What is Missing from the Media? Responsible Critical Thinking

Richard Gale & Gary Null, PhD

Progressive Radio Network, October 10, 2021

No doubt, none of us can recall a time when the world at large has faced so many problems and crisis that impinge upon the well-being and mortality of billions of people. For over a year and a half, we have been overwhelmed with anxiety, dread, depression and anger, desperately seeking solutions to ameliorate an all-pervading angst as society is completely being reconfigured in the image of those who hold power, influence and wealth. There was a time in the past when we believed our elected officials would enact laws to protect the citizenry and provide a climate for sustaining a normal, productive life. The Covid-19 pandemic and those who would capitalize on the opportunities it provides for non-democratic agendas as changed all of that. In its place the masters of government and industry have assured us that existential angst is our new fate. Faith in any institutional security has collapsed into a tragic theater as the younger generations face an uncertain future and life loses its purpose and meaning.

The majority of people’s beliefs are grounded and conditioned upon the input and information they receive. And today that information has been completely corporatized through a media that spoon-feed the consuming public a heavy dose of fear and confusion. Those who make efforts to pull back the curtain to expose the global Oz’s wicked wizard are marginalized, officially canceled by Silicon Valley and an army of faux fact checkers. Consequently, it should come as no surprise that the culture of non-transparency draping the halls of Washington, the international health institutions, professional medical associations, and the pharmaceutical complex would spark public suspicions about conspiratorial attentions to shred democracy and individual rights and freedoms.

Objective skepticism, the ability to turn towards the mind’s faculty for critical thought, has rapidly declined in American society for several decades. Yet a healthy skepticism is necessary for questioning both the rhetoric and misinformation of “official” views and propaganda, including hints of what is commonly ridiculed as conspiracy. The word “conspiracy” has lost its meaning and credibility in the American lexicon. Rarely does mainstream media, professional associations and think tanks, and official federal public relations and propaganda contextualize the term to simply implicate wrongdoing and corruption. When used by authorities, “conspiracy” is almost always pejorative, a means to slander, accuse and marginalize people as loons and quacks. As a result we are led to believe the gospel word of officialdom: the Warren report, the 911 Commission, and more recently everything spouted from Anthony Fauci and the mouths of the White House and federal health agencies regarding the Covid pandemic and the wave of pro-vaccine mania.

Very often conspiracies are ridiculous, bordering on the absurd. However, past examples of politically motivated black flag operations and secretive agendas created in corporate boardrooms and government halls cannot rule out that conspiracies don’t exist or never have. When there is sound reason to question the integrity of a politician, health official, media pundit, or a corporate executive, it is natural for the inquisitive mind to explore more deeply the hidden motivations and goals underlying the thoughts and actions of conspiracies’ physical footprints. In most cases it is the evidence of contradictions, hypocrisies and confirmed blatant lies by individuals in authority that give birth to the conspiratorial mind.

Conspiracies conducted by the government, which resulted in unnecessary violence and death, are proven to have occurred and others were been planned: the Gulf of Tonkin, the Tuskegee syphilis experiments, the CIA staged coup to oust Iranian Prime Minister Mohammad Mossadegh, and the failed Operation Northwood scheme by the CIA and Pentagon to launch acts of terror against Miami residents. Before the 2001 anthrax scare identified any individual or group behind the toxic letters, according to an FBI whistleblower, the Bush White House instructed the FBI to blame the attacks on al-Qaeda; later it was revealed that the threats were carried out by one or more US government employed scientists. In addition, the US government frequently launches conspiratorial misinformation campaigns through the major corporate media and Silicon Valley complex in order to support its clandestine and long term agendas. Before the 2001 anthrax scare identified any individual or group behind the letters, according to an FBI whistleblower, the Bush White House instructed the FBI to blame the attacks on al-Qaeda. Later we learned that the threats were carried out by one or more US government scientists associated with Fort Detrick. Furthermore, the mainstream media makes every effort to seduce us into believing that we don’t have conspiracies in the banking system, the pharmaceutical industry, and the government intelligence apparatus.

NSA Director Gen. Keith Alexander claimed publicly that intelligence surveillance of the American public “foiled” 54 terrorist attacks by extremists. Independent research confirmed that in fact only one, and a possible second, attack, could be directly associated with the war on terrorism. The media never questioned the accuracy of Alexander’s claim nor provided evidence to the contrary. Repeatedly Obama lied to the American people about the largess of the national security state and its infiltration into the lives of average citizens, including massive data collection of private phone calls, emails and internet activity. The federal government is a vast sea of conspiracies operative at every moment. The NSA revelations of Edward Snowden documented proof that intelligence surveillance is far more extensive than officially reported. But others can be cited throughout the recent activities of the FBI, CIA, Pentagon, FISA courts, USDA and FDA and CDC, and the Justice Department. Additional confirmed conspiracies planned by our executive branch, the CIA, military and other federal agencies include:

• A US Congressional committee acknowledged that the CointelPro campaign included the FBI employing provocateurs from the 1950s to 1970s to carry out terrorist acts in order to blame civil political activists.

• Bush’s justice department Attorney General John Yoo recommended that the US create a false terrorist organization for the purpose of conducting terrorist attacks that could be blamed on al-Qaeda.

• Overwhelming scientific evidence now can debunk the official report that the three World Trade buildings could not have collapsed in free fall from jet-fuel fires alone.

• Government has covered up conspiracies waged against Americans by other nations. The Israeli bombing of the USS Liberty and the planting of bombs in US diplomatic facilities in Egypt by Israeli terrorist cells are two examples.

• State Department documents show the Pentagon’s Joint Chiefs of Staff planned to bomb the US consulate in the Dominican Republic in order to win popular support for an invasion of the country.

• During the US occupation of Afghanistan and Iraq, American soldiers were instructed to leave weapons near bodies of innocent civilians they killed in order to make the claim they were terrorists.

• The Tuskegee Syphilis Study conducted by the US Public Health Service between 1932 to 1972, which experimented with unknowing poor African American men in violation of the Nuremberg Code.

• The 2000 Simpsonwood meeting convened by the CDC with major health agencies and executives of vaccine makers to cover-up scientific evidence that mercury in vaccines were contributing to the increase in autism.

• The whistleblower document dump by a senior CDC epidemiologist, Dr. William Thompson, revealing that the health agency under Julie Gerberding’s directorship destroyed internal research proving the measles-mumps-rubella vaccine contributed to a 250 percent higher rate of autism in African American boys. Gerberding went on to become president of Merck’s vaccine division with a $2.5 million salary and $38 million in stock options.

• The thirty-year asbestos covered up of prior knowledge about asbestos’ association with respiratory illness and cancer in order to avoid lawsuits

• The CIA’s mind control operations known as MK Ultra from the 1950s into the 1970s before being exposed by the Church Committee.

• The Iran-Contra Affair in 1985 to secretly sell arms to Iran in order to fund Nicaraguan Contras.

• The October Surprise during the Carter-Reagan presidential election when Reagan insiders met with Iranian revolution leaders in Europe to prevent the release of American hostages until after Reagan’s inauguration if he won the election.

These are only examples indicting factions within the federal government with treason to conduct conspiratorial acts. When the brilliant journalist I.F. Stone wrote, “Every government is run by liars, and nothing they say should be believed,” he may have just as well been speaking about the entire gambit of federal agencies. Examples of legalized terror are aplenty and reveal actions solely for the pursuit of profit at the cost of Americans’ health. This has become particularly epidemic in private industry

• Merck’s withholding evidence from the FDA that its blockbuster drug Vioxx had serious health risks, including heart attack, stroke and death. The drug was responsible for at least a very conservative toll of 60,000 deaths.
• In 2009, Pfizer was fined $2.3 billion for what was then the largest healthcare felony settlement in US pharmaceutical history for illegally promoting its drugs, including its painkiller Bextra. $1.2 billion was for the criminal fine then the largest imposed in the US.
• The US Justice Department charged Johnson and Johnson $2.2 billion in criminal fines for marketing its autism and anti-psychotic drug Risperdal for unapproved uses. Forty-five states filed civil lawsuits against J&J in the scandal
• Lawsuits continue to pile up against Merck for punitive damages, negligence, strict liability with failure to warn, manufacturing defects and common law fraud due to injuries associated with its HPV vaccine Gardasil.
• A group of CDC scientists who called themselves SPIDER (Scientists Preserving the Integrity, Diligence and Ethics in Research) turned anonymous whistleblowers after releasing a written complaint criticizing the agency for operating as a tax-funded subsidiary of the drug industry in partnership with the FDA.
• The legal suits against the agricultural giant Monsanto hid years of research and evidence of its active Round Up chemical glyphosate being responsible for DNA damage, birth defects, and a variety of cancers
• Federally funded researchers forcefully administered highly toxic AIDS drugs in experiments on foster care children in a New York children’s center;

Besides withholding truthful claims, individuals, groups, companies or governments targeted in conspiracy theories share an atmosphere perceived as clandestine and secret. In the private sector, conspiracies are voluminous and are permitted to continue behind the backs of federal crime authorities. For decades independent voices have suggested that Wall Street has undue influence over government economic policies and the nation. On the contrary, tens of thousands of articles, books and opinion essays, reinforced with solid scholarship, reveal we do in fact have an epidemic of conspiracies in our midst. Yet there is barely a legislator or journalist in corporate media with the courage to independently investigate the trail of leads behind current events. The major corporate media is also complicit in our nationwide conspiracy of corruption and criminal behavior. The media wonks of public opinion, at the behest of federal and corporate pressure, control the issues that the public should or should not hear. Consequently our media engages in campaigns of psychological terror against society at large by keeping the public in doubt and fear. Something is terribly wrong when there is such disparity between official rhetoric and the destruction of civil freedoms, justice, sovereignty and constitutional guarantees now decimating human rights and the quality of life across the US. For example, recently the Biden White House instructed the justice department on the behalf of local school boards nationwide to consider any and all parents who challenge school board’s polices and rules. Instead parents should be identified as and pursed as domestic terrorists, thereby stifling all free speech that challenges government policies.

America is awash in conspiracy. Every firm on Wall Street and in the large private industrial complexes—oil and fossil fuels, nuclear energy, military and national security contractors, the pharmaceutical industry, agro-chemical firms, insurance firms—regularly and repeatedly engage in conspiracies against the American public. Private corporations and their employees have settled many thousands of lawsuits. On occasion accused individuals, usually propped as patsies and fall guys, have gone to jail. But in the vast majority of cases companies negotiate settlements and walk away without remorse and are able to retain their ill-gotten gains. JP Morgan settled on $13 billion for mortgage fraud, which left thousands of families homeless. Wachovia was slapped for a mere $800 million for money laundering hundreds of billions of dollars including dark money associated with the illegal drug trade. In every private industry we discover numerous resolved class action suits with underlying conspiratorial intentions to deceive the public and federal regulators. Corruption is systemic throughout corporate America and increases with every bill to further deregulate.

A seductive characteristic of many reasonable conspiracy theories is that they cannot be ruled out entirely. This is why they become so popular. Research conducted by psychologists Michael Wood and Karen Douglas at the University of Kent in the UK, and findings by political scientist Lance DeHaven in his book Conspiracy Theory in America, indicate that conspiracy theorists are more sane and intellectually mature than our naïve leaders in government and the major two political parties who more fanatically attach themselves to anti-conspiracy beliefs.ⁱ For example, the Kent studies showed that two of three viewers of mainstream media reporting on the events of 911 disbelieved the networks.

Now with full throttle efforts to impose anti-scientific policies to lessen the Covid pandemic entering dystopian territory, a flurry of conspiratorial charges are being leveled against the vaccine makers, Antony Fauci, the NIAID, the CDC and the Biden administration. Since conspiracies arise due to observable inconsistencies, contradictions and obvious misstatements, there is every reason for a critical thinking person to realize that the official narrative is contrary to the growing number of first person accounts of deception at every level. Numerous medical professionals and physicians have now spoken out against:

• The accuracy of PCR testing to track the pandemic and determine case counts;
• The manner in which Covid-19 deaths were recorded, which included deaths caused by other medical conditions including pneumonia and other infectious diseases;
• Unwarranted changes in the World Health Organization’s definition of a pandemic and herd immunity;
• The violation of international laws by enforcing an experimental vaccine on the public;
• Suppression of accurate data and reports of Covid vaccine injuries and deaths;
• The suppression of effective and inexpensive lifesaving drugs such as Ivermectin and Hydroxychloroquine;
• Years of scientific evidence against the effectiveness of masks and social distancing and lockdowns;

The widespread censorship of scientific voices within the orthodox medical community is only the tip of the iceberg; however, it provides certainty that the policies and strategies being endorsed are by no means science-based. Similar to the worst kinds of religious fundamentalism that represses and engages in violence against non-believers, the commercial based medicine advocated by Fauci, the federal health agencies and the government’s network of medical institutions, drug companies and philanthropists like Bill Gates are determined to kick out of the scientific community and excommunicate those who criticize their dogma. In every worse possible way the medical establishment is emulating religious institutions that have been totally intolerant of dissenters. We can and should have enormous respect for science when conducted in an objective methodological manner aligned with ethical intent, but we should show no respect whatsoever for science that is dogmatic, fundamentalist and intolerant. The official propaganda about Covid-19, the SARS-2 virus, the vaccines, and the demonization of safe, cheap and effective treatments is no friend to real science anymore than religious militants are to authentic ethical-based religion. The federal medical complex’s handling of the crisis has been an utter failure from the start. And now we are witnessing the larger cost of this incompetence appearing in unexpected harm such as enormous spikes in mental health disorders, suicides and violence.

The latest example, with disastrous consequences, is the recent discovery of the Covid vaccines are being incorrectly administered. Medical personnel administering the vaccines in clinics and pharmacies across the nation are failing to first aspirate the syringe to assure that no vein was punctured, which could cause a potentially lethal injury to the heart. This gross negligence is now being observed in people afflicted with blood clotting, myocardia and other heart problems following vaccination. However, the more disconcerning problem is that the CDC and WHO are giving false information by stating that aspiration is unnecessary. Again, our health officials are completely wrong despite millions of vaccines doses having administered. We can only imagine how many injuries and deaths were caused by this gross medical negligence.

Fortunately the pandemic is being exposed as a scam more quickly every day as federal inconsistencies and new information further implodes their narrative. The public will then need to rise up, along with the dissenting medical community, and demand legal accountability for the perpetuators of this pandemic terrorism.

i Kevin Barrett, “New Studies: Conspiracy Theorists Sane; Government Dupes Crazy, Hostile,” Press TV, July 12, 2013. http://www.presstv.com/detail/2013/07/12/313399/conspiracy-theorists-vs-govt-dupes/