This is Chapter 25 of my new book, working title “The Industry Playbook: Corporate Cartels, Corruption and Crimes Against Humanity” that is being published online chapter by chapter.
If you’re like me, you might recall commercials on TV about mesothelioma and lawsuits you can join. That and the idea that asbestos causes cancer was pretty much the extent of my knowledge about this industry.
You might also think that with the link so clear that asbestos is no longer use. As this chart shows, while it is down from its peak, asbestos production is certainly still strong.
Asbestos is a fibrous mineral that causes cancer, specifically the predominant form linked to it, mesothelioma. Just like tobacco, this is not the only disease linked to asbestos, the other main ones being asbestosis as well as lung cancer.
Barry Castleman, writes in Criminality and Asbestos in Industry, “Dominant companies in the asbestos industry have knowingly and recklessly endangered the health of their workers, their customers, and whole communities in the pursuit of profits since the 1930s. The fact of such business practices being so pervasive, often involving conspiracy in addition to misconduct by individual enterprizes, stands as an indictment of the social order. This documented breadth of misconduct throughout an industry points to a consistent legal, ethical, and corporate failure, not an aberrant one.”
There’s that conspiracy word again! That gives a quick overview, but now let’s dive into the specifics and the playbook strategies you should be familiar with by this point. Note that the time line of the asbestos industry is very close to that of tobacco.
Asbestos was used in industry because the fibers were strong, durable and resistant to fire, while also being flexible. Asbestos was widely using in buildings, automobiles, shipyards, and other areas, most notably as an insulating material that is heat resistant.
This picture from 1941 shows a nurse laying an asbestos blanket over an electric heater to warm a patient.
By Ministry of Information Photo Division Photographer
The biggest asbestos mining and manufacturing companies included Johns-Manville in the US and Cape Asbestos and Turner & Newall (T&N) in the UK. These companies, known as the “Big Three,” dominated the industry.
Here is a couple of ads from Johns-Manville showing some common places asbestos was used in the home.
Internal Science Kept Under Wraps
As with tobacco, the industrial scientists were the first to know about harms. That they knew all along was revealed through the discovery process brought on by litigation.
There was a 1947 report by W.C.L. Hemeon who was the head engineer of the Industrial Hygiene Foundation of America. This document showed that 20 percent of the workforce at two facilities developed asbestosis. It reported that the current safety standards were insufficient and did not protect workers.
Johns-Manville company doctors monitored the health of their mine workers. The company doctors told miners their health problems were their own fault because of smoking or other causes, while telling their bosses the true cause. After deaths their lungs were autopsied to be studied. But none of this information was brought to light until court discovery decades later.
In 1948, company executives met to discuss their own science showing asbestos causing cancer in rats. They ordered all reference to cancer and tumors be removed before publishing a report.
“If only the slightest exposure to the dust results ultimately in death, then the scope of the necessary preventive measures is summed up in one word—prohibition—for, practically speaking, it is impossible to prevent such exposure,” he said in 1933.
J.C. Wagner’s 1960 study was the first to find an association between mesotheliomas and those living near an asbestos mine in South Africa. This showed the workers weren’t the only ones in danger, but those living close by.
In the USA, the marking point for the science came in 1964. Dr. Irving Selikoff published research establishing a link between asbestos and disease. Note how this turning point of the science was roughly around the same time as tobacco, as 1964 was when the Surgeon General’s report came out.
Dr. Selikoff was involved in a conference at Mount Sinai Hospital. After this he was contacted by the attorneys of the Asbestos Textile Institute. In 1964 their lawyers threatened that they “urge caution in the discussion of these activities to avoid providing the basis for possibly damaging and misleading news stories. The right to study and to discuss these subjects is clear, of course. But the gravity of the subject matter and the consequences implicitly involved impose upon any who exercise those rights a very high degree of responsibility for their actions.”
A 2007 article in the International Journal of Health Services details the smear campaign that would ramp up. “Selikoff was consistently demonized as a media zealot who exaggerated the risks of asbestos on the back of bogus medical qualifications and flawed science. Since his death, the criticism has become even more vituperative and claims have persisted that he was malicious or a medical fraud. However, most of the attacks on Selikoff were inspired by the asbestos industry or its sympathizers, and for much of his career he was the victim of a sustained and orchestrated campaign to discredit him. The most serious criticisms usually more accurately describe his detractors than Selikoff himself.”
One such attack came from P.W.J. Bartrip titled, “Irving John Selikoff and the strange case of the missing medical degrees.” They accused him of not having a medical degree. He did, though the journal that published the attack refused to publish the degree or retract the article.
Unsurprisingly, internal documentation from the companies included titles such as “Discredit Selikoff.” Selikoff was the main target, but by no means the only one.
The Science Debate Shifts
Recall how the scientific/PR defense of Big Tobacco moved away from saying that smoking didn’t cause disease once that battle was fully lost. They shifted gears to saying tobacco wasn’t addictive, that secondhand smoke wasn’t a problem, that filters worked and more.
And so we see with the asbestos industry a similar shift.
Asbestos is found in six different naturally occurring minerals. These include brown asbestos, blue asbestos and white asbestos.
Once they could no longer hide it, the industry argued that most forms of asbestos were dangerous, but that white asbestos was safe. In the end this turned out to be nothing more than PR spin. And it also was very beneficial to the industry as white asbestos was the vast majority of what was mined.
Paul Cullinan, Professor of Occupational and Environmental Respiratory Disease at the National Heart and Lung Institute, Imperial College London, said, “It’s probably the case that white asbestos is less toxic in respect to mesothelioma than the amphiboles. The industry tries to argue that you can take precautions so that white asbestos can be used safely, but in practice, in the real world, that is not what is going to happen.”
Front Organizations and Institution Infiltration
Groups such as the Asbestos Research Council and the Asbestos Information Committee were formed and used to prop up the PR front.
Dr. Crump worked as a consultant for the Asbestos Information Association. He testified against OSHA regulation in 1984. In the early 2000’s he was contracted by the EPA to develop a mathematical model for risks of asbestos. His model found that white asbestos was not a threat. His model relied on a dose-response analysis done by J.C. McDonald, another industry-funded researcher.
The Institute of Occupational & Environmental Health at McGill University was funded by the Quebec asbestos mining industry. Jock McCulloch, a historian at the Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology University, wrote, “As the crisis over mesothelioma deepened, the Canadian and South African governments sided uncritically with industry. In 1984, the Asbestos Institute (AI) was formed in Quebec. From its inception, the AI has been dedicated to the ‘safe use of chrysotile asbestos,’ through conferences, public relations initiatives, and the dissemination of scientific information. AI, which describes itself as a ‘non-profit’ organization, has been subsidised by Canadian governments. By 1999 it had received in excess of $40 million in sponsorship.”
One unique thing about the story of asbestos, is that this litigation did drive many of the asbestos companies into bankruptcy. Their power was not on the level of Big Tobacco, and thus, for the most part, they weren’t able to stop the turn of tide against them.
Asbestos liabilities led to at least 70 companies going bankrupt since 1976. But that was the smaller producers. The bigger companies were able to survive through underhanded means.
McCulloch wrote, “The tide of litigation that began in the mid 1970s saw the major U.S. producers, including Johns Manville and Raybestos-Manhattan, take refuge in bankruptcy and subsequently re-invent themselves as non-asbestos companies. Simultaneously, the industry shifted offshore to the developing world, where despite the known dangers, more than 2 million tons of chrysotile were used during 2004. The industry’s survival has been due largely to its success in keeping alive the fiction that asbestos can be used safely. Arguably its most potent weapons have been the suppression of evidence about the hazards of asbestos and even the corruption of science to promote doubt about the mineral’s toxicity.”
Here you find the tactic of going worldwide used once again. But also a new tactic of “Beneficial Bankruptcies” that we’ll see play out elsewhere across industries. Bankruptcy can actually be used in certain ways to protect the guilty companies by restructuring assets and striving to use one jurisdiction that is more helpful than another.
“No executive in the United States asbestos mining and manufacturing industry has ever been charged with a crime related to asbestos, despite an impressive record of knowledge and cover-up revealed since the 1970s in civil litigation,” writes Barry Castleman in Criminality and Asbestos in Industry.
In an article for the Journal of Environmental and Occupational Health Policy Castleman details some attempts to charge those responsible in the USA. But the judges in these cases appeared to be on the side of the industry executives that were charged with willful and wanton endangerment.
The Strange Case of Schmidheiny
But I will detail a fascinating case from Italy described that sought to hold an owner responsible. Stephan Schmidheiny inherited Eternit, an asbestos-cement company with many mines and factories. Criminal charges were brought against Schmidheiny that resulted in a court case ending in 2011. Castleman writes, “In its eight hundred-page explanation of its verdict (‘‘Motivation’’), the appeal court found that Schmidheiny had directed a cover-up that delayed the ban of asbestos in Italy by ten years. The court concluded that Schmidheiny personally ordered a campaign of disinformation from 1976 on, in order to protect his fortune.”
“In reinventing himself as a ‘‘green’’ businessman in the 1990s, Stephan Schmidheiny created the World Business Council for Sustainable Development and began donating money to South American Conservation groups. He wrote several books saying business needed to conserve energy and manage resources sustainably, which was not yet a standard theme of corporate image advertizing. He was among the business leaders attending the Earth Summit in Rio de Janeiro in 1992. There, the billionaire was able to find help in his rebranding effort.”
We’ll see more examples of this greenwashing elsewhere.
Further appeal to the Italian Supreme Court had this overturned in 2014, saying his was guilty but that the statute of limitations had passed.
The EPA, the Environmental Protection Agency, was formed in 1970. OSHA, the Occupational Safety and Health Administration, was formed in 1971.
These were formed in part due to asbestos and the need to regulate it. The Clean Air Act of 1970 classified asbestos as an air pollutant. It gave the EPA the power to regulate use and disposal of asbestos. The Toxic Substances Control Act, in 1976, gave the EPA authority to place restrictions on certain chemicals including asbestos.
In 1986, the Asbestos Hazard Emergency Response Act had the EPA establish guidelines for removal of asbestos from schools.
In 1989, the EPA issued the Asbestos Ban and Phase-Out Rule. This aimed to fully ban the manufacturing, importing and sale of asbestos-containing products. However, the industry fought back. After appeal, Corrosion Proof Fittings v. Environmental Protection Agency, overturned the ban in 1991.
The Asbestos Information Association (AIA) was formed by the industry. The director was Matthew Swetonic, who explained what they were able to accomplish in fighting against these regulations. “I think it is a gauge of the effectiveness of the total industry involvement in this most crucial matter that of eleven main requirements in the [OSHA] standards, the industry position was accepted totally by OSHA on nine of the eleven, about fifty percent on a tenth, and totally rejected on only one. The struggle is far from over. We must not only continue but indeed expand our activities and the various areas of concern.”
More attempts were introduced to complete ban asbestos. Such as the Ban Asbestos in American Act in 2002. In 2007, this bill passed the Senate but not the House.
Use has gone way down, but it is still used in certain applications. In 2018, 750 metric tons were imported into the US. An estimated 10,000 people per year die in the United States from asbestos related disease.
A report from the WHO in 2018 found that about 125 million people in the world were exposed to asbestos in the workplace. And a whopping half of all deaths from occupational cancer come about because of asbestos.
In 1968, T&N had a five-point plan from H&K that stated in capital letters, “NEVER BE THE FIRST TO RAISE THE HEALTH QUESTION.” The points including emphasizing rarity and stressing the safety controls were effective.
Another front organization (are you keeping track of all these?) the Asbestos Information Centre shared offices with H&K. Again, just like the TIRC did.
In the early 1980’s U.S. Gypsum Company hired H&K to help with public schools seeking compensation for removal of asbestos. More companies joined with the firm, forming an industry coalition to face the threat together.
H&K’s strategy involved forming a “third-party panel of independent experts to be available for testimony, commentary and technical support in appropriate markets and forums.”
They also said, “the spread of media coverage must be stopped at the local level and as soon as possible.”
It was yet another Scientific Advisory Board. While the experts would be “independent” the funding would come from the industry itself.
In 1984, H&K formed the Safe Buildings Alliance (SBA) which could “could also act to deflect attention away from affected companies” and “take the heat from activist industry critics.” A court later found that “Due to the financial and operational control that the [asbestos manufacturers] exercise over the SBA, the SBA is merely the alter ego of the [asbestos manufacturers].”
Sounds quite similar to the National Smokers’ Alliance or Center for Indoor Air Research, run by Big Tobacco’s PR firms to me.
Big Names and Politicians On Your Side
A memo between two asbestos plant managers were noted as saying, “In tackling a problem of this nature [mesothelioma] one should either be completely frank with everyone or maintain complete secrecy – it is the latter that [Professor Archie Cochrane, director of epidemiology at the Medical Research Council] feels is best at the moment.”
A leader of public health and science was telling them to keep silent on the dangers. This was the man by which the Cochrane Collaboration was named. He is considered one of the fathers of clinical epidemiology and evidence-based medicine.
If he could be swayed to take the industry’s side, is any science safe at all?
And it turns out Smith was also a serial child sexual abuser which came to light much later. If you’re willing to abuse children, taking money from an industry and lying about it is not nearly as bad, right? Why wouldn’t you do that if you’re committing much greater crimes? After all it would help you to accumulate money and power which would be useful in being able to abuse more, while getting away with it.
We’ll unfortunately see examples of pedophile politicians come up again.
Conclusion
Of course, there are far more details available. I’ve tried to cover in a single chapter what it took me twenty chapters to do with Big Tobacco. And this pattern will mostly continue. It was a brief overview, showing just a few of the specifics involved in a century long industry.
The big picture I hope you can see is that it was almost exactly the same playbook in use, including one of the exact same players involved, Hill & Knowlton.
In the next chapter we look at the problems of asbestos in one of the world’s most famous products and the lies and coverup involved.
Key Takeaways on The Asbestos Industry
Internal science from as early as the 1920’s was showing that asbestos was dangerous. The industry covered this up.
As public science came out showing the dangers, the industry went on the defensive smearing and attacking such scientists.
The industry hired PR Firms, including Hill & Knowlton to basically run the exact same PR strategy as Big Tobacco did.
The EPA and OSHA were both created in part to offer protection against asbestos. Their powers were influenced by the industry even from early on. Front organizations were successful in stalling the scientific truth and keeping regulations, such as those from OSHA, at bay.
Litigation bankrupted some of the smaller companies, but many of the bigger one’s continued to thrive by utilizing bankruptcy loopholes or going more worldwide. No executive was held liable except possibly one in Italy where ongoing court cases are still occurring from events that occurred in the 80’s.
Despite the near unanimous recognition of asbestos dangers at any level, it is still produced in many countries and only banned in some.
Please leave any comments or questions below. Feel free to share it with anyone you’d like.
This is Chapter 24 of my new book, working title “The Industry Playbook: Corporate Cartels, Corruption and Crimes Against Humanity” that is being published online chapter by chapter.
What ultimately led to Big Tobacco losing some power? The legal battles were important. The overwhelming scientific facts eventually became self-evident. The whistleblowers definitely helped. The solid journalism that covered all of the above was critical. And it was all these things that coalesced into shifting culture.
For a moment stop thinking of yourself as an individual, but awash in a sea of humanity. So many of your thoughts, feelings, beliefs, and values come about because of the culture we’re surrounded with. Yes, you can consciously change these things, but most things are formed or at the very least influenced from the culture you live in.
In this chapter I will re-examine many of the events that previously were covered. However, this is done through the lens of how it shifted the overall culture.
Brandt writes, “In 1926, Chesterfield, then the nation’s number one cigarette, ran its famous advertisement in which a woman asks a man smoking nearby to ‘Blow Some My Way.’ From the perspective of the late twentieth century, this ad is a strikingly ironic indication of the radical shift in the nature of smoking and risk.”
Reflect on that for a moment. This successful ad campaign came before there was even a shred of an idea that secondhand smoke was dangerous. It speaks to outdated male and female roles that have similarly changed in our culture.
Recall in 1929 that chief propagandist Edward Bernays launched the “torches of freedom” campaign in order to get women to smoke in public. This campaign allied itself with a cultural movement (women’s liberation) that was already strongly in force. You could say it was co-opted by Bernays and Big Tobacco in order to sell more cigarettes. And remember, this was a successful PR campaign. It was no longer “blow some my way” but women smoke for yourselves.
What steers culture? Advertising does to a degree. Public relations far more so. And the professional relations (doctors, scientists, journalists, politicians, etc.) is the more critical part of that happening. This is true in Big Tobacco steering the culture where they want it, for reasons of profit. But it is equally true of public health advocates, anti-smokers, etc. that wanted to steer the culture the opposite way.
Culture is by and large steered through the media. In 1952, a popular article, “Cancer by the Carton” was republished in Reader’s Digest gaining wide circulation. The next year Time magazine published an article about titled, “Beyond Any Doubt.” These were some of the earlier pieces in major media publications that began the shift in the view of tobacco.
Yet, this was matched a short time later by Big Tobacco’s “A Frank Statement to Cigarette Smokers.” It wasn’t in a single major media publication but instead went out in 448 newspapers across 258 cities. This in turn won more media promotion from journalists congratulating Big Tobacco on doing the right thing in researching the risks of tobacco.
Now we had a cultural war on our hands. The scientific evidence coming to light about the risks of tobacco which would naturally work to lower consumption. And the warring side was Big Tobacco defending against this, seeking to promote cigarettes even more.
Television coverage is a place where culture is steered by and large especially back then due to the limit of media choices. At CBS Edward Murrow covered the tobacco controversy in two consecutive broadcasts at CBS. The head of Hill & Knowlton worked hard to make sure the coverage was a “balanced one” thus bringing the culture war over tobacco to the forefront. This controversy would continue for another decade at least. Some of the culture believed the science about the risks. Others in the culture believed Big Tobacco’s stance that the risks weren’t proven.
In 1961, 488 billion cigarettes were sold. Per capita consumption was 4,025 cigarettes. “From a business standpoint the tobacco industry has weathered this latest spate of health attacks on its products,” celebrated Hill &Knowlton. In other words, they were successfully “managing” the culture.
In 1967, John Banzhaf, a lawyer, asked the FCC to apply the “fairness doctrine” to cigarette advertising. The FCC granted a mandate of one antismoking message for every three TV commercials. These ads proved to lower cigarette consumption. This impact on culture led Big Tobacco to stop advertising on TV completely. While they continued to advertise elsewhere, this was a major big blow to their influence.
Imagine if this had not happened. There’s a good chance, with continued TV advertising they would have had more influence on journalism then they did. (Just look at Big Pharma’s every-other-commercial advertising onslaught in the USA on major news programs today.)
In 1978, Roper Organization, working under the direction of the Tobacco Institute, conducted a survey reporting, “Nearly six out of ten believe the smoking is hazardous to the non-smoker’s health, up sharply over the last four years. More than two-thirds of non-smokers believe it and nearly one-half of all smokers believe it. This we see as the most dangerous development to the viability of the tobacco industry that has yet occurred.” In other words, the cultural tide was turning.
“Many observers in the media and among tobacco interests predicted a war between smokers and nonsmokers, but it never happened,” writes Brandt. “As public restrictions on smoking became more aggressive in the 1980s and early 1990s, compliance remained remarkably high despite little or no official enforcement…The thousands of smoking regulations enacted during this period were only a step ahead of changing social conventions, and they did not cause conflict so much as help legitimate the new norms…What was fragrant became foul; what was attractive became repulsive; a public behavior became virtually private.”
If the culture, meaning the public at large, wasn’t ready for such laws there would have been more pushback on them. But the public was ready. The culture was ahead of the laws being enacted because of science and media.
You can see this even more clearly on flights. In 1988, smoking was banned on flights of two hours or less. Northwest Airlines announced a total ban on smoking which they heavily advertised and were successful with. More and more people, the culture at large, wanted smokeless flights. Culture is going to affect business decisions such as this. This wouldn’t have happened in the 50’s or 60’s. An airline that advertised smokeless flights back then almost assuredly would have flopped. In 1990, smoking was banned on all domestic flights.
A big cultural marker was in April 1994 when the CEO’s of the top seven tobacco companies appeared before Congress and all stated under oath that tobacco was not addictive nor that they manipulated nicotine levels in cigarettes.
By this point and time, most of American culture saw through the deceit of Big Tobacco. In fact, within the following year every one of those CEO’s had been replaced. I guess lying to Congress was not seen as good leadership, or at least good PR.
The cultural tide turning led to even more revelations coming out. The 90’s were largely the decade of the tobacco whistleblower. This led to big media coverage despite all of Big Tobacco’s efforts to keep whistleblowers under wraps. In included the leaked documents from Merrell Williams, the revelations of Jeffrey Wigand and others.
Entertainment, as a subset of media, is a big part of culture. So when Wigand’s story got promoted further through 1999’s The Insider starring Al Pacino and Russell Crowe it further shaped culture. This movie was nominated for seven academy awards. It received lots of attention.
I remember watching this movie when I was a teenager. Without fully grasping the context, and having nowhere near the understanding I currently possess, this movie still imprinted some of these basics on me. If I hadn’t seen this movie then, would I still be writing this book? Maybe or maybe not, it’s impossible to say for sure. Yet that I even can pose that question shows the influence of cultural impacts.
Brandt writes, “As the social and political status of the industry deteriorated, a number of institutions took actions to reduce the influence of the companies. Some universities, pension funds, and state governments divested their holdings in tobacco stocks. And a number of universities developed new policies to ban the acceptance of tobacco research funding—acknowledgement that the industry had historically used such grants to gain status and legitimacy, while distorting scientific progress.”
These are only steps that could happen when enough of the culture is aware of and believes in the goodness of such actions. And yet there is also individual action. Who started up the conversation at the first university to do so? Who took the steps that would lead the culture moving forward in that direction?
Now, you might think that Big Tobacco losing a RICO case in 2006 would be the final nail in the coffin of them having any cultural influence, but alas that is not the case. It is in the industry’s best interest for all these lessons to be forgotten. We saw how they target the youth of today in much the same way as previously. However, without the cultural influence that I and many others grew up in, such lessons are lost on many.
Of course, it’s not just the tobacco industry alone that wants this stuff forgotten. The PR firms, lawyers, politicians and others that benefit from the use of the Industry Playbook strategies don’t want the culture at large to know them.
Education is important to keep these lessons top of mind for every person. That’s why I wrote this, in the hopes that it can steer the culture, even just slightly, in a positive way.
Key Takeaways on Culture Shift
Culture both influences and is influenced by everything that occurs especially popular media whether that is news coverage or entertainment, as these are the main ways most people interact with scientific, legal, political or other fronts.
Culture can be steered in ways that are both for good and ill.
The co-opting of a cultural movement already under way, as we saw with Bernays’ “Torches of Freedom” campaign allying itself to women’s liberation, can be a PR masterstroke. Attaching yourself to a cultural movement in action is easier than starting one from scratch.
What effectively steers the culture, such as a successful advertising or PR campaign, must be matched to the times. Any other time it could flop. The culture is the environment in which all things take place.
For laws to take effect it often must mean that the culture is ahead of the legislation being passed and enacted.
Culture effects business decisions such as making smokeless flights available, institutions divesting of tobacco stocks and more. These can be seen as both cultural movements on a collective level, as well as the individual decisions and actions involved.
Please leave any comments or questions below. Feel free to share it with anyone you’d like.
Klaus Schwab is the one who coined the term “cyber pandemic” stating that the COVID-19 crisis would be “a small disturbance in comparison.”
A small disturbance in comparison. Just imagine a world-shaping event larger than what we’ve gone through the past couple of years. Are you ready for that?
This article explores what that might look like, and how to best be prepared for it. I included a little bit about this in my 2022 predictions. And here is the deep dive as promised.
I was struck reading The Real Anthony Fauci, especially the last chapter where RFK Jr. goes into all the pandemic-planning exercises over the past two decades. Many of these war games I was familiar with. Some were new to me. It’s a big list which includes:
Dark Winter
Atlantic Storm
Global Mercury
The SCL Simulation
Lockstep Simulation
MARS
SPARS
Clade X
Crimson Contagion
TOPOFF
Event 201
Each and every event focused on vaccines, grabbing more totalitarian control and using censorship. None of them focused on actually keeping people healthy, such as repurposing therapeutics, having stockpiles ready, etc. (Isn’t it amazing that despite all these we didn’t have enough PPE on hand? It must be Trump’s fault!)
RFK wrote, “After 9/11, the rising biosecurity cartel adopted simulations as signaling mechanisms for choreographing lockstep response among corporate, political, and military technocrats charge with managing global exigencies. Scenario planning became an indispensable device for multiple power centers to coordinate complex strategies for simultaneously imposing coercive controls upon democratic societies across the globe.”
This is how conspiracies operate. These events are the training ground for the top-down organization. The planning and training was about making sure the powers-that-be could and would act in lockstep, which happened to be the name of one such exercise.
On that note, I like Iain Davis’ model of:
Core Conspirators
Informed Influencers
Deceived Influencers
One way to think about such events is this is a place for backroom deals to be made by the core conspirators with the informed influencers (core conspirators knowing the full plan while informed influencers play their small part and are bribed/blackmailed/etc. to do so). It’s little more than business deals, albeit with some more nefarious aims.
Beyond that these are also the place where hypnotic programming begins on the deceived influencers. It starts here before it is rolled out worldwide by structuring the frame, by setting the policies. He who controls the frame controls the conversation.
Reading RFK’s book brought me back to watching the full Event 201 videos which I did when the pandemic started. Here’s my March 2020 article.
Something stood out to me in reviewing this information. In Event 201 they predicted internet blackouts in some countries as part of the censorship/pandemic response. In other words, they were planning for (expecting?) pushback to be even greater early on and thus needing to do such things! As our pushback and escalation increases, so too will those.
That all brings me to today’s topic. The same kinds of people have been conducting war games regarding a cyber pandemic.
Back in 2020 when the pandemic started, I had to play catchup. Sure, I was way ahead of the curve compared to most people, but still in elementary school in understanding the global push going on compared to my knowledge base now. If you’ve been with me since the beginning you’re in much the same boat.
This time I want to be more ready ahead of time by reviewing all the cyber pandemic material I can find to be prepared for what is coming next. When you see the “writing on the wall” there is no doubt that such an event is being planned, trained, coordinated for the world to march in lockstep.
Cyber Pandemic Cui Bono
Let’s start with who benefits? From Schwab, also stated in the video at the top of this post, “Cybercrime and global cooperation should be at the forefront of the global agenda.”
So what is that global agenda? I’ll boil it down to “top-down surveillance and control” which can be broken down to two main factors here:
Digital ID’s. If you can only access the online world by being identifiable then any cybercrime is tied to you or stopped before it begins. Total surveillance of the global livestock, aka humanity, especially as we’re pushed and pulled more online.
CBDC’s, that is central banker digital currencies. All money is becoming digital. No anonymous transactions means they have total surveillance on every transaction, and can stop you from participating in the economy if they want.
It’s the China model but applied on a global scale.
General manager of the BIS (Bank of International Settlements, aka the central bank of central bankers), Agustín Carstens, said, “The key difference with the CBDC is that central bank will have absolute control on the rules and regulations that will determine the use of that expression of central bank liability [aka money]. And also we will have the technology to enforce that.” (emphasis added)
Let me state that such technologies wouldn’t by themselves be bad. Not necessarily. Obviously, being involved in cryptocurrency, ecommerce, and our modern world I’m not against digital money.
Certain types of digital ID could possibly even be useful to help with logins, security and the like.
Always these things are talked about in the good they can do. And that possibility is certainly there. It must be to hypnotize the masses who are good or at least neutral people.
However, the people “in charge” are criminals. I know that. You know that. Therefore, I do not trust anything they are doing involving technology.
Nor does this mean everyone involved in such events are “in on it”. You have to understand how both compartmentalization and hiding nefarious plots behind golden words work, aka the deceived influencers which makes up most of the people propagating the narrative. The fact that that makes up most people doesn’t preclude the fact there are some people who really do conspire, who are actually sociopaths and evil, and those they control with blackmail or other methods.
Thus, overall, we’re going to look at such events with an aim of seeing how it moves the powerful towards the system of desired complete control. How would a cyber pandemic lead to the use of more technology to control all citizens? That is the lens this article looks through.
As I’ve written about before, for the CBDC’s the economy is being reformatted. The old system is dying. Just like the COVID pandemic gave further license to grab power, print money and blame it all on the scapegoat of the virus (and at this stage scapegoating people who don‘t listen to authorities) so too will this next pandemic.
In other words, the bankers aren’t to blame for the next steps in our worldwide economy being destroyed. It will be the cyber pandemic’s fault.
Klaus Schwab introduces Cyber Polygon to be gone in depth shortly as such, “We must do so with a broader mission in mind. To improve the state of our digital world by enhancing, on the one hand global cooperation, but also public-private cooperation.”
Public-private cooperation is the merging of big business and governments. Throughout this list of exercises, you’ll see that this merger is looked at as the only possibly solution, just like totalitarian lock downs, censorships and vaccines were the only game plan discussed in the pandemic war games.
Their mission can be boiled down to the elites of massive business (private) to steer government policy (public) via the corrupt revolving door between them.
More centralized power, in their hands, is the only route to cyber security as they define it. This is how they frame it.
World Economic Forum’s Overview of the Cyber Pandemic
The World Economic Forum (WEF) is partnered with many people in these cyber war games. They may not be the top of the conspirator pyramid but they’re certainly big players in it as they’re pushing the overall policy agenda. Here’s a short video with a few key excerpts below.
“A cyber attack with COVID-like characteristics would spread faster and farther than any biological virus”
While the coronavirus has drawn on (two years to flatten the curve!) such an event could be likely much faster.
“COVID-19 was known as an anticipated risk. So is the digital equivalent.”
Again, why was our response so bad? If the USA is so great why do they have the most deaths? Ah, of course…it surely must be because of racist, antivaxxer republicans…not that pharmaceutical control is strongest here and we killed off COVID patients with non-treatment then ventilators and remdesivir, incentivizing hospitals to do so.
“The only way to stop the exponential propagation of a COVID-like cyber threat is to fully disconnect the millions of vulnerable devices from one another and from the internet. All of this in a matter of days. A single day without the internet would cost our economies more than 50 billion US dollars, and that is before considering the economic and societal damages should these devices be linked to essential services, such as transport or healthcare.”
THIS IS KEY. A total internet blackout could be part of the big event. Imagine the economic disruption. Imagine the fear and anxiety generated by everyone that doesn’t know how to exist without the internet. They are boldly telling you this could very well happen.
(I wonder about one thing that could happen with such. Could incriminating pages and even internet archives be removed in such an event on the reboot? Some people recommend downloading files and/or printing them out as certain things might be memory-holed on the internet completely.)
Remember that the economic destruction was not caused by the virus but by the government’s response to the virus.
Such a cyber pandemic could be much the same. The goal is economic transition into their new system of increased control. What better way to help that happen then to completely blow up the worldwide economy?
One of the main wargames goes by the name of Cyber Polygon, an ongoing series of events…
Cyber Polygon 2019
“The fight against cybercrime cannot be waged alone. The sooner the public and private sectors learn to cooperate, the faster we can build a safe and secure cyberspace,” reads the website. In other words, top down control and coordination is the only answer.
One big takeaway from the results report was that “The ransomware infection turned out to be the most difficult scenario for the participants: only one company was able to mitigate the attack independently.” We’ll see this theme keep on appearing.
Cyber Polygon 2020
The website states “The central theme of the event was a ’digital pandemic’: how to prevent a crisis and to reinforce cybersecurity on all levels.”
“One of the most striking and exciting transformations caused by the pandemic has been our transition to the digital ‘everything’, both in our professional and also in our personal lives,” says Klaus Schwab. He’s excited by the pandemic because it is leading the world to where he wants it to go.
“Our research reveals that 83% of companies have no recovery plans in place.” These are going to be mostly smaller to midsized companies. Those that likely do have plans are the biggest corporations in the world. Thus, a worldwide digital attack could cause more harm to smaller businesses leading to greater consolidation of the biggest players, those partnered with the WEF. Just like small businesses got shuttered during the pandemic while the big players stayed open a big cyber pandemic could do much the same.
“Information and money remain the main target of cybercriminals. In 2019–2020, the world witnessed a wave of massive data leaks — even technologically advanced companies were not always immune. This is why, for the technical part of our training, we developed an attack scenario which in real life would jeopardise company reputation and data.”
Who was involved? The biggest three sectors included financial institutions, IT and government agencies, making up over half of all participants.
“COVID-19 has accelerated various processes. Before the pandemic, we had been rather critical of digitalisation because of all the problems brought about by the new technologies. Now, everybody is beginning to understand that this process is inevitable, we need to move forward and cybersecurity plays a great role in tech innovation.” – Herman Gref, CEO, Sberbank
When you understand that COVID19 is built on fraud, then these steps were not inevitable so much as planned and desired.
“5G will be the platform for the society, for hospitals, for public transport, for everything that is to be connected. You need to have absolute trust in the underlying infrastructure, hence there is a high demand for security… AI can be used for predictive analytics to improve performance, maintenance and security of the network.” – Sebastian Tolstoy, Head of Ericsson Eastern Europe & Central Asia
Predictive analytics means predictive cybercrime which means Minority Report style policing. Not just in the digital world of course.
War criminal Tony Blair said at the event, “The government is always the last to change, and the problem with cyber threats is that we cannot afford the government to take 10 years to catch up because at that time the damage will be too great’.
He also said, “Digital ID for me is a very big part of the future…Inevitably, governments are going to move in this direction — absolutely, inevitably.”
Check out what Thales’ Digital ID Wallet is like in this video. To see how this is intimately tied into the biosecurity state see especially the 35 second mark. Notice how casually “mandatory vaccination” is mentioned as if this is such a nice benefit.
This policy comes from policy makers such as the WEF, largely funded by corporate partners. Essentially, government just works to follow the policy. Essentially all of government is fast becoming a captured agency, most of it already being so.
“We have seen a steep increase of new narratives in online scams, phishing approaches and targeting of critical infrastructures: health service ransomware, attacks on hospitals, exploiting the need for personal protective material and medical research,” says Jürgen Stock, Secretary General, INTERPOL.
Notice the focus on how this too is tied into the biosecurity state. Things like data for vaccine passports must be closely guarded.
“In the era of digitisation, fake news has become a dangerous weapon being used by cybercriminals to attack people and organisations.”
Of course, fake news gets its spotlight here like it did in the virus pandemic exercises. The “misinformation” that will spin up regarding any such attacks will need to be stamped down in every way just like “conspiracy theories” regarding COVID.
Part of securing the digital world means securing the “truth”. The lines of fake news and cyberwarfare and going to continue to blur, more so over time.
Cyber Polygon 2021
Cyber Polygon 2021 focused on a supply chain cyber-attack. These specifically focused on ransomware attacks, as outlined as the most difficult attack to guard from in 2019.
“These days, ecosystems are more widespread than ever. Companies are taking the expansion of their supply chains to a global scale, with 60% of them already working with more than 1,000 partners each. In this context, the resilience of supply chain networks is an issue of worldwide concern. The vulnerability of one organisation can undermine an entire supply system.”
“More and more services in modern life are going digital — from shopping and banking to education and public services. In this environment, the prosperity of tomorrow depends on the secure development of corporate ecosystems, the resilience of the financial industry in the era of e-money, and the protection of states against cyberthreats.”
“The task of central banks is to keep the monetary system stable. In pursuit of this, central banks must be at the heart of the changes in the financial sector, they must broaden the functionality of money and of the economy, which is becoming increasingly digitised.”
Central banks must be at the heart…they absolutely don’t want to lose the control they have towards a decentralized money supply. They dive even deeper into this topic.
“Digital currency is becoming a pervasive force that fundamentally changes everything in the global economy, from cross-border payments to interbank transfers. The rapid adoption and decentralised nature of digital currencies pose unprecedented challenges for financial and tax authorities, capital market regulators and the business community.” – Matthew Blake, Head of Financial and Monetary System Initiatives, World Economic Forum
“[The Digital ruble] will permit better traceability of payments and money flow, and also explore the possibility of setting conditions on permitted terms of use of a given unit of currency…Just imagine that you are able to give your kids some money in digital rubles and then restrict their use for purchase of junk food.” — Alexey Zabotkin, Deputy Governor of the Bank of Russia
(Or just imagine that the WEF decides you’ll eat less meat because cow farts cause climate change and they stop you from buying it. Of course, Bill Gates vegan meats will be approved for purchase. He didn’t buy up the most farmland in the USA for nothing!)
“Ransomware is still one of the most persistent threats both for the private and public sectors. Encrypting data and demanding ransom in cryptocurrency is an easy way for fraudsters to reach financial gains… One way to mitigate these risks is to implement multilateral data sharing. This requires cross-border industry partnerships with cybersecurity organisations. It is important for the private sector to work closely with governments to enhance their understanding of the threat landscape and assist law enforcement in fighting criminal activity”
CBDC’s good. Cryptocurrency bad. These themes are repeated many times. We want greater control. We don’t want anything that doesn’t allow that.
“Technological progress is also playing into the hands of cybercriminals. Ransomware and supply chain attacks undermine the operations of entire networks of enterprises and impact both the private and public sectors. In such conditions, collective decisions are needed to avoid the domino effect and to reduce the risks for the whole global community.”
“A growing number of cyberthreats requires a consolidated response of the public and private sectors.” The same theme hypnotically repeated over and over and over again.
“Zero Trust policy and verification of vendors can help to minimise risk of supply chain attacks…While the business losses from supply chain attacks are increasing, verification of vendors’ security compliance becomes crucial to ensure every company’s cyber resilience.”
In other words, the entire supply chain needs to be digitally verified so that it can be controlled. Making everything more digital is somehow the answer to the problems of it being digital!
“Yet, the digital space is sometimes dangerous for kids. Because of their gullibility, they easily fall into the trap of online threats: they are exposed to harassment, phishing, social engineering and cyberbullying… In order to protect children from harm on the Internet, the public and private sectors need to join in their efforts.”
We need to make the internet a safe space. So we’ll social engineer everyone to avoid social engineering we don’t want. We’ll harass and cyberbully anyone that stands in our way (like mocking antivaxxers deaths).
The first scenario, “According to the script, an unknown APT group was able to gain network access to a virtual infrastructure segment in Modern Bank’s infrastructure. This segment hosts the services responsible for the continuous web app integration and deployment processes.” The target of banks is a theme we’ll see more of.
The main thrusts include:
Supply chains will be disrupted
Financial services will be disrupted
Public private partnership is the only answer
The digital landscape must be made safe and we define what that means
Totally surveilled and controlled CBDC’s are the answer
Decentralized cryptocurrency is destabilizing and used by criminalsand thus must be stopped
To show again how this all dovetails into the agenda of the biosecurity state, the end of Schwab’s speech includes:
“One of the lessons of the COVID-19 pandemic is also the notion of resilience. We have to protect ourselves not only against the virus, we also have to develop the ability to withstand a virus attack. In other words, masks are not sufficient. We need vaccines to immunize ourselves. The same is true for cyberattacks. Here, too, we have to move from simple protection to immunization. We need to build IT infrastructures that have digital antibodies built-in inherently to protect themselves.”
The 2021 Ransomware Attacks
COVID was preceded not just by the war games listed above. You can look at the previous real health scares as live training exercises. The Disneyland measles outbreak. SARS 1. Ebola. The bird flu. The swine flu, etc.
Each of these on a much smaller scale led to vaccinations or funding for them and other drugs, windfalls for pharma companies, helped to influence the propaganda media, and helped to elevate the players involved.
Training exercise. Live exercise. Training exercise. Live exercise. Test and tweak along the way. Witness how well your propaganda works. Do the totalitarian tip-toe forward until there is too much resistance. Back off. Learn from it, make some changes, and start moving forward again.
So too have there been a string of growing cyber attacks. I’m not saying that every single one of these is planned. I can’t make that claim. But even if a legitimate attack from an outside entity and not a false flag, the powers that be will co-opt and use it for their agendas. Never let a crisis go to waste!
Cyber Polygon 2021 happened in July, shortly after the Colonial Pipeline attack, which used ransomware. This ransom involved cryptocurrency. Bloomberg reports, “The ransomware attack caused fuel shortages at gasoline stations in several states and even affected operations by some airlines and airports…In the attack last month, Colonial Pipeline ended up paying hackers — a Russia-linked cybercrime group known as DarkSide — $4.4 million in cryptocurrency in order to help restore its operations.”
Except, that’s not quite accurate. “The cyber attack that shutdown the Colonial pipeline causing a gas panic and stoking fears of gasoline shortages, didn’t actually shut down the pipeline. It impacted the billing system at the Colonial Pipeline Co., which shut it down because they were worried about how they’d collect payments.”
Also ironic that this hack was supposedly done by Russian hackers given “safe haven” by the Russian government…meanwhile the WEF co-hosts Cyber Polygon with Sberbank, majorly owned by the same Russian government.
Russia is still the main boogeyman, and we’ll see them pop up again and again here.
There were many other such attacks across the world.
Cyber Polygon 2022
Another event is planned upcoming.
Dates are not announced yet, but it occurred in July last year and could possibly be the same this year.
“Growing dependency on digital systems over the last 20 years has drastically shifted how many societies function. Users will be required to navigate security vulnerabilities inherent in both increased dependency on and growing fragmentation in these types of complex technologies often characterized by decentralization and lack of structured guardrails or sophisticated onboarding infrastructure.”
Decentralization is seen as a flaw not a feature. This is their overall frame. (And that’s not to say that decentralization doesn’t have flaws. It is hard to coordinate.)
“Malware increased by 358% in 2020, while ransomware increased by 435%, with a four-fold rise in the total cryptocurrency value received by ransomware addresses (see Figure 3.1). “Ransomware as a service” allows even non-technical criminals to execute attacks, a trend that might intensify with the advent of artificial intelligence (AI)-powered malware. In fact, profit-seeking groups of cyber mercenaries stand ready to provide access to sophisticated cyber-intrusion tools to facilitate such attacks. Furthermore, cryptocurrencies have also allowed cybercriminals to collect payments with an only modest risk of detection or monetary clawback.”
Never mind that “According to Cybersecurity Ventures, the global cost of ransomware in 2020 is estimated at $20 billion,” which means cryptocurrency only made up 2% of the value of such attacks. We know who the bad guy is to them.
“85% of the Cybersecurity Leadership Community of the World Economic Forum have stressed that ransomware is becoming a dangerously growing threat and presents a major concern for public safety.”
Near unanimous consensus so it must be true!
“The growth of deepfakes and “disinformation-for-hire” is likely to deepen mistrust between societies, business and government. For example, deepfakes could be used to sway elections or political outcomes. More concretely, in one recent case, cybercriminals cloned the voice of a company director to authorize the transfer of US$35 million to fraudulent accounts. There is also a booming market for services designed to manipulate public opinion in favour of clients, public or private, or to damage rivals.”
Note that deep fakes could be used in fantastic false flags operations. What better way to control the entire population then to make them not believe their own eyes and ears increasingly.
“If cyberthreats continue without mitigation, governments will continue to retaliate against perpetrators (actual or perceived), leading to open cyberwarfare, further disruption for societies and loss of trust in governments’ ability to act as digital stewards.”
Open cyberwarfare, that sounds interesting. What exactly would that look like?
Please note that (actual or perceived) in the USA the cyber bad guys are always from Russia, China, North Korea, or Iran.
It is odd how Russia is such a huge part of the Cyber Polygon events and yet also the main bad guy in cyber warfare at the same time. Or it would be odd to the official narrative. But it makes more sense with a behind-the-scenes conspiratorial look.
“Imagine the consequences of a cyber attack that wipe or alters financial records, especially as the economy remains fragile in the wake of the pandemic.” (emphasis added)
“Increasingly concerned, key voices are sounding the alarm. In February 2020, Christine Lagarde, the president of the European Central Bank (ECB) and former head of the International Monetary Fund (IMF), warned that a cyber attack could trigger a serious financial crisis.”
The head of Japan’s central bank predicted that cybersecurity could become the financial system’s most serious risk in the near future.
Jamie Dimon, CEO of JPMorgan Chase, said in April 2019 that cyber attacks “may very well be the biggest threat to the U.S. financial system.”
In April 2020, the Financial Stability Board (FSB) cautioned that “cyber incidents pose a threat to the stability of the global financial system.”
The report states “This requires countries not only to better organize themselves domestically but also to strengthen international cooperation to defend against, investigate, prosecute and ideally prevent future attacks. This implies that the financial sector and financial authorities must regularly interact with law enforcement and other national security agencies in unprecedented ways, both domestically and internationally.”
Essentially, the banks need to be more closely tied to the government regulators and intelligence agencies. Consolidation to an overwhelming centralized power. Do you hear the themes repeating enough yet?
Collective Strength
This event, named “Collective Strength”, took place in Israel and simulated a cyberattack on the global financial system. This involved the BIS, IMF and World Bank, occurring late November or early December. Ten countries took part including Austria, Germany, Israel, Italy, The Netherlands, Switzerland, Thailand, UAE, UK and the USA.
The war game, reported Reuters, “evolved over 10 days, with sensitive data emerging on the Dark Web. The simulation also used fake news reports that in the scenario caused chaos in global markets and a run on banks.”
Key note…CHAOS IN GLOBAL MARKETS and a RUN ON BANKS.
“The banks are appealing for emergency liquidity assistance in a multitude of currencies to put a halt to the chaos as counterparties withdraw their funds and limit access to liquidity, leaving the banks in disarray and ruin,” the narrator said.
The response? A “coordinated bank holiday, debt repayment grace periods, SWAP/REPO agreements and coordinated delinking from major currencies.” Possibly this could be read as
Average people can’t get their money
The big players get debts forgiven (while average people may get thrown a bone, just like the pandemic stimulus checks)
Further bank consolidation
The shift away from USD as the major reserve currency
Catherine Austin Fitts mentions regarding this event, “In addition, we know that regulators in both the United States and European Union have been working steadily since the 2008-2012 financial crisis to develop a regulatory structure that can easily engineer bail-ins permitting the funding of liquidity problems and fraudulent collateral shortfalls with depositors’ assets and retirement savings. Given recent moves to assert greater oversight over the cryptocurrency markets, this could also include controls on or access to the taking of traditionally unregulated digital assets.” (emphasis added)
In other words, be cautious about trusting the banks, or government run pensions and the like. And most certainly, look for more money printing to be the solution…quite possible of the CBDC type.
Cyber Storm I-VIII
“Cyber Storm, [the USA’s] Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency’s (CISA) biennial exercise series, provides the framework for the most extensive government-sponsored cybersecurity exercise of its kind.”
Cyber Storm III: September 2010 – “Cyber Storm III served as the primary vehicle to exercise the newly-developed National Cyber Incident Response Plan (NCIRP), a blueprint for cybersecurity incident response, to examine the roles, responsibilities, authorities, and other key elements of the nation’s cyber incident response and management capabilities and use those findings to refine the plan.” This involved “Increased Federal, State, International and Private Sector Participation” going “Administration-Wide”.
Cyber Storm V: March 2016 – “For the first time in the Cyber Storm exercise series, the exercise featured dedicated participation from the Healthcare and Public Health sector”
Cyber Storm VI: April 2018 – “Integrated a simulated and dynamically-updated media and social media platform to replicate the customer and public components of an incident”
I’ll spend a bit more time on the final most recent even, Cyber Storm 2020 taking place in August 2020.
The results PDF states, “CS 2020’s core scenario focused on three back-bone services of the Internet – DNS, CA, and BGP. These services are critical to Internet architecture, allowing users to access web pages and ensuring that only the correct users are permitted access.” That’s Domain Name System (DNS), Certificate Authorities (CA), and the Border Gateway Protocol (BGP).
The stated objectives include “Strengthen and enhance information sharing and coordination mechanisms used across the cyber ecosystem during a cyber incident” and “Reinforce public and private partnerships and improve their ability to share relevant and timely information.” These should be sounding quite familiar at this point. The goal is top-down coordination and they even talk about a “Cyber Unified Coordination Group (UCG)”.
“Supported classified planning and execution efforts in tandem with the classified exercise ICE STORM 2020, facilitating interaction at an unclassified level between the intelligence community and stakeholders impacted by simulated cyber incidents.”
I could find no information behind that classified exercise, but that certainly piqued my curiosity.
The industry partners includes every major financial institution in the US. Here is half of the list.
This event involved the Federal Reserve, FDIC, CFTC, SEC, Treasury and more. It involved pharma players such as Eli Lilly, Merck and Sanofi. Both the DOD, DOJ, and NSA were involved.
And there’s another event coming up.
“Cyber Storm VIII is scheduled for Spring 2022. As the eighth iteration of the Cyber Storm exercise series, Cyber Storm VIII will examine discovery of and response to a large-scale, coordinated significant cyber incident impacting multiple critical infrastructure sectors. Cyber Storm VIII will further strengthen public and private partnerships and assess areas of improvement for national cyber security plans and policies.”
Bloomberg reported on January 11th, “European Union governments will launch later this week a large-scale simulation of cyberattacks against multiple member states.”
“Participants will be confronted with attacks on their supply chains and some spillover socio-economic effects in other member states, before having to coordinate public communications and a diplomatic response, according to people familiar with the matter and documents seen by Bloomberg.”
“Though the EU has various tools at its disposal to counter and sanction acts of cyber aggression, it doesn’t currently have a framework for effectively coordinating a joint response to a major crisis, the document says.”
“The exercise will be structured around a gradual escalation toward a major crisis that culminates in an attack that could qualify as an armed aggression under the United Nations Charter, according to one of the documents.” (emphasis added)
As if on cue…
Ukraine Attacked Days Ago
Just a couple of days ago, as I was writing this article, a huge cyber attack knocking offline government websites occurred in the Ukraine, which is not part of the EU but is in Europe.
Sky News reports, a spokesman for the Ministry of Foreign Affairs said: “It’s too early to draw conclusions, but there is a long record of Russian assaults against Ukraine.”
The EU’s foreign policy chief Joseph Borrell condemned the attack, saying he “has no evidence who was responsible”, but “we can imagine who is behind it”.
(Really reminds me of our government and intelligence agencies claiming someone, often Russia, is behind something with zero evidence.)
Messages put on the website in three languages read: “Ukrainian! All your personal data was uploaded to the public network. All data on the computer is destroyed, it is impossible to restore it. All information about you has become public, be afraid and expect the worst. This is for your past, present and future.”
US National Security Adviser Jake Sullivan stated, “Our intelligence community has developed information, which has now been downgraded, that Russia is laying the groundwork to have the option of fabricating a pretext for an invasion — including through sabotage activities and information operations — by accusing Ukraine of preparing an imminent attack against Russian forces in eastern Ukraine.”
Are we seeing an escalation that leads to armed agression?
“The organization, called the Financial Services Information Sharing and Analysis Center (FS-ISAC), made the claim in its 2021 “Navigating Cyber” report…That forecast, which casts a devastating cyber attack on the financial system through third parties as practically inevitable, also makes the case for a “global fincyber [financial-cyber] utility” as the main solution to the catastrophic scenarios it predicts.”
“A major theme in these efforts has not only been an emphasis on global cooperation, but also a merging of private banks and/or corporations with the State, specifically intelligence and law enforcement agencies. In addition, many of the banks, institutions and individuals involved in the creation of these reports and simulations are either actively involved in WEF-related efforts to usher in a new global economic model of “stakeholder capitalism” or are seeking to imminently introduce, or are actively developing, central bank-backed digital currencies, or CBDCs.”
“Of particular interest is the call by both FS-ISAC and the WEF Partnership against Cybercrime to specifically target cryptocurrencies, particularly those that favor transactional anonymity, as well as the infrastructure on which those cryptocurrencies run. Though framed as a way to combat “cybercrime”, it is obvious that cryptocurrencies are to be unwanted competitors for the soon-to-be-launched central bank digital currencies.”
“The report contains several “predictions for 2021 and beyond.” The first of these predictions is that adversarial nation-states will team up with “the cybercriminal underworld” in order to “obfuscate their activity and complication attribution.””
“FS-ISAC also predicts that attacks will cross borders, continents, and verticals, with increasing speed. More specifically, it states that the cyber pandemic will begin with cyber criminals that “test attacks in one country and quickly scale up to multiple targets in other parts of the world.””
Teresa Walsh, Global Head of Intelligence at the FS-ISAC spoke at Cyber Polygon 2021 said, “You can just go into the underground marketplace and purchase a kit, purchase a phishing kit to help you distribute it, and then just reap the benefits of the Bitcoins coming in as long as you give a little bit to the side to the operators behind the desk”.
A large part of this narrative is to derail crypto which the central bankers do not control. These narratives are widely repeated. And you must understand that their attacks could ultimately be successful, so if you’re invested in crypto take heed and be cautious.
In Summation
So what does the cyber pandemic look like?
I wish I had a reliable crystal ball here. First of all, it is not one single thing. Reading this there are clearly multiple cyber events, which is already happening.
What you can be sure of is that things along these lines absolutely will be occurring in both increasing frequency and seismic impact.
If you had an article like this before the pandemic going through all the war games would you know exactly what to expect? Some events like Event 201 and SPARS were almost identical to what happened in reality (with the exception of the death counts).
Some of the above undoubtedly are too…but which ones?
My bet is on something like Collective Strength as the big event. This could be the thing that fully breaks the worldwide economy and allows them to step in with CBDC’s.
The rippling economic shocks allow to further push forward other agenda items.
However, the focus on supply chains and infrastructure are big too. Based on what we’ve seen so far there be many more attacks on such, that continue to escalate in size.
A big one that focuses on Bitcoin as the ransom will be used by governments/bankers the world over to rally against it’s existence. They may not be able to stop it…but they can aim to fully surveil it through the choke-points of on and off ramps.
From the unnamed EU exercise, the cyber attacks escalate to “a major crisis that culminates in an attack that could qualify as an armed aggression under the United Nations Charter.”
Does this lead to “open cyberwarfare” which could then be a precursor to physical war? Is this already starting between Ukraine and Russia?
Then there is an attack that could bring down the entire internet, even if just temporarily. This could be tied into many of the above scenarios, but most likely would be with the big financial one.
Regardless of what the events looks like they will be used:
To increase censorship
To rollout digital ID’s
To rollout CBDC’s
To increase surveillance
To crush cryptocurrencies
To consolidate power and wealth to the powerful and wealthy
To usher in pre-crime
When?
It is my sense that this plan, whatever form it ultimately comes in, will actually be done in response to pushback. As the mainstream narrative collapses, as the people stand together, this is the follow up phase in their Great Reset of humanity.
My feeling is less than 10% of people are onboard the infinite booster plan. So as I’ve said before bigger shocks are needed to get us to their agenda items.
Based on the gaping wide holes in the narrative, on the average person being fed up with this stuff, I feel another big event very well could be happening sometime in 2022.
Here’s the good news. There is a Cyber Polygon 2022 and Cyber Storm VIII scheduled for “this year” and “Spring” respectively. It likely won’t take place until after these if they need more planning and coordinating.
…On the other hand, the fact that there are no dates, especially when Spring is coming up fast, is disconcerting!
Neither can we deny that training exercises “coincidentally” take place at the same time as real attacks.
It doesn’t look like they’re ready to rollout CBDC’s. So my guess is they are not yet ready for the big one that collapses the global financial system. But then again them not being ready is based on public information of CBDC rollout plans.
But, at the very least, 2022 will definitely see an escalation of
Supply chain/infrastructure attacks
Bordering on nation-state war cyber attacks
Discouraged? Find Your Courage…
I know being realistic about such stuff can feel like soul-crushing pessimism. You might be thinking “What’s the point?” for anything that you do. So let me offer some advice around that.
Getting yourself mentally, emotionally and spiritually ready for what is coming is the most important part. The Worry Formula is:
STEP 1: Ask, “What’s the worst that can possibly happen?” (Basically imagine these exercises as really happening)
STEP 2: Prepare to accept the worst-case scenario if you have to (You’re not going to change it, so best to accept it)
STEP 3: Calmly proceed to improve on the worst-case scenario (what CAN you do? I recommend meditating and/or journaling on this question)
Just as the pandemic was an initiation for many of us to courageously step up in the world, so too would this be a calling to up your game. The world needs real, strong, good men and women more than ever right now.
Understand that one of the aims of propaganda is demoralization. They want you to be morally defeated.
Don’t play into their hands so easily.
As you prepare, and I’ll give you some specifics to start with below, think about some of the following:
What is worth doing even if the world falls apart around you?
What builds your adaptability/antifragility both for right now and for such future events?
What can you do that helps you now AND sets you in a better position for tomorrow?
Can you build towards a future that is worth having regardless of the disruption or not?
One step at a time. One foot in front of the other.
Have faith that their plans are ultimately so audacious as to be doomed to failure. That this revelation and cleansing is needed to arrive at a more positive future in due time.
Pray for the best, ready yourself for the worst.
How to Personally Be Prepared
Civilization collapse stack. Start from the bottom and work your way up. Don’t forget that community is actually the most important part.
Of note, precious metals have been manipulated with downward pressure for years. At some point this will release, after all the same bankers making such plans aren’t hoarding them just for kicks.
It appears to me that release will be when the global financial system gets attacked, not before then.
Crypto is sexy and can be insanely profitable if you do it well. Crypto can help you build out the rest of the stack.
However, it is clear that it is very much a direct target of such cyber warfare. At the very least, it would likely crash with the economic chaos involved. Hedge properly. Here’s my courses/coaching available:
Thank you for reading this long article. I hope you’ve found it useful. If you are aware of anything I missed, or would like to add your two cents please do so in the comments below.
This is Chapter 23 of my new book, working title “The Industry Playbook: Corporate Cartels, Corruption and Crimes Against Humanity” that is being published online chapter by chapter.
Earlier we covered astroturf, that is fake grassroots. The influence of this PR strategy is that there is genuine power behind grassroots organizations. This is where there are real people that are passionate about something. In many cases they try and succeed in changing legislation or make other impact
In 1966, Betty Carnes, whose son had died from lung cancer, started Arizonans Concerned About Smoking, one of the first nonsmokers’ rights groups. They sent out thousands of “Thank you for not smoking” signs. They lobbied their state legislatures.
Ultimately, they were successful. In 1973, due to their campaigning, Arizona became the first state within the USA to pass a law restricting smoking in public places.
In 1970, Clara Gouin started up a group in Maryland, Group Against Smoking Pollution (GASP). They started small, removing ashtrays from their homes. Against the threat of being seen as bad hostesses, they made this action with the support of each other. Within a year they had sent out 500 chapter kits to groups around the country, the movement growing organically.
A former Minnesota state senator, Edward Brandt, founded a local chapter of the Association for Non-Smokers’ Rights in 1973. Through similar lobbying and grassroots campaigning, Minnesota passed the Clean Indoor Air Act in 1975, which banned smoking in most public places.
It is critical to understand that these grassroots groups focused on smaller, more local governments. They helped San Francisco pass restrictions on public smoking in 1983. Big Tobacco’s powerful reach was less effective within cities, counties and sometimes states, than it was at the federal level.
In 1974, Tobacco Institute president Horace Kornegay stated that the “relative calm in Washington” disguised “stormy weather out in the states.” Over time, 41 states and 1,354 cities would enact smoking laws, while the federal government never did.
Sadly, it was after a few initial real grassroots wins that Big Tobacco got more serious about using astroturf organizations and mounting solid defenses against such local organization. California tried to follow suit with these other states, with Proposition 5, but Big Tobacco was able to defeat this in 1978 by spending $6.5 million.
The American Legacy Foundation, which later was renamed the Truth Initiative, ran a campaign around the idea of “What if cigarette ads told the Truth?” Here is a two page spread from a magazine.
Unfortunately, it is much harder to find information about all these smaller groups. There is no one centralized organization to match CTR or the Tobacco Institute. Instead, it is the results of hundreds of smaller organizations and non-profits.
These many actions led to legislation, but also were important in helping to shift the culture, as is covered in the next chapter.
Key Takeaways on Real Grassroots Organization
It is easier for corporations such as Big Tobacco to influence politics at the federal level. It is harder to influence politics at a state and local level. Therefore, grassroots organization at the smaller levels was ultimately more successful.
Public smoking bans started with single cities and states, and within a couple of decades, some forms of restriction were in place in most areas.
No one group was able to match the power of Big Tobacco. But real people fighting for real change could cause real world effects to happen.
Please leave any comments or questions below. Feel free to share it with anyone you’d like.
I post this up here in the tradition of what I’ve done the last few years. (You can find the others here: 2017, 2018, 2019, 2020)
Hidden-in-plain-sight within this list you may find the main reason that I read less books this year than previously! Feel free to guess in the comments below 😉
Here I’ll highlight some of my top picks across different categories.
Economy and Crypto
The Bitcoin Standard: The Decentralized Alternative to Central Banking by Saifedean Ammous
If you read one book about cryptocurrency, I would recommend The Bitcoin Standard. It doesn’t just talk about Bitcoin but gives a good history of money. Considering how little people understand how money actually works, this is important for understanding how Bitcoin can work as money. His sequel The Fiat Standard, is also great.
Principles for Dealing with The Changing World Order: Why Nations Succeed and Fail by Ray Dalio
I mentioned this in a recent article. It’s a great overview of the rise and fall of empires. As we’re going through this shaky time right now (the USA falling and China rising fast), it is useful to learn the historical lessons involved. This covers what a changing of the world reserve currency has looked like in the past.
The Pandemic
The Real Anthony Fauci: Bill Gates, Big Pharma, and the Global War on Democracy and Public Health by Robert F. Kennedy Jr.
I’ve obviously studied the pandemic a lot, as you can see by the many articles on this blog. But some have covered it even better. High marks for The Real Anthony Fauci. This covers not just the past two years but all the nefarious actions, particularly around HIV/AIDS that too few people know. The final chapter covering how the military allied itself with pharma (having to do with a biological weapons ban that left biological defense, aka vaccines, on the table) is worth the price of admission. It gives me hope that this was the #1 book in the world for a short time.
Pseudo Pandemic: New Normal Technocracy by Iain Davis
I also have to give a shout out to this one as well. While this drills into the details of inflated deaths and so much more, the best parts, in my opinion, covered the worldviews of eugenics, technocracy and the bigger picture of how current events fit in. Coming from the UK it also gives a greater perspective across the pond, compared to the USA. (Note that you can download this free from his website.)
How the World Really Works
Beyond the pandemic, there’s so many good ones. This subject matter is the main thing I read about these days. But I’ll select just four. I might also term this conspiracy history, or how evil is perpetrated often under the cover of good.
The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism by Naomi Klein
Witness the pattern of economics and totalitarian action done in country after country after country. This playbook is being rolled out worldwide right now (though Klein herself doesn’t seem to see it!). This is foundational and I mention it in this article, Is Your Money Safe? Is the Economy Safe?
Poisoner in Chief: Sidney Gottlieb and the CIA Search for Mind Control by Stephen Kinzer
When people laugh off conspiracy theories, I know that they simply don’t understand history. The CIA literally tortured people in cruel ways as part of their experiments. Dosing them with LSD along with sensory deprivation for weeks on end. And that’s just one example of what we know about as covered in this book. My theory is they were more successful in these experiments than what has been let on. Still, the understanding of the publicly available knowledge is critical.
The Rape of the Mind: The Psychology of Thought Control, Menticide, and Brainwashing by Joost Meerloo
The title tells you what you’re in for. Meerloo was in the Netherlands when the Nazis came through. Helps to flesh out and give some perspective on the former book. I mentioned this book in this article, Totalitarian Takeover.
Empire of Pain: The Secret History of the Sackler Dynasty by Patrick Radden Keefe
Before Purdue Pharma, Arthur Sackler singlehandedly developed pharmaceutical advertising and was a pioneer in the corruption of regulators. His sociopathic children and brothers children were worse. This book catalogs the rise of what is a worse pandemic going on right now, the opioid epidemic, and just how lucrative it was to become philanthropic high society members. In the reality inversion they caused tremendous pain by treating pain. If you’re thinking in terms of family dynasty at all I would encourage you to read this as a cautionary tale.
Science
The Turning Point: Science, Society, and the Rising Culture by Fritjof Capra
Amazing that this book was written decades ago! Capra was a prophet that saw the swinging of the pendulum and put so well into words many things I was thinking. If you’re into philosophy of science, this is a must read.
Not Even Trying…The Corruption of Real Science by Bruce G Charlton
A quick read that accurately diagnosis some of the main problems. There’s a focus on peer review, which instead of making for good science, has turned into a popularity contest.
Health
The Phoenix Protocol: Dry Fasting for Rapid Healing and Radical Life Extension by August Dunning
I don’t read too much about health these days, though you can see the topic sprinkled in my list. This book is the most intriguing to me on the topic of dry fasting which I plan to experiment more with.
The Body Keeps the Score: Brain, Mind, and Body In The Healing of Trauma by Bessel Van Der Kolk, M.D.
A dense book but well worth reading through. If you want to understand trauma and healing it, this is probably the best place to start. Highly recommended!
Mind-Stretching
The Shamanic Way of the Bee: Ancient Wisdom and Healing Practices of the Bee Masters by Simon Buxton
A non-fiction account of a man initiated into a secret sect of shamanism focused around bees. The out-of-this-world shamanic events are mind-blowing. A highly entertaining read.
Fiction
Abaddon’s Gate by James S.A. Corey
This is the third in a series called The Expanse, my favorite so far. Its an Amazon Prime series, though as typical the books are far better, especially this third book that loses its best character and gets scrunched into half a season.
It’s some good ol’ sci-fi drama. I’m enjoying it and have the rest of the books in the series that I’ll eventually be reading.
Your Turn
If you have any questions about any of these books go ahead and ask them in the comments below.
Also please share your top one or two books that you read last year. I’m always looking to add to my reading list.
This is Chapter 22 of my new book, working title “The Industry Playbook: Corporate Cartels, Corruption and Crimes Against Humanity” that is being published online chapter by chapter.
An earlier chapter covered the army of lawyers used by Big Tobacco in mounting a solid legal defense against any threat. And this defense was very successful.
But lawyers aren’t all bad. There are also lawyers on the other side who were fighting for the truth to come out. “For all the significant political objections to judicial activism and the public disparagement of trial lawyers, it seems important to recognize that the legal process serves certain social ends that the legislative process is poorly structured to address,” writes Brandt. “The courts possess a highly articulated set of procedures for the production and evaluation of evidence on behalf of the public adjudication of responsibility for harms. Demonstrating these harms, within institutional structure that are relatively insulated from the pressures of political and economic interests, serves a critical social good. It is because they brought such facts into public view that the courts have offered such a crucial civic arena for pursuing the control of tobacco.”
We previously saw how legal counsel came to dominate overall strategy for Big Tobacco. However, it was also through the legal process that discovery happens, that is what the tobacco companies knew and when they knew it that could be revealed. Ultimately, it was in the courts the key cases were eventually won.
Understand that this was how the science was really settled, in that we’d see Big Tobacco talking internally about the risks and dangers of their product, separate from their PR campaigns.
Big Tobacco was able to defy regulation due to their influence. Thus, “Tort law became a tool for indirect regulatory policy,” states Brandt. “Between 1994 and 1997, more lawsuits were filed against tobacco firms than in the previous thirty years.”
In one case the judge Kenneth J. Fitzpatrick ruled that Philip Morris had engaged “in an egregious attempt to hide information.” There was proof that they destroyed documents. Here he found that the lawyers had explicitly reviewed industry materials, such as scientific studies, for the purpose of claiming privilege.
Special Master Mark W. Gehan reviewed privileged documents of Big Tobacco in the 90’s. He found that the attorney-client privilege had been abused. Brandt writes, “His ruling implicated the attorneys as not ‘representing’ the legal interests of their clients but as full-fledged participants in a decades-long conspiracy.”
Attorney Mike Ciresi had argued “that counsel for the tobacco industry advised the industry to conceal documents and research harmful to the industry by depositing documents with counsel, by routing correspondence through the industry counsel, by naming damning research projects as ‘special projects’ purportedly ordered by counsel, etc., to cover potentially dangerous materials under a blanket of attorney-client privilege protection, and Plaintiffs wish to tear this blanket away.”
The legal process was necessary to showcase Big Tobacco’s lawyers as conspirators. Again, it was discovery of internal documentation that proved this publicly.
One court case builds upon the next. With discovery out in the open and rulings in place, the next court case could often be a little more successful.
Such was the case for the Cipollone case. The lawyer for the plaintiff, Marc Edell, had amassed 300,000 internal tobacco documents. Although Edell won the case, he never received damages for his clients.
This case was appealed up to the Supreme Court, but they refused to hear it. Accordingly, these industry documents were made public. Attorney Richard Daynard said these documents would “provide a firm foundation for future plaintiffs to build a convincing case of fraud and conspiracy against the tobacco industry.”
In the last chapter we covered the paralegal who became a whistleblower, Merrell Williams and his leaking of what became known as the ‘Cigarette Papers’. While a huge milestone that was just one piece of the action.
Through discovery, there are now over 40,000,000 pages of tobacco documents available online.
The proof is all available there. But it is a massive amount! (Burying the opponents in useless paperwork being another tactic of a strong legal defense. You must disclose some things but sometimes you can hide it, in volume, especially if your opponent is short-staffed.)
The legal process, especially through the component of discovery, is key to unveiling conspiracies. We’ll see this time and time again in industry after industry.
Key Takeaways on Discovery and Litigation
The judicial system, specifically tort law, was a critical area where the truth of Big Tobacco came to light through the discovery process.
While Big Tobacco was successful in any and all civil lawsuits for many years, the tide eventually turned against them.
Each successful discovery of proof of Big Tobacco’s deceit, each successful court case, was a stepping stone for the next. The internal documentation revealed in one case could be used to build the following one.
It was shown in court cases that the lawyers for Big Tobacco were not only representing their clients, but part of the conspiracy in covering up criminal activity, abusing the attorney-client privilege.
Please leave any comments or questions below. Feel free to share it with anyone you’d like.
In recent articles I covered possible scenarios. Keyword being possible. While I like to think in probabilities and possibilities, I’m aiming to put in what I think is most likely to occur here and with the time frame of just a year.
In other words, what follows are my highest probability picks.
Again, I’ll reiterate that this isn’t from looking into a crystal ball so much as it is looking at the trends in play and projecting where those lead. As such, this article is not just predictions, but serves as a current state-of-things status report too.
Chief among my superpowers is learning and synthesizing. My heavy “data diet” of speed read articles and books, along with 3X playback videos and podcasts, is overwhelming at times. For me, it’s a long-cultivated skillset.
Of course, just absorbing the information would only be so useful. Bringing it all together, then distilling it down to the most useful and actionable is what I’m truly aiming for. Add a dash or three of intuition and here we are.
The Pandemic
It’s going to be the same old song and dance as long as they can get away with it…but with some interesting twists.
If you haven’t figured it out by now, SARS-CoV-2 is not going away. It’s endemic, we have to live with it, just like common coronaviruses that have caused some versions of the common cold before all this.
The definition of insanity is to do the same thing over and over again despite the results. Clearly, our world is insane.
The data coming out of Israel is interesting, such as this study from July 2021. “This communication… challenges the assumption that high universal vaccination rates will lead to herd immunity and prevent COVID-19 outbreaks… In the outbreak described here, 96.2% of the exposed population was vaccinated. Infection advanced rapidly (many cases became symptomatic within 2 days of exposure), and viral load was high.” I like to throw this quote at people who say the vaccines stops infection.
But there is a big positive sign. Omicron, while spreading more rapidly, is even less deadly than the already statistically speaking not-so-deadly other variants.
In addition there is something extremely odd about Omicron. “Omicron has no recent ancestor. Its most recent ancestor existed in the beginning of year 2020 and went extinct. The weirdness of this is similar to a young man who is alive today and is proven genetically to be a biological son of George Washington: you know that something very special is going on,” writes Igor Chudov.
Of course the public narrative comes up with some hypothesis about this being because of an immune-compromised individual, or jumping to an animal and back to humans. Publicly, there’s no talk of possible (more) lab engineering. The question to ask: did someone assist in making this virus more innocuous? If so, why?
Or, if indeed this did come from a lab, is there some more nefarious purpose to it that we can’t see just yet?
Or does it cause people to double-down saying I’m glad that I had the vaccine or else it would have been worse?
What I see happening is both. Some places continuing pushing forward with draconian policies. Other places increasingly stop playing the pandemic game.
Hmmm, when would that be? End of November plus 100 days takes us into the middle of March. Right after Winter ends…you know when historically there’s always been cold and flu season coming to an end. Guess what can then take the credit for ending the spike once again? The vaccines, just like what happened as they rolled out in 2020.
For those places that are escalating, that means more mandates and coercion. In the USA, we only have to look at some other countries that are ahead of the race.
Across the pond, “Austria is the first European country to demand compulsory vaccinations for all citizens. Now, employees will be tasked with enforcing fines on those who refuse to acquire the COVID vaccine in the Austrian city of Linz.” Socially enforced once again.
And of course, Australia already has the camps ready and is taking away people who test positive.
New York was trying to pass a bill for the “removal of cases, contacts and carriers of communicable diseases who are potentially dangerous to the public health.” Apparently, this already has been struck down. Yet that’s just one of several bills proposed for vote on January 5th, 2022. JP Sears covers this well.
If you’re anywhere that something like this passes, get out!
I’ll distill this down. My predictions on what we’ll see in 2022:
People detained in “medical facilities” or camps within some parts of the USA.
There will be more of these facilities in many parts around the world, copying Australia. These will include sending people that aren’t even “infected” but “exposed,” aka the contacts of cases.
Fines will begin on the unvaccinated for being so. This will happen in some states but will likely be pushed by the Biden admin too.
The growth of “unvaccinated hunters” as a job position for many countries. Of course, they’ll have a nicer title than that.
At least one example of a vaccinated person killing an unvaccinated person because they’re a “threat” to their health.
Escalation of doctors and hospitals refusing to treat the unvaccinated completely.
Escalation of many more grocery stores refusing the unvaccinated.
More lockdowns in more countries specifically just for the unvaccinated.
The vaccines will be rolled out to all ages within the USA, meaning the 0-4 year old group is next.
The vaccines will be added to the official CDC schedule for children to enter school.
The companies talked about mRNA jabs as updates to the software of life. Fauci and others want to update your immunity every five months. 2022 sees the year when boosters become variant-specific.
A strong push in the USA to make all flights reliant on being jabbed and current with boosters.
Other countries will pass similar measures. The unvaccinated will not be able to travel, whether flying or driving out of some places.
There will be Chinese-style reeducation camps in other countries for the unvaccinated to be “deradicalized”.
Dystopian, I know, but that’s fortunately only half of the story…
The Pushback and the Revolution
The pushback is working to a large degree. For instance:
That’s in legit courts. The legal angle is important, but it certainly can’t be the only part of the picture. The pushback will continue to escalate in country after country in all ways it can.
My prediction is it actually will get to the point of revolutionary behavior in some places.
Austria, Germany or other parts of Europe seem the most likely as they’re going the most totalitarian with solid levels of pushback. The protests are already huge. Australia possibly too, but it’s harder to judge from this point.
There will be violence. Again, I hope for it to be minimal, but it is already existing. It needs to be quite strategic so that the violence doesn’t simply beget more violence.
In case, you haven’t seen any footage related to the above, here’s one short clip in France.
Holy shit the French riot police is getting fucked up 😅 the law usually gets forced at the end of a police baton but it seems that the roles are changing… People are fed up! pic.twitter.com/8exOFAptKh
Let me be clear. I am not advocating for violence. I am simply predicting that it will occur.
Here’s another interesting example, apparently threats did change a lawmaker’s mind! State Rep. Jonathan Carroll, led a “proposal requiring unvaccinated Illinoisans to pay their health care expenses — including hospital bills — out of pocket if they contract COVID-19.” He said in “a statement Thursday that he decided not to pursue the legislation he filed earlier in the week because of the ‘unintended divisive nature’ of the proposal.”
Seems like a mixed message to me that the threats were horrible and unjustified…yet they worked when nicely pleading to lawmakers doesn’t appear to in most cases.
Here’s some specific events I’ll be on the lookout for:
Mainstream media figures will be physically attacked, maybe even killed.
Politicians will be physically attacked, maybe even killed.
The size of worldwide protests will continue to grow. As has been happening, only independent media will cover such, which is why normies don’t even know they’re happening.
Increasingly, protests will become riots with clashes against the people and the police/military. Increasingly, we’ll also see police joined with the people in.
The destructive behavior this time will focus on damaging parts of “the system” such as camps, vaccination facilities and the like.
There will be cases of sabotage of communications and technology of such parts of “the system”.
In the USA, November holds the midterm elections. There will be fraud, but nonetheless, Democrats will be losing a lot of power.
As I’ve talked about before only our side is growing in numbers. More people are popping out of the matrix. Many people who got the vaccine the first time, aren’t going back for round two, let alone three, four and beyond.
C.J. Hopkins made a great point that GloboCap, as he likes to call it, needs to work with at least the pretense of democracy. “In other words, we need to make GloboCap (and its minions) go openly totalitarian … because it can’t. If it could, it would have done so already. Global capitalism cannot function that way. Going openly totalitarian will cause it to implode … no, not global capitalism itself, but this totalitarian version of it. In fact, this is starting to happen already. It needs the simulation of “reality,” and “democracy,” and “normality,” to keep the masses docile.”
As you’re witnessing, they are going more totalitarian and this has the benefit of making it that much more apparent to everyone.
I’m encouraging people to ask where those buying into the narrative draw their line personally as to what is overreach. Mostly people ignore the question, as that is the only defense against it. But I have finally gotten one person to answer it. As we know the agenda is to cross all such lines, this helps rally people to our side.
A follow-up question if they do answer is to ask, when they do cross that line, “What are you going to do about it?”
As it becomes increasingly totalitarian, more people will stand up and say no more. Of course there is an adoption curve of learning and acting on this stuff.
In one sense, that is all we really have to do. To not participate in the madness, the consequences be damned. Because their only response is to go more totalitarian and they increasingly have less justification for doing so.
Fantastic podcast here from Aubrey Marcus with Charles Eisenstein. This is some level five conversation.
One of my takeaways from this was that courage is largely a community thing. I’ve said this before in different ways, but the more that people stand up, the easier it becomes to do so. I see more and more people speaking out. I see encouraging signs of that.
And with this trend, I predict 2022 is the year where this tipping point is reached. Understand that it doesn’t take courage anymore once just about everyone else is doing. Each and every person speaking out is less courageous than the person before. That doesn’t mean that it’s not important to do so, just that it becomes easier as the crowd shifts.
The key of the totalitarian control grid plan is vaccine mandates and passports. These must be pushed back on each and every chance we get. It is the lynch pin of the whole system.
If they get that, the noose is on. If they don’t get that, the other pieces cannot so easily fall into place.
All you have to do is say no. And I understand that this can be a big ask because your people’s livelihoods depend on it.
There are strong elements of both sides will not shift. This only leads to revolution and/or war. It’s the historical facts of such a situation.
As I said earlier, the good news is that there will be other places, small towns in the country mostly, perhaps even small countries themselves, that simply stop complying with all the BS. It will be “normal” in these locations. In this way there will be decentralized growth of alternatives, while the propaganda becomes increasingly spitting into the wind.
Similarly the psyop, will be dismantled legally piece by piece in certain places. The tide turns.
This is the de-escalation that is occurring at the same time than escalation is occurring.
The Counterrevolution
Unfortunately, the increasing pushback comes from the other side too.
As a result of attacks, private police and military will be used increasingly by certain public individuals.
There will be assassinations of leaders of freedom. Of course, these won’t look like assassinations to the normies. They’ll have plausible deniability. (There’s already some evidence of this taking place throughout the pandemic.)
The army will be called in to quell the protests and riots increasingly.
The UN “peacekeepers” will have to be brought in to assist in some countries.
Any sort of government aid will increasingly be tied into being a good citizen (aka vaccinated and obedient).
The propaganda will ramp up because they need the people themselves to enforce their rules. It’ll get that much more bat-shit crazy as the demonization of the scapegoats must escalate.
It’s an information war first, economic war second, and will increasingly become a physical war. This is because information and economic warfare are the appetizers to the real thing.
In many ways, I perceive that 2022 could be the make-or-break year for humanity.
Perhaps I’m smoking too much hopium, but I think we will make it. That is my prediction. Understand that that doesn’t mean it’ll be “done with” in 2022, far from it, but the tide of the war will change.
Think about when Hitler and Napoleon before him over-reached by attacking Russia. It turned the tide of war. This push for vaccine mandates and passports for a vaccine that is not safe nor effective is the turning point.
The Cyber Pandemic
I predicted this last year but was either wrong or too early. So I’m pushing the prediction out to 2022 or beyond. The thing is, at this point, I don’t know enough about the topic to make a solid prediction.
I’m going to deep dive into this area in an upcoming article. With that hopefully I can paint a more useful picture of what this likely will look like.
I was struck reading The Real Anthony Fauci, especially the last chapter where RFK Jr. goes into all the pandemic-planning exercises over the past two decades.
Many of these war games I was familiar with. Some were new to me. What became clear was that these training exercises were about coordinating among institutions and individuals how to rollout the real thing. Each and every event focused on vaccines, grabbing more totalitarian control and using censorship.
None of them focused on actually keeping people healthy, such as repurposing therapeutics, having stockpiles ready, etc. The planning and training was about making sure the powers-that-be could and would act in lockstep (which happened to be the name of one such exercise).
It brought me back to watching the full Event 201 videos which I did when the pandemic started. Here’s my March 2020 article.
Something stood out to me in reviewing this information. They predicted internet blackouts in some countries as part of the censorship/pandemic response.
In other words, they were planning for (expecting?) pushback to be even greater early on and thus needing to do such things!
My feeling right now is the big cyber pandemic is the card they pull out when they need too.
The other huge piece is this. The pandemic was the excuse for the collapsing financial system. It both kicked the can down the road and allowed the grift to continue. The virus was blamed, never the bankers.
Our economy is that much more in collapse now. The bankers won’t be blamed publicly, so the cyber pandemic is the next scapegoat, as well as emergency to seize more power.
The tide is turning…and that makes me think exactly such an event could be close to happening. When they are losing control of the narrative, and we see signs of it cracking left and right, they MUST do something to gain back control.
The pandemic wargames such as Event 201 and SPARS are virtually a script for the entire real thing (though less deaths in real life than in those).
What if the cyber war games are much the same? I need to understand what occurs. Again, far more detail upcoming in my next article I hope to have out in the next week or two. With that there will be some more projections/predictions of how it could roll out.
The Economy
The Fed recently mentioned that they’d increase rates, but this is a lie. The inflationary money added into the system has been described as crack and heroin. The current economic system is an addict that has no chance of redemption.
Any tapering will be reversed in short order once the withdrawal symptoms kick in. Why? Well, those withdrawal symptoms hurt the predator class.
In other words, inflation will continue, even going higher.
We’re not going to see deflation. They’re going to inflate until the entire worldwide economy bubble bursts. The only deflation will occur with the new financial system coming in.
We’ll see prices continue in the same directions. While the frenzy has died down, as comes with winter anyway, houses will continue to see higher values.
Supply chain problems will become even more apparent in certain sectors such as chip manufacturing and all the technological devices that depend on such. I just purchased a vehicle and the inventory was extremely small because of these chips.
The US dollar will not hyperinflate, but will continue to accelerate in it’s inflation. It’s the least worst fiat currency and as such has shown some strength recently.
More of the same…until the time is ready for it to pop. Right now, I feel like the cyber pandemic is likely the engineered pin that pops the balloon for both the collapse and demolition, but again need to do more research on the topic.
And I feel like this is most likely coming when the pushback is winning, because that makes sense too.
Understand also that such an event opens up the money printing spigot even more widely open.
Cryptocurrency
I’ve still got two more articles on cryptocurrency and various scenarios and narratives coming up, hopefully in January. Those will explore some of these ideas further.
I do think there’s more blue-sky ahead though we haven’t yet hit the bottom of this sideways/down leg. After that, I am undecided if it will be a quick run up and a blow-off top before it collapses.
I’ll be looking at the following signs for a blow-off top encroaching:
Retail flowing in from A) tweaks in social media algorithms showing social metrics and B) even mainstream news coverage
Or it may just slowly grind higher over time, with some dips and sideways action along the way. Again, that depends on larger economic events. You can bet I’ll be watching those indicators like a hawk.
Either way, I’m still heavily positioned in the space though there’s a good chance I won’t be so heavily invested come 2022’s end. You’ve got to have an Exit Plan! (I discuss my 5-prong exit strategy as one of the bonuses in the Crash Course.)
Certain sectors such as crypto-gaming are going to do particularly well. (I just covered my top pick for this in my Crypto Conspiracy membership.)
Some of the alternative Layer 1’s will continue to do well. Terra (LUNA) continues to impress me, though I feel that Ethereum (ETH) and it’s Layer 2’s are likely to have another big opportunity to shine too around mid-2022.
I predict we’ll see at least another country or two follow suit from El Salvador in adoption of Bitcoin.
We’ll definitely see more cities, states and various places make steps towards using it as a parallel currency.
Regarding the SEC and regulation of crypto, this will occur to some degree in 2022. It’s going to be restricting in some way, compared to other countries, thus forcing more talent and innovation out. But it will not cripple the industry. I don’t think they’ll go that far, after all their control-grid rides on many of the same rails.
Speaking of control grids, China is rolling out their CBDC early in 2022, surrounding the Winter Olympics. There are tons of other CBDC experiments going on that are worth watching. The pace of CBDC’s is going to accelerate.
I think a Tether (USDT) collapse could damage the overall crypto market and allow the bankers and regulators to step in saying this is why you need us. I see that as on-the-table. However, I also don’t know if the bankers, outside of China, are ready to step in with their solutions just yet either.
What head of the SEC Gary Gensler (aka Goldman Gary) is doing seems mostly to be playing a delay game. Delay for what? Until they are ready?
Obviously, any sort of cyber pandemic could play into crypto and/or disintegrate these markets in a big way.
Ghislaine Maxwell
I wrote this last week while working on the article, “She will be found guilty.” I didn’t realize the verdict would come in before the article was out. And indeed she has, on five of six counts. This will be appealed of course.
But the important thing to the powers-that-be is that she’s the scapegoat and this case goes no further beyond her.
And yet there will be continued slow moving push towards just that.
The Epstein saga is important because it shows just how high such things go (royalty, presidents, businessmen and intelligence agencies), how long they can go on (Epstein was reported to the FBI back in the 90’s), and the extent of cover-up involved (Epstein didn’t kill himself).
Eugenics and Genocide
Besides The Real Anthony Fauci, if you read one book about the pandemic, I would recommend Pseudo Pandemic: New Normal Technocracy by Iain Davis. You can download this free at his website.
While this drills into the details of inflated deaths and so much more, the best parts, in my opinion, cover the worldviews of eugenics, technocracy and the bigger picture of how all these current events fit together. Coming from the UK it also gives a greater perspective across the pond, compared to the USA.
Understanding eugenics is key to understand what we see going on.
The vaccine is killing some people. This certainly is a statistically small number, but it is happening nonetheless. (I personally know one person who died within two weeks after a shot. I also personally only know one person who has died of COVID, though I am unsure if he was vaccinated or not.)
You’ve probably seen athletes dropping dead on the field and the court. I wish this chart went back to 2020 to show the comparison, but you can see the baseline rate pretty much from the first months when the vaccine was just starting to rollout.
Some people are claiming that the shot is a death sentence, just delayed for most with prion disease or something like that. I don’t believe that is true overall, thankfully, but there is zero doubt it is for some.
Reducing population is the desire of some in power. That is clear. The evidence is out in the open if you simply look. This is not only done by the vaccine though.
What I didn’t see at the time was how it has dangerous side effects that may have been killing people in the hospitals where COVID would be blamed instead of the deadly drug. This is well covered in RFK Jr’s book.
I fear that Pfizer’s Paxlovid and Merck’s molnupiravir might end up doing the same. Think about this from the nefarious viewpoint. What if you could make money killing people, while being able to blame the deaths on the disease which generates more fear? It’s evil genius. And it’s not just today. AZT during AIDS was exactly that.
These vaccines likely are going to render many sterile. Miscarriage rates are up and IVF clinics are reporting problems. There is a history of sterility vaccines being worked on, again covered well in RFK Jr’s book. The long tail of seeing vaccines as causative means that most people will miss it.
But the big killers across time have always been starvation and war. If the economic collapse occurs in 2022, there will be the former. If the revolution really ramps up we’ve got to be careful of the latter.
These stats are hard to get, and not fun to think about, but my prediction is more overall death in 2022 than 2021. Just like there were more COVID deaths in 2021, despite the vaccine, then in 2020 when there was no vaccine. (Of course, this is the unvaccinated people’s fault, not the failure of the vaccine say the cognitively dissonant.)
Governments are going to shift more totalitarian by necessity.
Courage and pushback will grow.
Revolutions are going to start.
Wargamers going to rollout the next big real thing.
Economics going to inflate and eventually collapse.
And eugenicists gonna genocide.
Despite all this, I think 2022 will be a good year.
Forcing into the open the batshit craziness and totalitarian nature is necessary for the cleansing that must be done. It’s going to be a rough ride but that is the nature of a healing crisis.
Feel free to agree or disagree or add your own prognostications in the comments below.
This is Chapter 21 of my new book, working title “The Industry Playbook: Corporate Cartels, Corruption and Crimes Against Humanity” that is being published online chapter by chapter.
If it weren’t for whistleblowers, we may never had learned the truth about Big Tobacco. Legally, a whistleblower is an insider of a business or political body that reveals crime. In the popular culture, it has come to mean any insider that shows wrongdoing whether illegal or just immoral. Big Tobacco had many whistleblowers over the years.
James Mold was a research scientist at Liggett. He had worked on the XA cigarette which was designed to be safer. As one of the first whistleblowers to come out, a deposition showed him testifying that Liggett had suppressed this safer cigarette even though it worked. Why? To roll out a safer cigarette would be to acknowledge the truth about the lack of safety of their other products.
Because of the size of the companies that make up Big Tobacco it is not like any one whistleblower can reveal the whole truth. Instead, each one may just reveal certain documents, one piece of the puzzle.
In February 1994, ABC’s Day One news program featured an anonymous whistle blower nicknamed “Deep Cough” from R.J. Reynolds. He revealed that tobacco companies knowingly added more nicotine to cigarettes to increase addictiveness.
It was this that got the attention of the FDA and Congress. During this program, former Surgeon General Everett Koop said, “I would think that if I were the administrator of FDA and I learned that nicotine was being added to cigarettes to increase the amount of nicotine present that I would view that cigarette as a delivery device for the use of nicotine which is, under ordinary circumstances, a prescription drug. And I would think that demanded regulation.”
Merrell Williams was a paralegal at Wyatt, Tarrant & Combs who had been working for Brown & Williamson from 1988 to 1992 when he was laid off. He went through quintuple bypass surgery, likely a result of being a lifelong smoker. He would go on to become a whistleblower revealing a treasure trove of documents, more than 4,000 pages containing damning materials, from Brown & Williamson. And this was not easy to do.
Brandt writes, “Williams and [his attorney] Scruggs had each pushed the margins of law and ethics in their efforts to get the [documents] into the public domain…They had conspired to break a remarkable conspiracy…In retrospect, the documents might very well have remained locked within the fortress of Big Tobacco; so much of what we have come to know about the history of the tobacco industry might have remained cloaked by attorney-client privilege.”
In 1994, The New York Times published “Tobacco Company Was Silent on Hazards” which featured some of the leaked documents from Merrell Williams. This news piece said, “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.”
As a result of this, the following month, a series of five peer-reviewed articles appear in JAMA detailing what Big Tobacco knew and did. The whistleblower leaks helped to bolster scientific fact.
Brown & Williamson senior research scientist Jeffrey Wigand became a principal informant to the FDA. He shared nicotine delivery was enhanced with the use of ammonia-based compounds. He shared how different tobacco plants were blended together to ensure high enough nicotine content. He even shared how genetic engineering was being used to increase nicotine levels.
In August 1995, Wigand was interviewed by Mike Wallace for CBS’ 60 Minutes. Unfortunately, Big Tobacco was able to put tremendous pressure on CBS not to air this. In October, CBS decided to cancel the 60 Minutes broadcast featuring Wigand. Daniel Schoor of CBS said, “The tobacco industry…has apparently settled on the threat of lawsuit as a key weapon in its defense against an increasingly unfavorable press. “
But more leaking helped this to get this story out. In 1996, CBS’ Wigand interview got leaked to the New York Daily News and Wall Street Journal which published parts of the transcript. With the threat of legal action reduced 60 Minutes issues a revised version of its original story. You can watch that here.
This story is beautifully told by the movie, The Insider. This features Jeffrey Wigand, played by Russell Crowe and 60 Minutes producer Lowell Bergman, played by Al Pacino. This story not only covers the threats and smearing that comes with being a whistleblower, but a look at the threats that come with daring to cover the truth in a news program.
This story fairly accurately portrays just how close Big Tobacco came to stopping the revelations of Wigand through their multi-pronged attack.
There were plenty of others. Some Philip Morris scientist whistleblowers included William Farone, Victor DeNoble, and Paul Mele.
While most of the whistleblowers were scientists, we do see others involved, such as the paralegal Williams. We can even see a CEO step into this role.
Bennett LeBow, CEO of the Liggett Group, was a leverage buyout entrepreneur. In other words, he didn’t rise up withing Big Tobacco like other executives did. He took a different track than the rest of Big Tobacco, including settling cases with the states while other tobacco companies fought against them.
LeBow signed an agreement for immunity in exchange for turning over Liggett and other company documents. He even publicly admitted tobacco caused cancer and that companies had knowingly marketed to children. It is telling to contrast this position to that of every other tobacco CEO.
We can see that whistleblowers were many of the key positions in the fight against Big Tobacco regarding science, but even more so in the courts and the courts of public opinion, mediated primarily through journalists.
We know about these examples because Big Tobacco wasn’t able to stop them. Unfortunately, there is a chilling thought about all this. How many would-be whistleblowers that were successfully stopped by Big Tobacco’s reach when they saw what Wigand and others went through?
Key Takeaways on Whistleblowers and the Media
Several whistleblowers were the ones to reveal the science that Big Tobacco kept under lock and key, including how they added nicotine to cigarettes, had made a safer cigarette and more.
Getting internal documents into the public domain was key to having the mass media give them coverage further getting the information out to the public.
Even a CEO could act as a whistleblower, working in opposition to the rest of Big Tobacco.
Big Tobacco would pull out every stop to dissuade and silence whistleblowers and stop them from being able to get favorable coverage in the news. While they were unsuccessful with those detailed in this chapter, there may be many more we don’t know about where they were successful for one reason or another.
Please leave any comments or questions below. Feel free to share it with anyone you’d like.
Anything I put in quotes and italics here, is quoting myself from that article. Let’s dive in…
“COVID will peak in threat towards the end of this winter.” This was in reference to the 2020-21 winter season. That was accurate.
“[T]hings will get better come springtime. Summer will almost be normal in many places.” Remember when we were allowed to remove our masks? We were finally getting back to normal, but of course, if you’re following what is going on, you knew that was temporary.
“Of course, the vaccines will be congratulated for their early successes.” Check!
“COVID will come back with a vengeance next Winter (‘21-’22). It will probably mutate, or so they’ll say.” I didn’t predict it would be named Omicron, but we’re just getting started with this.
I did not see the spike that would happen in late Summer, but otherwise pretty spot on.
“When supply [of vaccines] is greater than demand, they’ll need to amp up demand. Understand what that means. I will not demand it, but lots of people will be demanding that I get it.” Check!
“The good news is you probably won’t be forced. Woohoo! You’ll just be coerced, coaxed and threatened in a thousand different ways. Booooo!” Check! I was right in that they haven’t yet got to the forced injection stage yet, but they’ve thrown everything else at us.
“How many will get vaccinated just so they aren’t inconvenienced? So they can travel? So they can go to a concert? So they can receive Social Security or be able to buy groceries? Why do so many think the latter would just be impossible? How many “impossible” things happened in 2020?” Every single one of these things is happening in some places.
“I expect to be banned from Facebook and Instagram in the coming year!” Didn’t quite get this. I guess I failed to be ballsy enough. I did have some comments I wasn’t allowed to post though.
“The censorship noose will get that much tighter throughout 2021. The mainstream news will become that much more fake in 2021. Cancel culture will grow.” Check, check and check.
(Another way to see this is two of the three Youtube videos I posted on the article last year are no longer available. In fact my blog is just full of missing Youtube videos at this point, which is why I’m using alternative platforms much more now.)
“From the stuff I have seen, this does look like a stolen election…and they’re going to get away with it.” IF you believe in the former, then a big check on the latter.
“My guess is that Kamala Harris assumes control within the first year or two.” There’s still time for this, but it wasn’t this year.
“A Qanon Terrorist Plot… This movement could be infiltrated and helped along by agent provocateurs.” Partial check. To be honest I did expect something bigger than the January 6thprotest insurrection. Not much actually happened there but this was touted as worse than 9/11 by some. Some of the protestors involved are still being detained!
The narrative surrounding this is still being pushed hard. (Watch out for one year anniversary news coverage.) It shows the continual rollup of conservative, racist, antivaxxer, conspiracy theorist narratives.
“Some sort of terrorist attack, physical or cyber, is very likely in 2021. Even multiple different events.” There were definitely some hacks, but I’ll overall say my prediction was off on this.
It’s easy to say that this is still coming, and in fact I’m going to do just that, but there’s an investing phrase that “early = wrong”, that I’ll stick to in critiquing myself. Largely missed here.
I unfortunately had some life situations come up so I was unable to finish the part two of my predictions. ‘Twas a shame as I had in my draft for part two “Cryptocurrencies Much higher”. Would have been nice to let you know about that as the bull market was just starting, earlier than I actually started focusing on the subject!
August was a time when the market was still going down/sideways after the May crash. (Didn’t see that one coming.) In this article I said “I do agree that these profits will NOT always exist, but they will continue for the foreseeable future…Here’s what I see as the most likely scenario. Crypto is going to go up like crazy one more time. Likely, it’ll make the last rush seem like child’s play.”
This is partially right. We did have another wave up to all-time highs. But I was partially wrong. It wasn’t that much stronger than the previous one. It also hasn’t led to the crash. In other words it’s my prediction that there is more upside ahead.
How do you rate my predictions? Give me an A-F grade as if this was school. I know what I would give myself, but don’t want to sway your decision. So please leave a comment with your grade, and perhaps why.
Secondly, I’m going to do predictions for 2022 as well.
Obviously, I’ll be covering these areas, but is there any other areas or particular things you’d like me to make predictions on?
This is Chapter 20 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 is the beginning of Part 2 – Breaking Free of Big Tobacco.
In the previous part, we detailed the many strategies from the Tobacco Playbook. I contend that overall Big Tobacco did win the overall war. After all, they’re still around and still very profitable. But without a doubt, they did lose some key battles especially within the USA. How did this occur? In this section I detail out four specific areas.
Let me state that the war cannot be won by science alone. While that piece is important and was largely the reason for the war in the first place, that’s just a starting point.
Beyond science, it is through the methods described herein that the dangers became publicly known and widely accepted.
Whistleblowers and Media Coverage
Discovery & Litigation
Real Grassroots Organization
Culture Shift
The foregoing chapters explain what we the people were up against when it came to Big Tobacco. It explains the many strategies and tactics inside of the Industry Playbook that are used to promote and protect profits, even at the cost of human lives.
Awareness of these tactics is useful for you personally. Collectively, understanding what led to that success is critical. Again, it is not just so that we understand what happened in Big Tobacco, but we can collectively aim at the same things against those that commit crimes against humanity today while utilizing the Industry Playbook all the same.
This is broken up over four sections.
Whistleblowers are instrumental. These are the insider’s that leak documentation or share what is really going on. Generally, without whistleblowers, there is no breaking free. Because of the power of insiders, you must understand the smear campaigns and worse that comes from Big Tobacco against them. This includes not just whistleblowers but how it effectively stops would-be whistleblowers. We’ll see the role that whistleblowers play, particular with their interfacing with the media.
While the justice system is not without its flaws and corruption, it may be the least economically influenced of the three branches of government in the USA! The legal process allows for discovery and litigation in a process that was essential for these truths coming to light. The courts are where so many battles were fought. While Big Tobacco had total victory for a long time, this eventually did shift. With each shift cracks in their defenses grew and grew. As you’ll see, it was the discovery of internal documents that proved Big Tobacco’s crimes for the world to see.
We’ve seen how Big Tobacco captured politics to work in its favor. However, especially on a real grassroots and local level, the battles were easier to fight by the people, instituting change on this smaller but still immensely useful level.
Ultimately, it was the science, the whistleblowers, and the court cases predominately that led to a cultural shift. This is the most important step, yet in many ways the most difficult one to achieve. The fact is that people could withdraw their funding from any company, and it would collapse quickly. But getting to that mass action is not easy, so how a culture shifts is analyzed here.
These factors as well as additional smaller ones are explored in the following chapters. These lessons from history with Big Tobacco act as our starter ground for diving in even deeper in Part 7 – The People’s Playbook with other industries and more contemporary examples.
Key Takeaways on Introduction to Breaking Free
Correct and accurate science is insufficient to overcome the power of industry. While it is crucial, it is not enough without other levers to get it out in the open.
Whistleblowers are the key part of revelation as these insider’s come from the industry itself to show wrongdoing. Thus, bringing to light their information can be enough to turn the tide of war. And for this reason, industry uses many strategies to overcome any would-be whistleblower.
The discovery process in litigation is crucial for showing the lies of industry. While their PR spin says one thing, internal documentation can show what they knew when.
The political power of industry can be immense able to capture the highest levels. Ironically, it is the local level of politics that becomes that much more difficult to sway showing the real grassroots organization can be successful.
Ultimately, this is a culture war. Every strategy and tactic can shift the dominant viewpoint of the culture which can best be seen by zooming out over the arc of history.
Please leave any comments or questions below. Feel free to share it with anyone you’d like.
