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Academic Media Censorship Conference Censored by YouTube

Posted by M. C. on February 4, 2021

Perhaps more worrying of all is the increasingly close connections between Silicon Valley and the National Security State. “What Lockheed Martin was to the twentieth century…technology and cyber-security companies will be to the twenty-first,” wrote Google executives Eric Schmidt and Jared Cohen. Late last year, the CIA signed a partnership deal worth tens of billions of dollars with Microsoft, Google, Oracle, IBM, and Amazon Web Services. Meanwhile, Facebook has partnered with the NATO cutout organization the Atlantic Council to help them curate the world’s news feeds. Reddit has also hired Atlantic Council official Jessica Ashooh as its director of policy.

The Atlantic Council’s board of directors includes eight former CIA chiefs, multiple U.S. Army Generals, and high statespeople like Henry Kissinger and Condoleezza Rice, meaning that any decisions big tech companies make are only one step removed from the U.S. government. “This is actually [state] censorship by proxy,” Higdon warned.

https://www.mintpressnews.com/media-censorship-conference-censored-youtube/274918/

By Alan Macleod

An academic critical media literacy conference warning of the dangers of media censorship has, ironically, been censored by YouTube. The Critical Media Literacy Conference of the Americas 2020 took place without incident online over two days in October and featured a number of esteemed speakers and panels discussing issues concerning modern media studies.

Weeks later, however, the entire video record of the conference — estimated at around 24 hours of material — disappeared from YouTube. Organizer Nolan Higdon of California State University East Bay, began receiving worried messages from other academics, some of which were shared with MintPress, who had been using the material in their classrooms, noting that it had all mysteriously disappeared.

“At first I thought it was a joke,” said Mickey Huff of Diablo Valley College, California. “My initial reaction was ‘that’s absurd;’ there must have been a mistake or an accident or it must have got swept under somehow. There is no violation, there was no reasoning, there was no warning, there was not an explanation, there was no nothing. The entire channel was just gone,” he told MintPress. Huff is also the director of Project Censored, an organization that sponsored the event.

Higdon suspected that it was the content critical of big tech monopolies like Google, YouTube, Facebook, and Twitter that was the reason why the channel was deleted. “Each video was a different panel and every panel had different people from the other ones, so it is not like there was one theme or person or copyrighted content in all of our videos; this seems to be an attack on the conference, not on a singular video,” he said.

“This wasn’t a keg party with Parler users”

The organizers were careful to avoid copyright infringement, with the large majority of their videos in lecture format, essentially a recorded Zoom call. Speakers included some of the best-known names in media studies, with the event sponsored by institutions like Stanford University and UCLA. “This wasn’t a keg party with Parler users: it was an academic conference,” Huff said.

These are pioneering figures in critical media literacy scholarship. It’s mind numbing that all of this was just disappeared from YouTube. The irony is writ large…This is part of a potentially algorithmic way of getting rid of more radical positions that criticize establishment media systems, including journalism.”

Higdon too, suspected YouTube’s action was politicized: “This is the same year we saw big tech trying to influence Prop 22 here in California, so I am not too surprised that they would be aggressive with folks like us who are critical of media corporations.”

Organizers say they attempted to contact YouTube but did not receive a reply.

MintPress spoke to representatives from Google, YouTube’s parent company, who strenuously denied that they would ever remove content from their platforms purely because it was critical of the company, noting that there is a wealth of videos on the website that challenge or attack them.After looking into the matter, Google said they could find only one video and reinstated it (although the video does not appear on the conference’s channel). As for the hours of other footage, that remains an enigma to them, with no record of its existence. Thus, it appears that there will be no closure or a definitive answer to this mystery.

Algorithms take aim

Media literacy, big tech power, and censorship are hot topics right now. In the wake of the dramatic storming of the Capitol Building earlier this month, a host of companies, including Google, Facebook, YouTube, Twitter, and Instagram, took actions against Donald Trump, limiting his and his supporters’ ability to communicate online. Perhaps most notably, however, Google, Apple, and Amazon Web Services launched a coordinated assault on “free speech app” Parler, a service popular with the far-right for its lax laws on racism. Together, the three effectively took the service offline around the world.

More recently, the Wall Street Bets subreddit, responsible for intentionally sinking a multi-billion dollar hedge fund, has endured retaliation, its communications channels cut by messaging app Discord, amid calls to immediately criminalize their behavior.

While the pros and cons of such decisions can, and have been, debated, the bigger question of should privately-owned companies be allowed to have the power to regulate who can and cannot speak online, has largely been downplayed.

“On the one hand I understand they have the right to deplatform people,” Huff told MintPress. “On a broader level though, I don’t think they should have achieved this kind of power over our communication systems in the first place, and these should be publicly run platforms regulated the same way our government regulates and enforces the First Amendment.”

Higdon was equally worried about the power amassed by the tech giants. “By empowering these tech companies to decide what is and is not appropriate, they are going to look out for their vested interests, and people who are critical of their business model and practices are going to be targets,” he said, predicting that,

These lefties right now who are advocating for censorship…the outcome of this is going to be on them.”

If history is any judge, he will be proven correct. In the wake of the 2016 election and the allegations that Russian disinformation swung the result in Trump’s favor, social media companies changed their algorithms to help halt the spread of fake news. The main result, however, was a throttling of traffic to high-quality alternative news sites and the promotion of corporate media like CNN and Fox News. Overnight, Consortium News’ Google traffic fell by 47%, Common Dreams’ by 37%, Democracy Now! By 36% and The Intercept by 19%. MintPress suffered similar, unrecoverable losses.

Likewise, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg personally approved the deliberate choking of alternative media, admitting that his company deranked Mother Jones because of its left-wing persuasion (despite Facebook’s assurances that it was doing no such thing). Other, more radical outlets have suffered even greater reductions in traffic.

Anti-social media

Whatever decisions big tech companies make reverberate throughout society. 35, 24, and 17% of Americans get their news from Facebook, YouTube, and Twitter, respectively, with similar numbers worldwide. This enormous user base makes them by far the greatest and most influential news platforms on the planet, with the ability to highlight stories, bury others, and even swing elections. Huff was extremely worried about the power of these new media monopolies.

“We can’t get away from the fact that Google, Facebook, YouTube, Twitter, the whole corporate Alphabet soup of this big tech dystopia have gobbled up the public sphere. This is where people can go to congregate and share their information and it is also where invisible forces decide which voices get heard and which do not. Let’s also not forget that all of this tech was initially funded with taxpayer money.”

Worse still, although we now live in an online world, the public is hopelessly ill-equipped to navigate its waters, displaying a shocking lack of awareness and understanding of how they can be manipulated.

A 2016 study from Stanford University found that two-thirds of college-aged “digital natives” — people who grew up using the Internet — mistook native advertising for a genuine news story, even with the words “sponsored content” displayed prominently. “Overall, young people’s ability to reason about the information on the Internet can be summed up in one word: bleak,” the study concluded, leading to calls for more critical media literacy education in schools. “Since we are not teaching people how to use these technologies, or how these technologies use them, they are more susceptible to propaganda and to disinformation. And ironically our conference was designed to combat exactly that problem,” Huff added.

Perhaps more worrying of all is the increasingly close connections between Silicon Valley and the National Security State. “What Lockheed Martin was to the twentieth century…technology and cyber-security companies will be to the twenty-first,” wrote Google executives Eric Schmidt and Jared Cohen. Late last year, the CIA signed a partnership deal worth tens of billions of dollars with Microsoft, Google, Oracle, IBM, and Amazon Web Services. Meanwhile, Facebook has partnered with the NATO cutout organization the Atlantic Council to help them curate the world’s news feeds. Reddit has also hired Atlantic Council official Jessica Ashooh as its director of policy.

The Atlantic Council’s board of directors includes eight former CIA chiefs, multiple U.S. Army Generals, and high statespeople like Henry Kissinger and Condoleezza Rice, meaning that any decisions big tech companies make are only one step removed from the U.S. government. “This is actually [state] censorship by proxy,” Higdon warned.

“These companies, we know thanks to Edward Snowden and others, have contracts with the Federal government. There is a revolving door between particularly the Democratic Party and big tech, and there are also various loans and government protections given to this industry. So this is not some independent set of entities making this decision.”

“If 1984’s protagonist Winston Smith were a real character today he’d be a fact checker at Facebook or a content curator at YouTube, relegating to the dustbins of history whatever programmers are told to or whatever keywords our conference triggered,” Huff added.

Big tech has repeatedly acted at the behest of the U.S. government to silence its international opponents, suspending the accounts of foreign leaders like Venezuela’s Nicolas Maduro or Iran’s Ayatollah Khamenei or deranking foreign media outlets like RT and TeleSUR.

It is in this light that the deletion of the Critical Media Literacy Conference of the Americas can be seen; not as a deliberate decision by an angry Google employee intent on revenge, but as the result of a powerful and Byzantine algorithm designed by Silicon Valley executives who are intimately intertwined with both the government and the corporate world. There is little oversight of their power or recourse to their decisions, given their enormous influence over public life today.

Huff was particularly sardonic about the whole affair:

There are layers of irony here that are certainly not lost on us. But I don’t know if the public at large is realizing the attack that is happening against the very people that are the intellectual bulwark against such institutional censorship. I’m not trying to make us out to be martyrs here, but my point is that I think it has a particular irony when the very public intellectuals who try to educate the public about how these systems work are silenced,” he said.

Feature photo | Graphic by Antonio Cabrera for MintPress News | Based on art created for Project Censored

Alan MacLeod is Senior Staff Writer for MintPress News. After completing his PhD in 2017 he published two books: Bad News From Venezuela: Twenty Years of Fake News and Misreporting and Propaganda in the Information Age: Still Manufacturing Consent, as well as a number of academic articles. He has also contributed to FAIR.org, The Guardian, Salon, The Grayzone, Jacobin Magazine, and Common Dreams.

Republish our stories! MintPress News is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 International License.

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It’s time to take seriously teachers’ refusal to teach – American Thinker

Posted by M. C. on February 4, 2021

The reason why teachers can take this stand is that they’re still getting their paychecks.

Nevertheless, page three of the handout for the LAUSD says that Wednesday, February 3 is going to be “Trans-Affirming, Queer-Affirming, and Collective Value” day.  Elementary classrooms are encouraged to do a “woke read aloud: They, She, He: Easy as ABC,” to explore “gender stereotypes through role plays,” and to read It Feels Good to Be Yourself: A book about gender identity. 

This is not education; it’s indoctrination, and the teachers’ cowardice in the face of the Wuhan virus is the perfect opportunity to bring an end to this madness. 

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2021/02/its_time_to_take_seriously_teachers_refusal_to_teach.html

By Andrea Widburg

In Democrat-run cities across America, teachers are demanding priority access to vaccines and refusing to return to their classrooms.  The big fights are in Chicago, Montclair (New Jersey), and California, where the teachers are insisting on working only from home.  Other school systems have only partial in-class teaching (e.g., Texas, Florida, and New York).  Conservatives are reflexively pushing for a return to classroom teaching, but perhaps they should push in the other direction: let’s end public schools entirely.

Before I go any farther, I’d better apologize to those readers who are intelligent, dedicated teachers who do not think theirs is the hardest job in the world, that they receive the lowest salary of any employee ever, or that they are uniquely vulnerable to the Wuhan virus despite evidence that classrooms are not dangerous virus spreaders.  This post is not about you.  This post is about teachers who use their classrooms to indoctrinate the captive young people in their charge with leftist values.

In Chicago, Mayor Lori Lightfoot is engaged in an epic battle with the teachers’ union to force them back into schools. So far, the teachers are winning with remote “learning” extended for at least two more days — and with the City having backed down from its threat to lock computer teaching access for those teachers who don’t return to their classrooms.  In California, teachers’ unions are refusing to re-open schools until every single teacher is vaccinated.

The reason why teachers can take this stand is that they’re still getting their paychecks.  While non-government workers are desperate to get back on the job so that they can buy food and shelter their families, teachers keep getting their paychecks even as students languish at home, isolated, alienated, depressed, and suicidal.

Conservatives rightly resent what’s happening.  They support getting teachers back to work, but I’d like to suggest a different approach: shut down the public schools in these cities, give parents vouchers, and let the free market do its magic.  Some parents might homeschool; some might do learning pods; some might reinvigorate parochial schools or other religious academies.  The point is that parents would finally have a say in what their children are learning — and good teachers would find a broad variety of employment opportunities.

More than that, parents would have a say in preventing their students from being on the receiving end of leftist indoctrination.  For example, parents might have a say about the content of Black Lives Matter week at the Los Angeles Unified School District.

The LAUSD has on its website a colorful five-page graphic talking about what students should be learning from February 1 through 5, which is the “week of action” for “black lives matter at schools.”  It’s a dangerous thing to say nowadays, but I believe that all lives matter.  I also believe that, if I say one race matters without mentioning the others, I am impliedly saying that the others don’t, which is a sentiment I cannot support.  So, right off the bat, if my children were still in school, I would resent mightily having the BLM agenda — a purely Marxist concept that substitutes race for class — foisted on them.

It’s not just that, though.  What’s being taught through the BLM curriculum is the whole panoply of hard-left thought, which substitutes illusory restorative justice for the rule of law, makes race (something over which people have no control) the single most important thing about the individual, pushes kids into becoming political activists, and — most disturbingly — advances the transgender myth.

People who believe they are the opposite of their biological sex or that they can change sex with the phases of the moon are every bit as mentally ill as anorexics or others with body dysmorphia.  It’s a tragic condition that should be dealt with compassionately.  It should not be foisted as reality on young children.  That’s as bad as treating anorexics with diet pills and stomach-stapling.

Nevertheless, page three of the handout for the LAUSD says that Wednesday, February 3 is going to be “Trans-Affirming, Queer-Affirming, and Collective Value” day.  Elementary classrooms are encouraged to do a “woke read aloud: They, She, He: Easy as ABC,” to explore “gender stereotypes through role plays,” and to read It Feels Good to Be Yourself: A book about gender identity.  (By the way, have you noticed that all so-called transgender men invariably traffic in hyper-feminine gender stereotypes, along the lines of Marilyn Monroe?)

This is not education; it’s indoctrination, and the teachers’ cowardice in the face of the Wuhan virus is the perfect opportunity to bring an end to this madness.  Public schools have gotten too big and too political.  If Democrats could use the Wuhan virus to upend America, conservatives should be able to use it to strike down a toxic system that employs too many people more interested in advocacy than in education.

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Surveillance Kills Freedom – LewRockwell

Posted by M. C. on February 4, 2021

I offer this brief constitutional history so as to address the abuse of the Fourth Amendment, and the consequences of that abuse. Two weeks ago, the Defense Intelligence Agency — an arm of the Pentagon and one of 16 federal entities that spies on Americans — acknowledged publicly that it uses commercial software to monitor the movements and conversations of those on whom it has chosen to spy. And because it does so without warrants, it spies on whomever it wishes.

https://www.lewrockwell.com/2021/02/andrew-p-napolitano/surveillance-kills-freedom/

By Andrew P. Napolitano

“The makers of our Constitution undertook to secure conditions favorable to the pursuit of happiness. They recognized the significance of man’s spiritual nature, of his feelings, and of his intellect. They knew that only a part of the pain, pleasure and satisfactions of life are to be found in material things. They sought to protect Americans in their beliefs, their thoughts, their emotions and their sensations. They conferred, as against the Government, the right to be let alone — the most comprehensive of rights, and the right most valued by civilized men.”
— Justice Louis D. Brandeis (1856-1941)

When Justice Louis D. Brandeis referred to the right to privacy as “the right to be let alone,” it was 1928. He was dissenting in a Supreme Court opinion called Olmstead v. United States, in which federal agents tapped the telephone lines of Roy Olmstead and others and recorded their conversations about importing alcohol into the U.S. during Prohibition. They did so without search warrants. On the basis of the tapped conversations, Olmstead and his colleagues were convicted of conspiracy to violate federal law. The Supreme Court upheld their convictions.

The issue in the case was whether the Fourth Amendment’s prohibition of searches and seizures without a warrant issued by a judge based on probable cause of crime includes surveillance. When Brandeis dissented in Olmstead, telephones were novel and not in widespread personal use. It would be 39 years before the Supreme Court accepted Brandeis’ dissent as properly encapsulating the understanding of the framers when it characterized surveillance as a search.

Stated differently, the language in the Fourth Amendment, which unambiguously prohibits the government from engaging in warrantless searches and seizures, was not interpreted so as to characterize government surveillance as a search until 1967, when the Supreme Court accepted Brandeis’ rationale. Since then, it is commonplace that the government needs a warrant to engage in surveillance. The warrant is a constitutional bulwark against fishing expeditions, and it requires the courts to defer to privacy.

I offer this brief constitutional history so as to address the abuse of the Fourth Amendment, and the consequences of that abuse. Two weeks ago, the Defense Intelligence Agency — an arm of the Pentagon and one of 16 federal entities that spies on Americans — acknowledged publicly that it uses commercial software to monitor the movements and conversations of those on whom it has chosen to spy. And because it does so without warrants, it spies on whomever it wishes.

It claims that the language of the Fourth Amendment — which protects the right of all people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers and effects — only restrains law enforcement and does not restrain the balance of the government.

Yet, the whole purpose of the Bill of Rights is to recognize that personal liberty stems from our humanity. When Thomas Jefferson wrote the Declaration of Independence, he referred to our rights to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness as inalienable from our human nature, and as gifts of the Creator.

The Bill of Rights, too, articulates that our rights are natural. The Ninth Amendment expressly commands that the enumeration of certain rights — such as the freedoms of religion, speech and press — shall not be construed by any government to deny or disparage other rights retained by the people.

Among the rights retained by the people — never given away to the states or the federal government — and thus protected by the Ninth Amendment, and since 1967 by the Fourth, is the right to privacy. The Olmstead decision focused narrowly on whether listening to someone’s telephone conversations without a warrant is as unconstitutional as rummaging through the person’s papers and effects without a warrant.

Brandeis understood that true happiness can only come from the exercise of personal liberty, and James Madison understood this when he wrote the Fourth Amendment. This understanding, as recognized by the courts today, is that the right to privacy protects intellectual activities, beliefs, thoughts, emotions, sensations, and private communications about them.

Who could be happy under a state of surveillance? Privacy is natural — there are things we all do that are none of the government’s business. Surveillance is totalitarian. It is the manifestation of the tyrant’s wish to know all about a potential opponent.

The whole purpose of the Bill of Rights is to keep the government at bay — off the people’s backs, as Justice William O. Douglas wrote — thereby protecting our natural state of freedom so that we can pursue happiness.

The Declaration of Independence underscores, and the Bill of Rights protects, the right to pursue happiness for individuals, not for governments.

Who can be happy while being observed by the government? A watched person changes behavior and loses liberty on account of being watched. The liberty to make unfettered choices, the right to shake a metaphorical fist in the tyrant’s face, the personal power to ignore what the government expects are all dissipated.

A watched person hesitates to exercise freedom. The more the government gets away with surveillance without warrants, the more people will accept the servitude it brings.

Personal freedom is the unfettered power to exercise natural rights without the approval of the government or the consent of any other person. It is the means to happiness. Yet, because we live in a society in which we need the government’s permission to do nearly anything, is it any wonder that the government wants to know everything about us?

The government that spies continuously has large ears and insatiable eyes. And on its face there is no smile.

The Best of Andrew P. Napolitano Andrew P. Napolitano [send him mail], a former judge of the Superior Court of New Jersey, is the senior judicial analyst at Fox News Channel. Judge Napolitano has written nine books on the U.S. Constitution. The most recent is Suicide Pact: The Radical Expansion of Presidential Powers and the Lethal Threat to American Liberty. To find out more about Judge Napolitano and to read features by other Creators Syndicate writers and cartoonists, visit creators.com.

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JFK, Allen Dulles, and Indonesia – Edward Curtin

Posted by M. C. on February 4, 2021

In JFK vs. Dulles, he exposes the intrigue behind the ruthless regime-change strategy in Indonesia of the longest-serving CIA director, Allen Dulles, and how it clashed with the policy of President John F. Kennedy, leading to JFK’s assassination, Indonesian regime change, and massive slaughter.

http://edwardcurtin.com/a-review-greg-poulgrains-jfk-vs-allen-dulles/

A Review: JFK vs. Allen Dulles by Greg Poulgrain

Before I digress slightly, let me state from the outset that the book by Greg Poulgrain that I am about to review is extraordinary by any measure. The story he tells is one you will read nowhere else, especially in the way he links the assassination of President Kennedy to former CIA Director Allen Dulles and the engineering by the latter of one of the 20th century’s most terrible mass murders.  It will make your hair stand on end and should be read by anyone who cares about historical truth.

About twelve years ago I taught a graduate school course to Massachusetts State Troopers and police officers from various cities and towns.  As part of the course material, I had created a segment on the history of the United States’ foreign policy, with particular emphasis on Indonesia.

No one in this class knew anything about Indonesia, not even where it was. These were intelligent, ambitious adults, eager to learn, all with college degrees. This was in the midst of the “war on terror” – i.e. war on Muslim countries – and the first year of Barack Obama’s presidency.  Almost all the class had voted for Obama and were aware they he had spent some part of his youth in this unknown country somewhere far away.

I mention this as a preface to this review of JFK vs. Dulles, because its subtitle is Battleground Indonesia, and my suspicion is that those students’ lack of knowledge about the intertwined history of Indonesia and the U.S. is as scanty today among the general public as it was for my students a dozen years ago.

This makes Greg Poulgrain’s remarkable book – JFK vs. Allen Dulles: Battleground Indonesia – even more important since it is a powerful antidote to such ignorance, and a reminder for those who have fallen, purposefully or not, into a state of historical amnesia that has erased the fact that the U.S. has committed systematic crimes that have resulted in the deaths of more than a million Indonesians and many more millions throughout the world over innumerable decades.

Such crimes against humanity have been hidden behind what the English playwright Harold Pinter in his 2005 Nobel Prize address called “a tapestry of lies.”  Of such massive crimes, he said:

But you wouldn’t know it.
It never happened. Nothing ever happened. Even while it was happening it wasn’t happening. It didn’t matter. It was of no interest. The crimes of the United States have been systematic, constant, vicious, remorseless, but very few people have actually talked about them.

And when one examines the true history of such atrocities, again and again one comes up against familiar names of the guilty who have never been prosecuted.  Criminals in high places whose crimes around the world from Vietnam to Chile to Cuba to Nicaragua to Argentina to Iraq to Libya to Syria, etc. have been – and continue to be – integral to American foreign policy as it serves the interests of its wealthy owners and their media mouthpieces.

In his brilliant new book on U.S./Indonesian history, Dr. Greg Poulgrain unweaves this tapestry of lies and sheds new light on the liars’ sordid deeds.

See the rest here

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The GameStop Rebels vs. “Too Big to Fail” | Mises Wire

Posted by M. C. on February 4, 2021

The fearmongering went beyond even the usual places we hear about financial news. On The View, for example, Meghan McCain delivered the sort of status quo–defending bromides we’ve come to expect from her. She insisted the GameStop affair could spiral into an economy-killing disaster because

If the stock ends up plunging because of this, because of GameStop and Wall Street loses billions, at a certain point, it will impact stocks like Apple and Disney and stocks that a lot of average Americans do invest in, and if that happens, average Americans will end up losing even more money.

Her comment doesn’t really make any sense, and she doesn’t seem to have even a rudimentary understanding of what happened. But her comment delivered the important point: namely, that anything that causes volatility in the market could be a disaster for every American household. Translation: we should all be very, very afraid if something isn’t done to keep these Reddit people—whom she compared to the Capitol “insurrectionists”—under control.

https://mises.org/wire/gamestop-rebels-vs-too-big-fail

Ryan McMaken

Last week, a large number of small-time investors drove up the price of GameStop’s (GME) stock a historic 1,784 percent. But this was no mere spike in some obscure stock. The stock’s price spiked in part as a result of efforts by “an army of smaller investors who have been rallying on Reddit and elsewhere online to support GameStop’s stock and beat back the professionals.” These professionals were hedge fund managers who had shorted GameStop’s stock. In other words, hedge funders were betting billions that GameStop’s stock would go down. But the price went up instead, meaning hedge funds like Melvin Capital (and Citron Research) took “a significant loss,” possibly totaling $70 billion.

There surely were plenty of insiders on both sides of this deal. Given the complexity of various schemes employed by seasoned investors, it seems it is very unlikely that this is just a simple matter of little Davids taking on Wall Street Goliaths. But it also looks like that’s not all that was going on. Had this only been just another scheme by some Wall Street insiders against some other Wall Street insiders the story would probably have ended there.

But that’s not what happened. Rather, it appears that, for many of the smaller investors who were involved, much of this “short squeeze” was conducted for the purposes of throwing a monkey wrench in the plans of Wall Street hedge funds which exist within the rarified world of billionaires and their friends. 

Pro–Wall Street Fearmongering

The reactions to the event from media pundits and other commentators were telling in that there was clearly fear and outrage over the fact that business as usual on Wall Street wasn’t being enforced. Predictably, much of the reaction to the Reddit rebellion was to label it a “fiasco,” “insanity,” and something sure to leave a “trail of destruction.” The important thing was to use words designed to make it all look like the threat to hedge funds represents some sort of grave threat to the overall economy. Jim Lebenthal at CNBC, for example, declared the “short-squeeze fiasco is a threat to the proper functioning of financial markets.”

The fearmongering went beyond even the usual places we hear about financial news. On The View, for example, Meghan McCain delivered the sort of status quo–defending bromides we’ve come to expect from her. She insisted the GameStop affair could spiral into an economy-killing disaster because

If the stock ends up plunging because of this, because of GameStop and Wall Street loses billions, at a certain point, it will impact stocks like Apple and Disney and stocks that a lot of average Americans do invest in, and if that happens, average Americans will end up losing even more money.

Her comment doesn’t really make any sense, and she doesn’t seem to have even a rudimentary understanding of what happened. But her comment delivered the important point: namely, that anything that causes volatility in the market could be a disaster for every American household. Translation: we should all be very, very afraid if something isn’t done to keep these Reddit people—whom she compared to the Capitol “insurrectionists”—under control.

Of course, in a functioning and relatively unhampered market, unusual, unexpected things happen all the time. Entrepreneurial actors do things the incumbent firms and “experts” hadn’t counted on. This leads to “instability” and big swings in prices. This is actual capitalism, and it doesn’t mean the marketplace isn’t functioning properly. In fact, it probably means the marketplace is dynamic and responsive to consumers and other market participants. 

But that’s not something Wall Street insiders or their pals in Washington like in the modern era. Although Wall Streeters love to portray themselves as capitalist captains of industry, the fact is they have very little interest in real, competitive capitalism. 

Rather, we live in the era of “too big to fail” (TBTF), when market freedom means nothing and preserving the portfolios of powerful Wall Street institutions—through any means necessary—is all that matters. 

Decades of “Too Big to Fail”

It’s based on the idea that Wall Street is just too important to leave to the market, and Washington must intervene to make sure rich guys on Wall Street stay rich. David Stockman explains this philosophy: 

[It is] the notion that the “threat of systemic risk” and a cascading contagion of losses from the failure of any big Wall Street institution would be so calamitous that it warranted an exemption from free market discipline.

This goes back at least to the 1994 Mexican bailout—which was really a bailout of investors, not of Mexico—which solidified the process of normalizing huge transfers of wealth from taxpayers and dollar holders to the Wall Street elite. By then, the “Greenspan put” was already in place, with the central bank forever poised to embrace more easy money in pursuit of propping up stock prices. Then came the bailouts of 2008 and the covid-19 avalanche of easy money—all of which lopsidedly benefited Wall Street over the rest of the economy. 

This “exemption from free market discipline” is what Wall Street is all about these days. The financial sector has become accustomed to enjoying bailouts, easy money, and the resulting financialization which puts ever greater amounts of the US economy into the hands of Wall Street money managers. The sector is now built on corporate welfare, not “free markets.” No matter what happens, Wall Street expects the deck to be stacked in its favor.

This is why “volatility” has become a bad word, and “stability” is now the name of the game. It’s why Lebenthal thinks anything out of the ordinary is a threat to the “proper functioning of financial markets.” If some free market innovation and inventiveness actually takes place in some small corner of the marketplace, well, then we’re all expected to get very upset.

That’s the way Wall Street likes it.  Author:

Contact Ryan McMaken

Ryan McMaken (@ryanmcmaken) is a senior editor at the Mises Institute. Send him your article submissions for the Mises Wire and The Austrian, but read article guidelines first. Ryan has degrees in economics and political science from the University of Colorado and was a housing economist for the State of Colorado. He is the author of Commie Cowboys: The Bourgeoisie and the Nation-State in the Western Genre.

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AOC Claims Two Men In MAGA Hats Threw Economics Textbooks At Her

Posted by M. C. on February 3, 2021

https://babylonbee.com/news/aoc-claims-two-men-in-maga-hats-threw-economics-textbooks-at-her

WASHINGTON, D.C.—In recounting her terrifying experience in the Capitol when America’s sacred and holy democracy was assaulted by Lin Wood’s Twitter followers, Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez revealed that the attack was much more horrible and terrifying than anyone originally thought.

“At one point, two scary men in MAGA hats, like, literally threw copies of Basic Economics by Thomas Sowell, literally right at me,” said AOC. “They said: ‘Read this! Read this please!’ in their very scary man voices. I thought at that moment I was going to die. I’m lucky to still be standing before you today.”

AOC and other representatives are calling for Republicans and all their voters to be held accountable for the brazen terrorist attack, and have called for all copies of Basic Economics to be burned immediately. “I heard Thomas Sowell is a notorious white supremacist, so his book has no business being sold in stores let alone being thrown at innocent congresspeople in D.C.,” said AOC.

At the time of publishing, FBI officials confirmed there were two more deadly copies of Basic Economics found on site after the attack on the Capitol. 

“We’re lucky we found these books before someone else did,” said one investigator. “Thousands could have been injured.” 

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What’s Wrong with Wind and Solar?

Posted by M. C. on February 3, 2021

Lots.

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Truth in the Crosshairs – Taki’s Magazine

Posted by M. C. on February 3, 2021

A friend of mine recently rang me from Florida, just as the Democrats in Congress were outlawing words such as “father,” “brother,” “sister,” and “son,” and told me how people in the enclosed community where he lives are outraged by this, but they whisper their outrage, scared to death to be denounced and canceled.

Far from being bastions of freedom, universities and newspapers have come to see themselves as fortresses to protect people from dangerous and noninclusive words such as “boys” and “girls.”

https://www.takimag.com/article/truth-in-the-crosshairs/print

Taki

The question of what is truth has been around since the Greeks, perhaps even before that. One can speak of moral truth as well as of aesthetic truth, yet scientific truth seems to me to be one that’s undeniable. And yet, there’s definite proof the world is round, although there are those who deny it and are to be found living normal lives among us and not in mental institutions.

That old Greek Diogenes was often seen walking around the marketplace carrying a lit torch during daytime. When asked why, he answered because he was looking for an honest man. I suppose intellectual dishonesty was as brazen back then as it is now, but the Greeks would not have reached the heights of wisdom that they did if they had denied self-evident truths themselves.

At present, needless to say, here in America and in Britain we are very busy constructing the biggest falsehoods our minds can muster in order to pacify those who feel history has wronged. In Orwell’s 1984, two plus two equaled five if the Party decreed it, the Ministry of Truth disseminated lies, and what Big Brother decreed was the only truth. Orwell didn’t live long enough to see a modern version of his nightmare scenario, but what is taking place in America and Western Europe today is the closest we’ve come to emulating 1984. Orwell had the Soviet system in mind when he wrote the classic, yet after its collapse it was the victorious Americans who embraced Big Brother. “Allowing the creation of a culture in which people become scared to say what they mean is the beginning of the end, as far as freedom is concerned.”

About fifteen years ago I was seated next to a Nobel Prize winner, James Watson, codiscoverer of DNA, a tall, blue-eyed, and handsome older man who was delightful company and mostly wanted to know details about Princess Diana. Unthinkingly I asked him about a past finding of his concerning the I.Q. of Africans compared with Indo-Europeans. He looked as if O’Brien (the baddie in 1984) had appeared, and asked me, almost begged me, to change the subject. Watson later on gave millions of Nobel Prize dollars to black causes, yet became a nonperson for his scientific findings, which did not suit the politically correct. If scientific findings can be disputed or denied in order to please political correctness, truth becomes redundant and a bad joke. This pernicious philosophy of denying truth is not new. The Nazis and the Communists perfected it, and the Chinese government revels in it as I write. But what is truly amazing is that it has caught on here in America, supposedly the land of free thinkers and of freedom in general. A friend of mine recently rang me from Florida, just as the Democrats in Congress were outlawing words such as “father,” “brother,” “sister,” and “son,” and told me how people in the enclosed community where he lives are outraged by this, but they whisper their outrage, scared to death to be denounced and canceled.

Allowing the creation of a culture in which people become scared to say what they mean is the beginning of the end, as far as freedom is concerned. American universities effectively suspended political debate, and from there it spread via the internet into a bland, “safe” environment in which only the left is allowed to exercise freedom of speech. I find it ironic that Americans still call their country the Land of the Free when no one is safe from the PC Gestapo.

This self-flagellating lunacy by American universities is encouraged by greedy, white-hating media such as The New York Times and the Jeff Bezos-owned Washington Post. These papers have now honorably replaced Der Stürmer, the Nazi mouthpiece that turned truth into a big lie, and vice versa. What beggars belief is that now it’s journalists, students, and academics themselves who are trying to impose new limits on free speech and free thinking. Far from being bastions of freedom, universities and newspapers have come to see themselves as fortresses to protect people from dangerous and noninclusive words such as “boys” and “girls.” And speaking of girls, a 15-year-old uses the N-word to no one in particular while passing her driver’s license and is taped by a busybody, and The New York Times publishes a full-page story about her indiscretion now that she’s a well-rounded sophomore at a Texas university. She’s asked to leave, her life in ruins. If this is not Orwellian I don’t know what is.

Free minds and free markets have always outperformed sclerotic central planning and tyrannical ideologies. But when imagined racism dominates the news media and late-night shows with the false assumption that America comprises a race-based white-supremacist society—and that there’s a killer cop standing on every corner—it’s time to cry halt to political correctness, get out on the street, and do something about our freedoms that are ebbing away.

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Kamala Harris already becoming a problem for Biden White House – American Thinker

Posted by M. C. on February 3, 2021

But Harris has no subtlety, no finesse.  She got her start in politics by sleeping with the (married) most powerful politician in California, and since then, she has risen through the hierarchy of public offices based on identity politics and personal pull in a one-party state.

With Biden’s physical and mental health questionable, she has a good chance to become the first female POTUS without being elected to the office.  Cleaning up after her messes then, in the hands of her chosen staff of lackeys, may be costly to all of us, not just to her dignity.

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2021/02/kamala_harris_already_becoming_a_problem_for_biden_white_house.html

By Thomas Lifson

I suspect that regret already is setting in among his handlers over their pick of Kamala Harris for Joe Biden’s running mate.  The first of what will be many clean-up efforts began yesterday for her bungling an incident eight days in office.

CNN reports:

The White House called Democratic Sen. Joe Manchin after Vice President Kamala Harris conducted interviews with West Virginia media, according to a person with knowledge of the conversation.

The outreach comes after Harris’ apparent move to apply pressure on Manchin frustrated the conservative Democrat, something that he made clear over the weekend.

The pressure V.P. Harris attempted to apply came in the form of an exclusive interview she granted to WSAZ TV in Huntington, W.Va.  Curiously, I have been unable to locate a video clip on Rumble or YouTube or Twitter.  Even WSAZ’s own website is not making available what has to be one of the most newsworthy broadcast moments in the station’s history.

In the interview, Harris tried to pressure the popular former governor by speaking directly to his own constituents:

On Thursday, Harris promoted the $1.9 trillion Covid relief plan in interviews with television stations in West Virginia and Arizona — states that are home to Democrats whose votes could be critical to passing Covid relief, including Manchin in West Virginia and Sen. Kyrsten Sinema, along with Sen. Mark Kelly, who will face re-election in the state in 2022, in Arizona.

In an interview with WSAZ Thursday, Harris said she and Biden believe it’s important to “work with a sense of urgency” to address the public health and economic crisis. The Vice President touted the package, saying it’s “about opening schools back up in a safe way, it’s about getting support for small businesses, getting relief for families.”

Harris also spoke about the economic situation of the West Virginia coal industry.

“All of those skilled workers who are in the coal industry and transferring those skills to what we need to do in terms of dealing with reclaiming abandoned land mines; what we need to do around plugging leaks from oil and gas wells; and, transferring those important skills to the work that has yet to be done that needs to get done,” she said.

I am fairly certain Harris did not mean what she literally said: that unemployed coal miners ought to hunt for unexploded land mines, one of the most horrifically dangerous occupations imaginable (and a favorite cause of Princess Di).  She probably meant reclaiming old coal mines by decontamination and planting of ground cover over the sites where people used to earn a good living.  But such is her arrogance that she has not admitted that she misspoke.

Manchin publicly complained (video at the link) on the same West Virginia TV station about not being consulted before being, in essence, shamed before his electorate:

“I saw [the interview], I couldn’t believe it. No one called me [about it],” Manchin said. “We’re going to try to find a bipartisan pathway forward, but we need to work together. That’s not a way of working together.”

Given the 50-50 split of the Senate, the Democrats can’t afford to lose Manchin’s vote on any measure that won’t attract Republican votes.  They ought to be flattering and offering boons to him at every opportunity, not shaming him.  That, apparently, never occurred to Kamala, her aides, or whatever White House staff (if any) were consulted about the interview.

So, Jen Psaki had to admit yesterday, without even her customary dodge of circling back, that someone — she would not say who — had phoned Senator Manchin about the interview, presumably to make amends.  Even CNN, well connected with the Biden White House, could not even get a straight answer:

The source [“a person with knowledge of the conversation”] declined to say what the White House said to Manchin or who from the White House called him, but the call underscores the delicate balancing act President Joe Biden faces as he and Democrats try to hold a narrow Senate majority together to pass a sweeping Covid relief plan — and any other legislation this year.

I am pretty sure that this means that some heavy-duty groveling was involved.  Like many people widely mocked outside their home state, West Virginians are a proud bunch and do not react well to strangers looking down their noses at them.  Harris, already a wealthy Californian, whose stepdaughter just received a modeling contract that is difficult to justify on aesthetic grounds, personifies status, privilege, and arrogance. 

At the time, then-senator Harris was chosen as Biden’s running mate, a female who could claim Black heritage.  Demographically, that was almost mandatory, given the role of the Black constituency in putting Biden over the top in the South Carolina primary and its standing as a quarter of the Dems’ voting base.  And, if the party were going to go with another white male at the top of the ticket, a female also was virtually mandatory in the veep slot.

But Harris has no subtlety, no finesse.  She got her start in politics by sleeping with the (married) most powerful politician in California, and since then, she has risen through the hierarchy of public offices based on identity politics and personal pull in a one-party state.

With Biden’s physical and mental health questionable, she has a good chance to become the first female POTUS without being elected to the office.  Cleaning up after her messes then, in the hands of her chosen staff of lackeys, may be costly to all of us, not just to her dignity.

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Two strategic errors in facing Covid-19, by Thierry Meyssan

Posted by M. C. on February 3, 2021

This man was the designer of the Healthy Person Containment for the US Secretary of Defense, Donald Rumsfeld [4]. In 2005, this member of President George W. Bush’s National Security Council was tasked with adapting US military procedures to the civilian population as part of a plan to militarise US society. Since IMs stationed abroad were instructed to confine themselves to their bases in the event of a biological terrorist attack against them, he advocated confining the entire civilian population to their homes in the event of a biological attack on US soil. This military plan was unanimously rejected by US doctors, led by Professor Donald Henderson of Johns Hopkins University. They stressed that doctors had never confined healthy populations before.

https://www.voltairenet.org/article212113.html

by Thierry Meyssan

Western countries succumbed to panic in the face of the Covid-19 epidemic. Turning irrational, they committed two strategic errors: confining their healthy population at the risk of destroying their economy, and betting everything on MRA vaccines to the detriment of health care, or even at the risk of causing particular disorders due to this new vaccine technique.

Communication: Covid and war

Covid-19 is a viral disease causing the death, in the worst case, of 0.001% of the population. The average age of death from Covid-19 in developed states is about 80 years, with a median age of about 83 years.

In comparison, countries at war experience an additional mortality, due to war, that is 5 to 8 times higher, but mainly affects males aged 18 to 30. To this must be added emigration of up to 50.00% of the population.

The Covid epidemic and war are therefore two situations that are out of all proportion, despite the apocalyptic rhetoric that confuses them [1]. Moreover, the response of those who have ventured to make this dramatic comparison has not borrowed anything, in terms of mobilisation, from those of war situations. At most, a mobile military hospital was required to take a few photos of uniforms in action. Its only real effect was to panic the population and thus deprive it of its critical spirit.

Origin of the communication error

This comparison was made on the basis of erroneous information. A British statistician, whose mathematical models had been used to justify the European hospital reduction policy, Neil Ferguson, had indeed predicted more than half a million deaths in his own country and as many in France.

This scientist was unaware that a virus is a living being that does not seek to kill its hosts, but to inhabit them like a parasite. If it kills the man it has infected, it dies with him. This is why all viral epidemics are at first very deadly, and then less and less so as the virus varies and adapts to humans. It is therefore completely ridiculous to extrapolate its lethality from the devastation it causes in the first weeks of the epidemic.

Political leaders are not connoisseurs of everything. They must have a general culture that enables them to distinguish the quality of their experts in different fields. Neil Ferguson is one of those scientists who demonstrate what is asked of them, not those who seek to understand unexplained phenomena. His curriculum vitœ is just a long succession of errors commissioned by politicians and denied by the facts [2]. He was eventually dismissed from the British Cobra Council (Cabinet Office Briefing Rooms), but one of his disciples, Simon Cauchemez of the Pasteur Institute, still sits on the French Scientific Council.JPEG - 43.5 kbEmpty streets of Paris during the lockdown of its population.

First strategic error: lockdown, a variable for adjusting health policies

Faced with the scourge of Covid, developed States have reacted by enacting border closures, curfews, administrative closures of companies, and even generalized lockdown of the population.

This was a first in history: never before had generalised lockdown – i.e. confinement of healthy populations – been used to combat an epidemic. This political measure is very costly from an educational, psychological, medical, social and economic point of view. Its effectiveness is limited to interrupting the spread of the disease in healthy families during containment at the cost of its dissemination in families where a person is already infected. When the confinement is lifted, the spread of the virus immediately resumes in healthy families.

As all developed States have progressively reduced their hospital capacities since the dissolution of the Soviet Union, most governments have adopted containment measures, not to control disease – which they cannot – but to prevent overcrowding in their hospitals. In other words, in order to continue their system of managing public health services, governments consider containment as the only possible adjustment variable. Yet the price of these confinements is much higher than more expensive hospital management. Above all, the ageing of the population in developed States makes it foreseeable that the same crisis of hospital congestion will occur every three to four years, the usual cycle of epidemics of all kinds. In practice, the use of containment condemns the countries concerned to resort to it more and more often, during epidemics of Covid, influenza or many other deadly diseases.

A comparative study by Stanford University, published on January 12, 2021, shows that countries that have practised widespread plant closures, curfews and containment have not ultimately influenced the spread of the disease, which they have only delayed, compared to countries that have respected the freedom of their citizens [3].

Contrary to popular belief, the choice was not between hospital overcrowding or containment, but between mobilizing or even requisitioning private clinics and containment. All developed countries have a private health care system that is largely capable of dealing with the overflow of patients.

Origin of the strategic error

The source behind the lockdown is CEPI (Coalition for Epidemic Preparedness Innovations). This association was created in Davos on the occasion of the 2015 World Economic Forum. It is headed by Dr Richard J. Hatchett. You will not find his biography on Wikipedia or even on the CEPI website. He had it removed.

This man was the designer of the Healthy Person Containment for the US Secretary of Defense, Donald Rumsfeld [4]. In 2005, this member of President George W. Bush’s National Security Council was tasked with adapting US military procedures to the civilian population as part of a plan to militarise US society. Since IMs stationed abroad were instructed to confine themselves to their bases in the event of a biological terrorist attack against them, he advocated confining the entire civilian population to their homes in the event of a biological attack on US soil. This military plan was unanimously rejected by US doctors, led by Professor Donald Henderson of Johns Hopkins University. They stressed that doctors had never confined healthy populations before.

Professor Richard J. Hatchett was the first to draw a comparison between the Covid-19 epidemic and a war, in an interview on Channel 4 a few days before President Macron. His first CEPI donation, of course, was to Imperial College London. The director of this venerable institution is not British, but American, Alice Gast. In addition to being a director of the transnational oil company Chevron, she worked with Dr Richard J. Hatchett in the United States to mobilise scientists against terrorism. She supported propaganda work to discredit what I had written about the September 11th attacks. In addition, one of the most famous professors at Imperial College is Neil Ferguson, the author of the fairy-tale curves projecting the spread of the epidemic.JPEG - 48.9 kbMessenger RNA” vaccines only have the name “vaccine” in common with conventional vaccines. The idea is no longer to inoculate a small quantity of the virus to provoke the creation of antibodies, but to play with the genetic material of patients so that they are no longer receptive to the virus.

Second strategic mistake: the exclusive focus of research on vaccines

Faced with this new epidemic, doctors found themselves without treatment. Western governments immediately directed medical research towards the discovery of appropriate vaccines.

In view of the sums involved, they directed all budgets towards genetic vaccines and closed research into pathology and care.

The use of the RNA-based vaccine technique, chosen by Moderna/NIAID, Pfizer/BioNTech/FosunPharma and CureVac, is not expected to involve classical side effects, but it is not without danger. Until now, this technique has been considered with great caution because it affects the genetic make-up of patients. This is why, in the absence of sufficient studies, these companies have demanded that their state clients relieve them of any legal liability.

Doctors who try to practise their art by treating their patients according to the Hippocratic oath have been prosecuted by their disciplinary bodies. The treatments they have implemented have been ridiculed, even banned, instead of being evaluated.

This is the second strategic error.

Western doctors, who, with rare exceptions, have never been confronted with the demands of war and disaster medicine, sometimes panicked. At the beginning of the epidemic, some did nothing at the first symptoms, waiting for the appearance of a cytokinic storm, of a brutal inflammation, to plunge their patients into an artificial coma. As a result, it was more often inappropriate care than the disease that killed the first patients. The disastrous results of some hospitals compared to others in the same region bear witness to this, despite the fraternal ban on criticism of incompetent doctors.

The gigantic budgets allocated to vaccines make it necessary not to discover a treatment without risking the bankruptcy of multinational pharmaceutical companies.

This is why all research in this field has been subjected to strict censorship. Yet a cocktail of blood-liquefying, immune-stimulating, antiviral and anti-inflammatory drugs is being tested in Asia, which treats almost all patients if administered at the first sign of symptoms. Similarly, in Venezuela, the medical and pharmacological authority has approved a drug, Carvativir, which, according to the authority, treats almost all patients if administered at the first sign of symptoms [5].

As I am not competent in this area, I will not comment on these treatments, but it is frightening that Western doctors are not informed about them and have not had the opportunity to evaluate them.

The Pasteur Institute of Lille and the company APTEEUS, for their part, in September 2020, identified a drug that had fallen into disuse as preventing the replication of the virus. They were careful not to advertise it so as not to have to face the rivalry of the vaccine industry. Their experiments are now coming to an end. The manufacture of this drug, originally a suppository for children, has resumed in France so that it could be advertised soon [6].

Moreover, censorship of non-Western medicines is not only unacceptable because it is detrimental to human health, but also because it is carried out by unelected powers (Google, Facebook, Twitter etc.). The problem here is not whether these treatments are effective or not, but to free up research so that it can study these molecules in order to reject, approve or improve them.

Origin of the second strategic mistake

Incidentally, let us observe that there is a strategic contradiction between slowing down contamination through the practice of confining healthy people and accelerating it through the generalisation of live or inactivated vaccines. However, this remark is not valid in the case of RNA vaccines, which are destined to become predominant in the West.

The second strategic error is the result of group thinking. Politicians imagine that only technical progress will provide solutions to problems that cannot be solved. Thus, if vaccines can be discovered using a new technique based not on viruses but on “messenger RNA”, the epidemic should be defeated. It no longer occurs to anyone that we can treat the Covid and do without heavy investment.

This is the ideology of the World Economic Forum in Davos and the CEPI. It is therefore in the order of things that governments do not react when transnationals censor the work of Asian or Venezuelan doctors, blocking the freedom of scientific research.Thierry Meyssan Translation
Roger Lagassé

[1] « Seconde allocution d’Emmanuel Macron sur l’épidémie », par Emmanuel Macron, Réseau Voltaire, 16 mars 2020.

[2] “Covid-19: Neil Ferguson, the Liberal Lyssenko”, by Thierry Meyssan, Translation Roger Lagassé, Voltaire Network, 20 April 2020.

[3] «Empirical assessment of mandatory stay-at-home and business closure effects on the spread of Covid-19», Eran Bendavid, Christopher Oh, Jay Bhattacharya, John P.A. Ioannidis, University of Stanford, January 12, 2021.

[4] “Covid-19 and The Red Dawn Emails”, by Thierry Meyssan, Translation Roger Lagassé, Voltaire Network, 28 April 2020.

[5] “Venezuela reportedly found drug against Covid-19”, “Google, Facebook and Twitter black out information on Carvativir”, Voltaire Network, 26 and 28 January 2021.

[6] «La recherche sur la COVID-19 : l’Institut Pasteur de Lille mobilisé face à la pandémie», Institut Pasteur de Lille, mise à jour du 26 janvier 2021.

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