I ended the last regular post, What Is Wrong With Western Civilization, with the suggestion to read Jacob Siegel’s ‘Invasion of the Fact-Checkers’ in The Tablet.  In summary, Mr. Siegel details the following:

• A “Ministry of Truth” – ala Orwell’s 1984 – has arisen and plays a large role in determining what most of the populace reads and hears.
• The Ministry covertly operates as a sort of Censorship Industrial Complex (CIC) under the euphemism “fact-checking.”
• One of the “fact-checking” pioneers in Mainstream Media (MSM) was the Tampa Bay Times’ Politifact begun in 2007.
• In fact, the Tampa Bay Times was and is a possession of the ‘not for profit institute’ for media ‘studies’, the Poynter Institute.
• Poltifact has morphed into Poynter’s International Fact Checking Network (IFCN). 
• Not only does IFCN serve as the hub for “authoritative” determinations of what constitutes ‘truth’, it trains and certifies censors across the world – with more than 100 new Ministry of Truth branches globally, and counting.
• The censorship efforts are funded with many millions of dollars from the plutocratic elite and your taxpayer dollars and essentially “proclaims that America’s ruling bureaucrats at the FDA,NIAID, CDC, the FBI, the CIA, the Fed – and the entire alphabet soup of government agencies – along with the ruling Democratic Party, are never wrong about anything.
• IFCN (and its Poynter overlords) are shockingly incompetent and predictably prejudiced in ‘fact-checking’, rendering a system that amounts to global, organized political censorship.

The Censorship Industrial Complex grew out of an obscure branch of the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) called Cybersecurity Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA).  It was originally formed to help prevent cyberattacks on traditional infrastructure such as bridges, airports, utilities, electric grids. However, in reaction to President Trump’s election in 2016, Obama’s outgoing DHS Chief designated voting systems as critical infrastructure to fall under CISA’s jurisdiction. Over the next four years CISA became a hub for coordinated government censorship efforts. The unconstitutional efforts were justified by claiming “voting infrastructure” apparently included each individual’s mind which had to be protected from disinformation, first foreign and then domestic. No joke, CIC luminaries have spoken of cleaning ‘neurological infrastructure’; that means your brain.  Clean brain = Brainwashing.

During the lead up to the ’22 mid terms DHS announced the formation of a full-blown Ministry of Truth called Disinformation Governance Board. The public outrage that engendered resulted in the Board being scuttled. Nonetheless, CISA in coordination with a number of federal agencies picked up the censorship work in earnest – recruiting and utilizing a number of non-government agencies to do the unconstitutional work it wished done. Most of the censorship work was done through cooperation of big tech platforms including Facebook, Twitter, and a dozen or so more. Tens of millions of postings by Americans were deleted, hundreds of millions of postings were partially censored by limiting their visibility and distribution. 

That there is a virtual Ministry of Truth operating ought to shock the sensibilities of anyone even vaguely familiar with the United States Bill of Rights. The idea itself is anathema to the very foundation of this country. Unfortunately, even this concern cannot be taken for granted. The most recently appointed Justice of the United States Supreme Court openly expressed dismay that the 1^st Amendment to the Constitution might be used to ‘hamstring’ the US government’s censorship efforts. It was once taught in grade school that the very purpose of the Free Speech Clause of the First Amendment was to not just hamstring but make impossible any efforts by the government to censor American citizens.

That the Poynter Institute was chosen to lead the censorship/propaganda efforts raises more concerns.  As we shall see, the inmates are literally running the asylum.

I have twenty years of experience dealing face to face with Poynter and its own propaganda arm, the Tampa Bay Times. Why, because Poynter and its Times have been avowed enemies of the Church of Scientology for the past 50 years.  As such, I have had occasion to deal directly with the Chairmen of the Board and Editors of both Poynter and its Times for the past forty years.  That includes Andrew Barnes (1984-2007), Paul Tash (2008-2022) and Neil Brown (2022 to the present). I have communicated with each of them. I can confidently state that the Poynter/Times board and its three continuous rulers over the past 4 decades are some of the most elitist, virtue-signaling folks I have ever encountered. They wield their newspaper and Poynter’s influence like a battle axe and do so in an arrogant fashion.  The halls of Poynter management ooze with sanctimony.

They were practiced at the arts of censorship, propaganda, shaming, and marginalizing many years before it became vogue as it is today. They treat opinion as fact when it suits their purposes, and they treat fact as opinion when it is inconvenient to their aims. They are pros at the techniques of identity politics and smear by association. That is, they condemn a class of people and continuously reinforce it with opinion dressed up like fact, label one as part of that class, then crush the person for carrying that label.  In the case of Scientology they played it both ways.  Many stories were written on the shortcomings of individual Scientologists.  Not church staff members or members of the clergy; Just persons whom they identified as believers or practitioners of the religion.  The only ‘newsworthy’ criterion was the fact of a Scientology affiliation.  Each story was sure to smear the person for being involved with Scientology and smear Scientology for having impliedly created such a creature.  A ‘heads we win, tails you lose’ set up.  It was the ‘fake news’ phenomena in practice, decades before the term was even coined.

The Poynter/Times anti-Scientology contingent’s grip on the “fact checker” censorship industrial complex is significant. IFNC is the sanctioning entity for all ‘fact-checkers’.  “Factchecker” is a newly created ‘profession’ that requires absolutely no expertise. The only requirement is a steadfast commitment to enforcing by any means necessary the approved narratives of the Neo Liberal Order. They train fact checkers to understand those narratives and in sophistry tactics which find any ‘facts’ not aligning with the narratives to be ‘false.’ 

The head of IFNC is Angie Holan.  She graduated to that position from a stint at the Times’ Politifact – the original ‘fact checker’.  It was at Politifact that she helped Poynter win a Pulitzer Prize for ‘fact checking’. Ironically, the most significant verified ‘fact’ leading to the award was later recognized to be “the lie of the year” (such a remarkable story warrants a separate post).  As a fledgling Poynter/Times acolyte, she ‘fact checked’ at least one anti-Scientology propaganda piece. The story smeared Scientology by labelling a member of the religion as a slumlord because of code violations in a rental property he had recently purchased. He was no more in violation than many other landlords, and far newer to the ranks than most. But, he was a Scientologist, so knives out.  

The story falsely claimed the individual was at an even ‘higher Scientology training level’ than a certain celebrity, who also happens to be a Scientologist, apparently for the purpose of also smearing the prominent Scientologist and garnering itself more attention for its hit piece.  The target of the piece was not a member of the Scientology clergy nor an employee of the church. He was labelled and his religion slammed because he was a member of that religion. Imagine, Jewish Slumlord Exposed?  Or, Catholic Slumlord Scandal?  Or Hindu Slumlord Shame?  It is a microcosm of the Mainstream Media’s smear modus operandi. The Scientologist is smeared and shamed for being associated with Scientology.  Scientology is smeared and shamed for the alleged acts of a believer. Prominent Scientologists are smeared by association with both.  This is critical to understanding what the CIC is now doing politically. The same tactics are applied to any political views that clash with NLO orthodoxy.  Label, smear, shame, and convict others by association. 

The reporter Ms. Holan fact checked was the then Scientology beat reporter. That’s right, the Poynter’s Times had then as it has today a beat to single out a single religion for frying whenever one of its members – no matter how lax in his or her participation or membership – commits a transgression. The reporter, Rob Farley, was all over the Clearwater community (the site of Scientology’s Florida headquarters). He ran a series of stories about the ramblings against Scientology of a homeless, jobless drug addict. The addict soon recognized for the first time in his three decades of life he could be elevated to semi-celebrity status by merely being anti-something he had no personal knowledge about. And so, at the Poynter Institutes’ behest he went in whole hog. Until, apparently overwhelmed with guilt he committed suicide. 

Where is Mr. Farley now?  He is the Deputy Managing Editor of FactCheck.org. His organization is ‘certified’ as reliable by, none other than the Angie Holan-lead International Fact-checking Network.  Deputized to censor you by the ‘very best people’ at the helm of the Poynter Institute. 

These are the people who have been designated by your government to determine what ideas are worthy of dissemination and what ideas will be suppressed. Factchecking is a euphemism for propaganda dissemination and censorship.  In our next installment we will demonstrate how Big Brother’s arbiters of truth are far more concerned with controlling your thoughts than assisting you on issues of credibility.