When Is True Information Not Authoritative?

Apparently when it suits Google. The story today is that Google has been funding Peter Daszak's adventures with bats and coronaviruses in China since about 2010. Which means that when Google suppressed search references regarding the origin of Covid-19 in the Wuhan lab they knew that they were suppressing information that was quite possibly true, and which certainly was highly relevant to the question of Covid origins. Especially given that Indian scientists had already identified the Covid virus as lab engineered by January, 2020. The problem, says Google, is that that information was somehow not "authoritative" and, so, had to be suppressed.

The Daily Mail summarizes:

REVEALED: Google funded virus research carried out by Wuhan-linked scientist Peter Daszak's EcoHealth Alliance for over a decade

• Google's charity arm, Google.org, has provided financial backing for research and studies carried out by Peter Daszak and his EcoHealth Alliance charity 
• The financial ties, which were first reported by The National Pulse , are disclosed in various scientific studies dating back to at least 2010
• Google on Tuesday issued a statement saying the 'one-off philanthropic grants' were years old and had nothing to do with COVID 
• 'We have engaged precisely zero times with this organization on any work related to COVID or the Wuhan lab,' a Google spokesperson said 
• Daszak has faced intense scrutiny since it emerged that his charity previously worked with the Wuhan lab accused of being the source of COVID-19
• He has been removed from the COVID-19 commission looking into the origins of the pandemic after it emerged that he tried to gag the Wuhan lab leak theory 
• It was not immediately clear how much funding Google has provided over the last decade to Daszak's EcoHealth Alliance 

Google can afford to employ the best PR people and the best lawyers in the world. Far be it from me to engage in hindsight advising, but this is one of the those things that can't be walked back and will never look better than dodgy. Suppressing information that you feature in? That's some kinda power.

Tucker Carlson thinks it's dodgy, too. And he says so: Tucker Carlson discusses report that Google funded Peter Daszak and the Wuhan Lab.

There's a nice piece at Zerohedge that looks at this whole phenomenon of truth versus authoritative information, i.e., truth versus narrative:

Late Stage Globalism: When Anything That Is Not Censored Is A Lie

I had to think about that for moment, but then it clicked.

Fortunately, people are going elsewhere to get their information--elsewhere than the establishment media platforms:

Until now the masses seemed to be inculcated with the slow burn of endless propaganda and sermonizing from as far back as the days of Edward Bernays (who coined the word “propaganda”). Now with the pandemic and all this talk about a Great Reset and the New Normal because of a virus that was made more infectious in a Chinese lab funded by US technocrats, this is all beginning to look (in the immortal words of The New York Dolls) like “too much, too soon”.

It may turn out that there is a saturation level of manufactured narrative that the public can be led to believe or tolerate and beyond that point it all begins to look like hyperreality. Not only do fewer people believe it anymore, more of them are done with even pretending to believe it.

With too many things that were presented to us as truthful information over the last year turning out to be wrong, or a lie and almost everything that was dismissed as “already debunked conspiracy theory” turning out to have more substance, we may be crossing that point now.

Mainstream media audiences are in secular decline.

The biggest audiences to be found aren’t on CNN or MSNBC anymore, but most of the people still watching TV are watching FOX, mainly because Tucker Carlson and Laura Ingraham are calling b/s on nearly every establishment talking point.

Via The Hill

But I’m looking beyond that, outside of network TV. The hottest news outlets are fast becoming independent journalists like Matt Taibbi and Glenn Greenwald, self-publishing via their Substack. That’s mainly email.

Joe Rogan has a larger audience than Rachel Maddow and Don Lemon combined. So too does Steve Bannon, btw. The few times I’ve been on his Warroom I was astounded at the reach of his audience. According to company sources he’s doing between 2.5 and 3.5 million downloads per day. The last people I would ever expect to be tuning into Bannon are telling me “I saw you on Warroom”. 

And here's a bit of true and (presumably) authoritative information that maybe people will figure out:

A new data analysis from Harvard University, Brown University, and the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation calculates how different employment levels have been impacted during the pandemic to date. The findings reveal that government lockdown orders devastated workers at the bottom of the financial food chain but left the upper-tier actually better off.

The analysis examined employment levels in January 2020, before the coronavirus spread widely and before lockdown orders and other restrictions on the economy were implemented. It compared them to employment figures from March 31, 2021.

The picture painted by this comparison is one of working-class destruction.

Employment for lower-wage workers, defined as earning less than $27,000 annually, declined by a whopping 23.6 percent over the time period. Employment for middle-wage workers, defined as earning from $27,000 to $60,000, declined by a modest 4.5 percent. However, employment for high-wage workers, defined as earning more than $60,000, actually increased 2.4 percent over the measured time period despite the country’s economic turmoil.

The data are damning. They offer yet another reminder that government lockdowns hurt most those who could least afford it. 

Here's an idea. Why don't we hold an election on truth, who's been suppressing it, and why it all matters.