Free Republic

A whistleblower has come forward with an explosive new trove of documents, rivaling or exceeding the Twitter Files and Facebook Files in scale and importance. They describe the activities of an “anti-disinformation” group called the Cyber Threat Intelligence League, or CTIL, that officially began as the volunteer project of data scientists and defense and intelligence veterans but whose tactics over time appear to have been absorbed into multiple official projects, including those of the Department of Homeland Security (DHS). The CTI League documents offer the missing link answers to key questions not addressed in the Twitter Files and Facebook Files....

Author and journalist Michael Shellenberger has said that “U.S. and U.K. military contractors” have used “sophisticated psychological operations and disinformation tactics… against the American people” in sworn testimony in the U.S. House of Representatives. In a hearing of the Subcommittee on the Weaponization of the Federal Government chaired by Jim Jordan (R-OH) on suppression of free speech by the government, Shellenberger presented the information he received from a whistleblower about the origins of the so-called “Censorship Industrial complex.” Shellenberger, one of the “Twitter Files” authors, coined the phrase “Censorship Industrial Complex” to describe the network of government and private entities...

NEW YORK (AP) — Preston Cabral eats meat nearly every day at home, but his favorite meals at school are served on “Meatless Mondays” and “Vegan Fridays.” “Today I ate chips, tangerines and this thing that looked like chili but without the meat — just beans,” the 12-year-old said after lunch. Programs like these are among the few proven to work for one of the thorniest problems of the 21st century: How to get people to eat less meat. Experts agree that the urgency of climate change and the demands of a surging global population call for an overhaul of...

As the PLA seeks to expand the reach of its influence operations around the world and to seize information dominance on the battlefield, it is researching and developing the next evolution of psychological warfare called cognitive domain operation[s] (CDO) that leverages subliminal messaging, deep fakes, overt propaganda, and public sentiment analysis,” the report stated. The report describes CDO as “a more aggressive form of psychological warfare” intended to “affect a target’s cognition, decision making, and behavior.” In short, CDO is the regime’s new methodology for breaking the will of an adversary, or else manipulating them into behaving in a manner...

The term "pedestrian" has a derogatory meaning because peasants walked while nobles were "equestrians" and rode horses. The industrial revolution eliminated this class difference, as it did so many others, by making car ownership available to the masses until eventually Herbert Hoover was able to boast that "Republican prosperity has reduced and increased earning capacity” to "put the proverbial 'chicken in every pot' and a car in every backyard to boot." Democrats have spent two generations trying to get those cars out of every backyard. Biden is trying to bring back Obama's mileage standards that were estimated to raise car...

Obama Issues Executive Order for the government to use individual's behavioral data.

IMPORTANT NOTE: In the effort to prevent the shooters from getting additional notoriety, I will refer to them, not by name, but as the Buffalo shooter and the Uvalde shooter, respectively.Quite some time ago, after Sandy Hook's school shooting in 2012, then after another school shooting at Umpqua Community College in October of 2015, I began to be suspicious of the frequency and the targets of these shootings. I wrote an editorial titled "Thinking the unthinkable: A case for orchestration". In it, I explored the possibility that the mass shootings were being orchestrated and enabled by members of certain three-letter...

Of all the platform firms, Google is singular. Its near-monopoly on search (around 90%) puts it in a position to steer thought. And increasingly, it avows the steering of thought as its unique responsibility. In an important article titled “Google.gov”, law professor Adam J. White details both the personnel flows and deep intellectual affini­ties between Google and the Obama White House. Hundreds of people switched jobs back and forth, some of them multiple times, between this one firm and the administration over eight years – an unprecedented alignment of corporate power and the executive branch. White writes that both aspired...

Climate change technocrats plan on using same methods that convinced public to obey lockdown. A deleted government report exploring how to make the public alter its behavior to accept the new ‘green economy’ reveals how COVID-19 restrictions have created a population with a “deep set reverence” for authority and a “powerful tendency to conform.” The report was inadvertently published by the British government before being hastily pulled down, but numerous journalists were able to retrieve its contents. The document explored how to weaponize behavioral psychology to ‘nudge’ the public into supporting measures and adopting behavior without them explicitly knowing they’re...

On 2 September 2018, Kansas University released a summation of a study on how gun owners affect politics.  The study will be presented at the American Political Science Association annual meeting in 2018, in Boston. A problem all scientists face is overcoming assumptions about reality they have already made. It is particularly true in social sciences such as political science. In such studies, it is very difficult to keep the world view of the person studying a subject from influencing the study.Most political scientists today subscribe to the Progressive political philosophy. It seems to be the case in the study...

The much-discussed new strain of COVID-19 — which is reportedly more contagious than the initial strain that swept the world in 2020 — has been detected in states like California and Colorado, leaving many Americans to wonder when it might emerge in their state and how the country will fight it. Public health experts have largely agreed that the recently approved vaccines will be able to fight the mutated COVID-19 strain effectively, noting that viruses mutate constantly.

Still haven’t gotten your fill of media professionals et al. fluffing the ChiComs? Well, we’ve got some great news for you: Huawei is sponsoring a conference on misinformation, with the National Association of Black Journalists.

The first lesson from how the Iran deal was sold to the public is that it is important to follow the money. Eight hundred eleven op-eds. Three hundred fifty- two letters to the editor. Two hundred twenty-seven editorials. That’s the number of “pro-diplomacy” articles that Ploughshares Fund takes credit for helping support as part of its “proactive” media campaign to support the Iran deal last year. They “were published during critical moments of the Iran campaign,” the website of the fund boasts in its 2015 annual report. The revelations about the work that this one fund did to support the...

People walk past the building that houses the offices of Cambridge Analytica in central London, March 20, 2018. Share WASHINGTON — Long before its controversial roles in the 2016 Brexit vote and U.S. presidential election, Cambridge Analytica influenced elections in Africa. The data mining company, under fire for its alleged use of 50 million Facebook accounts to shape campaign messages for then-candidate Donald Trump, also played a role in elections in Kenya and Nigeria, according to new reports. The company's first involvement in Africa dates to the general election in South Africa in 1994. That election marked the end of...

President Obama's re-election team has already been lauded for its mastery of data and organziation, but a feature in today's The New York Times looks at another secret, and more subtle, weapon: Behavioral science. Reporter Benedict Carey talks to some of the members of the campaign's "COBS" team, an informal group of unpaid advisors who shared their knowledge on the latest academic research and theories on how to influence the public's knowledge behavior. Publicly, the group—which it gave itself the name of "consortium of behavioral scientists"—where just friendly volunteers offering advice. None of the social scientists and psychologists who took...

Richard Stengel, a former high-level U.S. government official, head of the office for Public Diplomacy and Public Affairs at the State Department from 2013 to 2016, former editor of Time Magazine and a regular pundit on MSNBC, said in April of 2018 at a Council on Foreign Relations forum about “fake news,” that he “supports the use of propaganda on American citizens.” He then continued; “Basically, every country creates their own narrative story and, you know, my old job at the State Department was what people used to joke as the ‘chief propagandist’ job.” Keep in mind, that in 2013,...

From The Verge: The video was made in late 2016 by Nick Foster, the head of design at X (formerly Google X) and a co-founder of the Near Future Laboratory. The video, shared internally within Google, imagines a future of total data collection, where Google helps nudge users into alignment with their goals, custom-prints personalized devices to collect more data, and even guides the behavior of entire populations to solve global problems like poverty and disease.

It used to be said a picture what worth a thousand words. That’s not entirely true anymore, not with Photoshop. Now a picture is only worth a few words. Mostly, “Is that real?” This is one of the challenges facing us when we get something sent to us that we can’t verify. It is safer not to use it than to destroy our credibility by using phony evidence. We received such a picture when I wrote my first article exposing Adam Kokesh, the person who plans to lead an armed march on Washington DC on July 4th. Someone pasted a...

The rage-wing of the Democratic Party has gotten active again. Former Obama administration United Nations Ambassador Samantha Power followed former Central Intelligence Agency Director John Brennan to make big threats to the Trump administration in the wake of the firing of FBI Deputy Director Andrew McCabe for lying. It's fascinating because it's something President Trump had absolutely nothing to do with, given that it was apolitical watchdogs in the Department of Justice and the FBI's Office of Professional Responsibility who made the call. Yet they are lashing out and now making threats - because it's dawning on them that they...

FLASHBACK 2014: Facebook caught manipulating users: A recent study conscripted Facebook users as unwitting participants during a weeklong experiment in direct emotional manipulation. The study set out to discover if the emotional tone of a users’ News Feed content had an impact on their own emotional makeup, measured through the tone of what they posted to the social service after viewing the skewed material. Nearly 700,000 Facebook users were shown either more positive, or more negative content. The study found that users who were given more positive news feeds posted more positive things, and users who were given more negative...