That’s what Paul Rossi experienced at Grace Church School. It’s what Jennifer Sey went through at Levi’s. It’s what Antonio García Martínez dealt with at Apple. And Roland Fryer at Harvard. And Gordon Klein at UCLA. And Maud Maron at Legal Aid.

Now comes the story of Zac Kriegman, who, until not so long ago, was a director of data science at Thomson Reuters. Kriegman’s crime? Questioning the Black Lives Matter narrative.

Kriegman is a person who loves numbers and statistics. As you’ll read below, he didn’t just voice an opinion to his colleagues. He made an argument after having done extensive research. He thought logic would win out. He was wrong.

This story is most obviously about the assault on difference. The assault on the notion, previously taken for granted, that you shouldn’t punish employees for having heterodox opinions or for voicing disagreement with the political consensus in an organization. But it is also about the assault on reason itself. — BW

Until recently, I was a director of data science at Thomson Reuters, one of the biggest news organizations in the world. It was my job, among other things, to sift through reams of numbers and figure out what they meant.

About a year ago, I stumbled on a really big story. It was about black Americans being gunned down across the country and the ways in which we report on that violence. We had been talking nonstop about race and police brutality, and I thought: This is a story that could save lives. This is a story that has to be told.

But when I shared the story with my coworkers, my boss chastised me, telling me expressing this opinion could limit my ability to take on leadership roles within the company. Then I was maligned by my colleagues. And then I was fired.

This is the story Reuters didn’t want to tell. 

I had been at Thomson Reuters for over six years—most recently, leading a team of data scientists applying new machine learning and artificial intelligence algorithms to our legal, tax and news data. We advised any number of divisions inside the company, including Westlaw, an online legal research service used by most every law firm in the country, and the newsroom, which reaches an audience of one billion every day around the globe. I briefed the Chief Technology Officer regularly. My total annual compensation package exceeded $350,000.

In 2020, I started to witness the spread of a new ideology inside the company. On our internal collaboration platform, the Hub, people would post about “the self-indulgent tears of white women” and the danger of “White Privilege glasses.” They’d share articles with titles like “Seeing White,” “Habits of Whiteness” and “How to Be a Better White Person.” There was fervent and vocal support for Black Lives Matter at every level of the company. No one challenged the racial essentialism or the groupthink.

This concerned me. I had been following the academic research on BLM for years (for example, here, here, here and here), and I had come to the conclusion that the claim upon which the whole movement rested—that police more readily shoot black people—was false. 

The data were unequivocal. It showed that, if anything, police were slightly less likely to use lethal force against black suspects than white ones. 

Statistics from the most complete database of police shootings (compiled by The Washington Post) indicate that, over the last five years, police have fatally shot 39 percent more unarmed whites than blacks. Because there are roughly six times as many white Americans as black Americans, that figure should be closer to 600 percent, BLM activists (and their allies in legacy media) insist. The fact that it’s not—that there’s more than a 500-percentage point gap between reality and expectation—is, they say, evidence of the bias of police departments across the United States. 

But it’s more complicated than that. Police are authorized to use lethal force only when they believe a suspect poses a grave danger of harming others. So, when it comes to measuring cops’ racial attitudes, it’s important that we compare apples and apples: Black suspects who pose a grave danger and white suspects who do the same. 

Unfortunately, we don’t have reliable data on the racial makeup of dangerous suspects, but we do have a good proxy: The number of people in each group who murder police officers. 

According to calculations (published by Patrick Frey, Deputy District Attorney for Los Angeles County) based on FBI data, black Americans account for 37 percent of those who murder police officers, and 34 percent of the unarmed suspects killed by police. Meanwhile, whites make up 42.7 percent of cop killers and 42 percent of the unarmed suspects shot by police—meaning whites are killed by police at a 7 percent higher rate than blacks.

If you broaden the analysis to include armed suspects, the gap is even wider, with whites shot at a 70 percent higher rate than blacks. Other experts in the field concur that, in relation to the number of police officers murdered, whites are shot disproportionately.

There has been only one study that has looked at the rate at which police use lethal force in similar circumstances across racial groups. It was conducted by the wunderkind Harvard economist Roland Fryer, who is black, grew up poor, had his fair share of run-ins with the police and, initially, supported BLM. In 2016, Fryer, hoping to prove the BLM narrative, conducted a rigorous study that controlled for the circumstances of shootings—and was shocked to find that, while blacks and Latinos were likelier than whites to experience some level of police force, they were, if anything, slightly less likely to be shot. The study generated enormous controversy. (In 2018, Fryer was suspended from Harvard over dubious allegations of sexual harassment.)

Unfortunately, because the BLM narrative was now conventional wisdom, police departments, under intense scrutiny from left-wing politicians and activists, scaled back patrols in dangerous neighborhoods filled with vulnerable black residents. This led to soaring violence in many communities and thousands of needless deaths—otherwise known as the Ferguson Effect.

For many months I stayed silent. I continued to read Reuters’ reporting on the movement, and started to see how the company’s misguided worldview about policing and racism was distorting the way we were reporting news stories to the public. 

In one story, Reuters reported on police in Kenosha, Wisconsin shooting a black man, Jacob Blake, in the back—but failed to mention that they did so only after he grabbed a knife and looked likely to lunge at them.

In another story, Reuters referred “to a wave of killings of African-Americans by police using unjustified lethal force,” despite a lack of statistical evidence that such a wave of police killings had taken place. (In 2020, 18 unarmed black Americans were killed by police, according to The Washington Post database.)

And in yet another, Reuters referred to the shooting of Michael Brown as one of a number of “egregious examples of lethal police violence,” despite the fact that an investigation conducted by the Justice Department—then run by Barack Obama’s Attorney General Eric Holder—had cleared the police officer in question of all wrongdoing.  

A pattern was starting to emerge: Reporters and editors would omit key details that undermined the BLM narrative. More important than reporting accurately was upholding—nurturing—that storyline. 

At some point, the organization went from ignoring key facts to just reporting lies. When Donald Trump declared, in July 2020, that the police kill more white than black people—this is true—Reuters, in its dispatch, repeated the false claim that blacks “are shot at a disproportionate rate.” In December 2020, Reuters reported that black Americans “are more likely to be killed by police,” citing a 2019 National Academy of Sciences study that, our reporters claimed, found that black men were 2.5 times likelier than white men to be killed by police. In fact, the only rigorous study to examine the likelihood of police use of force—Roland Fryer’s—found that police, as mentioned, were less likely to use lethal force against black Americans.

All this left me deeply unsettled: It was bad for Reuters, which was supposed to be objective and withhold judgment. It was bad for our readers, who were being misinformed. And it was bad for black people in rough neighborhoods, where local officials, prompted to take action by reporting like ours and the public outcry it triggered, were doing things like defunding the police.

Reuters, which is headquartered in London, is hardly the biggest news organization in the United States, but its stories are published in newspapers across the country and read by millions of Americans. It influences our perception of reality. It matters. I didn’t know what to do. I thought I should speak up, but I wanted to preserve my career. My wife, Cynthia, and I started arguing. I’d stay up late into the night compulsively reading the news and studies about policing. I took a two-month leave of absence while I agonized over what to do. 

While I was gone, I started writing a post about the disconnect between what we thought was true and what was actually happening. I wasn’t sure what I planned to do with it. Maybe I would share it. More likely it would just be a kind of therapy, a chance for me to work through some of these issues.

In my post, I examined all the data I had compiled, and I cited the Justice Department’s National Crime Victimization Survey and several academic studies (see, for example, here, here, here and here) to help back up my conclusions—in addition to Fryer’s.

I also pointed out that there had been zero properly designed studies refuting Fryer’s findings. And I noted that a growing number of criminologists—like Paul Cassell, at the University of Utah; Lawrence Rosenthal, at Chapman University; and Richard Rosenfeld, at the University of Missouri-St. Louis—now believed that the false rhetoric around police bias had played a key role in the recent spike in violent crime. This suggested that the BLM lie had led to the murder of thousands of black people.

To drive home my point, I included this striking statistic: On an average year, 18 unarmed black people and 26 unarmed white people are shot by police. By contrast, roughly 10,000 black people are murdered annually by criminals in their own neighborhoods.

When I returned from my leave of absence, I was ready to post my summary to the Hub, where my colleagues regularly posted things about any number of hot-button issues. Cynthia wasn’t sure. She wasn’t just worried about my job, but also about her job, and she was worried that word would get out to the rest of our community. BLM lawn signs lined our street. Our friends sympathized with the cause. We wondered whether we’d be ostracized. We spent many hours over many weeks talking it through. I had come close to posting and then pulled back, and then again, and again. We were talking about it in couples therapy. Finally, I got the okay from Cynthia to publish. She understood that this was about me speaking freely and honestly about something I knew about, cared about and felt I had the responsibility to do something about. I took a deep breath and shared my post on the Hub. It was early May 2021.

Within an hour or two, the moderators had taken down my post.

I messaged my Human Resources contact to inquire why my post had been removed. She told me anyone could flag a post for review, at which point it would be immediately taken down. She didn’t say anything else. I had no idea who had objected or what the grounds for the objection were, or when, if ever, my post would be reinstated. 

Over the next two weeks, I kept checking back with her to see when they would reinstate it. After a good bit of waiting and wondering, she told me that “a team of human resources and communications professionals” was reviewing it. I asked if I’d be allowed to discuss the moderators’ concerns with them. She said no. Finally, she told me my post would not be reinstated because it had been deemed “antagonistic” and “provocative.”

When I asked what, exactly, was antagonistic or provocative, she suggested I speak with the Head of Diversity and Inclusion. So, I scheduled a meeting.

I should mention that, while this was going on with H.R., I met with my manager, who expressed surprise and concern that I had written and then shared my post. It could hurt me at the company, she said. It could put the kibosh on any future promotions.

The next week, I met with the Head of Diversity and Inclusion. I asked what was wrong with my post. She said she couldn’t tell me, because she hadn’t been involved in the decision to remove it. (I was unclear whether she’d actually read it.) 

The next week, there was another meeting—this time with H.R. and Diversity and Inclusion. I wanted to know what I had to change in my post to make it acceptable. They suggested scrubbing all instances of the term “systemic racism,” to start. 

So I did that, and the piece was reinstated. I was relieved. Such discussion about facts and statistics had to be permitted. It was impossible to report the news accurately if employees were not allowed to have internal, sometimes heated discussions about pretty much anything.

Then the comments started rolling in. A handful of BLM supporters, all of them white, said that, as a white person, I had no place criticizing BLM. They called my review of the academic literature “whitesplaining” (failing to note that many of the academics I cited were black). I was publicly derided as a “troll,” “confused,” “laughable,” and “not worth engaging with or even attempting to have an intelligent conversation” with. One colleague said: “I do not believe that there is any point in trying to engage in a blow-by-blow refutation of your argument, and I will not do so. My unwillingness to do so doesn't signal the strength of your argument. If someone says, ‘The KKK did lots of good things for the community—prove me wrong,’ I'm not obligated to do so.”

Notably absent from the attacks directed at me was even a single substantive challenge to the facts I was citing.

It was insulting and painful. Not a single executive, no one in H.R., no one in Diversity and Inclusion, condemned any of the public attacks on me. They were silent. I’m not surprised no one came to my defense. Who would take that kind of a risk? It became very clear very fast that my public takedown was intended to ensure that there would be no discussion around BLM or the question of police brutality and race.

After enduring waves of abuse, I emailed H.R. to express my concern about these attacks on me and their chilling effect. They responded by removing my post—and shutting down the conversation. I was told that, if I discussed my experience on any internal company communications channel, I would be fired.

I was distraught.  Here I was trying to bring the company's attention to how we were spreading lies that were contributing to the murders of thousands of black people, and I was compared to a Klansman sympathizer, and forbidden by the company to discuss any of it.

I had little doubt about the sincerity of H.R.’s threat to fire me.  But I still had a faint hope that the company’s senior leadership would right the ship if I could only make them aware of the matter.  Regardless, given the way the internal conversation had ended, I didn’t see a tenable way to continue working at the company without some sort of resolution. 

So, I sent an email to colleagues and company leadership, again expressing concern about how the attacks against me had successfully shut down any productive conversation and left my reputation in tatters. The next day, H.R. called me to say that my access to all company computer and communications systems had been revoked.

Three days later, on June 8, 2021, I was fired.

“As we discussed on Friday,” H.R. said in their parting email, “you’ve violated our expressed direction and have repeatedly refused to follow the counsel offered.” The email went on:“The manner in which you’ve conducted yourself in recent weeks does not align with our expectations for you as a leader within Thomson Reuters.”

A decade ago, my experience at Thomson Reuters would have been unthinkable. Most Americans probably think it’s still unthinkable. That’s what makes it so dangerous. Most of us don’t understand how deeply compromised our news sources have become. Most of us have no idea that we are suffused with fictions and half-truths that sound sort of believable and are shielded from scrutiny by people whose job is to challenge them. This is true, above all, of my fellow liberals, who assume that only Republicans complain about the mainstream media. But this is not a partisan issue. This is a We The People issue.

In January, I filed a complaint with the Massachusetts Commission Against Discrimination stating that I was fired in retaliation for complaining about a racially hostile work environment. (The MCAD works in conjunction with the U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission.) We’ll see whether the state finds that there are grounds for a lawsuit.

However that shakes out will not change the fact that thousands of black Americans are dead, in part because too many people are still unaware of basic facts about policing since their trusted news sources meticulously obscure the truth. The job of journalists is to report the stories that don’t comport with the prevailing or popular narrative. We desperately need them to do that again. (read more)

Two 13-year-old children were arraigned May 2 and charged in connection to one or more of those previous instances of violence. Those incidents include reports of children attempting to buy alcohol at downtown restaurants and then breaking the windows when refused, to group beating a woman reportedly because she was wearing braids as she walked in Downtown Crossing, to punching a McDonald’s employee in the face in Roxbury.

The ages of the children — with at least one leader in April’s attacks being reported as only 11 years old — make it hard for the city and law enforcement to come up with a response. That’s because of 2018 state criminal justice reform legislation.

“The 2018 reforms take kids under 12 out of the criminal justice system. Previously, kids as young as 7 could be charged criminally,” state Sen. William Brownsberger — a Democrat who represents Back Bay, Fenway, Allston, Brighton, Watertown and Belmont and a chief sponsor of the bill — wrote to the Herald on May 4. “The right responses for troubled children under 12 are through DCF, the schools, the health care system, and, of course, their parents.” (read more)

Do you find it strange that we do not dare challenge the prevailing narrative of the ‘democratic’ party of projection and the nation’s socialist media? Especially since questioning electoral integrity is a cottage industry for themselves whenever they lose.

Why does this matter? Consider it from another point of view – why is it so important to the nation’s socialist media and the anti-liberty left? (But, we repeat ourselves.) Why have they obsessed about this for months, viciously attacking anyone who brought up the suspiciously-termed ‘Big Lie’?

Could it be they obsess over this because they are hoping for a repeat performance? In military terms, this is known as ‘preparing the battlefield.’ The Biden Regime already issued a dire warning for the fall, with this key line that shows this is all smoke and mirrors:

In forecasting 100 million potential infections during a cold-weather wave later this year and early next, the official did not present new data or make a formal projection.

They are taking the time to discredit any allegations of their electoral malfeasance in order to issue the same condemnations when they do it again. The new movie, 2000 Mules, from esteemed documentarian Dinesh D’Souza, and news anchor Tucker Carlson, are raising these questions, but they are experiencing suppression – why? If you take into consideration all that is being done by the liberticidal left to destroy democracy and this country, this takes on critical importance.

Who can forget how the authoritarian leftists graciously accepted electoral defeat without the merest hint of controversy after losing to Trump in 2016? You can’t? Well, because it never happened! Somehow, we’re supposed to ‘memory hole’ near-constant complaints about ‘Russia collusion’ for four years. So before we go on, let them remind us that only ‘they’ are allowed to question election integrity.

Anti-liberty leftists will always accuse others of what they are doing – they do this for a number of reasons, mainly as a form of disinformation, but you have to consider it must bring a certain amount of perverse pleasure for these hypocrites. They love the Big Lie narrative because they love to accuse others of being what they are – a socialist workers' party, or race-based antagonists dividing people by skin color. Hence, their mantra for the past 18 months is that any allusion to the 2020 election being a dumpster fire is of course a ‘Big Lie’, and they repeat it often as admonished by their heroes Hitler and Lenin. (Both are socialists, so they can spare us the fake outrage over the comparison.)

First of all, we’re supposed to forget the Biden laptop scandal that implicated ‘the Big Guy’ – a scandal subsequently suppressed by the biased media. (The same folks that are ever-neutral to a fault except when there’s an election on the line.) Then all bets are off, and that news isn’t fit to print – until 18 months later – when it’s far too late. We are also supposed to forget that news jeopardized an honest election.

Within days of the chaos of mail-in voting, ballot harvesting, and dropbox stuffing, we were told it was in fact the "most secure in history." One of the ‘debunking’ stories had a great quote that 'extraordinary claims require extraordinary proof.’ If the 2020 election was the "most secure in history," then that extraordinary claim needs some extraordinary proof. That’s correct anti-liberty leftists, if you are going to claim perfection on a historic scale while simultaneously parroting the Big Lie BS (BidenSpeak) however and whenever you possibly can, the burden of proof is on you.  

We are also supposed to forget all the glaring statistical oddities of the 2020 election. That the man who campaigned from his basement, or to tiny crowds in the middle of nowhere, earned 80+ million votes. Even worse, was that his ability to acquire raw vote totals didn’t translate to down-ballot races. Does anyone feel like we’re being set up for the same kind of fairytale story this time around? That those plucky ‘Democrats’ facing long odds in ‘saving the planet’ and initiating change were able to win anyway despite the polling or that their other candidates didn’t get as many votes?

We’re also trying to figure out where the ‘secret history’ of the “Shadow Campaign That Saved the 2020 Election” fits into all of this? Back around the time of the election, it seemed like there was a conspiracy unfolding behind the scenes between business and labor that cropped up long before the emergence of COVID to ‘protect the election.’

It turns out that’s because there was in fact a conspiracy unfolding behind the scenes between business and labor that cropped up long before the emergence of COVID to ‘protect the election.’ But remember, anything about any kind of conspiracy is a Big Lie:

There was a conspiracy unfolding behind the scenes, one that both curtailed the protests and coordinated the resistance from CEOs. Both surprises were the result of an informal alliance between left-wing activists and business titans.
[...]
Even though it sounds like a paranoid fever dream – a well-funded cabal of powerful people, ranging across industries and ideologies, working together behind the scenes to influence perceptions, change rules and laws, steer media coverage and control the flow of information. They were not rigging the election; they were fortifying it. 

Did you catch that? They were not rigging the election; they were fortifying it – George Orwell, call your office. Remember, this was before the COVID pandemic made it necessary to deal with the COVID pandemic:

Sometime in the fall of 2019, Mike Podhorzer became convinced the election was headed for disaster – and determined to protect it.

Luckily for them, COVID came along, so their conspiracy was justified by a serious crisis instead of only feelings. The other odd thing about all of this is that this article was published back on February 4, 2021; it’s almost as though they wanted to have all of this out in the public record, optimally timed for it to be seen and then quickly forgotten. Why would they do this? Consider what would happen had they not defensively published this and someone dug it up at some point? With this out there they have all their bases covered. You do have to wonder how this fits into their lie matrix. There wasn’t a conspiracy but, actually, there was, or it’s all a big lie, but we keep changing our story anyway. Just remember, we’re not supposed to challenge any of it.

So we go back to the original question: why is all of this important? First, let’s get one thing out of the way, this isn’t about restoring anything. Because we have no doubt this will be the accusation – there aren’t any provisions for this, so that is off the table. But does anyone want to wager that this was part of the plan by the anti-liberty left anyway?

Sure, if Biden and Harris had any honor, they would have resigned by now, but who are we kidding? Anti-liberty leftists lack anything in the way of honor; if they did, they wouldn’t be running around with false monikers like liberal, progressive, or Democrat.

This is important because they are planning on doing it all over again, we realize that’s bloody obvious to anyone on the pro-freedom side, and they’ve already started to telegraph their intentions and meddle in local elections. If it’s supposedly a ‘Big Lie’ then why is there evidence of malfeasance out there – no matter how the anti-liberty left likes to deny it. They have to do it over again because they have nothing else – the people are rejecting the results of their national socialist agenda, so they have no other choice but to cheat and then lie about it. (read more)

The AP published a “hit piece” on May 3, attempting to expose TTV’s “flawed analysis of cellphone location data and ballot drop box surveillance footage” presented in 2000 Mules. We will examine those claims, weaving in information from the movie and conversations with Engelbrecht over the weekend.

Notably, the AP story states neither D’Souza nor Engelbrecht responded to “a request for comment.” At least in Engelbrecht’s case, she was given little to no time to respond. She “received the request for comment at 11 p.m., and this story was published the next day.”

The silliness of the @AP and @PolitiFact “fact checks” becomes obvious when you see “2000 Mules.” Cabdrivers going past dropboxes, really? Election workers? These cover-up artists want you to believe their preposterous conjectures instead of your own eyes https://t.co/GXmj2yMXBK

— Dinesh D'Souza (@DineshDSouza) May 8, 2022

Is Geospatial Data with Cellphones Precise?

“Cellphone data is like digital DNA,” Engelbrecht explained. A court case on the precision of this technology makes that claim difficult to dispute. In response to the 2016 Supreme Court case, Carpenter v. United States, Justice Roberts wrote a 2018 opinion in which he describes the level of precision tracing afforded by pinging a cellphone using geofencing technology. “Accordingly, when the Government tracks the location of a cell phone,” writes Roberts, “It achieves near perfect surveillance as if it had attached an ankle monitor to the phone’s user.” Two of the most striking paragraphs from his 2018 opinion are captured here.

Much of the premise of the AP story is built around proof that cellphone data is not as precise as Justice Roberts describes in his opinion. Notably, Engelbrecht mentions in the movie that their data in Georgia was used by law enforcement as a test case to help law enforcement solve a cold murder case of a young girl.

Methodology of the TTV/OPSEC Investigation

Ballot trafficking is defined as the paid collection and casting or delivery of a ballot by an unauthorized third party. In the 2020 election, multiple ballots were cast to dropboxes by many “mules” in numerous states and jurisdictions. It is illegal in all states to be paid for casting a ballot. Individuals or mules were paid $10 or more per ballot—according to witness interviews—to “pick up ballots from stash houses run by NGOs to run them to dropboxes.” Engelbrecht states in the documentary, “So you have the collectors, on the one hand, you have the stash houses, which are the nonprofits, and then you have the mules that are doing the drops.”

The criteria used to qualify as a ballot trafficker were purposely conceived by TTV to rule out false positives. In other words, TTV/OPSEC sought to avoid capturing individuals in their geo tracing that were merely passing by or who did not approach the dropbox. The mules also had to satisfy particular standards to be qualified as bonafide mules.

According to Engelbrecht, they set out to allow the “data to tell the tale.” Phillips explains in the movie, “We put together a plan to see where the data would take us. Our final decision was that the traffickers had to have been to a dropbox space and five or more visits to one of the one or more of these organizations.” Engelbrecht adds, “Those were the outliers. It was such an aberrant pattern.” Phillips introjects, “The fact of the matter is, these techniques are used every single day by law enforcement, intelligence community, [and] the Department of Defense.”

As such, their approach was conservative, meant to catch the worst offenders, according to Phillips:

“We want to absolutely ensure that we don’t have false positives, meaning including people that should not have been included. We’re not in any way saying that this is all there is. We’re just saying that based on our criteria that we identified, in Atlanta, 242 people who went to an average of 24 drop boxes in eight organizations during a two-week period.”

The team targeted swing states where the election was decided, Georgia, Wisconsin, Arizona, Pennsylvania, and Michigan. They collected data from October 1 through the election in all of the states, and in Georgia, the data was collected between October 1 and the January 6 runoff. In the Atlanta metro area, they targeted 309 dropboxes, some in suburban areas. They virtually fenced off (geofenced) the dropboxes to limit their collection of cellphone pings to those who entered the space and approached the dropbox. They also geofenced and pinged phones that approached or entered the identified “organizations (NGOs) across the country.” They bought 10 trillion signals, more than a petabyte of data, during the course of the investigation.

One of the key take-home messages from the movie 2000 mules is that the GOP had been approached by whistleblowers, and did absolutely nothing. An operation of this magnitude would have been impossible to pull off without the uniparty acting in complete concert with each other.

— Rising serpent (@rising_serpent) May 8, 2022

When I asked Engelbrecht about the claims in the AP story that innocent people may have been caught up in their data, she said their methodology addressed those pitfalls:

“Of course, there are ways to eliminate passers-by and county workers, of course, there are ways to confirm that the people in the videos are (or are not) mules. Larry Campbell, dropping off 6 ballots for his big family, wouldn’t be in our study. Going once to a dropbox wasn’t in our study. Our mules averaged 38 dropbox visits and 8 NGO visits. Any other combination (ex. going to NGOs and USPS boxes, for example, wouldn’t have been in our study. Or going to 100 dropboxes, but no NGOs. They weren’t in our study.) That’s how we know this is the tip of the iceberg.”

In the pattern of life below, the blue tracks are the pattern of travel by the individual in the course of one day. The orange dots are the dropboxes, and the house icons are the NGOs.

Phillips and Engelbrecht explain using the graphic above. Engelbrecht describes the things they looked for:

“Higher dropbox visits and the elements that are additive. Here the going to the nonprofits, the ability to identify the pattern of approach to a dropbox and that it is going not past a dropbox and on but directly to a dropbox and back to another point and then to another dropbox.”

Phillips:

“What you see here on the screen is a single person on a single day in Atlanta, GA. They went to 28 drop boxes and five organizations in one day. The individual, to get to some of these dropboxes, you had to be intentional— to get off the highway, to get to the dropbox, you had to go on surface streets, you have to turn in somewhere in order to get to those drop boxes. The circles represent where the ballots originate, the stash houses where the ballots are collected and handed to the mules.” 

Concerning AP’s recounting of Pennsylvania Sen. Sharif Street’s claims that he was “confident he was counted as several of the 1,155 anonymous “mules’, even though he didn’t deposit anything into a dropbox at that time period,” Engelbrecht’s response was as follows:

“We have been very precise in what we’ve said. The writer makes claims and then debunks those claims with what we’ve actually said (in our testimony). If the Senator was going back and forth between NGOs and dropboxes, and if he did more than 10 times, then it is possible he would be in our study. Removing him still leaves 1100+ mules. Oh, and, very important, driving by dropbox isn’t a thing. You have to get out of your car and walk up to it. That’s what we looked at in the study.”

Riots and Traffickers: Data Doesn’t Lie

Additionally, OPSEC collected evidence suggesting some of the mules also participated in the violent Antifa riots earlier in the year. As D’Souza introjected, the likelihood of left-leaning participation in both is a much more likely hypothesis. Phillips states:

“There were several different violent BLM Antifa riots in Atlanta, and in one of them, we had three dozen of our mules participate in these violent riots. There’s an organization that tracks the device IDs. Across all violent protests around the world, we took a look at our 242 mules in Atlanta, and sure enough, dozens and dozens and dozens of our mules show up on the ACLED databases.”

The AP story attempts to convince readers the theory of there being an intersection between mules and BLM rioters falls flat unless you believe the data collected by the Armed Conflict Location & Event Data Project (ACLED) is bogus. You would also have to believe the same geofencing technology used by the CIA, the FBI, or the Department of Defense is also flawed and imprecise. If that isn’t enough to convince, just read the 2019 NYTimes story on cellphone geolocation tracking. Moreover, the data combined with a robust law enforcement investigation with witness interviews would help to further substantiate TTV’s findings.

#2000Mules #2000MulesMovie

"An example of the precise location data Google provided for the device of just one alleged Capitol rioter. Courtesy of U.S. Justice Department" https://t.co/yljk9U1pMX

What @AP is peddling today What DOJ is using in court https://t.co/L7X1Fm4IUx pic.twitter.com/dcs1Sc2qwo

— Rasmussen Reports (@Rasmussen_Poll) May 8, 2022

I keep reading “fact checks” by @AP and @PolitiFact that say cell phone geotracking is not very precise or accurate. Here’s the @nytimes on how it pinpoints a person’s exact location #2000Mules pic.twitter.com/4QmNKgXaiF

— Dinesh D'Souza (@DineshDSouza) May 8, 2022

Raffensperger Does Not Have TTV Video

The AP story contends Georgia Secretary of State Raffensperger’s office investigated one of the surveillance videos circulated by True the Vote saying it found the man was dropping off ballots for himself and his family. Engelbrecht told UncoverDC while TTV has offered the video surveillance copies to the SOS, Raffensperger does not have TTV footage:

“They only have geospatial data. The GBI already has access to all the video because it’s a state video. We went through everything and offered to provide video, but until the subpoenas, they’ve never indicated what or how they wanted to receive info, and we didn’t want to do anything incorrectly. That’s how I am certain the comment about the Raffensperger having our video is inaccurate.”

UncoverDC reached out to Raffensperger’s office on Thursday about the video footage claim but has received no response as of this publication.

TTV has 4 million minutes of surveillance video from around the country from open records requests. According to Phillips, some of the video surveillance was turned off in Arizona. In Wisconsin—despite rules requiring video surveillance—surveillance of dropboxes was not done there. Importantly, in the places where TTV has video, they have the geolocation data that correlates with the video surveillance footage, further corroborating the evidence.

Gloves and Photos at Dropboxes

One of the AP claims is that wearing gloves to avoid fingerprints is “pure speculation.” The ballot trafficking case in Arizona did, in fact, involve fingerprint evidence from the ballots. The evidence is most likely under seal. Nevertheless, whether the hypothesis about the connection between the case and the sudden wearing of gloves elsewhere is true or not, it is still unlikely that a universe of innocent people would be wearing surgical gloves or taking photos at dropboxes when delivering multiple ballots at 3 in the morning. It just isn’t normal behavior.

Signature Verification Standards and Voter Rolls

The AP maintains all is well with absentee ballots concerning signature verification.  Voter rolls in the U.S. are notoriously poorly maintained and updated. Engelbrecht and Phillips discuss poorly maintained voter rolls at length in their testimony in front of Wisconsin legislators. It is very tough to conduct clean elections when your voter rolls are populated with dead voters and out-of-state votes. Multiple states experienced issues with IDs and signature verification. For example, there were known issues in Wisconsin, Arizona, and Georgia with signature verification. According to Engelbrecht, “Inaccurate voter rolls are the gateway. In GA, 75k+ (in Nov) and 46k+ (in Jan) votes came from ineligible records, primarily voters who were no longer living in [the] state, but still found a way to cast a ballot.” The claim that absentee and mail-in ballots are “verified by the signature and tracked closely” and “safeguards against anyone who tries to illegally cast extra ballots” is provably absurd.

AP Claims No Massive Ballot Collection Scheme

During the documentary, Engelbrecht describes an operation that delivers the ballots in the method of a thousand small cuts. She explained the operation seems to have been designed to have many mules delivering small numbers of ballots to avoid surges in ballot drops. Only in one case does the chain of custody documents indicate a significant surge at a dropbox, and that was in Gwinnett County, where 1,962 ballots were cast with “comparatively few cell phone devices were proximate to the dropbox during the period of time” notated. In this way, massive numbers of ballots were allegedly delivered, evading detection over time.

The numbers are stunning when the minimum criteria of 10 drop boxes, with 5 visits and a handful of ballots delivered per visit, are considered. By that calculus, it is a potential 380,000 illegal votes. When those criteria are lowered to fewer dropboxes and visits, another 810,000 illegal votes. In Georgia, Arizona, and Pennsylvania, the mules allegedly cast more than enough illegal votes to overcome the margin of defeat for Trump.

Either way, TTV did not set out to litigate or change the election results. The investigation was data-driven and conservatively designed to capture evidence that sought to eliminate bias and satisfy a stringent scientific inquiry standard.

D’Souza asks toward the end of the documentary whether Engelbrecht and Phillips believe their data proves crimes occurred. He also asks whether the 2020 election results may have changed as a result of the ballot trafficking scheme. Phillips responds:

“With the lower bar of five dropbox visits and just three illegal ballots per drop, we find election fraud on an astonishing scale in Wisconsin, 83,565 illegal votes were trafficked in Wisconsin, in Georgia 92,670. In Pennsylvania, 209,505. In Michigan, 226,590, and Arizona, 207,435. Using this calculus, Trump would have won all the key States and the final electoral vote 305 to 233.” 

“And so these are the kind of things, 4,000,000 minutes of this, this was an organized effort to subvert a free and fair election,” continued Phillips. “This is organized crime. You can’t look at this data in its aggregate and believe anything otherwise. That’s especially true when you consider that in places like Georgia, it was only decided by 10,012 thousand votes. And you look at 5,000 visits just from our mules. It’s not a leap to say ‘yes, this would have changed the results.'”

2000 Mules made its virtual debut on Saturday, May 7, with 80,000 people tuned in, according to D’Souza. (read more)

In the review I wrote about the movie, I explained in somewhat more detail how the program worked, but I urge you to see the film for yourself.  The only thing I found a bit disappointing was the fact that the movie did not name the non-profits involved.

Well, that disappointment is over.  True the Vote has announced that, in a few weeks, it will make available to the public every single bit of information it has regarding the drop-box fraud.  Or, as Catherine Engelbrecht, who founded True the Vote, calls it, pulling the ripcord.

Releasing the data matters because mainstream media outlets have alternately ignored the movie or, in the AP's case, "fact-checked it."  Ali Swenson insists that cell phone information isn't as precise as True the Vote claims and that True the Vote's assumptions are "faulty."

Swenson's claim that those cell phone pings are way too vague to be useful is easily debunked.  Back in 2018, the New York Times wrote about the extremely detailed information the apps on people's phones provide:

At least 75 companies receive anonymous, precise location data from apps whose users enable location services to get local news and weather or other information, the Times found. Several of those businesses claim to track up to 200 million mobile devices in the United States — about half of those in use last year. The database reviewed by the Times — a sample of information gathered in 2017 and held by one company — reveals people's travels in startling detail, accurate to within a few yards and in some cases updated more than 14,000 times a day. (Emphasis added.)

Swenson asserts that the film shows an interview with only one whistleblower who saw people pick up what she "assumed" were payments.  True.  But the fact is that in cases in which law enforcement has caught up with those mules who deliver multiple ballots to drop boxes, they always do it for money.  It is, therefore, a reasonable assumption that, when someone repeatedly goes to a non-profit and then visits between 20 and 45 drop boxes, that person is not acting out of the goodness of his heart.  If law enforcement would arrest these people, we could confirm this assumption.

Swenson quotes a single expert saying that cell phone data really won't prove whether the person was at, or merely near, the drop box.  What Swenson ignores is that, although putting someone near a single drop box proves nothing, 2000 Mules shows that the cell phone pings revealed that specific people were beating a path to innumerable drop boxes.  There is no reason that "delivery drivers, postal workers, cab drivers, poll workers and elected officials" would stop at only two places: leftist non-profits and multiple drop boxes.  Only mules would do that.

Swenson argues that, even though True the Vote had video footage of obvious mules stuffing boxes, the movie doesn't prove that the footage aligns with pings.  True.  I suspect that proof will come when True the Vote pulls the ripcord.

Another Swenson argument is that showing someone dropping off a stack of ballots doesn't prove wrongdoing because people are allowed to do so for family members and household members.  Considering that the data shows mules averaging 20 to 45 drop boxes, at each of which they dropped off an average of five ballots, I'm thinking those must be very big families...or, perhaps, it's evidence of election fraud.

The remainder of the "fact check" is the same: faulty assumptions; inaccurate facts; and extraneous, irrelevant information, all functioning as argument rather than analysis.

Judging by the AP's frantic effort to challenge the movie's premises, in a few weeks, it's going to be fun to see what happens when all of the facts — including the identity of those non-profits — are out there. (read more)

2000 Mules begins with the premise that Trump voters have found it impossible to believe that Trump lost the election. When they contrast his campaign appearances (60,000 screaming fans) with Biden’s campaign appearances (6 vaguely animated lumps sitting in little circles); the bellwether counties states showing Trump winning by a large margin; the significant gains Trump made with Hispanics and Blacks; the millions of votes Trump gained over the four years of his presidency; and the mysterious overnight counting shut-down in the states that ultimately gave Biden his “victory,” they know that something is wrong.

The folks at True the Vote also suspected that something was wrong, very wrong. The founder, Catherine Engelbrecht, working with Gregg Philips and a team of computer analysts, came up with a very clever way to determine whether there was fraud. They suspected as much, thanks to the way in which Democrats in key states used COVID as an excuse to increase absentee voting. That included states which allowed only absentee voting with drop boxes across cities and towns, where there had been massive ballot harvesting. That is, people, both real and fake, didn’t fill out their own ballots. Instead, they were collected, completed, and put into drop boxes by partisan and paid activists.

To prove this theory, True the Vote obtained geo-tracking information for major urban areas in Pennsylvania, Michigan, Wisconsin, Georgia, and Arizona, allowing them to follow cell phone signals. They marked all the drop boxes and all the facilities for left-wing non-profits. They then looked for cell phones that traveled between the non-profits and drop boxes at least ten times (to be sure to winnow out statistical noise). Through FOIA requests, they also obtained as many videos as they could showing people stuffing multiple ballots into the drop boxes, a completely illegal act.

Their data revealed 2,200 mules in just five cities, visiting between 20 and 45 drop boxes each, at which they dropped off an average of five ballots. When you do the math, the numbers are staggering. (read more)

In a familiar pattern, left-wing fact-checkers furiously try to hide the damning proof of election fraud in the 2020 election presented in Dinesh D'Souza's documentary 2000 Mules.  But those "fake checkers" clearly did not actually watch the film.  See, e.g., Ali Swenson, Associated Press, reprinted at U.S. News and World Report or at the Atlanta Journal-Constitution.

The U.S. Supreme Court will make history this summer if it overturns the 1973 Roe v. Wade decision that imposed unrestricted abortion nation-wide. The leaked draft of the opinion sent pro-abortion Leftists into foaming fits and has dominated news coverage all week. But this mightn’t be the only historic decision the court makes in the near future. Immigration and Affirmative Action are also pending cases. Thanks to the emergent American Kritarchy, SCOTUS now holds the fate of the country in its hands. Donald Trump’s appointees could either deliver decisions that put America and the Historic American Nation First—or capitulate to communist threats and intimidation.

Just as a wave of crucial midterm primary elections kick off around the country, the conveniently scheduled leak of a Supreme Court draft opinion overturning Roe v. Wade became America's new weapon of manufactured mass distraction. – @michellemalkin https://t.co/jIzHHnOR1g

— VDARE (@vdare) May 4, 2022

The most immediate immigration case SCOTUS is considering: the challenge to “Remain in Mexico,” which Trump established to make “asylum” seekers wait outside the country while their applications are processed. It’s a proven deterrent to illegal immigration and keeps dubious asylum seekers—90 percent of them—out of America [Migrant Protection Protocols, January 24, 2019]. Of course, President Biden wants to get rid of it. But a Trump-appointed judge overruled Biden’s attempt to scrap it last year, and this was upheld by three Republican-appointed judges on the Fifth Circuit. As it will in Roe, SCOTUS is expected to rule this summer [Supreme Court Struggles Over Biden’s Bid to End ‘Remain in Mexico’ Program, by Adam Liptak, New York Times, April 26, 2022]. SCOTUS will also hear cases about immigration enforcement, such as whether illegal aliens are eligible for bond hearings [Justices will revisit whether certain noncitizens in lengthy detention are entitled to bond hearings, by Shalini Bhargava Ray, SCOTUSblog, January 10, 2022].

SCOTUS might also hear a case involving Title 42 public-health expulsions. The implementation of that law, imposed by President Trump during the China Virus panic to keep carriers out of the country, is making its way through the lower courts. Last month, U.S. District Court Judge Robert Summerhays, a Trump appointee, halted Biden Regime’s plan to scrap it, leaving it open to further legal challenges [Biden administration plans to comply with court order to stop planning to lift Title 42, by Julia Ainsley, NBC News, April 26, 2022].

In light of the expected Roe v. Wade decision, Texas Gov. Greg Abbott wants to challenge the ruling in Plyler v. Doe, which requires public education for illegal-alien minors. “I think we will resurrect that case and challenge this issue again, because the expenses are extraordinary and the times are different than when Plyler v. Doe was issued many decades ago,” he told a radio host this week. Plyler v. Doe was a 1982 case where the Supreme Court struck down a Texas law that barred illegal-immigrant enrollment in public schools [The demise of Roe wouldn’t endanger school access, legal scholars say, by Moriah Balingit , Washington Post, May 6, 2022].

1/3 I make a cameo WAPO appearance for pointing out that the legal reasoning in the BROWN school desegregation decree was just as specious as ROE. But the real news: TX Gov. Abbott is questiong PLYER, which forced states to educate illegal alien childrenhttps://t.co/9sY21Il16G

— Peter Brimelow (@peterbrimelow) May 6, 2022

And some day, SCOTUS might take up Birthright Citizenship if Congress ends it, or if a Republican president does so via executive order, as Trump floated in 2018.

Beyond immigration, SCOTUS may also rule on other National Question issues. It has heard two challenges against racial preferences in university admissions this year, against Harvard University and the University of North Carolina, and so might issue a judgment on Affirmative Action. Plaintiffs allege the two colleges discriminate against whites and Asians with their admission preferences. The court’s decision could spell the end of racial quotas when it comes to university admissions [The Supreme Court adds Affirmative Action to its potential hit list, by Nina Totenberg, NPR, January 24, 2022].

Florida’s Stop WOKE Act might also come before the court. That bill prohibits teaching Critical Race Theory in schools and woke indoctrination training in the workplace. Left-wing activists have already filed a lawsuit against it [Minutes after bill is signed, lawsuit filed against DeSantis for ‘Stop WOKE Act,‘ by Ana Goñi-Lessan, Tallahassee Democrat, April 22, 2022].

How might SCOTUS rule on these cases? Justices Clarence Thomas and Samuel Alito are reliable conservatives who will rule for the Historic American Nation. Chief Justice John Roberts is unreliable. Thus Neil Gorsuch, Brett Kavanaugh, and Amy Coney Barrett will literally decide the fate of the nation.

Federal judges have seized control of immigration policy, a fact even the mainstream media admits. During the Trump years, some judges felt emboldened to read a non-existent Open Borders clause in the Constitution and overrule any attempts to strengthen border security or immigration enforcement. Yet during the Biden years, federal judges have proven to be allies to immigration patriots [Why Judges Are Basically in Charge of U.S. Immigration Policy Now, by Jasmine Aguilera, Time, May 4, 2022]. Kritarchy is real, and that’s why the opinions of nine judges matter so much to America’s future.

Out of Trump’s appointments, Kavanaugh is arguably the best on immigration. He already had a solid record on the issue prior to his appointment. As a circuit judge, he defended American workers from foreign competitors and opposed the participation of illegals in union elections. He has maintained a respectable record as an associate justice. He voted against the court’s blocking Trump’s elimination of the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) program, against striking down Trump’s proposed census citizenship question, voted for Trump’s tougher asylum rules, and voted for allowing Trump to use Pentagon appropriations to build a border wall.

Conversely, on immigration Gorsuch is probably the worst Trump appointment. Unlike Kavanaugh, he had a suspect record before joining the high court, with a reputation for ruling in favor of noncitizens against immigration enforcement. He says his immigrant wife (from England!) influences his views on the subject.

Gorsuch hasn’t really improved on SCOTUS. In 2018, he was the deciding vote to block a Trump measure that would have eased the deportation of illegals. In 2021, he wrote the opinion that sided with an illegal alien who had multiple deportation notices. Apparently, the deportation notices weren’t clear enough. Justice Kavanaugh called the conclusion “perplexing as a matter of statutory interpretation and common sense.”

Amy Coney Barrett agreed with Gorsuch on the case. Overall, Barrett has less of a record than the two other appointees. Before coming to the high court, the Center for Immigration Studies praised her for upholding the law [Those Favoring Judicial Activism on Immigration Will Likely Be Disappointed With a Justice Barrett, Center for Immigration Studies, October 5, 2020]. The 2021 case is one of the few times she’s made a substantial decision as an associate justice. She appears better than Gorsuch, but looks can be deceiving. She adopted two Haitian immigrants and says they affect her view of the law. At her confirmation hearing, she recalled crying with her adopted daughter over George Floyd and argued that “racism” is a huge problem in America. If Barrett cries about a career criminal who died of a fentanyl overdose, and proclaims racism an ever-present problem, she might just think American white kids must be taught to hate themselves.

Of course, if God startles Barrett into a decision Atlantic Leftists like, that will be fine. If she rules, say, to overturn Roe v. Wade, there will be weeping & gnashing of teeth. Leftists only like religion in public square when it serves liberal ends.https://t.co/sUTmmgnHHI

— VDARE (@vdare) May 3, 2022

As for Gorsuch and Kavanaugh, they are averse to racial preferences [Gorsuch, Kavanaugh, Barrett Offer Few Clues on Affirmative Action’s Future, by Marcia Coyle, Law.com, January 24, 2022]. Then again, Kavanaugh does have something of a soft spot, or soft head, when it comes to “racism.” He recently said the full benefits of American citizenship should be granted to residents of American territories due to the “racist” reasons for denying citizenship in the past. Leftist journalists argue that this reasoning is quite close to Critical Race Theory [Neil Gorsuch Has a Critical Race Theory About Puerto Rico, by Matt Ford, New Republic, April 27, 2022].

VDARE.com has bitter personal reasons to be skeptical of the courage of the Supreme Court. Moreover, it has ducked before, on Obamacare and on litigation arising from the 2020 election, especially Texas vs. Pennsylvania.

Still, SCOTUS may be poised to rule favorably for the Historic American Nation. Leftists are really worried that the Supremes will force Biden to enforce immigration laws and, even worse, gut Affirmative Action.

So now, with Roe v. Wade headed for the dustbin, the conservative legal movement must make immigration patriotism, Affirmative Action, and opposing CRT the new litmus tests for conservative judges.

We can’t hope to make America great again with judges who cry over black thugs who threaten pregnant women with guns. (read more)

Zero-Covid visionary and World Health Network founder Yaneer Bar-Yam appears to be losing his grip on sanity, to judge from the massive wall-of-text he posted to Twitter yesterday, a transcript of a statement he made at some Occupational Health and Safety Administration hearing.

As you look over my abbreviated edit of his insane rant, remember that Zero Covid, as a movement, once enjoyed massive political and scientific influence across the world:

I am Yaneer Bar-Yam, Professor and founding president of the New England Complex Systems Institute. I work on mathematical analyses to identify the variables necessary and sufficient to describe a complex problem at large scale. … Science … is about what we see and learn about the world around us. It is about life itself. All of us have formative experiences in life. For me one of them was the loss of my sister, Aureet, who was two years older than me. She cared deeply about helping people. For years afterwards I drove her car, on the steering wheel there was attached the “serenity prayer” that many of you surely know: “God grant me the Serenity, To accept the things I cannot change, Courage to change the things I can, And Wisdom to know the difference.”

In science as in life, the most important question is: Can we make it better? … Today I want to tell you that the pandemic has been mischaracterized as something we can’t control, even can’t do anything about. … Here, today, we have a historic opportunity to change the direction of society from failure, causing illness, death and disability, on a spiral of devastation, to a new path that will lead to an exit from this catastrophic condition. The place to start is in the workplace …. Economy depends on health. Infection followed by infection, disability accumulating from long covid organ damage after multiple infections, is untenable.

There are 5 pillars of prevention: Masking, Ventilation, Testing, Social distancing, and Vaccination. Each of these has multiple levels. From poor to outstanding. First: Masks: From cloth and surgical masks that might have been somewhat effective early in the pandemic, to N95s that help now, to elastomeric respirators that would stop almost all infection, to PAPRs that could stop infection entirely.

Second: Ventilation & HEPA purification according to conventional standards help significantly. Elevating standards makes it even better, and the risks can be minimal in many locations if we place HEPA purifiers near workers or customers based upon measured airflows.

Third: Testing is the most widely accepted measure. Reactive symptomatic and exposure testing has a significant effect. Proactive frequent screening, which in workplaces can and is being done once daily at some locations including fire departments at $1 per test using LAMP testing, can cause transmission to decrease even for Omicron, and can make risk minimal if it is done twice. Saliva tests are fine.

Fourth: Social distancing ranges from avoiding gatherings all the way to lockdowns.

Fifth: Vaccination in conjunction with other measures could have stopped the pandemic, but over reliance on vaccination alone undermined its utility because of new variants that would not have arisen if we effectively used other measures to reduce transmission.

What is important is that a combination of these five can be crafted based upon receptiveness and technology adoption and there are many choices that all work. Note that even though treatments exist, variants undermine them, they are not adequately available or equitably distributed, they do not always work, and have significant side effects. As far as we know, the only way to stop long covid disability is to stop infection.

… We need comprehensive protection. Regulation exists in the complexity of multidisciplinary knowledge. Each discipline has its own assumptions. Medical and biological sciences are different from social and engineering knowledge. Biologists may focus on vaccines, but high mask quality is no less a game changer. And RT-LAMP testing is now easy to do, costs $1 per test, and can be scaled immediately to 100s of millions per week.

Naysayers distort science, technology and economics. It is important to remember that scientists in general are passive observers. Biologists see biological phenomena not socio-technical advances or collective action, and surely not the opportunities of global enterprise engaging in coordinated action. To know what can be done, use a startup mentality and galvanize multidisciplinary teams to meet the challenge.

In this light passivity makes no sense. We have advanced since 1918. We have better science, technology, and communication to coordinate action. We provided people with clean water, we can provide clean air. Just as the virus can mutate and gain an advantage, we can innovate to defeat it. Our economic freedom driven culture has a knee jerk reaction: A desire for freedom from regulations. There are those who may say to themselves, I didn’t have these expenses before, I shouldn’t have them now.

We must recognize that there is a pandemic. The true costs of the pandemic are manifest in both acute illness and in post acute effects including cardiovascular events, symptoms of long covid and its organ damage and disability. Brain fog will cost workers and employers. We will surely pay for shortsighted views that focus on comparatively minuscule costs of masking, ventilation, testing, sick leave and supporting other precautions. …

Pandemics should not be thought of as waves, but as a fire. We know the solution is to put them out. Similarly for pandemics getting things to be a bit better is not enough. Can we do it? Multiple times we achieved cases going down. When cases go down, focus and put the fire out. We have been suffering from the pandemic for two years, complaining about its effect on the economy. Should we suffer for another two? Or more? Should we sacrifice lives pretending it is inevitable, or doesn’t exist? The data shows, strong action can reduce cases dramatically in 4-6 weeks. Then we only need to prevent a new wave, so the fire is not rekindled. We just need to start. We have the knowhow, we need the will. I hope you will recognize not just the challenge but the opportunity to make a difference. Seize this opportunity. Thank you.

We are watching the development of a technophilic religious system, here. There are the five rites of Masking, Ventilation, Testing, Social Distancing and Vaccination, the “preventive pillars” which each consist of “multiple levels.” These are the only things that can save initiates from the Pandemic Fires. With enough virtue, or will, adherents may dare to hope for a utopian world, free of disease and death. (read more)

A commenter points me to Jeffrey Tucker, who, as it turns out, has done critical work towards developing a Theory of Gates. At Microsoft, Gates oversaw the development of poorly secured software overrun by computer viruses. Afterwards, Tucker notes, he

… started dabbling in other areas, as newly rich people tend to do. They often imagine themselves especially competent at taking on challenges that others have failed at simply because of their professional successes. Also by this point in his career, he was only surrounded by sycophants who would not interrupt his descent into crankiness. 

And what subject did he pounce on? He would do to the world of pathogens what he did at Microsoft: he would stamp them out! He began with malaria and other issues and eventually decided to take on them all. And what was his solution? Of course: antivirus software. What is that? It is vaccines. Your body is the hard drive that he would save with his software-style solution. 

At the beginning of the pandemic, I noted that Gates was pushing hard for lockdowns. His foundation was now funding research labs the world over with billions of dollars, plus universities and direct grants to scientists. He was also investing heavily in vaccine companies. 

Early on in the pandemic, to get a sense of Gates’s views, I watched his TED talks. I began to realize something astonishing. He knew much less than anyone could discover by reading a book on cell biology from Amazon. He couldn’t even give a basic 9th-grade-level explanation of viruses and their interaction with the human body. And yet here he was lecturing the world about the coming pathogen and what should be done about it. His answer is always the same: more surveillance, more control, more technology.

Once you understand the simplicity of his core confusions, everything else he says makes sense from his point of view. He seems forever stuck in the fallacy that the human being is a cog in a massive machine called society that cries out for his managerial and technological leadership to improve to the point of operational perfection. 

There’s a lot to recommend this view. It explains specific things, like Gates’s fondness for mRNA vaccines, a genetic equivalent of computer code. More than that, though, it elucidates Gates’s failure to appreciate the essential intractability of many ancient human problems. Gates dreams of saving mankind from disease and poverty – things that are so much a part of what it means to be human, that it seems an error to call them problems in the first place. We are mortal beings; not all of us can be wealthy; we’ll all die of something. Gates the software developer has no experience of problems like that.

The fundamental message of How to Prevent the Next Pandemic is that we can stop future pandemic events by doing all of the things that did not stop the last pandemic event, only more, faster and harder.

Gates can’t get enough of the World Health Organisation. He proposes expanding it with a 3,000-strong division of pandemic shock troops called the Global Epidemic Response and Mobilisation team. That is not a joke; he actually wants to call it GERM. He says it’ll be comprised of epidemiologists, geneticists, pharmaceutical experts, data systems people, diplomats, rapid responders, modellers, and heaven knows who else. These people will jet around the world ensuring that an identical response is propagated instantly everywhere, so we can all endure the same catastrophic mistakes at the same time. A Corona tsar for every country, distributed from the same central depot.

Mass testing is another thing that is great and that we need more of. Gates wants cheap home tests everywhere, “to make it easier for everyone to get tested and get results fast” (p. 64). He also wants central databases to log all these precious test results. Antigen tests are great, but more accurate rapid testing technologies are even better. And of course we need more genetic sequencing to understand the progress of outbreaks and identify who is doing the spreading. It’s a scene straight out of Brazil: You wake up in the morning, send your mandatory swab through the vacuum tube for testing at the Ministry of Health, and the virus police are kicking down your door while you’re waiting for the coffee to boil.

Probably the strangest moment in this extended paean to the collection and management of disease statistics, is the praise Gates reserves for modellers. He thinks pandemic modelling “will eventually do better than the weather forecast” (p. 78), and he thinks modellers have been unfairly maligned by the press. He defends Neil Ferguson in particular:

In March 2020, Neil Ferguson, a highly respected epidemiologist at Imperial College, predicted that there could be more than 500,000 COVID deaths in the U.K. and more than 2 million in the U.S. over the course of the pandemic. That caused quite a stir in the press, but few reporters mentioned a key point that Ferguson had been very clear about: The scenario of his that made all the headlines assumed that people wouldn’t change their behavior – that no one would wear masks or shelter in place, for instance – but of course that wouldn’t be the case in reality. (p. 80)

It’s hard to imagine that Gates has ever even seen Ferguson’s paper. The Imperial College team were wrong about everything. They were especially wrong about the mitigating effects different interventions would have, which was the whole point of bothering with lockdown-justifying models in the first place.

In another absurd moment, Gates pleads that “The level of uncertainty” in pandemic modelling “can be quite high.” He recalls one modeller’s estimate, from February 2020, that there were “570 cases in Washington state, with a 90 percent certainty that it was between 80 and 1,500. Any report that omitted the range of possibilities left out some pretty important context” (p. 80). You have to rub your eyes, reading stupid stuff like this. What use is a model that predicts that there might be not that many cases out there, or there might be quite a lot, and how is it any better than just guessing? The open secret about modelling, of course, is that it’s not even a serious attempt at prediction. Modellers are just clients of the containment regime, tasked with developing fancy scientific equations that justify intrusive NPIs. Gates even seems intermittently aware of this, at one moment conceding that Ferguson’s goal was “to show how high the stakes were” (p. 80), (but somehow “not [to] drive everyone into a panic”).

“Help People Protect Themselves Right Away,” is the title of Chapter 4, where Gates lays out the case for keeping lockdowns and other containment measures in the pandemicist repertoire. He throws out that vile Fauci quote – “If it looks like you’re overreacting, you’re probably doing the right thing” – and indulges in what is by now one of the most tired arguments in the world:

The irony of NPIs is that the better they work, the easier it is to criticize the people who put them in place. If a city or state adopts them early enough, the case numbers will stay low, and critics will find it easy to say they weren’t necessary. (p. 86)

These pages are the most reprehensible in the whole book. Lockdowns have been an unmitigated disaster; they have ruined millions of lives and wrought untold economic destruction, and yet Gates, who lives in a 6,000 square-metre house and flies around the globe in private jets, waves away these costs with fake graphs and empty assurances that “lockdowns have clear benefits for public health” (p. 88).

Elsewhere, Gates vents his frustration that rich countries hoarded vaccine doses at the expense of the third world, but so great is his myopia that he fails to draw the obvious connection – that it was precisely his precious destructive lockdowns that drove the mad vaccination frenzy of 2021.

No, the costs of lockdowns remain beyond Gates, and in this he is no different than all the other oblivious well-off retirees, who have never thought twice about putting their neighbours out of business or condemning young children to eight hours of enforced masking every day. Climate lockdowns may have been a passing fantasy, but influenza lockdowns are something Gates remains deeply interested in. He even wonders if NPIs could be “paired with vaccines” to “eventually eradicate every strain of flu” (p. 96). Apparently, nobody has told the man that influenza has substantial animal reservoirs, from which it repeatedly jumps to humans.

In this formulaic endorsement of all the crazy policies that have been inflicted on humanity since 2020, two curiosities stand out. The first is Gates’s quiet but clear disillusionment with mRNA vaccines. The best thing he can find to say about them, is that they were developed quickly; otherwise, he damns them with faint praise, at one point even writing that masks have been more effective. He dreams of new, better vaccines, indeed “universal vaccines” that can target multiple pathogens, and that will provide “total protection” (p. 177) after a single dose. He also wonders about vaccines that can be delivered as a nasal spray, like the “imaginary vaccine for the hypothetical virus depicted in the movie Contagion” (p. 174), and that don’t have to be kept cold. Despite all of Gates’s software geek mRNA enthusiasm, these lines show he’s wondering if another approach wouldn’t have been better. The mRNA molecules decay quickly at normal temperatures, and technology for an mRNA nasal spray vaccine is years away.

The second eccentric moment, is Gates’s seventh chapter, called “Practice, practice, practice,” where he fantasises about all the pandemic war-games we need to have. Table-top exercises are great; “functional exercises” with “simulated disaster[s]” are better; the absolute best is the “full-scale exercise” complete with crisis actors and helicopters.

Proper war games have a certain logic to them; they allow commanders and politicians to gain experience in simulated conflicts, and they generate data for planners to study. Pandemic war-games are another matter. Pandemics are not wars, there is nobody to play the part of the virus, and so they tend to be little more than scripted media events – which explains why Bill Gates likes them so much. To him, these are fun parties where he can meet all of his favourite people and pretend to knowledge and importance. He’s had a great pandemic, and he wants to keep the emergency going, if only virtually.

Gates knows that he’s widely disliked, and that his inability to shut up has something to do with it:

One side effect of speaking out … is that it has provoked more of the criticisms of the Gate Foundation’s work that I’ve been hearing for years. … Bill Gates is an unelected billionaire - who is he to set the agenda on health or anything else? Three corollaries of this criticism are that the Gates Foundation has too much influence, that I have too much faith in the private sector as an engine of change, and that I’m a technophile who thinks new inventions will solve all our problems. (p. 16)

Gates has no real answer to these charges, pleading only that his foundation doesn’t work “in secret,” that they consult “outside experts.” As for technophilia, he is unapologetic:

Innovation is my hammer, and I try to use it on every nail I see. As a founder of a successful technology company, I am a great believer in the power of the private sector to drive innovation. But innovation doesn’t have to be just a new machine or a vaccine, as important as those are. It can be a different way of doing things, a new policy, or a clever scheme for financing a public good. (p. 17)

Innovation, in Gatesland, always works the same way: In the beginning there is a grave problem, which for some reason nobody has noticed or cared about before. Then, there appears an Innovator, very often a woman or a racial minority. This blessed Innovator proposes a simple and obvious solution, which requires mainly grant funding. Thereafter, the problem is no more, and the world is better.

Thus we have the story of Bernard Olayo, who solved the problem of oxygen:

Oxygen is an important component in any health system … and … low- and middle-income countries have struggled [to supply it]. Bernard Olayo, a health specialist at the world bank, is trying to do something about it … In 2014, Olayo created an organization called Hewatele – the Swahili word for “abundant air” … With funding from local and international investors, Hewatele built oxygen plants at several of the busiest hospitals in the country … It devised a milkman model: Oxygen cylinders would regularly be dropped off at remote hospitals and clinics, and empty cylinders returned for a refill. Using this new approach, Hewatele cut the market price for oxygen in Kenya by 50 percent and reached some 35,000 patients. (p. 119)

Or the story of Stephaun Wallace, who is solving the problem of demographically uniform trial participants by recruiting “a diverse pool of volunteers from different genders, communities, races, ethnicities and age groups” (p. 169). Or the story of Sister Astridah Banda, who “is not a doctor but … is passionate about public health” (p. 175), and who is helping to combat Corona misinformation in Zambia by translating English advisories into local languages.

Gates likes to wrap up his anecdotes with statistics that sound good but don’t actually say very much the success of his blessed innovations: “Her show now reaches more than 1.5 million people” (p. 176), he says.

Problem, innovation, solution, happy: This is how everything works according to Gates. It’s how Maurice Hilleman invented the mumps vaccine, it’s how Katalin Karikó developed mRNA technology, it’s how James Lind discovered a cure for scurvy:

In May 1747, a physician named James Lind was serving as a ship’s surgeon … He was horrified by the number of sailors who were suffering from scurvy. No one knew at the time what caused scurvy, but Lind wanted a cure, so he decided to try various options and compare the results … The citrus treatment won out. … Although the British navy wouldn’t make citrus a required part of a sailor’s diet for nearly fifty years, Lind had found the first real evidence of a cure for scurvy. He had also run what is widely regarded as the first controlled clinical trial of the modern era. (p. 125)

If you look a little deeper, though, you’ll find that almost nothing ever works like Gates claims it does. Lind is a great example. The knowledge that scurvy was diet-related, and that fresh fruits or vegetables could cure it, had been around for centuries. Lind presented the results of his experiment only in passing; he never promoted citrus as the primary remedy, and scurvy continued to plague sailors until well into the twentieth century. It wasn’t poor nutritional discipline that caused scurvy outbreaks, but the logistical problem of maintaining fresh food stores on long voyages. And proving the citrus fruit cure wasn’t enough; without a deeper understanding of Vitamin C, Lind’s solution was incomplete and unstable, doomed to be disputed, forgotten and rediscovered over and over.

Simple, straightforward problems, of the sort that can be rectified through the genius of an innovator and the beneficence of the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, are so rare that that there aren’t enough to stock even Gates’s carefully chosen catalogue of innovationist parables. Most of what faces us are complex, difficult and multilayered problems, solutions to which will require developments across multiple fields and new cultural and social understandings. The empowered innovator is a convenient myth, and this persistent belief that we are just One Cool Trick away from solving things like viruses is a dangerous, destructive illusion.

Gates, the retired software engineer who can’t distinguish between digital and biological viruses, is one, specific theory of the man. In reading How to Prevent the Next Pandemic, though, I’ve come to formulate another, more general theory. This is simply that, far from being a conspiratorial and calculating agenda-setter, Gates is a follower. He spends his days chasing down bureaucrats and politicians and scientists, pestering them for meetings, currying favour, asking them what to think and eagerly repeating everything they tell him in childish, oversimplified prose to anybody who will listen.

He loves dropping names. Barely has he started writing, than he’s telling us about his “first call with Anthony Fauci,” a man he’s “lucky to have known … for years … long before he was on the cover of pop-culture magazines.” Gates “wanted to hear what he was thinking”; he “wanted to understand what he was saying publicly … so” he “could help by echoing the same points” (p. 15). You can see Gates now, the strange bespectacled boy at the front of the class, begging teacher for the answer.

In another unguarded moment, Gates mentions attending a meeting in March 2020 while feeling sick; masking would’ve been the obvious thing to do, given his faith in them, but “the CDC hadn’t recommended masks yet” (p. 110), so he didn’t bother. Elsewhere, Gates lectures his readers on the virtuous and hardworking nature of medical bureaucrats; he calls them “unsung heroes” and warns against anyone who might be “bad-mouthing” them (p. 160). And in a bizarre Afterword on his hopes for a “digital future,” Gates enthuses about how much easier our newfound reliance on screens has made it for him to stay in touch with “political leaders”. “Pre-pandemic,” he worried that asking for a video call “would have been seen as less respectful than meeting in person” (p. 238), but now videoconferencing is the norm, so he feels better about pinging them whenever he wants their attention.

Gates-as-follower explains the most obtrusive aspect of How to Prevent the Next Pandemic, namely the total absence from its pages of any original thought. Gates doesn’t know anything except what his small clique of court experts tells him. That masks don’t work, that pandemic modelling has been a laughable failure, that it is the human immune system and not technology that places the ultimate constraints on vaccine potential, that corona and influenza viruses have massive animal reservoirs – he has no idea about any of this. Gates is part of an ominous development, a new breed of low-brow elite who present themselves as leaders, while eagerly following every source of celebrity and authority they know. Thus modern society is increasingly caught in dangerous, self-reinforcing feedback loops, a massive ant-wheel, a world of dogs chasing their tails, with nobody in charge. A Davos-directed conspiracy would be some comfort, but our car is heading for the cliff and absolutely nobody is driving. That’s much, much worse. (read more)