Joseph Mercola, M.D., Propaganda and Censorship Dominate the Information War

Google promised to bring us the world, and for decades dished up tens of thousands of results to any given search. It was a clever trap. Get the world’s population hooked on an information monopoly, and then, when the time was ripe, funnel everyone toward specific narratives and hide everything else.

Google can do it because the primary way anyone “researches” a topic online is by using the Google search engine; Google controls well over 95% of the searches done on the internet across the entire planet. A similar trap was laid within the media landscape. As reported by Swiss Policy Research:¹

“… most of the international news coverage in Western media is provided by only three global news agencies based in New York, London and Paris. The key role played by these agencies means Western media often report on the same topics, even using the same wording.

In addition, governments, military and intelligence services use these global news agencies as multipliers to spread their messages around the world. A study of the Syria war coverage by nine leading European newspapers clearly illustrates these issues: 78% of all articles were based in whole or in part on agency reports, yet 0% on investigative research.

Moreover, 82% of all opinion pieces and interviews were in favor of a US and NATO intervention, while propaganda was attributed exclusively to the opposite side.”

Propaganda on the one hand, and censorship on the other, are the primary battle strategies of the information war we now find ourselves steeped in. It’s imperative, then, to understand how these “weapons of war” against the public are being used, and by whom.

News Agencies Are the Invisible Propaganda Nerve Center

When it comes to the actual dissemination of fake news and propaganda, international news agencies play a central role and, as mentioned, there’s only three of them:

1. The Associated Press (AP) — Headquartered in the U.S., with more than 4,000 employees worldwide, AP is relied upon by approximately 12,000 international media outlets and reaches more than half of the world’s population each day.
2. Thomson Reuters — Reuters was originally headquartered in London, U.K., but was acquired by the Thomson Corporation in 2008. The two media companies merged and become the Thomson Reuters Corp., which employs more than 25,000 people in hundreds of locations worldwide.
3. Agence France-Presse (AFP) — A quasi-governmental organization based in Paris, France, with about 4,000 employees, according to Swiss Policy Research,² the AFP sends out more than 3,000 stories and photos each day to media companies around the world.

As once noted by Wolfgang Vyslozil, former managing director of Austria Presse Agentur (APA, Austria’s national press agency):³

“News agencies are rarely in the public eye. Yet they are one of the most influential and at the same time one of the least known media types. They are key institutions of substantial importance to any media system. They are the invisible nerve center that connects all parts of this system.”

Indeed, until or unless at least one of these news agencies sends out a notice, national and local media are unlikely to report on an event. Even photos and videos are typically sourced directly from these global news agencies. This way, people hear, see and read the exact same message everywhere.

Even media outlets that have foreign correspondents on their payroll do not expect those correspondents to conduct independent investigations. They too simply report whatever the Big Three news agencies want covered, and from the angle they want it covered.

What you end up with is a sort of echo chamber where only one view is presented. As one might expect, this setup makes for a perfect propaganda machine. As noted by Swiss Policy Research:⁴

“Due to the rather low journalistic performance of the mainstream media and their high dependence on a few news agencies, it is easy for interested parties to spread propaganda and disinformation in a supposedly respectable format to a worldwide audience.”

The Propaganda Multiplier

Intelligence agencies and defense ministries are well aware of the power of these news agencies and use them with regularity. In 2009, then-president of the AP, Tom Curley, let it slip that the U.S. Pentagon has more than 27,000 PR specialists that spin up stories, and an annual propaganda budget of nearly $5 billion.

Curley also stated that high-ranking U.S. generals had threatened to “ruin” him and the agency should AP journalists decide to take a critical stance against the U.S. military.⁵

The rest of the technocratic apparatus also uses these news agencies in the same way and for the same reasons — to proliferate certain narratives while burying or “debunking” others. Of course, we now also know that at least some of the world’s defense ministries are working on the Deep State’s behalf, so there’s not much separating them. Their narratives fit together like puzzle pieces.

In short, the current censoring and labeling of anything that threatens the globalist agenda as “misinformation” and “disinformation” is a top-down scheme, as illustrated⁶ above. It’s not random, by any means, and it’s not driven by the opinions of private companies themselves. Social media companies, for example, are mere tools for the technocratic deep state, which operates worldwide.

That said, many of the key media personalities are also part of the globalist network.⁷ Just look at the membership rosters of the World Economic Forum (WEF), the U.S. Council on Foreign Relations (CFR), the Bilderberg Group and the Trilateral Commission, just to name a few.

You’ll find many prominent journalists, editors and publishers. As insiders, they don’t have to be told what to report. They already know what the agenda is, and the narrative that will further that agenda.

Why News Outlets Don’t Let You in on Their Sources

The reason most people have no idea that their local or favored news media are simply regurgitating the same story as everyone else is because, except for print newspapers, where you’ll notice a tiny acronym in parentheses in the dateline, media rarely name their sources. If they did, you’d quickly notice the pattern.

At that point, you’d realize that few if any news reports have actually been independently researched, and this, of course, is a perception they don’t want you to have.

You can find these sources if you know where to look, but they’re still too cryptic to interpret for most. As mentioned, the news agency that circulated the story and occasionally the agency editor that edited the report are typically listed at the top or bottom of the article in abbreviated form, within parentheses.

Media specialists are usually the only ones who know how to decipher these references, but if you know the abbreviation of three international agencies — AP, Reuters and AFP — you will at least know that a news agency created the story.

Fabricated Media Narratives Shape Public Opinion

Sometimes media companies will use an agency’s story without attribution, however, and/or they may simply rewrite it slightly to make it appear like an independent contribution. Still, the vast majority of news stories — including accompanying photos and videos — are sourced from the Big Three.

“In the end, this dependency on the global agencies creates a striking similarity in international reporting: from Vienna to Washington, our media often report the same topics, using many of the same phrases — a phenomenon that would otherwise rather be associated with ‘controlled media’ in authoritarian states,” Swiss Policy Research writes, adding:⁸

“Dependence on global agencies is also a major reason why media coverage of geopolitical conflicts is often superficial and erratic, while historic relationships and background are fragmented or altogether absent …

Finally, the dominance of global agencies explains why certain geopolitical issues and events … are not mentioned in our media at all: if the agencies do not report on something, then most Western media will not be aware of it.

As pointed out on the occasion of the 50th anniversary of the German DPA [the German national press agency]: ‘What the agency does not report, does not take place …

While some topics do not appear at all in our media, other topics are very prominent — even though they shouldn’t actually be: ‘Often the mass media do not report on reality, but on a constructed or staged reality. Several studies have shown that the mass media are predominantly determined by PR activities …'”

‘Homeland Security’ Is Now All About Propaganda

In mid-November 2020, then-President Donald Trump fired Chris Krebs, director of the Department of Homeland Security’s (DHS) Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA), after Krebs declared the 2020 election “the most secure election in U.S. history.”⁹

Incidentally, Krebs is a former Microsoft executive, which puts him inside the sphere of the globalist cabal. Krebs also oversaw CISA’s change of focus, from one focused on countering foreign disinformation campaigns to domestic censorship. This clearly demonstrates which team he’s on, and it’s not Team Humanity.

In 2020, Krebs even launched a “rumor control” website¹⁰ to debunk claims of voter fraud — including claims by the sitting president himself. CISA still maintains that site, ostensibly to counter any false claims of voter fraud that might arise in future elections.¹¹

There are clear problems with this. If there are claims of fraud, both sides need to be allowed to be heard and present their evidence. You can’t just have one side saying “there’s nothing to see here, move along.” Yet CISA is acting as a de facto censorship bureau, using 120 analysts to censor millions of social media posts — not only on elections but also on COVID-19.¹²

CISA — A Propaganda and Censorship Platform

Elon Musk recently called CISA out as a “propaganda platform,”¹³ and he’s correct. We now know that CISA is partnered with a censorship consortium called the Election Integrity Partnership (EIP). The EIP, in turn, is made up of four organizations:

1. The Stanford Internet Observatory (SIO)
2. The University of Washington’s Center for an Informed Public
3. The Atlantic Council’s Digital Forensic Research Lab
4. Graphika (a social media analytics company)

During the 2020 election cycle, the EIP and CISA worked with the State Department’s Global Engagement Center (GEC) and the DHS-backed Elections Infrastructure Information Sharing and Analysis Center (ISAC) to police wrongthink on social media. As reported by Kanekoa News on Substack:¹⁴

“The EIP built communication portals with Big Tech platforms, including Facebook, Twitter, Google, TikTok, Reddit, and Discord; and liberal groups NAACP, Common Cause, the Democratic National Committee, and Harvard’s Defending Digital Democracy Project, cofounded by former Hillary Clinton campaign manager Robby Mook, throughout the 2020 and 2022 election cycles, to censor domestic ‘mis- and disinformation.’

They had about 120 analysts monitoring social media for 20 hours a day, forwarding tickets of misinformation to be censored, and this censorship pivoted to COVID vaccines when they started the Virality Project in Feb. 2021.

A report¹⁵ from the Foundation for Freedom Online (FFO), a non-profit founded by Mike Benz, entitled ‘DHS Censorship Agency Had Strange First Mission: Banning Speech That Casts Doubt On ‘Red Mirage, Blue Shift’ Election Events’ details this government speech control machine and its ability to control the narrative during the 2020 election …”

DHS Partners Pressured Private Companies to Comply

Based on the Foundation of Freedom Online’s investigation, the DHS and its partners targeted dozens of “misinformation narratives,” all of which were suppressed. They labeled 22 million tweets as “misinformation,” along with hundreds of millions of Facebook posts, YouTube videos and TikToks.

DHS partners also bragged about their ability to get tech companies to change their terms of service to facilitate or allow for this otherwise illegal censoring. As noted by Kanekoa News:¹⁶

“In short, CISA outsourced censorship to a web of like-minded private sector and civil society partners to circumvent unclear legal authorities and violations of the First Amendment.”

Not surprisingly, “Every single ‘repeat spreader of election misinformation’ … was aligned with the political right,” Kanekoa News writes, adding:

“Krebs and the EIP’s decision to completely censor the narrative around voting machine vulnerabilities fails to acknowledge that congressional members aligned with the left, including Sen. Amy Klobuchar, Sen. Ron Wyden, and Sen. Kamala Harris, among numerous computer science professors and election security experts, spent the last four years warning the American people that computerized voting systems are often connected to the internet, compromised, and vulnerable to hackers.

In effect, the left was allowed to discuss the vulnerabilities of voting machines after the 2016 election and the right was censored for discussing those very same vulnerabilities after the 2020 election.”

Equally hypocritical, many of the individuals in the EIP had promoted the idea that Donald Trump was an illegitimate president because of the accusations raised in the Russiagate “scandal” — all of which later turned out to be intentionally fabricated lies, approved and paid for by Hillary Clinton.¹⁷

Yet, despite delegitimizing the 2016 election and having been proven wrong, those same people then went on to censor anyone who dared “delegitimize” the 2020 election by asking questions and pointing to evidence of foul play.

Dangerous Hypocrisy

One player in particular, Renée DiResta, a technical research manager at Stanford Internet Observatory, epitomizes the EIP’s hypocrisy. As explained by the Foundation for Freedom Online:¹⁸

“The prominent role Renée DiResta plays in EIP … is particularly worrisome and disturbing. Before DiResta became research manager at the Stanford disinfo lab, she was research director for a now-notorious, scandal-laden and disgraced political hatchet firm known as New Knowledge LLC.

In December 2018, the New York Times exposed that DiResta’s Democrat donor-funded small cybersecurity firm, New Knowledge, had clandestinely created thousands of fake ‘Russian bots’ (user accounts generated with a virtual private network (VPN) to simulate a Russian IP address) on Twitter and Facebook then mass subscribed those fake ‘Russian bots’ to opposition Republican Senate candidate Roy Moore’s campaign.

DiResta did this — or at least the small firm where she was a director did this — in the heat of the Nov. 2017 Alabama special election, which substantially decided the party control of the US Senate. It was a race in which Moore narrowly lost, and for whose loss New Knowledge – in its own report — took credit.

At the time, mainstream news genuinely thought Roy Moore was being backed by Russians. But it was just DiResta’s professional disinformation firm interfering in the election.”

Deep State Actors Say One Thing and Do the Opposite

A key take-home here is that a great deal of the propaganda war involves people and organizations that say they’re one thing but do the complete opposite. For example, DiResta is the head of policy for Data for Democracy,¹⁹ while at the same time taking part in a plot to directly circumvent the democratic election process.

This shockingly deceitful behavior becomes easier to understand once you know she’s also a member of the Council on Foreign Relations (CFR), the mission of which is to bring about a totalitarian one world government, a New World Order with global top-down rule. How do we know this? Simple, they’ve admitted it.

In 1950, the son of one of the CFR’s founders, James Warburg, said to the Senate Foreign Relations Committee: “We shall have world government whether or not you like it — by conquest or consent.”²⁰ Similarly, in 1975 CFR insider Admiral Chester Ward wrote that the goal of the CFR was “submergence of U.S. sovereignty and national independence into an all-powerful one-world government.”²¹

According to Ward, the desire to “surrender the sovereignty and independence of the United States is pervasive throughout most of its membership,” and “In the entire CFR lexicon, there is no term of revulsion carrying a meaning so deep as ‘America First.'” So, DiResta is working on behalf of those who seek to establish a one-world government, and they’re not known for their scruples, or for following democratic processes.

CISA Turned Law Abiding Americans Into Cybercriminals

As explained by Foundation for Freedom Online founder Mike Benz:^22,23

“DHS insiders’ collective justification, without uttering a peep about the switch’s revolutionary implications, was that ‘domestic disinformation’ was now a greater ‘cyber threat to elections’ than falsehoods flowing from foreign interference.

So CISA’s self-invented censorship powers against ‘foreign disinformation’ went from being pointed outward against supposed Russian bot accounts to being pointed inwards at tens of millions of US citizens simply talking lawfully about their elections.”

Being Able to Identify Propaganda Is Part of the Solution

If propaganda is already deeply entrenched in our media structure, and government agencies are engaged in censoring, how do we know what is true and what is not?

There’s no easy answer to this question, but the solution involves first becoming aware of the fact that mainstream media consistently lie to support the cabal’s agenda. There is a reason for why the media narrative is what it is. One way to evaluate the news is to ask yourself, “Why might they want me to think of this in this particular way?” Eventually, patterns begin to form.

Ultimately, to find the truth, you must be willing to look hard for it, and to look in places outside the mainstream media consortium. You will rarely ever find the answer on Google, or even the new Open AI Chatbot. You have to ask questions and reason your way through the information you find. If something doesn’t make sense yet you’re told to accept it without question, it’s probably propaganda.

Any number of COVID-19 restrictions, for example, have been illogical in the extreme, which tells us they’re not about protecting people from infection. It’s about something else, and that something else has often been the purposeful destruction of small businesses to facilitate wealth transfer from the middle and lower class to the top echelon. Ultimately, that is the plan, and to stop it, we have to stop believing the propaganda. It’s just that simple. And that challenging.