Publisher’s Note: “Wild COVID conspiracy theories are infecting the Internet!” proclaims UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres. Thanks to our NYU colleague Mark Crispin Miller for this impassioned response, a meditation on “groupthink,”conspiracy theory” and what we here at VI call “COVIDAGANDA” in a time of #Plandemic. NOTE: MCM is focusing his critique on Consortium News, an independent news journal usually willing to challenge “official narratives” with hard questions and evidence-based journalism. But his larger observations about #COVID’AGANDA resonate, especially his framing of FOUR so-called “conspiracy theories” much heard and discussed online. Here’s an October 2020 update – “Survey uncovers widespread belief in ‘dangerous’ COVID conspiracy theories,” proclaims The Guardian. Yah – it is proving more and more dangerous to exercise one’s critical thinking faculties – which makes doing so all the more important. Read on, and let’s keep our wits about us.

The late, great Robert Parry founded Consortium News in 1995, in response to “a crisis building in the U.S. news media,” whose allergy to inconvenient information he knew all too well from having worked for Newsweek and AP.

“The mainstream media was falling into a pattern of “groupthink” on issue after issue, often ignoring important factual information because it didn’t fit with what all the Important People knew to be true,” wrote Parry in 2015. “Looking back over the past two decades,” he continued, “I wish I could say that the media trend that we detected in the mid-1990s had been reversed. But, if anything, it’s grown worse. The major Western news outlets now conflate the discrete difficulties from made-up ‘fake news’ and baseless ‘conspiracy theories’ with responsible dissenting analyses. All get thrown into the same pot andsubjected to disdain and ridicule.”

Such was the tactic used to make Parry himself look like a kook, when he shed light on Iran/contra and the “October surprise,” just as it was used in the mid-Nineties to demolish Gary Webb, the investigative journalist who broke the story of the CIA’s drug smuggling out of Nicaragua. By then, the tactic had been used successfully for roughly thirty years, after the CIA, in its Memo #1035-960, first weaponized the phrase “conspiracy theory” to discredit critics of the Warren Report. By the time Parry founded Consortium News—as George Seldes (in 1940) and I.F. Stone (in 1953) had founded their respective antidotes to the propaganda gushing from the US press—”conspiracy theory” had been absorbed into the hearts and minds of everybody in the US and beyond, so that most people felt—and feel—that they must distrust their own quite rational suspicions of elite attempts to rob them of their rights and freedoms, as if the very notion of such covert class warfare, waged by Them against the rest of us, is absolutely crazy on its face.  

That is a very dangerous idea, as it has largely incapacitated We the People, by giving them a sentimental misimpression of executive authority, so that they often can’t believe our government would do the things it’s actually, demonstrably, been doing to the rest of us, and peoples all over the world, for decades, from the assassinations of our most beloved leaders, to the initiation, and protraction, of gratuitous wars and rightist coups abroad, to the orchestration of horrific terrorist attacks on our own soil, to the stealing of elections everywhere (including here), to the harassment and imprisonment of whistle-blowers and other activists, to the shattering experiments in mind control inflicted on prisoners, mental patients, students and other helpless people, to the routine approval of drugs and vaccines that do lasting harm, and even kill; and so on.

Those independent outlets bold enough to tell the awful truths that all the other media ridicule as lunacy are few and far between; and Robert Parry’s was among the best of them. I say “was” because Consortium News has just gone over to the enemy, by publishing a solemn editorial highlighting UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres’ recent diatribe against the “dangerous epidemic of misinformation” about COVID-19. “Wild conspiracy theories are infecting the Internet,” raved the UN chief, casting all such dissident material as itself a plague  that—clearly—must be “cured,” which is to say,  wiped out, just like that apocalyptic virus.

And what, exactly, would those “wild conspiracy theories” urge us to believe? “Social media has been inundated by opposition to vaccines, promotion of the idea that Covid-19 is just like a normal flu, that hospitals are empty and that enforced self-isolation based on medical advice is a plot to impose a permanent police state.” Guterres, or his speechwriter (or handler), did his best to make what Parry called some quite “responsible dissenting analyses” sound as unhinged—and dangerous—as possible. 

All four of what the Secretary-General “decries” as “wild conspiracy theories” are obfuscations of important facts that everybody needs to know, in order to protect ourselves from real “misinformation” that’s more dangerous than COVID-19.

1) “Social media has been inundated by opposition to vaccines.” Thus Guterres ,following Big Pharma’s script, casts advocates of vaccine safety as “anti-vaxxers,”which is like calling critics of Vioxx, or opioids, “anti-drug,” or critics of GMO’s glyphosate, or refined sugar, “anti-food.”While there are arguments against all vaccination, and some pop up online, what’s “inundating” social media, and what Guterres actually deplores,is wholly valid information—scientific studies, records of the US Vaccine Court, product inserts from the vaccine manufacturers themselves, as well as harrowing personal accounts of vaccine injury—on the dangers of particular vaccines, such as the MMR, Gardasil and flu shots, among other proven toxins. Also “inundating” social media are reports on scientific studies of the various drug therapies—hydroxychloroquine (in combination with azithromycin and/or high-dose Vitamin C), remdesevir, Ivermectin, Interferon Alfa 2B (from Cuba), Avigen (a Japanese flu drug), a placenta-based cell therapy from Israel, and so on—that would obviate the need for a new COVID-19 vaccine.Such is the solid and important information that’s “infecting the Internet,” according to the UN Secretary-General—and the editors of Consortium News, who, apparently, would also like to see the Internet “disinfected.”

2) “Social media has been inundated by … promotion of the idea that Covid-19 is just like a normal flu.” While that “idea” is clearly ludicrous—”a normal flu” does not entail acute hypoxemia, nor is it fatallyexacerbated by the use of ventilators—Guterres’ blanket charge would necessarily include an “idea” that’s not ludicrous at all: that the death rate among COVID-19 patients is comparable to that of influenza. Such is the important finding of Dr. John Ioannidis’s team, from their study of COVID-19 antibody seroprevalence in Santa Clara County: “True infection rate fatality is in the ballpark of seasonal influenza,” they conclude. We find much the same rough equivalence in a Dutch study, suggesting that 3% of Holland’s population may have the coronavirus antibodies, with a case fatality rate of 0.7%. Such numbers offer us a very healthy antidote to the terroristic coverage of this crisis by the media, whose “wild” exaggeration of the danger facing us—exaggeration that’s now proving far more lethal than that virus—is based wholly on the shrieking prophecies of doom that we’ve been hearing from Bill Gates, WHO’s Tedros Adhonam, and now the UN Secretary-General, who seems to want us to be paralyzed with fear—and, evidently, so does Consortium News.

3) “Social media has been inundated by … the idea … that hospitals are empty.” While some hospitals are overwhelmed, as their workers have been saying (or would say, if their bosses hadn’t gagged them), a lot of hospitals are empty—too empty, as fear of COVID-19 has kept all too many people far away, with grave conditions (strokes, heart attacks, diabetes, appendicitis) that would ordinarily have them in the hospital. As for the field hospitals set up last month to handle the expected mobs of COVID-19 patients (at the Javits Center in New York, the CenturyLink Field Event Center in Seattle, and on the USNS Comfort and USNS Mercy), they’ve now been closed down for lack of business, while others (at McCormick Place in Chicago, and in New York’s Central Park) appear to have few patients, if the many photos of them in the local press failedsomehow to exclude the suffering masses there.To call this a “conspiracy theory” is to contradict what people the world over (myself included) have seen with their own eyes—and, again, to stoke the panic that is killing off the world economy, and, with it, countless people, mostly poor. 

4) “Social media has been inundated by … the idea …. that enforced self-isolation based on medical advice is a plot to impose a permanent police state.” This last of Guterres’ charges of “conspiracy theory” is his craziest. Leaving aside the fact that there’s much expert “medical advice” against the policy of “enforced self-isolation” (a consensus that’s been growing steadily), the signs of the police state are as blatant as a rubber bullet in the eye, as governments have sicced the cops on people the world over, dictating day-to-day behavior with the zeal and vigilance of any Nazi Governor or Soviet commissar. Perhaps the Secretary-General of the United Nations could devote some resources to tracking the abuse of power by national, state and city governments worldwide, as cops now use surveillance drones to badger people taking walks in Paris, Britain, Spain, California and Elizabeth, New Jersey, as well as in the UAE and (of course) China; and as “governments in Italy, Germany, Austria, China, SouthKorea and Taiwan have begun analysing smartphone data so as to determine to what extent populations are really locking themselves down at home,” as Forbes reported a few weeks ago (noting that the US and UK were close to doing the same); and as the cops in Colorado handcuffed a man (a former cop) for playing catch with his daughter in a park, and the cops are fining residents of Beverly, Massachusetts, a Boston suburb, $100 for walking the wrong way on the township’s one-way sidewalks, and thirty cops raided a child’s birthday party in Los Angeles, and the governor of Michigan has banned travel between two residences in the state; and so on. It would take a full-time staff to keep track of such police-state measures, now commonplace throughout the “democratic” West just as in Dubai, Colombia and the Philippines.

However, the prospect of “a permanent police state”—singular—is obviously looming not just in the crackdowns by those disparate governments, but also, or especially, in the clear agenda of the globalist cabal in which the UN Secretary-General serves so prominent a role. It’s no “conspiracy theory,” but an established fact, that the World Health Organization, the Gates Foundation (WHO’s most lavish funder), the World Economic Forum, the Clinton Foundation, UNICEF and the component giants of Big Pharma have joined forces in “Gavi, the Vaccine Alliance,” a “public-private partnership” that is explicitly intent on vaccinating every human being on Earth, through house-to-house campaigns by goon squads (personnel with “minimal training”) ready to confront and overcome resistance. Nor is it a “conspiracy theory,” but a matter of public record, that Gates intends, through those mass vaccinations, to inject every member of the human race with a “tattoo-like mechanism,” so that one’s vaccine history may be read instantly by cell phones; and it is also not a “theory” but a fact that, in the meantime, Gates et al. plan to require everyone who wants to leave the house to carry “immunity certificates”—a concept first proposed in Germany two weeks ago, and one that Dr. Fauci says is “being discussed” for roll-out here in the US.

Even if this dystopian scenario were groundless, as the UN Secretary-General has charged, it’s no “conspiracy theory” to point out that this crisis has been most convenient for the powers that be, as it has instantly and totally snuffed out vigorous protest movements that were growing all around the world, from the un-silent majority supporting Bernie Sanders here in the US, to the YellowVests in France, to the robust protests of state corruption and/or neoliberal economic policies in Chile, Argentina, Honduras, Ecuador, Brazil, and Haiti, Indonesia, Lebanon and Cameroon, to the feminist uprisings in Mexico and all over South America; and so on. “2019 may be remembered as the year of the protests, as demonstrations are engulfing the world,” FAIR noted in December (in an article spotlighting the Western media’s exclusive focus on Hong Kong). The COVID-19 crisis has extinguished all that fire, and blocked all public memory that it was burning—just as World War I stamped out the rich political ferment of the Progressive Era in the US, and like developments in Europe; and just as 9/11 put an end to the growing grass-roots pushback against “free trade,” and the mass refusal to accept Bush/Cheney as legitimate, after the theft of the election in 2000. As effective as those prior crises were at ending mass resistance and dissent, they were as nothing by comparison with this crisis, which has not just silenced everyone, but has us all cut off from one another, locked up under quasi-voluntary house arrest.   

Thus, this crisis has not only radically empowered governments throughout the world, and granted international authority to a gigantic “public-private partnership” intent on exercising full control over our very bodies, and our children’s bodies—and, as well, the world economy, and global food supply (two “conspiracy theories” that I don’t have space for here). While thus exalting those authorities, the COVID-19 crisis has also disabled actual mass protest of that empowerment—the only kind of protest that ourmasters fear—by terrorizing people into staying home, and keeping far apart when we skulk out, to go buy groceries (if any) and medicine (if we can afford it). 

Maybe the snuffing out of all that protest was deliberate, or maybe it was just an inadvertent benefit of this apocalyptic crisis. Either way, it’s really happened—just as some vaccines are toxic, unnecessary and/or ineffective; and the number of COVID-19 deaths is comparable to that of influenza; and many hospitals are standing empty, even in the places that, reportedly, are hardest hit; and the prospect of a “permanent police state”is very real, its signs quite clear to anyone who’s half-awake, and not gone blind from having drunk the Kool-Aid gushing endlessly from “our free press.” To warn us not to heed those dismal facts by calling them “wild conspiracy theories” is not only a Big Lie, and a form of gaslighting, but—in light of what will happen if we don’t face up to them—a crime against humanity. 

We would expect that “wild” Big Lie from the UN Secretary-General, justas we’d expect it from Bill Gates, or Dr. Fauci, or—especially—the New York Times. What we would not expect is that Consortium News would echo that Big Lie instead of blowing it to smithereens, as Robert Parry always did as a reporter of forbidden truths, and as he clearly meant Consortium News to do. That even his dissenting forum has now joined the thunderous propaganda chorus drowning out the truth about this lethal crisis—along with “Democracy Now!” and other outlets on “the left”—tells us that we’re in even bigger trouble than we thought, and that we must fight all the more intrepidly to honor Robert Parry’s name, by following his great example.

Mark Crispin Miller is an NYU professor of media/communications and the author of many books, including The Bush Dyslexicon and Fooled Again.