My understanding is that Jonathan Cook is (like Chomsky and Pilger) highly regarded by the Sh!tboat crew.
But now Cook is circling ever closer to the ‘conspiracy-theory’ ‘rabbit hole’. I wonder whether that might make any of the sh!tters wake up or, instead, lead them to disdain him.
Cook: ‘Across the West, people are dying in greater numbers. Nobody wants to learn why’
Cook may be waking up but still has sleep in his eyes, For instance, “The inference that there is a connection between the vaccines and excess deaths may be wrong.”
The evidence against vaccines and not just the Convid jab, is now so strong, I fail to understand how any adult in full control of their faculties, cannot see the light. However, thanks for posting.
hi @rippon , thanks for the post. I’ll be interested to see what the responses are to this post by Jackie:
If the commenters on Campbell on that thread are anything to go by it’s going to be difficult for them not to start another smear campaign!
It’s a pity that JC’s article misses the contemporaneous Ed Dowd material on the disability Black Swan shown in the UK PIP statistics! ( which @PatB posted here:
You Can't Run From This Data; Ed Dowd )
I continue to glow in the freedom of this free speech space which all you guys (and of course Rhis ) set up in response to the “leaky hulk”!
I have personally moved on from certain elements of JC’s current position - I think there is now sufficient evidence to show that no-one has proved pathogenic virus’ exist and by extension that there is no basis for “viral pandemics”,“virology” and “viral vaxxes” at all. Nor do I accept that we are facing a climate crisis which he refers to here:
"As the last year has demonstrated, our elites had no more idea how to deal with the pandemic than they currently do with the climate crisis, or with the Ukraine war (without risking nuclear conflagration), or with rapid advances in Artificial Intelligence. Faced with the biggest challenges, they are like children – shouting “Follow the Science” or “Green New Deal” to distract the rest of us as they grab as many sweets as they can thrust into their pockets. "
cheers
Dan’s responses in that thread are really something to behold: Campbell is apparently a grifter making money off his few subscribers. Oh yes, a lot of money in that line of work especially if you’re in danger of getting closed down. Of course Alexander Mercouris, Scott Ritter, J Cook etc. can all be dismissed in the same way.
Seems to me the slightly more clued up folk there like t and Ian M must be wondering if Dan isn’t simply a useful idiot for Pfizer. But they’re very careful not to upset their dear leader
Hi folks, after 24 hours of crickets on the biggest con of history one post responds :
this shouts “cognitive dissonance” to me using all the tricks in the book to stay in the club - take this phrase:
" Campbell doesn’t appear to be trustworthy to me any more, but I would be lying if I said I entirely understood the reasons why, and at this point in my life I don’t have the time or inclination to become an expert in the peer review process so in a real sense I don’t think I really can understand why such-and-such claim is to be believed or not."
The club mentality, which has been wielded by one man and his cheerleaders to produce a completely one sided view on “Covid” in close lockstep with the Establishment, is of course safely ignored lest the poster be the next on the authoritarian plank.
cheers
Cognitive dissonance, or “since Dan, so” 
Yes spot on I think @CJ1. He’s saying "I think Campbell is untrustworthy but I don’t know why I think it. " but seems to be influenced by Dan.
It’s a pity we can’t repeat the experiment of Ian M replying ‘blind’ about Campbell’s video - without having seen Dan’s emphatic dismissal and attack on him.
But even in his first reply, made after Dan’s entrance, you can see him rowing back weakly on Dan’s thrust. He seems to feel that’s wrong somehow.
But by the time of his reply to Dan’s second post he’s given in - and raising his own ‘doubts’. Not thinking at all - seems to be inventing reasons to go along with Dan.
He suggests that Cook’s reasonable list of further video references:
"*the mishandling and lack of oversight of Pfizer’s research into its vaccine;
*the astounding admission that Pfizer never actually tested whether its vaccine stopped transmission;
*continuing efforts to obscure evidence demonstrating that natural infection confers superior immunity to the vaccine;
*the troubling discovery that mRNA can remain in the blood for at least a month after vaccination, with no understanding of what it might be doing in that time to our immune systems;
*high variation in adverse reactions caused by different batches of mRNA vaccine, with some off the scale;
*the involvement of US researchers and Pfizer in engineering Frankenstein’s monster-type coronaviruses of the very kind that, it increasingly seems, led to the Covid pandemic in the first place;
*new research demonstrating the lack of evidence for reduction in virus transmission from masking;
*the failure of policymakers to weigh the serious financial, social and possibly medical costs of lockdowns;
*and a causal connection, confirmed by the WHO, between vaccination and the development of autoimmune disease like multiple sclerosis. "
might not stand up to ‘scrutiny’, though most are in the realm of common knowledege.
It reads like a peace offer - you can shoot some of them down but not all (please), so we’re both sort of right, or have a point, no problem…
It’s not just Dan muddying the waters - Ian M says he gets expertise from ‘Science Based Medicine’. One or two at TLN have cited this as a counterweight - unaware that it is a one man blog/polemic specializing in shouty spin and character attacks, though the blogger David Gorsky is a Dr.
-nice one!
The whole thing is so sad - I wonder whether IanM really understands what has happened to the UK under the Thatcherites in the Con and Lab parties - he talks about :
“The problem is social and political, over which hypotheses get the most attention in the meantime and how that affects policy and the overall atmosphere in society” - when thanks to her and her acolytes we now have little in the way of a cohesive society outside our own small set of friends and family. Determining science by what best fits with the atmosphere in society is asking for tyranny when “society” is forged by the Establishment for the Establishment!
I wonder what sort of reception the “no such thing as anthropogenic global warming” stance would receive?
cheers
I think he understands it all, all right - just seems a bit shy in the Presence. But brave enough to answer back, just feeling unsure of himself. While acknowledging there is rank being pulled here…
It seems to me that his responses here can be separated into those he actually feels, and forced or Dan-induced concessions to ‘expertise’. And the former are perfectly reasonable!
I think he’s good egg, if only we could get him away from the pesky curate…
The Curate’s a good egg too IMO - views just coloured by the big challenge to his lifelong faith…
.
I hadn’t really bothered looking there if I’m honest. I tend to scan especially now that Mary no longer posts (RIP?).
So imagine my surprise when I see this from the good doctors fingers;
…I’ve given up an academic career quite a long time ago because of the petty corruption. I used to peer review papers. It’s hard to remember and there are other science philosophy paradigms, but any scientist has to be honest and formally work through all the ways the null hypothesis could actually be the right answer…ie there is no difference between the batches. The absence of that balance is an alarm.
Apart from the petty corruption there is the formal corruption of the corporate science industry which works in the same way on an industrial scale.
It’s a challenge to have to interpret all novel clinical information as potentially maybe even probably a lie, but there you go…
Man knows his trade is rotten at low level, and corrupt higher up. Man makes excuse for not doing due diligence. Man knows the truth possibly and doesn’t want to face it?
Hmmm.
Drs Dan and John are not even paying attention to developments, yet send Ian M away with a flea in his ear.
Don’t they know Pfizer tried to keep trial documents secret for 75 years, and were only forced into document disclosures by a court? Even then it will be years before everything relevant is in the open.
They sound off that the requirements for criticizing vaccines, have not been met, brought and full details have not been laid in their lap, wrapped in pink ribbon.
It seems the requirements for anyone criticizing vaccines are much more stringent than their hallowed ‘peer review’.
This is using rank as a barrier - rather than accept that these are concerns that the establishment should be addressing, they hide behind a pretence that the criticism has not met some exalted standard for raising concerns.
They could easily have dug around themselves but the mask over their eyes is kept in position allowing them to delude themselves about what they can ‘see’ - rather than simply take the mask off. The hapless messenger then accepts their authority on the matter.
Rather than tout the clearly-neglected peer review process, Doctors should have been ALL OVER this kind of thing:
But even Dan and John must know that the trials were unblinded affter two months as Pfizer pushed the wonderful vaccines onto the relieved placebo group. That ended the safety study, after which no-one could legitimately cite the trials - crookedly done as they were - as evidence of even short term safety.
So when problems are THEN seen to appear, the answer is to confront the messenger about the standards for peer review?
Geneticist Kevin McKernan discovered the vaccines are contaminated with high levels of bacterial DNA used in production. The mass production process was different from the one creating the trial vaccines. Josh Guetzkow called it Pfizer’s ‘bait and switch’.
There’s a lot more of these problems. Naomi Wolf heads a team sifting through the hundreds of thousands of Pfizer documents. They might grate a bit (people who are shocked at what they have found can be like that 
), but they are flagging up more issues than can be addressed.
Maybe the expert media analysis site presumed this would be discussed in the media…not much learned in Dan’s 15+ years there then 
But as you say, there is plenty to suggest that they know the problem themselves and are making use of pretence-land to shore up their own position.
Thanks for posting Rippon, I hesitate to read this because Cook makes my teeth grind.
Why?
Well, I think he’s too slick, he knows he’s playing close to the edge but he pretends he’s not, and he never looks over the edge. If you go back and look at all his post january 2020 Covid stuff you’ll see what I mean. He was more clever than most of the pro BigPharma left but he never questioned the PsyOp as a PsyOp, and, if I recall correctly, despite his long years posing as a pro freedom of speech anti Guardianista he never came to succor all those deplatformed, slandered and censored by the State/Corporate media because of their views concerning Covid. So, he revealed himself then as an ‘good controllable leftist’ who simply occupies a certain niche in the media ecosystem that appeals to a certain public, and is careful not to go beyond certain limits.
If some of you recall, Cook and I had an exchange on Media Lens where instead of responding to me directly Cook would respond to me via the Media Lens editors. What I did was point out that Cook wrote for the UAE (state affiliated) newspaper The National but he never criticized the foreign policy of the UAE, for example concerning Yemen or Syria, while one of Cook’s schticks was to criticize UK media figures for not criticizing UK foreign policy.
Cook said I was someone who read Chomsky but ‘sadly misunderstood him’…or something condescending like that.
As a result of me posting such an opinion about Cook, the ‘journalist god’ of Media Lens some posters wanted me kicked off, others wanted me to doxx myself, claiming I was some kind of operative! Just for stating the obvious! Even Rhis, to his discredit, accused me, but to his credit he later apologized. The main attacker was a guy whose name I’ve forgotten, but if there was such a thing as Media Lens editor toady then he was it.
Now, one interesting aspect of Cook’s work for The National, is that though Cook consistently skewered Guardian writers like Monbiot and they guy who looks like a kid (sorry, memory fails again) they NEVER did the OBVIOUS and point out that Cook was writing for The National and never criticizing the UAE!! Now ask yourself, why would they not use the most effective arrow in the quiver? Because they AGREED with UAE foreign policy themselves? Or for other reasons?
To be clear, I admire Cook’s journalism, most of it, and I have been partially formed by it. And the same with Media Lens.
However their response to Covid Propaganda really made me question my whole representation of the ‘alt media’ and ‘media critics’ worlds. What is REALLY going on? Are they sincere? Are they protecting themselves? Are they protecting others? Well, we will never know, how can we?
Now Media Lens and probably Cook too (I haven’t looked) are pushing to HEAT WAVE BE AFRAID DOOM DOOM button like there is no tomorrow, which is their apparent belief. They call people who ask normal questions ‘deniers’. They republish the ‘red maps’ of temperatures without ever asking whether they themselves are pushing propaganda.
So anyway, I’ll make a mental note to read the Cook piece sometime, when I’m in a good mood, and remind myself to stop gritting my teeth!
Memory test…
Journalist - Owen Jones?
Was the ML guy called Jeff? I vaguely remember an almost surreal third party discussion involving Cook and concering someone who wasn’t even an ML poster, who was referred to as “Jeff’s friend”.
You raise an interesting point, on the issue of purity.
Isn’t there a conflict between trying to say what you think is true, and actually having an audience to tell it to?
Cook has (arguably) paid quite a price already. Maybe he calculated that keeping quiet about UAE is a small price to pay for reaching a relatively wider audience about the again, wider abuses of capitalism or western foreign policy.
What sources do you cite that are uncompromised? There might be people that are ‘pure’ in their own output, but even they have to cite information from the source that it comes from.
How far can you take this fine principle? You can take it to the n’th degree, but is that not at the expense of not having anyone to talk to?
I agree Media Lens have shied away from the corruption of science, and that debate could really do with their kind of light - media framing, corruption and creating false perceptions, etc - being shone upon it.
But there is a risk to that as well. Maybe it would end their general influence on media matters!
Maybe it’s best to let people do what they actually do (so long as it’s generally good) without undermining them on a theoretical basis!?
Cheers
hi Evvy yes Owen Jones, the other name I forgot, the Cook/Media Lens disciple who wanted me outed on Media Lens Message Board was John Hilley.
I don’t understand your point about purity. With Cook, I had read one of his articles about Israel and I critiqued it on Media Lens Message Board for what I saw as a strange lapse, I cannot remember what it was, and he responded via the editors. He never lowered himself to responding directly on the Board. So I looked into his work further and noted who he mostly worked for and found it odd that he could criticise Monbiot/Owens for doing exactly what he was doing. But, as I said, even odder, Monbiot and Owens never mentioned that.
Then I researched Martha Gelhorn, because Cook had won the Gelhorn Prize and that is one of the proofs of his standing as a good journalist. But did you know Martha Gelhorn is responsible for probably the most influential pro zionist long magazine articles about Palestine, written in 1961 and reprinted a gazillion times by the zionist orgs in the USA? Why hasn’t Cook ever written about that?
I see it in terms of a marketing model, or maybe you can call it a double spy model.
Divide the public into segments and market to each segment. Coke tastes great is the overall frame. For one segment the slogan is ‘Coke Tastes Great’. For another segment, the health conscious, they need a slightly different slogan. They get a famous health guru to say ‘Yes, Coke may be bad for you if you drink too much, but IT DOES TASTE GREAT!’ Thus the overall frame is still operative.
Post 2020 we know that anti imperialism is ‘ok’, that anti capitalism is ‘ok’, that media criticism is ‘ok’, that opposing ‘climate change’ is ‘ok’, but questioning Covid is NOT OK. The most important political market segment is potential activists. NOT the people who passively accept the New York Times and the Guardian as ‘reality’. So, the people who can influence potential activists seem ‘small’ but in fact are more important than we realize, because they influence those who may DO something. So what is the effect when Chomsky says AIPAC is not that powerful? When Media Lens does not point out the massive Covid propaganda? When Cook doesn’t talk about doctors and scientists and other journalists being deplatformed because of BigPharma pressure?
Well, it neuters potential activism against concentrated power.
In terms of the ‘double spy’ model, the double spy will feed accurate info for years and then, at a key point, will feed inaccurate info.
I’m not saying anybody is a ‘double spy’. I’m saying that I now, after Covid, treat them all as potential double spies, that is, they are targeting a market segment, and at a key time, they will oddly market a frame that supports concentrated power.
We CANNOT KNOW anybody’s true motivations. So, it’s necessary to maintain a complete skepticism, constant. So ‘purity’ doesn’t enter into the equation, in my view. Remember the poor woman who married the police spy who was spying on her organization? Even she did not know the political motivations of the man she married. How can we know anybody’s motivations?
Thanks Everyman for elucidating and these further thoughts.
By purity I simply meant judgement of people or their projects by rigid adherence to perceived principles (or some such 
)
I didn’t know Martha Gelhorn beforehand. From a quick look she had a long career as an on the ground war correspondent. Seems she was a leftwing supporter of Israel, and of the Spanish Republic.
She seems to have been known for speaking her mind in her reporting and scorning journalistic objectivity.
That article seems to bear this out. The way it’s written, I wouldn’t normally have read it.
Her career seems to have been distinguished and/or brave, she kept going until she was in her 80s. And they named a prize after her.
Other recipients include Dahr Jamail, Robert Fisk, Patrick Cockburn, and Julian Assange.
Pilger praises her.
My reading is that the prize is awarded for journalistic courage!? Not for political merit (which would make it a political prize).
While I can see how that article written over three decades before her last one grates on you, I think you’re being hard on Cook; she didn’t give him the award, as I say it was named after her for her journalistic courage as a veteran, not for pro-zionist hit pieces in the 60s.
Would you reject a Pilger award, because he had been friends with Gellhorn?
I think your ‘model’ is valid in theory, and we’ve probably seen piecemeal instances of it. I’ve seen politicians appeal insincerely to traits certain sectors have, that they don’t have themselves, in order to advance something they want.
But it would be a stretch to think of it as the norm, and try to ‘call it out’ every time you read something you disagree with from someone you respect. We know the pressure on independent journalists are under, and some compromises are necessary.
You’ve only got to read the btls underneath to see that Cook is showing a deal of courage, and conviction, in wading in to combative disagreements with his clientele. It would be far easier to avoid these revelations - tame though they seem to us, they have got him a lot of flak.
Campbell has had similar reactions for crossing red lines - yet see how much he has spread a useful message to people that would otherwise not have received it!
And if either Campbell or Cook have masters to obey, logically they shouln’t be happy at these developments either.
So I wouldn’t agree that activism is being neutered - rather the opposite, opening fresh eyes to level of ideas that even if not the most radical, they wouldn’t otherwise be opened to.
I’ve no time to spend worrying about double spies - I don’t need to know anyone’s true motivations. I think that’s the wrong track. You have to try to check things anyway, so take away what seems useful, and try to check it out. You can still judge by your experience of the person.
To me Cook, Campbell, Robert Malone etc, are all useful and when they are discussed - in all seriousness - as if they were some kind of plants it seems to me that’s a victory that can be notched up for the enemy.
Also, you can often get useful information from the untrustworthy opponents!
Cheers
I think that’s very well said E_D. Sorry can’t write much on this silly “smart phone “. The discussion Everyman opens reminds me of Finkelstein’s views: when principles collide (in this case reaching a large audience and/or criticising your employer) one has to use a judgement: do you do more good reaching lots of people with your criticism of the West/Israeli policies than criticising the UAE and the few people with statements about Yemen. I suspect once people understand the hypocrisy and evil nature of “western values” that are pointed out by Cook, they’re likely to see through any UAE policies
H Evvy
" By purity I simply meant judgement of people or their projects by rigid adherence to perceived principles"
If that’s your definition I plead not guilty because I’m only judging Cook by his adherence or non adherence to his own stated principles. He’s a media critic who has raked Guardian journalist over the coals for not criticizing the way the Guardian ‘covers’ the news. Yet surely he can understand why they would be rather averse to criticizing their paymaster when he must do the same to have a platform?
And who more than Cook in the anglo sphere writes more about the Palestinians and not only their political and living situation but how that situation is ignored or when not ignored grotesquely portrayed in the western media? Cook is quite sharp about journalists who justify apartheid and property theft. This would seem to me to suggest an article was due from him about Gellhorn, who more than any postwar journalist, in my opinion, set the ‘left stage’ for justifying Israeli colonization. It was not until Chomsky wrote The Fateful Triangle in the 1980s that the ‘left’ really started talking about what should have been a ‘leftist’ issue.
See the article below.
As I said, I’ve been formed by Cook, I think he’s a fine journalist, but I’m skeptical of anyone with a platform, and Cook the media critic was silent when Covid dissidents were deplatformed and slandered and censored. Why? How would you answer that question?
Perhaps you underestimate the value, no I’ll go further, the NEED that western imperial power has for alt journalists like Cook The system requires dissidents. Cook was never throttled on Twitter, OffGuardian was. Cook the media critic ignored that. So did many other ‘leftists’ and that is exactly what I mean by neutering potential activism. Imagine the difference had Galloway and Cook and Greenwald and others had opposed the freedom destroying Covid psy op from the beginning! They didn’t. So we media critics must ask ‘why’?
Surely there is a parallel between the shame of the left for going from opposing fascism in Spain to supporting fascism in Palestine, and the shame of left recently for supporting either directly or via their silence the freedom destroying Covid Psy op.
Hi again Everyman
I think in reality it’s a matter of degree; you can’t avoid breaking principles while trying to making progress against stronger forces - so you can criticize everyone if you want, and even be free of personal hypocrisy if you want to be (while making no progress as well).
Doesn’t your ‘marketing model’ have a role here in reverse. Journalists can criticize the general media reporting on a topic, while maintaining an awkward silence over their own media outlet’s compromised position.
If doing this I agree it would be hypocritical to lay into other journalists personally (but the degree would be dependent on the size and degree of complicity of their own platform). And also, what I suggest might even be a bit hypocritical - probably is. But in ‘my’ defense I’d say If the enemy is using the weapon…it’s not really ‘my’ defence, as without a measure of compromise you might as well concede. Like Palestinians deciding it’s immoral to throw stones, you’d have no effective weapons, just some moral high ground that’s already been sidelined by outside forces, which are stronger than those available to you.
I think you’re stretching to expect to push such a narrow focus from so far back on to a contemporary writer.
How do we know that Cook has these insights and is hypocritically, you say, avoiding writing about them. Have you thought of raising the issue with him directly. Even if you have to sub for a while…just a thought!
Though, it’s a good question you raise about the silence of what was the left on covid. It’s not just censorship, they seemed to all wake up on the same day and forget that big Pharma and even bigger corporations are powerful and rich, and not see what seem blatant manouvres to push their products on to the population via the government - and more than that, ridicule others who pointed things out. Things that they shouldn’t have needed Cook and Greenwald to tell them!
They appeared to succumb to fear; maybe Cook and Campbell did the same, but gradually came out of it. For me the hostility they experienced even for lukewarm shifts in position tells its own story, and I’ve no need of more complex suppositions.
In my personal view, to be insincere Campbell, Cook and Malone (and McCullough, Pierre Kory, others) would need to be phenomally good actors!
Media Lens have been proved correct that the role of the mainstream media is vital in keeping the populace in check, and despite the internet, this has been shown to be even more critical in the covid era than ever before. In my view the covid narrative would have fallen apart even with the media of 20 years ago, that sold Iraq to us.
So I kind of balk at the idea they should be denounced as suppressing progress…
Interesting about the lobby. Do you think it’s true that the tail wags the dog? Chomsky won’t hear of it, but some I’ve seen with a decent inside vantage point, disagree.
If there is a war, it is about information. There aren’t many doing a good job in terms of both content and reach. It’s possible to envisage such people doing a different job - but then would they even be where they are (as the Chomsky sort of said to the Marr ) ?
In a wider sense, people opposing the same thing need to cooperate with each other, and have enough respect not to call foul on each other just because they have different ideas.
After all, next time it could be your own useful ideas and efforts coming under the gun! You seem to have a good understanding of the political dynamics over long periods of time. Much to contribute, but I’ve recently seen quite a few useful covid-challenging figures cancelling each other out. A significant net loss of course; but good for the bad guys.
Cheers
Evvy