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How Factchecking Became Thought Policing

Posted on April 18, 2024 by | Comments Off on How Factchecking Became Thought Policing

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The Poynter Principle

Reference: Meet the Censors

If the International Factchecking Network (IFNC) run out of the Poynter Institute in St Petersburg Florida was sticking to the facts it might not be posing the existential threat to our society that it currently does. Neither would the Mainstream media (MSM) in general. But, neither of them have ever let the facts get in the way of their mission. Both are fond of saying “we can disagree on how we view the facts, but we cannot disagree on what the facts are.”  The truth is, MSM and IFNC and the Censorship Industrial Complex (CIC) they pimp for are really concerned with the conclusions people make and will manipulate the ‘facts’ to implant those conclusions in their minds. I witnessed Poynter and its Times do this for decades in order to smear and marginalize a group of people it took issue with, the Scientologists. Now, they practice their trade on political opponents on an international level.

Fact checking has been foisted upon us as a pseudo-scientific process for determining what our minds ought to process and ought not to. MSM and IFNC have invented the title ‘factchecker’ and incessantly used it as if it were a profession for which one took a prescribed university course of education to earn a degree.  In fact, certified IFNC factcheckers have zero credentials. Worse, in most cases they have anti-credentials. That is, their only claim to entitlement is that they are reporters. Think about it. Reporters are literally the least trusted profession in the world when it comes to facts.  A recent Gallup poll found that the percentage of Americans who have a great deal of confidence in the media is 7%. That is about the same percentage of Americans who own more than 50% of its wealth. That is about right – the media, by survey, is the tool of the Plutocrats to keep the real people ignorant so that they remain in their peasant places. 

What reporters do have that hard-working honest people do not, is practiced expertise in the art of deception. They are expert at sophistry. (Sophistry: a subtle, tricky, superficially plausible, but generally fallacious method of reasoning. – Dictionary.com)

When you combine that trick with the sleight of hand of calling opinions, theories and ideas ‘facts’ that can be judged on an objective basis by some authority on high, an upside-down Orwellian world obtains. No longer are they banning falsehood, they are banning prohibited ways of thinking. They are controlling thought.

Let us take an example from IFNC itself to show the depth of deception with the unelected thought authorities at Poynter.

The media industry loves to shower itself with honors and credentials with which to lord over its subjects. The pinnacle of MSM self-love is the Pulitzer Prize. Poynter Institute won one in 2009 for the handiwork of its IFNC predecessor and now partner Politifact. The Prize was awarded for its fact checking work during the 2008 Presidential election. As you may recall one of the most contentious issues in debate in 2008 was whether Obama’s universal healthcare proposal would include the right to keep the plan you were already on.  An army of health care analysts claimed that under the vague campaign health care proposal of Obama it was very likely impossible that one would retain the right to choose his own doctor; and that it was very clearly impossible to confirm it without the entire proposed system set forth in detail.

Nonetheless, Politifact’s (and later IFCN) head Angie Holan decided as a matter FACT that Obama’s unlikely promise  was a ‘fact’, publishing on October 8, 2009:

“Under Barack Obama’s health care proposal, “if you’ve got a health care plan that you like, you can keep it…

                     …we rate his statement True”

First realize that clearly this was not a factual dispute.  It was a matter of opinion.  And an opinion about whether someone would do what he promised despite a slim probability. But, as noted in the last post, the New Liberal Order – through IFNC – treats opinion as fact when it suits its purpose. And the NLO decided Obama was the chosen one, and so had factchecking central (Poynter’s Politifact – now IFNC) turn Obama’s promise into a fact. It was for this type of flat-out partisanship that Pulitzer awarded its prize for “factchecking.”

So wrong was Poynter’s Politifact that it became a huge campaign issue in 2012. By then everybody seemed to understand the Pulitzer-prize winning fact confirmation was fraudulent, except for its perpetrator Politifact. The political hack nature of Politifact is evidenced by the fact that it remained silent about its fraud until after the 2012 election. Only when the chosen one was back in office did they deign to acknowledge the error.  

When it no longer mattered to its political purposes, Politifact (and IFCN) head Angie Holan finally penned the article “Lie of the Year: ‘If you like your health care plan, you can keep it’’ 

Holan had the chutzpah to call the Pulitzer-prize winning FACT verification of the year 2008 “a catchy political pitch” and a “breezy assurance”, instead of the fact it had certified. Instead of even acknowledging her and Poynter’s error (and fraudulent Pulitzer) she condemned Obama for intentional dishonesty.  Like the psychiatrist who can never lose an argument by use of the device of judging his opposition “crazy”, such is the arrogant nature of the Censorship Industrial Complex. It is never wrong, and you are never right if you do not slavishly go along with its certified narratives. Opinions (even potentially fraudulent misrepresentations) are fact when it suits their purpose.  And when they become debunked, the self-appointed judges of thought rewrite history.

In 2013, Avi Roy found and exposed these very facts in Forbes magazine. For a deeper dive into this sham, see Pants On Fire: Politifact Tries To Hide That It Rated ‘True’ Obamacare’s ‘Keep Your Health Plan’ Promise

Roy observed that “It’s more than a bit precious for Holan—a self-appointed Arbiter of the Truth—to declare as a “Lie” a statement that she herself once declared to be “True” without even acknowledging the fact that she had done so… That we can’t count on PolitiFact to even admit it was wrong tells you everything you need to know about the group.”

Indeed. And yet 11 years after the exposure, Holan and Poynter have been rewarded for dutifully calling false promises fact when it suits the New Liberal Order’s purposes. They have been granted millions of tax-exempt dollars to serve as the global Ministry of Truth and as the “certifier” of truth arbiters across the world. This is something even worse than the Peter Principle, wherein incompetence is rewarded by promotion in a bureaucracy. This is not mere incompetence. This is promotion for carrying out intentional fraud and deceit for the New Liberal Order: The Poynter Principle.

For our purposes, the event captures opinion checking in the name of fact checking. The former is in no fashion objective. It chooses ‘proper’ ways to look at things or think about things while banning others. In that regard it monitors and controls how you think, your very thought processes. It is beyond mere deception and dishonesty. The CIC through Poynter has entered the realm of thought policing and mind control.

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Meet The Censors – The Poynter Problem

Posted on April 11, 2024 by | Comments Off on Meet The Censors – The Poynter Problem

 

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 1st 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. 

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Moving on up a Little Higher III: What is Wrong with Western Civilization?

Posted on March 20, 2024 by | Comments Off on Moving on up a Little Higher III: What is Wrong with Western Civilization?

This blog began in 2009 attempting to spell out what is wrong and right with Scientology. The primary purpose was to preserve that which has worked well for Scientologists by their own reckoning.  It more recently explored the reality of those obsessed with destroying Scientology. From the inside (bottom to top to out) to the outside (bottom to top to out) of Scientology, from pro to con to the positive side of neutral, a uniquely informed and broad perspective has developed. That point of view combined with a deep investigation into what is happening with western culture, has afforded me the understanding that society faces problems far more pressing and important than any of the perceived “defects” with Scientology.  That is, what the media perennially revisits whenever Scientology begins to make some headway or the powers that be need a handy, scintillating distraction. However, current affairs have convinced me that there is an aspect of my 45 years of experience in and around the subject that has become of vital relevance to the world’s most pressing, serious problem. 

Applying a consistent, almost religious, negation of anything positive on Scientology, the media periodically regurgitates an old Scientology narrative, originally created by vested interests. The very same vested interests who today are running a far broader and more repressive censorship and propaganda war on the American people at large. Significantly, that war employs the same tactics which for decades have been employed against Scientology, and others. Those tactics have evolved into the McCarthyist cancel culture that currently prevails. While the cancel culture participants like to think it is a bottom-up grass roots effort, a closer study demonstrates it is top down all the way. The elites ply the populace with a steady stream of propaganda that instills destructive values and prompts us to turn on one another like jackals.

I refer to the censoring and defaming powers that be as the Neo Liberal Order (or NLO).  The ever-growing Washington D.C. blob that rules through its uniparty (with Republican and Democrat branches) masquerading as a two-party system to give the public the illusion that they have a choice in how matters are governed. They are the plutocrats who man and use the Military Industrial Complex, Big Pharma, the Intelligence Community (lead by CIA and a vast array of spying and law enforcement tentacles), and its ever-more compliant propaganda arms, the mainstream media (MSM) and Big Tech.  

The war on speech and thought has taken on Orwellian dimensions of late, bolstered by NLO’s hold and control over the internet through Big Tech (Google, META/Facebook, Amazon, Microsoft, and once significantly Twitter before it cut that control with Musk’s purchase of what is now X).  Thankfully, many are fighting this descent into a digital Matrix-like world by exposing the grip that what they call the Censorship Industrial Complex (CIC) is attempting to exercise over the hearts and minds of billions. 

As I have alluded to in earlier writings, the Church of Scientology has often served as an NLO/MSM canary in the coal mine of sorts, over decades. Nothing that current targets of the NLO/MSM propaganda machine (e.g. Elon Musk, Russell Brand, Edward Snowden, Julian Assange, Robert F. Kennedy Jr, Glenn Greenwald, even Donald Trump) face day in and day out has not already been plied incessantly against Scientology and its founder L. Ron Hubbard for several decades. That includes censorship, enforced false narratives, loads of propaganda, shaming, and denial of civil and human rights. Lest anyone attempt to pigeon-hole this educational effort as politically partisan, I fully recognize complete government censorship power is an Uniparty effort backed by significant percentages of Republicans as well as Democrats.  It so happens that at the present the political left seems nearly unanimous in embracing and adopting the censorship and state propaganda machine. 

One aspect of the Church I could never get the MSM to take an iota of interest in was its 50-year record of taking on the NLO over such issues as freedom of speech, freedom of information and privacy, freedom of religion and conscience, freedom from ill-health effects of institutionalized medicine, and freedom from undue Big Pharma influence in the systematic drugging of America and especially its children.  My attempts to do so were shamed by accusations that I was still acting as a “Scientology warrior.”

The Big Pharma work was critical to understanding that rejection.  As I recounted in one book, it was the heads of the American Psychiatric Association, the American Psychological Association, the American Medical Association and the Pharmaceutical Manufacturers Association who first hammered Scientology’s founder in the early fifties, clearly threatened by his claims that Scientology’s precursor Dianetics was effective in handling psychosomatic ills, not to mention offering a decidedly anti-drug approach to mental and spiritual therapy. The documented record shows it was those profit and control centers that worked hand in glove with CIA, Justice Department, FBI, FDA, and at least three branches of military intelligence to silence and discredit L. Ron Hubbard and his early Scientology organizations. The same crew today has expanded that discredit, depersonalize, shame, silence and reprogram program and directed it against citizens who advocate freedom of speech, information and privacy, conscience, and freedom from mass drugging of America, especially its children. 

The NLO efforts to stifle Scientology did not end during its fledgling days. In the late eighties and early nineties Big Pharma was bribing federal officials (having already infiltrated and utterly controlled a number of Federal agencies, across the National Institutes of Health, and especially the FDA) to pass regulations that would grant Big Pharma the right to advertise directly to the public. At the forefront of those attempting to fight that coup was the Church of Scientology. In the middle of that struggle, Scientology was hit with the biggest, coordinated MSM propaganda assault in its then 30-year history. It was clearly originated and coordinated at the highest levels of Big Pharma and through the usual channels (MSM and US government).  Unfortunately for the country, the biggest victim of the operation was not the Church of Scientology, but the public at large.

Why?  Because with Scientology temporarily disabled as a significant opposition, the government green light was given to market drugs direct to the public. Watch one half hour of any network at news time and prime time, particularly the popular NLO cable outlets that serve as megaphones for the latest federal government NLO party lines (CNN/MSNBC) and notice who literally owns them now. Big Pharma. It is a continuous advertisement for a Brave New World where there is a pill for virtually anything that so much as causes one the slightest discomfort, periodically interrupted with the “news” Big Brother wants you to buy. According to the wall to wall ads, the drugs don’t just cure, they turn you into a rock star, an athlete, an explorer – you name it – at middle age or even in seniority.  It is continual programming directed at the infantilization of American adults (for more on the organized, systematic dummying down – the infantilization – of Americans, read Consumed: How Markets Corrupt Children, Infantilize Adults, and Swallow Citizens Whole by Benjamin R. Barber).  It was not that way 25 years ago.

Now, any resistance to the programming (infantilizing, now intensified by cyber censorship and propaganda) receives the same treatment I witnessed the Church of Scientology receive for nearly three decades: discrediting, censorship, shaming, labelling, cancellation and depersonalization.

When one studies and understands the growing censorship industry and its military intelligence community origins and technologies, one understands that censorship is not simply stopping certain types of communication. It also entails discrediting, depersonalizing and cancelling the origination points of communication of verboten ideas. That is followed by re-programming: the steady diet of now uncontested propaganda Big Brother wishes the sheep to believe.

As much as MSM and its subsidiary Anti-Scientology Cult smear machine have attempted to effectively lobotomize me, the recent proliferation of independent, citizen media (as Elon Musk aptly terms it) across the internet – and the Scientology-like treatment NLO is countering it with – has fully revitalized and restored my memory.  Before Scientology and after Scientology I was deeply engaged in alternative, independent media.  In effect, I was even more involved during my 27 years within the Church of Scientology.  Citizen-media’s latest incantation – and forums – and its most important and fastest spreading subject matter beckons me to share my 45 years of experience in and around it. 

That is, educating on and forwarding of freedom of information and privacy, freedom of conscience, freedom of expression, and freedom from mass drugging, and more particularly freedom from the drugging and abuse of children. In other words, contributing to the alternative to the real time construction of The Matrix.

For a primer and example of how the Censorship Industrial Complex (CIC) has come to be and evolved from an allegedly objective ‘fact-checking’ outfit into a full-blown mind control operation, please read Jacob Seigel’s excellent summation, Invasion of the Fact-Checkers: Who are you going to believe, the Democratic Party’s new official-unofficial, public-private monopoly tech platform censorship brigade, or your misinformed, disinformed eyes?, at The Tablet, Fact Checking the Fact Checkers – Tablet Magazine

Seigel’s piece will lead us directly to chapter one of our investigation into a brand new frontier. 

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