The Information War
STORY AT-A-GLANCE
- 1967, the CIA’s covert use of the National Student Association to spread countermessages to communism was revealed by a college dropout named Michael Wood. The revelation sent shockwaves through the U.S., and as journalists started to pull at the strings, the CIA’s covert propaganda operations unraveled
- Journalists discovered the CIA had set up nonprofit foundations to funnel taxpayer money into philanthropic foundations that then sent the CIA’s “donations” to organizations that had joined the CIA’s payroll to promote government-sponsored propaganda
- These included youth organizations and student groups, church groups, public radio and news organizations. Sen. Wayne Morse, D-Ore., slammed the CIA’s covert propaganda activities, arguing the agency had created a “credibility chasm” within public opinion — a gap that could not and would not be bridged unless the government made clear that it would “fill the chasm with the truth”
- The CIA was never reined in and is more involved in propaganda activities today than ever before
- While many still have not realized it, we are at war, and the aggressors are government intelligence and security agencies that have turned their weapon of choice — information — against their own citizens
The video above features a 1967 CBS special report titled “In the Pay of the CIA: An American Dilemma,”1 hosted by Mike Wallace. It examines how the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) was secretly paying students, labor organizations, broadcasting networks and other organizations to do their bidding.
CBS News correspondents interview several of the people who at the time had received secret CIA payments, and the implications these activities have for the American way of life.
Gloria Steinem, for example, who headed the Independent Research Service, was paid by the CIA to send American students to attend and represent American values at communist youth festivals overseas, as was Philip Sherburne, former president of the National Student Association.
In 1967, the CIA’s covert use of the National Student Association to spread countermessages to communism was revealed by a college dropout named Michael Wood.2 The revelation sent shockwaves through the U.S., and as journalists started to pull at the strings, the extent of the CIA’s propaganda operations started to unravel.
A Condensed History
The National Security Act of 1947, signed by President Truman, created the CIA, the National Security Council, the Office of Secretary of Defense and the U.S. Air Force.3 As explained by the Office of the Historian,4 the Act “was a major reorganization of the foreign policy and military establishments of the U.S. government.”
The CIA was an outgrowth of the World War II era Office of Strategic Services and several small post-war intelligence organizations, and as noted by Wallace:
“Since the beginning, the CIA has suffered a personality split, because in addition to intelligence, the Security Act of 1947 orders the CIA to ‘perform other functions and duties as directed by the President and his National Security Council.’ That phrase has become a sort of blank check, authorizing CIA excursions into everything from simple propaganda to the overthrow of unfriendly governments.”
Wallace goes on to explain how the CIA ended up with fingers in so many pies. First, it set up several nondescript nonprofit foundations, the function of which were to funnel taxpayer money from the CIA to other, real foundations involved in real-world philanthropy.
However, in return for CIA funds, these foundations “agreed to become conduits for central intelligence,” and funneled the exact dollar amounts received on to other organizations that, in the 1940s, ’50s and ’60s, joined the CIA’s payroll to promote government-sponsored propaganda.
These included not only youth organizations and student groups, but also church groups, public radio and news organizations. Sen. Wayne Morse slammed the CIA’s covert propaganda activities, arguing the agency had created a “credibility chasm” within public opinion — a gap that could not and would not be bridged unless the government made clear that it would “fill the chasm with the truth.”
“The CIA has corrupted the stream of truth, objectivity and academic learning,” Morse told CBS News, “and it must be removed from all activities, except the very limited activity of what we know as intelligence activity, the field of spying and espionage.”
Another senator, Eugene McCarthy, was also critical of the CIA’s use of students and church groups to manipulate public opinion. He also said he felt there was “empire building” going on within the CIA — a statement that rings all the more true today.
Sen. John Stennis, member of the CIA Watchdog Subcommittee, defended the CIAs actions, reminding the CBS audience about the climate in which the agency was founded. In 1954, the U.S. Congress passed a bill outlawing communism, and the CIA was still basically protecting American liberty and democracy.
Former CIA director Allen Dulles also defended the agency’s behavior, citing the need to manage the threat of communism. The counterargument presented by critics was that by using covert propaganda techniques, the U.S. government was using the same strategies as the enemy, thereby undermining the idea of America being a country dedicated to free speech and the diversity of ideas.
At the end of the day, the overarching message of the CBS News report was that the CIA needed to change with changing times, clean up its act and get out of the covert propaganda business, as its interventions were harming the American image of being a free and open country.
Operation Mockingbird Is Alive and Well
Unfortunately, the CIA was never reined in, and its propaganda activities have only expanded and become more sophisticated over time. The 1976 Church Investigation exposed how the CIA had corrupted the media by paying journalists to promote the agency’s narratives.
The program, called Operation Mockingbird, was officially dismantled, but while the operational name may have been retired, there’s plenty of evidence to suggest the CIA never discontinued its media influence.5
In fact, we have evidence the CIA is controlling mainstream media to this day, and it’s doing so with unprecedented efficiency, as it can now push its narratives out through the three global news agencies, which are responsible for crafting and curating most of the news disseminated worldwide.
The only thing that has changed, really, is the CIA’s narrative. Whereas in the past it was dedicated to undermining communism, today, the CIA is a disinformation fountainhead for an unelected global Deep State that is hellbent on implementing a technocratic, totalitarian One World Government, the tyranny of which makes communism pale in comparison.
The CIA is now neck-deep in a global psyop to ensure the successful implementation of The Great Reset and the Fourth Industrial Revolution — two terms that describe different aspects of the same agenda of enslavement. And the CIA is not alone in this endeavor.
The FBI is also in on the action, as are most of the world’s intelligence agencies. They’re all pushing the same Great Reset and Fourth Industrial Revolution narratives, the aim of which is the technocratic control of the global population. That’s why we’re seeing the same narratives playing all over the world, including the Orwellian argument that we must censor to protect democracy.
A New Type of War
While many still have not realized it, we are at war. The aggressors are government intelligence and security agencies that have turned their weapon of choice — information — against their own citizens.
And, while the organizations doing the CIA’s dirty work may have changed, the basic organizational structure is the same as it was in 1967. Taxpayer money gets funneled through various federal departments and agencies into the hands of nongovernmental agencies that carry out censorship activities as directed. As recently reported by investigative journalists Alex Gutentag and Michael Shellenberger:6
“The Anti-Defamation League (ADL), the Center for Countering Digital Hate (CCDH), and the Institute for Strategic Dialogue (ISD) are nongovernmental organizations, their leaders say.
When they demand more censorship of online hate speech, as they are currently doing of X, formerly Twitter, those NGOs are doing it as free citizens and not, say, as government agents.
But the fact of the matter is that the US and other Western governments fund ISD, the UK government indirectly funds CCDH, and, for at least 40 years, ADL spied on its enemies and shared intelligence with the US, Israel and other governments.
The reason all of this matters is that ADL’s advertiser boycott against X may be an effort by governments to regain the ability to censor users on X that they had under Twitter before Musk’s takeover last November.
Internal Twitter and Facebook messages show that representatives of the US government, including the White House, FBI, Department of Homeland Security (DHS), as well as the UK government, successfully demanded Facebook and Twitter censorship of their users over the last several years.”
Censorship by Proxy
What we have now is government censorship by proxy, a deeply anti-American activity that has become standard practice, not just by intelligence and national security agencies but federal agencies of all stripes, including our public health agencies.
September 8, 2023, the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals upheld a lower court’s injunction banning the White House, the surgeon general, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and the FBI from influencing social media companies to remove so-called “disinformation.”7
According to the judges’ decision,8 “CDC officials provided direct guidance to the platforms on the application of the platforms’ internal policies and moderation activities” by telling them what was, and was not, misinformation, asking for changes to platforms’ moderation policies and directing platforms to take specific actions.
“Ultimately, the CDC’s guidance informed, if not directly affected, the platforms’ moderation decisions,” the judges said, so, “although not plainly coercive, the CDC officials likely significantly encouraged the platforms’ moderation decisions, meaning they violated the First Amendment.”
Unfortunately, as mentioned earlier, the U.S. government is not acting alone. Governments around the world and international organizations like the World Health Organization are all engaged in censorship, and when it comes to medical information, most Big Tech platforms are taking their lead from the WHO. And, if the WHO’s pandemic treaty9 is enacted, then the WHO will have sole authority to dictate truth. Everything else will be censored.
YouTube to Ban All Types of Medical ‘Misinformation’
YouTube, for example, which censored medical information that went against CDC guidance during the COVID pandemic, recently announced it is committed to eliminating virtually all medical “misinformation” that contradicts the WHO:10
“While specific medical guidance can change over time as we learn more, our goal is to ensure that when it comes to areas of well-studied scientific consensus, YouTube is not a platform for distributing information that could harm people.
Moving forward, YouTube will streamline dozens of our existing medical misinformation guidelines to fall under three categories – Prevention, Treatment, and Denial.
These policies will apply to specific health conditions, treatments, and substances where content contradicts local health authorities or the World Health Organization (WHO) … Here’s what the framework will look like:
•Prevention misinformation: We will remove content that contradicts health authority guidance on the prevention and transmission of specific health conditions, and on the safety and efficacy of approved vaccines. For example, this encompasses content that promotes a harmful substance for disease prevention.
•Treatment misinformation: We will remove content that contradicts health authority guidance on treatments for specific health conditions … Examples include content that encourages unproven remedies in place of seeking medical attention for specific conditions, like promoting caesium chloride as a treatment for cancer.
•Denial misinformation: We will remove content that disputes the existence of specific health conditions. This covers content that denies people have died from COVID-19 …
In applying our updated approach, cancer treatment misinformation fits the framework — the public health risk is high as cancer is one of the leading causes of death worldwide, there is stable consensus about safe cancer treatments … and it’s a topic that’s prone to misinformation.
Starting today and ramping up in the coming weeks, we will begin removing content that promotes cancer treatments proven to be harmful or ineffective, or content that discourages viewers from seeking professional medical treatment.”
The UN his also partnered with private businesses, telecommunications companies, civil society groups, media and individual journalists to combat misinformation.
The UN secretary-general António Guterres’ has even gone on record saying “hate speech” is a “weapon of war” that must be brought under control to achieve the UN’s peacekeeping aims. In July 2022, he made the following remarks to the Security Council, clearly demonstrating that the UN views censorship as a necessity for world peace:12
“The United Nations must play a more deliberate role as an information actor in conflict environments. We must be seen as a trusted source of information by providing engaging, factual content, facilitating inclusive dialogue, demanding the removal of harmful speech, calling leaders to account and promoting the voices of peace and unity.”
Just what is “harmful speech”? Why, anything that counters the globalist narrative — “the voices of unity” — of course. In classic Orwellian doublespeak, UN leadership is calling dissent (i.e., “hate speech”) “a weapon of war,” when in reality, censorship is the weapon.
This kind of rhetoric alone tells you that we are in fact at war, and the public has been declared the enemy of the globalist cabal, the members of which have infiltrated all the key national agencies and international organizations now being used to browbeat us into compliance with a slave agenda.
In the video above, under-secretary-general for the UN’s global communications talks about how “social media is being weaponized to provoke the worst in human nature” (there’s that war lingo again), and how the UN is “pushing Big Tech” to “bring balance to our information systems.”
In other words, Big Tech is being pushed to give the technocrats a battlefield edge by eliminating the “weapons” of everyday people (who greatly outnumber them), namely their voices.
Why Are We Being Censored?
While globalists and technocrats would have you believe that censorship is all about protecting people by making sure everything they see is accurate and truthful, the exact opposite is actually happening. The Deep State players (whether they recognize themselves as belonging to that exclusive club or not) are the ones spreading false information to lull you into compliance with an agenda that is so utterly horrifying that no sane, rational person would ever go along with it.
I’m talking about The Great Reset, the Fourth Industrial Revolution, the UN’s Sustainable Development Goals, the 2030 Agenda, the One Health agenda. These and several other terms all refer to one comprehensive, worldwide plot to create a global slave society under the rule of a centralized world government run by unelected technocrats.
Everything we’ve seen and experienced over the last three years are part of that agenda, including the global push for vaccine mandates. It’s no surprise then, to find out that 14 of the 17 Sustainable Development Goals involve compulsory vaccinations. As noted in the August 2021 issue of Globalization and Health:13
“Immunization directly impacts health (SDG3) and brings a contribution to 14 out of the 17 Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), such as ending poverty, reducing hunger, and reducing inequalities. Therefore, immunization is recognized to play a central role in reaching the SDGs, especially in low- and middle-income countries (LMICs).”
Nothing is happening by accident. It’s all part of a movement toward a global totalitarianism centered on the control and suppression of populations. But to get there, they must control the flow of information. Truthtellers cannot be tolerated because, again, there are billions of us, and only thousands, perhaps tens of thousands, of them.
Once the technocratic system of control is fully in place, 24/7 surveillance and artificial intelligence-driven algorithms will keep people in check, but until then, the globalists need our cooperation to install and implement the prerequisite surveillance and control systems. Keeping people from understanding the big picture is the greatest weapon in their arsenal.
There’s also plenty of evidence indicating they’d prefer to have far fewer of us around, and preventing you from accessing truthful information about health and medicine will ensure you get and stay sick (which is profitable for them) and ultimately die sooner rather than later (which is the goal).
Once you understand the grand plan, you can see how it’s being implemented in pieces, and why all this censorship is needed, from their point of view. At that point you have a decision to make. Go along with their program to own you and all of your descendants, in perpetuity, or take ownership of your own life and peacefully move in the opposite direction, toward decentralized, uncensored, privacy-based systems of all kinds.