fantasies of Russian conspiracies have proven false, and yet the story won’t go away.

Here’s hoping this time they’re slayed for good — heck, even Anderson Cooper admitted the report was “devastating” to the FBI.