All Global Research articles can be read in 51 languages by activating the Translate Website button below the author’s name (only available in desktop version).
To receive Global Research’s Daily Newsletter (selected articles), click here.
Click the share button above to email/forward this article to your friends and colleagues. Follow us on Instagram and Twitter and subscribe to our Telegram Channel. Feel free to repost and share widely Global Research articles.
***
Essential to science, whether basic or applied, is the freedom of open discussion and debate. When varying interpretations exist, no opinion should be purged. Any entity, individual or collective, claiming authority to impose its determination of what is truth and what is “misinformation” is totalitarian and anti-science by definition. So it is the height of irony that the nation’s agency representing science, the National Science Foundation, has become a primary instrument for the protection of official governmental narrative and the attack on opposing views. But there you are.
That both the universities of Washington and Wisconsin are being funded by NSF through its Convergence Accelerator program was detailed on Global Research in August. To these NSF-funded projects must be added Stanford University, which is working in close association with U of WA. In all cases, the search is for detecting and countering “misinformation” on social media. Special emphasis is on Covid-19, vaccination hesitancy and the growing conviction that elections have been, and continue to be, stolen.
Stanford, through the Stanford Internet Observatory, and U of WA, through its Center For An Informed Public, joined with the Atlantic Council’s Digital Forensics Research Lab and Graphika, a company using AI to study the internet, to create the Election Integrity Partnership. A reading of the one page Executive Summary of EIP’s final report, which begins with “On January 6, 2021, an armed mob stormed the US Capitol…..”, and ends with “All stakeholders must focus on predicting and pre-bunking false narratives …..”, is an enlightening glimpse into the thinking and strategy permeating the Censorship Industrial Complex.
((ASIDE: On November 6, 2023 the Judiciary Committee of the House of Representatives reported that agencies in both the State Department and the Department of Homeland Security coordinated with Stanford University in creating the Election Integrity Partnership, which was created at the request of DHS. See HERE for a one page ‘bullet’ list of who is to be targeted by EIP for censorship.))
Meanwhile, faculty at the Hubbard School of Journalism and Mass Communication at the University of Minnesota was invited in 2022 to join a “team of researchers” in a project called Course Correct, a “weapon” designed to be “a tool for journalists that can help identify and correct misinformation online.” Again, funding for this “team of researchers” was coming from NSF. Here is the $5million grant, as outlined at the NSF website, revealing the lead role in this ‘Team’ to be the University of Wisconsin’s School of Journalism and Mass Communication, cited above regarding another NSF grant to U of WI. The University of Minnesota joined the “Team” to facilitate work on Phase 2 of the larger NSF grant.
Things are changing so quickly it’s hard to keep up. Only two years ago, virtually all governmental, media and celebrity “influencer” sources were functioning like a coordinated drone attack from every information outlet assuring the public that: Covid-19 vaccination is “safe and effective”, “stops the disease in its tracks”, “Nobody is safe until everyone is safe”, “The unvaccinated are the enemy… and … shouldn’t be welcomed in polite society”, etc. If you’ve forgotten, here’s an 11-minute trip down memory lane (see video below). Remember now?
At the same time, all voices to the contrary have been either rendered invisible or accused of “misinformation” or of “conspiracy theory”, that CIA-inspired gem. But as old items of misinformation and conspiracy theory are revealed as having been true all along (eg, here and here), the System simply doubles down. But then, why not, when all key elements — governmental agencies, intelligence/military, Pharma, big tech, big banks, mainstream media, “higher education” — all are now occupied territory by globalist interests that have placed their representative to form an information control grid. Even the White House is now part of it.
All of this harks back to a 2008 public law working paper, “Conspiracy Theories”, by two Harvard law professors. The authors claim that conspiracy theorists, a term the authors use interchangeably with “extremists”, suffer from “cognitive blunders” and “crippled epistemology” and cannot think clearly. And how do they intend to deal with the problem? “Practically speaking, the government might do well to maintain a more vigorous counter-disinformation establishment.” Specifically, they propose changing thinking of conspiracists through “cognitive infiltration” of citizen groups by governmental agents or their hirelings: “Government agents might enter chat rooms, online social networks, or even real-space groups and attempt to undermine percolating conspiracy theories.”
Conspiracy Theories authors suggest, as a means of destroying credibility, associating conspiracy theorists with people “mentally ill and subject to delusions”, with “Holocaust denial” and with “conspiracy entrepreneurs — who profit directly or indirectly from propagating their theories”. Nevertheless, they admit that conspiracy theories are difficult to counter and that “Extra resistance to correction through simple techniques is what makes conspiracy theories distinctly worrisome.” Incredibly, but perhaps not surprising, in 2009, a year after publication of Conspiracy Theories, Obama made the senior author, Cass Sunstein, Administrator of Information and Regulatory Affairs of the Office of Management and Budget. In connecting the dots, there is substantial indication that in this position paper one finds early indications of what, in time, is to morph into the Conspiracy Industrial Complex.
But it’s when the National Science Foundation has become a major player in the censorship complex that it seems as if it’s game over. It’s logical to conclude that when the presumed bastion of free inquiry and the objective pursuit of truth becomes a leading voice in the strategy to quash authoritarian-defined “misinformation”, it’s as if the last stronghold has been breached, and the System in its entirety is laid bare for all to see as thoroughly corrupt.
*
Note to readers: Please click the share button above. Follow us on Instagram and Twitter and subscribe to our Telegram Channel. Feel free to repost and share widely Global Research articles.
Bill Willers is an emeritus professor of biology, University of Wisconsin at Oshkosh. He is founder of the Superior Wilderness Action Network and editor of Learning to Listen to the Land, and Unmanaged Landscapes, both from Island Press. He can be contacted at [email protected].
He is a regular contributor to Global Research.
Featured image: National Science Foundation’s former headquarters in Arlington County, Virginia; in 2017, the foundation relocated to Alexandria, Virginia (Licensed under the Public Domain)
