Sunshine is the Best Disinfectant
For any infectious disease. Including infectious diseases of the mind.
If you’ve followed this Stack before much of what this post is about has been shared. A Fox attempting to share knowledge with others that a fox’s curiosity led to learning.
A story that just came out in the New York Post by Miranda Devine is about an investigation into Google’s election interference.
How Google manipulates search to favor liberals and tip elections
NY Post, Miranda Devine, May 24, 2023
https://nypost.com/2023/05/24/how-google-manipulates-search-to-favor-liberals-and-tip-elections/
The ongoing investigation is being led by one of the leading behavioral scientists in the world, Dr. Robert Epstein:
https://www.judiciary.senate.gov/imo/media/doc/Epstein%20Testimony.pdf
I decided to revisit information I’ve previously shared and combine it to frame this presentation in a way that I hope will become a shared resource, Sunshine, the best disinfectant for any infectious disease. Including infectious diseases of the mind.
The following is a very long information trail that I believe provides the answer to the question posed in the NY Post article. And points to where else that trail leads to that has much greater implications than simply tipping elections.
I encourage readers to take some time out of their busy schedule to read along, all credible sources linked, and a narrative I hope they’ll find easy to follow and compelling. I’ve written out the links instead of embedding them (except for the videos that un-embedded links pull into a post since I’ve not figured out how to prevent being displayed.) And I hope that readers will share this presentation. Like disinfecting sunshine.
First, to answer the question raised in the NY Post article, I’ll begin with Maya Shankar, Google's Chief Global Behavioral Scientist:
https://www.linkedin.com/in/maya-shankar-8b380350/
Shankar was the first Behavioral Science Advisor to the United Nations under Ban Ki-moon, and as a core member of Pete Buttigieg’s debate preparation team during his 2020 presidential run:
Google's Head of Behavioral Science on Why We Do What We Do? | Maya Shankar, PhD (21:27)
Voting Decision Influences (04:36 timestamp)
"We like to think that when people go to the voting booth they're going to vote for the person they most would like to be elected into office. That's pretty straightforward, right? The research shows...."
Wouldn't this be a clear path to learning how Google manipulates search to favor liberals and tip elections? Do readers discern any potential political bias Maya Shankar may have to manipulate elections?
In the video Maya Shankar mentions her time running the "Nudge Unit" under Pres. Barack Obama. This:
https://behavioralscientist.org/executive-order-formally-establishes-us-nudge-unit/
More about Maya Shankar:
Interesting Company, Chelsea Clinton and Frank Luntz - Speaker Kevin McCarthy’s (Republican) BFF and DC roommate:
She coauthored the UN’s Behavioural Insights to Achieving Agenda 2030 (WEF Great Reset?):
https://www.undp.org/publications/behavioural-insights-united-nations-achieving-agenda-2030
Shankar describes behavioral science on panel to the very influential Council on Foreign Relations, how governments can impose policy with psychological manipulation:
https://www.cfr.org/event/behavioral-insights-policymaking
[Note: the article acknowledges that they can’t speak freely on how the behavioral sciences are being used by government to coerce and manipulate populations on the record, they save those conversations for behind closed doors]
She also serves on the Board of Advisors to the Global Association of Applied Behavioral Sciences (GAABS). An organization created to establish best practices guidelines in the field (Foxes guarding the henhouse - yummy!):
Maya Shankar is a protege of Cass Sunstein, a prominent and key figure in the US and global application of Behavioral Science as the governing model, co-author of "Nudge":
https://bluetent.us/articles/governing/cass-sunstein-biden-white-house-oira/
Sunstein's wife is Samantha Power, who now leads USAID. She’s also a behavioral scientist, who's specialty is taking down from within governments that the US opposes by engaging in behavioral science-informed censorship and propaganda, manipulating and influencing foreign elections:
http://ronpaulinstitute.org/archives/featured-articles/2015/june/16/samantha-power-liberal-war-hawk/
Aka, “Color Revolutions”:
https://americanmind.org/salvo/revolution-of-color/
And the agency Power heads up, USAID, has its fingerprints all over manufactured pandemics:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PREDICT_(USAID)
While at OIRA, Sunstein had another protege in the Obama administration, a lawyer and behavioral scientist, Jessica Hertz.
In addition to working with Sunstein, Jessica Hertz also served on VP Biden's team of advisors during the Obama administration. And after the Trump administration took over she eventually became Facebook's senior regulatory lawyer, working with government policymakers and regulators (hmmm....compliance with perception-altering, choice-architecture framing propaganda censorship government orders, i.e. Twitter Files, Hunter's 'Laptop from Hell'?) and leaving FB in early October, 2020 just prior to the election to head up Joe Biden's transition team, then the new administration's staff selection oversight:
https://nypost.com/2020/10/01/joe-biden-hires-facebooks-jessica-hertz-for-transition-team/
Then Hertz became the Biden administration's Staff Secretary, arguably the most powerful role in an administration - a role once held by John Podesta in the Bill Clinton administration:
https://www.vox.com/recode/22206646/joe-biden-jessica-hertz-facebook-staff-secretary-big-tech
Holding that position until the Biden administration was up and running:
Then taking a cushy Big Tech gig again, Hertz is now working for Shopify as Counsel and on their DC lobbying team. And look here, Justice Sonia Sotomayer - who Hertz clerked for - presided over her wedding:
Justice Sotomayer isn't the only Supreme Court justice who is supportive of behaviorism-based jurisprudence. Chief Justice John Roberts cited Health Affairs to rule ACA (Obamacare) was constitutional. It’s a bipartisan pseudoscience model of governance. Health Affairs is a very influential Behavioral Health policy publication. Very:
https://www.healthaffairs.org/about
Behavioral science jurisprudence is moving from informing jurisprudence, to determining jurisprudence. Cass Sunstein is now a professor at Harvard Law School, teaching how the rule of law needs to swat aside the pesky constraints found in the US Constitution, language evolves, you know, allowing for a living, breathing constitution that needs no arduous amendment process requiring the archaic and obstructionist concept of the consent of the people:
https://www.kirkusreviews.com/book-reviews/cass-r-sunstein/how-to-interpret-the-constitution/
https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=4405238
Even though sixty years ago an esteemed philosopher and law professor predicted the evolution of law could become an implement of Social sciences, behavioral sciences specifically. Cautioning about jurisprudence "following the science" instead of wisdom. Suggesting it would lead to totalitarianism:
Law and Behavioral Science by Walter Berns
Law and Contemporary Problems (Duke Law School), Winter, 1963
https://scholarship.law.duke.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=2953&context=lcp
[The first 14 pages get into a game theory type application of behavioral sciences on judicial philosophy. In trying to understand the rulings of the Roberts court it could be speaking to the same philosophy. The final 14 pages are very informative and cautionary for the type of governance we are being subjected to today.]
Berns wasn't alone cautioning about "following the science", natural and social-behavioral, to govern. Warnings about pseudoscience as a means and ends to totalitarianism came in 1941:
So when the pandemic protocols, Behavioral Science-based Nonpharmaceutical Interventions (NPI) took the steering wheel of global governance in early-2020 it's no surprise that it quickly became known as "The Science of Totalitarianism" even among some of the practitioners who helped develop behavioral science-base NPI:
https://www.healthaffairs.org/do/10.1377/forefront.20200508.769108/full/
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41562-020-0884-z
[There's Cass Sunstein's name again!]
The National Institute of Health has its own Social and Behavioral Sciences Research office that was intimately involved in designing the behavioral science-based pandemic NPI, aka “The Science” the world was ordered to follow:
In the UK it was led by the Behavioural Sciences pandemic team, SPI-B:
https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/spi-b-the-role-of-behavioural-science-in-the-coronavirus-outbreak-14-march-2020
The SPI-B was informed by Cass Sunstein’s “Nudge” co-author, Richard Thaler and the Behavioural Insights Team (BIT) he helped establish at the same time Prime Minister David Cameron (Conservative Party) as when Pres. Obama stood up the SBST. They make behavioural science go down so smooth:
https://www.instituteforgovernment.org.uk/article/explainer/nudge-unit
https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2008/jul/12/economy.conservatives
Demanding mandates, not just Nudges. Nudges only useful to gain compliance with mandates:
Behavioral Science totalitarians. The leader of the UK's pandemic SPI-B behavioral science NPI program, Susan Michie, a Marxist deemed too totalitarian for the Communist Party, "Stalin's Nanny" recently appointed as the WHO's Chief Behavioral Scientist:
Joined by another Behavioral Science totalitarian, Sir Jeremy Farrar, at the WHO's Chief Scientist, recently leaving Wellcome Trust, a peer global health policy influencer of The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation:
https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p08x20jh
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2021/jul/25/jeremy-farrar-wellcome-covid-lockdown-inquiry-sage
Jeremy Farrar and NIH, NIAID Director Anthony Fauci came together to coodinate their responses on coronavirus origins:
https://nypost.com/2021/06/02/fauci-was-warned-that-covid-may-have-been-engineered-emails/
Jeremy Farrar's Wellcome Trust recently started Wellcome LEAP, led by former DARPA and Big Tech Manipulation, Deception and Surveillance Specialist Regina Dugan:
https://wellcome.org/news/wellcome-leap-announces-leadership-team
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Regina_E._Dugan
And Farrar’s Wellcome Trust funds The Nuffield Council on Bioethics, one of the most influential organizations in the world for the field of bioethics in setting health public policy. To make sure their “Good Stewardship” model of governance is following ethical guidelines. Until those pesky ethics are disposed of.
https://www.nuffieldbioethics.org/wp-content/uploads/2014/07/Public-health-ethical-issues.pdf
Interestingly, Dr. Fauci’s wife, Dr. Christine Grady, serves as the NIH’s Chief Bioethicist (now that would be an interesting email exchange between Farrar and Grady to track down!) and informed him and the behavioral scientists directing the totalitarian pandemic response that it was all was ethical!
https://www.elle.com/culture/career-politics/a32715031/fauci-christine-grady-nih-covid/
And when pseudosciences like Behavioral Science move from informing our governance to becoming our governance very bad things happen, with very elastic, negotiable ethics, we get public policy like eugenics. And newgenics. But it’s ethical. They say so. Except it’s just a few "bad men" away from untold horrors. Believing they’re acting ethically, for a greater good. As fallen man is prone to doing:
https://scholarship.law.umn.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1622&context=lawineq
Which is exactly how so many horrors happened through public health policy of the past that we were supposed to learn from. That the field of medicine was supposed to learn from:
https://www.catholicculture.org/culture/library/view.cfm?recnum=7019
[Warning: It’s a real tear-jerker]
This is how Death by Government happens. Democratic forms of government vs. Authoritarian vs. Totalitarian, their crisis track records comparisons are stark. And compelling:
https://www.hawaii.edu/powerkills/NOTE1.HTM
https://www.hawaii.edu/powerkills/DBG.TAB1.6.GIF
https://www.hawaii.edu/powerkills/DBG.FIG1.7.GIF
Yet at the beginning of the pandemic the most influential global affairs publication in the world today, Foreign Affairs, said the world needed to follow China's totalitarian pandemic protocols. Foreign Affairs is an international affairs publication supported by and intended for the globalist audience, those who believe in one-world governance, varieties found both on the left and right:
In the Foreign Affairs pandemic piece it links to this book out of China on disease politics. Yes, disease has always been politicized. China uses disease to impose a "double-discipline" model of governance. External - laws enforced by authorities + Internal - behavioral science manipulation so the population (seemingly) willingly obeys. Double-discipline. A blueprint for transformation of an individualist, nationalistic (democratic) society to a collectivist, globalist (totalitarian) society wielding infectious disease as a weapon for political change:
http://library.lol/main/DB87C08A174B849E1EB0476138787AED
('GET' .pdf download)
https://freedomfox.substack.com/p/the-devious-use-of-infectious-disease
For all of the good, and I acknowledge the fact that much good has resulted from the introduction and practices of Behavioral Science in the world, for all of that good it has committed unspeakable evil. Still being committed. And Behavioral Health programs have exploded across the nation in recent years, especially since 2020, federal, state and local:
https://www2.deloitte.com/us/en/insights/industry/health-care/future-of-behavioral-health.html
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6689432/
They make it all sound so darn good, so compelling, goes down smooth. But it is extremely dangerous when it escapes ethical constraints. As it has since 2020. Behavioral Health programs have the potential to become pivotal actors of totalitarian repression, weaponized against political opponents who can be diagnosed with suffering from dissociation from “evidence-based reality,” aka “insane.” It’s been done before (see Catholic Culture link):
https://www.aspeninstitute.org/programs/commission-on-information-disorder/
Applied behavioral sciences are used to manufacture consent to Totalitarianism. Why make government adhere to the archaic and obstructionist concept of genuinely following the consent of the people when they can manufacture it, as Noam Chomsky described?:
https://chomsky.info/19890315/
It's all interconnected. The field of Behavioral Science, weaponized, is the most dangerous threat mankind faces today. And if those who are truly searching for how Google (and Big Tech, media, etc) manipulates information to tip elections for one side of the political divide, I encourage them to expand their sights beyond left vs. right, Democrat vs. Republican, liberal vs. conservative. The division is authoritarianism/totalitarianism vs. democratic liberty. The Hitler-Stalin Pact was the manifestation of that division:
But in 2023 that division is being fought within western liberal democracies around the world, not originating from foreign adversaries. The hard, natural sciences are corrupted by the soft, social sciences, specifically behavioral sciences. Weaponized information control, propaganda, censorship, as George Orwell described was already present in western liberal democracies in 1946, not just as experienced in Germany and the USSR under Hitler and Stalin, or in his futuristic Dystopian “1984” portrayal or his analogous “Animal Farm”:
I'm curious what reader’s thoughts are on how I've presented this information, an indictment, actually, of the abuses the field is currently inflicting, and is oriented to control the future of humanity with? Please dig deep, read as many of the links as you are able to, they go much deeper in understanding the dynamics and forces shaping our present world today, with designs for our shared world tomorrow. Feedback and additional insights are welcome. Intelligent and curious Foxes never stop learning, even when they are sharing knowledge.
Much like splitting the atom has good applications, and bad. The difference being who is applying The Science. Bad men, believing they are doing good? Negotiating away predetermined ethics designed to prevent abuses by do-gooders.
I'll close with CS Lewis's observation:
“Of all tyrannies, a tyranny sincerely exercised for the good of its victims may be the most oppressive. It would be better to live under robber barons than under omnipotent moral busybodies. The robber baron's cruelty may sometimes sleep, his cupidity may at some point be satiated; but those who torment us for our own good will torment us without end for they do so with the approval of their own conscience. They may be more likely to go to Heaven yet at the same time likelier to make a Hell of earth. This very kindness stings with intolerable insult. To be "cured" against one's will and cured of states which we may not regard as disease is to be put on a level of those who have not yet reached the age of reason or those who never will; to be classed with infants, imbeciles, and domestic animals.”
― C.S. Lewis, God in the Dock: Essays on Theology (Making of Modern Theology)
https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/526469-of-all-tyrannies-a-tyranny-sincerely-exercised-for-the-good
🙏🏻🙏🏻🙏🏻
OMG, this is so extensive, thank you!