Why we should believe none of the polls

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The November election is already decided, say many in the left-leaning media, and President Donald Trump has lost, almost 100 days before Election Day.

Some polls show Democratic presidential standard-bearer Joe Biden leading by as much as 13 points, "a nearly-insurmountable lead" that leftist pundits say Mr. Trump almost certainly cannot overcome. This has led some on the right to despair.

Both major parties are in transition. Democrats are transforming from liberalism to globalist socialism, and abandoning the blue-collar working class. Republicans are metamorphosing from globalism to pro-worker American populism.

Gallup this month declared that "since January Americans' party preferences have shifted dramatically. … What had been a 2-percentage point Republican advantage … has become an 11-point Democratic advantage."

Polls reflect what a tiny representative "sample" of only a few hundred people say, and this year many conservatives are afraid to share their opinions. If pollsters "oversample" Democrats, their polls will be even more inaccurate than in 2016.

Democrats depend on minorities. In 2016, Hillary Clinton won only 37% of white votes, and lost because she got "only" 89% of black votes. Rasmussen finds that only 77% of blacks approve of Biden; Trump could win 14-21% of black votes and 41% of Hispanic votes.

The leftist media love polls, which turn politics into sports, a horse race. Polls let media manufacture their own exclusive "news" on slow news days, and promote their biases by selecting slanted questions and leftist respondents to manipulate, moralize and demoralize their audience.

How accurate are political polls?

Consider our "democracy." Roughly 1 in 4 "eligible voters" (citizens 18 or older) are not registered to vote, many because they do not want to be on jury duty lists. Of those who register, up to half do not vote. Of those who vote, less than half vote for the winner.

Recent presidents, therefore, have typically been chosen by roughly 18% of eligible voters – only slightly more than 1 potential voter in 6.

In the U.S. House of Representatives, no bill can be passed without approval of at least 50% plus one of all lawmakers present, a quorum. By this standard, any president "elected" by only 18% of eligible voters should be illegitimate.

We have no national vote for president. Under the Electoral College, we choose our chief executive through 50 separate state elections plus one in the District of Columbia. It is irrelevant, therefore, that in 2016 Hillary Clinton won a slightly larger "nationwide popular vote," mostly due to one-third of America's welfare recipients, who reside in Democrat-dominated California. A "national poll" is meaningless.

In recent days, statewide polls show Trump beating Biden with 60% of the vote in Kentucky, 52% in Montana, 50% in Michigan, 49% in North Carolina, Texas and Georgia and 48% in Pennsylvania. The left-of-center national media never report these polls.

President Trump in the highly credible Rasmussen poll has risen to a statistical tie with Biden.

Only 37% of Biden voters are for Biden; 60% say they are voting against Trump, whose supporters suffer no such enthusiasm gap. As Nina Turner, former co-chair for Sen. Bernie Sanders, says, voting for Biden is like eating a "bowl of s***." America, wake up and smell corrupt Joe.

American Thinker pundit Brian Joondeph sees many leftist-media-paid polls as rigged. "The Washington Post-ABC News poll," he writes, "sampled 1,000 adults. Not likely voters, not registered voters, not even eligible voters, just whoever answered the phone."

"They also oversampled Democrats by 6%," Joondeph continues, "and their sample contained 399 Trump supporters compared to 522 Biden supporters, over a 25% advantage for Biden."

Likewise, the Quinnipiac University poll "oversampled Democrats by 10 points, 34 to 24%." Even the Fox News poll "oversampled Democrats by 4 points," writes Joondeph. Those polled recently by Monmouth University favored Biden by 13%, but they believed Trump would win the election. Huh?

A libertarian Cato Institute YouGov national survey finds that 62% of Americans are afraid to share their political views. Nowadays, ordinary opinions can get you threatened, stalked, attacked, fired, firebombed, or even killed by internet radicals and violent mobs. This fear is shared by 77% of Republicans, 59% of Independents and even 52% of Democrats. Only a majority (58%) of hard-core leftists feel free to express themselves.

Would you tell a telephoning stranger who claims to be a pollster if you support President Donald Trump? Many millions of Americans would not. So why believe any of today's polls?

Lowell Ponte is a former Reader's Digest Roving Editor. His articles have appeared in the Wall Street Journal, the New York Times and other major publications. His latest paper co-authored with Craig R. Smith, "The Secret War," shows how to rethink several areas of investment to protect and grow your savings against little-known economic threats. For a free, postpaid copy, call toll-free 800-630-1492.

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Senate expands inquiry into Obama's Russia-collusion probe

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Sen. Chuck Grassley, R-Iowa

In a dramatic expansion of the inquiry into the Obama administration's now-debunked Russia collusion claims against the Trump campaign in 2016, two senators have requested documents from the CIA, the Director of National Intelligence and the State Department.

Just the News reported Sen. Ron Johnson, R-Wis., the chairman of the Homeland and Governmental Affairs Committee, and Sen. Charles Grassley, R-Iowa, of the Finance Committee have dispatched letters to those agencies and the FBI.

They appear to focus on officials who disseminated  Christopher Steele's discredited anti-Trump dossier, an opposition research document funded by the Hillary Clinton campaign that was used by the FBI to obtain warrants to spy on the Trump campaign.

Among them are longtime Clinton associate and former Deputy Secretary of State Strobe Talbott, who has admitted he received and provided copies of the Steele dossier. Others are Clinton associates Cody Shearer and Sidney Blumenthal. Shearer, a relative of Talbott, wrote a similar dossier that was provided to Steele.

Also in the crosshairs are former State Department officials Victoria Nuland, Jonathan Winer and Kathleen Kavalec.

"The senators also made their most sweeping demands for records from CIA, including any information the spy agency provided the FBI concerning the credibility of Steele as a human source. Recently declassified footnotes from Justice Department inspector general Michael Horowitz's report on Russia probe abuses revealed that the CIA had raised red flags about Steele's reporting, including that he had been targeted with Russian intelligence agency disinformation about Donald Trump while writing the dossier," Just the News reported.

The letter to the FBI and Department of Justice lists 17 categories of information the senators seek in their review of the FBI's Crossfire Hurricane operation. They include potential conflicts of interest related to the Obama administration's policy decisions with respect to Ukraine and Burisma Holdings.

They also seek records linked to James Comey, Andrew McCabe, Rod Rosenstein, Michael Flynn, Glenn Simpson Kevin Clinesmith, Bruce Ohr, Stefan Halper ,Steele's contact with State Department officials and any "information provided to or received from the CIA about persons affiliated with the Trump campaign."

The senators request "any correspondence to or from the U.S. Embassy in London about the FBI sending any official or affiliated person to the United Kingdom to gather information about … anyone affiliated with the Trump campaign."

From the CIA they want records of any requests for assistance from foreign allies in the Russia collusion case.

JTN reported the CIA "also was pressed for records concerning the conduct of former Obama-era director John Brennan, including his contact about the Russia probe with fired FBI Director James Comey and then-Senate Democratic Leader Harry Reid as well as any travel he took to Ukraine, Russia's neighbor."

Johnson already had been given permission to subpoena Blue Star Strategies for its investigation of Burisma, the Ukrainian gas company that paid Hunter Biden more than $3 million while his father was Barack Obama's point man for Ukraine policy.

Joe Biden, meanwhile, boasted of pressuring Ukrainian officials to fire a prosecutor investigating Burisma by threatening to withhold a billion dollars in American loan guarantees.

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Yale epidemiologist: Dr. Fauci running ‘misinformation campaign’ against hydroxychloroquine

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Risch, however, is sharply criticizing Fauci’s approach to evaluating the drug’s effectiveness, arguing that repeated trials and tests have shown that it is markedly effective at treating COVID-19 so long as it is administered properly. Risch, a professor of epidemiology and the director of Yale’s Molecular Cancer Epidemiology Laboratory, has been pushing for the drug’s use in the […]

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Hydroxychloroquine, COVID, FDA; and Pharma and all its whores around the world

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by Jon Rappoport

July 29, 2020

(To join our email list, click here.)

“We are talking about private contracts outside the scope of government. We’re talking about local barter, and the issuing of local currencies, the building of private money systems. During the Great Depression, many citizens looked around and said, ‘We still have land and food, we still have commodities. Nothing has changed here. We just have to invent a way to conduct commerce among ourselves.’ One estimate states that, during the Depression of the 1930s, there were 1500 private money systems across America.” (My notes for “The Underground”)

I have made my case concerning the fake pandemic. Many times now.

From the beginning—the failure to isolate, purify, or actually discover a novel coronavirus by correct procedures. The meaningless diagnostic tests and the meaningless case numbers. The propaganda. The use of “the virus” as a cover story obscuring high-level corporate and government crimes.

Of course, many people believe in the COVID-19 virus. And of these, some have been seeking treatments outside the bounds of government certification.

This is their right. They are exercising freedom in managing their own health. And so some of them are taking hydroxychloroquine (HCQ).

The FDA, which certifies all medical drugs as safe and effective, before they are released for public use, has not recommended HCQ for COVID treatment. It has banned the drug for that purpose, outside of hospitals and clinical trials.

The FDA‘s track record—which I’ve been documenting for the past 25 years—is a horror show. The first key review I became aware of was authored in 2000, by Dr. Barbara Starfield, and published on July 26th of that year, in the Journal of the American Medical Association. Starfield stated that, annually, FDA-approved medicines kill 106,000 Americans. That’s over a million Americans per decade. So relying on the FDA to decide whether HCQ is a useful drug is not a concession some Americans are willing to make.

Pharma and all its allies and minions and whores are focusing on a jackpot bonanza for COVID treatment: vaccines and new antiviral drugs. Pharma does not want competition. It definitely does not want to see a landscape in which all sorts of alternative treatments for COVID (or any purported disease) are rampant and free-wheeling.

We are seeing multiple censorship actions across platforms, when people, including doctors, speak positively about HCQ.

Fauci is very much in the pro-Pharma camp, of course. He and Gates want an RNA vaccine to come to market, by any means necessary. They also want antiviral drugs to dominate COVID treatment.

A very sharp reader spelled out the Pharma-anticipated future for these new (toxic) antiviral medicines. And not just for COVID. Up to now, there has been very little mainstream progress in getting drugs specifically designed to treat viruses into the marketplace. This is Pharma’s big opportunity. They envision a trillion-dollar operation that will elevate antivirals (for treating any viruses) to the level of, say, antibiotics, which are used against bacteria. COVID would simply be the first major “breakthrough.”

So we have a war going on. HCQ and other alternative modalities vs. vaccines and antivirals. Pharma does want to lose this one. It would be disastrous.

I am not touting HCQ. I am putting it this way: if many people are convinced, or become convinced, that HCQ is a drug of choice, and if they believe it is helping them, then a major rebellion against Pharma and the FDA and its counterparts around the world takes off. It soars. And it spurs the use of other alternatives on which Pharma makes zero profits.

So-called natural health and alternative medicine have been booming since the 1980s. A new escalation would send very serious shock waves through the pharmaceutical industry.

Fauci is well aware of this. He is fronting for the industry in every possible way. Trump, with his statements favoring HCQ, has become a major threat in that regard.

When you see new reports of soaring COVID case numbers—a con which I’ve documented six ways from Sunday—you’re not only witnessing a planned strategy to maintain the war against the economy and therefore against billions of people whose lives are at stake; you’re also watching a justification for pushing antivirals and vaccines. For the benefit of Pharma.

The last thing the pharmaceutical industry wants to see is their own case-number con giving birth to wildcat outbreaks of health freedom. People leaving the nest. People going elsewhere for treatment.

Individuals making decisions about their own treatments—this is very serious business. People should look deeply before making choices. In the case of various HCQ protocols, they should consider: dosage levels; when in the course of illness the drug would be given (early or late); whether there is illness requiring treatment to begin with; whether people may have a heredity condition which could make HCQ perilous or even lethal—these are some of the relevant considerations.

The FDA and Pharma want to be the first and last word.

Life and Liberty say they are not the first and last word.

In that regard, there is another issue: licenses vs. contracts. The medical cartel, backed by governments, has established medical boards which grant licenses to practice medicine. These special persons, doctors, are handed the right to treat and cure diseases. This is an attempt to create a monopoly.

There is another avenue: private contracts. Here is the analogy I’ve used to describe this situation. Two adults, Joe and Fred, enter into an agreement. Joe says he has a health condition. He will be the patient. Fred will be the practitioner. Fred has a well on his property. Fred believes the water has a special healing quality. He will give some of it (or sell it) to Joe, who will drink it over the course of two weeks.

Both men, in their contract, agree that no legal liability will be attached to the outcome. They are both responsible. They are of sound mind. They don’t require government permission to sign or fulfill their contract.

That’s it in a nutshell.

Joe and Fred are operating on their own. They have that natural right. They also have the right to be wrong—in case the water treatment doesn’t work, or is harmful.

Of course, all sorts of meddlers will claim this arrangement is illegal and absurd. Meddlers always try to curb freedom. That’s their crusade in life. They can’t stand the idea of people making their own choices and decisions and then accepting the consequences.

I’m not saying governments will honor such contracts. Governments are prime meddlers. I’m saying these contracts (and not just in the arena of healing) stand outside governments. They are citizen-to-citizen. They are prior to government. They are intrinsically more real than government.

THIS is what COMMUNITY actually means.

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(To read about Jon’s mega-collection, The Matrix Revealed, click here.)

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Jon Rappoport

The author of three explosive collections, THE MATRIX REVEALED, EXIT FROM THE MATRIX, and POWER OUTSIDE THE MATRIX, Jon was a candidate for a US Congressional seat in the 29^th District of California. He maintains a consulting practice for private clients, the purpose of which is the expansion of personal creative power. Nominated for a Pulitzer Prize, he has worked as an investigative reporter for 30 years, writing articles on politics, medicine, and health for CBS Healthwatch, LA Weekly, Spin Magazine, Stern, and other newspapers and magazines in the US and Europe. Jon has delivered lectures and seminars on global politics, health, logic, and creative power to audiences around the world. You can sign up for his free NoMoreFakeNews emails here or his free OutsideTheRealityMachine emails here.

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Trump Sparks Firestorm With Suggestion To Delay Elections 'Until Vote Can Be Safe'

President Trump fired off a Thursday tweet that's about to dominate the weekend news cycle - suggesting that the 2020 election could be postponed over concerns that mail-in ballots will lead to "the most INACCURATE & FRAUDULENT Election in history," adding "It will be a great embarrassment to the US

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US Q2 GDP Crashes By A Record 32.9%, Worse Than Great Depression

The biggest question we had ahead of today's unprecedented GDP drop was "how do we show it on a chart without losing the impact of all other prints?" Well, for better or worse, this is the best we could come up with: at -32.9% annualized, Q2 GDP just plunged by the most on record.

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Ex-Porn Star Jenna Jameson Says Jeffrey Epstein Is An “Amateur” & Children Are “Hunted” At “Parties”

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What Happened: In a series of recent tweets, Jenna Jameson shared that she has “heard terrible things about “The Hunt.” Implying that societal elite people “hunt” children as young as 4, at “parties.” She went on to state that “These topics circulate” among the elite. She also tweeted about Hollywood, expressing that “The reason why Hollywood has been so incredibly silent on child sex trafficking is not only do they partake, they are covering for the big league hitters. The ones that hide in the shadows under the cover of a crown.”

Just prior to those tweets, she brought up Jeffrey Epstein, tweeting the following:

If you think Epstein is somehow unique, you’re sadly mistaken…there are MANY Epstein’s, that make him look like an amateur. Child hunting games, sacrifice, torture of children as young as 2. The elite.

Jameson’s perspective is quite unique. As she’s shared many times before, she was raped as a child and groomed for the porn industry. She claims she is a victim of child sex trafficking.

Why This Matters: We’ve been writing about this topic quite some time, especially more so this year with all of the recent revelations that have made their way into the mainstream regarding elite child sex trafficking. Epstein’s case goes beyond just the dealings involving Maxwell and himself, and the issue of trafficking very young children, and teenage children, it is much more widespread than Epstein. Epstein is being made out to be a rich billionaire with connections that allowed him to entice young women into his home to be sexually abused, but we really need to talk about just how widespread this type of abuse is among people who are made out to be idols, like multiple Vatican officials, politicians and celebrities.

If you want to dive deeper, I recently published this article that does just that.

This kind of stuff is all over the place, and the theme involves high ranking people. As a paper published in European Psychiatry details:

Research eventually led to the Franklin scandal that broke in 1989 when hundreds of children were apparently flown around the US to be abused by high ranking ‘Establishment’ members. Former state senator John W DeCamp, cited as one of the most effective legislators in Nebraska history, is today attorney for two of the abuse victims. A 15 year old girl disclosed that she had been abused since the age of 9 and was exposed since the age of 9 and was exposed to ‘ritual murder’ of a new born girl, a small boy (who was subsequently fried and eaten) and three others.

Our Interview With A Survivor

If you want to go even deeper on this, we conducted an interview with a survivor of elite child sex trafficking/slavery. You can access the full interview and start your free trial HERE on CETV, a platform we created to help combat internet censorship and allow us to continue to do our work and get the word out about various issues and topics.

The interview is with Anneke Lucas, who is is an author, speaker, advocate for child sex trafficking victims, founder of the non-profit organization Liberation Prison Yoga, and creator of the Unconditional Model. Her work is based on personal experience of a 30-year healing journey after surviving being sold by her family as a child sex slave to a pedophile network.

The interview is deep, and goes into the consciousness aspect of her experience and why that aspect is so important.

The Takeaway

We have to ask ourselves, are the ones we are choosing to let govern us capable of steering the world in the direction that creates peace and harmony? Or are their actions, now coming to the surface, coming from a state of being that is inherently disconnected and violent? If these things are true, why do we continue to participate in elections, and uphold a system that’s dominated by corruption, misinformation and these types of acts?

Why is so much information being censored on the internet right now, yet child porn continues to run rampant? What type of world are we choosing to create? Why do we continue to simply follow and obey rules that are clearly not in our best interests? If billions of us can all come together and lockdown for the coronavirus, imagine what we could do if we all came together for what we truly wanted to create in this world.

This issue may be perceived as “negative”, but we can’t change it by ignoring it. It must be acknowledged and brought to light, as there are still many children losing their lives as a result of this activity. Do we wish for this to continue? Are we being pushed to ask big questions and move towards creating a different experience here?

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Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg RESPONDS to Rep. Matt Gaetz

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After 5 years of lies from Big Tech about their suppression and censorship of Centrists and Conservatives, things are finally starting to happen!

Whether ironically or strategically, Wednesday’s Congressional hearing had been teed-off by the “White Coat Summit” on Monday, in which dozens of MDs descended upon DC, seeking to correct the unprecedented misinformation about hydroxychloroquine, the WHO-designated “Essential Medicine” which has been administered to pregnant women since 1955 and is taken daily for decades at a time by autoimmune patients.

Now, it’s suddenly demonized as “dangerous” and banned from prescription to treat COVID by 44 out of 50 US states, which is unprecedented and kooky. The pediatricians in the group sought to put the one-in-a-million mortality rate among school-age COVID patients into perspective (4-5 times lower than influenza), so that schools may re-open.

The “White Coat Summit” was put together by the formidable Dr. Simone Gold, who is also an attorney and who has been doing a yeoman’s job of countering the breathtaking skullduggery that has been coordinated worldwide across governments and health agencies against HCQ, in addition to spotlighting the medically unnecessary and economically suicidal lockdowns of healthy individuals worldwide.

As if to demonstrate the juggernaut of pure evil that’s been erected around us by the demonic Globalists who control Big Pharma and Big Tech, the videos and posts featuring these doctors were promptly removed by Facebook, Twitter and YouTube. Twitter didn’t merely flag the President’s retweet of the video, they deleted the post, entirely. But he fared better than his son, Donald Jr. and Sidney Powell, the attorney representing Gen. Michael Flynn, whose Twitter accounts were suspended for retweeting these videos, demonstrating the arbitrary enforcement and the capriciousness of their “rules”.

Big Tech continues to hew to World Health Organization guidelines, despite the fact that the WHO lied to the US in order to protect the Chinese Communist Party, despite the fact that Trump has since cut ties with the UN agency and despite the mounting evidence from peer-reviewed studies that HCQ is effective, both as a preventative and when used to treat early stages of the disease.

On Wednesday morning, Trump tweeted, “If Congress doesn’t bring fairness to Big Tech, which they should have done years ago, I will do it myself with Executive Orders. In Washington, it has been ALL TALK and NO ACTION for years, and the people of our Country are sick and tired of it!”

The lightweight questioning by Congress proved his point and as the hearings were coming to a close, the White House made an announcement about directing the FCC to implement Trump’s May 27th Executive Order on Preventing Online Censorship, stating “President Trump will continue to fight back against unfair, un-American, and politically biased censorship of Americans online.”

The EO directs the Department of Commerce to request that the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) clarify the scope of the Section 230 exemption within the 1996 Communications Decency Act, to ensure that it “does not permit social media companies that alter or editorialize users’ speech to escape civil liability. The petition also requests…transparency requirements on their moderation practices, similar to requirements imposed on broadband service providers under Title I of the Communications Act.”

Contributed by Alexandra Bruce

Contact

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Think Cancel Culture Doesn’t Exist? My Own ‘Lived Experience’ Says Otherwise

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Given the moral authority that many progressives assign to the lessons of “lived experience,” it seems counterintuitive that they are the ones now strenuously downplaying the scourge of cancel culture. No less a progressive icon than Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez recently brushed off the phenomenon as just a bunch of entitled people being “challenged” and “held accountable” for their problematic views. New York Times columnist Charles Blow believes cancel culture doesn’t even exist, except to the extent it’s simply a desirable by-product of grass-roots activism:

Once more: THERE IS NO SUCH THING AS CANCEL CULTURE. There is free speech. You can say and do as you pls, and others can choose never to deal this you, your company or your products EVER again. The rich and powerful are just upset that the masses can now organize their dissent.

— Charles M. Blow (@CharlesMBlow) July 11, 2020

A common theme is that the faux-victims complaining about cancel culture are high-profile cynics, playing the martyr for the benefit of clicks and fans. Ocasio-Cortez describes the complainants as people who “get their thoughts published and amplified in major outlets,” while Blow tells us that “the rich and powerful are just upset that the masses can now organize their dissent.” It’s hard not to see this as a rhetorical shell game. If canceled individuals fade into obscurity, we never hear their stories. But if they do manage to get their story out to the media, they’re dismissed as pampered pundits. By means of this damned-if-you-do/damned-if-you-don’t logic, cancel-culture Truthers can pretend away the existence of thousands of victims.

Of course, it’s absolutely true that wealthy cancel-culture targets such as J. K. Rowling get enormous attention. But that’s not just because of their wealth and fame: It’s because their stories act as a stand-in for the many other, more obscure, figures who’ve been mobbed in the press, on campuses, on social-media forums, and in arts and literary subcultures. The vast majority of cancel culture’s victims are people you’ve never heard of, who don’t have the means to fight back, or who have learned to keep quiet so they don’t lose whatever reputation or job security they still have.

I know, because I was once one of them.

* * *

This isn’t the first time I’ve alluded publicly to my ordeal. I’ve spoken about it on Twitter and various podcasts. But the ongoing effort to deny cancel culture’s existence has convinced me that I need to lay out my own experience in a more systematic way.

In 2008, I decided to pursue a career as an academic biologist. Science in general, and evolutionary biology in particular, had been a passion from a young age. Even as an undergraduate, I maintained a blog that I used to debunk pseudoscience, and critique creationism and Intelligent Design. I was outspoken, and sometimes launched headlong into debates with Christian conservatives. Creationists and IDers frequently told me I was wrong or stupid, but my critics never called me a bigot.

This changed, however, when I started graduate school in 2013. This was an environment where I didn’t have to worry about right-wing creationists. Rather, the pseudoscience I observed was coming from the other side of the political spectrum—especially in the form of “Blank Slate” proponents who argued (falsely) that sex differences in human personality, preferences, and behavior are entirely the result of socialization.

It was also during this time that I started to take an interest in what many now call “gender ideology.” This ideology not only invites compassionate treatment for trans individuals (which I support), but also promotes the scientifically inaccurate claims that biological sex exists on a continuous “spectrum,” that notions of male and female may be mere social constructs, and that one’s sex may be determined by self-declared “identity” instead of reproductive anatomy. When I pushed back against these claims, I was smeared as a transphobic bigot. Fearing professional harm, I stopped engaging, ceding the field to those who champion fashionable fictions.

I graduated with a PhD in evolutionary biology from UC Santa Barbara in 2018, and took a postdoctoral position at Penn State. I’d just joined Twitter, and observed that the pseudoscience I’d seen on campus had by now metastasized to the wider world and become the stuff of everyday hashtags. Even scientists whom I knew personally and respected were parroting this nonsense as scientific fact. But I dared not say a word. I would soon be applying to tenure-track assistant-professor jobs; I could not be seen publicly arguing down the claim that internally felt gender feelings trumped biology.

In October 2018, the Grievance Studies scandal dropped, bringing renewed focus on the intellectual degradation within academic fields focused on gender and sex. A few weeks later, one of the world’s most prestigious scientific journals, Nature, published an editorial claiming that classifying an individual’s sex using any combination of anatomy and genetics “has no basis in science.” These events, happening in such close succession, pushed me beyond my threshold for restraint. Despite my academic mentors’ warnings that speaking up could ruin my career, I let my bottled-up frustrations out in an essay I sent to Quillette. It was published under the headline, The New Evolution Deniers.

The essay went viral. And while I received my fair share of praise for it, I also knew I’d provided critics with a bona fide gotcha moment. (“I did not train to be a scientist for over a decade just to sit quietly while science in general, and my field in particular, comes under attack from activists who subvert truth to ideology and narrative,” I wrote.) Blank-Slate feminists and trans activists alike publicly accused me of wrongthink.

What’s worse, my heresies were multiplying, as I had taken to Twitter to defend my views and confront my critics. I also eventually co-authored another Quillette essay, with endocrinologist Dr. William Malone and author Julia Robertson, titled No One Is Born in ‘The Wrong Body’, arguing that children are put at risk of long-term harm if they are indoctrinated with ideologically torqued misinformation about their bodies and behavior.

In October 2019, following the publication of that second article, I received word that someone had posted a new listing in EcoEvoJobs, the largest job board in my field, that read, “Colin Wright is a Transphobe who supports Race Science.” This was during the height of the academic-recruitment season. The post was eventually removed by the board operator. But there was no telling how long it was up or how many of my colleagues had seen it. (I expressed concern to the board operator, and urged that they vet listings before they go live, but was told this wasn’t possible. Luckily, a tech-savvy friend volunteered to run a script that scanned the board for my name on a minute-by-minute basis, and sent me a text message when it got a hit.) At the time, I had nearly a hundred job applications being reviewed by search committees. I locked my Twitter and resolved, once again, to lay low.

But of course, I fell off the wagon. If you’re looking for common characteristics among those of us who get targeted for cancelation, it isn’t money or privilege. Rather, many of us simply have an inability to mumble slogans we know aren’t true. Over time, we become exasperated with dishonest propaganda that masquerades as social justice, and we speak out. It’s a habit rooted in the truth-telling, whistle-blowing impulse that, not so long ago, progressives applauded.

I broke my Twitter silence on Valentine’s Day, 2020, when the Wall Street Journal published an essay I’d co-authored with developmental biologist Dr. Emma Hilton, titled The Dangerous Denial of Sex. Although constrained by the space limitations of the op-ed format, Dr. Hilton and I were able to briefly outline the science of biological sex, and detail how its denial harms vulnerable groups, including women, gay men, lesbians, and, especially, gender non-conforming children. Even more than other pieces I’d bylined, this one unleashed a tidal wave of online hate—perhaps because we’d pricked the precious conceit that gender ideology saves children instead of harming them. Several Penn State professors publicly denounced the essay as transphobic. Students and faculty complained to my department’s diversity committee that I’d launched “a personal attack on individuals with non-binary gender identity,” and that my presence at PSU “made them feel less comfortable.”

“In for a penny, in for a pound,” as the expression goes. Earlier this year, on February 22nd, I tweeted out a Guardian article titled, “Teenage transgender row splits Sweden as dysphoria diagnoses soar by 1,500%,” accompanied by my own two-word commentary: “social contagion.” My tweet would have made sense to those familiar with the work of Brown University academic Lisa Littman, and particularly her scientific paper hypothesizing links between “rapid onset gender dysphoria” (ROGD) and peer contagion within cliques of teenage girls. However, activists were able to contort my comment in a way that suggested I was targeting the children themselves or suggesting gender dysphoria was akin to a virus. Knowing I was on the job market, a Michigan State University graduate student (and president of the Graduate Employees Union) named Kevin Bird accused me of “spreading disgusting transphobic pseudoscience.” Unlike other critics, Bird didn’t even pretend to be motivated by anything other than a desire to deny me employment in my field.

Colin is now spreading disgusting transphobic pseudoscience. He’s on the job market. I hope The EEB community is paying attention. This isn’t how you @DiversifyEEB https://t.co/8iiYlWrXdq

— Kevin Bird (@itsbirdemic) February 23, 2020

Bird himself offers an interesting case study, because his example illustrates how even a single ideologically radicalized troll can present the appearance of a grass-roots campaign. If Bird’s name sounds familiar, it’s because he is the same activist who led a campaign against his own university’s senior vice president of research and innovation, theoretical physicist Stephen Hsu. Bird has no particular distinction in his academic field, has tweeted support for burning banks, and is on record stating that he has no “interest in attaining or discovering truth” when he does science. But he also has worked tirelessly to build up his online stature as a cancel-culture enforcer and a warrior “against fascism.” As such, he has been able to mobilize flash mobs of online trolls to aid in his deplatforming efforts—which is why Hsu was forced to resign his VP position despite the spurious nature of Bird’s racism accusations.

It was around this time that I was contacted by a biology-department chair at a private liberal arts college in the Midwest. He commended me for my writings, and told me that he’d even used my New Evolution Deniers essay as a basis for discussion in his own classes. But while he and his fellow biology-department faculty would likely support my hiring, he said, the school’s own human-resources department would almost certainly block me as “too risky.” These experiences remind me that when Blow extols “the masses” who are canceling people like me, the people he’s praising are actually just a small coalition of professional trolls such as Bird, working in effective concert with the risk-averse, upper-middle corporate bureaucrats who now have taken over decision-making on many college and university campuses.

Guilt by association is a hallmark of all social panics. And in early March, I received a text message from a close friend and research collaborator who is now an assistant professor at a major research university, informing me that his colleagues had started questioning him about our affiliation. He told me that this sort of thing was happening frequently enough that he felt the need to publicly denounce my views to clear his name. And that’s exactly what he did. Ask yourself what other ideological movements and historical periods we tend to associate with such performative acts.

Later that month, someone again posted “Colin Wright is a Transphobe who supports Race Science” to the EcoEvoJobs board. I contacted the board operator—again—expressing my concerns. This time, I received no response.

Meanwhile, an anonymous Twitter account informed me that “preemptive emails” had been sent to academic search committees about me. While it is impossible to verify these claims, I note that the same tactic is known to have been used against former psychology professor Bo Winegard, who was recently fired from Marietta College after a persistent effort by similar (perhaps the same) activists to smear him as a racist and “race scientist.” In fact, these anonymous “masses,” as Blow calls them, may just be one person.

In April, I chose to leave academia. To give credit to Penn State, I was not fired. In fact, I had the opportunity to extend my fellowship contract for another year. However, I no longer believed that any amount of hard work or talent on my part would lead to a tenure-track academic job in the current climate. Nor did I want to spend my time constantly responding to false accusations of transphobia and racism. I had embarked on this journey because I love science, and wanted to help beat back the forces of pseudoscience in the public sphere. But that project is impossible when scientists themselves have become intimidated by small clusters of activists who demand that the scientific method be subordinated to magical thinking, and who seek to ruin the lives of those who dissent. If you follow in my footsteps, you can expect to receive similar treatment.

None of the views I have ever espoused are extreme. Indeed, all or most are taken as common sense by pretty much anyone who isn’t an activist or professional academic. And I will repeat them here. Male and female are not social constructs, but are real biological categories that do not fall on a spectrum. Humans are sexually dimorphic, and this matters in certain contexts, such as sports. Ignoring the reality of sexual dimorphism can harm women and members of the gay community whose experience of discrimination is rooted in these real differences between male and female bodies. Esoteric theories of gender that purport to deny the reality of biology, or that conflate biological sex with secondary sexual characteristics or sex-based stereotypes, can confuse children; and are likely partly responsible for the massive uptick in self-reported gender dysphoria among adolescents, especially teen girls.

In the closing lines of The New Evolution Deniers, I wrote that academia was “no longer a refuge for outspoken, free-thinking intellectuals,” and that “one must now choose between living a zipper-lipped life as an academic scientist, or living a life as a fulfilled intellectual.” My own experience, reinforced by the steady flow of emails I receive from concerned academics, would suggest that the situation has only gotten worse.

What you have read here is the story of just one ex-academic. But it should concern everyone that the entire academy is now being held hostage to a vocal minority that insists we should inhabit a fantasy intellectual milieu that is little more than an ideologically deflected play on Christian myths. Make no mistake: Cancel culture is very real. And its manifestations are not confined to the rich and powerful. As with many cultural processes, the fight to roll it back will be a long, hard struggle. I don’t pretend to know how it will end. But I do know that it begins by opening our eyes to the problem. To do otherwise would represent—if I may borrow a phrase from the social-justice lexicon—the literal erasure of my own lived experience.

 

 

Colin Wright is Managing Editor of Quillette.

The post Think Cancel Culture Doesn’t Exist? My Own ‘Lived Experience’ Says Otherwise appeared first on Quillette.

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Top researcher, a Democrat, warns Big Tech is stealing election from Trump

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President Donald J. Trump waves as he disembarks Air Force One at Miami International Airport Friday, July 10, 2020, and is greeted by state and local officials. (Official White House photo by Tia Dufour)

For Harvard-trained research psychologist and Democratic voter Robert Epstein, the question isn't whether or not Google and other Silicon Valley giants are manipulating their searches and feeds to make sure Donald Trump doesn't win reelection.

A supporter of Hillary Clinton in 2016 and Joe Biden in 2020, he told WND in an interview Wednesday he has statistical evidence to back up the tech titans' bias, derived from more than seven years of research, internal documents, emails, videos and the testimony of whistleblowers.

He has testified to Congress that Google manipulation of search results could have cost Trump 2.6 million votes in 2016. In 2020, he believes, as many as 15 million votes could be manipulated.

And as Silicon Valley CEOs testified to Congress Wednesday about their outsized influence, there was "anecdotal" evidence, such as the claim of Breitbart News that Google has manipulated its algorithm to curb traffic to the site and those of other conservative outlets. On May 1, for example, a Google search for "Joe Biden" resulted in 30,000 impressions for Breitbart News links. After May 5, it dropped to zero.

Robert Epstein

What is needed now, Epstein believes, is to follow up his research in 2016 and 2018 with a large-scale system of field agents in every swing state to monitor Google, YouTube, Twitter, Facebook and others in real time.

He had the funding lined up to launch the ambitious project in February, but the money "dried up" he said, when the coronavirus hit and "sucked all of the oxygen out of Washington."

Now, with interest returning to the election, he has the people and systems in place and just needs the money. Many small donations have come in, he said, but he needs much more to pull it off – about $10 million.

He emphasized to WND he is not a Trump supporter but a "supporter of democracy." He wants Joe Biden to win, but he wants the election to be fair, recognizing that in the future the tech giants could put their massive power behind a candidate he doesn't want.

"It's not in our interest to turn the election over to Google and the gang," he said. "To give them carte blanche is insane."

The goal of his monitoring project is to force the tech companies "to back off in the swing states."

"And when we do get them to back off, we will be able to detect that," he said.

But much more funding is needed "to do this in a credible way that would be taken seriously by the courts and also by mainstream media."

"We have people on standby, we have a very ambitious program of what we want to monitor," explained Epstein, a senior research psychologist at the American Institute for Behavioral Research and Technology in Vista, California.

The plan is to do a "real time analysis so we can make announcements almost every day if we find bias in news feeds, tweet suppression and the sequence of YouTube videos."

All of that would be reported to Congress, journalists and the Federal Trade Commission.

He said he's getting calls from Congress members, senators, attorneys general and others, but there's no money.

"There is so much as stake here that I'm dumbfounded," he said. "This is the watershed year, where we either turn over democracy to the tech companies – and maybe never get it back again – or we fight them."

Epstein – who was famed behavioral psychologist B.F. Skinner's last Ph.D. student at Harvard – has been a research psychologist for nearly 40 years. He has served in various editorial positions at Psychology Today magazine and Scientific American MIND. He's the author of 15 books and more than 300 scientific and mainstream articles on artificial intelligence and other topics.

'Serious threat to democracy'

In testimony one year ago to the Senate Judiciary Subcommittee on the Constitution, he emphasized he is "not a conservative."

"I am here today for three reasons: to explain why Google presents a serious threat to democracy and human autonomy, to explain how passive monitoring systems can protect us both now and in the future from companies like Google, and to tell you how Congress can immediately end Google’s worldwide monopoly on search."

Google CEO Sundar Pichai testifies in a House hearing Dec. 11, 2018 (video screenshot)

He found in 2016 that biased results generated by Google's search algorithm likely impacted undecided voters in a way that gave at least 2.6 million votes to Hillary Clinton.

He based that on his preservation of more than 13,000
election-related searches conducted by a diverse group of Americans on Google, Bing, and Yahoo in the weeks leading up to the election.

Google search results were significantly biased in favor of Clinton, he found, in all 10 positions on the first page of search results in both blue states and red states.

Epstein said he knows the number of votes that shifted because he conducted dozens of controlled experiments in the U.S. and other countries that measure precisely how opinions and votes shift when search results favor one candidate, cause or company.

He calls the shift "SEME," for the Search Engine Manipulation Effect.

His first scientific paper on SEME was published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences in 2015. SEME, he noted, also has been replicated by a research team at one of the Max Planck Institutes in Germany.

Epstein warned that SEME is one of the most powerful forms of influence ever discovered in the behavioral sciences, particularly because it is invisible to people, or subliminal, in effect.

"It leaves people thinking they have made up their own minds, which is very much an illusion," he told the Senate Committee. "It also leaves no paper trail for authorities to trace. Worse still, the very few people who can detect bias in search results shift even farther in the direction of the bias, so merely being able to see the bias doesn't protect you from it."

SEME, he said, is an example of an "ephemeral experience," deliberately engineered to change someone's thinking.

Epstein noted to WND on Wednesday that Google internal emails leaked to the Wall Street Journal showed the company created "ephemeral experiences" to change people's views about Trump's ban on travel from terrorist nations.

"These companies understand what's at stake and that's why they are being so brazen," he said. "If they are brazen about Breitbart, imagine what they are doing with ephemeral experiences and search results."

He also pointed to the power of YouTube's manipulation of videos through its "up-next" algorithm, which pushes to users subsequent videos of YouTube's choice.

Some 70% of videos people watch on YouTube are suggested by its up next algorithm, Epstein said.

He and his team are studying and measuring the power that algorithm possesses to influence votes and opinions.

"If a platform wants to shift people's views and votes, you can't counteract what they're doing," he said. "In most cases, you can't even see what they are doing – unless you are monitoring."

Epstein said a member of the Senate committee asked him for questions to pose to the Big Tech CEOs on Wednesday.

"Generally speaking they are not asking the right questions," he said of the lawmakers.

Epstein said he could give some of the CEOs, including Google parent Alphabet's Sundar Pichai, "a stroke on live TV ... because I know the truth."

"It's not just I know the numbers, but I've been talking to whistleblowers for quite a while and talking about people who are considering becoming whistleblowers," Epstein said.

He believes a significant way to hold the tech titans accountable is for states to bring charges for illegal in-kind contributions.

"If you are Facebook sending targeted messages only to Democrats to vote, that is a massive in-kind campaign contribution that is illegal," he contended.

'Debunked' study?

Last August, as WND reported, President Trump spotlighted Epstein's study concluding Google manipulated millions of votes in favor of Hillary Clinton in 2016.

The former secretary of state responded, contending the study had been "debunked."

Hillary Clinton speaking at the Brown & Black Presidential Forum at Sheslow Auditorium at Drake University in Des Moines, Iowa, Jan. 11, 2016 (Gage Skidmore, Wikimedia Commons)

Epstein, who voted for Clinton in 2016, fired back on Twitter, stating "to my knowledge no credible authority has ever 'debunked' either my 2016 and 2018 election monitoring projects or my controlled studies on internet influence."

Epstein pointed out his "2016 monitoring findings were based on an analysis of 13,207 election-related searches, along with the 98,044 web pages to which the search results linked."

He said the "pro-Hillary bias was significant at the .001 level."

In his testimony to the Senate in July, Epstein warned that Google is working to ensure that Trump does not win reelection in 2020.

In an interview with WND in December 2018, Epstein pointed to a video leaked in September 2018 that showed Google executives at their first weekly meeting after the election of Donald Trump in 2016 exhibiting panic and dismay while expressing their determination to thwart the new administration's agenda as well as the emerging global populist movement.

"You heard people saying it. It's not my imagination," Epstein said.

Noting again that he voted for Clinton, he told WND, "I don’t care whether I share those values or not, a private company not elected by the people should not have that kind of power."

But Google has that power in 200 countries around the world, not just in the U.S., he noted.

"That's obscene," Epstein said.

He estimated that the outcomes of about 25% of elections around the world are being determined by Google’s search algorithm.

Not politically neutral

A senior software engineer at Google admitted in a July 2019 interview with Project Veritas that the tech giants are not politically neutral and that his company manipulates search algorithms "to do what we want them to do."

"It's time to decide, do we run the technology, or does the technology run us?" said Greg Coppola, who worked on artificial intelligence and the popular Google Assistant software.

"Are we going to just let the biggest tech companies decide who wins every election from now on?"

After the interview was published, Google put Coppola on administrative leave.

Project Veritas asked Coppola about CEO Pichai's testimony to Congress in December 2018 in which he insisted Google's algorithms are politically unbiased.

Coppola began by expressing his respect for Sundar as a manager and noted that the Google Assistant on which he works, the counterpart to Apple's Siri, "really doesn't have a political bias."

However, regarding Google's algorithms, he said it's "ridiculous to say that there's no bias."

"I think everyone who supports anything other than the Democrats, anyone who's pro-Trump or in any way deviates from what CNN and the New York Times are pushing, notices how bad it is," he said.

The post Top researcher, a Democrat, warns Big Tech is stealing election from Trump appeared first on WND.

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