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* Reading Notes: One Nation Under Blackmail by Whitney Webb

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I’ve read it twice, so you don’t have to—though I would recommend you do. Webb is a brilliant researcher with encyclopedic knowledge of the historical development of global corruption and crimes, the players involved, and their connections to one another. All is not what it seems! Here are the Coles notes. 

One Nation Under Blackmail Volume 1 ~ the Sordid Union Between Intelligence and Organized Crime That Gave Rise to Jeffrey Epstein by Whitney Webb

In order to understand Jeffery Epstein and his activities in their full context, one must understand his powerful contacts and the structures that protected him. Those structures and those networks did not begin with Jeffery Epstein and they also did not die with him. In revealing his broader milieu, and that of his past associates and clients, one is left not only with a damning indictment of Jeffery Epstein, but also a damning indictment of American institutions, particularly those involved in “national security” matters and law enforcement. We cannot properly address the crimes of Jeffery Epstein, nor prevent them being committed by others in the future, unless we grapple with the covert power structures that have long wielded blackmail, bribes and assassinations as their weapons of choice to corrupt and control public institutions while manipulating and looting the public. JE was not an anomaly and his activities represent just the tip of the veritable iceberg. (ix)

Former CIA officer and Iran-Contra whistleblower Bruce Hemmings, circa 1990: “If you let them, they will take over not only the CIA but the entire government and the world, cutting off dissent, free speech, a free media, and they will cut a deal with anyone, from the Mafia to Saddam Hussein, if it means more power and money. (x)

Operation Underworld [WWII, where the U.S. government decided to enlist organized crime members in their operations], which the government was forced to reluctantly acknowledge after decades of public denials, involved the recruitment of high-level organized crime figures for work with American intelligence services, justified by wartime necessity. (2)

The National Crime Syndicate might be best understand as a social network—a sprawling, faction-filled web of associations and organizations that either collaborated or competed, depending on the situation of the spoils. (4) 

Lurking in the background of Operation Underworld, which has seen the ONI directly recruit [Lucky] Luciano, was the Office of Strategic Services (OSS), the wartime forerunner to the CIA and America’s first robust national intelligence organization [WW2]. (5)

[China involved in big pharma right from the start.] The Green Gang [who rose of power after Beijing tried to squash their grassroots trading empire] financed its activities through the cultivation and sale of opium—an activity that was fully sanctioned by Chiang Kai-Shek and the Kuomintang (KMT). Prior to the KMTs rise to power, Chinese opium production was unorganized, distributed among many different warring figures. Under Chang, however, a “suppression” was carried out with the ostensible goal of wiping out the opium trade in the name of public health. Behind the scenes, however, the KMT was doing quite the opposite: the “suppression” of opium production was actually an integrated effort to centralize it, placing production, distribution and ultimately control of the substance in the hands of a joint KMT-Green Gang monopoly. (11) 

Support for the KMT opium monopoly came from Western modernizers—including the Rockefeller Foundation, which had set up shop in China during the 1910s with the creation of the China Medical Board. At the same time, it was also part of a larger tendency among internationalists like the Rockefellers to seek regulation and control of the global drug trade. The overarching imperative of the League of Nations efforts for global drug regulation was to rationalize the production of opium and other precursors and to consolidate drug refining and distribution within a series of select major pharmaceutical corporations. Under Chiang’s leadership, China simultaneously kowtowed to the League’s initiatives while using the monopolization drive to cement itself at the center of drug production for both the criminal underworld and the “legitimate” overworld. A full-blown narco state was in the process of being formed, as opium cultivation came to be the central focus of the government’s revenue-raising programs. (11) 

The Supermob. The global drug trade is a massive business, and the offshore banking system that enables it is even bigger. Although most imagine drug networks, their controllers and their users as existing on the fringes of society, in reality, the massive amounts of capital that result from the production and distribution of illicit drugs occupy a central place within the global economic system. Consider a statement made in 2009 by Antoinio Maria Costa, who was then head of the UN Office on Drugs and Crime. According to Costa, proceeds from the drug trade were an important source of liquidity for cash-starved banks at the height of the 2008 economic crisis. The amounts absorbed by the banking system were enough to prevent some banks from collapsing. (22) 

The UN Office of Drugs and Crime estimated that money laundering activities—encompassing the washing of illicit drug revenue and more—make up anywhere from 2 to 5% of global GDP, at around $800 billion to $2 trillion. This, again, is almost certainly a conservative estimate. (22) 

What makes the “Supermob” unique is that it was a particularly stark and fairly unmasked example of how criminal networks, political power, and “legitimate” commercial activity mixed together in the period of explosive economic and cultural growth in the wake of WW2.  (24)

William Mellon Hitchcock was one of the financial backers of the Brotherhood of Eternal Love, the so-called “hippie mafia” that produced and distributed psychedelics on an international scale. (33) See Acid Dreams: The Complete Social History of LSD: The CIA, the Sixties and Beyond by Lee & Schlain

Castle Bank was a melding of worlds. A blossoming of heroin traffic coming out of Southeast Asia and a complicated money laundering operation that silently moved the funds of powerful gangsters, politicians, businessmen, and intelligence services around the globe. (33)

Carefully removed from the official Watergate narrative is Woodward’s stint, immediately prior to his career as a journalist, in the military. After attending Yale, Woodward had gone into the Navy, where he spent “four years of sea duty as a communications officer”. He served under two superiors who would go on to land important positions at the Pentagon. In August 1969, Woodward, still an enterprising young naval officer, arrived in Washington, DC. (179)

Clearly, this emergent network was like an octopus, with far-reaching tentacles reaching out in all directions and intertwined with seemingly legitimate businesses. …a strange, darker underbelly… (211)

Saudi Arabia was lending its Egyptian allies large sums of money, which were then used to purchase French-produced weapons that soon flooded African conflict zones. (220) 

At the end of the war [WW2], Donovan organized a committee to advise Hollywood on the production of spy-themed movies. The members of this special commission included Daved K.E. Bruce, J. Russell Forgan, Allen Dulles, and Shaheen. Their efforts successfully inserted a score of OSS veterans into the movie business, while also giving directors and producers a direct link to the inside world of wartime-intelligence operatives. Hollywood, as a result, became yet another milieu where the worlds of American intelligence intersected with organized crime. (250) 

When Nixon had briefly returned to private law practice, Shaheen had been one of his clients. He was responsible for connecting Nixon with Joey Smallwood, the premier of the Canadian province of Newfoundland. Smallwood, meanwhile, was engaged in an effort to industrialize the remote province by courting European and American capital. Some of the firms he courted bore the unmistakable mark of organized crime—for example, the controversial John C. Doyle and his company, Canadian Javelin. (250)

Thus, BCCI supported the work of A.Q. Khan, a Pakistani nuclear physicist and engineer known as the father of Pakistan’s weapons program. This work had begun after India tested the “Smiling Buddha,” their own nuclear weapon, in 1974 and it was carried out under the auspices of Khan Research Laboratories. Pakistan and Iraq had an experimental weapon called a “Columbine head”. Columbine heads were allegedly a type of thermobaric bomb, better known as a “fuel air explosive,” as they suck in the surrounding air to create a powerful explosion. (271) 

During the 1980s, Singlaub headed the US Council for World Freedom, the US branch of a global network of spies, criminals, Nazi exiles, fascist operators, and death squad leaders belonging to the World Anti-Communist League. By 1984, he was serving as the chairman of the league itself. The World Anti-Communist League and the US Council for World Freedom were interlaced with a host of like-minded pressure groups, dark-money fronts, private-intelligence apparatuses, and closed-door meeting places. These groups pressed for rolling back Cold War policies and boosting defense spending. More specifically, the pushed for the continuation and deepening of covert wars across the world; free trade policies, and other packages beneficial to multinational corporations; and the curtailing of civil and labor rights. Some of these, such as the American Security Council, appear to have participated in psychological operations aimed at the domestic population of the United States as well as abroad. (292)

A key aspect of the covert operations of the Reagan era that is frequently overlooked is that, with respect to the complex trafficking of arms to Iran, Oliver North and the Enterprise were dipping their toes into a much wider swamp of political and economic corruption, arms trafficking, and money laundering on a truly colossal scale. As the conflict between Iraq and Iran heated up, companies, banks, intelligence agents and smugglers poured arms and military materials into both sides of a bloody war. Despite laws barring such activities, the conflict in the Middle East was a boom time for many. (306) 

Space Research Corporation is best remembered for the man behind the company: Gerald Bull, a Canadian-born engineer and artillery expert who, prior to his 1990 assassination in the doorway of his Brussels apartment, had designed weapons systems for the Iraqis and the Chinese. He had also brokered the sale of arms to South Africa. Yet, his most famous effort was Project Babylon. Commissioned by the Iraqi government, Project Babylon was intended to construct a series of space guns, based on Bull’s earlier designs for launching satellites into orbit. These guns would be used to fire projectiles high into the atmosphere or near-earth orbit in order to reach targets far beyond the range of normal artillery equipment. (318) 

[A note on the exhaustive research Webb has brought to bear in this tome: one chapter, A Killer Enterprise, has 267 end notes! Each chapter is chock-a-block full of citations and documentation.)

[The book details the unbelievably byzantine labyrinth of a global toxic brotherhood]… “which paints a complicated picture of the unstable alliances and power competitions that raged beneath the surface of the this covert world”. (341) 

One of the most brazen and successful operations ever conducted by Israeli intelligence on a global scale involved its sale of a bugged software program to governments, corporations, and major financial and scientific institutions around the world. That software program, known as the Prosecutor’s Information Management System or PROMIS, was originally created and marketed by Inslaw Inc., a company created by former NSA official Bill Hamilton and his wife Nancy. In 1982, Inslaw leased its revolutionary PROMIS software to the US Justice Department, then headed by Edwin Meese III, Ronald Reagan’s most trusted advisor, Attorney General and, later, an advisor to Donald Trump following the 2016 election. The success of the software, which allowed integration of separate databases and information analysis on a previously unimaginable scale, eventually caught the attention of Rafi Eitan, the notorious and legendary Israeli spymaster as well as the handler of the “most dangerous spy” in American history, Jonathan Pollard. The PROMIS software could track anything, specifically money and people…This agreement between Eitan and Brian eventually led to two different versions of bugged PROMIS software, one bugged by Israel for the main purpose of spying on the operations of foreign governments and intelligence services and one bugged by CIA-linked entities and individuals for the main purpose of engaging in financial espionage and money laundering. (384-5)

Through Degem and other Maxwell-owned companies based in Israel and elsewhere, Maxwell marketed PROMIS so successfully that Israel intelligence soon had access to the innermost workings of innumerable governments, intelligence services, and corporations around the world. Many of Maxwell’s biggest successes came in selling PROMIS to dictators in Eastern Europe, Africa, and Latin America. Following the sale, and after Maxwell collected a handsome pay check, PROMIS’ unparalleled ability to track and surveil anything—from cash flows to human movement—was used by these governments to commit financial crimes with greater finesse and also to hunt down and disappear dissidents. Israel intelligence, of course, watched it all play out in real time. (386)

In Latin America, for instance, Maxwell sold PROMIS to military dictatorships in Chile and Argentina. There, PROMIS was used to facilitate the mass murder that characterized Operation Condo, as the friends and families of dissidents and so-called subversives were easily identified using PROMIS. PROMIS was so effective for this purpose that, just days after Maxwell sold the software to Guatemala, its US-backed dictatorship rounded up 20,000 “subversives” who were never heard from again. Of course, thanks to their backdoor in PROMIS, Israeli intelligence knew the identities of Guatemala’s disappeared before the victims’ own families. Israel, along with the United States, was also intimately involved in the arming and training of many of the same Latin American dictatorships that had been sold the bugged PROMIS software.  (387) 

Per Seymour, Riconosciuto had been recruited by the CIA while at Stanford University and Riconoscuito “and Earl Brian had traveled to Iran in 1980 and had paid $40 million to Iranian officials to persuade them not to let the hostages go before the presidential election”, a scheme better known as the October Surprise. Riconoscuito later testified that the software “was stolen as a favor to software-company executive Earl Brian, a friend of Meese’s, for Brian’s help in persuading the Iranian government to hold on to the embassy hostages until the 1980 election was over. (390) [In order to make residing president Carter look bad to the voters and lose.]

Systematics has had close ties to the NSA and CIA ever since its founding, sources say, as a money-shuffler for covert operations. It is no secret that there were billions of dollars moving around in “black” accounts—from buying and selling arms to the Contras, Iran, Iraq, Angola and other countries paying CIA operatives and laundering money from clandestine CIA drug dealing. Having taken over the complete computer rooms in scores of small U.S. banks as an “outsource” supplier of data processing, Systematics was in a unique position to manage that covert money flow. Sources say the money was moved at the end of every day disguised as a routine bank-to-bank balancing transaction. (396, footnote 67, James Normal articled called Fostergate) 

This focus on obtaining a secret window into the in and out-flows of the global banking system enabled not only the covert tracking of funds, but presumably allowed funds to be covertly hidden and financial crimes to be effectively covered up or rendered invisible. 

As previously mentioned, prior to Casolaro’s death [he was murdered], those close to the journalist had seen documents involving money transfers involving the World Bank to people involved in these scandals, such as Earl Brian and Adnan Khashoggi. In addition, it was reported by economist and author J. Orlin Grabbe that his particular version of PROMIS in use by the World Bank was being used to track wire transfers “in connection with a money-laundering operation that went from BCCI [Bank of Credit and Commerce International] London through the World Bank into Caribbean institutions. The role of the World Bank in the PROMIS scandal has been largely unexplored. (406-7)

One of the men who developed Neva alongside Maxwell, Ognian Doninov, president of the Bulgarian Chamber for Industry and Trade from 1980 to 1984 and Bulgaria’s Vice Premier from 1984-1986, claimed that Bulgarian intelligence agents involved in Neva had been covertly working “in Silicon Valley and other key technology sectors” in the United States, as well as in Britain and other Western countries. There, they would steal “technology blueprints, actual software, even computers. According to Gordon Thomas, Robert Maxwell created an umbrella of companies for use in Neva within six months. Thanks to Maxwell, Thomas writes, “The country had become […] the center of a thriving economy based upon whole-sale theft and money laundering.” This growing business empire, Thomas asserts would later “grown into one of the most powerful crime syndicates in the world, embracing the Russian mafia, the crime families of Bulgaria and, far away across the Atlantic, those in New York and, on the other side of the world, the crime families of Japan and Hong Kong. (412-3) 

John Patrick O’Neill, FBI executive agent-in-charge in New York until 2001, would later say the following about Maxwell and Multi-Group: in many ways Maxwell was at the heart of the global criminal network. Beginning with his Bulgarian connection he showed how to structure a network that grew into financially powerful criminal corporations whose power would extend to the South American drug cartels, the Tongs and the Triads, the Russian Mafia and the Japanese Yakuza. They were all there before. But the way Robert Maxwell set things up, they would all come together in Multi-Group in its early years. His last contribution was not that he just robbed his pension funds. It was that he was the man who set in motion a true coalition of global criminals. (413) 

[Reagan era schemes] Some have explained these specific scandals away, painting them as blights of the Reagan-Bush administrations and treating these intelligence-organized crime rackets as isolated incidents. However, instead, it appears that these intelligence-organized crime networks were so central to the national power structure by the time Reagan took office that the more well-known scandals of the era can be seen as “business as usual” for the period. Yet, lurking beneath Iran-Contra and other scandals that rocked the Reagan administration, there were darker and more nefarious activities that reached the highest levels of power during the same period, but received considerably less media attention. These other, lesser known scandals and crimes of the era show that, during the reigns of Reagan and Bush Sr., the rot reached all the way to the White House. Key power brokers in this sordid milieu included individuals intimately involved in the world of sex blackmail, who often bragged about their ability to “fix” and “manipulate” any politician or powerful individual they sought to influence, for the benefit of intelligence agencies, organized crime, as well as their own personal gain. (434)  

[Stay tuned for notes on Volume 2, when I’m done reading it.]

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* Reading Notes: Spycraft & Intelligence

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~ research notes from non-fiction books I’ve recently read ~ for the benefit of all researchers and dedicated, informed citizens 

Book and Dagger ~ How Scholars and Librarians Became the Unlikely Spies of WW2 by Elyse Graham 

Definition of Intelligence: “The world’s least glamourous people for the world’s most glamourous profession.” 

1941. After Pearl Harbour, the U.S. radically changed its foreign policy of avoiding scuffles perceived as being relevant to Europe and other places beyond America. 

They [scholars and librarians] went to training camps and “covered every aspect of spy craft: how to withstand interrogation; how to memorize someone’s appearance without resorting to useless descriptions like ‘normal height’ or ‘average face’; how to write in code; how to steal and alter identity documents; how to fight; how to kill quietly.”

President Truman created the OSS (Office of Strategic Services, nicknamed Oh So Social for all the drunken parties they had) on America’s entry into the war in 1942. After the war ended the OSS was briefly dissolved —for fear of how it could harm America from within. Shortly thereafter the CIA was formed. 

CIA: Unelected, centralized government-funded and approved agency of intelligence. It gave a place for a segment of the human population to think in spy, to live spy, long term. It’s how their brains are wired. The combined efforts spawned a vast array of sneaky, lying tactics, actors in a long play, a blooming of black roses, let’s say. They had a big library of secrets and dirt. 

Parties in Georgetown, WA, galore. Dissolved in 1945. “We don’t want to risk having an American gestapo.” This was just as Operation Paperclip was developing. The era of secrets—top secrets—began a long time ago. 

Previous incarnation of OSS was the Office of the Coordinator of Information. 

1942. The frontline became libraries and librarians recall “coming to work and finding that the map library had suddenly become top security area protected by 24-hour armed guards”. America’s supply of global maps was woefully small back then. 

What made a great spy wasn’t gadgets; what made a great saboteur wasn’t bombs. It was cleverness, cunning, an ability to believe in the power of small acts of rebellion.” (p199)

For decades, college students followed tunnels that led straight from the seminar room to the CIA. Among intelligence agencies like the CIA the phrase “P sources” – short for professor source – used to be code for the professors and university administrators who recruited on their behalf. For a time, Ivy league schools supplied a disproportionate amount of new employees of the CIA, according to the CIA’s in-house journal Studies in Intelligence (p292) 

For much of the second half of the 20th century, intelligence agencies recruited in large numbers from departments of English, History and the social sciences—and they still relied on professors in those departments to help turn data into usable intelligence. Humanities scholars moved in the hidden world of spies, and spies, in turn, shaped major institutions in the humanities. (p292) 

The world was incredibly fortunate (lol) that the United States was able to turn its greatest advantage at the start of WW2, its lack of a standing intelligence service, into its greatest advantage. That advantage came from innovation: because they weren’t tied down by established ways of doing things, the professors and librarians of OSS, and the refugees who joined them, were able to create something new. They became the scholars who invented modern spy craft. (297)

Jonathon Swift: “Falsehood flies, and truth comes limping after it, so that when men come to be undeceived, it is too late; the jest is over, and the tale hath had its effect.”

Washington Post Feb. 99 “When Seeing and Hearing isn’t Believing”: “Digital morphing—voice, video and photo—has come of age, available for use in psychological operations. PSYOPS, as the military calls it, seek to exploit human vulnerabilities in enemy governments, militaries and populations to pursue national battlefield objectives…” [Note: Whitney Webb’s observation that Americans have not cottoned on to the fact that they themselves are also considered “enemies” and are also being subjected to the same dirty warfaring techniques the American military has used on people overseas.)

The Yale library–and a young English professor–would serve as a cover for a secret agent who would “go abroad ostensibly to acquire books for the library, but actually to gather intelligence”. (intro xii)

OSS recruited 100s of “mild mannered professors and oddball archivists and restless librarians”. 

Europeans had been developing spy craft for centuries so the Americans, knowing they could not beat them at their game, found an intelligence resource that other countries in the war were underestimating. (intro xiv)

The 900 secret agents in the Research and Analysis (R&A) were called the “Chairborne Division”. The war may have been fought on battlefields but it was won in libraries. (intro xv)

The power of power from down below. 

The library rats of the OSS approached problems differently than their enemy counterparts, the Nazis. They saw  military intel in newspaper society columns, maps to unfamiliar cities in phone books, trash, enemy newspapers, railway rate schedules, vacation photographs of buildings the OSS wanted to burgle or demolish, and many more. 

Pearl Harbour attack on Dec. 7/41 showed Americans they had no intelligence infrastructure. Recruits had no idea how to “spy” and, like their instructors, probably gleaned what they could from spy novels and radio programs, and movies. Later on from TV. 

Just how do you teach women and men who held ordinary jobs—teacher, professor, librarian, secretary, hospital technician—to suddenly become saboteurs, prison interrogators, undercover agents, resistance cell liaisons, etc?

Spy school courses fell into 5 categories: cryptology, criminal skills like burglary, sabotage, how to kill, psychological warfare, recognizing enemy police officers and intelligence agents, and secrecy. (p39)

OSS operatives whom the Gestapo captured had to be able to hold out under interrogations for 48 hours, not because there was any chance of rescue but so their underground allies had the time they needed to safely relocate. 

In England in the 1940s, England assigned an upper class mystery writer and screenwriter to the position of interviewer of potential female secret agents. 

Students became couriers, saboteurs, recruiters, propagandists, whisperers seeding conflict. 

A Woman of No Importance — the Untold Story of the American Spy Who Helped Win World War II by Sonia Purnell

Back in 1953, “morale generally at the CIA was low, with one in five officers leaving in 1953 alone. Many believed their bosses did not know what they were doing and wasted a “shocking amount of money” on failed missions overseas, which were falsely claimed as successes. (sound familiar?) To the outside world the CIA represented the highest form of public service and an omnipotent muscular force intent on subverting and sabotaging Communism. But insiders claimed that “incompetent people were given great power and capable recruits were stacked like cordwood in the corridors”. (p300)

Operation Paperclip, “the code name for the wholesale recruitment of former senior Nazis on the grounds that however barbaric their conduct in the war they also ranked as the ultimate anti-Soviets. The U.S. Army’s intelligence operation had taken on the Butcher of Lyon himself, Klaus Barbie. Men who had been responsible for the torture and deaths of so many […] were now being spirited away from their war crimes tribunals to safety” by the U.S and were paid handsomely by the American government. (p301) 

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* I’m Scamming the CBC

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You Did Not Harm Us

I used to be an ardent CBC fan, for decades. But no more. Now I want to live long enough to see the death of that dank purveyor of propaganda and brainwashing. Demolished. In the dustbin of history. I know in my heart that CBC can’t be reformed; it’s propped up by the government, last year it received $1.4 billion (!). But ever hopeful, and in the off chance that maybe, just maybe, a few of their story submission readers might have what James Corbett calls “two brain cells to rub together,” I decided to submit a non-fiction article into their annual writing contest. Winning comes with CBC-styled publicity, $6K prize money and a session at Banff Center for the Arts, all of which I could care less about.

Without a doubt my article doesn’t stand a chance in hell of being picked for the shortlist. My words slam the mainstream media in general, and CBC in particular, for their disgraceful subjectivity, their vicious attacks against unvaxxed Canadians and the Truckers Freedom Convoy during the COVID scamdemic, their blithe superficiality, their compromised ethical backbone, their avoidance of all corporate corruption, their obsequious worship of the dirty Liberal party, their tedious mediocrity, their endless WOKE proselytizing. (Did I miss anything?) 

When I submitted the article, I visualized me having super strong arms and pulling back my huge, symbolic quiver and releasing a giant symbolic flaming arrow that would arc up through the air and over the CBC’s ramparts into the dark heart of the compound. Maybe my words would land where they desperately need to go and start a raging fire that would spread quickly and destroy the entire nasty mess. 

Contest entry fee: $25. In therapy terms, a real bargain. My disgust was eating me up and I had to get it off my chest. Here it is:

You Did Not Harm Us

…but don’t ever ‘not harm us’ again!

It’s a safe bet that anyone against research during COVID was gripped by terror. Most of us were in the midst of avoiding our own ignorance—some were protecting vested interests and careers—and some were corrupt and wanting to keep a nefarious agenda concealed. You don’t have to look very far to figure out why so many were averse to the knowledge that research brings; corporate-owned media was—and still is—busy trying to grind everyone into their version of correct groupthink: 

“Doing Your Own Research

is a Good Way of Being Wrong”

Washington Post

January 2024

Investigative journalist and stand-up comic, Jimmy Dore, poked fun at this in one of his performances: 

“You know, before COVID, doing your own research used to be called reading. You would never shame people for trying to get informed, no matter what other subject it was, no matter how unimportant, like if I say, Hey I’m gonna go buy a car. Don’t look into it! Well how would I know which car to get? Ask the salesman!..”

This little gem of 1984 doublespeak could make Orwell spin in his grave:

Don’t Go Down the Rabbit Hole

Critical thinking, as we’re taught to do it,

isn’t helping in the fight against misinformation.

~ New York Times, February 2021

With the perspective of hindsight, COVID showed us that doing research has become a necessity, and in some cases would even be crucial for survival. Media literacy has never been a more important skillset. Has anyone asked why the corporate-owned media—local, national and international—were all so magically in sync? Why did they all push identical “news”, why did they all hammer the phrases “all scientists agree” and “safe and effective”? Why did they squash all necessary inquiry and investigation? As one protestor accurately put it, of course all scientists agree when you censor and cancel the ones who don’t. As for “safe and effective”, pharmaceutical companies weren’t telling—because they didn’t have to. 

Blackout clauses are built into their contracts. Before American courts forced them to do so, COVID vaccine makers didn’t have to provide any clinical trial data for 75 years! They are legally protected from liability. Back in the 1980s, before then President Reagan granted pharmaceutical companies immunity from legal prosecution, people were successfully suing for damages. Vaccine makers would have to yank their faulty products off the market when more than a handful of injuries or death occurred. How is it possible that car manufacturers can be sued for manufacturing defects but vaccine manufacturers cannot? Harming or killing consumers with spoiled food, a dangerous toy or even a scalding hot cup of coffee, have all been decided by the courts to be serious crimes, but harming or killing people with a vaccine isn’t? 

Today we see the direct result of that legal immunity. During the COVID years, people began collapsing and dying on camera. Professional athletes dropping on soccer fields, tennis pros dropping on the court, TV talk show hosts toppling from their desk, lecturers dropping from their lecterns, public speakers toppling like trees, performers staggering sideways and crumpling into a heap on stage, audiences gasping and unsure if what they’re seeing is part of the performance. The young and healthy were suddenly dying, all cause mortality numbers climbed, miscarriages increased, chronic disease increased, alarming stats poured in. (1)(2)

Scientists with courage and backbone who sounded the alarm on shoddy clinical trials were rapidly silenced and de-platformed; social media platforms, including Twitter and Facebook, were actively involved in censorship. The few brave doctors who blew the whistle were ruined; nurses who declined getting the vaccine or refused to go along with COVID emergency protocols were ostracized, fired or laid off and denied Employment Insurance benefits. 

Funeral home embalmers began finding sinewy white clots in the blood of cadavers, some as thick and long as a pencil. This was completely new and shocking to the profession. And they, too, feared speaking out, though one eventually did at Canada’s National Citizens Inquiry. (3) Dissenting voices of all kinds, professional and layman, all were silenced and crushed. And you wouldn’t have known any of this unless you were researching or listening to others doing research. 

If your primary source of official “health” information during COVID was the TV news, you were thoroughly brainwashed. I know because I was one of them! Despite my instincts telling me to wait, warning me not to do it, despite not understanding RNA, despite being repelled by the words ‘new technology’ in the same sentence as ‘vaccine’, I decided to get the first dose of Moderna. I told myself, I’ll take one for the team, meaning I wanted to help protect my community.

I’ve had forty vaccines in my life: twenty during school years, nineteen for work and world travels, and then the fortieth shot was this “safe and effective” mRNA. Four months after the first shot, my heart suddenly went wonky—irregular heartbeat, dizzy spells, blood pressure so high my doctor was alarmed. By then reports were starting to come in about deaths in the UK from the AstraZeneca jab. The UK and other countries were stopping its use. With some bitterness I listened as my doctor told me she didn’t think my symptoms were related to the vaccine. I had to go on blood pressure medication normally given to the very elderly. 

It suddenly became clear to me that we’d all been profoundly conned, which was very destabilizing for someone who had always trusted science and the guys in charge. Months later, after my fear of dying prematurely subsided, I was gripped with self-loathing for being stupid and not listening to my intuition. Finally, once I had figured out what happened, who’s responsible, and why we were so harmed, I felt a diamond-hard determination to see the corporate media cartel well and truly reformed, all the health cons exposed and all the criminals brought to justice.

I began monitoring media far and wide. Any reports on sudden deaths, on the myriad of vax injuries? Nothing, complete blackout. Instead, all news outlets pummelled us with propaganda, half-lies and fear factor messaging until families fractured, friendships severed, children were sent into spirals of mental illness, and the web of Canadian society started to fall apart. Not to mention all the rest of the social and economic carnage all around the world.

Many Canadians were turned into proto-Nazis. Many called for the quarantine and shunning of the unvaxxed; suspicion, hysteria and hatred spread like black mold. Those who chose body autonomy over an untested, experimental vaccine had their lives turned into a nightmare. Canada was being marched into fascism: produce papers, scan that QR code so you can order a cheeseburger, agree to endless draconian measures and quarantines. It was hard to buy food, have a normal life, go to school, travel, access important services, and attend gatherings. So many people were happy to show their papers in order to do their part: proof of vax status wasn’t tyranny writ large, it was doing the right thing.  

Making matters worse, in 2021, then Prime Minister Trudeau dove into the hate game and used a divide-and-conquer strategy to win his re-election campaign, calling Canadians who declined an experimental vaccine “unacceptable”, asking if we “should tolerate them”. Canada’s bought-off press helped him every step of the way. 

The unvaxxed—and those like me who became anti-vaxxers—summoned our courage and hunkered down in defense mode. We worked hard to expose and debunk the absurdity, lies and corruption. Researching became the order of the day; it was the only way to light the path forward. People from across the political spectrum became a new tribe of resisters, realizing, for the first time in our lives, that our rights were under direct threat and something very dark was underway. 

If you lose the rights of the few, you end up losing the rights of the many. Voltaire’s famous quote helped give us strength: those who can make you believe absurdities can make you commit atrocities. Canada was deeply wounded and society was terribly divided, and we were driven to expose the truth on behalf of all of us. As Margaret Mead so famously said, Never doubt that a small group of committed citizens can change the world, indeed it’s the only thing that ever has.

Former veteran CBC reporter, Rodney Palmer, testifying before the National Citizens Inquiry: 

“They took an exceptional moment to decide they would not be journalists, that instead they would be public health messengers [which] failed to expire with the end of the emergency…and the result is that Canada’s national broadcaster has morphed into a state broadcaster. And I worked in countries where there were state broadcasters—China, Syria, Malawi, North Korea—it’s promoting government policy without question, while censoring, belittling and shaming learned Canadians who dare to object and inform us of the truth. Bad journalism is incompetence but propaganda is a betrayal. And that’s what CBC has done, it betrayed us all.”

People still ignorant of the media’s use of propaganda tactics often hurl abuse at those who research, use the internet to learn the truth, think freely and question official narratives. Derogatory insults, stereotypes and cliches are used to belittle. Ironically, they believe they’re educated and innately superior—if they didn’t hear it on the news it didn’t happen or it’s conspiracy theory. They’ve become weaponized handmaidens—useful, manipulated and strictly controlled.

Canadian society is now fractured and unwell, though nobody seems to want to talk about that. Hoping to heal by avoidance, perhaps. We don’t want to believe that science could actually harm us, but we know we don’t want that nightmare to ever repeat. Luckily for all of us, efforts to crush free speech have failed—so far. But attacks continue and we’re seeing more dirty tactics, more devious legislation to push us into compliance and obedience. The same bad actors who sold us “safe and effective” are now demonizing by levelling accusations of hatred, far right extremism, and misinformation. How ludicrous and how obvious. 

Most people aren’t “far” anything, other than right so far. Most are firmly in the majority middle which tends to be about 75% of the population; they value reasonableness and discussion, they value balanced perspectives and cool heads prevailing. The majority middle tend to dislike extremist ideas and extremist groups; they keep civil society afloat. And the accusation of misinformation is both a weapon and a disguise—a weapon because it aims to kill facts and truth; a disguise because it shields the corrupt from scrutiny.

The time to wake up was yesterday. The vaccine industrial complex is real; militarism, greed and sociopathy have corroded science thanks to lax laws and regulation, lack of transparency and far too much trust. The same people invested in pharma also own the corporate media. They don’t want us to trust the decency of our fellow Canadians; they want us obedient, divided and fearful. If they can keep us in constant opposition it’s easier to slow march us into tyranny. You would know all this if you did some research and stopped allowing yourself to be easy pickings for brainwashing. We better wise up, come together and focus on the right targets. It’s no longer Left versus Right but rather Truth versus Propaganda. 

Corporate and government-funded media are not our friends—not worthy of blanket trust; giving them our attention needs to be a cautionary tale of alert skepticism. The sooner we become media literate, the sooner we learn how to find high quality sources of independent information. It’s up to us to protect our democracy, freedom and health. 

Citations:

(1) https://dksdata.com/ExcessDeaths 

(2) allcausecanadaFebruary2024.pdf

(3) https://rumble.com/v2fuj08-licensed-funeral-director-laura-jeffery-on-post-vaccine-embalming-nci.html (Pictures of clots found in the blood at the 19:00 minute mark.) 

Excellent independent journalism builds hope and strength. Here are a few: 

~ Every minute at the Corbett Report is time well spent. https://corbettreport.com/ James is superbly educated about every dire and diabolical issue we face. And he communicates in a way that is clear-hearted, easy to understand and entertaining.

~ Whitney Webb has a brain like an encyclopedia. Her massive political knowledge means there’s nothing she doesn’t know. Author of One Nation Under Blackmail.

https://unlimitedhangout.com/author/whitney-webb

~ Andy Lee is a forensic investigator exposing fiscal corruption, especially of the Liberal government, China’s infiltration and Canada’s swamp. She’s on X (with over 220,000 followers)  @realAndyLeeShow 

https://sleepingwithgiants.substack.com

 ~ Sam Cooper, investigative journalist, former Global TV reporter, expert on money laundering, CCP operations and political corruption. 

https://www.thebureau.news

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* Meet Some Citizen Journalists

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They dig for facts and get the truth; they do so because they have our backs; they take no money from corporations or government; and they’re funded by the people.

SAM COOPER

@scoopercooper on X

You may know him from his many years reporting for the Province and Sun newspapers in Vancouver, then his years at Global TV. In 2023 he became an independent and opened The Bureau.

https://www.thebureau.news/

See his book, Willful Blindness: How a Network of Narcos, Tycoons, and CCP Agents Infiltrated the West 

“Sam Cooper is an award-winning investigative journalist and best-selling author, who has presented his anti-corruption findings to Canadian law enforcement agencies, officials in the Pentagon, financial and legal professionals, and academics.”

Over 30K Substack subscribers and many more followers.

Podcasting: An excerpt from “CCP Golden Shares.. Inside the Global Fentanyl Trade” during which he interviews a Washington Drug Expert:

Sam Cooper: They’re not looking at the banks. And they’re basically wrong?

Senior U.S. Expert: The issue isn’t a lack of skill—there are tremendously capable investigators in the RCMP. The problem is they don’t have the legal tools to back them up. For example, if I seize a drug lab, I’m required to immediately disclose the evidence. That exposes our trade craft. Once the network knows it’s being investigated, we can’t pursue them effectively anymore. So, in effect, the laws are protecting these criminal groups. That’s why they’re expanding—they’re not going away.

Sam Cooper: And that’s why they’re bigger in Canada.

Senior U.S. Expert: Exactly. And this is a critical point I want to make. As the U.S. tightens control over the southwest border and ramps up efforts against cartels in Mexico, what do you think happens in Canada? Who becomes the supplier?

“The Bureau investigates the PRC’s geopolitical ‘Vancouver Model’—a system of illicit finance and influence—” https://www.thebureau.news/p/weaponizing-drugs-and-dirty-money

https://www.thebureau.news/p/united-front-narcos-from-maine-farms

Aaron Gunn—then documentary filmmaker, now MP for North Island—Powell River, interviews Sam Cooper about his book, Willful Blindness:

JAMES CORBETT

CorbettReport.com

James Corbett can teach you everything you need to know about everything. There are many excellent independent investigative journalists but he’s the one everyone should know about and visit often. He’s been at it for over 25 years, winning awards, writing, directing, hosting, and producing hundreds of podcasts and many excellent long-form documentaries. In every video he makes, he includes a list of primary source links so people can verify for themselves the truth in what he’s saying. He’s a brilliant humanist with a scrupulous ethical core. He brings a clear heart and temperate passions to the darkest subjects; his light touch, often laced with levity and wit, makes the hard truths easier to bear.

https://substack.com/@corbettreport

https://www.wikispooks.com/wiki/James_Corbett

His just-published book, Reportage, Essays on the New World Order is at https://reportagebook.com/ or you can find it on Amazon.

How & Why Big Oil Conquered The World
Episode 415 – The Global Digital ID Prison
The Media Matrix

TRISH WOOD

…hosted CBC’s Fifth Estate for a decade; she credits the CBC of yore with teaching her to be a great investigative journalist, which she’s been for over 35 years.

But the award-winning investigative journalist left the Mothercorp when its standards deteriorated and she couldn’t see herself being there anymore. Her excoriating criticism: “We don’t have media. The CBC is now evil. They’re populated with the left-wing that hates populism, they hate the Conservatives, they hate religion. The CBC was captured by extreme Wokeism really early on. They wouldn’t have jobs anywhere else so they are all in to drink—and force the rest of us to drink—the KoolAid. They are not reflecting what Canadians are thinking or need to be talking about. They hate the working class as much as the bureaucrats in Ottawa hate the working class. They think the working class are dirty, smelly racists and we need to get rid of all of them. The media caters to people’s biases because it’s more financially expedient to do so.”

Now a successful independent, Wood shares her wealth of experience and wisdom—in that mellifluous voice of hers you can listen to all day—with over 15K subscribers, and many more followers, on her podcast Trish Wood is Critical.

https://trishwood.substack.com/

https://www.trishwoodpodcast.com/podcast/episode-158-rodney-palmer

https://trishwood.substack.com/p/can-the-cbc-be-resuscitated-or-should

https://trishwood.substack.com/p/new-pod-indy-journos-gone-wild

WHITNEY WEBB

…has a brain and memory like an entire set of encyclopedias. Listening to her speak is a privilege; that she works so assiduously on behalf of humanity is a blessing to us all in these darkening days.

Find her at unlimitedhangout.com and there’s a big catalogue of interviews on Rumble.

See her book of two volumes, One Nation Under Blackmail, the sordid union between Intelligence and Organized Crime that gave rise to Jeffrey Epstein (volume one is available at the Lillooet Library).

A sample of the way her comprehensive knowledge leads to confident, accurate assessments and on-the-nose predictions:

“Mark Carney isn’t stepping into power to protect Canadian sovereignty, he’s here to dissolve it. This is not an elected leader with a mandate from the people, this is a banker groomed by global institutions, positioned at the helm of the most powerful central banks in the West and now parachuted into Canada’s top office in the middle of an engineered crisis.

Carney was governor of the bank of Canada during the 2008 crash, then he was handed the top job at the bank of England becoming the first non-Brit to hold that position in over three centuries. That wasn’t a promotion, that was placement… a signal to the global financial elite that Carney wasn’t just one of them, he was ready for the next phase of the project and that project is global governance…technocratic control. A world where countries exist in name but real decisions are made by unelected bureaucrats, asset managers and central banks.

Carney has never hidden his loyalties. He’s a key figure within the World Economic Forum, a trusted Architect of Klaus Schwab’s “Great-Reset”. He doesn’t just support stakeholder capitalism, he helped design its playbook. He spent the last several years preparing the framework for an economic transition that replaces national interest with global compliance, freedom with surveillance and sovereignty with dependency.

Carney’s language is the same coded language used by every WEF loyalist…Sustainability, resilience, inclusion and climate finance. But decode that language and the reality is much darker. What they call climate finance is the commodification of nature. Turning forests, oceans, carbon footprints and even your personal behaviour into financial instruments to be tracked, traded and controlled. It’s not about protecting the environment, it’s about creating a new asset class for the elite, and once human behaviour becomes an asset it can also become a liability… something to be taxed, fined and even restricted. This is Carney’s real vision for Canada. NOT protection from Trump but deeper integration into a technocratic system designed in Davos and enforced through digital change.

He is a leading proponent of central bank digital currency (CBDC’s) which are being marketed as efficient and modern but are in fact tools of unprecedented control. Programmable money means conditional money. Money that can be restricted based on who you are, where you are, what you say or how you behave. Pair that with digital ID Systems, bio-metric tracking and algorithmic decision making and the result is a digital prison where your ability to participate in society depends on your willingness to comply with the demands of unelected global institutions.

This is not a conspiracy theory. This is his openly admitted policy. Carney has published it, the WEF has published it, the International Settlements has published it. What they need now is public consent or at the very least public submission.”

Interview 1676 – Whitney Webb Exposes How Green Finance is Monopolizing the Planet

Another great Whitney interview here:

https://odysee.com/@BackToTheLight:7/webb-climate-720p:f

ANDY LEE

https://twitter.com/RealAndyLeeShow/

@realAndyLeeShow 

Approaching 200K followers on X.Her mission is to expose Canadian government corruption and the malfeasance of the privileged minority. Her research uncovers the relationships and business connections among them, the colossal taxpayer money they misappropriate and lose (steal), and provides documentation that should bring the culprits to justice. If we had a healthy, functioning country these people would be brought down. But they aren’t, they remain in power, and a long ways from justice. By all appearances, Canada is run by an untouchable Swamp, Inc., primarily that historical Laurentian club concentrated in Ottawa/Montreal. You want to see a brilliant forensic investigator in action, check her out. Her posts are viewed by many more people than the mainstream news, by a long shot.

NEIL OLIVER

NeilOliver.com on Youtube

@thecoastguy on X

Neil Oliver, who many will know as the Coast Guy from former TV series and documentaries. A former practising archaeologist and show host, Oliver became a full-time citizen activist during COVID when he started connecting the dots of extreme corruption, lies and advancing tyranny. Like so many millions of us, the COVID scamdemic sent him down the rabbit hole where he discovered just how corrupt things are. He chronicles, step by step, that process, and he’s become much, much more than a TV host, he’s a beacon of light, a soul warrior. His new understanding of reality unfolds for himself in real time, as it does for his more than 325K followers. And he tells a great yarn while doing so.

 

CATHERINE AUSTIN FITTS

https://solari.com/

Her personal story is riveting; a heavy weight in the financial world of the west, one of the few women inside the boys club with significant power and a front seat for decades—until she saw the depth of corruption and problems. When she could no longer support the fallacies of the boys club she became a whistleblower. For that betrayal she was persecuted for 11 years—but she survived. Assisted by the strength of her religious beliefs she hung onto her optimism and joy in life and now runs Solari, a successful business which situates money inside an ethical, holistic framework.

Wikipedia: “Catherine Austin Fitts is an American investment banker and former public official who served as managing director of Dillon, Read & Co. and, during the Presidency of George H.W. Bush, as United States Assistant Secretary of Housing and Urban Development for Housing. Fitts has researched and commented on government spending. In a 2004 study published in World Affairs: The Journal of International Issues, she purported to find “evidence that a very large proportion of the nation’s wealth is being illegally diverted since several decades into secret, unaccountable channels and programmes with unspecified purposes, including covert operations and subversions abroad and clandestine military R&D at home. Public institutions have been infiltrated and taken over by shadowy groups in the service of powerful private and vested interests, often at the expense of the common good.”

She works tirelessly to warn about CBDC, digital IDs and programmable money.

https://home.solari.com/i-want-to-stop-cbdcs-what-can-i-do

Fitts gives an excellent speech at Hillside College: “You need to stop doing business with criminals and stop financing criminals.”

Her interview with Tucker Carlson.

The sum of the parts: when you add them all up, watch a bit here and there through your week, you end up being fairly well-informed, with facts at your fingertips and the ability to speak calmly and intelligently on many subjects.

So many more citizen journalists could be showcased here. Feel free to add your favourites in the comments.