Author: admin

Systemic Collapse vs. Controlled Demolition

Are we facing systemic collapse? Or is it controlled demolition?

This is the next installment in a series looking at these questions. In the first post I laid the foundation for understanding how our world can be explained with bottoms up systemic effects vs. top-down control and conspiracy. In short, there is both going on. It can best be explained by this graph.

Here’s a quick recap:

  • Everyone is deluded, you and me included. It’s best to look at possibilities and take your own beliefs with a grain of salt (especially ideological positions you think are facts but are actually just sets of beliefs!)
  • Kayfabe is a professional wrestling term describing the mixing of fake with reality in a complicated layering that screws with your head. With all our deception going on politically, economically, and culturally, self-deception is a natural systemic result. In essence, what is real is ever increasingly hard to understand.
  • The opacity of conspiracy has to do with layers of secrecy further compounded by time. This conspiring fits together along with known systemic effects, i.e. corruption will spread and grow over time. Together this makes it impossible to know the Truth of how things work.
  • Even piercing through one layer of deception (being awake) doesn’t mean you’re not falling for the next six (asleep).
  • This all being said, we do know “their” agenda because they’re public enough about it as long as you can fit the puzzle pieces together. Falsifying “official narratives” is easy, even if knowing the full truth is hard. Thus, this is a useful lens to view the world.

Got it? Good.

I felt all that was needed to cover what I really wanted think through, this question of are we facing systemic collapse or controlled demolition? Just like the answer to systems vs. control was both, the answer here appears to be both. I’ll dive into how I see that.

Why Seek to Understand?

Why is this question important? Why should we care if it is systemic collapse or controlled demolition?

Beyond just desiring to better understand the world, fool’s errand that it appears to be, I feel that striving to answer it helps us to better predict and prepare for the future.

To paraphrase Gretzky, we want to go where the collapse/demolition is going to happen, not just be caught unawares when the next event occurs, still thinking about the last one.

If it is mostly systemic collapse, then pushing back, especially in key leveraged places, may help the systems that need to collapse do so better, and re-emerge with better new systems.

If controlled demolition coming from down on high pushing back might just be futile. If that’s the case than preparations and movement towards self-sustainability and parallel societies become even more important. Figuring out how to go “underground” might just be essential.

There is overlap in actions and preparations however it goes down, but not completely. Therefore, understanding what is really going on helps us take accurate action.

Signs of Systemic Collapse

There are a lot of people popping out on the side of freedom, against what the totalitarians are pushing.

More journalists are breaking free. We even had a rare moment of truth on CNN with Wall Street Journal and New York Times editor and writer, Bari Weiss talking about the craziness going on.

And a mainstream source, Newsweek calling out Fauci. “The evidence is in. Governors, journalists, scientists, university presidents, hospital administrators and business leaders can continue to follow Dr. Anthony Fauci or open their eyes,” writes Martin Kulldorff, Ph.D. and Jay Bhattacharya, MD, Ph.D., at Harvard and Stanford respectively.

Fauci being in-part responsible for the torture of dogs is another thing. (Ironic, that his role in stymieing valid treatments for COVID while pushing the vaccine agenda wasn’t enough to get some people against him. But cruel animal abuse will!)

Journalists going independent via channels such as SubStack is proving to be MORE lucrative for these journalists. It’s because people are craving real news, not propaganda. There is free access, and many (myself included) help to fund particular journalists we like best.

That’s why Joe Rogan’s numbers are going up and all the mainstream channels are going down.

And, more often than not, when main figures appear on alternative channels, such as podcasts, they do horribly. For instance, Sanjay Gupta getting ripped about CNN lying on Joe Rogan, or how most of the people listening see through the lies perpetrated by head of the NIH Francis Collins on Lex Friedman’s podcast.

Look at the comments. And recognize why so many mainstream places turn off comments in the first place.

Now the next step just rolled out. Youtube to remove the dislike count from public view across the entire platform.

Why? Because this allowing the public to speak hurts their propaganda.

The amount of pro-vaccine people that never once questioned the science, the regulators, the funding of vaccines before, that are questioning this vaccine is large and ever growing.

I like listening to many of them. And I wonder when they’ll not just focus on COVID but dig a bit further into the past!

After all, the smear machine sure wasn’t invented with COVID. Just ask Andrew Wakefield.

Even vaccinated people are fighting against the mandates.

Even FDA officials are resigning over the vaccine push. You must be going way too aggressive with pushing the agenda if that is happening in this captured agency!

Although the censorship is ramping up, people are using the alternative channels in growing amounts. As more get censored these will continue to grow.

Most everyone knows politics and news is all BS, even the people still trapped in the cult! It’s just that many haven’t yet figured out what they should be believing instead. They’re disillusioned…they’re just not sure what to believe instead because it is a painful and disorienting journey.

Sometimes the steering of the narrative is so poorly done, so quickly dismantled, that it appears to reek of desperation. This lie was foiled almost as soon as it began…

NBA star Kylie Irving sacrificing his pay and job for making a stand. He’s something of the Rosa Parks of our generation.

Now we have Green Bay Packers quarterback Aaron Rodgers doing the same. Rollout the smear machine.

Almost no one is happy with the system as this recent polling demonstrates.

The pushback on the mandates seems to be working at least to some degree. Southwest Airlines canceled theirs. In-and-Out Burger said they wouldn’t be the vaccine police.

This can’t be according to the plan, can it?

Are these not positive signs that collapse is happening?

Some People Popping Out of the Matrix…Some Remain

What does it take for people to change beliefs? Often times, it is trauma.

They’re using fear and trauma-based conditioning to scare people with Covid. That’s the number one tool. Scientists in the UK admitted to such a while back.

Some double-down on their positions no matter what.

Sadly, I think some people will literally die fighting for their imprisonment. Their comfortable slavery is better than uncomfortable truth. To recognize they’ve been duped is a fate worse than death, especially for the louder and more belligerent.

Commitment and consistency are powerful persuasive triggers, layered on top of the fear-based conditioning.

The above is from a person I know and have personally met. Sadly, I don’t think this person will ever be capable of giving up his imprisonment.

Yet others realize the narrative is horribly wrong. This series of social media posts gives light on this “awakening” showing it happen almost in real-time. It is worth reading each comment in full.

Keep in mind, that just being awake to one thing, doesn’t mean you see the rest.

Here’s another similar story, but in a mother, Paula Hauck. with an adverse event.

“I went from having a very regular uneventful period for 10 years, which I have been tracking in an app for the majority of those, to it suddenly going haywire. So I started asking my friends, family, neighbours, ‘hey have you had anything weird happen with your period after your second vaccine?’ and so many women I talk to were like ‘ya!…That for me was the turning point. I was shocked, I was thinking, how many other symptoms are occurring as a reaction to the vaccine and they are not being documented or listed?”

Story after story after story.

It is with a heavy heart that I witness the FDA approving the vaccines for 5-11 year olds. This absolutely sickens me…and, to find a silver lining in pain, some of those kid’s injuries will wake their parents up.

The vaccines are just one aspect. Others got disillusioned with the pullout of Afghanistan. Others are getting disillusioned with the inflation.

The propaganda is failing. Witness the absurdity in this tweet that got deleted shortly after going live…

Our world is largely a result of social conditioning (and social engineering). This is a systemic effect. The more that believe, the more pressure to conform. This applies both ways. So as the narrative collapses, more people will speak up.

There is an ever growing social pressure to conform the opposite way. That is a positive sign. Every single person can help and aid in this.

The Emerging New System

The control grid systems do need to collapse. But collapse without something to fill the void would not be good.

What we see are bottoms up, decentralized systems that seem to be emerging.

Individual and independent journalists that bring people news instead of propaganda.

With doctors and nurses being fired for refusing the vaccine, there are going to be more alternative doctors and healthcare options popping up. Natural health modalities are growing stronger, trending up all the time.

Home school is growing the fastest it ever has, and will only continue to.

Independent scientists will be starting new journals and rebooting how science is going to be done. Citizen scientists, like those that launched the scientific method, will become a thing once again.

With supply chain issues, things are going to have to become more local.

Community bonds which have fractured over the past decades, are now becoming crucially important and building once again.

Alternative non-totalitarian tech platforms are growing by leaps and bounds.

There are new leaders who see through the BS and are courageously stepping up. The more it happens…the more it happens.

To me these are signs of the systems collapsing. Is a mass tipping point in sight?

Possibly, but first let’s take a look at the other side…

Controlled Demolition – The 9/11 Parallel

Let’s use World Trade Center Building 7 as a parallel of controlled demolition.

Just a few fun facts:

  • WTC7 was not hit by a plane at all yet the building collapsed just like the twin towers, supposedly because of office fires
  • There is a news clip from BBC where the anchor talks about WTC7 coming down…though you can see in the background that it is still standing.
  • There were several people there that report hearing explosions and more inside the building.
  • The 9/11 Commission Report, coming at 585 pages, doesn’t even mention WTC7. Not very thorough to miss an entire building collapse, is it?
  • Some of the authors of the 9/11 Commission Report themselves said they were not allowed to adequately investigate the evidence. The official story is incomplete and non-transparent. Bush and Cheney testified not under oath and behind closed doors for example.

A great place to start is the relatively new documentary titled Seven. Here’s the trailer.

Although the 9/11 Commission didn’t even discuss WTC7, and many people still aren’t aware of it, enough people asked questions that this had to be covered (up).

NIST, the National Institute of Standards and Technology, came up with a model, a brand new never-before-seen phenomenon of “thermal expansion” to explain what caused the collapse.

In the rule of “follow the transparency,” it is important to note that NIST does not share their data.

Can you think of anything recent where non-transparent models were used to steer the narrative?

The University of Alaska, the focus of the above mentioned documentary, also studied the collapse and came to the conclusion that fires could not possibly explain it.

In the rule of “follow the transparency,” it is important to note that the University makes their data available.

Why am I bringing this up now?

Obviously, because of the term I’m using of controlled demolition. But it has greater meaning here.

I haven’t really ever talked publicly about 9/11, but you don’t really get to here from there without it. By that I mean the clear signs of COVID being a worldwide conspiracy and that this is the first official narrative that isn’t truthful.

I can’t even remember when I first heard about “9/11 conspiracy theories”. But when I did, when I watched some documentaries, the evidence was enough to convince me something fishy was going on. Over the years I kept revisiting this and adding more layers of understanding to what went on.

I make no claims to know the truth of what went on there. But the official story is easily falsifiable if you merely scratch below the surface.

When many people are popping out of the matrix due to Covid, this leads at least some of them back to previous events such as this.

Covid is hard to understand if you don’t understand 9/11, which is hard to understand if you don’t understand JFK.

There were many, many other events, but at least in the USA (with worldwide ramifications), these are the big three.

Look at the jumps in size of the events themselves and the scale of psychological operations undertaken in each.

Many of the people that are “new to the program” wrestle with how the worldwide response to Covid can be so poor. They, subconsciously, want to find an explanation that keeps most of their worldview intact.

That the people in power are well-meaning just misguided…instead of sociopathic monsters that the evidence actually points too.

I think many refuse to accept reality because to do so, subconsciously, means to question other sacred cows. Make no mistake, questioning sacred cows is a painful, arduous process to engage in.

But if we indeed do have monsters running the show, well then this being controlled demolition actually makes more sense.

Signs of Controlled Demolition Now

This sums it up well…

You’ve heard about the supply chain issues right. A systems problem, right?

Evidence points to the supply chain disruptions being engineered. All the ships at the port in California are based on crazy California restrictions, not actual physical issues so much.

The economy is being driven to inflation with the money printers going non-stop. Do you really think the central bankers haven’t learned from history how money printing affects things? There’s all the lies of there not being inflation, to it being transitory, to it now being a good thing!

With the economy, we see such things as The Going Direct Reset being put in place by BlackRock in the middle of 2019. And an event just happened to take place in 2020 where that plan was rolled out.

All the coincidence theorists are in overdrive!

With COVID, not only has the lab origin not been thoroughly investigated, but it was also and continues to be covered up. And signs, such as patent transfers taking place before key events point to this being planned to a bigger degree.

There are events such as Event 201, the SPARS document, and quite a few more that show how just such a coronavirus pandemic specifically was war-gamed before it happened. (Despite such war games, the USA response was so bad…it must all Trump’s fault!)

Moderna was on about to disappear when this miracle event happened.

More comes clear over time.

But with recent events it is harder to know for sure. The fog of war and all that. Was the pull out of Afghanistan just bumbled up?

Or was it purposefully done in the way it was? And why? (Further dismantle the USA, while strengthening China?)

Understand that even if events are not planned ahead of time, they will 100% be spun, managed, co-opted towards agenda aims. Every…single…big…event.

In the first article I pointed to a similar graphic but in a humorous way. However, I found this graphic from Iain Davis that describes the Controllers that we can see in action, described as the Global Public Private Partnership.

With this, we can see how policies get filtered down, and get a better sense of who is involved in controlled demolition and why.

The Great Reset has Only Just Begun

If we’re talking about civilization collapse, we can term that civilization demolishment too.

The “New Normal” speaks to big changes. That there is no going back to the old normal.

A change in culture. A change in how economics works. A changing of governance structure. A change in the everyday lives of the human species.

The Great Reset is about using such events to reboot our systems in a sustainable, equitable and inclusive way. Sounds so great, doesn’t it?

But the agenda is clear for those who have eyes to see. They want worldwide top-down control at a level never before seen. A technocracy with obedient citizens that are properly managed like livestock.

Techno-feudalism. We own nothing. They own everything.

Nature, carbon, human beings, everything included.

Sociopaths exist and rise to the tops of hierarchies. Why wouldn’t they want this and strive to get it?

And there are hidden hierarchies of power, which allows this to occur even more so. Sociopathy thrives in the shadows. None of the “policy makers” are elected. It’s all back-room deals and influence peddling.

Here’s the bad news. The Great Reset requires more than just a not-very-deadly virus.

More is required. Bigger is required. I just had a dream the other night where I was explaining to someone that we’ve only seen the prologue to the Great Reset.

Some of the main things on the table right now:

  • Cyber Pandemic
  • More Viruses (Marburg? Smallpox?)
  • Supply Chain Disruption
  • Food Shortages
  • Economic Collapse
  • Massive “Natural” Disasters
  • Domestic Terrorist Attacks from the Left and/or Right
  • Rittenhouse Riots
  • US Civil War
  • War with China

Whoever they ultimately are, do you think their plans ended with the coronavirus? I highly, highly doubt it.

Do you get it? There is a chance that ALL of the list above is planned to happen.

What stands in the way of their techno-feudalist dreams?

As mentioned in the last article, the biggest thing is the USA, the Constitution, and a populace with weapons. Therefore, the USA must be the biggest target of greater threats.

The best way to remove it, is by fueling internal strife. Let it tear itself apart from the inside out. Increasing polarization appears to be part of the plan. Look for riots based on the outcome of the Rittenhouse trial coming soon. Increasing polarization ultimately leads to violent actions.

Religion is another block that needs to be removed to be replaced by the totalitarian ideology that is seen in scientism. Christianity in particular, with their whole mark-of-the-beast prophecies, seems a particular target.

The policy makers want to intentionally collapse the systems, those that stand in the way, no matter the collateral damage it takes to get to their chosen land.

Is Collapse Avoidable? What is the Solution?

Even if it is systemic collapse and they are losing control, I don’t see how the control mechanism, that the elites are moved out of power, without violence ensuing.

I do not see that they will willingly give up power. Do you?

They’re going all out right now. There is no turning back.

Signs are the propaganda is failing. More are standing up. But let’s say we pushback enough to stop vaccine mandates for instance…I think that could just be a delay. We can’t just play defense; we must go on the offense.

What happens when the next virus, one that is actually quite deadly, is released?

When smallpox gets released in airports as Bill Gates talked about, how quickly can they drum up fear and a stronger vaccination push? Society is already preconditioned, the next time around, it becomes easier.

The corruption is so systemic and so deep, how is it fixed?

Understand that I don’t want things to get violent. As history has shown, non-violent protest can be extremely powerful.

They are quite strategic. Any violence can and will be steered towards their aims. They’re already calling us domestic terrorists. The narrative is already there for violence to beget more totalitarianism.

Take this article from the Council on Foreign Relations, titled “Unvaccinated Police Officers Could Become America’s Own Insurgents.”

“The disturbing and violent precedent for what could happen if large numbers of vaccine-resistant police are fired was seen in Iraq when the United States dissolved the Iraqi armed forces in May 2003. In one fell swoop, the order left thousands upon thousands of individuals with military training without the means to support themselves and their families. This misguided decision contributed to bloodshed and instability for years.

“Federal, state, and local officials should think long and hard before letting go of such large numbers of people trained in violence and encouraged to think of themselves as different from so-called civilians. This is especially so in a country with militarized policing, where right-wing extremist groups specifically seek to recruit law enforcement officers and where the state’s monopoly over violence is weakening.”

Do you see how this narrative plays out?

It’s hard because on one hand I have firmly chosen my “side” and feel that other people need to too.

And yet I recognize that this forcing choosing of sides drives more polarization which seems to play right into my enemies’ hands.

How can I best plant seeds that might one day be watered by life events to bloom and at the same time strive to avoid strengthening reactionary stances against such seeds?

Can I both depolarize and get more people on my side at the same time? How is that best done?

Just some open ended questions I’m still working on.

I do not see an easy way out of this.

When Propaganda Fails, Force Comes Next

Things are mostly peaceful across the world. (Insert CNN joke here.)

Why is this? Because they still overwhelmingly control the narrative. But that is cracking. When the propaganda no longer works, what do totalitarians rely on?

Force!

At the end of the day, all government is backed by a monopoly on violence.

Can we avoid that? What it takes is massive non-compliance.

But we’ve got such herd delusion going on now will that happen? Even though it is getting better will it be soon enough?

Getting to massive non-compliance relies on more and more people “waking up” even if just to the first layer of deception.

But it looks like this frog continues to get boiled slowly enough that we very well might not critical mass until it is too late.

This is especially true if a new mass narrative event occurs to grab control the narrative once again with a new enemy to fear.

Threading the Eye of the Needle

My feeling, witnessing all of this evidence (and 100 time more of stuff that I haven’t mentioned!) is that it is like this.

The systems are collapsing. Public systems. But this also includes hidden systems of control and methods that have worked previously.

So the would-be-controllers are panicking. It is not guaranteed successful by any stretch of the imagination.

They must steer humanity into willingly accepting vaccine passports tied into digital ID system tied into CBDC’s into individual social credit and carbon indulgence schemes.

That still will take years to do from here. That will take more events to get there.

All along the way, with every move they make, more people are popping out of the matrix.

Can they control the demolition of existing society enough while their new systems are built and adopted?

Or do things fall apart faster or more out of control than they can manage?

My feeling is that this is like threading the eye of the needle. For them to pull it off, it must be done right. Delicately and precisely.

I do not think this future is a foregone conclusion. In fact, I think they have a very tough situation ahead of them.

Unfortunately, a tough time for them also means a tough time for us!

Let me be clear, I’d rather overestimate my enemy and be prepared for the worst. Better to be over-prepared, to overshoot the mark, so as not to be caught unawares.

In other words, do not underestimate the depths of evil they are willing to go to. Mass casualty events appear to be part of the plan. Society doesn’t get restructured without them. (Revisit the Great Leap Forward.)

Assume they have greater control and will do even more evil things to grab even more power. Use this as a lens to view the world and prepare accordingly.

How Dark Can it Get?

Warning. This is especially dark. Like make-you-want-to-vomit or ruin-your-day type of dark.

I don’t share it lightly.

Yet, remember that it is the inability to face evil that gives rise to many of our collective problems. Sticking your head in the sand does not make you good…it makes you a coward but using self-deception to protect your ego at the same time.

The following is written in Manufacturing Consent by Chomsky.

“According to the British Parliamentary Human Rights Group, in 1984 alone there were an average of one hundred political murders and over forty disappearances per month in Guatemala. These figures are almost surely an underestimate.”

It gets darker when we look at specific examples…

“On March 30, 1985, GAM leader Hector Gomez Calito was seized, tortured and murdered. (The six policemen who had come for him were themselves assassinated shortly after his death.) He had been burned with a blowtorch, on the stomach and elsewhere, and beaten on the face so severely that his lips were swollen and his teeth were broken; his tongue had been cut out. Then, on April 4, another leader of GAM, Maria Rosario Godoy de Cuevas, her twenty-one-year old brother, and her two-year old son were picked up, tortured, and murdered. Her breasts had bite marks and her underclothing was bloody; her two-year-old son had had his fingernails pulled out.

Take a deep breath…

Our world is very evil. The USA fully supported the Guatemalan regime that perpetrated such evils (the Reagan admin). That’s just one place of many where such crimes were state-sanctioned.

Our supposedly free press, as covered in that book, supported the USA government in doing so, not calling attention to such crimes.

This stuff has always been happening. It is in actuality, par for the course.

The only thing really different now is that such evil is rising to the surface for more to view.

Once again, you don’t get to here (Covid) without there (USA support of totalitarian regimes for many, many decades).

I imagine my daughter being tortured as such to understand what we’re up against. I know it’s perverse, but this helps to steel my reserve.

While many get vaccines without incident, some have adverse events that amount to torture on a comparable level.

Children and babies have suffered as such. For decades.

I perceive the future in which there absolutely could be roving death squads in the USA like there have been in third world countries.

I see this possibility only a couple years away because the controlled demolition can move that fast.

Make no mistake, I definitely want to avoid that! All the more reason to stand up now, while there’s still a chance of non-violent protests working. Of us not descending to that level or barbarity.

But at the same time, I recognize the bigger game being played. Of where the puck might be going.

I recognize that this makes some people want to stick their head in the sand. I get it. I wrestled with speaking out so many times in the past. I still do.

Yet I act with courage because my name is almost assuredly on government lists and databases already.

And hell, this 8 year old girl has more balls than you and I combined. This gives me hope and inspires me to do more.

By no means does this get better “if we all just simply did our part”.

As history has shown us time and time again, you can’t comply your way out of tyranny.

Driven Insane, Non-Functional…or to Become a New Crop of Leaders

As the narrative continues to crack, as the world collapses more and more, each and every person has a few options.

“Normies” can dig their heels are in further. Hold on tight to the collapsing narrative. Even if this means slowly but surely, you become a foot soldier for the totalitarians. It worked in Nazi Germany. It is working now.

Become an mental gymnast able to flip over logic and turn on the narrative on a dime as needed by the propagandists. Masks don’t work. Masks work. Vaccines work. Vaccines only kind of work so I still need my mask. Vaccines are safe and effective but unvaccinated can still get me sick.

I’ve witnessed some Olympic level mental gymnastics so far! Many more to come.

To go back to The Matrix analogy, it’s to take the blue pill over and over again, no matter the cost. (To take the vaccines over and over again, no matter the cost.)

Normies can also take the red pill…

Remember, that this is not the movies. It’s not a one-time thing. There are many red pills to take…and some even wake you up to false realities or other matrixes.

Slaving yourself to reality is a tough pill to swallow. But it is better than the alternative in my opinion.

For so long you could delay choosing the red pill or blue pill, at least in the USA. We’re getting to the point where Normies are being forced to choose. It’s being mandated.

As the cracks become fissures, some may just be driven literally insane by all this. Many will become depressed to the point of not being functional.

Many will opt out through suicides, escape into addiction and overdoses. To some, literal death is better than taking the red pill.  

Remember that depression and anger is a part of this journey. It is character building. I feel I am a better, more antifragile man for looking at evil.

For those that choose the red pill, and do so on a daily basis, I say welcome to you. This is a new crop of leadership to rise up and help others to do so every single day.

The more everyone does it, the more everyone does it.

Steel yourselves for harder times to come. Get prepared physically, mentally, emotionally and spiritually.

How you position yourself now matters greatly for what is coming. I know we’re all overwhelmed with too much too do. Just take action, one step at a time. Find a window in your week, each and every week, to do something.

Your first action is to brainstorm what actions to take.

What do you need to get? What do you need to learn? Who should you be connecting with? How can you take actions to make a stand against tyranny?

If you haven’t already watch the video I did with my friend Josh on steps to take. And know that we have another one planned coming soon!

I’m not done with the subject but this article is already too long. In the next part of this series I’ll be detailing more collapse scenarios, pictures of what could play out for good or ill. What to look for in these future potential time lines, the probabilities of them happening, and all that.

After that I’ll dive deeper into systemic collapse vs. controlled demolition of our economy, with a big focus on cryptocurrencies.

Legal Defense and Offense (The Industry Playbook)

This is Chapter 14 of my new book, working title “The Industry Playbook: Corporate Cartels, Corruption and Crimes Against Humanity” that is being published online chapter by chapter.


It is not just the army of scientists, PR spinsters, politicians and lobbyists. Without an army of lawyers, the industry playbook would be far from complete.

People started suing the cigarette companies as early as the 1950’s. In 1964, over 30 lawsuits had been filed against Big Tobacco accusing them of negligence and other crimes. The majority were dismissed or dropped. Others failed.

One of the main legal strategies was to do all kinds of maneuvers designed to maximize costs for the plaintiffs. Big Tobacco had deep pockets, meanwhile their victims, and the lawyers they worked with, simply couldn’t compete economically.

R.J. Reynolds attorney J. Michael Jordan specified, “The aggressive posture we have taken regarding depositions and discovery in general continues to make these cases extremely burdensome and expensive for plaintiffs’ lawyers…to paraphrase General Patton, the way we won all of these cases was not by spending all of [R.J. Reynolds’] money, but by making the other son of a bitch spend all his.”

It wasn’t until 1988 when a jury awarded Antonio Cipollone $400,000 in damages that we saw the first judgment against any tobacco company. Still, this was later overturned. It was estimated that the firm representing Cipollone had spent close to $10 million and a decade of 3,000 hours per year on this case.

The first actual payment of any damages didn’t occur until 1996 when lung cancer victim Grady Carter was awarded $750,000 in damages from Brown & Williamson. 

That’s almost fifty years of a flawless legal defense! How were they able to do this?

Understand that this was often a use of monopoly power once again. In 1964 all the Big Tobacco executives agreed to let attorney Thomas Austern of Covington & Burling represent them all when they went up against the FTC.

Like there was a united front of PR by working with Hill & Knowlton, there would be a predominately united legal front too. In this case, it was defense against the FTC in regulation of ads, but the same strategy would be used elsewhere. This is summed up by an attorney with Brown & Williamson, J. Kendrick Wells. He said, “direct lawyer involvement is needed in all activities pertaining to smoking and health.”

The principle legal defense used against the people was that they were warned of the dangers with the FTC required warning labels. A law that was meant to help people against Big Tobacco’s excesses, in turn actually helped them out.

“Once the purchaser is informed of a danger, the burden of any injuries incurred from that danger would shift to him,” argued David Hardy, a partner at Shook, Hardy & Bacon. This Kansas City law firm helped shape the overall legal strategy that worked against plaintiffs.

They would also argue that even if cigarettes did cause cancer that they couldn’t prove it did so in any individual case of cancer. Epidemiologically that cigarettes caused cancer was clear. But in individual cases the causality was difficult to pin down.

One helpful strategy included the use of scientific experts, this time extended to the courtroom. Brandt writes, “In 1966, CTR had established, under the guidance of its Committee of Counsel, a ‘special projects’ program to undertake specific research projects and to prepare scientific witnesses for trials and congressional testimony. Special Projects offer the lawyers considerably more control to direct the research and to withhold negative findings. This was overseen by Ed Jacobs of the firm Jacob, Medinger, Finnegan & Hart. As one former R.J. Reynolds employee explained, ‘As soon as Mr. Jacob funded [a scientific study] it was a privileged communication and it couldn’t come into court.’”

This is how science is used to influence not just the body of scientific research and the public, but how law is both made and enforced.

One of the most useful legal defense strategies was to claim client-attorney privilege. By running research papers and other memos through their paid lawyers, Big Tobacco would state that these did not need to be disclosed.

This strategy worked for many decades, but eventually many of these privileged documents were leaked or disclosed. One example came from 1983. A legal memo from a law firm working for Philip Morris quotes researchers Victor DeNoble and Paul Mele in their paper “Nicotine as a Positive Reinforcer in Rats” that “their overall results are extremely unfavorable” and that “research such as this strengthens the adverse case against nicotine as an addictive drug.” Note that this was in a legal memo that eventually came out. There was no earlier record of this damning science showing that the tobacco companies knew about the addictiveness of nicotine while publicly admitting nothing.

Shook, Hardy & Bacon wrote to Philip Morris, “Research engaged in, as well as some possibly under consideration, by Philip Morris, has undesirable and dangerous implications for litigation positions the industry takes in regard to smoking behavior…the performing and publishing of nicotine research clearly seems ill-advised from a litigation point of view.”

The lawyers did not approve of this research. What does law have to do with scientific fact? Sadly, it seems to lead what can and should be investigated and what should not.

Even when laws have been breached, that doesn’t mean the playbook has run out of strategies. In 1994, Congressman Marty Meehan requested the DOJ investigate the tobacco companies for perjury and criminal conduct. Despite five years investigation by a task force the DOJ did not file any charges. Even Judge Kessler, who found the companies guilty in the RICO case, said “perhaps it suggests that additional influences have been brought to bear on what the government’s case is.”

I can’t say for sure why this was, but many people think the law and those involved, especially judges, are beyond reproach. Some of them, maybe even most of them. But that doesn’t mean that all are. This is conjecture, but various backroom deals are absolutely possible in this realm as well.

In Horton v. American Tobacco, the end result had been a hung jury with claims of jury tampering. Seeing everything else these lawyers and executives involved in, would you put that past them?

And just like Big Tobacco was able to steer much legislation in its favor, they would sometimes pull this off in losing legal battles too! In 1997 over 30 US states banded together to sue Big Tobacco for public health costs. In June that year, Attorney General Moore announced a “global settlement” with tobacco industry. They agreed to pay $365.5 billion to the states over the next 25 years.

By November 1998, this master settlement agreement, MSA, was negotiated. The amount was whittled down. Five major tobacco companies agreed to pay $206 billion to 46 states over 25 years. This also included funding a national foundation devoted to public health and some restrictions to advertising.

The bad guys had to pay. Sounds good right? Regarding this settlement, “It’s a terrible deal,” said UCSF health economist Dorothy Rice. She estimated California had $8.7 billion in costs related to cigarette illness but would receive only $500 million per year.

The settlement made it so that the governments would assure Big Tobacco was successful enough to keep making these payments. Brandt writes, “In Illinois, where Philip Morris lost a class-action suit with a judgment of $10.1 billion, more than thirty attorneys general filed an amicus brief warning that bankruptcy to the company would cause dire harm to the states. It was a remarkable turnabout to have the attorneys general defending the industry and its economic well-being…The MSA proved to be one of the industry’s most surprising victories in its long history of combat with the public health forces.”

So here we see a way to not just put Congress in your pockets through lobbying, but the state’s legal departments through good lawyering!

Big Tobacco was amazingly successful in the court room. But the truth did eventually come out. It was in the courtroom where many battles were eventually won. That will be covered in the upcoming chapter Discovery and Litigation. 

Key Takeaways on Legal Defense

  • Court cases against Big Tobacco began in the 1950’s. Due to an army of lawyers and a wide range of legal strategies, they didn’t lose a case until 1988, and paid nothing until 1996.
  • Making cases difficult, long and expensive for anyone that came against them was the first key legal strategy.
  • Like the united PR strategy, a united legal strategy was agreed on by the tobacco companies in many areas.
  • A law meant to help people, by putting warning labels of cigarettes themselves, was a key defense strategy in saying that people had been warned.
  • The lawyers became directly involved in science itself, directed what studies were done, what was withheld, all of it becoming client-attorney privileged communication and thus not open to the public.
  • Despite criminal conduct and a successful RICO case, the DOJ never filed any charges against the tobacco companies. This raises the question of what larger influence they used.
  • In at least one court case, there were accusations of jury tampering.
  • Even a settlement made between the tobacco companies and the states, often trumpeted as a big win against Big Tobacco, would end up supporting the criminal companies. This made the states reliant on tobacco revenues which stopped further regulation or court battles.

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Trump – The Savior, the Antichrist or the Professional Wrestler?

I’ve been asked for my thoughts on Trump a number of times. When someone did so recently, I felt bad afterwards that I hadn’t articulated them well enough. So, this is me trying to correct that.

Trump is probably the most polarizing figure ever. I’m guessing by putting my opinions out there I’ll ruffle a few feathers. Clearly I don’t let that stop me from speaking my opinion! Please also feel free to share your point of view, and evidence for it, in the comments below.

Why am I talking about him in 2021 when he is no longer president? Well, he might be coming back, but I’m getting ahead of myself.

The main reason is he plays into our conversation of Systems vs. Control in a big way. This is important because Trump is explained by some as the effect of our systems gone awry. By others, he is explained as the result of control and conspiracy, one way or another.

I’ve grouped this into what I see as four different predominant “narratives” about the man. From what I’ve seen two of these are easily falsifiable, leaving just two possibilities. Of these, I strongly lean towards one direction, but don’t say it is certain.

I put these on a spectrum from being “For the People” to “Against the People” on the ends. And in the middle is “For Self,” that would be narcissistic, not really caring about the people one way or another excepting as it fits his own ends.

While there are four main narratives, there are variations on these themes available, for stronger or weaker positions within those categories.

(I did a similar sort of thing with Bill Gates earlier that seemed popular enough.)

Trump is a Russian Asset or the Next Hitler – The Mainstream Narrative

The mainstream narrative can be boiled down to Trump being a Russian agent and/or the next Hitler. Even Trump being a devil, the antichrist or worse than Satan is not hyperbole to some!

While these are the more extreme positions, we can consider more moderate positions (anything Orange Man Bad, that he is just a pathological liar, etc) to be in this camp.

This is the position of most of mainstream media, just about anyone left leaning. In the bubble of the coast of California, this is the predominant viewpoint by far.

And yet many of these conspiracy narratives collapse under the evidence. Glenn Greenwald and Matt Taibbi have both done good jobs as mainstream journalists picking apart Russiagate for example in a non-partisan way.

Trump did not seize power like Hitler did, even after the election was stolen. (“But he did encourage an insurrection worse than 9/11!” they rant.)

This stuff is easily falsified and its funny how people who spit on conspiracy theories as being delusional tend to believe in their own. But, because they have the stamp of their desired authorities, they’ll buy it!

The lighter form of this is that Trump is simply a narcissist. But really, that also plays into what I call “Useful Idiot” so we’ll get there shortly.

Let’s go to the other extreme…

Trump is Our Savior – Q and the 5D Chess Player

Q is summarily dismissed as a crackpot conspiracy theory by the mainstream. So for those of us into conspiracy theories, it was a fascinating thing to observe. I’ll admit it threw me for a loop. I couldn’t understand what was going on for a long time. I wanted to believe in the hopium, this concept that there is a conspiracy of secret government agents that are going to ride in on a white horse and save us from the conspiracy of corruption.

In the Q community and its offshoots (there are many different variations from hardcore Christian, to Secret Space program focused, and many more) there is talk about everything Trump doing is him playing 5-dimensional chess. What this is is a way to spin every single thing he does as positive, you just don’t know what is going on.

Trump orders Iran’s General Qasem Soleimani killed. Assassinating world leaders must be good.

Trump surrounds himself in Deep State swamp creatures. It must be good. He does that to keep his enemies close, to entrap them in a strategy that takes years to play out. That is until he fired them, then they must be bad. (John “the devil incarnate” Bolton, for instance.)

Trump orders Operation Warp Speed to fast-track vaccine development. It must be good, that this will actually cripple Big Pharma.

Trump is being investigated by Robert Mueller. It must be good, that Mueller is actually investigating the Deep State and the arrests are imminent.

Trump allows the Democrats to steal the election. Don’t worry, conceding power is part of his masterplan to take away the demoncrats power.

So much of what Q predicted and lead people to believe didn’t come true. Something like a 90% prediction failure rate. But it can always be spun via the 5D chess metaphor.

I’m still waiting on those convictions.

Oh wait, we just got one days ago with Special Investigator John Durham arresting Igor Danchenko, the Trump dossier source. The house of cards is about to fall! Obama and the Clintons will be in jail soon!

…Oh wait, haven’t I heard this before? Like when Jeffrey Epstein was arrested. We all know what happened there. Trump’s second-hand savior AG William Burr covered up his death…but that’s because Epstein wasn’t really killed, it was a double and he’s now in Guantanamo ratting out his hire ups! Do you see how this works?

This Durham investigation almost assuredly will just deal out the hopium a little bit at a time, but at most some smaller players will see justice, the scapegoats for the whole thing.

Yet, that doesn’t mean that there is zero signal amongst all the noise. For that you must understand the term limited hangout.

Deputy Director of the CIA Victor Marchetti described it as “spy jargon for a favorite and frequently used gimmick of the clandestine professionals. When their veil of secrecy is shredded and they can no longer rely on a phony cover story to misinform the public, they resort to admitting—sometimes even volunteering—some of the truth while still managing to withhold the key and damaging facts in the case. The public, however, is usually so intrigued by the new information that it never thinks to pursue the matter further.”

Q did talk about some things such as Jeffrey Epstein that need thorough investigation rather than cover up. Q did “wake” some people up.

But to what kayfabe “reality” exactly?

Q did point at child sex trafficking as a massive problem, which it is. Trump did sign an executive order that targeted it. But has this changed anything fundamental?

There is SOME truth to Q. Still, that doesn’t make it THE truth.

We can say that this narratively was overwhelmingly inaccurate and thus falsified.

Trump is a Useful Idiot

In this narrative, Trump was just in over his head. He never dreamed that he’d actually get elected, just that the race would help his brand.

Maybe he was really just looking out for himself and beyond that got steered by those around him.

Perhaps Trump did want to break the deep state and help people. That he only surrounded himself deeper in the swamp, it’s possible that he was very much deceived as all of use have been.

It is possible that he ordered the lockdowns, the “economic stimulus,” the fast-tracking of vaccines for the pandemic because of the advice he got from people when COVID seemed a real threat. That he believed Fauci!

This is the least conspiratorial of the possible narratives. And I don’t completely eliminate it only because people are able to be massively deceived.

For instance, people on Team Trump right now are wrestling with why Trump is STILL promoting the vaccine. The only way to grapple with this is:

  • Believing the Covid vaccine is actually good
  • Thinking it’s a 5D chess-move
  • Or thinking he’s still being fed bad information, that he believes the vaccine is actually good when clearly it is not

Those are the only options. It is possible that he tried his best and was simply overwhelmingly played. They managed and manipulated him successfully. Some might call him an unknowing puppet. Not Putin as the mainstream narrative claims said, but by the internal Deep State players manipulating him towards their ends.

With this narrative you can see him as more played or less played depending on which things he did that you agree with or don’t. The things you don’t agree with were him being played. The things you do agree with were him doing the right thing.

But even if you think his heart was in the right place you can’t honestly look at where we are at and see that he didn’t help get us here. That he didn’t help usher in a far more powerful and blatant government.

In other words, this narrative says that Trump was not “in on it” but became a useful idiot for the would-be controllers to move forwards their plan.

But perhaps he is in on it…

Trump is Controlled Opposition

Controlled opposition is defined as: “a strategy in which an individual, organization, or movement is covertly controlled or influenced by a 3rd party and the controlled entity’s true purpose is something other than its publicly stated purpose. The controlled entity serves a role of mass deception, surveillance and/or political/social manipulation. In most cases the controlled party is portrayed as being in opposition to the interests of the controlling party.”

I just mentioned that Trump could have been played like a fiddle. But look at what he did…

He helped usher in massive money printing, according to the banker’s plans or, more accurately, BlackRock’s plans. This supposedly free market capitalist, ushered in the greatest inflation the US has ever seen.

He helped further the vaccine agenda by leaps and bounds. He helped Big Pharma greatly, even while seemingly fighting against it, by promoting hydroxychloroquine or cutting funding to the WHO.

Even before the pandemic he talked about the vaccine-autism link, but that all got swept under the rug, when he became president.

He talked about fake news and Big Tech censorship, but acted as the foil that allowed them to ramp up fake news and censorship specifically against him.

What ever happened with “Lock her up,” referring to Hillary Clinton? Absolutely nothing.

Some polls say half the country or more believes the election was stolen from him. And yet he hasn’t been able to mount an adequate defense against such despite all the overwhelming proof.

I’m still waiting for those audits to result in anything.

The strongest evidence is that he was a lying politician like all the others.

If you doubt this I would encourage you to watch this video by James Corbett of the Corbett Report which breaks this narrative down in further detail.

(This video also available on other players, also references here.)

If you watch nothing else make sure to check out the bit at the 10 minute mark. It talks about the president of the galaxy Zaphod Beeblebrox in The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy. So often reality reflects art.

“The President in particular is very much a figurehead — he wields no real power whatsoever. He is apparently chosen by the government, but the qualities he is required to display are not those of leadership but those of finely judged outrage. For this reason the President is always a controversial choice, always an infuriating but fascinating character. His job is not to wield power but to draw attention away from it. On those criteria Zaphod Beeblebrox is one of the most successful Presidents the Galaxy has ever had — he has already spent two of his ten presidential years in prison for fraud.”

Trump is the most perfect Beeblebrox we’ve had.

I see this as the most likely scenario, with Trump being a “useful idiot” the secondary possibility.

Understand that just because the fake news maligns Trump doesn’t make him great. Just because mainstream unfairly maligns Q, doesn’t make it correct. That, in fact, is what controlled opposition is about.

Yes, 5D Chess is Being Played…Against You

I see this as the best possibility because I do think 5D chess is being played, but it’s mostly against the public, against you and I.

In my opinion, Q Anon was a limited hangout, a way to string-along and cognitively infiltrate the conspiracy crowd itself. It wasn’t targeted at normies ever. The vast majority of conspiracy crowd could never be folded back into the mainstream crowd. Therefore, this was a method to corral part of this herd and put them to good use.

To go back to professional wrestling, Q is the face (the good guy) for the people involved in it. But is the heel (bad guy) for the mainstream. Even without Q, Trump himself functions as both the face to the Republicans and the heel to democrats.

With these heels, the mainstream power structures are able to roll-up all the conspiracies into one to dismiss them, censor them, label them hate speech, etc. with greater ease. They’re rolling up conservatives into racists into anti-vaxxers into flat-earthers all at once.

The kayfabe of mainstream and Q narratives shows dizzying degrees of deception, that allow for greater attempts at control.

And it is working. Sadly, I think it’s just getting started.

Polarization is the Plan

Polarization is certainly based on systemic effects. Social media, filter bubbles, politicization of everything, and more. But I think willful increased polarization is part of the plan. That it moves their extreme agendas forward. And in this way Trump was and still is a key figure.

Just think, could they have run the Covid operation without Trump being president in the first place?

If there was less of a polarizing figure the people could more easily have united against such actions. If Clinton or Biden was president when this operation kicked off, the resistance against it would have been far stronger. But because of him, we were successfully divided in Red vs. Blue. It was easier to handle.

They need the splitting of realities to play people off each other, to further the polarization gap.

I concede that some of this stuff could be different deep state factions fighting it out (Democrats and Republicans just being middle management), but if that is the case, that doesn’t mean that there aren’t higher controlling powers that are still directing the controlled collapse and allowing that to happen.

If the powers-that-be intend to increase polarization, where does this lead? Why are they doing so?

We Haven’t Seen the Last of Trump – A 2024 Timeline?

Right now, I consider that there is a significant chance that Trump will get re-elected in 2024. I know that is still a long ways off but bear with me.

Just recently in New Jersey and Vermont we saw Republicans take the lead or at least close the gap. The mid-term elections will likely see even more.

And then for the 2024 election Trump could very likely step up and win again. So many people would rejoice!

But what if he is controlled opposition? How would this professional wrestling political script play out?

(Wouldn’t it be ironic if cheating occurs for Trump to win this election the next time around? And then the left goes crazy over the proof of such?)

If you think that TDS (Trump Derangement Syndrome) was bad before, you haven’t seen anything yet!

The pendulum swings back the other way. Trump is a fighter of freedom! Except that this time he does make some (more) totalitarian moves. It’s against the extreme left…or as the Q contingent believes the satanic left.

Martial law is prayed for…as long as it comes from Team Trump. Swift and furious military action.

Civil war erupts. Probably it starts with a few events but soon enough it’s big.

The domestic terrorist narrative is targeted on the right for the time being. But how easy is it to flip on the other side?

As Greenwald labeled it, “The New Domestic War on Terror is Coming.” Right now this is little more than propaganda being spouted by the left-wing media and politicians. But their plan is for it to become much more than that.

Throw in a bio-terrorism event (Gates back in the news days ago this time talking about smallpox in airports) and we have ourselves a real party, that fits hand in glove with the health-scare narratives.

Succession is being talked about in some right leaning states right now. What if it is the left-leaning states down the road though?

And Trump acts like Lincoln in keeping the states together. In case you don’t know, Lincoln suspended all kinds of constitutional liberties in that time. Habeas corpus. Long before the Federal Reserve, greenbacks, a fiat money, were printed to pay for war.

Some massive actions are taken. The rebellion is or is not stamped down. But either way we have become more of a totalitarian society because of it.

The might of the US military against the might of the US military.

Perhaps the UN has to step in to help keep the peace. Perhaps things get so bad a new nation (or global zone) must be born from the ashes.

Maybe after a few years of in-fighting is when China launches its attack.

However it’ll play out, the emergency allows for more power to be grabbed which is never relinquished once again.

If what we are facing indeed is controlled demolition, the USA as we know it has to go away. The constitution is already being trampled upon. It has been for decades but they kicked it up a notch the last two years especially, and that includes under Trump’s watch.

With our 2nd amendment particularly, an armed populace stands in the way. Compare where the USA is to Australia or Canada for instance.

What better way to destroy that then to get the people up in arms against manufactured enemies? To turn on one another.

The values of the USA stands in the way of the total totalitarian takeover. Simple as that.

Civil war is one option to get there. And there’s no more divisive figure than Trump to help us get there. Hasn’t he already moved us so significantly in that direction since 2016?

The way I see it, we’re in World War 3 right now. But it’s a Cold War for now. It’s information warfare and economic warfare predominately. It is these controlling elites vs. the populace.

Sadly, I believe the chances that it will turn into a hot war before the decade is out are greater than 50%, one way or another.

By no means do I think this is exactly our future, but something along these could play out. This was an exercise in stretching my imagination, and hopefully yours too.

As always, I sincerely hope I am wrong but I fear I am not.

There is hope to avoid such a future. But it takes more and more people seeing through the BS and standing up against it without falling into the partisan divide. If Q indeed is was a psy-op, they were playing with fire, that might come back to burn them.

And if I happen to be wrong about all that and the white horse gallops in with checkmate in the final moment, I’ll gladly eat crow. In the meantime I’ll be acting as if that will never happen, and it’s up to the people, with bottoms up organization to topple this corruption.

More on Systemic Collapse vs. Controlled Demolition and other possible timelines next time…

Controlling Regulation (The Industry Playbook)

This is Chapter 13 of my new book, working title “The Industry Playbook: Corporate Cartels, Corruption and Crimes Against Humanity” that is being published online chapter by chapter.


Tobacco is an interesting case as it became a monopoly power before any of our big regulatory agencies were even created.

“As food and drug regulation was created in 1906 and stiffened in 1938, tobacco products were viewed within the Food and Drug Administration as neither food nor drug and, thus, outside the agency’s mandate,” writes Brandt. “The industry successfully avoided any requirements for reporting ingredients or evaluating the safety of the product. There was virtually no governmental oversight of the manufacturing process.”

This is in stark contrast to other industries where a revolving door of regulators moving to and from industry is critically important in benefiting the industry as will be described in other chapters. For Big Tobacco it was a matter of staying free from regulation and they were able to do that for a long time. Defying any kind of regulation is just one form of controlling it.

The Tobacco Institute could take credit for this. As legislation occurred, the industry aimed to make sure that state or local level regulations could not pass. They did so by pre-empting such regulations with federally approved legislation. A Congressional act would require labels to be put on cigarette packages and ads but wouldn’t allow states to pass any other regulation.

“The Federal Cigarette Labeling and Advertising Act of 1865 (FCLAA) is a classic demonstration of how efforts to regulate can be turned 180 degrees—given enormous clout in Congress and a successful strategy, implemented with great tactical skill and military precision,” writes Brandt.

Journalist Elizabeth Drow wrote about the FCLAA that “It is an unabashed act to protect private industry from government regulation.”

In 1992, the EPA declared that tobacco smoke is a Class A human carcinogen. This action did not carry any policy change though.

In August of 1996, FDA Commissioner David Kessler announced they’d regulate nicotine-containing tobacco products as medical devices and restrict youth access and advertising. They asserted that tobacco did fall under its jurisdiction. “Whatever the challenges, the industry cannot be left to peacefully reap billions of dollars in profits, totally unrepentant, and without thought to the pain caused in the process. For that remains its intent,” said Kessler.

However, the industry immediately sued to stop this. And they did. The courts taking a long time through motions and appeals, it was not until March of 2000, that the Supreme Court ruled 5-4 that the FDA did not have jurisdiction to regulate tobacco.

But that wasn’t the end of the fight either. Ultimately, the FDA was successful, with the passage of the Family Smoking Prevention and Tobacco Control Act by Congress in 2009. This granted the FDA regulatory power over tobacco.

Big Tobacco now pays for a significant portion of the FDA’s budget for this regulation. In 2019, tobacco user fees, paid by manufacturers and importers, made up $666 million of the $3.15 billion total budget. That means that Big Tobacco pays roughly a quarter of the FDA’s budget.

Key Takeaways on Controlling Regulation

  • Tobacco products were around before any regulatory agency that should oversee them was. With this they were sort of grandfathered in to not being regulated.
  • Big Tobacco was able to stop regulation at a state or local level by pre-empting any such regulation with passage of a federal act that did nothing more than label cigarettes. 
  • The FDA sought to regulate tobacco in 1996. Due to Big Tobacco fighting it, it didn’t come to pass until 2009, thirteen years later. Big Tobacco pays approximately one quarter of the FDA’s total budget.

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Systems vs. Control

How much of what we’re seeing is top down control? How much is bottoms up systemic effects? These questions are those that I’ve been wrestling with for a long time now.

This is the first in a two part series. The next one covers these aspects specifically along the lines of systemic collapse vs. controlled demolition. That’s what I really want to understand strategically to better plan for the future. But before we can go there there’s some groundwork to lay.

Life is complex systems. These are very, very, very tricky to understand. (I’ve mentioned it several times before but Thinking in Systems is highly recommended reading.)

Most people don’t believe in conspiracy theories for a couple of reasons. One, they can’t really fathom evil, and I’ve covered that topic before. (Whether systemically or by design many even deny it exists!)

Secondly, and relevant to this article, they think that so many people would need to be in on it. But that’s not actually true.

If you missed my recent Industry Playbook chapter on Ideological Allies, please go read it. This will help you to understand how people can believe things despite all the evidence to the contrary. How an ideological position (one you assume is not ideological but factual) will make you outright dismiss any evidence that doesn’t fit.

I’m guessing you have experience with this among your family and friends these days!

I know many extremely smart people that have beliefs regarding the pandemic that run from one end of the spectrum all the way over to the other. In my opinion, intelligence has NOTHING to do with it.

Understanding that we are all deluded, you and me included, is a tough thing to wrap your mind around. Smart people especially don’t want to admit it because it challenges their intelligence and ability to know. (Hint, hint, doctors, scientists perhaps most of all. After all that spent so many years in school. So maybe intelligence does have something to do with it…being inversely correlated with truth-seeking!)

Of course, I think I’m less deluded than most…but I take my own beliefs, even what I perceive as facts, with a grain of salt.

I try to learn from my own past ideological leanings and how I believe extremely different things these days. And of course I didn’t think I was being ideological at the time! (To humble me I’ll share that I thought that bodyweight exercise was the only fitness worth doing at one point, everything else was stupid. I also believed that raw food was THE best way to eat for humans. Silly me. Just two examples and there sure are more.)

Systems themselves can give rise to much of what we’re seeing.

The sociopathic-by-structure corporate drive for meeting next quarter’s profits per share target. One corner being cut leads to the next.

The need to get grants steers scientists in certain directions and not others. Not being able to get funding for anything besides the next cancer drug keeps them focused on the next cancer drug and its reductionist pathway target. The economic incentive of staying on this track are great. The pitfalls of going outside it are significant.

The filter bubbles caused by social media drive polarization further.

There is no doubt that these things are going on. There’s no denying that our systems give rise to emergent properties. The question is how much of these things are only that, and how much are driven top down? Let’s explore more systemic complexities first.

Layered Deception of Kayfabe

I’ve talked about politics as pro wrestling before. Keep in mind, I was watching WWE as a teenager when Trump was on it.

Here are two videos that discuss an important concept to understand, kayfabe, as laid out by Eric Weinstein.

(A third video in this series is coming…)

We have layers and layers of systems that have problems. This argument is that MOST of the deception is not intentional but is self-deception that balloons out of control that reflexively feed back on themselves and other systems.

That we can’t even tell much of the difference between what is real, what is fake, and what is some weird combination of both. Work, shoots and worked shoots.

This leads to people seeing some small lens of things, not realizing the false assumptions they’re standing on.

These things can build over decades. Your entire life can and does involve some illusion that you don’t even think to question.

The assumptions are not a single thing, but layers of them. What are your chances of seeing ten layers deep into social and cultural assumptions? It’s even smaller than a healthy child’s chances of dying from COVID!

Project yourself out to being someone living in 2321. They’ll look back at our time and laugh at so many of the beliefs we don’t even question. Just like you could do so to anyone in 1721.

The divide between the right and left might as well be between people living 300 years apart from each other. Their worldview’s just don’t even have space to match up.

For example, the scientist that doesn’t even realize the whole house of cards is built on a foundation of a materialist philosophy…one that has been falsified a thousand times over. But many don’t realize it. The implicit assumptions was never pointed out in their years and years of schooling.

It’s the Semmelweis reflex all over again, one thousand times over.

Chomsky’s Propaganda Model…and Being Blind to Propaganda

I’m reading Manufacturing Consent right now. Fantastic book. Very detailed in showing how the media toes the line. That in many cases this can be seen as a systemic effect.

On this topic there’s a fascinating exchange between a journalist, Andrew Marrs, and Chomsky discussing the latter’s propaganda model. (Transcript from Mint Press News.)


Marr: ‘I’m just interested in this because I was brought up like a lot of people, probably post-Watergate film and so on, to believe that journalism was a crusading craft and there were a lot of disputatious, stroppy, difficult people in journalism. And I have to say, I think I know some of them.’

Chomsky: ‘Well, I know some of the best, and best-known, investigative reporters in the United States – I won’t mention names – whose attitude towards the media is much more cynical than mine. In fact, they regard the media as a sham. And they know, and they consciously talk about how they try to play it like a violin. If they see a little opening, they’ll try to squeeze something in that ordinarily wouldn’t make it through. And it’s perfectly true that the majority – I’m sure you’re speaking for the majority of journalists who are trained – have it driven into their heads, that this is a crusading profession, adversarial, we stand up against power. A very self-serving view. On the other hand, in my opinion, I hate to make a value judgement but, the better journalists and, in fact, the ones who are often regarded as the best journalists have quite a different picture. And I think a very realistic one.’

Marr: “How can you know that I’m self-censoring? How can you know that journalists are…’

Chomsky: “I’m not saying your self-censoring. I’m sure you believe everything you’re saying. But what I’m saying is that if you believe something different, you wouldn’t be sitting where you’re sitting.


Well-worth understanding. It’s ideological positioning once again.

Chomsky’s propaganda model shows how journalism has been corrupted, without requiring worldwide conspiracy. It’s simply finding those that believe what you want to believe to further what you want believed. It’s upregulating their messages, while downregulating those that oppose.

And yet here’s the mind-warping part. It’s curious to see that Chomsky buys into some mainstream narratives hook-line-and-sinker.

Is he controlled opposition? Or does this just go to show how the layers of deception, very few can get through? (To go deeper into understand propaganda, from someone who taught the subject in college and personally knew Chomsky but goes “deeper” than him, listen to this fantastic interview between Whitney Webb and Mark Crispin Miller.)

Another example. Naomi Klein wrote The Shock Doctrine, detailing how totalitarian and economic shocks are used to disrupt a populace allowing others to plunder.

Amazing book, that helped me to understand history better. It has been shown in countless South American countries, in Africa, in Iran, in Iraq, in Russian. And yet Klein can’t see it happening right now across the entire world as they reformat the worldwide economy. She dismissed the Great Reset as a “conspiracy smoothie.” Is she controlled opposition? Or does she just not see how the pieces fit because of some ideological positions she possesses?

So is this really just systems going crazy? Let’s look at the other lens from which to view things, the top down conspiratorial lens.

The Opacity of Conspiracy

This is something that I’ve long wrestled with in my investigations of conspiracy. This is the part that drives me crazy, and has led to this article.

Definitions of Opacity:

  • obscurity of sense : UNINTELLIGIBILITY
  • the quality or state of a body that makes it impervious to the rays of light
  • broadly : the relative capacity of matter to obstruct the transmission of radiant energy

Definition of Conspiracy:

  • the act of secretly planning to do something that is harmful or illegal

By its very definition of secrecy, conspiracy creates opacity.

We see conspiracies come to light many times. Big tobacco was a 50+ year conspiracy. Known cases of pharmaceutical conspiracies. Tons and tons of examples are available. Why do these conspiracies become revealed? Usually, it has to do with documented evidence and/or insiders that reveal something.

But these are what I’ll call “run-of-the-mill” conspiracies. They’re small enough to come to light. Many of these can be explained completely, or at least mostly, simply by looking at the systems at play.

Yet, the deeper down the rabbit hole we go, the more secrecy there is. The more layers of conspiracy exist. The more intentional disinformation exists. The more certain things must be universally denied.

And at the same time, the less actual PROOF exists.

Conspiracy research is best at falsifying the official stories/mainstream narratives. It’s relatively easy to find the lies. Actually knowing the truth is another matter entirely!

A recent Industry Playbook chapter discusses destroying evidence. That some things have come out simply leads to those conspiring to destroy more or better yet not create ANY evidence in the first place.

The bankers meeting annually at the BIS (Bank of International Settlements) meet in seclusion and write nothing down. Groups such as Bilderberg release nothing. For a long time it was even denied that the Bilderberg group existed.

The deeper you go, the more opaque it becomes.

We know Bill Gates is up to some nefarious things from your and my point of view. Blocking the sun to combat climate change. Genetically modifying mosquitoes to squelch malaria. Quantum dots vaccine tattoos, using luciferase enzymes. Lying about his relationship to Jeffrey Epstein (fun video below). Being the biggest US farmland owner and driving more towards GMO’s, pesticides and ultraprocessed food despite the evidence showing these do not help yields or health. Monopolizing philanthropy through and through.

But it IS possible he believes he is doing good!  

…It’s also possible that he’s part of some generational Luciferian cult. 

I do not know the absolute truth about what goes on in Bill Gates mind and life. I don’t pretend too. But I know enough to know I’m very much opposed to his plans.

The official story that Gates is a philanthropist earnestly seeking to help the world falls apart on closer inspection.

The deeper question. Is he the ringleader?

If not, who (or what) does he answer to? That answer is opaque. I would argue that it is unanswerable as of right now. Those that claim they know the answer, without actually being in on the conspiring with Gates himself, are deluding themselves.

Sure there are hints, even strong hints, that things are darker, but knowing for sure feels out of our grasps.

In other words, are Gates, Fauci and others the leaders of the pandemic? They could be. Personally, I doubt it…but I don’t know for sure.

Surely, no one thinks that Biden is actually in charge. It’s been talked about that presidents were puppets going back at least decades, but this presidency does it much more in your face.

How Far Up Does Control Go? To Whom?

Have you heard any or all of these before? The controller’s of our world are the…

  • Rothschilds
  • Rockefellers
  • Nazis
  • Zionists (oh darn, I guess I’m anti-semitic now)
  • Reptilians
  • Freemasons
  • Skull & Bones
  • AI
  • Illuminati
  • CIA
  • Khazarians
  • Thirteen Families
  • Jesuits
  • Luciferians
  • Satan
  • Annunaki

Do you claim with 100% certainty that you know the answer? I sure don’t. I attempt to stay grounded in provable conspiring as much of the time as I possibly can.

Have you NOT heard of all of these? Then you’re likely in a conspiracy filter bubble and should probably look outside of it.

(And what possibilities am I not even aware of because of my own?)

From where I stand, the answer is totally opaque.

Even if it is some dark, evil force (that some call Satan), surely there are other intermediaries involved? That just gets us asking the same question again of who is controlling what.

The question “Are their different shadowy factions competing?” adds still more opacity to this topic.

THE Answer

Nevermind, while writing this article I found THE Answer. (sarcasm)

I forget where I saw this but had to save it. How could you possibly say for sure that THIS is how everything works?

It gets very fuzzy just the first level up, five times as much the second level up. By the third level here you’re swimming in pure mystery!

All this opacity lends itself to controlled opposition, disinformation, limited hangouts and more. This makes it even more opaque. Mind-numbing dizziness.

Maybe Naomi Klien is right. This does look like a conspiracy smoothie to me.

On the other hand, while I highly doubt the exact specifics of that chart, I concede that it could be something LIKE that. As one of the sheeple, I’m not in a very good position to judge.

Awake doesn’t mean Awake

Things got bad with Covid. This has caused many new people to “wake up.”

I don’t really like that phrase. Just because you’re “awake” to one layer of deception, doesn’t mean you’re still dreaming through the next nine.

This much I can tell you is true. It didn’t start with Covid. It goes back further than that. Things got bad with 9/11…

No, it goes back further than that. The “original” coup was the CIA killing JFK…

No, it goes back further than that. Things changed after WW2 when the Nazis went underground and Bretton Woods changed everything…

No, things really changed with Rockefeller philanthropy and the Federal Reserve being created at the turn of the 20th century…

No, things have been controlled for longer than that. The Catholic church was controlled by the Jesuits and the Black Nobility…

No, (this was a brand new one to me I heard about recently), almost all of our history is wrong because of the Tartarian empire that has been erased from history books and our timelines rewritten…

No, you have to go back further than that, to Atlantis, Lemuria and the hidden civilizations with bloodlines and secret knowledge passed down for millennia…

No, you have to go back to the progenitor aliens that lived (still live in Antartica?) that tweaked our DNA to create our species. 

The other layer of opacity is time. The further back you go, the harder it is to pin down with anything even remotely resembling certainty.

Do you claim with 100% certainty that you know the answer? I sure don’t. I attempt to stay grounded in provable history of the past hundred years or so! And do you know how much has happened just in the last century? It’s dizzying.

But suppose some of these deeper layers go back hundreds or even thousands of years. If that is the case, then actual top-down control becomes more feasible because what do they know about how the world, how reality itself, actually works that we’re led to not believe?

Influence vs. Control

Truthfully, it’s not a question of top down conspiracy for control, or bottom up systematic emergent properties. It’s both.

I wrote the following as part of my WHO deep dive (World Health Organization). It covers the WHO, but the idea pertains to every single institution that exists. This covers how conspiring will infect and grow over time.


That’s why the way I see it, it’s not so much about control as about influence.

If Big Pharma can get policies and decisions swayed in their favor just 10% of the time, as I’ll prove shortly they’ve done over and over again, that gives them an unfair advantage. If one high-up person is “in their pocket” and they make a decision on a policy that has lasting impact this has occurred.

This then means through time they’ll continue to benefit allowing for more similar actions to be taken. In other words, the 10% compounds over time.

It also means that the one person becomes two, becomes five. Any degree of corruption at high levels allows for more corrupt people, not less, to gain more power. After all, almost all of these positions are appointed not elected. (And we know elections can be gamed too!)

Corruption spreads. In a backroom deal someone basically says you do this thing for us you’ll get the position. With the position you help us gain more profits and power so we incentivize the next person…

At the same time corruption stops “good people” from being successful. They get locked out in one fashion or another. We’ll see examples of that from employees of the WHO blowing the whistle later on.

If Gates can earmark certain funds he donates to specific projects, and those projects involve buying drugs from companies he is invested in, personally or through his foundation, that’s a serious conflict of interest at the very least. He then gains money that allows him to further influence the WHO.

Understand, because the WHO is a large organization, with about 7000 employees, these kinds of things can be occurring while there are also legitimate, good lifesaving projects also being done. It’s not black and white or an either/or thing, it is both/and situation.

Although systems are important, understand that these come down to people making decisions. Thus, it may be best to think of the people involved in a few different buckets:

1. There are some really good people that are genuinely striving to solve the world’s health problems.

2. There are some that are simply bureaucratic types that may not influence things one way or another. They’re largely just doing their jobs, punching the clock.

3. There are some that are undoubtedly and fully corrupt. (Remember, sociopaths exist and they have a higher than average chance of rising in position because of such!)

4. There are those that allow corruption in small ways (such as a consultancy fee from a pharmaceutical company). As we know from doctors that attend pharma sponsored events, meals or receive kickbacks, they make think they’re then making independent choices but their actions show they’ve been swayed.

The saying is that power corrupts and absolute power corrupts absolutely. With these types of people involved and with money involved, corruption is pretty much inevitable…even if the majority of people are in group one!

The question is not whether the WHO is corrupt or not. Instead the big question is how much corruption is involved? How much harmful influence is involved? This exploration is not exhaustive but is meant to give us some answers to these questions.


Right now, we’re talking about worldwide influence. Not just the WHO but the FDA, the CDC, the NIH and these equivalent health institutions in every single country.

Not just health but politics, economics, journalism, education, activists, foundations…every institution and system.

How deep and far do the tentacles reach? How long have the tentacles been reaching?

Long enough and deep enough to pervade every institution it seems!

This is scary to look at, which is why most people don’t. But everywhere you look you find this corrupting influence going on. That is where the evidence leads.

Using the Top Down Control Lens to See the World

We’re going through The Great Reset, right? We’ve moved into the New Normal.

We’ve seen their plans for the future. The complete control gird of a technocractic utopia/dystopia. Plugged into the Matrix with our microchips, nanobots, vaccine passports, AI controlled, with climate and social credits. Babies born in test tubes. Genderless too! “You’ll own nothing and be happy” as predicted/planned by the World Economic Forum…and Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World before that.

You…not we. Someone will be owning everything, even all of nature herself with new “natural asset companies”. That someone appears to be BlackRock and Vanguard, though those are the vehicles with the exact owners obscured behind them further.

In short, they’re turning us into the Borg. Technocratic enslavement is the agenda. And doing it without the people recognizing its happening is key. That’s because the best slave is one that thinks they’re free. Slaves don’t revolt if they don’t realize they are slaves.

The good news is we’re still a ways from that agenda being complete. (Though arguments can and have been made that we have enslaved for a long time. Watch this short video to understand that.)

“They” Plan for Decades

A consistent critique of conspiracy theorists is that they want the safety and security of understanding how the world works. While this is undoubtedly true of most, as can be told by this article, it’s not true of me. I encourage you to be a “Conspiracy Theorist 2.0,” not being married to a specific who deep down the rabbit hole.

All the best sources I follow think along these lines. Because of the opacity, it’s the only accurate opinion to say we don’t know for sure.

One of the reasons that I like the information shared by Catherine Austin Fitts is that she often talks about unanswered questions, all the things she doesn’t know.

She uses the term “Mr. Global” to describe the opaque, shadowy governance that actually runs things. (Desiring control of 100% of the globe being one a big part of the plan.)

Here’s a great recent interview with her giving the big picture with some verifiable evidence discussed.

Looking at this systemically, humans are seeking to steer our cultures all the time. It’s human nature to control things. There’s just many competing interests from corporations, to nation-states, to NGO’s, to technological determinism itself.

But imagining that there is top-down control of the world, steering of our civilization, is a useful lens to look at the world. Use it to look at the world and think differently.

It is clear that there is some form of a worldwide conspiracy even if we don’t know all the details. That country after country has dealt with the virus almost in lockstep is proof of that.

(Pay no attention to the 2010 Lock Step scenario in Scenarios for the Future of Technology and International Development which talks about a deadly pandemic sweeping the world. And how China fared best by locking down completely. They write, “Even after the pandemic faded, this more authoritarian control and oversight of citizens and their activities stuck and even intensified.” Who published this? The Rockefeller Foundation. Funny how reality copies from think tank papers and events funded by such people so often, isn’t it?)

If we do not know how governance actually works, not how we collectively pretend it to work, it sure makes it harder to predict the future. But still I strive to.

Certain layers of such planning are not opaque. Certain players, even if they are not the top of the pyramid, are known.

Going back to kayfabe, how much of what we think of as reality worked shoots? Consider the Afghanistan withdrawal fiasco. Was it a fiasco? Or was it planned to come off as a fiasco? For how many and what agenda items did it check off?

In other words was that part of systemic collapse, or was that controlled demolition? In the next part we’ll take these concepts further and specifically looking at current and future events.

Lobbying and Buying Politicians (The Industry Playbook)

This is Chapter 12 of my new book, working title “The Industry Playbook: Corporate Cartels, Corruption and Crimes Against Humanity” that is being published online chapter by chapter.


Public relations are not just about the public but about professionals. Seeing as politicians have influence over laws that could either benefit or cripple industry aims, a huge part of the playbook is to influence the politicians and thus, the laws they create.

In the USA, there are three branches of government, the executive, legislative and judicial. These checks and balances were meant to keep government honest. In this chapter most of the focus is on the legislative branch, however influence is not exclusive to that branch.

Back around the turn of the 20th century, well before the dangers of cigarettes were known, there was discussion of laws prohibiting sales of tobacco. Brandt writes, “As dozens of states debated such laws [prohibiting sales of cigarettes], rumors flew that Tobacco Trust representatives were liberally dispensing bribes among state legislators to fight the restrictions.”

It is one of the monopoly or cartel powers, to be able to influence those who make the laws.

There are illegal bribes and then there are legal bribes. Big Tobacco were some of the biggest spenders when it came to political campaigns, something that is legal to do.

Most of the spending went to politicians of the south where tobacco was grown. As such 80% of funding went to Republican candidates.

This led to statements such as this among politicians. “The Surgeon General is entitled to draw his own conclusions,” said Senator Sam J. Evans, Jr. in 1965. “He is treading on questionable ground, however, when he begins to impose these opinions on the public, without acknowledging the fact that this matter is in controversy among scientists.” This was the PR line of the tobacco companies used inside the Senate.

In 1965, the Federal Trade Commission required a label on packages saying “Caution: cigarette smoking is dangerous to health and may cause death from cancer and other diseases.” This was a result of the passage of the Federal Cigarette Labeling and Advertising Act of 1965.

Brandt writes, “[T]he industry sought legislation that would explicitly preempt any state and local regulations about labeling and advertising in favor of a congressional mandated—and heavily lobbied—federal act…The legislation was aggressively regulatory in this one respect: it clipped the wings of the FTC, which was legally banned from taking regulatory actions against tobacco for four years.”

Despite the warning, passage of this act was actually in Big Tobacco’s favor. This is because with the warning, they would argue in court repeatedly, and successfully for decades, that people were made aware of the dangers and thus the companies were not responsible. This warning label would also help them in tort litigation over the coming decades, as the consumers were now warned of the dangers.

Not every politician is influenced by money, though this unfortunately seems to be a minority. Before the passage of the act, Congressman John Blatnik and seven other congressmen and senators wrote to President Johnson asking him to veto the bill saying it “protects only the cigarette industry.”

Behind most of this was the Tobacco Institute. Public Relations Journal described the Institute as one of the “most formidable public relations/lobbying machines in history.”

Former state legislator Ron Faucheux said, “In the modern world, few major issues are merely lobbied anymore. Most of them are now managed, using a triad of public relations, grassroots mobilization and lobbyists.”  Because of these strategies we would see examples of favorable legislation being enacted over and over again in the following years.

In 1966, The Fair Labeling and Packaging Act was passed. It explicitly did not cover tobacco thanks to the Tobacco Institute’s lobbying.

The “Federal Cigarette Labeling and Advertising Act marks one of American history’s most impressive examples of the power of special interests to shape congressional action,” wrote Brandt. “The industry increasingly utilized legitimate antitobacco legislation as a ‘vehicle’ for inserting preemptive clauses. Given that such bills often originated with public health advocates and their allies, the addition of preemption clauses sometimes had the effect of dividing antitobacco coalitions, as they found themselves forced to decide whether to accept valuable public health interventions at the cost of conceding preemption of local controls.”

In 1969, The Public Health Cigarette Smoking Act passed, mandating the warning on cigarette packages read, “Warning: The Surgeon General Has Determined That Cigarette Smoking Is Dangerous To Your Health.” Note that this did not change much of anything.

In 1970, The Controlled Substances Act was passed. It explicitly did not cover tobacco thanks to Tobacco’s lobbying efforts.

In 1972, The Consumer Product Safety Act was passed. Guess what products it didn’t cover once again? This led the Wall Street Journal to say that the Tobacco Institute had shown its power in “turning a series of imminent disasters into near victories.”

In 1974, Senator Frank Moss of Utah submitted a petition to Consumer Product Safety Commission (CPSC) to ban high-tar cigarettes. The next year in October of 1975, Congress passed HR 644, the CPSC Amendments Bill. This specifically excluded tobacco products from the jurisdiction of the CPSC.

In 1981, the FTC conceded that it’s warning labels on ads and packages were ineffective. Yet three years later, Congress passed the Comprehensive Smoking Prevention Education Act. A part of the bill changed the cigarette package labels to four in rotation, still active today.

Senator John McCain led a bill in 1998 to curtail Big Tobacco. As a result, they spent $40 million on radio and television ads within a two-month period talking about how the bill would increase taxes. One such ad stated, “Washington wants to raise the price of cigarettes so high there’ll be a black market in cigarettes with unregulated access to kids.”

In addition, tobacco lobbyists loaded it up with amendments that had nothing to do with tobacco. Then they opposed it on the grounds that it is was no longer a tobacco bill. This was another tactic in the political game. The bill was killed.

Understand that legislation could have been passed in these years that actually would have affected Big Tobacco’s impact on human health. But since they had the money to fund lobbyists, astroturfers, front organizations and the politicians themselves, they would be able to steer the laws in their favor.

Looking at the results of this legislation we can confidently say that Congress was effectively bought on the subject of tobacco for decades.

Yet the battleground wasn’t only there. It also existed in the states.

In 1973 we saw campaigning by a real grassroots organization Arizonans Concerned About Smoking, founded by Betty Carnes. This led to Arizona being the first state within the USA to pass a law restricting smoking in public places.

In 1975, Minnesota passed the Clean Indoor Air Act, banning smoking in most public places unless specifically allowed. 

Big Tobacco aimed to curtail these laws too. For example, in 1978, they spent $6.5 million to kill a referendum in California, Proposition 5, which aimed at statewide restrictions on smoking. This proposition was effectively defeated.

Still, in this case with the tide of public opinion turning especially regarding secondhand smoke, by

1981, thirty-six states had some form of restriction on smoking in public.

The deceptive tactics used only grew over time. In 1994, Philip Morris hired PR agency Dolphin, who setup a front group called “Californians for Statewide Smoking Restrictions.” Along with the National Smokers Alliance, they were able to gather enough signatures to put Proposition 188 on the ballot. Billboards promoted “Yes on 188—Tough Statewide Smoking Restrictions—The Right Choice.”

The facts were that this referendum would aid Big Tobacco, despite the anti-tobacco messaging they advertised it with. It would have undermined 270 local restrictions and state-wide smoke free work laws. The funding and the ploy came to light and this referendum was not passed by the public.

Total lobbying has decline in recent years, but it hasn’t gone away. “In 1998, the tobacco industry spent a total of almost $73 million on federal lobbying and employed over 200 lobbyists who advocated on its behalf. In 2014, total lobbying expenditures from the industry had dropped to around $22.2 million, with fewer lobbyists as well,” writes Alex Lazar of the Center for Responsive Politics.

Key Takeaways on Lobbying and Buying Politicians

  • There are illegal bribes and legal bribes. Contributing to the campaigns of politicians is an effective way to influence how politicians will vote. Most funding went to Republicans, due to tobacco being grown in red states and their affinity for bigger businesses and less government.
  • If we look at the track record it is clear that Big Tobacco was effectively ably to buy Congress on the topic of tobacco for decades.
  • Any legislation that was passed did not cover tobacco, or when it did, was actually in favor of the tobacco companies.
  • This came despite people and other legislators aiming to constrain the power of the tobacco companies. Bills were altered or amended. Bills were stuff full of other things.
  • Any truly detrimental legislation would have the full power of the playbook thrown against it. Not just lobbying, but astroturf, front organizations, calling in favors, advertising, PR campaigns, smears and more.
  • The biggest fights happened on the Federal level. But these fights also took place on the state and local levels too.
  • Big Tobacco and their PR firm allies were not above deception such as the case of Proposition 188 in California shows. This pro-tobacco bill advertised anti-tobacco messaging to attempt to sway people to mistakenly vote for it.
  • While the power of Big Tobacco has gone in recent year they still are active in the lobbying game today.

Please leave any comments or questions below. Feel free to share it with anyone you’d like.

Links to all published chapters of The Industry Playbook can be found here.

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Destroying Evidence (The Industry Playbook)

This is Chapter 11 of my new book, working title “The Industry Playbook: Corporate Cartels, Corruption and Crimes Against Humanity” that is being published online chapter by chapter.


Nowadays, there over 14 million documents from tobacco companies online. Just one place where they can be found is the UCSF website, along with documents from other industries.

It could take many lifetimes to go through all this. And this is more than enough evidence to prove everything that is shared in this report.

But the facts are likely even worse than what is proven here because of the topic of this chapter.

The Verdict is In, summarizes this as such. “Defendants attempted to and, at times, did prevent/stop ongoing research, hide existing research, and destroy sensitive documents in order to protect their public positions on smoking and health, avoid or limit liability for smoking and health related claims in litigation, and prevent regulatory limitations on the cigarette industry.”

Judge Fitzpatrick ruled that Philip Morris had engaged “in an egregious attempt to hide information.’” This included not just having lawyers review industry materials for the very purpose of claiming privilege, but the destruction of documents as well.

We can see a couple of examples from other companies. In the 1960’s R.J. Reynolds established a research facility nicknamed the Mouse House to do research on the health effects of smoking.

In 1970, Philip Morris’ president complained to R.J. Reynolds about this work. So R.J. Reynold’s closed the Mouse House, fired all 26 scientists working there, and destroyed all the research. They didn’t want it to possibly get out.

Another document from Thomas Osdene, Philip Morris’ director of research, stated, “Ship all documents to Cologne…Keep in Cologne. OK to phone and telex (these will be destroyed)…We will monitor in person every 2-3 months. If important letters have to be sent please send to home—I will act on them and destroy.”

Ironically there was documentation of the destroying of documentation.

Internal correspondence from British American Tobacco (BAT) showed just how far this destruction of evidence went. It became policy! “[M]embers of the BAT Group, in furtherance of the Policy’s purposes, destroyed documents, routed them from one country or BAT facility to another, erased a useful litigation database as well as the fact that the documents it contained had ever existed as soon as the pre-existing judicial hold was lifted, and constantly exhorted their many employees to avoid putting anything in writing. All these activities were taken for one overriding purpose — to prevent disclosure of evidence in litigation.”

Here’s an example of one of their memos from June 1992, regarding another front group Healthy Buildings International (HBI).

“Please also note, more importantly, that this [is] an extremely sensitive document! HBI are [sic] currently under a considerable amount of investigation in the US about their connections with the industry. All references to companies in the quote has [sic] therefore been removed. Please do not copy or circulate this in any way and please destroy this fax cover sheet after reading! I know this sounds a little like James Bond, but this is an extremely serious issue for HBI.”

So yes, we have tons of evidence. But the facts are we are likely missing the worst of the worst!

Just think about it for a moment. If they’re not capturing information in the first place, or go on to destroy any and all records, it will very often be the most incriminating stuff.

What are the things you don’t dare to put on paper, but only discuss behind closed doors?

Furthermore, if your policy involves destroying evidence, you know you’re doing immoral or illegal things. And you’re specifically seeking to cover it up.

What that means is as bad as we know Big Tobacco acted, it is likely even worse.

 Key Takeaways on Destroying Evidence

  • Although there is plenty of damning evidence of what Big Tobacco did, the most damning of all evidence was likely destroyed never to see the light of day.
  • Hiding and destroying research and evidence was actually the policy of many of the companies.
  • If your policy involves destroying evidence, you know you’re doing immoral or illegal things. Is the cover up worse than the original crime?
  • The fact that so much evidence has come out in court cases against Big Tobacco and other industries means that the amount of evidence destroyed by others has likely gone up. Or the most sensitive matters are discussed without any record at all ever existing. Learning from this history would lead to more conspiring behind closed doors off the record. 

Please leave any comments or questions below. Feel free to share it with anyone you’d like.

Links to all published chapters of The Industry Playbook can be found here.

You can also support this project with a tip.

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Weaponization of Values (The Industry Playbook)

This is Chapter 10 of my new book, working title “The Industry Playbook: Corporate Cartels, Corruption and Crimes Against Humanity” that is being published online chapter by chapter.


This topic is not often mentioned, yet a critically important aspect of a successful PR campaign. If you want to steer the public or professionals towards your agenda, how do you do it? You can’t simply say we want to make more profit so you should listen to us. No one would embrace your agenda if you did that.

Instead, you must hook into genuine values that people already hold. The stronger the values the better. This is key for good PR to work.

Months ago, I mentioned the crimes of Big Tobacco in an email I sent out to subscribers, and I received this reply from Michael:

“Thanks for this. While I understand the opinion, I’m a big believer in the Constitution and personal responsibility. Poor diet’s impact I’d say is over a billion [deaths per year]. The same could be said about unhealthy food, it’s a person’s free choice. Can’t blame McDonald’s if you’re obese and diabetic.”

First of all, I am big on personal responsibility too. I largely agree with this.

But these are exactly the values that Big Tobacco, not to mention other industries such as fast food, use against us. It’s called spin for a reason.

Big Tobacco successfully avoided legislation and continually won court cases based on using this idea of individual responsibility. As it fits in the American individualistic view, it was especially useful.

Brandt writes about this in the book. “Widely shared libertarian attitudes about both the role of the state and the behavior of individuals constrained the future of campaigns against tobacco. The American individualist credo, ‘It’s my body and I’ll do as a I please,” cast a net over further antismoking initiatives…The tobacco companies and the Tobacco Institute had aggressively and effectively presented the case for smoking as a voluntary risk…The industry and its political allies frequently invoked Big Brother or the Prohibition debacle to point out how paternalistic government interventions offended the basic American values of independence, autonomy, and the right to take risks. Dictating other people’s behavior, even in the name of health, was portrayed as un-American.”

Big Brother is absolutely something to be worried about. Prohibition was a spectacular failure. Independence is a great thing. I agree with all of these. And I certainly wish we enforced the Constitution much more than we do these days.

Yet, understand that these are not the full picture. The truth is messier. These same exact values can be twisted. They are spun in order to abdicate any responsibility from the companies involved.

Again, I am in total favor of people being personally responsible. Too few people become radically self-responsible. And we must talk about corporate responsibility too. Corporations used to have a social responsibility, not just a fiduciary one (that’s the responsibility to make as much profit as possible for their stakeholders).

Corporations have lots of benefits, in being treated as persons, so why not an equal playing field of responsibilities too? Responsibilities should actually be more important to big business, not less, because of the outsized power they have as compared to individuals.

Furthermore, we can’t think of free choice as an all-or-nothing thing. There are shades of grey involved. Many studies have shown just how swayable our thoughts and feelings are. One that sticks out in my mind is covered in Brian Wansink’s Mindless Eating. Giving a free bottle of wine to restaurant guests altered their outlook and behavior. If the label said California (a place known for good wine), compared to North Dakota (not at all known for wine), the differences were stark. With the California wine people stayed longer, tipped bigger and rated enjoyment of their food higher. And they said the wine had nothing to do with it.

I’m not saying we’re stimulus-response automatons. But neither is free choice absolute. There are shades of gray in all things. This is a large function of why propaganda, advertising and public relations exist. So much money is spent in these areas because they work.

So our question can transform a bit more into reflecting how much is free will? How much is choice overtly or covertly swayed?

How much is it an individual’s free choice when we’re talking about an underage child taking up smoking because of advertising specifically pointed at them? Take into consideration that R.J. Reynolds knew that Joe Camel targeted youths, and that’s just one example of many.

Is the adult still capable of free choice if they became addicted as a teenager when their brain is still developing?

Furthermore, how much is free choice when Big Tobacco claimed cigarettes were not addictive when they were specifically and purposefully engineering the cigarettes to be more addictive?

Where is the responsibility behind what a May 1994, New York Times piece shared featuring leaked documents from Merrell Williams? This included “the executives of the…Brown & Williamson Tobacco Corporation chose to remain silent, to keep their research results secret, to stop work on a safer cigarette and to pursue a legal and public relations strategy of admitting nothing.”

Such actions directly affect your autonomy because information is not only withheld but disinformation purposefully spread. How can you make a free choice, choose to smoke with informed consent, when the information necessary to do so is withheld from you and your perspective distorted?

 “It is ironic that the impact of smoking on nonsmokers, rather than on smokers themselves, is what finally transformed the regulation and cultural perception of the cigarette,” writes Brandt. Why was it this that changed everything? Because this had to do with the same values of liberty and autonomy.

In 1986, a National Academy of Sciences report showed that children of smokers were twice as likely to suffer from respiratory infections, pneumonia, and bronchitis as children of non-smokers. This report estimates that ETS caused between 2,500 and 8,400 lung cancer deaths per year.

In 1974, Surgeon General Jesse Steinfeld said, “Nonsmokers have as much right to clean air and wholesome air as smokers have to their so-called right to smoke, which I would redefine as a ‘right to pollute.’…It is time that we interpret the Bill of Rights for the Nonsmoker as well as the smoker.”

You’d be hard-pressed to believe that this was free choice and personal responsibility of the children. But then again, that was argued for! In 1996, Charles Harper, the CEO of R.J. Reynolds, stated, “If children don’t like to be in a smoky room, they’ll leave.”

You can say it’s the parent’s responsibility. Again, I agree in part, but what if that parent became a smoker because their parents before them were addicted? And that parent didn’t think it was important to quit because Big Tobacco lied about the dangers, the addictiveness, and grasped their values of independence, coolness, and manliness with the Marlboro man.

Upon careful reflection, values most often cut both ways. And it is important to recognize that rights go hand in hand with responsibilities. This is true, or at least ought to be, for individuals as well as companies.

Be aware of when industry uses your closely held values to manipulate you into believing and acting on their bidding. John Stauber and Sheldon Ramptom wrote in Toxic Sludge is Good For You!, “If the PR industry were only based on ‘lies and damn lies,’ it might be easier to see through its deceptions. But PR’s cunning half-truths and ‘spins’ appeal to us and work on us because they come from us, from the constant plumbing of the public mind by surveys, opinion polls, focus groups, and information gathered as we apply for bank loans, purchase goods with credit cards, place birth announcements in newspapers, vote and make phone calls. Every day we as individuals are leaving behind the electronic equivalent of fingerprints and DNA samples that marketing and PR firms lift from the commercial landscape, and refine for their use in their efforts to manipulate our minds.”

And keep in mind that this was all before social media even existed! This is the art of spin.

Key Takeaways on Weaponization of Values

  • When it comes to PR, outright lies aren’t nearly as effective as half-truths spun in a way to hook onto values you hold near and dear.
  • The common industry line is to place the blame on the individual, while abdicating any real responsibility for the companies involved. Notice where the blame is placed.
  • Corporations have lots of rights legally, they ought to have greater responsibilities too. This is especially the case when you acknowledge they have outsized power as compared to individual people.
  • Free choice nor stimulus-response are black and white. We must see these with shades of grey to properly navigate the world.

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Ideological Allies (The Industry Playbook)

This is Chapter 9 of my new book, working title “The Industry Playbook: Corporate Cartels, Corruption and Crimes Against Humanity” that is being published online chapter by chapter.


This chapter is different than most. It covers an area I’ve never really seen covered in discussions of the industry playbook. Yes, it is well known that science can and will bend the knee to industry. But how does it happen? I’m guessing there are some sociopaths in science that are there just for power and money. But these can’t be the majority. Not by a long shot.

People are great at rationalizing their behaviors. Tobacco executives didn’t think of what they were doing as evil. No tobacco friendly research scientist thought that they were killing people. The truth was that their PR was not just external but internal. At least early on, they honestly convinced themselves that there was no link between health and smoking.

This chapter explores what it means to have other rigidly held beliefs that would stop someone from seeing such a link because of underlying assumptions. That some “fact” was assumed true regardless of actual validity and independent of observation.

We can see this ideological positioning clearly in an early survey. In 1955, a survey of doctors found that for heavy smokers only 31% agreed with “Heavy smoking may lead to lung cancer.” For non-smokers, more than 65% agreed with this statement.

Those that smoked didn’t want to believe it was bad for them because they’d have to own up to their behavior. This would unconsciously change how they viewed evidence, whose side they would take, which arguments they would find more appealing. This is human nature, and it affects authority figures like doctors and scientists just as well as laymen. Perhaps even more so because of their believing in the superiority of their rationality!

Evarts Graham wrote in 1954, “it has not been universally accepted and there are still many cigarette addicts among the medical profession who demand absolute proof…The obstinacy of many of them in refusing to accept the existing evidence compels me to conclude that it is their own addiction to this drug habit which blinds them. They have eyes to see but they see not because of their unwillingness or inability to give up smoking…I have never encountered any non-smoker who makes light of the evidence or is skeptical of the association between excessive smoking and lung cancer.”

In essence, this position boiled down to “I smoke, therefore it can’t be harmful.”

As the scientific evidence of dangers began to mount, there were opponents. Two of these were Joseph Berkson, head of Biometry and Medical Statistics of the Mayo Clinic and Sir Ronald Fisher, leading biometrician and geneticist at University College London and Cambridge University. These two were skeptics of the tobacco-cancer link.

Brandt writes, “While Fisher and Berkson raised important questions, their critiques were no match for the overwhelming evidence of repeated studies. Nonethelesss, the industry broadcast and rebroadcast these attacks and ultimately hired both Fisher and Berkson as paid consultants. Although both men identified themselves as ‘independent’ skeptics, they brought both a priori assumptions and, later, conflicts of interest to their unrelenting critiques.”

These men didn’t believe that smoking could cause cancer. They believed this because they had other beliefs about health and how the world worked, that essentially didn’t give room for this possibility. Big Tobacco found willing allies here. And that relationship only strengthened when money began to flow towards it.

This reminds me of Upton Sinclair saying, “It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends upon his not understanding it.”

Of course, this wasn’t everyone. Many scientists started off skeptical of the link. But based on the mounting evidence some changed their positions. Some of these scientists quit smoking in light of the evidence. This is how science ideally works, if you’re not paid to look the other way or wrapped up in ideology.

We’ll now turn to Dr. Clarence Cook Little who was elected to head the Scientific Advisory Board of the TIRC.

“Little’s personal commitments and a priori assumptions about cancer causality made him the ideal proponent of the industry’s singular goal of maintaining a ‘controversy’ regarding smoking and health.,” writes Brandt. “His scientific beliefs about cancer corresponded directly to his belief in the importance of heredity for understanding the causes of disease. From his earliest scientific training, Little had been deeply committed to hereditarian notions of cancer and society. In 1936, as president of the American Birth Control League, he decried the ‘ill-advised and unsound policies of economic relief employed in this country,’ which he maintained would only lead to the further propagation of the unfit, and he offered gratitude to ‘the gentlemen who rule Italy, Japan, and Germany for demonstrating that a program of stimulating population is a program of war.” Little’s eugenic science was closely tied to his politics. ‘Our political and sociological premise in America is based on the false premise that all persons are born free and equal. This is an absolute absurdity,’ he wrote in 1936. ‘We must segregate men according to their standing.’ Little also became a founding director of the National Society for the Legalization of Euthanasia and the Race Betterment Congress. He vigorously defended compulsory sterilization, urging the expansion of legislation mandating such policies.”

While few people call themselves eugenicists today, these ideas have only slightly changed among many scientists. For many decades all health was attributed to genetics. The Human Genome Project promised to end all disease, and we’re still waiting. That genetics would solve all health problems is always on the horizon, even now using CRISPR, machine learning, gene therapies and more.

These assumptions about what causes disease and what does not, are very helpful to any industry that wants to point the blame away from their cancer and other disease-causing products.

Brandt continues, “Given Little’s personal rigidities and conceit, no epidemiological findings could possibly unsettle such deeply held convictions…Once Little became the scientific director of the TIRC, he demonstrated a complete unwillingness to be swayed from the positions he took in 1954. No new evidence ever convinced him of the relationship of smoking to disease. Little had no respect for clinical and field observations. He brought these unbending views to his work for the industry and structured its research program accordingly.”

Understand what this means. No amount of evidence would ever convince Little. Why? Because it wasn’t just about cigarettes causing cancer. For that to be admitted, his entire worldview would have to shift. His beliefs about race, economics, politics, heredity, health and more would all have to significantly change for him to see that cigarettes caused cancer. Therefore, it was all of these other things that ultimately held that single belief in place. It was the foundation on which his world view was built.

The ideal scientist is one who is dispassionately observing facts and brings no belief to the table to simply observe what is. But scientists are human. And deeply held beliefs, and a priori assumptions, are not always easy to observe.

Brandt concludes, “Was Little disingenuous in his skepticism? Did he dissemble on behalf of his employer? The evidence on this question remains indeterminate. What we do know is that Little, by self-proclamation deeply committed to science and rationality, lost all capacity to evaluate his own biases as he assessed the question. Fiercely independent throughout his career, he failed to comprehend the corrosive social and psychological mechanisms of conflicts of interest. Colleagues and friends came to question his judgment and rectitude: he had sold his science to industry.”

Clarence Little said as late as 1969, “There is no demonstrated causal relationship between smoking or any disease. The gaps in knowledge are so great that those who dogmatically assert otherwise – whether they state that there is or is not such a causal relationship – are premature in judgment. If anything, the pure biological evidence is pointing away from, not toward, the causal hypothesis.” He retired from the Scientific Advisory Board that year. A smoker himself, he died in 1971 of a heart attack.

Yes, there are scientists that have their price. But more often than not, the best industry strategy is finding ideological allies, those that already believe what you want believed for any other reason.

And while we focused on scientists here, ideology is certainly not exclusive to them. Journalists, politicians, lawyers, regulators and more can all become allied in the same way.

Key Takeaways on Ideological Allies

  • The ideal of science is to objectively look at the data and form beliefs solely based on that. Many people confuse this ideal with what happens in scientific reality.
  • Science in practice is done by human beings which bring a priori assumptions, beliefs and values to their experiments and their viewing of data. This can and does skew opinions. Like with Dr. Little, no evidence of smoking causing cancer could ever shift his worldview of cancer being solely hereditary.
  • For industry it is best to find those people that have underlying assumptions about what causes disease and what does not that are friendly to your products and position. You don’t need to convince them, for one reason or another they’re already convinced.
  • In addition to ideological positions, financial conflicts of interest can further sway scientists and other allies. Often one step leads to the next.

Please leave any comments or questions below. Feel free to share it with anyone you’d like.

Links to all published chapters of The Industry Playbook can be found here.

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Infiltrating Institutions (The Industry Playbook)

This is Chapter 8 of my new book, working title “The Industry Playbook: Corporate Cartels, Corruption and Crimes Against Humanity” that is being published online chapter by chapter.


By infiltrating existing institutions, Big Tobacco was able to spread its message through them. In some cases, this involved borrowing the credibility and authority of such places. Or at the very least Big Tobacco would aim to slow down institutions from taking harsher positions against them.

Let’s start with the American Medical Association (AMA). As we’ve already seen, Big Tobacco advertised heavily within the Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA). Yes, the advertisements were there to influence the doctors and scientists that read the journal. But even more important was to establish the financial relationship between Big Tobacco and the AMA. This wasn’t just about advertising but gaining influence over editorial content.

Morris Fishbein singlehandedly led the AMA for many years. Robert N. Proctor, professor at Stanford, wrote about such connections. “Dr Morris Fishbein of Chicago was another prominent defender of the industry. As iron‐fisted editor of JAMA, Fishbein helped stave off efforts to have the journal refuse tobacco ads and, in the mid 1950s, received about $100000 from Lorillard to write industry‐friendly articles on smoking and health. Fishbein also helped place ads for Kent cigarettes in medical magazines…the man should also be remembered as author of a 1954 review of tobacco and health hazards, contracted by Doubleday with financial backing from Lorillard. The makers of Kent cigarettes—with its ‘micronite’ asbestos filter—paid Fishbein tens of thousands of dollars to write [a] book.”

It was this cozy relationship that eventually forced Fishbein out. “Fishbein was actually booted from his position as JAMA editor a year after his editorial, partly for his refusal to limit cigarette ads in the pages of JAMA…In 1953 JAMA’s new editors announced that they would no longer publish tobacco ads of any kind, by which time Fishbein was receiving tens of thousands of dollars per year to front for the industry.”

Through the revolving door Fishbein went. In the 60’s and 70’s he continued to work for Lorillard.  

That shows what one man, holding sway over one large institution can do. And even though they stopped advertising, that doesn’t mean the AMA came out strong against tobacco. Even as late at 1965, one year after the Surgeon General’s report, the AMA resisted taking a position against smoking.

CEO of the AMA, F.J.L. Blasingame stated, “it is our opinion that the answer that will do most to protect the public health lies not in labeling…but in research.” The phrase “more research is needed” was the exact PR message of Big Tobacco.

They finally took a stand, launching a war against smoking, in 1972. Not exactly on the forefront of the biggest medical killer out there from the most powerful medical organization, at the time, in the world.

Part of the reason that institutional infiltration worked had to do with the size of such organizations. Brandt writes, “The fight for tobacco control ordinances demonstrated the possibilities of grassroots public health advocacy. Single-issue advocacy groups were in a far better position to take up the fight than the traditional voluntary health organizations like the American Cancer Society and the American Heart Association. The latter had complex constituencies and philanthropic and educational missions that led to an inherent conservatism; they sought to avoid political controversy that could alienate not only smokers, but donors from tobacco-growing states. The new organizations reveled in controversy, deliberately seeking media attention to sustain their cause.”

For instance, in 1957, scientists from American Cancer Society, American Heart Association, National Cancer Institute, and the National Heart Institute looked at the data and concluded: “The sum total of scientific evidence establishes beyond reasonable doubt that cigarette smoking is a causative factor in the rapidly increasing incidence of human epidermoid carcinoma of the lung…The evidence of a cause-effect relationship is adequate for considering the initiation of public health measures.”

But these scientific positions didn’t always translate into policy, based on the controversy, constituency and funding involved. (In a bit of irony, the American Heart Association would hire Hill & Knowlton in 2004 and received tremendous backlash for the PR firm’s role in tobacco which causes heart disease.)

Some of the institutional outreach was more defense than offense, seeking to do damage control and soften anti-tobacco positions. In 1963, Little and the TIRC attempted to shape the Surgeon General’s Advisory Committee through the committee’s medical coordinator, Peter Hamill. They were ultimately unsuccessful in doing this, but they tried.

I think the World Health Organization (WHO) provides one of the best examples of institutional infiltration. In 1995, the World Health Assembly, WHO’s governing body, began looking into the possibility of an international treaty on tobacco control. In May of 1996, the World Health Assembly unanimously passed a resolution for the director-general of the WHO to develop a framework convention, a type of multilateral treaty, for tobacco control.

And finally, in May 2003, the 192 member nations of the WHO unanimously adopt the FCTC (Framework Convention of Tobacco Control), which was the WHO’s first ever multilateral treaty. More on the effects of that later.

When I was doing research on the history of the WHO, I found a document called Tobacco Company Strategies to Undermine Tobacco Control Activities at the World Health Organization.

This was put together internally at the WHO by the Committee of Experts on Tobacco Industry Documents in July 2000.

This 260-page report is extremely revealing, sharing how the WHO was infiltrated and influenced by Big Tobacco. Here are just a few quotes from inside:

  • “Evidence from tobacco industry documents reveals that tobacco companies have operated for many years with the deliberate purpose of subverting the efforts of the World Health Organization (WHO) to control tobacco use. The attempted subversion has been elaborate, well financed, sophisticated, and usually invisible.”
  • “In one of their most significant strategies for influencing WHO’s tobacco control activities, tobacco companies developed and maintained relationships with current or former WHO staff, consultants and advisors. In some cases, tobacco companies hired or offered future employment to former WHO or UN officials in order to indirectly gain valuable contacts within these organizations that might assist in its goal of influencing WHO activities. Of greatest concern, tobacco companies have, in some cases, had their own consultants in positions at WHO, paying them to serve the goals of tobacco companies while working for WHO. Some of these cases raise serious questions about whether the integrity of WHO decision making has been compromised.”
  • “In several cases, tobacco companies have attempted to undermine WHO tobacco control activities by putting pressure on relevant WHO budgets. Tobacco companies have also used their resources to gain favor or particular outcomes by making well placed contributions.”
  • “Documents in this study illustrate that tobacco companies utilized a number of outside organizations to lobby against and influence tobacco control activities at WHO including trade unions, tobacco company created front groups and tobacco companies’ own affiliated food companies.”
  • “Much of the Boca Raton Action Plan [created at a secretive Big Tobacco meeting] involved the creation or manipulation of seemingly independent organizations with strong tobacco company ties. The documents show that some of these organizations such as LIBERTAD, the New York Society for International Affairs, the America-European Community Association and the Institute for International Health and Development, were used successfully to gain access to dozens of national and world leaders, health ministers, WHO and other United Nations agency delegates.”

Once again, propaganda and influence are actually less about influencing the public directly but instead through all manner of professionals. This includes influencing organizations to make use of their authority ideally to advance your agenda. If that doesn’t work then seeking out to undermine their authority instead.

By necessity, this complicates matters significantly. Yet it is exactly a group like Big Tobacco, who has the necessary money and people, that is able to afford to play this game. The complicated web they weave involves front organizations, consultants, donations and so much more involved.

Because this is more complicated most people are not able to see it happening. The WHO had to look deep at themselves in this area to come to terms with the specifics of how they were infiltrated. That’s a rare thing! (Unfortunately, these same exact tactics are used even more successfully by other industries with the WHO and other large organizations.)

These same tactics of infiltrating institutions and setting up front groups are still being used to this day. A 2020 article by The Bureau of Investigative Journalism shows how Phillip Morris, British American Tobacco and others were able to use front groups to ultimately influence NHS and Public Health England.

A picture is worth a thousand words. Here you see the combination of advocacy front groups being used to infiltrate bigger and more powerful scientific and public health institutions. Webs of influence are a main method of the playbook.

Key Takeaways on Infiltrating Institutions

  • Advertising, whether in journals, on TV, or elsewhere is a useful step in gaining some influence over editorial content.
  • The largest and most powerful medical association, the AMA, was firmly under the financial influence of Big Tobacco for decades. They promoted cigarettes, and even when that stopped, refused to stand against them, echoing the PR line of Big Tobacco. They only came out against smoking in 1972, hardly at the forefront of the science.
  • Even when large organizations took scientific stands, it often didn’t translate into policy due to complex reasons of constituencies, politics, and influence.
  • Big Tobacco attempted to influence the Surgeon General’s committee through Peter Hamill. While this attempt was unsuccessful, it was just one of many such attempts. 
  • The FDA tried hard to put tobacco under its jurisdiction in 1996, but Big Tobacco was able to delay this regulation until 2007.
  • A report from the WHO looked at how they were infiltrated and subverted by Big Tobacco including by paying consultants, advisors and other officials that worked for or with the WHO, by the use of political pressure, lobbying and more.
  • The Boca Raton Action Plan, created at a secretive Big Tobacco meeting, relied primarily on using various advocacy front groups to help influence and infiltrate institutions. These complicated “webs of influence” are an industry playbook mainstay.

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Links to all published chapters of The Industry Playbook can be found here.

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