Authored by Elizabeth Nickson via ‘Welcome to Absurdistan’ substack,

The polite world was fascinated last month when long-time NPR editor Uri Berliner confessed to the Stalinist suicide pact the public broadcaster, like all public broadcasters, seems to be on. Formerly it was a place of differing views, he claimed, but now it has sold as truth some genuine falsehoods like, for instance, the Russia hoax, after which it covered up the Hunter Biden laptop. And let’s not forget our censor-like behaviour regarding Covid and the vaccine. NPR bleated that they were still diverse in political opinion, but researchers found that all 87 reporters at NPR were Democrats. Berliner was immediately put on leave and a few days later resigned, no doubt under pressure.

Even more interesting was the reveal of the genesis of NPR’s new CEO, Katherine Maher, a 41-year-old with a distinctly odd CV. Maher had put in stints at a CIA cutout, the National Democratic Institute, and trotted onto the World Bank, UNICEF, the Council on Foreign Relations, the Center for Technology and Democracy, the Digital Public Library of America, and finally the famous disinfo site Wikipedia. That same week, Tunisia accused her of working for the CIA during the so-called Arab Spring. And, of course, she is a WEF young global leader.

She was marched out for a talk at the Carnegie Endowment where she was prayerfully interviewed and spouted mediatized language so anodyne, so meaningless, yet so filled with nods to her base the AWFULS (affluent white female urban liberals) one was amazed that she was able to get away with it. There was no acknowledgement that the criticism by this award-winning reporter/editor/producer, who had spent his life at NPR had any merit whatsoever, and in fact that he was wrong on every count. That this was a flagrant lie didn’t even ruffle her artfully disarranged short blonde hair.

Christopher Rufo did an intensive investigation of her career in City Journal. It is an instructive read and illustrative of a lot of peculiar yet stellar careers of American women. Working for Big Daddy is apparently something these ghastly creatures value. I strongly suggest reading Rufo’s piece linked here. It’s a riot of spooky confluences.

Intelligence has been embedded in media forever and a day. During my time at Time Magazine in London, the bureau chief, deputy bureau chief and no doubt the “war and diplomacy” correspondent all filed to Langley and each of them cruised social London ceaselessly for information. Tucker Carlson asserted on his interview with Aaron Rogers this week that intelligence operatives were laced through DC media and in fact, Mr. Watergate, Bob Woodward himself, had been naval intelligence a scant year before he cropped up at the Washington Post as ‘an intrepid fighter for the truth and freedom no matter where it led.’  Watergate, of course, was yet another operation to bring down another inconvenient President; at this juncture, unless you are being puppeted by the CIA, you don’t get to stay in power. Refuse and bang bang or end up in court on insultingly stupid charges. As Carlson pointed out, all congressmen and senators are terrified by the security state, even and especially the ones on the intelligence committee who are supposed to be controlling them. They can install child porn on your laptop and you don’t even know it’s there until you are raided, said Carlson. The security state is that unethical, that power mad.

Now, it’s global. And feminine. Where is Norman Mailer when you need him?

At the same time, at the same time, Freddie Sayers, the editor-in-chief of Unherd, testified in Parliament on the Global Disinformation Index which had choked Unherd’s ability to grow. Unherd had hired three advertising firms who were, one after the other, unable to place ads. The third sourced the problem to the Index, which had deemed his interviews with journalist Katherine Stock about the problems faced by young people transitioning their sex, had made him persona non grata for all advertising agencies across the world. Eerily, that same week, Katherine Stock was awarded a high honorable mention in the National Press Awards for her work.

Here is Clare Melford, the fetching chief of the Global Disinformation Index, a woman seemingly bent on sterilizing confused children, Yet another non-profit authoritarian working for a mysterious Big Daddy. Who the hell trained her?

On Tuesday this week, out pops Europe’s headmistress, European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen in Politico.eu, complaining about “Russia” and “right-wingers” sowing distrust of Europe’s election processes. She is, she says, launching a new war on Disinformation. Most importantly, no more reporting on migrant assaults. This seems to be their new crusade. Please note the halo over her Christed head. Honestly, they are shameless, vain, silly creatures with limited bandwidth. Other than obedience to some grim reaper.

Said Politico:

“She promised to set up “a European Democracy Shield,” if reelected for a second term, to fight back against foreign meddling.

EU cybersecurity and disinformation officials expect a surge in online falsehoods in the 20 days prior to the European Parliament election June 6-9, when millions of Europeans elect new representatives. Officials fear that Russia is ramping up its influence operations to sow doubt about the integrity of elections in the West and to manipulate public opinion in its favor.”

By the way, madam, western election integrity has been thoroughly compromised by the men who tell you what to do. More than half of us think elections are stolen. More than half. That’s not disinformation, it’s math.

This week Michael Shellenberger, who is the acknowledged lead in the take-down of the global censorship complex, had a look at Julie Inman Grant, another American Barbie, now Australia’s “e-safety commissioner,” with ties to the WEF. Grant had demanded that X censor a migrant stabbing, and X refused. Grant, as Shellenberger describes, is the Zelig of internet history tinkering in the bowels of said internet until she burst onto the public stage as Australia’s chief censor, bent on building a global online safety network.

Working for Big Daddy is apparently something these ghastly creatures value.

At a recent government hearing, she announced, “We have powerful tools to regulate platforms with ISP blocking power, and can collect basic device information, account information, phone numbers and email addresses, so that our investigators can at least find a place to issue a warning.” Grant went on to say they could compel take-downs, fine perpetrators and fine content hosts.

The Daily Mail had a ball with Inman Grant, mocking her and pointing out that she was wasting taxpayer money on a game of whack-a-mole.

Nevertheless, Grant takes herself very very seriously and since she is accreting power at a massive clip, so must we.

Grant’s network of independent regulators is called the Global Online Safety Regulators Network. “We have Australia, France, Ireland, South Africa, Korea, the UK and Fiji so far, with others observing. Canada is coming along,” she preens, “and is about to create a National Safety Regulator.” Canada’s proposed censorship program is so draconian you can be jailed for something you posted online years ago. And the government proposing it is so unpopular, it will be lucky to hang onto 20 seats in the next election.

There are literally hundreds of these women. Why? Why?

At a meeting this year of the World Economic Forum, Věra Jourová, from the European Commission, outlined just how exciting she and her team found the tools she is being given. “We can,” she said, “influence in such a way the real life and the behavior of people!” She sighed with excitement after this sentence. Jourova was caught last September trying to spread yet another Russia hoax. You have only to hear censorship plans uttered in a central-European accent to really understand what is happening here.

As terrifying as this all seems, and it is terrifying, it is instructive to look at the ruination of the career of America’s chief censor, Renée DiResta. DiResta, as research head of the Stanford Internet Observatory, is now being sued for abuse of power and unethical behavior that violates the constitution. Spookily, DiResta soared from “new mom” to providing the intellectual under-pinnning for censorship, until she headed up the Stanford Internet Observatory during Covid, where she was instrumental in censoring vaccine and Covid “disinformation.” People thought her backstory contrived and in fact, Shellenberger found that she was, unmistakably another CIA trained censor of inconvenient information under the guise of “safety.”

At this point, every time you hear the word ‘safety”, it’s best to check your ammunition supply. Said Shellenberger:

As research director of Stanford Internet Observatory, DiResta was the key leader and spokesperson of both the 2021 “Virality Project,” against Covid vaccine “misinformation” and the 2020 “Election Integrity Project.”

Shellenberger goes on to look into DiResta’s work history and finds a lot of congruence with CIA operations.

But then I learned that DiResta had worked for the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA). The journalist Matt Taibbi pointed me to the investigative research into the censorship industry by Mike Benz, a former State Department official in charge of cybersecurity. Benz had discovered a little-viewed video of her supervisor at the Stanford Internet Observatory, Alex Stamos, mentioning in an off-hand way that DiResta had previously “worked for the CIA.”

In her response to my criticism of her on Joe Rogan, DiResta acknowledged but then waved away her CIA connection. “My purported secret-agent double life was an undergraduate student fellowship at CIA, ending in 2004 — years prior to Twitter’s founding,” she wrote. “I’ve had no affiliation since.”

But DiResta’s acknowledgment of her connection to the CIA is significant, if only because she hid it for so long. DiResta’s LinkedIn includes her undergraduate education at Stony Brook University, graduating in 2004, and her job as a trader at Jane Street from October 2004 to May 2011, but does not mention her time at the CIA.

And, notably, the CIA describes its fellowships as covering precisely the issues in which DiResta is an expert. “As an Intelligence Analyst Intern for CIA, you will work on teams alongside full-time analysts, studying and evaluating information from all available sources—classified and unclassified—and then analyzing it to provide timely and objective assessments to customers such as the President, National Security Council, and other U.S. policymakers.”

At this juncture it is a race, as the intelligence community moves to shut down the revelations of its manipulations and machinations, and people injured by the vaccine and the flagrant abuse of election integrity move to fight them. It is instructive to note that DiResta, while apparently soaring to the heights of journalism at Wired, the New York Times, the Atlantic, selling her safety/censorhip program, cannot seem to get actual people to read or subscribe to her Substack. DiResta, like so many women in power now, are in reality, talentless cutouts for a hidden and malignant agenda.

An agenda that the people of the world roundly hate. I have just one final thing to saw to these truly dreadful human beings. My God is stronger than whatever demon or predator you obey. And as a woman, I am ashamed of each and every one of you. To use one of your awful phrases: Do Better.

*  *  *

There is a lot of work to do, please consider funding a very cheap annual subscription.