Here are the show notes for Chief Influence of Justice - Rounding the News, livestreamed on March 17, 2023. Watch the episode on the following platforms:

• Locals: https://roundingtheearth.locals.com/post/3688939/chief-influence-of-justice-rounding-the-news
• Rumble: 
  
• Rokfin: https://rokfin.com/stream/31627/Chief-Influence-of-Justice--Rounding-the-News
• Odysee: https://odysee.com/@RoundingtheEarth:8/chief-influence-of-justice:1
• BitChute:
  
  
• Brighteon: https://www.brighteon.com/ad84ec9d-714e-4970-bab3-c3bd8c48c9ea
• CloutHub: https://clouthub.com/v/3c5baa61-4f20-4524-b1b5-22a92cad6a6a
• Facebook: https://fb.watch/jkxQ4mLiV0/
• Archive.org: https://archive.org/details/chief-influence-of-justice-rounding-the-news

You can also listen to the audio podcast here:

Here are the show notes for Limited Hangout Files - Rounding the News, livestreamed on March 10, 2023. Watch the episode on the following platforms:

• Locals: https://roundingtheearth.locals.com/post/3650286/limited-hangout-files-rounding-the-news
• Rumble: 
  
• Rokfin: https://rokfin.com/stream/31280/Limited-Hangout-Files–Rounding-the-News
• Odysee: https://odysee.com/@RoundingtheEarth:8/limited-hangout-files:8
• BitChute:
  
  
• Brighteon: coming soon
• CloutHub: https://clouthub.com/v/78793b2e-a362-4b3d-8d9b-6b38d36cf71d
• Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/100089876748410/videos/2486304581539664
• Twitter: https://twitter.com/RoundEarthClub/status/1634283460520185857
• Archive.org: https://archive.org/details/limited-hangout-files-rounding-the-news

You can also listen to the audio podcast here:

• RSS.com: https://rss.com/podcasts/roundingtheearth/860939/
• Apple Podcasts: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/limited-hangout-files-rounding-the-news/id1631953407?i=1000603652660
• Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/episode/0hUfz0Gxoiiw8MtBFYtdtM
• SoundCloud: https://on.soundcloud.com/HdLeW
• Amazon Music: https://music.amazon.com/podcasts/3a58411a-b7c4-477b-af0a-b75a52a64831/episodes/6733fbbd-f46c-4d6b-b139-979d4c9fe316/rounding-the-earth-limited-hangout-files—rounding-the-news
• Audible: coming soon
• TuneIn: http://tun.in/tr2qD3
• Stitcher: https://www.stitcher.com/show/rounding-the-earth/episode/limited-hangout-files-rounding-the-news-300426194

 

Limited Hangout Files

Is anyone else picking up on a trend?

On February 28, British new outlet The Daily Telegraph kicked off a new series of articles titled “The Lockdown Files”. The series is centred around a set of 100,000+ WhatsApp messages provided to the Telegraph, purporting to demonstrate the many failures of key British Government officials during the course of the COVID-19 era — in particular, former Health Secretary Matt Hancock and Chief Scientific Adviser Chris Witty.

The supposed revelations are exciting, affirming the emerging consensus that the response to the declared pandemic caused far more harm than good. From the government’s use of “nudge” units to govern by fear, to the outright rejection of evidence-based scientific advice, to conflicts of interest linking together bureaucrats and lobbyists, the Lockdown Files have it all. Topped off, of course, with nods to sex scandals and Bill Gates.

Despite the appearance of a full-on revelation of wrongdoing, The Lockdown Files are far from a tell-all exposé. In fact, I am concerned that behind the flashy headlines lies an effort to misdirect and mislead believers and dissidents alike.

Defining a Limited Hangout

It goes without saying that the general public is much more openminded to the idea that the last few years have not only resulted in policy decisions that didn’t work for their stated purpose, but actually caused significant harm. Certain topics are starting to seep into mainstream publications, including the reality that all-cause mortality is soaring in countries all around the world — in other words, more people are dying from all causes, including so-called “COVID-19”, after COVID-19 measures were implemented in 2020.

Of course, few of them are outright blaming pandemic policies. Specifically, there is a long list of reasons why decision-makers at all levels would aggressively want to redirect focus away from the ever-clearer reality that all available COVID-19 vaccines are injuring and killing people en masse. The legal and spiritual liability on those who promoted, coerced and forced needles into arms is immense and is increasingly difficult to avoid. As such, it’s no surprise that as news of vaccine injury and death continues to spread, so too will stories focusing on other causes that are equally or less likely to explain the global state of affairs. In the end, it was the totality of institutional actions that led to this widespread harm, and all must be examined with precision and depth for accountability to be possible. Nothing must be left out.

And as the reality of the illness and death worldwide continues to take hold in the public consciousness, “we don’t know” will quickly lose its validity as an explanation.

Here are a few examples:

• March 7, 2023: Nova Scotia tight-lipped about spike in deaths - CBC News

• February 9, 2023: ‘Severely damaged’ and abandoned: Australian victims of COVID-19 vaccine injuries feel they are ‘not being heard’ by Australian Government - Sky News

• November 7, 2022: Child speech delays increase following lockdowns - BBC News

With this in mind, let’s examine The Lockdown Files.

The Lockdown Files

On February 28, 2023, the first article in The Lockdown Files was published. Titled “The Lockdown Files: How WhatsApp messages offer an unprecedented view of government failings,” the Telegraph article explained that the revelations to follow “will help people form their own conclusions about what the UK went through in the darkest days of the pandemic.”

No author was listed on the debut article. In fact, the vast majority of articles in the series would be credited to the pseudonymous “Lockdown Files Team” with accompanying commentary inserted as opinion pieces by Telegraph writers, columnists and editors.

One of the 12 articles published on Day 1 was titled “I had to release Matt Hancock’s Covid WhatsApp messages to avoid a whitewash”, written by Isabel Oakeshott, the source of the “leaked” communications. She explains that she was provided copies of the 100,000 messages by Matt Hancock himself while the two collaborated on writing his memoir, titled The Pandemic Diaries. Specifically, she says that Hancock “downloaded the records from his phone and shared them with various people” following his June 2021 resignation from government. Hancock publicly confirmed this, stating they had “worked closely together for more than a year on [his] book, based on legal confidentiality and a process approved by the Cabinet Office.”

Oakeshott immediately defended her decision to provide copies of these confidential messages to The Telegraph, expressing concern that the United Kingdom’s “Covid Inquiry” would “become a colossal whitewash.” After all, the inquiry had already spent nearly two years and tens of millions of pounds in taxpayer money, and has not yet even started in earnest.

In order to fast-track the process, Oakeshott decided it would be the most ethical choice to tap The Telegraph to help her get what she feels is the real story to the public.

Format matters

This brings us to a very important question: if Oakeshott’s mission was full disclosure of the dark inner workings of the UK government’s COVID-19 decision-making, then why did she decide to selectively release the messages one-by-one through a third party news organization? Why introduce a gatekeeper into the process, when you’re claiming to be removing the gatekeeper from the equation?

In her article published in the British Medical Journal, writer Jacqui Wise points out that “Oakeshott has said she chose [The Telegraph] because of its anti-lockdown stance.”

 Surely she could have seen this coming as a criticism, and combatted it by inviting at least one so-called “pro-lockdown” outlet to balance out the public perception of Oakeshott’s good intentions of unbiased, transparent revelations of the truth. As noted in the BMJ article, “The BMJ, like other media outlets, has not seen or independently verified the messages.”

It gets even more suspect when you realize that so far, no actual WhatsApp messages have been produced.

Hear me out for a second on this.

We’re told that Hancock downloaded the 100,000 WhatsApp messages from his phone. There are a few ways for him to have done this. As outlined by this explainer published by data storage service Backblaze, there is an Export Chat feature that results in messages in .txt format, along with accompanying media files in their own specific format (.jpg, .mov, .mp4, .gif, and so on).

Assuming Hancock wasn’t sending and receiving hundreds or thousands of videos or high-quality pictures, the resulting folder would be very small and easy to share, as he did with Oakeshott and others — especially when compressed into a .zip archive, which is a required step depending on how the files were shared. Alternatively, they may have been stored on a Google Drive or Dropbox account, reducing the need to repeatedly upload and download copies of the whole archive.

Here’s what I’m getting at: it would be very easy to include copies of the messages in their original format, complete with metadata for verifiability, to substantiate The Telegraph’s reporting. Why are they not doing this? If they are taking advantage of the trove to squeeze as much attention as possible, they could opt to release one message at a time as they are revealed in a given article.

If not this specific process, a near equivalent necessarily took place. At least for Android phones, message backups are stored in a folder called “Databases”, as shown on WhatsApp’s own website:

The database would need to be loaded up inside WhatsApp in order to actually read the messages, an option available to the general public and journalists alike. It seems to me less likely that Hancock would have shared the messages in this clunkier format, but even if it is the case that he did, the Database folder would still be easily published for the public to review and independently verify as real.

Your next thought might be: “But Liam, they are releasing the messages! Even better; they’re releasing screenshots, which could only have been taken by Hancock’s phone (or the recipient).” Actually, that’s not even true. Think about how overwhelmingly laborious it would be to take individual screenshots of every single message, let alone the limitations that would place on what else could be seen onscreen for context. It’s not a reasonable premise, and is logically baseless to think that Hancock would even try to sit down and take hundreds of thousands of screenshots as a backup, whether or not he intended to then hand them out to journalists. It would be far more reasonable to suggest he had captured screenshots of specific messages that he considered particularly notable — heck, I do that in the moment sometimes, with no specific intention to store or distribute them. But that’s not what we’re being told happened. We are told that 100,000 WhatsApp messages were downloaded from Hancock’s phone, which necessarily were not in the form of “images” generated by screenshots.

So why do we instinctually think of them as screenshots? Let’s take a closer look at the “messages” as they appear in The Telegraph articles.

The above image is a screenshot taken by me from the March 9 article titled “Ministers feared 'racist' label if they spoke about Covid spread”. For the purposes of this demonstration, you'll need to open up the article on your own computer (a smartphone should still work, but will be more finicky).

On first glance, the WhatsApp message thread looks like it was taken straight from Hancock’s phone, or perhaps his iPad or laptop (due to the width). But with the benefit of four seconds of thought, the reality begins to set in. Are we supposed to believe that those profile pictures are the photos selected by Hancock and/or Nadine Dorries? Look closely at Hancock’s face.

From a distance, he’s not exactly portraying a sympathetic character, though a larger version of the same photo looks much more like a press shot. A reverse image search reveals that the photo has been used for a handful of news pieces starting with a March 31, 2020 BBC article about Hancock recovering from a “mild” case of COVID-19.

I suppose the implication here is that Hancock admired the Reuters-attributed picture so much that he decided to set it as his WhatsApp profile picture. Similar results are found by repeating the process for Dorries.

Alas, The Telegraph is not actually even pretending these are screenshots. If you look even closer, the messages are presented in a composite format of text, images, and interactive annotations.

In this image, I scrolled my cursor over the highlighted “Andy Burnham” text, which reveals an annotation explaining who Burnham is (the Mayor of Greater Manchester). Needless to say, these are useful elements that were added by The Telegraph. Hovering over the “i” icon beside a message results in a similar pop-up annotation, this time offering an interpretation of the message as opposed to adding simple biographic context.

My point is this: these are not the original messages, nor are they screenshots of the original messages. They are editorialized representations of .txt files, which were backed up and then exported from Hancock’s phone for easy distribution in bulk.

If this is such a monumental story, the effects of which are supposedly intended to dramatically alter the course of the United Kingdom’s post-COVID-19 inquiry in the court of public opinion, then why fail to provide the evidence required to independently verify the basis of the reporting?

Even if my wish were granted and the underlying messages were disclosed along with their accompanying articles, there’s still the matter of the selective disclosures. A narrative is being written by the team behind The Lockdown Files, and it is a biased one. It’s not possible to avoid gatekeeping, as the individual or collective bias of The Telegraph team working on the articles will result in some material being withheld so as to best support whichever “truth” they’re trying to architect — for better or worse.

What is being said?

At this point, I can confidently say that I feel it’s most likely that The Lockdown Files are an attempted “limited hangout” operation. It is an institutional campaign by all accounts; the WhatsApp messages were provided by a representative of the institution to an number of institutionally-sanctioned co-authors, who then provided those messages to an institutional media organization. At no point in this process were the messages “leaked”, and no “whistleblower” makes an appearance. These words are misleading, and do not represent the chain of events.

Heck, The Lockdown Files already has its own Wikipedia page. It doesn’t get much more institutionally-endorsed than that, especially in the context of COVID-19.

With that in mind, let’s summarize some of the primary “revelations” from The Lockdown Files.

Harm to elderly long-term care residents

In an article titled “Far from a ‘protective ring’, WhatsApp messages show care homes were cast adrift”, Hancock is accused of putting senior citizens in danger by failing to make COVID-19 tests mandatory for all entering long-term care facilities.

This "widely criticised policy was blamed for care homes accounting for roughly half of all excess deaths (25,374) between March 7 and Sept 18 last year, according to the Office for National Statistics (ONS), as coronavirus ripped through facilities caring for 400,000 residents in England.

All of this harm is blamed squarely on community transmission of SARS-CoV-2, which apparently would have been prevented if mandatory testing was, in fact, implemented. The article’s entire premise relies on the notion that diagnostic testing ever did, or ever could, provide any meaningful information with which to determine whether or not someone is contagious with a disease-causing virus.

It also entirely fails to mention the plethora of other reasons long-term care residents were dying in large numbers in 2020, not the least of which is the widespread use of “end-of-life” care to treat patients that tested positive for SARS-CoV-2. What I would have expected The Telegraph to cover is the record-breaking increase in the use of powerful sedatives including midazolam and morphine, both of which depress breathing and essentially resulted in the systemic euthanizing of senior citizens.

Incredibly, there were even calls to loosen regulations to allow morphine to be deployed in even greater quantities for "relaxing patients who have acute shortness of breath."

A second article describes Hancock’s concern that increasing the rate of testing at nursing homes would “get in the way of actually fulfilling the capacity in testing” — or, as The Telegraph put it, “put his personal goal in jeopardy.” 

Heaven forbid the campaign operate within its capacity to succeed!

• February 28, 2023: The leaked WhatsApp messages that expose how Britain’s elderly were failed on Covid

• February 28, 2023: I want to hit my target, Matt Hancock said as he called in a favour from George Osborne

• February 28, 2023: The Lockdown Files: Matt Hancock rejected expert advice on care home testing, WhatsApp messages reveal

This was compounded by facilities that chose not to subject staff to testing, apparently out of concern they would be forced to operate with even less staff than their already-thin roster.

• March 1, 2023: Care homes refused to test staff they feared had Covid

Granted, a later article correctly emphasizes the “inhumane” decision to prevent friends and family from visiting care home residents. This is reminiscent of what my friend 

here in British Columbia, Canada. Many elderly residents suffered due to these policies with no reason whatsoever to believe they would help. Former U.K. First Lady Rachel Johnson penned a guest piece for The Lockdown Files (yes, you read that right) sharing her mother’s own experience in “care home prison.”

• February 28, 2023: Matt Hancock was told care home Covid rules were ‘inhumane’ – but kept them

Discussion of senior citizens and long-term care facilities essentially ended after March 2, moving on to more sensational matters.

Preferential treatment for government officials

There are numerous examples provided of elected officials and bureaucrats receiving preferential treatment, “unfairly” getting a step up in the pandemic.

On what exactly? Testing.

• February 28, 2023: Jacob Rees-Mogg's child got Covid test couriered to family home during huge shortage

Then there was the “Partygate” incident - or rather, a similar incident recounting government officials getting together to party while regular citizens were forced to stay isolated.

The country’s “Quarantine Hotels” were a source of humour for Hancock and Permanent Secretary Simon Case.

Here are several more examples of the COVID chiefs enjoying themselves:

• March 2, 2023: Top mandarin mocked holidaymakers ‘locked up’ in Covid quarantine hotel rooms

• March 3, 2023: I broke the lockdown rules – and pipsqueak Matt Hancock couldn’t stop me by Nigel Farage

• March 3, 2023: Matt Hancock said worst he and Gina could be accused of was kissing ‘before they legalised hugs’

• March 5, 2023: Matt Hancock covered up inviting Gina Coladangelo to G7 dinners

Physical and psychological health damage from “shielding” policies

And yes, there is even mention of the harms caused by “shielding policies” - another way of describing “social distancing” or “lockdown” policies.

• March 1, 2023: Whitty and Vallance raised concerns about shielding - yet it remained for months

This is just a sampling of the dozen or so topics covered by The Lockdown Files. It is by no means exhaustive, but I have attempted to at least capture the headlines and archived versions of the articles as they appear daily; these can be seen on the Campfire Wiki on the page titled “Lockdown Files”.

The Telegraph themselves are also publishing all of the Lockdown Files articles on a special page for the series, which you can keep track of here.

What is the outcome?

Just as with our discussion of Canada’s Political Chaos last week, we must ask, qui bono? Who benefits from the selective release of these messages and the narrative architected out of it? Furthermore, what are the stated objectives of the mission?

We already know that The Telegraph’s source, Isabel Oakeshott, wants to sway public opinion to expedite the UK’s Covid Inquiry. But the Lockdown Files are beginning to also include headlines such as the following:

• March 7, 2023: Matt Hancock should be arrested for wilful misconduct in public office by Allison Pearson

• March 9, 2023: No 10 to consider Wuhan leak theory after backlash to 'entirely coincidental' remark

In other words, Matt Hancock is absolutely being painted as the patsy to be taken down in some form or another, perhaps even put in jail. Don’t get me wrong; I agree that Hancock is to blame for his actions, assuming it can be demonstrated that they resulted in harm (which is essentially a given). But to put the blame squarely and solely on him is absurd and transparently dumb.

Then there’s the matter of the “lab leak”, which the British Government under Prime Minister Rishi Sunak is apparently starting to take seriously just now. As my friend Jonathan Couey commented yesterday during his livestream of the U.S. Congress’ Select Subcommittee on the Coronavirus Pandemic, this comes three years after critical thinking individuals like him were warning of the possibility of laboratory manipulation, and many months after those same people went one step further to warn that the “lab leak” premise was fundamentally impossible, arguing instead that the “lab leak vs. natural spillover” dichotomy is a trap that dooms humanity to biosecurity tyranny in either case. How convenient that the mainstream narrative is now catching up.

It’s a trap: COVID-19 variant “deployed”

Speaking of traps, I must bring up an example of how the Lockdown Files have already shown themselves able to trip up highly intelligent, critical thinking people.

On March 4, an article was published titled “‘Project Fear’ authors discussed when to ‘deploy’ new Covid variant”. The headline is deceptive, and so is the body of the article. It reads:

The following day, Rounding the Earth’s own Mathew Crawford posted the following on Twitter:

I had some questions.

Others we know did, too.

The problem, as far as I see it, is that nothing in the article actually indicates, or even suggests, that there was any sort of “release” of anything — other than propaganda. However, I don’t blame Mathew for jumping from A to Z, filling in gaps with what is the most likely scenario based on his research outside of the Twitter thread. The result of this article is obviously that some people, like Mathew, will read this as a literal “deployment” of a new variant, rather than what the article actually says and provides as evidence, which is that the British Government sought to “deploy” propaganda to frighten to public into compliance.

Gain-of-function viruses are not the threat to our humanity. Fear is.

I’m not trying to be hard on Mathew. On the other hand, he is a role model of mine and a mentor, and I won’t hesitate to point out when I think he’s making mistakes. I did it before when he began his Chaos Agents series, and I have since come around to believe that he was much closer to reality than I was. This is the scientific method, and I look forward to learning more about his Omicron hypothesis — whether or not this article has anything to do with it after all.

In the end, I ask every one to question: what other “Insert-noun-here Files” have we recently experienced, and did they too fail to provide the underlying evidence behind their explosive revelations? And if so, why are we not holding such outlets and journalists to the same high standard to which we hold those we disagree with?

Here are the show notes for Canada's Political Chaos - Rounding the News, livestreamed on March 3, 2023. Watch the episode on the following platforms:

• Locals: https://roundingtheearth.locals.com/post/3611898/canadas-political-chaos-rounding-the-news
• Rumble: 
  
• Rokfin: https://rokfin.com/post/126105/Canadas-Political-Chaos--Rounding-the-News
• Odysee: https://odysee.com/@RoundingtheEarth:8/canada's-political-chaos:9
• BitChute: 
  
  
• Brighteon: coming soon
• Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/100089876748410/videos/717030659964210
• CloutHub: https://clouthub.com/v/vhbZMh2c'

You can also listen to the audio podcast here:

• Apple Podcasts: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/canadas-political-chaos-rounding-the-news/id1631953407?i=1000602706927
• Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/episode/1th7AfJPb4nnbCZZqbiVyp
• Amazon Music: https://music.amazon.com/podcasts/3a58411a-b7c4-477b-af0a-b75a52a64831
• Audible: https://www.audible.ca/pd/Canadas-Political-Chaos-Rounding-the-News-Podcast/B0BXF14VY7?ref=a_pd_Roundi_c0_lAsin_0_0&pf_rd_p=ef8b1b21-74d0-4bb7-8c33-48388ec241ca
• TuneIn: http://tun.in/trTiJ7
• Stitcher: https://www.stitcher.com/show/rounding-the-earth/episode/canadas-political-chaos-rounding-the-news-300169798

 

Oral arguments on Pfizer’s motion to dismiss whistleblower lawsuit

On Wednesday, lawyers for Pfizer and two research contractors appeared in court to argue in favour of dismissing the landmark lawsuit brought against them alleging substantial misconduct during clinical trials for their COVID-19 genetic vaccine, BNT162b2.

The plaintiff in the case, Brook Jackson, filed the complaint after witnessing a series of critical flaws in how the Phase III clinical trial was being run at Ventavia Research Group, where she had been hired to oversee the conduct and activities of research staff. According to Jackson’s testimony at A Citizens’ Hearing in June 2022, Ventavia had enrolled more trial participants than their facilities could safely accommodate. “Pfizer was applying pressure on Ventavia to enrol more patients than they were capable of safely overseeing, despite being understaffed and lacking the infrastructure to conduct this type of study.”

Other issues included the inadvertent unblinding of participants, failure to maintain the integrity of trial data, and miscategorizing of adverse events observed during the trial. The explosive allegations were brought to the public in November 2021 through an investigative report published in the British Medical Journal by Paul Thacker.

Jackson filed a claim under the federal False Claims Act, a provision of law allowing citizens to seek legal action on behalf of the citizens of the United States. Otherwise known as a qui tam case, her claim accuses Pfizer, Ventavia and another contractor, ICON, of defrauding the U.S. government and the American people, given that the data from the Phase III clinical trial was subsequently used as the basis for awarding an Emergency Use Authorization for BNT162b2 in December 2020.

According to lead attorney Robert Barnes, oral arguments lasted more than three hours and did not immediately result in a ruling.

For those new to the case, Brook’s story can be explored further by watching her testimony at A Citizens’ Hearing. Mathew and I also had the pleasure of welcoming Brook and Warner Mendenhall, another attorney on the case, to one of our first round table discussions back in August 2022.

Finally, all of the court documents related to the case can be found on Brook’s website. We’ll be continuing to follow Brook and the case as it progresses!

NBC Journalist Placed on Ukrainian “Hit List” for Crimea Story

NBC News journalist Keir Simmons is facing alarming blowback after reporting that Crimean citizens consider themselves Russian rather than Ukrainian.

In his February 28 Nightly News report titled “A rare look inside Crimea, the territory illegally annexed by Russia in 2014”, Simmons interviews several residents on the ground who assert that Ukraine has no chance of reclaiming the region of Crimea.

Each person interviewed expresses that they are Russian, and support the military led by Russian President Vladimir Putin in their defense. On the other hand, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy has insisted Crimea will be retaken — so long as the United States and the North Atlantic Treaty Alliance Organization (NATO) provide Ukraine with “more powerful weapons.”

Formerly controlled by the modern nation of Ukraine, Crimea rejoined Russia in 2014 in a move characterized by the coalition of Western Nations as an illegal annexation. A referendum was held March 17, 2014 in which an overwhelming majority of respondents voted to rejoin Russia, though the process and results remain contested by Ukraine and its Western allies.

Following the NBC News report, Simmons was added to the highly controversial website Myrotvorets, described by the Kyiv Post as maintaining a list of “enemies of Ukraine”. As the Post explains, “[t]he website is widely recognized as tied to the law enforcement or security agencies, although none have ever admitted a connection.”

As pointed out by Max Blumenthal, editor of The Gray Zone, inclusion on this list has previously been tied to the targeted killings of Ukrainian journalist Oles Buzina and politician Oleg Kalashnikov, among others.

Others dismiss the characterization of Myrotvorets as a “kill list” to be “disinformation,” such as this writeup from DisinfoWatch, a "leading Canadian foreign disinformation monitoring and debunking platform":

Blumenthal inquired rhetorically on Twitter as to whether NBC News would highlight Simmons’ addition to the Myrotvorets website, or whether “press freedom” groups would denounce the action.

One woman in the NBC News feature offered some wisdom that I wish to emphasize: “We all pray to the same God. Why can’t we share bread?”

What Would Christine Anderson Do?

This was the question at the heart of a recent tour across Canada that led to a dramatic division among the nation’s Conservatives and their apolitical allies.

Context: Canada Experiments with Totalitarianism

Christine Anderson is a Member of European Parliament (MEP) from Germany, representing the Alternative für Deutschland (AfD) party, which translates to Alternative for Germany. She made international headlines back in March 2022 when she scolded Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau to his face for his unprecedented human rights violations during the COVID-19 crisis and his invocation of the Emergencies Act in response to the Freedom Convoy 2022 protest in Ottawa.

Anderson was joined by several other MEPs who confronted Trudeau and refused to give him an audience during his visit.

This understandably resonated with many Canadians, myself included, who found themselves singled out and oppressed on the basis of a personal, private medical decision. Trudeau employed rhetoric historically associated with totalitarian regimes, describing thousands of protesters representing millions of Canadians as “a fringe minority” with “unacceptable views.”

While seeking re-election in late 2021, he accused those who decided against receiving a COVID-19 genetic vaccine of being racist, misogynistic, anti-science extremists, openly inquiring as to whether the rest of Canada should "tolerate" these people.

It is vital to consider how alarmingly overt our Prime Minister was in his attempts at “othering” — historically seen as a dangerous step in the process of dehumanizing citizens of a totalitarian state. The Canadian Museum for Human Rights offers the following:

Contemporary discussion is correctly centred around the Holocaust, during which people were systematically eliminated based on all of the above-described attributes: ethnicity, skin colour, religion, gender and sexual orientation. Unfortunately, there are many who are deeply disinterested in considering the possibility that what is observable today can be in any way compared to the years leading up to the Holocaust, angrily dismissing such comparisons as disrespectful and insensitive.

I lost one of my oldest friends, Nathalie, when I spoke out in the summer of 2021 against a policy announced by the National Football League which encouraged teams to have “unvaccinated” football players wear yellow wristbands for easy identification. To me, this was as clear a parallel as we could ever get, and served no scientific or medical purpose whatsoever — other than to enforce the “othering” of a group artificially manufactured based on whether or not they had accepted a specific pharmaceutical intervention. I have no idea how anybody could have ever defended this, or failed to speak out against it.

The very next month, The Toronto Star ran a cover story that openly called for "the wilfully unvaccinated" to be allowed to die without any empathy or care from the "vaccinated":

Yes, that really happened. These are just a couple of examples of what we’ve been dealing with in Canada. 2021 was a dark year.

It will take me a lifetime to process.

Christine Comes to Canada

I am personal friends with at least one of the organizers of the tour, who I will not name for the sake of their privacy. I’ve heard about the tour since its early planning stages, and was excited to possibly join at the Calgary stop (which didn’t wind up being in the cards.)

Friday Morning Crisis

On Friday morning last week, I got a call from my friend who told me there was a rapidly unfolding public relations incident arising from a picture taken at a dinner during one of Anderson’s tour stops.

The picture itself is completely innocuous, capturing a friendly gathering at a restaurant. In the picture are one or two people that may be familiar to long-time Rounding the Earth podcast listeners, but most notable is the trio of people surrounding Christine Anderson: Colin Carrie, Leslyn Lewis and Dean Allison, all Members of Parliament representing the Conservative Party of Canada (CPC).

The Centre for Israel and Jewish Affairs (CIJA), self-described as “the advocacy agent of Jewish Federations across Canada,” published a message on Twitter expressing their deep "concern" that these MPs had met with Anderson, who they described as being "a member of the far-right German AFD Party known for Islamophobic and anti-immigrant views."

This was followed up by a number of scathing opinion pieces, doubling and tripling down on assertions that Anderson and her party evoked a form of modern Naziism. One of the first — if not the first — was the Toronto Sun, publishing a piece written by columnist Warren Kinsella with the headline “Conservative MPs wrong to meet with German extremist.”

Then, Pierre Poilievre, the recently-elected leader of the Conservative Party of Canada and the Official Opposition, issued his own statement condemning Anderson as being "vile" with "racist, hateful views."

Carrie, Allison and Lewis, coming under intense fire from both outside and inside their party, quickly released a statement claiming they were not aware of Anderson’s political views and had failed to conduct their usual due diligence in arranging a meeting with a foreign government representative.

At first, I was taken aback by this response. All three of these MPs have been champions of Canadians harmed by the federal government’s COVID-19 response, and have frequently gone out on a limb to ask hard questions others avoided confronting.

Colin Carrie, for example, brought to the House of Commons a question from constituents about the role of the World Economic Forum in Canadian politics following an unprecedented amount of scrutiny on the group, particularly Deputy Prime Minister Chrystia Freeland’s high-level position on the group’s Board of Trustees, and a resurfaced video of WEF founder Klaus Schwab boasting about having “penetrated the Cabinets” of Prime Minister Trudeau and other world leaders.

Leslyn Lewis ran against Pierre Poilievre for leadership of the CPC, using the opportunity to shine a spotlight on the highly-concerning "pandemic treaty" currently being finalized, which would offer the World Health Organization far-reaching powers to supersede national sovereignty anytime the agency felt it appropriate for "global health" purposes.

With the benefit of a week of thought and a couple of conversations with people directly involved in the affair, I now admit that I personally overreacted to the situation and didn’t help anybody resolve things. I believe these three MPs mishandled the situation - not by making the “mistake” of meeting Anderson for dinner, but by giving benefit of the doubt to the organizers of the dinner, resulting in them walking into a deeply inappropriate political situation for which they were not prepared. Combine that with their upsetting public statement and Poilievre’s tone deaf and hateful condemnation of Anderson and her allies, and you have an utter trainwreck for the Conservative Party of Canada.

Even worse than that, though, is the disaster this causes for those who strategically allied with Poilievre and the CPC out of a temporary alignment of interests — an alliance which seems utterly fruitless and unwelcome now.

What the Heck Happened?

In fact, this wasn’t my first thought, but it became hard to ignore once my friend name-dropped a specific person that has come up time and time again in their role as an alleged “chaos agent.” I have chosen not to name names, but I encourage everyone to peruse through Mathew Crawford’s Chaos Agents series of articles, as well as the Themis Report written by our friend Kristin Elizabeth.

How crazy is it that this one person keeps coming up in so many different large-scale events that wind up turning into chaos?

Let’s take a look at the players involved in this nonsense.

Centre for Israel and Jewish Affairs

As mentioned above, the Centre for Israel and Jewish Affairs (CIJA) was among the first to shine a spotlight on the meeting between Anderson and the three Conservative MPs, and to invoke racism and “anti-Islam” in framing who Anderson and her party are.

CIJA is a Zionist and Jewish lobbying organization operating as an agency of the Jewish Federations of Canada. It works “in support of activities to strengthen Jewish communities in Canada,” as well as “supporting charitable activities, in accord with its objects, in Israel and in Jewish communities overseas.”

It stands to reason that CIJA would be concerned if they legitimately believe Anderson and her party represent a version of Neo-Nazism, or anything that even begins to resemble it. Of course, this is made more complicated by the example of Vera Sharav, a Jewish survivor of the Holocaust, who delivered an address to attendees at at least one stop on Anderson’s tour calling on Canadians to remain vigilant about the familiar path towards totalitarianism.

Contrary to Judaism, which is jointly cultural and religious, Zionism is a nationalist political ideology devoted to the establishment and protection of the nation of Israel for ethnic Jewish people. It is vital to understand the difference between these two concepts, as they are absolutely not one and the same. As noted in a 2016 report by the BBC, conflating anti-Zionism and anti-Semitism is “wrong” and risks blurring the lines between hatred towards Jewish people and criticizing the actions of the Israeli state.

As a political lobby, CIJA is partnered with a number of other Canadian and international organizations aligned with their interests. This includes an initiative hosted by CIJA itself called the Canadian Coalition to Combat Online Hate, founded in the spring of 2020 with funding from none other than the Government of Canada.

CCTCOH’s website was developed in partnership with MediaSmarts and Project Someone. MediaSmarts describes itself as “Canada’s Centre for Digital and Media Literacy” and is funded by tech giants Bell, Google, Meta, Telus and TikTok. Project Someone is a program of the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO).

Another of CIJA’s affiliates is the Canadian Jewish Political Affairs Committee (CJPAC), which specifically describes itself and its work with CIJA as being “in the political arena.” 

CJPAC is funded by hugely influential corporations including the Postmedia Network — the parent company of the Toronto Sun, which had swiftly followed up on CIJA’s initial statement with a scalding opinion piece blasting the Conservative MPs for meeting with Anderson.

Other sponsors include the Bank of Montreal (BMO), Air Canada, TD Bank Group, Goodmans LLP, the Insurance Bureau of Canada (IBC), Meta, the National Bank of Canada, CIBC, POINT BioPharma, Citi Private Bank and Rogers.

Conclusion

Once again, this story has shown itself to be even more interesting than immediately meets the eye. With just a cursory look at the first group to instigate this political attack, we find ourselves with an advocacy campaign funded by the Government of Canada; the same government lambasted by Christine Anderson and under scrutiny from Colin Carrie, Dean Allison and Leslyn Lewis. One step deeper and we find that this same network also influences (or is influenced by) one of Canada’s largest media giants.

I have further questions about some of the people and groups that actually organized the tour, and led the Conservative MPs into this politically unwise situation. The investigation will continue on the Campfire Wiki, where I have documented the majority of relationships and funding discussed in today’s episode. Explore all of this and more at www.Campfire.wiki.

In the meantime, I ask you: what is the result of this mess? As Robert Barnes always says, qui bono? Who walked away from this in a better position than before? Well, some might point out that while this chaos was unfolding, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau successfully diverted attention away from the revelation that his re-election was helped in no small part by interference from the Chinese Communist Party.

Like I said, others will say that.

I’m far too polite.